bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Law and Society in Latin America since 1800
Authors: Buffington Robert
Published: February 2014

Complex intersections between legal codes, practices, and institutions, on one hand, and social structures, on the other, have played a central role throughout Latin American history. The modern history of law and society in most Latin American countries properly begins with the severing of colonial ties with Spain in the early 19th century and the subsequent introduction of new constitutions and legal codes in the decades that followed. Even countries such as Cuba and Brazil with different historical trajectories took steps to modernize their laws and legal institutions during this period. From the beginning, legal scholars in Latin America have devoted considerable time and energy to reconstructing and analyzing the laborious, convoluted efforts made in each country to reconcile the colonial legal legacy with new ideas about the role of laws and legal institutions in the governance of modern societies. Written for the most part by lawyers and judges rather than by professional historians, these works concern themselves almost exclusively with legal developments within their respective countries (rather than across the region) and generally pay scant attention to the larger historical frames in which these developments occurred. Despite their limitations, many of these local legal histories are foundational works of great value, and scholars would be foolish to overlook them. Still they are often hard to find outside their countries of origin (although more recent articles are sometimes accessible online); for that reason and in the interest of space, only a few of these country-specific “traditional” legal histories appear in this article. In terms of historical scholarship, the turning point in the history of the intersections between law and society in modern Latin America was the mid-1990s. During this period, scholars influenced by recent developments in social and cultural history began to ask new questions of historical sources, especially court records, which had been largely overlooked by traditional legal historians, and to engage with new theoretical approaches, especially philosopher-historian Michel Foucault’s insights into the linkages between knowledge and power. This so-called “new legal history” of Latin America has been especially prominent in two of the fields of inquiry included in this article: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family and Crime and Punishment. In contrast, scholars working in the other five fields—constitutions and codes, Legal Institutions, Indigenous Rights, environmental regulation, and International Law—generally engage with the more conventional research questions and theoretical frameworks of legal historians, economic historians, political historians, and (for more recent periods) political scientists.
Machine Translation
Authors: Yvon François
Published: February 2014

Machine translation (MT) is an interdisciplinary scientific field that brings together linguists, lexicologists, computer scientists, and translation practitioners in the pursuit of a common goal: to design and develop electronic resources and computer software capable of automatically translating a document in a source language (SL) into an equivalent text in a target language (TL). By extension, machine translation technologies also include tools aimed at helping human translators to perform their work more efficiently using computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology. Machine translation started in the late 1950s with attempts to automatically translate Russian into English. Realization of the extreme difficulty of the task led the MT community to concentrate its efforts on more focused and realistic problems, starting the field of natural language processing (NLP) studies. MT was thus broken down into three main sub-issues: analyzing the SL into a more abstract representation, transferring this representation into an equivalent target representation, and, finally, generating a proper surface realization in TL. Capitalizing on the progress in applied NLP and artificial intelligence, MT made slow progress over the next thirty years, using mostly symbolic models of language processing to accomplish the analysis, transfer, and generation processes. Despite of several remarkable achievements, these models were challenged in the 1980s by corpus-based methodologies, which rely on the analysis of large bodies of manually translated bitexts to generate translations of new documents. In particular, the statistical approaches in machine translation introduced in the early 1990s, and subsequently improved during the next decade, have rapidly gained momentum. As of 2014, statistical approaches have been superseded by more powerful machine learning techniques based on artificial neural networks. Relying on the systematic exploitation of huge corpora of monolingual texts and multilingual bitexts available on the Internet, ” Neural Machine Translation” appears to be the most effective approach today for a wide variety of uses. Neural approaches can handle almost any language pair, provided a sufficient access to parallel corpora is available. A remarkable recent evolution is the development of multilingual translation models that are able to handle multiple languages directions in one single system.
Morphological Change
Authors: Booij Geert
Published: February 2014

Morphology is the subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with the structure of words. The study of word structure comprises two domains: inflection and word formation. Inflection deals with the formal expression of morphosyntactic properties of words (such as number, case, and tense), whereas word formation concerns the ways in which words are made. Both types of morphology can be studied from a historical perspective. Commonly, the study of changes in inflection and word formation is referred to as diachronic morphology, or morphological change. Such changes are the effects of various form of language behavior (such as acquisition, processing, variation, storage, and lexicalization) or of language contact. The historical study of inflection focuses on three issues: how inflectional systems arise, how and why they change, and how they erode. The rise of inflection through the grammaticalization of words into inflectional affixes is an important domain of historical research. The historical study of word formation considers the emergence of and changes in word formation patterns. Syntactic structures may develop into morphological structures, and compound constituents may develop into affixes. Word formation processes may lose their productivity or completely disappear from a language. New morphological patterns may arise through the morphologization of once phonological patterns. For instance, the German umlaut, the alternation between back vowels and front vowels, was once triggered by the presence of suffixes with high vowels but, can be used in present-day German as a morphological process, as in the plural form of the German Vater “father,” Väter. Language contact can have all kinds of effects on the morphology of a language. For example, Germanic languages have borrowed greatly from French in the domain of word formation. Inflectional systems may simplify, owing to their being obtained in second-language acquisition. Creole languages and their morphology arise through contact between speakers with different native languages. Morphological change may also occur at the level of the individual word. The inflection of a word may change (e.g., from irregular to regular), and complex words may lose their morphological transparency (lexicalization). Morphological change functions as a testing ground for various theories of the nature and architecture of the grammar of natural languages; for providing a framework in which morphological changes can be properly interpreted and explained.
Ethics in Research with Children
Authors: Farrell Ann
Published: February 2014

