bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Probiotic supplements are effective in people with cognitive impairment: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
Authors: Liu Nanyang , Yang Di , Sun Jiahui , Li Yapeng
Published: January 2023

Context

Cognitive function is a significant concern among the elderly and has a major negative effect on their quality of life. Probiotics have a positive effect on improving cognition, but the exact nature of the association between probiotic supplements and cognitive function is poorly understood.

Objective

The purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate how probiotic supplements improve cognitive function.

Data sources

A systematic search was conducted of the PubMed, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, Embase, and ClinicalTrials.gov databases for all relevant studies published in English, with no date restrictions.

Data extraction

The estimated, pooled results were analyzed with a standardized mean difference (SMD) and a corresponding 95% confidence interval (95%CI). Publication bias was analyzed by the Egger’s and Begg’s tests. Funnel plots were also constructed to assess the probability of publication bias. The robustness of the results was tested using the method of sequential removal and cumulation of each trial.

Data analysis

Overall, the pooled SMD showed significant differences between the probiotic and placebo groups (SMD = 0.64; 95%CI, 0.15–1.12), with significant heterogeneity (I2 = 92%). Subgroup analyses showed a significant effect of probiotics on cognition in the studies involving populations with Alzheimer's disease and cognitive impairment (SMD = 1.34; 95%CI, 0.51–2.16; P < 0.01). In addition, subgroup analysis showed that single probiotic strains, receiving probiotic supplements over 12 weeks, and doses >1 × 109 CFU/g were more beneficial for improving cognitive impairment.

Conclusions

According to this meta-analysis, probiotic supplementation had a highly significant effect on cognitive function in people with cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. For people without cognitive impairment, probiotic supplementation may be ineffective.
Roman Gardens and Landscape Architecture
Authors: Macaulay Elizabeth R.
Published: January 2023

Gardens are highly constructed spaces, where art, science, and nature intersect. The ancient Mediterranean, Egypt, and Near East had several well-developed garden traditions. Of these, the Romans developed one of the most complex gardening and horticultural traditions. Through archaeological, art-historical, and textual evidence, we can understand how Roman gardens evolved; their diverse socioeconomic, political, and cultural meanings in the Roman world; and how these gardens were constructed. Although landscape architecture would not be formally recognized as a discipline for centuries, the Romans had a well-developed tradition of landscape architecture, as well as individuals—the toparius—whom scholars can identify as proto-landscape architects. Ancient Greece had gardens, although on a more limited scope and scale than the Romans, within houses and sacred groves. Alexander the Great’s conquests in the East transformed the garden traditions of the Mediterranean. His visits to major gardens and palaces of the Persian Empire brought him into direct contact with the complex gardening traditions, horticultural practices, and plants of western Asia, which were then transmitted to the Mediterranean. His successors and subsequent Hellenistic rulers constructed elaborate palatial gardens. Philosophical gardens, which had developed in the late classical period, remained popular during the Hellenistic era, although there is no archaeological evidence for such gardens. Rome, the ascendant power at the end of the first millennium bce, had an indigenous domestic garden tradition, where ownership of a garden was viewed as essential to the identity of the Roman citizen. The Romans developed the most extensive garden tradition of antiquity. Roman gardens ranged from domestic, villa, and palatial gardens to public parks and gardens associated with temples or sanctuaries. Garden and landscape paintings were an integral part of Roman houses and villas. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the study of Roman gardens was primarily a textual endeavor; however, W. F. Jashemski pioneered the use of garden archaeology at Pompeii and its environs. Archaeology is vital to the study of Roman gardens and landscape architecture because it provides direct information about landscape architecture, garden design, plantings, and use. While ancient sources are still critical to interpreting the physical remains of Roman gardens, archaeological discoveries enable scholars to consider sophisticated questions about design, plants, and horticultural techniques, as well as the meanings, purpose, and function of Roman gardens. Most studies examine Roman landscape design and theory in the context of specific gardens, because there are no surviving treatises about Roman landscape design or theory. As such, these issues will be considered alongside the discussions of different types of gardens.
Conversion
Authors: Shinn Abigail
Published: January 2023

