bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Inherited thrombocytopenia associated with mutation of UDP-galactose-4-epimerase (GALE)
Authors: Seo Aaron , Gulsuner Suleyman , Pierce Sarah , Ben-Harosh Miri , Shalev Hanna , Walsh Tom , Krasnov Tanya , Dgany Orly , Doulatov Sergei , Tamary Hannah , Shimamura Akiko , King Mary-Claire
Published: September 2018

Severe thrombocytopenia, characterized by dysplastic megakaryocytes and intracranial bleeding, was diagnosed in six individuals from a consanguineous kindred. Three of the individuals were successfully treated by bone marrow transplant. Whole-exome sequencing and homozygosity mapping of multiple family members, coupled with whole-genome sequencing to reveal shared non-coding variants, revealed one potentially functional variant segregating with thrombocytopenia under a recessive model: GALE p.R51W (c.C151T, NM_001127621). The mutation is extremely rare (allele frequency = 2.5 × 10−05), and the likelihood of the observed co-segregation occurring by chance is 1.2 × 10−06. GALE encodes UDP-galactose-4-epimerase, an enzyme of galactose metabolism and glycosylation responsible for two reversible reactions: interconversion of UDP-galactose with UDP-glucose and interconversion of UDP-N-acetylgalactosamine with UDP-N-acetylglucosamine. The mutation alters an amino acid residue that is conserved from yeast to humans. The variant protein has both significantly lower enzymatic activity for both interconversion reactions and highly significant thermal instability. Proper glycosylation is critical to normal hematopoiesis, in particular to megakaryocyte and platelet development, as reflected in the presence of thrombocytopenia in the context of congenital disorders of glycosylation. Mutations in GALE have not previously been associated with thrombocytopenia. Our results suggest that GALE p.R51W is inadequate for normal glycosylation and thereby may impair megakaryocyte and platelet development. If other mutations in GALE are shown to have similar consequences, this gene may be proven to play a critical role in hematopoiesis.
Robustness by intrinsically disordered C-termini and translational readthrough
Authors: Kleppe April Snofrid , Bornberg-Bauer Erich
Published: September 2018

During protein synthesis genetic instructions are passed from DNA via mRNA to the ribosome to assemble a protein chain. Occasionally, stop codons in the mRNA are bypassed and translation continues into the untranslated region (3′-UTR). This process, called translational readthrough (TR), yields a protein chain that becomes longer than would be predicted from the DNA sequence alone. Protein sequences vary in propensity for translational errors, which may yield evolutionary constraints by limiting evolutionary paths. Here we investigated TR in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by analysing ribosome profiling data. We clustered proteins as either prone or non-prone to TR, and conducted comparative analyses. We find that a relatively high frequency (5%) of genes undergo TR, including ribosomal subunit proteins. Our main finding is that proteins undergoing TR are highly expressed and have a higher proportion of intrinsically disordered C-termini. We suggest that highly expressed proteins may compensate for the deleterious effects of TR by having intrinsically disordered C-termini, which may provide conformational flexibility but without distorting native function. Moreover, we discuss whether minimizing deleterious effects of TR is also enabling exploration of the phenotypic landscape of protein isoforms.
Of Mind and Murder
Authors: Mastroianni George R.
Published: September 2018

How could the Holocaust have happened? How could people do such things to other people? Were all or most of the perpetrators insane? Are psychologically normal people capable of committing such unspeakable violence? Were Germans willing participants in the genocidal enterprise, or were they mainly influenced by evil leaders? Is the potential for genocidal behavior universal—could something like the Holocaust happen anywhere, anytime? Such questions have motivated much discussion of the Holocaust, and psychologists have been contributing to the discussion from the very beginning. Of Mind and Murder provides a brief reminder as to what the Holocaust was, and it offers a detailed look at the major approaches taken by psychologists in their attempts to explain the behavior of those caught up in the Holocaust. Of Mind and Murder also suggests some new ways of thinking psychologically about the Holocaust and argues for renewed interest in some old approaches.
Psychology, Context, and the Risk of Genocide
Authors: Mastroianni George R.
Published: September 2018

Chapter 11 compares the attitudes of some Americans toward Japanese and Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor with German attitudes toward Jews. Theories of genocide generally posit predisposing psychological conditions and then examine instances of genocide to confirm whether or not those predisposing conditions were present. The case of the Japanese American confinements offers an opportunity to examine a case in which at least some of the suspected predisposing conditions were present but genocide did not follow. This suggests that there were significant differences between America and Germany in the intensity and penetration of anti-Japanese and anti-Semitic attitudes, respectively, and also that important legal and political safeguards against minority mistreatment that were compromised in Germany remained at least partially intact in the United States.
Identity Politics Inside Out
Authors: Hintz Lisel
Published: September 2018

