Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy, this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines (...) several postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art. (shrink)

OBJETIVO -/- O estudante de Zootecnia e de Veterinária, quando se depara com a produção animal, um dos pilares importantes é a reprodução, uma vez que é a perpetuação da espécie, seja para gerar filhas de uma vaca campeã em produção leiteira e de um touro com rusticidade e com aptidão produtiva de corte, ou mesmo para reposição de um plantel, o mesmo deve estar consciente de que esse ramo é de extrema responsabilidade, já que estará intimamente lidando com a (...) vida e com um investimento que pode gerar lucros em demasia para a propriedade ou, se mal feito o manejo da reprodução, trazer sérios transtornos para a mesma. -/- Nesse trabalho, o estudante revisará os sucessos da puberdade e estacionalidade reprodutiva relacionando-os com os processos endócrinos e os fatores que afetam sua manifestação como os nutricionais, para compreender a maneira ao qual podem ser manipuladas. -/- -/- • _____INTRODUÇÃO -/- A puberdade marca o início da vida reprodutiva do animal, permitindo integrar o indivíduo ao seu ciclo produtivo. A estacionalidade é uma característica de adaptação que algumas espécies desenvolveram para fazer garantir a eficiência da reprodução e a sobrevivência dos filhotes. -/- -/- • _____PUBERDADE -/- A puberdade é atingida quando o animal é capaz de produzir e liberar gametas viáveis e funcionais (férteis). Na fêmea esse fato ocorre na primeira ovulação, que geralmente coincide com a manifestação do comportamento do cio; e nos machos durante a primeira ejaculação com espermatozoides viáveis. -/- Do ponto de vista da produção animal, puberdade prematura ou precoce, é importante para poder permitir a incorporação dos animais ao ciclo produtivo o mais rapidamente possível. No caso de touros holandeses, por exemplo, é desejável que produzam sêmen precocemente para incorporá-los a prova de progênie; nas fêmeas, entretanto, deve-se considerar que nem sempre é conveniente usar o primeiro ciclo ou cio para reprodução. É o caso das marrãs (porcas primíparas), onde é benéfico esperar até o segundo ou terceiro estro para aumentar o tamanho da ninhada. Também pode ser vantajoso esperar que o indivíduo alcance sua maturidade sexual, que ocorre quando a fêmea consegue se reproduzir sem sofrer efeitos adversos. A ovelha nascida na primavera, por exemplo, pode engravidar no outono seguinte e dar à luz no primeiro ano de vida, mas seu crescimento pode ser afetado; o mesmo ocorre com a novilha, em que o acasalamento precoce pode promover distorcia por falta de desenvolvimento pélvico. -/- A puberdade é um processo gradual e está intimamente relacionada à taxa de crescimento e ao metabolismo energético. O recém-nascido usa energia para funções vitais, principalmente termorregulação; esse feito se deve ao fato de os jovens possuírem uma superfície corporal muito elevada em relação ao seu volume. Durante o desenvolvi-mento subsequente dos tecidos também há prioridade no uso de nutrientes, que inicialmente favorecem o desenvolvimento do tecido ósseo e muscular, e uma vez que estes atingem determinado tamanho de acordo com as condições genéticas do indivíduo, inicia-se o desenvolvimento do tecido adiposo, que é indicativa de um reservatório de energia. É importante ressaltar que existe uma interação entre a genética e o meio ambiente, de forma que o potencial genético só será expresso se o meio ambiente for favorável. -/- Para que a ovulação ocorra, é necessário considerar o funcionamento do eixo hipotálamo-hipófise-gonodal. O aumento da frequência pulsátil do GnRH hipotalâmico e em consequência do LH hipofisário provoca a maturação do folículo em nível gonodal, o que aumenta a produção de estrógenos. O aumento dos estrogênios causa, por feedback positivo no hipotálamo, a liberação do pico pré-ovulatório de LH e, consequentemente, a ovulação. Na fase pré-púbere, a frequência dos pulsos de GnRH e LH é muito baixa e insuficiente para provocar a maturação folicular, pois o hipotálamo é inibido e, portanto, não ocorre ovulação. -/- A geração pulsátil de GnRH no momento reprodutivo adequado para desencadear o início da puberdade depende de uma rede neural complexa que, além dos neurônios GnRH, inclui outros neurônios e células da glia; ele também integra vários sinais internos e externos para o corpo. A morfologia dos neurônios GnRH também é única, uma vez que seus dendritos também podem funcionar como axônios, dando-lhes uma função distinta. A geração de pulsos também indica a necessidade de sincronização entre subpopulações de neurônios GnRH, que, acima de tudo, parece ser extrínseca a esses neurônios e envolve múltiplos hormônios e neurotransmissores -/- Se dois níveis de conexões aferentes são considerados, estima-se que cada neurônio de GnRH pode ser conectado a cerca de cinco milhões de outros neurônios; milhares de genes, então, podem estar envolvidos no processo da puberdade. A importância funcional e hierárquica de cada um desses genes no controle dos neurônios GnRH, juntamente com outros fatores neuronais e gliais, pode diferir entre as espécies. Existem, no entanto, componentes fundamentais que parecem ser comuns a todos os mamíferos e que se situam nos níveis hierárquicos mais elevados, ajudando a compreender a progressão do processo puberal. Assim, todas as espécies de mamíferos estudadas, por exemplo, têm aglomerados de neurônios kisspeptinérgicos (que secretam kisspeptina), envolvidos na regulação da secreção tônica e secreção cíclica de GnRH, que também se classifica como o elemento mais alto na hierarquia desse complexo neuronal após considerar os neurônios GnRH. -/- Sabe-se que o eixo hipotálamo-hipofisário-gonodal está ativo desde as primeiras fases da vida do indivíduo, mesmo antes do nascimento em certas espécies. A secreção de GnRH, no entanto, é suprimida mais tarde no desenvolvimento e permanece dessa forma até o período pré-púbere, quando será reativada gradualmente. -/- Por várias décadas, a supressão e reinicialização dos pulsos de GnRH foi atribuída a uma hipótese conhecida como teoria gonadostat que afirma que o centro tônico do hipotálamo é inibido devido à sua sensibilidade ao mecanismo de feedback negativo dos esteroides gonodais, é aumentado; portanto, o GnRH e a consequente secreção de gonadotrofinas (FSH e LH) são insuficientes para a ocorrência da maturação folicular e espermatogênese. Essa sensibilidade diminui progressivamente à medida que a puberdade se aproxima. -/- Sabe-se agora que existem fatores não gonodais que agem em paralelo com os esteroides para mediar mudanças no feedback negativo que também são específicos da espécie. -/- Na fêmea, o centro gerador de pulso cíclico também deve ser considerado, o qual é responsável por iniciar a primeira ovulação. O centro cíclico é composto por uma segunda subpopulação de neurônios GnRH que é reativada por meio de uma complexa interação entre vários sistemas neuronais inibitórios (que devem reduzir progressiva-mente sua influência) e outros sistemas excitatórios, que, por sua vez, operam por meio de diferentes neurotransmissores, como o ácido γ-amino-butírico (GABA) e seus receptores, glutamato, óxido nítrico e neuropeptídio Y (NPY). Esses fatores, juntamente com as alterações morfológicas observadas nos neurônios do GnRH à medida que a puberdade se aproxima, e com as interações e sinais aferentes das células gliais, levam a um padrão de progressão linear que culminará na reativação do centro cíclico. Esse processo era conhecido anteriormente como teoria da maturação central e faz parte das mudanças que configuram o processo para chegar à puberdade. A elevação nas concen-trações de estradiol subsequente à reativação gradual do centro gerador de pulso tônico GnRH provavelmente permitirá a maturação final do centro cíclico. -/- A forma como cada organismo estabelece o momento certo para iniciar as mudanças que levam à puberdade é conhecido; a existência de algum mecanismo neurobiológico que constitui um relógio interno pode ser considerada. No entanto, esse mecanismo afetaria principalmente o desenvolvimento neuronal no nível central; também seria difícil compará-lo com a maneira pela qual fatores externos ao indivíduo afetam o início da puberdade. Nessa perspectiva, um sistema que permita receber informações completas sobre o crescimento e desenvolvimento do indivíduo poderia ser mais prático. Os mediadores desse sistema incluem o hormônio do crescimento, IGF-I, leptina e outros substratos metabólicos. A leptina em particular, que sinaliza as reservas de tecido adiposo, é um dos elementos mais importantes e, embora não determine quando começa a puberdade, se atua como fator permissivo para que o processo progrida, uma vez que excede um nível limite. A consideração do estágio de desenvolvimento do animal para o início da puberdade era anteriormente conhecida como o peso corporal crítico ou teoria do lipostato. É importante considerar que as três teorias mencionadas não são exclusivas. -/- O mecanismo da puberdade nos machos é semelhante ao já descrito; entretanto, deve-se