The Sanctified ‘Adultress’ and Her Circumstantial Clause: Bathsheba’s Bath and Self-Consecration in 2 Samuel 11

Bathsheba's actions in 2 Sam. 11.2-4 identify crucial aspects of her character. Past commentators interpret these words in connection with menstrual purification, stressing the certain paternity of David's adulterine child. This article demonstrates that the participles rōheset and mitqaddesšet and the noun mittum'ātāh do not denote menstrual cleansing. Bathsheba's washing is an innocent bath. She is the only individual human to self-sanctify, placing her in the company of the Israelite deity. The syntax of the verse necessitates that her action of self-sanctifying occurs simultaneously as David lies with her. The three focal terms highlight the important legitimacy of Bathsheba before the Israelite deity, her identity as a non-Israelite, her role as queen mother of the Solomonic line, and her full participation in the narrative.

ESCMID* guideline for the diagnosis and management of Candida diseases 2012: developing European guidelines in clinical microbiology and infectious diseases.

The process to develop a guideline in a European setting remains a challenge. The ESCMID Fungal Infection Study Group (EFISG) successfully achieved this endeavour. After two face-to-face meetings, numerous telephone conferences, and email correspondence, an ESCMID task force (basically composed of members of the Society's Fungal Infection Study Group, EFISG) finalized the ESCMID diagnostic and management/therapeutic guideline for Candida diseases. By appreciating various patient populations at risk for Candida diseases, four subgroups were predefined, mainly ICU patients, paediatric, HIV/AIDS and patients with malignancies including haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Besides treatment recommendations, the ESCMID guidelines provide guidance for diagnostic procedures. For the guidelines, questions were formulated to phrase the intention of a given recommendation, for example, outcome. The recommendation was the clinical intervention, which was graded by a score of A-D for the 'Strength of a recommendation'. The 'level of evidence' received a score of I-III. The author panel was approved by ESCMID, European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer, European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, European Society of Intensive Care Medicine and the European Confederation of Medical Mycology. The guidelines followed the framework of GRADE and Appraisal of Guidelines, Research, and Evaluation. The drafted guideline was presented at ECCMID 2011 and points of discussion occurring during that meeting were incorporated into the manuscripts. These ESCMID guidelines for the diagnosis and management of Candida diseases provide guidance for clinicians in their daily decision-making process.

Effect of levodopa on both verbal and motor representations of action in Parkinson's disease: a fMRI study.

Previous studies have demonstrated that non-demented Parkinson's disease (PD) patients have a specific impairment of verb production compared with noun generation. One interpretation of this deficit suggested the influence of striato-frontal dysfunction on action-related verb processing. The aim of our study was to investigate cerebral changes after motor improvement due to dopaminergic medication on the neural circuitry supporting action representation in the brain as mediated by verb generation and motor imagery in PD patients. Functional magnetic resonance imaging on 8 PD patients in "ON" dopaminergic treatment state (DTS) and in "OFF" DTS was used to explore the brain activity during three different tasks: Object Naming (ObjN), Generation of Action Verbs (GenA) in which patients were asked to overtly say an action associated with a picture and mental simulation of action (MSoA) was investigated by asking subjects to mentally simulate an action related to a depicted object. The distribution of brain activities associated with these tasks whatever DTS was very similar to results of previous studies. The results showed that brain activity related to semantics of action is modified by dopaminergic treatment in PD patients. This cerebral reorganisation concerns mainly motor and premotor cortex suggesting an involvement of the putaminal motor loop according to the "motor" theory of verb processing.

El parlar salat: descripció, àmbit geogràfic i ús

La recerca, que ha durat quatre anys (2004-2008), s’ha centrat en l’estudi del parlar salat, un subdialecte del català oriental que es caracteritza per una sola isoglossa: l’ús de l’article salat (es, sa), és a dir, l’element derivat del demostratiu llatí “ipse”. Aquesta varietat ―poc estudiada― no té un abast gaire definit. Se sol situar en una estreta franja del litoral de Girona, entre Blanes i Begur, i que, després, isoladament, reapareix a Cadaqués, on es manté amb més vigència. A banda que els estudis no estableixen els límits geogràfics del fenomen de manera precisa, es tenen indicis que el tret que defineix i dóna nom a la varietat es troba en un acusat procés de recessió i de pèrdua, ja que només l’empren persones d’edat avançada (en general, pescadors). La tesi concreta l’estat actual del parlar salat. També fixa la cronologia del canvi de l’article salat (és a dir, en quin moment s’ha substituït per l’article literari, el, la) i es decriuen els factors que l’han propiciat (migració, turisme, la pressió de l’estàndard, etc.). El parlar salat és un exemple de desdialectalització del català, atès que es verifica que el tret que el caracteritza va començar a caure en desús en dels anys cinquanta del segle passat i que, avui dia, pràcticament ja s’ha extingit (només es manté en parlants de Cadaqués nascuts després de 1983). Per tant, s’evidencia que cal replantejar-se l’actual divisió dialectal de la llengua catalana ja que el subdialecte estudiat no existeix.