Teasing out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy, this book turns the concept of identity politics as traditionally used in IR scholarship inside out. Rather than treating national identity as a cause or consequence of a state’s foreign policy, it rethinks foreign policy as an arena, alternative to domestic politics, in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. It argues that elites choose to take their contestation “outside” when their identity gambits are blocked at the domestic level by supporters of competing proposals, theorizing when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Turkey offers an ideal empirical window onto these dynamics because of dramatic challenges to understandings of Turkishness and because its identity is implicated in multiple international roles, such as NATO ally, EU candidate, and OIC member. Using intertextual analysis, the book extracts competing proposals for Turkey’s identity from a wide array of pop culture and social media sources, interviews, surveys, and archives. It then employs process tracing to demonstrate how elites sharing an Ottoman Islamist understanding of identity counterintuitively used an EU-oriented foreign policy to challenge the institutional grip of pro-Western, secular Republican Nationalism back home, thus clearing the way for an increased presence of Islam domestically and a renewed role in the Middle East. The framework developed closes the identity-foreign policy circle, analytically linking the “inside-out” spillover of national identity debates in foreign policy with changes in the contours of these debates produced by their contestation abroad.
LGBTQ in the Courtroom
Authors: Woods Jordan Blair
Published: September 2018

This chapter reviews a limited but emerging body of research on biases that arise and affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) jurors as well as juror decision-making when LGBTQ individuals are involved in criminal cases. The chapter also discusses recent research and legal developments surrounding jury selection and LGBTQ identity and describes debates over best practices to identify and combat anti-LGBTQ juror biases. Finally, the chapter reviews gay and trans “panic” defenses in cases involving the murders of LGBTQ individuals and examines other challenges that LGBTQ defendants and victims face in different criminal contexts. Although there is a need for future studies, the available research illustrates how challenges linked to sexuality and gender identity in the criminal jury system can compromise legitimacy and fairness in the criminal justice system more broadly.
Pre- and Midtrial Publicity in the Age of Internet and Social Media
Authors: Daftary-Kapur Tarika , Penrod Steven D.
Published: September 2018

Although juror misconduct has always been a concern, the prevalence of technology available to jurors has increased the ease with which jurors can improperly communicate with others, publish information regarding the trial, and conduct outside research on the case. This chapter discusses the role of the Internet and social media in the courtroom and how access to this information in the form of midtrial publicity might impact juror decision-making. Additionally, it discusses steps that have been taken by courts around the United States to address the issue of Internet use by jurors as well as recommendations to limit the impact of the Internet and social media on juror decision-making.
The Role of Emotion and Motivation in Jury Decision-Making
Authors: Holloway Colin , Wiener Richard L.
Published: September 2018

Abstract: American law requires jurors to impartially evaluate information presented during trial to render a just verdict based primarily—if not solely—on relevant facts of the case. These expectations leave little room for emotion-driven subjective evaluations, fostering instead an expectation of juror objectivity, which serves as a foundation for a fair and just legal system. The legal community acknowledges the potentially deleterious effect that emotion can have on juror objectivity. Yet the response, which relies on procedural safeguards to prevent against affect infusion, is limited by a lack of understanding of the depth with which emotion directs information processing, motivates judgment, and ultimately drives decision-making. This chapter summarizes theories of emotion and decision-making, applies emotion research findings to a legal scenario to challenge the assumption of juror objectivity, and proposes a system that recognizes and accounts for the variety of ways affect impacts jury decision-making.
The New Public Health Law
Authors: Burris Scott , Berman Micah L. , Penn Matthew , Ramanathan Holiday Tara
Published: September 2018

Using a “transdisciplinary approach” to public health law, this book follows the core competencies for both law and public health programs. It reviews the basic background of the field of public health law, then introduces tools, concepts, and skills needed for effective development of public health laws and policies. The book also introduces the core legal doctrine of public health law and outlines the process for turning a public health law idea into an actionable, codified law or policy. It then turns to the challenges and key issues regulators and authorities face in implementation, enforcement, and legal and political defense against challenges. The book concludes with evaluation—explaining how legal monitoring and evaluation are integral to the cause of using law in public health and helping spread laws that work across jurisdictions, from the city level and beyond.
Constitutional Limitations
Authors: Burris Scott , Berman Micah L. , Penn, and Matthew , Holiday Tara Ramanathan
Published: September 2018

