bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Direct Amplification of Whole Blood and Amniotic Fluid Specimens for Prenatal and Postnatal Diagnosis of Hb E-β 0-Thalassemia Diseases
Authors: Wichian Phongsathorn , Yamsri Supawadee , Sanchaisuriya Kanokwan , Fucharoen Supan
Published: December 2020

Objective

Prenatal and postnatal diagnosis of hemoglobin E-β 0-thalassemia can be made using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis mostly on purified DNA. We have establihed a direct amplification method without DNA extraction on whole blood (WB) and amniotic fluid (AF) specimens to diagnose the disease.

Methods

Three reactions of WB PCR assays and 7 reactions of AF PCR tests were developed for postnatal and prenatal diagnosis, respectively. Assays were validated against routine tests in a blinded trial.

Results

The results showed 100% concordance with routine DNA PCR assays. Among 309 β-thalassemia carriers, 191 patients (61.8%) carried common β-thalassemia mutations. Among 448 AF specimens, 116 (25.9%) fetuses were found to be affected, 247 (55.1%) fetuses were carriers, and 85 (19%) fetuses were unaffected.

Conclusion

We found that WB and AF PCR assays are simple, rapid, and reliable. The developed techniques could be applicable in routine settings.
Mass ratio, the hills mechanism, and the Galactic Centre S-stars
Authors: Generozov Aleksey
Published: December 2020

The Galactic Centre contains several young populations within its central parsec: a disc between ∼0.05 and 0.5 pc from the centre, and the isotropic S-star cluster extending an order of magnitude further inwards in radius. Recent observations (i.e. spectroscopy and hypervelocity stars) suggest that some S-stars originate in the disc. In particular, the S-stars may be remnants of tidally disrupted disc binaries. However, there is an apparent inconsistency in this scenario: the disc contains massive O and Wolf–Rayet stars while the S-stars are lower mass, B stars. We explore two different explanations for this apparent discrepancy: (i) a built-in bias in binary disruptions, where the primary star remains closer in energy to the centre-of-mass orbit than the secondary and (ii) selective tidal disruption of massive stars within the S-star cluster. The first explanation is plausible. On the other hand, tidal disruptions have not strongly affected the mass distribution of the S-stars over the last several Myr.
Testing the effect of H0 on fσ8 tension using a Gaussian process method
Authors: Li En-Kun , Du Minghui , Zhou Zhi-Huan , Zhang Hongchao , Xu Lixin
Published: December 2020

Using the fσ8(z) redshift space distortion (RSD) data, the $\sigma _8^0\!-\!\Omega _\mathrm{ m}^0$ tension is studied utilizing a parametrization of growth rate f(z) = Ωm(z)γ. Here, f(z) is derived from the expansion history H(z) which is reconstructed from the observational Hubble data applying the Gaussian process method. It is found that different priors of H0 have great influences on the evolution curve of H(z) and the constraint of $\sigma _8^0\!-\!\Omega _\mathrm{ m}^0$. When using a larger H0 prior, the low redshifts H(z) deviate significantly from that of the ΛCDM model, which indicates that a dark energy model different from the cosmological constant can help to relax the H0 tension problem. The tension between our best-fitting values of $\sigma _8^0\!-\!\Omega _\mathrm{ m}^0$ and that of the Planck 2018 ΛCDM (PLA) will disappear (less than 1σ) when taking a prior for H0 obtained from PLA. Moreover, the tension exceeds 2σ level when applying the prior H0 = 73.52 ± 1.62 km s−1 Mpc−1 resulted from the Hubble Space Telescope photometry. By comparing the $S_8\!-\!\Omega _\mathrm{ m}^0$ planes of our method with the results from KV450+DES-Y1, we find that using our method and applying the RSD data may be helpful to break the parameter degeneracies.
Mildly relativistic magnetized shocks in electron–ion plasmas – I. Electromagnetic shock structure
Authors: Ligorini Arianna , Niemiec Jacek , Kobzar Oleh , Iwamoto Masanori , Bohdan Artem , Pohl Martin , Matsumoto Yosuke , Amano Takanobu , Matsukiyo Shuichi , Esaki Yodai , Hoshino Masahiro
Published: December 2020

Mildly relativistic shocks in magnetized electron–ion plasmas are investigated with 2D kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of unprecedentedly high resolution and large scale for conditions that may be found at internal shocks in blazar cores. Ion-scale effects cause corrugations along the shock surface whose properties somewhat depend on the configuration of the mean perpendicular magnetic field, that is either in or out of the simulation plane. We show that the synchrotron maser instability persists to operate in mildly relativistic shocks in agreement with theoretical predictions and produces coherent emission of upstream-propagating electromagnetic waves. Shock front ripples are excited in both mean-field configurations and they engender effective wave amplification. The interaction of these waves with upstream plasma generates electrostatic wakefields.
Gibbs point process model for young star clusters in M33
Authors: Li Dayi , Barmby Pauline
Published: December 2020

