bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Intertextuality
Authors: Allen Graham
Published: May 2019

Intertextuality is a concept first outlined in the work of poststructuralist theorists Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and refers to the emergence of and understanding of any individual text out of the vast network of discourses and languages that make up culture. No text, in the light of intertextuality, stands alone; all texts have their existence and their meaning in relation to a practically infinite field of prior texts and prior significations. Such a vision of textuality emerges from 20th-century developments in our understanding of what it means to use and to be in language. No speaker creates their language from scratch; all linguistic utterances depend upon the employment and redeployment of already existent utterances. Intertextuality is part, then, of a radical rethinking of human subjectivity and human expression, a rethinking that at its most extreme argues it is language rather than human intention that generates meaning.

Having found expression in the radical texts of early poststructuralism, intertextuality became a popular concept within literary criticism, often reimagined in ways that appear far less skeptical about authorial intentionality. A survey of literary theory and practice from the 1970s onward will show a host of critics and theorists employing the term to foreground formalist, political, psychoanalytical, feminist, postcolonial, postmodernist, and other modes of interpretation and commentary. At times these approaches bring the concept much closer to ideas centered in the humanistic subject, such as influence, allusion, citation, and appropriation, while at other times they continue and extend the deconstruction of traditional models of intention. What all theories and practices of intertextuality seem to share, however, is a need to reimagine the act of reading, given that reading can no longer be confined to the reader’s encounter with a single, stable, inviolable text. Taken together, intertextual theories and practices have demonstrated in a myriad of ways the need to move beyond the

Author—Text—Reader

model to models of reading which, by treating all texts as intertexts, confront the limits of interpretation itself.
Literary Representations of Migration
Authors: Moreno Marisel
Published: May 2019

Migration has always been at the core of Latina/o literature. In fact, it would be difficult to find any work in this corpus that does not address migration to some extent. This is because, save some exceptions, the experience of migration is the unifying condition from which Latina/o identities have emerged. All Latinas/os trace their family origins to Latin America and/or the Hispanic Caribbean. That said, not all of them experience migration first-hand or in the same manner; there are many factors that determine why, how, when, and where migration takes place. Yet, despite all of these factors, it is safe to say that a crucial reason behind the mass movements of people from Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean to the United States has been direct or indirect US involvement in the countries of origin. This is evident, for instance, in the cases of Puerto Rico (invasion of 1898) and Central America (civil wars in the 1980s), where US intervention led to migration to the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Other factors that tend to affect the experience of migration include nationality, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, language, citizenship status, age, ability, and the historical juncture at which migration takes place.

The heterogeneous ways in which migration is represented in Latina/o literature reflect the wide range of factors that influence and shape the experience of migration. Latina/o narrative, poetry, theatre, essay, and other forms of literary expressions capture the diversity of the migration experience. Some of the constant themes that emerge in these works include nostalgia, transculturation, discrimination, racism, uprootedness, hybridity, and survival. In addressing these issues, Latina/o literature brings visibility to the complexities surrounding migration and Latina/o identity, while undermining the one-dimensional and negative stereotypes that tend to dehumanize Latinas/os in US dominant society. Most importantly, it allows the public to see that while migration is complex and in constant flux, those who experience it are human beings in search for survival.
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)
Authors: Harman Graham
Published: May 2019

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is an intellectual movement in the arts and humanities sharing certain affinities with both phenomenology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It is a philosophically realist position often at odds with existing currents in postmodernism and critical theory. The best-known idea of OOO is that objects “withdraw” from all direct human and non-human contact, so that relations between things are always indirect and must be accounted for rather than taken for granted. More broadly speaking, however, OOO is a theory of two kinds of objects (real, sensual) and two kinds of qualities (real, sensual). Real objects and qualities are not directly accessible to thought, perception, practical use, or even causal relation, and must be approached by more allusive means. Sensual objects and qualities, by contrast, exist only for some other entity, human or otherwise. Each type of object has troubled relations with each of the two forms of qualities, resulting in four basic tensions, the analysis of which is the heart of object-oriented method in every field and not just literature. OOO literary theory has a special fondness for the weird: especially the writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose work is taken to exemplify two of the key ontological tensions. Dante and Edgar Allan Poe are also key OOO figures, due to their manner of theatrically investing their characters and readers in sincere relations with objects. OOO’s relation with the formalist aesthetics of Immanuel Kant is ambivalent, since Kant is admired for cutting off the aesthetic object from its surroundings but challenged for his modernist assumption that the human and non-human must never be mixed.
Political Cartoons
Authors: García Zazil Reyes
Published: May 2019

Political cartoons are rhetorical artifacts where journalism and popular culture intersect. Through the use of images and words, facts and fiction, political cartoons provide their readers with a point of view: a single frame loaded with vivid images and condensed meaning. Political cartoons perform several political and social functions; the main one is to provide political commentary on current events and social issues. Additionally, cartoonists often see their work as a weapon against the abuses of power. Thus, they seek to expose and ridicule the powerful. The result is not always funny, but it is often surprising.

