When considering external assistive systems for people with motor impairments, gaze has been shown to be a powerful tool as it is anticipatory to motor actions and is promising for understanding intentions of an individual even before the action. Up until now, the vast majority of studies investigating the coordinated eye and hand movement in a grasping task focused on single objects manipulation without placing them in a meaningful scene. Very little is known about the impact of the scene context (...) on how we manipulate objects in an interactive task. In the present study, it was investigated how the scene context affects human object manipulation in a pick-and-place task in a realistic scenario implemented in VR. During the experiment, participants were instructed to find the target object in a room, pick it up, and transport it to a predefined final location. Thereafter, the impact of the scene context on different stages of the task was examined using head and hand movement, as well as eye tracking. As the main result, the scene context had a significant effect on the search and transport phases, but not on the reach phase of the task. The present work provides insights into the development of potential supporting intention predicting systems, revealing the dynamics of the pick-and-place task behavior once it is realized in a realistic context-rich scenario. (shrink)

Two continents. Three countries. Mountains, archipelago, a little red dot & more to come. BERIT SOLI-HOLT (Editor): When I think of introductory material, I think of that Derrida documentary when he is asked about what he would like to know about other philosophers. He simply states: their love life. APRIL VANNINI (Editor): And as far as introductions go, I think Derrida brought forth a fruitful discussion on philosophy and thinking with this statement. First, he allows philosophy to open up the (...) personal and second, the ability to conjure the notion of thinking in relation. After all, love lives are spawned from relations, and such are philosophical encounters—the co-emergence of thought and affect. This brings us to discuss the concept of the special issue of continent. called drift . From the Statement of Intent : The discussion that has become drift , a special issue of continent. began in the glow of a bonfire beside a lake near the Thousand Islands of Ontario when co-founders April and Berit came across a conception of a journal that would decline to follow traditional models of invitation and editorship, instead following a generated discourse through relational means. Shedding preemptive articulation of expected outcome and cohesion, we hope to light a fuse of chain interactions with each contributor active in authorial, editorial, and curatorial roles. drift seeks to allow the framing mechanism to choose itself, to find where something can flow or emerge in relation to a series of participants. By setting out a thread of thought to work its own way through writers and artists of various locations, drift operates through links, breaks, pauses, new directions, unintended consequences, twists, holes, bridges. We are attempting to give the scene for an emergence and what can become conceivable when given the opportunity to create chains of thought—linking, welding, fusing, looping, stitching. We hope to explore what is attainable when scholarly/artistic relationships transverse on their own terms instead of articulated by an institutional environment. JEREMY FERNANDO (Guest Editor): I think he was actually more interested in their sex lives. Though at the same time completely refusing to discuss, disclose, his own: I found it rather touching that he blushes whenever speaking of his life with Marguerite. So perhaps in this sense it is very apt to speak of it in terms of love; and the secret that is in each love: that even though it is a relationality between, there are parts of it that remain hidden, not just from everyone else, but even those in that relation itself. What the editors intend to ^do^ to impart this conceptualization is to provide a framework through the choice of a theme and by minimal standardization of form and content guidelines. As initial instigator, each editor will send their contribution to the issue to a fellow colleague, thinker, artist, friend with the invitation to send (via post) the accruing materials to another possible contributor. In this, we hope to engage with many individuals on ideas surrounding a specific theme determined but not limited by the editors of the drift . The end result will take the form of whatever is at hand (as materials can only stay with each contributor for two weeks) and whomever is at hand (the availability of interested and capable parties) through a course of five months. We are curious. What are the ways in which thought can emerge between individuals and places? What occurs when our fundamental mode of inquiry is between each other? How are ethical, social, spacious, political, aesthetic practices created between a chain of contributors. BSH: To introduce what to look forward to in June with the publication of drift isn't quite possible yet. It is in the stages of preparation, barely started, but already begun. I have been thinking about drift as an insect that goes through life cycles, chrysalises, pupas, larva. Each moment of the production and publication of this issue of continent. is its own life. A bug under a pin is not as interesting as one in flight or crawling up your leg. JF: Though the one crawling up your leg is also more likely to bite you. There is always already a danger in letting be, thinking …. Then again, there is also a potential rupture in attempting to seize, pin down, capture. BSH: I think a word we haven't thought about enough yet is capture. I think we are perhaps trying to capture something, or to allow for the moments of this capture along the way, the resulting material being the ripples left in the sand when the water waves away. AV: This question comes to mind when speaking about captures, waves, ripples: How can we activate a ripple? What I find interesting about a wave is the difference in frequencies, movements, forms, style that are activated in between intervals. What is interesting about a wave is that it is activated in relation to what came before. What remains in the sand is a ripple that forms in relation between multiple intervals of stylistic waves. As Deleuze and Parnet have taught us, "We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being 'author'. And these 'between-the-twos' referred back to other people, who were different on one side from the other. The desert expanded, but in so doing became more populous." 1 Drift is activation for thinking-with and possibly much more—who knows? There is the intent to subvert the relational qualities between people in journal publishing, but also important to the editors is the subversion of materials. The editors do not shy away from use of contemporary technology and, in fact, have relied and will continue to rely on the wonders of internet connectivity to midwife the drift. The connective infrastructure chosen to relay the developing issue is simply one of bodies, of postal workers and the varying postal systems. Some may find it to be merely be a call of an already dying form, but the editors believe that the conversation exchanged from hand to hand is of explicit difference in quality of engagement due to the complexity of peripheral information transported by physical matter. Different hospitalities and responsibilities are at play in keeping hold of one-of-a-kind materials for a time and entrusting various postal systems to bear the message forward. To have work physically transported through space and time through this kind of infrastructure that is reliant on individuals to literally carry a message is crucial in incorporating traces of bodily presence. AV: Thought is contingent and emergent process that folds, twists, pulls, shifts in multiple directions and we are interested in these multiple directions. JF: And even as thought is contingent on, hinged around, its place, time, venue—on its continents, as it were (we still tend to speak of gestures of thinking as Continental, British, American, European, Asian, etc.)—we might also attempt to respond to the landscape within each thought: its folds, unfoldings, rolls, manoeuvres, geography. BSH: How different is this than Morelli's screw that Julio Cortazar or Horacio Oliveira recounts in Hopscotch? The fable recalls a man who regarded a screw everyday on his stoop. When he perishes, the screw disappears, perhaps into a fellow neighbor's pocket for secret contemplation. Whoever is writing the passage remarks that "Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw." JF: Perhaps even more intriguing is the notion that we do not quite know who is inscribing these remarks on Morelli. That even as someone says that it is a screw, perhaps because it is shaped like a screw, the one who names it “screw”—the one whom we are in a relation with in relation to the screw—remains veiled from us. But even as this is so, the notion of the object as “screw” is marked, etched, onto us. BSH: A periodical, marking a period of time, but where? An issue, a magazine, a storehouse of information. To show the remainders of thinkers connecting and surfing. With all this stated, we, as editors of the drift are aware of the active fault, quaking potential, and ethical catastrophe of such a proposed project — the inheritance or the gifting of a project without consent. We are certain that there may be possible oversight on the process of such a project. If such is the case, we hope that oversight and misdirection will not leave this project dormant but rather open up promising new directions, questions, and potential considerations. We are very excited about the accidental propositions that can occur in between. In sum, we'll see what happens. JF: Perhaps, all we can know of the screw is that we are screwed ... NOTE Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet. Dialogues II . Revised edition. (New York: Columbia University Press). 2007: 17. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Right HeartIngrid GouldI remarked to a friend, “We haven’t spoken since my arrest!” Alarm and confusion clouded his face, given my half-century of squeaky-clean living. “Cardiac arrest,” I clarified. “The fire department rebooted me.”An electrophysiologist diagnosed Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia, prescribed medication, and implanted a defibrillator. For the next three-and-a-half years, he helped me live with a disease I didn’t know existed until he told me I had (...) it.The disease progressed—an ironic, disease-centric term since its advancement was to my detriment— prompting my cardiologist to recommend seeing someone who specialized in heart failure. I resisted the very idea of heart failure, a terrible term for a struggling organ, but took her advice and scheduled an appointment.The new cardiologist urged transplant testing, a lengthy process. I agreed, figuring that by the time I needed a new heart in 15–20 years, they’d be rolling off 3D printers.To record occasional transplant musings and inchoate fears and perhaps, over time, untangle them, I began journaling. I chronicled my passage through the echocardiogram, heart catheterization, 31 tubes of bloodwork, interviews with different clinical specialties, a pulmonary function test in a machine reminiscent of Star Trek’s Transporter, and more. Testing had barely begun when my medication stopped working—a Halloween shock.I began a harsher medication, underwent an ablation, and spent six weeks in a wearable defibrillator, a vest with abundant wires, and a purse-sized battery pack that made me resemble a character in [End Page 123] the Jetsons. This attire did not bring holiday comfort or joy to the TSA1 when I flew to visit my sister. As my R-waves faded to a whisper, I swapped the vest for a second implanted defibrillator, substantially more sensitive than the first.In early 2018, we learned I had qualified for transplant listing, though I wished to get as much mileage as possible from the original engine. My cardiologist warned, “There is no Plan B—no machine, device, or medication for the long-term. You will need a transplant.” He explained that since most cardiac patients have left-heart problems, companies develop products for the left side of the heart. My problem was on the right—a tiny market. He also cautioned that a patient needs to be sick enough to warrant transplant and well enough to remain a candidate, survive the surgery, and recover.Although clinically I was ready, I was not personally ready. I felt too good to trade an excellent quality of life for the promised miserable post-transplant year. The cardiologist wisely asked if I wanted to speak with another patient. When I requested someone beyond the dreaded first year, he put me in touch with two women who had received new hearts a few years earlier and befriended each other. They soon became my invaluable mentors and cherished friends. I will never forget seeing them stride into our first meeting and thinking, “They are beautiful! They look totally normal!”By May, climbing four flights of stairs took as much effort as five used to take. Tests confirmed further deterioration and suggested I had 7–13 months of declining health before my heart would give out completely. We chose a date for hospital admission, and I started telling people outside my immediate family. Most were flabbergasted, believing heart transplants were the last hope of the desperately ill. I did not look moribund, though, apparently, I was.The eight months after my first transplant appointment let me prepare psychologically to bid farewell to my heart—the metaphor for kindness, love, and bravery in our culture—and to welcome a new organ from a generous person less medically fortunate than I.In the hospital, I met others awaiting their hearts. A sudden intimacy arises when mortal choices catapult people into a medical realm suggestive of science fiction. Add the emotional intensity that accompanies knowing your extended life comes courtesy of a person who breathes no more on this earth and you wonder how an organ recipient integrates sorrow and gratitude.Two weeks after I was hospitalized, my cardiologist informed me the wait was over... (shrink)

