A conservationist, an economist, and a medic walk into a moral dilemma: Environmental decisions and rationalizing behavior

A recent Biological Conservation paper found that while conservationists behave more sustainably than other professionals in some respects (e.g. compost more), they still have much room to improve. Three key domains of behavior the paper tested were meat consumption, daily commuting behavior, and air travel. In this research, we analyzed the voluntary comments people made in response to questions about their behavior in these areas to seek a better understanding of how conservationists explain or rationalize their behavior despite their knowledge of how their behavior impacts the environment. The results revealed that conservationists were more likely to rationalize their meat consumption behavior than economists. Otherwise, there was not a significant difference between the likelihood of conservationists, economists, and medical professionals to rationalize their behavior. The most common types of rationalizations used by respondents to justify their unsustainable behavior were Self-Sanctions and Moral Justification. Interestingly, the rationalizations offered in the comments of the respondents also took the form of Positive Self-Reactions, or self-praise for behaving in a sustainable manner. A future line of study could assess the efficacy of interrupting the ability of people to rationalize their unsustainable behavior as a leverage point to alter behavior

Actin cytoskeleton assembly regulates collagen production via TGF‐β type II receptor in human skin fibroblasts

The dermal compartment of skin is primarily composed of collagen‐rich extracellular matrix (ECM), which is produced by dermal fibroblasts. In Young skin, fibroblasts attach to the ECM through integrins. During ageing, fragmentation of the dermal ECM limits fibroblast attachment. This reduced attachment is associated with decreased collagen production, a major cause of skin thinning and fragility, in the elderly. Fibroblast attachment promotes assembly of the cellular actin cytoskeleton, which generates mechanical forces needed for structural support. The mechanism(s) linking reduced assembly of the actin cytoskeleton to decreased collagen production remains unclear. Here, we report that disassembly of the actin cytoskeleton results in impairment of TGF‐β pathway, which controls collagen production, in dermal fibroblasts. Cytoskeleton disassembly rapidly down‐regulates TGF‐β type II receptor (TβRII) levels. This down‐regulation leads to reduced activation of downstream effectors Smad2/Smad3 and CCN2, resulting in decreased collagen production. These responses are fully reversible; restoration of actin cytoskeleton assembly up‐regulates TβRII, Smad2/Smad3, CCN2 and collagen expression. Finally, actin cytoskeleton‐dependent reduction of TβRII is mediated by induction of microRNA 21, a potent inhibitor of TβRII protein expression. Our findings reveal a novel mechanism that links actin cytoskeleton assembly and collagen expression in dermal fibroblasts. This mechanism likely contributes to loss of TβRII and collagen production, which are observed in aged human skin.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145494/1/jcmm13685_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145494/2/jcmm13685-sup-0001-FigS1-S2.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145494/3/jcmm13685.pd

Regional Medical Campuses: A New Classification System

There is burgeoning belief that regional medical campuses (RMCs) are a significant part of the narrative about medical education and the health care workforce in the United States and Canada. Although RMCs are not new, in the recent years of medical education enrollment expansion, they have seen their numbers increase. Class expansion explains the rapid growth of RMCs in the past 10 years, but it does not adequately describe their function. Often, RMCs have missions that differ from their main campus, especially in the areas of rural and community medicine. The absence of an easy-to-use classification system has led to a lack of current research about RMCs as evidenced by the small number of articles in the current literature. The authors describe the process of the Group on Regional Medical Campuses used to develop attributes of a campus separate from the main campus that constitute a “classification” of a campus as an RMC. The system is broken into four models—basic science, clinical, longitudinal, and combined—and is linked to Liaison Committee on Medical Education standards. It is applicable to all schools and can be applied by any medical school dean or medical education researcher. The classification system paves the way for stakeholders to agree on a denominator of RMCs and conduct future research about their impact on medical education

Training Students on the Effective Use of Translator Services: How Can You Treat Someone You Don’t Understand?

