The nuclear envelope shapes the functional organization of the nucleus. Increasing evidence indicates that one of its main components, the nuclear lamina, dynamically interacts with the genome, including the promoter region of specific genes. This seems to occur in a manner that accords developmental significance to these interactions. This essay addresses key issues raised by recent data on the association of nuclear lamins with the genome. We discuss how lamins interact with large chromatin domains and with spatially restricted regions on (...) gene promoters. We address the relationship between these interactions, chromatin modifications and gene expression outcomes. Lamin‐genome contacts are redistributed after cell division and during stem cell differentiation, with evidence of lineage specificity. Thus, we also speculate on a developmental role of lamin interactions with specific genes. Finally, we highlight how concepts arising from this recent work lay the foundations of future challenges and investigations. (shrink)

The PRDM family has recently spawned considerable interest as it has been implicated in fundamental aspects of cellular differentiation and exhibits expanding ties to human diseases. The PRDMs belong to the SET domain family of histone methyltransferases, however, enzymatic activity has been determined for only few PRDMs suggesting that they act by recruiting co‐factors or, more speculatively, confer methylation of non‐histone targets. Several PRDM family members are deregulated in human diseases, most prominently in hematological malignancies and solid cancers, where they (...) can act as both tumor suppressors or drivers of oncogenic processes. The molecular mechanisms have been delineated for only few PRDMs and little is known about functional redundancy within the family. Future studies should identify target genes of PRDM proteins and the protein complexes in which PRDM proteins reside to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the biological and biochemical functions of this important protein family. (shrink)

Les géologues ont suggéré de nommer l’époque actuelle « Anthropocène » pour indiquer que les activités humaines ont atteint un impact sur l’environnement qui rivalise avec celui d’événements naturels comme l’érosion des sols, les orbites lunaires, la tectonique des plaques, etc. Il semble évident que le terme n’a de sens que s’il est possible de distinguer les événements anthropiques des événements naturels, c’est-à-dire les êtres humains de la nature. La grande influence de Bruno Latour sur le débat international autour des (...) questions environnementales est indiscutable, mais surprenante si l’on considère qu’il s’est efforcé, au fil des ans, dans ses livres, articles et interviews, de contester le sens même du terme « nature ». Par conséquent, il a minimisé la pertinence du concept pour aborder la situation désastreuse actuelle concernant l’Anthropocène. Dans cet article, l’auteur tente de reconstituer les prises de position changeantes de Latour sur le concept de nature, en s’appuyant sur une sélection de ses œuvres jusqu’à la publication de Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique. Il s’avère que Latour a, dans une certaine mesure, abandonné sa première interprétation constructiviste de la nature comme « fabriquée » et a timidement commencé à accepter l’existence de la nature. Cependant, il n’a jamais défini un concept cohérent de la nature et, par conséquent, n’a pas non plus atteint une position stable sur les questions écologiques fondamentales. (shrink)

Background: In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of a mindfulness program including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on the mental health of student teachers when offered at their educational institution in a real-life context.Methods: A parallel randomized controlled trial was conducted among self-selected student teachers at a Danish undergraduate program for teacher education in the autumns of 2019 and 2020. Participation was not recommended in case of clinical depression or a diagnosis of psychosis or schizophrenia, abuse of alcohol, drugs, (...) and/or medicine. Randomization was performed by a Statistician who was blinded to the identity of the students. Data was collected using self-reported questionnaires. The primary outcome was a change in perceived stress 3 months from baseline. Secondary outcome measures were symptoms of anxiety and depression, well-being, resilience, mindfulness, and thoughts and feelings during rest. The effects were analyzed according to the intention-to-treat principle using mixed-effect linear regression models. Mediating effects of mindfulness skills on the mental health outcomes were explored using structural equation modeling.Results: The study group included 67 student teachers with 34 allocated to the intervention group ; and 33 students allocated to a waiting list control group. At baseline, mean Perceived Stress Scale scores were 18.88 in the intervention group and 17.91 in the waiting list control group. A total of 56 students completed the questionnaire at a 3-month follow-up. Statistically significant effects of the intervention were found on perceived stress, symptoms of anxiety and depression, well-being, and on three of seven resting-state dimensions. No effects were found on resilience or mindfulness. Statistically significant mediated effects via resting-state dimensions were found.Conclusion The findings suggested that offering a mindfulness program at an undergraduate program for teacher education could significantly improve the mental health among self-selected students within 3 months. Results of mediation analysis supported the hypothesis that some of the effects might be explained by reduced distracting thoughts.Clinical Trial Registration: [www.ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT04558099]. (shrink)

