bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Antipsychotic Treatment Effectiveness in First Episode of Psychosis: PAFIP 3-Year Follow-Up Randomized Clinical Trials Comparing Haloperidol, Olanzapine, Risperidone, Aripiprazole, Quetiapine, and Ziprasidone
Authors: Gómez-Revuelta Marcos , Pelayo-Terán José María , Juncal-Ruiz María , Vázquez-Bourgon Javier , Suárez-Pinilla Paula , Romero-Jiménez Rodrigo , Setién Suero Esther , Ayesa-Arriola Rosa , Crespo-Facorro Benedicto
Published: January 2020

Background

Different effectiveness profiles among antipsychotics may be a key point to optimize treatment in patients suffering a first episode of psychosis to impact on long-term outcome. The aim of this study is to compare the clinical effectiveness of olanzapine, risperidone, haloperidol, aripiprazole, ziprasidone, and quetiapine in the treatment of first episode of psychosis at 3-year follow-up.

Method

From February 2001 to January 2011, 2 phases of a prospective, randomized, open-label study were undertaken. A total of 376 first-episode drug-naïve patients were randomly assigned to olanzapine (n = 55), risperidone (n = 63), haloperidol (n = 56), aripiprazole (n = 78), ziprasidone (n = 62), or quetiapine (n = 62) and followed up for 3 years. The primary effectiveness measure was all cause of treatment discontinuation. In addition, an analysis based on intention-to-treat principle was conducted in the analysis for clinical efficacy.

Results

The overall dropout rate at 3 years reached 20.75%. Treatment discontinuation rates were significantly different among treatment groups (olanzapine = 69.09, risperidone = 71.43, aripiprazole = 73.08%, ziprasidone = 79.03%, haloperidol = 89.28%, and quetiapine = 95.53%) (χ2 = 79.86; P = .000). Statistically significant differences in terms of lack of efficacy, adherence, and tolerability were observed among treatment groups along the 3-year follow-up, determining significant differences in time to all-cause discontinuation (log-rank = 92.240; P = .000). Significant differences between treatments were found in the categories of sleepiness/sedation, increased sleep duration, akinesia, weight gain, ejaculatory dysfunction, extrapyramidal-symptoms, and amenorrhea.

Conclusions

Olanzapine, risperidone, and aripiprazole presented advantages for the first-line treatment of first episode of psychosis in terms of effectiveness. Identifying different discontinuation patterns may contribute to optimize treatment selection after first episode of psychosis.

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02526030 https://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT02526030
Tigecycline efflux in Acinetobacter baumannii is mediated by TetA in synergy with RND-type efflux transporters
Authors: Foong Wuen Ee , Wilhelm Jochen , Tam Heng-Keat , Pos Klaas M
Published: January 2020

Objectives

To investigate the role of Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS)-type transporters from Acinetobacter baumannii AYE in tigecycline efflux.

Methods

Two putative tetracycline transporter genes of A. baumannii AYE (tetA and tetG) were heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli and drug susceptibility assays were conducted with tigecycline and three other tetracycline derivatives. The importance of TetA in tigecycline transport in A. baumannii was determined by complementation of tetA in WT and Resistance Nodulation cell Division (RND) gene knockout strains of A. baumannii ATCC 19606. Gene expression of the MFS-type tetA gene and RND efflux pump genes adeB, adeG and adeJ in A. baumannii AYE in the presence of tigecycline was analysed by quantitative real-time RT–PCR.

Results

Overproduction of TetA or TetG conferred resistance to doxycycline, minocycline and tetracycline in E. coli. Cells expressing tetA, but not those expressing tetG, conferred resistance to tigecycline, implying that TetA is a determinant for tigecycline transport. A. baumannii WT and RND-knockout strains complemented with plasmid-encoded tetA are significantly less susceptible to tigecycline compared with non-complemented strains. Efflux pump genes tetA and adeG are up-regulated in A. baumannii AYE in the presence of subinhibitory tigecycline concentrations.

Conclusions

TetA plays an important role in tigecycline efflux of A. baumannii by removing the drug from cytoplasm to periplasm and, subsequently, the RND-type transporters AdeABC and AdeIJK extrude tigecycline across the outer membrane. When challenged with tigecycline, tetA is up-regulated in A. baumannii AYE. Synergy between TetA and the RND-type transporters AdeABC and/or AdeIJK appears necessary for A. baumannii to confer higher tigecycline resistance via drug efflux.
Pharmacokinetic Study of Multiple Components of Gelsemium elegans in Goats by Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography Coupled to Tandem Mass Spectrometry
Authors: Cao Jun-Jie , Yang Kun , Huang Chong-Yin , Li Yu-Juan , Yu Hui , Wu Yong , Sun Zhi-Liang , Liu Zhao-Ying
Published: January 2020

