bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Media or Corporations? Social Media Governance Between Public and Commercial Rationales
Authors: Stockmann Daniela
Published: November 2020

In public discussions of social media governance, corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are often first and foremost seen as providers of information and as media. However, social media companies’ business models aim to generate income by attracting a large, growing, and active user base and by collecting and monetising personal data. This has generated concerns with respect to hate speech, disinformation, and privacy. Over time, there has been a trend away from industry self-regulation towards a strengthening of national-level and European Union-level regulations, that is, from soft to hard law. Hence, moving beyond general corporate governance codes, governments are imposing more targeted regulations that recognise these firms’ profound societal importance and wide-reaching influence. The chapter reviews these developments, highlighting the tension between companies’ commercial and public rationales, critiques the current industry-specific regulatory framework, and raises potential policy alternatives.
Behavioural Economics, Neuroeconomics, and Corporate Law
Authors: Redenius-Hövermann Julia
Published: November 2020

Behavioural economics is an established field. Still it carries the premises that the actions of corporate players are only to a minor degree led by self-interest, rationality, and self-discipline. Bias portrayed throughout behavioural economics offers an alternative to rational-theoretical standard theory as it allows predictions about the systematic deviation from the prognosis of the homo economicus’ actions. The reception of the findings of systematic research on the basis of human behaviour in modern psychology, neurology, or behavioural economics in corporate and capital market law enables its continuing development. The intention is to assume that non-legal arguments, complying with the standard of their respective scientific field, can be adopted for the development of corporate law. Therefore, the core of the chapter addresses the question of how the development of corporate law will occur under the consideration of findings from adjacent research fields such as behavioural economics.
Advances in Corporate Governance
Authors: Anheier Helmut K. , Abels Christoph M.
Published: November 2020

Listed corporations have been at the centre of corporate governance research and professional concern. Yet, organisational diversity reflecting a wide range of corporate forms and an evolving understanding of the corporation’s social role have broadened the scope of corporate governance beyond the listed firm. This chapter synthesises the preceding chapters’ findings. Starting with a discussion of different theoretical approaches, the chapter demonstrates the need to reflect on the applicability of the principal–agent theory to organisational forms such as non-profits and social enterprises with multiple stakeholders. Afterwards, the varying needs for corporate governance are discussed, thereby pointing to how existing models and approaches play out in different organisational contexts. The chapter concludes with implications for the development of corporate governance, derived from this volume’s comparative analysis.
Understanding the Macro-financial Effects of Household Debt
Authors: Alter Adrian , Feng Alan , Valckx Nico
Published: November 2020

Higher household debt has been associated with lower future GDP growth across a broad set of 80 countries over the period from 1950 to 2016. Several institutional factors, such as flexible exchange rates, capital account openness, and higher financial development and inclusion, appear to mitigate this negative relationship between an increase in household debt and lower future GDP growth. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms help explain this relationship. First, increases in household debt amplify the probability of future banking crises which significantly disrupt financial intermediation. Second, crash risk may be systematically neglected due to investors’ overoptimistic expectations associated with household debt booms. Third, debt overhang impairs household consumption when negative shocks hit.
After Aristotle’s Justice
Authors: LeBar Mark
Published: November 2020

To the extent that we are interested in justice as a virtue of character, we might start with Aristotle’s conception, but a fresh look at justice can, potentially, open avenues of thought in more than one direction. The fruits of interaction between Aristotelian and Kantian thought have been manifest in a wide variety of ways in recent years, and this chapter aspires to rethink the virtue of justice in this light. It aims to offer a first cut at a conception of a virtue of justice that draws on both traditions. Its Aristotelian provenance provides the general understanding of virtue employed, and accepts Aristotle’s general picture of virtue and its centrality to the good life and to happiness. The Kantian (and contractualist) part of the union provides content for justice as a distinctive virtue of character.
The Rule Worship and Idealization Objections Revisited and Resisted
Authors: Copp David
Published: November 2020

There are two familiar and important challenges to the rule consequentialist picture, Smart’s “rule worship objection” and the “idealization objection.” This chapter defends rule consequentialism (RC) against these challenges. It argues that to satisfactorily meet the rule worship objection, we need to reconceptualize RC. We need to think of it as not fundamentally a rival to act consequentialism or deontology or virtue theory. Instead, it can potentially adjudicate among these views. It is best viewed as a “second-order” theory that rests on a view about the nature and point of morality. The rule worship objection can be answered if we interpret RC in this way. The idealization objection can seem more difficult because it appears to arise from the basic RC approach to evaluating rules. This chapter suggests, however, that the idealization objection boils down to a familiar problem about conflicts of pro tanto duties. RC can handle it in the way that it handles such conflict.
Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons
Authors: Siraganian Lisa
Published: November 2020

