bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Influence of the Li/TM Ratio on Electrochemical Properties of LiNi0.9Co0.1O2 Cathodes
Authors: Li Danhua , Wang Jing , Wang Ran , Hou Rui , Su Yuefeng , Yuan Qiang , Chen Shi , Wu Feng
Published: March 2020

The layered Nickel-rich LiNixMyO2 (Ni ≥60%) cathodes have attracted much attention owing to their high energy density, promising cycle property and low cost. Nevertheless, their electrochemical performances greatly depend on the synthesis conditions, especially for the ratio of lithium to transition metal (Li / TM). Herein, we have systematically investigated the influence of Li/TM on structure and electrochemical performance of LiNi0.9Co0.1O2 cathodes. The optimized LiNi0.9Co0.1O2 (Li/TM is 1.02) exhibits highest initial capacity of 189.8mAh g−1 at 1 C and much better capacity retention of 82.19% after 100 cycles between 2.8 and 4.35 V at 1 C.
Research on Teaching Reform of Civil Engineering Materials Based on Individuation and Interactivity
Authors: Pan Chonggen , Chen Keyu , Shen Xinyuan , Liu Wei
Published: March 2020

Teachers should take the initiative to develop specialties of students and drive the progress of the curriculum. The traditional course of civil engineering materials has some obvious problems such as redundant course content, unreasonable scoring assessment mechanism, and low output of post-class practice. As a result, students in the classroom are less motivated and do not get insight into the understanding of this course. To conquer these limitations, this paper aims to optimize the traditional teaching system from three aspects: (1) the teaching method of course teaching, (2) the course evaluation system and (3) the extracurricular practice output. In addition, it also helps to carry out teaching activities for students based on the perspective of individuality and interaction as well as cultivate applied talents. This paper also provides a reference for the innovative teaching model.
Carrier-Induced Degradation in Monocrystalline Silicon: Dependence on the Temperature and Irradiance
Authors: Li Hailing , Wang Xinxin , Wang Wenjing
Published: March 2020

The dependence of the carrier-induced degradation on the temperature and irradiance is studied. The stability of samples after accelerated degradation and regeneration at different temperature and irradiance are studied also. Minority carrier lifetime and normalized defect density are used to characterize the degradation and regeneration kinetics. The mechanism of temperature and irradiance on degradation is studied and discussed.
Pedagogy
Authors: Mead Philip , Doecke Brenton
Published: March 2020

Concepts of pedagogy that circulate within various educational contexts refer to the abstract and theoretical discourse about ways in which learners and students are introduced into fields of knowledge and established ways of knowing. But when pedagogical theory refers to the actual social apparatus that drives the production and reproduction of knowledge it is referring to the everyday activity of teaching. Teaching can be relatively un-self-reflexive and instrumental, or it can be self-reflexively aware of its own modes and processes (praxis) and grounded in an awareness of its social settings and learners’ experience. This article explores how pedagogy and teaching are bound up with the complex, disciplinary relation between literary knowledge and literary theory. Specific accounts of classroom interactions, from a range of national settings, are adduced to indicate the complexity of the relationship between theory, literary knowledge, and classroom praxis and the ways in which literary meaning making is mediated by the social relationships that comprise classroom settings. The article draws on research with which we have been engaged that interrogates the role that literary knowledge might play within the professional practice of early career English teachers as they negotiate the curriculum in school settings. The article also raises the question of how literary knowing outside of formal education systems and institutions can enter into what Gayatri Spivak calls the “teaching machine.” How do pedagogy and teaching account for and incorporate the myriad ways in which we learn about literature in broad social and experiential contexts?
Possible Worlds
Authors: Ronen Ruth
Published: March 2020

The concept of possible worlds (PW) originated in the metaphysics of Leibnitz and had its greatest impact on philosophy, as well as on other disciplines, through its recurrence as a powerful tool of modal logic in the 1960s. PW were named in order to attribute semantic content to the (modal) difference between necessity, possibility, and impossibility. The concept later wandered into other disciplines, principally into literary theory around the subject of fiction and fictional worlds. The conversion of a strictly analytic tool into an interdisciplinary concept serving literary theorists is striking, especially because this pairing of the idea of PW, as a logical tool, with a primarily literary problem, has proven to be prolific.

PW suggest several ideas that account for their interdisciplinary appeal: the acknowledgment of multiple realities, the privileging of one world from a plurality of worlds, and the assigning of truth value to assertions about nonexistents. A possible world, in which horses fly, includes assertions about an alternative (actualized) reality, and these assertions have a nonexistent as their referent, whether this nonexistent is interpreted intensionally, as the semantic content of the assertion, or extensionally, as a real thing that inhabits a world. This divergence of interpretations, between a semantic and a realistic understanding, figures in the whole range of philosophical topics discussed in relation to PW.

