bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Incretin-Based Therapies and the Short-term Risk of Pancreatic Cancer: Results From Two Retrospective Cohort Studies
Authors: Boniol Mathieu , Franchi Matteo , Bota Maria , Leclercq Agnès , Guillaume Joeri , van Damme Nancy , Corrao Giovanni , Autier Philippe , Boyle Peter
Published: November 2017

OBJECTIVE

Concerns have been raised about a possible increased risk of pancreatic cancer associated with incretin-based therapies. We examined the risk of pancreatic cancer among patients with diabetes prescribed incretin drugs.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

With the use of public health insurance databases of Belgium and the Lombardy Region, Italy, we created two retrospective cohorts that included adult patients who were first prescribed an incretin drug or another noninsulin antidiabetic drug (NIAD) from 1 July 2008 to 31 December 2013 in Belgium and from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2012 in the Lombardy Region. The risk of pancreatic cancer was evaluated by multivariate-adjusted Cox models that included time-dependent variables. Adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs) from Belgium and Italy were pooled by using fixed-effects meta-analyses.

RESULTS

The cohorts included 525,733 patients with diabetes treated with NIADs and 33,292 with incretin drugs. Results in both cohorts were similar. Eighty-five and 1,589 subjects who developed pancreatic cancer were registered among the incretin and NIAD new users, respectively, which represented an aHR of pancreatic cancer of 2.14 (95% CI 1.71–2.67) among those prescribed an incretin compared with an NIAD. The aHR with a drug use lag exposure of 6 months was 1.69 (1.24–2.32). The aHR decreased from 3.35 (2.32–4.84) in the first 3 months after the first incretin prescription to 2.12 (1.22–3.66) in months 3–5.9, 1.95 (1.20–3.16) in months 6–11.9, and 1.69 (1.12–2.55) after 12 months. Among those prescribed an NIAD, pancreatic cancer occurred mostly within the year after the first prescription. The risk of pancreatic cancer among patients subsequently prescribed insulin was 6.89 (6.05–7.85).

CONCLUSIONS

The recent prescription of incretin therapy is associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer. The reason for such an increase is likely the consequence of an occult pancreatic cancer that provokes or aggravates diabetes. Studies are warranted for assessing the risk of pancreatic cancer associated with long-term use of incretin drugs.
Diet Behavior Change Techniques in Type 2 Diabetes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Authors: Cradock Kevin A. , ÓLaighin Gearóid , Finucane Francis M. , McKay Rhyann , Quinlan Leo R. , Martin Ginis Kathleen A. , Gainforth Heather L.
Published: November 2017

OBJECTIVE

Dietary behavior is closely connected to type 2 diabetes. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to identify behavior change techniques (BCTs) and specific components of dietary interventions for patients with type 2 diabetes associated with changes in HbA1c and body weight.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

The Cochrane Library, CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, PsycINFO, and Scopus databases were searched. Reports of randomized controlled trials published during 1975–2017 that focused on changing dietary behavior were selected, and methodological rigor, use of BCTs, and fidelity and intervention features were evaluated.

RESULTS

In total, 54 studies were included, with 42 different BCTs applied and an average of 7 BCTs used per study. Four BCTs—“problem solving,” “feedback on behavior,” “adding objects to the environment,” and “social comparison”—and the intervention feature “use of theory” were associated with >0.3% (3.3 mmol/mol) reduction in HbA1c. Meta-analysis revealed that studies that aimed to control or change the environment showed a greater reduction in HbA1c of 0.5% (5.5 mmol/mol) (95% CI −0.65, −0.34), compared with 0.32% (3.5 mmol/mol) (95% CI −0.40, −0.23) for studies that aimed to change behavior. Limitations of our study were the heterogeneity of dietary interventions and poor quality of reporting of BCTs.

CONCLUSIONS

This study provides evidence that changing the dietary environment may have more of an effect on HbA1c in adults with type 2 diabetes than changing dietary behavior. Diet interventions achieved clinically significant reductions in HbA1c, although initial reductions in body weight diminished over time. If appropriate BCTs and theory are applied, dietary interventions may result in better glucose control.
Increased Liver Fatty Acid Uptake Is Partly Reversed and Liver Fat Content Normalized After Bariatric Surgery
Authors: Immonen Heidi , Hannukainen Jarna C. , Kudomi Nobuyuki , Pihlajamäki Jussi , Saunavaara Virva , Laine Jukka , Salminen Paulina , Lehtimäki Terho , Pham Tam , Iozzo Patricia , Nuutila Pirjo
Published: November 2017

OBJECTIVE

Changes in liver fatty acid metabolism are important in understanding the mechanisms of diabetes remission and metabolic changes after bariatric surgery.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

Liver fatty acid uptake (LFU), blood flow, and fat content (LFC) were measured in 25 obese subjects before bariatric surgery and 6 months after using positron emission tomography/computed tomography and MRS; 14 lean individuals served as the control subjects.

