The transforming growth factors beta are a family of peptides which are involved in the regulation of cell growth and differentiation. It has been suggested that the loss of sensitivity to growth inhibition by endogenous TGF‐β may contribute to the process of carcinogenesis in epithelial systems. However, many breast cancer cells remain sensitive to the growth inhibitory effects of these peptides, suggesting that the local induction of TGF‐β could provide a pharmacological approach to chemoprevention. Triphenylethylene anti‐oestrogens, synthetic progestins and retinoids (...) all offer potential as chemopreventative agents. A common feature of their mechanism of action is the ability to locally increase the production of the transforming growth factors beta. (shrink)

Neither Augustine nor Aquinas can accept a political order in which religious doctrine as such is barred from serving as an explicit basis of political, legal, and economic norms. Certain twentieth-century commentators indebted (wittingly or not) to Kantianism or to other Enlightenment ideologies ignored this fact, or minimized its importance. Aquinas was misread as a forerunner of modern liberal democracy; Augustine was portrayed, with equal injustice, as seeking to dissuade Christians from participation in the political arena. In reality, the political (...) philosophy of each is consistent with a robust Christian presence in the public square, and is incompatible both with theocracy and with the modern secular state. A better understanding of the distance separating these philosopher-theologians from some of their prominent twentieth-century commentators may shed light on the history of the reception of Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes. (shrink)

Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy explores the range of ways in which Frantz Fanon's decolonization theory can reveal new answers to perennial philosophical questions and new paths to social justice. The aim is to show not just that Fanon's thought remains philosophically relevant, but that it is relevant to an even wider range of philosophical issues than has previously been realized. The essays in this book are written by both renowned Fanon scholars and new scholars who are emerging as (...) experts in aspects of Fanonian thought as diverse as humanistic psychiatry, the colonial roots of racial violence and marginalization, and decolonizing possibilities in law, academia, and tourism. In addition to examining philosophical concerns that arise from political decolonization movements, many of the essays turn to the discipline of philosophy itself and take up the challenge of suggesting ways that philosophy might liberate itself from colonial—and colonizing—assumptions. -/- This collection will be useful to those interested in political theory, feminist theory, existentialism, phenomenology, Africana studies, and Caribbean philosophy. Its Fanon-inspired vision of social justice is endorsed in the foreword by his daughter, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, a noted human rights defender in the French-speaking world. -/- Contributions by Anna Carastathis; Nigel C. Gibson; Lewis R. Gordon; Peter Gratton; Ferit Güven; Mireille Fanon Mendès-France; Marilyn Nissim-Sabat; Olúfémi Táíwò; Mohammad H. Tamdgidi; Chloë Taylor and Sokthan Yeng. (shrink)

Institutional review board delays may hinder the successful completion of federally funded research in the U.S. military. When this happens, time-sensitive, mission-relevant questions go unanswered. Research participants face unnecessary burdens and risks if delays squeeze recruitment timelines, resulting in inadequate sample sizes for definitive analyses. More broadly, military members are exposed to untested or undertested interventions, implemented by well-intentioned leaders who bypass the research process altogether. To illustrate, we offer two case examples. We posit that IRB delays often appear in (...) the service of managing institutional risk, rather than protecting research participants. Regulators may see more risk associated with moving quickly than risk related to delay, choosing to err on the side of bureaucracy. The authors of this article, all of whom are military-funded researchers, government stakeholders, and/or human subject protection experts, offer feasible recommendations to improv... (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 326-329, March 2022.

