Few accounts have survived detailing the techniques employed for the production of optical glass for astronomical and microscopical instruments during the seventeenth century in Italy; the period during which the art was being developed in the shops of Eustachio Divini and Giuseppe Campani, and other optical instrument-makers. Indeed, few of the tools of the lens-makers have been described in any detail, and few if any have survived. Consequently, the discovery of a hitherto apparently unknown Italian treatise, or what appears to (...) have been notes for a shop manual of the period, is a contribution to present knowledge of lens-making technology even though the identity and region of the author remain unknown. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Power of PersuasionG. Bennett HumphreyA long white coat, the title of doctor, a practiced professional persona and an appointment to the staff of a prestigious university medical center allows the physician to be a persuader of clinical decisions affecting patient management. When this power of persuasion is used to encourage patient compliance with a therapeutic regimen that might be curative for a fatal disease, there is justification (...) for trying to influence the patient to make choices resulting in a positive outcome. But when a physician is asking permission to enter the patient into a research protocol where the primary goal of the study is the hope of advancing knowledge, then much thought needs to be given to the potential abuse of this power of persuasion.In the 1960s, I found myself having to think about recruiting children into research protocols. I had just finished two years of residency in internal medicine and wanted to pursue a career in academic medicine. My primary interest was in laboratory research. To strengthen my training in research, I had competed for a position as clinical fellow in a western university. The fellowship program was designed to expose young physicians to both clinical and laboratory research. The first year was spent on one of the clinical research wards and the second year in a research laboratory. The program was open to residents from surgery, medicine and pediatrics but because there was a shortage of pediatricians in the program, I was required to work on the children’s leukemia ward for one year.The learning curve was steep during the first few months. Naturally, the faculty in pediatrics and the medical literature gave me a technical education in the use of protocols for therapeutic treatment of leukemia. For example, the first protocol used was designated as Phase III, and the goal was to try to cure the patient. A remission could be achieved in over 90 percent of children but the disease recurred. The median duration of these remissions in the mid–1960s was one year. A relapse was followed by progressive disease and death in a matter of weeks, but a new drug of unknown efficacy could be administered. This was a Phase II protocol, and while there was a chance of prolonging life for a month or so, the primary goal was the identification of drugs anti–leukemic activity.The pediatric leukemia ward experience for me as a fellow was unusual. There was more to learn than the treatment of leukemia. To my surprise, the children and their mothers gave me insight into the care of pediatric patients. Each month, the patients were admitted for five days of intravenous chemotherapy. The first day was traumatic with venipunctures, bone marrow aspirations and the establishment of an IV for the daily infusion of drugs. The remaining four days were for social rounds: listening to the children who liked to talk; talking with the ones who liked to listen; putting puzzles together with some toddlers; responding to a request to listen to the heart of a much loved teddy bear; exchanging jokes and riddles; stories about school, the family dog, or a favorite friend; enjoying the banter of the adolescents; and not invading the privacy of a few who didn’t like me, the ward or the therapy. These children were sharing their childhood with me and it took couple of months for me to recognize I was bonding with these little patients. I observed and listened to the mothers caring for their children and stood in awe of the resources that they brought to bear on having children with a fatal disease. A feeling of mutual respect and trust developed between these mothers and me. For an internist, these experiences were profound and very different from my experience treating adults.A professor, an internationally known researcher in the field of leukemia, was in charge of the ward. Formal rounds were conducted on Tuesday mornings when the result of the bone marrow aspirates and the toxicity of the chemotherapy were reviewed. The day–to–day responsibility for [End Page 101] treatment and informing the mothers on the remission status on Mondays was my responsibility... (shrink)

This compelling work brings together an array of distinguished scholars to explore key concepts, theories, and findings pertaining to some of the most fundamental issues in social life: the conditions under which people are kind and helpful to others or, conversely, under which they commit harmful, even murderous, acts. Covered are such topics as the complex interaction of individual, societal, and situational factors underpinning good or evil behavior; the role of guilt and the self-concept; and issues of responsibility and motivation, (...) including why good people do bad things. The volume also examines whether aggression and violence are inescapable aspects of human nature, and how cooperative interaction can break down stereotyping and discrimination. (shrink)