Gelsemium elegans (G. elegans) has been used in traditional Chinese medicine. This plant is highly toxic to humans, but can promote the growth of pigs and goats in the veterinary clinic. It is a very complex mixture containing tens or hundreds of different components. Therefore, multiple-component pharmacokinetic studies of G. elegans are a major challenge due to the lack of authentic standards of the components. The purpose of this study was to investigate the plasma pharmacokinetics of multiple components after a single oral dose of G. elegans in goat using a sensitive ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry method for the simultaneous semiquantification of multiple alkaloids without standards. The method was validated in terms of the specificity, LOD, LOQ, linearity, accuracy, precision and matrix effects. To validate the global pharmacokinetic characteristics, the results obtained from the semiquantitative analysis of three authentic compounds (gelsemine, koumine and humantenmine) were compared with the absolute quantification from our recently published method. The results showed that the two methods had similar analytical results, and the obtained values of Tmax, T1/2 and MRT0−t of the three alkaloids were similar between the two methods. In addition, the values of Cmax and AUC0−t of the three alkaloids after normalization were close to the real values, which indicated that this semiquantitative method could be used in the pharmacokinetic study of multiplecomponents. Then the pharmacokinetic parameters of 23 other G. elegans alkaloids in goats were obtained. The results suggested that the gelsedine-type alkaloids were the major active ingredients that predict and explain the efficacy and toxicity of G. elegans.
Litter size and cub age influence weight gain and development in American black bears (Ursus americanus)
Authors: Mesa-Cruz J Bernardo , Olfenbuttel Colleen , Vaughan Michael R , Sajecki Jaime L , Kelly Marcella J
Published: January 2020

We assessed the effects of cub age, litter size, and sex, on body mass (BM), absolute and relative growth rates (AGR, RGR), opening of ears and eyes, and deciduous teeth eruption from 129 cubs of American black bears (Ursus americanus) born at Virginia Tech’s Black Bear Research Center. Specific ages, related to maternal food consumption, and litter size, best described BM, AGR, RGR, and ear and eye development. Overall, newborns weighed ~0.44 kg at birth and increased ~9-fold by ~14 weeks. Twins were greater in BM than single cubs and triplets. Single and triplet cubs had higher AGR and RGR than twins after mothers resumed food consumption post-hibernation. Newborns displayed RGR > 3.5% that decreased until den emergence (RGR < 3.5% after emergence). RGR differed among litter sizes, particularly after den emergence. Ear and eye opening occurred concurrently at ~44 days of age, while teeth erupted ~10 days later. Single cubs experienced delayed development of these organs compared to other litter sizes. Postnatal developmental differences between black bears and other carnivores likely stem from strategies allowing black bears to minimize energy expenditure during the gestational period when hibernating.
Hoshi: A Japanese morphological adorner for TEI XML
Authors: Bonnell Jerry , Ogihara Mitsunori
Published: January 2020

Morphological adornment of text in Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML can be useful for studies in textual analysis. MorphAdorner is a principal tool for providing such functionality in English texts. However, its practical use is limited when the input XML contains branching text, e.g. when  appears, as it modifies the input document. In such cases, preprocessing is required to obtain the desired results. This article introduces a new tool Hoshi with the purpose of determining how this issue can be best handled with minimal input modification and preprocessing needed. It also investigates whether parsing software available online can be used to supply morphological information that can be encoded in an output format like MorphAdorner, and whether such a tool can be developed to adorn text in other languages. Challenges include those posed by the target language, the current software available for providing morphological analysis in it, and the schema needed for encoding the results. Moreover, technical hurdles presented by segmented and branching text can complicate the alignment process, especially when the intent is to guarantee input document integrity. Our approach for handling these is presented, and the article ends by outlining future applications of Hoshi that can help to enhance TEI scholarship that prioritizes the use of morphological word metadata.
Scribe versus authorship attribution and clustering in historic Czech manuscripts: a case study with visual and linguistic features
Authors: Tikhonov Aleksej , Müller Klaus
Published: January 2020

For the identification of scribes and authors in handwritten documents, methods from classical linguistic analysis are combined with modern computer vision approaches to enhance the knowledge discovery process. One important finding is that it is possible to train neural networks for automatic transcription of handwritten documents and to use these transcriptions as input for statistical analysis. Furthermore, hypotheses about scribes can be tested by extracting visual handwriting features and clustering them. From a linguistic point of view, the R package stylo is a useful tool to analyse and cluster texts. Unfortunately, it only achieves a high level of accuracy with longer texts. For texts under 5000 words it is more suitable to measure their Euclidean distance based on a set of linguistic features. Both approaches, the analysis with stylo and the Euclidean distance, in combination with neural networks for automatic transcription and clustering allow for more precise statements about the relationship between texts, authors and scribes, even if the documents are under 1,000 words.
Elevated minimum inhibitory concentrations to antifungal drugs prevail in 14 rare species of candidemia-causing Saccharomycotina yeasts
Authors: Stavrou Aimilia A , Pérez-Hansen Antonio , Lackner Michaela , Lass-Flörl Cornelia , Boekhout Teun
Published: January 2020

