Face-to-face meetings are often preferred over other forms of communication because meeting in person provides the “richest” way to communicate. Face-to-face meetings are so rich because many ways of communicating are available to support mutual understanding. With the progress of digitization and driven by the need to reduce personal contact during the global pandemic, many face-to-face work meetings have been shifted to videoconferences. With webcams turned on, video calls come closest to the richness of face-to-face meetings. However, webcam use often (...) remains voluntary, and some participants choose not to turn their cameras on. In order to find ways to support webcam use—when desired—we analyzed how social norms in groups affect the decision to activate a webcam in a specific meeting. Based on an online survey with N = 333 participants, we found that social norms are related to an individual’s decision to turn on the webcam, even when controlling for group size. If the number of participants with activated webcams in a university meeting increased by 25%, it was 5.92 times more likely that an individual decided to turn their webcam on, too. Furthermore, 81.84% of respondents indicated they would turn on their webcam if participants in a meeting were explicitly asked to do so. The results demonstrate a strong relation between social norms and the decision to activate a webcam in online meetings. They build a basis for enhancing webcam use and enable a greater richness of communication in online meetings. (shrink)

Aim: Explore nurses’ values and perceptions regarding the practice of medical aid in dying. Background: Medical aid in dying is becoming increasing legal in the United States. The laws and American Nurses Association documents limit nursing involvement in this practice. Nurses’ values regarding this controversial topic are poorly understood. Methodology: Cross-sectional electronic survey design sent to nurse members of the American Nurses Association. Inductive thematic content analysis was applied to open-ended comments. Ethical Considerations: Approved by the institutional review board (#191046). (...) Participants: 1213 nurses provided 3639 open-ended comments. More than 80% of participants self-identified as white 58% held a graduate degree; and half were of Christian faith. Results: Values ranged on a continuum expressed through four themes: “Honoring Patient Autonomy without Judgment,” “Honoring with Limitations,” “Not until...,” and “Adamantly against.” Some felt it was a duty to honor the patients’ wishes, set aside own beliefs, and respect patients’ choices often with a spiritual connotation. Nurses held concerns about the process, policy, potential psychological harm, legal risk, and the need to learn more about MAID. Nurse who were adamantly against MAID associated the practice with murder/suicide and against religious beliefs. Disparate values were expressed about changing the MAID legislation to allow patient support with taking MAID medications and allowing MAID via advance directive. Conclusions: Nurses desire more education on MAID. There is not one universally held position on the nurse’s role during MAID. Healthcare policy/standards need to accommodate the wide variation in nurses’ values. Implications: Nurses desire education regarding their role in MAID. Nurses are encouraged to participate in policy discussions as the practice becomes increasingly legal. Managers need to expect that nurses, patients, and families will need psychological support to participate in MAID. Careful construction of policy/standards is needed to minimize conflict, moral distress, and psychological harm amongst nurses. Further research is needed. (shrink)

In Older Adults (OAs), Electroencephalogram (EEG) slowing in frontal lobes and a diminished muscle atonia during Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM) have each been effective tracers of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), but this relationship remains to be explored by non-linear analysis. Likewise, data provided by EEG, EMG (Electromyogram) and EOG (Electrooculogram)—the three required sleep indicators—during the transition from REM to Non-REM (NREM) sleep have not been related jointly to MCI. Therefore, the main aim of the study was to explore, with (...) results for Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) and multichannel DFA (mDFA), the Color of Noise (CN) at the NREM to REM transition in OAs with MCI vs. subjects with good performances. The comparisons for the transition from NREM to REM were made for each group at each cerebral area, taking bilateral derivations to evaluate interhemispheric coupling and anteroposterior and posterior networks. In addition, stationarity analysis was carried out to explore if the three markers distinguished between the groups. Neuropsi and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) were administered, as well as other geriatric tests. One night polysomnography was applied to 6 OAs with MCI (68.1 ± 3) and to 7 subjects without it (CTRL) (64.5 ± 9), and pre-REM and REM epochs were analyzed for each subject. Lower scores for attention, memory and executive funcions and a greater index of arousals during sleep were found for the MCI group. Results confirmed that EOGs constituted significant markers of MCI, increasing the CN for the MCI group in REM sleep. The CN of the EEG from the pre-REM to REM was higher for the MCI group vs. the opposite for the CTRL group at frontotemporal areas. Frontopolar interhemispheric scaling values also followed this trend as well as right anteroposterior networks. EMG Hurst values for both groups were lower than those for EEG and EOG. Stationarity analyses showed differences between stages in frontal areas and right and left EOGs for both groups. These results may demonstrate the breakdown of fractality of areas especially involved in executive functioning and the way weak stationarity analyses may help to distinguish between sleep stages in OAs. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work investigates how the various pictures of creation found in Scripture helped shape the ancient faith community's moral character. Bringing together the fields of biblical studies and ethics, William Brown demonstrates how certain creation traditions of the Old and New Testaments were developed from the community's moral imagination for the purpose of forming and preserving both Israel's and the early church's identity in the world.