Biblical Exegesis and Mystical Theology in the Venerable Bede brings together seventeen essays by Arthur Holder exploring the theology and spirituality found in Bede's biblical commentaries and homilies. The volume shows that Bede was both a masterful student of received tradition and a creative thinker concerned to address the needs and concerns of his audience of Christian pastors and teachers in the eighth-century Northumbrian church. Although Bede is best known as the author of The Ecclesiastical History of the English (...) People, the last half-century of scholarship has demonstrated the sophistication and vast influence of his work in the fields of grammar, biblical interpretation, hagiography, poetry, computus, natural science, and theology. The chapters in this volume show how Bede's exegesis was integrally connected with his work in all those genres and with the monumental artistic productions of his monastery such as the illuminated bible manuscript known as the Codex Amiatinus. The five parts of the book deal with Bede as teacher and biblical scholar, his interpretations of the tabernacle and the temple, his commentary on the Song of Songs, his attitudes toward philosophy and heresy, and his mystical theology. This book will be of interest to students of Christian theology, mysticism, the development of biblical interpretation, and the history of early medieval England. (shrink)

Norris, McQueen & Cutler claim that Merge is an autonomous model, superior to the interactive TRACE model and the autonomous Race model. Merge is actually an interactive model, despite claims to the contrary. The presentation of the literature seriously distorts many findings, in order to advocate autonomy. It is Merge's interactivity that allows it to simulate findings in the literature.

In a continuum of past and present, "Pittsburgh Then and Now" portrays the city through 161 pairs of matching photographs. Each archival image, culled from old books, municipal records, and library collections, was rephotographed in 1986-89 from the same camera position, forming an evocation of the past and a record of urban continuity and change. "Pittsburgh Then and Now" recalls specific locations in the city of the past and then compares them to the present, showing both how much and how (...) little Pittsburgh has changed. Most of the pairs of photographs illustrate continuity with the past, features that have remained over the decades. A steep residential street in Perry Hilltop, for example, is little changed, and a jagged hillside staircase on the South Side is still in use. Other images document urban change. Massive Duquesne Gardens, on Craig Street in Oakland, is shown alongside the University Square Apartments of the present. The old Loew's Penn Theatre on Sixth Street in 1935 is copared to its modern manifestation as Heinz hall, 1987. The pre-Renaissance cornor of Stanwyx Street and Penn Avenue is recalled before the Gateway buildings were constructed.This journey into the past shows how change and continuity have mingled in the city landscape, reveling Pittsburgh as it has evolved from architecutral styles that reflected turn-of-the-century eclecticism to the more recent styles labeled "modernist" and "postmodernist, " from horse to streetcar to automobile, and from steel mills to high-technology centers. "Pittsburgh Then and Now" is a treasury of photographic images for those who remember the old Pittsburgh, those who are curious about its past, and anyoneinterested in the evolution of a city. (shrink)

The political prophecy ascribed to John of Bridlington consists of twenty-nine poems, each about twenty to thirty lines long in rhyming hexameters; in four manuscripts it is accompanied by a prose commentary, which explains the cryptic codes and interprets the prophecies.1 The Commentary is “signed” in a cryptogram “Ergom,” that is, John Ergom , an Austin friar of the priory at York. Recent scholarly opinion has generally held that the attribution to John of Bridlington, John Thwenge, is a late fiction, (...) as contemporaries would not attribute a “prophecy” to someone who had manifestly witnessed the events that he claimed to foretell; and that Ergom himself was the author of both the Prophecy and the Commentary. Only Paul Meyvaert has dissented from the second view, arguing that Ergom did not make use of the attribution to “Robert the Scribe,” which was attached to the poem in its earliest version; Meyvaert also notes that Ergom's version of the Prophecy lacked verses found in other manuscripts and that Ergom did not have the command of vocabulary shown by the original author. The most recent investigator, Michael J. Curley, has presented both sides of the argument judiciously; in favor of Ergom's authorship he draws attention to the commentator's interpretative skill, which, he argues, could only have come from an author's knowledge of the meaning of the poem. (shrink)

Baumrind provides a fifty-year updating of her pioneering, extraordinarily influential ethical critique of the Milgram obedience experiments. She essentially reaffirms her earlier objections. These include the extensive use of deception, particularly in the informed consent phase, the destructive obedience exhibited by Milgram’s research personnel, violations of the experimenter’s fiduciary role of trust and empathy, the likelihood of lasting psychological harm experienced by at least some participants, and unwarranted generalizations made to the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. I consider each (...) of these concerns, among others, and find areas of agreement and disagreement with Baumrind. Her argument against the use of deception in the informed consent phase is convincing, as is her cautionary stance on generalizations made to the Nazi genocide. I take issue with her views on lasting harm, the epistemological value of deception, and the experimenter as fiduciary. Regardless of one’s agreement with Baumrind, her ethical arguments, considered in historical context, remain integral to an understanding of the impact of the obedience experiments. Her views have been seminal in changing the ethical monitoring of research with human participants. (shrink)

