(2013). A review of “Smith, Nicholas J. J., Logic: The Laws of Truth. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 91, No. 3, pp. 629-629. doi: 10.1080/00048402.2013.794849.

This study investigated patient preferences for various types of physician persuasion strategies. Four types of persuasion strategies were utilized which involved combination of high and low levels of affectivity and information. In addition, patient variables, receiver apprehension and health beliefs were introduced to predict preference choices by patients. Results indicated that patients are influenced in their decision-making (preferences) by the type of persuasive strategy employed. Further, patients with different characteristics and predispositions prefer different persuasive strategies. The results of this study (...) suggest that the success of physician persuasiveness is dependent upon the type of strategy used and the type of patient being persuaded. (shrink)

Dog ownership is believed to benefit owner wellbeing but, contrary to popular belief, there is limited evidence to suggest that simply owning a dog is associated with improved mental health. This mixed-methods study investigates whether dog owners with stronger relationships with their dogs experience better mental health. Participants completed an online survey. Owners’ health was measured using the validated PROMIS questions regarding depression, anxiety, emotional support, and companionship. The dog–owner relationship was measured using the validated MDORS scale, which has three (...) subscales: interaction, emotional closeness, and perceived costs. Univariable and multivariable linear regression analyses were conducted, adjusting for confounding factors. Additionally, positive and negative impacts of dog ownership on mental wellbeing were coded from open questions using thematic analysis. A stronger dog–owner relationship was associated with greater feelings of emotional support and companionship but poorer mental health in terms of anxiety or depression. However, the perceived costs subscale was consistently associated with better mental health outcomes. Direction of causality cannot be inferred as people with poor mental health may acquire dogs to help relieve symptoms, which qualitative analysis supported. Key themes included positive impacts on owner wellbeing and happiness through providing purpose, companionship and self-acceptance, pleasure and distraction, as well as lessening emotional pain and suffering and reducing risk behaviors. However, negative impacts of a strong relationship include anticipatory grief over loss of the dog, and concerns regarding the burden of responsibility and ability to meet dog’s needs. Perceived ability to adequately meet dog’s needs promoted personal growth and positive relationships with others, whereas perceived inability led to feelings of guilt, or anger/frustration, and reduced autonomy and sense of environmental mastery. Dog ownership contributes to both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing in multiple ways, including supporting owners through periods of poor mental health and providing purpose. However, the burden of responsibility and owner and dog characteristics can create challenges, and owners may benefit from support in caring for their dogs and reducing problematic behaviors. (shrink)

Background Visual atypicalities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are a well documented phenomenon, beginning as early as 2–6 months of age and manifesting in a significantly decreased attention to the eyes, direct gaze and socially salient information. Early emerging neurobiological deficits in perceiving social stimuli as rewarding or its active avoidance due to the anxiety it entails have been widely purported as potential reasons for this atypicality. Parallel research evidence also points to the significant benefits of animal presence for reducing (...) social anxiety and enhancing social interaction in children with autism. While atypicality in social attention in ASD has been widely substantiated, whether this atypicality persists equally across species types or is confined to humans has not been a key focus of research insofar. Methods We attempted a comprehensive examination of the differences in visual attention to static images of human and animal faces (40 images; 20 human faces and 20 animal faces) among children with ASD using an eye tracking paradigm. 44 children (ASD n = 21; TD n = 23) participated in the study (10,362 valid observations) across five regions of interest (left eye, right eye, eye region, face and screen). Results Results obtained revealed significantly greater social attention across human and animal stimuli in typical controls when compared to children with ASD. However in children with ASD, a significantly greater attention allocation was seen to animal faces and eye region and lesser attention to the animal mouth when compared to human faces, indicative of a clear attentional preference to socially salient regions of animal stimuli. The positive attentional bias toward animals was also seen in terms of a significantly greater visual attention to direct gaze in animal images. Conclusion Our results suggest the possibility that atypicalities in social attention in ASD may not be uniform across species. It adds to the current neural and biomarker evidence base of the potentially greater social reward processing and lesser social anxiety underlying animal stimuli as compared to human stimuli in children with ASD. (shrink)

