Humans, animals, and the environment face a universal crisis: antimicrobial resistance. Addressing AR and its multi-disciplinary causes across many sectors including in human and veterinary medicine remains underdeveloped. One barrier to AR efforts is an inconsistent process to incorporate the plenitude of stakeholders about what AR is and how to stifle its development and spread—especially stakeholders from the animal agriculture sector, one of the largest purchasers of antimicrobial drugs. In 2019, The Wellcome Trust released Reframing Resistance: How to communicate about (...) antimicrobial resistance effectively, which proposed the need to establish a consistent and harmonized messaging effort that describes the AR crisis and its global implications for health and wellbeing across all stakeholders. Yet, Reframing Resistance does not specifically engage the animal agriculture community. This study investigates the gap between two principles recommended by Reframing Resistance and animal agriculture stakeholders. For this analysis, the research group conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of United States animal agriculture stakeholders. Participants reported attitudes, beliefs, and practices about a variety of issues, including how they defined AR and what entities the AR crisis impacts most. Exploration of Reframing Resistance’s Principle 2, “explain the fundamentals succinctly” and Principle 3, “emphasis that this is universal issue; it can affect anyone, including you” reveals disagreement in both the fundamentals of AR and consensus of “who” the AR crisis impacts. Principle 2 may do better to acknowledge that animal agriculture stakeholders espouse a complex array of perspectives that cannot be summed up in a single perspective or principle. As a primary tool to combat AR, behavior change must be accomplished first through outreach to stakeholder groups and understanding their perspectives. (shrink)

A course on the Western philosophical tradition, with multiple lecturers, available in audio and video formats through the Great Courses.

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, crucially, (...) not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

Mauricio Suárez and Agnes Bolinska apply the tools of communication theory to scientific modeling in order to characterize the informational content of a scientific model. They argue that when represented as a communication channel, a model source conveys information about its target, and that such representations are therefore appropriate whenever modeling is employed for informational gain. They then extract two consequences. First, the introduction of idealizations is akin in informational terms to the introduction of noise in a signal; for (...) in an idealization we introduce ‘extraneous’ elements into the model that have no correlate in the target. Second, abstraction in a model is informationally equivalent to equivocation in the signal; for in an abstraction we “neglect” in the model certain features that obtain in the target. They conclude that it becomes possible in principle to quantify idealization and abstraction in informative models, although precise absolute quantification will be difficult to achieve in practice. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 37, Issue 1, pp 45 - 67 The sudden surge in English translations of Erasmus’ _Apophthegmata_ during the later years of Henry VIII ’s reign can be partly attributed to the gradual introduction of the new standards set by the humanist educational agenda and partly to the profound political and religious changes brought about by the English Reformation that was codified in the Act of Supremacy in 1534. Richard Taverner’s _The garden of wysdom_ and _The second booke (...) of the Garden of wysedome_ and Nicholas Udall’s _Apophthegmes_ reveal a pronounced shift towards a more widely conceived education of the English public. While Taverner’s translation, with its overt political commentary, provided a morally instructive commonplace book, marked by a Protestant overtone and influenced by Luther’s and Melanchthon’s views, Udall’s extensive pedagogical notes were meant to disseminate new methods of instruction modelled on Erasmus’ _De ratione studii_. Albeit in notably different ways, Udall’s and Taverner’s promotion of classical culture through apophthegms reflected their humanist zeal to reshape existing moral and cultural ideals and to expand the codes of conduct of the reformed Christian commonwealth in England. (shrink)

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories (...) of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment. (shrink)

