bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Alterations of fecal microbiome characteristics by dietary soy isoflavone ingestion in growing pigs infected with porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus
Authors: Smith Brooke N , Fleming Stephen A , Wang Mei , Dilger Ryan N
Published: May 2020

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is an economically important disease, and the ingestion of soy isoflavones (ISF) may benefit PRRSV-infected pigs due to demonstrated anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties. The objective of this study was to quantify the effects of ISF consumption on fecal microbiome characteristics at different timepoints across a disease challenge and determine whether any changes, if present, elude to potential biological mechanisms for previously observed performance benefits. In total, 96 weaned barrows were group-housed in a Biosafety Level-2 containment facility and allotted to one of three experimental treatments that were maintained throughout the study: noninfected pigs receiving an ISF-devoid control diet (NEG, n = 24) and infected pigs receiving either the control diet (POS, n = 36) or that supplemented with total ISF in excess of 1,600 mg/kg (ISF, n = 36). Following a 7-d adaptation, pigs were inoculated intranasally with either a sham-control (phosphate-buffered saline) or live PRRSV (1 × 105 median tissue culture infectious dose[TCID]50/mL, strain NADC20). Fecal samples were collected from 48 individual pigs at pre-infection (−2 d post-inoculation [DPI]), peak-infection (10 DPI), and post-infection (144 DPI) timepoints. Extracted DNA was used to quantify fecal microbiota profiles via 16S bacterial rRNA sequencing. Differences in bacterial communities among diet groups were evaluated with principal coordinate analysis and permutational multivariate analysis of variance using UniFrac distance matrices based on both unweighted and weighted UniFrac distances using QIIME 2. All other data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA performed on square root transformations using R. Across all timepoints, only a few differences were observed due to ISF alone mainly in lowly abundant genera. The most notable differences observed were decreased relative abundance of Actinobacteria at 144 DPI between noninfected and infected treatments (P < 0.05), which is consistent with various dysbioses observed in other disease models. Our findings indicate that the differences present were mainly due to PRRSV-infection alone and not strongly influenced by diet, which implies that previously observed performance benefits conferred by dietary ISF are not likely due to the changes in microbiome composition.
Protracted Armed Violence as a Criterion for the Existence of Non-international Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Law and Beyond
Authors: Hrnjaz Miloš , Simentić Popović Janja
Published: May 2020

The present article provides legal analysis of the concept of ‘protracted armed violence’ which is part of the commonly accepted definition of non-international armed conflict (NIAC). The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia interpreted this notion as the intensity requirement. However, the practice of other international legal institutions that use this concept (such as International Criminal Court and some other judicial institutions) is not always coherent with this finding. This fact raised several theoretical and practical issues in the process of interpretation and implementation of international legal norms. Therefore, the aim of the article is to critically reassess the ‘protracted armed violence’ concept in various branches of international law and to contribute to the better understanding of the NIAC phenomenon.
Smoking Status at Diagnosis and Colorectal Cancer Prognosis According to Tumor Lymphocytic Reaction
Authors: Fujiyoshi Kenji , Chen Yang , Haruki Koichiro , Ugai Tomotaka , Kishikawa Junko , Hamada Tsuyoshi , Liu Li , Arima Kota , Borowsky Jennifer , Väyrynen Juha P , Zhao Melissa , Lau Mai Chan , Gu Simeng , Shi Shanshan , Akimoto Naohiko , Twombly Tyler S , Drew David A , Song Mingyang , Chan Andrew T , Giovannucci Edward L , Meyerhardt Jeffrey A , Fuchs Charles S , Nishihara Reiko , Lennerz Jochen K , Giannakis Marios , Nowak Jonathan A , Zhang Xuehong , Wu Kana , Ogino Shuji
Published: May 2020

Background

Smoking has been associated with worse colorectal cancer patient survival and may potentially suppress the immune response in the tumor microenvironment. We hypothesized that the prognostic association of smoking behavior at colorectal cancer diagnosis might differ by lymphocytic reaction patterns in cancer tissue.

Methods

Using 1474 colon and rectal cancer patients within 2 large prospective cohort studies (Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study), we characterized 4 patterns of histopathologic lymphocytic reaction, including tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), intratumoral periglandular reaction, peritumoral lymphocytic reaction, and Crohn’s-like lymphoid reaction. Using covariate data of 4420 incident colorectal cancer patients in total, an inverse probability weighted multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression model was conducted to adjust for selection bias due to tissue availability and potential confounders, including tumor differentiation, disease stage, microsatellite instability status, CpG island methylator phenotype, long interspersed nucleotide element-1 methylation, and KRAS, BRAF, and PIK3CA mutations.

