(Statement of Responsibility) by Timothy S. Huebner.

Oxidised bases, such as 8-oxo-guanine, occur in cellular DNA as a result of attack by oxygen free radicals. The cancer-protective effect of vegetables and fruit is attributed to the ability of antioxidants in them to scavenge free radicals, preventing DNA damage and subsequent mutation. Antioxidant supplements (e.g., β-carotene, vitamin C) increase the resistance of lymphocytes to oxidative damage, and a negative correlation is seen between antioxidant concentrations in tissues and oxidised bases in DNA. Large-scale intervention trials with β-carotene have, however, (...) led to increases in cancer. Recent measurements of the frequency of oxidised DNA bases indicate that earlier estimates were greatly exaggerated; there may be only a few thousand 8-oxo-guanines per cell. Convincing evidence for mutations resulting from oxidative damage, in tumours or cultured cells, is lacking. It seems that efficient antioxidant defences together with DNA repair maintain a steady-state level of damage representing minimal risk to cell or organism. BioEssays 21:238–246, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

For many years, the downtown in Clarksdale, with a municipal population of 17,960 and located in the northern part of the Mississippi Delta, had lost its role as the centre providing a wide range of jobs and services to those living in the surrounding region. For many cities and towns in America, downtown decline has been associated with the flight to the suburbs and the growth in shopping malls serving flourishing gated communities. In Clarksdale’s case, downtown decline has been due (...) largely to the advent of big box retailing and the location of new retail and commercial developments along the state highway on the edge of town, combined with the loss of jobs and population associated with agricultural restructuring. Today, however, Clarksdale has taken up the challenge to ‘revitalize’ the downtown in the face of economic adversity. Recovery is under way, and much of this is associated with blues music and Delta culture: Clarksdale is situated at the fabled ‘crossroads’ of Highways 49 and 61 and is also the home to national icons in literature, art and other cultural pursuits. These are key elements around which the downtown revitalization effort is focused. This paper charts the process by which the Clarksdale community has embarked on the road to downtown recovery, and highlights the town’s indelible links with the blues, borne out of years of toil, hardship and social deprivation. The paper emphasizes the importance of ‘champions’ and ‘creative people’, drawing on community support, in achieving downtown revitalization. Positive results are becoming evident with new businesses and jobs, improved levels of service, refurbishment of derelict buildings, a renewed sense of place, and an uplift in community confidence. The significance of cultural tourism to downtown revitalization is highlighted, with particular emphasis on the global appeal of blues, but with its roots firmly established in Clarksdale and the Delta. (shrink)

Alcoholism is endemic in Nigeria’s traditional religion and society. This abuse is especially common at New Yam festivals, Ekpe, Ekpo and Nmanwu masquerades festivals, burial rituals, birth, marriage and naming ceremonies. Some claim that this is driven by specific beliefs and activities in African culture, such as beliefs in ancestors, libation, hospitality and entertaining guests and strangers and the desire to maintain the cultural traditions of the ancestors. Alcohol abuse has generated major health and social issues for abusers, their families (...) and society, plunging families, towns and tribes into crises and conflicts that bring economic and political retrogression. This research studied how the African traditional religion encourages alcohol misuse and how to decrease it for national development. This study was on Nigeria’s South-South region. The study uses qualitative and ethnographic research methodologies, including key informants, in-depth and focus group interviews and the reward deficiency syndrome as a theoretical framework. Although African Traditional Religion (ATR) supports alcohol usage, greed, a lack of self-control, peer pressure, indiscipline and lack of moral upbringing led to alcohol misuse, which harms the person, family, community and country as a whole. Education and enlightenment are a remedy to free alcoholics and utilise them for national integration and development.Contribution: Some say Africans drink a lot because their religious heritage promotes drinking, leading to abuse. However, peer pressure, selfishness, a lack of self-control, bad parenting and not religion push persons with reward deficiency syndrome into alcoholism, according to this research. (shrink)