Adenosine transport in cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) was characterized and shown to be mediated by a single facilitated diffusion mechanism. Initial rates of adenosine influx at 22 degrees C were saturable [apparent Michaelis constant, 69 +/- 10 mu M; maximum velocity (V-max), 600 +/- 70 pmol.10(6) cells(-1).s(-1)] and inhibited by nitrobenzylthioinosine (NBMPR). Formycin B had an unusually high affinity [inhibitory constant K-i), 18 +/- 4.3 mu M], whereas inosine had a low affinity (K-i, 440 +/- 68 (...) mu M) and nucleobases were without effect on adenosine influx. The number of transporters (1.2 x 10(6) sites/cell) was estimated by NBMPR equilibrium binding (apparent dissociation constant, 0.11 +/- 0.01 nM; maximum binding, 2.0 +/- 0.15 pmol/10(6) cells). In addition, we compared these endothelial cells with those obtained from cords from pregnancies complicated by diabetes (HUVEC-D), since embriopathy may occur in these conditions. HUVEC-D exhibited a 2.3-fold reduction in both the V-max for adenosine influx and the maximum number of NBMPR binding sites (260 +/- 40 pmol.10(6) cells(-1).s(-1) and 0.86 +/- 0.08 pmol/10(6) cells, respectively). However, the turnover number for each nucleoside transporter in normal and diabetic HUVEC was similar (approximate to 300 adenosine molecules/s). Adenosine metabolism at 10 mu M in HUVEC-D was modified compared with normal cells. Intracellular phosphorylation (> 90%) was the predominant pathway in normal HUVEC, whereas in HUVEC-D, substantial levels of adenine and adenosine were detected. The present results demonstrate therefore the downregulation of the NBMPR-sensitive nucleoside transporter and changes in adenosine metabolism in HUVEC from diabetic pregnancies. (shrink)

We all know that problems of transportation and allocation appear frequently in practical life. We need to transfer materials from production centers to consumption centers to secure the areas’ need for the transported material or allocate machines or people to do a specific job at the lowest cost, or in the shortest time. We know that the cost factors Time is one of the most important factors that decision-makers care about because it plays an “important” role in many of (...) the practical and scientific issues that we face in our daily lives, and we need careful study to enable us to avoid losses. For this, the linear programming method was used, which is one of the research methods. Processes, where the problem data is converted into a linear mathematical model for which the optimal solution achieves the desired goal. Since these models are linear models, we can solve them using the direct simplex method and its modifications, but the specificity that these models enjoy has enabled scholars and researchers to find special methods that help us in obtaining the optimal solution. Whatever the method used, the goal is to determine the number of units transferred from any material from production centers to consumption centers, or to allocate a machine or person to do a job so that the cost or time is as short as possible. These issues were addressed according to classical logic, but the ideal solution was a specific value appropriate to the conditions in which the data was collected and does not take into account the changes that may occur in the work environment. In order to obtain results that are more accurate and enjoy a margin of freedom, we present in this book a study of transport issues and neutrosophic allocation issues and some methods for solving them. By neutrosophic issues we mean These are the problems in which the data are neutrosophic values, i.e. the required quantities and the available quantities. (shrink)

Conditional promises and threats are speech acts that are used to manipulate other people's behaviour. Studies on human reasoning typically use propositional logic to analyse what people infer from such inducements. While this approach is sufficient to uncover conceptual features of inducements, it fails to explain them. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multilevel analysis integrating motivational, linguistic, deontic, behavioural, and emotional aspects. Commonalities and differences between conditional promises and threats on various levels were examined in two experiments. (...) The first shows that both types of inducements are understood as being complementary on the linguistic level, but not reversible, due to the specific temporal order of their actions. In addition, it gives a first assessment of emotional reactions. The second experiment investigated the novel question of whether complementary promises and threats, despite semantic differences, both imply an obligation to cooperate on the deontic level. The data corroborate this hypothesis, and they support various appraisal-theoretical assumptions on the elicitation of emotions. They also reveal that content affects not only the attribution of emotions, but also the deontic interpretation. (shrink)

Considering that getting along in civil society is based on the expectation that people will do what they say they will do, i.e., essentially live up to their explicit or implicit promises, it is amazing that so little scientific attention has been given to the act of promising. A great deal of research has been done on the moral development of children, for example, but not on the child’s ability to make and keep a promise, one of the highest moral (...) achievements. What makes it possible developmentally, cognitively, and emotionally to make a promise in the first place? And on the other hand, what compels one to keep a promise when there seems to be no personal advantage in doing so, and even when harm can be predicted? How do we know when a promise is offered seriously to be taken at face value, and how do we understand that another is only a polite gesture, not to be taken seriously? In _Promises, Oaths, and Vows: On the Psychology of Promising_, Herbert Schlesinger addresses these questions, drawing on the literature of moral development in children; the psychotherapy of a patient who regularly broke promises that were unnecessary in the first place; those who were regarded as "promising youngsters" who did not fulfill their "promise"; and those who feared making a promise, a commitment, or a threat out of fear that, once made, the utterance would take on a life of its own and could never be taken back. Furthermore, he illustrates his conclusions by examining the widespread use of promising in classical literature, such as Greek drama and the plays of Shakespeare, as well as the motivating and reifying power of the promise in Western religious traditions. With a style honed over the penning of two previous books, Schlesinger once again produces a work grounded in a firm analytic sensibility, but which also retains the wit and candor of the seasoned analyst. His seminal investigation of this all but neglected topic in the clinical literature is as timely as it is scholarly, and – with the title firmly in mind – _Promises, Oaths, and Vows_ is assured to be a worthy addition to any clinician’s library and a provoking investigation into Nietzsche’s notion of man as "the animal who makes promises.". (shrink)

