Cross Purposes Research Articles

The Role Of Eu In The Libyan Conflict

Europe was marginalized in the Libyan conflict, not the least because the conflict exposed foreign policy flaws concerning a lack of coherence and cohesion. Working at cross purposes, European states were more interested in fulfilling their parochial interests than making an effort to give a typical response to the Libyan conflict. At the same time, the shortcomings related to tools and strategies in the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) helped prevent the EU from adopting an influential position. This lack of a joint European position enabling it to play a significant role in the Libyan civil strife facilitated the functions of rival countries, such as Russia in Libya, leaving the EU sidelined.

Talking at Cross Purposes?

Talking at Cross Purposes?

Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition: Accuracy and Lexical and Syntactic Complexity

First-year composition courses must balance a range of writing instruction priorities including genre and audience awareness with language instruction, particularly for second-language writers. Despite the attested efficacy of dynamic written corrective feedback for language gains in intensive English programs, little research has investigated dynamic written corrective feedback in supporting language and discourse development among L2 first-year composition students. In the present study, pre- and post-test writing from 63 second-language first-year composition writers was analyzed for grammatical accuracy as well as lexical and syntactic complexity. Writers with dynamic written corrective feedback intervention ( n = 30) failed to outperform a control group on nearly all measures, and in fact made significantly more verb errors and demonstrated significantly less syntactic complexity over time compared to the control group. Results suggest that while dynamic written corrective feedback is efficacious in some settings, it may be at cross purposes with other first-year composition discourse-based goals such as genre and audience awareness.

Socioeconomic Challenges of California Strawberry Production and Disease Resistant Cultivars

Strawberries are the 4th highest grossing crop in California and supply 90% of US strawberries. But the industry's long reliance on the use of chemical fumigants to control soil disease, nematodes and weeds is being threatened by increased regulation of these fumigants, leading to urgent efforts to develop and test non-chemical alternatives to fumigation, such as disease resistant cultivars. Many of these technologies are promising ecologically, but making them economically viable for growers is more challenging, especially in light of the socioeconomic context of strawberry production in California that has created a state of lock-in for a sustainability transition. This paper discusses how the challenges of land prices, labor shortages, marketing standards, and low prices bear on cultivar selection. Based on qualitative interviews, we corroborate that strawberry growers operate under significant socioeconomic constraints in California, many of which are beyond their control. In addition, we find that most growers see high-yielding varieties as crucial to their economic viability with regard to land, labor, and marketing intermediaries and yet recognize that the focus on individual farm productivity works at cross purposes to the problem of poor prices. Disease resistant varieties do not at face value address the concerns voiced by most growers. Our findings suggest, however, that if some of the other pressures were exogenously mitigated, growers might be more inclined to experiment with and adopt disease resistant varieties, in combination with other approaches. The most promising policy avenues seem to therefore lie with support of grower revenues.

Challenges in Observation-Based Mapping of Daily Precipitation across the Conterminous United States

AbstractThere is a great need for gridded daily precipitation datasets to support a wide variety of disciplines in science and industry. Production of such datasets faces many challenges, from station data ingest to gridded dataset distribution. The quality of the dataset is directly related to its information content, and each step in the production process provides an opportunity to maximize that content. The first opportunity is maximizing station density from a variety of sources and assuring high quality through intensive screening, including manual review. To accommodate varying data latency times, the Parameter-Elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) Climate Group releases eight versions of a day’s precipitation grid, from 24 h after day’s end to 6 months of elapsed time. The second opportunity is to distribute the station data to a grid using methods that add information and minimize the smoothing effect of interpolation. We use two competing methods, one that utilizes the information in long-term precipitation climatologies, and the other using weather radar return patterns. Last, maintaining consistency among different time scales (monthly vs daily) affords the opportunity to exploit information available at each scale. Maintaining temporal consistency over longer time scales is at cross purposes with maximizing information content. We therefore produce two datasets, one that maximizes data sources and a second that includes only networks with long-term stations and no radar (a short-term data source). Further work is under way to improve station metadata, refine interpolation methods by producing climatologies targeted to specific storm conditions, and employ higher-resolution radar products.