The ability to engage in reflexive thought—in thought about thought or about other mental states more generally—is regarded as a complex intellectual achievement that is beyond the capacities of most nonhuman animals. To the extent that reflexive thought capacities are believed necessary for the possession of many other psychological states or capacities, including consciousness, belief, emotion, and empathy, the inability of animals to engage in reflexive thought calls into question their other psychological abilities. This chapter attacks the idea that reflexive (...) thought is required in this pervasive way and holds that supposing that it is derives from a tendency among philosophers and scientists toward overcomplication. Against this tendency, it recommends an aponoian framework, from apó, “away from” and noûs, “intelligence” or “thought,” arguing that seemingly complex psychological abilities are often not as complex as they seem, and do not require the ability to engage in reflexive thought. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between accountability, trust and corporate reputation building. Increasing numbers of corporations are mobilising themselves to put more and more information out into the public domain as a way of communicating with stakeholders. Corporate social accounting and stakeholder engagement is happening on an unprecedented scale. Rather than welcoming such initiatives, academics have been quick to pick faults with contemporary social auditing and reporting, claiming that in its current form it is not about demonstrating accountability at all, (...) but rather about building corporate reputation. Academics argue that ‘accountability should hurt’, that if accountability is an enjoyable process, then the organisation isn’t doing it right. For organisations that are currently engaging with stakeholders and ostensibly becoming more transparent about their corporate social performance, this kind of critique is likely to be bewildering. This paper argues that central to the notion of accountability and to contemporary social accounting practice is the concept of trust. Accountability is based upon a distrust of corporate management, whereas corporate reputation building is about strategically seeking to establish trust in stakeholder relationships in order to negate formal accountability requirements. Using a split trust continuum, the paper seeks to explain and synthesise what seem to be two very different paradigms of organisational transparency. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between accountability, trust and corporate reputation building. Increasing numbers of corporations are mobilising themselves to put more and more information out into the public domain as a way of communicating with stakeholders. Corporate social accounting and stakeholder engagement is happening on an unprecedented scale. Rather than welcoming such initiatives, academics have been quick to pick faults with contemporary social auditing and reporting, claiming that in its current form it is not about demonstrating accountability at all, (...) but rather about building corporate reputation. Academics argue that ‘accountability should hurt’, that if accountability is an enjoyable process, then the organisation isn’t doing it right. For organisations that are currently engaging with stakeholders and ostensibly becoming more transparent about their corporate social performance, this kind of critique is likely to be bewildering. This paper argues that central to the notion of accountability and to contemporary social accounting practice is the concept of trust. Accountability is based upon a distrust of corporate management, whereas corporate reputation building is about strategically seeking to establish trust in stakeholder relationships in order to negate formal accountability requirements. Using a split trust continuum, the paper seeks to explain and synthesise what seem to be two very different paradigms of organisational transparency. (shrink)

Self-plagiarism requires clear definition within an environment that places integrity at the heart of the research enterprise. This paper explores the whole notion of self-plagiarism by academics and distinguishes between appropriate and inappropriate textual re-use in academic publications, while considering research on other forms of plagiarism such as student plagiarism. Based on the practical experience of the authors in identifying academics’ self-plagiarism using both electronic detection and manual analysis, a simple model is proposed for identifying self-plagiarism by academics.

This paper contends that principles of virtue ethics have the potential to both supplement and complement academic integrity policy in the adjudication of undergraduate student academic integrity breaches. The paper uses elements of grounded theory to explore responses from 15 Academic Integrity Breach Decision Makers at an Australian university, and in particular, the process they use to determine outcomes for student breaches of academic integrity. The findings indicate that AIBDMs often use principles of virtue ethics to help provide nuanced judgement (...) on sometimes complicated breaches of ethical behaviour. The findings demonstrate that many AIBDMs supplemented their knowledge of institutional academic integrity policy with a deep commitment to their own virtuous behaviour. (shrink)

Our gender identity is our sense of ourselves as a woman, a man, as genderqueer or as another gender. Trans people have a gender identity that is different from.

In the past twenty years, advances in forensic DNA technology have revolutionized the American criminal justice system. The use of forensic DNA testing in America began in 1987, and its demonstrated scientific accuracy quickly led jurisdictions to accept expert testimony regarding DNA matches between suspects and crime scene evidence. Wielding the power to exonerate the innocent and apprehend the guilty, the use of DNA identification technology has become an indispensable resource for prosecutors and law enforcement officials, as well as for (...) defense lawyers representing persons falsely accused or wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. As states began to compile DNA profiles from convicted offenders, the need for a repository for these profiles resulted in the DNA database.Originally, DNA databases included only “those classes of offenders with a high recidivism rate, such as sex offenders and violent felons.” Recognizing the crime-solving potential of this technology, state legislatures soon began to expand the scope of DNA database statutes to include broader classes of offenders. (shrink)

