bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Weak State, Strong State, Deep State
Authors: Skowronek Stephen , Dearborn John A. , King Desmond
Published: February 2021

The most pressing reason to revive scholarly discussion of the state in America is that, for the first time, everyone else is talking about it quite candidly. Trump’s assault on the “Deep State” has pulled that old chestnut front and center. But as many researchers have shown, the American state defies easy characterization. Some describe it as a “weak state” because of the constitutional fragmentation of authority, the divisions of national power among three branches and between the national and state governments vertically. Others describe it as a “strong state” for its proven capacities to release social energies and deploy resources under pressure. The weak/strong debate has turned on the most exceptional features of the American state. This chapter reconfigures that debate around attributes of depth, and it brings to the fore issues that the modern American state shares with all others.
Depth in Norms
Authors: Skowronek Stephen , Dearborn John A. , King Desmond
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines depth in norms, shared understandings of what constitutes appropriate political and institutional behavior. Norms that shield the work of administrators reflect an abiding, collective interest in preventing the operations of the executive branch from being overrun by personal interests and the political calculations of the moment. Nowhere in the executive branch do norms play a larger role than in law enforcement, where they figure prominently in public perception of the legitimacy of the entire operation. By the same token, however, political insulation and administrative discretion make the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice prime sites both for resistance to the claims of a unitary executive and for presidential suspicions about a Deep State with interests of its own.
Beyond Bias
Authors: Krzych Scott
Published: February 2021

“Bias” is a term that circulates frequently in the contemporary landscape of political media, a term intended to diagnose a failure when media outlets fail to maintain journalistic objectivity. Beyond Bias interrogates what would seem, at first glance, to be examples of utterly biased political media—contemporary conservative documentary films. However, rather than dismiss such cases of political representation as exemplars of ideological nonsense, reactionary propaganda, and so on, Beyond Bias locates in conservative media a mode of discourse central to contemporary democratic debate in the United States. Specifically, this book identifies conservative media as a mode of hysterical discourse. As the book makes clear, hysterical political discourse occurs when debate is simulated as a means to avoid a more substantive exchange. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of hysteria and aesthetic politics, and likewise by placing conservative documentaries in the context of many concerns central to Documentary Studies (participation, observation, representation, the archive, etc.), Beyond Bias views conservative documentary, and conservative media and politics more generally, not as the biased excesses of the contemporary political landscape but rather as texts central to understanding the implicit, though sometimes affectively traumatic, antagonisms inevitable in democracy and constitutive of democratic debate.
Conclusion Rebirth
Authors: Bittner Stephen V.
Published: February 2021

After restating the central arguments, the conclusion takes the story of Russian and Soviet winemaking into the post-Soviet years. It describes the near destruction of the former Soviet wine industry amid the economic chaos of the 1990s and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Amid this destruction, Western wines reappeared in the post-Soviet marketplace after a seventy-year hiatus. Moreover, Western wine connoisseurs discovered Georgian wines and traditional Georgian production methods. The book ends with Vladimir Putin’s 2006 ban on the import of wines from Georgia and Moldova, and the emergence of a genuine culture of connoisseurship among young, educated, and worldly Russians and Ukrainians, who were far more prone to choose a high-quality imported wine from Australia or Europe than a more potent bottle of bormotukha.
Schumpeter's Venture Money
Authors: Peneder Michael , Resch Andreas
Published: February 2021

Schumpeter’s venture money examines the role of financial innovation and monetary thought throughout economic history, following the unique perspective of the leading scholar of a monetary theory of economic development. It proceeds with the analysis along three threads. The first thread is the history of money, or more precisely the continuous stream of innovations that has improved and expanded the scope of financing new ventures. The second thread is the complementary stream of ideas in the history of monetary thought. Finally, Josef Schumpeter himself, his theoretical vision and personal vita of failed financial ventures, is the third thread that ties everything together.
Guardians of the Benighted
Authors: Werth Paul W.
Published: February 2021

Created in December 1837, the Ministry of State Properties played a crucial role in agrarian reform and peasant affairs in Russia for decades thereafter. Armed with a reformist ethos and headed for two decades by Pavel Kiselev, the ministry sought to reorder the lives of state peasants—Russia’s principal non-serf population—by promoting new crops such as the potato, establishing communal grain reserves, and building schools. These and other initiatives heralded a new degree of state intervention into the lives of Russia’s rural population and defined key parameters of Russia’s subsequent efforts to solve its ‘peasant question’. The ministry thus occupies a critical place in Russia’s agrarian history.
Introduction
Authors: Huggins Robert , Thompson Piers
Published: February 2021

