Ontological principles are needed in order to bridge the gap between medical and biological information in a robust and computable fashion. This is essential in order to draw inferences across the levels of granularity which span medicine and biology, an example of which include the understanding of the roles of tumor markers in the development and progress of carcinoma. Such information integration is also important for the integration of genomics information with the information contained in the electronic patient records (...) in such a way that real time conclusions can be drawn. In this paper we describe a large multi-granular datasource built by using ontological principles and focusing on the case of colon carcinoma. (shrink)

Tumors, abscesses, cysts, scars, fractures are familiar types of what we shall call pathological continuant entities. The instances of such types exist always in or on anatomical structures, which thereby become transformed into pathological anatomical structures of corresponding types: a fractured tibia, a blistered thumb, a carcinomatous colon. In previous work on biomedical ontologies we showed how the provision of formal definitions for relations such as is_a, part_of and transformation_of can facilitate the integration of such ontologies in ways which (...) have the potential to support new kinds of automated reasoning. We here extend this approach to the treatment of pathologies, focusing especially on those pathological continuant entities which arise when organs become affected by carcinomas. (shrink)

There are a number of existing classifications and staging schemes for carcinomas, one of the most frequently used being the TNM classification. Such classifications represent classes of entities which exist at various anatomical levels of granularity. We argue that in order to apply such representations to the Electronic Health Records one needs sound ontologies which take into consideration the diversity of the domains which are involved in clinical bioinformatics. Here we outline a formal theory for addressing these issues in a (...) way that the ontologies can be used to support inferences relating to entities which exist at different anatomical levels of granularity. Our case study is the colon carcinoma, one of the most common carcinomas prevalent within the European population. (shrink)

Rousseau has always had an uncertain relationship with the theory of constituent power. On the one hand, his distrust of political representation and support for popular sovereignty seem consistent with the idea of the people as a legally unlimited constitution-maker. On the other hand, if, from those views about representation and sovereignty, it follows that Rousseau is a proponent of direct democracy, then there seems to be no place in his thought for a theory that presupposes, above all, a separation (...) between those who exercise a delegated authority and those who possess an original constitution-making power. In a legal order in which all laws must be directly made by the people, such a separation is absent: the constituent and the legislative body are one and the same. It is therefore not surprising that Rousseau’s name is largely absent from contemporary literature on constituent power. In this article, however, I will show that once Rousseau’s particular conception of law, as well as his distinction between sovereignty and government, are properly understood, one finds in his work not only the first major formulation of the theory of constituent power, but also a careful exploration of its implications for actual constitutional practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Problem with BreathÉglantine Colon (bio)On day 1, when my comrades and I talked about it, we couldn't quite figure out how it happened. It just seemed as though we had suddenly been incited not to communicate or enact our love for each other. This time, no policy had been formulated, no law had been issued. It was harder than usual to locate where, to which parts of (...) the apparatus, we should direct our attention.On day 2, we were at a loss. We had gotten so good at reading the apparatus. We had developed wonderfully efficient techniques of resistance. Each and every one of us had become most brilliant at crafting discrete gestures of love. On day 3 onwards, we were misfiring on a regular basis, falling in and out of love with the same wrong comrades, over and over again, and always out of sync. The loving gestures we composed were barely legible and when we would intuitively find a genre in which to communicate our love, something would inevitably break down. Voices, generally. Sometimes the entire figurative system. Bodies, always. We would lose sleep and appetite over love and get useless for weeks.And then, the problem with love became a problem with breath. On day 6, the air got hot and busy with ashes and all sunsets turned red. At every breath, for all we knew, we could be inhaling particles of carbonized pine sap, debris of melted trailer parts, or burnt baby birds in bits. I quit smoking. I bought boxes of white masks at the construction store. The dominant smell during these days was a cagey mix of ghost paint, polymer fibers, and dry chemistry.On day 17, the air got cold and saturated with drops of viral poison. The city shut down. An incredibly sad number of lungs, too. The perspective to live in pods and die alone, disconnected from each other's breath, hyper-connected to life-support machines, plunged many of us, myself included, into brand new strands of historical despair. For those of us whose lungs had been weakened by bad inner-city fumes, evil chemicals, or entire centuries of racialized exposure to horrendous air quality, the problem with breath became plain lethal.Our neighborhoods were saturated with wildfire smoke and unnecessary death. Elsewhere, the streets were not empty. And when I say not empty, I mean they were just not. Or not yet. Usual metallic densities on the bridge. Geometrical glows of digital light in the underground. [End Page 237]Abnormally, no bodies of any ancestries were being captured, or hanged, or tortured, or kneeled upon. Nothing tangible, nothing blatantly repressive this time. No gas, no gag, no name, no whip, no rope. No strangulating remnant of sovereignty within no softness of biopower. A racist and classist brand of distributive pneumocracy is what it was, or at least this is how it initially appeared.On day 25, "Critical Pandemic Studies" became a thing, and "Pod Theory" a subgenre in post-social anthropology. Denounced as a "white fantasy of networked individualism," (in one of its purest forms) as "domestic fascism dressed as elective affinity," the pod appeared to us, from the get-go, as a thoroughly ratchet social formation. On day 29, the "podtag" emerged as a timely intervention in existing forms of street art. Equational in its form, efficient in its power of evocation, and satirical in its poetic economy, the podtag proliferated on the privatized walls of neighborhoods where the biggest challenges presented to breathing were unreasonably difficult Pilates classes on Zoom. Click for larger view View full resolutionOn day 35, the air got complex and full of knots, so striated that we could no longer count on our capacity to share the same air. A meal was being cooked, an instrument was being played, a child was given birth to, and suddenly the rhythm of all breaths would break. Sometimes a pair of lungs would refuse, stubbornly, to take in any oxygen until someone else's pair of lungs had released its own dose of carbon dioxide. At other times, the quantity of air available to each one of us would decrease with... (shrink)

