bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Avoided valence transition in a plutonium superconductor
Authors: Ramshaw B. J. , Shekhter Arkady , McDonald Ross D. , Betts Jon B. , Mitchell J. N. , Tobash P. H. , Mielke C. H. , Bauer E. D. , Migliori Albert
Published: March 2015

Significance

One way to search for new superconductors is to find a magnetic metal and then suppress the magnetism using chemical doping or pressure. Heavy-fermion superconductors are the archetypal family of magnetic superconductors, but PuCoGa
5
—the heavy fermion with the highest

T
c

(18.5 K)—has no static magnetism. What other mechanism, then, is driving superconductivity in PuCoGa
5
? We measured the elastic constants of PuCoGa
5
and found that the bulk modulus softens dramatically before

T
c

—evidence for fluctuations of the plutonium valence as opposed to magnetic fluctuations associated with the suppression of magnetic order. Valence fluctuations resolve the missing magnetism conundrum in PuCoGa
5
by providing an alternative mechanism for the high-temperature superconductivity.
Oncogenic fusion protein EWS-FLI1 is a network hub that regulates alternative splicing
Authors: Selvanathan Saravana P. , Graham Garrett T. , Erkizan Hayriye V. , Dirksen Uta , Natarajan Thanemozhi G. , Dakic Aleksandra , Yu Songtao , Liu Xuefeng , Paulsen Michelle T. , Ljungman Mats E. , Wu Cathy H. , Lawlor Elizabeth R. , Üren Aykut , Toretsky Jeffrey A.
Published: March 2015

Significance

Alternative splicing of RNA allows a limited number of coding regions in the human genome to produce proteins with diverse functionality. Alternative splicing has also been implicated as an oncogenic process. Identifying aspects of cancer cells that differentiate them from noncancer cells remains an ongoing challenge, and our research suggests that alternatively spliced mRNA and subsequent protein isoforms will provide new anticancer targets. We determined that the key oncoprotein of Ewing sarcoma (ES), EWS-FLI1, regulates alternative splicing in multiple cell line models. These experiments establish oncogenic aspects of splicing that are specific to cancer cells and thereby illuminate potentially oncogenic splicing shifts as well as provide a useful stratification mechanism for ES patients.
Disruption of hierarchical predictive coding during sleep
Authors: Strauss Melanie , Sitt Jacobo D. , King Jean-Remi , Elbaz Maxime , Azizi Leila , Buiatti Marco , Naccache Lionel , van Wassenhove Virginie , Dehaene Stanislas
Published: March 2015

Significance

Sleeping disrupts the conscious awareness of external sounds. We investigated the stage of processing at which this disruption occurs. In the awake brain, when a regular sequence of sounds is presented, a hierarchy of brain areas uses the available regularities to predict forthcoming sounds and to respond with a series of “prediction error” signals when these predictions are violated. Using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography signals, we discovered that both short-term and long-term brain responses to auditory prediction errors are disrupted during non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep; however, the brain still exhibits detectable auditory responses and a capacity to habituate to frequently repeated sounds. Thus, sleep appears to selectively affect the brain’s prediction and error detection systems.
L596–W733 bond between the start of the S4–S5 linker and the TRP box stabilizes the closed state of TRPV4 channel
Authors: Teng Jinfeng , Loukin Stephen H. , Anishkin Andriy , Kung Ching
Published: March 2015

Significance

Transient receptor potential (TRP) families are front-line channels that transduce various physical or chemical stimuli into ion fluxes. TRP subunits have architecture similar to that of voltage-gated K
+
(Kv) channels, but most have an additional TRP-domain helix of unknown function. An invariant tryptophan in this helix forms a hydrogen bond with a residue that begins another helix, the S4–S5 linker, which is the lever that operates the channel gate in Kv channels. By electrophysiological and other examinations of TRP vanilloid subfamily, member 4 (TRPV4) channels mutated at the two bonding partners, we show that this bond is needed to stabilize the closed conformation. Destabilized channels leak ions, explaining the harmful phenotypes of mutant TRPV4 in budding yeast (growth stoppage) and in human (bone-development blockage).
Performance of Cage-Raised, Overwintered Hybrid Striped Bass Fed Fish Meal- or Soybean-Based Diets
Authors: Rossi Waldemar , Tomasso Joseph R , Gatlin Delbert M
Published: March 2015