lembrar que no macho o centro cíclico não está ativo. À medida que a puberdade se aproxima, o crescimento testicular é desencadeado e, em ruminantes e suínos, o pênis que estava preso à mucosa prepucial é gradualmente liberado. -/- -/- • _____FATORES QUE INFLUENCIAM A PUBERDADE -/- Os animais podem manifestar a puberdade de três formas diferentes. Pode ser tardia e o animal demorar para estar apto a reprodução; precoce e o animal entrar na vida reprodutiva antes do esperado ou pode ser normal e o animal estar com boa conformação e idade. Para tanto, alguns fatores podem interferir à manifestação da puberdade pelos animais como a genética, idade e peso, nutrição, fotoperíodo e o próprio manejo adotado. -/- -/- Genética -/- O genótipo afeta a idade da puberdade, pois algumas raças são anteriores a outras. Nos bovinos, as raças europeias atingem a puberdade antes dos zebuínos, isto é, uma novilha ou novilho da raça holandesa atinge a puberdade primeiro que os animais da mesma idade e do mesmo peso da raça nelore, por exemplo. -/- Da mesma forma, as porcas da raça chinesa Meishan atingem a puberdade por volta dos 115 dias de idade, metade da idade das raças brancas. As ovelhas de raças de corte, da mesma forma, são mais precoces que os produtores de lã. As raças pequenas, da mesma forma, são geralmente mais precoces, pelo menos em bovinos (jersey x guzerá) e em caninos. Os híbridos, por outro lado, apresentam puberdade mais precoce que os puros, devido ao efeito da heterose. Por este motivo, em certas espécies são utilizadas linhas híbridas. -/- -/- Idade e peso -/- A tabela 1 mostra a idade média de início da puberdade em espécies domésticas. O peso vivo (PV) adulto é mais relevante para a idade na puberdade nos ruminantes, enquanto em suínos é menos decisivo. A tabela também apresenta a porcentagem de peso corporal necessária para a puberdade ocorrer de forma natural. -/- -/- Tabela 1: Idade e peso a puberdade das espécies domésticas -/- Espécie -/- Fêmea (meses) -/- Macho (meses) -/- PV adulto (%) -/- Gado holandês -/- 11 (8-15) -/- 11 (7-18) -/- 30-40 -/- Gado brahman -/- 19 -/- 17 -/- 45-60 -/- Caprinos e ovinos -/- 7 (4-14) -/- 7 (6-9) -/- 40-60 -/- Suínos -/- 6 (5-7) -/- 7 (5-8) -/- 75 -/- Equinos -/- 18 (12-19) -/- 14 (10-24) -/- - -/- Caninos -/- 12 (6-24) -/- 9 (5-12) -/- - -/- Felinos -/- 8 (4-12) -/- 9 (8-10) -/- - -/- Fonte: VALENCIA, 2018. -/- Nutrição -/- Como a puberdade está relacionada à taxa de crescimento, os animais que recebem uma nutrição adequada e balanceada apresentarão puberdade em uma idade mais jovem, ou seja, mais precocemente; ao contrário, a puberdade será tardia nos animais que sofreram restrição alimentar, que estão desnutridos ou que tiveram seu crescimento afetado por doenças infecciosas ou parasitárias. A superalimentação também não é recomendada, pois pode alterar tanto os sinais que são recebidos pelo hipotálamo quanto sua resposta a eles. -/- Logo, o manejo alimentar adotado deve estar de acordo com as normas estabeleci-das pelos especialistas na área, principalmente no tocante as exigências nutricionais que devem servir de regra na propriedade. Sendo assim, os animais entrarão em puberdade com as taxas de alta qualidade o que afetará positivamente na prole futura e dará retorno lucrativo ao proprietário. -/- -/- Época do ano (Fotoperíodo) -/- Em fêmeas de espécies sazonais, como ovelhas e cabras, existem certos requisitos de fotoperíodo que devem ser atendidos para que a puberdade ocorra. Nessas espécies, um período de exposição a dias longos é necessário, seguido por outro de exposição a dias curtos. Na verdade, os cordeiros e cabritos nascidos fora da estação, mesmo que tenham atingido o peso necessário, terão que esperar até o outono seguinte (a estação reprodutiva) para atingir a puberdade. Os machos, por outro lado, não estão sujeitos a essas limitações nos requisitos fotoperiódicos para apresentar a puberdade. -/- Em novilhas nascidas no outono, por outro lado, a puberdade ocorre antes de um ano de idade, no verão seguinte ou no início do outono, mais cedo do que nas nascidas na primavera, devido à exposição a longos dias durante os primeiros seis meses do ano após seu nascimento aceleram seu crescimento. Em gatos, o aumento do fotoperíodo também acelera o início da puberdade. -/- Em ovelhas e novilhas, a primeira ovulação que ocorre ao entrar na puberdade é silenciosa; ou seja, não é acompanhada de sinais comportamentais de cio como a micção frequente, inchamento da vulva, uma montando a outra e deixando-se montar etc., pois para que esse comportamento se manifeste, o sistema nervoso necessita de uma pré-sensibilização com progesterona que não estará presente até o próximo ciclo, após o desenvolvimento do corpo lúteo vindo desta primeira ovulação. -/- -/- Sociossexual -/- A interação de indivíduos da mesma espécie ou a presença ou ausência de sinais de bioestimulação, como feromônios, pode afetar o período de puberdade. A puberdade, por exemplo, é atrasada em porcas criadas individualmente em comparação com porcas criadas em grupo. Além disso, na porca, ovelha e cabra, a exposição ao macho estimula as fêmeas e a puberdade aparece mais precocemente. -/- -/- Manejo -/- Certas práticas de manejo podem acelerar a puberdade, especialmente no período pré-púbere. Em porcas próximas à puberdade, por exemplo, o estresse causado por procedimentos, como o transporte de um local para outro ou a exposição ao macho, faz com que apareça o estro em torno de sete dias após a realização do manejo mencionado. -/- -/- • _____ESTACIONALIDADE REPRODUTIVA -/- A estacionalidade ou sazonalidade reprodutiva é uma estratégia evolutiva que se desenvolveu em algumas espécies; tende a tornar a reprodução mais eficiente. Nos países de latitudes distantes do equador, o objetivo é que as crias nasçam na primavera, época do ano mais favorável, graças à abundância de alimentos e às amenas condições climáticas. No caso da ovelha, cuja gestação dura cinco meses, para que os partos ocorram na primavera, ela deve engravidar no outono (figura 1), quando os dias são curtos; enquanto a égua, tendo uma gestação de aproximadamente 11 meses, deve conceber na primavera, quando os dias são longos; assim, o parto ocorrerá na primavera do ano seguinte (figura 2). -/- -/- Figura 1: Esquema ilustrativo da estacionalidade reprodutiva na espécie ovina. Fonte: PIRES et al., 2011. -/- -/- Esta característica evolutiva desenvolvida pela seleção natural na maioria das espécies silvestres e ainda é conservado por algumas espécies domésticas, como ovelhas, cabras, cavalos e gatos. Em bovinos e suínos, ao contrário, a domesticação levou à perda quase total da estacionalidade reprodutiva. -/- A estacionalidade reprodutiva é codificada nos genes; significa então que a seleção natural favoreceu a propagação de genes que permitiam acoplar a hora do nascimento com a melhor época do ano, por isso passou a ser considerada um método anticoncepcional natural. -/- -/- Figura 2: ciclo reprodutivo anual em espécies estacionais; onde são apresentados os períodos de gestação e a forma como se agrupam os nascimentos, independentemente da época reprodutiva da espécie, em vermelho as fêmeas estão apresentando estro ou cio. Fonte: VALENCIA, 2018. -/- -/- Fotoperíodo -/- Para sincronizar o período fértil com a época mais favorável do ano, a maioria das espécies sazonais usa o fotoperíodo (quantidade de luz diária ao longo do ano). -/- Este sinal ambiental é seguro, confiável e se repete a cada ano. Ovinos e caprinos se reproduzem na época do ano em que os dias são curtos e os equinos quando são longos. O grau de sazonalidade depende da origem da raça. As raças nativas de países localizados em latitudes elevadas (> 50°,ovelhas: soay, blackface, suffolk; cabras: saanen, alpino francês, toggenburg; equinos: puro-sangue, hanoveriano) terão uma estacionalidade mais acentuada do que as latitudes menores ou mediterrâneas (ovelhas: merino; cabras: murciana granadina; equinos: quarto de milha). Também existem raças de latitudes próximas ao Equador cuja estacionalidade é baixa ou nula (ovelhas: raças de pelo, crioulas; cabras: raças africanas e asiáticas) (tabela 2). -/- Para a maioria das raças de ovinos e caprinos, a estação reprodutiva começa no final do verão e início do outono; caracteriza-se pela apresentação de ciclos estrais sucessivos, e termina no final do inverno, quando se inicia o anestro, que se caracteriza pela ausência de ovulação. Nos equinos, ocorre o contrário, uma vez que a estação reprodutiva ocorre na primavera e no verão. -/- -/- Tabela 2: Relação entre a origem da raça e o grau de estacionalidade ou sazonalidade -/- Espécie -/- Alta -/- Média -/- Baixa -/- Ovinos -/- Suffolk, raças britânicas de lã e corte -/- Merino -/- Pelibuey, crioulas -/- Caprinos -/- Saanen, alpino, toggenburg -/- Murciana granadina -/- Crioula -/- Equinos -/- Puro-sangue, hanoveriano, quarto de milha -/- - -/- Crioula, burros -/- Fonte: VALENCIA, 2018. -/- -/- Mecanismo neuroendócrino da estacionalidade -/- Durante o período de anestro, o fotoperíodo exerce efeito inibitório sobre o centro tônico do GnRH no hipotálamo, diminuindo a frequência de pulso. Consequentemente, a