bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Friendship Rekindled, Pluralism Refined
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores how Horace Kallen and Alain Locke's friendship grew and developed over time. Through friendship, Locke helped Kallen overcome his prejudices. Kallen never admitted to that in print, but his eulogizing of Locke spoke volumes as to the effect his friend had on his racial thinking, and the boundaries of cultural pluralism. Kallen had learned from Locke to appreciate the cultural contributions of African Americans. Before the major moments of the civil rights movement, Kallen began to speak of Black people as he had of Jews and Irishmen and Italians, as a part of the United States' symphony of civilization. Locke's friendship proved pivotal not only to Kallen's greater appreciation for Black culture but also to Kallen's own understanding of cultural pluralism as friendship, an understanding he developed most clearly in his memorials for Locke.
Conclusion Differences Made
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This concluding chapter reflects on the term, “cultural pluralism,” as both Horace Kallen and Alain Locke conceived it. That idea, as old as the United States itself, had always been simple: different peoples coming together to form one nation. Kallen and Locke's conversation did not represent the first attempt to solve the problem, but it helped create a vocabulary for how we approach the issue today. It provided a blueprint for what the United States could look like, particularly for elite intellectuals. From there, the chapter briefly considers the relevance of cultural pluralism in an era defined by the divisiveness of the Trump era and the isolation and alienation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the promise and peril of multiculturalism.
Oikophobia in France
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This chapter demonstrates how France superseded Spain as the dominant power on the continent after the Thirty Years' War. It looks at the same pattern of disparate nations that was manifest in antiquity and that because of religion and economic fragmentation lay dormant during the Dark Ages. The chapter summarizes that pattern as follows: A people relatively uncivilized and uncultured, but possessed of great mobility and untested strength, awakens and, as it were, goes abroad in service of its deities. It notes that the opportunism afforded by the higher degree of wealth and leisure thus contributes to oikophobia. The chapter then jumps to examine how the French state comes into its own—the people finally present a unified front and national character in its struggles against the various Italian states during the end of the fifteenth and about the first half of the sixteenth century. It also assesses how French society becomes increasingly centralized and Catholic. The chapter then reviews France's political and military advances and the first cracks in their political centralization.
Oikophobia as Positivism
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This chapter recalls how oikophobia began to develop in Greece as a sort of cultural relativism, an ideology that still applies to many manifestations of oikophobia today. It then pays attention to an opposite philosophical guise in which oikophobia can appear, positivist oikophobia. As the chapter highlights, the type of positivism discussed here is of an epistemological sort. Whereas epistemological positivism generally posits that all that can be known are things confirmed by the natural or hard sciences, the chapter examines the attempts to transfer that stance into the sociohistorical and cultural realm, turning it into a moral and cultural positivism. In order to understand what positivist oikophobia is, the chapter first introduces Thomas More. It describes More's vision of a society free of old English institutions, and where the supposedly natural and rational kindness of human nature replaces Christianity in producing social harmony. The chapter concludes by defining our epistemological positivism in the present context: as a sociohistorical, moral, and cultural positivism—that is, a positivism that is confident that laws similar to those used in the natural sciences can be applied to the humane and social sciences as well.
Commerce and Conflict from 1087 to 1123
Authors: King Matt
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the increasingly tenuous relationship between the Zirids and Normans from 1087 until the Zirid victory at the Battle of al-Dimas in the summer of 517H (1123). The fruitful trading partnership between the two dynasties weathered a Pisan-Genoese campaign against Mahdia in 1087 as well as the First Crusade, but it was disrupted when the Ifriqiyan governor of Gabès tried to forge an alliance with the Normans in the early twelfth century to further his own commercial goals. The Zirids subsequently formed an alliance of their own with the Almoravids of Morocco to destabilize Norman power in Sicily, which led to a successful raid on Norman lands. The Normans responded to this aggression by sending an army to Ifriqiya, which the Zirids and their Arab allies dispatched at the Battle of al-Dimas. This was a meaningful victory for the Zirid emir, al-Hasan ibn ʻAli, who sent a letter to his neighbors that highlighted his victory over the tyrannical Normans and extolled the righteous zeal of his allies.
The Norman Kingdom of Africa
Authors: King Matt
Published: January 2023

This chapter assesses the policies and consequences of Norman governance in North Africa. King Roger II and his successor William I ruled their African coastal cities through local Muslim governors, who were appointed to their positions through traditional Islamic practices like the bestowal of robes of honor. In most of the cities they conquered, the Normans played little role in the day-to-day management of their lands. Nonetheless, they made structural changes in the region that proved consequential. The Norman kings installed garrisons in Ifriqiyan cities, changed the tax structure to benefit Christians, and signed contracts with local governors to ensure their fealty. Jewish merchants, deterred by years of violence between the Zirids and Normans, also forsook the ports of Ifriqiya, which allowed Italian Christian merchants more room to conduct commerce. These changes denigrated the Muslim majority of Ifriqiya and ultimately paved the way for future revolts against Norman rule.
Health Insurance Politics in Japan
Authors: Yamagishi Takakazu
Published: January 2023

