In Russia, philosophy of religion, likewise religious studies, only managed to claim their name, let alone their right for self-realisation, as late as the early 1990s. The article represents an attempt to elicit the maximum possible number of primary methodological accounts, conceptual divergences and discussions pertaining to both the domain of understanding and that of studying the phenomenon of religion and the variety of religious expression, as well as methods of establishing the actual interdisciplinary relations between religious studies and the (...) philosophy of religion, with their disciplinary scope defined, on the one hand, and contiguous scientific disciplines and worldview discourses on the other. (shrink)
The Yogārṇava is a Sanskrit compendium on yoga that has not been published, translated or even mentioned in secondary literature on yoga. Citations attributed to it occur in several premodern commentaries and compendiums on yoga, and a few published library catalogues report manuscripts of a work on yoga called the Yogārṇava. This article presents the results of the first academic study of the text. It has attempted to answer basic questions, such as the work’s provenance and textual sources. The authors (...) then discuss the importance of the Yogārṇava within the broader history of yoga based on their identification of citations and parallel verses in other Sanskrit texts and a detailed analysis of the Yogārṇava’s content. (shrink)
Objective: To compare the attitudes of patients with cancer toward making changes in lifestyle, according to their awareness of the diagnosis.Method: Personal interviews with 50 patients with breast cancer, 24 patients with prostate cancer and 50 patients with colorectal cancer were conducted in a cancer hospital in Athens, Greece.Analysis: Multiple logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds ratio as a measure of the association of the characteristics of participants with changes in lifestyle.Results: Overall, 22.6% of the patients were (...) not aware of the diagnosis. Among the changes in lifestyle, 41.1% reported changing their diet to a healthier one, 22.6% of the smokers reduced or stopped smoking and 13.7% added new physical activity. Compared with uninformed patients, those who were aware of the diagnosis, after adjusting for the confounding effect of educational status , were 2.5 times as likely to make dietary changes . Among the other characteristics under study, older patients were less likely to add new physical activity than younger ones , and newly diagnosed patients were more likely to stop or reduce smoking than patients with a diagnosis made more than 12 months previously.Conclusion: Patients with cancer are motivated to attempt changes in lifestyle and can benefit from more factual information about the diagnosis. (shrink)
Given that theoretical analysis and empirical validation is fundamental to any model, whether conceptual or formal, it is surprising that these two tools of scientific discovery are so often ignored in contemporary studies of communication. In this paper, we pursued the ideas of a) correcting and expanding the modeling approaches of linguistics, which are otherwise inapplicable, to the general case of hypermedia-based communication, and b) developing techniques for empirical validation of semiotic models, which are nowadays routinely used to explore internal (...) mechanisms of complex systems, yet on a purely speculative basis. This study thus offers two experimentally tested substantive contributions: the formal representation of communication as the mutually-orienting behavior of coupled autonomous systems, and the mathematical interpretation of the semiosis of communication, which together offer a concrete and parsimonious understanding of diverse communication phenomena. (shrink)
To localize wheat ESTs on chromosomes, 882 homoeologous group 6-specific ESTs were identified by physically mapping 7965 singletons from 37 cDNA libraries on 146 chromosome, arm, and sub-arm aneuploid and deletion stocks. The 882 ESTs were physically mapped to 25 regions flanked by 23 deletion breakpoints. Of the 5154 restriction fragments detected by 882 ESTs, 2043 were localized to group 6 chromosomes and 806 were mapped on other chromosome groups. The number of loci mapped was greatest on chromosome 6B and (...) least on 6D. The 264 ESTs that detected orthologous loci on all three homoeologs using one restriction enzyme were used to construct a consensus physical map. The physical distribution of ESTs was uneven on chromosomes with a tendency toward higher densities in the distal halves of chromosome arms. About 43% of the wheat group 6 ESTs identified rice homologs upon comparisons of genome sequences. Fifty-eight percent of these ESTs were present on rice chromosome 2 and the remaining were on other rice chromosomes. Even within the group 6 bins, rice chromosomal blocks identified by 1-6 wheat ESTs were homologous to up to 11 rice chromosomes. These rice-block contigs were used to resolve the order of wheat ESTs within each bin. (shrink)
Deep brain stimulation — a novel surgical procedure — is emerging as a treatment of last resort for people diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders such as severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. The US Food and Drug Administration granted a so-called humanitarian device exemption to allow patients to access this intervention, thereby removing the requirement for a clinical trial of the appropriate size and statistical power. Bypassing the rigors of such trials puts patients at risk, limits opportunities for scientific discovery, and gives device manufacturers (...) unique marketing opportunities. We argue that Congress and federal regulators should revisit the humanitarian device exemption to ensure that it is not used to sidestep careful research that can offer valuable data with appropriate patient safeguards. (shrink)