Conversion was a phenomenon that defined the post-Reformation world in multiple ways. The fracturing of the Catholic Church meant that Christians were faced with choosing which way to turn, whether toward Rome or the new reformed faith of Luther. Increased travel and trade in the period also resulted in exposure to new faiths, and anxieties about seamen who “turned Turk” came to define English attitudes to the perceived threat of the Ottoman Empire and Islam. Such anxieties resulted in conversion being explored expansively on the early modern stage and in poetry. It also produced its own genre in the form of the conversion narrative, a strand of spiritual autobiography that became increasingly prolific and a widespread print phenomenon by the mid-seventeenth century. The Counter-Reformation and the evangelizing missions of the Jesuits also placed the conversion of the indigenous peoples of the New World as well as the inhabitants of countries in the Far East and Africa at the forefront of a now-global mission to convert.
Dutch Overseas Empire
Authors: Brandon Pepijn
Published: January 2023

Many have wondered how the relatively small Dutch Republic could emerge from a decades-long war of independence to achieve an outsized influence on global economic and political affairs. Explanations have focused on the commercial dynamism found in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, and the way in which the fall of Antwerp and rise of Amsterdam further strengthened capitalist tendencies. These propelled Dutch merchants, backed by the newly established state, to export the war against their Iberian adversaries to the Americas and Asia and to begin a series of conquests. Recently, historians have started to turn away from a purely commercially oriented narrative of expansion, to stress the crucial role of state planning and violence, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and slavery in Dutch expansion. These aspects were not absent from earlier literature, but historians often relegated them to second place, behind more positively perceived aspects like commercial acumen, maritime ingenuity, or tolerant attitudes toward religious diversity. Around 1650, Dutch overseas territories stretched from the nutmeg-producing Banda Islands in the Moluccas to provisioning stations and slave-trading fortresses on the African coast, and from the plantation colony Brazil to New Netherland in North America. Inter-imperial rivalry meant that the Dutch lost several Atlantic colonies while gaining new plantation colonies along the Guyana coast. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) in Asia continued to expand its territorial possessions in Asia. Some would question the use of the term “empire” for these spread-out territories, or whether it is correct to use this phrase in the singular when discussing the diverging processes of expansion in two hemispheres. Still, few historians now would deny the imperial dimension of Dutch early modernity, or its lasting global impact. The literature on the Dutch early modern empire is vast, and every selection biased. This bibliography focuses on power relations and the state. It includes several works that focus on colonial culture and the cultural resilience of the colonized, but not nearly enough. It foregrounds specialist work focused on Dutch colonization, which means that comparison and connections with other European and non-European empires are weakly represented. Finally, it reflects the tendency to treat the early modern empire as completely separate from the state-run colonial empire that emerged in the nineteenth century, though much of the more interesting work breaks through this divide. Some of the less conventional choices in this bibliography are aimed at working against these biases.
Shirdi Sai Baba
Authors: McLain Karline
Published: January 2023

Sai Baba was an itinerant renouncer who settled down in the village of Shirdi in western India in the mid-nineteenth century. Sai Baba means “saintly faither,” and little is known with historical certainty of his early years, including where and when he was born, what his birth name was, and what religion he was born into. Various hagiographies composed by his devotees provide different answers to some of these key questions. What is known with some historical certainty is that the man who came to be known as Shirdi Sai Baba arrived in Shirdi in the late 1850s, when he was a young man of approximately twenty years, and he died there in 1918. During the decades that he lived in Shirdi, Sai Baba gathered both Hindu and Muslim followers from the surrounding region. Some of his followers were drawn to his reputation for possessing miraculous powers, and others for his ability to help them progress down their individual spiritual paths. In the century since Sai Baba’s death, his following has only continued to grow. Shirdi Sai Baba has now acquired a pan-Indian and increasingly global devotional following, and the village of Shirdi has transformed into one of India’s most popular pilgrimage destinations.
Indigenous Knowledge
Authors: Lachenicht Susanne
Published: January 2023