pulsatilidade do LH também diminui, que agora é incapaz de induzir a maturação folicular, o aumento dos estrogênios, o pico pré-ovulatório de LH e, portanto, a ovulação. -/- Isso ocorre porque durante o anestro a sensibilidade do hipotálamo ao mecanismo de feedback negativo dos estrogênios e de outros fatores de origem não gonodal é aumentada. Ao aproximar-se da estação reprodutiva, a sensibilidade hipotalâmica diminui e o aumento da pulsatilidade do GnRH causa as mudanças que culminam na ovulação. Portanto, o mecanismo endócrino do anestro estacional é semelhante ao do anestro pré-púbere e de alguns outros tipos de anestro. -/- A estacionalidade é um bom exemplo da interação entre o meio ambiente e o sistema neuroendócrino, pois o organismo é capaz de traduzir um sinal externo ambiental, como o fotoperíodo, em um sinal hormonal interno, que neste caso é a melatonina. -/- A glândula pineal secreta melatonina durante as horas de escuridão. Os animais sazonais apresentam um ritmo reprodutivo endógeno, que é regulado por janelas de fotossensibilidade, determinadas por mudanças na duração do dia. O sinal luminoso é captado pela retina e conduzido, via nervo, pelo trato retino-hipotalâmico até o núcleo supraquiasmático, que funciona como o relógio biológico do corpo. Daí o sinal viaja para o núcleo para-ventricular, depois para o gânglio cervical e, finalmente, para a glândula pineal, que responde secretando melatonina (figura 3). -/- Nas ovelhas, a estação reprodutiva começa quando a duração do dia diminui e, naturalmente, a noite aumenta; na égua, ocorre quando os dias se alongam. -/- A primavera não é necessariamente a melhor época do ano em todas as regiões do globo. Nas latitudes tropicais, a primavera coincide com a seca e não com a abundância de forragem, aspecto a ser levado em consideração ao programar a reprodução. -/- Outro ponto importante a considerar é que as raças europeias sazonais mantêm sua estacionalidade no Brasil. -/- -/- Figura 3: Mecanismo do fotoperíodo em ovinos e a melatonina. Fonte: HAFEZ, 2004. -/- -/- Estacionalidade no macho -/- O macho é menos afetado que a fêmea pelas mudanças típicas de cada época do ano, já que sua função reprodutiva não é necessariamente interrompida durante o anestro ou repouso sexual, embora a produção de hormônios reprodutivos, tamanho e tônus testicular, a libido, as características qualitativas e quantitativas do ejaculado e a fertilidade do esperma podem ser diminuídas. O nível de afetação depende do grau de sazonalidade da raça e da latitude. Por fim, os efeitos do fotoperíodo devem ser separados dos nutricionais, que também variam com a época do ano. -/- -/- REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS -/- -/- BEARDEN, Henry Joe et al. Reproducción animal aplicada. México: Manual Moderno, 1982. -/- BROOKS, P. H.; COLE, D. J. A. The effect of the presence of a boar on the attainment of puberty in gilts. Reproduction, v. 23, n. 3, p. 435-440, 1970. -/- CARDOSO, Daniel; DE PAULA NOGUEIRA, Guilherme. Mecanismos neuroendócrinos envolvidos na puberdade de novilhas. Arquivos de Ciências Veterinárias e Zoologia da Unipar, v. 10, n. 1, 2007. -/- CHEMINEAU, P. et al. Induction and persistence of pituitary and ovarian activity in the out-of-season lactating dairy goat after a treatment combining a skeleton photoperiod, melatonin and the male effect. Reproduction, v. 78, n. 2, p. 497-504, 1986. -/- CLARKE, Iain J. et al. Kisspeptin and seasonality in sheep. Peptides, v. 30, n. 1, p. 154-163, 2009. -/- CORTEEL, J. M. Production, storage and insemination of goat semen. In: Management and Reproduction in Sheep and Goats Symposium, Madison, Wis. (USA), 1977. University of Wisconsin, 1977. -/- CUNNINGHAM, James. Tratado de fisiologia veterinária. Elsevier Health Sciences, 2011. -/- CUPPS, Perry T. (Ed.). Reproduction in domestic animals. Elsevier, 1991. -/- DUKES, Henry Hugh; SWENSON, Melvin J.; REECE, William O. Dukes fisiologia dos animais domésticos. Editora Guanabara Koogan, 1996. -/- DÝRMUNDSSON, Ó. R.; LEES, J. L. Effect of rams on the onset of breeding activity in Clun Forest ewe lambs. The Journal of Agricultural Science, v. 79, n. 2, p. 269-271, 1972. -/- EBLING, F. J. P.; FOSTER, D. L. Photoperiod requirements for puberty differ from those for the onset of the adult breeding season in female sheep. Reproduction, v. 84, n. 1, p. 283-293, 1988. -/- FIELDS, Michael J.; SAND, Robert S.; YELICH, Joel V. (Ed.). Factors affecting calf crop: Biotechnology of reproduction. CRC Press, 2001. -/- HAFEZ, Elsayed Saad Eldin; HAFEZ, Bahaa. Reprodução animal. São Paulo: Manole, 2004. -/- HUGHES, P. E.; PHILIP, G.; SISWADI, R. The effects of contact frequency and transport on the efficacy of the boar effect. Animal Reproduction Science, v. 46, n. 1-2, p. 159-165, 1997. -/- KARSCH, FRED J. et al. Neuroendocrine basis of seasonal reproduction. In: Proceedings of the 1983 Laurentian Hormone Conference. Academic Press, 1984. p. 185-232. -/- LINCOLN, G. A.; SHORT, R. V. Seasonal breeding: nature's contraceptive. In: Proceedings of the 1979 Laurentian Hormone Conference. Academic Press, 1980. p. 1-52. -/- MELLO, Raquel Rodrigues Costa. Puberdade e maturidade sexual em touros bovinos. Agropecuária Científica no Semiárido, v. 10, n. 3, p. 11-28, 2015. -/- MEZA‐HERRERA, C. A. et al. Neuroendocrine, metabolic and genomic cues signalling the onset of puberty in females. Reproduction in Domestic Animals, v. 45, n. 6, p. e495-e502, 2010. -/- MONTEIRO, Claudia Dias; BICUDO, Sony Dimas; TOMA, Hugo Shisei. Puberdade em fêmeas ovinas. Pubvet, v. 4, p. Art. 850-857, 2010. -/- OLIVEIRA, Daniel de Jesus Cardoso de. Mecanismos neuroendócrinos envolvidos na puberdade de novilhas da raça Nelore. 2006. Tese de Doutorado em Medicina Veterinária. Universidade de São Paulo. -/- OLSTER, DEBORAH H.; FOSTER, DOUGLAS L. Control of gonadotropin secretion in the male during puberty: a decrease in response to steroid inhibitory feedback in the absence of an increase in steroid-independent drive in the sheep. Endocrinology, v. 118, n. 6, p. 2225-2234, 1986. -/- PIRES, Bruno Carlos et al. Métodos para elevar o ritmo reprodutivo dos ovinos. PUBVET, Londrina, V. 5, N. 11, Ed. 158, Art. 1071, 2011. -/- PLANT, Tony M.; ZELEZNIK, Anthony J. (Ed.). Knobil and Neill's physiology of reproduction. New York: Academic Press, 2014. -/- RAMIREZ, Domingo V.; MCCANN, S. M. Comparison of the regulation of luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion in immature and adult rats. Endocrinology, v. 72, n. 3, p. 452-464, 1963. -/- ROSER, JANET F.; HUGHES, JOHN P. Seasonal effects on seminal quality, plasma hormone concentrations, and GnRH‐induced LH response in fertile and subfertile stallions. Journal of andrology, v. 13, n. 3, p. 214-223, 1992. -/- SALOMONI, Eduardo et al. Idade e peso à puberdade em fêmeas de corte puras e cruzas em campo natural. Pesquisa Agropecuária Brasileira, v. 23, n. 10, p. 1171-1179, 1988. -/- SMITH, Jeremy T.; CLARKE, Iain J. Seasonal breeding as a neuroendocrine model for puberty in sheep. Molecular and cellular endocrinology, v. 324, n. 1-2, p. 102-109, 2010. -/- VALENCIA, J. Pubertad y estacionalidad reproductiva. In. PORTA, L. R.; MEDRANO, J. H. H. Fisiología reproductiva de los animales domésticos. Cidade do México: FMVZ-UNAM, 2018. -/- WHITTEMORE, Colin et al. The science and practice of pig production. Blackwell Science Ltd, 1998. -/- -/- -/- FIXAÇÃO DO ASSUNTO -/- -/- 1. Defina o que é puberdade e como ela manifesta-se no corpo. -/- -/- -/- 2. Diferencie puberdade de maturidade sexual. -/- -/- -/- 3. Quais são os fenômenos que devem ser observados em fêmeas que estão entrando na puberdade? -/- -/- -/- 4. Qual o papel do GnRH e do IGF-I sobre a puberdade? -/- 5. Um produtor possui duas ovelhas e um carneiro reprodutor, as ovelhas possuem idade e peso, mas não manifestaram seu primeiro cio, quais elementos que você recomenda ao produtor para induzir a ciclicidade dessas fêmeas? -/- -/- -/- 6. De forma geral, quais os fatores que podem afetar a entrada na puberdade dos animais? -/- -/- -/- 7. Defina estacionalidade reprodutiva. -/- -/- -/- 8. O que é fotoperíodo e qual sua importância para a reprodução dos animais domésticos? -/- -/- -/- 9. Defina as relações existentes entre a origem da raça e o grau de estacionalidade e como tais teorias se aplicam ao rebanho brasileiro. -/- -/- -/- 10. Qual o papel da glândula pineal para a estacionalidade reprodutiva? -/- -/- -/- 11. Por que os machos são menos afetados pela sazonalidade reprodutiva do que as fêmeas? -/- -/- -/- 12. Sabendo-se sobre os termos de puberdade e estacionalidade e as características de ambos nas espécies domésticas, pede-se: um criador deseja obter 5 novas crias ovinas e 5 caprinas em seu plantel até o final do ano, para tanto ele ainda possui um ano e está na estação do verão, sabendo-se sobre a estacionalidade dessas espécies elabore um projeto reprodutivo de modo que essas 10 fêmeas possam gerar uma cria cada até a primavera. -/- -/- Dados: 10 fêmeas gerando 10 crias. 1 macho ovino e 1 caprino. Fêmeas com 1 ano de idade (2º cio) e peso corporal = 55% do peso adulto. Verão de 2020 para parir na primavera de 2020. (shrink)