Symbolic Annihilation of Social Groups as Hidden Curriculum in Japanese ELT Materials

AbstractThis study empirically investigated the invisibility, or symbolic annihilation, in Japanese English education of social groups at risk of marginalization. To do so, I assembled a corpus of 3746 English teaching materials selected because they involved world social group representation and because they were disseminated through the JET Program, a Japanese government initiative intended to promote internationalization and interculturalism in schools across Japan. Corpus analysis indicated various forms of symbolic annihilation. Most broadly, the world was portrayed as a dichotomy between Japan and countries of the Kachruvian Inner Circle. Europe was of secondary prominence while other regions were poorly represented. These materials reflected Christonormativity as well with adherents to other religions being symbolically annihilated. The visibility of those other than Anglos and Japanese was likewise highly attenuated. Stereotypes equating ethnicity and nationality were prevalent with Inner Circle dialog characters, for example, rarely having non‐Anglo names. Not only did this corpus thus evidence lingering Inner Circle‐centrism, but this was a Christonormative, white, Anglo, Inner Circle/Euro‐centric imaginary. These results thus evinced a hidden curriculum reinscribing stereotypes and regimes of social power, one working at cross purposes to the stated purpose of the JET Program as promoting internationalization and interculturalism.

Ohm Krüger: Context, Appropriation and Irony

ABSTRACT Ohm Krüger premièred in Berlin in 1941 and was widely praised by audiences, critics and the Nazi high command. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, instituted a special award to honour the film, Film der Nation (Film of the Nation), and it was pronounced reichswichtig (important to the state). Ohm Krüger places in parallel the Boer War (1899–1902) 1 1 I have elected to use ‘Boer War’ instead of the more current and correct ‘South African War’ because the former accords more usefully with the language of comment and critique from 1900 to 1941. and the rise of German National Socialism. Presenting these histories as contiguous generates a series of ironies that undermine the film’s propagandist intentions. This is most striking in the concentration camp sequences at its climax. In order to consider the ways in which these scenes are at cross purposes with the ideological logic of the film, this article contextualises Ohm Krüger’s production, reviews the dynamics of its appropriation of the Boer cause, and dwells on its self-subversion. The argument concludes that totalitarianism is based, in part, on inculcating a mindset in its subjects consisting of their capacity to overlook contradictions between hegemony and reality.

Rethinking Assessment Design: Evidence-Informed Strategies to Boost Educational Impact in the Anatomical Sciences.

University assessment is in the midst of transformation. Assessments are no longer designed solely to determine that students can remember and regurgitate lecture content, nor in order to rank students to aid with some future selection process. Instead, assessments are expected to drive, support, and enhance learning and to contribute to student self-assessment and development of skills and attributes for a lifetime of learning. While traditional purposes of certifying achievement and determining readiness to progress remain important, these new expectations for assessment can create tensions in assessment design, selection, and deployment. With the recognition of these tensions, three contemporary approaches to assessment in medical education are described. These approaches include careful consideration of the educational impact of assessment-before, during (test or recall enhanced learning) and after assessments; development of student (and staff) assessment literacy; and planning of cohesive systems of assessment (with a range of assessment tools) designed to assess the various competencies demanded of future graduates. These approaches purposefully straddle the cross purposes of assessment in modern health professions education. The implications of these models are explored within the context of medical education and then linked with contemporary work in the anatomical sciences in order to highlight current synergies and potential future innovations when using evidence-informed strategies to boost the educational impact of assessments.

Ontology and Atrocity: Teaching Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art

AbstractThis article sketches a strategy for teaching Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Origin”). I illustrate how one can address Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation while simultaneously engaging his philosophy of art on its own terms—goals that often work at cross purposes in the classroom. Like many, I read “Origin” together with Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of a van Gogh still life of shoes, which figures so prominently in “Origin.” My innovation is to pair the Heidegger/Schapiro dispute with Holocaust imagery of victims’ shoes and personal effects. Such imagery serves to introduce historical and political context for the debate and to highlight methodological differences in their conceptions of the meaning, reception, and interpretation of artworks and images more generally. These differences raise big-picture questions about the norms that govern our engagements with art and the theoretical desiderata we want a philosophy of art to satisfy. The dispute between Heidegger and Schapiro, read in conjunction with Holocaust imagery, lends these rather abstract questions a concreteness and urgency that greatly enhances classroom discussion.

Defense Counsel's Cross Purposes: Prior Conviction Impeachment of Prosecution Witnesses

A broad scholarly coalition supports the prohibition or diminution of the impeachment of criminal defendants with their convictions. Yet scholars should pay more attention to the flipside arrangement: impeachment of prosecution witnesses by defense counsel. First because new efforts at reform need to resolve the competing interests: constitutional arguments on behalf of the defense, but on the other hand concerns about a tool that (regardless of the nature of the witness) risks reinforcing biases and stereotypes. Second because the impossibility of adequate resolution is itself important to note. Whether one considers the conflicting values of rule makers deciding whether to regulate this, or the conflicting values of defense attorneys deciding whether to deploy it, the intractability underscores the appeal of abolitionist visions.

