This article explores the duality of law with regard to the LGBTQ+ community, examining both its historical regulation of non-heteronormative genders and sexualities and its contradictory potential to transcend such regulations over time. Situated within a postcolonial analytical framework, it undertakes a thematic overview and narrative appraisal of research materials, drawn from a diverse array of social science disciplinary intersections, spanning the timeline from 1990 to 2022, that expounds on the intricate and overlapping imbrications between law and the LGBTQ+ community (...) in India. It was observed that the extant academic deliberations on the subject are dispersed across disciplinary boundaries within the larger scope of humanities and social sciences, necessitating an integrative approach. By delving into the historical antecedents of the subject matter, the current findings are situated within four domains, namely: i) the colonial nexus; ii) the postcolonial public redress; and iii) other domains of sustained legal contestation, such as healthcare, workplace, media censorship, and the fraught terrain of identity and legal lexicon. (shrink)

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a pervasive difficulty affecting number processing and arithmetic. It is encountered in around 6% of school-aged children. While previous studies have mainly focused on general cognitive functions, the present paper aims to further investigate the hypothesis of a specific numerical deficit in dyscalculia. The performance of 10- and 11-year-old children with DD characterised by a weakness in arithmetic facts retrieval and age-matched control children was compared on various number comparison tasks. Participants were asked to compare a (...) quantity presented in either a symbolic (Arabic numerals, number words, canonical dots patterns) or a nonsymbolic format (noncanonical dots patterns, and random sticks patterns) to the reference quantity 5. DD children showed a greater numerical distance effect than control children, irrespective of the number format. This favours a deficit in the specialised cognitive system underlying the processing of number magnitude in children with DD. Results are discussed in terms of access and representation deficit hypotheses. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Why did Plato put his philosophical arguments into dialogues, rather than presenting them in a plain and readily understandable fashion? A group of distinguished scholars here offer answers to this question by studying the relation between form and argument in his late dialogues. These penetrating studies show that the literary structure of the dialogues is of vital importance in the ongoing interpretation of Plato.

L’article présente le projet ORFEO (outils pour l’étude du Français écrit et oral). Ce projet a consisté à rassembler 4M de mots de Français oral et 6M de mots d’écrit à partir de ressources existantes. Les ressources orales ont été unifiées dans un format trs et alignées avec les fichiers sons au phonème. Les corpus sont présentés avec des métadonnées qui permettent de constituer des sous-corpus d’étude. Les données orales ont été segmentées et annotées en POS et relations de dépendance (...) semi automatiquement. La précision des annotations a fait l’objet d’une évaluation. L’ensemble est interrogeable à partir d’une plateforme adaptée du logiciel libre ANNIS. La ressource sera mise à disposition en open source courant 2017. (shrink)

L’adjectif prochain fait partie de ces adjectifs que Schnedecker (2002a) nomme « les adjectifs du troisième type ». Ni qualificatifs ni relationnels, souvent marginalisés, ces derniers possèdent des caractéristiques qui n’ont fait l’objet d’aucune étude systématique sur corpus. Nous nous proposons de combler cette lacune en réalisant une analyse distributionnelle de prochain dans différents genres textuels (oraux et écrits). Dans un premier temps, l’analyse portera sur les phénomènes de sélection lexicale qui apparaissent dans les emplois attestés et qui semblent fortement (...) conditionnés par la position de l’adjectif par rapport à son nom recteur. Nous verrons également que le nombre du nom recteur impose des contraintes d’emploi qui ont été peu détaillées dans les travaux antérieurs. Dans un deuxième temps, nous nous intéresserons aux noms recteurs, tels fois, saison et siècle, dont le fonctionnement diffère. L’étude sera l’occasion de comparer la description sur corpus avec celle proposée par Berthonneau (2002), basée sur une analyse introspective. La comparaison permettra de mettre en évidence les spécificités et les limites des deux approches. Une démarche similaire sera développée à partir des entrées de quelques dictionnaires. Au-delà de l’analyse de détail, l’article a pour objectif de présenter les bases descriptives permettant de problématiser le statut catégoriel de prochain. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the centrality of permaculture design courses as the principal sociopolitical strategy of the permaculture community in Canada to transform local food production practices. Building on the work of Antonio Gramsci and political agroecology as a framework of analysis, we argue that permaculture instruction remains deeply embedded within market and colonial relations, which orients the pedagogy of permaculture trainings in such a way as to reproduce the basic elements of the colonial capitalist economy among its practitioners. In (...) the specific case of eastern Ontario, this embeddedness had the effect of diluting the transformative capacity of permaculture practitioners who were unable to create its own social movement organization. The paper then highlights key elements of the agroecological pedagogy used by the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement and the Escola Latinoamericana de Agroecología in Paraná, Brazil. The objective is to draw lessons from these inspiring experiences, in a rather unique context of struggles that can help to critically assess the pedagogical practices and principles presently informing permaculture communities in Canada and in advanced industrialized countries more generally. We then conclude by reiterating the key arguments and lessons drawn from the Brazilian pedagogical experiences, pointing out the importance of engagement and coalition-building with established rural and urban movements, as well as progressive farmer, Indigenous, and rural associations to foster a just and sustainable transformation of agri-food systems, starting at the local and regional levels. It also emphasizes the need for the most marginalized sectors to lead the way towards an agroecological transition. (shrink)