Daly, Brendan About a month before my ordination as a priest on 7 May 1977, my diocesan bishop asked me to come and see him at his office. He said after my ordination I was going to be appointed to Mairehau parish as an assistant priest. Two weeks later I was making my pre-ordination retreat and the bishop arrived to see me. He was embarrassed and said 'We have a problem. One parish priest won't take the assistant priest that I (...) want to give him, and another assistant priest won't go where he is appointed, so the end result is that you are now going to Addington parish. Is that okay?' I replied 'Yes.' Both parishes were in Christchurch city, and I did not know either parish priest personally, so it really did not matter at all. However, two weeks later at my ordination ceremony, it came time for the promise of obedience. I knelt down before the bishop who asked me did 'I promise him and his successors obedience and respect.' At the same time as he said this I was conscious of the thought going through my mind, 'what does it all mean anyway?'. (shrink)

Advances in cognitive neuroscience make cosmetic neurology in some form inevitable and will give rise to extremely difficult ethical issuesConsider the following hypothetical case study. A well heeled executive walks into my cognitive neurology clinic because he is concerned that he is becoming forgetful. It turns out that he is going through a difficult divorce and my clinical impression is that his memory problems stem from the stress he is experiencing. I place him on a selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor, sertraline, (...) and in a few weeks he feels better. Around this time his 13 year old daughter has difficulty at school and is diagnosed by the school psychologist as having attention deficit disorder. I place her on adderall, a stimulant combination drug, which seems to help with her behaviour in school. My patient then comes to me because he is experiencing the “tip of the tongue” phenomena more frequently. He is concerned that his word finding difficulty interferes with his ability to function in high level meetings. I suggest we try a cholinesterase inhibitor to see if this helps. I am careful to explain that the Food and Drug Administration does not approve such a use for this medication. He wants to try it and is pleased with the results.A few months later, this patient visits me with his 16 year old son, a talented middle distance runner. His father thinks if he were just a bit better, among the elite high school runners in the state, he would be far more competitive as an applicant for selective colleges. We discuss various options. Because of a recent report that sildenafil, which is used conventionally for male impotence, may improve oxygen carrying capacity, I prescribe this medication. The son does not object.Encouraged by these pharmacologic successes, my patient …. (shrink)

The essential biological processes that sustain life are catalyzed by protein nano-engines, which maintain living systems in far-from-equilibrium ordered states. To investigate energetic processes in proteins, we have analyzed the system of generalized Davydov equations that govern the quantum dynamics of multiple amide I exciton quanta propagating along the hydrogen-bonded peptide groups in α-helices. Computational simulations have confirmed the generation of moving Davydov solitons by applied pulses of amide I energy for protein α-helices of varying length. The stability and mobility (...) of these solitons depended on the uniformity of dipole-dipole coupling between amide I oscillators, and the isotropy of the exciton-phonon interaction. Davydov solitons were also able to quantum tunnel through massive barriers, or to quantum interfere at collision sites. The results presented here support a nontrivial role of quantum effects in biological systems that lies beyond the mechanistic support of covalent bonds as binding agents of macromolecular structures. Quantum tunneling and interference of Davydov solitons provide catalytically active macromolecular protein complexes with a physical mechanism allowing highly efficient transport, delivery, and utilization of free energy, besides the evolutionary mandate of biological order that supports the existence of such genuine quantum phenomena, and may indeed demarcate the quantum boundaries of life. (shrink)

Conditional promises and threats are speech acts that are used to manipulate other people's behaviour. Studies on human reasoning typically use propositional logic to analyse what people infer from such inducements. While this approach is sufficient to uncover conceptual features of inducements, it fails to explain them. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multilevel analysis integrating motivational, linguistic, deontic, behavioural, and emotional aspects. Commonalities and differences between conditional promises and threats on various levels were examined in two experiments. (...) The first shows that both types of inducements are understood as being complementary on the linguistic level, but not reversible, due to the specific temporal order of their actions. In addition, it gives a first assessment of emotional reactions. The second experiment investigated the novel question of whether complementary promises and threats, despite semantic differences, both imply an obligation to cooperate on the deontic level. The data corroborate this hypothesis, and they support various appraisal-theoretical assumptions on the elicitation of emotions. They also reveal that content affects not only the attribution of emotions, but also the deontic interpretation. (shrink)

In this piece, I argue that promises need not be kept just because they were made. This is not to say, however, that unwise, unhappy, and unfortunate promises do not generate obligations. When broken promises will result either in wrongful gains to promisors or wrongful losses to promisees, obligations of corrective justice will demand that such promises be kept if their breach cannot be fully repaired. Thus, when a broken promise will constitute a deliberate loss transfer for personal gain, (...) the duty not to exact unjust enrichment will require a promisor either to honor her promise or craft a means of ensuring that the promisee’s impoverishment is not traded for her enrichment. And when a broken promise will constitute the culpable imposition of a reliance-based injury on a nonculpable promisee, the duty to make others whole when one has purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly injured them will require one either to keep one’s promise or to fashion a remedy for its breach that ensures that the promisee is left no worse off than he would be had the promise not been made. This account explicitly parts ways with normative powers theories of promising. It places no weight at all on the raw fact that a promise has been made. Instead, it locates the gravamen of a promissory violation in the harm that is caused to a promisee who nonculpably relies upon and changes her position in anticipation of the prediction about the promisor’s future conduct that is embedded in his promise. Absent any adverse reliance on the part of a promisee, there is nothing that gives rise to an obligation of performance or repair on the part of the promisor. But this account is also to be distinguished from utilitarian theories that take promises to be instruments of wealth maximization that properly give way whenever the reason for honoring them speaks in favor of violating them. On my account, the balance of reasons for action that determines the morality of performance includes deontological rights and duties, agent-relative permissions, and Hohfeldian liberties. As I shall argue, even if one rightly concludes that one has no duty either to keep a promise or to craft a remedy for its breach, one must nevertheless remember that virtue requires one to be or become the kind of person who often goes beyond the call of duty. But the fact that virtue often requires us to do what we have no duty to do should not cause us to confuse its conditions with the conditions of right and wrong action. We have a duty to keep promises or to otherwise protect the reliance interests that they generate only when failing to do so will lead either to our own unjust enrichment or to others’ unjust injury. And this means that we have a duty to keep promises in far fewer circumstances than is commonly believed. (shrink)

The cilium/flagellum is a sensory-motile organelle ancestrally present in eukaryotic cells. For assembly cilia universally rely on intraflagellar transport (IFT), a specialised bidirectional transport process mediated by the ancestral and conserved IFT complex. Based on the homology of IFT complex proteins to components of coat protein I (COPI) and clathrin-coated vesicles, we propose that the non- vesicular, membrane-bound IFT evolved as a specialised form of coated vesicle transport from a protocoatomer complex. IFT thus shares common ancestry with all protocoatomer derivatives, (...) including all vesicle coats and the nuclear pore complex (NPC). This has major implications for the evolutionary origin of the cilium. First, it reinforces the tenet that duplication and divergence of pre-existing structures, rather than symbiosis, were the major themes during cilium evolution. Second, it suggests that the initial step in the autogenous origin of the cilium was the establishment of a membrane patch with transmembrane proteins transported by the ancestral vesicle-coating IFT complex. We propose a scenario for how the initial membrane patch gradually protruded to enhance exposure to the environment, then started to move, and finally compartmentalised to render receptor signalling and ciliary beating more efficient. BioEssays 28: 191–198, 2006. © 2006 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