Means–ends decoupling has recently been suggested as one consequence of the problems organizations face in trying to comply with institutional rules in contexts of institutional complexity. Such decoupling is characterized by the adoption, implementation, and scrutiny of particular codes of practice, which tend not to deliver the outcomes they were developed to produce. Recent scholarship focusing on this issue has suggested that such decoupling is a consequence of the trade-off organizations need to make between compliance and goal achievement, most especially (...) when the latter is difficult to evaluate. Although recent scholarship has suggested that this tension might be mitigated by the activities of developers of compliance rules, in this article, we explore how actors internal to organizations, in this case, two charitable organizations, mitigate this tension via nonconformance with particular codes. We focus on how the process of accounting for nonconformance results in the discursive coupling of means and ends as actors creatively develop vocabularies of motive, which respond to anticipated social criticism. (shrink)

Arguing first that the best way to understand what a continuant is is as something that primarily has its properties at a time rather than atemporally, the paper then defends the idea that there are occurrent continuants. These are things that were, are, or will be happening—like the ongoing process of someone reading or my writing this paper, for instance. A recently popular philosophical view of process is as something that is referred to with mass nouns and not count nouns. (...) This has mistakenly encouraged the view that the only way to think of process is as the stuff of events, and has obscured the possibility of thinking of processes as individual continuants. (shrink)

Real-world judgements and decisions often require choosing from an open-ended set of options which cannot be exhaustively considered before a choice is made. Recent work has found that the options people do consider tend to have particular features, such as high historical value. Here, we pursue the idea that option generation during decision making may reflect a more general mechanism for calling things to mind, by which relevant features in a context-appropriate representational space guide what comes to mind. In this (...) paper, we evaluate this proposal primarily based on what comes to mind in different familiar categories. We first introduce an empirical approach for deriving the space of features that people use to represent items in a particular category and for locating the category members that come to mind within that space. We show that in both familiar and ad hoc categories, a category member’s location along certain dimensions of the derived feature space predicts its likelihood of coming to mind. Next, we show that category members from these feature space locations come to mind by default in a way that is somewhat impervious to conscious control. We then demonstrate that the extent to which a given dimension is a predictor of what comes to mind within a category is related to how relevant that feature is for representing the category in question, using a novel measure of general feature relevance. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of this framework in the context of a decision making task. We close with the proposal that people call category members to mind according to their location in representational space, specifically based on the predicted usefulness of considering category members with particular features. (shrink)

Community Engagement (CE) has been presented by bio-ethicists and scientists as a straightforward and unequivocal good which can minimize the risks of exploitation and ensure a fair distribution of research benefits in developing countries. By means of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Kenya between 2007 and 2009 we explored how CE is understood and enacted in paediatric vaccine trials conducted by the Kenyan Medical Research Institute and the US Centers for Disease Control (KEMRI/CDC). In this paper we focus on the role (...) of paid volunteers who act as an interface between villagers KEMRI/CDC. Village Reporters’ (VRs) position of being both with the community and with KEMRI/CDC is advantageous for the conduct of trials. However it is also problematic in terms of exercising trust, balancing allegiances and representing community views. VRs role is shaped by ambiguities related to their employment status and their dual accountability to researchers and their villages. VRs are understandably careful to stress their commitment to self-less community service since it augments their respectability at community level and opens up opportunities for financial gain and self-development. Simultaneously VRs association with KEMRI/CDC and proximity to trial participants requires them to negotiate implicit and explicit expectations for material and medical assistance in a cultural setting in which much importance is placed on sharing and mutuality. To ensure continuity of productive interactions between VRs, and similar community intermediaries, and researchers, open discussion is needed about the problematic aspects of relational ethics, issues concerning undue influence, power relations and negotiating expectations. (shrink)

In this paper we set out the basic model theory of differential fields of characteristic 0, which have finitely many commuting derivations. We give axioms for the theory of differentially closed differential fields with m derivations and show that this theory is ω-stable, model complete, and quantifier-eliminable, and that it admits elimination of imaginaries. We give a characterization of forking and compute the rank of this theory to be ω m + 1.

