Pedloen prce je textov filosofickou analzou prvn sti Platnova dialogu Menn, piem se sna pedvst, jak v konkrtnm literrnm dle Platnov je obsaen stet mezi silou ji skomrajcho svta tradice (s jejmi hodnotami lidskho ivota), a silou jedince, kter hodnoty lidskho ivota sm pro sebe vydobyl v kritick diskusi s tradic. Vechny ti pokusy definovat co je vlastn aret, odhaluj pi pelivm rozboru pouh rtorick stetnut Menna se Skratem jako pklad stetu dvou odlinch paradigmat a sil, uvedench ve.

The transport of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) from the nucleus to cytoplasm is an essential step in the gene expression program of all eukaryotes. Recent technological advances in the areas of RNA‐labeling, microscopy, and sequencing are leading to novel insights about mRNA biogenesis and export. This includes quantitative single molecule imaging (SMI) of RNA molecules in live cells, which is providing knowledge of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the export process. As this information becomes available, it leads to new questions, (...) the reinterpretation of previous findings, and revised models of mRNA export. In this review, we will briefly highlight some of these recent findings and discuss how live cell SMI approaches may be used to further our current understanding of mRNA export and gene expression. (shrink)

We hypothesize that aspects of animal multicellularity originated before the divergence of metazoans from fungi and social amoebae. Polarized epithelial tissues are a defining feature of metazoans and contribute to the diversity of animal body plans. The recent finding of a polarized epithelium in the non‐metazoan social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum demonstrates that epithelial tissue is not a unique feature of metazoans, and challenges the traditional paradigm that multicellularity evolved independently in social amoebae and metazoans. An alternative view, presented here, is (...) that the common ancestor of social amoebae, fungi, and animals spent a portion of its life cycle in a multicellular state and possessed molecular machinery necessary for forming an epithelial tissue. Some descendants of this ancestor retained multicellularity, while others reverted to unicellularity. This hypothesis makes testable predictions regarding tissue organization in close relatives of metazoans and provides a novel conceptual framework for studies of early animal evolution.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Searching for Eve: Basal metazoans and the evolution of multicellular complexity Abstract. (shrink)

Primary progressive aphasia is a clinical syndrome in which patients progressively lose speech and language abilities. Three variants are recognized: logopenic, associated with phonology and/or short-term verbal memory deficits accompanied by left temporo-parietal atrophy; semantic, associated with semantic deficits and anterior temporal lobe atrophy; non-fluent associated with grammar and/or speech-motor deficits and inferior frontal gyrus atrophy. Here, we set out to investigate whether the three variants of PPA can be dissociated based on error patterns in a single language task. We (...) recruited 21 lvPPA, 28 svPPA, and 24 nfvPPA patients, together with 31 healthy controls, and analyzed their performance on an auditory noun-to-verb generation task, which requires auditory analysis of the input, access to and selection of relevant lexical and semantic knowledge, as well as preparation and execution of speech. Task accuracy differed across the three variants and controls, with lvPPA and nfvPPA having the lowest and highest accuracy, respectively. Critically, machine learning analysis of the different error types yielded above-chance classification of patients into their corresponding group. An analysis of the error types revealed clear variant-specific effects: lvPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “not-a-verb” responses and the highest number of semantically related nouns ; in contrast, svPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “unrelated verb” responses and the highest number of light verbs. Taken together, our findings indicate that error patterns in an auditory verb generation task are associated with the breakdown of different neurocognitive mechanisms across PPA variants. Specifically, they corroborate the link between temporo-parietal regions with lexical processing, as well as ATL with semantic processes. These findings illustrate how the analysis of pattern of responses can help PPA phenotyping and heighten diagnostic sensitivity, while providing insights on the neural correlates of different components of language. (shrink)

The size and distance of an object are crucial pieces of information that every human being processes from an early age (see, e.g., Day & McKenzie, 1981; Granrud, 2006). For infants, the distance o...