RESULTS

The increased LFU in obese subjects was associated with body adiposity. LFU was reduced postoperatively but was still high compared with the control subjects. LFC was normalized. Liver blood flow (per unit volume) was higher in obese subjects than in the control subjects at baseline and was further increased postoperatively; however, the total organ blood flow was unchanged as the liver volume decreased.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest that in a postoperative state, intrahepatic fatty acids are not stored in the liver but are used for oxidation to provide energy. Changes in perfusion may contribute to improved liver metabolism postoperatively.
Liquid parameter free method for nanoparticle size determination based on dynamic light scattering
Authors: Yue Chengfeng , Han Peng , Tang Zhilie
Published: November 2017

A ratio of diameter method based on dynamic light scattering was proposed to measure the size of nanoparticles. In the measurement process, parameters, such as the surrounding temperature T, the viscous coefficient η, and the refractive index n0 of the solvent and the scattering angle θ and the wavelength of the light λ0 in vacuum, are not needed. The only requirement is to provide a particle sample with a known diameter as a reference. After the intensity autocorrelation function values and baseline values are measured, the ratio of diameters from two kinds of particles can be calculated and the size of the sample particles can be deduced. The data analysis process is simple, convenient, and effective. When this method is applied to a polydisperse sample, the intensity-weighted mean diameter can be obtained.
Introduction
Authors: Woloch Nancy
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of single-sex protective laws. The longevity of protective laws rests in part on reformers' bifocal defense. The goal of such laws, their proponents claimed, was to compensate for women's disadvantages in the labor market and to serve as the linchpin of a larger plan to achieve wage-and-hour standards for all employees. This double-planked rationale—though contradictory—proved versatile and enduring; it suited constituents with varied priorities. Protective laws' longevity also rested on effective social feminist organization and, after 1920, on the federal Women's Bureau. In retrospect, single-sex protective laws were an unwieldy means to achieve egalitarian ends—or what women reformers of the 1920s called “industrial equality.” However, critics charged that the laws failed to redress disadvantage and even compounded it. Protection's supporters also confronted developments they could not anticipate and shifts in attitude they could not foresee.
Transformations: The New Deal through the 1950s
Authors: Woloch Nancy
Published: November 2017

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.
A Riotous Success
Authors: Hahamovitch Cindy
Published: November 2017

This chapter reveals the intimate and early relationship between illegal immigration and authorized guestworker programs, a relationship that continues to this day. Guestworker programs had persisted in the postwar period because they appeared to offer a manageable alternative to unregulated migration. However, to the extent that this was managed migration, it was managed to benefit the nation's largest farm employers, not the farmworkers. Managed migration was a success from the growers' perspective, precisely because the Caribbean and Mexican guestworker programs kept wages low and labor plentiful. From the policy makers' perspective, the guestworker programs seemed like sensible and legitimate ways to keep the border open. Temporary worker contracts and guestworkers' deportability added a patina of legality to what was, in essence, a grower-dominated labor recruitment scheme.
Takin’ It to the Courts
Authors: Hahamovitch Cindy
Published: November 2017

This chapter details the conflict between domestic workers and guestworkers as the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), with the Florida Rural Legal Services, became involved in a struggle for “the worst jobs in the world.” Florida Rural was working to transform every aspect of farmworkers' lives. Its lawyers sued to gain access to labor camps, to integrate those camps, to get workers transported in buses rather than flatbed trucks, to get any Florida county to set up a Food Stamp program, to get farmworkers paid what they were owed, and to enforce local sanitation and housing ordinances. And although Florida Rural took all sorts of cases—including straight forward divorce and landlord–tenant cases—a great deal of their time would be spent suing on behalf of Caribbean guestworkers who alleged exploitation by sugarcane companies and to prove that domestic workers had been unfairly deprived of those same miserable jobs.
Anthony Trollope and the Repellent Book
Authors: Price Leah
Published: November 2017

