We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that philosophers of science have an obligation to recognize and engage with the social nature of the sciences they assess if those sciences are morally relevant. Morally-relevant science is science that has the potential to risk harm to humans, non-humans, or the environment. My argument and the approach I develop are informed by an analysis of the philosophy of biology literature on the criticism of evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolution of human psychology and (...) behaviour. From this literature, I tease out two different methods of scientific critique. The first I call the “truth-detectional” approach. Those who take this approach are first and foremost concerned about the truth of EP claims as that truth can be determined by evidence. The second I call the “social-dimensional” approach. Those who take this approach talk about the production and truth of EP claims but within a social framework. On this account, the legitimacy and perceived legitimacy of EP claims are not separate from the institutional and social processes and values that lend to their production. I show that the truth-detectional approach risks harms to society and to the philosophy of science, but that the social-dimensional approach avoids these harms. Philosophers of science, therefore, should take a social-dimensional approach to the assessment of morally-relevant science. (shrink)

In this article I explore Serres’ idea of science and how it impacted his overall work. This approach to understanding Serres’ idea of science is much like working with Nietzsche. I look at the areas Serres viewed as the dangers of science including what he referred to as a tsunami of data and the primary focus on methods. I end with Serres third way of inventive science.

Much of the inspiration for structuralist approaches to mathematics can be found in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century program of characterizing various mathematical systems upto isomorphism. From the perspective of this program, differences between isomorphic systems are irrelevant. It is argued that a different view of the import of the differences between isomorphic systems can be obtained from the perspective of contemporary discussions of representation theorems and that from this perspective both the identification of isomorphic systems and the reduction (...) to abstract structures or patterns should be resisted. (shrink)

In philosophy and in religious ethics, accounts of mercy are typically developed in relation to justice. The essays in this focus issue each insist on an integral connection between mercy and justice, yet each reconfigures that relationship by arguing that mercy is best understood as a normative response to others in their need. Defining mercy as our response to others’ need highlights the value of mercy as an effective public virtue, grounded in realism about the human condition and focused on (...) reparative and restorative action. (shrink)

This volume examines some of the most contentious social justice issues present in the corpus of Augustine's writings. Whether one is concerned with human trafficking and the contemporary slave trade, the global economy, or endless wars, these essays further the conversation on social justice as informed by the writings of Augustine of Hippo.

“Losing Thomas & Ella” presents a research comic about one father’s perinatal loss of twins. The comic recounts Paul’s experience of the hospital and the babies’ deaths, and it details the complex grieving process afterward, including themes of anger, distance, relationship stress, self-blame, religious challenges, and resignation. A methodological appendix explains the process of constructing the comic and provides a rationale for the use of comics-based research for illness, death, and grief among practitioners, policy makers, and the bereaved.

The Nova Scotia Participatory Food Costing Project uses participatory action research to collect data on the cost and affordability of food and involves those who are directly affected by food insecurity. More than a decade of this work has also yielded qualitative evaluation data that illustrates the project participants' experience with the project and with food security more generally. The data are characterized by ample evidence of participants' perceived powerlessness related to government and social structures. At the same time, that (...) data indicate that playing a role in participatory processes seems to have served as an empowering experience for the participants. We highlight some of the findings here and situate them within critical literature on citizens' discourse. (shrink)

The career of the father of Claudius Etruscus is of special importance in the history of the Imperial administration in the first century A.D. In the course of a long life he rose from slave status under Tiberius to be head of the Imperial financial administration and to equestrian status under Vespasian. He was one of the most important, wealthy, and influential of the Imperial freedmen in the first century when their influence was at its peak; he is one of (...) the best documented of their number outside the pages of Tacitus; yet we do not know his personal name—he has to remain simply ‘the father of Claudius Etruscus’ —and even his nomen gentilicium and the date of his appointment to be the secretary a rationibus are subject to disput. (shrink)

A Dedekind Algebra is an ordered pair (B,h) where B is a non-empty set and h is an injective unary function on B. Each Dedekind algebra can be decomposed into a family of disjoint, countable subalgebras called configurations of the Dedekind algebra. There are N0 isomorphism types of configurations. Each Dedekind algebra is associated with a cardinal-valued function on omega called its configuration signature. The configuration signature of a Dedekind algebra counts the number of configurations in the decomposition of the (...) algebra in each isomorphism type.The configuration signature of a Dedekind algebra encodes the structure of that algebra in the sense that two Dedekind algebras are isomorphic iff their configuration signatures are identical. Configuration signatures are used to establish various results in the first-order model theory of Dedekind algebras. These include categoricity results for the first-order theories of Dedekind algebras and existence and uniqueness results for homogeneous, universal and saturated Dedekind algebras. Fundamental to these results is a condition on configuration signatures that is necessary and sufficient for elementary equivalence. (shrink)

In this chapter I proffer a success argument for classical logical consequence. I articulate in what sense that notion of consequence should be regarded as the privileged notion for metaphysical inquiry aimed at uncovering the fundamental nature of the world. Classical logic breeds necessitism. I use necessitism to produce problems for both ontological naturalism and atheism.