The Acquisition of Actional Passives in Catalan

L'objectiu del present treball de recerca va ser avaluar les dues teories predominants (BORER & WEXLER 1987, WEXLER 2004; FOX & GRODZINSKY 1997) que miren d'explicar el tardà desenvolupament de la forma passiva en la gramàtica dels nens. Es van seleccionar tres grups de nens de ambdós sexes d'edats compreses entre els 3,1 i els 5;9 i es va a dur a terme un experiment per verificar la competència dels nens en les frases actives, passives curtes i passives llargues (amb el complement agentiu per...) . Mentre la comprensió de les actives és com l'adulta des del principi, la comprensió de las passives curtes és significativament més dolenta que la de les actives i la comprensió de les passives llargues és molt deficient fins i tot per al grup més gran d'edat. Les diferencies significatives trobades afavoreixen la hipòtesi de la maduració. Es discuteixen els resultats en relació amb estudis similars i es suggereixen noves vies d'investigació més enllà de les passives agentives.

Effects of Bilingualism on Multi-Word Production

It has been shown that bilinguals are disadvantaged on some language production tasks when compared to monolinguals. The present study investigated the effects of bilingualism on lexical retrieval in single and multi-word utterances. To this purpose, we tested three groups of 35 participants each (Spanish monolinguals, highly proficient Spanish-Catalan and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals) in two sets of picture naming experiments. In the first one, participants were asked to name black-and-white object drawings by single words. In the second one, participants had to name colored pictures with determiner adjectival noun phrases (NP) like “the red car”. In both sets of experiments, bilinguals were slower than monolinguals, even when naming in their dominant language. We also examined the articulatory durations of both single word and NP productions for this bilingual disadvantage. Furthermore, response onset times and durations of all groups in both experiments were affected by lexical variables of the picture names. These results are consistent with previous studies (Ivanova & Costa, 2008, Gollan et al., 2005) showing a bilingual disadvantage in single word production and extend these findings to multiword-utterances and response durations. They also support the claim that articulatory processes are influenced by lexical variables.

Prosodic differences between Germans and German-speaking Swiss in L2

Cette recherche étudie dans quelle mesure l'origine géographique d'un locuteur influence son accent dans une langue étrangère. L'anglais et le français parlés par des Allemands et des Suisses alémaniques sont examinés à travers une expérience de perception et d'analyses phonétiques. L'expérience de perception démontre que les participants sont bien capables d'indiquer si une phrase est lue par un Allemand ou un Suisse alémanique; les participants de langue maternelle allemande y réussissent le mieux. L'analyse prosodique permet d'observer de nettes différences entre les deux groupes de locuteurs. Dans la lecture des phrases françaises, les Suisses alémaniques ont tendance à accentuer la première syllabe des mots, en montant avec leur intonation et en prolongeant la durée des voyelles. Les Allemands, en revanche, accentuent par une intonation fortement montante la dernière syllabe des mots.

Address by Michea¡l Martin to the Conference - Legislating for Tobacco Free Society

