bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Molecular characterization of latent GDF8 reveals mechanisms of activation
Authors: Walker Ryan G. , McCoy Jason C. , Czepnik Magdalena , Mills Melanie J. , Hagg Adam , Walton Kelly L. , Cotton Thomas R. , Hyvönen Marko , Lee Richard T. , Gregorevic Paul , Harrison Craig A. , Thompson Thomas B.
Published: January 2018

Significance

GDF8 is a signaling protein that inhibits muscle mass. Inhibitors of GDF8 are highly sought as therapeutics for the treatment of muscle-wasting diseases. During synthesis, GDF8 is made as a precursor where the signaling segment is cleaved from the N-terminal prodomain, which remains associated and inhibits signaling. Activation involves an additional cleavage of the prodomain. We demonstrate GDF8 signaling could be gained through a conformational change where the prodomain remains associated with the signaling segment. Alteration of the prodomain can weaken the interactions causing GDF8 to signal, thus alleviating inhibition by the prodomain. This study illuminates how GDF8 transitions from an inhibited state to an active state—information that will help to understand the mechanism of GDF8 signaling.
Challenges in the formability of the next generation of automotive steel sheets
Authors: Yi H. L. , Sun L. , Xiong X. C.
Published: January 2018

Improving strength may lightweight car bodies by thinning the structure gauge while bearing the same crash loads. Development of the third generation advanced high-strength steels aiming to boost material ductility to over 30% total elongation has become the common sense of potential solutions for stamping. Not only total elongation but also several other parameters, involving presswork hardening, anisotropy ratio, strain rate sensitivity, uniform elongation, edge sensitivity and internal stress between phases, are critical in determining the formability under the complex stress and strain distributions during stamping. We clarify here the logic of formability and difficulties in this context of three types of steel: quenching and partitioning, δ-transformation-induced plasticity and medium Mn-TRIP.
Large load friction stir welding of Mg–6Al–0.4Mn–2Ca magnesium alloy
Authors: Xu Nan , Song Qining , Jiang Yuan , Bao Yefeng , Fujii Hidetoshi
Published: January 2018

Friction stir welded (FSW) magnesium alloys usually exhibit a lower yield strength and elongation compared with base materials. In this study, large load FSW associated with an extremely low welding speed and rotation rate were applied to a non-combustive Mg–6Al–0.4Mn–2Ca magnesium alloy to modify the microstructure and texture in the weld zone and improve the mechanical properties of the joint. The twin structure in the stir zone provided adequate barriers for dislocation motion for strengthening and created more local sites for nucleating and accommodating dislocations, thereby elevating ductility and strain hardening in the transverse tensile test. The results showed that the yield strength and elongation of the joint were enhanced to 98% and 126% of the base material levels, respectively.
Interleukin-10 stiffens the heart
Authors: Cihakova Daniela
Published: January 2018

Cardiac-resident macrophages are a diverse population of cells that have a critical role in the pathogenesis of heart failure. A new understanding of communication between macrophages and cardiac fibroblasts could lead to novel therapeutic strategies for heart failure with preserved ejection function.
Up all night: BK channels’ circadian dance with different calcium sources
Authors: Sedwick Caitlin
Published: January 2018

JGP study explores diurnal changes in calcium sources governing BK activity in the SCN.
Primer3_masker: integrating masking of template sequence with primer design software
Authors: Kõressaar Triinu , Lepamets Maarja , Kaplinski Lauris , Raime Kairi , Andreson Reidar , Remm Maido
Published: January 2018

Designing PCR primers for amplifying regions of eukaryotic genomes is a complicated task because the genomes contain a large number of repeat sequences and other regions unsuitable for amplification by PCR. We have developed a novel k-mer based masking method that uses a statistical model to detect and mask failure-prone regions on the DNA template prior to primer design. We implemented the software as a standalone software primer3_masker and integrated it into the primer design program Primer3.

Availability and implementation

The standalone version of primer3_masker is implemented in C. The source code is freely available at https://github.com/bioinfo-ut/primer3_masker/ (standalone version for Linux and macOS) and at https://github.com/primer3-org/primer3/ (integrated version). Primer3 web application that allows masking sequences of 196 animal and plant genomes is available at http://primer3.ut.ee/.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Where can a Trappist-1 planetary system be produced?
Authors: Haworth Thomas J , Facchini Stefano , Clarke Cathie J , Mohanty Subhanjoy
Published: January 2018

