bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Methyltransferase-like protein 16 binds the 3′-terminal triple helix of MALAT1 long noncoding RNA
Authors: Brown Jessica A. , Kinzig Charles G. , DeGregorio Suzanne J. , Steitz Joan A.
Published: November 2016

Significance

RNA triple helices were deduced to form in vitro almost 60 years ago, yet only three examples from eukaryotic cellular RNAs have been structurally validated. The longest triple helix, the MALAT1 (metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1) ENE+A (element for nuclear expression with a downstream A-rich tract), presents an opportunity to investigate the biological roles of these enigmatic structures. We have discovered that the MALAT1 triple helix is specifically recognized and bound by METTL16 (methyltransferase-like protein 16). There are two important implications: (
i
) the MALAT1 triple helix is a bona fide structure in the cellular environment and (
ii
) there may exist an undiscovered class of triple-stranded RNA binding proteins. METTL16’s antiproliferative role in
Caenorhabditis elegans
suggests that the METTL16–MALAT1 complex may contribute to the oncogenic activity of MALAT1.
Singular role for T-BET
+
CXCR3
+
regulatory T cells in protection from autoimmune diabetes
Authors: Tan Tze Guan , Mathis Diane , Benoist Christophe
Published: November 2016

Significance

We analyzed the transcriptome, phenotype, and function of Foxp3
+
regulatory T cells (Tregs) infiltrating the pancreatic lesion of NOD mice and found a unique and nonredundant role for T-BET–dependent, CXCR3
+
Tregs in the control of autoimmune diabetes. In particular, pancreatic Tregs were enriched for the T-BET–dependent CXCR3
+
population. Genetic deficiency of T-BET in Treg cells dramatically accelerated diabetes and eliminated the sex bias common to NOD mice. These findings have implications for the therapeutic targeting of Treg cells in type 1 diabetes and other Treg-associated disorders.
Large numbers of vertebrates began rapid population decline in the late 19th century
Authors: Li Haipeng , Xiang-Yu Jinggong , Dai Guangyi , Gu Zhili , Ming Chen , Yang Zongfeng , Ryder Oliver A. , Li Wen-Hsiung , Fu Yun-Xin , Zhang Ya-Ping
Published: November 2016

Significance

The current rate of species extinction is ∼1,000 times the background rate of extinction and is attributable to human impact, ecological and demographic fluctuations, and inbreeding due to small population sizes. The rate and the initiation date of rapid population decline (RPD) can provide important clues about the driving forces of population decline in threatened species, but they are generally unknown. We analyzed the genetic diversity data in 2,764 vertebrate species. Our population genetics modeling suggests that in many threatened vertebrate species the RPD on average began in the late 19th century, and the mean current size of threatened vertebrates is only 5% of their ancestral size. We estimated a ∼25% population decline every 10 y in threatened vertebrate species.
A tale of two cities
Authors: Cruickshank Kenneth , Wright Jan
Published: November 2016

The current discourse in Australian languages education is that if children study languages in the early years, then languages uptake in secondary schools will increase. There has been little coherent data collection and analysis, however, to support or challenge this discourse. This article draws on findings from an ARC Linkage study in NSW involving cross-sectoral languages study data (2007 to 2014), school case studies and teacher surveys to explore links between primary school provision, uptake and continuation to Year 12. The study focused on 348 schools in two demographic areas – inner city Sydney and Wollongong. The three key findings were that uptake in upper secondary school is primarily a factor of scaling for tertiary entry; that socioeconomic status (SES) is a key factor in K-10 languages provision and uptake and that community languages have been marginalised from day schools. The paper argues that language programs and policy need to be based not on common beliefs but on consistent data collection. It also argues that two key issues need to be addressed to reverse the decline in language study: a review of the tertiary scaling of languages and government strategies which work from issues of equity of access for students in lower-SES schools.
Women in the Andalusian Parliament
Authors: Fuentes-Rodríguez Catalina
Published: November 2016

The aim of this chapter is to provide documentary information on the weight of women in the Andalusian Parliament, from the first legislative terms until the 9th. The chapter also shows that parity of representation does not necessarily imply parity of participation.
Intensification, identity and gender in the Andalusian Parliament
Authors: Fuentes-Rodríguez Catalina
Published: November 2016

Parliamentary discourse is a confrontation talk where ideological positions are related to interactional roles. Intensification is the main politicians’ strategy, an identity device, and a mark of this professional discourse. It appears in all fields: semantic meaning, sentence intonation, stress, illocutionary acts, grammatical structures and argumentative operators. Men and women use it in a similar way. This chapter aims at analysing parliamentary discourse from a pragmatic perspective, where ideology and identity work together in the process of cognitive and discourse construction.
Argumentation and face-threatening acts
Authors: López Martín José M.
Published: November 2016