We show how mereotopological notions can be expressed by extending intuitionistic propositional logic with propositional quantification and a strong modal operator. We first prove completeness for the logics wrt Kripke models; then we trace the correspondence between Kripke models and topological spaces that have been enhanced with an explicit notion of expressible region. We show how some qualitative spatial notions can be expressed in topological terms. We use the semantical and topological results in order to show how in some extensions (...) of the logics it is possible to express connectedness, non-emptiness and a set of jointly exhaustive, pairwise disjoint, binary relations that play a significant role in qualitative spatial reasoning. (shrink)

Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

This compact and innovative book tackles one of the central issues in drug policy: the lack of a coherent conceptual structure for thinking about drugs. Drugs generally fall into one of seven categories: prescription, over the counter, alternative medicine, common-use drugs like alcohol, tobacco and caffeine; religious-use, sports enhancement; and of course illegal street drugs like cocaine and marijuana. Our thinking and policies varies wildly from one to the other, with inconsistencies that derive more from cultural and social values than (...) from medical or scientific facts. Penalties exist for steroid use, while herbal remedies or cold medication are legal. Native Americans may legally use peyote, but others may not. Penalties may vary for using different forms of the same drug, such as crack vs. powder cocaine. Herbal remedies are unregulated by the FDA; but medical marijuana is illegal in most states. Battin and her contributors lay a foundation for a wiser drug policy by promoting consistency and coherency in the discussion of drug issues and by encouraging a unique dialogue across disciplines. The contributors are an interdisciplinary group of scholars mostly based at the University of Utah, and include a pharmacologist, a psychiatrist, a toxicologist, a trial court judge, a law professor, an attorney, a diatary specialist, a physician, a health expert on substance abuse, and Battin herself who is a philosopher. They consider questions like the historical development of current policy and the rationales for it; scientific views on how drugs actually cause harm; how to define the key notions of harm and addiction; and ways in which drug policy can be made more consistent. They conclude with an examination of the implications of a consistent policy for various disciplines and society generally. The book is written accessibly with little need for expert knowledge, and will appeal to a diverse audience of philosophers, bioethicists, clinicians, policy makers, law enforcement, legal scholars and practitioners, social workers, and general readers, as well as to students in areas like pharmacy, medicine, law, nursing, sociology, social work, psychology, and bioethics. (shrink)

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics andin vivonanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

An important short study of Nietzsche by the famed European critic. Included are selections from the Brandes-Nietzsche correspondence.

In this paper I consider whether traditional behaviors of animals, like traditions of humans, are transmitted by imitation learning. Review of the literature on problem solving by captive primates, and detailed consideration of two widely cited instances of purported learning by imitation and of culture in free-living primates (sweet-potato washing by Japanese macaques and termite fishing by chimpanzees), suggests that nonhuman primates do not learn to solve problems by imitation. It may, therefore, be misleading to treat animal traditions and human (...) culture as homologous (rather than analogous) and to refer to animal traditions as cultural. (shrink)

This paper examines an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant as the pressures of a warming planet, changing climate and changing ecosystems ramp up. The broad context for the paper is the intragenerational, intergenerational, and interspecies equity implications of changing the climate and the value orientations of adapting to such change. In addition, the need to stabilize the planetary climate by urgent mitigation of change factors is a foundational ethical assumption. In order to avoid further animal and plant extinctions, or (...) at the very least, their increased vulnerability to becoming rare and endangered; the systematic assisted colonization of “at risk” species is being seriously considered by scientists and managers of biodiversity. The more practical aspects of assisted colonization have been covered in the conservation biology literature; however, the ethical implications of such actions have not been extensively examined. Our discussion of the value issues, using a novel case study approach, will rectify the limited ethical analysis of the issue of assisted colonization of species in the face of climate change pressures. Beyond sustainability ethics, both animal and environmental ethical approaches will be used and intrinsic versus instrumental value orientations in the literature shall form the basis of our discussion. After the application of all the ethical approaches to the case studies, we conclude that without mitigation and the prospect of a future stable climate, assisted colonization will be involved in an inherently unethical process and a “move and lose it” outcome. With mitigation, there is wide-ranging ethical support for assisted colonization. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman has provided one of the most exciting advances in semiotic aesthetics in years in his recent book, Languages of Art. Among other theses that Goodman defends is the claim that pictures are elements of symbol systems to be understood in the way that languages are understood: that depiction and description are species of a common genus which is to be understood in terms of denotation. One of the consequences Goodman draws from his theory is that depiction is conventional: (...) the fact that a certain picture depicts a man is as much a matter of convention as the fact that a certain phrase describes him. This claim is interesting and exciting, but is it correct? Unfortunately, I do not think we are yet in a position to answer this last question, although I shall try to get nearer to an answer in this paper. (shrink)