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PubMed1988

[Time from the viewpoint of Cantor's and post-Cantorian set theory--a contribution to the founding of chronobiology].

There is given a survey of the evolution of the idea of time in the mankind's thinking from the beginning down to the term's application in sciences and in the philosophy. As one can point out from some languages, living as well as extincted ones, the words for time are derived etymologically from several roots or stems, respectively, which mostly represent different meanings. But by increasing abstraction in all civilized languages, the process of stripping the different words of their concrete accompaniments led up to a narrow of the diverse meanings which converged towards the common understanding of time in modern sciences. Nevertheless time is no unequivocal term as one can show by linguistic and mathematical analysis. Especially by means of the theory of differential equations and the set theory, the chimerical nature of time is demonstrable, so that time is only an abstraction of abstractions.

Biological Evolution↗

PubMed2005

What's the difference? Contrasting modular and neural network approaches to understanding developmental variability.

Understanding why development differs across individuals is an important challenge for developmental theory. This paper evaluates two approaches to developmental variability observed in domains such as language processing and across populations such as typically developing children, children with developmental disorders, and typical adults. Modular accounts attribute developmental variability to delay, damage, or dysfunction in discrete underlying structures. Neural network approaches attribute developmental variability to emergent effects of graded variations in an interactive, developing system. The authors conclude that neural network approaches offer more formal and parsimonious accounts of the nature and sources of developmental variability.

Child↗

PubMed2000

[New risks of addiction for new populations: the example of hackers].

Our purpose was to examine recent social and technical habits related to high-tech environments. Our goal was to show that the prevention of risk behaviors due to training in data processing, requires an interdisciplinary approach where medical anthropology could benefit from and exchange of complementary information sources (particularly from psychiatrics and psychoanalysis). We used this approach to search for solutions regarding new kinds of addiction. When identifying pathological conditions and proposing appropriate care, these solutions must take into consideration the progressive loss of human nature in data processing environments and the very important and highly sophisticated relationship established between the human being and the computer. We looked at the hacker population as a modern tribe and marginal group. Our analysis led to a better understanding of this kind of artificial culture, sometimes called a "high-tech" or "cyber" culture. The hacker population is integrating new rituals, languages and special rhythms which induce addictions. We show how high-tech environments operating in e-time and e-life induce addictions. This work illustrates a classical anthropological approach to the question (ethnological fields, interviews, literature analysis). The major challenge is to explain how high-tech environments present high risks for dependency in the hacker population and other, unwarned, computer (ab)users.

Behavior, Addictive↗

PubMed2003

Interplay between syntax and semantics during sentence comprehension: ERP effects of combining syntactic and semantic violations.

This study investigated the effects of combined semantic and syntactic violations in relation to the effects of single semantic and single syntactic violations on language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effects (N400 and P600/SPS). Syntactic violations consisted of a mismatch in grammatical gender or number features of the definite article and the noun in sentence-internal or sentence-final noun phrases (NPs). Semantic violations consisted of semantically implausible adjective-noun combinations in the same NPs. Combined syntactic and semantic violations were a summation of these two respective violation types. ERPs were recorded while subjects read the sentences with the different types of violations and the correct control sentences. ERP effects were computed relative to ERPs elicited by the sentence-internal or sentence-final nouns. The size of the N400 effect to the semantic violation was increased by an additional syntactic violation (the syntactic boost). In contrast, the size of the P600/SPS to the syntactic violation was not affected by an additional semantic violation. This suggests that in the absence of syntactic ambiguity, the assignment of syntactic structure is independent of semantic context. However, semantic integration is influenced by syntactic processing. In the sentence-final position, additional global processing consequences were obtained as a result of earlier violations in the sentence. The resulting increase in the N400 amplitude to sentence-final words was independent of the nature of the violation. A speeded anomaly detection task revealed that it takes substantially longer to detect semantic than syntactic anomalies. These results are discussed in relation to the latency and processing characteristics of the N400 and P600/SPS effects. Overall, the results reveal an asymmetry in the interplay between syntax and semantics during on-line sentence comprehension.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

A graphical user interface to facilitate patient-specific drug dosing.

This paper describes the development of a graphical user-interface (GUI) designed to facilitate the process of generating patient-specific drug doses using bayesian modelling software. The graphical user interface was developed in Visual Basic (Microsoft, Inc.) and runs under the Windows 3.1 (Microsoft, Inc.) operating system. Patient demographic data are stored in a relational database (Access, Microsoft, Inc.). The GUI and the database communicate via dynamic data exchange links. The largely object-oriented nature of the language allowed us to change the entire look and feel of the system with a few simple changes to the underlying code. Use of the relational database to store patient demographic information allows greater flexibility in searching for and displaying patient specific information. The GUI reduces the time required to enter data. The prototype has allowed us to experiment with different presentation methods, greatly improving the clinical acceptance of the dosing programs.

