bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
txtools: an R package facilitating analysis of RNA modifications, structures, and interactions
Authors: Garcia-Campos Miguel Angel , Schwartz Schraga
Published: March 2024

We present txtools, an R package that enables the processing, analysis, and visualization of RNA-seq data at the nucleotide-level resolution, seamlessly integrating alignments to the genome with transcriptomic representation. txtools’ main inputs are BAM files and a transcriptome annotation, and the main output is a table, capturing mismatches, deletions, and the number of reads beginning and ending at each nucleotide in the transcriptomic space. txtools further facilitates downstream visualization and analyses. We showcase, using examples from the epitranscriptomic field, how a few calls to txtools functions can yield insightful and ready-to-publish results. txtools is of broad utility also in the context of structural mapping and RNA:protein interaction mapping. By providing a simple and intuitive framework, we believe that txtools will be a useful and convenient tool and pave the path for future discovery. txtools is available for installation from its GitHub repository at https://github.com/AngelCampos/txtools.
Methoxsalen Inhibits the Acquisition of Nicotine Self-Administration: Attenuation by Cotinine Replacement in Male Rats
Authors: Ding Zheng-Ming , Neslund Elizabeth M , Sun Dongxiao , Tan Xiaoying
Published: March 2024

Introduction

Cigarette smoking remains the leading preventable cause of disease and death. Nicotine is the primary reinforcing ingredient in cigarettes sustaining addiction. Cotinine is the major metabolite of nicotine that produces a myriad of neurobehavioral effects. Previous studies showed that cotinine-supported self-administration in rats and rats with a history of cotinine self-administration exhibited relapse-like drug-seeking behavior, suggesting that cotinine may also be reinforcing. To date, whether cotinine may contribute to nicotine reinforcement remains unknown. Nicotine metabolism is mainly catalyzed by hepatic CYP2B1/2 enzymes in rats and methoxsalen is a potent CYP2B1/2 inhibitor.

Aims and Methods

The study examined nicotine metabolism, self-administration, and locomotor activity. The hypothesis is that methoxsalen inhibits nicotine self-administration and cotinine replacement attenuates the inhibitory effects of methoxsalen in male rats.

Results

Methoxsalen decreased plasma cotinine levels following a subcutaneous nicotine injection. Repeated daily methoxsalen treatments reduced the acquisition of nicotine self-administration, leading to fewer nicotine infusions, lower nicotine intake, and lower plasma cotinine levels. However, methoxsalen did not alter the maintenance of nicotine self-administration despite a significant reduction of plasma cotinine levels. Cotinine replacement by mixing cotinine with nicotine for self-administration dose-dependently increased plasma cotinine levels and enhanced the acquisition of self-administration. Neither basal nor nicotine-induced locomotor activity was altered by methoxsalen.

Conclusions

These results indicate that methoxsalen inhibition of cotinine formation impaired the acquisition of nicotine self-administration, and cotinine replacement attenuated the inhibitory effects of methoxsalen on the acquisition of self-administration, suggesting that cotinine may contribute to the initial development of nicotine reinforcement.

Implications

Smoking cessation medications targeting nicotine’s effects are only moderately effective, making it imperative to better understand the mechanisms of nicotine misuse. Methoxsalen inhibited nicotine metabolism to cotinine and impaired the acquisition of nicotine self-administration. Cotinine replacement restored plasma cotinine and attenuated the methoxsalen inhibition of nicotine self-administration in rats. These results suggest that (1) the inhibition of nicotine metabolism may be a viable strategy in reducing the development of nicotine reinforcement, (2) methoxsalen may be translationally valuable, and (3) cotinine may be a potential pharmacological target for therapeutic development given its important role in the initial development of nicotine reinforcement.
Virological Suppression and its Predictors Among HIV/AIDS Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy in Ethiopia: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Authors: Melak Dagnachew , Bayou Fekade Demeke , Yasin Husniya , Zerga Aregash Abebayehu , Wagaye Birhanu , Ayele Fanos Yeshanew , Kebede Natnael , Mekonen Asnakew Molla , Asfaw Ahmed Hussien , Tsegaw Shambel Ayichew , Mihiretu Mengistu Mera , Tsega Yawkal , Addisu Elsabeth , Cherie Niguss , Birhane Tesfaye , Abegaz Zinet , Endawkie Abel , Mohammed Anissa
Published: March 2024

Background

Achieving viral load suppression is crucial for the prevention of complications and deaths related to HIV infection. Ethiopia has embraced the worldwide 95-95-95 target, but there is no national representative information regarding virological suppression. Therefore, this review aims to determine the pooled virological suppression rate and identify the pooled effect of contributing factors of viral suppression for HIV-positive patients on antiretroviral therapy in Ethiopia.