This chapter introduces the book and the fact that it is motivated by a belief that theories of economic development can move beyond the generally known factors and mechanisms of such development, with the aim being to analyse deeper and more fundamental causes of uneven development. In particular, influences such as innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge, and human capital are widely acknowledged as key levers of development. However, what are the sources of these factors, and why do they differ in their endowment across places? This chapter indicates that the book seeks to theoretically argue and to empirically illustrate that differences in human behaviour across cities and regions are a significant deep-rooted cause of uneven development. Fusing a range of concepts relating to culture, psychology, human agency, institutions, and power, it proposes that the uneven economic development and evolution of cities and regions within and across nations are strongly connected with the underlying forms of behaviour enacted by humans both individually and collectively.
The Nature and Sources of Agency
Authors: Huggins Robert , Thompson Piers
Published: February 2021

This chapter argues that constructs such as self-efficacy and innovativeness are closely associated with agency. This refers to the ability of individuals to make changes to their environment, and the chapter discusses that this is not just related to an individual’s own abilities and skills but is also constrained by their power relations. It is argued that agency can be captured both in terms of the ability to intentionally take actions to cause change or prevent change, or the actual actions themselves. Therefore, it may be best to think of the former as human agency potential (HAP) and the latter as manifestations of human agency, or human agency actualization (HAA), and this chapter considers measures of both. The chapter seeks to establish the links from community culture and personality via values and norms to human agency. It expands on notions relating to HAP and HAA, and empirically develops measures of HAP.
Poets and Lawmakers
Authors: Ziogas Ioannis
Published: February 2021

This chapter argues that Ovid’s didactic elegy (Ars amatoria) should be studied in the tradition of the genre’s founding father, Hesiod. The relationship between law and didacticism is encoded already in Hesiod’s Works and Days and continues thereafter in Greek elegy (Theognis and Solon). Ovid is part of this tradition. The courtroom setting, to which Ovid has repeated recourse, reproduces the trial setting of the Works and Days. Not unlike Hesiod, Ovid aims at an out-of-court settlement in contrast with the litigiousness of corrupt lords. Hesiod and Solon cast themselves as champions of justice in a world dominated by unjust rulers. Subtly but clearly, this is how Ovid envisages the relationship between his poetry and the laws of Augustus. The Roman poet aligns himself with the old and authoritative voices of legendary bards and lawgivers in competition with powerful leaders who attempt to control the juridical order.
Authors of Law and Life
Authors: Ziogas Ioannis
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the biopolitical force of Augustan legislation vis-à-vis Ovid’s love poetry. Ovid, the ‘father of poems’, pits himself against the prince, the ‘Father of the Fatherland’ (pater patriae). Poet and emperor are involved in the production of normative discourse (legal or literary) that aims at generating biological or conceptual offspring. Their roles are both parallel and antithetical. Augustus’ laws aim to increase the population, while the elegiac legislator sees pregnancy as undermining attractiveness. Yet both poet and prince cast themselves as auctores, a word that can refer to a proposer of law, an author of poems, and a father. As auctores, Ovid and Augustus aspire to create a zone of indistinction between the biological and the political, between law and life. The capacity of Ovid’s art to become life parallels and contrasts with the power of Augustus’ laws to become flesh.
Music Language Dwelling
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: February 2021

This chapter takes seriously the idea that music does not just address some of the broad currents of modernity but also offers ways beyond some of its aporias. Its argument is that music reconfigures the relation between our sensible being in the world and ways of being structured by certain kinds of language use. This musical reconfiguring, it is proposed, can be experienced as a kind of re-enchantment that brings with it a renewed sense of dwelling, or of being-at-home in the world. The chapter is in three sections: section I reviews the powerful claims made for the value of music around 1800 in relation to language and examines the potential of such claims in respect to the idea of freedom; section II explores the particularity of two musical works, comparing the relation of music and language in Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1798) and Schumann’s song ‘Mondnacht’, from his Eichendorff Lieder, Op. 39 (1840); section III explores the idea that ‘music as dwelling’ helps us to understand both the significance of the historical moment around 1800 and its renewed importance for a contemporary understanding of the idea of freedom.
The Witness of Praise—The Hope of Dwelling
Authors: Wirzba Norman
Published: February 2021

Praise has long been identified as a linguistic and musical form that is a response to the goodness and beauty of creaturely life. More generally, it reflects forms of life that seek to participate in God’s creative, nurturing, and reconciling ways with the world. In Western modernity, however, praise is rendered difficult and more tenuous because people find it hard to perceive and engage with the world as God’s creative realm. It is, instead, reduced to a brute material realm devoid of purpose or sanctity. The muting of praise is reflected in modern musical forms, but also in changes in the built environment. After describing the logic of praise, this essay argues that the action of praising God is much more than a personal, pious gesture. It is also a primary and practical way of being that communicates a desire to dwell in the world in ways that honour creatures and their creator. Understood this way, praise mobilizes worship and world-making at the same time.
The Word Refreshed
Authors: Begbie Jeremy
Published: February 2021

