Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Abstract This article examines the phenomenon of ‘magic’ concepts – those key terms which seem to be pervasive among both academics and practitioners. Within that category our focus is on ‘governance’, ‘accountability’ and ‘networks’. Our prime purpose is to map their meanings and how they are used. Following an analysis of a wide range of literature – both academic and practitioner – we find that these concepts have properties in common which help promote their popularity. A high degree of abstraction, a strongly positive normative charge, a seeming ability to dissolve previous dilemmas and binary oppositions and a mobility across domains, give them their ‘magic’ character. Limitations are also identified. Magic concepts are useful, but potentially seductive. They should not be stretched to purposes for which they are not fitted.

Daedalus Winter 2005 Why has race mattered in so many times and places? Why does it still matter? Put more precisely, why has there been such a pervasive tendency to apply the category of race and to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds of people? Call this the ‘1⁄2rst question.’ Of course there are many more questions that one must also ask: Why has racial oppression been so ubiquitous? Why racial exploitation? Why racial slavery? Perhaps we tend to think of races as essentially different just because we want to excuse or to justify the domination of one race by another. I shall proceed with the 1⁄2rst question by canvassing 1⁄2ve possible answers to it that variously invoke nature, genealogy (in the sense of Michel Foucault), cognitive science, empire, and pollution rules. One 1⁄2nal preliminary remark is in order. Most parts of this essay could have been written last year or next year, but the discussion of naturalism, medicine, and race could only have been written in November of 2004, and may well be out of date by the time this piece is printed.

ABSTRACT We investigated the effect of porosity, pore geometry, and diagenetic history on the elastic properties of dry, tightly cemented grainstones whose pore space consists dominantly of intragranular microporosity within micritic grains. The integration of laboratory petrophysical measurements (porosity, P- and S-wave velocity), petrographic analysis and scanning electron microscope (SEM) imaging of micropore space of 80 Lower Cretaceous microporous carbonate samples from Provence (south-east France) allows (1) the changes in porosity and pore geometry during the diagenetic history to be related to changes in elastic properties, and (2) the impact of micritic grain diagenesis on the elastic properties of microporous grainstones to be quantified by means of fitting parameters derived from equivalent elastic medium modeling. The Urgonian microporous cemented grainstones are elastically equivalent to a homogeneous calcitic host with spherical calcitic inclusions comprising spheroidal pores. The best fit is obtained when porous spheres are modelled using the differential effective medium (DEM) approach and the whole composite using the self-consistent (SC) method (DEM-SC model). At lower porosity values (<20%), when the micropore volume is controlled by intercrystalline cementation processes without compaction, the equivalent pore aspect ratio (EPAR) derived from DEM-SC modelling is nearly constant and averages 0.15. At higher porosities, changes in micropore space architecture related to leaching processes result in slightly increasing EPAR. The recognition of EPAR-preserving versus EPAR-non preserving elastic property evolution is proposed as a tool for diagenetic pattern detection in microporous carbonate reservoirs.

With use of standardized techniques, a study of nasopharyngeal pneumococcal carriage in children in six Central and Eastern European cities was undertaken during the winter of 1993-1994. Nasopharyngeal swab specimens were collected from 954 children (predominantly under the age of 5 years) who were hospitalized or attending outpatient clinics or day-care centers. Susceptibility of isolates was determined by disk diffusion (on Mueller-Hinton agar with 5% sheep blood). Disks containing 1 micrograms of oxacillin were used to screen for susceptibility to penicillin G. Pneumococci were recovered from 258 (27.0%) of the 954 children. A variety of strains were recovered, and most penicillin-resistant strains were ŕesistant to multiple agents. Minimum inhibitory concentrations of penicillin for selected resistant strains were 0.125-8 micrograms/mL. Resistance to penicillin was common in strains from Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia. Resistance to erythromycin and chloramphenicol occurred in Bulgarian and Romanian strains. Strains from Poland were all susceptible to penicillin, but many were resistant to tetracycline. Resistance to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole was common in Bulgarian, Romanian, and Slovak strains. Czech and Russian strains were predominantly susceptible to antibiotics. Most resistant strains were of serotypes 6, 14, 19, and 23.

