Diphtheria is an acute toxin-mediated superficial infection of the respiratory tract or skin caused by the aerobic gram-positive bacillus Corynebacterium diphtheriae. The epidemiology of infection and clinical manifestations of the disease vary in different parts of the world. Historical accounts of diphtheria epidemics have been described in many parts of the world since antiquity. Developed in the late 19th century, the diphtheria antitoxin played a pivotal role in the history of public health and vaccinology prior to the advent of the (...) diphtheria-tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis vaccine. One of the most significant demonstrations of the importance of DAT was its use in the 1925 diphtheria epidemic of Nome, Alaska. Coordinated emergency delivery of this life-saving antitoxin by dog-sled relay in the harshest of conditions has left a profound legacy in the annals of vaccinology and public health. Lead dogs Balto and Togo, and the dog-led antitoxin run of 1925 represent a dynamic illustration of the contribution made by non-human species towards mass immunization in the history of vaccinology. This unique example of cooperative interspecies fellowship and collaboration highlights the importance of the human-animal bond in the one-health initiative. (shrink)

We describe KAT-ML, an implementation of an interactive theorem prover for Kleene algebra with tests. The system is designed to reflect the natural style of reasoning with KAT that one finds in the literature. One can also use the system to reason about properties of simple imperative programs using schematic KAT. We explain how the system works and illustrate its use with some examples, including an extensive scheme equivalence proof.

Workplace compassion is one of the cornerstone remedies to employees’ suffering. Compassionate acts will directly affect the job performance of employees. This research study looks at the analysing...

What is the spirit that animates collective action? What is the ethos of democracy? _Worldly Ethics _offers a powerful and original response to these questions, arguing that associative democratic politics, in which citizens join together and struggle to shape shared conditions, requires a world-centered ethos. This distinctive ethos, Ella Myers shows, involves care for "worldly things," which are the common and contentious objects of concern around which democratic actors mobilize. In articulating the meaning of worldly ethics, she reveals the (...) limits of previous modes of ethics, including Michel Foucault's therapeutic model, based on a "care of the self," and Emmanuel Levinas's charitable model, based on care for the Other. Myers contends that these approaches occlude the worldly character of political life and are therefore unlikely to inspire and support collective democratic activity. The alternative ethics she proposes is informed by Hannah Arendt's notion of _amor mundi_, or love of the world, and it focuses on the ways democratic actors align around issues, goals, or things in the world, practicing collaborative care for them. Myers sees worldly ethics as a resource that can inspire and motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democratic politics, and the book highlights civic organizations that already embody its principles. (shrink)

Consider a terrible situation that too many women find themselves in: 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year. Many of these women do not bring their cases to trial. There are multiple reasons that they might not want to testify in the courts. The incredibly low conviction rate is one. Another reason, however, might be that these women do not want the fact that they were raped to become the most salient thing about them. More specifically, (...) they do not want it to be the thing that others attend to the most—that others find most noticeable and memorable. In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘harmful salience perspectives’ to help to explain this and related phenomena. This refers either to attention on things that should not be salient, or not enough attention on things that deserve to be made salient. Following ideas within the feminist literature on objectification, I argue that we can be harmed when aspects of our identity that do not reflect our personhood—our agency, rationality, personality, and so on—are more prominent in the minds of others than aspects that do reflect our personhood. Crucially, these ways of attending do not need to implicate false beliefs and harmful ideologies to be harmful, but can be harmful in their own right. (shrink)

Rancière’s political thought is the object of growing fascination, particularly as a lens through which to interpret contemporary political protests, yet his conception of axiomatic equality remains unexamined. This article investigates Rancière’s account of equality as a ‘presupposition’, showing that an axiom of equality guides momentary acts of resistance, but also serves as a ‘necessary and sufficient condition’ of all societies, however hierarchical. Although this account holds some appeal, I argue that it restricts equality to two, not especially satisfying possibilities: (...) a temporary revelation or a hidden secret. This rendering of axiomatic equality is symptomatic of Rancière’s general hostility toward institutional politics. Because Rancière tends to depict ‘institutions’ per se as oppressive, equality is positioned ‘outside’ the socio-political order – as its fleeting interruption or disavowed condition of possibility. I argue, on the contrary, that a radically egalitarian politics today should affirm a practice-centered project of institution-building. (shrink)