This chapter analyses parody in parliamentary discourse as a strategy towards the following objective: disqualifying one’s political enemies. To do this, the politician uses a very useful resource: the non-literal quotation. This form of attack is a very effective manipulation tool, which we must study by relating politeness theory and argumentation. This chapter also studies aggressive and fallacious strategies in relation to the gender of the speaker and the listener, in the context of a discourse traditionally monopolised by men.
Pseudo-desemantisation as a discursive strategy in political discourse
Authors: García Platero Juan Manuel , Castillo Carballo M.ª Auxiliadora
Published: November 2016

In parliamentary discourse, lexical elements are routinely used by MPs, regardless of ideology and gender factors. The only important difference lies between government and opposition. Therefore, no remarkable lexical innovations are expected. In parliamentary interventions, there is a reduction in ideological polarity and a tendency to use words that suffer a process of pseudo-desemantisation (i.e. loss of its full and original meaning) with an intensifying function.
Emotional argumentation in political discourse
Authors: Alcaide Lara Esperanza , Carranza Márquez Aurelia , Fuentes-Rodríguez Catalina
Published: November 2016

The aim of this chapter is to determine whether the expression of emotion is a meaningful variable in the argumentative discourse found in the Andalusian Parliament. The chapter also examines whether the gender factor has any relevance in the expression of emotion.This is because one of the main presuppositions in gender research is the stereotype that women are more expressive in relation to emotion and subjectivity.

We take into account appraisal theory and argumentation theory to see how affect, judgement and appreciation, less associated with formal and institutional discourse, are used with a strategic and communicative purpose: persuasion.
Gender differences in eye-contact behaviour in parliamentary discourse
Authors: Álvarez-Benito Gloria , Íñigo-Mora Isabel
Published: November 2016

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the main functions of eye-contact in the Andalusian Parliament (Committee for Equality and Social Welfare). The corpus consists of 12 oral questions (from March to September 2010) raised by the two main political parties. The study focuses on three aspects: 1) turn-types; 2) political allegiance; 3) gender differences. Regarding turn-types, the results showed that longer eye-contact tended to be more frequent in the second turns. Concerning political allegiance, eye-contact was used as a means to signalling affiliation and loyalty towards the Regional Minister. Regarding gender differences, men seemed to keep more eye-contact than women.
Introduction with a state of the art in generative Slovenian syntax
Authors: Marušič Franc Lanko , Žaucer Rok
Published: November 2016

Although in the early days of generative linguistics Slovenian was rarely called on in the development of theoretical models, the attention it gets has subsequently grown, so that by now it has contributed to generative linguistics a fair share of theoretically important data. Some of the topics where Slovenian data played a prominent role include the feel-like construction, imperative embedding, closest conjunct agreement phenomena, double applicatives, etc. In this Introduction, we outline some of these topics to demonstrate how Slovenian has been brought to bear on issues in generative syntax, and then briefly introduce individual chapters, some of which touch on the above-mentioned topics and some of which address new topics where Slovenian data prove relevant for the study of a particular linguistic phenomenon, such as relativization, modality, and clitics.
Participles come back to Slovenian
Authors: Browne Wayles
Published: November 2016

In Slavic noun phrases an adjective normally precedes a noun, as in English ‘new student’. If the adjective has a complement of its own, in half the languages, e.g. Russian, this complement follows it: ‘a new-to-me student’. Russian historically lost most of its participles, but later they were borrowed back in from Church Slavonic, and in keeping with their value of adjective derived from a verb, they fit into the adjective-complement-noun word order: ‘a reading-books student’. Slovenian, like e.g. Czech and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, instead has complement-adjective-noun word order in its noun phrase: ‘a to-me-new student’. Slovenian lost most participles, but active participles were later re-introduced, and these indeed joined the existing Slovenian complement-adjective-noun order: ‘a books-reading student’.
Quo vadis, Slovenian bipartite pronouns?
Authors: Živanovic Sašo
Published: November 2016

In the diachronic literature, it is well known that reciprocals, which are usually bipartite structures, arise as grammaticalizations of a quantifier and an alterity word, English each other being a typical example. Typical stages in this development are (A) each … other (the parts are independent), (B) each at other (the parts are loosely connected) and (C) at each other (the parts are tightly connected). Mainstream Slovenian seems to have reached stage B, but several speakers can be found using the stage C construction, hinting that Slovenian might be embarking on a further voyage. The aim of the paper is twofold: to call attention to the phenomenon by presenting some initial data on this new development, and to emphasize that not only reciprocals, but all bipartite pronouns are undergoing the same process.
Verbs of pain and accusative subjects in Romanian
Authors: Van Peteghem Marleen
Published: November 2016

