bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prediction of LDL cholesterol response to statin using transcriptomic and genetic variation
Authors: Kim Kyungpil , Bolotin Eugene , Theusch Elizabeth , Huang Haiyan , Medina Marisa W , Krauss Ronald M
Published: September 2014

Background

Statins are widely prescribed for lowering LDL-cholesterol (LDLC) levels and risk of cardiovascular disease. There is, however, substantial inter-individual variation in the magnitude of statin-induced LDLC reduction. To date, analysis of individual DNA sequence variants has explained only a small proportion of this variability. The present study was aimed at assessing whether transcriptomic analyses could be used to identify additional genetic contributions to inter-individual differences in statin efficacy.

Results

Using expression array data from immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from 372 participants of the Cholesterol and Pharmacogenetics clinical trial, we identify 100 signature genes differentiating high versus low statin responders. A radial-basis support vector machine prediction model of these signature genes explains 12.3% of the variance in statin-mediated LDLC change. Addition of SNPs either associated with expression levels of the signature genes (eQTLs) or previously reported to be associated with statin response in genome-wide association studies results in a combined model that predicts 15.0% of the variance. Notably, a model of the signature gene associated eQTLs alone explains up to 17.2% of the variance in the tails of a separate subset of the Cholesterol and Pharmacogenetics population. Furthermore, using a support vector machine classification model, we classify the most extreme 15% of high and low responders with high accuracy.

Conclusions

These results demonstrate that transcriptomic information can explain a substantial proportion of the variance in LDLC response to statin treatment, and suggest that this may provide a framework for identifying novel pathways that influence cholesterol metabolism.
Response to ‘OPN gene polymorphisms influence the risk of knee OA and OPN levels in synovial fluid in a Chinese population’
Authors: Zeng Chao , Gao Shu-guang , Lei Guang-hua
Published: September 2014

No abstract.
On linear ODEs with a time singularity of the first kind and unsmooth inhomogeneity
Authors: Burkotová Jana , Rachůnková Irena , Staněk Svatoslav , Weinmüller Ewa B
Published: September 2014

In this paper we investigate the analytical properties of systems of linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with unsmooth nonintegrable inhomogeneities and a time singularity of the first kind. We are especially interested in specifying the structure of general linear two-point boundary conditions guaranteeing existence and uniqueness of solutions which are continuous on a closed interval including the singular point. Moreover, we study the convergence behavior of collocation schemes applied to solving the problem numerically. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments.

MSC: 34A12, 34A30, 34B05.
Induction of the G2/M transition stabilizes haploid embryonic stem cells
Authors: Takahashi Saori , Lee Jiyoung , Kohda Takashi , Matsuzawa Ayumi , Kawasumi Miyuri , Kanai-Azuma Masami , Kaneko-Ishino Tomoko , Ishino Fumitoshi
Published: September 2014

The recent successful establishment of mouse parthenogenetic haploid embryonic stem cells (phESCs) and androgenetic haploid ESCs (ahESCs) has stimulated genetic research not only in vitro but also in vivo because of the germline competence of these cell lines. However, it is difficult to maintain the haploid status over time without a frequent sorting of the G1 phase haploid ESCs by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) at short intervals, because haploid cells tend to readily self-diploidize. To overcome this spontaneous diploid conversion, we developed a phESC culture condition using a small molecular inhibitor of Wee1 kinase to regulate the cell cycle by accelerating the G2/M phase transition and preventing re-entry into extra G1/S phase. Here, we demonstrate that, under this condition, phESCs maintained the haploid status for at least 4 weeks without the need for FACS. This method will greatly enhance the availability of these cells for genetic screening.
Theoretical Study of Electronic Properties of Phenalenyl Radical and Zethrene Diradical Species: Possibility of Triplet Oxygen Adsorption onto Graphene Surface
Authors: Kinoshita Keiji , Kawakami Takashi , Yoshimura Shohei , Saito Toru , Kitagawa Yasutaka , Yamanaka Shusuke , Okumura Mitsutaka , Yamaguchi Kizashi
Published: September 2014

Phenalenyl, zethrene, and extended zethrene molecules were employed to study the change in electronic properties of graphene surfaces upon exposure to oxygen atmosphere. These hydrocarbons are the smallest systems that can be used to evaluate intermolecular interaction with triplet oxygen molecules. The phenalenyl radical can simulate the radical nature of an edge structure and defect site of graphene sheets. Zethrene and extended zethrene molecules (n = 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4), which possess open-singlet diradical character, are also good models for studying chemisorption phenomena. From the calculated results for phenalenyl, the reaction path from the dissociation limit to the final products was found with chemisorbed structures (SS1 and SS2) and transition states (TS1, TS2, and TS3). Calculated adsorption energies were 7.72 (SS1) and 6.58 (SS2) kcal mol−1. An oxygen molecule can form a contact with phenalenyl radical in a weak chemisorption process, which is endothermic and has very low energy barriers to transition states. For the zethrene series, the diradical character index y, used to describe coupling between two radical spins, was evaluated using the broken symmetry approach. The values were 0.00, 0.01, 0.10, 0.23, and 0.32, for n = 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Although diradical nature was absent in ordinary zethrene, other extended zethrene molecules exhibited diradical character. The radical spin induced in phenalenyl unit A can contribute to the chemisorption of triplet oxygen molecules. The calculated adsorption energy for the first O2 adsorption onto heptazethrene was 5.38 kcal mol−1. Concomitantly, the radical electron on unit B revived and played an important role in the radical activity. The required adsorption energy for the second O2 adsorption became lower at −0.64 kcal mol−1.
Case Article—Class Scheduling with Linear Programming
Authors: Winch Janice K. , Yurkiewicz Jack
Published: September 2014

