ZusammenfassungIm 18. Jahrhundert kommt ein historisch neuer Typus des Festes auf: das Bundesfest als Gründungsakt. Im Zuge der Dekorporierung wird das Fest zum Medium bürgerlicher Assoziation, die allmählich auf das Politische ausgreift. Im Kontext der Verzeitlichung im 18. Jahrhundert entbindet sich das Fest seiner vormaligen Funktion zyklischer Zeitreproduktion und bildet eine futurisch-utopische Form aus. Dabei avanciert der Eid, der entinstitutionalisiert wird und als universales Kohäsionsritual Verbreitung findet, zum zentralen Element einer Dramaturgie feierlicher Kommunion, in der das Fest als epochaler ›Übergangsritus‹ (...) den Zeitenumbruch zu imaginieren und zu forcieren sucht. Von der Ebene bürgerlicher Sozialbeziehungen steigt dieser neue Festtypus mit der Französischen Revolution auf die Ebene politischer Repräsentation auf.In the 18th century a new type of feasts evolve: the covenant festival as a founding act. As the corporative society dissolves, the bourgeoisie uses festivals as an instrument of social cohesion. Those associations gradually promote a political claim. Since modern society develops linear and progressive time patterns, the festivals lose the task of cyclically reproducing time. Instead, the new utopian festivals seek to imagine and to push the turn towards a new age. They therefore fulfill the function of modern ›rites of passage‹. Being detached from institutions and becoming a ritual of universal social cohesion, the oath becomes the crucial element of the festivals’ dramaturgy seeking social fusion. From the social sphere, the bourgeois covenant festivals rise to the level of political representation in the French Revolution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 51-56 [Access article in PDF] KarraKarrawirraparri-River Red Gum-Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Vivonne Thwaites [Figures]Karra was a visual arts project devised for the 2000 Adelaide Festival in Australia. Its focus was the River Red Gum, quite justifiably an Australian icon, and once the most widespread tree in south eastern Australia. The project comprised an installation by three artists and a forty-page publication with essays (...) and visual material from many contributors.The intention of the project (which I developed and oversaw as curator) was twofold. First, I hoped that an examination of the River Red Gum from a number of points of view might help people connect with the tree itself, and more broadly with this place non-Aboriginal Australians so uneasily inhabit. Second, given the tree's central place in Australia's inland waterways, I wanted the art to help people consider the urgent problems facing this ecosystem, such as increased salinity, diminished water flow and environmental degradation. This subject had particular relevance for South Australians, as our state is so dependent on the Murray-Darling River system. For example, in February 1999 the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation published a media release on "Salt: Australia's Greatest Battle," declaring that we stand to lose a large fraction of our native biodiversity to salinity, and that native tress "remain the front line answer." [End Page 51]Behind the Festival Centre lies the River Torrens and the Adelaide Plains. Along the river are several gnarled old trees, River Red Gums, some of them predating white settlement and bearing the scars of Aboriginal timber collecting activities. The media was full of stories about the way these trees were still being cut down along the Murray further out, regardless of their proven value in filtering water and reducing salinity. The theme of the 2000 Festival was "The New Out of the Old," and it seemed that a project about the relevance of these beautiful old trees would help educate and inspire. We found the subject for the Festival project right in our own backyard.Once committed to the subject, research could begin. First up was the tree's Aboriginal history. The Kaurna people, original inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains, called it Karra or more fully, Karrawirraparri (literally 'redgum-forest-river'). The tree was central to their lives as source of food and shelter, and supplier of timber for shields and other implements. There are incised shields of Red Gum in the South Australian Museum, and delicate drawings of the tree by Jim Kite. The tree's place in Australia's white history can be traced back to explorer's journals where, variously named, it was described as a welcome sign of the presence of a watercourse. More recently it appears in the natural history writing of Eric Rolls and others (Rolls 2002). Ironically the tree's botanical name, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, originated in 1832, when a botanist admired and named a single specimen grown by monks outside Naples, Italy. The eucalyptus was already spreading in 1832.Early in the research it became clear that the Red Gum tree, and the complex set of natural and cultural interactions it engendered, could be seen as a symbol of human interactions with the land in Australia. The tree was much discussed and much loved by Australians, but also much abused. It seemed that bringing together different systems of understanding and representation of the tree could help contemporary urban Australians begin to understand their own connections to it, and to the land as well. This was the broader cultural agenda of the project.Preparing the art exhibition required a wide reading of literature. Les Murray's poem, "The Gum Forest," one of the greatest 20th - century Australian poems, was inspirational: After the last gapped wire on a post, homecoming for me, to enter the gum forest. (1998, 33) [End Page 52] [Begin Page 54]So too was Murray Bail's book Eucalyptus: By sheer numbers there's always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the... (shrink)