Political cartoons are valuable objects of study for many disciplines, such as art history, journalism, and sociology. Studying political cartoons can give us information about past and present political processes and social imagery; it can also serve to understand how visual elements are used to communicate; but most importantly, it provides insight into the cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes of the societies that produce them.

Political cartoons are a form of communication with extraordinary rhetorical power. In order to construct meaning, and in hopes of persuading their audience, cartoonists use different rhetorical strategies, such as the use of metaphors and widely known cultural references. Like other rhetorical artifacts, political cartoons are not a straightforward form of communication. To understand one cartoon, people require multiple literacies, and often different people have different readings. Although the influence of political cartoons has diminished in some parts of the Western world, they continue to do political work around the world.
The Global Open Society: Civilizations and Cultural Interpretations
Authors: Mickunas Algis
Published: May 2019

Mass media are global and involve numerous and varied cultures whose customs, languages, beliefs, and arts are different. The differences require bridges for mutual understanding, and such bridges are offered as cross-cultural communication. The latter point raises a question of translation and interpretation, showing how cultures are suppressed, absorbed by other cultures, or how they survive. Historical examples will be provided to form basic canons for an understanding of cross-cultural interpretation. The analyses of interpretation suggest that cultures belong to civilizations with more fundamental and more encompassing structures, capable of providing frameworks for their own cultures. At this level, cultures become symbolic designs of a given civilization. With this turn, cross-cultural communication is shifted toward comparative civilizations and their capacity to offer more fundamental frameworks of cross-cultural communication. Moving through major theories of comparative civilization, the critical questions are as follows: Does a specific theory favor the structure of one civilization over others, and does it contain features that do not belong to other civilizations? In brief, do scholars of civilizations assume the concepts of their civilization and contextualize all other civilizations in one context? In spite of these questions, civilizations, by virtue of their cultures as symbolic designs, offer phenomena that allow the formation of basic rules available in all civilizations. By comparing such rules, it is possible to decipher the way that such rules form the communicative ground at the level of cultural symbolic designs as interpretations of the broader structures—civilizations.
The Treaties of Rome
Authors: Patel Kiran Klaus
Published: May 2019

Together with the Treaty of Paris (1951), which established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the two Treaties of Rome (1957) were the founding treaties of today’s European Union. Of the two Rome treaties, the more influential proved to be that which created the European Economic Community (EEC), although many contemporaries expected the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) to acquire that role. As during all major treaty negotiations in the history of European integration, there were divisions of opinion among the six ECSC member states (Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) along and within national lines. In the end, however, their governments were able to agree on a complex package deal with various components. To reach this result, the work of two preparatory bodies, the so-called Spaak Committee and an intergovernmental conference set up by the foreign ministers of the six ECSC states, proved crucial. In addition, transnational actors and networks had a considerable impact on the Treaties.

The ultimate treaty texts reflected this trajectory of negotiations and the wider political context of the time. The Treaties of Rome were less supranational than the Treaty of Paris, and the three resultant communities were characterized by their hybrid nature: until the Merger Treaty of 1967, they shared some common institutions, such as the Parliamentary Assembly and the Court of Justice, while they had three independent executive bodies. Euratom, which focused on cooperation in the sphere of nuclear power, soon experienced institutional crises, and the same holds true for the ECSC. The EEC, in contrast, possessed greater powers and unleashed more significant dynamics and thus became the core of European integration.