This chapter describes “due process,” a Constitutional restriction on governmental actions that impact individuals, in the context of public health. It outlines the doctrines of procedural and substantive due process, including the legal tests that courts apply to decide whether individuals’ due process rights have been violated. It uses examples from Supreme Court cases that have defined due process in the context of public health, including those that struggle to define the scope of reproductive rights. It also examines two cases where public health principles were raised as a justification for governmental action: one about involuntary sterilization and one about Ebola. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the “state action doctrine” that defines which public health actors may be challenged on due process grounds.
Looming Civil War
Authors: Phillips Jason
Published: September 2018

This work explains how American prophecies and forecasts of the Civil War formed, spread, and affected the war’s outbreak, conduct, meaning, and memory. It identifies two temporalities in nineteenth-century America, progressive anticipations and fatalistic expectations, and shows how these approaches to the future shaped predictions of frontier conflicts, class warfare, slave insurrections, revolutions, and Armageddon. By interpreting the material culture of weapons, particularly bowie knives and pikes, it reveals how arms projected the looming conflict by threatening enemies and goading men to fight. Recovering the visions of leaders, citizens, soldiers, and slaves, this research challenges the popular notion that Americans expected a short, bloodless war at the outset. This short war myth gained currency after the conflict to reconcile the sections and romanticize an innocent antebellum era.
Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Multilingual Learners
Authors: Crowe Kathryn
Published: September 2018

With nearly 8,000 languages used in the world and increasing levels of transnational mobility, the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners accessing education and therapy services has never been greater. This growing diversity creates a challenge for educators and clinicians who work with these children and their families, especially where DHH learners are exposed to or acquiring more than one spoken language. Spoken language multilingualism in DHH learners is an area in which research knowledge is gradually increasing but evidence-based practices for intervention and education are rarely described. This chapter presents information describing the increasing linguistic diversity and spoken language multilingualism of DHH learners and research concerning the advantages and disadvantages of multilingualism. The current research describing the speech and language skills of multilingual DHH learners is discussed with reference to the impact of multilingualism on learners’ outcomes.
Cognitive Constraints on Learning to Read in Children with an Intellectual Disability Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Authors: van Wingerden Evelien , van Tilborg Arjan , van Balkom Hans
Published: September 2018

Learning to read is challenging for children who have hearing impairments and concurrent intellectual disabilities because they face barriers due to both conditions. In many developmental domains, including executive functioning and language development, auditory and intellectual disabilities mutually influence each other; a deficit in one domain hinders coping mechanisms to compensate for distortions in the other. The resulting impact is more than the sum of the parts. It affects the way students learn to read and the way they process written text in many ways. Little is known about the key factors in literacy development for children with both hearing impairments and intellectual disabilities. This chapter integrates recent findings on reading development in children with both of these conditions to define a research base for two exploratory studies on literacy attainment in these learners. Recommendations for literacy education are based on these studies.
Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Learners in Relation to Social Skills
Authors: Zaidman-Zait Anat , Most Tova
Published: September 2018

Pragmatic behaviors are related to the social use of language in an appropriate and effective way. As a result of their hearing loss, many deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners who use spoken language have pragmatic difficulties in everyday interactions. Assessing pragmatic competence is the most challenging aspect of language ability to assess and there are few efficient, valid, and reliable sound tools for this purpose in DHH learners. The successful use of pragmatic skills is particularly important to DHH children’s social and emotional functioning in the educational system, including their self-confidence, motivation, social adjustment, peer acceptance, and popularity. This chapter discusses the assessment of pragmatic abilities in DHH learners and argues that pragmatic abilities are fundamental to DHH learners’ social-emotional functioning. A case example will be provided and implications for educational assessment and intervention will be discussed.
Revisiting Curricula for Deaf Students
Authors: Ohna Stein Erik
Published: September 2018

The Norwegian National Curriculum in 1997 introduced four subject curricula for deaf students as part of new legislation giving deaf students who have acquired sign language as their first language the right to instruction in the use of sign language and through the medium of sign language. A few years later, new hearing technologies contributed to substantial changes in the educational context. This situation has challenged the school system, schools, and teachers. The chapter is organized in three sections. First, the educational system and the process leading to the introduction of new legislation is presented. The second section deals with information about the use of curricula for deaf students. The last section discusses issues of students’ achievements, classroom processes, and national policies.
What a Sexy Tale!
Authors: Hogh-Olesen Henrik
Published: September 2018