We demonstrate the power of Gibbs point process models from the spatial statistics literature when applied to studies of resolved galaxies. We conduct a rigorous analysis of the spatial distributions of objects in the star formation complexes of M33, including giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and young stellar cluster candidates (YSCCs). We choose a hierarchical model structure from GMCs to YSCCs based on the natural formation hierarchy between them. This approach circumvents the limitations of the empirical two-point correlation function analysis by naturally accounting for the inhomogeneity present in the distribution of YSCCs. We also investigate the effects of GMCs’ properties on their spatial distributions. We confirm that the distribution of GMCs and YSCCs are highly correlated. We found that the spatial distributions of YSCCs reaches a peak of clustering pattern at ∼250 pc scale compared to a Poisson process. This clustering mainly occurs in regions where the galactocentric distance ≳4.5 kpc. Furthermore, the galactocentric distance of GMCs and their mass have strong positive effects on the correlation strength between GMCs and YSCCs. We outline some possible implications of these findings for our understanding of the cluster formation process.
Flux density variability of 286 radio pulsars from a decade of monitoring
Authors: Kumamoto H , Dai S , Johnston S , Kerr M , Shannon R M , Weltevrede P , Sobey C , Manchester R N , Hobbs G , Takahashi K
Published: December 2020

The Parkes telescope has been monitoring 286 radio pulsars approximately monthly since 2007 at an observing frequency of 1.4 GHz. The wide dispersion measure (DM) range of the pulsar sample and the uniformity of the observing procedure make the data set extremely valuable for studies of flux density variability and the interstellar medium (ISM). Here, we present flux density measurements and modulation indices of these pulsars over this period. We derive the structure function from the light curves and discuss the contributions to it from measurement noise, intrinsic variability, and interstellar scintillation. Despite a large scatter, we show that the modulation index is inversely correlated with DM, and can be generally described by a power law with an index of ∼−0.7 covering DMs from ∼10 to 1000 cm−3 pc. We present refractive time-scales and/or lower limits for a group of 42 pulsars. These often have values significantly different from theoretical expectations, indicating the complex nature of the ISM along individual lines of sight. In particular, local structures and non-Kolmogorov density fluctuations are likely playing important roles in the observed flux density variation of many of these pulsars.
Changing Results to Change Results: Nudging Antimicrobial Prescribing for Clostridium difficile
Authors: Herman Dakoda J , Sarabia Alicia , Chan Helen , Graham Christopher
Published: December 2020

Background

Patients who test positive for Clostridium difficile by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), with a negative toxin enzyme immunoassay (EIA), are commonly colonized and do not require treatment. However, clinicians often treat based on a positive PCR result regardless of the toxin EIA result. We evaluated the clinical impact of a microbiology reporting nudge, changing from a report that included both assay results along with treatment recommendations to one that suggested clinicians consider C difficile colonization or early infection.

Methods

We conducted a retrospective cohort study of all adult patients admitted to a large multisite community hospital with a positive C difficile PCR result and negative toxin EIA from January 1, 2016 to June 30, 2018. We examined total days of therapy (DOT) and impacts on clinical outcomes.

Results

One hundred ninety-nine episodes occurred preintervention and 165 episodes occurred postintervention. The mean DOTs per episode decreased from 13.6 to 7.9 days (difference −5.8 days; 95% confidence interval, −3.9 to −7.6) postintervention, with statistical process control charts suggesting special cause variation. Patients receiving no treatment increased from 6.5% to 23.6% postintervention (P < .0001). No significant changes in subsequent toxin positive disease (9.0% vs 6.7%), colectomy (0% vs 0.6%), mortality (7.5% vs 12.1%), or length of stay (18.5 vs 16 days) were observed.

Conclusions

Microbiology reporting nudges raising the possibility of C difficile colonization were associated with altered prescribing, reinforcing a postanalytic strategy for invoking change. Decreases in antimicrobial prescribing occurred without increasing subsequent disease or other adverse outcomes, suggesting a safe strategy for decreasing unnecessary treatment of C difficile colonization.
Few Illusions Left
Authors: Patey Luke
Published: December 2020

For decades, Germany accepted a trade-off of technology for market access when its multinational corporations invested in China. What has changed in recent years is that China’s model of political authoritarianism and state capitalism is reaching out to the world. Increasingly competitive in China, Chinese multinationals have busied themselves with entering overseas markets and buying foreign corporations. China’s aim is to climb the global competitiveness ladder through its “Made in China 2025” policy and lead production in higher-value goods and services in the automotive, aviation, machinery, robotics, and other industries. Standing in direct competition with German industry, this set off alarm bells in Berlin. China’s investment restrictions and controls at home, coupled with its targeted investment abroad, antagonized relations in Berlin and other European capitals. New policies to protect German and European corporations from foreign takeover, and efforts to reform the World Trade Organization, have grown as this lack of reciprocity has been exposed.
Preferences and Production under Uncertainty
Authors: Chambers Robert G.
Published: December 2020