Japan is the fastest aging country, with the largest super-aged society in the world and growing larger by the day, yet its universal health care costs are relatively low. This book draws back the curtain for an international audience and investigates how Japan has been able to control health care costs through health insurance politics. Covering the period from the Meiji Restoration to the Abe Administration, the book uses a historical institutionalist approach to examine the driving force behind the development of health insurance policies in Japan. The book pays special attention to the roles of government and medical professionals, the main actors of the policymaking and medical worlds, in this development. The book pushes Japan into the spotlight of the international conversation about health care reform.
Detention
Authors: Vanderhurst Stacey
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes the practices of interception and detention that brought migrant women to the Lagos rehabilitation center despite their adamant protests, expressed in the Nigerian pidgin phrase “I wan go.” It considers how women's resistance to intervention was both normalized and ignored in ways that are revealing of citizen–state encounters in Nigeria more broadly. It also explains how the systematic detention of migrant women could be made to feel mundane, benevolent, or not there at all, despite residents' constant vocal demands to go. The chapter looks at the migrant women's lived experiences of confinement within the Lagos rehabilitation center, including their suffering and their ready recognition of and resistance to this system, as well as their reasons for acquiescing to it. It examines the contours of enforcing detention materially and rhetorically, from barbed wire on the walls to passing comments over mealtime.
God’s Plan
Authors: Vanderhurst Stacey
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses how heated theological arguments over different possible fates made each woman at the Lagos rehabilitation center contemplate, articulate, and defend her life choices. It shows how state programs appropriated religious authority not by appealing to conservative moral codes but by facilitating sustained introspection and self-reflection. The terms for debating God's plan reflect the ordinary hermeneutics of Christian religious practice in Nigeria. The chapter details how Pentecostal churches dominate the religious landscape in Lagos and Benin City, and how Pentecostal theology has influenced popular religious thinking and popular culture even across other Christian denominations. Pentecostalism is characterized by a belief in direct experiences with the Holy Spirit, in baptism, and in daily life.
Conclusion
Authors: Komaromi Ann
Published: January 2023

This concluding chapter considers how samizdat expressed the contradictions of the Soviet system as a version of modernity. Theories on the contradictions of modernity and the Soviet system put forth by Habermas, Claude Lefort, and Yurchak provide a framework for considering Soviet samizdat and the underground public sphere as both specific to their context and part of what is called “multiple modernities.” Samizdat periodicals illustrate the epistemological stakes of a more pluralistic and varied version of modern social imagination marked increasingly by extra-Gutenberg characteristics. In the Soviet case, the extra-Gutenberg culture of samizdat helped widen the possibilities for imagining the self, society, culture, and history. Samizdat epistemology implied less dependence on the knowledge provided by the state and established print institutions. Communities linked by samizdat circulation generated their own forms of knowledge and truth that complicated and, in some cases, contradicted official knowledge.
Paradise of the Damned
Authors: Lehman David
Published: January 2023

This chapter further defines noir by exploring several common tropes and themes. It particularly focuses on the poetry of noir—its symbolisms, its patterns and repetitions, and even its romance. The chapter contends that noir is where pessimism meets desperation and where foolproof plans always fail regardless. It is a “paradise of the damned” where gamblers, gangsters, femme fatales, detectives, and other individuals who harbor a certain kind of darkness meet their grim fates on a stage adorned with guns, love triangles, and the many shades of shadows present in noir. Noir then becomes a meditation on identity, an existential allegory, and even a seduction—particularly, as this chapter asserts, for the poet.
Orange Noir (Charles Willeford)
Authors: Lehman David
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971) and Pick-Up (1955) by Charles Willeford. It explains The Burnt Orange Heresy as either a murder mystery or a parable about the hoax element in modern art. The 1971 novel gives satisfaction on both counts. It is an inverted detective story in the approved noir manner: the first-person narration takes the reader into the killer's mind. Yet not until digesting most of the book does the fallible reader guess who is to be murdered and why. Pick-Up, on the other hand, is a much darker novel, with a particular appeal for French existentialists.
Hitchcock’s America
Authors: Lehman David
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes the visions of America depicted in Alfred Hitchcock's films during his prime Hollywood period. After a brief biography and an overview of his various accomplishments, the chapter embarks on an analysis of the more evocative tropes in Hitchcock's oeuvre. If there is an overriding theme in Hitchcock's America, it is not that there are dangerous paranoids among us, though that is the case; it is that paranoia is sometimes a reasonable response to events in a world of menace and violence, with threats to safety and complacency close at hand, sometimes in the most intimate of places or from the most trusted of friends or relations. In the mythic landscape that is Hitchcock's America, the murderous or perilous coexists with the homely and domestic. Yet for all that, Hitchcock's America is also the America of the grateful immigrant, émigré, or refugee: a haven of freedom, a light in the storm of World War II. Through these and many other character archetypes and themes employed in Hitchcock's films, the chapter explores his own particular brand of film noir.
A Reluctant Spy’s Conversion
Authors: Lehman David
Published: January 2023

