bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘A Better Remedy’
Authors: Giladi Rotem
Published: August 2021

Chapter 7 traces the sensibilities that brought Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne to clash over the Refugee Convention’s ratification. Here they diverged in how they read the Convention’s Jewish aspect and the Diaspora’s place in Jewish life at the age of Jewish sovereignty. The Refugee Convention confirmed and challenged cardinal Zionist principles. On the one hand, it affirmed Israel’s character as the Jewish people’s state of asylum and validated the Zionist principle of ‘Return’ and Israel’s ‘in-gathering of exiles’ policy. On the other hand, the Convention was rendered superfluous by Zionism’s ‘radical solution’ and ‘better remedy’ of ‘Return’ to the Jewish state. Moreover, the Convention subverted the Jewish state’s very raison d’être: a permanent political remedy to Jewish statelessness itself. Robinson’s reading of the Convention as according Israel ‘legal title’ to intervene on behalf of Jewish refugees, therefore, marked an ideological deviation accentuated by Rosenne’s reticence to see it ratified.
The United Kingdom
Authors: Gingrich Jane , Greer Scott L.
Published: August 2021

This chapter looks at health politics and the comprehensive, tax-funded (largely free at point of service) health system in the United Kingdom and its four constituent countries, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It traces the development of the UK’s healthcare system from an originally plural structure to a single National Health Service and then a devolved health policy structure. Though the NHS has continued to be highly popular and politically salient, the structure of care has substantially changed since 1948 as a result of reforms, with the growth of central government regulatory and managerial control, increasing competition in service delivery, more structured incentives for both GPs and hospitals, and a blurring of public and private boundaries in the provision of some outpatient care. As the chapter shows, the NHS’s devolution in 1999 has resulted in an increasingly diverging set of pathways across the four countries.
Denmark
Authors: Vrangbæk Karsten
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the tax-financed, universal health system in Denmark. It traces the development of the Danish healthcare system, characterized by an evolving division of labor between central authorities and decentralized municipal and regional governments. Since the late 1980s, Danish health policy has seen a number of gradual changes and a major structural reform passed in 2005 that amalgamated municipalities and regions and changed healthcare financing rules, thus shifting the balance of shared power toward the center. Other healthcare issues have been cost containment, patient rights, and promotion of local integrated health services. A negotiated policy style contributes to efficient implementation of reforms once a decision has been made.
Italy
Authors: Maino Franca , Razetti Federico
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the decentralized, tax-financed health system in Italy. It traces the development of the Italian healthcare system, including the processes leading to hospital reform and regionalization in the 1960s and 1970s and the creation of the national health service in 1978. Since the late 1980s, health policy has been shaped by the transformation of the Italian political system, further transfer of powers to the regions, and public expenditure constraints due to public debt. Policies inspired by the New Public Management approach that aimed to increase the health system’s cost-effectiveness through steps towards fiscal federalism were introduced and reversed. Over the course of the 2000s, agreements between the central state and regional governments have become the main tool for coordinating health policy and trying to settle recurring disputes regarding health expenditure responsibilities. Ongoing debates on healthcare concern measures to ensure the national health service’s sustainability, typically the control and containment of its costs, and to reduce the territorial gap and other gaps that clash with the system’s universalist design.
Regional OutlookCentral Eastern Europe
Authors: Popic Tamara
Published: August 2021

The Central Eastern Europe regional outlook presents a comparative assessment of the historical development of the healthcare system, health politics, and selected health-related indicators for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In terms of health financing, these countries rely on compulsory contributory insurance, which is complemented with out-of-pocket spending (highest in Poland) and with voluntary private insurance in Slovenia. While health outcomes are steadily improving, there are high levels of health inequalities. Unmet needs vary dramatically across the region, being the highest in Poland and the lowest in Slovenia, which is also reflected in cross-regional differences in satisfaction. Salience of healthcare is lower than in other European regions, but in most countries, it increased during government attempts to introduce market-oriented reforms. The key issues in Central Eastern Europe have been indebtedness of the public health sector and high levels of perceived corruption in Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, the countries with the lowest satisfaction. As the chapter notes, a hotly debated issue in the region is privatization of the hospital sector, marked by strong public and political opposition.
Montenegro
Authors: Perišić Natalija
Published: August 2021

