A comprehensive look at the decline of the United States offers non-ideological remedies on how to overcome national self-doubt, reclaim optimism, and secure a prosperous future for American citizens.

A Síndrome de Kabuki é um distúrbio bastante raro, com múltiplas anomalias congênitas. O objetivo do estudo foi descrever características comportamentais, cognitivas e sociais de uma criança com seis anos de idade com Síndrome de Kabuki, e suas implicações no processo escolar. Como resultados, verif..

A wide range of medical institutions have developed and implemented policies to mitigate the adverse consequences of conflicts of interest. These newly implemented policies, which include regulation of industry contact with physicians and hospitals, controls on gifts from industry, and greater transparency in industry sponsored activities, have generated considerable controversy.Formulating and evaluating policies in a neutral, unbiased fashion can be difficult for those personally affected. When people have a stake in an issue, they tend to process information in a selective (...) fashion that supports their personal interests, a phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning.” When decision makers with preexisting opinions are exposed to information, they are inclined to selectively use the information to arrive at conclusions that justify their prior beliefs. When confronted with information that contradicts existing views, people evaluate it with greater skepticism. Additionally, once decision makers have reached a decision, they are likely to evaluate subsequent evidence in a biased manner that supports their decision. (shrink)

The idea that crimes can usefully be understood as ‘public wrongs’, and that this can generate a plausible principle of criminalisation, has found some support in recent years; it has also been subjected to some sharp criticism. This paper aims to sketch the most plausible version of that idea, and to show how, once properly explained, it is not vulnerable to those criticisms. After a brief defence of the negative principle, that we may not criminalise conduct that does not constitute (...) a public wrong, it explains the positive principle, that we have reason to criminalise conduct if it constitutes a public wrong, by drawing an analogy between criminal law and codes of professional ethics, and by appealing to the idea of civil order, as the normative structure of a polity—a structure that criminal law helps both to constitute and to sustain. Four objections are then met: that this account implies an unacceptable relativism; that it distorts the reasons that bear on criminalisation; that it cannot make room for those who do not identify themselves with the polity in which they live; and that it implies an unrealistically demanding conception of what is required for a polity to exist. (shrink)

The origin of marine invertebrate larvae has been an area of controversy in developmental evolution for over a century. Here, we address the question of whether a pelagic “larval” or benthic “adult” morphology originated first in metazoan lineages by testing the hypothesis that particular gene co-option patterns will be associated with the origin of feeding, indirect developing larval forms. Empirical evidence bearing on this hypothesis is derivable from gene expression studies of the sea urchin larval gut of two closely related (...) but differently developing congenerics, Heliocidaris tuberculata (feeding indirect-developing larva) and H. erythrogramma (nonfeeding direct developer), given two subsidiary hypotheses. (1) If larval gut gene expression in H. tuberculata was co-opted from an ancestral adult expression pattern, then the gut expression pattern will remain in adult H. erythrogramma despite its direct development. (2) Genes expressed in the larval gut of H. tuberculata will not have a coordinated expression pattern in H. erythrogramma larvae due to loss of a functional gut. Five structural genes expressed in the invaginating archenteron of H. tuberculata during gastrulation exhibit substantially different expression patterns in H. erythrogramma with only one remaining endoderm specific. Expression of these genes in the adult of H. erythrogramma and larval gut of H. tuberculata, but not in H. erythrogramma larval endoderm, supports the hypothesis that they first played roles in the formation of adult structures and were subsequently recruited into larval ontogeny during the origin and evolution of feeding planktotrophic deuterostome larvae. (shrink)

Reductionism and holism, that is, antireductionism, are two of the prevailing paradigms within the philosophy of biology. Reductionists strive to understand biological phenomena by reducing them to a series of levels of complexity with each lower level forming the foundation for the subsequent level, by mapping such biological phenomena inasmuch as possible to the principal phenomena within the fundamental sciences of chemistry and physics. In this way, complex phenomena can be reduced to assemblages of more elementary explananda. Holism, in counterpart, (...) claims that there independently exist phenomena arising from ordered levels of complexity that have intrinsic causal power and cannot be reduced in this way. When dealing with the nature of biology and its unique foundations of essentialism, determinism and ethics, the pedagogical lens through which these foundations are conveyed to learners could provide a limited perspective if only the reductive approach is followed as it would not sensitise learners to the true complexity of the phenomenon of life and the study thereof, and it is the purpose of this article to frame the reductionist–antireductionist debate in order to illustrate this.Contribution: This article contributes new knowledge to the field of the philosophy of science; more specifically, the philosophy of biology by critically evaluating the pervasive dialectic between the theoretical frameworks of reductionism and antireductionism and alluding to the pedagogical consequences thereof. (shrink)

This extended abstract critically exams the use of the terms "rigorous" and "soft" in the context of engineering modeling. Common usage of the terms is contrasted with Toulmin's notion of "reasonableness" and Schoen's notion of "reflective practice." The abstract continues by considering an economic model of models in engineering, suggesting that overly "rigorous" engineering practice may box itself into being unable to afford the models it values, thereby presenting a conundrum for the practice and teaching engineering that demands relaxation.

Many years ago Wilamowitz desiderated a systematic collection of the texts which relate to the different types of poetry composed by the great lyric poets of Greece. He hoped that if we could only crystallize our admittedly scanty information about the characteristics of, say, the Paean or the Dirge, we might be able to reach a slightly better understanding than we have now of the formal structure and artistic design of the poems and fragments which have come down to us (...) under these titles. Indeed, this kind of knowledge is very important. (shrink)