Man, Institutions and Bioeconomics

2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-355
Author(s):  
Javier Alfonso Gil

Because bioeconomics is born of the interaction between the biological activity system and its socio-economic activity system, a holistic methodological approach is essential to study the relations between them. However, it must search for increasing levels of reductionism within each discipline to delve into the ultimate nature of each one of the intervening forces, whether economic or biological. This paper explores the economic forces. Through the biological capacity to comprehend, man and by extension, society, accumulates knowledge, the fulcrum from which he is able to dominate over his natural habitat. From this ‘point d’appui’, man builds two basic tools to assist him in achieving the goal of bettering his social condition. On the one hand, he creates institutions that allow him to “live with others” and, on the other, he develops technology that helps him to “live better with others”. Institutions, also referred to as ‘social technology’, tend toward stability over time while technology or ‘material technology’, tends toward instability, which would suggest that, normally, the mechanics of change will originate in material technology and, from there, progress to social technology by way of the political market. The level of progress and development attained depends on the quantity and rate of growth of knowledge applied by a society. In the process, man and his collectivity are forced to adopt new views of their environment through new shared mental models. The concurrence of equipment and political market will ultimately become the prime mover of institutional and economic change as well as change in mentality. Both technologies must keep on an adaptive course of stable evolution since discrepancies arising between them can cause tension between the various social groups. Adequate management of technological shock is essential to avoid extreme situations of social conflict. Herein lie the most important political decisions that a government must confront over the long term.

1985 ◽  
Vol 53 (01) ◽  
pp. 122-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
B Åstedt ◽  
Ingegerd Lecander ◽  
T Brodin ◽  
A Lundblad ◽  
Karin Löw

SummaryA monoclonal antibody of IgG2a-type was obtained against a specific fast acting plasminogen activator inhibitor found in placenta. The placental inhibitor was purified by affinity chromatography using the monoclonal antibody and additionally in a FPLC-system. A strong complex formation was found between the inhibitor and urokinase and also with the two-chain form of plasminogen activator of the tissue-type. A weaker complex was found between the placental inhibitor and the one- chain form of the tissue-type activator.


1886 ◽  
Vol 31 (136) ◽  
pp. 504-507
Author(s):  
Geo. H. Savage

In so-called nervous disorders it is common to find changes occur in other of the bodily systems than the nervous. The pathology of nervous disease should be looked upon as a general pathology, and it is certain that we cannot look to the one system alone for causes of all the nervous disorders without greatly misunderstanding the whole subject. The more exact we become in limiting the causes, the more liable are we to error. We are all prepared to consider general paralysis of the insane as essentially a disease of the nervous system, a disease in which nearly every part of the nervous system may suffer sooner or later. But beside the essentially nervous symptoms which occur in the disease, we are constantly struck by the regular series of nutritional changes which occur in general paralysis, and this is so much the case that we are quite prepared to recognise as general paralysis a disorder in which any mental symptoms have been present, but have after a brief period of acuteness been followed by a state of fatness and weak-mindedness which again has been followed by a period of wasting and further mental weakness. We have here nervous symptoms related very directly with nutritional changes.


Finisterra ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (72) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Pinto Correia ◽  
António Cancela Abreu ◽  
Rosário Oliveira

IDENTIFICATION AND CHARACTERISATION OF LANDSCAPE IN PORTUGAL –This paper presents the concepts and methodology used in the study «Identification and characterisation of landscape in continental Portugal» undertaken by theDepartment of Landscape and Biophysical Planning of the University of Evora for the General Directorate for Spatial Planning and Urban Development (DGOT-DU) at the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning, between 1999 and 2001. On the one hand, the methodological approach developed is based on the methodologies used recently for the same purpose in different European countries and on the way landscape has been considered in various European documents in the last years. On the other hand, it is also based on the team’s concern to approach the landscape as an holistic entity, and to examine its various components: ecological, cultural, socio-economic and sensorial. The set aim has been to define landscape units and to characterize these units in relation to the present landscape and the recorded trends, related problems and possibilities. Thus, the cartography relative to selected variables has been combined and related to satellite images and field surveys. The results of cross-referencing all this information has than been combined with expert examination of landscape coherence and character within each unit. The assessment was completed after careful bibliographic research and consultation with regional experts. The result is a flexible approach that combines objective analysis with a more subjective assessment, which the team considered fundamental for a true understanding of landscape.


Author(s):  
Tahani Aljohani ◽  
Alexandra I. Cristea

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become universal learning resources, and the COVID-19 pandemic is rendering these platforms even more necessary. In this paper, we seek to improve Learner Profiling (LP), i.e. estimating the demographic characteristics of learners in MOOC platforms. We have focused on examining models which show promise elsewhere, but were never examined in the LP area (deep learning models) based on effective textual representations. As LP characteristics, we predict here the employment status of learners. We compare sequential and parallel ensemble deep learning architectures based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks, obtaining an average high accuracy of 96.3% for our best method. Next, we predict the gender of learners based on syntactic knowledge from the text. We compare different tree-structured Long-Short-Term Memory models (as state-of-the-art candidates) and provide our novel version of a Bi-directional composition function for existing architectures. In addition, we evaluate 18 different combinations of word-level encoding and sentence-level encoding functions. Based on these results, we show that our Bi-directional model outperforms all other models and the highest accuracy result among our models is the one based on the combination of FeedForward Neural Network and the Stack-augmented Parser-Interpreter Neural Network (82.60% prediction accuracy). We argue that our prediction models recommended for both demographics characteristics examined in this study can achieve high accuracy. This is additionally also the first time a sound methodological approach toward improving accuracy for learner demographics classification on MOOCs was proposed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
B.G. Meshcheryakov ◽  
A.I. Nazarov ◽  
L.G. Chesnokova ◽  
D.V. Yushchenkova

