bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Hidden Zero Problem
Authors: Budolfson Mark , Spears Dean
Published: October 2019

In this chapter, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears analyse the marginal effect of philanthropic donations. The core of their analysis is the observation that marginal good done per dollar donated is a product (in the mathematical sense) of several factors: change in good done per change in activity level of the charity in question, change in activity per change in the charity’s budget size, and change in budget size per change in the individual’s donation to the charity in question. They then discuss the “hidden zero problem” that some of the terms in the equation (in particular, the last term) might be “hidden zeros” that prevent donations from doing any good—or worse, imply that they do harm—even if the charity is at the top of effective altruism rankings based on the other factors.
Beyond Individualism
Authors: Collins Stephanie
Published: October 2019

In this chapter, Stephanie Collins examines the idea that individuals can acquire ‘membership duties’ as a result of being members of a group that itself bears duties. In particular, powerful and wealthy states are duty-bearing groups, and their citizens have derivative membership duties (for example, to contribute to putting right wrongs that have been done in the past by the group in question, and to increase the extent to which the group fulfils its duties). In addition, she argues, individuals have duties to signal their willingness to coordinate with others so as to do more good than the sum of what each could do on their own. Putting these two things together, Collins suggests, individuals’ duties in (for instance) matters of global poverty might be largely driven by such group-based considerations, leaving little room for the duties that would follow from more individualistic reasoning.
Ole Roemer, Who Started It All
Authors: Spence John C. H.
Published: October 2019

The story of the first measurement of the speed of light by Ole Roemer in 1676. Galileo had discovered the moons of Jupiter with his new telescope, and proposed using observations of their eclipse every forty-two hours as a universal clock for our planet, since they could be seen from practically anywhere. This would keep track of the time at home, and so give a traveller his or her local longitude. (The King of Spain had offered a prize for longitude determination to avoid disasterous shipwrecks.) Roemer noticed that the eclipses were sometimes a little late, which he concluded was due to the time it took light to get from Saturn to Earth and the movement of the Earth between eclipses. His estimate of the time for light to travel from the Sun to Earth was quite accurate. Roemer’s remarkable life story and many other achievements are told.
The Nineteenth CenturyLight Beams Across the Rooftops of Paris
Authors: Spence John C. H.
Published: October 2019

The history of the discovery that light is a wave by the remarkable scientists Fresnel, Young, and Huygens, and their eventful lives. The discovery of optical interference, and the influence of Newton, who mostly treated light as a particle. Wheatston’s measurement of the speed of electricity, the first use of rotating mirrors. Paris in the nineteenth century, the Siege of Paris and the Commune, and the extraordinarily adventurous life of Francois Arago and his achievements. The first non-astronomical measurements of the speed of light on Earth by Fizeau, Foucault, and Cornu, using spinning toothed wheels and rotating mirrors at the Paris Observatory.
Faraday and Maxwell
Authors: Spence John C. H.
Published: October 2019

The story of Michael Faraday and the development of field theory in the early nineteenth century and his discovery of the magneto-optical effect, which linked the study of optics and light to electromagnetism for the first time, and led to the discovery of the displacement current. The integration of electrostatics and electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell and others. How Maxwell discovered his great equations, which predict a constant speed of light and show that light is an electromagnetic wave. How the symmetry which resulted from his displacement current provided an important clue for Einstein’s theory. Maxwell’s current-charge balance apparatus, which allowed him to measure the speed of light by purely electrical means. How Maxwell’s equations were later used in the discovery of radio waves. Maxwell’s life and interests, from poetry to horse riding and guitar. Kelvin and the laying of the Atlantic cable.
Introduction
Authors: Spence John C. H.
Published: October 2019

This book tells the human story of one of mankind’s greatest intellectual adventures - how we understood that light travels at a finite speed, so that when we look up at the stars we are looking back in time. And how the search for an absolute frame of reference in the universe led inexorably to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 for the energy released by nuclear weapons, which also powers our sun and the stars. From the ancient Greeks measuring the distance to the sun, to today’s satellite navigation and Einstein’s theories, the book takes the reader on a gripping historical journey. How Galileo with his telescope discovered the moons of Jupiter and used their eclipses as a global clock, allowing travellers to find their Longitude. How Roemer, noticing that the eclipses were sometimes late, used this delay to obtain the first measurement of the speed of light, which takes eight minutes to get to us from the Sun. From the international collaborations to observe the Transits of Venus, including Cook’s voyage to Australia, to the extraordinary achievements of Young and Fresnel, whose discoveries eventually taught us that light travels as a wave but arrives as a particle, and the quantum weirdness which follows. In the nineteenth century we find Faraday and Maxwell, struggling to understand how light can propagate through the vacuum of space unless it is filled with a ghostly vortex Aether foam. We follow the brilliantly gifted experimentalists Hertz, discoverer of radio, Michelson with his search for the Aether wind, and Foucault and Fizeau with their spinning mirrors and lightbeams across the rooftops of Paris, competing to be the first to measure the speed of light on earth. The difficulty of sending messages faster than light using quantum entanglement, and the reality of the quantum world conclude this saga.
Introduction
Authors: Curato Nicole
Published: October 2019

