If, as many suppose, pornography changes people, a question arises as to how.1 One answer to this question offers a grand and noble vision. Inspired by the idea that pornography is speech, and inspired by a certain liberal ideal about the point of speech in political life, some theorists say that pornography contributes to that liberal ideal: pornography, even at its most violent and misogynistic, and even at its most harmful, is political speech that aims to express certain views about (...) the good life, 2aims to persuade its consumers of a certain political point of view—and to some extent succeeds in persuading them. Ronald Dworkin suggests that the pornographer contributes to the ‘moral environment, by expressing his political or social convictions or tastes or prejudices informally’, that pornography ‘seeks to deliver’ a ‘message’ , that it reflects the ‘opinion’ that ‘women are submissive, or enjoy being dominated, or should be treated as if they did’, that it is comparable to speech ‘advocating that women occupy inferior roles’.3 Pornography on this view is political speech that aims to persuade its listeners of the truth of certain ideas about women, and of course ‘the government must leave to the people the evaluation of ideas’.4 Another answer offers a vision that is not grand and noble, but thoroughly reductive. Pornography is not politically persuasive speech, but speech that works by a process of psychological conditioning. This view seems common enough in the social science literature. Consider, for example, this description of an early experiment, from a time that pre-dates contemporary political debate. (shrink)

It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with our epistemic practices. In this paper, I aim to show that current attitude-based theories have asymmetric mechanisms: moral features only make it (...) harder for attitudes to secure epistemic merits. I argue that, if attitudes can incur moral injury, failure to form attitudes can too. To make sense of this, I contend, attitude-based accounts require symmetric mechanisms, allowing that moral considerations make it both harder and easier for attitudes to attain epistemic merits. I maintain that, once we recognize this, attitude-based encroachment views must soon concede that they sometimes demand we believe against the evidence. (shrink)

There has been increasing debate in recent years about the conceptualization of moral distress. Broadly speaking, two groups of scholars have emerged: those who agree with Jameton’s ‘narrow definition’ that focuses on constraint and those who argue that Jameton’s definition is insufficient and needs to be broadened. Using feminist empirical bioethics, we interviewed critical care nurses in the United Kingdom about their experiences and conceptualizations of moral distress. We provide our broader definition of moral distress and examples of data that (...) both challenge and support our conceptualization. We pre‐empt and overcome three key challenges that could be levelled at our account and argue that there are good reasons to adopt our broader definition of moral distress when exploring prevalence of, and management strategies for, moral distress. (shrink)

Individuals of many animal species are said to have a personality. It has been shown that some individuals are bolder than other individuals of the same species, or more sociable or more aggressive. In this paper, we analyse what it means to say that an animal has a personality. We clarify what an animal personality is, that is, its ontology, and how different personality concepts relate to each other, and we examine how personality traits are identified in biological practice. Our (...) analysis shows that biologists often study specific personality traits, such as boldness, sociability or aggressiveness, rather than personalities in general. We claim that personality traits are best understood as dispositions and that they are operationally defined in terms of certain sets of behaviours, which are studied in specific experimental set-ups. Furthermore, we develop an integrative philosophical account that specifies and formalises three criteria for identifying personality traits, which are used in biological practice. For an individual animal to have a personality trait it must, first, behave differently than others. Second, these behavioural differences must be stable over a certain time, and third, they must be consistent in different contexts. (shrink)

A growing body of research reveals that abusive supervision may have negative impacts in organizations. The purpose of the present study is to expand the knowledge regarding the impacts of this dysfunctional leadership behavior by examining its relationship with innovation in work teams. Specifically, we investigate the process through which abusive supervision may undermine team innovation by taking into account the mediating role of team proactive behavior. Moreover, we propose a boundary condition of the negative effect of abusive supervision by (...) considering leader–members interdependence as a moderator. Using a multisource approach, data were gathered from 394 members and 82 immediate supervisors in a public safety organization. Results of path analyses reveal that the relationship between abusive supervision and team innovation is mediated by team proactive behavior. Furthermore, we found that the relationship between abusive supervision and team proactive behavior is moderated by leader–members interdependence, such that this relationship is stronger when the level of interdependence is high. Taken together, the findings of this study improve the understanding of why and under what circumstances abusive supervision may impair team innovation. (shrink)

