Tracking a person over time is tracking what?

Tracking persons, that is, determining that a person now is or is not a specific earlier person, is extremely common and widespread in our way of life and extremely important. If so, figuring out what we are tracking, what it is to persist as a person over a period of time, is also important. Trying to figure this out will be the main focus of this chapter.

Comparison of CT and fluoroscopic guidance for lumbar puncture in an obese population with prior failed unguided attempt.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: In the past 50 years, fluoroscopic guidance has been used to improve upon lumbar puncture (LP) technique that was unchanged for over a century. Recently, CT has seen increasing use as a guidance modality due to its ability to demonstrate soft tissue contrast and provide millimeter accuracy with needle targeting. This study compared procedure time and radiation dosages for fluoroscopic and CT guided LP. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This institutional review board and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant study was a retrospective review of a consecutive cohort referred for image guided LP. For CT, 45 patients aged 49 years (range 20-78, SD 14) with body mass index (BMI) values of 33 kg/m(2) (range 20-50, SD 12) were included. For fluoroscopy, 100 patients aged 47 years (range 18-88, SD 17) with BMI values of 29 kg/m(2) (range 15-56, SD 9) were included. CT procedure time was determined using picture archiving and communication system (PACS) image time stamps. Radiation dose was determined using the CT dose report and effective dose conversion factors. Fluoroscopic procedure time was determined from nursing. Fluoroscopic radiation dose was calculated from dose-area product (DAP) and fluoroscopy times, with effective dosage calculated using simulation software. RESULTS: For CT, procedure time average was 14 min (range 5-42, SD 8.5). Average dose-length product was 120 mGy×cm (range 39-211, SD 43) and average effective dose was 1.98 mSv (range 0.2-8.18, SD 4.4). For fluoroscopy, procedure time averaged 12 min (range 12-30, SD 6). Average DAP was 10 Gy×cm(2) (range 0.1-70, SD 11) and effective dose estimate averaged 2.9 mSv (range 0.9-9.4, SD 1.9). There were no unsuccessful taps or complications. CONCLUSIONS: Both fluoroscopic and CT guidance may be used to perform an LP in an obese population with a short procedure time and low radiation dose.

Sense of fairness: not by itself a moral sense and not a foundation of a lot of morality.

Baumard et al. make a good case that a sense of fairness evolved and that showing this requires reciprocity games with choice of partner. However, they oversimplify both morality and the evolution of morality. Where fairness is involved in morality, other things are, too, and fairness is often not involved. In the evolution of morality, other things played a role. Plus, the motive for being fair originally was self-interest, not anything moral.

Savant Genome Browser 2: visualization and analysis for population-scale genomics.

High-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies are providing an unprecedented capacity for data generation, and there is a corresponding need for efficient data exploration and analysis capabilities. Although most existing tools for HTS data analysis are developed for either automated (e.g. genotyping) or visualization (e.g. genome browsing) purposes, such tools are most powerful when combined. For example, integration of visualization and computation allows users to iteratively refine their analyses by updating computational parameters within the visual framework in real-time. Here we introduce the second version of the Savant Genome Browser, a standalone program for visual and computational analysis of HTS data. Savant substantially improves upon its predecessor and existing tools by introducing innovative visualization modes and navigation interfaces for several genomic datatypes, and synergizing visual and automated analyses in a way that is powerful yet easy even for non-expert users. We also present a number of plugins that were developed by the Savant Community, which demonstrate the power of integrating visual and automated analyses using Savant. The Savant Genome Browser is freely available (open source) at www.savantbrowser.com.

Further routes to psychological constructionism.

In this commentary, we do two things. First, we sketch two further routes to psychological constructionism. They are complementary to Lindquist et al.'s meta-analyses and have potential to add new evidence. Second, we look at a challenging kind of case for constructionism, namely, emotional anomalies where there are correlated, and probably relevant, brain anomalies. Psychopaths are our example.

Savant: genome browser for high-throughput sequencing data.

MOTIVATION: The advent of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies has made it affordable to sequence many individuals' genomes. Simultaneously the computational analysis of the large volumes of data generated by the new sequencing machines remains a challenge. While a plethora of tools are available to map the resulting reads to a reference genome, and to conduct primary analysis of the mappings, it is often necessary to visually examine the results and underlying data to confirm predictions and understand the functional effects, especially in the context of other datasets. RESULTS: We introduce Savant, the Sequence Annotation, Visualization and ANalysis Tool, a desktop visualization and analysis browser for genomic data. Savant was developed for visualizing and analyzing HTS data, with special care taken to enable dynamic visualization in the presence of gigabases of genomic reads and references the size of the human genome. Savant supports the visualization of genome-based sequence, point, interval and continuous datasets, and multiple visualization modes that enable easy identification of genomic variants (including single nucleotide polymorphisms, structural and copy number variants), and functional genomic information (e.g. peaks in ChIP-seq data) in the context of genomic annotations. AVAILABILITY: Savant is freely available at http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/savant.

Introduction: philosophy in and philosophy of cognitive science.

Despite being there from the beginning, philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitive research and few cognitive researchers not trained in philosophy have a clear sense of what its role has been or should be. We distinguish philosophy in cognitive research and philosophy of cognitive research. Concerning philosophy in cognitive research, after exploring some standard reactions to this work by nonphilosophers, we will pay particular attention to the methods that philosophers use. Being neither experimental nor computational, they can leave others bewildered. Thought experiments are the most striking example but not the only one. Concerning philosophy of cognitive research, we will pay particular attention to its power to generate and test normative claims, claims about what should and should not be done.