From Traditional Sports and Games (TSG) we have not only learned different ways of living time as well as inhabit space and a particular mode of practicing sports and games from distinct cultures, but also promoting universal dialog among people. TSG presents sustainable and ecological references for living needed even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nowadays, environmentally friendly policies and production methods must be taken more seriously. TSG may reveal a path to sustainable development, considering our corporeality and (...) cultural diversity. TSG are expressions of human groups that historically reproduce their way of life-based on modes of social cooperation and specific forms of relationship with nature, traditionally characterized by sustained environmental management. The purpose of this article is to discuss how TSG promotes intercultural dialog with a focus on sustainability, and how it empowers people and creates equality among its players. We understand that TSG can break socio-cultural barriers. For this study, we considered data from a Brazilian experience of TSG’s Festival held at a public school in the city of São Paulo (Brazil), organized in collaboration with our study group. Data consists of observations recorded in pictures and films during the processes of organization, preparation, implementation, and evaluation of a TSG Festival, held in a public school in São Paulo, Brazil from the years of 2017 and 2018, with the participation of 800 students from the first to the ninth grade of elementary school, aged between 7 and 17 years. The first step in our analysis is taken from a dynamic called “Talking Circles,” where researchers registered dialog about experiences and used specific literature about TSG, from a philosophical perspective. The team and students from our study group that organized these events were invited to participate in four different Talking Circles. Approximately 20 people participated in each one of these meetings. Recurrences that emerged from these Talking Circles are presented in the results and explored afterward. What does this experience–from bodies in movement, artistic or sporting, or both–teach about intercultural dialog and empowerment? Such gestures indicate a cultural heritage and corporeal wisdom that allows humans to face new encounters and understanding in peace, recognizing humanity common to all of us, regardless of our origins. Ethical and aesthetical results of such dialog reveal possibilities to be explored in our relationship with different cultures and the environment, providing points of sustainable development through TSG. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

Ethical concerns about randomising persons to a no-treatment arm in the context of Ebola epidemic led to consideration of alternative designs. The stepped wedge design, in which participants or clusters are randomised to receive an intervention at different time points, gained popularity. Common arguments in favour of using this design are when an intervention is likely to do more good than harm, all participants should receive the experimental intervention at some time point during the study and the design might be (...) preferable for practical reasons. We examine these assumptions when considering Ebola vaccine research. First, based on the claim that a stepped wedge design is indicated when it is likely that the intervention will do more good than harm, we reviewed published and ongoing SW trials to explore previous use of this design to test experimental drugs or vaccines, and found that SW design has never been used for trials of experimental drugs or vaccines. Given that Ebola vaccines were all experimental with no prior efficacy data, the use of a stepped wedge design would have been unprecedented. Second, we show that it is rarely true that all participants receive the intervention in SW studies, but rather, depending on certain design features, all clusters receive the intervention. Third, we explore whether the SW design is appealing for feasibility reasons and point out that there is significant complexity. In the setting of the Ebola epidemic, spatiotemporal variation may have posed problematic challenges to a stepped wedge design for vaccine research. Finally, we propose a set of points to consider for scientific reviewers and ethics committees regarding proposals for SW designs. (shrink)