This paper describes “Kelly’s Class Scheduling” case that illustrates a real-life application that is understandable to undergraduate business students in an introductory management science course. Given available courses, their meeting times, and ratings of the course sections, we show how to use a simple integer program to find an optimal class schedule. The case analysis is followed by an optional “Make Your Own Schedule” assignment where students formulate their own class schedule using a similar approach. This case-and-assignment combination offers several benefits. It provides an interesting example that students can identify with and is simple enough for inexperienced students to grasp in a relatively short time. It helps students develop appreciation for optimization methods by applying them immediately in their own life and lets students experience the entire process of quantitative modeling including problem definition, data collection, model formulation, model solution, and implementation.

Case Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.
A positive change in surgical attitudes towards online workplace-based assessment
Authors: Hawkins SC , Osborne A , Egbeare D , Williamson J , Lambert AW
Published: September 2014

Traditional models of surgical education have been based on the apprenticeship model. However, in recent years work patterns have changed significantly 1 and a competency-based approach to trainee assessment has been developed with the introduction of workplace-based assessments (WBAs) and online portfolios. The Intercollegiate Surgical Curriculum Programme (ISCP) began development in 2002 and has become a central component of surgical trainee assessment since its introduction in 2007.
On special values of certain L -functions
Authors: Furusawa Masaaki , Morimoto Kazuki
Published: September 2014

We prove an algebraicity result concerning special values of certain automorphic $L$-functions. Namely let
$f$ be a holomorphic newform of weight $k$ and let $\pi$ denote the attached irreducible unitary cuspidal
representation of ${\rm GL}_2(\Bbb{A}_{\Bbb{Q}})$. Let $V$ be a quadratic space defined over $\Bbb{Q}$ such
that $V\otimes_{\Bbb{Q}}\Bbb{R}$ is anisotropic. Let $\tau$ be an irreducible automorphic representation of
${\rm SO}(V,\Bbb{A}_{\Bbb{Q}})$. Then we prove an algebraicity result on the special value of $L_S(s,\pi
\otimes\tau)$ at the rightmost critical point under some conditions. As a special case we prove a new
algebraicity result on the special value of the Rankin triple $L$-function for ${\rm GL}(2)$ in some
unbalanced case, which conforms with Deligne's conjecture on special values of motivic $L$-functions made
explicit by Blasius in the aforementioned case.
Quantitative rigidity results for conformal immersions
Authors: Lamm Tobias , Nguyen Huy The
Published: September 2014

In this paper we prove several quantitative rigidity results for conformal immersions of surfaces in ${\Bbb R}^n$
with bounded total curvature. We show that (branched) conformal immersions which are close in energy to either
a round sphere, a conformal Clifford torus, an inverted catenoid, an inverted Enneper's minimal surface or an
inverted Chen's minimal graph must be close to these surfaces in the $W^{2,2}$-norm. Moreover, we apply these
results to prove a corresponding rigidity result for complete, connected and non-compact surfaces.
Equivariant K -Chevalley rules for Kac-Moody flag manifolds
Authors: Lenart Cristian , Shimozono Mark
Published: September 2014

Explicit combinatorial cancellation-free rules are given for the product of an equivariant line bundle class
with a Schubert class in the torus-equivariant $K$-theory of a Kac-Moody flag manifold. The weight of the line
bundle may be dominant or antidominant, and the coefficients may be described either by Lakshmibai-Seshadri
paths or by the $\lambda$-chain model of the first author and Postnikov. For Lakshmibai-Seshadri
paths, our formulas are the Kac-Moody generalizations of results of Griffeth and Ram and Pittie and
Ram for finite dimensional flag manifolds. A gap in the proofs of the mentioned results is addressed.
The identification problem for the attenuated X-ray transform
Authors: Stefanov Plamen
Published: September 2014

We study the problem of recovery both the attenuation $a$ and the source $f$ in the attenuated X-ray
transform in the plane. We study the linearization as well. It turns out that there is a natural
Hamiltonian flow that determines which singularities we can recover. If the perturbation $\delta a$
is supported in a compact set that is non-trapping for that flow, then the problem is well posed.
Otherwise, it may not be, and least in the case of radial $a$, $f$, it is not. We present uniqueness
and non-uniqueness results for both the linearized and the non-linear problem; as well as a H\"older
stability estimate.
An exotic deformation of the hyperbolic space
Authors: Monod Nicolas , Py Pierre
Published: September 2014