Thank you Chairman I would like to extend a warm welcome to our keynote speakers, David Byrne of the European Commission, Derek Yach from the World Health Organisation, and Paul Quinn representing Congressman Marty Meehan who sends his apologies. When we include the speakers who will address later sessions, this is, undoubtedly, one of the strongest teams that have been assembled on tobacco control in Europe. The very strength of the team underlines what I see as a shift – a very necessary shift – in the way we perceive the tobacco issue. For the last twenty years, we have lived out a paradox. It isn´t a social side issue. I make no apology for the bluntness of what I´m saying, and will come back, a little later, to the radicalism I believe we need to bring – nationally – to this issue. For starters, though, I want to lay it on the line that what we´re talking about is an epidemic as deadly as any suffered by human kind throughout the centuries. Slower than some of those epidemics in its lethal action, perhaps. But an epidemic, nonetheless. According to the World Health Organisation tobacco accounted for just over 3 million annual deaths in 1990, rising to 4.023 million annual deaths in 1998. The numbers of deaths due to tobacco will rise to 8.4 million in 2020 and reach roughly 10 million annually by 2030. This is quite simply ghastly. Tobacco kills. It kills in many different ways. It kills increasing numbers of women. It does its damage directly and indirectly. For children, much of the damage comes from smoking by adults where children live, study, play and work. The very least we should be able to offer every child is breathable air. Air that doesn´t do them damage. We´re now seeing a global public health response to the tobacco epidemic. The Tobacco Free Initiative launched by the World Health Organisation was matched by significant tobacco control initiatives throughout the world. During this conference we will hear about the experiences our speakers had in driving these initiatives. This Tobacco Free Initiative poses unique challenges to our legal frameworks at both national and international levels; in particular it raises challenges about the legal context in which tobacco products are traded and asks questions about the impact of commercial speech especially on children, and the extent of the limitations that should be imposed on it. Politicians, supported by economists and lawyers as well as the medical profession, must continue to explore and develop this context to find innovative ways to wrap public health considerations around the trade in tobacco products – very tightly. We also have the right to demand a totally new paradigm from the tobacco industry. Bluntly, the tobacco industry plays the PR game at its cynical worst. The industry sells its products without regard to the harm these products cause. At the same time, to gain social acceptance, it gives donations, endowments and patronage to high profile events and people. Not good enough. This model of behaviour is no longer acceptable in a modern society. We need one where the industry integrates social responsibility and accountability into its day-to-day activities. We have waited for this change in behaviour from the tobacco industry for many decades. Unfortunately the documents disclosed during litigation in the USA and from other sources make very depressing reading; it is clear from them that any trust society placed in the tobacco industry in the past to address the health problems associated with its products was misplaced. This industry appears to lack the necessary leadership to guide it towards just and responsible action. Instead, it chooses evasion, deception and at times illegal activity to protect its profits at any price and to avoid its responsibilities to society and its customers. It has engaged in elaborate ´spin´ to generate political tolerance, scientific uncertainty and public acceptance of its products. Legislators must act now. I see no reason why the global community should continue to wait. Effective legal controls must be laid on this errant industry. We should also keep these controls under review at regular intervals and if they are failing to achieve the desired outcomes we should be prepared to amend them. In Ireland, as Minister for Health and Children, I launched a comprehensive tobacco control policy entitled “Towards a Tobacco Free Society“. OTT?Excessive?Unrealistic? On the contrary – I believe it to be imperative and inevitable. I honestly hold that, given the range of fatal diseases caused by tobacco use we have little alternative but to pursue the clear objective of creating a tobacco free society. Aiming at a tobacco free society means ensuring public and political opinion are properly informed. It requires help to be given to smokers to break the addiction. It demands that people are protected against environmental tobacco smoke and children are protected from any inducement to experiment with this product. Over the past year we have implemented a number of measures which will support these objectives; we have established an independent Office of Tobacco Control, we have introduced free nicotine replacement therapy for low-income earners, we have extended our existing prohibitions on tobacco advertising to the print media with some minor derogations for international publications. We have raised the legal age at which a person can be sold tobacco products to eighteen years. We have invested substantially more funds in health promotion activities and we have mounted sustained information campaigns. We have engaged in sponsorship arrangements, which are new and innovative for public bodies. I have provided health boards with additional resources to let them mount a sustained inspection and enforcement service. Health boards will engage new Directors of Tobacco Control responsible for coordinating each health board´s response and for liasing with the Tobacco Control Agency I set up earlier this year. Most recently, I have published a comprehensive Bill – The Public Health (Tobacco) Bill, 2001. This Bill will, among other things, end all forms of product display and in-store advertising and will require all retailers to register with the new Tobacco Control Agency. Ten packs of cigarettes will be banned and transparent and independent testing procedures of tobacco products will be introduced. Enforcement officers will be given all the necessary powers to ensure there is full compliance with the law. On smoking in public places we will extend the existing areas covered and it is proposed that I, as Minister for Health and Children, will have the powers to introduce further prohibitions in public places such as pubs and the work place. I will also provide for the establishment of a Tobacco Free Council to advise and assist on an ongoing basis. I believe the measures already introduced and those additional ones proposed in the Bill have widespread community support. In fact, you´re going to hear a detailed presentation from the MRBI which will amply illustrate the extent of this support. The great thing is that the support comes from smokers and non-smokers alike. Bottom line, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that we are at a watershed. As a society (if you´ll allow me to play with a popular phrase) we´ve realised it´s time to ´wake up and smell the cigarettes.´ Smell them. See them for what they are. And get real about destroying their hold on our people. The MRBI survey makes it clear that the single strongest weapon we have when it comes to preventing the habit among young people is price. Simple as that. Price. Up to now, the fear of inflation has been a real impediment to increasing taxes on tobacco. It sounds a serious, logical argument. Until you take it out and look at it a little more closely. Weigh it, as it were, in two hands. I believe – and I believe this with a great passion – that we must take cigarettes out of the equation we use when awarding wage increases. I am calling on IBEC and ICTU, on employers and trade unions alike, to move away from any kind of tolerance of a trade that is killing our citizens. At one point in industrial history, cigarettes were a staple of the workingman´s life. So it was legitimate to include them in the ´basket´ of goods that goes to make up the Consumer Price Index. It isn´t legitimate to include them any more. Today, I´m saying that society collectively must take the step to remove cigarettes from the basket of normality, from the list of elements which constitute necessary consumer spending. I´m saying: “We can no longer delude ourselves. We must exclude cigarettes from the considerations we address in central wage bargaining. We must price cigarettes out of the reach of the children those cigarettes will kill.” Right now, in the monthly Central Statistics Office reports on consumer spending, the figures include cigarettes. But – right down at the bottom of the page – there´s another figure. Calculated without including cigarettes. I believe that if we continue to use the first figure as our constant measure, it will be an indictment of us as legislators, as advocates for working people, as public health professionals. If, on the other hand, we move to the use of the second figure, we will be sending out a message of startling clarity to the nation. We will be saying “We don´t count an addictive, killer drug as part of normal consumer spending.” Taking cigarettes out of the basket used to determine the Consumer Price Index will take away the inflation argument. It will not be easy, in its implications for the social partners. But it is morally inescapable. We must do it. Because it will help us stop the killer that is tobacco. If we can do it, we will give so much extra strength to health educators and the new Tobacco Control Association. This new organisation of young people who already have branches in over fifteen counties, is represented here today. The young adults who make up its membership are well placed to advise children of the dangers of tobacco addiction in a way that older generations cannot. It would strengthen their hand if cigarettes move – in price terms – out of the easy reach of our children Finally, I would like to commend so many public health advocates who have shown professional and indeed personal courage in their commitment to this critical public health issue down through the years. We need you to continue to challenge and confront this grave public health problem and to repudiate the questionable science of the tobacco industry. The Research Institute for a Tobacco Free Society represents a new and dynamic form of partnership between government and civil society. It will provide an effective platform to engage and mobilise the many different professional and academic skills necessary to guide and challenge us. I wish the conference every success.