The Introduction places the book in conversation with the scholarly literature that views post-disaster politics using the lens of democratization. It interrogates the ethical and political value of democracy in the most trying of times and reimagines how democracy can be experienced in the context of widespread suffering. It makes a case for contextualizing normative assumptions about inclusiveness, voice, and accountability in relation to the material, social, and affective consequences of communities surviving a spectacular tragedy. These theoretical arguments are contextualized using the case of the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan—one of the strongest storms that made landfall in recent history—which resulted to over 6000 deaths and widespread displacement. It concludes by providing a summary of the book’s theoretical and empirical chapters.
Responding to the Unspeakable
Authors: Curato Nicole
Published: October 2019

This chapter makes a case for a multimodal account of discursive participation. In the context of tragedies where collective suffering is unspeakable, deliberative democratic theory should be sensitive to political claim-making that go beyond linguistic forms of expression. The chapter puts forward some examples of claim-making that go beyond voice, as well as practices of responsiveness that act on these political claims. To recognize that there are many forms of claim-making, however, is not enough. For deliberative democratic theory to maintain its critical bite, pluralizing norms of discursive participation must remain anchored on clear ethical commitments. The chapter draws on normative media theory’s concept of agonistic solidarity as a guidepost to assess democratic practice amidst spectacular tragedies.
Collaborative Publics
Authors: Curato Nicole
Published: October 2019

Collaborative publics view misery as a disposition that needs to be overcome by hope. They are collaborative as far as they view post-disaster rehabilitation as a ‘deliberative project’—one that is made coherent by a shared storyline of collaboration rather than that of contestation, linked together by democratic professionals, and sustained by processes of community-level deliberations. The chapter draws on the case study of a ‘model community’ which effectively mobilized displaced communities to become political actors who take charge of their own recovery. The chapter concludes by distinguishing collaborative from contestatory publics and examining collaborative publics’ contributions in post-disaster politics.
The Invention of the System
Authors: Bronowski Ada
Published: October 2019

This chapter offers a deep critique of a commonly held view that the Stoic system of philosophy consists in the tripartition of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics. The teaching of philosophy is distinguished from the transmission of doctrine, showing that whilst tripartition might be useful for the former, the latter is concerned with the transmission of an interrelated whole which the Stoics call, for the first time in the history of philosophy, a ‘systēma’, whose internal regimentation is not dependent on tripartition. Views of successive generations of Stoics are analysed, including a vindication of the orthodoxy of Zeno of Tarsus and Posidonius, which leads to a broader reappraisal of the ancient historiography on these matters, sifting through the agendas of the first generation of Platonists and the later classifications of Sextus Empiricus; a critique of modern historiography is also broached, targeting in particular the work of Pierre Hadot. The Stoic notion of a systēma is examined in detail from different perspectives as the basis for the Stoic definitions of knowledge, science, and the constitution of an argument, as also, at the macro-level, for the structure of the cosmos, describing thus the foundations of the unity of the cosmic city, supported by cosmic sympathy, so as ultimately to identify lekta as the keystones of this structure.
Causation
Authors: Bronowski Ada
Published: October 2019

This chapter examines the Stoic theory of causation. The Stoics say that a cause is the cause of an incorporeal katēgorēma, a kind of lekton, thereby giving an idiosyncratic account of a cause, and setting out the reality conditions for its incorporeal effect. The debates between the Peripatetics and the Stoics on the cause as a ‘because of which’ frame the analysis in a critical appraisal of the ancient historiography on the question, amongst both the generations of Stoics, and the Peripatetics, Platonists, and Early Christians. Though a consensus gathers around the necessary activity of the cause, the particular contribution of the Stoics is to posit the unicity of the active cause, which gives each body a unique causal signature, determining both the range of its capacities and what katēgorēmata it can or must actualize to be the thing it is. Causation confirms the independent reality of katēgorēmata and lekta in general, since a cause validates the actuality of the lekton it has caused. This also implies that the lekton is there ready to be actualized, and remains there once the cause, no longer active, no longer actualizes it: it thus sometimes obtains (when actualized) and otherwise subsists. The view that lekta cannot therefore depend on bodies for their susbsistence is defended against an interpretation dominant since the ancients which is shown not to have taken into account the role of lekta in causation.
‘The Demands of Justice Must be Stated before the Words of Peace Find a Receptive Ground, 1972–1976’
Authors: Scull Margaret M.
Published: October 2019

