In Silico medicine: Social, Technological and Symbolic Mediation

In silico medicine is still forging a road for itself in the current biomedical landscape. Discursively and rhetorically, it is using a three-way positioning, first, deploying discourses of personalised medicine, second, extending the 3Rs from animal to clinical research, and third, aligning its methods with experimental methods. The discursive and rhetorical positioning in promotions and statements of the programme gives us insight into the sociability of the scientific labour of advancing the programme. Its progress depends on complex social, institutional and technological conditions which are not external to its epistemology, but intricately interwoven with it. This article sets out to show that this is the case through an analysis of the process of computational modelling that is at the core of its epistemology. In this paper I show that the very notion of ‘model’ needs to be re-thought for in silico medicine (as indeed, for most forms of computational modelling), and propose a replacement, in the form of the ‘Model-Simulation-Experiment-System’ or MSE-system, which is simultaneously an epistemological, social and technological system. I argue that the MSE-system is radically mediated by social relations, technologies and symbolic systems. We need now to understand how such mediations operate effectively in the construction of robust MSE-systems. keywords: system medicine, philosophy of modeling and simulation, technological mediation

CHILDREN IN BRAZIL: HEALTH, EDUCATION AND WORK

In Brazil, even though school participation is compulsory for children between 7 to 14 years old, some of them are not enrolled in the education system. One of the main reasons is their participation to the work market that may have an impact on their health. Moreover, child's school attendance in public schools usually insures a meal to child but for children working, they have to accumulate two journeys: school and job. So, child's health could be explained by both, school attendance and work market participation. In addition, problems related to school attendance and school progress could be related to child work or his health. Therefore, we cannot explore determinants of one of these components school attendance, health and child work without studying their interactions. In this paper, we use the database Living Standards Measurement Study Survey 1996/1997 (Pesquisa de Padrões de Vida - PPV) to look at this interactions. It appears that child's labor and school attendance have a very strong correlation. School attendance has a negative impact in child's probability to participate in labor market. For instance, child ´s labor market affects negatively child ´s probability to evaluate his health as good and excellent. We also note that school attendance does not have a significant impact in child ´s health evaluation. The main conclusion of our article is that the development of human capital should consider together health and education. A policy focusing only in education, as incentives to go to school, does not seem to be sufficient to improve child's health. Also, government should also consider the population at risk, as children from poor families, living in worse conditions and obliged to work.

Problems involved in translating South African prose into Italian, with reference to N. Gordimer's Burger's daughter

A Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the tfitwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Translation. Johannesburg, 1982This study consists of three chapters of varying length dealing with the- problem of literary translation from contemporary South African English to modern Italian. Talcing as our model the recent Gordimer novel Burger's Daughter (Jonathan Cape Ltd.., London, 1979), we consider the various responsibilities of the literary translator, detaching his problems from those of the commercial version of a piece of prose, which require qualities of paraphrase, word to word correspondence and accuracy at expense of style. In our opening chapter we look at the extraordinary difference between the educated literary reader's expectation when handling a modern classic in the target language and this version's actual treatment of the original language. We taice Capriolo's La figlia fid Burger (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S. p . A . , Milanoj 197S) as the model of an average* competent, professional exercise in South African/Italian translation and we note that most of our criteria are contravened or even ignored In chapter II our study turns to a detailed listing of omissions, adjustments, inaccuracies, misunderstandings, unresearched technical points and plain imperfections of style and manner. In most cases the study accounts for the imperfection or error and proceeds to suggest not only why it arose, but also how it could be rectified. Our criteria for improvement rest on categories of (a) stylistic compensation for individual features of the original, (b) homogeneous Hi manner and (political equivalences. In chapter III we offer a sample translation into Italian of four selected pages of the text (original, pp. 353-356) in our own hand, hoping thereby to establish tighter and more rigorous categories for the rendition of this exemplary modern South Africa

Sei sonate per due violini overo due flavti traversi e basso peril cembalo o violoncello

by Francesco Carusi Incomplete set: upper parts missing. Title from cover of basso partDr. James L. and Dr. Margaret Whitby donation Publisher London : Printed and sold by David Rutherford Pages 22Call number MZ2577https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/whitby/1001/thumbnail.jp

On the formation location of Uranus and Neptune as constrained by dynamical and chemical models of comets