The Arrow-Savage-Debreu formalism (state space, consequence space, acts) for modelling a stochastic decision is introduced. Preferences over stochastic outcomes framed as maps (acts) from the state space to the consequence space are studied and related to nonstochastic preference structures. Distance function representations of preferences are developed and their superdifferential correspondences are shown to define subjective probability measures. Structural restrictions including uncertainty aversion, constant absolute uncertainty aversion, and constant relative uncertainty aversion are examined and related to parallel restrictions for nonstochastic preference or production structures. A model of a stochastic technology that has the nonstochastic production model as a special case is introduced, and distance function representations of it are discussed. Structural assumptions on the stochastic technology are discussed.
The Integration Myth
Authors: Ciancia Kathryn
Published: December 2020

When Polish elites utilized the language of state integration during the early-to-mid-1920s, they highlighted their own centrality in competitive civilizing projects in Volhynia. At the moment when the post-imperial state was itself being constituted, these actors crafted myths about who was foreign, based on civilizational hierarchies between—and even within—the zones of the former partitions. If the right-wing Endecja relied on the antisemitic trope that Jews were eternal foreigners in Volhynia, Polish military settlers also faced accusations of national and social foreignness from Volhynia’s Ukrainian-speaking peasants and Polish-speaking landowners alike. Moreover, in locations beyond Warsaw, notably Poznań and Lublin, urban elites fashioned their cities as civilizational leaders by offering to usher Volhynia’s Poles, particularly those in the provincial capital of Łuck, toward modernity.
How Media Shapes the Public Discourse and Influences Health
Authors: Plough Alonzo L.
Published: December 2020

This chapter describes the multiple roles of modern media in determining not only what consumers know, but also how and what they think. The exponential growth of ideologically driven cable channels and social media, dovetailing with cutbacks in newspaper staffing and coverage, point to the many ways that the power and reach of media are shifting even as they continue to reshape American society and norms. In this environment, multiple media compete for viewers, readers, and listeners who will click on their websites, buy their products, sign their petitions, and often accept their spin, especially if it reinforces personal perspectives. Thoughtful information about complex public health issues is easily lost in that context, leading too many people to base their decision-making on incomplete, biased, and even inaccurate information. For the news media to help build a Culture of Health, people need to understand how it works, what it does, and how it can be used for widespread benefit.
Linking Education and Health to Support the Whole Child
Authors: Plough Alonzo L.
Published: December 2020

This chapter examines the bidirectional connection between education and health. The complex, bidirectional connection between education and health can foster opportunity, making it a key component of the mantra, “Health starts where we live, learn, work, and play.” Yet access to quality education and the knowledge and foundation it provides are not distributed equitably. Schools located in areas of concentrated poverty often lack resources to fully provide even the basic academic materials and supports needed for an adequate educational experience, let alone the complete range of associated services that can help ensure a child's educational and developmental success. By making the commitments needed to support the whole child, schools, families, health care providers, and communities can help ensure that children across all population groups and geographic regions can succeed. The chapter then looks at the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, and considers a research program designed to advance the broad implementation of that model, especially in under-resourced environments. It also highlights a school-based initiative to encourage healthy eating and active living and to build resilience and foster wellness for school staff and students.
Creating a Government Commitment to Well-Being
Authors: Ng Tim
Published: December 2020

This chapter describes how the New Zealand Government in 2019 demonstrated its commitment to well-being as a public policy with the release of its Wellbeing Budget. It details how the New Zealand Treasury’s Living Standards Framework (LSF) has guided the Treasury’s policy advice to governments in New Zealand, using the Wellbeing Budget as a key example of the application of the LSF in practice. The LSF is a population-level economic framework with a multidimensional well-being outcomes focus and associated measurement, analysis, and assessment tools. It helps the government to express, analyze, and implement its well-being objectives in the form of concrete policy action. As well as government budget management, the LSF has been applied to strategic fiscal and economic policy development. Priority policy areas for funding and other interventions addressed in the Wellbeing Budget included mental health, family and sexual violence, and sustainable land use. The chapter then looks at the experience of applying LSF tools to various stages of the policy process, including examples of cross-agency collaboration and the resulting policy packages informed by the LSF.
Caṇḍī
Authors: Sengupta Saswati
Published: December 2020