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.
Depth Interviewing as Science and Art
Authors: Gerson Kathleen
Published: November 2020

Chapter 1 outlines the key principles that guide interview-based research and highlights the unique contributions this can yield. Conducting depth interviews places each participant’s voice at the heart of the study, giving participants an opportunity to tell their stories in their own words and to think more deeply about their experiences than is usually possible with other methods. Through careful questioning, concentrated listening, and focused follow-up probing, interviewers invite further exploration that encourages people to share their life experiences, describe the social contexts surrounding these experiences, and consider their personal reactions to them, including the meaning they attribute to life events and the accounts, motivations, and actions these events engender. Then, through systematic analysis of how each piece of information stands in relationship to the other information offered by that participant and all the others, it becomes possible to chart the dynamic processes that shape life trajectories and link individual actions to larger social structures. This enables interviewers to address their original question(s) and any new ones that emerge to discover empirical patterns and develop theoretical insights.
Getting Started
Authors: Gerson Kathleen
Published: November 2020

Chapter 2 discusses how to formulate research questions and construct an appropriate research design by outlining the kinds of questions that the interviewing method is especially—often uniquely—able to answer. Even before a researcher decides whom to interview and what to ask, the chapter helps assess whether interviewing is the right method to use. Once a researcher is committed to conducting interviews, the chapter then shows how to ground the research theoretically and devise a design that will yield theoretically relevant discoveries. This journey starts by using the existing literature to formulate a question or questions that address noteworthy yet unresolved empirical and theoretical puzzles. Formulating such a question requires focusing on specific empirical phenomena and/or theoretical debates and then asking what forms they take, how they emerge, and why they take the forms they do. The chapter then details the kinds of questions that interviewing is well equipped to answer, highlighting many examples from classic and recent studies. Once developed, these core questions set the stage for constructing a research design that maximizes the chances of answering them and contributing new empirical and theoretical knowledge.
Analyzing Interviews
Authors: Gerson Kathleen
Published: November 2020

Chapter 6 describes the process of analyzing interview transcripts, which involves a search for the patterns concealed within the complex material that these transcripts contain. Analyzing interview data involves a number of methodological strategies. These include immersing oneself in the findings; developing concepts and organizing the material conceptually; attending to non-relationships and contradictory findings; and applying the basic rules of the logic of inquiry, such as conducting a comparative analysis and examining the time order of events and responses to events. All these steps provide ways to impose order on messy material, which then increases the chances of making empirical discoveries and theoretical breakthroughs. The chapter provides a step-by-step consideration of how coding and categorizing can be used to make sense out of the material. By dividing the analytic process into separate concrete steps, analysis becomes more manageable, less intimidating, and more fun. This systematic approach also increases confidence in the findings, enhances their credibility, and raises the potential for making theoretical breakthroughs.
Ontology
Authors: Kroon Fred , McKeown-Green Jonathan
Published: November 2020

One example of the impressive breadth, depth, and deep interconnectedness of Fine’s work concerns his views about what sorts of entities we should commit ourselves to, as philosophers. In “The Question of Ontology” he challenges existing accounts of the philosophical task of ontology, rejecting a Quinean concern with what there is in favor of a focus on what entities are real. Fine thinks such a notion of reality is primitive, although linked to the notion of being ungrounded. The present chapter constitutes a critique of Fine’s interconnected set of ideas about the task of ontology, and defends the ability of quantificational constructions to capture ontological commitments, while questioning the usefulness to ontology of a primitive concept of reality.
One Absolutely Infinite Universe to Rule Them All
Authors: Almog Joseph
Published: November 2020

We contrast two Universe-outlooks and universality-sources. The first—localism—runs bottom-up and is in the vein of modern iterative set theory, generating ever more sets but all limited unities and barring an ur-Universe taken as a primary—the prime-object/unity. This contrasts with an absolutely infinite Universe-first outlook, globalism, inspired by some remarks on Cantor but later exiled by Zermelo. The metaphysics is now all top-down, and all sets (e.g. large cardinals) are regarded as generated fragments. The role of the (Godel-central) reflection principle is dissected.?
Indefinites, Skolem Functions, and Arbitrary Objects
Authors: Sandu Gabriel
Published: November 2020

In this chapter I will look at the semantic analysis of indefinites in English, and their treatment in the framework of Dynamic Logic, choice functions (epsilon terms), and Kit Fine’s arbitrary objects. In the end I will make some comparative remarks about the latter and the account in terms of Skolem functions that Fine criticized, and propose an alternative framework (team semantics).
Essence and Identity
Authors: Koslicki Kathrin
Published: November 2020

