Fencing for the blind and visually impaired is an emerging sub-discipline of fencing that creates unusual conditions for meaning-making through interaction between embodied endowments and worldly affordances. With the rules of fencing slightly adjusted to the needs of the blindfolded participants – regardless of their sightedness – the discipline requires the fencers to engage in a duel by relying on other than visual cues. This article explores what an autoethnographic account of experiences of participation in fencing (...) for the blind and visually impaired brings to debates on the embodied, and specifically sensory difference. The discussion of these experiences intersects with debates on affect, affordance, and habit, with all three having important roles in related semiotic processes. Presented vignettes draw upon the author’s lived experiences of participation in fencing for the blind and visually impaired and are analyzed as part of a mixed-method autoethnographic study, accompanied by sensory methodologies, with a focus on an inquiry beyond the visual. The vignettes elucidate how we make sense of our surroundings through a complex engagement with the ecology of sensory and affective processes. In addition to exploring the role of affective and pre-conceptual aspects of our experiences, the article seeks to understand how semiosis occurs through both exposure to as well as the active pursuit of specific environmental signs available to us. The article also derives from biosemiotics to examine the complex relationship between meaning-making processes and habits. Finally, the autoethnographic account provides an insight into how we habituate the world and our embodied differences and thus enable meaning-making processes. (shrink)

Occupational fraud frequently involves the direct or indirect participation of professional accountants. To reduce fraud, companies often focus on the incentive/pressure and opportunity legs of the fraud triangle, perhaps believing that rationalization is beyond their control. We argue that rationalization reduction is necessary to minimize occupational fraud. We propose that educators and PA consider incorporating fences as controls to reduce rationalization. Because they focus on compliance and risk avoidance and are non-negotiable, fences appeal to accountant’s Myers Briggs personalities and conventional (...) level of moral development. Educators can teach students about the fences used in practice, and explain how they help new professionals resist pressures and temptations. By adding fences to existing professional guidance, accountants can reduce the likelihood that they will be a party to fraud. (shrink)

(2013). Electronic Fences Make Good Neighbors: The Importance of Medical Records Managers to Protecting Autonomy. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 50-52. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2013.767965.

This essay explores the parallel development of fencing theory and philosophy in early modern Europe, and suggests that each field significantly influenced the other. Arguably, neither philosophy nor fencing would be the same today had the two not been engaged in this particular cultural symbiosis. An analysis is given of the philosophic content within several historical fencing treatises and of the position of fencing in seventeenth and eighteenth-century education and courtly life. Two case studies are then (...) examined: the influence of the fencing master Charles Besnard on the intellectual development of Descartes, and the fencing master William Hope’s appropriation of the ideas of John Locke. (shrink)

Crossing the border into the moral domain changes moral thinking in two ways: (1) the facts at hand become “anthropocentric” facts not easily open to revision, and (2) moral reasoning is often the servant of moral intuitions, making it difficult for people to challenge their own intuitions. Sunstein's argument is sound, but policy makers are likely to resist.

Bayesian reasoning, defined here as the updating of a posterior probability following new information, has historically been problematic for humans. Classic psychology experiments have tested human Bayesian reasoning through the use of word problems and have evaluated each participant’s performance against the normatively correct answer provided by Bayes’ theorem. The standard finding is of generally poor performance. Over the past two decades, though, progress has been made on how to improve Bayesian reasoning. Most notably, research has demonstrated that the use (...) of frequencies in a natural sampling framework —as opposed to single-event probabilities—can improve participants’ Bayesian estimates. Furthermore, pictorial aids and certain individual difference factors also can play significant roles in Bayesian reasoning success. The mechanics of how to build tasks which show these improvements is not under much debate. The explanations for why naturally-sampled frequencies and pictures help Bayesian reasoning remain hotly contested, however, with many researchers falling into ingrained “camps” organized around two dominant theoretical perspectives. The present paper evaluates the merits of these theoretical perspectives, including the weight of empirical evidence, theoretical coherence, and predictive power. By these criteria, the ecological rationality approach is clearly better than the heuristics and biases view. Progress in the study of Bayesian reasoning will depend on continued research that honestly, vigorously, and consistently engages across these different theoretical accounts rather than staying “siloed” within one particular perspective. The process of science requires an understanding of competing points of view, with the ultimate goal being integration. (shrink)