Methods

We systematically searched websites and databases, including online repositories, to obtain primary studies. Two reviewers assessed the quality of the included articles using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale appraisal checklist. Publication bias was checked using Egger's regression test, the heterogeneity of the studies was assessed using I2 statistics and Q statistics, and a sensitivity analysis was performed to identify any outlier results in the included studies. The Der Simonian Laird random-effects model was used to estimate the overall proportion of viral suppression, and STATA 17 statistical software was used for all types of analysis.

Results

A total of 21 eligible articles primarily conducted in Ethiopia using HIV program data were used for this quantitative synthesis. The overall pooled virological suppression rate was 71% (95% CI, 64%–77%). The pooled effects of poor adherence to ART (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 0.33; 95% CI, 0.28–0.40), body mass index (18.5–24.9 kg/m2; AOR, 1.8; 95% CI, 1.37–2.36), disclosure (AOR, 1.41; 95% CI, 1.05–1.89), absence of opportunistic infection (AOR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.43–1.97), and high baseline viral load count (AOR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.52–0.81) were identified as significant predictors of viral suppression.

Conclusions

The overall pooled percentage of virological suppression was low compared with the global target of viral suppression and the Ethiopian Public Health Institute report. Poor adherence, normal body mass index, disclosure, absence of opportunistic infection, and high baseline viral load count were factors contributing to viral suppression in Ethiopia. Responsible stakeholders should maximize their efforts to achieve the global target of virological suppression by addressing significant predictors.
Evolutionary Cell Biology
Authors: Lynch Michael R.
Published: March 2024

The fields of molecular evolution, genome evolution, and evolutionary genetics are now well established. Remarkably, however, although all evolutionary modifications begin at the cellular level, and despite the advances made in cell biology and microbiology over the past few decades, there is as yet no recognized discipline of evolutionary cell biology. The goal of this book is to help establish the foundations for this newly-emerging field. Its principal aims are twofold: first, to promote an understanding among evolutionary biologists as to why the cellular details matter if we are to understand the mechanisms of evolution; second, to make clear to non-evolutionary biologists – cell biologists in particular – that evolution is not just a matter of natural selection and optimization, but a process whose reach depends on other population-genetic features such as mutation, recombination, and random genetic drift. Although there are many excellent books on cell biology, microbiology, and biophysics, almost no attention is given to evolution. Likewise, although there are numerous evolutionary biology books on the market, none of them gives more than passing attention to details at the cellular level. Thus, Evolutionary Cell Biology offers a broader understanding of evolutionary processes and an appreciation for the many interesting problems that remain to be solved at the cellular and subcellular levels. Narrative is aimed at both cell biologists and evolutionary biologists. It will be accessible to upper-level undergraduates in biology, and certainly to graduate students in all areas of the life sciences. Professionals from a wide range of fields – cell biology, microbiology, evolution, biophysics, biochemistry, and mathematics – will be exposed to entirely new ideas not traditionally covered in their primary fields of expertise.
Enzymes and Metabolic Pathways
Authors: Lynch Michael R.
Published: March 2024

Metabolic reactions are carried out by enzymes capable of enhancing specific reaction rates by many orders of magnitude above spontaneous background levels. Although specialized for particular functions, most enzymes are also highly promiscuous and have catalytic capacities that are commonly far below the biophysical limits, suggesting that the degree of molecular refinement is generally stalled at a drift barrier. Enzyme promiscuity facilitates the emergence of novel enzyme functions by descent with modification, usually via just a few key amino-acid substitutions. Individual enzymes typically carry out just simple chemical modifications, necessitating the use of multi-step metabolic pathways in the transformation of organic material. Despite their conserved functions, many enzymatic steps and their molecular participants have diverged substantially among phylogenetic lineages, with gene duplication and divergence often playing a role in such remodelling. Overall flux rates are generally influenced most by the enzymes furthest upstream in a pathway. Most catabolic pathways are energetically inefficient, with a substantial amount of energy contained within substrate molecules being lost as heat rather than being converted to ATP. Flux-rate theory suggests that such inefficiency is an inevitable outcome of maximizing the net rate of product formation.
Comparative Analysis of Five Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Life Sciences
Authors: Alvedalen Janna , Carlsson Bo
Published: March 2024

The entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) is a popular concept in entrepreneurship studies that describes all actors and the interaction between actors in a specific geographical area or industrial domain. This chapter compares five EEs in life sciences in Sweden and the US, based on own data collection in all five areas. The EEs studied here are in different phases of evolution as a result of different and shifting strategies pursued by major companies in each region. The chapter outlines commonalities and differences between how EEs operate and function in different territorial, institutional, and historical contexts. It also explores how national and local factors influence the rate and nature of entrepreneurship at the regional level.
Alexandria and Apocalypse
Authors: Cioffi Robert
Published: March 2024

Chapter 4 examines the city of Alexandria, which by the Roman imperial period had long been acknowledged as the first city of Egypt. It argues that for Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, and Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story Alexandria was not only a symbol of the power of outsiders to control Egypt, but that it also provided a politically, intellectually, and symbolically charged image to represent resistance to that power. These texts draw on and respond to both Greek and Egyptian traditions—some ethnographic, some apocalyptic—in order to present three very different pictures of the city’s relationship to the rest of Egypt. The chapter shows how authors can work against the view of the city familiar from other Roman imperial literature to represent Alexandria as a labile landscape, one that, in Heliodorus at least, is always in danger of being unwritten and pulled down to its very foundations.
Country, Corporates, and the Construct of BRI
Authors: Jie Yu
Published: March 2024

This chapter seeks to discuss to what extent Chinese companies, mostly state-owned enterprises (SOEs), have become a formidable player in challenging the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO). In particular, it aims to explore the evolving relationships between the Chinese companies and the Chinese central government as Beijing pursues its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It intends to analyse whether Chinese SOEs have become a source of destabilizing the existing Liberal International Order and acted as a vehicle of delivering Beijing’s geopolitical ambition through the participation of the BRI. It challenges the conventional wisdom that China is a monolithic player for its deciding foreign policies. Instead, it adopts an ‘inside-out’ approach by examining the actual policy process with a primary focus on individual actors such as the Party, the government department, and the Chinese state-owned companies. It also aims to offer a nascent assessment of the implementation of the ‘dual circulation strategy’ in determining future BRI investments by the Chinese SOEs.
The “Uncongenial Air of Freedom”: Union Occupation and the Slave Trade
Authors: Colby Robert K.D.
Published: March 2024

Chapter 2 explores the effects of Union military successes in 1861 and 1862 on the Confederate slave trade. Slave trading slowly rebounded in the Confederacy following secession and, by the winter of 1861, appeared to be on a path toward relative normality. In the spring of 1862, however, Union forces won several major victories and captured or threatened many of the Confederate States of America’s biggest slave trading centers, including Alexandria, Norfolk, Nashville, Memphis, Natchez, and, most importantly, New Orleans. When US soldiers occupied these cities, they all but ended slave trading in them by refusing to uphold what enslavers understood to be their property rights in man. In doing so, they aided and abetted enslaved people’s ongoing resistance to slavery. With enslavers’ right to hold people as property uncertain, the slave trade virtually ceased in Union-occupied areas.
Sold “Far Out of the Way of Lincoln”: Emancipation and Counterrevolutionary Slave Commerce
Authors: Colby Robert K.D.
Published: March 2024

Chapter 6 explores the intersections between the Confederacy’s surviving slave trade and emancipation. The Civil War provided enslaved people with unprecedented opportunities to seize their freedom—a reality they exploited by the tens, even hundreds, of thousands. As enslaved people embraced this moment, however, enslavers fought against their efforts through the slave trade. Slaveholders used the surviving commerce in slaves to punish people who escaped but failed to make it to freedom, whom they recaptured, or who threatened the existing racial order in any way. Against the slaves’ revolution, then, enslavers deployed the domestic slave trade as a counterrevolutionary weapon. This profoundly shaped the choices available to the people enslaved in the Confederacy and influenced the ways in which they did (or did not) become free during the Civil War.
Animal Sacrifice in the Roman Empire (31 BCE-395 CE)
Authors: Rives J. B.
Published: March 2024

This book explores the changing socioeconomic, political, and cultural significance of animal sacrifice in the Roman imperial period. Although animal sacrifice was only one of a wide range of offerings to the gods, it was distinctive in being more costly than many others and in generating a valuable consumer good: high-quality meat. As a result, it functioned to reinforce social structures that enabled the smooth operation of the Roman Empire: the socioeconomic hierarchies of Graeco-Roman cities, the normative Graeco-Roman culture that bound together urban elites, and the ideological role of the Roman emperor (Part I of the book). At the same time as the practice of animal sacrifice performed these ideological functions, there were also, from an early date, various discourses about animal sacrifice that relocated its meaning from the social to the conceptual sphere, discourses that a range of freelance experts, from Graeco-Roman philosophers to early Christian leaders, deployed as a means of establishing their own social power (Part II). These two aspects of animal sacrifice, as practice and as discourse, intersected both with each other and with larger economic and political developments in ways that, starting in the mid-third century CE, led to its becoming the object of both imperial and ecclesiastical policy. Over the course of the fourth century CE, animal sacrifice was displaced from its central role in the structuring of the empire, redefined as a marker of “paganism,” and eventually prohibited altogether (Part III).
Introduction
Authors: Rives J. B.
Published: March 2024