This chapter evaluates six proposals essentialists might put forward in response to Quine’s challenge, viz., to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals: (i) an object’s qualitative character; (ii) matter; (iii) origins; (iv) haecceities; (v) “world-indexed properties”; and (iv) individual forms. It is argued that the first three candidates fail to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals, while the fourth and fifth criteria arguably do not succeed in meeting Quine’s demand in an explanatorily adequate fashion. On balance, the sixth option, individual forms, therefore deserves to be taken very seriously as a possible response to Quine’s challenge, especially by neo-Aristotelians. Individual forms, moreover, have other explanatory virtues; in particular, they are more likely than their closest competitors to contribute to an explanation of how an object’s de re modal profile follows from facts about its essence.
Necessary, Transcendental, and Universal Truth
Authors: Kuhn Steven T.
Published: November 2020

A simple puzzle leads Fine to conclude that we should distinguish between worldly sentences like “Socrates exists,” whose truth values depend on circumstances and unworldly ones like “Socrates is human,” which are true or false independently of circumstances. The former, if true in every circumstance, express necessary propositions. The latter, if true, express transcendental propositions, which, for theoretical convenience, we regard as necessary in an extended sense. Here it is argued that this understanding is backwards. Transcendental truths and sentences true in every circumstance (here labeled universal truths) are both species of necessary truth. The revised understanding is clarified by a simple formal system with distinct operators for necessary, transcendental, and universal truth. The system is axiomatized. Its universal-truth fragment coincides with something that Arthur Prior once proposed as System
A. The ideas of necessary, transcendental truth are further clarified by considering their interaction with actual truth. Adding an operator for actually true to the formal system produces a system closely related to one of Crossley and Humberstone.
More on the Reduction of Necessity to Essence
Authors: Correia Fabrice
Published: November 2020

In previous work, I developed Kit Fine’s view that metaphysical modality should be understood in terms of essence, based on his suggestion that the essence of the logical concepts is given by rules of inference rather than by propositions. I here strengthen the case for this “rule-based account” by criticizing alternative accounts and by suggesting replies to some objections against the account.
Variable Objects and Truthmaking
Authors: Moltmann Friederike
Published: November 2020

Noun phrases like the number of people that can fit into the bus or the book John needs to write are an extremely puzzling linguistic phenomenon. This chapter argues that such noun phrases stand for objects, namely variable objects, entities that have different manifestations (as ordinary entities) in different circumstances. Variable objects unite two important notions of Fine’s philosophy: that of a variable embodiment and that of truthmaking. Variable objects fall under an extension of Fine’s notion of a variable embodiment and involve as circumstances truthmakers of entities like needs.
Comments on Joseph Almog’s “One Absolutely Infinite Universe to Rule Them All: Reverse Reflection, Reverse Metaphysics”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

Joseph Almog’s chapter is a daring and dazzling investigation into the nature of the universe, situated within the grand tradition of absolutist metaphysics, but motivated more by the comparison of the absolute with the set-theoretic universe than with God. It is impossible for me to deal adequately with the deep and difficult issues which his chapter raises and so I hope I may be forgiven if I focus on a few remarks he makes in his Appendix on “the Nature versus Concept/Essence of BO and {BO}.” Some of my comments are relatively minor and serve simply to clear up possible misunderstandings of my position, but others raise substantive and neglected issues concerning the possible “absolutist” source of necessary truth....
Comments on Kathrin Koslicki’s “Essence and Identity”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

Kathrin Koslicki’s chapter is a wonderfully bold and innovative attack on the question of crossworld-identity: Quine thought Aristotelian essentialism was the problem; and she takes Aristotelian hylomorphism to be the solution.

Let me begin with a small point. Koslicki takes a criterion of crossworld identity to be a criterion for when an entity y...
Comments on Steven T. Kuhn’s “Necessary, Transcendental, and Universal Truth”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

I should begin with an apology. In my paper “Necessity and Non-existence” (NN), I made no reference to the importantly related work of Prior in appendix C of Prior 1957 and to the importantly related work of Steven Kuhn in his superb thesis (Kuhn ...
Comments on Jessica Wilson’s “Essence and Dependence”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

Jessica Wilson’s paper is a wonderfully sympathetic account of my general approach to metaphysics; and there is a special satisfaction to be had in being, not merely understood, but understood so well. I particularly appreciated her closing remarks to the effect that ‘first-order investigations [in metaphysics] are often characterized by stolid, even dogmatic adherence to one or other set of first-order views. Given how far we are from the end of metaphysical inquiry, it is too early for such dogmatism.’ I am often astonished by the confidence metaphysicians express in their own views and their indifference, or even hostility, to alternative views; and I can only hope that more of them will take her admonishments to heart....
Comments on Scott Shalkowski’s “Essence and Nominalism”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

Scott Shalkowski and I share a distaste for the ontological extravagance of modal realism and it is a delight to read him write with such eloquence and passion on the need for “sober metaphysics.”

