bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Circumstances of Partisan Deliberation
Authors: Wolkenstein Fabio
Published: January 2020

This chapter aims to provide a tentative answer to the question of whether party members are at all capable of engaging in non-coercive dialogical exchanges of arguments that result in concrete political proposals, let alone sustained critiques of some existing proposal. It looks specifically at the ‘circumstances of deliberation’ at the party base, asking whether the local partisan associations in which party members engage provide the conditions that are necessary for reasonably non-coercive and dialogical deliberation to arise, namely that participants have equal opportunities to influence the deliberative process, and that they hold a variety of different viewpoints that ensure that the issue under deliberation is considered from multiple angles. The chapter argues that these desiderata are indeed satisfied, showing that diversity is ensured by members’ different occupational backgrounds, and that partisans’ joint commitment to shared political ideals establishes an egalitarian ‘deliberative field’ in which everyone’s voice is heard. These are, it is suggested, very favourable conditions for deliberation, even if one applies much higher normative standards than the book does. Interestingly, the fact that partisanship involves having common adversaries—a by-product of having shared normative commitments—also contributes to the equal standing branch members enjoy; so, partisanship’s inherent exclusionary dynamics have the happy effect of rendering branches supportive environments for deliberation.
Partisan Deliberation in Action
Authors: Wolkenstein Fabio
Published: January 2020

This chapter shifts the focus from the circumstances of deliberation to actual deliberative practice. It begins by distinguishing two different types of disagreement within the partisan groups: ones about organizational matters and ones about issues concerning society at large. It then goes on to examine several exemplary text passages that illustrate how partisans ‘deliberatively’ handle these kinds of disagreements. The central point that emerges from the analysis is that party activists engage in acts of reason giving that may reasonably be interpreted as satisfying the twin demands of uptake and mutual engagement. One of several interesting specificities of partisan deliberation is that it is marked by tensions between pragmatically-minded partisans and more ideological ones. This, it turns out, is also an important source of diversity within party groups. Another notable finding is that the political principles underpinning partisanship can facilitate mutual justification. The ‘normative consensus’ that characterizes partisan collectives plays a crucial role in this connection: partisans’ pre-deliberative agreement on a certain set of political principles ensures that appeals to those principles are immediately resonant. This makes reaching agreements and compromises easier. The upshot is that even though deliberation in party branches is a particular kind of deliberation, it is undoubtedly good deliberation. If this is any indication, then there is plenty of potential for involving these partisans more in the party’s wider deliberations and giving them bigger deliberative tasks
Robbe-Grillet in Other Worlds
Authors: Guy Adam
Published: January 2020

This chapter shows how the narrative form and obsessive focus on objects of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s early fiction—his chosisme—was adopted in three novels published in Britain in the 1960s. In Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A (1968), Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964), and Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation (1968), Robbe-Grillet’s literary innovations become a means of reflecting on the end of empire. First, Robbe-Grillet’s broader reception within the context of the end of empire is surveyed. Then the three novels in question are analysed in turn. The chapter concludes by considering how new literary forms and new world-historical forms might line up in the work of Aldiss, Brooke-Rose, and Williams.
Out of Bounds
Authors: Davis Alex
Published: January 2020

In the fourteenth-century romance of Gamelyn, Sir John of Boundys wills that the greater part of his land should pass to the youngest of his sons, Gamelyn, defying the convention of primogeniture. After his father’s death, Gamelyn is forced to flee to the greenwood and take up life as an outlaw. This chapter examines this narrative as it plays out in Gamelyn and in Gamelyn’s literary successors. Gamelyn was adapted by Thomas Lodge, who used it as the basis of his prose romance Rosalynde; Rosalynde in turn served as the source for Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. I argue that this line of adaptation forms a ‘testamentary fiction’: a narrative about legacies and bequests that uses the idea of inheritance to frame itself as an object of transmission. I also argue that this tradition ultimately serves to celebrate a quasi-sovereign will exercised through the possession of landed property.
The Home-Bred Enemy
Authors: Davis Alex
Published: January 2020

This chapter considers the naturalization of inheritance in relation to the Tudor usurpation of the English throne and its Stuart aftermath. I examine the implication of a language of succession in various early modern discussions of the opposed values of constancy and change. In the literature of the Elizabethan succession crisis, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and in the projects superintended by the seventeenth-century noblewoman Anne Clifford we see a variety of attempts to discover in practices of inheritance a ground of psychic stability and sociopolitical domination. In each case, however, these efforts at control find themselves confronted by a recalcitrant matter—encountered on the Gaelic-speaking peripheries of the British islands, in the medieval past, in women’s bodies, or in the changeable fabric of all created things—that resists full regimentation.
Heavenly Inheritances
Authors: Davis Alex
Published: January 2020

