bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Promoting negative politeness in nineteenth-century England
Authors: Shvanyukova Polina
Published: January 2019

In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.
“With kindest regards”
Authors: Dossena Marina
Published: January 2019

In Late Modern times, both usage guides and letter-writing manuals commented on language etiquette, providing guidance on how to address specific recipients according to their rank, age, and gender, how to approach certain topics, and how to convey mutual status relying exclusively on language. Guides and manuals, however, cannot always be assumed to be accurate representations of what actually occurred in usage. In this contribution I intend to investigate these materials alongside authentic ones, in order to assess the extent to which texts convey their writers’ awareness of asymmetrical social status by placing particular emphasis on politeness moves. Special attention is paid to business discourse, where identity construal issues are crucial for the maintenance of successful networks.
Language discordance and technological facilitation in health care service encounters
Authors: De Wilde July , Van Praet Ellen , Van Vaerenbergh Yves
Published: January 2019

This chapter reports on the design and implementation of a multilingual, mobile app to facilitate the communication in language discordant face-to-face service encounters (SEs). It describes the results of a two-group between-subjects experiment, in which respondents (N = 20) were randomly assigned to either a SE with app (N = 11), or a SE without app (N = 9). The research builds on the hypothesis that technological mediation facilitates the transfer of information. To verify this hypothesis, it relies on qualitative and quantitative research data: (i) SERVQUAL satisfaction questionnaires and (ii) interaction analysis of video-recorded SEs. The findings address concerns of lengthened visit time, reduced eye contact and additional training needs. The chapter closes with brief guidelines for unlocking the potential of mHealth in language discordant SEs.
Context and pragmatic meaning in telephone interpreting
Authors: Lázaro Gutiérrez Raquel , Cabrera Méndez Gabriel
Published: January 2019

Remote and telephone interpreting involve a number of skills that must be acquired. For instance, telephone interpreters cannot take into account their first impression of the situation before starting work as, because of reasons of practicality, briefing is rarely possible. Thus, it is typically quite challenging to select the appropriate context and, in turn, grasp the pragmatic meaning of the discourse being interpreted. Professional telephone interpreters have developed a set of strategies to cope with this difficulty – mostly based on their own skills and experience. This chapter presents the analysis of a case study consisting of a mediated telephone conversation between doctors/patient and interpreter in Spanish and Italian within the context of Hospital Emergency Department. Our main aim is to illustrate, with examples, the difficulties interpreters encounter and the strategic solutions they adopt in order to cope.
Managing verbal and embodied conduct in telephone-mediated service encounters
Authors: Matthew Edmonds David , Weatherall Ann
Published: January 2019

In telephone-mediated service encounters, there are limits on how parties interact with one another. Speakers are restricted to only verbal (what they say) and aural (what they hear) means of communication. Therefore, a practical problem at the heart of such interactions is how speakers manage embodied conduct, given that they can only hear – rather than see the other person. We investigated how verbal and embodied conduct were managed in a corpus of 63 calls to a New Zealand helpline service where callers (complainants) interact with conciliators (institutional representatives) to complain about, and attempt to resolve disputes with their electricity and gas providers. Using conversation analysis, we document two ways that callers could manage verbal and embodied conduct in a particular type of sequence in these calls.
Call centre service encounters
Authors: Mugford Gerrard
Published: January 2019

Non-native English-speaking call-centre agents, often located hundreds of miles from their customers, engage in asymmetrical transactional relationships with callers who often question their language proficiency and their overall work competence. Potentially placed at a communicative disadvantage with their native-speaking callers, the operators cannot directly confront their customers. Furthermore, agents tend to engage in conversationalised transactional talk as they adhere to scripts, standardised politeness routines and “synthetic personalisation” (Fairclough 2010). A critical discourse analysis framework examines Mexican call centre agents’ own perceptions regarding how they face up to the challenges of constructing a dialogue on equal terms, negotiate conflictive situations and overcome a sense of powerlessness due to their restrictive discursive options.
Relational practices on commercial Facebook wall interactions
Authors: Bou-Franch Patricia
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores mediated service encounters in social networking sites, as examples of the new (or reconfigured) forms of social organization and interaction brought about by technology. Social networking sites afford multidirectional communication, i.e. encounters between companies and consumers, as well as interactions among consumers, which are impacting previously stable corporate and consumer roles and are transforming efficiency and sociability management in various ways. This chapter specifically investigates relational practices on commercial Facebook pages. To carry out this research, a reference corpus of commercial wall interactions, comprising over 900 comments, was compiled. A representative sample (n = 290 posts) was quantitatively analyzed to identify consumers’ alignment with the corporation. Drawing on a revised framework of relational work and extant second-order taxonomies of im/politeness, a qualitative analysis unveiled a number of relational practices that emerged in supportive and unsupportive interactions. This chapter unveiled specific interactional patterns and revealed the predominance of both textual and visual relational practices on Facebook.
A new family of irreducible subgroups of the orthogonal algebraic groups
Authors: Cavallin Mikaël , Testerman Donna
Published: January 2019

