The Global Flora: Descriptive statistics with a commentary and an ethnobotanical example

This paper briefly describes the world’s flora, based on the materials available at ThePlantList.org, a large web site built by a collaboration of botanists at Kew Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Garden. The paper details the number and distribution of families, genera, species, authors, publication dates and several other elements of the flora. The author notes several of the most notable features of this global scientific enterprise. Though it might seem arcane, the database is widely utilized, and as such seems worth examining. For example, a search of Wikipedia.com found 901 references to ThePlantList.org.

Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136378/1/ae.1997.24.1.218.1.pd

Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Distinguished Lecture: Consciousness, “Symbolic Healing,” and the Meaning Response

Symbolic healing, that is, responding to meaningful experiences in positive ways, can facilitate human healing. This process partly engages consciousness and partly evades consciousness completely (sometimes it partakes of both simultaneously). This paper, presented as the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Distinguished Lecture at the 2011 AAA meeting in Montreal, reviews recent research on what is ordinarily (and unfortunately) called the “placebo effect.” The author makes the argument that language use should change, and the relevant portions of what is often called the placebo effect should be referred to as the “meaning response.”Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93714/1/anoc1061.pd

Examining a Powerful Healing Effect through a Cultural Lens, and finding Meaning

In this paper I argue that the "placebo effect" doesn't exist; placebos do, but they are inert so they have no effects (that's what "inert" means). Yet we know that often enough, things do happen after placebo administration. Among various causes for such change, I attribute some effects to the meanings the placebos convey to the participants in the medical event — the doctors, nurses, patients, family, community, etc., of the patient. I call these "meaning responses," and survey here some of the ways they occur (with or without the presence of placebos). Then, I describe some recent studies which dramatically complicate the interpretation of RCTs, and our perhaps overly simplistic understandings of the nature of medical efficacy

The meaning of baldness and implications for treatment

Use of therapies to improve an individual's appearance is not a new medical concept. Androgenetic alopecia has been recognized as a disorder since the time of Hippocrates,1 and since that time, a variety of preparations and surgical procedures have been used as treatments. Recently, both the popular press and the professional literature2 have given much attention to the antihypertensive agent minoxidil for treating androgenetic alopecia. Treatment of alopecia raises a number of interesting questions regarding the definitions of "disease" and "illness," some of which have implications for practitioners as they define the limits of proper medical practice.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27109/1/0000101.pd

Symbols and selectivity: A statistical analysis of native american medical ethnobotany

Native Americans use a wide range of plants medicinally. Many of these plants have profound meaning to their users. Does this mean, as some assert, that tribal medicine is "all placebo"? Since the essential character of meaning is the arbitrariness of the sign, then insofar as this medicine is symbolic, the plants used medicinally will be a random representation of plants available in nature. Several regression analyses of plants used by native Americans on plants available to them indicate substantial selectivity in plant use. Native American medical ethnobotany is not only placebo medicine.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/23587/1/0000549.pd

Dekonstruktion af Placebo Effekten og fundet af Betydningsrespons

We provide a new perspect ve with which to understand what for a half century has been known as the »placebo effect.« We argue that, as currently used, the concept includes much that has nothing to do with placebos, confusirig the most interesting and important aspects of the phenomenon. We propose a new way to understand those aspects of medical care, plus a broad range of additional human experiences, by focusing on the idea of »meaning,« to which people, when they are sick, often respond. We review several of the many areas in medicine in which meaning affects illness or healing and introduce the idea of the »meaning response.« We suggest that use of this formulation, rather than the fixation on inert placebos, will probably lead to far greater insight into how treatment works and perhaps to real improvements in human well-being

The Meaning Response, 'Placebo' and Methods

In 2002, Dan Moerman outlined three candidate explanations for the "placebo response": the "conditioned stimulus-response," Irving Kirsch's "response-expectancy" explanation, and the "meaning response." The meaning response, Moerman argued, was the only one of the three candidate explanations that could cover all the data, gained from decades of RCTs and centuries of historical record. Moerman went so far as to propose replacing the term "placebo effect/response" with the term "meaning response," because people are not responding to placebos, since there is nothing to respond to; people are responding to meanings. There is evidence of medically significant meaning responses where there is no evidence for conditioning. Similarly, there is evidence for such responses where those subject to them lack the knowledge—epistemic capital—required to form the beliefs which might constitute an expectation. Something else, neither conditioning nor propositional attitudes, explained placebo responses, and Moerman proposed the meaning response. While the authors consider the meaning response to avoid the pitfalls of conditioning and response-expectancy, it has been subject to criticism. The criticisms have focused on what is seen as the explanation falling foul of the naturalistic demand and not fitting with prevalent predilections in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This article seeks to allay these worries and proposes the inclusion of ethnomethodological fieldwork in future research

Experimental validation of a reinforcement learning based approach for a service-wise optimisation of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Due to their constrained nature, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often optimised for a specific application domain, for example by designing a custom medium access control protocol. However, when several WSNs are located in close proximity to one another, the performance of the individual networks can be negatively affected as a result of unexpected protocol interactions. The performance impact of this 'protocol interference' depends on the exact set of protocols and (network) services used. This paper therefore proposes an optimisation approach that uses self-learning techniques to automatically learn the optimal combination of services and/or protocols in each individual network. We introduce tools capable of discovering this optimal set of services and protocols for any given set of co-located heterogeneous sensor networks. These tools eliminate the need for manual reconfiguration while only requiring minimal a priori knowledge about the network. A continuous re-evaluation of the decision process provides resilience to volatile networking conditions in case of highly dynamic environments. The methodology is experimentally evaluated in a large scale testbed using both single- and multihop scenarios, showing a clear decrease in end-to-end delay and an increase in reliability of almost 25 %