On the one hand, we construct a continuous family of non-isometric proper ${\rm CAT}(-1)$ spaces on which the
isometry group ${\rm Isom}({\bf H}^n)$ of the real hyperbolic $n$-space acts minimally and cocompactly. This
provides the first examples of non-standard ${\rm CAT}(0)$ model spaces for simple Lie groups. On the other
hand, we classify all continuous non-elementary actions of ${\rm Isom}({\bf H}^n)$ on the infinite-dimensional
real hyperbolic space. It turns out that they are in correspondence with the exotic model spaces that
we construct.
Translate of horospheres and counting problems
Authors: Mohammadi Amir , Golsefidy Alireza Salehi
Published: September 2014

Let $G$ be a semisimple Lie group without compact factors, $\Gamma$ be an irreducible lattice in $G$.
In the first part of the article we give the necessary and sufficient condition under which a sequence
of translates of probability ``horospherical measures'' is convergent. And the limiting measure is also
determined when it is convergent (see Theorems~1 and~2 for the precise statements). In the second part,
two applications are presented. The first one is of geometric nature and the second one gives an
alternative way to count the number of rational points on a flag variety.
Martial Rape, Pulsating Fear, and the Sexual Maltreatment of Girls (παῖδες), Virgins (παρθένοι), and Women (γυναῖκες) in Antiquity
Authors: Gaca Kathy L.
Published: September 2014

The variably sequenced tripartite noun phrase, παῖδες, παρθένοι, and γυναῖκες, is shown to be a coordinated noun series signifying “girls, virgins, and women,” not, as hitherto interpreted, παῖδες as “male youths” or as “boy and girl children” plus “virgins and women.” Further, “virgins” in this phrase is primarily an age designation meaning “emergent adolescent or virgin-aged girls.” The tripartite phrase is thus female-specific, and it reflects the three life stages of underage girlhood, emergent adolescent “virginhood” (or maidenhood), and womanhood as a sexually active wifehood and procreative motherhood. In relation to female groups, the tripartite phrase refers to females of mixed ages from girlhood to child-bearing womanhood. Although important in itself for raising the social visibility of girls and women in antiquity, this semantic argument also brings forth important new evidence from the orator Hyperides, the Peripatetic Clearchus, the historian Diodorus, and the Roman imperial-era Adoulis inscription about the sexual tenor and sexually acquisitive goals of populace-ravaging warfare against underage girls, virgin-aged girls, and women. The Neoplatonist Proclus discloses the resultant social availability of underage girls, virgin-aged girls, and women to be sexually objectified and maltreated. These new insights reaffirm the value of linguistics and philology as powerful tools of socio-historical inquiry.
Voice or Vision?: Socrates’ Divine Sign and Homeric Epiphany in Late Platonism and Beyond
Authors: Roskam Geert
Published: September 2014

Socrates’ notorious “divine sign” (δαιμόνιον) was a challenge for the later philosophical (esp. Platonic) tradition. Different attempts at interpretation were made throughout late Antiquity. One interesting approach, discussed in this article, was the strategy of interpreting the phenomenon by means of Homeric material. In particular, Athena’s famous epiphany to Achilles at the beginning of Iliad Book 1 provides interesting opportunities in such a context, although other Homeric lines are occasionally used as well. This rich tradition, beginning with Plutarch’s De genio Socratis , can also be found in authors such as Maximus of Tyre, Apuleius, Julian, and Hermias of Alexandria, and turns up again centuries later in Byzantine Homeric exegesis.
Terence Interrupted: Literary Biography and the Reception of the Terentian Canon
Authors: Davis Josiah E.
Published: September 2014

Inconsistent and contradictory accounts of Terence’s death conclude his biography in Suetonius’ De Viris Illustribus . Many of these narratives originated in the work of scholar-poets active at the end of the second century b.c.e. This article shows that the numerous versions of his death are interpretations of the formation of his canon from the retrospective viewpoint of his late second-century readers. These death scenes dramatize the construction of Terence’s literary legacy in its reception. Furthermore, they elucidate the role that the nascent genre of Roman literary biography played in enacting and articulating literary-critical debates among Terence’s readers.
In Further Defense of Ovid’s Astronomical Accuracy in the Fasti
Authors: Lewis Anne-Marie
Published: September 2014

Matthew Fox argued convincingly, in AJP 125:91–133 (“Stars in the Fasti ”), that an earlier negative assessment of Ovid’s astronomy in the Fasti has been incorrect and that Ovid’s accuracy in his astronomical references is generally above reproach. Fox was left at the conclusion of his analysis, however, with twelve astronomical references, which he was compelled to categorize as “genuine mistakes.” This article argues that, on the basis of astronomical placements that can be verified on a celestial map, Ovid does not appear to have committed any errors in his astronomical references in the Fasti .
Show Me the Way to Go Home: A Reconsideration of Seneca’s De Consolatione ad Polybium
Authors: Gloyn Liz
Published: September 2014