This chapter takes its cue from the vision of music adumbrated by the previous three essayists: in which music is seen as depending on a ‘faith in an order of things that exceeds the logic of statement and counterstatement’, arising from an embodied dwelling in the world which is pre-conceptual, pre-theoretical. As such, music has the capacity to free us from the kind of alienating relation to our physical environment that an over-dependence on instrumental language brings, and free us for a more fruitful indwelling of it that has been largely lost to modernity. This resonates with broadly biblical-theological view of humanity’s intended relation to the cosmos, as exemplified in the concept of New Creation in Christ. This essay returns to language, considered in this light: how can music, and thinking about music, enrich language? Specifically, how might music facilitate a deeper understanding of the way ‘God-talk’ operates? It is argued that music can offer a powerful witness to the impossibility (and danger) of imagining we can grasp or circumscribe the divine (the antithesis of human freedom). More positively, it can greatly enrich our use (and understanding) of existing theological language, and generate fresh language that enables a more faithful perception of, and participation in the realities it engages.
The Contradictory Christ
Authors: Beall Jc
Published: February 2021

The claim that Jesus Christ is God (“fully divine”) and is as human as you and me (“fully human”) has appeared to many thinkers to be contradictory. But all sides have long shared a common position: namely, that the truth of God incarnate cannot be contradictory. Jc Beall disagrees: he argues that the truth of the incarnation is as it appears to be, namely, contradictory. This book lays out Beall's contradictory account of Jesus Christ.
The Structural Context for Billionaires
Authors: Hägel Peter
Published: February 2021

Chapter 3 describes how, over the past decades, structural changes within the material, ideational, and institutional realms have expanded the opportunities for individuals to become extremely rich and to engage in politics. At the material level, post-1950, globalization has amplified the benefits of those who succeed in “winner-take-all” markets, which is further supported by the peacefulness that developed countries have enjoyed after the Second World War. Neoliberalism is the ideology behind globalizing markets, privatization, and deregulation, and its celebration of entrepreneurship is turning the self-made billionaire into a normative role model. At the institutional level, states have been highly involved in facilitating economic globalization, reducing many barriers that curbed business before. The shift from the welfare to the competition state, which includes the liberalization of trade, the protection of foreign investments, and tax havens, favors capital. Oftentimes, it will be argued, the same structural transformations that promote opportunities for individual wealth accumulation also provide openings in world politics for individuals to exercise power, as private authority has gained legitimacy within global governance.
Reinventing International Health in East Central Europe
Authors: Silverstein Sara
Published: February 2021

A network of east central European health experts involved in the state-building of their post-imperial region were responsible for the methods and objectives of the League of Nations Health Organization. Their programmes challenged both western influence in public health and the great powers’ dominance within interwar internationalism. The health services of east central Europe did not evolve in national isolation, and their principles of mutual assistance became the basis for the League Health Organization to redefine human security and to support early international development projects.
Nation, Internationalism, and the Policies against Trafficking in Girls and Women after the Fall of the Habsburg Empire
Authors: Steer Martina
Published: February 2021

Interwar Poland inherited the problem of prostitution and human trafficking from its three predecessor states, above all from the Habsburg Monarchy. It soon came into the focus of interest of the League of Nations’ anti-trafficking agencies. Exploring the interaction between the recently acquired national sovereignty of post-Habsburg Poland and the new world order with the League of Nations as its pivotal force is tantamount to understanding how a nation state tried to tackle a transnational problem such as ‘white slavery’, as well as how it struggled with commitments resulting from its new position as a sovereign actor in interwar international politics. This chapter investigates governmental and non-governmental activities against prostitution and human trafficking in Poland, along with the government’s stance on the League’s recommendations. Whereas prewar international Jewish activities to save women from prostitution came to an end, domestic institutions seized opportunities provided by a democratic state and took their place.
The Decline of Serfdom and the Origins of the ‘Little Divergence’
Authors: Bailey Mark
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the main social and economic consequences of plague between the 1340s and the 1390s. In 1400 England was still not at the forefront of European economic development, but it was beginning to close the gap on the leaders. GDP per head, the proportion of people in non-agricultural employment, and the livestock share of agriculture had all increased irreversibly. Dependence upon the market for basic commodities and manufactures had increased, and population and taxable wealth were spread more equitably across the country, reducing the economic divide between the south-east and the rest of the country. Recent arguments that the European Marriage Pattern (EMP)—one of the main institutional characteristics of the Little Divergence—was established in England soon after the Black Death are assessed on the basis of the economic and demographic evidence. Serfdom had declined quickly and significantly, and the implications of the English experience for our understanding of the decline of European serfdom are explored. The main institutional changes in factor markets in general, and the spread of contractual arrangements in particular, are considered. By 1400 the main changes had worked their way through the economy, and further significant developments did not occur until population began to rise again in the sixteenth century.
Institutional Investor Voting Behaviour
Authors: Enriques Luca , Romano Alessandro
Published: February 2021

