Afferent feedback can appreciably alter the pharyngeal phase of swallow. In order to measure the stability of the swallow motor pattern during several types of alterations in afferent feedback, we assessed swallow during a conventional water challenge in four anesthetized cats, and compared that to swallows induced by fixed (20 Hz) and stochastic (1-20Hz) electrical stimulation applied to the superior laryngeal nerve. The swallow motor patterns were evaluated by electromyographic activity (EMG) of eight muscles, based on their functional significance: laryngeal (...) elevators (mylohyoid, geniohyoid, and thyrohyoid); laryngeal adductor (thyroarytenoid); inferior pharyngeal constrictor (thyropharyngeus); upper esophageal sphincter (cricopharyngeus); and inspiratory activity (parasternal and costal diaphragm). Both the fixed and stochastic electrical stimulation paradigms increased activity of the laryngeal elevators, produced short-term facilitation evidenced by increasing swallow durations over the stimulus period, and conversely inhibited swallow-related diaphragm activity. Both the fixed and stochastic stimulus conditions also increased specific EMG amplitudes, which never occurred with the water challenges. Stochastic stimulation increased swallow excitability, as measured by an increase in the number of swallows produced. Consistent with our previous results, changes in the swallow motor pattern for pairs of muscles were only sometimes correlated with each other. We conclude that alterations in afferent feedback produced particular variations of the swallow motor pattern. We hypothesize that specific SLN feedback might modulate the swallow central pattern generator during aberrant feeding conditions (food/liquid entering the airway), which may protect the airway and serve as potentially important clinical diagnostic indicators. (shrink)

This note gives a new proof of the 'operational extensionality' property of Abramsky's lazy lambda calculus-namely the coincidence of contextual equivalence with a co-inductively defined notion of 'applicative bisimilarity'. This purely syntactic results is here proved using a logical relation between the syntax and its denotational semantics. The proof exploits a mixed inductive/coinductive characterisation of the logical relation recently discovered by the author.

The Anderson-Friedman absolute objects program has been a favorite analysis of the substantive general covariance that supposedly characterizes Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR). Absolute objects are the same locally in all models (modulo gauge freedom). Substantive general covariance is the lack of absolute objects. Several counterexamples have been proposed, however, including the Jones-Geroch dust and Torretti constant curvature spaces counterexamples. The Jones-Geroch dust case, ostensibly a false positive, is resolved by noting that holes in the dust in some models (...) ensure that no physically relevant nonvanishing timelike vector field exists there, so no absolute object exists. The Torretti constant curvature spaces case, allegedly a false negative, is resolved by testing an irreducible piece of the metric, the conformal metric density of weight -2/3, for absoluteness; this geometric object is absolute. A new counterexample is proposed involving the orthonormal tetrad said to be necessary to couple spinors to a curved metric. The threat of finding an absolute object in GTR + spinors is overcome by the use of an alternative spinor formalism that takes a symmetric square root of the metric (with the help of the matrix diag(-1,1,1,1)), eliminating 6 of the 16 tetrad components as irrelevant. The importance of eliminating irrelevant structures, as Anderson emphasized, is clear. The importance of the choice of physical fields is also evident. A new counterexample due to Robert Geroch and Domenico Giulini, however, finds an absolute object in vacuum GTR itself, namely the scalar density $g$ given by the metric components' determinant. Thus either the definition of absoluteness or its use to analyze GTR's substantive general covariance is flawed. Anderson's belief that all absolute objects are nonvariational (that is, not varied in a suitable action principle) and vice versa is also falsified by the Geroch-Giulini counterexample. However, it remains plausible that all nonvariational fields are absolute, so adding nonvariationality as a necessary condition for absoluteness, as Hiskes once suggested, would likely leave no useful work to the Anderson-Friedman condition of sameness in all models. Simply having only variational fields in an action principle (suitably free of irrelevant fields) might be a satisfactory analysis of substantive general covariance, if one exists. This proposal also resembles the suggestion that GTR is "already parameterized," if one decides to parameterize theories by defining the nonvariational fields in terms of preferred coordinates called clock fields. More questions need to be addressed. Which fields should be tested for absoluteness: only primitive fields (which ones?), or all or some (which?) of their concomitants also? Geroch observes that some kinds of geometric objects, such as tangent vectors, scalar densities, and tangent vector densities of non-unit weight, satisfy the condition of sameness in all models if they merely fail to vanish. If these "susceptible" geometric objects can hardly help being absolute, to what degree are they, or the theories harboring them, responsible for this absoluteness? The answer to this question helps to determine the significance of the Geroch-Giulini counterexample. (shrink)