We are in places. Some places beckon us, some are to be avoided, and some are banal. However, this emplacement urges reflection. In this essay I consider the role of place in environmental experiences, beginning with analysis of the concepts of place and space that motivate the development of four environmental imaginaries (extractive, wilderness, managed, and reciprocal). Ultimately, through a discussion of fences, I aim to show how place-meanings are materially inscribed on the landscape while evidencing the value of place-based (...) analysis to understanding the ways these landscapes are shaped by and serve to shape experience. (shrink)

In response to Helmut Heid's critique of domesticated philosophical critique, I focus on the metaphor of domestication, which is central to his article. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I offer a deconstructive critique of the opposition between domesticated and undomesticated critique, arguing that a clear conceptual demarcation between the two is impossible, and that ‘domesticated’ and ‘undomesticated’ critique always carry each other's traces. I explore connections between the undomesticated and das Unheimliche (Freud's ‘Uncanny’), as well as differences between (...) Helmut Heid's and Paulo Freire's interpretation and use of the concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘liberation’. Lastly, I examine how educators might go about a pedagogy of critique. I argue that critique can and should be understood and taught as a tradition, but one that is heterogeneous rather than monolithic. A careful reception of this translated and metonymic tradition of critique will enable students to see the spaces in which new critique—and critique of critique— is possible. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn order to properly understand how expert disagreement should be dealt with, it is essential to grasp how expert opinion is used in the reasoning process by which humans reach conclusions and make decisions. This paper utilises the tools of argumentation theory, specifically Douglas Walton’s argument schemes, and variations upon them, in order to examine how patterns of reasoning are affected by the presence of conflicting testimony. This study suggests that although it may be supplemented with the construction of epistemic (...) hierarchies, the scheme of reasoning for the appeal to expert opinion provides no mechanism for establishing a preference for one expert statement over another, making it impossible to reach any rational conclusion as to the likely truth of the matter. Further, it is also argued that other schemes for presumptive argumentation are either unhelpful in themselves or lead to unwanted consequences. (shrink)

Film has not always been kind to farmed animals, maltreatment ranging from horrendous cruelty to anthropomorphization and training under duress. Admittedly, many fine documentaries have been made on maltreatment, but many of these tend to see farmed animals as a mass, with deindividuation leading to a psychic numbing in those watching. In contrast, narrative films on this theme generally have the farmed animal protagonists as human-like in being able to converse in the language of the people around them and generally (...) with happily-ever-after endings, subverting the reality for most farmed animals. Writers on animal rights generally neglect film as a medium and its relationship to farmed animals. This article sets out a farmed animal rights manifesto (FARM) for film, aimed at overcoming these problems in insisting on ethical treatment in all ways. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Good Neighbors Make Good Fences: Frost’s “Mending Wall”Zev TrachtenbergDefenders of the institution of private property have considered at length its benefits to individuals: for Aristotle it allows for the practice of certain virtues; for Hegel it allows for the expression of free human personality. 1 Property is also, of course, seen as the foundation of political society: for Locke men form government to enforce their property rights; for Jefferson (...) property enables citizens to participate in their institutions of self-government. 2But there is a level of human experience between simple individuality and the formal rules and rights articulated and enforced by society. I have in mind the more immediate form of human association evoked by the word community. Let me offer a rough-and-ready distinction. The social contract tradition prompts us to think of society in terms of the cooperative human enterprise of protecting individuals’ interests; the concept of society calls to mind formal voluntary agreements and associations, contracts, the economy, ultimately laws and rights. 3 We can think of community, by contrast, in affective terms; it calls to mind the direct human relations of people who share a place and mode of living. 4 A society has laws and a government; a community has customs and a culture.In this essay, then, I want to explore the relationship between property and community. It is, I think, an ambiguous one: property can be accused of corroding the human connections that constitute community life, but the maintenance of a property regime can also be seen as itself a communal enterprise. 5 This ambiguity is displayed vividly in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” 6 Reading the poem can help us see the complex ways in which property and community are intertwined. [End Page 114]I“Mending Wall” has two characters: its narrator and his neighbor, owners of adjacent farms, who meet each Spring to repair the stone wall that stands between their properties. The narrator, at first glance, seems to take a somewhat skeptical attitude toward property. (We shall see that his attitude is in fact more complicated.) The poem opens with his words “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”—a phrase he repeats later, making it a kind of slogan for the position on property he personifies. That position seems to reject human attempts to inscribe the arbitrary divisions of property holdings on the land. The narrator sees in natural processes an attempt to cast off this artificial imposition: that which doesn’t love a wall “sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, /And spills the upper boulders in the sun.” He recognizes that asserting a separation between the two parcels of property by erecting a wall is futile. For, he recognizes, the two parcels are one, connected underneath the wall by natural forces that work unconsciously but actively against human efforts to divide them.The neighbor, by contrast, speaks for an individualistic belief in the value of marking property holdings. “Good fences make good neighbors” are his only words in the poem, repeated in the last line like a counter-slogan to the narrator’s. The neighbor first offers his slogan in response to the fact that the wall is not needed for the practical purpose of keeping his and the narrator’s goods separate. Their goods do not need a wall to be kept apart: they have no cows to wander back and forth across the line, and the narrator’s “apple trees will never get across/And eat the cones under [the neighbor’s] pines.” For the neighbor, that is, the utility of the wall is not economic. Rather it serves to define the sort of relationship he wishes to have with those who surround him: his slogan expresses an ideology of human separation. In the neighbor’s eyes, apparently, all that makes a neighbor is the mere fact of owning an adjacent farm, hence what makes a good neighbor is his separateness. For what else could characterize the goodness of neighbors who are made good by fences?The neighbor thus personifies a position on property that disvalues community. Property is marked by walls, whose main function in his view... (shrink)

