bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Explaining Contingency
Authors: Wilson Alastair
Published: March 2020

The first part of this introduction sketches the main project of the book, and the structure of the arguments for my proposed quantum modal realism. The second part describes the unsatisfying present state of the metaphysics of modality, setting out what I take to be the most serious objections facing the best extant proposals. A naturalistic approach to metaphysics promises to resolve these objections by providing an account of modality that draws only on scientifically respectable theoretical resources. In the third part, I distinguish two big-picture approaches to the metaphysics of modality, and argue for the viability of an unfamiliar approach that takes the nature of contingency as the core phenomenon that a theory of modality needs to explain. In the fourth part, I explain my methodology and briefly defend the general project of naturalistic metaphysics.
Anthropic Contingency
Authors: Wilson Alastair
Published: March 2020

Distinguish contingency in general from anthropic contingency. The former is what really could happen; the latter is what really could be observed to happen. Quantum histories which host no life cannot, as a matter of obvious necessity, be observed. This distinction generates an anthropic observation selection effect, which has been employed in response to the fine-tuning argument for the design hypothesis. This chapter argues that fine-tuning is a genuine phenomenon that cries out for explanation; that in one-world approaches to quantum theory a chancy determination of cosmological parameters would render the one universe we are in preposterously lucky; that no preposterous luck is required from the perspective of quantum modal realism; and that the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics turns out to have a significant evidential bearing on the design question.
From Myth to Logos in Greek Studies
Authors: Lee Adam
Published: March 2020

This chapter analyses Pater’s understanding of myth and its creation in his Greek Studies (1895). Although the book was published posthumously, the majority of its essays appeared within a five-year period, beginning in 1876 with ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ and ‘A Study of Dionysus’. Pater follows a three-stage mythopoeic process, beginning with the myths of the people, which are collected and organized by the poets, and finally sculpted into ethical archetypes, conveying the development from myth to logos. Apollo comes to exemplify the archetypal character for Pater, influenced by Plato’s reverence for the god as the embodiment of reason, light, sanity, and music. Around the time of these first studies on myth, in their account of how traditional stories are created and characters are formed, Pater first turns his hand to publishing fiction.
Right of Exit and Entry
Authors: Guild Elspeth , Peers Steve , Tomkin Jonathan
Published: March 2020

This chapter examines the right of exit and entry provided for in the citizens’ Directive. Articles 4 and 5 of Directive 2004/38 affirm the right of Union citizens and members of their family to leave their Member State of origin and to enter any other Member State of their choosing. As such, these Articles constitute a ‘gateway’ for the exercise of rights of residence and rights of permanent residence provided for in the Directive. In addition to affirming the right of free movement, Articles 4 and 5 specify the administrative documentation and procedures governing travel between Member States. However, there have been significant failures to transpose these provisions correctly, with some Member States imposing exit controls on their own citizens, while some Member States blatantly ignore the clear legal requirements of the Directive.
Introduction
Authors: Bouras-Vallianatos Petros
Published: March 2020

This chapter provides introductory sections on Byzantine medical literature and the historical and intellectual setting in which John and his corpus should be placed, including the early Palaiologan revival of knowledge. A special section provides a survey of previous studies on John’s works and identifies the limitations of earlier scholarship, showing that his medical corpus has been inadequately evaluated. It then focuses on John’s biographical details and his works. Particular attention is paid to the dating of John’s works and his use of language. Moreover, new data is provided on the office of aktouarios in late Byzantium showing that, contrary to what has been suggested in the past, there is not sufficient evidence to support the idea that John had a permanent post as court physician.
Conclusion
Authors: Bouras-Vallianatos Petros
Published: March 2020

The last chapter aims to sum up the main findings from the study of John’s works, as detailed in previous chapters. In particular, it highlights John’s original contributions to medicine in the context of early Palaiologan intellectual circles and the wider Mediterranean milieu. It also provides plenty of examples of John’s outstanding reception in the Byzantine world and in Renaissance Europe, including the early-sixteenth-century editions of his corpus. In this respect, some specific examples are given, such as the first translation of On Urines by Ambrogio Leone of Nola with reference to its subsequent influence throughout Europe, the publication of the complete Latin translation of the Medical Epitome by Henry Mathys, and the early printed Greek edition of On Psychic Pneuma by Jacques Goupyl.
International Relations in a Relational Universe
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

