The length of participant information sheets for research and difficulties in their comprehension have been a cause of increasing concern. We aimed to examine the information sheets in research proposals submitted to an Australian HREC in one year, comparing the results with national recommendations and published data. Information sheets in all 86 research submissions were analysed using available software. The work of Flesch was used for Reading Ease or Readability and that of Flesch and Kincaid for the level of education (...) required for comprehension, the Reading Grade Level. The mean length of 86 information sheets was 3110 words; many had more than 5000 words. Using the Flesch scale of 0 to 100, with 0 meaning most difficult and 100 very easy to read, the mean readability level was 47. The mean length of education needed to easily grasp the information was 11.6 years, equivalent to senior secondary school. Information sheets in research projects submitted to an HREC were often too long to be read in a reasonable time and too difficult to be easily understood. Recommended standards for information sheets were infrequently met. (shrink)

Taking as its starting point Carr's view that historical narrative reflects the preoccupations of the time in which it is written and Foucault's concept of consensual historical discourse as the outcome of a social struggle in which the victor suppresses or at least diminishes contrary versions of historical events in favour of their own, this paper traces and discusses the historical narrative of British nursing in the Crimean war and, in particular, three competing narratives that have arisen in the latter (...) half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. These are the established narrative surrounding Florence Nightingale, the new narrative surrounding Mary Seacole and an Irish narrative surrounding the role of the Sisters of Mercy. It is argued that the increased vehemence of the debate surrounding these narratives is representative of the changes that have taken place in British society. However, we also argue that the Irish narrative and its critique are reflective of deep‐rooted Anglo‐Protestant attitudes articulated by Nightingale and uncritically accepted by subsequent historians even in modern British historiography. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores gender and mental health with particular reference to the emerging philosophical field of critical realism. This philosophy suggests a shared ontology and epistemology for the natural and social sciences. Until recently, most of the debate surrounding gender and mental health has been guided either implicitly or explicitly within a positivist or constructivist philosophy. With this in mind, key areas of critical realism are explored in relation to gender and mental health, and contrasted with the positions of (...) positivism and constructivism. It is argued that critical realism offers an alternative philosophical framework for the exploration of gender issues within mental health care. (shrink)

Provides a reading of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms in the context of contemporary continental philosophy.

Kenya has one of the highest remaining concentrations of tropical savanna wildlife in the world. It has been recognised by the state and international community as a 'unique world heritage' which should be preserved for posterity. However, the wildlife conservation efforts of the Kenya government confront complex and often persistent social and ecological problems, including land-use conflicts between the local people and wildlife, local people's suspicions and hostilities toward state policies of wildlife conservation, and accelerated destruction of wildlife habitats. This (...) essay uses a political -ecological framework in the analysis of the social factors of wildlife conservation in Kenya. It postulates that the overriding socioeconomic issue impacting wildlife conservation in Kenya is underdevelopment. The problem of underdevelopment is manifested in forms of increasing levels of poverty, famine and malnutrition. The long term survival of Kenya 's wildlife depends on social and ecological solutions to the problems of underdevelopment. (shrink)

Bioregionalists have championed the utility of the concept of the watershed as an organizing framework for thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land. In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Getz has recently introduced the term “foodshed” to facilitate critical thought about where our food is coming from and how it is getting to us. We find the “foodshed” to be a particularly rich and evocative metaphor; but (...) it is much more than metaphor. Like its analogue the watershed, the foodshed can serve us as a conceptual and methodological unit of analysis that provides a frame for action as well as thought. Food comes to most of us now through a global food system that is destructive of both natural and social communities. In this article we explore a variety of routes for the conceptual and practical elaboration of the foodshed. While corporations that are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system now dominate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, alternatives are emerging that together could form the basis for foodshed development. Just as many farmers are recognizing the social and environmental advantages to sustainable agriculture, so are many consumers coming to appreciate the benefits of fresh and sustainably produced food. Such producers and consumers are being linked through such innovative arrangements as community supported agriculture and farmers markets. Alternative producers, alternative consumers, and alternative small entrepreneurs are rediscovering community and finding common ground in municipal and community food councils. Recognition of one's residence within a foodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land and from the land in a place that we can call home, a place to which we are or can become native. (shrink)

This study focused on the state-level implementation of the Common Core English Language Arts (CC-ELA) standards and the implications for state education department personnel in social studies. Researchers employed a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis asking the following research questions: (1) How do state-level social studies coordinators understand the obligations and implications of the CC-ELA standards for social studies? and (2) What benefits and challenges do they anticipate the CC-ELA standards offer to social studies educators? Findings from (...) the survey and interviews offer a glimpse into the thinking of social studies coordinators. The findings clustered around four assertions: (1) Coordinators were generally supportive of the CC-ELA standards, (2) CC-ELA is changing the way social studies is enacted at the state level, (3) Coordinators were cautiously optimistic about the impact of CC-ELA on elementary social studies, and (4) Coordinators were consistently positive about the impact of CC-ELA on secondary social studies. The positive views of the CC-ELA standards, however, appeared to do little to mitigate the challenge that the state coordinators face as they translate the standards and teach them to social studies teachers across their states. (shrink)

