Uncoupling proteins (UCPs) regulate mitochondrial function, and thus cellular metabolism. Angiotensin‐converting enzyme (ACE) is the central component of endocrine and local tissue renin–angiotensin systems (RAS), which also regulate diverse aspects of whole‐body metabolism and mitochondrial function (partly through altering mitochondrial UCP expression). We show that ACE expression also appears to be regulated by mitochondrial UCPs. In genetic analysis of two unrelated populations (healthy young UK men and Scandinavian diabetic patients) serum ACE (sACE) activity was significantly higher amongst UCP3‐55C (rather than (...) T) and UCP2 I (rather than D) allele carriers. RNA interference against UCP2 in human umbilical vein endothelial cells reduced UCP2 mRNA sixfold (P < 0·01) whilst increasing ACE expression within a physiological range (<1·8‐fold at 48 h; P < 0·01). Our findings suggest novel hypotheses. Firstly, cellular feedback regulation may occur between UCPs and ACE. Secondly, cellular UCP regulation of sACE suggests a novel means of crosstalk between (and mutual regulation of) cellular and endocrine metabolism. This might partly explain the reduced risk of developing diabetes and metabolic syndrome with RAS antagonists and offer insight into the origins of cardiovascular disease in which UCPs and ACE both play a role. (shrink)

The ideas of cultural-historical psychology have led to a new understanding of the human psyche as developing in the process of the subject acting in social and historical contexts. Such a “non-classical” reinterpretation of psychological concepts should be based on a theoretical and philosophical framework in order to explain genetic sources of these concepts. For this purpose, Il’enkov’s philosophy is of great significance. This is illustrated by discussing a possible cultural-historical understanding of the concept of intelligence.

Name der Zeitschrift: SATS Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 1 Seiten: 19-35.

We describe sets of partial Boolean functions being closed under the operations of superposition. For any class A of total functions we define the set ????(A) consisting of all partial classes which contain precisely the functions of A as total functions. The cardinalities of such sets ????(A) can be finite or infinite. We state some general results on ????(A). In particular, we describe all 30 closed sets of partial Boolean functions which contain all monotone and zero-preserving total Boolean functions.

Runar M. Thorsteinsson presents a challenge to this view by comparing Christian morality in first-century Rome with contemporary Stoic ethics in the city ...

This book examines the possible ways in which the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, were inspired by philosophical traditions. It considers how the authors discussed Jesus in relation to contemporary philosophy.

What, ultimately, is the nature of reality according to Derrida? What, in his scheme of things, is being, what is time? What is consciousness and how should we conceive of the relation between self and other? What sort of metaphysics, or, more specifically, what sort of ontology if any can Derrida justifiably be said to adhere to? The aim of this chapter is to address these questions in a way that will not be entirely disloyal, or, rather, will be as (...) loyal as possible, to Derrida's legacy. In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida subjects this term to a relentless deconstruction. In Specters of Marx, written almost 30 years later than “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida famously invokes and sketches what he calls hauntology, namely, a “logic of haunting” understood as a discourse and practice that would transcend “the opposition between presence and non‐presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non‐life”. (shrink)

This article discusses the different meanings of ‘keyword’ and related terms such as ‘keyphrase', ‘descriptor’, ‘index term’, ‘subject heading’, ‘tag’ and ‘n-gram’ and suggests definitions of each of these terms. It further illustrates a classification of keywords, based on how they are produced or who is the actor generating them and present comparison between author-assigned keywords, indexer-assigned keywords and reader-assigned keywords as well as the automatic generation of keywords. The article also considers the functions of keywords including the use of (...) keywords for generating bibliographic indexes. The theoretical view informing the article is that the assignment of a keyword to a text, picture or other document involves an interpretation of the document and an evaluation of the document’s potentials for users. This perspective is important for both manually assigned keywords and for automated generation and is opposed to a strong tendency to consider a set of keywords as ideally presenting one best representation of a document for all requests. (shrink)