As we have discussed elsewhere, Franz Boas and John Dewey were intellectual and political allies at Columbia University for over thirty years.1 Dewey advocated for an increased role of anthropology for philosophical insight, and he often used anthropological knowledge as a starting point for his ethics and politics, including such knowledge as learned from Boas. We hold that Boas and Dewey shared a common core understanding of human global and evolutionary diversity, and that this shared understanding itself forms a core (...) component of their progressive projects.However, with regard to the problem of racism in the United States, Boas and Dewey had different engagements. Boas made the questioning... (shrink)

El conjunto de ensayos que el lector tiene entre sus manos expresa un cuerpo sistemático de ideas provocadoras sobre la tensión entre el constitucionalismo y la democracia. Su autor, el profesor Joel Colón-Ríos, boricua, formado en las dos facultades de derecho canadienses de mayor renombre, e investigador de una de las mejores universidades de Oceanía, las ha fraguado a lo largo de más de un lustro y debatido con gran éxito ante la elite intelectual de Norteamérica. La propuesta central del (...) libro es una original reivindicación de la democracia frente al constitucionalismo. Su institucionalización consiste en un constitucionalismo débil. La piedra angular de este modelo es una constitución inacabada, permanentemente abierta al cambio, que permite y promueve la participación y la deliberación popular continua, en particular, mediante el potencial ejercicio del poder constituyente en cualquier momento. De esta manera, el pueblo tiene la posibilidad de hablar por sí mismo cuando lo juzgue pertinente. Puede cuestionar y reformular los principios básicos de la organización social. No está supeditado a las decisiones adoptadas por los ancestros que expidieron la Constitución, ni por sus representantes que, en el Congreso, ostentan el poder de reformarla. Precio: 49.000 pesos. (shrink)

Nearly twenty years after SubStance devoted a special issue to the contemporary French writer we know as Antoine Volodine, we are thoroughly pleased to be publishing in this issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering any other "post-exotic" text. One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of post-traumatic (...) subjects, between dark humor and luminous despair, in the liminal space between life and death, between humanity and animality, and, in the odd beauty... (shrink)