This chapter examines health politics and the health system in Montenegro based on compulsory social health insurance. It traces the post-communist development of the Montenegrin healthcare system that started with incremental privatization and continued toward a more decisive move toward liberalization through the 2004 reforms, which included, among other elements, a stronger role of private healthcare delivery and the introduction of different types of voluntary insurance. As the chapter notes, the main issues facing the health system in Montenegro are incomplete coverage, limited access to healthcare, and lack of regulation of private healthcare provision.
Introduction: A New Way to Read Nature
Authors: Ågren J. Arvid
Published: August 2021

There really is something special about biology. The French biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod described its position among the sciences as simultaneously marginal and central (Monod 1970, p. xi). It is marginal, because its object of study—living organisms—are but a special case of chemistry and physics, contributing to only a minuscule part of the universe. Biology will never be the source of natural laws in the way physics is. At the same time, if, as Monod believed, the whole point of science is to understand humanity’s place in the world, then biology is the most central of them all. No other field of study deals so directly with the question of who we are and how we got here in the first place....
Conclusion: The Gene’s-Eye View Today
Authors: Ågren J. Arvid
Published: August 2021

Marian Stamp Dawkins once recounted her experience marking a final exam paper by one of her undergraduates (Stamp Dawkins 2006). The student successfully answered the set question on how natural selection could have resulted in some animals not reproducing, using all the correct technical terms, but then went on to say ‘And here I rely heavily on the words of Richard Dawkins’ before wrapping up their conclusion. In response, Stamp Dawkins noted in the margin of the examination paper: ‘Yes. Don’t we all?’...
Alan Turing and Human-Like Intelligence
Authors: Millican Peter
Published: August 2021

Alan Turing’s model of computation (1936) is explicated in terms of the potential operations of a human “computer”, and his famous test for intelligence (1950) is based on indistinguishability from human verbal behaviour. But this chapter challenges the apparent human-centredness of the 1936 model, suggesting a focus instead on mathematical concepts, with human comparisons making an entrance only retrospectively. The 1950 account of intelligence also turns out to be far less human-centred than it initially appears to be, because the universality of computation makes human intelligence just one variety amongst many. It is only when Turing considers consciousness that he treats intelligence in a way that cannot properly be carried over to machines. But here he is mistaken, since his own work gave ample reason to reinterpret intelligence as sophisticated information processing for some purpose, and to divorce this from the subjective consciousness with which it is humanly associated.
Human-like Communication
Authors: Healey Patrick G. T.
Published: August 2021

The most famous grand challenge for machine intelligence is human-like communication. This chapter explores two problem that need to be solved in order for machines to meet this challenge. The first is the technical difficulties posed by ordinary conversation. Production and comprehension in conversation are: multimodal, multi-person, incremental, concurrent, and jointly managed. The fine-grained complexity of these aspects of human interaction are beyond the current state of the art but should, ultimately, be tractable. The second set of problems are foundational. Models that assume human communication is underwritten by a shared language are unable to account for the ubiuquitous and systematic role misunderstanding plays in everyday interaction. As a result they also fail to explain how people adapt their language use to each new person and new situation in real time. This capability is essential for any machine that aims to engage constructively with human diversity.
Too Many cooks: Bayesian inference for coordinating Multi-agent Collaboration
Authors: Wang Rose E. , Wu Sarah A. , Evans James A. , Parkes David C. , Tenenbaum Joshua B. , Kleiman-Weiner Max
Published: August 2021

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub-tasks to work on in parallel. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi-agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of others by inverse planning. We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi-agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high-level plans (e.g. what sub-task they should work on) and their low-level actions (e.g. avoiding getting in each other’s way). In a self-play evaluation, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternative algorithms. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad-hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience.
The Shared-Workspace Framework for Dialogue and Other Cooperative Joint Activities
Authors: Pickering Martin J. , Garrod Simon
Published: August 2021

We present a theory of dialogue as a form of cooperative joint activity. Dialogue is treated as a system involving two interlocutors and a shared workspace that contains their contributions and relevant non-linguistic context. The interlocutors construct shared plans and use them to “post” contributions to the workspace, to comprehend joint contributions, and to distribute control of the dialogue between them. A fundamental part of this process is to simulate their partner’s contributions and to use it to predict the upcoming state of the shared workspace. As a consequence, they align their linguistic representations and their representations of the situation and of the “games” underlying successful communication. The shared workspace is a highly limited resource, and the interlocutors use their aligned representations to say just enough and to speak in good time. We describe how dialogue and cooperative joint activity can be brought together in situated communication, and then sketch some implications of our account for human-like artificial systems.
Interactive Learning with Mutual Explanations in Relational Domains
Authors: Schmid Ute
Published: August 2021

