bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Filtering and inference for stochastic oscillators with distributed delays
Authors: Calderazzo Silvia , Brancaccio Marco , Finkenstädt Bärbel 
Published: September 2018

Abstract

Motivation
The time evolution of molecular species involved in biochemical reaction networks often arises from complex stochastic processes involving many species and reaction events. Inference for such systems is profoundly challenged by the relative sparseness of experimental data, as measurements are often limited to a small subset of the participating species measured at discrete time points. The need for model reduction can be realistically achieved for oscillatory dynamics resulting from negative translational and transcriptional feedback loops by the introduction of probabilistic time-delays. Although this approach yields a simplified model, inference is challenging and subject to ongoing research. The linear noise approximation (LNA) has recently been proposed to address such systems in stochastic form and will be exploited here.

Results
We develop a novel filtering approach for the LNA in stochastic systems with distributed delays, which allows the parameter values and unobserved states of a stochastic negative feedback model to be inferred from univariate time-series data. The performance of the methods is tested for simulated data. Results are obtained for real data when the model is fitted to imaging data on Cry1, a key gene involved in the mammalian central circadian clock, observed via a luciferase reporter construct in a mouse suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Availability and implementation
Programmes are written in MATLAB and Statistics Toolbox Release 2016 b, The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, Massachusetts, USA. Sample code and Cry1 data are available on GitHub https://github.com/scalderazzo/FLNADD.

Supplementary information
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Strategic adjustment of copulatory plug size in a nematode
Authors: Canales-Lazcano Jorge , Contreras-GarduÑo Jorge , Cordero Carlos 
Published: September 2018

AbstractCopulatory plugs (CP) are substances produced during copulation that block the genital openings of the female. In several species of Nematoda, males produce CP that are thought to impede female remating and thus sperm competition. The relatively large size of the CP in several nematodes, and its evolutionary loss in self-fertilizing populations of Caenorhabditis elegans, suggests that CP are costly to produce. If CP production is costly, the application of basic concepts of strategic ejaculation theory suggests a modulated allocation of CP in response to sperm competition risk. This hypothesis led us to predict that males perceiving a higher risk of sperm competition will produce larger CP. We tested these ideas with the entomopathogenic, gonochoristic nematode Rhabditis regina. Our first experiment provides evidence suggesting that production of CP is costly, because the size of CP is negatively affected by stressful conditions (high population density, small male adult size, and suboptimal food type). The results of our second experiment support the prediction that males adjust the size of CP to sperm competition risk: the average size of CP increased as the number of males competing for one female increased. Overall, our study supports the idea that in R. regina the production of CP is costly for males and that the size of the CP produced is influenced by sperm competition risk.
Knowledge of intrapartum care among obstetric care providers in rural Kenya
Authors: Itote Elizabeth W , Fleming Lila C , Mallinson R Kevin , Gaffney Kathleen F , Jacobsen Kathryn H 
Published: September 2018

Abstract

Background
Kenya did not meet its maternal mortality ratio (MMR) target under the Millennium Development Goals. The aim of this study was to examine the gaps in knowledge of intrapartum care among obstetric care providers (OCPs) in rural Nandi County, Kenya.

Methods
This cross-sectional study in 2015 surveyed 326 nurses, midwives, clinical officers and physicians about their knowledge, attitudes and practices related to normal labor and childbirth, immediate newborn care and management of obstetric complications.

Results
Self-reported intrapartum knowledge among OCPs was insufficient according to accepted international standards. The mean total knowledge score for all OCPs based on a validated 30-question inventory was 62% (range 23–90%). Only 14 providers (4%) scored as ‘competent’ (a score ≥80%). Scores were higher for OCPs who had received pre- and postemployment emergency obstetric care training and those with higher levels of confidence in their skills. Survey respondents identified a lack of knowledge as one of the greatest barriers to high-quality patient care.

Conclusions
Increasing training opportunities for OCPs may improve the quality of obstetric care provided to women in Kenya and other high-MMR locations in sub-Saharan Africa and enable progress toward achieving the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals target for maternal survival.
Poverty, networks, resistance: The economic sociology of Roma migration for begging
Authors: Friberg Jon Horgen 
Published: September 2018