It is common knowledge that the Jews have shown an unusually persistent emotional attachment to their fatherland, notably when they were exiled and dispersed. The sentiment has found many expressions throughout Jewish history and is too well known to require repeated documentation, but a few examples may remind us of its ardent nature.“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion,” opens a well-known Psalm (137). And the weeping does not meander into (...) a passive nostalgia, but leads to an active determination expressed in the oath: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” When the moment of return from Babylon arrives, the experience transcends the confines of reality: “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.” (Psalm 126). (shrink)

Why have philosophers since Hume regarded promising as problematic? I distinguish two problems raised by Hume. The problem of the bare wrong is the problem of how it can make sense to avoid a wrong when the wrong does not affect any intelligible human interest. The problem of normative power is the problem of how something can be a wrong simply because it has been declared to be a wrong. I argue that the problem of the bare wrong is more (...) basic. I then examine the attempts of practice theorists like Hume and Rawls to overcome the problem of the bare wrong by arguing that whenever breach of promise seems like a bare wrong, in fact human interests are adversely affected because a socially valuable practice is damaged. I argue that their various explanations cannot cover all the cases. I then formulate an assumption which is shared by all practice theorists (and others) namely the assumption that we take promises seriously because they serve our interest in social co-ordination. I argue that if this assumption were true, there need be no practice of promise-keeping for promises to bind. Furthermore, were this assumption true, promising would be a social tool that we could largely do without. And so long as promising intelligibility is in doubt (because of the problem of the bare wrong) an adherent of the social co-ordination hypothesis should assume that we largely do do without it. So anyone who gives promising a key role in human social life must reject the social co-ordination hypothesis. (shrink)

This article describes a project involving 13 community focus groups on the topic of anti-racism and belonging where the researchers concluded each group with a robust discussion about how the group would prefer to receive the findings from the project. Analysis of this data, existing literature, and the practical experiences of the researchers revealed that while there are multiple “bridges” researchers can take to connect their research with community-level users, and although it is desirable to offer tailored approaches for specific (...) audiences, there are significant barriers and challenges for truly effective engagement. By describing the various factors that determined which bridges were taken, we hope to help other community-based researchers imagine new ways of mobilizing knowledge, consider promising practices to guide the connection of knowledge to the community and shine a light on the very real constraints of time, budget, personnel, and university system considerations that impact knowledge mobilization decisions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Promises and PitfallsMark BerksonThe Center for the Pacific Rim and the University of San Francisco hosted a conference on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on May 8, 1998. The conference brought together scholars and practitioners of both traditions in an encounter that was not only academically stimulating, but also personally and spiritually enriching for those involved. The participants included both those who have had extensive experience in the dialogue, as (...) well as a number of new voices. The conference both critiqued previous and ongoing efforts at dialogue and also took the dialogue itself in new directions. While Buddhist-Christian dialogue of the past has often focused on comparative doctrine, involving theological issues and comparative beliefs, this conference focused instead on comparative practice, an approach that was quite productive. The practices explored included monasticism, pilgrimage, bowing, meditation, renunciation, social action and—of particular relevance to the overall project of interfaith encounter—the practice of dialogue itself and the methods and virtues necessary to carry it out successfully.Comparative PracticeIn the first of three panels, the following questions were central: Despite the differences that exist in metaphysics, doctrine, and worldview between the traditions, are there certain practices which, because they are shared, point to some deep commonalities between the traditions? What is the relation of belief to both the interpretation of practice and to the experience itself? Can a tradition authentically incorporate the practices of another tradition? What obstacles are involved in the process?The first speaker, Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and a Benedictine prioress, gave a paper entitled “Monastic Practice: Views of the Mind.” She focused on the theme of renunciation in monastic life and discussed three types of renunciation Benedictine monastics undergo that seem to resonate with the experience of Buddhist monastics. The first is the renunciation of the former way of life, moving away from “the designs of self-willed projects and works that serve to shore up the ego and make one’s own personality the main concern in life.” Following that comes the renunciation of thoughts about the [End Page 181] former way of life. Sister Funk pointed out that while monastics might physically renounce their former life (e.g., move into a monastery), their thoughts, desires, and passions follow them. The final renunciation is to give up even thoughts, images, and mental constructs of God. She observed: “The monastic practices that deal with the mind seem to be parallel tracks in both spiritualities. The observation of our thoughts, desires, and passions [is] a universal experience.”David Komito, a fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim and scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, in his talk “Teacher, Reliquary, Circumambulation,” discussed the practice of pilgrimage in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition of Tibet. The questions that framed his talk included, “What would be the virtue of visiting a stupa (reliquary) and what would be the goal of travel?” He pointed out that the answer to such questions would depend on one’s philosophical or theological position, explaining that the different schools of Buddhism would often provide different answers. This raised an important point for the conference: We might look at Buddhists undertaking a particular practice, such as pilgrimage, and assume that they’re doing the same thing; for example, traveling to a place in a group, walking around that place, and returning home. Yet their experiences might be very different; in fact, pilgrims on the same journey who arrive at a sacred site may even be seeing different things while looking at one and the same object. This is because they might be framing, interpreting, and understanding the experience differently. If this is true among Buddhists, how much more so between Buddhists and Christians?The panel continued with Father Paul Bernadicou’s “Catholic Guides to Buddhist Practice.” Father Bernadicou, the chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at USF, discussed a number of Catholics who have had deep encounters with Buddhism and incorporated Buddhist practice and insights into their own spiritual path. Through this historical survey, he both provided a context in which to understand our conference and showed us the possibilities that lie in our own... (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Serotonin transporter promoter genotype appears to increase risk for depression in the context of stressful life events. However, the effects of this genotype on measures of stress sensitivity are poorly understood. Therefore, this study examined whether 5-HTTLPR genotype was associated with negative information processing biases in early childhood. METHOD: Thirty-nine unselected seven-year-old children completed a negative mood induction procedure and a Self-Referent Encoding Task designed to measure positive and negative schematic processing. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR (...) gene. RESULTS: Children who were homozygous for the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene showed greater negative schematic processing following a negative mood prime than those with other genotypes. 5-HTTLPR genotype was not significantly associated with positive schematic processing. LIMITATIONS: The sample size for this study was small. We did not analyze more recently reported variants of the 5-HTTLPR long alleles. CONCLUSIONS: 5-HTTLPR genotype is associated with negative information processing styles following a negative mood prime in a non-clinical sample of young children. Such cognitive styles are thought to be activated in response to stressful life events, leading to depressive symptoms; thus, cognitive styles may index the "stress-sensitivity" conferred by this genotype. (shrink)

It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of science and technology under scrutiny, with a special focus on technologies and methods of transportation. The history of transportation is a history of trying to avoid shipwrecks and plane crashes. It is also a history of broken masts, worm-eaten hulls, the flat tires of cars, and endless delays at airports. This introductory article assesses the technological, scientific, and cultural implications of (...) repairing and maintaining transportation networks. We argue that infrastructures for maintenance and repair played just as important a role in the history of transportation as the wharves and factories where ships, cars, trains, and airplanes were originally built. We also suggest that maintenance and repair are important sites of knowledge production, and a historical account of these practices provides a new, decentered narrative for the development of modern science and technology. (shrink)

