bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Predicting Control Beliefs in Older Adults: A Micro-Longitudinal Study
Authors: Zhang Shenghao , Gamaldo Alyssa A , Neupert Shevaun D , Allaire Jason C
Published: January 2019

Objectives

The present study examined potential sources of intra- and inter-individual differences in older adults’ control beliefs using a micro-longitudinal design.

Method

Older adults (n = 205) ranging in age from 60 to 94 (M = 72.70, SD = 6.72) completed 8 in-person testing sessions within 3 weeks which included assessments of control beliefs (Locus of Control and Perceived Competence), physical health (physical symptoms and sleep self-efficacy), stressors, emotional well-being (Positive Affect and Negative Affect), and cognition (basic cognition tests, everyday cognition, and memory failures).

Results

Multilevel models indicated that on days when older adults had higher sleep self-efficacy, more positive affect, and less negative affect, they also had more internal locus of control and higher perceived competence. Having stressors on the previous occasion was associated with lower internal locus of control on the subsequent occasion. Physical symptoms, everyday cognition, and memory failures could be predictive of locus of control for some older adults.

Discussion

Our findings showed the differentiated antecedents of locus of control and perceived competence, the unique role of sleep self-efficacy, positive affect, and negative affect in understanding antecedents of both, as well as the need to study well-being and cognition antecedents of control beliefs in future studies.
A critical comparison of technologies for a plant genome sequencing project
Authors: Paajanen Pirita , Kettleborough George , López-Girona Elena , Giolai Michael , Heavens Darren , Baker David , Lister Ashleigh , Cugliandolo Fiorella , Wilde Gail , Hein Ingo , Macaulay Iain , Bryan Glenn J , Clark Matthew D
Published: January 2019

Background

A high-quality genome sequence of any model organism is an essential starting point for genetic and other studies. Older clone-based methods are slow and expensive, whereas faster, cheaper short-read–only assemblies can be incomplete and highly fragmented, which minimizes their usefulness. The last few years have seen the introduction of many new technologies for genome assembly. These new technologies and associated new algorithms are typically benchmarked on microbial genomes or, if they scale appropriately, on larger (e.g., human) genomes. However, plant genomes can be much more repetitive and larger than the human genome, and plant biochemistry often makes obtaining high-quality DNA that is free from contaminants difficult. Reflecting their challenging nature, we observe that plant genome assembly statistics are typically poorer than for vertebrates.

Results

Here, we compare Illumina short read, Pacific Biosciences long read, 10x Genomics linked reads, Dovetail Hi-C, and BioNano Genomics optical maps, singly and combined, in producing high-quality long-range genome assemblies of the potato species Solanum verrucosum. We benchmark the assemblies for completeness and accuracy, as well as DNA compute requirements and sequencing costs.

Conclusions

The field of genome sequencing and assembly is reaching maturity, and the differences we observe between assemblies are surprisingly small. We expect that our results will be helpful to other genome projects, and that these datasets will be used in benchmarking by assembly algorithm developers.
Geographic patterns of plant–herbivore interactions are driven by soil fertility
Authors: Lynn Joshua S , Fridley Jason D
Published: January 2019

Aims

Geographic patterns of the intensity of plant herbivory in relation to climate factors have garnered little general support and appear to be species specific. However, plant–herbivore interactions are also driven by resource availability, such as soil nutrient content, and it remains unclear whether broad-scale variation in soil factors is reflected in herbivore consumption rates across species’ ranges. Additionally, we know little of how intraspecific variation in tissue quality associates with edaphic and climatic factors, and how this variation controls herbivore consumption. The resource availability hypothesis (RAH) predicts that plant individuals growing in low-resource environments will have lower leaf nutritional quality and more constitutive defenses, which will result in lower rates of leaf consumption.

Methods

We collected leaves from the old-field dominant species, Solidago altissima L., from 20 sites across 10 degrees of latitude in the Eastern USA to determine the percentage leaf area consumed by insect folivores. We obtained soil and climate data for each site, as well as plant functional and defensive traits, including specific leaf area (SLA), leaf carbon:nitrogen (C:N), and trichome density.