Paralleling the formal derivation of general relativity as a flat spacetime theory, we introduce in addition a preferred temporal foliation. The physical interpretation of the formalism is considered in the context of 5-dimensional “parametrized” and 4-dimensional preferred frame contexts. In the former case, we suggest that our earlier proposal of unconcatenated parametrized physics requires that the dependence on τ be rather slow. In the 4-dimensional case, we consider and tentatively reject several areas of physics that might require a preferred foliation, (...) but find a need for one in the process (“flowing”) theory of time. We then suggest why such a foliation might reasonably be unobservable. (shrink)

In this project, I combine theoretical resources from metaethics and philosophy of language with contemporary issues in critical philosophy of race. Drawing from these literatures, I examine the nature of racial norms by developing a non-ideal, situated, and intersectional approach to second-personhood. Second-personhood, as I propose in the first half of the dissertation, serves two explanatory functions with respect to the nature of racial norms. First, second-personhood highlights how manifestations of moral and political agency are embedded in interdependent forms of (...) I-you and we-you relationships. Second, with respect to language, second-personhood provides an account of how speech acts, when understood as a subset of embodied action, come to bear normative force. These features of second-personhood then undergird the three distinct sites of analysis that I examine in the latter half of the dissertation. There, I propose that we can examine collective, interpersonal, and personal levels of racial discourse to see the functioning of racial norms through second-personhood. (shrink)

James L. Anderson analyzed the conceptual novelty of Einstein's theory of gravity as its lack of ``absolute objects.'' Michael Friedman's related concept of absolute objects has been criticized by Roger Jones and Robert Geroch for implausibly admitting as absolute the timelike 4-velocity field of dust in cosmological models in Einstein's theory. Using Nathan Rosen's action principle, I complete Anna Maidens's argument that the Jones-Geroch problem is not solved by requiring that absolute objects not be varied. Recalling Anderson's proscription of (globally) (...) ``irrelevant'' variables that do no work (anywhere in any model), I generalize that proscription to locally irrelevant variables that do no work in some places in some models. This move vindicates Friedman's intuitions and removes the Jones-Geroch counterexample: some regions of some models of gravity with dust are dust-free, and there is no good reason to have a timelike dust 4-velocity vector there. Eliminating the irrelevant timelike vctors keeps the dust 4-velocity from counting as absolute by spoiling its neighborhood-by-neighborhood diffeomorphic equivalence to (1,0,0,0). A more fundamental Gerochian timelike vector field presents itself in gravity with spinors in the standard orthonormal tetrad formalism, though eliminating irrelevant fields might solve this problem as well. (shrink)

Abstract:Whatever the technology, whatever the age, geophonic, biophonic, and anthro-pophonic soundscapes are a wholesale part of the sensory experience of warfare, and this essay considers how representations of sound in the Iliad attempt to capture through attunement to aural sensory perception the extreme phenomenological experiences of warfare for individuals, communities, landscapes, and nations. Much attention has been given to the visual imagery in the Iliad, some attention to the acoustic poetics of the Iliad, but very little to representations of sound (...) as they relate to both the physical environment and the phenomenological experience of war. I argue here that representations of geophonic and biophonic sound in the Iliad frequently serve to contrast both anthrophony and the devastational impact of anthropogenic agency, and that this impact extends to the environmental. (shrink)

