bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe
Authors: O'Hara Alexander
Published: May 2018

From 550 to 750 monastic culture became more firmly entrenched in Western Europe. The role of monasteries and their relationship to the social world around them was transformed during this period as monastic institutions became more integrated in social and political power networks. These collected essays focus on one of the central figures in this process, the Irish ascetic exile and monastic founder Columbanus (c. 550–615), his travels on the Continent, and the monastic network he and his Frankish disciples established in Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy. The post-Roman kingdoms through which Columbanus traveled and in which he established his monastic foundations were made up of many different peoples. As an outsider and immigrant, how did Columbanus and his communities interact with these peoples? How did they negotiate differences, and what emerged from these encounters? This volume aims to explore further the strands of this vibrant contact.
A Unified Spatial Model of Congress
Authors: Buchler Justin
Published: May 2018

This chapter presents a unified model of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting, built around a party leadership election. First, a legislative caucus selects a party leader who campaigns based on a platform of a disciplinary system. Once elected, that leader runs the legislative session, in which roll call votes occur. Then elections occur, and incumbents face re-election with the positions they incrementally adopted. When the caucus is ideologically homogeneous, electorally diverse, and policy motivated, members will elect a leader who solves the collective action problem of sincere voting with “preference-preserving influence.” That leader will threaten to punish legislators who bow to electoral pressure to vote as centrists. Consequently, legislators vote sincerely as extremists and get slightly lower vote shares, but they offset that lost utility with policy gains that they couldn’t have gotten without party influence. Party leaders will rarely pressure legislators to vote insincerely.
Extreme Reversion Points and Party Leadership from 2011 through 2016
Authors: Buchler Justin
Published: May 2018

When a majority party works on normal legislation, it faces a collective action problem of sincere voting, and must prevent legislators from centrist districts from voting against noncentrist legislation. From 2011 through 2016, though, Republican Party leadership faced a different challenge, and leaders were pitted against the extremists in their caucus. This occurred because of a change to the legislative agenda resulting from the combination of extreme polarization and divided government introduced by the 2010 election. With no incentive to work on normal legislation, the agenda did little but avoid reversion points, like debt ceiling breaches, which the extreme elements in the caucus actually found acceptable. Speaker Boehner was forced to solve a new collective action problem, then, convincing a group of Republicans to join with Democrats on bipartisan deals to avoid these reversion points. While historically unusual, the dynamic is what would be expected from the unified model.
Idiocy
Authors: Straus Joseph N.
Published: May 2018

Idiocy, once understood as a mark of divine disfavor, is later medicalized under a variety of seemingly scientific classifications, culminating in a eugenic-era fear of the “menace of the feebleminded” and the widespread institutionalization to which it gave rise. In literature and in music, representations of idiocy have generally fallen into a small number of types: the Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot; the Wild Child and the Natural Man; the Village Idiot (often played for laughs); and the Eugenic Idiot (simultaneously pitiable and a feared source of violence, possibly sexual in nature). Modernist music represents idiocy in its tendency toward simplification in all domains; its static, nondevelopmental character; its deliberate cultivation of disfluency and inarticulateness; its interest in generic incongruity; its pleasure in low humor; and above all its deep interest in the childlike, the folk, and the primitive (including the racial primitive). As in modernist literature, musical representations of idiocy enable the sorts of compositional innovations that are widely understood as defining musical modernism.
Autism
Authors: Straus Joseph N.
Published: May 2018

Autism and twelve-tone serial music are related, mutually reinforcing forms of cultural modernism. Both have been understood as excessively isolated or alone, with each entity self-contained and self-enclosed; as uncommunicative, or communicating in atypical ways, with an excess of private meanings and self-references; as demonstrating an unproductive preference for routines and rituals; as incongruously hypertrophied in certain respects (often hyperrational) and atrophied in others (often emotionally or expressively defective). They have also been understood as inaccessible fortresses; as incomprehensible aliens; as cold, unfeeling machines (especially computational machines); and as idiot savants (with isolated islands of excellence in a sea of cognitive deficiency).
Gravitational Waves
Authors: Maggiore Michele
Published: May 2018

