The theme of the third annual Spring workshop of the HUPO-PSI was proteomics and beyond and its underlying goal was to reach beyond the boundaries of the proteomics community to interact with groups working on the similar issues of developing interchange standards and minimal reporting requirements. Significant developments in many of the HUPO-PSI XML interchange formats, minimal reporting requirements and accompanying controlled vocabularies were reported, with many of these now feeding into the broader efforts of the Functional Genomics Experiment data (...) model and Functional Genomics Ontology ontologies. (shrink)

The author is the recipient of the Herman Halperin Electric Transmission and Distribution Award, IEEE; United States Activities Board Professional Leadership Award, IEEE; United States Activities Board Citation of Honor, IEEE; Philip Sporn Award, Cigré; Atwood Associate, Cigré. J.A. Casazza has established the Peter Cooper Fund for Advancing Government Technical Competitions at Cooper Union.

Though the publication of Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the (...) problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with discussion of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

Research on personality psychology is making important contributions to psychological science and applied psychology. This second edition of The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology offers a one-stop resource for scientific personality psychology. It summarizes cutting-edge personality research in all its forms, including genetics, psychometrics, social-cognitive psychology, and real-world expressions, with informative and lively chapters that also highlight some areas of controversy. The team of renowned international authors, led by two esteemed editors, ensures a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Each research (...) area is discussed in terms of scientific foundations, main theories and findings, and future directions for research. The handbook also features advances in technology, such as molecular genetics and functional neuroimaging, as well as contemporary statistical approaches. An invaluable aid to understanding the central role played by personality in psychology, it will appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and the social sciences. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider ethical and philosophical aspects of trust in the practice of medicine. We focus on trust within the patient-physician relationship, trust and professionalism, and trust in Western (allopathic) institutions of medicine and medical research. Philosophical approaches to trust contain important insights into medicine as an ethical and social practice. In what follows we explain several philosophical approaches and discuss their strengths and weaknesses in this context. We also highlight some relevant empirical work in the section on (...) trust in the institutions of medicine. It is hoped that the approaches discussed here can be extended to nursing and other topics in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

Don Isaac Abravanel was one of the main leaders of medieval Spanish Jewry. This work presents a systematic exposition of Abravanel's defence of Judaism, analyzing and evaluating his views on the basic issues of medieval philosophy and theology.

Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man by Seymour W. Itzkoff is currently one of the few books available in the English language that discusses the philosophy of twentieth-century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Itzkoff's study brings Cassirer's perspective directly into the contemporary debate over the evolution of human thought and its relationship to animal life. Further, Itzkoff places Cassirer directly in the context of recent philosophical thought, arguing for the importance of his Kantian perspective, a significance that (...) is amply vindicated by the current interest in Cassirer's ideas. For this second edition, Seymour has written a new introduction and has added a new retrospective essay. (shrink)

Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Here, Kitcher elaborates his radical vision of this millennia-long ethical project.

At War with War visualizes humanity's 5,000-year-long state of conflict, chaos, and violence on a continuous timeline. Seventy pages of stark black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings and woodcuts illustrate history's most notorious battles -- from 3300 BCE to the present day. Interspersed are contemplations on war from historic thinkers, including excerpts from "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu, "The Complaint of Peace" by Desiderius Erasmus, and "The State" by Randolph Bourne. Searing and sardonic, balancing anger and despair with wit and humanity, (...) these raw illustrations follow in the tradition of great social satirists such as Honoré Daumier, Frans Masereel, Felix Vallotton, and Otto Dix. Seymour Chwast is a design legend. As co-founder with Milton Glaser of Push Pin Studios, he led a revolution in graphic design in the 1960s and '70s, producing bold, vibrant work that pushed the limits of nearly every visual medium.Now, he turns his pen and sketchpad toward creating a new book on a subject that has been a personal obsession for nearly six decades: the fight against war, humankind's never-ending scourge. (shrink)

Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

A comprehensive study of the thought of this French philosopher, the foremost Christian existentialist of this century.

Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009).