Antifungal susceptibility profiles of rare Saccharomycotina yeasts remain missing, even though an increase in prevalence of such rare Candida species was reported in candidemia. Majority of these rare yeast species carry intrinsic resistances against at least one antifungal compound. Some species are known to be cross-resistant (against multiple drugs of the same drug class) or even multi-drug resistant (against multiple drugs of different drug classes). We performed antifungal susceptibility testing (AFST) according to EUCAST broth microdilution for 14 rare species (Clavispora lusitaniae, Candida intermedia, Candida auris, Diutina rugosa, Wickerhamiella pararugosa, Yarrowia lipolytica, Pichia norvegensis, Candida nivariensis, Kluyveromyces marxianus, Wickerhamomyces anomalus, Candida palmioleophila, Meyerozyma guilliermondii, Meyerozyma caribbica, and Debaryomyces hansenii) known to cause candidemia. In total, 234 isolates were tested for amphotericin B, fluconazole, itraconazole, voriconazole, posaconazole, anidulafungin, micafungin, and caspofungin. Amphothericin B had the broadest efficiency against the 14 tested rare yeast species, while high minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) against azole drugs and echinocandins were common. Voriconazole was the most efficient azole drug. Multidrug resistance was observed for the species C. auris and K. marxianus. Multidrug resistant individual isolates were found for Y. lipolytica and M. caribbica. In conclusion, the observed high MIC values of the rare Saccharomycotina species tested limit antifungal treatment options, complicating the management of such infections.
X-ray spectra and polarization from magnetar candidates
Authors: Taverna R , Turolla R , Suleimanov V , Potekhin A Y , Zane S
Published: January 2020

Magnetars are believed to host the strongest magnetic fields in the present universe ($B\gtrsim 10^{14}$ G) and the study of their persistent emission in the X-ray band offers an unprecedented opportunity to gain insight into physical processes in the presence of ultra-strong magnetic fields. Up to now, most of our knowledge about magnetar sources came from spectral analysis, which allowed to test the resonant Compton scattering scenario and to probe the structure of the star magnetosphere. On the other hand, radiation emitted from magnetar surface is expected to be strongly polarized and its observed polarization pattern bears the imprint of both scatterings on to magnetospheric charges and quantum electro-dynamics (QED) effects as it propagates in the magnetized vacuum around the star. X-ray polarimeters scheduled to fly in the next years will finally allow to exploit the wealth of information stored in the polarization observables. Here we revisit the problem of assessing the spectro-polarimetric properties of magnetar persistent emission. At variance with previous investigations, proper account for more physical surface emission models is made by considering either a condensed surface or a magnetized atmosphere. Results are used to simulate polarimetric observations with the forthcoming Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer. We find that X-ray polarimetry will allow to detect QED vacuum effects for all the emission models we considered and to discriminate among them.
Spinning and colour properties of the active asteroid (6478) Gault
Authors: Carbognani Albino , Buzzoni Alberto
Published: January 2020

We report on accurate BVRc observations of (6478) Gault, a 5–6 km diameter inner main-belt asteroid in the Phocaea family, notable for its sporadic, comet-like ejection of dust. This curious behaviour has been mainly interpreted as reconfigurations after YORP spin-up, although merging of a contact binary system cannot be fully excluded. We collected optical observations along the 2019 March–April period, at orbital phase angles between 12° and 21°, to search for direct evidence of asteroid quick spinning rotation. A prevailing period value of 3.34 ± 0.02 h is supported by our and other photometric observations. In the YORP spin-up hypothesis, this period points to a bulk density ρ ≈ 1 $\textrm{g}\, \textrm{cm}^{-3}$. The mean colours are B − V = +0.82±0.3, V − Rc = +0.28±0.06, and B − Rc = +1.11±0.4, but we have observed a trend towards bluer colour during the April session, with about Δ(B − V) ∼ 0.35 ± 0.09 mag. This colour change can be due to asteroid rotation and support the hypothesis that there is a bluer surface under the Gault’s dust.
Supermassive neutron stars in axion F(R) gravity
Authors: Astashenok Artyom V , Odintsov Sergey D
Published: January 2020

