Letters to the Editor

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 667-667
Author(s):  
Leon Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Reproductive Freedom ◽  
The Difference

Mittleman insists upon the difference between words that obscure and those that accurately communicate reality. It is one of the few points on which we agree. He transmutes my phrase "right to reproductive freedom" to his phrase "murder ... unborn children." To him "it is self-evident" that abortion is murder and that human life begins at conception. He adds: "There are no legitimate arguments about these facts!" Despite his assertion of absolute rectitude on these questions, there is continuing public debate on precisely these issues.

The logic of entrapment: Digital proletarians; digital fascism; symbiosis between a virus and autocracy

Maska ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (200s3) ◽  
pp. 98-108
Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Media Representation ◽  
Essential Difference ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Artistic Interpretation ◽  
Transitional Forms ◽  
The Difference

Abstract This text was written on the occasion of the 200th issue of Maska magazine. My goal is to identify and interpret the time when the text is written and when the 200th issue of Maska will be published. I identified a situation of sociability at the time of the coronavirus pandemic and the dominance of digital/postdigital communications. I am interested in the difference between media representation, virus events and political-or-artistic interpretation of modern and transitional forms of human life. If we are talking about digital art/culture/society in relation to the technological turns from the mechanical to the analogue-electronic world, from the analogue to the digital world, from the digital world to the post-digital world, and from the post-digital world into a De Re media possible world, then we are facing a conflict between the dialectic of emancipation through the new and the differentiation of the production/and/consumption of the new in a time and space where the human being is becoming the product of its own product. It is important to index the contemporary antagonism between the ‘digital proletarian’ and ‘digital fascism’. Confronted with digital fascism, digital proletarians pursue a risky process of self-fulfilment and thereby liberation/emancipation in complex digital practices and their impacts on other forms of existence – in a critical and dialectic ontology. Therein lies the essential difference between the politics of functionalism and that of liberation.

On the Proportion of Marriages at different Ages of the Sexes

1858 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 188-200
Author(s):  
Samuel Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Progressive Increase ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Different Ages ◽  
Social Statistics ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Natural Decay

In a paper which was read before the Institute of Actuaries on the 31st May, 1852, “On the Uniform Action of the Human Will, as exhibited by its Mean Results in Social Statistics,” I drew attention to the remarkable regularity with which marriages are contracted in any country, and the very small limits of difference from the average number which appear from year to year. The observations made by M. Quetelet in Belgium, from 1825 to 1845, showed that the extreme difference in the total number of marriages was little more than half the difference of the extremes in the number of deaths in the same period. Such a conclusion seemed to imply that the subject was worthy of more research. If the law of mortality can be so accurately defined at different ages, that pecuniary interests, amounting to some hundreds of millions sterling, can be valued and adjusted with the greatest nicety, it is reasonable to conclude that the labour of a statistical inquiry into the proportion of marriages at different ages would be rewarded with the discovery of some equally defined law, since the variations from year to year in a given number of facts appear, from a large number of observations, to be even less than in the former case. It is true that, as human life must fail at some time, from the natural decay of the powers of life, every interval of age after man has once attained maturity may be expected, under ordinary circumstances, to show a steady and progressive increase in the liability to disease and death. On the other hand, it may be, argued that marriage is the exercise of the free will of man—that consequently, it does not depend on the age or period of life, but on the arbitrary exertion of those feelings or mental and moral qualities which are not subject to natural laws, or at least not to such laws as we are able to express numerically in the same manner we can the law of mortality in any given population. If we consider, however, marriage as, in one sense, the natural provision for the preservation or increase of the species, and the counteraction to the law of mortality by which the species would perish, we should not be surprised to find that, however imperceptibly to individuals, there is a tendency to obey some unknown law of nature which at the period of maturity would lead to the maximum of marriages, and gradually diminish with age in the same manner as the tendency to disease and death increases with age. The motives and caprices of individuals would only have the same effect on the general results which the different habits of individuals may have in increasing or diminishing the rate of mortality. Accordingly, M. Quetelet, in a comparison of the number of marriages in Belgium for each five years of age after 21, for both sexes, for a period of five years consecutively, showed that the average results in each period scarcely differed at all from year to year. The table is so remarkable, that I have reduced the proportion to 100 of the total marriages in each year, and present it to show the small differences which will then be seen to prevail.