On the basis of the Treaties of Rome, the European Communities incrementally turned into the foremost forum of international cooperation and integration in (Western) Europe. That, however, was quite unclear in 1957, as reflected in opinion polls at the time. Moreover, there were important contenders for this role. By the end of the Cold War, the EC had outpaced them all, for three main reasons: its focus on market integration, its greater legal integration in comparison to organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Council of Europe and, finally, its financial resources. In sum, one needs to know about the Treaties of Rome and the integration dynamics they unleashed in order to understand the enormous importance that today’s EU has acquired.
Transgender-Specific Policy in Latin America
Authors: Campbell Baird
Published: May 2019

The situation of trans rights in Latin America varies greatly by country and region despite a binding 2017 opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) clarifying member states’ obligations to guarantee trans rights. While countries in the Southern Cone and Northern Andes have recently made great strides in protecting and supporting their trans citizens, Central America, the Caribbean, and several countries in South America continue to offer little or no legal support for trans rights. Some countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Uruguay, have passed Gender Identity Laws that provide trans people with the ability to rectify their documents to reflect their names and gender identities. The current state of trans-specific policy in the region is explored by first framing it through an overview of the relevant parts of the IACHR ruling and then presenting the case for the depathologization of trans identities, one of the movement’s most pressing goals. Crucial to this discussion is the next section, which presents the current rights and limitations in trans-specific healthcare in the region. A discussion of the importance of gender identity as a basic human right, recognized in the IACHR ruling, follows, continuing on to an analysis of the place of children, adolescents, and their parents in relation to this right. Relatedly, the next section explores the prevalence and force of anti-discrimination laws in the region, which vary greatly in their specific protection of trans people. Finally, we attempt to look forward to what may be next in the fight for trans rights in the region, exemplifying cases such as that of Uruguay, which has recently begun to debate trans-specific reparations, and Argentina, which has begun to debate dedicated employment slots for trans people.
North American and Australian LGBT Movement and Interest Groups
Authors: Tadlock Barry L. , Glick Christopher
Published: May 2019

A study of the LGBT movement within Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Australia reveals the movement’s youth and vitality. Only since the mid-1900s has there been what one might identify as an organized social movement within any of these four countries. A key similarity across the social movements in these four countries has been the formation of associated interest groups. These groups have transformed the LGBT movement. Scholarly research regarding the movement and its attendant interest groups reveals decades of growth and development. These changes over the years allow scholars to investigate topics such as how the LGBT movement compares to other social movements, how various sexual and gender minority communities have been incorporated into the larger movement, and how movement groups have utilized various strategies in pursuit of movement goals.

In the United States, the gay rights movement was one of a few distinct movements included within a larger new social movement. These various movements shared the fact they were organized around a goal of identity expression. (The extent to which a gay rights movement morphed into a broader LGBT movement is also an important part of the U.S. story.) In Canada, the modern movement for LGBT individuals exemplified a gradual process rising out of the post–World War era; it was attached to a rise in Quebecois nationalism and the growth of First Nations peoples’ rights movements. Conversely, Australia has seen a slower progression than Canada or the United States, in part because Australia has had a relatively inactive set of social rights movements over the same period. (There is evidence that Australian social rights movements came to consciousness more from a global than a domestic narrative.) Finally, with respect to Mexico, one might assume that LGBT successes there have lagged behind those in the United States because of a more vibrant social movement community in the United States and also because Mexicans are assumed by some to be more religious than residents of the United States. However, there is evidence that the LGBT movement has had greater electoral and policy successes in Mexico. This could in part be due to a history in Mexico of LGBT activists identifying with other revolutionary agents who sought broad structural changes in that country.
Deliberative Democracy and Political Decision Making
Authors: Green Jon , Kingzette Jonathon , Neblo Michael
Published: May 2019

Defined expansively as the exchange of politically relevant justifications, political deliberation occurs at many sites in the democratic system. It is also performed by several different types of actors. Here, we review political deliberation based on who is deliberating and what role these deliberations play in making binding decisions. First, ordinary citizens frequently deliberate in informal settings. While these discussions often fail to live up to the standards outlined by deliberative theorists, they typically correlate with other democratic goods, such as increased political participation. Second, there have been several attempts in recent years to construct the conditions necessary for quality deliberation among citizens by organizing small-group discussions in semi-formal settings. Proponents of such discussions argue that they promote a variety of democratic goods, such as political knowledge and better-justified political decisions, and as such should be incorporated into the formal policymaking process. However, critics of these procedural innovations hold that a more deliberative society is unrealistic or, alternatively, that deliberation is not without drawbacks on its own terms. Third, in a limited number of cases, citizens’ deliberations are formally embedded in democratic institutions, serving to advise voters and politicians or directly leading to binding decisions. Finally, political elites deliberate frequently. Opinion leaders attempt to and often succeed in shaping the discourse around issues, while elected officials, bureaucrats, and judges formally deliberate before making almost every binding decision. Surprisingly, though these deliberations happen frequently and likely have substantial effects on policy, they are probably the least studied in the political system, though recent breakthroughs in text analysis offer a path forward to analyzing deliberation among elites more systematically.
Single Neuron Computational Modeling
Authors: Yoo Yeonjoo , Gabbiani Fabrizio
Published: May 2019