The concept of PW as a philosophical tool is associated with theories of reference that aim to loosen up an alleged dependence of successful reference on the prior existence and/or prior knowledge of the referent. Concepts such as counterfactuals and rigid designation—reflect this orientation and nourish philosophical ways of addressing the problems posed by modal possibilities, such as fiction.

PW appear to offer literary theory straightforward sources of fascination: multiple realities and the relations among them, and the possibility of referring to imaginary or semi-imaginary entities. PW suggest commitment to multiple realities, whether possible or impossible, that are actualized as fiction, without losing sight of an ontological center (i.e., the primacy of one world as actual). The fictional world can hence be considered as real as the world accepted as reality, while the boundary between the actual-fictional world and other modalities is sustained. PW and the worldly character of fiction they suggest explain the intimacy readers feel with narrative persons and events. PW further explain how a fictional world can both be distinct (i.e., autonomous) and imbued with reference to real-world counterparts. The interdisciplinary exchange around PW developed in productive ways, which yet accentuate that the explanatory potential of PW is specific to each of the disciplines.
Genders
Authors: Goulimari Pelagia
Published: March 2020

Feminist, queer, and transgender theory has developed an array of fruitful concepts for the study of gender. It offers critiques of patriarchy, the gender binary, compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity, inter alia. New Materialist feminists have analyzed gender variance, continuous variation, and continuous transition through concepts such as rhizome, assemblage, making kin, and sym-poiesis (making-with). Feminists of color and postcolonial feminists have theorized intersectionality—that gender always-already intersects with race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—and gender roles outside the white middle-class nuclear family, such as othermothering and fictive kin. Materialist feminists have studied gender as social class, while psychoanalytic gender theorists have explored gender as self-identification and in terms of the relation of gender identification and desire. Queer theory has explored vexed gender identifications and disidentification as well as heterotopias, counterpublic spaces, and queer kinship beyond the private/public divide. Transgender theory has critiqued transmisogyny and theorized transgender and trans* identities. Indigenous feminist and queer theory has theorized Two-Spirit identities and queer indigeneity in the context of a decolonial vision. Theorists of masculinities have analyzed masculinities as historically specific, plural, and intersectional. Gender studies, in all this diversity, has influenced most fields of study—for example, disability studies in its theorization of complex embodiment, its development of crip theory, and so on. Gender studies, in turn, has greatly benefitted from the study of literature. Literature has been indispensable in the genealogy of dominant gender norms such as the 19th-century norms of the angelic/demonic woman and self-made man. In return, gender theory has offered fresh insights into literary genre, for example the Bildungsroman. Since the development of gender theory, it has taken part in an ongoing dialogue and cross-fertilization with literature, evidenced in self-reflexive and critically informed literary texts as well as in gender theory that includes autobiographical and literary (e.g., narrative, figurative, fictional, poetic) elements.
Díaz, Junot
Authors: Figueroa Yomaira C.
Published: March 2020

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American award-winning fiction writer and essayist. For over twenty years his work has helped to map and remap Latinx, Caribbean, and American literary and cultural studies. Since his collection of short stories, Drown, debuted in 1996, Díaz has become a leading literary figure in Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora studies. His voice is critically linked to the legacy of Latinx Caribbean literary poetics reaching back to the 1960s (including Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, 1967). Díaz’s work is likewise transnational and diasporic, often reflecting the lived experiences of working-class immigrant populations of color in northeastern urban centers. Within a broader scope, Díaz’s writing is tied to feminist African American and Chicana literary traditions, with Díaz citing the influence of writers such as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros in his writing practice. His 2007 award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction and catapulted him into literary superstardom. Díaz followed that success with his 2012 collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for both the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2012, Díaz was conferred the MacArthur Fellows Program Award, commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in 2017, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019, he was the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the fiction editor at the renowned literary magazine the Boston Review.