This chapter shows how network theory can improve our understanding of institutional investors’ voting behaviour and, more generally, their role in corporate governance. The standard idea is that institutional investors compete against each other on relative performance and hence might not cast informed votes, due to rational apathy and rational reticence. In other words, institutional investors have incentives to free-ride instead of ‘cooperating’ and casting informed votes. We show that connections of various kinds among institutional investors, whether from formal networks, geographical proximity, or common ownership, and among institutional investors and other agents, such as proxy advisors, contribute to shaping institutional investors’ incentives to vote ‘actively’. They also create intricate competition dynamics: competition takes place not only among institutional investors (and their asset managers) but also at the level of their employees and among ‘cliques’ of institutional investors. Employees, who strive for better jobs, are motivated to obtain more information on portfolio companies than may be strictly justified from their employer institution’s perspective, and to circulate it within their network. Cliques of institutional investors compete against each other. Because there are good reasons to believe that cliques of cooperators outperform cliques of non-cooperators, the network-level competition might increase the incentives of institutional investors to collect information. These dynamics can enhance institutional investors’ engagement in portfolio companies and also shed light on some current policy issues such as the antitrust effects of common ownership and mandatory disclosures of institutional investors’ voting.
The Power of Sequence
Authors: Jaeger Christopher Brett , Trueblood Jennifer S.
Published: February 2021

Researchers have documented numerous cognitive biases that are difficult to reconcile with rational choice theory. But is there a more general set of decision-making rules that might account for these cognitive biases and ‘rational’ decisions alike? Psychologists in search of such rules have developed a theory of quantum decision making. This chapter introduces quantum decision making to a legal audience, explains its intellectual origins, and identifies some contexts in which it provides useful tools for legal theorists. Using the example of a juror evaluating a criminal case, the chapter illustrates how quantum decision making explains and predicts phenomena that are difficult to reconcile with other theories of choice. More generally, quantum decision making highlights the importance of sequence in shaping judgments and decisions—and thus, its importance in law’s choice architecture.
Introduction
Authors: Murphy Gretchen
Published: February 2021

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.
The Basic Conception of Doxa at Work
Authors: Moss Jessica
Published: February 2021

If doxa’s defining object is what seems, then the Basic Conception of doxa will be cognition of what seems. This chapter argues that this conception can do the work of explaining the various features Plato attributes to doxa, with a focus on the most controversial: the restriction of doxa to the perceptible realm of Becoming. I argue that on Plato’s view Becoming seems, and so we have doxa of it, while Being does not seem, and so we have no doxa of it. I address the philosophical objections to this claim by showing that Plato can nonetheless account for thoughts about Forms which fall short of epistêmê, by appealing to a third, “in between” category in his epistemology: dianoia (“thought”). I then address the apparent textual evidence for Forms seeming, and for doxa of Forms, arguing that it can be accommodated.
Epistemology in the Earlier Dialogues
Authors: Moss Jessica
Published: February 2021

The objects-based epistemology I have attributed to Plato in the Republic and other dialogues depends on a robust metaphysical distinction between ontologically privileged Beings and ontologically inferior seemings, and so we should not expect to see this kind of epistemological view in the absence of a full-blown Two Worlds metaphysics. Nonetheless, the Socratic dialogues and Meno take it as basic principles that epistêmê is primarily or specially of Being, and that there is a widespread inferior cognitive condition which fails to get at Being. Arguably they do not embrace Distinct Objects, but this is precisely what we should expect given their metaphysical differences from the Two Worlds dialogues. In sum, Plato’s views in the earlier dialogues are such that when he comes to develop a more developed epistemology, along with a more inflated metaphysics, the Basic Conceptions of doxa and epistêmê are the natural conceptions for him to adopt.
Introduction
Authors: Balaguer Mark
Published: February 2021

Chapter 1 provides a synopsis of the entire book. Roughly speaking, the book does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view and argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions—most notably, the question of whether there are any abstract objects and the question of whether there are any composite objects. Second, the book explains how these non-factualist views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and it explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view that every metaphysical question decomposes into subquestions, and in connection with each of these subquestions, we can endorse one of the following three anti-metaphysical views: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is (roughly) the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is (roughly) the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about reality and, if it’s true, isn’t made true by reality.
A Worldview
Authors: Balaguer Mark
Published: February 2021

