Loop regions in proteins have traditionally been described as ‘random coil’, although they are known to adopt well‐defined conformations in most globular proteins. In this contribution we summarize the results of detailed analysis of the structures and sequences of these loop regions in proteins of known three‐dimensional structure. We also describe how these results can be used as an aid to protein design, modification and modelling.

Somites are transient structures which represent the most overt segmental feature of the vertebrate embryo. The strict temporal regulation of somitogenesis is of critical developmental importance since many segmental structures adopt a periodicity based on that of the somites. Until recently, the mechanisms underlying the periodicity of somitogenesis were largely unknown. Based on the oscillations of c-hairy1 and lunatic fringe RNA, we now have evidence for an intrinsic segmentation clock in presomitic cells. Translation of this temporal periodicity into a spatial (...) periodicity, through somite formation, requires Notch signaling. While the Hox genes are certainly involved, it remains unknown how the metameric vertebrate axis becomes regionalized along the antero–posterior (AP) dimension into the occipital, cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral domains. We discuss the implications of cell division as a clock mechanism underlying the regionalization of somites and their derivatives along the AP axis. Possible links between the segmentation clock and axial regionalization are also discussed. BioEssays 22:72–83, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Behaving ethically depends on the ability to recognize that ethical issues exist, to see from an ethical point of view. This ability to see and respond ethically may be related more to attributes of corporate culture than to attributes of individual employees. Efforts to increase ethical standards and decrease pressure to behave unethically should therefore concentrate on the organization and its culture. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how total quality (TQ) techniques can facilitate the development of a (...) cooperative corporate culture that promotes and encourages ethical behavior throughout an organization. (shrink)

I propose a novel metaphysical explanation of identity and distinctness facts called the Modal Proposal. According to the Modal Proposal, for each identity fact – that is, each fact of the form a=b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is necessary that the entities involved are indiscernible, and for each distinctness fact –that is, each fact of the form a≠b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is possible for the entities (...) involved to be discernible. I argue that the Modal Proposal has greater payoffs at less cost than any of its competitors. It gives simple, uniform, and intuitive explanations of identity and distinctness that conserve longstanding philosophical insights about identity that go back to Leibniz. It does this while making our fundamental base more parsimonious, determining whether controversial cases of identity or distinctness are possible, and expanding our understanding of these central philosophical relations. It does all this while avoiding controversial ontological commitments. (shrink)

b>—Several paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integra- tion) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. However, those studies almost always rely on explicit reports. It remains a possibility that the visual system can implicitly detect change, but that in the absence of focused attention, the change does not (...) reach awareness and consequently is not reported. To test this possibility, we used a simple change detection paradigm coupled with a speeded orien- tation discrimination task. Even when observers reported being unaware of a change in an item’s orientation, its nal orientation effectively biased their response in the orientation discrimination task. Both in aware and unaware trials, errors were most frequent when the changed item and the probe had incongruent orientations. These results demonstrate that the _nature _of the change can be represented in the absence of awareness. (shrink)

The relationship between nature and normativity in Aristotle’s practical philosophy is problematic. On the one hand, Aristotle insists that ethical virtue arises through the habitual repetition of ethically good actions, and thus no one is good or virtuous by nature. Phusikê aretê or “natural virtue” is more like cleverness (demotes) than prudence (phronêsis) and it can result in wrong actions. Yet on the other hand, at times Aristotle appears to use nature to justify normative claims. Thus the problem with Aristotle’s (...) use of the notion of nature in his practical philosophy is that in some instances what is natural seems to be ethically neutral, but in other instances it seems to set the standard for human perfection. Modern Aristotle exegetes have sometimes argued that Aristotle must, consciously or not, be using the term “nature” in at least two different senses here. To use the language of Julia Annas, when Aristotle talks about “natural virtue” in the sense of the talents or abilities which one possesses from birth, he has in mind the notion of “mere nature,” but when he discusses the perfections which a virtuous individual enjoys by his or her nature, Aristotle has in mind the notion of nature as an “ethical ideal.” I would like to suggest an alternative solution to the problem of reconciling Aristotle’s different senses of nature in his Ethics. In Nicomachean Ethics V.7, Aristotle claims that political justice {to dikaion politikon) possesses a “natural” {phusikon) part and a “conventional” {nomikori) part. Aristotle claims that both nature and convention admit of variation, and his language suggests that the two are ultimately parts which need to be interwoven or combined. Scholars who have struggled with Aristotle’s apparently disparate senses of the idea of nature have assumed that nature is an ethical ideal which can be separated from and serve as a guide for that which is merely conventional. I argue that when Aristotle invokes what is “natural” as a norm, he does so under the assumption that the natural component of a norm is ultimately separable from its conventional part only in abstraction. Just like the syllable “BA” is not reducible to the letters “b” and “a,” but instead is a whole greater than its two parts, political justice is a composite unity of nature and convention which, in unifying the two parts, transforms them. (shrink)

