Biological forms are very complex, and mechanisms of pattern formation are not well understood. Although developmental biology deals with the mechanistic explanation of patterns, currently we do not know how to understand the mechanisms of pattern formation from huge amounts of molecular information. In this article, I present one useful tool, mathematical modeling, to obtain a mechanistic understanding of biological pattern formation, and show an actual example in lung branching morphogenesis. In this example, mathematical modeling plays an indispensable (...) role in understanding the biological phenomena. The model successfully reproduces the basic features of morphogenesis in vitro, but mechanism in vivo still remains to be elucidated. (shrink)

Recent studies support a model in which the progeny of SOX9+ epithelial progenitors at the distal tip of lung branches undergo cell allocation and differentiation sequentially along the distal‐to‐proximal axis. Concomitant with the elongation and ramification of lung branches, the descendants of the distal SOX9+ progenitors are distributed proximally, express SOX2, and differentiate into cell types in the conducting airways. Amid subsequent sacculation, the distal SOX9+ progenitors generate alveolar epithelial cells to form alveoli. Sequential cell allocation and differentiation (...) are integrated with the branching process to generate a functional branching organ. This review focuses on the roles of SOX9+ cells as precursors for new branches, as the source of various cell types in the conducting airways, and as progenitors of the alveolar epithelium. All of these processes are controlled by multiple signaling pathways. Many mouse mutants with defective lung branching contain underlying defects in one or more steps of cell allocation and differentiation of SOX9+ progenitors. This model provides a framework to understand the molecular basis of lung phenotypes and to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of lung patterning. It builds a foundation on which comparing and contrasting the mechanisms employed by different branching organs in diverse species can be made. (shrink)

An abundance of information about lung development in animal models exists; however, comparatively little is known about lung development in humans. Recent advances using primary human lung tissue combined with the use of human in vitro model systems, such as human pluripotent stem cell‐derived tissue, have led to a growing understanding of the mechanisms governing human lung development. They have illuminated key differences between animal models and humans, underscoring the need for continued advancements in modeling human (...) lung development and utilizing human tissue. This review discusses the use of human tissue and the use of human in vitro model systems that have been leveraged to better understand key regulators of human lung development and that have identified uniquely human features of development. This review also examines the implementation and challenges of human model systems and discusses how they can be applied to address knowledge gaps. (shrink)

Formation of branching epithelial trees from unbranched precursors is a common process in animal organogenesis. In humans, for example, this process gives rise to the airways of the lungs, the urine‐collecting ducts of the kidneys and the excretory epithelia of the mammary, prostate and salivary glands. Branching in these different organs, and in different animal classes and phyla, is morphologically similar enough to suggest that they might use a conserved developmental programme, while being dissimilar enough not to make (...) it obviously certain that they do. In this article, I review recent discoveries about the molecular regulation of branching morphogenesis in the best‐studied systems, and present evidence for and against the idea of there being a highly conserved mechanism. Overall, I come to the tentative conclusion that key mechanisms are highly conserved, at least within vertebrates, but acknowledge that more work needs to be done before the case is proved beyond reasonable doubt. BioEssays 24:937–948, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

A tree‐like hierarchical branching structure is present in many biological systems, such as the kidney, lung, mammary gland, and blood vessels. Most of these organs form through branching morphogenesis, where outward growth results in smaller and smaller branches. However, the blood vasculature is unique in that it exists as two trees (arterial and venous) connected at their tips. Obtaining this organization might therefore require unique developmental mechanisms. As reviewed here, recent data indicate that arterial trees often form (...) in reverse order. Accordingly, initial arterial endothelial cell differentiation occurs outside of arterial vessels. These pre‐artery cells then build trees by following a migratory path from smaller into larger arteries, a process guided by the forces imparted by blood flow. Thus, in comparison to other branched organs, arteries can obtain their structure through inward growth and coalescence. Here, new information on the underlying mechanisms is discussed, and how defects can lead to pathologies, such as hypoplastic arteries and arteriovenous malformations. -/- . (shrink)

It is generally believed, that when the surface/volume ratio is high, fractal structure is expected to exist. The branched fractal structure of the lung has been cited as a classical example of this statement. In this short paper I would like to demonstrate that an alternative lung structure (namely sponge-like fractal) is at least as good as, or even better than the branched one, concerning this ratio, therefore, the cause of the lung''s fractality lies elsewhere.

