That there is a heritable or familial component of susceptibility to chronic non‐communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease is well established, but there is increasing evidence that some elements of such heritability are transmitted non‐genomically and that the processes whereby environmental influences act during early development to shape disease risk in later life can have effects beyond a single generation. Such heritability may operate through epigenetic mechanisms involving regulation of either imprinted or non‐imprinted genes but (...) also through broader mechanisms related to parental physiology or behaviour. We review evidence and potential mechanisms for non‐genomic transgenerational inheritance of ‘lifestyle’ disease and propose that the ‘developmental origins of disease’ phenomenon is a maladaptive consequence of an ancestral mechanism of developmental plasticity that may have had adaptive value in the evolution of generalist species such as Homo sapiens. BioEssays 29: 145–154, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

sweet-potato porridge: symbol of semen, 148 symbol (see also taboos): anthropological interpretation of, 126, 172-3; in Ndembu ritual, 125 f., 169, 172-3 ; and social relationships, 18, 42; of trees as sacrament, 171-2 taboos (see also ...

A formal semantic analysis of the _tough_-construction is provided building on the well-known observation that _events_ play a central role. A close look at the semantic characteristics of the class of _tough_-predicates and the syntactic and semantic properties of nonfinite clauses reveals the link between these pieces, expanding on recent advances in the semantics of clauses (Moulton in Natural selection and the syntax of clausal complementation, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2009 ). Building on Salzmann (Reconstruction and resumption (...) in indirect A′-dependencies: On the syntax of prolepsis and relativization in (Swiss) German and beyond, de Gruyter, Berlin 2017b ), a formal semantic and syntactic analysis of prolepsis is provided to explain the antecedent gap chain in the _tough_-construction. In total, this paper offers a description and explanation of (i) the class of _tough_-predicates; (ii) the properties of the nonfinite clause that appears in the _tough_-construction; (iii) why no other predicates or clauses are permitted in the construction; (iv) the many properties of the antecedent gap chain in the _tough_-construction, primarily the fact that the chain is “weakly” unbounded; and (v) the semantic contribution of prolepsis as it applies in the _tough_-construction. (shrink)

It has been established that the kinematics of the Voigt transformation, which lacks group structure, is different from that of the Lorentz transformation, and that the apparent kinematic asymmetry of the Voigt coordinate transformations may be understood as a conformally symmetric kinematics. Phenomena such as the kinetic energy of a moving body and the Doppler effect are not quite the same under the conformal Voigt transformation as they are for the usual theory developed with respect to the Lorentz group. Yet (...) the massenergy conservation law under the Voigt coordinate transformations and the mass-energy conservation law under the group of Lorentz transformations are identically the same. (shrink)

There is a constructive method to define a structure of simple k-cyclic Post algebra of order p, L p,κ, on a given finite field F, and conversely. There exists an interpretation Ф₁ of the variety V generated by L p,κ into the variety V) generated by F and an interpretation Ф₂ of V) into V such that Ф₂Ф₁ = B for every B ϵ V and Ф₁₂ = R for every R ϵ V). In this paper we show how we (...) can solve an algebraic system of equations over an arbitrary cyclic Post algebra of order p, p prime, using the above interpretation, Gröbner bases and algorithms programmed in Maple. (shrink)

We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use of scientific models, we need to understand why models are not truly representational of our world, but are already pitched towards various uses. Second, we need to understand the implicit power relations in numbers and models in public policy, and, thus, the implications for good (...) governance if numbers and models are used as the exclusive drivers of decision making. (shrink)