These years mark the bloodiest of the conflict with the highest number of deaths. Priests, women religious, and the Irish Catholic hierarchy continued to find their voice in condemning violence and, in private moments, acted as mediators between the British government and republican paramilitary groups. However, ecumenical efforts between Protestant and Catholic Church leaders at this time remained limited. The English Catholic Church hierarchy began to publicly condemn republican paramilitaries as the IRA started to bomb England. The death of IRA member James McDade, after a bomb he planted in Coventry exploded prematurely, marked the first major schism between English and Irish Catholic Church doctrine and practice. This set a course of confusion over the Church stance on issues of suicide and excommunication that continued for the rest of the conflict.
Brazil’s Bolsa Família Programme
Authors: Paiva Luis Henrique , Cotta Tereza Cristina , Barrientos Armando
Published: October 2019

The first experiences with conditional cash transfers (CCTs) took place in the mid-1990s in Brazil, at the local level. They were later adopted at the national level in Mexico (in 1997, with the Prospera programme), in Brazil (by 2001, with several CCTs), as well as in other Latin American countries. In 2003, the Bolsa Família programme unified previous national CCTs and massively expanded their number of beneficiaries. It managed to reach almost a quarter of the Brazilian population and became the most progressive cash transfer made by the state. Over time, numerous evaluations measured the programme’s impacts on the reduction of poverty and inequality and the improvement of education and health indicators. Domestically, these impacts, together with strong support by researchers and multilateral organizations, eventually translated this ‘good policy’ (quality design and implementation) into ‘good politics’ (political support from beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries alike, and public commitment to the programme’s maintenance by all relevant political forces). The Bolsa Família ‘model’ is now adopted in sixty-seven different countries according to the World Bank in 2017.
Household Songs
Authors: Larson Katherine R.
Published: October 2019

This chapter illuminates the affective significance of music and song within household drama, a genre that early modern scholarship has found difficult to detach from the page and that continues to be undervalued in performance terms. Drawing on the notion of the closet, understood both as an architectural and acoustic space within the early modern household and as a generic marker for women’s dramatic productions, it explores the range of musical practices encompassed under the broad category of “household plays.” Focusing on Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, it then considers how recent staging experiments help to illuminate textual markers of music and song that have too often been silenced.
Prologue
Authors: Larson Katherine R.
Published: October 2019

The Prologue confronts the volatility and airy capriciousness of song as a performance medium and considers the methodological challenges of locating song’s musical and performance-based traces. Nuancing Carolyn Abbate’s influential notion of the “drastic” nature of musical performance, it argues for the necessity of factoring the embodied experience of song into literary analysis. The Prologue devotes particular attention to women’s engagement with song as a performance-based—and performative—genre in early modern England, a history whose richness is reflected in the companion recording. Even as the recording process exemplifies the impossibility of pinpointing the “drastic” in definitive terms, this acoustic archive—as well as the performers’ reflections on their experience of inhabiting the featured pieces—underscores the importance of tuning our ears to the musical matter of early modern literary texts, many of which were the products of embodied and musical processes of circulation.
Promising
Authors: Hawley Katherine
Published: October 2019

This chapter argues that promise-making is governed by a norm of competence, alongside a norm of sincerity. Thus a promise can be criticizable even if it expresses a sincere commitment to act in some admirable way: even if it is neither a false promise nor a wicked promise. The chapter shows how a competence norm is distinct from the norm of keeping one’s promises. Competence norms come in various strengths, from a very weak ‘keepability’ norm of avoiding unkeepable promises to a very strong norm of not making promises unless one knows one will be able to keep the promise. These correspond to the variety of possible epistemic norms on assertion which are more familiar from philosophical debate. Finally, the chapter briefly reviews the relationship between different accounts of why we should keep our promises, and different accounts of what competence norm applies to promise-making.
The Expected Utility of Insurance
Authors: Epperly Brad
Published: October 2019

