Promoting student’s school engagement is a major goal in our society. The literature has shown that students’ proximal sources of social support can play a fundamental role in facilitating this engagement. The purpose of this study was to compare perceived support from four sources as a function of two different middle-school student backgrounds, a priority education area and a privileged area; and to examine the contribution of these main sources of social support, either directly or indirectly to school engagement; and (...) to test whether perceived social support is more strongly related to school engagement, directly or indirectly, among students from priority education school compared to students from the advantaged area. In all, 623 middle-school students from either a privileged or priority education area participated in this study. The results showed that the mother was perceived as providing more support, followed by the father, the teachers, and the peers. Students from the priority education area perceived more support from their teachers than their counterparts from the more privileged area did. A path analysis showed that each source of social support, except for maternal support, contributed to school engagement. Peers and teachers emerged as the best source of support for school engagement, having significant direct effects among students from the priority education area and both direct and indirect effects among students from the advantaged area. Peer support also appears to have a double-edged effect on school engagement among students in the priority education area. This study contributes to enlightening the phenomenon of school engagement in adolescence by clarifying the role of social support and the related mediating process. Being perceived as an important source of social support by students is not enough to contribute to their sense of school belonging and school engagement. (shrink)

The Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania1 determines that both parents have to maintain their minors, while the state has to establish conditions under which parents would be able to do their duties, i.e. undertakes responsibility to maintain the children who lack the maintenance from their parents. Latter obligations are concretized in the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania2 (3.192–3.204 art.). It also anticipates the principles under which the child’s maintenance should be provided, its forms, size criteria (...) and the definition of its use and control. There is a theory that when parents are not able to fully perform the duty to maintain their children, the guarantees of the child’s constitutional rights oblige the State to secure quick reception of necessary financial support from other resources. Considering the existing social, economic, legal and other changes and sustaining both the analysis of court practice and doctrine attitude the article analyses present topicality concerning children maintenance, i.e. correspondence between child’s needs, parent’s wealth status and the prosecution of court’s decision, the correlation of state’s duty to children maintenance and parent’s responsibility, the peculiarities of majors maintenance. (shrink)

Smaldino suggests that patterns that give rise to group-level cultural traits can also increase individual-level cultural diversity. I distinguish social roles and related social network structures and discuss ways in which each might maintain diversity. I suggest that cognitive analogs of “cohesion,” a property of networks that helps maintenance of diversity, might mediate the effects of social roles on diversity.

Connected vehicle fleets have formed significant component of industrial internet of things scenarios as part of Industry 4.0 worldwide. The number of vehicles in these fleets has grown at a steady pace. The vehicles monitoring with machine learning algorithms has significantly improved maintenance activities. Predictive maintenance potential has increased where machines are controlled through networked smart devices. Here, benefits are accrued considering uptimes optimization. This has resulted in reduction of associated time and labor costs. It has also provided (...) significant increase in cost benefit ratios. Considering vehicle fault trends in this research predictive maintenance problem is addressed through hybrid deep learning-based ensemble method (HDLEM). The ensemble framework which acts as predictive analytics engine comprises of three deep learning algorithms viz modified cox proportional hazard deep learning (MCoxPHDL), modified deep learning embedded semi supervised learning (MDLeSSL) and merged LSTM (MLSTM) networks. Both sensor as well as historical maintenance data are collected and prepared using benchmarking methods for HDLEM training and testing. Here, times between failures (TBF) modeling and prediction on multi-source data are successfully achieved. The results obtained are compared with stated deep learning models. This ensemble framework offers great potential towards achieving more profitable, efficient and sustainable vehicle fleet management solutions. This helps better telematics data implementation which ensures preventative management towards desired solution. The ensemble method's superiority is highlighted through several experimental results. (shrink)

