Transmission models for infectious diseases are typically formulated in terms of dynamics between individuals or groups with processes such as disease progression or recovery for each individual captured phenomenologically, without reference to underlying biological processes. Furthermore, the construction of these models is often monolithic: they do not allow one to readily modify the processes involved or include the new ones, or to combine models at different scales. We show how to construct a simple model of immune response to a respiratory virus and a model of transmission using an easily modifiable set of rules allowing further refining and merging the two models together. The immune response model reproduces the expected response curve of PCR testing for COVID-19 and implies a long-tailed distribution of infectiousness reflective of individual heterogeneity. This immune response model, when combined with a transmission model, reproduces the previously reported shift in the population distribution of viral loads along an epidemic trajectory. This article is part of the theme issue 'Technical challenges of modelling real-life epidemics and examples of overcoming these'.
This article examines the presence of Plotinus in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. First, it presents the movement of indirect transmission of the Enneads throughout the Middle Ages and the editions that reappeared in the Renaissance. In this line, the presence and influence of Plotinus' ideas on medieval thinkers is discussed. Second, it unfolds certain core features of Plotinus' thought – the three hypostases and a single universe – and then, third, it exposes the profound coincidences that can be found in the structure of Nicholas of Cusa's thought – with the study of the language of the binomials complication-explanation, incontract-contract. Finally, it considers the possibility of including both authors in a Great Unified Theory that unfolds throughout the Middle Ages.
This essay looks at the genealogy of blackness in the West, from the Enlightenment “invention of the Negro” to the counter-discourses offered by 20th century writers and philosophers from the African Diaspora. Bringing both her personal experiences and these discursive traditions under the lens, Michelle M. Wright looks at how gender, sexuality, knowledge and power, inform, subvert and (re)inscribe blackness as central to Western identity as she moves from Thomas Jefferson’s invention of the Negro through Hegel’s dialectic of progress up to contemporaiy black theorists and writers such as Paul Gilroy, Joanna Traynor and Danzy Senna. She then asks if the definition of “black identity” that we now possess in both academic discourse and the quotidian do little more than reinscribe the same heteropatriarchal logic of identity that produced the black as Other to the white Western subject
In several passages of the Enneads, Plotinus is openly critical of Aristotle. In IV.7,8, he rejects the soul-entelechy theory; in II.4.14, he criticises the function of the three principles, from, privation and matter, and in III.7, he rejects the Physics definition of time. But the locus classicus of this explicit criticism is the long work, VI,1-3, dividd by Porphyry into three treatises, which constitutes a sustained attack upon the ten Aristotelian categories as genra of being. In the opening chapters of VI.1, it is argued that sensible and intelligble substance can not on Aristotelian principles form one genus, and in the critique of substance in VI.3,1-8, Plotinus concludes that sensible substance can only be "an aggregate of qualities and matter", not true substance, but an imitation. This will also be Porphyry's view.
This article attempts to show that the Aristotelian view of soul was not absolutely limited to the entelechy theory. It further suggests that the irreducible opposition between the extreme formulations of the Platonic and Aristotelian positions was clearly recognised before Aquinas (in particular by Plotinus) and that an attempt was then made to "reconcile" the two theories.
"Should feminists clone?" "What do neurons think about?" "How can we learn from bacterial writing?" These and other provocative questions have long preoccupied neuroscientist, molecular biologist, and intrepid feminist theorist Deboleena Roy, who takes seriously the capabilities of lab "objects"-bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants-in order to understand processes of becoming.
In Molecular Feminisms, Roy investigates science as feminism at the lab bench, engaging in an interdisciplinary conversation between molecular biology, Deleuzian philosophies, posthumanism, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. She brings insights from feminist theory together with lessons learned from bacteria, subcloning, and synthetic biology, arguing that renewed interest in matter and materiality must be accompanied by a feminist rethinking of scientific research methods and techniques.
The death penalty by lethal injection is a legal punishment in the United States. Sodium Thiopental, once used in the death penalty cocktail, is no longer available for use in the United States as a consequence of this association. Anesthesiologists possess knowledge of Sodium Thiopental and possible chemical alternatives. Further, lethal injection has the look and feel of a medical act thereby encouraging physician participation and comment. Concern has been raised that the death penalty by lethal injection, is cruel. Physicians are ethically directed to prevent cruelty within the doctor-patient relationship and ethically prohibited from participation in any component of the death penalty. The US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is not cruel per se and is not in conflict with the 8th amendment of the US constitution. If the death penalty is not cruel, it requires no further refinement. If, on the other hand, the death penalty is in fact cruel, physicians have no mandate outside of the doctor patient relationship to reduce cruelty. Any intervention in the name of cruelty reduction, in the setting of lethal injection, does not lead to a more humane form of punishment. If physicians contend that the death penalty can be botched, they wrongly direct that it can be improved. The death penalty cocktail, as a method to reduce suffering during execution, is an unverifiable claim. At best, anesthetics produce an outward appearance of calmness only and do not address suffering as a consequence of the anticipation of death on the part of the condemned.
Although motivation is a well-established field of study in its own right, and has been fruitfully studied in connection with attribution theory and belief formation under the heading of "motivated thinking," its powerful and pervasive influence on specifically explanatory processes is less well explored. Where one has a strong motivation to understand some event correctly, one is thereby motivated to adhere as best one can to normative or "epistemic" criteria for correct or accurate explanation, even if one does not consciously formulate or apply such criteria. By contrast, many of our motivations to explain introduce bias into the processes involved in generating, evaluating, or giving explanations. Non-epistemic explanatory motivations, or following Kunda's usage, "directional" motivations, include self-justification, resolution of cognitive dissonance, deliberate deception, teaching, and many more. Some of these motivations lead to the relaxation or violation of epistemic norms; others enhance epistemic motivation, so that one engages in more careful and thorough generational and evaluative processes. We propose that "real life" explanatory processes are often constrained by multiple goals, epistemic and directional, where these goals may mutually reinforce one another or may conflict, and where our explanations emerge as a matter of weighing and satisfying those goals. We review emerging evidence from psychology and neuroscience to support this framework and to elucidate the central role of motivation in human thought and explanation.
The problem of boundaries The problem of cultural boundaries arises for any philosophical view that tries to ground meaning or normativity in what "we" do. The particular version of the problem to be discussed here arises out of Ludwig Wittgenstein's writing, but very similar problems arise out of the work of W.V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Each of these philosophers was arguing against views that reified word meaning into an abstract or psychological object. While their accounts were different, all held that the meaning of words is determined by what members of a community say and do. It follows that the content of a given word will vary as the community boundaries are drawn differently.