Dreaming is often characterized as lacking high-order cognitive skills. In two studies, we test the alternative hypothesis that the dreaming mind is highly similar to the waking mind. Multiple experience samples were obtained from late-night REM sleep and waking, following a systematic protocol described in Kahan . Results indicated that reported dreaming and waking experiences are surprisingly similar in their cognitive and sensory qualities. Concurrently, ratings of dreaming and waking experiences were markedly different on questions of general reality orientation and (...) logical organization . Consistent with other recent studies , experiences sampled from dreaming and waking were more similar with respect to their process features than with respect to their structural features. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that one can literally perceive someone's anger in their face, I argue that this would not be possible if what is perceived is a static facial signature of their anger. There is a product–process distinction in talk of facial expression, and I argue that one can see anger in someone's facial expression only if this is understood to be a process rather than a product.

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ perceptions of teaching and learning in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of engaged pedagogy and the ideas of bell hooks. It aimed to explore the different ways that teachers experienced teaching and learning during this time and the impact this may have had on teacher identity. Sixty teachers and head teachers were interviewed using MS Teams in the period April-June, 2020. For this paper, 18 transcripts were analyzed by members (...) of the research team. Four key themes emerged from the interview data: Working from home, parental engagement, teacher identity, and changes in pedagogy. Each of these themes were discussed in terms of concepts such as engaged pedagogy, agency, self-actualization, recognition and boundary transgression situated in the work of bell hooks. The idea of boundaries wove itself throughout our data as teachers expressed how the transgression of boundaries was occurring in multiple, and often contradictory, ways in pedagogical, professional, institutional and personal spaces and systems. We see in our data evidence of a shift in practice not just in the way teachers are ‘doing’ education but also, perhaps, in the way that teachers are ‘being’ as educators as they adapt to different ways of knowing. This study provides a unique exploration of a time and space in Scotland during 2020. However, the themes and understandings that emerged are of relevance to educators internationally. Schools across the world were impacted by various lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and teachers faced a common set of challenges that were resolved via re-negotiation and recognition of individual and collective agency to create new pedagogies. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between gender, class, and race through a case study of the Ontario, Canada dental profession in the first two decades of the twentieth century. During this time period dentists endeavored to solidify their claims to professional status by defining their relations with patients, the public, and with dental assistants. Dentists drew on gender, class, and racial-ethnic relations and ideology in defining these relations and fostering their professional identity. Dentists' use of these relations enabled them to (...) define and defend their claims to professional authority in the area of dental health. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDrawing extends the capacity to communicate, since it allows individuals to use graphic objects and symbols to articulate complex ideas not easily communicated using words alone. Similarly,...

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic people have endured potentially stressful challenges which have influenced behaviors such as eating. This pilot study examined the effectiveness of two brief interventions aimed to help individuals deal with food cravings and associated emotional experiences. Participants were 165 individuals residing in United Kingdom, Finland, Philippines, Spain, Italy, Brazil, North America, South Korea, and China. The study was implemented remotely, thus without any contact with researchers, and involved two groups. Group one participants were requested (...) to use daily diaries for seven consecutive days to assess the frequency of experience of their food cravings, frequency of giving in to cravings, and difficulty resisting cravings, as well as emotional states associated with their cravings. In addition to completing daily food diaries, participants in group two were asked to engage in mindful eating practice and forming implementation intentions. Participants assessed their perceived changes in eating, wellbeing, and health at the beginning and end of the intervention. Repeated measures MANOVAs indicated that participants experienced significantly less food cravings, as well as lower intensities of unpleasant states associated with cravings across time. In contrast to our hypothesis, the main effects of the group were not significant. Participants reported less eating and enhanced wellbeing at the end of the study. Our findings can be used to inform future remote interventions to manage food cravings and associated emotions and highlight the need for alternative solutions to increase participant engagement. (shrink)