This paper provides an analysis of the educational use of the Internet and of digital technologies that is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, that is neither critical nor post-critical. Turning to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s comments on studying and its relationship to the technology of the blank writing tablet, the authors argue that digital devises are a radical transformation in our relationship to the technologies of reading and writing. Traditionally, the scholar was able to experience his or her potentiality to communicate (...) through writing via the blankness of the writing tablet. Yet, according to Agamben, such blankness has become inaccessible in the digital age, where the screen is always full of content. Here the authors argue that Agamben is correct in his diagnosis, yet his own theory of communicability offers up a way to redeem the educational use of digital devices. It is precisely the overflowing saturation of communications on the Internet which produces a new kind of blankness. It is this blankness which should thus become the focus of a studious form of media literacy—one that is not critical or post-critical so much as pre-critical. (shrink)

While compulsory licensing is described in the TRIPS agreement as flexibility to protect public health by improving access to medicines in developing countries, a recent literature contends adversely that CL may harm public health. Therefore, this article intends to evaluate the usefulness of CL in the South through the prism of obligations and goals entrusted to patent holders and in light of experiences in Thailand and Brazil regarding access to antiretroviral drugs. In this way, it shows that the obligations assigned (...) to patent holders were better served by the recipients of CL and brought significant health and industrial benefits in the two high middle-income countries. In particular, CL allowed the scaling-up of free and universal access to antiretroviral drugs by assuring the financial sustainability of these public health programs endangered by monopolistic practices from patent holders. (shrink)

IntroductionMaking appropriate plans for the provision of hospice care is considered a perceived need in the Iranian health system. The current study aimed to develop a model for establishing hospice care delivery system for the adult patients with cancer.Materials and MethodsThis study is part of a larger study that has been done in four phases. This Health System Policy Research utilized a mixed qualitative-quantitative approach. At the first phase, a qualitative study was conducted which explained the care needs and the (...) requirements for establishing this system from the stakeholders’ perspective. The second phase aimed to examine the current situation of hospice care delivery in Iran and identify and determine the similarities and differences among them in the selected countries. At the third phase, the main areas of the model and the related indicators were extracted and prioritized by consulting with experts. Then the model was formulated. At the fourth phase, the proposed model was validated and finalized in terms of importance, scientific acceptability, and feasibility.ResultsBased on the developed model the first and the most important step in establishing the hospice care delivery system is laying the groundwork in the health system which requires focusing on policymaking. It is necessary to establish hospice centers and implement public awareness raising programs, train, and supply expert manpower, strengthen family physician and referral process, formulate clinical guidelines, encourage the private sector and NGOs.) to invest, develop end-of-life and hospice care service packages, and create quality care indicators. The proposed model had moderate feasibility.ConclusionThis model was developed based on the current Iranian healthcare structure and the needs of terminally ill cancer patients. It can be used as a model tailored to the current state of the health system and community in Iran. It is suggested to use this model as a pilot at the regional level. (shrink)

The proliferation of digital devices in educational settings has contributed to the decentralization of knowledge from teachers and established textbooks to fluid online personalized resources, and...

