bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pulmonary Effects of Positive-pressure Ventilation
Authors: Silva Pedro Leme , Nieman Gary , Pelosi Paolo , Rocco Patricia RM
Published: March 2024

Summary

Mechanical ventilation represents a life-support system to ensure blood gas exchange and to assist respiratory muscles to ventilate the non-compliant lung during the acute phase of lung disease or following surgery. Positive-pressure mechanical ventilation considerably differs from normal physiologic negative-pressure breathing. If applied incorrectly, mechanical ventilation can cause a secondary lung injury known as ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI). Multiple parameters that comprise the mechanical breath, including tidal volume (VT), positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP), plateau (Pplat) and driving (ΔP) pressures, respiratory rate (RR), and airflow (Vʹ), must all be adjusted appropriately in order to minimize VILI. Numerous mechanisms have been hypothesized for VILI including (1) inspiratory stress (i.e. the respiratory system Pplat), (2) dynamic strain (i.e. the ratio between VT and the end-expiratory lung volume), (3) static strain (i.e. the end-expiratory lung volume determined by PEEP), (4) driving pressure (i.e. the difference between Pplat and PEEP), (5) energy (i.e. the changes in airway pressure as a function of VT), and (6) and power (the amount of energy as a function of RR). Two of these mechanisms are predominantly associated with VILI: (1) volutrauma, inappropriate tidal volumes leading to alveolar overdistension, and (2) atelectrauma, cyclic closing and opening of small airways and alveoli due to low PEEP levels. Understanding VILI mechanisms and identifying the optimal combination of mechanical ventilator parameters to block these mechanisms can be personalized to the pathology of each patient’s lung.
Extrapulmonary Effects of Positive-pressure Ventilation
Authors: Silva Pedro Leme , Nieman Gary , Pelosi Paolo , Rocco Patricia RM
Published: March 2024

Summary

One of the consequences of positive-pressure ventilation is an increase in intrathoracic pressure. This leads to several negative consequences, both in organs situated within the mediastinum and remotely. First, haemodynamic changes can affect cardiovascular performance, cerebral perfusion pressure, and drainage of renal veins. Second, the negative effect of mechanical ventilation on the alveolar–capillary membrane may cause inflammation in susceptible distal organs, such as the central nervous system, kidney, and liver. Intra-abdominal hypertension (IAH) impairs lung and peripheral organ function. The ideal combinations of mechanical ventilation settings necessary to optimize both respiratory function and haemodynamics in the presence of IAH have yet to be elucidated. Finally, ventilator-induced diaphragm dysfunction is discussed. Understanding the effects of positive-pressure ventilation on extrapulmonary organs is important to prevent multiple organ dysfunction and improve long-term outcomes after discharge from the intensive care unit.
Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome
Authors: Umbrello Michele , Formenti Paolo , Chiumello Davide
Published: March 2024

Summary

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is characterized by non-cardiogenic pulmonary oedema with bilateral chest X-ray opacities and reduction in respiratory system compliance. The hallmark of the syndrome is hypoxaemia refractory to oxygen therapy. Although the standard supportive treatment remains mechanical ventilation (both non-invasive and invasive), adjuvant therapies can be considered. Therapeutic approaches to ARDS, including lung-protective ventilation, prone positioning, inhaled vasodilators, neuromuscular blockade, steroids, and recruitment manoeuvres, will be reviewed. In patients with ARDS, a holistic framework of respiratory and haemodynamic support should be provided, aiming to ensure adequate gas exchange while minimizing the risk of ventilator-induced lung injury, by promoting lung recruitment and protective mechanical ventilation. To do so, lung recruitability should be considered, while avoiding lung overstress and consequent strain, by monitoring airway driving pressure or transpulmonary pressure. In the most severe cases, neuromuscular blockade, prone positioning, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (alone or in combination) should be considered.
Chest Wall Disease and Post-thoracic Surgery
Authors: Kiss Thomas , Abreu Marcelo Gama de
Published: March 2024

Summary

Chest wall diseases can arise from a number of causes and can result in altered respiratory mechanics. Kyphoscoliosis, a mostly idiopathic deformity of the spine commonly alters chest wall compliance. In adolescence treatment may include observation, bracing or surgery, whilst surgical correction in adults is of uncertain benefit and has significant associate morbidity.