Let

n
≥
3
,

n\geq 3,

and let

Y
Y

be a simply connected, simple algebraic group of type

D

n
+
1

D_{n+1}

over an algebraically closed field

K
.

K.

Also let

X
X

be the subgroup of type

B
n

B_n

of

Y
,

Y,

embedded in the usual way. In this paper, we correct an error in a proof of a theorem of Seitz (Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 67 (1987), no. 365), resulting in the discovery of a new family of triples

(
X
,
Y
,
V
)
,

(X,Y,V),

where

V
V

denotes a finite-dimensional, irreducible, rational

K
Y

KY

-module, on which

X
X

acts irreducibly. We go on to investigate the impact of the existence of the new examples on the classification of the maximal closed connected subgroups of the classical algebraic groups.
KdV hierarchy via Abelian coverings and operator identities
Authors: Eichinger B. , VandenBoom T. , Yuditskii P.
Published: January 2019

We establish precise spectral criteria for potential functions

V
V

of reflectionless Schrödinger operators

L
V

=
−

∂
x
2

+
V

L_V = -\partial _x^2 + V

to admit solutions to the Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) hierarchy with

V
V

as an initial value. More generally, our methods extend the classical study of algebro-geometric solutions for the KdV hierarchy to noncompact Riemann surfaces by defining generalized Abelian integrals and analogues of the Baker-Akhiezer function on infinitely connected domains with a uniformly thick boundary satisfying a fractional moment condition.
Ena/VASP processive elongation is modulated by avidity on actin filaments bundled by the filopodia cross-linker fascin
Authors: Harker Alyssa J. , Katkar Harshwardhan H. , Bidone Tamara C. , Aydin Fikret , Voth Gregory A. , Applewhite Derek A. , Kovar David R.
Published: January 2019

Ena/VASP tetramers are processive actin elongation factors that localize to diverse F-actin networks composed of filaments bundled by different cross-linking proteins, such as filopodia (fascin), lamellipodia (fimbrin), and stress fibers (α-actinin). Previously, we found that Ena takes approximately threefold longer processive runs on trailing barbed ends of fascin-bundled F-actin. Here, we used single-molecule TIRFM (total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy) and developed a kinetic model to further dissect Ena/VASP’s processive mechanism on bundled filaments. We discovered that Ena’s enhanced processivity on trailing barbed ends is specific to fascin bundles, with no enhancement on fimbrin or α-actinin bundles. Notably, Ena/VASP’s processive run length increases with the number of both fascin-bundled filaments and Ena “arms,” revealing avidity facilitates enhanced processivity. Consistently, Ena tetramers form more filopodia than mutant dimer and trimers in Drosophila culture cells. Moreover, enhanced processivity on trailing barbed ends of fascin-bundled filaments is an evolutionarily conserved property of Ena/VASP homologues, including human VASP and Caenorhabditis elegans UNC-34. These results demonstrate that Ena tetramers are tailored for enhanced processivity on fascin bundles and that avidity of multiple arms associating with multiple filaments is critical for this process. Furthermore, we discovered a novel regulatory process whereby bundle size and bundling protein specificity control activities of a processive assembly factor.
Thiol stress–dependent aggregation of the glycolytic enzyme triose phosphate isomerase in yeast and human cells
Authors: Ford Amy E. , Denicourt Catherine , Morano Kevin A.
Published: January 2019