This chapter contends that while the verbal content of novels forces readers to empathize with other minds, the material heft of the book allows them to block each other out. Moreover, the unrepresentability of reading becomes a proxy for the incredibility of selfhood. The wedge that novels drive between the outside of books and the interiority of readers, or between material cover and verbal content, forces the genre to choose between describing the look of reading and its feel. In coding the handling of books as authentic and the reading of texts as a front, Anthony Trollope's comedies of manners upstage textually occasioned absorption by bibliographically assisted repulsion; but, more crucially, they abdicate any attempt to plumb psychological depths. Whenever the novel juxtaposes competing vocabularies in which to describe a printed object, it stages questions about the relation of the inner life to the object world.
It-Narrative and the Book as Agent
Authors: Price Leah
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that the most productive overlap between recent book-historical scholarship and the longer tradition of bibliographically themed life writing lies not in their common interest in human subjects, but rather in their shared attention to the circulation of things. Analytical bibliographers have shown that books accrue meaning not just at the moment of manufacture, but through their subsequent uses: buying and selling, lending and borrowing, preserving and destroying. A history of the book that took that whole range of transactions as building blocks could usefully borrow its formal conventions from the “it-narrative”: a fictional autobiography in which a thing traces its travels among a series of richer and poorer owners.
The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts
Authors: Price Leah
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at religious tracts and junk mail. The Victorians pioneered institutions—whether secular (the post) or religious (the tract society)—that allowed printed matter to be distributed at the expense of someone other than its end user. By disjoining owning from choosing, those transactions challenged Enlightenment assumptions about the relation between reading and identity. Where the secular press trusted print to lift individuals out of their social origin, the niche marketing pioneered by Evangelical publishers and commercial advertisers alike vested it instead with the power to mark age, gender, and class. If the content of tracts interpellated new audiences by matching characters' demographic to readers', so did the different material forms that each text took—reprinted on different paper, sold at different price points, distributed in gross and in detail.
The Book as Go-Between: Domestic Servants and Forced Reading
Authors: Price Leah
Published: November 2017

This chapter assesses why secular fiction devoted so much space to jokes about tract distributing. Where tracts imitate the formal conventions of the same novels with which they competed, mid-Victorian novels almost obsessively represent characters distributing—though rarely reading—tracts. Yet tract distribution was only one among several practices that the secular press used to figure questions about the relation between supply and demand. The experiences of being handed a tract, read aloud to, and tricked into mistaking printed advertisements for personal letters, all provided the novel with mirror images for its own claim to be freely chosen. By satirizing intrusively personal forms of charitable and familial transmission, the novel made a virtue of a traditional accusation against it: that its commercial distribution and solitary consumption made the novel an antisocial genre.
Conclusion
Authors: Price Leah
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter looks at George Gissing's New Grub Street (1985). Gissing's satire identifies a diffuse threat: that the book might become a vector for the social entanglements from which it's supposed to provide an escape. By the nineteenth century, the emotions generated by shared reading were coded less positively. Today, a gulf separates any literary critic's description of his own reading of a particular text—whose interest lies in its atypicality, even its perverseness—from a scholar's description of readings that are removed from his own world and whose agent is imagined as either collective or representative. In recent memory, that gulf has mapped on to a division of labor between two disciplines, literary criticism and cultural history.
Shoring Up Partisan Control: The Speakership Elections of 1839 and 1847
Authors: Jenkins Jeffery A. , Stewart Charles
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the speakership elections of 1839 and 1847, each of which highlighted the conflicting impulses of party and region at a time when national party leaders were striving for greater organization over House affairs. It explores the dynamics of roll call votes once the House began electing Speakers and other officers through viva voce voting, first in the 26th Congress (1839–1841), when the officer choices were dictated by a small group of nominal Democrats led by John C. Calhoun, and then in the succeeding four Congresses. The chapter also considers whether the coalition that elected Speakers in the early nineteenth century could look like a governing coalition, or even a procedural cartel. It shows that controlling the speakership was no guarantee of controlling the floor for the remainder of the antebellum period.
Totally Nonnegative Matrices
Authors: Fallat Shaun M. , Johnson Charles R.
Published: November 2017