Luce Irigaray’s recent book To Be Born: Genesis of New a Human Being can be seen as a response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known call for us to overcome humanity in its current form. Irigaray shares with Nietzsche the belief that to overcome the dissonance that runs through our culture and our being we cannot attend only to cultural and social problems but must bring about the emergence of a new kind of human being. Unlike Nietzsche, however, she develops an understanding (...) of who we are and what we could be that begins with birth and thus roots the potential for this transformation in the concreteness of our infancy and the context of our upbringing. Nietzsche employs the idea of pregnancy in his discussions of the genesis of a new being, but his exclusion of conception and birth indicate limitations in his approach. I will argue that Nietzsche’s insights into how dependency can limit critical insights and transformation demonstrate the importance of solitude, but he neglects the positive role of care we can find in a proper understanding of a child’s dependency on its parents. Irigaray suggests a route towards addressing these limitations. (shrink)

The problem of the difficulties created by disjunctive concepts is shown to be a spurious one. It is due in part to a confusion between concept formation and concept identification, in part to unfortunate terminological moves, in part to confusions between logical and methodological matters. Behind this pseudo-problem there are a number of real problems: how to work efficiently with partially interpreted concepts? are there differences in comprehension of various logical connectives? how does this comprehension change with age and linguistic (...) exposure? (shrink)

This interview comprises different key aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Amongst others, the following topics are treated: the development of Frédéric Lebaron’s collaboration with Bourdieu, the political and ideological conditions prevailing at the time of Bourdieu’s early works and during the phase of his establishment, the epistemological foundations of Bourdieu’s relationism, the relationship to other modern paradigms such as Fligstein’s and McAdam’s field theory, Hedström’s analytical sociology, discourse analysis, network analysis, and a debate on relationalism, causality, and rationality within the (...) architecture of Bourdieu’s theory. (shrink)

Este artigo refere-se ao conhecido episódio da famosa novela "Gargantua", de Rabelais, e a sua intenção é mostrar que naquelas singulares sociedade e arquitectura se apresentam ou prefigu­ram, em larga medida, as questões que mais tarde foram exploradas no pensamento utópico oci­dental sobre o tema de "Antiutopia". Em particular, há a intenção de mostrar as relações entre as "Sociedades Ideais" e as "Arquitecturas Ideais"... Como se mutuamente se implicassem. – E, claro, os hilariantes equívocos relacionados com tal...

Es sabido que las obras de Marx, en sus distintas épocas, guardan siempre una relación conflictiva con Hegel. Pero, al mismo tiempo, esta relación se ve afectada continuamente por el propio desarrollo del pensamiento de Marx. Teniendo en cuenta este desarrollo, en el presente trabajo intentaremos brindar una interpretación marxiana del sistema hegeliano, tomando como punto de partida la frase juvenil de Marx que afirma que la Ciencia de la lógica de Hegel es "el dinero del espíritu". Sin embargo, bajo (...) la premisa de que Marx está mucho más próximo a Hegel en su período de madurez que en su juventud, daremos un nuevo sentido a aquella frase juvenil a partir del tratamiento del dinero en la primera sección de El capital. Esto nos proporcionará nuevas herramientas conceptuales para interpretar la filosofía de Hegel, justificando esta interpretación en los propios textos hegelianos. (shrink)

My aim is to explain the relation of ‘right reason’ to Ockham's voluntarism by analysing what Ockham takes individual liberty to mean and how men come to know of it. The Christian law of liberty reveals what individuals come to know by other means — from their own experiences and reason, about certain rights which can never be alienated either to Church or ‘state’. It is argued that his distinctive and later political positions can be supported by positions maintained in (...) his earlier logical, psychological and philosophical writings from his Oxford period. He explains the three sources of our knowledge as experience, natural reason and infallible scriptural authority. Based on his explanation of how Scripture is to be interpreted and linking this to his epistemology which starts with intuitive cognition, it is argued that Ockham's understanding of the separate roles of ‘state’ and Church can be defended. From his earlier positions can also be derived his understanding of corporation theory, his defence of individual members of the community's consent to the constitution of government and the limits on absolute government, no matter what its constitutional form. Because right reason always operates in social contexts with their respective, prevalent knowledge, Ockham has some startling things to say about men's access to the truth. (shrink)

Discusses human sexuality, population contral, women's rights, genetic research, abortion, AIDS, and childcare.