The eukaryotic cytosolic proteome is vulnerable to changes in proteostatic and redox balance caused by temperature, pH, oxidants, and xenobiotics. Cysteine-containing proteins are especially at risk, as the thiol side chain is subject to oxidation, adduction, and chelation by thiol-reactive compounds. The thiol-chelating heavy metal cadmium is a highly toxic environmental pollutant demonstrated to induce the heat shock response and recruit protein chaperones to sites of presumed protein aggregation in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. However, endogenous targets of cadmium toxicity responsible for these outcomes are largely unknown. Using fluorescent protein fusion to cytosolic proteins with known redox-active cysteines, we identified the yeast glycolytic enzyme triose phosphate isomerase as being aggregation-prone in response to cadmium and to glucose depletion in chronologically aging cultures. Cadmium-induced aggregation was limited to newly synthesized Tpi1 that was recruited to foci containing the disaggregase Hsp104 and the peroxiredoxin chaperone Tsa1. Misfolding of nascent Tpi1 in response to both cadmium and glucose-depletion stress required both cysteines, implying that thiol status in this protein directly influences folding. We also demonstrate that cadmium proteotoxicity is conserved between yeast and human cells, as HEK293 and HCT116 cell lines exhibit recruitment of the protein chaperone Hsp70 to visible foci. Moreover, human TPI, mutations in which cause a glycolytic deficiency syndrome, also forms aggregates in response to cadmium treatment, suggesting that this conserved enzyme is folding-labile and may be a useful endogenous model for investigating thiol-specific proteotoxicity.
Clathrin plaques and associated actin anchor intermediate filaments in skeletal muscle
Authors: Franck Agathe , Lainé Jeanne , Moulay Gilles , Lemerle Eline , Trichet Michaël , Gentil Christel , Benkhelifa-Ziyyat Sofia , Lacène Emmanuelle , Bui Mai Thao , Brochier Guy , Guicheney Pascale , Romero Norma , Bitoun Marc , Vassilopoulos Stéphane
Published: January 2019

Clathrin plaques are stable features of the plasma membrane observed in several cell types. They are abundant in muscle, where they localize at costameres that link the contractile apparatus to the sarcolemma and connect the sarcolemma to the basal lamina. Here, we show that clathrin plaques and surrounding branched actin filaments form microdomains that anchor a three-dimensional desmin intermediate filament (IF) web. Depletion of clathrin plaque and branched actin components causes accumulation of desmin tangles in the cytoplasm. We show that dynamin 2, whose mutations cause centronuclear myopathy (CNM), regulates both clathrin plaques and surrounding branched actin filaments, while CNM-causing mutations lead to desmin disorganization in a CNM mouse model and patient biopsies. Our results suggest a novel paradigm in cell biology, wherein clathrin plaques act as platforms capable of recruiting branched cortical actin, which in turn anchors IFs, both essential for striated muscle formation and function.
Neoliberalism and Communication
Authors: Bsumek Peter K.
Published: January 2019

Neoliberalism has become a central topic in critical cultural studies and communication. Broadly speaking, neoliberalism refers to economic theories, political discourses, and cultural practices that support free markets and private property. It is a political project dedicated to rolling back “the welfare state” and instituting a society based on market principles, as well as the ideologies and forms of governance that justify and enable such reforms. Neoliberalism is seen by many in the critical cultural tradition as a threat to enduring values such as justice, equality, and the ideals of “the public good” and the “common interest.” Others are critical of it as an explanatory concept, arguing that it lacks coherence and is used promiscuously as an all-purpose category of denunciation.

In general, communication scholars have approached neoliberalism in two main ways. On the one hand, they have attempted to analyze communication about neoliberalism by focusing on the ways that communication is utilized to represent, enable, and justify neoliberal ideas, policies, and practices. This scholarship is largely concerned with the persuasive effects of communication and rhetoric. On the other hand, they have focused on the forms of communication that produce the cultural and material realities of neoliberalism. These scholars are generally concerned with the circulation of communication and rhetoric. It should come as no surprise that the distinction between the two approaches is not always neat and tidy. This is so, at least in part, because the critical traditions that inform this scholarship do not necessarily agree upon what exactly neoliberalism is. Communication scholars have engaged neoliberalism by aligning with, building upon, and mobilizing a variety of critical cultural scholarly approaches. Three of the most common approaches are discussed: neoliberalism as hegemonic project and ideology, neoliberalism as governmentality and biopolitics, and neoliberalism as political project and process. Each of these traditions assumes that neoliberalism constitutes, to a significant degree, the world we now inhabit.
Nation, Identity, and Power in the Critical Cultural Studies Tradition
Authors: Mengibar Ana Caballero
Published: January 2019

