In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.4 (2003) 621-624 [Access article in PDF] HARRY B. EVANS. Aqueduct Hunting in the Seventeenth Century: Raffaello Fabretti's De aquis et aquaeductibus veteris Romae. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. xvi + 309 pp. 38 black-and-white figures. Cloth, $55. Stretching across the Roman Campagna, the tall arches of ancient aqueducts, even in their present ruined condition, are vivid reminders of the powerful state (...) and skilled engineers that built them. Scholarly interest in the geography and topography of the Campagna, with its natural and manmade wonders, had its genesis in such ancient commentators as Pliny the Elder and Strabo, but perhaps no scholars were more energetic than the early modern. Antiquarians and archaeologists perused the ruins of Rome and its countryside, among them the talented epigrapher and hunter of aqueducts, Raffaello Fabretti. A prominent figure in the learned world of seventeenth-century Rome, Fabretti published a study of the city's ancient aqueducts in 1680. It was the earliest modern topographical work to take the water system as its subject and among the most influential studies of its kind. Until now, Fabretti's treatise, titled De aquis et aquaeductibus veteris Romae, was available only in the original Latin (reprinted in The Printed Sources of Western Art series); its language quirky, ornate, and difficult, the treatise was not readily accessible to most readers.In the volume under review, Harry Evans, a veteran scholar of the Roman countryside and its water system, provides a complete English translation of and commentary on Fabretti's Deaquis. In the original text, Fabretti takes his readers on an exhaustive tour of the Roman Campagna that includes not only the aqueducts—whose water sources, conduit routes, and distribution systems he details—but also the ancient road system and city gates; he even assesses the size of the ancient city itself. His discussion encompasses literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence and is invaluable for its description of physical remains long since lost. Focusing primarily on the topographical issues addressed by Fabretti, Evans assesses his methods, contributions, and errors; at the same time, Evans offers a glimpse into the lively, often deeply contentious world of early modern scholarship.Fabretti's treatise was initially written as three separate "dissertations," published together in 1680. The first addresses the route and purpose of the Aqua Alexandrina, a third-century imperial conduit; the second explores the sources of the Aqua Marcia and Aqua Claudia in the upper Anio valley east of Tivoli; the third investigates a discrepancy between the number of aqueducts cited by Procopius (14) and the number of water sources listed in the fourth-century regionary catalogues (20). In two introductory chapters, Evans reviews Fabretti's biography and provides historical context for the treatise. Each of the following three chapters addresses one of the dissertations, with Evans' commentary following a full translation of the text. In a brief conclusion, Evan reflects upon Fabretti's contribution to later archaeological and topographical scholarship down to the twentieth century. Evans provides a readable translation of Fabretti's Latin text (while remaining faithful to the original), a text that will amuse [End Page 621] readers with its frequent barbs aimed at rivals in the field. Amply illustrated, including reproductions of the topographical maps that accompany each dissertation, this volume is a significant resource not only for philologists but also for historians of Rome more generally.Like many polymaths of his day, Fabretti had a career in the Church but made his name as a scholar of the ancients. His knowledge of Rome and the Campagna was not simply literary, though his command of the written sources was unquestionable, for as superintendent of the catacombs and custodian of antiquities, Fabretti had ample opportunity to excavate and examine Roman remains firsthand. He formed his own collection of inscriptions and published a number of ambitious archaeological tomes, including one on the column of Trajan. Intimate with the most learned persons of his day, Bernard Montfaucon and Giovanni Ciampini among them, Fabretti moved in the scholarly... (shrink)

Legal decision-support systems have the potential to improve access to justice, administrative efficiency, and judicial consistency, but broad adoption of such systems is contingent on development of technologies with low knowledge-engineering, validation, and maintenance costs. This paper describes two approaches to an important form of legal decision support—explainable outcome prediction—that obviate both annotation of an entire decision corpus and manual processing of new cases. The first approach, which uses an attention network for prediction and attention weights to highlight salient case (...) text, was shown to be capable of predicting decisions, but attention-weight-based text highlighting did not demonstrably improve human decision speed or accuracy in an evaluation with 61 human subjects. The second approach, termed semi-supervised case annotation for legal explanations, exploits structural and semantic regularities in case corpora to identify textual patterns that have both predictable relationships to case decisions and explanatory value. (shrink)

This paper provides a series of reflections on making the case to senior leaders for the introduction of clinical ethics support services within a UK hospital Trust at a time when clinical ethics committees are dwindling in the UK. The paper provides key considerations for those building a case for clinical ethics support within hospitals by drawing upon published academic literature, and key reports from governmental and professional bodies. We also include extracts from documents relating to, and annual reports of, (...) existing clinical ethics support within UK hospitals, as well as extracts from our own proposal submitted to the Trust Board. We aim for this paper to support other ethicists and/or health care staff contemplating introducing clinical ethics support into hospitals, to facilitate the process of making the case for clinical ethics support, and to contribute to the key debates in the literature around clinical ethics support. We conclude that there is a real need for investment in clinical ethics in the UK in order to build the evidence base required to support the wider introduction of clinical ethics support into UK hospitals. Furthermore, our perceptions of the purpose of, and perceived needs met through, clinical ethics support needs to shift to one of hospitals investing in their staff. Finally, we raise concerns over the optional nature of clinical ethics support available to practitioners within UK hospitals. (shrink)