Learning to adapt to the new set of conditions that confound behavioral standards was made possible by the pandemic-driven change in the school system. Due to these conditions and the COVID-19 pandemic, students may experience behaviors like social media addiction and social anxiety that may affect their well-being or happiness. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of social media addiction and social anxiety on the happiness of tertiary students amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was conducted on 316 (...) first-year college students utilizing Google forms to disseminate questionnaires. After utilizing Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, Social Anxiety Scale, and Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, it was found that social media addiction (β = -0.30, p<.00) and social anxiety (β = -0.003, p<.00) has a significant negative effect on happiness. Therefore, the study recommended and designed a student wellness program that provides a range of recreational, healthimproving, self-esteem-boosting, and relationship-strengthening activities for students in order to mitigate the negative effects of problematic social media usage and social anxiety that negatively effect their happiness. (shrink)

Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns’, referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange’. Despite their apparent (...) triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength. (shrink)

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into (...) these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination. (shrink)

Recent scandals allegedly linked to CEO compensation have brought executive compensation and perquisites to the forefront of debate about constraining executive compensation and reforming the associated corporate governance structure. We briefly describe the structure of executive compensation, and the agency theory framework that has commonly been used to conceptualize executives acting on behalf of shareholders. We detail some criticisms of executive compensation and associated ethical issues, and then discuss what previous research suggests are likely intended and unintended consequences of some (...) widely proposed executive compensation reforms. We explicitly discuss the following recommendations for reform: require greater independence of compensation committees, require executives to hold equity in the corporation, require greater disclosure of executive compensation, increase institutional investor involvement in corporate governance (including executive compensation), and require firms to expense stock options on their income statements. We provide a brief summary discussion of ethical issues related to executive compensation, and describe possible future research. (shrink)

Purpose Online violence has been rampant in the past decade, intensifying the victims’ suffering owing to its rapid dissemination to vast audiences. This study aims to focus on online gender-based violence directed against young Bedouin women who have left their male-dominated home territory for academic studies. This study examined how the backlash against these students, intended to stop changes in traditional gender roles, is reflected in offensive TikTok videos. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a qualitative-thematic analysis of 77 questionnaires (...) and 30 semistructured in-depth interviews with first-year female Bedouin students aged 18–21 years. Findings The backlash was widespread, with young Bedouin men using offensive videos as “proof” that women have violated codes of honor and morality. The videos exhibited four types of gender-based violence: claims of immoral behavior, aggressive captions that take the footage out of context, allegations of immodest clothing and digital photo editing that produced fabricated results. Examining participants' reactions to the videos, this study revealed two patterns of response: passive acceptance of the situation and an active approach that included reaching out to powerful Bedouin men for solutions. Originality/value This research enriches the literature on online gender-based violence, particularly against women in traditional societies, and suggests practical steps: developing online media literacy in traditional societies, adopting a proactive approach and nurturing social self-competence in women who have been victims of online gender-based violence. (shrink)

One theme in complaints from those with marginalized social identities is that they are seen primarily in terms of that identity. Some Black artists, for instance, complain about being seen as Black first and artists second. These individuals can be understood as objecting to a particularly subtle form of morally problematic attention: “relative attentional surplus on the wrong property.” This attentional surplus can coexist with another type of common problematic attention affecting these groups, including attentional deficits; marginalized individuals and groups (...) themselves are routinely insufficiently attended to in virtue of the surplus attention given to their social identity properties. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a (...) racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it. (shrink)

Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking simple forms of mental states, and a later-developing system, based on (...) fully developed concepts of belief and other propositional attitudes. One prediction of such theories is that the early-developing system has signature limits concerning aspectuality. We tested this prediction in two experiments. The first experiment showed that 2- and 3-year-olds take into account a protagonist's true or false belief about the location of an object in their active helping behavior. In contrast, toddlers' helping behavior did not differentiate between true and false belief conditions when the protagonist's belief essentially involved aspectuality. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more stringent method designed to rule out more parsimonious explanations. Taken together, the current findings are compatible with the possibility that early theory-of-mind reasoning is subject to signature limits as predicted by the two-systems account. (shrink)