Evidence from many different paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integration) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. In four experiments we use modified change blindness tasks to demonstrate (a) that sensitivity to change does occur in the absence of awareness, and (b) this sensitivity does not rely on (...) the redeploy- ment of attention. We discuss these results in relation to theories of scene percep- tion, and propose a reinterpretatio n of the role of attention in representing change. (shrink)

Research suggests that some fathers and birth partners can experience post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing a traumatic birth. Birth-related PTSD may impact on many aspects of fathers’ and birth partners’ life, including relationship breakdown, self-blame and reducing plans for future children. Despite the potential impact on birth partners’ lives there is currently no measure of birth-related PTSD validated for use with birth partners. The current study therefore adapted the City Birth Trauma Scale for use with birth partners. The City Birth (...) Trauma Scale is a 29-item questionnaire developed to measure birth-related PTSD according to DSM-5 criteria: stressor criteria, symptoms of re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions and mood, and hyperarousal, as well as duration of symptoms, significant distress or impairment, and exclusion criteria or other causes. A sample of 301 fathers/birth partners was recruited online and completed measures of birth-related PTSD, bonding, and demographic details. Results showed the City Birth Trauma Scale had good reliability and psychometric and construct validity. The fathers/birth partners version has the same two-factor structure as the original scale: general symptoms and birth-related symptoms, which accounted for 51% of the variance. PTSD symptoms were associated with preterm birth and maternal and infant complications. Overall, the City Birth Trauma Scale provides a promising measure of PTSD following childbirth that can be used in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

This volume examines the concept of free will -- the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. The author intends this work to be a general guide to the variety of philosophical opinions and dimensions that deal with the concept of free will. He defines the concept, provides a historical overview, and then he goes on the present the various philosophical views and opinions that surround this topic.

In the controversial Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant claims to “complete the critical work of pure reason” [A670/b698] by providing a transcendental deduction of the ideas of pure reason. In order to analyse the role that this Appendix plays in the first Critique, this paper will read the Appendix alongside Kant’s comments in the B-Preface concerning the astronomy of Copernicus. Through an analysis of the nature of Kant and Copernicus’ respective use of presuppositions, and by looking at their respective (...) attempts to unify a science around a single systematic conception of the object of that science, this paper will offer a defence of the fundamental role that Kant’s transcendental deduction of the ideas of pure reason plays in the text. (shrink)

Balot’s (B.) Greek Political Thought aims to provide an “introductory guide” for undergraduate and graduate students to ancient Greek thinkers (broadly construed) from Homer through Epicurus who wrote in both systematic and unsystematic ways about life in the Greek polis (viii). B. notes that he has not tried to locate his arguments within current scholarly discussions (although he does include a 19 page bibliographic essay that provides an overview of Anglophone scholarship on Greek political thought). Nonetheless, he states that he (...) hopes scholars will be able to recognize his take on scholarly arguments and appreciate what is distinctive in his approach, which combines normative and historical analysis. B. also characterizes his volume as distinctive in that it approaches Greek political thought through ethical thought, or what he calls “the perspective of ‘virtue politics'” (ix), a point I will consider at greater length below. (shrink)