It is time for International Relations (IR) to join the relational revolution afoot in the natural and social sciences. To do so, more careful reflection is needed on cosmological assumptions in the sciences and also in the study and practice of international relations. In particular it is argued here that we need to pay careful attention to whether and how we think ‘relationally’. Building a conversation between relational cosmology, developed in the natural sciences, and critical social theory, this book seeks to develop a new perspective on how to think relationally in and around the study of IR. This book asks: What kind of cosmological background assumptions do we make as we tackle international relations today and where do our assumptions (about states, individuals or the international) come from? And can we reorient our cosmological imaginations towards more relational understandings of the universe and what would this mean for the study and practice of international politics? The book argues that we live in a world without ‘things’, a world of processes and relations. It also suggests that we live in relations which exceed the boundaries of the human and the social, in planetary relations with plants and animals. Rethinking conceptual premises of IR, Kurki points towards a ‘planetary politics’ perspective within which we can reimagine IR as a field of study and also political practices, including the future of democracy.
Introduction
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

This chapter introduces the challenge of rethinking international relations and the field of International Relations as it embarks on its ‘second century’ of scholarship. It considers the varied criticisms of the field, in particular its inability to deal with questions of environmental degradation and planetary co-existence. In this context the chapter introduces why we should be interested in cosmology and relational cosmology in particular as we tackle these challenges. The chapter also introduces puzzles, and doubts, which may concern the reader as they start their engagement with cosmology as well as existing literatures tackling relevant puzzle-fields, such as literatures on new materialism, relationality, and new ways of thinking IR.
Reorienting to the International, the Global and the Planetary
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

This chapter extends the arguments developed in the previous chapters into a conversation with recent International Relations scholarship. First, the chapter argues against the notions of the international and the global as key conceptual tropes in the field, suggesting that there are important reasons to develop the notion of planetarity for the field. Through it we perceive aspects of political life and negotiation with relationalities which we do not via classical IR notions. However, the chapter also critically interrogates existing attempts to develop planet politics and planetarity, suggesting some ways forward. The chapter then explores the meaning of democracy and politics in a planetary politics setting, exploring an example around fisheries.
Urban Incumbent Hostility
Authors: Harding Robin
Published: March 2020

This chapter is the first of two that provide quantitative cross-national evidence to support the book’s central theoretical claim. Responding directly to the puzzle of urban incumbent hostility discussed in Chapter 2, this chapter evaluates the expectation that the lower proclivity of urbanites to support incumbents and express satisfaction with democracy should be conditional on levels of urbanization. More specifically, analysis of public opinion data from twenty-eight countries across Africa shows that urban hostility towards incumbents and dissatisfaction with democracy are not only robust to a variety of potentially confounding factors but are decreasing with urbanization. The data come from multiple rounds of the Afrobarometer Survey Series, enabling the use of fixed effects models to estimate robust within-country effects by leveraging changes to urbanization over time. These findings are important because, as highlighted in Chapter 2, the expectation that urban incumbent hostility should be conditional on urbanization is a unique observable implication of the book’s argument. Although scholars have put forward a variety of reasons for why urbanites across Africa should be less likely than rural residents to support incumbents, none of these alternative explanations account for the conditional effects demonstrated in this chapter. As such, this evidence supports the theoretical claim that electoral competition leads African governments to pursue pro-rural development policies.
Mechanisms: Historical Evidence from Botswana
Authors: Harding Robin
Published: March 2020

The third stage of the empirical strategy considers a potential counter to the central theoretical argument; it is possible that rather than resulting from electoral incentives, any urban–rural differences in development may result from contemporaneous external forces, such as donor conditionality. If foreign donors encouraged both competitive elections and pro-rural policies, then the link between electoral competition and pro-rural development across Africa may be spurious. Chapter 6 addresses this possibility through a largely qualitative analysis of the historical case of Botswana in the period immediately following independence. This case is useful because uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa Botswana has held competitive elections consistently since gaining independence in 1966. Taking advantage of this, Chapter 6 explores the link between electoral competition and pro-rural development during a period when the international context was very different, and when no such external pressures to introduce competitive elections and rural development policies were likely to have been felt. Using archival resources such as original minutes from cabinet meetings and ministerial correspondence, the chapter traces the ruling party’s responses to electoral outcomes in the early post-independence period. Despite its dominant position, the ruling party responded strongly to losses of rural support with a major program of rural development policies. Interestingly, cabinet minutes document an explicit policy of prioritizing rural development projects that were both highly visible and likely to be completed prior to the next election, suggesting a strong role for electoral incentives. Alongside this archival evidence Chapter 6 also analyses the contents of the ruling party’s manifestos during this period to evaluate changes in policy emphasis during this period. Taken together, the evidence from this historical case strongly supports the proposed theoretical mechanism, suggesting that electoral competition does indeed lead to rural development in Africa.
The Crown as Machine
Authors: Mohamed Feisal G.
Published: March 2020

