Opinion Section Research Articles

Infographic: Fifteen years of Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior

The Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior (BJMB) is a quadriannual, peer-reviewed, free of charge/fee and open-access journal published by the Brazilian Society of Motor Behavior (SOCIBRACOM). The BJMB has published original contributions within the multidisciplinary study of human motor behavior, in the broad scope of motor control, development and learning, movement disorders, sports, clinical, theoretical and model studies. Since 2019 the BJMBpublishes manuscripts only in English. In the same year, BJMB started to invite researchers to be guest editors in article collections, providing an excellent opportunity to promote high-quality contents within the field.
 The BJMB is the main motor behavior journal in the Latin American. It is widely recognized for its significant academic contribution and indexed in the UlrichsWeb Global Serial Directory, Diadorium, Gale Directory Library, Google Scholar, Road Directory of Open Access Scholary resources and Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico. The number of edition and papers has sustainable and significantly increased in the last years, with over 500 authors contributing with 121 manuscripts, distributed in 40 numbers. The time of peer-reviewed process is short (first revision- 26 days) and paper publication is quick (57 days).
 The BJMB was launched with its first edition published in December of 2006 and, thus, we are celebrating its 15thanniversary. For that, the BJMB launches a new type of manuscript: INFOGRAPHIC. This initiative aims to provide a quick, easy-to-use and enjoyable publication that conveys notable knowledge. Two types of infographics will be publishable: a) theory perspective: visual material to theory acknowledge to facilitate the understanding of models, theory frameworks, concepts, principles, and approaches in the field; b) article infographic: visual material about interventional effects on motor learning, development and control sustained by reviews and/or meta-analysis.
 The infographic section will be added to those already existing: research, systematic review and meta-analysis, mini review, scoping review, research notes, current opinion, critique, and tutorials. It is interesting to highlight the section about tutorial, which emphasizes and provides reflection on the use of one or several methods or self-instruction in motor behavior. Finally, the current opinion section publishes pieces of diverse authors around the world that provide perspectives on a hot, relevant, and perhaps controversial topic within the scope of BJMB.
 We would like to congratulate all for this important occasion and to wish that the BJMB continues publishing impactful and relevant contributions in the motor behavior field still for many years to come.

Device profile of the Zephyr endobronchial valve in heterogenous emphysema: overview of its safety and efficacy

ABSTRACT Introduction Emphysema affects millions of people; the underlying pathophysiology is hyperinflation due to destruction of lung parenchyma. The mainstay of treatment is medical therapy however there are two surgical treatment strategies approved by the FDA to reduce lung hyperinflation. First being lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS), which carries higher risk of mortality versus bronchoscopic lung volume reduction (BLVR). BLVR has reduced peri-operative morbidity without compromising improvement in post-bronchodilator forced expiratory volume 1s (FEV1) and patient-reported outcomes. The added benefit of BLVR is that older adults who have end-stage emphysema who otherwise would not be appropriate surgical candidates for LVRS or transplant have an alternative treatment option. Areas covered This is a review paper focusing on Zephyr® endobronchial valves (EBV). Specifically, clinical outcomes of major trials, selection criteria, valve/deployment catheter features, description of procedure, discussing the Chartis™ Pulmonary Assessment System and StratX report, management of complications and discussing next steps in protocolizing post-EBV care. Expert opinion The expert opinion section focuses on outcomes from the LIBERATE Trial and 1-yr post-hoc analysis. Further 5-year follow-up post Zephyr® EBV placement along with protocolization post-EBV placement are needed to minimize adverse events and/or be able to manage, especially with high risk of pneumothorax (PTX).

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Brexit and the Northern Ireland Peace Process

This analysis of the future EU-UK relationship deals with the impact of the Northern Ireland (NI) Protocol to the Withdrawal Agreement, that was put in place at the insistence of the EU to protect the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement. It discusses the reasons why the Protocol was adopted, why there is strong opposition to the Protocol from a section of political opinion in NI and its impact on political developments in Ireland and the UK. As the new EU-UK relationship develops, the UK will have to deal with the impact of its policy choice to leave the Single Market on the deeply divided politics of Northern Ireland and also on the UK’s internal constitutional conflicts, especially in Scotland. The intersection between the UK’s internal problems, including in NI, and its management of future negotiations with the EU under the TCA, has added an element of unpredictable volatility to the UK’s future relationship with the EU.

Differentiation of Public Opinion on Law Enforcement of Federal Laws: a Statistical Aspect

In order to identify the level of awareness and satisfaction of citizens with the measu­res taken to regulate public relations in specific areas of legislation, monitoring of the enforcement of existing and newly introduced laws is used. Monitoring is based on a sociological survey and statistical methodology. The first explores the subjective perception of the population of the effectiveness of the mechanism of public administration. With the correct formation of the sample, the data obtained using statistical inference can be extended to the entire population and the general patterns of the process under study can be investigated. The authors carried out a sociological survey on the enforcement of four federal laws. In addition to the obtained section of public opinion on the awareness and satisfaction of citizens with the functioning of the laws under study, the paper also presents an analysis of the territorial differentiation of public opinion on law enforcement, the uneven development of civic activity in the regional context, and the development of civil society in Russia.

Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: The Role of Printing Media in Asian Countries

During all critical incidents, the media frame our understanding and create powerful forces at both individual and societal levels. The mental health of readers and viewers can also be affected by the media after tragic events. Potentially, the media have a proactive role in shaping the actions of the mass population and thereby influencing policy actions. The print media especially are considered a key avenue for taking information to the masses. However, in this information and communications technology (ICT) era, people are increasingly reluctant to carry hard-copy newspapers, instead preferring e-newspapers. At the present time, entire newspapers, and especially their opinion sections, are deluged by concerns about the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. After China and Japan first encountered COVID-19, other Asian countries began their COVID-19 fight at different times between January and March 2020. All affected countries sought to manage the pandemic in their own way, following lessons learned from China and Japan. Every form of media in affected countries highlighted concerns by presenting news, perceptions, and opinions related to the pandemic. With opinion sections and editorials, the key sections of e-newspapers to reflect experts' perceptions and thoughts, this study aims to examine experts' views in the e-newspapers of five different countries in Asia, in relation to China and Japan. Considering the diversity of socioeconomic and geopolitical settings, five countries—South Korea, Singapore, Iran, India, and Bangladesh—are selected, each represented by one leading English-language e-newspaper. This study explores how experts' perceptions in the studied countries present different aspects of life. It also examines which e-newspaper emphasized which aspect of life and in which period of the outbreak. By intensive text mining in each selected e-newspaper, the study found that experts' opinions addressed diverse issues with regard to COVID-19. These issues are grouped under the following eight categories: health and drugs, preparedness and awareness, social welfare and humanity, the economy, governance and institutions, politics, the environment and wildlife, and innovation and technology. This pioneering study of five different e-newspapers in Asian countries from January to March 2020 presents a similar picture of experts' concerns and their roles in shaping responses to health crises; thus, it plays a role in contributing to policy actions.

President Donald Trump's Photo Op in Front of St. John's Church

President Donald Trump's Photo Op in Front of St. John's Church

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining the verbs used in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post to find out the relation between frequency and text characteristics. This study collected the opinion articles of The Jakarta Post comprising 47.143 words. This study was assisted by Lancsbox to store the corpus of opinion section texts, to identify the verb lemmas, and to count the frequency of verbs. The verbs found in this study were then classified based on Scheibman’s main verb classification (which is based on Halliday’s and Dixon’s verb types). The results of the study show that there are three most frequent verb types used in opinion texts in The Jakarta Post; they are material, verbal, and feeling verb types. Meanwhile, the lesser frequent ones are perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition verbs types. Meanwhile, the least frequent verb types are existential, corporeal and perception/relational verbs types. As opinion text conveys the argument of the writer, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belongs to the third most frequent types, along with material type to show concrete actions and verbal type to report the information. These frequencies exhibit that there is a firm relationship between text characteristics and the tendency of verb choice.

The bitter harvest of French interventionism in the Sahel

Abstract This article studies the bitter diplomatic sequence arising in the fall of 2019 between France and the Sahelian countries where France has been conducting military operations since 2013. Far from being just one more hiccup in the troubled relations between France and its former colonies, the article interprets this sequence as a constitutive effect of French protracted military presence in the Sahel. Specifically, it argues that although France has a rather clear security-driven agenda, its operational moves produced by bureaucratic thinking are questioned by influential sections of Sahelian public opinions who frame the French military presence as a deeply political issue over their country's sovereignty. In addition, being the de facto military guarantor of the security of Sahelian regimes, France constrains the domestic political conversation through the ‘red lines’ it imposes on actors. This externally-induced distortion of the domestic political landscape eventually places Sahelian authorities in front of a dilemma. Pleasing their foreign patrons might cost them the support of the section of public opinion most attached to national sovereignty, and expose them to nationalist entrepreneurs.

On Democratic Fetishism

A sizeable section of American public opinion along with that of many political scientists have interpreted Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 as a token of a profound crisis in democracy, or of an ongoing and dangerous deepening of that crisis. The urge to fathom the nature of this (supposed) crisis and to find ways to overcome it has resulted in a substantial rethinking of some of the mainstays of the conventional democratic theory that has been dominant until recently. This article scrutinizes and assesses these recent and ongoing metamorphoses in mainstream democratic theory by focusing primarily on How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which has been much praised by Trump’s opponents. The paper argues that these theoretical metamorphoses are still taking place within the ambit of the elitist political culture and are perhaps even augmenting its characteristic features.The nature and the logic of this avowedly elitist response to Trump’s populist challenge call for a thorough investigation, but theories of political culture are inadequate to grapple with this problem. Instead, the author suggests turning to the fundamental categories of fetish and fetishism and constructing the concepts of political fetishism and democratic fetishism as derivatives from them. The author borrows certain elements of the concept of democratic fetishism from Alain Badiou, who has recently elaborated and popularized it. There are, however, at least two departures from Badiou’s account. First, although Badiou sees democratic fetishism as an apolitical degeneration of politics, it is not here interpreted as a completely negative factor in current politics. Second, the author makes a distinction between popular democratic fetishism and its elite version and finds that the “fate of democracy” now depends heavily (especially in the West) upon the nature and dynamics the interactions between them.

