bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
In defence of the nation: Why do churches receive public trust as high as their secular counterparts?
Authors: Abbasov Namig
Published: May 2023

Secularisation theory contends that religiosity and trust in religious organisations tend to decline when trust in their secular counterparts increases. However, it is puzzling why religious organisations receive public trust as high as their secular counterparts in countries where religiosity is low. If religious organisations are deemed to be doomed as trust in secular counterparts rises, why do people still trust them? We argue that a high level of trust in religious organisations is associated with their importance in nation‐building and national identity construction: Individuals with a strong national identity are more likely to trust religious organisations. Using both qualitative and quantitative data about public trust in the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC) and Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC), this study finds that the historical role of religious organisations in strengthening national cohesion and building national identity during times of instability leads ordinary citizens to place both generational and strategic trust in these religious organisations.
Reducing the environmental impact of mask inductions in children: A quality improvement report
Authors: Isserman Rebecca S. , Yuan Ian , Elliott Elizabeth M. , Muhly Wallis T. , Iyer Rajeev S. , Farrell Heather A. , Varallo Domonique A. , Georgostathi Georgia , Richter Adam G. , Stiso Jennifer , Tsui Fuchiang (Rich) , Feldman Jeffrey M.
Published: May 2023

Background

Inhalational anesthetic agents are potent greenhouse gases with global warming potential that far exceed that of carbon dioxide. Traditionally, pediatric inhalation inductions are achieved with a volatile anesthetic delivered to the patient in oxygen and nitrous oxide at high fresh gas flows. While contemporary volatile anesthetics and anesthesia machines allow for a more environmentally conscious induction, practice has not changed. We aimed to reduce the environmental impact of our inhalation inductions by decreasing the use of nitrous oxide and fresh gas flows.

Methods

Through a series of four plan‐do‐study‐act cycles, the improvement team used content experts to demonstrate the environmental impact of the current inductions and to provide practical ways to reduce this, by focusing on nitrous oxide use and fresh gas flows, with visual reminders introduced at point of delivery. The primary measures were the percentage of inhalation inductions that used nitrous oxide and the maximum fresh gas flows/kg during the induction period. Statistical process control charts were used to measure improvement over time.

Results

33 285 inhalation inductions were included over a 20‐month period. nitrous oxide use decreased from 80% to <20% and maximum fresh gas flows/kg decreased from a rate of 0.53 L/min/kg to 0.38 L/min/kg, an overall reduction of 28%. Reduction in fresh gas flows was greatest in the lightest weight groups. Induction times and behaviors remained unchanged over the duration of this project.

Conclusions

Our quality improvement group decreased the environmental impact of inhalation inductions and created cultural change within our department to sustain change and foster the pursuit of future environmental efforts.
Inheritance of seed protein in two interspecific pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) crosses
Authors: Saxena K. B. , Srivastava Namita , Reddy L. J. , Saxena R. K.
Published: May 2023

Pigeonpea is one of the primary sources of protein for most rural communities of south Asia and Africa. The enhancement of protein from the present level of 20–22% will help masses in their nutritional well‐beings. Breeders have identified high‐protein (28–30%) germplasm amongst the wild relatives of pigeonpea; and these can serve as donors in breeding high‐yielding high‐protein cultivars. To achieve this, information on the inheritance of seed protein will be useful in organizing interspecific matings, generation advancement, and selection schemes. In the present study, two interspecific crosses, involving two pigeonpea cultivars ('Pant A2' and 'ICP 6997') and a wild species (Cajanus albicans (W. & A.)), were made to study the inheritance of seed protein in F1, F2, and BC1F1 generations. The high‐protein trait was found to be controlled by two independent dominant genes with complementary effects. These genes are tagged with symbols “HPt1” and “HPt2”. The authors believe that now opportunities exist for enhancing the protein levels in pigeonpea through breeding approaches.
Diversity stabilizes but does not increase sapling survival in a tree diversity experiment
Authors: King Rachel A. , Pullen Jamie , Cook‐Patton Susan C. , Parker John D.
Published: May 2023