Chapter 10 briefly articulates the worldview that’s implied (or at least suggested) by the rest of the book. Very roughly, the idea is that neo-positivists can articulate their worldview with a counterfactual that says something roughly like the following: “If there had been a plenitudinous platonic realm (i.e., a plenitudinous realm of abstract objects like numbers and sets and propositions and so on), and if a certain kind of mereological universalism had been true (in particular, if there had existed a huge plurality of tiny mereological simples and unrestricted compositions of those simples, so that there were, e.g., simples arranged tablewise and catwise and moleculewise and so on, and there were also tables and cats and molecules and trout-turkeys and so on), then quantum mechanics would have been true, and evolution theory would have been true, and Zermelo-Frankel set theory would have been true, and so on.”
Introduction
Authors: Earlie Paul
Published: February 2021

The Introduction outlines a number of issues central to Derrida’s thought and to his engagement with the legacy of psychoanalysis in particular. Using a series of lexemes developed throughout his work—including ‘origin’, ‘legacy’, ‘trace’, and ‘différance’—it shows how for Derrida, despite the fractious history of disputes over its significance, Freud’s legacy can never be reduced to a single, universalizable meaning. Against Lacan’s linguistic ‘return to Freud’, Derrida insists on the structural openness of Freud’s legacy to reinterpretation in new and unpredictable contexts. This openness calls us to a dual responsibility: towards the past traces that Freud has bequeathed to us and towards a future in which this legacy must be transformed. Existing commentaries on Freud’s significance for Derrida have not always taken the full measure of his account of legacy. What Derrida views as the possible-impossible structure of inheritance is developed in each of the book’s subsequent chapters, which explore the vicissitudes of Freud’s French reception, the role of spatiality within the psyche, the relationship between science and fiction, memory and the archive, and the politics of affect.
Conclusion
Authors: Earlie Paul
Published: February 2021

The Conclusion addresses the shared impossibility of legacy in Freud and Derrida by exploring a number of key differences between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. For Freud, psychoanalysis is interminable because the work of understanding one’s past is always exposed to an unpredictability that haunts the calculating technique of the analyst. For different reasons, Derrida figures deconstruction as an endless task, though one not without implications for the interminability of psychoanalysis. In this vein, the Conclusion examines a term privileged by both Derrida and Freud: ‘resistance’. For Derrida, the irreducible resistance of Freud’s legacy to interpretation has consequences for how we should engage with this legacy, explored here with respect to Lacan’s contrapuntal inheritance of Freud. This resistance also has consequences, however, for how we should engage with Derrida’s work today and for ongoing debates over the linguistic-materialist legacy of deconstruction.
The Case against Powers
Authors: Ott Walter
Published: February 2021

Walter Ott argues that there is a central, underlying metaphysical worry that animated early modern thinking against causal powers that is still unresolved. He emphasizes that there is a spectre of power holism embedded in the Aristotelian’s commitment to intrinsicality. Ott sees this as the worry expressed in Descartes’s ‘little souls’ argument against powers, which he sees as an important precursor to Neil Williams’s recent ‘problem of fit’ objection to neo-Aristotelian causal powers. And it is this ‘problem of fit’ that highlights the connection between intrinsicality and powers holism. According to Ott, however, the lesson to take from the ‘problem of fit’ is not that Humeanism is the proper position. He suggests instead that we return to a mitigate powers ontology like that found in Boyle and Locke. The idea here is that powers are really relational properties that cannot be reduced to any one of their relata; they simply ‘are internal relations among the intrinsic properties of things’.
Failures of Complex Ecosystems
Authors: Rouse William B.
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses failures in healthcare (AIDS and Opioids Epidemics), the economy (Great Depression and Recession), and the environment (Population and Climate). Multi-level analyses are used to provide comparisons across case studies. How these types of domains anticipate and manage failures are briefly reviewed. Surveilling versus controlling failures are contrasted. These insights are used to foreshadow later discussions of failure management.
Pasting Diagrams
Authors: Johnson Niles , Yau Donald
Published: February 2021