The concepts of nation and identity are intimately linked to how power functions in society. At its core the nation is associated with some sort of “authentic” cultural location. Speaking of the nation often implies cultural homogeneity and a sense of national unity. Critical cultural studies contest this view of the nation and the consequent construction of a coherent identity. The nation and its identities are neither univocal nor culturally homogenous, nor do the people have a socially cohesive experience. The nation is the product of cultural practices of representation between “Us” and the “Other,” all contained in stored societal knowledge and disseminated in discourses. The knowledge contained in discourses about the nation and its people, critical cultural followers argue, produce and reproduce a very particular type of truth contained in social categories such as sex, gender, age, race, ability, and class. The nation and its identities following a cultural critical tradition have been studied by an array of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches but most notably by postmodernists, postcolonialists, critical feminists, and multiculturalists. At their core, they all share the belief that the nation and its identities are socially constructed and that obscured social relations of power contained in discourses of nationhood can be uncovered. They also share a commitment to denouncing discrimination and inequality and enhancing the voices of the margins, the subalterns, and the multicultural identities contained in and transcending the nation. Critical cultural scholarship examines the interarticulation of power and culture. Central to critical studies is the critical examination of discourses seeking to uncover the socially constructed machinery of power with the end goal of enacting social change. The terms nation and identity are political in nature and thus are highly interrelated with power.
Cyberculture and Globalization
Authors: Lemos André
Published: January 2019

Globalization should be understood as a new economic, political, and cultural dynamic in what is now a global space. It is diagnosed based on a description of the different phases in its development, as an abstract, modern narrative reinforced by cyberculture, the information and communications technologies (ICTs) culture that emerged in the 1970s. Communications media have enabled the constraints and limits of space and time to be overcome, expanding human agency and connecting people and objects. Globalization is linked to the development of cyberculture precisely because this increases the number of different types of connections between people, products, and information all around the planet. It is constructed abstractly, as it does not pay the price of the connections and connectors that locate social relations. At the same time as it helps to create the fiction of “global globalization,” cyberculture reveals mediators that always connect objects, processes, people, and places, making a “localized globalization” visible. Rather than being merely deterritorializing, globalization produces connections and situations with the aid of connectors. Like every sociotechnical network, it is involved in the creation of new spatialities. The narrative of globalization ignores the connectors and overlooks the notion of territory, asserting the global nature of globalization when in fact it is the result of concrete mediations performed locally, produced by a specific and material network. It is important to politicize globalization. This requires “relocalization” of the global, that is, identifying specific, material situations. Having an appreciation of this dependence leads us to very concrete political attitudes. Attention is drawn to the need to give visibility to the mediators that anchor experiences, gainsaying the generic nature of globalization and allowing it to be politicized.
Post-Truth and Critical Communication Studies
Authors: Harsin Jayson
Published: January 2019

While the periodizing concept “post-truth” (PT) initially appeared in the United States as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society,” it quickly appeared in many languages. It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. Its popular and academic treatments sometimes differ in respect to its meaning, but most associate it with communication forms such as fake or false news, rumors, hoaxes, and political lying. They also identify causes such as polarization and unethical politicians or unregulated social media; shoddy journalism; or simply the inevitable chaos ushered in by digital media technologies. PT is sometimes posited as a social and political condition whereby citizens or audiences and politicians no longer respect truth (e.g., climate science deniers or “birthers”) but simply accept as true what they believe or feel. However, more rigorously, PT is actually a breakdown of social trust, which encompasses what was formerly the major institutional truth-teller or publicist—the news media. What is accepted as popular truth is really a weak form of knowledge, opinion based on trust in those who supposedly know. Critical communication approaches locate its historical legacy in the earliest forms of political persuasion and questions of ethics and epistemology, such as those raised by Plato in the Gorgias. While there are timeless similarities, PT is a 21st-century phenomenon. It is not “after” truth but after a historical period where interlocking elite institutions were discoverers, producers, and gatekeepers of truth, accepted by social trust (the church, science, governments, the school, etc.). Critical scholars have identified a more complex historical set of factors, to which popular proposed solutions have been mostly blind. Modern origins of PT lie in the anxious elite negotiation of mass representative liberal democracy with proposals for organizing and deploying mass communication technologies. These elites consisted of pioneers in the influence or persuasion industries, closely associated with government and political practice and funding, and university research. These influence industries were increasingly accepted not just by business but also by (resource-rich) professional political actors. Their object was not policy education and argument to constituents but, increasingly strategically, emotion and attention management. PT can usefully be understood in the context of its historical emergence, through its popular forms and responses, such as rumors, conspiracies, hoaxes, fake news, fact-checking, and filter bubbles, as well as through its multiple effects—not the least of which the discourse of panic about it.
Regional Dynamical Downscaling
Authors: Giorgi Filippo
Published: January 2019