Fifteen distinguished contributors free present up-to-date arguments for the libertarian alternative. Part One introduces libertarianism and outlines some approaches by which it might be justified. Part Two addresses how a society that embraces libertarian principles might deal with various social problems, especially those that seem to require government intervention. Part Three responds to criticisms of libertarianism from other political perspectives and presents a libertarian critique of those viewpoints. Contributors: N. Scott Arnold; James E. Chesher; Mike Gemmell; John Hospers; Gregory R. (...) Johnson; Loren E. Lomasky; Tibor R. Machan; Eric Mack; Jan Narveson; Douglas B. Rasmussen; Daniel Shapiro; Aeon Skoble; Mark Thornton; Douglas J. Den Uyl; Steven Yates. (shrink)

This study has been designed to investigate whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) orientations have shifted in their priority in response to society's changing expectations. For this sample of U.S.-based multinational chemical subsidiaries, it appears that the top priority continues to be economic responsibilities, followed closely by legal responsibilities. A socially accountable corporation ... must be a thoughtful institution, able to rise above economic interest to anticipate the impact of its actions on all individuals and groups, from shareholders to employees to (...) customers, to fellow-breathers of the air and fellow-sharers of the land. A successful business organization must possess a moral sense as well as an economic sense (Thornton Bradshaw, President of Atlantic Richfield Co. inBusiness and Society: Strategies for the 1980's, 1980, p. xiv). (shrink)

Clark & Thornton's “superficially distinct ploys and mechanisms” are in fact very different: there is a deep difference between (a) filters and feature detectors, which “let the information in,” and (b) contentful representations and theories, which reconfigure it into a computationally tractable form. (a) is bringing abilities to experience whereas (b) is bringing content to experience. Both have well known problems. I outline an evolutionary story that avoids these problems and begins to explain how representations and theories developed out (...) of feature detectors and filters. (shrink)

Where are we to look for the unique hues? Out in the world? In the eye? In more central processing? 1. There are difficulties looking for the structure of the unique hues in simple combinations of cone-response functions like ( L − M ) and ( S − ( L + M )): such functions may fit pretty well the early physiological processing, but they don’t correspond to the structure of unique hues. It may seem more promising to look to, (...) e.g., Hurvich & Jameson’s ‘chromatic response functions’; but these report on psychophysical behaviour, not on underlying physiology. So ‘opponent processing’ isn’t any particular help on the unique hues—and even physiology in general seems not to have come up with any good correlate or explanation. 2. Wright ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2: 1–17, 2011 ) looks in a different place: to (a) magnitude of total visual response that a stimulus light provokes, the maxima and minima of which, he thinks, give us the boundaries of the main hue categories (Wright connects these with Thornton’s ‘prime’ and ‘antiprime’ colours in an illuminant: Journal of the Optical Society of America 61 ( 1971 ): 1155–1163); and (b) the ratio of chromatic to achromatic response, the maxima and minima of which, he suggests, give us the focal points of the unique hues. The suggestions are extremely interesting; but the desired correspondences have some counterexamples; and where they hold, one could wonder how much they depend upon the particular choice of functions to measure (a) and (b); and one could hope for more of an explanatory linkage between the sets of items in question. 3. Could the unique hues come from, so to speak, the external world? White and black can easily be defined as particular kinds of reflectance. What of the standard four unique hues? Variation in kinds of sunlight and skylight coincides well with variation along a line from unique yellow to unique blue (cf. Shepard 1992 , Mollon 2006 ). If we wanted something to calibrate our standards for unique yellow and blue as the lens of the eye changes with age, and despite interpersonal cone differences, this would be a good basis—and there are several ways this can be extended to surface colours. But is there any essential connection between these things: is there any rationale why the light of the sun and the sky should be counted as unique hued ? An answer may be: because in our environment, these illuminants are as close to white (or the natural illuminant colour) as you can get—to see things tinged with sunlight or skylight should be to see them minimally tinged with any alien colour. Whereas other hues in an illuminant would be treated as tinging with a more alien colour the thing seen. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the global economy, with numerous companies suffering losses and shutting down. However, some companies proved to be resilient, being able to sustain their economic performance despite the pandemic. The study aims to explain the sustainable economic performance of companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The relationships between empowering leadership, innovative work behavior, organizational readiness to change, and sustainable economic performance were assessed. The data were collected via an online questionnaire from January 2021 to March 2021, during the (...) height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia. The respondents were Russian companies’ employees holding management positions, competent to objectively assess organizational circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. A sample of 337 was used in the analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with maximum likelihood estimation was conducted using SPSS AMOS. The structural model was tested with standardized parameter estimates, standard errors, and p-values calculated. The findings of the study suggest that innovative work behavior and organizational readiness to learn have a direct influence on sustainable economic performance. The findings also suggest that empowering leadership impacts innovative work behavior but not sustainable economic performance. The mediation analysis indicates that innovative work behavior is a mediator between empowering leadership and sustainable economic performance, whereas organizational readiness to learn is not a moderator. The study adds to the leadership and sustainability body of knowledge and contributes to the research on the COVID-19 pandemic in the organizational context. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: Buddhist inquiry into the natural world proceeds from a radically different point of departure than western science, and its methods differ correspondingly. Early pioneers of the scientific revolution, including Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, expressed an initial interest in the nature of physical objects most far removed from human subjectivity: such issues as the relative motions of the sun and earth, the surface of the moon, and the revolutions of the planets. And a central principle of scientific naturalism is (...) the pure objectification of the natural world, free of any contamination of subjectivity. This principle of objectivism demands that science deals with empirical facts testable by empirical methods entailing testability by third-person means; and such facts must, therefore, be public rather than private, which is to say, they must be accessible to more than one observer. (shrink)

