bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
P47 Infographics about antibiotics: making facts accessible
Authors: van Hecke Oliver , Lee Joseph , Butler Chris , Moore Michael , Tonkin-Crine Sarah
Published: February 2022

Background

Public misconceptions about antibiotic use persist despite the efforts of antibiotic awareness campaigns. These campaigns have often followed a top-down approach and have not sought input from the public. Communities need to see antibiotic campaign messages as relevant, accessible and important in order to have an influence on health-seeking behaviour and antibiotic use.

Objectives

To develop a series of evidenced-based infographics (EBIs) on antibiotic use for common infections in children and to evaluate their effectiveness at increasing parents' understanding of antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance.

Methods

There were three phases to this research. In Phase 1 we set out to identify and summarize scientific evidence for the use of antibiotics for three common infections in children (sore throat, acute cough and otitis media). Phase 2 focused on co-design of a series of prototype EBIs for each infection in focus groups with parents of young children and graphic designers, to test the face and content validity. Phase 3 tested the feasibility of EBIs in increasing parents' understanding about antibiotic use and the perceived relevance of antibiotic resistance in an online survey.

Results

We iteratively co-produced 10 prototype EBIs. Parents found the evidence displayed in the EBIs novel and relevant to their families. Parents did not favour EBIs that were too medically focused. The way the information was displayed influenced their understanding. Parents preferred one health message per EBI. We included eight EBIs in a national survey of parents (n = 998). EBIs improved knowledge by more than a third across the board (34%, IQR 20%–46% P<0.001). Respondents confirmed that EBIs were novel and potentially useful, corroborating our focus group findings.

Conclusions

Co-designed EBIs have the potential to succinctly change parents' perceptions about antibiotics for acute respiratory tract infections in children. Further research should test EBIs in real-world settings to assess their reach as a potential public-facing intervention.
Case report: chronic acalculous cholecystitis preceded by Coxsackievirus B4 infection
Authors: Fewel Connor E , Weiss Joshua R , Harrington Jane C
Published: February 2022

A 41-year-old female presented with an 8-month history of right upper quadrant pain, exacerbated by ingestion of saturated fats. The patient was positive for antibodies to Coxsackievirus serotype B4, established by an investigation incited by an acute episode of pleurodynia 8 months before the current presentation. Imaging studies including a hepatobiliary iminodiacetic acid scan showed no gallbladder structural or functional abnormalities. Laboratory studies indicated pancreatic enzyme insufficiency associated with below-normal lipase and amylase levels. Patient symptomology was consistent with cholecystitis with positive Murphy’s sign, so cholecystectomy was recommended. Post-surgery pathological report confirmed chronic acalculous cholecystitis. Patient demonstrated full recovery, indicated by return of normal pancreatic enzymes levels and resolution of abdominal pain.
“What Does that Flag Mean to Them?” Rural Relief, Children’s Suffering, and American Philanthropy in Cuba
Authors: Rodríguez Daniel A
Published: February 2022

This article explores the transnational politics of hunger, philanthropy, and rural reconstruction during the U.S. occupation of Cuba (1899–1902). In the wake of Cuba’s final War of Independence (1895–1898), tens of thousands of reconcentrados—rural civilians forcibly removed from their lands by Spanish forces during the war—continued to face starvation, disease, and homelessness in the island’s western towns and cities. The Cuban Industrial Relief Fund, a U.S.-based philanthropy, hoped to return the reconcentrados to their now-overgrown lands and help them rebuild their homes and farms. The organization connected rural Cubans and ordinary Americans through the complex bonds of transnational philanthropy just as Americans were working out the meanings of American power and responsibility in the new post-1898 world. Early during the U.S. occupation of Cuba, debates over rural reconstruction and relief became a central locus for Americans to articulate the meanings of U.S. power in Cuba. These meanings, however, were refracted through American understandings of childhood, race, and poverty, as paternalist understandings of poverty as cultural failure and colonial depictions of Latin Americans as childlike and untrustworthy shaped debates over the future of rural Cuba. Based on newly available organizational records as well as Cuban and U.S. archival and popular press sources, this article argues that while the goals of the CIRF were to return the Cuban peasantry to a state of self-sufficient independence, entrenched racialized U.S. perceptions of the Cuban poor as lazy, irresponsible, and essentially dependent doomed the prospects of any large-scale industrial relief for Cuban reconcentrados.
Potassium regulates diel leaf growth of Brassica napus by coordinating the rhythmic carbon supply and water balance
Authors: Lu Zhifeng , Hu Wenshi , Ye Xiaolei , Lu Jianwei , Gu Hehe , Li Xiaokun , Cong Rihuan , Ren Tao
Published: February 2022