With the growing number of applications of machine learning in complex real-world domains machine learning research has to meet new requirements to deal with the imperfections of real world data and the legal as well as ethical obligations to make classifier decisions transparent and comprehensible. In this contribution, arguments for interpretable and interactive approaches to machine learning are presented. It is argued that visual explanations are often not expressive enough to grasp critical information which relies on relations between different aspects or sub-concepts. Consequently, inductive logic programming (ILP) and the generation of verbal explanations from Prolog rules is advocated. Interactive learning in the context of ILP is illustrated with the Dare2Del system which helps users to manage their digital clutter. It is shown that verbal explanations overcome the explanatory one-way street from AI system to user. Interactive learning with mutual explanations allows the learning system to take into account not only class corrections but also corrections of explanations to guide learning. We propose mutual explanations as a building-block for human-like computing and an important ingredient for human AI partnership.
Endowing Machines with the Expert Human Ability to Select Representations: Why and How
Authors: Jamnik Mateja , Cheng Peter
Published: August 2021

To achieve efficient human computer collaboration, computers need to be able to represent information in ways that humans can understand. Picking a good representation is critical for effective communication and human learning, especially on technical topics. To select representations appropriately, AI systems must have some understanding of how humans reason and comprehend the nature of representations. In this interdisciplinary research, we are developing the foundations for the analysis of representations for reasoning. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that select representations intelligently, taking users’ preferences and abilities into account.
Human–Machine Collaboration for Democratizing Data Science
Authors: Gautrais CléMent , Dauxais Yann , Teso Stefano , Kolb Samuel , Verbruggen Gust , Raedt Luc De
Published: August 2021

Everybody wants to analyse their data, but only few posses the data science expertise to do this. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a novel framework and system VisualSynth for human-machine collaboration in data science. Its aim is to democratize data science by allowing users to interact with standard spreadsheet software in order to perform and automate various data analysis tasks ranging from data wrangling, data selection, clustering, constraint learning, predictive modeling and auto-completion. VisualSynth relies on the user providing colored sketches, i.e., coloring parts of the spreadsheet, to partially specify data science tasks, which are then determined and executed using artificial intelligence techniques.
Conclusion
Authors: Evangelista Stefano
Published: August 2021