Dynamical downscaling has been used for about 30 years to produce high-resolution climate information for studies of regional climate processes and for the production of climate information usable for vulnerability, impact assessment and adaptation studies. Three dynamical downscaling tools are available in the literature: high-resolution global atmospheric models (HIRGCMs), variable resolution global atmospheric models (VARGCMs), and regional climate models (RCMs). These techniques share their basic principles, but have different underlying assumptions, advantages and limitations. They have undergone a tremendous growth in the last decades, especially RCMs, to the point that they are considered fundamental tools in climate change research. Major intercomparison programs have been implemented over the years, culminating in the Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX), an international program aimed at producing fine scale regional climate information based on multi-model and multi-technique approaches. These intercomparison projects have lead to an increasing understanding of fundamental issues in climate downscaling and in the potential of downscaling techniques to provide actionable climate change information. Yet some open issues remain, most notably that of the added value of downscaling, which are the focus of substantial current research. One of the primary future directions in dynamical downscaling is the development of fully coupled regional earth system models including multiple components, such as the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere and the chemosphere. Within this context, dynamical downscaling models offer optimal testbeds to incorporate the human component in a fully interactive way. Another main future research direction is the transition to models running at convection-permitting scales, order of 1–3 km, for climate applications. This is a major modeling step which will require substantial development in research and infrastructure, and will allow the description of local scale processes and phenomena within the climate change context. Especially in view of these future directions, climate downscaling will increasingly constitute a fundamental interface between the climate modeling and end-user communities in support of climate service activities.
Anxiety and Fear in Sport and Performance
Authors: Zhang Shuge , Woodman Tim , Roberts Ross
Published: January 2019

Anxiety and fear are unpleasant emotions commonly experienced in sport and performance settings. While fear usually has an apparent cause, the source of anxiety is comparatively vague and complex. Anxiety has cognitive and somatic components and can be either a trait or a state. To assess the different aspects of anxiety, a variety of psychometric scales have been developed in sport and performance domains. Besides efforts to quantify anxiety, a major focus in the anxiety-performance literature has been to explore the impact of anxiety on performance and why such effects occur. Anxiety-performance theories and models have increased the understanding of how anxiety affects performance and have helped to explain why anxiety is widely considered a negative emotion that individuals typically seek to avoid in performance settings. Nonetheless, individuals approach anxiety-inducing or fear-provoking situations in different ways. For example, high-risk sport research shows that individuals can actively approach fear-inducing environments in order to glean intra- and interpersonal regulatory benefits. Such individual differences are particularly relevant to sport and performance researchers and practitioners, as those who actively approach competition to enjoy the fear-inducing environment (i.e., the “risk”) are likely to have a performance advantage over those who compete while having to cope with their troublesome anxiety and fear. Future research would do well to: (1) examine the effects of anxiety on the processes that underpin performance rather than a sole focus on the performance outcomes, (2) test directly the different cognitive functions that are thought to be impaired when performing under anxiety, (3) unite the existing theories to understand a “whole picture” of how anxiety influences performance, and (4) explore the largely overlooked field of individual differences in the context of performance psychology.
Psychological Skills Training and the Impact on Military Performance Readiness
Authors: Barnicle Scott
Published: January 2019

With the demands of the United States Military constantly evolving, it is necessary to think outside of the common battlefield to find a competitive advantage. Aside from tactical and technical advancement in military science and weaponry, the psychological component of warfare and readiness has been given more attention and resources in recent years. While the primary goal of these programs, which are mainly with the US Army and Navy, is to psychologically train soldiers for optimal performance and readiness, the mental health and psychological well-being upon return from deployment is also a top priority. These programs have grown in scope and size over the past 20 years, and with no end in sight of U.S. military responsibilities, the psychological training platforms continue to be a critical component of global military readiness.
New Directions in Theories of Emotion and Aging
Authors: Mikels Joseph A. , Young Nathaniel A.
Published: January 2019

The adult life span is characterized as a time of divergent trajectories. It is a time of compounding losses (such as physical, sensory, and cognitive declines) and is also a time of surprising growth (such as improvements in well-being and emotion regulation). These divergent trajectories present theorists with the paradox of aging: in the face of accumulating losses, how is it that as people age, they generally feel good and experience greater well-being? Theorists have grappled with this paradox and have focused on how motivational, cognitive, control, and social factors impact emotional development across the adult life span. These foundational theories have paved the way to a deeper understanding of adult life-span development, but they do not draw as deeply from theories in affective science. Some of the latest perspectives on emotion and aging offer integrative views, such as how older adults may experience different discrete emotion (i.e., anger versus sadness) from an evolutionary functional perspective. Other perspectives consider how an array of appraisal processes may change across adulthood (such as shifts in evaluations of self-control versus other-control for younger versus older adults). These newer approaches dig deeper into mechanistic explanations and underscore the need for greater theoretical integration. Later life is clearly a time of increased well-being, but the field is only on the cusp of understanding the mysteries of emotional experience in later life.
Dynamic Integration Theory
Authors: Diehl Manfred , Griffin Eden , Brothers Allyson
Published: January 2019