A comprehensive and detailed account of the physics of gravitational waves and their role in astrophysics and cosmology. The part on astrophysical sources of gravitational waves includes chapters on GWs from supernovae, neutron stars (neutron star normal modes, CFS instability, r-modes), black-hole perturbation theory (Regge-Wheeler and Zerilli equations, Teukoslky equation for rotating BHs, quasi-normal modes) coalescing compact binaries (effective one-body formalism, numerical relativity), discovery of gravitational waves at the advanced LIGO interferometers (discoveries of GW150914, GW151226, tests of general relativity, astrophysical implications), supermassive black holes (supermassive black-hole binaries, EMRI, relevance for LISA and pulsar timing arrays). The part on gravitational waves and cosmology include discussions of FRW cosmology, cosmological perturbation theory (helicity decomposition, scalar and tensor perturbations, Bardeen variables, power spectra, transfer functions for scalar and tensor modes), the effects of GWs on the Cosmic Microwave Background (ISW effect, CMB polarization, E and B modes), inflation (amplification of vacuum fluctuations, quantum fields in curved space, generation of scalar and tensor perturbations, Mukhanov-Sasaki equation,reheating, preheating), stochastic backgrounds of cosmological origin (phase transitions, cosmic strings, alternatives to inflation, bounds on primordial GWs) and search of stochastic backgrounds with Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTA).
Basics of FRW cosmology
Authors: Maggiore Michele
Published: May 2018

An introduction to FRW cosmology. Comoving and physical coordinates and momenta. Background equation for single fluids and multi-components fluids. Radiation dominance, matter dominance, recombination and decoupling. Newtonian cosmology inside the horizon.
Fellow Creatures
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M.
Published: May 2018

This book argues that we are obligated to treat all sentient animals as “ends in themselves.” Drawing on a theory of the good derived from Aristotle, it offers an explanation of why animals are the sorts of beings who have a good. Drawing on a revised version of Kant’s argument for the value of humanity, it argues that rationality commits us to claiming the standing of ends in ourselves in two senses. As autonomous beings, we claim to be ends in ourselves when we claim the standing to make laws for ourselves and each other. As beings who have a good, we also claim to be ends in ourselves when we take the things that are good for us to be good absolutely and so worthy of pursuit. The first claim commits us to joining with other autonomous beings in relations of reciprocal moral lawmaking. The second claim commits us to treating the good of every sentient animal as something of absolute importance. The book also argues that human beings are not more important than, superior to, or better off than the other animals. It criticizes the “marginal cases” argument and advances a view of moral standing as attaching to the atemporal subjects of lives. It offers a non-utilitarian account of the relationship between the good and pleasure, and addresses questions about the badness of extinction and about whether we have the right to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets.
Pragmatic indexicals
Authors: Jaszczolt Kasia M.
Published: May 2018

In this chapter Kasia M. Jaszczolt offers a pragmatic, contextualist account of the meaning of devices used for first-person reference that makes use of the post-Gricean idea of top-down modification of truth-conditional content. On this view, the indexical/non-indexical distinction becomes blurred because expressions on each side of the dichotomy can have indexical as well as non-indexical functions. She demonstrates how indexicality can be ‘pragmaticized’, and how the resulting ‘functional indexicals’ can be represented in her radical contextualist theory of Default Semantics.
Metacognitive diversity across cultures
Authors: Proust Joëlle , Fortier Martin
Published: May 2018

This book collects essays on linguistics, on anthropology, on philosophy, on developmental, experimental, and social psychology, and on the neurosciences, with the aim of integrating knowledge about the variability of metacognitive skills across cultures, and of identifying the potential factors accounting for such variability—such as childrearing practices, linguistic syntax and semantics, beliefs about the self, and rituals. In this introductory chapter, the main reasons that make this topic scientifically and culturally important are presented.
Learning
Authors: Kühnen Ulrich , Egmond Marieke van
Published: May 2018

Do metacognitive beliefs about learning differ across cultures? This chapter reviews relevant literature from different fields (in particular from educational science and from social, cognitive, and educational psychology). Building on previous work, it argues that Western students conceptualize learning primarily as the acquisition of knowledge and the development of mental skills (“mind orientation”). According to the “virtue orientation” that is more prevalent among Asians, learning encompasses in addition the pursuit of moral and social development. Both orientations are embedded in intellectual traditions that go back to ancient times (i.e., to Socrates in the West and to Confucius in the East). They are also associated with the culturally conferred understanding of what it means to be a good person, which differs between individualist and collectivist societies. The chapter reviews the empirical literature showing that discrepancies in learning beliefs between faculty and students from diverse backgrounds are detrimental for academic satisfaction and performance.
Overt gender marking depending on syntactic context in Ripano
Authors: Paciaroni Tania , Loporcaro Michele
Published: May 2018