Important Findings

Although we found no significant latitudinal trend of leaf consumption rate, there was strong evidence that leaf herbivory decreased with leaf C:N and trichome density, which themselves decreased with soil N, supporting our hypothesis that the RAH applies for intraspecific variation across spatial gradients. Additionally, high precipitation seasonality and soil nitrogen predicted decreased herbivory. The results suggest that spatial variation in herbivory can be driven by factors other than herbivore communities and climatic gradients, and that bottom-up processes, where plant traits and soil fertility control leaf consumption, must be incorporated into spatial predictions of herbivory.
The peculiar velocity field up to z ∼ 0.05 by forward-modelling Cosmicflows-3 data
Authors: Graziani R , Courtois H M , Lavaux G , Hoffman Y , Tully R B , Copin Y , Pomarède D
Published: January 2019

A hierarchical Bayesian model is applied to the Cosmicflows-3 catalogue of galaxy distances in order to derive the peculiar velocity field and distribution of matter within z ∼ 0.054. The model assumes the ΛCDM model within the linear regime and includes the fit of the galaxy distances together with the underlying density field. By forward modelling the data, the method is able to mitigate biases inherent to peculiar velocity analyses, such as the Homogeneous Malmquist bias or the lognormal distribution of peculiar velocities. The statistical uncertainty on the recovered velocity field is about 150 km s−1 depending on the location, and we study systematics coming from the selection function and calibration of distance indicators. The resulting velocity field and related density fields recover the cosmography of the Local Universe which is presented in an unprecedented volume of our Universe 10 times larger than previously reached. This methodology opens the doors to reconstruction of initial conditions for larger and more accurate constrained cosmological simulations. This work is also preparatory to larger peculiar velocity data sets coming from Wallaby, TAIPAN, or LSST.
Testing a model for subphotospheric dissipation in GRBs: fits to Fermi data constrain the dissipation scenario
Authors: Ahlgren Björn , Larsson Josefin , Ahlberg Erik , Lundman Christoffer , Ryde Felix , Pe’er Asaf
Published: January 2019

It has been suggested that the prompt emission in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) could be described by radiation from the photosphere in a hot fireball. Such models must be tested by directly fitting them to data. In this work we use data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and consider a specific photospheric model, in which the kinetic energy of a low-magnetization outflow is dissipated locally by internal shocks below the photosphere. We construct a table model with a physically motivated parameter space and fit it to time-resolved spectra of the 36 brightest Fermi GRBs with a known redshift. We find that about two-thirds of the examined spectra cannot be described by the model, as it typically underpredicts the observed flux. However, since the sample is strongly biased towards bright GRBs, we argue that this fraction will be significantly lowered when considering the full population. From the successful fits we find that the model can reproduce the full range of spectral slopes present in the sample. For these cases we also find that the dissipation consistently occurs at a radius of ∼1012 cm and that only a few per cent efficiency is required. Furthermore, we find a positive correlation between the fireball luminosity and the Lorentz factor. Such a correlation has been previously reported by independent methods. We conclude that if GRB spectra are due to photospheric emission, the dissipation cannot only be the specific scenario we consider here.
Global prevalent use, trends and practices in haemodiafiltration
Authors: Canaud Bernard , Köhler Katrin , Sichart Jan-Michael , Möller Stefan
Published: January 2019

Online haemodiafiltration (HDF) represents today the most advanced and innovative form of renal replacement therapy (RRT). Recent controlled trials tend to prove its superiority over conventional haemodialysis on hard clinical end points provided that the right convective dose was delivered. In this article we report on present prevalent use and epidemiologic trends of HDF worldwide as well as on practice patterns in HDF prescription. In addition we analyze factors that may affect HDF clinical acceptance and more widely its implementation. National and international renal registries provide valuable demographic and epidemiologic information on end stage kidney disease patients on RRT. However, the updating and maintenance of such information system is particularly challenging at a country level and even more so on an international basis. Lag time, incompleteness and/or imprecision of data collection may further hamper precision and validity of data reporting. Fresenius Medical Care (FMC), as a large dialysis care provider operating worldwide, maintains an annually updated database addressing international end stage kidney disease data. Over the last decade, FMC has produced series of precise and reliable reports analyzing RRT trends and practices worldwide. The present overview and analysis is based on our consolidated data from market survey as well as national database registries and databases of recent studies. Online HDF acceptance is growing fast in the two leading regions having approved the method, i.e. Europe and Asia Pacific, with a patient average growth rate of 12 to 24%, being far above the total patient HD growth rate of 6.6%. Today online HDF represents a new paradigm shift in RRT with promising clinical results. Further initiatives (e.g., Kidney Health Initiative, NICE) might provide further push for promoting HDF as a new standard of care in end stage kidney disease patients on a global scale.
Children, Adolescents, and Public Health: Ethical Considerations
Authors: Moon Margaret
Published: January 2019

The population of children and adolescents encompasses a remarkable range of physiological, developmental, and experiential phenomena. Considered from a global perspective, differences may seem to overwhelm similarities. This chapter proposes and explains three distinct but interrelated characteristics that should frame ethical considerations of public health approaches to children and adolescents: (1) lack of political, economic, and social power; (2) status as subject to stewardship by adults; and (3) presumed lack of capacity for decision-making.The impact of these shared characteristics is examined using public health approaches to health information, health promotion and access to confidential services. Public health policies that anticipate the risks related to powerlessness and failures of stewardship, and seek to promote respect for developing capacity can help to create conditions in which children can thrive.
Justice and Public Health
Authors: Persad Govind
Published: January 2019