We conducted a 26-week study to evaluate the performance of cage-raised hybrid Striped Bass (female White Bass Morone chrysops × male Striped Bass M. saxatilis) fed fish meal (FM) and soybean (SOY; soybean meal + soy protein concentrate) based diets. A FM reference diet was formulated to contain crude protein (CP) at 450 g/kg, lipid at 120 g/kg, and an estimated digestible energy level of 13 MJ/kg. Two test diets (SOY and SOY+GBA) were formulated to replace 70% of the CP in the reference diet with SBM in the absence or presence of GroBiotic-A (GBA), a yeast-based prebiotic, at 20 g/kg. The other 12% of dietary FM in the reference diet was replaced with SPC in the test diets, further reducing FM inclusion to 70 g/kg. Each diet was fed to quadruplicate groups of 40 advanced juvenile hybrid Striped Bass (initial weight ∼ 54 g/fish) stocked into each of twelve 1-m3 floating cages, which were equally divided into four 0.05-ha, rubber-lined ponds according to a randomized complete block design. Caged fish in each pond were fed one of the randomly assigned diets to apparent satiation once daily. After 26 weeks of feeding, results showed that (1) the overall growth performance, survival, and feed efficiency of the fish were unaffected by diet; (2) the intraperitoneal fat ratio was significantly lower in fish that received the SOY-based diets; and (3) plasma glucose and lysozyme activity were significantly lower in fish that were fed the SOY-based diets, whereas plasma osmolality, hematocrit, neutrophil oxidative radical production (nitroblue tetrazolium test), and extracellular superoxide anion production of head-kidney macrophages were unaffected by diet. We conclude that low-FM, SOY-based diets can support adequate performance and normal physiological responses of hybrid Striped Bass during overwintering.
Riemannian Ricci curvature lower bounds in metric measure spaces with 𝜎-finite measure
Authors: Ambrosio Luigi , Gigli Nicola , Mondino Andrea , Rajala Tapio
Published: March 2015

In a prior work of the first two authors with Savaré, a new Riemannian notion of a lower bound for Ricci curvature in the class of metric measure spaces

(
X
,

d

,

m

)

(X,\textsf {d},\mathbf {m})

was introduced, and the corresponding class of spaces was denoted by

R
C
D
(
K
,
∞
)

RCD(K,\infty )

. This notion relates the

C
D
(
K
,
N
)

CD(K,N)

theory of Sturm and Lott-Villani, in the case

N
=
∞

N=\infty

, to the Bakry-Emery approach. In this prior work the

R
C
D
(
K
,
∞
)

RCD(K,\infty )

property is defined in three equivalent ways and several properties of

R
C
D
(
K
,
∞
)

RCD(K,\infty )

spaces, including the regularization properties of the heat flow, the connections with the theory of Dirichlet forms and the stability under tensor products, are provided. In the above-mentioned work only finite reference measures

m

\mathbf {m}

have been considered. The goal of this paper is twofold: on one side we extend these results to general

σ
\sigma

-finite spaces, and on the other we remove a technical assumption that appeared in the earlier work concerning a strengthening of the

C
D
(
K
,
∞
)

CD(K,\infty )

condition. This more general class of spaces includes Euclidean spaces endowed with Lebesgue measure, complete noncompact Riemannian manifolds with bounded geometry and the pointed metric measure limits of manifolds with lower Ricci curvature bounds.
Schur and Fourier multipliers of an amenable group acting on non-commutative 𝐿^{𝑝}-spaces
Authors: Caspers Martijn , de la Salle Mikael
Published: March 2015

Consider a completely bounded Fourier multiplier

ϕ
\phi

of a locally compact group

G
G

, and take

1
≤
p
≤
∞

1 \leq p \leq \infty

. One can associate to

ϕ
\phi

a Schur multiplier on the Schatten classes

S

p

(

L
2

G
)

\mathcal {S}_p(L^2 G)

, as well as a Fourier multiplier on

L
p

(

L

G
)

L^p(\mathcal {L} G)

, the non-commutative

L
p

L^p

-space of the group von Neumann algebra of

G
G

. We prove that the completely bounded norm of the Schur multiplier is not greater than the completely bounded norm of the

L
p

L^p

-Fourier multiplier. When

G
G

is amenable we show that equality holds, extending a result by Neuwirth and Ricard to non-discrete groups.

For a discrete group

G
G

and in the special case when

p
≠
2

p\neq 2

is an even integer, we show the following. If there exists a map between

L
p

(

L

G
)

L^p(\mathcal {L} G)

and an ultraproduct of

L
p

(

M

)
⊗

S

p

(

L
2

G
)

L^p(\mathcal {M}) \otimes \mathcal {S}_p(L^2G)

that intertwines the Fourier multiplier with the Schur multiplier, then

G
G

must be amenable. This is an obstruction to extend the Neuwirth-Ricard result to non-amenable groups.
Weakly proper group actions, Mansfield’s Imprimitivity and twisted Landstad duality
Authors: Buss Alcides , Echterhoff Siegfried
Published: March 2015

Using the theory of weakly proper actions of locally compact groups recently developed by the authors, we give a unified proof of both reduced and maximal versions of Mansfield’s Imprimitivity Theorem and obtain a general version of Landstad’s Duality Theorem for twisted group coactions. As one application, we obtain the stabilization trick for arbitrary twisted coactions, showing that every twisted coaction is Morita equivalent to an inflated coaction.
Hsp70 clears misfolded kinases that partitioned into distinct quality-control compartments
Authors: Roy Joydeep , Mitra Sahana , Sengupta Kaushik , Mandal Atin K.
Published: March 2015