In The Nationality of Utopia, Maxim Shadurski considers the utopian writings of H. G. Wells within the context of cultural Englishness and the British liberal tradition. Shadurski, an associate professor of literary theory and comparative studies at Siedlce University, has edited The Wellsian, the journal of the H. G. Wells Society, since 2016 and published Utopiia kak model mira: granitsy i pogranichiia literaturnogo iavleniia in 2016. Curiously, given Shadurski's multinational heritage—a Belorussian by birthright who has published in Russian and English (...) and teaches at a Polish university—his secondary sources are overwhelmingly... (shrink)

This volume brings together J.S. Mills On Liberty and a selection of important essays by such eminent scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, John Rees, C.L. Ten and Richard Wollheim. As well as providing authoritative commentary upon On Liberty , the essays reflect a broader debate about the philosophical foundations of Mill's liberalism, particularly the question of the connection betweenMill's professed utilitarianism and his commitment to individual liberty. Introduced and edited by John Gray and G.W. Smith, the book (...) will be of interest to students of Mill, to ethical and political philosophers and to anyone interested in the contemporary status of liberalism. (shrink)

This volume brings together J.S. Mills _On Liberty_ and a selection of important essays by such eminent scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, John Rees, C.L. Ten and Richard Wollheim. As well as providing authoritative commentary upon _On Liberty_, the essays reflect a broader debate about the philosophical foundations of Mill's liberalism, particularly the question of the connection betweenMill's professed utilitarianism and his commitment to individual liberty. Introduced and edited by John Gray and G.W. Smith, the book will (...) be of interest to students of Mill, to ethical and political philosophers and to anyone interested in the contemporary status of liberalism. (shrink)

This volume brings together J.S. Mills _On Liberty_ and a selection of important essays by such eminent scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, John Rees, C.L. Ten and Richard Wollheim. As well as providing authoritative commentary upon _On Liberty_, the essays reflect a broader debate about the philosophical foundations of Mill's liberalism, particularly the question of the connection betweenMill's professed utilitarianism and his commitment to individual liberty. Introduced and edited by John Gray and G.W. Smith, the book will (...) be of interest to students of Mill, to ethical and political philosophers and to anyone interested in the contemporary status of liberalism. (shrink)

This volume probes the social context of Paul's letter to Galatians in order to determine the character and purpose of the moral instruction Paul gives to its recipients. Here the new perspectives on Paul and the Law are fully integrated with a detailed exegesis of Galatians, shedding light on the crisis Paul addressed and on the whole character of Pauline ethics.

Some modern Christian notions of ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘cruciformity’ abstract an ethic of self-negation from its larger theological and teleological frame. A distinctively modern and Western trajectory has shaped an ‘exclusive altruism’ where the interests of the self and of the other stand in a competitive relationship. Although Paul's letter to the Philippians has often been cited as a prime example of such an ethic, closer scrutiny reveals a larger narrative frame, for both Christ and believers, that is oriented towards fullness, (...) not kenosis. Within a community of solidarity and reciprocal asymmetry in Christ, each person's work in looking to the concerns of others is balanced and framed by a communal concern to safeguard the interests of each person in the interests of conjoint benefit. Pauline resources thus enable us to replace the modern polarity with an alternative: the proper opposite to being selfish is not to be ‘selfless’ but to be ‘self-with’. (shrink)

It is shown that there is a formula σ(g) in the first-order language of group theory with the following property: for every finite group G, the largest soluble normal subgroup of G consists precisely of the elements g of G such that σ(g) holds.

The purpose of Donald Winch’s "historiographic revision" is to show that most recent interpretations of Smith have distorted his meaning because they have misread the intention of Smith’s work, treating it either as the first great justification of the nascent liberal capitalist polity, or as such a justification infiltrated by intimations of the Marxian notion of alienation. In Winch’s view, either account of Smith’s project is misleading by virtue of imposing nineteenth-century perspectives and categories upon "what is quintessentially a work (...) of the eighteenth century." The problem, then, is to determine the historically appropriate context or problematic within which the complex and at times paradoxical thought of the Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the Lectures on Jurisprudence can reasonably be situated. As Winch notes, his study is an application of the contextualist methodological principles of Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and is similar in design to recent works on Locke by John Dunn and on Hume by Duncan Forbes. (shrink)