I argue that the Carroll-Chen cosmogonic model does not provide a plausible scientific explanation of the past hypothesis (the thesis that our universe began in an extremely low-entropy state). I suggest that this counts as a welcomed result for those who adopt a Mill-Ramsey-Lewis best systems account of laws and maintain that the past hypothesis is a brute fact that is a non-dynamical law.

These original essays offer new perspectives for science educators, curriculum theorists, and cultural critics on science education, French post-structural thought, and the science debates. Included in this book are chapters on the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Jean Baudrillard, plus chapters on postmodern approaches to science education and critiques of modern scientific assumptions in curriculum development.

Model validation in computational cognitive psychology often relies on methods drawn from the testing of theories in experimental physics. However, applications of these methods to computational models in typical cognitive experiments can hide multiple, plausible sources of variation arising from human participants and from stochastic cognitive theories, encouraging a “model fixed, data variable” paradigm that makes it difficult to interpret model predictions and to account for individual differences. This article proposes a likelihood‐based, “data fixed, model variable” paradigm in which models (...) are treated as stochastic processes in experiments with participant‐to‐participant variation that can be applied to a broad range of mechanistic cognitive architectures. This article discusses the implementation and implications of this view in model validation, with a concrete focus on a simple class of ACT‐R models of cognition. This article is not intended as a recipe for broad application of these preliminary, proof‐of‐concept methods, but as a framework for communication between statisticians searching for interesting problems in the cognitive modeling sphere, and cognitive modelers interested in generalizing from deterministic to stochastic model validation, in the face of random variation in human experimental data. (shrink)

To interpret scripture, we must first recognize the “thing” of which it speaks: the incarnation understood through the commandments of love for God and neighbor. Scripture consists of “signs” that disclose that message. Interpreting the signs and communicating their meaning are dynamic processes that engage the “unquiet” of the human condition.

Michel Serres was a successful scholar who made a living within the university on two continents. However, he also viewed the university with great trepidation and tried to warn young scholars against falling victim to the university culture that encouraged a scholar to become a critic and not do original work. In place of the current university system, Serres offers an alternative vision that I refer to as the Diogenes University.

This paper introduces the notion of syntactic feature to provide a unified treatment of earlier model theoretic proofs of both the compactness and interpolation theorems for a variety of two valued logics including sentential logic, first order logic, and a family of modal sentential logic includingM,B,S 4 andS 5. The compactness papers focused on providing a proof of the consequence formulation which exhibited the appropriate finite subset. A unified presentation of these proofs is given by isolating their essential feature and (...) presenting it as an abstract principle about syntactic features. The interpolation papers focused on exhibiting the interpolant. A unified presentation of these proofs is given by isolating their essential feature and presenting it as a second abstract principle about syntactic features. This second principle reduces the problem of exhibiting the interpolant to that of establishing the existence of a family of syntactic features satisfying certain conditions. The existence of such features is established for a variety of logics (including those mentioned above) by purely combinatorial arguments. (shrink)

