An argument against the focus on Community Resilience in Public Health

Background - It has been suggested that Public Health professionals focus on community resilience in tackling chronic problems, such as poverty and deprivation; is this approach useful? Discussion - Resilience is always i) of something ii) to something iii) to an endpoint, as in i) a rubber ball, ii) to a blunt force, iii) to its original shape. “Community resilience” might be: of a neighbourhood, to a flu pandemic, with the endpoint, to return to normality. In these two examples, the endpoint is as-you-were. This is unsuitable for some examples of resilience. A child that is resilient to an abusive upbringing has an endpoint of living a happy life despite that upbringing: this is an as-you-should-be endpoint. Similarly, a chronically deprived community cannot have the endpoint of returning to chronic deprivation: so what is its endpoint? Roughly, it is an as-you-should-be endpoint: to provide an environment for inhabitants to live well. Thus resilient communities will be those that do this in the face of challenges. How can they be identified? One method uses statistical outliers, neighbourhoods that do better than would be expected on a range of outcomes given a range of stressors. This method tells us that a neighbourhood is resilient but not why it is. In response, a number of researchers have attributed characteristics to resilient communities; however, these generally fail to distinguish characteristics of a good community from those of a resilient one. Making this distinction is difficult and we have not seen it successfully done; more importantly, it is arguably unnecessary. There already exist approaches in Public Health to assessing and developing communities faced with chronic problems, typically tied to notions such as Social Capital. Communityresilience to chronic problems, if it makes sense at all, is likely to be a property that emerges from the various assets in a community such as human capital, built capital and natural capital. Summary - Public Health professionals working with deprived neighbourhoods would be better to focus on what neighbourhoods have or could develop as social capital for living well, rather than on the vague and tangential notion of community resilience.</p

Identification of a gene signature for discriminating metastatic from primary melanoma using a molecular interaction network approach

Understanding the biological factors that are characteristic of metastasis in melanoma remains a key approach to improving treatment. In this study, we seek to identify a gene signature of metastatic melanoma. We configured a new network-based computational pipeline, combined with a machine learning method, to mine publicly available transcriptomic data from melanoma patient samples. Our method is unbiased and scans a genome-wide protein-protein interaction network using a novel formulation for network scoring. Using this, we identify the most influential, differentially expressed nodes in metastatic as compared to primary melanoma. We evaluated the shortlisted genes by a machine learning method to rank them by their discriminatory capacities. From this, we identified a panel of 6 genes, ALDH1A1, HSP90AB1, KIT, KRT16, SPRR3 and TMEM45B whose expression values discriminated metastatic from primary melanoma (87% classification accuracy). In an independent transcriptomic data set derived from 703 primary melanomas, we showed that all six genes were significant in predicting melanoma specific survival (MSS) in a univariate analysis, which was also consistent with AJCC staging. Further, 3 of these genes, HSP90AB1, SPRR3 and KRT16 remained significant predictors of MSS in a joint analysis (HR = 2.3, P = 0.03) although, HSP90AB1 (HR = 1.9, P = 2 × 10−4) alone remained predictive after adjusting for clinical predictors

Paradoxos da educação natural no Émile de Rousseau: os cuidados do adulto Paradoxes of the natural education in Rousseau's Émile: adults' care

O artigo trata do conceito de primeira infância em Rousseau, buscando esclarecê-lo mediante a análise do modo como Rousseau define os cuidados do adulto dispensados à supressão das necessidades da criança. Procura mostrar também que a definição deste conceito e o tratamento oferecido às dificuldades a ele subjacente dependem, em última instância, da inserção da própria temática dos cuidados no contexto normativo mais amplo da educação natural. O traço principal de tal contexto normativo repousa na idéia da liberdade bem regrada como diretriz do caminho natural, ao qual o processo formativo-educacional da criança deve ser conduzido. A definição dos cuidados do adulto conduz Rousseau à percepção de que estes só podem ser exercidos pedagogicamente com base no caráter aporético da educação natural, o qual se desdobra em três pólos tensivos.<br>This paper deals with the concept of first infancy in Rousseau in order to clarify it through the analysis of the way Rousseau defines the care adults devote to suppressing children needs. It also seeks to show that the definition of this concept and the treatment offered to the underlying difficulties ultimately depend on the insertion of the very theme of care in a broader normative context of natural education. The main feature of such a normative context rests on the idea of well ruled liberty as a guide to the natural path on which the educational shaping process should take place. The definition of adults' care leads Rousseau to realize that this care can only be exercised pedagogically on the basis of the non-poetic character of natural education which unfolds into three tensive poles

Physiologische, biochemische und cytomorphologische Untersuchungen an immissionsbelasteten Fichten Forschungsendbericht

With 110 refs., 14 tabs., 89 figs.Available from TIB Hannover: FR 4970 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Gewißheit und Wahrheit bei Popper

Il saggio indaga il rapporto fra certezza e verità in Popper nei diversi periodi in cui può essere suddivisa la sua opera, cercando di mostrare come Popper abbia sempre cercato di concepire questo rapporto modulando in modi diversi il proprio fallibilismo, ciò che con poche, ma assai significative eccezioni, ha sempre condotto ad un'insostenibile separazione fra questi due concetti. Nelle sue prime opere Popper contrappone alla certezza l’obiettività scientifica, contrapponendo gli Erlebnisse di percezione, soggettivi e assoluti, agli enunciati scientifici, intersoggettivamente controllabili. Con l'adesione alla teoria semantica della verità di Tarski Popper rinuncia soltanto apparentemente al suo fallibilismo, poiché – tramite la separazione del concetto di verità da quello dei criteri per accertarla – egli contrappone di nuovo nettamente certezza e verità, rendendo ancora una volta impossibile la fondazione delle ipotesi empiriche da parte dell'esperienza. Con la teoria dei tre mondi Popper tenta di evitare gli esiti relativistici della sua epistemologia, accogliendo alcuni punti della teoria platonica delle idee, che, se coerentemente sviluppati, conducono alla completa (ma di nuovo inaccettabile) identificazione di certezza e verità. Ma per altro verso egli modifica in modo talmente radicale la dottrina platonica da riproporre un’insostenibile separazione fra certezza e verità scientifica