On some accounts, Sophocles’ Philoctetes is most notable for what it lacks: alone among the extant Attic tragedies, there are no women in the dramatis personae; alone among the extant plays of Sophocles, no characters die; and the chorus plays a relatively diminished role, adhering most closely to Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that a chorus should take on the role of an actor. But when viewed through the lens of ecocritical feminism and vibrant materialism, notably the work of Donna (...) Haraway, Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, and Anna Tsing, the play’s landscape, the island of Lemnos, comes to life; and it teems with feminine energies as well as compromised and complicated animacies, while the chorus serves as an empathic focalizer and world-builder. This paper argues that in addition to animating the island’s material ecosystem, Sophocles conjures Lemnos’ mythic ecosystem, most notably the tale of the notorious, murderous, and malodorous Lemnian Women. All of these elements cohere to characterize Philoctetes as an abject, sterile menstruator. Furthermore, the chorus’s brief, strange Hymn to Gaia encapsulates the play’s tension between a masculine, heroic, teleological narrative and the feminine, primordial, bestial world of Lemnos. These dynamics are further considered through the lens of fifth-century Athenian colonization, the story of the indigenous Lemnian Pelasgians, and a colonial reading of the Odyssey’s Cyclopeia. Finally, the paper explores the close, mutually constitutive relationship between text, landscape, and body via the popularity, in later antiquity, of pharmacological applications of Lemnian Earth, used to treat, among other ailments, snakebites and menstruation. (shrink)

Excerpt from Everyday Ethics A successful book on methods of teaching ethics will improve in the schoolroom the art of instruction in the most difficult province of study and practice. Ethics relates to all manner of deeds and habits of doing which concern one's fellow men, either as private individuals or as members of institutions - members of the social whole. One may conduct himself in such a manner as to obstruct the actions of his fellow men and thereby reduce (...) their labours and strivings to a nullity, more or less, according to his power and skill. Or, on the other hand, he may act in such a manner as to reenforce their labours and strivings and increase the net product of human endeavour. The fact that there are rational objects to be achieved by humanity - name them collectively as the conquest of nature for man's use and the peaceful combination of man with men to the end that each individual may share in the experience of all individuals - these objects ought to be the common aim of all rational beings: this fact furnishes the basis and norm of ethics. It makes evident the Source of Power. The individual who promotes the twofold end of civilisation increases the aggregate power of mankind and at the same time shares in that power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Pour faire parler le Mvett, la philosophique devait de faire pratique, pour que la pensée se conjugue avec l'action, tant il est vrai que le Mvett, par-delà l'épopée, est au fond la vie pensée par l'Etre. D'où une approche phénoménologique et éthique, qui permet de montrer comment le Mvett met en oeuvre, à sa manière, les deux catégories fondamentales de l'Altérité et de la Transcendance. Ce qui se vit sur le mode initiatique peut alors se conceptualiser avec le concours de (...) Platon, Aristote, Hegel, Husserl et Ricoeur. (shrink)

Written between 1985 and 2005, the twelve essays in this collection include some of Shohat's best known pieces as well as one new essay.

This paper examines one strand of the ‘turn to ethics’ in recent political theory by engaging with Michel Foucault's late work on ‘the care of the self.’ For contemporary thinkers interested in how democratic politics might be guided, informed, or vivified by particular ethical orientations, Foucault's inquiry into ancient ethics has proved intriguing. Might concentrated ‘work on the self’ contribute to efforts to resist and remake present-day power relations? This paper endeavors to raise doubts about the Foucauldian inspired view, which (...) regards a reflexive relation of the self to itself as a privileged site for critically engaging with existing configurations of power. To do so, I offer a close reading of Foucault's scholarship that examines his work on ethics together with his well-known theory of power. I demonstrate that Foucault's distinctive theory of power, if read carefully, alerts us to the limits of the care of the self as a strategy for making power relations more equitable, open, and responsive to democratic constituencies. As I show, disciplinary power and biopower target collectivities by ‘individualizing’ and ‘massifying,’ respectively, and thereby diminishing the potential ‘counter-power’ generated by pluralistic association. If this dimension of Foucault's thought is appreciated, the ‘care of the self’ appears as a very limited resource for challenging these de-politicizing effects. Yet this paper also draws on Foucault's thought in order to stress the importance of re-orienting debates concerning the relationship between ethics and politics toward associative rather than reflexive practices of freedom. (shrink)

The need for the spiritual revival of the Ukrainian nation does not lose its relevance due to the complex and painful process of becoming an independent Ukraine. For centuries, spiritual filling of personality has been under the influence of religious factors, as religion and the church have occupied a significant place and left their informative footprint in many areas of human existence. They determined the directions of spiritual development of society, affirmed social values ​​and priorities, influenced the socio-political, economic and (...) cultural relations. Joining the discussion of the participation of church institutions in the secular education system, it should be noted that the spiritual health of the nation today is formed not only under the influence of denominational factors. (shrink)

The article describes the course of the Soviet-Vatican negotiations, analyzes from the point of view of the differences of value orientations of its subjects.