Contemporary research with young children is informed by the growing multidisciplinary field of research ethics. While the discipline of ethics can be traced back to the Hippocratic school, its current applications in the worlds of children are gaining traction from a wide range of theorists, practitioners, and those involved in policy. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1979) has provided a robust platform for international attention to children’s rights to provision, protection, and participation in everyday contexts, including those in which research occurs. Most recently, the global pandemic fueled by the COVID-19 virus has brought into even sharper focus the need for ethical conduct of research cognizant of children’s rights. Understandings of research ethics and of children’s involvement in research relate to broader understandings of children and childhood drawn from developmental science, sociology, human geography, health sciences, and children’s human rights. Key understandings pertain to children’s competence to participate in research, to operate as reliable informants with respect to their own lives, to provide voluntary informed consent and dissent in research, and to make meaningful decisions about the nature and extent of their participation. The field is international and interdisciplinary, although bounded by legislative, policy, and jurisdictional requirements governing research—its conduct and dissemination. So, too, the critical work of ethics committees, whether in relation to health research or social research, is evidence of a sharpened focus on the governance of child research. Oxford Bibliographies offers a suite of perspectives, resources, and strategies to guide the researcher, practitioner, and policymaker and serves to challenge readers to interrogate diverse conceptual understandings, methodologies, and dissemination of research with and about children. Exploration of the suite opens up new possibilities for considering children’s rights to participation in matters that affect their lives and for children to be seen and heard in research.
Contemporary Legends
Authors: Tucker Elizabeth
Published: February 2014

Contemporary legends (sometimes called urban legends or simply legends) are stories that spread primarily through informal channels. Traditionally, legends spread by word of mouth, but contemporary legends can travel by other means of individual communication, such as telephone, photocopy, email, or social-media postings. These stories may receive some coverage in the mass media, but traditional, oral channels are central to the legend’s spread. Typically, both the person telling the tale and the person hearing it understand the legend to be true, and the story may include elements intended to authenticate it, such as being set in a familiar location such as a local mall, or being told as something that happened to a friend of a friend (abbreviated FOAF) of the teller. Legends differ from rumors; rumors are brief speculative statements and are usually confined to a specific location, whereas legends tend to be longer narratives and may be localized or spread more widely. Legends are most often studied by folklorists but have also been studied by sociologists, psychologists, and scholars in other fields. Legends have important connections to childhood: children both tell legends and are key elements in many stories. For more information on children’s folklore, please see the Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies article “Folklore.”
Orphan Films
Authors: Streible Dan
Published: February 2014

Although of unknown vernacular origin, the term “orphan film” emerged in the 1990s within discussions among archivists, referring to motion pictures abandoned by their legal owners. A decade later, the term entered scholarly cinema studies, where the concept expanded to refer to films that had suffered neglect. Archivists identified orphan films as a preservation problem. If a Copyright holder could not be identified or located, archives typically left the material untouched, rather than invest resources to preserve a film owned by others. As this problem has become better known, preservationists and archivists have lobbied for legislative relief, with limited success. The introduction of the archival term to scholarly circles has had a significant impact. For media studies, identification of the orphan film phenomenon has meant a historiographical shift: what does it mean to study the millions of obscure and neglected celluloid recordings that were not theatrical movies or art films? What does cinema history look like if the hundreds of thousands of nontheatrical films or millions of feet of home movies and newsreel outtakes are taken into account? For both historians and archivists, the broader concept of an orphan is often demonstrated by listing the variety of categories that fall under the umbrella term: sponsored films, silent shorts, home movies, scientific and experimental works, ethnographic footage, newsreel outtakes, training and educational films, medical studies, experimental and uncompleted works, and other ephemeral motion pictures. Because such productions record or create a much broader and tangibly different world than conventional moviedom does, subject specialists outside of cinema studies also study orphaned films. Since 1999, the biennial Orphan Film Symposium has convened a mix of archivists, scholars, and artists to screen and discuss neglected film and video, much of it newly preserved. Begun at the University of South Carolina, since 2008 the symposium has been supported by New York University, which continues a Web presence for symposium documents and digital viewing copies of some of the films presented, NYU Orphan Film Symposium. The symposium has led to substantive publications and DVDs; however, scholarly writing on Categories of Orphan Films comes from many sources. Note that while the medium-specificity of motion picture film is crucial to the phenomenon, increasingly the term “orphan film” has been expanded to include videotape and digital moving images.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Authors: Mamula Tijana
Published: February 2014