This chapter reviews the espionage film, The Counterfeit Traitor (1962). The film stars William Holden as Eric “Red” Erickson, a man who must be converted to the Allied cause during World War II. Thus The Counterfeit Traitor embarks on a transition from reluctant spy to committed freedom fighter, the change being made possible by the heroine Marianne Möllendorf, played by Lilli Palmer. Based on the 1958 nonfiction book of the same title by Alexander Klein, The Counterfeit Traitor is true in its broad contours if not in all details. The chapter provides historical details to flesh out the film's narrative, though its focus remains on the emotional development between the two lead characters.
Rogues’ Gallery
Authors: Lehman David
Published: January 2023

This chapter lists some of the author's favorite noir villains, from Gregory Anton in 1944's Gaslight to Julian Wilde from Lured (1947). It explores the enduring appeal of these villains, as these characters are a significant presence in crime dramas. In such films the villains have to be wicked, but they also have to make that wickedness interesting. Whether by being singular in some way, or by virtue of fine acting, or because what they do is so despicable, they offend even those who might ordinarily root for the scoundrel. However, as the chapter shows, some of them can simply impress the audience with their roguish charm or sharp-toothed wit.
Managerial and Participatory Bureaucracies
Authors: Meyers Joan S. M.
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on how the two organizational structures affect the inequality outcomes at People's Daily Bread Bakery and One World Natural Grocery. At the bakery, the formalization of hierarchical management obscures managerial biases in seemingly neutral hiring and promotion criteria to the detriment of white women and men and women of color. At the grocery, strong formalization coupled with distributed management undermines the most problematic “structurelessness” associated with the cooperatives of the countercultural collectivist era, creating more egalitarian outcomes. Both, the chapter argues, are varieties of bureaucracy: a managerial version at the bakery and a participatory one at the grocery. Unpacking these different iterations reveals the significance and also flexibility of bureaucratic formalization, which can either subordinate or protect worker-owners.
Worker Identities
Authors: Meyers Joan S. M.
Published: January 2023

This chapter returns to the question of how such similar groups came to create such different organizational structures and different inequality regimes. It explores how distinct worker identities were constructed between individuals and through organizational practices at each cooperative. It also shows how those identities became something workers (and managers) could use to expand or limit workers' power. Worker identities became part of the organizations' “diversity regimes,” or the formal mechanisms used by the cooperatives to address social differences among their workers. These diversity regimes further expanded or limited worker access to organizational resources, including wealth and power; they also legitimated each cooperative's organizational structure in important (but not inevitable) ways that seemed to render them “natural” at each site.
Conclusion
Authors: Petri Olga
Published: January 2023

This concluding chapter highlights the many factors that had a very practical, immediate, and real impact on the lives of queer men in St. Petersburg. These included precinct-level police protocols, ministerial dossiers, citywide directives, orders for spatial modifications, sanitary regulations, approved designs of urinals, streetlights, tram lines, the landscaping of public gardens, and instruction manuals for police officers. The chapter then considers the importance of recognizing and addressing ambiguity as a hallmark of the historical queer milieu. It looks at Mikhail Kuzmin's only novel, Wings (1906), an early-twentieth-century fictional account of what one might today describe as a coming-out story set in late imperial St. Petersburg. Unabashedly flirtatious in public in his nonliterary life, Kuzmin here preserved the nuanced art of detecting and navigating the urban queer milieu.
St. Petersburg and its Familiar Strangers
Authors: Petri Olga
Published: January 2023

