Steven Vogel and Albert Borgmann have much in common. Both thinkers agree we collectively and materially build our environment. Both also believe communal discussion is essential for constructing better environments. Yet Borgmann does not hesitate to speak of “eloquent things,” while Vogel insists on nature’s silence. This essay examines that disagreement, arguing Vogel’s position is made stronger by the inclusion of what Borgmann calls “deictic discourse.” Such discourse testifies to the goodness of things, but without being either straightforward first-person speech, (...) or the kind of ventriloquism that worries Vogel. Deictic discourse does not eschew responsibility; it accepts a deep responsibility not only for the practices it advocates, but for the wellbeing of its subject. The essay concludes by arguing deictic discourse plays a crucial and ineliminable role in the type of transparent conversations about practice Vogel promotes. (shrink)

The embryonic vertebrate face is composed of similarly sized buds of neural crest‐derived mesenchyme encased in epithelium. These buds or facial prominences grow and fuse together to give the postnatal morphology characteristic of each species. Here we review the role of neural crest cells and foregut endoderm in differentiating facial features. We relate the developing facial prominences to the skeletal structure of the face and review the signals and genes that have been shown to play an important role in facial (...) morphogenesis. We also examine two experiments one at the genetic level and one at the signal level in which transformation of facial prominences and subsequent change of jaw identity was induced. We propose that signals such as retinoids and BMPs and downstream transcription factors such as Distal‐less related genes specify jaw identity. BioEssays 25:554–568, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Objectives: The mental health legislation of most developed countries includes either a dangerousness criterion or an obligatory dangerousness criterion (ODC). A dangerousness criterion holds that mentally ill people may be given treatment without consent if they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others. An ODC holds that mentally ill people may be given treatment without consent only if they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others. This paper argues that the dangerousness criterion is unnecessary, (...) unethical and, in the case of the ODC, potentially harmful to mentally ill people and to the rest of the community. Methods: We examine the history of the dangerousness criterion, and provide reasoned argument and empirical evidence in support of our position. Results: Dangerousness criteria are not required to balance the perceived loss of autonomy arising from mental health legislation. Dangerousness criteria unfairly discriminate against the mentally ill, as they represent an unreasonable barrier to treatment without consent, and they spread the burden of risk that any mentally ill person might become violent across large numbers of mentally ill people who will never become violent. Mental health legislation that includes an ODC is associated with a longer duration of untreated psychosis, and probably contributes to a poorer prognosis and an increase risk of suicide and violence in patients in their first episode of psychosis. Conclusions: Dangerousness criteria should be removed from mental health legislation and be replaced by criteria that focus on a patient’s capacity to refuse treatment. (shrink)

Book Information An Identity Theory of Truth. By Dodd Julian. Macmillan. Basingstoke. 2000. Pp. ix + 199. Hardback, £42.50.

We consider a deterministic rewrite system for combinatory logic over combinators , and . Terms will be represented by graphs so that reduction of a duplicator will cause the duplicated expression to be "shared" rather than copied. To each normalizing term we assign a weighting which is the number of reduction steps necessary to reduce the expression to normal form. A lambda-expression may be represented by several distinct expressions in combinatory logic, and two combinatory logic expressions are considered equivalent if (...) they represent the same lambda-expression (up to --equivalence). The problem of minimizing the number of reduction steps over equivalent combinator expressions (i.e., the problem of finding the "fastest running" combinator representation for a specific lambda-expression) is proved to be NP-complete by reduction from the "Hitting Set" problem. (shrink)

Popular imaginings of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are founded on the idea of wilderness preserved, but this conception of the ‘park’ is based in colonial-era race-thinking. Rather than simply a colonial-era manifestation of an apparently universal conservationist ideal, Serengeti and Ngorongoro are instead racial projects that embody the historical and ongoing processes of racial formation. The creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro enabled a racialisation of nature, a process begun by the British and reinscribed via safari ever (...) since. Recognising this racialisation of nature has larger implications for not only the treatment and perception of those in the Global South, the racialised ‘other’ to the Global North, but also for the realities of white privilege and constructions of whiteness. (shrink)