What is Indigenous knowledge? While the term is rather problematic—as much knowledge, including European or Western knowledge, could be dubbed Indigenous—this article uses the concept for non-European that is Native American or African (and African diasporic) knowledge in the Atlantic world. Notwithstanding, this labeling is also problematic, as knowledge is often more transcultural or hybrid than we would think. In the last two decades Indigenous knowledge in the Atlantic World has received much scholarly attention from scholars of anthropology, archaeology, history of science, history of knowledge, and environmental history, as well as from many other subdisciplines of cultural and social history. Natural sciences are today also interested in Indigenous knowledge; as much as their early modern predecessors, they use Indigenous knowledge about such topics as climate, environments, ecology, botany, zoology, and minerals as resources in areas such as medicine and pharmaceutics, foodstuffs, and new forms of agriculture and ecology. Early modern knowledge about the Atlantic world—as it came to be institutionalized from the 15th century in the European republic of letters, its academies, royal societies, correspondence networks, universities, collections of objects, maps, natural histories, encyclopedias, travel narratives, and dictionaries—was the result of colonial European powers striving to make sense, conquer, and exploit the Americas. In this, they not only relied on European sources but also depended on American Indigenous populations, African or Arabic enslaved people, Atlantic creoles, pirates, Maroons, and other groups hitherto underrepresented in the master narratives of European expansion, the rise of the sciences, and the production of universal knowledge. These groups left traces in maps, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and travel narratives and produced their own forms and practices of knowledge formation and exchange. The “extraction” of this knowledge came by way of contact, in borderlands and middle grounds, by conquest, colonization, enslavement, and other violent and nonviolent forms of encounter. The intellectual construction of the New World and the rise of modern sciences, as a major foundation of European empire building, had a transcultural and global dimension. All of this often hides the multiple Indigenous American traditions in the production, formation, performance, and codification of knowledge and the categories through which they structure life, societies, political systems, and environments at large. Against this background, this article looks into the conditions and modes of knowledge exchange that have dominated the Atlantic world, focusing on epistemes and problems of translation, on issues of knowledge and empire. Through European categories, it will then assess Indigenous knowledge, with regard to Ecology and Environments, Climate and climate change, land and landscapes, gardening and agriculture, Botany and Zoology, and Medicine and Pharmaceutics, as well as the collecting and exhibiting of such knowledge.
The Ideal Diplomat
Authors: Lequesne Christian , Derieux-Billaud Simon
Published: January 2023

For a long time, the literature on the diplomat has remained very normative. From Callières to Satow and Nicolson, it was often the product of former diplomats who shared their experience as an art, offering a guide to good practice for future diplomats. For their part, theories of international relations have neglected diplomacy as an activity of its own, considering it to be equivalent to interstate relations. Until the writings of the English School of International Relations, diplomacy was not seen as a set of practices carried out by professional actors, namely diplomats. By focusing on the diplomat with a micro-sociological or anthropological approach, researchers from the English School opened the way to new research starting in the 1990s. The Norwegian scholar Iver B. Neumann played a fundamental role in the renewal of work on the diplomat. His ethnographic study of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, focusing on the study of actors’ practices (including discursive practices), opened up a new field of research on the diplomat. Approaching the ideal diplomat with the tools of social sciences has now become possible. We have now a literature to understand how a professional of mediation and rapprochement, as a sort of stranger to his own country and to the country of accreditation, develops particular practices that shape the foreign policy of a state. The diplomat is obviously in competition with others who claim, inside and outside the state, to practice diplomacy as well. Diplomats form a transnational epistemic community sharing common codes and know-how. As this article shows, the literature provides a body of references on the recruitment, career, professional practices, and crisis management methods of the diplomat. Nevertheless, the literature on the diplomat still suffers from some limitations that social science research will have to fill. First, the literature (as for diplomatic studies in general) is often Western-centric. Secondly, it says relatively little about the distinction between the diplomat and the politician. Finally, it neglects the interactions between the diplomat and other actors, such as intelligence services but also nongovernmental organizations. There is still work to be done to understand who the ideal diplomat is, especially from a comparative view point. Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) are also struggling on the question: What defines a diplomat? Access to the field is, of course, not easy for the researcher because it depends on the collaboration that diplomats intend to undertake. As the practice of diplomacy becomes a public rather than a secret exercise, it is more useful than ever that diplomats accept to be objectified by social science research.
Organized Criminal Syndicates and Governance in Mexico and Central America
Authors: García-Ponce Omar
Published: January 2023

Organized criminal groups (OCGs), ranging from local gangs to powerful drug cartels that operate across national boundaries, represent the single most important security threat in Mexico and Central America. A growing body of research in political science and other disciplines has examined the political and socioeconomic roots of these organizations, as well as the mechanisms underlying the production of organized criminal violence. The unprecedented wave of organized criminal violence that has been affecting the region in recent years can be traced back to political transformations and policy changes that disrupted the social and political order at the local level, redefining the organization of illicit markets, and undermining the rule of law. On these issues there is a particularly rich literature that focuses on understanding the outbreak of violence and criminal rivalry in Mexico. Several studies have emphasized the role of state-criminal group relationships as a key factor to understand the challenges that organized crime poses in terms of peacebuilding and democratic rule. Within this framework, the existing literature has identified various forms of criminal governance prevalent in Mexico and Central America, and shed light on how communities respond to crime and violence in contexts of low state capacity. Some of these responses include social mobilization, vigilantism, and support for extralegal violence. The use of violence by OCGs in electoral contexts has also received particular attention in the literature, since they often target candidates or intimidate voters, affecting political preferences and patterns of political participation. Finally, a series of studies has rigorously investigated the impact of organized criminal violence on a number of outcomes, including political attitudes and behavior, trust in institutions, and health and education, among others.
Gender and Alternative Education
Authors: Russell Lisa
Published: January 2023