Ontologies are the prime way of organizing data in the Semantic Web. Often, it is necessary to combine several, independently developed ontologies to obtain a complete representation of a domain of interest. The complementarity of existing ontologies can be leveraged by merging them. Existing approaches for ontology merging mostly implement a binary merge. However, with the growing number and size of relevant ontologies across domains, scalability becomes a central challenge. A multi-ontology merging technique offers a potential solution to this problem. (...) We present Co Merger, a scalable multiple ontologies merging method. It takes as input a set of source ontologies and existing mappings across them and generates a merged ontology. For efficient processing, rather than successively merging complete ontologies pairwise, we group related concepts across ontologies into partitions and merge first within and then across those partitions. In both steps, user-specified subsets of generic merge requirements (GMRs) are taken into account and used to optimize outputs. The experimental results on well-known datasets confirm the feasibility of our approach and demonstrate its superiority over binary strategies. A prototypical implementation is freely accessible through a live web portal. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-MY X-NONE AR-SA Normal 0 false false false EN-MY X-NONE AR-SA /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:24.0pt; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:0cm; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:justify; line-height:200%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:24.0pt; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:0cm; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:justify; line-height:200%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; (...) mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}This study explores the significance of the family factors on drug use and its effects on relapse. In this respect, the effects of parental substance use , family conflict , and family structure are discussed in this research. The family, as a fundamental social unit of society, can be expected to exert remarkable influences on the development of social behaviors such as adolescent substance use and also relapse ADDIN EN.CITE Rouholamini 2002 90 90 90 32 Rouholamini,S Formative research on familial characteristics of drug users in Iran Master 2002 New Haven Yale (Rouholamini, 2002) . Since nearly 90% of drug abusers in Iran live with a family member ADDIN EN.CITE Mokri 2002 6 6 6 17 Mokri, A A brief overview of the status of drug abuse in Iran Archives of Iranian Medicine 184-190 5(3) 2002 (Mokri, 2002) , therefore family has an important role to reduce the high rates of relapse after detoxification. Therefore, this study considers three factors: Parental substance use , Family Conflict , and Family Structure. The objective of this study is to examine the effects of family factors on relapse behavior among male adolescent opiate users in Kerman. In this research 226 adolescents between the ages of 13 to 20 were selected based on ten rehabilitation centers to answer the Self-administered questionnaire. Results showed that there were important relationships between these factors with relapse in adolescents. The study proposes some suggestions in order to prevent relapse after treatment in adolescents. (shrink)

O presente trabalho se propõe a refletir acerca do sofrimento emergido em meio à grave crise sanitária instalada pela pandemia do novo coronavírus (SARS-COV-2), considerando as mudanças nas dinâmicas de vida da população como a adoção de medidas de distanciamento social, quarentena, uso de máscaras, dentre outras contingências que transformaram o cotidiano e o ritmo das existências contemporâneas. O crescente número de casos e mortes, as modificações nas rotinas de casa, trabalho e relações sociais vêm repercutindo na saúde mental das (...) pessoas e desencadeando vários sofrimentos, expressos nas queixas que chegam diariamente aos serviços de acolhimento psicológico.Considerando, assim, a experiência de escuta clínica das pessoas em sofrimento neste período, com o objetivo de refletir sobre os modos de vida e sofrimento que se desvelam em meio ao contexto pandêmico, recorremos ao pensamento do filósofo alemão Martin Heidegger para pensar o tédio e a técnica moderna como os sentidos e afetos que caracterizam e afinam as existências contemporâneas; bem como as suas repercussões nas experiências de sofrimento que se revelam em meio aos novos modos de existência assumidos durante a pandemia de covid-19. (shrink)

The works of Knight (1921) and Keynes (1921, 1936) seek to clarify confusion about uncertainty. According to these authors, a precise analysis of uncertainty is required, in order to obtain a clear significance of the concept and understand the consequences for the decision process. Consequently, Knight and Keynes study the content of the decision process in uncertainty and converge towards similar views on the mobilization of confidence. Their works thus go beyond a simple examination of uncertainty, by also throwing light (...) on the role and function of confidence in economic analysis. These works demonstrate that confidence is the prerequisite for individual action under uncertainty. (shrink)

Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545. By Aditya Behl, edited by Wendy Doniger. New York: Oxford Universoty Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 403. $74.