Computer Simulation↗

PubMed2005

On Broca, brain, and binding: a new framework.

In speaking and comprehending language, word information is retrieved from memory and combined into larger units (unification). Unification operations take place in parallel at the semantic, syntactic and phonological levels of processing. This article proposes a new framework that connects psycholinguistic models to a neurobiological account of language. According to this proposal the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays an important role in unification. Research in other domains of cognition indicates that left prefrontal cortex has the necessary neurobiological characteristics for its involvement in the unification for language. I offer here a psycholinguistic perspective on the nature of language unification and the role of LIFG.

Brain↗

PubMed1998

The power of the word: some post-structural considerations of qualitative approaches in nursing research.

This paper takes a post-structural position to discuss some issues related to the use of qualitative research methodologies in nursing research. Two fundamental assumptions which underpin qualitative approaches are explored in relation to how subjectivity is constructed in the process of data collection. These assumptions reveal an ideological position which proposes that reality can be apprehended by capturing the individual's point of view (subjectivity) and that qualitative researchers can directly represent this lived experience in language (linguistic representation). Post-structural approaches challenge these assumptions which are often an uncritically accepted part of the common sense world and therefore taken to be natural. It proposes that these views of subjectivity and language are not natural but rather cultural. There is a recognition of the wider sociopolitical and historical context in which nursing research takes place and a displacement of normative constructions of subjectivity. It provides nursing with the possibility of challenging existing power structures which determine the individual's experiences of health and illness.

Bias↗

PubMed2005

Hypertrophic response and keloid diathesis: two very different forms of scar.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After studying this article, the participant should be able to: 1. Have a greater appreciation of the extent of differences and similarities between keloid and hypertrophic scarring. 2. Have a greater appreciation of the significance of the stage of maturation of a keloid or hypertrophic scar with regard to its morphologic, biochemical, and molecular profile. 3. More critically review basic science research that is based on poorly characterized scar tissue. 4. More critically review clinical studies that are based on poorly characterized scar tissue. BACKGROUND: Hypertrophic and keloid scars remain extremely challenging, particularly in their variable response to treatment. The understanding of hypertrophic and keloid scarring is evolving from a position where they were regarded as different stages of the same process to the contemporary perspective of two separate entities. This article reviews the differences in the two forms of scarring and discusses the implications for future research. METHODS: The authors conducted a MEDLINE search of all English language reviews linking key words "hypertrophic," "keloid," and "scarring." RESULTS: Over the past four decades, there has been considerable clinical and experimental research looking at the biological nature and therapeutic response of keloid and hypertrophic scarring. As more differences are emerging regarding the fundamental biology of the scars, investigators are giving more detailed characterization of their source material. It is evident that even within the broad categories of hypertrophic and keloid scarring there is a heterogenous distribution of pathologic connective tissue matrix biology. CONCLUSION: Considerable advances have been made in our understanding of the fundamental biology of scarring. As research methodology becomes even more sophisticated, it will be even more crucial to extensively characterize source material, recognizing major differences not only between keloid and hypertrophic scar but also between scars of varying stages of maturation and histomorphological, biochemical, and molecular variations within individual scars.

Apoptosis↗

PubMed2001

Language as an evolving word web.

Human language may be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and interacting words in sentences are connected by edges. The empirical distribution of the number of connections of words in this network is of a peculiar form that includes two pronounced power-law regions. Here we propose a theory of the evolution of language, which treats language as a self-organizing network of interacting words. In the framework of this concept, we completely describe the observed word web structure without any fitting. We show that the two regimes in the distribution naturally emerge from the evolutionary dynamics of the word web. It follows from our theory that the size of the core part of language, the 'kernel lexicon', does not vary as language evolves.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Managing cancer: the role of holiday taking.