Pleural diseases including infections (empyema) and other processes such as asbestosis may lead to fibrothorax, which although pleural in origin can produce similar restrictive defects to chest wall disease. Surgical decortication, by open or video-assisted thoracoscopic approaches are often required if less invasive approaches fail. Ankylosing spondylitis is the most common form of spondyloarthropathies and usually affects young male adults. In most patients, pain, stiffness, and fatigue associated with the disease is the most limiting factor. Treatment is primarily preventive and supportive, and focuses on pain and inflammation control and maintenance of maximum skeletal mobility to prevent deformities. The two most familiar and common chest wall abnormalities are pectus excavatum and pectus carinatum. The minimally invasive surgical repair (Nuss) of pectus excavatum has become widely accepted as an alternative to surgery. External bracing techniques can significantly improve pectus carinatum deformities. Management of chest wall disease in ICU requires close liaison between intensivists, thoracic surgeons and other specialist teams such as respiratory medicine and rheumatology depending on the underlying causes.
Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
Authors: Wilkinson Ian B. , Raine Tim , Wiles Kate , Hateley Peter , Kelly Dearbhla , McGurgan Iain
Published: March 2024

Unique among medical texts, the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine is a complete and concise guide to the core areas of medicine that also encourages thinking about the world from the patient's perspective, offering a holistic, patient-centred approach. Loved and trusted by millions for over three decades, the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine continues to be a truly indispensable companion for the practice of modern medicine. Now in its eleventh edition, the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine includes three new authors on the writing team, bringing a fresh perspective to the content. Each page has been updated to reflect the latest changes in practice and best management, and the chapters on haematology, oncology, surgery, and radiology have been extensively reworked. Figures and illustrations have been carefully revised and updated in response to reader feedback, key references have been honed to the most up-to-date and relevant, and the text has undergone a thorough review process to ensure the level and coverage are pitched correctly.
Chest medicine
Authors: Wilkinson Ian B. , Raine Tim , Wiles Kate , Hateley Peter , Kelly Dearbhla , McGurgan Iain
Published: March 2024

This chapter explores chest medicine, including respiratory health, bedside tests in chest medicine, further investigations in chest medicine, pneumonia, bronchiectasis, cystic fibrosis (CF), lung tumours, fungi and the lung, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), respiratory failure, pulmonary embolism (PE), pneumothorax, pleural effusion, obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome, cor pulmonale, sarcoidosis, interstitial lung disease (ILD), idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), and occupational lung diseases.
Kidney medicine
Authors: Wilkinson Ian B. , Raine Tim , Wiles Kate , Hateley Peter , Kelly Dearbhla , McGurgan Iain
Published: March 2024

This chapter discusses renal medicine, including urine, urinary tract infection (UTI), acute kidney injury (AKI), chronic kidney disease (CKD), renal replacement therapy (RRT), transplantation, glomerulonephritis, nephrotic syndrome, systemic disease in the kidney, kidney tubules: disorders and diuretics, tubulointerstitial nephropathy and nephrotoxins, and inherited kidney disease.
Infectious diseases
Authors: Wilkinson Ian B. , Raine Tim , Wiles Kate , Hateley Peter , Kelly Dearbhla , McGurgan Iain
Published: March 2024

This chapter discusses infectious diseases, and includes bacterial infection, antibiotics, gram-positive bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, tuberculosis (TB), influenza, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) diagnosis, complications, and HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART), herpes, immunization, fungi, healthcare-associated (nosocomial) infection, sexually transmitted infection, fever in the returning traveller, enteric fever, malaria, mosquito-borne disease, vector-borne disease, zoonoses, viral haemorrhagic fever (VHF), gastroenteritis, gastrointestinal parasites, schistosomiasis and liver disease, neurological disease, eye disease, skin disease, and pyrexia of unknown origin.
3D simulations of TRAPPIST-1e with varying CO2, CH4, and haze profiles
Authors: Mak Mei Ting , Sergeev Denis E , Mayne Nathan , Banks Nahum , Eager-Nash Jake , Manners James , Arney Giada , Hébrard Éric , Kohary Krisztian
Published: March 2024

Using a 3D General Circulation Model, the Unified Model, we present results from simulations of a tidally locked TRAPPIST-1e with varying carbon dioxide CO2 and methane CH4 gas concentrations, and their corresponding prescribed spherical haze profiles. Our results show that the presence of CO2 leads to a warmer atmosphere globally due to its greenhouse effect, with the increase of surface temperature on the dayside surface reaching up to ∼14.1 K, and on the nightside up to ∼21.2 K. Increasing presence of CH4 first elevates the surface temperature on the dayside, followed by a decrease due to the balance of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling. A thin layer of haze, formed when the partial pressures of CH4 to CO2 (pCH4/pCO2) = 0.1, leads to a dayside warming of ∼4.9 K due to a change in the water vapour H2O distribution. The presence of a haze layer that formed beyond the ratio of 0.1 leads to dayside cooling. The haze reaches an optical threshold thickness when pCH4/pCO2 ∼ 0.4 beyond which the dayside mean surface temperature does not vary much. The planet is more favourable to maintaining liquid water on the surface (mean surface temperature above 273.15 K) when pCO2 is high, pCH4 is low, and the haze layer is thin. The effect of CO2, CH4, and haze on the dayside is similar to that for a rapidly rotating planet. On the contrary, their effect on the nightside depends on the wind structure and the wind speed in the simulation.
A morphological segmentation approach to determining bar lengths
Authors: Cavanagh Mitchell K , Bekki Kenji , Groves Brent A
Published: March 2024

