Jules Michelet Historian, Philosopher, Naturalist A vast, all-embracing literary personality dominates Michelet's works: that of the author. ...

A primary proposal of the Cowan target article is that capacity limits arise in working memory because only 4 chunks of information can be attended at one time. This implies a single, unitary attentional focus or resource; we instead propose that relatively independent attentional mech- anisms operate within different cognitive subsystems depending on the demands of the current stimuli and tasks.

A psychology, Phenomenology and ontology of creativity developed by this french epistemologist and historian of science (1884-1962) are systematically described. Starting from analysis of image networks in literature, Bachelard presents imagination as autonomous, A power of human transcendence, A force preceding perception and memory. He ultimately surpasses psychological reductionism. Imagination of form is inferior to imagination of matter (depth); yet they both are secondary to dynamic imagination. Bachelard's fundamental method is a phenomenological study of images as origins of consciousness; a (...) phenomenology of reverie and writing underlies his ontology. Reverie is the model upon which imaginative consciousness is judged. Man should extend the freedom and beauty of his inner cosmos to enhance relation with the world. (shrink)

Teaching business ethics to undergraduates has disclosed difficulties for both students and teacher which raise deeper issues about what is the purpose of teaching ethics and of engaging in business. The author is Lecturer in Business Ethics in the Faculty of Business and Social Studies, Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 4AZ, UK.

Biobanks are increasingly being created specifically for research purposes. Concomitantly, we are seeing significant and evolving shifts in research ethics in relation to biobanking. Three discrete shifts are identified in this article. The first extends the ethical focus beyond the protection of human subjects to the promotion of broader community benefits of research utilizing biobanked resources, and an expectation that these benefits will be shared. The second involves the evolution of the traditional consent paradigm for future research uses of biobanks (...) resources that are not in contemplation at the time of donation. The third involves a move away from single project management to more dynamic governance accountability to research participants and the public. These shifts may take different local and institutional forms but share common recognizable elements. (shrink)

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

The capacity of visual working memory (VWM) refers to the amount of visual information that can be maintained in mind at once, readily accessible for ongoing tasks. In healthy young adults, the capacity limit of VWM corresponds to about three simple objects. While some researchers argued that VWM capacity becomes adult-like in early years of life, others claimed that the capacity of VWM continues to develop beyond middle childhood. Here we assessed whether VWM capacity reaches adult levels in adolescence. Using (...) an adaptation of the visual change detection task, we measured visual working memory capacity estimates in 13 year-olds, 16-year-olds, and young adults. We tested whether the capacity estimates observed in early or later years of adolescence were comparable to the estimates obtained from adults. Our results demonstrated that the capacity of VWM continues to develop throughout adolescence, not reaching adult levels even in 16 year-olds. These findings suggest that VWM capacity displays a prolonged development, similar to the protracted trajectories observed in various other aspects of cognition. (shrink)

In the mouse, at least 16 genes regulate vesicle trafficking to specialized lysosome‐related organelles, including platelet dense granules and melanosomes. Fourteen of these genes have been identified by positional cloning. All 16 mouse mutants are models for the genetically heterogeneous human disease, Hermansky–Pudlak Syndrome (HPS). Five HPS genes encode known vesicle trafficking proteins. Nine genes are novel, are found only in higher eukaryotes and encode members of three protein complexes termed BLOCs (Biogenesis of Lysosome‐related Organelles Complexes). Mutations in murine HPS (...) genes, which encode protein co‐members of BLOCs, produce essentially identical phenotypes. In addition to their well‐known effects on pigmentation, platelet function and lysosome secretion, HPS genes control a wide range of physiological processes including immune recognition, neuronal functions and lung surfactant trafficking. Studies of the molecular functions of HPS proteins will reveal important details of vesicle trafficking and may lead to therapies for HPS. BioEssays 26:616–628, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

It is proposed that the Darwinian theoretical approach and account of living systems has not yet been clearly given. A first approximation to this is attempted, focussing on behavior in evolving environments. A theoretical terminology is defined emphasizing the mutuality of organism and environment and the existence of biologically theoretical entities.