Bidirectional trans‐synaptic signaling is essential for the formation, maturation, and plasticity of synaptic connections. Synaptic cell adhesion molecules (CAMs) are prime drivers in shaping the identities of trans‐synaptic signaling pathways. A series of recent studies provide evidence that diverse presynaptic cell adhesion proteins dictate the regulation of specific synaptic properties in postsynaptic neurons. Focusing on mammalian synaptic CAMs, this article outlines several exemplary cases supporting this notion and highlights how these trans‐synaptic signaling pathways collectively contribute to the specificity and diversity (...) of neural circuit architecture. (shrink)

Prioritizing friendship is associated with many health and well-being benefits. However, to date, there have been relatively few studies that have examined cultural moderators of the link between friendship and important outcomes. In other words, is prioritizing friendships more beneficial in some contexts than others? In the current study, we examined how culture- and country-level factors were associated with the importance people place on friendships and the benefits derived from this importance. The sample comprised of 323,200 participants from 99 countries (...) from the World Values Survey. Multilevel analyses revealed that women, people with higher levels of education, and people living in countries that are more economically equal and high in indulgence placed more value on friendships. Prioritizing friendships in life was associated with better health and well-being, but these associations depended on many cultural factors. The findings are discussed in the context of the ways in which friendships can enrich health and well-being across different settings. (shrink)

This edited collection represents an ongoing conversation for bringing healing cultures into suffering and evil. The pluralistic perspectives emerge from the creativity of this unique community of interpreters.

This Korean study replicated a previously published American study. The conceptual framework and method combined ethical enquiry and phenomenology. The research questions were: (1) What is nursing students’ experience of ethical problems involving nursing practice? and, (2) What is nursing students’ experience of using an ethical decision-making model? The participants were 97 senior baccalaureate nursing students, each of whom described one ethical problem and chose to use one of five ethical decision-making models. From 97 ethical problems, five content categories emerged, (...) the largest being health professionals (69%). The basic nature of the ethical problems was the students’ experience of conflict, resolution and rationale. Using an ethical decision-making model helped 94% of the students. A comparison of the Korean and American results yields important implications for nursing ethics education, practice and research. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

Previous studies have been split over how to view family owners’ CSR engagement, arguing that they either engage in or disengage from CSR based on different motives (i.e., preserving socio-emotional wealth vs. seeking rent expropriation). Focusing on family owners in business groups, this study integrates these divergent views. We hypothesize that family owners would pursue both motives simultaneously by optimizing the level of CSR of each affiliated firm depending on their ownership level. Furthermore, we argue that this tendency is moderated (...) by group-level contexts. Using a sample of Korean business groups, we found that family ownership is negatively associated with affiliated firms’ CSR. Also, this negative relationship is more pronounced when firms belong to business groups with more charitable corporate foundations and when business networks are greater in their scope and scale. This study contributes to the literature by offering a more complete understanding of how family owners make CSR decisions in business group contexts. (shrink)

This article has called past studies into question as they relate to describing and explaining the impact of information on policy-making. More specifically, it attempts to empirically investigate the causality of the factors involved in the impact of information on governmental decision-making. Based on an integrated conceptual framework for when and how information helps to make policy decisions, a path model (or a covariance structure model without latent variables) is built and tested against the data in two areas of mental (...) health policy (i.e., service provision and financing). Findings of the study demonstrate that how and when information influences governmental decision-making is directly and indirectly affected by a variety of factors and their linkages, not dominated by one set of factors (e.g., trustworthiness of information source or format of reports) defined by a single perspective (e.g., the organizational interest or the communications perspective). The most important paths in the model are those between factors related to information (e.g., the amount of information received or its use) and the impact of information on policy-making. Interestingly, these factors also play a major role in linking other variables (e.g., demographics or decision makers’ distrust of information) to the impact of information on policy-making. Furthermore, the general pattern of the findings indicates that policy areas make a difference in accounting for the impact of information on policy-making. Overall, the single most important lesson is that past perspectives are not alternative or competing tools for understanding the phenomena, and, thus, the theoretical and/or empirical task of explaining when and why information affects policy-making is equivalent to explaining why a certain set of factors is not appropriate or appropriate for a particular context and to identifying such a context. (shrink)