Is flood resilience planning improving? A longitudinal analysis of networks of plans in Boston and Fort Lauderdale

As climate change increases flood risk, there is growing recognition that the multiple plans cities adopt often work at cross purposes and encourage development in areas at risk of current and future flooding. There have been calls for a more coordinated approach to planning for current and future flood risks, but is planning rising to the challenge? We apply the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard (PIRS) methodology to spatially evaluate policies that would impact physical vulnerability to flooding in the network of different city plans that shape land use and steer development in Boston, MA and Fort Lauderdale, FL. Unlike previous applications of this approach, we look at how the plan network is changing over time. Between 2015 and 2019, attention on climate change grew in both cities, as did the number of plans and policies across the network with the potential to decrease physical vulnerability. New types of plans, such as climate change adaptation plans, play an important role in reducing flood risks. However, plans perpetuate past disparities in policy attention. As the first study to analyze how city networks of plans and their potential impact on resilience evolve over time, this work has important implications for planning scholarship and practice as well as hazard and climate change governance more broadly.

A Return to Culture: Literature as Ecology

Literature is an important part of French national identity and cultural patrimony, as seen in the hype around the literary rentrée each year and the prestige economy that continues to mark French literature with its prize system. However, French literature, particularly those works that are canonical or on track to being canonized, is full of excrement. I examine this literature's excrementality to argue that the shit in this valued literature allows us to think literature not in canonical terms but in ecological ones. Shit serves as the ground for conceptualizing what kind of material literature is; it is the material by which canonical texts break down the very idea of the canon that would contain them, thereby returning culture to its early, non-industrial, agricultural roots, where culture and cultivation converge as a material, human encounter with the environment marked by a cycle of exchange and reciprocity. Despite the seeming health of an elitist and canon-driven model of literary production, these works’ scatological quality acts at cross purposes with the canon to allow the shit-culture it contains to circulate and return to an environment where it can be mobilized to enrich and produce new forms of culture.

Turn Anger into Passionate Disagreement?

People can be outraged over, say, mismanagement or fraud and motivated to address such problems; they can, however, also be angry and lash out against the innocent. In addition to such unpredictability, angry people can seem literally out of their mind. My aim is to render anger intelligible and productive from a social epistemological perspective: epistemological because I assume that anger involves value recognition and arouses reflection; social because I assume that the related values and inquiries involve questions of justice and/or morality. I believe that value disagreements are set up at cross purposes if we disqualify the emotional reactions of those whom we judge too unpleasant to understand. However, I also believe that we should not take anger at face value. My proposal is pragmatic for two reasons. First, and in line with classical pragmatist tenets about the role of doubt and other emotions in reasoning, it is pragmatic because I think that anger results from moral and political uncertainty and leads to a failure to understand one another and, hence, to a failure to act together. Second, my proposal is more concerned with what could be made of anger rather than focussing on what anger essentially is. In sum, I suggest that communities can regulate and use the variety of angry experiences in situations of uncertainty and conflict about moral and political values; that would be “passionate disagreement.” I explain four pragmatic considerations that go along with it and address three problems one might raise in response.

Lessons Learned, Best Practices: Care Coordination for Children with Medical Complexity.

Although care coordination has long been established in the health care system in the United States, too often it may compete or work at cross purposes with care teams serving patients and families. Care coordination is a team sport that requires strong clinician-family partnerships as well as adequate time and resources to be done effectively. We incorporate the latest literature to offer clarity for identifying, coordinating, and funding care for children with medical complexity (CMC), the most medically fragile, high-cost subpopulation of children and youth with special health care needs. Algorithms for identifying CMC exist. Calculation of the cost of care for CMC is confounded by cost shifting to families and the variable course of illness and aging in this heterogeneous population. Multiple studies of different sizes have reported similar care coordination team structure, staffing ratios, and cost ranges. We describe models for funding this work and how they can be tailored to individual practice environments. [Pediatr Ann. 2020;49(11):e457-e466.].

Prediction and Dissipation in Nonequilibrium Molecular Sensors: Conditionally Markovian Channels Driven by Memoryful Environments.