Results

The prognostic association of smoking status at diagnosis differed by TIL status. Compared with never smokers, the multivariable-adjusted colorectal cancer–specific mortality hazard ratio for current smokers was 1.50 (95% confidence interval = 1.10 to 2.06) in tumors with negative or low TIL and 0.43 (95% confidence interval = 0.16 to 1.12) in tumors with intermediate or high TIL (2-sided Pinteraction = .009). No statistically significant interactions were observed in the other patterns of lymphocytic reaction.

Conclusions

The association of smoking status at diagnosis with colorectal cancer mortality may be stronger for carcinomas with negative or low TIL, suggesting a potential interplay of smoking and lymphocytic reaction in the colorectal cancer microenvironment.
International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution
Authors: Rubins Noah D , Nektarios Papanastasiou Thomas , Kinsella N Stephan
Published: May 2020

This second edition explores the multi-layered legal framework for the protection of foreign investment against political risk. The chapters analyze some of the key issues surrounding this subject, such as structuring transactions to minimize political risk, political risk insurance, State responsibility, treaties protecting foreign investmentand international arbitration between States and investors. Since the previous edition, far more attention has been paid to some of these issues, in particular investor–State arbitration.All chapters have been revised to take into account the number of new arbitration awards that have come to light and the massive volume of commentary on the subject of international investment arbitration since the first edition. The authors have carefully considered the latest theoretical approaches to foreign investment protection and the most intellectually challenging awards issued in the intervening decade, as well as the most recent practical guidance on the procedural recourse available to investors who face political risks. The book is written to appeal to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. It is suitable as a primer for non-specialist practitioners seeking to familiarize themselves with international law pertaining to political risk. It is also suitable for students who intend to specialize in international investment law.
Structuring Transactions to Minimize Political Risk
Authors: Rubins Noah D , Papanastasiou Thomas-Nektarios , Kinsella N Stephan
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes the types of investment projects most often undertaken in developing States, and provides an analysis of the structures that can be implemented to reduce exposure to political risk. The discussions cover project types (petroleum extraction agreements and infrastructure projects), transaction structures, investor–State contracts, core State contract clauses affecting political risk (arbitration clause, choice-of-law clause, stabilization clause, and force majeure clause), clauses for guidance of courts and tribunals (damage clause, interest rate clause, local remedies clause, and waiver of sovereign immunity), and other useful contractual provisions (conversion of currency clause, payment of currency to offshore account, and binding the State as party to the contract).
Abuse of Rights in International Arbitration
Authors: El Far Ahmed
Published: May 2020

In recent years, international arbitration has become plagued by different forms of substantive and procedural abuse. For example, we have witnessed a rise in cases where parties restructure their investments in an abusive manner by altering one of its features purely to gain access to ICSID arbitration. Similarly, the increasingly common practice of initiating parallel arbitral proceedings in order to maximise a party’s chances of success, and the possibility of inconsistent decisions pose a risk to standards of fairness. Abusive practices designed by parties to prejudice their opponents may undermine the fair resolution of disputes and frustrate the administration of arbitral justice. There are pre-existing tools and legal rules that can be utilised to prevent abuse. However, these tools are inherently rigid in their application and fail to remedy all forms of abuse. Abuse of Rights in International Arbitration introduces the principle of abuse of rights and considers its application as a general principle of law to prevent different forms of substantive and procedural abuse in international arbitration. The virtue of a single theory with a wide scope and an overarching premise is that it is a principle, which involves equity considerations, enjoys the flexibility of general principles of law, and can address different abusive behaviours. The author carefully examines the legal basis and core elements of abuse of rights and analyses the relevant case law to address how the principle may affect administration of arbitral justice. Arguing for the application of abuse of rights as a general principle of law, the author expertly examines how it could apply in both international commercial and investment arbitration to tackle procedural misconduct and different abusive practices.
Abuse of Rights in National Legal Systems and International Law
Authors: El Far Ahmed
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the principle of abuse of rights and its application in national legal systems and in international law. To determine if abuse of rights constitutes a general principle of law, its recognition must first be examined in the different legal systems in order to establish its generality and then subsequently one must distil the concept to its essential elements. This is necessary to determine if there is a need to modify its conditions of application in order to make it suitable for the particularities of international arbitration. The chapter then looks at the application of the principle in civil legal systems: mainly in French law, German law, Swiss law, Louisiana Law, and Egyptian law. It also considers the recognition, or lack thereof, of abuse of rights in the common law legal systems and in international law. The omnipresence of the principle of abuse of rights in civil legal systems is evident. However, the ubiquity of the principle does not necessarily reflect a uniform legal basis of the principle’s existence, or a uniform method of how it is utilized to prevent an abuse of right.
Individual resource games and resource redistributions
Authors: Troquard Nicolas
Published: May 2020