In this chapter, pasting diagrams are defined, and pasting theorems for 2-/bicategories are proved. Pasting is an essential reasoning tool in 2-dimensional category theory. Each pasting theorem says that a pasting diagram, in a 2-category or a bicategory, has a unique composite. String diagrams, which provide another way to visualize and manipulate pasting diagrams, are also discussed.
Bicategorical Limits and Nerves
Authors: Johnson Niles , Yau Donald
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on bicategorical limits and nerves, which are the 2-/bicategorical analogues of (co)limits and nerves. The chapter proves that lax limits, lax bilimits, pseudo limits, and pseudo bilimits are unique up to an equivalence and an invertible modification. The chapter discusses 2-limits and 2-colimits, as well as the Duskin nerve and the 2-nerve, which are two different generalizations of the 1-categorical Grothendieck nerve. In each case, an explicit description of the simplices is provided.
Motor Control Exercises Compared to Strengthening Exercises for Upper- and Lower-Extremity Musculoskeletal Disorders: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analyses of Randomized Controlled Trials
Authors: Lafrance Simon , Ouellet Philippe , Alaoui Reda , Roy Jean-Sébastien , Lewis Jeremy , Christiansen David Høyrup , Dubois Blaise , Langevin Pierre , Desmeules François
Published: February 2021

Objective

The purpose of this review was to compare the efficacy of motor control exercises (MCEs) to strengthening exercises for adults with upper- or lower-extremity musculoskeletal disorders (MSKDs).

Methods

Electronic searches were conducted up to April 2020 in Medline, Embase, Cochrane CENTRAL, and CINAHL. Randomized controlled trials were identified on the efficacy of MCEs compared to strengthening exercises for adults with upper- or lower-extremity MSKDs. Data were extracted with a standardized form that documented the study characteristics and results. For pain and disability outcomes, pooled mean differences (MDs) and standardized mean differences (SMDs) were calculated using random-effects inverse variance models.

Results

Twenty-one randomized controlled trials (n = 1244 participants) were included. Based on moderate-quality evidence, MCEs lead to greater pain (MD = −0.41 out of 10 points; 95% CI = −0.72 to −0.10; n = 626) and disability reductions (SMD = −0.28; 95% CI = −0.43 to −0.13; n = 713) when compared to strengthening exercises in the short term; these differences are not clinically important. When excluding trials on osteoarthritis (OA) participants and evaluating only the trials involving participants with rotator cuff–related shoulder pain, shoulder instability, hip-related groin pain, or patellofemoral pain syndrome, there is moderate quality evidence that MCEs lead to greater pain (MD = −0.74 out of 10 points; 95% CI = −1.22 to −0.26; n = 293) and disability reductions (SMD = −0.40; 95% CI = −0.61 to −0.19; n = 354) than strengthening exercises in the short term; these differences might be clinically important.

Conclusions

MCEs lead to statistically greater pain and disability reductions when compared to strengthening exercises among adults with MSKDs in the short term, but these effects might be clinically important only in conditions that do not involve OA. Inclusion of new trials might modify these conclusions.

Impact

These results suggest that MCEs could be prioritized over strengthening exercises for adults with the included non-OA MSKDs; however, results are unclear for OA disorders.
Prevention and planning as important factors in ensuring public health in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: De Vero Mark Kelvin B , Gozum Ivan Efreaim A , Melad Aristothel M
Published: February 2021

A recent correspondence discussed that in trying times, technology can help be applied toward epidemiology to benefit communities by building a basic surveillance system. This suggested development in Honduras can be utilized in the Philippines to improve the State’s handling of health emergencies. With this, this paper accentuates the importance of prevention and planning to ensure public health in the Philippines, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Legal Deposit, Literary Value, and Rejected Books at the 1818 Select Committee on the Copyright Acts
Authors: Field Hannah
Published: February 2021

While copyright libraries now routinely present themselves as exemplars of assiduous preservation, in line with the long duration of their legal deposit privileges, the history of these libraries is also a history of discrimination, sifting, and rejection—especially up until the early nineteenth century. This article uses the 1818 Select Committee on the Copyright Acts to examine how the theory and practice of legal deposit entail a (shifting) calibration of the catholic and the selective. I focus on two sets of documents. The first is the minutes of the select committee, where I trace the different modes of literary value put forward by library representatives. In particular, I consider the difficulty librarians face when asked to comment on individual texts (rather than the principle of deposit). The second group of documents comprises parliamentary returns from the Bodleian Library and the Cambridge University Library listing deposit items that these libraries rejected between 1814 and 1817. I have traced many of the roughly 500 texts listed and present strategies drawn from the computational humanities for exploring the different authors, genres, and forms represented. In conclusion, I propose that legal deposit can generate negative bibliographies—lists of the works not to be preserved in certain libraries—that allow book historians to investigate canon formation in terms of rejection, relegation, and indifference, rather than elevation and appreciation.
Do people with rheumatoid arthritis maintain their physical activity level at treatment onset over the first year of methotrexate therapy?
Authors: Gwinnutt James M , Alsafar Husain , Hyrich Kimme L , Lunt Mark , Barton Anne , Verstappen Suzanne M M ,   the RAMS co-investigators
Published: February 2021

Objectives

To describe how many people with RA reduce their baseline physical activity level over the first year of MTX treatment, and which factors predict this.