Pier Paolo Pasolini (b. 1922–d. 1975) was one of the most important and innovative figures in postwar Italian culture, whose influence, both within Italy and internationally, has continued to grow in the decades since his death. Though his international reputation rests largely on the fame he achieved as a filmmaker in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was equally prolific as a poet, novelist, playwright, film theorist, and literary critic, and, particularly in the latter portion of his career, as a political commentator and controversial public intellectual. He was a national celebrity, despite his uncomfortable “scandalous” pronouncements, who was consistently published and broadcast in Italy’s major media outlets. This eclecticism is reflected as much in Pasolini’s aesthetics—centered on adaptation, analogy, and the reciprocal “contamination” of low and high culture—as in the themes persistently explored in his films and writings. An unorthodox Communist driven by a “desperate love for reality” and a lifelong interest in popular Italian culture (particularly dialectal poetry), Pasolini was also, for example, interested in early Renaissance painting, ancient Greek tragedy, and Baroque music. He wrote novels and made films about prostitution and criminality in the Roman borgate, staged tableaux vivants of Mannerist paintings in a tragicomedy about a starving extra hired to participate in a film about the Deposition, wrote a talking Marxist crow into a picaresque allegory starring Totò, transformed his location-scouting journeys into a series of documentaries about Africa and the Middle East, adapted the Bible, Sophocles, Euripides, the Decameron, the Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, and, for his last film, transposed Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to the Fascist Republic of Salò. Pasolini also a wrote a series of long-disparaged and now increasingly revalued essays on film theory, famously arguing for the conceptual analogy between death and editing and maintaining that cinema is “the written language of reality.” Much of the writing on Pasolini, which, like his own work, is staggering in volume, has been devoted to unraveling the relationships between his many and diverse sources, as well as considering his relevance as a uniquely perceptive and intransigent analyst of the radical transformation of Italian culture and society during the postwar period and the years of the economic miracle. The present article is primarily focused on scholarly discussions of Pasolini’s films and film theory, and for the most part excludes review articles and sources centered on other areas of his work. It also privileges writing available in English, although some of the most important and useful Italian texts, as well as several works in French and Spanish, have been included.
Natalie Wood
Authors: Lucia Cynthia
Published: February 2014

Born in San Francisco as Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, three-time Oscar-nominated actress Natalie Wood (b. 1938–d. 1981) began her career at age four with an uncredited role in Irving Pichel’s Happy Land (1943). Natalia’s Russian father, a carpenter and eventual studio set builder, changed the family name to Gurdin for better placement on Depression job lists. Claiming to be an amateur ballet dancer and/or actress in her native Russia, Natalia’s mother became the driving force behind her daughter’s career. She moved her family from Santa Rosa to Hollywood in 1944, hoping to persuade Pichel to again cast Natalia, who preferred the name Natasha. Fond of Natasha and aware of the difficulties child actors endured, Pichel only reluctantly cast the seven-year-old in Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) and re-christened her “Natalie Wood.” Natalie’s popularity took hold at age nine with her role in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), followed by twenty-eight movie and television performances before emerging as a teenage star in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean. During her teenage and early adult career, Wood’s most prominent roles mediated cultural anxieties over female sexuality and maturation, with allegorical resonance for audiences who had watched this compelling child grow up onscreen. Most notable are The Searchers and A Cry in the Night, both 1956, which cast Wood as a kidnapping victim, and later Bombers B-52 (1957), Marjorie Morningstar (1958), Cash McCall (1960), Splendor in the Grass, and West Side Story (both 1961). Wood’s Louise in Gypsy (1962) literally effects a transition from innocent, soulful girl to illustrious stripper. Even when Wood was in her mid- and late twenties, her roles hinged on a nuanced interplay of sexual innocence and experience, whether in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), Sex and the Single Girl (1964), or This Property Is Condemned (1966). Her last big hit, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), treated adult sexual ennui and experimentation in the explicit and hilarious terms possible only with the demise of the Production Code and the studio system that supported it. Throughout her career, Wood acted in more than sixty movies and television series, concluding with Brainstorm (1983), released two years after her untimely, still mysterious death by drowning. Her uncommon beauty and deep, brown eyes registered intelligence, sincerity, and an inexplicable vulnerability, qualities animating her ever-captivating screen performances and frequently commented upon by critics, scholars, and biographers alike.
Emotion
Authors: Oatley Keith
Published: February 2014