The article describes an experiment which used a new methodological approach to the study of covert recognition of faces by means of registration electro-dermal activity under short-term exposure of familiar and unfamiliar faces and the backward facelike masking stimulus. In contrast to previous studies the control of stimulus awareness allows us to evaluate not just the correct recognitions, but false alarms too. We used as the familiar faces not faces of the well-known persons, but faces of persons from the inner circle of subjects, including the subject’s own face. We confirmed the hypothesis that the characteristics of the electro-dermal reactions in response to familiar and unfamiliar faces will not be different in subjects with a high level of false alarms. However, for the group of subjects with practically zero false alarm rate and zero discriminability of familiar and unfamiliar faces an analysis of electro-dermal reactions have been mixed. On the one hand, as analysis on a group level showed, nor electrocutaneous reactions frequency, nor their amplitudes were not significantly different for the familiar and unfamiliar faces. On the other hand, it is clearly that these individual median and mean values of the amplitudes of subject's reactions are in average more than 2 times stronger when viewed familiar faces than viewed unfamiliar ones. These results leave a good chance to prove the effect of covert identification of faces in further experimentation with other groups of subjects


Author(s):  
Kinga Jaworska ◽  
Mateusz Koper ◽  
Marcin Ufnal

Gut microbiota is a potent biological modulator of many physiological and pathological states. The renin-angiotensin system (RAS), including the local gastrointestinal RAS (GI RAS), emerges as a potential mediator of microbiota-related effects. The RAS is involved in cardiovascular system homeostasis, water-electrolyte balance, intestinal absorption, glycemic control, inflammation, carcinogenesis and aging-related processes. Ample evidence suggests a bidirectional interaction between the microbiome and RAS. On the one hand, gut bacteria and their metabolites may modulate GI and systemic RAS. On the other hand, changes in the intestinal habitat caused by alterations in RAS may shape microbiota metabolic activity and composition. Notably, the pharmacodynamic effects of the RAS-targeted therapies may be in part mediated by the intestinal RAS and changes in the microbiome. This review summarizes studies on gut microbiota and RAS physiology. Expanding the research on this topic may lay a foundation for new therapeutic paradigms in gastrointestinal diseases and multiple systemic disorders.


Author(s):  
Kseniya V. Donik

The article considers the role of Prince A. Menshikov as a specific type of agent of supreme authority in the process of reforming the maritime administration. The problem context of reforms resulted from the involvement of the naval generals and officials in abuses, which was a consequence of nepotism and unrest in the navy. The involvement of sailors in the Decembrist revolt significantly affected the attitude of the tsar to the general situation in the naval environment. Distrustful of the existing naval administration, Nicholas I needed an intermediary who would implement his idea of the arrangement of the navy on the one hand, and provide him with an objective “impartial” account of maritime problems, on the other hand. As a result of that, Adjutant General Prince A. Menshikov, who had had nothing to do with the naval service earlier, joined the navy to become the monarch’s agent in charge of the naval issues in the bodies of autocratic authority. The objective of the article is to identify the functions of such an agent based on the example of the Maritime Department. The sources of the article include official records and personal documents, some of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The principal methodological approach to the problem under study is an attempt to bring the appointment of Menshikov beyond the scope of narrow departmental history which was based on the unmotivated decision of the emperor and to propose an interpretation of the events in the context of tsarist government via agents, which has already been described in historiography. The author makes a conclusion about the interconnection between the crisis in the naval department, the attitude of the supreme authority towards it, and the appearance of the monarch’s agent with a number of his own functional characteristics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 171076 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Kampowski ◽  
Max David Mylo ◽  
Simon Poppinga ◽  
Thomas Speck

In its natural habitat, the one-leaf plant Monophyllaea horsfieldii (Gesneriaceae) shows striking postural changes and dramatic loss of stability in response to intermittently occurring droughts. As the morphological, anatomical and biomechanical bases of these alterations are as yet unclear, we examined the influence of varying water contents on M. horsfieldii by conducting dehydration–rehydration experiments together with various imaging techniques as well as quantitative bending and turgor pressure measurements. As long as only moderate water stress was applied, gradual reductions in hypocotyl diameters and structural bending moduli during dehydration were almost always rapidly recovered in acropetal direction upon rehydration. On an anatomical scale, M. horsfieldii hypocotyls revealed substantial water stress-induced alterations in parenchymatous tissues, whereas the cell form and structure of epidermal and vascular tissues hardly changed. In summary, the functional morphology and biomechanics of M. horsfieldii hypocotyls directly correlated with water status alterations and associated physiological parameters (i.e. turgor pressure). Moreover, M. horsfieldii showed only little passive structural–functional adaptations to dehydration in comparison with poikilohydrous Ramonda myconi .


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