Seneca’s De Consolatione ad Polybium is firmly grounded in an underappreciated Stoic theoretical framework. Writing from exile on Corsica, Seneca deliberately uses Stoic language as one of many complex interweaving strategies to offer consolation to the imperial freedman Polybius on the death of his brother, specifically through the text’s portrait of the emperor Claudius. Instead of demonstrating or undermining Seneca’s sincerity, the ad Polybium offers us an insight into the strategies an elite writer might use to engage with the emperor and the power politics behind their relationship.
Investigations into the Elemental Composition of Earthenware Vessels from the Guthe Collection using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis
Authors: Yao Alice
Published: September 2014

This study undertakes an elemental compositional analysis of Philippine earthenware vessels from the Guthe collection using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA). Unlike foreign trade ceramics, earthenware vessels were locally produced goods but which also played a part in the development of Philippine chiefdoms as an item traded between inland and coastal groups. Thus, the detection of compositional groups within earthenware vessels may help identify patterns of production and exchange. It is also hoped that the results from this pilot study can contribute to the future development of an elemental database for earthenware vessels.
The Distribution and Cultural Context of Artificial Cranial Modification in the Central and Southern Philippines
Authors: Clark Jamie L.
Published: September 2014

Given its regional scope and good provenience information, the Guthe Collection offers a rare opportunity to examine both the spatial distribution and the cultural context of artificial cranial modification (ACM) in the archaeological record of the central and southern Philippines. A combination of visual classification and discriminant function analysis was used to classify the cranial sample into modified and unmodified groups. Following this, the relative frequency of each class of crania by island was explored. The results show that 95 percent of the artificially modified crania in this sample were recovered from the Visayan group, and most of these were found on the islands of Samar and Tablas. Not only did these two islands have the greatest percentage of modified crania (among islands with a sample size greater than one), they were also the only islands from which crania of ambiguous modification status were recovered. On the basis of these results, it would appear that the practice of ACM may have been more common among historic populations on Samar and Tablas than on other islands in the study region. Statistical tests were then conducted in order to explore the hypothesis that cranial modification was an elite practice. The available evidence suggests that the practice of ACM in the central and southern Philippines was not limited to members of the social elite.
Temporal Variability in Southeast Asian Dragon Jars: A Case from the Philippines
Authors: Dueppen Stephen
Published: September 2014

This article presents the results of a detailed analysis of four dragon jar groups found in the Guthe Collection at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. Dragon jars are a class of decorated stoneware storage vessels that were employed in trade throughout Southeast Asia during the second millennium a.d . The jars in this study, recovered from mortuary contexts, are a unique data set due to their wide deposition throughout the southern Philippines. An exploration of intra-group and inter-group patterning has revealed temporal patterns and likely production locales for dragon jar manufacture over the course of the twelfth to seventeenth centuries. These temporal and spatial trends are then applied to the Guthe Collection to examine jar distribution throughout the Philippines over the critical period spanning the emergence of large-scale international commerce in the region. This study contributes a well-defined chronology for a commonly found material class, as well as knowledge of regional trading patterns.
Survey, Excavation, and Geophysics at Songjiaheba—A Small Bronze Age Site in the Chengdu Plain
Authors: Flad Rowan , Horsley Timothy J. , Guedes Jade D’Alpoim , Kunyu He , Bennett Gwen , Chen Pochan , Shuicheng Li , Zhanghua Jiang
Published: September 2014

Archaeological survey in the Chengdu Plain of Sichuan Province has revealed settlement patterns surrounding Late Neolithic walled sites, including large numbers of small settlements from the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Han Dynasty eras. Here geophysical survey and excavation at one of these small-scale sites dating to the Middle Bronze Age are reported, showing for the first time the value of high-resolution geophysics for evaluating site size and integrity in the Chengdu region.
Reconsidering Display in Online Testimonial Advertising: The “Show Faces” Feature in Facebook’s Social Plugins
Authors: Jessen Iben Bredahl
Published: September 2014

Showing what consumers think and like about products, services, or brands is a well-known communicative feature in advertising. This article explores the new ways in which consumer experience is represented in online communication. Facebook has developed a range of Social Plugins that can be added on external websites to generate traffic to Facebook (e.g., by showing what other users “like”). This article focuses on the display of profile pictures in Social Plugins located on brand and company websites. Within this context, the article approaches the display of profile pictures as a dynamic text feature in what will be considered “testimonial advertising.” Inspired by Goffman’s discussion of display in public and private pictures, the article examines new meanings of display by focusing on the textual mechanisms of the plugins. Two main types of arguments related to the display of profile pictures are identified: an interpersonal argument based on personal knowledge of the portrayed, and a crowd argument established by the piles of unknown faces. The article suggests these two arguments as important to the meaning potential of the Social Plugins’ profile pictures; yet, it also critically discusses the compiled pictures beyond social communication as a tendency of aestheticization .
Shifting to Digital: Difficulties, Challenges, and Opportunities—A Qualitative Interview Study of Practitioners’ Experiences in the U.S.
Authors: Roca Meritxell
Published: September 2014