This chapter discusses how justice applies to public health. It begins by outlining three different metrics employed in discussions of justice: resources, capabilities, and welfare. It then discusses different accounts of justice in distribution, reviewing utilitarianism, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism, as well as desert-based theories, and applies these distributive approaches to public health examples. Next, it examines the interplay between distributive justice and individual rights, such as religious rights, property rights, and rights against discrimination, by discussing examples such as mandatory treatment and screening. The chapter also examines the nexus between public health and debates concerning whose interests matter to justice (the “scope of justice”), including global justice, intergenerational justice, and environmental justice, as well as debates concerning whether justice applies to individual choices or only to institutional structures (the “site of justice”). The chapter closes with a discussion of strategies, including deliberative and aggregative democracy, for adjudicating disagreements about justice.
Public Health Interventions: Ethical Implications
Authors: Buchanan David R.
Published: January 2019

Public health interventions present distinct ethical challenges relative to clinical medical interventions, primarily because of their focus on prevention (rather than treatment) and their intended impact on the health of a population as a whole (rather than the individual). Public health interventions can be broadly categorized as falling into two main types: educational and environmental. Educational interventions aim to change individual behaviors, whereas environmental interventions seek to change the social and environmental conditions that encourage, require, or reinforce behaviors that are either beneficial or harmful to health. Public health interventions raise normative concerns with respect to three key ethical principles: the potential for harm (including stigmatization, lost opportunity costs, and threats to autonomy), justice, and social solidarity, particularly with respect to the problem of free riders. The high value placed on individual liberty in the modern era makes the task of asking individuals to give up freedoms to protect and promote population health increasingly difficult.
Music Assessment in Higher Education
Authors: Burrack Frederick
Published: January 2019

A major factor shaping educational assessment in higher education has been public and political demand for accountability, which often focuses on improving efficiency and effectiveness. This chapter provides a historical background of assessment in higher education; an international perspective of how expectations of accountability influenced assessment of music in higher education; a review of philosophical foundations of higher education music assessment, accreditor policies, assessment frameworks guiding curricular practice, alignment of policy to documentation of student learning, and barriers that hinder assessment in practice; and implications for future development of higher education music assessment.
Using Accountability to Improve Student Learning in Higher Education Music Programs
Authors: Ward Jeffrey
Published: January 2019

Educational accountability has become an increasingly influential factor in higher education. This chapter examines various government oversight and accreditation standards in Central and South America, Europe, and the United States and how student learning in higher education in music can be improved through meeting these standards. The author specifically describes music accreditation procedures of the National Association of Schools of Music and the American Music Therapy Association in the United States. Using accreditation standards as a guideline for program improvement, the author offers a variety of assessment best practices to engage higher education faculty in the assessment process, to improve instruction, to guide curricular development, and to ultimately improve student learning.
Connecticut Common Music Assessments
Authors: Wells Richard , Shuler Scott C.
Published: January 2019

Connecticut’s Common Music Assessment initiative positively impacted music education and, more broadly, arts education. This seven-year project culminated a series of Connecticut State Department of Education initiatives structured around the artistic process model. Teachers from Connecticut and other states formed professional learning communities (PLCs) to create, pilot, and refine standards-based units with embedded performance assessment and benchmarked student work addressing singing, composition, and improvisation. Key elements included an emphasis on student self-assessment and the power of PLCs centered on the examination of student work. These units were adopted or adapted by teachers across the United States and internationally. The initiative fostered a generation of curriculum and assessment leaders, and informed the development of the National Core Arts Standards and Model Cornerstone Assessments (MCAs). The MeasureSuccess.org site developed to facilitate this project and MCA piloting provides a platform for PLCs to engage in transformative processes such as benchmarking, standard-setting, and calibration and to disseminate units/tasks.
Culturally Responsive Assessment in Music Education
Authors: Tuncer-Boon Ebru
Published: January 2019

This chapter is constructed on culturally responsive teaching and assessment practices that the author has been involved in during her music teaching experiences with Asian-American children at the Petit String Orchestra and Junior Youth Orchestra at the University of Florida, and African American children in the United States and their violin experiences at Lincoln Elementary. The chapter explores how culturally responsive music-teaching practices and assessments support each other. The chapter discusses and identifies how culturally responsive assessment practices, as implemented in string teaching practices and music classrooms in the United States, enhance learning and emphasize student and culture-driven learning and, more specifically, develops a framework of action for analyzing and understanding culturally responsive teaching and assessment processes. In providing the recent literature and research in cross-cultural psychology, music psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this chapter opens up new ways of understanding differences in human cognitive functions, cross-cultural varieties in musical perceptions, music teaching, learning, and educational achievement.
Levinas, Feminism, and Temporality
Authors: Coe Cynthia
Published: January 2019

