Vast Majority Of Humans Research Articles

A Time – and a Project – for Pacifism and Nonviolence Studies

Abstract Why is it time to take pacifism and nonviolence studies more seriously? I attempt to show that pacifism and nonviolence studies are not only helpful but are necessary to understand and root out a presumption about violence that has persisted throughout human history, a presumption through which the vast majority of humans on earth experience our world. I am referring to the seemingly universal human inclination to take violence for granted as a necessary – even moral – means for human thriving, safety, and progress. We are told that it is human nature to fight or flee danger. In what follows I explore the possibility that fighting and fleeing may not be natural but cultural, and that they may not exhaust human options in response to danger. I then discuss the presumption of violence and consider the role of pacifist and nonviolence studies in analyzing and even deconstructing it by exploring a reasonable alternative view.

Beyond the limits of circadian entrainment: Non-24-h sleep-wake disorder, shift work, and social jet lag

While the vast majority of humans are able to entrain their circadian rhythm to the 24-h light-dark cycle, there are numerous individuals who are not able to do so due to disease or societal reasons. We use computational and mathematical methods to analyze a well-established model of human circadian rhythms to address cases where individuals do not entrain to the 24-h light-dark cycle, leading to misalignment of their circadian phase. For each case, we provide a mathematically justified strategy for how to minimize circadian misalignment. In the case of non-24-h sleep-wake disorder, we show why appropriately timed bright light therapy induces entrainment. With regard to shift work, we explain why reentrainment times following transitions between day and night shifts are asymmetric, and how higher light intensity enables unusually rapid reentrainment after certain transitions. Finally, with regard to teenagers who engage in compensatory catch-up sleep on weekends, we propose a rule of thumb for sleep and wake onset times that minimizes circadian misalignment due to this type of social jet lag. In all cases, the primary mathematical approach involves understanding the dynamics of entrainment maps that measure the phase of the entrained rhythm with respect to the daily onset of lights.

НАУКОВІ ТА ВИХОВНІ ПРОБЛЕМИ ПОБУДОВИ БЕЗПЕЧНОЇ ЕМОЦІЙНОЇ СФЕРИ: ПОГЛЯДИ СТУДЕНТІВ-МЕДИКІВ

The article is highly relevant. It was created at a very difficult time for Ukrainians and the vast majority of humanity. There is a combination of two major phenomena in Ukraine. The first is the beginning of the global civilizational transition of all mankind from destructive to Nature industrialism to livelihoods based on environmentally ideal nootechnologies (wisetechnology). The second phenomenon is the armed resistance of the entire population of Ukraine to the intentions of Russia under the leadership of dictator Vladimir Putin with his teenage deviant thinking to conquer first Ukrainian territory, and later the entire planet. The authors are interested in all broad issues of the brain and nervous system based on emotional influences and states. A specific task was to study the causes of semantic imbalance in the use of the words "emotional love" and "love" and their meaning for happiness and comfortable family life. The study used many effective classical methods together with the achievements of several young human sciences. The authors found that in the vast majority of modern languages, the first word is missing and is included in the set of meanings of the word "love". An attempt has been made to explain this distinct and very old asymmetry. The core of the article is the latest scientific facts from the human sciences. The neuromolecular nature of the emotional love is explained in detail, its importance for the normal course of life of men and women is proved. The reasons for the lack of truthful information in Ukrainian education about the value of the emotional love for young people, for their family and parental happiness. The proposals are to spread the truth about emotional love and affection in the national education system.

The origin of human handedness and its role in pre-birth motor control

The vast majority of humans are right-handed, but how and when this bias emerges during human ontogenesis is still unclear. We propose an approach that explains postnatal handedness starting from 18 gestational weeks using a kinematic analysis of different fetal arm movements recorded during ultrasonography. Based on the hand dominance reported postnatally at age 9, the fetuses were classified as right-handed (86%) or left-handed, in line with population data. We revealed that both right-handed and left-handed fetuses were faster to reach to targets requiring greater precision (i.e., eye and mouth), with their dominant (vs. non-dominant) hand. By using either movement times or deceleration estimates, handedness can be inferred with a classification accuracy ranging from 89 to 100% from gestational week 18. The reliability of this inference hints to the yet unexplored potential of standard ultrasonography to advance our understanding of prenatal life.

Getting Big on BPA: Role for BPA in Obesity?

Getting Big on BPA: Role for BPA in Obesity?

Is life what we make of it?