Consumers’ attention is more divided than ever, and the value of that attention has reached unprecedented levels. The Internet has changed the way we communicate, the way we amuse, and the way we live. And, as a consequence, both the entertainment industry and the advertising industry are being forced to redefine their relationship and their bonds with audiences. This has put severe pressure on how they operate as they try to adapt to a new scenario mainly characterized by unpredictability. Using data from 13 semi-structured in-depth interviews, this paper explores the transformation of the advertising industry in the “digital age” by means of examining practitioners’ narratives related to business models, relationship with consumers, metrics and analytics, organizational structure, and the integration of digital and traditional strategies.
Pasifika Diaspora and the Changing Face of Australian Rugby League
Authors: Lakisa David , Adair Daryl , Taylor Tracy
Published: September 2014

This article investigates the sociocultural motivations of the Pasifika diaspora in Australian sport in the context of rugby league football. In 2011, some 36 percent of National Rugby League ( nrl ) playing contracts were signed by players of Pasifika descent (). There has been an accompanying rise of Pasifika influence in the game: this is apparent on the field with the high profile of star Pasifika players and off the field with the intensification of welfare and education programs intended to accommodate Pasifika athletes in the National Rugby League. The purpose of this article is to critically analyze kinship networks, religious influences, and the sociocultural expectations placed on Pasifika footballers by various stakeholders and to evaluate how these factors either motivate these athletes to play in the National Rugby League or discourage them from doing so. The article explores what these experiences reveal about the nature of Pasifika communities in an Australian context. The material presented draws on the principal author’s original research on Australian rugby league and the experience of athletes of Pasifika descent, as well as his direct experience as a former sports education administrator and as the inaugural Pacific Islander coaching and development officer for the New South Wales Rugby League.
Beyond the All Blacks Representations: The Dialectic between the Indigenization of Rugby and Postcolonial Strategies to Control Māori
Authors: Calabrò Domenica Gisella
Published: September 2014

Since the advent of professional rugby, Māori have gained international visibility and attractiveness. The representation of the New Zealand rugby team revolves around their integration and the incorporation of their warrior tradition, suggesting a strong connection between rugby and contemporary Māori society. Rugby has indeed been the object of a process of indigenization, fulfilling goals of sociocultural continuity, political acknowledgment, and, in the professional era, upward social mobility. Nevertheless, rugby has also partly fulfilled its role as a tool of colonization in creating and sanctioning power differentials. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in New Zealand, this article examines the relationship between Māori and rugby as a dialectic phenomenon that has resulted in the diversification of Māori experiences and perceptions of rugby and attests to the heterogeneity of Māori life experiences, aspirations, and formulations of indigeneity in contemporary society.
Global Sport in the Pacific: A Brief Overview
Authors: Uperesa Fa‘anofo Lisaclaire , Mountjoy Tom
Published: September 2014

In recent decades, sport has become an increasingly important path of mobility for Pacific Islander men, positioning them within interlinked local, state, regional, and global sporting economies. Players from the Pacific (particularly in rugby, rugby league, soccer, and gridiron football) have become icons through their sporting prowess, not only within Oceania but in Japan, the United States, and throughout Europe as well, as new markets have opened up through professional and semi-professional sport. Yet this movement continues to take place within the fragile context of the spread of globalized media, transnational capital investment, and development initiatives throughout the region. This introduction to global sport in the Pacific considers the complicated realities of and links between modern, highly commercialized team sports that have facilitated both the rise of global sport in the Pacific and the rise of the Pacific in global sport. Focused on key themes of agency and mobility; development and discipline; indigenization, embodiment, and ethno-nationalism; and polyvalent imaginaries, the contributions to this special issue explore how and why sporting practices have become closely linked to various economic, political, and social processes that shape possibilities for everyday life across the Pacific and beyond.
“Such a Site for Play, This Edge”: Surfing, Tourism, and Modernist Fantasy in Papua New Guinea
Authors: West Paige
Published: September 2014

Both sport and tourism are deeply modernist forms that rely on the circulation of people, media, and capital for their endurance. In this article, I analyze both forms through the ethnographic examination of surf-related tourism in Papua New Guinea. For many Papua New Guineans, surf tourism is an avenue for gaining positions in wage labor. For some the development of the industry is an attempt to foster “sustainable” economic development in the country. These forms of participation rely on international tourists who see the sport and the industry in Papua New Guinea as a site for recreation and play. This article deals with these people, surf tourists who visit Papua New Guinea and for whom surfing is a major part of their social identity. Surfing as an embedded, affective practice and a set of deeply socio-ecological propositions about people-in-nature is historically tractable to indigenous Pacific Island societies. It was deterritorialized, or removed from the context of its origin, by Australian and American youth who took up the practice as a sport in the early part of the twentieth century. Today surfing has been reassembled as a form of development in the very places from which it emerged. Through the analysis of the movements of media, people, and capital involved in the surf tourism industry in Papua New Guinea, this article demonstrates the new social assemblages that emerge when labor, development, and play intertwine.
Fabled Futures: Migration and Mobility for Samoans in American Football
Authors: Uperesa Fa’anofo Lisaclaire
Published: September 2014