AbstractMigration for begging and informal street work in Western Europe has become a common livelihood strategy in many Romanian Roma communities, and over the last decade, Scandinavia has emerged as an important new destination. Using a combination of quantitative survey data on Romanian migrant beggars and street workers in Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen, and qualitative fieldworks in Scandinavia and Romania, this article presents a framework for studying migration for begging that goes beyond widespread narratives rooted in either culture or poverty. I argue that migration for begging is a purposeful economic adaptation, embedded in three distinct sets of social phenomena. First, the social and economic processes of marginalization of Roma communities in post-socialist Romania can help explain the motive for migration in terms of poverty and lack of alternative options. Second, the structure of social capital within Roma households and communities can help explain why they are able to engage in transnational migration under extremely difficult conditions despite lacking economic and educational resources. Third, ‘oppositional’ Roma identities can help to explain why some are willing to engage in ‘transgressional’ activities that others perceive as shameful, thus allowing the exploitation of marginal economic resources in times of economic hardship.
First-generation immigrant women faculty’s workplace experiences in the US universities—examples from China and Taiwan
Authors: Li Yun Ling 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
Higher education institutions around the world have striven to recruit ‘the world’s best and brightest’ faculty to enhance their scientific leadership and innovation, and American colleges and universities recognize their responsibilities to promote international intellectual exchange and encourage the free flow of ideas, knowledge, and people of all nations.While there is a growing body of literature on foreign-born academics, very little is known about foreign-born women in the US higher educational institutes, despite the fact that an increasing number of women exist in all academic disciplines, especially in STEM fields. By exploring Chinese and Taiwanese immigrant women faculty’s stories, this study aims to partially address the gap in the literature concerning foreign-born women faculty’s workplace experiences in US universities and colleges.
Dynamical cluster disruption and its implications for multiple population models in the E-MOSAICS simulations
Authors: Reina-Campos M , Kruijssen J M D , Pfeffer J , Bastian N , Crain R A 
Published: September 2018

ABSTRACT
Several models have been advanced to explain the multiple stellar populations observed in globular clusters (GCs). Most models necessitate a large initial population of unenriched stars that provide the pollution for an enriched population, and which are subsequently lost from the cluster. This scenario generally requires clusters to lose &gt;90 per cent of their birth mass. We use a suite of 25 cosmological zoom-in simulations of present-day Milky Way mass galaxies from the e-mosaics project to study whether dynamical disruption by evaporation and tidal shocking provides the necessary mass-loss. We find that GCs with present-day masses $M\gt 10^5 $ M⊙ were only 2–4 times more massive at birth, in conflict with the requirements of the proposed models. This factor correlates weakly with metallicity, gas pressure at birth, or galactocentric radius, but increases towards lower GC masses. To reconcile our results with observational data, either an unphysically steep cluster mass-size relation must be assumed, or the initial enriched fractions must be similar to their present values. We provide the required relation between the initial enriched fraction and cluster mass. Dynamical cluster mass-loss cannot reproduce the high observed enriched fractions nor their trend with cluster mass.
Pulsational activity changes in the Cepheid Polaris (α UMi) during 2017–2018: a new amplitude decrease
Authors: Usenko I A , Kovtyukh V V , Miroshnichenko A S , Danford S , Prendergast P 
Published: September 2018

