Le Japon et l'Asie - le danger d'une nouvelle guerre froide

Le Japon a renoncé à un rôle militaire important au niveau régional en limitant ses forces réduites à la défense exclusive de son territoire. Toutefois, en accueillant des bases militaires américaines sur son territoire et en mettant en application les directives en matière de coopération de défense avec les États-Unis, le Japon sera peut-être impliqué dans un conflit ou une crise à propos de Taiwan entre les États-Unis et la Chine. Un tel scénario remettrait en cause le rôle du Japon comme partenaire économique indispensable pour ses voisins aux titres des investissements, du commerce et de l'aide économique. Le torrent de critiques récentes adressées envers le Japon au sujet de la gestion de ses problèmes économiques a noyé le fait que le Japon finance généreusement ses voisins. Malgré le regain de tensions au sujet de la Corée du Nord, le problème le plus sérieux pour le Japon demeure probablement le déclenchement d'une guerre froide avec la Chine par les États-Unis, qui sont poussés en cela par les « faucons » du Congrès.Japan has abdicated from any important regional military role by restricting its relatively small forces to defence of Japan only. However, by hosting us military bases and by implementing the new Japan-us Defence Cooperation Guidelines, it may become involved in any tension or conflict over Taiwan between the us and China. Such conflict threatens Japan's role as an indispensable economic partner for all of its neighbors with its vast investment capital, trade, and aid. During the tidal wave of foreign criticism of its handling of its own economic problems, overlooked has been Japan's continuing generous loans and credits to its neighbors. Even with renewed tension over North Korea, probably the most serious problem for Japan remains the trend toward a new Cold War with China, led by the us, egged on by its hawks especially in the Congress

La politique économique du Japon à l’égard du Canada

The article attempts to evaluate the balance of United Nations accomplishments in the field of peace and security since 1945. The first part deals with the elements one has to take into consideration to properly evaluate such performance. These are what the Organization ought to do (its objectives), what it could do (its means) and what it has done (the kinds of activities). In the second part, each one of these elements is examined. About the objectives, the article distinguishes between manifest and latent objectives and it argues that the first ones have not changed when the second ones have much changed. About the means, the article analyzes the powers given the UN and the way its principal organs exercise them. It traces the evolution of the roles of the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Secretary general and the International Court of Justice. Concerning the kinds of activities, the article uses a typology developed by H.K. Jacobson to argue that the main function of the UN is a "verbal" or informational one, that the normative function especially in its collective legitimization aspect is the second most important, that the rule supervisory function accounts or few activities, and, that the operational function is more developed than it may appear. The article concludes that the balance is a positive one pointing to the flexibility, the adaptability and the continued usefulness of the UN

The importance of cultural aspects in impact assessment and project: developmentreflections from a case study of a hydroelectric dam in Brazil

Failure to consider the cultural and social factors of projects can lead to situations where mitigation does not effectively address the impacts they were intended to alleviate, and can even create other impacts. We critically analyse the processes of designing and implementing a social and environmental compensation program for the Lajeado Hydroelectric Dam in the Amazon region of central-northern Brazil. This mitigation program caused a wide range of social and environmental impacts on the Xerente Indigenous people, such as intra-group conflict, and changes in agricultural practices and food regime. Based on qualitative fieldwork and an extensive document analysis, we present a contextualization of the region, the project, the Xerente people, and their cosmological understandings. We consider the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders about the compensation program and its outcomes, and demonstrate how traditional cultural practices and values played a role in the unfolding of the program. Better comprehension of sociocultural aspects through the use of ethnography, ongoing consultation, and meaningful community participation in the planning and implementation of mitigation measures are recommended.</p

SHP-2 acts via ROCK to regulate the cardiac actin cytoskeleton

Noonan syndrome is one of the most common causes of human congenital heart disease and is frequently associated with missense mutations in the protein phosphatase SHP-2. Interestingly, patients with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML) and LEOPARD syndrome frequently carry a second, somatically introduced subset of missense mutations in SHP-2. To determine the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which SHP-2 regulates heart development and, thus, understand how Noonan-associated mutations affect cardiogenesis, we introduced SHP-2 encoding the most prevalent Noonan syndrome and JMML mutations into Xenopus embryos. Resulting embryos show a direct relationship between a Noonan SHP-2 mutation and its ability to cause cardiac defects in Xenopus; embryos expressing Noonan SHP-2 mutations exhibit morphologically abnormal hearts, whereas those expressing an SHP-2 JMML-associated mutation do not. Our studies indicate that the cardiac defects associated with the introduction of the Noonan-associated SHP-2 mutations are coupled with a delay or arrest of the cardiac cell cycle in M-phase and a failure of cardiomyocyte progenitors to incorporate into the developing heart. We show that these defects are a result of an underlying malformation in the formation and polarity of cardiac actin fibers and F-actin deposition. We show that these defects can be rescued in culture and in embryos through the inhibition of the Rho-associated, coiled-coil-containing protein kinase 1 (ROCK), thus demonstrating a direct relationship between SHP-2N308D and ROCK activation in the developing heart