Over the course of his professional writing career, Díaz has published numerous nonfiction essays and political commentaries, and coauthored opinion editorials on immigration and reflections on Caribbean and US politics. His short story “Monstro,” published in 2012, further rooted Díaz in the genres of science fiction and Afrofuturism. “Monstro” was understood to be a teaser for a now discarded novel of the same name. The simultaneous publication of the English-language Islandborn and Spanish-language Lola in 2018 represented the author’s first foray into the genre of children’s literature. Like much of Díaz’s literary oeuvre, the children’s books chronicle the experiences and memories of Afro-Dominicans in the diaspora through the perspective of a child narrator. Díaz is one of the founders of Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a summer creative writing workshop for writers of color where he helps aspiring writers to workshop their fiction. Díaz’s fiction and nonfiction writings have catalyzed work in literary, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx studies, prompting renewed discourses on literary representations of masculinity, gender, sexuality, intimacy, sexual violence, dictatorship, immigration, disability, Dominican history, race and anti-blackness, anti-Haitianism, decolonization and radical politics, and diaspora and belonging.
Futures for Literary Studies
Authors: Jay Paul
Published: March 2020

The future of literary studies will be shaped by new and emerging trends in scholarly, critical, and theoretical work, by changes in the material conditions that enable that work, and, perhaps most importantly, by how the institutions within which it functions respond to recent changes in higher education that increasingly threaten the viability of almost all humanities disciplines. The material conditions that shape work in literary studies have changed dramatically in recent decades. The impact of digital technology has been nothing short of transformative, and the changes it has introduced are bound to continue to reshape the field. At the same time, the expansion of the canon, the transnationalizing of literary studies, the revitalization of narratological, formalist, and aesthetic criticism, the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields including the study of sexuality and gender, ecocriticism, affect theory, and disability studies, promise to continue to exert influence in the coming decades. The future from these perspectives looks promising. At the same time, however, the institutional sustainability of literary studies has come under threat as the liberal arts model of higher education has increasingly given way to a stress in higher education on vocational training in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines, which has worked to undercut the value and the attraction of literary studies. How the field responds to these changes in the coming decade will be crucial to determining its future viability.
Bella Figura: Understanding Italian Communication in Local and Transatlantic Contexts
Authors: Scannell Guida Denise
Published: March 2020

Bella figura—beautiful figure—is an idiomatic expression used to reflect every part of Italian life. The phrase appears in travel books and in transnational business guides to describe Italian customs, in sociological research to describe the national characteristics of Italians, and in popular culture to depict thematic constructs and stereotypes, such as the Mafia, romance, and la dolce vita. Scholarly research on bella figura indicates its significance in Italian civilization, yet it remains one of the most elusive concepts to translate. Among the various interpretations and references from foreigners and Italians there is not a single definition that captures the complexity of bella figura as a cultural phenomenon. There is also little explanation of the term, its usage, or its effects on Italians who have migrated to other countries. Gadamerian hermeneutics offers an explanation for how bella figura functions as a frame of reference for understanding Italian culture and identity, which does not disappear or fuse when Italians interact with people from different countries but instead takes on an interpretive dimension that is continually integrating new information into the subconscious structures of the mind.

In sum, bella figura is a sense-making process, and requires a pragmatic know-how of Italian communication (verbal and nonverbal). From this perspective, bella figura is prestructure by which Italians and some Italian migrants understand and interpret their linguistically mediated and historical world. This distinction changes the concept bella figura from a simple facade to a dynamic interplay among ever-changing interpretations and symbolic interactions. The exploration of bella figura is relevant to understanding Italian communication on both local and transnational levels.
Laboratory Versus Field Experiments in Political Decision-Making Research
Authors: Hoffman Aaron
Published: March 2020

It can be difficult for political scientists and economists to know when to use laboratory experiments in their research programs. There are longstanding concerns in economics and political science about the external invalidity of laboratory results. Making matters worse, a number of prominent academics recommend using field experiments instead of laboratory experiments to learn about human behavior because field experiments do not have the same external invalidity problems that plague laboratory experiments. The criticisms of laboratory experiments as externally invalid, however, overlook the many advantages of laboratory experiments that derive from their external invalidity. Laboratory experiments are preferable to field experiments at examining hypothetical scenarios (e.g., When automated vehicles dominate the roadways, what principles do people want their automobiles to rely on?), at minimizing erroneous causal inferences (e.g., Did a treatment produce the reaction researchers are studying?), and at replicating and extending previous studies. Rather than being a technique that should be abandoned in favor of field experiments, political scientists and economists should embrace laboratory experiments when testing theoretically important but empirically unusual scenarios, tracing experimental processes, and reproducing and building on prior experiments.
The Common Commercial Policy
Authors: Adriaensen Johan
Published: March 2020

In 1958, the European Economic Community was formed as a customs union with a common external tariff. From then on, the Common Commercial Policy—also known as the European Union’s (EU) trade policy—served as the interface between the increasingly integrated common market and its external trade partners.