Christian scripture repeatedly has recourse to the language of inheritance, as in the promise offered in the sermon on the mount: ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5: 5). What was the relationship between this heavenly inheritance, and inheritance considered as a worldly system for the transmission of property and title? This chapter examines two motifs that focused this question with particular intensity. First, we have the tale of Jacob and Esau—of the younger son who, by divine command, supplants his elder sibling and contravenes a divinely authorized Mosaic law that mandates a form of primogeniture. Second, there is the premodern tradition of allegorical knightly quests, in which the conventions of chivalric romance, including its characteristic focus upon noble blood and its addiction to genealogical plots, were redeployed in order to produce Everyman narratives that explore questions of spiritual salvation.
Accomplishing Change in Teaching and Learning Regimes
Authors: Trowler Paul
Published: January 2020

This book offers a new perspective on the professional world of higher education. Using social practice theory, it presents a practice sensibility rooted in concepts which illuminate teaching and learning contexts. The book takes the reader through the social processes occurring within higher education institutions which shape contexts and influence the direction of change; for leaders and managers, educational developers, change agents, and academics, this sensibility will help to identify the successful paths to changes for enhancement and the patterns of policy implementation likely to occur as teaching and learning is enhanced. For researchers of higher education, the practice sensibility offers new possibilities for meaningful research into teaching and learning issues. Teaching and learning regimes are a key focus of the book. As a family of practices performed by a workgroup in higher education over extended periods, they comprise a number of ‘moments’—characteristics derived from structural foundations which shape the workgroup’s practices and frameworks of meaning. These moments condition how teaching and learning is fundamentally understood, what its aims are thought to be, what is considered ‘normal’ practice, how individuals see themselves and others, and how power operates within the workgroup. The material context is significant in this, as are the backstories, personal histories, and institutional sagas. This book develops a completely new approach to Trowler’s concept of teaching and learning regimes. Using both his research and that of others in the field, it presents a more nuanced, fully developed, and sophisticated version of the concept which has great traction for empirical research, the management of change, and the enhancement of the student experience and learning outcomes.
Historical Foundations
Authors: Smith Stephen A.
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the historical origins of remedial law and of the common law’s understanding of remedial law. The chapter focuses on two relationships: (1) between so-called ‘legal’ and ‘equitable’ remedies; and (2) between remedial law and substantive law. Substantively, Chapter 2 explains, from an historical perspective, why the common law has traditionally regarded equitable remedies as distinctive and, second, why the common law has long understood substantive law through a largely remedial lens. The chapter also sets the stage for the critiques, developed in later chapters, to each of these understandings.
Wrongs
Authors: Smith Stephen A.
Published: January 2020

Chapter 7 examines remedies issued in response to wrongs. Some writers assume that all remedies are responses to wrong; others argue for the opposite conclusion. This chapter defends a mid-way position, arguing that some (but only some) damages awards are wrong-responding, specifically: nominal damages, exemplary damages, pain and suffering damages, and a variety of awards that are described compendiously as ‘vindicatory’ damages (and individually as user damages, waiver damages, market-price damages, non-pecuniary damages, and gain-based damages). Importantly, ordinary compensatory damages are not responses to wrongs. In defending this position, Chapter 7 rejects the ‘continuity thesis’ and, more generally, the idea of a substantive duty to pay damages. The chapter also explains the distinctive characteristics of wrong-based remedies, arguing that there is no natural or logical remedial response to a wrong (and, therefore, that, like criminal punishment, the sums awarded under this heading are determined by choice and convention).
Dance Rhythm
Authors: Bresnahan Aili
Published: January 2020

Chapter 5 proposes a theory of dance rhythm as distinct from rhythm in dance. First, it distinguishes natural and intentional rhythm, constructed from combining theories by John Dewey and Joseph Margolis. It then defends this account by exploring musical and non-musical connections between rhythm and dance. It argues that dance rhythm can arise in conjunction with music, or that it can—though need not—follow music, or that it can set the musical rhythm, or be completely independent of music, though natural or internal bodily rhythms can underpin both. Finally, it asserts the existence of dance that might be naturally rhythmic, but not in a way essential to dance qua dance.
The Life of Rhythm
Authors: Hagberg Garry L.
Published: January 2020