The D/H enrichment observed in Saturn's satellite Enceladus is remarkably similar to the values observed in the nearly-isotropic comets. Given the predicted strong variation of D/H with heliocentric distance in the solar nebula, this observation links the primordial source region of the nearly-isotropic comets with the formation location of Enceladus. That is, comets from the nearly-isotropic class were most likely fed into their current reservoir, the Oort cloud, from a source region near the formation location of Enceladus. Dynamical simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud indicate that Uranus and Neptune are, primarily, responsible for the delivery of material into the Oort cloud. In addition, Enceladus formed from material that condensed from the solar nebula near the location at which Saturn captured its gas envelope, most likely at or near Saturn's current location in the solar system. The coupling of these lines of evidence appears to require that Uranus and Neptune were, during the epoch of the formation of the Oort cloud, much closer to the current location of Saturn than they are currently. Such a configuration is consistent with the Nice model of the evolution of the outer solar system. Further measurements of the D/H enrichment in comets, particularly in ecliptic comets, will provide an excellent discriminator among various models of the formation of the outer solar system.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, ApJL accepte

Professional expectations and patient expectations concerning the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the early diagnosis of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH)

The expectations of professionals working on the development of healthcare Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and the patients who will be affected by them have received limited attention. This paper reports on a Foresight Workshop with professionals involved with pulmonary hypertension (PH) and a Focus Group with members of a PH patient group, to discuss expectations of AI development and implementation. We show that while professionals and patients had similar expectations of AI, with respect to the priority of early diagnosis; data risks of privacy and reuse; and responsibility, other expectations differed. One important point of difference was in the attitude toward using AI to point up other potential health problems (in addition to PH). A second difference was in the expectations regarding how much clinical professionals should know about the role of AI in diagnosis. These findings allow us to better prepare for the future by providing a frank appraisal of the complexities of AI development with foresight, and the anxieties of key stakeholders

The Persistence of Policy: A Tropological Analysis of Contemporary Education Policy Discourse in the United States

Contemporary federal education policy discourse from A Nation at Risk to the Race to the Top program has promoted and extended neoliberal discourse from the national level to the level of the school and its personnel. This study highlights the persistence of neoliberal discourse within federal education policy and the consequences this persistence holds for critiques of current policies and practices. Analyzing reports published by the United States Department of Education and contemporary United States education policy starting from A Nation at Risk, moving through America 2000, Goals 2000, and No Child Left Behind, and ending with the Race to the Top program, I use rhetorical tropes to provide a method of analysis for education policy. Due to the novelty of this project for the field of education policy studies, I bring in concepts from rhetorical studies and discourse analysis to produce an interdisciplinary approach to policy analysis that fills a particular gap in existing analyses. At present, there exists no framework within the traditional analyses of education policy that offers a theoretical account of how a discourse maintains and propagates itself through policy. This dissertation offers a new method of policy analysis that examines how a discourse stabilizes and perpetuates itself through education policy. Specifically, an analysis of these policies and reports demonstrates how neoliberal discourse uses the tropes of metaphor, where two objects are identified with one another, and synecdoche, where the part is made to represent the whole and vice-versa, to ground and naturalize its growing presence in education policy and practice. Through the tropological analysis of the above cited texts, the co-operation of metaphor and synecdoche, what I term “organic identification,” accounts for the persistence of neoliberal discourse through its identification and integration with federal education policy discourse specifically through the constitution of places, e.g., the nation and the school. The conclusion suggests the critical potential for considering the role of tropes in the discursive constitution of place by mapping the persistence of a discourse and providing a critical distance from which contradictions and alternative trajectories can be forwarded

Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims

Biological knowledge is increasingly represented as a collection of (entity-relationship-entity) triplets. These are queried, mined, appended to papers, and published. However, this representation ignores the argumentation contained within a paper and the relationships between hypotheses, claims and evidence put forth in the article. In this paper, we propose an alternate view of the research article as a network of 'hypotheses and evidence'. Our knowledge representation focuses on scientific discourse as a rhetorical activity, which leads to a different direction in the development of tools and processes for modeling this discourse. We propose to extract knowledge from the article to allow the construction of a system where a specific scientific claim is connected, through trails of meaningful relationships, to experimental evidence. We discuss some current efforts and future plans in this area