To introduce agent-based technologies in real-world systems, one needs to acknowledge that the agents often have limited access to resources. They have to seek after resource objectives and compete for those resources. We introduce a class of resource games where resources and preferences are specified with the language of a resource-sensitive logic. The agents are endowed with a bag of resources and try to achieve a resource objective. For each agent, an action consists in making available a part of their endowed resources. All the resources made available can be used towards the agents’ objectives. We study three decision problems, the first of which is deciding whether an action profile is a Nash equilibrium: when all the agents have chosen an action, it is a Nash Equilibrium if no agent has an incentive to change their action unilaterally. When dealing with resources, interesting questions arise as to whether some equilibria can be eliminated or constructed by a central authority by redistributing the available resources among the agents. In our economies, division of property in divorce law exemplifies how a central authority can redistribute the resources of individuals and why they would desire to do so. We thus study two related decision problems: (i) rational elimination: given an action profile’s outcome, can the endowed resources be redistributed so that it is not the outcome of a Nash equilibrium? (ii) Rational construction: given an action profile’s outcome, can the endowed resources be redistributed so that it is the outcome of a Nash equilibrium? Among other results, we prove that all three problems are $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-complete when the resources are described in the very expressive language of the propositional multiplicative and additive linear logic. We also identify a new modest fragment of linear logic that we call MULT, suitable to represent multisets and reason about the inclusion and equality of bags of resources. We show that when the resources are described in MULT, the problem of deciding whether a profile is a Nash equilibrium is in $\textsf{PTIME}$.
The e-MERGE Survey (e-MERLIN Galaxy Evolution Survey): overview and survey description
Authors: Muxlow T W B , Thomson A P , Radcliffe J F , Wrigley N H , Beswick R J , Smail Ian , McHardy I M , Garrington S T , Ivison R J , Jarvis M J , Prandoni I , Bondi M , Guidetti D , Argo M K , Bacon David , Best P N , Biggs A D , Chapman S C , Coppin K , Chen H , Garratt T K , Garrett M A , Ibar E , Kneib Jean-Paul , Knudsen Kirsten K , Koopmans L V E , Morabito L K , Murphy E J , Njeri A , Pearson Chris , Pérez-Torres M A , Richards A M S , Röttgering H J A , Sargent M T , Serjeant Stephen , Simpson C , Simpson J M , Swinbank A M , Varenius E , Venturi T
Published: May 2020

We present an overview and description of the e-MERGE Survey (e-MERLIN Galaxy Evolution Survey) Data Release 1 (DR1), a large program of high-resolution 1.5-GHz radio observations of the GOODS-N field comprising ∼140 h of observations with enhanced-Multi-Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network (e-MERLIN) and ∼40 h with the Very Large Array (VLA). We combine the long baselines of e-MERLIN (providing high angular resolution) with the relatively closely packed antennas of the VLA (providing excellent surface brightness sensitivity) to produce a deep 1.5-GHz radio survey with the sensitivity (${\sim}1.5\, \mu$ Jy beam−1), angular resolution (0.2–0.7 arcsec) and field-of-view (∼15 × 15 arcmin2) to detect and spatially resolve star-forming galaxies and active galactic nucleus (AGN) at $z$ ≳ 1. The goal of e-MERGE is to provide new constraints on the deep, sub-arcsecond radio sky which will be surveyed by SKA1-mid. In this initial publication, we discuss our data analysis techniques, including steps taken to model in-beam source variability over an ∼20-yr baseline and the development of new point spread function/primary beam models to seamlessly merge e-MERLIN and VLA data in the uv plane. We present early science results, including measurements of the luminosities and/or linear sizes of ∼500 galaxies selected at 1.5 GHz. In combination with deep Hubble Space Telescope observations, we measure a mean radio-to-optical size ratio of re-MERGE/rHST ∼ 1.02 ± 0.03, suggesting that in most high-redshift galaxies, the ∼GHz continuum emission traces the stellar light seen in optical imaging. This is the first in a series of papers that will explore the ∼kpc-scale radio properties of star-forming galaxies and AGN in the GOODS-N field observed by e-MERGE DR1.
Maximum entropy estimation of the Galactic bulge morphology via the VVV Red Clump
Authors: Coleman B , Paterson D , Gordon C , Macias O , Ploeg H
Published: May 2020

The abundance and narrow magnitude dispersion of Red Clump (RC) stars make them a popular candidate for mapping the morphology of the bulge region of the Milky Way. Using an estimate of the RC’s intrinsic luminosity function, we extracted the three-dimensional density distribution of the RC from deep photometric catalogues of the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey. We used maximum entropy-based deconvolution to extract the spatial distribution of the bulge from Ks-band star counts. We obtained our extrapolated non-parametric model of the bulge over the inner 40° × 40° region of the Galactic centre. Our reconstruction also naturally matches on to a parametric fit to the bulge outside the VVV region and inpaints overcrowded and high extinction regions. We found a range of bulge properties consistent with other recent investigations based on the VVV data. In particular, we estimated the bulge mass to be in the range $[1.3,1.7]\times 10^{10} \, \mathrm{M}_\odot$, the X-component to be between 18 per cent and 25 per cent of the bulge mass, and the bulge angle with respect to the Sun–Galactic centre line to be between 18° and 32°. Studies of the FermiLarge Area Telescope (LAT) gamma-ray Galactic centre excess suggest that the excess may be traced by Galactic bulge distributed sources. We applied our deconvolved density in a template fitting analysis of this Fermi–LAT GeV excess and found an improvement in the fit compared to previous parametric-based templates.
Galaxy optical variability of Virgo cluster: new tracer for environmental influences on galaxies
Authors: Yang Fan , Long Richard J , Shan Su-Su , Ge Jun-Qiang , Guo Rui , Zhang Bo , Gao Jing-Hua , Ji Xiang , Liu Ji-Feng
Published: May 2020

