Consider the following well‐attested observations: (1) Forty years of international development policies have increased rural poverty in a gender‐disproportionate manner. During the last twenty years, even as USAID policies mandated concern for women, “the number of rural women living in absolute poverty rose by about 50 per cent … as against an increase of about 30 per cent for rural men”. Against this, international justice would require that women's development be secured as a part of international development.

In this article I undertake to discover the extent to which five distinct philosophical arguments for “hardhearted” responses to hunger are rationalizations. In each case, I consider the prima facie appeal and then consider the extent to which these appeals can be answered or overcome by principles promoting policies of food equity. I pay special attention to the appeal that pits political self-determination against food equity, because I believe it is especially important to determine the extent to which respect for (...) sovereignty and political self-determination is to be seen as compatible with promoting policies of food equity. (shrink)

The phenomenon of whistleblowing seems puzzling in that whistleblowing presumably brings a wrongful practice to the attention of those with power to correct the situation. In this respect, whistleblowers act to serve the public interest in defeating harmful, illegal and unjust practices. Yet these persons suffer vilification and worse, not only from their fellow employees, but from members of the general public as well. Cases in which members of a discriminated minority report instances of job discrimination, and especially instances of (...) sexual harassment resemble other cases in which an employee reports corporate or bureaucratic misdeeds. In the early 1970s those who brought charges of sexual harassment did suffer character assassination, reprisals and difficulties in finding equivalent employment afterwards. But by the mid-1980s, consequences for those bringing discrimination charges, and especially the charge of sexual harassment have come to differ in several important respects from other cases of whistleblowing. Examining the differences, and what seem to be underlying causes of these differences, provides some insight into the factors that set limits to the practice of whistleblowing in a democratic society. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to understand the issue of gender strategies of political leadership. Theoretical basis. The works of Ukrainian and foreign scholars helped to find out the specifics of male and female leadership. The article applied the latest methodology of androgyny-analysis. According to this methodology, sex has not only a biological, psychological and social, but also an existential dimension. So, the existential dimension of gender is soulfulness as an existential femininity and spirituality as an existential masculinity. (...) These two beginnings may conflict and may be in harmony. Depending on this, we have constructive or destructive strategies for the development of both the personality and the relations between individuals. Constructiveness here means not only gender equality, but also gender partnership. Originality. In the context of modern gender anthropology and androgyny-analysis, it is found that as a result of the implementation of the strategy of existential sexism and existential hermaphroditism, political leadership becomes authoritarian, and sometimes also totalitarian, while the strategy of androgynism associated with gender partnership gives rise to constructive political leadership. Conclusions. Androgynous personality of a political leader, which balances the existential and psychological qualities of men and women, is able to reform the society and change the country for better. (shrink)

Protein complexes perform many important functions in the cell. Large‐scale studies of protein–protein interactions have not only revealed new complexes but have also placed many proteins into multiple complexes. Whilst the advocates of hypothesis‐free research touted the discovery of these shared components as new links between diverse cellular processes, critical commentators denounced many of the findings as artefacts, thus questioning the usefulness of large‐scale approaches. Here, we survey proteins known to be shared between complexes, as established in the literature, and (...) compare them to shared components found in high‐throughput screens. We discuss the various challenges to the identification and functional interpretation of bona fide shared components, namely contaminants, variant and megacomplexes, and transient interactions, and suggest that many of the novel shared components found in high‐throughput screens are neither the results of contamination nor central components, but appear to be primarily regulatory links in cellular processes. BioEssays 26:1333–1343, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)