However, there is a point on which we appear to disagree and this has to do with the formulation and defense of nominalism; and it will perhaps help to illuminate the general doctrines of QE and QO by drawing out the contrast between our different views in this particular case....
Comments on Robert Goldblatt’s “Fine’s Theorem on First-Order Complete Modal Logics”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

I am grateful to Robert Goldblatt for his lucid and masterly chapter on “canonicity” in modal logic. The main result of Fine 1975a was that a modal logic being first-order complete (i.e. complete for a first-order class of frames) was sufficient for the logic to be canonical, i.e. for its canonical frames to be frames for the logic. But ideally what one would like is an equivalence. ...
Comments on Gary Ostertag’s “Fine on Frege’s Puzzle”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

Gary Ostertag’s chapter is an intriguing and probing investigation into the concept of coordination, or de jure co-reference, in which he is concerned not only to criticize the views on coordination which I presented in “Semantic Relationism” (SR) but also to develop a view of his own, one in which coordination is not a feature of what we say, but of how we say it....
Comments on Paolo Bonardi’s “Coordination, Understanding, and Semantic Requirements”
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2020

Paolo Bonardi has written extensively and illuminatingly on direct reference theory, and I am grateful for his present comments on the conceptual foundations of semantic relationism.

Central to the doctrine of semantic relationism is the relation of coordination. This is the relation that normally holds between two tokens of the name “Cicero” though not between a token of “Cicero” and a token of “Tully,” even though there is co-reference in both cases. Although the concept of coordination is central to semantic relationism I do not think of the doctrine as having exclusive claim on the concept. As I mention in ...
The Making of the American Creative Class
Authors: Clark Shannan
Published: November 2020

During most of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United States. Within a few square miles were the headquarters of broadcast networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of book and magazine publishers, major newspapers, and advertising and design agencies. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, secretaries, and other white-collar workers made advertisements, produced media content, and enhanced the appearance of goods in order to boost sales. While this center of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labor. This book examines these workers and New York’s culture industries throughout the twentieth century. As manufacturers and retailers competed to attract consumers’ attention, their advertising expenditures financed the growth of enterprises engaged in the production of culture. With the shock of the Great Depression, employees in these firms organized unions to improve their working conditions; launched alternative media and cultural endeavors supported by public, labor, or cooperative patronage; and fought in other ways to expand their creative autonomy. As blacklisting and attacks on unions undermined these efforts after the Second World War, workers in advertising, design, publishing, and broadcasting found themselves constrained in their ability to respond to economic dislocations and to combat discrimination on the basis of gender and race in these fields of cultural production.
Introduction: The Labor of Culture
Authors: Clark Shannan
Published: November 2020

This introduction provides an overview of the The Making of the American Creative Class. It opens with a vignette narrating the successful unionization by white-collar workers at the Manhattan headquarters of the CBS network during the mid-1940s, which was exemplary of the larger movement of culture workers in mid-twentieth century New York that organized to challenge both the managerial prerogatives and ideological imperatives of consumer capitalism. The introduction also elucidates the book’s central premise, which is that its historical subjects—New York’s white-collar workers in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and design—were at the intersection of two major trends in the twentieth-century United States: the expanding production and circulation of a pervasive culture of consumer capitalism, and the transformation of the middle class from a social grouping of proprietors and independent professionals to one comprised primarily of salaried employees.
Creativity and Consumer Capitalism in the Affluent Society
Authors: Clark Shannan
Published: November 2020

Chapter 7 explores how the ideal of creativity evolved within the postwar culture industries, with a particular focus on developments in advertising and industrial design. Following the defeat of the Popular Front, many culture workers from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s came to believe that their rising affluence set them in a new realm of freedom beyond necessity. Nonetheless, the ethos of creativity in postwar America clashed with the forces of consumer capitalism that still constrained the autonomy of culture workers. This tension was particularly evident in the creative revolution that swept New York’s advertising industry during the 1960s, but, as the chapter shows, it also influenced the evolution of industrial design theory and practice during the heyday of postwar prosperity.
miR-322/miR-503 clusters regulate defective myoblast differentiation in myotonic dystrophy RNA-toxic by targeting Celf1
Authors: Dong Wei , Liu Qian , Wang Zhi-Chao , Du Xing-Xiang , Liu Lei-Lei , Wang Nan , Weng Jun-Fei , Peng Xiao-Ping
Published: November 2020