It is a commonplace to describe the modern state as one where sovereign power is depersonalized by mediating bureaucracies. This chapter offers tangible instances of this phenomenon in early modernity: the Court of Wards and Liveries, through which the crown exercised its feudal rights; and the colonial corporation, which limited the sovereign’s otherwise unfettered power abroad. The political philosophy of Hobbes is set in this context, showing its desire to translate feudal obligation into a modern idiom, one influenced by raison d’état, and to cast the sovereign as akin to the corporation. The career of William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele is also set in this context, but his is a markedly different response, being consistently committed to the principle of divided sovereignty. The chapter closes with consideration of the mechanization of the state as it appears in Schmitt’s writings, and in Leo Strauss’ famous critique of them.
Milton’s Unitary Sovereignty
Authors: Mohamed Feisal G.
Published: March 2020

This chapter complicates the received image of Milton as firebrand republican, showing a consistent sympathy in his thought with “red” unitary sovereignty. That sympathy displays itself differently at different points in his career, from an early acceptance of royal prerogative in the Ludlow Maske, to mid-career arguments for the sovereignty of Parliament, to a late godly republicanism anticipating the rule of a spiritual elect. Illumining these developments of Milton’s thought are, respectively, the precarity of the Council in the Marches of Wales, of which Milton’s patron the Earl of Bridgewater was president; a Tacitist approach to liberty and prudentia; and the manuscript writings of Sir Henry Vane, the younger, which include a lengthy commentary on the Book of Job. In closing, the role of the “people” in popular sovereignty is considered, as the category appears in Milton and in Schmitt.
Athens and Jerusalem
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: March 2020

Autochthony is fundamental to ancient Greek notions of belonging to the land. While the motif had a negligible presence in the literature of European Christendom, it returns with some force in modern productions by Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce. Martin Heidegger too draws on pre-Socratic Greek thought on the theme of autochthony. But there is a parallel tradition of belonging to the land that begins in the Pentateuch. In Exodus, God speaks to Moses about a Promised Land. In medieval Europe, Meister Eckhart reads Exodus as providing a special, mystical understanding of God’s soul, one that intertwines promised land with the human soul’s creative capacities, and lays the foundation for theologically infused politics in the German tradition. In Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and J. G. Fichte, nationalism is linked to Eckhart. In the twentieth century, Heidegger phenomenologically reinscribes earth, divinities, and dwelling poetically.
Introduction
Authors: Sinykin Dan
Published: March 2020

To find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, I call this the long downturn. The economics of the long downturn worked interfered with the most intimate experiences of everyday life, and inspired the fear that there would be no tomorrow. This fear takes the form of what I call neoliberal apocalypse. The varieties neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation’s commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century.
Human Capital
Authors: Sinykin Dan
Published: March 2020

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead describes characters struggling to survive amid the wreckage of finance and neoliberalism in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. These characters live according to scripts provided for them, above all, by “human capital,” the neoliberal concept that people are inseparable from the knowledge, skills, health, and values that comprise their market value or capacity to earn. Characters extend the logic of privatizing public goods to its limit: they monetize state policing (via insurance); human bodies (via black markets); torture (via snuff films); suicide (via art). In the tradition of syncretic indigenous apocalypticism, best known through the Ghost Dance religion, Silko imagines the novel’s eponymous almanac as an enigmatic indigenous object that incites the apocalypse and prepares a life after neoliberalism.
Investment and prosperity
Authors: Toulmin Camilla
Published: March 2020

The last 35 years have seen an increase in the scale, diversification, and distribution of assets between households in Dlonguébougou (DBG). Poor economic statistics added to outward signs suggest nothing has changed in villages like DBG, but a more careful look shows major investment in livestock, wells, shops, solar panels, mobile phones, sewing machines, and motorbikes. Most people say they are better off now, having combined migration earnings, crop returns, and livestock sales over the last 35 years to achieve asset growth. A positive interplay of household size and the ability to take risks and reap higher returns means larger households gain higher returns to reinvest in further domestic growth. Will education of children be the next step in the cycle of investment?
Spins and Magnets
Authors: Satz Helmut
Published: March 2020

The magnetization of iron is the result of an energetically favorable alignment of adjacent spins. At high temperatures, the thermal motion prevents such alignment, but below a certain specific (Curie) temperature, the energy constraints overcome the thermal disorder trend. The onset of magnetization is abrupt, it defines a critical point. The resulting Curie temperature thus separates the high temperature paramagnetic from the low temperature ferromagnetic state.
Laser Beams
Authors: Satz Helmut
Published: March 2020