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of “New Conceptualism.” It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial “generic art” and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music’s New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues that (...) the perspective on New Music it takes has wider implications in music and art. It begins by defining what exactly “New Music” refers to, and outlines some of the conditions for the recent rise of conceptualism in New Music. It then takes the work of the composer Johannes Kreidler as a key example of some artistic tendencies and theoretical presuppositions in New Conceptualism. Following this it draws on work in the field of sound studies in order to critically examine the theoretical attempt to connect New Music with contemporary art that is found in the notion of “Music in the Expanded Field.” To conclude it offers some reflections on how a more robust conversation between contemporary art and New Music can begin to be conceived. (shrink)

Deep learning may transform health care, but model development has largely been dependent on availability of advanced technical expertise. The aim of this study is to develop a deep learning model to predict the gender from retinal fundus images. The proposed model was based on the Xception pre-trained model. The proposed model was trained on 20,000 retinal fundus images from Kaggle depository. The dataset was preprocessed them split into three datasets (training, validation, Testing). After training and cross-validating the proposed model, (...) it was evaluated using the testing dataset. The result of testing, the area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of the model was 0.99, precision, recall, f1-score and accuracy were 99%, precision, recall, f1-score and accuracy were 96.83%, 96.83%, 96.82% and 96.83% respectively.. Clinicians are presently unaware of dissimilar retinal feature variants between females and males, stressing the importance of model explain ability for the prediction of gender from retinal fundus images. The proposed deep learning may enable clinician-driven automated discovery of novel visions and disease biomarkers. (shrink)

