Unifying Message Research Articles

The concept of faith from Benedict to Francis: 10 years after Lumen Fidei

This article, referring to the tenth anniversary of the publication of the encyclical Lumen Fidei in 2013, the first encyclical of Pope Francis, which he wrote to complement the work of Benedict XVI, will want to show, on the one hand, the hermeneutical continuity between the two pontificates, with regard to faith and its transmission, on the other and methodological differentiation in relation to the concept of faith between the German and the Argentinian pope.
 Analyzing Lumen Fidei, the article shows the exemplary unity of intentions of both Popes who, despite coming from different theological and existential experiences, find themselves in this document and propose a unifying message that includes, on the one hand, a clear analysis of the act of faith to demonstrate its rationality and necessity, to be fully "human" clearly inspired by Ratzinger, and on the other hand, the practicality of faith and its impact on today's areas of life and society with a decidedly more Bergoglian inspiration. The theological genius of Benedict, one of the greatest theologians who ascended the papal throne, and the pastoral charisma of Francis, the first Latin American Jesuit and Pope, remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration for all believers.

“The Swedish Principle is the Christian Principle”

To strengthen Swedish patriotism during World War II, representatives of the Swedish Parliament and the Church of Sweden gathered at Stockholm’s City Hall and issued the motto “The Swedish principle is the Christian principle.” This study analyzes the role of Christianity in Swedish patriotism as expressed at that meeting. Using Viroli’s theories of nationalism and patriotism, this unifying message is found to contain a variety of understandings regarding the relationships between the Swedish people, Christianity, and the Church of Sweden. Christian faith was presented as part of both nationalism and patriotism and as both an instrument for increasing national loyalty and an objective in itself.

Using a Nationwide Virtual Radiology Student Interest Group to Expand Medical Students’ General Awareness, Drive Greater Interest, and Achieve Uniform National Messaging in the Field of Radiology

Many medical schools offer minimal exposure to radiology, leading to a decreased understanding of the field and negative perceptions among medical students. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a radiology intensive series piloted by a novel virtual radiology interest group. Specifically, we were interested in how radiologists and medical educators can expand students' general awareness, drive greater interest in the field, and achieve more uniform national messaging across all trainees. We launched a national/international interest group called Radiology Student Interest Group (RadSIG) and piloted the RadSIG Intensive, a series of five events aimed at increasing awareness and dispelling misconceptions among preclinical medical students. Validated pre-intensive and post-intensive surveys were used to ascertain the students' baseline and changed perspectives, respectively. A separate faculty survey was also distributed to understand how they perceived our events. Statistical analysis was carried out on the collected data to identify trends and assess the utility of our programming. 205 students completed the pre-intensive survey, and 61 students completed the post-intensive survey. Of the pre-intensive survey respondents, 51.7% (106/205) indicated that they had a limited understanding of what a career in radiology entails. Of those who completed the entire RadSIG Intensive, average 5-point Likert scale scores for understanding of a radiology career rose from 3.30 to 4.38 respectively pre- to post-completion. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed that this difference was statistically significant (Z=-5.95, p<0.001), and that the RadSIG Intensive significantly improved perceptions of radiologists across every single question measured, except for perception of long hours worked (Z=-0.20, p=0.841). The results also showed increased student comfort in reaching out to radiology attendings (Z=-4.30, p<0.001) and residents (Z=-5.12, p<0.001). Faculty survey results indicated positive perceptions of the series. Our results show that the RadSIG Intensive was effective in increasing students' understanding of radiology as a field and a potential career. Online outreach can also lower the resistance and improve student comfort in reaching out for mentorship, which may provide a new pathway to reach underserved students with a unifying message. By furthering a platform based on voluntary and supplemental resources, we see a far greater potential of impacting the perception and known role of the imager in patient care among our next generation of physicians.