Verbs of pain in Romanian such as durea ‘ache’, ustura ‘burn’, and furnica ‘itch’ assign the accusative to their experiencer arguments, unlike other Romance languages, where the experiencer is dative-marked. The use of the accusative raises interesting problems in that it gives rise to a mismatch between the hypothesis on the syntax of inalienability in Romance in Generative Grammar (Guéron 1985) on the one hand and Burzio’s (1986) Generalization on the other hand. This article shows that the inversed nominative NP denoting the body part does not show subject properties, and that the accusative experiencer in sentence initial position does not show object properties, but instead displays subject properties, just like the dative in similar constructions. However, the difference between accusative and dative subjects in this construction is that the accusative is assigned to verb arguments and is a lexical case, whereas the dative is assigned to external possessors and is an inherent case. Surprisingly, the argument status of the accusative experiencer makes it even more subject-like than the dative experiencer, which is an adjunct and is dependent on the presence of an internal argument triggering verb agreement, whereas the accusative subject can also occur without an internal argument or with a locative PP.
Non-canonical ‘existential-like‘ constructions in colloquial Modern Hebrew
Authors: Halevy Rivka
Published: November 2016

The paper deals with the non-typical structure and coding properties of ‘existential-like’ constructions in Colloquial Modern Hebrew (CMH), with reference to parallels in some major Indo-European languages. The construction explored consists of an invariable (neuter) predicate incorporating an empty referential subject (S) morpheme, plus an explicit postverbal NP representing the logic-­semantic subject (S′) that is deficient in topicality and behaves like an O (though it is not a Patient argument). This construction exhibits inconsistency and instability in several aspects of its encoding.
Taking the structure-based approach as its starting point, the paper’s main argument is that the construction under investigation is a special impersonal construction displaying a split between the grammatical S and semantic S′. Typologically, it proposes a unified account of the construction in both synthetic inflectional languages like Hebrew, which do not require an expletive/dummy-­subject, and in analytic inflectional languages like Germanic languages and French that do require it. The paper disputes the assumption that the postverbal NP in this construction is an O or an S that became an O.
The underlying assumption of the paper is that a construction is a form-­meaning-function unit; accordingly, the construction at hand is examined not only from the structural and semantic viewpoint but also from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective and the speaker’s perspectival choice with respect to the construal of the event.
The argument-structure configuration of English middle and related structures
Authors: Garcia de la Maza Casilda
Published: November 2016

This paper assesses the place of middle structures in relation to transitivity and intransitivity in English. Unlike some accounts that have questioned the grammatical status of middles as a self-standing category, this research justifies the recognition of middles as a structural category that constitutes an independent class of intransitive sentences. It does so through an analysis of the underlying thematic structure of middles themselves, as compared to structures which deviate from the middle prototype and other non-canonical structures. A discussion of these issues highlights the great fluidity shown by English verbs entering diathesis alternations, as well as the intransitivisation process exhibited by the English verbal paradigm. The paper concludes with some theoretical considerations regarding the notion of argument structure.
Non-categorical categories
Authors: Soare Elena
Published: November 2016

This paper aims at circumscribing the range of structures that underlie participial constructions, with a particular emphasis on Romanian data. Participial constructions exhibit high flexibility, e.g., the participial stem labeled “supine” in Romanian grammars, which can be used in both nominal and verbal environments:
(i) a. cărţi de citit b. cititul cărţilor c. am citit
books of read.Sup read.Sup.the books.Gen have read
books intended for reading the reading of books I have read
The challenge these data raise to linguistic theory is to find the key property that would allow distinguishing a natural class of participles inside the larger class of non-­finite verbal forms. It is assumed, in line with much recent work, that this common property should be their truncated character: participles are deprived of some verbal layers; they are lower verbal domains.
Taking this as a working definition, the term ‘participle’ is given a wider use; for instance, it is argued that a part of Romance infinitivals are participial constructions; apparently the same morphology can be used to cover different structures from language to language – defining morphology as the locus of variation. The main idea is that participles are truncated clauses of different heights, and not categories of a special kind. In the view that I propose, having a theory of lexical categories is not an interesting goal in itself (contra Baker 2003–2005). Rather, I show how the structural make-up of the different kinds of participles accounts for their overall behavior, making them behave like nouns, verbs, or adjectives.
I make a distinction between non-finite clauses which (i) include a subject layer and (ii) involve defective Tense, like infinitives and English Acc-Gerunds, and participial constructions that (i) do not include a subject layer (ii) do not involve Tense, even defective, but at most personal and agreement marking. I focus on reduced participial domains and refer to non-finite tensed domains and participial nominalizations for comparative matters. I base my study mainly on Romance data (with key data from Romanian), and punctually refer to English for comparison.
Verbal constructions in spoken language deviating from the norm
Authors: Schmale Günter
Published: November 2016

