Familiar Feature Research Articles

“A Right to the Square”: Practices of Urban Space Appropriation by the Religious Community of the Strastnoy Monastery in Moscow

In post-secular cities, many representatives of different religions claim places that, for one reason or another, they consider theirs. Researchers call such places mixed. Pushkin Square in Moscow, one of them, is used simultaneously by different groups. The first group is the community of the Strastnoy monastery, whose members have been striving for eighteen years to make their religious presence a familiar feature of this square, through collective practices and material symbols. However, they constantly face the presence of other groups that force them to adapt and explain their presence. This article explores the case of the Strastnoy monastery community, which sheds light on the situation of religious initiatives in contemporary Russia. They are aware of their marginal position in public space: however, pursuing their goal of restoring Orthodox order in the country, they are looking, unlike many other Orthodox groups, for non-conflictual ways of interacting with citizens and government institutions, by appealing to historical memory and cultural heritage.

The Art of the Review

What’s a book review for? You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast. Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to mention committee hearings, and passing new statutes, the latter apparently written by Bulgarian bureaucrats struggling in their fifth semester of English as a second language. Don’t get me started on what the agencies are up to. (Quick! how many pages were added to the Federal Register while you read this paragraph?) Especially if you fear that some books should have been articles and that most law review articles are too long, you can be forgiven for basking in deep and abiding gratitude to the reviewer who boils things down. If you’re the tiniest bit unscrupulous, you can then pretend to have read the book yourself. You can even cite it, though I hope you have enough of a scholarly conscience left to feel uneasy about that morsel of cheating. (I hope too that “scholarly conscience” is not an oxymoron.) And you can be baffled or annoyed—I am—by the kinds of “reviews” that sometimes appear in, oh, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, where the ostensible reviewer can barely be bothered to mention the book she’s allegedly reviewing, but just wants to tell you what she would have said had she written a book on the topic.

Enhanced sensitivity to pitch perception and its possible relation to language acquisition in autism.

Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but also that they have the ability to perceive the finer details of auditory stimuli. This is consistent with the previously reported consensus that absolute pitch is more common in autistic individuals than in neurotypicals. We take this to suggest that autistic people have perception that allows them to pay attention to fine details. It is important to establish whether or not this is so as autism is often presented as a deficit rather than a difference. We therefore undertook a narrative literature review of studies of auditory perception, in autistic and nonautistic individuals, focussing on any differences in processing linguistic and nonlinguistic sounds. We find persuasive evidence that nonlinguistic auditory perception in autistic children differs from that of nonautistic children. This is supported by the additional finding of a higher prevalence of absolute pitch and enhanced pitch discriminating abilities in autistic children compared to neurotypical children. Such abilities appear to stem from atypical perception, which is biased toward local-level information necessary for processing pitch and other prosodic features. Enhanced pitch discriminating abilities tend to be found in autistic individuals with a history of language delay, suggesting possible reciprocity. Research on various aspects of language development in autism also supports the hypothesis that atypical pitch perception may be accountable for observed differences in language development in autism. The results of our review of previously published studies are consistent with the hypothesis that auditory perception, and particularly pitch perception, in autism are different from the norm but not always impaired. Detail-oriented pitch perception may be an advantage given the right environment. We speculate that unusually heightened sensitivity to pitch differences may be at the cost of the normal development of the perception of the sounds that contribute most to early language development. The acquisition of speech and language may be a process that normally involves an enhanced perception of speech sounds at the expense of the processing of nonlinguistic sounds, but autistic children may not give speech sounds this same priority.