This paper asks, first, how have comparative publications (academic ‘outputs’) developed during the past three decades; second, what theories have been in play, and, third, how can we best explain the picture of comparative PA that is thus revealed? The trajectories of themes and theories are set within a wider story of the development of networks and academic communities. Changes in practitioner concerns and networks have had significant impacts on the evolution of the academic sub‐field. Changes in ICTs – particularly the coming of the Internet and the growth of cheap air travel – have also had a pervasive influence. While there seems little prospect of convergence on any single theory or methodological approach, the vitality of comparative PA is nevertheless considerable. The volume, range and sophistication of publications have grown markedly since the late 1980s. Yet even if comparative studies are now mainstream, they remain hard to do well.

An accurate tide‐generating potential series for Mercury has been calculated on the basis of VSOP87 ephemerides for the solar system planets. Due to the 3:2 spin‐orbit resonance, the tides on Mercury cannot be divided into the three classically known tidal frequency bands for the Earth: the diurnal, semidiurnal, and long‐period tides. Instead, the tides all have periods of the order of one Mercury day, or, equivalently, one Mercury year, and their amplitudes have been calculated with an accuracy of 10 −5 m 2 s −2 . Basic Mercury models with varying inner and outer core radii and core sulfur concentration have been constructed in order to test the sensitivity of tides to these parameters. To determine the reaction of Mercury to the tidal forcing, the Love numbers h , l , and k and the gravimetric factor δ were calculated for the interior models. Tidal displacements, gravity variations, and external gravitational potential variations have also been calculated for the models. It is shown that especially the measurement of the external potential variations will be extremely useful for constraining the inner and outer core.

OBJECTIVE: This study explores how surgeons define innovation, critically examines and evaluates these views, and uses the findings to develop practical criteria for identifying surgical innovation for ethical and regulatory purposes. BACKGROUND: Surgical innovation is crucial for progress in surgery, but can be harmful to patients and difficult to identify and therefore support appropriately. Current attempts to define surgical innovation lack precision, and do not give enough guidance to identify innovations in practice. This study is the first to give an account of surgeons' own views about defining innovation. METHODS: This qualitative study involved interviews with 18 Australian surgeons. Participants provided examples of innovation and distinguished innovation from variations in practice and from research. Data were collected using audio-recorded semistructured interviews. The data were coded using a template and analyzed to develop a thematic account of innovative surgery in practice. RESULTS: There was no uniform view about innovation, but participants identified 5 features of surgical innovation that distinguish it from variations: newness or novelty; degree of change; level of risk; impact; and requiring formal processes. There was no agreement on the distinction between innovation and research. CONCLUSIONS: Drawing on surgeons' own views is important for the development of a practical definition of surgical innovation. We have used a critical analysis of surgeons' own views as the basis for defining the core features of innovation. A precise definition of innovation will assist surgeons to identify and manage innovation and thereby enhance patient safety.

Very-low-mass stars (those less than 0.3 solar masses) host orbiting terrestrial planets more frequently than other types of stars. The compositions of those planets are largely unknown but are expected to relate to the protoplanetary disk in which they form. We used James Webb Space Telescope mid-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the chemical composition of the planet-forming disk around ISO-ChaI 147, a 0.11-solar-mass star. The inner disk has a carbon-rich chemistry; we identified emission from 13 carbon-bearing molecules, including ethane and benzene. The high column densities of hydrocarbons indicate that the observations probe deep into the disk. The high carbon-to-oxygen ratio indicates radial transport of material within the disk, which we predict would affect the bulk composition of any planets forming in the disk.

This introduction does three things. We first give an overview of the linguistic justice debate in normative political philosophy. We then situate Philippe Van Parijs’s position within it, by zooming in on Van Parijs’s two major normative claims: the support of the rise of English as the global lingua franca and the defence of linguistic territoriality. Finally, we clarify how each of the essays that follow this introduction relates to those two claims.

