Search Results (4)

Laboratory medicine has undergone a deep and multifaceted revolution in the course of human history, in both organizational and technical terms. Over the past century, there has been a growing recognition of the need to centralize numerous diagnostic activities, often similar or identical but located in different clinical departments, into a common environment (i.e., the medical laboratory service), followed by a progressive centralization of tests from smaller laboratories into larger diagnostic facilities. Nevertheless, the numerous technological advances that emerged at the beginning of the new millennium have helped to create a new testing culture characterized by a countervailing trend of decentralization of some tests closer to patients and caregivers. The forces that have driven this (centripetal) counter-revolution essentially include a few key concepts, namely “home testing”, “portable or even wearable devices” and “remote patient monitoring”. By their very nature, laboratory medical services and remote patient testing/monitoring are not contradictory, but may well coexist, with the choice of one or the other depending on the demographic and clinical characteristics of the patient, the type of analytical procedure and the logistics and local organization of the care system. Therefore, this article aims to provide a general overview of patient self-testing, with a particular focus on portable and wearable (including implantable) devices. Full article

This article explores how competing images of Jewish corporeality and gendered identity are emerging in Israel through classical ballet by religious girls and women. It traces the cultural, political, and religious implications of this in the context of masculine Zionist ideals of the valorization of the corporeal. Focusing on a group of pioneering Israeli women it traces how they have reshaped the study of ballet into a liberatory yet modest practice for Orthodox women across a range of Israeli religious communities. The revolutionary efforts that linked the founding of the state of Israel with a new body are viewed through a revised feminist perspective, one within the paradigm of a religious counterrevolution. Just as the laboring body of the secular folk dancer of the Yishuv has stood for socialism, egalitarianism, and muscular Judaism while relegating the religious body to the sidelines, it is possible now to read an image of the return of the religious, via the feminized body of classical ballet, as emblematic of the new Jewish woman of Orthodox communities. I argue that through the study of ballet a politics of piety is operating among Orthodox Jewish women making it a medium through which they are changing assumptions about agency, patriarchal norms, and nationalist politics. Full article

IIT includes commitments about the very nature of physical reality, a fact both highly unusual for an empirical theory within neuroscience, and surprisingly underappreciated within the literature. These commitments are intimately tied to the theory; they are not incidental. This paper demonstrates as much by raising certain objections in a “naive” way, and then exposing how the principled IIT responses would rely upon metaphysical positions. Along the way we draw on the IIT literature for support for these interpretations, but also point to a need for elaboration and clarification. Section 1 applies the Placement Argument in a way that leads to problem involving zombies, treated in Section 2. Section 3 frames the zombie problem as an apparent dilemma, and addresses that dilemma by drawing on claims in the IIT literature concerning physical reality. Section 4 raises a related dilemma and treats it in a way that dovetails with the treatment in Section 3 of physical reality. All of this underscores not just the breadth of IIT, but the relevance of this breadth to a full consideration of IIT’s merits. Full article

The discourses of literature and history are generally regarded as two distinct genres. This essay sets out to investigate the use of fictitious, that is, the invented, as well as real elements, in addition to narrative tools in some literary and historical texts to examine whether there is evidence for a fundamental difference between them in this respect. In the first half of the article, from the juxtaposition of Merle’s historical novel, En nos vertes années, to Le Roy Ladurie’s The Beggar and the Professor, we shall see that real and fictitious elements are also interwoven in Merle’s text, just as history uses fictitious elements, necessarily and tacitly, or, in some works, in a rather provocative way. In the second half of this essay, in examining literary and historical narratives of the counter-revolution in the Vendée, it will become evident that historians also use the same narrative techniques as writers to orientate readers. While these findings would confound the normative distinction between history and literature, we cannot, however, finally conclude that there is no fundamental difference between literary fiction and history. Arguing against Alun Munslow, who claims in Authoring the Past that “’doing history’ is an authorial activity,” this present article tries to argue that, while in many aspects writing history is indistinguishable from writing fiction, the historian has co-authors: the sources themselves may enter the process of writing history. This is a conclusion that emerges from the analysis of Simon Schama’s Citizens. His text about the revolt in the Vendée points to a potential advantage of history when compared to literary fiction: historians may feel obliged to change their original point of view under the burden of the fact they themselves have enumerated—something we can call the latent but inherent co-authorship of the sources in historical narratives. Full article