We survey the use of extra-set-theoretic hypotheses, mainly the continuum hypothesis, in the C*-algebra literature. The Calkin algebra emerges as a basic object of interest.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eleven brothers and sisters followed me in quick succession and the old farm house was bursting at the seams. So Mom and Dad put on a new dining room. Somehow it didn’t fit. It was built differently than the rest of the house. It was out of place, like a new patch on an old shirt. Some parts of the Later Rule of Saint Francis just don’t fit either. (...) They are “patches,” sewed on afterwards. Those little “patches” on the Later Rule stand out and they tell an important story.In 1221 Saint Francis re-edited the legislation of the Order. At the end of the twenty-four chapters of the new edition of the Rule, he commanded that “on behalf of Almighty God and of the Lord Pope, and by obedience ... that no one delete or add to what has been written in this life” . He would do everything possible to avoid changes, but just a couple of years later there was yet a newer edition of the Rule, which we know as the Later Rule. In his Testament, Francis does not distinguish between these two or, in fact, any of the different stages of the development of the Rule. In spite of the changes, even changes that were not to be expected, it seems that for Francis the Rule is one and the same at whatever stage.The Later Rule consists of twelve chapters. The chapters are not enumerated in the two original manuscripts, but rather are simply distinguished by headings set off from the rest of the text by bold lettering.2 The titles give us the theme of each chapter. It will become obvious to us that the number twelve was intentional and limiting, when we examine the Rule’s “patches” and see that they bring extraneous materials into the twelve chapters of the Rule. By “extraneous” I mean that the materials of the “patches” neither pertain to the principal theme of the chapter of the Later Rule into which they are inserted nor are they drawn from the corresponding chapter of the Earlier Rule. The “patches” do not make a good fit with the chapters in which we find them, but they do have two consistent characteristics: each of them comes at the end of its chapter in the Later Rule and, except for the last of the four patches, each of them includes materials from different chapters of the Earlier Rule. The “patches” we will examine are Chapter III, 10–13; Chapter VI, 7–9; Chapter X, 7–10, and Chapter XII, 3–4. The “patches” shed light on claims that Francis was forced to omit from the Rule ideas that were important to him, and even the myth that the whole original copy of the Rule was intentionally lost. They bring us to the conclusion that nothing important was lost in the transition from the Earlier Rule to the Later Rule.Chapter III, 10–13Chapter three of the Later Rule carries the heading, “The Divine Office, Fasting, and how the Brothers should go about in the World.” Chapter three of the Earlier Rule had also dealt with the divine office and fasting. The earlier text had begun with the saying of the Gospel that some evil spirits could only be driven out “through prayer and fasting” . This Gospel phrase explains why the Later Rule, following the Earlier Rule, deals with prayer and fasting in the same chapter. With respect to the Earlier Rule, Francis has included new content in the corresponding chapter of Later Rule. It is material that goes beyond the themes of prayer and fasting, and it doesn’t mesh neatly with these two themes.Chapter three of the Earlier Rule ends saying, “However, at other times, according to this life, let them not be.. (shrink)

This article examines the doctrine of the Trinity taught in the Second London Confession of Faith of 1677. It begins by examining a trinitarian controversy among the Particular Baptists of England in the mid-seventeenth century. After outlining the doctrinal deviations of Thomas Collier, the article proceeds to describe some of the responses to Collier from the Particular Baptist community. In many ways the Second London Confession can be seen as a response to Collier. The article also explores the theology of (...) Hercules Collins, a signatory of the Second London Confession, in contrast to the doctrinal deviations of Collier. The article shows that the Particular Baptists continued in the orthodox Christian tradition of the Apostles, Nicene, and Chalcedonian Creeds. They adopted the Reformed confessional language of the Westminster Confession of 1646 and the Savoy Declaration of 1658 while at the same time not fearing to adjust the language in accordance with their orthodox commitments. (shrink)

The status nomenclature of the Imperial slaves, as that of the Imperial freedmen, is important mainly for its bearing on the difficult problems of dating slave sepulchral inscriptions, but also as a means of determining who were Imperial slaves belonging to the Familia Caesaris with the significant social status this implied. Bang's careful but brief treatment of the subject, published in 1919, was not based on a complete collection of the material—admittedly difficult to obtain—and much has appeared in the interval. (...) Moreover, a deeper analysis of the evidence necessitates some revision of his conclusions. (shrink)

Lily Ross Taylor in an interesting recent article on the proportion of freedmen to freeborn in the sepulchral inscriptions of Imperial Rome discusses the increasing omission of status nomenclature by freedmen in the first and second centuries A.D. and the consequent difficulty of determining the status of persons whose names appear in the epitaphs. One contributory factor to this decline in the traditional nomenclature which she mentions is the growing numbers and importance of the freedmen of the emperor, the Augusti (...) liberti. While non-imperial freedmen were anxious to record their acquisition of citizenship, but not their inferior status in the citizen body, the emperor's freedmen, on the other hand, increasingly formalized their status nomenclature so that the formula ‘Aug. lib.’ proclaimed not only the fact of their manumission within the Familia Caesaris but also the higher social status which they enjoyed. An examination of the nomenclature of the Imperial freedmen might help to throw some light on this process, particularly on the problem of dating. (shrink)