This chapter analyzes Levinas’s references to the feminine and the maternal through their connection to his treatment of time. Totality and Infinity provides a progressive narrative in which subjects are confronted with their responsibility to the other, and the feminine plays an instrumental role within that narrative. By contrast, Otherwise than Being discusses maternity in an anti-teleological, non-linear register. The maternal body is not the precursor to the ethical relation but an experience of ethical exposure, and one that confounds chronological representation. The concept of the maternal in Levinas’s later work thus more radically challenges the ideal of the “virile” subject, in ways that are congruent with feminist critiques, despite the fact that Levinas himself does not develop those possibilities.
What’s Wrong with “You Say You’re Happy, but . . . ” Reasoning?
Authors: Marsh Jason
Published: January 2019

Disability-positive philosophers often note a troubling tendency to dismiss what disabled people say about their well-being. This chapter seeks to get clearer on why this tendency might be troubling. It argues that recent appeals to lived experience, testimonial injustice, and certain challenges to adaptive-preference reasoning do not fully explain what is wrong with questioning the happiness of disabled people. It then argues that common attempts to debunk the claim that disabled people are happy are worrisome because they threaten everyone’s well-being and are further challenged by an argument from moral risk.
Slurs, Assertion, and Predication
Authors: Hom Christopher
Published: January 2019

A multidimensional account of the meanings of slurs holds that a slur has both literal, truth-conditional content (which is neutral) and conventional implicature (which is derogatory). This chapter offers a careful examination of the motivations and commitments for a multidimensional account and argues that the theoretic costs for such a view are prohibitive. One of the primary motivations for a multidimensional account over a purely truth-conditional account is the apparent wide-scoping phenomenon of slurs (e.g., that derogatory content does not seem cancellable under negation). The chapter argues that carefully distinguishing between predication and assertion not only dispels the misconception that the phenomena in question is centrally about scope but also vindicates the purely truth-conditional account as a more general and unified explanation.
Assertibility and Paradox
Authors: McCarthy Timothy G.
Published: January 2019

Antinomies involving the assertibility modal arise when we consider what are called “syntactic interpretations” of the assertibility operator A, translation schemes in which the operator is interpreted in terms of a monadic predicate in the nonmodal fragment of the language. Such a translation scheme, of course, is nothing more than a systematic attempt to replace the assertibility modality by a concept, and trouble tends to arise precisely when the concept is too truthlike. In this chapter, a number of paradoxical syntactic interpretations of the assertibility modality are explored. In each case, the paradox consists in an inconsistency affecting the syntactic transcription of certain apparently unexceptionable combinations of modal principles concerning the assertibility operator. It is argued that the modal construal of the notion of assertibility is fundamental, and a standard model theoretic semantics is presented for it. I finally suggest that an assertibility predicate for a language L with the assertibility operator be recovered at the metalinguistic level: a sentence p will be said to be assertible in L if and only if the sentence Ap is true in L, with the result that the alternative forms for a theory of the assertibility property in L exactly mirror the alternative forms for a theory of truth for L. Some consequences of these observations for the philosophy of mathematics are explored.
Daily Stress and Hassles
Authors: Wright Aidan G. C. , Aslinger Elizabeth N. , Bellamy Blessy , Edershile Elizabeth A. , Woods William C.
Published: January 2019

Daily stress and hassles refers to quotidian adversity and the friction of moving through life. They have proved to be strongly associated with mental health, and serve as a proximal catalyst and outcome of symptomatology. Despite their intuitive and accessible nature, the constructs of daily hassles and stress pose several significant challenges in their conceptualization and measurement. This chapter reviews historical and contemporary approaches to measuring and assessing daily stress and hassles. Conceptual and definitional issues are covered, followed by three generations of daily stress assessment: cross-sectional, ambulatory assessment, and passive sensing. A selective summary is provided of research on daily stress as it relates to mental health.
Latina/os and Race
Authors: Torres-Saillant Silvio
Published: January 2019