Starting out from the consideration that conclusions as to what is atypical regarding a linguistic feature have to be drawn on the basis of language norms, the paper discusses three types of norms: those defined in authoritative grammars or dictionaries, those apparent through judgements by native speakers, and those determined by corpus-based analyses of language use in large corpora. As grammars and dictionaries are generally based on – formal – written language productions (“folk belief” being strongly dependant on school grammar), the norms defined do not cover the phenomena of verbal constructions occurring in oral language production, especially in dialogical contexts. The study of naturally occurring conversations consequently reveals a great number of syntactic, semantic and conversational features a priori deviating from the “official” norm. The paper demonstrates that rather than being atypical these forms are specific for oral language production. What is more, atypicality cannot be defined on the basis of one specific type of speech exchange system, each different genre having its own typical properties. Atypicality is consequently what does not coincide with the forms of oral or written conceptuality applied by the majority of a community of language users in a given situation.
Discourse Topics
Authors: Watson Todd Richard
Published: November 2016

Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.
Alcohol Use Patterns and Alcohol use Disorders among Young Adult, Ethnically Diverse Bariatric Surgery Patients
Authors: Spadola Christine E. , Wagner Eric F. , Accornero Veronica H. , Vidot Denise C. , de la Cruz-Munoz Nestor , Messiah Sarah E.
Published: November 2016

Background: Research suggests that young adults and racial/ethnic minorities are at an increased risk for problematic alcohol use. Recent studies have also documented patterns of problematic alcohol use among a subset of weight loss surgery (WLS) patients. However, to date, there are no published studies investigating the intersection of these demographic and clinical characteristics. Methods: This study used descriptive and inferential analyses to examine alcohol use patterns, prevalence of pre- and post-WLS alcohol use disorders (AUDs), and predictors of increased alcohol use and problematic alcohol use post-WLS among young adult (mean age 26.5 years, SD = 5.5 years) ethnically diverse (57% Hispanic, 28% non-Hispanic black) WLS patients ( N = 69). Results: Over 21% of the sample had a history of a lifetime AUD, and 4.2% of the sample developed an AUD post-WLS. In the past 30 days, 14.5% of respondents reported binge drinking, and 42% reported drinking until intoxication. History of a pre-WLS AUD was associated with an increased frequency of alcohol use post-WLS ( P = .012). Age, time since WLS, the gastric bypass procedure, and pre-WLS history of an AUD were not significant predictors of binge drinking or drinking to intoxication post-WLS. Conclusions: Ethnically diverse, young adults may have an elevated prevalence of AUD diagnoses pre-WLS. Having a pre-WLS AUD appears to be a risk factor for increased alcohol use post-WLS. Young adult WLS patients might also demonstrate high rates of binge drinking and drinking to intoxication. Binge drinking could be especially problematic considering that WLS could increase sensitivity to alcohol. Further investigation is warranted with this important subpopulation to explore risk factors for problematic alcohol use post-WLS; future assessments of alcohol use should consider potential heightened alcohol sensitivity resulting from WLS.
MicroRNAs-103/107 coordinately regulate macropinocytosis and autophagy
Authors: Park Jong Kook , Peng Han , Katsnelson Julia , Yang Wending , Kaplan Nihal , Dong Ying , Rappoport Joshua Z. , He CongCong , Lavker Robert M.
Published: November 2016

Macropinocytosis, by which cells ingest large amounts of fluid, and autophagy, the lysosome-based catabolic process, involve vesicular biogenesis (early stage) and turnover (end stage). Much is known about early-stage events; however, our understanding of how the end stages of these processes are governed is incomplete. Here we demonstrate that the microRNA-103/107(miR-103/107) family, which is preferentially expressed in the stem cell–enriched limbal epithelium, coordinately regulates aspects of both these activities. Loss of miR-103/107 causes dysregulation of macropinocytosis with the formation of large vacuoles, primarily through up-regulation of Src, Ras, and Ankfy1. Vacuole accumulation is not a malfunction of early-stage autophagy; rather, miR-103/107 ensure proper end-stage autophagy by regulating diacylglycerol/protein kinase C and cyclin-dependent kinase 5 signaling, which enables dynamin to function in vacuole clearance. Our findings unveil a key biological function for miR-103/107 in coordinately suppressing macropinocytosis and preserving end-stage autophagy, thereby contributing to maintenance of a stem cell–enriched epithelium.
Meiotic spindle assembly and chromosome segregation in oocytes
Authors: Bennabi Isma , Terret Marie-Emilie , Verlhac Marie-Hélène
Published: November 2016