Bars are important drivers of galaxy evolution, influencing many physical processes and properties. Characterizing bars is a difficult task, especially in large-scale surveys. In this work, we propose a novel morphological segmentation technique for determining bar lengths based on deep learning. We develop U-Nets capable of decomposing galaxy images into pixel masks highlighting the regions corresponding to bars and spiral arms. We demonstrate the versatility of this technique through applying our models to galaxy images from two different observational data sets with different source imagery, and to RGB colour and monochromatic galaxy imaging. We apply our models to analyse SDSS and Subaru HyperSuprime Cam imaging of barred galaxies from the NA10 and Sydney AAO Multi-object IFS catalogues in order to determine the dependence of bar length on stellar mass, morphology, redshift and the spin parameter proxy $\lambda _{R_e}$. Based on the predicted bar masks, we show that the relative bar scale length varies with morphology, with early type galaxies hosting longer bars. While bars are longer in more massive galaxies in absolute terms, relative to the galaxy disc they are actually shorter. We also find that the normalized bar length decreases with increasing redshift, with bars in early type galaxies exhibiting the strongest rate of decline. We show that it is possible to distinguish spiral arms and bars in monochrome imaging, although for a given galaxy the estimated length in monochrome tends to be longer than in colour imaging. Our morphological segmentation technique can be efficiently applied to study bars in large-scale surveys and even in cosmological simulations.
Superflare rate variability on M dwarfs
Authors: Crowley James , Wheatland Michael S , Yang Kai
Published: March 2024

M dwarfs are often highly flare productive, and changes in the rate of flaring can potentially affect the radiation and energetic particles an exoplanet is exposed to. Rate variability has been found to be rare on G-type stars, and there has been limited study of the variability of flaring on M dwarfs. Using data from the TESS mission up to Observation Sector 66, we analyse 658 stars ranging from K7 to M5 to test for superflare rate variability by calculating an optimal piecewise constant-rate model for flare occurrence using a Bayesian algorithm and identify 66 stars with rate changes, a larger proportion than our previous study into G-type stars (7 out of 270 stars). We find that rate variability does not depend on the stellar parameters for our sample. We investigate how the flare-frequency distribution for these stars varies and whether this variation affects exoplanet habitability. No stars in our sample provide sufficient UV flux to support prebiotic chemistry. We investigate the phase distributions on the rate variable stars, finding 11 cases of potential phase dependence in flaring across seven stars. We also compare the Bayesian method to another measure of activity, the fraction of flux emitted through flares, and do not observe a consistent relationship between this flaring activity metric and the optimal Bayesian model. We discuss the possible reasons for the discrepancy and identify a problem with the flaring activity metric due to the power-law distribution of the flare events.
Effects of an Increased Financial Incentive on Follow-up in an Online, Automated Smoking Cessation Trial: A randomized Controlled Study Within a Trial
Authors: High Juliet , Grant Kelly , Hope Aimie , Shepstone Lee , West Claire , Colles Antony , Naughton Felix
Published: March 2024

Introduction

Poor retention in clinical trials can impact on statistical power, reliability, validity, and generalizability of findings and is a particular challenge in smoking cessation studies. In online trials with automated follow-up mechanisms, poor response also increases the resource need for manual follow-up. This study compared two financial incentives on response rates at 6 months follow up, in an online, automated smoking cessation feasibility trial of a cessation smartphone app (Quit Sense).

Aims and Methods

A study within a trial (SWAT), embedded within a host randomized controlled trial. Host trial participants were randomized 1:1 to receive either a £10 or £20 voucher incentive, for completing the 6-month questionnaire. Stratification for randomization to the SWAT was by minimization to ensure an even split of host trial arm participants and by 6-week response rate. Outcome measures were: Questionnaire completion rate, time to completion, number of completers requiring manual follow-up, and completeness of responses.

Results

Two hundred and four participants were randomized to the SWAT. The £20 and £10 incentives did not differ in completion rate at 6 months (79% vs. 74%; p = .362) but did reduce the proportion of participants requiring manual follow-up (46% vs. 62%; p = .018) and the median completion time (7 days vs. 15 days; p = .008). Measure response completeness rates were higher among £20 incentive participants, though differences were small for the host trial’s primary smoking outcome.

Conclusions

Benefits to using relatively modest increases in incentive for online smoking cessation trials include more rapid completion of follow-up questionnaires and reduced manual follow-up.

Implications

A modest increase in incentive (from £10 to £20) to promote the completion of follow-up questionnaires in online smoking cessation trials may not increase overall response rates but could lead to more rapid data collection, a reduced need for manual follow-up and reduced missing data among those who initiate completing a questionnaire. Such an improvement may help to reduce bias, increase validity and generalizability, and improve statistical power in smoking cessation trials.

