The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Benevolent intersubjectivity developed in parent–infant interactions and compassion toward friend and foe alike are non-violent interventions to group behavior in conflict. Based on a dyadic active inference framework rooted in specific parental brain mechanisms, we suggest that interventions promoting compassion and intersubjectivity can reduce stress, and that compassionate mediation may resolve conflicts.

Despite a lack of formal university schooling in textual scholarship or in Renaissance studies, Helen Allen became a co-worker and co-editor with Percy Allen in the preparation of the great edition of the letters of Erasmus. Thanks to training she had received from her husband, she herself was largely responsible for the choices in Sir Thomas More, Selections, and the Allens together worked on the notes and glossary.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.1 (2004) 155-157 [Access article in PDF] In Memoriam John F. Callahan John Francis Callahan, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Classics at Georgetown University, died 14 July 2003 after open-heart surgery performed 6 June and was buried with full military honors 17 September at Arlington National Cemetery. His funeral Mass at the Old Post Chapel was concelebrated by his old friend and former (...) colleague, Father Edward W. Bodnar, S.J., who had also concelebrated a memorial Mass in the Jesuit Chapel at Georgetown 5 August.John served on the Board of Editors and the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Ideas from 1970 until his death and was Vice-President from 1985. Throughout thirty-three years, during which he never missed a meeting until the last, he devoted unstinted time and energy to the affairs of the Journal, rigorously scrutinizing every problem, from matters of editorial policy through changes in leadership, location, and membership on the Editorial Board to proposals for expenditures and questions of format and style. He was a meticulous reader of manuscripts and applied the most stringent standards to his consideration of both content and modes of expression. No mistake in Greek typography escaped his vigilance. He brought to the annual meetings a distinctive elegance and an unusual sense of collegiality that derived both from his devotion to the Journal itself and from his long friendship with some of the older members of the Board, such as Paul Kristeller and Richard McKeon.John was a life member of the American Philological Association (since 1940) and served with distinction from 1976 to 1986 as its delegate to the International Federation of Classical Studies (FIEC), attending its meetings in Budapest and Helsinki. A scholar of exceptionally wide-ranging interests, he was best known for his studies of the concept of time in ancient philosophy and his critical edition of Gregory of Nyssa, De oratione dominica et De beatitudinibus, which he completed at Dumbarton Oaks after he retired from Georgetown.Born in Chicago 13 May 1912, he began the study of Greek and Latin at St. Ignatius Prep, where he was also introduced to opera, a lifelong passion, by one of his Jesuit teachers. He received the A.B. in 1933 and the A.M. in 1934 from Loyola University, Chicago, which on Founder's Day, 1965, honored him with an award for distinguished contributions to classical scholarship. He received the Ph.D. in 1940 from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Richard McKeon and Werner Jaeger, the two principal, very different influences on his approach to philosophy and philology. Henry Prescott and Carl Darling Buck were two other members of that fabulous generation of classical scholars at Chicago who made a lasting impression on him. His interest in Plautus, Greek and Roman linguistics, and comparative grammar continued throughout his life, contributing to what a former colleague at Dumbarton Oaks has described as an uncanny ability to penetrate beneath the surface of the classical languages, to "peer into their deep structure."John was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, 1936-37, Instructor at Loyola University, 1937-40, Visiting Instructor, Harvard University, 1940-41, Assistant Professor, Loyola University, 1941-43, Associate Professor and Professor of Classics and Philosophy, Georgetown University, from 1946 until he retired in 1978, and Project Director at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, 1977-86. He served in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946, working in Naval Communications. He rarely [End Page 155] spoke of his part in breaking the Japanese code, but often referred to such comrades in arms as Sam Atkins and Richmond Lattimore, who like him returned to teaching as soon as World War II was over.John's teaching was enriched by his research, which was supported by a notable succession of fellowships, from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1947, the Ford Foundation for the Advancement of Education, 1953-54, the Fulbright Commission, 1953-55, the Guggenheim Foundation, 1958-59, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1967. He... (shrink)

Living out of silence, out of a fully functioning, lovingly attentive mind, and not just out of thought, out of a partially functioning mind, is requisite for depth or profundity in living or relating. A fully attentive, truly silent or meditative mind sees that there is real dualism of time and the timeless and that time and the timeless each has its own unique value. The timeless, or real silence, that which alone can make for depth in one's living and (...) relating, can be there only when, in one's awareness, time and all that is related to time, have come to an end. An examination of a wide variety of statements made by writers, both past and present, shows that these understandings are seldom there in contemporary writings, just as they were not there in writings that have come down to us from the past. 'Living beyond the One and the Many' invites readers to consider the possibility that what is presented in it can bring deep meaning to one's way of living in the world"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

Making us whole : avoiding split personalities -- The purpose of business : working together for the common good -- The virtues : human development in the corporate community -- Job design : prudence and subsidiarity in operations -- Just wages : justice and the subjective dimension of work in human resources -- Corporate ownership : temperance and common use in finance -- Marketing communication and product development : courage and solidarity in marketing -- Faith, hope and charity : authentic (...) habits of a Christian spirituality of work -- Liturgy : the source and summit of our work. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between anti-physicalist arguments in the philosophy of mind and anti-naturalist arguments in metaethics, and to show how the literature on the mind-body problem can inform metaethics. Among the questions we will consider are: (1) whether a moral parallel of the knowledge argument can be constructed to create trouble for naturalists, (2) the relationship between such a "Moral Knowledge Argument" and the familiar Open Question Argument, and (3) how naturalists can respond (...) to the Moral Twin Earth argument. We will give particular attention to recent arguments in the philosophy of mind that aim to show that anti-physicalist arguments can be defused by acknowledging a distinctive kind of conceptual dualism between the phenomenal and the physical. This tactic for evading anti-physicalist arguments has come to be known as the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. We will propose a metaethical version of this strategy, which we shall call the `Moral Concept Strategy'. We suggest that the Moral Concept Strategy offers the most promising way out of these anti-naturalist arguments, though significant challenges remain. (shrink)