Tree plantings have the potential to increase species diversity and sequester carbon, yet planting failure and early mortality pose significant barriers to their success. Biodiversity‐ecosystem function theory suggests that diverse tree plantings could improve survival outcomes through either the portfolio or facilitation effect, yet there remain few tests of this hypothesis. Here, we use a large‐scale tree‐diversity experiment (BiodiversiTREE), with monitoring of nearly 8,000 individual trees to test whether (1) tree species diversity increases survival rates, (2) tree diversity stabilizes the risk of planting failure, and/or (3) diversity effects are important relative to other common drivers of seedling mortality (e.g. herbivory and soil moisture). We found that only species identity significantly impacted the likelihood of survival, not plant functional diversity nor plot species richness nor phylogenetic diversity. There were minor effects of elevation and soil moisture on survival, but both explained a very small amount of variation in the data (r2marg ≤ 0.011). Higher tree diversity did, however, strongly reduce variation in survival across plots, with nearly 2‐fold higher coefficients of variation in monocultures (30.4%, 28.4–32.6% 95% bootstrapped confidence interval) compared to 4‐ (16.3%, 13.8–18.7%) and 12‐species plots (12.8%, 10.8–14.7%). Ultimately, our results suggest that employing diverse species can lower the risk of planting failure (i.e. the portfolio effect), but that species selection still plays a large role in early establishment.
Both overwhelmed or in it together? Similarity in COVID‐19‐related stress and romantic relationship quality
Authors: From Annika , Luerssen Anna , Gordon Amie M.
Published: May 2023

Stress tends to be negatively associated with romantic relationship quality, but shared stress can bond romantic partners and may actually have a positive effect on relationships. Thus, are similar levels of pandemic‐related stress during the COVID‐19 pandemic—a time of high stress for many couples—associated with better or worse relationship quality? In this study, we investigated whether similarity in COVID‐19‐related stress was associated with romantic relationship outcomes in two dyadic samples (N = 300 couples). Generally, we found little evidence that similarity in COVID‐19‐related stress was associated with relationship outcomes. We did find that similarity in general worry about the pandemic was associated with lower overall relationship quality; however, it was also associated with lower levels of viewing the pandemic as a source of conflict. Therefore, more research is needed to understand the nuances of when and how stress similarity is associated with romantic relationship quality.
Evolution, systematics and historical biogeography of Palparini and Palparidiini antlions (Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae): Old origin and in situ diversification in Southern Africa
Authors: Hévin Noémie M.‐C. , Kergoat Gael. J. , Clamens Anne‐Laure , Le Ru Bruno , Mansell Mervyn W. , Michel Bruno
Published: May 2023

Palparine and palparidiine antlions constitute an emblematic clade of large and occasionally colourful insects that are only distributed in the western portion of the Eastern hemisphere, with about half of the known species diversity occurring exclusively in Southern Africa. Little is known about their evolutionary history, and the boundaries and relationships of most genera are still unresolved. In this study, we analyse a molecular dataset consisting of seven loci (five mitochondrial and two nuclear genes) for 144 antlion species and provide the first phylogenetic hypothesis for a representative sampling of Palparini and Palparidiini (62 Palparini species, representing 15 of the 17 known genera, and all three known Palparidiini species). In addition, we reconstruct their timing of diversification and historical biogeography. The resulting tree indicates that several extant palparine genera are polyphyletic or paraphyletic and provides interesting leads that ought to be helpful for future taxonomic revisions; it also enables us to re‐evaluate the taxonomic utility and relevancy of a number of morphological characters that were previously used to define some genera. Molecular dating analyses indicate that the most recent common ancestor of both groups originated about 92 million years ago (Ma) in the Late Cretaceous. Finally, the results of historical biogeography analyses provide strong support for an origin in Southern Africa, which further acted as both a cradle of diversification and a springboard for successive waves of northern dispersals.
Too Many Ties
Authors: Davis Jason
Published: May 2023

This chapter describes how and why organizational and individual networking interests become misaligned in the formation of relationships, the density of the resulting networks, and the impact of too many ties on organizational outcomes. The falling cost of networking with the increased use of digital technologies is a key factor in the proliferation of network agency problems as it shifts incentives for individuals and enables them to form too many ties.
Ties Too Weak
Authors: Davis Jason
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on network agency problems related to the quality of relationships that individuals form, noting that individuals often have incentives to create weaker ties than are necessary to accomplish organizational goals. Digital technologies that enable employees to maintain vast networks of weak ties amplify this effect. Employee motivation to form weak ties is related to the firm specificity of strong ties in organizations. Although weak ties are often associated with heterogeneous resource access in markets, strong ties may be necessary to mobilize the diverse knowledge and resources necessary to achieve heterogeneous objectives in organizational contexts.
Persistence
Authors: Davis Jason
Published: May 2023