The conclusion re-evaluates the paradox of the cosmopolitan subject as citizen of nowhere, with fresh examples from essays by Oscar Wilde and Lafcadio Hearn. It argues that a critical interrogation of cosmopolitanism is more necessary than ever at a time of rising nationalism.
Introduction: No More Answers?
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This Introduction is a short intellectual biography. In addition to telling how it was that the author ended up in philosophy, it tracks the development of his views in the theory of reasons and the way in which combining those views with views he later developed in the theory of motivation reveal the possibility of a new form of Aristotelianism in the theory of practical reasoning. It ends by discussing the relevance of the distinction between knowledge and true belief to the theory of motivation.
Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper follows a path that takes us from utilitarianism to particularism. Utilitarianism is the leading one-principle theory; its falsehood is here simply asserted. W. D. Ross’s theory of prima facie duty is offered as the strongest many-principle theory. Ross’s two accounts of his notion of a prima facie duty are considered and criticized. But the real criticism of his view is that being a prima facie duty is a context-sensitive notion, since a feature that is a prima facie duty-making feature in one case may be prevented from playing that role in another. Since the strongest many-principle theory is therefore false, the only conclusion is a no-principle theory: a theory that allows moral reasons but does not suppose that they behave in the regular way required for there to be moral principles—namely, moral particularism.
The Role of Imaginary Cases in Ethics
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper examines the rationale for the standard practice in ethics of arguing from imaginary cases to real ones. Challengeable aspects of this practice are exposed. One question is whether an imaginary case is being taken to establish a Rossian prima facie duty or a duty proper. Another is whether, once we have established the correct account of an imaginary case, we can be sure that another case similar to the first in all respects relevant to our account of the first must be given the same account, irrespective of other differences. A generalist will try to extract principles from the imaginary case and apply them to the real case. This paper argues that this is hopeless. Is particularism in a better situation? A possible line is that what the imaginary case reveals is the importance that certain features can have and may have in the real case before us. No more can be expected.
The Particularist’s Progress
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper is an attempt to show how we might find ourselves ending up as particularists in ethics and elsewhere. It first takes us from holism in the theory of reasons to holism in the theory of value. Having got us that far, it takes us further: from holism in the theory of value to a form of holism in the theory of choice under which our preference for one option over another can be reversed by the appearance of a third option. The paper then turns to consider, in the light of these results, the possibility of a full ordering of values. And it ends by asking to what extent explanation and generalization are linked.
Necessity, Universality, and the A Priori in Ethics
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper asks what form of moral epistemology is best fitted to the claims of moral particularism. It argues that moral truths can be known a priori even though moral truths about particular cases are context-sensitive and so contingent. The general idea is that although one needs empirical knowledge of the situation, one’s knowledge of how to respond is not thereby shown to be empirical. We emerge with synthetic a priori knowledge of a range of truths including among them the moral. Particular attention is paid to Kant’s claim that since moral truths apply to all rational beings, they must be universal in form
Two Conceptions of Moral Realism
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper considers the comparative merits of two conceptions of real properties, as applied to the moral domain. On the weaker conception, real properties or facts are there anyway, independent of any experience. On the stronger conception, real properties are those not constituted by the availability of some response to them. The question is whether moral realists should restrict themselves to the weaker conception, allowing that a wrong action is one that is such as to elicit blame but not holding that this could constitute wrongness in the object. This paper argues that the weaker conception is inconsistent with the main argument for moral realism, which the author takes to appeal to the phenomenology of moral deliberation.
In Defence of Thick Concepts
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper focuses on the way in which thick concepts manage to combine the descriptive and the evaluative. It accepts Blackburn’s suggestion that thick terms have variable relevance, but disputes his conclusion that there are no thick concepts. The views of Wiggins and McDowell on these topics play an important role in the discussion. In the process a richer picture of the thick begins to emerge. The paper ends by considering the question whether the doctrine of the supervenience of the evaluative on the natural can still be sustained as a result.
McDowell, Williams, and Intuitionism
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper is concerned with a disagreement between Bernard Williams and John McDowell. It starts by asking what form a dispositional account of value should take. A no-priority view could hold that value is a disposition to elicit a certain response, and the response is to the object as disposed to elicit just that response. But a different no-priority view could talk of meriting a response and responding in the way merited. The response is explained as an instance of things being as they rationally ought to be. The paper debates the merits of such a view, and then turns to ask how much truth there is in the common claim that McDowell is an intuitionist.
Why There Is Really No Such Thing as the Theory of Motivation
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: August 2021

This paper (a forerunner of the author’s Practical Reality) considers in detail the distinction between the reasons we have to act in certain ways, often known as justifying reasons, and the reasons for which we act when the time comes, often known as motivating reasons. It argues that it must be possible for one and the same reason to play both roles. It warns accordingly against the popular version of that distinction which understands the reasons we have to act in certain ways with relevant features of the situation and reasons for which we act as certain psychological states of our own, combinations of beliefs and desires. Any such distinction makes it impossible to act for a good reason. The paper also offers some suggestions about what a better account of the distinction would look like.
Russellian Monism to the Rescue?
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: August 2021

This chapter elaborates two standard versions of a view of consciousness known as Russellian Monism. The key idea of this view is that the fundamental entities in micro-reality have intrinsic natures not specified in microphysics, natures that include a range of properties crucial to consciousness and conscious states. The reductive version holds that the relevant properties are themselves genuinely conscious properties of various sorts. The primitivist version holds that the relevant properties ground macro-level conscious properties without themselves involving consciousness. It is shown that neither version is defensible and that neither helps with the paradox.
Transparency and Representationalism
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: August 2021

This chapter explores the phenomenon of transparency and presents several different versions of representationalism about conscious states, only one of which is endorsed. There are discussions of representationalism with respect to perceptual experiences, bodily sensations, emotions, conscious thoughts, and moods. Along the way, the objection from blur in vision is addressed and an account offered of how introspection works with respect to conscious states. At the end, there is a discussion of whether consciousness itself is transparent to us. The background context for this discussion is provided by some remarks made by G.E. Moore that seem to run counter to transparency.
The Publishing of Popular Social History Books
Authors: Carter Laura
Published: August 2021

Chapters 1 and 2 make up Part I of this book, which explains how the ‘history of everyday life’ developed and why it had such purchase in mid-twentieth-century British society. This chapter uses the publishing of popular history books to investigate the emergence of the ‘history of everyday life’ as a new genre of popular social history in the inter-war period. Between the wars, publishers competed to capture burgeoning educational markets as the market for ‘traditional’ narrative and literary histories declined. As a result, they began to repackage illustrated source books, memoirs, and diaries as history books after 1918. This fed the appetites of an altered, post-war reading public, including women and juvenile workers.
Social History for ‘Ordinary’ School Pupils
Authors: Carter Laura
Published: August 2021