The ubiquitous goddesses dotting Bengal are referred to by the epithet mā/mother and commonly trailed by the suffix Caṇḍī and usually calcified as the Brahmanical wife of Śiva. The Caṇḍī maṅgalakābyas by Brahmanical male poets from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries helped propagate the śāstrik framing of the laukika goddesses. The narratives start appearing as the Afghan sultanate of Bengal is incorporated into the Mughal Empire, proliferate in the seventeenth century as the Mughal conquest is consolidated, and stagnate by the end of the eighteenth century as the empire begins to disintegrate and the British Empire start rising. The modern canonized criticism of the Caṇḍīmaṅgalas argues that the genre represents the agenda of shaping a Hindu community in the context of Muslim rule and Caitanya’s critique of Brahmanical norms. But an ideological silence shrouds the detrimental implications of this patronizing project on customary caste and gender practices and rights.
Estimating Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Discord
Authors: Lahiri Kajal , Wang Wuwei
Published: December 2020

We apply generalized beta and triangular distributions to histograms from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to estimate forecast uncertainty, shocks. and discord using an information framework, and we compare these with moment-based estimates. We find that these two approaches produce analogous results, except in cases where the underlying densities deviate significantly from normality. Even though the Shannon entropy is more inclusive of different facets of a forecast density, we find that with SPF forecasts it is largely driven by the variance of the densities. We use Jenson–Shannon Information to measure ex ante “news” or “uncertainty shocks” in real time, and we find that this “news” is closely related to revisions in forecast means, is countercyclical, and raises uncertainty. Using standard vector autoregression analysis, we confirm that uncertainty affects the real sector of the economy negatively.
Divine Service
Authors: Hefling Charles
Published: December 2020

“Divine Service” is a name for the most frequently performed act of public worship that is prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. Most of this chapter examines the texts of the three liturgical offices in which Divine Service has consisted on Sundays: Morning Prayer (or Mattins), the Litany (or General Supplication), and the beginning of Holy Communion (or the Lord’s Supper), as these would take place on one specific day. Evening Prayer (or Evensong), which is a separate part of Divine Service, is also described. In the course of the discussion the chapter introduces a number of basic terms used throughout the book.
Preambles: Time and the Prayer Book
Authors: Hefling Charles
Published: December 2020

The “prelims” of the Book of Common Prayer include a number of tables, rules, schedules, and lists. All of these are necessary for specifying components of Divine Service that vary from day to day, most importantly the reading and recitation of passages from Christian scripture. The specification is significant in two ways, which this chapter will discuss. On the one hand, the various instructions situate Prayer Book worship in time, and more particularly within the annual sequence of holydays and seasons known as the ecclesiastical or liturgical year. On the other hand, they define the relation of the Book of Common Prayer to the still more sacred text of the Bible.
Occasional Services
Authors: Hefling Charles
Published: December 2020

In addition to services that take place regularly, every day or every week, the Book of Common Prayer includes a number of “occasional” services, which are conducted when circumstances call for them. This chapter describes the Prayer Book’s provisions for these services—its three rites of Ordination; the wedding service, formally called the Solemnization of Matrimony; the initiation rite of Baptism and the closely related service of Confirmation; and liturgies used at the Visitation of the Sick and the Burial of the Dead—as well as other related texts. The discussion points out some of the theological issues and emphases that have been inseparable from these ad hoc liturgies.
Running a Family
Authors: Roychowdhury Poulami
Published: December 2020

Chapter 3 details why so many women wished to remain with their abusers and how it was they started moving toward the law despite their best efforts. Using interview and observation data, the author describes how women initially wished to avoid the law. They tried to “run a family” (sansar calano): work things out, make the violence stop, have a peaceful family life with people who had abused them. This chapter asks what it means to “run a family” and examines the social and institutional factors that shape women’s desires. It then goes on to show how, despite their commitments, in the process of seeking help women became enmeshed in kin networks that pushed them toward legal engagements.
Incentivizing the Law
Authors: Roychowdhury Poulami
Published: December 2020

Before they could propel women toward the criminal justice system, brokers had to contend with the fact that most women wanted to “run a family.” Before and during the actual work of mediation, brokers thus had to convince women to reorient their preferences. Chapter 5 shows how brokers encouraged women to approach the law for assistance. To do so, brokers provided concrete services and rewards: therapy, associational membership, job training programs, medical assistance, financial support. These psychological, social, and material incentives lowered both the perceived and the actual costs of legal cases for individual women while raising the potential benefits.
‘Following No Party But The Truth’: Petrus Van Musschenbroek’s Rhetorical Defence Of (Newtonian) Experimental Philosophy
Authors: Present Pieter
Published: December 2020