College of Medicine, University of South Alabama Mobile, AL 36688-0002, USA wbp501{at}jaguar1.usouthal.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent work in viral genomics has shown that bacteriophages exhibit a high degree of mosaicism, which is most likely due to a long history of prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given these findings, we argue that each of the most plausible attempts to properly classify bacteriophages into distinct species fail. Mayr's biological species concept fails because there is (...) no useful viral analog to sexual reproduction. Phenetic species concepts fail because they obscure the mosaicism and the rich reticulated viral histories. Phylogenetic species concepts, even when extended to take into account reticulation, fail because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between recombination events that create a new viral species and those that do not. There is good reason to think that bacteriophages, arguably the Earth's most abundant biological agent, evolve without forming species. Introduction The Biology of Viruses 2.1 Bacteriophage life cycles 2.2 Mechanisms of HGT The Species Problem and Species Concepts 3.1 Phenetic species concepts 3.2 The biological species concept 3.3 Phylogenetic species concepts 3.4 The ecological species concept 3.5 Homeostatic property cluster species Viruses and Species Taxonomy Reticular Phylogenies Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the level of meaning or truth-conditions. More (...) recently, however, they have also increasingly turned their attention to psychological connections between causal and counterfactual understanding or reasoning. At the same time, there has been a surge in interest in empirical work on causal and counterfactual cognition amongst developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists--much of it inspired by work in philosophy. In this volume, twelve original contributions from leading philosophers and psychologists explore in detail what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify the issues at stake in empirical work on the cognitive underpinnings of, and relationships between, causal and counterfactual thought. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive book on the philosophy of time. Leading philosophers discuss the metaphysics of time, our experience and representation of time, the role of time in ethics and action, and philosophical issues in the sciences of time, especially quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language is, or corresponds to, a part of a natural language like English or Greek. The deductive system is to capture, codify, or simply record which inferences are correct for the given language, and the semantics is to capture, codify, or record the meanings, or truth-conditions, or possible truth conditions, for at least part of the language.

During its century-long unfolding, spreading in numerous directions, Husserlian phenomenology while loosening inner articulations, has nevertheless maintained a somewhat consistent profile. As we see in this collection, the numerous conceptions and theories advanced in the various phases of reinterpretations have remained identifiable with phenomenology. What conveys this consistency in virtue of which innumerable types of inquiry-scientific, social, artistic, literary – may consider themselves phenomenological? Is it not the quintessence of the phenomenological quest, namely our seeking to reach the very foundations (...) of reality at all its constitutive levels by pursuing its logos? Inquiring into the logos of the phenomenological quest we discover, indeed, all the main constitutive spheres of reality and of the human subject involved in it, and concurrently, the logos itself comes to light in the radiation of its force (Tymieniecka). Papers by: Kristana Arp, Gary Backhaus, Mafalda Blanc, Piotr Blaszczyk, Manuel Bremer, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Peter Abumhenre Egbe, Jesus Adrian Escudero, Wayne Froman, Jorge Garcia-Gomez, David Grunberg, Dasuke Kamei, Arion Kelkel, Filip Kolen, Tze-wan Kwan, Leonard Lawlor, Grahame Lock, Nancy Mardas, Nikolay Milkov, Cezary J. Olbromski, Helena De Preester, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Luca Vanzago, Anatoly Zotov. (shrink)

This book explores the “new normal” for teaching, learning, and leadership in higher education. Emphasis is placed on welcoming growth and change and being curious to the transformative opportunities that exist for today’s students so that the next generation is prepared to solve the world’s most pressing issues.