Focusing on the cultural implications of the relationship between white segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond and his biracial daughter Essie Mae Washington-Williams, this essay explores national narratives of whiteness, femininity, morality, and the institutionalization of sexual violence against black women.

Property and political obligation are central issues of Locke's Two Treatises of Government. It is agreed that obligation is somehow contingent upon the government's protecting the property of its members. But ‘property’ in the Two Treatises had two meanings — in the state of nature usually referring to material possessions but in civil society meaning ‘life, liberty and estate’ — and its relationship to political obligation is complex. This complexity results from Locke's varying accounts of the movement from the state (...) of nature to civil society: he combined a traditional natural law justification of ownership with a legalist and semi-Aristotelian conception of the ends of and limitations on the state; he failed to provide a full account of the obligation of landless residents; he left unsettled difficulties inherent in the concept ‘property’ itself. Locke's notions of ‘trust’ and the ‘public good’ pointed to solutions to be worked out by future generations. (shrink)

The use of virtual fencing in pasture-grazed farm systems is currently close to commercial reality but there are no studies applying the principles of responsible research and innovation, such as foresighting, to this technology. This paper reports results of a study aimed at foresighting potential implications associated with virtual fencing of cattle. A Delphi method was used to survey the opinions of farming practitioners and researchers, using pasture-grazed cattle farming in New Zealand as a case study. The key (...) benefits were identified as environmental protection, improved feed allocation, access to previously unavailable grazing areas, labour savings and individual animal management. The five most important potential barriers identified were device reliability, farmer perception of a value proposition, ethical issues related to community perception of negative animal welfare, lack of feed budgeting skills of farmers, and excessive training time. We suggest that more knowledge is needed on ethical issues associated with VF, including understanding public opinions of such technology developments. We suggest that development and use of VF has been focussed primarily on technical features and user benefits and needs to include consideration of wider socio-ethical principles to ensure responsible innovation processes. The findings from this study will aid focussed research and development to incorporate ethically acceptable development alongside technical factors. (shrink)

The present research aimed to provide a more holistic analysis of stressful experiences in sport by examining how stress appraisal, coping and emotion are dynamically inter-related constructs and the extent to which their dynamic relationship is associated with objective performance. Based on process-oriented methods, two studies were conducted with elite athletes in order to investigate the dynamic relationship between these constructs and performance in highly demanding sport situations (Study 1: simulated competitive fencing matches during a training session; Study 2: (...) real-life competitive fencing matches during an international competition). The results of the random coefficient regression models emphasise the dynamic nature of the relationship between stress appraisal, coping behaviour, emotion and objective performance over the course of fencing matches. They allowed identification of additional mediating effects of coping and emotion within dynamic relationships between stress appraisal and performance. These studies contribute to a deeper understanding of psychological adaptation in performance environments. The implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the design of effective coping interventions to support the learning of performance-related coping skills and the attainment of performance goals among individuals in highly demanding environments. (shrink)