In atoms, the electron orbits around the nucleus are quantized, occur for discrete energies. Transitions between energy levels require absorption or emission of photons. In the case of an unusual occupation of excited levels, individual photons can trigger a coherent transition of all such levels to the ground state, thus leading to a beam of coherent photons, a laser beam.
Kin Selection: My Sister’s Keeper
Authors: Satz Helmut
Published: March 2020

Female bees carry two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother, one from the father—they are diploid. Male bees (drones) carry only one set, inherited from the mother—they are haploid. As a result, the relation between sisters is closer than between a female worker and her possible offspring. This inheritance structure led to the caste scheme of bee colonies, with a single queen giving rise to all offspring, while the sterile female workers take over the child care, not having children of their own. By assuring the survival of the children of the queen, the worker females assure the passage of favorable genes better than by having children of their own.
Modal Homotopy Type Theory
Authors: Corfield David
Published: March 2020

In[KF1] 1914, in an essay entitled ‘Logic as the Essence of Philosophy’, Bertrand Russell promised to revolutionize philosophy by introducing there the ‘new logic’ of Frege and Peano: “The old logic put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings.” A century later, this book proposes a comparable revolution with a newly emerging logic, modal homotopy type theory. Russell’s prediction turned out to be accurate. Frege’s first-order logic, along with its extension to modal logic, is to be found throughout anglophone analytic philosophy. This book provides a considerable array of evidence for the claim that philosophers working in metaphysics, as well as those treating language, logic or mathematics, would be much better served with the new ‘new logic’. It offers an introduction to this new logic, thoroughly motivated by intuitive explanations of the need for all of its component parts—the discipline of a type theory, the flexibility of type dependency, the more refined homotopic notion of identity and a powerful range of modalities. Innovative applications of the calculus are given, including analysis of the distinction between objects and events, an intrinsic treatment of structure and a conception of modality both as a form of general variation and as allowing constructions in modern geometry. In this way, we see how varied are the applications of this powerful new language—modal homotopy type theory.
Introduction and History of Rules of Engagement
Authors: Hosang J.F.R. Boddens
Published: March 2020

This section provides an overall introduction to the book, explaining the methodology of studying rules of engagement in the context of (international) law. The book adopts the perspective of military and law enforcement personnel on the actual application of the use of force in military operations and in law enforcement. On these bases, the focus is principally directed at the rules on the use of force issued to such personnel in order to carry out their tasks, while their analyses and interpretations were directed at those rules themselves as the principal source of authorizations and restrictions on the use of force in the conduct of their operations. Furthermore, the chapter provides a historical overview of how rules of engagement have developed from ancient times to the present, with a particular focus on how they have been affected by the conflicts of the twentieth century onwards.
Rules of Engagement and Self-Defence
Authors: Hosang J.F.R. Boddens
Published: March 2020

This chapter discusses the interaction between (the law of) self-defence and the rules of engagement (ROE), and how they play out against the military, and subsequently the political objectives of governments. It analyses the various forms of self-defence, from a national to individual perspective, including unit self-defence and force protection, and examines the legal basis and framework for each type of self-defence. The chapter goes on to analyse how these frameworks interact with, and influence, the ROE for military operations, discussing the concepts and applications of Hostile Act and Hostile Intent as followed by the North America Treaty Organization and the European Union in specific detail.
Conclusions
Authors: Hosang J.F.R. Boddens
Published: March 2020

This study has sought to contribute to the communication between the academic analysis of the legal aspects of the use of force and the realm of pragmatic application of the rules on the use of force during the conduct of military operations, presenting the case for the need, indeed necessity, for both these realms to remain connected. This chapter presents a conceptual model of rules of engagement (ROE) on the basis of the constituent chapters of the book, drawing on the introductory discussion of the classic ROE model in Chapter 1. It re-examines the influence of political, operational, and legal considerations on ROE and describes the overall function of ROE in terms of applicable law and in the context of the international law of military operations. Drawing on the underlying conclusions from this study, the main questions discussed in the Introduction will be addressed in order to answer the central question: what is the function of ROE and derivative (or similar) rules on the use of force in the context of the legal framework governing the use of force during military operations.
Introduction
Authors: Predelli Stefano
Published: March 2020

This introduction presents a concise plan for the book, and it provides a sketch of the sense of ‘fictionalism’ relevant for what will follow. It also anticipates the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and so-called non-realist views of fictional discourse, it sketches the consequences of Radical Fictionalism for the distinction between storyworld and periphery, and it introduces the reverberations of Radical Fictionalism on some central themes in the study of narrative. Three homages serve as an indirect preliminary description of the background for Radical Fictionalism, namely Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, David Lewis’ ‘Truth in Fiction’, and John Searle’s ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Authors: Predelli Stefano
Published: March 2020