Donald Gelpi, SJ saw his life's work as an attempt to construct an integral systematic theology during a time when such projects were deemed passé and undesirable. Such attitudes did not deter him though, and he worked quietly in his office at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley for several decades developing such a system and teaching it in his classes and lectures. During those years, he produced works on theological method, sacramental theology, the Trinity, and Christology.Grounding his systematic (...) theology was a theological method defined by his fellow North American Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan. In his seminal work, Method in Theology, Lonergan articulated eight "functional specialties" for... (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Our topic is the notion of logical consequence: the link between premises and conclusions, the glue that holds together deductively valid argument. How can we understand this relation between premises and conclusions? It seems that any account begs questions. Painting with very broad brushtrokes, we can sketch the landscape of disagreement like this: “Realists” prefer an analysis of logical consequence in terms of the preservation of truth [29]. “Anti-realists” take this to be unhelpful and o:er alternative analyses. Some, like Dummett, (...) look to preservation of warrant to assert [9, 36]. Others, like Brandom [5], take inference as primitive, and analyse other notions in terms of it. There is plenty of disagreement on the “realist” side of the fence too. It is one thing to argue that logical consequence involves preservation of truth. It is another to explain how far truth must be preserved. Is the preservation essentially modal (in all circumstances [25]) or analytic (vouchsafed by.. (shrink)

The -logic of Terwijn is a variant of first-order logic with the same syntax in which the models are equipped with probability measures and the quantifier is interpreted as ‘there exists a set A of a measure such that for each,...’. Previously, Kuyper and Terwijn proved that the general satisfiability and validity problems for this logic are, i) for rational, respectively -complete and -hard, and ii) for, respectively decidable and -complete. The adjective ‘general’ here means ‘uniformly over all languages’. We (...) extend these results in the scenario of finite models. In particular, we show that the problems of satisfiability and validity with respect to finite models in E-logic are, i) for rational, respectively -complete and -complete, and ii) for, respectively decidable and -complete. Although partial results toward the countable case are also achieved, the computability of E-logic over countable models still remains largely unsolved. In addition, most o... (shrink)

In early March 2020, the March‐April Hastings Center Report was very nearly assembled and contained nothing about Covid‐19, which was still just beginning to make itself publicly known in the United States. Two weeks later, the editorial line‐up was undergoing a remix, and essays that lay out sweeping agendas for the response to the worldwide crisis were in preparation. The central theme in the agenda that Lawrence O. Gostin and colleagues develop is that the pandemic requires a sharp break from (...) usual ethical norms yet simultaneously demands a return to core ethical commitments. A similar theme is sounded by Mildred Z. Solomon and colleagues in a commentary calling for federal actions to keep the health care system functioning. Other essays in the issue take up an assortment of topical issues—including international patient dumping—that were simmering along prior to the pandemic, and the two articles take up foundational questions about the nature of moral reasoning. (shrink)

In his landmark article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” W.V.O. Quine pushed analytical philosophy into its post-positivist phase by rejecting two central tenets of logical empiricism. The first dogma was the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; the second was reductionism, or the belief that to each synthetic sentence there corresponds a set of experiences that will confirm or disconfirm it. But in both “Two Dogmas” and Word and Object, Quine stretches analytical philosophy to its limits. The problem is, ironically, his (...) adherence to two separate dogmas. The first stems from Quine’s empiricism: he insists that there is nothing more to meaning than the empirical method of discovering it. The second has been taken as the defining characteristic of analytical philosophy;2 it is the belief that a philosophical account of thought can only be attained through an account of language – the famed “linguistic turn.” I will argue that a philosophical account of language can only be attained given an account of thought,3 and that the philosophies of Kant and Davidson can help us construct such an account. (shrink)