The current experiments examine mental health clinicians’ beliefs about biological, psychological, and environmental bases of the DSM‐IV‐TR mental disorders and the consequences of those causal beliefs for judging treatment effectiveness. Study 1 found a large negative correlation between clinicians’ beliefs about biological bases and environmental/psychological bases, suggesting that clinicians conceptualize mental disorders along a single continuum spanning from highly biological disorders (e.g., autistic disorder) to highly nonbiological disorders (e.g., adjustment disorders). Study 2 replicated this finding by having clinicians list what (...) they thought were the specific causes of nine familiar mental disorders and rate their bio–psycho–environmental bases. Study 3 further found that clinicians believe medication to be more effective for biologically based mental disorders and psychotherapy to be more effective for psychosocially based mental disorders. These results demonstrate that even expert mental health clinicians make strong distinctions between psychological and biological phenomena. (shrink)

It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' names whatever natural social kind is (...) justified by the best arguments, that free speech is therefore this more general condition. This condition involves not merely the orthodox freedom (in some sense) of speakers to distribute words, but also two less frequently acknowledged dimensions of free speech: audience understanding and consideration. We conclude with some discussion of the policy implications of this conception of free speech. (shrink)

We address how listeners perceive temporal regularity in music performances, which are rich in temporal irregularities. A computational model is described in which a small system of internal self‐sustained oscillations, operating at different periods with specific phase and period relations, entrains to the rhythms of music performances. Based on temporal expectancies embodied by the oscillations, the model predicts the categorization of temporally changing event intervals into discrete metrical categories, as well as the perceptual salience of deviations from these categories. The (...) model's predictions are tested in two experiments using piano performances of the same music with different phrase structure interpretations (Experiment 1) or different melodic interpretations (Experiment 2). The model successfully tracked temporal regularity amidst the temporal fluctuations found in the performances. The model's sensitivity to performed deviations from its temporal expectations compared favorably with the performers' structural (phrasal and melodic) intentions. Furthermore, the model tracked normal performances (with increased temporal variability) better than performances in which temporal fluctuations associated with individual voices were removed (with decreased variability). The small, systematic temporal irregularities characteristic of human performances (chord asynchronies) improved tracking, but randomly generated temporal irregularities did not. These findings suggest that perception of temporal regularity in complex musical sequences is based on temporal expectancies that adapt in response to temporally fluctuating input. (shrink)

This study explores the connections between time, travel, and creative acts such as painting and poetry, highlighting the similarities that unite these themes. It also focuses on the relationships between the East and the West in regards to these subjects, and posits that travel can be understood as an active form of meditation. The study argues that the meaning of wanderings can be found by learning to make them conscious, and that there has been a deep reflection on time, consciousness, (...) and mobility since ancient times. (shrink)

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role of eye gaze (...) in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: vocabulary development, word–object mapping, object processing, and speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board. (shrink)

Résumé Le principe de précaution engage les rapports entre la connaissance, les risques et l’action ; appréhendé d’un point de vue simultanément éthique et politique, il pose également un défi aux institutions et au public pour ce qui est de sa mobilisation dans le débat et de sa mise en œuvre dans l’action, en tant que principe possédant une portée générale. L’article propose une description des problèmes spécifiques que comporte, à cet égard, le choix des interprétations. Cette description conduit à (...) une appréciation positive du nouveau rôle dévolu aux démarches participatives dans la discussion des enjeux éthiques et des risques acceptables. (shrink)

Este artigo aborda as motivações para a docência e os desafios enfrentados por licenciandos em psicologia. A metodologia utilizada foi a abordagem qualitativa, e o instrumento de coleta de dados questionário online com questões abertas e fechadas. Participaram do estudo, onze estudantes de cursos de licenciatura em psicologia de quatro instituições universitárias das regiões sul e sudeste do Brasil. Os resultados demonstraram que a escolha pela licenciatura se deu, sobretudo, pelo interesse e curiosidade na área da educação, apropriação dos saberes (...) pedagógicos, ampliação do mercado de trabalho, bem como as possibilidades de atuação profissional. As dificuldades apontadas revelaram: a falta de informações sobre as especificidades do curso de licenciatura e da atuação do professor de psicologia e a ausência de docentes com saberes pedagógicos para atuar na licenciatura em psicologia. Embora seja considerada formação complementar entre os estudantes, observou-se possibilidades de um ensino-aprendizagem de psicologia engajada e inventiva. (shrink)

to be published in the Proceedings of the 18. International Conference of Linguistics, Seoul, Korea.

