Chaque fois que nous chantons dans le choeur ou jouons dans l'orchestre, comme lorsque nous pénétrons dans un monument fédérant l'espace urbain, tout notre être s'éprouve soudain d'une façon inédite et multi-dimensionnée. Nous contemplons alors un espace-temps rendu holistique, tout en détaillant les singularités linéaires de mouvements spiralés rythmiques, mélodiques et harmoniques, dont la synergie provoquera, par rebond, notre accession à une dimension d'ouverture, d'écoute et d'être, d'autant plus supérieure qu'y est intimement présente la dimension communautaire. Ainsi apprenons-nous, par et (...) au sein de l'invariant et du géométrisme qui structurent toute oeuvre d'art, à penser de façon entière et globalisée, à travers un espace mental infiniment élargi – particulièrement à l'altérité, seule apte à rassembler et fonder tout l'ensemble de notre activité à tous les plans, du plus physique au plus conceptuel et de l'idée à sa dimension la plus spirituelle. (shrink)

As ecologically and socially oriented food initiatives proliferate, the significance of these initiatives with respect to conventional food systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the transformative potential of alternative food networks by drawing on insights from recent research on food and embodiment, diverse food economies, and more-than-human food geographies. I identify several synergies between these literatures, including an emphasis on the pedagogic capacities of AFNs; the role of the researcher; and the analytical and political value of using assemblage and actor-network (...) thinking to understand the far-reaching forces and power disparities confronting proponents of more ethical and sustainable food futures. (shrink)

It is a common misconception that individuals act rationally and according to their interests—numerous examinations of human psychology have proven that this is not the case (Tversky and Kahneman 1...

Previous works usually report greater postural stability in precise visual tasks than in stationary-gaze tasks. However, existing cognitive models do not fully support these results as they assume that performing an attention-demanding task while standing would alter postural stability because of the competition of attention between the tasks. Contrary to these cognitive models, attentional resources may increase to create a synergy between visual and postural brain processes to perform precise oculomotor behaviors. To test this hypothesis, we investigated a difficult (...) searching task and a control free-viewing task. The precise visual task required the 16 young participants to find a target in densely furnished images. The free-viewing task consisted of looking at similar images without searching anything. As expected, the participants exhibited significantly lower body displacements and a significantly higher cognitive workload in the precise visual task than in the free-viewing task. Most important, our exploration showed functional synergies between visual and postural processes in the searching task, that is, significant negative relationships showing lower head and neck displacements to reach more expended zones of fixation. These functional synergies seemed to involve a greater attentional demand because they were not significant anymore when the cognitive workload was controlled. In the free-viewing task, only significant positive relationships were found and they did not involve any change in cognitive workload. An alternative cognitive model and its potential subtended neuroscientific circuit are proposed to explain the supposedly cognitively grounded functional nature of vision–posture synergies in precise visual tasks. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ethical concerns associated with HIV prevention and treatment research have been widely explored in South Africa over the past 3 decades. However, HIV cure research is relatively new to the region and significant ethical and social challenges are anticipated. There has been no published empirical enquiry in Africa into key informant perspectives on HIV cure research. Consequently, this study was conducted to gain preliminary data from South African HIV clinicians, researchers and activists.MethodsIn-depth interviews were conducted on a purposive sample (...) of fourteen key informants in South Africa. Audiotaped interviews were transcribed verbatim with concurrent thematic analysis. The perspectives of HIV clinicians, researchers and activists were captured. Analyst triangulation occurred as the data were analysed by three authors independently.ResultsThe rapid evolution of HIV cure research agendas was prominent with participants expressing some concern that the global North was driving the cure agenda. Participants described a symbiotic relationship between cure, treatment and prevention research necessitating collaboration. Assessing and managing knowledge and expectations around HIV cure research emerged as a central theme related to challenges to constructing ‘cure’ - how patients understand the idea of cure is important in explaining the complexity of cure research especially in the South African context where understanding of science is often challenging. Managing expectations and avoiding curative misconception will have implications for consent processes. Unique strategies in cure research could include treatment interruption, which has the potential to create therapeutic and ethical conflict and will be perceived as a significant risk. Ethical challenges in cure research will impact on informed consent and community engagement.ConclusionsIt was encouraging to note the desire for synergy amongst researchers and clinicians working in the fields of prevention, treatment and cure. Translation of complex HIV cure science into lay language is critical. Moving forward, RECs must be adequately constituted with scientific expertise and community representation when reviewing cure protocols. It is hoped that knowledge and resource sharing in the context of collaboration between research scientists working in cure and those working in treatment and prevention will accelerate progress towards cure. (shrink)