Myotonic dystrophy (DM) is a genetic disorder featured by muscular dystrophy. It is caused by CUG expansion in the myotonic dystrophy protein kinase gene that leads to aberrant signaling and impaired myocyte differentiation. Many studies have shown that microRNAs are involved in the differentiation process of myoblasts. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the miR-322/miR-503 cluster regulates intracellular signaling to affect cell differentiation. The cell model of DM1 was employed by expressing GFP-CUG200 or CUGBP Elav-like family member 1 (Celf1) in myoblasts. Immunostaining of MF-20 was performed to examine myocyte differentiation. qRT-PCR and western blot were used to determine the levels of Celf1, MyoD, MyoG, Mef2c, miR-322/miR-503, and mitogen-activated protein kinase/extracellular signal-regulated kinase (MEK/ERK) signaling. Dual luciferase assay was performed to validate the interaction between miR-322/miR-503 and Celf1. CUG expansion in myoblasts impaired the cell differentiation, increased the Celf1 level, but it decreased the miR-322/miR-503 levels. miR-322/miR-503 mimics restored the impaired differentiation caused by CUG expansion, while miR-322/miR-503 inhibitors further suppressed. miR-322/miR-503 directly targeted Celf1 and negatively regulated its expression. Knockdown of Celf1 promoted myocyte differentiation. Further, miR-322/miR-503 mimics rescued the impaired differentiation of myocytes caused by CUG expansion or Celf1 overexpression through suppressing of MEK/ERK signaling. miR-322/miR-503 cluster recover the defective myocyte differentiation caused by RNA-toxic via targeting Celf1. Restoring miR-322/miR-503 levels could be an avenue for DM1 therapy.
Population Genomics of Plant Viruses: The Ecology and Evolution of Virus Emergence
Authors: McLeish Michael J. , Fraile Aurora , García-Arenal Fernando
Published: November 2020

The genomics era has revolutionized studies of adaptive evolution by monitoring large numbers of loci throughout the genomes of many individuals. Ideally, the investigation of emergence in plant viruses requires examining the population dynamics of both virus and host, their interactions with each other, with other organisms and the abiotic environment. Genetic mechanisms that affect demographic processes are now being studied with high-throughput technologies, traditional genetics methods, and new computational tools for big-data. In this review, we discuss the utility of these approaches to monitor and detect changes in virus populations within cells and individuals, and over wider areas across species and communities of ecosystems. The advent of genomics in virology has fostered a multidisciplinary approach to tackling disease risk. The ability to make sense of the information now generated in this integrated setting is by far the most substantial obstacle to the ultimate goal of plant virology to minimize the threats to food security posed by disease. To achieve this goal, it is imperative to understand and forecast how populations respond to future changes in complex natural systems.
Bone marrow mesenchymal cells: polymorphism associated with transformation of rough endoplasmic reticulum
Authors: Ru Yong-Xin , Dong Shu-Xu , Xu Chun-Hui , Zhao Shi-Xuan , Zhang Hua-Mei , Liang Hao-Yue , Fen Min , Zhang Feng-Kui , Gao Ying-Dai , Qi Shu-Lin , Shang Hong-Cai
Published: November 2020

To understand the behavior and function of bone-marrow mesenchymal cells (BMMCs), we overviewed the morphological presentation of BMMCs in bone-marrow granules (b-BMMCs), isolated BMMCs (i-BMMCs), and BMMCs (c-BMMCs) cultured in H4434 methylcellulose semisolid and MEM media. All samples were derived from bone-marrow aspirates of 30 patients with hematocytopenia. Light microscopy exhibited b-BMMCs and i-BMMCs characterized by abundant cytoplasm and irregular shape in bone-marrow smears, as well as c-BMMCs in culture conditions. Scanning electron microscopy demonstrated cultured c-BMMCs with a sheet-like feature enveloping hematopoietic cells. Transmission electron microscopy revealed b-BMMCs constructing a honeycomb-like structure by thin bifurcate processes among hematopoietic cells. Furthermore, i-BMMCs had bifurcate parapodiums on the surface and prominent rough endoplasmic reticulum (rER) connected with the plasmalemma of the parapodiums. The detailed images suggested that rER may serve as a membrane resource for plasmalemmal expansion in BMMCs in bone marrow.
Lamellar Dissection Technique for Traumatic Cataract With Corneal Incarceration
Authors: Hamad Julia B. , Sivaraman Kavitha R. , Snyder Michael E.
Published: November 2020

Purpose:

To describe a technique for traumatic cataract management for cases in which part of the anterior capsule has been incarcerated into a healed corneal laceration.

Methods:

This is a single-center retrospective chart review of 3 patients with capsular/corneal incarceration after penetrating injury. Each patient underwent primary globe repair, followed by subsequent cataract surgery with intraocular lens (IOL) and iris prosthesis placement. The main outcome measure was corrected distance visual acuity.

