bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Risk Factors for and Mechanisms of COlistin Resistance Among Enterobacterales: Getting at the CORE of the Issue
Authors: Mills John P , Rojas Laura J , Marshall Steve H , Rudin Susan D , Hujer Andrea M , Nayak Luke , Bachman Michael A , Bonomo Robert A , Kaye Keith S
Published: April 2021

Background

Despite the recent emergence of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance, the epidemiology and mechanisms of colistin-resistant Enterobacterales (CORE) infections remain poorly understood.

Methods

A case–case–control study was conducted utilizing routine clinical isolates obtained at a single tertiary health system in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Patients with CORE isolates from January 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017, were matched 1:1 with patients with colistin-susceptible Enterobacterales (COSE) and uninfected controls. Multivariable logistic regression was used to compare clinical and microbiologic features of patients with CORE and COSE to controls. A subset of available CORE isolates underwent whole-genome sequencing to identify putative colistin resistance genes.

Results

Of 16 373 tested clinical isolates, 166 (0.99%) were colistin-resistant, representing 103 unique patients. Among 103 CORE isolates, 103 COSE isolates, and 102 uninfected controls, antibiotic exposure in the antecedent 90 days and age >55 years were predictors of both CORE and COSE. Of 33 isolates that underwent whole-genome sequencing, a large variety of mutations associated with colistin resistance were identified, including 4 mcr-1/mcr-1.1 genes and 4 pmrA/B mutations among 9 Escherichia coli isolates and 5 mgrB and 3 PmrA mutations among 8 Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates. Genetic mutations found in Enterobacter species were not associated with known phenotypic colistin resistance.

Conclusions

Increased age and prior antibiotic receipt were associated with increased risk for patients with CORE and for patients with COSE. Mcr-1, pmrA/B, and mgrB were the predominant colistin resistance–associated mutations identified among E. coli and K. pneumoniae, respectively. Mechanisms of colistin resistance among Enterobacter species could not be determined.
Influenza Vaccination Rates Among Patients With a History of Cancer: Analysis of the National Health Interview Survey
Authors: Chang Andres , Ellingson Mallory K , Flowers Christopher R , Bednarczyk Robert A
Published: April 2021

Background

Annual influenza vaccination is recommended for all patients with cancer, but vaccine uptake data by cancer type and time since diagnosis are limited. We sought to estimate vaccination rates across different cancer types in the United States and determine whether rates vary over time since diagnosis.

Methods

Vaccination rates in individuals with solid tumor and hematological malignancies were estimated using data from 59 917 individuals obtained by the 2016 and 2017 National Health Interview Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Results

An average of 64% of the 5053 individuals with self-reported cancer received the influenza vaccine. Vaccination rates in men and women with solid tumors (66.6% and 60.3%, respectively) and hematological malignancies (58.1% and 59.2%, respectively) were significantly higher compared to those without cancer (38.9% and 46.8%, respectively). Lower rates were seen in uninsured patients, those younger than 45 years of age, and in African Americans with hematological malignancies but not with solid tumors. Vaccine uptake was similar regardless of time since cancer diagnosis.

Conclusions

Influenza vaccination rates are higher in men and women with cancer but remain suboptimal, highlighting the need for additional measures to improve vaccine compliance and prevent complications from influenza across all cancer types.
Building Homes
Authors: Korver-Glenn Elizabeth
Published: April 2021

This chapter discusses how housing developers used the racist or people-oriented market rubric to interpret their mental maps of Houston and made choices about where to develop land for residential use. Developers first thought about development at the local neighborhood level, reading neighborhoods through one of these two rubrics to make choices about where to build and where not to build. When they considered specific plots of land to purchase, they engaged in reverse blockbusting. Several housing developers targeted homeowners of color and others they perceived as gullible or more likely to sell for cheap. They did so in order to purchase land at bargain prices and then make a higher profit when selling the new homes they constructed on this land.
Appraising Value
Authors: Korver-Glenn Elizabeth
Published: April 2021

This chapter analyzes how appraisers assess home value. It demonstrates that despite surface changes to appraisal requirements, the logic and methods guiding contemporary appraisers’ work reflected the explicitly racist appraisal logic and methods instituted by the U.S. federal government and the appraisal industry in the early and mid-twentieth century. When using such logic, appraisers assumed that racially uniform, White neighborhoods were the most valuable. They also assumed that White home buyers were the reference point for neighborhood desirability and value. This logic guided their methods, such that they typically chose “comps” from within singular neighborhoods. This chapter also uses quantitative data to show that homes in White Houston neighborhoods were systematically appraised higher than homes in otherwise similar Black and Latinx Houston neighborhoods in 2015. Such inequality is not merely an artifact of explicitly racist historical appraisals; rather, it is actively produced by contemporary appraisers.
Shareholder-driven Corporate Governance
Authors: Anand Anita Indira
Published: April 2021