Insight is a construct carried out into different theoretical orientations with increasing application out of the boundaries of clinical psychology. Recent studies have investigated insight also as a promising variable for organizational outcomes. Given the relevance of Insight in promoting change, this paper aimed at describing the psychometric analysis of one of the shortest, most agile, and most versatile tool for measuring some of the characteristics of insight, the Insight Orientation Scale, using Item Response Theory. To achieve this goal, we (...) applied a Mixed Rash Model to the IOS. Data from 1,445 individuals were analyzed by the means of WIN-MIRA and Multilog. Based on the likelihood statistics we assumed a three-class solution for the IOS. Results also indicated that the greater part of items had good discrimination and threshold parameters. These findings confirmed psychometric stability of the IOS highlighting its measurement precision, supporting its utility in both research and practice. (shrink)

Attentional bias has been suggested to contribute to the persistence of substance use behavior. However, the empirical evidence for its proposed role in addiction is inconsistent. This might be due to the inability of commonly used measures to differentiate between attentional engagement and attentional disengagement. Attesting to the importance of differentiating between both components of AB, a recent study using the odd-one-out task showed that substance use was differentially related to engagement and disengagement bias. However, the AB measures derived from (...) the OOOT showed insufficient reliability to be used as a solid measure of individual differences. Therefore, the current study aimed to improve the reliability of the AB measures derived from the OOOT by using more distinct contrast stimuli, adding practice trials, increasing the number of trials, and by having participants perform the task in an alcohol-relevant context. We contrasted the original OOOT with the adapted OOOT and assessed AB in low- and high-drinking individuals. Participants were 245 undergraduate students who typically tend to drink either low or high amounts of alcohol. In one condition, AB was measured with the original OOOT in a typical laboratory context, whereas in the other condition, AB was measured with the OOOT-adapt in a bar context. The OOOT-adapt showed superior internal consistency, especially for the high-drinking group. Further, specifically the OOOT-adapt differentiated between low- and high-drinking participants showing that high drinkers engaged faster with alcohol cues than did low drinkers. Thus, the OOOT-adapt was found to be a promising candidate to reliably index AB in the context of alcohol use. The OOOT-adapt further showed superior criterion validity as it could differentiate between low- and high-drinking individuals, thereby adding to the evidence that AB might be involved in substance use behavior. (shrink)

Understanding human behaviour involves "why"'s as well as "how"'s. Rational people have good reasons for acting, but it can be hard to find out what these were and how they worked. In this Note, we discuss a few ways in which actions, preferences, and expectations are intermingled. This mixture is especially clear with the well-known solution procedure for extensive games called 'Backward Induction'. In particular, we discuss three scenarios for analyzing behaviour in a game. One can rationalize given moves (...) as revealing agents' preferences, one can also rationalize them as revealing agents' beliefs about others, but one can also change a predicted pattern of behaviour by making promises. All three scenarios transform given games to new ones, and we prove some results about their scope. A more general view of relevant game transformations would involve dynamic and epistemic game logics. Finally, our analysis describes and disentangles matters: but it will not tell you what to do! (shrink)

The intensification of debate over environmental ethics in recent years have clarified some ethical arguments such as autonomy, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, trans-generational ethics and the rights of nature. However, we can ask if these ethical principles could become an incentive for people to act considering the environment. A questionnaire sheet for use in face-to-face interviews was developed to explore the ideas of the general public in order to describe the attitudes and behaviour towards transportation using private cars. People (...) class='Hi'>were interviewed to ask how they think of the use of private cars in the future, and whether they have restricted their use of private cars considering the environment, using open-ended questions. According to this survey, it is suggested that while more than 90% of the general public in Japan think the environment faces serious problems, most lack concrete knowledge about why environmental problems are dangerous. Among those who object to restrictions on private car use, there are also many respondents who expect a solution from the development of science and technology, as well as the general state of mind and society that considers a convenient life to be most important. (shrink)

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, (...) and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

In The Choice Theory of Contracts, Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller state that by arguing “that autonomy matters centrally to contract,” Contract as Promise makes an “enduring contribution... but [its] specific arguments faltered because [they] missed the role of diverse contract types and because [it] grounded contractual freedom in a flawed rights-based view.... We can now say all rights-based arguments for contractual autonomy have failed.” The authors conclude that their proposed choice theory “approach returns analysis to the mainstream of twentieth-century (...) liberalism – a tradition concerned with enhancing self-determination that is mostly absent in contract theory today.” Perhaps the signal flaw in Contract as Promise they sought to address was the homogenization of all contract types under a single paradigm. In this Article, I defend the promise principle as the appropriate paradigm for the regime of contract law. Along the way I defend the Kantian account of this subject, while acknowledging that state enforcement necessarily introduces elements — both normative and institutional — for which that paradigm fails adequately to account. Of particular interest and validity is Dagan and Heller’s discussion of contract types, to which the law has always and inevitably recurred. They show how this apparent constraint on contractual freedom actually enhances freedom to contract. I discuss what I have learned from their discussion: that choice like languages, is “lumpy,” so that realistically choices must be made between and framed within available types, off the rack, as it were, and not bespoke on each occasion. I do ask as well how these types come into being mutate, and can be deliberately adapted to changing circumstances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Second Harvest: Further Reflections on the Promise of the Thomistic PsychologyGiuseppe Butera (bio)Keywordsmethod, emotion, developmental psychology, rationalism, holismSamuel Johnson was once accosted by a lady demanding to know why he had defined “pastern” as “the knee of a horse.” Seeing perhaps that escape was impossible, the great man simply confessed, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance” (Fadiman 1985, 312). In preparing to write my response to the gracious and stimulating commentaries (...) of Eugene DeRobertis and Christopher Megone, I came gradually to feel how apposite such a reply would be to some of their own critical observations and remarks. Although I had known from the start that the work of bringing Aquinas’s philosophical psychology (APP) into dialogue with modern psychology would be difficult, it was only in reflecting on their commentaries that I came to appreciate just how difficult it would be and how far short of the mark my own first attempt had fallen. But there was also much in their commentaries to encourage me in this work. For their penetrating observations and criticisms, as well as their supportive comments, I am truly grateful.Rather than responding to their critical remarks one at a time and in the order in which they appear in their respective commentaries, I would like to treat them thematically. Taken together, DeRobertis and Megone seem to have three major concerns, each of which will be treated separately in the following sections. Very briefly, these concerns have to do with: (1) Claims I make about the difference between the methods of inquiry employed by philosophy and psychology; (2) the absence of a discussion of the importance of developmental psychology for an adequate philosophical understanding of judgment (of both the rational and the cogitative kinds) and its relation to emotion; and (3) a subtle rationalist/cognitivist tendency in my treatment of Aquinas’s understanding of human rationality that comes dangerously close to muting, almost to the point of denying, its decidedly un-Cartesian embodiment.On MethodAlthough I did not undertake to argue for the legitimacy of philosophical inquiry into matters nowadays viewed by many to be the exclusive domain of the sciences—among which psychology is often numbered—I did make a few passing comments in that direction. Unfortunately, in the process of doing so, I ended up reducing the variegated field of psychology, with its wide range of explanatory stances and research methodologies,1 to the highly restrictive quantitative methodology [End Page 377] employed by the hard sciences.2 There is no question in my mind that DeRobertis would be right to call my “characterization of psychology as a strictly quantitative science” “damning” (DeRobertis 2010, 370) were I unwilling to disavow it.Admitting DeRobertis’ point that psychology is not limited to using a strictly quantitative research methodology is not, however, to deny that there is a real difference between the approaches taken by philosophy and modern psychology in their separate attempts to understand the human psyche. Although it is no simple task to say in what this difference consists, some indication of its nature may be grasped by answering questions in Megone’s commentary that invite a careful examination of “the linked roles of reason and experience in both science and philosophy” (Megone 2010, 374).Although Megone asks three distinct questions, the answers to the first two may be subsumed under the answer to the third, which asks how the “interaction of the two different modes of inquiry [employed by APP and CT]” may “be explained, given their different methods” (Megone 2010, 374). How, in other words, is it possible for cognitive therapy (CT) to be queried by APP, and vice versa, given their methodological differences? To answer this question, we must clarify what it is about modern psychology that makes it different from philosophical psychology (the first question); we must also say something about the “linked roles of reason and experience in both science and philosophy” (the second question).Generally speaking, philosophical psychology, at least as it is found in the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and other philosophical realists, differs from modern psychology not so much in the kinds of questions it asks as in the kinds of answers it seeks... (shrink)