Since the 1970s, Samoan participation in American gridiron football has grown exponentially. In American Sāmoa (and other transpacific Samoan communities), football has come to represent both a real and imagined “way out” of what appears to many as a strangled field of possibility. The visibility and vibrancy of football in American Sāmoa is rooted in Samoan histories of migration to the United States, Samoan cultural sensibilities, the changing market of the American football industry, and narrowing economic opportunities. The transnational nature of football migration is key to understanding the appeal of playing football, the rewards that accrue to successful players, and how these resources have continued to transform conditions of possibility (materially and ideologically) for young people in the islands. This article explores the layered and complex motivations for football participation as shaped by prospective forms of capital, transnational sporting institutions, and historical contingency. Focused on history, economy, and a transformed vision of the future, it offers a critical genealogy of football in (American) Sāmoa and Samoans in football.
Sports, Bodies, and Futures: An Epilogue
Authors: Besnier Niko
Published: September 2014

Since their invention in mid-nineteenth century Britain, modern sports have traveled: first, as they were exported to all regions of the world, often piggybacking on colonial projects; second, as sports are often brought to troubled economies and states in the context of development and reconciliation projects; and third, as athletes moved across national and other borders to play and seek a livelihood by playing. Athlete mobility is more alive than ever in the contemporary world, and Pacific Islanders’ participation in this mobility is disproportionate to the visibility of their nations on the global stage. Understanding the meaning of sport in the region, however, raises important questions whose implications reach beyond the confines of sport: the workings of power in a world in which bodies become commodities; the conflicts that arise between different epistemologies of development and resource use; and the clashes between different conceptualizations of the future.
“No Longer Just a Pastime”: Sport for Development in Times of Change
Authors: Kwauk Christina Ting
Published: September 2014

In the midst of a noncommunicable disease (ncd) crisis, sport has emerged as a popular public health strategy across Oceania. Promising to turn unhealthy, obese bodies into fit, productive bodies, sport-based health programs are supposed to contribute to the economic development of Pacific Island nations. In Sāmoa, however, these efforts have been complicated by an existing web of meaning entangling sport within the transnational realities of Samoan families. Drawing from twelve months of multi-sited, ethnographic field research on sport for development (sfd) in Sāmoa, this paper demonstrates how Samoan understandings of sport reshape what it means to be a fit and productive citizen. Specifically, I illuminate (1) how sport is perceived as a “ticket” overseas and (2) how sport is perceived as a viable alternative pathway to the blessed life, especially for those (male) youth not excelling in school. Finally, I discuss (3) how sfd is a sociocultural response to a shifting transnational political economy of tautua (service) to the family, church, and village rooted in an unevenly expanding social landscape of mobility and work. This paper contributes to anthropological conversations on contemporary sporting formations in Oceania by highlighting how sport is reimagined and repackaged by Samoan youth, education leaders, and government officials as a development tool to create healthy development futures.
Playing with Knowledge: Sport and the Paradox of Development in Solomon Islands
Authors: Mountjoy Tom
Published: September 2014

This article addresses particular ideas behind the ideological discourses and practices of development relating to Solomon Islands soccer and the dissemination of knowledge applied to sporting practice. Speaking through the interconnection of local processes linked to global flows of information and practices, this analysis focuses on specific recent attempts by the global governing body fifa and its regional representative, the ofc , to introduce and implement various development programs under the objectives set out in official statutes. I further assess the disparate set of practices and conceptions of the various actors following the 1998–2003 “Tension” period as part of a broader discourse of development systems and interaction. By examining forms of “empowerment” discourse, appropriated by local agents as well as foreign organizations such as fifa , this article suggests a more nuanced and pluralized approach to rethinking contemporary sporting formations and the competing knowledge systems at play throughout the region.
How Capitalism Got Its Name
Authors: Merrill Michael
Published: September 2014

What is capitalism? What is it we are for, if we are for it? Or against, if we are against it? As we use the term today, it generally refers to a kind of economy, variously characterized by private industry, free enterprise, competitive markets, and lots of investment opportunities, which most people believe are valuable parts of the way we live together. But during the 1830s and 1840s, in the run-up to the revolutions of 1848, when the term “capitalism” first began to appear frequently, it signified neither a social system nor a “mode of production” but a politics—the concerted attempt by capitalists and their allies to secure the political power they needed to ensure that their interests took precedence over those of everyone else, including landowners, small businesses, wage earners, and even taxpayers more generally.
Candide’s Garden: A Parable
Authors: DeWitt Helen
Published: September 2014

