La ola reciente de ampliación histórica del sistema mundial organizador llamado el capitalismo nos brinda la ocasión de reflexionar sobre su realidad y acerca de cómo estudiamos las interacciones ...entre el capitalismo y las diversas culturas del mundo. Este trabajo nos acerca al tema por medio de una exploración de la fuente principal de nuestro entendimiento de tales procesos: la economía académica. La economía académica ha jugado un papel importante en la historia contemporánea, respaldando e impulsando el sistema capitalista y el modo de pensar que lo sustenta. No obstante su preeminencia en las ciencias sociales, la economía académica ha tenido pocos avances en cuanto al entendimiento del funcionamiento de las economías reales, capitalistas y no-capitalistas. En este artículo se argumentará que esta incapacidad de explicar los fenómenos económicos radica en las raíces profundas del campo académico, en el logocentrismo y en el planteamiento metafísico de la ciencia clásica occidental. Tanto su supremacía en las ciencias sociales como sus deficiencias y rol político, exigen que comprendamos las contradicciones lógicas de la economía académica, no sólo para formular una crítica, sino para elaborar métodos alternativos de apropiar y alcanzar procesos socioeconómicos que evitan los mismos errores y debilidades. Este artículo pretenderá esbozar la relación que se puede generar entre el logocentrismo, la ciencia clásica y la economía académica, destacando sus errores de fondo y repercusiones sociopolíticas, y planteando una metodología alternativa para el estudio de economías humanas en el contexto de la sociedad pluricultural.
Este ensayo versa sobre los contenidos de un encuentro sobre la globalización y el desarrollo rural y comunitarino, auspiciado por el Centro de Investigaciones para América Latina y el Caribe ...(CERLAC).
International organisations are inherently purposive actors within the international legal system, created and empowered by States to pursue finite common objectives. This teleological dimension has ...come to play a prominent role in the way in which international law rationalises international organisations, with their purposes given a significant, often determinative, role in delimiting their competences. This article argues that this is the product of a conscious shift in legal reasoning that took place in the aftermath of World War II. Through an analysis of a series of key post-War decisions, it identifies the common features of this ‘teleological turn’ and, disentangling it from other forms of legal reasoning, examines its unique underlying logic and normative claims. It demonstrates that while the teleological turn offers prospects for the systemic development of international governance, an increasingly abstract approach to the concept and identification of an organisation's ‘purpose’ raises a number of unresolved questions which cast a shadow of indeterminacy over the law of international organisations.
For most patients, asthma is not controlled as defined by guidelines; whether this is achievable has not been prospectively studied. A 1-year, randomized, stratified, double-blind, parallel-group ...study of 3,421 patients with uncontrolled asthma compared fluticasone propionate and salmeterol/fluticasone in achieving two rigorous, composite, guideline-based measures of control: totally and well-controlled asthma. Treatment was stepped-up until total control was achieved (or maximum 500 microg corticosteroid twice a day). Significantly more patients in each stratum (previously corticosteroid-free, low- and moderate-dose corticosteroid users) achieved control with salmeterol/fluticasone than fluticasone. Total control was achieved across all strata: 520 (31%) versus 326 (19%) patients after dose escalation (p < 0.001) and 690 (41%) versus 468 (28%) at 1 year for salmeterol/fluticasone and fluticasone, respectively. Asthma became well controlled in 1,071 (63%) versus 846 (50%) after dose escalation (p < 0.001) and 1,204 (71%) versus 988 (59%) at 1 year. Control was achieved more rapidly and at a lower corticosteroid dose with salmeterol/fluticasone versus fluticasone. Across all strata, 68% and 76% of the patients receiving salmeterol/fluticasone and fluticasone, respectively, were on the highest dose at the end of treatment. Exacerbation rates (0.07-0.27 per patient per year) and improvement in health status were significantly better with salmeterol/fluticasone. This study confirms that the goal of guideline-derived asthma control was achieved in a majority of the patients.
Mixed pathology, with both Alzheimer’s disease and vascular abnormalities, is the most common cause of clinical dementia in the elderly. While usually thought to be concurrent diseases, the fact that ...changes in cerebral blood flow are a prominent early and persistent alteration in Alzheimer’s disease raises the possibility that vascular alterations and Alzheimer pathology are more directly linked. Here, we report that aged tau-overexpressing mice develop changes to blood vessels including abnormal, spiraling morphologies; reduced blood vessel diameters; and increased overall blood vessel density in cortex. Blood flow in these vessels was altered, with periods of obstructed flow rarely observed in normal capillaries. These changes were accompanied by cortical atrophy as well as increased expression of angiogenesis-related genes such as Vegfa, Serpine1, and Plau in CD31-positive endothelial cells. Interestingly, mice overexpressing nonmutant forms of tau in the absence of frank neurodegeneration also demonstrated similar changes. Furthermore, many of the genes we observe in mice are also altered in human RNA datasets from Alzheimer patients, particularly in brain regions classically associated with tau pathology such as the temporal lobe and limbic system regions. Together these data indicate that tau pathological changes in neurons can impact brain endothelial cell biology, altering the integrity of the brain’s microvasculature.