This paper focuses on weather and climate as factors affecting certain facets of human activity during the Byzantine period. Various aspects of impact that weather phenomena and climatic conditions could have upon travel, travellers and communications by land, either in short-term or in long-term context, during the Byzantine period are discussed: Were there any long-term impacts of climatic change upon communications overland? Which weather phenomena are described by the Byzantine authors as affecting people on move? What was the impact (...) of weather upon land transport and communications? Which was the concept of weather that people on the move had and how can we combine weather reports with traveller's emotional and factual reality while experiencing meteorologically induced dangers during overland travel? (shrink)

When imposing traffic congestion pricing around downtown commercial centers, there is a concern that commercial activities will have to consider relocating due to reduced demand, at a cost to merchants. Concerns like these were important in the debates before the introductions of congestion charges in both London and Stockholm and influenced the final policy design choices. This study introduces a sequential experimental game to study reactions to congestion pricing in the commercial sector. In the game, merchants first make location (...) choices. Consumers, who drive to do their shopping, subsequently choose where to shop. Initial responses to the introduction of congestion pricing and equilibrium selection adjustments over time are observed. These observations are compared to responses and adjustments in a condition where congestion pricing is reduced from an initially high level. Payoffs are non-linear and non-transparent, making it less than obvious that the efficient equilibrium will be selected, and introducing possibilities that participants need to discover their preferences and anchor on past experiences. We find that initial responses reflect standard inverse price–demand relations, and that adjustments over time rely on signaling by consumers leading to the efficient equilibrium. There is also evidence that priming from initial experiences influence play somewhat. We confirm that commercial activities relocate following the introduction of congestion pricing and that the adjustment process is costly to merchants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project by Ann HartleVicente Raga RosalenyHARTLE, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2022. ix + 178 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $30.00Why are we witnessing increasing social polarization in Western societies? What has happened to make our liberal democracies so ideologically charged? Professor Ann (...) Hartle's book tries to answer these and other questions in line with the concept of civility that, according to her thesis, Michel de Montaigne created in early modernity and that is about to disappear in our day. Not in vain is Montaigne the protagonist of this book, given that Professor Hartle is a world-renowned specialist on the author of the Essays, although in this case she is interested in the transformations that gave rise to modernity in order to understand our present day. She reads Montaigne for a better interpretation of some central problems of our time, such as the difficulty to speak freely that is experienced on university campuses and, in general, the increasing politicization of our civil societies.Thus, in the first place, Professor Hartle's work interrogates the origins of civility, the social bond created in modernity. To this end, she exposes what happened in the time of Montaigne, when societies, based on the classical and Christian tradition, were plunged into a general crisis. This is what the French essayist detected, and it led him to propose a new type of bond. For this, it is necessary to free oneself from tradition, which had legitimized the division between masters and slaves, the source of all conflicts.Montaigne's movement is philosophical in character: It consists of a split carried out in his Essays between the natural human being and the philosophical observer, which leads to a break with traditional moral standards, identified with Nature. The new human being, thus unfolded, can choose his own hierarchy of values and address the good he chooses with his own will (although this will be a will purified of particularisms, without excessive self-esteem). Such self-awareness, achieved by Montaigne as an accidental philosopher, is concretized in the predominance of the concept of judgment, in the ability to freely choose our possibilities (and not ends dictated by Nature).The new world thus created, Hartle explains, gave rise to the liberal order. It is true that Montaigne was not a theorist, but in his work it is possible to find the rupture of the traditional hierarchy between masters [End Page 351] and slaves, now considered as equals before the law, which is above all, and which is the fruit of reason. In this civil society, human beings no longer dominate each other, and each peacefully pursues his purposes. It is the state, as the embodiment of the law, that regulates everything, except the space of freedom gained with the emergence of the modern public sphere.In this context, the concept of authenticity makes sense, which, according to Professor Hartle, is the best reflection of the breakdown of the traditional order and the disappearance of its moral community. Now each individual pursues his purposes and is no longer to fulfill the ends of a universal human nature. That is why the bond of civility, in which the absolute autonomy of the subject is recognized, as well as his equality before the law, replaces the moral ties of the traditional community and its hierarchies. It is the French thinker who best exemplifies this transit, by showing himself openly in his Essays as a common subject who pursues his purposes and who relates to others as equals, no longer as someone superior, capable of disputing merit, and dominating others.However, this new society and its civil bonds are in crisis; civility fades, or that is Professor Hartle's pessimistic conclusion. Today we are witnessing an ideologization of previously depoliticized areas, such as the university, with the demand for the use of politically correct language and the fear of expressing oneself freely, especially when one's own opinions do not align with the current political trends. The failure... (shrink)

Beauregard claims that Bowman and I were mistaken in saying that “… if the empirical predictions of the Special Theory regarding clock transport are correct, [then] a slow transport definition of simultaneity can be constructed that is logically independent of any signal definition, but is in fact equivalent to the standard signal definition” His objection is not to the empirical concordance of the two criteria, but to the claim that the two are logically independent. His argument is that we (...) fail to take account of Winnie's Passage Time Principle, and that if due account is taken of this principle, then “the concordance between the two criteria is logically guaranteed by the synchrony-free factual core of the STR”. However, one cannot show that A is not logically independent of B by showing that it is not independent of B and C. Hence, Beauregard's argument fails against the quoted passage. (shrink)

In order to receive controlled pain medications for chronic non-oncologic pain, patients often must sign a “narcotic contract” or “opioid treatment agreement” in which they promise not to give pills to others, use illegal drugs, or seek controlled medications from health care providers. In addition, they must agree to use the medication as prescribed and to come to the clinic for drug testing and pill counts. Patients acknowledge that if they violate the opioid treatment agreement, they may no longer receive (...) controlled medications. OTAs have been widely implemented since they were recommended by multiple national bodies to decrease misuse and diversion of narcotic medications. But critics argue that OTAs are ethically suspect, if not unethical, and should be used with extreme care if at all. We agree that OTAs pose real dangers and must be implemented carefully. But we also believe that the most serious criticisms stem from a mistaken understanding of OTAs’ purpose and ethical basis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spit for Science and the Progress and Promise of Psychiatric GeneticsDanielle M. Dick, PhD (bio)In their paper “Spit for Science and the Limits of Applied Psychiatric Genetics,” Turkheimer and Rodock Greer use results from the Spit for Science (S4S) project to argue that the idea of psychiatric genetics1 yielding actionable results is a folly. Although there is much about which Turkheimer and I agree (I took my first psychology (...) class from him 30 years ago), we fundamentally disagree about the outlook of psychiatric genetics. His paper suggests that our differing conclusions arise from the authors misunderstanding the nature of the S4S project and a difference in our views on the broader purpose of psychiatric genetics.It is the characterization of S4S as a “program of research” that is the foundation for the conclusions Turkheimer and Rodock Greer draw about the unlikely potential for meaningful results from psychiatric genetics. But S4S was never intended to be a program of research. The dataset was established as a registry, owned and administered by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and intended as a resource for the field. Accordingly, what is presented as a series of studies that bounce from one topic to another (which the paper mischaracterizes as resulting from “desultory progress”), actually reflects the use of the dataset by many scientific teams, including trainees and early career investigators, to explore various questions. The fact that the project attracted researchers from a diversity of fields (>140 faculty/trainees from 28 departments across VCU and 16 external collaborators) to study the many factors that impact college behavioral and emotional health is, to my mind, one of the strengths of the project.Within my own program of research, S4S is just one of many datasets with which I work; the papers included in their review account for only 3% of my more than 450 papers. Accordingly, my outlook on psychiatric genetics is not based solely, or even largely, upon S4S. As of 2021, I am no longer involved with the project, having ceded its stewardship to another VCU faculty member. Like with the other genetically informative datasets we analyze, the individual papers from S4S reflect the state of the science at the time they were initiated (often years before the eventual publication date). This fact is evident in the evolution of methods applied to S4S and would be true of a review of papers from Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism, Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents [End Page 425] and Children, The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the UK Biobank, or any other dataset made available as a resource for the field. Turkheimer’s paper abstract states “the negligible results have never been acknowledged,” but in fact, many papers have been devoted to discussing small effect sizes in psychiatric genetics (Gordon, 2021).The success of S4S was never intended to be evaluated based on the number of genetic loci identified. Turkheimer wrote, “S4S was not designed to investigate whether individual level genetic data might be useful at the scale of a mid-sized institution including about 10,000 students… it assumed as much.” In fact, they were correct only in the first part of that statement; studying whether individual level genetic data might be useful in a college setting (although a question I find interesting) was never the point of S4S. Turkheimer refers to the findings (of tiny effect sizes, few robust genetic loci identified) as “unexpected” and “surprising”; in fact, we find the results to be neither, as anyone following the progression of the field of psychiatric genetics would agree. The university administrators with whom we worked to launch the study never expected us to deliver actionable individual-level genetic findings. To use that as the benchmark for evaluating the success of S4S, and then to extrapolate to the larger field of psychiatric genetics, misses the point.The ways in which the S4S project made a significant contribution to the field can be found in other metrics. I am most proud of how we used a community-engaged approach (Dick, 2017) and were intentional about the recruitment of underrepresented populations (Dick et al., 2014), which were uncommon in... (shrink)