Emotion is central to our experience of others and of ourselves. Since the early 1950s it has come fully onto the agenda of psychology, and takes its place firmly alongside such functions as perception, memory, and thinking. A human emotion occurs typically when an inner concern is affected by an event in the outer world, usually about another person. Sometimes, of course, the inner concern meets an inner event, a thought, but the more frequent cause, a meeting of inner and outer makes emotion of special importance in psychology. The best current conception is that when a concern is affected by an outer or inner event, an emotion is the process that then gives urgency and priority to one goal or course of action and thought, while relegating others to a background for some period. Often the emotion has bodily accompaniments, some of which occur in readiness for the urgent action. Imagine you are crossing the road, holding the hand of a five-year-old child. A car screeches to a halt right beside you. You stop your road-crossing, grab the child, and jump back onto the curb. You look to make sure that the child is alright. Your heart thumps in your chest. You can’t help thinking about the implications of what has happened. The concern is for safety of the child and yourself. The event is being nearly run over. The emotion is fear. The urgent priority is to reach safety. Emotions of other kinds, too, typically involve patterns of action, bodily changes, and patterns of self-sustaining thought, which often are about our relationships with others. In our relationships, emotions of affection, of anxiety, and of conflict are fundamental to our social lives. Questions that have directed thinkers on emotions over the centuries include how the urgency, sometimes the seeming inexorability, of emotions might be modified, how individual lives are affected by emotions, and how friendships, families, and societies are shaped by them. Although emotions are psychological, their significance has become important also in psychiatry, sociology, economics, anthropology, philosophy, history, and literary study.
Counseling Psychology
Authors: Williams Elizabeth Nutt
Published: February 2014

Counseling psychology is a specialty within psychology that focuses on counseling, research, and assessment in which close attention is paid to individual’s assets and psychological strengths. Counseling psychologists have three primary roles: remedial (e.g., working to help correct problems), preventative (e.g., interventions focused on forestalling problems), and developmental (e.g., skills training and psychoeducational approaches). The primary interventions of the specialty tend to be brief and cover a variety of settings (e.g., counseling, training, consultation, outreach). Gelso, et al. 2014, Counseling Psychology (cited under Reference Works), summarizes the enduring central values of counseling psychology, noting it has (1) an emphasis on a person’s strengths and optimal functioning; (2) a focus on the whole person, with particular emphasis on life-span development and vocational growth; (3) a commitment to advocacy and social justice, maintaining an ongoing awareness of the importance of environmental context and culture; (4) a concentration on brief, educational, and preventive counseling interventions; and (5) a dedication to the scientist-practitioner model. While counseling psychology’s abiding interest in vocational guidance began in 1908 with the establishment of a vocations bureau by Frank Parsons, most view the field of counseling psychology as beginning with the role of psychologists (in assessment of military personnel) in the 1940s during World War II. The Division of Counseling and Guidance (Division 17) of the American Psychological Association was formally established in 1946. Division 17 changed its name in 1951 to the Division of Counseling Psychology, and again in 2003 to the Society of Counseling Psychology. The major journals in counseling psychology were founded in 1954 (the Journal of Counseling Psychology, cited under Journals) and 1969 (The Counseling Psychologist, cited under Journals).The field’s history can also be marked by its major conferences. The first conference for counseling psychology was held in 1951 at Northwestern University. It was at this conference that the scientist-practitioner model of training was formally endorsed. The field has held a major conference approximately every dozen years since then (1964, Greyston Conference; 1973, Vail Conference; 1987, Georgia Conference; 2001, Houston Conference). At each conference, the field strengthened its identity and debated issues of importance to the field, such as social justice initiatives and multicultural competencies. In 1999, Division 17 was one of the founding divisions (along with divisions 35, 44, and 45) of the National Multicultural Conference and Summit (NMCS). In 2008 the Society of Counseling Psychology held its first international conference in Chicago, acknowledging the global nature of counseling psychology. In fact, there has been a growing emphasis in the field on ensuring transnational and global perspectives in science and practice (see Gerstein, et al. 2009, cited under Reference Works).
Ecosystem Services
Authors: Isbell Forest
Published: February 2014

Investigations of ecosystem services have journeyed from discussing how people depend on nature, through refining definitions and classification schemes, to accounting for multiple benefits that nature provides for people in decision-making processes. Ecological and economic approaches are becoming increasingly integrated in ecosystem service studies, and a common language is emerging. In particular, landscape-ecological and welfare-economic approaches are often utilized and integrated in these studies. Ecosystem services extend the traditional conservation agenda, offering a fuller consideration of the benefits and costs arising from land-use changes and marine spatial planning. It has also been argued, however, that ecosystem services distract from the original mission of biodiversity conservation. The citations included in this article include foundational works; overviews and assessments; definitions and classification schemes; debates; and applications in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems.
Indian Jews
Authors: Weil Shalva
Published: February 2014

