bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Estimating the contribution of plant traits to light partitioning in simultaneous maize/soybean intercropping
Authors: Li Shuangwei , van der Werf Wopke , Zhu Junqi , Guo Yan , Li Baoguo , Ma Yuntao , Evers Jochem B
Published: February 2021

Spatial configuration and plant phenotypic plasticity contribute to increased light capture in relay intercropping, but there is little information on whether these factors also increase light capture in simultaneous intercropping. We developed and validated a three-dimensional functional–structural plant model to simulate light capture in maize and soybean sole crops and intercrop scenarios, using species traits observed in sole crops and intercrops. The intercrop maize phenotype had 2% greater light capture than the sole crop phenotype in a pure stand. The soybean intercrop phenotype had 5–10% lower light capture than the sole crop phenotype in a pure stand. The intercrop configuration increased the light capture of maize by 29% and reduced the light capture of soybean by 42%, compared with the light capture expected from sole crops. However, intercrop configuration only marginally affected total light capture by the intercrop system (+1%). Testing of individual soybean plant traits revealed that plasticity in leaf dimensions was the main reason for differences in light capture by soybean in simulated sole crops and intercrops. The results of this study illustrate a major shift of light capture from shorter species (soybean) to the taller component (maize) in a simultaneous strip intercrop. Plastic plant traits modulate this overall effect, but only marginally.
StPIP1, a PAMP-induced peptide in potato, elicits plant defenses and is associated with disease symptom severity in a compatible interaction with Potato virus Y
Authors: Combest Max M , Moroz Natalia , Tanaka Kiwamu , Rogan Conner J , Anderson Jeffrey C , Thura Lin , Rakotondrafara Aurélie M , Goyer Aymeric
Published: February 2021

The role of small secreted peptides in plant defense responses to viruses has seldom been investigated. Here, we report a role for potato (Solanum tuberosum) PIP1, a gene predicted to encode a member of the pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP)-induced peptide (PIP) family, in the response of potato to Potato virus Y (PVY) infection. We show that exogenous application of synthetic StPIP1 to potato leaves and nodes increased the production of reactive oxygen species and the expression of plant defense-related genes, revealing that StPIP1 triggers early defense responses. In support of this hypothesis, transgenic potato plants that constitutively overexpress StPIP1 had higher levels of leaf callose deposition and, based on measurements of viral RNA titers, were less susceptible to infection by a compatible PVY strain. Interestingly, systemic infection of StPIP1-overexpressing lines with PVY resulted in clear rugose mosaic symptoms that were absent or very mild in infected non-transgenic plants. A transcriptomics analysis revealed that marker genes associated with both pattern-triggered immunity and effector-triggered immunity were induced in infected StPIP1 overexpressors but not in non-transgenic plants. Together, our results reveal a role for StPIP1 in eliciting plant defense responses and in regulating plant antiviral immunity.
Drone phenotyping and machine learning enable discovery of loci regulating daily floral opening in lettuce
Authors: Han Rongkui , Wong Andy J Y , Tang Zhehan , Truco Maria J , Lavelle Dean O , Kozik Alexander , Jin Yufang , Michelmore Richard W
Published: February 2021

Flower opening and closure are traits of reproductive importance in all angiosperms because they determine the success of self- and cross-pollination. The temporal nature of this phenotype rendered it a difficult target for genetic studies. Cultivated and wild lettuce, Lactuca spp., have composite inflorescences that open only once. An L. serriola×L. sativa F6 recombinant inbred line (RIL) population differed markedly for daily floral opening time. This population was used to map the genetic determinants of this trait; the floral opening time of 236 RILs was scored using time-course image series obtained by drone-based phenotyping on two occasions. Floral pixels were identified from the images using a support vector machine with an accuracy >99%. A Bayesian inference method was developed to extract the peak floral opening time for individual genotypes from the time-stamped image data. Two independent quantitative trait loci (QTLs; Daily Floral Opening 2.1 and qDFO8.1) explaining >30% of the phenotypic variation in floral opening time were discovered. Candidate genes with non-synonymous polymorphisms in coding sequences were identified within the QTLs. This study demonstrates the power of combining remote sensing, machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and genome-wide marker data for studying the genetics of recalcitrant phenotypes.
Comparative Genomics Reveals Early Emergence and Biased Spatiotemporal Distribution of SARS-CoV-2
Authors: Chiara Matteo , Horner David S , Gissi Carmela , Pesole Graziano
Published: February 2021