At first thought, iteration seems banal. It is about repeating the existing; nothing is changing. But this special issue shows that, in an era obsessed with the new, it is often the repetition of the old that creates social change. Iteration fosters persuasion. It affords opportunities for critical and creative engagement with meaning, values and knowledge. It invites collaboration, though its apparent simplicity often belies a tremendous amount of individual and collective labour involved in the practices of iteration. Through its (...) repetition of the existing, however, iteration also can be a mechanism for reproducing the status quo. Its pervasiveness and banality naturalises power, and its mimetic qualities shrink spaces for critical distance and care. The editors of this special issue have brought together a delightful and fascinating diversity of articles focussed on iteration in cultural production in the digital age. We hop across geographies to examine lockdown diaries, artists’ books, socialist memes, fake news, the design of social media platforms and artificial intelligence, activism, film, social media forum moderation, news website reader comments and more. Iterating through the collection as a whole, across its many disciplines, is a commitment to theorising through empirical evidence, to explaining with critique, and to providing pathways to praxis. These characteristics of this special issue, and the many concepts and arguments it puts forward, make this collection of work exceptionally rich material for seeing iteration and how it shapes the world we live in today, as well as the world we want it to be. In this preface, I take a media sociology approach to show how iteration can be usefully understood as collaborative communication for change. I see this understanding of iteration, whose ascendancy is related to the ascendancy of computer science, as baked into the form of communication technologies—and thus as shaping the kinds of iteration that are possible when we use these technologies. This understanding also prompts us to focus on the connection between iteration and social change. To explore how this works, I analytically slow down the practice of iteration to show that it is a communication practice of transmission. That transmission practice is itself constituted of cognate communication practices—the reception, evaluation and production of knowledge—in which visibility and persuasion are key. In the latter parts of the preface, I illustrate this through the example of witnessing as iteration, as the high-stakes nature of witnessing make it a canary in the coalmine, more generally, for mediated communication in the digital age. I show how breaking the witnessing practice down into its various parts allows us to see how power enters and inflects who and what are iterated, when—and who and what are not. Thinking critically with iteration and against unequal power relations, the praxis this preface suggests is one—much in line with the rest of this special issue—of explaining how iteration might move the grassroots towards their goals. (shrink)

In the philosophy of language and epistemology, debates often centre on what content a person is communicating, or representing in their mind. How that content is organised, along dimensions of salience, has received relatively little attention. I argue that salience matters. Mere change of salience patterns, without change of content, can have dramatic implications, both epistemic and moral. Imagine two newspaper articles that offer the same information about a subject, but differ in terms of what they headline. These articles can (...) be said to adopt different linguistic salience perspectives. Making different things salient in language is a way of making different things salient in an audience’s mind: it is a way of encouraging the audience to adopt a particular cognitive salience perspective. Building on Elisabeth Camp’s work on perspectives, and Sebastian Watzl’s work on attention, I suggest that one has a certain cognitive salience perspective in virtue of better noticing, remembering, and finding cognitively accessible certain contents over others. Drawing on psychological research into cognitive biases and framing effects, I argue that that simply making some content salient in the mind, perhaps through first making it salient in language, can be sufficient to activate substantive cultural beliefs or ideologies associated with that content. Where those beliefs and ideologies have epistemic and moral problems, we have grounds for criticising the salience perspective that causally produced them. Besides this instrumental harm, I also suggest that certain salience perspectives can themselves constitute harm. I draw on feminist work on objectification to argue that making the wrong thing salient about a person can constitute a way of dehumanising them. A great many factors, from physical and psychological violence, to false beliefs and credibility deficits, have already been identified as potentially harming an individual or group. What is distinctive about this argument, then, is the idea that, sometimes, mere patterns of salience can be damaging in and of themselves. (shrink)

André Padoux was among a small number of scholars, including Harvey P. Alper and Lilian Silburn, who introduced the study of Tantra to Western scholars. He authored such important works as Vāc: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras and Tantric Mantras: Studies on Mantrasastra. Padoux's 2017 Hindu Tantric World: An Overview is a significant revision of his 2010 Comprendre le tantrisme: Les sources hindoues.Padoux seeks to discover what constitutes Tantric Hinduism by investigating its essential notions and its (...) numberless practices. These are bound together, "since there is no practice without a theory that gives it meaning and explains it". He discusses the Tantric body, as it "is a... (shrink)