This chapter offers a new version of popular “insurance” models of judicial independence, in which the competitiveness of the electoral arena induces leaders to prefer more independent courts, as a means of offering policy and personal security if they lose power. That is, paying the “premium” of increased constraints on behavior imposed by independent courts now for the insurance of protection in the future if out of office. The crux of the argument is that the risks associated with losing power in autocratic regimes are greater than in democracies, and therefore competition should be more salient in dictatorships than democracies. The stakes are higher because autocratic power means access to wealth and state resources in a way rarely equaled in democratic regimes, and more importantly the likelihood of being punished after leaving office is greater for former autocrats. Judiciaries exercising greater independence, however, can minimize the risks of being a former leader, and the chapter leverages this finding to develop an expected utility model, the empirical implication of which is higher salience of competition—when present—in autocracies. Unlike previous theories of how competition affects independence, this model integrates both the likelihood of losing office and the risks associated with such an outcome, and thus allows us to examine the phenomena across the democracy/dictatorship divide.
The Reference to Desire in Reasons for Action
Authors: Persson Ingmar
Published: October 2019

It is here argued that when we act for a reason, the consequent of this reason(-conditional) must specify something that we desire. Intelligent desires, which are involved in intentional action, are distinguished from non-intelligent desires. It is intelligent desires which are ‘decisive’ that determine our intentional actions. Such desires can be said to be formed by decisions, but not necessarily decisions preceded by deliberation. You have an occurrent decisive desire to cause p now just in case you are in an internal state which, along with its underlying thought that you can now cause p (and thereby cause consequences specified by reasons that you may have for causing p), causes something to become a fact because you think that it is that p (and thereby will have the specified consequences).
Strong Democracy, Weak State
Authors: Resnick Danielle
Published: October 2019

Through a comparative analysis of presidential tenures from Jerry Rawlings through John Mahama, this chapter notes that Ghana’s stable but modest growth reflects its long-term democratic stability and the need to retain voters’ support through expanding access to education and health. However, rapid growth through structural transformation has been hindered by weak state capacity and three political economy factors. First, robust democracy has enabled a broader range of interest groups to permeate policymaking decisions, often resulting in policy backtracking and volatility and fiscal deficits that stifle credit access for domestic business through high interest rates. Secondly, public sector reforms historically were not pursued to the same degree as macroeconomic reforms so, state bureaucrats lack the technical capacity to identify winning industries or to facilitate the transition to higher value-added sectors. Thirdly, successive governments have failed to invest in strong, productive relationships with the private sector. Consequently, achieving transformation in Ghana will require more activist economic policies within the confines of the state’s capacity.
Ghana’s Agricultural Transformation
Authors: Hazell Peter , Diao Xinshen , Magalhaes Eduardo
Published: October 2019

This chapter provides a broad overview of the agricultural sector and helps situate the narrower focus in each of the subsequent chapters of Part II of the book. Ghana’s agriculture has performed reasonably well since the 1980s in terms of its growth, labor productivity, farm incomes, and the decline in rural poverty. It then provides a description of the main features of the agricultural transformation that has occurred, and explains three drivers underlying these patterns: the policy environment; growing population pressure on the land base; and rapid urbanization. The chapter also identifies how agricultural transformation is progressing differently in the northern and southern regions of the country. In the former, substantial increases in farm production and incomes has come more from increases in the cropped area and crop mix than from increased yields. Land productivity has increased only modestly, but labor productivity has increased substantially in line with wages. In the latter, farm households have taken advantage of urban–rural linkages to diversify into nonagricultural sources of income, and farms have become smaller and more part-time. Despite having greater access to urban markets, services, infrastructure and an increasing population pressure on the land base, there is little evidence of agricultural intensification leading to higher land productivity in these areas.
Planck, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Black‐body Radiation
Authors: Duncan Anthony , Janssen Michel
Published: October 2019

Planck’s work on black‐body radiation grew out of a failed attempt to use electrodynamics to show that entropy can never decrease, i.e., that the second law of thermodynamics is not just a statistical but a strict law of nature. This original interest is reflected in his approach to the problem of black‐body radiation. Planck derived the formula for the spectral distribution of black‐body radiation from the formula for the entropy of a resonator interacting with the radiation at its resonance frequency. He initially chose an entropy formula that gave him a black‐body radiation formula proposed by Wien. Deviations from this Wien law at low frequencies led him to adopt a new entropy formula, which gives a law that reduces to the Wien law at high frequencies and to (what is now known as) the Rayleigh‐Jeans law at low frequencies. This new Planck law agreed remarkably well with all experimental data. Planck thus set out to find a derivation of the entropy formula leading to it. Although he continued to resist Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation of the second law for another decade, Planck borrowed some of Boltzmann’s techniques for this derivation. The derivation critically depends on energy elements with sizes proportional to the frequency of the radiation and Planck’s constant as the proportionality constant. Planck’s papers of 1900–01, however, leave open the question of how these energy elements are to be interpreted.
Failures
Authors: Duncan Anthony , Janssen Michel
Published: October 2019

