Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Biomedical and philosophical traditions postulate the experience of pain either as quantifiable or as sociocultural phenomena. This critical assessment offers a close reading of Lara Parker’s Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, Painful Sex, and Other Taboo Topics (2020) and Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain (2018), analyzing the authors’ use of language as a tool to comprehend and communicate pain. Norman’s and Parker’s memoirs narrate the lived experience of endometriosis, a condition diagnosed (...) almost exclusively in women and characterized by chronic pain. The essay looks at how metaphors are employed in living and narrating endometriosis in medical, social, and cultural settings that are highly skeptical of women’s pain and trace a shift in the use of pain metaphors towards an acceptance of the pain experience, which is conceptualized as empowering by the climax of the narrative. (shrink)

In the context of the ever-increasing political problematization of migration in Europe, agencies charged with migrant administration create diverse categories of difference to distinguish between the 'deserving migrant' and the illegal one: They assess the detainability or the credibility of asylum seekers, the danger posed by Islamic organizations, and make situational decisions that determine whether migration or labour law applies to individual agricultural workers. In this book, each chapter analyses how organizational interpretations 'in service of' the common good shape bureaucratic (...) practices. Together, these ethnographic analyses reveal how migration policies in different European countries take shape in administrative practice."--Back cover. (shrink)

This article makes the case for including frameworks of media ecology and mobilities research in the shaping of critical robotics research for a human-centered and holistic lens onto robot technologies. The two meta-disciplines, which align in their attention to relational processes of communication and movement, provide useful tools for critically exploring emerging human–robot dimensions and dynamics. Media ecology approaches human-made technologies as media that can shape the way we think, feel, and act. Relatedly, mobilities research highlights various kinds of influential (...) movement and stillness of people, things, and ideas. The emerging field of critical robotics research can benefit from such attention to the ways of thinking, feeling, and moving robotic forms and environments encourage and discourage. Drawing on various studies into robotics, I illustrate those conceptual alignments of media ecology, mobilities, and critical robotics research and point to the value of this interdisciplinary approach to robots as media and robotics as socio-cultural environments. (shrink)

Knowledge of the ethical and legal basis of medicine is as essential to clinical practice as an understanding of basic medical sciences. In the UK, the General Medical Council requires that medical graduates behave according to ethical and legal principles and must know about and comply with the GMC’s ethical guidance and standards. We suggest that these standards can only be achieved when the teaching and learning of medical ethics, law and professionalism are fundamental to, and thoroughly integrated both vertically (...) and horizontally throughout, the curricula of all medical schools as a shared obligation of all teachers. The GMC also requires that each medical school provides adequate teaching time and resources to achieve the above. We reiterate that the adequate provision and coordination of teaching and learning of ethics and law requires at least one full-time senior academic in ethics and law with relevant professional and academic expertise. In this paper we set out an updated indicative core content of learning for medical ethics and law in UK medical schools and describe its origins and the consultative process by which it was achieved. (shrink)

There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence. Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of (...) valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words, whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words. In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children’s lexical development. (shrink)

Vygotsky (1997) coined the term speech-drawing to describe what he saw as the most significant moment in intellectual development, the moment when two psychological tools intersect each other. This paper resurrects the utilization of speech-drawing as a methodological tool to investigate children’s thinking. Specifically, this paper will examine children’s drawings of make-believe houses and the private speech, or spontaneous self-directed speech, children produccd while drawing. These instances of speech-drawing will be utilized to illuminate critical and creative thinking from a Vygotskian (...) perspective. The future use of speech-drawing, as a promising methodological tool to study children’s thought processes, will also be presented and discussed. (shrink)