We study the evolution of protoplanetary discs that would have been precursors of a Trappist-1-like system under the action of accretion and external photoevaporation in different radiation environments. Dust grains swiftly grow above the critical size below which they are entrained in the photoevaporative wind, so although gas is continually depleted, dust is resilient to photoevaporation after only a short time. This means that the ratio of the mass in solids (dust plus planetary) to the mass in gas rises steadily over time. Dust is still stripped early on, and the initial disc mass required to produce the observed 4 M⊕ of Trappist-1 planets is high. For example, assuming a Fatuzzo & Adams distribution of UV fields, typical initial disc masses have to be >30 per cent the stellar (which are still Toomre Q stable) for the majority of similar mass M dwarfs to be viable hosts of the Trappist-1 planets. Even in the case of the lowest UV environments observed, there is a strong loss of dust due to photoevaporation at early times from the weakly bound outer regions of the disc. This minimum level of dust loss is a factor of 2 higher than that which would be lost by accretion on to the star during 10 Myr of evolution. Consequently, even in these least irradiated environments, discs that are viable Trappist-1 precursors need to be initially massive (>10 per cent of the stellar mass).
Chandra X-ray constraints on the candidate Ca-rich gap transient SN 2016hnk
Authors: Sell P H , Arur K , Maccarone T J , Kotak R , Knigge C , Sand D J , Valenti S
Published: January 2018

We present a Chandra observation of SN 2016hnk, a candidate Ca-rich gap transient. This observation was specifically designed to test whether or not this transient was the result of the tidal detonation of a white dwarf by an intermediate-mass black hole. Since we detect no X-ray emission 28 d after the discovery of the transient, as predicted from fall-back accretion, we rule out this model. Our upper limit of ∼10 M⊙ does not allow us to rule out a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole detonator due limits on the sensitivity of Chandra to soft X-rays and unconstrained variables tied to the structure of super-Eddington accretion discs. Together with other Chandra and multiwavelength observations, our analysis strongly argues against the intermediate-mass black hole tidal detonation scenario for Ca-rich gap transients more generally.
Americanists in Unexpected Places
Authors: Blaustein George
Published: January 2018

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”
Meta-Analysis
Authors: Haig Brian D.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 5 is concerned with the conceptual foundations of meta-analysis. It deals with large-scale issues having to do with meta-analysis and the nature of science. Meta-analysis is an approach to data analysis that involves the quantitative, or statistical, analysis of data analyses from a number of existing primary studies in a common domain. At its simplest, meta-analysis involves computing the average effect size for a group of studies. The chapter begins by discussing Gene Glass’s rationale for meta-analysis. It then examines David Sohn’s argument that meta-analysis does not produce genuine scientific discoveries. The roles of meta-analysis in relation to the processes of phenomena detection and scientific explanation are also considered.
A Way of Music Education as a Way of Life
Authors: Fung C. Victor
Published: January 2018

This chapter recaps the idea that a triad of classic Chinese sources (Yijing, classic Confucianism, and classic Daoism) forms the basis of a philosophy of music education, which is presented as a trilogy (change, balance, and liberation). It highlights the importance of persistent improvement and iterates that the human spirit is at the center of this philosophy. While the classic wisdoms are ancient, the human spirit transcends time and space. The human spirit is preserved regardless of the changes that occur in the society, culture, or everyday materials, and it is bestowed in music and music education. To live a proactive musical life is to enable musical liberation and to promote prosperity in life. In a state of liberation, humans are able to do anything as wished only within the bounds of humanly dao and heavenly dao.
Introduction
Authors: Whittier Nancy
Published: January 2018

The introduction lays out a model of social movement relationships that are neither coalitions nor oppositional, including their form and outcomes. It outlines three types of relationships between feminists and conservatives: collaborative adversarial relationships, narrow neutrality, and ambivalent alliances. It gives an overview of the three case studies (pornography, child sexual abuse, and the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA). It discusses feminist and conservative engagement with the intersections of gender and race in issues of violence and crime. It discusses mechanisms and paths of social movement outcomes for federal legislation and policy and cultural processes within the state, including emotion, frames, and discourse. It gives an overview of the book’s methodology and data, including analysis of transcripts of congressional hearings, conservative and feminist publications, amicus briefs, and governmental and archival material.
Opposition to Pornography
Authors: Whittier Nancy
Published: January 2018