Trial Registration

Host trial ISRCTN12326962, SWAT repository store ID 164.
A Method for Amending Loose Smokeless Tobacco With Menthol for Administration in Clinical Studies
Authors: Dolan Sean , McDonald Jacob , Claus Eric , Gahl Robert F , Sun Yan , Farrar Jabari , Meredith Steven
Published: March 2024

Introduction

Menthol has long been incorporated as a flavor additive in tobacco products and can impact use behaviors. Despite its inclusion in some of the most popular flavored smokeless tobacco (ST) products (eg, “mint” flavored products), few studies have systematically investigated the impact of menthol on ST use behaviors in prospective empirical studies. Rigorous investigation of ST menthol content on behavioral and physiological outcomes requires ST products with stable and precise levels of menthol; however, commercial product composition variability prevents product comparisons when evaluating the effects of systematic changes in menthol content on clinical outcomes.

Aims and Methods

We developed amended loose moist snuff ST products by treating commercially available, unflavored loose ST with an ethanol-based menthol spiking solution or a nonmentholated ethanol control solution to develop test products with different levels of menthol: 0, 1, 3, and 5 mg menthol/g tobacco. We evaluated the stability of menthol content in these products over 24 months and evaluated menthol exposure associated with the products through pharmacokinetic analysis of plasma menthol-glucuronide in human participants (n = 22).

Results

Menthol content of the amended products was on target, homogenous, and stable for up to 24 months. Menthol exposure (menthol-glucuronide Cmax and AUC) significantly differed between each test product.

Conclusions

These data suggest that stable products with nonoverlapping menthol content can be developed using a menthol spiking solution and can be subsequently administered for clinical assessments of mentholated loose ST.

Implications

The results from this study suggest that a menthol spiking solution can be used to mentholate unflavored, loose ST to a target menthol content. With this method, the ST menthol content was stable for at least 24 months, and the products exposed users to menthol in a dose-dependent manner. This method yielded loose ST products with precise, stable levels of menthol to allow systematic evaluation of ST menthol content on clinical outcomes. The method may have applications for systematically evaluating changes in other tobacco product ingredients.
Sequential Time to Positivity as a Prognostic Indicator in Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia
Authors: Comba Isin Y , Go John Raymond , Vaillant James , O’Horo John C , Stevens Ryan W , Palraj Raj , Abu Saleh Omar
Published: March 2024

Background

We aimed to determine the factors associated with sequential blood culture time to positivity (STTP) and validate the previously defined time to positivity (TTP) ratio threshold of 1.5 in predicting adverse disease outcomes and mortality of Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB).

Methods

We conducted an observational study of adult patients with SAB. The TTP ratio was calculated by dividing the TTP of the second blood culture by that of the first.

Results

Of 186 patients, 69 (37%) were female, with a mean age of 63.6 years. Median TTP was 12 hours (interquartile range [IQR], 10–15 hours) from the initial and 21 hours (17–29) from sequential blood cultures. Methicillin-resistant S aureus (MRSA)–infected patients had significantly shorter STTPs (P < .001) and lower TTP ratios (P < .001) compared to patients with methicillin-susceptible S aureus (MSSA). A significant correlation between initial and STTP was observed in patients with MRSA (r = 0.42, P = .002) but not in those with MSSA. A higher rate of native valve endocarditis (NVE) significantly correlated with a TTP ratio of ≤1.5 (odds ratio, 2.65 [95% confidence interval, 1.3–5.6]; P = .01). The subgroup having an initial TTP <12 hours combined with a TTP ratio ≤1.5 showed the highest prevalence of NVE.

Conclusions

The STTP varies based on methicillin susceptibility of S aureus isolate. This study suggests a potential clinical utility of the STTP to identify patients at a higher risk of NVE. However, prospective studies are required to validate these findings.
Hidden Wars
Authors: Davies Sara E. , True Jacqui
Published: March 2024

Hidden Wars documents the gendered political violence that is frequently neglected or ignored in conventional analysis of war and conflict, affecting how we understand conflict and which violence we prioritize with implications for postwar peace. Specifically, the book-length study examines the relationship between reports of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and structural gender inequality in three conflict-affected societies in Asia: Burma, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. It is based on extensive field research and analysis of an original dataset on conflict-related SGBV in each country. The longitudinal data is purposively contextualized within conflict dynamics, political struggles, and local understandings of gender relations. Existing social science research shows that structural gender inequality is the most significant risk factor for SGBV. Building on this scholarship, the authors argue that the presence and type of SGBV in Asian civil conflicts reflect distinct and highly politicized, gendered societies. Scholars and policymakers are aware that reporting silence is a major problem for identifying and responding to SGBV. As a result, however, they rarely note the limitations of the data and our knowledge of who perpetrates or is a victim of SGBV, when, and where, due to the politicized contexts of reporting and data collection on the ground. Hidden Wars addresses these real-world limitations by examining the social and political conditions—especially the reporting conditions—for SGBV. Localized patterns of SGBV and the prospects for its prevention in low-intensity conflict environments, like those predominant across Asia, are explicated.
Reframing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict
Authors: Davies Sara E. , True Jacqui
Published: March 2024