Computational modeling is essential to understand how the complex dendritic structure and membrane properties of a neuron process input signals to generate output signals. Compartmental models describe how inputs, such as synaptic currents, affect a neuron’s membrane potential and produce outputs, such as action potentials, by converting membrane properties into the components of an electrical circuit. The simplest such model consists of a single compartment with a leakage conductance which represents a neuron having spatially uniform membrane potential and a constant conductance summarizing the combined effect of every ion flowing across the neuron’s membrane. The Hodgkin-Huxley model introduces two additional active channels; the sodium channel and the delayed rectifier potassium channel whose associated conductances change depending on the membrane potential and that are described by an additional set of three nonlinear differential equations. Since its conception in 1952, many kinds of active channels have been discovered with a variety of characteristics that can successfully be modeled within the same framework. As the membrane potential varies spatially in a neuron, the next refinement consists in describing a neuron as an electric cable to account for membrane potential attenuation and signal propagation along dendritic or axonal processes. A discrete version of the cable equation results in compartments with possibly different properties, such as different types of ion channels or spatially varying maximum conductances to model changes in channel densities. Branching neural processes such as dendrites can be modeled with the cable equation by considering the junctions of cables with different radii and electrical properties. Single neuron computational models are used to investigate a variety of topics and reveal insights that cannot be evidenced directly by experimental observation. Studies on action potential initiation and on synaptic integration provide prototypical examples illustrating why computational models are essential. Modeling action potential initiation constrains the localization and density of channels required to reproduce experimental observations, while modeling synaptic integration sheds light on the interaction between the morphological and physiological characteristics of dendrites. Finally, reduced compartmental models demonstrate how a simplified morphological structure supplemented by a small number of ion channel-related variables can provide clear explanations about complex intracellular membrane potential dynamics.
Stereopsis and Depth Perception
Authors: Parker Andrew J.
Published: May 2019

Humans and some animals can use their two eyes in cooperation to detect and discriminate parts of the visual scene based on depth. Owing to the horizontal separation of the eyes, each eye obtains a slightly different view of the scene in front of the head. These small differences are processed by the nervous system to generate a sense of binocular depth. As humans, we experience an impression of solidity that is fully three-dimensional; this impression is called stereopsis and is what we appreciate when we watch a 3D movie or look into a stereoscopic viewer. While the basic perceptual phenomena of stereoscopic vision have been known for some time, it is mainly within the last 50 years that we have gained an understanding of how the nervous system delivers this sense of depth. This period of research began with the identification of neuronal signals for binocular depth in the primary visual cortex. Building on that finding, subsequent work has traced the signaling pathways for binocular stereoscopic depth forward into extrastriate cortex and further on into cortical areas concerning with sensorimotor integration. Within these pathways, neurons acquire sensitivity to more complex, higher order aspects of stereoscopic depth. Signals relating to the relative depth of visual features can be identified in the extrastriate cortex, which is a form of selectivity not found in the primary visual cortex. Over the same time period, knowledge of the organization of binocular vision in animals that inhabit a wide diversity of ecological niches has substantially increased. The implications of these findings for developmental and adult plasticity of the visual nervous system and onset of the clinical condition of amblyopia are explored in this article. Amblyopic vision is associated with a cluster of different visual and oculomotor symptoms, but the loss of high-quality stereoscopic depth performance is one of the consistent clinical features. Understanding where and how those losses occur in the visual brain is an important goal of current research, for both scientific and clinical reasons.
Network Ethnography as an Approach for the Study of New Governance Structures in Education
Authors: Player-Koro Catarina
Published: May 2019

Network ethnography was first developed for the study of organizations built around digital media, and is an amalgam of different research methods derived from traditional ethnography and social network analysis. It was then further adapted to study contemporary policy mobility and governance structures, and could be summarized as an adaptation of ethnographic methods to the way contemporary organizations and associations are working due to the globalization and digitalization of society.