We investigate the relationship between the optical variability of galaxies and their distances from the centre of the Virgo cluster using Palomar Transient Factory data. We define the ratio between the standard deviation of the galaxy brightness and the mean value of the standard deviation as a measure of a galaxy’s optical variability. A sample of 814 Virgo galaxies with 230 263 observations shows a monotonically decreasing trend of optical variability with increasing clustercentric distance. The variability level inside the cluster is 3.2σ higher than the level outside. We fit the variability with a linear function and find that the data reject a distance-independent model. We examine 217 background galaxies for comparison and find no significant trend in galaxy variability. We assess the relation with Monte Carlo simulation by rebuilding the brightness of each galaxy. The simulation shows a monotonically decreasing relation for member galaxy variability and a distance-independent relation for background galaxies. Our result is consistent with the theory that the cold gas flowing inwards the cluster centre fuels AGN activity. This work is a new implementation of the method using optical variability to investigate the relation between galaxies evolution and their environment.
New insights into the potential mechanisms of spermatogenic failure in patients with idiopathic azoospermia
Authors: Cai Zhonglin , Zhang Jianzhong , Xiong Jian , Ma Chengquan , Yang Bin , Li Hongjun
Published: May 2020

Idiopathic azoospermia (IA) refers to azoospermia without a clear aetiology. Due to the unclear aetiology and pathological mechanism of IA, there is no effective treatment for IA. The development of assisted reproductive and microsperm extraction technologies has brought hope to patients with IA with fertility problems. However, there are still many patients with IA whose testes lack healthy sperm, causing infertility. Therefore, it is key to identify how testicular spermatogenic failure can be reversed to promote spermatogenesis in patients with IA to resolve fertility problems; these goals are a great challenge in reproductive medicine. The underlying genetic factors seem to be important pathological factors of IA. Understanding the role of genetic factors in the pathological mechanism of spermatogenic failure in patients with IA is of great value for future studies and treatments and is also an important reference for the reproductive health of males and their offspring. A method combining sequencing technology and bioinformatics analysis is an important means to understand the genetic pathological mechanisms. We used bioinformatics analysis to study the public human IA dataset. We found that the pathogenic mechanism of IA may be related to abnormal ciliary structure and function and disrupted RNA metabolism in spermatogenic cells. Disrupted m6A regulation of spermatogenesis may be an important pathological mechanism of IA and warrants attention. Finally, we screened for key genes and potential therapeutic drugs to determine future research directions.
Evidence for oxygenation of Fe-Mg oxides at mid-mantle conditions and the rise of deep oxygen
Authors: Liu Jin , Wang Chenxu , Lv Chaojia , Su Xiaowan , Liu Yijin , Tang Ruilian , Chen Jiuhua , Hu Qingyang , Mao Ho-Kwang , Mao Wendy L
Published: May 2020

As the reaction product of subducted water and the iron core, FeO2 with more oxygen than hematite (Fe2O3) has been recently recognized as an important component in the D” layer just above the Earth's core-mantle boundary. Here, we report a new oxygen-excess phase (Mg, Fe)2O3+δ (0 < δ < 1, denoted as ‘OE-phase’). It forms at pressures greater than 40 gigapascal when (Mg, Fe)-bearing hydrous materials are heated over 1500 kelvin. The OE-phase is fully recoverable to ambient conditions for ex situ investigation using transmission electron microscopy, which indicates that the OE-phase contains ferric iron (Fe3+) as in Fe2O3 but holds excess oxygen through interactions between oxygen atoms. The new OE-phase provides strong evidence that H2O has extraordinary oxidation power at high pressure. Unlike the formation of pyrite-type FeO2Hx which usually requires saturated water, the OE-phase can be formed with under-saturated water at mid-mantle conditions, and is expected to be more ubiquitous at depths greater than 1000 km in the Earth's mantle. The emergence of oxygen-excess reservoirs out of primordial or subducted (Mg, Fe)-bearing hydrous materials may revise our view on the deep-mantle redox chemistry.
Vancomycin-Nonsusceptible Enterococci Mediated by vanC at a Large Children’s Hospital: Prevalence, Susceptibility, and Impact on Care of Enterococcal Bacteremia
Authors: Dodson Daniel S , Dominguez Samuel R , MacBrayne Christine E , Williams Manon C , Parker Sarah K
Published: May 2020

