The data analyzed in this paper are part of the results described in Bueno et al. (2000). Three cytogenetics endpoints were analyzed in three populations of a species of wild rodent – Akodon montensis – living in an industrial, an agricultural, and a preservation area at the Itajaí Valley, State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The polychromatic/normochromatic ratio, the mitotic index, and the frequency of micronucleated polychromatic erythrocites were used in an attempt to establish a genotoxic profile of each area. It (...) was assumed that the three populations were in the same conditions with respect to the influence of confounding factors such as animal age, health, nutrition status, presence of pathogens, and intra- and inter-populational genetic variability. Therefore, any differences found in the endpoints analyzed could be attributed to the external agents present in each area. The statistical models used in this paper are mixtures of negative-binomials and Poisson variables. The Poisson variables are used as approximations of binomials for rare events. The mixing distributions are beta densities. The statistical analyzes are under the bayesian perspective, as opposed to the frequentist ones often considered in the literature, as for instance in Bueno et al. (2000). (shrink)

Hans Jonas and Arne Næss have argued that philosophers need not be concerned with natural sciences even when they talk about enviromental issues like global warming (§1). However, believing sciences blindly is in itself unphilosophical. So we think, in this paper, the other way around: We consider the current view of global warming, which was reported by the IPCC, critically. The so-called AR4 is divided into two parts. One is about the industrial revolutions (§§5-9); the other is about the (...) greenhouse effect (§§11-20). Through this consideration, it will be revealed: the views of the Establishment are not at all absolute; there still remains room to reconsider them. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)