ABSTRACT
We present an analysis of 67 recent spectra of α UMi (Polaris) obtained in 2017 August–2018 May. Frequency analysis reveals an increase in the pulsation period to $3{{^{\rm d}_{.}}}970662$ relative to our 2016/17 observations. The radial velocity amplitude was found to be 3.87 $\mathrm{\, km\, s}^{-1}$  in the last half of 2017, but dropped to 2.80 $\mathrm{\, km\, s}^{-1}$ during the first half of 2018. In comparison with 4.16 $\mathrm{\, km\, s}^{-1}$ observed by us in 2015, the observations reveal a new decrease in pulsation amplitude. Such a result is unexpected given that a gradual amplitude growth was evident during the last decade. The average values of ${T_{\rm eff}\, }$ were found to be 6017 K and 6039 K, respectively, but the ${T_{\rm eff}\, }$ amplitude has increased despite the decrease in radial velocity amplitude. Possibly that could be explained by the presence of starspots on the Cepheid’s surface.
Historical Method In The Study of Law And Culture
Authors: Wagner Bryan 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter explores some of the ways that legal historical research has been conditioned by the concept of culture. It argues for the importance of understanding key terms of analysis in light of their intellectual history. No matter how we draw the distinction between law and culture, legal historical research becomes skewed when we presume that we are able to distinguish law from culture without attending to the intellectual and institutional history that made law and culture understandable as opposed entities separated into distinct domains. Legal historians must proceed inductively, but they also need to expand their analysis dialectically through a genealogy that conceives law and culture not as natural kinds but as inherited ideas.
Legal History As The History of Legal Texts
Authors: Fernandez Angela 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
The use and reliance on casebooks and law-review articles informed the background understanding of famous leading cases as they developed over time, particularly into the twentieth century and the context of an academic law school using the case method of instruction. The case is still the primary unit of analysis. However, investigations of how cases came to be included in casebooks are few and far between. This chapter asks: Why did that happen to some cases and not others? What were editors thinking when they dragged one of these specimens out of obscurity? Did the weight of past practice dictate their continued inclusion or were other factors at play? Did they actually become useful in new ways to new generations of teachers and students or was it just a strange kind of deference or inertia that kept them in the casebook where they continued to be read and discussed?
From Evolutionary Functionalism to Critical Transnationalism
Authors: Schmidt Katharina Isabel 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter explores practices of legal-historical comparison from their beginnings as an occasional element of ancient, medieval, and early modern treatises to their institutionalization as a discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. It also makes a case for ‘critical transnationalism’ as a way for legal-historical comparativists to produce works that are both timely and interesting. Finally, it surveys promising areas of and approaches to transnational legal research, all the while bearing in mind the particular challenge law poses to transnational history.
Marxist Legal History
Authors: Tomlins Christopher 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
Forty years after the 1975–1985 decade of socialism’s macro-political crisis, and of Western Marxism’s metastasizing theoretical crisis and eventual dispersal, we are in the grip of a new fast-forming historical conjuncture. Both globally, and within its historic Anglophone heartlands, capital is at war with itself, and it is liberalism’s turn to feel the cold pinch of disintegration. This chapter asks: What opportunities exist for renewing the attempt to create a Marxist legal historiography? What responsibilities attend that effort? It suggests that legal historians need to realize that what makes Marxist legal history useful and attractive is less that it is a particular way of doing legal history that produces specific outcomes than that it is an explicitly historical method.
Critical legal studies
Authors: Christodoulidis Emilios , van der Walt Johan 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and framed legal thought. A key, and distinctive, element of this legal tradition is that it characteristically connects to the state as constitutive reference; in other words it understands the institution of law as that which organizes and mediates the relation of the state to civil society. The other constitutive reference is political economy, a reference that typically grounds this tradition of thinking about the law in the materiality of the practices of social production and reproduction. It is in these connections, of the institution of law to the domains of the state and of the political economy, that critical legal theory locates the function of law, and the emancipatory potentially it affords on the one hand, and the obstacles to emancipation it imposes, on the other.
Critical Race Theory and The Political Uses of Legal History
Authors: Lovelace H. Timothy 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
In 1976, Derrick Bell, a former lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wrote about the inability of modern civil rights litigation to advance real racial justice. His willingness to dissent from civil rights orthodoxy would radically reshape the study of race, law, and history. The result would lead to the creation of critical race theory. This chapter begins by examining the role of historical analysis in the development of critical race theory. It then explores how legal historians of the civil rights movement imported insights from critical race theory to develop three decades of movement scholarship. Next, it charts new scholarly directions for both critical race theorists and legal historians. The chapter concludes with reflections on how legal history and critical race theory have influenced contemporary struggles for racial justice.
Literary Analysis of Law
Authors: Stern Simon 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter shows what digital resources can reveal about the prehistory of the Miranda warning. The first part of the chapter offers an extensive, database-driven survey that takes novelistic representation as its focus. Conversely, by studying a particular work, and focusing not only on its content but also on how it uses plot and character, we can ask about its animating logic, posing questions about how a text works rather than what it says or shows overtly. The second part takes a more intensive approach, asking how Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1891) uses various techniques of representation to explore the logic of obscenity law—a logic that also applies to the legal regulation of language in other contexts, such as libel and sedition.
Doing Things with Legal History
Authors: Brophy Alfred L. 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of historical analysis in property law. The history of property has been used to offer support for property rights. Their long history makes the distribution of property look normal, indeed natural and something that cannot or should not be challenged. However, historically in the U.S there have been competing visions of property. From the Progressive era onward especially, the history of property has been used to show the unequal distribution of property and to offer an alternative vision that expands the rights of non-owners of property. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the history of opposition to feudalism and protection of the rights of non-owners was used to protect the rights of non-owners. Thus, the history of property has been a tool of judges and legislators to support property rights and it has also been, less frequently, a tool of critique.
The Historical Method in Public Law
Authors: Loughlin Martin 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter highlights the importance of the historical method in public law by showing the way that public law was established as a distinct field of knowledge in European jurisprudence. Since developments in French legal thought in the sixteenth century provided the catalyst for generating this modern concept of public law, this is the focus of the chapter. This approach exposes the constituent elements of public law and shows how the historical method becomes a central element of the modern practice of public law. It suggests that the modern idea of public law was created as a local, contextual, source-based practice in opposition to the universal metaphysics of medieval scholasticism. It was established by setting in place a conception of law as a body of practical knowledge that is historical in orientation and geared to the concerns of civil government.
Adjudication of Indigenous-Settler Relations
Authors: Boast Richard P. 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter examines the connections between the field of legal history and the various ways in which claims against states by indigenous groups are adjudicated and resolved. It focuses on ‘indigenous’ and ‘settler’ relationships, and on redress mechanisms in Australia and New Zealand. In both cases, the establishment of such mechanisms arose out of political and legal conjunctures within each country, and owed little to developments in international law. The Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand and the Native Title Tribunal in Australia have very different functions, utilize different kinds of expert evidence, and operate in very different political and constitutional settings. While both bodies require expert evidence typically provided by non-indigenous specialist researchers, the required expertise in each case is different: anthropology in the Australian case, and history in New Zealand.
Legal History as Political History
Authors: Kreitner Roy 
Published: September 2018