This chapter looks at a dossier preserved in the personal archives of imperial minister Mikhail Ostrovskii to explore the visibility and composition of late imperial St. Petersburg's queer milieu. By the late nineteenth century, St. Petersburg's queer milieu had developed a clear and recognizable footprint. One of its central locations was Anichkov Bridge, part of the city's largest traffic artery, Nevsky Prospect. The chapter addresses the prism of social class, the dossier's emphasis on decadent and exploitative cross-class encounters, and sets out the preliminary position of the dossier vis-à-vis other key historical sources and, most important, the forensic-medical discussion of “homosexuality.” The chapter summarizes certain themes highlighted in the dossier that are repeated in other documents from around this time: the tension on the part of the city's governing authorities between suppression and toleration; the implications of streetlife for the queer milieu; its use of semipublic spaces; and finally, casual queer socialization.
Interdependence, Development, and Jimmy Carter
Authors: Franczak Michael
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the Carter administration's approach to the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was at once comprehensive and chaotic. It describes how Jimmy Carter went from being a little-known southern governor to US president through two important influences on his approach to foreign affairs. First, the chapter details the Trilateral Commission, led by his future national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. It then examines the Overseas Development Council (ODC), an influential Washington-based think tank that also provided Carter with a number of new hires. The chapter argues that the starting point for Carter's post-Vietnam foreign policy was the Trilateral Commission's idea of an interdependent world divided between North and South. It investigates how the ODC's promotion of a model of development based on meeting “basic human needs” became a major part of his administration's approach to human rights.
Introduction
Authors: Prout Jerry
Published: January 2023

This introductory chapter considers the emerging problem of technology replacing jobs in the early twentieth century and the actors involved. Prior to World War I, the federal government scarcely acknowledged the unemployment issue and did nothing to ameliorate its effects. But in the war's aftermath, and prompted by a deepening recession caused by a glut of surplus war goods, the U.S. government began acting on the issue. With the United States now the world's leading industrial economy, the government officially recognized that the reality of joblessness could no longer be ignored. By urging businessmen to become engaged with their communities in finding new work opportunities, and with the establishment of a committee within the Department of Commerce to further study the issue, the federal government took a small, though high-profile, step toward legitimizing the need for government to address this nagging issue.
Taming Technology
Authors: Prout Jerry
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores attempts at addressing the unemployment issue during the New Deal era. In their energetic response to the unemployment crisis, President Franklin Roosevelt and the emerging liberal–labor coalition that supported his New Deal enacted a remarkable array of measures that put people back to work and compensated those employees who lost their jobs. And yet, as it achieved its impressive arsenal of reforms, Roosevelt's New Deal seemed unable to stem the persistently high rates of unemployment. He would later echo his brain trust's increasing belief that technology was having a more systemic impact on employment than he had earlier cared to admit. While the precise role the new machines were playing remained difficult to measure, technology would now receive its share of the blame as the economy sputtered.
Competitive Elections and Campaign Behavior
Authors: Kramer Elisabeth
Published: January 2023

This chapter situates electoral campaigns against the backdrop of Indonesia's transition to competitive elections since 1998. It traces the evolution of the electoral system and proposes a model of how it—and other factors such as campaign norms, resources, and values—shape the decisions that candidates make. By locating the experiences of candidates within this dynamic political environment, the chapter brings into focus existing electoral institutions and the effect they have on candidates competing for public office at the national level. The chapter then expands this discussion of context to identify key factors that shape an individual candidate's political campaign, laying the foundation for the book's author's analysis of individual accounts of campaign creation and decision making in the context of the 2014 election. The chapter examines how the political transition following the resignation of President Suharto, the authoritarian leader who ruled Indonesia from 1966 to 1998, prompted a shift in how elections and political campaigns were conceived and conducted.
Conclusion
Authors: Kramer Elisabeth
Published: January 2023

This chapter reflects on what the cases tell us about a candidate's dilemma and how we can better understand candidates' decisions about vote buying through a multifaceted context lens. It presents some ideas about the implications of this research beyond the case studies and the scope for replication in studying other election campaigns, both in Indonesia and elsewhere. The chapter also describes how, and in what ways, context influences the development of individual electoral campaigns. It argues that the context here extends beyond macro influences, such as electoral regulations, issue salience, and far-reaching campaign norms to include micro influences specific to the candidates themselves. The chapter examines what this research can tell us about demand-driven vote buying, an ongoing question among academics studying Indonesian elections. Using the insights from this study, the chapter identifies ways to better understand the actions of those running for office and what these actions can tell us about democratization in Indonesia.
Staging Democracy
Authors: Pisano Jessica
Published: January 2023

Focusing on the experiences of people in Russia and Ukraine, this book shows how some national leaders' seeming popularity rests on local economic compacts. The book draws on long-term research in rural communities and company towns, analyzing how local political and business leaders, seeking favor from incumbent politicians, used salaries, benefits, and public infrastructure to pressure citizens to participate in command performances. The book looks at elections whose outcomes were known in advance, protests for hire, and smaller mises en scène to explain why people participate, what differs from spectacle in totalitarian societies, how political theater exists in both authoritarian and democratic systems, and how such performances reshape understandings of the role of politics. The book moves beyond Russia and Ukraine to offer a novel economic argument for why some people support Vladimir Putin and similar politicians. The book suggests we can analyze politics in both democracies and authoritarian regimes using the same analytical lens of political theater.
Conclusion a New Social Contract
Authors: Pisano Jessica
Published: January 2023