This field study aims to explore the effect of the forced separation between Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and Palestinians living in the West Bank on their perceptions of collective narratives (Sagy et al. in Am J Orthopsychiatry 72(1): 26–38, 2002) and their identity strategies (Berry in Nebraska symposium on motivation, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990; Tajfel in Human groups and social categories, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981). Two questionnaires, based on the theoretical categories and contents revealed in focus (...) groups, were administered to wide ranging samples, comprised of 1,104 Palestinians who are Israeli citizens (622 females), and 948 Palestinians (466 females) living in the West Bank, aged 18 and up. The results indicate differences between the two Palestinian groups: Palestinians living in the West Bank significantly tended to endorse integration and blamed Israel for the separation, but also endorsed separation and social competition with the other Palestinian group, in comparison to the Palestinians living in Israel. The latter exhibited stronger tendencies to preserve their in-group collective narratives compared to the West Bank Palestinians. The older members of both groups perceived the intergroup relations in a more positive way. The results are mainly interpreted according to the social identity theory and the complex situation of living “on both sides of the fence”. (shrink)

Neuroscientific research in relation to antisocial behavior has strongly grown in the last decades. This has resulted in a better understanding of biological factors associated with antisocial behavior. Furthermore several neuroscientific instruments and interventions have been developed that have a relatively low threshold for use in the criminal justice system to contribute to prevention or reduction of antisocial and criminal behavior. When considering implementation in the criminal justice system, ethical aspects of the use of neuroscientific instruments and interventions need to (...) be taken into account. With respect to ethics in relation to neurocriminology much of the literature focuses on identifying and debating risks and value conflicts. This is important and necessary, but the positive contribution of neuroscientific applications may therefore get less attention in the ethical literature. Yet, ethicists can help criminal justice researchers and practitioners to identify ways in which neuroscience could add positively to important values in (young) offender rehabilitation. It is argued that this role of ethicists in interdisciplinary teams deserves more emphasis. As an illustration, this contribution focuses on how neuroscientific knowledge, instruments and interventions may contribute to autonomy of (young) offenders. (shrink)

Neuroscientific research in relation to antisocial behavior has strongly grown in the last decades. This has resulted in a better understanding of biological factors associated with antisocial behavior. Furthermore several neuroscientific instruments and interventions have been developed that have a relatively low threshold for use in the criminal justice system to contribute to prevention or reduction of antisocial and criminal behavior. When considering implementation in the criminal justice system, ethical aspects of the use of neuroscientific instruments and interventions need to (...) be taken into account. With respect to ethics in relation to neurocriminology much of the literature focuses on identifying and debating risks and value conflicts. This is important and necessary, but the positive contribution of neuroscientific applications may therefore get less attention in the ethical literature. Yet, ethicists can help criminal justice researchers and practitioners to identify ways in which neuroscience could add positively to important values in offender rehabilitation. It is argued that this role of ethicists in interdisciplinary teams deserves more emphasis. As an illustration, this contribution focuses on how neuroscientific knowledge, instruments and interventions may contribute to autonomy of offenders. (shrink)

This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of (...) the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air. (shrink)

Intellectual historians have rarely attended to the genre of fighting manuals, but these provide a new window on long-debated questions such as the relationship between Scholasticism and Humanism. This article offers a close comparison of the first known fencing manual, the 14-th century Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries FECHT 1, previously and better known as MS I.33), and the corpus of fighting manuals which underwent a remarkable expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries. While the former clearly (...) shows its origins in a scholastic background, the latter is mainly viewed as reflecting its humanist context. To this historiographical division corresponds a linguistic one: MS I.33 is a Latin text, while the rest of the corpus is mainly written in German and Italian. However, exceptions arise, amongst which, Heinrich von Gunterrodt’s Sciomachia et Hoplomachia: sive de Veris Principiis Artis Dimicatoriae (1579), the first text which explicitly refers to I.33. This article will compare these two texts, in order to interrogate their common relation to Scholasticism, namely the traditional frame of the knowledge within the medieval and early modern universities. The intent is to show that (at least some) Renaissance fight books include references to Scholasticism and to provide a better qualification of the nature of such references. The general hypothesis is that a large part of the texts―and products of culture―of the Renaissance that have been read, until recently, exclusively in relation to a humanist intellectual background can valuably be interpreted in the context of a Scholasticism that is still vivid during the period in question. (shrink)