The Dutch Republic played an important role in the dissemination of Newton’s philosophy. There, it found its earliest proponents, who were instrumental in the spread of Newton’s ideas on the Continent. One of these figures was Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692-1761), who took up professorships at the universities of Duisburg, Utrecht, and Leiden. In a letter to Newton written at the beginning of his academic career, van Musschenbroek explicitly stated that it was his aim to spread the ‘Newtonian philosophy’ in the university, and from there to the rest of Dutch society. In this article, I focus on van Musschenbroek’s activities in the context of his professorship at different universities in the Dutch Republic. I analyse the way van Musschenbroek presents Newton and his philosophy in his academic orations and the prefaces to the different editions of his textbook. I argue that van Musschenbroek implicitly uses a certain view on the institution of the university and its tasks as a leverage in his defence of ‘(Newtonian) experimental philosophy’ and his attack on the existing tradition of Cartesian philosophy in the university. I also show how van Musschenbroek was not consistent in presenting his philosophy as specifically ‘Newtonian’, and increasingly emphasised that he should not be seen as a ‘follower’ of Newton, but rather as an impartial ‘experimental philosopher’. This shift, however, can be seen as motivated by the same rhetorical strategy used by van Musschenbroek in his earlier defence of ‘Newtonian’ experimental philosophy.
On measure phrase alternation and smuggling
Authors: Corver Norbert
Published: December 2020

This chapter examines the phenomenon of M(easure) P(hrase) alternation from a cross-categorial perspective. An illustration of this phenomenon is given by the minimal pair (i) John is two inches too tall; (ii) John is too tall by two inches. The former features a bare MP, the latter by+MP. Interestingly, clauses permit only one order: *Mary two years outlived her husband; (ii) Mary outlived her husband by two years. It is proposed that the pattern featuring the bare MP is the base order. The pattern featuring by+MP is the derived order. This derived order results from leftward movement of a phrasal constituent past MP. In clauses, this phrasal constituent is a VP which smuggles the subject across MP. The ill-formedness of the clause featuring a bare MP is due to a locality violation: a subject moves across an intervening MP. In non-clausal configurations, this violation does not occur since the (small clause) subject is located higher than MP.
Remnant movement and smuggling in some romance interrogative clauses
Authors: Poletto Cecilia , Pollock Jean-Yves
Published: December 2020

This chapter analyzes the syntax of interrogative clauses in French and in some Northern Italian dialects (NIDs), including so-called “wh-in-situ” configurations. It shows that their intricate properties can be derived from standard computations (“wh-movement” and remnant movement of vP/IP to a Top/ground slot) to either the vP Left periphery (“LLP”) or the CP domain (“HLP”). If so, it becomes necessary to raise the question of why some languages make use of the LLP or the HLP, or indeed both, like French, as argued in sections 2–7. In significant cases the morphological properties of the various Wh-words and the surface forms of the sentences provide all the clues required by the language learner and the linguist. In French, movement of interrogative pronouns to the HLP is actually movement to a free relative layer. This is an automatic consequence of the fact that, as in Germanic, most French and Romance wh-items are morphologically both (free) relative and interrogative pronouns. This will explain the distribution of French Quoi (what)—only an interrogative pronoun—and similar items in a number of NIDs (Che in Bellunese and Illasi, Què in Borgomanerese and Monese). In the same vein, sections 9–11 show that the fact that French Que is both an interrogative and relative element, in addition to being a clitic qua interrogative, will account for its properties in conjunction with a “smuggling” analysis of Subject Clitic Inversion (SCLI). Sections 14–16 show that many NIDs make use of both the LLP and the HLP and that smuggling is involved in deriving the form and interpretation of interrogative clauses in Bellunese, Illasi, and Monese. In addition to renewed empirical arguments in favor of remnant movement and smuggling, sections 2–7 argue that embedded interrogative infinitives in (at least) French are vPs and only have a (sometimes truncated) LLP. In addition to the fruitfulness of the “smuggling” idea for Romance, the main theoretical result of this chapter is that the interrogative syntax of the languages and dialects studied here supports the idea that “relative constructions” or “interrogative constructions” are not primitives of the language faculty, since in significant cases the derivation of questions activates both the interrogative side of the LLP and the (free) relative side of the HLP.
The Consumer Citizen, Political Knowledge, and Political Attitudes
Authors: Porter Ethan
Published: December 2020

This chapter investigates the consumer citizen’s relationship with political knowledge and political attitudes. A survey experiment in the United States shows that taxpayer receipts can increase knowledge; evidence from a field experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, about the U.K. government’s nationwide distribution of taxpayer receipts, reaches similar conclusions. Yet the receipt is unable to affect a host of attitudes, including toward redistribution. But the consumer citizen’s attitudes toward redistribution can be changed—not just through alignability, but because of the everyday pressures of consumer life. This is illustrated by an experiment that finds that reminders of consumer debts can lead people to become more supportive of higher taxes on the rich.
Five
Authors: Maçães Bruno
Published: December 2020