This chapter summarizes key network mechanisms underlying the impact of four network agency problems described in previous chapters, the misaligned incentives and social capital inducements that are their antecedent causes, and the misaligned political content that misaligned social capital often supports in organizations. The persistence of problems is related to the failure of interventions directed at specific network structures and networking behaviors to fundamentally change the organizational incentives and opportunities underlying misaligned networking. Digital technologies are shown to often support resistance to intervention aimed at resolving network agency problems more than these interventions themselves.
Network Agency over the Life Cycle
Authors: Davis Jason
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the implications of network agency theory for different types of organizations as they evolve over the life cycle—namely, entrepreneurial and established organizations. Heterogeneity in agency costs related to bonding, monitoring, and intervention is used to explain typical organizational life-cycle differences. Network agency ideas are used to explain fundamental differences in organizational forms for innovation. These forms are closed innovation leveraging corporate structures and open innovation as in open-source communities.
A Research Agenda
Authors: Davis Jason
Published: May 2023

This chapter outlines a research agenda for network agency theory, including central questions to be answered about behavioral antecedents of network agency theory and the impact of misalignment between individual and organizational networking interests. I argue for the most fruitful application of inductive research through case methods, simulation and analytical modeling, and experimentation.
America’s Contribution to Political Thought: Prophylactic Judicial Independence as an Instrument of Democratic Constitutionalism
Authors: Redish Martin H.
Published: May 2023

The Introduction to the book explains how the American system of constitutionalism illustrates a form of American exceptionalism. Its version of a written, mandatory countermajoritarian constitution combined with an aggressive form of independent, insulated judicial interpretation and enforcement was unique at the time of its creation and in many ways remains unique today. It also explains the fundamentally paradoxical nature of the system: Only through a form of aggressive judicial policing by prophylactically protected judges may the American form of democracy continue to thrive. Finally, it emphasizes the limitations on this otherwise broad judicial power to enforce, interpret and protect the Constitution: the need for a corresponding degree of judicial humility, recognizing that for the very reason of the judiciary’s insulation from the democratic process, it is prohibited from enforcing its value choices on the populace absent a principled grounding in constitutional text and value.
Constitutionalism, Democracy, and the Pathology of Legislative Deception
Authors: Redish Martin H.
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that paradoxically, the best way to assure accountability of the majoritarian legislative branch of the federal government to the electorate is to require that the insulated judiciary prevent forms of “legislative deception” that Congress may impose. Where Congress enacts a law that explicitly provides “X” but by means of evidentiary or procedural modification effectively transforms that law into “Y” or even “Not X,” the judiciary should declare such legislation unconstitutional as a violation of separation of powers. This is because otherwise such a statutory form of shell game would commandeer the federal judiciary as an unwilling partner in a scheme to defraud the public, thereby undermining the foundational element of democratic accountability.
Ancestral Tales
Authors: Mintz Alan
Published: May 2023

S. Y. Agnon (1887–1970) is the preeminent Hebrew writer of the twentieth century and the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1966). From the mid-1950s until his death, Agnon was busy writing an epic cycle of short stories that reimagined the life of the Jewish community in the early modern period in his hometown of Buczacz. Part of Poland until 1772, Buczacz passed to the Austrian Empire as part of the province of Galicia; today it is located in western Ukraine. The stories were published three years after Agnon’s death in a volume titled A City in Its Fullness (in Hebrew). (A volume of the same title containing the major stories in English translation was published in summer 2016.) Agnon’s Buczacz stories are a unique instance of a major modernist writer devoting his fictional imagination to exploring and reanimating traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The project is also a unique response to the Holocaust in its insistence on reinscribing what was lost rather than representing the experience of destruction. This study explains Agnon’s strategy focusing exclusively on the fortunes of one town over time and analyzes and presents the new modes of narration required to make his writing seem at home both within the time they are set as well as for the mid-twentieth-century reader. This literary-critical study offers readings of the major stories against a shifting historical background.
Kant’s Remaining Time
Authors: Ellermann Greg
Published: May 2023