This chapter presents a Radical Fictionalist analysis of talk about fiction, as in my utterances of ‘Fahrquhar was a well to do planter’ or of ‘according to Bierce’s Occurrence, Fahrquhar was a well to do planter’. According to this chapter’s favourite approach, namely the Way of Retelling, the former sentence does not encode a proposition, and the latter does not involve a sentential operator. The central sections of this chapter justify the sense in which these sentences are not in the business of truth, and are rather to be assessed according to the normative dimension of faithfulness. The final sections of this chapter present an alternative to the Way of Retelling, namely the Way of Truth. This hypothesis remains consistent with the premises of Radical Fictionalism, but it satisfies those who insist that fiction talk is to be analysed as elliptical talk concerned with actual truth.
Reflex and Bone Structure
Authors: Predelli Stefano
Published: March 2020

This chapter covers some central topics related to narrative fiction, taking as its starting point the Radical Fictionalist focus on peripheral discourse and fictional telling. In particular, the chapter discusses certain features of allegedly inconsistent fictions and of storyworld importation, with particular attention to the theory in David Lewis’ ‘Truth in Fiction’ and to the case of postmodernist literature. The chapter also discusses some aspects of unreliable narratives, and it puts forth an analysis of alleged cases of importation by appealing to the closure of peripheral discourse. Finally, this chapter defends a Radical Fictionalist take on the distinction between nested and framed narratives.
The Turn of the Screw
Authors: Predelli Stefano
Published: March 2020

This chapter proposes a Radical Fictionalist analysis of critical discourse. In particular, it contrasts actuality-concerned modes of criticism directed towards educated naturalization with two different, non-propositional enterprises. One is a form of critical retelling aimed at bringing to the foreground certain allegedly important but not obvious features of the storyworld. Accordingly, this chapter discusses the idea of underreading and the critics’ commitment to faithfulness, paying particular attention to examples from the critical literature on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The other type of critical retelling is a form of biased retelling which abandons faithfulness in favour of canonicity, that is, in favour of retellings consonant with the critical canon.
History and overview of ‘IFF’
Authors: Cobham Alex , Janský Petr
Published: March 2020

This chapter provides a history of the rise of the term ‘illicit financial flows’ (IFF), and the emergence since 2000 of a global tax justice movement. As a broad umbrella term, the phrase was useful in ensuring the political consensus behind the establishment of a target to curtail IFF in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But that consensus has hidden, to some extent, disagreements over the relative priorities—from the old view of corruption as a problem predominantly of lower-income countries, to the more recent recognition of the central role of typically high-income financial secrecy jurisdictions. Disagreements over political priority have played out as disputes over the definition of IFF, and over the quality of estimates of scale. This chapter provides a comprehensive typology of IFF, and summarises the evidence on the importance of the phenomenon for human development.
Capital and Wealth Estimates
Authors: Cobham Alex , Janský Petr
Published: March 2020

Capital account-based estimates form an important part of the literature on the scale of illicit financial flows (IFF), along with related approaches to estimate the scale of wealth held offshore and undeclared for tax purposes. This chapter provides a critical survey of the leading estimates. It is clear that offshore wealth is both a significant element in IFF, and offers a valuable avenue to construct indicators of scale. At the same time, however, current estimates of this deliberately hidden quantum are characterised by a high degree of uncertainty, or are based on necessarily partial data sources. But the importance of the area and the relatively high quality of estimates, combined with reasons to expect improving data availability, suggest that offshore wealth should form a core element of IFF scale indicators.
Beyond Scale
Authors: Cobham Alex , Janský Petr
Published: March 2020

This chapter lays out the alternatives to measures of the scale of illicit financial flows (IFF). These include policy-based indicators offering the scope to track global process on transparency measures that are key to curtailing illicit financial flows, and also offer the jurisdiction-level disaggregation to support accountability for policies that maintain opacity; and two related sets of IFF risk measure, which extend the logic of evaluating IFF-facilitating secrecy jurisdictions, to evaluate the exposure of each country to the IFF risks of secrecy elsewhere. While these measures do not offer the single, dollar measure of IFF that the UN target requires, they have the potential to support national, regional and international policymakers in prioritising their responses and ensuring appropriate accountability.
Architects of Structural Biology
Authors: Meurig Thomas John
Published: March 2020

