Broad Claims Research Articles

Broad Patent Claims Come Before the Supreme Court in Amgen v Sanofi

This Viewpoint discusses a current Supreme Court lawsuit, Amgen v Sanofi, involving Amgen’s broad patents on PCSK9 that could effectively prevent other manufacturers from producing similar or even clinically superior antibodies, with important negative consequences for patients.

Personhood, Masculinity, and Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence

Most international violence research that are firmly rooted in the ontology and cultural background of individualism make rash generalisations about violence and human nature by taking the examples of self and gender concepts in Western settings as the only reference point for their claims. Based on the understanding of self in Western cultures, many social psychological studies have over the years blamed interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), on perpetrators’ self-image. For example, while some studies indicate that people with low self-esteem are more likely to turn violent in order to gain esteem, others have theorised that individuals with inflated (high) self-esteem are more susceptible to use violence, particularly when the inflated self is threatened in interpersonal relationships. A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship also traces the aetiology of IPV and the propensity for men to commit violence against women to the internalisation, endorsement and enactment of culturally defined male gender role. Despite the valuable contributions of these studies, there are significant challenges inherent in research that make broad universal claims about self and violence at the expense of culture and context. One of the most important phenomena that seems underexplored, overlooked or neglected in the context of violence research is how culture-specific notions of personhood and masculinity shapes male-perpetrated IPV. In this article, I explore the centrality of context and culture-specificities of personhood and masculinity in understanding male-perpetrated IPV. I discuss how the dialogical relationship between men’s psychological sense of who they are (personhood) and cultural notions of masculinity provides new insights for understanding violence research in context. I argue that, rather than a threat to a person’s dispositional self, the social pain of unfavourable third-party communal evaluations of masculine inadequacy threatens a man’s relational sense of personhood, and consequently provoke the use of violence towards the source of the threat in intimate relationships in Ghana.

Resocialization and regeneration in Ernest Cline’s ‘The Omnibot Incident’

This report contributes to scholarship on the bestselling American writer Ernest Cline by examining his critically neglected short story ‘The Omnibot Incident’ (2014). It begins by revealing continuities between ‘Incident’ and his ambitious novels Ready Player One (2011) and Ready Player Two (2020). Across these works, we meet, for example, characters who turn to popular culture for compensation, and in the more recent titles, robots who go (or appear to go) rogue. I go on to suggest that the story’s form, particularly its economy, makes it especially hospitable for exploring how the central character Wyatt overcomes grief following his mother’s death. Notwithstanding the close resemblance in the names ‘Wyatt’ and ‘Wade Watts’, the protagonist of Cline’s novels, Wyatt is far more successful with prioritizing his family over the fantasies presented by science fiction. My broader claim is that we can deepen our understanding of and appreciation for Cline’s programme by looking at his short fiction.

Financial market development: A potentiating policy choice for the green transition in G7 economies

Despite the overwhelming literature claiming the environmental benefits of the transition towards a green economy, the evidence favoring these broad claims is still obscure and fuzzy. The present study makes two significant contributions to this important yet unsettled issue. First, we segregate the overall green transition in G7 economies into three different manifestations i.e., Green Energy, Green Industry, and Green Trade, to evaluate their idiosyncratic effects on the environment. Second, we assess the moderating role of financial development in green transition and ultimately in achieving the COP-26 targets. Our findings indicate that the transition towards green energy and the green industrial sector improves environmental quality, and the benefits are more pronounced with a high degree of financial development. In contrast, the transition towards green trade does not help in improving environmental quality and may have some adverse effects; however, financial development could mitigate some of these undesirable effects and help combat carbon emissions. The study emphasizes that policymakers should view financial development as a crucial policy choice to achieve COP-26 targets owing to its benign environmental impact.

Functional constipation and the effect of prebiotics on the gut microbiota: a review.

