Mitochondria can change their shape from discrete isolated organelles to a large continuous reticulum. The cellular advantages underlying these fused networks are still incompletely understood. In this paper, we describe and compare hypotheses regarding the function of mitochondrial networks. We use mathematical and physical tools both to investigate existing hypotheses and to generate new ones, and we suggest experimental and modelling strategies. Among the novel insights we underline from this work are the possibilities that (i) selective mitophagy is not required (...) for quality control because selective fusion is sufficient; (ii) increased connectivity may have non‐linear effects on the diffusion rate of proteins; and (iii) fused networks can act to dampen biochemical fluctuations. We hope to convey to the reader that quantitative approaches can drive advances in the understanding of the physiological advantage of these morphological changes. (shrink)

Heterogeneity in mitochondrial content has been previously suggested as a major contributor to cellular noise, with multiple studies indicating its direct involvement in biomedically important cellular phenomena. A recently published dataset explored the connection between mitochondrial functionality and cell physiology, where a non‐linearity between mitochondrial functionality and cell size was found. Using mathematical models, we suggest that a combination of metabolic scaling and a simple model of cell death may account for these observations. However, our findings also suggest the existence (...) of alternative competing hypotheses, such as a non‐linearity between cell death and cell size. While we find that the proposed non‐linear coupling between mitochondrial functionality and cell size provides a compelling alternative to previous attempts to link mitochondrial heterogeneity and cell physiology, we emphasise the need to account for alternative causal variables, including cell cycle, size, mitochondrial density and death, in future studies of mitochondrial physiology. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

The attitudes of patients' to consent have changed over the years, but there has been little systematic study of the attitudes of anaesthetists and surgeons in this process. We aimed to describe observations made on the attitudes of medical professionals working in the UK to issues surrounding informed consent.

Prefrontal cortex is dysregulated in women with restricting anorexia nervosa . It is not known whether appetitive non-conscious stimuli bias cognitive responses in those with RAN. Thirteen women with RAN and 20 healthy controls completed a dorsolateral PFC working memory task and an anterior cingulate cortex conflict task, while masked subliminal food, aversive and neutral images were presented. During the DLPFC task, accuracy was higher in the RAN compared to the HC group, but superior performance was compromised when subliminal food (...) stimuli were presented: errors positively correlated with self-reported trait anxiety in the RAN group. These effects were not observed in the ACC task. Appetitive activation is intact and anxiogenic in women with RAN, and non-consciously interacts with working memory processes associated with the DLPFC. This interaction mechanism may underlie cognitive inhibition of appetitive processes that are anxiety inducing, in people with AN. (shrink)

PREFACE I AM greatly indebted to my friends, Professor Dewar of Reading and Miss Maude G. May of Glasgow, for many corrections and suggestions while the following pages were passing through the press. W. M. D. PART I I INTRODUCTION Y. D.H.S. The most singular and deepest themes in the History of the Universe and Mankind, to which all the rest are subordinate, are those in which there is a conflict between Belief and Unbelief, and all epochs, wherein Belief prevails, (...) under, what form it will, are splendid, heart-elevating and fruitful. (shrink)

As predicted by Duverger’s Law, the UK has two-party competition in each electoral district. However, there can be different patterns of two-party competition in different districts (currently there are five), so that there have usually been more than two effective parties in the Commons. Since 1874 it has always contained parties fighting seats in only one of the non-English parts of the Union. These parties wish to change the Union by strengthening, weakening, or dissolving it. By calculating the Penrose power (...) index for all parties in the House of Commons for all General Elections since 1874, we identify the occasions on which a party that wished to modify the Union was pivotal. We explain various acts (e.g, the Crofters Act 1886; the first three Irish Home Rule Bills; the Parliament Act 1911) and non-acts (e.g. the failure to enact female suffrage before 1914) by reference to the Penrose indices of the non-English parties. The indices also explain how and why policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland changed, and did not change, in the 1970s. (shrink)

The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500?1800 edited by J. G. A. Pocock with the assistance of Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, in association with the Folger Institute, Washington D.C., 1993, pp. 373 + x, ISBN 0 521 443776, £40.00 $59.95.