Although astrobiological or SETI detections are possible, actual invasions of sentient extra-terrestrials or plagues of escaped alien microbes are unlikely. Therefore, an anthropological perspective on the question suggests that in the event of a detection, the vast majority of humanity will be dealing not with extra-terrestrial life itself (whether intelligent or not, local or distant), but with human perceptions and representations of that alien life. These will, inevitably, derive from the powerful influences of culture and individual psychology, as well as from science. It may even be argued that in most detection scenarios, the scientific data (and debates about their interpretation) will be nigh-irrelevant to the unfolding of international public reaction. 'Extra-terrestrial life' will, in short, go wild. From this premise, some key questions emerge, including: what can scientists reasonably do to prepare, and what should their responsibilities be, particularly with respect to information dissemination and public discussions about policy? Then, moving beyond the level of immediate practicalities, we might also ask some more anthropological questions: what are the cultural substrates underneath the inquiries of Western science into extra-terrestrial life? In particular, what are the stories we have been told about discovery of rare life, and about contact with other beings, and do these stories really mean what we think they do? Might a closer look at those narratives help us gain perspective on the quest to find extra-terrestrial life, and on our quest to prepare for the consequences of detection?

Idiosyncratic Liver Injury: Challenges and Approaches

Clinical presentations of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) cover essentially the entire spectrum of known liver diseases. However, in the last 8 years the form of liver injury that has most frequently resulted in labeling restrictions is idiosyncratic hepatocellular injury leading to acute liver failure. This rare form of DILI has a characteristic clinical presentation that includes an acute onset after uneventful treatment with drug for weeks to months. Serum alanine aminotransferase rises to very high levels and the appearance of jaundice indicates a high mortality even if the therapy is discontinued. Drugs that can cause this type of injury almost always are associated with frequent (2-15% of all treated patients) and minor serum aminotransferase elevations. These elevations are believed to reflect true liver injury, but often reverse even if drug therapy is continued. The bases for this "adaptation" is not known, as is why some patients do not adapt and develop progressive liver injury. Understanding how drugs cause severe idiosyncratic hepatocellular toxicity has been frustrated by the lack of good preclinical models. Indeed, because these events occur so rarely, the vast majority of humans are not good models. Studies of genomic DNA from affected individuals should provide important insight but not the complete answer because environmental factors almost certainly contribute to individual susceptibility. The most fruitful approach may therefore lie in focused and well-controlled phenotype/genotype studies of the rare patients who have survived this type of injury. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of The National Institutes of Health has recently sponsored a cooperative agreement (UO1) to create a Drug Induced Liver Injury Network (DILIN). DILIN consists of University of Michigan, Indiana University, University of Connecticut, University of California, San Francisco, University of North Carolina, and Duke University. This network should provide heretofore missing resources required to address the problem.

Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City

City air makes you free. This medieval German maxim referring to the city as a haven from the harsh laws of feudal vassalage might serve as an ironic epigraph for Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco. Near the beginning of Chamoiseau’s third novel, his narrator, the so-called Word Scratcher, writes that “to escape the night of slavery and colonialism, Martinique’s black slaves and mulattoes will, one generation after another, abandon the plantations, the fi elds, and the hills to throw themselves into the conquest of the cities.” 1 In Texaco the powerful matriarch of a squatter camp, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, recounts the epic battles she and her ancestors fought to gain a home in the city. This struggle has helped shape urban space, creating a highly cosmopolitan but also extremely polarized social geography in the Martinican capital of Fort-de-France. The fragmented geography of urban space described in Chamoiseau’s novel ensures that the freedom of the city will be alloyed with suffering, its cosmopolitanism shot through with inequality and unrest. In The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm argues that the most convulsive social change of the turbulent century that had just closed was not what one might expect. 2 It was not the revolution in Russia, or the two world wars, or the development of the atom bomb and the cold war, or the decolonization of the third world. No, for Hobsbawm the greatest change of the twentieth century was the death of the peasantry. In 1900, the vast majority of humanity lived in rural areas. Of course, the percentage of rural residents was signifi cantly higher in the third world than in the industrialized core countries. Yet by the close of the century, the majority of human beings lived not in the countryside but in cities. This change has been particularly wrenching in the third world. There, policies implemented by international development agencies such as the World Bank have pushed poor subsistence farmers off their lands by the hundreds of millions and forced them into the derelict squatter camps that ring the megacities of the developing world. Every year, a staggering 20 to 30 million of the world’s poor leave their villages and move to cities. 3 The last century has, in other words, witnessed a process of accumulation by dispossession on an unprecedented scale. 4 The powerful global cities of the developed world are an increasingly