Carbon and water are two main factors limiting leaf expansion. Restriction of leaf growth by low availability of carbon or water is among the earliest visible effects of potassium (K) deficiency. It is not known how K is involved in regulating the rhythmic supply of these two substrates, which differ remarkably across the day–night cycle, affecting leaf expansion. We investigated the effects of different K regimes on the time courses of leaf expansion, carbon assimilation, carbohydrates, and hydraulic properties of Brassica napus. Potassium supply increased leaf area, predominantly by promoting night-time leaf expansion (>60%), which was mainly associated with increased availability of carbohydrates from photosynthetic carbon fixation and import from old leaves rather than improvement of leaf hydraulics. However, sufficient K improved leaf hydraulic conductance to balance diurnal evaporative water loss and increase the osmotic contribution of water-soluble carbohydrates, thereby maintaining leaf turgor and increasing the daytime expansion rate. The results also indicated an ontogenetic role of K in modifying the amplitude of circadian expansion; almost 80% of the increase in leaf area occurred before the area reached 66.9% of the mature size. Our data provide mechanistic insight into K-mediated diel coordination of rhythmic carbon supply and water balance in leaf expansion.
Nanopore ReCappable sequencing maps SARS-CoV-2 5′ capping sites and provides new insights into the structure of sgRNAs
Authors: Ugolini Camilla , Mulroney Logan , Leger Adrien , Castelli Matteo , Criscuolo Elena , Williamson Maia Kavanagh , Davidson Andrew D , Almuqrin Abdulaziz , Giambruno Roberto , Jain Miten , Frigè Gianmaria , Olsen Hugh , Tzertzinis George , Schildkraut Ira , Wulf Madalee G , Corrêa Ivan R , Ettwiller Laurence , Clementi Nicola , Clementi Massimo , Mancini Nicasio , Birney Ewan , Akeson Mark , Nicassio Francesco , Matthews David A , Leonardi Tommaso
Published: February 2022

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a complex transcriptome characterised by multiple, nested subgenomic RNAsused to express structural and accessory proteins. Long-read sequencing technologies such as nanopore direct RNA sequencing can recover full-length transcripts, greatly simplifying the assembly of structurally complex RNAs. However, these techniques do not detect the 5′ cap, thus preventing reliable identification and quantification of full-length, coding transcript models. Here we used Nanopore ReCappable Sequencing (NRCeq), a new technique that can identify capped full-length RNAs, to assemble a complete annotation of SARS-CoV-2 sgRNAs and annotate the location of capping sites across the viral genome. We obtained robust estimates of sgRNA expression across cell lines and viral isolates and identified novel canonical and non-canonical sgRNAs, including one that uses a previously un-annotated leader-to-body junction site. The data generated in this work constitute a useful resource for the scientific community and provide important insights into the mechanisms that regulate the transcription of SARS-CoV-2 sgRNAs.
European Renal Best Practice endorsement of guidelines for diagnosis and therapy of thrombotic thrombocytopaenic purpura published by the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis
Authors: Eller Kathrin , Knoebl Paul , Bakkaloglu Sevcan A , Menne Jan J , Brinkkoetter Paul T , Grandt Leonie , Thiem Ursula , Coppo Paul , Scully Marie , Haller Maria C
Published: February 2022

Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) is a life-threatening disease that is caused by severe ADAMTS-13 deficiency. Immune-mediated TTP develops due to autoantibodies against ADAMTS-13, whereas congenital TTP is caused by mutations in the ADAMTS13 gene. Diagnostic possibilities and treatment options in TTP have emerged in recent years, which prompted the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) to publish clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of TTP in 2020. In this article, the European Renal Best Practice Working Group endorsed the ISTH guidelines and emphasizes a number of considerations, including the importance of rapid ADAMTS-13 activity testing, the use of rituximab and anti-von Willebrand factor therapies such as caplacizumab, that enhance the clinical applicability of the guidelines in Europe.
Modeling the Prognostic Impact of Circulating Tumor Cells Enumeration in Metastatic Breast Cancer for Clinical Trial Design Simulation
Authors: Gerratana Lorenzo , Pierga Jean-Yves , Reuben James M , Davis Andrew A , Wehbe Firas H , Dirix Luc , Fehm Tanja , Nolé Franco , Gisbert-Criado Rafael , Mavroudis Dimitrios , Grisanti Salvatore , Garcia-Saenz Jose A , Stebbing Justin , Caldas Carlos , Gazzaniga Paola , Manso Luis , Zamarchi Rita , Bonotto Marta , Fernandez de Lascoiti Angela , De Mattos-Arruda Leticia , Ignatiadis Michail , Sandri Maria-Teresa , Generali Daniele , De Angelis Carmine , Dawson Sarah-Jane , Janni Wolfgang , Carañana Vicente , Riethdorf Sabine , Solomayer Erich-Franz , Puglisi Fabio , Giuliano Mario , Pantel Klaus , Bidard François-Clément , Cristofanilli Massimo
Published: February 2022