Community engagement in research, including public health related research, is acknowledged as an ethical imperative. While medical care and public health action take priority over research during infectious disease outbreaks, research is still required in order to learn from epidemic responses. The World Health Organisation developed a guide for community engagement during infectious disease epidemics called the Good Participatory Practice for Trials of Emerging (and Re‐emerging) Pathogens that are Likely to Cause Severe Outbreaks in the Near Future and for which (...) Few or No Medical Counter‐Measures Exist (GPP‐EP). This paper identified priorities for community engagement for research conducted during infectious disease outbreaks drawing on discussions held with a purposive sample of bioethicists, social scientists, researchers, policy makers and laypersons who work with ethics committees in West Africa. These perspectives were considered in the light of the GPP‐EP, which adds further depth and dimension to discussions on community engagement frameworks. It concludes that there is no presumptive justification for the exclusion of communities in the design, implementation and monitoring of clinical trials conducted during an infectious disease outbreak. Engagement that facilitates collaboration rather than partnership between researchers and the community during epidemics is acceptable. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the way Williams elaborates, defends, and recommends Hegel’s revision of Christianity, which makes possible a Christianity free from the defects of its pre-modern form without collapsing into atheism and humanism. The essay begins by examining the development of Williams’s case in Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God and in Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. This examination shows that Williams uses Hegel’s critique of pre-modern Christianity to demonstrate that modernity, in which discourse, practices, (...) and forms of life are regulated by freedom and reason, means the end of orthodox theology, and uses Hegel’s logic of relations and reciprocal determination to interpret the God-world relation and the internal constitution of the divinity so that it preserves divine transcendence and independence. The second section of the essay challenges Williams’s position by showing how reciprocal determination does not just revise and qualify the asymmetrical dependence that is the lynchpin of classical theism, it completely disqualifies it, how the analysis of the Trinity involves the divinity in a complete emptying of itself into the world and its being as the world, so that Williams’s God cannot preserve even a hair’s breadth of the transcendence required for qualifying as a form of Christianity. The essay concludes from this that Williams’s appropriation of Hegel’s revised Christianity is infected with an element that destabilizes its ability to mediate between pre-modern insistence on God’s transcendence and independence and modernity’s insistence on human freedom and the universal status of its rational subjectivity, with a decisive leaning towards the humanistic posture. (shrink)

This study explores consumer expectations and attitudes related to gender-based price discrimination. Although much research has focused on pay inequalities and gender diversity, considerably less attention has been focused on situations in which men and women are charged different prices based on gender. In two studies, expectations and attitudes toward gender-based price discrimination are examined. In Study 1, two scenarios related to prices at hair salon and dry cleaning services were manipulated to measure expectations and attitudes toward gender-based price discrimination. (...) We found that the nature of the service results in expectations of price differences between men and women. We also found men expect gender-based pricing more than women. In Study 2, qualitative research was conducted to reveal the cognitions that men and women experience when exposed to gender-based price discrimination. (shrink)

How putrid is the matter which underlies everything. Water, dust, bones, stench. Again, fine marbles are calluses of the earth; gold and silver, its sediments; our clothes, animal-hair; their purple, blood from a shellfish. Our very breath is something similar and changes from this to that. Meditations, 9 36).

Dandruff is a common scalp condition, which frequently causes psychological distress in those affected. Dandruff is considered to be caused by an interplay of several factors. However, the pathogenesis of dandruff remains under‐investigated, especially with respect to the contribution of the hair follicle. As the hair follicle exhibits unique immune‐modulatory properties, including the creation of an immunoinhibitory, immune‐privileged milieu, we propose a novel hypothesis taking into account the role of the hair follicle. We hypothesize that the changes and imbalance of (...) yeast and bacterial species, along with increasing proinflammatory sebum by‐products, leads to the activation of immune response and inflammation. Hair follicle keratinocytes may then detect these changes in scalp microbiota resulting in the recruitment of leukocytes to the inflammation site. These changes in the scalp skin immune‐microenvironment may impact hair follicle immune privilege status, which opens new avenues into exploring the role of the hair follicle in dandruff pathogenesis. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/mEZEznCYtNs. (shrink)

