Author Archives: ev1

What motivates males who commit sexual assault on campus?

Posted on by

IMAGE:Violence and Gender is the only peer-reviewed journal focusing on the understanding, prediction, and prevention of acts of violence. Through research papers, roundtable discussions, case studies, and other original content,... view more

Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

New Rochelle, NY, January 6, 2015-The shocking statistic that about one in five women will be the victim of sexual assault while in college is made even more so by the fact that most of those women will know their assailants. No one-size-fits-all approach to rape prevention will be effective, as some offenders are driven by hostility toward women, while others may objectify women and view forceful intercourse as part of expected male dominant behavior. These different motivations and views on rape, and how they can be used to deliver rape prevention measures and successful intervention strategies are explored in an article in Violence and Gender, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Violence and Gender website until February 6, 2015.

In the article "Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders," Sara Edwards, PhD, and Kathryn Bradshaw, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, and Verlin Hinsz, PhD, North Dakota State University, Fargo, separated male participants into three groups based on how they scored on measurements of hypermasculinity, hostility toward women, and callous sexual attitudes. The authors reported associations between these groupings and whether the men denied any intention to rape or use force to obtain intercourse, self-reported intentions to rape, or indicated a distinction between sexually coercive behavior and rape and expressed intentions to use of force to obtain intercourse but denied rape.

"These authors describe the numbers as staggering, and we know it is one of the most concerning crimes in the country today," says Violence and Gender Editor-in-Chief Mary Ellen O'Toole, PhD, Forensic Behavioral Consultant and Senior FBI Profiler/Criminal Investigative Analyst (ret.). "Sexual assault on college campuses is the pink elephant in the room. It is a crime that is underreported and misunderstood. In this article, researchers look at how callous sexual attitudes of some males who do not have feelings of hostility toward women can still engage in forced intercourse with a victim, and consider their behavior as an achievement rather than rape. The implications for these findings are extremely significant for education programs about sexual aggression and rape prevention and the development of a more accurate identification of subtypes of offenders based on their motivation, cognition, and personality traits."

###

About the Journal

Violence and Gender is the only peer-reviewed journal focusing on the understanding, prediction, and prevention of acts of violence. Through research papers, roundtable discussions, case studies, and other original content, the Journal critically examines biological, genetic, behavioral, psychological, racial, ethnic, and cultural factors as they relate to the gender of perpetrators of violence. Led by Editor-in-Chief Mary Ellen O'Toole, PhD, Forensic Behavioral Consultant and Senior FBI Profiler/Criminal Investigative Analyst (ret.), Violence and Gender explores the difficult issues that are vital to threat assessment and prevention of the epidemic of violence. Violence and Gender is published quarterly online with Open Access options and in print, and is the official journal of The Avielle Foundation. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Violence and Gender website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking and Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

Continued here:
What motivates males who commit sexual assault on campus?

The ‘Berlin patient,’ first and only person cured of HIV, speaks out

Posted on by

IMAGE:AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, published monthly in print and online, presents papers, reviews, and case studies documenting the latest developments and research advances in the molecular biology of HIV... view more

Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

New Rochelle, NY, January 6, 2015--Timothy Ray Brown, long known only as the "Berlin Patient" had HIV for 12 years before he became the first person in the world to be cured of the infection following a stem cell transplant in 2007. He recalls his many years of illness, a series of difficult decisions, and his long road to recovery in the first-person account, "I Am the Berlin Patient: A Personal Reflection," published in AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is part of a special issue on HIV Cure Research and is available free on the AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses website.

Brown's Commentary describes the bold experiment of using a stem cell donor who was naturally resistant to HIV infection to treat the acute myeloid leukemia (AML) diagnosed 10 years after he became HIV-positive. The stem cell donor had a specific genetic mutation called CCR5 Delta 32 that can protect a person against HIV infection. The virus is not able to enter its target, the CD4 cells. After the stem cell transplant, Brown was able to stop all antiretroviral treatment and the HIV has not returned.

"This is the first time that we get to read this important story written by the man who lived it," says Thomas Hope, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses and Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL. "It is a unique opportunity to share in the human side of this transformative experience."