Facial information is a powerful channel for human-to-human communication. Characteristically, faces can be defined as biological objects that are four-dimensional (4D) patterns, whereby they have concurrently a spatial structure as well as temporal dynamics. The spatial characteristics of facial objects possess three dimensions (3D), namely breadth, height and importantly, depth. The temporal properties of facial objects are defined by how a 3D facial structure evolves dynamically over time; where time is referred to as the fourth dimension (4D). Our entire perspective (...) of another’s face, whether it be social, affective or cognitive perceptions, is therefore built on a combination of 3D and 4D visual cues. Counterintuitively, over the past few decades of experimental research in psychology, facial stimuli have largely been presented to participants as a spatial pattern that has been flattened into two dimensions (2D), while remaining largely static. The following review aims to advance and update facial researchers, on the recent revolution in computer-generated, realistic 4D facial models produced from real-life human subjects. We delve in-depth to summarize recent studies which have utilized facial stimuli that possess 3D structural cues (geometry and depth) and 4D temporal cues (3D structure + dynamic viewpoint and movement). In sum, we have found that higher-order perceptions such as identity, gender, ethnicity, emotion and personality, are critically influenced by the 4D characteristics embedded within natural human faces. In future, it is recommended that facial stimuli incorporate the 4D space-time perspective with the proposed time-resolved methods. (shrink)

Recently, an increasing number of researchers in different parts of the world have been studying childhood from a point of view that highlights children who are considered “peripheral” – far from the ideal model associated with Western countries. We began with the intention of getting to know African children in Angola, informed by the belief that the preservation of languages is important in maintaining social knowledge and traditions. This text describes a preliminary study carried out in a culturally rich location (...) with strong traditions, but which is also marked by processes of cultural denial and devaluation. According to Ndombele and Timbane (2020), most Angolan children learn Portuguese at age seven, when they start school, especially in rural areas. This fact hinders the literacy learning process, and presents the risk of the disappearance of some native languages. Many schools teach children only in Portuguese. When visiting a school in Ganda, a rural area of Benguela, we found a group of children who, primarily through the games they played, keep the Umbundu language alive, and with that the identity and culture of their ancestors. Building on this, these children and their teachers created a syllable association game based on the music sung as they played. The game had two modalities - in the Umbundu language and in the Portuguese language – and functioned as a bilingual pedagogical tool. In the initial moment of offering the game for testing with the children, it was discovered that by singing the song of the game and discussing the possible solutions by themselves, they were able to make correct associations of the syllables in Umbundu, which they then translated into Portuguese. Thus, a resource was created together with the teachers, which, in addition to valuing the native language of the population, allowed the use of children's knowledge to create a didactic resource. In addition, it was possible to encounter the concept of childhood in the current world, deconstructing the idea of a single and ideal model, especially in light of those children who bring habits from home that do not always harmonize with the school routine, and often clash with Euro/Western model, which is based on age separation of classes as a requirement to guarantee learning, and tend to devalue other exchanges that help children learn. (shrink)

THEODOR GOMPERZ AND JOHN STUART MILL The subject of this essay is the little known episode of an unusual friendship. To the writer its fascination lies as ...