Chapter 2 shows how antipornography feminists and conservatives were ideologically opposed to each other but briefly engaged with some of the same governmental bodies in the 1980s. The chapter challenges the accepted story that feminists made common cause with conservatives. It defines them as collaborative adversaries, who staked out distinct positions and collaborated covertly, each hoping to use the other to advance their own agenda. Both sides interacted with municipal governments, the federal Attorney General’s Commission on the Status of Pornography (i.e., Meese Commission), and Congress. Activism and Congressional attention to pornography peaked during two different periods. During the years of peak activity, 1982‒1988, when feminists and conservatives were both highly mobilized; feminist frames emphasizing harms to women gained ground and legal obscenity enforcement grew. Their greater political power gave conservatives more influence than feminists. Between 1997‒2006, congressional attention peaked again; conservatives remained active on the issue, but feminists were sidelined and pornography was framed primarily as harmful to children. The chapter discusses feminist conflict over pornography and how participants in collaborative adversarial relationships defend their reputations. The chapter also covers the changing legal and policy landscape for federal obscenity enforcement.
Building the Webb Community
Authors: Howe Justine
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the suburban religious landscape, educational networks, and narratives of the American Muslim past out of which the Webb community emerged. It demonstrates how the suburbs are a vital site to study broader dynamics in the American Muslim community. At its heart, the Webb Foundation is built on the idea that the Chicago suburbs can be the ideal place to practice Islam. Its core membership consists of young parents who are very committed to upper-middle-class norms of intensive parenting, such as supervising homework, shuttling kids between after-school activities, and maintaining an active presence in their social lives. The American Islam they seek to create fits into these constructions of family life, enabling children and adults alike to become American Muslims in ways they believe earlier generations were either unable or unwilling to be.
All-American Islam
Authors: Howe Justine
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the role of consumer culture and leisure in the performance of American Muslim culture. The Webb community embraces American culture as the fullest expression of their Muslim identity. Its members locate these efforts in two foundational narratives: that of premodern generations of Muslims, who embraced local cultures as their own, and that of white ethnic immigrants, who successfully made previously suspect religious traditions into mainstream ones. These practices demonstrate both the possibilities and constraints of Webb’s mission to rehabilitate American representations of Islam. Through leisure activities centered on the nuclear family unit, the community builds relationships among parents and their children, as well as among peers. Webb youth and parents also participate regularly in community service, partnering with various local organizations to provide assistance to less privileged communities.
Jim Crow Storytelling
Authors: McRae Elizabeth Gillespie
Published: January 2018

Nell Battle Lewis, a liberal white supremacist writing for the Raleigh News and Observer, did important political work for the Jim Crow world by translating everyday experience into stories that supported the segregatedsocial system. Lewis’s white supremacist politics took root in her beliefs in Progressive Era reform, modern science, eugenics, and women’s civic participation. Her writings offered lessons that gendered ideas about women’s citizenship, progressivism, and the Jim Crow order. She knew that the segregated order was never as secure as it might seem. White people needed instruction in how to maintain white supremacy, and white apathy or white misuse of racial authority threatened the very system that guaranteed their political, economic, and cultural authority. She criticized the way segregation as practiced departed from the way it should be, calling on fellow white southerners to live up to separate but equal, not abandon it.
White Women, White Youth, and the Hope of the Nation
Authors: McRae Elizabeth Gillespie
Published: January 2018

After Brown, white segregationist women build national organizations and were devoted to making white youth political activists and future purveyors of white supremacy. As the legal support for segregation diminished, the Jim Crow order remade itself. While moderates directed the implementation of integration, southern segregationist women continued to work in various ways and with national political constituencies to secure resistance to racial equality and to meaningful integration. They continued their efforts for racial segregation after the forced federal integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and of Ole Miss. As white segregationists focused on training white youth for the next iteration of white supremacist politics, they gradually amplified their color-blind political rhetoric. They built organizations like the Women for Constitutional Government and Patriotic American Youth that emphasized limited government, anti-communism, and school choice and opposition to decolonization, joining conservatives and segregationists nationwide to shape the New Right.
Icon and Aura
Authors: Morgan David
Published: January 2018

The icon is not just a certain kind of religious image developed during the early Byzantine empire and still used today in Orthodox Christianity. The chapter defines a broader category of the cultural icon as a key feature of modern visual culture and a powerful instance of enchantment in a secular context. With examples from popular culture and history, the text shows the enduring quality of an icon. Indeed, icons are powerful devices that operate in terms of an extended apparatus of iterations that shuttle aura across space and time in traffic with what matters. The icon enchants by pledging action at a distance, mediated by unseen chains of images reiterated in it.
Bill the Blogger
Authors: Amann Diane Marie
Published: January 2018

In a final twist on the preceding essays in this volume, ‘Bill the Blogger’ adapts the style of online publishing to review Professor Schabas’s own foray into this emergent form of public discourse. It locates blogging and other new-media developments within the frame of academic and international law teaching and scholarship. The principal focus is on his founding of the ‘PhD studies in human rights’. Its initial post concerned the Charles Taylor trial. Thereafter, Professor Schabas’s constructed content for describing law in action in the many areas of interest to him, including aggression, death penalty, culture, education, genocide, human rights, and international criminal law.
Degrees of Embodiment in Literary Reading
Authors: Caracciolo Marco
Published: January 2018