Person‐specific evidence was developed as a grounded theory by analyzing 20 selected case descriptions from interventions using the guided self‐determination method with people with various long‐term health conditions. It explains the mechanisms of mobilizing relational capacity by including person‐specific evidence in shared decision‐making. Person‐specific self‐insight was the first step, achieved as individuals completed reflection sheets enabling them to clarify their personal values and identify actions or omissions related to self‐management challenges. This step paved the way for sharing these insights and (...) challenges in a relationship with a supportive health professional, who could then rely on person‐specific evidence instead of assumptions or a narrow disease perspective for shared decision‐making. Trust in the evidence encouraged the supportive health professional to transfer it to the interdisciplinary team. Person‐specific evidence then enhanced the ability of team members to apply general evidence in a meaningful way. The increased openness achieved by individuals through these steps enabled them to eventually share their new self‐insights in daily life with other people, decreasing loneliness they experienced in self‐management. Relational capacity, the core of the theory, is mobilized in both people with long‐term health conditions and healthcare professionals. Further research on person‐specific evidence and relational capacity in healthcare is recommended. (shrink)

A reductionistic, bottom‐up, cellular‐based concept of the origins of sentience and consciousness has been put forward. Because all life is based on cells, any evolutionary theory of the emergence of sentience and consciousness must be grounded in mechanisms that take place in prokaryotes, the simplest unicellular species. It has been posited that subjective awareness is a fundamental property of cellular life. It emerges as an inherent feature of, and contemporaneously with, the very first life‐forms. All other varieties of mentation are (...) the result of evolutionary mechanisms based on this singular event. Therefore, all forms of sentience and consciousness evolve from this original instantiation in prokaryotes. It has also been identified that three cellular structures and mechanisms that likely play critical roles here are excitable membranes, oscillating cytoskeletal polymers, and structurally flexible proteins. Finally, basic biophysical principles are proposed to guide those processes that underly the emergence of supracellular sentience from cellular sentience in multicellular organisms. (shrink)

Creative Class, Creative Economy, and the Wisdom Society as a Solution to their Controversy The paper briefly introduces the notion of creativity, linking the concepts of creative class and the related creative economy that are considered by Florida and his followers as the driving force of the current social and economic development. The concept of creative economy and its quantification in form of the Creative Class Index 3T or the Euro-Creativity Index were submitted to strong critique.The critics overturn some key (...) issues of the concept of creative class with an indication that the creative people give priority in choosing the work from the place; and there is no or almost nil correlation of a perceptual representation of the persons of homosexual orientation and the high-tech growth which confirms the opinion that the assertion about higher creativity of homosexual persons is a myth only. The purpose of the article is the examination of propriety of the concept of creative class and its quantification at one hand, and the rightfulness of their critique at the other. The analysis of the axiology of the concept of creative class is the method of examination. From point of view of axiology probably the most significant characteristic of the creative class is its accompanying destruction of thee social capital of creative people and it substitution of the creative capital. The rise of creative class takes place in parallel with the implosion of values at which basis our Jewish-Christian civilization is established. To this Florida expresses rather vague attitude by a statement that all socio-cultural changes that accompany the rise of the creative class will have no favorable impact on society.Florida labeled creativity as a basic human law, furthermore, he announced the need for a new live style in which the quality of life will increase and people become better men. The concept of creativity as an instrument of urban planning evolved into a left-liberal ideology with elements of social engineering that is the most important finding of the axiological analysis. The second finding is the need to accept the meaning of creativity. By implication of the two findings there arises a proposal for wisdom as a new driving force of social and economic development. The conclusion is the contribution is a requirement for formulation of the concept of wisdom society that is currently likely absent in the academic world, and the statement that if the West will not create the wisdom society, it will lose the raison d'être of its existence. (shrink)

We have conducted an experimental study of V-type electromagnetically induced transparency in sodium. Its principles are elucidated by a simple model. Measurements show decreased fluorescence and absorption depending on the detuning of the driving and probe fields, which is in agreement with the results of numerical simulation.

Mathematical logic is a branch of mathematics that takes axiom systems and mathematical proofs as its objects of study. This book shows how it can also provide a foundation for the development of information science and technology. The first five chapters systematically present the core topics of classical mathematical logic, including the syntax and models of first-order languages, formal inference systems, computability and representability, and Gödel’s theorems. The last five chapters present extensions and developments of classical mathematical logic, particularly the (...) concepts of version sequences of formal theories and their limits, the system of revision calculus, proschemes (formal descriptions of proof methods and strategies) and their properties, and the theory of inductive inference. All of these themes contribute to a formal theory of axiomatization and its application to the process of developing information technology and scientific theories. The book also describes the paradigm of three kinds of language environments for theories and it presents the basic properties required of a meta-language environment. Finally, the book brings these themes together by describing a workflow for scientific research in the information era in which formal methods, interactive software and human invention are all used to their advantage. The second edition of the book includes major revisions on the proof of the completeness theorem of the Gentzen system and new contents on the logic of scientific discovery, R-calculus without cut, and the operational semantics of program debugging. This book represents a valuable reference for graduate and undergraduate students and researchers in mathematics, information science and technology, and other relevant areas of natural sciences. Its first five chapters serve as an undergraduate text in mathematical logic and the last five chapters are addressed to graduate students in relevant disciplines. (shrink)

A review of Lubomír Doležel´s Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 171 pp. ISBN 978-0-8018-9463-3).