Designed for the non-specialist, the explanations and illustrations used here describe the work, personalities, collaborations, and idiosyncrasies of four of the most distinguished Nobel Laureates of the twentieth century. They exploited a discovery made over a century ago about the nature of X-rays, and thereby created a new branch of science. This enabled them to elucidate, in atomic detail, the structure and mode of action of molecules of the living world: enzymes, vitamins, and viruses, as well as antibiotics. Perutz and Kendrew, from their pioneering work using X-ray diffraction on haemoglobin and myoglobin, the proteins that transport and store oxygen in all animals, led them to establish in 1962 one of the most successful research centres ever—the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Medicines discovered there are used worldwide to treat leukaemia, arthritis, and other diseases. Their work also led to the creation in the United States of the Protein Data Bank that guides scientists in understanding the misfolding of proteins, which cause Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases. This book is first a memoir of these scientists and their contemporaries, many of them friends of the author. Second, it is an insight into the great excitement associated with structural molecular biology, which directly informs our understanding of ourselves. Third, it describes how two renowned research centres in the United Kingdom—the LMB and the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory—achieved iconic status. It also highlights the importance of the popularization of science, of which Bragg, Perutz, and Kendrew, as well as Dorothy Hodgkin (who solved the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12) were experts.
A Dispute Between the Cavendish and Caltech: The Emergence and Ubiquity of the α‎-Helix
Authors: Meurig Thomas John
Published: March 2020

Bragg, Kendrew, and Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, published in 1950 proposals for the nature of the folding of the constituents (the amino acid residues) of proteins such as keratin, the constituent of hair and wool. Almost immediately, Pauling and Corey at the California Institute of Technology published a series of strong critical articles, in which they repudiated the model proposed by the Cambridge trio. Also, they proposed a new motif for the structure of proteins—the so-called alpha-helix. Its nature and importance are described herein, and its subsequent validity (demonstrated by Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory and Phillips et al. at the DFRL) was demonstrated by the work done in the United Kingdom on the X-ray studies of the oxygen-storage protein myoglobin and on the enzyme known as lysozyme found in egg white and in human tears.
Theory of tropical moist convection
Authors: Romps David M.
Published: March 2020

These lecture notes cover the theory of tropical moist convection. Many simplifications are made along the way, like neglecting rotation and treating the atmosphere as a two-dimensional fluid or even reducing the atmosphere to two columns. We can gain an immense amount of insight into the real atmosphere by studying these toy models, including answers to the following questions: What is the dominant energy balance in the tropical free troposphere; what sets the temperature structure of the tropical free troposphere; what happens to the pulse of heating deposited into the atmosphere by a rain cloud; why does the tropical atmosphere have the relative-humidity pro le that it does; and what sets the amount of energy available to storms?
Barotropic aspects of large-scale atmospheric turbulence
Authors: Shepherd Theodore G.
Published: March 2020

The chapter begins with a phenomenological treatment of the observed atmospheric circulation. It then goes on to discuss how the barotropic model arises as a so-calledbalanced model of the slow, vorticity-driven dynamics, from the more general shallowwater model which also admits inertia-gravity waves. This is important because large-scale atmospheric turbulence exhibits aspects of both balanced and unbalanced dynamics. Because of the first-order importance of zonal flows in the atmospheric general circulation, the large-scale turbulence is highly inhomogeneous, and is shaped by the nature of the interaction between zonal flows and Rossby waves described eloquently by Michael McIntyre as a wave-turbulence jigsaw puzzle. This motivates a review of the barotropic theory of wave, mean-flow interaction, which is underpinned by the Hamiltonian structure of geophysical fluid dynamics.
The Sick Preface
Authors: Socarides Alexandra
Published: March 2020

Chapter 2 takes up the paratextual convention of the preface to a book by a single author. In the prefaces written by or about largely unknown, often small-town, lower-class women poets who existed far outside the canon’s gaze, we find a particular rhetorical convention employed ubiquitously over the course of the century. In these prefaces, women are declared to be both physically sick and resistant to the idea of public readers. While this convention got its start in the antebellum culture of charity, it persisted into the century’s final decade, and along the way the women poets who used it (and were used by it) registered both their compliance and resistance. By looking closely at both the rhetoric of these prefaces and the poems that follow them, this chapter unpacks these women poets’ relationships to a convention that declared them unworthy of any future readership.
Collaborative Composition and Sororal Poetics
Authors: Socarides Alexandra
Published: March 2020

Chapter 4 showcases the collaborative nature of American women’s poetics: they often composed in groups, they conceived of poetic practice as a shared and communal endeavor, and their editors promoted the image of their collaboration. This chapter asks how a collaborative approach to the writing and publishing of poetry undercuts notions of individual genius and solitary creative labor that is now associated with women’s poetry. By looking closely at the compositional practices of several sets of nineteenth-century American sisters and at the ways they were each presented to a reading public, this chapter argues that such collaborations made these sisters visible and popular in their own day in ways that they could no longer be once ideas about poetic authorship began to change.
Concerts and Inadvertent Secularization: Religious Music in the Entertainment Market of Eighteenth-Century Paris*
Authors: Pesic Andrei
Published: March 2020