Functional constipation is a significant health issue impacting the lives of an estimated 14 % of the global population. Non-pharmaceutical treatment advice for cases with no underlying medical conditions focuses on exercise, hydration and an increase in dietary fibre intake. An alteration in the composition of the gut microbiota is thought to play a role in constipation. Prebiotics are non-digestible food ingredients that selectively stimulate the growth of a limited number of bacteria in the colon with a benefit for host health. Various types of dietary fibre, though not all, can act as a prebiotic. Short-chain fatty acidsproduced by these microbes play a critical role as signalling molecules in a range of metabolic and physiological processes including laxation, although details are unclear. Prebiotics have a history of safe use in the food industry spanning several decades and are increasingly used as supplements to alleviate constipation. Most scientific research on the effects of prebiotics and gut microbiota has focussed on inflammatory bowel disease rather than functional constipation. Very few clinical studies evaluated the efficacy of prebiotics in the management of constipation and their effect on the microbiota, with highly variable designs and conflicting results. Despite this, broad health claims are made by manufacturers of prebiotic supplements. This narrative review provides an overview of the literature on the interaction of prebiotics with the gut microbiota and their potential clinical role in the alleviation of functional constipation.

Women's inheritance in Islamic law A statement of the truth and a response to the suspicions

this research shows the aspects of Islam's care for women, focusing on the aspects of God's(Allah's) justice and the great care accorded by Islamic law (sharea) to women, especially, in the inheritance that a woman inherits from her inheritance, there are cases in which the male inherits more, cases in which the male and female inheritance is equal, and cases in which the woman inherits more than the man. Which refutes a broad claim accusing Islam of giving the male absolute priority over the female. If we find a discrepancy in inheritance between male and female in some issues, it is due to other considerations that have nothing to do with the gender of the heir in them, then this research came to clarify and demonstrate that.

Integral Ecology As Theosemiotic: A Case For A Pragmatist Theological Ethics

Integral Ecology As Theosemiotic: A Case For A Pragmatist Theological Ethics

Native Intoxicants of North America by Sean Rafferty

Reviewed by: Native Intoxicants of North America by Sean Rafferty Cameron B. Strang (bio) Keywords Intoxicants, Native Americans, Indigenous, Drugs Native Intoxicants of North America. By Sean Rafferty. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. 294. Cloth $60.00.) Anthropologist Sean Rafferty's Native Intoxicants of North America is an overview of the plants, fungi, and animals that Indigenous people consumed to achieve altered states of consciousness. The scope of Rafferty's study is continental, reaching from Florida to Alaska, but he situates this research in a global and panhuman context. Thus, instead of zeroing in on how particular groups understood or pursued intoxication, Rafferty sees efforts to reach altered states of consciousness as a "universal human trait" (1) and asserts that "Native North Americans were no different from any other human population in terms of innate desires for intoxication" (203). While this desire to reach altered states of consciousness may be partially biological, the book argues that social behaviors, especially rituals, determine the prevalence and use of various drugs. Humans are intensely social creatures, and those individuals and groups with the most friends, lovers, trading partners, and allies have a competitive—and perhaps evolutionary—advantage over loners. So, the theory goes, intoxicants that foster connections among people tend to be more widespread and socially acceptable than those that lead to antisocial behavior. Tobacco was the most widely used intoxicant throughout North America because its mild effect encouraged social bonding and, relatedly, because the rituals and material culture associated with tobacco—most famously calumet smoking—strengthened relationships within groups, among nations, and between human beings and non-human beings. More potent drugs, especially powerful and risky hallucinogens, were more limited to ritual specialists (whom Rafferty associates with a broad shamanic tradition that may have had roots in central Asia). Drawing global significance from North American evidence, Rafferty concludes that "intoxication was an ancient and widespread practice" (16) among humans and that "it is the social value of intoxicants that has been largely responsible for their widespread use by human societies" (214). Rafferty supports these broad claims with both archaeological and documentary evidence. Archaeologists have uncovered centuries-old botanical specimens of intoxicating species as well as artifacts such as pipe bowls and other ceramics that suggest the degree to which intoxicants mattered [End Page 454] to social and spiritual rituals. Rafferty interprets petroglyphs from the Great Basin and Southwest as possible evidence of drug-inspired artwork, and while he is rightly cautious in drawing conclusions from these elusive drawings, he suggests that they may reflect some of the patterns and images often visualized by users of particular hallucinogens. The book also leans heavily on the work of twentieth-century ethnographers and the writings of early European observers. Assembling this wide array of textual sources is a practical way to fulfill the book's continental ambitions, but the author's decision to introduce most of this ethnographic and historical evidence through a parade of long block quotes makes for clunky reading. Although some of these passages do capture Native peoples' own perspectives on intoxicants—especially peyote use within the Native American Church—the overall dearth of Indigenous voices is glaring when compared to the surplus of quotations from white observers. Native Intoxicants of North America is at its best when interrogating how and why drugs were used in a comparative, continental context. For example, the discussion of datura, which early Americanists may know as jimsonweed—from "Jamestown weed," the deliriant that incapacitated some of America's first English colonists—is both far-ranging and culturally specific. As a powerful and potentially deadly hallucinogen, datura use seems to have been regulated by social and ritual norms within the many nations that ingested or smoked it throughout the continent. Interestingly, Native groups in both Virginia and California incorporated datura into male initiation ceremonies because, Rasmussen suggests, of its antisocial effects: Datura created such a strong disassociation from oneself and one's people that the period of delirium helped mark a break between childhood and adulthood. Moreover, kiva drawings resembling datura from the Southwest, datura-shaped ceramics from Cahokia, and chemical residue from datura on a Mississippian pipe bowl found in Tennessee all support the...