BackgroundImplementation of recommendations from clinical practice guidelines is essential for evidence based clinical practice. However, the most effective methods of implementation are unclear. We conducted a national, cluster-randomised, blinded implementation trial to determine if midwife or doctor local implementation leaders are more effective in implementing a guideline for use of oral dextrose gel to treat hypoglycaemic babies on postnatal wards. To prevent any conscious or unconscious performance bias both the doctor and midwife local implementation leaders were kept unaware of the (...) trial. This paper reports the ethical dilemmas and practical challenges of ensuring clinicians remained unaware of their involvement in an implementation trial.MethodsWe sought approval from the National Health and Disability Ethics committee to keep clinicians unaware of the trial by waiving the standard requirement for locality approval usually required for each district health board. The ethics committee did not approve a waiver of consent but advised that we approach the chief executive of each district health board to ask for provisional locality approval. Ultimately it was necessary to seek ethics approval for three separate study designs to keep clinicians unaware of the trial.ResultsThe median time for chief executive approval was 16 days and for locality approval was 57 days. We completed 21 different locality approval forms for 27 hospitals.ConclusionsKeeping clinicians unaware of their involvement in a national implementation cluster-randomised trial is feasible. However, despite a national ethics committee, significant logistical challenges were time consuming and delayed trial completion. Co-ordination of the locality approval process would help facilitate multi-centre trials. (shrink)

This article aims to deepen and extend theoretical understanding of mobility by exploring some of the mechanisms by which it operates. It introduces the concept and practices of ‘tacking’ as a frame for examining the creative processes of navigation and improvisation through which people approach and reflect on the irregularities and uncertainties of their everyday rounds, enacted or otherwise narrated as spatial biography – lives conceived in mobile-spatial terms. ‘Tacking’ also travels beyond this frame of reference, i.e. it is ‘good (...) to think with’ across different substantive contexts of social interaction. Tacking suggests ongoing adjustment and modification that respond to shifting circumstances and may create new facts on the ground, which elicit further adjustments. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that there is a need to examine what is meant by “context” in Social Psychology and present an example of how to place identity in its social and institutional context. Taking the case of British naturalisation, the process whereby migrants become citizens, we show that the identity of naturalised citizens is defined by common-sense ideas about Britishness and by immigration policies. An analysis of policy documents on “earned citizenship” and interviews with naturalised citizens shows that (...) the distinction between “elite” and “non-elite” migrants is evident in both the “reified” sphere of policy and the “common sense” sphere of everyday identity construction. While social representations embedded in lay experience construct ethno-cultural similarity and difference, immigration policies engage in an institutionalised positioning process by determining migrants' rights of mobility. These spheres of knowledge and practice are not disconnected as these two levels of “managing otherness” overlap—it is the poorer, less skilled migrants, originating outside the West who epitomise difference (within a consensual sphere) and have less freedom of mobility (within a reified sphere). We show that the context of identity should be understood as simultaneously psychological and political. (shrink)

Op-ed written with historian Caroline Light about some of the ways that ideas of democratic citizenship can become perverted by the idea that personal safety required armed defense against attacks by strangers.

