Cancer susceptibility testing is likely to become routine in medical practice, despite many limitations and unanswered questions. These uncertainties greatly complicate the process of informed consent, creating an excellent opportunity to reconsider exactly how it should be conducted. Research with women's reactions to the availability of genetic susceptibility testing for breast cancer dramatically underscores that informed consent ought to be highly individualized, taking care to discern what patients believe about the disease and its causes and what role they want their (...) physician to play. (shrink)

Confidentiality is a cornerstone of the physician-patient relationship. Breaches of confidentiality in the context of genetic testing are of particular concern for a number of reasons. First, genetic testing reveals information not only about a particular patient, but also about his or her family members. Second,genetic testing can label healthy people as “at risk,” subjecting them to possible stigmatization or discrimination by third parties. Third, as genetic testing becomes more widespread and is incorporated into primary care, breaches of confidentiality might (...) inadvertently occur more frequently because primary care providers may not be trained to understand the uniqueness of genetic information. Until now, genetic services have been provided primarily by medical geneticists and genetic counselors. However, with the proliferation of new genetic presymptomatic and carrier tests, primary care physicians are going to become increasingly involved in genetic testing. Currently, little is known about physicians’ attitudes toward disclosure of confidential genetic information to third parties. (shrink)

Este trabajo explora el tema de la vivencia conciente del aprendizaje. Específicamente, el momento en que una persona se da cuenta que algo nuevo se está articulando a su experiencia anterior. Desde la psicología del aprendizaje, este fenómeno estás comprendido en el concepto de metacognición. El trabajo aborda la comprensión de este concepto, y elabora los factores favorecedores del aprendizaje. Finalmente aborda los grupos de acción comunitaria como proyectos socioeducativos, abordando la construcción de utopías cotidianas, la resignificación de la historia (...) personal y la construcción de sentidos en el grupo. (shrink)

Machery (2009) has proposed that the notion of ‘concept’ ought to be eliminated from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology. I raise three questions about his argument: (1) Is there a meaningful distinction between concepts and background knowledge? (2) Do we need to discard the hybrid view? (3) Are there really categories of things in the world that are the basis for concepts? Although I argue that the answer to all three is ‘no’, I agree with Machery's conclusion that seeking a (...) single characterization of concepts will not be fruitful for understanding cognitive representations and processes. (shrink)

Elementary set theory accustoms the students to mathematical abstraction, includes the standard constructions of relations, functions, and orderings, and leads to a discussion of the various orders of infinity. The material on logic covers not only the standard statement logic and first-order predicate logic but includes an introduction to formal systems, axiomatization, and model theory. The section on algebra is presented with an emphasis on lattices as well as Boolean and Heyting algebras. Background for recent research in natural language semantics (...) includes sections on lambda-abstraction and generalized quantifiers. Chapters on automata theory and formal languages contain a discussion of languages between context-free and context-sensitive and form the background for much current work in syntactic theory and computational linguistics. The many exercises not only reinforce basic skills but offer an entry to linguistic applications of mathematical concepts. For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in theoretical linguistics, computer-science students with interests in computational linguistics, logic programming and artificial intelligence, mathematicians and logicians with interests in linguistics and the semantics of natural language. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of posthumous harm based on an account of the harm of murder. I start with the deep-seated intuition that when someone is murdered he (or she) is harmed (over and above the pain of injury or dying), and argue that Feinberg's account that assumes that harm is an invasion of an interest cannot plausibly accommodate this intuition. I propose a new account of the harm of murder: it is an irreversible loss of functions necessary for (...) worthwhile existence. I suggest a (partial) loss analysis of harm in general, and then go on to apply it to posthumous harm and defend the idea that there can be posthumous losses. (shrink)

Comme s’en explique Melville lui-même, le classicisme domine dans l’écriture de ce film noir « à la française » qu’est Le Cercle rouge. Un casse sans spectacle, des héros sans passé incarnés par des acteurs mythiques, une rencontre improbable qui se clôt dans une vision déceptive du monde : le silence qui s’installe entre les personnages renforce le sentiment d’incommunicabilité, de solitude, de froideur. Autant qu’un film noir, Melville semble finalement explorer les pistes du « film froid ».

Some of the series' finest lectures have been lost for many years, unavailable to the public in any form -- until now.

Es ist ein Charakteristikum der hellenistisch-kaiserzeitlichen Lebensphilosophie, dass sie der ethischen Ausbildung des Menschen fuer die Lebenspraxis zentrale Bedeutung zuweist. Philosophie wird praxisbezogen und genieat den Stellenwert einer Lebenskunst (ars vitae). Dies gilt in besonderem Maae auch fuer Epiktet (ca. 50-135 n.Chr.), der in den Lehrgesprachen (Diatriben) seinen Schuelern Hilfen zur Bewaltigung des taglichen Lebens an die Hand gibt. Die vorliegende Monografie untersucht anhand einer eingehenden Analyse der vielschichtigen Dialogstruktur von Epiktets Lehrgesprachen die von Epiktet angewandten Mittel der Willenserziehung und (...) kommt u.a. zu dem ueberraschenden Ergebnis, dass Epiktet bereits Methoden wahlt, die auch in der modernen Psychologie Verwendung finden. Die Bedeutung dieses Werkes liegt - abgesehen vom unmittelbaren Gewinn fuer das Verstandnis Epiktets - darin, dass wichtige Einsichten im Bereich der Padagogik gewonnen werden, und zwar sowohl in systematischer als auch in historischer Hinsicht. "a ein Standardwerk fuer die formale Gestaltung von Epiktets Diatribena" Gymnasium "ades analyses tres precises et tres fines a] (I)l fault souligner limportance de cet excellent ouvrage pour letude de la grande tradition de la direction de conscience, de la meditation et des techniques de formation de la volonte qui sest maintenue et developpee dun bout a lautre de lhistoire de la philosophie antique. Gnomon. (shrink)