We investigated realistic neutron stars in axion R2 gravity. The coupling between curvature and axion field ϕ is assumed in the simple form ∼R2ϕ. For the axion mass in the range ma ∼ 10−11–10−10 eV the solitonic core within neutron star and corresponding halo with size ∼100 km can exist. Therefore the effective contribution of R2 term grows inside the star and it leads to change of star parameters (namely, mass, and radius). We obtained the increase of star mass independent from central density for wide range of masses. Therefore, maximal possible mass for given equation of state grows. At the same time, the star radius increases not so considerably in comparison with GR. Hence, our model may predict possible existence of supermassive compact stars with masses $M\sim 2.2\!-\!2.3\, \mathrm{M}_\odot$ and radii Rs ∼ 11 km for realistic equation of state (we considered APR equation of state). In general relativity one can obtain neutron stars with such characteristics only for unrealistic, extremely stiff equations of state. Note that this increase of mass occurs due to change of solution for scalar curvature outside the star. In GR curvature drops to zero on star surface where ρ = p = 0. In the model underconsideration the scalar curvature dumps more slowly in comparison with vacuum R2 gravity due to axion ‘galo’ around the star.
Introduction
Authors: Jasper James M. , Young Michael P. , Zuern Elke
Published: January 2020

Public characters, especially the main versions of heroes, villains, victims, and minions, represent central building blocks in the reputations of groups and individuals. Character work is devoted to crafting familiar images, especially of strategic players and even more especially of political players, that influence audiences primarily by suggesting the emotions they are supposed to feel about the characters. The characters are defined along two dimensions: as weak or strong and as moral or immoral. Public characters are often found in stories, but they are also created through visual images. In an era of corporate public relations, carefully orchestrated electoral campaigns, and social media, character work has never been more influential—or more ignored.
Presidential Elections and Majority Rule
Authors: Foley Edward B.
Published: January 2020

The Electoral College governing America today was adopted by Thomas Jefferson’s supporters, after the 1800 election almost derailed his presidency. The Jeffersonians were motivated by majority rule. Given the emergence of two-party competition between Federalists and themselves, the Jeffersonians intended the Electoral College to award the presidency to the majority party. Given the federal structure of the United States, they envisioned the Electoral College as implementing a compound form of majority rule: a candidate would win by amassing a majority of electoral votes from states where the candidate’s party was in the majority.
The Jeffersonian Electoral College in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Foley Edward B.
Published: January 2020

The 2016 election is, at a minimum, problematic from a Jeffersonian perspective, like 1992, and may have been another systemic malfunction, like 2000. Donald Trump received 107 of his 304 electoral votes in states where he won less than 50 percent of the popular vote—failing to achieve the kind of compound majority-of-majorities consistent with the Jeffersonian vision of how the system should work. 2016 illustrates the system’s inability to handle third-party and independent candidates, like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, an inability caused by the addition of plurality winner-take-all in the Jacksonian era. It is unknowable whether Trump or Hillary Clinton would have won runoffs in the three pivotal Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But if Clinton had won runoffs there (and in the states where she was only a plurality winner), then she would have won the Electoral College with an appropriately Jeffersonian majority-of-majorities.
Conclusion
Authors: Foley Edward B.
Published: January 2020

Election College reform should be considered in the context of overall concerns about American democracy. Civic culture is essential, as is strengthening democratic institutions. While the United States must address other institutional weaknesses, including gerrymandering, the power of the presidency requires urgent attention to the current deficiency of the Electoral College. The problem is that plurality winner-take-all permits the kind of accident that occurred in 1844, where the winner is not the candidate preferred by a majority of voters in enough states for an Electoral College majority. Insofar as this kind of accident may have happened again in 2016, recognizing this institutional problem requires a different analysis and solution than if a majority of Americans want to elect a president with anti-democratic tendencies. Currently, there is a mismatch between America’s expectation of two-party competition and the multicandidate reality of contemporary presidential elections. Majority rule is necessary to realign reality and expectations.
The Preacher King
Authors: Lischer Richard
Published: January 2020

This book investigates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s religious development from a precocious “preacher’s kid” in segregated Atlanta to the most influential American preacher and orator of the twentieth century. To give an intimate portrait, the book draws almost exclusively on King’s unpublished sermons and speeches, as well as tape recordings, personal interviews, and even police surveillance reports. By returning to the raw sources, it recaptures King’s real preaching voice and, consequently, something of the real King himself. The book shows how as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers, King early on absorbed the poetic cadences, traditions, and power of the pulpit, as profoundly influenced by his fellow African-American preachers as he was by Gandhi and the classical philosophers. The book also reveals a later phase of King’s development: the prophetic rage with which he condemned American religious and political hypocrisy. During the last three years of his life, the book shows, King accused his country of genocide, warned of long hot summers in the ghettos, and called for a radical redistribution of wealth.
After Debussy
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: January 2020

