Integration or individuation : are the salvation goods promised by first-century Christian preaching still attractive ?

(Résumé de l'ouvrage) The idea that religion has to succeed in a «market», selling «salvation goods», has proved to be extremely attractive to scholars in sociology and the study of religion. Max Weber used the term «salvation good» to compare different religious traditions. Pierre Bourdieu employed the term in order to analyze «religious economy». And recently, an American group of researchers advocating «rational choice of religion» put the theme at the forefront of current debates. This book - the fruit of an International Congress in Lausanne in April 2005 - brings together leading specialists in the fields of sociology and the study of religion who discuss the terms «salvation goods» (or religious goods) and «religious market». The authors test the applicability of these concepts by using specific examples and they either deliberately advocate or criticize Weberian, Bourdieusian or rational-choice perspectives.

Evolutionary dynamics of interlinked public goods traits: an experimental study of siderophore production in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Public goods cooperation is common in microbes, and there is much interest in understanding how such traits evolve. Research in recent years has identified several important factors that shape the evolutionary dynamics of such systems, yet few studies have investigated scenarios involving interactions between multiple public goods. Here, we offer general predictions about the evolutionary trajectories of two public goods traits having positive, negative or neutral regulatory influence on one another's expression, and we report on a test of some of our predictions in the context of Pseudomonas aeruginosa's production of two interlinked iron-scavenging siderophores. First, we confirmed that both pyoverdine and pyochelin siderophores do operate as public goods under appropriate environmental conditions. We then tracked their production in lines experimentally evolved under different iron-limitation regimes known to favour different siderophore expression profiles. Under strong iron limitation, where pyoverdine represses pyochelin, we saw a decline in pyoverdine and a concomitant increase in pyochelin - consistent with expansion of pyoverdine-defective cheats derepressed for pyochelin. Under moderate iron limitation, pyochelin declined - again consistent with an expected cheat invasion scenario - but there was no concomitant shift in pyoverdine because cross-suppression between the traits is unidirectional only. Alternating exposure to strong and moderate iron limitation caused qualitatively similar though lesser shifts compared to the constant-environment regimes. Our results confirm that the regulatory interconnections between public goods traits can significantly modulate the course of evolution, yet also suggest how we can start to predict the impacts such complexities will have on phenotypic divergence and community stability.

Collective symbolic coping with disease threat and othering: A case study of avian influenza

Much research studies how individuals cope with disease threat by blaming out-groups and protecting the in-group. The model of collective symbolic coping (CSC) describes four stages by which representations of a threatening event are elaborated in the mass media: awareness, divergence, convergence, and normalization. We used the CSC model to predict when symbolic in-group protection (othering) would occur in the case of the avian influenza (AI) outbreak. Two studies documented CSC stages and showed that othering occurred during the divergence stage, characterized by an uncertain symbolic environment. Study 1 analysed media coverage of AI over time, documenting CSC stages of awareness and divergence. In Study 2, a two-wave repeated cross-sectional survey was conducted just after the divergence stage and a year later. Othering was measured by the number of foreign countries erroneously ticked by participants as having human victims. Individual differences in germ aversion and social dominance orientation interacted to predict othering during the divergence stage but not a year later. Implications for research on CSC and symbolic in-group protection strategies resulting from disease threat are discussed.

Current and future trens in the quality control of pharmaceuticals and biopharmaticals : impacts on Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

[Summary] 2. Roles of quality control in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries. - 2.1. Pharmaceutical industry. - 2.2. Biopharmaceutical industry. - 2.3. Policy and regulatory. - 2.3.1. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). - 2.3.2. The European Medicine Agency (EMEA). - 2.3.3. The Japanese Ministry of Work, Labor and Welfare (MHLW). - 2.3.4. The Swiss Agency for Therapeutic Products (Swissmedic). - 2.3.5. The International Conference on Harmonization (ICH). - - 3. Types of testing. - 3.1. Microbiological purity tests. - 3.2. Physiochemical tests. - 3.3. Critical to quality steps. - 3.3.1. API starting materials and excipients. - 3.3.2. Intermediates. - 3.3.3. APIs (drug substances) and final drug product. - 3.3.4. Primary and secondary packaging materials fro drug products. - - 4. Manufacturing cost and quality control. - 4.1.1. Pharmaceutical manufacturing cost breakdown. - 4.1.2. Biopharmaceutical manufacturing cost breakdown. - 4.2. Batch failure / rejection / rework / recalls. - - 5. Future trends in the quality control of pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals. - 5.1. Rapid and real time testing. - 5.1.1. Physio-chemicals testing. - 5.1.2. Rapid microbiology methods