Canadian nursing practice has been profoundly influenced by the legalization of medical assistance in dying in 2016, requiring that nurses navigate new and sometimes highly challenging experiences. Findings from our longitudinal studies of nurses' experiences suggest that these include deep emotional responses to medical assistance in dying, an urgency in orchestrating the perfect death, and a high degree of relational impact, both professionally and personally. Here we propose a theoretical explanation for these experiences based upon a relational ontology. Drawing upon (...) the work of Wildman, we understand a relational ontology to be one in which relationships are more fundamentally central than the conceptual entities that provide the context to practice. It is in a relationship that conceptual entities, and their affiliated values, are created and recreated. Seen as causal, relationships have ontological status, with important implications for how we consider the concepts of death, suffering, and time in this context. From a conceptual perspective, suffering is primarily self‐defined based upon personal histories, time reflects the potential remaining until death, and death is primarily biological and amoral, although social discourses of a good and bad death surround the death trajectory. However, within a relational ontology of medical assistance in dying, these understandings shift. Death becomes primarily social rather than biological, suffering is shared, and time until death is now clearly delimited. Accordingly, nurses assume a profound responsibility for influencing outcomes that are authentically person‐centered. These understandings provide important insights into nurses' experiences, enabling us to recognize the causal effects, both intended and unintended, of nurses' relational practices amidst the complexities of assisted death. Drawing on such a perspective, we find implications for how we provide spaces for nurses to reflect on, and have conversations about, their experiences with some of the greatest mysteries of life—death, suffering, and time. (shrink)

Most literature about vaccine hesitancy has been focused on parental attitudes. Less attention has been devoted to both scientists and experts who raise criticism about immunization policies and intervene in the public debate. This consideration aims to balance the current emphasis in the literature on parents’ attitudes about vaccination, offering a complementary angle to reframe and widen the controversy. Focusing on scientists and experts, an unattended complex picture of multiple attitudes towards vaccines and vaccinations has been discovered through a qualitative (...) content analysis of texts related to the harsh public debate, held between March 2017 and November 2018, triggered by the legislative proposal of making ten vaccinations mandatory for children. Unlike oversemplications that misleading dichotomies reproduce, the analysis reveals nine different positions along the continuum of immunisation attitudes, ranging from radical acceptance of vaccinations to radical rejection, which constitute a fuzzy set. Consequently, a twofold reality emerges: on the surface, the conflict seems between pro-vaxxers versus hesitant, pro-choice and anti-vaxxers; beneath it is amid standardized versus a varieties of contextual and personalised approaches to health. (shrink)

In a provocative book, Andrew Carstairs- McCarthy argues that the apparently universal distinction in human languages between sentences and noun phrases cannot be assumed to be inevitable for languages with the expressive power of human languages, but needs explaining. His work suggests, but does not explicitly state, that there is also no conceptual necessity for the distinction between basic types e and t, a distinction argued for by Frege and carried into formal semantics through the work of Montague. Pragmatic distinctions (...) among various kinds of speech acts, including asserting, questioning, commanding, and pointing things out are assumed in Carstairs- McCarthy ’s work, as are expressions of functional types; what is questioned is whether a syntacticized sentence-NP distinction is essential. (shrink)

Sexual eukaryotic organisms are characterized by an alternation between haploid and diploid phases. In vascular plants and animals, somatic growth and development occur primarily in the diploid phase, with the haploid phase reduced to the gametic cells. In many other eukaryotes, however, growth and development occur in both phases, with substantial variability among organisms in the length of each phase of the life cycle. A number of theoretical models and experimental studies have shed light on factors that may influence life (...) cycle evolution, yet we remain far from a complete understanding of the diversity of life cycles observed in nature. In this paper we review the current state of knowledge in this field, and touch upon the many questions that remain unanswered. BioEssays 20:453–462, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Artificial insemination and other fertilization techniques are today considered central to the history of reproductive medicine. The medical treatment of infertile couples, however, constitutes just a small part of the whole story of artificial fertilization. Lazzaro Spallanzani in particular, said to have been the inventor of artificial insemination, did not develop this method for medical purposes. He belonged to a generation of naturalists to whom artificial insemination was part of a heterogeneous series of investigations that were undertaken to explore the (...) natural history of animal generation. Questions concerning conception, the role of the gametes, the definition of species, the production of hybrids or livestock breeding were all included in these investigations. Thus, no one strain of thought, nor single set of ideas or interests, entirely shaped the development of artificial fertilization. (shrink)

Cancer is one of the most frequent fatal human diseases. It is a genetic disease, and molecular analysis of the genes involved revealed that they belong to several distinct classes of molecules, one of which is the receptor tyrosine kinases. Neoplastic transformation is regarded as the result of a multistep process and, in most cases, it is hard to evaluate what the initial events in tumor formation are. What makes it difficult to approach this question is the paucity of animal (...) models for tumorigenesis allowing investigation of the mechanisms leading to uncontrolled cell proliferation. Melanoma formation in Xiphophorus is one of these model systems. Here, overexpression and activation of a receptor tyrosine kinase causes neoplastic transformation of pigment cells. Xiphophorus provides all the advantages of a well‐characterised genetic system. In addition, some crucial components of the transformation pathway have been identified at the molecular level. As a vertebrate, Xiphophorus might serve as a model system to aid understanding, in more general terms, of the mechanisms of tumorigenesis in human diseases. (shrink)