This book explores an idea of music, exemplified by the work of Debussy, in dialogue with a parallel movement in French literary and philosophical thought. Its central thesis is that modern music and philosophy converge on the same set of problems but from opposite directions. Through close readings of selected musical works it argues that Debussy’s rethinking of the relation between sound and grammar anticipates and complements the defining problem of modern philosophy – the gap between language and a sensory relation to the world, between abstract systems of signification and embodied experience. Although its principal focus is the music of Debussy, it ranges widely across French music from Fauré and Ravel to Dutilleux, Boulez, Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho. It ranges similarly through a set of French writers and philosophers, from Mallarmé and Proust to Merleau-Ponty, Jankélévitch, Derrida, Lyotard, and Nancy. Frequent reference is made to the visual arts (Rodin, Monet, Bonnard, Cezanne, Matisse). It explores the idea that this current of French music, running through the long twentieth century from Debussy to the present, makes sense in a manner that affords a different way of knowing the world, foregrounding sound over syntax, and sense over signification.
Mélisande and the silence of music
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: January 2020

Through detailed discussion of specific moments in the opera, this chapter explores how Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande exemplifies the central aesthetic idea of ‘saying nothing’. The muteness of Mélisande is an idea that joins the work of Maeterlinck and Debussy to a wider aesthetic movement. It is key to the aesthetics that Mallarmé sets out in relation to the figure of the ballet dancer, whose ‘veils’ make visible a kind of nothing that appears only in her speechless movements. This muteness of art offers a critical and embodied reflection on a key category of wordlessness and the unsayable that preoccupies philosophy from Bergson, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger through to Jankélévitch, Derrida, and Nancy.
Coming to presence
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: January 2020

Debussy’s early setting of Mallarmé’s ‘Apparition’ provides the focus for an exploration of the way music stages the process of appearing and coming to presence. The foregrounding of this, over any idea of narrative or drama, is traced in La damoiselle élue, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Pelléas et Mélisande, La mer, Jeux – works whose central concern is the play of appearing and disappearing. This category is explored theoretically through the work of Jankélévitch, Martin Seel, and Derrida. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence is central here, as is a consideration of Mallarmé’s discussion of the dancer Loïe Fuller. The idea of an evanescent music is thematised in the ‘fairy’ creatures of Debussy’s piano preludes, a kind of fictional embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea of poetry as a ‘dispersion volatile’.
Mallarmé and the edge of language
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: January 2020

This chapter focusses on Debussy’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913). These songs are analysed to demonstrate how Debussy’s music makes absence appear through sonorous presence and how it explores the ‘vertige’ experienced at the edge of language. The idea of the fan (Eventail) lends itself to a comparison with Derrida’s idea of the hinge (la brisure) at the heart of all language – the articulated joint that both connects and separates language and its signifieds. This leads to a discussion of the wider tension between words and music in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as in Boulez’s settings of Mallarmé in his Pli selon pli.
Writing the body
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: January 2020

This chapter distinguishes between recent disciplinary swings to foreground the body, in a phenomenology of experience, and the more specific focus on how musical works write the body. Just as Mallarmé sees the dancer as an écriture corporelle, so music ‘after Debussy’ can be understood in a similar way. Debussy’s piano Préludes (Book 1) are examined in detail for their re-writing of the body. The work of Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Marion are explored in terms of a phenomenology that places the perceiving body centre stage but read as a development in philosophical thought that was already being explored through art and music.
Thinking in sound
Authors: Johnson Julian
Published: January 2020

Debussy’s music is discussed in terms of its logic of sensation (Deleuze) and the ways of being it affords, rather than for any discursive logic of propositions. Composers think in and through sounds; they do not transpose other things into sound. Saariaho’s ‘grammar of dreams’ signals a concern with a different kind of musical logic – what Adorno called a ‘musique informelle’. ‘Jeux de vagues’, the central movement of Debussy’s La mer, provides a key focus, though music by Dutilleux and Saariaho is also explored to demonstrate the allusive logic of this musical repertoire. The chapter examines how this music constitutes ‘a new epistemology’ (Dufourt), an embodied knowing of the world inscribed in the details of musical works.
Restoring Public Faith
Authors: Gastil John , Knobloch Katherine R.
Published: January 2020

Deliberative participation can have a profound impact on how citizens understand and enact political life. Chapter 10 reviews research that demonstrate this impact. Jury participation can increase the likelihood of voting, and studies of Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) and Australian Citizens’ Parliament participants find that deliberative experiences encourage participants to view government as responsive to the public and more confident in their ability to self-govern. The chapter also shows that CIR participants report increased participation in political discussions and community-based engagement, though they were not more likely to participate in partisan politics. It goes on to detail how some of these effects spilled over into the wider electorate. Those who were aware of the CIR and read its statements tended to increase their own political efficacy, even though they themselves did not directly participate in the review.
Cycles of Compulsion
Authors: Loevy Karin
Published: January 2020