Network ethnography involves a mapping of the policy field under study using techniques from social network analysis. Data production and analysis of mobilities and interactions within the network are conducted with network ethnography, a method that shares the fundamental principle of ethnography as a tradition. This allows the researcher to analyze network activities and evolutions, how social relations are established and performed, and how policy is being moved—and fixed—through these activities.
Post-Intentional Phenomenology and Studies of Social Change in Teaching
Authors: Vagle Mark D.
Published: May 2019

Post-intentional phenomenology is a phenomenological research approach that draws on phenomenological and poststructural philosophies. In its early conceptualization, post-intentional phenomenology was imagined as a philosophical and methodological space in which all sorts of philosophies, theories, and ideas could be put in conceptual dialogue with one another—creating a productive and generative cacophony of philosophies/theories/ideas that accomplishes something(s) that these same individual philosophies/theories/ideas may not be able to do, in the same way at least, on their own. Although this desire remains, post-intentional phenomenology now serves as more of an invitation for others to play with and among philosophies/theories/ideas to see what might come of such playfulness—and to have the work of the methodology itself potentially produce social change, however great or small. The post-intentional phenomenologist is asked not only to identify a phenomenon of interest, but also to situate the phenomenon in context, around a social issue. An underlying assumption of this methodology is that all phenomena are both personal and social—that is, phenomena are lived by individuals and are in a constant state of production and provocation through social relations. Such a methodological configuration can be of use to studies of teaching—as the work of teaching (as a post-intentional phenomenon) is lived, produced, and provoked by all sorts of entangled complexities that may or may not be conscious to the individual.
Community-Based Experiential Learning in Teacher Education
Authors: Harfitt Gary
Published: May 2019

Institutes of higher education around the world have increasingly adopted community-based experiential learning (EL) programs as pedagogy to equip their students with skills and values that make them more open to an increasingly unpredictable and ill-defined 21st-century world. Values of social justice, empathy, care, collaboration, creativity, and resilience have all been seen as potential benefits of community engagement through EL. In the field of teacher education, the goals of preparing teachers for the 21st century have undergone similar changes with the local community being positioned more and more as a knowledge space that is rich in learning opportunities for both preservice and in-service teachers. It is no longer enough for teacher educators to only focus on the teaching of classroom strategies and methods; beginning teachers’ must now move toward a critical interrogation of their role as a community-based teacher. Boundary-crossing projects established by teacher education institutes and that are embedded in local communities can complement more traditional pedagogies such as classroom-based lectures and teaching practicum. Such an approach to teacher education can allow for new teachers to draw on powerful community knowledge in order to become more inclusive and socially connected educators. In sum, community-based EL in teacher preparation programs can create a hybrid, nonhierarchical platform for academics, practitioners, and community partners who bring together different expertise that are all seen as being beneficial to teacher development in a rapidly changing and uncertain world.

While research has shown that community-based EL projects can bring tangible benefits to students, universities, and community members, a number of contentious issues continue to surround the topic and need to be addressed. One concerns the very definition of community-based EL itself. There is still a need to better characterize what community-based EL is and what it involves, because too often it is seen in overly simplistic terms, such as voluntary work, or categorized loosely as another example of service-learning endeavors, including field studies and internship programs. There has also been a paucity of research on the degree to which community-based EL projects in teacher training actually help to promote subject matter teaching skills. Other ongoing issues about the case for community-based learning in teacher education today include the question of who the teacher educators are in today’s rapidly changing world and to what extent noneducation-related community partners should be positioned as co-creators of knowledge alongside teacher educators in the development of new teachers’ personal and professional development.
African Masculinities
Authors: Mbah Ndubueze L.
Published: May 2019

As a system of identity, African masculinity is much more than a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicit and implicit expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others. It also refers to more than how African male bodies, subjectivities, and experiences are constituted in specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. African masculinities, as historical subjects embodying distinctive socially constructed gender and sexual identities, have been both male and female. By occupying a masculine sociopolitical position, embodying masculine social traits, and performing cultural deeds socially construed and symbolized as masculine, African men and women have constituted masculinity. Across various African societies and times, there have been multiple and conflicting notions of masculinities, promoted by local and foreign institutions, and there have been ceaseless contestations and synergies among the various forms of hegemonic, subordinate, and subversive African masculinities. Men and women have frequently brought their own agendas to bear on the political utility of particular notions of masculinity. Through such performances of masculinity, Africans have constantly negotiated the institutional power dynamics of gender relations. So, the question is not whether Africans worked with gender binaries, because they did. As anthropologist John Wood puts it, African indigenous logic of gender becomes evident in the juxtaposition, symbolic reversals, and interrelation of opposites. Rather, one should ask, why and how did African societies generate a fluid gender system in which biological sex did not always correspond to gender, such that anatomically male and female persons could normatively occupy socially constructed masculine and feminine roles and vice versa? And how did African mutually constitutive gender and sexuality constructions shape African societies?
The Planets in Ancient Egypt
Authors: Quack Joachim Friedrich
Published: May 2019