This is a book about the ways in which capital markets have come to be shaped by the ubiquity of sophisticated investors. In particular, many of today’s investors have the economic might and technical capacity to play a role in the decision-making of the corporations in which they invest. This phenomenon brings with it a host of benefits, such as mechanisms to ameliorate the moral hazard that can exist when the people who bear the risk of corporate activity are different from those who make decisions. A key element of this book is an examination of the ways in which thinking about corporations and capital markets must change to reflect the prevalence of sophisticated shareholders. The book develops a concept—shareholder-driven corporate governance—to explain the role of powerful shareholders and to propose a regulatory scheme that furthers their participation in corporate decision-making. In doing so, the book considers a number of regulatory challenges that confront securities regulators. Ultimately, the book identifies an important trend in capital markets, highlights reasons for fostering this trend, and discusses the path that regulation can and should take in order to protect investors and foster well-regulated markets.
Recall from Office
Authors: Collins Richard B. , Oesterle Dale A. , Friedman Lawrence
Published: April 2021

This chapter discusses Article XXI of the Colorado Constitution, titled “Recall from Office.” Added by citizens’ initiative in 1912, it established the constitutional right of voters to recall and replace public officials by petition and election. Section 1 subjects every “elective public officer of the state” to recall. Section 4 provides that elective officers of counties and cities may be recalled as provided by statute. It includes ambiguous language that can be read to say that every elected officer with governmental authority “shall be subject” to recall. Section 2 details the form of recall petitions, and Section 3 states the procedure for carrying out recalls.
The Voters’ Choice
Authors: Crook Malcolm
Published: April 2021

Designated candidates seeking office play a central role in elections today, so it is a surprise to discover that in the past voters were free to name whom they wished on their ballot papers. In France, their choice was only restricted when declared candidatures were required for election to the Chamber of Deputies after 1889, though this liberty lasted much longer when it came to local elections. This raises the question of how individuals aspiring to office put themselves forward, in the absence of manifestos or publicity, when their talents were supposed to speak for themselves. Indeed, before the French Revolution, and even afterwards, to openly seek election was regarded as a disqualification, though this created confusion as votes were widely dispersed and those elected often declined to serve. Yet the reluctance to abandon this approach was not simply attachment to tradition, rather it constituted an assertion of the voters’ sovereign right to exercise an unfettered electoral choice, and to reject those offered to them as official candidates by the government or as the nominees of political parties.
Open Secrets
Authors: Crook Malcolm
Published: April 2021

Precisely how votes were to be cast had a long-contested history in France, as elsewhere. A show of hands or voice-voting was the traditional way of reaching a decision in an electoral assembly, for public voting made sense in societies where illiteracy was widespread, though it inhibited individual expression. Immense problems were accordingly created when paper-balloting was imposed after the Revolution of 1789 and demanded a new technology. A pioneering proposal for a fully secure vote was actually made during the 1790s, but it was not adopted until 1914, when the French finally introduced both an envelope for the ballot paper and a polling booth where it was inserted in private. During the intervening century, though the ballot box was made more secure, the voter’s choice had largely remained an open secret, which suited those who sought to monitor the behaviour of the mass electorate. Yet, just as the ballot paper was becoming globally accepted, mechanical and then electronic voting was invented; it is employed in many countries today, but only to a very limited extent in France.
Pulse Oximetry in Anesthesia—The “Perfect” Medical Technology Use Case
Authors: Perakslis Eric D. , Stanley Martin
Published: April 2021

It can be difficult to quantify progress or success when it comes to digital health, because there are many and highly varied stakeholders and perspectives to be considered, including some that are in opposition. Technological “advances” that bring clear benefits to patients, providers, and healthcare institutions are rare but do happen. In the 1980s, the first digital pulse oximeters changed the way blood oxygen saturation was monitored during surgery, an innovation that resulted in less pain for patients and better patient safety, superior real-time data for anesthetists, and greatly reduced surgical liability for hospitals. Inventions with such clear benefits to so many stakeholders remain rare three decades later. In this chapter, the evolution of digital pulse oximetry for oxygen saturation monitoring during surgical anesthesia is discussed via personal anecdote from the author.
Electronic Health Records
Authors: Perakslis Eric D. , Stanley Martin
Published: April 2021