Enterococcus gallinarum and casseliflavus have inherent vancomycin resistance and, though known as pathogens, have not been well characterized in pediatric patients. We identified a significant prevalence of these enterococcal species among immunocompromised patients at a large pediatric institution and describe the impact on patient care, antibiotic stewardship, and infection control.
The Impact of Multidrug-Resistant Organisms on Outcomes in Patients With Diabetic Foot Infections
Authors: Henig Oryan , Pogue Jason M , Martin Emily , Hayat Umar , Ja’ara Mahmoud , Kilgore Paul E , Cha Raymond , Dhar Sorab , Kaye Keith S
Published: May 2020

Background

Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) are important diabetic foot infection (DFI) pathogens. This study evaluated the impact of DFIs associated with MDRO pathogens (DFI-MDRO) on clinical outcomes.

Methods

Adults admitted to Detroit Medical Center from January 2012 to December 2015 with culture-positive DFI were included. Associations between outcomes and DFI-MDRO (evaluated as a single group that included methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus [MRSA], vancomycin-resistant enterococci, Enterobacteriaceae resistant to third-generation cephalosporin [3GCR-EC], Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) were analyzed. Outcomes included above- and below-knee lower extremity amputation (LEA), readmissions, and mortality within a year after DFI. A propensity score predicting the likelihood of having DFI-MDRO was computed by comparing patients with DFI-MDRO with patients with DFI with non-MDRO pathogens (DFI-non-MDRO). Using conditional logistic regression, DFI-MDRO was analyzed as an independent variable after patients in the MDRO and non-MDRO groups were matched by propensity score.

Results

Six hundred forty-eight patients were included, with a mean age ± SD of 58.4 ± 13.7. Most patients in the cohort presented with chronic infection (75%). DFI-MDRO occurred in greater than one-half of the cohort (n = 364, 56%), and MRSA was the most common MDRO (n = 224, 62% of the DFI-MDRO group). In propensity-matched analyses, DFI-MDRO was not associated with 1-year LEA or readmissions, but was associated with recurrent DFI episodes (odds ratio, 2.1; 95% confidence interval, 1.38–3.21).

Conclusions

DFI-MDRO was associated with a 2-fold increased risk of recurrent DFI compared with patients with DFI-non-MDRO.
Political Translation and the Sustainable Development Goals
Authors: Pope Chris G. , Ji Meng , Bai Xuemei
Published: May 2020

The chapter argues that whether or not the world is successful in attaining sustainability, political systems are in a process of epoch-defining change as a result of the unsustainable demands of our social systems. This chapter theorizes a framework for analyzing the political “translation” of sustainability norms within national polities. Translation, in this sense, denotes the political reinterpretation of sustainable development as well as the national capacities and contexts which impact how sustainability agendas can be instrumentalized. This requires an examination into the political architecture of a national polity, the norms that inform a political process, socioecological contexts, the main communicative channels involved in the dissemination of political discourse and other key structures and agencies, and the kinds of approaches toward sustainability that inform the political process. This framework aims to draw attention to the ways in which global economic, political, and social systems are adapting and transforming as a result of unsustainability and to further understanding of the effectiveness of globally diffused sustainability norms in directing that change.
Translation in Health Literacy Research
Authors: Chen Xuewei , Acosta Sandra
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the translation process for six health literacy instruments: Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine, Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (TOFHLA), European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q), All Aspects of Health Literacy Scale, Newest Vital Sign, and Functional, Communicative and Critical Health Literacy. Some instruments, developed in the United States and the United Kingdom, targeted English-speaking populations only. Later, researchers translated several into the languages of immigrant and refugee groups with limited English proficiency. For example, the TOFHLA was translated and adapted to target Korean and Vietnamese Americans. Some instruments were translated and employed for conducting health literacy research worldwide. One example is the HLS-EU-Q for health literacy research conducted in Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Taiwan, and Vietnam. This chapter describes how health literacy instruments were translated into various languages and revised to account for cultural and health system differences across countries and population groups.
Intersectionality and Children’s Rights
Authors: Weaver Jessica Dixon
Published: May 2020

This chapter illustrates the influence of intersectionality on children’s rights through examination of child marriage. It demonstrates how interlocking identities of female children across the globe create specific vulnerabilities that subject them to sexual violence and forced pregnancies within marriage to older men. This chapter identifies poverty, geography, religion, ethnicity, traditional patriarchal practices, and war or civil conflict as consistent factors that strongly influence the prevalence of forced marriage in many countries. It analyzes whether domestic and international laws, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, provide sufficient protection to prevent child brides. It concludes with a discussion of how community and nonprofit leaders are affecting cultural change and global education on child marriage and how young women are given voice through court cases challenging the practice as child abuse and oppression.
Citizenship and Rights of Children
Authors: Thronson David B.
Published: May 2020

