How to construct liquid-crystal spectacles to control vision of real-world objects and environments.

A major challenge in studying naturalistic vision lies in controlling stimulus and scene viewing time. This is especially the case for studies using real-world objects as stimuli (rather than computerized images) because real objects cannot be "onset" and "offset" in the same way that images can be. Since the late 1980s, one solution to this problem has been to have the observer wear electro-optic spectacles with computer-controlled liquid-crystal lenses that switch between transparent ("open") and translucent ("closed") states. Unfortunately, the commercially available glasses (PLATO Visual Occlusion Spectacles) command a high price tag, the hardware is fragile, and the glasses cannot be customized. This led us to explore how to manufacture liquid-crystal occlusion glasses in our own laboratory. Here, we share the products of our work by providing step-by-step instructions for researchers to design, build, operate, and test liquid-crystal glasses for use in experimental contexts. The glasses can be assembled with minimal technical knowledge using readily available components, and they can be customized for different populations and applications. The glasses are robust, and they can be produced at a fraction of the cost of commercial alternatives. Tests of reliability and temporal accuracy show that the performance of our laboratory prototype was comparable to that of the PLATO glasses. We discuss the results of our work with respect to implications for promoting rigor and reproducibility, potential use cases, comparisons with other liquid-crystal shutter glasses, and how users can find information regarding future updates and developments.

The late origins of the timeline, or: three paradoxes explained.

We are all used to drawing straight lines to represent time, and above them, we plot historical events or physical or economic data. What to us is a self-evident convention, is however of an astonishingly recent date: it emerged only in the second half of the eighteenth century. To us, this late date seems paradoxical and cries out for an explanation. How else did earlier periods measure change, if not as a function of time? it will be argued that since Antiquity, time was taken to measure change, and change to occur in space. 'Our' idea of representing time as an independent dimension would have seemed aberrant. But then, a second issue arises. Did not medieval natural philosophers employ timelines, Oresme's diagram of the mean speed theorem being the most famous case? However, as will be shown, our interpretation of his diagram is probably wrong. This insight, in turn, takes care of a third paradox, namely Galileo's initial inability to represent the law of free fall correctly. This article will document that the timeline first emerged in the late sixteenth century in works on chronology, made its first appearance in physics in Galileo's diagrams, and had its general breakthrough in the eighteenth century.

Plato unmasks hidden limits of tele-education.

Plato's powerful metaphor of the Cave, from Republic, further advances a critical assessment of the hidden limits of distance learning. In the Cave, individuals are restrained to see only straight ahead to the images projected from behind them onto the wall in front of them. As in the Cave, in tele-education the dynamism of learning is replaced by passive learning. Not only do learners become largely passive with respect to their teacher, but also to each other. These effects are masked from teacher and learner alike by the technical prowess of distance learning and teaching, a version of Plato's Cave. Tele-education has at least three undeniably salient features: safety, convenience, and cost savings. Two and a half millennia after Plato gave us the concept of mimesis and the metaphor of the Cave, we can use these philosophical tools to unmask hidden limits of tele-education.

Human Nature and Aspiring the Divine: On Antiquity and Transhumanism.

Many transhumanists see their respective movement as being rooted in ancient ethical thought. However, this alleged connection between the contemporary transhumanist doctrine and the ethical theory of antiquity has come under attack. In this paper, we defend this connection by pointing out a key similarity between the two intellectual traditions. Both traditions are committed to the "radical transformation thesis": ancient ethical theory holds that we should assimilate ourselves to the gods as far as possible, and transhumanists hold that we should enhance ourselves beyond the physical and intellectual parameters of being human so as to become posthuman. By considering the two views in tandem, we develop an account of the assimilation directive that is palatable to contemporary readers and provide a view of posthumanism worth wanting.

Clinical reasoning as midwifery: A Socratic model for shared decision making in person-centred care.

Shared decision making has become the standard of care, yet there remains no consensus about how it should be conducted. Most accounts are concerned with threats to patient autonomy, and they address the dangers of a power imbalance by foregrounding the patient as a person whose complex preferences it is the practitioner's task to support. Other corrective models fear that this level of mutuality risks abdicating the practitioner's responsibilities as an expert, and they address that concern by recovering a nuanced but genuinely directive clinical role. Cribb and Entwistle helpfully categorize models of shared decision making as 'narrower' and 'broader' and praise the latter's 'open-ended and fully dialogical ways of relating'. However, they stop short of providing a philosophical account of how that dialogue works. In this paper, a nurse-midwife and a philosopher collaborate to argue that the Socratic model of dialogue offers a solution to the practitioner-patient dilemma. In the Theaetetus, Socrates compares dialogical reasoning to 'midwifery with all its standard features'. By means of a three-way analogy, elements of midwifery practice are used to illuminate features of Socrates' claim that his dialogue is like midwifery; those features are then translated into an approach to shared decision making as the 'midwifery of good thinking' which both midwives and physicians would do well to adopt. A key concept that emerges is the need for practitioners to make a risk-confidence assessment of the particular content of any decision to appropriately modulate their role in the practice of shared decision making.