The faces of both adults and children can be classified accurately by sex, even in the absence of sex‐stereotyped social cues such as hair and clothing (Wild et al., 2000). Although much is known from psychological and computational studies about the information that supports sex classification for adults' faces, children's faces have been much less studied. The purpose of the present study was to quantify and compare the information available in adults' versus children's faces for sex classification and to test (...) alternative theories of how human observers distinguish male and female faces for these different age groups. We implemented four computational/neural network models of this task that differed in terms of the age categories from which the sex classification features were derived. Two of the four strategies replicated the advantage for classifying adults' faces found in previous work. To determine which of these strategies was a better model of human performance, we compared the performance of the two models with that of human subjects at the level of individual faces. The results suggest that humans judge the sex of adults' and children's faces using feature sets derived from the appropriate face age category, rather than applying features derived from another age category or from a combination of age categories. (shrink)

© 2016 Elsevier LtdJumping spiders are famous for their visually driven behaviors [1]. Here, however, we present behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that these animals also perceive and respond to airborne acoustic stimuli, even when the distance between the animal and the sound source is relatively large and with stimulus amplitudes at the position of the spider of ∼65 dB sound pressure level. Behavioral experiments with the jumping spider Phidippus audax reveal that these animals respond to low-frequency sounds by freezing—a common (...) anti-predatory behavior characteristic of an acoustic startle response. Neurophysiological recordings from auditory-sensitive neural units in the brains of these jumping spiders showed responses to low-frequency tones —recordings that also represent the first record of acoustically responsive neural units in the jumping spider brain. Responses persisted even when the distances between spider and stimulus source exceeded 3 m and under anechoic conditions. Thus, these spiders appear able to detect airborne sound at distances in the acoustic far-field region, beyond the near-field range often thought to bound acoustic perception in arthropods that lack tympanic ears [2]. Furthermore, direct mechanical stimulation of hairs on the patella of the foreleg was sufficient to generate responses in neural units that also responded to airborne acoustic stimuli—evidence that these hairs likely play a role in the detection of acoustic cues. We suggest that these auditory responses enable the detection of predators and facilitate an acoustic startle response. Video. (shrink)

The sclera, the eye’s tough outer layer, is, among primates, white only in humans, providing the ground necessary for the display of colors that vary in health and disease. The current study evaluates scleral color as a cue of socially significant information about health, attractiveness, and age by contrasting the perception of eyes with normal whites with copies of those eyes whose whites were reddened, yellowed, or further whitened by digital editing. Individuals with red and yellow sclera were rated to (...) be less healthy, less attractive, and older than individuals with untinted control sclera. Individuals with whitened, “super-white” sclera were rated as younger, although not more healthy or attractive, than controls. In humans, clear, white sclera may join such traits as smooth skin and long, lustrous hair as signs of health, beauty, and reproductive fitness. The evolution of a white sclera may have contributed to the emergence of humans as a social species. (shrink)

RESUMO Este texto reflete sobre a representatividade do cabelo crespo como elemento de pertencimento racial na literatura infantil, ancorando-se no livro Amor de cabelo, do diretor, produtor e escritor negro norte-americano Matthew A. Cherry. Para tanto, investiga como as imagens da ilustradora Vashti Harrison, também uma norte-americana negra, comungam com o texto para expressarem uma visão da pessoa negra e de seu núcleo familiar sem os estereótipos usuais. Cotejando a noção de amor de bell hooks, esta análise empreende uma leitura (...) que vagueia tanto pelos aspectos temáticos como estruturais da narrativa, tendo como hipótese de que o livro, sem fazer alusão direta, é um contradiscurso ao racismo que se origina no período da escravização, cujos efeitos podem ser sentidos até hoje. Do ponto de vista teórico, além de hooks, fundamenta esta leitura uma rede conceitual norteada pelos estudos de Eliane Debus, Grada Kilomba e Nilma Lina Gomes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This text reflects on the representativeness of the kinky hair (or afro-textured hair) as an element of racial belonging in children’s literature, based on the book Hair Love, by the African American director, producer, and writer Matthew A. Cherry. To do so, it investigates how the illustrations by Vashti Harrison, also an African American, align with the text to express a vision of black individuals and of their family without usual stereotypes. Drawing on bell hooks’ notion of love, this (...) analysis undertakes a reading that runs through both thematic and structural aspects of the narrative, hypothesizing that the book, without making direct allusions, serves as a counter-discourse to the racism that originated during slavery, the effects of which can still be felt today. From a theoretical perspective, in addition to hooks, this reading is grounded on a conceptual framework guided by the studies of Eliane Debus, Grada Kilomba and Nilma Lina Gomes. (shrink)