Oocytes accumulate maternal stores (proteins, mRNAs, metabolites, etc.) during their growth in the ovary to support development after fertilization. To preserve this cytoplasmic maternal inheritance, they accomplish the difficult task of partitioning their cytoplasm unequally while dividing their chromosomes equally. Added to this complexity, most oocytes, for reasons still speculative, lack the major microtubule organizing centers that most cells use to assemble and position their spindles, namely canonical centrosomes. In this review, we will address recent work on the mechanisms of meiotic spindle assembly and chromosome alignment/segregation in female gametes to try to understand the origin of errors of oocyte meiotic divisions. The challenge of oocyte divisions appears indeed not trivial because in both mice and humans oocyte meiotic divisions are prone to chromosome segregation errors, a leading cause of frequent miscarriages and congenital defects.
Policing and Publishing in Modernist 20th-Century America
Authors: Culleton Claire A.
Published: November 2016

For almost four decades, from 1936 to 1972, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, fueled by intense paranoia and fear, hounded and relentlessly pursued a variety of American writers and publishers in a staunch effort to control the dissemination of literature that he thought threatened the American way of life. In fact, beginning as early as the Red Scare of 1919, he managed to control literary modernism by bullying and harassing writers and artists at a time when the movement was spreading quickly in the hands of an especially young, vibrant collection of international writers, editors, and publishers. He, his special agents in charge, and their field agents worked to manipulate the relationship between state power and modern literature, thereby “federalizing,” to a point, political surveillance. There still seems to be a resurgence of brute state force that is omnipresent and going through all matters and aspects of our private lives. We are constantly under surveillance, tracked, and monitored when engaged in even the most mundane activities. The only way to counter our omnipresent state surveillance is to monitor the monitors themselves.
Media Convergence Policy Issues
Authors: Mansell Robin
Published: November 2016

Digital technologies are frequently said to have converged. This claim may be made with respect to the technologies themselves or to restructuring of the media industry over time. Innovations that are associated with digitalization (representing analogue signals by binary digits) often emerge in ways that cross the boundaries of earlier industries. When this occurs, technologies may be configured in new ways and the knowledge that supports the development of services and applications becomes complex. In the media industries, the convergence phenomenon has been very rapid, and empirical evidence suggests that the (de)convergence of technologies and industries also needs to be taken into account to understand change in this area. There is a very large literature that seeks to explain why convergence and (de)convergence phenomena occur. Some of this literature looks for economic and market-based explanations on the supply side of the industry, whereas other approaches explore the cultural, social, and political demand side factors that are important in shaping innovation in the digital media sector and the often unexpected pathways that it takes.

Developments in digital media are crucially important because they are becoming a cornerstone of contemporary information societies. The benefits of digital media are often heralded in terms of improved productivity, opportunities to construct multiple identities through social media, new connections between close and distant others, and a new foundation for democracy and political mobilization. The risks associated with these technologies are equally of concern in part because the spread of digital media gives rise to major challenges. Policymakers are tasked with governing these technologies and issues of privacy protection, surveillance, and commercial security as well as ensuring that the skills base is appropriate to the digital media ecology need to be addressed. The complexity of the converged landscape makes it difficult to provide straightforward answers to policy problems. Policy responses also need to be compatible with the cultural, social, political, and economic environments in different countries and regions of the world. This means that these developments must be examined from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and need to be understood in their historical context so as take both continuities and discontinuities in the media industry landscape into account.
The Effects of Negative Advertising
Authors: Dowling Conor M. , Krupnikov Yanna
Published: November 2016

Since the 1960s there has been an increase in the amount of negative advertising in American campaigns. Although only 10% of advertisements aired in the 1960 campaign were negative, in the 2012 campaign only 14.3% of aired ads were positive. The increase in negative advertising has raised questions about the effects these types of ads may have on the electoral outcomes and the political process at large. Indeed, many voters and political actors have assumed and argued that negative advertising will have negative consequences for American politics. Although many news consumers and people interested in politics make many assumptions about the role of negativity in politics, the effect of campaign negativity on the political process is ambiguous. If there is a relationship between negativity and political outcomes, this relationship is nuanced and conditional. Although negativity may, under certain conditions, have powerful effects on political outcomes, under other conditions the effects of negativity are minimal. Moreover, while there is some research to suggest that this type of campaigning can produce negative consequences, other research suggests that negativity may—at times—be beneficial for the political process.
Using Experiments to Understand How Agency Influences Media Effects
Authors: Arceneaux Kevin , Johnson Martin
Published: November 2016

Students of public opinion tend to focus on how exposure to political media, such as news coverage and political advertisements, influences the political choices that people make. However, the expansion of news and entertainment choices on television and via the Internet makes the decisions that people make about what to consume from various media outlets a political choice in its own right. While the current day hyperchoice media landscape opens new avenues of research, it also complicates how we should approach, conduct, and interpret this research. More choices means greater ability to choose media content based on one’s political preferences, exacerbating the severity of selection bias and endogeneity inherent in observational studies. Traditional randomized experiments offer compelling ways to obviate these challenges to making valid causal inferences, but at the cost of minimizing the role that agency plays in how people make media choices.