AURA project: enjoyment of the auralisation experience by different target groups

Modern technologies have become a familiar feature in experiencing our cultural heritage. With the AURA (Auralisation of acoustic heritage sites using Augmented and Virtual Reality) project, music and opera houses in Berlin, Florence and Lviv opened up to the potentials of auralisation for music performing arts and establishments. AURA reached out to the European music community and offer a wide range of opportunities of building new audiences, new business models, new performance practices and exciting new aural experiences. Also, it aims to create a model for cross sectoral collaboration to foster creativity and to promote European heritage in new ways. The present article describes the procedures applied by Vie en.ro.se Ingegneria project partner to engage different target groups, make them experience auralised models of the three theatres and assess their perception through a questionnaire designed ad-hoc for each group and through the participation in round tables discussions. The main outcomes from the analysis of the collected data are reported, together with the structure of video tutorials implemented to ensure a wide dissemination of results.

Situating the Atrium: A Cultural Political Economy

Effectively a double-height or larger void internal to a building, the atrium is a familiar architectural feature the world over. The global popularity of the space in contemporary urban buildings – including hotels, shopping malls, casinos, hospitals, museums, galleries, libraries, schools, office blocks, and universities – is a somewhat puzzling development, and one ripe for sociological analysis. Cultural political economy (CPE) helps to explain this affinity. Using this perspective guards against reductionisms of various stripes, while rigorously situating the atrium vis-a-vis the production and circulation of material and symbolic surplus value. By facilitating inquiry into how this architectural form stabilises and furthers capitalist arrangements, CPE allows for interrogation of the atrium’s distinctive role in adding momentum and cultural meaning to contemporary urban accumulative strategies. In particular, the article draws out the atrium space’s paradoxical relationships to (i) the intensification of rentiership in very tall buildings, and (ii) with respect to the demarcation of insider–outsider boundaries underpinning elite consumption. Positioning the atrium as being reflective of attempts to both intensify and embed capitalism in the built environment, key arguments concern the meaningful, experiential and out-of-the ordinary nature of the space, As such, the article contributes to and draws from sociologies of architecture, reconciling the atrium’s materiality and meaning in a way that does not reduce either to the other.

Active Learning: A Review of European Studies of Active Lessons

Background: Physical activity is a familiar feature in schools worldwide. Its most common justification for inclusion is its distinctive contribution to students’ physical health and fitness and claimed benefits to non-physical aspects of education, such as social skills. Possible effects on cognitive and academic performance are less frequently assumed. This article examines the academic effects of ‘Active Learning’ practices in school classrooms. Our objective was to test the claim that physical activity can enhance curricular achievement and learning, specifically curriculum-focused physical activity and Learning Through Movement. Methods: Using a rapid review methodology, in this article we report on the evidence of contributions of active learning from peer-reviewed publications from 2010 to 2022. Results: The literature generally supported the central hypothesis that students in Active Learning conditions out-performed those in non-active conditions, both during Active Learning tasks and later. Whether this was due to the introduction of physical activity in the specific setting of classroom lessons or physical activity per se remains unclear. Conclusions: To ensure positive outcomes from Active Learning, practices should be planned in association with a series of favourable change mechanisms: proactive leadership, teacher engagement, the ease of finding and implementing Active Learning in sessions, and the genuine integration of Active Learning into curricula and lessons.

Challenges in Implementing Futility Schemes, with Reference to Aducanumab.

Stopping an ongoing clinical trial based on an interim analysis that shows poor outcomes, often referred to as a judgment of "futility", is a familiar feature in current clinical trials practice. Interim data can be misleading, and the implications of prematurely terminating a trial that should not stop are severe. It is thus critical that designs allowing futility stopping be planned and implemented carefully and cautiously. A recent Phase III development program for aducanumab in Alzheimer's disease was halted based on a pre-defined futility guideline, yet based upon updated data and closer examination, the terminated studies became the basis for a regulatory submission. Not surprisingly, this situation generated much controversy and discussion. It provides a good basis for illustrating important principles governing the planning and implementation of futility schemes.