DHODH modulates transcriptional elongation in the neural crest and melanoma

Melanoma is a tumour of transformed melanocytes, which are originally derived from the embryonic neural crest. It is unknown to what extent the programs that regulate neural crest development interact with mutations in the BRAF oncogene, which is the most commonly mutated gene in human melanoma1. We have used zebrafish embryos to identify the initiating transcriptional events that occur on activation of human BRAF(V600E) (which encodes an amino acid substitution mutant of BRAF) in the neural crest lineage. Zebrafish embryos that are transgenic for mitfa:BRAF(V600E) and lack p53 (also known as tp53) have a gene signature that is enriched for markers of multipotent neural crest cells, and neural crest progenitors from these embryos fail to terminally differentiate. To determine whether these early transcriptional events are important for melanoma pathogenesis, we performed a chemical genetic screen to identify small-molecule suppressors of the neural crest lineage, which were then tested for their effects on melanoma. One class of compound, inhibitors of dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH), for example leflunomide, led to an almost complete abrogation of neural crest development in zebrafish and to a reduction in the self-renewal of mammalian neural crest stem cells. Leflunomide exerts these effects by inhibiting the transcriptional elongation of genes that are required for neural crest development and melanoma growth. When used alone or in combination with a specific inhibitor of the BRAF(V600E) oncogene, DHODH inhibition led to a marked decrease in melanoma growth both in vitro and in mouse xenograft studies. Taken together, these studies highlight developmental pathways in neural crest cells that have a direct bearing on melanoma formation

Culture and Hallucinations: Overview and Future Directions

A number of studies have explored hallucinations as complex experiences involving interactions between psychological, biological, and environmental factors and mechanisms. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has focused on the role of culture in shaping hallucinations. This article reviews the published research, drawing on the expertise of both anthropologists and psychologists. We argue that the extant body of work suggests that culture does indeed have a significant impact on the experience, understanding, and labeling of hallucinations and that there may be important theoretical and clinical consequences of that observation. We find that culture can affect what is identified as a hallucination, that there are different patterns of hallucination among the clinical and nonclinical populations, that hallucinations are often culturally meaningful, that hallucinations occur at different rates in different settings; that culture affects the meaning and characteristics of hallucinations associated with psychosis, and that the cultural variations of psychotic hallucinations may have implications for the clinical outcome of those who struggle with psychosis. We conclude that a clinician should never assume that the mere report of what seems to be a hallucination is necessarily a symptom of pathology and that the patient’s cultural background needs to be taken into account when assessing and treating hallucinations

Conference of Microelectronics Research 2002

https://scholarworks.rit.edu/meec_archive/1011/thumbnail.jp

Temporal Information Processing in Short- and Long-Term Memory of Patients with Schizophrenia

Cognitive deficits of patients with schizophrenia have been largely recognized as core symptoms of the disorder. One neglected factor that contributes to these deficits is the comprehension of time. In the present study, we assessed temporal information processing and manipulation from short- and long-term memory in 34 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 34 matched healthy controls. On the short-term memory temporal-order reconstruction task, an incidental or intentional learning strategy was deployed. Patients showed worse overall performance than healthy controls. The intentional learning strategy led to dissociable performance improvement in both groups. Whereas healthy controls improved on a performance measure (serial organization), patients improved on an error measure (inappropriate semantic clustering) when using the intentional instead of the incidental learning strategy. On the long-term memory script-generation task, routine and non-routine events of everyday activities (e.g., buying groceries) had to be generated in either chronological or inverted temporal order. Patients were slower than controls at generating events in the chronological routine condition only. They also committed more sequencing and boundary errors in the inverted conditions. The number of irrelevant events was higher in patients in the chronological, non-routine condition. These results suggest that patients with schizophrenia imprecisely access temporal information from short- and long-term memory. In short-term memory, processing of temporal information led to a reduction in errors rather than, as was the case in healthy controls, to an improvement in temporal-order recall. When accessing temporal information from long-term memory, patients were slower and committed more sequencing, boundary, and intrusion errors. Together, these results suggest that time information can be accessed and processed only imprecisely by patients who provide evidence for impaired time comprehension. This could contribute to symptomatic cognitive deficits and strategic inefficiency in schizophrenia