Totally nonnegative matrices arise in a remarkable variety of mathematical applications. This book is a comprehensive and self-contained study of the essential theory of totally nonnegative matrices, defined by the nonnegativity of all subdeterminants. It explores methodological background, historical highlights of key ideas, and specialized topics. The book uses classical and ad hoc tools, but a unifying theme is the elementary bidiagonal factorization, which has emerged as the single most important tool for this particular class of matrices. Recent work has shown that bidiagonal factorizations may be viewed in a succinct combinatorial way, leading to many deep insights. Despite slow development, bidiagonal factorizations, along with determinants, now provide the dominant methodology for understanding total nonnegativity. The remainder of the book treats important topics, such as recognition of totally nonnegative or totally positive matrices, variation diminution, spectral properties, determinantal inequalities, Hadamard products, and completion problems associated with totally nonnegative or totally positive matrices. The book also contains sample applications, an up-to-date bibliography, a glossary of all symbols used, an index, and related references.
On Gaia
Authors: Tyrrell Toby
Published: November 2017

One of the enduring questions about our planet is how it has remained continuously habitable over vast stretches of geological time despite the fact that its atmosphere and climate are potentially unstable. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis posits that life itself has intervened in the regulation of the planetary environment in order to keep it stable and favorable for life. First proposed in the 1970s, Lovelock's hypothesis remains highly controversial and continues to provoke fierce debate. This book undertakes the first in-depth investigation of the arguments put forward by Lovelock and others—and concludes that the evidence doesn't stack up in support of Gaia. The book draws on the latest findings in fields as diverse as climate science, oceanography, atmospheric science, geology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. The book takes readers to obscure corners of the natural world, from southern Africa where ancient rocks reveal that icebergs were once present near the equator, to mimics of cleaner fish on Indonesian reefs, to blind fish deep in Mexican caves. It weaves these and many other intriguing observations into a comprehensive analysis of the major assertions and lines of argument underpinning Gaia, and finds that it is not a credible picture of how life and Earth interact. The book reflects on the scientific evidence indicating that life and environment mutually affect each other, and proposes that feedbacks on Earth do not provide robust protection against the environment becoming uninhabitable—or against poor stewardship by us.
Gaia, the Grand Idea
Authors: Tyrrell Toby
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the Gaia hypothesis as well as two other competing hypotheses. Gaia, the idea that life moderates the global environment to make it more favorable for life, was first introduced in 1972 in an academic paper by James Lovelock titled “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere.” The Gaia hypothesis proposes planetary regulation by and for the biota, where the “biota” is the collection of all life. Lovelock suggests that life has had a hand on the tiller of environmental control, and the intervention of life in the regulation of the planet has been such as to promote stability and keep conditions comfortable. The chapter then looks at the geological hypothesis, which suggests that the nature of the Earth's environment is principally determined by a mixture of geological forces and astronomical processes, and the coevolutionary hypothesis, which asserts that life has had an enormous impact on the planetary environment.
Broader Implications
Authors: Vogel David
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores some of the broader implications of studying the dynamics of policy convergence and divergence, the relationship between political institutions and policy styles, and the public perception of risks. The extensive literature on policy convergence addresses two issues: the extent of policy convergence and direction of policy convergence. A second body of literature addresses the impact of convergence on the direction of public policy. Much of this literature focuses on the impact of increased economic integration and global competition on the stringency of environmental regulation. The fact that both the United States and the EU have adopted a wide range of comprehensive consumer and environmental regulations suggests that powerful political and economic states enjoy substantial discretion in responding to domestic pressures for more stringent consumer and environmental regulations.
Encounters in the Metropole
Authors: Mandel Maud S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how migration and settlement in Marseille in the 1950s and early 1960s illustrates the impact of colonial legacies in shaping the contours of Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole. While Paris remained the main pole of attraction for both, Marseille's close proximity to North Africa, its Mediterranean climate, and its expanding economy meant that the city attracted thousands of repatriates and immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Shared cultural frameworks and the common experiences of migration and displacement meant that Muslim and Jewish newcomers often had much in common, creating the basis for convivial exchange in the mixed immigrant neighborhoods where many initially settled. Such commonalities did not, however, ensure similar processes of incorporation into French urban life. Differing relationships to the French state and levels of communal development meant that incoming Jews often not only had more resources available to them than Muslims arriving in the same period but also benefited from a local administration sympathetic to their concerns.
The 1967 War and the Forging of Political Community
Authors: Mandel Maud S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter investigates the influence of the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors on Muslim–Jewish relations in France. This conflict, which ended with Israel's occupation of significant Arab lands including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, had little impact on daily interactions more fundamentally shaped by the colonial North African past and the French present than the Middle East. Nevertheless, the unprecedented mobilization of Jewish organizational life around Israel and efforts to create parallel affinities in the Muslim North African population around Palestine continued to shape political discourse in binary terms. The result was that while conflict between France's large Muslim and Jewish populations was rare, the story of two polarized ethno-religious political units hardened as new political actors, particularly university students, began to use French campuses as spaces in which to engage in discussions of foreign policy.
Mafias on the Move
Authors: Varese Federico
Published: November 2017