Subcontracting and enterprise development in India's informal manufacturing sector

PurposeSubcontracting is a crucial cause behind the simultaneous existence of formal and informal entrepreneurship in India. This article aims to provide an over-time comparative analysis between the subcontracted and the non-subcontracted enterprises within the informal sector. Further, it also brings to fore the contribution of subcontracting towards ensuring sustainability of the informal enterprises.Design/methodology/approachBy constructing a panel data from two rounds of NSS Unincorporated Enterprise Survey Data (2010 and 2015), and employing a PSM-DID method, considering labour productivity and net retained earnings as two critical indicators of growth and development of the informal sector firms, this study has made some broad claims regarding the differences in immediate and long run performances between the subcontracted and non-subcontracted informal sector enterprises in India.FindingsThis study finds that subcontracted enterprises have not only been performing at a much lower level than the non-subcontracted enterprises, they are also growing much slowly than their counterparts. However, it has been observed that for the establishments, who are capital abundant and also have a larger production capacity, subcontracting is showing the prospect for deriving sustainable gains.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the existing literature in the following two ways. Firstly, it provides an over-time comparative analysis between the subcontracted and the non-subcontracted enterprises within the informal sector. Secondly, it brings to fore the contribution of subcontracting towards ensuring sustainability of the informal enterprises.

“Saints” or “Scabs”: Contesting Feminized Labors, Social Needs, and the Welfare State in the Volunteering Wars of the 1970s

The fate of caring labor was up for grabs in the 1970s, when Americans debated how to value feminized work—paid or unpaid, professional or service-oriented, performed in one's own home or beyond it—as women's social roles shifted. President Richard Nixon and his allies proposed reassigning caregiving functions to volunteers as a way to resist new demands on the welfare state and shrug off unmet social needs. Although many women's groups objected, their varied approaches to feminized labors also kept them from forging a united response. Recovering these volunteering wars offers up a vital perspective on the conflict between postwar movements advancing broad rights claims and the New Right's frontal assault on the “undeserving.” Manipulating notions of benevolence, Nixon and his associates found new ways to puncture the social safety net—a process that political leaders from both major parties would emulate and accelerate.

Max Weber and his conservative critics: Social science and the problem of value relativism

In this paper some fundamental criticisms of Max Weber’s conception of the vocation of science are addressed. These well-known criticisms focus on his admission that science cannot demonstrate its own value, and his broader claim that there can be no rational basis for committing oneself to one set of ultimate values as against another. Instead, he insisted that the adoption of such values is necessarily a matter of individual decision. Influential critics have argued that this amounts to relativism, or even nihilism: that, if it were true, neither science nor anything else could have genuine value, all value-judgements would be arbitrary or entirely instrumental (e.g. a matter of self-interest). I will outline Weber’s position, and then examine the arguments of some of his critics: focussing particularly on Midgley and Strauss. This provides the basis for a careful reassessment of Weber’s position, and for some suggestions about how he could respond to these critics. It is argued that fundamental values operate in a dialectical relationship with specific evaluations, and that they arise naturally out of more or less universal features of human beings’ life experience. While this does not provide a compelling rational basis for commitment to those values, even less for prioritising one over another, it tells us why we often feel a need to uphold them. Furthermore, despite the fact that it does not guarantee agreement, rational clarification of these values and their implications, as well as appraisal of their relative significance in particular cases, is possible.

Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia by Laura Rodríguez Castro

Reviewed by: Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia by Laura Rodríguez Castro Elena Tjandra Laura Rodríguez Castro Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xiii + 208 pp. 83,19 € hardback (ISBN 978-3-030-59439-8); 67,40 € ebook (ISBN 978-3-030-59440-4). Decolonial feminisms, power and place is a formidable illustration of Laura Rodríguez Castro’s commitment to decolonial praxis in research. “Feeling-thinking” alongside women in Colombia’s countryside, Castro charts rural territorial struggles and strategies of resistance in the context of on-going neoliberal and colonial violence. In this book, women’s voices are not included as supporting evidence to illustrate some broad theoretical claim; instead critique and decolonial praxis are articulated through the words and practices of rural women themselves. In dialogue with rural women, the book addresses two main projects: the coloniality of gender—as coined from María [End Page 205] Lugones’ extension of Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo’s coloniality of power—and colonial, white feminisms. Castro’s work draws upon ethnographic and participatory research primarily based in Toca, Boyacá, north of Bogotá, and Minca, in Magdalena, southeast of the Santa Marta coast. Her interlocutors include women who work in agro-tourism industries, rural social leaders, activists, and NGO staff. However, the book is organized less as a traditional ethnography than a carefully arranged set of themes in seven chapters. In Chapters 1 and 2, Castro provide an overview of women’s struggles in the context of Colombia’s recent and contested peace accords and agrarian reform, noting the institutionalized feminisms that exist within continuing, colonial matrices of power, and the decolonial feminisms that challenge them. The two chapters provide a clear overview of Lugones, Quijano, and Mignolo’s fundamental concepts of the colonial matrix of power and the coloniality of gender, as Castro explains the violence inherent within colonial and institutional feminisms such as that which arises from the cleaving of gender from race that positions Indigenous, Black and campesina women as both holders of ancient ancestral knowledge, and in need of saving. These chapters caution against the dissolving of difference in appeals to the universal, and views difference as a source of strength to work across in decolonial practice. The concepts of sentipensar (feeling-thinking), veredear (walking through rural places) and territorio cuerpo-tierra (territory body-land) are also introduced at the beginning to serve as foundation for later chapters. With these concepts, Castro maintains a critical self-reflexivity that cuts across the volume, but is elaborated in Chapter 3, Sentipensando and Unlearning, where Castro details her own process of dismantling coloniality from within that unfolds into her epistemological and methodological approach of sentipensando. Enriched by insights from critical race scholars and Black and Indigenous feminists and geographers, Chapter 3 implicitly addresses feminist geography’s longstanding concerns around accounting for positionality. Considering that “mainstream feminist reflexivity and identity politics [that] have hyperfocused on the self ignore the structures and processes that sustain the coloniality of power” (p. 64), Castro states point-by-point four ways her “positionality is entangled within the coloniality of power” in the context of the Colombian countryside. Although she does not name classic geographic provocations from Audrey Kobayashi, Gillian Rose, Linda Peak and Kim England, her work speaks to their ideas by showing that decolonial feminism goes beyond “writing in” positionality or adopting a feminist methodological framework. Instead, Castro sets out to develop a decolonial feminist praxis, that begins with unlearning and moves toward sentipensando working with rural women. Through this commitment to work alongside, not on, Castro herself is present in the following chapters but rural women are at the center of the narrative. This unpacking of positionality is an important contribution to debates around reflexivity in feminist geography. Chapter 4 offers a refreshing take on the geographies of place as it draws on [End Page 206] Doreen Massey’s theorization of place as multifaceted and relational, as an aperture to re-imagine place and place-making “as a process [that] allows for openness [and] provides an opportunity to dismantle the discourses of modernity as...