Hamaker's conjecture κομâ (for τολμâ,sic) at Lysias 16.18 was adopted by Rauchenstein in his influential edition of 1869 and soon given powerful endorsement by Jebb and by Shuckburgh. Successive later editors and commentators have seen no reason to demur: Thalheim, Adams, Hude, Gernet and Bizos, Lamb, and finally Edwards and Usher all adopt κομâ, and, where they comment, unanimously cite Aristophanic parallels (especiallyEq.580) in support of a connection between longhaired affectation and ‘oligarchic’ affiliations; some also adduce the expression ảπ’ὂΨεως in (...) justification. But this is an egregious instance of unwarranted tampering with a sound text. τóλμα is a quality conspicuously displayed by Mantitheus, on his own account of his character, words, and actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Hannah Baker Saltmarsh This Girl I Lost Touch With This girl, who was afraid to enter a room— a girl born in the woods, on moss, whose family dreamt under quilts, who wore dresses that matched anything fabric in the house, even the dresses without loneliness— I held her hand in the corridor-dark until the speaking-in-tongues at (...) the community college dispersed into prayers with too many gerunds and too much fervor that wouldn’t adjust if you got a thousand dollars in the mail or jury duty, faith subtle as a crucifix the size of God on the highway. I waited with her until it was over, although the prayer group was never really over. Over rooms of crowded, faith-based humidity, she loved corridors of woods, the rushes of running away. This girl and I, we were cult-lured, but then the leader stepped down—was it porn, alcohol? He drove us around in a red jeep without doors— the first time I drove in a man’s car, I was eighteen so I fell in love: looking straight ahead together, arm hair touching, the cathedral of autumn anticipating a shape to hold you, the wind that you sometimes hollered over. What happened I can’t see, but when he left the group, I left: the death of visions. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh 95 This girl could long for a man in her fingernails, and, without talking, take a man from his pregnant wife’s side, have his even newer children, this girl who wouldn’t go in a room all alone, walked right in, somewhere we’ve not been, and never left. Monostich in Praise of Four Missed Foul Shots in a Row, Ending with a Line by Shaquille O’Neal —Orlando Magic vs. Houston Rockets, Game 1, NBA Final, 1995 Each mistake at the foul line longs to be its own distinct trip-up, divorced from the tragic-comic failure automatic-reflex of a protagonist on a shame-rampage; each delicate flaw of glass, net, rim wants to be denied once at the charity line, once and only once of red-lipsticked points, the naive purity of one aberrant error in calculation—not bring bleacher-crowds to their feet, posterless hands in the vaulted air before tallying Nick Anderson up as Brick Anderson, most hated NBA player of all time, and by his own fans not believing their own eyes as a series of empty arcs toward scoring dovetails into quadruple humiliations and a goofy smile of gutted hopes and boyish fear-tangled awe that any brain so practiced (for this and what else?) could fail so many times in a row, each fail better and Beckett-harder until the last exit out of obliterating loss is part of the abyss too, unless you are quick on your feet for sports broadcasting... but there is no end to swindled championships if you are a man who’s never had to face the extinction of his early twenties or suck the aftertaste of multi-millionaire juice cocktails poured with a legend’s touch, but in the soapy-sweet glass of your Dixie cup liquor, however close to the sound of Shaq’s name spoken in every language, stares your same lovesick reflection in the welt of that shot-glass mirror, mouthing the bitters of paranoid distraction, unripe manhood, aged ingratitude, and a starless Orlando Magic blue diamond broomed over by nursery-rhyme witches brushing out the cobweb-haze because the crowd is always the same crowd calling you swept... each fumbling error of pressure you let get to you, if only it could be a plotless, lyric monostich without arc, not driven to the plot that is your grave, where the unfaithful, the murderers, liars, and cheaters are defined by threads, no, snapped pieces, of seconds and, as Dante would have it, sorted in hell by a singular thought or deed so 96 Hannah Baker Saltmarsh transformative as to name you; the blue and white jersey on the floor, fists and feet, knees and elbows vacuumed in tantrum, hyped up in the court glare and... (shrink)