Dynamic integration theory (DIT) describes emotion development across the lifespan, from childhood to old age. In doing so, DIT draws on a number of perspectives, such as equilibrium theories, theories of cognitive development, and theories of behavioral adaptation, and takes a strong cognitive-developmental view on emotion experience and emotion regulation. Two propositions are at the core of DIT. First, the development of emotion experience and emotion regulation proceeds from simple and automatic reactions to increasingly complex and integrated cognitive-affective structures (i.e., schemas). These cognitive-affective structures can be ordered in terms of increasing levels of cognitive complexity and integration, with integration referring to a person’s ability to acknowledge both positive and negative affect states and to tolerate and reconcile the contradictions and tensions that these states generate. Second, DIT also postulates that the efficiency with which cognitive-affective systems work is a result of the dynamic interplay between contextual variables and person-specific characteristics. Three key factors contribute to this dynamic interplay between person and context: (1) the strength of the affective arousal, (2) the person’s cognitive resources for dealing with different affect states, and (3) pre-existing trait-like dispositions and reaction tendencies that may either hinder or facilitate emotion regulation. Thus, a person’s emotion experience and emotion regulation in a given situation are the product of the dynamic interaction of these factors. Considerable empirical evidence supports the theoretical propositions of DIT, including findings speaking to changes in emotion experience and emotion regulation in later life when declines in cognitive functioning tend to become normative.
Cultural Values and the Nature of Successful Aging
Authors: Torres Sandra
Published: January 2019

Ideas regarding what it means to age well date back centuries. Gerontological scholarship includes countless conceptual, theoretical, and empirical contributions to how to make sense of these ideas. The construct of successful aging is therefore one of the most debated operationalizations of what it means to age well. Empirical research on successful aging taps into either understandings of successful aging or the strategies that people use to age well. The very essence of the construct of successful aging is, however, sociocultural. This is why this chapter proposes that exploring the cultural values that underpin the understandings of successful aging that inform this scholarship is a theoretically profuse approach to making sense of the controversy that surrounds this construct.

Two decades ago, a culture-relevant framework for the study of understandings of successful aging was formulated to address the disregard for cultural values that lie at the very core of this controversy. This framework proposes that there is congruence between the value orientations that people prefer and the understandings of successful aging that they hold, and that if we are to make sense of this congruence, we need to acknowledge that the foundations of value orientations (i.e., political, economic, and religious systems) shape what we deem to be necessary for aging well. From this it follows that there are bound to be more understandings of successful aging than what the scholarship in this area tends to acknowledge. After all, gerontological scholarship relies most heavily on contributions made on the basis of data from highly industrialized societies in the part of the world referred to as “the West.” In other words, gerontological scholarship on successful aging is extremely ethnocentric in its take on this construct, since only a handful of cultural understandings of what it means to age well are regarded as the norm. A failure to acknowledge this very fact leads gerontologists to disregard or downplay (often inadvertently) understandings of what it means to age well that do not resonate well with their own value paradigms or to impose (sometimes unintentionally) the Western template on findings about successful aging that do not rhyme well with what this scholarship assumes to be a given (i.e., a future, activity, independence, and mastering of nature orientation to what aging well means).
Aging Societies and the Ethical Challenges of Long Life
Authors: Heid Allison R. , Zarit Steven H.
Published: January 2019