We consider three topics which proved frustratingly resistant to the methods of the old quantum theory up to the point of emergence of the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg and collaborators in late 1925. First, the old theory could not account convincingly for the superfluity of stationary states implied by the existence of the complex multiplets seen in most atomic spectra. Second, the progressively more complicated theories proposed for explaining the splittings of lines in the anomalous Zeeman effect were found to lead inevitably to glaring inconsistencies with the assumed mechanical equations of motion. Finally, there was the problem of the dual spectrum of helium, and even more basically, of the ground state energy of helium, all calculations of which in terms of specified electron orbits gave incorrect results. We relate the tangled history of the efforts to provide a theoretical resolution of these problems within the old quantum theory.
Organic Unities and the Problem of Evil
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: October 2019

Chapter 9 constitutes a critical examination of Noah Lemos’s contribution to this volume (see Chapter 8). It addresses Lemos’s defense of G. E. Moore’s principle of organic unities against three objections. The first objection concerns what is involved in contributing to the intrinsic value of a state of affairs; the second concerns a kind of evaluative schizophrenia; and the third concerns the concept of evaluative inadequacy. Lemos’s response to the third objection is examined at length, and it is argued that this response may not succeed in defeating the objection, in which case the problem of evil may not be as easy to solve as some theodicists have suggested,
Accidental Forms as Metaphysical Parts of Material Substances in Aquinas’s Ontology
Authors: Skrzypek Jeremy W.
Published: October 2019

Following in the hylomorphic tradition of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas holds that all material substances are composed of matter and form. Like Aristotle, Aquinas also recognizes two different types of forms that material substances can be said to possess: substantial forms and accidental forms. Of which form or forms, then, are material substances composed? This paper explores two competing models of Aquinas’s ontology of material substances, which diverge on precisely this issue. According to what the author refers to as the “Standard Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter and substantial form. According to the “Expanded Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of its accidental forms. After outlining the main claims of each of the two competing models and considering two arguments in favor of the Standard Model, the author offers two arguments in favor of the Expanded Model. He argues that, given the way in which Aquinas argues for God’s simplicity in question three of the Prima pars, and the way in which he consistently describes the difference between an essence and a suppositum, or individual substance, throughout his works, there is good reason to believe that Aquinas thinks that the accidental forms of a material substance are included among its metaphysical parts.
Benefit Plan Cybersecurity Considerations
Authors: Rouse Timothy , Levine David N. , Itami Allison , Taylor Benjamin
Published: October 2019

The U.S. has no comprehensive national law governing cybersecurity and no uniform framework for measuring the effectiveness of protections, though retirement plan record keepers maintain the personally identifiable information on millions of workers, collecting names, birth dates, social security numbers, and beneficiaries. Plan sponsors frequently engage consultants and attorneys to help them secure sensitive data, but more work is necessary to engage a larger discussion around this issue. The SPARK Institute has outlined a flexible approach for an independent third-party reporting of cyber security capabilities with several key control objectives.
Designing for Older Adults: Overcoming Barriers to a Supportive, Safe, and Healthy Retirement
Authors: Munteanu Cosmin , Axtell Benett , Rafih Hiba , Liaqat Amna , Aly Yomna
Published: October 2019

Older adults (65+) are at increasing risk of being ‘digitally marginalized’ due to lower tech savviness, social isolation, and few peers who can provide the needed input. As a consequence, some seniors have difficulties and are exposed to security risks when accessing essential services which are increasingly moving online. These include making critical life decisions, understanding health information, accessing health services, staying connected to families, or simply doing online shopping. This chapter investigates how online technologies can be designed to be inclusive of older adults’ needs, abilities, and contexts. Several barriers barring technology adoption include mental models; attitudes related to critical decision making; privacy concerns; and overall cyber-safety concerns preventing seniors from engaging with such resources online. We also propose ways to help the FinTech sector incorporate new approaches so that services and applications better serve the needs and constraints of older adults.
The FinTech Opportunity
Authors: Philippon Thomas
Published: October 2019