The five visible planets are certainly attested to in Egyptian sources from about 2000 bce. The three outer ones are religiously connected with the falcon-headed god Horus, Venus with his father Osiris, and Mercury with Seth, the brother and murderer of Osiris. Clear attestations of the planets are largely limited to decoration programs covering the whole night sky. There are a number of passages in religious texts where planets may be mentioned, but many of them are uncertain because the names given to the planets are for most of them not specific enough to exclude other interpretations. There may have been a few treatises giving a more detailed religious interpretation of the planets and their behavior, but they are badly preserved and hardly understandable in the details.

In the Late Period, probably under Mesopotamian influence, the sequence of the planets as well as their religious associations could change; at least one source links Saturn with the Sun god, Mars with Miysis, Mercury with Thot, Venus with Horus, son of Isis, and Jupiter with Amun, arranging the planets with those considered negative in astrology first, separated from the positive ones by the vacillating Mercury. Late monuments depicting the zodiac place the planets in positions which are considered important in astrology, especially the houses or the place of maximum power (hypsoma; i.e., “exaltation”).

Probably under Babylonian influence, in the Greco-Roman Period mathematical models for calculating the positions and phases of the planets arose. These were used for calculating horoscopes, of which a number in demotic Egyptian are attested. There are also astrological treatises (most still unpublished) in the Egyptian language which indicate the relevance of planets for forecasts, especially for the fate of individuals born under a certain constellation, but also for events important for the king and the country in general; they could be relevant also for enterprises begun at a certain date.

There is some reception of supposedly or actually specific Egyptian planet sequences, names and religious associations in Greek sources.
The Central American Coffee Commodity Chain
Authors: Samper Kutschbach Mario
Published: May 2019

Coffee production has been a significant economic activity in Central America since the 19th century, and it has played an important role in shaping social relations, politics, and culture in various ways over time, both within coffee-producing areas and in each country. Coffee continues to be a major export crop, although the region’s economy has diversified, and the prospects of coffee as a commodity and a way of life will influence the fortunes of many in the highland areas of the isthmus. The Central American coffee commodity chain, from planting, care of the coffee groves, and harvesting through transportation, processing, and storage to shipping, roasting, and distribution abroad and within each country, has evolved in response both to internal dynamics and to changes in the world market for coffee and consumer demand, international trading systems, capital flows, and marketing systems. The supply of credit and the exchange of knowledge and information on the market as well as technical expertise and the provision of inputs, genetic material, and equipment have helped shape and reshape this value chain. Farmers’ strategies and cooperative endeavors, as well as local processing, gathering, and storage facilities and financing and regulations, have adapted to changing trends and to market downturns, recoveries, and segmentation. Vertical and horizontal integration of the various links in this chain have also evolved, in ways that differ from one country to another. While historically there has been a trend toward concentration especially in processing and export, there has also been fragmentation and greater involvement of small- or medium-scale producers in cultivation and in primary processing in specific countries or areas. Certain pests and diseases, whose geographical distribution and severity have been related to agro-ecological conditions and practices, have also contributed to modifications in productive systems. Climate change has had increasingly severe short-term impacts on the frequency of extreme events and variability of rainfall and temperature, while warmer average temperatures have begun to affect the altitudinal range of coffee cultivation. There is definitely a future for specific types of Central American coffee, but not necessarily for all current areas, farms, and firms specializing in this tropical product.
Pre-Columbian Earth Builders of the Amazon
Authors: Gregorio de Souza Jonas
Published: May 2019