Jeffery et al. accurately identify the importance of developing an understanding of spatial reference frames in a three-dimensional world. We examine human spatial cognition via a unique paradigm that investigates the role of saliency and adjusting reference frames. This includes work with adults, typically developing children, and children who develop non-typically (e.g., those with autism).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionPiers H.G. StephensThis special issue of Ethics and the Environment is dedicated to the philosophical contributions of our founding editor, Victoria Davion, who launched the journal in 1996 and edited it until shortly before her death in November 2017. Vicky was a pioneering figure in ecofeminist philosophy, as well as being both the first woman to become a full professor and the first to be chair of the Philosophy (...) Department here at the University of Georgia. Naturally we have endeavored to give her a suitable tribute in this issue, which we hope you will appreciate.In addition to these achievements, Vicky developed and practiced a pedagogy that consistently complemented her philosophical perspective, and in the issue's opening piece, Cecilia Herles reflects personally on the enduring legacy and influence of Vicky Davion's teaching work, and the rich heritage that has flowed out of it for her students, encouraging egalitarian dialogue, interdisciplinarity, and a practicality that extended beyond the University and into the wider community. It is surely appropriate to begin our special issue with such an appreciation of the ways that Vicky touched and lifted up so many lives.These reflections are built upon in Chaone Mallory's essay, which takes Davion's key essay "Is Ecofeminism Feminist?" as its touchstone, examining that essay's vital influence on scholarship and activism as well as its key role in defining contemporary ecofeminism itself. Drawing upon Davion's arguments, Mallory tracks a series of vital questions for the development of the field. She demonstrates how Davion's early critical insights have helped sort the wheat from the chaff in dealing with concerns such as spirituality, irrationality, essentialism, and sexism within environmentalism, concerns that made ecofeminism questionable in some feminists' eyes, and she concludes with a positive exposition as to why "all feminisms, whether named this or not, should in some sense, be eco."From here we move to Ronnie Hawkins' extensive and detailed application of Davion's work to the neurobiological, cultural, and axiological roots of our contemporary ecological situation, in which Hawkins invokes [End Page 1] and applies the insights of Davion's 2002 essay "Anthropocentrism, Artificial Intelligence, and Moral Network Theory: An Ecofeminist Perspective." Drawing upon Davion's inventive use of Val Plumwood's account of dualisms, Hawkins stresses Davion's pioneering work in avoiding the reason/nature dualistic fracture, and uses this work to critique the predominant current discourses of AI and neuroscience, in the process further expounding Davion's critiques of anthropocentrism and logocentrism. Cashing out the wider implications of Davion's perspective for our models of the mind, Hawkins connects these to Iain McGilchrist's recent work on the neuropsychology of perception and morality, arguing that this new account of the interaction of the two cerebral hemispheres and their role in generating an orientation to the world for cognition and valuing is consistent with Davion's insights, and can both help explain the environmental failings of modern Western culture and give support for non-instrumentalizing and nonanthropocentric alternatives.Finally, Trish Glazebrook and Emmanuela Opoku offer an extended ecofeminist examination of the roles, significance, dangers, and current status of environmental protectors in contemporary global environmental politics. In a paper dedicated to Davion that addresses many of her concerns with the interlocking character of forms of oppression, they systematically investigate and elucidate the importance of environmental protectors, the struggles that they engage in, the increasing threats of violence that they face, and their significance in the fight against climate change, ultimately arguing that the UN should extend explicit protection to land and environmental defenders under its human rights umbrella.We think these contributions are a fitting tribute to our founding editor, and offer you this special issue with the wish that her legacy will endure. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