Chapters 1 and 2 make up Part I of this book, which explains how the ‘history of everyday life’ developed and why it had such purchase in mid-twentieth-century British society. This chapter is about the theory and practice of teaching social history in schools between the 1920s and the 1960s. It explains the pedagogical framework in which ordinary consumers of history came to be conceptualized in the mid-twentieth century. It is argued that social history in schools was increasingly associated with average ability and younger pupils after 1918. Through mass education, the ‘history of everyday life’, with its premium on local settings, practical skills, emotions, and the visual, became the type of history prescribed for the ordinary, ‘modern’ pupil.
DIY Policing: Crafting the New Contours of Policing in a Globalized World
Authors: Aliverti Ana
Published: August 2021

This chapter explores the experimentation within British policing resulting from the impetus to identify, fix individual identities, and make people legible in recent decades. Concerns over people’s identification and the crave for information has taken a new shift becoming a prime driver of police innovation and partnership work. The quest to know who is who reinvigorated institutional and operational connections with the inland immigration police, Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement (IE), including Operation Nexus. Operation Nexus (Nexus) is an initiative to bring the operational and intelligence capacities of IE and the police together to identify and manage foreign national suspects. While Nexus has been an important catalyst of fragmented and piecemeal practices in the policing of foreign nationals, the chapter focuses on the bespoke, informal nature of much (migration) policing which relies less on formal structures than in ever fragile and contingent relations, termed as ‘DIY policing’. The peculiar nature of such policing points to the intractable challenges of doing policing in contemporary conditions. At least in the UK, the analysis presented here points to a less coherent strategy and less assertive stance towards migration than that sometimes depicted by policy papers and academic literature on ‘crimmigration’, and provides an important empirical corrective to the dystopian diagnosis of penal power in criminology.
‘In Our Crowded Little Island’: Policing Cartographies, Order, Place, and Belonging
Authors: Aliverti Ana
Published: August 2021

This final chapter explores the relationship between place, belonging, and order in migration policing. It foregrounds the question of ‘place’ as a category of analysis to understand how immigration and police officers relate to and make sense of their quotidian work and the different publics they interact with. Foregrounding space in policing sheds light on its importance for visualizing, sensing, and constructing order. This spatial and atmospheric dimension of policing forms part of officers’ cognitive maps through which they attach meaning to and make sense of their patches, and the world beyond them. As these officers deal on an everyday basis with people hailing from far away, what are their perceptions of the world outside their patches and how do these ideas and experiences impact on their work? Directing our attention to the geographies of migration policing, its spatial dimensions illuminate how officers apprehend and construct ‘the here and now’ of the local and vernacular in relation to the ‘outside’ and the past. While the intensification of global movements and interconnections—and the attendant economic, social, and political transformations it entailed–has been said to de-border the state and erode a sense of place, their testimonies point to a recasting of it (of the immediate communities and the nation) in a globalizing context. In such context, these sensibilities which articulate experiences of change have become more acute as these officers convey their sense that the world has been turned upside down.
The Natural Forum Revisited
Authors: Bell Andrew
Published: August 2021

This essay considers and revisits the concept of the ‘natural forum’ thirty-five years after the landmark decision of the House of Lords in Spiliada Maritime Corporation v Cansulex. It considers the role of that concept throughout the common law world and whether the concept is still fit for purpose in light of changes in the legal and procedural landscape during this period.
The Conflict of Laws and Unjust Enrichment
Authors: Burrows Andrew
Published: August 2021

This essay revisits the relationship between the conflict of laws and the law of unjust enrichment (or, more widely, the law of restitution) in light of shifts in the legal landscape over the past forty years. It considers the rules of jurisdiction and of choice of law applied by the English courts, accounting for the effects of the UK’s departure from the European Union.
The Rise of English Prose
Authors: Werlin Julianne
Published: August 2021

This chapter offers a social history of the emergence of a standardized vernacular English prose in the sixteenth century. As national networks of trade and administration formed in late medieval and Tudor England, new channels of communication were forged alongside them. In these conditions, written forms stabilized, while rates of literacy rose. By the end of the sixteenth century, England had become a single linguistic community with shared conventions of writing. An emerging capitalism thus powerfully shaped England’s written language, a fact that has implications for the history of style and genres. The rise of the plain style and the emergence of new genres of prose at the end of the sixteenth century both offer compelling case studies of how English norms of writing emerged out of practical communications.
The Writing of Daily Life
Authors: Werlin Julianne
Published: August 2021