Continuing advances in the archaeology of the Amazon have changed long-standing misconceptions about the rainforest as a homogeneous, nearly pristine environment occupied by small, scattered groups. Massive archaeological sites, deep deposits of anthropogenic soils, and earthworks found over thousands of kilometers now testify to the scale and intensity of past human impact in some parts of the Amazon. However, debate persists about the extent of such transformations, as distinct environments within the Amazon Basin (floodplains, savannas, seasonal forests) reveal different scales and intensities of pre-Columbian landscape modification. In that context, the discovery of hundreds of geometric earthen enclosures in the southern rim of the Amazon is proving that some areas that were previously considered virtually untouched forest may have been densely settled in the past. Although regional variations exist, most southern Amazonian enclosures appear to be defensive earthworks built at the turn of the second millennium ce, a period recognized by archaeologists as one of escalating population densities, migrations, and warfare across the Amazon Basin.
Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives)
Authors: Akita Kimi , Dingemanse Mark
Published: May 2019

Ideophones, also termed mimetics or expressives, are marked words that depict sensory imagery. They are found in many of the world’s languages, and sizable lexical classes of ideophones are particularly well-documented in the languages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Ideophones are not limited to onomatopoeia like meow and smack but cover a wide range of sensory domains, such as manner of motion (e.g., plisti plasta ‘splish-splash’ in Basque), texture (e.g., tsaklii ‘rough’ in Ewe), and psychological states (e.g., wakuwaku ‘excited’ in Japanese). Across languages, ideophones stand out as marked words due to special phonotactics, expressive morphology including certain types of reduplication, and relative syntactic independence, in addition to production features like prosodic foregrounding and common co-occurrence with iconic gestures.

Three intertwined issues have been repeatedly debated in the century-long literature on ideophones. (a) Definition: Isolated descriptive traditions and cross-linguistic variation have sometimes obscured a typologically unified view of ideophones, but recent advances show the promise of a prototype definition of ideophones as conventionalized depictions in speech, with room for language-specific nuances. (b) Integration: The variable integration of ideophones across linguistic levels reveals an interaction between expressiveness and grammatical integration, and has important implications for how to conceive of dependencies between linguistic systems. (c) Iconicity: Ideophones form a natural laboratory for the study of iconic form-meaning associations in natural languages, and converging evidence from corpus and experimental studies suggests important developmental, evolutionary, and communicative advantages of ideophones.
Morphology in Niger-Congo Languages
Authors: Creissels Denis
Published: May 2019

This chapter is an overview of the structure of words belonging to the major lexical categories (nouns and verbs) in Niger-Congo languages, with an emphasis on the morphological patterns typically found in the core Niger-Congo languages commonly considered as relatively conservative in their morphology: rich systems of verb morphology, both inflectional and derivational, and systems of gender-number marking with a relative high number of genders, and no possibility to isolate number marking from gender marking. As regards formal aspects of the structure of words, as a rule, verb forms are morphologically more complex than nominal forms. The highest degree of synthesis is found in the verbal morphology of some Bantu languages. Both prefixes and suffixes are found. Cumulative exponence is typically found in gender-number marking. Multiple exponence is very common in the verbal morphology of Bantu language but rather uncommon in the remainder of Niger-Congo. Consonant alternations are common in several groups of Niger-Congo languages, and various types of tonal alternations play an important role in the morphology of many Niger-Congo languages. The categories most commonly expressed in the inflectional morphology of nouns are gender, number, definiteness, and possession. The inflectional morphology of verbs commonly expresses agreement, TAM, and polarity, and is also widely used to express interclausal dependencies and information structure. As regards word formation, the situation is not uniform across the language groups included in Niger-Congo, but rich systems of verb-to-verb derivation are typically found in the Niger-Congo languages whose morphological patterns are commonly viewed as conservative.
Valuation of Rainforest Preservation in the Amazon
Authors: Strand Jon
Published: May 2019

