bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Formation of GW190521 from stellar evolution: the impact of the hydrogen-rich envelope, dredge-up, and 12C(α, γ)16O rate on the pair-instability black hole mass gap
Authors: Costa Guglielmo , Bressan Alessandro , Mapelli Michela , Marigo Paola , Iorio Giuliano , Spera Mario
Published: December 2020

Pair-instability (PI) is expected to open a gap in the mass spectrum of black holes (BHs) between ≈40–65 and ≈120 M⊙. The existence of the mass gap is currently being challenged by the detection of GW190521, with a primary component mass of $85^{+21}_{-14}$ M⊙. Here, we investigate the main uncertainties on the PI mass gap: the 12C(α, γ)16O reaction rate and the H-rich envelope collapse. With the standard 12C(α, γ)16O rate, the lower edge of the mass gap can be 70 M⊙ if we allow for the collapse of the residual H-rich envelope at metallicity Z ≤ 0.0003. Adopting the uncertainties given by the starlib database, for models computed with the 12C(α, γ)16O rate $-1\, \sigma$, we find that the PI mass gap ranges between ≈80 and ≈150 M⊙. Stars with MZAMS > 110 M⊙ may experience a deep dredge-up episode during the core helium-burning phase, that extracts matter from the core enriching the envelope. As a consequence of the He-core mass reduction, a star with MZAMS = 160 M⊙ may avoid the PI and produce a BH of 150 M⊙. In the $-2\, {}\sigma {}$ case, the PI mass gap ranges from 92 to 110 M⊙. Finally, in models computed with 12C(α, γ)16O $-3\, {}\sigma {}$, the mass gap is completely removed by the dredge-up effect. The onset of this dredge-up is particularly sensitive to the assumed model for convection and mixing. The combined effect of H-rich envelope collapse and low 12C(α, γ)16O rate can lead to the formation of BHs with masses consistent with the primary component of GW190521.
To mock or not: a comprehensive comparison of mock IP and DNA input for ChIP-seq
Authors: Xu Jinrui , Kudron Michelle M , Victorsen Alec , Gao Jiahao , Ammouri Haneen N , Navarro Fabio C P , Gevirtzman Louis , Waterston Robert H , White Kevin P , Reinke Valerie , Gerstein Mark
Published: December 2020

Chromatin immunoprecipitation (IP) followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) is the gold standard to detect transcription-factor (TF) binding sites in the genome. Its success depends on appropriate controls removing systematic biases. The predominantly used controls, i.e. DNA input, correct for uneven sonication, but not for nonspecific interactions of the IP antibody. Another type of controls, ‘mock’ IP, corrects for both of the issues, but is not widely used because it is considered susceptible to technical noise. The tradeoff between the two control types has not been investigated systematically. Therefore, we generated comparable DNA input and mock IP experiments. Because mock IPs contain only nonspecific interactions, the sites predicted from them using DNA input indicate the spurious-site abundance. This abundance is highly correlated with the ‘genomic activity’ (e.g. chromatin openness). In particular, compared to cell lines, complex samples such as whole organisms have more spurious sites—probably because they contain multiple cell types, resulting in more expressed genes and more open chromatin. Consequently, DNA input and mock IP controls performed similarly for cell lines, whereas for complex samples, mock IP substantially reduced the number of spurious sites. However, DNA input is still informative; thus, we developed a simple framework integrating both controls, improving binding site detection.
Structural interpretation of the effects of threo-nucleotides on nonenzymatic template-directed polymerization
Authors: Zhang Wen , Kim Seohyun Chris , Tam Chun Pong , Lelyveld Victor S , Bala Saikat , Chaput John C , Szostak Jack W
Published: December 2020

The prebiotic synthesis of ribonucleotides is likely to have been accompanied by the synthesis of noncanonical nucleotides including the threo-nucleotide building blocks of TNA. Here, we examine the ability of activated threo-nucleotides to participate in nonenzymatic template-directed polymerization. We find that primer extension by multiple sequential threo-nucleotide monomers is strongly disfavored relative to ribo-nucleotides. Kinetic, NMR and crystallographic studies suggest that this is due in part to the slow formation of the imidazolium-bridged TNA dinucleotide intermediate in primer extension, and in part because of the greater distance between the attacking RNA primer 3′-hydroxyl and the phosphate of the incoming threo-nucleotide intermediate. Even a single activated threo-nucleotide in the presence of an activated downstream RNA oligonucleotide is added to the primer 10-fold more slowly than an activated ribonucleotide. In contrast, a single activated threo-nucleotide at the end of an RNA primer or in an RNA template results in only a modest decrease in the rate of primer extension, consistent with the minor and local structural distortions revealed by crystal structures. Our results are consistent with a model in which heterogeneous primordial oligonucleotides would, through cycles of replication, have given rise to increasingly homogeneous RNA strands.
Targeting alternative splicing by RNAi: from the differential impact on splice variants to triggering artificial pre-mRNA splicing
Authors: Fuchs Armin , Riegler Stefan , Ayatollahi Zahra , Cavallari Nicola , Giono Luciana E , Nimeth Barbara A , Mutanwad Krishna V , Schweighofer Alois , Lucyshyn Doris , Barta Andrea , Petrillo Ezequiel , Kalyna Maria
Published: December 2020