FinTech covers digital innovations and technology-enabled business model innovations in the financial sector. Such innovations can disrupt existing industry structures and blur industry boundaries, facilitate strategic disintermediation, revolutionize how existing firms create and deliver products and services, provide new gateways for entrepreneurship, democratize access to financial services, but also create significant privacy, regulatory and law-enforcement challenges. This chapter assesses potential impacts of FinTech on the finance industry. First we show that financial services remain surprisingly expensive in the U.S., which helps explain the emergence of new entrants. We then argue that the current regulatory approach is subject to significant political economy and coordination costs, and therefore it is unlikely to deliver much structural change. FinTech can improve both financial stability and access to services, but this will require important changes in the focus of regulations.
Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel
Authors: Britton Jeanne M.
Published: October 2019

This chapter argues that a novelistic version of sympathy negotiates transitions between oral, written, and printed texts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The mode of vicarious narration that earlier chapters locate in the decline of epistolary fiction culminates in a logic of epistolarity that justifies this novel’s narrative form. Brontë’s novel also transforms Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy through the shared identity between Heathcliff and Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial difference that trouble Enlightenment notions of sympathy: Heathcliff could just as easily be Catherine’s brother or a racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff’s sorrows, Catherine declares “I am Heathcliff.” This assertion suggests an assimilation of radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary that separates sibling from stranger.
Risk and Liquidity
Authors: Shin Hyun Song
Published: October 2019

Risk is endogenous. It builds up during booms, as measured risks fall and individual market participants increase their risk-taking. Risk is then manifested during downturns, as measured risks rise and individual market participants recoil from risk taking. Prices (including the market price of risk) therefore play a dual role: they are simultaneously a reflection of market participants’ actions as well as an imperative for their actions. This book is organized around several practical examples in financial economics that illustrate these principles.
Be Careful What You Measure
Authors: Altman Andrew
Published: October 2019

The mission of teachers (and of schools that employ them) is twofold. Schools hire teachers not only to educate students but to certify them. In our role as educators, our job is to develop talent. As certifiers, our job is to measure—to evaluate performance. If we confuse the signal with the objective, we go astray. If we misread our educational mission, we also misread what we (who volunteered for that mission) need to do to be giving people their due. Further, to know whether we are accomplishing our mission, we have to be able to measure, to quantify, but if we pretend there is any straightforward way to do that, we oversimplify.
What Should Schooling Be About and How Should It Be Distributed?
Authors: Altman Andrew
Published: October 2019

This chapter lays out the several principles that should guide decisions about the structure of the education system. Children should develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions that will enable them to be effective contributors to the economy, to be competent democratic citizens, to have healthy emotional relationships, to be able to make their own authentic judgements about how to live their lives, and to have fulfilling personal lives. Equality has some weight when thinking about how educational success should be distributed, but focusing on lower achievers, within limits, is a matter of considerable urgency, greater urgency than educational equality.
Confirmation and Induction
Authors: Sprenger Jan , Hartmann Stephan
Published: October 2019

Confirmation of scientific theories by empirical evidence is an important element of scientific reasoning and a central topic in philosophy of science. Bayesian Confirmation Theory—the analysis of confirmation in terms of degree of belief—is the most popular model of inductive reasoning. It comes in two varieties: confirmation as firmness (of belief), and confirmation as increase in firmness. We show why increase in firmness is a particularly fruitful explication of degree of confirmation, and how it resolves longstanding paradoxes of inductive inference (e.g., the paradox of the ravens, the tacking paradoxes and the grue paradox). Finally, we give an axiomatic characterization of various confirmation measures and we discuss the question of whether there is a single adequate measure of confirmation or whether a pluralist position is more promising
Conclusion: The Theme Revisited
Authors: Sprenger Jan , Hartmann Stephan
Published: October 2019

In this final chapter, we look back on the results of the book and the methods we used. In particular, we enter a discussion whether Bayesian philosophy of science can and should be labeled a proper scientific philosophy due to its combination of formal, conceptual, and empirical methods. Finally, we explore the limitations of the book and we sketch projects for future research (e.g., integrating our results with social epistemology of science and the philosophy of statistical inference).
Theme: Bayesian Philosophy of Science
Authors: Sprenger Jan , Hartmann Stephan
Published: October 2019

This chapter sets the stage for what follows, introducing the reader to the philosophical principles and the mathematical formalism behind Bayesian inference and its scientific applications. We explain and motivate the representation of graded epistemic attitudes (“degrees of belief”) by means of specific mathematical structures: probabilities. Then we show how these attitudes are supposed to change upon learning new evidence (“Bayesian Conditionalization”), and how all this relates to theory evaluation, action and decision-making. After sketching the different varieties of Bayesian inference, we present Causal Bayesian Networks as an intuitive graphical tool for making Bayesian inference and we give an overview over the contents of the book.
La prise en charge et le suivi du trouble du spectre de l’autisme une fois le diagnostic posé
Authors: Ip Angie , Zaigenbaum Lonnie , Brian Jessica A
Published: October 2019