Permanent school exclusion rates are increasing for all genders, with much of the dominant discourse being framed around a widening concern about white working-class boys increasingly likely to disengage from formal education systems. Boys are more likely to receive formal fixed or permanent exclusions, but girls too are arguably at a disproportionate risk of being excluded via other means, such as school moves. Alternative education is for pupils under the school leaving age who because of exclusion, illness, or other reasons would not otherwise receive mainstream education. As such more males, then females tend to occupy alternative education provision. There is a great deal of literature about alternative education provision, much of which is international in its scope. This literature represents consistent findings across different countries and time when evaluating particular programs and exploring young people’s perceptions of such provisions, but the literature is much narrower in scope when analyzing the specificities of gender and alternative education. This bibliography is structured to present seminal studies, reports, and other key sources that serve to highlight the definitional issues with alternative education, while also identifying who alternative education tends to serve (with a focus on gender) and how such provision has been evaluated. Gender does to some extent shape the alternative education landscape, being dominated by boys. As such this bibliography serves to fill the dearth of knowledge with regards to the increasing need to highlight the differences in defining alternative education, in terms of who it is for and for what purpose, as well as to investigate how such varying provision is monitored in relation to gender.
Personalized Communication
Authors: Maslowska Ewa
Published: January 2023

Personalization is not a new idea in communication—media, marketers, political strategists, health communication specialists have been always looking for ways to increase their messages’ relevance; however, it was the arrival of highly connected digital technologies that enabled personalization on a big-scale. The prevalence of vast amounts of digital-trace data and the development of methods facilitating the analysis of large data sets, often in (near) real time, as well as the optimization of content based on analytical insights made various forms of personalization ubiquitous. When participating in digital activities (e.g., texting, location tagging, browsing websites, sharing content on social media, tracking activities on a smartwatch, interacting with a voice assistant, etc.), people produce digital footprints that can be used to tailor messages, services, and products to them. The digital footprints data are also used to infer higher-order constructs, allowing for personalized communication to build on information about people’s interests, needs, motives, political views, personalities, etc. This article defines personalization as a strategy of providing content selected, adjusted, or created for the specific recipient based on information about them with the aim of increasing the recipient’s perceived relevance of and openness to the content. While in the early days, personalization was based on surveys and the variation in the message content was rather limited, today personalization is increasingly fueled by digital-trace data and developed automatically via algorithms, allowing for dynamic content optimization.
Anthropology and Education
Authors: McCarty Teresa , Erickson Frederick
Published: January 2023

The field of anthropology and education, also referred to as educational anthropology, was formally organized in the mid-twentieth century, with primary research interests at the time in infant and childhood socialization as this took place in everyday life in families in non-Western, smaller-scale societies. This focus on early enculturation was informed by the cultural relativist perspective of Franz Boas in American anthropology and its assumption that everyone learns to be human, and by the psychodynamic perspective of Sigmund Freud and its assumption that early childhood learning is what is most consequential for later development. The key contribution of anthropology was the notion that education, broadly conceived, is culturally shaped, and that parallels and differences exist in educative processes across cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts. In subsequent years, research interests broadened to consider teaching and learning of cultural practices across the life span and in myriad societies, including socialization in and across global immigrant flows and in a wide array of interactional environments in and out of schools. Educational anthropology is characterized by its interdisciplinarity and the diversity of topics, sociocultural settings, and education processes it investigates. To capture this complexity and the trajectory of scholarship over more than one hundred years of its development, some sections of this article are divided into Early Works—publications prior to the mid-1990s—and Contemporary Works that have shaped the field from the late twentieth century to the present. As a consequence, the entire bibliography presents a history of the field as it has evolved across disciplines, topics, and research settings, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the countries of the European Union. In selecting entries, emphasis is given to books and monographs, but seminal book chapters and journal articles that are particularly useful for research and course readings are also included. While entries are divided into categories based on their salience to particular strands of scholarship, a great deal of overlap is found among the categories. Finally, entries are limited to those published in English, which, as noted in Anderson-Levitt 2012 (cited under General Overviews: Contemporary Works), disguises the “voluminous but less visible” educational-anthropological scholarship published in other languages. Readers are referred to the global guide in Anderson-Levitt’s 2012 for publications in languages representative of the diverse regions of the world in which educational anthropologists conduct research.
Code-switching and Children
Authors: Lanza Elizabeth , Wei Li
Published: January 2023