Individuals are living longer than they ever have before with average life expectancy at birth estimated at 79 years of age in the United States. A greater proportion of individuals are living to advanced ages of 85 or more and the ratio of individuals 65 and over to individuals of younger age groups is shrinking. Disparities in life expectancy across genders and races are pronounced. Financial challenges of sustaining the older population are substantial in most developed and many developing countries. In the United States in particular, employer-based pension programs are diminishing. Furthermore, Social Security will begin taking in less money than it pays out as early as 2023, and the debate over its future in part entails discussions of equitable distribution of resources for the young in need and the old. Living longer is associated with a greater number of chronic health conditions—over two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries in the United States have two or more chronic health conditions that require complex self-management regimes partnered with informal and formal care services from family caregivers and institutional long-term services and supports. Caregiver burden and stress is high as are quality care deficiencies in residential long-term care settings. The balance of honoring individuals’ autonomous wishes and providing person-centered care that also addresses the practicalities of safety is an ever-present quandary. Furthermore, complex decisions regarding end-of-life care and treatments plague the medical and social realms, as more money is spent at the end of life than at any other point and individuals’ wishes for less invasive treatment are often not accommodated. Yet, despite these challenges of later life, a large percentage of older individuals are giving financial support, time, and energy to younger generations, who are increasingly strained by economic hardship, the pressures on dual earner parents, and the problems faced by single parenthood. Older individuals’ engagement in society and the help they provide others runs counter to stereotypes that render them helpless and lonely. Overall, the ethical challenges faced by society due to the aging of the population are considerable. Difficult decisions that must be addressed include the sustainability of programs, resources, and social justice in care, as well as how to marshal the resources, talents, and wisdom that older people provide.
Scientific Dating Methods in African Archaeology
Authors: Hare Vincent J. , Loftus Emma
Published: January 2019

The African archaeological record is particularly remarkable in that it covers timescales relevant to all human history and prehistory. Different dating techniques are therefore fundamental to constructing reliable chronologies for the continent. The principal factors that determine the usefulness of a dating technique are (1) applicability to the material in question, (2) the expected precision of the technique, and (3) the age range over which it is expected to be useful. Radiocarbon is applicable to the past fifty thousand years of human history, encompassing the Later Stone Age, Iron Age, and historical periods, and is a highly-refined method applicable to organic materials such as bones, plant matter, charcoal, teeth, and sometimes eggshell. However, African archaeological contexts often present challenges to the preservation of material, and it is important to establish the context of the material under investigation. Materials of preference for radiocarbon dating, such as plant cellulose, are thought to be resistant to alteration during burial (diagenesis). The age ranges of luminescence and uranium-series dating stretch well into the African Middle Stone Age. Luminescence dating is applied to sediments and burnt objects, and uranium-series (U-series) dating is applied to geological materials such as carbonates and stalagmites. In some special cases, U-series dating can also be applied to fossil bones, teeth, and eggshell. For all dating methods the importance of context cannot be overstated. Other techniques, such as archaeomagnetic dating and rehydroxylation (RHX) dating, should be applicable over the historical period, but these new methods are under development. Dating methods are an active area of interdisciplinary research, continuously refined and developed, and collaboration between African archaeologists, geologists, and dating specialists is important to establish accurate regional chronologies.
Digital Sources in Europe for African History
Authors: Wallace Marion
Published: January 2019

There are copious resources for the study of African history on the internet. They include manuscripts and documentary archives, maps, museum collections, newspapers, printed books, picture collections, and sound and moving images. The websites of European institutions provide a good proportion of this content, reflecting the long, entangled, and troubled histories that connect Europe and Africa, as well as new partnerships with African institutions.

This plethora of digital resources enables both specialized researchers and the public to access information about Africa more quickly and easily, and on a larger scale than ever before. Digitization comes with a strong democratic impulse, and the new technology has been instrumental in making libraries, archives, museums, and art galleries much more open. But all is not smooth sailing, and there are two particular aspects of which researchers should be aware.

The first is that there are still huge collections, or parts of collections, that have not been digitized, and that resources have been—on the whole—most focused on items with visual appeal. The twin brakes of cost and copyright restrain the process, and researchers need to understand how what they can get online relates to what still exists only in hard copy.

The second consideration is that digitized resources can be difficult to find. Information about the riches of the web in this area is very fragmented, and exclusive use of one search engine, however dominant, is clearly not enough. As a counter to this fragmentation, a listing of the major websites for African history in Europe is given in a handy guide for researchers, which covers these resources by format and by region of Africa. The listing also provides websites in two particular areas of interest to historians and to the public: the transatlantic slave trade, and the liberation struggles in southern Africa.
Swazi Women’s Resilience regarding Patriarchy, Marginalization, and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic
Authors: Harris Betty
Published: January 2019

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Please check back later for the full article.