Effective systems for the analysis of molecular data are fundamental for monitoring the spread of infectious diseases and studying pathogen evolution. The rapid identification of emerging viral strains, and/or genetic variants potentially associated with novel phenotypic features is one of the most important objectives of genomic surveillance of human pathogens and represents one of the first lines of defense for the control of their spread. During the COVID 19 pandemic, several taxonomic frameworks have been proposed for the classification of SARS-Cov-2 isolates. These systems, which are typically based on phylogenetic approaches, represent essential tools for epidemiological studies as well as contributing to the study of the origin of the outbreak. Here, we propose an alternative, reproducible, and transparent phenetic method to study changes in SARS-CoV-2 genomic diversity over time. We suggest that our approach can complement other systems and facilitate the identification of biologically relevant variants in the viral genome. To demonstrate the validity of our approach, we present comparative genomic analyses of more than 175,000 genomes. Our method delineates 22 distinct SARS-CoV-2 haplogroups, which, based on the distribution of high-frequency genetic variants, fall into four major macrohaplogroups. We highlight biased spatiotemporal distributions of SARS-CoV-2 genetic profiles and show that seven of the 22 haplogroups (and of all of the four haplogroup clusters) showed a broad geographic distribution within China by the time the outbreak was widely recognized—suggesting early emergence and widespread cryptic circulation of the virus well before its isolation in January 2020. General patterns of genomic variability are remarkably similar within all major SARS-CoV-2 haplogroups, with UTRs consistently exhibiting the greatest variability, with s2m, a conserved secondary structure element of unknown function in the 3′-UTR of the viral genome showing evidence of a functional shift. Although several polymorphic sites that are specific to one or more haplogroups were predicted to be under positive or negative selection, overall our analyses suggest that the emergence of novel types is unlikely to be driven by convergent evolution and independent fixation of advantageous substitutions, or by selection of recombined strains. In the absence of extensive clinical metadata for most available genome sequences, and in the context of extensive geographic and temporal biases in the sampling, many questions regarding the evolution and clinical characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 isolates remain open. However, our data indicate that the approach outlined here can be usefully employed in the identification of candidate SARS-CoV-2 genetic variants of clinical and epidemiological importance.
A Unique Case of Combined Nodular and Tracheobronchial Amyloidosis
Authors: Ding Feihong , Li Yun , Balasubramanian Shailesh , Ghosh Subha , Valent Jason N , Almeida Francisco , Arrossi A Valeria , Mehta Atul
Published: February 2021

Amyloidosis is a heterogeneous group of diseases characterized by the extracellular deposition of misfolded proteins that can affect either systemically or locally confined to one system. Pulmonary amyloidosis is rare and can be classified into three forms according to the anatomic site of involvement: nodular pulmonary amyloidosis, tracheobronchial amyloidosis and diffuse alveolar-septal amyloidosis. The former two usually represent localized amyloid disease and the latter represents systemic disease. Typically lung parenchymal and tracheobronchial amyloidosis do not present together in localized forms of pulmonary amyloidosis. Here we report a unique case of localized pulmonary immunoglobulin light-chain amyloidosis, manifested as both parenchymal nodules and tracheobronchial amyloid deposition.
One clot after another in COVID-19 patient: diagnostic utility of handheld echocardiogram
Authors: Jeyashanmugaraja Gini Priyadharshini , Shkolnik Evgeny , Akanya Deborah Tosin , Stawiarski Kristin , Winterbottom Christopher , Zarich Stuart
Published: February 2021

A 63-year-old woman was admitted with severe respiratory distress requiring mechanical ventilation and shock requiring vasopressor support. She was found to have COVID-19 pneumonia. Focused cardiac ultrasound performed for evaluation of shock was significant for right ventricular dilation and dysfunction with signs of right ventricular pressure overload. Given worsening shock and hypoxemia systemic thrombolysis was administered for presumed massive pulmonary embolism with remarkable improvement of hemodynamics and respiratory failure. In next 24 h patient’s neurologic status deteriorated to the point of unresponsiveness. Emergent computed tomography showed multiple ischemic infarcts concerning for embolic etiology. Focused cardiac ultrasound with agitated saline showed large right to left shunt due to a patent foramen ovale. This was confirmed by transesophageal echocardiogram, 5 months later. This case highlights strengths of focused cardiac ultrasound in critical care setting and in patients with COVID-19 when access to other imaging modalities can be limited.
The Fourth Troll Prerequisite
Authors: Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: February 2021

Chapter 7 explores the fourth troll prerequisite for hacked and generated content to influence the U.S. election: was it persuasive, that is, was it convincing, viral, and memorable? Jamieson discusses how the trolls flooded the communication climate in key areas, the way in which liking and sharing amplified the reach of their messages, and the strength of their evocative visual content, which increased both their virality and memorability.
The Effect of Hacked Content on the Last Two Presidential Debates
Authors: Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: February 2021