Abstract The leadership of the black community is concerned with welfare, with equality, with unemployment, with discrimination, with racism, with the pay gap, and with dozens of other such traditional issues. Oh, yes, they are also apprehensive about the use of addictive drugs. But, as we speak, young male members of this community are being incarcerated at frightful rates, and, even worse, are killing each other to boot. One would think that this latter issue would occupy the interest of black (...) leaders front and center. After all, there are few worse problems than being jailed or killed. The present paper is dedicated to making the case that the black leadership has its priorities all wrong; that if they were to exercise true leadership, they would see the jailing and murder of young black men as perhaps the greatest threat to their community; and, if so, they would fervently support the legalization of all drugs. (shrink)

The discourse marker use of the word like is considered by many to be superfluously sprinkled into talk, a bad habit best avoided. But a comparison of the use of like in successive tellings of stories demonstrates that like can be anticipated in advance and planned into stories. In this way, like is similar to other words and phrases tellers recycle during story telling. The anticipation of like contrasted with the uses of other discourse markers such as oh, you know, (...) and well, which almost never re-occurred in similar locations across tellings. Um and uh did sometimes re-occur; these uses are contrasted with like. Although discourse markers are generally used on the fly to handle various issues that come up in coordinating talk as it unfolds, like can be used as an integral part of the story -a marked contrast to the prevalent idea that likes are speech tics. (shrink)

Words like well, oh, and you know have long been observed and studied in spontaneous speech. With the proliferation of on-line dialogues, such as instant messaging between friends or back-and-forth postings at websites, there are increasing opportunities to observe them in spontaneous writing. In Experiment 1, the interpretation of discourse markers in on-line debates was compared to proposed functions of those markers identified in other settings. In Experiment 2, the use of discourse markers in spontaneous speech was compared to their (...) uses in spontaneous writing. Results support the conclusion that although they vary in frequency in spoken versus written domains, discourse markers are used similarly across domains, but with particular communicative functions that make them non-interchangeable. (shrink)

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6 Authors Erika L. Milam, Department of History, University of Maryland, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA Roberta L. Millstein, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Angela Potochnik, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Joan E. Roughgarden, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

Atran & Norenzyan (A&N) claim that an appreciation of the evolved inferential machinery underlying supernatural beliefs can greatly aid us in understanding regularities in culturally shared conceptions of religion. I explore how their model provides insight into why culturally shared tales of horror (e.g., horror movies) often combine religious and predatory content.

"Oh really. The Cartesian dualism is the major sin of modernity, didn't you know that?" She began laughing, as if this were some sort of inside joke. "And you don't want to be living in sin, do you? What are you, Wilber, all of 20 years old? And already living in sin.".

Horʼot hilkhatiyot - ke-hanḥayot oh ke-tsiṿuyim.

Es de notar desde e] principio la actitud afirmativa, superadora, en la filosofía de Nietzsche y su mediación para sentir y crear bellamente, pues él se toma en serio el problema de la estética, como la actividad propiamente metafísica, en sentido schopenhaueriano. Aquí referimos nuestra meditación al aforismo 276 de El Cay saber «Quiero aprender cada vez más, a ver lo necesario como bello en las cosas y así seré uno de los que embellecen las cosas. Amorfati: que esto desde (...) ahora esté en mi amor. No quiero acusar, tampoco quiero acusar al acusador. ¡Mi única negación sea a~adar la mirada! Y de una vez y en grande, quiero en todo momento no ser más que un hombre siempre afirmativo.» También, en Así habló Zaratustra 1, muestra Nietzsche bella y estimulante la admiración ante la necesidad: «Oh voluntad, cambio de toda necesidad! ¡tú, mi necesidad. Resérvame para una gran victoria!» Lo que acontece necesariamente, lo que se nos impone por la fuerza de las cosas, que no puede ser cambiado en sí mismo, abre sin embargo una posibilidad de diferente actitud en el modo de vivirlo y quien vive conscientemente lo inexorable puede «ver lo necesario como bello en las cosas». Es el desarrollo de su primera actitud científico filológica, cuando este joven profesor quiere expresar lo más hondo de la cultura griega en El nacimiento de la tragedia, donde manifiesta su profundamente sentida admiración por la vida y la cultura del pueblo heleno, en los últimos párrafos, con las palabras del extranjero que exclama: «cuánto tuvo que sufrir este pueblo para haber llegado a ser tan bello». De este modo, belleza y sufrimiento se hacen constitutivos de la vida trágica como puede ser afrontar con elevación, imprimiendo un bello sentido a cuanto la necesidad nos impone. (shrink)

