Neurodegenerative changes of retina in Parkinson disease

In Parkinson’s disease (PD), some structural changes in the retina have been shown using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Among them most attractive are atrophic changes in retinal nerve fi ber layer (RNFL). However, diagnostic signifi cance of the OCT method in PD remains debatable. Objective: to investigate a thickness of RNFL in Parkinson’s disease patients and to determine the signifi cance of the OCT method in the PD diagnostics. Materials and methods. In PD patients (n = 24) and in a control group (n = 20) OCT was used to study the thickness of RNFL — average, in quadrants and in 10 sectors. Results. In patients with PD thinning of RNFL in the inferior quadrant was revealed (p = 0.009). The sensitivity and specifi city of the method were 56% and 82%, respectively. The thickness of RNFL was not associated with parkinsonian symptoms asymmetry, duration and severity of the disease. In the control group and in PD patients, there was a relationship between the RNFL thickness and age. Conclusion. PD is characterized by atrophic changes in the retina in the form of thinning of RNFL in the inferior quadrant, which confi rms the systemic nature of neurodegenerative pathology in this disease going beyond the substantia nigra and brain tissue. At the same time, the thickness of RNFL showed limited diagnostic value for detecting PD cases.

Kestävä kädenjälki käsityössä

Käsitepari kestävä käsityö on syntynyt käsityön vastaukseksi kestävän kehityksen haasteisiin. Tässä teoreettisessa kirjallisuuskatsauksessa tarkastelemme käsityötä mahdollisuutena kestävään kädenjälkeen. Ensin pohjustamme keskustelua kirjallisuuden avulla, minkä jälkeen syvennymme kestävän käsityön käsitteeseen sekä avaamme näkökulmia kestävään käsityöhön perusopetuksen käsityössä. Kestävän käsityön teoreettisessa mallissa kuvataan käsityötä toimintana, tuotteena ja aineettomana käsityönä. Kestävää käsityötä toimintana kuvataan käsityötietoa syventävänä sekä arvoja ja asenteita muokkaavana taitona. Kestävä käsityötuote puolestaan huomioi materiaalien, elinkaaren, tekniikan, designin, laadun, esteettisyyden, tarpeen ja tuotesuhteen. Aineeton käsityö nivoo kestävyyden ympäristön lisäksi kulttuuriin sekä sosiaaliseen, taloudelliseen, psykologiseen, yhteiskunnalliseen, filosofiseen ja kommunikatiiviseen näkökulmaan. Nämä elementit toimivat lomittain yhdessä muotoillen ympäristöä, konkreettisia tuotteita sekä tekoja kestäväksi ekologiseksi kädenjäljeksi, mikä tulisi olla lähtökohtana myös käsityönopetuksessa kaikilla koulutusasteilla. Ecological handprint in craft Abstract The concept of sustainable craft is crafts’ response to sustainability. This theoretical article views the craft's potential to be an ecological handprint. We first view discussion through literature, followed by opening the concept of sustainable craft and viewpoint to sustainable craft education. The theoretical model concretizes the systemic nature of sustainable craft as practice, product, and immaterial craft. Sustainable craft as practice is described as deepening craft knowledge and as a skill shaping the values and attitudes of craft. Sustainable craft products consider the materials, life cycle, technique, design, quality, aesthetics, need, and product relationship. Immaterial craft combines sustainability to the environment, cultural, social, economic, psychologic, societal, philosophical, and communicational aspects. These elements work together shaping the environment, concrete product, and actions towards sustainability with an ecological handprint that could be utilized in craft education. Keywords: Immaterial craft, sustainable development, craft product, craft skill, ecological handprint

The Diminishing Agency of Urbanised Alevis Against the Rise of Political Islam in Turkey

This paper critically examines the diminishing agency of the first-urbanised Alevi generation vis- à-vis the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and their sectarian agenda mediated by political Islam. The conceptual position is underpinned by Foucault’s concept of governmentality and theory of agency in broader cultural terms. These theoretical frameworks interweave to present a rich and complex set of snapshots that document the first-urbanised Alevi generation’s decreasing possibilities of action in the urban context. Accordingly, the empirical data that informs this piece has been collected by a series of qualitative and semi-structured interviews with the first-urbanised Alevi generation, children of those who migrated to urban areas in the 1960s and wittingly or unwittingly kept their identities undisclosed to varying degrees. Those interviewed come from a range of different professional backgrounds, with the only common point being that they have spent their childhoods and adult years in Istanbul, Turkey. Through a close engagement with the empirical material, this paper addresses the effects of the AKP’s Sunnification process centring around political Islam on the first generation urbanised Alevis and to what extent the systemic nature of this process attenuates or takes away their agency in the urban context. The account is focused around three key themes including daily life, institutional forms of discrimination and the workplace.