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the (...) United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century. (shrink)

This paper traces the background to R. A. Fisher's multi-factorial theory of inheritance. It is argued that the traditional account is incomplete, and that Karl Pearson's well-known pre-Fisherian objections to the theory were in fact overcome by Pearson himself. It is further argued that Pearson's stated reasons for not accepting his own achievement has to be seen as a rationalization, standing in for deeper-seated metaphysical objections to the Mendelian paradigm of a type not readily discussed in a formal scientific paper. (...) The apparent, post-Fisherian, continued acceptance of Pearson's objections is presented as an interesting problem for the historian and sociologist. (shrink)

"The definitive work by B.K.S. Iyengar, the world's most respected yoga teacher. B.K.S. Iyengar has devoted his life to the practice and study of yoga. It was B.K.S. Iyengar's unique teaching style, bringing precision and clarity to the practice, as well as a mindset of 'yoga for all', which has made it into the worldwide phenomenon it is today. 'Light on Yoga' is widely called 'the bible of yoga' and has served as the source book for generations of yoga students (...) around the world. It is the classic text for all serious students of yoga." --Publisher description. (shrink)

In the paper I offer a brief sketch of one of the sources of utilitarianism. Our biological ancestry is a matter of fact that is not altered by the way we describe ourselves. With philosophical theories it is otherwise. Utilitarianism can be described in ways that make it look as if it is as old as moral philosophy – as J. S. Mill thought it was. For my historical purposes, it is more useful to have an account that brings out (...) what is specific about Benthamism and its descendants. Let us try to make do with the following. First, utilitarianism asserts that the fundamental requirement of morality is that we are to maximize good, for everyone and not just for the agent. This basic principle presupposes that it makes sense to think of aggregating goods to make a total, and of comparing amounts of good thus aggregated. Second, the good to be brought about is located in feelings of pleasure, and the evil to be avoided in feelings of pain. These feelings have inherent value or disvalue regardless of how they are caused to exist and regardless of their own consequences. Third, all moral principles can be derived from the requirement that good be maximized. The principles involved in evaluating agents as well as in giving moral direction to action are nothing but applications of the basic principle. (shrink)