Candide, after many vicissitudes, retreats to a primitive cabin in the woods; he will cultivate his garden. He drinks, smokes too much. He goes to AA, an avowedly apolitical social machine for sobriety. At each meeting one volunteer reads the Twelve Traditions, a second the Twelve Steps, each member speaks briefly in turn (cross-talk forbidden), the serenity prayer is recited in unison. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
The Gospel According to Terry
Authors: McCarraher Eugene
Published: September 2014

God has been through a very rough patch over the last 500 years. Once the Creator and Ruler of the universe, He fell into a long and precipitous decline with the advent of modernity. Dethroned as Ruler in the North Atlantic by religious tolerance and democracy, the Almighty watched helplessly as science refuted His claim to be the Creator. Historians, archeologists, and literary scholars broke the spell of His holy books, impugning their inerrancy and exposing them as riven by myths, errors, and contradictions. Add popular education, material prosperity, and longevity extended by better diet and medicine, and God’s hold on the moral and metaphysical imagination grew ever more attenuated.
Bad Feminists
Authors: Tennant-Moore Hannah
Published: September 2014

The internet is excited about the rise of the bad girl. Critics from Bitch magazine to the Guardian have applauded characters like Hannah, Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, and Annie of the film Bridesmaids for upending the traditional injunction that women must be likeable. These women are selfish, obnoxious, and slutty: and they still get the guy! In a superficial sense, the fantasy is indeed a female take on an old comedic trope: the unappealing anti-hero winds up in the arms of a gorgeous, kind woman. The interesting—and troubling—thing about this supposed inversion is that the gender dynamic of the resulting happy couple is pretty much the same, no matter who’s writing the fantasy: the woman is melodramatic and led astray by her emotions; the man is the moral compass who sets her straight.
Burma’s Fault Lines: Ethnic Federalism and the Road to Peace
Authors: Craig Charmaine
Published: September 2014

After more than half a century of war and broken ceasefire agreements, Burma is currently in the midst of landmark peace talks between its government and a coalition of ethnic resistance groups. In July, the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT)—representing sixteen ethnic nationalities including the Karen, the Kachin, the Mon, the Arakanese, and the Shan—met in Kachin-held Laiza to discuss the terms of a proposed national ceasefire, under negotiation with the government since last November. The ethnic nationalities, of which all but the Kachin and the Ta’ang have already struck bilateral ceasefire agreements with the government, are calling for greater administrative autonomy within a new federal Union of Burma, control over natural resources in their territories, and a guarantee that political dialogue with the government will take place within months of a national ceasefire accord.
The Naxal Novel
Authors: Martyris Nina
Published: September 2014

The Lowland—Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel—opens on the grounds of the Tollygunge Club, a British-built country club in Calcutta, West Bengal. The year is 1956, and although a decade has passed since India won its freedom, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth graces the club’s main drawing room. Two Bengali brothers have snuck over the boundary wall of the club and are gazing at its golf course in awe. Subhash and Udayan Mitra belong to a middle-class family. They live in a modest enclave of houses near the titular lowland, a marshy sprawl that floods during the monsoon. On its periphery, hundreds of Partition refugees from East Bengal have erected huts of sackcloth and bamboo between growing piles of garbage. The club’s walls have been raised to block out the squalor but also to prevent the poor from seeing how the elite live.
Social Democracy in America?
Authors: Yeselson Rich
Published: September 2014

Recently, a group of conservative policy intellectuals and writers captured the attention of the media and even of a few Republican politicians. These “reformocons,” including Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review, and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, believe it is time for the Republican Party to propose public policy solutions to domestic issues like health care and education, rather than provoke the cultural resentments of the party base, what Douthat has called the politics of “white identity.”
Passports for Sale
Authors: Araxia Abrahamian Atossa
Published: September 2014

Last March, Malta began accepting citizenship applications from wealthy foreigners willing to invest $1.5 million in the country in exchange for Maltese citizenship (and with it, all the benefits that come with belonging to an EU member state). While the Maltese program was by no means the first of its kind, it received an enormous amount of attention in Europe for putting a price tag on EU passports. Then, in May, an entrepreneur named Roger Ver launched Passports for Bitcoin, a service that helps clients use bitcoin to buy St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship. St. Kitts has exchanged citizenship for cash for years, but thanks to Ver, it’s gaining a reputation among the techie-libertarian set as a go-to place to escape the U.S. tax code.
Refusing Marcuse: Fifty Years after One-Dimensional Man
Authors: Whitfield Stephen J.
Published: September 2014

One-Dimensional Man was published just half a century ago, catapulting a rather obscure professor in his sixties to international fame. In less than five years, over 100,000 copies of the book would be sold in the United States alone, with translations extending the influence of Herbert Marcuse into sixteen foreign languages. He addressed packed auditoriums all over the United States and Europe. At a student-occupied university in France, young rebels put on a kind of teach-in they called a “journée marcusienne.” In Paris, Marcuse met with Nguyen Than Le, North Vietnam’s chief delegate to the peace talks with the United States. At the University of Rome, students brandished placards proclaiming their allegiance to Marx, Mao and Marcuse. Before the sixties had ended, he was commonly designated as the unofficial faculty advisor to the New Left.
Theses on the Feminist Novel
Authors: Gay Roxane
Published: September 2014