Social Representations, Communication, and the Evolution of Cultures

This chapter suggests that, in order to understand changes in both social representations and culture, we need to focus on their systemic nature and on the role of communication processes. Linking up with a lengthy tradition that enhances the social nature of the human mind, the connections between the Frankfurt School’s legacy, cultural psychology, and the socio-constructionist movement are explored from a mature biological-evolutionary perspective. Considering and extending the idea of complexity from the biological domain to the mental, social, and cultural spheres, the attention shifts from structures to processes. What then becomes relevant is how well living and cultural systems are able to constantly regenerate themselves through structural changes and the establishing of new connections. The author suggests that we consider social representations as “maps” that we need to orient ourselves effectively in the “territory” of knowledge, action, and social relations.

Court expert status in Poland. Flagging up the selected problems

The intent of this written presentation is to analyse the multi-faceted issue of the position and functioning of court experts in the Polish legal system. Particular attention should be paid in this respect to the appointment and verification of the competencies of candidates for experts, as well as to the instruments of control over their work. These selected aspects are extremely important, not only from the point of view of public interest, but in particular from the perspective of the party’s right to a fair trial, and to have the case heard within a reasonable time. The problems identified and briefly discussed have a structural and systemic nature, and result in arrangements which confirm the necessity for legislative changes proposed for many years, relating to court experts as well as to the practice of judicial authorities. The discussion of these issues has an informative purpose, especially for readers unfamiliar with the Polish legal system.

System approach in criminal law: achievements and prospects of application

The solution of fundamental problems of criminal-law regulation should be carried out taking into account doctrinal scientific developments and the latest achievements of scientific and technological progress. In this sense, using of a system approach is expanded, which has now received significant instrumental support in the format of information technology and software. A system approach is a methodological direction of scientific knowledge of system objects by means of system engineering, which is implemented in two main areas – in the field of methodology and theory, and in the field of specific applications. The aim of the paper is a comprehensive description of using of system approach in domestic criminal law. The task is to outline the prospects of applying a system approach in domestic criminal law, taking into account the latest technologies of systems engineering. Criminal law in its essence can be understood as a system of information (knowledge) that outlines the criminal offenses’ types and criminal law measures of state reaction to them. As a systemic object, this phenomenon is characterized by several circumstances. System components of criminal law. First of all, the authors are talking about the systemic nature of a crime, according to which the system of criminal law regulation is oriented. The systems are also criminal law provisions. Their structural elements-subsystems are hypothesis, disposition and sanction The system of criminal law has its own structure. The initial elements of its structure are criminal law. This also includes atypical regulations: criminal law constructions, legal presumptions and fictions. According to the degree of generalization, legal norms and atypical normative prescriptions are united into legal institutions. The systemic structure of the studied system object is manifested in the multiplicity of relations between them. System connections of criminal law. In the system of criminal law, informational connections are realized. Functioning of criminal law system in the system environment. Through the mechanisms of rule-making, information from protected social relations is introduced into it from the outside, and through the mechanisms of law enforcement, it affects its environment. According to the system approach, a model of the crime system and the system of the Criminal Code of Ukraine is proposed, developed on the basis of IDEF0 notation

Experience of therapy of psoriasis patients with methotrexate in the form of subcutaneous and intramuscularly injections

