bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On some 2𝐷 orthogonal 𝑞-polynomials
Authors: Ismail Mourad , Zhang Ruiming
Published: October 2016

We introduce two

q
q

-analogues of the

2
D

2D

-Hermite polynomials which are functions of two complex variables. We derive explicit formulas, orthogonality relations, raising and lowering operator relations, generating functions, and Rodrigues formulas for both families. We also introduce a

q
q

-

2
D

2D

analogue of the disk polynomials (Zernike polynomials) and derive similar formulas for them as well, including evaluating certain connection coefficients. Some of the generating functions may be related to Rogers–Ramanujan type identities.
Polish groupoids and functorial complexity
Authors: Lupini Martino
Published: October 2016

We introduce and study the notion of functorial Borel complexity for Polish groupoids. Such a notion aims to measure the complexity of classifying the objects of a category in a constructive and functorial way. In the particular case of principal groupoids such a notion coincides with the usual Borel complexity of equivalence relations. Our main result is that on one hand for Polish groupoids with an essentially treeable orbit equivalence relation, functorial Borel complexity coincides with the Borel complexity of the associated orbit equivalence relation. On the other hand, for every countable equivalence relation

E
E

that is not treeable there are Polish groupoids with different functorial Borel complexity both having

E
E

as orbit equivalence relation. In order to obtain such a conclusion we generalize some fundamental results about the descriptive set theory of Polish group actions to actions of Polish groupoids, answering a question of Arlan Ramsay. These include the Becker-Kechris results on Polishability of Borel

G
G

-spaces, existence of universal Borel

G
G

-spaces, and characterization of Borel

G
G

-spaces with Borel orbit equivalence relations.
Dimension maximizing measures for self-affine systems
Authors: Bárány Balázs , Rams Michał
Published: October 2016

In this paper we study the dimension theory of planar self-affine sets satisfying dominated splitting in the linear parts and the strong separation condition. The main result of this paper is the existence of dimension maximizing Gibbs measures (Käenmäki measures). To prove this phenomena, we show that the Ledrappier-Young formula holds for Gibbs measures and we introduce a transversality type condition for the strong-stable directions on the projective space.
The VE-cadherin cytoplasmic domain undergoes proteolytic processing during endocytosis
Authors: Su Wenji , Kowalczyk Andrew P.
Published: October 2016

VE-cadherin trafficking to and from the plasma membrane has emerged as a critical mechanism for regulating cadherin surface levels and adhesion strength. In addition, proteolytic processing of cadherin extracellular and cytoplasmic domains has been reported to regulate cadherin adhesion and signaling. Here we provide evidence that VE-cadherin is cleaved by calpain upon entry into clathrin-enriched domains. This cleavage event occurs between the β-catenin and p120-binding domains within the cadherin cytoplasmic tail. Of interest, VE-cadherin mutants that are resistant to endocytosis are similarly resistant to cleavage. Furthermore, p120-catenin overexpression blocks cadherin internalization and cleavage, coupling entry into the endocytic pathway with proteolytic processing. Of importance, the cleavage of the VE-cadherin tail alters the postendocytic trafficking itinerary of the cadherin, resulting in a higher turnover rate due to decreased recycling and increased degradation. In conclusion, this study identifies a novel proteolytic event that regulates the trafficking of VE-cadherin after endocytosis.
The Literatures of Chinese Australia
Authors: Ommundsen Wenche
Published: October 2016

Few chapters of Australian history reveal more about the shifting social, cultural, and political climate of a nation torn between its European roots and its Asian destiny than the story of Chinese migration and settlement. From the Chinese diggers in the gold rush of the mid-19th century, through the long period of discrimination and exclusion during the White Australia policy (1901–1970s) to recent decades of mass migration and extensive transnational traffic, China has been, and arguably remains, Australia’s privileged Other, and Chinese Australia a barometer for testing the nation’s commitment to the policy of multiculturalism. Chinese Australian writers imaginatively trace and interrogate this history, at the same time reflecting the heterogeneity of the community and debating their allegiance to the host nation and to a real as well as mythical China.

The first literary writing to emerge from the Chinese community in Australia was published in the Chinese language press in Sydney and Melbourne around the turn of the 20th century. It reflected the community’s passionate involvement in the political events of China in the lead-up to the republican revolution of 1911, but also their opposition to the White Australia policy and efforts to educate the lower classes to abstain from cultural practices unacceptable to the Australian mainstream, such as gambling, opium smoking, and polygamy. After a long hiatus, Chinese-language writing again blossomed in the 1990s, a direct consequence of the new wave of migration from mainland China following the opening-up policy of the 1980s and the crushing of the protest movement in 1989. Once again, this writing was community oriented, reflecting both their attitudes to the political climate in China and the challenges facing the new migrants in their integration into an at times hostile host culture.

The story of Chinese Australian writing in English is quite different, in terms of both the writers’ background and the nature of their output. The majority of writers are ethnic Chinese who arrived in Australia from Southeast Asia or Hong Kong, often educated in English and conversant with Western as well as Asian cultures. For these writers, and for those born in Australia, China is a distant, often ambiguous, cultural memory, and questions of identity are tied up with complex individual histories and hybrid ethnicities. From positions at the same time inside and outside the dominant culture, they engage with identity and belonging in innovative ways, writing into being a “Chineseness” that owes less to cultural roots than to their negotiation between community expectations and personal memory. Refusing to be pigeonholed or confined to conventional themes of diasporic writing, Chinese Australian writers respond to their diverse cultural and literary heritage and lived experience by inventing selves, voices, and stories that reflect the complexity of contemporary life at the intersection of local, (multi)national, and global perspectives.
The Environment in Australian Literature
Authors: Hughes-d'Aeth Tony
Published: October 2016

While the relationship between humans and environment in Australia stretches back some 50,000 years, the colonization of the continent by Europeans in the late 18th century dramatically altered Australia’s ecology. Creative literature has responded variously to the encounter that colonization precipitated. In particular, modulations appear through successive epistemological and ideological paradigms: Enlightenment rationality, romantic sensibility, nationalist celebration, and ecological alarm. While early conservationist impulses are visible in the colonial period, in the middle of the 20th century, the birth of the modern ecological consciousness understands that not only particular species or habitats are at risk, but the entirety of nature seems to suddenly face a historically unprecedented vulnerability. In this sense, it is methodologically useful to separate Australian environmental texts between those that are “pre-ecological” and those that are “post-ecological.”
Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina
Authors: Rogers Geraldine
Published: October 2016

To consider the most influential Argentine writer of the 20th century within the South American cultural and historical framework implies going deeper in a literature that put the periphery—the margins, the minor literature—forward as a particular place of enunciation, not only by destiny but also by choice, as an imaginary place of freedom derived from the lack of cultural tradition tied to a territory.

After some years in Europe as a youth, in 1921, Jorge Luis Borges went back to Buenos Aires, where he took part in avant-garde projects and little magazines, as well as in mass circulation publishing and journalistic endeavors. It was in this junction of Modernism and mass culture that, from the 1930s, he began to create his sophisticated fictions, which fully exploited the resources of a second-hand culture, made of hybrid genres, clippings, displacements, plagiarism, and mistranslations, making artistic innovations from some of the most usual practices in printed culture. In the following decade, his anti-Hispanism and his appreciation of certain forms of Argentinian orality were paradoxically combined with his militancy against nationalism. The peripheral condition he addressed in one of his most famous essays (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”), which stands as a theoretical and critical locus that could decenter Western tradition in its entirety, was an argument stated from a particular time and place against the realism and the nationalism that predominated in the vernacular literary field. His opinions on literary, cultural, or political matters (veiled, as in “The Aleph,” or more visible, as in his anti-Peronist texts “L’Illusion Comique,” “The Monster’s Feast,” and “The Mountebank”) present a minefield of controversial interventions in the Argentinian disputes of his time and account for a specifically Borgesian way—self-interested, instrumental, strategic—of taking part in the dilemmas of the history and the culture that he was part of.

Borges has sparked various responses throughout time in Argentina. Some milestones are the tributes to him by the Megáfono group, in 1933, and by Sur magazine in the 1940s, the Contorno patricide trial in the following decade, the Borges “for the masses” in the 1970s, and the generalized rejection of his support for military dictatorships (the one that overthrew Perón in 1955 and the one that began in 1976). In 2009, the literary experiment of a young writer using one of the most famous short stories by Borges gave rise to a lawsuit for copyright fraud, which, in turn, triggered intellectual debates on literary heritage in a socially significant and broader sense, reinstating the problematic—and not merely legal—character of literary property. A well-nourished history tells how, in Argentina, consecutive generations of authors, critics, and readers have dealt with one of their most challenging and intense writers, wondering how to read him, how to get away from the fascination he causes, and how to make his powerful legacy their own.
Aerosols and Climate
Authors: Samset Bjørn H.
Published: October 2016

Among the factors that affect the climate, few are as diverse and challenging to understand as aerosols. Minute particles suspended in the atmosphere, aerosols are emitted through a wide range of natural and industrial processes, and are transported around the globe by winds and weather. Once airborne, they affect the climate both directly, through scattering and absorption of solar radiation, and indirectly, through their impact on cloud properties. Combining all their effects, anthropogenic changes to aerosol concentrations are estimated to have had a climate impact over the industrial era that is second only to CO2. Their atmospheric lifetime of only a few days, however, makes their climate effects substantially different from those of well-mixed greenhouse gases.

Major aerosol types include sea salt, dust, sulfate compounds, and black carbon—or soot—from incomplete combustion. Of these, most scatter incoming sunlight back to space, and thus mainly cool the climate. Black carbon, however, absorbs sunlight, and therefore acts as a heating agent much like a greenhouse gas. Furthermore, aerosols can act as cloud condensation nuclei, causing clouds to become whiter—and thus more reflecting—further cooling the surface. Black carbon is again a special case, acting to change the stability of the atmosphere through local heating of the upper air, and also changing the albedo of the surface when it is deposited on snow and ice, for example.

The wide range of climate interactions that aerosols have, and the fact that their distribution depends on the weather at the time and location of emission, lead to large uncertainties in the scientific assessment of their impact. This in turn leads to uncertainties in our present understanding of the climate sensitivity, because while aerosols have predominantly acted to oppose 20th-century global warming by greenhouse gases, the magnitude of aerosol effects on climate is highly uncertain.

Finally, aerosols are important for large-scale climate events such as major volcanoes, or the threat of nuclear winter. The relative ease with which they can be produced and distributed has led to suggestions for using targeted aerosol emissions to counteract global warming—so-called climate engineering.
Portrayal and Impacts of Climate Change in Advertising and Consumer Campaigns
Authors: Atkinson Lucy
Published: October 2016

Climate change specifically and the environment more generally are becoming increasingly central features in much of contemporary persuasive messages. From World Wildlife Fund public service announcements showing the Earth as a melting scoop of ice cream to advertisements for environmentally friendly hybrid cars set against backdrops of lush, green fields, climate change and the environment are closely linked to strategic communication and consumer behavior. This growing focus on the connection between climate change and consumption represents a wide and varied field of study, underscoring the ways in which the two can at once be symbiotic and yet also antagonistic.

Meaningful academic attention to environmental cues in advertising can be thought of as occurring in two waves. In the first wave, peaking in the 1990s, research was concerned primarily with content analyses of advertising containing environmental appeals. Questions about deceptive environmental claims, often referred to as greenwashing, were a primary concern during this phase. Climate change specifically was not a central element, and instead, issues of environmental preservation and conservation dominated. In the second wave, which emerged in the late 2000s and continues unabated, researchers have broadened their focus to examine not only how the environment was depicted in advertising messages but also how audiences understood them. Attention was paid to message factors, like framing, source cues, and visual depictions, as well as individual-level factors, such as environmental concern, political ideology and regulatory focus.

While concerns about greenwashing and deceptive advertising continue to plague green advertising, a collection of new critiques has emerged, including questions about the implications of emphasizing consumer behavior as a source of climate change mitigation, of relying on nature as a commodity to be sold and used, and of engaging individuals as consumers rather than as citizens in attempts to effect environmental change.
Governance Arrangements for Adaptation to Climate Change
Authors: Termeer Catrien , van Buuren Arwin , Dewulf Art , Huitema Dave , Mees Heleen , Meijerink Sander , van Rijswick Marleen
Published: October 2016

Adaptation to climate change is not only a technical issue; above all, it is a matter of governance. Governance is more than government and includes the totality of interactions in which public as well as private actors participate, aiming to solve societal problems. Adaptation governance poses some specific, demanding challenges, such as the context of institutional fragmentation, as climate change involves almost all policy domains and governance levels; the persistent uncertainties about the nature and scale of risks and proposed solutions; and the need to make short-term policies based on long-term projections. Furthermore, adaptation is an emerging policy field with, at least for the time being, only weakly defined ambitions, responsibilities, procedures, routines, and solutions. Many scholars have already shown that complex problems, such as adaptation to climate change, cannot be solved in a straightforward way with actions taken by a hierarchic or monocentric form of governance. This raises the question of how to develop governance arrangements that contribute to realizing adaptation options and increasing the adaptive capacity of society. A series of seven basic elements have to be addressed in designing climate adaptation governance arrangements: the framing of the problem, the level(s) at which to act, the alignment across sectoral boundaries, the timing of the policies, the selection of policy instruments, the organization of the science-policy interface, and the most appropriate form of leadership. For each of these elements, this chapter suggests some tentative design principles. In addition to effectiveness and legitimacy, resilience is an important criterion for evaluating these arrangements. The development of governance arrangements is always context- and time-specific, and constrained by the formal and informal rules of existing institutions.
Communication and Intergroup Relations
Authors: Harwood Jake
Published: October 2016

The subfield of communication and intergroup relations attempts to disentangle the ways in which human message exchange is influenced by, and itself affects, relations between social groups. Typically, the social groups considered are large scale groups (e.g., national, religious, ethnic groups), but similar processes can also be applied to smaller groups such as families or work groups. Specifically, the field of communication and intergroup relations considers how social interaction is changed when the interlocutors belong to (or perceive themselves as belonging to) specific social groups, and how everyday talk about groups changes perceptions and attitudes concerning those groups. The subfield also considers how broader societal messages relate to group memberships. For instance, how do media messages reflect the macrosocial position of particular groups, and do media messages influence how consumers think about group memberships and intergroup relations? Underpinning all study of intergroup communication is the belief that intergroup relations are forged, perpetuated, and modified in real-life everyday social communication.
Pornification and the Mainstreaming of Sex
Authors: Paasonen Susanna
Published: October 2016

The changing cultural role, visibility, and meaning of pornography, particularly its increased accessibility and the sociocultural reverberations that this is seen to cause, have been lively topics of public debate in most Western countries throughout the new millennium. Concerns are routinely yet passionately voiced, especially over the ubiquity of sexual representations flirting with the codes of pornography in different fields of popular media, as well as children’s exposure to hardcore materials that are seen to grow increasingly extreme and violent. At the same time, the production, distribution, and consumption have undergone notable transformations with the ubiquity of digital cameras and online platforms. Not only is pornography accessible on an unprecedented scale, but also it is available in more diverse shapes and forms than ever. All this has given rise to diverse journalistic and academic diagnoses on the pornification and sexualization of culture, which, despite their notable differences, aim to conceptualize transformations in the visibility of sexually explicit media content and its broader sociocultural resonances.
The Emirate of Bukhara
Authors: Wilde Andreas
Published: October 2016

In the 19th century, the Emirate of Bukhara was one of three independent Uzbek principalities known as khanates. Ruled by the Manghit amīrs, Bukhara was the biggest and most important of the southern Central Asian polities and one of the major power centers in the wider region. To the readers of 19th-century European travelogues, Bukhara was known for the despotism of its rulers notorious for their cruelty and strange tastes. From a geopolitical point of view, the Bukharan Emirate was part of an anarchic transition space between Central and South Asia made up of half a dozen petty principalities without centralized power structures. While the bulk of the 19th- and 20th-century secondary sources stress the despotism of its amīrs and its isolation in view of the declining caravan trade on the Central Asian caravan routes, Bukhara and other urban centers such as Samarqand and Qarshi were embedded in transregional religious and trading networks. As a crossroads of commerce and an important religious center, Bukhara in particular and other Transoxanian towns as well attracted flows of goods and people from all directions and was well connected to other places and areas such as Siberia, China, India, and Persia. In the second half of the 19th century, the Emirate of Bukhara and its neighbors north of the Āmū Daryā River came into the focus of Russia. After a series of military defeats in 1868, Bukhara was turned into a Russian protectorate, which finally became a People’s Republic after the Bolshevik conquest in 1920. This political entity was absorbed into the emerging Soviet Union in 1924.
Martin Luther on Death and Dying
Authors: Karant-Nunn Susan C.
Published: October 2016

In the late 15th century, when Martin Luther was born and grew up, death was very much present. Family, friends, and neighbors seldom reached what we today would consider a middle age, and women of childbearing age were at special risk. Catholic clergy took pains to offer Christians at every social level ways in which they could prepare themselves for the happiest possible afterlife.

When Martin Luther joined the order of Augustinian Eremite Friars in 1505, he had never read a Bible. He now gained access to one that the brothers of the Erfurt house had in their library. Luther read it intently. He found that numerous Catholic points of theology and practice were not validated in scripture. In 1517, he chose the issue of indulgences on which to attack church practice, in view of the fact that the ordinary people in Wittenberg to whom he regularly preached—he was not their pastor—sacrificed a great deal to pay for certificates of indulgence.

As a result of his encounter with the Bible, Luther proceeded to dismantle long-standing Catholic belief concerning death and treatment of the dead. He disqualified the Virgin, saints, and priests as intermediaries between individual souls and God. He insisted that as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve, humans could not perform good deeds to earn themselves entry to Heaven. They had, instead, to rely on the atoning power of Christ’s death on the cross to pay the penalties that they deserved for their continual sinning. Those who had faith in the atonement would be saved. Justification by faith supplanted a theology of justification by good works.

Gradually, over about twenty years, new Lutheran liturgies for ministering to the sick and dying and for burying the dead were introduced. Beginning at about midcentury, preachers were instructed to compose funeral sermons for just about every burial. These constitute a new literary subgenre. Many were published for reading by a larger audience, and as many as a quarter million of such printed sermons have survived. Visible as a theme within them is the traditional belief that every Christian should strive to achieve a “good death.” The phrase meant that dying people should cling fervently to the certainty that Christ has paid the penalty for faithful Christians’ sins.
Emotions and Experience in Martin Luther
Authors: Kärkkäinen Pekka
Published: October 2016

Martin Luther’s view of emotions is firmly based on traditional language. He prefers to use affect as a general term for emotional phenomena, which includes general inclinations of love and hate, which involve more incidental emotions such as joy and fear. In general terms, emotions always have a cognitive content, although they are for Luther more than mere cognitions. In some cases, Luther even enjoins a cognitive manipulation of unwanted emotions, using traditional forms of piety, such as meditation on Christ’s sufferings. In the healing of emotions both in the spiritual and in the natural realm, music has a prominent place for Luther. The main cognitive source of spiritual emotions for Luther is the Word of God, dispensed by God himself in the scripture as the supreme rhetorician. Luther also noted the social nature of emotions. In particular, he appreciated the innate emotional bonds between the members of the family as God’s means for securing the well-being of humankind. The emotions are so deeply embedded in human nature that all the saints and even Christ himself were not without them. Luther’s ideal is not Stoic apatheia, but rather a moderation of emotions. Luther seldom attributes genuine emotions to God. He considers biblical language on God’s anger as pointing to his future judgment rather than any present state of mind. Luther intimately connects faith, which grasps the promises of the Gospel and creates the certainty of salvation, with human emotional life. This has a double effect on the emotions, providing comfort against the fear caused by sinfulness and external adversities as well as creating spiritual joy and peace of mind. Fear of God is an ambiguous emotion for Luther. The right kind of fear connected to reverence is essential to Christian life, and a similar fear should be felt for parents and authorities. Faith creates joy, which drives away fear, but the remaining sinfulness means that a certain amount of fear remains in this life. Fear and joy are dynamically complementary in Luther’s view, and he accuses his adversaries of preaching false security, which gets rid of the fear by denying the inherence of sin and mortality in human life. As with emotions, Luther adopts the traditional terminology of experience but develops it in a creative manner. Experience of God’s both negative and positive presence is essential for theology, especially for understanding the true meaning of the scriptures. However, in comparison to scripture, experience is insufficient in spiritual matters.
William Labov
Authors: Gordon Matthew J.
Published: October 2016

William Labov (b. 1927) is an American linguist who pioneered the study of variationist sociolinguistics. Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Labov studied English and philosophy at Harvard University (BA, 1948) and worked as an industrial chemist for several years before entering graduate school in linguistics at Columbia University in 1961. He completed his PhD in 1964, under the direction of Uriel Weinreich. He worked at Columbia until 1971, when he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until his retirement in 2014.

Labov’s influence on the field began with research he conducted in graduate school. His study of changing pronunciations on Martha’s Vineyard, the subject of his master’s thesis, introduced a method for observing sound change in progress and broke with tradition by exploring social motivations for linguistic innovations. For his PhD dissertation, Labov carried out a study of dialect patterns on the Lower East Side of New York City. Using a systematic, quantitative methodology, he demonstrated that linguistic variation is socially stratified, such that the use of pronunciation features (e.g., dropping of post-vocalic /r/) correlates with social class, ethnicity, etc. in regular patterns. Labov’s early research was greatly influential and inspired many scholars to carry out similar projects in other communities. The paradigm came to be known as variationist sociolinguistics.

Much of Labov’s scholarship seeks to advance our understanding of language change. Historical linguists traditionally study completed linguistic changes, often long after they occurred, but Labov developed a method for examining active changes through a quantitative comparison of speakers representing several generations. This approach produces a new perspective on the change process by revealing intermediate stages. Labov has brought insights from this research to bear on theoretical debates within historical linguistics and the field more broadly. His work in this area has also documented many active sound changes in American English. Among these changes are innovations underway in particular dialects, such as the vowel changes in Philadelphia, as well as broader regional patterns, such as the Northern Cities Shift heard in the Great Lakes states.

Throughout his career, social justice concerns have fueled Labov’s research. He has sought to demonstrate that the speech of stigmatized groups is as systematic and rule-governed as any other. He led a pioneering study in Harlem in the late 1960s that shone new light on African American English, demonstrating, for example, that grammatical usages like the deletion of the copula (e.g., He fast) are subject to regular constraints. Labov has served as an expert witness in court and before the U.S. Congress to share insights from his study of African American English. He has also worked to promote literacy for speakers of non-standard dialects, carrying out research on reading and developing material for the teaching of reading to these populations.
Consequences of Agriculture in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant
Authors: Marston John M.
Published: October 2016

The ancient Near East was one of the earliest centers of agriculture in the world, giving rise to domesticated herd animals, cereals, and legumes that today have become primary agricultural staples worldwide. Although much attention has been paid to the origins of agriculture, identifying when, where, and how plants and animals were domesticated, equally important are the social and environmental consequences of agriculture. Shortly after the advent of domestication, agricultural economies quickly replaced hunting and gathering across Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia. The social and environmental context of this transition has profound implications for understanding the rise of social complexity and incipient urbanism in the Near East.

Economic transformation accompanied the expansion of agriculture throughout small-scale societies of the Near East. These farmsteads and villages, as well as mobile pastoral groups, formed the backbone of agricultural production, which enabled tradable surpluses necessary for more expansive, community-scale economic networks. The role of such economies in the development of social complexity remains debated, but they did play an essential role in the rise of urbanism. Cities depended on agricultural specialists, including farmers and herders, to feed urban populations and to enable craft and ritual specializations that became manifest in the first cities of southern Mesopotamia. The environmental implications of these agricultural systems in the Mesopotamian lowlands, especially soil salinization, were equally substantial. The environmental implications of Mesopotamian agriculture are distinct from those accompanying the spread of agriculture to the Levant and Anatolia, where deforestation, erosion, and loss of biodiversity can be identified as the hallmarks of agricultural expansion.

Agriculture is intimately connected with the rise of territorial empires across the Near East. Such empires often controlled agricultural production closely, for both economic and strategic ends, but the methods by which they encouraged the production of specific agricultural products and the adoption of particular agricultural strategies, especially irrigation, varied considerably between empires. By combining written records, archaeological data from surveys and excavation, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction, together with the study of plant and animal remains from archaeological sites occupied during multiple imperial periods, it is possible to reconstruct the environmental consequences of imperial agricultural systems across the Near East. Divergent environmental histories across space and time allow us to assess the sustainability of the agricultural policies of each empire and to consider how resulting environmental change contributed to the success or failure of those polities.
Economics of Low Carbon Agriculture
Authors: Moran Dominic , Knook Jorie
Published: October 2016

Climate change is already having a significant impact on agriculture through greater weather variability and the increasing frequency of extreme events. International policy is rightly focused on adapting and transforming agricultural and food production systems to reduce vulnerability. But agriculture also has a role in terms of climate change mitigation. The agricultural sector accounts for approximately a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, including related emissions from land-use change and deforestation. Farmers and land managers have a significant role to play because emissions reduction measures can be taken to increase soil carbon sequestration, manage fertilizer application, and improve ruminant nutrition and waste. There is also potential to improve overall productivity in some systems, thereby reducing emissions per unit of product. The global significance of such actions should not be underestimated. Existing research shows that some of these measures are low cost relative to the costs of reducing emissions in other sectors such as energy or heavy industry. Some measures are apparently cost-negative or win–win, in that they have the potential to reduce emissions and save production costs. However, the mitigation potential is also hindered by the biophysical complexity of agricultural systems and institutional and behavioral barriers limiting the adoption of these measures in developed and developing countries. This includes formal agreement on how agricultural mitigation should be treated in national obligations, commitments or targets, and the nature of policy incentives that can be deployed in different farming systems and along food chains beyond the farm gate. These challenges also overlap growing concern about global food security, which highlights additional stressors, including demographic change, natural resource scarcity, and economic convergence in consumption preferences, particularly for livestock products. The focus on reducing emissions through modified food consumption and reduced waste is a recent agenda that is proving more controversial than dealing with emissions related to production.
Identification of stable reference genes for lipopolysaccharide-stimulated macrophage gene expression studies
Authors: Kalagara Roshini , Gao Weimin , Glenn Honor L. , Ziegler Colleen , Belmont Laura , Meldrum Deirdre R.
Published: October 2016

Gene expression studies which utilize lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated macrophages to model immune signaling are widely used for elucidating the mechanisms of inflammation-related disease. When expression levels of target genes are quantified using Real-Time quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (qRT-PCR), they are analyzed in comparison to reference genes, which should have stable expression. Judicious selection of reference genes is, therefore, critical to interpretation of qRT-PCR results. Ideal reference genes must be identified for each experimental system and demonstrated to remain constant under the experimental conditions. In this study, we evaluated the stability of eight common reference genes: Beta-2-microglobulin (B2M), Cyclophilin A/Peptidylprolyl isomerase A, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphatedehydrogenase (GAPDH), Hypoxanthine Phosphoribosyltransferase 1, Large Ribosomal Protein P0, TATA box binding protein, Ubiquitin C (UBC), and Ribosomal protein L13A. Expression stability of each gene was tested under different conditions of LPS stimulation and compared to untreated controls. Reference gene stabilities were analyzed using Ct value comparison, NormFinder, and geNorm. We found that UBC, closely followed by B2M, is the most stable gene, while the commonly used reference gene GAPDH is the least stable. Thus, for improved accuracy in evaluating gene expression levels, we propose the use of UBC to normalize PCR data from LPS-stimulated macrophages.
A sound approach to assessing the impact of underwater noise on marine fishes and invertebrates
Authors: Hawkins Anthony D. , Popper Arthur N.
Published: October 2016

Increasing attention is being paid to the ecological consequences of underwater noise generated by human activities such as shipping and maritime industries including, but not limited to, oil and gas exploration and extraction, sonar systems, dredging and the construction of offshore renewable energy devices. There is particular concern over the extension of these activities into previously undeveloped areas of the oceans, including Polar Regions and areas of coral reef habitat. Most of the concern by regulators and others has focussed upon effects upon marine mammals and other protected species. However, examining the impacts upon the overall ecology of affected habitats is also important as it may be dominated by effects upon the far larger biomasses of fishes and invertebrates, which do not have the same degree of legal protection. Many of these assessments of the impact of noise on fishes and invertebrates have overlooked important issues, including the sensitivity of a substantial proportion of these species to particle motion rather than sound pressure. Attempts have been made to establish sound exposure criteria setting regulatory limits to the levels of noise in terms of effects upon mortality levels, injury to tissues, hearing abilities, behaviour, and physiology. However, such criteria have almost exclusively been developed for marine mammals. Criteria for fishes and invertebrates have often had to be assumed, or they have been derived from poorly designed and controlled studies. Moreover, the metrics employed to describe sounds from different sources have often been inappropriate, especially for fishes, and invertebrates, as they have been based on sound pressure rather than particle motion. In addition, the sound propagation models employed to assess the distances over which effects might occur have seldom been validated by actual measurements and are especially poor at dealing with transmission under shallow water conditions, close to or within the seabed, or at the surface. Finally, impacts on fish and invertebrate populations are often unknown and remain unassessed. This paper considers the problems of assessing the impact of noise upon fishes and invertebrates and the assessment procedures that need to be implemented to protect these animals and the marine ecosystems of which they form an integral part. The paper also suggests directions for future research and planning that, if implemented, will provide for a far better scientific and regulatory basis for dealing with effects of noise on aquatic life.
Scholarly Concentration Program Development: A Generalizable, Data-Driven Approach
Authors: Burk-Rafel Jesse , Mullan Patricia B. , Wagenschutz Heather , Pulst-Korenberg Alexandra , Skye Eric , Davis Matthew M.
Published: October 2016

Purpose

Scholarly concentration programs—also known as scholarly projects, pathways, tracks, or pursuits—are increasingly common in U.S. medical schools. However, systematic, data-driven program development methods have not been described.

Method

The authors examined scholarly concentration programs at U.S. medical schools that U.S. News & World Report ranked as top 25 for research or primary care (n = 43 institutions), coding concentrations and mission statements. Subsequently, the authors conducted a targeted needs assessment via a student-led, institution-wide survey, eliciting learners’ preferences for 10 “Pathways” (i.e., concentrations) and 30 “Topics” (i.e., potential content) augmenting core curricula at their institution. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a capacity optimization algorithm characterized best institutional options for learner-focused Pathway development.

Results

The authors identified scholarly concentration programs at 32 of 43 medical schools (74%), comprising 199 distinct concentrations (mean concentrations per program: 6.2, mode: 5, range: 1–16). Thematic analysis identified 10 content domains; most common were “Global/Public Health” (30 institutions; 94%) and “Clinical/Translational Research” (26 institutions; 81%). The institutional needs assessment (n = 468 medical students; response rate 60% overall, 97% among first-year students) demonstrated myriad student preferences for Pathways and Topics. EFA of Topic preferences identified eight factors, systematically related to Pathway preferences, informing content development. Capacity modeling indicated that offering six Pathways could guarantee 95% of first-year students (162/171) their first- or second-choice Pathway.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates a generalizable, data-driven approach to scholarly concentration program development that reflects student preferences and institutional strengths, while optimizing program diversity within capacity constraints.
The Causes of Errors in Clinical Reasoning: Cognitive Biases, Knowledge Deficits, and Dual Process Thinking
Authors: Norman Geoffrey R. , Monteiro Sandra D. , Sherbino Jonathan , Ilgen Jonathan S. , Schmidt Henk G. , Mamede Silvia
Published: October 2016

Contemporary theories of clinical reasoning espouse a dual processing model, which consists of a rapid, intuitive component (Type 1) and a slower, logical and analytical component (Type 2). Although the general consensus is that this dual processing model is a valid representation of clinical reasoning, the causes of diagnostic errors remain unclear. Cognitive theories about human memory propose that such errors may arise from both Type 1 and Type 2 reasoning. Errors in Type 1 reasoning may be a consequence of the associative nature of memory, which can lead to cognitive biases. However, the literature indicates that, with increasing expertise (and knowledge), the likelihood of errors decreases. Errors in Type 2 reasoning may result from the limited capacity of working memory, which constrains computational processes. In this article, the authors review the medical literature to answer two substantial questions that arise from this work: (1) To what extent do diagnostic errors originate in Type 1 (intuitive) processes versus in Type 2 (analytical) processes? (2) To what extent are errors a consequence of cognitive biases versus a consequence of knowledge deficits?

The literature suggests that both Type 1 and Type 2 processes contribute to errors. Although it is possible to experimentally induce cognitive biases, particularly availability bias, the extent to which these biases actually contribute to diagnostic errors is not well established. Educational strategies directed at the recognition of biases are ineffective in reducing errors; conversely, strategies focused on the reorganization of knowledge to reduce errors have small but consistent benefits.
The lateral wedge augmentation trochleoplasty in a pediatric population: a 5-year follow-up study
Authors: Pesenti Sébastien , Blondel Benjamin , Armaganian Gregory , Parratte Sébastien , Bollini Gérard , Launay Franck , Jouve Jean-Luc
Published: October 2016

Patellofemoral instability in children requires surgery when recurrent dislocation occurs. The aim of this study is to report the 5-year clinical and radiographic outcomes following lateral wedge augmentation trochleoplasty of the femoral trochlea. This is a review of 23 (mean age: 12.5 years) patients who underwent surgery for recurrent patellar dislocations related to a flat trochlea. In every case, a lateral wedge augmentation trochleoplasty was performed with preservation of the growth plate. This surgery was consistently associated with a soft tissue procedure. All patients were reviewed for a clinical and radiographic evaluation [computed tomography (CT)-scan]. No case of recurrent patellar dislocation was reported and all patients were satisfied with the procedure; three patients reported anterior knee pain after physical activities. CT scan analysis revealed improvement of the trochlear shape measurements in all cases, but osteoarthritis lesions (narrowing of the lateral patellofemoral compartment) were visible on four CT scans. This trochleoplasty technique augmented by a soft tissue procedure on the extensor apparatus led to acceptable clinical mid-term results in terms of stability for patients with a flat trochlea (grade B according to Dejour classification). However, at the 5-year follow-up, four patients showed signs of osteoarthritis on CT scan evaluation. This warrants serious concern in this young population, and alternative methods should be considered whenever possible.
Proximal femoral focal deficiency associated with fibular duplication and diplopodia and complete agenesis of the tibia: a case report
Authors: Chawathe Vivek S. , Gaur Anil K. , Athani Badrinath D. , Gupta Shefali
Published: October 2016

A 14-year-old boy reported with congenital deformity of the left lower limb, with gross shortening, hip and knee flexion deformities, ankle with equinus deformity, and polydactyly of the left foot. Radiologic examination showed proximal femoral focal deficiency, double fibula, and duplication of the tarsal bones, and a diagnosis of ‘proximal femoral focal deficiency associated with fibular duplication and diplopodia with complete agenesis of tibia’ was made. Such association of deformities is very rare and poses difficulties in rehabilitation of the case. This patient was managed with elective knee disarticulation, early prosthetic fitment, and gait training.
Sporadically occurred bilateral osteochondritis dissecans on the trochlea of the femur: case report
Authors: Kumahashi Nobuyuki , Matsumoto Akinori , Kuwata Suguru , Kadowaki Masaru , Uchio Yuji
Published: October 2016

We report the case of a 13-year-old boy with bilateral osteochondritis dissecans in the lateral femoral trochlea of the knees. They were classified as grade 4 in the right knee and grade 1 in the left knee on the basis of the Nelson classification within 1 year after first consultation. In the right knee, the fragment was surgically fixed, but the left knee healed with conservative treatment. This case indicates the possibility that osteochondritis dissecans of the lateral femoral trochlea may develop bilaterally at different times and present at different stages. The case shows the importance of early diagnosis and appropriate treatment on the basis of the stage.