Indo-Judaic studies, which range from historical to anthropological treatises, have developed at a rapid pace since the 1990s. Linguistic evidence confirms the possibility of ancient Jewish communities and early commercial connections between India and the Holy Land. The articles brought on King Solomon’s ships and mentioned in the biblical book of Kings, such as kofim (apes) tukim (peacocks), and almag (sandalwood = valgum), were of Indian origin. Travelers’ tales in the Talmud mention trade with India, including specific commodities, such as Indian ginger and iron. From the ninth century ce, Jewish merchants known as Radanites traded between East and West, from the Middle East to South Asia and back. Ancient Jewish texts, dating from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, discovered in the Cairo Genizah, include documents describing the trade carried out between Arab-speaking Jews and Hindu partners in spices, pharmaceuticals, textiles, metals, gold, silver, and silks. The Jews of India consisted of three distinct communities: the Bene Israel, the Cochin Jews, and the “Baghdadis.” Their ranks were temporarily swelled before and during World War II by European Jews who fled from Nazi Europe. Except for a brief period in certain parts of India under Portuguese rule, the Jews never encountered anti-Semitism there. In recent years, different tribal peoples from northeastern India, today known as Bnei Menashe, claim that they are “lost” Israelites and are migrating to Israel. In addition, other Indian groups are in the process of Judaizing. At their peak in 1947, prior to Indian independence, the total Jewish population of India numbered 28,000. To date, some 34,000 Jews remain in India. Others are scattered in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, and more than approximately 80,000 Jews of Indian descent live in Israel.
Geography of Justice
Authors: Jeffrey Alex
Published: February 2014

The term “geography of justice” can be interpreted in a number of ways. One reading of the term relates to the spatial aspects of claims to justice. This interpretation is often related to questions of social justice, work that examines fundamental questions of inequality and the uneven distribution of resources or harm. The roots of this scholarship are diverse, inspired by anticapitalist, anticolonial, and feminist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the diversity of these approaches, they all express an interest in addressing questions of spatial justice, where the organization of space is understood as a crucial aspect of the entrenchment of injustice within society. At the heart of much of this work is a philosophical question of how justice is interpreted, most crucially whether justice is a universal human condition (perhaps structured around certain human rights) or should be understood as a more localized set of solidarities. These concerns become particularly apparent when questions of spatial justice are considered within structures of power relations. A second interpretation of “geography of justice” relates to the mechanisms used to address injustice and resolve conflict. Alongside reflections of the spatial qualities of injustice, legal geographers have examined the relationship between law and space. On the one hand, this work has encouraged scholarly reflection on the spatial nature of legal concepts, such as jurisdiction and sovereignty. On the other, it has explored the spatial aspects of trial processes, from the architecture of courtrooms to the spatiality of prisons and internment. A third interpretation of “geography of justice” turns critical attention to the nature of scholarly inquiry, posing the question, what is a just form of geographical discipline? Much of the work examining forms of spatial justice and legal geographies has reflected on the nature of knowledge production within geography, and the subsequent ways in which certain viewpoints, topics, or voices have been marginalized. Emerging in particular from the fields of feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist scholarship, these reflections have sought to challenge injustices within the discipline of geography. These perspectives have advanced forms of qualitative methodology that focus on positionality: the implications of the researcher’s identity, geography, and history for the nature of knowledge production. Reflecting these three aspects of the “geography of justice,” the review below does not chart the emergence of a single, coherent body of scholarship. Instead, it seeks to sketch the implications of this fragmentation and diversification, as geographers and others have explored the complex intersection between geography and justice.
Biopedoturbation
Authors: Butler David R. , Cavin Rachel M.
Published: February 2014

Biopedoturbation (spelled “biopedturbation” in British, Canadian, and Australian publications) is soil mixing by biological means (i.e., by animals, plants, and humans). Pedoturbation (or “pedturbation”), the mixing of soils, encompasses all forms of biopedoturbation as well as mixing by air, water, shrinking and swelling of clays, freeze-thaw activity, crystal growth, mass movements, extraterrestrial impacts, and earthquakes. Under the broad umbrella of biopedoturbation, “faunalturbation” (also known as “faunalpedoturbation” or “faunalpedturbation”) is the study of soil mixing by animals. Faunalturbation has been widely studied by geographers, compared to the number of geographic studies examining soil mixing by plants, or “floralturbation” (also known as “floralpedoturbation” or “floralpedturbation”). Human mixing of soils, broadly studied in agriculture and pedology as well as in geography, has been referred to as “anthroturbation” (or “anthropedoturbation,” “anthropedturbation”). Biopedoturbation studies are not restricted to geography, where they typically occur within the fields of soils geography and in biogeomorphology, but are also common in pedology and in the ecological subdiscipline of ecosystem engineering. With the increasing focus of geomorphologists on fine-scale process studies and measurements since the 1970s, studies of biopedoturbation have increased dramatically. However, classic studies of biopedoturbation can be traced back to the last published work by Charles Darwin in the late 1800s, who spent his final years meticulously documenting the soil-mixing effects of earthworms. With the emergence of the subdiscipline of zoogeomorphology in the 1990s within geomorphology, many studies of zoogeomorphic effects on landscapes can be considered to fall under the broad rubric of biopedoturbation. Examples include churning of soil by burrowing animals such as gophers and moles, wallowing actions of animals, trampling and chiseling of soils by animal hooves, and digging for food. Floralpedoturbation is primarily accomplished by tree uprooting, although root growth through soils also accomplishes soil mixing. Anthropedoturbation includes all forms of soil mixing by humans, including agricultural activities, and has been invoked by some authors as a primary indicator of the onset of the Anthropocene epoch.
Slope Processes
Authors: Mudd Simon M.
Published: February 2014