Artykuł stanowi uzasadnienie twierdzącej odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy możliwa jest „Nauka o książce Katalogi oraz bibliografie pełnią funkcję przewodników wskazujących czytelnikom drogi poznania; zawierają one wiedzę szczególną i specyficzną. Przedmiotem rozważań jest analiza definicji bibliografii sformułowanych przez teoretyków zajmujących się tą problematyką: scharakteryzowane zostały koncepcje, których autorami są: W. Greg, F. Bowers, D. P. Mc Kenzie. Porównanie różnych poglądów, dotyczących przedmiotu, zakresu oraz zadań bibliografii, jest źródłem refleksji, ukazującej znaczenie pracy bibliografa w różnych aspektach. „Nauka o książce” jako główny (...) przedmiot swych zainteresowań uznaje tę oryginalną wiedzę, która jest rezultatem pracy bibliografa. (shrink)

Jednym z głównych pytań w filozofii logiki jest to, czy jest jedna, czy wiele logik. Pytanie to doczekało się różnych odpowiedzi, które formułują opozycyjne stanowiska: monizm logiczny contra pluralizm logiczny. Za reprezentatywnego przedstawiciela monizmu uznawany jest Willard Van Orman Quine, a pluralizmu — Susan Haack. Oba te stanowiska są kontynuowane współcześnie: monizm (m.in. Michael Dummett, Graham Priest, Timothy Williamson) oraz pluralizm (m.in. Jc Beall i Greg Restall, Johan van Benthem, Ottavio Bueno i Scott Shalkovski, Stewart Shapiro i Roy Cook). (...) Monizm jest znacznie mniej preferowany niż pluralizm. W artykule wskazano na źródła pluralizmu w logice (m.in. wieloznaczność spójników języka naturalnego, prawdy i wynikania) oraz przywołano argumentacje wybranych przedstawicieli tego stanowiska. (shrink)

Comparative study of Mongolian and world philosophy of the human beings' supernatural abilities.

Commentators from the Old Scholiast onward extract from these two clauses the one meaning that the pedagogue will not be recognized. They complain that a man's hair going white does not suffice to disguise him, and offer some unconvincing reinterpretations and emendations of The change of mood and tense is also odd; at O.C. 450 ff. which Jebb quotes in support, there is a change of meaning and intensity to justify it.