Some parting words.

Some parting words.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Dolutegravir/rilpivirine for the treatment of HIV-1 infection.

Much progress has been made in the development of antiretroviral therapies (ARTs) for HIV-1 infection. Beginning a little over a decade ago, single tablet combination regimens (STRs) became available, and subsequently, newer STR formulations with improved safety profiles have emerged. Recently, there is a growing interest in regimen simplification with the primary goal of further reducing long-term toxicities of ART and improving medication adherence. Dolutegravir/rilpivirine (DTG/RPV) was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the first dual antiretroviral STR for the maintenance therapy of HIV-1 infection. Following an extensive review of all published papers on RPV and DTG, administered alone and in combination, extracted from databases including PubMed, Google scholar, and EMBASE, as well as drug package inserts and conference abstracts and proceedings, this review discusses the chemical properties and composition, pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetic properties, clinical trial efficacy and safety data, as well as important drug–drug interactions associated with DTG/RPV. An expert opinion section discusses ideal candidates for DTG/RPV in the context of available but limited data and in comparison to currently available and emerging ART alternatives.

Frente a la enigmática realidad: Juan Benet y el articulismo de opinión

ABSTRACTJuan Benet’s image as a public intellectual in Spain during the final years of the Franco Regime and the transition to democracy is due in large part to his collaboration in the opinion section of the El País, the daily national that sympathized with this political process. The present study will center on how Benet as a writer of literary texts addresses similar aesthetic concerns in his newspaper writings. It will be shown that a large part of his columns, published in El País over two decades, focuses on the mysterious condition of the surrounding world. As in his fiction, Benet writes opinion pieces to explore the enigmatic and unexplainable nature of reality. In this fashion, as public intellectual, the author employs a national forum to address his readers while presenting his unique vision of a world shrouded in mystery and uncertainty.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

La prensa escrita durante el gobierno de Néstor Kirchner. Periodismo de opinión y disputas por el sentido político frente al proceso de construcción del kirchnerismo

La tesis desarrolla un estudio acerca de las modalidades discursivas mediante las cuales los diarios argentinos Clarín, La Nacióny Página/12, se consolidaron como actores políticos durante el primer kirchnerismo. Estas condujeron a la construcción de gramáticas productoras de discursos (coyuntural, políticoideológica refutativa y político-ideológica de adhesión) que determinaron formas de interpretar las coyunturas. Se abordó un área en tensión por su hibridez entre la discursividad periodística y la política, que configuró el vínculo, el solapamiento, la disputa y/o la complementariedad entre los posicionamientos construidos por los periódicos en las secciones de opinión cuando intervinieron en los debates en torno al poder político.

Newspaper editorial pages frame China similarly

The current study examines the framing of China in the opinion section of two elite newspapers, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Although there is an expectation that editorials and op-eds present multiple frames and opinions, the results of a content analysis show that China is not framed differently between these two newspapers. Both papers largely emphasized the same issues and issue frames.

The Value of the Outlook of Public Opinion—Based on the Perspective of China's Internet Public Opinion Analysis Report

The report on China's Internet public opinion analysis by People's daily public opinion monitoring annual, is the important information for studying public opinion on the net. Through researching the Outlook sections of public opinion for the report, and using a longitudinal comparison analysis, case analysis, literature and empirical research as the method of combining, revealing the great value of the outlook sections of public opinion on the net: High accuracy, laid the precise basis of Internet public opinion analysis report for the following year; possesses forward-looking, plays a guiding role in the work of the Internet for relevant departments on the following year; with dynamic, reflecting the Internet environment of the times.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

The Educational Role of the Journals of Social and Educational Associations in the Second Republic of Poland as Exemplified by “Citizen Work” of the Women’s Citizen Work Association

The organisational press, as exemplified by “Praca Obywatelska”, published by ZPOK, served a vital role from the point of view of the reborn state, its administration, and local government, as well as the expectations of broader social circles (particularly women) and political parties; it fulfilled the awakened demand and expectations of engaged women citizens in the areas of information on the political, social, economic, and cultural life of the country, its regions, and local communities. The press of women’s organisations defended the interests of women and facilitated the forming of their political, social, and economic beliefs. It was a tool of propaganda and political agitation in various local and central events; it popularised the ideologies and programmes of political parties and expressed the convictions of particular sections of public opinion, while bringing together clearly defined political and creative circles. This press also served to develop various social initiatives and fulfil the cultural needs of intellectuals, and it participated actively in the popularisation of interest in the country, regions, and local communities.