A key opportunity for anticipating and understanding the potential risks and benefits of digital health is readily available in the form of electronic health records (EHRs). Touted as a transformation in health care and funded by tens of billions of dollars in federal investment, the outcomes remain mixed. Although the anticipated benefits of increased visibility to healthcare spending and utilization are real, the massive ongoing expense, the time taken away from clinical encounters, and the massive burden on clinicians are all frequently reported unsolved problems. The need to address all stakeholders, to obtain objective measurement, to spend equal time spent examining risks and benefits, and to achieve long-term sustainability are just a few examples of lessons learned from the implementation of EHRs that should be applied to digital health.
Nonadversarially Driven Toxicities
Authors: Perakslis Eric D. , Stanley Martin
Published: April 2021

The Internet and digital health tools have brought us the convenience of online medical appointment scheduling, quick access to definitions of medical terms, and many other conveniences and capabilities, but these are not without concurrent risks of harm. Widespread availability of self-care tools has the potential for overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Fixation upon potential medical conditions has led to increased cyberchondria; and convenience, when taken to far, can drive risky practices and overdependence on tools that are meant to aid in care but not intended to be reliable life support. In this chapter we examine the five nonadversarially driven toxicities of digital health in order to understand how human frailty, habit, and bias may exacerbate the risks of otherwise harmless and helpful digital health aids.
Conclusion
Authors: Qi Xiaoying
Published: April 2021

The conclusion highlights how an examination of emerging family practices in China challenges the conventional approaches. Core expectations involving family obligation, marital intimacy, and intergenerational exchange depart from current conventional representations. The idea that descending familism characterizes a new norm is shown to overlook the ways in which private property shapes the consciousness of entitlement. Patriarchal elements inform relations between family members in ways that have not previously been encountered. Traditionally, only males could access family wealth; today, females have equal rights to shared property, as both spouses and daughters, and they may generate property through their own efforts that is theirs to deploy in their own terms. The conclusion expresses the hope that this book will stimulate and encourage further research on erstwhile neglected aspects of family life, as well as the development of new theoretical frameworks for understanding family dynamics, not only in China but more generally.
Current Recommendations on the Selection of Measures for Well-Being
Authors: VanderWeele Tyler J. , Trudel-Fitzgerald Claudia , Allin Paul V. , Farrelly Colin , Fletcher Guy , Frederick Donald E. , Hall Jon , Helliwell John F. , Kim Eric S. , Lauinger William A. , Lee Matthew T. , Lyubomirsky Sonja , Margolis Seth , McNeely Eileen , Messer Neil G. , Tay Louis , Vish Viswanath K. , Węziak-Białowolska Dorota , Kubzansky Laura D.
Published: April 2021

Measures of well-being have proliferated over the past decades. Very little guidance has been available about which measures to use in particular contexts. This chapter provides a series of recommendations, based on the present state of knowledge and the existing measures available, of which measures might be preferred in which contexts. The recommendations came out of an interdisciplinary workshop on the measurement of well-being and are shaped around the number of items that can be included in a survey and also based on the differing potential contexts and purposes of data collection such as, for example, government surveys, multiuse cohort studies, or studies specifically about psychological well-being. The recommendations are not intended to be definitive but instead to stimulate discussion and refinement and provide guidance to those relatively new to the study of well-being.
The Earth Is (Still) Our Mother
Authors: Hamill Chad S.
Published: April 2021

As many large-scale protests by Indigenous people have articulated, lands inhabited by Indigenous communities (such as desert margins, small islands, lakes and rivers, high-altitude zones, and the circumpolar Arctic) are particularly vulnerable to the dramatic shifts in climate currently underway. The delicate ecosystems upon which Indigenous communities rely are in flux, and the accelerating rate of climate change—outpacing the direst scientific projections—amounts to a crisis that is every bit as threatening as the legacy of European colonialism. Fortunately, for millennia Indigenous communities have cultivated an intimate awareness of their ecology and have remained, throughout the era of world-wide industrial devastation, adept at adapting to environmental change. This awareness and adaptive power has been discussed within the framework of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Using traditional stories and songs in Indigenous communities as a touchstone, this chapter will explore three interrelated aspects of TEK: (1) its role in assisting Indigenous communities in adapting to the effects of climate change; (2) its potential to inform and influence Western-generated climate science; and (3) its promise as a unifying thread tying Indigenous communities together, strengthening global self-determination.
Music Endangerment, Repatriation, and Intercultural Collaboration in an Australian Discomfort Zone
Authors: Treloyn Sally , Charles Rona Goonginda
Published: April 2021