Based on dedicated fieldwork, this chapter analyses the gender system of Ripano (Italo-Romance), showing that it displays overt gender marking, but only depending on syntactic context. While overt gender per se and the syntactic dependency of gender marking via agreement on targets have both been described for several languages, the Ripano system is unprecedented, and deserves thorough description: thus, the chapter presents the phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic prerequisites as well as the syntactic conditions which constrain overt gender marking. It places this peculiarity of Ripano in perspective, describing the many other quite extraordinary properties of this dialect: not only does it mark—unusually for Indo-European—gender/number agreement on finite verbs, but also on several other agreement targets, including non-finite verb forms, complementizers, wh-words, and even nouns, which in certain syntactic constructions cumulate the usual inherent gender specification with highly unusual contextual gender marking, determined via agreement with the clause subject.
From a Rational Point of View
Authors: Henning Tim
Published: May 2018

When we discuss normative reasons, oughts, requirements of rationality, hypothetical imperatives (or “anankastic conditionals”), motivating reasons, or weakness and strength of will, we often use verbs like “believe” and “want” to capture a relevant subject’s perspective. According to the received view, what these verbs do is describe the subject’s mental states. Many puzzles concerning normative discourse have to do with the role that mental states consequently appear to play in this discourse. This book uses tools from formal semantics and the philosophy of language to develop an alternative account of sentences involving these verbs. According to this view, called parentheticalism in honour of J. O. Urmson, we very commonly use these verbs in a parenthetical sense. Clauses with these verbs thereby express backgrounded side-remarks on the contents they embed, and these latter, embedded contents constitute the at-issue contents of our utterances. Thus, instead of speaking about the subject’s mental states, we often use sentences involving “believe” and “want” to speak about the world in a way that, in the conversational background, relates our utterances to her point of view. This idea is made precise and used to solve various puzzles concerning normative discourse. The result is a new, unified understanding of normative discourse, which does not postulate conceptual breaks between objective and subjective normative reasons, or normative reasons and rationality, or indeed between the reasons we ascribe to an agent and the reasons she herself can be expected to cite.
Social Democracy and the Welfare State in Context: The Conditioning Effect of Institutional Legacies and Party Competition
Authors: Häusermann Silja
Published: May 2018

The chapter links shifts in the social democratic electorate to the positions of social democratic parties on new and old welfare state policies and explains the programmatic responsiveness of social democratic parties to their new constituency with institutional policy legacies and party competition. The chapter demonstrates that shifts to middle-class electoral constituencies are correlated with shifts toward a progressive position on the socio-cultural dimension of political competition, and an increased support for social investment policies on the economic dimension. Importantly, however, the new middle-class electorate does not withdraw social democrats’ support for traditional welfare policies. Both institutional legacies and party competition moderate the link between these shifts in the electorate and party positions.
Algebra
Authors: Henderson Andrea
Published: May 2018

The difference between the transcendent Coleridgean symbol and the unreliable conventional symbol was of explicit concern in Victorian mathematics, where the former was aligned with Euclidean geometry and the latter with algebra. Rather than trying to bridge this divide, practitioners of modern algebra and the pioneers of symbolic logic made it the founding principle of their work. Regarding the content of claims as a matter of “indifference,” they concerned themselves solely with the formal interrelations of the symbolic systems devised to represent those claims. In its celebration of artificial algorithmic structures, symbolic logician Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno dramatizes the power of this new formalist ideal not only to revitalize the moribund field of Aristotelian logic but also to redeem symbolism itself, conceived by Carroll and his mathematical, philosophical, and symbolist contemporaries as a set of harmonious associative networks rather than singular organic correspondences.
Introduction
Authors: Spies Dennis C.
Published: May 2018

By briefly summarizing the New Progressive Dilemma (NPD) debate, this introduction presents to the reader the general research question: does immigration necessarily lead to welfare cuts? It outlines the significance of relationships between immigrants and native citizens, showing how these relate to redistributive policies in the US and Western Europe—but with very different results. In the US, states with high minority populations tend to favor lower welfare benefits, whereas in cross-national comparisons no such depressing effect of immigration on welfare spending can easily be identified. The book applies the insights from comparative welfare state and party research to the NPD to explain this difference, analyzing the effect of immigration on welfare state retrenchment. Finally, the introduction presents the book’s overall line of reasoning and the structure of its chapters.
The New Progressive Dilemma through the Lens of Comparative Welfare State and Party Research
Authors: Spies Dennis C.
Published: May 2018

