A house divided against itself cannot stand.

House Divided

In the prophetic words of Abraham Lincoln in addressing the antebellum Nation, " A house divided against itself cannot stand. " As physicians, we too live in a house divided. We factionalize along lines of specialty, practice size, practice location, ethnicity, etc. As emergency physicians, we are among the most egregious in splintering the House of Medicine. We have subdivided our small young ...

Jean-Paul Sartre on the Meaning of Life: Objections from an Islamic Viewpoint

Theories of the meaning of life are divided into two categories: nihilistic and anti-nihilistic. The latter is divided, in turn, into the view that life is meaningful and the view that life can be made meaningful. In this paper, we deploy a descriptive-analytic method to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre’s view of nihilism. In his view, God does not exist, the human being is born and dies without a reas...

Through the lens of accountability: referral of inquiries by ministers to upper house committees

The New South Wales Legislative Council is alone among upper houses around Australia in providing for the referral of inquiries to committees by a minister of the Crown. The resolution establishing the standing committees upon the commencement of each parliament states that a committee ‘is to inquire into and report on any matter relevant to the functions of the committee which is referred to t...

The Battle Against COVID-19: Where Do We Stand Now?

Local Object Gist: Meaningful Shapes and Spatial Layout at a Very Early Stage of Visual Processing

In his introduction, Pinna (2010) quoted one of Wertheimer’s observations: “I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky. Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of color. Do I have ‘327’? No. I have sky, house, and trees.” This seems quite remarkable, for Max Wertheimer, together with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Koehler, was a pioneer of Gestalt Theory: perceptual o...