This chapter argues that the subject of racism and race is crucial to Latino studies in that the historical conditions responsible for birthing gospels of phenotype and fundamentalisms of ancestry began in sites of Hispanic colonial domination in our hemisphere. Only later did racial literacies and pedagogies travel to other colonial domains within the hemisphere and across the globe. The chapter stresses the crisis of Christian piety that caused colonizing nations to produce discourses of disparagement meant to reduce or stigmatize the humanity of their subjects, the eminently historical nature of racial thought, and the role of cultivated intellects in defining, demeaning, and debasing conquered populations that differed from them in heritage, origin, and appearance. It posits that racist violence, including of the genocidal kind, is not an aberration but a vital factor of the civilization that European colonial ventures forged in the Americas. It offers an outline for a pan-hemispheric history of discourse from the Anglo and Iberian Americas to illustrate how feasibly one can claim that in the hemisphere one is racist by default. The exclusion of black, Indian, or Asian-descended people not only recurs as an ideal for the region’s foremost thinkers, political theorists, and founding fathers, but it also creeps into the pages of schoolbooks and the media in general. This scenario leaves it up to the maligned groups in the citizenry to devise ways of surviving the animosity hurled at them from various levels of public discourse in their own country. Nothing, then, would seem more urgent to fuel visions of humane solidarity and peaceful coexistence across difference of phenotype and ancestry in the Americas than to rehabilitate social relations by disabling the App of racial acrimony installed in the social fabric of our nations by the founding discourses that created our civilization.
Contesting Lyme Disease
Authors: Nordmarken Sonny
Published: January 2019

In this chapter, the author examines his embodied experience with Lyme disease to chart how power and knowledge within the dominant biomedical framework were produced via engagement with medical providers. Analyzing the medical governance of Lyme disease through actors’ everyday decision-making practices, the author shows how, in failing to accurately diagnose and treat his sick body and depriving him of treatment, credentialed health care providers reproduced culturally dominant, institutionalized, yet inadequate formations of medical power-knowledge. The author’s experience of this disease illustrates how the manufacture of disease categories and their ascription regulates bodies that do not fit into established categories. Analyzing data from his own life in light of medical science research, the author advances an analytical autoethnography and dissenting embodied knowledge, legitimizing the diagnostic category of chronic Lyme disease, and introducing two concepts—contested disease and contested care—to theorize the complex phenomenon of Lyme disease.
YouTube Vlogs as Illness Narratives
Authors: Fullenkamp Natalie Kay
Published: January 2019

In this chapter we present a methodological template for the use of video diaries (vlogs) as data in social science research, with a particular eye toward the selection, coding, and analysis of vlogs as data. Amid the sea of YouTube content, vlogs provide a medium for ordinary people to tell and share sobering stories about coming to terms with profound life events. YouTube vlogs that present individuals’ experiences with illness are a case in point. Considered as illness narratives, vlogs afford a new way to both document and study the experience of illness. Of importance to us here, vlogs project the physical body into cyberspace in ways that shape how “wounded storytellers” (Frank 1995) perform their illness. Beyond the specifics of our empirical case, therefore, a study of illness vlogs is relevant to body scholars interested in the representation and construction of bodies in online spaces.
Energy as an Instrument in Global Politics
Authors: Herman Lior
Published: January 2019

Oil and natural gas have frequently been used as instruments of foreign policy. While scholars have given substantial attention to the economics of exports and imports, much less has been paid to theorizing how energy can be its own type of carrot or stick, influencing international relations around the world. Future scholarship should focus on developing foreign policy theories specific to energy, including renewable energy sources and drawing on constructivist theories. In addition, the role of transit states, energy firms, sovereign wealth funds, and civil society should be more carefully theorized. Future theoretical and empirical research should also focus on the use of electricity and renewable energies as foreign policy instruments and their effects on global politics.
Gapping and Stripping
Authors: Johnson Kyle
Published: January 2019

The chapter looks at the main attempts to model two constructions: gapping and stripping. It reviews the ways in which these constructions are similar, exploring the thesis that they both stem from the same underlying process. One of those shared properties is their restriction to coordinations—a restriction that is not found elsewhere in the menagerie of ellipsis constructions. Methods of tying this restriction to the similarly gapping/stripping-specific constraint against embedding the ellipsis or its antecedent are examined. The chapter focuses on the shortcomings of previous attempts to explain these conditions, and their counter-examples, and points to new directions of analysis that seem promising.
The Athenian Military
Authors: Burckhardt Leonhard
Published: January 2019

Chapter 12 focuses on the Athenian military during the fourth century. By the time Demosthenes was a youth Athens had more or less recovered after its major losses in the Peloponnesian Wars, but it never regained the position of power that it used to occupy in Greece at the beginning of the war. Although the Peace of Antalcidas (or King’s Peace) of 387 had largely freed Athens from the constraints of the peace treaty of 404 and despite the establishment in 378/7 of the Second Athenian League, the city was reduced to just one among a number of powers in the Greek world. Major military setbacks in conflicts with leading members of the Alliance in 357–355 and against Philip II of Macedon further restricted the Athenians’ sphere of influence. The chapter first considers military development and military leadership in fourth-century Athens before discussing the Athenian army and the fleet.
Views on the Past
Authors: Westwood Guy
Published: January 2019