Vygotsky (1997) coined the term speech-drawing to describe what he saw as the most significant moment in intellectual development, the moment when two psychological tools intersect each other. This paper resurrects the utilization of speech-drawing as a methodological tool to investigate children’s thinking. Specifically, this paper will examine children’s drawings of make-believe houses and the private speech, or spontaneous self-directed speech, children produccd while drawing. These instances of speech-drawing will be utilized to illuminate critical and creative thinking from a Vygotskian (...) perspective. The future use of speech-drawing, as a promising methodological tool to study children’s thought processes, will also be presented and discussed. (shrink)

Este trabajo aborda algunos de los últimos registros de Rubén Darío, para señalar cómo su obra socava la modernidad latinoamericana, más allá de cómo se ha entendido y se ha practicado tradicionalmente, incluso por él mismo, suturando mundos que seguimos sin consolidar.

In recent decades, normative expectations for parenthood have changed for both men and women, fertility has declined, and work–family arrangements have become more egalitarian. Previous studies indicate that the transition to parenthood and work–family arrangements both influence life satisfaction and do so differently for men and women. Drawing on constructivism and utility maximization, we theorize how gendered parenthood norms influence life satisfaction after the transition to parenthood, and how decisions regarding motherhood and fatherhood are made in order to maximize life (...) satisfaction. We hypothesize that the rise of gender-egalitarian patterns has contributed to closing the parental happiness gap, and that the effects of motherhood and fatherhood on life satisfaction have converged. We test these assumptions by drawing on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and applying a series of hybrid panel regressions to estimate motherhood and fatherhood effects on life satisfaction in Western Germany over the last three decades. We then trace trends in these effects back to changing parenthood norms. The results indicate that the implications of parenthood have converged for men and women. As support for a gendered division of labor has lost ground, the transition to parenthood has become increasingly conducive to life satisfaction for both genders, and the parental happiness gap has vanished. (shrink)

Driverless automobility presents a “technological sublime” encompassing both promises and perils. The light side of the emerging transportation future lies, for instance, in the newly gained freedom from driving. The dark side of this sublime includes ethical challenges and potential harm resulting from the required socio-technical transformations of mobility. This article explores contemporary visions for the self-driving car future through the lens of the sublime and some of its theoretical variations, such as the natural, technological, electrical, and digital sublime. Nissan’s (...) IDS Concept preview clip and the Chevrolet FNR trailer serve as examples for this analysis, which aims to demythologize the visual rhetoric of the depicted awe-inspiring self-driving systems. The sublime’s inherent dialectic of inducing both pleasure and displeasure is removed in the corporate utopian visions in favor of an exalting partnership between human and machine. This strategy succeeds by setting the mobility future in the context of controlled parameters such as the trustworthy communicative vehicle, the vital and independent protagonists, and the harmless and unharmed environment. Recognizing such recurring strategies and identifying the controlled parameters which allow the sublime object to electrify, not terrify, is key for a sensible engagement with such imagined futures and their social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, and ethical implications. Such premediations of awe-inspiring technological formations and the underlying logics ask to be unpacked toward decision making that considers all potential facets of the sublime future. (shrink)

In psychology, causal inference – both the transport from lab estimates to the real world and estimation on the basis of observational data – is often pursued in a casual manner. Underlying assumptions remain unarticulated; potential pitfalls are compiled in post-hoc lists of flaws. The field should move on to coherent frameworks of causal inference and generalizability that have been developed elsewhere.

A survey of the work of the Majorcan lay theologian and philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1316), along with examples of its wide influence in late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe and in colonial Spanish America.