From the perspective of the security official, the practice of torture raises two interrelated compulsions: that of efficacy and that of legality. The compulsion of efficacy is expressed by the need to make sure that all state actions conform to an instrumental rationality. The compulsion of legality is the tendency to justify all state actions in terms of their reference to law. When a deeply ingrained knowledge that torture is necessary “to get the job done” interacts with the belief that legality is a necessary condition for all legitimate state actions, one can readily expect an ongoing process of legalization of organized torture practices aimed at bringing every official act of necessity to be seen as conforming to law. The history of torture debates and practice in Israel illustrates this dynamic long-term process. The two compulsions—the compulsion of efficacy and the compulsion of legality—run through that history, creating an ongoing circular dynamic in which torture scandals are followed by systematic attempts to abolish the practice, which in turn open up opportunities for new regulation, creating new torture scandals to which the Israeli justice system responds by redrawing the lines so that what is seen as necessary violence will remain “within the law.” This chapter lays out this cyclical history, predicts its next stage, and ultimately suggests how to begin to break the cycle.
A Qualified Defense of the Obama Administration’s Record on Torture
Authors: Parry John T.
Published: January 2020

The Obama administration successfully dismantled the remaining pieces of the Bush administration’s torture apparatus. But these efforts encountered increasingly bitter opposition from torture apologists, who obstructed efforts to impose any kind of accountability and who continued to press arguments that torture prevented terrorist attacks and that opposition to torture was a form of weakness. In addition, although the administration adopted an anti-torture position, the torture question was not high on its agenda. Thus, when it encountered resistance, the administration abandoned the effort to impose criminal accountability for the deaths and serious injuries caused by the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. It also dropped efforts to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center. By the time President Obama left office, his administration’s record on torture was more mixed than many people initially would have predicted. Some of the blame for that mixed record rests with the administration. But anti-torture advocates also hoped for too much. The Obama political agenda was about much more than torture, and the administration made rational political decisions to focus its resources on other issues once it had formally dismantled the Bush administration policy. In addition, a true anti-torture policy would require cooperation from Congress, which is something Obama rarely was able to obtain. In the end, the Obama administration was able to reorient U.S. policy away from torture, but it was unable to prevent the crystallization of a political discourse and culture in which torture remained a legitimate option.
Torture, Dignity, and the Rule of Law
Authors: Bernstein J.M.
Published: January 2020

It has been claimed, “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. If you make this exception [and permit torture], the whole Constitution crumbles.” The ambition of this chapter is to provide the terms through which this judgment can be vindicated. The judgment’s pivotal assumption is that the prohibition on torture is in some manner foundational for any modern legal system. Three theses help to secure this foundational thesis: (i) Historically, basic rule of law and procedural due process requirements—most profoundly the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty”—first emerge in the 18th century as the necessary legal bases for prohibiting judicial and penal torture. (ii) What is systematically implied by this historical process is that the modern rule of law is law’s own reflective effort to provide an absolute separation between the force of law and physical force, between legality or lawfulness and state violence. (iii) The rule of law’s emphatic separation between the force of law and the procedures of state violence presupposes that the object of law is the person with dignity, that is, a being possessing intrinsic worth. What dignity minimally means in the modern age is that while the state may deprive subjects of their liberty, it may not directly infringe upon their bodily integrity, or treat them in any manner that would infringe upon their equal intrinsic worth with all other legal subjects.
Reclaiming Bentham on Torture
Authors: Barela Steven J.
Published: January 2020

Nearly two and a half centuries ago, Jeremy Bentham presented a moral challenge to the absolutist view on eliminating torture in all circumstances—written in the privacy of his study and never published during his lifetime. Although three sentences of his utilitarian argument for torture in limited situations have become quite well-known (often equated with the ticking bomb scenario), Bentham’s view on torture would be greatly served by a more nuanced understanding of his sometimes-contradictory opinions, the development of his thought, and the context of his writing. This chapter aims to provide a fuller view. We will find four main points well worth highlighting: (1) Bentham was strikingly indecisive about the effectiveness of interrogational torture; (2) he keenly touched on the same questions that drive scientific research today; (3) he worried that torture could open the door to tyranny; and (4) he struggled to find the proper standard of “certainty” that could trigger the government’s use of severe pain and suffering. In the long run, the trigger softened as Bentham identified the insurmountable hurdle that we can only suspect what resides inside a prisoner’s mind. As a result, I will suggest that a moral epistemic duty was implied in his work and would require that when choosing subjects for questioning, we must begin with a presumption of innocence as the innocent and ill-informed will inevitably wind up under questioning.
Preventing Torture: What Works?
Authors: Thomson Mark , Bernath Barbara
Published: January 2020