Results:

At a mean of 19-month postoperative follow-up (range 12–26 mo), corrected distance visual acuity ranged from 20/25 to 20/80 and all patients had improved vision compared with before cataract surgery. At the final follow-up, all IOLs and iris prostheses were in stable position and no eyes required corneal transplantation.

Conclusions:

Traumatic cataracts may be complicated by incarceration of the anterior capsule into the cornea. Incorporating the posterior aspect of the cornea into the anterior capsulotomy enables cataract removal and IOL placement in a stable capsular bag complex.
Bilateral Descemet Membrane Endothelial Keratoplasty in an Infant With Congenital Hereditary Endothelial Dystrophy
Authors: Wu Frances , Oatts Julius T. , Schallhorn Julie M.
Published: November 2020

Purpose:

Descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK) has been reported in children but not in infants. We evaluate the outcomes and complications of DMEK for an infant with congenital hereditary endothelial dystrophy.

Methods:

A 3-month-old male infant with congenital hereditary endothelial dystrophy underwent unilateral DMEK, which was complicated by incomplete graft unfurling. Bilateral DMEK was then performed successfully. The visual acuity, pachymetry, corneal transparency, and complications were assessed over 3 months of follow-up.

Results:

At 3 months postoperatively, the nystagmus had resolved and visual acuity improved from 20/2000 to 20/270 in each eye. Pachymetry, which had been unmeasurable preoperatively, was 695 μm in the right eye and 678 μm in the left eye. On examination, there was improvement in corneal transparency bilaterally. There were no postoperative complications.

Conclusions:

We demonstrate that DMEK is feasible in infants and propose that it should be considered in the treatment of corneal endothelial disorders of infancy. In theory, DMEK might confer improved visual potential and lower risk for rejection compared with other corneal transplantation techniques, although further studies in this age group are needed.
High throughput wastewater SARS-CoV-2 detection enables forecasting of community infection dynamics in San Diego county
Authors: Karthikeyan Smruthi , Ronquillo Nancy , Belda-Ferre Pedro , Alvarado Destiny , Javidi Tara , Longhurst Christopher A. , Knight Rob
Published: November 2020

Large-scale wastewater surveillance has the ability to greatly augment the tracking of infection dynamics especially in communities where the prevalence rates far exceed the testing capacity. However, current methods for viral detection in wastewater are severely lacking in terms of scaling up for high throughput. In the present study, we employed an automated magnetic-bead based concentration approach for viral detection in sewage that can effectively be scaled up for processing 24 samples in a single 40-minute run. The method compared favorably to conventionally used methods for viral wastewater concentrations with higher recovery efficiencies from input sample volumes as low as 10ml and can enable the processing of over 100 wastewater samples in a day. The sensitivity of the high-throughput protocol was shown to detect cases as low as 2 in a hospital building with a known COVID-19 caseload. Using the high throughput pipeline, samples from the influent stream of the primary wastewater treatment plant of San Diego county (serving 2.3 million residents) were processed for a period of 13 weeks. Wastewater estimates of SARS-CoV-2 viral genome copies in raw untreated wastewater correlated strongly with clinically reported cases by the county, and when used alongside past reported case numbers and temporal information in an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model enabled prediction of new reported cases up to 3 weeks in advance. Taken together, the results show that the high-throughput surveillance could greatly ameliorate comprehensive community prevalence assessments by providing robust, rapid estimates.

Importance

Wastewater monitoring has a lot of potential for revealing COVID-19 outbreaks before they happen because the virus is found in the wastewater before people have clinical symptoms. However, application of wastewater-based surveillance has been limited by long processing times specifically at the concentration step. Here we introduce a much faster method of processing the samples, and show that its robustness by demonstrating direct comparisons with existing methods and showing that we can predict cases in San Diego by a week with excellent accuracy, and three weeks with fair accuracy, using city sewage. The automated viral concentration method will greatly alleviate the major bottleneck in wastewater processing by reducing the turnaround time during epidemics.
Recommendations from long-term care reports, commissions, and inquiries in Canada
Authors: Wong Eric KC , Thorne Trina , Estabrooks Carole , Straus Sharon E
Published: November 2020

Background

Multiple long-term care (LTC) reports over the last 30 years issued similar recommendations for improvement across Canadian LTC homes. Our primary objective was to identify the most common recommendations made over the past 10 years. Our secondary objective was to estimate the total cost of studying LTC issues repeatedly over the past 30 years.