Information on the factors influencing parents’ decision-making process following a lethal, life-limiting or severely debilitating prenatal diagnosis remains deficient. A comprehensive systematic review and meta-synthesis was conducted to explore the influencing factors for parents considering termination or continuation of pregnancy following identification of lethal, life-limiting or severely debilitating fetal abnormalities. Electronic searches of 13 databases were conducted. These searches were supplemented by hand-searching Google Scholar and bibliographies and citation tracing. Thomas and Harden’s thematic synthesis method was used to synthesise data (...) from identified studies. Twenty-four papers were identified and reviewed, but two papers were removed following quality assessment. Three main themes were identified through systematic synthesis. Theme 1, entitled ‘all life is precious’, described parents’ perception of the importance of the fetus’ life, a fatalistic view of their situation alongside moral implications as well as the implications decisions would have on their own life, in consideration of previous life experiences. Theme 2 contained two sub-themes which considered the parent’s own imagined future and the influence of other people’s experiences. Finally, Theme 3 presented three sub-themes which may influence their parental decision-making: These described parental consideration of the quality of life for their unborn child, the possibility of waiting to try for another pregnancy, and their own responsibilities and commitments. The first review to fully explore parental decision-making process following lethal, life-limiting, or severely debilitating prenatal diagnosis provided novel findings and insight into which factors influenced parents’ decision-making process. This comprehensive and systematic review provides greater understanding of the factors influential on decision-making, such as hope, morality and potential implications on their own and other’s quality of life, will enable professionals to facilitate supported decision-making, including greater knowledge of the variables likely to influence parental choices. (shrink)

Faces carry key personal information about individuals, including cues to their identity, social traits, and emotional state. Much research to date has employed static images of faces taken under tightly controlled conditions yet faces in the real world are dynamic and experienced under ambient conditions. A common approach to studying key dimensions of facial variation is the use of facial caricatures. However, such techniques have again typically relied on static images, and the few examples of dynamic caricatures have relied on (...) animating graphical head models. Here, we present a principal component analysis -based active appearance model for capturing patterns of spatiotemporal variation in videos of natural dynamic facial behaviours. We demonstrate how this technique can be applied to generate dynamic anti-caricatures of biological motion patterns in facial behaviours. This technique could be extended to caricaturing other facial dimensions, or to more general analyses of spatiotemporal variations in dynamic faces. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to compare medical and social sciences students’ outcomes in terms of self-perceived stress, quality of life, and personality traits. We put particular emphasis on external and internal differences in students of specific fields–medicine, nursing, psychology, and pedagogy. In a survey, 1,783 students from Medical University of Gdańsk and University of Gdańsk participated in our study, of whom 1,223 were included in the final statistical analysis. All of them were evaluated using valid and reliable questionnaires–TIPI-PL, (...) PSS-10, and a one-item scale of quality of life. Stress turned out to have a negative effect on quality of life, regardless of the type of field of study. Moreover, students from different fields varied in terms of personality factors: conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, and emotional stability. In conclusion, many students regardless of their field suffer from high stress and report low quality of life, which potentially further affects their academic performance and social life. (shrink)

Hosea-Zephaniah so closely conform to Zechariah's description of the “former prophets” that these books may have been written or edited as a prelude to Zechariah. Recognizing that Zechariah constructed a picture of earlier prophets that would support his own message in the Persian period invites modern readers to reflect on the promise and the dangers of engaging in a similar process of reshaping the past in the interests of the present.

Working memory deficits are pervasive co-morbidities of epilepsy. Although the pathophysiological mechanisms underpinning these impairments remain elusive, it is thought that WM depends on oscillatory interactions within and between nodes of large-scale functional networks. These include the hippocampus and default mode network as well as the prefrontal cortex and frontoparietal central executive network. Here, we review the functional roles of neural oscillations in subserving WM and the putative mechanisms by which epilepsy disrupts normative activity, leading to aberrant oscillatory signatures. We (...) highlight the particular role of interictal epileptic activity, including interictal epileptiform discharges and high frequency oscillations in WM deficits. We also discuss the translational opportunities presented by greater understanding of the oscillatory basis of WM function and dysfunction in epilepsy, including potential targets for neuromodulation. (shrink)

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety (...) regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems. (shrink)

This article analyses the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility in relation to Human Resources (HR) management. Five potential tools are defined and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, the implementation of the most advanced and powerful tool in this area is studied: the SA8000 standard.

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety (...) regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems. (shrink)