This volume introduces readers to emergence theory, outlines the major arguments in its defence, and summarizes the most powerful objections against it. It provides the clearest explication yet of this exciting new theory of science, which challenges the reductionist approach by proposing the continuous emergence of novel phenomena.

An esteemed philosopher discusses his theory of universal freedom, describing how even those who are members of free societies may find their liberties curtailed and includes tests of freedom including the eyeball test and the tough-luck test.

Some incompatibilists about free will or moral responsibility and determinism would abandon their incompatibilism were they to learn that determinism is true. But is it reasonable to flip-flop in this way? In this article, we contend that it is and show what follows. The result is both a defense of a particular incompatibilist strategy and a general framework for assessing other cases of flip-flopping.

Although the advantages of flight at high altitude were early recognized, so also were the physiological problems standing in the way of its realization. The idea of surmounting such problems by means of a pressurized cabin was advocated as early as 1909, while the first attempt to translate the concept into actuality occurred in 1921. Neither it nor several successive attempts enjoyed any real success until a project launched by the U. S. Air Corps in 1935 produced a breakthrough aircraft (...) designated the XC-35. The major reason for the favorable termination of that venture was the thoroughness of the engineering involved. But it is equally notable that this was the first instance in the age of powered flight where there was an active collaboration between the scientists and engineers, a rather curious circumstance in view of the fact that the achievement of altitude record-setting balloon flights in the nineteenth century had owed a great deal to an interconnection of aeronauts and scientists' laboratories. This paper focuses on the physiological investigations which informed the XC-35 engineers while at the same time bringing into being a new aeromedical laboratory taking the first small step toward turning aeromedicine into space medicine. (shrink)

Drawing on the latest work in cognitive neuroscience, a philosopher proposes that delusions are narrative models that accommodate anomalous experiences.

A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...) to reasons, and it is compatible with a subjective awareness of the available options. (shrink)

_Idealist Alternatives to Materialist Philosophies of Science_ (ed. Philip MacEwen) presents some of the major challenges to materialist interpretations of science while also giving materialism a full hearing.

In “Scientific Knowledge,” Philip Kitcher challenges arguments that deny the truth of the theoretical claims of science, and he attempts to discover reasons for endorsing the truth of such claims. He suggests that the discovery of such reasons might succeed if we ask why anyone thinks that the theoretical claims we accept are true and then look for answers that reconstruct actual belief‐generating processes. To this end, Kitcher presents the “homely argument” for scientific truth, which claims that when a (...) field of science is continually applied to yield precise predictions, then it is at least approximately true. He defends this approach and offers a supplementary account that gives more attention to detail. This account includes a historical aspect that must answer to skeptical challenges and a social aspect. (shrink)

Targeted hypermutation has proven to be a useful survival strategy for bacteria under severe stress and is also used by multicellular organisms in specific instances such as the mammalian immune system. This might appear surprising, given the generally observed deleterious effects of poor replication fidelity/high mutation rate. A previous theoretical model designed to explore the role of replication fidelity in the origin of life was applied to a simulated hypermutation scenario. The results confirmed that the same model is useful for (...) analyzing hypermutation and can predict the effects of the same parameters (survival probability, replication fidelity, mutation effect, and others) on the survival of cellular populations undergoing hypermutation as a result of severe stress. (shrink)

Evolution in modern life requires high replication fidelity to allow for natural selection. A simulation model utilizing simulated phenotype data on cellular probability of survival was developed to determine how self-replication fidelity could evolve in early life. The results indicate that initial survivability and replication fidelity both contribute to overall fitness as measured by growth rates of the cell population. Survival probability was the more dominant feature, and evolution was possible even with zero replication fidelity. A derived formula for the (...) relationship of survival probability and replication fidelity with growth rate was consistent with the simulated empirical data. Quantitative assessment of continuity and other evidence was obtained for a saltation evolutionary process starting from low to moderate levels of survival probability and self-replication fidelity to reach the high levels seen in modern life forms. (shrink)

Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner's "evolutionary instrumentalism," his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a ...