Methods

The qualitative and cost analyses were conducted in Canada from July to October 2020. Using a list of reports, inquiries and commission from The Royal Society of Canada Working Group on Long-Term Care, we coded recurrent recommendations in LTC reports. We contacted the sponsoring organizations for a cost estimate, including direct and indirect costs. All costs were adjusted to 2020 Canadian dollar values.

Results

Of the 80 Canadian LTC reports spanning the years of 1998 to 2020, twenty-four (30%) were based on a national level and 56 (70%) were focused on provinces or municipalities. Report length ranged from 4 to 1491 pages and the median number of contributors was 14 (interquartile range, IQR, 5–26) per report. The most common recommendation was to increase funding to LTC to improve staffing, direct care and capacity (67% of reports). A median of 8 (IQR 3.25– 18) recommendations were made per report. The total cost for all 80 reports was estimated to be $23,626,442.78.

Interpretation

Problems in Canadian LTC homes and their solutions have been known for decades. Despite this, governments and non-governmental agencies continue to produce more reports at a monetary and societal cost to Canadians.
The stochastic dynamics of early epidemics: probability of establishment, initial growth rate, and infection cluster size at first detection
Authors: Czuppon Peter , Schertzer Emmanuel , Blanquart François , Débarre Florence
Published: November 2020

Emerging epidemics and local infection clusters are initially prone to stochastic effects that can substantially impact the epidemic trajectory. While numerous studies are devoted to the deterministic regime of an established epidemic, mathematical descriptions of the initial phase of epidemic growth are comparatively rarer. Here, we review existing mathematical results on the epidemic size over time, and derive new results to elucidate the early dynamics of an infection cluster started by a single infected individual. We show that the initial growth of epidemics that eventually take off is accelerated by stochasticity. These results are critical to improve early cluster detection and control. As an application, we compute the distribution of the first detection time of an infected individual in an infection cluster depending on the testing effort, and estimate that the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern Alpha detected in September 2020 first appeared in the United Kingdom early August 2020. We also compute a minimal testing frequency to detect clusters before they exceed a given threshold size. These results improve our theoretical understanding of early epidemics and will be useful for the study and control of local infectious disease clusters.
On short-term trends and predictions for COVID-19 in France and the USA: comparison with Australia
Authors: Tuckwell Henry C. , Dorraki Mohsen , Salamon Stephen J. , Allison Andrew , Abbott Derek
Published: November 2020

In Europe and the USA daily new COVID-19 cases have recently been occurring in record numbers, which has created an alarming situation. The CDC in conjunction with several University groups gives forecasts for each county in the USA for several weeks at a time, but they have very large confidence intervals typified by the most recent national prediction of between 310,000 and 710,000 new cases for the week ending November 21, 2020. We have examined recent data for France and the USA over 10, 15 and 20 days. Using such data with simple fitting techniques, which do not require knowledge of any parameters, it has been possible to predict new case numbers fairly accurately for a week or more. A best-fitting polynomial of high order was only useful for a few days, after which it severely overestimated case numbers. A more detailed analysis with confidence intervals was performed for polynomials of orders one to six, which showed that lower order polynomials were more useful for prediction. Using the packages PCHIP and a POLYFIT (with degree one) in MATLAB gave smooth curves from which future case numbers could be reasonably well estimated. With PCHIP the average errors over 7 days were remarkably small, being −0.16% for France and +0.19% for the USA. A comparison is made between the temporal patterns of new cases for France, the USA and Australia. For Australia the second wave has dwindled to close to zero due to hard lock down conditions, which are discussed.
Cumulative COVID-19 incidence, mortality, and prognosis in cancer survivors: a population-based study in Reggio Emilia, Northern Italy
Authors: Mangone Lucia , Gioia Francesco , Mancuso Pamela , Bisceglia Isabella , Ottone Marta , Vicentini Massimo , Pinto Carmine , Rossi Paolo Giorgi
Published: November 2020

The aim of this population-based study was to evaluate the impact of having had cancer on COVID-19 risk and prognosis during the first wave of the pandemic (27 February – 13 May 2020) in Reggio Emilia Province. Prevalent cancer cases diagnosed between 1996 and December 2019 were linked with the provincial COVID-19 surveillance system. We compared cancer survivors (CS)’ cumulative incidence of being tested, testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, being hospitalized, and dying of COVID-19 with that of the general population; we compared COVID-19 prognosis in CS and in patients without cancer.