In this essay we will take the American experimental composer John Cage’s understanding of sound as the starting point for an evaluation of that term in the field of sound studies. Drawing together two of the most influential figures in the field, Cage’s thought and work will serve as a lens through which to engage with recent debate concerning the uptake in sound studies of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing we will attempt to develop a path between (...) conflicting sides of sound studies, putting forward an understanding of sound that presents it not as an uninterrogated ontological essence, nor as only a term in a discursive web, but as a problem which must be repeatedly posed anew. We will consider points where this may yet be pushed towards a reified, essentialized understanding of the nature of sound, but move to offset this by emphasizing the production of a practical process of learning and experimentation. (shrink)

Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations. . This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil for engaging with these practical (...) and theoretical musical concerns, and for suggesting some heretofore underappreciated distinctions within the ongoing work on multi-agential performance. (shrink)

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore how these ideas have (...) been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with phenomenology, and with the phenomenological problematic of sensation, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Considering Deleuze’s adoption, from the phenomenology of art, of notions of sensation and rhythm, it examines how Deleuze complexifies these phenomenological notions by aligning them with his profoundly non-phenomenological notion of the body without organs, as well as with the concepts of modulation and the diagram. In mapping Deleuze’s complexification of rhythm and his development of a logic (...) of rhythmic modulation, this article shows how Deleuze immanently refines an approach to working beyond phenomenology, through phenomenology. (shrink)

This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox’s realist project of a ‘sonic materialism’ by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze’s work in fact challenges many of the precepts of Cox’s sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze’s work neglected by Cox, the ‘realist’ ontological inquiry Cox affirms is challenged through (...) the ‘onto-ethology’ that Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop in their A Thousand Plateaus, with this diversely constructive theory of relations explicated through musical examples from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. To conclude, this article suggests that Deleuze can indeed be understood as subscribing to a materialism, but a materialism that is practical rather than doctrinal. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of this critique. While (...) Kane argues that Schaeffer’s recourse to myth, coupled with his adoption of Husserlian phenomenology, leads to a closure of his inquiry and a failure to accommodate the contingency of his position, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell brings into focus an open-ended, motivating phenomenological problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity that runs through his thought. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, this paper considers the epistemological significance of this moment in Schaeffer’s thought, suggesting a “problematic” account of the myth of the seashell that puts Schaeffer into conversation with contemporary work in epistemology. (shrink)