Much of the terrestrial surface of our planet is sloping. Rivers and glaciers occupy some of this terrain, but the vast majority of sloping grounds are hillslopes, or simply “slopes.” Slope processes are those that generate and transport soil or regolith. Both chemical and physical weathering occurs on and within slopes, and mass transport can be rapid and hazardous, as in the case of mass wasting, or gradual, as in the case of soil creep. Although humans have presumably pondered since prehistoric times why landscapes look the way they do, the formal study of slope processes has its roots in the 19th century, when scientists began debating how sediment is produced, the mechanisms and rates at which it is transported, and the manner in which sloping lands evolve through time. The field of slope processes continues today with the aim of predicting socially relevant phenomena such as slope failure and soil sustainability. Recent advances have been abetted by new techniques allowing unprecedented accuracy in characterizing the topography, chemistry, material properties, ages, and transport rates of sloping landscapes.
Revolutionary Literature under Mao
Authors: King Richard
Published: February 2014

This article includes literature (principally fiction, but also poetry, spoken drama, opera, and popular performances), cultural policy and debate, and the history of the Communist Party’s relations with cultural intellectuals for the years 1942–1976. The starting point is Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” delivered in May 1942, when China was politically divided and at war with Japan, and the period ends with Mao’s death in September 1976, an event closely followed by the arrest of his widow and her closest associates in a coup the following month. Mao’s “Talks” set the tone for the entire period, demanding the subordination of the arts to the Party’s mission as currently defined, and insisting that culture serve the Party’s constituency of “workers, peasants, and soldiers.” The “Talks,” variously interpreted, remained Party policy through the civil war period (1945–1949), and following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. The new communist state established a Soviet Union–style cultural bureaucracy, and the most fortunate writers, performers, and artists were rewarded with official recognition and state sponsorship; also imported from the Soviet Union was the doctrine of socialist realism, with its requirement for loyalist and heroic works celebrating the nation’s prospective progress along the road to the glorious future of communism. Throughout the Mao era, the authorities sought to sponsor a new socialist Chinese culture, with varying degrees of tolerance for indigenous traditions and Western influence. The Communist Party and its leader believed in the power of the arts to support, and in the wrong hands to undermine, the cause of socialism; Mao intervened periodically in cultural matters, and many of the political campaigns that disrupted the period had cultural components. The effect of mercurial and often vindictive policy changes on writers and artists could be devastating: the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s last decade (1966–1976) saw the persecution of many of the nation’s leading cultural figures; virtually no writer or artist had an uninterrupted career. Chinese cultural histories customarily view the Yan’an and civil war period as distinct, and they divide the period from 1949 to 1976 into the seventeen years before 1966 and the Cultural Revolution decade that followed. Although this periodization overstates the discontinuity of cultural policy and artistic output, it will be observed for convenience here. A note on Romanization: English-language publications from China prior to 1979 use a modified, and inefficient, version of the now little-used Wade-Giles Romanization; after 1979, Chinese publishers converted to the now conventional pinyin Romanization. For Western scholarship or translations, the transition from Wade-Giles (in its more precise form) to pinyin took place at around the same time.
Early Medieval Poetry
Authors: Chen Jack W. , Nicoll-Johnson Evan
Published: February 2014