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.
An Age of Possibility
Authors: Briones Matthew M.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter draws on Charles Kikuchi's diaries in presenting a trail guide for a reconstructive study of why the various schools of American democracy—including Nisei intellectuals at Berkeley, pluralist advocates, Chicago School sociologists, and African American progressives, among other types—ultimately failed in part and, not insignificantly, of how some of their ideas managed to survive the larger society's capitulation to Orwellian, Cold War ideology in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kikuchi's preservation of the time's key moments and meaning makers allows for a restaging of historical actors and events. Most importantly, through Kikuchi's narrative, historical actors reenact their earnest but fallible efforts at progressively redefining the idea of American democracy on a stage not quite prepared for the glare of klieg lights.
Conclusion: Tatsuro, “Standing Man”
Authors: Briones Matthew M.
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter discusses how the postwar period had remained charged with democratic possibility, though ideological retrenchment lingered both domestically and internationally. In an attempt to build on the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) initiated by FDR and A. Philip Randolph in 1941, which made it a crime for any company with a government contract to discriminate based on race or religion, President Harry Truman commissioned a Committee on Civil Rights in 1946 to study the problem of race relations and civil rights. Truman demonstrated how seriously he took the issue of civil rights by ordering the end of segregation in the federal workforce and the armed forces, two incredibly significant steps toward measurable progress and reform.
Introduction
Authors: Maxwell William J.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter first discusses the FBI's surveillance African American writers and imitation of black prose as part of its struggle against African American protest. It argues that unlike nearly every other institution of U.S. literary study, prone to showing interest only during well-promoted black renaissances, the Bureau rarely took its eyes off the latest in African American writing between 1919 and 1972. And during this more-than-fifty-year period, the whole of its Hoover era, it never dismissed this writing as an impractical vogue relevant only to blacks (or to bleeding-heart white “Negrotarians,” for that matter). Relying on dueling public documents of African American literature and FBI literary commentary, the book helps establish their surprising depth of contact between spy-critics and black Bureau writers. An overview of the four parts of the book is also presented.
Biodiversity and Plant-Animal Coevolution
Authors: Bascompte Jordi , Jordano Pedro
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins by tracing the history of research on mutualism. The first studies on mutualism focused on highly specialized one-to-one interactions between one plant and one animal. Examples of these highly specific pairwise interactions include Darwin’s moth and its, long-tongued flies and monocot plants, fig wasps and figs, and yucca moths and yuccas. The discussions then turn to the five major groups of multispecific mutualisms and coevolution in multispecific mutualisms. It argues that the interest in mutualistic interactions and their patterns of evolution and coevolution has been marginal during most of the recent history of ecology, with its central emphasis on antagonistic interactions. A persistent challenge has been to understand how multispecies interactions evolve and coevolve among free-living species.
Ecological and Evolutionary Mechanisms
Authors: Bascompte Jordi , Jordano Pedro
Published: November 2017

A persistent challenge in evolutionary biology has been understanding how coevolution has produced complex webs of interacting species. This chapter investigates the suite of ecological, evolutionary, and coevolutionary mechanisms responsible for generating such network patterns. Although some predictors of a species position in a network of interactions have been studied—mainly species abundance and forbidden links—we are moving toward an integrative approach, where several variables are tested simultaneously within the framework of phylogenetically independent contrasts. This can help us quantify the relative contribution of different factors given that they are often correlated. Body size, phenological spread, regional abundance, and species abundance are significantly correlated with a species position in the network of interactions in the frugivore set. There is a phylogenetic signal in the position of a species in the network (e.g., its degree). Beyond this, the phylogenetic patterns of shared ancestry also play a key role in explaining the overall pattern of mutualistic associations between the two sets of species. This pattern of interaction is influenced mainly by the evolutionary history of the plants.
The Price of Rights
Authors: Ruhs Martin
Published: November 2017