Background This paper describes the design, implementation, and process outcomes from three public deliberations held in three tribal communities. Although increasingly used around the globe to address collective challenges, our study is among the first to adapt public deliberation for use with exclusively Indigenous populations. In question was how to design deliberations for tribal communities and whether this adapted model would achieve key deliberative goals and be well received.Methods We adapted democratic deliberation, an approach to stakeholder engagement, for use with (...) three tribal communities to respect tribal values and customs. Public deliberation convenes people from diverse backgrounds in reasoned reflection and dialogue in search of collective solutions. The deliberation planning process and design were informed by frameworks of enclave deliberation and community-based participatory research, which share key egalitarian values. The deliberations were collaboratively designed with tribal leadership and extensive partner input and involvement in the deliberations. Each deliberation posed different, locally relevant questions about genomic research, but used the same deliberation structure and measures to gauge the quality and experience of deliberation.Results A total of 52 individuals participated in the deliberations across all three sites. Deliberants were balanced in gender, spanned decades in age, and were diverse in educational attainment and exposure to health research. Overall, the deliberations were positively evaluated. Participant perceptions and external observer datasets depict three deliberations that offered intensive conversation experiences in which participants learned from one another, reported feeling respected and connected to one another, and endorsed this intensive form of engagement.Conclusion The adapted deliberations achieved key deliberative goals and were generally well received. Limitations of the study are described. (shrink)

The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement represents a collection of work that reveals and explores the often times dramatic relationship of our biology and culture that is inextricably woven into a tapestry of movement patterns. It explores the underpinning of human movement, reflected in play, sport, games and human culture from an evolutionary perspective and contemporary expression of sport and human movement.

In this article, I aim at problematizing the implied idea of causality in cognitive evaluations of horizontal justice events. I will draw on theories about retrospective sensemaking and its cognitive foundation in counterfactual belief formation. Issues related to horizontal or intraunit unfairness emerge in situations in which the actions of one employee influence the outcome of another due to relational interdependence. The authors of theories about horizontal unfairness have continued the traditional distinction between the three facets of justice, procedural, distributive, (...) and interactional. However, might employee A blame employee B because she (B) obtained qualitative (e.g., non-monetary appraisal) or quantitative (e.g., monetary compensation) recognition even though the latter did not, directly at least, bring about the event. The problem here is one of causality which asks the question, Can A be blamed by B for bringing about the event of outcome difference? While blame in evaluations of vertical justice certainly presumes causal agency, it might be questioned whether the same goes for horizontal unfairness. Counterfactual belief formation enables a step into the cognitive and retrospective nature of evaluations of horizontal justice events centered on the counterfactual belief “had the unfavorable event X not occurred, another and more favorable event X1 would have occurred.” This is related to the distance between the actual X and the potential event state X), in the sense that the closer the two appear, the more convincing becomes A’s belief to himself. The underlying causality of rewarding processes, however, states that some third party introduces the recognition, for example, a manager, and, therefore, B did not bring about the reward event, the third party did. It seems, then, that to understand this, we should take into consideration: 1) the formation of counterfactual beliefs and 2) the causality of blame. The article concludes that, due to the underlying causality of rewarding processes, one might solely consider one facet of horizontal justice, interactional horizontal justice. However, tapping into the phenomenological dimension of morality might allow one also to address the moral nature of distributive and procedural facets of horizontal justice as the experience of the psychosocial fabric of social reality related with feeling either “as if” one is being treated unfairly or “as if” one is treating others unfairly. (shrink)

This paper offers arguments against Francesco Ademollo’s redundancy thesis about the notion of the correctness of names in the Cratylus. The paper distinguishes between two versions of the redundancy thesis and provides arguments against each of them. In addition to supporting the rejection of both versions of the redundancy thesis, the arguments provide new interpretations of important issues inside and outside of the Cratylus. These issues include the philological evidence from the Classical period (e.g. Nicomachean Ethics, VI.9, 1142b6–12, on euboulia (...) as a kind of correctness), the view of correctness expressed by Plato’s Socrates in other dialogues, and Socrates’ initial discussion with Cratylus (in particular 428e–429b). (shrink)