A comment on “Recovering Accounting”

Abstract This commentary on Williams’s (2002) essay “Recovering Accounting as a Worthy Endeavor” agrees with him that the “accounting academy USA” has been colonized by “the positive economic missionaries” of the informational perspective camp. Williams sees the prime motive for this as economic gain by academics, practitioners, and executives in organizations. This commentary tries to go beyond that conclusion to explore the why , the how , and the what-of-it of this state of affairs. For the why question it draws on Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the will-to-power as a way to justify, promote, and preserve a particular way of life. For the how question it likens the informational perspective’s modus operandi as a special case of Michel Foucault’s description of contemporary society that features a para-legal system which: operates outside the legal system; constitutes a juridical archipelago which performs the punitive mechanisms of justice; and functions as a quiet, unassuming economy of normative knowledge and power. And for the what-of-it question it explores the ethics of this hegemonic control from the ethical obligation of a Self to do good to an Other as argued by Emmanuel Levinas and applied by Shearer (2002) to economic theory and to the giving of accounts. The commentary goes on to argue that accounting research and theory could benefit by taking the “linguistic turn” taken by most of the humanities and social science in recent decades by most of the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. It concludes that the ultimate function of criticism, for those who share a sensibility that the present status quo of the accounting academy and its support for global capitalism at large represents a serious transgression against the vast majority of humanity, is to struggle against the institutionalization of practices, like those of the informational perspective, that shut down the free-play of opinion and individual autonomy.

Multiple mechanisms of early hyperglycaemic injury of the rat intestinal microcirculation.

1. Hyperglycaemia in the vast majority of humans with diabetes mellitus is the end result of profound insulin resistance secondary to obesity. For patients in treatment, hyperglycaemia is usually not sustained but, rather, occurs intermittently. In in vivo studies of the rat intestinal microcirculation, endothelial impairment occurs within 30 min at D-glucose concentrations > or = 300 mg/dL. Endothelial-dependent dilation to acetylcholine and constriction to noradrenaline is impaired. Vasodilation to exogenous nitric oxide (NO) remains normal. 2. When initiated before hyperglycaemia, suppression of oxygen radicals by both scavenging and pretreatment with cyclo-oxygenase blockade to prevent oxygen radical formation minimized endothelial impairments during hyperglycaemia. Neither treatment was effective in restoring endothelial function once it was damaged by hyperglycaemia. 3. A mechanism that may initiate the arachidonic acid- oxygen radical process is activation of specific isoforms of protein kinase C (PKC). De novo formation of diacylglycerol during hyperglycaemia activates PKC. Blockade of the beta II PKC isoform with LY-333531 prior to hyperglycaemia protected NO formation within the arteriolar wall, as judged with NO-sensitive microelectrodes. Furthermore, once suppression of endothelial dilation was present in untreated animals, PKC blockade could substantially restore endothelial-dependent dilation. 4. These results indicate that acute hyperglycaemia is far from benign and, in the rat, causes rapid endothelial impairment. Both oxygen radical scavenging and cyclo-oxygenase blockade prior to bouts of hyperglycaemia minimize endothelial impairment with limited side effects. Blockade of specific PKC isozymes protects endothelial function both as a pre- or post-treatment during moderately severe hyperglycaemia.

WESTERNIZING THE THIRD WORLD

The last 200 years, roughly from the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776 to the present, have witnessed a remarkable, systemic drive for the globalization of Western capitalism. The intellectual origin of this drive has been mainstream economics which has capitalised technology, labour, environment and other productive resources; in practice, these resources have been harnessed by aggressive capitalists [originally called adventurers, forerunnes of today's multinational corporations (MNCs)] in a worldwide search for profits. This drive has enriched the West but not the vast majority of humanity.

THE DETERMINATION OF HISTORICAL POPULAR READING HABITS: A CASE STUDY

The study of popular reading habits is in many ways an important one. While the reading habits of the elite form the leading edge of intellectual thought, the vast majority of humanity have had, in the past as well as the present, different habits and aims. Popular literature has been bought right from the beginning by its readers, but from the seventeenth century there has been an interest in it from above, and from the nineteenth century some attempt to study it in detail. In order to recover the reading habits of a real community (Ulster) between 1700 and 1900, a number of methodologies were examined, and the conclusion was come to that a full examination of contemporary evidence was of the utmost importance. Of great use were several advertisements specifically aimed at the unsophisticated reader, dating from the mid‐eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth century. The material recovered from these agreed well with other evidence. In addition, a contemporary eighteenth century classification of the physical types of popular reading material was found.