In this special issue of Visual Neuroscience , we present a series of papers to honor the life and career of Robert William Rodieck, who passed away at his home in Seattle on September 30, 2003. Rodieck held the E.K. Bishop Professorship in Ophthalmology at the University of Washington Medical Center from 1978-1997. Known to everyone as "Bob," he leaves behind an intellectual legacy often admir...

Over the past decades, education took a critical-oriented shift. This perspective changed the role of teachers, students, and classrooms. A teacher's role changes from an instructor to a reflective practitioner, a student is considered an active agent of his/her learning, and a classroom is a place for identity endeavor. The assumption underlying such an approach conceptualizes educatio...

One of the elements in Persian poetry and sonnets (Ghazal) is penname, which in addition to marking poetry in the name of the poet, sometimes has an amphiboly to another means; but in the poetry of poets such as Hafez - which have a special and coherent intellectual system - in the form of a main metaphor or central metaphor, penname is involved in determining their intellectual system. In this...

We do not expect sympathy from a good accountant, or a good lawyer. An unsympathetic accountant or lawyer can be good, we might even take the lack of sympathy to be a mark of professionalism; however, there is something profoundly wrong, even unprofessional, about unsympathetic physicians. Good doctors ought to have a caring heart. We inherit this expectation from the Scottish Enlightenment. Un...

The paper deals with the personality traits of Gallo-Roman author Sidonius Apollinaris (~430–489) who was a representative of Late Roman nobility and clergyman as well. It wasn’t unusual situation for 4th-6th century’s Mediterranean world, when intellectual elite was a fueler for religious leaders. Nonetheless some of them underwent the crisis of identity, others continued to hold old values an...

Eliot Freidson (1923-2005) is considered one of the founders of the sociology of medicine. Both his critics and admirers in the sociological and medical fields recognize his work as an international benchmark. This paper analyzes Freidson's intellectual biography without concentrating on his ideas or their transformation over the course of time. The emphasis is on the personal constraints that ...

Objective: No specific pharmacological approach to behavioral disorders in patients with severe intellectual disabilities associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exists. Neuroleptics are known to be epileptogenic, and benzodiazepines have an adverse effect on their already limited cognitive capabilities. The possibility of managing behavioral disorders in persons with ASD via antidepress...