Background In this qualitative analysis we aimed to explore addiction physicians’ perspectives on safer injection education for people who inject drugs, especially: (1) on possible means of introducing safer injection education in the medical environment, (2) on the compatibility of safer injection education with each physician’s core values and goals, and (3) on possible reasons for the ethical dilemma in safer injection education. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven physicians practicing addiction medicine in France in clinical and harm reduction (...) settings. Results All participants were in favor of educational interventions for people who inject drugs. Nonetheless, these interventions varied from simple advice to injection supervision and they were seen as less acceptable when they concerned the practical and material aspects of injection. Some participants found that physicians practicing in clinical settings, where patients consult mostly to stop their drug use, should not practice safer injection education. On the contrary, other participants claimed that safer injection education was essential in all settings and was not a choice but rather a duty for addiction physicians. The ethical dilemma of such intervention when delivered by medical staff was viewed as a complex phenomenon, related to the representations of intravenous drug use and to societal expectations from physicians. Conclusion Physicians’ views on safer injection education for people who inject drugs reveal an emotionally charged subject related to the structural organization of addiction management in France. Such education is marked by an arduous history of harm reduction policies in France. IRB registration: #00011928. (shrink)

The mechanical properties of vertebrate cells are largely defined by the system of intermediate filaments (IF). As part of a dense network, IF polymers are constantly rearranged and relocalized in the cell to fulfill their duty as cells change shape, migrate, or divide. With the development of new imaging technologies, such as photoconvertible proteins and super‐resolution microscopy, a new appreciation for the complexity of IF dynamics has emerged. This review highlights new findings about the transport of IF, the remodeling of (...) filaments by a process of severing and re‐annealing, and the subunit exchange that occurs between filament precursors and a soluble pool of IF. We will also discuss the unique dynamic features of the keratin IF network. Finally, we will speculate about how the dynamic properties of IF are related to their functions. (shrink)

Background Thirst and dry mouth are common symptoms in terminally ill patients. In their day-to-day practice, palliative care physicians regularly encounter ethical dilemmas, especially regarding artificial hydration. Few studies have focused on thirst and the ethical dilemmas palliative care physicians encounter in relation to this, leading to a knowledge gap in this area. Aim The aim of this study was to explore palliative care physicians’ experiences of ethical challenges in relation to thirst in terminally ill patients. Methods A qualitative interview (...) study with an inductive approach was conducted. Sixteen physicians working in four different specialised palliative care units and one geriatric care unit in different hospitals in Sweden were interviewed. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed with a reflexive thematic analysis. Results When presented with an ethical challenge relating to thirst, physicians attempted to balance benefits and harms while emphasizing respect for the patient’s autonomy. The ethical challenges in this study were: Starting, continuing or discontinuing drips; lack of evidence and traditions create doubt; and lack of interest and time may result in patient suffering. Conclusions All physicians in this study reported that “Starting, continuing or discontinuing drips” was the main ethical challenge they encountered, where some were so accustomed to the decision that they had a standard answer ready to offer patients and families. Physicians reported that drips were a symbol of thirst quenching, life and survival but were not necessary in end-of-life care. Others questioned the traditions regarding thirst and emphasised drips in particular. (shrink)

Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering is a superlative collection of essays that does what too few scholarly works have dared: it takes seriously the philosophical significance of women’s lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women’s lives seriously. In (...) this volume 16 authors- including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars- engage in sustained reflection on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of conventional philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women’s experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume. (shrink)

Background:Neonatal nurse practitioners have become the frontline staff exposed to a myriad of ethical issues that arise in the day-to-day environment of the neonatal intensive care unit. However, ethics competency at the time of graduation and after years of practice has not been described.Research aim:To examine the ethics knowledge base of neonatal nurse practitioners as this knowledge relates to decision making in the neonatal intensive care unit and to determine whether this knowledge is reflected in attitudes toward ethical dilemmas in (...) the neonatal intensive care unit.Research design:This was a prospective cohort study that examined decision making at the threshold of viability, life-sustaining therapies for sick neonates, and a ranking of the five most impactful ethical issues.Participants and research context:All 47 neonatal nurse practitioners who had an active license in the State of Mississippi were contacted via e-mail. Surveys were completed online using Survey Monkey software.Ethical considerations:The study was approved by the University of Mississippi Medical Center Institutional Review Board (IRB; #2015-0189).Findings:Of the neonatal nurse practitioners who completed the survey, 87.5% stated that their religious practices affected their ethical decision making and 76% felt that decisions regarding life-sustaining treatment for a neonate should not involve consultation with the hospital’s legal team or risk management. Only 11% indicated that the consent process involved patient understanding of possible procedures. Participating in the continuation or escalation of care for infants at the threshold of viability was the top ethical issue encountered by neonatal nurse practitioners.Discussion:Our findings reflect deficiencies in the neonatal nurse practitioner knowledge base concerning ethical decision making, informed consent/permission, and the continuation/escalation of care.Conclusion:In addition to continuing education highlighting ethics concepts, exploring the influence of religion in making decisions and knowing the most prominent dilemmas faced by neonatal nurse practitioners in the neonatal intensive care unit may lead to insights into potential solutions. (shrink)