Prior studies have shown a general preference among citizens for juries over judges. Researchers, however, have not considered whether race and ethnicity modify this preference. We hypothesized that minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics), who generally express less trust in the legal system, may also express less trust in juries than non-Hispanic whites. We asked a representative sample of 1,465 residents of Texas to state whether they would prefer a jury or a judge to be the decision maker in four hypothetical circumstances. Consistent (...) with expectations, non-Hispanic whites favored juries over judges, particularly if they imagined themselves as a defendant in a criminal trial. By comparison, although African-Americans and some Hispanics generally favored juries, they showed a much weaker set of jury preferences. African Americans had markedly lower support for the civil jury, but support was higher among minorities with prior jury service. Among Hispanics, respondents who took the survey in Spanish typically preferred a judge to make legal decisions. We consider the implications of our findings for trust in the jury system and trust in community members as decision makers. (shrink)

Future practitioners of sustainable agriculture and agroecology must have the capacity to address the wicked problems in the food system to make progress toward sustainability. Undergraduate sustainable agriculture students from a variety of backgrounds may struggle with the question, is the challenging and complex work of addressing wicked problems of agroecology for me? Our case study investigated sociocultural tensions associated with identity encountered when wicked problems teaching units were integrated into the Advanced Practices of Sustainable Agriculture course at a large, (...) Midwestern Land Grant University. The research and course employed a four-part framework that focused on attending to individual needs and identities, facilitating practice-based and community-based learning, engaging in problems situated in regional contexts, and supporting awareness of local and global political and ecological issues. Researchers used a community of practice theoretical lens, and focused on the sociocultural tensions that may have impacted individual and community identity formation. Two wicked problems teaching units are described by drawing upon documentation and audio recordings from planning meetings, course sessions, student and instructor interviews, and course artifacts. Vignettes were constructed to situate four interrelated types of sociocultural tensions encountered by instructors and students. These tensions reflected forces at the individual, community, local, and global levels which interact to influence learners’ capacity to become full participants in sustainable agriculture. The study fills a gap related to affective dimensions of learning like identity in agroecology education. Dilemmas and implications related to identity, pedagogy, and epistemology are discussed. (shrink)

L'idée que la concentration géographique est essentielle au processus d'innovation est largement admise. Or, ce lien n'est pas clairement établi et il convient de réinterroger les relations entre communication, localisation et processus d'innovation. Cet article s'attache à le faire en privilégiant une entrée par les dynamiques de proximité, c'est-à-dire par la question de la coordination des acteurs. Nous identifions dans un premier temps le rôle de la proximité entre les différentes parties prenantes du processus d'innovation. Nous proposons ensuite une typologie (...) de la diversité des configurations spatiales de l'innovation en tenant compte du jeu dynamique des proximités.The idea that geographic concentration is essential to the process of innovation is widely recognized. However, this relationship is not clear and should re-examine the relationship between communication, location and process innovation. This article attempts to do so by favoring entry dynamics proximity, that is to say, by the issue of coordination of the actors. We identify firstly the role of proximity between the various stakeholders in the innovation process. We then propose a typology of the diversity of spatial patterns of innovation taking into account the dynamic interplay of proximity. (shrink)

Extensive progress has been made recently in understanding the mechanism by which cells move and extend protrusions using site‐directed polymerization of actin in response to signalling. Insights into the molecular mechanism of production of force and movement by actin polymerization have been provided by a crosstalk between several disciplines, including biochemistry, biomimetic approaches and computational studies. This review focuses on the biochemical properties of the proteins involved in actin‐based motility and shows how these properties are used to generate models of (...) force production, how the predictions of different theoretical models are tested using a biochemically controlled reconstituted motility assay and how the changes in motility resulting from changes to the concentrations of components of the assay can help understand diverse aspects of the motile behavior of living cells. BioEssays 25:336–345, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