To the extent that intercultural ethnomusicology in the Australian settler state operates on a colonialist stage, research that perpetuates a procedure of discovery, recording, and offsite archiving, analysis, and interpretation risks repeating a form of musical colonialism with which ethnomusicology worldwide is inextricably tied. While these research methods continue to play an important role in contemporary intercultural ethnomusicological research, ethnomusicologists in Australia in recent years have become increasingly concerned to make their research available to cultural heritage communities. Cultural heritage communities are also leading discovery, identification, recording, and dissemination to support, revive, reinvent, and sustain their practices and knowledges. Repatriation is now almost ubiquitous in ethnomusicological approaches to Aboriginal music in Australia as researchers and collaborating communities seek to harness research to respond to the impact that colonialism has had on social and emotional well-being, education, the environment, and the health of performance traditions. However, the hand-to-hand transaction of research products and represented knowledge from performers to researcher and archive back to performers opens a new field of complexities and ambiguities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants: just like earlier forms of ethnomusicology, the introduction, return, and repatriation of research materials operate in “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 2007 [1992]). In this chapter, we recount the processes and outcomes of “The Junba Project” located in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. Framed by a participatory action research model, the project has emphasized responsiveness, iteration, and collaborative reflection, with an aim to identify strategies to sustain endangered Junba dance-song practices through recording, repatriation, and dissemination. We draw on Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” as a “discomfort zone” (Somerville & Perkins 2003) and look upon an applied/advocacy ethnomusicological project as an opportunity for difference and dialogue in the repatriation process to support heterogeneous research agendas.
Ethical Friction
Authors: McGraw Andy
Published: April 2021

This chapter describes a music program in the Richmond, Virginia, city jail and the ethical ambiguities arising from the author’s overlapping roles as organizer and observer. The author examines the vague boundaries between applied and academic ethnomusicology, voluntarism and work, and personal and institutional ethical standards. An ethnomusicological approach to music in jails and prisons exposes ethical frictions between policies, methodologies, and codes espoused by IRB (or other ethics review) boards, ethnomusicologists, their interlocutors, and academic societies. The tension between the author’s status as a volunteer and ethnographer raises a number of questions: How is ethical knowledge differently defined? Which definitions have more authority and how is that authority established? Where are the epistemological and ethical boundaries between academic and applied ethnomusicology? How is ethnographic knowledge connected to social change? An examination of the ethnomusicology’s relationship to IRBs reveals ongoing ethical ambiguities, especially regarding research on “vulnerable populations.” The author examines the ways in which IRBs might impede the production of public knowledge that would serve the ethical demands of social justice.
Thoreau’s Rainbow
Authors: Wilk Stephen R.
Published: April 2021

In his famous book Walden, or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau writes about the experience of walking through a rainbow. Since Thoreau is often praised for the accuracy of his observations of natural phenomena, what are we to make of this plainly unscientific description of a rainbow? A rainbow is a phenomenon that is always about 138 degrees (180 degrees – 42 degrees) away from the sun, and the impossibility of ever reaching it is enshrined in such stories as the Gold at the End of the Rainbow. Was he mistaken, or was he describing an emotional reaction to a natural wonder? And how critical should we be of him?
Barrel and Pincushion
Authors: Wilk Stephen R.
Published: April 2021

One of the five basic optical aberrations is Distortion. Whether the Distortion aberration has a positive or negative sign determines whether it is described as “Pincushion” or “Barrel” distortion. The origin of the term “Barrel” distortion is obvious—the image of a square object produced by an optical system with negative distortion resembles a classic “barrel” shape. But one with a positive coefficient produces a shape that is not that of the pincushions of my acquaintance. What kinds of pincushions inspired the name of this characteristic aberration, and who came up with it?
Walter Darcy Ryan and His Electric Scintillator
Authors: Wilk Stephen R.
Published: April 2021

In order to publicize the capabilities of General Electric’s lighting department and to solicit more contracts, lead engineer Walter Darcy Ryan came up with a spectacular lighting effect. He called it the “Scintillator.” It was showcased at Wonderland, a local amusement park and to illuminate Niagara Falls, and then appeared at international exhibitions and World’s Fairs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere for the next quarter of a century. It was also used atop some buildings, and helped inspire the “searchlight” motif in Art Deco depictions of cities. Wanter Darcy Ryan had effectively invented the light show.
Killing Vampires Efficiently with Ultraviolet Light
Authors: Wilk Stephen R.
Published: April 2021

The modern mythology of the vampire isn’t ancient folklore but modern “fakelore” that has developed over the past two centuries. But it has grown in an organic way, not by considered construction, but by chance and accident and from a variety of influences. That being so, how is it that the modern conception of the vampire is not only destroyed by sunlight (a detail not in the original idea of the vampire) but specifically by ultraviolet light? And how did such a specific idea as destruction by ultraviolet light ever get into the public consciousness?
Non-Trojans under the Influence of Atomism (Epic Losers)
Authors: Gorey Matthew M.
Published: April 2021