This chapter critically reviews the scholarship on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and highlights the relative absence of analysis of SGBV in low-intensity and protracted conflict environments. This absence is particularly significant for the Asian region. To date, most research on SGBV investigates its occurrence, prevalence, perpetrators, victims, and survivors in high-intensity conflict environments and genocide. Primary understanding of conflict-related SGBV, however, depends upon prior identification of a situation as “conflict-affected.” As a result of the substantial focus on high-intensity conflicts during this period, SGBV in Burma, the Philippines, Timor Leste, North Korea, and postconflict Cambodia and Sri Lanka were not studied to the same extent as Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where reports of mass sexual violence captured global public attention. This chapter argues that attention to SGBV in low-intensity, protracted conflict situations merits further study.
Rethinking Methodologies for Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict
Authors: Davies Sara E. , True Jacqui
Published: March 2024

This chapter asks how situations of endemic gender discrimination affect knowledge of where sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is taking place in low-intensity conflicts in Asia. This chapter has three main parts. First, it explains why existing methods for understanding and preventing SGBV often do not work in Asia. Second, the chapter explores how silences with regard to acts of SGBV can be identified and investigated by scrutinizing the blind spots of existing SGBV reporting and data collection methods. Third, this chapter illustrates the book’s methodological approach to identifying and analyzing SGBV in Asian contexts of low-intensity conflict. It highlights the importance of feminist analytical reflexivity in addressing the limitations of any approach to conflict-related SGBV and what they imply about the silences and absence of reports in particular areas and phases of conflict.
Probing SilencesSexual and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict and Peace in the Philippines
Authors: Davies Sara E. , True Jacqui
Published: March 2024

This chapter investigates the case of the Philippines exploring the pattern of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) reports from 1998 to 2016, during the key years in which the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the largest insurgent group in the conflict-affected island of Mindanao, achieved a peace process. The chapter finds that while SGBV is acknowledged, it is not viewed as conflict-related. Instead, this violence is dissociated from conflict and attributed to the personalized culture of violence, impunity, clan wars, economic disenfranchisement, and displacement that primarily affect women, particularly Indigenous women, in the Mindanao region. Minimal SGBV reporting takes place in this conflict-affected region, and in the few surveys conducted of women in Mindanao, they are reluctant to come forward to report their SGBV experiences.
Comparing Regional Patterns and Trends in Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence across Asia
Authors: Davies Sara E. , True Jacqui
Published: March 2024

This chapter compares the research findings across the three Asian cases to reveal the effects of conflict dynamics on reporting SGBV before, during, and after conflict. It highlights four common trends across Burma, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka for further examination in other low-intensity or protracted conflicts globally: 1. Escalation of SGBV reports takes place along with increased international access to conflict areas. 2. Consistently low reports may be the result of no state provision of services or institutions for reporting conflict-related SGBV; emblematic of state denial of conflict and low prioritization of gendered political violence. 3. Little reporting of SGBV perpetrated by nonstate armed actors does not mean low nonstate armed actor prevalence. 4. How a conflict ends may sustain conflict-related SGBV and impunity. The chapter argues that addressing the limitations of SGBV reporting can assist with identifying—and therefore preventing—the onset and escalation of SGBV in low-intensity conflict environments.
Tribal Self-Government
Authors: Pevar Stephen L.
Published: March 2024

Indian tribes are sovereign nations exercising sovereign powers. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court, quoting one of its earlier decisions, confirmed that “Indian tribes [are] distinct, independent political communities exercising sovereign authority.” This chapter discusses the inherent powers that tribes have, including their right to form a government, to determine who qualifies for membership, to regulate activities occurring on tribal land, to regulate dangerous activities within the reservation, and to exercise criminal jurisdiction. Also discussed are the limitations that Congress has imposed on the exercise of tribal powers and whether Congress actually has a valid legal basis to impose those limitations.
Introduction
Authors: Ferguson Benjamin , Zwolinski Matt
Published: March 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the volume’s other chapters, organized around three themes that are central to exploitation theory: What is exploitation? Why, if at all, is it wrong? What should be done about it? The chapter surveys existing answers to these three questions and then situates the volume’s contributions within these themes. It also provides a general taxonomy of theories of exploitation, distinguishing first between agential accounts and structural accounts, and then between theories that focus purely on the distribution of transactional gains and those theories that also include non-distributive components, such as agents’ attitudes and mental states.
Sacrificing and Forgoing
Authors: van Donselaar Gijs
Published: March 2024

A distinction is made between what is sacrificed in helping others in distress and what is forgone in helping others in distress. What is sacrificed by saving a wreck-bound ship is the cost of towing it to safety; what is forgone is the value of the spoils on the beach if it is not towed to safety. Refusing to help the ship in order not to forgo the spoils is exploitation by omission, instrumentalizing the victims of the wreck. Neither consequentialists nor libertarians can be sensitive to the moral importance of the deontic distinction. The distinction is then applied to the relation between international corporations and the sweatshop laborers in their employ. It is concluded that the verdict “exploitative” crucially depends on the tightness of market conditions.
Two Faces of Exploitation
Authors: Sample Ruth
Published: March 2024