###

About the Journal

AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, published monthly in print and online, presents papers, reviews, and case studies documenting the latest developments and research advances in the molecular biology of HIV and SIV and innovative approaches to HIV vaccine and therapeutic drug research, including the development of antiretroviral agents and immune-restorative therapies. The content also explores the molecular and cellular basis of HIV pathogenesis and HIV/HTLV epidemiology. The Journal features rapid publication of emerging sequence information and reports on clinical trials of emerging HIV therapies. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers/ is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including AIDS Patient Care and STDs, Viral Immunology, and Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

Read this article:
The 'Berlin patient,' first and only person cured of HIV, speaks out

Parrot’s New In-Dash System Gives Any Dumb Car Apple or Android Brains

Posted on by

While Apple CarPlay and Android Auto promise to make your car's in-dash system infinitely more bearable in the not so distant future, you're still stuck in the unfortunate position of having to choose between one or the other. Not so Parrot's whimsically named RNB6, which lets you go both ways. Oh, and it has a dash cam built right in.

The flexibility of the RNB6 extends beyond its operating system agnosticism; it comes with nav, hands-free telephone operation, voice controls, and on-board diagnostics that let you know just how low your tire pressure is. And again: dashcam.

The RNB6 should fit in just about any relatively recent car, which itself is not such a feat but is reassuring if you've never dipped a toe in the aftermarket before. And CarPlay/Android Auto feature is a welcome one for householdslike mine!that have a split platform personality. Or, you know, if you don't want your car to dictate what phone you buy next.

Are there caveats? There are caveats! The biggest one being that there's no price or availability for this yet, and while it certainly doesn't smell like vaporware it's definitely going to cost. Whether that split platform personality commands a premiumor rather, just how much of a premium it commandsis going to go a long way towards deciding if this belongs in your dash.

But also: that dash cam!

Read more:
Parrot's New In-Dash System Gives Any Dumb Car Apple or Android Brains

Religions sinister fairy tale: Extremists, the religious right, Reza Aslan and the fight for reason

Posted on by

I would like to thank Reza Aslan. In his recent Salon rebuttal to denunciations (including mine) of religion put forward by people the media has come to call New Atheists, he resurrects a word the late Christopher Hitchens, now three years departed, used to describe himself: antitheist. (Aslan even provides the link to a relevant Hitchens text from long ago that is well worth reading.) Antitheists hold that the portrayal of our world and humankinds place in it as set out in the foundational texts of the three Abrahamic religions constitutes, to quote Hitchens, a sinister fairy tale, and that life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case. The reason? [T]here may be people, he wrote, who wish to live their lives under a cradle-to-grave divine supervision; a permanent surveillance and [around the clock] monitoring [a celestial North Korea], but he certainly did not. The eternally repressive alternate reality concocted by the religious of eons past, if true, would be, in his words, horrible and grotesque.

Well said! Speaking for myself, Im happy to be labeled an antitheist. Or an atheist. It makes no difference to me. The point is, I do not, cannot, believe, and do not wish to believe. I have never envied people of faith their worldview, never esteemed the ability to consider something true without evidence, never respected as morally superior those who manage this feat of credulity and illogicality. For that matter, I have never had an experience for which I sought a religious that is, supernatural or superstitious explanation. For Aslan, though, the semantic distinction between atheist and antitheist is key and intended to discredit those speaking out for rationalism and against religion.

Not only is New Atheism not representative of atheism, he writes. It isnt even mere atheism. It is in fact antitheism, which he finds to be rooted in a naive and, dare I say, unscientific understanding of religion one thoroughly disconnected from the history of religious thought. He contends that atheism has become more difficult to define for the simple reason that it comes in as many forms as theism does negative atheism, positive atheism, empirical atheism, and even agnosticism. He cites an obscure poll dividing nonbelievers into categories academics, activists, seeker-agnostics, apatheists and ritual atheists, with the least numerous (and hence ostensibly least credible) being the antitheists, who account for only 12.5 percent. His conclusion: the vast majority of atheists 85 percent according to one poll are not anti-theists and should not be lumped into the same category as the anti-theist ideologues that inundate the media landscape.

Just how an atheists understanding of religion per se differs from that of an antitheist Aslan does not say. Neither of them, after all, believe in God. And is he saying that an atheists concept of faith is more scientific (and thus presumably more accurate) than an antitheists? Doubtful: Aslan is a Muslim. The critical factor would appear to be that unlike (upstart) antitheists, (old-time) atheists, at least as he sees it, dont speak out much about religion. Presumably, (plain-old) atheists keep quiet and humbly listen to scholars such as Aslan explain away the role of faith in, for instance, the barbarities that assault us daily in news from abroad. If, however, atheists forcefully advocate their rationalist convictions, they become antitheists and join the negligible 12.5-percent minority of his poll, to be safely dismissed or regarded as an annoyance.