Alternative splicing generates multiple transcript and protein isoforms from a single gene and controls transcript intracellular localization and stability by coupling to mRNA export and nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). RNA interference (RNAi) is a potent mechanism to modulate gene expression. However, its interactions with alternative splicing are poorly understood. We used artificial microRNAs (amiRNAs, also termed shRNAmiR) to knockdown all splice variants of selected target genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. We found that splice variants, which vary by their protein-coding capacity, subcellular localization and sensitivity to NMD, are affected differentially by an amiRNA, although all of them contain the target site. Particular transcript isoforms escape amiRNA-mediated degradation due to their nuclear localization. The nuclear and NMD-sensitive isoforms mask RNAi action in alternatively spliced genes. Interestingly, Arabidopsis SPL genes, which undergo alternative splicing and are targets of miR156, are regulated in the same manner. Moreover, similar results were obtained in mammalian cells using siRNAs, indicating cross-kingdom conservation of these interactions among RNAi and splicing isoforms. Furthermore, we report that amiRNA can trigger artificial alternative splicing, thus expanding the RNAi functional repertoire. Our findings unveil novel interactions between different post-transcriptional processes in defining transcript fates and regulating gene expression.
Postoperative Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy for Spinal Metastasis and Predictors of Local Control
Authors: Blakaj Dukagjin M , Palmer Joshua D , Dibs Khaled , Olausson Alexander , Bourekas Eric C , Boulter Daniel , Ayan Ahmet S , Cochran Eric , Marras William S , Mageswaran Prasath , Katzir Miki , Yildiz Vedat O , Grecula John , Arnett Andrea , Raval Raju , Scharschmidt Thomas , Elder James B , Lonser Russell , Chakravarti Arnab , Mendel Ehud
Published: December 2020

BACKGROUND

Spine surgery is indicated for select patients with mechanical instability, pain, and/or malignant epidural spinal cord compression, with or without neurological compromise. Stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) is an option for durable local control (LC) for metastatic spine disease.

OBJECTIVE

To determine factors associated with LC and progression-free survival (PFS) for patients receiving postoperative stereotactic spine radiosurgery.

METHODS

We analyzed consecutive patients from 2013 to 2019 treated with surgical intervention followed by SBRT. Surgical interventions included laminectomy and vertebrectomy. SBRT included patients treated with 1 to 5 fractions of radiosurgery. We analyzed LC, PFS, overall survival (OS), and toxicity. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed.

RESULTS

A total of 63 patients were treated with a median follow-up of 12.5 mo. Approximately 75% of patients underwent vertebrectomy and 25% underwent laminectomy. One-year cumulative incidence of local failure was 19%. LC was significantly improved for patients receiving radiosurgery ≤40 d from surgery compared to that for patients receiving radiosurgery ≥40 d from surgery, 94% vs 75%, respectively, at 1 yr (P = .03). Patients who received preoperative embolization had improved LC with 1-yr LC of 88% vs 76% for those who did not receive preoperative embolization (P = .037). Significant predictors for LC on multivariate analysis were time from surgery to radiosurgery, higher radiotherapy dose, and preoperative embolization. The 1-yr PFS and OS was 56% and 60%, respectively.

CONCLUSION

Postoperative radiosurgery has excellent and durable LC for spine metastasis. An important consideration when planning postoperative radiosurgery is minimizing delay from surgery to radiosurgery. Preoperative embolization and higher radiotherapy dose were associated with improved LC warranting further study.
Moral Acrobatics
Authors: Rochat Philippe
Published: December 2020

Pure monsters do not exist. That is difficult for us to fathom. Terrorists and other serial killers massacre innocent people, yet are perfectly capable of loving their own parents, neighbors, and children. Hitler was a vegetarian. He sent millions to their death while contemptuous of meat eaters and a strong advocate of animal welfare. He loved his pets. High-ranking Nazis were often cultured and had strong moral views. How do we reconcile such moral ambiguities? Could it capture something deep about how we build values? As members of a uniquely symbolic and self-conscious species, aware of its own mortality, we develop uncanny abilities toward lying and self-deception. We harbor deeply categorical and compartmentalized views of the world. We live within multiple, interchangeable moral spheres. We overcome our blatant moral ambiguities by thinking the world in black and white, imagining essence where there is none. We juggle double standards and manage contradictory values, clustering our existence depending on context and situations, whether we deal in relation to close kin, colleagues, strangers, lovers, or enemies. This social-contextual determination of the moral domain is the source of moral ambiguities and blatant contradictions we all need to own up to.
Nobody Hates Money
Authors: Patey Luke
Published: December 2020