The situation of asylum seekers confined under deportation orders can expose caregivers to major clinical and organisational ethics issues. To help caregivers and healthcare organisations find ethical guidance, I reviewed the challenges of access to care and analysed the health and socio-political data to understand the ethical and logistical issues they face in these situations. My research shows that the situation of these patients raises issues of law, equity and distributive justice, and that there is a wide gap in knowledge (...) about these situations and the resources available. This exploratory study shows that independent doctors, independent community resources and hospitals are the resources best placed to meet the care needs of refused asylum seekers, and that there is an urgent need to raise awareness and train caregivers in these issues. (shrink)

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries worldwide have put lockdowns in place to prevent the virus from spreading. Evidence shows that lockdown measures can affect mental health; it is, therefore, important to identify the psychological characteristics making individuals more vulnerable. The present study aimed, first, to identify, through a cluster analysis, the psychological attributes that characterize individuals with similar psychological responses to the COVID-19 home confinement; second, to investigate whether different psychological characteristics, such as personality traits, alexithymia, and resilience, specifically (...) influence anxiety, stress, and depression, depending on the scope of the confinement. We analyzed data from 393 participants who completed an online survey on their experiences during two different phases of the Italian lockdown, characterized by more or less strict measures of confinement. Two clusters were identified which included participants reporting a better (+ER) and worse (−ER) emotional response to the lockdown, respectively. Individuals in the −ER group showed lower emotional stability, resilience, and higher alexithymia. Moreover, even if lifting part of the restrictions decreased psychological distress among all participants, a reduction in perceived stress was observed only among individuals with high resilience. Finally, personality traits, alexithymia, and resilience differently affected depression, anxiety, and stress. Our results suggest that different psychological interventions should be planned depending on the context: mental health professionals should focus on enhancing the individuals’ coping strategies to alleviate stress in emergencies, while long-term intervention aiming at alleviating anxiety and depressive symptoms should focus on alexithymic tendencies and personality constructs. (shrink)

In Italy, consent for health treatment, aside from being an ethical and deontological obligation, constitutes an essential requirement for any medical treatment according to articles 13 and 32 of the National Constitution and also in accordance with the Council of Europe's ‘Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine’. An essential requirement for the validity of consent is that clear, exhaustive and adequate information be provided to the patient himself: the practice of informed consent is a communicative relationship in which the patient (...) can express doubts, perplexities and clarification requests to the dentist. Furthermore, dental treatment has specific peculiarities: the relationship between dentistry and aesthetics, the concomitant presence of pathologies requiring different treatments, the elongated care process and the establishment of a trustworthy relationship and familiarity with the patient represent important aspects in the configuration of the dentist-patient relationship and in the process of acquiring informed consent. The dentist must offer correct information on diagnosis, prognosis, the therapeutic perspective and the likely consequences of therapy, alternative therapy and refusal of therapy, as well as eventual commitments for the period after treatment. Particular consideration must be given to minors and patients of unsound mind: the dentist's approach to these patients needs to be clear and appropriate to the person's age and understanding ability, even if the decisional power for sanitary treatment may be in the hands of a third person. (shrink)

A partir da implantação da República, surgiu um movimento de intelectuais que procurou congregar e dinamizar num esforço comum os pensadores de várias áreas do conhecimento, através da revista A Águia, tendo em vista uma nova ordem moral e cívica dentro do ideal democrático. Procurámos dar a conhecer as linhas principais que consubstanciaram o espaço aberto pela revista, as influências recebidas e os debates que a animaram.

The nature of the relationship between the two types of meiotic recombination outcomes, exchange (crossing‐over) and simple gene conversion, has been debated for years. I here propose that these two types of events are not necessarily causally related and hypothesize that the primary role of events detected as simple gene conversion is in the recognition of homology during synapsis.

The processing of sensitive information in the health field is subject to rigorous standards that guarantee the protection of information confidentiality. Recently, the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali) stated their formal opinion on a standard procedure in dental offices involving the submission of a questionnaire that includes the patient's health status. HIV infection status is included on the form. The Authority has stated that all health data collection must be in accordance with the current (...) Italian normative framework for personal data protection and respect the patient's freedom. This freedom allows the patient to decide, in a conscious and responsible way, whether to share health information with health personnel without experiencing any prejudice in the provision of healthcare requested. Moreover, data collection must be relevant and cannot exceed the principles of treatment goals with reference to the specific care of the concerned person. However, the need for recording information regarding HIV infection at the first appointment, regardless of the clinical intervention or therapeutic plan that needs to be conducted, should not alter the standard protection measures of the healthcare staff. In fact, these measures are adopted for every patient. (shrink)