Torture can be prevented by first understanding why it happens, and secondly by taking a combination of actions to reduce risks of it occurring: replace discriminatory and abusive practice with professional policing that conforms with international human rights law. With reference to country-specific experiences and an academic research commissioned by the Association for the Prevention of Torture, the authors provide examples of measures that work to reduce the risk of torture and other ill-treatment. The most effective measures are the application of detention safeguards, such as the immediate notification of family, access to a lawyer and a medical doctor, and being brought promptly before a judge. The presence of a lawyer during interrogation, in particular, has an important preventive effect. These safeguards have greater impact when combined with other measures that tackle discriminatory practice and injustices. For example, independent oversight bodies, especially OPCAT National Preventive Mechanisms, who have the mandate to visit all places where persons are deprived of their liberty, have not only a deterrent effect but also act as agents of change by presenting well-informed recommendations to prevent possible future abuse. The authors use country-specific examples (e.g., Sri Lanka, Fiji, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Georgia, Turkey, and Chile) to explain how sociopolitical order, cultural traditions, and institutional culture that are discriminatory and prejudiced in nature need to be addressed, challenged, and changed. Examples are given of when this has and hasn’t been achieved through professional skills training; institutional, judicial, and legal reform. Put simply, prevention works best when anchored within a rights-based paradigm of dignity, justice, and equality before the law.
Repairing the Damage from Illegal Acts of State
Authors: Finkelstein Claire , Xenakis Stephen N.
Published: January 2020

The United States is only just beginning to grapple with the fallout from the program known as Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI), an illegal interrogation practice designed to further the United States counter-terrorism efforts against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. One of the most consequential legacies of the program stems from the way it was justified: lawyers for the Bush administration sought to legitimize the program through distorted legal doctrines, some of which remained in currency even after the RDI program was finally abandoned. The attempt to justify illegal conduct with false legal arguments, along with the failure of the subsequent administration to hold the principal architects of the program responsible, has eroded the rule of law in the United States and done permanent damage to norms of armed conflict as well as to domestic and international law. This chapter discusses the consequences of the RDI program, with particular attention paid to the impact of legal manipulations used to justify the program as well as the failure of accountability that resulted. In Part IV, this chapter addresses the question whether torture has been permanently eliminated from U.S. law, or whether the practice is likely to return. In this connection, the chapter raises concerns about the McCain-Feinstein Amendment that tied permissible interrogation methods to the Army Field Manual (AFM), which continues to authorize the psychologically and emotionally damaging techniques of sensory and sleep deprivation through Appendix M. The chapter finally discusses ways to repair the damage the RDI program and its aftermath inflicted on the rule of law.
Drinking from a Poisoned Chalice
Authors: Baker John G. , Spears Mary E. , Newell Katherine S.
Published: January 2020

The following is an adaptation of the keynote speech given by John G. Baker at the 2018 NATSECDEF Conference, “Preserving Justice in National Security,” hosted by the George Washington University Law School on September 20, 2018. Brigadier General Baker examined whether the United States military commissions, special military tribunals established by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 solely to try noncitizen terrorism suspects, were capable of achieving justice. Answering with an empathetic “no,” Brigadier General Baker described an increasingly troubling series of actions taken against defendants who had been secretly held and tortured by the same government that was then seeking their criminal convictions and executions. It is clear from this speech that by the time this piece is published, more, and possibly more troubling events, will have occurred, as the United States continues to pay the price of torture.
Calvinism and Education
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: January 2020

Calvinists left their stamp on different academic institutions with consequences that neither they nor their disciples could control. Reformed Protestants adapted to specific circumstances to carry out their efforts of ecclesiastical reform. From questions about the control of institutions of advanced learning and the purposes of university education, to ones about the actual content of the curriculum and the difficulty of balancing theology, the arts, and natural science, Calvinists struggled to retain theological orthodoxy at the center of the educational enterprise. This challenge continued even when Calvinists started institutions from scratch. This is illustrated in case studies of the universities of Geneva, Leiden, and St. Andrews.
Exiles and Calvinist Identity
Authors: van Veen Mirjam
Published: January 2020

Historians tend to agree that the experience of exile had a decisive impact on the organizational structures of Calvinism, and on its theology and identity, encouraging the development of independent church structures, and a strong Reformed confessional culture. Meanwhile, the decision to go into exile is considered a catalyst for wider radicalization among Calvinists. But this consensus is problematic. So many refugees were ready to negotiate their beliefs that it raises the question of whether the notion of radicalized exiles really matches the experiences of sixteenth-century believers. Like other Protestants, Reformed theologians were inclined to identify their church as a suffering church. This chapter argues that exile did not contribute to the development of orthodox Calvinism.
On Social Identity
Authors: Reed-Sandoval Amy
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins to explore what it means to have a socially undocumented identity by means of establishing what asocial identities are. It engages the respective metaphysical accounts of social identity of Linda Martín Alcoff and Pierre Bourdieu, both of which focus, albeit in different ways, on the embodied aspects of certain social identities. It adopts an account of social identity that understands such identities—particularly those that are race, gender and class-based—to be real, embodied sites of hermeneutical horizons. The goal is to develop a theory of socially undocumented identity that will prove useful for dismantling the sorts of institutions, thinking, and rhetoric that serve to brand and constrain unjustly a subset of the population as so-called “illegals.”
Socially Undocumented Horizons
Authors: Reed-Sandoval Amy
Published: January 2020