These are questionable assumptions, to put it charitably, but they are beside the point. Aslan is hoping to discredit and classify into irrelevance those who publicly insist, as I have (and he quotes me), that religion is innately backward, obscurantist, irrational and dangerous. Backward, because it relies not on reason for solutions, but on looking to ancient texts for ready-made answers. Obscurantist, because it discourages searching for truthes about our world using empirical methods. Irrational, because (for starters) the very notion that this or that shepherd or merchant ages ago was chosen by a divine being to deliver a message valid eternally and for all humanity offends reason and commonsense. Dangerous, because (again, just for starters), armed with holy texts, the faithful practice all sorts of mischief and savagery, damaging both members of their own communities and those outside them. But atheist or antitheist, no matter: what counts is the shared bedrock of nonbelief, the refusal to accept as fact, and defer to, what is asserted without evidence.

There can be only one reason that Aslan adduces his taxonomy of nonbelievers: to confuse the argument, this time by claiming that atheists (or antitheists) are busy propagating a fundamentalism of their own, and a potentially murderous one at that. Once harmless, some of the faithless, in his telling, have been horribly transmogrified into wannabe tyrants. He opens a brief but otherwise interesting historical excursus on the roots of nonbelief by erroneously deciphering the Greek roots of the word atheist, atheos, which breaks down not as without gods but without god. In any case, antitheists, from the middle of the 19th century, he says, have professed a stridently militant form of atheism, and seen religion as an insidious force that must be rooted from society forcibly if necessary.

To lead readers to this conclusion, he presents a misapprehension of history from which he draws an incorrect analogy injurious to New Atheists. He announces that Marxs vision of a religion-less society was spectacularly realized with the establishment of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China two nations that actively promoted state atheism by violently suppressing religious expression and persecuting faith communities. But it wasnt atheism that motivated Stalin and Mao to demolish or expropriate houses of worship, to slaughter tens of thousands of priests, nuns and monks. It was anti-theism that motivated them to do so.

Untrue. In both countries, faith enjoyed nominal constitutional protection as a private matter and was never outlawed, lingering on despite official efforts to the contrary. Militantly atheist, the communist governments of the two countries opposed religion because it rivaled the all-encompassing state ideology they were bent on inculcating in their subjects. This was particularly true in the case of Russia, where the tsar had claimed a divine right to the throne and ruled as Gods viceroy on earth, and the Russian Orthodox Church functioned as an arm of the state. Lenin and then Stalin waged a decimating war on the Old (faith-buttressed) Order, with the clergy numbering heavily among their countless victims, with many houses of worship destroyed or expropriated. But Stalin eventually had to backpedal and enlist the Church to help him rally the masses in World War II. The point is, both Russia and China aimed to break resistance to their versions of Marxism, with the goal of establishing dictatorial temporal power.

(Perhaps, though, religion did play a part in deforming Stalins psyche. He was a seminary student until he found his calling with the Bolsheviks.)

But back to New Atheists and antitheists and their alleged penchant for dangerous fundamentalism. Having equated them with historys most notorious tyrants, Aslan provides incendiary quotes from Richard Dawkins and Hitchens, and poses the question: If you honestly believed [such terrible things] about religion, then what lengths would you not go through to rid society of it?

See original here:
Religions sinister fairy tale: Extremists, the religious right, Reza Aslan and the fight for reason

The Role of Microorganisms in Genetic Engineering

Posted on by

'Genetic engineering' or genetic manipulation as it should properly be called, relies essentially on the ability to manipulate molecules in vitro. Most biomolecules exist in low concentrations & as complex, mixed populations which it is not possible to work with effectively. This problem was solved in 1970 using the molecular biologist's favourite bug, Escherichia coli , a normally innocuous commensal occupant of the human gut. By inserting a piece of DNA of interest into a vector molecule, i.e. a molecule with a bacterial origin of replication, when the whole recombinant construction is introduced into a bacterial host cell, a large number of identical copies is produced. Together with the rapid growth of bacterial colonies all derived from a single original cell bearing the recombinant vector, in a short time (e.g. a few hours) a large amount of the DNA of interest is produced. This can be purified from contaminating bacterial DNA easily & the resulting product is said to have been 'cloned'.