In “Internalists Beware – We Might All Be Amoralists!” Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder [henceforth B&O] offer an original objection to motivational internalism, which promises to move the debate beyond the seeming stalemate between externalists and internalists. The main idea behind this objection is that to pose a challenge to internalists, amoralists need not fail to be motivated to do the right thing – they might reliably be motivated to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Moreover, we (...) could all be amoralists if enough of us were motivated in this way – at any rate, this is an intelligible hypothesis. This, though, spells trouble for motivational internalism. The challenge is dialectically powerful precisely because internalists often fall back on the idea that although individuals can fail to be motivated to do what they take to be the right thing, the idea that whole communities could fail to be appropriately motivated yet still be making moral judgments makes no sense (Cf. Blackburn 1998: 61–63). The hypothesis put forward by B&O puts pressure on this classic internalist strategy of “going communal” by emphasizing that the assumption of no appropriate motivation is too stark; motivation of the wrong sort would still undermine internalism as it is best interpreted. In this paper, I argue that this intriguing new objection to internalism can, after all, be met if we pay special attention to judgments of blameworthiness. (shrink)

Can commitments be generated without promises, commissive speech acts or gestures that are conventionally interpreted as such? While we remain neutral with respect to the normative answer to this question, we propose a psychological answer. Specifically, we hypothesize that people at least believe that commitments are in place if one agent (the sender) has led a second agent (the recipient) to rely on her to do something, and if this is mutually known by the two agents. Crucially, this situation can (...) occur even if the sender has neither uttered a commissive speech act nor performed any action that would conventionally be interpreted as such. In a series of online experiments, we tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with vignettes describing everyday situations in which a recipient’s expectations were frustrated by the sender’s behavior, and then eliciting moral judgments about the sender’s actions and character. We manipulated whether the recipient’s reliance on the sender was mutually known, and if so, whether the sender verbally acknowledged this or not. The results show that moral judgments differed significantly according to whether the recipient’s reliance was mutually known, but not according to whether this was verbally acknowledged. (shrink)

This study aims to the role of emergency paramedics in transporting cases to hospitals, the rate of completion of emergency paramedics in transporting cases to hospitals in record time, the role of emergency paramedics in saving people’s lives, a questionnaire was prepared via Google Drive and distributed to the population aged 25-55 years, men and women, in the city of Mecca. As for the questionnaire, it was distributed via the social networking program (WhatsApp) for the purpose of distancing for fear (...) of the presence of the Corona virus. 400 questionnaires were distributed, and 380 responses were obtained via email to the principal researcher. The paramedic writes a brief report and sends it with the injured person when he is transported to the doctor or to the hospital? Yes 91.1%. From the participants’ opinions, we it concluded that the role of the emergency paramedic is extremely important in saving people’s lives. (shrink)

This article explores the founding of Pennsylvania as a window into the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. I argue that this founding illustrates both the importance and the limits of political theory to the study of political life. On the one hand, theorizing new societies is vitally important, because founding documents give shape to the aspirations of both founders and citizens. In this case, the founder's plans for his colony were the product of a great deal (...) of political theorizing, grounded in Penn's Quakerism and his active role in English religious and political life. But theory's importance to the study of actual foundings (and, I argue, politics more generally) is inherently limited, as well, since the colony's theoretical foundations were themselves evolving and unstable, and the translation of ideas into practice is only ever partial. After a careful consideration of the many founding documents produced by Penn between spring 1681 and summer 1682, and a close examination of developments in Pennsylvania from late 1682 through Penn's departure in summer 1684, I close by reflecting on what the case of Pennsylvania might tell us about the broader study of political theory and political practice. I suggest that we need a more flexible understanding of what political theory 'is' if we want to make sense of thinkers like Penn who theorized out of their deep involvement in the thick of actual governing. (shrink)

The devotion of a full article in the Paris Agreement to loss and damage was a major breakthrough for the world’s most vulnerable nations seeing to gain support for climate impacts beyond what can be adapted to. But how will loss and damage be paid for, and who will pay it? Will ethics be part of this decision? Here we ask what are the possible means of raising predictable and adequate levels of funding to address loss and damage? Utilizing a (...) framework developed by Marco Grasso, we argue that making the ethical connections between addressing climate impacts and finance mechanisms could significantly enhance their likelihood of being adopted. We briefly review insurance mechanisms and catastrophe bonds, and then move on to six “innovative finance” approaches to funding loss and damage. We utilize six criteria in assessing them: adequacy, predictability, technical feasibility, fairness, and indirect effects, and whether each has a clear link to loss and damage. Several mechanisms for gathering funds emerged as most promising. Three of the six financial mechanisms we reviewed to raise funding involved airline transport: clearly, there is a huge opportunity to tax this sector in one form or another, in recognition of airline emissions’ role in creating losses and damages in vulnerable nations from sea level rise, droughts, floods or hurricanes. Funding loss and damage response is a contentious issue that will get only more unwieldy if Parties’ conceptions of loss and damage are at odds: a common definition of loss and damage needs to be agreed upon under the UNFCCC. Most immediately, to meet any equity criteria, wealthy countries should do more to support the premiums of those who cannot afford insurance. (shrink)

Sponges branch basally in the metazoan phylogenetic tree and are believed to be composed of four distinct lineages with still uncertain relationships. Indeed, some molecular studies propose that Homoscleromorpha may be a fourth Sponge lineage, distinct from Demospongiae in which they were traditionally classified. They harbour many features that distinguish them from other sponges and are more evocative of those of the eumetazoans. They are notably the only sponges to possess a basement membrane with collagen IV and specialized cell‐junctions, (...) thus possessing true epithelia. Among Homoscleromorphs, we have chosen Oscarella lobularis as a model species. This common and easily accessible sponge is characterized by relatively simple histology and cell composition, absence of skeleton, and strongly pronounced epithelial structure. In this review, we explore the specific features that make O. lobularis a promising homoscleromorph sponge model for evolutionary and developmental researches. (shrink)