This paper provides an analysis of the educational use of the Internet and of digital technologies that is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, that is neither critical nor post-critical. Turning to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s comments on studying and its relationship to the technology of the blank writing tablet, the authors argue that digital devises are a radical transformation in our relationship to the technologies of reading and writing. Traditionally, the scholar was able to experience his or her potentiality to communicate (...) through writing via the blankness of the writing tablet. Yet, according to Agamben, such blankness has become inaccessible in the digital age, where the screen is always full of content. Here the authors argue that Agamben is correct in his diagnosis, yet his own theory of communicability offers up a way to redeem the educational use of digital devices. It is precisely the overflowing saturation of communications on the Internet which produces a new kind of blankness. It is this blankness which should thus become the focus of a studious form of media literacy—one that is not critical or post-critical so much as pre-critical. (shrink)

The demonstration that dendritic cell (DC)‐derived exosomes can be exploited for targeted RNAi delivery to the brain after systemic injection provides the first proof‐of‐concept for the potential of these naturally occurring vesicles as vehicles of drug delivery. As well as being amenable to existing in vivo targeting strategies already in use for viruses and liposomes, this novel approach offers the added advantages of in vivo safety and low immunogenicity. Fulfilment of the potential of exosome delivery methods warrants a better understanding (...) of their biology, as well as the development of novel production, characterisation, targeting and cargo‐loading nanotechnologies. Ultimately, exosome‐mediated drug delivery promises to overcome important challenges in the field of therapeutics, such as delivery of drugs across otherwise impermeable biological barriers, such as the blood brain barrier, and using patient‐derived tissue as a source of individualised and biocompatible therapeutic drug delivery vehicles. (shrink)

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of (...) dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with (...) death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (shrink)

Background:The holistic approach views the human as a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual being. Evidence suggests that among these dimensions, the spiritual one is largely ignored in healthcare settings.Objectives:This study aimed to evaluate Iranian nurses’ perceived professional competence in spiritual care, the relationship between perceived competence and nurses’ personal characteristics, and barriers to provide spiritual care.Research design:A cross-sectional study was conducted in the year 2014.Participants and research context:The study population consisted of nurses working in teaching hospitals in Kashan city. Using a stratified, systematic random (...) method, 250 samples were selected from a total of 1400 nurses. An indigenous instrument was used to assess the nurses’ competencies in spiritual care.Ethical considerations:A research ethics committee approved the study. All the participants were briefed on the study aims, were assured of the confidentiality of their personal information, and signed a written informed consent.Results:Among a total of 250 nurses, 239 answered the questionnaire completely, and in total, 23%, 51%, and 26% had poor, moderate, and favorable competence in spiritual care, respectively. No significant differences were found between the mean competence scores of spiritual care in terms of gender, marital status, employment status, and level of qualification. Significant difference was found between nurses’ overall score of competence in spiritual care and receiving training on spiritual care, nurses’ position, and the ward they worked in.Discussion:Confirming the findings of the international literature, this study puts light on the situation of nurses’ perceived competence and barriers to providing spiritual care in Iran as an eastern and Islamic context.Conclusion:Three-quarters of the nurses had moderate or unfavorable competence in spiritual care. Due to the crucial role of spiritual care in quality of care and patient satisfaction, nurses should be trained and supported to provide spiritual care. (shrink)

Brette presents arguments that query the existence of the neural code. However, he has neglected certain evidence that could be viewed as proof that a neural code operates in the brain. Albeit these proofs show a link between neural activity and cognition, we discuss why they fail to demonstrate the existence of an invariant neural code.

O presente trabalho analisa a crise da legalidade sobre os aspectos da falência da legitimidade do Estado e da crise do Estado de Direito. Os poderes estabelecidos carecem de representatividade junto à população, que não credita mais à lei um meio de expressão da justiça. A hipótese averiguada demonstra que os pressupostos e técnicas da Legística possuem meios para o restabelecimento da credibilidade da lei no processo legislativo. Utilizou-se o método jurídico-dedutivo na pesquisa bibliográfica, com marco teórico na teoria do (...) Estado de Direito, de Jacques Chevallier e na Legística, que visa impulsionar a produção eficiente e eficaz da norma jurídica. (shrink)