In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is relevant to the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction. After discussing some (...) criticisms of ontological and materialist approaches to sound, I consider the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, posed as offering an alternative to these approaches. Following an examination of some limitations to ANT based around the themes of critique and abstraction, I draw from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Georgina Born to suggest that work on improvisation and the posthumanities may be fruitful, but must be part of a pluralistic mode of inquiry that does not reject critique and abstraction, as some work in the posthumanities has done. (shrink)

In this chapter I look at some questions around the notion of experimentation in philosophy, science, and the arts, through the thought of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze. My argument is articulated around three areas of enquiry – Bachelard’s work on the experimental sciences, Deleuze’s notion of philosophy as an experimental practice, and recent musicological debate around the practical and political stakes of the term ‘experimental music’. By drawing together these three senses of experimentation, I test the possibilities of understanding (...) experimentation as a transdisciplinary concept and/or method. I develop a notion of experimentation as open, fluid, and non-hierarchical, but also consider points where such an idea is short-circuited by the reassertion of disciplinary closure and more top-down forms of method. My frame for discussing this question is a commonly posited distinction between the experiment and the experimental. Here the experiment is something like a controlled and closed environment in which a privileged observer tests predefined hypotheses, while the experimental concerns attempts to relinquish such control and to produce contexts in which the unknown and the unexpected can arise. By turning to Bachelard’s studies of the practice of science, I will question the common conception of a disciplinary split between the experiments of science and experimental art, showing both how such a distinction cannot be so neat and how these terms are often not easily separable. Putting this notion into conjunction with recent critical discourse on experimentation in music, namely regarding the kinds of exclusions and closures that the term ‘experimental music’ has produced, and with Deleuze’s criticisms of scientific method as well as the apparent disciplinary closure of his transdisciplinary project that is present and his and Félix Guattari’s final work, What is Philosophy?, I argue that refining our understanding of experimentation as a pluralistic and fragile concept will help us engage with the difficulties raised in these fields. More generally I point towards a project of mapping out the diverse and divergent relations that a transdisciplinary understanding of experimentation may draw between philosophy, science, and art. (shrink)

Rhythm is generally taken to refer to a temporal pattern of events. Yet in recent years, across diverse fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, it has come to serve as the conceptual marker for a wide range of new approaches to understanding relations and relationality, following most explicitly from the late work of Henri Lefebvre. This article explores the temporal aspect of such relational thinking, in particular asking how time is implicated in relations, and how it can be (...) meaningful in those relations. The sense of time is surveyed from the perspectives of both cognition and metaphysics as well as with reference to music scholarship and social theory, and key threads are drawn, from the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Charles Sanders Peirce in particular, in order to suggest that time can be a sign, and that the signifying properties of rhythm have critical social consequences. (shrink)

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, however, is not as (...) transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. -/- Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the status and stakes of Gilles Deleuze’s “break” with structuralism. With a particular focus on a transitional text of Deleuze, the 1967/1972 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” it asks how Deleuze understood structuralism and why, after his encounter with Félix Guattari and Guattari’s own transitional text, 1969’s “Machine and Structure,” Deleuze felt the need to break with structuralism. It argues that reading these two texts together allows us to see that Deleuze already perceived tensions (...) within the structuralist project, and argues that Guattari’s non-structural account of the machine allowed Deleuze to clarify this perception, and see it as necessitating a departure from structuralism. To close, however, it turns to recent work by philosophers such as Étienne Balibar and Patrice Maniglier that re-examines the structuralist moment and identifies an ongoing legacy that the “poststructuralism” of Deleuze and Guattari may be part of. By considering Deleuze and Guattari’s break with structuralism in light of this work, this article considers how the polemical rejection of structuralism by Deleuze and Guattari may not fully account for the ongoing legacy of the structuralist program and the persistence of a structuralist problematic in their thought. (shrink)

I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as (...) developed in Proust and Signs (1964) and Difference and Repetition (1968), following which I sketch Guattari’s engagements with signs and semiotics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through his notion of “a-signifying semiotics” and the concept of the “diagram” he adapts from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. I close by showing how these heterogeneous theories of the sign are drawn together in A Thousand Plateaus through the Spinozist reading of the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll and the theorisation of rhythm in the form of the refrain. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)

Highlights: -/- • Breastfeeding and breastfeeding support can contribute to mitigating climate change. • Achieving global nutrition targets will save more emissions than fuel-switching. • Breastfeeding support programmes support a just transition. • This work can support the expansion of mitigation options in energy system models. -/- Abstract: -/- Renewable gas has been proposed as a solution to decarbonise industrial processes, specifically heat demand. As part of this effort, the breast-milk substitutes industry is proposing to use renewable gas as a (...) substitute for fossil natural gas. However, decarbonising the industrial processing of breast-milk substitutes can increase social license for these products, potentially undermining breastfeeding. World Health Organisation nutrition targets aim to increase exclusive breastfeeding to at least 50% globally by 2025 to improve maternal, infant, and young child health and nutrition. This target will have implications for the energy transition. A weakness of existing energy models is that demands for end-use products such as breast-milk substitutes are typically not considered explicitly. This paper develops an analytical framework for explicitly representing infant feeding methods in energy systems models. We compare the emissions saved in Ireland from decarbonising the industrial processing of breast-milk substitutes with renewable gas with the emissions saved by an increase in exclusive breastfeeding to 50% in both Ireland and a key export market, China. We demonstrate that the emissions saved from achieving the minimum global breastfeeding target are greater than when renewable gas is used to displace natural gas in the production of breast-milk substitutes in Ireland. We discuss the decarbonisation of breast-milk substitutes in relation to the principle of justice as non-maleficence, a principle based on the commitment to avoid harm, a novel application of a principle of justice. We conclude that breastfeeding support can be considered a demand-side measure for mitigating climate change by reducing the demand for energy services to produce breast-milk substitutes. A key recommendation is to position breastfeeding support as both a public health and a climate justice issue that is relevant for a just transition. The framework developed for this paper could be applied to support the inclusion of a wider range of mitigation options with social justice outcomes in energy system models. [Open access]. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a new concept named the uniform single valued neutrosophic graph. An illustrative example and some properties are examined. Next, we develop an algorithmic approach for computing the complement of the single valued neutrosophic graph. A numerical example is demonstrated for computing the complement of single valued neutrosophic graphs and uniform single valued neutrosophic graph.