During the 1870s animal morphologists and embryologists at Cambridge University came to dominate British zoology, quickly establishing an international reputation. Earlier accounts of the Cambridge school have portrayed this success as short-lived, and attributed the school's failure to a more general movement within the life sciences away from museum-based description, towards laboratory-based experiment. More recent work has shown that the shift in the life sciences to experimental work was locally contingent and highly varied, often drawing on and incorporating aspects of (...) museum work. Thus in order to understand the more general changes, studies of particular sites are needed. Here I examine the organisation of teaching at Cambridge, both in terms of the spaces in which it was taught and the ways in which teaching and examining were organised, to bring out the complexities of the 'revolt from morphology' and to show in more detail the institutional aspects that intertwined with intellectual change. Francis Maitland Balfour, as head of the Cambridge school, was able to make use of family connections and his own personal wealth to promote morphology. His successor lacked these resources, and one competition within the natural sciences at Cambridge intensified, morphology was unable to compete properly. (shrink)

Despite the omnipresence of the fiduciary in business organisations, there is an omission of theorisations of this legal concept within business ethics literature. This is surprising considering its widespread and embedded use, but even more so given that the presence of ethics within the fiduciary is increasingly contested ground. This article addresses both issues by theorising the fiduciary using an ontological analysis—one which subsequently helps identify a suitable ethical framework. The article argues on two grounds that the ontology of the (...) fiduciary is inherently relational; it renders the fiduciary’s implicit ontology explicit. Firstly, the fiduciary is shown to be process-oriented, indicating an open, emergent, and relational ontology at work. Secondly, historical investigation of the development of the fiduciary highlights its core relationship structure, and the interdependency and power dynamic embedded in the fiduciary are revealed. The argument is advanced that by bringing this inherent relational ontology to the fore, we can see how a relational ethical framework—the Ethics of Care—is best placed to explicate the ethics at work in the fiduciary. The article concludes with a discussion outlining how this ontological theorisation offers utility in steering future practice of the fiduciary. (shrink)

Embryogenesis requires the precise movement and reorganization of many cell and tissue types. Presumably, cell surface receptors allow cells to interact selectively with adjacent cells and with the extracellular environment, as well as initiate differentiative events by transducing appropriate signals across the plasma membrane. One cell surface component that serves as a receptor during a variety of cellular interactions is β1,4‐galactosyltransferase. Cell surface galactosyltransferase participates in diverse cellular interactions by binding its specific glycoconjugate substrate on adjacent cell surfaces or in (...) the extracellular matrix. Biochemical, immunological, and molecular probes are being used to better define cell surface galactosyl‐transferase functional in cellular interactions during fertilization, intercellular adhesion, cell migration, and growth control. (shrink)

Existing research highlights the role of partnerships between business and non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) in addressing poverty, climate change, disease and other challenges. But less is known about how such partnerships may also challenge our very understanding of the nature of those problems. This paper draws on Habermas' theoretical ideas about communicative action and deliberative democracy, applying them to an ethnographic study of Concern Universal, an international NGO with a particular focus on working collaboratively with business. The focus of the study (...) is the seam between two apparently different ‘worlds’, along which alternating processes of ‘colonisation’ and resistance are played out. Partnership emerges as an arena for both instrumental and communicative encounters, in which slow progress is occasionally punctuated by leaps in partners' understanding of both themselves and the challenges they seek to address. As such, despite the evolutionary ambitions of participants, partnership emerges as a potential catalyst of social change. (shrink)

Existing research highlights the role of partnerships between business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in addressing poverty, climate change, disease and other challenges. But less is known about how such partnerships may also challenge our very understanding of the nature of those problems. This paper draws on Habermas' theoretical ideas about communicative action and deliberative democracy, applying them to an ethnographic study of Concern Universal, an international NGO with a particular focus on working collaboratively with business. The focus of the study (...) is the seam between two apparently different ‘worlds’, along which alternating processes of ‘colonisation’ and resistance are played out. Partnership emerges as an arena for both instrumental and communicative encounters, in which slow progress is occasionally punctuated by leaps in partners' understanding of both themselves and the challenges they seek to address. As such, despite the evolutionary ambitions of participants, partnership emerges as a potential catalyst of social change. (shrink)

This book presents a broad-ranging and fascinating examination of attitudes: how we form them; how we organize them towards others; and whether they are inherently human or could also be developed by computers. Professor Eiser suggests there are fundamental objections to the idea of a computer having a sense of self or a set of attitutdes.

By its alternative depiction of God's non-violent creative power at the start of the biblical canon, Gen 1 signals the Creator's original intent for shalom and blessing at the outset of human history, prior to the rise of human (or divine) violence. Gen 1 constitutes a normative framework by which we may judge all the violence that pervades the rest of the Bible.