Salomón de la Selva (1893-1959) was a Nicaraguan writer/activist who authored many books of verse in Spanish, but only one in English: TropicalTown, And Other Poems (1918). Published in New York by John Lane–and regarded by Silvio Sirias as the first book of English verse published in the U.S.by a Latin American–Tropical Town exhibits a curious dynamic of avantgarde impulse: radically subversive in invoking counter-politics resisting U.S. colonial transnationalism, yet tending toward inherited, traditional aesthetic forms of poetry meant to legitimize (...) Selva’s Latin American identity with an impression of authority that contiguous Modernist experimental poetries could not. Through its sympathy for the U.S. immigrant’s nostalgia for homeland, coupled with express disapproval of U.S. international affairs, Tropical Town leaves a poetic record that challenges presuppositions about the integral relationships between ethos, aesthetics, and consciousness vis-à-vis assumed understandings of what constitutes radical poetry in the Modernist moment. (shrink)

Lysine methylation has been traditionally associated with histones and epigenetics. Recently, lysine methyltransferases and demethylases – which are involved in methylation of non‐histone substrates – have been frequently found deregulated in human tumours. In this realm, a new discovery has unveiled the methyltransferase SMYD3 as an enhancer of Ras‐driven cancer. SMYD3 is up‐regulated in different types of tumours. SMYD3‐mediated methylation of MAP3K2 increases mutant K‐Ras‐induced activation of ERK1/2. Methylation of MAP3K2 prevents it from binding to the phosphatase PP2A, thereby impeding (...) the impact of this negative regulator on Ras‐ERK1/2 signals, leading to the formation of lung and pancreatic adenocarcinomas. Furthermore, depletion of SMYD3 synergises with a MEK inhibitor, currently in clinical trials, to block Ras‐driven pancreatic neoplasia. These results underscore the importance of lysine methylation in the regulation of signalling pathways relevant for tumourigenesis and endorse the development of drugs targeting unregulated lysine methylation as therapeutic agents in the struggle against cancer. (shrink)

El estudio de la conciencia es de considerable relevancia en la filosofía de la mente contemporánea. Sin embargo, el enfoque “cientificista” imperante en esta disciplina, aunque de indiscutible utilidad, ha contribuido al rechazo de perspectivas cuyo valor explicativo resulta revelador en la investigación sobre la mente, la consciencia y el cuerpo. Una de estas perspectivas la podemos encontrar en la obra filosófica de Friedrich Nietzsche. El determinismo causal de la relación mente-cuerpo que propuso el filósofo alemán ha sido defendido por (...) medio de propuestas similares de neurocientíficos y filósofos de probada pericia. No obstante, la relevancia de la aportación nietzscheana no ha sido reconocida en su importancia histórica y teórica. El propósito de este artículo es señalar las particularidades sobre la determinación causal de la relación mente/cuerpo y sus implicaciones en los debates actuales sobre la naturaleza de la consciencia. (shrink)

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the question "How does it feel to be a social problem?". In 2008, Moustafa Bayoumi answered the same question for Muslims in the United States. Both Du Bois and Bayoumi provide powerful critiques against any notion that racialized minorities are inherently problematic. Both men generally argue that one cannot blame racialized minorities for the ill treatment they endure under systematic oppression. Du Bois and Bayoumi are two of many voices fighting against the (...) popular stigmatization of racialized peoples that include public intellectuals, civil rights activists, politicians, community leaders, educators, and many others. One of the things that all these voices have in common... (shrink)