This introductory chapter defines key terms and presents the book’s analytical framework. It defines animal sacrifice as a ritualized practice involving the slaughter of an animal, parts of which were offered to superhuman powers to win their favor. It also elaborates on two key concepts. The first is social power, analyzed in terms developed by Michael Mann. Social power takes two broad forms: authoritative (commands that are enforced) and diffused (social practices that embody power relations but are not enforced). It derives from a range of sources; the two most important for this book are control of economic resources and physical force on the one hand and ideology on the other. The second key concept is communication, the propagation of diffused power, which takes two distinct but interrelated forms: practice, primarily nonverbal, and discourse, primarily verbal. These two modes of communication align respectively with the immanent and transcendent forms of ideological power. The chapter also addresses cultural transformation, especially the shift from a cultural configuration in which there is little that is analogous to modern conceptions of “religion” to one in which there existed something much closer to “religion” as the term is employed today.
Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism in the Roman Empire
Authors: Rives J. B.
Published: March 2024

This chapter examines how the role of animal sacrifice as an efficient instrument for structuring sociopolitical hierarchies acquired new force in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, becoming integrated into the socioeconomic system of euergetism. In this system, wealthy community members bestowed benefits on fellow citizens in exchange for public honors and superior civic status. In the cities of the Greek east, inscriptions reveal how local benefactors, as magistrates and priests, used their own resources to fund the civic festivals over which they presided, including the animal sacrifices central to them. Their economic and social prominence as sponsors of these events took on concrete form in their ritual prominence as those who presided over the sacrifice and distribution of meat. In the cities of the Latin west, the relationship between animal sacrifice and euergetism was more indirect but still apparent: people who presided over public animal sacrifices as magistrates and priests held their positions by virtue of their wealth. Animal sacrifice was tightly integrated into the euergetic system, which was integral to the sociopolitical organization of the Graeco-Roman city. Given the central role of the city in imperial administration, public animal sacrifice contributed to the smooth functioning of the Roman Empire.
Animal Sacrifice and Graeco-Roman Culture
Authors: Rives J. B.
Published: March 2024

This chapter explores animal sacrifice as a key element in the common Graeco-Roman culture that local elites used in negotiating a place for themselves in the empire-wide network of social power. As a cult practice existing from time immemorial in both Greek and Roman tradition, Greeks and Romans alike could regard it as a normal, natural way of demonstrating piety. At the same time, because individual cults had their own particular procedures, there was flexibility in what counted as proper animal sacrifice. Thus, when new peoples were incorporated into Roman hegemony, their elites could adapt native traditions of animal sacrifice, highlighting similarities and downplaying differences with Graeco-Roman procedure, in order to employ it as a tool for cultural and political negotiation. Two case studies illustrate the forms these negotiations could take. In northern Gaul, offering animal sacrifices to ancestral gods allowed local elites to maintain a distinctively Gallic identity, even as they brought Gallic sacrificial practice and structures of social power into conformity with Graeco-Roman norms. Although Judaean sacrificial practice differed from the Graeco-Roman norm more than Gallic practice, there were enough similarities that Judaeans and non-Judaeans were able to employ it to forge and maintain positive relations with each other.
Oh, I Know I’m Different
Authors: Hart Adam Charles
Published: March 2024

This chapter chronicles the development of ideas that would end up in Romero’s teen vampire movie Martin (1977) and in the radically different Bruiser (2000), a film about a put-upon office drone taking bloody revenge on everyone who’s wronged him. In the early 1970s, Romero started—and quickly abandoned—a novel about a dissatisfied middle-aged businessman named Martin Matthias. He then placed that character in a film treatment called Blood, in which a hereditary condition causes Martin to start feeling an uncontrollable urge to feed on human blood. About two years later, Romero rewrote that treatment for a script that would become the feature film Martin, about a painfully shy vampire who appears to be a teenager but who claims he’s much, much older. The film treats Martin’s condition as an illness, but it is unflinching in detailing the ugliness of his actions: it shows remarkable sympathy for Martin but also insistently humanizes his victims. More than two decades later, Romero would revisit themes from Blood for Bruiser, but where Martin relentlessly examined the morality of its protagonist and used him as a means of exploring the limits of sympathy, the more glib Bruiser glamorizes and celebrates its hero’s violence. This chapter uses these distinct projects to articulate Romero’s larger project in horror, in which monsters become central figures in stories of sympathy and recognition: they are us, in all our weakness, vulnerability, and prejudices.
Introduction
Authors: Liu Shelley X.
Published: March 2024