In Chapter 11, Jamieson examines how the hacked content affected the last two presidential debates of the election, in which the moderators took excerpts of Clinton speeches from the emails released via WikiLeaks and deployed them out of context in their questions. One hacked excerpt was spun into a debate question directed at Clinton about whether it’s acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”; her response and the subsequent framing by Trump, Russian trolls, and Trump-aligned media fueled the supposition that the Democratic nominee had different public and private stances. In the final debate, a line from another Russian-gotten speech was used to imply that Clinton wanted “open borders,” serving both to create an extended discussion of one of Trump’s central campaign appeals and to further the idea that Clinton’s statements in private diverged from those she made in public.
The Role of Russian Disinformation in the Comey “October Surprise”
Authors: Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: February 2021

Chapter 12 analyzes the role of Russian disinformation in FBI Director James Comey’s decision to verbally indict Clinton’s handling of the server in a public statement in July 2016 announcing that the investigation into it was being closed without charges, as well as in his notification to Congress on October 28 that he was scrutinizing newly found Clinton emails located on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the husband of a key Clinton aide. Although the reopened investigation proved fruitless, coverage of it by the news media and reinforcement by troll accounts and the Trump campaign fueled suspicion and bolstered Trump’s allegations that Clinton was hiding something.
Russian, Assange, and Troll Activities in the Closing Days of the Election
Authors: Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: February 2021

Chapter 13 discusses the synergy among Julian Assange, conservative media, and Russian trolls in the final days of the campaign. Two days before the election, WikiLeaks posted allegations of Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, which was amplified by troll accounts and conservative media. During the lead-up to Election Day, the Russian trolls focused their messaging on turning out the votes of evangelicals and military households, suppressing voting by Blacks, and shifting the votes of disaffected liberals to Stein.
Afterword
Authors: Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: February 2021

The afterword to Cyberwar explores the question of where this knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 election leaves us, considering the fact that Russian cyberpiracy, espionage, and assaults in 2016 were not a one-time occurrence, despite attempts to deter them via sanctions. Jamieson discusses how five groups unwittingly helped the Russians achieve their ends in 2016—the press, the social media platforms, the citizenry, past and prospective candidates, and the polarizers who have created a climate conducive to distrust and discord—and how we can draw on what we learned in 2016 to combat Russian trolls and hackers going forward.
Did the Russian Machinations Make the Election Close Enough for Clinton to Lose/Trump to Win?
Authors: Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: February 2021

Throughout Cyberwar, Jamieson argues that taken together the Russian interventions, including press use of the hacked content, troll messaging, disinformation, and the changes in the media and campaign agendas, were sufficient to probably have affected the 2016 Electoral College outcome. Part Five responds to critics who challenge that conclusion. In the process, it examines the controversies over what we know about the nature, extent, timing, targets, and impact of the Russian attacks and their effects.
Deciding Whom to Include in Treatment
Authors: Grove David R. , Greene Gilbert J. , Lee Mo Yee
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the decision of who to include in treatment. In integrative family and systems treatment (I-FAST), this is a case-by-case decision that in and of itself is considered an intervention. Guidelines for making this decision are offered. Two special situations are examined in detail: whole-family interviews as they relate to trauma and family interviews that include both survivor and perpetrator in cases of intrafamilial sexual abuse. Criteria for when and when not to conduct these interviews, along with detailed steps are outlined. Several case examples are offered covering a wide range of issues related to who to include in treatment are given.
Epochal Transitions
Authors: Smil Vaclav
Published: February 2021

The modern world has been created by five relatively rapid and interconnected transitions. They led to temporarily high growth rates of the global population and, eventually, to much reduced fertility, longer life expectancies, and mass-scale urbanization. Increased agricultural productivity eliminated famines, reduced undernutrition, and resulted in a surfeit and waste of food in affluent countries. Transition from traditional biofuels to fossil fuels brought large increases of per capita energy supply and higher efficiencies of energy conversion, along with new powerful machines. Economic growth reached unprecedented rates, transformed sectoral contribution, created material abundance, and enabled high levels of mobility and instant communication. Environmental consequences of these transitions range from land-use changes to many forms of pollution and to global climate change. Future transitions have to address many problems created by our past successes and failures, but given the magnitude of the challenges, they will have to unfold gradually.
Agricultures and Diets
Authors: Smil Vaclav
Published: February 2021