Review of plasma turbulence experiments.

Understandings of turbulent plasma have been developed along with nuclear fusion research for more than a half century. Long international research has produced discoveries concerning turbulent plasma that allow us to notice the hidden nature and physics questions that could contribute to other scientific fields and the development of technologies. Guiding concepts have been established up to now that stimulate investigations on turbulent plasma. Research based on concepts concerning symmetry breaking and global linkage requires observing the entire field of plasma turbulence for an ultimate understanding of plasma. This article reviews the achievements as well as contemporary problems regarding turbulence experiments associated with strongly magnetized plasmas in the last and present century, and introduces forthcoming experimental issues, including new diagnostics and physics-oriented devices related to plasma turbulence.

Phenomenology of Illness and the Need for a More Comprehensive Approach: Lessons from a Discussion of Plato's Charmides.

Phenomenology informs a number of contemporary attempts to give more weight to the lived experience of patients and overcome the limitations of a one-sidedly biomedical understanding of illness. Susan Bredlau has recently presented a reading of Plato's dialogue Charmides, which portrays Socrates as a pioneer of the phenomenological approach to illness. I use a critical discussion of Bredlau's interpretation of the Charmides to show that the phenomenology of illness also has its shortcomings and needs to be complemented by still other approaches. While Bredlau does make a number of highly apt and relevant suggestions as to how a narrow biomedical approach to illness may be corrected, some (but not all) of which are related to phenomenology, the attribution to Plato's Socrates of a phenomenological approach is mistaken. Characteristically, Socrates shows little interest in the personal experience of a patient. He is more concerned with the patient's lifestyle and conduct and so suggests an alternative or complementary perspective, stressing the importance of education and prevention to health care.

Moral sensitivity revisited.

Nurses find themselves in a unique position - between patient and physicians, and in close proximity to the patient. Moral sensitivity can help nurses to cope with the daily turmoil of demands and opinions while delivering care in concordance with the value system of the patient. This article aims to reconsider the concept of moral sensitivity by discussing the function of emotions in morality. We turn to the ideas of historic and contemporary authors on the function of emotions in morality to expand our understanding of moral sensitivity. Ancient philosophers and contemporary psychologists uphold different strategies on the orientation of morality being (a) personal growth or (b) community living, and the primordial function of (c) reason and (d) emotions in the creation of judgements about good and bad. The theoretical discussion on the function of emotions in morality shows that by focusing on reason alone, one leaves out an essential part of morality. The concept of moral sensitivity should (1) include an initial judgment of good and bad based on emotions, (2) hold the ability to reflect on the initial judgement and the associated emotions, (3) include the ability to understand other stakeholders' perspectives based on the ideal-types and (4) include a personal decision on the right course of action.

The relevance of Xenophon's Anabasis and Plato's Meno to nursing.

The current situation in which the humanities are disparaged affects all university disciplines, including nursing, in whose historical evolution the humanities have always been present in one form or another. Looking beyond this disrepute, this study proposes that nursing renew its attention to classical philosophy. Specifically, it invites a close reading of Xenophon's Anabasis and Plato's Meno, to get three related goals: to show how the use of ancient texts are very valuable tools for the philosophical initiation of nursing students and can help them reflect on their choice of nursing as a practical activity; to reflect on the problem of virtue and the nature of the good life; and to show how the interaction with ancient texts allows students to reflect on questions and issues of life, theirs and others, that are not open to investigation through a purely scientific method. Consequently, both Anabasis and Meno readings strengthen the intellectual relationship between philosophy and nursing, enabling the latter to delve deeper into the key questions of its own thought as a discipline.

Systematic autoantigen analysis identifies a distinct subtype of scleroderma with coincident cancer.

Scleroderma is a chronic autoimmune rheumatic disease associated with widespread tissue fibrosis and vasculopathy. Approximately two-thirds of all patients with scleroderma present with three dominant autoantibody subsets. Here, we used a pair of complementary high-throughput methods for antibody epitope discovery to examine patients with scleroderma with or without known autoantibody specificities. We identified a specificity for the minor spliceosome complex containing RNA Binding Region (RNP1, RNA recognition motif) Containing 3 (RNPC3) that is found in patients with scleroderma without known specificities and is absent in unrelated autoimmune diseases. We found strong evidence for both intra- and intermolecular epitope spreading in patients with RNA polymerase III (POLR3) and the minor spliceosome specificities. Our results demonstrate the utility of these technologies in rapidly identifying antibodies that can serve as biomarkers of disease subsets in the evolving precision medicine era.