Chapter 3 explores even further back in evolutionary history and examines whether there are traces of the aesthetic impulse in species other than our own. Do other species have a sense of aesthetics? Do they make aesthetic choices, and do they exhibit examples of aesthetic behavior? Among other things, this chapter looks at bird song and crane dance. It follows the fascinating bowerbirds as they create their remarkable and colorful constructions. And it follows the action as experiments are conducted with chimpanzees in the lab. The chapter also discusses honest signals, innate sensibilities, sexual selection, and the evolution of beauty.
Who Lives Here?
Authors: Hogh-Olesen Henrik
Published: September 2018

Chapter 6 follows the aesthetic impulse full circle and explores the human need to decorate objects and surroundings, as well as the marking of property and status in the public domain. Furthermore, it looks at phenomena such as folk art, street art, and graffiti. The purpose of the chapter is to show that such extravaganzas too make biological sense and thereby strengthen the argument that aesthetic behavior is natural for humans. Decorations signal personal fitness, ability, care, effort, resources, as well as power, because they ensure social status, for instance to attract more sexual partners. Like our body ornamentation, decoration is immediate communication transmitting key social and evolutionary information to the surroundings.
Art and the Brain’s Reward System
Authors: Hogh-Olesen Henrik
Published: September 2018

Chapter 7 takes the investigation of the aesthetic impulse into the human brain to understand, first, why only we—and not our closest relatives among the primates—express ourselves aesthetically; and second, how the brain reacts when presented with aesthetic material. Brain scans are less useful when you are interested in the Why of aesthetic behavior rather than the How. Nevertheless, some brain studies have been ground-breaking, and neuroaesthetics offers a pivotal argument for the key function of the aesthetic impulse in human lives; it shows us that the brain’s reward circuit is activated when we are presented with aesthetic objects and stimuli. For why reward a perception or an activity that is evolutionarily useless and worthless in relation to human existence?
Aristotle's Theory of Bodies
Authors: Pfeiffer Christian
Published: September 2018

Aristotle’s conception of body at the heart of this study is the notion of a three‐dimensionally extended and continuous magnitude bounded by surfaces. This notion is distinct from the notion of a physical substance. Substances have bodies: they are extended, their parts are continuous with each other, and they have boundaries which demarcate them from their surroundings. It is argued that body has a pivotal role in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. A theory of bodies can be compared to Aristotle’s account of central concepts for natural science, such as motion, place, and time which are discussed in Physics III‐‐IV. The book argues that when Aristotle discusses the notion of body and related notions, he has primarily physical, as opposed to mathematical, bodies in mind. The physicist studies body insofar as it is the body of a physical substance, whereas the mathematician studies body as if it were separate. Although Aristotle never wrote a continuous treatment on bodies, it is possible to reconstruct a coherent and philosophically appealing theory of bodies. The second half of the book offers a systematic treatment of the concept of three‐dimensional magnitude and related notions such as boundary, extension, contact, and continuity. Both the structural features and the ontological status of body are discussed. In this sense, the second half of the book is a study in ancient mereotopology.
Central Bankers in Twelve Countries between 1950 and 2000
Authors: Wendschlag Mikael
Published: September 2018

This chapter studies the professional, political, and academic ‘human capital endowment’ of the central bank governors in office between 1950 and 2000 in twelve OECD countries. Although many national differences are observed, four more general shifts in central bank governor ‘types’ have been identified: (1) the civil servant central banker of the economic ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s; (2), the central bank politicians of the 1970s; (3) the market-oriented governors of the 1980s; and (4), the academic central banker from the 1990s onward. During the period studied, it is also possible to track the development of an international elite of central bankers, sharing similar backgrounds (academically and professionally) and views on monetary policy. A key observation is that ‘what makes for a credible central banker’ has changed over time, and especially following events such as economic recessions or financial crises.
Reforming the Law of Unfitness to Plead in England and Wales
Authors: Bevan Miranda , Ormerod David
Published: September 2018

This chapter reviews the legal framework in England and Wales for dealing with defendants in criminal trials who are ‘unfit to plead’, and considers efforts to reform the legal test and procedures. The chapter offers a critique of the present law governing fitness to plead and its failure to reflect modern-day trial processes and psychiatric understanding. It examines law reform proposals made over recent decades and how these have failed to produce significant development in the common law. It focuses in particular on the Law Commission’s recent report and draft Bill in 2016. That report seeks to provide a fair and effective process for those who are unable to participate effectively in their criminal trial and to ensure that defendants’ rights are respected.
The Right to Fair Preliminary Investigation and Trial for Vulnerable Defendants
Authors: van Kempen PHPHMC
Published: September 2018