This article demonstrates that Tacitus, who coined the term interpretatio Romana, used this concept differently than today's historians of religion. Tacitus differentiated between universal and local gods. It is also shown that this differentiation fits the author's structuring of "Germania", which he divides into a general and a specific part. This carries far-reaching consequences because for instance the cult of the Semnones is a local superstitio in tacitean terms, and the common identification of Roman with ”Germanic“ gods since J. Grimm (...) must be abandoned. Finally, the article establishes that G. Wissowa's seminal work on interpretatio Romana, which assumes the deity cults of Germania superior and inferior, fails to take into account that Tacitus, as a historian of religion, merely dealt with "authentic" and "original" Germania. (shrink)

The monograph under review, written as a doctorate in 1999 and later revised and supplemented, offers a searching analysis of the form and function of rhetoric in the Pascal-Pentecost cycle of the 12th century homilist Cyril of Turov, together with an examination of the Byzantine sources. Lunde scrutinizes eight festal homilies for the period from Palm Sunday to the Sunday before Pentecost, using the edition by Igor' Erëmin [TODL 11–13,15 (1955–1958), reprinted as Literaturnoe nasledie Kirilla Turovskogo: Archeologičeskij obzor I izdanie (...) tekstov in 1989]. All Slavonic fragments are accompanied by English translations, predominantly drawn from Simon Franklin's Sermon and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus' [1991, reviewed by Francis Thomson in Slavica Gandensia 19], with minor alterations (e.g. p. 266, note 11) and critical remarks (e.g. p. 180, note 37). The study is positioned along the line that marks a shift in focus from philological and historical commentary towards the literary analysis of Cyril's sermons. Lunde's approach is clearly indebted to various developments in modern literary criticism, from structural linguistics to discourse analysis and communication theory. Questions of dating, attribution, and textual criticism are consciously left aside. (shrink)

The evidence-based practice and evidence-based medicine movements have promoted standardization through guideline development methodologies based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of best available research. EBM has challenged clinicians to question their reliance on practical reasoning and clinical judgement. In this paper, we argue that the protagonists of EBM position their mission as reducing uncertainty through the use of standardized methods for knowledge evaluation and use. With this drive towards uniformity, standardization and control comes a suspicion towards intuition, creativity and uncertainty (...) as integral parts of medical practice. We question the appropriateness of attempts to standardize professional practice through a discussion of the importance of uncertainty. Greenhalgh’s taxonomy of uncertainty is used to inform an analysis of the clinical reasoning occurring in a potentially life threatening emergency situation with a young patient. The case analysis is further developed by the use of the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s theory about understanding and objective knowing. According to Lonergan it is not by getting rid of or even by reducing uncertainty, but by attending systematically to it and by relating to it in a self-conscious way, that objective knowledge can be obtained. The paper concludes that uncertainty is not a regrettable and unavoidable aspect of decision making but a productive component of clinical reasoning. (shrink)

An active ethically conscious consumer has been acclaimed as the new hero and hope for an ethically improved capitalism. Through consumers’ “voting” at the checkout, corporations are supposed to be held accountable for their conduct. In the literature on political consumerism, this has mainly been approached as political participation and governance. In this article, we do a critical review of this literature. We do so by questioning the existence of what we call a “generic active consumer model.” At the core (...) of this position, there is a belief that the active consumer is a universal entity, available across nations and time. Instead we call for an approach that takes accord of the ways consumers and consumer roles are framed in interactive processes in markets, governance structures, and everyday life. Consumers in different countries assess their responsibilities and their powers as consumers differently due to different institutionalizations within distinctive contexts. We also must take into account how the inertia of ordinary consumption and the moral complexities of everyday life restrict the adoption of an active consumerist role. Hence, the debate on political consumerism should make for a more realistic notion of ethical consumer-sovereignty and its role in improving the workings of capitalism. In our view, these findings have severe implications for understanding both theories of political consumption and the dynamics of political consumption per se. (shrink)

The Norwegian Arbeidernes leksikon, “Workers’ Encyclopedia,” was published in six volumes from 1931–1936. It was inspired by The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, explicitly aimed at working-class readers, and establishing an alternative to the hegemonic bourgeoise discourse. The editors and many of the contributors belonged to the Communist Party of Norway (NKP) and the independent communist intellectual organization Mot Dag (“Towards Dawn”). This article investigates the reception and representation of the ancient world in Arbeidernes leksikon based on selected articles through the lens (...) of narrative theory. Classical education was traditionally the domain of the upper classes. It is argued that the Workers’ Encyclopedia demonstrates that reorienting the reception of ancient history was considered essential both to rewrite history according to Marxist doctrine and to establish workers’ culture as a full-fledged alternative to its bourgeoise counterpart. In the Workers’ Encyclopedia, the classical past is celebrated not for its empires and rulers but for the effort of the masses and their struggle for freedom. (shrink)

Indlæg ved CM's (Centrum för Marxistiska Samhällsstudier) seminar i filosofi i Lund, april 1978.