This study aimed to describe and compare the views of nurses and older patients' relatives on factors restricting the maintenance of patient integrity in long-term care. The purposive sample comprised 222 nurses and 213 relatives of older patients in four Finnish long-term care institutions. The data were collected using a self-developed questionnaire addressing five sets of factors relating to patients, relatives, nurses, the organization and society. The maintenance of patient integrity was restricted by: (1) social factors, including lack (...) of respect for long-term geriatric care and lack of adequate resources; (2) patient factors relating to forgetfulness; and (3) factors relating to nurses and relatives in maintaining patient integrity. Better maintenance of patient integrity requires that more consideration is paid to issues of social respect and to the availability of adequate resources. Closer attention must be given to patients who are forgetful and unable to take part in decision making. (shrink)

What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. -/- The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and (...) human practice. They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide variety of technologies, from urban infrastructure such as bridges and buildings to data technologies such as servers and software systems. Together, the contributions highlight common themes in the philosophical study of maintenance, including the role of skill, the significance of social values and the potential of these practices to transform the technologies to which they are applied. By reflecting on the different ways in which we keep technologies going, from the devices we use in our homes to the large technical systems which surround us, this volume reveals the philosophical significance of practices of maintenance, not only as a source of new insights but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy. -/- Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering and science & technology studies. (shrink)

Although reducing the costs of software maintenance has long been held as an important goal, few researchers have studied software maintenance — except in the context of software design. However, thinking in software design is itself muddled by the frequent confusion over the term ‘software’ and ‘programs’. In this paper we argue for a re-examination of the underlying philosophical foundations of programs, in order to establish software as a phenomenon in its own right. Once we understand the basic (...) structure of software theories, we will be in a better position to understand how theories of software relate to theories of programs. This might finally provide the insight needed to achieve the long awaited reduction in the cost of software maintenance. (shrink)

Human concern with problems of being and becoming promotes conceptions of ideal states of being, exemplified by paragons and heroes and projected as Utopias or visions of salvation; it leads to regimens for cultivating and maintaining individual ability to meet social expectations; and it produces fantasies, as in myth and popular literature, that rehearse the problems and that offer escape from them and roles to emulate in dealing with them. Many of these regimens and fantasies appear in the rituals and (...) teachings of organized religion. Many also figure in private devotions apart from established religions. The many forms they take constitute much of the religious life of ordinary people. From this viewpoint, there is much to examine in American life. (shrink)

Many kinds of health compromising norms, habits, and beliefs are highly resistant to change thereby preventing new knowledge about health maintenance from advancing widespread better health. Persons would be more responsive if they used a health ethic to harmonize personal behavior with health-maintaining practices. We argue that common sense morality includes a portion of a health ethic in the guise of responsibilities to maintain health as well as avoid self destruction. We discuss an example in which its application can (...) retard decline in older age that results from a sedentary lifestyle. (shrink)

Minichromosome maintenance (Mcm) proteins are well‐known for their functions in DNA replication. However, their roles in chromosome segregation are yet to be reviewed in detail. Following the discovery in 1984, a group of Mcm proteins, known as the ARS‐nonspecific group consisting of Mcm13, Mcm16‐19, and Mcm21‐22, were characterized as bonafide kinetochore proteins and were shown to play significant roles in the kinetochore assembly and high‐fidelity chromosome segregation. This review focuses on the structure, function, and evolution of this group of (...) Mcm proteins. Our in silico analysis of the physical interactors of these proteins reveals that they share non‐overlapping functions despite being copurified in biochemically stable complexes. We have discussed the contrasting results reported in the literature and experimental strategies to address them. Taken together, this review focuses on the structure‐function of the ARS‐nonspecific Mcm proteins and their evolutionary flexibility to maintain genome stability in various organisms. (shrink)

Based on an ethnographic project in a public high school in a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, this paper argues that access to information and communication technologies cannot be taken as helpful or empowering on its own terms; instead, concerns about justice must be accounted for by the local communities technology is meant to benefit. This paper juxtaposes the concept of technological access with recent work in feminist science and technology studies on infrastructure, maintenance, and ethics. In contrast (...) to popular descriptions of ICTs as emancipatory and transformative, in the setting of an urban school, access produced extensive demands for attention, time, and information. This paper focuses on the labor of a group of student workers, Student Technology Leaders, and how they became responsible for the significant amount of repair and maintenance work involved in keeping hundreds of new computing devices available for use. An expanded process of accounting can more realistically frame issues of justice and its relationship to ICTs. I use a town hall meeting held with these students as an example of a processual vision of justice, one that encourages the beneficiaries of technological access to evaluate costs, benefits, and ethical concerns together. (shrink)

