We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

How to read Plato's Dialogues? -- Freedom-general and universal -- Dialectic of library -- Participation and appropriation -- Onto-politics and political ontology -- Equality and difference -- The good-rationality, totality, dialectic -- Justice, politics and philosophy -- Foundations of responsibility -- The politics of virtue -- Dialectic of liberty revisited-democracy and Politeia -- Liberty in the Polis.

Fractal versus fragment -- From proto-modernity to pseudo-modernity. Kant and his descendants -- The politics of re-presentation. a collection of fractals -- Epilogue or after the end -- From sophisticated meaninglessness to sophisticated primitivism -- The state of mindlessness. the rise of the pseudo-modern world -- Ideologies of the non-world. the post-colonial and the subaltern.

This essay argues that schooling in Israel is tied too closely to ideology. This results in an indoctrinary orientation that contributes to divisiveness and imperils Israeli democracy. After reviewing and critiquing the roots of this orientation, I advance an alternative that understands education as an agent of the good rather than ideology. Israeli schooling requires a vision of goodness broad enough to encompass competing conceptions of Jewish life espoused by the majority as well as non-Jewish orientations affirmed by various minorities. (...) Such a vision can be grounded, I contend, in a democratic Jewish theology that emphasizes God as teacher rather than tyrant. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 5-24, February 2021.

According to the traditional inferential theory of perception, percepts of object motion or stationarity stem from an evaluation of afferent retinal signals (which encode image motion) with the help of extraretinal signals (which encode eye movements). According to direct perception theory, on the other hand, the percepts derive from retinally conveyed information only. Neither view is compatible with a perceptual phenomenon that occurs during visually induced sensations of ego motion (vection). A modified version of inferential theory yields a model in (...) which the concept of extraretinal signals is replaced by that of reference signals, which do not encode how the eyes move in their orbits but how they move in space. Hence reference signals are produced not only during eye movements but also during ego motion (i.e., in response to vestibular stimulation and to retinal image flow, which may induce vection). The present theory describes the interface between self-motion and object-motion percepts. An experimental paradigm that allows quantitative measurement of the magnitude and gain of reference signals and the size of the just noticeable difference (JND) between retinal and reference signals reveals that the distinction between direct and inferential theories largely depends on: (1) a mistaken belief that perceptual veridicality is evidence that extraretinal information is not involved, and (2) a failure to distinguish between (the perception of) absolute object motion in space and relative motion of objects with respect to each other. The model corrects these errors, and provides a new, unified framework for interpreting many phenomena in the field of motion perception. (shrink)