In 2005, the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine partnered with the Inova Health System to create the first regional branch medical campus in Northern Virginia. As a part of this partnership, the VCU School of Medicine Inova Campus accepts a minimum of twenty-four medical students from the third and fourth year classes annually. In an effort to better prepare the incoming students for their clinical years and an extremely diverse patient population, a video was created to demonstrate effective use of translator services

State School Systems and Language Rights

This paper discusses the issue of language rights, examining the struggle for power between state school systems and parents over children’s education, specifically language rights. An examination of state statutes regarding bilingual education, and state department of education web pages for the lower 48 states revealed that all states provide bilingual education for limited-English proficient students, or LEP students. The indicator of language rights the paper uses is parental approval, the extent of the authority that parents have over their child’s presence in bilingual education classes as stated in state statutes. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we attempt to explain the absence of parent approval in particular states

Al-Shaʿrānī’s Theological Defence of Ibn ʿArabī in Context

This research undertakes the investigation of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī’s (d. 973/ 1565) defence of Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 638/ 1240) mysticism. It aims to clarify the theological project on which al-Shaʿrānī embarked in an attempt to promulgate Ibn ʿArabī’s thought to a wider audience. The thesis challenges the reductive view agreed upon in recent scholarship that al-Shaʿrānī was an uncritical apologist of Ibn ʿArabī and a mediocre thinker who was not interested in the latter’s mystical worldview. Contrary to the current reading of al-Shaʿrānī, the study argues how he systematically presents Ibn ʿArabī’s ontology of ‘the oneness of existence’ (waḥdat al-wujūd) as a perceptual and visionary experience. It is shown that this interpretive method emerged against a backdrop of polemics over Ibn ʿArabī. I will further demonstrate that, by situating Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrines in the context of theological issues, al-Shaʿrānī integrates them into his own worldview, thereby merging the mystical and theological disciplines. I will also discuss that al-Shaʿrānī was supportive of Ibn ʿArabī’s monistic teachings on condition that the audience are advanced enough to fully understand them. The thesis therefore provides an account of al-Shaʿrānī’s biography, intellectual milieu, and oeuvre (Chapter 1), investigates his interpretation of the oneness of existence as experiential oneness (Chapter 2), considers his support of the monistic worldview (the first part of Chapter 3), then studies his treatment of some of Ibn ʿArabī’s controversial doctrines, focusing in particular on al-Shaʿrānī’s approach to the anthropomorphic attributes of God (the second part of Chapter 3, and Chapters 4 and 5). It will become clear that al-Shaʿrānī’s theological project was formulated through innovative interpretive efforts and in the context of his own intellectual milieu. The research concludes that al-Shaʿrānī’s defence of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought ought to be received in a more positive manner

The Medical Futures Program: How One Regional Medical Campus Educates Its Community

Poster created for the 2012 GRMC Session of the AAMC Annual Meeting. The Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine Inova Campus has extensive ties to the northern Virginia community. The Medical Futures Program was created to provide valuable information regarding medical school admissions and current physician workforce issues to high school and university students, their parents, and guests

Segmenting Multivariate Time Series of Water Flow : a Prior Tool for Contamination Warning Systems

International audienceDrinking Water Distribution Networks (WDN) are critical infrastructures exposed to the risk of accidental and intentional contaminations. To ensure protection of drinking water, there is an important need to design automatic and secure Early Warning Systems (EWS). Online monitoring of water quality into a WDN is a challenging problem due to the complexity of hydraulic networks. Conventional detection methods deal with specific contaminants and usually assume a stationary state of the WDN meanwhile such problem is hardly addressed when operational conditions are changing. This paper introduces a generic methodology based on a temporal analysis in order to extract prior knowledge for warning detectors. Frequent types of operating period are extracted and for each period, upstream / downstream relationships into the WDN can be found. The procedure is fully data-driven and prevents to use heavy hydraulic-quality simulations during the monitoring stage. In fact, the method can be used as a preprocessing step by any detector in order to help dealing with multiple quality sensors and to avoid false alarms due to operating changes. The proposed approach is illustrated on a large real-world network in France and the experimental results are very promising