This paper acknowledges the fact human beings are social animals, as they tend to live in well-organized societies. However, human population expansion explodes into internal implosions that continue to wreck havoc globally on the social, economic, political, architectural, and aesthetic environments. To harness the universal territorial imperatives, of contending components harmoniously, the world requires synergy and dialogue.

The author discusses the power of cumulative theory generation in which two or more grounded theories are joined utilizing the constant comparative method of analysis. He introduces an example of such theoretical synergy between his theory of weathering change and Gregory's and Thomas' work on diversity dynamics. Initial grounded theory analysis by Gregory and Raffanti indicates that combining relevant aspects of weathering and diversity management has the potential to generate powerful explanatory and operational theories.

Conceived by Wagner as a way to recover the synthesis of arts at the core of the Greek tragedy, the Gesamtkunstwerk played a big role in post-Romantic aesthetics. This book revisits the "total work of art" as a variation of intermediality that captures the digital age's principle of open textuality through complex interplay and synergy of media.

Muscle synergies reflect the presence of a common neural input to multiple muscles. Steering small sets of synergies is commonly believed to simplify the control of complex motor tasks like walking and running. When these locomotor patterns emerge, it is likely that synergies emerge as well. We hence hypothesized that in children learning to run the number of accompanying synergies increases and that some of the synergies’ activities display a temporal shift related to a reduced stance phase as observed in (...) adults. We investigated the development of locomotion in 23 children aged 2–9 years of age and compared them with seven young adults. Muscle activity of 15 bilateral leg, trunk, and arm muscles, ground reaction forces, and kinematics were recorded during comfortable treadmill walking and running, followed by a muscle synergy analysis. We found that toddlers and preschoolers utilize a “walk-run strategy” when learning to run: they managed the fastest speeds on the treadmill by combining double support and flight phases. In particular the activity duration of the medial gastrocnemius muscle was weakly correlated with age. The number of synergies across groups and conditions needed to cover sufficient data variation ranged between four and eight. The number of synergies tended to be smaller in toddlers than it did in preschoolers and school-age children but the adults had the lowest number for both conditions. Against our expectations, the age groups did not differ significantly in the timing or duration of synergies. We believe that the increase in the number of muscle synergies in older children relates to motor learning and exploration. The ability to run with a FP is clearly associated with an increase in the number of muscle synergies. (shrink)

This paper draws on the emerging field of innovation ethics to complement the more established field of responsible innovation by focusing on key ethical issues raised by technological innovations. One key limitation of influential frameworks of RI is that they tend to neglect some key ethical issues raised by innovation, as well as major normative dimensions of the notion of responsibility. We explain how IE could enrich RI by stressing the more important role that ethical analysis should play in RI. (...) We focus on two transversal issues of IE: the issue of redrawing conceptual boundaries, especially the topic of the artificialization of the world, and the issue of responsibility, especially the notion of total responsibility. We address these two issues from the thematic perspective of IE, thereby generating lessons learnt for RI. These two examples are taken as illustrations and blueprint of the dialogue that should take place between the two fields. (shrink)

Creativity is a powerful determinant of all economic activity, including competition. But its mirror image may be destructiveness, which cannot be ignored, either in life or in business. In fact, the nature of competition appears to involve synergy between the two. The author has considerable business experience as a Senior Executive of a medium‐sized textile group, and is now Visiting Lecturer in Social Ethics at Heythrop College, University of London, Kensington Square, London W8 5HQ. This paper was first presented (...) at a Seminar on Teaching Business Ethics held at London Business School on Friday, 10 March, 1995. (shrink)

