33. The Red Herring: Unmasking Psychiatric Agitation as an Untreated Autoimmune Condition

Edmond Locard's L'enquête criminelle et les méthodes scientifiques marks a pivotal moment in criminology's transformation from a largely unmethodical practice to a scientific discipline. While Locard is best known for advancing laboratory methods of forensic analysis, this article argues that at the heart of his conception of forensics lies the assertion that it is not rationality, but vivid imagination that makes or breaks the criminal investigation. Following Locard's claim that one of the most crucial challenges in teaching forensics is to introduce fellow criminologists to the art of using intuition and creativity for problem‐solving, this article examines the concrete ways in which L'enquête criminelle attempts to actively engage the reader's imaginative faculty by presenting problems that can only be solved through “lateral thinking” and “abductive reasoning.” To introduce his speculative methods, I argue, Locard borrows from detective fiction in two ways: Firstly, he counterfactually presents literary case studies by Poe as real‐world cases, endorsing Dupin's detective technique as a viable criminological practice. By planting hidden clues and red herrings in semiotic puzzles to be deciphered by the reader, secondly, Locard appropriates narrative techniques to sharpen his reader's hermeneutics instincts.

Pneumonia in a Post-Transplant Patient: The Eosinophilic Red Herring

The dental profession’s understanding of occlusion and temporomandibular disorders remains clouded by fundamental terminological and conceptual misalignments. The conflation of “occlusion” with masticatory function represents a persistent red herring in dental discourse. This semantic misdirection distracts from evaluating the masticatory system’s biological complexity. To resolve this, occlusion should be strictly defined as dental closure, while masticatory function must be assessed independently—specifically, distinguishing between normal function and pathological dysfunction. Awaiting definitive studies to explain TMDs parallels waiting indefinitely at an abandoned depot. A more productive framework emerges through analogy: Just as carpal tunnel syndrome is causally linked to typing without requiring exhaustive evidence, TMD etiology logically centers on parafunctional vertical clenching. This mechanism targets the temporomandibular joint menisci with forces reaching 1,600 Newtons, positioning it as the primary etiological driver. The prevailing question of occlusion’s relationship to TMDs should be replaced with two targeted inquires: What is the liability of parafunction (clenching) in TMD development and does malocclusion initiate the parafunction?

In the emergency radiology setting, ectopic air can frequently be a cause for alarm, such as with pneumothorax, pneumomediastinum, and portal venous gas. Ectopic air can often serve as a harbinger of serious injury, which can prompt the radiologist to notify clinicians so patients can receive appropriate care. However, there are many benign conditions which may present radiographically with air in unusual locations. It is critical to be able to recognize these benign entities, as inaccurate identification could lead to unnecessary procedures or imaging. We present numerous benign conditions which can produce air in unusual locations that we have encountered in our practice. For each condition, we will describe its etiology and will also provide key imaging findings that help to distinguish it from pathology.

When Air is a Red Herring: Benign Appearances of Air in Unusual Locations

Crystal-Storing Histiocytosis as a Red Herring in Multiple Myeloma

Upstart Crows and Red Herrings: Thomas Nashe and <i>Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit</i>

A Red Herring - Extrinsic Compression of the Inferior Vena Cava by a Hepatic Mass

Fever in a Geriatric Patient With Bronchiectasis Manifesting as Microscopic Polyangiitis in a Sea of Red Herrings

Unmasking Lamotrigine Toxicity: Two Cases with Ocular Red Herrings and the Crucial Role of Vigilant Pharmacological Assessment (P9-11.001)

ABSTRACT This article critically examines the misconception that burnout is unrelated to work conditions, arguing that such a stance perpetuates a harmful tradition of absolving exploitative and poorly managed workplaces of responsibility for employee distress. This perspective disregards a well-established body of research on burnout, leading to distorted interpretations of empirical data. While individuals may experience distress across multiple life domains, this does not negate the significant role that workplace conditions play in the development of burnout. The failure to acknowledge these systemic factors results in analytical missteps, including the erroneous conflation of burnout with clinical depression. Although both conditions share some symptomatic overlap, they remain distinct in terms of etiology, diagnostic criteria, and intervention strategies. By equating burnout with a medicalized framework of individual pathology, organizations and policymakers obscure the structural and managerial deficiencies that contribute to workplace stress. This article highlights the necessity of maintaining conceptual clarity in burnout research to ensure that interventions target the organizational factors that drive burnout rather than reducing the issue to an individualized psychological disorder. A more accurate understanding of burnout is essential for designing evidence-based policies and workplace reforms that promote employee wellbeing and sustainable work environments.

Abstract: Travellers have been marginalized as "lower caste" because of their cultural differences from majority Ireland, a racialization denoted by the pejorative term "tinker." This racialization is entwined with the importation of that term into Anglophone Ireland in the early nineteenth century. In post-Reformation northern European Protestant culture, "tynkers" were condemned as the inverse of Western and Christian norms. As English spread, tinker unevenly but gradually replaced Irish-language terms used for the peripatetic that did not carry the negative connotations of the imported word. Therefore, in tracing any earlier presence in Ireland of those so named, the word tinker is a red herring. This essay will unfold how the racial and cultural politics of the classification of disparate European peripatetic communities since the Reformation are central to how the word tinker became attached to the community now known as Travellers.

Food Refusal During Oral Food Challenge: Warning Sign Or Red Herring?