Hsp70 aids in protein folding and directs misfolded proteins to the cellular degradation machinery. We describe discrete roles of Hsp70,SSA1 as an important quality-control machinery that switches functions to ameliorate the cellular environment. SSA1 facilitates folding/maturation of newly synthesized protein kinases by aiding their phosphorylation process and also stimulates ubiquitylation and degradation of kinases in regular protein turnover or during stress when kinases are denatured or improperly folded. Significantly, while kinases accumulate as insoluble inclusions upon SSA1 inhibition, they form soluble inclusions upon Hsp90 inhibition or stress foci during heat stress. This suggests formation of inclusion-specific quality-control compartments under various stress conditions. Up-regulation of SSA1 results in complete removal of these inclusions by the proteasome. Elevation of the cellular SSA1 level accelerates kinase turnover and protects cells from proteotoxic stress. Upon overexpression, SSA1 targets heat-denatured kinases toward degradation, which could enable them to recover their functional state under physiological conditions. Thus active participation of SSA1 in the degradation of misfolded proteins establishes an essential role of Hsp70 in deciding client fate during stress.
Logical transformation of genome-scale metabolic models for gene level applications and analysis
Authors: Zhang Cheng , Ji Boyang , Mardinoglu Adil , Nielsen Jens , Hua Qiang
Published: March 2015

Motivation: In recent years, genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) have played important roles in areas like systems biology and bioinformatics. However, because of the complexity of gene–reaction associations, GEMs often have limitations in gene level analysis and related applications. Hence, the existing methods were mainly focused on applications and analysis of reactions and metabolites.

Results: Here, we propose a framework named logic transformation of model (LTM) that is able to simplify the gene–reaction associations and enables integration with other developed methods for gene level applications. We show that the transformed GEMs have increased reaction and metabolite number as well as degree of freedom in flux balance analysis, but the gene–reaction associations and the main features of flux distributions remain constant. In addition, we develop two methods, OptGeneKnock and FastGeneSL by combining LTM with previously developed reaction-based methods. We show that the FastGeneSL outperforms exhaustive search. Finally, we demonstrate the use of the developed methods in two different case studies. We could design fast genetic intervention strategies for targeted overproduction of biochemicals and identify double and triple synthetic lethal gene sets for inhibition of hepatocellular carcinoma tumor growth through the use of OptGeneKnock and FastGeneSL, respectively.

Availability and implementation: Source code implemented in MATLAB, RAVEN toolbox and COBRA toolbox, is public available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/logictransformationofmodel.

Contact:  nielsenj@chalmers.se or qhua@ecust.edu.cn

Supplementary information:  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Online.
Ethics in Relation to Recovery from Mental Illness
Authors: Clements Robert L.H. , Cizman Juna Lea , Forchuk Cheryl , Pallaveshi Luljeta , Rudnick Abraham
Published: March 2015

Given that recovery of people with mental health challenges is often a personal experience inclusive of autonomy, the development and provision of recovery-oriented services may benefit from identification and discussion of potential ethical conflicts and challenges. This chapter includes a conceptual and theoretical analysis of ethics in relation to recovery from mental illness, and a literature review to identify known ethical conflicts or challenges. Proposed solutions include shared decision-making, community treatment orders, and psychiatric advance directives; however, there is a dearth of evidence on their effectiveness. Mental health agencies, as well as self-regulated professional colleges, may be a potential designate for the development of clinical practice guidelines to help identify and address common ethical conflicts in this area. Doing so may help both service users and service providers successfully navigate ethical challenges in a way that best promotes recovery.
Introduction
Authors: Cummings Brian , Simpson James
Published: March 2015

This book examines cultural history and cultural transformation in the period spanning the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and how such transition relates to modernity. Taking a dynamically diachronic approach, it offers a fresh perspective on the historiography of culture and literature, with emphasis on the idea of periodization and the tendency to divide cultural history into different eras. Many of the essays focus on themes spanning the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, each linking pre- and post-Reformation cultures, including those related to religion, and highlight the creative and destructive anxieties as well as the legacy of the Reformation.
National Histories
Authors: Butterfield Ardis
Published: March 2015

Nation and vernacularity are naturally intertwined, as Adrian Hastings, Richard Helgerson, and Benedict Anderson would attest. Hastings, Helgerson, and Anderson all argue that the rise of nation coincides with a decisively new burgeoning of the vernacular, even as this moment occurs in a different century. This article explores three issues concerning nation that have particular relevance to cross-period “cultural reformations” and are radically affected by England’s long relationship with France: nation’s relation to modernity, to language, and to England and Englishness. It examines the entanglement between English and French in the context of nationhood and considers a bifurcated Anglo-French model for vernacularity that it argues is central to understanding of nation and crucially resistant to it at the same time.
Place
Authors: Simpson James
Published: March 2015