This chapter argues that the growing importance of financial documentation in early modernity shaped the form and content of vernacular writing. Focusing on the diary, it traces links between journals and accounts from early Renaissance Florence through seventeenth-century England, showing how notebook culture spread in response to financial pressures. Ultimately, the extension of monetary relations in early capitalist England gave men and women new reasons to record apparently trivial details of their daily lives, which now appeared in lists of expenses, debts, and accounts. The chapter thus contributes to debates about English economic individualism and the origins of realist prose; in addition, it shows how practical documents served as a vector for transmitting financial imperatives to literary history.
Personality and Powers of the EU
Authors: Wouters Jan , Hoffmeister Frank , Baere Geert De , Ramopoulos Thomas
Published: August 2021

This chapter provides an overview of the questions pertaining to the international legal personality and external powers of the Union. It presents and analyses the seminal judgments of the extensive case law of the Court of Justice on the external powers of the Union that span almost fifty years. It thereby explains the distinction between the existence and nature of external powers of the EU as well as the doctrine of implied external powers. Starting from ERTA and Opinion 1/76, the chapter brings together this case law, discusses its latest codification in the EU Treaties with the Treaty of Lisbon, and how this has been interpreted by the Court in its judgments and Opinions. Lastly, a section is dedicated to the recently highly contested question whether the Union may exercise external powers in areas of shared competence. Answering in the affirmative, the Court further clarified the relationship between Articles 3(2) and 216(1) TFEU.
The Status of International Law in the EU
Authors: Wouters Jan , Hoffmeister Frank , Baere Geert De , Ramopoulos Thomas
Published: August 2021

This chapter deals with the status of international law in the EU legal order under the Lisbon Treaty. It presents in great detail the most important cases of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the incorporation of international agreements and their rank in the domestic legal order. The origins and current practice of the doctrine of direct effect for specific provisions in an international agreement are explained. Moreover, the chapter contains an assessment of the famous ECJ Kadi-jurisprudence on the significance of human rights in the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions on counter-terrorism. Finally, it also shows with concrete examples how the Court of Justice developed the status of customary international law in the EU.
Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Summarization
Authors: Touchon Justin C.
Published: August 2021

The third chapter introduces the dataset that readers will work with for the remainder of the book: the RxP data. Students are taught how to import the data and how to use indexing and packages like dplyr to navigate this large, real, and somewhat messy set of ecological data. Basic plotting is introduced as a tool for exploratory data analysis. Lastly, students are taught how to summarize a dataset quickly and efficiently.
Introduction to Plotting
Authors: Touchon Justin C.
Published: August 2021

R is one of the most powerful programs available for graphically representing your data, and chapter 4 begins the important process of teaching how this is done. Base graphics are introduced but the main focus is on teaching the package ggplot2, which has become the principal method of making figures in R. Various types of graphics are taught, including box-and-whisker plots, scatterplots, histograms, and density plots. In addition, the ways to customize these figures with colors, shapes, and faceting are also covered. The chapter ends by walking readers step-by-step through the process of creating a professional looking bar graph in both base graphics and ggplot2
Advanced Data Wrangling and Plotting
Authors: Touchon Justin C.
Published: August 2021

The advent of the packages in the tidyverse such as dplyr, tidyr, and ggplot2, has made the process of navigating, summarizing, transforming and plotting data increasing easy. Chapter 9 teaches readers the most important basics of data wrangling, such as how to summarize, spread, and gather your data, and how to use to the do() function to automate running functions. A detailed run through of plotting with ggplot2 is also undertaken, as is the connectivity of data wrangling and plotting.
‘Wang’s Paradox’
Authors: Wright Crispin
Published: August 2021

This chapter, specially written for the 2007 Schilp volume in his honour, revisits Sir Michael Dummett’s seminal contribution to the debates about vagueness in his ipsonymous 1975 paper. The chapter again rejects both the conception of vagueness as any kind of semantic incompleteness and Epistemicism, and critiques Dummett’s own suggestion of Incoherentism, returning again to the governing view and the question of the sense, if any, in which vague expressions should be thought of as governed by semantic rules. The Sorites for phenomenal predicates, ‘looks red’ and its ilk, receives special focus. It is argued that the correct response is that the competent use of these and other vague expressions is, in a certain sense, unprincipled: their vagueness is a phenomenon of reactive judgement unsupported by reasons. This conception enforces Agnosticism about Bivalence and a consequent repudiation of the validity of double negation elimination.
Fermionic topological phases and bosonization in higher dimensions
Authors: Kobayashi Ryohei
Published: August 2021