Norm Contestation for Strategic Effect: Legal Narratives as Information Advantage

Telling stories is intrinsic to legal practice. Clients, lawyers, and courts constantly tell stories about the facts and the law to make sense of the world around them. Legal narration is thus a familiar feature at the domestic as well as at the international level. In formal venues, legal storytelling is subject to arange of procedural and substantive requirements. For example, not everyone enjoys standing before a particular court. By contrast, in informal venues, few if any such conditions apply. Press releases, official statements and social media posts provide legal actors with considerable latitude and communicative freedom to give their version of events. Much of this has emancipatory potential, as it can lend a voice to those who lack representation in more formal circumstances. However, it also enables actors to engage in legal discourse, and to spin their stories, without the various checks and balances that apply in formal settings. Legal narratives are also a source of conflict, polemics and even misinformation. The purpose of this article is to take a closer look at the role that legal narratives play in the contestation of, and contestation through, international norms. The article argues that legal narratives display certain distinct features that set them apart from other types of storytelling. Specifically, they are marked by normative constraints imposed by the formal nature of legal reasoning and interpretation and by the logic of rhetoric and the policy choices they are meant to serve. These two features – the formalism of the law and the demands of rhetoric and instrumentalism – pull legal narratives in different directions. Outside formal processes and venues, this tension becomes acute. In the absence of epistemic scrutiny by experts and authorities, legal narratives may stray far from the formalism of the law in pursuit of competing goals. Where these goals gain the upper hand, attaining an information advantage may become their primary purpose, a point the article illustrates with reference to the justifications Russia offered for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In such circumstances, legal narratives may invoke the language and authority of the law not just unpersuasively, but falsely.

Yellowknives Dene and Gwich’in Stellar Wayfinding in Large-Scale Subarctic Landscapes

Indigenous systems of stellar wayfinding are rarely described or robustly attested outside of maritime contexts, with few examples reported among peoples of the high Arctic and some desert regions. However, like other large-scale environments that exhibit a low legibility of landmarks, the barrenlands of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Flats of Alaska generally lack views of prominent or distinguishing topography for using classic route-based navigation. When travelling off trails and waterways in these respective inland subarctic environments, the Yellowknives Dene and the Alaskan Gwich’in utilize drastically different stellar wayfinding approaches from one another while essentially sharing the same view of the sky. However, in both systems the use of celestial schemata is suspended in favor of route-based navigation when the traveller intersects a familiar geographical feature or trail near their target destination, suggesting strong preference for orienting by landmarks when available. A comparison of both wayfinding systems suggests that large-scale environments that lack a readily discernible ground pattern may be more conducive to the development and implementation of a celestial wayfinding schema when combined with other influential factors such as culture, individual experience, and travel behavior. These are likely the first stellar wayfinding systems described in detail for any inland subarctic culture.

Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context by Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai

Reviewed by: Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context by Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai Satoko Shimazaki Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context. By Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021. 246 pages. ISBN: 9780367150624 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai's Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context is a welcome addition to the small library of monographs on early modern Japanese theater and, specifically, studies of bunraku. Focusing their attention on historical and political plays, the authors discuss various bunraku period pieces (jidaimono) beginning with Chikamatsu Monzaemon's Kokusen'ya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga), first staged in 1715, and ending with Igagoe dōchū sugoroku (Travel Game while Crossing Iga) by Chikamatsu Hanji, which was first staged in 1783. Along the way, they cover plays by Takeda Izumo I; collaborations between Takeda Izumo II, Miyoshi Shōraku, and Namiki Senryū (Sōsuke); as well as earlier plays by Hanji. They trace the trajectory of the [End Page 130] puppet theater from its golden age to the beginning of its decline in Osaka as kabuki came to dominate. The study of bunraku period plays has seen renewed interest in Japan in the last decade with the publication of several monographs wholly or partially devoted to the topic, including Itō Risa's Ningyō jōruri no doramatsurugī (The Dramaturgy of Bunraku; 2012); Hara Michio's Chikamatsu jōruri no sakugekihō (Dramaturgy in Chikamatsu's Bunraku; 2013); and Han Kyoung Ja's Chikamatsu jidai jōruri no sekai (The World of Chikamatsu's Bunraku History Plays; 2019)—all of which build on Uchiyama Mikiko's seminal Jōrurishi no jūhasseiki (The Eighteenth Century in the History of Bunraku) from 1989. The focus of Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century on period plays gives sustained attention in English to works that have been taken up only now and then in translation and critical studies by authors such as Donald Keene, James Brandon, C. Andrew Gerstle, and Stanleigh H. Jones. The meanings of bunraku that the authors explore are distinct from those we might find in Chikamatsu's domestic dramas (sewamono), which still play an outsize role in shaping the image of the art in English-language contexts, perhaps partly because their concise, tightly structured, and poetic nature makes them more accessible and thus a familiar feature in surveys of early modern literature. Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century discusses well-known plays such as Kanadehon chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers; 1748), but also plays that are less familiar in English such as Ashiya Dōman ōuchi kagami (A Courtly Mirror of Ashiya Dōman; 1734) and Ōmi Genji senjin yakata (The Genji Vanguard in Ōmi Province; 1769). The authors argue that "bunraku theatre, despite its aspect as popular entertainment, was often a place for playwrights to manifest their political concerns" and a space of "reflection of the audience's expectations" (p. xvi). At first glance, this countercultural interpretation might seem to follow a well-trodden path in Tokugawa theater studies, recalling writings by Donald Shively that portrayed kabuki theater as a forum for popular resistance against censorship and governmental regulation.1 Analysis of this sort in previous English-language scholarship has tended to focus, however, on the dynamic within the administrative city of Edo as the center of political power and has never fully addressed bunraku, which saw its most dynamic developments four hundred kilometers west in Osaka. Despite drawing heavily on the world of the warriors and on contemporary political material, bunraku may have been shielded by sheer distance from the sort of scrutiny to which kabuki was subject. Odanaka and Iwai home in on this possibility and cultivate a focus on Osaka as a methodology, emphasizing the city's economic significance as an essential non-samurai center in the Tokugawa political body. The preface and introduction position "the rising economic power of the merchants" against the "sovereignty of the warriors" (p. xvi). Exploring the geographical division of Osaka into administrative spaces and areas of economic activity...

Dignity as a Constitutional Value: Abortion, Political Communication and Proportionality

This article examines the High Court of Australia’s treatment of the concept of dignity as both a value animating the implied freedom of political communication and as a legitimate reason to limit the exercise of that freedom. It does so through the lens of Clubb v Edwards, Preston v Avery, where the Court found that laws establishing safe access zones around abortion clinics were compatible with the implied freedom. The use of dignity as a prism through which to view the interests at stake in both abortion and speech cases is a familiar feature of developments abroad, and the Court has laid the foundations for recognition of dignity as one of the axiological bases of the implied freedom in a manner that generally emphasises individual autonomy over other conceptions of dignity that might be described as operating as a constraint on behaviour to protect other interests. Yet, while the Court has used dignity as the common measure with which to commensurate competing claims, it has yet to convincingly address concerns regarding incommensurability that attend the balancing stage of proportionality review, not to mention the potential objection that its reliance on dignity is not properly grounded in the text and structure of the Constitution. In light of these issues, the role of dignity ought to be tethered to its central role in facilitating political participation so as to more clearly link the concept to the text and structure of the Constitution, and to identify what is at stake when women’s ability to access reproductive health care is impaired or denied.

Re-creating the hybrid text: postcolonial Indian writings and the European scene

For a language with a wealth of great literature such as English, globaliza-tion has been a mixed blessing. The International English of Mc World is a poor descendant of the language of Shakespeare and Dickens. On the other hand, English literature has been tremendously enriched by writings from the former colonies of the British Empire, creating their own ‘norms’ of English – ‘a new English’, as Chinua Achebe famously put it, “still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new surroundings ”. In the postcolonial literary scene, such ‘hybrid’ texts – or ‘métissés ’– are now a familiar feature, but a complicated one for translators working into other European languages. This essay concentrates on India, and looking at writings by Sethu (Pandavapuram in English translation) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things in English and in German translation), it investigates the striking features of hybrid source texts and the cultural and linguistic problems involved in re-creating them for a European target culture.