Resent research modifies the traditional experimental design for studying media effects in ways that incorporate agency over media content. These modifications require researchers to consider different trade-offs when choosing among different design features, creating both advantages and disadvantages. Nonetheless, this emerging line of research offers a fresh perspective on how people’s media choices shapes their reaction to media content and political decisions.
The Supreme Court Decision Making Process
Authors: Johnson Timothy R.
Published: November 2016

The U.S. Supreme Court is but one of three political institutions within the structure of the U.S. federal government. Within this system of separated powers it rules on the constitutionality of some of the nation’s most important legal and political issues. In making such decisions, the nation’s highest court may be considered the most powerful of the three branches of the U.S. federal government. Understanding this process will allow scholars, students of the Court, and Court watchers alike to gain a better understanding of the way in which the justices conduct their business and to come to terms with some of the most important legal and political decisions in our nation’s history. Combining a theoretical account of Supreme Court decision-making with an examination of its internal decision-making process illuminates this opaque institution.
School Ethnography in Chile
Authors: Contreras Paulina , Santa Cruz G. Eduardo , Assaél Jenny , Valdivia Andrea
Published: November 2016

In Chile, ethnographic studies of schools started 30 years ago. At the time, most of the educational research in Latin America was done through quantitative methodologies, which didn’t show school processes in their proper contexts. In this scenario, a group of Latin-American educational researchers came together to develop a critical qualitative research network, in which Chile adopted the form of the first school ethnography research team in the country. From that, a new means of research was developed, aimed towards understanding everyday life in schools, which was what the “black box” quantitative research was unable to see. This innovation allowed these ethnographers to understand schools as a singular and complex reality. They took up a Latin American critical-historical epistemological approach, understanding that schools require a thick description, historically contextualized, that also considers the structures that determine a school’s singularity.

Chilean school ethnographies in the last 30 years have focused on the ways in which concrete social relationships take place in situated historical contexts, from the dictatorship of the 1980s to current neoliberal educational policy. They have allowed the visualization of the effects that more general political, economic, and social transformations have had in the schools’ daily organization and practices. In this trajectory, there have been different approaches to educational policy; some take on a critical perspective and others aim to inform and influence policy. School ethnography has addressed a variety of topics, from school failure in its beginnings, to youth culture, civic engagement, ethnicity, learning and development, and gender and educational policy. This diversity, however, has a common interest: the subordinated or excluded cultural forms and subjectivities, which are the consequence of power relationships and normative structures that are reproduced in schools.
Public Schooling and Democracy in the United States
Authors: Stitzlein Sarah M.
Published: November 2016

The health of our democracy in the United States depends directly on our public schools. The relationship between democracy and public schooling was established early in our history, growing and changing as practices and demands of democracy changed. Although we have failed to fully fulfill the relationship, it continues to be a key one for maintaining the strength of our society and our political system. This article clarifies that relationship and offers insight into how it might be maintained and improved.
Self-Directed Education—Unschooling and Democratic Schooling
Authors: Gray Peter
Published: November 2016

Education, broadly defined, is cultural transmission. It is the process or set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires and builds on the skills, knowledge, beliefs, values, and lore of the culture into which they are born. Through all but the most recent speck of human history, education was always the responsibility of those being educated. Children come into the world biologically prepared to educate themselves through observing the culture around them and incorporating what they see into their play. Research in hunter-gatherer cultures shows that children in those cultures became educated through their own self-directed exploration and play. In modern cultures, self-directed education is pursued most fully by children in families that adopt the homeschooling approach commonly called “unschooling” and by children enrolled in democratic schools with no imposed curriculum. Follow-up studies of “graduates” of unschooling and democratic schools reveal that this approach can be highly effective, in today’s world, if children are provided with an adequate environment for self-education—an environment in which they can interact freely with others across a broad range of ages, can experience firsthand what is most valued in the culture, and can play and thereby experiment with the primary tools of the culture.
Indigenous Mobilizations and the Mexican Government during the 20th Century
Authors: Muñoz María L. O.
Published: November 2016