China is already a global builder of infrastructure. Under President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, China intends to take this activity to another level with a $1 trillion global strategy to finance, build, and connect new transport infrastructure, industrial corridors, and trade routes from China to Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. But China’s grand plan requires political acceptance from foreign governments and societies over the long run. Before the Belt and Road, Latin America was one of the main destinations for Chinese infrastructure loans overseas. Argentina is an early story of the Belt and Road facing local pushback. It is a microcosm for how China, a one-party authoritarian state, is reacting to democratic political change and democracy endangering its interests overseas. The one-sided economic conditions of China’s loans held important political, social, and environmental consequences for host countries that over time swing back against Chinese interests.
Different Worlds
Authors: Frankel Francine R.
Published: December 2020

Nehru considered the establishment of Mao’s People’s Republic of China an event of historical importance, transcending the Cold War and signaling the resurgence of free Asia. But China had never accepted the northern boundary with India, known as the McMahon Line, asserting it had been drawn by British imperialists intent on diminishing its control over Tibet. India, militarily much weaker than China, adopted a policy of unwavering friendship toward China as the best approach to securing a diplomatic solution to the border dispute. Once China entered an alliance with the Soviet Union, the United States perceived an expanded communist threat. Nehru, reiterating India’s nonalignment, advanced the notion of Asianism to consolidate Indian-China solidarity.
US and Indian Policies in Direct Conflict, Part II
Authors: Frankel Francine R.
Published: December 2020

India asserted its influence at the Geneva Conference through the informal participation of Krishna Menon in behind-the-scenes discussions. The Geneva settlement reduced fears among smaller powers that China would intervene in Indo-China and weakened their incentives to join a US-sponsored mutual security alliance. It also deprived China of a rationale for its own expansion to meet a US threat. The “area of peace” thereby served India’s aspiration to protect its role in Indo-China. But this was immediately countered by the US plan to establish SEATO. Indian policymakers treated the United States as its enemy and competitor in Southeast Asia.
Depoliticizing the Volhynian Village
Authors: Ciancia Kathryn
Published: December 2020

In the Volhynian countryside, Józewski and his supporters launched an apolitical civilizing mission. Their efforts were based on the idea that land reform, the removal of feudal practices, modifications to natural and built environments, and improved sanitation would lead to pro-state attitudes among the peasantry. Believing that Volhynia was experiencing modernization in a piecemeal and sometimes dangerous way, they sought to use rural sites, including elementary schools, military settlements, border guard outposts, and healthcare centers, to teach peasants how to become civilized citizens. Rural apoliticism, however, was itself characterized by political conflict. Power struggles occurred at the level of the village—for instance, between parents and schoolteachers and between Roman Catholic priests and more secular-minded officials. Moreover, elite women drew on traditional gender roles concerning domesticity, sanitation, and childcare in order to promote their role in a state that remained dominated by male-led institutions.
Regionalism, or the Limits of Inclusion
Authors: Ciancia Kathryn
Published: December 2020

Between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s, the Volhynian authorities drew on broader ideas of European regionalism in an attempt to attach the province’s multiethnic populations to the Polish state project. The message put forward at museums and provincial fairs and in regionalist journals focused on national inclusivity. But the elite-led fetishizing of local folklore by regionalists like Jakub Hoffman naturally led to other types of exclusion—or, at least, to conditional inclusion. Ukrainian-speaking populations were permitted only as vestiges of premodern diversity, while a focus on synagogues and the tiny Jewish sect of the Karaites allowed regionalists to write Jews into narratives of rootedness that always emphasized Polish tolerance. Supporters of tourism, which offered another way of navigating the relationship between Volhynia and Poland, undertook the tricky balancing act of claiming the province’s status in the modern world and simultaneously repackaging backwardness as a series of desirable characteristics, such as primitiveness and exoticism.
Polygenists, Black Jews, and the Proofs for the Disunity of Man
Authors: Parfitt Tudor
Published: December 2020

Charles White set the scene for the insertion of Jews, blacks, and black Jews into the great origin debate from a polygenist perspective. The polygenist “American School” of race theorists tried to destroy the monogenist argument based on the existence of a color change among Jews by arguing that all black Jews were racially not Jews at all. The immutability of race became a key feature of polygenist thinking. One of the proofs for immutability was perceived in the images found in ancient Egyptian and Assyrian art. Nott’s Types of Mankind analyzed not only black but also Jewish racial specificity. The Jews had a mark on them, and blacks were marked by the “mark of Cain”—their color. The heresy of the black Jew was attacked time and again by the polygenists. Agassiz agreed that Jews and blacks were marked out and distinguished from other races. In France Joseph Arthur, “Comte” de Gobineau combatted the idea that black Jews proved the impact of climate on racial groups, and the single origin of humankind. Gradually the polygenist argument started to suggest that purity of race among Jews could be shown by the fact that all Jews were of a dark, dusky coloring. Beddoe developed an index of nigrescence, on which the Jews scored 100 percent. Russell, co-creator with Darwin of the concept of natural selection, took issue with the concept of multicolored Jews and so, more ambiguously, did Richard Burton. Burton thought that the Jews were racially unique, like blacks.
The Black/Jew in the Racial State
Authors: Parfitt Tudor
Published: December 2020