This concluding chapter presents three arguments concerning political theater. It begins by explaining why Hayekian solutions to lessen state regulation of the economy would not eliminate the conditions that make command performances possible. In and of itself, privatization does not offer protection against the politicization of services. Instead, privatization changes who can be pressured and how. The chapter then highlights the recent adoption of similar dramaturgical forms in American politics. It suggests that political theater in Eastern Europe may prefigure political effects of precarity in capitalism amid economic crisis elsewhere. Finally, the chapter shows that the dislocation of clear boundaries between political and economic authority can reverberate in a blurring of boundaries between state and society, with implications for the future of politics.
The Concrete Plateau
Authors: Grant Andrew
Published: January 2023

This book examines the ways that urbanization has extended into the Tibetan Plateau. Many people still think of Tibetans as not being urban, or that if they do live in cities, this means that they have lost something. Much of this relates to the expectation that urbanization can only erode essential aspects of Tibetan culture. The book pushes back against this notion through an in-depth exploration of Tibetans' experiences with urban life in the growing city of Xining, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau. It shows how Tibetans' actions to sustain their community challenge China's civilizing machine: a product of state-led urbanization seeking to marginalize ethnic and indigenous groups. In their homes, neighborhoods, and businesses, Tibetans' assertion of cultural identity and modification of the built environment has prevented their assimilation into China's national urban project. The book presents insights into the politics of urban development not only in Tibet and China, but to contexts of urban diversity all around the world. Its findings are important for studies of urban development in the Global South where in-migrating ethnic and indigenous groups are negotiating top-down urban projects. The book offers a profound rethinking of urbanization, rurality, culture, and the politics of place.
Building the Concrete Plateau
Authors: Grant Andrew
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the rebuilding of Xining City during the twenty-first century with shopping centers and high-end residential districts that are both, in terms of layout and architecture, unmistakably Chinese and similar in national developmental ambitions to new world-class urban districts across the globe. Moving to Xining, the chapter investigates how Tibetan migrants have been confronted with a dilemma: if they pursue the urban dream promoted by government policy and valorized in national media, they face the steep cost of cultural assimilation. The chapter also considers Tibetans' involvement in the creation of a subaltern city that ultimately challenged the project of the Chinese civilizing machine. It then examines how Tibetans rerouted state attempts to mute local politics and asserted themselves as a community that belongs in China's urban future. The chapter focuses on Xining City to investigate the effects of authoritarian practices of urbanization on minoritized and marginalized populations in general, as well as on Tibetans in particular.
At Kingdom's Edge
Authors: Selwood Jacob
Published: January 2023

This book investigates how life in a conquered colony both revealed and shaped what it meant to be English outside of the British Isles. Considering the case of Jeronimy Clifford, who rose to become one of Suriname's richest planters, the book examines the mutual influence of race and subjecthood in the early modern world. Clifford was a child in Suriname when the Dutch, in 1667, wrested the South American colony from England soon after England seized control of New Netherland in North America. Across the arc of his life—from time in the tenuous English colony to prosperity as a slaveholding planter to a stint in debtors' prison in London—Clifford used all the tools at his disposal to elevate and secure his status. His English subjecthood, which he clung to as a wealthy planter in Dutch-controlled Suriname, was a ready means to exert political, legal, economic, and cultural authority. Clifford deployed it without hesitation, even when it failed to serve his interests. In 1695, Clifford left Suriname and, until his death, he tried to regain control over his abandoned plantation and its enslaved workers. His evocation of international treaties at times secured the support of the Crown. The English and Dutch governments' responses reveal competing definitions of belonging between and across empires, as well as the differing imperial political cultures with which claimants to rights and privileges had to contend. Clifford's case highlights the unresolved tensions about the meanings of colonial subjecthood, Anglo-Dutch relations, and the legacy of England's seventeenth-century empire.
Organizing all People
Authors: Smiley Erica , Gupta Sarita
Published: January 2023

