Does law matter regarding public health outcomes? Regardless of what one may think about the answer to this age-old question, in recent years the public health community has increasingly demonstrated and recognized the roles that public health laws and policies play in effectuating long-lasting and broad-based population-wide changes. Public health laws and policies have been instrumental in the following ways: reducing smoking prevalence; reducing underage alcohol-related drinking, driving, crashes, and fatalities; reducing exposure to second-hand smoke; eliminating vaccine–associated paralytic poliomyelitis ; (...) increasing seat-belt use and reducing traffic fatalities; reducing dental carries; and reducing access to and consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages sold in schools and to reductions in caloric intake and overweight. In fact, in a review of the ten greatest public health achievements in the 20th century, all were influenced by policy change. (shrink)

Does law matter regarding public health outcomes? Regardless of what one may think about the answer to this age-old question, in recent years the public health community has increasingly demonstrated and recognized the roles that public health laws and policies play in effectuating long-lasting and broad-based population-wide changes. Public health laws and policies have been instrumental in the following ways: reducing smoking prevalence; reducing underage alcohol-related drinking, driving, crashes, and fatalities; reducing exposure to second-hand smoke; eliminating vaccine–associated paralytic poliomyelitis ; (...) increasing seat-belt use and reducing traffic fatalities; reducing dental carries; and reducing access to and consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages sold in schools and to reductions in caloric intake and overweight. In fact, in a review of the ten greatest public health achievements in the 20th century, all were influenced by policy change. (shrink)

Elimination of state laws that preempt local antismoking ordinances is a national health objective. However, the tobacco industry and its supporters have continued to pursue statelevel preemption of local tobacco control ordinances as part of an apparent strategy to avoid the difusion of grassroots antismoking initiatives. And, an increasing number of challenges to local ordinances by the tobacco industry and persons supported by the tobacco industry are being decided in state supreme courts and courts of appeals. The outcomes of seemingly (...) similar cases about the validity of local smoke-free air ordinances vary signifcantly by state. This paper examines the common and unique aspects of the decisions and the potential implications of court rulings on preemption for future state tobacco control eforts and achievement of national health objectives around the elimination of preemption. Using a search strategy developed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's State Tobacco Activities Tracking and Evaluation System, cases where a state or federal appellate level court made a fnding on the validity of a local smoke-free air ordinance or regulation were identifed in 19 states. In contrast to previous studies, we found that cases in approximately half of states were decided for local governments. We also found that across the states, courts were considering similar factors in their decisions including the extent to which: the local government possessed the authority to pass the ordinance, the ordinance conficted with the state constitution, and state statutes preempt the ordinance. (shrink)

Despite governmental and private antismoking initiatives, tobacco smoking remains a significant public health and economic challenge. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that for each year between 1997 and 2001, cigarette smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke caused approximately 438,000 U.S. residents to die prematurely, resulting in 5.5 million years of potential life lost, and in $92 billion dollars of lost productivity. Also, despite convincing scientific data that laws against indoor smoking protect people from the negative health effects (...) of cigarette smoke, not all states have afforded their residents this protection. As of July 2007, 16 states neither restricted nor banned indoor smoking in restaurants, private worksites, or government worksites, and many state statutes only required separate rooms for smokers rather than eliminating all smoking inside buildings. In several states, local governments have attempted to fill this gap by adopting their own antismoking measures. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance and psycho-physiological measures . This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task . The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the (...) task and a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed. (shrink)

The book includes contributions by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, George F. R. Ellis, Christopher D. Frith, Mark Hallett, David Hodgson, Owen D. Jones, Alicia Juarrero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Christof Koch, Hans Küng, Hakwan C. Lau, Dean Mobbs,...

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

PurposeEven low intensity exercise bouts of at least 15 min can improve feelings of energy and reduce systolic blood pressure. However, little is known about the psychological outcomes of briefer exercise bouts, particularly for modes of exercise that are more intense than level walking, and readily available to many working adults. This study assessed the effects of a 4-min bout of stair walking on FOE and feelings of fatigue.MethodsThirty-six young adult participants were randomized to either stair walking or seated control (...) groups. All participants walked on level-ground from a laboratory to a nearby stairwell and were seated for 4 min before beginning their experimental condition. Stair-walking participants walked up and down one flight of 16 stairs at their own pace for 4 min, while control participants remained seated during that time. Participants walked back to the laboratory for post-condition assessments. Measures of blood pressure, heart rate, rated perceived exertion, and the intensity of feelings of mental energy, mental fatigue, physical energy, and physical fatigue were assessed pre-and post-condition. Separate one-way ANOVAs were conducted on change scores for all variables.ResultsThe stair climbing group experienced significant increases in heart rate [F = 13.167, p < 0.001] and RPE [F = 93.844, p < 0.001] that were not observed in the seated control group. Four minutes of self-paced stair climbing resulted in small changes and non-significant differences within and between groups in blood pressure as well as FOE and FOF.ConclusionAlthough a 4-min self-paced exercise bout can convey short-term physiological health benefits, a 4-min bout of self-paced indoor stair walking in a stairwell was insufficient to lower blood pressure or change subjective FOE and fatigue in a sample that exhibited better than typical FOE and FOF at the pre-test. (shrink)

The thought of G. W. F. Hegel has had a deep and lasting influence on a wide range of philosophical, political, religious, aesthetic, cultural and scientific movements. But, despite the far-reaching importance of Hegel's thought, there is often a great deal of confusion about what he actually said or believed. This is an invaluable introduction for philosophical beginners and a useful reference source for more advanced scholars and researchers.