Like the creation of the single market, contemporary trade policy has long transcended discussions about tariffs and quotas at the border and has focused increasingly on the impediments to trade caused by regulatory divergences. Whether they concern agricultural subsidies or cultural protections, rules on public procurement or food standards, insofar as a regulation discriminates against exporters, it can potentially be part of a trade negotiation. The evolving nature of trade policy has triggered a redefinition of both the scope of the EU’s exclusive competencies as well as the procedures to govern this policy domain.

The central actor in EU trade policy is the European Commission, which is the designated negotiator for external trade agreements. Whereas member states always played a crucial role in overseeing such negotiations in the Council, the European Parliament has only taken up a position of power since 2009. Beyond securing market access abroad and protecting domestic sectors at home, post-material values have come to feature more prominently in the balancing act of contemporary trade discussions. This has galvanized a far wider range of societal actors to lobby the EU institutions in order to tilt the balance in their favor.

Complicating matters even further, the EU conducts a large part of its foreign policy through the Common Commercial Policy. Contrary to most other instruments of the EU’s external action, trade policy is an exclusive competency of the EU. Fostering development, promoting stability, providing humanitarian aid, and the promotion and enforcement of human rights and sustainable development commitments are but a few of the many objectives pursued via trade policy. However, there are clear limitations to the fungibility of the EU’s large market power for foreign policy objectives.

It should therefore be clear that the literature on the Common Commercial Policy is extremely diverse. Situated at the nexus of international political economy, regulatory governance, and foreign policy, it has become a well-studied policy domain through a great variety of theoretical and disciplinary lenses. The prominence of trade scholarship in EU studies is unlikely to change soon as developments at the international level, where the Western liberal order is under increasing pressure, but also domestically, where the contestation of several trade negotiations and the position of trade policy within the EU’s broader external action, are set to animate future debates.
Historical Views of Homosexuality: Roman Empire
Authors: Hubbard Thomas K.
Published: March 2020

The practice and social construction of homosexual relations in the Roman Empire were particularly important as the immediate background to the early Christian and patristic responses that determined the widespread suppression of same-sex behavior in subsequent Western civilization; this suppression was already manifest in influential Roman legal texts of late antiquity. Although to some degree influenced by earlier Greek and Etruscan models, particularly in the realms of literature and art, Roman culture evolved its own distinctive set of practices and moral responses. Whereas classical Greek elites exalted voluntary pederastic relations between adult males and freeborn adolescents, framing them within a pedagogical context, Romans viewed any form of passivity as unmanly and fundamentally incompatible with the conquering warrior ethos required by the expansionist Roman state. Hence, pederastic attentions were legitimate only when directed toward current or former slaves. Despite the coercive character of such relations, they sometimes became tender and affectionate, leading to the favored slave’s manumission and even inheritance of property.

While literary references in Augustan-era poets like Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus are decorous and idealizing after the Greek style, the treatment of homosexuality in much Roman literature is markedly different, manifesting an anatomical frankness and obscenity seldom found in Greek texts outside of Attic comedy. Accusations of the most extravagant sexual depravity became commonplace in political rhetoric of the late Republic and escalated in the many defamatory biographical accounts of Rome’s emperors, most of whom engendered posthumous infamy from patrician critics. Whether true or not, such accounts contributed to popular perceptions of a hedonistic ruling class more innured to pleasure than the public good.

Not surprisingly, Rome evolved a strong tradition of morally inflected satire and ethical critique of homosexual indulgence. In the early period, this took the form of treating it as a foreign, Greek-inspired vice. More serious was the philosophical response of later Roman Stoicism, which advocated a highly restrictive sexual economy and sought to liberate the soul from enslavement to appetitive desires, particularly if not tied to the providential demands of Nature. Other sources, however, regarded same-sex desire as itself a manifestation of inborn dispositions, and Roman imperial literature features several polarized debates between advocates of boys and women as superior objects of sexual affect, presaging modern conceptions of sexual identity.
Strategic Management in Public Administration
Authors: Bryson John , George Bert
Published: March 2020

Strategic management is an approach to strategizing by public organizations or other entities that integrates strategy formulation and implementation, and typically includes strategic planning to formulate strategies, ways of implementing strategies, and continuous strategic learning. Strategic management can help public organizations or other entities achieve important goals and create public value.

Strategy is what links capabilities and aspirations. Four broad types of strategists (as individuals, teams, organizations, and collaborations) in public administration exist: the reactor (low aspirations, low capabilities), the dreamer (high aspirations, low capabilities), the underachiever (low aspirations, high capabilities) and the savvy strategist (high aspirations, high capabilities).