_Purpose:_ In order to develop an evidence-based, sport-specific minimum impairment criteria (MIC) for the sport of vision-impaired (VI) shooting, this study aimed to determine the relative influence of losses in visual acuity (VA) and contrast sensitivity (CS) on shooting performance. Presently, VA but not CS is used to determine eligibility to compete in VI shooting. _Methods:_ Elite able-sighted athletes ( n = 27) shot under standard conditions with their habitual vision, and with their vision impaired by the use of simulation (...) spectacles (filters which reduce both VA and CS) and refractive blur (lenses which reduce VA with less effect on CS). Habitual shooting scores were used to establish a cut-off in order to determine when shooting performance was ‘below expected’ in the presence of vision impairment. Logistic regression and decision tree analyses were then used to assess the relationship between visual function and shooting performance. _Results:_ Mild reductions in VA and/or CS did not alter shooting performance, with greater reductions required for shooting performance to fall below habitual levels (below 87% of normalized performance). Stepwise logistic regression selected CS as the most significant predictor of shooting performance, with VA subsequently improving the validity of the model. In an unconstrained decision tree analysis, CS was selected as the sole criterion (80%) for predicting ‘below expected’ shooting score. _Conclusion:_ Shooting performance is better predicted by losses in CS than by VA. Given that it is not presently tested during classification, the results suggest that CS is an important measure to include in testing for the classification of vision impairment for athletes competing in VI shooting. (shrink)

In the New Testament treatment of Moses, the early church affirmed its continuity with him and therefore with the Jewish community of which he was the leader, a continuity which offers a basis for improving modern Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Spirituality is a universal human experience. Within the process of development, the role of spirituality as a developmental asset is understudied in general and especially within majority world contexts. In this article, we frame advances in spirituality research and practice with youth around three pillars: (a) theory, (b) measurement, and (c) research about and evaluations of positive youth development (PYD) programs in low- and middle-income countries. We place PYD programs as associated with dynamic, relational developmental systems (RDS)-based models of human (...) development, describe spirituality and the “Big Three” features of effective PYD programs as aligning to promote thriving, and discuss spirituality as a strength, as a key asset, in the lives of youth. We discuss advances in developmental methods and measures for describing, explaining, and promoting spirituality and PYD and offer a case study that responds to a United States Agency for International Development call for action and evaluations of spirituality within the context of a PYD program in the majority world. Considerations for future research about spirituality and youth development are discussed. (shrink)

Perlecan is a ubiquitous proteoglycan of basement membrane and vascularized tissues but is also present in articular cartilage, meniscus and intervertebral disc, which are devoid of basement membrane and predominantly avascular. It is a prominent pericellular proteoglycan in the transitory matrix of the cartilaginous rudiments that develop into components of diarthrodial joints and the axial skeleton, and it forms intricate perichondrial vessel networks that define the presumptive articulating surfaces of developing joints and line the cartilage canals in cartilaginous rudiments. Such (...) vessels have roles in the nutrition of the expanding cell numbers in the developing joint. Perlecan sequesters a number of growth factors pericellularly (FGFs, PDGF, VEGF and CTGF) and through these promotes cell signalling, cell proliferation and differentiation. Perlecan also interacts with a diverse range of extracellular matrix proteins, stabilising and organising the ECM, and promoting collagen fibrillogenesis. Perlecan is a prominent pericellular component of mesenchymal cells from their earliest developmental stages through to maturation, forming cell–cell and cell–ECM interconnections that are suggestive of a role in mechanosensory processes important to tissue homeostasis. BioEssays 30:457–469, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Recent experimental work offers evidence that infants become aware of suffixes at a remarkably early age, as early as 6 months for the English suffix -s. Here, we seek to understand this ability though the strategy of computational modeling. We evaluate a set of distributional learning models for their ability to mimic the observed acquisition order for various suffixes when trained on a corpus of child-directed speech. Our best-performing model first segments utterances of the corpus into candidate words, thus populating (...) a proto-lexicon. It then searches the proto-lexicon to discover affixes, making use of two distributional heuristics that we call Terminus Frequency and Parse Reliability. With suitable parameter settings, this model is able to mimic the order of acquisition of several suffixes, as established in experimental work. In contrast, models that attempt to spot affixes within utterances, without reference to words, consistently fail. Specifically, they fail to match acquisition order, and they extract implausible pseudo-affixes from single words of high token frequency, as in [pi-] from peekaboo. Our modeling results thus suggest that affix learning proceeds hierarchically, with word discovery providing the essential basis for affix discovery. (shrink)

Working in Britain and in Poland, the authors independently arrived at an interpretation of spirituality as a natural phenomenon. From the point of view of the British author, spirituality is based on a biological predisposition that has been selected for in the process of evolution because it has survival value. In several important ways this approach is in harmony with the psychological perspective of the Polish author that sees spirituality as a socioculturally structured and determined attempt to cope with the (...) existential human situation. Thus interpreted, spirituality is a human universal appearing in many secular as well as religious forms, although its most typical manifestations have been in religious experience. In this essay we discuss research data in support of this theoretical point of view and highlight some of the issues in bringing the two theoretical perspectives together. (shrink)