Game theory has played a critical role in elucidating the evolutionary origins of social behavior. Sober and Wilson model altruism as a prisoner's dilemma and claim that this model indicates that altruism arose from group selection pressures. Sober and Wilson also suggest that the prisoner's dilemma model can be used to characterize punishment; hence, punishment too originated from group selection pressures. However, empirical evidence suggests that a group selection model of the origins of altruistic punishment may be insufficient. I argue (...) that examining dominance hierarchies and coalition formation in chimpanzee societies suggests that the origins of altruistic punishment may be best captured by individual selection models. I suggest that this shows the necessity of coupling of game-theoretic models with a conception of what our actual social structure may have been like to best model the origins of our own behavior. ‡I would like to thank Zachary Ernst and Emma Marris for their many helpful comments which greatly improved this paper. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, Skinner Building, College Park, MD 20742; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The ethics of geoengineering has gained momentum in recent academic debate. The current debates, however, is typically framed in terms of (i) the first-order question about the moral permissibility of geoengineering, and (ii) the second-order question about the distributive and compensatory issues associated with geoengineering. Both (i) and (ii) are central to decision-making about geoengineering, but they have not cover all ethical issues related to geoengineering. I argue that a preoccupation with (i) and (ii) may lead to an oversight of (...) post-implementation scenarios (PISs), which introduce different ethical issues relevant to decision-making on geoengineering. More specifically, I use the requirement of maintenance for geoengineering as an example to draw attention to PISs, and to illustrate the limit of the existing discussion in the ethics of geoengineering. (shrink)

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally-fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how autistic and neurotypical children maintain a conversation topic. We also investigated within-group relationships between conversational ability and cognitive and socio-cognitive predictors. Study 1 found autistic children were more likely than neurotypical controls (...) to give off-topic and generic minimal responses (e.g. ‘mm’, ‘oh’) and were less likely to give non-verbal responses (e.g. nodding or use of facial affect to respond). Nonetheless, the autistic group provided topic-supporting responses 62% of the time, indicating some aspects of conversation topic maintenance are a relative strength. Studies 2 and 3 found large individual differences in topic-supporting conversational responding amongst both neurotypical and autistic children. These were positively related to theory of mind ability and age in both groups. Conversational skills lie on a continuum for the general population and differences by diagnostic group are a matter of degree. Given the importance for peer relationships, we suggest a whole-classroom approach to supporting conversation skills in all children. (shrink)

Making reference to Luce Irigaray’s definitions of mimesis and mimicry, and the ways in which these concepts respectively reinforce and challenge the phallogocentric order, this article investigates the representation of the Troubles in the play Somewhere over the Balcony by Charabanc—a pioneering all-female theatre company which operated in Belfast in the 1980s and early 1990s. The article discusses the achievement of the company in the local context and offers a reading of Somewhere over the Balcony, Charabanc’s 1987 play which depicts (...) the lives of underprivileged working-class Catholic women in the infamous Divis Flats in Belfast. Showing the protagonists’ struggle with the everyday reality of sectarianism in Northern Ireland, it celebrates female creativity and jouissance. The article argues that the characters challenge the masculinist order by means of mimicry. Irigaray defines this strategy as a deliberate assumption of prescribed female roles, which involves a playful attitude to “mimesis imposed”—in other words, to the programmed repetition of socially sanctioned patterns. Mimicry, as well as other productive strategies help the female characters in the play to transform the balconies of their flats into an area of creativity and empowerment, which challenges binary thinking about the division into private and public space. Such a geopolitical reading of the play corresponds to the artistic agenda of the company, communicated by its very name. It also sheds light on Charabanc’s attempt to create a more inclusive and varied cultural space that would reach beyond gender, sectarian, and class divides in Northern Ireland. (shrink)

One of the fundamental questions raised by Ruchkin, Grafman, Cameron, and Berndt's (Ruchkin et al.'s) interpretation of no distinct specialized neural networks for short-term storage buffers and long-term memory systems, is that of the link between perception and memory processes. In this framework, we take the opportunity in this commentary to discuss a specific working memory task involving percept formation, temporary retention, auditory imagery, and the attention-based maintenance of information, that is, the verbal transformation effect.

Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) is a harm reduction approach for persons who wish to stop using opioids and is rather effective if used for a minimum of 12 months. Notably, research demonstrates that many persons enrolled in MMT programs discontinue care before this time, limiting its effects. To better understand this process, we undertook an exploratory descriptive qualitative study and interviewed 12 men and women who were using MMT. Using the theoretical work of Foucault and Hardt and Negri, the (...) interview data highlighted that MMT continues to be strongly stigmatized, and that it is a system of care that involves rewards and penalties, based on if patients behave according to prescribed norms. These results suggest that MMT is a disciplinary mechanism, albeit one that impedes its own access. We consequently recommend that healthcare providers work to facilitate access to MMT, which means altering care delivery. (shrink)

S’il est difficile de lever à court terme les freins – avant tout géopolitiques – qui empêchent de mettre en œuvre un revenu de base d’un montant « élevé », il faudrait néanmoins commencer par mettre un œuvre un revenu de base, même d’un montant équivalent à l’actuel RSA. Cela doit et peut se faire dès maintenant. Cet article explique comment, étape par étape.

Flying phobia is a highly prevalent anxiety disorder, which causes sufferers significant distress and life interference. The processes which maintain flying phobia remain poorly understood. A systematic search of the literature was performed to identify what research has been conducted into the processes which may be involved in the fear of flying and whether processes which are believed to maintain other anxiety disorder diagnoses have been investigated in flying phobia. The results of the literature review are presented and related to (...) existing cognitive behavioral theory and research. The results indicate that little research has been conducted into a number of areas considered important in the wider cognitive behavioral literature on anxiety disorders: namely attention, mental imagery, memory, worry, and safety-seeking behaviors. The review proposes a hypothetical model, derived from cognitive behavioral theory, for the processes which may be involved in maintaining flying phobia, and considers a number of areas for future research. (shrink)

In this reply, I discuss some important issues raised in two commentaries. One relates to the distinction between hate and revenge, which also touches upon the more general problem of the usefulness of distinguishing between various related emotions. I argue that emotion researchers need to define specific emotions carefully in order to be able to examine such emotions without necessarily using emotion words. A second comment focusses on the factors influencing the development of hate over time. The question is whether (...) there is an intrapersonal mechanism leading to an increase or decrease of hate over time. I think it is the social environment that is essential in the maintenance of hate. (shrink)

Souvenir du passé, variation sur le présent, imagination de l'avenir : la littérature s'est toujours nourrie de ces ressorts immémoriaux de l'art du récit. Mais qu'en est-il de la littérature contemporaine? Comment agence-t-elle la mémoire et l'espérance, le " déjà plus " et le " pas encore ", le maintenant et l'autrefois? Quels sont les rythmes et les durées, les passés et les futurs qui fondent la singularité de la littérature du présent, de notre présent? Ce cahier de recherche, qui (...) rassemble les interventions de douze jeunes chercheurs, interroge la manière dont les littératures québécoise et française disent notre contemporanéité et son imaginaire du temps. (shrink)

Using computer simulations I studied the simultaneous effect of variable environments, mutation rates, ploidy, number of loci subject to evolution and random and assortative mating on various reproductive systems. The simulations showed that mutants for sex and recombination are evolutionarily stable, displacing alleles for monosexuality in diploid populations mating assortatively under variable selection pressure. Assortative mating reduced excessive allelic variance induced by recombination and sex, especially among diploids. Results suggest a novel adaptive value for sex and recombination. They show that (...) the adaptive value of diploidy and that of the segregation of sexes is different to that of sex and recombination. The results suggest that the emergence of sex had to be preceded by the emergence of diploid monosexual organisms and provide an explanation for the emergence and maintenance of sex among diploids and for the scarcity of sex among haploid organisms. (shrink)

