On Happiness: A Minimalist Perspective on a Complex Neural Circuitry and its Psychosocial Constructs

To the human race, Happiness is surely the most coveted of emotions, yet the science behind it is almost as elusive as how to attain and maintain it. An attempt to understand the basis of happiness and its components, in addition to other positive experiences, including mirth and laughter, is a formidable task. Happiness is a separate entity and is not the absence or the opposite of sadness. It deserves its own field of study. It is impermeable to money and transient pleasurable overshoots. This paper is an open invitation to explore the domain of Happiness, review its neuroanatomical and psychosocial constructs and live in its blissful unawareness.     

Accuracy of Self-Reported Personal History of Cancer in an Outpatient Breast Center

The self-reporting of cancer history is becoming increasingly important, as it frequently guides medical decision-making. We studied the accuracy of personal cancer history using a self-administered questionnaire, comparing the results with the Tumor Registry at our institution. Among 39,662 records, we identified 3614 women with a single cancer in the Tumor Registry who reported none or one cancer on their questionnaire. The sensitivity in self-reporting cancers was 85.7%, ranging from 92.1% for breast cancer to 42.9% for leukemia. The accuracy for breast cancer and Hodgkin's Lymphoma was significantly better than other cancers (p=0.00027, CI: 1.4–3.88). Analysis of patient's characteristics showed that Caucasians reported breast cancer more accurately than Asian/Pacific Islanders (p=0.008), and those with Jewish ancestry more accurately than non-Jewish (p=0.0435). These results will help us to improve data collection and thus improve medical decision-making.     

Priestley duality for some subalgebra lattices

Priestley duality can be used to study subalgebras of Heyting algebras and related structures. The dual concept is that of congruence on the dual space and the congruence lattice of a Heyting space is dually isomorphic to the subalgebra lattice of the dual algebra. In this paper we continue our investigation of the congruence lattice of a Heyting space that was undertaken in [10], [8] and [12]. Our main result is a characterization of the modularity of this lattice (Theorem 2.12). Partial results about its complementedness are also given, and among other things a characterization of those finite Heyting algebras with a complemented subalgebra lattice (Theorem 3.5).     

Hommage à Gerrit Mannoury

Sans résumé     

La methode empirique en sociologie

Sans résuméRésumé de l'activité sociologique à tendance empirique en France     

From negation to “notion”: Cognitive processes and argumentative strategies

Summary This article deals with the role of negation as a language and cognitive operation. Such a topic is treated here within the framework of the argumentative strategies which consist in making certain cognitive landmarks of the discourse flip over with the intent of imposing the necessity to choose between two types of notions, aiming at the transformation of this choice into an implication. The reference here to the Aristotelian logic of Prior Analytics appears to be more efficient than any other contemporary logic and the author intends to give account of the role of negation as contrary coming into play on an operational and cognitive basis in all the argumentative strategies which oscillate reciprocally from universal to particular.     

解放神学与马克思主义

本文基于基督宗教和马克思主义的对话,特别分析拉美解放神学在人类灵性方面的价值贡献,指出解放神学可以在一定程度上补充马克思对宗教的批判.