The study determined the influence of innate mathematical characteristics on the number sense competencies of junior high school students in a Philippine public school. The descriptive-correlational research design was used to accomplish the study involving a nonrandom sample of sixty 7th-grade students attending synchronous math sessions. Data obtained from the math-specific Learning Style and Self-Efficacy questionnaires and the modified Number Sense Test (NST) were analyzed and interpreted using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s Chi-Square, and Simple Linear Regression analysis. The research instruments and (...) statistics were all validated and tested for reliability. The analysis revealed that the students are visual learners, had no or slight self-efficacy, and their number sense competency level is poor. They encountered difficulty in all the components and domains of the NST. Moreover, the students’ mathematical self-efficacy is significantly related and may influence their number sense competency level. Building upon the learners’ self-efficacy to further their understanding and skills in number sense is necessary. (shrink)

A dilemma exists when a doctor is faced with a child or young person who refuses medically indicated treatment. The Gillick case has been interpreted by many to mean that a child of sufficient age and intelligence could validly consent or refuse consent to treatment. Recent decisions of the Court of Appeal on a child's refusal of medical treatment have clouded the issue and undermined the spirit of the Gillick decision and the Children Act 1989. It is now the case (...) that a child patient whose competence is in doubt will be found rational if he or she accepts the proposal to treat but may be found incompetent if he or she disagrees. Practitioners are alerted to the anomalies now exhibited by the law on the issue of children's consent and refusal. The impact of the decisions from the perspectives of medicine, ethics, and the law are examined. Practitioners should review each case of child care carefully and in cases of doubt seek legal advice. (shrink)

Atualmente, biotecnologias são empregadas na forma de protocolos a fim de sincronizar o crescimento folicular e a ovulação, bem como permitir que vacas atuem como receptoras de embriões visando melhorar o potencial genético do rebanho. O objetivo desse estudo foi avaliar o efeito da utilização de implantes intravaginais de progesterona de 1º, 2º e 3º uso no protocolo de transferência de embriões em tempo fixo (TETF) sobre a taxa de prenhez em receptoras girolandas. O experimento ocorreu em uma fazenda localizada (...) no município de São Sebastião do Maranhão (MG). Foram utilizadas 74 vacas submetidas aos seguintes protocolos: No dia 0 (D0) administrou-se 2 ml de 17β-Estradiol e progesterona e foi colocado o implante intravaginal de progesterona. Estes implantes foram colocados de forma aleatória, sendo de 1° uso (grupo 1; n=15), 2° (grupo 2; n=24) ou 3° (grupo 3; n=35).No D8, os implantes foram retirados e administrou-se 2 ml PGF2α; 1,5 ml de eCG e 1 ml de 17β-Estradiol e progesterona. A inovulação dos embriões in vitroo correu no D (16) para todas as vacas que apresentaram um corpo lúteo. As variáveis qualitativas (prenhe ou não prenhe) foram comparadas em tabelas de contingência e analisadas pelo teste de qui-quadrado a 5% de probabilidade. Neste estudo não houve diferença estatística entre os grupos protocolados em relação ao aproveitamento como receptoras: 1º uso (53,3%), 2º (79,2%) e 3º (68,65). Ademais, observou-se uma taxa de prenhez entre os grupos de 37,5% para o 1º uso, 42,1% para o 2º e 33,3% para o 3º (P>0,05). Dentre as vantagens ao reaproveitamento dos implantes multiusos destaca-se a redução dos custos dos protocolos hormonais, já que a progesterona é o hormônio mais oneroso, desta forma, a maximização do uso reduz o valor final do protocolo sem prejuízos a taxa de prenhez. (shrink)

This study investigates the dynamics of brick-and-mortar versus click-and-mortar microbusinesses, focusing on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) within the local context of Balayan. Ten purposively sampled microbusiness entrepreneurs were examined using the SWOT method. The findings underscore the significance of product assessment, communication, and customer experiences in cultivating trust. Sensory experiences and competitive pricing emerge as strengths, while challenges such as poor sales necessitate strategic interventions. External factors, particularly technological advancements, exert influence on the retail landscape. Key strategies (...) include competitive pricing, flexibility, and an understanding of customer behavior. The study highlights growth potential in tailored experiences but acknowledges the risks posed by e-commerce competition. Additionally, a SWOT strategic plan is developed to leverage internal and external strengths and opportunities while mitigating weaknesses and threats. (shrink)

How might emerging and future technologies—sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, or algorithms to track, quantify, and ‘gamify’ romantic relationships—change how we understand and value love? We canvass some of the main ethical worries posed by such technologies, while also considering whether there are reasons for “cautious optimism” about their implications for our lives. Along the way, we touch on some key ideas from the philosophies of love and technology.

We develop a conceptually clear, intuitive, and feasible decision procedure for testing satisfiability in the full multi\-agent epistemic logic \CMAELCD\ with operators for common and distributed knowledge for all coalitions of agents mentioned in the language. To that end, we introduce Hintikka structures for \CMAELCD\ and prove that satisfiability in such structures is equivalent to satisfiability in standard models. Using that result, we design an incremental tableau-building procedure that eventually constructs a satisfying Hintikka structure for every satisfiable input set of (...) formulae of \CMAELCD\ and closes for every unsatisfiable input set of formulae. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) web resource provides an integrative framework for protein-centric exploration and enables specific and precise annotation of proteins and protein complexes based on PRO. Functionalities include: browsing, searching and retrieving, terms, displaying selected terms in OBO or OWL format, and supporting URIs. In addition, the PRO website offers multiple ways for the user to request, submit, or modify terms and/or annotation. We will demonstrate the use of these tools for protein research and annotation.

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

This article synthesizes the results of several interviews with argumentation scholars from across the American continents to address three questions regarding the connections in argumentation studies between North and South/Central America: “What motivated the study of argumentation in the Americas?” “What commonalities, if any, exist in argumentation studies across the Americas?” and “What should the future of argumentation studies in the Americas look like?” Using these interviews in combination with existing textual sources, the article also provides motivated suggestions for directions (...) for the future of the community in the field. (shrink)

In recent years noise seems to have become an interdisciplinary concept par excellence, apt to capturing important dynamics at work whether in technological, scientific, social, or aesthetic domains. But when economists, biologists, psychologists, and musicians speak of noise, are they really all referring to the same thing? In An Epistemology of Noise Cecile Malaspina takes this dispersion of the notion of noise as a starting point, and moreover accepts that, when removed from its mathematical formulation in information theory and spread (...) into diverse disciplines, noise takes on a metaphorical ambiguity. Yet rather than aiming to eliminate this ambiguity, Malaspina sets out to account for it. The key problem in An Epistemology of Noise is not to identify the legitimate usage of the concept of noise, but rather to examine what happens when noise moves between disciplines, and what the ‘noisiness’ of this movement tells us about the conditions for interdisciplinary knowledge. Noise here is both an object (or many objects) of inquiry and a condition for that inquiry, and presents us with the problem of how knowledge can find its ground in these ‘shifting sands’ (9). (shrink)

Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. But deliberation can prevent majority cycles – not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to single-peakedness. The increases are greater for lower versus higher salience issues and for individuals who seem to have (...) deliberated more versus less effectively. They are not merely a byproduct of increased substantive agreement. Our results both refine and support the idea that deliberation, by increasing proximity to single-peakedness, provides an escape from the problem of majority cycling. (shrink)

Defense of an account of intrinsic properties in terms of (what is now called) grounding rather than naturalness.