Extreme racist opinion in Germany, exemplified by Theodor Fritsch, asserted that Jews were a negroid mix. This continued in the works of, for instance, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Each individual Jew, according to John Beddoe, the pigmentation expert, contained the negroid and Asiatic type. The Jew was a chameleon in this respect. Rudolf Virchow conducted a research project in which skin color was presented not as an objective fact but rather as something to be intuitively felt. The general consensus, even among Jews, was that Jews were dark, yet the research showed the contrary. Jews in the liberal arts and poetry of the Weimar period often constructed Jews as dark or black, as in the work of George Grosz. The Swiss-French race theorist and anti-Semite George-Alexis Montandon perceived the Jews as an ancient cross of Asiatic and negro and expressed this in his famous exhibition, “How to recognize a Jew.” The fear of cross-breeding became more intense in the Nazi period, along with sexual fear of blacks and Jews. Hitler attacked the “black disgrace” on the Rhine that was leading to a Jewish-inspired Vernegerung and would eventually produce in Germany something like the negrified French state to the south. Nazi polemical and propaganda literature habitually portrayed the Jews as black or dark. Nazis borrowed from American anti-black legislation. Fascist Italy had a similar fear of racial pollution by Jews and blacks, as can be seen in countless cartoons and illustrations in La Difesa della Razza. Cultural pollution by Jews and negroes was equally feared.
Story in Structure
Authors: Leong Daphne
Published: December 2020

This chapter presents intertwined readings of Schnittke’s Piano Quartet from four points of view: compositional, performative, esthesic, and analytical. Drawing on Schnittke’s description of the Quartet—“at first the attempt to remember” a fragment by Mahler “and then remembrance itself”—it analyzes the work as a rotational form: four passes through the fragment’s material, followed by a statement of the fragment itself. It discusses interpretive and practical considerations in depicting the journey to Mahler’s fragment. It shows that “memory” expresses Romantic irony through its evocation of a fragment from the past, denial of a clear temporal line, and search for an impossible perfection. And it dissects three techniques—rhythmic “formants,” contraction and expansion, and self-similiarity—employed by Schnittke to subvert temporal direction. Audience and performer viewpoints taken from a concert and interactive presentation supplement the authors’ interpretation. The authors’ live performance on audio (Ingolfsson, Eckert, Glyde, and Leong) complements the written text.
“If you don’t have money, you can’t dance.”
Authors: Skeel Sharon
Published: December 2020

Catherine is hired by William Goldman to stage dances for the Stanley Theatre in Philadelphia. Goldman becomes her boyfriend. At the Mastbaum Theatre, she is appointed assistant to dance director Robert Alton. The Littlefield School moves to the Fuller Building. William Dollar, Douglas Coudy, and Thomas Cannon, students of Mikhail Mordkin and Ethel Phillips in Philadelphia, join Catherine’s ensemble. Mommie takes Catherine, Dorothie, and other dancers to Paris to train with Russians Lubov Egorova and Alexandre Volinine. In Paris, the sisters become friendly with choreographer George Balanchine. The Littlefields move to an elegant home in the Wynnefield neighborhood. Catherine hires Alexis Dolinoff to dance in H.P. (Horsepower), a ballet-symphony by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in collaboration with Diego Rivera, Frances Flynn Paine, and Lincoln Kirstein. Conducted by Leopold Stokowski in March 1932, H.P. is the first piece of choreography attributed solely to Catherine.
“An enormous macédoine of musical comedy, patriotism, and burlesque, spangled with American history—that is ‘American Jubilee.’ ”
Authors: Skeel Sharon
Published: December 2020

Joan McCracken leaves the Littlefields to perform at Radio City Music Hall and eventually on Broadway. Catherine stages dances for the large-scale “American Jubilee” pageant at the World’s Fair in New York in 1940. Her innovative bicycle ballet in the pageant is a tremendous hit. Al Jolson hires her for his comeback show on Broadway, Hold On to Your Hats. She is then enlisted to choreograph ice-skating routines for New York’s Center Theatre, which has been converted into an ice theater by Chicago entrepreneur Arthur Wirtz and his business partner, Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie. Wirtz soon installs Catherine as choreographer for Henie’s touring Hollywood Ice Revues as well. She takes her Littlefield Ballet on an eight-week national tour. She and Philip officially separate, although they remain friends and business associates. She and her Littlefield Ballet return to Chicago for the 1941 opera season. The company disbands after Pearl Harbor is bombed and many of Catherine’s male dancers, including Carl, enlist in the military.
Dynamic Analysis of Intellectual Property
Authors: Barnett Jonathan M.
Published: December 2020