“I Know Not If I Delude Myself”: Rousseau’s Julie and the Ambiguities of Self-Deception

Rousseau has long been viewed as a champion of an ethic of sincerity that celebrates the honest moral sentiments of simple souls and opposes deception and dissimulation in all its forms. I, however, argue here that Rousseau proves surprisingly receptive to the benefits of self-deception and that he views it as an important—and perhaps necessary—aspect of moral development. I advance this broad claim through an analysis of his novel Julie, which (1) distinguishes between intentional and nonintentional forms of self-deception and (2) reveals the distinctive ethical advantages and risks associated with each. By uncovering the varieties of self-deceptive experience and revealing the problematic but indispensable role that it plays in the process of moral development, this essay points to important but undertheorized tensions in the relationship of epistemic and moral virtue.

Who’s Laughing Now?: Feminist Tactics in Social Media

Who’s Laughing Now?: Feminist Tactics in Social Media

Unhappy Dialectics

Unhappy Dialectics

International comparisons on organic analysis. The main achievements and development perspectives

International comparisons in organic analysis (OA) are organized and coordinated by the Organic Analysis Working Group (OAWG) of the Consultative Committee for Amount of Substance (CCQM). OAWG also performs strategic planning and highlights the focus areas and challenges in OA. Realizing well that the amount of organic compounds and potential combinations of analyte-matrix is numerous, the OAWG has developed a systematic approach to the comparisons organizing. This approach allows to comprehensively describe the specifics of each comparison and appropriate features combination allows to cover all relevant aspects of OA. In terms of CMCs submission, recently the new concept has been created suggesting a broader view on the NMIs competence – it is the concept of “Broad Scope Claims” (BCs). BCs allow NMIs to submit CMCs for a wider range of analytes and matrices. In 2021 the OAWG has highlighted the priority areas for activities and promising methods and technologies for the OA for the period up to 2030.In international comparisons on OA Russia is represented by VNIIM. Since 1998 VNIIM has been taking part in more than 35 comparisons covering various aspects of OA. Each successful comparison is a real and documented confirmation of Russia competence in the relevant OA area. At the moment 89 CMCs are presented in the Database, including 25 BCs.

The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

Toward a Comparative Approach to Language Acquisition

The world’s languages vary in almost every conceivable way, yet children readily learn their native language. Understanding how children can acquire such a diversity of different languages has been a long-standing goal for psychological science, yet current acquisition research is dominated by studies of children learning one particular language: English. In this article, we argue that progress toward this goal will require systematic comparisons between different languages. We propose three levels of comparison: coarse-grained comparisons contrasting unrelated languages to confirm or refute broad theoretical claims, fine-grained comparisons between closely related languages to investigate the impact of specific factors on acquisition outcomes, and within-language comparisons targeting the impact of socio-communicative differences on learning. This three-pronged comparative approach to language acquisition promises to provide new insights into the mechanisms and processes by which children acquire their native tongue under such varied linguistic and socio-communicative conditions.

Brexit and Japanese foreign direct investment in the UK: a sectoral analysis

AbstractPolitical and economic stability significantly affect the economic performance of a country and its ability to attract inward investment. This article investigates Brexit-associated uncertainty and Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into the UK. In contrast to most previous studies that use pre-vote behaviour to model post-vote outcomes, we include both pre- and post-announcement and post-vote data on Japanese firm-level FDI activity into Europe. In a Knowledge-Capital framework, we examine the annual count of newly established Japanese foreign affiliates into 80 countries between the years 1995 and 2019. Results from a negative binomial model reveal a statistically significant relationship between the Brexit announcement and decreased FDI in the UK. Our results identify significant sectoral heterogeneity, indicating the difficulty in making broad claims as to Brexit’s effect on the British economy’s future.

The epistemology of international politics: offensive realism and the Neorealist Scientific Research Program

What follows is a much-needed appraisal of the current state of scientificity and progressiveness in the study of international politics. Imre Lakatos’ Methodology of Scientific Research Programs will provide the epistemological grounds. Three broad claims will be made and supported: (i) Waltz’s neorealism is not an isolated theory of international politics, but a proper scientific research program; (ii) Mearsheimer’s offensive realism too is not an isolated theory, but a set of theoretical amendments to the Neorealist Scientific Research Program’s protective belt; and (iii) the offensive-realist theoryshift is both theoretically and empirically progressive.