The question of the Church’s location became a central issue of the Protestant Reformation: was it the material, visible Church containing the saved and the damned (as yet unable to be distinguished), or the immaterial, invisible Church of the Elect? This little noticed but hugely significant issue preoccupied Reformation theorists, but already in the late fourteenth century writers were conscious of it. Pilgrimage narratives, particularly narratives in which the visible, located Church’s relics are exposed as disgusting, exploitative and fake, underline the fragilities of the “located” Church. This essay defines the theological issue of place, and then sees how it works in practice with two Canterbury pilgrimage texts, Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and Desiderius Erasmus’s Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion.
Travel
Authors: Hadfield Andrew
Published: March 2015

Advances in technology had dramatically improved mapping and navigational possibilities that made travel within Europe easier, more comfortable, and more feasible. In the early seventeenth century, writers such as Fynes Moryson, Thomas Coryat, and William Lithgow began to provide accounts of their extensive travels. However, the ethnological models that were used by Europeans in the sixteenth century were hardly modern. While the discovery of the New World showed the scope and diversity of the known universe, it also encouraged a heightened xenophobia and racism. There are also other more practical considerations implying that change was not as rapid as might be expected. This article examines travel in the context of cultural history and how the Reformation became a key impediment to travel. It looks at travelers who were prepared to go beyond what was generally expected or even acceptable despite the obvious dangers and discomforts, focusing on the experiences of Margery Kempe and William Lithgow.
The Saints
Authors: Mueller Janel
Published: March 2015

In his authoritative New Testament formulations, St. Paul describes the saints of Christianity as the “beloved of God and the called of Jesus Christ” for their obedience to the faith in him...” Peter Brown, in his account of the Christian communities of the post-apostolic church and later antiquity, states that “the cult of the saints” emerges from beliefs and practices that differ from Paul’s normative definitions. St. Augustine’s transhistorical composition of his two cities in City of God retraces Paul’s serial tracking of the saints who are the true members of Christ’s Church. This article examines the depiction of Christian saints in medieval literature in Western Europe, particularly early Christian virgins martyred by pagan oppressors. It looks at the life of John Wyclif, an Oxford scholar and cleric, and his views about the character and validity of the Church and its saints. It also analyzes Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints and his arguments regarding the value of the model of Puritan sainthood in present-day circumstances.
Vernacular Theology
Authors: Betteridge Thomas
Published: March 2015

This article explores the problems arising from the asymmetrical status of mysticism across the period between medieval and Renaissance. It begins with James Nayler’s mysticism before proceeding with a discussion of vernacular theology in relation to social and cultural change during the period between Lollardy and the English Civil War. It then considers the failure of mysticism in the context of historiography, the connections between religious literature produced across the period between Lollardy and the English Civil War, and how confessionalization gave rise to Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. It also examines the religious writings of Julian of Norwich and George Herbert before concluding with an assessment of religious reform in Western Europe during the period.
Conscience
Authors: Strohm Paul
Published: March 2015

This article considers a Christian view of conscience starting with St. Augustine’s personal crisis in his Confessions. Augustine’s conscience sits at the margins of the self, balanced between interior and exterior. A new emphasis emerges in Protestant views of conscience, including Martin Luther’s emphasis on conscientia mea in his writings and his understanding of conscience. A Reformation view of personal conscience is illustrated in Henry VIII’s frequent references to “my conscience,” and other instances. The clash of personal and collective views of conscience underlies the views of sixteenth-century judge James Hales and Marian chancellor Stephen Gardiner. The evangelically leaning Hales sees conscience as a private matter, a personal secret, unknowable to any other person. In contrast, Gardiner, a Catholic, insists that conscience is a recognizable and unproblematic entity with evident properties that make it easily identifiable.
When English Became Latin
Authors: Machan Tim William
Published: March 2015

The English language, at all grammatical levels, underwent a profound, albeit gradual, change between 1377 and 1642. These phonological changes include the Great Vowel Shift and the change in inflectional morphology. This article examines the transition from Middle English to Modern English and how English became Latin. It considers the retention of what might be called England’s sociolinguistic infrastructure, alongside a wide-ranging reconfiguration of English’s grammar and social uses. It discusses three unfamiliar constancies that characterize the decisive shift in the English language between the medieval and early modern epochs: the first involved the object of grammatical inquiry in early modern England, the second concerned the character of England’s linguistic repertoire of which diglossia was the notable organizing principle, and the third relates to the cultural significance that English was understood to project as an emerging High Language.
Heresy and Treason
Authors: Loewenstein David
Published: March 2015

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an acute religious crisis occurred in England due to the troublesome specter of heresies proliferating at the time. During the 1520s and 1530s, Thomas More, Lord Chancellor, played a major role in the escalating polemical warfare against Lutheran and evangelical heresy. And in the 1640s and 1650s, the fragmentation of Protestantism provoked powerful new fears of unbridled heresies and the rise of anti-heretical writings. This article examines the cultural fears sparked by the hysterical religious imagination and how they generated enormous anxieties, savagery, and bitter religious contention and polarization. It also looks at the anti-heresy literature of the English Civil War and Interregnum in the context of new legislation enacted by Parliament to control the proliferation of religious error. In addition, it considers the remarkable continuities between the late Middle Ages and early modern period with regard to heresy, treason, fears, and the feverish religious imagination, along with what was distinctive about the imaginings of heretics and heresies during those unstable decades.
Naughty Printed Books
Authors: Kastan David Scott
Published: March 2015