Publication trends of shared decision making in 15 high impact medical journals: a full-text review with bibliometric analysis.

BACKGROUND: Shared Decision Making (SDM) is increasingly advocated as a model for medical decision making. However, there is still low use of SDM in clinical practice. High impact factor journals might represent an efficient way for its dissemination. We aimed to identify and characterize publication trends of SDM in 15 high impact medical journals. METHODS: We selected the 15 general and internal medicine journals with the highest impact factor publishing original articles, letters and editorials. We retrieved publications from 1996 to 2011 through the full-text search function on each journal website and abstracted bibliometric data. We included publications of any type containing the phrase "shared decision making" or five other variants in their abstract or full text. These were referred to as SDM publications. A polynomial Poisson regression model with logarithmic link function was used to assess the evolution across the period of the number of SDM publications according to publication characteristics. RESULTS: We identified 1285 SDM publications out of 229,179 publications in 15 journals from 1996 to 2011. The absolute number of SDM publications by journal ranged from 2 to 273 over 16 years. SDM publications increased both in absolute and relative numbers per year, from 46 (0.32% relative to all publications from the 15 journals) in 1996 to 165 (1.17%) in 2011. This growth was exponential (P < 0.01). We found fewer research publications (465, 36.2% of all SDM publications) than non-research publications, which included non-systematic reviews, letters, and editorials. The increase of research publications across time was linear. Full-text search retrieved ten times more SDM publications than a similar PubMed search (1285 vs. 119 respectively). CONCLUSION: This review in full-text showed that SDM publications increased exponentially in major medical journals from 1996 to 2011. This growth might reflect an increased dissemination of the SDM concept to the medical community.