This chapter surveys some of the key issues in the study of embodiment in literary reading. Recent research in psycholinguistics has called attention to the role of motor resonance and experiential models in understanding language—two psychological mechanisms often brought together under the heading of “embodied simulation.” How does literary reading, and particularly reading literary narrative, leverage these embodied phenomena? Does embodiment always matter in reading or only in specific circumstances? Building on linguist David Ritchie’s scalar account of embodied simulation, and using Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as a case study, this chapter distinguishes among various types of embodied involvement and shows how they shape the experience of reading Ellis’s novel. It also draws attention to the question of consciousness, calling for empirical research on the interplay between unconscious processes and lived experience (mental imagery, bodily feelings, etc.) in engaging with literary narrative.
Ut Pictura Poesis? The Poetics of Verbal Imagery
Authors: Zeman Sonja
Published: January 2018

How can verbal-cued poetry be “visual,” “pictorial,” and “vivid”? This chapter aims at looking behind such notions by isolating the basic semiotic mechanisms of vision, picture-viewing, and mental imagery and provides a descriptive model to investigate (1) the semiotic dimension of verbal imagery with respect to its visual and pictorial character and (2) its relationship to the reader’s experience of mental imagery. Through exemplary analyses of visual poetry, onomatopoeia, figurative language, the historical present, and ekphrastic descriptions, it is shown that the literary core concepts of “visuality,” “pictoriality,” and “vividness” refer to surface phenomena that are not directly linked to the phenomenal experience of visual perception and image likeness. The results are discussed against the background of recent neurocognitive studies, leading to the conclusion that such notions should be given up in favor of a general model of representation in terms of poetic iconicity.
Elusive Qualities in Poetry, Receptivity, and Neural Correlates
Authors: Tsur Reuven
Published: January 2018

Arnheim’s terms “actively organizing mind” and “passively receiving mind” can usefully be applied in practical criticism to suggest the significance of poetic structures as described by more concrete terms. But it is not quite clear what exactly they refer to. This chapter explores how the latter term can be illuminating in close readings of poems by Verlaine. Neuropsychological findings proposed in the last section fill those terms with more solid meaning. When you experience sensory stimuli, certain areas in the secondary somatosensory cortex light up. When you perceive yourself as the voluntary agent causing the sensations, this activity is suppressed. This may account for the observation that the actively organizing mind is less sensitive to elusive sensations in poetry than a passive attitude. This chapter explores the linguistic means—syntactic, semantic, and phonetic—by which Verlaine’s texts manipulate the fictional speaker and/or the flesh-and-blood reader into a passive stance.
The Seventh Continent
Authors: Walker Elsie
Published: January 2018

This chapter is an auteurist analysis that establishes the fundamental sonic patterns of Haneke’s work, especially as they create impact through concentrated moments. Like Mother Courage’s silent scream, these moments are self-consciously constructed to unsettle us, raise questions, challenge conventions of representation, and demand our emotional and intellectual reactions to them as such. This close analysis of The Seventh Continent illuminates the dominant sonic patterns of Haneke’s cinema, including: heightened sound effects of everyday objects and actions, atypical emphasis on absent sound and silences, the non-sutured use of sound, the use of music as “noise,” sound effects that are carefully “orchestrated,” pared-down dialogue, abrasively depersonalized and often acousmatized speech, and the sparing use of music that is clearly meant to be heard.
Funny Games
Authors: Walker Elsie
Published: January 2018

Having established the dominant sonic patterns of Haneke’s cinema in relation to The Seventh Continent, this chapter combines an auteur-centered approach with genre studies. More specifically, it analyzes how Funny Games disobeys sonic rules of mainstream thrillers, including: a comparative lack of non-diegetic music, few stingers to punctuate shocking moments, and an absence of sexualized sounds when the female victim resists her killer. The defamiliarizing experience of Funny Games confronts us with what it means to view violence as entertainment, especially through its uncomfortable extremes of sonic bombast (including the music of John Zorn), its terrifying use of everyday sounds, and its extended quiet around scenes of most terror and grief. Like the family of victims, we are forced into subjection by the killers who “direct” most of the film’s sounds, along with being made to experience the silent and beyond-verbal agony of its victims.
Caché
Authors: Walker Elsie
Published: January 2018