This paper considers the legislative debates in Australia that led to the passage of the Research Involving Human Embryos Act (Cth 2002) and the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act (Cth 2002). In the first part of the paper, we discuss the debate surrounding the legislation with particular emphasis on the ways in which demands for public consultation, public debate and the education of Australians about the potential ethical and scientific impact of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) research were deployed, (...) and the explicit and implicit framing of the scope of public consultation. We then ask whether, given the calls for public consultations, debate and understanding, current work in democratic theory could be helpful in analysing the process of policy-making in these areas. In particular, we canvass the literature relating to aggregative and deliberative models of democracy for processes that support the legitimacy of policy. We identify features of the debate that reflect the appeal of deliberative approaches as well as some of the possible hurdles or limitations to developing deliberative democratic approaches to policy in ethically contentious areas. (shrink)

This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for (...) discussions about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work. (shrink)

The ramifications of including genetic components in the clinical studies conducted in non-academic settings create unique ethical challenges. We used a qualitative research design consisting of semi-structured interviews that took place between October 2010 and September 2012. The sample consisted of 80 participants − 38 physicians and 42 coordinators − who worked across a number of different settings, including clinics, private practices, small hospitals, free standing research centers, and blended hospital-institutes in both rural and urban communities in 13 states across (...) the United States. The respondents primarily conducted industry sponsored trials and recruited their own patients as research participants. A majority of the respondents (65%) reported that most of the studies they conducted included an additional genetics component, and so participants were asked to donate specimens for genomics or biobanking. While genomics association studies were perceived as being of benefit, awareness of ethical implications associated with such studies was limited. The rapid advances in genetic technologies make it hard for clinicians and coordinators to help patients make informed decisions about participating in clinical research, and underscore the need to ensure that the regulations governing research on human subjects keep pace with the social and technological changes. It seems essential to discern legitimate ethical concerns and find ways to convey what is going on, what is possible and what might not be possible in terms of protecting privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality. (shrink)

Research on self-determination theory emphasizes the importance of the internalization of motivation as a crucial factor for determining the quality of motivation. Hence, intrinsic motivation is deemed as an important predictor of learning. Research on epistemic beliefs, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of knowledge, and learning with more sophisticated epistemic beliefs associated with more adaptive outcomes. While learning and achievement are multiply determined, a more comprehensive theoretical model that takes into account both motivational quality and epistemic beliefs (...) is needed. Hence, this study aims to examine the role of intrinsic and instrumental motivation alongside epistemic beliefs in predicting students’ achievement in science. Data were drawn from the PISA 2015 survey. We focused on four of the top-performing societies. Two were Eastern societies – Singapore and Hong Kong, and the other two were Western societies: Canada and Finland. We found both common and specific patterns among the four societies. Regarding the common patterns, we found that intrinsic motivation and epistemic beliefs had direct positive effects on science achievement. As for the regionally-specific findings, instrumental motivation positively predicted achievement only in Western societies, but not in Eastern societies. The interaction effect between motivation and epistemic beliefs also demonstrated different patterns across the four societies. Implications for the role of motivation and epistemic beliefs in optimizing student learning and achievement are discussed. (shrink)

Depletion of mitochondrial endo/exonuclease G‐like (EXOG) in cultured neonatal cardiomyocytes stimulates mitochondrial oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and induces hypertrophy via reactive oxygen species (ROS). Here, we show that neurohormonal stress triggers cell death in endo/exonuclease G‐like‐depleted cells, and this is marked by a decrease in mitochondrial reserve capacity. Neurohormonal stimulation with phenylephrine (PE) did not have an additive effect on the hypertrophic response induced by endo/exonuclease G‐like depletion. Interestingly, PE‐induced atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) gene expression was completely abolished in endo/exonuclease (...) G‐like‐depleted cells, suggesting a reverse signaling function of endo/exonuclease G‐like. Endo/exonuclease G‐like depletion initially resulted in increased mitochondrial OCR, but this declined upon PE stimulation. In particular, the reserve capacity of the mitochondrial respiratory chain and maximal respiration were the first indicators of perturbations in mitochondrial respiration, and these marked the subsequent decline in mitochondrial function. Although pathological stimulation accelerated these processes, prolonged EXOG depletion also resulted in a decline in mitochondrial function. At early stages of endo/exonuclease G‐like depletion, mitochondrial ROS production was increased, but this did not affect mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) integrity. After prolonged depletion, ROS levels returned to control values, despite hyperpolarization of the mitochondrial membrane. The mitochondrial dysfunction finally resulted in cell death, which appears to be mainly a form of necrosis. In conclusion, endo/exonuclease G‐like plays an essential role in cardiomyocyte physiology. Loss of endo/exonuclease G‐like results in diminished adaptation to pathological stress. The decline in maximal respiration and reserve capacity is the first sign of mitochondrial dysfunction that determines subsequent cell death. (shrink)

In this note, we briefly explain how this special issue on critical management studies and business ethics unfolded and discuss its underlying rationale. We then summarize each of the articles that were accepted for publication in the special issue. We ultimately hope that this collection of articles will initiate greater interest in studying business ethics from critically informed perspectives.

Can the Internet reach beyond the U. S. college samples predominant in social science research? A sample of 564,502 participants completed a personality questionnaire online. We found that 19% were not from advanced economies; 20% were from non-Western societies; 35% of the Western-society sample were not from the United States; and 66% of the U. S. sample were not in the 18–22 (college) age group.

Throughout the world, female students are less likely than males to take advanced physics courses. This mixed-methods study uses a concurrent, nested design to study an online homework intervention designed to address choice and achievement. A choice of three different contexts (biological, sports, and traditional) were offered to students for each physics problem, intending to stimulate females’ interest and enhance achievement. Informed by aspects of Artino’s social-cognitive model of academic motivation and emotion, we investigated: Which context of physics problems (...) do males and females select?; What explanations do students give for their choices?; Are there differences in the achievement of males and females?; and Is there a relationship between student achievement and the context selected? Fifty-two high school physics students from five U.S. states participated. Data included pre and post Force Concept Inventory scores, homework context choices and achievement, and rationales for choices. Findings indicate that females were most likely to select biology contexts; males, traditional. All students made more attempts on video questions over word questions, although females did not score as well. For all questions, students generally persisted until they answered them correctly, with females taking fewer attempts on problems. Context choice was mostly driven by interest, for males, and perceptions of difficulty level for females; however, rationales were indistinguishable by gender. On their first homework question attempt, females scored significantly better than the males. Initially, males had significantly higher FCI scores; post homework intervention, females increased their mean scores significantly on the FCI, erasing the initial gender gap, with no growth nor decline in males’ scores. Females with FCI growth were equally as likely to choose biology contexts as traditional contexts; males were more likely to choose biology contexts. Findings from this study suggest that modest changes to homework problems that provide choice and make the physics problems more contextually interesting - even without changes in classroom instruction - could increase interest and motivation students and increase achievement for both male and female students. Recommendations will be discussed. (shrink)

HEIDEGGER COULD NEVER RESIST A GOOD STORY. He could never resist giving what he had discovered about alëtheia and the oblivion of Being a narrative form. In Being and Time we were promised a story--which was to be written backwards--of the "destruction of the history of ontology." Beginning at the end, with Kant, it was to feel its way back through the tradition in a deconstructive gesture, looking for what had all along been blocking the discovery of the (...) temporal meaning of Being which had at last begun to emerge in Kant. In the later works this story is considerably recast. Again, the vantage point is the end, but now the end is the age of the Gestell, the enframing, the "end of philosophy," which holds us all in its grip. The end is not conceived as a modern breakthrough but as an eschaton, a dead end into which the West has run. The task of thought is to make its way back into the primordial "Beginning" in order to recapture that fleeting moment which will make it possible for us today to begin anew, to make the present into an "authentic" end, which means a transition to another beginning. (shrink)

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch (...) declared, "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)