Hay que entender que los cambios súbitos de todo tipo que nos están afectando globalmente, demuestran claramente que los modelos puramente racionales resultan ser insuficientes para dar respuesta a las complejidades de este mundo. Pero también, hay que entender que los modelos no puramente racionales han sido de difícil lectura y de poca aceptación. Pienso que este es el caso de la Crítica del Juicio. La falta de sensibilidad respecto de la apreciación de esta obra puede deberse a que la (...) misma ha sido calificada en nuestros días como el trabajo arquetípico del postmodernismo, revelando las contradicciones inherentes a toda idea de conocimiento, racionalidad, cultura y arte... “Ya no es el paradigma del clasicismo, ni del formalismo, la última del trio de las tres grandes Críticas se ha convertido de pronto, en el símbolo del deconstruccionismo”. También consideraremos a esta obra, como centro del sistema kantiano, un modelo para los sistemas complejos. Así que luego de señalar I- las discrepancias de Bauman con la Crítica del Juicio, veremos II- las correspondencias de esta obra con los axiomas del postmodernismo, y III- con los sistemas complejos. Luego IV- presentaremos un proyecto de rehabilitación de esta obra, y en V- ‘proyecciones sobre el presente’, expondremos el pensamiento de Bauman y Jonas señalando que no es el futuro, sino el presente de las condiciones globales de la vida humana y la existencia misma de la especie lo que está en peligro inminente. La metafísica de la moral de Jonas, aplicada a una ‘Moralidad sin Concepto,’ cierra el circulo de la nueva moralidad propuesta. Incluímos al final un apéndice sobre el supremo bien. (shrink)

La interioridad de lo viviente ha sido ignorada en una descripción científica del comportamiento humano. Hoy en día, sin embargo, la autopoiesis como paradigma de auto-organización, ha continuado incorpo- rando esos primeros atisbos de la interioridad de lo viviente que Kant desarrolló en la tercera Crítica. No hay organismo sin teleología y no hay teleología sin interioridad, nos dice, y sin un segmento teleológico el proyecto total de la moral se vuelve ininteligible. Hay un cambio de una ética basada en (...) el imperativo categórico a una moralidad sin concepto basada en otro aspecto del imperativo categórico presente en la estética kantiana. Con F.Varela surge la convicción de la inminencia de un cambio de paradigma que se trasluce como la primacía de lo concreto y la oposición a todo análisis deliberado e intencional. Estas características ya se habían manifestado en Kant y en Husserl como el cambio de lo exterior a lo interior, donde prima el abandono de toda regla o principio y la contundencia de la evidencia intuitiva. Se han de reconocer la importancia de los impulsos pre-conscientes y los instintos, por lo cual he incluido un Apéndice. Este camino dio lugar a las experiencias límite de lo sublime y de la epojé ética universal, la cual, según N. Depraz, filósofa francesa especializada en Husserl, no tienenada de misterioso o esotérico aunque está lejos de ser autoevidente. (shrink)

Notre travail s’inscrit dans les ancrages théoriques de l’ethnométhodologie et de l’analyse conversationnelle. Notre intérêt est avant tout d’analyser les pratiques interactionnelles entre joueurs en situation de jeux vidéo ; et d’autre part, de comparer différents jeux sur le plan de leur organisation interactionnelle ainsi que leur structure séquentielle et multimodale. Á partir des pratiques de joueurs, nous questionnons les problèmes et contraintes rencontrés, d’une part lors des analyses de ces données en situation de jeux vidéo, et d’autre part lors (...) de présentations académiques de nos recherches. Une étude en cours, sur les séquences d’encouragement et d’instruction dans les interactions entre joueurs, nous permet de montrer qu’il est indispensable de contextualiser le type de jeu joué, ses règles, ses options spécifiques parfois, les relations entre les joueurs, les rôles de chacun à l’instant de l’extrait, et aussi les actions en cours dans l’univers du jeu lui-même qui donneraient du sens à l’analyse. Ces contextualisations et prises en compte des ressources multimodales permettent d’expliquer et de décrire plus clairement et objectivement le phénomène linguistique, l’action ou encore la problématique analysée. (shrink)

In this article, the author presents some of the counterpoints between historical developments and feminist studies in Puerto Rico since the 1970s, elaborating on the most recurrent topics. She includes a brief historical overview of Puerto Rico and the trends in women's status, feminism, and feminist studies in the Island. Next, she provides a brief summary of general theoretical and methodological issues. Then she discusses research on specific topics, including the intersections of gender, nation, race, class, and sexuality; women's employment (...) and poverty; family structures and relations; sexual and reproductive rights; and current issues such as the relationship between feminism and the state and the context of globalization. (shrink)