This chapter is a sonic analysis of Caché as an important postcolonial statement, one that attempts to redress historical injustices by amplifying the buried truths, and the ongoing fallout, of France’s colonial legacy. More specifically, the chapter explains the sonic significance of the characters’ speech, silences, and failures to face truths and understand each other (represented by the aural motif of their saying “nothing”), especially in relation to the historically suppressed massacre of Algerians protesting for Independence in October 1961. The chapter also dwells on the film’s undeniable power in the complete absence of any music to mediate its uncompromising representation of lasting social inequities in a postcolonial nation, and on a massive scale. The analysis engages with many other critical reactions to Caché that, like much scholarship on Haneke, downplay sonic subtleties and their progressive significance.
Conclusions and Implications
Authors: van Prooijen Jan-Willem
Published: January 2018

This final chapter summarizes the main propositions and concludes that punishment originates from moral emotions, stimulates and sustains cooperation, and shapes the social life of humans both within and between groups. Punishment hence is a hardwired moral instinct that evolved to stimulate cooperation in small groups. The remainder of the chapter discusses the practical implications of these insights for public policy, courts of law, organizations, schools, sports, and any other setting that requires punishment to stimulate cooperation. The main implications are (1) when punishing, fairness is more successful than severity in establishing cooperation; (2) for punishment to be effective, one should discourage big egos and personal vendettas, and leave punishment up to independent third parties; (3) punishment is most effective if combined with restorative justice; and (4) one should try to avoid inter-group bias by relying on reason instead of emotions when assigning punishment.
Advocating for Twice Exceptional Students
Authors: Weinfeld Rich
Published: January 2018

It is clear that our schools are not adequately meeting the needs of twice exceptional (2e) students. To ensure that our 2e students are receiving appropriate education, professionals and parents must advocate that each student receives a meaningful Individualized Educational program (iep). Advocating effectively for 2e students requires an understanding of the law and knowledge of both the challenges of appropriate identification and the best practices for educating this population. Based on the author’s experience in over four decades of advocating for students with special needs, this chapter offers a recipe for thinking through each of these areas in a collaborative way with the school team in order to develop appropriate educational programs.
Visuo-Spatial Skills in Atypical Readers
Authors: Crogman Maryam Trebeau , Gilger Jeffrey , Hoeft Fumiko
Published: January 2018

Atypical learners, including those with developmental dyslexia or reading disorder (RD) and twice exceptionality (2e), exhibit a wide variety of cognitive profiles. The empirical data reviewed in this chapter suggest that RD individuals as a group do not generally exhibit superior visual-spatial abilities, but there appear to be specific types of visuo-spatial (VS) skills that RD individuals may show strengths in. This may be particularly true for a subset of RD individuals who could be classified as 2e-RD. This chapter aims to highlight the need for a different theoretical and applied approach to how VS skills in RD populations are considered; it also suggests the need for different methodologies to assess those skills. Recommendations are made for future research to better characterize the VS aspects of the RD profile, their possible neurological underpinnings, and what may be unique VS processing mechanisms in RD and 2e-RD populations.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Authors: Mayes Renae D. , Hines Erik M. , Moore III James L.
Published: January 2018

Greater literature on twice exceptionality has led to increased understanding and practical applications in supporting the success of students. However, much of the literature does not take into consideration the intersection of giftedness, disability, and cultural identities, which can significantly shape the experience of students in school. This chapter focuses on these intersecting identities through a case study of a gifted African American student with a learning disability. This case study illustrates both the challenges and strengths that this student faced in his K-12 educational pursuit. Further, the chapter offers practical solutions and strategies for teachers and school counselors to collaborate with families to promote student success.
Bridges Academy
Authors: Sabatino Carl , Wiebe Chris
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the programmatic components of a successful strength-based school serving twice exceptional (2e) students in grades 4 through 12. The chapter first provides a brief overview of the school’s background to shed light on the unique learning needs of 2e students and discusses the institutional foundations and beliefs that best support student growth. An overview of the school’s Multiple Perspectives Model shows how faculty members focus on several factors—including students’ gifts and talents, learning differences, and family contexts—to make decisions about learning strategies in a dynamic educational environment. The school stresses the importance of a culture of appreciation of students’ strengths while differentiating and dual differentiating their curricula to move students forward to appropriate levels of depth and complexity in their learning. Finally, the chapter underscores the need for flexible school policies that embrace creative problem-solving and put the needs of the student above external rules and regulations.
Discursive Psychological Approaches to the (Un)making of Sex/Gender
Authors: Donaghue Ngaire
Published: January 2018