Citizenship plays a larger and more critical role in the life of children than it should. Children who lack citizenship are incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. In the migration context, a child’s citizenship can be largely determinative of where and with whom a child lives. Despite a modern children’s rights framework that recognizes the humanity and autonomy of children, citizenship and nationality still form an integral part of a child’s identity and play a critical role in a child’s development. It has a pervasive impact in securing other rights for children and can be a central factor in a child’s cultural and linguistic background, education, economic and environment exposures, and virtually all aspects of a child’s daily life. This chapter examines children’s right to citizenship and explores the ongoing crisis of statelessness that undermines these rights. It reviews the role that citizenship plays in both voluntary and forced migration of children, child-specific protections found in both universal and regional human rights frameworks, and the role of children’s citizenship in promoting family unity.
Images toward the Emancipation of Children in Modern Western Culture
Authors: Lenzer Gertrud
Published: May 2020

This chapter outlines how in modern Western history since the late seventeenth century the modern concepts of the child and childhood have evolved and how these images have increasingly entailed conceptions of the rights of the child as a human subject. These transformations eventually became the central affirmations of the human rights of all children, as they are articulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in the best interests of the child. The foundations of the new images of childhood are prepared in the work of empiricist philosophy, the Enlightenment, the Romantic poets, and Victorian novels and are, in turn, connected to the reform movements against child labor and the innovations of childhood education in the nineteenth century with their emphasis that every child has a right to a humane and nurturing childhood. The arc of these developments also leads, in important part, to the establishment of such new disciplines as pedagogy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and social work with their concentrated focus on the child and childhood.
Situating the Rights versus Culture Binary within the Context of Colonial History in Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: May 2020

Children’s rights and culture have long been positioned as logically opposed to each other. Human rights, with their focus on the individual, were said to infringe on collective identity in diverse contexts. In turn, cultures (especially those in non-Western societies), and their attendant practices, were seen to impede the realization of human rights. However, the reality of children’s lives demonstrates the complexities that frame the contexts within which children are raised and highlights the implications for perceptions of children’s rights and culture. These complexities can be attributed to numerous factors, including the historical context of a society and its implications for that society’s relationship to both the concepts of culture and rights. Therefore, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this chapter explores the role of one historical event—colonial rule and missionary engagement—in shaping a society’s relationship to both the cultures that underpin its communities and the dominant notion of children’s rights.
Climate Change and Children’s Rights
Authors: Bakker Christine
Published: May 2020

The relationship between climate change and children’s rights has been explicitly recognized in the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This chapter considers how the enjoyment of children’s rights can be endangered by climate change and critically discusses the potentialities and limitations of children’s access to justice before international and regional human rights bodies to hold states accountable for their failure to protect these rights. The chapter concludes with some key challenges for states, human rights bodies, NGOs, and children themselves, suggesting, inte alia, that states should adopt a fully integrated approach toward climate policies, sustainable development, and their obligations under the Convention on Rights of the Child and that children, with the support of NGOs and other stakeholders, should fully exploit their access to justice and their participatory rights to influence decision-making on climate change that directly affects their current and future lives.
Examining the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child through the Lens of Caste- and Descent-Based Discrimination
Authors: Veerman Philip E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews and critiques the work of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child through the lens of caste- and descent-based discrimination. The chapter explores both the promise and the limitations of the work of the Committee in addressing discrimination that is, in many cases, fundamentally woven into the cultural and the religious practices of a society. In particular, it explores the promise and limitations of the Committee’s work in India, Nepal, and Mauritania to combat caste- and descent-based discrimination, inter alia, through its Concluding Observations. The chapter calls attention to the rights of children who are considered ‘untouchables’ or ‘outcastes.’ The chapter shows the challenges the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC Committee) confronts in addressing such discrimination. The chapter concludes by exploring ways the CRC Committee further the potential of the CRC to be an instrument of change.
The Psychology of Creative Processes in Music
Authors: Clarke Eric F.
Published: May 2020

In contrast to cerebral or mentalistic psychological accounts of creative processes, this chapter argues for an approach based within the frameworks of ecological theory and 4E cognition—the idea that psychological functioning is embodied, extended, embedded, and enacted. The chapter considers “everyday” and exceptional notions of the creative process and reviews cognitive models of musical creativity as a form of decision-making, as well as the tension between individualistic and social perspectives. As an alternative, it offers an account that recognizes the reciprocal relationship between materials (instruments, notations, tuning systems, recording/playback systems) and human minds and bodies conceived individually and collectively, drawing attention to four important features of musical creating: (1) the different scales at which it takes place, (2) its temporality, (3) its distributed and collaborative character, and (4) its intimate entanglement with environmental affordances.
The Enduring Kantian Presence in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
Authors: Shapshay Sandra
Published: May 2020