There are eight approaches to strategic planning. More comprehensive process approaches include those influenced by the Harvard Policy Model, logical incrementalism, and stakeholder management. More partial process approaches include strategic negotiations, strategic issues management, and strategic planning as a framework for innovation. Finally, two content approaches also exist, namely, portfolio and competitive forces analyses.

Seven approaches to strategic management systems can be discerned. These include: the integrated units of management approach (or layered or stacked units of management), strategic issues management approach, contract approach, collaboration approach (including the lead organization, shared governance, and network administrative organization approaches), portfolio management approach, goal or benchmark approach, and hybrid approaches.

Strategic planning and management are approaches to identifying and addressing challenges. Neither is a single invariant thing but is instead a set of concepts, processes, procedures, tools, techniques, and practices (and structures in the case of strategic management systems) that must be drawn on selectively and adapted thoughtfully and strategically to specific contexts if they are to help produce desirable results. While there are a variety of generic approaches to both, the boundaries among them are not necessarily clear, and strategic planning and management in practice are typically hybridic. Research is accumulating about which approaches to strategic planning and management work under which circumstances, how, and why, but much work remains to be done.
Governing by Silos
Authors: Scott Ian
Published: March 2020

Government organizational silos have been blamed for a multitude of sins. Yet they have proved to be resilient, principally because they provide opportunities for centralized government, political control over the bureaucracy, and the prospect of rapid decision-making, effective implementation, and support for economic development. But silos often also suffer from serious dysfunctions that impede smooth progress from decision to action. Their relationships with other government, private, and third-sector organizations frequently reflect inadequate horizontal coordination, a failure to communicate and to share information, and disputes over funding and jurisdictional responsibilities.

It is instructive to compare how countries in Europe and Asia view government silos and attempt to deal with their shortcomings. Radical reforms in Europe have mitigated some dysfunctions by creating flatter structures, decentralized organizations, and improved horizontal coordination within government and between government, the market, and society. But the reforms have not entirely overcome the “silos mentality,” which may result in failure to share information and may affect implementation. Nor have European governments entirely overcome the tendency to reintroduce centralization and more rigid hierarchies when faced with problems. In Asia, silos continue to be a dominant and valued organizational feature of most governments because they are seen to have an important role in maintaining political stability and promoting economic development. Although political leaders acknowledge their weaknesses and there have been some efforts to improve horizontal coordination, particularly in crisis management, the macro-level public sector reforms that dismantling the silos would entail has not been on the agenda. On both continents, resolving the problems of the silos and finding the right mix between vertical and horizontal coordination remain major challenges.
Women and Genocide in Africa
Authors: Jessee Erin
Published: March 2020

Genocide, defined in international law as killings and related mass atrocities that are committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” has negatively impacted countless communities across Africa over the centuries. The resulting historical literature is strongest regarding those genocides that occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries due to a tendency to privilege written sources. Within this literature, African women’s experiences remain understudied compared to the experiences of men, despite widespread recognition that genocides often affect people differently according to their gender identity. However, in looking at the widely studied examples of colonial genocides in Belgian-occupied Congo (1885–1908) and German-occupied Namibia (1904–1908), and the subsequent genocides in Burundi (1972), Rwanda (1994), and Sudan (2003–2008), it becomes evident that perpetrators have targeted women in particular ways as part of their broader efforts to exterminate unwanted communities. While women are frequently killed alongside men during genocides, the literature on these case studies abounds with examples of sexual violence, particularly rape, that the perpetrators inflict upon women as part of their efforts to undermine the social vitality of their intended victims’ communities. Women’s experiences of genocide are often far more diverse than the literature’s singular focus on sexual violence suggests, however. The case of Rwanda demonstrates that women can also serve as combatants and perpetrators, while the case of Belgian-occupied Congo reveals that women can lead resistance movements in opposition to genocidal violence. Similarly, German-occupied Namibia and Rwanda demonstrate that women can serve important roles in rebuilding their communities and advocating for recognition and reparations in the post-genocide period. Scholars are beginning to pay greater attention to women’s diverse experiences of genocide, but there is a great deal of research to be undertaken, particularly regarding how different facets of women’s identities, such as class, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, among others, shape their experiences of genocide.
The Indian Economy After Independence
Authors: Roy Tirthankar
Published: March 2020