Multiple realization historically mandated the autonomy of psychology, and its principled irreducibility to neuroscience. Recently, multiple realization and its implications for the reducibility of psychology to neuroscience have been challenged. One challenge concerns the proper understanding of reduction. Another concerns whether multiple realization is as pervasive as is alleged. I focus on the latter question. I illustrate multiple realization with actual, rather than hypothetical, cases of multiple realization from within the biological sciences. Though they do support a degree of autonomy (...) for higher levels of explanation and organization, they do not have the dire consequences critics of multiple realization fear. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221‐0374; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

At workplaces where nanomaterials are produced or used, risk assessment and risk management are extremely difficult tasks since there is still limited evidence about the risks of nanomaterials. Measurement methods for nanoparticles are contested and safety standards have not yet been developed properly. To support compliance with the legal obligation of the employer to care for safe workplaces a large number of ‘soft’ regulatory tools have been proposed (e.g. codes of conduct, benchmarks, standards). However, it is not clear whether and (...) under which conditions soft regulation is complied with. This article discusses the potential advantages and drawbacks of soft regulation. It explores compliance issues when exposure measurement devices and other technology-related factors are involved. The exploration of three examples of soft regulation on occupational health and safety (a ministerial recommendation on preliminary exposure benchmarks, a nano-specific guidance of a chemical company and a public–private OHS guideline) shows that the capacity of the regulated parties to comply depends on the availability of appropriate technological devices and methods, technical expertise and other resources. When technological prerequisites are met, compliance is likely to increase. (shrink)

The study of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo‐devo”) has recently experienced a dramatic surge in popularity among researchers and theorists concerned with evolution. However, some biologists and philosophers remain skeptical of the claims of evo‐devo. This paper discusses and responds to the recent high profile criticisms of evo‐devo presented by biologists Hopi E. Hoekstra and Jerry A. Coyne. I argue that their objections are unconvincing. Indeed, empirical research supports the main tenets of evo‐devo, including the claim that morphological evolution is the (...) result of cis ‐regulatory change and the distinction that evo‐devo draws between morphological and physiological traits. *Received January 2008; revised March 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Bioethics is a field in which innovation is required to help prevent and respond to zoonotic diseases with the potential to cause epidemics and pandemics. Some of the developments necessary to fight pandemics, such as COVID-19 vaccines, require public debate on the benefits and risks of individual choice versus responsibility to society. While these debates are necessary, a more fundamental ethical innovation to rebalance human, animal, and environmental interests is also needed. One Health (OH) can be characterized as a strategy (...) that recognizes and promotes the synergy between human, animal, and environmental health. Yet, despite the recognition that these entities are interdependent, there is a pronounced inequality in the power relations between human, non-human animal, and the environmental interests which threatens the well-being of all. Until OH can ensure the moral status of animals and the environment and thereby the equal consideration of these interests, it will struggle to protect non-human interests and, as a result, human health. To create a sustainable health system requires a renewed concept of justice that is ecocentric in nature and an application of OH that is flexible and responsive to different ethical interests (e.g., person-centred care and physician responsibilities). Ultimately, to save themselves, humans must now think beyond themselves. Bioethics must assume a key role in supporting the developments required to create and maintain relationships able to sustain environmental and human health. (shrink)

In spite of doubts in many quarters there seems to be considerable confidence in the benefits of health examinations. In my opinion it is important to analyze the structure and the purpose of the examinations in order to elucidate the practical thinking and logical quality of OHS. In this article I will conceive health examination as an information process and offer types of inference, i.e. prediction, abduction and induction, feasible for the analysis. I will study the logical conditions and possibilities (...) to draw conclusions using these inference methods and try, in a preliminary way, to show how the qualitative or quantitative formulations of presuppositions affect the formulation of the conclusion. Finally I will explicate the implicit purposes of the health examinations stipulated by Finnish legislation with the aid of the above inference methods. I find the methods feasible for analyzing the information process, and will set forth some conditions for presuppositions used with inference and point out the alternative purposes of Finnish occupational health examinations. (shrink)

This essay opens the Special Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law entitled “Legal Languages and Legal Communication” devoted to issues in translating, interpreting and teaching legal languages and legal communication. This volume of the International Journal of the Semiotics of Law comprises twelve articles which might be grouped into three categories of problems i.e. culture in legal translation and interpretation, legal discourse and/in legal communication and teaching legal languages and legal communication. The first section refers to (...) issues connected with legal terminology and the impact legal culture has on the quality of translation and interpretation (Kordić in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Janigova in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Matulewska and Oh in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4)). The second part focuses on the question of legal discourse with a special emphasis on its role in legal communication (Więcławska in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Alwazna in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Hadryan and Rutecka-Góra in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Orts in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Cudowska in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Górska and Juzaszek in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4) and Grieshofer in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4)). The third and last section of the special issue is dedicated to question of instructing legal languages and legal communication and, mainly tackles the problem of designing curricula of English for Legal Purposes in such a way so as to equip legal professionals with such linguistic competences, knowledge and skills that are most valuable for their work (Bhatia in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4); Chiknaverova in Int J Semiot of Law 36 (4)). (shrink)