Mainly as a result of the nature of criminal procedure in the Netherlands, which until recently could be characterized as a modern moderate inquisitorial system, the fitness-to- plead principle has been rather underdeveloped here. This chapter analyses how the European Convention on Human Rights, EU Directives, and the increase of adversarial elements in an originally inquisitorial criminal justice system are now catalysing the fitness-to-plead principle. Fourteen recommendations will be provided for what is considered a necessary reinforcement of the legal position of defendants who possess insufficient abilities to adequately participate during criminal proceedings—both preliminary investigation and trial—or who are even unfit to stand trial. The recommendations are based on a detailed analyses of criminal procedure law of the Netherlands, case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and several EU Directives that are relevant for the fitness to plead principle..
Perspectives and Slurs
Authors: Bianchi Claudia
Published: September 2018

In discussing figurative speech, Lepore and Stone argue that metaphorical interpretation involves a process of perspective taking: metaphor invites us to organize our thinking about something through an analogical correspondence with something it is not. According to them, the same applies to slurs: some words come with an invitation to take a certain perspective, and uses of slurs are associated with ways of thinking about their targets that can harm people. My aim is to critically evaluate such a proposal, within a speech-acts framework. In the recent literature on hate speech, utterances containing slurs are conceived as speech acts in two distinct senses: 1. as perlocutionary acts that cause harm to their targets; 2. as illocutionary acts that constitute harm towards their targets. I will claim that Lepore and Stone’s proposal can be understood both in perlocutionary and illocutionary terms, and argue in favor of an illocutionary approach.
Habitat selection and territoriality
Authors: Kemp Darrell J.
Published: September 2018

Insects dominate virtually all terrestrial and freshwater habitats on earth. This chapter reviews insect habitat selection, focusing on the occupation and defence of mating sites. First the adaptive basis of mating systems, sex roles, and behaviors in regard to habitat are established, then site occupation and defence in territorial species is explored. Resource-holding potential and resource value are discussed for how they determine aggressive motivation, as well as how contestants seek to gauge such parameters, with particular attention to the role of convention, drawing upon exemplar studies in damselflies and butterflies that have provided a narrative between theory and empiricism. Conventional and/or plastic behaviors are also discussed in terms of the presence and certainty of contestant roles, encompassing phenomena, such as residency confusion, nasty neighbours and interloper effects. The chapter concludes by discussing future avenues, foremost among which is the opportunity to synthesize empirical data across taxa.
Behavioral, plastic, and evolutionary responses to a changing world
Authors: Blanckenhorn Wolf U.
Published: September 2018

Organisms can respond to environmental change by modifying their behavior to obtain an instant response, through short-term phenotypically plastic, often physiological, adjustments, and/or by adapting their life history through a more long-term evolutionary response. Behavioural and physiological responses, in fact, can occur at all these three temporal scales. Examples of behaviors so affected include congregation, dispersal, foraging, migration, or mating. Such responses have consequences at the population and community levels, and ultimately for the evolution of species. This chapter discusses insect examples of these kinds, with an emphasis on human-induced factors, such as (primarily) climate change, pollution, fragmentation, and urbanization.
Spectral Theory and Differential Operators
Authors: Edmunds David , Evans Des
Published: September 2018

This book gives an account of those parts of the analysis of closed linear operators acting in Banach or Hilbert spaces that are relevant to spectral problems involving differential operators, and makes applications to such questions. After the exposition of the abstract theory in the first four chapters, Sobolev spaces are introduced and their main properties established. The remaining seven chapters are largely concerned with second-order elliptic differential operators and related boundary-value problems. Particular attention is paid to the spectrum of the Schrödinger operator. Its original form contains material of lasting importance that is relatively unaffected by advances in the theory since 1987, when the book was first published. The present edition differs from the old by virtue of the correction of minor errors and improvements of various proofs. In addition, it contains Notes at the ends of most chapters, intended to give the reader some idea of recent developments together with additional references that enable more detailed accounts to be accessed.
The Future of the World
Authors: Andersson Jenny
Published: September 2018

The book is devoted to the intriguing post-war activity called—with different terms—futurism, futurology, future research, or futures studies. It seeks to understand how futurists and futurologists imagined the Cold War and post-Cold War world and how they used the tools and methods of future research to influence and change that world. Forms of future research emerged after 1945 and engaged with the future both as an object of science and as an object of the human imagination. The book carefully explains these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post-war period. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which came from new strands of critical theory in the margins of the social sciences or sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. Different forms of prediction lay very different claims to how, and with what accuracy, futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over coming and not yet existing developments. Not surprisingly, such different claims to predictability coincided with radically different notions of human agency, of morality and responsibility, indeed of politics.
Form, Matter, Substance
Authors: Koslicki Kathrin
Published: September 2018