The introductory chapter sets up the underlying puzzle of the book: rebel groups that win civil war come into power having won the sympathies of only a portion of the state's civilians. In the post-war period, they face a polarized political climate and, often, armed rivals. What governing strategies do rebel victors undertake to engage in post-war state-building and the consolidation of their power? The chapter lays out the argument in brief: (1) rebel victors allocate resources toward violence and development to consolidate control; and (2) where resources are allocated, and whether state-building strategies are ultimately successful at preventing return to conflict, depend on the spatial distribution of rebel–civilian ties on the ground. This chapter situates this book within broader literatures on conflict, development, and state-building. Finally, the introduction considers scope conditions, outlines the case selection process, and discusses the empirical approaches used throughout the book.
External Comparisons
Authors: Liu Shelley X.
Published: March 2024

To account for the differences between Zimbabwe and Liberia that could have led to divergences in their ability to consolidate power, the final empirical chapter analyzes these two cases alongside conflicts in Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Burundi, and Rwanda. Angola's War for Independence began with similar motivations, ideology, time period, regional context, and political institutions as Zimbabwe. The narrative traces how the conflict unfolded and explain why Angola's post-independence politics resembled the state failure in Liberia. Côte d'Ivoire is similarly selected as a case with pre-war similarities to Liberia but, owing to differences in wartime processes, the victor's post-war trajectory enjoyed a relatively quick path to consolidating power. Finally, the chapter investigates a paired examination of the Burundi and Rwanda cases—neighboring states with similar ethnic cleavages and histories, but diverged in their post-war experiences. Together, these four cases provide evidence that wartime control is a strong predictor of post-war power consolidation following rebel victory.
Introduction
Authors: Fox Colm A.
Published: March 2024

Chapter 1 summarizes the book’s key concepts, main argument, and methods. It begins by illustrating the complexity of politicizing ethnicity during elections and introduces the concepts of ethnic bonding, bridging, and bypassing appeals. To explain how and why candidates use particular ethnic appeals in electoral campaigns, it argues that three factors—electoral rules, ethnic group viability, and party ideology—interact to guide candidates’ behavior. These factors provide the microfoundations for their ethnic appeal strategy. Indonesia is then introduced as an excellent testing ground for the argument due to the variation in its electoral rules, party ideologies, and ethnic diversity. The chapter describes the extensive fieldwork conducted and the unique collection of Indonesian campaign newspaper reports and election posters that were gathered and coded. Finally, it provides an overview of subsequent chapters.
The Logic of Ethnic Appeals
Authors: Fox Colm A.
Published: March 2024

Chapter 3 presents the book’s main argument, which explains why candidates choose to politicize ethnicity in particular ways during elections. It begins by reviewing studies on ethnic demographics and the personal vote. Building on this review, it proposes an argument composed of three explanatory factors. The first factor is electoral rules, which can range from party-centric to candidate-centric. Second is ethnic group viability, which relates to the size of the ethnic group and any social constraints on appealing to it. Third is party ideology, which can be ethnic or not. The chapter also highlights three additional factors (ethnic reputation, co-ethnic competition, and competitiveness) that can have a second-level effect. The chapter argues that these factors, plus what it calls the bonding-trumps-bridging heuristic, guide candidates’ behavior and provide the microfoundations for candidates’ ethnic bonding, bridging, or bypassing strategy. In the final section, the chapter elaborates on competing explanations, organized around three prominent driving forces: ethnic attachment, cultural modernization, and critical junctures.
Party Ideology
Authors: Fox Colm A.
Published: March 2024

Chapter 8 analyzes how political party ideology affects the kinds of ethnic appeals candidates make. In terms of ideology, Indonesian parties fit largely into two categories: nationalist and Islamic. An analysis of election posters confirms the impact of this ideological distinction: Islamic party candidates tended to make Islamic bonding appeals, while nationalist party candidates made bridging and bypassing appeals far more frequently. Moreover, this ideological distinction was strongly mediated by the type of electoral system. In more party-centric legislative elections, candidates looked largely to the party and its ideology to inform their campaign, while in the candidate-centric regional head elections there was a scant relationship between party ideology and candidates’ appeals. Finally, the chapter studies regional political parties that competed only in the legislative election in Aceh. Compared to candidates from parties that competed nationally, Acehnese regional party candidates were more strongly affected by their party’s religious or indigenous ideological stance.
The Religion of Whiteness
Authors: Emerson Michael O. , E. Bracey II Glenn
Published: March 2024