The chapter summarizes the New Progressive Dilemma (NPD) debate, identifying three arguments from comparative welfare state and party research likely to be relevant to the relationship between immigration and welfare state retrenchment: public opinion, welfare institutions, and political parties. Alignment of anti-immigrant sentiments and welfare support varies considerably between countries, especially between the US and Europe, leading to different party incentives vis-à-vis welfare state retrenchment. The chapter introduces insights from comparative welfare state and party research to the debate, discussing inter alia, political parties in terms of welfare retrenchment, immigrants as a voter group, and cross-national variation of existing welfare institutions. It addresses the complex debates around attitudinal change caused by immigration, levels of welfare support, voting behavior, and social expenditures. Combining these strands of literature, a common theoretical framework is developed that is subsequently applied to both the US and Western European context.
Introduction
Authors: Tarter Michele Lise , Gill Catie
Published: May 2018

From Quakerism’s earliest beginnings in England, women comprised a swelling number of converts, and they persisted in expanding their transatlantic community throughout the century and a half covered by this book. This introduction explores the rise of this religious sect through focusing on how women participated in the establishment of Quakerism; it appraises women’s religiosity as a way of explaining their enduring presence in the Quaker movement, and gives an account of the strength of women’s contributions through exploring their varied roles within the Society of Friends. The introduction provides a background of Quaker women’s history and establishes a context for the volume’s essays, situating each of the twelve chapters in relation to a critical paradigm and key research question: to assess how radical were the movement’s women, and how far they were able to modify traditional expectations. The conclusion suggests paths for future scholarship to pursue in the light of the findings in this work.
‘Harden not thy Heart’
Authors: Gill Catie
Published: May 2018

In 1660, the Quaker Anne Gilman encouraged the Stuart ruler Charles II to govern judiciously, warning: ‘harden not thy heart’. Monarchy’s ability to inexorably remove power from ‘the people’ was concerning; so too were the ruler’s bawdy predilections. The pamphlets explored in this chapter (c.1660–5) spotlight a group of women who endeavoured to remind the ruler that he is accountable not only to the populace, but to God. Pamphleteering of this kind expresses a combination of moral, theological, and political commitments, as writers pointedly sought to inspire in Charles a thoroughgoing reformation. The tendency of some writers, it is argued, is theologically Antinomian. In surveying this writing, this chapter offers a new approach to how women’s political critique combines with theological principle in the Restoration period.
Copying Hannah Griffitts
Authors: Rosen Rebecca M.
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines verses written and copied by Philadelphia Quaker poet Hannah Griffitts and the circumstances under which they were circulated. It argues that Griffitts’ experiences in print, in contrast with the agency over verse grouping and distribution which manuscript provided, determined her preference for manuscript circulation. It surveys some of the more frequently copied poems circulated by Griffitts and her contemporaries, and compares Griffitts’ own modes of transmitting those verses with those employed by two of her cousins, Milcah Martha Moore and Deborah Norris Logan, in addition to other women in the Quaker community. The chapter concludes with a case study of Griffitts’ transcription and possible distribution of work by a poet coming from outside her own familial circle—Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Atheism’—and how that impacts consideration of Griffitts’ modes and methods of circulation, and the role of that circulation in the construction of both the coterie and the canon.
Conclusion
Authors: Garipzanov Ildar
Published: May 2018

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.
TheObject : Substance :: Event : ProcessAnalogy
Authors: Wellwood Alexis , Hespos Susan J. , Rips Lance J.
Published: May 2018

Beginning at least with Bach (1986), semanticists have suggested that objects are formally parallel to events in the way substances are formally parallel to processes. This chapter investigates whether these parallels can be understood to reflect a shared representational format in cognition, which underlies aspects of the intuitive metaphysics of these categories. The authors of this chapter hypothesized that a way of counting (atomicity) is necessary for object and event representations, unlike for substance or process representations. Atomicity is strongly implied by plural but not mass language. The chapter investigates the language–perception interface across these domains using minimally different images and animations, designed either to encourage atomicity (‘natural’ breaks) or to discourage it (‘unnatural’ breaks). The experiments test preference for naming such stimuli with mass or count syntax. The results support Bach’s analogy in perception and highlight the formal role of atomicity in object and event representation.
Crowdsourcing: A Primer and Research Framework
Authors: Afuah Allan
Published: May 2018

Managers are regularly confronted with unsolved problems. If a manager knows who can solve a problem, they can assign the problem to the correct person to have it solved under an ex ante contract or other form of agreement/commitment, inside or outside the organization. If they do not know who can solve it, they can crowdsource it, broadcasting the problem to an undefined set of people (the crowd) to self-select and solve it with no ex ante contract or other commitment. Although the practice of crowdsourcing goes back to at least the Longitude Prize of 1714, research on the phenomenon has only recently flourished, thanks, in part, to advances in information technology, globalization, and other macro-environmental factors. This chapter presents a crowdsourcing primer and framework with the goal of providing management scholars with some of the fundamentals needed to pursue their research interests in this compelling phenomenon.
Three’s a Crowd?
Authors: Viscusi Gianluigi , Tucci Christopher L.
Published: May 2018