Considering Life and Death in Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic therapy is not supposed to cure man from death, nor to help him forget about it. It is supposed to deal with the soul, and it is up to the soul to deal with death. Death is actually not an issue for psychoanalytic therapy-its only problem can be the soul. On the other hand, only for the soul is death an authentic problem. Only the soul can authentically bring death into question. Psychoanalysis has indebted humanity by finding the strength and critical prudence in a crucial moment for civilization to remove the veil of prohibition and shame from sexuality, which had been repressed for centuries. Today, sexuality is no longer repressed (it may be even too present in the media for some)-but death became repressed. This paper considers death as an essential topic for psychoanalysis.

Mimesis and clinical pictures: thinking with Plato and Broekman through the production and meaning of images of disease.

This paper contends, following Plato and Broekman, that (1) seeing images as images is crucial to theorizing medicine and that (2) considering clinical pictures as images of images is a much-needed epistemic complement to the domineering view that sees clinical pictures as mirrors of disease. This does not only offer epistemic, but also ethical benefits to individual patients, especially in those cases where patients suffer from chronic, debilitating, and terminal illnesses and where medicine provides no, or limited, answers in terms of treatment, intervention, and meaning. By creating room for a theory of clinical pictures that rightfully emphasizes its pictorial nature, patients and doctors alike may be encouraged to consider under what authorship, and with which epistemic tools, alternative, supplemental images may be produced to get at the existential reality of disease and suffering. Ultimately, this paper argues that the epistemic tools provided by aesthetics may offer such glimpses into the reality of disease and suffering, and I conclude by discussing a few artistic renditions of breast cancer to illustrate my point.

Good and Bad: Love and Intimacy From Plato to Melanie Klein.

Melanie Klein's theories on love outline a complex system of relations-an oscillating dynamic of psychical and emotional tendencies following from both actual experience and fantasies produced by the mind. Her insights are often discussed and applied in psychoanalytical contexts, but the philosophical implications of her theory-especially in relation to Platonic thought-have rarely been discussed. In this article, I will attempt to address this gap by setting out some preliminary yet core considerations shared by both Plato and Klein. First, I will describe some structural parallels between Kleinian and Platonic thought, especially in dialectical terms. Second, I will outline Plato's covert influence on Freud as passing through the teachings of philosopher Franz Brentano. And last, I will discuss intimacy as a struggle between the forces of good and bad, creativity and destruction, and love and hate-suggesting that Klein's conception of love emerges as a moral exigency.

Antiquity's Missive to Transhumanism1.

To reassure those concerned about wholesale discontinuity between human existence and posthumanity, transhumanists assert shared ground with antiquity on vital challenges and aspirations. Because their claims reflect key misconceptions, there is no shared vision for transhumanists to invoke. Having exposed their misuses of Prometheus, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that not only do transhumanists and antiquity crucially diverge on our relation to ideals, contrast-dependent aspiration, and worthy endeavors but that illumining this divide exposes central weaknesses in transhumanist argumentation. What is more, antiquity's handling of these topics suggests a way through the impasse in current enhancement debates about human "nature" and helps to resolve a tension within transhumanists' accounts of what our best moments signify about the ontological requirements for real flourishing.

Historical antecedents to the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend.

Paul Feyerabend has been considered a very radical philosopher of science for proposing that we may advance hypotheses contrary to well-confirmed experimental results, that observations make theoretical assumptions, that all methodological rules have exceptions, that ordinary citizens may challenge the judgment of experts, and that human happiness should be a key value for science. As radical as these theses may sound, they all have historical antecedents. In defending the Copernican view, Galileo exemplified the first two; Mill, Aristotle and Machiavelli all argued for pluralism; Aristotle gave commonsense reasons for why ordinary citizens may be able to judge the work of experts; and a combination of Plato's and Aristotle's views can offer strong support for the connection between science and happiness.

Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière on art/aesthetics and politics: the origins of disagreement, 1963-1985.

Rancière published two substantial criticisms of the work of Bourdieu in the early 1980s. It is possible that these were provoked by his sense that he needed to oppose what he considered to be the sociological reduction of aesthetic taste offered by Bourdieu in Distinction (Bourdieu 1986 [1979]) at precisely the moment when he (Rancière) was beginning to articulate his commitment to the potential of aesthetic expression as a mode of political resistance. Except in so far as it draws upon some of the retrospective reflections offered by Rancière in his introductions to the re-issues of his early texts, this paper examines the parallel development of the thinking of the two men up to the mid-1980s--but not beyond. The discussion is situated socio-historically and, by definition, does not seek to offer comparatively any transhistorical assessment of the values of the positions adopted by the two men. I argue that Rancière misrepresented the character of Bourdieu's sociological work by failing to recognize the underlying phenomenological orientation of his thinking. Bourdieu suppressed this orientation in the 1960s but, after the May events of 1968, it enabled him to expose the extent to which the practices of both science and art operate within constructed 'fields' in strategic distinction from popular primary experience. The challenge is to introduce an ongoing dialogue between primary and constructed cultures rather than to suppose that either social science or art possesses intrinsic autonomy.