Traditional cropping had low and variable yields, required large inputs of animate labor (human and animal), and could not assure an adequate and affordable supply of food. Agricultural transition was driven primarily by rising inputs of fossil energies—directly as fuels for machinery and irrigation, and indirectly as energies embedded in synthetic fertilizer, other agrochemicals, and farm machinery. Mechanization eliminated draft animals and reduced agricultural labor to just a few percentage points of the total labor force. Better crop varieties could take advantage of fertilizing and crop protection, and resulting high yields eliminated famines and improved the nutritional status of populations (in large part by using bigger shares of harvest for animal feeding). Further gains were due to expanded food trade made possible by lowered transportation costs. These accomplishments had many undesirable environmental consequences (from nutrient runoff to greenhouse gas emissions), increased food waste to unacceptable levels, and contributed to higher frequency of obesity.
Industry
Authors: Robin William
Published: February 2021

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genre that had been long considered box office poison. Through the 1980s and 1990s, three young, visionary composers—David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe—nurtured Bang on a Can into a multifaceted organization with a major record deal, a virtuoso in-house ensemble, and a seat at the table at Lincoln Center, and in the process changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States. Bang on a Can captured a new public for new music. But they did not do so alone. As the twentieth century came to a close, the world of American composition pivoted away from the insular academy and toward the broader marketplace. In the wake of the unexpected popularity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, classical presenters looked to contemporary music for relevance and record labels scrambled to reap its potential profits, all while government funding was imperilled by the evangelical right. Other institutions faltered amidst the vagaries of late capitalism, but the renegade Bang on a Can survived—and thrived—in a tumultuous and idealistic moment that made new music what it is today.
Feeling a Little Uncomfortable, and That’s Okay
Authors: and Michelson
Published: February 2021

Discomfort is a central feature of attitudes toward transgender people and rights. Previous work with other stigmatized groups including the physically disabled shows that acknowledging that discomfort can be a successful strategy for alleviating discomfort and increasing support. Two experiments described in this chapter explore efforts to mitigate discomfort. The first finds that simple acknowledgment of discomfort is not effective. The second, combining acknowledgment with a message of a journey story from a woman whose daughter came out as transgender, is much more effective at increasing expressed comfort with and support for transgender people and rights.
In the Beginning Was the Image
Authors: Price David H.
Published: February 2021

Renaissance artists represented the Bible as the preeminent monument of classical culture well before humanist scholars began their revolutionary efforts to recover the ancient forms of biblical texts. Once Renaissance humanism and the Reformation turned decisively to biblical philology (and began overturning the authority of the Vulgate Bible and medieval theology), artists supported their creation of innovative conceptualizations of the Bible. Remarkably, the three most influential artists of the Northern Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger—made profound contributions to all the major Renaissance and Reformation Bibles in Germany and Switzerland and to the biblical humanist movement generally. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the history of biblical humanism, including the emergence of new authoritative Bibles beginning with Erasmus’s first edition of the New Testament in the original Greek.
How to Create a Bot
Authors: Natale Simone
Published: February 2021

In 1991, American inventor and philanthropist Hugh Loebner funded the launch of a competition aimed at recreating the conditions of the Turing test to assess the success of conversational programs in passing as human. The Loebner Prize competition has been conducted every year since then. This chapter looks at the history of this competition in order to argue that it has functioned as a proving ground for AI’s ability to deceive humans and as a form of spectacle highlighting the potential of computing technologies. The staged confrontations between computers and humans provide a context where humans’ liability for deception and its implications for natural language programs were systematically put to test in a competitive framework. This encouraged programmers to develop strategies and tricks that are reemerging today in communicative AI technologies. Thus, the case of the Loebner Prize helps one better understand Alexa, Siri, and other AI voice assistants that are becoming increasingly widespread in contemporary societies.
Robert Triffin
Authors: Maes Ivo , Pasotti Ilaria
Published: February 2021

This book provides an intellectual biography of Robert Triffin. Triffin (1911–1993) played a key role in the international monetary debates in the postwar period. He became famous with trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the international monetary system that was dependent on a national currency for its international liquidity (the Triffin dilemma), predicting the end of the Bretton Woods system. Triffin was a child of the interwar period, marked by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. He became not only an eminent academic but also an influential policy adviser. In the mid-1940s he worked at the Federal Reserve, participating in several monetary reform missions in Latin America. Thereafter, Triffin played an important role in the creation of the European Payments Union. In his later academic life, Triffin put forward proposals for reforming the international monetary system. But because he doubted that they would come to fruition, he also developed plans for regional monetary integration, particularly in Europe, where he became the monetary adviser of Jean Monnet. With proposals for a European Reserve Fund and a European currency unit, he became one of the intellectual fathers of Europe’s monetary union. Throughout his life Triffin remained faithful to the ideals of his youth. The young Triffin was indignant about the Versailles Treaty, while the old Triffin fulminated against the Vietnam War. For him, economics was a way to contribute to a better world. He was strongly attached to his independence and the pursuit of a better and more peaceful world. He was a monk in economist’s clothing.
Pirate Lands
Authors: Daxecker Ursula , Prins Brandon
Published: February 2021