According to conventional wisdom on crowdsourcing, the number of people defines the crowd and maximization of this number is often assumed to be the goal of any crowdsourcing exercise. However, some structural characteristics of the crowd might be more important than the sheer number of participants. These characteristics include (1) the growth rate and its attractiveness to members, (2) equality among members, (3) density within provisional boundaries, (4) goal orientation of the crowd, and (5) “seriality” of the interactions between members. Therefore, a typology is proposed that may allow managers to position their companies’ initiatives among four strategic types for driving innovation: crowd crystals, online communities, closed crowds, and open crowds. Incumbent companies may prefer closed and controlled access to the crowd, limiting the potential for gaining results and insights from fully open crowd-driven innovation initiatives. Thus, the effects on industries and organizations by open crowds are still to be explored.
The Road to Crowdfunding Success: A Review of the Extant Literature
Authors: Butticè Vincenzo , Franzoni Chiara , Rossi-Lamastra Cristina , Rovelli Paola
Published: May 2018

The literature on crowdfunding, the practice of collecting money (fundraising) from a “crowd” of Internet users, has devoted the bulk of its attention to identifying the determinants of success of crowdfunding campaigns. Thanks to the support of the crowd, crowdfunding helps people to enact their projects and entrepreneurial ideas, being particularly important for those who have typically encountered problems accessing traditional sources of finance. Nevertheless, the benefits of crowdfunding are not just limited to raising money. In this chapter, we review the literature on this research and we highlight the main empirical results that have emerged on the topic. We describe the elements and characteristics of crowdfunding campaigns and we discuss how they relate to crowdfunding success. We show that the debate is still in its infancy with several areas in need of further investigation. In the conclusion, we call readers’ attention to some existing gaps.
A Problem in the Making: How Firms Formulate Sharable Problems for Open Innovation Contests
Authors: Wallin Martin W. , Krogh Georg von , Sieg Jan Henrik
Published: May 2018

Crowdsourcing in the form of innovation contests stimulates knowledge creation external to the firm by distributing technical, innovation-related problems to external solvers and by proposing a fixed monetary reward for solutions. While prior work demonstrates that innovation contests can generate solutions of value to the firm, little is known about how problems are formulated for such contests. We investigate problem formulation in a multiple exploratory case study of seven firms and inductively develop a theoretical framework that explains the mechanisms of formulating sharable problems for innovation contests. The chapter contributes to the literatures on crowdsourcing and open innovation by providing a rare account of the intra-organizational implications of engaging in innovation contests and by providing initial clues to problem formulation—a critical antecedent to firms’ ability to leverage external sources of innovation.
Prediction Markets for Crowdsourcing
Authors: Horn Christian , Bogers Marcel , Brem* Alexander
Published: May 2018

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly important phenomenon that is fundamentally changing how companies create and capture value. There are still important questions with respect to how crowdsourcing works and can be applied in practice, especially in business practice. In this chapter, we focus on prediction markets as a mechanism and tool to tap into a crowd in the early stages of an innovation process. The act of opening up to external knowledge sources is also in line with the growing interest in open innovation. One example of a prediction market, a virtual stock market, is applied to open innovation through an online platform. We show that use of mechanisms of internal crowdsourcing with prediction markets can outperform use of external crowds.
Judicialization and its Challenges
Authors: Sands Philippe
Published: May 2018

As an epilogue to the volume, Philippe Sands lays out several of the challenges to international courts. He recalls conversations with the late Professor Vladimir Ibler from Croatia, who recommended that one should not draw conclusions about the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals (ICs) too quickly. Sands reminds us that international courts and tribunals are young, compared to national courts. Several of the ICs have encountered challenges, from accusations that the International Criminal Court is a neo-colonial instrument, to revelations about leakages and unacceptable communication in the boundary arbitration between Croatia and Slovenia. Sands encourages the relatively small community of practitioners and scholars engaged in the workings of ICs to speak out about the deficiencies of the system. However, he ends on a positive note with a sense of optimism for the future of the international courts and tribunals.
The Justice Facade
Authors: Hinton Alexander
Published: May 2018