Most commentators hold that Schopenhauer breaks with Kant’s transcendental idealism insofar as he identifies the thing-in-itself with “Will.” By contrast, in this chapter, the author argues that Schopenhauer’s system bears a complicated yet faithful relationship to Kant’s transcendental idealism. After examining an interesting, recent interpretation by Alistair Welchman that reads him in this transcendent way, the author argues for an alternative view: Schopenhauer’s identification of the thing-in-itself with “Will” should be understood as metonymic, and the metaphysics he offers should be understood as hermeneutic. In sum, he is not giving a transcendent metaphysical doctrine so much as an immanent “interpretation” of the inner meaning of the world—along the lines of an interpretation of the meaning of a work of art—and one that, by the lights of Schopenhauer’s own methodology, should stand or fall on the basis of how well it makes sense of the phenomena.
Schopenhauer’s Haunted World
Authors: Cartwright David E.
Published: May 2020

Schopenhauer aspired to develop a metaphysics that provided a comprehensive explanation of the totality of experiences. Central to this task was the completion of the scientific image of the world by explaining assumptions made by, but not explainable by science and by explaining actual phenomena that science would rule out as impossible. So, in On Will in Nature, a work ostensibly concerned with showing how the best findings of science substantiated his metaphysics, the lengthiest chapter is “Animal Magnetism and Magic,” a discussion of phenomena that are viewed by science as impossible due to their violating the laws of space, time, and causality. In this chapter, the author critically examines the role that weird and paranormal phenomena play in validating Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, phenomena such as waking dreams, animal magnetism, ghosts, magic, prophetic dreams, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and communication with the dead.
Schopenhauer and Hindu Thought
Authors: Singh R. Raj
Published: May 2020

This chapter begins with a presentation of writers during Schopenhauer’s time who also wrote about Hindu thought, such as Herder, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, and Hegel, contrasting them with Schopenhauer’s relatively more knowledgeable approach. It then considers the question of whether Schopenhauer’s interest in Hindu thought diminished as he grew older or if his fundamental doctrines changed due to his subsequent studies of Buddhism; the author argues that it did not, contrary to some recent commentators. The chapter concludes by examining the extent to which Schopenhauer understood Hindu thought as an outlook that fully supports his pessimism and shows that Schopenhauer remained uninformed about how the Vedantic tradition includes the practice of bhakti (devotion, love). This is not exactly the path of Schopenhauerian asceticism but is an alternative to asceticism that involves a spontaneous embracing of the other-worldly in this world and an invitation to higher love in this life.
Post-Schopenhauerian Metaphysics
Authors: Gardner Sebastian
Published: May 2020

This chapter offers a synoptic view of an important strand in Schopenhauer’s legacy, the philosophical interest of which remains underappreciated: the diverse attempts of certain highly creative thinkers in the period 1860–1880 to refashion Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will in alternative and, they argue, more satisfactory and fruitful terms. The principal works in question are von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868), Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Mainländer’s Philosophie der Erlösung (Vol. 1, 1876), and Bahnsen’s Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt (1880). The author’s aim is to compare these developments systematically and relate them back to the doctrines and tensions in Schopenhauer from which they originate, in each case drawing out their original features and indicating their philosophical rationale.
Introduction
Authors: Wicks Robert L.
Published: May 2020

This Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer begins with a brief overview of Schopenhauer’s life and philosophical interests, emphasizing how the experience of compassion is central for understanding his philosophy. It highlights Schopenhauer’s profound distress about the amount of suffering in life and how this inspires his pessimism about the ordinary world and his subsequent hopes for transcendence through the minimization of suffering. The Introduction continues with a summary of the volume’s thirty-one essays that together address (1) influences on Schopenhauer; (2) Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will and empirical knowledge; (3) aesthetic experience, music, and the sublime; (4) human meaning, politics, and morality; (5) religion and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and (6) Schopenhauer’s influence.
Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar
Authors: Duffy Damian
Published: May 2020

While comics studies as a delineated field of academic discourse is relatively new, comics studies as a practice has existed since the earliest days of modern Western notions of the form. This chapter, composed in comics form, explores the author’s own history as a practitioner-scholar, creating both academic metacomics and nonacademic graphic novels. The auto(bio)graphic(al) essay—comics as scholarship—serves as a framing device for explicating the various and evolving roles for comics creation in academia: as a subject of study, as a form of critical making, and as a means of information dissemination. The chapter also employs the conspicuously juxtapositional, multimodal representational affordances of comics-as-design to highlight tensions between the institutional contexts of academia and creative professional practice.
Meditation and the Post-Secular Condition
Authors: Bazzano Manu
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the links between meditation practice and the post-secular turn in the wider domain of culture. The latter is a multifaceted phenomenon, and the chapter focuses on one of these—namely the assertion of immanence over transcendence. This calls for a reinterpretation of the habitual opposition between secularism and religion. Meditation is often embedded in either a religious or secular framework, with contemporary forms increasingly of the latter kind. A third way is suggested, in favor of a meditation practice that acknowledges the post-secular turn. This is particularly called for at a time when secularist forms of meditation such as mindfulness have been decontextualized to the extent of undermining the ethical context of meditation.
Negation and Opposition
Authors: Horn Laurence R.
Published: May 2020