Despite the strong prognostic stratification of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) enumeration in metastatic breast cancer (MBC), current clinical trials usually do not include a baseline CTCs in their design. This study aimed to generate a classifier for CTCs prognostic simulation in existing datasets for hypothesis generation in patients with MBC. A K-nearest neighbor machine learning algorithm was trained on a pooled dataset comprising 2436 individual MBC patients from the European Pooled Analysis Consortium and the MD Anderson Cancer Center to identify patients likely to have CTCs ≥ 5/7 mL blood (StageIVaggressive vs StageIVindolent). The model had a 65.1% accuracy and its prognostic impact resulted in a hazard ratio (HR) of 1.89 (Simulatedaggressive vs SimulatedindolentP < .001), similar to patients with actual CTCs enumeration (HR 2.76; P < .001). The classifier’s performance was then tested on an independent retrospective database comprising 446 consecutive hormone receptor (HR)-positive HER2-negative MBC patients. The model further stratified clinical subgroups usually considered prognostically homogeneous such as patients with bone-only or liver metastases. Bone-only disease classified as Simulatedaggressive had a significantly worse overall survival (OS; P < .0001), while patients with liver metastases classified as Simulatedindolent had a significantly better prognosis (P < .0001). Consistent results were observed for patients who had undergone CTCs enumeration in the pooled population. The differential prognostic impact of endocrine- (ET) and chemotherapy (CT) was explored across the simulated subgroups. No significant differences were observed between ET and CT in the overall population, both in terms of progression-free survival (PFS) and OS. In contrast, a statistically significant difference, favoring CT over ET was observed among Simulatedaggressive patients (HR: 0.62; P = .030 and HR: 0.60; P = .037, respectively, for PFS and OS).
Pogroms in Modern Poland, 1918–1946
Authors: Cichopek-Gajraj Anna , Dynner Glenn
Published: February 2022

Poland’s era of independence between the two world wars was bookended by waves of pogroms. The first section of this chapter concerns the more than 130 pogroms of 1918–1921; many of them initiated by Polish military troops as they entered towns and cities of the new Poland. The second section concerns the pogroms of 1935–1937 instigated by right-wing nationalists, the most infamous being the Przytyk pogrom of March 9, 1936. Both pogrom waves should be conceived as a part of a larger construct of shifting economic and political relations rather than as isolated events or simple manifestations of antisemitism. The final section reveals the post–World War II pogroms (1945–1946) as adhering to a similar pattern, though exacerbated by prior Nazi occupation and genocide and the postwar communist takeover.
Saeb Erakat: “Arafat Is Interested in a Crisis”
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

Barak failed the test of the general in battle, exploiting the effect of success. Instead of pursuing the progress created by our backchannel, Arafat’s concessions, our delegation’s daylong cathartic Jerusalem discussion, and Clinton’s upbeat mood, he took a counterproductive tactical step back that alienated the president and pushed the summit into a dead end. But, his tactical retreat on Jerusalem was simply unsustainable, and he was forced by the fear of losing the president’ support to finally make his boldest move in this summit. Alas, his move came at a time when Arafat was already in full combative mood and, as his own aides admitted, was interested in a crisis. The President’s departure to the Japan G8 summit left Secretary Albright with the unenviable task of ironing out differences about the ground rules of engagement in his absence.
Trapped in No-Win Conditions
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

An unwinnable war and a public opinion disaster, the Intifada cornered Israel in a lose-lose position. Arab states that had a modicum of diplomatic ties with Israel now severed them, and the call for an investigation of Israel’s disproportionate military response gained ground. The European Union endorsed in its Biarritz summit Israel’s Camp David peace offers as a basis for a settlement, but Britain’s Tony Blair could not find candidates for collective action in support of Israel’s position in the conflict. An international effort to pave the way to a return to peace negotiations, the Sharm El-Sheikh international summit of October 16 concluded with a ceasefire agreement and the creation of an international committee of investigation into responsibility for the war. Arafat signed, but had no interest in complying. He had still to further squeeze the political benefits of the Intifada.
Neither Inspiring nor Intimidating
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

The Palestinians succeeded in turning the Intifada into an Israeli diplomatic defeat. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s initiative to send an international force to the occupied territories, European threats of sanctions, a forum of the Mediterranean foreign ministers that turned into a collective onslaught on Israel’s disproportionate use of force, and, more importantly, a panicked American reaction that led Washington to distance itself from Israel lest it lose its strategic assets in the Arab world were all direct repercussions of the Intifada. Arafat’s surprising “acceptance” in early November of Clinton’s new peace ideas and his decision to send his team to one last round of talks in Washington were either his way to reap the fruits of the Intifada or an attempt to simply regain the ground he had lost in his relations with the Americans.
An Uninviting Concept
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