Because actual social experience is often damaging to conceptions of self, individuals in all societies engage in identity work beyond ordinary social interaction. For people in religious groups, identity work may involve the subjective experience of interactions with spirit beings as in altered states of consciousness such as dreams, reverie, or trance. In memories, anticipations, and fantasies, secular Americans, too, may experience gratifying imaginary social interactions when they gain recognition and acclaim from imagined others. Unlike spirit relations these fantasies are (...) not culturally defined as “real.” However, like spirit relations, they may have very real effects on self‐maintenance. (shrink)

Shared intentions supporting cooperation and other social practices are often used to describe human social life but not the social lives of nonhuman animals. This difference in description is supported by a lack of evidence for rebuke or stakeholding during collaboration in nonhuman animals. We suggest that rebuke and stakeholding are just two examples of the many and varied forms of social maintenance that can support shared intentions. Drawing on insights about mindshaping in social cognition, we show how apes (...) can be stakeholders of a different sort in joint action. Drawing on pluralistic social maintenance methods of behavior enforcement, we show ape joint action can be supported by different forms of positive and negative social pressures, and not just protest. We explain how diverse relationships, contexts, social structures, and forms of communication may play a role in forming and successfully fulfilling joint commitments for humans, great apes, and other animals. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a domain-specific, open access, reference ontology (ROMAIN) for the maintenance management domain. We use a hybrid approach, based on a top-down alignment to an open sourc...

This article, through a case study of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), traces the reception, experimentation with, and uses of radium in early twentieth-century Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century there was increasing state intervention in the provision of scientific and technical education in Ireland. This culminated in the loss of the RDS's traditional role in this area. The article demonstrates that the RDS was forced to re-envisage its role as a scientific institution by actively seeking to support experimental research. Using (...) radium as a case study, the article argues for the success of this tactic. It demonstrates that radium played a central role within the RDS as a nexus for the maintenance of an experimental and philanthropic culture that permeated much of the society's scientific output in this period. In doing this it highlights the importance of sociability in the promotion of science in Ireland in the early twentieth century. In addition, it explores the role of the RDS as an arbiter of scientific authority. (shrink)

Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic authority. Drawing on 15 video-recorded church workplace meetings between pastors and cantors as data, and conversation analysis as a (...) theoretical and methodological framework, I analyze situations where a non-expert participant makes a proposal that the expert participant orients to as reasonable to comply with. Specifically, I demonstrate how the expert participants respond to these proposals with displays of deontic authority, arguably in an attempt to maintain their expert identities in the face of their de facto compliance with the proposals. In these situations, the expert participants are shown to invoke a past decision of their own, a future decision of their own, or a pattern that is beyond both participants’ control. Each of these practices involves the expert participant balancing resistance and compliance by minimally acknowledging the content of the non-expert participant’s proposal, while excluding the non-expert from those who have deontic authority in the matter. In so doing, the expert speaker implies that the non-expert proposal speaker lacks procedural knowledge about the specific matters about which it is relevant to make proposals to experts and access to the distinct experiential perspective that characterizes expert perception of things. It is thus argued that, in this context, the mere claims of deontic authority, produced without any substantial displays of expert knowledge, can serve the maintenance of expert professional identities. (shrink)