In this study, we are addressing the call for further research (Aikhenvald 2015) into how languages, in our case Modern Greek, mark the unexpected. Our first research question is: Can we identify a class of mirative evidential markers in Modern Greek? The expected answer is that we can, if we take account of frequency rates in a variety of sources in the real world, namely plays, corpora and tags in social media. The second research question is: Do these markers convey (...) propositional or non-propositional meaning? Our findings suggest that the Greek data involves predominantly non-propositional types of meaning since mirativity is not delivered by the semantic content of the utterance (e.g., Ooo! Tí vlépoun ta mátia mou? “Oh! What do I see?”, Ma ti les tóra? “But what are you saying now?”, Ba ba ti akoúo? “Well, well, what do I hear?” Mi mou pis! ‘Don’t tell me!’). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Being Ability–different, Atypically–bodied... Criptastic?Emily HutcheonIn being prompted to write about my experiences with disability [alternatively written: (dis)ability, dis/ability, “disability,” disAbility], I am confronted with more questions than I have answers. Am I to reflect on that small window of time, one so small that I don’t actually remember it, when I did not know that I was different? My mom [End Page 196] has recounted vivid (...) moments where I seem to come to this realization—for example, at the age of three, when I see my twin sister and friends scrambling on a playground and I process that I am unable to join them. Realization of my differentness (my different body, my different way of moving, my different abilities) continued into my youth and adulthood (Can’t skate—check. Can’t ride a two–wheeled bike—check. Usually walk behind others, destined to be the last in a group—check. Was the smart kid in class, aka smartass–in–training—check).Eventually, I realized that my differentness was not contained to my body or my abilities. Were my mind, my self, and my relationships different as well? I seemed to empathize when others didn’t or couldn’t. I saw that certain things were just wrong, and was confused when others didn’t share my concern. I seemed to see, feel, and experience things that others did not. For instance, I had two invasive operations before the age of eleven, a handful of minor procedures and countless physiotherapy sessions. Some memories of these times are horrific. Some I cherish, including the genuine care of the health care staff. Some are hilarious, like being doped–up before invasive surgery at the age of ten and calling my favorite surgeon “So cute!!” But always, there was physical pain, pain, pain. At times, I was completely dependent on others to help me to the bathroom, the shower, to move around, and to recover. I received such tender and exquisite care from my mom during these times. The dependency, which I had no choice but to experience, the dependency that is feared by almost everyone I know (“If I am ever a burden to my family, shoot me”) is something that my mom and I constantly joke about (“Em, I will take care of you now, only if you change my diapers when I’m old, kay?”). I have come to learn that this dependency, along with those other shades of vulnerability, are an inevitable consequence of being human, and to deny this is to relinquish our capacity to connect with others.I had, and continue to have, relationships with strangers, friends and family, which are, in my best estimation, atypical. I am the recipient of staring, laughing, pointing, sympathy, disgust, empathy, tender care, curiosity, hostility, resentment, and ambivalence. While in the gym, complete strangers approach me to say, with all the kindness, enthusiasm, and obliviousness in the world: “Glad to see you out and about. Good for you!” For some, I am to be protected; for others, I am to be tiptoed around; and for others, I am to be congratulated for “overcoming my circumstance” and for being oh–so–valuable to society because of my smarts and productivity.It is a rare few who accept what Cerebral Palsy and epilepsy offer to my life and to their own, with all of their accompanying complexities, possibilities, and contradictions.It is ironic that the excellent health care and services I have received, which have probably changed my life for the better, are only made possible because of the “disability” label, which I have come to heartily dislike. I have always felt ill–at–ease with this word and concept. In my mind, it just does not describe me or others around me. Perhaps more accurately, the definitions and associations that stubbornly accompany the term (e.g., the disabled person as asexual, passive and in need of protection, the disabled person as the conquering hero) would never accurately describe me. Undoubtedly, the term is negative in its connotations. And, of course, the concept of disability relies on certain notions of “normal.” By most accounts in... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Am I Doing? My Experience The Title Literature: What Is It? A Friendly Witness?