Chapter 6 poses the question: Why does rhythm speak to us so deeply? Patterns of accented or percussive sound that move us are meaningful, yet we find it hard to say what associations or connotations create that meaning. It argues that John Dewey’s Art as Experience has deep insights on this question, and focuses on their implications for jazz improvisation. For Dewey, both player and listener are like the live organism interacting within its environment. Hagberg addresses Dewey’s understanding that “rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, [that] pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance”; that “The supposition that the interest in rhythm which dominates the fine arts can be explained simply on the basis of rhythmic processes in the living body is but another case of the separation of organism from environment.”
Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness
Authors: Gracyk Ted
Published: January 2020

Despite the vast philosophical literature on musical expression, there is a surprising paucity of philosophical discussion of how rhythm contributes to the topic. Chapter 10 proposes that certain kinds of accounts of expressive qualities of music become more plausible when we recognize that entrainable rhythms play a role in our experience of musical expression. More specifically, an entrainment account of musical expression holds that the ability to hear expressiveness in rhythmic sounds is logically prior to hearing some musical patterns as expressive gestures. Although the author does not endorse arousalism as a general account of musical expression, understanding the role of rhythm in expressiveness supports a combination of the “resemblance” and “contagion” accounts of music’s expressiveness, blending what are often treated as mutually opposed accounts.
Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception
Authors: London Justin
Published: January 2020

Chapter 11 discusses the limits and mechanisms of our perceptual faculties for auditory rhythm. Perhaps more than vision, a consideration of auditory perception, and our auditory perception of rhythm in particular, reminds us that the perceptual process is not a linear chain of information from the external world to the mind, but an active interplay between mind and world. But while considering our senses as perceptual systems—as cross-modal—solves some problems of perception, it creates other, perhaps deeper ones, the author argues. In the case of musical rhythm, our rhythmic percepts are often non-veridical, as we add accents, beats, and grouping structure to otherwise undifferentiated stimuli.
How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There?
Authors: Tenzer Michael
Published: January 2020

The universe of possible rhythms comprises a timescape with a timescape embedded within it; that is, the full complement of rhythms that can be imagined engulfs its own subset, namely those rhythms already created or discovered by human agents. But if, in response to the question posed by the title, we endeavor to partition this whole to construct a typology of rhythm, we face from the outset a stark methodological choice. Do we opt to separate out perception and experience to create an abstract rhythm science mapping the terrain of the possible, or do we seek an anthropology of the rhythms humans have made and perceived? Chapter 13 views rhythm’s potential along various continua: via comparison with language, in the development of human culture, in the life of an individual’s experience, perception and cognitive prowess, and in the non-human natural world.
Complexity and Passage
Authors: Hasty Christopher
Published: January 2020

Chapter 15 treats rhythm as the shaping of events and their succession, rather than as a pre-existent or transcendent order of isochronous division or fixed pattern. Although “rhythm” has come to imply the regularity of a repeated unit or pattern, the author argues that it also evokes the dynamic, temporal connotations of flow conceived not as of a homogeneous substance (“time”) but rather as a fluid, active, and characterful creation of things or events. The chapter thus prioritizes a living, subjective sense of rhythm over a non-vital, objective concept. The author relates this concept to poetry through a reading of the opening of Keats’s “Hymn to Pan,” from Endymion, analyzing the continuing “life” of the vocal impulse along the lines and through the word-sounds taken as “mouth events”—a reading after the manner of M. H. Abrams.
Time, Rhythm, and Subjectivity
Authors: Paddison Max
Published: January 2020

Chapter 17 argues for an experiential concept of temporality that takes Kantian subjectivity as its point of reference. Drawing on Bachelard’s phenomenology of duration, it makes a case for temporal experience as fundamentally subjective and exploratory, but historically contingent. Placing the aesthetic experience of music in this context, it argues for a large-scale notion of “rhythmicized duration” as form that affords extended scope for the aesthetic experience of temporality. Finally, the author argues that aesthetic concepts of temporality, duration, and rhythm are subject to change, development, and displacement, and as a result have functioned both normatively and metaphorically in different historical periods. It suggests that there are distinctly different aesthetic experiences of time, and that this is reflected in the fact that historical paradigms of temporal experience in music shift, which in turn serves to shape our experience of rhythm as structured duration.
Performing Nationhood
Authors: Pandit Mimasha
Published: January 2020