An examination of the non-official Geneva Understandings (2003) and the subsequent debates about it show that the two-state solution is technically possible under laboratory conditions and when discussed in backtrack channels by pundits willing to explore the most advanced ideas possible. But, the lack of political will, the changing political conditions, the inertia of occupation and the loss of hope among Israelis and Palestinians have made the two-state idea into an uninviting concept. This is particularly the case in the younger generation on both sides of the divide. To the Palestinians, the end of occupation has become more important than separate statehood. The vision of one, bi-national state with equal rights and opportunities for all is today the dream of the younger Palestinian generation.
The Failed “Zionization” of Palestine and the Three-State “Solution”
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

Israeli occupation has much to answer for. But, the disarray of the Palestinian national movement responds to a large degree to its inherent weaknesses and inconsistencies. Split between fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza and the supposedly secular PLO in the West Bank, the National Palestinian movement has lost its sense of purpose. The PLO has failed in the task of state-building that Former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad tried vainly to accomplish. Corruption, dictatorial practices and dependence on its cooperation with the occupier’s security forces, have made lose its preponderance in the national movement. This is a reality that suits the occupier. The existence of a fundamentalist, terrorist Hamas state in Gaza has become for Israel the most convenient pretext for not reviving the peace process. Netanyahu has sidelined the PA and has an implicit pact with Hamas to secure the survival of its Gaza state, with the help of Qatari money. For all practical purposes, a three-state reality has emerged with Israel shielding itself through walls and other security arrangements from the two Palestinian states in a state of war between themselves.
Epilogue
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

The disappointments of the peace process was crucial in the defeat of Israel’s peace camp and the political hegemony of the right that has stymied altogether the peace process . The two-state solution is simply no longer on the menu. Israel is “punished” for its occupation of Palestinian lands only in Western public opinion, not in her dealings with governments. Democrats in the US and Jewish liberals are distancing themselves from Israel. This dichotomy between governments and public opinion facilitates Israel’s rising global clout, Also, gas findings in the eastern Mediterranean allowed her to become the pivot of a tripartite alliance with Greece and Cyprus aimed at countering Turkey’s destabilizing regional strategies. The Palestinians meanwhile remain fragmented and leaderless which suits well Israel’s static strategy on Palestine. But, as the recent war in Gaza has shown, the Palestinian problem can re-emerge with a vengeance. Alas, neither the Israelis nor the US have any intention to revive the old peace diplomacy. A solution of sorts to the Palestine problem would have to wait for another geo-strategic earthquake: a shift in regional alliances, a new Arab (or Palestinian Spring) that will sweep away some of the region’s conservative regimes, a war with Iran, an Israeli unilateral withdrawal or an Israeli-Palestinian “civil war” in the bi-national state that is emerging by osmosis.
Delta Blues
Authors: Larson Kate Clifford
Published: February 2022

This chapter describes how Fannie Lou Hamer's family endured crushing poverty and hunger during the hardest years of the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit Mississippi hard. As the Depression worsened, both Black and white rural non-landowning farmers suffered, but African Americans received fewer relief benefits and financial support. Farm owners flat out refused to pay competitive wages and instead found ways to thwart President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Black Mississippians fought back by organizing local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Unsurprisingly, rural membership was low in Mississippi-affiliation with civil rights and Black nationalist organizations brought risks and threats of violence from white employers, police officials, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and other white supremacist organizations. The chapter then looks at how bootlegging-the illegal manufacturing, sale, and distribution of alcoholic spirits-became a significant cash business during the Depression for some rural Mississippians, ushering in the emergence of speakeasies and juke houses that supplied venues for the new and increasingly popular music genre, the blues. Hamer's legendary voice, conditioned and shaped by hymns and gospel music at church, matured with the emotional lived experience that inspired the blues. Indeed, Delta blues singers captured and articulated the voices of the Black community.
The New Kingdom
Authors: Larson Kate Clifford
Published: February 2022

This chapter addresses how retaliation against the voter registrants and other local civil rights advocates surfaced quickly. Fannie Lou Hamer lived like a vagabond, moving every couple of days to another sympathetic friend's home, trying to figure out what to do. No one would hire her. Her family needed her help bringing in their share of the crop, and the loss of the extra income as record keeper shattered their already fragile financial stability. Hamer faced a personal crisis; she stood before another crossroad. Registering to vote cost her the job she had held for eighteen years and people had shot up her friends' neighborhood. Yet she thought about those young people from away, who had come to Ruleville and risked their lives to help her, and her neighbors, claim their civil rights. Hamer realized that those youthful activists represented the beginning of a "New Kingdom right here on earth." She then became a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Atlantic City
Authors: Larson Kate Clifford
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines how the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) elected sixty-eight delegates to go to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the seating of the all-white official Mississippi Democratic Party. National press coverage of the MFDP's planned challenge enflamed white supremacists. Harassment and attacks escalated during the two weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer herself received death threats over the phone almost daily. But the delegates and their supporters remained focused on their goal: lobbying Credentials Committee members and DNC state delegations to seat the MFDP instead of the Mississippi Regular party delegation. They also held protests and vigils, handed out promotional literature, and gave impromptu talks on the boardwalk to illuminate race relations and the conditions in Mississippi.
Epilogue
Authors: Larson Kate Clifford
Published: February 2022