This work defends a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms). The Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism holds that those entities that fall under it are compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē or eidos). The author argues that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects is well equipped to compete with alternative approaches when measured against a wide range of criteria of success. A successful application of the doctrine of hylomorphism to the special case of concrete particular objects, however, hinges on how hylomorphists conceive of the matter composing a concrete particular object, its form, and the hylomorphic relations which hold between a matter–form compound, its matter and its form. Through the detailed answers to these questions the author develops in this book, matter–form compounds, despite their metaphysical complexity, emerge as occupying the privileged ontological status traditionally associated with substances, due in particular to their high degree of unity.
Dopamine and reward-related learning
Authors: Beninger Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Dopamine and reward-related learning describes how the intellectual influence of behaviorism declined in the middle of the twentieth century as descriptions of behavioral phenomena that violated the putative laws of learning accumulated. Incentive theory along with an ethological perspective that emphasized animals’ specific behavioral adaptations for survival in their natural environment provided an alternative. Thus, rewarding stimuli produce incentive learning, the acquisition of neutral stimuli of an increased ability to elicit approach and other responses. The reward-related learning effects of food were shown to depend on dopamine and dopamine was implicated in avoidance learning. Results suggest that in untrained animals, tested while in a dopamine-depleted state, conditioned incentive stimuli fail to acquire the ability to elicit approach and other responses; in trained animals tested while in a dopamine-depleted state, conditioned incentive stimuli gradually lose their ability to elicit approach and other responses.
Being for Beauty
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: September 2018

One question that leads us into aesthetics is: why does beauty matter? Or, what do aesthetic goods bring to my life, to make it a life that goes well? Or, how does beauty deserve the place we have evidently made for it in our lives? A theory of aesthetic value states what beauty is so as to equip us to answer this question. According to aesthetic hedonism, aesthetic values are properties of items that stand in constitutive relation to pleasure. Contemporary versions of aesthetic hedonism don’t explain what makes aesthetic values aesthetic, but they do explain what makes them normative, stating what makes it the case that aesthetic value facts lend weight to what an agent should do, for the fact that acting yields pleasure is always a reason to act. This book introduces and defends an alternative to aesthetic hedonism. According to the network theory, aesthetic value facts lend weight to its being an achievement for an agent to act. Since agents achieve by acting in coordination with one another, the theory takes seriously the sociality of aesthetic activity. The main argument for the network theory is that it better explains six facts about aesthetic activity than does aesthetic hedonism. The book also discusses the relationship between aesthetic value and pleasure, the point and distinctive character of aesthetic discourse, and the metaphysics of aesthetic value. Two final chapters use the network theory to shed light on how aesthetic value matters to us as individuals and as members of collectives.
The Child in Shakespeare
Authors: Scott Charlotte
Published: September 2018

This book examines the child on Shakespeare’s stage. As a life force, an impassioned plea for justice, a legacy, history, memory, or image of love or violence, children are everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. Focusing on Shakespeare’s unique interest in the young body, the life stage, the parental and social dynamic, this book offers the first sustained account of the role and representation of the child in Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. Drawing on a vast range of contemporary texts, including parenting manuals, household and pedagogic texts, as well as books on nursing and maternity, childbirth and child rearing, Shakespeare’s Children explores the contexts in which the idea of the child is mobilized as a body and image on the early modern stage. Understanding the child, not only as a specific life stage, but also as a role and an abstraction of feeling, this book examines why Shakespeare, who showed little interest in writing for children in the playing companies, wrote so powerfully about them on his stage.
Evolution and Selection of Quantitative Traits
Authors: Walsh Bruce , Lynch Michael
Published: September 2018

Quantitative traits—be they morphological or physiological characters, aspects of behavior, or genome-level features such as the amount of RNA or protein expression for a specific gene—usually show considerable variation within and among populations. Quantitative genetics, also referred to as the genetics of complex traits, is the study of such characters and is based on mathematical models of evolution in which many genes influence the trait and in which non-genetic factors may also be important. Evolution and Selection of Quantitative Traits presents a holistic treatment of the subject, showing the interplay between theory and data with extensive discussions on statistical issues relating to the estimation of the biologically relevant parameters for these models. Quantitative genetics is viewed as the bridge between complex mathematical models of trait evolution and real-world data, and the authors have clearly framed their treatment as such. This is the second volume in a planned trilogy that summarizes the modern field of quantitative genetics, informed by empirical observations from wide-ranging fields (agriculture, evolution, ecology, and human biology) as well as population genetics, statistical theory, mathematical modeling, genetics, and genomics. Whilst volume 1 (1998) dealt with the genetics of such traits, the main focus of volume 2 is on their evolution, with a special emphasis on detecting selection (ranging from the use of genomic and historical data through to ecological field data) and examining its consequences. This extensive work of reference is suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers (both empiricists and theoreticians) in the fields of evolutionary biology, genetics, and genomics. It will also be of particular relevance and use to plant and animal breeders, human geneticists, and statisticians.
Broadway to Main Street
Authors: Maslon Laurence
Published: September 2018