It has become a truism that the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary and must help guide technological developments. Numerous ethical guidelines have emerged from academia, industry, government and civil society in recent years. While they provide a basis for discussion on appropriate regulation of AI, it is not always clear how these ethical guidelines were developed, and by whom. Using content analysis, we surveyed a sample of the major documents (_n_ = 47) and analyzed the accessible information regarding (...) their methodology and stakeholder engagement. Surprisingly, only 38% report some form of stakeholder engagement (with 9% involving citizens) and most do not report their methodology for developing normative insights (15%). Our results show that documents with stakeholder engagement develop more comprehensive ethical guidance with greater applicability, and that the private sector is least likely to engage stakeholders. We argue that the current trend for enunciating AI ethical guidance not only poses widely discussed challenges of applicability in practice, but also of transparent development (as it rather behaves as a black box) and of active engagement of diversified, independent and trustworthy stakeholders. While most of these documents consider people and the common good as central to their telos, engagement with the general public is significantly lacking. As AI ethics moves from the initial race for enunciating general principles to more sustainable, inclusive and practical guidance, stakeholder engagement and citizen involvement will need to be embedded into the framing of ethical and societal expectations towards this technology. (shrink)

Ethics is an unconventional field of research for a surgeon, as ethics in surgery owns several specificities and surgery is considered an aggressive specialty. Therefore, the interest of research in medical ethics is sometimes unclear.In this short essay, we discussed the interest of research in medical ethics using a comparison to thermodynamics and mainly, entropy. During the transformation of a figure from one state to another, some energy is released or absorbed; yet, a part of this energy is wasted because (...) of “unordered” reactions: it is Entropy.This “wasted energy” exists in Medical practice and justifies research in Medical ethics. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of recognising the ethical dimension of clinical decision-making. Medical professional regulatory authorities in some countries now include ethical knowledge and practice in their required competencies for undergraduate and post graduate medical training. Educational interventions and clinical ethics support services have been developed to support and improve ethical decision making in clinical practice, but research evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions has been limited. We undertook a systematic review of (...) the published literature on measures or models of evaluation used to assess the impact of interventions to improve ethical decision making in clinical care. We identified a range of measures to evaluate educational interventions, and one tool used to evaluate a clinical ethics support intervention. Most measures did not evaluate the key impact of interest, that is the quality of ethical decision making in real-world clinical practice. We describe the results of our review and reflect on the challenges of assessing ethical decision making in clinical practice that face both developers of educational and support interventions and the regulatory organisations that set and assess competency standards. (shrink)

Les prestataires de soins de santé (HCP) ont joué un rôle central dans l'endiguement de la pandémie de COVID-19. Bien que potentiellement très bénéfique, la mise en oeuvre de tests sérologiques rapides à grande échelle soulève des dilemmes éthiques et affecte la capacité des HCP à travailler dans des conditions optimales. À cet égard, nous appelons l'attention sur les questions éthiques spécifiques et urgentes qui affectent de manière distincte les HCP suite à la disponibilité et à l'éventuelle utilisation obligatoire de (...) tests sérologiques rapides pour COVID-19. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

There is little information about the content of ethics consultations in pediatrics. We sought to describe the reasons for consultation and ethical principles addressed during EC in pediatrics through retrospective review and directed content analysis of EC records at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Patient-based EC were highly complex and often involved evaluation of parental decision making, particularly consideration of the risks and benefits of a proposed medical intervention, and the physician's fiduciary responsibility to the patient. Nonpatient consultations provided guidance (...) in the development of institutional policies that would broadly affect patients and families. This is one of the few existing reviews of the content of pediatric EC and indicates that the distribution of ethical issues and reasons for moral distress are different than with adults. Pediatric EC often facilitates complex decision making among multiple stakeholders, and further prospective research is need.. (shrink)

Drug exceptional access programs (DEAPs) exist across Canada to address gaps in access to pharmaceuticals. These programs circumvent standard procedures, raising epistemic, economic, social and political issues. This commentary provides insights into these issues by revealing the context and procedures on which these programs depend.

Building on the recent scholarship of Bonnie Kent, Christian Trottmann, and especially L.M. de Rijk, this volume gathers together studies by other specialists on Odonis, covering his ideas in economics, logic, metaphysics, ethics, natural ...