Псориаз является одним из наиболее распространенных хронических дерматозов, в мире зарегистрировано около 125 млн больных этим заболеванием, причем частота встречаемости в структуре дерматологических заболеваний составляет около 40%. Несмотря на то, что в большинстве случаев псориаз не представляет угрозы для жизни, тем не менее он является непосредственной причиной появления весьма серьезных патологических проблем, социальной дезадаптации. В последнее время все большее число исследователей говорят о псориазе не как об изолированном кожном заболевании, а как о системной псориатической болезни с доминирующими проявлениями на коже. Системность заболевания проявляется в частом вовлечении в процесс не только кожного покрова, но и других систем и органов, в частности опорно-двигательного аппарата при артропатической форме псориаза (псориатическом артрите). Распространенность псориатического артрита у больных псориазом колеблется от 7% до 47%, причем у 15% пациентов артрит развивается до поражения кожи, при обычном псориазе артрит бывает в 6-7% случаев, а при уже выявленной псориатической артропатии у 73,2% больных встречается пустулезный или экссудативный псориаз, а также псориатическая эритродермия. В статье представлены результаты применения в терапии больных среднетяжелым и тяжелым псориазом препарата метотрексат в виде подкожных инъекций в сравнении с аналогичной схемой использования внутримышечных инъекций метотрексата. Показана высокая эффективность курса терапии метотрексатом в лечении псориаза и псориатического артрита. Приведены данные о более высокой безопасности, более значимом позитивном влиянии на качество жизни, о лучшей переносимости и более длительной ремиссии, достигнутых в группе пациентов, получавших подкожные инъекции метотрексата. Psoriasis is one of the most common chronic dermatoses. About 125 million patients with this disease are registered in the world, and the frequency of occurrence in the structure of dermatological diseases is about 40%. Despite the fact that in most cases psoriasis does not pose a threat to life, but, nevertheless, it is the direct cause of the appearance of very serious pathological problems, social maladjustment. Recently, an increasing number of researchers speak of psoriasis not as an isolated skin disease, but as a systemic psoriatic disease with dominant skin manifestations. The systemic nature of the disease is manifested in the frequent involvement in the process of not only the skin, but also other systems and organs, in particular, the musculoskeletal system in the arthropathic form of psoriasis (psoriatic arthritis). The prevalence of psoriatic arthritis in patients with psoriasis ranges from 7 to 47%, and in 15% of patients arthritis develops before skin lesions, with ordinary psoriasis, arthritis occurs in 6-7% of cases, and with already identified psoriatic arthropathy in 73,2%, pustular or exudative psoriasis, as well as psoriatic erythroderma. The article presents the results of the use of methotrexate in the form of subcutaneous injections in clinical practice in the treatment of patients with moderate and severe psoriasis, in comparison with a similar scheme of using intramuscular injections of methotrexate. The course of methotrexate therapy has been shown to be highly effective in the treatment of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The data on higher safety, a more significant positive effect on the quality of life, better tolerability and longer remission of the process achieved in a group of patients receiving subcutaneous injections of methotrexate are presented.

Compositional Technique as a Language Mechanism: from Rule to Sound

Relevance of the study. lies in study of the concept of “compositional technique”, identifying its specificity as a linguistic mechanism. The technique of composition is functioning between language and text and thereby finds its concretization at the level of the composer, his thinking and style. In the typological similarity of the elements of each technique and, at the same time, in constant renewal, the understanding of the composition technique as a tradition is manifested, which seems essential for understanding the development of music in the 20th — early 21st centuries. The analysis of technique reveals its participation in the process of transition of language into speech at the moment of creating a certain work, which is also extremely important in modern musical culture. Scientific novelty. For the first time in Ukrainian musicology composition techniques have been analyzed in the aspect of language and the functioning of technology as a linguistic mechanism has been investigated. The purpose of the study is to analyze the specifics of the composition technique as a linguistic mechanism, the peculiarities of its functioning in the creative process in the linguistic aspect, to consider typical techniques in well-known established techniques as the corresponding rules for the embodiment and development of the material. Methods. The research is based on systemic and functional methods. The results and conclusions. The study of the composition technique in the aspect of the musical language allows us to renew our understanding of its specifics. The moment of selection of parts and the rules for their further combination emphasize the “general” nature of the composition technique. Being between language and text, technology functions as a linguistic mechanism, out of all the variety of a huge number of elements of the language, choosing only “its own” number, limits and concretizes the possible combination of these elements. The systemic nature of the compositional technique determines the functionality of the parts of each technique. With all the difference in established techniques, it is the functionality of the elements that reveals the general nature and similarity of processes in each technique. Significance of these results consists in the statement of the fact that reception in technology due to repetition and recognizability becomes the rule, offering options for its embodiment. The typing of techniques is very important for the composition technique. Simultaneously, each new incarnation of this technique renews and develops it.

Circular Economy Business Models: a Repertoire of Theoretical Relationships and a Research Agenda

The shift towards a more resource efficient circular economy has become a necessity in the wake of current ecological, economic and social sustainability challenges. Mirroring circular-related developments in policy and business quarters, the circular economy literature is growing as a distinct field of academic enquiry. Yet, the conceptual and theoretical foundations of circular economy thinking need consolidation. Drawing from strategic management, sustainability transitions and systems theories, this article establishes some theoretical anchoring for circular economy business models. It finds that circular business models contribute to an understanding of both competitive advantage and the systemic nature of business. It also develops a future agenda for management research at the interface between the circular economy and business models.