Language and facticity in Heidegger’s lecture of Saint Augustine. The phenomenological analysis of the Confessions of Saint Augustine gave to Heidegger the opportunity to radicalize the deconstruction of the theoretical path do God and to discover the factical life under the “formal indication” of “the historical”. In Book X of the Confessions Heidegger found an authentic experience of temporality, breaking down with the cosmological concept of time characteristic of Greek philosophy and of metaphysical tradition. The confrontation with such an experience (...) is inscribed in Heidegger’s interpretation of the augustinian concept “cura’‘, that Heidegger will incorporate in Sein und Zeit, as an “existential” accountable for the whole Daseins’s existential structure. So, the phenomenological description of “care”, in the double modality of authenticity or unauthenticity in the Freiburger Vorlesung de 1921 will also lead the heideggerian’s investigation in Sein und Zeit in the direction of the ambiguity of both Daseins’s existence, which moves back and forward, and of Dasein’s language, which swings between Rede und Gerede. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a new and simple method for image encryption. It uses an external secret key of 128 bits long and an internal secret key. The novelties of the proposed encryption process are the methods used to extract an internal key to apply the zigzag process, affine transformation, and substitution-diffusion process. Initially, an original gray-scale image is converted into binary images. An internal secret key is extracted from binary images. The two keys are combined to compute the (...) substitution-diffusion keys. The zigzag process is firstly applied on each binary image. Using an external key, every zigzag binary image is reflected or rotated and a new gray-scale image is reconstructed. The new image is divided into many nonoverlapping subblocks, and each subblock uses its own key to take out a substitution-diffusion process. We tested our algorithms on many biomedical and nonmedical images. It is seen from evaluation metrics that the proposed image encryption scheme provides good statistical and diffusion properties and can resist many kinds of attacks. It is an efficient and secure scheme for real-time encryption and transmission of biomedical images in telemedicine. (shrink)

In Sein und Zeit, the Dasein, thrown in the world by Geworfenheit and relaunched by Entwurf (projection) into the future, experiences itself as a “Self”. This exercise of existence cannot escape the critique of solipsism. However, paragraph 29 — about the existentiale of Befindlichkeit — opens an access way to the Other, which later will be ceaselessly explored by Heidegger, after having found the Stimmungen of the Greek beginning in Holderlin’s poetry and the Grund Stimmungen of “the night of the (...) gods” and of the forgetfulness of being of our time. Not until the fifties and the mystical experience of the fourfold (das Geviert) will Heidegger find the possibility of transmuting the experience of the Other from a πόλεμος into a being-in-harmony (stimmen). This unique path of affectivity, asserted in paragraph 29 of Sein und Zeit, will enable Heidegger to reach an essential way of working out the question of Otherness, that only right now we may be starting to understand. (shrink)

: This article discusses the parallels between Friedrich von Hayek and Bruno Leoni’s criticisms of democracy. Both men were leading protagonists of the classical liberal tradition. The thesis contained of this paper is that Hayek, although critical of democratic systems that do not reconcile liberty and equality, still believed in the democratic principle and tried ….