Chapter 14 examines how versions of the past, particularly the Athenian past, figure and are deployed rhetorically in the public part of Demosthenes’ texts. It considers Demosthenes’ conception of Athenian history and the ways that he fashioned his historical material for communication to mass audiences by comparing his practice with that of Lycurgus, Aeschines, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. It discusses the basic unit of historical reference in Athenian oratorical texts, the paradeigma or illustrative analogy, and analyses Demosthenes’ uses of historical themes and argumentation in relation to the overall strategies of the speeches concerned. Finally, it highlights some key factors affecting the compositional and presentational choices made by orators as well as the extent to which orators modelled their self-presentation strategies on those of their political seniors (or indeed on more chronologically distant figures) and modified them to respond to those of successful rivals.
Kinship
Authors: Humphreys S. C.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 20 focuses on kinship in Athenian social life and legal proceedings, especially as illustrated in the Demosthenic corpus. It explains why kinship was important to Athenians (civil and economic status), and how legal rules, combined with norms of age at marriage and gender roles, structured the bilateral kindred and shaped relations with kin and affines, both supportive and hostile. Because Demosthenes’ career began with his attack on Aphobus, and Apollodorus also attacked his brother’s guardian Phormion, guardianship receives special attention. The article ends with new questions about the process through which speeches on kinship issues came to be circulated, and about their readership.
Law and Justice
Authors: Canevaro Mirko
Published: January 2019

Chapter 6 examines the role of law and justice in the speeches of Demosthenes and other Greek orators. The Demosthenic corpus consists of 42 judicial speeches in which issues of justice are central and legal cases are assessed for their conformity with the laws of Athens. After discussing how the laws and justice figure in the oratory of Demosthenes, in connection with the judges’ expectations and with the rules and institutional habits that determined how these cases were assessed, the chapter considers the place of law and justice in Athenian trials. It also analyses the ways that the law is applied in the Athenian lawcourts and the importance of laws being consistent among themselves and in the principles they foster.
Political Elites
Authors: Lape Susan
Published: January 2019

Chapter 8 focuses on how political elites in Athens are represented in Demosthenes’ speeches, with particular emphasis on the speakers and politicians. The speakers were a self-selected rather than elected group whose status depended on the willingness of ordinary citizens to listen to them and take them seriously. They were also usually members of the wealth elite. Although there were no formal political parties in Athens, fourth-century politicians often collaborated in informal groups to achieve their objectives. The article considers select passages from Against Meidias, a speech by Demosthenes that illustrates the importance of competition, democratic ideology, and personal history in shaping his portrayal of the proper and improper ways of being elite.
Domain-General Models of Expertise
Authors: Hambrick David Z. , Burgoyne Alexander P. , Oswald Frederick L.
Published: January 2019

This chapter reviews evidence concerning the contribution of cognitive ability to individual differences in expertise. The review covers research in traditional domains for expertise research such as music, sports, and chess, as well as research from industrial–organizational psychology on job performance. The specific question that we seek to address is whether domain-general measures of cognitive ability (e.g., IQ, working memory capacity, executive functioning, processing speed) predict individual differences in domain-relevant performance, especially beyond beginning levels of skill. Evidence from the expertise literature relevant to this question is difficult to interpret, due to small sample sizes, restriction of range, and other methodological limitations. By contrast, there is a wealth of consistent evidence that cognitive ability is a practically important and statistically significant predictor of job performance, even after extensive job experience. The chapter discusses ways that cognitive ability measures might be used in efforts to accelerate the acquisition of expertise.
Executive Dominance and Hyper-Presidentialism in Nigeria
Authors: Baba Yahaya
Published: January 2019

The chapter examines the crises that triggered the collapse of the colonially imposed parliamentary system in Nigeria. The parochial nature of regional structures and the fragility of party institutions heightened mutual suspicion, disenchantment, and violence among different segments of the country. This led to military intervention through coups and counter coups, which then ordained the adoption of a presidential system in 1979, 1989, and 1999. This was based on the assumption that presidentialism facilitates national integration. Two of the presidential arrangements (1979) and (1989) collapsed and the relative stability achieved in the Fourth Republic is again being undermined by the growing culture of executive dominance. Evidence exists that the executive treats the legislature and judiciary as subordinate rather than co-equal branches of government. The overbearing powers of the presidency undermines checks and balances and the preponderance of executive dominance in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic suggests that Nigeria is drifting dangerously towards hyper-presidentialism.
Nigeria’s Non-Western Democracy
Authors: Kiki Edozie Rita
Published: January 2019