Although legitimacy theory provides strong arguments that environmental, social and governance disclosure and performance can help mitigate firm-specific risks, this relationship has been repeatedly challenged by conceptual arguments, such as ‘transparency fallacy’ or ‘impression management’, and mixed empirical evidence. Therefore, we investigate this relationship in the revelatory case of initial public offerings, which represent the first sale of common stock to the wider public. IPOs are characterised by strong information asymmetry between firm insiders and society, while at the same time (...) suffering from uncertainty in firm legitimacy, culminating in amplified financial risks for both issuers and investors in aftermarket trading. Using data from the United States, we demonstrate that voluntary ESG disclosure reduces idiosyncratic volatility and downside tail risk and higher ESG ratings have lower associated firm-specific volatility and downside tail risk during the first year of trading in the aftermarket. We provide theoretical arguments for the relationships observed, suggesting that companies striving for ESG performance and communicating their efforts signal their compliance with sustainability-related norms, thus acquiring and upholding a societal license to operate. ESG performance and disclosure help companies build their reputation capital with investors after going public. We also report that ESG disclosure is a more consistent proxy for ex-ante uncertainty as an indicator of aftermarket risk, thereby replacing some of the more conventional measures, such as firm age, offered in the existing literature. (shrink)

Se ofrece una panorámica de la evolución del sistema bibliotecario español en los 10/15 últimos años, comparándola con la situación en el mundo bibliotecario anglosajón. Se analizan los proyectos de cooperación bibliotecaria en España y se apuntan las líneas de interés en los proyectos europeos con participación española. Finalmente se presentan unas conclusiones sobre lo expuesto y una reflexión del papel que deben jugar las bibliotecas en un sistema organizado de investigación.

GNèS LEJBOWICZ. — Pour comprendre votre réflexion, pouvez-vous nous parler en introduction de votre parcours au sein de l’armée ? 2 JEAN-RENé BACHELET. — Je ne suis pas un officier « de droit divin » ; mon père a été tué dans la Résistance, et j’ai été enfant de troupe à 10 ans. Je suis d’une génération qui est à cheval sur deux ères : celle d’un temps ancien qui se termine avec la fin du monde bipolaire et celle de (...) temps nouveaux, chaotiques et ouverts par une exceptionnelle conjugaison de ruptures, notamment géostratégiques. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe COVID-19 pandemic and government measures implemented to counter the spread of the infection may be a major stressor affecting the psychological health of university students. This study aimed to explore how anxiety symptoms changed during the pandemic.Methods676 students at Zurich University of Applied Sciences participated in the first and second survey waves. Anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-Scale-7. Risk and protective factors were examined.ResultsGAD-7 scores decreased significantly from T0 to T1. Participants with moderate-to-severe anxiety score were (...) 20.2 and 15.6% at T0 and T1, respectively. The following positively predicted anxiety: older age, female gender, non-Swiss nationality, loneliness, participants’ concern about their own health, and interaction between time and participants’ concern about their own health. Resilience and social support negatively predicted anxiety.ConclusionsOur findings provide information for public health measures and psychological interventions supporting the mental health of university students during the COVID-19 emergency. (shrink)

The endeavor to naturalize the philosophy of biology brings the problem of agency to the forefront, along with renewed attention to the organism and organicism. In this article, we argue for a mutualist approach to agency that starts to unravel layers of this complex issue by focusing on perception and action at the core of all biological agency. The mutuality of animals and their surroundings is seen as distinct from the typical concepts of organism, preexisting environment, and their interactions. Mutuality (...) means a deep ontological and epistemological compatibility between the organism and its surround. We suggest that the concept of direct perception developed and empirically researched in the tradition of the ecological approach, launched by James J. Gibson, offers a promising path to approach agency within an ecological–mutuality framework. At the core of our definition of agency is the animal’s ability to self-initiate actions and activities. Animals are the source of their own actions and activities within the mutual, co-defining relation to their surround. The place of agency related to mutuality has not been elaborated sufficiently thus far, in either biology or ecological psychology. In this article, our goal is to argue for the necessity of placing agency into an ecological–mutuality framework and of further research in this direction in line with Marjorie Grene’s call to assimilate Gibson’s theory of knowledge into biology. (shrink)

Building on research demonstrating relationships between well being and perceptions of aspects of life as sacred, this study describes the rationale for and development of a scale measuring perceiving sacredness in life. It then explores associations between perceptions of sacredness in life and these four domains: religious/spiritual, personal, social, and situational. Participants responded to a mailing to a national random sample within the United States, completing 16 scales pertaining to the religious/spiritual, personal, social, and situational domains. While many variables were (...) correlated with perceiving sacredness in life, there were three overall predictors: intrinsic religiosity, mysticism, and community service attitude. (shrink)