Liberals agree that free speech should be protected, where speech is understood broadly to include all forms of intentional communication, including actions and pictures, not merely the spoken or written word. A surprising view about free speech in some liberal and legal circles is that communications should be protected on free-speech grounds only if the communications are mentally mediated. By “mentally mediated communication” we mean speech which communicates its message in such a way that the message can be rationally evaluated (...) by hearers, and causes the hearers to believe it, when it does, through the mechanism of those hearers employing their rational capacity to judge that it is correct. The mental-mediation or persuasion principle, as it is sometimes called, has some important legal and public policy implications. It has been applied to argue that certain forms of expression, despite being forms of speech or expression, lack even a prima facie claim to protection on free speech grounds. -/- Our central aim is to show why the mental mediation principle is mistaken. Liberals should think that some speech which is not mentally mediated deserves protection for the very same reasons that speech which is mentally mediated is often thought to deserve protection. (shrink)

Bien que les approches basées sur les déficits soient encore prédominantes en formation à l’enseignement, on reconnaît de plus en plus l’apport potentiel des approches basées sur les forces, afin de développer une identité professionnelle positive. Conséquemment, nous avons expérimenté une activité innovante d’écriture réflexive, basée sur la psychologie positive, auprès de 50 stagiaires en enseignement préscolaire/primaire au Québec. L’analyse de ces empreintes offre de dégager divers aspects constitutifs de l’identité professionnelle des stagiaires, de décrire l’évolution du processus de construction (...) identitaire, ce qui permet d’apprécier la contribution de ce type d’activité pour rendre ce processus plus explicite. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the desired verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s famous _Drops of water._ The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. According to Touborg (_The dual nature of causation_, 2018), it is a necessary condition for causation that (...) a cause increases the security of its effect. Building on this idea, we suggest, roughly, that you have a teleological reason to act in a certain way when doing so increases the security of some good outcome. This represents a middle way between the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _would_ cause a good outcome and the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _could_ cause a good outcome. (shrink)

We address the problem of musical variation (identification of different musical sequences as variations) and its implications for mental representations of music. According to reductionist theories, listeners judge the structural importance of musical events while forming mental representations. These judgments may result from the production of reduced memory representations that retain only the musical gist. In a study of improvised music performance, pianists produced variations on melodies. Analyses of the musical events retained across variations provided support for the reductionist account (...) of structural importance. A neural network trained to produce reduced memory representations for the same melodies represented structurally important events more efficiently than others. Agreement among the musicians' improvisations, the network model, and music‐theoretic predictions suggest that perceived constancy across musical variation is a natural result of a reductionist mechanism for producing memory representations. (shrink)

Confidentiality is one of the foundations on which psychotherapy is built. Limitations on confidentiality in the therapeutic process have been explained and explored by many authors and organizations. However, controversy and confusion continue to exist with regard to the limitations on confidentiality in situations where clients are considering their options at the end of life and after a client has died. This article reviews these 2 areas and provides some suggestions for future research.

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies of syntactic priming of the English dative alternation. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study (N = 140) of children aged 3−9 years, in which we found strong evidence of abstract priming and the lexical boost, but (...) little evidence that either effect was moderated by age. We found weak evidence for a prime surprisal effect; however, exploratory analyses revealed a protracted developmental trajectory for verb-structure biases, providing an explanation as for why prime surprisal effects are more elusive in developmental populations. In a longitudinal study (N = 102) of children in tightly controlled age bands at 42, 48, and 54 months, we found priming effects emerged on trials with verb overlap early but did not observe clear evidence of priming on trials without verb overlap until 54 months. There was no evidence of a prime surprisal effect at any time point and none of the effects were moderated by age. The results relating to the emergence of the abstract priming and lexical boost effects are consistent with prediction-based models, while the absence of age-related effects appears to reflect the structure-specific challenges the dative presents to English-acquiring children. Overall, our complex pattern of findings demonstrates the value of developmental data sets in testing psycholinguistic theory. (shrink)

Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of ...