To understand the feminist novel we must first understand feminism. Or perhaps we must understand the nature of the novel. Or perhaps we must ask the questions, “What is feminism?” and “What is the novel?” Or perhaps, these questions are not at all relevant. The answers could never be wholly satisfying. Feminism concerns the equality of women. When I say equality, I mean that women should be able to move through the world with the same ease as men. Women should be able to live in a society where their bodies are not legislated.
Decline of the Strike
Authors: Gourevitch Alex
Published: September 2014

These days, we associate the right to bear arms with right-wing cranks who think they are defending themselves when they bring their assault rifles with them to Chili’s. But consider a few episodes from American labor history. During the Great Strike of 1877, workers beat back hutindreds of National Guardsmen with stones, brickbats, and pistols, taking over most of St. Louis for a few days. In 1892, during a running battle with local militias in the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, miners loaded a railroad car with powder and a burning fuse and sent the makeshift bomb down a hill into a mill where strikebreakers and their militia protectors had been staying. In 1922, after armed guards fired machine guns at strikers trying to convince strikebreakers to rejoin the strike, hundreds of miners accompanied by an airplane dropping dynamite bombs attacked the mine personnel.
Introduction: The Gunshot Concert
Authors: Marcus David
Published: September 2014

In the summer of 1935, as Hitler’s troops were readying their occupation of the Rhineland, a group of left-wing writers gathered before a crowd of over three thousand in the Latin Quarter’s Palais de la Mutualité. Paris in June can be a swamp, and la Mutualité—a poorly ventilated theater built at the height of the Depression—was hot as ever. Paul Vallaint-Couturier, the editor of the Communist daily L’Humanité, rose to give his speech in a bathing suit. In the auditorium were Gide and Malraux, Brecht and Musil, Pasternak and E.M. Forster—who before an audience of improvised newspaper fans and sweat-stained shirts rehearsed the arguments he later made in Two Cheers for Democracy.
How the Right Gets Us Wrong
Authors: Serpe Nick
Published: September 2014

Kevin D. Williamson, a National Review correspondent whose recent highlights include comparing a black nine-year-old to a monkey, has read Dissent’s Summer 2014 special section on economic policy, and has found it “disappointing.” The articles, he wrote, were “intellectually exhausted and sodden with nostalgia,” offered “cheap homiletics,” and featured arguments of “magnificent crudeness.” Lest you think Williamson’s conservative corrective was mean-spirited, I should also mention that, in the same piece, he called Dissent “one of the Left’s better journals—possibly its best.” And he explained why: Dissent “has resisted the pressure to disguise its ideological commitments as Ezra Klein–style pseudo-pragmatism. Rather, it forthrightly makes the case for a command-and-control economy and a totalitarian politics.”
Bartlebys All!
Authors: Saval Nikil
Published: September 2014

Few institutions have offered themselves as less promising for the novelist than the modern office. Work of any kind is a tricky subject for representation; office work—gray, gnomic, and unknowable—even more so. After all, what is it that people do in offices? Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” the locus classicus for discussions of early clerical work, begins by depicting strategies for avoiding work at what is nominally a law office. Few of the unnamed narrator’s employees seem to do much lawyering: Turkey works through the morning, but gets drunk at lunch; Nippers never finds an appropriate position to sit at his desk. And then there’s Bartleby, who, unlike his colleagues, works—and does so without fanfare, “silently, palely, mechanically.”
Piketty in Paris: Why don’t popular economic ideas become policy?
Authors: Delalande Nicolas
Published: September 2014

This year the French economist Thomas Piketty became an international celebrity. Headlines everywhere proclaimed his meteoric rise. This was particularly astonishing in the United States where, as Paul Krugman noted in his review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, few readers had previously heard his name. But viewed from France, his book’s success has not been a complete surprise. For more than ten years now, Piketty has been one of the best-known economists in France and among the most active in public debate, especially since the publication in 2001 of his book Les hauts revenus en France au XXème siècle: Inégalités et redistribution, 1901–1998, which details the history of high incomes in the modern nation. This ambitious book laid the groundwork for the method and argument that are at the heart of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Odd Women
Authors: Gornick Vivian
Published: September 2014

It remains one of life’s great mysteries, that moment of political readiness when the elements of experience and circumstance are sufficiently fused to galvanize an idea whose time has come. For me, and a few thousand others like me, discovering feminism in the early 1970s provided such a moment. I was born into an immigrant working class family that was also Jewish and left-wing so I don’t remember a moment when I was not aware of and moved by the political-ness of life; but it was only now, in the 70s, that I felt it viscerally. I was in my thirties and already twice married, twice divorced, when that first feminist trumpet was sounded and I awakened, as though from a dream, to the single most important realization of my life: the conviction that men by nature take their brains seriously and women by nature do not was an acquired belief, not an inborn reality.