This chapter treats Kant’s concept of time in relation to his philosophy of nature. Famously, time as the “form of inner sense” is fundamental to the account of consciousness offered in the first and third Critiques. Reading the Critiques alongside Kant’s works on natural history, this chapter attends to a planetary, or even cosmological, time irreducible to the forms of intuition. While Kant insists that philosophy inhabit “the human standpoint,” he also recognizes a temporality that exceeds the bounds of inner sense: a natural-historical time that cannot be attributed to the transcendental subject. This “remaining time,” which endures with or without finite things, recurs in Kant’s reflections on natural history, and it unsettles stories about his inattention or hostility to wild nature.
Hegel in and Out of the Woods
Authors: Ellermann Greg
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the environmental implications of Hegel’s early thought. Often charged with being hostile to nature, Hegel’s attitude is more complex: his concern is not with nature in itself but with the destruction enabled by an ideology of subjective freedom. In the essays and lectures of his Jena period, Hegel takes the measure of a nascent industrial capitalism, along with its consequences for life, consciousness, and labor. This chapter emphasizes the philosopher’s resistance to the domination of nature. In a lecture course of 1803–4, he asks how machine labor reshapes consciousness. But he also proposes that machinery “deceives” nature, as it hastens on the “evaporation” of a bond between worker and world. If under capitalism all that is solid melts into air, for Hegel this change in the weather can be attributed to industry and its intensifying capacity for exploitation.
Epistemic Reality
Authors: Walser Hannah
Published: May 2023

Through readings of Poe's Dupin trilogy and Melville's “Bartleby,” this chapter develops the concept of a pragmatics of behavior, highlighting the way that formal and narratological choices steer a reader’s ad hoc epistemic stance in real time. By focalizing these texts through narrators who shift from one psychological model to another under pressure from a seemingly inexplicable series of actions (whether human or, in the case of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” of ambiguous origin), Poe and Melville not only define a spectrum of epistemic stances toward the propositional contents of other minds, but also indicate the utilitarian goals of enforcing laws, managing subordinates, and maintaining a good-enough social harmony that inform even the most abstract theories of will and psychological interiority. As tightly controlled as philosophical thought experiments, these fictions delineate the conditions under which behaviorist explanations and predictions are more successful than intentionalist ones.
Causal Power
Authors: Walser Hannah
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines textual representations of slavery—both nonfictional accounts like Douglass’s autobiographies and the interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted by the Works Progress Administration, and fictions like Delany’s Blake, Stowe’s Dred, and Chesnutt’s conjure tales—that figure the plantation as the site of a mindreading arms race. On the one hand, the contradictions folded into the white supremacist cognitive model led whites into erratic behavior patterns that placed considerable strain on enslaved people’s efforts to predict and manage the actions of their oppressors. On the other hand, the ever-evolving white supremacist model acted as a framework within which and against which enslaved people developed an understanding of the causal power of their own mental states. This chapter reads scenes of Black minds reasoning about white minds as interventions in the project of diagnosing and resisting the sociocognitive scripts of white supremacy.
Responsibility
Authors: Walser Hannah
Published: May 2023

This chapter uses two works by Mark Twain to define “fooling,” a form of nonmentalistic deception. Twain’s characters deceive, not by communicating deliberately false information to their victims, but by creating scenes filled with material clues designed to activate a misleading behavioral schema. Because it does not rely on social trust, fooling is especially well suited to deception across a power or status differential. The capacity of fooling to ameliorate what the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice” makes it a recurring motif in both fictional and nonfictional texts. In particular, fooling appears as a subterranean force in two important social spaces in the antebellum United States: the slave auction and the asylum. The closing pages continue to explore the cognitive impact of Gilded Age inequality by examining the gendered and national reasons for what Henry James represents as the inverse correlation between wealth and mindreading capacity.
Coleridge Tripping
Authors: Mathes Carmen Faye
Published: May 2023

This chapter reveals Coleridge’s later frustrations with Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads to depend on a metaphysical dilemma: by 1817’s Biographia Literaria, Coleridge has come to disagree with the materialist morality that would justify Wordsworth’s prosaic verse. Declaring that metrical irregularity and flat diction feel like tripping down stairs in the dark, Coleridge claims that poetry should make readers feel a perfect coincidence of bodily balance and self-conscious self-control. Retracing Coleridge’s steps as he attempts to achieve such equipoise in his critique of Wordsworth’s “The Sailor’s Mother” (1807), I show how disappointed reading becomes the affective measure by which Wordsworth’s poem fails to model self-restraint as a (properly Spinozist, in Coleridge’s view) means of preserving the power and integrity of other people. What Coleridge wants from Wordsworth instead, I conclude, is akin to the transformative recitation of The Prelude that Coleridge immortalizes in “To William Wordsworth” (1807).
The Politics of Provocation
Authors: Mathes Carmen Faye
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores revolutionary metaphors of the wind and weather in poems by William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two very different historical situations organize this chapter: the forced extraction and imprisonment of the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture by the French in 1802, and the public outcry following the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. My readings of Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1802) and Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (1832) reveal that, although border-crossing affects represent a condition of political possibility for both poets, there remains an irresolvable tension between such optimism and the ethics of charging those who are most vulnerable with bearing to be moved to insurrection and violence.
On Salafism
Authors: Bishara Azmi
Published: May 2023

On Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations. Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11 Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by specific sociopolitical contexts.
Bishara offers a sophisticated account of various movements—such as Wahabbism and Hanbalism—frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and examines patterns of modernization in the development of contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms, plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.
On Apostasy
Authors: Bishara Azmi
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the practice of takfīr—the branding of an individual or a group as infidel—including the facile categorization of entire groups as infidels. The chapter traces the genesis of takfiri groups and ideas across the centuries. It shows how disagreement among Salafis has reached the point of division and mutual takfīr. It argues that while takfīr can only be about doctrine, disagreements made non-doctrinal issues into doctrinal ones. Therefore, the chapter explores modern groups’ shifting interpretations of classical texts, and splits within the trends over these interpretations. Salafis generally hold that primary religious texts are self-explanatory and literally true. They do not need interpretation but must be taken as self-evident. These groups may tolerate differences in limited areas of ritual and law, but not in theology. Their intolerance is at the root of the stagnation that has affected some parts of the Muslim world.
Introduction
Authors: Chatterjee Ronjaunee
Published: May 2023

The introduction unfolds a theoretical genealogy of the term “singularity” and introduces a constellation of related terms that the book deploys in its chapters: “likeness,” “seriality,” and “minimal difference.” While singularity is often read in continental philosophy—especially the aesthetic tradition after Immanuel Kant—as conceptually errant and unwieldy, the term nevertheless functions as a useful critical optic for untangling normative and prescriptive models of femininity and identity. This introduction opens up a critical conversation between nineteenth-century literature and several vibrant theoretical fields that engage singularity as an alternative to liberal individualism: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer of color theory, and the Black radical tradition.
Seriality, Singularity, Sociality The Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
Authors: Chatterjee Ronjaunee
Published: May 2023

This chapter builds on the book’s earlier arguments about likeness and singularity in a reading of Wilkie Collins’s celebrated sensation novel The Woman in White. The book is a serialized tale of two women who are switched for an inheritance scheme, only to reveal their sisterhood. Noting that the novel’s anxieties around gendered identity resemble those of passing narratives, this chapter studies The Woman in White and its material afterlife—the popularity of the figure of a “white woman” in visual and popular culture in Britain—to contest the stable epistemic grounds of “woman” and “whiteness.” In revealing that women cannot be substituted for one another after all, Collins’s novel exposes a gap between the visible body and its alleged interior as a stable locus of gendered and racialized subjectivity.
Epilogue
Authors: Chatterjee Ronjaunee
Published: May 2023

In theorizing the long durée of nineteenth-century conceptions of a subject, the concluding section of the book finds that problems of likeness and seriality haunt contemporary posthuman accounts of being as much as they do an earlier liberal humanism. Insofar as contemporary science fiction inherits tropes of doubling and iteration handed down from the Gothic, it remains enmired in basic questions around how difference functions to articulate ontology. The book ends by turning to a contemporary film, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), to consider the presently popularized AI definition of singularity. This definition is animated by earlier trajectories of literary and philosophical thought. I read the film with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) to contrast their differing approaches to femininity and subjectivity. The book closes with a short reading of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, “Literary Communism.”
Sirens Are Calling
Authors: Martel Stéphanie
Published: May 2023

This chapter deals with the “human dimension” of regional insecurity in Southeast Asia, focusing on ASEAN’s claim to form a “people-centered” security community. It discusses the evolution of ASEAN’s approach to issues like pandemics, natural disasters, intra-state conflict, and gendered forms of insecurity. It shows that ASEAN is increasingly pressured into developing solutions to ensure the security of its “people” while resisting the “sirens” of human security and the responsibility to protect. The chapter discusses the growing participation of NGOs in the ASEAN process on peace and security, and how it contributes to the development of alternative spaces of security governance where ASEAN’s champion-of-the-people narrative is overtly challenged. Specific cases are covered, including trafficking in persons and the Rohingya crisis, to highlight how civil society actors, despite the constraints under which they operate, are still able to assert agency in shaping ASEAN’s people-centered community.
Big Tiger, Tyrant of the Mountain
Authors: DeMare Brian
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the downfall of Big Tiger, a local thug charged as an evil tyrant by the Communists in the first years of the People’s Republic of China. His story reveals much about rural life, both before and after the arrival of the Communists. We see how the Nationalists relied on unpaid men such as Big Tiger to control the countryside, allowing him to engage in significant corruption. His arrest provides an inside view of the new legal system, including the ways in which the identity of the accused could shift to meet political needs.
Merchant Zha Goes To Court
Authors: DeMare Brian
Published: May 2023