Code-switching is the use of elements from more than one language, dialect, or variety in a single utterance (intra-sentential code-switching) or across utterances in a conversation (inter-sentential code-switching). It is a characteristic behavior of bilinguals/multilinguals in multilingual contexts that has fascinated scholars across disciplines. There are three broad approaches to studying code-switching: (1) a sociolinguistic or ethnographic approach, which focuses on the social and cultural parameters that motivate or inhibit the use of more than one language in social interaction; (2) a psycholinguistic approach, which addresses the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition, production, and perception of using more than one language; and (3) a linguistic approach, which focuses on the contact between languages at different structural levels. Methodologies employed to study code-switching may vary considerably. Sociolinguistic or ethnographic approaches target the use of languages in their natural contexts while psycholinguistic approaches focus on more controlled situations for the collection of data for analysis, particularly in the laboratory. Research on code-switching in adults is quite extensive in relation to what is found for children. The role of code-switching in the child’s development of more than one language has received considerable attention since the 1990s. While language contact in young multilingual children’s development was originally construed by developmental psycholinguists as a sign of the child’s lack of language differentiation, a stage to be overcome, current work underscores the interplay between social, cognitive, and linguistic factors in language acquisition. In this vein, researchers investigate the multilingual child’s development of more than one language not only through what the child says, but also giving attention to the input the child receives and the experiences they have with each of their languages, and how this may impact the child’s development and use of the languages. Children are socialized into the language use norms of their communities, whether these communities are bilingual, multilingual, or even monolingual. The child learns to code-switch appropriately, or refrain from code-switching when deemed necessary, in the home, the school, and throughout society. Research has clearly shown that code-switching is indeed a resource for the multilingual child.
The Concept of Validity in Psychological Assessment
Authors: Teglasi Hedwig , Fleece Hailey Mae , Havewala Mazneen Cyrus , Bali Diksha
Published: January 2023

The concept of validity is central to psychological assessment, providing the theoretical and methodological principles for the development and use of measurement instruments. A consensus has emerged that validity does not reside in the measuring instrument per se, but rather in the inferences drawn from the scores. However, the concept of validity is complex and its intricacies continue to be debated. In this chapter, we aim to represent the diversity of perspectives on the concept of validity and to translate the implications of these perspectives for psychological assessment. There has been a movement away from the historical emphasis on types of validity (e.g., content, criterion, construct) and from the view of reliability as distinct from, but related to, validity. These terms have been reconceptualized as different forms of evidence gathered through the process of validation to support the claim to validity. This “unitary” approach to validity has gained traction, though some texts still refer to different types of validity. What counts as evidence in support of validity depends on the basic assumptions about what is being measured (substantive theory) and about how it should be measured (measurement theory). Substantive theory addresses the nature of the phenomena under consideration (i.e., realist and constructivist perspectives) and measurement theory addresses the principles and procedures to quantify psychological phenomena and to gather evidence of validity. Measurement theory enjoys considerable consensus, but questions regarding substantive theory remain unsettled. Quantitative and qualitative measurement share commonalities in the conception of validity but rely on different validation procedures. As emphasized in the Standards for testing endorsed by educational and psychological professional associations, decisions based on tests are consequential for people’s lives, warranting consideration of all available evidence, including issues of bias and fairness in the interpretation and the use of scores. Yet when considering the implications of test scores for decision-making, it is hard to escape basic questions about the nature of the phenomenon being measured by a particular method. Gaps between substantive theory and validation procedures, including use of metrics that don’t adequately represent the target phenomenon, reduce the usefulness of conclusions drawn. Different instruments purporting to measure the same phenomenon may capture different aspects of that phenomenon or may apply in different contexts (hence, low agreement is not fully explained by measurement error). Since clinical assessments often include batteries of tests that get at different psychological phenomena relevant to the issues at hand, a more complete conception of validity in psychological assessment would reach beyond the current emphasis on validation of single test scores.
Nature versus Nurture Debate in Psychology
Authors: Honeycutt Hunter
Published: January 2023