Is there a point to international justice? This book explores this question in Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge revolutionaries committed genocide and crimes against humanity in an attempt to create a pure socialist regime (1975–1979). Due to geopolitics, it was only in 2006 that a UN-backed hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“Khmer Rouge Tribunal”), commenced operation, one of a growing number of post-Cold War transitional justice interventions. The Justice Facade argues that there is a point to such tribunals, but it is masked by a set of utopian human rights and democratization ideals. Instead of projecting this transitional justice imaginary onto post-conflict peacebuilding efforts, we need to step behind the justice facade to examine what tribunals mean in terms of everyday life and practices—such as the Buddhist beliefs and ritual interactions with the spirits of the dead that are critical to Cambodian victims and survivors. In making this argument, The Justice Facade focuses on civil society outreach efforts to “translate” the court in terms meaningful to Cambodians, the majority of whom are rural villagers, as well as the experience of Cambodian civil parties who testified. This ground-breaking study of transitional justice and demonstration of the importance of examining “justice in translation” is of critical importance not just to those working in the field of transitional justice and law, but in related fields such as development, human rights, anthropology, and peacebuilding.
The Goldilocks Challenge
Authors: Gugerty Mary Kay , Karlan Dean
Published: May 2018

Nonprofits, governments, and social enterprises face increasing pressure to prove that their programs are making a positive impact on the world. This focus on impact is positive: learning whether we are making a difference enhances our ability to effectively address pressing social problems, and is critical for wise stewardship of resources. However, measuring the impact of a program is not always possible, nor is impact evaluation always the right choice for every organization or program. Accurately assessing impact requires information about what would have happened had the program not occurred, and it can be difficult and costly (or even impossible) to gather that information. Yet actors in the social sector face stiff competition for funding, and competition often demands evidence of impact. Faced with this pressure, organizations often attempt to measure impact even when the accuracy is questionable or worse. The result? A lot of misleading data and rhetoric about what works. Moreover, in this pursuit, many organizations collect huge amounts of data that cannot be or are not put to good use for learning and program improvement. Bottom line: Impact is great to measure when you can. But not everyone can and should measure impact. What, then, should organizations do? The Goldilocks Challenge presents four key principles to help guide organizations of all sizes and types in building strong, “right-fit” data collection systems. Those principles—Credible, Actionable, Responsible, and Transportable, or “CART”—describe how organizations can build data systems that support learning and improvement and measure impact when the time is right.
Knowledge and Truth in Plato
Authors: Rowett Catherine
Published: May 2018

I defend four main theses: (1) Knowledge, in Plato’s vocabulary, is a kind of conceptual competence, involving ‘knowing what it is’ about something like virtue or justice; (2) There is a corresponding special meaning of the verb ‘is’ that occurs in the expression ‘knowing what it is’, which is key to understanding what Plato means by claiming that Forms have a superior kind of being; (3) When one knows ‘what it is’ about such concepts, one knows neither a proposition, nor set of propositions, nor an object, but something like a type. Plato’s term is eidos. Plato rightly notes that, in ordinary experience, we never encounter types, only tokens; (4) Although encountering such tokens does not constitute knowledge, it can provide a ladder whereby philosophers can attain a better grasp of the truths in question. Plato’s preferred philosophical method turns out to be an ‘iconic method’—consciously using images and particulars as stepping stones in the enquiry. Via case studies from the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, I establish that these theses are not only compatible with the texts, but render some otherwise puzzling passages intelligible. I show that Plato diagnoses, and deliberately sidesteps, the impasse of Socrates’ fruitless quest for definitions, developing a new method inspired by geometry’s ability to deal pictorially with indefinable lengths. The book offers a novel picture of Plato as resisting and overcoming, not following, the Socratic obsession with definitions, and adopting, not resisting, the use of pictorial proofs and imagery.
American Obscurantism
Authors: Lurie Peter
Published: May 2018

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.
ALMA 12CO (J= 1–0) imaging of the nearby galaxy M 83: Variations in the efficiency of star formation in giant molecular clouds
Authors: Hirota Akihiko , Egusa Fumi , Baba Junichi , Kuno Nario , Muraoka Kazuyuki , Tosaki Tomoka , Miura Rie , Nakanishi Hiroyuki , Kawabe Ryohei
Published: May 2018