The treatment of negation has long been linked to the treatment of opposition between propositions (or sentences) and between terms (or subsentential constituents). The primary types of opposition, usefully displayed on the post-Aristotelian Square of Opposition, are contradiction (two contradictories always differ in truth value) and contrariety (two contraries can both be false, but not both be true). The law of non-contradiction governs both oppositions, while the law of excluded middle applies only to contradictories. In principle, Aristotle’s semantic category of contradictory opposition lines up with the syntactic category of sentence (vs. constituent) negation, but in practice matters are more complicated, and while Klima’s diagnostics are helpful they are often not decisive. These complications are illustrated by the distribution of affixal negation, the phenomenon of logical double negation, the interaction of negation with quantifiers and modals, and the tendency for formal contradictory negation to be pragmatically strengthened to contrariety.
Modals and Negation
Authors: Francis Naomi , Iatridou Sabine
Published: May 2020

This chapter investigates the interaction of negation with modals. In many—though not all—languages, modals have a fixed scope with respect to negation, which does not always reflect the overt linear order of the two elements. The modal flavor and strength are sometimes predictors of the scopal relations, but sometimes not. This complex distribution of patterns has received a certain amount of attention in the literature. The chapter divides the proposals into three major camps, and discusses some strengths and weaknesses of each type of approach.
Negation in Non-Standard Varieties
Authors: Tortora Christina , Blanchette Frances
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the relevance of data from non-standard varieties to our understanding of natural language negation, and in particular, to theories which seek to model and explain natural language properties. The chapter focuses specifically on the different types of Negative Concord exhibited in non-standard Englishes, in West Flemish, and in Romance varieties, showing that in relation to Standard English, Standard Dutch, and Standard French, these non-standard languages exhibit much more intricate points of syntactic variation. The theoretical relevance of subject/non-subject asymmetries, the lexical nature of postverbal negative constituents, and intra-speaker variability in the expression of negation are discussed. The syntactic structures examined reveal that when non-standard languages serve as the main reference point in linguistic theory, this extends the hypothesis space in crucial ways, and more fruitful and revealing cross-linguistic comparisons can be made.
The Role of Pragmatics in Negation Change
Authors: Larrivée Pierre
Published: May 2020

The long tradition of relating changes in the form and meaning of negation to pragmatics raises the questions of what precise pragmatic notions are involved, and under what conditions they relate to (stages of) evolution. Emerging clausal negators (and possibly Negative Concord Items, NCIs) introducing a new stage of the Jespersen Cycle (Dahl 1979) are categorically found in explicitly discourse-old value clauses, to lose that value at quantifiable rates of usage. Emphasis characterizes NCIs when they contain a scalar marker, compete with another synonymous NCI, or enter a clausal negative construction. The pragmatic value of declining negative markers is still unclear. Markers from other grammatical categories relating to veridicality, such as interrogations and Verum Focus markers, also associate to a categorical discourse-old value in their initial stages of evolution. By identifying known knowns but also known unknowns, the chapter encourages systematic research into the relation between pragmatics and grammatical change.
Neg-raising
Authors: Horn Laurence R.
Published: May 2020

Neg-raising is “the strong tendency in many languages to attract to the main verb a negative which should logically belong to the dependent nexus [=clause]”: a speaker uttering I don’t believe that p is typically taken to have conveyed ‘I believe that not-p’. Such lower-clause understandings of higher-clause negations are possible across certain predicates (believe, think, want) but not others (realize, regret, deny) in English and other languages. Grammatical theories of Neg-raising posit a movement rule based on evidence from the interaction of higher negation with strict negative polarity items, negative inversion, negative parentheticals, and syntactic islands. Semantic and pragmatic approaches cite the relation of Neg-raising to other processes involving contrary negation in contradictory form, the availability of excluded middle presuppositions (I believe that p v I believe that not-p), the Neg-first conspiracy, and the role of politeness or euphemism in motivating Neg-raising.
A New Liability Regime for Illegal Content in the Digital Single Market Strategy
Authors: Montagnani Maria Lillà
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews developments in the regulation of online platforms as a result of the European Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy. In order to show a shift from a conditional liability regime to an organizational one—that is, a regime where liability depends on the structure adopted by the undertaking in relation to the diverse types of content—this chapter unpacks the category of illegal content (copyright infringing content, harmful content, and misleading content) and details for each type the obligations that have been envisaged by the European institutions. In doing so, the chapter establishes the boundaries of the online intermediaries’ liability regime for illegal content that is emerging within the DSM strategy, analyses its main features, and addresses its coherence.