Nursing and bioethics have a lot in common because they share concerns about life and death, illness and health, the rights of individuals and communities, ethical patient care, health care delivery, and public health. Nurses and bioethicists contribute to ethical practice, ethics scholarship, and health policy‐making in a variety of ways. Some nurses have bioethics education or experience, some bioethicists study or collaborate closely with nurses, and some of us proudly identify as both bioethicists and as nurses. Despite certain shared (...) and interwoven aims, bioethicists and nurses often accomplish their goals in dissimilar ways, have diverse educational and training trajectories as well as distinct roles and responsibilities, and are viewed differently within health care organizations. Yet the work of bioethics and nursing can be, and in my view should more often be, synergistic. That synergism may be especially critical in the arena of health policy and ethics. Nurses can bring extraordinary insights and real‐world experiences to the policy table but are not always considered essential contributors. (shrink)

What is the proper unit of analysis in the psycholinguistics of dialog? While classical approaches are largely based on models of individual linguistic processing, recent advances stress the social coordinative nature of dialog. In the influential interactive alignment model, dialogue is thus approached as the progressive entrainment of interlocutors' linguistic behaviors toward the alignment of situation models. Still, the driving mechanisms are attributed to individual cognition in the form of automatic structural priming. Challenging these ideas, we outline a dynamical framework (...) for studying dialog based on the notion of interpersonal synergy. Crucial to this synergetic model is the emphasis on dialog as an emergent, self-organizing, interpersonal system capable of functional coordination. A consequence of this model is that linguistic processes cannot be reduced to the workings of individual cognitive systems but must be approached also at the interpersonal level. From the synergy model follows a number of new predictions: beyond simple synchrony, good dialog affords complementary dynamics, constrained by contextual sensitivity and functional specificity. We substantiate our arguments by reference to recent empirical studies supporting the idea of dialog as interpersonal synergy. (shrink)

When behaviors assemble into combinations, then synergies have a central role in the discovery of productive patterns of behavior. In our view—what we call the Synergy Emergence Principle (SEP)—synergies are dynamic attractors, drawing interactions toward greater returns as they happen, in the moment. This Principle offers an alternative to the two conventionally acknowledged routes to discovery: directed problem solving, involving forethought and planning; and the complete randomness of trial and error. Natural selection has a role in the process, in (...) humans favoring the maintenance and improvement of certain key underlying capabilities, such as prosocial helping and episodic foresight, but selection is not required for discovery by synergy (which occurs too rapidly for selection anyway). Here we discuss the consequences of the SEP for the evolution in humans of key synergies such as tool usage and interactions that reward cooperation, show how discovery by synergy and the selection of synergy-supporting abilities formed a positive feedback loop, and show how synergies can combine, forming clusters and packages that are the core of institutions and cultures. Finally, clusters and packages represent an intermediate level of organization above the individual and below whole society, with consequences for our understanding of the major transitions in evolution. (shrink)

The article will focus on the implicit values dimension that is evident in research findings concerning quality teaching. Furthermore, it sets out to demonstrate that maximizing the effects of quality teaching requires explicit attention to this values dimension and that this can be achieved through a well-crafted values education program. Evidence for this latter claim will come from international studies as well as from the Australian Government's Values Education Program and, especially from the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project Stage (...) 1 Report (DEST, 2006). (shrink)

This paper acknowledges the fact human beings are social animals, as they tend to live in well-organized societies. However, human population expansion explodes into internal implosions that continue to wreck havoc globally on the social, economic, political, architectural, and aesthetic environments. To harness the universal territorial imperatives, of contending components harmoniously, the world requires synergy and dialogue.

For patients with multiple sclerosis, deficits in gait significantly reduce the quality of life. Using the concept of muscle synergies, this study investigated the modular organization of motor control during level and inclined walking in MS patients compared with healthy participants to identify the potential demand-specific adjustments in motor control in MSP. We hypothesized a widening of the time-dependent activation patterns in MSP to increase the overlap of temporally-adjacent muscle synergies, especially during inclined walking, as a strategy to increase the (...) robustness of motor control, thus compensating pathology-related deficits. We analyzed temporal gait parameters and muscle synergies from myoelectric signals of 13 ipsilateral leg muscles using non-negative matrix factorization. Compared with HP, MSP demonstrated a widening in the time-dependent coefficients, as well as altered relative muscle contribution, in certain synergies during level and inclined walking. Moreover, inclined walking revealed a demand-specific adjustment in the modular organization in MSP, resulting in an extra synergy compared with HP. This further increased the overlap of temporally-adjacent muscle synergies to provide sufficient robustness in motor control to accomplish the more demanding motor task while coping with pathology-related motor deficits during walking. (shrink)