The Index librorum prohibitorum, first issued in 1559, the Roman Catholic Church’s official effort to ban certain books, is often contrasted with John Milton’s Areopagitica, so often claimed the foundational text of a modern notion of freedom of expression. But the opposition is more a function of a modern desire than of historical fact. The two texts do not so much display this reassuring opposition as their unnerving similarity. This article examines and attempts to undo some of the oppositions that have structured most of the scholarly discussion on the subject of censorship: Catholic versus Protestant, state versus individual, repression versus freedom. All of these play their role in an undeniably appealing history of liberty and toleration, but it is not a history that has much purchase in early modern England, as may be shown by a consideration of the efforts of the Church and authorities in England to prevent the circulation of what they called “naughty printed books.”
Community
Authors: Shrank Cathy
Published: March 2015

In 1590, Edward Allde printed a slim quarto of thirty-six leaves containing John Lydgate’s The Serpent of Devision (1422) and Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Tragedye of Gorboduc (first performed in 1561). This article examines the extent and nature of the “cultural reformations” that occurred in late medieval and Tudor England, using the joint publication of the two works as a useful starting point. It considers three types of community: the national communities – Gorboduc’s Britain and Caesar’s Rome – that these texts depict; the imagined communities of readers/spectators that they address; and the Elizabethan political community that they envisage. It also discusses the often interrelated processes of religious, social, political, technological, and cultural change witnessed in the period and analyses the ways in which these processes can be traced through the revisions made to the fifteenth-century Serpent for its publication in 1590.
Nuns
Authors: Wallace David
Published: March 2015

In his poem Upon Appleton House, Andrew Marvell implies that the Appleton nunnery in Yorkshire, along with all its works, vanish “in one instant.” The suggestion that the English nuns disappear the moment they are chased from their buildings is iconic both of English Renaissance imaginings and of modern scholarship. The mysterious absence of nuns was compounded with their excessive presence, a paradox that in many ways compares with medieval Catholic thinking and feeling about nuns. This article examines the representations of nuns in English Renaissance literature and their habitual failure to portray the kinds of lives, and conditions of enclosure, actually known to nuns in England. It also considers how the long history of convent literacies in England, leading from Anglo-Saxon and Latin to Anglo-Norman and English, results in gradual separation of women from the literacy of the clerical elite. The article analyzes Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miracolorum, a compilation of miniature ascetic romances written for Cistercian novice monks.
Active and Contemplative Lives
Authors: Summit Jennifer
Published: March 2015

This article examines the debate over the vita activa versus the vita contemplativa in England across the late medieval and early modern periods. After considering the inversion of the traditional hierarchy of contemplative life over active life as the defining paradigm shift of modernity, it explains how contemplation and the contemplative enterprise offered a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for Francis Bacon’s sense of his own project. It also analyzes Margaret Cavendish’s appropriation of intellectual stances and methods associated with the contemplative life.
Childbirth
Authors: Barratt Alexander
Published: March 2015

During the latter part of Henry VIII’s reign, humanism became entrenched, England broke with Rome, and monasteries disappeared. More subtle changes occurred in other, quite different, parts of the cultural landscape, including the discourse of childbirth. This article examines, in the light of vernacular versions of the Trotula (the standard authority on childbirth during the medieval period), two editions of an English gynecological handbook, The Byrth of Mankynde, published in 1540 and 1545, and also their immediate source, the Roszgarten, composed by Eucharius Rösslin and translated into Latin as De Partu Hominis. It argues that, at some point between the two editions of the English text, there had been a reorientation of the place of women in the discourse of childbirth: the new edition significantly ‘empowers’ women.
Persona
Authors: Parker John
Published: March 2015

This chapter argues that Christian antitheatricalists could persuasively oppose pagan theater only by offering their faith as a superior but fundamentally similar substitute — starting with Tertullian's use of persona (the Latin term for a theater mask) to describe the multiple facets of a Trinitarian godhead. The patristic hermeneutics of prosopopoeia (or in Latin, fictio personae) likewise treated scripture explicitly as a drama in which God plays multiple roles. Medieval Christians went even further by staging the Bible and once again using masks as an indispensable theatrico-theological property; hence the common English Protestant position that Christian culture had devolved into little more than paganism by a different name. Ironically enough, early modern antitheatricalists constantly cited their patristic antecedents in order to demonstrate the theater's dangerous allegiance to polytheism — even as they once again implicitly positioned their "strictly scriptural" version of Christianity as the ultimate drama. By the time Sidney published his Defense of Poesie it was in fact possible to argue that scripture itself had achieved such sublime effects only by means of its quasi-theatrical impersonation of multiple sacred figures.
Land and Environment
Authors: Moon David
Published: March 2015