Les pédiatres et les autres dispensateurs de soins de première ligne sont bien placés pour fournir ou coordonner des soins médicaux et psychosociaux continus et des services de soutien aux enfants ayant un trouble du spectre de l’autisme (TSA). Le présent document de principes fournit des recommandations et de l’information sur une série d’interventions et de ressources en vue d’aider les dispensateurs de soins pédiatriques à optimiser les soins aux enfants ayant un TSA et de soutenir les familles. La prise en charge du TSA inclut le traitement des affections physiques et psychiatriques associées, les interventions comportementales et développementales et la prestation de services sociaux pour améliorer la qualité de vie des enfants touchés et de leur famille.
Saint and Doctors: Gender, Social Class and Spiritual Health in the Egyptian Delta from the 1890s to 1910s
Authors: Boyle Stephanie
Published: October 2019

In the 1890s, the American United Presbyterian Mission selected the Egyptian delta city of Tanta as the site for their new mission. Like the Egyptian government, these missionaries saw Tanta as a place that drew the sick. Their interest in the city developed mostly from the city’s reputation as a site of cholera during the 1848 outbreak. Many ill and afflicted pilgrims came to Tanta to not only receive blessings from the patron saint Ahmad al-Badawi but also to be treated by the various healers, physicians and pharmacists around the mosque and tomb. This article shows that Tanta was a site of collaboration amongst female physicians and healers and posits that Tanta’s system of health thrived most notably when these Christian missionaries worked within the local system of healers and embraced the culture of well-being rather than imposing modern attitudes about medicine and treatment.
‘Non-Amending’ Provisions in a Constitutional Amendment: A Practical Application to the ‘Transition Period’ under the 101st Constitution Amendment Act, 2016
Authors: Prasanna Bhattacharya Aditya , Makkar Kashish
Published: October 2019

Amendments to the constitution and the jurisprudence surrounding the constituent power of Parliament have traditionally dominated the field of Indian constitutional law and constitutionalism. Most debates in this field have been restricted to issues like the source of the amending power of Parliament, express, and implied limits on the power to amend, and so on. In an attempt to revert to the core principles of constituent power, this paper attempts to answer more basic but extremely compelling constitutional questions: to qualify as an amendment to the constitution, how exactly must an amendment affect the text of the constitution? If an amendment does not change the bare text of the constitution in any way, but merely affects the overall constitutional scheme, can it still be accorded the status of a constitutional amendment? Locating this issue in the extension of the compensation period under the GST regime in India, this paper seeks to provide an answer to these questions by using a practical setting. First, the source of parliamentary competence to bring about such an amendment is traced. By the use of constitutional theory and principles of statutory interpretation, is then demonstrated that such ‘non-amending’ provisions are undoubtedly an inherent part of the constitutional regime. Lastly, this paper proposes a model that covers both legislative powers of Parliament, that is, constituent power and ordinary law-making power. In the nature of a walk-through, this model explains the legislative process to be followed to bring about an extension of the compensation period.
Prevalence and co-infection of schistosomiasis/hepatitis B among rural populations in endemic areas in Hubei, China
Authors: Zhang Yupeng , Xie Yaofei , Chen Qi , Chen Xuyu , Dong Zhuangzhuang , Tan Xiaodong
Published: October 2019

Background

Both hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and schistosomiasis are important public health problems in China. Concurrent infection between HBV and schistosomiasis is often observed in areas where schistosomiasis is endemic. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of schistosomiasis and HBV in schistosomiasis-affected areas, to explore whether schistosomiasis patients are more susceptible to HBV and to determine if the prevalence of HBV in high-endemic areas of schistosomiasis is higher than in low-endemic areas.

Methods

A total of 6526 participants from 13 villages in Hubei province were included in a cross-sectional study and blood samples were collected and examined. Qualitative variables were compared between groups using Pearson’s chi-squared test or Fisher’s exact test as appropriate.

Results

Of the 6526 participants, the overall prevalence was 8.27% for schistosomiasis and 2.67% for HBV. The prevalence of hepatitis B among participants who were Schistosoma antibody positive (25.37%) was higher than the prevalence in participants who were Schistosoma antibody negative (0.62%; χ2=1169.358, p<0.001, odds ratio 54.659). We also observed that there was no difference in the prevalence of hepatitis B between males and females in areas where schistosomiasis was endemic (χ2=1.827, p=0.177), but the prevalence of hepatitis B in middle-aged people was higher than in other age groups (χ2=47.877, p<0.001).