La présente recherche s’intéresse à l’impact du contexte phonétique sur les formants 1, 2 et 3 des voyelles nasales françaises. La chaine parlée en français est constituée de la succession des voyelles orales et nasales influencées par le contexte consonantique. En nous appuyant, dans cette étude, sur le modèle de Stevens et House, dit « production undershoot model »,nous avons abordé plus particulièrement l’effet du contexte phonétique sur les trois voyelles nasales françaises afin de vérifier l’hypothèse suivante : dans le (...) contexte phonétique, la consonne influerait, non seulement, sur le formant 1 et 2 mais aussi sur le formant nasal de la voyelle nasale et elle l’écarte de son propre « hyperespace », bien qu’elle ne bannisse pas l’anti-formant. Pour vérifier notre hypothèse, nous avons analysé les productions phonétiques de 4 étudiants de français de première année de l’université d’Ispahan à l’aide d’un logiciel d’analyse de sons tout en tenant compte des variables acousti... (shrink)

The ethical aspect of the online learning is a major priority that has to be addressed by all stakeholders in the educational field. This study sheds the light on establishing a code of ethics for the online learning based on a Palestinian vision. A content analysis was used for related literature in order to drive themes and major topics, then a qualitative approach was used to collect data to test the themes from the field. The study population consisted of 21 (...) educators who have previous experience in online learning and 4 key university specialists with pedagogical experience. Interviews and focused group meetings were conducted with participants. The findings revealed that most of educators’ attitudes toward establishing a code for ethics in online learning mode are positive. The study also revealed that all educational stakeholders play a vital role in the success of online learning and particularly in practicing positive ethics. (shrink)

Non‐genetic forms of antimicrobial (drug) resistance can result from cell‐to‐cell variability that is not encoded in the genetic material. Data from recent studies also suggest that non‐genetic mechanisms can facilitate the development of genetic drug resistance. We speculate on how the interplay between non‐genetic and genetic mechanisms may affect microbial adaptation and evolution during drug treatment. We argue that cellular heterogeneity arising from fluctuations in gene expression, epigenetic modifications, as well as genetic changes contribute to drug resistance at different timescales, (...) and that the interplay between these mechanisms enhance pathogen resistance. Accordingly, developing a better understanding of the role of non‐genetic mechanisms in drug resistance and how they interact with genetic mechanisms will enhance our ability to combat antimicrobial resistance. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/aefGpdh-bgU. (shrink)

BackgroundThe acceptance or practical application of the do-not-resuscitate order is substantially dependent on internal or personal factors; in a way that decision-making about this issue can be specific to each person. Moreover, most nurses feel morally and emotionally stressed and confused during the process decision-making regarding DNR order. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to evaluate nurses’ attitudes towards DNR order in a systematic review.MethodsThis critical survey was conducted using a systematic review protocol. To this end, the most (...) relevant articles published in domestic and foreign databases with no time limits until October 2018 were searched. The inclusion and exclusion criteria were articles on DNR order, studies about nurses’ attitudes, descriptive and analytical research papers, as well as those with download links and full texts. The given articles were also assessed in terms of their quality and their main results were extracted.ResultsOf the total number of 1663 articles searched in the process of systematic review to investigate nurses’ attitudes towards DNR order, 88 articles were included in the full-text review step and finally 10 articles, meeting the inclusion criteria, were found. Assessing the quality of articles included in this review showed that 8 articles, in general, were of good quality and 2 studies were characterized with moderate quality. The main factors associated with nurses’ attitudes towards DNR order were grouped into three categories of (1) nurses’ attitudes towards DNR order, (2) guidelines for DNR order, and (3) decision-making by patients and their families about DNR order. In most of the studies examined, nurses’ attitudes towards DNR order were reported positive.ConclusionIt seemed that nurses were willing to get involved in DNR order and each hospital was recommended to develop a written DNR policy directing individuals and avoiding their confusion in this respect. (shrink)