Public concerts offer a new perspective on the controversial subject of secularization and the Enlightenment. From 1725–90, the Concert spirituel in Paris, one of the earliest and most famous concert series in Europe, presented a mixture of sacred and secular music when other entertainments were forbidden during religious holidays. Over the course of the century, the proportion of religious works in its repertoire declined significantly. Whereas previous interpretations tended to describe secularization as resulting either from battles between philosophes and the Church or from broader declines in belief, this article casts doubt on these explanations by showing the heterogeneous composition of the Concert’s audience. Instead, it depicts a process of ‘inadvertent secularization’ stemming from market pressure, in this case due to the multiplication of new concert series and other entertainments in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. This framework accounts for secularization at the institutional level without assuming that the society as a whole was marked by declining Christian belief. Bringing together the study of markets and religion reveals how multiple logics increased the autonomy of artistic fields formerly subject to religious constraints.
Near-Infrared Light Increases Functional Connectivity with a Non-thermal Mechanism
Authors: Dmochowski Grzegorz M , Shereen Ahmed Duke , Berisha Destiny , Dmochowski Jacek P
Published: March 2020

Although techniques for noninvasive brain stimulation are under intense investigation, an approach that has received limited attention is transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM), the delivery of near-infrared light to the brain with a laser or light-emitting diode directed at the scalp. Here we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the blood-oxygenation-level–dependent signal in n = 20 healthy human participants while concurrently stimulating their right frontal pole with a near-infrared laser. Functional connectivity with the illuminated region increased by up to 15% during stimulation, with a quarter of all connections experiencing a significant increase. The time course of connectivity exhibited a sharp rise approximately 1 min after illumination onset. Brain-wide connectivity increases were also observed, with connections involving the stimulated hemisphere showing a significantly larger increase than those in the contralateral hemisphere. We subsequently employed magnetic resonance thermometry to measure brain temperature during tPBM (separate cohort, n = 20) and found no significant temperature differences between active and sham stimulation. Our findings suggest that near-infrared light synchronizes brain activity with a nonthermal mechanism, underscoring the promise of tPBM as a new technique for stimulating brain function.
Sensitivity of the lateral flow urine lipoarabinomannan assay in ambulant adults with advanced HIV disease: data from the TB Fast Track study
Authors: Tlali Mpho , Fielding Katherine L , Karat Aaron S , Hoffmann Christopher J , Muravha Tshifhiwa , Grant Alison D , Charalambous Salome
Published: March 2020

Background

WHO guidelines recommend the lateral flow urine lipoarabinomannan assay (LF-LAM) for TB diagnosis in hospitalised HIV-positive individuals. The role of LF-LAM among ambulant patients remains less well defined. We investigated the sensitivity of LF-LAM among ambulant HIV-positive adults in primary health clinics in South Africa.

Methods

We enrolled adults (aged ≥18 y) with CD4 counts of ≤150 cells/mm3 who had not received TB treatment or antiretroviral therapy in the preceding 3 or 6 mo, respectively. Research nurses performed the LF-LAM test on freshly voided urine. Results were compared with a reference standard of positive mycobacterial culture (sputum or urine).

Results

Of 1505 (54.5% female; median age 37 y; median CD4 count 73 cells/mm3) participants, 973 (64.7%) had a mycobacterial culture result; 105/973 (10.8%) were positive for Mycobacterium tuberculosis. LF-LAM sensitivity was 41.9% (95% CI 32.3 to 51.9%) and 19.0% (95% CI 12.0 to 27.9%) using grade 1+ and grade 2+ cut-off points, respectively. Sensitivity increased with severe immunosuppression and in the presence of poor prognostic indicators (low haemoglobin, body mass index).

Conclusions

When used as the only TB diagnostic test, LF-LAM sensitivity is suboptimal, particularly using the grade 2+ cut-off. More sensitive tests for TB are needed that can be used in primary care settings.
Predicting of COVID-19 Confirmed Cases in Different Countries with ARIMA Models in 2020
Authors: Dehesh Tania , Mardani-Fard Heydar Ali , Dehesh Paria
Published: March 2020

The epidemic of a novel coronavirus illness (COVID-19) becomes as a global threat. The aim of this study is first to find the best prediction models for daily confirmed cases in countries with high number of confirmed cases in the world and second to predict confirmed cases with these models in order to have more readiness in healthcare systems. This study was conducted based on daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 that were collected from the official website of Johns Hopkins University from January 22th, 2020 to March 1th, 2020. Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model was used to predict the trend of confirmed cases. Stata version 12 and R version 3.6.2 were used. Parameters used for ARIMA were (2,1,0) for Mainland China, ARIMA(1,0,0) for South Korea, and ARIMA(3,1,0) for Thailand. Mainland China and Thailand were successful in haltering COVID-19 epidemic. Investigating their protocol in this control like quarantine should be in the first line of other countries’ program
One experiment to rule them all? Testing multiple drivers of the temperature-size rule with nonlinear temperature increase
Authors: Tabi Andrea , Garnier Aurelie , Pennekamp Frank
Published: March 2020

