Decades of public investment in molecular technologies and data integration techniques have fueled promises of precision medicine (PM) as a novel, targeted, and data-driven approach that takes into...

The convergence of increasingly efficient high throughput sequencing technology and ubiquitous Internet use by the public has fueled the proliferation of companies that provide personal genetic information (PGI) direct-to-consumers. Companies such as 23andme (Mountain View, CA) and Navigenics (Foster City, CA) are emblematic of a growing market for PGI that some argue represents a paradigm shift in how the public values this information and incorporates it into how they behave and plan for their futures. This new class of social networking (...) business ventures that market the science of the personal genome illustrates the new trend in collaborative science. In addition to fostering a consumer empowerment movement, it promotes the trend of democratizing information—openly sharing of data with all interested parties, not just the biomedical researcher—for the purposes of pooling data (increasing statistical power) and escalating the innovation process. This target article discusses the need for new approaches to studying DTC genomics using social network analysis to identify the impact of obtaining, sharing, and using PGI. As a locus of biosociality, DTC personal genomics forges social relationships based on beliefs of common genetic susceptibility that links risk, disease, and group identity. Ethical issues related to the reframing of DTC personal genomic consumers as advocates and research subjects and the creation of new social formations around health research may be identified through social network analysis. (shrink)

Must We Mean What We Say? is Stanley Cavell's first book, and, in a sense, it is his most important. It contains all the themes that Cavell continues to develop masterfully throughout his philosophy. There is a renewed usage of J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, and, in the classic essay “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” he establishes the foundations of a radical reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein , the connections among skepticism, acknowledgement, and Shakespearean tragedy ; there is (...) the reflection on the ordinary that runs throughout his later works ; and, finally, there is the original aesthetic approach that defines Cavell's work, through his objects—which range from William Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett and pass through Hollywood comedies and melodrama, and opera—and, above all, through his style and method. (shrink)

Pierre Hadot, professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation. (shrink)

This volume portrays the Polish or Lvov-Warsaw School, one of the most influential schools in analytic philosophy, which, as discussed in the thorough introduction, presented an alternative working picture of the unity of science.

Precision medicine relies on data and biospecimens from participants who willingly offer their personal information on the promise that this act will ultimately result in knowledge that will improv...

The rise of genomic technologies has catalyzed shifts in the health care landscape through the commercialization of genome sequencing and testing services in the genomics marketplace. The development of consumer genomics into a growing array of information technologies aimed at collecting, curating, and broadly sharing personal data and biological materials reconstitutes the meaning of health and reframes patients into biocitizens. In this context, the good biocitizen is expected to assume personal responsibility for health through consumption of genomic information and acquiescence (...) to public and private efforts at data surveillance and aggregation. These shifts raise fundamental questions about how competing interests of the public, the state, and corporate entities will be reconciled and what trade‐offs are demanded for the promise of precision health. (shrink)

Criminal violence is one of the most pressing problems in Latin America and the Caribbean, with profound political consequences. Its effects on social policy preferences, however, remain largely unexplored. This article argues that to understand such effects it is crucial to analyze victimization experiences and perceptions of insecurity as separate phenomena with distinct attitudinal consequences. Heightened perceptions of insecurity are associated with a reduced demand for public welfare provision, as such perceptions reflect a sense of the state’s failure to provide (...) public security. At the same time, acknowledging the mounting costs and needs that direct experience with crime entails, victimization is expected to increase support for social policies, particularly for health services. Survey data from twenty-four Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period 2008–12 show that perceptions of insecurity indeed reduce support for the state’s role in welfare provision, whereas crime victimization strongly increases such preferences. (shrink)

Environmental crises, which are consequences of resource-intensive lifestyles and are characterized to a large extent by both a changing climate and a loss of biodiversity, stress the urgent need for a global social-ecological transformation of the agro-food system. In this regard, the bioeconomy and bioeconomic innovations have frequently been seen as instrumental in addressing these grand challenges and contributing to more sustainable land use. To date, the question of how much bioeconomic innovations contribute to sustainability objectives remains unanswered. Against this (...) background, we study four bioeconomic innovations using the case study of animal production and manure utilization in relation to their potential contributions to a social-ecological transformation. The analysis is based on the application of analytical categories derived from the literature that assess the normativity of these innovations and their implicit cultural changes. The results show that the innovations examined manifest existing thought styles and the incumbent socio-technical regime rather than contribute to a more fundamental transition. In this respect, we stress the importance of evolving alterative ideas in innovation design, applying more integrative approaches, such as embedding innovation processes into transdisciplinary processes, and developing adaptive and reflective governance approaches. In return, bioeconomic innovations should adjust towards the design mission of a social-ecological transformation and include a multitude of actors to discuss and harmonize contesting imaginaries and ethical concerns. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBesides physiological, behavioural, and affective effects, romantic love also has cognitive effects. In this study, we tested whether individual differences in infatuation and/or attachment level predict impaired interference control even in the absence of a love booster procedure, and whether individual differences in attachment level predict reduced adaptive cognitive control as measured by conflict adaptation and post-error slowing. Eighty-three young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a Stroop-like task, which yielded reliable indices of interference control and adaptive cognitive (...) control. We did not observe the predicted negative association between infatuation or attachment level and interference control. It might be that reduced interference control with love only happens when people are actively thinking about their beloved. In addition, we observed only weak evidence for the prediction t... (shrink)