If two persons agree to a transaction, and the transaction makes both parties better off than they were before, then how can the transaction be wrong? The commonsense answer seems to be that such Pareto-efficient transactions cannot be wrong, and therefore there is no prima facie good reason to interfere with the transaction. Alan Wertheimer called this the non-worseness claim. And yet many putatively exploitative interactions seem to fit this description, yet seem to be seriously wrong. This is at the heart of what has come to be known as the paradox of exploitation. This chapter suggests a resolution of the paradox by appealing to a distinction in tort law: the distinction between moral injury and moral harm. It argues that the expressive content of some transactions constitutes a moral injury that is distinct from harm.
The Mystery of Suicide Clusters
Authors: Mueller Anna S. , Abrutyn Seth
Published: March 2024

This chapter introduces the notion of suicide in line with narratives from the journal by Aria, a teen who ended her life twelve days after starting her journal. It looks into the high-profile suicide clusters and suicide attempts among Poplar Grove High School students since 2000. Suicide results from a complex tangle of biological, social, and psychological factors that cause someone to experience intense psychological pain. The chapter acknowledges suicide as a significant public health problem among US adolescents. It also explains how to understand suicide losses and collective pain to identify new strategies to prevent suicide and make young lives feel worth living.
An Ideal Place
Authors: Mueller Anna S. , Abrutyn Seth
Published: March 2024

This chapter introduces the reader to Popular Grove, a seemingly idyllic community that, for all intents and purposes, should be exactly the kind of place that protects its kids from suicide. However, Popular Grove is home to an enduring youth suicide problem. The chapter then describes the dark side of the allegedly ideal community while referencing the unnamed privileges of Poplar Grovians for being White and in the upper echelons of socioeconomic status. Additionally, the affluence in Poplar Grove serves to further divide the school from the surrounding communities. Ultimately, these factors have consequences for youth well-being.
Safer Memorialization
Authors: Mueller Anna S. , Abrutyn Seth
Published: March 2024

This chapter tackles the serious concerns about mass memorializing people who have died by suicide. It looks into a community’s ability to effectively engage in postvention. In Poplar Grove, the dense social networks that draw community members into each other’s lives also draw them together in the wake of tragedy. However, one of the concerns lies in the fact that memorials may inadvertently glorify or romanticize suicide as an option, sending confusing messages about suicide. The chapter discusses the benefits of social inoculation of youth against suicide by openly talking about the pain of grieving and suicide at the memorial.
The Variety of Psalms
Authors: Bodner Keith
Published: March 2024

Within the collection of 150 psalms written over the course of a millennium, there is great diversity of material. Just as there are different kinds of songs nowadays (ballads, anthems, hymns, folk tunes) and assorted musical genres (classical, jazz, country, hip-hop), so there are numerous categories and styles of psalms. In this chapter various genres of psalms are canvassed, including the most frequently attested: psalms of lament and psalms of the temple. There is also some discussion about how the poetic medium was utilized to explore important topics such as alienation and suffering, child-rearing woes and vocational anxieties, fear of the future and situations of deep distress, in addition to the seemingly mundane circumstances of everyday routine as opportunities to experience the divine presence.
Israel’s Story in the Psalms
Authors: Bodner Keith
Published: March 2024

This chapter probes the ways the Israelite songwriters produced various compositions that invite the community to reimagine important events and to highlight the experience of a particular occasion or perhaps to counter a prevailing ideology or belief system. An important genre is the historical psalms, where a sequence of episodes in Israel’s national history are poetically represented. Nearly a dozen psalms might be classified as historical (or at least contain longer historical reflections or have the characteristics of the genre), and three examples are discussed in this chapter: Psalms 114, 105–106, and 78. Several kinds of interconnected elements are of interest: some of the poetic techniques that are used (such as parallelism of intensification, ellipsis, and intertextuality) in the historical psalms, the overall message of a given psalm when its entirety is considered, and ideas about why a particular historical psalm may have been composed and preserved and how it might have been used in ancient Israel’s social setting.
Iraq and ISIS
Authors: English Richard
Published: March 2024

This chapter discusses the Iraq War, which was tightly integrated into the War on Terror. Part of the rationale for the Iraq War was to counter the supposed threat of terrorism generated by Saddam Hussein’s regime and its connections. Since Saddam Hussein did not possess Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) nor the alliances that had been central to justifying the war, the outcome here in counter-terrorist terms was simply negative. Indeed, in terms of combating terrorism, the war proved counter-productive. Terrorism actually grew as a consequence of the Iraq War: the country became a magnet for jihadists, a site of violent struggle and lasting chaos, a justification deployed in defence of terrorist attacks elsewhere, and part of the complex sequence of events which generated the ISIS crisis. US foreign policy had been one of the supposed justifications for al-Qaida violence for some years. More broadly, Iraq fits the pattern that Western foreign policy—aimed at countering terrorism—has sometimes been one of the motivations behind anti-Western terrorism.
“This Fuller Life,” 1849–1854
Authors: Blumberg Ilana M.
Published: March 2024