Why does the U.S. still experience racism and racial inequality, despite decades of social movements and tremendous personal sacrifices, and despite new laws and policies? The Religion of Whiteness offers a new perspective that this inequality is perpetuated because it is a necessary feature of a religion, a religion practiced and held dearly by millions of people. That religion, which we label the Religion of Whiteness, raises racial interests to the level of spiritual commitment rivaling followers’ commitment to Christianity itself. The Religion of Whiteness, a sect within historical Christianity, has risen to canonical status in many churches and among its millions of followers. This religion has its own unique beliefs, practices, sacred symbols, and organizations. It drives the nation’s politics, divides families, and is especially harmful to communities of color. Using national survey data, in-depth interviews, and focus group results over several years of study, we show how the Religion of Whiteness distorts the practice of traditional Christianity for millions of Americans. We find that the Religion of Whiteness has two distinct but mutually constitutive groups, which we call the White Veil and the White Might groups. These two groups work to defend and uphold the Religion of Whiteness, at great costs to any who do not follow the religion. If churches hope to promote traditional Christianity and navigate the many contentious issues of the nation, they must confront the distorting power of the Religion of Whiteness. The book concludes with a suggested path for doing exactly that.
Deterrence Is Not (Just) One Thing
Authors: Gartzke Erik , Lindsay Jon R.
Published: March 2024

The theme of this book is that deterrence is a complex relationship between many ends and many means. The overview of the theory is presented in two chapters. This chapter tackles the many ends of deterrence. The next chapter will delve into its many means. This chapter first returns to first principles and delineates the basic features of the bargaining model of war. The bargaining model suggests four different objectives for deterrence strategy (reducing risk, increasing influence, maximizing power, reducing costs), even as it is silent about which of these actors should prefer. Second, we delve into a discussion of general tensions across these objectives. These tensions have always been inherent in deterrence, but rarely considered together. Third, it emphasizes that the source of complexity is ultimately rooted in domestic preferences over the various objectives of deterrence theory.
Cyber
Authors: Gartzke Erik , Lindsay Jon R. , Nadiya Kostyuk
Published: March 2024

This chapter argues that improvements in the general availability of information in and through cyberspace are correlated with other factors that make conventional war less likely. States that are getting rich through economic interdependence have less reason to go to war for economic resources. And economic interdependence depends increasingly on information technology. But the price of the modern informational peace is an increasing attractiveness of intelligence contests in and through cyberspace. The same developments that discourage conventional war, therefore, will also encourage information “conflict” or intelligence contests. Common information systems improve economic prosperity, and actors moderate the intensity of cybercrime and cyber espionage to preserve the benefits of digital globalization, which include opportunities for future exploitation. The chapter presents empirical evidence that supports the hypothesis that cyber conflict is an indirect substitute for conventional war.
Increasing Access and Equity for First-Generation Scholars in Linguistics
Authors: Mantenuto Iara , Levy Tamaya , Reyes Stephanie , Zhang Zhongyin
Published: March 2024

This chapter provides information about who first-generation scholars are in the field of linguistics, and the work that the authors have done with their First Gen Access and Equity (FGAE) committee. The authors argue that the field of linguistics needs to do better to recruit and retain first-generation scholars, and to do so linguists need to educate themselves, by reflecting on some of the hurdles that institutions create. The chapter focuses in particular on two main issues the authors have faced in their experiences as first-generation scholars: financial barriers to success and the culture of exclusion. This chapter and the FGAE committee offer tools to start improving and advocating for the first-generation scholar experience, while also creating a supportive community.
Pedagogies of Inclusion Must Start from Within
Authors: Chung Rhonda , Cruz John Wayne N. dela
Published: March 2024

Before contact, the Americas were a multilingual pastiche of Indigenous communities. The arrival of colonial linguistic policies disrupted this biodiversity with monolingual (i.e., English-only) pedagogies. To reverse this noninclusive trend, Indigenous scholarship asks settler teacher programs to self-locate their teaching practices on the land and confront TESL’s role in maintaining settler-only linguistic futures. To explore a land-based resistance to monolingual pedagogies, the authors piloted and then conducted a two-hour online workshop with ESL instructors in a Canadian university in Québec. The first half of the workshop combined individual self-reflection and self-location activities, followed by small group discussions that located attendees’ language teaching practices and learning experiences on the land (Landguaging). The second half explored maintaining multilingual landscapes via three plurilingual teaching strategies, which attendees evaluated in small groups. Participants positively perceived the Landguaging exercises and plurilingual strategies, viewing them as helpful combinations to foster inclusion in the ESL classroom.
Transforming Impeding Structures for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality
Authors: Hirway Indira
Published: March 2024