The book Performing Nationhood serves as a corridor to one’s ‘self’. It began as a humble attempt to interrogate the performance history of Swadeshi Bengal. The burgeoning public space and the audibility of voices hitherto unheard presented a two-way problem, for the colonisers as well as for the colonised. The thinking mind that hid behind a facade of obedience suddenly appeared before all. The transparent veil separating the hidden from the manifest was torn apart. In the context of the swadeshi and boycott agitation, performative spaces such as theatre, jatra, and songs did not just serve as a forum for disseminating the notions of nationhood put forward by the intellectuals; the ideas gained a life of their own once they were placed in the performative space. Encompassing both the performer and the audience/recipient of the ideas, the notion underwent changes at various planes of consciousness. The notion of the nation, as disseminated by the performances, acquired a different meaning at the level of enactment, and attained an entirely new substance when received by the audience. None of these exchanges occurred in complete passivity of any one party present in the performative space. Consequently, the emergent emotion of nationhood developed as a nuanced image of the ‘self’. This book has tried to locate the beginning of that emotion of the national ‘self’.
Idea and Methods of Legal Research
Authors: Bhat P. Ishwara
Published: January 2020

Legal research examines subject matter enshrouded in social circumstances in order to conceptualize theories and prepare a future course of action. This dynamic, inter-disciplinary, and labyrinthine character of legal research requires researchers to be fluid, eclectic, and analytical in their approach. Idea and Methods of Legal Research unearths how the thinking process is to be streamlined in research, how a theme is built on the basis of comprehensive and intensive study, and the paths through which notions of objectivity, feminism, ethics, and purposive character of knowledge are to be understood. The book first explains the meaning, evolution, and scope of legal research, and discusses objectivity and ethics in legal research. It engages with the requirements, advantages, and limits of various doctrinal and non-doctrinal methods and tools, and the points to be considered in selecting a suitable method or combination of methods. It highlights analytical, historical, philosophical, comparative, qualitative, and quantitative methods of legal research. The book then goes on to discuss the use of multi-method legal research, policy research, action research, and feminist legal research and finally, reflects on research-based critical legal writing, as opposed to client-related legal writing. This book, thus, is a comprehensive answer to key questions one faces in legal research.
Choosing, Designing, and Building the Legal Research Theme
Authors: Bhat P. Ishwara
Published: January 2020

A research problem originates when the researcher considers the situation as complex, confusing and needs to probe into the way in which it can be resolved. The chapter discusses methods of selection of a problem by looking to incongruities and gaps and choice on the basis of personal interests, social relevance, and availability of time, fund and research materials. To define is to zero down the research problem. It next focuses on the drafting of a research proposal and research design, its importance, content and steps. Through this discussion it focuses on 3 questions: How to conduct literature review? What is its importance? How to contextualise a discussion in relation to the existing body of knowledge? It also discusses the formulation of a hypothesis, its importance and verification in light of vast data collected in the course of research. From the beginning to the final stage how intellectual activity is to be carried on in a systematic manner is the theme of this chapter.
Doctrinal Legal Research as a Means of Synthesizing Facts, Thoughts, and Legal Principles
Authors: Bhat P. Ishwara
Published: January 2020

Doctrinal legal research (DLR) is a predominant method employed by various classes of legal researchers. It involves rigorous analysis and creative synthesis of multiple doctrinal strands. Doctrines are central to juridical treatment of concepts. Since legal propositions have roots in economic, social, political, and psychological factors, an inter-disciplinary approach becomes essential. Because of the need to overarch changing values, social mores, and economic factors, doctrinal research collaborates with historical, comparative, analytical, and philosophical methods of research. DLR has a long history and definite procedure. Adoption of required steps systematises DLR. It has received criticism for excessively relying on concepts rather than social inputs; for ignoring the empirical techniques; for concentrating only on court decisions or legal rules. It differs from non-doctrinal legal research in the matter of data, venue of research, and time and money utilised. Because of social character of law there is need for collaboration between DLR and NDLR for positive outcome.
Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social
Authors: Guru Gopal , Sarukkai Sundar
Published: January 2020

This book develops a radically new way of understanding the social by focussing on different experiences we have of the everyday empirical reality. This book offers a new way of understanding the social processes of societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, all of which have complex experiences of the everyday social. The authors begin with the argument that the everyday social is the domain where the first experiences of the social are formed and these experiences influence to a great extent meaning-making of the structural social. Following a critique of some dominant trends in social ontology, they discuss in detail, and with many common examples, how the social is experienced through the perceptual capacities of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. They then discuss the relation between experience of belongingness and the social, and show how the social gets authority in a way similar to how natural gets authority in the natural sciences. Moreover, the social appears through the invocation of we-ness, suggestive of a social self. The everyday social also creates its sense of time, a social time which orders social experiences such as caste. Finally, the authors explain how the ethics of the social is formed through the relationship of Maitri (drawn from Ambedkar) between the different socials that constitute a society. This is not just a new theory of the social but is filled with illustrations from the everyday experiences of India, including the diverse experiences of caste.
Introduction
Authors: Guru Gopal , Sarukkai Sundar
Published: January 2020

There is no one universal ‘social’ but a multitude of socials that characterise our societal experiences. These multiple experiences of the ‘social’ influence the ideas we form of the social, as well as give cognitive access to the different socials. The introduction sets out the motivation for the study of the social and discusses the basic approaches to the idea of social ontology. How do we define the everyday social? Why is the study of the everyday so important to formulate the idea of the social? Are there different socials? It then goes on to discuss the major themes in the other chapters of the book.
Sensing the Social
Authors: Guru Gopal , Sarukkai Sundar
Published: January 2020

Social is not an abstract term. It is one that is experienced through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. People talk about the social as if it is something that they can experience. How can we make sense of this character of the social? In what sense could the social be real in such a way that it can be experienced? This chapter discusses many examples of how the social is accessed through these senses and how they repeatedly occur in caste experiences. The chapter goes on to discuss the experience of the social through vision, smell, sound and touch: especially bringing in how we socialize our perceptions of ‘social touch’.
Monetary Policy Transmission in India
Authors: Kanagasabapathy K. , Bhangaonkar Rekha A. , Pandey Shruti J.
Published: January 2020

K. Kanagasabapathy, Rekha A. Bhangaonkar, and Shruti Pandey address the issue whether the rate and quantum channels were complementary to each other over the period April 2001 to December 2017. Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) monetary policy framework is characterized by use of multiple instruments combining adjustments in policy rate with a complex use of liquidity management operations, despite changes in the functioning of the monetary policy. They study easing and tightening phases of the policy cycle and bring out stylized facts on several relationships highlighting the impact of policy rate changes and liquidity conditions on short and medium term market interest rates and output and prices. An empirical analysis confirmed the linkage between the repo rate and the market related rates. On the quantum side, a bi-causal relationship is observed between repo and liquidity. Money and financial transmission market transmission is better established than that to the real sector. Shruti Pandey and K. Kanagasabapathy have worked on the revised version for the new edition.
Reforms and Global Economic Integration of the Indian Economy
Authors: Kumar Nagesh
Published: January 2020

Nagesh Kumar brings out the reforms pursued since 1991 have deepened global integration of the Indian economy. Opportunities for product and market diversification remain to be fully exploited to sustain export growth and create more jobs. Despite healthy trade surpluses earned by services as India emerged as a global hub for ICT outsourcing, the balance of payment situation continues to face occasional pressures related to oil prices fluctuations. Export competitiveness needs to be strengthened through appropriate exchange rate management and opportunities for strategic import substitution need to be exploited by leveraging India’s large domestic market size using industrial policy measures, such as Make-in-India. While farsighted policies have led India becoming a part of emerging broader regional economic arrangement, Indian industry has yet to learn to exploit the opportunities provided by preferential access to East Asian markets rather than passively grant market access.
India and the Uruguay Round Trade Agreement
Authors: Nachiappan Karthik
Published: January 2020

In this chapter, I map how India negotiates agreements under GATT’s Uruguay Round by showing how protectionism by developed countries in the 1980s affected the Indian economy and particular sectors like textiles, agriculture and services, in turn, shaping their interests for more open trade. The arrival of a new GATT round served as an apt opportunity for the Ministry of Commerce, the institution that sought to alleviate constraints facing Indian exporters in these and other sectors influencing the pragmatic tack adopted at negotiations. India’s practical, yet sober, approach at the Uruguay Round was also influenced by domestic interest groups, specifically business groups and lobbies, who were keen to secure greater market access for their goods and services.
Unity of the Individual and the Collective
Authors: Tripathi R.C.
Published: January 2020

This chapter undertakes a conceptual analysis of the relationship between the individual and the collective with a view to understanding the processes and conditions, which bring about ‘unity’ of the two within diverse cultures. The individual is seen as being constituted by several types of selves, which seek unity with several types of collectives. The chapter discusses the processes and factors that explain how a collective comes to inhabit the individual, and individual the collective. Another question that is examined is how certain processes and cultural contexts create permeable and impermeable boundary conditions between self and the other, between the individual and the collective. The chapter draws from the discourses and approaches in disciplines other than psychology.
Radical Pacifist
Authors: Aronson Amy
Published: January 2020

As World War I began in Europe in 1914, Crystal Eastman helped lead two major peace organizations. She facilitated the founding of the Woman’s Peace Party, today the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), initiating the recruitment of a reluctant Jane Addams to head the national organization while she formed and led the more audacious New York branch. And she served as executive secretary of the American Union Against Militarism, the only American antiwar organization ever to demonstrate that citizen diplomacy could avert war. She joined an impressive group of Progressive reformers—Addams; Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service; Oswald Garrison Villard, National Association for the Advancement of Color People financier and publisher of the Nation; and Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress. With others, they created the “new peace movement,” which allied world peacekeeping with global democracy, human rights, and economic justice.
Agonizing Dilemmas and the March toward War
Authors: Aronson Amy
Published: January 2020

In 1916, Crystal Eastman quietly married Walter Fuller, after becoming pregnant with their first child. At the same time, she faced one of the cruelest dilemmas of her political life. It was an election year, and Woodrow Wilson promised peace but not suffrage while his opponent, former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes, promised suffrage but not peace. She chose peace, backed Wilson, and broke with every downtown feminist and militant suffragist with whom she had stood since college. But after Election Day, Wilson’s promises for American “peace without victory” eroded with changing circumstances. Ultimately, the infamous “Zimmerman telegram,” in which Germany promised to help Mexico recover territory lost to the United States in the 1840s if they joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, turned the tide. When Eastman’s colleagues met with Wilson on February 28, 1917, they knew the United States would soon enter the world war.
Training Working Memory for 100 Days
Authors: Schmiedek Florian , Lövdén Martin , Lindenberger Ulman
Published: January 2020

This chapter is based on a theoretical framework for the study of adult cognitive plasticity and on empirical findings from the COGITO Study. The design and analyses of the study include key features for producing and detecting transfer effects at the level of cognitive abilities. Among the features are: (a) an intensity and dosage of training that is likely to induce an enduring mismatch between functional supply and demand, which is conducive to plastic changes in cognitive abilities, and (b) a multivariate and heterogeneous battery of transfer tasks and sufficiently large samples to allow for the investigation of transfer of training at the level of latent factors. Younger adults showed short-term and long-term transfer effects for reasoning and episodic memory, whereas older adults showed only short-term transfer on a working memory (WM) latent factor composed of tasks that resembled the practiced tasks, something that younger adults did as well. The chapter discusses possible interpretations of the findings in terms of increases in WM capacity, improvements in the efficiency of material-independent or material-specific processes or strategies, and improvements in motivation and self-concept.
Neuroscience Perspectives on Cognitive Training
Authors: Kuchinsky Stefanie E. , Haarmann Henk J.
Published: January 2020

The aim of this chapter is to spark a discussion regarding how cognitive neuroscience research can aid in the evaluation and development of effective cognitive training protocols. In particular, the authors pose questions relating to whether training-related neural plasticity (i.e., changes in brain function and structure in response to experience) could be used to facilitate the identification and targeting of the neural systems (for working memory and other executive functions) that both support performance on a desired outcome task (e.g., speech recognition) and are alterable via training. The chapter describes approaches that provide unique methodological perspectives for understanding the neural systems that support training-related improvements in cognition. The chapter also highlights the multiple challenges that have emerged from behavioral studies of cognitive training and that neuroscience techniques may help to address, including: establishing the extent to which cognitive training benefits exist for trained tasks and materials, transfer to untrained tasks and materials, persist for extended periods of time, and are effective across a range of individuals. Cognitive neuroscience research has begun not only to tackle these challenges but also to pose new questions, such as: Can training benefits be maximized via regulating or stimulating the neural systems that support behavior? How might our current approaches to cognitive training be significantly altered by novel and developing cognitive neuroscience methodologies?
Working Memory Training and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation
Authors: Au Jacky , Buschkuehl Martin , Jaeggi Susanne M.
Published: January 2020

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the discussion of the cognitive neuroscience of brain stimulation. In doing so, the authors emphasize work from their own laboratory that focuses both on working memory training and transcranial direct current stimulation. Transcranial direct current stimulation is one of the most commonly used and extensively researched methods of transcranial electrical stimulation. The chapter focuses on implementation of transcranial direct current stimulation to enhance and inform research on working memory training, and not on the underlying mechanisms of transcranial direct current stimulation. Thus, while respecting the intricacies and unknowns of the inner workings of electrical stimulation on the brain, the chapter relies on the premise that transcranial direct current stimulation is able to directly affect the electrophysiological profile of the brain and provides evidence that this in turn can influence behavior given the right parameters.
Logical and Methodological Considerations in Cognitive Training Research
Authors: Katz Benjamin , Shah Priti
Published: January 2020

It is unclear whether existing computer-based cognitive training can improve prefrontal function in a manner relevant to real-life outcomes. An important scientific goal for research is to identify the necessary and sufficient experiences that could lead to the creation of efficient and effective cognitive interventions. Researchers who have developed computerized cognitive training interventions have attempted to identify the core executive processes of the prefrontal cortex and to target and tax exactly those processes. However, a vast space of possibilities (and potential barriers) remains between the development of targeted and successful cognitive interventions and the natural set of rich early-life experiences that have been shown to be important in the development of prefrontal function. To construct efficient, effective training interventions that may generalize to real-life outcomes, properly mapping out this space is necessary. Therefore, the chapter discusses the cognitive skills that are the focus of many cognitive interventions: executive functions, working memory, and functions of the prefrontal cortex.
Beyond Limits: Unmasking Potential Through Movement Discovery
Authors: Fisher Beth E
Published: January 2020

Beth E. Fisher, PT, PhD, FAPTA, is a physical therapist, educator, and scholar whose clinical career has been shaped by numerous observations and experiences of patients’ remarkable potential to recover ideal movement capability. Currently, Dr Fisher is a Professor of Clinical Physical Therapy in the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the University of Southern California. She is Director of the Neuroplasticity and Imaging Laboratory, primarily using transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate brain-behavior relationships during motor skill learning and motor control in both individuals without disabilities and individuals with neurologic disorders. Dr Fisher previously worked at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center on the Adult Neurology and Brain Injury Services. During her years as a clinician and rehabilitation specialist, it was her greatest ambition to be a part of developing physical therapist interventions that would maximize neural and behavioral recovery in individuals with pathological conditions affecting the nervous system. Toward this goal, she has continued to consult and teach nationally and internationally on current concepts for the treatment of adults with neurological disorders. It has been her consistent clinical observation not only that patients are limited by impairments that result from their injury, but that movement abnormalities are in part the result of a patient’s automatic, implicit tendency to “respond” to those impairments via compensation.
Brain networks mediating the influence of background music on selective attention
Authors: Fernandez Natalia B , Trost Wiebke J , Vuilleumier Patrik
Published: January 2020

Prevalent across societies and times, music has the ability to enhance attention, a property relevant to clinical applications, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain unknown. It is also unclear whether music produces similar or differential effects with advancing age. Here, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the influence of music exposure evoking four types of emotions on distinct attentional components measured with a modified attention network test, across 19 young (21 ± 2.6) and 33 old participants (72 ± 5.4). We then determined whether music-related effects differed across age groups and whether they were associated with particular acoustic features. Background music during selective attention requiring distractor conflict resolution was associated with faster response times and greater activations of fronto-parietal areas during happy and high-arousing music, whereas sad and low-valence music was associated with slower responses and greater occipital recruitment. Shifting and altering components of attention were unaffected. The influence of music on performance and brain networks was similar between age groups. These behavioral and neuroimaging results demonstrate the importance of affective music dimensions, particularly arousal, in enhancing selective attention processes. This study adds novel support to the benefits of music in the rehabilitation of attention functions.
Inflation and rupture of vaginal tissue
Authors: McGuire Jeffrey A. , Crandall Christie L. , Abramowitch Steven D. , De Vita Raffaella
Published: January 2020

Around 80% of women experience vaginal tears during labour when the diameter of the vagina must increase to allow the passage of a full-term baby. Current techniques for evaluating vaginal tears are qualitative and often lead to an incorrect diagnosis and inadequate treatment, severely compromising the quality of life of women. In order to characterize the failure properties of the vaginal tissue, whole vaginal tracts from rats (
n
= 18) were subjected to free-extension inflation tests until rupture using a custom-built experimental set-up. The resulting deformations were measured using the digital image correlation technique. Overall, the strain and changes in curvature in the hoop direction were significantly larger relative to the axial direction. At a failure pressure of 110 ± 23 kPa (mean ± s.d.), the hoop and axial stresses were computed to be 970 ± 340 kPa and 490 ± 170 kPa, respectively. Moreover, at such pressure, the hoop and axial strains were found to be

12.8
±
4.4
%

and

6.4
±
3.7
%

, respectively. Rupture of the vaginal specimens always occurred in the hoop direction by tearing along the axial direction. This knowledge about the rupture properties of the vaginal tissue will be crucial for the development of clinical approaches for preventing and mitigating vaginal tearing and the associated short- and long-term traumatic conditions.
Clinical utility of Basophil and B-cell biomarkers for monitoring disease activity in food allergy and food oral immunotherapy
Authors: Kim Theodore , Wasserman Richard L. , Alpan Oral , Shah Atul , Jones Douglas
Published: January 2020

As research in the field of food allergy is gaining momentum with new and emerging therapies there is need for both researchers and clinicians to have a better understanding on how to put all this new information into context in clinical care. We are continuously learning from other fields, such as oncology, that a one-shoe-fits all type approaches are becoming the practice of the past and there is need to incorporate markers of disease activity as well as drug selection into clinical care. In the United States, this can happen in two ways; laboratory developed testing and companion diagnostics, generally former leading the path to the later. The findings in this letter is a collaboration between four CLIA/CAP accredited in-office flow cytometry laboratories in Utah, New York and Virginia that are part of very busy food allergy clinics directed by board certified Allergist/Immunologists. The identification of changes in basophils and B cells during oral food immunotherapy are proving to be potentially useful markers in monitoring these patients. We show a high ratio of CD63 to CD203c and CD73 expression on B-cells, compared to healthy non-allergic controls and patients who have outgrown their food allergies. This ratio of basophil surface markers as well as B cell CD73 expression drops as patients are undergoing food-OIT. Quite interestingly, we see a similar low pattern in patients who have non-releaser basophils. Altogether these biomarkers are providing useful and important information monitoring patients and we have validated these assays for clinical use as laboratory developed tests. The Basophil Activation Test is used much more routinely outside the United States, and the powerful correlation it provides to oral food challenge outcomes is making it a very attractive tool. We have just submitted two manuscripts on the validation of the BAT as well as sample stability which is under review elsewhere. We expect more utility of the BAT in the United States in the future. Incorporating biomarkers to clinical care of patients with food allergies will provide to be important in assessing efficacy as well as complications of various therapies as well as monitoring the natural resolution of the food allergies.
A repository of web-based bioinformatics resources developed in India
Authors: Agarwal Abhishek , Agrawal Piyush , Sharma Aditi , Kumar Vinod , Mugdal Chirag , Dhall Anjali , Raghava Gajendra P.S.
Published: January 2020

IndiaBioDb (https://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/indiabiodb/) is a manually curated comprehensive repository of bioinformatics resources developed and maintained by Indian researchers. This repository maintains information about 543 freely accessible functional resources that include around 258 biological databases. Each entry provides a complete detail about a resource that includes the name of resources, web link, detail of publication, information about the corresponding author, name of institute, type of resource. A user-friendly searching module has been integrated, which allows users to search our repository on any field. In order to retrieve categorized information, we integrate the browsing facility in this repository. This database can be utilized for extracting the useful information regarding the present scenario of bioinformatics inclusive of all research labs funded by government and private bodies of India. In addition to web interface, we also developed mobile to facilitate the scientific community.
First description of a herpesvirus infection in genus Lepus
Authors: Abade dos Santos F.A. , Monteiro M. , Pinto A. , Carvalho C.L. , Peleteiro M.C. , Carvalho P. , Mendonça P. , Carvalho T. , Duarte M.D.
Published: January 2020

During the necropsies of Iberian hares obtained in 2018/2019, along with signs of the nodular form of myxomatosis, other unexpected external lesions were also observed. Histopathology revealed nuclear inclusion bodies in stromal cells suggesting the additional presence of a nuclear replicating virus.

Transmission electron microscopy further demonstrated the presence of herpesvirus particles in the tissues of affected hares.

We confirmed the presence of herpesvirus in 13 MYXV-positive hares by PCR and sequencing analysis. Herpesvirus-DNA was also detected in seven healthy hares, suggesting its asymptomatic circulation.

Phylogenetic analysis based on DNA polymerase gene, grouped this virus within the gammaherpesviruses, close to herpesviruses from bats and rodents.

We propose to name this new virus Leporid gammaherpesvirus 5 (LeHV-5), according to the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses standards.

The impact of herpesvirus infection on the reproduction and mortality of the Iberian hare is yet unknown but may aggravate the decline of wild populations caused by the recently emerged natural recombinant myxoma virus.