The application of the formal framework of causal Bayesian Networks to children’s causal learning provides the motivation to examine the link between judgments about the causal structure of a system, and the ability to make inferences about interventions on components of the system. Three experiments examined whether children are able to make correct inferences about interventions on different causal structures. The first two experiments examined whether children’s causal structure and intervention judgments were consistent with one another. In Experiment 1, children (...) aged between 4 and 8 years made causal structure judgments on a three-component causal system followed by counterfactual intervention judgments. In Experiment 2, children’s causal structure judgments were followed by intervention judgments phrased as future hypotheticals. In Experiment 3, we explicitly told children what the correct causal structure was and asked them to make intervention judgments. The results of the three experiments suggest that the representations that support causal structure judgments do not easily support simple judgments about interventions in children. We discuss our findings in light of strong interventionist claims that the two types of judgments should be closely linked. (shrink)

In education, we are concerned with the teaching and learning of subjects, but the word “subject” can refer to the discipline being studied as well as the individual who is studying. In this essay, Teresa Strong-Wilson explores this “double entendre” of curriculum studies through the analogy afforded by German author-in-exile W. G. Sebald's working through of difficult subjects by way of semi-autobiographical writing that takes the form of an “invisible subject”: a preoccupation with an unnamed injustice entangled with his (...) own upbringing. Curriculum theory, as currere, has foregrounded the autobiographical. While the place of autobiography in curriculum studies has often been taken to mean writing, currere is more an allegorical method of study, of intellectual engagement, of learning through reading and writing, and of teaching so as to open spaces for agency. Strong-Wilson suggests that Sebald can provide a strong example for us in curriculum studies of how to ethically bring into being an allegorical, autobiographical practice focused on “invisible” subjects of deep concern. (shrink)

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) research presents unique problems for research ethics committees which must be considered in some detail. Applying conventional research techniques to CAM raises a number of issues which ethics committees may find challenging. CAM is widely available and this will have a substantial effect on any proposed research strategy as so many individuals will have pre-existing opinions about these treatments. Whilst many complementary therapies may eventually be ‘validated’ by appropriate clinical trial methodologies other research methods could (...) be more appropriate in the early stages of a research strategy, particularly in view of the widespread availability in both the public and private sectors. Safety, efficacy, cost-effectiveness and patient preference also need evaluation; and these cannot be adequately assessed through double blind randomised placebo controlled trials. If the research question is clear, then thoughtful and often innovative evaluative processes can be designed to answer the socially and clinically relevant issues posed by this area of medicine. There are a number of agencies and organizations available to offer advice to ethics committees in this newly emerging field of CAM research including CAM Strategy Research and Development (CAM STRAND), the Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH) and the Research Council for Complementary Medicine (RCCM). (shrink)

Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammatic comprehension disorders. Although agrammatism is evidence for syntactic modularity, there is no evidence for its anatomical modularity or for its localization in the frontal lobe. Agrammatism results from diffuse left hemisphere damage – allowing the emergence of the limited right hemisphere linguistic competence – rather than from damage to an anatomic module in the left hemisphere.

Several groups of large DNA viruses successfully utilise the rich resource provided by insect hosts. Defining the mechanisms that enable these pathogens to optimise their relationships with their hosts is of considerable scientific and practical importance, but our understanding of the processes involved is, as yet, rudimentary. Here we describe an informatics-based approach that uses comparison of viral genomic sequences to identify candidate genes likely to be specifically involved in this process. We hypothesise that such genes should satisfy two essential (...) criteria, namely, that they should be (i) present in those members of a virus family that infect insects, but absent from those that infect other hosts, and (ii) found in at least two unrelated taxa of insect viruses. These criteria currently identify six groups of viral genes, including one that encodes the fusolin/gp37 proteins. Demonstration that the fusolin/gp37 proteins can enhance oral infectivity of insect viruses provides a primary validation of this approach to the examination of insectvirus relationships. BioEssays 23:184–193, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

La figura del payaso ha pasado por diferentes momentos y lecturas históricas, lo que permite considerarla como una figura arquetípica. Su papel en la sociedad históricamente fue el del ridículo, objeto de risas, pero el payaso no sólo es un ser congruente, auténtico y valiente, sino que también pued..