A table of contents is a kind of document representation as well as a paratext and a kind of finding device to the document it represents. TOCs are very common in books and some other kinds of documents, but not in all kinds. This article discusses the definition and functions of ToC, normative guidelines for their design, and the history and forms of ToC in different kinds of documents and media. A main part of the article is about the role (...) of ToC in information searching, in current awareness services and as items added to bibliographical records. The introduction and the conclusion focus on the core theoretical issues concerning ToCs. Should they be document-oriented or request-oriented, neutral, or policy-oriented, objective, or subjective? It is concluded that because of the special functions of ToCs, the arguments for the request-oriented view are weaker than they are in relation to indexing and knowledge organization in general. Apart from level of granularity, the evaluation of a ToC is difficult to separate from the evaluation of the structuring and naming of the elements of the structure of the document it represents. (shrink)

Considerations of Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, and of deconstruction as theory and practice, are bound to revolve around Derrida’s key notion of différance, developed at the outset of his career. However, Derrida’s conception of justice, which started to make its presence felt in his work in the late 1980s, should also be considered to play a major role, not least when bearing in mind his declaration, made in 1989, that “deconstruction is justice.” In this paper, the relation between différance and justice (...) is explored against the background of Martin Heidegger’s essay “Anaximander’s Saying” which, it is argued, played a formative role in the development of Derrida’s thinking. Derrida’s analysis of justice as being comprised of three aspects—justice as idea, as law or right and as deconstruction—is shown to bear a strong resemblance with the conceptual scheme drawn from Anaximander in Heidegger’s essay. The parallels between Derrida’s différance and the notion of usage, described by Heidegger as “the early word for Being,” are also brought out. (shrink)

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and (...) early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity. (shrink)

Social policies to promote socially excluded young adult women generally concentrate on education, employment, and residence but tend to neglect thriving. The current article puts forward a Civic Engagement Community Participation Thriving Model (CECP-TM) that views thriving as a social policy goal in and of itself. It posits that civic engagement, beyond its contribution to social justice, serves as a vehicle for thriving through self-exploration and identity formation. Both are considered key components of successful maturation and thriving. Nonetheless, civic engagement (...) and self-exploration tend not to be nurtured in socially excluded young adult women, a unique group experiencing intersecting discrimination. The model shows how active civic engagement in the context of a community of peers contributes to developing a sense of belonging and connectedness and promotes new self-reflection, identity formation, and agency capabilities. When situated within the context of intersectionality, these encourage the development of critical consciousness and new understandings of “who I am and how I fit into the social world in which we live.” These can provide a sense of meaning, contribute to identity formation, and promote the thriving of the self and the community. Several examples illustrate the model. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses different kinds of data documents, including data sets, data studies, data papers and data journals. It provides descriptive and bibliometric data on different kinds of data documents and discusses the theoretical and philosophical problems by classifying documents according to the DIKW model (data documents, information documents, knowl­edge documents and wisdom documents). Data documents are, on the one hand, an established category today, even with its own data citation index (DCI). On the other hand, data documents (...) have blurred boundaries in relation to other kinds of documents and seem sometimes to be understood from the problematic philosophical assumption that a datum can be understood as “a single, fixed truth, valid for everyone, everywhere, at all times”. (shrink)

This is a critical and exegetical introduction to the work and thought of Hannah Arendt, one of the most powerful and important political thinkers of the twentieth century. The book traces the connections in Arendt's work between public life and political thinking and the ways in which each informs the other. In conclusion, the author suggests why Arendt provides a unique way of rendering the political visible and relevant to people in an everyday setting.

This article analyzes a developmental tendency of the digital economy, namely the increasingly perspicuous personalization of marketable goods and services. Pro-files of user preferences relevant to consumption, calculated from innumerable traces left in digital space, engender unprecedented ways of addressing potential buyers anticipatorily. Such ways cater to desires of recognition on consumers; and they simulate a benevolent authority shepherding the individual.

A citation index is a bibliographic database that provides citation links between documents. The first modern citation index was suggested by the researcher Eugene Garfield in 1955 and created by him in 1964, and it represents an important innovation to knowledge organization and information retrieval. This article describes citation indexes in general, considering the modern citation indexes, including Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Crossref, Dimensions and some special citation indexes and predecessors to the modern citation index like (...) Shepard’s Citations. We present comparative studies of the major ones and survey theoretical problems related to the role of citation indexes as subject access points (SAP), recognizing the implications to knowledge organization and information retrieval. Finally, studies on citation behavior are presented and the influence of citation indexes on knowledge organization, information retrieval and the scientific information ecosystem is recognized. (shrink)

"This manuscript seeks to provide a fresh and comprehensive re-interpretation of the ideas of the world-renowned Canadian Political theorist, C.B. Macpherson."--.

