The author argues that consciousness, just like matter and energy, space and time, life and self, knowledge and intelligence, and language and meaning, may never be defined or explained fundamentally or comprehensively as entities or their properties. As an alternative, the author created a theoretical mind with matter, energy, and lives as its components, and with all its components defined as changes. Based on the relationships among these three components, a triple definition or explanation of consciousness is reached: • Ontologically, (...) consciousness is universal, since it is the distinction between matter and energy. • Epistemologically, consciousness is unique, since it is the energy formalized, qualified, or diversified by the matter. • Semantically, consciousness is a meaningless language with lives as its only meaning. Many theories of consciousness have neglected this universality or uniqueness and have even ignored that life is the only cause or effect of consciousness. No consciousness may ever be consciousness in the absence of life. -/- . (shrink)

It seems to the author that, though it is possible to reach an explanation of consciousness, there is no direct way for us to go. In other words, the author believes that, only through a detour, through an understanding of everything outside mind, we may and can and will finally reach an understanding of those inside. The author tries in this article to discuss some details of such a detour, first from the understanding of Being and being, universe and life, (...) organism and human, and finally to the understanding of the mind and the mystery of our consciousness. Here, to understand Being is the core activities of the whole detour, and there the being is understandably the source and the nature of life and consciousness. (shrink)

Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether it is caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as ‘yellow (...) fever’, to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racial social meanings. (shrink)

Consciousness may not only be a problem how to know the brain but also a problem how to understand what known. Understanding is always an ontological system created as the explanation of what known by us. And, if all brains, including human brains, may be defined as the mind, consciousness must be part of our understanding of the mind. The author argues that no mind may exist if not be a life or lives, no life may exist if not be (...) a mind or a part of it, and, if it is the mind that needs to be explained, it must finally and fundamentally be explained as a life or a living system. An ontological definition of life is proposed first in this article, which is also applicable to fields such as physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. Based on an analysis of two kinds of lives and their relationship with matter and energy, a living system is modeled as the organization of two system relations, which explains not only consciousness but also wakefulness, emotion, intelligence, language and mind-body relationship. And finally, a semantic theory is reached, which takes lives as the only meaning of all symmetrical and conservative changes, such as the location changes or form changes of consciousness, or the state changes of memories. The concept of life, the model of living systems and the semantic theory together provide a framework for us to understand what and how consciousness is, why there is consciousness, where and when consciousness occurs. (shrink)

Complexity may not be defined or explained with entities and properties. Instead, a system is proposed ontologically, epistemologically, and semantically as the definition or explanation in this paper, with matter, energy and lives as its components, and with all its components defined as changes, which might improve upon our prediction in/with complexity. -/- .

The yin yang model of thinking is most essential to the Chinese cosmology, ontology and outlook on life. This paper is a systematic discussion of such a dialectical way of thinking and its significance. It starts with investigating the origin and the meaning of terms “yin” and “yang”, and explains the later developed yin yang doctrine; it then shows how greatly and profoundly the yin yang model of thinking has influenced Chinese philosophy and Chinese character. It concludes that Chinese naturalistic, (...) dialectical, and optimistic attitudes toward the world and life are all based on the yin yang model of thinking and that the yin yang doctrine is the starting point for anyone to understand Chinese people and their philosophies. (shrink)

The author argues that consciousness and its meaning may only be defined and explained within an ontological system. Such a system is proposed in this article, with matter, energy, and life as its components, and with all its components defined as changes. The systematic relations between matter and energy and the semantic relations among all its components together may define and explain what and how consciousness is, why there is consciousness, where and when it may occur, and what is its (...) significance or meaning. (shrink)

With this article, the author argues that in reality nothing is or isn’t itself, that everything is both a relative proof and an absolute proof of God’s existence, and that our language, such as “nature” or “god”, is the only obstacle between Nature and God.

God is free. If free, God certainly hates being omniscient, omnipotent, eternal and perfection. If God hates so, ....