Discursive psychologists question the taken-for-granted status of the categories that are used to classify and investigate human experience (Potter & Edwards, 1996). Instead of assuming the “reality” of sex/gender and conducting empirical investigations into the qualities that characterize “each” of the sexes, discursive psychologists investigate how the concepts of “sex” and “gender” are constructed through their use in both scientific and everyday contexts. For discursive psychologists, there are no “pregiven” meanings attached to the categories of sex/gender. What these categories mean, what they signify, is a matter of negotiation and consensus. This chapter concerns how discursive psychologists have challenged the various assumptions underlying traditional sex differences research and considers alternate approaches drawn from discursive psychology to asking questions about sex/gender.
Muslim America
Authors: Ali Muna
Published: January 2018

This chapter gives a brief historical tour of Muslim America to provide a context for situating the younger generations of Muslims— the second and third generations of immigrants and of convert Muslims— in both intra-community and societal dynamics. It shows the ethno-racial and class diversity of this group, then provides a detailed profile of the participants in this ethnographic study. The two study areas—Chicagoland and Phoenix-valley—are also described in regard to their Muslim residents. This chapter argues that though immigrant and convert Muslim Americas are often presented as having parallel histories, theirs is a shared history in which they have coauthored each chapter, in spite of their divergent origins and internal tensions.
College and Christ
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: January 2018

When Protestant fundamentalists founded their network of colleges and universities in the 1920s, they often complained that their ideas and values had been kicked out of mainstream schools. They were right. Since the 1870s, a dramatic revolution had transformed American higher education. Modern research universities no longer inculcated young people with a specific Christian faith, but rather hoped to open students’ minds to the possibilities of knowledge. That religious transformation, however, was only part of the widespread academic revolution. Student culture changed drastically, with new emphasis on sports and student clubs. Universities absorbed professional and technical training programs in fields such as agriculture, law, and engineering.
What Is College For?
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: January 2018

By the 1950s, more and more colleges and universities had moved toward new, modern standards of admissions and degree requirements. Schools worked hard to earn accreditation to prove that they had met these expensive regulations. With a few significant exceptions, evangelical and fundamentalist schools participated in this trend. However, they maintained their distinctive intellectual atmospheres, encouraging students and faculty to think about their higher-education experience in unique ways. For some, that meant thinking of missionary training as the main purpose of higher education. For others, that meant infusing schools with specific ideas about theology and politics, such as Calvinism or free-market capitalism.
Learn One for the Gipper
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: January 2018

By the late 1970s, fundamentalist schools no longer pretended to stand aloof from electoral politics. But though pundits and scholars tended to think of this as something new, it actually represented a continuation of a long tradition. Since the 1920s, evangelical and fundamentalist campuses had always been hotbeds of political thought and activism, usually along conservative lines. Similarly, by the 1970s a new debate split creationists, with fundamentalists often insisting on young-earth beliefs and evangelicals hoping for a more profound engagement with mainstream science. The angry split between young-earth creationist fundamentalists and progressive creationist evangelicals reinforced the long running feud at all conservative-evangelical institutions.
Contempt, Futility, and Exemption
Authors: Vallier Kevin , Weber Michael
Published: January 2018

Exemptions from laws of general application are sometimes granted on the basis of an individual’s unwillingness to comply with the law. Most such volitional exemptions involve a conflict between the law and the demands of an individual’s religious or secular moral convictions. I argue here that a limited number of volitional exemptions can be justified on the basis of a futility principle. When otherwise morally permissible penalties for violating the law cannot be expected to induce the compliance of an intransigent minority, the penalties are futile, and the state has some principled reason to exempt the minority from the law’s requirements. Since the futility principle only applies to some cases of conscientious objection, it differs in important ways from justifications grounded in a general entitlement to religious or moral exemptions.
Italian Imperialism and Sanusi Authority at the Turn of the Century
Authors: Ryan Eileen
Published: January 2018

Italian unification preceded a new era of European imperial expansion. Italian nationalists were eager to ensure Italy’s position as a European great power by claiming overseas territories. For many Italians, adventures in East Africa served only as a distraction from the goal of securing the Mediterranean. After the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 and the Italian military disaster at Adwa in 1896, Italian imperialists turned their focus to the Ottoman districts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in modern-day Libya. It was during these last decades of the nineteenth century that the Sanusiyya emerged as an undeniable political, social, and religious force in North Africa. Any central state authorities with an interest in securing the eastern Libyan district of Cyrenaica had to engage with the Sanusiyya. Sanusi elites developed patterns of engaging with centralized state authorities that would inform their reactions to the Italian occupation after 1911.
Religion and Power in the Fascist Colonies
Authors: Ryan Eileen
Published: January 2018

