In prevention and health promotion interventions, screening methods and risk profile assessments are often used as tools for establishing the interventions’ effectiveness, for the selection and determination of the health status of participants. The role these instruments fulfil in the creation of effectiveness and the effects these instruments have themselves remain unexplored. In this paper, we have analysed the role screening methods and risk profile assessments fulfil as part of prevention and health promotion programmes in the selection, enrolment and participation (...) of participants. Our analysis showed, that screening methods and health risk assessments create effects as they objectify health risks and/or the health status of individuals, i.e., they select the individuals ‘at risk’ and indicate the lifestyle modifications these people are required to make in order to improve their health. Yet, these instruments also reduce the group of participants thereby decreasing the possible effect of interventions, as they provide the legitimisation for people to make choices to whether they enrol or not and what lifestyle changes they incorporate into their lives. In other words, they present a space of interaction, in which agency is distributed across the practice nurses, the participants and the instruments. Decisions were not just made upon the projection of the outcomes of these instruments; decisions that were made by both the patients and practice nurses were the resultant of their opinions on these outcomes that were formed in interaction with the instruments. (shrink)

En los más disímiles contextos universitarios, se generan hoy programas para mejorar los desempeños de los docentes en el proceso formativo; pero, infortunadamente estos no siempre resultan en un mejoramiento de la práctica cotidiana de las universidades, sobre todo en la calidad de la formación de los profesionales. De este hecho, el propósito del presente artículo está dado en realizar una valoración de las principales influencias epistemológicas en lo relativo a la profesionalización del docente universitario y develar aquellos desempeños idóneos (...) esenciales que deben poseer en este nivel de educación como expresión de las competencias que deben desarrollar. Today, in most diverse university contexts, programs are developed to improve the performance of professors in the educational process; but unfortunately, they do not always result in improving the daily practice of universities, especially in the quality of professionals training. Of this fact, the purpose of the present article is to carry out a valuation of the main epistemological influences related to the professionalization of universities` professors; and to determine the main essential suitable performances these professionals should have as an expression of the competences they must develop. (shrink)

Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group for permission to access medical records without written permission. We present a (...) case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case £560 000 of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG’s responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing “opt-out” consent for many public health research projects. (shrink)

Ce compte rendu a déjà paru dans E-rea [En ligne], n° 6.1, 2008. F. Gaillet-de-Chezelles, Wordsworth et la marche : parcours poétique et esthétique, Grenoble, Ellug, 2007, 423 p. Spécialiste de la période romantique, et de William Wordsworth en particulier, Florence Gaillet-de-Chazelles a développé dans Wordsworth et la marche : parcours poétique et esthétique une approche critique qui s'inscrit très bien dans celle de la collection « Esthétique et représentation : monde anglophone », - Recensions.

Ernesto de Martino left The End of the World unfinished at his death in 1965. His student Clara Gallini published the first Italian edition in 1977, which was followed by an updated version in 2002...

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

Resenha do curso ministrado por Henri Bergson no Collège de France, no ano universitário de 1901-1902. Tradução Débora Cristina Morato Pinto. Editora da Unesp 2022.

The author first investigates how to precise and get to the core of the sense of a word in common language. Any definition, however appropriate it may seem, is in fact inadequate. The word must be considered as a moment of a precising activity, which is particularly clear in the case of analogy as a word and an idea. With that in view, the concept of the scheme is explained and it is examined in which horizon a mental scheme may (...) have an existence of its own. In order to provide a satisfactory answer, it is necessary to investigate and uncover the structure of subjectivity, to make it understood that the basic principles of mathematics arise from elaborating some of these disciplines in relation with a scheme.Two fields of existence may then be said analogous if they may be considered as two different realisations of a scheme. The views gained in investigating the structures of subjectivity permit to realize how the result may be extended to mathematical models and how the part played by those mathematical models may be precised. (shrink)

Scientists have attempted several times to define the notion of complexity. A proper definition uses elements of three sets: a set of sites, as set of connections, and a set of nodes coincides with the set. Sites and connections can be translated into terms of graph theory as vertices and edges, which enables to consider complexity as an associated graph.Thus complexity of a system (or a structure) will be defined as the number of possible figures and aspects which are obtained (...) by combining vertices and edges. Complexity is the product of two factors, the first factor is tied to the combination of nodes called mutability and the second is tied to the combination of edges called liability. (shrink)