Many low-income countries and development organizations are calling for greater liberalization of labor immigration policies in high-income countries. At the same time, human rights organizations and migrant rights advocates demand more equal rights for migrant workers. This book shows why you cannot always have both. Examining labor immigration policies in over forty countries, as well as policy drivers in major migrant-receiving and migrant-sending states, the book finds that there are trade-offs in the policies of high-income countries between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. Insisting on greater equality of rights for migrant workers can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies, especially for lower-skilled workers. The book advocates the liberalization of international labor migration through temporary migration programs that protect a universal set of core rights and account for the interests of nation-states by restricting a few specific rights that create net costs for receiving countries. It analyzes how high-income countries restrict the rights of migrant workers as part of their labor immigration policies and discusses the implications for global debates about regulating labor migration and protecting migrants. It comprehensively looks at the tensions between human rights and citizenship rights, the agency and interests of migrants and states, and the determinants and ethics of labor immigration policy.
The Human Rights of Migrant Workers
Authors: Ruhs Martin
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines why so few countries have ratified international legal instruments for the protection of the rights of migrant workers. The existing literature has identified a host of legal issues and complexities as well as a lack of campaigning and awareness of the United Nations Convention on Migrant Workers (CMW) and other international conventions as key factors. The chapter argues that the primary explanation for the low level of ratifications of international migrant rights conventions lies with the effects of granting or restricting migrant rights on the national interests of migrant-receiving countries. It concludes by conceptualizing migrant rights as a subset of citizenship rights and suggests that policy decisions about the regulation of the rights of different types of migrant workers are, in practice, an integral part of nation-states' overall labor immigration policies.
Crime, Punishment, and Social Disorder
Authors: Wright James D. , Jasinski Jana L. , Lanier Drew Noble
Published: November 2017

