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Modern Forms (modern + form)
Selected AbstractsTHE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF NEUROETHICSDEVELOPING WORLD BIOETHICS, Issue 2 2009SOFIA LOMBERA ABSTRACT Neuroethics, in its modern form, investigates the impact of brain science in four basic dimensions: the self, social policy, practice and discourse. In this study, we analyzed a set of 461 peer-reviewed articles with neuroethics content, published by authors from 32 countries. We analyzed the data for: (1) trends in the development of international neuroethics over time, and (2) how challenges at the intersection of ethics and neuroscience are viewed in countries that are considered developed by International Monetary Fund (IMF) standards, and in those that are developing. Our results demonstrate a steady increase in global participation in neuroethics from 1989 to 2005, characterized by an increase in numbers of articles published specifically on neuroethics, journals publishing these articles, and countries contributing to the literature. The focus from all countries was on the practice of brain science and the amelioration of neurological disease. Indicators of technology creation and diffusion in developing countries were specifically correlated with increases in publications concerning policy implications of brain science. Neuroethics is an international endeavor and, as such, should be sensitive to the impact that context has on acceptance and use of technological innovation. [source] FLORENTINE CIVIC HUMANISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN IDEOLOGYHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2007HANAN YORAN ABSTRACT This article revisits the question of the modernity of the Renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans Baron's interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists' political republicanism in fifteenth-century Florence. The article's main contention is that humanist political discourse rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. This created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequalities and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself. [source] Cultural imagery and statistical models of the force of mortality: Addison, Gompertz and PearsonJOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY: SERIES A (STATISTICS IN SOCIETY), Issue 3 2010Elizabeth L. Turner Summary., We describe selected artistic and statistical depictions of the force of mortality (hazard or mortality rate), which is a concept that has long preoccupied actuaries, demographers and statisticians. We provide a more graphic form for the force-of-mortality function that makes the relationship between its constituents more explicit. The ,Bridge of human life' in Addison's allegorical essay of 1711 provides a particularly vivid image, with the forces depicted as external. The model that was used by Gompertz in 1825 appears to treat the forces as internal. In his 1897 essay Pearson mathematically modernized ,the medieval conception of the relation between Death and Chance' by decomposing the full mortality curve into five distributions along the age axis, the results of five ,marksmen' aiming at the human mass crossing this bridge. We describe Addison's imagery, comment briefly on Gompertz's law and the origin of the term ,force of mortality', describe the background for Pearson's essay, as well as his imagery and statistical model, and give the bridge of life a modern form, illustrating it via statistical animation. [source] A critical reappraisal of the fossil record of the bilaterian phylaBIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, Issue 2 2000GRAHAM E. BUDD ABSTRACT It has long been assumed that the extant bilaterian phyla generally have their origin in the Cambrian explosion, when they appear in an essentially modern form. Both these assumptions are questionable. A strict application of stem- and crown-group concepts to phyla shows that although the branching points of many clades may have occurred in the Early Cambrian or before, the appearance of the modern body plans was in most cases later: very few bilaterian phyla sensu stricto have demonstrable representatives in the earliest Cambrian. Given that the early branching points of major clades is an inevitable result of the geometry of clade diversification, the alleged phenomenon of phyla appearing early and remaining morphologically static is seen not to require particular explanation. Confusion in the definition of a phylum has thus led to attempts to explain (especially from a developmental perspective) a feature that is partly inevitable, partly illusory. We critically discuss models for Proterozoic diversification based on small body size, limited developmental capacity and poor preservation and cryptic habits, and show that the prospect of lineage diversification occurring early in the Proterozoic can be seen to be unlikely on grounds of both parsimony and functional morphology. Indeed, the combination of the body and trace fossil record demonstrates a progressive diversification through the end of the Proterozoic well into the Cambrian and beyond, a picture consistent with body plans being assembled during this time. Body-plan characters are likely to have been acquired monophyletically in the history of the bilaterians, and a model explaining the diversity in just one of them, the coelom, is presented. This analysis points to the requirement for a careful application of systematic methodology before explanations are sought for alleged patterns of constraint and flexibility. [source] The Measure of Mercy: Islamic Justice, Sovereign Power, and Human Rights in IranCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2006Arzoo Osanloo In January 2000, Iranian government agents hailed a last-minute death sentence reprieve as an expression of Islamic human rights. Officials mobilized a native source of human rights in the invocation of mercy. For some, the proliferation of human rights norms situates a state in the fold of modernity, whereas the "spectacle of the scaffold" suggests a premodern demonstration of sovereign power. Through a study of sovereign power and human rights, this article questions the seemingly clear-cut divide between premodern and modern forms of justice and suggests that contemporary appeals to mercy as human rights should not be