This chapter examines scenes in the Aeneid in which non-Trojan characters are associated with atomism and atomic imagery. It argues that prominent non-Trojan antagonists are described in atomistic terms in order to associate their opposition to the Trojans with the chaotic, non-purposeful motion of atoms. Lucretian atomic imagery appears in the description of Dido’s death at the end of Book 4, and in the fighting that takes place in the Italian countryside in Book 10, including Turnus’ removal from the battlefield by Juno and Mezentius’ defeat by Aeneas. By depicting the defeat of these characters with the language of atomic phenomena, Virgil aligns the enemies of Rome’s historical and imperial teleology with an Epicurean cosmology that is similarly opposed to narratives of fate and fixed authority, both national and divine.
Atomism and the Worldview of theAeneid
Authors: Gorey Matthew M.
Published: April 2021

This chapter summarizes the findings of the various chapters, noting that, by the end of the Aeneid, the putative disorder of atomism yields, on the whole, to Roman rule and a divinely organized cosmos. It argues that this conclusion reveals an important preference for teleology and hierarchy in the world of the poem, which is starkly opposed to the worldview of Epicurean atomism. In terms of Virgil’s biography, the poem’s endorsement of an anti-atomist perspective also indicates a level of intellectual seriousness to his philosophical allusions beyond what is often supposed for the Aeneid. Last, the chapter calls for further study of anti-atomist discourse in authors after Virgil, noting similar treatments of atomism as a symbol of disorder in later periods of Greek and Roman literature.
Preacher Woman
Authors: Lauve-Moon Katie
Published: April 2021

When people are committed to gender equality, what gets in their way of achieving it? Why do well-intentioned people reinforce sexist outcomes? Why does dissonance persist between organizational actors’ good intentions of equality and sexist outcomes? This book provides answers to these questions by applying the critical lens of gendered organizations to moderate-liberal congregations that separated from their mainline denomination in support of women’s equal leadership yet remain predominately male in positions of authority. This critical methodological study investigates congregations affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) with some dually aligned with The Alliance of Baptists. Although the CBF identifies the equal leadership of women as a core component of its collective identity and women are enrolling in Baptist seminaries at almost equal rates as men, only about 5% of CBF congregations employ women as solo senior pastors. This book provides an organizational analysis investigating gendered congregational processes on the individual, interactional, and organizational levels, including themes such as gendered hiring criteria, a perceived incongruence of women’s bodies and leadership, unconscious biases of organizational actors, and how women pastors’ experiences of discrimination influence their riskier approaches to leadership.
America’s Confessional
Authors: Golia Julie
Published: April 2021

In the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, newspaper advice columnists and letter writers came together to create a complex and interactive exchange of advice that both responded to and contributed to the making of modern American society. This chapter offers an in-depth analysis of both the letters written to advice columns and the worldviews advocated by the nation’s most influential columnists. It demonstrates that advice columns were essential public forums where Americans critiqued and learned to cope with the dislocations of modern urban life. Advice given by popular columnists upheld both the structural racism undergirding American society, as well as the increasingly unrealistic gender norms to which women were held. Yet the interactivity of the columns transformed advice into an ongoing dialogue that allowed participants to seek guidance and empathy in a public yet anonymous forum.
Restore
Authors: Myrick Nathan
Published: April 2021

This chapter continues the affective, formational trajectory, and combining the work of musicians and ethicists, argues the specifics of what care will entail in the context of musical activity in Christian communities, both in what care ethics addresses and where it may be directed. This interrogation of musical ethics is combined with a concern for restorative justice and concludes by weaving together the threads of ethical significance to articulate how the music of Christian communities can respond to the actions and events that those communities encounter.
Camino Promises
Authors: Jenkins Kathleen E.
Published: April 2021

This chapter interprets family members’ expectations of the Camino as a practice that could bring miracles, life lessons, and individual and relational healing through different kinds of spiritual encounters. It details how parents and their young adult children expected the Camino to be a pilgrimage space where they could develop shared bonds as pilgrims, and where leveling social relationships and expectations in a time and place away from their everyday lives could bring them into deep relationship with other pilgrims. This chapter demonstrates how these Camino promises and expectations are related to the multiple ways people talk about spirituality and its effects in our contemporary world.
Intimacy and Disciplining Technology
Authors: Jenkins Kathleen E.
Published: April 2021

This chapter focuses on research participants’ stories of managing and limiting technology, and how they used digital devices to stay connected to each other, fellow pilgrims, and friends and family back home. Drawing from formal and informal interviews, it illustrates how family members negotiated and reflected, both before and as they walked, on their use of smartphones and tablets. Research participants’ voices describe creating time and space away from digital devices to self-reflect and come to know each other as spiritual co-practitioners. The chapter suggests how Camino experience represented, in compressed form, relational and individual habits regarding digital technologies in their everyday lives.
The Decline of Natural Law and Custom
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: April 2021