Maritime piracy—like civil war, terrorism, and organized crime—is a problem of weak states. Surprisingly, though, pirates do not operate in the least-governed areas of weak states. Pirate Lands addresses this puzzle by explaining why some coastal communities experience more pirate attacks in their vicinity than others. Pirates do well in places where elites and law enforcement can be bribed, but they also need access to functioning roads, ports, and markets. Using statistical analyses of cross-national and subnational data on pirate attacks in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia, the authors detail how governance at the state and local levels explains the location of maritime piracy. Pirate Lands employs geospatial tools to rigorously measure how local political capacity and infrastructure affect maritime piracy. The authors find that pirates operate in areas where local governance is weak enough to incentivize collusion among pirates and local authorities yet strong enough to ensure that infrastructure and markets are sufficiently developed to permit the organization of sustained piracy. Interviews with former pirates, community members, and maritime security experts based on field research in Indonesia and Nigeria complement the quantitative findings. Pirate Lands offers the first comprehensive, social scientific account of maritime piracy.
Biomass
Authors: Meier Paul F.
Published: February 2021

Just as a fossil fuel can be burned to generate steam and drive a turbine, biomass can also be burned as a fuel to generate electricity. Biomass comes in many forms, such as wood and wood waste, agricultural waste, municipal waste, and energy crops. In the United States, biomass accounted for 1.5% of electricity generation, and was about 9% of electricity from renewables. Two-thirds of electricity from biomass comes from wood and wood waste. An advantage of using biomass as a fuel is that plants remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, thereby recycling the CO2 made from combustion. The overall footprint of a biomass-to-electricity plant is dominated by the land area needed to grow and harvest the biomass fuel.
Retail Workers
Authors: Cummings Scott L.
Published: February 2021

This chapter charts the Los Angeles community benefits movement, launched at the turn of the millennium to strengthen low-income communities by transforming local redevelopment. The movement was built on an emergent partnership between community-based organizations promoting “equitable development” in the face of gentrification and labor movement groups, led by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), challenging the city-sponsored proliferation of low-wage jobs, especially in the multifaceted retail industry. The legal instrument used to codify campaign victories was the community benefits agreement, or CBA—a contract under which a developer agreed to provide specific levels of living wage jobs, affordable housing, and other benefits in exchange for community support for project approvals and public subsidies. Because CBAs offered a proactive response to redress negative development externalities through contractual compromise, they rested on a distinctive model of community organizing—leveraging the power of broad-based coalitions to extract benefits through negotiation—and thus enlisted a particular role for lawyers focused on strategic counseling and contract drafting. This chapter traces the evolution and outcomes of Los Angeles’s seminal community benefits campaigns: from the nation’s first CBA with the developer of a transformational downtown sports and entertainment complex anchored around the Staples Center, through a $500 million CBA centered on environmental mitigation in connection with the expansion of the L.A. International Airport, to the Grand Avenue CBA, which focused on affordable housing production in a proposed upscale development on downtown’s Bunker Hill. Following this arc, the chapter shows how the CBA movement conferred significant benefits on low-income communities and institutionalized pro-labor policy in the city—while also revealing tensions in the community-labor alliance at the movement’s heart and the limits of contract-based solutions to inequality.
Soothing Movements
Authors: Rogers Jillian C.
Published: February 2021

This chapter argues that after 1914 French modernist composers and performers embraced a neoclassical, repetitive, perpetual-motion-oriented musical style—often termed style dépouillé—to help themselves and others cope with trauma somatically. Examination of psychological, scientific, and medical discourse on the mental, emotional, and physical benefits of rhythmic bodily movement in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French texts provides a broader context for understanding the interwar popularity of music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, a popular interwar musical practice based on the understanding of musical movement as emotionally transformative. Analysis of compositions in the style dépouillé, situated within the context of trauma studies, Dalcroze’s influence, and musicians’ commentaries on how these pieces made them feel, reveals that the challenging musique dépouillée repertoire engaged musicians’ bodies in rhythmically regular corporeal movements and provided them opportunities to process and perform the emotional difficulty of trauma.
Jazzing Around, or “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down?”
Authors: Gillett Rachel Anne
Published: February 2021