We review a recipe to produce a lattice construction of fermionic phases of matter in the presence of time reversal symmetry by extending the fermionization and bosonization known in (1+1) dimensions to various setups including higher spacetime dimensions in the presence of global symmetries. As an application, we provide a state sum lattice path integral for a (1+1)-dimensional topological superconductor with time reversal symmetry generating the $\mathbb{Z}_8$ classification of the symmetry-protected topological phase. We also illustrate a state sum path integral for a (3+1)-dimensional topological superconductor with time reversal symmetry that generates the $\mathbb{Z}_{16}$ classification.
Concentrated growth factor regulates the macrophage-mediated immune response
Authors: Luo Haiyun , Liu Wenjing , Zhou Yachuan , Jiang Xiao , Liu Yeungyeung , Yang Qin , Shao Longquan
Published: August 2021

Concentrated growth factor (CGF) is a promising regenerative material that serves as a scaffold and adjunct growth factor for tissue engineering. The host immune response, particularly macrophage activity, plays a critical role in injury repair and tissue regeneration. However, the biological effect of CGF on the immune response is not clear. To enrich the theoretical groundwork for clinical application, the present study examined the immunoregulatory role of CGF in macrophage functional activities in vitro. The CGF scaffold appeared as a dense fibrin network with multiple embedded leukocytes and platelets, and it was biocompatible with macrophages. Concentrated bioactive factors in the CGF extract enhanced THP-1 monocyte recruitment and promoted the maturation of suspended monocytes into adherent macrophages. CGF extract also promoted THP-1 macrophage polarization toward the M2 phenotype with upregulated CD163 expression, as detected by cell morphology and surface marker expression. A cytokine antibody array showed that CGF extract exerted a regulatory effect on macrophage functional activities by reducing secretion of the inflammatory factor interleukin-1β while inducing expression of the chemokine regulated on activation, normal T cell expressed and secreted. Mechanistically, the AKT signaling pathway was activated, and an AKT inhibitor partially suppressed the immunomodulatory effect of CGF. Our findings reveal that CGF induces a favorable immune response mediated by macrophages, which represents a promising strategy for functional tissue regeneration.
Complete Genome Sequence of the Plant-Pathogenic Fungus Colletotrichum lupini
Authors: Baroncelli Riccardo , Pensec Flora , Da Lio Daniele , Boufleur Thais , Vicente Isabel , Sarrocco Sabrina , Picot Adeline , Baraldi Elena , Sukno Serenella , Thon Michael , Le Floch Gaetan
Published: August 2021

Colletotrichum is a fungal genus (Ascomycota, Sordariomycetes, Glomerellaceae) that includes many economically important plant pathogens that cause devastating diseases of a wide range of plants. In this work, using a combination of long- and short-read sequencing technologies, we sequenced the genome of Colletotrichum lupini RB221, isolated from white lupin (Lupinus albus) in France during a survey in 2014. The genome was assembled into 11 nuclear chromosomes and a mitochondrial genome with a total assembly size of 63.41 Mb and 36.55 kb, respectively. In total, 18,324 protein-encoding genes have been predicted, of which only 39 are specific to C. lupini. This resource will provide insight into pathogenicity factors and will help provide a better understanding of the evolution and genome structure of this important plant pathogen.

[Formula: see text] Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification Assay for Rapid Detection of Phoma macdonaldii, the Causal Agent of Sunflower Black Stem
Authors: Sun Huiying , Sun Lin , Yang Liuliu , Wang Zehao , Xia Zihao , Yang Xinyu , Jiao Zhiwei , Feng Jie , Liang Yue
Published: August 2021

Phoma macdonaldii, the causal agent of sunflower black stem, severely affects sunflower yield and quality. A rapid and sensitive detection method is necessary for diagnosis of this disease. In this study, a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay was developed for rapid detection of the pathogen from diseased sunflower tissues. The LAMP primers were designed to target the rDNA region of the fungus. The reaction condition was optimized to 60°C water baths for 45 min. The detection limit of the LAMP assay was 100 fg DNA or 10 conidia/g seeds. The LAMP assay was validated by detecting P. macdonaldii from infected sunflower tissue samples, including leaves, stems, and seeds, and applying to seed samples randomly collected from sunflower fields. This LAMP assay will be useful for estimating disease prevalence and implementing sustainable management of sunflower black stem.
Koumiss promotes Mycobacterium bovis infection by disturbing intestinal flora and inhibiting endoplasmic reticulum stress
Authors: Wang Haoran , Hussain Tariq , Yao Jiao , Li Jing , Sabir Naveed , Liao Yi , Liang Zhengmin , Wang Yuanzhi , Liu Yiduo , Zhao Deming , Zhou Xiangmei
Published: August 2021