The political history of indigenous peoples in Mexico during the 20th century is complex, particularly because it intersects with changing local, state, and federal government projects aimed at exclusion, inclusion, assimilation, integration, homogenization, and multiculturalism. Focusing only on such government initiatives, however, muddies the analytical waters, as doing so tends to silence forms of resistance, accommodation, reaction, adaptation, and the agency of first peoples and communities. Oftentimes this approach assumes a complacent population at the mercy of a predatory state or a subject people in the care of a paternalistic state. In recognition of the danger of accepting state-driven indigenismo projects as the defining criteria of native people’s histories during the 20th century, this article parallels glimpses of state-driven indigenismos with indigenous forms of regional and national organization in defense of individual and collective interests, as expressed in works that have emerged over the last twenty-five years. By no means are the themes covered in this article indicative of the breadth of the concerns, ideas or political, social, and economic interests of native peoples. Rather, its intent is to juxtapose histories of indigenismos and indígena mobilizations and organization after 1940 to illustrate how the government attempted to shape its “revolutionary” vision after 1920 and the ways in which indigenous communities themselves also engaged, or did not, in this process for a number of reasons, collective and individual.
Assessment and Adaptation to Climate Change-Related Flood Risks
Authors: Jongman Brenden , Winsemius Hessel C. , Fraser Stuart A. , Muis Sanne , Ward Philip J.
Published: November 2016

The flooding of rivers and coastlines is the most frequent and damaging of all natural hazards. Between 1980 and 2016, total direct damages exceeded $1.6 trillion, and at least 225,000 people lost their lives. Recent events causing major economic losses include the 2011 river flooding in Thailand ($40 billion) and the 2013 coastal floods in the United States caused by Hurricane Sandy (over $50 billion). Flooding also triggers great humanitarian challenges. The 2015 Malawi floods were the worst in the country’s history and were followed by food shortage across large parts of the country.

Flood losses are increasing rapidly in some world regions, driven by economic development in floodplains and increases in the frequency of extreme precipitation events and global sea level due to climate change. The largest increase in flood losses is seen in low-income countries, where population growth is rapid and many cities are expanding quickly. At the same time, evidence shows that adaptation to flood risk is already happening, and a large proportion of losses can be contained successfully by effective risk management strategies. Such risk management strategies may include floodplain zoning, construction and maintenance of flood defenses, reforestation of land draining into rivers, and use of early warning systems.

To reduce risk effectively, it is important to know the location and impact of potential floods under current and future social and environmental conditions. In a risk assessment, models can be used to map the flow of water over land after an intense rainfall event or storm surge (the hazard). Modeled for many different potential events, this provides estimates of potential inundation depth in flood-prone areas. Such maps can be constructed for various scenarios of climate change based on specific changes in rainfall, temperature, and sea level.

To assess the impact of the modeled hazard (e.g., cost of damage or lives lost), the potential exposure (including buildings, population, and infrastructure) must be mapped using land-use and population density data and construction information. Population growth and urban expansion can be simulated by increasing the density or extent of the urban area in the model. The effects of floods on people and different types of buildings and infrastructure are determined using a vulnerability function. This indicates the damage expected to occur to a structure or group of people as a function of flood intensity (e.g., inundation depth and flow velocity).

Potential adaptation measures such as land-use change or new flood defenses can be included in the model in order to understand how effective they may be in reducing flood risk. This way, risk assessments can demonstrate the possible approaches available to policymakers to build a less risky future.
Environmental Economics and the Anthropocene
Authors: Smith V. Kerry
Published: November 2016

Geologists’ reframing of the global changes arising from human impacts can be used to consider how the insights from environmental economics inform policy under this new perspective. They ask a rhetorical question. How would a future generation looking back at the records in the sediments and ice cores from today’s activities judge mankind’s impact? They conclude that the globe has entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Now mankind is the driving force altering the Earth’s natural systems. This conclusion, linking a physical record to a temporal one, represents an assessment of the extent of current human impact on global systems in a way that provides a warning that all policy design and evaluation must acknowledge that the impacts of human activity are taking place on a planetary scale. As a result, it is argued that national and international environmental policies need to be reconsidered. Environmental economics considers the interaction between people and natural systems. So it comes squarely into conflict with conventional practices in both economics and ecology. Each discipline marginalizes the role of the other in the outcomes it describes. Market and natural systems are not separate. This conclusion is important to the evaluation of how (a) economic analysis avoided recognition of natural systems, (b) the separation of these systems affects past assessments of natural resource adequacy, and (c) policy needs to be redesigned in ways that help direct technological innovation that is responsive to the importance of nonmarket environmental services to the global economy and to sustaining the Earth’s living systems.
The PPI3D web server for searching, analyzing and modeling protein–protein interactions in the context of 3D structures
Authors: Dapkūnas Justas , Timinskas Albertas , Olechnovič Kliment , Margelevičius Mindaugas , Dičiūnas Rytis , Venclovas Česlovas
Published: November 2016

The PPI3D web server is focused on searching and analyzing the structural data on protein–protein interactions. Reducing the data redundancy by clustering and analyzing the properties of interaction interfaces using Voronoi tessellation makes this software a highly effective tool for addressing different questions related to protein interactions.