The chapter discusses the need for a movement that includes and organizes all people, notably one that fights against white supremacy, patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia, and all other strategies of exclusion, division, and oppression. By failing to practice the strategy of inclusion, parts of the twentieth-century labor movement allowed itself to be robbed of much of the power derived from true solidarity. The chapter mentions Lidia Victoria of Tar Heel, North Carolina, who explains how she and her co-workers won by centering a multiracial struggle for dignity at a Smithfield pork processing plant. The chapter explains how global capitalism exploited the fears and insecurities of working people to maintain their hold on power and the riches it generates. One of the most important under-the-radar dynamics of the current era is the way white supremacy is being used to crush the spirits of white workers.
Explaining Adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime
Authors: Gibbons Rebecca Davis
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It clarifies the difference between regime adherence and compliance, citing how adherence primarily referred to whether and when states join agreements. Moreover, theories related to security, regime fairness, and domestic political economy showcase an alternative perspective into understanding the widespread adherence to the nuclear nonproliferation regime. The responses of states to the adherence request depend on their overall relationship with the US global leadership. Thus, US officials use a series of tools that range between low-cost diplomacy, high-cost diplomatic actions, positive inducements, and coercive threats to bring all states on board with the regime.
Slow but Successful US Promotion of the NPT
Authors: Gibbons Rebecca Davis
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the influence of the United States amidst the decision-making processes in Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and Cuba in joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It cites the significance of US diplomacy and US policy as decisive factors in the ratification of the NPT. As the theory of regime adherence predicted, US officials began promoting the NPT abroad even before the complete draft text was finalized. The domestic economic politics theory is consistent with aspects of the Japanese and Egyptian cases, while security considerations also contributed to the Indonesian delay in NPT ratification. The chapter also details the complicated relationship between the United States and Cuba under the pretense of possessing and transferring biological weapons.
Conclusion
Authors: Gibbons Rebecca Davis
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the impact of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons on the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It also cites the importance of the United States and allied leadership in understanding regime adherence. The United States has been able to persuade reluctant adherents to the regime through low-cost diplomacy, high-cost diplomacy, positive inducements, and coercion. However, the United States could lose influence and the ability to shape the global order by weakening or withdrawing from its alliance commitments as the global system becomes increasingly multipolar. The chapter also proposes five brief policy recommendations and possible improvements to nuclear disarmament. It highlights how the current trends suggest that dissatisfaction over the lack of fairness in the treaty could have a long-lasting impact in the future.
Introduction
Authors: Campbell Stephen
Published: January 2023

This introductory chapter looks into the transition of Myanmar and its subsequent influence on the nation's contemporary capitalist development. It starts with the experiences of Zaw Lin Oo and his family concerning the narrative of transition that dominates academic, government, and media accounts of Myanmar during the period of reform. The notion of periodization and political rupture influenced the transition narrative of Myanmar. The Cold War modernization theory offered a progressive historical narrative of newly independent countries that eschewed a revolutionary redistribution of power and resources in favor of capitalist industrialization. The chapter provides an overview of the lives and labor of the people living in the Yadana squatter settlement.
Debt Collection as Labor Discipline
Authors: Campbell Stephen
Published: January 2023

This chapter elaborates on Myanmar's debt crisis wherein mass financialization fueled the growth of household indebtedness. It cites the role of credit and the effects of debt in relation to labor. Moreover, financialization and the multiplication of nonnormative labor arrangements are interrelated processes as some analysts believe profits no longer depend on labor alone. Financial debts and moral obligations operate in mutually constitutive registers instead of autonomous logic. The informal economy across the Global South and urban slums interconnected the heterogeneous class relations of exploitation, especially with debt serving as a crucial means of discipline and value extraction. The chapter also tackles Karl Marx's notion of surplus populations. It acknowledges how colonial and postcolonial political economies featured heterogeneity of capitalist relations.
Rising Inequality
Authors: Koo Hagen
Published: January 2023

This chapter covers the economic inequality in South Korea despite the rapid economic growth in the second of the twentieth century. Korea's income distribution showcased a trend of polarizing the labor market concerning employment status, a large income differential between regular and non-regular workers, and different sized firms. Another trend in the income distribution was the polarization between a minority of top income earners and the rest of the labor force. The chapter also looks into the self-employment sector as the independent business sector becomes saturated. It expounds on the skewed income distribution that led to the division between the affluent middle class and the ordinary middle class, which determined a person's life chances and lifestyle.
Conclusion
Authors: Koo Hagen
Published: January 2023

This concluding chapter explores the sociological implication of the book's major findings and arguments while considering Bourdieu's theory of class distinction. It covers how the Korean middle class experienced an economic and social change in the era of neoliberal globalization. The middle class tried to follow the affluent's class practices, but they suffered anxiety and observed a widening gap between themselves and the affluent minority. However, the affluent also suffer a great deal of anxiety keeping up with the rising cost of status maintenance and difficulties of ensuring class reproduction. The chapter then notes consumption and money as major areas where class distinction occurs most vividly.
Monitoring algorithm of hospitalized patients in a medical center with SARS-CoV-2 (Omicron variant) infection: clinical epidemiological surveillance and immunological assessment
Authors: Chen Chi-Sheng , Jian Ming-Jr , Chang Chih-Kai , Chung Hsing-Yi , Li Shih-Yi , Lin Jung-Chung , Yeh Kuo-Ming , Yang Ya-Sung , Chen Chien-Wen , Hsieh Shan-Shan , Tang Sheng-Hui , Perng Cherng-Lih , Chang Feng-Yee , Shang Hung-Sheng
Published: January 2023

Purpose

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a major healthcare threat worldwide. Since it was first identified in November 2021, the Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant of SARS-CoV-2 has evolved into several lineages, including BA.1, BA.2–BA.4, and BA.5. SARS-CoV-2 variants might increase transmissibility, pathogenicity, and resistance to vaccine-induced immunity. Thus, the epidemiological surveillance of circulating lineages using variant phenotyping is essential. The aim of the current study was to characterize the clinical outcome of Omicron BA.2 infections among hospitalized COVID-19 patients and to perform an immunological assessment of such cases against SARS-CoV-2.