In 1980, Arthur Stinchcombe, Tom Smith, Garth Taylor, and several additional coauthors published Crime and Punishment—Changing Attitudes in America. The book reviewed public opinion data from the first five or six waves of the General Social Survey (GSS), plus a large number of pre-GSS polls and surveys dating back to the 1930s, all dealing with attitudes of the American public toward crime, punishment, and social disorder. This chapter revisits the principal findings, themes, and conclusions of Crime and Punishment in light of what is now 30-plus years worth of GSS data. In addition, for the first time since Crime and Punishment was published, the United States has recently experienced a sharp decline in crime rates that began in about 1994 and continued for a decade. Thus, the chapter also explores the apparent effects of declining crime rates on Americans' attitudes about crime, punishment, and related matters.
Labor Force Insecurity and U.S. Work Attitudes, 1970s–2006
Authors: Kalleberg Arne L. , Marsden Peter V.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers subjective well-being at work—both perceived security and job satisfaction. Recent changes in U.S. economic organization have made employment more precarious. Jobs are viewed as less secure than in past decades, after adjusting for cyclical variations in unemployment. Insecurity appears to have grown fastest among the upper socioeconomic groups that historically have been least at risk of job loss. In keeping with happiness trends, though, job satisfaction remained very stable between the 1970s and 2000s. Gains in satisfaction during the course of employment countered lower satisfaction among cohorts of young workers entering the labor force. Present-day workers regard their jobs as less secure, but dissatisfaction need not follow if they regard precarity as a to-be-expected condition of employment.
Anti-Semitism: Spearhead of Universal Teror
Authors: Neumann Franz
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the function of anti-Semitism within the framework of the Nazi system. Anti-Semitism had been the most constant single ideology of the Nazi Party, but its understanding was impaired by the widely accepted scapegoat theory according to which the Jews were used as scapegoats for all evils of society. The slaughter or the expulsion of the scapegoat, however, marks in mythology the end of a process, while the persecution of the Jews, as practiced by National Socialists, was only the beginning of more horrible things to come. While anti-Semitism had thus been a constant and consistent policy of National Socialism, its manifestations changed considerably from 1933 to 1943. The chapter discusses these changes in anti-Semitic policies in order to gain insights not so much into the fate of the Jews but rather into the structure of the Nazi system.
Changes in the Reich Government
Authors: Marcuse Herbert
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on changes in the Reich government, beginning with the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as head of the Ministry of Interior. Himmler's appointment reflected growing internal difficulties and the determination of the regime to go to the limit in applying the totalitarian terror. The opposition would now be ferreted out and destroyed even more ruthlessly than before. As far as the underground movement was concerned, this would mean little change. The increase in Himmler's powers seemed to be primarily directed against the “conservative” groups in the Civil Service, against opposition among the middle classes and intellectuals, and against those business circles which may be inclined to favor an understanding with the Western Powers. The chapter discusses the state and party positions now held by Himmler, his role in implementing Nazi Germany's Eastern policy, and changes in the Reich Labor Service and in the Protectorate.
German Social Stratification
Authors: Marcuse Herbert
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses social stratification in Nazi Germany. Since the abolition of all popular representation, the political decisions in Germany were reached by compromises between the leadership of the Nazi Party, the Army, the ministerial bureaucracy, and the representatives of certain powerful business groups. The economic groups usually kept in the background, although their voice in the fundamental decisions of policy-making was just as strong as, and perhaps even stronger than, that of the government (state and Party). The chapter provides an overview of five ruling groups in Nazi Germany: the leadership of the Nazi Party and affiliated organizations; the top strata of the governmental and political bureaucracy; the High Command of the Armed Forces and its representatives; the leadership of big business; and the landed aristocracy. It also looks at the ruled social groups, which include artisans, civil servants, and peasants.
German Cartels and Cartel-Like Organizations
Authors: Neumann Franz
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on cartels and cartel-like organizations in Nazi Germany. The report explains German industrial organization is dominated by large vertical combines. Cartels and other associations of business, a common fixture of the German economy, have been used by the combines as means for the domination of industry and are in part a reflection of the degree of concentration of German industry. The prototypes of the combines are those within so-called heavy industry. The chapter first considers the role of cartels and cartel-like organizations in Germany before offering a number of recommendations relating to denazification, administration, cartels, Reichsvereinigungen, the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and the main committees and rings.
Administration of German Criminal Justice Under Military Government
Authors: Kircheimer Otto
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the administration of criminal justice in Germany under military government. The report claims that German criminal law conflicts in many respects not only with the theories and practices for which German criminal law had previously stood, but also with the theories which, in Anglo-American countries, are traditionally linked to the functions of criminal law. This conflict alone does not suffice to impose upon military government a duty to revise or revoke criminal legislation. The chapter considers changes in the German criminal justice system which are necessary not only for the security of the occupying army and the orderly development of German political and social life, but also for the execution of the policies and purposes of the United Nations. It also makes a number of recommendations with respect to military government's approach to criminal law, substantive law, procedural law, problems of jurisdiction, amnesty problems, prosecution of Nazi offenders against German citizens, and problems of administration.
Nazi Plans for Dominating Germany and Europe: The Nazi Master Plan
Authors: Marcuse Herbert
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses Nazi Germany's comprehensive plan for aggression, conquest, and domination in Europe and beyond. It first explains the role of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), or Nazi Party, in the Nazi plan for domination before analyzing the stages in which the plan would be executed: to overthrow the Weimar Republic, which was founded on parliamentary democracy, and to fight for the establishment of a Nazi dictatorship led by Adolf Hitler; to eliminate all opposition and establish totalitarian control over Germany; rearmament and preparation for the war of aggression. The chapter also considers the concepts of Lebensraum and Grossraumordnung on which the Nazi occupation policy was based and concludes with an assessment of the unlawful elements of the policy.
Photosynthetic Pigments: Chlorophylls, Carotenoids, and Phycobilins
Authors: Bianchi Thomas S. , Canuel Elizabeth A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the primary photosynthetic pigments used in absorbing photosynthetically active radiation, which include chlorophylls, carotenoids, and phycobilins—with chlorophyll representing the dominant photosynthetic pigment. Although a greater amount of chlorophyll is found on land, 75% of the annual global turnover occurs in oceans, lakes, and rivers/estuaries. All of the light-harvesting pigments are bound to proteins making up distinct carotenoid and chlorophyll-protein complexes. The chapter considers the chemistry and application of these very important chemical biomarkers and discusses their limitations in aquatic systems. The matrix factorization program CHEMical TAXonomy (CHEMTAX) was introduced to calculate the relative abundance of major algal groups based on concentrations of diagnostic pigments and is also discussed.
Local Elite
Authors: Pines Yuri
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses primarily on those members of local elites who were connected to the government apparatus. This core group of local elites had decisively shaped state-elite interactions throughout imperial history. The chapter first outlines historical changes in the character of local elites and in their relations with the pre-imperial, the early imperial, and the late imperial state. It shows that the process of establishing viable relations between these elites and the bureaucracy was a lengthy and painful one, and that it took more than a full millennium for the empire to learn how to harness local elites to its cause. Even then, tension between holders of social and of administrative power remained highly visible, and cycles of cooperation and contest between them shaped much of the political dynamics of the imperial age.
The People
Authors: Pines Yuri
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the reasons for the recurrence of large-scale popular uprisings throughout imperial history. It considers how the idea of rebellion correlates with fundamental principles of Chinese political culture, such as monarchism and intellectual elitism. Moreover, the chapter looks at why the rebellions serve to support rather than disrupt the empire's longevity. These issues are then related to the broader issue of the political role of the “people,” here referring primarily, although not exclusively, to the lower strata, in the Chinese imperial enterprise. In answering these questions, this chapter focuses on ideological and social factors that both legitimated rebellions and also enabled their accommodation within the imperial enterprise.
Imperial Political Culture in the Modern Age
Authors: Pines Yuri
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the modern trajectory of those major aspects of traditional Chinese political culture that discussed in the previous chapters. It shows that the concept of political unity remained the least affected by the advent of modernity. However, the principle of monarchism collapsed immediately with the advent of the new age, and the intellectual elite likewise saw a gradual erosion in their political power. Descending the traditional social ladder, the chapter arrives at two groups whose positions changed dramatically in the wake of the twentieth-century upheavals: local elites and the commoners. The first were, along with the emperor, the chief victims of China's entrance into modernity; the latter—now referred to in the modern parlance, as “the masses”—were supposed to be its major beneficiaries, and certainly gained a lot, though less than what might have been expected.
The Legacy of Max Weber in Weimar Political and Social Theory
Authors: Villa Dana
Published: November 2017