The Indian Union, from the time of independence from British colonial rule, 1947, until now, has undergone shifts in the trajectory of economic change and the political context of economic change. One of these transitions was a ‘green revolution’ in farming that occurred in the 1970s. In the same decade, Indian migration to the Persian Gulf states began to increase. In the 1980s, the government of India seemed to abandon a strategy of economic development that had relied on public investment in heavy industries and encouraged private enterprise in most fields. These shifts did not always follow announced policy, produced deep impact on economic growth and standards of living, and generated new forms of inequality. Therefore, their causes and consequences are matters of discussion and debate. Most discussions and debates form around three larger questions. First, why was there a turnaround in the pace of economic change in the 1980s? The answer lies in a fortuitous rebalancing of the role of openness and private investment in the economy. Second, why did human development lag achievements in income growth after the turnaround? A preoccupation with state-aided industrialization, the essay answers, entailed neglect of infrastructure and human development, and some of that legacy persisted. If the quality of life failed to improve enough, then a third question follows, why did the democratic political system survive at all if it did not equitably distribute the benefits from growth? In answer, the essay discusses studies that question the extent of the failure.
Agriculture and the Environment
Authors: Stoll Steven
Published: March 2020

During the Holocene, the present geological epoch, an increasing portion of humans began to manipulate the reproduction of plants and animals in a series of environmental practices known as agriculture. No other ecological relationship sustains as many humans as farming; no other has transformed the landscape to the same extent. The domestication of plants by American Indians followed the end of the last glacial maximum (the Ice Age). About eight thousand years ago, the first domesticated maize and squash arrived from central Mexico, spreading to every region and as far north as the subarctic boreal forest. The incursion of Europeans into North America set off widespread deforestation, soil depletion, and the spread of settlement, followed by the introduction of industrial machines and chemicals. A series of institutions sponsored publically funded research into fertilizers and insecticides. By the late 19th century, writers and activists criticized the technological transformation of farming as destructive to the environment and rural society. During the 20th century, wind erosion contributed to the depopulation of much of the Great Plains. Vast projects in environmental engineering transformed deserts into highly productive regions of intensive fruit and vegetable production. Throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, access to land remained limited to whites, with American Indians, African Americans, Latinas/os, Chinese, and peoples of other ethnicities attempting to gain farms or hold on to the land they owned.

Two broad periods describe the history of agriculture and the environment in that portion of North America that became the United States. In the first, the environment dominated, forcing humans to adapt during the end of thousands of years of extreme climate variability. In the second, institutional and technological change became more significant, though the environment remained a constant factor against which American agriculture took shape. A related historical pattern within this shift was the capitalist transformation of the United States. For thousands of years, households sustained themselves and exchanged some of what they produced for money. But during the 19th century among a majority of American farmers, commodities took over the entire purpose of agriculture, transforming environments to reflect commercial opportunity.
Reception History of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Authors: Markl Dominik
Published: March 2020

The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (HB/OT) is like a prism through which ancient Near Eastern traditions were transformed and transmitted to Jewish and Christian cultures. Through the Jewish diaspora and the Christian missions, it became a nomadic text that spread to all continents. It was received and transformed in diverse genres of literature, music, art, theatre, law, and politics. Interest in processes of reception has intensified since World War I, but reception history became a major field within biblical studies only at the turn of the millennium. Analyzing the history of reception of the HB/OT poses a variety of challenges: what hermeneutical expectations, attitudes, interests, and methods were applied to its texts? How were they involved in diverse fields of culture, and how did different modes of reception influence each other? What historical developments occasioned changes in interpretation? In analyzing textual reception, three basic aspects should be considered: the texts with their respective genres and themes, the hermeneutics applied to them, and the social contexts in which the reception takes place. Each of these aspects is characterized by great variation: biblical genres are as diverse as curse and love poetry, law and lament; hermeneutical approaches involve extremely different interests and results in, for example, allegorical, kabballistic and historical critical interpretation; social contexts of reception include family education, monastic lectio divina, public reading and preaching, and academic teaching. Investigating this history of reception means looking at cultural history through the lens of the HB/OT. Rather than defining itself as a field of research separate from interpretation, reception history should be seen as a constituent of the hermeneutical endeavor.
Le Musée d’Art E Pluribus Unum: An Urban Arts Movement in Haiti
Authors: Smith Katherine
Published: March 2020

The Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) are a collective of sculptors based in downtown Port-au-Prince who have founded their own museum. The artists are best known for using found objects and wood to make politically charged works that draw on the imagery of Vodou. Since launching this artistic movement over a decade ago, co-founder André Eugène has referred to his home and atelier as Le Musée d’Art E Pluribus Unum. While art collectives are common in Haitian art, by designating themselves a “museum” the Atis Rezistans have incorporated aspects of conceptual art and installation art into their art movement. They describe the founding of this museum as a strategic appropriation of an institution that has historically belonged to the bourgeoisie. Conversations with Eugène, and other artists in the collective, reveal that they have carefully considered the power of museums: museums imbue certain objects with cultural capital and monetary value; present certain world views through the display of objects; and may offer visitors encounters with human remains. Becoming a museum has allowed Eugène and the other artists to access networks of art world mobility in ways that their artworks alone would not have. This essay offers context for understanding the Atis Rezistans as part of a tradition of art making among Haiti’s majority. It argues that due to their location, their class, and their overt use of Vodou imagery, scholars have overlooked conceptual elements of their movement, specifically how they play with the idea of the museum.
Subtraction in Morphology
Authors: Manova Stela
Published: March 2020

Subtraction consists in shortening the shape of the word. It operates on morphological bases such as roots, stems, and words in word-formation and inflection. Cognitively, subtraction is the opposite of affixation, since the latter adds meaning and form (an overt affix) to roots, stems, or words, while the former adds meaning through subtraction of form. As subtraction and affixation work at the same level of grammar (morphology), they sometimes compete for the expression of the same semantics in the same language, for example, the pattern ‘science—scientist’ in German has derivations such as Physik ‘physics’—Physik-er ‘physicist’ and Astronom-ie ‘astronomy’—Astronom ‘astronomer’. Subtraction can delete phonemes and morphemes. In case of phoneme deletion, it is usually the final phoneme of a morphological base that is deleted and sometimes that phoneme can coincide with a morpheme.

Some analyses of subtraction(-like shortenings) rely not on morphological units (roots, stems, morphological words, affixes) but on the phonological word, which sometimes results in alternative definitions of subtraction. Additionally, syntax-based theories of morphology that do not recognize a morphological component of grammar and operate only with additive syntactic rules claim that subtraction actually consists in addition of defective phonological material that causes adjustments in phonology and leads to deletion of form on the surface. Other scholars postulate subtraction only if the deleted material does not coincide with an existing morpheme elsewhere in the language and if it does, they call the change backformation. There is also some controversy regarding what is a proper word-formation process and whether what is derived by subtraction is true word-formation or just marginal or extragrammatical morphology; that is, the question is whether shortenings such as hypocoristics and clippings should be treated on par with derivations such as, for example, the pattern of science-scientist.

Finally, research in subtraction also faces terminology issues in the sense that in the literature different labels have been used to refer to subtraction(-like) formations: minus feature, minus formation, disfixation, subtractive morph, (subtractive) truncation, backformation, or just shortening.
Copulas in the Romance Languages
Authors: Pountain Christopher
Published: March 2020

Definition of the copula as a discrete grammatical category is problematic. It is the semantically unmarked copulas (simple equivalents of the English verb ‘to be’) which deserve most attention in a comparison of the Romance languages; they have a typically suppletive historical morphology and are often the result of the grammaticalization of full lexical verbs, the point at which true unmarked copular status is achieved being sometimes difficult to identify. The unmarked copulas of the Ibero-Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan) have the most complex distribution and have proved the most difficult to account for synchronically.

The situation in the early 21st century is the consequence of a progressive encroachment of the reflexes of Latin stare and other verbs on the functions of Latin esse (reference is made to the Classical Latin form esse for convenience; however, the Romance paradigms must be taken to derive from a Vulgar Latin form *essĕre, into which other verbs, notably sedēre ‘to sit’ in the case of the Ibero-Romance languages, were suppletively incorporated). The contrastive study of the development of cognate copular verbs in closely related languages needs closer attention in regard to the identification of the parameters of copula choice with adjectival complements.
The Acquisition of Clitics in the Romance Languages
Authors: Gavarró Anna
Published: March 2020

The Romance languages are characterized by the existence of pronominal clitics. Third person pronominal clitics are often, but not always, homophonous with the definite determiner series in the same language. Both pronominal and determiner clitics emerge early in child acquisition, but their path of development varies depending on clitic type and language. While determiner clitic acquisition is quite homogeneous across Romance, there is wide cross-linguistic variation for pronominal clitics (accusative vs. partitive vs. dative, first/second person vs. third person); the observed differences in acquisition correlate with syntactic differences between the pronouns. Acquisition of pronominal clitics is also affected if a language has both null objects and object clitics, as in European Portuguese. The interpretation of Romance pronominal clitics is generally target-like in child grammar, with absence of Pronoun Interpretation problems like those found in languages with strong pronouns. Studies on developmental language impairment show that, as in typical development, clitic production is subject to cross-linguistic variation. The divergent performance between determiners and pronominals in this population points to the syntactic (as opposed to phonological) nature of the deficit.
Prioritizing genetic variants in GWAS with lasso using permutation-assisted tuning
Authors: Yang Songshan , Wen Jiawei , Eckert Scott T , Wang Yaqun , Liu Dajiang J , Wu Rongling , Li Runze , Zhan Xiang
Published: March 2020