While the theory of relative plausibility is presented by Allen and Pardo as a descriptive theory of the proof process, this commentary discusses their theory as a possible starting point for a prescriptive theory of evidence assessment. Generally, naturalness and simplicity are necessary for the success of such a theory. The theory of relative plausibility is very promising in this respect, as its key concept is the straightforward and intuitive notion of explanation, according to which an explanation is an answer (...) to a “why” question. Still, both the explanatory and the comparative dimensions of relative plausibility are in need of elaboration if one wants to give advice on evidence assessment in terms of Allen and Pardo’s framework. For one thing, it is necessary to examine the epistemological status of the various explanatory criteria regarding their potential as guides to truth or likelihood. Only epistemic criteria should be included in recommendations to fact-finders. Moreover, given the author’s interpretation of the ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ standard, it is unclear what the comparative dimension amounts to in criminal trials. At least a comparison of the kind involved in the author's account of civil trials standards is absent in their interpretation of BARD. If the comparative dimension of relative plausibility is relevant at all in criminal trials, it must be clarified what is to be compared. (shrink)

In this paper we compare causal models with reason models in the construction of Bayesian networks for legal evidence. In causal models, arrows in the network are drawn from causes to effects. In a reason model, the arrows are instead drawn towards the evidence, from factum probandum to factum probans. We explore the differences between causal models and reason models and observe several distinct advantages with reason models. Reason models are better aligned with the philosophy of Bayesian inference, as they (...) model reasons for up-dating beliefs. Reason models are better suited for measuring the combined support of the evidence, and a prior probability of guilt that reflects the number of possible perpetrators is accommodated more easily with reason models. (shrink)

After distinguishing two senses of 'analysis', the author claims that the purpose of Moore's analytical (meta-ethical) program in Principia Ethica was to serve as an indispensable tool for avoiding false judgments in substantial ethics and for establishing true ones. It is shown that Moore's analyses and assumptions are not normatively neutral in that, (1) he disagreed with other philosophers about the extension (as well as the intension) of moral terms, (2) he disagreed in extension with 'common-sense' morality. Finally, an attempt (...) is made to show that Moore's moral methodology, in which his analytical distinctions play the crucial part, is meant to be of practical value for everybody in their moral decisions. (shrink)

The authors examine empirically the influence of personal and organizational values on marketing professionals'' ethical behavior. The results indicate that personal and organizational values underlie differences in marketing professionals'' ethical behavior, albeit small terms of the proportion of explained variance. The results also suggest the relationship between organizational values and ethical behavior to be significant. However, the same is not the case for the relationship between personal values and ethical behavior.

Psychological experiments allegedly show that people have a tendency to confabulate explanations of their behavior, because their conscious selves do not know why they do what they do, and therefore create the explanations that make most sense. This article explains why confabulation is neither a threat to interpretivist social science nor a threat to the presumption of first-person authority in Davidson’s interpretation theory. The reason is that the interpretative endeavor, which is necessary in order to identify and provide evidence for (...) confabulation is governed by a presumption of first-person authority. Explanations of confabulation thus depend on prior interpretations. (shrink)

The purpose of this valuable book is to consider recent cultural trends in bioethics from a Catholic perspective. Bioethics is intended for a lay audience interested in understanding bioethical issues from a Catholic perspective.

This essay discusses the attempt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writers to achieve a clear definition of "wit." I provide a number of quotations from Hobbes, Locke, Pope, Addison, Dryden, and others to make the point that there was an unresolved tension between wit and judgment, imagination and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy, throughout the period.

Three‐dimensional (3D) structures have been used to explore the evolution of proteins for decades, yet they have rarely been utilized to study the molecular evolution of peptides. Here, we highlight areas in which 3D structures can be particularly useful for studying the molecular evolution of peptide toxins. Although we focus our discussion on animal toxins, including one of the most widespread disulfide‐rich peptide folds known, the inhibitor cystine knot, our conclusions should be widely applicable to studies of the evolution of (...) disulfide‐constrained peptides. We show that conserved 3D folds can be used to identify evolutionary links and test hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origin of peptides with extremely low sequence identity; construct accurate multiple sequence alignments; and better understand the evolutionary forces that drive the molecular evolution of peptides.Also watch the video abstract. (shrink)