The relationship between democracy and constitutions is a long and fractious one. Those who lean towards the constitutionalist side have tended to perceive democracy as a threat to political order and the preservation of important values, whereas those who take a more democratist stance tend to treat constitutions as elite hindrances to popular rule as much as anything else. In this paper, we will give the constitutionalist thesis a broader theoretical and political scrutiny. By way of explanation, we will address (...) and recommend the possibilities and problems for putting into practical operation such an anti-constitutionalist stance; the recent experience of the U.S. State of California offers itself as a good forcing-ground for these ideas. In short, from a democratic standpoint, the challenge for the citizenry is not so much about defining the values of constitutions, but constitutions whose change is outside the scope of popular decision making, supposed to exclusively take place through judicial interpretation or through an amendment formula designed precisely to make change difficult and unlikely. Too often, constitutions place checks and limits on democratic participation in the name of some other set of vaunted truths or elite-favouring values. For the strong democrat, it is formal constitutions and their institutional paraphernalia that do more to inhibit and dull democracy's emancipatory potential than to nurture and fulfil it. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the weaknesses of development strategies which have been applied in Puerto Rico. The process of industrialization by invitation, referred to as Operation Bootstrap, was instituted by the United States of America by the end of the 1940s. This involved tax incentives and subsidies for companies and was dependent on industrial peace and low wages in labor-intensive, low-wage industries, especially those of textile and clothing. Naturally, women's labor was encouraged as a result of the lower cost, (...) as well as assumed dexterity, of the female in such areas. While these new activity areas for women also allowed other benefits in the form of legislation and increased social services, the inherent problems of rapid, labor-intensive industrialization also led to displacement and increased underemployment and impoverization of female headed families from the 1960s onwards. The paper explores some of the changes in gender relations which resulted from these policies and looks at the challenges which the feminist movement in Puerto Rico has made, particularly with regard to state processes to bring about beneficial changes in the economic, legal, political and social status of women in Puerto Rico. (shrink)

Understanding how transcription factor (TF) binding is related to gene regulation is a moving target. We recently uncovered genome‐wide evidence for a “Hit‐and‐Run” model of transcription. In this model, a master TF “hits” a target promoter to initiate a rapid response to a signal. As the “hit” is transient, the model invokes recruitment of partner TFs to sustain transcription over time. Following the “run”, the master TF “hits” other targets to propagate the response genome‐wide. As such, a TF may act (...) as a “catalyst” to mount a broad and acute response in cells that first sense the signal, while the recruited TF partners promote long‐term adaptive behavior in the whole organism. This “Hit‐and‐Run” model likely has broad relevance, as TF perturbation studies across eukaryotes show small overlaps between TF‐regulated and TF‐bound genes, implicating transient TF‐target binding. Here, we explore this “Hit‐and‐Run” model to suggest molecular mechanisms and its biological relevance. (shrink)

Dans cette contribution, nous présentons la base CLAPI développée au laboratoire ICAR dans le contexte de l’évolution des bases de données de langues parlées en France au cours des trente dernières années. Nous détaillons les deux composantes de CLAPI, l’archive de corpus de langue parlée en interaction audio et vidéo enregistrés dans des situations sociales naturelles variées, et la plateforme d’outils.L’usage et l’apport de CLAPI sont illustrés par deux études. L’une décrit comment la base peut être utilisée pour des travaux (...) de linguistique interactionnelle intégrant la multimodalité (« oh là là ») ; l’autre concerne une recherche combinant données et métadonnées (« trop »). L’article est aussi l’occasion d’un bilan plus général. La mise en perspective montre en effet qu’après la période des questions est venue celle des dilemmes. La période des questions, choix et décisions à toutes sortes de niveaux a accompagné la mise en place des bases de données. L’expérience permet maintenant de mesurer leurs indéniables apports en termes non seulement de quantité de données disponibles (et traitables grâce aux outils), mais aussi de qualité (comme conséquence des exigences de standardisation liées au partage des données). La période des dilemmes nous conduit à nous interroger sur les meilleurs choix à opérer aujourd’hui dans les relations entre la poursuite des recherches sur des corpus variés (et parfois sensibles) et les exigences des bases de données ouvertes. (shrink)