Reporting peers’ counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) is important for maintaining an ethical organization, but is a significant and potentially risky action. In Bandura’s Theory of Moral Thought and Action (Bandura, 1991) he states that such acts require significant moral agency, which is generated when an individual possesses adequate moral self-regulatory capacities to address the issue and is in a context that activates and reinforces those capacities. Guided by this theory, we assess moral potency (i.e., moral courage, moral efficacy, and moral (...) ownership) as key capacities predicting peer reporting intentions and assess three contextual factors influencing the generation and effects of moral potency: whether a potential informant (1) works for an ethical leader, (2) is embedded in a psychologically safe climate promoting interpersonal risk-taking, and (3) operates in a more normal or extreme context. We assess the proposed model across three field studies entailing both normal and extreme (i.e., firefighting units) contexts. Results show that ethical leaders raise employees’ moral potency, promoting greater willingness to report their peers’ CWBs. In normal work contexts, psychological safety positively moderated both the relationship between ethical leadership and moral potency and between moral potency and peer reporting intentions. However, psychological safety had the opposite effects in more extreme work contexts. Whereas psychological safety strengthens the positive association between moral potency and peer reporting intentions in normal work contexts, in contexts where individuals are more frequently exposed to extreme events, psychological safety weakens this relationship, thus highlighting the unforeseen downsides of psychological safety in extreme contexts. (shrink)

It is argued that mathematical statements are "a posteriori synthetic" statements of a very special sort, To be called "structure-Analytic" statements. They follow logically from the axioms defining the mathematical structure they are describing--Provided that these axioms are "consistent". Yet, Consistency of these axioms is an empirical claim: it may be "empirically verifiable" by existence of a finite model, Or may have the nature of an "empirically falsifiable hypothesis" that no contradiction can be derived from the axioms.

Members of the Y‐box (YB) family of transcription factors are expressed in a wide range of cell types and are implicated in the regulation of a rapidly increasing number of genes. Although the biological activities of YB proteins appear to be varied, distinct patterns, relating to the timing of their expression and the identity of their target genes, are beginning to emerge. A recent report by Ito et al.(1) focusses attention on cell proliferation and adds support to earlier suggestions(2, 3) (...) that a primary function of YB proteins is to help activate growth‐associated genes. (shrink)

One of the paradoxes of the physical sciences is that as our knowledge has progressed, more and more diverse physical phenomena can be explained in terms of fewer underlying laws, or principles. In Hidden Unity, eminent physicist John Taylor puts many of these findings into historical perspective and documents how progress is made when unexpected, hidden unities are uncovered between apparently unrelated physical phenomena. Taylor cites examples from the ancient Greeks to the present day, such as the unity of (...) celestial and terrestrial dynamics (17th century), the unity of heat within the rest of dynamics (18th century), the unity of electricity, magnetism, and light (19th century), the unity of space and time and the unification of nuclear forces with electromagnetism (20th century). Without relying on mathematical detail, Taylor's emphasis is on fundamental physics, like particle physics and cosmology. Balancing what is understood with the unestablished theories and still unanswered questions, Taylor takes readers on a fascinating ongoing journey. John C. Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge. A student of Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, Taylor's research career has spanned the era of developments in elementary particle physics since the 1950s. He taught theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and he has lectured worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. (shrink)

Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War HIRATA Seiko IN ORDER FULLY TO UNDERSTAND the standpoint of Zen on the question of nationalism, one must first consider the ...

The eight essays and three responses collected in Rethinking Borders were commissioned from an exciting range of leading younger writers, artists and intellectuals whose work has raised significant questions about the border cultures in ...

The 1990s saw a revival of interest in Kierkegaard's thought, affecting the fields of theology, social theory, and literary and cultural criticism. The resulting discussions have done much to discredit the earlier misreadings of Kierkegaard's works.

Intentionality is aboutness. Some things are about other things: a belief can be about icebergs, but an iceberg is not about anything; an idea can be about the number 7, but the number 7 is not about anything; a book or a film can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything. Philosophers have long been concerned with the analysis of the phenomenon of intentionality, which has seemed to many to be a fundamental feature of mental states and events.