“A Moment of Science, Please”: Activism, Community, and Humor at the March for Science

In April 2017, scientists and science sympathizers held marches in the United Kingdom as part of a coordinated international March for Science movement that was held in over 600 cities worldwide. This article reports from participant-observation studies of the marches that took place in London and Cardiff. Supplemented with data from 37 interviews from marchers at the London event, the article reports on an analysis of the placards, focusing on marchers’ concerns and the language and images through which they expressed those concerns. How did the protesters articulate their concerns and objectives, and how were these articulations used to build a community? The placards did not represent a clear, focused, and unifying message; they instead illustrated disparate concerns ranging from human-induced climate change, Trump and “alternative facts,” and local UK specific political issues concerning the country’s exit from the European Union. Our analysis shows that placards gave a playful and whimsical character to the march, with slogans displaying significant amounts (and moments) of humor, often formulated through insider jokes, scientific puns, or self-deprecating appropriation of negative stereotypes about scientists. We analyze the march through the social movement literature and as a collective identity-building exercise for an (emergent) community of scientists and sympathizers with long-term aims of establishing a louder voice for scientists, and experts, in public discourse.

Diaspora journalism’s coverage of migration: How the Irish diaspora press reported the refugee crisis

Irish diasporas have a long history of multidirectional and multigenerational migration with large communities sustaining successful commercial diaspora news media organizations. Such complex migration patterns often result in the hybridization of identities whereby the migrant group develops cultural identities that are different from the ‘homeland’ and each other. Diaspora media operate as important cultural landmarks that mediate the representation of home and hostland identity, providing a rich set of cultural building blocks with which diaspora communities can identify. Indeed, comparative studies have shown diverse representations of Irish diasporic identities and history in Irish diaspora news media located in different parts of the world. However, to date much of the focus has been on the representations of historical events such as the Famine the 1916 Rising. What is not yet clear is how identity is represented in relation to contemporary news events. Using framing analysis this article compares how Irish diaspora news media located in different regions draw on Irish diasporic identity to represent the appropriate responses of Irish diasporans and Irish people to the Refugee crisis in 2016 finding that while there are some variances, a unifying message dominates.

The Rope

The Rope

Unifying Message Passing Algorithms Under the Framework of Constrained Bethe Free Energy Minimization

Variational message passing (VMP), belief propagation (BP) and expectation propagation (EP) have found their wide applications in complex statistical signal processing problems. In addition to viewing them as a class of algorithms operating on graphical models, this article unifies them under an optimization framework, namely, Bethe free energy minimization with differently and appropriately imposed constraints. This new perspective in terms of constraint manipulation can offer additional insights on the connection between different message passing algorithms and is valid for a generic statistical model. It also founds a theoretical framework to systematically derive message passing variants. Taking the sparse signal recovery (SSR) problem as an example, a low-complexity EP variant can be obtained by simple constraint reformulation, delivering better estimation performance with lower complexity than the standard EP algorithm. Furthermore, we can resort to the framework for the systematic derivation of hybrid message passing for complex inference tasks. Notably, a hybrid message passing algorithm is exemplarily derived for joint SSR and statistical model learning with near-optimal inference performance and scalable complexity.

Low complexity model to study scale dependence of phytoplankton dynamics in the tropical Pacific.

We demonstrate that a simple model based on reaction-diffusion-advection (RDA) equation forced by realistic surface velocities and nutrients is skilled in reproducing the distributions of the surface phytoplankton chlorophyll in the tropical Pacific. We use the low-complexity RDA model to investigate the scale relationships in the impact of different drivers (turbulent diffusion, mean and eddy advection, primary productivity) on the phytoplankton chlorophyll concentrations. We find that in the 1/4^{∘} (∼25km) model, advection has a substantial impact on the rate of primary productivity, while the turbulent diffusion term has a fairly negligible impact. Turbulent diffusion has an impact on the phytoplankton variability, with the impact being scale propagated and amplified by the larger scale surface currents. We investigate the impact of a surface nutrient decline and some changes to mesoscale eddy kinetic energy (climate change projections) on the surface phytoplankton concentrations. The RDA model suggests that unless mesoscale eddies radically change, phytoplankton chlorophyll scales sublinearly with the nutrients, and it is relatively stable with respect to the nutrient concentrations. Furthermore, we explore how a white multiplicative Gaussian noise introduced into the RDA model on its resolution scale propagates across spatial scales through the nonlinear model dynamics under different sets of phytoplankton drivers. The unifying message of this work is that the low-complexity (e.g., RDA) models can be successfully used to realistically model some specific aspects of marine ecosystem dynamics and by using those models one can explore many questions that would be beyond computational affordability of the higher-complexity ecosystem models.