The paper deals with the state of the social sciences after the boom of internet services in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. The results of our survey, based on 512 responses from the economics and history departments of major Czech public universities, show that internet services are considered a quality factor for academic output; however, the issues of plagiarism, a lack of resource criticism, inadequacy of impact factor-based evaluations, poor academic training for the new generation of social scientists, the (...) failure of state academic policy, and the generation gap make further development in the Czech social sciences rather problematic. As a result we recommend creating a better communication link between policy makers and scholars, reforming the current state policy which encourages lower quality academic output, and improving academic training, which requires a more individual approach, and also placing higher demands on social scientists. (shrink)

Cellular circadian clocks represent ancient anticipatory systems which co‐evolved with the first cells to safeguard their survival. Cyanobacteria represent one of the most ancient cells, having essentially invented photosynthesis together with redox‐based cellular circadian clocks some 2.7 billion years ago. Bioelectricity phenomena, based on redox homeostasis associated electron transfers in membranes and within protein complexes inserted in excitable membranes, play important roles, not only in the cellular circadian clocks and in anesthetics‐sensitive cellular sentience (awareness of environment), but also in the (...) coupling of single cells into tissues and organs of unitary multicellular organisms. This integration of cellular circadian clocks with cellular basis of sentience is an essential feature of the cognitive CBC‐Clock basis of cellular life. (shrink)

Úvahy spojené s náhodností se v evropské historii objevují poměrně pozdě, na přelomu středověku a novověku. Týkají se zpočátku šancí výhry v různých hrách či situacích a později přecházejí k zavedení pravděpodobnosti klasické a geometrické. Počet pravděpodobnosti je z matematického hlediska završen Kolmogorovovou axiomatickou teorií. Ve způsobu vnímání a interpretace pravděpodobnosti však přetrvává mnoho otevřených otázek, problémů a paradoxů, jako například řešení Bertandovy úlohy. Čtyři hlavní směry v pojetí pravděpodobnosti (logické, četnostní, subjektivní a propenzitní) úzce souvisejí se způsobem vnímání náhodnosti (...) (epistemologickým nebo ontologickým). Úvahy o vývoji vnímání náhodnosti a interpretace pravděpodobnosti přinášejí schopnost orientovat se v základních principech a poznatcích vědy a přispívají k hlubšímu pochopení celé problematiky. (shrink)

Book review: Aristotelés, Etika Eudémova, Praha (Dybbuk), transl. Viktor Zavřel – Jan Brázdil, 2020, 168 p.

Heterogeneous institutional investors' shareholding preferences have been driven to change by the deepening of ESG investment philosophy. Therefore, we examine the impact of corporate ESG performance on institutional investors' shareholding preferences and its mechanism of action. We conduct mixed OLS and mediation effect tests using data on ESG responsibility scores and institutional investors' shareholding ratios of A-share listed companies in China from 2010 to 2020 as samples. We find that corporate ESG performance can significantly and robustly increase institutional investors' shareholdings; (...) the mediation effect analysis shows that overall corporate ESG performance contributes to increases in corporate book and market values, thus encouraging institutional investors to increase their shareholdings. The heterogeneity analysis shows that independent institutional investors attach more importance to corporate ESG responsibility performance, and long-term institutional investors attach more importance to corporate environmental performance; moreover, institutional investors have more significant ESG shareholding preferences for Chinese SOEs. Our study can strengthen the encouragement of institutional investors to integrate ESG investment concepts from multiple perspectives, such as research and analysis, portfolio management, risk control, and due diligence management, to design and develop targeted ESG investment tools, give full play to the role of shareholders and guide the sound development of listed companies from the perspective of investment strategy objectives. (shrink)

Tu Wei-ming is the foremost exponent of Confucian thought in the United States today. Over the last two decades he has been developing a creative scholarly interpretation of Confucian humanism as a living tradition. The result is a work of interpretive brilliance that revitalizes Confucian thought, making it a legitimate concern of contemporary philosophical reflections.