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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Transfer learning can improve the robustness of deep learning in the case of small samples. However, when the semantic difference between the source domain data and the target domain data is large, transfer learning easily introduces redundant features and leads to negative transfer. According the mechanism of the human brain focusing on effective features while ignoring redundant features in recognition tasks, a brain-like classification method based on adaptive feature matching dual-source domain heterogeneous transfer learning is proposed for the preoperative aided (...) diagnosis of lung granuloma and lung adenocarcinoma for patients with solitary pulmonary solid nodule in the case of small samples. The method includes two parts: (1) feature extraction and (2) feature classification. In the feature extraction part, first, By simulating the feature selection mechanism of the human brain in the process of drawing inferences about other cases from one instance, an adaptive selected-based dual-source domain feature matching network is proposed to determine the matching weight of each pair of feature maps and each pair of convolution layers between the two source networks and the target network, respectively. These two weights can, respectively, adaptive select the features in the source network that are conducive to the learning of the target task, and the destination of feature transfer to improve the robustness of the target network. Meanwhile, a target network based on diverse branch block is proposed, which made the target network have different receptive fields and complex paths to further improve the feature expression ability of the target network. Second, the convolution kernel of the target network is used as the feature extractor to extract features. In the feature classification part, an ensemble classifier based on sparse Bayesian extreme learning machine is proposed that can automatically decide how to combine the output of base classifiers to improve the classification performance. Finally, the experimental results (the AUCs were 0.9542 and 0.9356, respectively) on the data of two center data show that this method can provide a better diagnostic reference for doctors. (shrink)

The extracellular domains of several integral membrane proteins are released from the cell surface by a group of enzymes known as “sheddases” through a process called “ectodomain shedding”. Because many transmembrane growth and differentiation factors, including members of the epidermal growth factor (EGF) family that play a crucial role in development, require ectodomain shedding for proper action in vivo, proteolysis is now viewed as a regulatory mechanism in the developing embryos. Two recent reports by Zhao et al. provide evidence for (...) the role of cell surface proteolysis by an ADAM (a disintegrin and metalloprotease) in the development of murine lung.(1,2) Inhibition of tumor necrosis factor‐α converting enzyme (TACE, ADAM17) by the hydroxamic acid‐based metalloprotease inhibitor (TAPI), (1) or a targeted mutation in Zn2+‐binding domain of TACE, (2) disrupts two essential epithelial functions in lung development: branching morphogenesis and cytodifferentiation. Evidence for the role of ADAMs as sheddases in development and growth factor signaling is discussed. BioEssays 24:8–12, 2002. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Vinaya rules embody the ideal of how Buddhists should regulate their daily lives, and monastics are required to observe them, despite the fact that they were compiled nearly 2,500 years ago in India: a context dramatically different not only from Chinese Buddhism's present monastic conditions, but from its historical conditions. Against this backdrop, rules of purity were gradually formulated by Chinese masters in medieval times to supplement and adapt vinaya rules to China's cultural ethos and to specific local Chinese contexts. (...) This study explores how the traditional qinggui are applied by the Buddhist sa?gha in present-day Taiwan, and contrasts modern monastics' opinions on these rules and their relation to early Buddhist vinaya, on the one hand, against classical Chan literature and the Buddhist canon, on the other. This comparison fills a notable gap in the existing literature. (shrink)