The Abrahamic tradition that the Arabs value most was ḥajj. The ḥajj, which means to visit Kaʿba was the greatest means of getting closer to Allāh. The Kaʿba was the house of Allāh. And the visitors of the Kaʿba were Allāh’s guests. For this reason, the Arabs used to great respect to the visitors and they never used to attack a man in the ḥarem (the area around the Kaʿba). The same respect included visitors’ travels to the Kaʿba. There were (...) two Abrahamic traditions that ensured the safety of visitors and sacrifices: Ḥaram months and qalāid. Ḥaram months were Dhū l-Qaʿdah, Dhū l-Ḥijjah, Muḥarram and Rajab. And the Arabs did not used to attack anyone in those months. For visits outside the ḥaram months, the visitors used to use the qalāid as a primitive visa. Qalāid is the plural of the word qilāda, meaning necklace. The Arab, who saw the qilādas, used to understand that the person who wore the qilāda wanted to go to the Kaʿba or had returned home from the Kaʿba. Qilādas used to be knitted from wool ropes and they used to be hung on animals’ neck or humps. Sometimes horseshoes used to hang on these qilādas. On the way back from Kaʿba, the barks of the ḥarem trees used to hang on the qilādas instead of the horseshoes. The Qurʾān orders Muslims not to disrespect the qilādas. This order also reveals that the Qurʾān recognizes the qilāda tradition. Allāh’s Apostle (sallallaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) and Ṣaḥāba are also known to continue this tradition.Summary: Ḥajj was the most important worship of the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period. Human and commodity mobility in the ḥajj had an important place in the life of the Meccans who lived in land unfit for agriculture. This fact is expressed as follows in Abraham’s (Ibrāhīm al-Khalīl) prayer: “Our Lord! Lo! I have settled some of my posterity in an uncultivable valley near unto Thy holy House, our Lord! That they may establish proper worship; so incline some hearts of men that they may yearn toward them, and provide Thou them with fruits in order that they may be thankful.” (Ibrahim 14:37) The Arabs who lived in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula used to come to Mecca during the ḥajj season and present their sacrifices. They also used to buy their needs from nearby markets. These markets were also places where traders had the opportunity to sell their products.Because the Arabian Peninsula is unfavorable in terms of climate and soil, many Arab tribes used to raid and attack other tribes to sustain their existence. It is even known that some Arabs proud of their raids. The attacks only used to stop in the ḥaram months (Dhū l-Qaʿdah, Dhū l-Ḥijjah, Muḥarram and Rajab). Because of the prohibition of fighting in the ḥaram months, the visitors used to visit the Kaʿba with confidence. Thanks to this truce, the trade goods carried by visitors used to reach to Mecca with confidence.It was possible that the visits outside of the ḥaram months were safe. However, it was necessary to follow some traditions in order to achieve this confidence. Visitors to the Kaʿba used to use some signs that they were visitors to the Kaʿba. One of these signs was qilāda (necklace) hanging on the neck or hump of the animal. The person wearing qilāda was Allāh’s guest, and his sacrifice was the property of Allāh. For this reason, no Arab would to dare to attack these visitors and property. Because of the Arab reverence for the Kaʿba, visitors wearing qilādas used to come to the Kaʿba and present their sacrifices throughout the year. The sacrifices had an important place in the livelihood of the poor.Qilādas were mostly used for visits outside the ḥaram months. The qilādas used to hang on the necks of the animals shipped to the Kaʿba as sacrifice. However, it is also known that qilādas are sometimes hung on hump. People who did not deliver sacrifices (animals) to the Kaʿba used to hang the qilāda his neck to show that he was a visitor to the Kaʿba. Similarly, it is known that people who sacrificed their animals on the Kaʿba hang the qilāda their neck on the way back. The qilādas fitted on the way to the Kaʿba were made of ropes spun from wool or hair. Sometimes horseshoes used to hang on these qilādas. Ḥarem plants (grass, tree bark) used to use in the qilādas on the way back.The Qurʾān orders Muslims not to disrespect the qilādas. This order also reveals that the Qurʾān recognizes the qilāda tradition. The word qalāid is mentioned twice in the Qurʾān: “O ye who believe violate not the sanctity of the symbols of Allāh, nor of the sacred month, nor of the animals brought for sacrifice, nor the qalāid, nor the people resorting to the sacred house, seeking of the Bounty and good pleasure of their Lord.” (Al Māʼidah 5:2), “Allāh made the Kaʿba, the sacred house, an asylum of security of men as also the sacred months, the animals for offerings, and the qalāid.” (Al Māʼidah 5:97) Considering the practices of the qilāda, it is understood that qilādas are a kind of visa. It is understood that all practices related to the visit to the Kaʿba, especially the ḥajj, have an aim to satisfy the material-spiritual needs of those who come there for the purpose of visiting and trading, as well as those who reside in the Kaʿba. Therefore, it will not be far away to say that qilādas can be used today for the same purpose. For example, labels, banderols, visas and passports can be used instead of ropes, horseshoes and plants. On the other hand, the meaning of the āyāt (verse) in which the word qalāid is mentioned is not limited to the Arabs. The same āyāt declare that qilādas are a development (qiyām) instrument for people. Therefore, the qilāda has a meaning potential beyond the 7th century and the inhabitants of this century. (shrink)