scholarly journals GENETINIS DISKURSAS MEDIJŲ KULTŪROJE: GUNDYMAS PREKINIU NEMIRTINGUMU

Problemos ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Vytautas Rubavičius
Keyword(s):  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
Private Property ◽  
World View ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Proper Form ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Universe

Straipsnyje grindžiama nuomonė, jog postmodernybė yra iš modernybės kylantis kapitalizmo sistemos būvis, kuriam būdinga gyvybės suprekinimas ir suišteklinimas. Postmodernybę charakterizuoja populiariosios ir medijų kultūros išplitimas. Tos kultūros apima ne tik kultūros prekes, bet ir vartojimo būdus, įgūdžius ir jų lavinimą. Pastaruoju metu jos kuria nemirtingumo vaizdiniams bei nuojautoms palankią kultūrinę, intelektinę ir pasaulėvaizdinę terpę, kurioje struktūriškai įsitvirtina genetinis diskursas ir jo nustatomos žmogaus ir jo gyvenamo pasaulio aiškinimo gairės. Svarbus šio diskurso bruožas yra technologinis inžinerinis jo pobūdis, išryškėjęs susiejant nano ir biotechnologijas, kuriomis tikimasi įveikti gyvąją ir negyvąją gamtą skiriančią prarają, iš reikalingų atomų bei molekulių kuriant reikalingų ląstelių dalis ir klonuojant gyvas būtybes. Gyvybė suprekinama ir suišteklinama patentuojant gyvybės elementus – genus ir su jais susijusius procesus. Daroma išvada, jog visi genetikos, informatikos ir kitų mokslų laimėjimai, teikiantys žmogaus gyvenimo ilginimo galimybių, kurios palaiko gundančią nemirtingumo idėją, jau yra persmelkti prekinių santykių, tad ir pats nemirtingumas įmanomas tik kaip prekė. Aptariami kai kurie evoliuciniai ir religiniai techno sapiens sampratos aspektai. Detaliau gvildenamos dvi „nemirtingumo“ versijos: Z. Baumano, kuris nemirtingumo pažadą sieja su kompiuterinės technikos plėtra prasidėjus „Antrajai medijų erai“, ir J. Baudrillard’o, tegiančio, jog klonavimo technologijos „apgręžia“ evoliuciją ir žmogų gundo virusiniu ar vėžiniu belyčiu nemirtingumu.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: genetinis diskursas, klonavimas, medijų kultūra, nanobiotechnologijos, nemirtingumas, suprekinimas.Genetic Discourse in Media Culture: Temptation by Commodified ImmoralityVytautas Rubavičius   SummaryPostmodernity is maintained as a stage of the development of capitalism. The difference between modernity and postmodernity is explained in relation to the new sphere of commodification and resourcification, namely, that of life and of all natural living processes. Postmodern media culture, or popular culture, is peopled by signs of immortality and various kinds of immortals – cyborgs, clones, zombies, immortal human beings and others. Thus, culture accustoms a consumer to immortals and immortality which is concidered as the main goal of a human being and evolution. By nano-bio-technologies and genetic discourse this goal is made scientifically valid, thus reachable. Genetic discourse is becoming the fundamental world-view providing focal landmarks for the emerging future. Media culture supports the spreading of genetic discourse and facilitates its understanding. The temptation by immortality can be considered as a version of modernist ideology of human liberation from various natural, social and heavenly bonds. This liberation, and also secularization, is supported by a scientific genetic technological discourse which is becoming a stimulating factor of postmodern media production. The genetic explanation of the world is particularly handy for technological reflexivity: the entire world is as if encapsulated into human genes, which become the principle explaining the mystery of life, evolution and the future of humanity, thus rendering power to produce the human proper form and the future of people. All the possibilities stemming from the new genetic and biotech discoveries fell under the regulation of property relations by patenting, thus making “immortality” – as a temptation and brand – not only an exeptional commodity, but also a political tool and a commodifying force. As the relationships of private property have penetrated natural biogenetic diversity and, having turned it into a resource, the cognitive subject has reached the goal to secularise the Universe, which he has set for himself: only he as the owner and producer of genes lures people with the eternal shapes of the clones and their genetic information, which will be sustained in any location of the Universe. The temptation by “immortality” will become even stronger when the genetic code is mastered. The future of humanity is related to the mixed forms of life, trans-genic or otherwise genetically modified organisms and techno-human forms that will help to postpone, and later to conquer, death. Even thinkers with religious tendencies perceive the technological improvement of human beings as their evolution towards the techno sapiens and consider such a development as an advancement towards the Kingdom of God. The technologization of human beings is imagined in terms of their divination. Yet in this case the character of contemporary science secularising God and obliterating the perception of divinity is overlooked. Two versions of immortality are analyzed more closely – that of Z. Bauman, who links it with the development of computer technologies, and that of J. Baudrillard, who gives a warning that by cloning technologies humanity is trying to inverse the evolution and to return to the undifferentiated state of cells. The conclusion is drawn that regardless of how we understand ‘immortality,’ argue over its reality or unreality, all possibilities to prolong human life granted by genetics, informatics and other advances in science and technologies, which support the tempting idea of immortality, have already been penetrated by commodity relationships; therefore, “immortality” itself will be available only as a commodity.Keywords: cloning, commodification, genetic discourse, immortality, media culture, nano-bio-technologies.