Leaving the Midlands for London, Mary Ann Evans entered the intellectual center of English life and began work alongside the publisher John Chapman as the unacknowledged editor of The Westminster Review in the attempt to make it the leading journal of progressive thinking. From her anonymous but powerful platform she encountered and helped confirm the status of the mid-century’s most central thinkers in science, religion, philosophy, sociology, and art. In this period, she came to know well the thinkers Herbert Spencer and G. H. Lewes, who would become her life partner, and she took on the translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. She found Feuerbach’s aim, to awaken “religion to self-consciousness,” a powerful formulation of the relationship between theology and anthropology.
“A Divine Work to Be Done in Life,” 1857
Authors: Blumberg Ilana M.
Published: March 2024

As her marriage to Lewes thrived, fiction writing did as well. John Blackwood became a trusted, sensitive publisher with whom Eliot would work for almost the entirety of her career, at first under the incognito that allowed her work to be judged by its own merits and not harmed by her dubious reputation. Eliot’s early fiction both indicts contemporary Christianity and attests to its value when practiced in faith. If the institution of the Church often advanced no sacred goals, bred social division, and offered inscrutable doctrine, when practiced by human beings who shared a knowledge of common suffering and mortality a genuine religious experience became possible. Eliot boldly confronted the hardest problems facing religiously unorthodox moral thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century, implicitly claiming that realist novels would take up such problems or be worth nothing at all.
The “Soul’s Own Warrant,” 1860–1863
Authors: Blumberg Ilana M.
Published: March 2024

Eliot’s novels caught up with Marian’s spiritual life only in the early 1860s. Writing now from a place of financial security, Eliot took her favored plot line of the lonely search for meaning and fellowship past finding Christian faith, to losing such faith and surviving its loss. Romola allowed Eliot to explore the fallibility of religious authority and the potentially imperative demands of personal autonomy, a conflict autobiographically resonant both in her apostasy and in her decision to live with Lewes. Submission, the hallmark of her understanding of religious life, could no longer be represented as a satisfying resolution. In both Romola and Silas Marner, Eliot rejected the possibility of articulate divine–human communication and instead asserted a hallmark of religious modernity: a recognition that the self is all human beings have with which to arbitrate divine will, as it has come down to them through text and tradition.
The Population-Genetic Environment
Authors: Lynch Michael R.
Published: March 2024

Evolution depends ultimately on the population-genetic environment, defined by mutation and recombination rates and the power of random genetic drift. The latter, which is an inverse function of the effective population size, defines the noise in evolutionary dynamics. If the power of drift exceeds the deterministic force of selection, the latter is rendered ineffective, resulting in patterns of evolution entirely determined by mutational forces. These issues are central to understanding evolutionary processes because all three major forces vary by about four orders of magnitude across the Tree of Life. Moreover, the mutation rate evolves to become inversely related to the effective population size, so populations experiencing greater drift simultaneously experience increased mutational pressure. In addition, average rates of recombination per nucleotide site decline in larger organisms, which evolve larger chromosomes owing to the accumulation of large amounts of non-functional DNA, but still experience just one to two crossover events per chromosome arm during meiosis. This covariation of rates of mutation, recombination, and drift across the Tree of Life influences the ways in which different lineages evolve in response to natural selection, in effect creating drift barriers beyond which selection cannot proceed. In large multicellular organisms with small effective population sizes, natural selection is constrained to utilize mutations with relatively large effects, whereas microbes with large effective population sizes are capable of discriminating mutations with very tiny effects, opening up the capacity for more fine-grained evolution.
Evolution as a Population-Genetic Process
Authors: Lynch Michael R.
Published: March 2024

The distributions of fitness and phenotypic effects of mutations ultimately determine the evolutionary potential of phylogenetic lineages. No mutations have absolutely zero effects, and most are deleterious, but many have small enough fitness consequences that they are only visible to selection in populations of sufficiently large size. As consequence, traits under identical forms of selection in independent lineages will diverge phenotypically when population sizes are different with progress stalling at different locations along the drift barrier. Many adaptations require the simultaneous fixation of two or more mutations, a process whose efficiency can strongly depend on population size, which determines the number of mutational targets per generation. Stochastic tunnelling of pairs of linked mutations in large populations allows the establishment of features in which single mutations would otherwise be strongly deleterious. Mutation can also impact phenotypic evolution by facilitating movement towards more accessible states, guided by the multiplicity of ways in which certain phenotypes can be constructed from alternative genotypes. These basic principles from population genetics raise significant issues about the common assumption that observed phenotypes are precise reflections of prevailing selection pressures.
The Costs of Cellular Features
Authors: Lynch Michael R.
Published: March 2024