This chapter proposes a dynamic approach to IP analysis that assesses the effects of changes in the strength of IP rights by anticipating firms’ ability to adopt alternative non-IP mechanisms for capturing returns on innovation. Some of the most powerful non-IP alternatives are the economies of scale, financing capacities, and accumulated goodwill that are inherent to older, larger, and more integrated entities. By contrast, these non-IP alternatives are generally unavailable to younger, smaller, and less integrated entities. These entity-specific differences in adopting non-IP alternatives imply that changes in the strength of IP rights can have significantly different effects on different entity types as a function of age, size, and level of integration. Critically, weak- or zero-IP regimes can advantage large incumbents by compelling exit or deterring entry by smaller and less integrated firms that cannot sufficiently monetize R&D investments in the absence of reasonably secure IP protections.
Organizational Effects of Intellectual Property (Macro Level)
Authors: Barnett Jonathan M.
Published: December 2020

This chapter describes how the level of IP protection impacts firms’ choices in organizing the innovation and commercialization process, which in turn influences the structure of the innovation market as a whole. Weak-IP regimes induce firms to adopt “hierarchical” structures that mitigate expropriation risk by locating innovation and commercialization activities within substantially integrated supply chains. Strong-IP regimes restore organizational choice and enable innovators to adopt “entrepreneurial” structures that rely on contractual relationships among firms that specialize in particular innovation or commercialization functions. If hierarchical structures cannot sufficiently mitigate expropriation risk, then innovation markets will adopt “bureaucratic” structures that rely on tax-based or philanthropic funding. Even when markets adapt to weak-IP regimes by adopting hierarchical structures, or hybrid hierarchical and semi-bureaucratic structures, that support robust R&D investment, efficiency losses will arise to the extent that entry by entrepreneurial innovators is suppressed and the selected mix of innovation projects is distorted.
Constructing an Objective History of the U.S. Patent System
Authors: Barnett Jonathan M.
Published: December 2020

This chapter presents a history of the U.S. patent system based on quantitative and qualitative evidence relating to patentees’ expectations that courts will uphold the validity of contested patents, find infringement, and award injunctive relief against infringing parties. Additionally, this chapter describes historical changes in antitrust law that have impacted patentees’ ability to enter into licensing and other patent-dependent transactions. Based on these features of patent law and antitrust-related patent law, supplemented by background institutional developments, the history of the U.S. patent system during 1890–2006 consists of three periods: (i) a strong-patent, weak-antitrust period from 1890 through the mid-1930s; (ii) a weak-patent, strong-antitrust period from the late 1930s through the 1970s; and (iii) a strong-patent, weak-antitrust period from the early 1980s through 2006. Historical trends in the volume of patent applications by U.S. inventors are consistent with this division of U.S. patent history.
Why Incumbents (Usually) Prefer Weak Intellectual-Property Rights
Authors: Barnett Jonathan M.
Published: December 2020

This chapter challenges the conventional assumption that incumbents in technology markets lobby for strong IP rights to erect entry barriers and capture market rents. In the railroad industry in the late nineteenth century, in the software industry in the 1960s and 1970s, and in patent-reform debates since the mid-2000s, large vertically and horizontally (systems-level) integrated firms outside the pharmaceutical industry have generally advocated for weaker patents or resisted the extension of IP protection to new technologies. By contrast, smaller R&D-intensive entities and venture-capital firms have generally expressed the opposite position. A comprehensive study of all amicus briefs filed in Supreme Court patent-related litigation during 2006–2016 confirms this entity-specific divergence in IP-policy preferences. Historical and contemporary evidence supports the hypothesis that in a significant number of industries, weak patents protect incumbents by impeding entry by smaller innovators that lack comparable non-IP complementary capacities by which to capture returns on innovation.
Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure
Authors: DiBranco Alex
Published: December 2020

This chapter analyzes US conservative media as it expanded into new forms in the 1970s. While a first generation of conservative media activists invested in more or less traditional media enterprises (e.g. magazines, newsletters, radio programming), by the 1970s movement activists associated with the New Right were investing in think tanks and foundations—not only diversifying the conservative movement infrastructure but also complicating the variegated means of sourcing and circulating conservative news and commentary. The chapter shows how the movement’s turn toward nonprofit organizational structures in the 1970s enabled its institutional proliferation. The result was a dizzying array of funders, organizations, publications, and activists whose efforts continue to wield outsized influence over both the conservative movement and the news cultures that surround it.
Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media
Authors: Lane Julie B.
Published: December 2020

This chapter traces the origins of the “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure appropriated by National Review writers, who successfully used it to construct a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. William F. Buckley and other National Review writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions as a gatekeeper of acceptable opinions. The chapter documents that National Review writers made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion that demanded conformity to liberal views.
Diana Doherty
Authors: Fiala Michele
Published: December 2020