In the present study, we use a training design in two experiments to examine whether bilingual language switching facilitates two components of cognitive control, namely monitoring and inhibitory control. The results of Experiment 1 showed that training in language switching reduced mixing costs and the anti-saccade effect among bilinguals. In Experiment 2, the findings revealed a greater decrease of mixing costs and a smaller decrease of the anti-saccade effect from pre- to post-training for the language switching training group compared to (...) the L2 training group. Overall, the results suggest that extensive exercise in monitoring and inhibitory control among languages in an experimental setting may enhance the corresponding components of cognitive control. We discuss these findings in the context of the relationship between bilingual language control and executive control. (shrink)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 4 million Italians migrated to the United States of America (U.S.), which they regarded as a utopia. The film _The Legend of 1900_, which was inspired by Alessandro Baricco’s monologue _Nocecento_ and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, tells the story about the genius pianist 1900, an orphan, who is fostered by Danny, a black coalman in the boiler room of an ocean liner, and whose parents are presumably Italian immigrants. Due to (...) immigration law, 1900, a man with neither identity, visa, nor legal papers, cannot legally set foot on American soil. As a genius pianist, his existence is nothing more than that of musician—an entertainer to passengers on the gigantic trans-Atlantic liner Virginian, the only place he is permitted to live. According to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, a ship is “a piece of floating space, a placeless place”—a vessel transporting people to the land of their dreams. However, 1900, who has no legal status, will never arrive in utopia aboard Virginian. He can only construct a heterotopia—a mirror of utopia—so that it to him is a utopia. In the eyes of the law, 1900 is a legally non-existent person on Virginian, a placeless place. However, it is this lawless heterotopia and isolation that create a genius. In this paper, I illustrate how Virginian, as a place outside the law of land, metaphorically gives birth to a pianist, 1900, and why 1900 at the end chooses not to leave the ship, while also discussing the meaning behind the film and the relationship between law and space. (shrink)

Double 11 shopping carnival, celebrated by the most successful electronic-commerce Chinese company, Alibaba, has always been the online shopping festival with the highest turnover and involves the largest number of consumers and enterprises in China. This study integrates the elaboration likelihood model and stimulus-organism-response theory to study the dual-processing path of information, which drives customers’ behavioral intention on Double 11. There are 454 valid samples of data are collected, and the research model is tested using the partial least squares method. (...) Results show that in the Double 11 context, two different processing mechanisms affect consumers’ behavioral intention. Thereinto, consumers’ behavioral intention is more affected by the peripheral path than the central path. The affective experience affected by the information stimulus has a greater impact on the behavioral intention than cognitive experience. Furthermore, we find situational involvement have different moderating effects on the relationship between two experiences and behavioral intention. (shrink)

The recent proposal by the Independent Expert Panel of the Stop Ecocide initiative to include the crime of ecocide in the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute has raised expectations for preventing and remedying severe environmental harm through international prosecution. As alluring as this image is, we argue that ecocide prosecutions may be the most difficult, perhaps even impossible, in precisely the cases that the ICC would need to be concerned with; namely, the gravest global incidents of environmental harm, including those (...) associated with planetary climate change. We explore a series of questions about the panel's formulation of ecocide that resonate with longer debates around criminalizing environmental harm but take on new dimensions amid the Anthropocene and after twenty years of ICC trials. Ecocide must contend with the hard lessons learned concerning the ICC's limitations in realizing justice in a fraught international political context and also with fundamental challenges to knowledge and legitimacy arising from the uncertainty and dynamic socioenvironmental context of the Anthropocene. The proposed amendment, if adopted, risks ineffective prosecutions or even perverse outcomes for the environment itself. This risk, however, may characterize any effort to prosecute ecocide internationally in the Anthropocene unless the terms of international criminal law are fundamentally rethought. (shrink)

I served as a medical student and resident in the 1960s. Science as a belief system had reached a pinnacle. Yet Not infrequently in those days, I found myself caring, with little available backup, for a hospital ward filled with sick and dying people. It was a lonely and often frightening responsibility. I began to encounter situations that were at odds with our collective certainty that science would provide the answers. Some of these memories I repressed for almost a decade. (...) I was unable to process them until I had personally experienced a more humanistic side of medicine. (shrink)

Replacing the value-free ideal (VFI) for science requires attention to the broader understanding of how science in society should function. In public spaces, science needed to project the VFI in norms for science advising, science education, and science communication. This resulted in the independent science advisor model and a focus on science literacy for science education and communication. Attending to these broader implications of the VFI which structure science and society relationships is crucial if we are to properly replace the (...) VFI with a better ideal. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse and encouraged an appeal to a wide range of social indicators of trustworthiness in order to decide whom to trust. We analyze public discourse on expertise by examining how social indicators inform the reputation of Dr. Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who rose to international prominence as an early advocate for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. To (...) comprehend how these indicators came to inform his reputation, we outline Dr. Raoult's rise to fame based on discourse about hydroxychloroquine. We then discuss why we trust in experts like scientist-practitioners. This is followed by an examination of how social indicators of trust like status, epistemic authority, influence and values have informed Dr. Raoult's reputation. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the selection and evaluation social indicators of trust and reputations. Our aim here, instead of making a claim about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Raoult's reputation per se, is to outline through this case study how social indicators of trust inform reputation and the challenge they present to evaluating expertise. (shrink)