The nature-nurture dichotomy is a long-standing and pervasive framework for thinking about the causal influences believed to be operating during individual development. In this dichotomy, nature refers to factors (e.g., genes, genetic programs, and/or biological blueprints) or forces (e.g., heredity and/or maturation) inherent to the individual that predetermine the development of form and function. Nurture generally refers to all the remaining, typically “external,” causal factors (e.g., physical and social conditions) and processes (e.g., learning and experience) that influence development. The nature versus nurture debate in psychology deals with disagreements about the extent to which the development of traits in humans and animals reflects the relative influence of nature and nurture. It is commonly stated that psychologists have moved on from asking whether traits (or variation in traits) develop from nature or nurture, to recognize instead that both nature and nurture work together or “interact” to produce outcomes, although exactly how to view the interaction is a matter of much debate. While acknowledging the interaction of nature and nurture, one’s theoretical models and research focus might emphasize the prominence of one over the other. Thus, nativists focus more on the importance of innate factors or forces operating on development, whereas empiricists focus more on experiential or environmental factors. However, not everyone finds value in thinking about development in terms of nature and nurture. By the middle of the twentieth century, some psychologists, biologists, and philosophers began to view nature-nurture as a conceptually deficient and biologically implausible dichotomy that oversimplifies the dynamics of behavior and development. Such people espouse some variant of “developmental systems theory” and seek to eliminate or otherwise fuse the nature-nurture division.
Transient Dynamics
Authors: Heggerud Christopher , Abbott Karen , Hastings Alan
Published: January 2023

While much of theoretical ecology has focused on the study of long-term asymptotic dynamics of populations, a growing realization is that the study of dynamics on more ecologically relevant timescales is of equal or greater importance. Often, dynamics that occur on shorter, ecologically relevant, timescales are referred to as transient dynamics, and include examples such as disease outbreaks and regime shifts. While any perturbation or environmental change that moves a system away from equilibrium will trigger a transient, this article focuses specifically on those “long transients” whose impact persists over a meaningful timescale (very roughly, dozens of generations or longer). Transient dynamics often lead to significant qualitative changes in an ecological system’s state that can occur with little to no warning at all. In the context of management, transients can cloud the manager’s judgment of the stability of a system. It would be easy to assume the system is in a stable state when it may be near a regime shift (long transients), which may result in inaccurate predictions of long-term dynamics based solely on short-term data. Consequently, the study of transient dynamics involves several avenues, including mathematical theory, management implications, and empirical understanding. New literature in these areas has begun to emerge. The notion of transient dynamics was discussed as early as the mid-1900s, where the idea that steady states are the most ecologically relevant quantities was challenged and the exploration of more complex ecological dynamics was sought. In more recent literature, transient dynamics, the underlying theory, empirical evidence, management implications, and ecological implications have all been more explicitly discussed. One major challenge when dealing with transient dynamics is the infancy of the mathematical theory that underpins much of the necessary analysis. Additionally, the implications transient dynamics have on management and ecological applications are still being developed. However, the significance of transients is now appreciated and research in such areas is attracting much attention. Several important avenues for future research have been made apparent in ecology, and new insights continue to be developed.
Ousmane Sembène
Authors: Fofana Amadou
Published: January 2023

In 1960, when Senegal became independent from France, Ousmane Sembène was already an established author in French. He had published Le docker noir (1956), O pays mon beau peuple (1957), and his famous novel, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960). His other books are Voltaïque, Véhi-Ciosane ou Blanche-Genèse: Suivi du Mandat, Xala, L’harmattan, Niiwam suivi de Taaw, Guelwaar, Le dernier de l’empire. However, Sembène had repeatedly expressed frustration that the overwhelming majority of audiences for whom he wrote could not read his work because they were not literate in French. To reach out to them, he resorted to cinema and made Borom Sarret (The Cart Driver) in 1963, a film admittedly referred to as the first sub-Saharan African film. Three years later, he released the very first sub-Saharan African feature length, La noire de . . . (Black Girl), in 1966. In 1968, he made the very first sub-Saharan African film in color using an African language, Manda bi (The Money Order). The films that followed incorporated a combination of African languages and French. His other films include Niaye (1964), Emitaï (1971), Xala (1974), Ceddo (1976), Camp de Thiaroye (1988), Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kine (2000), and Moolaade (2005). Born in 1923 during the pinnacle of Senegal’s colonial occupation by the French, Sembène was the son of a fisherman in the southern region of Senegal. He grew up under colonial rule, went briefly to a French-language school, worked as a mechanic and bricklayer, served in the French military, and then moved to France in 1946, at the age of 23. He was a self-taught man who learned to read and write while working at the docks in Marseilles. Although he lived to be 84—he passed away in June 2007—the first decades and most formative years of his life were spent under colonial domination. He was both an eyewitness to colonial rule and a subject of its dominance. He also lived through the tumultuous period during which Africans struggled to liberate themselves from the grip of foreign occupation. In other words, Sembène’s life spanned three of the most significant eras of recent African history: colonialism, the years of struggle for liberation, and the first half-century of independence. He was a living chronicler of Senegal’s history.
Eastern Africa and the South Asian Diaspora
Authors: Mickleburgh Andrew
Published: January 2023