A movement for “non-Western democracy” has emerged from a world frustrated with the inability of liberal democracy and neoliberal globalization to achieve conflict resolution, economic justice, and cultural self-determination and consensus, especially in developing world contexts. Underscoring its decentralized ethnic structures and social movements, which have developed consensual democracy mechanisms and models to address the problems and opportunities that come with democratization, this chapter presents Nigeria as a case study of non-Western democracy. The chapter chronicles Nigeria’s evolving and transformational intersections of culture, democracy, and ethnic community in ways that inform a contemporary understanding of the ongoing pressures relayed by the country’s ethnic social movements and struggles, its consociational revisions to liberal democracy, and its invocation of decentralized, cultural consensus models. The conclusion reveals how these processes underlay the distinctiveness, challenges, and opportunities confronting Nigerian democracy and analyzes them in the context of a contemporary debate about political restructuring.
Fiscal Policy during Boom and Bust
Authors: Moghalu Kingsley C. , Obikili Nonso
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the history and challenges of fiscal policy in Nigeria. It examines fiscal policy since independence in 1960 up until contemporary times. It explores the transition from an agriculture and trade-dominated government to the rise of crude oil as an important and dominating part of government revenues, and the subsequent effects the boom and bust of the crude oil commodity cycles have had. The chapter cycles through the conditions that led to the first oil boom and crash in the late 1970s, the difficult decades of adjustments that followed, and the fiscal reforms enacted during the democratic years. The chapter examines strategies that have been put in place at various points in time and explores the risks for fiscal policy going forward.
Faith, Fame, and Fortune
Authors: Ukah Asonzeh
Published: January 2019

There are more Christians in Nigeria than in other African country, a demographic situation that has produced a variety of worship styles and communities. The most socially visible is the collection of protean movements, churches, para-ministries, and organizations that scholars designate as Pentecostal-Charismatic movements. Features of these movements include: emphases on the power of the Holy Spirit to produce a new empowered person mandated to live victoriously; vibrant and emotionally charged worship styles; new desires to dominate; and the appropriation of scriptural texts to produce miracles and material well-being. More importantly, the expansion of the Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic formations is also driven by its embeddedness within the global neoliberal logic of profit-seeking, competition, and deregulation of the religious market. These features have enabled many of these churches and organizations to preach prosperity doctrines, exhibit wealth, and also engage in commercial practices that blur the boundary between worship organizations and commercial corporations.
Introduction
Authors: Levan Carl , Ukata Patrick
Published: January 2019

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and arguably its most important. This introduction provides a succinct overview of the volume’s organization into six thematic areas: chapters within Part I, “Locating Nigeria in African History,” explore the historical, spatial, and cultural dimensions of Nigeria’s existence, including its colonial past and its place in the Atlantic trade. In Part II, chapters covering “political institutions” analyze Nigeria’s legislative politics since independence, its experiments with different executives, as well as federalism, electoral politics, and the operational modalities of its military regimes. Several chapters within Part III explore civil society from theoretical, comparative, and historical perspectives. This includes labor, women’s movements, and protest music. Part IV explores and explains the vicissitudes of Nigeria’s economic performance, including the impact of oil and the possibilities for reforming that problematic sector. Within Part V, several chapters study the sources of insecurity, including Boko Haram, Biafra’s secessionist revival, and farmer-pastoralist tensions. Those authors also consider sources of conflict resolution and alternative tools for public safety, such as informal security services. Part VI situates Nigeria within a globalized world, outlining its foreign policies, transnational features of its religious practices, and its leadership role in international organizations.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and its Lasting Impact
Authors: Khan Wasiq
Published: January 2019

This chapter describes aspects of the transatlantic slave trade specific to regions that now comprise Nigeria and provides a review of academic research since the Second World War on the causes, effects, and character of the trade. Because of its volume, duration, and destabilizing effects, the trade had a profound impact on Nigeria’s political and economic evolution. Modern scholarship has centered around five recurring questions: How large was the trade? How efficient and productive was slave labor relative to free labor? Did the trade catalyze the Industrial Revolution in England? Did the trade retard the long-term economic development of Africa? Why did Africa, as opposed to many other potential source regions, become the New World’s primary provider of slave labor? Despite decades of research and scholarly debate, questions about the economic motives for the transatlantic trade and its long-term effects on Africa’s development remain unsettled.
Cultural Considerations on Online Interactions
Authors: Selim Heyla
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores cultural factors in online interaction and communication. Several major cultural theories are considered, including Hall’s (1976) distinction between high- and low-context cultures, Hofstede’s (1991) cultural dimensions, and Schwartz’s (1992) universal human values, with discussion of how these models might be applied in an online context. The discussion draws on empirical research into how people from different cultural contexts use the Internet, and focuses on online self-presentation, particularly on online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook and Twitter. These studies suggest that culture does indeed impact on how people interact online, but in ways that are sometimes unpredictable and surprising. The chapter concludes by noting that, while the advent of the Internet has not necessarily led to significant cultural convergence per se, it has underlined the fact that, while cultural context is an influential factor in how people communicate, individual differences are just as important.
Image Sharing on Social Networking Sites: Who, What, Why, and So What?
Authors: Keep Melanie , Janssen Anna , Amon Krestina
Published: January 2019