There are two formidable structures to women’s empowerment, namely, social structure in the form of patriarchy, and economic structure in the form of exclusion of unpaid work, in which women are predominantly engaged, from the purview of the economy. Unpaid work here is the work that is located outside the production boundary and includes unpaid domestic services and unpaid care performed at the household level. Both these structures reinforce each other and have far-reaching impact on multiple aspects of women’s lives. There are also structures like race, caste, religion etc., which cut across gender but impact on women more intensively. The policies and programmes for women in India have not been able to address these structures upfront. As the unpaid work contributes significantly to the economy in multiple ways, and vice versa, it is too valuable to be excluded from the economy. Exclusion of unpaid work results in several distortions in the economy, which are primarily unfair and unjust to women. One major strategy for empowering women and for gender equality is integration of unpaid work with the mainstream economy. The paper discusses these strategies, and explores the pathways to women’s empowermet.
Care Economy in India
Authors: Neetha N.
Published: March 2024

Care work has replaced the term housework world over, and in India too care work is an important area of discussion and analysis from varied entry points. Labour market changes, such as the low and declining work participation of women and the growth of paid domestic workers, were important concerns that illuminated the interest in care work in the Indian context. The understanding of care, though, has developed; the institutions or practices of care are mostly defined by the social and gendered understanding of care. The paper outlines these developments and dimensions of care work, setting the larger context. Various care institutions and practices are examined alongside highlighting the interconnectedness of these institutions. The paper points to the importance of family and the gendering of care work, though market for care services has expanded. Other arrangements for care, provided either through state or community intervention or corporate employers, are found minimal. Public crèches and preschools and institutional arrangements such as maternity leave are not available to the bulk of women. The burden of care work and its social and cultural understanding is a hurdle for women to enter paid work. Even when they are in employment, women shoulder multiple responsibilities, resulting in occasional interruptions in employment adversely affecting their status as workers, which makes state support crucial.
Gender Inequalities in Health and Care
Authors: Mehta Aasha Kapur , Chowdhury Samik
Published: March 2024

This chapter analyses existing secondary data and information to draw attention to gender inequalities in health and care outcomes in India and their complex determinants that are rooted in the intrinsic gender biases prevalent within the household and in society. It analyses issues of access, financing and care, with the understanding that to address inequalities in health outcomes, we also need to focus on the processes that lead to them. Government spending on health in India is among the lowest in the world. Out of pocket expenditure on health is extremely high. A dysfunctional health system that is predominantly based on out-of-pocket expenditure adversely affects women and girls due to gender bias inherent in household spending decisions. Hence, the chapter underlines the important role of public provisioning of health and corresponding health financing arrangements required for enabling gender equitable access, availability and affordability of health care. Even before the onset of COVID-19, India was unlikely to achieve SDG1 and SDG3. However, the pandemic has thrown open the fault lines caused by persistent poverty combined with low public investment in health care leading to severe shortfalls in the access to health care services. This adds to women’s unpaid care work as the burden of providing emotional, physical, nutritional care etc., is primarily borne by them. Hence, it is extremely important that all forms of care work are measured and women’s unpaid care work is reduced and redistributed through universal access to publicly provisioned quality care services. This requires substantial increases in budgetary allocation for health on priority.
Expanding Statistical Paradigm: Mainstreaming Time Use Surveys in the India Statistical System
Authors: Hirway Indira
Published: March 2024

The present statistical system in India collects data, through the available survey techniques, related to production, consumption and incomes generated in the entire economy at different levels – from micro to macro levels covering the production boundary of the economy. Human life however goes much beyond the production boundary, as human activities also cover activities lying within the general production boundary, and personal activities that are non-delegable. Expanding the statistical paradigm to cover these activities will provide a broader and realistic view of human life, which will open up immense possibilities of understanding human life. Time use survey is the only survey technique available to us today to cover all human activities in the national statistical paradigm. National Statistical Organization of India conducted the first all India TUS recently in 2019. This paper examines briefly the history of time use surveys in India, assesses the conceptual and methodological concerns of this 2019 all India survey, and then presents how to conduct a time use survey in the countries of the Global South using rigorous concepts and methods to produce quality time use data
Languages without Native Speakers
Authors: Schoenberger Casey
Published: March 2024

