This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different (...) cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Improving nitrogen (N) fertilizer management in agricultural systems is critical to meeting environmental goals while maintaining economically viable and productive food systems. This paper applies a farm systems framework to analyze how adoption of N management practices is related to different farming operation characteristics and the extent to which fertilizer, soil and irrigation practices are related to each other. We develop a multivariate probit regression model to analyze the interdependency of these adoption behaviors from 966 farmers across three watersheds and (...) diverse cropping systems in the Central Valley of California. Our analysis demonstrates that farmers adopt varying combinations or portfolios of practices, with the most common portfolio featuring a core set of fertilizer-focused practices. Irrigation infrastructure is an especially important farm operation characteristic for encouraging adoption of innovative practice portfolios that integrate water and fertilizer management. These findings highlight the ability for a farm systems approach to improve our understanding of farmer decision-making across diverse agricultural landscapes. (shrink)

Emerging parallel to long-standing, academic and policy inquiries on personal responsibility for health is the empirical assessment of lay persons’ views. Yet, previous studies rarely explored personal responsibility for health among lay persons as dynamic societal values. We sought to explore lay persons’ views on personal responsibility for health using the Fairness Dialogues, a method for lay persons to deliberate equity issues in health and health care through a small group dialogue using a hypothetical scenario. We conducted two 2-h Fairness (...) Dialogues sessions (n = 15 in total) in Nova Scotia, Canada. We analyzed data using thematic analysis. Our analysis showed that personal choice played an important role in participants’ thinking about health. Underlying the concept of personal choice was considerations of freedom and societal debt. In participants’ minds, personal and social responsibilities co-existed and they were unwilling to determine health care priority based on personal responsibility. The Fairness Dialogues is a promising deliberative method to explore lay persons’ views as dynamic values to be developed through group dialogues as opposed to static, already-formed values waiting to be elicited. (shrink)

This unique volume will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence as well as students of Castaneda and Latin American philosophy.

This book asks whether evolution can help us to understand human behaviour and explores diverse evolutionary methods and arguments. It provides a short, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. It is widely used in undergraduate courses around the world.

Description: Ancient Indian logic by itself is a very vast subject. The ancient Sanskrit term nyaya which was first used in a different or in a much more general sense, was later specifically applied to the Nyaya school. The physics and physiology and psychology of the Nyaya doctrine are not specifically its own, being from the first indistinguishable from those of its sister Sastra, the Vaisesika. What characterizes it specifically is the development of the nyaya or five-membered method of demonstration (...) and its insistence on the four sources of knowledge, corresponding to the first four members of its demonstrative formula, or 'Syllogism.' The importance of Nyaya is in its doctrine of the pramanas, or sources of proof, and in its formulation of the nyaya, or method of demonstration. Indian Logic in its Early Schools by H.N. Randle is an interpretation of Indian logical theory in its historical development based on the study of original texts wherever reference to Nyaya as a method of logic has been made, and thus, covers a very wide field of Indian philosophy. An indispensable work for students of Indian philosophy, it is especially important for those who are interested in Nyayadarsana in its relation to the early logic of other schools. (shrink)

The modal interpretation of quantum mechanics allows one to keep the standard classical definition of realism intact. That is, variables have a definite status for all time and a measurement only tells us which value it had. However, at present modal dynamics are only applicable to situations that are described in the orthodox theory by projective measures. In this paper we extend modal dynamics to include positive operator measures. That is, for example, rather than using a complete set of orthogonal (...) projectors, we can use an overcomplete set of nonorthogonal projectors. We derive the conditions under which Bell's stochastic modal dynamics for projective measures reduce to deterministic dynamics, showing that Brown and Hiley's generalization of Bohmian mechanics [quant-ph/0005026, ] cannot be thus derived. We then show how deterministic dynamics for positive operators can also be derived. As a simple case, we consider a Harmonic oscillator, and the overcomplete set of coherent state projectors. We show that the modal dynamics for this POM in the classical limit correspond to the classical dynamics, even for the nonclassical number state |n>. This is in contrast to the Bohmian dynamics, which for energy eigenstates, the dynamics are always non-classical. (shrink)