Mycobacterium bovis is the causative agent of bovine tuberculosis and also responsible for serious threat to public health. Koumiss is a fermented mare's milk product, used as traditional drink. Here, we explored the effect of koumiss on gut microbiota and the host immune response against M bovis infection. Therefore, mice were treated with koumiss and fresh mare milk for 14 days before M bovis infection and continue for 5 weeks after infection. The results showed a clear change in the intestinal flora of mice treated with koumiss, and the lungs of mice treated with koumiss showed severe edema, inflammatory infiltration, and pulmonary nodules in M bovis‐infected mice. Notably, we found that the content of short‐chain fatty acids was significantly lower in the koumiss‐treated group compared with the control group. However, the expression of endoplasmic reticulum stress and apoptosis‐related proteins in the lungs of koumiss‐treated mice were significantly decreased. Collectively, these findings suggest that koumiss treatment disturb the intestinal flora of, which is associated with disease severity and the possible mechanism that induces lungs pathology. Our current findings can be exploited further to establish the “gut‐lung” axis which might be a novel strategy for the control of tuberculosis.
New mechanism-based approaches to treating and evaluating the vasculopathy of scleroderma
Authors: Flavahan Nicholas A.
Published: August 2021

Purpose of review

Utilizing recent insight into the vasculopathy of scleroderma (SSc), the review will highlight new opportunities for evaluating and treating the disease by promoting stabilization and protection of the microvasculature.

Recent findings

Endothelial junctional signaling initiated by vascular endothelial-cadherin (VE-cadherin) and Tie2 receptors, which are fundamental to promoting vascular health and stability, are disrupted in SSc. This would be expected to not only diminish their protective activity, but also increase pathological processes that are normally restrained by these signaling mediators, resulting in pathological changes in vascular function and structure. Indeed, key features of SSc vasculopathy, from the earliest signs of edema and puffy fingers to pathological disruption of hemodynamics, nutritional blood flow, capillary structure and angiogenesis are all consistent with this altered endothelial signaling. It also likely contributes to further progression of the disease including tissue fibrosis, and organ and tissue injury.

Restoring protective endothelial junctional signaling should combat the vasculopathy of SSc and prevent further deterioration in vascular and organ function. Indeed, this type of targeted approach has achieved remarkable results in preclinical models for other diseases. Furthermore, tracking this endothelial junctional signaling, for example by assessing vascular permeability, should facilitate insight into disease progression and its response to therapy.
Lymphocyte immunophenotyping in inflammatory myositis: a review
Authors: Franco Chiara , Gatto Mariele , Iaccarino Luca , Ghirardello Anna , Doria Andrea
Published: August 2021

Purpose of review

This is a comprehensive review of the current knowledge on predominant immune cell phenotypes involved in idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM).

Recent findings

Major circulating immune cell subpopulations described in IIM encompass the lymphocyte compartment. An unbalance in T cell subsets seems to consistently affect the peripheral and muscle compartment, with a predominance of CD4+ T and B cells in dermatomyositis, CD8+ T cells in polymyositis/inclusion body myositis (IBM) and novel findings highlighting novel proinflammatory T subsets, that is, CD8+Tbet+ and CD28− T cells across different IIM subsets. On the other hand, an impairment in Treg cells number and function has been described especially across polymyositis/dermatomyositis and IBM. Total T follicular helper (Tfh) cells, increased in immune-mediated necrotizing myopathy, skewed toward Tfh2 and Tfh17 in dermatomyositis, polymyositis, and juvenile dermatomyositis. B cell compartment is more rarely described in IIM, yet an unbalance in this pool is as well likely. Evidence of plasma cells increased in polymyositis, dermatomyositis, IBM, and Bregs decreased in dermatomyositis have been reported. Perturbations in the memory and naïve subsets are common in dermatomyositis/polymyositis and antisynthetase syndrome.

Protean immune cell abnormalities characterize different IIM subsets, reflecting the complexity of these autoimmune conditions. A deeper understanding of B-cell and T-cell immunophenotyping may promote early diagnosis and identification of new potential therapeutic targets.