This chapter recreates the trials and tribulations of Merchant Zha, a hapless businessman who ran afoul of the legal system of the People’s Republic of China. His early life introduces readers to banking and commerce in the countryside. His troubles with the law highlight the power of local cadres and the inside workings of the PRC legal system.
A Few More Words in Closing
Authors: DeMare Brian
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter offers readers a chance to rethink how history is told, by viewing the previous casefiles as a unified whole. This perspective highlights how the Communists brought the power of the state to the grassroots through a punishing combination of mass campaigns, legal trials, and sheer patience.
Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor
Authors: Whearty Bridget
Published: May 2023

The introduction uses the digitization of Huntington Library, MSS El 26 C 9, the Ellesmere Chaucer, to highlight what has habitually gone missing in writing about digitization—namely, the many laborers and bookmakers, medieval and modern, who mediate between premodern books and contemporary end users. It suggests that this erasure and historic discomfort around digitization are both rooted in late twentieth-century celebrations of “the physical” versus “the digital” and concerns that the rise of computers would inevitably bring about “the death of the book.” As a corrective, it proposes a special extension of the Caswell Test to include digitizers and library technologists. Doing so brings modern research more in line with long-standing methodological commitments to historical scribes, printers, and copyists, and with our more recent engagement in experiential research, by partnering with medieval scribes’ modern heirs to rigorously understand digitization from the inside out.
A Tabernacle in the Desert
Authors: Bailey Christian
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how love was experienced and communicated across the life course, focusing especially on the experiences of courtship, engagement, and marriage. The chapter pays particular attention to the shifting gender dynamics in Jewish relationships across the Imperial era. Whereas middle-class Jewish men might seek compensation in their private lives for the lack of integration they experienced in the public arena, the situation was often different for similarly situated women. Growing numbers of Jewish women made the most of their new educational opportunities while single but were usually expected to prioritize their roles as wives and mothers once married. As a result, the triumph of the love marriage had a different valence for men and women. Although it might be a particularly powerful sign of their greater freedom for many men, it was less likely to change the life trajectories of women.
Verdigris and Radical Democracy
Authors: Greiman Jennifer
Published: May 2023

Chapter 2 argues that Melville carries his rethinking of state-of-nature philosophy into a radical experiment in literary aesthetics in Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. Rejecting the view that Pierre is a darkly cynical book, this chapter takes seriously the narrator’s claim that Pierre is “a bit too radical” for his readers' tastes. That radicalism lies not in the novel’s plot but in the sources for Melville’s figuration of democracy as a peculiar shade of green produced by corroding copper. Invoking Romantic color theory, and the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the novel pursues an experiment in radical creativity in which aesthetics and politics appear at the collision of human and nonhuman agencies. From this, the chapter proposes a new account of the role that aesthetics might play in radical democratic theory.
Shadow Negotiators
Authors: Margulis Matias E.
Published: May 2023

Shadow Negotiators is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO, Matias E. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as “shadow negotiators” engaged in political actions intended to alter the trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics, agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four different UN organizations – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP), Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF).
By identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to shape international trade law, this book shows that UN organizations chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right to food.
Introduction
Authors: Margulis Matias E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter introduces the main argument of the book, its contribution to scholarship, and the scope of the study. I argue that United Nations organizations have intervened in multilateral trade negotiations at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO) in an effort to alter proposed trade rules that those organizations expected would have negative implications for world food security and vulnerable populations. I situate the book within existing scholarship and outline its contribution to debates about global trade politics and law, the UN’s role in global economic governance, and theories of regime complexes and international organizations (IOs) as actors. The chapter finishes with a description of each chapter in the book.
The Regime Complex for Food Security
Authors: Margulis Matias E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter charts the evolution of the global governance of food security from an international regime to a regime complex. It explains how the creation of the WTO in 1995 to replace the GATT was pivotal in transforming the global governance of food security by bringing agriculture and food under the authority of the trade regime. The chapter provides the context for understanding how institutional proliferation and diverging goals among IOs involved in the regime complex for food security have spurred UN actors to intervene in trade negotiations at the GATT/WTO.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
Authors: Margulis Matias E.
Published: May 2023