This article presents a practical roadmap for scholarly publishers to implement data citation in accordance with the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (JDDCP), a synopsis and ...harmonization of the recommendations of major science policy bodies. It was developed by the Publishers Early Adopters Expert Group as part of the Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP) project, an initiative of FORCE11.org and the NIH BioCADDIE program. The structure of the roadmap presented here follows the "life of a paper" workflow and includes the categories Pre-submission, Submission, Production, and Publication. The roadmap is intended to be publisher-agnostic so that all publishers can use this as a starting point when implementing JDDCP-compliant data citation. Authors reading this roadmap will also better know what to expect from publishers and how to enable their own data citations to gain maximum impact, as well as complying with what will become increasingly common funder mandates on data transparency.
Urine contains extracellular RNA (exRNA) markers of urogenital cancers. However, the capacity of genetic material in urine to identify systemic diseases is unknown. Here we describe exRNA splice ...products in human urine as a source of biomarkers for the two most common forms of muscular dystrophies, myotonic dystrophy (DM) and Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Using a training set, RT-PCR, droplet digital PCR, and principal component regression, we identify ten transcripts that are spliced differently in urine exRNA from patients with DM type 1 (DM1) as compared to unaffected or disease controls, form a composite biomarker, and develop a predictive model that is 100% accurate in our independent validation set. Urine also contains mutation-specific DMD mRNAs that confirm exon-skipping activity of the antisense oligonucleotide drug eteplirsen. Our results establish that urine mRNA splice variants can be used to monitor systemic diseases with minimal or no clinical effect on the urinary tract.
Most biomedical data repositories issue locally-unique accessions numbers, but do not provide globally unique, machine-resolvable, persistent identifiers for their datasets, as required by publishers ...wishing to implement data citation in accordance with widely accepted principles. Local accessions may however be prefixed with a namespace identifier, providing global uniqueness. Such "compact identifiers" have been widely used in biomedical informatics to support global resource identification with local identifier assignment. We report here on our project to provide robust support for machine-resolvable, persistent compact identifiers in biomedical data citation, by harmonizing the Identifiers.org and N2T.net (Name-To-Thing) meta-resolvers and extending their capabilities. Identifiers.org services hosted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and N2T.net services hosted at the California Digital Library (CDL), can now resolve any given identifier from over 600 source databases to its original source on the Web, using a common registry of prefix-based redirection rules. We believe these services will be of significant help to publishers and others implementing persistent, machine-resolvable citation of research data.
Background During the Gaining Optimal Asthma controL study, 3416 patients with uncontrolled asthma were randomized to receive salmeterol/fluticasone propionate combination (SFC) or fluticasone ...propionate (FP) for 1 year. Approximately two thirds of patients achieved well-controlled (WC) asthma, and one third continued to have asthma that was not well controlled (NWC). Objective This analysis aimed to (1) identify factors influencing treatment response and (2) assess the clinical benefits of SFC and FP in patients with NWC asthma. Methods Logistic regression analysis was used to investigate whether covariates influenced the achievement of at least WC asthma in the study population. In patients with NWC asthma, predefined criteria were used to assess improvements in 6 clinical outcomes. Results Factors affecting the probability of having NWC asthma included smoking status (current vs never: odds ratio OR, 2.757; 95% CI, 2.061−3.689; P < .0001; former vs never: OR, 1.274; 95% CI, 1.031−1.574; P = 0.0273), sex (women vs men: OR, 0.652; 95% CI, 0.527–0.806; P < .0001), history of inhaled corticosteroid use (no history vs history: OR, 0.546; 95% CI, 0.437−0.683; P < .0001), and treatment (FP vs SFC: OR, 1.972; 95% CI, 1.686–2.308; P < .0001). Of patients with NWC asthma, 86% to 96% showed improvements in 1 or more clinical outcomes. Conclusion It is imperative for good asthma control that patients stop smoking. Patients who did not have at least WC asthma demonstrated clinical improvements in individual asthma outcomes. Clinical implications Although not all patients can achieve guideline-defined control, long-term treatment with SFC or FP is associated with clinical improvements in nearly all patients, regardless of smoking history or inhaled corticosteroid use.
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