This chapter details how television became the first modern technology to be entirely shaped by American culture and American ambition, and to take the American way of life to its fullest development. In the beginning, the new medium was literally the product of American power, a peacetime application of wartime technology used against German submarines and the Japanese navy. Later, the connection would seem less obvious, but only at first. As the mass medium of choice during the decades when the United States conquered the planet, television quickly became synonymous with an American future of material and spiritual progress. They were a window into America, but a window displaying the American dream in all its glory, a transplant of the American life energy. Arguably, the internet, mobile technology, Netflix, and binge-watching did not change this basic fact. By liberating content from the physical restraints of the old wartime vacuum tubes, they can only increase its powers and render it, as it were, more spiritual. Ultimately, the internet can be seen as an expansion of television culture.
Conclusion
Authors: Pearson David
Published: December 2020

The 1990s underground punk scene fostered a culture and politics of resistance against and an alternative to the triumphalism of US empire. Evaluating the successes and failures of the 1990s punk renaissance offers lessons for future alternative cultures seeking to use music to foster political change. Involvement in antiracist movements and protests against globalized capitalism, such as the 1999 “Battle in Seattle,” battles over inclusion within the punk scene, the dangers of becoming insular, and struggles over concrete political commitment versus sloganeering or “lifestylism” all highlight the challenges of creating and sustaining a music of rebellion.
Regenerating Life
Authors: Parrington John
Published: December 2020

Stem cells, which are ‘immortal’ cells that divide indefinitely and produce many different cell types, are central to how our body develops and maintains itself. Embryonic stem cells can give rise to all cell types in the body, and there has been lots of interest since their discovery in the 1980s in using such cells to generate new tissues or organs to replace diseased or faulty ones. More recently has come the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, which are normal skin cells taken from a person and genetically modified or tweaked chemically to give them stem cell properties. There is now hope that both of these types of stem cells might be used in ‘regenerative’ medicine, for instance in producing pancreatic cells that secrete insulin which could be used to treat diabetes. Perhaps the most remarkable breakthrough in recent years has been the discovery that stem cells introduced into a 3D matrix that is infused with chemicals that stimulate the development of particular cell types, can spontaneously form ‘organoids’, which have many of the cell types and even structural features of human organs such as hearts, kidneys, intestines, and even eyes and brains. Organoids make it possible to study how human organs develop but also this area of science raises many ethical issues. For instance, currently human brain organoids can only grow to the size of an embryonic brain, but if in the future they could be induced to grow to adult brain size, could they develop feelings and thoughts?
Life as a Machine
Authors: Parrington John
Published: December 2020

Bacteria are a source of many of the tools used in biotechnology. A technique called the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, made it possible for the first time to amplify tiny starting amounts of DNA and has revolutionised medical diagnosis, testing of IVF embryos for mutations, and forensic science. PCR involves the repeated generation of DNA from a starting sequence in a cycle, one stage of which occurs at boiling point. Because of this PCR uses a DNA polymerase enzyme purified from an ‘extremophile’ bacterium that lives in hot springs. More recently scientists have constructed artificial bacterial or yeast genomes from scratch. The next step will be to create reconfigured bacteria and yeast with enhanced characteristics for use in agriculture, energy production, or generation of new materials. Some scientists are now seeking to expand the genetic code itself. The DNA code that human beings share with all other species on the planet has four ‘letters’, A, C, G, and T, which pair as A:T and C:G to join the two strands of the DNA double helix. And each particular triplet of DNA letters, for instance CGA, or TGC, codes for a specific amino acid, the 20 different amino acids joining together in a specific sequence to make up a particular protein. Scientists have now developed a new DNA letter pair, X:Y. By introducing this into an artificial bacterial genome, it is becoming possible to create many more amino acids than the current 20 naturally occurring ones, and thereby allowing many new types of proteins.
Bolzano on Continuity
Authors: Rusnock Paul
Published: December 2020

Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) was a philosophical mathematician, especially interested in foundations and the analysis of important mathematical concepts. The notion of continuity was a subject of sustained reflection throughout his life. He deals with the notion in many settings: the theory of space (geometry), the theory of time (chronometry), the theory of functions (analysis), physics (continuous processes, matter), and numerical continuity (the theory of measurable numbers). One can also distinguish earlier and later versions of most of his work in these areas. This chapter provides an overview of his thoughts on these matters, along with some indications of the historical and philosophical context of his work.
What Is a Number?
Authors: McCarty Charles
Published: December 2020