Methods

Data came from the Rheumatoid Arthritis Medication Study (RAMS), a prospective cohort of people with early RA starting MTX. Participants reported demographics and completed questionnaires at baseline, and 6 and 12 months, including reporting the number of days per week they performed ≥20 min of physical activity, coded as none, low (1–3 days) or high (4–7 days). The physical activity levels of participants over 12 months are described. Predictors of stopping physical activity were assessed using multivariable logistic regression.

Results

In total, 1468 participants were included [median (interquartile range) age 60 (50, 69) years; 957 (65.2%) women]. At baseline, the physical activity levels of the people with RA were: none = 408 (27.8%), low = 518 (35.3%) and high = 542 (36.9%). Eighty percent of participants maintained some physical activity or began physical activity between assessments (baseline to 6 months = 79.3%, 6 months to 12 months = 80.7%). In total, 24.1% of participants reduced physical activity and 11.3% of participants stopped performing physical activity between baseline and 6 months (6 months to 12 months: 22.6% and 10.2%, respectively). Baseline smoking, higher disability and greater socioeconomic deprivation were associated with stopping physical activity.

Conclusion

Many people with early RA were not performing physical activity when starting MTX, or stopped performing physical activity over the first year of treatment. These people may require interventions to stay active. These interventions need to be mindful of socioeconomic barriers to physical activity participation.
Silent or Inaudible? Male Survivor Stories in Bosnia–Herzegovina
Authors: Touquet Heleen
Published: February 2021

This article develops a new conceptual framework to understand silence and silencing with regard to conflict-related sexual violence against men. Based on fieldwork data from Bosnia–Herzegovina, it argues that rather than the silence of victims, the problem is that survivor testimonies are coopted and entextualized, and that male vulnerabilities remain inaudible. This process reinforces ignorance about male-directed sexual violence and helps to maintain the dominant view that masculinity and vulnerability are mutually exclusive. To illustrate the point, it examines two spaces where male survivors have told their stories in Bosnia–Herzegovina: the courts and the detainee associations.
Six Species of Diaporthe Associated with Phomopsis Stem Canker of Sunflower in Southern Pampean Region of Argentina
Authors: Zambelli Andrés , Mancebo María F. , Bazzalo María E. , Reid Roberto J. , Sanchez María C. , Kontz Brian J. , Mathew Febina M.
Published: February 2021

A survey of 67 commercial fields in 19 locations was conducted in the southern Pampean region of Argentina for Phomopsis stem canker of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) between 2014 and 2019. A total of 210 plants having typical symptoms of Phomopsis stem canker were randomly sampled, and fungal isolation was performed. Of the 187 isolates of Diaporthe that were recovered, 94% of the isolates showed morphological characteristics similar to D. helianthi, 3% to D. gulyae, 1% to D. caulivora, 1% to D. sojae, 0.5% to D. kongii, and 0.5% to D. longicolla. Following morphological characterization, the identity of the six morpho-species was confirmed by phylogenetic analyses of β-tubulin, translation elongation factor 1-α, and internal transcribed spacer gene regions. Koch’s postulates were completed for the six fungi by inoculating one susceptible sunflower hybrid with one isolate each of the six species of Diaporthe using the stem-wound inoculation method. Seven days postinoculation, significant differences in disease severity were observed between the six isolates (P < 0.0001), with D. helianthi and D. gulyae isolates causing significantly greater disease severity. To our knowledge, this is the first report of D. kongii, D. longicolla, D. caulivora, and D. sojae associated with Phomopsis stem canker of sunflower in Argentina.
Reactive Oxygen Species Contribute to Symptomless, Extreme Resistance toPotato virus Xin Tobacco
Authors: Király Lóránt , Albert Réka , Zsemberi Orsolya , Schwarczinger Ildikó , Hafez Yaser Mohamed , Künstler András
Published: February 2021