AFTER FANNIE LOU HAMER’S funeral was over and the guests, distinguished and ordinary, had gone, Pap went back home to raise his two granddaughters, Lenora and Jackie, alone in the little yellow brick house on James Street. Some people suggested he give the two girls up, but he refused. They were his and he loved them, and no one would take them from him. His granddaughter Jacqueline remembered him as an incredible father....
Conclusion
Authors: Wells Anjanette A. , Thompson Vetta L. Sanders , Ross Will , Yeakey Carol Camp , Notaro Sheri R.
Published: February 2022

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the book. We discuss a partnership in care that begins with a basic understanding of the barriers and stressors faced by low-income women, culturally competent communication and engagement, and evidence-based interventions and strategies important to treatment across the cancer continuum. As this volume concludes, we begin to understand the ways to reconfigure the healthcare system to more effectively deliver care to low-income women. We emphasize the multiple levels of healthcare inequities, their impact, and practical skills and actions that might address them. Strategies of interest include increasing the number of community health workers and cancer navigators, along with reforming the payment system to emphasize performance. Ultimately, true and effective healthcare delivery and redesign must focus on reducing the number of uninsured and underinsured.
Introduction
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

The word meaning, as used in such expressions as “the meaning of life,” is ubiquitous in the English-speaking world. It is used to convey grand, metaphysical ideas, but it is almost never defined. It is of relatively recent provenance, arising in the early nineteenth century in a climate reflecting the impact of German Romanticism. While other European languages feature phrases roughly equivalent to the English “meaning of life,” the words in those languages corresponding to meaning do not function in the same way as our English word. Meaning is a verbal noun. It can suggest both the act of signifying or intending and the signified thing resulting from that act (as in the meaning of a word or story). Thanks partly to this feature and partly to the haziness of the ideas with which it is commonly associated, meaning is almost always ambiguous and polyvalent. Those who use it are understandably reluctant to supply a definition for meaning. Its ambiguity and polyvalence, however, turn out to be the source of its considerable power.
Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson Bring the “Mystery of Existence” and the “Sense of Life” to the English-Speaking World
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

This chapter describes how meaning, as in “the meaning of life,” made its appearance in the English language. Credit goes to Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), a Scot whose Presbyterian worldview features a doctrine of divine immanence, of nature as a revelation of the divine. He was fond of the image of a figurative veil separating the world of appearances from a sacred world behind it. Carlyle introduced the English-speaking world to Novalis, whose writing he regarded as pervaded with mysticism and idealism. He wrote of the “Volume of Nature” and introduced the phrase “meaning of life” to the English-speaking world. He used the word meaning by itself, to suggest “purpose,” “worth,” “religious truth.” Aspects of Carlyle’s worldview, as well as his infatuation with Novalis, moved west to the United States thanks to the friendship that Ralph Waldo Emerson struck up with the Scottish writer. Not only did the New England Transcendentalist help introduce Carlyle’s writings to American readers, but his own writings became infused with Carlyle’s thinking, above all in his predilection for discovering, in nature, meaning and meanings—never defined and always infused with mystery.
Meaning in the Age of Anxiety and Well Beyond
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