This paper offers a review of the catalogue composed by Myriam Vogelaar of one of the largest and most important collections of Fight Books and fencing manuals in the field of Historical European Martial Arts Studies (HEMAS). The Mokken Collection is named after Wiebe Mokken, the man who meticulously built it up over the past decades in Amsterdam. The book also highlights the glaring lack of contemporary knowlegde about other major historical fencing-related collections, like Gotti’s spectacular private collection (...) held at the Museo dell Arte Marziale in Brescia, Italy. Others, such as the Corble collection at the KU Leuven Libraries, recently published their catalogue on line. This catalogue thus constitutes an important milestone for this exciting and still relatively new subdomain in the field of European cultural studies, by making accessible one of the most important collections of source materials dedicated to it. (shrink)

In this dissertation we explore projective Fraïssé theory and its applications, as well as limitations, to the study of compact metrizable spaces. The goal of projective Fraïssé theory is to approximate spaces via classes of finite structures and glean topological or dynamical properties of a space by relating them to combinatorial features of the associated class of structures. Using the framework of compact metrixable structures, we establish general results which expand and help contextualize previous works in the field. Many proofs (...) in the domain of projective Fraïssé theory are carried out in a context dependent fashion and have thus far eluded clean generalizations. A reason is to be found in the lack of a clear understanding of which spaces are amenable to be studied via projective Fraïssé limits. We give both positive and negative results in this direction. We isolate a combinatorial condition which entails a correspondence between finite structures and regular quasi-partitions of compact metrizable spaces. This correspondence greatly aids the combinatorial-toplogical translation. We apply this machinery to study a class of one-dimensional compact metrizable spaces, which we call smooth fences. To this end, we isolate a class of finite structures—finite partial orders whose Hasse diagram is a forest—whose projective Fraïssé limit approximates a distinctive smooth fence with remarkable properties. We call it the Fraïssé fence and characterize it topologically by carefully exploiting the bridge between the combinatorial and topological worlds. We explore homogeneity and universality features of the Fraïssé fence and the properties of its spaces and endpoints, and provide some results on the dynamics of its group of homeomorphisms. The dissertation is partially based on [1, 2]. (shrink)

Depending on historical periods and individual perspectives, fencing has been defined in various ways. Indeed, fencing has been regarded as an art, and/or a science, and/or a sport, and/or a game. This paper shows that those various attempts to define fencing throughout history are strategies aiming to conceal the founding violence of fencing (although these strategies do not prevent the emergence of further forms of violence). The study demonstrates that these strategies pertain to semantics, to regulation (...) and codification of fencing, and to more recent phenomena which are linked to the deterritorialization of the practice of fencing. (shrink)

To sustain its serene environment, YourTown, USA—which is a real town—enacted a policy designed to abate public nuisances occurring on residential properties. The nuisance ordinance authorizes the police chief, after two incidents within a twelve‐month period in which criminal activity nuisances have occurred on a property, to warn owners in writing that a third incident may result in an order to pay fees. The third finding authorizes YourTown to “abate the nuisance by responding to the activities using administrative and law (...) enforcement actions, and the costs of such abatement shall be assessed on the nuisance property.” On one of YourTown's tree‐lined streets lives a couple with a twenty‐six‐year old son, Jeremy—a real person—whose combination of behavioral disorders produces what his psychiatrist describes as devastatingly difficult symptoms. Jeremy's behavior frequently takes him outside, where he disturbs his neighbors with screams and moans. (shrink)