Most vector molecules were originally derived from one of two sources:

Vector molecules & cloning are not the only contribution which microorganisms have made to genetic manipulation. The actual task of altering the DNA at a molecular level is carried out by the use of naturally-occurring enzymes - most of which are derived from bacteria or viruses:

EcoRI from Escherichia coli BamHI from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens

These systems operate by enzymes which recognise specific short regions of DNA sequence, which are usually palindromic ('Able was I ere I saw Elba'), e.g:

5' GGATCC 3' 3' CCTAGG 5'

Recently, thermostable polymerases have become important, e.g. Taq DNA polymerase from Thermus aquaticus. This bacterium has evolved to grow in hot springs at temperatures which kill most other species. These enzymes allow the amplification of as little as one molecule of DNA into a large amount by means of repeated cycles of melting, primer annealing & extension by the enzyme which is not destroyed by the high temperatures used in this process. This is known as the polymerase chain reaction:

The utility of cloning is partly analytical, i.e it provides the ability to determine the genetic organization of particular regions or whole genomes (the human genome will soon be underway). However, it also facilitates the production of naturally-occurring & artificially-modifed biological products by the expression of cloned genes. The ability to take a gene from one organism (e.g. man or a tree), clone it in E. coli & express it in another (e.g. a yeast) is dependent on the universality of the genetic code, i.e. the triplets of bases which encode amino acids in proteins:

Read the original here:
The Role of Microorganisms in Genetic Engineering

Talent Plus Featured in The Patient Experience Journal

Posted on by

SOURCE: Talent Plus, Inc.

LINCOLN, NE--(Marketwired - Jan 5, 2015) - Talent Plus Science of Talent is featured in The Patient Experience Journal in an article, authored by Dr. Edgar Staren, of Cancer Treatment Centers of America and Talent Plus' Dr. Susan Hirt and Doug Rath, identifying why scientifically assessing talent and behavioral skill in physicians beyond their clinical skill set is vital to providing excellent patient care. "Just as patient-centric measurement is prompting healthcare organizations to refine their care models, physician selection processes must also be enhanced to better serve patients," stated author, Dr. Susan Hirt.

"Volume 1, Issue 2 of Patient Experience Journal continues to push our thinking on both the edges and the fundamentals of the patient experience conversation. Staren at al. touch on the heart of the matter in experience excellence, the very power of personal interactions. They help us see the value in identifying behavioral excellence, specifically as it relates to physicians and how looking beyond skills in selection can positively impact on overall performance," offered Jason Wolf, President of The Beryl Institute.

Titled, Beyond Credentialing in Physician Selection: Application of an Instrument that Measures Behavioral Aptitude, this article provides insight into why scientific selection benefits both the medical institution as a whole and the patient's they serve. -- To download this journal article for free Click Here.

Talent Plus is proud of the work we do to impact patient lives with The Science of Talent . Recently recognized as one of the 2014 Best Places to Work in Healthcare by Modern Healthcare magazine, and as the Leading Talent Assessment Partner(SM) in the industry, we are excited to partner with health care organizations that are focusing on one of the most important aspects of health care, the patient experience.

For more information about the Physician Interview or our suite of clinical and non-clinical assessments for health care organizations, contact us at healthcare@talentplus.com or call 1.800.VARSITY.

Talent Plus, Inc. is the Leading Talent Assessment Partner with over 400 clients in 20 countries delivering selection and development in more than 20 languages. Headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, Talent Plus also has an office in Singapore. For more information, please visit http://www.talentplus.com or call 1.800.VARSITY.

Original post:
Talent Plus Featured in The Patient Experience Journal

Science and Dogs | A science based exploration of (mostly …

Posted on by

I once found an interesting article in The Anatomical Record and Ive been getting their email TOCs and early view alerts ever since. Usually its obscure stuff, though occasionally the subscription pays off. Case in point, the third installment of The Anatomy of the Dog Soft Palate, yes the appeal is still limited

This chart appeared in Mental Evolution in Animals Mental Evolution in Man, both published in the 1880s; Romanes depicts the emotional and cognitive development starting with unicellular. On the left, at level 21, Romanes lists Jealousy. Anger and Play. On the right side, at level 28 we see Anthropoid apes and dogs at the same

I am slowly writing a post on animal pain or how we view pain in animals, not really sure yet. During my research I came across this lecture (audio / 40 min / 19 MB). by Joanna Bourke; I found the parallels in our historical attitudes toward animals and the other(i.e. gender, race, economic classes)

Hogarths The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) depict, fictional protagonist Tom Nero as he progresses from cruelty to animals as a child,to cruelty to animals as an adult. While various Scenes of sportive Woe, The Infant Race employ, And torturd Victims bleeding shew, The Tyrant in the Boy. Behold! a Youth of gentler Heart, To

The SPARCS conference was a unique opportunity for people to hear directly from researchers; not restrained by an interviewer, the PIs were able to present their research in whatever way they felt was important. Researchers dont often get to talk directly to the public and I cant think of a case where such a distinguished

Read more here:
Science and Dogs | A science based exploration of (mostly ...