Education is a pillar of buen vivir, the guiding ideal of Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. In this framework, Ecuador made significant shifts in its education system from 2006 to 2016, the decade of the Citizens’ Revolution. The key buen vivir concepts and processes that framed these shifts were considering education as a right, as a social debt, and as a driver of a more just, knowledge-intensive and clean economy. Resource allocation, general access, learning, and inclusion of structurally marginalized groups showed significant (...) improvement in this decade, along with other key political, economic and social changes, thus making significant advances in the emancipation of society toward buen vivir, and marking elements of how and why advancing this transformation is important. (shrink)

Lors de la création de CLIO, Histoire, Femmes, Sociétés, le thème « Femmes et religions»s'est imposé immédiatement. Le temps passé, en effet, n'est interrogé qu'à partir des questions que se pose le temps présent et notre époque semble située à la croisée de deux mouvements antagonistes : « le retour du religieux » - accompagné d'un développement du fondamentalisme - et l'émancipation des femmes. La presse ne cesse de signaler les agressions des « intégristes » de toute obédience con...

Coexistence in schools inevitably carries a higher risk of conflicts among peers. This fact can be detrimental to the well-being and academic achievement of the students. In many developed countries, about 90% of the pupils in compulsory secondary education report witnessing assaults among peers. In this regard, recognizing, controlling and managing emotions is key to ensure a healthy and effective interaction with others. Negative emotions, such as anger, can trigger conflicts or even episodes of violence if not regulated properly. Interactive (...) tools, such as specialised software’s, have shown high rates of efficacy for the training of different kinds of competences like the regulation of emotions. The aim of the present work is to describe the Happy Emotional Education Program and its effects over a sample of secondary school students. This software focuses in the training of emotional competences of the students with the objective of solving conflicts in a more assertive way. The design employed in the present work was a quasiexperimental design with pretest and posttest with a control group. Results show that Happy Emotional Education Program contributes to the management of emotions and well-being in a significant way. Additionally, the constant use of this interactive tool enhances motivation and the learning process of students. Results also indicate the importance of assessing the effects of the program in the long term. This would enable researchers to further assess the effects of the program over those emotional competences that are more resistant to change given its stable nature. (shrink)

Written by four recognized experts with senior experience in research and government, this text is the first comprehensive survival kit for students and practitioners of economic policy. It is set to become an indispensable resource for everyone involved or interested in modern economic policy. Academic scholars willing to engage in policy discussions and students at graduate or advanced undergraduate levels will find it an essential bridge to the policy world. What makes the book unique is that it combines like no (...) other, facts-based analysis, state-of-the art theories and models, and insights from first-hand policy experience at national and international levels. The book has grown out of ten years of experience teaching economic policy at the graduate level. It provides an intellectually coherent framework to understand the potentialities and limits of economic policy. It addresses positive dimensions, normative dimensions and political-economy constraints. It fills an important gap by reconciling in each major policy area stylized facts of recent economic history, key questions faced by contemporary policymakers, and essential lessons from theory which are captured and explained in a clear, concise, and self-contained way. All major areas of domestic and international policymaking are covered: fiscal policy, monetary policy, international finance and exchange-rate policy, tax policy, and long-term growth policies. The book concludes with a special chapter on the lessons of the financial crisis. The authors are intellectually non-partisan and they draw examples from various countries and experiences; from emerging markets to developing economies, shedding light when necessary on local specificities such as European Union rules and instruments. Economic Policy: Theory and Practice is the essential guide to economic policy in the new post-crisis context. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explain the evolution of life through the evolution of cellular and supra-cellular closures, two distinct ways of strict delimitation against the surroundings. Such closures are a necessary precondition of organisation, semiosis, and agency. We argue that in addition to the basic, first-order, cellular closures, which have been in existence without interruption since the dawn of life, there also exist second-order closures (cell communities), which are dynamic and often formed ad hoc. Moreover, a living (...) entity may belong simultaneously to different kinds of such second-order closures. It is these second-order closures which organise cellular (and higher-order) communities and form the core of the bonds that hold the biosphere together. In second-order closures, there exist countless crisscrossing pathways leading to manifold interpretations of particular situations. We provide examples of such relationships and point to an elaborate network connecting all denizens of the biosphere. (shrink)