Idris al-Sanusi’s departure and the rise of the fascist regime in Italy introduced a new phase in the Italian occupation of Libya. The Sanusiyya came to be redefined as an anticolonial Islamic force rather than an intermediary of state authority. Under the leadership of Mussolini’s first minister of colonies, Luigi Federzoni, the Italian colonial administration moved away from attempts to negotiate authority through Sanusi mediation, though this shift occurred gradually. At the same time, Federzoni introduced a firm commitment to a Catholic identity in Italian imperial expansion. This hardening of divisions culminated in the military campaign known as the reconquest of the Libyan interior in the late 1920s. The symbolic end of the campaign occurred with the capture and execution of the Sanusi military leader ‘Umar al-Mukhtar in 1931. Declaring Libya open for mass colonization, the fascist colonial administration imagined a territory that would become fully Italian and fully Catholic.
The Goodness of Home
Authors: Marandiuc Natalia
Published: January 2018

Bringing together the strands of the book’s argument, the chapter proposes that a relational home is both anthropological and pneumatological, enabling human freedom. Kierkegaard’s divine middle term understood here as the Holy Spirit, who inhabits the attachment space between human beings, holds the relational space in place, preventing its implosion or dissolution and making it a space of belonging, which befits the concept of home. It is suggested that Jesus’s embodied life provides the pattern for meeting human need and desire, as Jesus is both needful of and a generous giver of human love while simultaneously the most perfect union of human and divine loves working in tandem. The chapter proposes that the self is cocreated and sustained by relational homes that mediate and participate in the streams of divine love that originate in God, reach human lives, and empower human beings to become channels of such love toward other people.
Alcohol Use Disorder
Authors: Ponomarev Igor
Published: January 2018

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is characterized by clinically significant impairments in health and social function. Epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation may provide an attractive explanation for how early life exposures to alcohol contribute to the development of AUD and exert lifelong effects on the brain. This chapter provides a critical discussion of the role of epigenetic mechanisms in AUD etiology and the potential of epigenetic research to improve diagnosis, evaluate risks for alcohol-induced pathologies, and promote development of novel therapies for the prevention and treatment of AUD. Challenges of the current epigenetic approaches and future directions are also discussed.
Alcohol and Youth
Authors: Bacio Guadalupe A. , Brumback Ty , Brown Sandra A.
Published: January 2018

Adolescence is a period of intense transition and change, from social and emotional changes with increased independence from family to physical changes associated with the onset of puberty. The onset of involvement with alcohol and drugs emerges simultaneously with these interrelated biological, cognitive, affective, and social changes. This chapter considers how developmental processes and emerging domains of functioning impact alcohol consumption in adolescence and presents examples of two lines of research that use integrative models to explore these relationships: the National Consortium on Alcohol and NeuroDevelopment in Adolescence, a longitudinal study designed to examine the developmental impact of alcohol and other drug use on neuroanatomy, neurocognition, and behavior; and Project Options, a voluntary, high school-based intervention aimed at reducing dangerous alcohol use. The chapter concludes with a discussion of research questions for future study, highlighting the central function of technological, behavioral, biomedical, and data analytic advances in these efforts.
Substance Use and Abuse During Adolescence and the Transition to Adulthood Are Developmental Phenomena
Authors: Schulenberg John , Maslowsky Julie , Jager Justin
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes characteristics of a developmental perspective on substance use regarding age curves; heterogeneity in course; embeddedness within all else that is changing developmentally and historically; and a life course emphasis on distal upstream predictors and downstream consequences as well as more proximal developmental mechanisms and consequences, including transitions, turning points, and developmental disturbances. The chapter then describes the developmental and historical context of adolescence and the transition to adulthood, followed by a consideration of key conceptual issues related to developmental continuity, discontinuity, and transitions. Next, it examines implications for understanding risk and protective factors for, and consequences of, substance use during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. it concludes with a discussion of opportunities and challenges for future research.
Who Is Using Alternative Tobacco Products and Why?
Authors: Loukas Alexandra , Agarwal Deepti
Published: January 2018