This article seeks to explain why, in terms of Iain Macneil's relational theory of contract, the implied mutual duty of trust and confidence can be described as a quintessentially relational norm. The role played by the duty in the development of a relational approach to variation of the employment contract is examined. The potential for the trust duty to become a relational principle informing the content of the employment contract is explored. The impact of litigation based on the (...) trust duty in creating a relational approach to employees’ contractual remedies at common law, which have traditionally been dominated by the notice rule, is assessed. Finally, the potential for there to develop a relational principle of trust and confidence capable of, to some extent, unifying the contractual, statutory and tortious elements of the law of the employment relationship is examined. (shrink)

In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, peopleâes material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawlsâes theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state (...) but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawlsâes constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality. (shrink)

A Kleene lattice is a distributive lattice equipped with an antitone involution and satisfying the so-called normality condition. These lattices were introduced by J. A. Kalman. We extended this concept also for posets with an antitone involution. In our recent paper (Chajda, Länger and Paseka, in: Proceeding of 2022 IEEE 52th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic, Springer, 2022), we showed how to construct such Kleene lattices or Kleene posets from a given distributive lattice or poset and a fixed element of (...) this lattice or poset by using the so-called twist product construction, respectively. We extend this construction of Kleene lattices and Kleene posets by considering a fixed subset instead of a fixed element. Moreover, we show that in some cases, this generating poset can be embedded into the resulting Kleene poset. We investigate the question when a Kleene poset can be represented by a Kleene poset obtained by the mentioned construction. We show that a direct product of representable Kleene posets is again representable and hence a direct product of finite chains is representable. This does not hold in general for subdirect products, but we show some examples where it holds. We present large classes of representable and non-representable Kleene posets. Finally, we investigate two kinds of extensions of a distributive poset $${\textbf{A}}$$ A, namely its Dedekind-MacNeille completion $${{\,\mathrm{\textbf{DM}}\,}}({\textbf{A}})$$ DM ( A ) and a completion $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) which coincides with $${{\,\mathrm{\textbf{DM}}\,}}({\textbf{A}})$$ DM ( A ) provided $${\textbf{A}}$$ A is finite. In particular we prove that if $${\textbf{A}}$$ A is a Kleene poset then its extension $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) is also a Kleene lattice. If the subset X of principal order ideals of $${\textbf{A}}$$ A is involution-closed and doubly dense in $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) then it generates $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) and it is isomorphic to $${\textbf{A}}$$ A itself. (shrink)

Several debates of the last years within the research field of contemporary realism – known under titles such as "New Realism," "Continental Realism," or "Speculative Materialism" – have shown that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality. This does not mean that we should abandon the notions of truth or objectivity all together, as has been posited repeatedly within certain currents of twentieth century philosophy. However, within the research field of contemporary realism, the concept of objectivity (...) itself has not been adequately refined. What is objective is supposed to be true outside a subject’s biases, interpretations and opinions, having truth conditions that are met by the way the world is. The volume combines articles of internationally outstanding authors who have published on either Idealism, Epistemic Relativism, or Realism and often locate themselves within one of these divergent schools of thought. As such, the volume focuses on these traditions with the aim of clarifying what the concept objectivity nowadays stands for within contemporary ontology and epistemology beyond the analytic-continental divide. With articles from: Jocelyn Benoist, Ray Brassier, G. Anthony Bruno, Dominik Finkelde, Markus Gabriel, Deborah Goldgaber, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Johannes Hübner, Andrea Kern, Anton F. Koch, Martin Kusch, Paul M. Livingston, Paul Redding, Sebastian Rödl, Dieter Sturma. (shrink)