The period from the end of the 1940s through the 1960s was ubiquitously referred to in popular culture as “The Age of Anxiety.” Anxiety had multiple resonances: fear of nuclear annihilation, the pathological condition that mental health professionals treat, and the fear of non-being that existentialist thinkers (starting with Kierkegaard) spoke of. The mania for meaning fostered by such writers as Tillich was a natural fit, since a likely source of anxiety was precisely the unsuccessful quest for meaning that seemed in this age to mark the human condition. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and other religious thinkers, including the Jewish mystic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), had fallen under the spell of Tillich and reflected his influence in their plentiful use of meaning.
Meaning Goes Clinical, Therapeutic, and Popular
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the role that meaning plays in the world of psychotherapy, where meaning-based or “meaning-centered” schools and techniques have flourished since the mid-twentieth century. A dominant figure in this movement was the Austrian-born psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl (1905–1997). Frankl made meaning the central concept in his therapeutic practice, claiming that the quest for it was what allowed concentration camp inmates to survive the unimaginable hardships of their plight. But he never adequately defined meaning and offers slim evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of his therapeutic methods. Dr. William Breitbart, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, has developed meaning-centered psychotherapy exclusively for terminal cancer patients. In the literature of this method, meaning is not defined with any precision. Meaning appears as a central concept in “well-being” studies, a field that examines the biochemistry of mental well-being. Here, as in meaning-centered psychotherapy, meaning is not precisely defined. This chapter makes the point that the very ambiguity and polyvalence of meaning allow it to produce experimentally verified results. In popular culture the self-help movement is pervaded with references to meaning. Here too the term is almost never defined but functions in the way it does precisely because of its ambiguity and polyvalence.
Meaning Bridges the Secular and the Sacred
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the role and function of meaning in the ever-evolving relationship between an increasingly secular society and conventional religion. Charles Taylor (1931–) has offered a powerful but often confusing account of the secular age in which we live, plentifully and disparately using the term meaning to suggest both the object of a search and the thing that goes missing when we abandon religious faith. Philip Kitcher has made a case for secularism in which he claims that meaning is a factor common to both the religious and secular outlooks, though it is understood differently in each. Apparently because of the perception that meaning is a term that secular or simply non-theological minds can grasp, many religious leaders and institutions have adopted it as an outreach tool to the non-religious, the formerly religious, and the doubting religious, using the term to attract members of a target audience into—or to retain them within—the ranks of the religious. Indeed, evangelical Christianity has in many instances unabashedly adopted the language of the self-help movement, including the word essential to that movement. Even Hassidic Judaism includes a rabbi who runs a Meaningful Life Center, offering its services to members of all faiths as well as to the faithless. Meaning in all its ambiguous and polyvalent glory serves as a bridge word, allowing both the religious and the secular to make sense, in an increasingly secular world, of religious beliefs and practices.
Afterword: ‘What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?’
Authors: Hingley Richard
Published: February 2022

The Roman conquest of Britain had a significant impact in post-Roman times. After the Renaissance, the tale of the valiant freedom fighter Boudica was used to reflect upon Queen Elizabeth I’s resistance in the face of a Spanish invasion. Hadrian’s Wall, known as ‘Picts’ Wall’, served to cast a reflection on the attempts of King James I to unify Scotland and England into a single kingdom. A counternarrative to the resistance of Boudica was provided by the idea that the Romans had brought ‘civilization’ to southern Britain, a popular idea during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the modern world, conflicting ideas of the value of the Roman invasion continue. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Rome is seen to have been a primarily positive influence. (‘What the Romans did for us’.) Large numbers of people visit Roman monuments across Britain today. A more critical narrative which views the Roman Empire as an evil and dictatorial regime is popular with some, including those who drew Boudica’s uprising as an ancient parallel with Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s attempts to extricate Britain from the European Union. The events of Roman rule continue to cast light on political and military actions in the present.
Contemplating Nothing
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the teaching of creation ex nihilo, arguing that the nihil is an ineradicable pedal note in all that is created. It examines this nihil in mediations upon death and meonotology in post-structural philosophy, before turning to the tradition and the role of nothingness in Eriugena’s apophatic theology. These two strands are brought into dialectic conversation: juxtaposing the nihilistic nothingness expressed in the novels of Joseph Conrad with a theological examination of the notion of uncreated grace in Rahner. Finally, the chapter turns to the emptiness of contemplative silence in which, through contemplation, one enters what Augustine called the ‘eternally silent Word’, before concluding with an exploration of how these two notions of nothingness, the atheistic and the theological, are interwoven in a fable by the French Jesuit, Michel de Certeau.
Ecce Homo
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: February 2022

Many of the themes developed in the earlier part of the book come together in this chapter on theological anthropology: being unhoused and in exile, the desire to belong, our migratory nature. Exegesis of J’s narrative in Genesis opens an exploration into the divine intimacy, which developed through reflections upon Michelangelo’s depiction of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. Part of that intimacy, for J, is the act of naming which the chapter develops into an account of the incomplete nature of being human: we are always looking for our true name. Examining P’s account of the making of human beings, we arrive at the idea of having no kind of our own. We are made in the image of. A tradition in English poetry is explored in which our loss of a divine home and belonging is articulated. Rejecting the notion of a pre-existence, the chapter argues that our personal histories concern soul-formation with respect to a Christic belonging we have yet to come into.
The Imitable Charles Dickens
Authors: Kerr Matthew P. M.
Published: February 2022

For many critics, Charles Dickens’s use of the sea produces problematic effects, as solid features of his nautical scenes continually dissolve into literary cliché. By contrast, this chapter suggests that it is the mobile doubleness of the literary sea—at once unique and commonplace, credible and implausible—that appeals to Dickens. The discussion focuses on Dombey and Son and the Uncommercial Traveller essay ‘The Shipwreck’, tracing clichéd marine associations (including the sea as divine), figures (the midshipman), and set-pieces (the shipwreck). By involving the sea in his prose, Dickens often finds a means by which both his characters and the individuals he encounters as a journalist can be made to coexist in his imagination with their ideal or literary doubles.
Introduction: How to Bridge the Gap from Ethics to Practice
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