We present results of the 12CO (1–0) mosaic observations of the nearby barred-spiral galaxy M 83 obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The total flux is recovered by combining the ALMA data with single-dish data obtained using the Nobeyama 45 m telescope. The combined map covers a ∼13 kpc2 field that includes the galactic center, eastern bar, and spiral arm with a resolution of 2${^{\prime\prime}_{.}}$03 × 1${^{\prime\prime}_{.}}$15 (∼45 pc × ∼25 pc). With a resolution comparable to typical sizes of giant molecular clouds (GMCs), the CO distribution in the bar and arm is resolved into many clumpy peaks that form ridge-like structures. Remarkably, in the eastern arm, the CO peaks form two arc-shaped ridges that run along the arm and exhibit a distinct difference in the activity of star formation: the one on the leading side has numerous H ii regions associated with it, whereas the other one on the trailing side has only a few. To see whether GMCs form stars with uniform star formation efficiency (SFE) per free-fall time (SFEff), GMCs are identified from the data cube and then cross-matched with the catalog of ${H}\,\, \small {II}$ regions to estimate the star formation rate for each of them. 179 GMCs with a median mass of 1.6 × 106 M⊙ are identified. The mass-weighted average SFEff of the GMCs is ∼9.4 × 10−3, which is in agreement with models of turbulence regulated star formation. Meanwhile, we find that SFEff is not universal within the mapped region. In particular, one of the arm ridges shows a high SFEff with a mass-weighted value of ∼2.7 × 10−2, which is higher by more than a factor of 5 compared to the inter-arm regions. This large regional variation in SFEff favors the recent interpretation that GMCs do not form stars at a constant rate within their lifetime.
Racial Bias in Bail Decisions*
Authors: Arnold David , Dobbie Will , Yang Crystal S
Published: May 2018

This article develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions—a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker’s model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pretrial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have higher rates of misconduct than marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially biased, whether that bias is driven by racial animus, inaccurate racial stereotypes, or any other form of bias. To test the model, we use the release tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to identify the relevant race-specific misconduct rates. Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges. We find suggestive evidence that this racial bias is driven by bail judges relying on inaccurate stereotypes that exaggerate the relative danger of releasing black defendants.
Prevalence of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus According to IADPSG and NICE Criteria
Authors: Djelmis Josip , Pavić Mato , Kotori Vjosa Mulliqi , Renar Ivana Pavlić , Ivanisevic Marina , Oreskovic Slavko
Published: May 2018

(Abstracted from Int J Gynecol Obstet 2016;135:250–254)

Hyperglycemia during pregnancy leads to a plethora of complications such as preeclampsia, cesarean delivery, and increased perinatal mortality as well as adverse neonatal health conditions including long-term obesity and diabetes. However, there is disagreement regarding the best approach to screening for gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM).
Development and Evaluation of an Educational Initiative to Improve Hospital Personnel Preparedness to Care for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Authors: Lucarelli Jennifer , Welchons Leah , Sideridis Georgios , Sullivan Nancy R. , Chan Eugenia , Weissman Laura
Published: May 2018

Objective:

To evaluate the effectiveness of a multimodal educational curriculum on increasing hospital personnel's awareness of successful strategies and comfort in caring for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Methods:

We developed a 3-part training for front-line staff (i.e., front desk, clinical assistants, and phlebotomists) in 8 outpatient hospital departments frequented by patients with ASD. Following a needs assessment, participants completed an online educational module and then attended an in-person seminar tailored to each department. To evaluate training effectiveness, we administered pre-, immediate post-, and 1 month post-training surveys assessing personnel attitudes, comfort, perceived knowledge, and behaviors around caring for patients with ASD.

Results:

We trained 168 staff members from 8 departments. On the needs assessment, participants (N = 129) reported a mean 2.5 behavioral incidents involving patients with ASD over the previous 3 months; 92% believed that the training would be helpful for their work. Across pre-, immediate- and 1-month post-training surveys, scores improved on all questions related to personnel attitudes about the importance of ASD-friendly care, comfort interacting with patients with ASD, perceived knowledge about ASD, and self-reported frequency of behaviors intended to help children with ASD adjust to the hospital setting (p < 0.05). There was no difference in baseline scores or change in scores between clinical and nonclinical personnel. On a program evaluation (N = 57), 81% rated the training as “very good” or “excellent,” and 87% reported that they would be able to apply training material immediately to their role.