The National Cancer Institute’s Thesaurus (NCIT) has been created with the goal of providing a controlled vocabulary which can be used by specialists in the various sub-domains of oncology. It is intended to be used for purposes of annotation in ways designed to ensure the integration of data and information deriving from these various sub-domains, and thus to support more powerful cross-domain inferences. In order to evaluate its suitability for this purpose, we examined the NCIT’s treatment of the kinds of (...) entities which are fundamental to an ontology of colon carcinoma. We here describe the problems we uncovered concerning classification, synonymy, relations and definitions, and we draw conclusions for the work needed to establish the NCIT as a reference ontology for the cancer domain in the future. (shrink)

DNA mismatch repair is an important pathway of mutation avoidance. It also contributes to the cytotoxic effects of some kinds of DNA damage, and cells defective in mismatch repair are resistant, or tolerant, to the presence of some normally cytotoxic base analogues in their DNA. The absence of a particular mismatch binding function from some mammalian cells confers resistance to the base analogues O6‐methylguanine and 6‐thioguanine in DNA. Cells also acquire a spontaneous mutator phenotype as a consequence of this defect. (...) Impaired mismatch binding can cause an instability in DNA microsatellite regions that comprise repeated dinucleotides. Microsatellite DNA instability is common in familial and sporadic colon carcinomas as well as in a number of other tumours. Several independent lines of investigation have identified defects in mismatch repair proteins that are causally related to these cancers. (shrink)

Recent work on the quality assurance of the Gene Ontology (GO, Gene Ontology Consortium 2004) from the perspective of both linguistic and ontological organization has made it clear that GO lacks the kind of formalism needed to support logic-based reasoning. At the same time it is no less clear that GO has proven itself to be an excellent terminological resource that can serve to combine together a variety of biomedical database and information systems. Given the strengths of GO, it is (...) worth investigating whether, by overcoming some of its weaknesses from the point of view of formal-ontological principles, we might not be able to enhance a version of GO which can come even closer to serving the needs of the various communities of biomedical researchers and practitioners. It is accepted that clinical and bioinformatics need to find common ground if the results of data-intensive biomedical research are to be harvested to the full. It is also widely accepted that no single method will be sufficient to create the needed common framework. We believe that the principles-based approach to life-science data integration and knowledge representation must be one of the methods applied. Indeed in dealing with the ontological representation of carcinomas, and specifically of colon carcinomas, we have established that, had GO (and related biomedical ontologies) followed some of the basic formal-ontological principles we have identified (Smith et al. 2004, Ceusters et al. 2004), then the effort required to navigate successfully between clinical and bioinformatics systems would have been reduced. We point here to the sources of ontologically-related errors in GO, and also provide arguments as to why and how such errors need to be resolved. (shrink)

Ian Stoner has recently argued that we ought not to colonize Mars because doing so would flout our pro tanto obligation not to violate the principle of scientific conservation, and there is no countervailing considerations that render our violation of the principle permissible. While I remain agnostic on, my primary goal in this article is to challenge : there are countervailing considerations that render our violation of the principle permissible. As such, Stoner has failed to establish that we ought not (...) to colonize Mars. I close with some thoughts on what it would take to show that we do have an obligation to colonize Mars and related issues concerning the relationship between the way we discount our preferences over time and projects with long time horizons, like space colonization. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the reading assessment, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), on literacy education through the Habermasian lens. It argues that DIBELS, along with other systemic forces, has surged beyond its domain as a mere assessment and colonized the lifeworld of literacy education by distorting the meaning of the teaching and learning of literacy.This article calls for a critical reflection on the systemized practices in literacy education and for a return to a lifeworld where (...) literacy is considered more than a testable skill. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the reading assessment, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), on literacy education through the Habermasian lens. It argues that DIBELS, along with other systemic forces, has surged beyond its domain as a mere assessment and colonized the lifeworld of literacy education by distorting the meaning of the teaching and learning of literacy.This article calls for a critical reflection on the systemized practices in literacy education and for a return to a lifeworld where (...) literacy is considered more than a testable skill. (shrink)