There is a growing array of alternative tobacco and nicotine products, such as hookah, cigarillos, snus, and electronic nicotine delivery systems (e-cigarettes). Both e-cigarette and hookah use are now more prevalent than cigarette use among adolescents in the United States. Alternative products are appealing to adolescents and young adults because they are available in a variety of flavors, often cheaper than cigarettes, and perceived to be less harmful than cigarettes. Existing studies are beginning to provide important information on the prevalence, correlates, and patterns of alternative tobacco and nicotine product use. Longitudinal models that map developmental trajectories and transitions of tobacco and nicotine use are needed to examine factors associated with persistence, progression, or desistence of use and also with changes in patterns of use. Future research can draw on developmental traditions in other areas of substance use to describe the heterogeneity in product use across time.
The Power of Uncivil Conversation
Authors: Thompson Douglas I.
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates Michel de Montaigne’s engagement with the Italian humanist conception of “civil conversation” as an exercise for training effective political counselors and ambassadors. Using himself as a model, Montaigne prescribes a more confrontational, uncivil form of conversation as a means to train his readers into a high tolerance for political negotiation with the widest possible range of interlocutors and opinions. Following the conventions of the humanist literature on political education, Montaigne argues that the best way to practice political negotiation and other forms of conversation with political opponents is to go out and do it. The chapter then compares this theme of the Essais with Rainer Forst’s conception of tolerance as a form of civil public reason.
Radical Moderation
Authors: Thompson Douglas I.
Published: January 2018

Renaissance theories of diplomacy seek to address the tension between the ambassador’s dual roles as mediator between princes and representative of one prince exclusively. Michel de Montaigne transposes this concern onto the question of how to negotiate the resolution of civil conflict when one is a partisan within the conflict. In his view, moderation is the capacity that this activity demands. This is a deeply paradoxical virtue: if one is to be moderate and not overly hostile toward all signs of partisanship, one must retain some contact with partisan extremes. Montaigne argues that one should handle this paradox by acknowledging the customary, habitual aspects of one’s partisan attachments, so that one may affirm them without incapacitating oneself politically. The chapter then compares Montaigne’s conception of moderation with William Connolly’s conception of “bicameral citizenship,” which also seeks to enable non-incapacitating partisanship.
National Liberalisms in Historical Perspective
Authors: Vail Mark I.
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the development of French, German, and Italian liberalism from the nineteenth century to the 1980s, giving particular attention to each tradition’s conceptions of the role of the state and its relationship to groups and individual citizens. Using a broad range of historical source material and the works of influential political philosophers, it outlines the analytical frameworks central to French “statist liberalism,” German “corporate liberalism,” and Italian “clientelist liberalism.” It shows how these evolving traditions shaped the structure of each country’s postwar political-economic model and the policy priorities developed during the postwar boom through the early 1970s and provides conceptual touchstones for the direction and character of these traditions’ evolution in the face of the neoliberal challenge since the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates that each tradition accepted elements of a more liberal economic order while rejecting neoliberalism’s messianic market-making agenda and its abstract and disembedded political-economic vision.
Methodological Guidance
Authors: Linos Katerina
Published: January 2018

To develop arguments about international law we often must study how different countries act. International courts, casebook and textbook authors, and other scholars often reference the practices of foreign states. International lawyers are well aware of the need of comparison. What we lack is the toolkit to select and develop these comparative analyses. As a result, comparisons often focus on countries that share strong linguistic, cultural, legal, and political ties, which is not always analytically ideal. This chapter synthesizes key findings to the following questions, and applies them to fundamental questions in international law: How can we know whether we are cherry-picking examples that favor our preferred conclusions? When is it best to develop examples from countries that are very different from one’s own, and when should one focus on similar ones? How should one define similarity? And finally, which aspects of foreign systems are most relevant for particular inquiries?
Why Comparative International Law Needs International Relations Theory
Authors: Abebe Daniel
Published: January 2018

This chapter challenges the conventional wisdom that international relations theory has nothing to offer scholars interested in comparative international law. It argues that comparativists should not underestimate the value of international relations theory in explaining how and why certain states adopt particular interpretations of international law. While international relations theory cannot explain the evolution of specific doctrines, it can be very useful in understanding the general approaches to international law that states embrace. The chapter develops the connection between domestic institutional design and the interpretation of international law on one side, and realism, institutionalism, and liberalism on the other. It argues that greater consideration of the relationship among power, domestic institutional design, and international relations theory paradigms will not only prove fruitful for the comparative international law project but also for those thinking about the aims of international law and the operation of international politics.
International Law in National Legal Systems
Authors: Verdier Pierre-Hugues , Versteeg Mila
Published: January 2018

International legal scholars have long recognized the importance of the relationship between international law and domestic legal systems. This chapter draws upon a new data set, which covers 101 countries for the period 1815–2013 and records specific features of national approaches to international law, including treaty-making procedures, the status of treaties in domestic law, and the reception of customary international law. The chapter finds that national legal systems have become more likely to give treaties direct effect and hierarchical superiority over domestic law, but at the same time have steadily expanded the categories of treaties whose ratification requires prior legislative approval. With respect to CIL, the chapter finds that the vast majority of national legal systems now recognize custom as directly applicable, at least in principle, but generally consider it to be hierarchically inferior to domestic law. The chapter discusses the implications of these findings for comparative international law.