15,391 people (1527 CS) underwent RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2, of whom 4541 (447 CS) tested positive; 541 (113 CS) died of COVID-19. The cumulative incidences of being tested, testing positive, COVID-19 hospitalization, and death were lower in CS: age- and sex-adjusted incidence rate ratios were 1.28 [95%CI = 1.21, 1.35], 1.06 [95%CI = 0.96, 1.18], 1.27 [95%CI = 1.09, 1.48], and 1.39 [95%CI = 1.12, 1.71], respectively. CS had worse prognosis when diagnosed with COVID-19, particularly those below the age of 70 (age- and sex-adjusted odds ratio (OR) of death 5.03; [95%CI = 2.59, 9.75]), while the OR decreased after age 70. The OR of death was higher for patients with a recent diagnosis, i.e. <2 years (OR=2.92; 95%CI = 1.64, 5.21), or metastases (OR=2.09; 95%CI = 0. 88, 4.93).

Cancer patients showed the same probability of being infected, despite a slightly higher probability of being tested, than the general population, nevertheless they were at higher risk of death once infected.

Novelty and impact

Cancer survivors during the first wave of the pandemic showed higher COVID-19 cumulative incidence and mortality. When infected, they had worse prognosis, particularly in people younger than age 70 or those with a recent diagnosis.
COVID-19 Twitter-based analysis reveals differential concerns across areas with socioeconomic disparities
Authors: Su Yihua , Venkat Aarthi , Yadav Yadush , Puglisi Lisa B. , Fodeh Samah J.
Published: November 2020

Objective

We sought to understand how U.S. residents responded to COVID-19 as it emerged, and the extent to which spatial-temporal factors impacted response.

Materials and Methods

We mined and reverse-geocoded 269,556 coronavirus-related social media postings on Twitter from January 23rd to March 25th, 2020. We then ranked tweets based on the socioeconomic status of the county they originated from using the Area Deprivation Index (ADI); that we also used to identify areas with high initial disease counts (“hotspots”). We applied topic modeling on the tweets to identify chief concerns and determine their evolution over time. We also investigated how topic proportions varied based on ADI and between hotspots and non-hotspots.

Results

We identified 45 topics, which shifted from early-outbreak-related content in January, to the presidential election and governmental response in February, to lifestyle changes in March. Highly resourced areas (low ADI) were concerned with stocks, social distancing, and national-level policies, while high ADI areas shared content with negative expression, prayers, and discussion of the CARES Act economic relief package. Within hotspots, these differences stand, with the addition of increased discussion regarding employment in high ADI versus low ADI hotspots.

Discussion

Topic modeling captures the major concerns in COVID-19-related discussion on a social media platform in the early months of the pandemic. Our study extends previous studies that utilized topic modeling on COVID-19 related tweets and linked the identified topics to socioeconomic status using ADI. Comparisons between low and high ADI areas indicate differential Twitter discussions, corresponding to greater concern with economic hardship and impacts of the pandemic in less resourced communities, and less focus on general public health messaging.

Conclusion

This work demonstrates a novel framework for assessing differential topics of conversation correlating to income, education, and housing disparities. This, with integration of COVID-19 hotspots, offers improved analysis of crisis response on Twitter. Such insight is critical for informed public health messaging campaigns in future waves of the pandemic, which should focus in part specifically on the interests of those who are most vulnerable in the lowest resourced health settings.
Structural Basis of Complex Formation Between Mitochondrial Anion Channel VDAC1 and Hexokinase-II
Authors: Haloi Nandan , Wen Po-Chao , Cheng Qunlii , Yang Meiying , Natarajan Gayathri , Camara Amadou KS , Kwok Wai-Meng , Tajkhorshid Emad
Published: November 2020

Complex formation between hexokinase-II (HKII) and the mitochondrial channel VDAC1 plays a crucial role in regulating cell growth and survival; however, structural details of this complex remain elusive. We hypothesize that a conserved, hydrophobic helix (H-anchor) of HKII first inserts into the outer membrane of mitochondria (OMM) and then interacts with VDAC1 on the cytosolic leaflet of OMM to form a binary complex. To systematically investigate this process, we adopted a hybrid approach: 1) the membrane binding of HKII was first described with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations employing a membrane mimetic model with enhanced lipid diffusion, then 2) the resulting membrane-bound HKII was used to form complex with VDAC1 in millisecond-scale Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations. We show that H-anchor inserts its first 10 residues into the membrane, substantiating previous experimental findings. The insertion depth of the H-anchor was used to derive positional restraints in subsequent BD simulations to preserve the membrane-bound pose of HKII during the formation of the HKII/VDAC1 binary complex. Multiple BD-derived structural models were further refined with MD simulations, resulting in one stable complex. A major feature in the complex is the partial (not complete) blockade of VDAC1’s permeation pathway by HKII, a result supported by our comparative electrophysiological measurements of the channel in the presence and absence of HKII. Additionally, we showed how VDAC1 phosphorylation disrupts HKII binding, a feature that is verified by our electrophysiology recordings and have implications in mitochondria-mediated cell death.