Wittgenstein est un philosophe du langage, de l'esprit, et en particulier un philosophe de la subjectivite; pas seulement de la grammaire de la premiere personne, ou de la logique du scepticisme, mais de la subjectivite comme exprimee dans le langage, comme articulation du dedans et du dehors: comme voix humaine. Le mythe de l'interiorite se revele, dans cette approche, comme un mythe de l'inexpressivite: on prefere un prive inaccessible, muet, a la realite (corporelle) et a la fatalite du vouloir-dire. C'est (...) bien le realisme ( la chose la plus difficile, dit Wittgenstein) qu'on decouvre alors au bout du scepticisme. (shrink)

The use of robots had already been proven to encourage the promotion of social interaction and skills lacking in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, who typically have difficulties in recognizing facial expressions and emotions. The main goal of this research is to study the influence of a humanoid robot to develop socio-emotional skills in children with ASD. The children’s performance in game scenarios aiming to develop facial expressions recognition skills is presented. Along the sessions, children who performed the game scenarios (...) with the robot and the experimenter had a significantly better performance than the children who performed the game scenarios without the robot. The main conclusions of this research support that a humanoid robot is a useful tool to develop socio-emotional skills in the intervention of children with ASD, due to the engagement and positive learning outcome observed. (shrink)

Human-eyelid conditioning was the principal source of information on Pavlovian conditioning, especially human, in the 1950s and 1960s, but it suffered a sharp decline in productivity, beginning in the late 1960s. The present article treats the decline as a case study with potential implications concerning the survival contingencies of research specialties. We make use of questionnaire data from eyelid-conditioning researchers and examine a variety of publication, topic-of-investigation, and institutional data to identify the major factors in the decline of human-eyelid conditioning.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04780-w.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Annual Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies:Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 29-30 October 2010Sandra Costen KunzThis past fall the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (SBCS) presented two sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in Atlanta, Georgia. On Friday afternoon, 29 October, an extremely well-attended and in many ways inspiring session titled "The Scholarly Contributions of Rita M. Gross" was presented. The second panel, titled (...) "Can/Should Buddhists and Christians Do Theology/ Buddhology Together?" was presented on Saturday morning, 30 October. It also drew a considerable crowd.Each of the six members of Friday's panel addressed a different aspect of the work of Rita Gross, longtime SBCS leader and now professor emerita of comparative studies in religion, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She is also a senior teacher (lopon) in Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche's U.S. Lotus Garden center. The session was organized and moderated by current SBCS president Miriam M. Levering, professor of religious studies and Asian studies at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an international advisor at Rissho Ko-Sekei in Tokyo. I will give highlights from the panelists' presentations in the order in which they spoke.Kathleen Erndl, associate professor of religion at Florida State University, focused on Gross's work as teacher and mentor. Although she taught primarily undergraduates, Gross, in her writing, speaking, and generous conversation with rising scholars, not only moved the field toward taking religious practices and women's religious experience more seriously but also had a huge influence on how "women in religion" is taught. Gross was one of the first scholars to use the term "androcentric." Nancy Auer Falk, professor emerita of comparative religion at Western Michigan University, coedited Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives (1981) with Gross. Now in its third edition, this groundbreaking collection of case studies watered the flowering of cross-cultural studies in the lived religion of women. Falk reminded us of Gross's role in the election of the first female member of the AAR's board and the establishment of its working group on women and religion. Judith Simmer-Brown, professor of religious [End Page 221] studies at Naropa University, focused on Gross's work in Tibetan Buddhist studies, especially her pointing out the discrepancy between the prophetic voices about women's roles in early Buddhist texts and Tibetan monasticism's institutionalized androcentrism. Simmer-Brown emphasized the importance of Gross's work in Buddhist theology—for example, her deconstructing "Theravada/Mahayana/Vajrayana put-downs" and "incipient fundamentalisms" in Western Buddhism.The fourth panelist, Paul F. Knitter, professor of theology, world religions, and culture at Union Theological Seminary, described Gross's contributions to Buddhist-Christian dialogue, recounting that they met at the Society's founding conference in 1980. He said, "Rita is the Christian theologians' friendly gadfly, always asking questions that make us very uncomfortable." Particularly provocative has been her insistence that claims on the part of religious communities to religious superiority or exclusive truth are incompatible with support of religious diversity. SBCS vice president Terry Muck, dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary, spoke about Gross's contributions to the society, noting that she has held every office except treasurer. He and Gross coedited Buddhist-Christian Studies from 1995-2005, in part because the society had decided— after founding editor David Chappell retired—that the ideal would be one male and one female editor and one Buddhist and one Christian editor. He usually handled the work with the publisher while she usually worked with article selection along with the reviewers. Rosemary Radford Ruether, professor emerita at the Pacific School of Religion, reviewed Gross's contributions to feminist scholarship. She reminded us that while still a student at the University of Chicago, Gross crafted a fundamental methodology for studying women and religion and insisted that turning a blind eye to 80 percent of the religious practice in various cultures is simply bad empiricism. Gross has consistently pointed out that colonialism is connected with privileging males and texts, Reuther claimed, and that no one studies religion with "objectivity."Gross's response to these presentations focused on... (shrink)