Against ideas of dualism, logocentrism, anthropocentrism, animism, panpsychism, biocentrism, neurocentrism, foundationalism, computationalism, especially substantialism, reductionism and even physicalism, the author argues that life may be the only non-reductive concept, even the only ontological concept, with which we may explain our consciousness, intelligence and language. Life, as defined in this article, explains but not only human brains, and even not only biological organisms. Still, the mind, also as defined in this article, is the only one it explains. No mind may exist (...) if not be a life or lives, and no life may exist if not be a mind or a part of it. If it is the mind that needs to be explained, it must finally and fundamentally be explained as a life or lives. If the question is about the origin of the mind, a life or lives must be the ultimate answer. In other words, life is the only attribute of mind, and mind also the only attribute of life, and therefore, consciousness, intelligence and language must be the properties of all the living systems, including non-biological living systems. A model of mind is hypothesized based on the analysis of two kinds of lives and their relationship with matter and energy. It may be deduced from this model: 1. All the memories of a living brain are its intelligence. 2. Both consciousness and nonconscious are only meaningless languages used in the communication among lives in an awakened brain. 3. Life is the only meaning of all those memories and languages. Ontologically, life may even be the only meaning of all matter and energy. -/- (A version of this article was published by the Journal of NeuroPhilosophy on 26.10.2022). (shrink)

“Being” or “being and beings” might be the meta-notion when philosophy and science were still sharing the same mind or minds in ancient Greek and Europe. To find its meaning and to become a part of the meaning are however more and more vital nowadays, not for philosophy but for science, especially for physics and biology. The author proposes in this essay that this concept may mean to us nothing more or less than the unity or unification of Parmenides’ idea (...) “being is one” and Heraclitus’ idea “all things are in flux and nothing may remain the same”. That is just as to say that a being and an entity may never be identified with the same boundary. In other words, nothing or none should ever be understood as a being. This understanding is conceptualized and linguisticalized by the author as the compound symbol “OC”. And the OC represents a synthetic and also analytical understanding of both our universe and us together. And its value and strength may be found more obvious in his concise discussion, in the last part of the essay, on the OC’s meanings to ontology, epistemology, axiology, logic, mathematics, physics, biology, cosmogony and more. (shrink)

Scientism denies change and creation in science, and humanism denies change and creation in humanity. They leave no room for freedom, equality and fraternity. This book is written as the deconstruction of both scientism and humanism.

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. However, most reports of scientific results in the published literature make it difficult for the reader to reproduce the statistical analyses performed in achieving those results because they provide inadequate documentation of the statistical tests and algorithms applied. The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) is put forward here as a step towards solving this problem. Terms in OBCS, including ‘data collection’, ‘data transformation in statistics’, ‘data visualization’, ‘statistical data (...) analysis’, and ‘drawing a conclusion based on data’, cover the major types of statistical processes used in basic biological research and clinical outcome studies. OBCS is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry ontology supported by over 20 research communities. We discuss two examples illustrating how the ontology is being applied. In the first (biological) use case, we describe how OBCS was applied to represent the high throughput microarray data analysis of immunological transcriptional profiles in human subjects vaccinated with an influenza vaccine. In the second (clinical outcomes) use case, we applied OBCS to represent the processing of electronic health care data to determine the associations between hospital staffing levels and patient mortality. Our case studies were designed to show how OBCS can be used for the consistent representation of statistical analysis pipelines under two different research paradigms. By representing statistics-related terms and their relations in a rigorous fashion, OBCS facilitates standard data analysis and integration, and supports reproducible biological and clinical research. (shrink)

Based on the ontological proposition, “life is the only attribute of mind, and mind also the only attribute of life”, a model of the human mind is hypothesized in this article. It may be deduced from the proposition and the model: 1. All the structures of a brain are the potentials of its intelligence. 2. Consciousness is only the language used in the communication of an awakened brain. 3. Qualia are the same mental language manipulated by different memories. 4. Life (...) is the only meaning of all mental languages. -/- . (shrink)

Prominent memeticists like Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore have made claims far more radical than those included in Dawkins’ original proposal, which provoked increasingly heated debates and arguments over the theoretical significance as well as limits or flaws of the entire memetic enterprise. In this paper, I examine closely some of the critical points taken by Kate Distin in her penetrating engagement with those radical claims, which include such ideas as the thought that we are meme machines as much as (...) gene machines, the thesis that there is no conscious self inside those machines, and the claim that a complex interplay of replicators and environment is all there is to life (Blackmore 1999: 241). It is hoped that a viable thesis concerning a deep-seated normativity emerges from my discussion. (shrink)

Scientism denies change and creation in science, and humanism denies change and creation in humanity. They leave no room for freedom, equality and fraternity. The paper is written as the deconstruction of both scientism and humanism.