An examination of and plea for a time-honored answer to the title question, that answer being, “A number is one principal result among others of a process of converting magnitudes drawn from a continuum, via a scheme of measurement, into arithmetic quantities.” Ideas on this subject of Paul du Bois-Reymond, Richard Dedekind, and Otto Hölder are subjected to detailed statement and close analysis. At the very center lies du Bois-Reymond’s demonstration that the Cantor-Dedekind Axiom–that an intuition into the nature of continuous magnitude shows that the geometric line is isomorphic to the array of Dedekind real numbers–is not merely unprovable but wholly false.
Continuity in Intuitionism
Authors: McCarty Charles
Published: December 2020

The chapter features, first, a critical presentation of Brouwer’s intuitionistic doctrines concerning logic, the real numbers, and continuity in the real number system, including his Principle for Numbers and Continuity Theorem. This is followed by a parallel examination of Hermann Weyl’s quasi-intuitionistic views on logic, continuity, and the real number system, views inspired by (but grossly misrepresenting) ideas of Brouwer. The whole business wraps up with an attempt to place Brouwer’s and Weyl’s efforts within the trajectory of informed thinking, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, on the subjects of continua, magnitudes, and quantities.
The Peircean Continuum
Authors: Vargas Francisco , Moore Matthew E.
Published: December 2020

Charles Sanders Peirce’s views on continuity, the concept he lionized as “the master-key which … unlocks the arcana of philosophy”, are of vital importance for students of his philosophy, but have received much less attention from historians and philosophers of continuity. This is partly because Peirce’s mathematics of continuity was still very much a work in progress when he died over a century ago. In the first and principal section of this chapter, the first author summarizes the defining features of the theory of continuity that Peirce made the most progress on, and constructs a model for that theory as a proper class in Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory with Choice. This model provides a fuller mathematical vindication of Peirce’s conception than any reconstruction offered to date. The second section is an historical appendix, in which the second author briefly summarizes Peirce’s own attempts to put his conception into a rigorous form.
Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante
Authors: Bowe David
Published: December 2020

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante’s works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy before and contemporary with Dante. The second part of the book uses this reconstruction to demonstrated Dante’s engagement with and indebtedness to the dynamics of exchange that characterized the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument of the book, for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition, is underpinned by a conceptualization of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, and as sense of ‘performative’ speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts (such as Dante’s Commedia).
Regulating Unfair Contract Terms under Chinese Law
Authors: Shiyuan Han
Published: December 2020

This chapter examines how Chinese contract law deals with extremely one-sided, onerous, or otherwise unfair terms, such as exclusions or limitations of liability, penalty clauses, or restraint of trade clauses. It discusses the overt judicial control of such terms under specific legislation, sometimes targeted exclusively at terms in consumer contracts or, to a lesser extent, standard terms. It also analyses how the Chinese courts have exercised a more indirect control by employing traditional general contract law doctrines, such as contract formation and interpretation or the rules on procedural fairness, in order to protect parties against the imposition of unfair terms. A number of hypothetical clauses are analysed to illustrate how Chinese courts regulate unfair contract terms in practice.
Epilogue
Authors: Smith Christopher
Published: December 2020

This chapter argues that it is time to depart from Sigonio’s strict legalistic line of thought and the connected scholarly tradition that is almost exclusively concerned with reinterpreting the relatively late Greco-Roman sources. It advocates a more fluid and locally variable understanding of Roman republican colonization, based on new intellectual models that may be found in the historiography of imperialism more generally. In particular, Lauren Benton’s seminal work on geography and law in European imperialism offers an intellectual framework worth exploring. The complex picture of partial and divided sovereignty, far removed from the classic notion of indivisible sovereignty, permits more messy and complex pictures of colonial agency that agree comfortably with recent trends in the study of Roman colonization practices.
The Transition from Welfare to Workfare in Times of Crisis
Authors: Hajdú József
Published: December 2020

Many of the serious deficiencies in the Hungarian welfare state pre-date the 2010 political changes and a pronounced anti-poverty policy turn was evidently already on its way in 2008, especially concerning income protection for the long-term unemployed. As if this were not enough, according to the OECD, among the thirty-two OECD member states, Hungary and Greece were the only states where real public social spending had decreased since the onset of the economic crisis. More precisely, Hungary’s social policy answer to the crisis included the introduction of workfare, the diminishment of the second pillar pension, the abolishment of early pensions, the activation of family policy, and the encouragement of citizens’ self-support attitude. Moreover, in 2010 a two-thirds majority in parliament gave the government the possibility to enact fundamental changes to Hungary’s Constitution and legislation as a whole. Confronted with the experience of non-democratic regimes and the individual vision of fundamental rights, after the transition, the Fundamental Law indicates a shift of emphasis from state obligations towards individual citizens to citizens’ obligations towards the community.
Fiduciaries’ Obligations and Climate Governance
Authors: Sarra Janis
Published: December 2020