The designation “early medieval China” denotes the centuries between the end of the Eastern Han 東漢 (27 ce–220 ce) and the Sui 隋 dynasty (581 ce–618 ce), or c. 200 ce–600 ce. During this period the Eastern Han devolved into rebellion and warlordism, ending with the founding of the Wei 魏 dynasty (220 ce–265 ce). The Wei in turn was supplanted by the Jin 晉dynasty (265 ce–420 ce). Although the new rulers managed to unify China for a brief time, the dynasty was forced south of the Yangzi River when non-Han nomadic tribes sacked Luoyang and Chang’an. Following this came the Northern and Southern Dynasties 南北朝 (420 ce–589 ce), which took place, respectively, to the north and south of the Yangzi River. Non-Han clans ruled during the Northern Dynasties 北朝 (386 ce–581 ce), whereas the Southern Dynasties 南朝 (420 ce–579 ce) era was controlled by northern emigré and southern clans. Sometimes, the period is referred to as the Six Dynasties 六朝 period or simply the Period of Disunion. Although this period was not one of grand empire building, it was acclaimed as an age of great literary, intellectual, and cultural accomplishment. Of particular cultural importance was the emergence of pentasyllabic (wuyan五言) and heptasyllabic (qiyan七言) shi詩 (lyric poetry), which began to rival and, eventually, eclipse the dominant, tetrasyllabic (siyan四言) form, which could be traced back to the Classic of Poetry (Shijing [詩經]). It should be noted, however, that although literary histories often conventionally characterize early medieval China as dominated by pentasyllabic poetry, the genre fu賦 (rhapsody, rhyme prose) was as significant in terms of cultural prestige. Also of importance was yuefu shi樂府詩 (Music Bureau poetry), often treated as a genre, but actually an amorphous poetic corpus with musical associations, from ritual hymns to local song traditions and literati imitations. The three major forms are often treated separately, but they share many thematic commonalities. Furthermore, there is a vast literature in Chinese and Japanese devoted to the poetry of this period, and the following article is intended simply as a starting point for research. This article provides a guide to the main traditional sources and modern critical editions for early medieval poetry, along with important English-language scholarship and selected scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, French, and German. Those interested in more general reference works and resources for Chinese poetry should consult the article on Traditional Chinese Poetry.
Yuan Dynasty Art
Authors: Purtle Jennifer
Published: February 2014

The art of the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368) is that produced in China under Mongolian rule. Traditional Chinese histories of the arts of this period, as well as many 20th-century accounts, have emphasized developments in Chinese-style arts. Since the late 20th century, scholarship in Europe, North America, and Asia has begun to address the vibrant multiculturalism of the arts in the Chinese portion of the Great Mongol Nation (Mongolian: Yeke Mongɣol Ulus, likely a translation of the Chinese Dai Menggu guo), bounded in the west by the eastern reaches of Hungary; in the east, by the Pacific Ocean; in the north, by the steppes; and in the south, by India and northern Vietnam. Just as the Yuan state was multilingual, so too its art assimilated the forms of multiple cultures that existed within the larger Mongolian Empire. Mongolian studies flourished from the 1950s to the 1980s in Europe and North America. This scholarship, on political and cultural histories of the Great Mongol Nation, grounded in both Mongolian and Chinese primary sources, sparked contemporary art-historical scholarship on the Yuan dynasty. Unlike the work of historians, which took a broad linguistic view of the period, even the most groundbreaking scholarship on Yuan dynasty art of that period was rooted in classical Chinese-language primary sources. Lack of engagement with primary sources in Mongolian, Persian, and Tibetan, coupled with the inaccessibility of China and Mongolia to scholars from other countries, especially in the West, produced scholarship on Yuan dynasty art that emphasized Chinese artistic media and forms. For much of the 20th century, the predominant subfield of Chinese art history was the history of painting. However, the arts of the Yuan dynasty include other important media, namely, architecture, urbanism, and the decorative arts, especially ceramics and textiles. The Yuan dynasty was the age in which blue-and-white porcelain was born and became a significant trade good. This was also a period in which traditional Chinese techniques of textile manufacture were transformed by contact with imported weaves and fibers. Additionally, given that the Yuan dynasty circulated artists and artisans from throughout Mongol-held lands, the arts of the Yuan also saw the development of sculpture, painting in non-Chinese styles, and metalwork.
Long-Term Follow-up of Off-Pump and On-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting
Authors: Raja Shahzad G. , Benedetto Umberto , Chudasama Dimple , Daley Siobhan , Husain Mubassher , Amrani Mohamed
Published: February 2014

Objective

Despite increasing recognition of the benefits of off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), concerns persist regarding its impact on long-term mortality and freedom from reintervention. In this study, we assessed the impact of off-pump CABG on long-term outcomes.

Methods

From January 2002 to December 2002, a total of 307 consecutive patients who underwent isolated multivessel off-pump CABG at our institution were compared with a control group of 397 patients who underwent multivessel on-pump CABG during the same period. Perioperative data were prospectively collected and compared. In addition, univariate and risk-adjusted comparisons between the two groups were performed at 10 years.

Results

After adjusting for clinical covariates, off-pump CABG did not emerge as a significant independent predictor of long-term mortality [hazard ratio (HR), 0.91; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.70–1.12], readmission to hospital for cardiac cause (HR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.78–1.10), or the need for reintervention (HR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.87–1.05).