Evolutionary cell biology requires information on the bioenergetic costs of various cell structures and functions to clarify when the evolutionary benefits of cell features outweigh the baseline costs of investment. Counts of ATP hydrolyses constitute the universal bioenergetic currency in such estimates. The total energetic cost of a cellular feature is the sum of the direct costs of construction/operation and the opportunity costs resulting from the diversion of resources from alternative cellular functions. The fitness cost can be assessed as a reduction in the cell-growth potential associated with the presence of the feature investments (independent of downstream benefits accrued). This requires information on the biosynthetic costs of life’s basic building blocks and the costs of assembling/maintaining the resultant structure during the cell’s life. These analyses indicate that the internal membranes associated with organelles comprise a major part of eukaryotic cell budgets. Gene-level costs partition into components associated with replication, transcription, and translation, with protein-level investment being the primary contributor. Empirical data suggest that inserts of just a few nucleotides of inert DNA can be detected by selection in the small cells of prokaryotes – a simple explanation for genomic streamlining in such lineages. Although the absolute bioenergetic costs of the more elaborate genes in larger eukaryotic cells are magnified, the elevated total energy budgets of such cells result in reduced relative costs of genomic additions. With reduced effective population sizes, the accumulation of excess genomic material then proceeds passively in eukaryotic species, particularly in multicellular lineages.
Multiple Artworks as Abstract Entities
Authors: Davies David
Published: March 2024

This chapter argues that a workable distinction between singular and multiple artworks can be drawn in terms of being p-multiple: admitting of a plurality of strict p-instances. This is elucidated through Wollheim’s idea of multiple artworks as ‘types’. Types, Wollheim maintains, are posited when we wish to correlate a group of particulars with a piece of human invention. He identifies various ways in which multiple artworks, so conceived, can be initiated through such invention. P-multiplicity is built into the very methods whereby such works are initiated: methods that permit a plurality of strict p-instances to be generated, where this is both intended and internal to the very process of initiation. In the case of art forms traditionally regarded as singular, on the other hand, this is not the case. It is explained how Wolterstorff and Dodd have understood the ontological implications of treating multiple artworks as types. For Wolterstorff, multiple artworks are ‘norm-kinds’ admitting of both properly and improperly formed tokens. The sharing of predicates between multiple artworks and their tokens involves ‘analogical predication’. Dodd defends a related position. Musical works are norm-types individuated according to the timbral sonic properties required in properly formed tokens. He claims ‘default status’ for the type-token theory because it provides a straightforward explanation of a work’s ‘repeatability’ and ‘audibility’. He also identifies four features that works of music must have if they are types: they must be abstract, unstructured, modally and temporally inflexible, and eternally existing, discovered rather than created.
Multiple Artworks as Wollheimian Types
Authors: Davies David
Published: March 2024

Dodd’s conception of types—term them D-types—is contrasted with Wollheim’s account of types sketched earlier in the book. Wollheimian types are generic entities under which particulars can be grouped, posited where we can correlate those particulars with a piece of human invention. This accords with what we have already seen regarding the role a particular causal history plays in grouping certain entities as p-instances of a photographic, cinematic, or cast-sculptural work. It is suggested that multiple artworks are Wollheimian types. This might seem to merely postpone the question about multiple artworks: what kind of thing is it, ontologically speaking, that we posit in such cases? It cannot be a D-type because the latter prescinds from provenance, but it might be a ‘Levinsonian’ initiated type. Indeed, the latter might be modified to accommodate the variability of some multiple works. It is argued, however, that such augmented ‘initiated types’ are metaphysically unnecessary once we have in place all of the elements that they comprise. In positing a Wollheimian type, what is posited is the precise combination of human invention and an enabling practice that explains and legitimates the groupings of certain things as p-instances of a work and the identification of the properties required in its strict instances. These things are contextualized actions, ‘performances’. The ‘performance theory’ and the arguments offered for it in my earlier work are summarized. Finally, it is explained how multiple artworks understood as Wollheimian types speak to all of the weighted explananda presented in Chapter 7.
The cognitive foundation of time
Authors: Spruijt Door , De Wit Astrid , de Vos Connie
Published: March 2024

This chapter explores the temporal distinctions signers encode in Kata Kolok, a Balinese sign language that has been used by deaf and hearing villagers for at least six generations. Our analysis focuses on two particles: finish and pidan as used in a corpus of everyday conversation among third- and fourth-generation deaf signers. Both particles cover a wide array of temporal and non-temporal meanings that indicate completion and non-immediacy, respectively. The frequency of these forms in our data set indicates that the linguistic encoding of such temporal distinctions occurs early on in language emergence and that these distinctions are therefore deemed central to cognition. The functional diversity of these particles indicates an ongoing process of grammaticalization through syntactic integration reminiscent of patterns found in spoken creoles.