The crossroads where the music of Broadway met popular culture was an expansive and pervasive juncture throughout most of the twentieth century and continues to influence the cultural discourse of today. Broadway to Main Street: How Show Music Enchanted America details how Americans heard the music from Broadway on every Main Street across the country over the last 125 years, from sheet music, radio, and recordings to television and the Internet. The original Broadway cast album—from the 78 rpm recording of Oklahoma! to the digital download of Hamilton—is one of the most successful, yet undervalued, genres in the history of popular recording. The phenomenon of how show tunes penetrated the American consciousness came not only from the original cast albums but from interpreters such as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, impresarios such as Rudy Vallee and Ed Sullivan, and record producers such as Johnny Mercer and Goddard Lieberson. The history of Broadway music is also the history of American popular music; the technological, commercial, and marketing forces of communications and media over the last century were inextricably bound up in the enterprise of bringing the musical gems of New York’s Theater District to millions of listeners from Trenton to Tacoma, and from Tallahassee to Toronto.
Consonance and Dissonance
Authors: Rehding Alexander
Published: September 2018

Despite their fundamental importance to music theory, consonance and dissonance are surprisingly slippery concepts. They cannot unequivocally be identified as acoustical, aesthetic, physiological, psychological, or cultural-historical. This chapter examines a wide range of approaches to consonance/dissonance, focusing on four debates: the age-old sensus/ratio discussion, contrapuntal treatises, non-Western evidence from cognitive science, and evolutionary arguments. The discussion includes musical examples by Joseph Haydn, Alban Berg, Tsimane′ singing, and various European compositions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It is impossible to fully close the gap between different approaches, in part because different definitions take their starting points in different objects: cognitive approaches work with sounds while music-theoretical traditions work with notes and intervals. But the diversity of approaches opens up new angles on certain conflations that music theory often tolerates—such as the equivocation between successive and simultaneous intervals—to illustrate how the consonance/dissonance pair functions in different contexts.
Beyond Moral Fundamentalism
Authors: Fesmire Steven
Published: September 2018

Drawing on unpublished and published sources from 1926 to 1932, this chapter builds on John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatic pluralism in ethical theory. A primary focus is “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” which analyzes good, duty, and virtue as distinct categories that in many cases express different experiential origins. The chapter suggests that a vital role for contemporary theorizing is to lay bare and analyze the sorts of conflicts that constantly underlie moral and political action. Instead of reinforcing moral fundamentalism via an outdated quest for the central and basic source of normative justification, we should foster theories with a range of idioms and emphases which, while accommodating monistic insights, better inform decision-making by opening communication across diverse elements of moral and political life, placing these elements in a wider context in which norms gain practical traction in nonideal conditions, and expanding prospects for social inquiry and convergence on policy and action.
Identification of Modulators That Activate the Constitutive Androstane Receptor From the Tox21 10K Compound Library
Authors: Lynch Caitlin , Mackowiak Bryan , Huang Ruili , Li Linhao , Heyward Scott , Sakamuru Srilatha , Wang Hongbing , Xia Menghang
Published: September 2018

The constitutive androstane receptor (CAR; NR1I3) is a nuclear receptor involved in all phases of drug metabolism and disposition. However, recently it’s been implicated in energy metabolism, tumor progression, and cancer therapy as well. It is, therefore, important to identify compounds that induce human CAR (hCAR) activation to predict drug-drug interactions and potential therapeutic usage. In this study, we screen the Tox21 10,000 compound collection to characterize hCAR activators. A potential novel structural cluster of compounds was identified, which included nitazoxanide and tenonitrozole, whereas known structural clusters, such as flavones and prazoles, were also detected. Four compounds, neticonazole, diphenamid, phenothrin, and rimcazole, have been identified as novel hCAR activators, one of which, rimcazole, shows potential selectivity toward hCAR over its sister receptor, the pregnane X receptor (PXR). All 4 compounds translocated hCAR from the cytoplasm into the nucleus demonstrating the first step to CAR activation. Profiling these compounds as hCAR activators would enable an estimation of drug-drug interactions, as well as identify prospective therapeutically beneficial drugs.
Perspectives from animal demography on incorporating evolutionary mechanism into plant population dynamics
Authors: Paniw Maria
Published: September 2018