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 126-131, April 2022. Engaging citizens and patients in research has become a truism in many fields of health research. It is now seen as a laudable—if not compulsory—activity in research for yielding more impactful and meaningful citizen/patient outcomes and steering research in the right direction. Although this research approach is increasingly common and commendable, we recently encountered a major obstacle in obtaining an ethics certificate from an institutional review board to conduct a study (...) that places citizen/patient perspectives on equal footing with those of academic/policy experts. The obstacle was the interpretation of fairness in terms of compensation for research participation. In terms of research ethics, this raised an important question: Should all types of participants be compensated equally, or should exceptions be made for citizen/patient participants? We argue that there are good reasons for exceptionalism and that clearer guidance on citizen/patient engagement in research should be embedded into research ethics doctrine. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 18-20, October 2012.

Analysis of sites of newly integrated DNA in cellular genomes is important to several fields, but methods for analyzing and visualizing these datasets are still under development. Here, we describe tools for data analysis and visualization that take as input integration site data from our INSPIIRED pipeline. Paired-end sequencing allows inference of the numbers of transduced cells as well as the distributions of integration sites in target genomes. We present interactive heatmaps that allow comparison of distributions of integration sites to (...) genomic features and that support numerous user-defined statistical tests. To summarize integration site data from human gene therapy samples, we developed a reproducible report format that catalogs sample population structure, longitudinal dynamics, and integration frequency near cancer-associated genes. We also introduce a novel summary statistic, the UC50, which provides a single number summarizing possible clonal expansion. Using these tools, we characterize ongoing longitudinal characterization of a patient from the first trial to treat severe combined immunodeficiency-X1, showing successful reconstitution for 15 years accompanied by persistence of a cell clone with an integration site near the cancer-associated gene CCND2. Software is available at https://github.com/BushmanLab/INSPIIRED. (shrink)

This paper presents our work on textual inference and situates it within the context of the larger goals of machine reading. The textual inference task is to determine if the meaning of one text can be inferred from the meaning of another and from background knowledge. Our system generates semantic graphs as a representation of the meaning of a text. This paper presents new results for aligning pairs of semantic graphs, and proposes the application of natural logic to derive inference (...) decisions from those aligned pairs. We consider this work as first steps toward a system able to demonstrate broad-coverage text understanding and learning abilities. (shrink)

Philosophical issues of hospitality are bound up with broader issues of cosmopolitanism in thought and in practice. This paper considers the interplay of human faces, masks, forms of hospitality, and cosmopolitanizing and anti-cosmopolitanizing socio-political dynamics in the time of Covid-19. Despite confident assertions by some interested parties that it is now finished and past history, Covid-19 remains a major challenge across the globe, and so reflections on the interplay of masking, cosmopolitanism, and hospitality remain pertinent today and are not merely (...) a quaint feature of life during the early years of the pandemic. Voluntary acts of self-masking are argued to be more than just mundane forms of micro-level action and interaction among persons. Instead, freighted sometimes with political meaning, and certainly loaded with ethical force, the donning of a face mask can operate as a small but compelling quotidian act of cosmopolitan concern and hospitableness towards other people, including those perceived to be very unlike oneself. (shrink)

Cognitive theories of depression assert that negative self-referent cognition has a causal role in the development and maintenance of depression symptoms, but few studies have examined temporal associations between these constructs using intensive, longitudinal sampling strategies. In three samples of undergraduate students, we examined associations between change in self-referent processing and depression across 5 daily assessments (Sample 1, N = 303, 1,194 measurements, 79% adherence), 7 daily assessments (Sample 2, N = 313, 1,784 measurements, 81% adherence), and 7 weekly assessments (...) (Sample 3; N = 155, 833 measurements, 81% adherence). Random intercept cross-lagged panel models indicated large cross-lagged effects in two of the three samples (Samples 1 and 3 but not Sample 2), such that more negative self-referent thinking than usual was significantly associated with a subsequent increase in depression symptoms at the next time lag. Notably, change in depression from usual was not associated with increases in negative self-referent processing at the next time point in any sample. These findings suggest that change in negative self-referent processing may be causally linked to future increases in depression on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, although confidence in this conclusion is tempered somewhat by a lack of replication in Sample 2. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Recently three studies have reported on the test-retest reliability of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity; however, these studies were limited to comparatively small samples . The present study examined the temporal stability of the 7-item version of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity over a 15-week period among a sample of 581 English children aged between 10 and 12 years. Data demonstrated that stability across the two administrations was very high ; however, there was a significant change (...) in mean scores between Time 1 and Time 2. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)