Letters to the Editor

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-192
Author(s):  
Kenneth J. Rothman ◽  
Siegfried M. Pueschel
Keyword(s):  
Birth Weight ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Difference

Saugstad1 studied the difference in birth weight between 53 Norwegian children with phenylketonuria and their 86 siblings. The mean birth weight of the propositi was 356 gm, less than that of siblings; this difference was more than 500 gm after adjustment for parity. To evaluate this finding, we studied the birth weights of 52 children with phenylketonuria and their 79 siblings (Pediatrics 58:842, 1976). Because birth weight varies considerably between families, we compared affected subjects with their siblings within families rather than pooling all subjects as Saugstad did.

Letters to the Editor

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-630
Author(s):  
Alfred Yankauer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Sampling Bias ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vital Statistics ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Medical Centers ◽  
Reporting Requirements ◽  
The Difference

The generalizations which Dr. Nichols has made (or inferred) by applying his (incorrect and incomplete) definitions to data from Galveston and Philadelphia are affected by an enormous sampling bias. How many other places in the United States which are not medical centers report the outcomes of pregnancy in the same way? Perhaps there is even more "under-reporting" (as Dr. Nichols defines it) in the U.S.A. as a whole than in the Netherlands as a whole in spite of certain differences in "official" reporting requirements (even though the difference Dr. Nichols specifies no longer holds)? Furthermore, the Galveston-Philadelphia data Dr. Nichols quotes are not those reported to the Vital Statistics Divisions of the cities of Philadelphia and Galveston.

scholarly journals Audience participation in the mediated Arctic public sphere

Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492097310
Author(s):  
Birgit Røe Mathisen ◽  
Lisbeth Morlandstø
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Arctic Region ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Audience Participation ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
New Development ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Regional Newspaper ◽  
The Arctic Region

The article investigates how the regional newspaper Nordlys facilitates public debate in the Arctic region of Norway. In 2014, Nordlys launched Nordnorsk debatt, a new development of the traditional letters to the editor, offering possibilities for audiences to comment and participate in public debates online. The article is based on a study of 883 opinion pieces posted on this website in 2017 and 2018. We analyse the individuals who access Nordnorsk debatt; we identify role and formal positions of the participants, and what issues they engage in. We also discuss how Nordnorsk debatt might contribute to dialogue and diversity in the regional public debate. We find an increasing engagement over the 2 years and a variety of issues brought into public discussion. Although the debate forum has a broad scope of participants, the analyses suggest that it is primarily a forum for the elites. Despite this, even if grassroots representatives do not dominate the agenda, their opinion pieces are mostly shared and disseminated.

scholarly journals Questioning the Ideal of the Public Sphere: The Emotional Turn

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511985217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media System ◽  
Essential Resource ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Ideal