The days of dominant manufacturers dictating the game to obedient retailers are long gone. When parties believe they have equal bargaining power, negotiations end in deadlock more frequently and result in conflict delistings wherein the manufacturers’ brands get removed from the retailers’ assortments. This might cause major sales losses as consumers are forced to change stores or brands. The authors study both parties’ vulnerabilities by investigating their market share shifts during a highly publicized real-life conflict delisting executed by a major retailer against a major manufacturer, involving multiple brands and categories. Generally, both parties lost sales, yet the retailer was the most vulnerable party. Manufacturer-brand and retailer-assortment characteristics moderated both parties’ vulnerability: the manufacturer and retailer became respectively less and more vulnerable when a high-equity brand was delisted in a small assortment. Both parties lost more in necessity than in impulse categories. The authors additionally investigate long-term consequences that occurred after the conflict was settled: the retailer's market share recovered to the predelisting level, whereas the manufacturer's share underwent a long-term level rise.

There has been a lot of recent interest in the way that language might enhance embodied cognition. This interest is driven in large part by a growing body of evidence implicating the language system in various aspects of semantic memory-including, but not limited to, its apparent contribution to abstract concepts. In this essay, I develop and defend a novel account of the cognitive role played by language in our concepts. This account relies on the embodied nature of the language system itself, diverges in significant ways from traditional accounts, and is part of a flexible, multimodal and multilevel view of our conceptual system. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

The nearby Supernova 1987A was accompanied by a burst of neutrino emission, which indicates that a compact object (a neutron star or black hole) was formed in the explosion. There has been no direct observation of this compact object. In this work, we observe the supernova remnant with JWST spectroscopy, finding narrow infrared emission lines of argon and sulfur. The line emission is spatially unresolved and blueshifted in velocity relative to the supernova rest frame. We interpret the lines as gas illuminated by a source of ionizing photons located close to the center of the expanding ejecta. Photoionization models show that the line ratios are consistent with ionization by a cooling neutron star or a pulsar wind nebula. The velocity shift could be evidence for a neutron star natal kick.

Magnetars are highly magnetized neutron stars, the formation mechanism of which is unknown. Hot helium-rich stars with spectra dominated by emission lines are known as Wolf-Rayet stars. We observed the binary system HD 45166 using spectropolarimetry and reanalyzed its orbit using archival data. We found that the system contains a Wolf-Rayet star with a mass of 2 solar masses and a magnetic field of 43 kilogauss. Stellar evolution calculations indicate that this component will explode as a supernova, and that its magnetic field is strong enough for the supernova to leave a magnetar remnant. We propose that the magnetized Wolf-Rayet star formed by the merger of two lower-mass helium stars.

An ideal of education is to ensure that our children develop into autonomous critical thinkers. The ‘indoctrination objection’, however, calls into question whether education, aimed at cultivating autonomous critical thinkers, is possible. The core of the concern is that since the young child lacks even modest capacities for assessing reasons, the constituent components of critical thinking have to be indoctrinated if there is to be any hope of the child's attaining the ideal. Our primary objective is to defuse this objection. We argue, first, that even if the indoctrination objection can be dealt with at the level of beliefs by an account that distinguishes between beliefs instilled in the child at the non‐rational stage that are indoctrinative and those that are non‐indoctrinative, there can be non‐autonomous ‘proto critical thinkers’ who lack autonomy with respect to the requisite motivational components. We then ask what must be added to the account to ensure that proto critical thinkers develop into autonomous ones. We suggest that motivational elements, even if instilled at a stage at which the child has insufficiently developed cognitive capacities, can be ‘truly the child's own’ only relationally: the autonomous motivational elements are ones with respect to which the future child is self‐governing.

Trypsin mRNA from the grey fleshfly (Neobellieria bullata) was reversed transcribed and amplified by means of PCR. Two cDNA species of 600 bp and 800 bp were cloned and sequenced. The 3' end of the gene (300 bp) was amplified by means of the rapid-amplification-of-cDNA-ends method, cloned and sequenced. The deduced protein sequence of 254 amino acids exhibited 46% identity to Drosophila trypsin and 32% identity to Anophiline trypsin and Aedes trypsin. Three-dimensional models of Neobellieria trypsin and Drosophilia trypsin were built and compared. Both models contain two domains of beta-barrel sheets as was shown by means of X-ray crystallography of mammalian trypsin. The catalytic active site is composed of the canonical triad of His42, Asp87 and Ser182 whereas Asp176 sits as the bottom of the specificity pocket. Southern blot analysis suggested that Neobellieria trypsin is encoded by one gene. Northern blot analysis showed that an early trypsin transcript is found in the midgut of sugar-fed females. This message disappeared after a liver meal, and was replaced by a late transcript. Injection of trypsin-modulating oostatic factor (TMOF) at 10(-9) M prevented the disappearance and the translation of the early transcript. TMOF did not prevent the appearance of the late transcript. However, in the presence of the hormone the late transcript was not translated. Thus, TMOF is the biological signal that terminates the translation of trypsin mRNA in the fleshfly gut and probably in the mosquito gut.