“Parliament of Man, Federation of the World”: Repertoires of Statecraft, the Hague Conferences, and the Making of the Liberal Order

ABSTRACT Contemporary power politics often takes place in liberal fora, yet scholars have not paid sustained attention to the origins and characteristics of this mode of statecraft. To trace the development of these repertoires, the negotiation practices of the 1899 and 1907 Hague conferences represent a critical transition from realist practices of the Concert system to twentieth-century liberal internationalism. At The Hague, states experimented with using parliamentary procedure: they introduced motions, held votes, signed and ratified agreements. The Hague conferences were also an occasion where states grappled with questions of institutional design. More broadly, the conferences were a moment when states appealed to concepts of public opinion, international society, and “civilisation” to legitimise change. The methods that diplomats developed for managing tensions within and amongst these repertoires remain a familiar feature of liberal statecraft until the present day.

Affective shifts: mood, emotion and well-being

It is a familiar feature of our affective psychology that our moods ‘crystalize’ into emotions, and that our emotions ‘diffuse’ into moods. Providing a detailed philosophical account of these affective shifts, as I will call them, is the central aim of this paper. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of emotion and mood, alongside distinctive ideas from the phenomenologically-inspired writer Robert Musil, a broadly ‘intentional’ and ‘evaluativist’ account will be defended. I argue that we do best to understand important features of these affective shifts–which I document across this paper–in terms of intentional and evaluative aspects of the respective states of moods and emotion. At same the time, the account is pitched at the phenomenological level, as dealing with affective shifts primarily in terms of moods and emotions as experiential states, with respect to which it feels-like-something to be undergoing the relevant affective experience. The paper also applies the intentional-evaluative model of affective shifts to anxiety in more detail, developing the idea that certain patterns of affective shift, particularly those that allow for a kind of ‘emotional release’, can contribute to a subject’s well-being.

The quantum and classical Fano parameter q

The Fano resonance has been a familiar and important feature in atomic and molecular physics for more than half a century. Typically, the combination of a discrete state with one or more continua results in an asymmetric peak in the ionization spectrum. The peak-shape, called the Fano profile, can be expressed by a simple formula derived by Fano in 1935. However, the interpretation of its characteristic parameter q, which represents the asymmetry of the peak in the formula, is not necessarily intuitively transparent. The Fano resonance is not necessarily a quantum effect, but it is a manifestation of a certain physical mechanism in various systems, both quantum and classical. Through the derivation of q from the known classical pictures with the classical coupled oscillator, we interpret the q value with a geometrical view. And further, we introduce a complex valued q parameter for the description of the resonance with a damped oscillator.

Unity over diversity? The politics of differentiated integration after Brexit

ABSTRACT There is now a significant literature on the effects of Brexit on the differentiated forms of integration that have become an increasingly familiar feature of the EU’s political landscape. While the significance of British withdrawal for questions of differentiation is not difficult to establish, there is little agreement in the literature on whether Brexit will lead to a more or less differentiated EU, which aspects of withdrawal are most relevant, and how the specified causal mechanisms operate. This article takes stock of the debate, discussing four distinct causal pathways: (1) the removal of the UK’s opt-outs; (2) the lessons of the British experience; (3) Brexit as a catalyst for reform; and (4) the future UK-EU relationship. The article suggests a more starkly differentiated EU post-Brexit is likely precluded by the political context of disintegration, which downplays negative lessons, reinforces EU unity, and disincentives a ‘British model’ of external differentiation.

