Based on a conference held at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, 24-25 March, 1988.

This book details the results of the authors' research using laboratory animals to investigate individual choice theory in economics-consumer-demand and labour supply behaviour and choice under uncertainty. The use of laboratory animals provides the opportunity to conduct controlled experiments involving precise and demanding tests of economic theory with rewards and punishments of real consequence. Economic models are compared to psychological and biological choice models along with the results of experiments testing between these competing explanations. Results of animal experiments are used (...) to address questions of social policy importance. (shrink)

To localize wheat ESTs on chromosomes, 882 homoeologous group 6-specific ESTs were identified by physically mapping 7965 singletons from 37 cDNA libraries on 146 chromosome, arm, and sub-arm aneuploid and deletion stocks. The 882 ESTs were physically mapped to 25 regions flanked by 23 deletion breakpoints. Of the 5154 restriction fragments detected by 882 ESTs, 2043 were localized to group 6 chromosomes and 806 were mapped on other chromosome groups. The number of loci mapped was greatest on chromosome 6B and (...) least on 6D. The 264 ESTs that detected orthologous loci on all three homoeologs using one restriction enzyme were used to construct a consensus physical map. The physical distribution of ESTs was uneven on chromosomes with a tendency toward higher densities in the distal halves of chromosome arms. About 43% of the wheat group 6 ESTs identified rice homologs upon comparisons of genome sequences. Fifty-eight percent of these ESTs were present on rice chromosome 2 and the remaining were on other rice chromosomes. Even within the group 6 bins, rice chromosomal blocks identified by 1-6 wheat ESTs were homologous to up to 11 rice chromosomes. These rice-block contigs were used to resolve the order of wheat ESTs within each bin. (shrink)

This is the correspondence (1959–1969), on the nature of the evolutionary process, between the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and the historian John C. Greene.

This report describes the rationale, approaches, organization, and resource development leading to a large-scale deletion bin map of the hexaploid wheat genome. Accompanying reports in this issue detail results from chromosome bin-mapping of expressed sequence tags representing genes onto the seven homoeologous chromosome groups and a global analysis of the entire mapped wheat EST data set. Among the resources developed were the first extensive public wheat EST collection. Described are protocols for sequencing, sequence processing, EST nomenclature, and the assembly of (...) ESTs into contigs. These contigs plus singletons were used for selection of distinct sequence motif unigenes. Selected ESTs were rearrayed, validated by 5′ and 3′ sequencing, and amplified for probing a series of wheat aneuploid and deletion stocks. Images and data for all Southern hybridizations were deposited in databases and were used by the coordinators for each of the seven homoeologous chromosome groups to validate the mapping results. Results from this project have established the foundation for future developments in wheat genomics. (shrink)

Since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), historians and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the implications of disciplinarity. In this chapter we consider restrictions posed to interdisciplinary exchange between ecology and economics that result from a particular kind of commitment to the ideal of disciplinary purity, that is, that each discipline is defined by an appropriate, unique set of objects, methods, theories, and aims. We argue that, when it comes to the objects of study in (...) ecology and economics, ideas of disciplinary purity have been underwritten by the artificial-natural distinction. We then problematize this distinction, and thus disciplinary purity, both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, the distinction is no longer tenable. Empirically, recent interdisciplinary research has shown the epistemological and policy-oriented benefits of dealing with models which explicitly link anthropogenic (i.e., “artificial”) and non-anthropogenic factors (i.e., “natural”). We conclude that, in the current age of the Anthropocene, it is to be expected that without interdisciplinary exchange, ecology and economics may relinquish global relevance because the distinct and separate systems to which each “pure” science was originally made to apply will only diminish over time. (shrink)

Throughout, there are many case histories to illustrate the text.

Preface.--Science, ideology, and world view.--Objectives and methods in intellectual history.--The Kuhnian paradigm and the Darwinian revolution in natural history.--Biology and social theory in the nineteenth century.--Darwin as a social evolutionist.--Darwinism as a world view.--From Huxley to Huxley.--Postscript.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Companies do have ethical responsibility and are not protected by limited liability from the consequences of their actions. A company's record and the preception of its ethics affect its reputation and ensure long term success or failure.The financial community has a history of placing moral considerations above legal or opportunistic expedients. But we are often exposed to moral dangers and the dangers of contamination are increasing. Deregulation and the technological revolution are sharpening ethical conflicts.

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One of the nation's foremost scholars in the history of ideas explores the impact of Darwin's evolutionary biology on the religious and intellectual thought of ...