This comparative case analysis contrasts two nations – Viet Nam and The United States of America (U.S.) – in terms of processes each employed and results each achieved in respective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a general theory of teaching to contrast the countries in terms of their approaches to COVID public health education. Viet Nam followed the recommendations of the theory. The U.S. did not. While our analysis does not and cannot prove educational theory acted as the (...) sole causal factor in realization of the disparate results in the countries, our case study does illustrate that the different approaches to public health education used by the countries may be counted among factors contributing to wide differences in the contrasting cases. The argument proceeds by 1) describing differences in relevant statistics between Viet Nam and the U.S., 2) outlining the theory of teaching we use to analyze differences in public health education in the two contexts, and 3) discussing successful implementation of the theory in Viet Nam and failure to implement in the U.S. Finally, we 4) dismiss competing explanations of differences between the countries and 5) offer considerations about how the U.S. may educate citizens away from turning the pandemic into a pan(en)demic. (shrink)

The scene takes place in O'Higgins Park, in Santiago, Chile, on 1 October 1995. Some women have just taken their place on the stage and the enthusiastic audience is applauding, the women have started singing accompanied by a guitar, but they cannot be heard, for the audience is still applauding. One of the women gets up. Like the others, she is wearing a white blouse and a long black skirt, she is old and her hair is grey. She moves to (...) the front of the stage, chooses her place and stops, her eyes search the horizon but do not wander aimlessly, her eyes are fixed somewhere between the here and the hereafter. When she finds what she is looking for, she raises her right hand to wave a white handkerchief, and the dance begins. The audience, suddenly attentive, watches. And what do they see? Not the woman alone on the stage, but the empty space which she traces. The empty space disturbs us, as Chilean spectators, because the cueca, the national folklore dance, is danced by two people, or it is not danced at all. The invisible other is invoked by this woman's every gesture and we do not smile when faced with the absence of her man because we have a premonition that she is not pretending, we have a premonition that she can see him. The image of women dancing alone has become one of the symbols of the struggle of the families of the disappeared under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. The families are commemorating, on 1 October 1995, the twentieth anniversary of their organization into an association in 1975. The term “the disappeared” has progressively become accepted to indicate the victims of a novel, coercive practice in Chile, since the coup d’état on 11 September 1973. The forced disappearance of people differs from political assassination, as Amnesty International never ceases to indicate in the various reports which it commissions on them. In the Chilean case, this speciality is in part due to the security system which has taken on the responsibility of destroying all organized opposition to the military dictatorship: the DINA, the intelligence service created by the military junta, which is only answerable for its actions to the junta. More fundamentally, the special character of disappearance is due to the invisibility of the victim's body and to the doubt that this invisibility arouses within the victim's family circle: the disappeared is not identified as dead because his death is never certified, on the other hand his sudden and unexplained absence indicates that he is a person in danger and that this danger extends to all those who notice his absence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT With few exceptions, the effectiveness of continuing education mandates has been measured by self-report assessments of the professional psychologists who fulfill them. The present investigation provided a longitudinal look at the number of approved CE providers and the incidence of licensing board complaints across a succession of two-year cycles prior to, and following, the 2012 implementation of CE mandates in the State of Illinois. Findings showed a substantial increase in the number of CE providers across that time, though no (...) significant change in the incidence of licensing board complaints, suggesting that the increased availability of CE did not translate into lower complaint rates. Possible reasons for these findings are noted, and recommendations for future work are detailed in support of an evidence-based approach to CE that better articulates and aligns its objectives with its outcomes in an era of renewed accountability in the health professions. (shrink)