In the 1920s, Paris became a central site in a Europe-wide process of touring and musical mixing that fostered Black cosmopolitanism. Performers experienced travel and touring as a social and political triumph over racial discrimination. This chapter also shows how economic depression at the end of this period heightened racial antagonism in Paris. The government responded with racial quotas on employment, and unions and laborers expressed hostility to immigrant workers (particularly those of color, whether French citizens or not). The quotas were particularly contentious regarding bands that played in popular venues, because many were marketed precisely on the basis of being foreign and thus best suited for tango, jazz, or biguine. Facing increased hardship, Black communities expressed solidarity against racial prejudice and economic discrimination. This, along with musical mixing during gigs and images and gossip in the Blackpress, contributed to the emergence of an everyday Black cosmopolitanism in interwar Paris.
Early Debates in the Reception of Buddhism
Authors: Rudbøg Tim
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyzes the origin and meaning of the notion “esoteric Buddhism” as it was used in the early Theosophical Society, especially in the work of Helena P. Blavatsky and Alfred P. Sinnett. Both Sinnett and Blavatsky primarily conceptualized Buddhism in relation to the notion of an esoteric doctrine, while scholars of Buddhism disregarded the existence of any esotericism in Buddhism. Based on an analysis of the debates about “esoteric Buddhism,” this chapter shows how differences between Orientalists and Theosophists can be contextualized in their specific imaginings of Buddhism and also in their receptions of Buddhism.
The Mahatma Letters
Authors: Godwin Joscelyn
Published: February 2021

This chapter deals with the so-called Mahatma Letters allegedly originating from Koot Hoomi and Morya. It systematically analyzes the two original recipients of the letters, Allan Octavian Hume and Alfred Percy Sinnett, showing how they became interested in the Eastern Masters and their teachings. Next the chapter explores the arrival of the letters, problems regarding their publication, and the physical letters themselves. The content of the letters is analyzed to see what they might tell us about the characteristics of the Masters. Helena Blavatsky’s role in the production of these letters is considered from various aspects, as is the purpose and effect of the myth of the Masters.
Kinds of Science
Authors: Alger Bradley E.
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews distinctions between kinds of science, which is especially relevant to the book’s topic because it is an area that Karl Popper did not consider in detail. This creates a problem since critics of the hypothesis often do not distinguish between true hypothesis-based science and other kinds that don’t depend on hypotheses, and the traditional divisions of science miss the main points. The chapter distinguishes among several modern kinds of science including Big Science/Small Science and how they relate to Big Data and Little Data, and why Discovery Science is different from hypothesis-testing science. It separates “exploratory” from “confirmatory” studies and explains why this terminology can create confusion in trying to understand science. The differences between applied and basic science are genuine and meaningful because these two kinds of science have different goals and apply different, though overlapping, standards to achieve their goals.
Statistics and Statistical Hypotheses
Authors: Alger Bradley E.
Published: February 2021

This chapter covers statistics from a conceptual rather than a quantitative perspective. The objective is to distinguish statistical from scientific hypotheses and provide background for later discussions. The fact that scientific and statistical hypotheses are dissimilar is often overlooked, and the chapter shows how they differ and why the differences matter. The chapter uses simple, nontechnical examples to present the main ideas in frequentist statistics; the next chapter covers the basics of Bayesian statistics and explores how the divergent philosophical viewpoints of frequentists and Bayesians affect scientific reasoning. The present chapter covers statistical error and its role in null hypothesis significance testing, which is still the dominant mode of scientific significance testing, as well as the origins, weaknesses of, and alternatives to, null-hypothesis testing. A philosophical objective of the chapter is to show how the concept of probability fits with Karl Popper’s program of falsification. The background material in this chapter will be especially important for evaluating the Reproducibility Crisis in Chapter 7.
Opponents of the Hypothesis
Authors: Alger Bradley E.
Published: February 2021