This chapter completes the argument that “being socially undocumented” entails having a real, visible social identity by exploring possible aspects of a socially undocumented interpretive horizon. It argues that the socially undocumented interpretive horizon can be characterized in terms of resistance to a “double bind” in which socially undocumented people often find themselves. On the one hand, they often have no choice but to perform under-valued labor in the United States; failure to do so could very literally result in starvation and death. On the other hand, socially undocumented people with and without legal authorization to be in the United States are “read” as “illegals,” and subjected to demeaning, immigration-related constraints, on the very basis of performing and being associated with such labor. They are, then, faced with two highly constraining options. This chapter explores ways in which socially undocumented people take innovative action to respond to this double bind.
Voice Control
Authors: Meizel Katherine
Published: January 2020

Chapter 7 discusses gendered political and personal implications of voice loss. It examines the loss of voice through and mediated by technology. First, it traces a history in American cinema and the shifting sociopolitical landscapes in which it has projected its visions and auditions, where the transformation of voices—especially women’s— can be heard clearly. The singing voice in cinema has moved from symbolizing the vulnerability of identity and its susceptibility to manipulation, to embodying the affirmation of identity as a site of individual agency. Outside of cinema, voice loss in singers is subject to discourses no less suffused with ideas about identity and agency. Second, the chapter explores the loss of voice that one singer experienced by selling her voice to a digital sampling library.
Fictionalism as a Phase (to Be Grown Out of)
Authors: Burgess John P.
Published: January 2020

In this chapter, it will be argued that a fictionalist account, in one central sense of that ambiguous phrase, of an area of discourse is not something that can be called correct or incorrect once and for all. Rather, areas of discourse often evolve from phases for which an error theory is most appropriate to phases for which a fictionalist account is appropriate. They can then evolve further into phases for which a straightforward account is appropriate. The latter can occur when the meaning of a key term changes. The phenomenon will be illustrated by examples from several areas of discourse.
Facebook Japan
Authors: Sun Huatong
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores why Japanese users were never crazed about Facebook and illustrates the value of a practice-oriented critical approach to global design with design tools. It begins with the case background. It then develops a nuanced and multifaceted discussion to uncover the hidden relations between power, ideology, and identity surrounding the local uses of Facebook Japan: Built on the findings triangulated from primary and secondary research, it reviews the different networked sociality between Japan and the United States within the postcolonial discourse, and then presents a design instrument of discursive affordances to redress asymmetrical power distribution for culturally sustaining design. It concludes the discussion by situating the Facebook Japan case within the political economy scholarship: The asymmetrical power structure demonstrated in the design and operation of the Facebook platform shows the importance of moving from the micro to the macro and connecting both toward a practice-oriented critical design with the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2, or CLUE-squared) approach. This chapter also introduces a few sets of social media notions to frame the design discussion in this book and to use them as sensitizing concepts to inspire social media technology design. Concepts include networked sociality, social capital, ties, and connectedness versus connectivity. Two design tools are introduced, including the activity-based affordances model for design inspiration and the design heuristics of discursive affordances.
Technocratic Naiveté
Authors: Friedman Jeffrey
Published: January 2020

An epistemological critique of technocracy may seem unnecessary if one believes that the causes of social and economic problems, and their solutions, are self-evident. However, this belief must confront the fact that technocrats frequently disagree with one another about the causes of and solutions to social and economic problems. One might respond to the fact of technocratic disagreement, however, by impugning the genuineness of technocratic disagreement: if the truth is self-evident, debate about it must be disingenuous. This response becomes untenable once we specify exactly the types of knowledge that a legitimate technocracy needs, for we then see that most of this knowledge is outside of anyone’s immediate experience and must be mediated to technocrats by fallible human interpreters. Moreover, unintended policy consequences may be counterintuitive, not self-evident. This chapter does not demonstrate that unintended consequences do plague technocracy, but it shows that they might.
Lippmann and Dewey
Authors: Friedman Jeffrey
Published: January 2020

During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann expressed his growing doubts about the epistemic capacities of the journalistically informed mass public, and John Dewey published three responses to these doubts—none of which grappled with the interpretive problems that Lippmann saw as the barrier to an adequate understanding of modern society. Rather than lamenting the mass public’s lack of knowledge, as Dewey did, Lippmann was mainly worried about the inevitably biased stereotypes by means of which journalists and their readers winnow down overabundant knowledge into coherent interpretations. Dewey’s hopes for a new form of journalism, his faith in ordinary people’s knowledge of the problems afflicting them, and his ideas for a new social science failed to confront this problem of interpretation. However, Lippmann’s own solution, early in the debate, was an epistocracy of statisticians, which also failed to confront the interpretive problem he had identified. The debate ended, then, with neither engagement nor resolution.