본 연구는 한중일 3국의 정원문화의 상호문화성을 에드문드 후설의 현상학적 방법에 기초하여 재구성하는 데 일차적 목적이 있다. 그리고 이를 토대로 한국 정원문화의 특성을 확인한다. 확인된 한국 정원문화의 특성을 통해 한민족의 다문화 감수성을 해명한다. 한중일 3국은 각자 고유한 정원문화를 가지고 있다. 그러면서도 나름의 문화적 특이성도 동시에 갖는다. 필자는 한국 정원문화가 갖는 특이성을 중국과 일본의 대표적인 정원과 비교하면서 재구성한다.BR 본 글은 중국의 전통적인 사합원 구조가 재현되어 있는 소주의 졸정원(拙政园)과 일본정원문화의 특성이 재현되어 있는 용안사(龍安寺) 정원을 한국의 도산서당 그리고 명재 고택과 비교한다. 이를 통해 퇴계의 (...) 도산서당과 윤증 (尹拯)의 명재(明齋)고택에 재현되어 있는 한민족의 다문화적 감수성을 드러내는 데 주된 목적이 있다.BR 이러한 목적으로 이루어지는 본 연구는 본론에 들어가지 전에 근대기하학적 공간구성에 의해 망각되어 버린 다문화적 감수성을 고발하고, 이 망각된 다문화적 감수성을 회복할 수 있는 다문화 장을 후설의 생활세계로부터 확인하고자 한다. (shrink)

본 연구는 한국 전통 건축의 담장문화를 중심으로 한민족의 정체성을 연구한다. 한국전통 담장은 경계 짓기를 싫어하는 자연을 닮아 있다. 한국 담장에는 습관적으로 만들어 놓은 인위적 경계를 허물고 자연과 소통하려는 지향성이 재현되어 있다. 필자는 조선시대 건축 담장 공간에 육화된 다문화적 감수성을 재구성한다. 특히 퇴계와 남명 그리고 한강으로 이어지는 영남의 문화적 벨트에서 그 단초를 확인하고자 한다.BR 본 연구는 한민족의 정체성을 한국 전통 건축의 담장 문화 속에서 재구성하는 것이다. 필자는 ‘16세기 조선’이라는 현실공간을 동시대인으로 살았던 퇴계와 남명의 문화적 감수성을 재현할 것이다. 특히 그들의 장수(藏修)와 유식(遊息) (...) 공간이었던 도산서당과 산천재를 중심으로 이루어질 것이다. 그리고 도동서원을 중건 한 한강의 문화적 감수성을 다룰 것이다. 그런데 왜 하필 이들이 대상인가? 과연 그들이 한민족의 문화적 정체성을 담보해 줄 수 있는가? 그들은 가장 척박했던 시공간 현실에서 그 나름의 특이한(singular) 문화적 정체성을 형성했다. 주자학이라는 주류문화에 동화(同化)되지 않으면서, “주자보다 훨씬 세련되고 발전된 모습으로” 한국적 성리학의 특이한(singular) 문화적 정체성을 능동적으로 구성한 문화적 감수성을 공유하고 있다. (shrink)

Kv10.1 is a voltage‐gated potassium channel relevant for tumor biology, but the underlying mechanism is still unclear. We propose that Kv10.1 plays a role coordinating primary cilium disassembly with cell cycle progression through localized changes of membrane potential at the ciliary base. Most non‐dividing cells display a primary cilium, an antenna‐like structure important for cell physiology. The cilium is disassembled when the cell divides, which requires an increase of Ca2+ concentration and a redistribution of phospholipids in its basal region, both (...) of which would be facilitated by local hyperpolarization. Cells lacking Kv10.1 show impaired ciliary disassembly and delayed entrance into mitosis. Kv10.1 is predominantly expressed during G2/M, a critical period for ciliary resorption, and localizes to the ciliary base and vesicles associated with the centrosome. This could explain the influence of Kv10.1 in cell proliferation, as well as phenotypic features of patients carrying gain of function mutations in the gene. (shrink)