Some patients awaken from their coma but only show reflex motor activity. This condition of wakeful (eyes open) unawareness is called the vegetative state. In 2002, a new clinical entity coined ‘‘minimally conscious state’’ defined patients who show more than reflex responsiveness but remain unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings. Emergence from the minimally conscious state is defined by functional recovery of verbal or nonverbal communication.1 Our empirical medical definitions aim to propose clearcut borders separating disorders of consciousness such (...) as coma, vegetative state and minimally conscious state but clinical reality shows that these boundaries can often be fuzzy (fig 1). Recent clinical, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies are shedding light on these challenging limits of consciousness encountered following severe acute brain damage. At the patient’s bedside, it is very challenging to differentiate reflex or automatic motor behaviour from movements indicating signs of consciousness, and hence some minimally conscious patients might be misdiagnosed as being vegetative. For some motor responses (eg, blinking to visual threat, brief fixation, normal flexion response to pain, etc) it remains unclear whether they truly are voluntary or willed because we lack convincing scientific evidence. We also lack consensus on how to practically assess some of these behavioural responses. For example, there is no agreement on what stimulus to employ in the assessment of visual pursuit movements— often one of the first clinical signs heralding the transition from the vegetative to the minimally conscious state. Vanhaudenhuyse and colleagues2 recently studied visual pursuit in 51 post-comatose patients comparing eye tracking of a moving object, person or mirror. It was shown that more.. (shrink)

The majority of food in the US is distributed through global/national supply chains that exclude locally-produced goods. This situation offers opportunities to increase local food production and consumption and is influenced by constraints that limit the scale of these activities. We conducted a study to assess perspectives of producers and consumers engaged in food systems of a major Midwestern city. We examined producers’ willingness to include/increase cultivation of local foods and consumers’ interest in purchasing/increasing local foods. We used focus groups (...) of producers (two groups of conventional farmers, four local food producers) and consumers (three conventional market participants, two locavores) to pose questions about production/consumption of local foods. We transcribed discussions verbatim and examined text to identify themes, using separate affinity diagrams for producers and consumers. We found producers and consumers are influenced by the _status quo_ and real and perceived barriers to local foods. We also learned participants believed increasing production and consumption of local foods would benefit their community and creating better infrastructure could enhance efforts to scale up local food systems. Focus group participants also indicated support from external champions/programs could support expansion of local foods. We learned that diversifying local food production was viewed as a way to support local community, increase access to healthy foods and reduce environmental impacts of conventional production. Our research indicates that encouraging producers and consumers in local food systems will be more successful when support for the local community is emphasized. (shrink)

Parmi les déesses du monde mésopotamien, deux figures féminines se dégagent : les soeurs Ištar et Ereškigal. Ištar agit dans la sphère des relations amoureuses, et surtout de la bataille. Elle joue dans la guerre comme elle le ferait « avec une corde à sauter ». Ereškigal règne sur le monde des morts : elle est celle « qui n’a pas connu le jeu des jeunes filles ». Cette contribution s’appuie sur les documents écrits (hymnes, narrations mythologiques) en cunéiformes (sumérien (...) – akkadien et textes bilingues) des iie et ier millénaire av. n. è. Elle prend pour angle d’approche les relations conflictuelles entre ces grandes déesses pour mieux saisir leurs rapports respectifs au jeu : où et quand jouent-elles? À quoi et avec qui jouent-elles? Quelles sont les informations que l’on peut en tirer pour les femmes et jeunes filles humaines? Diverses problématiques sont abordées à la lumière des études de genre : celles des rapports intergénérationnels et interfamiliaux, de la définition des espaces privé-public, de la séduction et de l’érotisme. (shrink)