Aristotle's Theory of Deviance and Contemporary Symbolic Interactionist Scholarship: Learning from the Past, Extending the Present, and Engaging the Future.

Although his work has been largely overlooked by symbolic interactionists and other students of deviance, Aristotle (c384-322BCE) addresses community life, activity, agency, and persuasive interchange in ways that not only are remarkably consistent with contemporary symbolic interactionist approaches to deviance, but that also conceptually inform present day theories of deviance and provide valuable transhistorical comparison points for subsequent analysis. Following (1) a brief overview of an interactionist approach to the study of deviance, attention is given to (2) classical Greek conceptions of good and evil (especially as these are articulated by Plato) before turning more directly to (3) Aristotle's notions of wrongdoing as this is reflected in his considerations of community, morality, agency, and culpability. While informed by Aristotle's considerations of causality (as addressed in Physics and Metaphysics), this statement builds most centrally on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. Striving for a broader understanding of deviance as a humanly engaged feature of community life, the paper briefly compares Aristotle's "theory of deviance" with Prus and Grills (2003) interactionist analysis of deviance. The paper (4) concludes with an assessment of the relative contributions of contemporary interactionist scholarship and Aristotle's materials for the study of deviance as a community-engaged process.

[Ticagrelor in acute coronary syndrome. Explaining the inexplicable]. / Ticagrelor en el síndrome coronario agudo. Explicando lo inexplicable.

The PLATO study evaluated the efficacy of adding ticagrelor, instead of clopidogrel, to aspirin in patients with acute coronary syndrome, which showed surprisingly positive results making the drug acceptable to regulatory agencies and specialty societies worldwide. Notwithstanding the aforementioned success, contradictory information supplied by critical analysis was submitted by the sponsor. The controversial findings revealed several aspects that are difficult to explain, threatening the veracity of the study's conclusions. Mortality rate pattern, excessive benefit not comparable to prior studies, unexplained loss of follow-up development and inconsistency in findings in accordance with the country, the type of events arbitrator and monitoring committee are some of the most questionable issues. Dubious reaction to this trial is based on the fact that the information could not be found in published articles. This complex situation poses a challenge to the critical analysis of the text and raises questions as to how far the conflicts of financial interest influenced the development of the study, the communication of its results and probably, acceptance of the drug for commercial use.

The Model Sketch for Enhancing Lie Detection and Eliciting Information.

BACKGROUND: Sketching while narrating is an effective interview technique for eliciting information and cues to deceit. The current research examined the effects of introducing a Model Sketch in investigative interviews andis pre-registered on https://osf.io/kz9mc (accessed on 18 January 2022). METHODS: Participants (N = 163) completed a mock mission and were asked to tell the truth or to lie about it in an interview. In Phase 1 of the interview, participants provided either a free recall (control condition), sketched and narrated with exposure to a Model Sketch (Model Sketch-present condition), or sketched and narrated without exposure to a Model Sketch (Model Sketch-absent condition). In Phase 2, all participants provided a free recall without sketching. RESULTS: Truth tellers reported significantly more information than lie tellers. The Model Sketch elicited more location details than a Free recall in Phase 1 and more veracity differences than the other Modality conditions in Phase 2. CONCLUSION: The Model Sketch seems to enhance the elicitation of information and to have carryover veracity effects in a follow-up free recall.

Alasdair MacIntyre on the division of goods and "the corrupting power of institutions".

This paper examines the distinction between "internal goods" and "external goods" and its significance for the political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, focusing especially on its relevance for our understanding of MacIntyre's views regarding the relationship which exists between "practices" and social "institutions. " The paper explores the origins of this distinction in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom (like MacIntyre) associate the notion of external goods with such things as wealth, status and power. Plato argues that these things are not really "goods" at all, but rather "bads," or things which ought to be avoided. Aristotle, on the other hand, takes issue with that view, arguing that the pursuit of such things is acceptable, morally speaking, provided it is in moderation and not to excess. The paper argues that what MacIntyre says about external goods and "the corrupting power of institutions" in After Virtue is ambivalent. For this reason, his views are open to different possible interpretations. Most commentators have read and understood him as a follower of Aristotle. There is however a strain of Platonism at times in the critical remarks which he makes about social institutions and those who manage them.