The final empirical chapter examines intervention by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF) in the WTO agriculture negotiations. It shows that the SRRTF intervened by taking sides and endorsing the bargaining position of a group of WTO members demanding greater flexibility in global trade rules to pursue domestic food security goals. The SRRTF chose to intervene in the WTO agriculture negotiations out of a conviction that major reform of global trade rules was necessary to combat rising food insecurity caused by a succession of global food crises. While the SRRTF’s interventions prompted significant backlash from powerful states, they were nevertheless influential in shaping the agenda and outcome of negotiations. Most notably, the SRRTF’s advocacy for a legal waiver to protect developing countries’ public food-stockholding programs from legal challenge served as the blueprint for a new WTO agreement.
Conclusion
Authors: Margulis Matias E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and assesses the influence of UN actors on global trade rulemaking. I show that interventions by UN actors had a demonstrable impact on discourse, agenda setting, and outcomes at the GATT/WTO, helping to steer international trade rules toward outcomes intended to protect world food security. When successful, intervention may ameliorate “trade-and” conflicts by introducing other important international objectives, such as food security and human rights, into the trade regime. This book contributes to our understanding of who makes the rules of global trade by revealing the previously unrecognized role of UN organizations in GATT/WTO negotiations. The cases also provide the basis for developing more generalizable insights about the phenomenon of intervention by showing that IOs are exercising influence over decision-making beyond the boundaries of their own institutions and at other overlapping institutions over which they have no formal control.
Dendrogeomorphology in Evaluating Erosive Processes in an Urban Conservation Unit
Authors: Nicolau Ricardo De Faria , Faria Karla Maria Silva de , Momoli Renata Santos , Chagas Matheus Peres
Published: May 2023

Water erosion is a worldwide problem that has been depleting soils mainly in tropical regions, due to the greater volume of precipitated water. In this sense, recent prediction methods in tropical regions such as dendrogeomorphology are necessary and important to identify and date the influence and correlation between erosion processes and vegetation. This study aimed to understand and scale the erosive processes, through the annual historical recognition of the rate of soil loss and sedimentation, applying the concepts of dendrogeomorphology in the evaluation of the stem and roots of trees of the species of Anadenanthera macrocarpa and Schefflera morototoni, in a conservation unit in the Brazilian Cerrado. Trees were selected in the following soil level conditions: (i) having root exposure, (ii) no exposure (buried), and (iii) no change in soil level (control). Cross-dating was performed using the COFECHA software program, and the information applied in dating scars and abnormal radial growth periods were observed in exposed roots and associated with the beginning of erosion processes. The results indicated that the occurrence of the erosive processes ascertained by anatomical changes in the exposed roots and a most common erosive rains date from 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2016 and 2017. While changes in the trunk growth ring width start from 1992, with similar years between the two species of 2013 and 2017. The highest soil accumulation rates were 18.6 mm/year, vertical losses were 500 mm per year and horizontal losses were 665 mm. Finally, there is a positive correlation between the number of scars and an abrupt increase in the growth rings of the exposed roots with the number of erosive rains.
Neoseiulus pseudomarginatus sp. nov., a new species of predatory mites (Acari: Phytoseiidae) continuously misidentified as Neoseiulus marginatus (Wainstein) from the Mediterranean countries
Authors: Döker Ismail , Stathakis Theodoros I. , Kolodochka Leonid A.
Published: May 2023