A landslide granular phase transition

Landslides appear in many different forms and sizes, from devastating debris flows to overly optimistic sand castles. A familiar and well-documented feature of all landslides is the positive correlation between volume and landslide runout. Larger landslides have a greater potential to reach farther. Here we explore the low volume limit and find a surprising negative correlation between volume and landslide runout. A decrease in volume leads to an increase in runout. In a series of experiments we systematically vary the landslide volume to reveal a transition between these two regimes.

Dignity as a Constitutional Value: Abortion, Political Communication and Proportionality

This article examines the High Court of Australia’s treatment of the concept of dignity as both a value animating the implied freedom of political communication and as a legitimate reason to limit the exercise of that freedom. It does so through the lens of Clubb v Edwards, Preston v Avery, the where the Court found that laws establishing safe access zones around abortion clinics were compatible with the implied freedom. The use of dignity as a prism through which to view the interests at stake in both abortion and speech cases is a familiar feature of developments abroad, and the Court has laid the foundations for recognition of dignity as one of the axiological bases of the implied freedom in a manner that generally emphasises individual autonomy over other conceptions of dignity that might be described as operating as a constraint on behaviour to protect other interests. Yet while the Court has used dignity as the common measure with which to commensurate competing claims, it has yet to convincingly address concerns regarding incommensurability that attend the balancing stage of proportionality review, not to mention the potential objection that its reliance on dignity is not properly grounded in the text and structure of the Constitution. In light of these issues, the role of dignity ought to be tethered to its central role in facilitating political participation so as to more clearly link the concept to the text and structure of the Constitution, and to identify what is at stake when women’s ability to access reproductive health care is impaired or denied.

External (Versus Internal) Facial Features Contribute Most to Repetition Priming in Facial Recognition: ERP Evidence.

Previous event-related potential (ERP) research demonstrated four successive ERP components in the repetition priming of human face recognition: P100, N170, N250r, and N400. While these components correspond, respectively, to the four stages proposed by the interactive activation and competition (IAC) model, there has been no emphasis in past research on how internal and external facial features affect repetition priming and the sensitivity of these ERP components to item interval. This study was designed to address these issues. We used faces of celebrities as targets, including completely familiar faces, familiar internal feature faces, and familiar external feature faces. We displayed a target face either immediately following its prime (immediate repetition) or after a delay with interference from a presentation of two other faces (delayed repetition). ERP differences at P100 and N170 were nearly statistically non-significant; familiar faces and familiar external feature faces were associated with reliable ERP signals of N250r and N400 in the immediate repetition condition. For delayed repetition, however, N250r and N400 signals were only preserved for the familiar external feature faces. The differences of these ERP components suggest that, compared with internal facial features, external features of a previously presented face contribute more to brain-based facial repetition priming, particularly during the last two stages of the IAC model.

Motifs and interface amino acid-mediated regulation of amyloid biogenesis in microbes to humans: potential targets for intervention.

Amyloids are linked to many debilitating diseases in mammals. Some organisms produce amyloids that have a functional role in the maintenance of their biological processes. Microbes utilize functional bacterial amyloids (FuBA) for pathogenicity and infections. Amyloid biogenesis is regulated differentially in various systems to avoid its toxic accumulation. A familiar feature in the process of amyloid biogenesis from humans to microbes is its regulation by protein-protein interactions (PPI). The spatial arrangement of amino acid residues in proteins generates topologies like flat interface and linear motif, which participate in protein interactions. Motifs and interface residue-mediated interactions have a direct or an indirect impact on amyloid secretion and assembly. Some motifs undergo post-translational modifications (PTM), which effects interactions and dynamics of the amyloid biogenesis cascade. Interaction-induced local changes stimulate global conformational transitions in the PPI complex, which indirectly affects amyloid formation. Perturbation of such motifs and interface residues results in amyloid abolishment. Interface residues, motifs and their respective interactive protein partners could serve as potential targets for intervention to inhibit amyloid biogenesis.