Diana Doherty is principal oboe of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (Australia). She won first prize at the Prague Spring International Music Competition in 1991 and was a joint winner of the 1995 Young Concert Artist auditions in New York. In this chapter, she discusses her early life, the international aspects of her career, and reeds. She also talks about how she warms up on the instrument and offers advice on developing finger technique and articulation. She shares her inspirations and memorable concerts
Elaine Douvas
Authors: Fiala Michele
Published: December 2020

Elaine Douvas has served as principal oboe of the Metropolitan Opera since 1977 and oboe instructor at the Juilliard School since 1982. In this interview, she discusses her early life and career, auditions, her teaching, and the relationship of vocal and instrumental music. She offers advice on tone production, articulation, reeds, and vibrato. She talks about the differences between playing in an opera orchestra versus a symphony orchestra and the connections between figure skating and music.
Sarah Jeffrey
Authors: Fiala Michele
Published: December 2020

Sarah Jeffrey is principal oboe of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and is on faculty at the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory and the University of Toronto. In this chapter, Jeffrey discusses her start in music, her inspirations, and her observations of North American styles. She also shares her priorities in warming up, reeds, and developing technique.
Nancy Ambrose King
Authors: Fiala Michele
Published: December 2020

Nancy Ambrose King is professor of oboe at the University of Michigan and first-prize winner of the Third New York International Competition for Solo Oboists, held in 1995. In this chapter, King discusses the relationship between teaching and performing. She also shares her ideas on reeds, learning new repertoire, and winning jobs. She relates her inspirations and memorable experiences.
Grover Schiltz
Authors: Fiala Michele
Published: December 2020

Grover Schiltz was one of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s longest-serving members, from 1959 until his retirement in 2005. He played assistant principal oboe until 1964 and served as principal English horn from 1964 to 2005. In this interview, he discussed warming up, technique, breathing, breath control, and vibrato. He provided advice on reeds, auditions, how to prepare for a performance, and tone production. He talked about the differences in performance between oboe and English horn. He offered advice how to teach musicianship, the nature of talent, and Baroque ornamentation. He shared which artists inspired him, reminiscences about his greatest concerts, and his observations on how the American style changed during his career.
Tear Gas, Rubber Bullets and Democracy
Authors: Wasserman Herman
Published: December 2020

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on conflict, democratization, and the media and positions the book within key debates in the field. The chapter explains the book’s approach to the topic of media and conflict from the angle of democratization and social transition and provides an overview of the key arguments made throughout the book. The chapter also introduces key questions regarding the media’s ethical responsibilities in times of conflict and crisis. These questions are complicated by the rise of social media platforms and the widening of access to content production and curation by media users. The chapter argues that conflict provides a lens through which to examine the media’s relationship to publics, politics, and society in a globalized world.
Introduction
Authors: Friedline Terri
Published: December 2020

As the Introduction to Banking on a Revolution, this chapter summarizes recent technological advancements and their applications to banking and finance. Despite the potential for financial technologies, or “fintech,” to expand access to banking and finance, this chapter presents the challenges with fintech that can undermine a financial system revolution. For example, racism in the financial system is so common that it even has its own hashtag: #BankingWhileBlack. Without critical investigation of technological advancements and their potential for disparately impacting Black and Brown communities, fintech may further embed banks’ racialized exploitation, advance forms of financial surveillance, and confer advantages to whites.
Calibrating the Financial System
Authors: Friedline Terri
Published: December 2020

This chapter explores how the financial system was created and developed to recognize whiteness as a first credential of banking. Based on the theory of racial capitalism, this chapter reviews the origins of modern-day banks, redlining, and credit scoring to explain how the financial system confers advantages to whites. The financial system’s calibrations to whiteness have made it unable to render equal access to financial products and services. Whites have disproportionately higher bank account ownership rates, savings amounts, and accumulated wealth compared to their Black and Brown counterparts. Reports that decontextualize these differences from racial capitalism ignore the racist policies and practices responsible for these present-day renderings.
Theorizing Moves to Financial Innocence
Authors: Friedline Terri
Published: December 2020

This chapter explores popular, normative theories that attempt to explain access to banking and finance by focusing on individuals and families. Theories such as financial socialization, development, behavioral economics, and financial capability try to explain racialized differences in access to banking and finance while ignoring the financial system’s calibrations to whiteness. This ignorance makes opaque the forces that wield power and opportunity and reinforces tropes of bootstraps and individual responsibility. Programs and policies built on normative theoretical traditions will not lead to a financial system revolution; instead, they will continue to exacerbate racialized inequality.
Halfsight
Authors: Spencer Danielle
Published: December 2020

Here the author continues her ophthalmic narrative, describing the surprising revelation of a long-standing, yet undetected, condition—a visual field “defect.” Discussing the narrative frames of diagnosis, questions of medical error and uncertainty are addressed. The particular challenges of accounting for a retrospective revelation are explored in detail, invoking themes of narratology, communicability, intelligibility, metaphor, and semiotics. In addition, the ways in which metagnosis invokes various stances toward the relationship between narrative and identity are investigated. This chapter offers an introduction to key concepts in illness narratives, narratology, semiotics, and narrative identity theory, discussed in relation to the author’s experience.
Blindsight
Authors: Spencer Danielle
Published: December 2020