There have been several calls from LIS researchers for practical or applied research not to ignore the epistemological assumptions underlying the systems and artifacts they design lest they showcase only the dominant theory at a given time. Others have also deplored the "epistemological promiscuity" or "eclecticism" of the field, its incessant borrowing of theories and models from elsewhere and the fact that the field has largely neglected the contributions that philosophy and epistemology could have made in its research. This problem (...) raises that of the boundaries of LIS and is all the more troublesome because boundaries between epistemological theories are fuzzy. Indeed, some epistemological theories share the same basic assumptions or are historically derived from one another. Gathering a wide array of acknowledged theorists in philosophy of science and epistemology, this panel aims to examine how research work in the LIS field can clearly articulate the epistemological assumptions underlying that research and under what constraints this can be achieved. The topic is of prime importance to Information studies as a whole and to ASIST as the scientific flag bearer of information scientists worldwide. (shrink)

This article is the first in a trilogy about the concept “science”. Section 1 considers the historical development of the meaning of the term science and shows its close relation to the terms “knowl­edge” and “philosophy”. Section 2 presents four historic phases in the basic conceptualizations of science science as representing absolute certain of knowl­edge based on deductive proof; science as representing absolute certain of knowl­edge based on “the scientific method”; science as representing fallible knowl­edge based on “the scientific method”; (...) science without a belief in “the scientific method” as constitutive, hence the question about the nature of science becomes dramatic. Section 3 presents four basic understandings of the scientific method: Rationalism, which gives priority to a priori thinking; empiricism, which gives priority to the collection, description, and processing of data in a neutral way; historicism, which gives priority to the interpretation of data in the light of “paradigm” and pragmatism, which emphasizes the analysis of the purposes, consequences, and the interests of knowl­edge. The second article in the trilogy focus on different fields studying science, while the final article presets further developments in the concept of science and the general conclusion. Overall, the trilogy illuminates the most important tensions in different conceptualizations of science and argues for the role of information science and knowl­edge organization in the study of science and suggests how “science” should be understood as an object of research in these fields. (shrink)

A growing awareness of a subsurface fossil record of mostly hyphal fungi organisms stretching back through the Phanerozoic to ≈400 megaannum (Ma) and possibly earlier, provides an alternative view on hyphal development. Parallel with the emergence of hyphal fungi during Ordovician–Devonian times when plants colonized the land, which is the traditional notion of hyphal evolution, hyphae‐based fungi existed in the deep biosphere. New insights suggest that the fundamental functions of hyphae may have evolved in response to an ancient subsurface endolithic (...) life style and might have been in place before the colonization of land. To address the gaps in the current understanding of hyphal evolution a strategy based on research prospects involving investigations of uncharted geological material, new diagnostics, and comparisons to live species is proposed. (shrink)

In an experimental study of humans reactions to social motor intention in a humanoid robot, we showed that SMI cause the emergence of social interaction between human and robot. We investigated whether people would respond differently to a humanoid robot depending on the kinematic profile of its movement. A robot placed a block on a table in front of a human subject in three different ways. We designed the robot’s arm and upper body movements to manifest the human kinematic profile (...) of either a non-social motor intention or a social motor intention. In the control condition the robot performed an irregular movements. Once the robot had finished its task, the task of the human was to place another block on top of the first one. We distinguishedbetween social and non-social responses to the robot’s behavior based in gaze behavior and kinematic profile of the human’s arm movement during the task. Our results show that the behavior of the human can be modulated by the kinematics of a robot’s motor action. In several cases the participants reciprocated movements displaying social motor intention with movements with a similar kind of kinematics, attempting to make eye contact during the task. This shows that HRI can emerge implicitly by sensorimotor processing and suggests that implementing a mechanism for social-motor intention in social robots designed to interact spontaneously would be useful. (shrink)