Abstract
This chapter takes the phrase ‘legal history as political history’ as gesturing at two existing, perhaps by now classic debates. One is the question of political history’s meaning, or its differentiation from social or cultural history. The other is the relationship between law and politics, especially regarding the Critical Legal Studies view of that relationship. The chapter begins by briefly considering these preliminary questions. It then advances a suggestion about what to look for when trying to understand legal history as political history. It suggests that there is a body of legal history being written and published today, not generally considered as a group or in any way related, that would be considered profitably as political history. The common feature for this work is that it shows change over time in the way law functions.
A Systematic Comparison of Designs to Study Human Fecundity
Authors: Eijkemans Marinus J. C. , Leridon Henri , Keiding Niels , Slama Rémy 
Published: September 2018

Background:
Several epidemiologic designs allow studying fecundability, the monthly probability of pregnancy occurrence in noncontracepting couples in the general population. These designs may, to varying extents, suffer from attenuation bias and other biases. We aimed to compare the main designs: incident and prevalent cohorts, pregnancy-based, and current duration approaches.

Methods:
A realistic simulation model produced individual reproductive lives of a fictitious population. We drew random population samples according to each study design, from which the cumulative probability of pregnancy was estimated. We compared the abilities of the designs to highlight the impact of an environmental factor influencing fecundability, relying on the Cox model with censoring after 12 or 6 months.

Results:
Regarding the estimation of the cumulative probability of pregnancy, the pregnancy-based approach was the most prone to bias. When we considered a hypothetical factor associated with a hazard ratio (HR) of pregnancy of 0.7, the estimated HR was in the 0.78–0.85 range, according to designs. This attenuation bias was largest for the prevalent cohort and smallest for the current duration approach, which had the largest variance. The bias could be limited in all designs by censoring durations at 6 months.

Conclusion:
Attenuation bias in HRs cannot be ignored in fecundability studies. Focusing on the effect of exposures during the first 6 months of unprotected intercourse through censoring removes part of this bias. For risk factors that can accurately be assessed retrospectively, retrospective fecundity designs, although biased, are not much more strongly so than logistically more intensive designs entailing follow-up.
A High Fidelity Cleft Lip Simulator
Authors: Podolsky Dale J. , Wong Riff Karen W. , Drake James M. , Forrest Christopher R. , Fisher David M. 
Published: September 2018

Background:
Cleft lip surgery is technically difficult requiring precise planning and understanding of 3-dimensional structures to obtain an optimal outcome. A physical cleft lip simulator was developed that allows trainees to gain experience in cleft lip repair and primary rhinoplasty before operating on real patients.

Methods:
A cleft lip simulator that comprises multilayered soft tissues, bone, and realistic dissection planes was developed using 3D printing, adhesive and polymer techniques. Four experienced cleft surgeons performed a total of 7 simulated repairs on the simulator. Feedback on the realism and value of the simulator was obtained from the surgeons.

Results:
Six of the repairs were a Fisher anatomic subunit approximation technique, and 1 was a rotation advancement repair. All repairs were completed with successful performance of markings, incisions, dissections, and multilayered closure. All surgeons agreed that the simulator is realistic and that the simulator is a valuable tool for training in cleft lip surgery.

Conclusions:
A cleft lip simulator that allows performance of a cleft lip repair and primary rhinoplasty from start to finish was developed and pilot tested. The simulator provides a training platform to gain experience in cleft lip repair before operating on real patients.