With a growing number of long-term, individual-based data on natural populations available, it has become increasingly evident that environmental change affects populations through complex, simultaneously occurring demographic and evolutionary processes. Analyses of population-level responses to environmental change must therefore integrate demography and evolution into one coherent framework. Integral projection models (IPMs), which can relate genetic and phenotypic traits to demographic and population-level processes, offer a powerful approach for such integration. However, a rather artificial divide exists in how plant and animal population ecologists use IPMs. Here, I argue for the integration of the two sub-disciplines, particularly focusing on how plant ecologists can diversify their toolset to investigate selection pressures and eco-evolutionary dynamics in plant population models. I provide an overview of approaches that have applied IPMs for eco-evolutionary studies and discuss a potential future research agenda for plant population ecologists. Given an impending extinction crisis, a holistic look at the interacting processes mediating population persistence under environmental change is urgently needed.
Coverage-versus-Length plots, a simple quality control step for de novo yeast genome sequence assemblies
Authors: Douglass Alexander P. , O’Brien Caoimhe E. , Offei Benjamin , Coughlan Aisling Y. , Ortiz-Merino Raúl A. , Butler Geraldine , Byrne Kevin P. , Wolfe Kenneth H.
Published: September 2018

Illumina sequencing has revolutionized yeast genomics, with prices for commercial draft genome sequencing now below $200. The popular SPAdes assembler makes it simple to generate a de novo genome assembly for any yeast species. However, whereas making genome assemblies has become routine, understanding what they contain is still challenging. Here, we show how graphing the information that SPAdes provides about the length and coverage of each scaffold can be used to investigate the nature of an assembly, and to diagnose possible problems. Scaffolds derived from mitochondrial DNA, ribosomal DNA, and yeast plasmids can be identified by their high coverage. Contaminating data, such as cross-contamination from other samples in a multiplex sequencing run, can be identified by its low coverage. Scaffolds derived from the bacteriophage PhiX174 and Lambda DNAs that are frequently used as molecular standards in Illumina protocols can also be detected. Assemblies of yeast genomes with high heterozygosity, such as interspecies hybrids, often contain two types of scaffold: regions of the genome where the two alleles assembled into two separate scaffolds and each has a coverage level C, and regions where the two alleles co-assembled (collapsed) into a single scaffold that has a coverage level 2C. Visualizing the data with Coverage-versus-Length (CVL) plots, which can be done using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, provides a simple method to understand the structure of a genome assembly and detect aberrant scaffolds or contigs. We provide a Python script that allows assemblies to be filtered to remove contaminants identified in CVL plots.

100-word article summary

We describe a simple new method, Coverage-versus-Length plots, for examining de novo genome sequence assemblies. These plots enable researchers to detect scaffolds that have unusually high or unusually low coverage, which allows contaminants, and scaffolds that come from atypical parts of the organism’s DNA complement, to be detected. We show that contaminants are common in yeast genomes sequenced in multiplex Illumina runs. We provide instructions for making plots using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, and software for filtering assemblies to remove contaminants. Contaminants can be detected and removed, even without knowing their source.
Complex human gut microbiome cultured in anaerobic human intestine chips
Authors: Jalili-Firoozinezhad Sasan , Gazzaniga Francesca S. , Calamari Elizabeth L. , Camacho Diogo M. , Fadel Cicely W. , Nestor Bret , Cronce Michael J. , Tovaglieri Alessio , Levy Oren , Gregory Katherine E. , Breault David T. , Cabral Joaquim M. S. , Kasper Dennis L. , Novak Richard , Ingber Donald E.
Published: September 2018

The diverse bacterial populations that comprise the commensal microbiota of the human intestine play a central role in health and disease, yet no method is available to sustain these complex microbial communities in direct contact with living human intestinal cells and their overlying mucus layerin vitro. Here we describe a human Organ-on-a-Chip (Organ Chip) microfluidic platform that permits control and real-time assessment of physiologically-relevant oxygen gradients, and which enables co-culture of living human intestinal epithelium with stable communities of aerobic and anaerobic human gut microbiota. When compared to aerobic co-culture conditions, establishment of a transluminal hypoxia gradient sustained higher microbial diversity with over 200 unique operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from 11 different genera, and an abundance of obligate anaerobic bacteria with ratios ofFirmicutesandBacteroidetessimilar to those observed in human feces, in addition to increasing intestinal barrier function. The ability to culture human intestinal epithelium overlaid by complex human gut microbial communities within microfluidic Intestine Chips may enable investigations of host-microbiome interactions that were not possible previously, and serve as a discovery tool for development of new microbiome-related therapeutics, probiotics, and nutraceuticals.