Jelson Roberto de Oliveira, autor de “Compreender Hans Jonas”, é graduado em Filosofia pela Universidade Federal do Paraná, com especialização em Sociologia Política e mestrado em História da Filosofia Moderna e Contemporânea pela mesma universidade. Atualmente é professor da pós-graduação em Filosofia na PUC-PR, e coordenador do GT Hans Jonas, da Anpof, que reúne vários pesquisadores de nível nacional na área. Ética para a civilização tecnológica e A solidão como virtude moral em Nietzsche são alguns dos diversos títulos que compõem (...) o acervo de obras do autor. (shrink)

Research has demonstrated that employee reactions to monitoring systems depend on both the characteristics of the monitoring system and how it is implemented. However, little is known about the role individual differences may play in this process. This study proposes that individuals have generalized attitudes toward organizational control and monitoring activities. We examined this argument by assessing the relationship between employees’ baseline attitudes toward a set of monitoring and control techniques that span the employment relationship. We further explore the effects (...) of employees’ generalized attitudes toward monitoring and their individual ethical orientations on their attitudinal reactions to an Internet monitoring system implemented in their workplace. Results of a longitudinal study indicate that as expected, prior beliefs and ethical orientation interact to affect employees’ reactions to monitoring systems. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The problems of this passage were concisely stated by M. Platnauer more than thirty years ago and his suggestions for their solution have been adopted and developed in A. S. F. Gow's magnum opus. Its authority—so the present writer suspects—is liable at this point to eclipse the meaning of the text.

The conceptual framework of behaviorism is reconstructed in a logical scheme rather than along chronological lines. The resulting reconstruction is faithful to the history of behaviorism and yet meets the contemporary challenges arising from cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and philosophy. In this reconstruction, the fundamental premise is that psychology is to be a natural science, and the major corollaries are that psychology is to be objective and empirical. To a great extent, the reconstruction of behaviorism is an elaboration of behaviorist views (...) of what it is for a science to be objective and empirical. The reconstruction examines and evaluates behaviorist positions on observation and the rejection of introspection, the behavioral data language, theory construction, stimulus-response psychology, the organization of behavior, complex processes, agency, and the interpretation of mentalistic language. The resulting reconstruction shows behaviorism to be a pragmatic psychological version of positivism based on a behavioral epistemology. (shrink)

Mathematical modeling is a convenient way for characterization of complex ecosystems. This approach was applied to study the dynamics of zooplankton in Lake Sevan (Armenia) at different stages of anthropogenic eutrophication with the use of a novel method called discrete modeling of dynamical systems with feedback (DMDS). Simulation demonstrated that the application of this method helps in characterization of inter- and intra-component relationships in a natural ecosystem. This method describes all possible pairwise inter-component relationships like “plus–plus,” “minus–minus,” “plus–minus,” “plus–zero,” “minus–zero,” (...) and “zero–zero” that occur in most ecosystems. Based on the results, a working hypothesis was formulated. It was found that the sensitivity to weak external influence in zooplanktons was the greatest during the mid period of eutrophication in Lake Sevan, whereas in the final stages of eutrophication, an outbreak in the biomass production of cyanobacteria was evident. To support this approach, a weak external disturbance in the form of magnetic storm was used to see its effect on species Daphnia longispina sevanica. A statistically significant correlation between the frequency of magnetic storms and the number of this species was revealed and an increase in the number of toxic cyanobacteria species as a consequence of eutrophication. This paper, for the first time, suggests a DMDS method, to diagnose impact of anthropogenic eutrophication on environment. (shrink)

In the article "The Epistemological Nature of Information Modeling" [Gnoseologicheskaia priroda informatsionnogo modelirovaniia], Voprosy filosofii, 1963, No. 10, Academician V. M. Glushkov examines two important methodological aspects of the modeling of natural objects and phenomena in the contemporary natural sciences. The first consists of the informational nature of the models created, and the second of their dynamism. The dynamic nature of today's models in the natural sciences means that it is not so much the material structure of the object that (...) is modeled as its behavior and functions in some sphere of natural phenomena. In this sense, the models under examination may also be termed functional, as distinct from the structural models pertaining to a static description of objects. (shrink)