In situating the author’s retrospective visual field “defect” revelation, this chapter begins with the neurological condition of anosognosia—being unaware of a disease—exploring its manifestations and philosophical implications. In addition, another means of understanding the author’s visual field “defect” emerges in the figure of “blindsight,” or unconscious vision. Tracing the relationship between vision and thought in the Western philosophical tradition as well as the philosophical role of blindsight, the chapter then proposes that blindsight models a particular epistemic stance encompassing the known and unknown, one which will prove useful in addressing the phenomenon of metagnosis and beyond.
Robin—My Gateway, Guide, Ears, and Voice in China
Authors: Josselson Ruthellen
Published: December 2020

This chapter is an intense portrait of the Chinese interpreter with some reflections on the slipperiness of language between the two cultures. The close relationship that developed between the author and the interpreter also revealed more nuanced aspects of cultural difference that could be narrated from different perspectives. When the interpreter came to a conference in the United States, subtle cultural differences became apparent in what she viewed as unusual. From her perspective, Americans seemed uncurious about people from China. In Mandarin, there is no word for “the Other.” China is largely an ethnically homogenous society and Western approaches to diversity are hard to understand.
Chinese Psychotherapy Patients
Authors: Josselson Ruthellen
Published: December 2020

This chapter discusses Chinese therapy patients in an effort to assess the differences between the clinical challenges that Western and Eastern therapists might encounter. Anxiety, depression, and interpersonal conflict lead people to seek therapy, similar to the West, but these have different presentations and contexts. Chinese families have different organization and dynamics compared to Western families. Emotion is expressed quite differently than in the West and conflict is suppressed, often at great emotional cost. Frequently, people feared that bringing up any dissatisfaction would lead to rupture in the family or that conflict would cause a spouse to leave. Three generational families are common and it is also not unusual for people to be raised by people other than their parents. Filial devotion is central in people’s psychology.
The Dilemmas of Training, Trauma, and Culture
Authors: Josselson Ruthellen
Published: December 2020

Looking closely at the dynamics of the process groups, many aspects of Chinese culture are revealed: the focus on privilege within systems, the ubiquity of intergenerational trauma in individuals, the denial of historical trauma. These are detailed stories that do not lend themselves well to being abstracted, but there are stories of abusive childhoods, forced abortion, and the great need for maternal love. As we began to teach supervision, we struggled with the tension between competition and collaboration in co-therapy teams. It was hard initially for them to work together when each of the co-therapists wanted to be the best.
The Good Witch Tries to Say Goodbye
Authors: Josselson Ruthellen
Published: December 2020

This chapter discusses the systemic issues around leaving in-person involvement in the training program. It offers detailed stories of some of the incidents that occurred.
The Power of Pigs
Authors: Price Max D.
Published: December 2020

This introductory chapter outlines the themes of the book. Pigs have long played important roles in the cultures of the Near East, especially in times of ethnoreligious conflict. The mass cull in 2009 of swine owned by the Zabaleen in Cairo is one of the most recent examples. Examining pigs provides a lens into the past, a unique means of studying Near Eastern cultures. Whereas previous scholarship has been content to study the pig in specific cultural contexts, often attempting to explain its history with reference to a single cultural or environmental process, this book covers the history of the pig from before its domestication to the present day. By adopting this long-term, wide-reaching perspective, I advance the argument that pigs, and the taboos placed upon them, can be understood only as evolving cultural elements.
Clash of Cultures in the Classical Period
Authors: Price Max D.
Published: December 2020

The influence of Greek and Roman culture on the Near East, especially after Alexander’s conquests, brought a revival of pig husbandry, which had largely been lost in the Iron Age. Pigs and pork played fundamental roles in Greek and Roman culture—in the economy, in the diet, and in ritual. Greek and, especially, Roman writers celebrated pigs and pork. Zooarchaeological data indicate a surge in pig production in Near Eastern cities. But Greco-Roman love of pigs and pork ran into conflict with Jewish populations in the Levant. The ingestion of pork became entangled in the political and ethnic conflicts playing out between Jews and their Greek and Roman imperial masters. It became a metonym for submission; its avoidance a symbol of resistance. Pork avoidance was thus elevated from one of many taboos codified in Leviticus to a practice definitive of Jewish identity. Pork consumption also became a way for Christians to reject Judaism.
Intuitionistic/Constructive Accounts of the Continuum Today
Authors: Bell John L.
Published: December 2020

