The Experts below are selected from a list of 240 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform

Brian L. Mishara - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Cultural specificity and universality of suicide: challenges for the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
    Crisis, 2006
    Co-Authors: Brian L. Mishara
    Abstract:

    One of the greatest strengths of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) has been its ability to bring together researchers and helpers, professionals and volunteers, from a great diversity of cultures around the world. This diversity is expressed in the participation at our biannual international meetings, regional activities, and the numerous events held around the world on September 10th, World Suicide Prevention Day. Even though suicide occurs in every culture, we may wonder if the phenomenon of suicide is essentially universal, or if we are dealing with a specific behavior whose etiology varies from culture to culture. Or, we may ask how much of our general understanding of suicide is applicable across cultures and when cultural factors may have a predominant influence. This question has important implications for transcultural research, as well as the future of IASP in determining the orientation of its new initiatives. Until now, the emphasis in IASP has been upon commonalities in suicide, with adaptations to specific cultures and settings. Our activities, while allowing for cultural diversity, have usually had a universal perspective: IASP generally develops activities or information that is considered to be of potential use to anyone, anywhere in the world. For example, IASP and its members have collaborated with the World Health Organization in developing general guidelines on topics such as suicide in the media, guidelines for the components of a national suicide prevention strategy, suicide prevention in prisons, how physicians should treat a suicidal patient, etc. The implicit hypothesis in developing such guidelines is that there are more commonalities in suicide prevention activities around the world than there is diversity. Thus, general guidelines, as well as information on methods of prevention and clinical practices, are pretty much the same worldwide, needing only linguistic translation and some minor adaptations to the local culture and the nature of the mental health and health delivery systems. One may ask if this assumption is justified. Proponents of the view that commonalities in suicidal behavior are predominant may cite the fact that suicide has existed since the earliest records of mankind. An early Egyptian Hieroglyphics recounts the inner struggle of a man “tired of life” who wants to end his own life and struggles with his suicidal intentions (Faulkner, 1956). It is strikingly apparent that this man’s woes appear akin to an individual’s suicidal dilemma today. Suicides exist in every country and there has been no historic era where suicide has not been present (Mishara & Tousignant, 2004). Nevertheless it may be hard to conceive of how the phenomenon of suicide can be similar in very different cultural milieus. For example, one may ask how the problems of a middle-class teenage girl in New York City can be similar to the problems of a poverty-stricken girl the same age in rural Sri-Lanka, who is married and struggling on a farm. How can we talk about a general phenomenon if life is so varied around the world? One may point to the fact that mental illness, a key risk factor for suicide, exists everywhere. Although the meaning and names given to mental health problems can vary from culture to culture, one finds similar symptoms of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and alcohol and drug abuse throughout the world. Some may take this to be an indication that the etiology of suicide is the same worldwide. However, mental illness, while a most important risk factor, is neither a sufficient nor a necessary cause of suicidal behavior. The expression of suicide within cultures varies tremendously. “Preferred” methods vary, and availability of means is not the only determinant of suicide method. Firearms are a leading cause of suicide deaths in the United States, and this is often attributed to their easy access (Dug-

Gregory A. Petsko - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • The Rosetta Stone
    Genome biology, 2001
    Co-Authors: Gregory A. Petsko
    Abstract:

    Aristotle, who got almost everything about science wrong, got quite a lot about writing and oratory right. (Perhaps the moral of this is that we might be better off if many scientists became literary critics instead... but I digress.) One of his comments seems to me particularly relevant to big science in general and genomics in particular: he asserted that the most important thing is to find the correct metaphor. Few things can cause so much trouble, especially in scientific discourse, as metaphor. The world is full of nitpickers and literalists who take perverse delight in pointing out inconsistencies between some obscure or trivial aspect of the metaphor and its counterpart. Reminding them that it is only a metaphor, and therefore not meant to be taken literally, accomplishes nothing: in addition to taking the metaphor too seriously, such people have an unfortunate tendency to take themselves too seriously as well. Yet we persist in using metaphor, particularly when we try to explain or justify scientific research to the general public, because the power of metaphor is so great. Metaphors allow us to bypass jargon and connect what we do with the everyday experience of the public who pay for our research and trust that what we do will help, not harm them. Get the metaphor right and we can mobilize public support even for the biggest and most expensive projects. But if the metaphor is wrong, the consequences can be disastrous. Take the United States' "War on Cancer", announced by the Nixon Administration in the 1970s with all the fanfare that normally accompanies the dispatching of troops. Good intentions, on the part of both politicians and scientists, were behind this project, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with those. War seemed to be the right metaphor for the anti-cancer project: it was, after all, a matter of life and death, and cancer had long been viewed with all the fear and hostility normally accorded an enemy. But I think it was the wrong metaphor, and in this case tragically wrong. Wars are perceived as having definite end-points, and usually must be won totally or else are deemed lost. This was never possible for the War on Cancer. Cancer is not a single disease. Every cancer has its own peculiarities, and the causes and treatments for it usually do not apply to most other cancers. This fact alone made a clear-cut victory in the war impossible. It also made a rapid victory even in a few key battles improbable. Thus, the metaphor of a war raised expectations that could never be met. True, the research that the cancer war spawned in the 1970s is now paying off with new approaches to cancer diagnosis and treatment thirty years later, but lay people do not connect today's breakthroughs with investigations that began so far back. Three decades is too long for a war. And yet the right metaphor would not only have avoided the disappointments that the war analogy produced, it would also, I think, have allowed that long-term connection to be understood. Suppose we had called it the Cancer Campaign, for example - that metaphor conveys a very different image, of a process that evolves over time and has many stages. Or the Cancer Initiative. I sincerely doubt that either of these metaphors would have been less effective than war in securing the funding increase that was obtained; the importance of the project spoke for itself. When the human genome sequencing project was started, a number of different metaphors were used to galvanize public and private support. The most common was that the sequence would represent a blueprint for building a human being. Another popular one likened the sequence to an encyclopedia. These metaphors were, I believe, very badly chosen. They convey the impression that the genome sequence can be understood easily and used readily. As we know, nothing could be farther from the truth. And now we have a gaggle of 'me too' big-science projects in its wake, which are being sold on the basis of their value in drug design (The Structural Genomics Project) or gene therapy (The Functional Genomics Project), or other immediate needs. Science isn't really like that. No one project can take us smoothly to improvements in human health. Even the biggest and best provide but a few pieces of the puzzle. This argument suggests what I think is the best metaphor for the genome project and its progeny. Arguably the greatest pure puzzle ever solved by human ingenuity was the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion. After all, the language of one person is completely meaningless to someone who has not been taught its alphabet, rules of grammar and vocabulary. It would thus seem impossible to decipher a 'lost' language, yet that is precisely what was done for Hieroglyphics by Young and Champollion. The key to solving the puzzle was, as every schoolchild knows, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Unearthed in 1799 when a group of French soldiers at Fort Julien in the town of Rosetta in the Nile delta were demolishing an ancient wall, the stone contained the same text inscribed in three different languages: Hieroglyphics, demotic (a script replacement for Hieroglyphics that evolved in Egypt around 600 BC and which was equally obscure), and Greek, which any scholar of that era could read. The Greek text represented the key to deciphering the other two languages, but because Hieroglyphics turned out to be a phonetic language after all (not a pure picture language as was commonly assumed) it was a far from trivial task. (There's a wonderful chapter on how it was done in Simon Singh's marvelous The Code Book (1999), a history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the present day.) If we imagine that understanding human biology and using that understanding to cure disease and improve the quality of life is a task every bit as difficult as being able to decipher Hieroglyphics (our first metaphor), then scientists are modern versions of Young and Champollion (second metaphor); the results of scientific research constitute the Rosetta Stone that will eventually enable us to solve the mystery (third and most important metaphor), and the genome sequence is one script on the tablet (fourth metaphor). Proteomics would provide another inscription, as would the three-dimensional structures of all the gene products, and so forth. Just as any one of the inscriptions would not have been enough, any one project - even the genome project - is not enough on its own; we need a number of different approaches, and the data from all of them. Individual 'small science' projects can aid in deciphering individual words or letters; the goal of each of the 'big science' genome-wide projects is to provide entire blocks of text in different languages that can, ultimately, all be put together to crack the code. I like this metaphor because it seems to me to evoke many of the actual characteristics of the scientific endeavor. It enables anyone to realize that no single project can provide the single answer. It suggests the difficulty of the task and the long struggle that may be required. And it also conveys some of the excitement and romance of the challenge. Best of all, the metaphor is elastic: we can continue to use it to explain each new effort and to help the public chart our progress. The wrong metaphor oversells what we do and raises hopes unfairly in people who trust us to make their lives better. The right metaphor helps them understand the torturous path between basic scientific discoveries and medicines or products, without robbing them of the hope that such a path will eventually be traversed. Maybe Aristotle had something useful to offer science after all.

David B. Rosenfield - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Disorders of Fluency and Voice
    Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 2006
    Co-Authors: David B. Rosenfield
    Abstract:

    Stuttering is a global, pan-cultural disturbance that has been with us throughout time. Those who have stuttered since childhood are often referred to as having developmental stuttering (DS), suffer considerable emotional pain and social stigma, and account for over 1% of the adult population. Heretofore fluent adult individuals rendered dysfluent by neurogenic compromise are referred to as having acquired stuttering (AS) and have speech-motor characteristics different from DS. Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, Egyptian Hieroglyphics (‘nit-nit’), the Old Testament (Moses stuttered), and the Holy Koran refer to stuttering. Recent neuroscience investigations of dysfluent speech-motor output substantiate organic factors in the etiology of stuttering and highlight stuttering as a window into understanding the normal as well as abnormal speech-motor processing.