This chapter dissociates Max Weber's thought not only from a radical “student” of Weber's like Schmitt, who would eventually embrace Hitler, but also from his much more intimate protégé, Georg Lukács, who would become almost equally notorious for endorsing Stalin. It begins by laying out the basics of Weber's theoretical and political positions, the better to assess the view that he was an unwitting godfather of Weimar anti-liberalism and political radicalism. It then discusses specific continuities and discontinuities between Weber and Schmitt and Weber and Luckács. It argues that the discontinuities far outweigh the supposedly damning continuities. While Schmitt and Lukács undoubtedly learned much from Weber, their theoretical, practical, and moral positions are irreconcilable with his, for reasons which are both clear and substantial. There is, in other words, no “slippery slope” that leads from Weber to the unbound (and often unprincipled) positions of either Schmitt or Lukács.
Weimar Philosophy and the Fate of Neo-Kantianism
Authors: Beiser Frederick
Published: November 2017

This chapter explains the decline of neo-Kantianism. In a polemically revisionist account of this major intellectual movement, it casts neo-Kantians as somewhat less than benevolent purveyors of pacifism and cosmopolitanism, explaining how long-simmering cultural and philosophical traditions of pessimism and nihilism ultimately displaced the authoritative role of genuinely Kantian themes in their writings. It shows that the old story told about the fate of neo-Kantianism during the Weimar years—that it represented the path of reason, that it was the sensible via media between the extremes of right and left, that it was murdered by irrationalist fanatics— is a myth. It is philosophically problematic because neo-Kantianism could not effectively justify the democratic and moral values of the Weimar Constitution. And it is historically inaccurate, because the great reaction against neo-Kantianism arose less because of its support for Weimar than because of its support for the Great War.
Weimar Philosophy and the Crisis of Historical Thinking
Authors: Bambach Charles
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the philosophy of history and the so-called crisis of historicism. For proponents of the Weimar “crisis theology,” the breakdown of historical norms and values had led to a “permanent Krisis of the relation between time and eternity.” In this void “between the times” the work of Spengler, Barth, and Gogarten came to signify a “crisis of historicism”: not merely of the empirical research paradigm of practicing historians, but rather a crisis in the foundations of historical thinking, of Nietzsche's question about whether history itself has any meaning for life. It is this crisis that came to shape German historical thinking in decisive ways during the Weimar era, especially in the work of four philosophers of history: Oswald Spengler, Ernst Troeltsch, Heinrich Rickert, and Martin Heidegger.
The Politics of Art and Architecture at the Bauhaus, 1919–1933
Authors: Maciuika John V.
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents a wide-ranging survey of the politics and aesthetics of developments in interwar German architecture, with special attention to the key institution of Weimar architectural modernism, the Bauhaus. Artists at Walter Gropius's experimental Bauhaus school and in such diverse avant-garde art movements as Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Constructivism reflected a broad consensus that the pre-war empire had proved an absolute failure. The Kaiser, the government, the aristocracy, the military, big business, and the bourgeoisie were all seen as complicit in a corrupt system unable to cope with the many challenges of industrial modernity. Like a shifting kaleidoscope, artistic production during the Weimar era dazzled with unexpected forms, ever-shifting conceptual variety, and ideological diversity.