Availability and Implementation

The server is freely accessible at http://bioinformatics.lt/software/ppi3d/.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
The origin of single low-mass WDs: another problem that consequential angular momentum loss in CVs might solve
Authors: Zorotovic M. , Schreiber M. R.
Published: November 2016

Low-mass helium-core white dwarfs (WDs) with masses below $0.5\,{\mathrm{M_{{\odot}}}}$ are known to be formed in binary star systems but unexpectedly, a significant fraction of them seems to be single. On the other hand, in cataclysmic variables (CVs), a large number of low-mass WD primary stars is predicted but not observed. We recently showed that the latter problem can be solved if consequential angular momentum loss causes especially CVs with low-mass WDs to merge and form single stars. Here we simulate the population of single WDs resulting from single-star evolution and from binary star mergers taking into account these new merging CVs. We show that according to the revised model of CV evolution, merging CVs might be the dominant channel leading to the formation of low-mass single WDs and that the predicted relative numbers are consistent with observations. This can be interpreted as further evidence for the revised model of CV evolution we recently suggested. This model includes consequential angular momentum loss that increases with decreasing WD mass and might not only explain the absence of low-mass WD primaries in CVs but also the existence of single low-mass WDs.
Interaction between the H ii region and AFGL 333-Ridge: Implications for the star formation scenario
Authors: Nakano Makoto , Soejima Takashi , Chibueze James O. , Nagayama Takumi , Omodaka Toshihiro , Handa Toshihiro , Sunada Kazuyoshi , Kamezaki Tatsuya , Burns Ross A.
Published: November 2016

We investigated the star formation activities in the AFGL 333 region, which is in the vicinity of the W 4 expanding bubble, by conducting NH3 (1,1), (2,2), and (3,3) mapping observations with the 45 m Nobeyama Radio Telescope an angular resolution of 75″. The morphology of the NH3 (1,1) map shows a bow-shaped structure with the size of 2.0 × 0.6 pc as seen in the dust continuum. At the interface between the W 4 bubble and the dense NH3 cloud, the compact H ii region G134.2+0.8, associated with IRAS 02245+6115, is located. Interestingly, just at the north and south of G134.2+0.8 we found NH3 emission exhibiting large velocity widths of ∼2.8 km s−1, compared to 1.8 km s−1 at the other positions. As the possibility of mechanical energy injection through the activity of young stellar objects (YSOs) is low, we considered the origin of the large turbulent gas motion as an indication of interaction between the compact H ii region and the periphery of the dense molecular cloud. We also found expanding motion of the CO emission associated with G134.2+0.8. The overall structure of the AFGL 333-Ridge might have been formed by the expanding bubble of W 4. However, the small velocity widths observed to the west of IRAS 02245+6115, around the center of the dense molecular cloud, suggest that interaction with the compact H ii region is limited. Therefore the YSOs (dominantly Class 0/I) in the core of the AFGL 333-Ridge dense molecular cloud most likely formed in quiescent mode. As previously suggested for the large-scale star formation in the W 3 giant molecular cloud, our results show an apparent coexistence of induced and quiescent star formations in this region. It appears that star formation in the AFGL 333 region has proceeded without significant external triggers, but accompanying stellar feedback environment.
Financial Impact of Dual Vendor, Matrix Pricing, and Sole-Source Contracting on Implant Costs
Authors: Althausen Peter L. , Lapham Joan , Mead Lisa
Published: November 2016

Implant costs comprise the largest proportion of operating room supply costs for orthopedic trauma care. Over the years, hospitals have devised several methods of controlling these costs with the help of physicians. With increasing economic pressure, these negotiations have a tremendous ability to decrease the cost of trauma care. In the past, physicians have taken no responsibility for implant pricing which has made cost control difficult. The reasons have been multifactorial. However, industry surgeon consulting fees, research support, and surgeon comfort with certain implant systems have played a large role in slowing adoption of cost-control measures. With the advent of physician gainsharing and comanagement agreements, physicians now have impetus to change. At our facility, we have used 3 methods for cost containment since 2009: dual vendor, matrix pricing, and sole-source contracting. Each has been increasingly successful, resulting in massive savings for the institution. This article describes the process and benefits of each model.