每本书都能有自己的一个名字，这实在是一件有趣且意味深长的事情。 这本书的名字，《存在或上帝 —— 对西方意识形态的建设性批判》，虽然长了点，但同样不失其有趣与意味深长。 书名中所谓的“西方意识形态”，指的是起源于西方世界，贯穿于西方历史，激发并引导了神学、哲学、数学、逻辑、艺术、科学、心理、经济、社会、环境、政治和军事等不同方面的理论和实践活动在西方的出现和发展，并造 就了西方人生活现状的那些最根本的理想或信念。 “对西方意识形态的批判”意味着，在本书作者看来，那些最根本的理想或信念并不完美，并不自洽，而且，不仅有必要也同样有可能变得更完美。 “对西方意识形态的建设性批判”则意味着，本书的重点并不是“批判”而是“建设”。这种建设性批判，主要涉及到两个极为重要的理想或信念的不自洽和不完美，其中一个是“存在”，另一个便是“上帝”。 至于书名中的“存在或上帝”，说的不仅是“存在”和“上帝” 的不自洽、不完美，说的不仅是使这两个概念更完美的必要性与可能性，说的不仅是使它们同一或统一的可能性与必要性，同时亦向读者提示了贯彻本书始终的那个基本方法或那条基本思路：在一切之间，有一切之存在。 无论是远在过去还是时至今日，对于许多西方人来说，“存在”与“上帝”这两个概念，既是一切问题之问题，又是一切答案之答案，不仅涉及到他们的过去，更涉及到了他们的未来。换句话说，“存在”与“上帝”所涉及到的 绝非仅仅只是人们所面对的那个世界，同样涉及到那个世界所面对的人本身，绝非仅仅只涉及到那个世界所承负着的“非我”，同样涉及到人们所承负着的那个“自我”，涉及到，我们每个人用“非我”为自己的“自我”所做的 每一件事情，涉及到了“自我”与“非我”的关系，特别是自由与必然之间的关系。 由此可见，这问题和答案绝非仅仅只是向西方人提出，亦绝非只应由西方人给出。对每个和所有人来说，这都同样有可能成为一个问题，我们又都以某种方式在给出一份自己的答案。甚至可以说，任何一种人生，人生中的任何一 件大事或小事，所留下的，无一不是这个问题，亦无一不是对这个问题的回答。 作为对这个问题的提出和对那个答案的探索，本书的第一章讨论了“存在”，最后一篇附录的文章讨论了“上帝”，而在它们之间的八个章节和所有附录的文章中，通过对宇宙、生命、生物、心灵、自我、人和社会的本体论理解 ，讨论的则是“自由” ，特别是“自由”与“平等”之间的相互依存，因为只有通过自由与平等的相互依存，“存在”与“上帝”方才能得以完美自洽，方才能回归于彼此。 通过这些讨论，本书顺便还介绍了两种尚且不为大多数西方人所知所行的自由，源于平等的自由和超越平等的自由。 因为存在或上帝既成就又超越了我们已有的一切知识，无论这知识是语言、哲学、逻辑、数学还是科学，所以，本书在内容和方法上同样既尊重它们又不为之所限。这种对现存全部知识既尊重又不为之所限的态度和做法，固然是 对形而上传统的继承，固然在自由主义中有其思想根源，亦可以说是本书作者对爱因斯坦所说“想象比知识更重要”那句话的理解、证明、实践和发扬光大。 既尊重又要超越一切知识，对任何人来说都不是一件容易做到的事情，但也同样不是一件不可能的事情。本书将一步一步地向读者解释并证明这一道理，证明这不仅符合存在或上帝的本性，也正是存在或上帝一直以来的所作所为 。 也许，无论是过去还是未来，无论是在西方还是在东方，只有当理解这本性和那所作所为之后，一个人才有可能最终走出自己，才有可能成就自己的真实与自由，人类才有可能最终走出柏拉图所说的那个洞穴，才有可能既生活在 存在的真实无妄之中，也生活在上帝的自由自在之中。 .