Conclusions

At long-term follow-up, off-pump CABG remains a safe and effective myocardial revascularization strategy with no adverse impact on survival or freedom from reintervention.
Protein associated with SMAD1 (PAWS1/FAM83G) is a substrate for type I bone morphogenetic protein receptors and modulates bone morphogenetic protein signalling
Authors: Vogt Janis , Dingwell Kevin S. , Herhaus Lina , Gourlay Robert , Macartney Thomas , Campbell David , Smith James C. , Sapkota Gopal P.
Published: February 2014

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) control multiple cellular processes in embryos and adult tissues. BMPs signal through the activation of type I BMP receptor kinases, which then phosphorylate SMADs 1/5/8. In the canonical pathway, this triggers the association of these SMADs with SMAD4 and their translocation to the nucleus, where they regulate gene expression. BMPs can also signal independently of SMAD4, but this pathway is poorly understood. Here, we report the discovery and characterization of PAWS1/FAM83G as a novel SMAD1 interactor. PAWS1 forms a complex with SMAD1 in a SMAD4-independent manner, and BMP signalling induces the phosphorylation of PAWS1 through BMPR1A. The phosphorylation of PAWS1 in response to BMP is essential for activation of the SMAD4-independent BMP target genesNEDD9andASNS. Our findings identify PAWS1 as the first non-SMAD substrate for type I BMP receptor kinases and as a novel player in the BMP pathway. We also demonstrate that PAWS1 regulates the expression of several non-BMP target genes, suggesting roles for PAWS1 beyond the BMP pathway.
Paenochrobactrum
pullorum sp. nov. isolated from a chicken
Authors: Kämpfer Peter , Poppel Marie T. , Wilharm Gottfried , Glaeser Stefanie P. , Busse Hans-Jürgen
Published: February 2014

A Gram-stain-negative, rod-shaped, oxidase-positive, non-spore-forming, non-motile bacterium (strain 280T) isolated from a chicken was studied for its taxonomic allocation. 16S rRNA gene sequence analyses clearly allocated the isolate in the genus

Paenochrobactrum

group with a 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity of 98.8 % to the currently recognized species,

Paenochrobactrum gallinarii

and

Paenochrobactrum glaciei

. This allocation was confirmed by the fatty acid data (major fatty acids: C18 : 1ω7c and C19 : 0 cyclo ω8c) and a polyamine pattern with the major compound putrescine and relatively high amounts of spermidine. Also, the polar lipid profile with phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatiylmonomethylethanolamine, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine and the genus-specific ‘stretched aminolipid’ was well in line with the description of the genus

Paenochrobactrum

. The quinone system consisted predominantly of ubiquinone Q-10 with traces of Q-9 and Q-11. DNA–DNA hybridization of strain 280T with

Paenochrobactrum gallinarii

Sa25T and

Paenochrobactrum glaciei

KMM 3858T showed relatedness values of 38.8 % (reciprocal 20.2 %) and 30.2 % (reciprocal 29.8 %), respectively. These results in combination with differentiating physiological and biochemical data clearly showed that strain 280T merits species status. We propose the name Paenochrobactrum pullorum sp. nov. to accommodate this strain with the type strain 280T ( = LMG 28095T = CIP 110700T).
Halomicroarcula limicola sp. nov., isolated from a marine solar saltern, and emended description of the genus Halomicroarcula
Authors: Zhang Wen-Jiao , Cui Heng-Lin
Published: February 2014

Halophilic archaeal strain YGHS32T was isolated from the Yinggehai marine solar saltern near Shanya city of Hainan Province, China. Cells of the strain were pleomorphic and lysed in distilled water, stained Gram-negative and formed red-pigmented colonies. Strain YGHS32T was able to grow at 20–50 °C (optimum 37 °C), in the presence of 0.9–4.8 M NaCl (optimum 2.1 M NaCl), with 0.005–1.0 M MgCl2 (optimum 0.3 M MgCl2) and at pH 6.0–8.5 (optimum pH 7.5). The minimal NaCl concentration to prevent cell lysis was 5 % (w/v). The major polar lipids of the strain were phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol phosphate methyl ester, phosphatidylglycerol sulfate and four major glycolipids chromatographically identical to sulfated mannosyl glucosyl diether, mannosyl glucosyl diether, glucosyl mannosyl glucosyl diether and a diglycosyl diether. Strain YGHS32T had two dissimilar 16S rRNA genes and both of them were phylogenetically related to those of

Halomicroarcula pellucida

JCM 17820T (92.9–96.3 % sequence similarity). The rpoB′ gene sequence similarity between strain YGHS32T and

Halomicroarcula pellucida

JCM 17820T was 91.3 %. The DNA G+C content of strain YGHS32T was 64.0 mol%. The DNA–DNA hybridization value between strain YGHS32T and

Halomicroarcula pellucida

JCM 17820T was 45 %. It was concluded that strain YGHS32T ( = CGMCC 1.12129T = JCM 18640T) represents a novel species of the genus

Halomicroarcula

, for which the name Halomicroarcula limicola sp. nov. is proposed. An emended description of the genus

Halomicroarcula

is also presented.