Creativity is a powerful determinant of all economic activity, including competition. But its mirror image may be destructiveness, which cannot be ignored, either in life or in business. In fact, the nature of competition appears to involve synergy between the two. The author has considerable business experience as a Senior Executive of a medium‐sized textile group, and is now Visiting Lecturer in Social Ethics at Heythrop College, University of London, Kensington Square, London W8 5HQ. This paper was first presented (...) at a Seminar on Teaching Business Ethics held at London Business School on Friday, 10 March, 1995. (shrink)

The switch from the Command-and-Control to Learning Organisation paradigm in the area of organisational theory is well understood. It is less well appreciated that learning organisations cannot operate effectively if supported by centralised data processing systems. The paper argues that there is a need for synergy between organisational structures and organisational information systems. Learning must be supported by the so-called new information technology. To obtain desired synergy it is necessary to design organisations and organisational information systems concurrently.

Palliative care and medical-legal partnership are complementary disciplines dedicated to integrating care to treat the whole patient and intervening before a legal or medical issue is at a crisis point. In this paper, we discuss the founding and operations of the Yale Palliative Medical Legal Partnership, give examples of typical cases, explain special considerations in this area of law, and propose areas for further research.

Understanding artificial intelligence and belief formation have interesting bidirectional synergies. From explaining the logical derivation of beliefs and their internal consistency, to giving a quantitative account of mightiness, AI still has plenty of unexploited metaphors that can illuminate belief formation. In addition, acknowledging that AI should integrate itself with our belief processes makes it possible to focus on more promising lines such as Interpretable Machine Learning.

This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, cyber‐fraud, (...) revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”. (shrink)

The momentum for global neuroscience that is geopolitically-free has never been greater, and neuroethics holds a unique place in this context both in its translational and transnational forms.In th...

In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this (...) theory into a much broader framework in _Holistic Darwinism_, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Principal propositions -- Synergetic and homeostatic transformations of energies in the natural space -- Mathematical basis for the applicability of synergy and homeostasis in the normative systems -- Natural normative order and comparison of the aggression of nonhuman and human animals -- Applicability of synergy and homeostasis for the normative transformations in civil society -- Applicability of synergy and homeostasis for the normative transformations in legal order -- Human rights and applicability of synergy and homeostasis for (...) the normative transformations in state -- The theory on the prevention of environmental disaster. (shrink)

Hemiparetic stroke in adulthood often results in the grouped movement pattern of the upper extremity flexion synergy thought to arise from an increased reliance on cortico-reticulospinal pathways due to a loss of lateral corticospinal projections. It is well-established that the flexion synergy induces reaching constraints in individuals with adult-onset hemiplegia. The expression of the flexion synergy in individuals with brain injuries onset earlier in the lifespan is currently unknown. An early unilateral brain injury occurring prior to six (...) months post full-term may preserve corticospinal projections which can be used for independent joint control and thus minimizing the expression of the flexion synergy. This study uses kinematics of a ballistic reaching task to evaluate the expression of the flexion synergy in individuals with pediatric-onset hemiplegia (PH) ages six to seventeen years. Fifteen individuals with brain injuries before birth (n = 8) and around full-term (n = 7) and nine age-matched controls with no known neurological impairment completed a set of reaches in an admittance controlled robotic device. Descending drive, and the possible expression of the upper extremity flexion snergy, was modulated by increasing shoulder abduction loading. Individuals with early PH achieved lower peak velocities when reaching with the paretic arm compared to controls however no differences in reaching distance were found between groups. Relative maintenance in reaching seen in individuals with early brain injuries highlights minimal expression of the flexion synergy. We interpret this conservation of independent control of the paretic shoulder and elbow as the use of more direct corticospinal projections instead of indirect cortico-reticulospinal pathways used in individuals with adult-onset hemiplegia. (shrink)