BACKGROUND: The primary objective of this paper is to consider whether holiday taking may have a role to play post-diagnosis/treatment, within the rehabilitation process for cancer patients. METHOD: A qualitative study was undertaken. Informants consisted of cancer patients (n=24), their family members (n=13) and friends (n=2), consultants (n=2) pediatric oncology nurses (n=2), social workers (n=2), a voluntary services coordinator (n=1), and a play specialist (n=1). All were accessed through four facilitators at Christie Hospital, National Health Service Trust, Manchester, United Kingdom. Data were collected via interviews, telephone discussions, letters, personal accounts, and health diaries between January 2000 and March 2001. Questions were asked regarding the perceived effects of travel during serious illness, travel propensity, and factors inhibiting full participation. RESULTS: Benefits to health and well being, particularly of a sociopsychological nature, were identified. Such benefits impacted upon personal health, social effectiveness, personal identity, self-image, independence, future career prospects, and personal behavior. Factors inhibiting travel included the side effects of treatment, other peoples' reactions to the visible signs of cancer (e.g., hair loss, surgical scars), inflated insurance costs, a lack of holiday information sources, and communication issues (e.g., language barriers). CONCLUSIONS: Holiday taking offers a vehicle for transcending illness, even if only for a short period of time. Travel offered a range of therapeutic opportunities as well as providing a necessary means of escapism. Promoting travel as part of the rehabilitation process may well generate more intrinsic benefits than are currently appreciated. Such benefits may also be of broader application to patients facing other similarly complex illnesses.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2002

Ambiguity and synonymy effects in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks: interactions between orthography, phonology, and semantics.

In this article, ambiguity and synonymy effects were examined in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks. Whereas the typical ambiguity advantage was observed in lexical decision and naming, an ambiguity disadvantage was observed in semantic categorization. In addition, a synonymy effect (slower latencies for words with many synonyms than for words with few synonyms) was observed in lexical decision and naming but not in semantic categorization. These results suggest that (a) an ambiguity disadvantage arises only when a task requires semantic processing, (b) the ambiguity advantage and the synonymy disadvantage in lexical decision and naming are due to semantic feedback, and (c) these effects are determined by the nature of the feedback relationships from semantics to orthography and phonology.

Attention↗

PubMed1988

Sign language and the brain.

Analysis of the patterns of breakdown of a visuospatial language in deaf signers thus allows new perspectives on the nature and determinants of cerebral specialization for language. First, these data show that hearing and speech are not necessary for the development of hemispheric specialization--sound is not crucial. Second, the data show that in these deaf signers, it is the left hemisphere that is dominant for sign language. The patients with damage to the left hemisphere showed marked sign language deficits but relatively intact capacity for processing nonlanguage visuospatial relations. The patients with damage to the right hemisphere showed much the reverse pattern. Thus, not only is there left hemisphere specialization for language functioning, there is a complementary right hemisphere specialization for visuospatial functioning. The fact that much of the grammatical information is conveyed via spatial manipulation appears not to alter this complementary specialization. Furthermore, the finding that components of sign language (e.g., lexicon and grammar) can be selectively impaired suggests that the functional organization of the brain for sign language may turn out to be modular. Finally, patients with left and right hemisphere damage showed dissociations between two uses of space in the language--one to represent spatial relations and the other to represent syntactic relations. Right hemisphere damage disrupts the former but spares the latter; left hemisphere damage disrupts the use of space for syntactic relations but spares its use for spatial relations. Taken together with studies of the processing of sign language "on line" by neurologically intact deaf signers, these data suggest that the left cerebral hemisphere in humans may have an innate predisposition for language, independent of language modality. Studies of the effects of brain damage on signing make it clear that accounts of hemispheric specialization are oversimplified if stated only in terms of a dichotomy between language and visuospatial functioning. Such studies may also permit us to come closer to the real principles underlying the specializations of the two cerebral hemispheres, since in sign language there is interplay between visuospatial and linguistic relations within the same system.

Aphasia↗

PubMed1996

[Medical expert assessment in criminal processes from the legal viewpoint].

In the area of medical professional blunder, the medical expert witness is the one participant in a trial whose statement is practically decisive for the court or the prosecutor. Legally, the responsibility remains naturally in the legal hand as the expert witness is only the assistant of the judge. The most important demands on the expert witness are strict objectiveness including towards the colleague, no independent inquiries or interrogations, comprehensive processing of the expert assessment, readiness to revise a written expert assessment according to better knowledge or new facts, independence from the client, no legal comments, clarity of language and intellectual honesty.

Ethics, Medical↗

PubMed2003

Nothing to say, something to sing: primary progressive dynamic aphasia.

We describe a 76-year-old man (ADY) with dynamic aphasia in the setting of a degenerative frontal lobe dementia: primary progressive dynamic aphasia. He displayed a striking paucity of propositional speech despite intact speech production, and preserved singing and prosody. Vocal expression in the verbal and musical domains was investigated in a series of neuropsychological experiments based on novel language and musical tasks that were designed to establish the nature and specificity of the verbal output deficit. The features of the language disorder indicated that the speech output pathway was disrupted at the early stage of generation of a new pre-verbal message. In contrast, tests of musical output demonstrated that the generation of new musical ideas was unimpaired. The domain-specificity of dynamic aphasia may result from the disruption of specific cognitive processes necessary for the creation of verbal messages, as well as selective damage of brain regions involved in language production.