Different ecosystem values of the Amazon rainforest are surveyed in economic terms. Spatial rainforest valuation is crucial for good forest management, such as where to put the most effort to stop illegal logging and forest fires, and which areas to designate as new nationally protected areas. Three classes of economic value are identified, according to who does the valuation: values accruing to the local and regional populations (of South America); carbon values (which are global); and other global (noncarbon) values. Only the first two classes are discussed. Three types of value are separated according to ecosystem service delivered from the rainforest: provisioning services; supporting and regulating services; and cultural and other human services. Net values of provisioning services, including reduced impact logging and various non-timber forest products, are well documented for the entire Brazilian Amazon at a spatially detailed scale and amount to at least $20–50/ha/year. Less-detailed information exists about values of fish, game, and bioprospecting from the Amazon, although their total values can be shown to be sizable. Many supporting and regulating services are harder to value economically, in particular climate regulation and watershed and erosion protection. Impacts of changed rainfall when Amazon rainforest is lost have been valued at detailed scale, but with relative model values of $10–20/ha/year. Carbon values are much larger, at a carbon price of $30/ton CO2, around $14,000/ha as capitalized value. The average per-hectare value of tourism and the health benefits from having the Amazon forest are low, and such values cannot easily be pinned down to individual areas of the Amazon. Finally, the biodiversity values of the Amazon, as accruing to the local and regional population, seem to be small based on recent stated-preference work in Brazil. Most of the values related to biodiversity are likely to be global and may. in principle, be very large, but the global components are not valued here. The concept of value is discussed, and a marginal valuation concept (practically useful for policy) is favored as opposed to an average or total valuation. Marginal value can be below average value (as is likely for biodiversity and tourism), but can also in some contexts be higher. This can occur where losing forest at a local scale increases the prevalence of forest fires and where it increases forest dryness, leading to a multiplier process whereby more forest is lost. While strides have recently been made to improve rainforest valuation at both micro- and macroscales, much work still remains.
1. Does dyslexia exist?
Authors: Snowling Margaret J.
Published: May 2019

Difficulties with reading and writing have wide-ranging effects beyond academic achievement, including effects on career opportunities, personal well-being, and to some extent mental health. Literacy difficulties, when they are not caused by lack of education, are known as dyslexia. Dyslexia can be defined as a problem with learning that primarily affects the development of reading accuracy and fluency and spelling skills. ‘Does dyslexia exist?’ explains that it is now widely understood that dyslexia is a specific learning disorder, but that there is no clear, diagnostic profile. However, dyslexia can be a disabling condition and we can do a great deal to ameliorate its effects.
7. The three Cs
Authors: Snowling Margaret J.
Published: May 2019

Dyslexia is not a ‘category’— it exists on a continuum. Even if it is difficult to be precise about the criteria for defining dyslexia, there are strong theoretical and moral grounds to use the label ‘dyslexia’ to refer to people with severe and persistent reading difficulties. Moreover, ‘naming it’ dyslexia is justified on the grounds of a large body of empirical evidence. ‘The three Cs: caveats, comorbidities, and compensation’ are framed within the Rose Review of dyslexia, an independent study published in 2009, which drew on the best evidence and practice surrounding the nature and remediation of dyslexia.
Assessing concordance among human, in silico predictions and functional assays on genetic variant classification
Authors: Luo Jiaqi , Zhou Tianliangwen , You Xiaobin , Zi Yi , Li Xiaoting , Wu Yangming , Lan Zhaoji , Zhi Qihuan , Yi Dandan , Xu Lei , Li Ang , Zhong Zaixuan , Zhu Mei , Sun Gang , Zhu Tao , Rao Jianmei , Lin Luhua , Sang Jianfeng , Shi Yujian
Published: May 2019

Motivation

A variety of in silico tools have been developed and frequently used to aid high-throughput rapid variant classification, but their performances vary, and their ability to classify variants of uncertain significance were not systemically assessed previously due to lack of validation data. This has been changed recently by advances of functional assays, where functional impact of genetic changes can be measured in single-nucleotide resolution using saturation genome editing (SGE) assay.

Results

We demonstrated the neural network model AIVAR (Artificial Intelligent VARiant classifier) was highly comparable to human experts on multiple verified datasets. Although highly accurate on known variants, AIVAR together with CADD and PhyloP showed non-significant concordance with SGE function scores. Moreover, our results indicated that neural network model trained from functional assay data may not produce accurate prediction on known variants.

Availability and implementation

All source code of AIVAR is deposited and freely available at https://github.com/TopGene/AIvar.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Trust in the Court: The Role of the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights
Authors: Creamer Cosette D , Godzimirska Zuzanna
Published: May 2019

The growing impact of European institutions on the daily lives of citizens has stimulated greater attention to the public’s trust in these bodies. Existing research on trust in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) tends to focus on the role of judges and their rulings. In contrast, this article examines the role of the ECtHR’s Registry. We argue that the civil servants of the ECtHR serve a critical function for the court’s operation and have the potential to play an indispensable trust-building role. Drawing on interviews with court officials and survey responses from government agents, we identify and discuss the practices and features of the Registry that contribute to, or undermine, member states’ estimations of trust in the ECtHR. In light of repeated and mounting criticism by member governments, our findings have important implications for the continued relevance of, and political support for, the Court moving forward.