Patients and Methods

We evaluated the analytical and clinical performance of the BioIC SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin (Ig)M/IgG detection kit, which was used for detecting antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in 257 patients infected with the Omicron variant.

Results

Poor prognosis was noted in 38 patients, including eight deaths in patients characterized by comorbidities predisposing them to severe COVID-19. The variant-of-concern (VOC) typing and serological analysis identified time-dependent epidemic trends of BA.2 variants emerging in the outbreak of the fourth wave in Taiwan. Of the 257 specimens analyzed, 108 (42%) and 24 (9.3%) were positive for anti-N IgM and IgG respectively.

Conclusion

The VOC typing of these samples allowed for the identification of epidemic trends by time intervals, including the B.1.1.529 variant replacing the B.1.617.2 variant. Moreover, antibody testing might serve as a complementary method for COVID-19 diagnosis. The combination of serological testing results with the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction cycle threshold value has potential value in disease prognosis, thereby aiding in epidemic investigations conducted by clinicians or the healthcare department.
Assessing the breeding phenology of a threatened frog species using eDNA and automatic acoustic monitoring
Authors: Chen Ying , Tournayre Orianne , Tian Haolun , Lougheed Stephen C.
Published: January 2023

Background

Climate change has driven shifts in breeding phenology of many amphibians, causing phenological mismatches (e.g., predator-prey interactions), and potentially population declines. Collecting data with high spatiotemporal sensitivity on hibernation emergence and breeding times can inform conservation best practices. However, monitoring the phenology of amphibians can be challenging because of their cryptic nature over much of their life cycle. Moreover, most salamanders and caecilians do not produce conspicuous breeding calls like frogs and toads do, presenting additional monitoring challenges.

Methods

In this study, we designed and evaluated the performance of an environmental DNA (eDNA) droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) assay as a non-invasive tool to assess the breeding phenology of a Western Chorus Frog population (Pseudacris maculata mitotype) in Eastern Ontario and compared eDNA detection patterns to hourly automatic acoustic monitoring. For two eDNA samples with strong PCR inhibition, we tested three methods to diminish the effect of inhibitors: diluting eDNA samples, adding bovine serum albumin to PCR reactions, and purifying eDNA using a commercial clean-up kit.

Results

We recorded the first male calling when the focal marsh was still largely frozen. Chorus frog eDNA was detected on April 6th, 6 days after acoustic monitoring revealed this first calling male, but only 2 days after males attained higher chorus activity. eDNA signals were detected at more sampling locales within the marsh and eDNA concentrations increased as more males participated in the chorus, suggesting that eDNA may be a reasonable proxy for calling assemblage size. Internal positive control revealed strong inhibition in some samples, limiting detection probability and quantification accuracy in ddPCR. We found diluting samples was the most effective in reducing inhibition and improving eDNA quantification.

Conclusions

Altogether, our results showed that eDNA ddPCR signals lagged behind male chorusing by a few days; thus, acoustic monitoring is preferable if the desire is to document the onset of male chorusing. However, eDNA may be an effective, non-invasive monitoring tool for amphibians that do not call and may provide a useful complement to automated acoustic recording. We found inhibition patterns were heterogeneous across time and space and we demonstrate that an internal positive control should always be included to assess inhibition for eDNA ddPCR signal interpretations.
Musculoskeletal simulations to examine the effects of accentuated eccentric loading (AEL) on jump height
Authors: Su Eric Yung-Sheng , Carroll Timothy J. , Farris Dominic J. , Lichtwark Glen A.
Published: January 2023

Background

During counter movement jumps, adding weight in the eccentric phase and then suddenly releasing this weight during the concentric phase, known as accentuated eccentric loading (AEL), has been suggested to immediately improve jumping performance. The level of evidence for the positive effects of AEL remains weak, with conflicting evidence over the effectiveness in enhancing performance. Therefore, we proposed to theoretically explore the influence of implementing AEL during constrained vertical jumping using computer modelling and simulation and examined whether the proposed mechanism of enhanced power, increased elastic energy storage and return, could enhance work and power.