We may never understand what the phrase “human being” means if we do not try to understand ontological meaning of the concept “Being” or “being” or “beings”. With two essays presented together, the author tries to explain not only this concept but also its ontological consequence to other concepts such as “universe”, “life”, “organism”, “human” and “human mind”.

This paper primarily investigates the following questions: The first question：What is the basic structure of consciousness? I proposed that objects moving at the speed of light form the fundamental structure of consciousness. The second question:How is the unified field of the conscious self formed? The study suggests that countless particles moving at the speed of light, through quantum entanglement, form the unified field of each individual's consciousness. Each individual's unified field consists of countless particles originating from a source, which can (...) be referred to as the "soul quantum." The third question:What is the mechanism underlying the formation of different forms of imagery (images, sounds, and bodily sensations)? The study posits that when the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics collapses, it results in different forms of imagery. (shrink)

This article presents a robust defense of the concept of “datafied enhancement” as a subset of human enhancement. Firstly, the author notes that the widespread development of ICT and AI technologies has made it possible to collect and analyze human biometric data, thus integrating data into the concept of embodiment. Secondly, the author explores the cultural and intellectual history of datafied enhancement, highlighting the significant role data has played in human evolution. Thirdly, the author examines the functional classifications of datafied (...) enhancement, arguing that conversational, wearable, ingestible, and embeddable technological devices can enhance individuals’ physical, cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities by collecting body data. Fourthly, the author underscores the importance of distinguishing datafied enhancement from dataism to avoid misconceptions. Finally, the author addresses potential ethical issues, such as data exclusivity, the uncontrollable data self, and privacy invasion. By acknowledging these risks, datafied enhancement can be guided to become a technology that respects human dignity and promotes the common good. (shrink)

When a widely reused ontology appears in a new version which is not compatible with older versions, the ontologies reusing it need to be updated accordingly. Ontobull has been developed to automatically update ontologies with new term IRI(s) and associated metadata to take account of such version changes. To use the Ontobull web interface a user is required to (i) upload one or more ontology OWL source files; (ii) input an ontology term IRI mapping; and (where needed) (iii) provide update (...) settings for ontology headers and XML namespace IDs. Using this information, the backend Ontobull Java program automatically updates the OWL ontology files with desired term IRIs and ontology metadata. The Ontobull subprogram BFOConvert supports the conversion of an ontology that imports a previous version of BFO. A use case is provided to demonstrate the features of Ontobull and BFOConvert. (shrink)

Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases, and extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery. A community-based Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions (OHMI) was developed following the OBO Foundry principles. OHMI leverages established (...) ontologies to create logically structured representations of microbiomes, microbial taxonomy, host species, host anatomical entities, and HMIs under different conditions and associated study protocols and types of data analysis and experimental results. (shrink)