This chapter aims to step outside prevailing environmental determinist interpretations, to treat the land and environment as more than a stage for history, and to look afresh at the story of human engagement with the natural world across the lands that have been Russia’s. The chapter considers in turn the diversity of natural habitats in these lands, the range of determinist interpretations that have dominated the historiography of the Russian environment, and the history of human impact on that environment over the very long term. Russians, it is argued, have made their own history and constructed their own identities in processes of interaction with the land and environment they have lived in, albeit one so naturally inhospitable as to be an unlikely first choice for a homeland.
Religion
Authors: Werth Paul
Published: March 2015

Given its ruling status under the old regime and the sheer numbers of its adherents, Orthodoxy has enjoyed an especially prominent place in Russian history. But Russia’s non-Orthodox religions have been equally important for their smaller communities and have been implicated in Russian politics, both internal and external, in profound ways. Drawing on recent scholarship about a long neglected field, this chapter explores the interplay between the many faiths and denominations represented in Russia and the Soviet Union. It focuses in turn on the relationship between the state and religious institutions, on local religious communities, both real and imagined, and on the ways in which lived religion proved remarkably adaptable to change and fundamentally compatible with modernity.
Urban Russia at the fin de siècle
Authors: McReynolds Louise
Published: March 2015

Because the history of prerevolutionary urban Russia has largely been written from the perspective of the revolution that engulfed all cities in 1917, historians have traditionally concentrated on the failures of urbanization, the limited ability of both state and local officials to manage growth and the horrific conditions at most factories. Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, however, labour history as the dominant mode of analysing urban history has given way to scholarship taking the ‘cultural turn’ and focus has shifted from strikes and strikers towards an investigation into how people experienced city life. This chapter follows that trend, taking the emergence of the modern industrial city as a topic in its own right, and examining not only familiar facets of urbanization such as in-migration, demographic flux and industrial unrest, but also conspicuous consumption, leisure and nightlife, religion and the role of women in urban society and culture.
Soldiers and Civilians, 1914–1917
Authors: Sanborn Joshua
Published: March 2015

The Great War so utterly transformed Russian society that the shift from a ‘sedimentary society’ (Alfred Rieber) to a ‘quicksand society’ (Moshe Lewin) was already well underway before either the October or the Stalin Revolutions. This chapter explores the disruptive effects between 1914 and 1917 of mass migrations, of a transfiguration of the ethnic order of the Empire, and of the dislocation of the imperial economy, including a major move away from a market system and the realignment of labour and authority in urban and rural areas alike. Among the most important social consequences of these developments was the emergence of an unstable mixture of refugees, soldiers and soldiers’ wives who together formed the wounded society of victims that emerged from the war years.
Vātsyāyana
Authors: Dasti Matthew
Published: March 2015

Vātsyāyana (c.450 ce) is the author of the Commentary on Nyāya, the first full commentary on the Nyāya-sūtra of Gautama (c.150 ce), which is itself the foundational text of the school of philosophy called “Nyāya.” The Nyāya tradition is home to a number of leading voices within classical Indian philosophy and is celebrated in later doxographies as one of the six “orthodox” systems of Hindu thought. Vātsyāyana’s commentary sets the agenda for much of Nyāya’s philosophical developments throughout its history. This chapter explores his theory of knowledge, giving special attention to his account of the nature and importance of cognition as a guide to action. It illustrates the way in which this theme informs a number of apparently distinct elements of his project including his realism, his account of epistemic entitlement, and his notion of philosophy’s contribution to living well.
The Nature of Idealism in the Mokṣopāyaśāstra/Yogavāsiṣṭha
Authors: Chenet François
Published: March 2015

The Mokṣopāyaśāstra, “The treatise expounding the means to liberation,” which later became more commonly known as the Yogavāsiṣṭha-mahā-rāmāyaṇa, “The great tale of Rāma as told by the sage Vasiṣṭha in order to expound his yoga philosophy,” or popularly simply as the Yogavāsiṣṭha, is a fascinating and original text in Indian philosophy. The Yogavāsiṣṭha, a “philosophical didactic Rāmāyaṇa,” advocates an uncompromising type of Idealism according to which the world emerges only upon perception, or, in short, that the whole world is in the mind only, that is to say, all contents of the world are psychical in character. The Yogavāsiṣṭha proposes a fine synthesis of Subjective Idealism—a blending of the “Emergence through Perception” (dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi) view and “Imaginism” (kalpanā-vāda)—with Monistic Idealism. The text appeals to narratives and fabulous stories as a means to elucidate deep philosophical truths.
The Neuropsychology of Acquired Number and Calculation Disorders
Authors: Cappelletti Marinella
Published: March 2015