La guerre d’Algérie a été l’occasion d’une remise en cause de l’image traditionnelle du combattant. Ni les formes de combat, ni les activités demandées aux soldats français, ni les ennemis qu’on les chargeait de poursuivre ne pouvaient les conforter dans l’image que les appelés du contingent avaient du statut militaire. Ces décalages eurent des conséquences sur les modèles de masculinité élaborés et éprouvés pendant la guerre, que ce soit entre hommes ou par rapport aux femmes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990 Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990. By Charles B.Jones. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 233 pp. Charles Jones spent over three years living in Taiwan pursuing the research for this book and for journal articles about religion on the island. He is currently on the faculty of (...) the Department of Religion at the Catholic University of America. Jones primarily focuses on the history of Chinese Buddhism as an organized religion in Taiwan from the mid-1600s to the late 1980s. This is a much needed study as most literature on Chinese Buddhism is based on Mainland Chinese Buddhism. Only in the last decade has there been a shift to focus on Taiwan Buddhism as a separate entity rather than seeing it only as an extension of Mainland Chinese Buddhism.The book is nicely organized into three major historical eras. Part 1 is titled "The Ming and Qing Dynasty (1660-1895)." This section, only one chapter, mainly focuses on the arrival and early development of Buddhism in Taiwan. Part 2 is titled "The Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945)." This section, two chapters, of course focuses on the advent of Japanese Buddhism on the island along with its impact on Taiwan's Buddhism. Part 3 is titled "From Retrocession to the Modern Period (1945-1990)." This is the largest section of the book, with four chapters. I found this section to be more detailed and interesting than the previous two sections. I will spend the remainder of this book review commenting on this last section.In part 3 of his book, Jones begins with a chapter on the retrocession (the period at the end of World War II when Japan was forced out of Taiwan) and the arrival of the Mainland Buddhist monks to Taiwan. This chapter shows the emergence of an organized Buddhism that started to develop under the oversight of the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC), which had begun previous to World War II in Mainland China but relocated to Taiwan with the national government in 1949. Also of interest in this chapter is the discussion of the power struggles within Buddhism between a traditionalist faction led byYuanying, and a reformist faction led by Taixu. In the end, the struggle was resolved in favor of the traditionalists; this has led to Taiwan Buddhism tending to incline toward conservatism.Chapter five focuses entirely on the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC). It is neatly organized into two major sections, "The early period, 1949-1960," and "The middle period, 1960-1986." In the early period section, Jones does a good job explaining the BAROC's organization, mission, and activities. Included as well is a small but fascinating discussion on "The vitality of the nun's order after 1952," in which Jones tries to answer the question of why nuns have increasingly come to predominate numerically over monks, a situation that exists only in Taiwan and Hong Kong.The second half of the chapter, "The middle period, 1960-1986," focuses on the leadership of the BAROC under Baisheng. From 1960, when Baisheng became president of BAROC, until his death in 1986, Baisheng remained a controlling presence in BAROC affairs, despite the fact that he did not hold the presidency continuously [End Page 133] during this period. Also in this section, Jones highlights the internationalism ofTaiwan Buddhism under the leadership of Baisheng, which was seen in the ordinations of foreign monks and in the involvement of BAROC in international Buddhism organizations. This chapter also covers the continual struggle to regain possession of Japanese-era temples.Chapter five ends with a section called "Criticisms of the BAROC." The largest criticism leveled against the BAROC was that it failed to become the unifying force for Taiwan Buddhism that it might have been, a problem related to its elitist attitude at the national level, where only a very small closed group of people had the actual decision... (shrink)

Nevin & Grace's approach is an interesting and useful attempt to find ways to measure “core” effects of a history of exposure to reinforcement. The momentum analogy makes intuitive sense, and the evidence for its utility is increasing. Several questions remain, however, about how the analogy will fare in the case of concurrent rather than sequential activities, about the use of extinction as a method to test resistance to change, and about the generality of some of the effects.

According to Theodore Schick, Jr., Eugenie C. Scott’s endorsement of methodological naturalism---roughly, the view that science is limited by its methodology to be neutral vis-à-vis the supernatural---is misguided. He offers three arguments; I contend that none is successful.