Ordinary action explanation formulated as "I am doing A because I am doing B" is explanation of an action in terms of another action-in-progress. According to Michael Thompson, the explained action is a teleological part of the explaining complex action, which is composed of different parts. Thompson's analysis focuses on the part-whole relation between the explained action and the explaining action, thus ignores a possibility: these two actions can be two different parts of a complex action. I shall argue that (...) the interrelation between different parts of a complex action corresponds to a new kind of action explanation of the formulas: "I am doing A because I am doing B" and "I am doing B because I have done A", where A and B are two different parts of a complex action. This kind of action explanation is associated with the temporal schema of an action-type, for example, X: First, do A; second, do B; then, C; finally, D. This is an attempt to probe into the inner structure of complex action. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to illustrate human–nature relations from a comparative study of the contexts of later Merleau-Ponty and the Zhuangzi. I argue that the Zhuangzi has its own phenomenology of the natural world, which is worth comparing to Merleau-Pontian later phenomenology. To compare the arguments on human–nature relations in the contexts of later Merleau-Ponty and the Zhuangzi in detail, first, I briefly compare the cultural philosophies of nature in ancient Greece and China and their possible influences (...) on our contemporary understanding of nature. Second, I compare the concept of “flesh” of Merleau-Ponty with the concept of “vital energy” in the Zhuangzi and point out the main roles of these concepts in their respective theories of the natural world. Third, I use the “reversibility thesis” created by Merleau-Ponty to analyze the ontological significance of illness in the arguments of Merleau-Ponty and the Zhuangzi. Fourth, inspired by Merleau-Pontian and Zhuangzian ideas about language and expression, I expound on a view of illness as a primordial language of nature and its possible role in mediating human–nature relations. Ultimately, I conclude that the comparative study of thoughts on human–nature relations in the literatures of later Merleau-Ponty and the Zhuangzi can help us reconsider and readjust our main attitudes toward nature, illness and nonhuman beings in the contemporary postpandemic era. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. To promote logically consistent representation and classification of statistical entities, we have developed the Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS). OBCS extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO Foundry ontology supported by some 20 communities. Currently, OBCS contains 686 terms, including 381 classes imported from OBI and 147 classes specific to OBCS. The goal of this paper is to present OBCS for community critique and to describe a (...) number of use cases designed to illustrate its potential applications. The OBCS project and source code are available at http://obcs.googlecode.com. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

This paper is a study about Philadelphia’s comprehensive user engagement sites (CUESs) as the authors address and examine issues related to the upcoming implementation of a CUES while seeking solutions for its disputed questions and plans. Beginning with the federal drug schedules, the authors visit some of the medical and public health issues vis-à-vis safe injection facilities (SIFs). Insite, a successful Canadian SIF, has been thoroughly researched as it represents a paradigm for which a Philadelphia CUES can expand upon. Also, (...) the existing criticisms against SIFs are revisited while critically unpackaged and responded to in favor of the establishment. In the main section, the authors propose the layout and services of the upcoming CUES, much of which would be in congruent to Vancouver’s Insite. On the other hand, the CUES would be distinct from Insite, as the authors emphasize, in that it will offer an information center run by individuals in recovery and place additional emphasis on early education for young healthcare professionals by providing them a platform to work at the site. The paper will also briefly investigate the implementation of a CUES site under an ethical scope of the Harm Reduction Theory. Lastly, the authors recommend some strategic plans that the Philadelphia City government may consider employing at this crucial stage. (shrink)

In the contemporary free will debate between compatibilism — the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilism — that free will is incompatible with determinism, many scholars are sympathetic to compatibilism, yet disagree in how the position is best characterized. As one of the most important branches of source compatibilism, reasons-responsive theories attempt to address an important issue, namely, what type of person can be regarded as moral agents. There are several controversial points within the theory. This (...) paper aims to show that reasons-responsive theories fail as a solution to the free will debate, to the extent that they remain silent on the issue of the nature of reasons. It is this silence and inadequacy that constitute a rebuttal to reasons-responsive theories. In what follows I will propose a dilemma to reasons-responsive theories: if moral reasons are objective in the sense that one could be wrong about them, it appears that one must be a moral expert to possess the so-called “reasons-reactivity”, a necessary condition for the possession of free will. This will later be shown to be deeply implausible. If moral reasons are instead subjective in the sense that whether one has a moral reason to do X crucially depends on his mental states, then reasons-responsiveness seems to have no connection with free will at all. In addition, there are independent grounds on which the subjective account of the nature of reason can be challenged. Therefore, no matter which road reasons-responsive theorists choose to go down, there are serious objections that cast doubt on their plausibility. At the end of the paper, I will touch on the question of why reasons-responsive theories are doomed to failure due to their lack of concern with the agent’s own psychology. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