This chapter focuses on the development of grammatical and notational technologies for encoding song lyrics and pronunciation standards that more nearly mimicked daily speech of official and, finally, local languages. Drawing on research of scholars like Sheldon Pollock and Alexander Beecroft on development of vernaculars out of cosmopolitan literary languages and work of scholars like Haun Saussy on inscription and orality, this chapter uses cognitive concepts like memory chunking to argue that material technologies, like writing and print, and scholarly activities, like dictionary and rhyme book writing, gradually enabled a “natural” stylistic of individual sentiment explored by poets and dramatists like Li Qingzhao and Xu Wei. The end of this chapter revisits the “Tang-Shen debate” to describe a dialectic of (classical) “elegance” and “fashionable” intelligibility in late imperial efforts to craft performing arts with empire-wide appeal.
Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature
Authors: Achille Étienne , Panaïté Oana
Published: March 2024

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing engages with Whiteness in French literature to provide an unprecedented critique of the institutionally and symbolically hegemonic figure that has gone heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized. The book identifies a set of formal features, functions, and aesthetic dispositions which reveal the ways in which White writers grapple with the postcolonial subject matter. We focus on seven case studies featuring texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Nicolas Fargues, Pierre Lemaitre, Édouard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu, representative of a larger body of works published by left-leaning, politically progressive writers who stand in stark ideological contrast while sharing certain thematic and aesthetic similarities with books published by neo-reactionary authors such as Michel Houellebecq, purportedly the epitomic French writer of our age. By positing the operative and transitional concept of White writer, our analysis surpasses disciplinary boundaries established in distinct historical and political contexts and maintained by institutional inertia and ideological inducements, to foreshadow the poetics of White writing in contemporary France and offer a replicable model for engaging with a literary field pervaded by (post)colonial themes. We argue that it is imperative to recast critically the enduring boundedness of race and empire as a matter of equal concern to White and non-White writers. Ultimately, this epistemological gesture, stemming from the recognition that Whiteness constitutes a determining factor in the construction of the modern literary field, allows readers and scholars to grasp the relationality of contemporary writing and to uncover the ‘common library’ of literature in French.
Measurement of the zodiacal light absolute intensity through Fraunhofer line spectroscopy of the night sky with the Hale telescope
Authors: Hanzawa Masaki , Matsuura Shuji , Takahashi Aoi , Chary Ranga-Ram , Sano Kei , Takimoto Kohji , Tome Yuto
Published: March 2024

Measuring the absolute brightness of the zodiacal light (ZL), which is the sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust particles, is important not only for understanding the physical properties of the dust but also for constraining the extragalactic background light (EBL) by subtracting the ZL foreground. We describe the results of high-resolution spectroscopic observations of the night sky in the wavelength range of 300–900 nm with the double spectrograph on the Hale telescope to determine the absolute brightness of the ZL continuum spectra from the Fraunhofer absorption line intensities. The observed fields are part of the fields observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope for the EBL study. Assuming that the spectral shape of the zodiacal light is identical to the solar spectrum in a narrow region around the Fraunhofer lines, we decomposed the observed sky brightness into multiple emission components by amplitude parameter fitting with spectral templates of the airglow, ZL, diffuse Galactic light, integrated starlight, and other isotropic components including EBL. As a result, the ZL component with the Ca ii λλ 393.3, 396.8 nm Fraunhofer lines around 400 nm is clearly separated from the others in all fields with uncertainties around 20%, mainly due to the template errors and the time variability of the airglow. The observed ZL brightness in most of the observed fields is consistent with the modeled ZL brightness calculated by combining the most conventional ZL model at 1250 nm based on the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment and the observational ZL template spectrum based on the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the ecliptic plane observation is considerably fainter than the ZL model, and this discrepancy is discussed in terms of the optical properties of the interplanetary dust accreted in the ecliptic plane.
Designing an instrument for scaling public sector innovations
Authors: van Hout Mirte A R , Braams Rik B , Meijer Paul , Meijer Albert J
Published: March 2024

Governments worldwide invest in developing and diffusing innovations to deal with wicked problems. While experiments and pilots flourish, governments struggle to successfully scale innovations. Public sector scaling remains understudied, and scholarly suggestions for scaling trajectories are lacking. Following a design approach, this research develops an academically grounded, practice-oriented scaling instrument for planning and reflecting on the scaling of public sector innovations. We design this instrument based on the academic literature, an empirical analysis of three scaling projects at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and six focus groups with practitioners. This research proposes a context-specific and iterative understanding of scaling processes and contributes a typology of scaling barriers and an additional scaling strategy to the literature. The presented instrument increases our academic understanding of scaling and enables teams of policymakers, in cooperation with stakeholders, to plan and reflect on a context-specific scaling pathway for public sector innovations.