Many previous descriptions of Phytoseiidae (Acari: Mesostigmata) species lack some important morphological characteristics including the number of dorsal solenotomes (gland pores). However, the importance of the presence or absence of a single pair of solenostomes to identify two distinct species in some phytoseiid genera, such as Kampimodromus Nesbitt and Neoseiulus Hughes has previously been confirmed by molecular studies in several cases. Neoseiulus marginatus (Wainstein) was originally described from Kazakhstan, a country located in Central Asia, based on the specimens collected from herbaceous plants. It was subsequently reported and redescribed from a series of Western Palearctic countries. However, the material first redescribed from Crimea and thereafter from Armenia, Greece, Israel, and Turkey, by having gd5 solenostomes, is distinct from the original N. marginatus described by Wainstein. Indeed, our examinations of its type specimens confirmed that gd5 pores are consistently absent in the type series of N. marginatus. Therefore, this species is redescribed and illustrated based on the female lectotype. In addition, N. pseudomarginatus sp. nov., a widely distributed species in the Western Palearctic countries, which has seven pairs of solenostomes is described as a new taxon for science. Furthermore, our examinations of the type specimens of N. polyporus (Wainstein) indicated that it should be considered as a junior synonym of N. marginatus, as already suggested in earlier studies.
Dynamic prospect theory: Two core decision theories coexist in the gambling behavior of monkeys and humans
Authors: Tymula Agnieszka , Wang Xueting , Imaizumi Yuri , Kawai Takashi , Kunimatsu Jun , Matsumoto Masayuki , Yamada Hiroshi
Published: May 2023

Research in the multidisciplinary field of neuroeconomics has mainly been driven by two influential theories regarding human economic choice: prospect theory, which describes decision-making under risk, and reinforcement learning theory, which describes learning for decision-making. We hypothesized that these two distinct theories guide decision-making in a comprehensive manner. Here, we propose and test a decision-making theory under uncertainty that combines these highly influential theories. Collecting many gambling decisions from laboratory monkeys allowed for reliable testing of our model and revealed a systematic violation of prospect theory’s assumption that probability weighting is static. Using the same experimental paradigm in humans, substantial similarities between these species were uncovered by various econometric analyses of our dynamic prospect theory model, which incorporates decision-by-decision learning dynamics of prediction errors into static prospect theory. Our model provides a unified theoretical framework for exploring a neurobiological model of economic choice in human and nonhuman primates.
Silica botryoids from chemically oscillating reactions and as Precambrian environmental proxies
Authors: Varkouhi Shahab , Papineau Dominic
Published: May 2023

In this petrographic and geochemical study, we differentiated diverse quartz botryoids, including circular-concentric, twinned, columnar, wavy, and stromatolite-like structures versus synchronous biotic patterns of similar geometry and size dimensions (filamentous traits and stromatolites) in Precambrian cherts of Barberton, South Africa, and Gunflint, Canada. The botryoidal habits explored retained self-similar patterns of radially aligned acicular quartz with concentric laminae, which are not documented in biologically built stromatolites. These ancient fractals and their composition imitate those in chemically oscillating reactions, implying that the precipitation of botryoids was fueled by abiotic diagenetic degradation of organic matter and subsequently metamorphosed into chert.
Exploring the efficacy of psychotherapies for depression: a multiverse meta-analysis
Authors: Plessen Constantin Yves , Karyotaki Eirini , Miguel Clara , Ciharova Marketa , Cuijpers Pim
Published: May 2023

Background

Hundreds of randomised controlled trials and dozens of meta-analyses have examined psychotherapies for depression—yet not all points in the same direction. Are these discrepancies a result of specific meta-analytical decisions or do most analytical strategies reaching the same conclusion?

Objective

We aim to solve these discrepancies by conducting a multiverse meta-analysis containing all possible meta-analyses, using all statistical methods.

Study selection and analysis

We searched four bibliographical databases (PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO and Cochrane Register of Controlled Trials), including studies published until 1 January 2022. We included all randomised controlled trials comparing psychotherapies with control conditions without restricting the type of psychotherapy, target group, intervention format, control condition and diagnosis. We defined all possible meta-analyses emerging from combinations of these inclusion criteria and estimated the resulting pooled effect sizes with fixed-effect, random-effects, 3-level, robust variance estimation,p-uniform and PET-PEESE (precision-effect test and precision-effect estimate with SE) meta-analysis models. This study was preregistered (https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-050197).

Findings

A total of 21 563 records were screened, and 3584 full texts were retrieved; 415 studies met our inclusion criteria containing 1206 effect sizes and 71 454 participants. Based on all possible combinations between inclusion criteria and meta-analytical methods, we calculated 4281 meta-analyses. The average summary effect size for these meta-analyses was Hedges’gmean=0.56, a medium effect size, and ranged fromg=−0.66 to 2.51. In total, 90% of these meta-analyses reached a clinically relevant magnitude.

Conclusions and Clinical Implications

The multiverse meta-analysis revealed the overall robustness of the effectiveness of psychotherapies for depression. Notably, meta-analyses that included studies with a high risk of bias, compared the intervention with wait-list control groups, and not correcting for publication bias produced larger effect sizes.