Aged↗

PubMedDate not supplied

An Expert PArasite IdentificatiON (EPAION) system with multimedia support.

Until now computer-assisted parasite identification was based on database applications requiring data specification on an individual basis, thus limiting the ability of the system to handle rule-based knowledge as humans are used to do. A new Expert PArasite IdentificatiON (EPAION: Greek term for expert) system was developed to serve as an interface between the database and the user, where the database is a repository for bionomic and morphological facts about the parasites for the expert system. The system was developed by using a logic-based computer language which allows the definition of rules and facts to assist the creation of queries to the database. The components of the system are the knowledge base, the multimedia data base, the inference mechanism, and the graphical user interface. The operational modules of the system are the Parasite Identifier and the system Utilities. This expert system facilitates knowledge incorporation in a manner simulating the natural mental process, thus allowing the checking of the accuracy of the information that the user feeds to the computer and the creation of intelligent queries to the database. These characteristics accelerate focusing and optimize the parasite identification scheme regardless of the user's profile of competency.

Animals↗

PubMed2003

Differential impairment of person-specific knowledge in a patient with semantic dementia.

We report the case of ST, a 61-year-old gentleman of superior intelligence, who presented with a five-year history of slowly progressive word finding difficulty for proper names. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) showed marked atrophy in the left anterior temporal lobe and SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) demonstrated hypoperfusion in the left anterior and inferior temporal region. A detailed behavioral analysis of the integrity of his semantic system revealed naming deficits for both proper and common names. ST also showed severe impairments in person-specific semantic knowledge, but preservation of knowledge for famous places and common objects. ST's semantic knowledge deficit for people emerged whether he was tested with the faces or the names of famous individuals. Variables that affect name retrieval, such as familiarity, age of acquisition, and frequency of concept encounter, do not account for the selective impairment of person-specific knowledge evidenced by ST. Qualitative differences between the nature of knowledge representations for people and for common objects may underlie this effect. Disruptions in left temporal regions associated with semantic processing may be sufficient to produce a selective deficit in person-specific knowledge.

Attention↗

PubMed2000

The selective impairment of phonological processing in speech production.

We report the naming performance of a patient (DM) with a fluent progressive aphasia who made phonological errors in all language production tasks. The pattern of errors in naming was strikingly clear: DM made very many phonological errors that resulted almost always in nonword responses. The complete absence of semantic errors and the very low ratio of formal errors relative to nonword errors (1.6:30.3) in DM's performance are discussed in the context of recent claims about the nature of naming deficits in fluent aphasics. We argue that DM's performance makes highly improbable the claim that fluent aphasia results from global lesions affecting all levels of the lexical access system equally.

Aged↗

PubMed2001

Gatekeeping and legitimization: how informal carers' relationship with health care workers is revealed in their everyday interactions.

AIM(S) OF THE STUDY: This study explores the relationship between informal carers of older people, and health care workers within the context of a hospital ward. Through an analysis of their language-based encounters the purpose of the study was to identify the discursive processes involved in face-to-face informal carer-health care worker interactions, during the course of carers' visits to one elderly care rehabilitation hospital ward. DESIGN: An ethnomethodological research design, which encompassed the concerns of conversation analysis and the study of institutional interaction, was used. The study involved videotape recording informal carers naturally occurring spontaneous interactions with a range of health care workers on the ward. Data collection was carried out for between 1 and 3 hours, two to three times a week over a period of 3 months. The data comprised: 30 dyadic and group interactions involving 19 different carers and 25 different health care workers, including nurses (qualified and unqualified), physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians, ambulance personnel, housekeepers and nursing auxiliaries. Detailed transcriptions of the data were produced and analysis was undertaken using a modified conversation analysis approach. FINDINGS: Analysis revealed that a central aspect of the way the relationship between informal carers and health care workers is framed is by the way information and access to information is obtained. This paper examines some of the aspects of informal carer-health care worker discourse, which denote both parties as gatekeepers. In doing so it considers the roles that legitimatization of competence and knowledgeability have in facilitating informal carers interactions with health care workers. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that the accomplishment of legitimacy is largely a collaborative undertaking on behalf of health care workers and informal carers. The implications of these findings for carers, health care workers, policy and future research are discussed.

Adult↗