Abstract According to Habermas' colonization thesis, reification is a social pathology that arises when the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld is 'colonized' by money and power. In this paper I argue that, thirty years after the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action, this thesis remains compelling. However, while Habermas offers a functionalist explanation of reification, his normative criticism of it remains largely implicit: he never explains what is wrong with reification from the perspective of the people whose social relations (...) are reified. As a result, Habermas cannot explain why only some forms of colonization lead to reification effects. In particular, he suggests that reification effects result from the juridification of communicatively structured domains of action but not from the commodification of labour power. I criticize this argument and suggest that if the normative dimension of the colonization thesis is made explicit, a more nuanced explanation of reification becomes possible. (shrink)

Disney represents a mythology that is universal because they are rapidly acquiring every possible alternate reality that one cares to enter, except for the sexual realm and the Christian religion realm. When Disney owns all possible significant alternate universes, then only Disney can colonize one's imagination, and only Disney will give him/her the lens through which to perceive any competing claim on understanding his/her ultimate Reality. Well, visual containment helps the psyche stay in the mode and the mood for the (...) various psychic propaganda programs being run, and allows one to enjoy and prolong the fantasy, as well as empty his/her wallet of all possible contents since the only way to experience more Disney is to hand them exactly all of his/her cash. Thus, in short order, Disney has successfully colonized an awful lot of the global imagination, from young to old, male to female, from history to fantasy, and now from right to left. (shrink)

Love is often seen as the most intimate aspect of our lives, but it is increasingly engineered by a few programmers with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nowadays, numerous dating platforms are deploying so-called smart algorithms to identify a greater number of potential matches for a user. These AI-enabled matchmaking systems, driven by a rich trove of data, can not only predict what a user might prefer but also deeply shape how people choose their partners. This paper draws on Jürgen Habermas’s “colonization (...) of the lifeworld” thesis to critically explore the insidious influence of delegating romantic decision-making to an algorithm. The love lifeworld is colonized inasmuch as online dating algorithms encroach into our romantic relations to the extent that communicative action within romance is replaced by the technocratic rules of an algorithm. (shrink)

The differentiation of mammalian neurons during development is a highly complex process involving regulation and coordination of gene expression at multiple steps. The P19 mouse embryonal carcinoma cell line is a suitable model system with which to analyze regulation of neuronal differentiation. These multipotential cells can be maintained and propagated in tissue culture in an undifferentiated state. Exposure of aggregated P19 cells to retinoic acid results in the differentiation of cells with many fundamental phenotypes of mammalian neurons. Undifferentiated P19 (...) cells are amenable to genetic manipulations such as transfection and establishment of stable clonal cell lines expressing introduced genes. Proteins that play a key role in the neuronal differentiation of P19 cells are beginning to be identified. These include retinoic acid receptors, the epidermal growth factor receptor and the transcription factors Oct‐3 and Brn‐2. The biological and technical advantages of this system should facilitate deeper analysis of the activities of proteins that play a role in neuronal differentiation. (shrink)

This article is an exploration of the social phenomenon of the coloniality of being and universal desires. It examines how coloniality became ingrained in a new form of global consciousness of capitalist aesthetics of consumption, and how from the convergence of globalized electronic capitalism, pervasive global advertisement and consumerism, universal desires were created for a colonized global audience. Many questions arise on agency, citizenship, territoriality and rights of these global audiences. In this global landscape, place making and the right to (...) the city have to be questioned from a new global perspective of coloniality, race and gender, not from the usual perspective of subaltern groups, but from within the centre of Euro-American Eurocentric society. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Colonization and neo‐Europes New Zealand: a neo‐Europe The Clovis colonization Philosophical significance of anthropogenic and non‐anthropogenic extinctions Terraformation: Mars Abiotic nature: is it morally considerable? Conclusion.