Acalculia is an acquired disorder of number and/or calculation skills following cerebral damage (Henschen, 1919) which affects about 20% of patients with left hemisphere injury. The inability to use numbers can be very incapacitating as it interferes with several everyday activities such as shopping and using bank accounts and telephones (Butterworth, 1999; Dehaene, 1997). After introducing the main cognitive and anatomical features of the normal number system, this chapter will discuss the main historical and contemporary achievements in the neuropsychology of number cognition. These achievements concern: understanding that the number system is fractionated in distinct subcomponents; characterizing the relation between number and other cognitive skills; defining the role of the brain regions that cause number and calculation disorders or that allow maintenance of residual number skills; and identifying tools for the assessment and the possible rehabilitation of acalculia.
Information Structure in Bantu
Authors: Downing Laura J. , Hyman Larry M.
Published: March 2015

For some 40 years, the role that information structure (IS) plays in the grammatical structure of the ca. 500 Bantu languages has been the topic of considerable research. In this chapter we review the role of prosody, morphology and syntax in expressing IS in Bantu languages. We show that prosodic prominence does not play an important role; rather syntax and morphology are more important. For example, syntactic constructions like clefts and and immediately after the verb position correlate with focus, while dislocations correlate with topic. Among the morphological properties relevant to IS are the “inherently focused” TAM features (progressive, imperative, negative etc.) and the “conjoint-disjoint” distinction on verbs, as well as well as the presence vs. absence of the Bantu augment on nominals. Finally, we consider a range of tonal effects which at least indirectly correlate with IS (tonal domains, metatony, tone cases).
Predicate Focus
Authors: Zimmermann Malte
Published: March 2015

This chapter discusses a grammatically defined sub-class of focus: that on verbal predicates and on functional elements in the extended verbal projection. The phenomena falling under the label of predicate focus are introduced, and it is shown that predicate focus is interpretable on a par with argument or term focus on DPs and PPs. A unified structured-meaning approach that treats focus as the psychological predicate of the clause allows for singling out DP-terms and transitive verbs as categories in need of explicit marking when focused. A cross-linguistic overview of the grammatical strategies for marking predicate focus is provided, focusing on asymmetries in the realization of predicate as opposed to in terms of obligatory marking, grammatical strategy, and complexity. The information-structural and grammatical factors behind such focus asymmetries are discussed with some tentative universals concerning the explicit marking of information-structural categories on verbal predicates.
The Political Development of the Regulatory State
Authors: Harris Richard
Published: March 2015

This chapter advances the argument that regulation in the United States developed through a pattern of actions and reactions set in motion by business corporations and financiers of the Gilded Age attempting to control markets through cooperative institutional arrangements such asstock poolingandtrusts, justified by new ideas based on work of Charles Darwin and Frederick Taylor. These efforts at “private regulation” evoked demands from first populists and then progressives for government intervention to counter not only the economic impacts these new ideas and institutions but also the concentrations of business power that created and defended them. These demands for “public regulation” led to America’s first national regulatory laws and agencies. The evolution of the regulatory state in America reflects a succession of alternating private and public regulatory regimes, each characterized by a distinct set of regulatory ideas justifying its defining regulatory institutions and polices.
Religion, Peace, and the Origins of Nationalism
Authors: Little David
Published: March 2015

This chapter reexamines the historical origins of nationalism and offers two conclusions. It reveals the saliency of religion by establishing the centrality of the Protestant Reformation and the complexity of its influence on the rise of nationalism. Different attitudes among leaders of the Reformation toward the religious and political shape of the nation exhibit conflicting tendencies toward liberalism and illiberalism that have become central to the study of nationalism, and they help explain why the conflicts are so deep-seated and persistent. The reexamination also reveals some significant intellectual resources for reevaluating and correcting our understanding of liberal nationalism, which holds that nations developing robust liberal political and economic institutions in an orderly manner contribute to peace while those lacking such institutions do not.
Secular-Religious Encounters as Peacebuilding
Authors: Jakelić Slavica
Published: March 2015

This chapter seeks to broaden the focus of peace studies in its considerations of religious-secular relations by retrieving a thicker meaning of secularism. According to an emerging consensus in the field of peace studies, the secularist paradigm has long excluded religious actors from peacebuilding. This chapter argues that although critique of this dynamic and the larger critique of secularism are necessary the field of peace studies must also move beyond them and probe the potential of the encounters between secular and religious actors for building justpeace. By considering Solidarity, a 1980s social movement in Communist Poland, the chapter retrieves a more nuanced meaning of secular agency and secularism and expands the horizons of peace studies in two ways. First, it describes the possibilities of religious-secular encounters among local actors in civil society and rather than on the levels of states or religious institutions. Second, the chapter retrieves a form of secularism that is not just a matter of power or ideology but a a moral orientation and practice that discloses rather than legitimizes state power.
The Comparative Study of Ethics and the Project of the Justpeace
Authors: Kelsay John
Published: March 2015