Chapter 10 reviews the writings of three prominent scientists who reject the hypothesis as the basis for scientific thinking and research. Stuart Firestein is virulently anti-hypothesis and champions Curiosity-Driven science, a free-form mode which is deliberately unstructured. David Glass’s program of Questioning and Model-Building is rigidly structured and inductivist in spirit; he rejects the hypothesis in favor of “models” that he distinguishes from hypotheses. Both Firestein and Glass accept the empiricist standard for assessing scientific truth and believe that a scientific investigation proceeds on the basis of asking testable questions. David Deutsch is a theoretical physicist whose advanced ideas are, in principle, empirically untestable and, since empirical testability is the key to scientific hypothesis testing, he also rejects the hypothesis. His program is called Conjectures and Criticism. Unlike the other two critics, Deutsch is sympathetic to the scientific thinking process that Karl Popper advanced, but feels that Popper’s program must be superseded for science to get beyond the constraints of empiricism. The chapter shows that the supposed incompatibilities of each of the alternative approaches with the hypothesis are largely based on misrepresentations or misapplications of the nature of hypothesis-based science. The counterproposals are not grounds for rejecting the hypothesis, which can in fact coexist comfortably with them.
The Hypothesis in Science Education
Authors: Alger Bradley E.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents a wide though unsystematic review of formal educational resources of information about the hypothesis, at levels from grade school through to professional science. The focus in the early school years is on the Next Generation Science Standards, intended to be a national norm for science teachers, as well as two commercial programs meant to guide science teaching. At the college level, several books on critical thinking are briefly analyzed, although the emphasis is on a popular textbook that is designed to teach how to think scientifically. The chapter points up several possible adverse influences on public perceptions of science, including views on topics ranging from astrology to global climate change, that could arise from misapprehensions about the nature of science that are fostered by many of these sources. Finally, attention turns to the websites of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to sample resources available to professional scientists. In general, the information concerning the scientific hypothesis across all of these sources was inconsistent in depth, detail, and accuracy. The chapter offers a number of suggestions for improving science education in this area.
How to Improve Your Own Scientific Thinking
Authors: Alger Bradley E.
Published: February 2021

Chapter 14 suggests concrete ways to improve your scientific thinking about your own hypotheses and how to identify them in the scientific publications of others. The chapter continues exploration of the effects of unconscious mental processes on scientific thinking by emphasizing methods for minimizing such effects. Practical exercises include finding and diagramming hypotheses, illustrated by a detailed example from the literature. Building on the notions that scientists’ own intellectual productions entail significant ego investment and are subject to the concerns from behavioral economics that were raised in Chapter 11, this chapter suggests ways for scientists to step back and view their own scientific thinking skills objectively. The goal is to help promote sound thinking by calling readers’ attention to subtle intrinsic forces that can undermine it. Strategies for improvement include avoiding the “curse of knowledge,” taking the “outside” view, and ignoring the “sunk cost fallacy” when it comes to their own ideas.
Engaging Returnee Entrepreneurs Through Institutional Change
Authors: Williams Nick
Published: February 2021

Chapter 8 returns the analysis to policy making and institution building. Through in-depth interviews with policy makers and other stakeholders in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro, the chapter investigates perceptions of, and progress towards, engaging returnee entrepreneurs. It demonstrates that while policy makers are aware of the importance of emotional ties to home, they have little influence over this, and instead need to focus on the practicalities of improving the institutional environment. The chapter shows that policy emphasis has been placed on formal institutional reform, in particular the regulative framework, rather than ideational politics which emphasises heritage and cultural promotion. Yet in all three countries reforms have been slow. This serves to discourage growing investment from the diaspora as risks are often considered to be too great. Positive reforms are required so that the second generation of migrants do not become more isolated from their parents’ homeland. If that connection is lost, investments will only decrease over time.
Introduction
Authors: Woldoff Rachael A. , Litchfield Robert C.
Published: February 2021

This chapter outlines the book’s objectives, conceptual framework, and organization, and it introduces the voices of several digital nomads from our sample. It begins with some illustrative quotations from informants and then describes our main arguments about work and community, providing a rationale for studying this subject. Specifically, it asserts that digital nomads are united by an intense, shared commitment to personal reinvention, are creating new paths to meaningful work, and surprisingly, they are also pioneering a new type of place-based community. Next, the chapter defines and introduces readers to the concept of a digital nomad and provides an overview of digital nomad hubs (i.e., places that attract large numbers of digital nomads, who then form communities that cater to their own needs). It also introduces Bali, the site of the study. Finally, it describes the research methods, sample, and plan of the book.
The Noise Component:N(at)
Authors: McDowall David , McCleary Richard , Bartos Bradley J.
Published: February 2021

Chapter 3 develops the methods or strategies for building ARIMA noise models. At one level, the iterative identify-estimate-diagnose modeling strategy proposed by Box and Jenkins has changed little. At another level, the collective experience of time series experimenters leads to several modifications of the strategy. For the most part, these changes are aimed at solving practical problems. Compared to the 1970s, for example, modelers today pay more attention to transformations and to the usefulness and interpretability of an ARIMA model. The Box-Jenkins ARIMA noise modeling strategy is illustrated with detailed analyses of twelve time series. The example analyses include non-Normal time series, stationary white noise, autoregressive and moving average time series, nonstationary time series, and seasonal time series. The time series models build in Chapter 3 are re-introduced in later chapters.
Cooperation and Economic Self-Reliance in Commercial Arrangements
Authors: Stapleton Jane
Published: February 2021