  • Do stutterers have different brains
    Neurology, 2001
    Co-Authors: David B. Rosenfield
    Abstract:

    In this issue of Neurology , Foundas et al.1 and Biran and Steiner2 present articles pertaining to a problem that has eternally plagued many human beings: stuttering. Foundas et al.1 investigate cerebral abnormalities in stutterers, querying whether their brains differ from those who are fluent; Biran and Steiner2 present Doc’s dysfluent speech in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a parody of fluent and charismatic leaders, reminding us that the fluent world considers stuttering to be funny. Those who have stuttered since they were children, often referred to as “developmental stutterers,” suffer considerable emotional pain and social stigma, and comprise over one percent of the adult population. Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, the Old Testament (Moses stuttered), and the Holy Koran all refer to this global, pancultural disturbance of speech.3 The medical community has paid insufficient attention to persons who stutter, individuals often joke about stuttering, and stutterers themselves frequently lack informed perspective of their own disability. Stuttering’s lack of “disease status”4 makes it more prone to ridicule. Many stutterers keep their speech disorder in the closet, circumlocuting difficult sounds and avoiding situations requiring them to speak. Many children who stutter …

Mason Inman - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • A Rosetta Stone for Brain Waves
    PLoS biology, 2011
    Co-Authors: Mason Inman
    Abstract:

    Whenever we watch the world around us or dream about it when sleeping, our neurons produce ‘‘brain waves’’—coordinated patterns of firing that create electrical signals that repeat in regular patterns. But exactly what messages are encoded in these brain waves, and how they are encoded, is still largely unresolved. The problem is that the brain has its own language for sending and receiving signals. Researchers have made great strides in decoding many parts of this language, but some are still largely mysterious—including the messages in brain waves. The Rosetta Stone allowed archeologists to decode Egyptian Hieroglyphics by showing how those characters matched up with letters in the well-known script of ancient Greek. Similarly, a new study by Philippe Schyns and colleagues at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow takes some initial steps toward cracking the brain wave code by matching up these waves with well-studied behavior: how people respond to looking at faces. The team recruited six volunteers and presented each of them with images of people’s faces displaying basic emotions such as happiness, fear, and surprise. The images were partially covered with randomly generated masks, so that the volunteers might see only the eyes and part of the mouth, for example, and were asked to say what emotion they saw in the image. The team then recorded whether they were correct or not. While doing these face-recognition tests, each volunteer’s brain waves were being measured by electroencephalography (EEG), using a cap with several dozen electrodes touching their scalp. By coordinating the brain wave signals with the photos of faces that the subjects saw, and the volunteers’ responses about what emotion they thought they saw in the photos, then Schyns and colleagues were able to build a sort of Rosetta Stone for brain waves. The brain has different frequencies of common waves—such as ‘‘theta’’ waves around 4 hertz (Hz), which repeat every one-fourth of a second, and ‘‘beta’’ waves at 12 Hz. The researchers found that the brain oscillations at certain frequencies tended to carry certain information about the face—just as one TV channel might carry mostly sports shows, and another channel mostly news. In one case, for example, beta waves encoded two eyes and theta waves encoded the mouth. By using multiple frequencies to encode two different parts of the face—a process known as multiplexing—then the brain can send more signals at the same time, just as having multiple TV channels allows the airwaves to carry more information at a time. Schyns and colleagues also found that within each kind of wave, the information could be encoded in more than one way. One type of encoding is in the timing, or ‘‘phase,’’ of the wave. If delayed somewhat from the brain’s baseline hum at that frequency, it relays some information, with a delay represented by degrees between 0u and 360u (like how a clock’s minute hand sweeps through 360u in the course of an hour). Beta waves encode eyes using a phase delay of between 45u and 90u, the study found, whereas theta waves encode the mouth with a phase delay between 270u and 315u. The study also found that the brain can encode information in the amplitude of the oscillations as well. Using statistical measures to estimate the strength of connection between volunteers’ responses and accompanying brain waves, the researchers determined which aspects of the brain waves encoded the most information. Variations in phase encoded 2.4 times more information than variations in amplitude, they found. And when brain waves combined both phase and amplitude, they encoded three times more information than they did in amplitude alone. By showing the key role of phase in encoding information, and by teasing apart the contributions of the various ways that the brain encodes information— including amplitudes, phases, and frequencies—Schyns and colleagues hope to open a new path to deciphering the brain’s oscillations.

Michael Levitt - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • The language of the protein universe.
    Current opinion in genetics & development, 2015
    Co-Authors: Andrea Scaiewicz, Michael Levitt
    Abstract:

    Proteins, the main cell machinery which play a major role in nearly every cellular process, have always been a central focus in biology. We live in the post-genomic era, and inferring information from massive data sets is a steadily growing universal challenge. The increasing availability of fully sequenced genomes can be regarded as the 'Rosetta Stone' of the protein universe, allowing the understanding of genomes and their evolution, just as the original Rosetta Stone allowed Champollion to decipher the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. In this review, we consider aspects of the protein domain architectures repertoire that are closely related to those of human languages and aim to provide some insights about the language of proteins.