Conclusions

There was an association between schistosomiasis and HBV infection. However, more work is needed to find the causal relationship between schistosomiasis and HBV infection.
Helices on interdomain interface couple catalysis in the ATPPase domain with allostery inPlasmodium falciparumGMP synthetase
Authors: Shivakumaraswamy Santosh , Pandey Nivedita , Ballut Lionel , Violot Sébastien , Aghajari Nushin , Balaram Hemalatha
Published: October 2019

GMP synthetase catalyzes the substitution of the C2 oxo-group of the purine base in XMP with an amino-group generating GMP, the last step in the biosynthesis of GMP. This reaction involves a series of catalytic events that include hydrolysis of Gln generating ammonia in the glutamine amidotransferase (GATase) domain, activation of XMP to adenyl-XMP intermediate in the ATP pyrophosphatase (ATPPase) domain and reaction of ammonia with the intermediate to generate GMP. Inherent to the functioning of GMP synthetases is bidirectional domain crosstalk, which leads to allosteric activation of the GATase domain by substrates binding to the ATPPase domain, synchronization of the two catalytic events and tunnelling of ammonia from the GATase to the ATPPase domain. Herein, we have taken recourse to the analysis of structures of GMP synthetases, site-directed mutagenesis and, steady-state and transient kinetic assays on thePlasmodium falciparumenzyme to decipher the molecular basis of catalysis in the ATPPase domain and domain crosstalk. The results map the residues critical for catalysis in the ATPPase domain to the helices α11 and α12 that are located at the interdomain interface, and the lid-loop that follows α11. This apart, perturbing interdomain interactions involving residues on α11 and α12 impairs GATase activation. These results imply that this arrangement of helices at the domain interface with residues that play roles in ATPPase catalysis as well as domain crosstalk enables coupling ATPPase catalysis with GATase activation. Overall, the study enhances our understanding of GMP synthetases, which are drug targets in many infectious pathogens.
Surface LSP1 is a phenotypic marker distinguishing human classical versus monocyte-derived dendritic cells
Authors: Moutel Sandrine , Beugnet Anne , Schneider Aurélie , Lombard Bérangère , Loew Damarys , Amigorena Sebastian , Perez Franck , Segura Elodie
Published: October 2019

Human mononuclear phagocytes comprise several subsets of dendritic cells (DCs), monocytes and macrophages. Distinguishing one population from another is challenging, especially in inflammed tissues, due to the promiscuous expression of phenotypic markers. Using a synthetic library of humanized llama single domain antibodies, we identified a novel surface marker for human naturally-occuring monocyte-derived DCs. Our antibody targets an extra-cellular domain of LSP-1, specifically on monocyte-derived DCs, but not on monocytes, macrophages or classical DCs. Using this antibody, we provide evidence that the recently described blood DC3 population does not correspond to circulating monocyte-derived DCs. Our findings will pave the way for a better characterization of human mononuclear phagocytes in pathological settings.
Analysis of single-cell gene pair coexpression landscapes by stochastic kinetic modeling reveals gene-pair interactions in development
Authors: Gallivan Cameron P. , Ren Honglei , Read Elizabeth L.
Published: October 2019

Single-cell transcriptomics is advancing discovery of the molecular determinants of cell identity, while spurring development of novel data analysis methods. Stochastic mathematical models of gene regulatory networks help unravel the dynamic, molecular mechanisms underlying cell-to-cell heterogeneity, and can thus aid interpretation of heterogeneous cell-states revealed by single-cell measurements. However, integrating stochastic gene network models with single cell data is challenging. Here, we present a method for analyzing single-cell gene-pair coexpression patterns, based on biophysical models of stochastic gene expression and interaction dynamics. We first developed a high-computational-throughput approach to stochastic modeling of gene-pair coexpression landscapes, based on numerical solution of gene network Master Equations. We then comprehensively catalogued coexpression patterns arising from tens of thousands of gene-gene interaction models with different biochemical kinetic parameters and regulatory interactions. From the computed landscapes, we obtain a low-dimensional “shape-space” describing distinct types of coexpression patterns. We applied the theoretical results to analysis of published single cell RNA sequencing data and uncovered complex dynamics of coexpression among gene pairs during embryonic development. Our approach provides a generalizable framework for inferring evolution of gene-gene interactions during critical cell-state transitions.