dismissed as being outside modern forms of state sovereignty. [source] Restraining the Genuine Homo Economicus: Why the Economy Cannot Be Divorced from Its GovernanceECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2003Stergios Skaperdas The Homo economicus of traditional economics is far from being completely self-interested, rational, or as individualistic as he is purported to be; he will haggle to death over price but will not take what he wants by force. Implicitly, he is assumed to behave ruthlessly within a well-defined bubble of sainthood. Based on a simple model, I first examine what occurs when this assumption is relaxed and genuine, amoral Homo economici interact. Productivity can be inversely related to compensation; a longer shadow of the future can intensify conflict; and more competition among providers of protection reduces welfare. The patently inefficient outcomes that follow call for restraining self-interest, for finding ways to govern markets. I then review some of the different ways of creating restraints, from the traditional social contract, to the hierarchical domination of kings and lords, to modern forms of governance. Checks and balances, wider representation, the bureaucratic form of organization, and other ingredients of modern governance can partly be thought of as providing restraints to the dark side of self-interest. Though highly imperfect, these restraints are better than the alternative, which typically involves autocratic, amateurish, and corrupt rule. Then, thinking of most problems in terms of a first-best economic model is practically and scientifically misguided. [source] GOVERNING FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND WITH LOVE: PARENTS AND CHILDREN BETWEEN HOME AND SCHOOLEDUCATIONAL THEORY, Issue 1 2008Benjamin Baez Where these two objectives converge is in their techniques: they both use the parent-child relationship and what appears to motivate it. Drawing on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of government as "the conduct of conduct," Baez and Talburt analyze two pamphlets with an eye to several themes: the "commonsensical" nature of its address to loving parents; the "responsibilization" of parents and children; the insidious entry of school goals and behavioral norms into homes; and the seeming empowerment of the parent as partner in his or her child's learning. Finally, the authors discuss how the logic of modern forms of governing families and schools might be contested. [source] Reflective practice and clinical supervision: meticulous rituals of the confessionalJOURNAL OF ADVANCED NURSING, Issue 2 2001Tony Gilbert BA MSc PhD RN PGCE Reflective practice and clinical supervision: meticulous rituals of the confessional Background.,Reflective practice and clinical supervision are progressively asserting hegemony upon nursing practice with claims of emancipation and empowerment. However, this is being achieved in an environment where there is little critical debate about the assumptions on which these practices are based. Aim.,This paper sets out to challenge the basis upon which reflective practice and clinical supervision are promoted within nursing discourse by employing Michel Foucault's (1982) concept of governmentality. Theme.,A broad Foucauldian perspective is used to demonstrate how the technologies of reflective practice and clinical supervision have been accommodated within modern forms of government. These technologies are consistent with the flattened hierarchies and increasing dispersal of practitioners in contemporary health care. In this context reflective practice and clinical supervision can be shown to function in two independent but interrelated ways. First as modes of surveillance disciplining the activity of professionals. Second, as ,confessional' practices that work to produce particular identities , autonomous and self-regulating. [source] ,Were it not against our laws': oppression and resistance in Shakespeare's Comedy of ErrorsLEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2009Eric Heinze The Comedy of Errors, always loved on the stage, has long been deemed less substantial than Shakespeare's ,mature' works. Its references to private and public law have certainly been noted: a trial, a breached contract, a stand-off between monarchical and parliamentary powers. Yet the play's legal elements are more than historical curios within an otherwise light-hearted venture. The play is pervasively structured by an array of socio-legal dualisms: master,servant, husband,wife, native,alien, parent,child, monarch,parliament, buyer,seller. All confront fraught transitions from pre-modern to early modern forms. Those fundamentally legal relationships fuel character and action, even where no conventionally legal norm or procedure is at issue. ,Errors' in the play serve constantly to highlight unstable and shifting relationships of dominance and submission. Law undergoes its own transition from feudal,aristocratic to commercial forms. Through a theatrical framing device, it thereby re-emerges to remind us that those dualisms, even in their new incarnations, will remain squarely within law's ambit. [source] Struggles Over the Shore: building the quay of Izmir, 1867,1875CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 1 2000Sibel Zandi-Sayek BEGINNING IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, the urban landscape of the Ottoman seaport of Izmir, like other centers on the eastern Mediterranean, was profoundly transformed by the advent of modern forms of urban institutions and infrastructure. Studies dealing with these transformations have been so immersed in structural processes of European economic penetration that little has been known on the ways in which local actors participated in these changes and reworked them to address their own urban concerns and ambitions. Focusing on the remaking of the quay in Izmir, this essay explores how the project triggered discursive and practical struggles among Ottoman administrators, shore owners, local merchants, and a progressive elite, by transforming land tenure patterns and modes of handling trade and shipping on the shore. In doing so, it demonstrates how existing power relations and the complexity of the local urban context reshaped'and gave meaning to this urban modernization scheme. [Modernization, urban elite, public interest, Izmir, Turkey] [source] | ||||||||||