Sharing images online, particularly through social networking sites (SNSs), is a widespread activity. The popularity of image sharing on SNSs has provided researchers with a unique opportunity for investigating how and why we communicate with each other via images. This chapter discusses research about photo sharing on three popular SNSs: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The unique affordances of each platform have resulted in differences in the images people share on them, and why people choose to share or view different images across the different SNSs. Personal characteristics also shape how and why we share images online. The chapter, therefore, also considers the role of age, gender, and personality on image sharing behaviors and preferences. Finally, the chapter outlines our current understanding of the interrelationship between image sharing and mental health. This chapter thus considers: Who shares images on social media? What do they share? Why do they share these images? What are the mental health consequences of image sharing on SNSs?
The Church of the East Until the Eighth Century
Authors: Hauser Stefan R.
Published: January 2019

For a long time, the development of Christian communities within the Sasanian and early Islamic Empires was either neglected or described in terms of a history of persecution and antagonism within a Zoroastrian or Islamic state. Only recently has the perception of the extent of Christianization, the interaction of religious communities, and the importance of Christians within these societies and their upper echelons changed dramatically. The narrative of permanent conflict and oppression of Christian faith has given way to the acknowledgment of a predominant Christian population in the territory of modern Iraq and western Iran in the fifth through seventh centuries. One argument in this context is the growing body of material evidence for Christian churches and images as well as burials, which are expressions of respected and self-assured Christian communities.
Burials and Human Remains of the Eastern Mediterranean in Early Christian Context
Authors: Fox Sherry C. , Tritsaroli Paraskevi
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the contribution of the contextual study of human skeletal remains of Early Christian burials in the eastern Mediterranean. Bioarchaeological studies of sites in Greece, Cyprus, Asia Minor, and Palestine are presented to better understand the people and their burial practices from this region during a tumultuous period in the fourth through seventh centuries. The use of multiple lines of evidence such as funerary archaeology, taphonomy, and skeletal biology reveals the lifestyles and burial customs of the inhabitants from a selection of eastern Mediterranean sites. Despite regional variations, there is a great degree of uniformity in the burial customs across the areas under consideration. Finally, the populations of the eastern Mediterranean share similar demographic profiles and health outcomes. Future research will likely engage in scientific applications in archaeology that may address significant questions, such as reconstructing diet from stable isotope analyses and disease via ancient DNA analysis.
Pluralism and Toleration in James’s Social Philosophy
Authors: Talisse Robert B.
Published: January 2019

William James wrote almost nothing that would count today as political philosophy. However, it is clear that much of his work is animated by rather profound concerns with our social lives. In this sense, it may be said that James is a social philosopher. The core of Jamesian social philosophy is the doctrine of value pluralism, which animates all of his moral writings. In these essays, James repeatedly attempts to establish that this pluralism underwrites a policy of social toleration. James’s idea is that the irreducible plurality of goods entails that we each must strive for conditions under which as many goods as possible can flourish. This chapter evaluates James’s pluralist argument for social toleration. Ultimately, the chapter argues that James’s value pluralism does not provide a stable basis for social toleration. But the chapter also argues that James has at his disposal a far more promising epistemic argument for social toleration that he left largely undeveloped.
Natural Morphology
Authors: Gaeta Livio
Published: January 2019

Natural Morphology offers a fairly elaborated model for analyzing and interpreting morphological facts, which heavily relies on the one hand on a semiotic foundation of the linguistic sign and on the other on a comprehensive understanding of the cognitive, typological, and system-specific aspects of natural languages. In this regard, it crucially distinguishes a system-independent dimension in which a number of universal preferences are at play for producing and understanding morphologically complex words from a system-dependent dimension in which language-specific factors play a major role. The morphological systems of natural languages result from the dialectic relation between these two dimensions which are concretely investigated in any conceivable empirical domain offered by languages as they are used especially in natural(istic) speech contexts, from language acquisition and change to language impairment and death.