L'A. se base sur deux oeuvres artistiques sur la Trinité qui se correspondent et qui soulèvent des questions sérieuses au sujet de la négociation chrétienne avec les autres religions. Ces deux oeuvres traitent de la Trinité en relation avec les autres traditions religieuses. Il s'agit de l'icône intitulée la Trinité de l'orthodoxe russe André Roublev qui date du 15siècle et de l'oeuvre contemporaine de l'artiste indien catholique romain Jyoti Sahi intitulée Abraham et Sarah recevant les trois anges. Par cette étude (...) comparative, l'A. souligne la richesse du Dieu trinitaire dans l'ouverture à la multiplicité des représentations du mystère infini. Ces représentations, visibles dans les créations, sont parfois le fruit de l'imagination des artistes et des théologiens, imagination qui est nécessaire. (shrink)

Entre los documentos del exjesuita peruano Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán que el venezolano Francisco Miranda recibió del plenipotenciario norteamericano en Inglaterra, Rufus King, se encontraba la "Carta dirigida a los españoles americanos". Este pieza documental, considerada "la primera proclama de la independencia" hispanoamericana, había sido escrita originalmente en francés hacia 1792 como testimonio de protesta de la situación de vejación y sometimiento que tenía España a sus colonias americanas, para ser presentada ante las autoridades inglesas. El entusiasmo que despertó (...) la "Carta" del fallecido jesuita en el temible e infatigable conspirador Miranda, fue inequívoca, al punto que no sólo se dispuso a traducirla y publicarla (Londres, 1801), sino la presentó, en su frustrada expedición de Coro en agosto de 1806, como portaestandarte de la cruzada libertadora. [Fragmento]. (shrink)

The seminal book on graph theory by Dénes Kőnig, published in the year 1936, collected notions and results from precursory works from the mid to late nineteenth century by Hamilton, Cayley, Sylvester and others. More importantly, Kőnig himself contributed many of his own results that he had obtained in the more than twenty years that he had been working on this subject matter. What is noteworthy is the fact that the fundamentals of what he calls directed graphs are taken almost (...) exhaustively from Paul Hertz' 1922 article on structural reasoning about sentences of the form a→b. This is not a fact that is well known in logical circles, even though Kőnig fully acknowledges this in his book. In view of the numerous trends in the recent decades to describe and explicate logical matters by means of graphs, the fact that it was Hertz' foundation of structural reasoning that informed basic notions of graph theory in the first place is highly significant. The main goal of this paper is to summarize Hertz' article and demonstrate how Kőnig integrates the notions and results presented therein in his book. This is followed by an exposition of how and when Hertz' results were reinvented in terms of graph theory. A critical discussion of the opinion expressed by both Hertz and Kőnig that the more general sentences of the form (a1,…,an)→b, introduced by Hertz in a companion article in 1923, cannot be interpreted by graphs concludes this paper. (shrink)

The centuries-long evolution of the iconography of Niccolò Machiavelli is itself a chapter in the history of Machiavelli’s reputation. As intuited by one of his foremost biographers, Oreste Tommasini, portraits of the Florentine are probably best considered as visual expressions of philosophical and literary anti-Machiavellism, which exercised, in their own way, a negative influence on the reception and interpretations of his writings. The Machiavelli who we have seen represented over the course of history in paintings, prints, and engravings may be (...) nothing more, therefore, than a Machiavellian persona: the visual translation of a conventional and stereotypical interpretation, which considers the author of The Prince to be the champion of a politics based on duplicity, cunning, deceit, and guile. This essay examines the origins and dissemination over the centuries of ‘La Testina’, one of the most celebrated and widely publicized portraits of Machiavelli. The conclusion, after comparing all of the extant variants of this portrait, is that it is an unfaithful and invented graphic representation of Machiavelli, whose fortunes in publishing and in the collective imagination have kept pace with the spread of a demonizing interpretation of Machiavelli, the master of evil, well-rooted even today in mass popular culture. (shrink)

DNA damage repair within telomeres are suppressed to maintain the integrity of linear chromosomes, but the accidental activation of repairs can lead to genome instability. This review develops the concept that mechanisms to repair DNA damage in telomeres contribute to genetic variability and karyotype evolution, rather than catastrophe. Spontaneous breaks in telomeres can be repaired by telomerase, but in some cases DNA repair pathways are activated, and can cause chromosomal rearrangements or fusions. The resultant changes can also affect subtelomeric regions (...) that are adjacent to telomeres. Subtelomeres are actively involved in such chromosomal changes, and are therefore the most variable regions in the genome. The case of Caenorhabditis elegans in the context of changes of subtelomeric structures revealed by long‐read sequencing is also discussed. Theoretical and methodological issues covered in this review will help to explore the mechanism of chromosome evolution by reconstruction of chromosomal ends in nature. (shrink)