This chapter takes a close look at how natural law and custom virtually disappeared from the legal system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were important changes, because they knocked out the common law’s two traditional foundations. If neither natural law nor custom were to play a role in the legal system, lawyers would have to rethink the grounding of the common law and the nature of common law decisionmaking. Natural law had also been a guide for judges in ascertaining the meaning of statutes and sometimes even in striking them down. Without natural law, lawyers would have to rethink the nature of statutory interpretation.
Queer from the Horse’s Mouth
Authors: Pramaggiore Maria
Published: April 2021

This chapter focuses on two mid-century American screen equines who possess the power of speech: Francis, a patriotic U.S. Army mule serving during WWII, and Mr. Ed, a palomino horse living in the suburbanizing postwar San Fernando Valley. Contextualizing Arthur Lubin’s wildly popular Francis films (1950–1956) and Mr. Ed television series (1961–1966) within the tradition of talking horses in literary classics such as The Iliad and Gulliver’s Travels—and also in relation to mid-twentieth-century American debates around gender—the chapter argues that Francis and Mr. Ed’s ventriloquial voices not only serve as vehicles for a critique of traditional masculinity, but also channel some startlingly queer and post-human interspecies alternatives to human heteronormativity.
The Mills Brothers, Animators of the Unseen Stage
Authors: Smith Jacob
Published: April 2021

The Mills Brothers were a vocal quartet who rose to fame in the 1930s with a distinctive vocal style that featured group harmonies, the imitation of musical instruments, and the incorporation of dramatic scenes into popular songs. That style doesn’t easily fit within the paradigm usually applied to popular singers of the radio age—the “crooners”—and instead, the Mills Brothers are best understood through reference to scholarship on puppetry, ventriloquism, and animation. The Mills Brothers provide an overlooked case study in Black transmedia stardom during the 1930s; the group’s multimedia presence at that time included network radio, phonograph records, live performances, three Fleischer Brothers sound cartoons, and appearances in several Hollywood films. The group’s unique vocal style was perhaps best captured in the Fleischer cartoons, and this chapter argues that they are better appreciated as animators than crooners; that is, as virtuosic practitioners in the art of sonic illusion.
A French Prerogative
Authors: Wyss Marco
Published: April 2021

In contrast to Nigeria, there had not been any real planning for the creation of national armed forces in Côte d’Ivoire in the late 1950s. Houphouët-Boigny relied on the protection of the French-led Community army, and de Gaulle continued to expect Ivorian contributions in manpower. The situation changed, however, in the wake of the abrupt end of the Community and Houphouët-Boigny’s sudden march towards independence. Despite Franco-Ivorian frictions during the transfer of power, however, the Ivorian leader expected and could eventually count on French military assistance. But France’s exclusive military assistance role nevertheless came to be challenged from unexpected quarters, with the Ivorian civic service being built up with Israeli assistance. But even though the French were at the time probably the Israelis’ closest Western security partners, and retained control of the purely military assistance to the Ivorian armed forces, they actively and successively sought to reduce Israel’s involvement.
French Rival
Authors: Wyss Marco
Published: April 2021

Faced with the potential withdrawal of French military assistance during his clash with de Gaulle during the transfer of power, Houphouët-Boigny enquired about potential American assistance. Neither the Eisenhower nor, at first, the Kennedy administration wanted to challenge the French in their sphere of influence. But the spectre of US military assistance began to haunt Paris, and influenced it to make concessions during the negotiations for the cooperation agreements. After independence, US policymakers were increasingly less inclined to fully defer to French sensitivities, and decided to provide a modicum of military assistance to the Entente states. With the French seeing the Americans as rivals in Africa, Houphouët-Boigny exploited the prospect of a heavier US involvement in the Ivorian security sector to extract additional military assistance from Paris and, eventually, to retain a French military presence in Côte d’Ivoire despite France’s planned withdrawal in line with its force reductions in Africa.
Ontological Pluralism about Non-Being
Authors: Bernstein Sara
Published: April 2021

Ontological pluralism is the view that there is more than one fundamental way of being. This paper sketches ontological pluralism about non-being, the idea that non-being can be further divided into more fundamental categories. After drawing out the relationship between pluralism about being and pluralism about non-being, I discuss quantificational strategies for the pluralist about non-being. I examine historical precedent for the view. Finally, I suggest that pluralism about non-being has explanatory power across a variety of domains, and that the view can account for differences between non-existent past and future times, between omissions and absences, and between different kinds of fictional objects.
The Normativity of Knowledge and the Scope and Sources of Defeat
Authors: Goldberg Sanford C.
Published: April 2021