Automatic Lexical Semantic Classification of Nouns

The work we present here addresses cue-based noun classification in English and Spanish. Its main objective is to automatically acquire lexical semantic information by classifying nouns into previously known noun lexical classes. This is achieved by using particular aspects of linguistic contexts as cues that identify a specific lexical class. Here we concentrate on the task of identifying such cues and the theoretical background that allows for an assessment of the complexity of the task. The results show that, despite of the a-priori complexity of the task, cue-based classification is a useful tool in the automatic acquisition of lexical semantic classes.

An LFG approach to the syntax of quotation

This paper attempts to give an account of the syntax of quotation from an LFG perspective. I claim that quotes are inserted at N’ positions by making use of a special phrase structure rule that makes the quote’s f-structure the PRED value of the mother f-structure. However, in order to reach to this conclusion, the concept of quotation has to be restricted to only include metalinguistic and direct reported speech quotes, by making use of the property of grammatical opacity, i.e. only subsegments whose ungrammaticality does not affect the grammaticality of the whole sentence are quotes. The main advantage of this is this distinguishes the syntax of direct quotes from the one of other citational but not quotational structures like Davidson’s (1979) and Cappelen and Lepore’s (2007) mixed quotation.

Wörter stehen da einige. On nominal split topicalization in non-standard viennese german

This work investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of nominal Split Topicalization (ST) constructions in Standard and non-Standard German. The topic phrase denotes a property, and the MF phrase either modifies this property or picks out a specific entity. Semantically, the topic phrase will be analysed as a property-denoting expression which restricts the denotation of the verbal predicate, while the MF phrase is composed either via specify or restrict (cf. Chung and Ladusaw, 2003). Syntactically, the base position of the topic phrase is the (incorporating) verb, and the MF phrase is generated independently as the complement of the verb containing an empty pronoun. Since predicates introduce abstract discourse referents, the topic phrase can be resumed via "pro" in the MF phrase.

PILULE ORALE OESTRO-PROGESTATIVE

« Un jour viendra où le principal avantage d'apprendre la médecine sera de se protéger contre les médecins ». Cette phrase de Jacques Ferron illustre bien le sentiment que certain-e-s patient-e-s cultivent à l'égard du corps médical, une confiance en les connaissances fournies par la science, mais une méfiance envers ceux chargés de les transmettre. La pilule contraceptive en est certainement l'emblème. Ce médicament apparu il y a maintenant 52 ans, fait depuis son apparition l'objet de débats intenses. Débats tant sociaux que médicaux. Aujourd'hui, la contraception orale est devenue la forme de contraception la plus utilisée dans le monde occidental mais malgré sont succès, elle reste toujours au centre des débats. Toutefois le contexte, les préoccupations et même la pilule ont changés. Le contexte actuel pousse les femmes à prendre la pilule, pour diverses raisons, soit personnelles, sociales, médicales ou commerciales. D'un côté elle est présentée comme la contraception « idéale », comme l'outil permettant à une femme d'avoir une vie sexuelle et professionnelle « libérée » avec un rapport risques- bénéfices optimal et de l'autre côté les femmes se posent des questions face à une pilule qui doit être prise quotidiennement et souvent à long terme. Une pilule dont elles entendent régulièrement parler dans les médias comme véhiculant un danger camouflé par un complot pharmaco-médical. Parfois commencée à un jeune âge, lorsque l'on est plus tout à fait enfant et loin d'être femme, ce contraceptif accompagne leurs premières aventures sexuelles et leurs premiers pas dans leur processus de construction en tant que femme. Mais très vite la pilule pose de nombreuses questions. Parce que les copines en parlent, parce que les médias en parlent, parce qu'elles ont l'impression d'avoir prit du poids, d'avoir une baisse de libido, d'être plus triste. Les médecins parlent d'un médicament peu dangereux, avec peu d'effets secondaires, mais elles ne se sentent pas rassurées. Parce que partout on nous dit que la pilule peut être dangereuse. Il y a ce reportage sur cette fille qui a fait un AVC, il y a cette amie qui portera un collant (bas à compression) à vie, il y a cet article qui dit que les poissons changent de sexe à cause des oestrogènes de leur pilule. Il y a ce sentiment que l'on ne leur dit pas tout.