In this significant addition to moral theory, George W. Harris
challenges a view of the dignity and worth of persons that goes
back through Kant and Christianity to the Stoics. He argues that we
do ...not, in fact, believe this view, which traces any breakdowns of
character to failures of strength. When it comes to what we
actually value in ourselves and others, he says, we are far more
Greek than Christian. At the most profound level, we value
ourselves as natural organisms, as animals, rather than as godlike
beings who transcend nature. The Kantian-Christian-Stoic tradition
holds that if we were fully able to realize our dignity as
Kantians, Christians, or Stoics, we would be better, stronger
people, and therefore less vulnerable to character breakdown.
Dignity and Vulnerability offers an opposing view, that
sometimes character breaks down not because of some shortcoming in
it but because of what is good about it, because of the very
virtues and features of character that give us our dignity. If
dignity can make us fragile and vulnerable to breakdown, then
breakdown can be benign as well as harmful, and thus the
conceptions of human dignity embedded in the tradition leading up
to Kant are deeply mistaken. Harris proposes a foundation for our
belief in human dignity in what we can actually know about
ourselves, rather than in metaphysical or theological fantasy.
Having gained this knowledge, we can understand the source of real
strength. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program,
which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek
out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach,
and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived
makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again
using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally
published in 1997.
Protected areas (PAs) are a key strategy for protecting biological resources, but they vary considerably in their effectiveness and are frequently reported as having negative impacts on local people. ...This has contributed to a divisive and unresolved debate concerning the compatibility of environmental and socioeconomic development goals. Elucidating the relationship between positive and negative social impacts and conservation outcomes of PAs is key for the development of more effective and socially just conservation. We conducted a global meta‐analysis on 165 PAs using data from 171 published studies. We assessed how PAs affect the well‐being of local people, the factors associated with these impacts, and crucially the relationship between PAs’ conservation and socioeconomic outcomes. Protected areas associated with positive socioeconomic outcomes were more likely to report positive conservation outcomes. Positive conservation and socioeconomic outcomes were more likely to occur when PAs adopted comanagement regimes, empowered local people, reduced economic inequalities, and maintained cultural and livelihood benefits. Whereas the strictest regimes of PA management attempted to exclude anthropogenic influences to achieve biological conservation objectives, PAs that explicitly integrated local people as stakeholders tended to be more effective at achieving joint biological conservation and socioeconomic development outcomes. Strict protection may be needed in some circumstances, yet our results demonstrate that conservation and development objectives can be synergistic and highlight management strategies that increase the probability of maximizing both conservation performance and development outcomes of PAs.
What kinds of persons do we aspire to be, and how do our
aspirations fit with our ideas of rationality? In
Agent-Centered Morality , George Harris argues that most of
us aspire to a certain sort of ...integrity: We wish to be respectful
of and sympathetic to others, and to be loving parents, friends,
and members of our communities. Against a prevailing Kantian
consensus, Harris offers an Aristotelian view of the problems
presented by practical reason, problems of integrating all our
concerns into a coherent, meaningful life in a way that preserves
our integrity. The task of solving these problems is "the
integration test." Systematically addressing the work of major
Kantian thinkers, Harris shows that even the most advanced
contemporary versions of the Kantian view fail to integrate all of
the values that correspond to what we call a moral life. By
demonstrating how the meaning of life and practical reason are
internally related, he constructs from Aristotle's thought a
conceptual scheme that successfully integrates all the
characteristics that make a life meaningful, without jeopardizing
the place of any. Harris's elucidation of this approach is a major
contribution to debates on human agency, practical reason, and
morality.
The NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog (www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas) is a FAIR knowledgebase providing detailed, structured, standardised and interoperable genome-wide association study (GWAS) data to >200 000 users per ...year from academic research, healthcare and industry. The Catalog contains variant-trait associations and supporting metadata for >45 000 published GWAS across >5000 human traits, and >40 000 full P-value summary statistics datasets. Content is curated from publications or acquired via author submission of prepublication summary statistics through a new submission portal and validation tool. GWAS data volume has vastly increased in recent years. We have updated our software to meet this scaling challenge and to enable rapid release of submitted summary statistics. The scope of the repository has expanded to include additional data types of high interest to the community, including sequencing-based GWAS, gene-based analyses and copy number variation analyses. Community outreach has increased the number of shared datasets from under-represented traits, e.g. cancer, and we continue to contribute to awareness of the lack of population diversity in GWAS. Interoperability of the Catalog has been enhanced through links to other resources including the Polygenic Score Catalog and the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, refinements to GWAS trait annotation, and the development of a standard format for GWAS data.