People interacted across the Indian Ocean for centuries before numbers arriving in East Africa from India increased with colonial rule. Although “South Asian”/”Asian” is now commonly used in scholarship and daily life in East Africa to refer to citizens and residents with ancestral roots in South Asia, “Indian” has been deployed for most of the time under discussion, including to migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The label “Indian” has been used to include and exclude, for instance to make and deny political claims. “Indian” has not been an immutable term, but it has been modified, subverted, and reworked in practice. Indians have and occasionally still continue to be treated as an addendum, a separate and distinct phenomenon, strangers and a perpetual foreign group, rather than integral to East Africa where their influence and contributions include, but are not limited to, the economy, politics, civil society, literature, arts, and the built environment. Understanding their lives is also significant for African and South Asian history, as well as to many wider areas of scholarship, including on multiracial societies, diaspora, identity, and gender. It also highlights the dangers of homogenization when naming communities; the importance of understanding inequalities within communities; the need to situate all interactions between people in their specific time and place; and the necessity of recognizing continuities as well as change. Typically one-dimensional representations of Indians in East Africa as male economic actors left Indian women and other political and social roles, identities, and subjectivities largely invisible. Scholarly attention has its origins largely since the 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s, political scientists focused their interest on the status of Indians after independence, economists on the roles that Indians had played and would play in their economies, and anthropologists on studies of social structures and the persistence of cultural traits. The focus has since broadened to include impacts of globalization, transnational networks and practices, and nationalism in East Africa. Diverse opportunities for further research exist, such as examining how differences between and within Indian communities may relate to particular localities, the roles African labor and patronage have played in the success or failure of Indian enterprises, and issue surrounding recent Indian migrants.
Geography of Beer
Authors: Patterson Mark , Hoalst-Pullen Nancy
Published: January 2023

The geographic distribution of archeological evidence shows beer has been a part of many societies for millennia. Beer (fermented, non-distilled beverage from grains) was produced on every continent, save Australia and Antarctica. Today, of course, beer can be found on every continent. But the recent craft beer explosion only started in the 1980s. As brewers experimented and new beer styles increased in number, scholars started branching out in their investigations of beer. The spatial differences and distribution of beer lent themselves to exploration by geographers in many subfields of the discipline. The articles that follow have been grouped into five major areas in which geographic research tends to fall—namely, Regions and Societies, Neolocalism, Environment and Sustainability, Economics, and History.
Buddhist Poetry of China
Authors: Mazanec Thomas , Protass Jason
Published: January 2023

Buddhism entered China sometime in the first century ce, first in relatively small communities of foreign merchants, only to take hold among the elites in the following centuries. It should be no surprise, then, that it soon interacted with the indigenous poetry of China, the most highly regarded literary art of the elites. Comprised of multiple broad terms, “Buddhist poetry of China” eludes easy definition, which has led to some scholarly confusion. In this bibliography, we define “poetry” as any rhymed verse form (including but not limited to shi詩); “Buddhism” as the institutions, practices, people, and texts that located spiritual authority in a Buddha, especially the historical Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama; and “of China” as works written in the Sinitic languages as they were used in the polities that claimed continuity with the Qin and Han dynasties (thus excluding much noteworthy Buddhist Sinitic verse composed in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere). Chinese poetry intersected with Buddhism in a variety of ways, which varied considerably by time, place, and social setting. Some poems drew upon Buddhist scriptures for stories and images, some were composed at Buddhist settings, some passed on Buddhist teachings, some were informed by Buddhist doctrines, some were written by or addressed to Buddhist practitioners, some were recited during Buddhist rituals or sermons, and some were designed to perform Buddhist practices themselves. Buddhist institutions were ambivalent toward poetry. Canonical scriptures warned against excessive indulgence in literary and other arts, and later monastic rulebooks shared many of these concerns. At the same time, Buddhist institutions recognized that facility with literary language could be a powerful tool for expression and proselytization, and that certain kinds of aesthetic refinement was important for ritual efficacy. Individual Buddhists held all kinds of attitudes toward poetry—some monks denounced it as a dangerous, slippery slope toward laicization, while others obsessively wrote thousands of poems, sometimes justifying it in Buddhist terms and other times not. Most seem to have come to peace with poetry as an integral part of the Chinese cultural sphere that could not be completely proscribed. The Buddhist poetry of China remains a vibrant, living tradition to this day. This bibliography focuses on English-language studies (but includes some in other languages, especially Chinese) and is arranged by the categories typically addressed in existing scholarship: Buddhist poetry by literati, poetry by Buddhist monks, poetry by legendary Buddhists, practical and didactic Buddhist verse, and the influence of Buddhism on poetic theory.
Coalescent Theory
Authors: Griffiths Robert
Published: January 2023