Biological sensors must often predict their input while operating under metabolic constraints. However, determining whether or not a particular sensor is evolved or designed to be accurate and efficient is challenging. This arises partly from the functional constraints being at cross purposes and partly since quantifying the prediction performance of even in silico sensors can require prohibitively long simulations, especially when highly complex environments drive sensors out of equilibrium. To circumvent these difficulties, we develop new expressions for the prediction accuracy and thermodynamic costs of the broad class of conditionally Markovian sensors subject to complex, correlated (unifilar hidden semi-Markov) environmental inputs in nonequilibrium steady state. Predictive metrics include the instantaneous memory and the total predictable information (the mutual information between present sensor state and input future), while dissipation metrics include power extracted from the environment and the nonpredictive information rate. Success in deriving these formulae relies on identifying the environment's causal states, the input's minimal sufficient statistics for prediction. Using these formulae, we study large random channels and the simplest nontrivial biological sensor model-that of a Hill molecule, characterized by the number of ligands that bind simultaneously-the sensor's cooperativity. We find that the seemingly impoverished Hill molecule can capture an order of magnitude more predictable information than large random channels.

"Cross Purposes": Sensation Fiction, Focalization, and Christian Repentance in Good Words

Once derided, sensation fiction has been critically recuperated over the past four decades; however, critics have largely viewed it as secular. Jennifer Phegley, Beth Palmer, and Julie Bizzotto have recently shown that Christian journals such as the Argosy and Good Words assimilated sensation fiction to serve their moral purposes. Building on their work, this article argues that Ellen Wood's Oswald Cray (1864) and Katherine Saunders's The High Mills (1871) repackaged sensation fiction for Good Words' Christian readers, creating sensational plots and mobilizing focalization techniques to urge the importance of self-restraint, self-reflection, and repentance.

The Gods Hate Fags

In the ongoing struggle between Falun Gong and the Chinese state, Li Hongzhi’s reactionary social teachings are often mentioned in passing, but not examined in a systematic fashion. The present paper makes a preliminary effort in that direction, surveying Li’s homophobic, anti-miscegenist, anti-feminist et cetera pronouncements. On the one hand, these teachings often work at cross purposes with the movement’s efforts to garner support and to portray itself as the innocent victim of the Chinese state. On the other hand, the harshness of Li Hongzhi’s frequent pronouncements against gays, race-mixing and the like turn away potential supporters and provide critics with an abundant reservoir from which to fashion anti-Falun Gong discourse.

Testamentary Capacity and Undue Influence: Assessments and Problematic Techniques

As the population of the USA ages, mental health practitioners are increasingly called upon to assess civil capacities. This paper provides information regarding the assessment of testamentary capacity and the related issue of undue influence. A brief review of the legal standards that inform these types of assessments is provided, including a discussion of the Goodfellow legal criteria and the relationship between delusional thinking and validity of will or trust. This paper reviews methods for performing these types of assessments with both living and deceased testators, including a general overview of methodology, suggestions for test choice and use, and the expert’s role in probate court. The overuse of inappropriate psychometric instruments is also discussed. Common problems with assessments and testimony in this area of practice, such as the conflation of diagnosis and functional capacity, and misunderstanding of the applicable legal standards, are reviewed. This paper concludes by suggesting that the courts and mental health professionals may be working at cross purposes in this area of practice.

Negotiating at cross purposes: conflicts and continuity in the EU’s trade and energy relations with Russia, pre- and post-2014

ABSTRACTThis article explores why the European Union (EU)’s promotion of Russia’s market liberalization has failed to generate the desired outcome. It takes as its starting point the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the question of whether the political rupture in 2014 constitutes a watershed in the EU-Russian trade and energy relationship. The sanctions targeting Russia for its actions in Ukraine, and the Russian counter-embargo, constrain the room for manoeuvre of businesses, but have not resulted in a decisive shift in the EU-Russian trade and energy relationship. The article finds that very limited progress had been made on key contentious issues throughout the decade preceding the breakdown of their political relations. Rather, the main shift took place with Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2012, which provided the EU with tools of compellence. The EU’s market policies have achieved very little resonance in Russia of their own accord.

Pluralism and Peace in South Asia

This article examines the relationship between religious pluralism and peace in the context of South Asia. It notes that today South Asia is one of the most hostile regions of the world for religious pluralism, owing, in large part, to resurgent religious nationalism. It argues that attempts to establish religious uniformity have worked at cross purposes with the desired goal of cultivating stability and security in Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan.