bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Human REXO2 controls short mitochondrial RNAs generated by mtRNA processing and decay machinery to prevent accumulation of double-stranded RNA
Authors: Szewczyk Maciej , Malik Deepshikha , Borowski Lukasz S , Czarnomska Sylwia D , Kotrys Anna V , Klosowska-Kosicka Kamila , Nowotny Marcin , Szczesny Roman J
Published: April 2020

RNA decay is a key element of mitochondrial RNA metabolism. To date, the only well-documented machinery that plays a role in mtRNA decay in humans is the complex of polynucleotide phosphorylase (PNPase) and SUV3 helicase, forming the degradosome. REXO2, a homolog of prokaryotic oligoribonucleases present in humans both in mitochondria and the cytoplasm, was earlier shown to be crucial for maintaining mitochondrial homeostasis, but its function in mitochondria has not been fully elucidated. In the present study, we created a cellular model that enables the clear dissection of mitochondrial and non-mitochondrial functions of human REXO2. We identified a novel mitochondrial short RNA, referred to as ncH2, that massively accumulated upon REXO2 silencing. ncH2 degradation occurred independently of the mitochondrial degradosome, strongly supporting the hypothesis that ncH2 is a primary substrate of REXO2. We also investigated the global impact of REXO2 depletion on mtRNA, revealing the importance of the protein for maintaining low steady-state levels of mitochondrial antisense transcripts and double-stranded RNA. Our detailed biochemical and structural studies provide evidence of sequence specificity of the REXO2 oligoribonuclease. We postulate that REXO2 plays dual roles in human mitochondria, ‘scavenging’ nanoRNAs that are produced by the degradosome and clearing short RNAs that are generated by RNA processing.
Structural basis of the XPB–Bax1 complex as a dynamic helicase–nuclease machinery for DNA repair
Authors: DuPrez Kevin , He Feng , Chen Zhenhang , Hilario Eduardo , Fan Li
Published: April 2020

Nucleotide excision repair (NER) is a major DNA repair pathway for a variety of DNA lesions. XPB plays a key role in DNA opening at damage sites and coordinating damage incision by nucleases. XPB is conserved from archaea to human. In archaea, XPB is associated with a nuclease Bax1. Here we report crystal structures of XPB in complex with Bax1 from Archaeoglobus fulgidus (Af) and Sulfolobus tokodaii (St). These structures reveal for the first time four domains in Bax1, which interacts with XPB mainly through its N-terminal domain. A Cas2-like domain likely helps to position Bax1 at the forked DNA allowing the nuclease domain to incise one arm of the fork. Bax1 exists in monomer or homodimer but forms a heterodimer exclusively with XPB. StBax1 keeps StXPB in a closed conformation and stimulates ATP hydrolysis by XPB while AfBax1 maintains AfXPB in the open conformation and reduces its ATPase activity. Bax1 contains two distinguished nuclease active sites to presumably incise DNA damage. Our results demonstrate that protein-protein interactions regulate the activities of XPB ATPase and Bax1 nuclease. These structures provide a platform to understand the XPB-nuclease interactions important for the coordination of DNA unwinding and damage incision in eukaryotic NER.
COVTree: Coevolution in OVerlapped sequences by Tree analysis server
Authors: Teppa Elin , Zea Diego J , Oteri Francesco , Carbone Alessandra
Published: April 2020

Overlapping genes are commonplace in viruses and play an important role in their function and evolution. For these genes, molecular coevolution may be seen as a mechanism to decrease the evolutionary constraints of amino acid positions in the overlapping regions and to tolerate or compensate unfavorable mutations. Tracing these mutational sites, could help to gain insight on the direct or indirect effect of the mutations in the corresponding overlapping proteins. In the past, coevolution analysis has been used to identify residue pairs and coevolutionary signatures within or between proteins that served as markers of physical interactions and/or functional relationships. Coevolution in OVerlapped sequences by Tree analysis (COVTree) is a web server providing the online analysis of coevolving amino-acid pairs in overlapping genes, where residues might be located inside or outside the overlapping region. COVTree is designed to handle protein families with various characteristics, among which those that typically display a small number of highly conserved sequences. It is based on BIS2, a fast version of the coevolution analysis tool Blocks in Sequences (BIS). COVTree provides a rich and interactive graphical interface to ease biological interpretation of the results and it is openly accessible at http://www.lcqb.upmc.fr/COVTree/.
Regulation of mRNA export through API5 and nuclear FGF2 interaction
Authors: Bong Seoung Min , Bae Seung-Hyun , Song Bomin , Gwak HyeRan , Yang Seung-Won , Kim Sunshin , Nam Seungyoon , Rajalingam Krishnaraj , Oh Se Jin , Kim Tae Woo , Park SangYoun , Jang Hyonchol , Lee Byung Il
Published: April 2020

API5 (APoptosis Inhibitor 5) and nuclear FGF2 (Fibroblast Growth Factor 2) are upregulated in various human cancers and are correlated with poor prognosis. Although their physical interaction has been identified, the function related to the resulting complex is unknown. Here, we determined the crystal structure of the API5–FGF2 complex and identified critical residues driving the protein interaction. These findings provided a structural basis for the nuclear localization of the FGF2 isoform lacking a canonical nuclear localization signal and identified a cryptic nuclear localization sequence in FGF2. The interaction between API5 and FGF2 was important for mRNA nuclear export through both the TREX and eIF4E/LRPPRC mRNA export complexes, thus regulating the export of bulk mRNA and specific mRNAs containing eIF4E sensitivity elements, such as c-MYC and cyclin D1. These data show the newly identified molecular function of API5 and nuclear FGF2, and provide a clue to understanding the dynamic regulation of mRNA export.
Fine-tune control of targeted RNAi efficacy by plant artificial small RNAs
Authors: López-Dolz Lucio , Spada Maria , Daròs José-Antonio , Carbonell Alberto
Published: April 2020

Eukaryotic RNA interference (RNAi) results in gene silencing upon the sequence-specific degradation of target transcripts by complementary small RNAs (sRNAs). In plants, RNAi-based tools have been optimized for high efficacy and high specificity, and are extensively used in gene function studies and for crop improvement. However, efficient methods for finely adjusting the degree of induced silencing are missing. Here, we present two different strategies based on artificial sRNAs for fine-tuning targeted RNAi efficacy in plants. First, the degree of silencing induced by synthetic-trans-acting small interfering RNAs (syn-tasiRNAs) can be adjusted by modifying the precursor position from which the syn-tasiRNA is expressed. The accumulation and efficacy of Arabidopsis TAS1c-based syn-tasiRNAs progressively decrease as the syn-tasiRNA is expressed from positions more distal to the trigger miR173 target site. And second, syn-tasiRNA activity can also be tweaked by modifying the degree of base-pairing between the 3′ end of the syn-tasiRNA and the 5′ end of the target RNA. Both strategies were used to finely modulate the degree of silencing of endogenous and exogenous target genes in Arabidopsis thaliana and Nicotiana benthamiana. New high-throughput syn-tasiRNA vectors were developed and functionally analyzed, and should facilitate the precise control of gene expression in multiple plant species.
Pharmacokinetics, safety, and tolerability of olaparib and temozolomide for recurrent glioblastoma: results of the phase I OPARATIC trial
Authors: Hanna Catherine , Kurian Kathreena M , Williams Karin , Watts Colin , Jackson Alan , Carruthers Ross , Strathdee Karen , Cruickshank Garth , Dunn Laurence , Erridge Sara , Godfrey Lisa , Jefferies Sarah , McBain Catherine , Sleigh Rebecca , McCormick Alex , Pittman Marc , Halford Sarah , Chalmers Anthony J
Published: April 2020

Background

The poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor olaparib potentiated radiation and temozolomide (TMZ) chemotherapy in preclinical glioblastoma models but brain penetration was poor. Clinically, PARP inhibitors exacerbate the hematological side effects of TMZ. The OPARATIC trial was conducted to measure penetration of recurrent glioblastoma by olaparib and assess the safety and tolerability of its combination with TMZ.

Methods

Preclinical pharmacokinetic studies evaluated olaparib tissue distribution in rats and tumor-bearing mice. Adult patients with recurrent glioblastoma received various doses and schedules of olaparib and low-dose TMZ in a 3 + 3 design. Suitable patients received olaparib prior to neurosurgical resection; olaparib concentrations in plasma, tumor core and tumor margin specimens were measured by mass spectrometry. A dose expansion cohort tested tolerability and efficacy of the recommended phase II dose (RP2D). Radiosensitizing effects of olaparib were measured by clonogenic survival in glioblastoma cell lines.

Results

Olaparib was a substrate for multidrug resistance protein 1 and showed no brain penetration in rats but was detected in orthotopic glioblastoma xenografts. Clinically, olaparib was detected in 71/71 tumor core specimens (27 patients; median, 496 nM) and 21/21 tumor margin specimens (9 patients; median, 512.3 nM). Olaparib exacerbated TMZ-related hematological toxicity, necessitating intermittent dosing. RP2D was olaparib 150 mg (3 days/week) with TMZ 75 mg/m2 daily for 42 days. Fourteen (36%) of 39 evaluable patients were progression free at 6 months. Olaparib radiosensitized 6 glioblastoma cell lines at clinically relevant concentrations of 100 and 500 nM.

Conclusion

Olaparib reliably penetrates recurrent glioblastoma at radiosensitizing concentrations, supporting further clinical development and highlighting the need for better preclinical models.
Surgical Management of Skull Base Osteoradionecrosis in the Cancer Population – Treatment Outcomes and Predictors of Recurrence: A Case Series
Authors: Habib Ahmed , Hanasono Matthew M , DeMonte Franco , Haider Ali , Breshears Jonathan D , Nader Marc-Elie , Gidley Paul W , Su Shirley Y , Hanna Ehab Y , Raza Shaan M
Published: April 2020

BACKGROUND

Skull base osteoradionecrosis (ORN) is a challenging treatment-related complication sometimes seen in patients with cancer. Although ORN management strategies for other anatomic sites have been reported, there is a paucity of data guiding the management of skull base ORN.

OBJECTIVE

To report a single-center tertiary care series of skull base ORN and to better understand the factors affecting ORN recurrence after surgical management.

METHODS

We conducted a retrospective cohort study of patients with skull base ORN treated at our center between 2003 and 2017. Univariate and multivariate binary logistic regressions were performed to identify predictors of recurrence.

RESULTS

A total of 31 patients were included in this study. The median age at ORN diagnosis was 61.1 yr (range, 32.8-84.9 yr). Of these 31 patients, 15 (48.4%) patients were initially treated medically. All 31 patients underwent surgery. Three (14.3%) of 21 patients treated with a free flap and 4 (50.0%) of 8 patients who underwent primary closure experienced recurrence. Cox regression analysis revealed that reconstruction with local tissue closure (P = .044) and ongoing treatment for active primary cancer (P = .022) were significant predictors of recurrence. The median overall survival from index surgery for ORN treatment was 83.9 mo. At 12-mo follow-up, 78.5% of patients were alive.

CONCLUSION

In this study, we assess the outcomes of our treatment approach, surgical debridement with vascularized reconstruction, on recurrence-free survival in patients with skull base ORN. Further studies with larger cohorts are needed to assess current treatment paradigms.
Layers of Agency
Authors: Nguyen C. Thi
Published: April 2020

In striving play, we not only take up disposable ends, but we take them up as if they were final. To become absorbed in games, we need to create an alternate agency and submerge ourselves within it. We need to put out of our minds, for the moment, our larger purposes, and give ourselves up to a temporary and narrowed form of agency. Otherwise, it would be impossible to achieve the sorts of wholehearted play that so many of us desire. This is a familiar technique that agents use for pursuing self-effacing ends. Games simply formalize it. This picture help us to explain why we put ourselves at risk of failure in games. For the striving player, failure in a game isn’t really a lasting failure. Rather, it is only a failure of the temporary constructed agent.
Games and Autonomy
Authors: Nguyen C. Thi
Published: April 2020

This chapter shows how games can help us to develop our agency and autonomy. They do so by allowing us to record different modes of agency. We, as limited beings, need to cycle between different modes of agency in order to cope with the difficulties of the world. In this chapter, we discover that games can serve as a communication vessel for those modes of agency. We can inscribe modes of agency into a game, and explore different modes of agency by playing a variety of games. Thus, games constitute a library of agencies. This library can help us to develop our autonomy, by increasing our inventory of agential modes, and helping us to recognize and deploy the appropriate agential mode for the appropriate circumstance. By offering us short-term restrictions on how to act, games force us into new postures of agency. This can help us become more fluid with our agency in the long term. Games are yoga for our agency.
The Aesthetics of Agency
Authors: Nguyen C. Thi
Published: April 2020

This chapter focuses on the aesthetics of agency, in which we can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of our own actions. These include aesthetic qualities in our own moving, deciding, analyzing, reacting, and doing. We can have aesthetic experiences of our own agency in everyday life. The chapter explores how ames concentrate and crystallize the aesthetics of agency. With games, we can sculpt activities for the sake of aesthetic experience of acting itself. And aesthetic experiences of one’s own actions can create a sense of practical harmony—of a beautiful fit between an agent and their practical world. It can also create a sense of aesthetic disharmony. There can be a game aesthetics of horror and clumsiness. Finally, the chapter squares the aesthetics of agencywith various theoretical demands—such as the demand for disinterest, and the demand for a nonpractical attitude—through the layered nature of agency in games.
Wendy Carlos
Authors: Sewell Amanda
Published: April 2020

This book is the first full-length biography to be written about the American composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos (b. 1939). With her debut album, Switched-On Bach, Carlos brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners. She not only blazed new trails in electronic music for decades but also intersected with many aspects of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Her story features an eclectic cast of characters, including Arthur Bell, Leonard Bernstein, Allan Kozinn, the Kronos Quartet, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Moog, Ron Nelson, Stevie Wonder, and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Carlos’s identity as a transgender woman has shaped many aspects of her life, her career, how she relates to the public, and how the public has received her and her music. Cultural factors surrounding the treatment of transgender people affected many decisions that Carlos has made over the decades. She remained in hiding for more than a decade after she transitioned to female because she feared for her personal safety and professional reputation. Once she disclosed her transition publicly, many journalists and fans began to focus almost exclusively on her gender instead of on her music. Eventually she retreated again, giving very few interviews and never speaking about her gender on record. The fact that she is transgender is just one dimension of her story, however. This text presents her life as completely as is currently possible and relates her life to many dimensions of American culture.
Introduction
Authors: Sewell Amanda
Published: April 2020

This chapter provides a brief overview of Wendy Carlos’s career, placing her and her album Switched-On Bach at the center of the Moog synthesizer’s popularity in the late 1960s. Carlos, who had been assigned the male sex at birth, had transitioned to female by the time Switched-On Bach reached the zenith of its popularity. Carlos remained in hiding for nearly a decade out of fear for her personal safety and professional reputation. Once she disclosed her transition in a Playboy interview in 1979, she was able to talk publicly about her music. At the same time, her gender—not her music—became a focal point for many scholars and journalists.
Foundations (1962–1967)
Authors: Sewell Amanda
Published: April 2020

This chapter follows Carlos from her time as a graduate student in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to her early professional career as a recording engineer with Gotham Studios. At Columbia, she studied with electronic music pioneers Vladimir Ussachevsky and Milton Babbitt, learning to compose music with magnetic tape and the RCA Mark II Synthesizer. Carlos met Robert Moog for the first time in 1964 at the Audio Engineering Society convention. They worked together as Moog developed modules for 900-series analog synthesizer. Carlos also began seeing Dr. Harry Benjamin, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon, in his office in New York.
“Welcome Back, Wendy!” The Playboy Interview (1979)
Authors: Sewell Amanda
Published: April 2020

This chapter focuses on Carlos’s decision to disclose her transition and the series of interviews she gave to Arthur Bell in 1978 and 1979 that were eventually published in Playboy magazine. She decided to do so because staying in isolation was hurting her career and her relationship with friends such as Rachel Elkind, who kept covering for her. She also felt that attitudes toward transgender people were changing, in part because of Renee Richards’s story. Following the interview’s publication, Carlos was humiliated that Bell chose to focus the vast majority of the printed interview on her gender identity and transition instead of on her music and what she called her “soul.”
Transformations (1979–1984)
Authors: Sewell Amanda
Published: April 2020

This chapter addresses the first few years after Carlos returned to the public eye, which included high-profile projects such as the soundtracks to the films The Shining and TRON. She also gave interviews to the New York Times and Keyboard magazine, the latter of which also installed her on its advisory board. This was a period of several changes in Carlos’s life. She and Rachel Elkind ended their personal and professional relationship, she began what would be a lifelong relationship with Annemarie Franklin, she began using digital synthesis instead of analog, and she worked with symphony orchestras for the first time.
The Idea in Motion
Authors: Andrew Nell
Published: April 2020

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller made her debut in Paris just as painters of the symbolist movement began to make first steps toward abstraction. In this chapter, works of art and decoration by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis painters are linked to Fuller’s dance. With its repetitive, continuous motions and shifting perceptual cues, the serpentine dance allowed viewers a prolonged grasp of the sensation of watching Fuller’s transitory movement. In a similar effort, symbolist artists wove flat and patterned surfaces and serpentine lines, hindering visual rest and creating a springboard for abstract sensations of movement. Innovations in both media offered a formal and material web through which motion was sensed and caught by perception. This prolongment of form and feeling expresses the heart of the dialectics of the modern experience, balancing in a single sensation Baudelaire’s fleeting and eternal.
Futurist Momentum
Authors: Andrew Nell
Published: April 2020

At the height of the “futurist moment,” just as painters across Europe were creating the first works of pure abstraction, in Paris the dramatist Valentine de Saint-Point announced a radical dance theory and performance. While Saint-Point is regularly aligned with the futurist movement, she was admired by a large roster of avant-garde artists and writers who were simultaneously theorizing and producing abstraction along the parallel paths of neosymbolism, futurism, cubism, and the philosophies of theosophy and Bergsonism. Saint-Point’s dance theory sought to create an abstract experience of vision by merging optical sensation with totalizing synesthetic and kinesthetic prompts. This chapter draws together this synesthetic vision and the similar perceptual estrangement of the painterly tactics of all-overness, musical rhythm, and collage in pioneering works of abstract painting by artists such as František Kupka, Gino Severini, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Dada Dance
Authors: Andrew Nell
Published: April 2020

Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance performances, but she is predominantly discussed as a designer and applied artist without political motivations. Using a photo of Taeuber in a dancer’s pose and costumed in a Dada body mask, this chapter registers her dance training and performances as a potent hybrid of art and movement that bridged the polarized concerns about art making during wartime. Taeuber’s danced intervention amid her artist colleagues puts Dada’s self-estrangement and alienation into contact with visceral self-recognition and agency. By working across a diversity of media, Taeuber’s process harnesses adaptive, circulating, collaborative, unauthored, and private modes of making, which highlight and bridge the gulf between the aesthetic and the political, or in avant-garde terms, between art and life.
Introduction
Authors: Duong Kevin
Published: April 2020

This chapter introduces redemptive violence and situates its appeal in a paradox intrinsic to modern revolutionary democracy: enthroning the people as sovereign came at the price of dissolving them into a multitude of abstract individuals. It focuses readers’ attention on redemptive violence in nineteenth-century French thought, outlines the structure of the book, and formalizes the book’s main claims. It shows why this book’s argument forces us to rethink inherited accounts of political violence, especially those generated during the Cold War. Where liberal antitotalitarian critics have drawn teleological connections between redemptive violence and totalitarianism, this chapter resists those connections to invite readers to consider what redemptive violence can reveal about democracy.
Threatening Allies
Authors: Bapat Navin A.
Published: April 2020

This chapter argues that the strain of the war created a risk that the U.S. would scale back its security guarantees to the hosts of the energy market. Instead, the U.S. would rely on non-state actors within the hosts’ territory, which would ultimately undermine the hosts’ territorial sovereignty. The threat that the U.S. would adopt this alternative strategy ultimately compelled several of the host states into actively fighting their terrorists, before they lost all American support. While this solved the moral hazard problem, it also created a negative consequence for the U.S., in that it weakened the strategic credibility of the American security guarantee. This in turn led host states to question whether or not they should continue to cooperate with the U.S. in maintaining the petrodollar system.
Conclusion
Authors: Bapat Navin A.
Published: April 2020

This chapter summarizes the book’s main conclusions. It argues that in the short term, the U.S. emerged victorious in the war on terror since the peg between energy sales and the dollar remains, and the euro has faded as a competitor. However, the enormous cost of the war on terror, and the credibility the U.S. lost by adopting the light footprint strategy, suggests that the war on terror resulted in long term damage to the U.S. Moreover, the U.S. is facing increasing competition from China and other states for control of the global energy market. This may cause the U.S. to double down on the war, even as it continues to drain American resources and cost American lives.
Health in Wartime Development and Postwar Visions, 1941–1952
Authors: Messac Luke
Published: April 2020

Chapter 4 explores how changes in political discourse within metropolitan Britain during and immediately after the Second World War altered debates about colonial provision of medical services. Enthusiasm for social protection in Britain, and the crisis of legitimacy that the war brought to imperial officials, led to increased interest in—if not always spending on—health care for the colonies. Members of the Fabian Colonial Bureau and other influential voices in colonial circles began to call for an extension of the newly discovered social rights to British colonial subjects. In response, officials began to stress that Africans already had their own traditional forms of social protection, obviating the need for government expenditure. Colonial medical officers in Nyasaland continued to complain that health spending was not at all sufficient to meet the needs of the populace.
“Vaccines or Latrines?” 1983–2016
Authors: Messac Luke
Published: April 2020

Chapter 7 explores how the history of neglect continued in the age of AIDS, only to be broken (at least temporarily) by a surge in global health-care spending. In the 1970s and early 1980s, economic collapse and the dictates of international economic institutions hastened the collapse of the health-care system in Malawi at a moment when the AIDS crisis was just beginning. Among global health experts, last two decades of the twentieth century were replete with claims of inescapable scarcity. During the mid-2000s, a surge in international aid, driven in large part by an unlikely cadre of global elites with a sentimental commitment to battling the AIDS pandemic, proved a boon to Malawi’s health system. But the 2008 global financial crisis halted the increase in aid. While political leaders in wealthy nations revisited the rhetorical arsenal of scarcity, doctors and nurses in Malawi implored them for the drugs and supplies necessary to care for their patients.
Conclusion: Breaking the Spell of Scarcity
Authors: Messac Luke
Published: April 2020

The conclusion begins with a personal story from the author, whose life was saved after his heart stopped as a child. Later, as a young man, he saw a young girl in Rwanda die of tuberculosis. Her avoidable death spurred him to study the global public health literature; he found that many in the field seemed focused less on remedying inequities than on the proper means of dividing up “inherently limited” resources. The assumption was that health-care spending in poor countries would remain, for the foreseeable future, at its current level. This work demonstrates both that this assumption is the product of history and that it continues to have mortal consequences.
Clientelism and Vote-Maximizing in Indigenous Latin America
Authors: West Karleen Jones
Published: April 2020

The analysis presented in this chapter indicates that indigenous voters are disproportionately targeted as clients in vote-buying schemes, which is why the distribution of patronage has become a necessary vote-maximizing strategy for ethnic-party candidates to utilize to earn votes. This finding gives further credence to the argument that ethnic-party candidates must compete using the tactics employed by mainstream candidates to win votes. As such, it was unfair to expect that ethnic-party candidates could ever be more consistently policy-focused, given the expectations of patronage that indigenous constituents have during campaign season. To demonstrate the power of clientelism as a technique to attract indigenous supporters, this chapter analyzes AmericasBarometer survey data from fifteen countries across Latin America. The results show that not only are indigenous voters more likely to be targeted for clientelism, but ethnic-party supporters specifically are also more likely to be approached to sell their votes. These findings therefore provide evidence of the generalizability of the argument that ethnic-party candidates face strong incentives to engage in the clientelist behavior of mainstream parties in order to win votes across Latin America.
The Implications of Individual Campaigns, Elections, and Clientelism for Ethnic-Party Behavior
Authors: West Karleen Jones
Published: April 2020

This chapter discusses some of the implications of the findings of the previous chapters, not only for the Pachakutik party and the indigenous movement, but for all niche parties competing in developing democracies. While ethnic parties certainly provide opportunities for increased indigenous representation, their involvement in the political arena has produced some troubling results. In particular, the chapter focuses on the fragmentation of Pachakutik, the apparent decline in support among the indigenous population, and the reliance on patronage within campaigns as indications of ethnic-party struggles. The chapter also argues that the anticipated positive effects of ethnic parties may be tempered by the barriers they face to achieving their goals of substantive representation within the formal political arena. In the process, the analysis shows how these findings fill a gap in the literatures on ethnic politics, institutions, and party evolution.
Drunk Crimes
Authors: West Mark D.
Published: April 2020

Japanese law categorizes intoxication as a form of insanity. It then further categorizes intoxication, using the methodology of Hans Binder, into three types: pathological, complex, and simple. Punishment in criminal cases depends on which type of intoxication an individual experiences: pathological intoxication results in a not guilty verdict; complex intoxication results in a reduction of sentence; and simple intoxication results in no reduction of sentence. Categorization is often determined by psychiatric tests, which can involve drinking tests, in which defendants, while in custody awaiting trial, drink alcohol in large quantities while an expert observes and records their behavior. Sometimes courts rely heavily on these tests, and sometimes courts completely ignore them and instead substitute their own notions of what factors constitute intoxication. In either case, courts provide extraordinarily individualized justice.
Drunk Others
Authors: West Mark D.
Published: April 2020

This chapter explores the responsibilities of sober people for intoxicated people. It first explores general duties created by relationships and employment law. It then examines responsibilities in two specific contexts: university tragedies in which students, often because of peer pressure, die from alcohol poisoning, and insurance cases in which intoxicated people or their heirs sue their insurers for damages incurred while drunk. In general, absent extreme circumstances, courts place liability with the intoxicated and not people around them. Although some of these outcomes might be attributable to specific legal doctrines or facts, the cases nevertheless stand in contrast with social science literature that finds that people in Japan tend to place responsibility for behavior with groups and circumstances, not individuals.
Drunk in Society
Authors: West Mark D.
Published: April 2020

This chapter focuses on the role of intoxication in society. After examining the way courts discuss alcohol use as a social problem, it turns to three legal contexts: employment law, family law, and torts. First, it examines cases of disciplinary dismissals, in which civil servants whose employment is terminated after drunk-driving convictions sue their former employers. Second, it explores divorce cases in which alcohol consumption and intoxication are raised as factors that contributed to the demise of the marriage. Third, it turns to cases in which people claim they were defamed by statements related to alcohol consumption. In each case, courts issue opinions that either offer little insight into their thoughts on intoxication (despite a penchant for editorializing in other types of cases) or apply uneven, but individualized, justice.
Short Circuiting Policy
Authors: Stokes Leah Cardamore
Published: April 2020

Short Circuiting Policy examines clean energy policies to understand why US states are not on track to meet the climate crisis. After two decades of leadership, American states are slipping in their commitment to transition away from dirty fossil fuels toward cleaner energy sources, including wind and solar. The author argues that organized combat between advocate and opponent interest groups is central to explaining why US states have stopped expanding and even started weakening their renewable energy policies. Fossil fuel companies and electric utilities played a key role in spreading climate denial. Now, they have turned to climate delay, working to block clean energy policies from passing or being implemented and driving retrenchment. Clean energy advocates typically lack sufficient power to overcome electric utilities’ opposition to climate policy. Short Circuiting Policy builds on policy feedback theory, showing the conditions under which retrenchment is more likely. Depending on their relative political influence, interest groups will work to drive retrenchment either directly by working with legislators, their staff, and regulators or indirectly through the parties, the public, and the courts. Also, the likely effects of policies are not easy to predict—an effect termed “the fog of enactment.” But over time, federated interest groups can learn to anticipate policies’ consequences through networks that cross state lines. Examining US energy policy over the past century, and Texas’s, Kansas’s, Arizona’s, and Ohio’s clean energy laws in the twenty-first century, the author shows how opponents have thwarted progress on climate policy.
Policy Feedback Takes Hold
Authors: Stokes Leah Cardamore
Published: April 2020

Chapter 4 examines one of the earliest renewable energy laws in the United States: Texas’s renewable portfolio standard, enacted under then-governor George W. Bush in 1999. This chapter provides the early history of clean energy leadership in Texas, when wind energy grew rapidly. Relying on original archival research and primary interviews, it explains why Texas acted on clean energy before California and other more progressive states. It shows how savvy advocates used public opinion to drive policy change during windows of opportunity. More broadly, this case reveals a classic positive feedback dynamic: a growing wind energy sector increased its influence over the legislature and successfully expanded clean energy policy. Here, advocates relied on the fog of enactment to get a clean energy target and an ambitious infrastructure spending bill passed in the legislature. They also worked through the public to convince legislators that clean energy leadership was important for Texans.
Regulatory Capture Thwarts Feedback
Authors: Stokes Leah Cardamore
Published: April 2020

Chapter 7 examines net metering. These laws have been crucial across the country for the development of the solar market. They set the rules for how to compensate individuals and organizations supplying energy to the grid, typically excess solar energy. After passing a series of clean energy targets in the 1990s and early 2000s that the state never implemented, Arizona finally began to get serious about renewable energy in 2008, passing a net metering law that year. However, the state regulator made a series of decisions from 2013 to 2017 that weakened and ultimately retrenched the state’s solar policies. Here, regulatory capture was key to electric utilities’ success in controlling the policymaking process. One utility, Arizona Public Service, spent over $55 million across several elections to block clean energy policies and elect anti-solar politicians. This chapter shows how opponent interest groups can directly drive retrenchment through regulatory capture.
When the Fog of Enactment Lifts
Authors: Stokes Leah Cardamore
Published: April 2020

Chapter 8 examines how networked interest groups can learn about policies in other states and use this information to swiftly drive retrenchment. Ohio was one of the last states to enact a renewable energy target. For this reason, electric utilities understood more quickly that the policy would undermine the financial viability of their existing fossil fuel assets. The American Legislative Exchange Council, which has prominent electric utility and fossil fuel companies as members, played an important role in Ohio, putting retrenching clean energy “mandates” on the agenda. In 2019, the utilities finally succeeded in repealing the state’s efficiency and renewable standards, replacing them with a bailout for coal plants. In this case, one can see how policy feedback can fail when opponents networked across the states learn from earlier policies’ implementation and weaken the policy before it is able to generate lock-in.
Understanding the Continuum of Musical Experiences for People With Dementia
Authors: Clements-Cortés Amy
Published: April 2020

This chapter provides an overview of the music experiences of people living with dementia with a focus on their implementation by care providers. Music experiences exist on a continuum which spans recreational to therapeutic and passive to active participatory opportunities. For care providers, it is essential to become familiar with the various musical opportunities that can be implemented when providing holistic care, and to choose the most appropriate experiences for persons living with dementia. This chapter explores the potential benefits of these experiences, as well as the risks of using music in care. A list of implications for care providers are presented alongside a dialogue on musical considerations.
Seven Capacities of Music That Underpin its Therapeutic Value in Dementia Care
Authors: Brancatisano Olivia , Thompson William Forde
Published: April 2020

Music is often employed as a therapeutic tool for individuals with dementia, facilitating memory recall, fluent speech and recovery of other cognitive and noncognitive abilities. There are several current discussions of the mechanisms that underlie these therapeutic effects, but no integrative model that can account for the benefits of music on multiple levels of analysis. Thompson and Schlaug (2015) proposed that seven capacities of music may be especially relevant to its therapeutic value for a range of neurological conditions; namely, that music is persuasive, engaging, emotional, personal, physical, and social, and that it encourages synchronization in rhythm and pitch. This chapter elaborates on this model by considering how each of these seven attributes of music has therapeutic benefits for people with dementia.
Music Therapy and Skill Sharing to Meet Psychosocial Needs for Persons With Advanced Dementia
Authors: Ridder Hanne Mette , Bøtker Julie Ørnholt
Published: April 2020

In advanced stages of dementia, the person experiences increasing difficulties in understanding and in being understood, and it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate and to engage socially. This may further lead to symptoms of agitation. In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), memory for music can be preserved and therefore music therapy can be beneficial. This chapter provides insights into how individual music-therapy sessions take place with people with AD, and emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and skill sharing. A psychosocial approach to music therapy is described and illustrated through a case example, demonstrating how music may facilitate safety, spontaneous play, improvisation and mutual interaction. The case contributes to the understanding of how person-attuned use of musical interactions are implemented and can be transferred from individual music therapy to daily care. The importance of knowledge creation and skill sharing between professionals is highlighted.
The Cash-in-Advance Model—Third Step
Authors: Cole Harold L.
Published: April 2020

This chapter extends the model to allow for stochastic shocks. It introduces the standard history state notation, shows how to derive the first-order conditions.
Price-Setting and Information Frictions
Authors: Cole Harold L.
Published: April 2020

This chapters shows how to construct a New Keynesian by changing the timing of monetary injections and imposing an information friction. We show the model implies an expectational Phillips Curve. We then discuss how to simulate our model on the computer.
Violence as a Mean of Attaining Group Goals*
Authors: Reykowski Janusz
Published: April 2020

For a very long period of human history, direct physical violence used to be one of the main means of obtaining power, wealth, and prestige, as well as social control, socialization of children, and regulation of social relations. Human societies were also developing various ways of controlling and curtailing direct violence, primarily in-group violence. Major changes in the social functions of violence were associated with the development of liberal thought and liberal institutions—the free market and the democratic political system. Liberal culture and liberal mentality have delegitimized all kinds of physical violence, except in defense of human rights and freedoms. Nevertheless, the tendency to use violence, as a means of attaining political, economic, or ideological goals has not disappeared. It is being fostered by ideologies that grew out of the transformation of traditional (conservative) thought into Right-Wing Authoritarianism and/or Social Dominance Orientation, but also the transformation of liberal thought into Libertarianism (egocentric individualism). These ideologies facilitate the change of competitions and disagreements between social groups into destructive conflicts.
Political Dialogue as an Instrument of the Democratic Policymaking
Authors: Reykowski Janusz
Published: April 2020

In democratic states, the decisions concerning important social problems may be attained by means of two different modes: by means of political competition and struggle, in which the winners can impose a solution according to its own interests and values (the adversarial mode), or through dialogue aimed at solving the problem collectively (the deliberative approach). The adversarial approach assumes that there are winners and losers, whereas the deliberative approach creates a potential opportunity to consider the interests and perspectives of different parties. Critics regard the deliberative approach as unrealistic and point to its limitations. This chapter explores the example of the Round Table talks in Poland, which led to a peaceful transformation of the sociopolitical system, to discuss the psychological and social determinants of the effectiveness of this approach in politics.
Poetic Cognition
Authors: Freeman Margaret H.
Published: April 2020

This introduction prepares the groundwork for explaining how a poem may become an icon. Drawing from insights in cognitive science, it discusses the nature of sensate cognition and introduces a theory of aesthetic cognition that places poetic cognition as a subcategory within its interdisciplinary field. The chapter begins with the central question of poetic cognition: how poetry achieves the felt experience of the essential being of reality that poets and writers throughout the centuries have claimed for their art. “Being” is understood as both the “life force” of organic systems and the “essence” of what makes a rock a rock. In this sense, particular creations of human cognitive activity may become icons of the being of reality. As a preliminary, the chapter briefly discusses the nature of the cognitive self, the roles of science and aesthetics, and the need to establish appropriate terminology for the interdisciplinary fields concerned in an aesthetics of cognition.
Semblance
Authors: Freeman Margaret H.
Published: April 2020

An icon always stands for something beyond itself. This chapter explores the various assumptions made by thinking of that relation in such terms as likeness, similarity, and representation that do not capture the nature of a poem as icon. Therefore the term semblance as “simulation” is chosen to avoid misconceptions that result in the separation of self from world. Semblance is the ontological underpinning of iconicity that relates it to the “felt life” of our epistemic reality. From a phenomenological perspective, the “being” of reality is in-visible, hidden within the precategorial realms of our preconscious sensory, motor, and emotive processes. The essence of being does not reside in a unified sense of one entity but in life in all its various manifestations. The ways in which poems create semblance are manifold and varied, as indicated in discussions of poems by Brendan Galvin, W. S. Merwin, and Wallace Stevens.
Schema
Authors: Freeman Margaret H.
Published: April 2020

The self is more than we consciously know. Neural and bodily processes of sensory experience, motor function, and emotive forces bind together to create the unity that is both the preconscious and conscious self. These sensate elements are governed by embodied schemata, a level of organization that binds subliminal sensory-motor-emotive processes with conceptual awareness in correlation with the worlds of our experience. Schemata internally structure metaphor by isomorphically creating correlations between its domains. The chapter first discusses the difference between the role of schemata that operate in everyday activities and behaviors and their role in the poetic arts. It shows how schemata bind the sensate elements of cognitive metaphoring in creating a poem as icon by revisiting Sylvia Plath’s poem discussed in the previous chapter, and two further poems by Li Bai and Elizabeth Bishop. The chapter ends by showing how schemata define the different poetics of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.
Affect
Authors: Freeman Margaret H.
Published: April 2020

Schemata acquire affective value through force dynamics at the deepest level of cognition. Affect is a transitive activity between the self as agonist and an “other” as antagonist that arises from sensory, motor, or emotive factors. In poetry, affect results primarily from a poem’s sonic and structural prosody to create the impression or “illusion” of virtual life. The affect respondents feel isn’t something static “in” the poem but a dynamic response to the poet’s intensions and motivations. Missing a poem’s affective tone can lead to misreading its emotive import and misevaluating the poet’s intension, as the discussion shows in a poem by Thomas Hardy. It also shows how the force dynamics of the fear schema in a Wallace Stevens poem creates an icon of danger confronting the self’s homeostasis. The chapter ends by summarizing the aspects of affective schemata that can lead to a theory of a model of affect in poetry and life.