Methods

We used a simplified model, consisting of a ball-shaped body (head, arm, and trunk), two lower limb segments (thigh and shank), and four muscles, to simulate the mechanisms of AEL. We adjusted the key activation parameters of the muscles to influence the performance outcome of the model. Numerical optimization was applied to search the optimal solution for the model. We implemented AEL and non-AEL conditions in the model to compare the simulated data between conditions.

Results

Our model predicted that the optimal jumping performance was achieved when the model utilized the whole joint range. However, there was no difference in jumping performance in AEL and non-AEL conditions because the model began its push-off at the similar state (posture, fiber length, fiber velocity, fiber force, tendon length, and the same activation level). Therefore, the optimal solution predicted by the model was primarily driven by intrinsic muscle dynamics (force-length-velocity relationship), and this coupled with the similar model state at the start of the push-off, resulting in similar push-off performance across all conditions. There was also no evidence of additional tendon-loading effect in AEL conditions compared to non-AEL condition.

Discussion

Our simplified simulations did not show improved jump performance with AEL, contrasting with experimental studies. The reduced model demonstrates that increased energy storage from the additional mass alone is not sufficient to induce increased performance and that other factors like differences in activation strategies or movement paths are more likely to contribute to enhanced performance.
Physico-chemical Characterization and Polyphenolic Composition of Red Wines Produced from Autochthonous Grapes Varieties (Vitis vinifera) in Turkey
Authors: Acikgoz Isil Aysel , Erkmen Osman
Published: January 2023

Aims: Local varieties of “Hönüsü” and “Horozkarası” red grapes have been evaluated for the production of red wine and characterized33 for their chemical and sensory characteristics.

Study Design: This research was initiated by the Food microbiology researcher and Applications Unit of Fermentation Laboratory.

Place and Duration of Study: Laboratory of Fermentation of the Food Engineering Department in Gaziantep University, October 2019 to May 2021.

Methodology: All wines were produced by a standard procedure of vinification. Three types of red wines were produced from combinations of red grapes. Ten phenolics were quantitatively detected in the red wines during processing. Brix, alcohol, pH and free SO2 contents were also detected.

Results: The results showed that the type of technology affects significantly (p<0.05) the level of phenolic compounds formed during processing. Horozkarası” red grape contributed to the highest amount of phenolic compounds in red wines. Gaziantep wine provides valuable information about the production of red wine from Gaziantep red grapes.

Conclusion: The phenolic compounds of red wines were significantly (p<0.05) higher than that of musts. Many of the remarkable features of the phenolic profiles and Brix of grape varieties could help us to characterize Gaziantep wines. The mixture of must from “Hönüsü” and “Horozkarası” red grapes with 7:3 ratio contributes suitable sugar and phenolic compounds for red wine. The results from this study provide valuable information about the red wine produced from the ancient grape varieties of the Southeast region.
Solitons of the Jimbo-Miwa Equation through the Sine-Gordon Expansion Scheme
Authors: Hossain Md. Motaleb , Akhter Mousumi
Published: January 2023

In this paper, we extract some novel solitary wave solutions in terms of hyperbolic functions to the Jimbo-Miwa model. The sine-Gordon expansion method is used to investigate the proposed model. By using graphical analysis, we show the impact the solution’s which are very impactful to explain the nature of the solitary wave. We believe that the findings of the current work will be useful in the field of solitons and solitary waves.
Design and Evaluation of a Palm Fruit Thresher
Authors: Idowu D. O. , Olaniran J. A. , Adebayo J. M. , Onifade T. B.
Published: January 2023

Aims: The high demand for palm oil as food and industrial raw material is on the increase and the traditional method cannot sustain the demand for the crop. Therefore, there is need for design and fabrication of a locally and affordable palm oil processing machine, hence, this project.

Methodology: A palm fruit thresher was designed, fabricated and evaluated at the Department of Agricultural Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria. The thresher. Comprises of hopper, threshing chamber, the drive mechanism, separation units and the discharge outlets. The machine was evaluated for effect of storage and sterilization time on the threshing efficiency. The storage time (1, 2, and 3 days) and sterilization time (30, 40, 50 and 60 minutes) were used to investigate the effect of these treatments on the machine threshing efficiency and throughput capacity.

Results: The palm thresher was designed, constructed and evaluated. The result of the experiment showed that the threshing efficiency and the throughput capacity increased from 87.0 to 93.0 % and 258.0 to 468.0 kg/hr. respectively, as the storage time increases from 1 to 3 days.  The effect of sterilization time was also found to be significant on the throughput and shelling efficiency (p< 0.05).  The shelling efficiency and the throughput capacity was found to increase from 58.3 to 92.2% and 517.1 to 769.3 kg/hr. respectively, as the sterilization time increased from 10 to 30 minutes.

Conclusion: The results of these experiments showed that palm fruit threshing can be mechanized using a locally fabricated machine.