The temperature-size rule (TSR) describes the inverse relationship between organism size and environmental temperature in uni- and multicellular species. Despite the TSR being widespread, the mechanisms for shrinking body size with warming remain elusive. Here, we experimentally test three hypotheses (differential development and growth [DDG], maintain aerobic scope and regulate oxygen supply [MASROS] and the supply-demand hypothesis [SD]) potentially explaining the TSR using the aquatic protistColpidium striatumin three gradually changing and one constant temperature environment crossed with three different nutrient levels. We find that the constant and slowly warming environments show similar responses in terms of population dynamics, whereas populations with linear and fast warming quickly decline and show a stronger temperature-size response. Our analyses suggest that acclimation may have played a role in observing these differences among treatments. The SD hypothesis is most parsimonious with the data, however, neither the DDG nor the MASROS hypothesis can be firmly dismissed. We conclude that the TSR is driven by multiple ecological and acclimatory responses and hence multicausal.

Author statement

A.T. designed and led the experiment, and A.T. and A.G. performed the sampling. A.T. and F.P. analyzed and interpreted the data. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
Overcoming uncollapsed haplotypes in long-read assemblies of non-model organisms
Authors: Guiglielmoni Nadège , Houtain Antoine , Derzelle Alessandro , van Doninck Karine , Flot Jean-François
Published: March 2020

Background

Third-generation sequencing, also called long-read sequencing, is revolutionizing genome assembly: as PacBio and Nanopore technologies become more accessible in technicity and in cost, long-read assemblers flourish and are starting to deliver chromosome-level assemblies. However, these long reads are also error-prone, making the generation of a haploid reference out of a diploid genome a difficult enterprise. Although failure to properly collapse haplotypes results in fragmented and/or structurally incorrect assemblies and wreaks havoc on orthology inference pipelines, this serious issue is rarely acknowledged and dealt with in genomic projects, and an independent, comparative benchmark of the capacity of assemblers and post-processing tools to properly collapse or purge haplotypes is still lacking.

Results

To fill this gap, we tested different assembly strategies on the genome of the rotiferAdineta vaga, a non-model organism for which high coverages of both PacBio and Nanopore reads were available. The assemblers we tested (Canu, Flye, NextDenovo, Ra, Raven, Shasta and wtdbg2) exhibited strikingly different behaviors when dealing with highly heterozygous regions, resulting in variable amounts of uncollapsed haplotypes. Filtering out shorter reads generally improved haploid assemblies, and we also benchmarked three post-processing tools aimed at detecting and purging uncollapsed haplotypes in long-read assemblies: HaploMerger2, purge_haplotigs and purge_dups.

Conclusions

Testing these strategies separately and in combination revealed several approaches able to generate haploid assemblies with genome sizes, coverage distributions, and completeness close to expectations.
‘Macrobot’–an automated segmentation-based system for powdery mildew disease quantification
Authors: Lück Stefanie , Strickert Marc , Lorbeer Maximilian , Melchert Friedrich , Backhaus Andreas , Kilias David , Seiffert Udo , Schweizer Patrick , Djamei Armin , Douchkov Dimitar
Published: March 2020

Plant diseases, as one of the perpetual problems in agriculture, is increasingly difficult to manage due to intensifying of the field production, global trafficking, reduction of genetic variability of crops, climatic changes-driven expansion of pests, redraw and loss of effectiveness of pesticides and rapid breakdown of the disease resistance in the field. The substantial progress in genomics of both plants and pathogens, achieved in the last decades has the potential to counteract this negative trend, however, only when the genomic data is supported by relevant phenotypic data that allows linking the genomic information to specific traits. In this respect, phenotyping is and will remain an essential element of any comprehensive functional genomics study.

We have developed a set of methods and equipment and combined them into a “Macrophenomics pipeline”. The pipeline has been optimized for the quantification of powdery mildew infection symptoms on wheat and barley but it can be adapted to other diseases and host plants. The Macrophenomics pipeline scores the visible disease symptoms, typically 5-7 days after inoculation (dai) in a highly automated manner. The system can precisely and reproducibly quantify the percentage of the infected leaf area with a throughput of the image acquisition module of up to 10 000 individual samples per day, making it appropriate for phenotyping of large germplasms collections and crossing populations.