Motivation

Large scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have resulted in the identification of a wide range of genetic variants related to a host of complex traits and disorders. Despite their success, the individual single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis approach adopted in most current GWAS can be limited in that it is usually biologically simple to elucidate a comprehensive genetic architecture of phenotypes and statistically underpowered due to heavy multiple-testing correction burden. On the other hand, multiple-SNP analyses (e.g. gene-based or region-based SNP-set analysis) are usually more powerful to examine the joint effects of a set of SNPs on the phenotype of interest. However, current multiple-SNP approaches can only draw an overall conclusion at the SNP-set level and does not directly inform which SNPs in the SNP-set are driving the overall genotype–phenotype association.

Results

In this article, we propose a new permutation-assisted tuning procedure in lasso (plasso) to identify phenotype-associated SNPs in a joint multiple-SNP regression model in GWAS. The tuning parameter of lasso determines the amount of shrinkage and is essential to the performance of variable selection. In the proposed plasso procedure, we first generate permutations as pseudo-SNPs that are not associated with the phenotype. Then, the lasso tuning parameter is delicately chosen to separate true signal SNPs and non-informative pseudo-SNPs. We illustrate plasso using simulations to demonstrate its superior performance over existing methods, and application of plasso to a real GWAS dataset gains new additional insights into the genetic control of complex traits.

Availability and implementation

R codes to implement the proposed methodology is available at https://github.com/xyz5074/plasso.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Non-insulin therapies in addition to insulin in Type 1 DM treatment
Authors: Llano Andrea , McKay Gerard A
Published: March 2020

Introduction

Complications of Type 1 diabetes (T1DM) remain prevalent due to suboptimal glycaemic control despite advances in analogue insulin, its delivery and technological advances in glucose monitoring. Intensive insulin therapy is associated with hypoglycaemia and weight gain. Non–insulin-dependent glucose lowering strategies may provide a strategy in improving glycaemic control without hypoglycaemia and weight gain.

Sources of data

Research papers and reviews about adjunctive treatment with insulin in T1DM in the published literature.

Areas of agreement

Non–insulin-dependent strategies may be beneficial inT1DM particularly when there is insulin resistance, but the evidence for benefit at the current time is limited. Although there have been trials with various drugs as adjunctive therapy to insulin in T1DM currently in the UK, there is only one sodium glucose transport protein 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor with a marketing authorization for use in this indication.

Areas of controversy

Potential for harm with SGLT2 inhibitors in T1DM is a potential issue, particularly euglycaemic diabetic ketoacidosis. Clinical trials confirm that there is a risk albeit small, but emerging safety data have led to questions as to whether the risk of euglycaemic diabetic ketoacidosis is higher with the use of SGLT2 inhibitors in clinical practice.

Growing points

Patient education is paramount—the work being done in T1DM to ensure safe use of SGLT2 inhibitors may help improve safety in the prescribing of SGLT2 inhibitors in Type 2 diabetes.

Areas timely for developing research

There is a need for larger clinical trials with SGLT2 inhibitors in T1DM and real world studies to clarify safety.
Structural Limits to the De-Westernization of the Communication Field: The Editorial Board in Clarivate's JCR System
Authors: de Albuquerque Afonso , de Oliveira Thaiane Moreira , dos Santos Junior Marcelo Alves , de Albuquerque Sofia Oliveira Firmo
Published: March 2020

Since the 2000s, calls for de-Westernizing the international communication research have been common, but their practical result has been very modest, as the share of non-western countries remained minimal. This article explores the hypothesis that structural factors hamper the diversity in international media research, based on the analysis of the membership of journals listed in Clarivate's Journal of Citation Reports. The data demonstrate a strong unbalance in favor of the US -- and a particular group of US universities in special -- to the detriment of the non-Western countries. The article discusses these findings in reference to the emergence of academic capitalism and the global rankings logic, which is based on ``universal'' defined from a US (and secondarily Anglophonic) viewpoint. The JCR system plays an important role in this schema, as it artificially introduces scarcity in the international publishing system and, therefore, concentrates symbolic power in the hands of a few.