Here we show that in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum cultivar Samsun NN Rx1) the development of Rx1 gene-mediated, symptomless, extreme resistance to Potato virus X (PVX) is preceded by an early, intensive accumulation of the reactive oxygen species (ROS) superoxide (O2·−), evident between 1 and 6 h after inoculation and associated with increased nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase activities. This suggests a direct contribution of this ROS to virus restriction during symptomless, extreme resistance. Superoxide inhibition in PVX-inoculated leaves by infiltration of antioxidants (superoxide dismutase [SOD] and catalase [CAT]) partially suppresses extreme resistance in parallel with the appearance of localized leaf necrosis resembling a hypersensitive resistance (HR) response. F1progeny from crosses of Rx1 and ferritin overproducer (deficient in production of the ROS OH·) tobaccos also display a suppressed extreme resistance to PVX, because significantly increased virus levels are coupled to HR, suggesting a role of the hydroxyl radical (OH·) in this symptomless antiviral defense. In addition, treatment of PVX-susceptible tobacco with a superoxide-generating agent (riboflavin/methionine) results in HR-like symptoms and reduced PVX titers. Finally, by comparing defense responses during PVX-elicited symptomless, extreme resistance and HR-type resistance elicited by Tobacco mosaic virus, we conclude that defense reactions typical of an HR (e.g., induction of cell death/ROS-regulator genes and antioxidants) are early and transient in the course of extreme resistance. Our results demonstrate the contribution of early accumulation of ROS (superoxide, OH·) in limiting PVX replication during symptomless extreme resistance and support earlier findings that virus-elicited HR represents a delayed, slower resistance response than symptomless, extreme resistance.
Infection, inflammation and intervention: mechanistic modelling of epithelial cells in COVID-19
Authors: Fadai Nabil T. , Sachak-Patwa Rahil , Byrne Helen M. , Maini Philip K. , Bafadhel Mona , Nicolau Dan V.
Published: February 2021

While the pathological mechanisms in COVID-19 illness are still poorly understood, it is increasingly clear that high levels of pro-inflammatory mediators play a major role in clinical deterioration in patients with severe disease. Current evidence points to a hyperinflammatory state as the driver of respiratory compromise in severe COVID-19 disease, with a clinical trajectory resembling acute respiratory distress syndrome, but how this ‘runaway train’ inflammatory response emerges and is maintained is not known. Here, we present the first mathematical model of lung hyperinflammation due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. This model is based on a network of purported mechanistic and physiological pathways linking together five distinct biochemical species involved in the inflammatory response. Simulations of our model give rise to distinct qualitative classes of COVID-19 patients: (i) individuals who naturally clear the virus, (ii) asymptomatic carriers and (iii–v) individuals who develop a case of mild, moderate, or severe illness. These findings, supported by a comprehensive sensitivity analysis, point to potential therapeutic interventions to prevent the emergence of hyperinflammation. Specifically, we suggest that early intervention with a locally acting anti-inflammatory agent (such as inhaled corticosteroids) may effectively blockade the pathological hyperinflammatory reaction as it emerges.
Still ‘dairy farm fever’? A Bayesian model for leptospirosis notification data in New Zealand
Authors: Benschop Jackie , Nisa Shahista , Spencer Simon E. F.
Published: February 2021

Routinely collected public health surveillance data are often partially complete, yet remain a useful source by which to monitor incidence and track progress during disease intervention. In the 1970s, leptospirosis in New Zealand (NZ) was known as ‘dairy farm fever’ and the disease was frequently associated with serovars Hardjo and Pomona. To reduce infection, interventions such as vaccination of dairy cattle with these two serovars was implemented. These interventions have been associated with significant reduction in leptospirosis incidence, however, livestock-based occupations continue to predominate notifications. In recent years, diagnosis is increasingly made by nucleic acid detection which currently does not provide serovar information. Serovar information can assist in linking the recognized maintenance host, such as livestock and wildlife, to infecting serovars in human cases which can feed back into the design of intervention strategies. In this study, confirmed and probable leptospirosis notification data from 1 January 1999 to 31 December 2016 were used to build a model to impute the number of cases from different occupational groups based on serovar and month of occurrence. We imputed missing occupation and serovar data within a Bayesian framework assuming a Poisson process for the occurrence of notified cases. The dataset contained 1430 notified cases, of which 927 had a specific occupation (181 dairy farmers, 45 dry stock farmers, 454 meatworkers, 247 other) while the remaining 503 had non-specified occupations. Of the 1430 cases, 1036 had specified serovars (231 Ballum, 460 Hardjo, 249 Pomona, 96 Tarassovi) while the remaining 394 had an unknown serovar. Thus, 47% (674/1430) of observations had both a serovar and a specific occupation. The results show that although all occupations have some degree of under-reporting, dry stock farmers were most strongly affected and were inferred to contribute as many cases as dairy farmers to the burden of disease, despite dairy farmer being recorded much more frequently. Rather than discard records with some missingness, we have illustrated how mathematical modelling can be used to leverage information from these partially complete cases. Our finding provides important evidence for reassessing the current minimal use of animal vaccinations in dry stock. Improving the capture of specific farming type in case report forms is an important next step.