Conclusion:

This training initiative led to improvement in attitudes, comfort level, perceived knowledge, and self-reported behaviors of hospital personnel working with patients with ASD, which was maintained over 1 month.
Psychiatric Emergencies in Pregnancy and Postpartum
Authors: RODRIGUEZ-CABEZAS LISETTE , CLARK CRYSTAL
Published: May 2018

The perinatal period is a vulnerable time for the acute onset and recurrence of psychiatric illness. Primary care providers are opportunely positioned to intervene for women who present with mood decompensation, excessive anxiety, or psychosis during the perinatal period. Owing to increased screening efforts in obstetrical clinics and amount of contact during the perinatal period, obstetricians may be able to identify patients who need treatment before their symptoms become severe. In this article, we address imminent and emergent psychiatric symptoms in the perinatal period including management and risk reduction to help obstetrician/gynecologists treat and/or refer patients as clinically appropriate.
Isolated Conjunctival Inflammation as a Manifestation of IgG4-Related Disease
Authors: Li Ang , Plesec Thomas P. , Mileti Linda , Singh Arun D.
Published: May 2018

Purpose:

To report a unique case of isolated conjunctival inflammation from IgG4-related disease (IgG4-RD) confirmed by pathology.

Methods:

A single interventional case of conjunctival IgG4-RD.

Results:

A 63-year-old woman presented with a chronic, solitary, vascularized, tan-colored, and raised conjunctival lesion measuring 7.5 × 8.0 × 1.2 mm located at the temporal bulbar conjunctiva. An excisional biopsy was diagnostic of IgG4-RD based on the classic fibrosis pattern, 120 IgG4-positive plasma cells per high-power field, and an overwhelming majority of IgG4-positive cells among IgG plasma cells. No orbital or systemic involvement was found on clinical examination, imaging, and laboratory workup. The serum IgG4 level was normal (87.1 mg/dL). The patient was free of recurrence at 6-month follow-up.

Conclusions:

Isolated conjunctival inflammation without orbital involvement can be a presentation of IgG4-RD.
Clinical Immersion
Authors: Geist Melissa J. , Sanders Robby , Harris Kevin , Arce-Trigatti Andrea , Hitchcock-Cass Cary
Published: May 2018

Background

A faculty team from nursing and chemical engineering developed a course that brought together students from each discipline for cross-disciplinary, team-based clinical immersion and collaboration.

Problem

Health care processes and devices are rapidly changing, and nurses are uniquely positioned to be bedside innovators to improve patient care delivery.

Approach

During each clinical immersion, the student teams rotated through various hospital units where they identified problems and worked together in the university's makerspace (iMaker Space) to design and build prototypes to improve health outcomes.

Outcomes

Data from the Critical thinking Assessment Test provided evidence of gains in critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, while the problems identified in the clinical setting and prototypes developed demonstrated the impact of bringing nursing and engineering students together to design innovations.

Conclusions

When challenged to identify authentic problems during their clinical immersion, the teams of nursing and engineering students proposed creative solutions and developed commercially viable prototypes.
Prenatal Air Pollution and Newborns' Predisposition to Accelerated Biological Aging
Authors: Martens Dries S. , Cox Bianca , Janssen Bram G. , Clemente Diana B. P. , Gasparrini Antonio , Vanpoucke Charlotte , Lefebvre Wouter , Roels Harry A. , Plusquin Michelle , Nawrot Tim S.
Published: May 2018

(Abstracted from JAMA Pediatr 2017;171(12):1160–1167)

Telomere length (TL) is considered a molecular marker of biological aging. Telomeres shorten with each cellular division, and their length is associated with age-related diseases, lifestyle factors such as smoking, and environmental factors that influence the oxidative stress and inflammatory status in humans.
Concordance of PD-L1 Expression Between Core Biopsy and Resection Specimens of Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer
Authors: Gradecki Sarah E. , Grange Jacob S. , Stelow Edward B.
Published: May 2018

The heterogeneity of programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression in non–small cell lung carcinomas (NSCLCs) is well studied; however, the method of tissue sampling needed to obtain adequate diagnostic material has not been established. This study aimed to determine whether core needle biopsy provides sufficient tissue for accurate PD-L1 evaluation despite tumor heterogeneity. A retrospective analysis comparing tumoral expression of PD-L1 in 51 lung core biopsies to subsequent resection specimens was performed. Scoring of membranous staining was categorized as 0%, 1% to 49%, and ≥50% of tumor cells. Staining ≥50% tumoral PD-L1 expression was detected in 8/51 (15.7%) of core biopsies and 8/51 (15.7%) of resection specimens. Core biopsy and resection results were concordant in 92.2% of cases (κ, 0.70; 95% confidence interval, 0.43-0.98). Therefore, despite tumor heterogeneity, detection of tumoral PD-L1 expression in NSCLC appears to be largely concordant between core biopsies and resection specimens, with the caveat that it may be helpful to reassess resection specimens for low-level staining. These findings suggest that core biopsy may be adequate for determining PD-L1 expression in NSCLC.