© Copyright 2015, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc..Signal transducer and activator of transcription factor 3 is hyperactivated in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas. Cumulative evidence indicates that IL-6 production by HNSCC cells and/or stromal cells in the tumor microenvironment activates STAT3 and contributes to tumor progression and drug resistance. A library of 94,491 compounds from the Molecular Library Screening Center Network was screened for the ability to inhibit interleukin-6 -induced pSTAT3 activation. For contractual reasons, the primary high-content screening campaign was (...) conducted over several months in 3 distinct phases; 1,068 primary HCS actives remained after cytotoxic or fluorescent outliers were eliminated. One thousand one hundred eighty-seven compounds were cherry-picked for confirmation; actives identified in the primary HCS and compounds selected by a structural similarity search of the remaining MLSCN library using hits identified in phases I and II of the screen. Actives were confirmed in pSTAT3 IC50 assays, and an IFNγ-induced pSTAT1 activation assay was used to prioritize selective inhibitors of STAT3 activation that would not inhibit STAT1 tumor suppressor functions. Two hundred three concentration-dependent inhibitors of IL-6-induced pSTAT3 activation were identified and 89 of these also produced IC50s against IFN-γ-induced pSTAT1 activation. Forty-nine compounds met our hit criteria: they reproducibly inhibited IL-6-induced pSTAT3 activation by ≥70% at 20 μM; their pSTAT3 activation IC50s were ≤25 μM; they were ≥2-fold selective for pSTAT3 inhibition over pSTAT1 inhibition; a cross target query of PubChem indicated that they were not biologically promiscuous; and they were ≥90% pure. Twenty-six chemically tractable hits that passed filters for nuisance compounds and had acceptable drug-like and ADME-Tox properties by computational evaluation were purchased for characterization. The hit structures were distributed among 5 clusters and 8 singletons. Twenty-four compounds inhibited IL-6-induced pSTAT3 activation with IC50s ≤20 μM and 13 were ≥3-fold selective versus inhibition of pSTAT1 activation. Eighteen hits inhibited the growth of HNSCC cell lines with average IC50s ≤ 20 μM. Four chemical series were progressed into lead optimization: the guanidinoquinazolines, the triazolothiadiazines, the amino alcohols, and an oxazole-piperazine singleton. (shrink)

This book is the second volume of an interdisciplinary study, chiefly one of philosophy and psychology, which concerns personality, especially the abnormal in terms of states of aloneness, primarily that of the negative emotional isolation customarily known as loneliness. Other states of aloneness investigated include solitude, reclusiveness, seclusion, desolation, isolation, and what the author terms “aloneliness,” “alonism,” “lonism,” and “lonerism.” Insofar as this study most explicitly focuses on abnormal personalities, it employs the general and specific definitions of personality aberrations as (...) formulated by the American Psychiatric Association in its latest edition of the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV)_. The author views personality as preeminently comprised of the individual's interpersonal relationships. Unlike the _DSM-IV_, he proposes that people with personality disorders not only possibly but necessarily manifest deviancy regarding interpersonal functioning via serious shortcomings in shared inwardness, paramountly reciprocated intimacy. This work also engages in an analysis of five social factors that are conducive to predisposing, precipitating, and maintaining negative kinds of personality and aloneness. The author has formed these factors into an acronym titled _SCRAM_ since when they are present, intimacy scurries away and in its absence, loneliness and other sorts of unwanted aloneness scamper in and fill the person with unhappiness via, for instance, sadness and self-worthlessness. The constituents of SCRAM are the following social illnesses: _S_uccessitis (for example, the fixation on fame and fortune), _C_apitalitis (greed-driven, unfettered capitalism), _R_ivalitis (competitivitis), _A_tomitis (hyper-individualism), and _M_aterialitis (for example, the anti-spirituality of consumeritis). In sum, this book provides a different perspective on personality via the lenses of various types of aloneness and their lack of public and private intimacy, especially love. (shrink)

Each title in the "Key Issues" series aims to set the work in its historical context. In this collection of contemporary responses to "Leviathan", attention is focused on its critics who attacked Hobbes's moral, political and religious ideas in a series of pamphlets and short books.

Harry S. Broudy has studied the utility of general education through the development and testing of his Newspaper Test of the Uses of Schooling (NPT). The results of research with a new version of the NPT are reported in this essay and some options for future research are presented. The results of the study indicate that continued development and testing of the NPT will prove important. Promising new versions of the test are suggested for future research to pursue, including a (...) Hypertest version. Additional instruments and research strategies are also suggested that could be used to broaden the "search for evidence" of the uses of schooling. (shrink)

Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and as a sometime collaborator with Theodor Adorno, especially on their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s.Included are Horkheimer's inaugural address as director of the Institute, in which he outlines the interdisciplinary research program that would dominate the initial phase of the Frankfurt School, his first full monograph, and a (...) number of other pieces published in the 1930s. The essays, most of which have not appeared in English before, are surprisingly relevant to current post-philosophy debates, notably "On the Problem of Truth," with its focus on pragmatism, and "The Rationalism Debate in Current Philosophy," a sustained critique of the post-Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. Horkheimer's 1933 critique of Kantian ethics, "Materialism and Morality," is of particular interest given the current reaction to the neo-Kantian aspect of Habermas's work. There are also essays relevant to the current foundations debate within Continental philosophy, and the rationality/relativism question is sustained throughout the volume. (shrink)

We study the weak truth-table and truth-table degrees of the images of subsets of computable structures under isomorphisms between computable structures. In particular, we show that there is a low c.e. set that is not weak truth-table reducible to any initial segment of any scattered computable linear ordering. Countable $\Pi _{1}^{0}$ subsets of 2ω and Kolmogorov complexity play a major role in the proof.