In this chapter we describe the properties of the continuum as it is conceived in the intuitionistic and constructive senses. The chapter ends with an account of the continuum as it is conceived in Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, a recently developed approach to mathematical analysis based on nilpotent infinitesimals.
Introduction
Authors: Fabbrini Federico
Published: December 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Withdrawal Agreement of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). The Withdrawal Agreement, adopted on the basis of Article 50 Treaty on European Union (TEU), spells out the terms and conditions of the UK departure from the EU, including ground-breaking solutions to deal with the thorniest issues which emerged in the context of the withdrawal negotiations. Admittedly, the Withdrawal Agreement is only a part of the Brexit deal. The Agreement, in fact, is accompanied by a connected political declaration, which outlines the framework of future EU–UK relations. The chapter then offers a chronological summary of the process that led to the adoption of the Withdrawal Agreement, describing the crucial stages in the Brexit process — from the negotiations to the conclusion of a draft agreement and its rejection, to the extension and the participation of the UK to European Parliament (EP) elections, to the change of UK government and the ensuing constitutional crisis, to the new negotiations with the conclusion of a revised agreement, new extension, and new UK elections eventually leading to the departure of the UK from the EU.
The Negotiations
Authors: Jones Emily
Published: December 2020

This chapter analyses the politics of the Brexit negotiations and shows how the UK government’s failure to manage the fraught domestic politics posed a major constraint and challenge to the negotiations. Under UK Prime Minister Theresa May, the UK government struggled to put forward coherent negotiating proposals, hamstrung by deep splits within the UK Cabinet and the Conservative Party. After two years of negotiations, in November of 2018, the UK and EU reached an agreement, only to see it resoundingly rejected by UK Parliament three times. The UK was then plunged into a constitutional crisis, and Prime Minister May stepped down. Boris Johnson, May’s successor, took a more hard-line approach. He took extreme measures, including suspending the UK Parliament, a move that was ruled illegal by the UK Supreme Court. Activist backbench MPs and a series of court cases ruled out a no-deal exit and helped generate an agreement between the Johnson government and the EU, but it was not ratified until after a snap general election in December of 2019 delivered a resounding victory for the Conservatives. The UK duly left the EU on January 31, 2020, with a Withdrawal Agreement in place.
The Future of the United Kingdom after Brexit
Authors: Douglas-Scott Sionaidh
Published: December 2020

This chapter evaluates how Brexit and the withdrawal negotiations impacted the UK system of devolved governance. The focus is on devolution because the voices of the three devolved nations — Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — have been too much ignored in Brexit manoeuvres, especially given Scotland and Northern Ireland voted in the Referendum to remain in the EU. The chapter then details the key points of the EU Withdrawal Act 2018 (EUWA) and EU Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020 (WAA), and looks at how Brexit will impact devolution. It also discusses the status of the UK’s existing territorial constitution. Finally, the chapter describes a possible federal future for the UK, and considers scenarios of regional independence.
Sigonio in Anglo-American Projects to Reform the Imperial Constitution, 1751–1777
Authors: Somos Mark
Published: December 2020

This chapter explores Carlo Sigonio’s long-term impact by zooming in on the nascent United States of America. It shows that Sigonio was seen as a leading comparative constitutional historian and one of the most cited authorities that would-be reformers turned to in the intense debate on the reform of the British imperial constitution in the second half of the eighteenth century. His analyses of the Roman Empire yielded timeless lessons for metropolitan and colonial administrators alike. Most importantly, Sigonio structured his studies of Roman, Athenian, Hebrew, and medieval Italian laws and customs in a way that revealed these complex historical states’ constitutional essence, making comparative analysis possible. This chapter shows why American lawyers, British politicians, and merchants and soldiers with a true British–American identity, explicitly drew on Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization in several reform plans for the British Empire, with particular attention to the American colonies.
Upholding the Welfare State During the Financial Crisis
Authors: Dima Elena-Luminița
Published: December 2020

In Romania, the social security benefits were influenced by the global economic crisis that occurred in 2008. This chapter presents the background of the reforms implemented in Romania in the context of the global crisis and reveals the reasons for their introduction, the specific legislative measures adopted, the reaction of the Romanian Constitutional Court to the measures, as well as the influence of the Court’s decisions on the implementation of the measures. Overall, the decisions of the Constitutional Court were observed by all the stakeholders and national institutions. Also regular courts, when deciding on cases referring to pension rights, were in line with the rules of interpretation adopted by the Constitutional Court. Hence, the Romanian constitutional doctrine was not significantly altered during the financial crisis and national constitutional law was able to restrict the pressure put on the national welfare state.
Sustainable Finance and the Move to a Circular Economy
Authors: Sarra Janis
Published: December 2020

Ultimately, our goal is to move beyond ideas, beyond action to net zero and then to ‘climate positive’; to create a circular economy that relies on renewable energy, designs waste out of the system as much as possible, conserves and enhances biodiversity, and frames economic activity so that it is fair and equitable, and is good for the planet and society. This chapter is a forward-looking vision for sustainable finance to support these goals. It discusses scaling-up of resources to decarbonize and links sustainable finance with sustainable development. It explores the European Commission’s vision for a sustainable and climate neutral economy. It looks at Indigenous partnerships in green finance and green energy and the potential contributions of conservation finance. The chapter then turns to examples of sustainable finance in a number of sectors.