Susan Schneider (2019) has proposed two new tests for consciousness in AI (artificial intelligence) systems, the AI Consciousness Test and the Chip Test. On their face, the two tests seem to have the virtue of proving satisfactory to a wide range of consciousness theorists holding divergent theoretical positions, rather than narrowly relying on the truth of any particular theory of consciousness. Unfortunately, both tests are undermined in having an ‘audience problem’: Those theorists with the kind of architectural worries that motivate (...) the need for such tests should, on similar grounds, doubt that the tests establish the existence of genuine consciousness in the AI in question. Nonetheless, the proposed tests constitute progress, as they could find use by some theorists holding fitting views about consciousness and perhaps in conjunction with other tests for AI consciousness. (shrink)

Vendler’s :161–173, 1979) puzzle about imagination is that the sentences ‘Imagine swimming in that water’ and ‘Imagine yourself swimming in that water’ seem at once semantically different and semantically the same. They seem semantically different, since the first requires you to imagine ’from the inside’, while the second allows you to imagine ’from the outside.’ They seem semantically the same, since despite superficial dissimilarity, there is good reason to think that they are syntactically and lexically identical. This paper sets out (...) the puzzle and offers a novel solution. Our proposal is that, just as there is knowledge-wh, there is also imagining-wh and that the inside/outside distinction Vendler points to is properly understood as a distinction within imagining-wh. In particular, to imagine swimming from the inside is to imagine what it feels like to swim, while to imagine swimming from the outside is to imagine what it looks like to swim. We show that this proposal is well grounded in both the semantics and syntax of ‘imagine.’ We also argue it makes better sense than its rivals of the data Vendler found so puzzling. (shrink)

The paper looks at the semantics and ontology of dispositions in the light of recent work on the subject. Objections to the simple conditionals apparently entailed by disposition statements are met by replacing them with so-called 'reduction sentences' and some implications of this are explored. The usual distinction between categorical and dispositional properties is criticised and the relation between dispositions and their bases examined. Applying this discussion to two typical cases leads to the conclusion that fragility is not a real (...) property and that, while both temperature and its bases are, this does not generate any problem of overdetermination. (shrink)

Global challenges such as climate change, food security, or public health have become dominant concerns in research and innovation policy. This article examines how responses to these challenges are addressed by governance actors. We argue that appeals to global challenges can give rise to a ‘solution strategy' that presents responses of dominant actors as solutions and a ‘negotiation strategy' that highlights the availability of heterogeneous and often conflicting responses. On the basis of interviews and document analyses, the study identifies both (...) strategies across local, national, and European levels. While our results demonstrate the co-existence of both strategies, we find that global challenges are most commonly highlighted together with the solutions offered by dominant actors. Global challenges are ‘wicked problems' that often become misframed as ‘tame problems’ in governance practice and thereby legitimise dominant responses. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept and role of ‘institutional racism’ in contemporary discussions of race should be reconsidered. It starts by distinguishing between ‘intrinsic institutional racism’, which holds that institutions are racist in virtue of their constitutive features, and ‘extrinsic institutional racism’, which holds that institutions are racist in virtue of their negative effects. It accepts intrinsic institutional racism, but argues that a ‘disparate impact’ conception of extrinsic conception faces a number of objections, the most serious being that it (...) has no plausible account of what it is that makes extrinsically racist institutions racist. It also argues that claims about the explanatory indispensability of institutional racism are overstated (individual racism is at least as important), critiques structural approaches to racial inequality, and suggests that there is reason to doubt whether institutional reform can provide us with all that morality may require in the racial domain. (shrink)

This article discusses the adequacy of Rawls’ theory of justice as a tool for racial justice. It is argued that critics like Charles W Mills fail to appreciate both the insights and limits of the Rawlsian framework. The article has two main parts spread out over several different sections. The first is concerned with whether the Rawlsian framework suffices to prevent racial injustice. It is argued that there are reasons to doubt whether it does. The second part is concerned with (...) whether a Rawlsian framework has the resources to rectify past racial injustice. It is argued that it has more resources to do this than Mills allows. This second part of the article centers on two Rawlsian ideas: ideal theory and the fair equality of opportunity principle. It is argued that ideal theory is essential for the kind of rectificatory work that Mills wants nonideal theory to do, and that where there is a socioeconomic legacy of past injustice, it is hard to see how FEO could be implemented if it did no rectificatory work, a result which means that there is less need to turn to nonideal theory at all. (shrink)

This paper rigorously examines the primitive foundations of economic reasoning through a framework based on symbolic logic. Extending previous work, it formalizes economic conceptions (\(\mathbb{C}\)), symbols (\(s_i\)), and introduces a structured language (\(\mathcal{L_{\mathbb{C}}}\)) to define their formation and interpretation. Organized as a continuous chain of declarations and illustrations, the paper offers a concise, systematic approach to understanding the philosophy of economic reasoning through formal symbolic representations.

This essays attempts to bridge the debate between Hu Shih and D.T. Suzuki concerning the role of history vs. practice in Chan/Zen Buddhism.

This paper is an original attempt to understand the foundations of economic reasoning. It endeavors to rigorously define the relationship between subjective interpretations and objective valuations of such interpretations in the context of theoretical economics. This analysis is substantially expanded through a dynamic approach, where the truth of a valuation results in an updated interpretation or changes in the agent's subjective belief regarding the effectiveness of the selected action as well as the objective reality of the effectiveness of all other (...) possible actions (i.e. consequence realization). Complications arise when the economic agent is presented with a set of actions that render ambiguous preference, or when the effectiveness of an action cannot be perceived upon its selection, thereby necessitating a different theory of choice and consequence realization. (shrink)

Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

The field of AI safety aims to prevent increasingly capable artificially intelligent systems from causing humans harm. Research on moral alignment is widely thought to offer a promising safety strategy: if we can equip AI systems with appropriate ethical rules, according to this line of thought, they'll be unlikely to disempower, destroy or otherwise seriously harm us. Deontological morality looks like a particularly attractive candidate for an alignment target, given its popularity, relative technical tractability and commitment to harm-avoidance principles. I (...) argue that the connection between moral alignment and safe behavior is more tenuous than many have hoped. In general, AI systems can possess either of these properties in the absence of the other, and we should favor safety when the two conflict. In particular, advanced AI systems governed by standard versions of deontology need not be especially safe. (shrink)