We examine the framing mechanisms used to maintain a cross-sector partnership that was created to address a complex long-term social issue. We study the first 8 years of existence of an XSP that aims to create a market for recycled phosphorus, a nutrient that is critical to crop growth but whose natural reserves have dwindled significantly. Drawing on 27 interviews and over 3000 internal documents, we study the evolution of different frames used by diverse actors in an XSP. We demonstrate (...) the role of framing in helping actors to avoid some of the common pitfalls for an XSP, such as debilitating conflict, and in creating sufficient common ground to sustain collaboration. As opposed to a commonly held assumption in the XSP literature, we find that collaboration in a partnership does not have to result in a unanimous agreement around a single or convergent frame regarding a contentious issue. Rather, successful collaboration between diverse partners can also be achieved by maintaining a productive tension between different frames through “optimal” frame plurality—not excessive frame variety that may prevent agreements from emerging, but the retention of a select few frames and the deletion of others toward achieving a narrowing frame bandwidth. One managerial implication is that resources need not be focussed on reaching a unanimous agreement among all partners on a single mega-frame vis-à-vis a contentious issue, but can instead be used to kindle a sense of unity in diversity that allows sufficient common ground to emerge, despite the variety of actors and their positions. (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. (...) In Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Protecting women and children is one of the core values of the Islamic legal tradition. In Muslim countries religious, constitutional, and legal frameworks obligate the state to take special measures to provide protection to women and children within families and in society. However, despite such provisions, post-divorce maintenance rights are not granted to women in Pakistan and Iran. Family law enacted in Pakistan and Iran still differs in form and substance from what has been mentioned in the primary sources (...) of Islamic law and from the previous articulations of early Islamic law scholars. Moreover, patriarchal notions of male authority are still sustained through law and judicial interpretations when it comes to the question of giving post-divorce maintenance to women. As a result in the absence of a welfare system divorced women are left in a vulnerable situation. Although in Iran, some financial compensation under the concept of Ujrat ul Misl is given to divorced women, but it remains unclear whether the right to Mata’at-ul-Talaq has been recognised under the family law. In Pakistan the law does not include any provision for giving women Ujrat ul Misl and Mata’at- ul -Talaq. Moreover in the absence of a welfare system, divorced Muslim women in both countries are left in a vulnerable situation. This article engages with plural normative sources and contemporary notions of human rights to make the case for family law reform and for awarding post-divorce maintenance rights to Muslim women in Pakistan and Iran. (shrink)

Maintenance decision errors can result in very costly problems. The 4th industrial revolution has given new opportunities for the development of and use of intelligent decision support systems. With these technological advancements, key concerns focus on gaining a better understanding of the linkage between the technicians’ knowledge and the intelligent decision support systems. The research reported in this study has two primary objectives. To propose a theoretical model that links technicians’ knowledge and intelligent decision support systems, and to present (...) a use case how to apply the theoretical model. The foundation of the new model builds upon two main streams of study in the decision support literature: “distribution” of knowledge among different agents, and “collaboration” of knowledge for reaching a shared goal. This study resulted in the identification of two main gaps: firstly, there must be a greater focus upon the technicians’ knowledge; secondly, technicians need assistance to maintain their focus on the big picture. We used the cognitive fit theory, and the theory of distributed situation awareness to propose the new theoretical model called “distributed collaborative awareness model.” The model considers both explicit and implicit knowledge and accommodates the dynamic challenges involved in operational level maintenance. As an application of this model, we identify and recommend some technological developments required in augmented reality based maintenance decision support. (shrink)

Faithful DNA replication and accurate chromosome segregation are the key machineries of genetic transmission. Disruption of these processes represents a hallmark of cancer and often results from loss of tumor suppressors. PTEN is an important tumor suppressor that is frequently mutated or deleted in human cancer. Loss of PTEN has been associated with aneuploidy and poor prognosis in cancer patients. In mice, Pten deletion or mutation drives genomic instability and tumor development. PTEN deficiency induces DNA replication stress, confers stress tolerance, (...) and disrupts mitotic spindle architecture, leading to accumulation of structural and numerical chromosome instability. Therefore, PTEN guards the genome by controlling multiple processes of chromosome inheritance. Here, we summarize current understanding of the PTEN function in promoting high-fidelity transmission of genetic information. We also discuss the PTEN pathways of genome maintenance and highlight potential targets for cancer treatment. PTEN is a guardian of the genome. However, the role of PTEN in guarding the genome has not been revealed until recently. PTEN controls multiple fundamental processes of genomic transmission. By physically interacting with key molecules in DNA replication, DNA repair/decatenation, and chromosome segregation during the cell cycle, PTEN maintains genomicintegrity and fitness. (shrink)