The Absent ‘Thing’ and the Value of Distance – Social media through an Arendtian lens

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Functionalism and Personal Identity – The Case of Mr. Jones

Stanisław Lem’s short story Are you there Mr. Jones?, first published in 1955, is set in a courtroom. The plaintiff is Cybernetics Company – a provider of prosthetics – and the defendant is Harry Jones, a race-car driver. It turns out that Mr. Jones, after a series of grave accidents, has had his entire body gradually replaced by prostheses. He is now deep in debt to the provider, Cybernetics Company, which consequently has sued him to reclaim their property. We aim to show that this short story illustrates important philosophical questions concerning personal identity and persistence over time, and that Lem in fact anticipates several of the main insights of functionalism, later introduced by Putnam (1967) and today a main contender for a theory of the mind. If the identity of Mr. Jones is constituted solely by his prostheses’ functional role, i.e., their causal relations to input, output and other bodily and mental states, Lem here gives us an early example of causal-theoretical functionalism.This brings us to the next question, implicitly raised by Lem: Is functional identity sufficient for personal identity? Is Mr. Jones the same person as he was before replacing all his body parts? In court, Mr. Jones argues for his continued personhood by appealing to memories from the past. This suggests the view that his persistence as a person depends on some form of psychological continuity, and we will discuss how the case of Mr. Jones relates to views on personal identity.publishedVersio

Segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions across Hospitals: Learn Continually or Train from Scratch?

Segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) lesions is a challenging problem. Several deep-learning-based methods have been proposed in recent years. However, most methods tend to be static, that is, a single model trained on a large, specialized dataset, which does not generalize well. Instead, the model should learn across datasets arriving sequentially from different hospitals by building upon the characteristics of lesions in a continual manner. In this regard, we explore experience replay, a well-known continual learning method, in the context of MS lesion segmentation across multi-contrast data from 8 different hospitals. Our experiments show that replay is able to achieve positive backward transfer and reduce catastrophic forgetting compared to sequential fine-tuning. Furthermore, replay outperforms the multi-domain training, thereby emerging as a promising solution for the segmentation of MS lesions. The code is available at this link: https://github.com/naga-karthik/continual-learning-msComment: Accepted at the Medical Imaging Meets NeurIPS (MedNeurIPS) Workshop 202

Is Profound Boredom Boredom?

Martin Heidegger is often credited as having offered one of the most thorough phenomenological investigations of the nature of boredom. In his 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between three different types of boredom and to explicate their respective characters. Within the context of his discussion of one of these types of boredom, profound boredom [tiefe Langweile], Heidegger opposes much of the philosophical and literary tradition on boredom insofar as he articulates how the experience of boredom can be existentially beneficial to us. In this chapter, we undertake a study of the nature of profound boredom with the aim of investigating its place within contemporary psychological and philosophical research on boredom. Although boredom used to be a neglected emotional experience, it is no more. Boredom’s causal antecedents, effects, experiential profile, and neurophysiological correlates have become topics of active study; as a consequence, a proliferation of claims and findings about boredom has ensued. Such a situation provides an opportunity to scrutinize Heidegger’s claims and to try to understand them both on their own terms and in light of our contemporary understanding of boredom

Peptide receptor radionuclide therapy in gastroenteropancreatic NEN G3:a multicenter cohort study

Peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) is an established treatment of metastatic neuroendocrine tumors grade 1–2 (G1–G2). However, its possible benefit in high-grade gastroenteropancreatic (GEP) neuroendocrine neoplasms (NEN G3) is largely unknown. We therefore aimed to assess the benefits and side effects of PRRT in patients with GEP NEN G3. We performed a retrospective cohort study at 12 centers to assess the efficacy and toxicity of PRRT in patients with GEP NEN G3. Outcomes were response rate, disease control rate, progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS) and toxicity. We included 149 patients (primary tumor: pancreatic n = 89, gastrointestinal n = 34, unknown n = 26). PRRT was first-line (n = 30), second-line (n = 62) or later-line treatment (n = 57). Of 114 patients evaluated, 1% had complete response, 41% partial response, 38% stable disease and 20% progressive disease. Of 104 patients with documented progressive disease before PRRT, disease control rate was 69%. The total cohort had median PFS of 14 months and OS of 29 months. Ki-67 21–54% (n = 125) vs Ki-67 ≥55% (n = 23): PFS 16 vs 6 months (P < 0.001) and OS 31 vs 9 months (P < 0.001). Well (n = 60) vs poorly differentiated NEN (n = 62): PFS 19 vs 8 months (P < 0.001) and OS 44 vs 19 months (P < 0.001). Grade 3–4 hematological or renal toxicity occurred in 17% of patients. This large multicenter cohort of patients with GEP NEN G3 treated with PRRT demonstrates promising response rates, disease control rates, PFS and OS as well as toxicity in patients with mainly progressive disease. Based on these results, PRRT may be considered for patients with GEP NEN G3.acceptedVersio

Cytochrome P450 induced differentially in endothelial cells cultured from different organs of Anguilla rostrata