Polarity is an inherent feature of almost all prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. In most eukaryotic cells, growth polarity is due to the assembly of actin‐based growing domains at particular locations on the cell periphery. A contrasting scenario is that growth polarity results from the establishment of non‐growing domains, which are actively maintained at opposite end‐poles of the cell. This latter mode of growth is common in rod‐shaped bacteria and, surprisingly, also in the majority of plant cells, which elongate along the (...) apical–basal axes of plant organs. The available data indicate that the non‐growing end‐pole domains of plant cells are sites of intense endocytosis and recycling. These actin‐enriched end‐poles serve also as signaling platforms, allowing bidirectional exchange of diverse signals along the supracellular domains of longitudinal cell files. It is proposed that these actively remodeled end‐poles of elongating plant cells remotely resemble neuronal synapses. BioEssays 25:569–576, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The similarity between logic and semantics of the Stoics and Frege has long been known, and it can be explained in various ways. In 2021, Susane Bobzien published a work in which she explains this similarity rather surprisingly: she hypothesizes that Frege generously helped himself with the foundations of Stoic logic as it was published in the first volume of History of Logic in the West by Carl Prantl. However, this hypothesis encounters various problems. The key point of the whole (...) accusation is founded on the formulation of a general propo-sition in language using implication and anaphora, which Frege supposedly took from the Stoics, although in Prantl’s text there is only one example of a sentence with this structure. On the contrary, there are many examples of such sentences in contemporary professional (e.g. legal) texts. Many examples of semantic simi-larities that Bobzien presents are based only on the similarities between isolated concepts; however, that is regularly the case for such concepts with the same conceptual basis. Bobzien presents a significant number of matches only on the basis of results that could allegedly be inferred from the texts. However, this cannot be considered a proof of plagiarism. Bobzien does not consider many sources for the continuity of interpretation such as the so-called hypothetical syllogism found in available textbooks of logic. Last but not least, her claims do not consider many differences between Stoic and Frege’s logic. All this leads us to the conclusion that Bobzien does not present sufficient facts and connections between them that would confirm her hypothesis about Frege’s plagiarism of the Stoic logic: Frege simply was not a plagiarist. (shrink)

Prosocial behaviors are susceptible to individuals’ preferences regarding payoffs and social context. In the present study, we combined individual differences with social influence and attempted to discover the effect of social value orientation (SVO) and social influence on prosocial behavior in a trust game and a dictator game. Prosocial behavior in the trust game could be motivated by strategic considerations whereas individuals’ decisions in the dictator game could be associated with their social preference. In the trust game, prosocials were less (...) likely than proselfs to conform to the behavior of other group members when the majority of group members distrusted the trustee. In the dictator game, the results of the three-way ANOVA indicated that, irrespective of the type of offer, in contrast to proselfs, prosocials were influenced more by others’ generous choices than their selfish choices, even if the selfish choices were beneficial to themselves. The overall results demonstrated that the effect of social influence appears to depend on individuals’ SVO: that is, prosocials tend to conform to prosocial rather than proself behaviors. (shrink)

As the Covid-19 pandemic struck, many healthcare providers switched to telemedicine to deliver medical care through computer and phone screens. How can historians make sense of this use of technolo...

Plants are sessile, highly sensitive organisms that actively compete for environmental resources both above and below the ground. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realise the optimum variant. They take measures to control certain environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. They process and evaluate information and then modify their behaviour accordingly. These highly diverse competences are made possible by parallel sign(alling)-mediated communication processes within the plant (...) body (intraorganismic), between the same, related and different species (interorganismic), and between plants and non-plant organisms (transorganismic). Intraorganismic communication involves sign-mediated interactions within cells (intracellular) and between cells (intercellular). This is crucial in coordinating growth and development, shape and dynamics. Such communication must function both on the local level and between widely separated plant parts. This allows plants to coordinate appropriate response behaviours in a differentiated manner, depending on their current developmental status and physiological influences. Lastly, this volume documents how plant ecosphere inhabitants communicate with each other to coordinate their behavioural patterns, as well as the role of viruses in these highly dynamic interactional networks. (shrink)

Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expres- sions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write (...) down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while o thers contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated. (shrink)

Thinking, the process of considering or reasoning about something, is one of the most distinctive qualities that set humans apart from other species. Philosophers around the world, such as Socrates...