While the idea that adding pyrogenic carbon (referred to as ‘biochar’ when used as a soil amendment) will enhance soil fertility and carbon sequestration has gained widespread attention, ...understanding of its chemical and physical characteristics and the methods most appropriate to determine them have lagged behind. This type of information is needed to optimize the properties of biochar for specific purposes such as nutrient retention, pH amelioration or contaminant remediation. A number of surface properties of a range of biochar types were examined to better understand how these properties were related to biochar production conditions, as well as to each other. Among biochars made from oak (
Quercus lobata), pine (
Pinus taeda) and grass (
Tripsacum floridanum) at 250
°C in air and 400 and 650
°C under N
2, micropore surface area (measured by CO
2 sorptometry) increased with production temperature as volatile matter (VM) decreased, indicating that VM was released from pore-infillings. The CEC, determined using K
+ exchange, was about 10
cmol
c
kg
−1 for 400 and 650
°C chars and did not show any pH dependency, whereas 250
°C biochar CECs were pH-dependant and rose to as much as 70
cmol
c
kg
−1 at pH 7. Measurements of surface charge on biochar particles indicated a zeta potential of −
9 to −
4
mV at neutral pH and an iso-electric point of pH 2–3. However, a colloidal or dissolved biochar component was 4–5 times more electronegative. Total acid functional group concentration ranged 4.4–8.1
mmol
g
−1 (measured by Boehm titration), decreased with production temperature, and was directly related to VM content. Together, these findings suggest that the VM component of biochar carries its acidity, negative charge, and thus, complexation ability. However, not all acid functional groups exchanged cations as the number of cation exchanging sites (CEC) was about 10 times less than the number of acid functional groups present on biochar surfaces and varied with biomass type. These findings suggest that lower temperature biochars will be better used to increase soil CEC while high temperature biochars will raise soil pH. Although no anion exchange capacity was measured in the biochars, they may sorb phosphate and nitrate by divalent cation bridging.
► Biochar surface area mainly in micropores and best measured by CO
2 sorptometry. ► The volatile component of biochar generates biochar acidity and CEC. ► Biochar surface is negatively charged. ► High temperature chars increase soil pH and low temperature chars increase CEC.
The large number of emerging antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) for cancer therapy has resulted in a significant market ‘boom’, garnering worldwide attention. Despite ADCs presenting huge challenges to ...researchers, particularly regarding the identification of a suitable combination of antibody, linker, and payload, as of September 2021, 11 ADCs have been granted FDA approval, with eight of these approved since 2017 alone. Optimism for this therapeutic approach is clear, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was a landmark year for deals and partnerships in the ADC arena, suggesting that there remains significant interest from Big Pharma. Herein we review the enthusiasm for ADCs by focusing on the features of those approved by the FDA, and offer some thoughts as to where the field is headed.
DNA barcoding has become a well‐funded, global enterprise since its proposition as a technique for species identification, delimitation and discovery in 2003. However, the rapid development of next ...generation sequencing (NGS) has the potential to render DNA barcoding irrelevant because of the speed with which it generates large volumes of genomic data. To avoid obsolescence, the DNA barcoding movement must adapt to use this new technology. This review examines the DNA barcoding enterprise, its continued resistance to improvement and the implications of this on the future of the discipline. We present the consistent failure of DNA barcoding to recognize its limitations and evolve its methodologies, reducing the usefulness of the data produced by the movement and throwing into doubt its ability to embrace NGS.
“QGP Signatures” revisited Harris, John W.; Müller, Berndt
The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields,
03/2024, Letnik:
84, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We revisit the graphic table of QCD signatures in our 1996
Annual Reviews
article “The Search for the Quark–Gluon Plasma” and assess the progress that has been made since its publication towards ...providing quantitative evidence for the formation of a quark–gluon plasma in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and its characteristic properties.
Abstract
The GWAS Catalog delivers a high-quality curated collection of all published genome-wide association studies enabling investigations to identify causal variants, understand disease ...mechanisms, and establish targets for novel therapies. The scope of the Catalog has also expanded to targeted and exome arrays with 1000 new associations added for these technologies. As of September 2018, the Catalog contains 5687 GWAS comprising 71673 variant-trait associations from 3567 publications. New content includes 284 full P-value summary statistics datasets for genome-wide and new targeted array studies, representing 6 × 109 individual variant-trait statistics. In the last 12 months, the Catalog's user interface was accessed by ∼90000 unique users who viewed >1 million pages. We have improved data access with the release of a new RESTful API to support high-throughput programmatic access, an improved web interface and a new summary statistics database. Summary statistics provision is supported by a new format proposed as a community standard for summary statistics data representation. This format was derived from our experience in standardizing heterogeneous submissions, mapping formats and in harmonizing content. Availability: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/.
As dairy cows are being housed for longer periods, with all-year-round housing growing in popularity, it is important to ensure housed environments are meeting the needs of cows. Dairy cows are ...motivated to access open lying areas, although previous motivation studies on this topic have confounded surface type and location (i.e. pasture outdoors vs cubicles indoors). This study measured cow motivation for lying down on an indoor open mattress (MAT; 9 m x 5 m) compared to indoor mattress-bedded cubicles, thus removing the confounding factor of surface type and location. This was repeated for an identically sized indoor deep-bedded straw yard (ST), to investigate whether surface type affected motivation for an open lying area. Thirty Holstein-Friesian dairy cows were housed in groups of 5 (n = 5 x 6) in an indoor robotic milking unit with access to six mattress-bedded cubicles. To assess motivation, cows were required to walk increasing distances via a one-way indoor raceway to access the open lying areas: Short (34.5 m), followed by Medium (80.5 m) and Long (126.5 m). Cows could choose to walk the raceway, leading to the MAT or ST, to lie down or they could lie down on the cubicles for 'free'. Overall, cows lay down for longer on the open lying areas at each distance compared to the cubicles, with cows lying down slightly longer on ST than MAT, although lying times on the open lying areas did decrease at the Long distance. However, cows were still lying for >60% of their lying time on the open lying areas at the Long distance. This study demonstrates that cows had a high motivation for an open lying area, the provision of which could better cater for the behavioural needs of housed dairy cows and improve housed dairy cow welfare.
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