The gold standard for an empirical science is the replicability of its research results. But the estimated average replicability rate of key-effects that top-tier psychology journals report falls between 36% and 39% (objective vs. subjective rate; Open Science Collaboration (2015)). So the standard mode of applying null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST) fails to adequately separate stable from random effects. Therefore, NHST does not fully convince as a statistical inference strategy. We argue that the replicability crisis is “home-made” because more sophisticated strategies can deliver results the successful replication of which is sufficiently probable. Thus, we can overcome the replicability crisis by integrating empirical results into genuine research programs. Instead of continuing to narrowly evaluate only the stability of data against random fluctuations (discovery context), such programs evaluate rival hypotheses against stable data (justification context).

Governments of OECD countries are under pressure to improve public sector performance and at the same time to reduce the government expenditure. In the process of improvement of public sector performance it is necessary ensure the efficiency in the provision of education, at the same time, the countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money directed to them. This prompted us to implement the comparative study to assess the efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education in European countries in 2015. First we analyze the government expenditure based on the data published by International Monetary Fund (IMF). Second, we analyze the quality of education through the PISA indicators published by OECD. Then we apply the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to assess the relative efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education using output-oriented model under the assumption of variable return to scale. Based on the results could it be said that average efficiency was 0.955 which suggests that the efficiency in evaluated countries was relatively high.

The study examined the resilience and coping of samples from Ukraine and five nearby countries during the war in Ukraine. The research focused on (1) the levels of community and societal resilience of the Ukrainian respondents compared with the populations of five nearby European countries and (2) commonalities and diversities concerning coping indicators (hope, well-being, perceived threats, distress symptoms, and sense of danger) across the examined countries. A cross-sectional study was conducted, based on data collection through Internet panel samples, representing the six countries' adult populations. Ukrainian respondents reported the highest levels of community and societal resilience, hope, and distress symptoms and the lowest level of well-being, compared to the population of the five nearby European countries. Hope was the best predictor of community and societal resilience in all countries. Positive coping variables, most notably hope, but also perceived well-being are instrumental in building resilience. While building resilience on a societal level is a complex, multifaceted task, various dimensions must be considered when planning actions to support these states. It is essential to monitor the levels of resilience, during and following the resolution of the crisis, both in Ukraine and in the neighboring countries.

The purpose of this contribution is to discuss the extent of the Union's competence to adopt a comprehensive instrument of substantive contract law in light of the options set forth in the Commission's 2010 Green Paper on European contract law, with a view to exploring the limits of, and the relationship between, certain prominent Treaty provisions in the debate – namely, Articles 114, 115, 81, 169 and 352 TFEU (ex Articles 95, 94, 65, 153 and 308 EC, respectively) – and the roles played by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality in guiding the exercise of Union competence inside, as well as outside, the EU decision-making process. Moreover, given the reference to certain American techniques in the Green Paper, this contribution seeks to facilitate discussion of the comparative dimensions of the constitutional assessment of contract law in the European Union and the United States.

Scattering of light by molecules can be elastic, Rayleigh scattering, or inelastic, Raman scattering. In the elastic scattering, the photon’s energy and the state of the molecule after the scattering events are unchanged. Hence, Rayleigh scattered light does not contain much information on the structure of molecular states. In inelastic scattering, the frequency of monochromatic light changes upon interaction with the vibrational states, or modes, of a molecule. With the advancement in the laser sources, better and compact spectrometers, detectors, and optics Raman spectroscopy have developed as a highly sensitive technique to probe structural details of a complex molecular structure. However, the low scattering cross section (10−31) of Raman scattering has limited the applications of the conventional Raman spectroscopy. With the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in 1973 by Martin Fleischmann, the interest of the research community in Raman spectroscopy as an analytical method has been revived. This chapter aims to familiarize the readers with the basics of Raman scattering phenomenon and SERS. This chapter will also discuss the latest developments in the SERS and its applications in various fields.