Summary Several subdisciplines within historiography, most notably the arms and armour or martial arts studies, are interested in inferring physical qualities of historical material objects from historical sources. Scholars from these fields face serious deficiency of written accounts when it comes to various crucial information regarding their subject matter. Therefore, researchers’ attention is often drawn to iconographical sources, sometimes resulting in certain fascination with the material culture depicted in primary technical literature (Fachliteratur). This tendency seems particularly strong in studies on (...) HEMA which rely heavily on pre-modern combat treatises known as ‘fight books’ (Fechtbücher) and are tempted either to treat the available iconography as a faithful representation of its corresponding material reality or to interpret apparent mismatch between icono-graphical representations and their material source domain as evidence for the inferior skills of the illustrator. We would like to put forward that there is a fundamental oversight in such approach to Fachliteratur in general and fight books in particular, namely the lack of consideration for the artwork as a diagrammatic representation of the functional aspects of depicted embodied technique, where proportional ‘realism’ is of lesser priority. It may be fruitful to develop a more nuanced method of ‘reading’ such images. Our survey of select late-medieval fight books shows that equipment, and even body parts, are regularly distorted in their depictions in the fight books to better communicate the subject matter, especially where textual descriptions would be complicated. Interpreted in Gestalt terms, this phenomenon may serve as an example of historical pragmatic application of the cognitive principle of holism – that the whole is something different than the sum of its parts. (shrink)

It's unclear what narrow content is interpersonally shared for concepts that don't originate from core cognition yet are still definitionally and interpretationally primitive. A primary concern is that for these concepts, one cannot draw a principled distinction between inferences that are content determining and those that aren't. The lack of a principled distinction imperils an account of interpersonally shared concepts.

Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them. They constitute the corporate version of grassroots social movements. Serious ethical and societal concerns underline this astroturfing practice, especially if corporations are successful in influencing public opinion by undertaking a social movement approach. This study is motivated by this particular issue and examines the effectiveness of astroturf organizations in the global warming context, (...) wherein large corporate polluters have an incentive to set up astroturf organizations to undermine the importance of human activities in climate change. We conduct an experiment to determine whether astroturf organizations have an impact on the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming. Results show that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used grassroots websites. Astroturf organizations are hence successful in promoting business interests over environmental protection. In addition to the multiple business ethics issues it raises, astroturfing poses a significant threat to the legitimacy of the grassroots movement. (shrink)

Des résidences fermées, associant murs ou clôtures et contrôle des accès pour les non résidants, se multiplient en France depuis les années 1990. Ce phénomène peut être interprété comme un témoin de l’affirmation d’un ordre sécuritaire. Mais il convient également de s’interroger sur l’effet frontière créé en explorant le couple imperméabilité et perméabilité : entre production de frontières imperméables, barrières symboliques et pragmatisme des résidants, le gradient de fermeture oscille d’un complexe résidentiel à l’autre, complexifiant la perception d’un espace urbain (...) aux formes résidentielles de plus en plus carcérales.Gated residential communities, with their walls, fences and controlled access for outsiders, have been increasing in number in France since the 1990s. This development could be interpreted as reflecting a prevailing concern with law and order, but there are also grounds for investigating the resulting boundary effect by exploring the twin notions of permeability and impermeability: between the creation of impermeable barriers, symbolic boundaries and the pragmatism of residents, the closure gradient varies from one residential community to the next, complicating perceptions of an urban sphere where residential life is increasingly shut in. (shrink)

Il s’agit ici d’analyser un objet urbain, la caméra de vidéosurveillance, et de saisir de quelle manière cet objet segmente virtuellement – mais effectivement – l’espace urbain et affecte intimement les individus. Dans un contexte de brouillage entre sphère publique et privée, nous montrerons comment les dispositifs de caméras, tout en participant à la dislocation de la masse, peuvent être considérés comme les nouveaux murs de nos individuations.This article analyses an urban object, the video surveillance camera, and attempts to show (...) how it segments city spaces – virtually but effectively – and closely affects individuals. In a context of blurred boundaries between the public and private spheres, we show how video camera systems, while contributing to the dislocation of urban masses, can also be seen as a new way of ring-fencing human individuation. (shrink)

Direct realists think that we can't get a clear view the nature of /hallucinating a white picket fence/: is it /representing a white picket fence/? is it /sensing white-picket-fencily/? is it /being acquainted with a white' picketed' sense-datum/? These are all epistemic possibilities for a single experience; hence they are all metaphysical possibilities for various experiences. Hallucination itself is a disjunctive or "multidisjunctive" category. I rebut MGF Martin's argument from statistical explanation for his "epistemic" conception of hallucination, but his view (...) embeds in my view as a "reference-fixer". (shrink)