The course of biological evolution is regarded by many authors as an ascending path toward higher levels of variety, complexity and integration. There are similar but partly conflicting accounts of the nature and causes of this ascending course. With the aim of reaching a unified conception I start by summarily reviewing three notable examples. These are, in their latest presentations, those of Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2015, Szathmáry 2015, and Lane 2015a. Comparison of their commonalities and divergences, combined with further reflections, (...) leads to the following views: 1) cooperation between preexistent traits and processes is the primary determinant in the emergence of evolutionary novelty; 2) cooperation is a triadic relation similar to semiosis ; 3) regulation, the key element of both metabolism and replication, results from the cooperation of energetic and semiotic causation; 4) conceptual generalization and concrete generalization are fruits of cooperation. Conceptual generalizations spring from the cooperation of ideas. I believe these realizations supply essential elements for a unified view of the ascent of biological evolution towards higher levels of organization. Some of these conceptions are also applicable to similar ascending trajectories through the stages of cultural and technological evolution. (shrink)

This study enriches the literature on entrepreneurial decisions by investigating the antecedents of the synergetic use of causal and effectual logic. Based on entrepreneurial metacognition and emotional complexity theories, we argued that the emotional complexity of an entrepreneur, referred to as the granular experience of, or variety in, experienced emotions during the entrepreneurial task, would contribute to the synergetic use of decision logic. With survey data gathered from 218 Chinese entrepreneurs, we found that entrepreneurs with higher emotional complexity are more (...) likely to adopt two types of entrepreneurial logic in tandem, and cognitive flexibility mediates this positive relationship. Thereby, this study helps to unravel some of the complexities behind the choice of decision logic of entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Ketamine is a dissociative drug that has been used medically since the 1970s primarily as an anesthetic agent but also for various psychiatric applications. Anecdotal reports and clinical research suggest substantial potential for ketamine as a treatment in conjunction with psychological interventions. Here, we review historical and modern approaches to the use of ketamine with psychotherapy, discuss the clinical relevance of ketamine’s acute psychoactive effects, propose a unique model for using esketamine with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and suggest considerations for (...) moving medication-assisted psychotherapy forward as a field. (shrink)

Motor learning can be defined as a process that leads to relatively permanent changes in motor behavior through repeated interactions with the environment. Different strategies can be adopted to achieve motor learning: movements can be overtly practiced leading to an amelioration of motor performance; alternatively, covert strategies (e.g., action observation) can promote neuroplastic changes in the motor system even in the absence of real movement execution. However, whether a training regularly alternating action observation and execution (i.e., Action Observation Training, AOT) (...) may surpass the pure motor practice (MP) and observational learning (OL) remains to be established. To address this issue, we enrolled 54 subjects requiring them to learn tying nautical knots via one out of three types of training (AOT, MP, OL) with the scope to investigate which element mostly contributes to motor learning. We evaluated the overall improvement of each group, along with the predictive role that neuropsychological indexes exert on each treatment outcome. The AOT group exhibited the highest performance improvement (42%), indicating that the regular alternation between observation and execution biases participants toward a better performance. The reiteration of this sequence provides an incremental, adjunct value that super-adds onto the efficacy of motor practice or observational learning in isolation (42% > 25% + 10%, i.e., OL + MP). These findings extend the use of the AOT from clinical and rehabilitative contexts to daily routines requiring the learning and perfectioning of new motor skills such as sports training, music, and occupational activities requiring fine motor control. (shrink)

The article will focus on the implicit values dimension that is evident in research findings concerning quality teaching. Furthermore, it sets out to demonstrate that maximizing the effects of quality teaching requires explicit attention to this values dimension and that this can be achieved through a well‐crafted values education program. Evidence for this latter claim will come from international studies as well as from the Australian Government's Values Education Program and, especially from the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project Stage (...) 1 Report (DEST, 2006). (shrink)

This article explores the crucial moments of scientists’ research activities when they decide to shift to a radical new domain or to perpetuate a project. We introduce what we have called the “respiration model” which describes and analyses key cognitive components which occur in this complex process. Respiration either privileges epistemic expectations which are rooted in socio-cognitive metrics of “concentration” or in a functionality-multiple horizon context which we refer to as “extension”. The respiration model accords particular attention to the elements (...) curiosity and synergy in science. (shrink)