A proposta deste estudo é abordar de forma teórica o pensamento do filósofo e cientista político, germano-americano, Eric Voegelin, buscando compreender a relação que promove entre o gnosticismo e a modernidade, tendo como foco sua afirmação de que o gnosticismo é o fundamento da modernidade. Para esta pesquisa, são utilizados como base teórica fundamental dois conceitos de sua teoria: religiões políticas e gnosticismo. Divide-se o trabalho em uma introdução ao tema e três capítulos, seguidos da conclusão. Na introdução, se aborda (...) o contexto histórico-político que fornece o estofo para o surgimento da modernidade e movimentos totalitários; com a biografia do autor, buscam-se elementos essenciais para a compreensão de sua posição de combate irrestrito às ideologias, principalmente ao nacional-socialismo alemão e socialismo stalinista. A partir da crítica ao movimento positivista, que considera a ciência natural e seus métodos o modo por excelência de apreensão da realidade, Voegelin demonstra que a dimensão simbólica, espiritual e transcendente do ser fica relegada a uma posição inferior, inexistente ou banalizada, causando uma deformação da verdade, que pode se manifestar em dogmas ou doutrinas ideológicas. No segundo capítulo, introduz-se sua noção de que o gnosticismo é o fundamento da sociedade moderna, na medida em que a insatisfação com a ordem corrente, a crença e desejo de mudança do indivíduo por meio do conhecimento, se firmam como contrários ao desenvolvimento do ser, apontando uma tendência nos movimentos ideológicos modernos à imanentização da escatologia cristã. No terceiro capítulo, apresentam-se as principais discussões a respeito dos limites e alcances de sua teoria, sua aproximação com uma filosofia da consciência e as possibilidades de utilizá-la para a compreensão dos fenômenos totalitários na atualidade, vistos como uma doença pneumopatológica. Concluiu-se que Voegelin, categórico ao apontar para a necessidade de uma nova abordagem para a ciência social e política, evidenciou uma estrutura religiosa nos movimentos modernos, ditos seculares; o conceito de gnosticismo como fundamento da modernidade, apesar de revisto pelo próprio autor e ainda fomentar controvérsias, pode ser um ponto de partida para estudos complementares, uma vez que enfatiza a necessidade de ampliação da consciência para a restauração da ordem social e política, e de incluir o aspecto transcendente do ser, que se expressa em seus símbolos e em suas experiências religiosas ao longo da história, para a compreensão da modernidade. (shrink)

: Hypotheses are the first step in scientific and clinical enquiry. They guide all of the subsequent steps in an investigation, and influence data collection, analysis, and interpretation. But how do we build scientific and clinical hypotheses? In both research and clinical contexts, a professional’s idiosyncratic way of perceiving reality, her prejudices and biases will influence the process of hypothesis formulation. We compare the process of formulating a scientific hypothesis in the field of neuroscience with the process of building a (...) clinical hypothesis in the systemic therapeutic approach. This comparison is intended to highlight the biases that influence researchers and clinicians when formulating hypotheses. Our aim is to raise awareness of the most common biases, and to point out how the tools developed by clinicians could be useful to researchers, and vice versa. Keywords: Hypotheses; Clinical Psychology; Neuroscience; Bias; Interdisciplinary Approach La costruzione di ipotesi nella psicologia clinica e nella neuroscienza: similitudini e differenze Riassunto: Le ipotesi sono il primo passo della ricerca scientifica e clinica. Sono la guida di tutti i passi successivi e influenzano la racconta dei dati, la loro analisi e l’interpretazione. Come si costruiscono le ipotesi scientifiche e quelle cliniche? Sia nell’ambito della ricerca che nei contesti clinici le idiosincrasie con cui un professionista percepisce la realtà, i suoi bias e pregiudizi influenzeranno il processo di formulazione dell’ipotesi. In questa sede intendiamo confrontare il processo di formulazione di un’ipotesi scientifica nel campo della neuroscienza e il processo di costruzione dell’ipotesi clinica nell’approccio della terapia sistemica. Questo confronto vuole mettere in luce i bias che influenzano ricercatori e terapeuti nella formulazione delle ipotesi. Il nostro scopo è mettere in luce gli errori sistematici più comuni, mostrando come gli strumenti sviluppati dai terapeuti possano essere utili per i ricercatori e viceversa. Parole chiave: Ipotesi; Psicologia clinica; Neuroscienza; Bias; Approccio interdisciplinare. (shrink)