In this paper we describe the objectives of teaching medical ethics to undergraduates and the teaching methods used. We describe a workshop used in the University of Liverpool Department of Psychiatry, designed to enhance ethical sensitivity in psychiatry. The workshop reviews significant historical and current errors in the ethical practice of psychiatry and doctors' defence mechanisms against accepting responsibility for deficiencies in ethical practice. The workshop explores the student doctors' own group ethos in response to ethical dilemmas, and demonstrates how (...) the individual contributes to and is responsible for the group ethos through participation and also through nonparticipation. The student feedback about the workshop is reviewed. The Toronto Ethical Sensitivity Instrument was used to assess whether or not the workshop altered sensitivity. Compared to a control group the attenders' sensitivity was significantly increased (on Student's t-test p equals or is less than 0.002). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Free as a Bird: Varro De Re Rustica 3C. M. C. GreenMarcus terentius varro is a most difficult writer to assess. The very high regard in which he was held by the greatest writers of his—or any—time is supported by a fragmentary structure made up of a mass of tantalizing titles, excerpts, and allusions gathered from later authors, the reflection of his Res Divinae in Augustine, the extant books (...) of his De Lingua Latina, and De Re Rustica. The last of these, De Re Rustica, is the only complete work of Varro’s we possess, and therefore on it must be tested all our theories and suppositions about Varro as a writer. Unhappily, the artistic weaknesses of this work seem only too apparent. 1 The subject—managing a villa economy—is not one to readily attract most readers in and of itself, and Varro’s undeniable learnedness is exhibited to us in a narrative full of “hasty remarks, conversational language, rhetorical nostalgia, and, crowning all, the anacoluthons,” all of which muddle his discussion, and produce a prose “style” that defies categorization, if not description. 2It is truly unsettling, then, that the opening of each of the books of [End Page 427] De Re Rustica presents to us a Varro whose urbane wit and literary skill are much more in accord with our expectations from the immensely learned friend of all the great writers of the late Republic, and particularly from the author of Menippean Satires. Such is the disparity between the charm of the dialogues’ setting and the dry exposition of the factual material, and so indifferently are they linked, that one could suppress the first, as Boissier suggests, 3 without noticeably affecting the second. The result, a learned and somewhat tedious discussion of agriculture, would be understandable: practicality and Cato’s crabbed example would naturally excuse Varro from the higher artistic requirements. Yet the dramatic dialogue suggests that the author intended more than a dry exposition of material—though it is a suggestion which is left unfulfilled and, at first sight, seems to do little more than demonstrate its irrelevance.My aim in this essay is to suggest that we have been taking Varro at once too seriously, and, paradoxically, not seriously enough. That is, we have been reading De Re Rustica so intently as a (lady-)farmer’s vade mecum—Varro began the project, he says, at the request of his young wife who wanted to know how to manage her new estate (1.1.1–4)—that we have not given its author’s wit and literary subtlety the attention they deserve. The ruthless either/or of academic categorization has misled readers; either Varro is joking, they tend to assume, or he is serious. That he might be both at the same time is an idea that needs more help than we have so far been given. It is my contention that his wit is more carefully wrought, and is reaching toward far more serious matters than the details of how to farm.If we begin, first, by allowing the possibility that Varro had a purpose beyond packaging some important agricultural information in a decent volume; and if we then proceed by taking the paradoxes of De Re Rustica as being intentional, and therefore having meaning, we may at least open the door to new observations. The genre is defined (or so it seems) immediately by the opening of book 1, the dedication to Fundania; it is a handbook, since that is what Varro’s bride asked for. Yet the dialogue form signals some kind of philosophical genre, taken more or less seriously. We look, therefore, to Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which Ischomachus and Socrates discuss farming and, in particular, Ischomachus’ [End Page 428] fifteen-year-old wife’s management of her part of the oikos. 4 Then there is the dramatic framing of the three books, each with a very distinctive and rather unphilosophical setting, and dates that are mutually discordant. 5 This, combined with the enchanting name-play lavished on most of the characters in the dialogue, 6 suggests a comedic influence. The whole mixed bag taken together—handbook, philosophical... (shrink)

The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

Within a given culture – whether industrialized or more tradition oriented – essentially the same fundamental medical theories, practices, and pharmacopoeia tend to be applied to human and non-human sickness and patients. In modern industrialized societies, however, healthcare services are sharply divided between human and veterinary medicine. There is likewise a sharp division between practitioners in these two health sectors: medical doctors and veterinarians. Yet in non-Western, traditional or indigenous medical systems, the same practitioners often treat both humans and animals. (...) There is a growing body of literature that attests to the efficacy of traditional health practices and herbal medicines for the prevention and treatment of both human and livestock ailments.The authors argue for an intersectoral approach to human and veterinary health services in poor countries, especially those targeted to rural people with LIMITED access to modern health services. Extension of conventional medical and veterinary services is particularly difficult and costly in Third World countries where the necessary infrastructure (roads, clinics, labs, cold chains, etc.) is poorly developed and where much of the populace and their livestock reside in remote, rural areas, or where people may be nomadic or transhumant. Consideration should therefore be given to the joint delivery of human and livestock healthcare and related services, as well as to linking informal, ethnoveterinary practices and practitioners with more formalized systems of veterinary AND medical practice. Several advantages of such an approach are identified and explored. (shrink)

It has long been thought that Romans did not hunt before the time of Scipio Aemilianus because hunting was not an activity for respectable citizens. This article shows that this tradition arose from a nineteenth-century bias for hunting on horseback. The tradition was supported principally by Polybius' account of Scipio's hunting and a quotation from Sallust. Although we now recognize that Greeks and Romans in general hunted on foot, this bias has predisposed the discussion against the discovery of evidence for (...) the actual practice of hunting among the early Romans. The archaeological evidence from new excavations in Latium and previously uncited historical and legal evidence for hunting in the Republican period demonstrate that, precisely as we would expect, Romans from the earliest days hunted. Hunting as an aristocratic sport, as a communal activity associated with the military preparation of soldier-citizens, and as a practical means of survival for the poorer countrymen, were all present in Roman society. Further, Polybius' account of Scipio's hunting, contrary to what has been argued, indicates that the cause of disapproval was not the fact that Scipio hunted, but rather that he hunted instead of pleading cases in the forum. Supporting evidence from Cato the Elder, Ennius, and Plautus shows that hunting was a common and accepted activity among Romans of the mid-Republic. Finally, Sallust's criticism of hunting cannot be assumed to represent Roman views, since he condemns farming and hunting together, and we know Romans highly respected farming. No evidence supporting a negative view of hunting in Roman society is found, and the positive evidence in sum demonstrates conclusively that in all periods Romans did indeed hunt. (shrink)