Aplastic anemia (AA) is a bone marrow failure disorder resulting in peripheral pancytopenia and marrow hypoplasia. An alternative diagnosis of hypoplastic myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) can overlap this diagnosis but is differentiated by the presence of dysplastic progenitor cells. Since AA can be characterized as an autoimmune disease directed against hematopoietic stem cells, its presence can potentially increase susceptibility to alternate malignancies. Hypoplastic MDS, however, can present itself in an extramedullary fashion solely or as a relapse of acute myeloid leukemia resulting in symptoms similar to those described in this case study. Solid tumor malignancies may also result in abnormal blood counts, creating a wide differential diagnosis. This manuscript presents a case of untreated AA in a patient presenting later with severe abdominal bloating.

Nature offers a bewildering diversity of flower colours. Understanding the ecology and evolution of this fantastic floral diversity requires knowledge about the visual systems of their natural observers, such as insect pollinators. The key question is how flower colour and pattern can be measured and represented to characterise the signals that are relevant to pollinators. A common way to interpret flower colours is using animal vision models that incorporate the spectral sensitivity of a focal observer (e.g. bees). These vision models provide a measure of colour contrast, which represents the perceived chromatic difference between two objects, such as a yellow flower against green leaves. Colour contrast is a behaviourally and physiologically validated proxy for relative conspicuousness of a stimulus. A growing number of studies attempt to interpret flower colouration through parameters that are grafted on to principles of human colour perception. A perpetuating measure to describe floral colours is via saturation, which is a metric in human perception describing a certain aspect of colourfulness and is, in pollination literature, often referred to as 'spectral purity'. We caution against the concept, calculation and biological interpretation of 'spectral purity' and similar measures that rest on an anthropocentric view, because it does not represent the diversity and complexity of animal visual systems that are the natural observers of flowers. We here discuss the strengths and weaknesses of common ways to interpret flower colouration and provide concrete suggestions for future colourful research.

A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating syntactic attachment ambiguities has shown that discarding a locally grammatically available, but globally failing, parse is costly. However, little is known about how comprehenders cope with semantic parsing ambiguities. Using the case study of scopally ambiguous definite descriptions such as the rabbit in the big hat, we examine whether comparable penalties arise for non-lexical semantic ambiguities. In a series of reference resolution tasks, we find dispreference for strings that are globally defined but fail to refer under alternative semantic parses, compared to strings where all readings successfully refer to the same individual. Crucially, this effect is only detectable when the alternative failing reading gives rise to a REFERENTIAL GARDEN PATH, where a dynamic constraint evaluation process temporarily settles on a unique referent before eventually failing. We conclude that failing alternative readings cause dispreference for a definite description, but only when the failing interpretation constitutes a red herring.

Abstract In the ninth century, Photios of Constantinople accused Clement of Alexandria of promoting a deficient ‘docetic’ Christology in his now-fragmentary Hypotyposes. This provoked a debate that continues to dominate discussion of Clement’s theological understandings—whether his extant christological comments constitute a proto-orthodox position, or reveal the influence of docetism. This paper argues that Photios’ accusations have been something of a red herring, and the subsequent debate has obscured Clement’s actual christological position. His own thoughts are most clearly articulated in chapter 10 of his exhortatory Protrepticus, as Clement presents a christological explanation through the language and metaphor of ancient drama. Christ is described as taking up the mask of humanity and performing the drama of salvation, and Clement leans on a wider contemporary understanding of the relationship between mask (προσωπεῖον) and actor to present this complex doctrine to his readership. Through a focus on this presentation, this paper will offer a solution to a debate that has troubled scholars for over a millennium, and which has blinkered our understanding of Clement’s Christian project more broadly.

This article examines Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013) as a work of biofiction. Kushner organizes her minor and major characters into a biofictional system marked by allusions, half-truths, inaccuracies, and red herrings. This distinctive biofictional technique makes visible not only the author’s hand but the author’s labor in the novel.

The article is devoted to creation and approbation of a method of intelligent detection of propaganda techniques by signs using machine learning, which allows to transform input data in the form of analysis text and controlled machine learning models into output data containing numerical evaluations of manifestation of each propaganda technique and marked text with visual analytics the presence of detected propaganda signs. A study was conducted, which allows to identify 17 main propaganda techniques: "Appeal to fear-prejudice", "Causal Oversimplification", "Doubt", "Exaggeration", "Flag-Waving", "Labeling", "Loaded Language", "Minimisation ", "Name Calling", "Repetition", "Appeal to Authority", "Black and White Fallacy", "Reductio ad hitlerum", "Red Herring", "Slogans", "Thought terminating Cliches", "Whataboutism". Study compared three approaches that are most often used for similar problems: traditional machine learning approach, approach based on recurrent neural networks, and approach based on transformer models. Traditional machine learning approaches performed worse, reaching accuracies between 0.60 and 0.67, because they are unable to take into account context, which is important for detecting propaganda techniques. Recurrent neural networks showed better results than traditional approaches, achieving accuracy from 0.66 to 0.80, but they still had difficulty handling long dependencies. The highest results were achieved by an approach based on the transformer neural network model, which uses self-awareness mechanisms that allow each element of sequence to directly interact with all other elements. This ensures the effective capture of long-term dependencies, which is characteristic of propaganda techniques. The results obtained on the basis of approach based on neural network transformer model ensured the detection of various propaganda techniques with minimum accuracy of 79.03% and maximum accuracy of 97.07%. At the same time, minimum accuracy values were obtained for "Whataboutism" technique, and maximum accuracy values were obtained for "Loaded Language" technique. The obtained accuracy values are better than all known analogues in detecting propaganda, regardless of methods used, which opens up opportunities for effective practical use of proposed method. Keywords: propaganda detecting, NLP, RNN, BERT, propaganda techniques, propaganda signs.