The Kingman coalescent describes the ancestral tree of a sample of homologous genes from a population. Mutations occurring to ancestors in the tree determine the gene types in the sample. The coalescent originated as a mathematical concept and has become important in biology because it provides a way of looking back in time that allows ancestral inference, for example about parameters such as the mutation rate, the time to the most recent ancestor of a sample (TMRCA), ages of mutations, the way population size has changed back in time, and geographical information. The coalescent is a description of the ancestral tree of a sample of individuals from a neutral Wright-Fisher population with large haploid population gene size N, constant over time. Random mating in the population is assumed. With the large population size, the ancestral tree is approximately binary, that is, only two ancestral lineages can join, or coalesce, at a time instant. Time is measured in a long scale of N generations, and technically N tends to infinity. With a large sample size, coalescence is fast, so much so that the coalescent with the sample size tending to infinity represents ancestry back in time of the whole population as a well-defined coalescent tree starting with an infinite number of genes. The Kingman coalescent is said to come down from infinity because of this property. There is a connection between diffusion process models of allele frequencies and the coalescent. In the infinitely-many-alleles model, mutations are always to a new type not existing previously. The allele frequencies in a sample arise from mutations on coalescent lineages that are duplicated forward in time. The famous Ewens’ sampling formula is the probability distribution of the allele frequencies in a sample under the infinitely-many-alleles model. Extensions of the original coalescent model include variable population size, recombination, selection, and spatial models. The ancestral recombination graph (ARG) describes the ancestry of a sample of genes when recombination is present. The ancestral selection graph (ASG) describes the ancestral tree when there are different selective advantages between allele types. The Lambda coalescent is a related model of ancestry where multiple individuals can coalesce at the same time. Coalescent theory has contributed to biology and mathematics, a nice interplay of disciplines.
The Latitudinal Diversity Gradient
Authors: Rolland Jonathan , Freeman Benjamin G.
Published: January 2023

The latitudinal diversity gradient describes the fact that there are less species in the temperate regions than in the tropics. The latitudinal diversity gradient is observed in most groups of animals, plants, and microorganisms, and remains one of the oldest and most famous mysteries in ecology. The ubiquity of this pattern suggests the possibility of a single general explanation for the latitudinal diversity gradient, and scientists since von Humboldt and Darwin have formulated dozens of hypotheses to explain the causes of this gradient. This article reviews the literature describing the main evolutionary hypotheses related to the fundamental processes that can explain why some places (like the tropics) have more species than others: speciation, extinction, colonization (dispersal), and the time necessary for diversity to accumulate. The recent advances in global-scale datasets of species distributions, the fossil record, and molecular mega-phylogenies give some hope of determining the primary cause(s) of the latitudinal diversity gradient.
Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance
Authors: Robinson-Garcia Nicolas , Costas Rodrigo , Nane Gabriela F , van Leeuwen Thed N
Published: January 2023

Evaluation systems have been long criticized for abusing and misusing bibliometric indicators. This has created a culture by which academics are constantly exposing their daily work to the standards they are expected to perform. In this study, we investigate whether researchers’ own values and expectations are in line with the expectations of the evaluation system. We conduct a multiple case study of five departments in two Dutch universities to examine how they balance between their own valuation regimes and the evaluation schemes. For this, we combine curriculum analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews. We propose a model to study the diversity of academic activities and apply it to the multiple case study to understand how such diversity is shaped by discipline and career stage. We conclude that the observed misalignment is not only resulting from an abuse of metrics but also by a lack of tools to evaluate performance in a contextualized and adaptable way.