Swazi women, who are grossly underrepresented in social, political, and economic spheres in contemporary Swaziland, nevertheless have helped to perpetuate the Dlamini dynasty that has ruled the kingdom since its inception in the mid-16th century. The kingdom has been ruled by the Ngwenyama and the Ndlovukazi, in complementary gender roles for the Swazi king and Queen Mother, respectively. Queen Mother Gwamile (1859–1925), a forward-thinking woman and the most prominent Queen Mother and regent, had a tremendous impact on shaping the Swazi polity by promoting the education of both genders and buying back land alienated by concessionaires and European settlers. Yet most women’s marginalization in the public sphere increased markedly during Swaziland’s colonization and has been reinforced in the post-independence period. Swaziland became a peripheral capitalist formation even prior to formal colonization vis-à-vis South Africa. Labor and capital were exchanged unequally, with Swazi men having more employment opportunities in Swaziland and South Africa, resulting in women having more restricted migration and employment opportunities. Often, women were confined to poor, rural homesteads. Furthermore, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in which Swaziland eventually had the highest percentage of cases, has resulted in a higher death rate for women. As independence approached, King Sobhuza II (1899–1982) resisted Westminster-style political institutions in favor of enhanced indigenous institutions. In the post-independence period, he prohibited citizens’ formation of political parties and exercising the franchise at the national level. Swazi women’s parliamentary representation is on the lowest tier in Africa and worldwide. Improvement in the status of Swazi women will require their own activism and the involvement of the international human rights community at various levels.
Public Housing in Urban America
Authors: Hunt D. Bradford
Published: January 2019

Public housing emerged during the New Deal as a progressive effort to end the scourge of dilapidated housing in American cities. Reformers argued that the private market had failed to provide decent, safe, and affordable housing, and they convinced Congress to provide deep subsidies to local housing authorities to build and manage modern, low-cost housing projects for the working poor. Well-intentioned but ultimately misguided policy decisions encouraged large-scale developments, concentrated poverty and youth, and starved public housing of needed resources. Further, the antipathy of private interests to public competition and the visceral resistance of white Americans to racial integration saddled public housing with many enemies and few friends. While residents often formed tight communities and fought for improvements, stigmatization and neglect undermined the success of many projects; a sizable fraction became disgraceful and tangible symbols of systemic racism toward the nation’s African American poor. Federal policy had few answers and retreated in the 1960s, eventually making a neoliberal turn to embrace public-private partnerships for delivering affordable housing. Housing vouchers and tax credits effectively displaced the federal public housing program. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration encouraged the demolition and rebuilding of troubled projects using vernacular “New Urbanist” designs to house “mixed-income” populations. Policy problems, political weakness, and an ideology of homeownership in the United States meant that a robust, public-centered program of housing for use rather than profit could not be sustained.
The politics of cholera, crisis and citizenship in urban Zimbabwe: ‘People were dying like flies’
Authors: Chigudu Simukai
Published: January 2019

Zimbabwe’s catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008/09 resulted in an unprecedented 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. In the aftermath of the epidemic, questions of suffering and death and of rescue, relief, and rehabilitation have persisted in on-going processes of meaning-making through which people come to terms with the epidemic as a ‘man-made’ disaster. Based on extensive fieldwork, I examine the views of residents in Harare’s high-density townships that were epicentres of the disease. I argue that cholera was experienced by township residents as many crises at the same time. It was not only a public health crisis but also a political–economic crisis, a social crisis as well as a crisis of expectations, history and social identity. As such, I argue that the cholera outbreak was intensely generative of political subjectivities that reveal important shifts in the fraught relations between state and society in Zimbabwe’s urban politics. Finally, I argue that the government’s perceived causal role in, and failure to respond to, the cholera outbreak occasioned intense public outrage among township residents, which speaks to a much deeper aspiration for substantive citizenship based on political rights, social recognition, and access to high-quality public services delivered by a robust, responsible state.
CRISPR-DT: designing gRNAs for the CRISPR-Cpf1 system with improved target efficiency and specificity
Authors: Zhu Houxiang , Liang Chun
Published: January 2019

Motivation

The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cpf1 system has been successfully applied in genome editing. However, target efficiency of the CRISPR-Cpf1 system varies among different guide RNA (gRNA) sequences.

Results

In this study, we reanalyzed the published CRISPR-Cpf1 gRNAs data and found many sequence and structural features related to their target efficiency. With the aid of Random Forest in feature selection, a support vector machine model was created to predict target efficiency for any given gRNAs. We have developed the first CRISPR-Cpf1 web service application, CRISPR-DT (CRISPR DNA Targeting), to help users design optimal gRNAs for the CRISPR-Cpf1 system by considering both target efficiency and specificity. CRISPR-DT will empower researchers in genome editing.

Availability and implementation

CRISPR-DT, mainly implemented in Perl, PHP and JavaScript, is freely available at http://bioinfolab.miamioh.edu/CRISPR-DT.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.