The goal of this study was to determine whether it is possible to teach children with serious decoding problems four text comprehension strategies in listening contexts. The subjects were 9-11 year old students from special schools for children with learning disabilities. All the students were very poor at decoding; half of the group were also poor listeners, whereas the other half consisted of normal listeners. The experimental children were trained in strategies of clarifying, questioning, summarising and predicting through a combination (...) of reciprocal teaching and direct instruction. The results indicated significant programme effects on a strategic listening comprehension test. A transfer effect on general listening comprehension and general reading comprehension tests was not found. The poor listeners within the experimental group did not perform better than the normal listeners. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

This is a daring and unusual book. It presents a selection of Wittgenstein’s texts without engaging in commentary or criticism, and yet it openly interprets. Guided by the conviction that Wittgenstein is a phenomenologist of the life-world, Brand intersperses textual citations with close paraphrase. While managing to preserve the resolutely unsystematic and evocative style of Wittgenstein’s texts, the paraphrases give a phenomenological tone to many familiar passages and gradually succeed in unfolding a tacit inner unity to his work. The (...) book’s organization is thematic rather than chronological: texts from different periods complement and confront one another in a succession of chapters which focus on such core themes as certainty, world, temporality, meaning, rule, understanding, and givenness. Brand does not attempt to dissipate the tensions between earlier and later works, although he does not include those earlier conceptions that Wittgenstein unequivocally rejected. However, the interpretative paraphrases do tend to soften the conflicts by suggesting the different perspectives from which apparently contradictory statements have been made. Brand attributes the "destructive" and therapeutic style of much of the late work to the phenomenological insight, that authentic comprehension lies hidden beneath the distortions generated by inappropriate theories and by the confusion of language games. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like (...) white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

Professor Austin explores four main areas in this paper. First of all he outlines the physical development of sex differentiation in the embryo. He develops this by describing the clinical manifestations of abnormality which can appear at that stage. Professor Austin points out that there are relatively few people with abnormalities and that those who do show homosexual tendencies are not noticeably different from the norm in terms of their sexual equipment and hormone levels. It is much more likely that (...) their psychological and social development has a greater influence in differentiating them sexually. The last section of the paper is a synopsis of society's reactions to homosexuality or bisexuality which term in Professor Austin's opinion is more accurate and descriptive of the condition. (shrink)

Recent reports published by the United Nations and the World Health Organization suggest that the brain drain of healthcare professionals from the developing to the developed world is decimating the provision of healthcare in poor countries. The migration of these key workers is driven by a combination of economic inequalities and the recruitment policies of governments in the rich world. This article assesses the impact of the healthcare brain drain and argues that wealthy countries have a moral obligation to reduce (...) the flow of healthcare workers from the developing to the developed world. (shrink)

This paper, which gives continuity to another article, analyzes the content of I Dialogus V, 14-22 and, in an appendix, presents our Portuguese translation of this excerpt. In these chapters, the Inceptor Venerabilis discusses whether St. Peter and the Roman Church possess primacy over all other apostles and churches; andwhether this primacy is granted by God himself. Ockham first presents, not ad litteram, the opinion of those who refute the thesis that Christ did not give primacy to Peter and the (...) Roman Church. Then, because this thesis fully deflates papal power, he proposes a contrary thesis based on five proofs. We conclude that Ockham’s unnamed opponent is Marsilius of Padua, whose opinions are in his Defensor Pacis. (shrink)

Recent research on the relations of personality to well-being shows that the people who are most healthy, happy and fulfilled are those who are high in all three of the character traits of self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence as measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory. In the past, the healthy personality has often been considered to require only high self-directedness and high cooperativeness. However, now the self-centred behaviour of people who are low in self-transcendence is degrading the conditions needed for (...) sustainable life by all human beings. Consequently, human beings need to and can develop their capacity for self-transcendence in order to maintain their individual and collective well-being. (shrink)

The title may be understood in three ways. Firstly, the truth under study is the truth about freedom. We speak of the truth of something, in as much as we presume that there are many misconceptions about that something, and it stands in need of clarification. Thus, the many misconceptions about freedom will have to be divested, if freedom is to be rightly grasped. Secondly, in the sense that there is a truth in the core of freedom, indeed, truth is (...) the essence of freedom. If truth is to be rightly grasped, its core has to be penetrated. Thirdly, there is a deeper relation between truth and freedom. Freedom cannot be understood, much less rightly practised, if we do not comprehend the necessary relation that freedom bears to truth. This essay purports to study all three senses, not quite generally, but with special reference to Ratzinger, the German theologian-cum-phenomenologist of religion, who also happens to be the current pope Benedict XVI of the Catholic Christianity. The study proceeds in three stages. First of all, I will give the statement of the problem. Secondly, I will briefly dwell on the modern Western history of freedom. Thirdly, I will study the interface between freedom and truth, highlighting the nature of human freedom, the relation between freedom and responsibility, and the relation between freedom and the truth of human existence itself. The essay is more interpretive than evaluative, with an eye to be as close to the insightful thoughts of Ratzinger as possible. (shrink)