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2004. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Society for In Vitro Biology for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology - Animal 41 (2005): 57-63, doi:10.1290/0409063.1.Endothelial cells are a structural barrier and an active regulator of many bodily processes. CYP1A activity is induced in the endothelium of teleosts and mammals exposed to lipophilic xenobiotics, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and can have significant consequences for endothelial functions. We exposed cultures of characterized endothelial cells from the heart, kidney and rete mirabile of the eel, Anguilla rostrata, to AhR agonists. In heart endothelial cells the maximum response (based on EROD activity) to TCDD, 113 pmol/mg-min, was at 1 nM TCDD and the peak response to βNF, 135 pmol/mg-min, was at 3 μM βNF. The maximum response to TCDD in the kidney endothelial cells is 12 pmol/mg-min at 0.3 nM TCDD. The rete mirabile capillary endothelial cells responded minimally or not at all to exposure to TCDD and βNF. Both the heart and kidney endothelial cells (but not the rete mirabile capillary cells) have a low level of EROD activity (12.7 and 5.2 pmol/mg-min respectively) in untreated or DMSO-treated cells. The robust response of the heart endothelial cells to induction and the lack of response in the rete mirabile capillary endothelial cells indicate that these cells are a good resource to use to investigate the physiological consequences of AhR agonist exposure and CYP1A induction in different areas of the vasculature.The Faculty Research Council of Fordham University provided partial support for RAG. This research was supported by NIH grant 5-P42-ES07381 and by U.S.EPA grant R827102-01-0

A survey and panel discussion of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on paediatric urological productivity, guideline adherence and provider stress

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented need to re-organise and re-align priorities for all surgical specialties. Despite the current declining numbers globally, the direct effects of the pandemic on institutional practices and on personal stress and coping mechanisms remains unknown. The aims of this study were to assess the effect of the pandemic on daily scheduling and work balances, its effects on stress, and to determine compliance with guidelines and to assess whether quarantining has led to other areas of increased productivity. Methods A trans-Atlantic convenience sample of paediatric urologists was created in which panellists (Zoom) discussed the direct effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on individual units, as well as creating a questionnaire using a mini-Delphi method to provide current semi-quantitative data regarding practice, and adherence levels to recently published risk stratification guidelines. They also filled out a Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) questionnaire to assess contemporary pandemic stress levels. Results There was an 86% response rate from paediatric urologists. The majority of respondents reported near complete disruption to planned operations (70%), and trainee education (70%). They were also worried about the effects of altered home-lives on productivity (<= 90%), as well as a lack of personal protective equipment (57%). The baseline stress rate was measured at a very high level (PSS) during the pandemic. Adherence to recent operative guidelines for urgent cases was 100%. Conclusion This study represents a panel discussion of a number of practical implications for paediatric urologists, and is one of the few papers to assess more pragmatic effects and combines opinions from both sides of the Atlantic. The impact of the pandemic has been very significant for paediatric urologists and includes a decrease in the number of patients seen and operated on, decreased salary, increased self-reported stress levels, substantially increased telemedicine usage, increased free time for various activities, and good compliance with guidelines and hospital management decisions

The Absent ‘Thing’ and the Value of Distance – Social media through an Arendtian lens

The discourse around social media has gone through several dramatic twists and turns; from the early techno-optimism that envisioned a brave new borderless Agora accessible to all, to dystopian vistas of a chaotic “post-truth” political landscape of mutual distrust, hatred, and conspiracy theories. I will here attempt to combine Mueller and D’Ambrosio’s notion of “profilicity” with Arendt’s critique of “the social” and suggest that there are some problems specific to how we interact on social media that justifies skepticism regarding the new digital media as an arena for political activism and public debate

Emotional Politics – Some notes on anger, resentment and compassion

The recent upsurge in interest in the role of emotions in politics is not a coincidence, but linked to our current political situation: We have extreme nationalism in India, authoritarians like Erdoğan and Orbán, as well popular far right political parties like the French National Front in Europe, and right-wing populists[1] like Trump and Bolsonaro in power in the US and Brazil. According to the sociologist Cas Mudde in his book The Far Right Today there is something new in this situation compared to a few decades ago: During most of the postwar era, the far right was seen as a “normal pathology” of western democracy, that is, as essentially a pre-modern fringe phenomenon, ideologically unconnected to modern democracy, and supported by just a small minority of the population (Mudde, 2019, 106-107)

District nurses´ experiences of working with person centered care at the reception in primary care

Bakgrund: Personcentrerad vård innebär att personen är i centrum och inte dennes sjukdom. Ett partnerskap mellan distriktssköterskan och personen eftersträvas, med utgångspunkt från personens livsberättelse och dennes livssituation för att gemensamt skapa mål och strategier för genomförande av behandlingar samt omvårdnad. I mötet ska distriktssköterskan visa vilja, öppenhet samt intresse att lyssna till personens berättelse och beskrivning av sin situation. Syftet: Syftet var att beskriva distriktssköterskors erfarenheter av att arbeta personcentrerat på mottagning i primärvården. Metod: Åtta distriktssköterskor från hälsocentraler i norra Sverige deltog i studien. Datainsamlingen utfördes med semistrukturerade intervjuer och data analyserades med kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultat: I resultatet framkom ett tema; Att vilja väl men inte ha förutsättningar och fem kategorier; Att vara lyhörd och närvarande i patientmötet; Att individanpassa mötet; Att skapa samförstånd med patienten; Att ha brist på tid; Att ha kunskap och samsyn om arbetssättet. I resultatet framkom att lyssna, vara lyhörd, närvarande, visa intresse och se patienten är viktiga aspekter i det personcentrerade arbetet. Ett ökat samförstånd och delaktighet resulterade i ökat ansvar från patienten i egenvården. Slutsats: Personcentrerad vård ger mer nöjda patienter med ökat egenansvar. Distriktssköterskor måste dock ges förutsättningar för att kunna arbeta personcentrerat varför arbetsgivare måste införa rutiner för att implementera detta arbetssätt. Detta skulle också ge distriktsköterskorna en ökad känsla av tillfredställelse i arbete med personcentrerad vård