Chapter 2 identifies a significant principle, immanent in tort law, vindicating the value in cooperative human arrangements. ‘Tort’s cooperation principle’ illuminates the necessity, at the duty of care stage in negligence claims, of analysing the prior dealings of the relevant parties. In claims between participants to a commercial arrangement, tort’s support for cooperation manifests in a preference for protecting the security of the coming together of the parties by refusing to recognise entitlements that would circumvent the arrangement. The common judicial assessment that society and the market expect commercial parties to be economically self-reliant exposes the importance of interrogating the reasonableness of commercial claimants’ reliance, for their own economic protection, on fellow participants in a commercial arrangement. This perspective reveals a long-standing doctrinal discontinuity and calls into question the reasoning used to support the Hedley Byrne & Co. Ltd. v. Heller & Partners Ltd. line of authority in commercial disputes.
Conceptual Interplay between Elements of the Tort of Negligence
Authors: Stapleton Jane
Published: February 2021

Chapter 3 examines how elements of the tort of negligence interact in critical conceptual ways and suggests that re-conceptualisation of aspects of those elements offers a more transparent and coherent framework. One argument is that a but-for concept of factual causation is inadequate and narrower than the concept evident in case law, one which can be identified by an ‘extended but-for test’. Another is that use of causal language at the analytical stage, which addresses the appropriate scope of responsibility for consequences of a specific breach (i.e. remoteness of damage), creates an obfuscating amalgam of the factual and normative. Similarly, by drawing a clear distinction between the forward-looking notion of the ‘scope of the duty’ and the backward-looking notion of the scope of responsibility for consequences the text argues that the principle that can coherently be extracted from the SAAMCO case is considerably narrower than the one being presented to courts.
Controlling Corruption
Authors: Rothstein Bo
Published: February 2021

This book presents a radically new approach to how societies can get corruption under control. Since the late 1990s, the detrimental effects of corruption on human wellbeing have become well established in research. This has resulted in a stark increase in anti-corruption programs launched by international and national development organizations. Despite these efforts, evaluations of the effects of these anti-corruption programs have been disappointing. As it can be measured, it is difficult to find substantial effects from such anti-corruption programs. The argument in this book is that this huge policy failure can be explained by three factors. Firstly, that the corruption problem has been poorly conceptualized since what should count as the opposite to corruption—the quality of government—has been left out. Secondly, that the problem has been located in the wrong social spaces. It is neither a cultural nor a legal problem. Instead, it is for the most part located in what organization theory defines as the “standard operating procedures” in social organizations. Thirdly, that the general theory that has dominated anti-corruption efforts—the principal-agent theory—is based on serious misspecification of the basic nature of the problem. The book presents a reconceptualization of corruption and a new theory—drawing on the tradition of the social contract—to explain it and motivate policies of how to get corruption under control. Several empirical cases serve to underpin this new theory ranging from the historical organization of religious practices to specific social policies, universal education, gender equality, and auditing.
Auditing, Trust, and the Social Contract
Authors: Rothstein Bo
Published: February 2021

The relationship between trust and auditing can be described as a paradox. In the social contract that forms the basis of modern societies, extensive trust issues arise. How can citizens trust that what is promised in the contract will also be provided? Elections should work to put politicians who do not deliver according to the social contract to be voted out of their position. Empirical research shows that this often does not work, hence the need for an auditing body. Empirical results have shown that national auditing institutions work towards reducing corruption and other forms of malfeasance, and are thereby vital to creating a working social contract. A high-quality system for auditing also has a much stronger effect on reducing corruption than is the case for democracy. Auditing turns out to be an undervalued instrument that not only complements but in some ways proves even more effective than representative democracy.
The Social Contract and the Indirect Approach to Anti-Corruption
Authors: Rothstein Bo
Published: February 2021

We have to find some compromise between extreme contextualism and complete universalism. We cannot operate with one theory of corruption per country, or region, or village, or “one-size-fits-all” approaches. General knowledge that is useful for anti-corruption policies must be applied according to the specific circumstances in each case. The social contract approach necessitates a dialogue between those who are doing basic research and those who are area or country specialists. Taking inspiration from military theorist Basil Liddell Hart’s indirect approach strategy, it is argued that decision makers should focus on policies that can change the basic social contract, instead of relying solely on measures that are intended to change incentives for corrupt actors. The indirect approach does not emphasize any single instrument, instead, the means depend on the case at hand. The main goal for the indirect approach is to change the opponent’s psychological willingness to resist change.