„Fenomenologia: natura, znaczenie, ograniczenia” to przekład publikacji Bernarda J. F. Lonergana pt. „Phenomenology” nature, significance, limitations”. Tenże dwunasty wykład kanadyjskiego filozofia o fenomenologii traktuje o jej definicji, przedmiocie, naturze, znaczeniu i zasługach oraz związkach z innymi naukami. Wprowadza czytelnika w główne koncepcje tej szkoły filozoficznej i zapoznaje z autorami, dla których ten sposób myślenia jest charakterystyczny. Filozof w szczególności zwraca uwagę na to, iż jest to metoda badań, w której istotną rolę odgrywa wgląd. Warto zauważyć, że kategoria wglądu w epistemologii (...) Bernarda J. F. Lonergana — XX-wiecznego myśliciela i księdza filozofującego na pograniczu fenomenologii, tomizmu i hermeneutyki — jest kluczowa. Przekładu dokonała Dominika Dziurosz-Serafinowicz. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

THEODORE KISIEL Date of birth: October 30,1930. Place of birth: Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Date of institution of highest degree: PhD., Duquesne University, 1962. Academic appointments: University of Dayton; Canisius College; Northwestern University; Duquesne University; Northern Illinois University. I first left the university to pursue a career in metallurgical research and nuclear technology. But I soon found myself drawn back to the uni versity to 'round out' an overly specialized education. It was along this path that I was 'waylaid' into philosophy by (...) teachers like H. L. Van Breda and Bernard Boelen. The philosophy department at Duquesne University was then (1958-1962) a veritable "little Louvain," and the Belgian-Dutch connection exposed me to (among other visiting scholars) Jean Ladriere and Joe Kockelmans, who planted the seeds which eventually led me to the hybrid discipline of a hermeneutics of natural science, and prompted me soon after graduation to make the first of numerous extended visits to Belgium and Germany. The endeavor to learn French and German led me to the task of translating the phenomenological literature bearing especially on natural science and on Heidegger. The talk in the sixties was of a "continental divide" in philosophy between Europe and the Anglo-American world. But in designing my courses in the philosophy of science, I naturally gravitated to the works of Hanson, Kuhn, Polanyi and Toulmin without at first fully realizing why I felt such a strong kinship with them, beyond their common anti positivism. (shrink)

This essay traces Newman’s rich legacy in modern American literature in the writings of three prominent American writers of the last century: F. Scott Fitzgerald, who plays off of Newman’s definition of a gentleman in his The Beautiful and Damned ; Sinclair Lewis, who connects the figure of Carlyle Vesper to Newman in Gideon Planish ; and Flannery O’Connor, who mentioned Newman in four published letters, and whose artistic vision was shaped appreciably by Newman’s Apologia and his Grammar of Assent.

INHALT: a. Besprechungen von J. P. Romangs Uber Willensfreiheit und Determinismus, 1835 - b. Anmerkungen zur [geplanten] 2. Auflage [des Lehrbuchs] der Religionswissenschaft - c. Materialien - d. Zur Athanasia - e. Zur Lebensbeschreibung - f. Herbarts System - g. Ein Vorschlag zur Vermeidung vieler Missverstandnisse in der Philosophie - h. Selbstanzeige der Wissenschaftslehre, 1837 - i. Skizze einer Anzeige der Logik fur die Freimuthigen Blatter - j. Uiber Hrn. Dr. und Prof. J. S. v. Drey Apologetik, 1838 - k. (...) Besprechung von J. A. Brunings Das Daseyn Gottes, 1838 - l. Einwurfe, die gegen Bolzano's Lehren bisher zum Vorschein gekommen, 1838 - m. Auseinandersetzung mit Notizen in Allgemeiner Religions- und Kirchenfreund und Kirchencorrespondent, 1839-1840 - n. Besprechung von M. Drobischs Neue Darstellung der Logik - o. Selbstanzeige von Prufung der Philosophie des seligen Georg Hermes, 1840 - p. Zur Biographie Stoppani's, 1848. (shrink)

i n br e ve ha pos t o l e f ondament a del l ’ e di f i ci o logico-matematico contemporaneo» (R. Blanché, La logica e la sua storia da Aristotele a Russell, Ubaldini, Roma 1973, p. 311).