Moving from ethics to practice means that decision makers will need to take meaningful actions at the levels of team, organization, industry, and government. The recommendations are meant to increase the reliability, safety, and trustworthiness of HCAI systems by way of governance structures: ● software engineering practices within teams ● Safety culture within organizations through business management strategies ● Trustworthy certification through industry-specific independent oversight efforts ● Regulation by government agencies to ensure fair business practices and public safety. The recommendations are a starting point for discussions that can lead to validated practices, which become widely accepted and then evolve to keep up with technology innovations.
Safety Culture through Business Management Strategies
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

Past accidents and incidents often had narrow impacts, but today’s failures of massive technology-based interdependent organizations in globalized economies can have devastating effects for the health and economies of entire cities, regions, and continents. Safety cultures have been successful in medicine, transportation, and other industries, so they may be effective for HCAI. The methods include: (1) Leadership commitment to safety, (2) hiring and training oriented to safety, (3) extensive reporting of failures and near misses, (4) internal review boards for problems and future plans, and (5) alignment with industry standards and accepted best practices. Safety cultures are never perfect, but they can improve existing processes and reduce costs, in part by preventing damage and injury.
Summary and Skeptic’s Corner
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

I promised to deliver a guidebook to hope and a roadmap to realistic policies. The guidebook calls for human-centered thinking that integrates disciplines, such as science, engineering, design, art, social sciences, and humanities. Combining disciplines will speed creation of technologies that respect human values of rights, justice, and dignity, while supporting individual goals of self-efficacy, creativity, responsibility, and social connections. Skeptics question whether the HCAI movement can become significant, but the growing efforts from academic researchers, technology innovators, business leaders, and government policy makers suggests that the future will be more human-centered.
Debating Natures and Persons
Authors: Rassi Salam
Published: February 2022

Chapter 4 discusses the Incarnation in ʿAbdīshōʿs works. Central to his defence of this doctrine is the argument that Christ possessed a divine and a human nature, each united in a single person. For Muslim polemicists such a notion was further proof of Christianity’s denial of God’s oneness, leading ʿAbdīshōʿ to make a case for the Incarnation’s rootedness in reason and revelation. As in his Trinitarian doctrine, our author appeals to a theological and literary vocabulary shared in by Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, he explicitly cites Christian authorities, suggesting that it is to the language of Islamic theology rather than its substance that he wishes to appeal. With that said, ʿAbdīshōʿ does not merely instrumentalize this language for the sake of apologetics. By employing poetic and narrative techniques shared between Christian and Muslim literatures, our author supplies renewed meaning and relevance to the mystery of the Incarnation and the biblical story of Christ’s mission. In contrast to his Trinitarian dogma, which appears uniformly directed against external criticisms, aspects of ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Christology are grounded in intra-Christian polemics, since various Christian confessions under Islamic rule were for centuries divided over the issue of Christ’s natures. Later in life, however, ʿAbdīshōʿ skilfully negotiated this vexed theological inheritance to formulate a Christology that was no longer hostile to other Christians.
Race
Authors: Mark James
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores anti-colonial whiteness. It argues that postwar global decolonization offered a pathway to international status for Eastern Europeans and thus an escape from their historical subordination as lesser whites defined by their lack of imperial power. Adopting the postwar consensus that the world consisted of three races, Communists often presented themselves as the morally superior white Europeans. The racial problem had been solved at home, Communists argued, and their commitment to fighting continued discrimination wherever capitalist imperialism reproduced it placed them in the anti-racist avant-garde. This chapter brings together the contemporary voices of Eastern European politicians, activists and writers, alongside those of the Chinese, and Africans, to explore such declarations. Both friends and enemies were often critical. They argued that such claims were cynically used to hide the realities of domestic anti-Semitism, or were merely performative, a product of only superficially hidden European desires for power still expressed through white saviour fantasies based on imperial nostalgia. Nevertheless, as long as an anti-racism motivated in part by an imperially inspired longing for status could be hitched to a powerful and appealing anti-colonial world project, Communist Eastern Europe’s allies could discern its progressive potential. As soon as Third World alliances ceased to be perceived, from the late 1970s, as a route to global influence, commitments to forging a superior anti-colonial whiteness collapsed. More and more voices in Eastern Europe contended that a ‘multi-coloured socialist internationalism’ had degraded the region, the status of which would be recovered through a return to a culturally distinct, and racially bordered, white Christian Europe.
Varieties of Protest: (i) Peasants, Alliances, Economics, Religion
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: February 2022