This article discusses the usefulness and limitations of Habermas concept of the public sphere, on the basis of the trajectory of the author’s work. It starts from the observation that the concept has generated a rich scholarly debate on tensions between the normative ideals and the nitty-gritty lived experience of mediated publics. While fundamental norms of interaction associated with the ideal of the public sphere remain essential to the creation of meaningful debate, it also relies on a series of unhelpful binary distinctions that may be neither normatively desirable nor attainable. Key assumptions of the public sphere model include the idea that public debate should be rational, impartial, dispassionate, and objective. This, in turn, implies the undesirability of emotionality, partiality, passion, and subjectivity. In recent years, particularly in response to the rise of digital and social media, scholars have begun to question the rigid delineation of such norms. The article draws on the author’s work to illuminate how an “emotional turn” in media studies has opened up for a more nuanced appraisal of the role of subjectivity and personal stories in the articulation of the common good, challenging Habermasian understandings of rational-critical debate. This “emotional turn” constitutes an essential resource for theorizing public debate as it unfolds within a hybrid media system, for better and for worse. The article shows how the “emotional turn” has shaped the author’s work on mediated public debate, ranging from letters to the editor and user-generated content to Twitter hashtags and the “emotional architecture” of Facebook.

scholarly journals COMPLEXITY AND INFORMATION-BASED ANALYSIS OF THE VARIATIONS OF THE SARS-COV-2 GENOME IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

Fractals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (07) ◽  
pp. 2150023
Author(s):  
HAMIDREZA NAMAZI ◽  
ONDREJ KREJCAR ◽  
ABDULHAMIT SUBASI
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Genomic Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Infected People ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Random Fluctuations ◽  
First Time

SARS-CoV-2 is a deadly virus that has affected human life since late 2019. Between all the countries that have reported the cases of patients with SARS-CoV-2 disease (COVID-19), the United States of America has the highest number of infected people and mortality rate. Since different states in the USA reported different numbers of patients and also death cases, analyzing the difference of SARS-CoV-2 between these states has great importance. Since the generated RNA walk from the SARS-CoV-2 genome includes complex random fluctuations that also contain information, in this study, we employ the complexity and information theories to investigate the variations of SARS-CoV-2 genome between different states in the USA for the first time. The results of our analysis showed that the fractal dimension and Shannon entropy of genome walk significantly change between different states. Based on these results, we can conclude that the SARS-CoV-2 genomic structure significantly changes between different states, which is resulted from the virus evolution. Therefore, developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is very challenging since it should be able to fight various structures of the virus in different states.

scholarly journals The Rhetoric of Krishna versus the Counter-Rhetoric of Vyas: The Place of Commiseration in the Mahabharat

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 154
Author(s):  
Bhushan Aryal
Keyword(s):  
Just War ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Hindu Tradition ◽  
Bhagavad Gita ◽  
The Status ◽  
Human Emotions ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Bhagavad Gītā

In the context of the mixed perception among scholars whether the Mahabharat is a pacifist or a militant text, this paper analyzes the rhetorical project of the epic to examine its position on violence. Highlighting the existence of two main arguments in the Mahabharat, this paper argues that the author has crafted a grand rhetorical project to question the dominant war ideology of the time that Krishna presents as the divine necessity. Historically, the emergence of Krishna—one of the major characters of the epic—as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu in Hindu tradition and the extraction and elevation of the Bhagavad Gita from the epic as an independent text have undermined the complexity of Vyas’ rhetoric. This paper places Krishna’s argument within the broad rhetorical scheme of the epic and demonstrates how Vyas has represented Krishna’s rhetoric of ‘just war’ only to illustrate its pitfalls. By directing his narrative lens to the devastating consequences of the war in the later parts of the epic, Vyas problematizes Krishna’s insistence on the need to suppress human emotions to attain a higher cognitive and ontological condition. What emerges is the difference between how Vyas and Krishna view the status of feeling: the scientist Krishna thinks that human emotions and individual lives are trivial, incidental instances in the cosmic game—something not worthy of a warrior’s concern; Vyas’ rhetoric, this paper argues, restores the significance of ordinary human emotions. It is a war—not human life and feeling—that arises as a futile enterprise in Vyas’ rhetoric.

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