This chapter focuses on the role of the comparative study of ethics in peacebuilding. The argument proceeds as follows. First, comparative ethics is presented primarily as a hermeneutical discipline, in which the goal is to answer the question “what is going on?” in a particular context. Second, the chapter analyzes changes in Muslim discourse about war. These point to a deep political crisis. Third, the chapter turns to an analysis of the virtues necessary for those who undertake to build peace in such a context. The example of Dag Hammerskjold serves to make the point that, among other virtues, peacebulding requires the wisdom to identify “provisional solutions”, which at times will include a judicious use of military force. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the vocabularies of jihad, just war, and other frameworks may yet play a constructive role in the building of peace.
Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding
Authors: Hayward Susan
Published: March 2015

This chapter explores the significant work of women-of-faith peacebuilders who have frequently been marginalized from the fields of religious and women’s peacebuilding. Religious women peacebuilders often find themselves caught between patriarchal religious institutions that prevent them from serving in key positions of authority and influence for peacebuilding, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a women’s peacebuilding sector shaped by Western feminism that tends to operate at a distance from a religious sector perceived to be a barrier to women’s empowerment. As the chapter shows, despite challenges, and at times capitalizing on their “invisibility,” these religious women peacebuilders have pursued strategic peacebuilding activities seeking to build relationships between communities, bring relief to survivors of violence, and advocate for structural changes to create more inclusive democratic systems (justpeace). In so doing, they have drawn creatively on religious resources supporting and empowering their peacebuilding agency and activities.
Peacebuilding in the Muslim World
Authors: Kadayifci-Orellana S. Ayse
Published: March 2015

This chapter argues that effective peacebuilding strategies in Muslim contexts should engage Islamic conceptions of peace and justice, and work together with credible agents of peace, including religious leaders. It elaborates on Islamic principles of peace and focuses on religious actors as important agents of change in Islamic contexts. Muslim religious actors often have more legitimacy than secular peacebuilders in their communities; local communities respect them as religious leaders who know their religious tradition and history well. The chapter also discusses various challenges practitioners face. Finally, it explores ways to empower agents of peace to respond to these challenges constructively within their unique historical, social, and political contexts.
Ritual, Religion, and Peacebuilding
Authors: Schirch Lisa
Published: March 2015

This chapter describes the role of religious ritual in the process of peacebuilding. It looks at the role of ritual in traditional religions and then examines how specific religious leaders use rituals and even develop new ones in order to foster reconciliation or transformation to support peace. Peacebuilding requires both ritual and rational approaches. Drawing on a wide set of interdisciplinary research on ritual, the chapter identifies distinct types and characteristics of ritual that support peacebuilding. Ritual does not offer a simple method for categorizing and analyzing conflict. Its symbolism and reliance on nonverbal methods of communication make it useful to peacebuilding precisely because there are so many irrational elements of conflict.
Spirituality and Religious Peacebuilding
Authors: Lederach John Paul
Published: March 2015

This chapter explores the meaning of quality of presence rising from spiritual resources that facilitate the practice of religious peacebuilding in protracted conflict. It begins by illustrating the quality of presence in three real-world examples of peacebuilding. It examines how religious identity engages the dilemmas faced when relationships are intentionally developed across lines of enmity. Faith-inspired peacebuilders exercise compassion, honesty, vulnerability, patience, and humility in choosing to reach out and connect with those who represent the face of threat and harm in the midst of conflict. The inner and outer worlds are explored as the context where spirituality and creativity forge the moral imagination necessary to sustain oneself and engaged relationships with the capacity to remain open with others amid conflict.
Religious Communities and Possibilities for Justpeace
Authors: Lynch Cecelia
Published: March 2015

This chapter analyzes religious communities’ role in peacebuilding vis-à-vis dominant political and economic discourses of the colonial past and the postcolonial present. This comparison demonstrates that such dominant discourses—of colonial expansion for “civilizing” purposes in the past, and for neoliberal modes of economic structuring in the context of the global war on terror in the present—entangle both strategic peacebuilders and religious communities. It is critically necessary, therefore, for peacebuilders to practice reflexivity about their own assumptions, connections, and relationships with all actors and processes in the peacebuilding environment. They should constantly interrogate whether and how the experiences of the past shape problems, strategies, and/or attitudes toward societies in conflict in the present. Moreover, religious communities and strategic peacebuilders should reclaim the prophetic voice extant in all religious traditions to challenge more directly the unjust economic, political, and social structures that inhibit the advancement of justpeace.
Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding
Authors: Omer Atalia
Published: March 2015

This synthetic chapter describes the contributions to the Oxford Handbook on Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, putting them in tension with one another through a consideration of larger orienting themes. One such theme is the tension between the liberal peace and justpeace paradigms. Another orienting thread in this synthesis is a more expansive interpretation of violence and the relevance of not only direct and acute violence but also structural and cultural modes of violence to the analysis of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. A related dimension of an expansive interpretation of religion and violence invites a discussion of the tool of discursive critique and scrutiny of the conventional categories informing theorizing about religion and political violence. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the tension emerging in the field between theory and practice as well as between global and local meanings, agendas, and theories of change. The synthesis proceeds with a careful effort to locate the contributions within a broader landscape of debates about modernism, secularism, and the so-called resurgence of religion.