In this paper I will be appealing to a prior grasp of the normativity of knowledge itself—its role in entitling a subject to confidence and in authorizing others to believe on the strength of one’s epistemic standing—to shed light on the nature and scope of defeat. The strategy will be to focus on cases in which an otherwise epistemically well-positioned subject fails to enjoy these normative standings, and to argue that the best explanation is the presence of defeaters. In ordinary cases, this strategy yields results that are not particularly interesting: in such cases the allegation of relevant defeaters will be greeted with a yawn. The interest of the present paper lies in its use of this strategy to motivate the allegation of a type of defeat that is decidedly more controversial: so-called normative defeat (a term I borrow from Lackey (1999)). Highlighting this type of defeat underscores a social dimension to knowledge that the literature typically overlooks or ignores.
Albanian Transnational Social Field and Diaspora Entrepreneurs
Authors: Koinova Maria
Published: April 2021

This chapter and the following Chapter 5 are interconnected as they both discuss Albanian diaspora mobilizations. This chapter lays out political dynamics in the Albanian transnational social field and presents the profiles of the four types of diaspora entrepreneurs that operate within it. Incomplete nation-building and state-building processes have left Albanians scattered throughout the Balkans since the early twentieth century, where they currently live as either majorities or minorities. Weak state capacities of Kosovo alongside those of adjacent fragile states, as well as problematic treatment of Albanians where they are minorities, most notably North Macedonia and Serbia, have created dynamics conducive for Albanians to emigrate from the region and mobilize in the diaspora. Kosovo’s independence was a goal not simply for Albanians from Kosovo but was widespread among other diaspora Albanians until the 2008 independence. Albanians socialized with each other in the diaspora, irrespective of their original homeland, thereby forging bonds and seeking Kosovo’s statehood through a transnational social field perspective. More recently, another field-wide idea has emerged, of an ‘Albanian space’ formed through the EU integration of Balkan states with Albanian populations. This chapter presents data on migration in the Albanian field, in the Balkans and globally, and specifies the individual profiles of Albanian diaspora entrepreneurs.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Authors: Riley Kathleen
Published: April 2021

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.
Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)
Authors: Riley Kathleen
Published: April 2021

This chapter looks closely at Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which he gives a compelling and impassioned voice to five South African ‘descendants’ of Penelope, and to Penelope herself. It argues that the book puts into practice Ndebele’s belief that it was important for South African writing to resist the orthodoxy of spectacle, to rediscover the ordinary, to fashion a new narrative of intimacy and introspection, and thereby envisage a future of promise and complexity. It shows how Ndebele challenges the classical paradigm of the faithful waiting woman and, in so doing, urgently interrogates the notion of Home in the new South Africa.
Tunneling Phenomenon
Authors: Chen C. Julian
Published: April 2021

This chapter presents basic experimental methods and the basic theory of tunneling. The classical metal-insulator-metal tunneling junction experiment of Giaever, designed to verify the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity, is the motivation for Bardeen to invent his perturbation theory of tunneling. That Bardeen theory then became the starting point of the most useful models of STM. Section 2.2 presents the Bardeen tunneling theory from time-dependent perturbation theory of quantum mechanics, starting from a one-dimensional case, then proceeds to three-dimensional version with wave-function corrections. The Bardeen theory in second-quantization format, the transfer-Hamiltonian formalism, is also presented. As extensions of the original Bardeen theory, the theories and experiments of inelastic tunneling and spin-polarized tunneling are discussed in depth.
Nanomechanical Effects
Authors: Chen C. Julian
Published: April 2021

This chapter discusses the effect of force and deformation of the tip apex and the sample surface in the operation and imaging mechanism of STM and AFM. Because the contact area is of atomic dimension, a very small force and deformation would generate a large measurable effect. Three effects are discussed. First is the stability of the STM junction, which depends on the rigidity of the material. For soft materials, hysterisis is more likely. For rigid materials, the approaching and retraction cycles are continuous and reproducible. Second is the effect of force and deformation to the STM imaging mechanism. For soft material such as graphite, force and deformation can amplify the observed corrugation. For hard materials as most metals, force and deformation can decrease the observed corrugation. Finally, the effect of force and deformation on tunneling barrier height measurements is discussed.
Regional Development Banks in the World Economy
Authors: Clifton Judith , Díaz-Fuentes Daniel , Howarth David
Published: April 2021