There is a popular hypothesis that performance on implicit and explicit memory tasks reflects 2 distinct memory systems. Explicit memory is said to store those experiences that can be consciously recollected, and implicit memory is said to store experiences and affect subsequent behavior but to be unavailable to conscious awareness. Although this division based on awareness is a useful taxonomy for memory tasks, the authors review the evidence that the unconscious character of implicit memory does not necessitate that it be (...) treated as a separate system of human memory. They also argue that some implicit and explicit memory tasks share the same memory representations and that the important distinction is whether the task (implicit or explicit) requires the formation of a new association. The authors review and critique dissociations from the behavioral, amnesia, and neuroimaging literatures that have been advanced in support of separate explicit and implicit memory systems by highlighting contradictory evidence and by illustrating how the data can be accounted for using a simple computational memory model that assumes the same memory representation for those disparate tasks. (shrink)

Up till now, China has not enacted any legal mechanisms governing certification or supervision for ethics committees. This article analyses deficiencies in the protection of subjects in clinical drug trials under China’s current laws and regulations; it emphasizes that investigators, as practitioners who have direct contact with subjects, play significant roles in protecting and safeguarding subjects’ rights and interests. The paper compares the status quo in China in this area to that of other countries and discusses ways China might enhance (...) the protection of rights and interests of trial subjects, such as enhancing the ethical awareness of investigators through training, improving laws and regulations, and strengthening the communication between investigators and ethics committees. (shrink)

The Suffering of the Impassible God provides a major reconsideration of the notion of divine impassibility in patristic thought. The question whether, in what sense, and under what circumstances suffering may be ascribed to God runs as a golden thread through such major controversies as Docetism, Patripassianism, Arianism, and Nestorianism. It is commonly claimed that in these debates patristic theology fell prey to the assumption of Hellenistic philosophy about the impassibility of God and departed from the allegedly biblical view, according (...) to which God is passible. As a result, patristic theology is presented as claiming that only the human nature of Christ suffered, while the divine nature remained unaffected. Paul L. Gavrilyuk argues that this standard view misrepresents the tradition. In contrast, he construes the development of patristic thought as a series of dialectical turning points taken to safeguard the paradox of God's voluntary suffering in the flesh. For the Fathers the attribute of divine impassibility functioned in a restricted sense as an apophatic qualifier of all divine emotions and as an indicator of God's full and undiminished divinity. The Fathers at the same time admitted qualified divine passibility of the Son of God within the framework of the Incarnation. Gavrilyuk shows that the Docetic, Arian, and Nestorian alternatives represent different attempts at dissolving the paradox of the Incarnation. These three alternatives are alike in that they start with the presupposition of God's unrestricted impassibility: the Docetic view proposes to give up the reality of Christ's human experiences; the Arian position sacrifices Christ's undiminished divinity; while the Nestorian alternative isolates the experiences and sufferings of Christ's humanity from his Godhead. In contrast to these alternatives, the mind of the Church succeeded in keeping God's transcendence and undiminished divinity in tension with God's intimate involvement in human suffering. It is precisely because God's divinity and transcendence are never lost in suffering that the Incarnation becomes a genuine act of divine compassion, capable of transforming and healing the human condition. (shrink)

On the life and works of ancient Jaina philosophers.

Il importe de situer les enjeux humains de ce mouvement que d'aucuns qualifient de « nouvel ordre mondial » : quel souci de l'être humain en tant que tel manifeste-t-il ? L'homme est un être d'appartenances individuelles et collectives, il s'éprouve dans sa liberté et dans sa participation à l'histoire qui se fait. La société qui s'annonce sera-t-elle pour lui, offerte à son engagement, ou contre lui, le contraignant à se soumettre ou à se démettre ? Des penseurs contemporains montrent (...) que l'homme se construit en habitant l'écart entre particulier et universel , individualité et solidarité , « territoire » et « planète » . Comment cette « dialectique » pourra-t-elle s'exercer demain dans un univers aux contours flous et aux logiques opaques? On ne peut fonder un « contrat » éthique et politique avec d'autres si le temps social, économique ou culturel dissout les particularités et rend l'avenir improbable. Il se pourrait que la mondialisation oblige les « instances de sens » à faire mémoire, à raconter comment on devient hommes ensemble dans la complexité d'une histoire à faire. L'urgence est à la transmission. It is important to situate the human stakes of this movement that some people qualify as « new world order » : what concern of the human being as such does it manifest ? Man is a being of individual and collective belonging. He tests himself in his freedom and in his participation in history in the making. Will future society be for him, inviting him to participate, or against him, forcing him to submit or to give up ? Contemporaneous thinkers show that man constructs himself in living the gap between the particular and universal , individuality and solidarity , « territory » and « planet » . How can this « dialectic » be practiced tomorrow in a universe with vague outlines and opaque logics ? One cannot establish an ethical and political « contract » with others if the social, economic, or cultural time dissolves particularities and makes the future improbable. Il is possible that globalization obliges the « moments of sense » to remember, to tell about how we become human together in the complexity of a history to be made. The urgency is the transmission. (shrink)

The minimally conscious state presents unique ethical, legal, and decision-making challenges because of the combination of diminished awareness, phenomenal experience, and diminished or absent comm...

We critically revisit the definition of thermal equilibrium, in its operational formulation, provided by standard thermodynamics. We show that it refers to experimental conditions which break the covariance of the theory at a fundamental level and that, therefore, it cannot be applied to the case of moving bodies. We propose an extension of this definition which is manifestly covariant and can be applied to the study of isolated systems in special relativity. The zeroth law of thermodynamics is, then, proven to (...) establish an equivalence relation among bodies which have not only the same temperature, but also the same center of mass four-velocity. (shrink)