The following two chapters introduce aspects of popular revolt during the Italian wars that trace convergences with the late Middle Ages. First, Italy did not follow European paths north of the Alps with widespread insurrections comprised largely of peasants that cut across states and linguistic divides. From 1494 to 1559, peasant revolts increased (1) with extensions of the ‘German Peasants’ Revolt’ into northern Italy in 1524–25 and (2) with resistance against billeting and military abuses throughout this period. Their number, however, remained distinctly in the shadows of urban revolt. Second, alliances between urban and peasant rebels also increased. However, in comparison with other European regions, indifference or hostility between urban and rural rebels in Italy largely remained. Third, if mutinies of soldiers are discarded, economic revolts between employers and labourers were even sparser in Italy, 1494 to 1559, than they had been in the Middle Ages. The most striking exception was the year-long Lucchese revolt, called Gli Straccioni (1531–32), that began as a protest of silk workers against new impositions from their bosses, but like Florence’s revolt of the Ciompi in 1378, quickly grew into a revolt of the city’s popolo to extend political representation. Finally, Italy did not follow trends north of the Alps, where religious ideals and doctrines and the role of clerics became central to insurrection. Revolts spawned by religious ideology and influenced by clerics in Italy instead declined below levels even seen in the late Middle Ages.
Violent Ventriloquism
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

The chapter focuses on the relationship between violence, both physical and rhetorical, and the emergence of dialect literature in the nineteenth-century post-Emancipation anglophone Caribbean. It focuses on racial ventriloquism, the use of so-called black voices by white authors to advocate violent retribution against black populations. The chapter uses as case studies Jamaica during the period of the Morant Bay Rebellion and British Guiana after the arrival of Indian indentured laborers and other large-scale migrations. White creole authors like British Guiana’s Michael McTurk, or “Quow,” are discussed. The chapter also examines rebuttals by black and brown people to white ventriloquist dialect in newspapers published by men of color.
The Charles Dickens of Jamaica
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

The chapter explores the life of Henry Garland Murray, the first black author of Creole literature in the English-speaking Caribbean. Murray was a popular performer of dialect sketches in post-Emancipation Jamaica who eventually published his dialect sketches in book form. The chapter discusses Murray’s travels to Panama and to Boston, where he performed at the famous Lyceum. It investigates the historical moment in the post-Emancipation Jamaica in which Murray authored his stories, particularly the nationalist bent of Jamaicans across racial lines who sought a “native literature” and identified Creole stories as the basis of that literature. It interprets the stories as balancing racist white nostalgia for slavery with an emergent literary nationalism.
Cornelia and Susanna Teellinck
Authors: Pipkin Amanda C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter features Cornelia Teellinck (1553–76) and Susanna Teellinck’s (1551–1625) efforts to spread the Reformed faith in Zeeland in the 1570s as well as the latter’s work providing material for the first wave of the Further Reformation after 1607. Among the earliest converts to Reformed Protestantism in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, the Teellincks were invigorated by Spain’s attempt to crush all those who rejected the Catholic faith. The sisters fought to unify their fellow Protestants and circulated anti-Spanish prophecy. The chapter makes the novel argument that the Teellinck sisters amplified the influence of the Dutch Reformed Church by spreading orthodox teachings and religious, political poetry, and by serving as important role models for religious revival in the seventeenth century. Their leadership within the Teellinck family as early converts to Protestantism made them essential church builders as well, given the impact of their prolific nephews Willem and Eeuwout, and Willem’s sons in advocating reform as ministers. In addition to the Teellinck sisters’ lasting impact on their religious communities, this chapter argues that Susanna’s publication of her sister’s book was not an anomaly, but one of many Further Reformation books published just after the turn of the seventeenth century to remind Calvinists to fight fiercely for their faith and live pious lives following the model of the previous generation. The Teellincks also provide an early example of women’s ability to help their relatives and other female friends appear in print.
“Makers of Manners”
Authors: MacConochie Alex
Published: February 2022

This chapter argues that the theater actively resists and reformulates accepted views of kissing in two contexts, courtship and greetings between neighbors. The first section examines dramatic depictions of a common English custom, greeting kisses between male guests and the women of the household, arguing that the theater criticizes this practice as, first, a threat to the stability of homosocial exchanges and, second, a transgression against female autonomy and agency. Serving as playwrights’ vehicles of critique, female characters object to or resist unwelcome greeting kisses in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Shakespeare’s Othello, William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. The chapter’s second section argues that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus strategically appropriate tropes of the Neoplatonic kiss to re-script the micro-politics of intimacy. Marlowe’s play stages a parody of Neoplatonic amatory discourse, in which the kiss effects a transfer of male and female lovers’ souls. In Faustus, by contrast, the kiss embodies a meeting between souls that, ultimately, remain separate. This separation lays the groundwork for mutuality, since the merger of souls lauded by Neoplatonists ultimately advantages the male partner. This mutuality is further developed in Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It, which pit two different discourses of courtship kissing—one of male prowess, one of female control as the “mistress” of the Petrarchan lover—against each other, in the process developing a more genuinely mutual idea of intimacy, embodied in the kiss.