A scarcity mindset is considered to impact consumer behaviors. Our research aimed to examine the moderating effect of the scarcity mindset on the relationship between mental accounting and hedonic (vs. utilitarian) consumption. We conducted an online experimental design (mental accounting: windfall gains vs. hard-earning gains; consumption: hedonic products vs. utilitarian products) and verified our hypotheses in two distinct samples: a student sample and an adult sample. Our results showed that consumers who received windfall gains tended to use it for hedonic (...) consumption rather than utilitarian consumption. Intriguingly, such an effect was insignificant under a high level of a scarcity mindset but significant under a low level of the scarcity mindset. Moreover, consumers who received hard-earning gains tended to spend the money on utilitarian (vs. hedonic) consumption. However, we did not detect the impact of the scarcity mindset on such effects. Our research suggested an asymmetric effect of the scarcity mindset on hedonic (vs. utilitarian) consumption under two different mental accounts. It highlights the important role of the scarcity mindset in consumer behaviors, which leaves avenues for future research to understand marketing promotion strategies for distinct products. (shrink)

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in (...) other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. (shrink)

In this article we wonder how a person can discharge the political responsibility for supporting and benefiting from unjust social structures. Firstly, we introduce the concept of structural injustice and defend it against three possible objections: ‘explanatory nationalism’, a diachronic interpretation of the benefits of industry-led growth, being part of a social structure does not automatically mean being responsible for its negative consequences. Then, we hold that both Iris Marion Young’s ‘social connection model’ and Robin Zheng’s ‘role-ideal model’ provide (...) clear indications on how to unload responsibility for supporting/participating in unjust social structures, but fail to explain how to get rid of responsibility for unjust enrichment. We maintain that both models should be complemented with a global redistributive scheme that allows to disgorge the benefits that are unfairly obtained in the global economic system, besides undertaking collective transformative actions and assuming ideal-role responsibilities. (shrink)

But the modelling of the Confucian gentleman or junzi type of human being under the music simile and the rules of propriety (li) 禮 needs to be brought within the perspective of the Confucian use of language and the ultimately harmonising role of this philosophy. Such considerations lead us back to a concept that Pound was always keen to produce in his expositions, and refers directly to the importance of precise language usage. Pound's first concern for 'le mot juste' and (...) later for zheng ming 正名 is consistent throughout his career. (shrink)

Sustainable Finance is the procedure of taking Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into consideration when making financial investment decisions (Zheng et al., 2021). Changing climate, moderation, adaptation, and the larger environment are all causes of environmental issues. Conservation of biodiversity, pollution avoidance, and circular economics are all part of it. Labor relations, investments in human capital and communities, and human rights challenges are examples of social factors. The governance of governmental and non - governmental businesses, including management structures, (...) employee relations, and executive payment, is critical in ensuring that social and environmental factors . (shrink)

A taioba orelha-de-elefante-gigante (TOEG) (Alocasia macrorrhizos) na alimentação animal tem sido utilizada como fonte de suplemento nutricional em diferentes propriedades pecuárias. Uma característica nutricional da TOEG é o acúmulo de amidos em seu caule ou medula, sendo um nutriente essencial para o fornecimento de energia ao animal (Wattiaux, 1996), da mesma forma o alto teor de proteínas nas folhas faz com que esta planta seja considerada como suplemento proteico nas dietas de diferentes sistemas de produção animal. Além da contribuição de (...) gorduras, vitaminas e minerais (Chowdhry e Hussain, 1979 citado por Wen, Luo e Zheng, 1997), além disso, a contribuição de 1.148 mg/kg de xantofilas em base seca de farinha de folhas de A. macrorrhizos tem sido considerado benéfico na alimentação de frangos de corte e galinhas poedeiras, pois o aumento da cor tanto das carcaças quanto da gema do ovo aumenta a aceitação do produto por parte dos consumidores (Luifa 1997 citado por Ponsano 2004, Ofosu 2008, Wen, Luo e Zheng, 1997). (shrink)