This chapter offers a revised categorization of regional development banks (RDB) through an analysis of their changing geographical operations and their shifting prioritization of five major functions—development, regional integration, market promotion, multi-polarity re-inforcement, and strategic market shaping. The authors demonstrate the first RDB were established to correct for market failure, prioritizing development with and, often, by regional integration. A second major period of RDB creation occurred in the 1990s, accompanied by a turn to promoting market-oriented functions—which shaped newly established RDB, as well as previously existing banks. The most recent period of RDB creation occurred from the beginning of the twenty-first century. RDB became more ambitious in geo-political terms and, with regard to function, adopted a more strategic approach to intervention, promoting industry and the provision of international public goods, whilst shifting to new business models with greater and more complex private sector involvement. We examine the extent to which principal-agent analysis sheds light on these complex transformations.
The European Investment Bank
Authors: Clifton Judith , Díaz-Fuentes Daniel , Gómez Ana Lara
Published: April 2021

The European Investment Bank (EIB) constitutes one of the main institutional pillars upon which the European Union (EU) was built. Strikingly, the institution has attracted little research. EIB Statutes can be condensed down to five overarching objectives that its lending should prioritize: originally, development, integration and investment, and, since the mid-1990s, environmental protection and tackling unemployment. This chapter provides a comprehensive qualitative analysis of EIB lending to Europe from its origins to the present and examines the Bank’s loans in light of its lending objectives. We find a watershed moment occurring at the end of the Cold War. Until the 1990s, the EIB promoted integration and development above the alleviation of capital constraints. Since then, however, there was a progressive ‘mechanization’ of EIB loans at the expense of securing the institution’s mission, to the extent that loans were increasingly associated with capital subscribed by its members. This could mean that the EIB mission as found in its Statutes and its lending practice is becoming increasingly misaligned.
Justification as Ignorance
Authors: Rosenkranz Sven
Published: April 2021

Justification as Ignorance offers an original account of epistemic justification as both non-factive and luminous that vindicates core internalist intuitions, without construing justification as an internal condition. The account conceives of justification, in its doxastic and propositional varieties, as a kind of epistemic possibility of knowing, and of being in a position to know, respectively. It thus contrasts with other recently proposed views that characterize justification in terms of the metaphysical possibility of knowing. In developing his account, Rosenkranz devises a suitable non-normal multi-modal epistemic logic for knowledge and being in a position to know that respects the finding that these notions create hyperintensional contexts, defends his conception of justification against well-known anti-luminosity arguments, shows that the account allows for fruitful applications and principled solutions to the lottery and preface paradoxes, and provides a metaphysics of justification, and of its varying degrees of strength, that is compatible with core assumptions of the knowledge-first approach and disjunctivist conceptions of mental states.
{ Introduction }
Authors: Storey Mark
Published: April 2021

The introduction sets out the theoretical and historical stakes of the book. Opening with a cluster of Roman analogies stretching from the Iraq War to the American War of Independence, this chapter develops and explains the key questions that underpin the rest of the book. It offers extended rationales for its three keywords—empire, antiquity, and time—and makes claims for the methodological innovations it offers through its theorization of historical analogy. It situates the argument within the wider debates around temporality in American literary studies, postcolonial studies, and classical reception, as well as mobilizing its primary conceptual thinkers (namely, Reinhart Koselleck and Walter Benjamin). It closes by returning to the opening examples and putting the book’s main arguments into action.
Education
Authors: Gribben Crawford
Published: April 2021

Since the 1960s, a growing number of American evangelicals have withdrawn their children from “government schools,” seeking alternative provision either in private Christian day schools or in parentally provided education within the home. Over two million American children are being home educated, and in the last few years, the number of children involved in home education has grown at a rate around twelve times that of the number of students entering public schools. Across the United States, but especially in north Idaho, an increasing number of believers are turning to several varieties of Christian education to dispute the minoritarian and subcultural assumptions of those believers who have conceded to liberal expectations, and to educate a generation of the faithful that will work to reclaim and eventually control the cultural mainstream. The influence of conservative religion on the public school system has never been greater, but in home schools, private schools, and liberal arts colleges, education has become a vital weapon in strategies of survival and resistance in evangelical America.
Conclusion
Authors: Gribben Crawford
Published: April 2021

Paradoxically, the failure of the first generation of Christian Reconstructionists to cohere, either personally or ideologically, has worked in the movement’s favor, creating an internal marketplace of ideas by means of which competing groupings within political and religious conservatism have been able to appropriate and adopt their central arguments. Recognizing that a “moral majority” does not exist, and therefore abandoning the top-down political strategies of earlier evangelicals, the believers who participate in the migration to the Pacific Northwest work to build communities that will expand organically and over time to renew America and to replace the supposed neutrality of its legislative base. The project is working. But it is not clear whether the integrity of these ideas will continue as their audience base grows. Mass culture routinizes what was once regarded as radical, with effects that may not easily be predicted at the “end of white, Christian America.”