Chapter 4 carefully examines the precise contours of the legal duties of directors and officers of companies, of pension fund trustees, their investment managers and service providers, and of asset managers and investment funds. It explores how these duties arise in respect of climate-related financial risk and opportunities. It discusses potential corporate law remedies for failing to address material climate-related risks, including liability for breach of directors’ duty of care and fiduciary duty, as well as oppression remedy provisions in the corporate laws of some countries. It examines fiduciary duties of pension fiduciaries and other institutional investors, exploring how these duties can be met with effective climate governance, oversight of managers, and proactive measures to address climate risk. It explores securities law disclosure requirements and the notion of materiality that guides what corporate officers need to disclose to investors.
The Werewolf in the Ancient World
Authors: Ogden Daniel
Published: December 2020

The ancient world already cherished a rich folklore of werewolfism that broadly resembled the one copiously attested for the central medieval period in Europe. Our best access to the sort of narrative that underpinned such folklore comes in the well-known werewolf tale of the Neronian Petronius’ Satyricon, which shares some striking motifs with the equally famous AD 1160-78 Anglo-Norman tale of Bisclavret by Marie de France. It was, accordingly, folklore that determined the ancients’ conception of what a werewolf actually was. Almost all the evidence for werewolfism in antiquity should be regarded either as folkloric in nature or as secondary to and refractive of a folkloric core. The ancients re-deployed, finessed and parlayed this focal conception in distinct ways in diverse cultural contexts. Notions, themes and images were borrowed from this folkloric home and transferred, in as it were a metaphorical fashion, to other realms of human experience and endeavour, be this: aetiological myth, in the case of the material bearing upon Lykaon; rites of passage or of maturation, in the case of the material bearing upon the Lykaia rite; or medicine, in the case of the medical writers’ identification of the disease of ‘lycanthropy.’ It is this that accounts for what initially appears to be the incoherent, chaotic and centrifugal nature of the evidence-field for werewolves that the ancients have bequeathed to us.
Introduction
Authors: Ogden Daniel
Published: December 2020

After laying out, by way of example, the fullest and richest of the ancient world’s werewolf stories, that at Petronius Satyricon 61-2, the Introduction lays out the book’s principal arguments: that in antiquity werewolves participated in a common story-world with witches, ghosts, demons and soul-flyers; that the comparison of medieval werewolf tales can be used to fill gaps in our knowledge of that story-world; and that it was such story-telling – as opposed to rites of passage – that took primacy in the ancient world’s general conceptualisation of the werewolf. Also provided here are definitions of terms and brief reviews of scholarship, and a discussion of why the wolf should be selected as the animal of transformation.
Extensions, conformal diagrams
Authors: Chruściel Piotr T.
Published: December 2020

In this chapter we present a systematic approach to extensions of spacetimes, as needed to construct black-hole spacetimes. On the way we introduce the conformal diagrams, which are a useful tool for visualizing the geometry of the extensions. We focus on extensions of metrics containing a two-by-two stationary Lorentzian block.We discuss causality for such metrics in Section 6.1; the possible building blocs are described in Section 6.2; these building blocs are put together in Section 6.3. The general rules governing the construction are explained in Section 6.4, with the causal aspects of the construction highlighted in the short Section 6.5. The method is applied to those Birmingham metrics which have not been analysed previously in Section 6.6.
John of the Cross
Authors: Hole Sam
Published: December 2020

This book examines the distinctive account of desire developed in the writings of the Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar John of the Cross (1542–1591), and locates its vital significance for modern depictions of Christian life and the transformation of the self. It contends that John’s delineation of the changes that are undergone by the ‘soul’ in the spiritual ascent is rooted in a distinctive, systematic, and neglected theological vision. A rich notion of desire animates his poetry and prose works and draws with creativity and novelty on biblical, Platonic, and Christian sources. This book traces the crucial role played by this underlying erotic driver of the spiritual ascent, and suggests that it represents a unique working out of the scholastic narrative of the graced transformation of the sensory appetites and the faculties of intellect, memory, and will. This is a neglected vision of the transformation of the self through the progressive purification of desire, which has the potential to significantly enrich current theological interest in desire and the self.
Simulating Subjectivity
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: December 2020

Pessoa’s technique of lucid analytical self-simulation comprises a new methodology in the philosophy of mind, one which I will call—in deliberate contrast to the empirical and transcendental phenomenology of his contemporary Edmund Husserl, of whose work he appears to have been unaware—an ‘analytical phenomenology’. The method of an analytical phenomenology has two components. The first element is to simulate, in a guided or directed manner, a sensorium. Pessoa has a technical term for such acts of simulation, ‘dreaming’, his use of the term not confined to actual dreaming but to the controlled and lucid simulation in wakeful consciousness of a sensorium. The Pessoan concept of ‘dreaming’ is closely related to what has more recently been called ‘enactive imagination’.