Iris Marion Young (2011) introduces a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of responsibility through the elaboration of her Social Connection Model (SCM) to combat structural injustice. This model offers a shared political understanding of responsibility, aiming to avoid victim-blaming and the imposition of supererogatory duties on the oppressed. However, two objections emerge regarding the application of the SCM. First, Young’s approach of assigning differentiated duties based on individual circumstances raises concerns about potential evasion by both oppressors and victims, leading to (...) the phenomenon of ‘undererogation’. Second, some question the SCM’s effectiveness in transcending blame, with the allocation of differentiated duties potentially resulting in a resurgence of victim-blaming. In this paper, I address both objections in relation to the issue of patriarchal bargains. To tackle the first, I propose turning to Serene Khader’s deliberative perfectionist approach (Khader 2011), which advocates for an intersubjectively defined spectrum of vulnerability. This spectrum can help determine the scope and degrees of victims’ duties, thus mitigating the issue of undererogation. To address the second objection regarding the risk of victim-blaming, I suggest two strategies: 1) Robin Zheng’s clarification of Young’s distinction between blaming and criticizing (Zheng 2018; 2019), and 2) differentiating between victim-blaming and blaming victims after the allocation of justified duties. While both strategies have their limitations, they provide valuable insights for navigating the complexities of Young’s reconceptualization of responsibility in relation to blame. (shrink)

RESUMO A alimentação é o fator que mais onera um sistema de produção animal. Assim, a utilização de diferentes estratégias de alimentação dos animais ainda é o grande desafio da nutrição animal, principalmente, levando em consideração as exigências nutricionais de diferentes categorias de ruminantes, em especial bovinos em regiões tropicais, haja vista que a sazonalidade na produção de forragens afeta diretamente a produção bovina, promovendo inadequação no atendimento das exigências nutricionais dos animais principalmente em minerais e vitaminas. Uma alimentação que (...) não atenda as exigências nutricionais dos ruminantes gera prejuízos no sistema de produção, além de, em casos mais graves, ocasionar a perda do animal. Estudos que abordam o efeito e a importância de vitaminas e minerais na nutrição bovina são escassos e necessários. Recentemente a National Research Council (NRC) apresentou novos registros das exigências nutricionais das vitaminas e minerais. Essas alterações proporcionam um impacto econômico significativo em relação à nutrição animal. Nesse sentido, objetivou-se com esta revisão trazer informações acerca de vitaminas e minerais na nutrição de bovinos em pastejo. -/- Palavras-chave: Alimentação animal; forragem; pastagem; requerimentos nutricionais; ruminantes; vitaminas lipossolúveis (Source: AGROVOC). -/- ABSTRACT Animal feed is the factor that most burdens a production system. Thus, the use of different animal feeding strategies is still the great challenge of animal nutrition, taking into account the nutritional requirements of different categories of ruminants, especially cattle in tropical regions, given that seasonality in forage production directly affects cattle production, promoting inadequacy in meeting the nutritional requirements of animals, mainly in minerals and vitamins. A diet that does not meet the nutritional requirements of ruminants generates losses in the production system, in addition to, in more serious cases, causing the loss of the animal. Studies that address the effect and importance of vitamins and minerals in bovine nutrition are scarce and necessary. Recently the National Research Council (NRC) presented new records of the nutritional requirements of vitamins and minerals. These changes provide a significant economic impact on animal nutrition. In this sense, the objective of this review was to bring information about vitamins and minerals in the nutrition of grazing cattle. -/- Keywords: Animal feeding; fat soluble vitamins; forage; nutritional requirements; pasture feeding; ruminants (Source: AGROVOC). -/- REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS -/- 1. Cavalcanti CPL, Silva e Macedo TJ, Gois GC, Menezes VG, Monte APO, Silva AD, Silva DJM, Silva EO, Araújo GGL, Rodrigues RTS, Wischral A, Matos MHT, Queiroz MAA. 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Nutrição Sobre a Reprodução e Fertilidade dos Bovinos. Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva, 2021. 56. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Suplementação e formulação de sal mineral e mistura múltipla para bovinos. Revista Universitária Brasileira, v. 2, n. 1, 2024. (shrink)