Although in core business practice most leaders are aware of the fact that information needs to be acquired from a wide range of sources, decision makers in corporate enterprises seem to forget this and all they do, in most cases, is ask their consumers and potential customers in the course of planning their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) activities. There are only few companies where managers refer to ethical principles as an argument for social contribution and the connection between CSR and (...) sustainability is being rarely explored. This article is based on research (interviews and questionnaires), observations and continuous action research carried out by the Kurt Lewin Foundation. The study focuses on the communication of social responsibility since according to our experience in most cases companies undertake causes in order to improve their own image and for marketing reasons. This article concludes that the reason for difficulties in finding the best CSR solutions for enterprises and creating the commitment of their employees for the undertaken cause is that they do not think of CSR as a consequence of ethical core business process, but rather as a separate task they try to complete aiming at short-term results and maximum benefits. (shrink)

In this article, the conceptual instrument that pragma-dialectical argumentation theory offers is elaborated for the analysis and evaluation of problem-solving discussions. The elaboration is aimed expressly at taking into account the discussion character of the discourse, in order to show how the developing process evolves and what the obstacles are therein. In addition, it focuses expressly on the verbal behaviour of the participants and on showing how this behaviour controls the evolving process. The analysis and evaluation is based on insights (...) and methods of conversational analysis and discourse analysis. One fragment of a problem-solving discussion is analysed and evaluated. (shrink)

With a global commitment to scaling up AIDS care and treatment in resource-poor settings for some of the most HIV-affected countries in Africa, availability of antiretroviral treatment is no longer the principal obstacle to expanding access to treatment. A shortage of trained healthcare personnel to initiate treatment and manage patients represents a more challenging barrier to offering life-saving treatment to all patients in need. Physician-centered treatment policies accentuate this challenge. Despite evidence that task shifting for nurse-centered AIDS patient care is (...) effective and can alleviate severe physician shortages that currently obstruct treatment scale-up, political commitment and policy action to support task shifting models of care has been slow to absent. In this paper we review the evidence in support of task shifting for AIDS treatment in Africa and argue that continued policy inaction amounts to unwarranted healthcare rationing and as such is ethically untenable. (shrink)

Animal welfare scientific literature has accumulated rapidly in recent years, but bias may exist which influences understanding of progress in the field. We conducted a survey of articles related to animal welfare or well being from an electronic database. From 8,541 articles on this topic, we randomly selected 115 articles for detailed review in four funding categories: government; charity and/or scientific association; industry; and educational organization. Ninety articles were evaluated after unsuitable articles were rejected. The welfare states of animals in (...) new treatments, conventional treatments or control groups with no treatment were classified as high, medium or low according to one or more. More articles were published in which the welfare of animals in new treatments was better than that of animals in the conventional or no treatment groups, demonstrating a positive result bias. Failure to publish studies with negative or inconclusive results may lead to other scientists unnecessarily repeating the research. The authors’ assessments of the welfare state of the groups were similarly rated high, medium or low, and it was found that new treatments were rated lower if the research was funded by industry, and higher when funded by charities, with government funding agencies intermediate. These differences were not evident in the Five Freedoms assessment, demonstrating an authors’ assessment bias that appeared to support the funding agencies’ interests. North American funded publications rated the welfare of animals in New treatments higher and those in a Conventional or No Treatment lower, compared with European-funded publications. It is concluded that preliminary evidence was provided of several forms of publication bias in animal welfare science. (shrink)

While digitization claims to provide efficiency, accessibility, expansion, speediness, and profit accumulation, it is actually colonizing every human activity. It has even become a purpose in itself. In this essay we focus on the digitization of legal practices and contents. We describe what digitization encompasses, how digitalization processes work, and to what extent they are able to replace juristic processes and produce legal outcomes. We are inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay on the influence of mechanical reproduction of the works of (...) Art. Parallel to Benjamin’s work on Art, we will analyze Law and the consequences of innovations such as mechanical mass (re)production and computerized digitization. (shrink)

In this article, the conceptual instrument that pragma-dialectical argumentation theory offers is elaborated for the analysis and evaluation of problem-solving discussions. The elaboration is aimed expressly at taking into account the discussion character of the discourse, in order to show how the developing process evolves and what the obstacles are therein. In addition, it focuses expressly on the verbal behaviour of the participants and on showing how this behaviour controls the evolving process. The analysis and evaluation is based on insights (...) and methods of conversational analysis and discourse analysis. One fragment of a problem-solving discussion is analysed and evaluated. (shrink)

Soul belief is a universal of human culture and belief in multiple souls is common, especially in pre-modern traditions. This essay illustrates how a three-folded structure appears in the soul concepts of Mongolian shamanistic traditions. The reported accounts of the three souls among various Mongolian ethnic groups are somewhat divergent — especially in their consciousness-related attributes — which may reflect the cultural bias of data collectors, inconsistencies between data providers, and the evolution of these concepts due to historical events, socio-economic (...) changes, and external cultural influences. Despite these confounding effects, the soul concept of Mongolian shamanism is similar in its pluralism to the beliefs of many other cultures. Mongolian Indigenous concepts and their descriptions reveal key elements of consciousness. Although these soul concepts evoke spiritual interpretations, they nevertheless reflect aspects of an innately-disposed mindset which extends conceptualizations of consciousness beyond mind-body dualism. (shrink)

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social context is less understood.We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test how learning variation is affected by a variable's social indexicality. Hungarian (...) native speakers played a co-operative game involving verb nonwords. These were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Participant behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, and this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in subsequent testing. Learning was similar for variables with or without social meaning.Results show that participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants seem to have equal capacity to pick up variables with and without social meaning. This suggests that the social meaning of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and becomes relevant downstream in learning. (shrink)

Se marier avec une dot, voilà une coutume qui, du moins en France, paraît révolue depuis longtemps, tant l'idée que l'on puisse associer mariage et argent heurte aujourd'hui nos sensibilités, attachées à la norme de la gratuité des sentiments amoureux. L'ampleur des changements dans les pratiques matrimoniales du monde moderne occidental ne doit pourtant pas occulter le fait qu'ils sont relativement récents. La dot a encore une importance sociale et économique considérable dans certains...

El cerebro es el órgano responsable de dos grandes habilidades, pensar y actuar, las cuales requieren de la capacidad de aprender y de recordar la información adquirida. El gran avance de las Neurociencias en los últimos años ha permitido conocer algunos de los mecanismos que subyacen a estos procesos, pero quedan aún muchos aspectos por descubrir. Se conoce la estructura neuronal y muchos de los mecanismos de comunicación entre neuronas y se han identificado algunas estructuras relacionadas con la elaboración y (...) almacenamiento de los diferentes tipos de memoria. Esto ha animado al desarrollo de fármacos que puedan incidir positivamente sobre estos procesos. La ciencia ficción por un lado, y la presión mediática por el otro, han hecho que perduren algunas leyendas acerca de las extraordinarias capacidades del sistema nervioso: desde aceptar que el cerebro es como un ordenador a pensar que es de una estructura plástica con capacidades prácticamente ilimitadas. (shrink)

Issues related to controlled human infection studies using Schistosoma mansoni (CHI-S) were explored to ensure the ethical and voluntary participation of potential CHI-S volunteers in an endemic setting in Uganda. We invited volunteers from a fishing community and a tertiary education community to guide the development of informed consent procedures. Consultative group discussions were held to modify educational materials on schistosomiasis, vaccines and the CHI-S model and similar discussions were held with a test group. With both groups, a mock consent (...) process was conducted. Fourteen in-depth key informant interviews and three group discussions were held to explore perceptions towards participating in a CHI-S. Most of the participants had not heard of the CHI-S. Willingness to take part depended on understanding the study procedures and the consenting process. Close social networks were key in deciding to take part. The worry of adverse effects was cited as a possible hindrance to taking part. Volunteer time compensation was unclear for a CHI-S. Potential volunteers in these communities are willing to take part in a CHI-S. Community engagement is needed to build trust and time must be taken to share study procedures and ensure understanding of key messages. (shrink)