The New Deal and the Old Frontier: American Identity, Environmental Design, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–42

As a flagship program of the New Deal, the CCC was one of several federal agencies which turned to the natural and built environment to promote socio-cultural homogenization between the First and Second World War. This article investigates the CCC's role as an agent of national transformation and considers the links between the New Deal's treatment of the American landscape and its promotion of a new, more pluralistic national identity. While historians of the interwar United States are quick to note the social and environmental significance of the CCC, the cultural role of this program remains largely overlooked. Specifically, relevant scholarship has neglected to address the architectural output of this program and the way it related to the New Deal's broader socio-cultural initiatives. With camps in each of the forty-eight states and overseas territories, the CCC reconfigured much of the American landscape and deployed a regionally diverse blend of vernacular architecture, all while fostering a mythologized sense of cultural heritage from coast to coast. In order to better understand both the role and rationale behind this process, this article considers several examples of CCC-produced architecture and landscape design across the greater United States. It argues that these designs were key vehicles of the unifying message that drove the New Deal and its many so-called ‘alphabet agencies’ from the depths of economic depression to a state of preparedness as the country approached the precipice of global war. This article also considers the Corps' role in the New Deal's construction of popular historical consciousness and draws attention to the frequent transregional interactions between enrollees and local populations.

Dr. Seidman replies.

We are pleased to note the interest that Van Hoovels and colleagues have for our SpACE Capsule study1, and read with interest their investigation of the clinical utility of assaying fecal calprotectin (FC) to assist in the diagnosis of spondyloarthritis (SpA)2. Rheumatologists traditionally proclaim that the extraarticular manifestations of SpA include inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)3. IBD, including Crohn disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis, are analogously associated with various extraintestinal manifestations (EIM). The most common EIM is articular involvement, reported in 16–33% of patients with IBD4. Thus, gastroenterologists often decree SpA as an EIM of IBD. Regardless of which side of this “chicken and egg” debate one adheres to, the unifying message is that SpA and IBD often coexist and need to be assessed, because jointly they modify management strategies5,6. FC is established as an excellent biomarker of intestinal inflammation7. Van Hoovels, et al investigated the value of FC in diagnosing … Address correspondence to Dr. E. Seidman. E-mail: ernest.seidman{at}mcgill.ca

Emerging insights into human health and NK cell biology from the study of NK cell deficiencies.

Human NK cells are innate immune effectors that play a critical roles in the control of viral infection and malignancy. The importance of their homeostasis and function can be demonstrated by the study of patients with primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs), which are part of the family of diseases known as inborn defects of immunity. While NK cells are affected in many PIDs in ways that may contribute to a patient's clinical phenotype, a small number of PIDs have an NK cell abnormality as their major immunological defect. These PIDs can be collectively referred to as NK cell deficiency (NKD) disorders and include effects upon NK cell numbers, subsets, and/or functions. The clinical impact of NKD can be severe including fatal viral infection, with particular susceptibility to herpesviral infections, such as cytomegalovirus, varicella zoster virus, and Epstein-Barr virus. While NKD is rare, studies of these diseases are important for defining specific requirements for human NK cell development and homeostasis. New themes in NK cell biology are emerging through the study of both known and novel NKD, particularly those affecting cell cycle and DNA damage repair, as well as broader PIDs having substantive impact upon NK cells. In addition, the discovery of NKD that affects other innate lymphoid cell (ILC) subsets opens new doors for better understanding the relationship between conventional NK cells and other ILC subsets. Here, we describe the biology underlying human NKD, particularly in the context of new insights into innate immune cell function, including a discussion of recently described NKD with accompanying effects on ILC subsets. Given the impact of these disorders upon human immunity with a common focus upon NK cells, the unifying message of a critical role for NK cells in human host defense singularly emerges.

Symbols of Conflict and Hope

The present article offers an analysis of the use of symbolism in the books of Daniel and Revelation. Thus, the first section of the study evaluates the degree of thematic unity which may be said to exist between the two books (given their common literary genre). Secondly, the article explores the different roles which symbolism plays within the two books. Finally, a concluding section brings together the findings of the study, indicating that despite the complex symbolism of Daniel and Revelation, it is plausible to speak of these books (individually and together) as having a unifying message which could be described as the victory of good over evil or, more precisely, the sovereignty of God in a world where evil seems to prevail. At the same time, this unifying message can take a wide variety of distinctive meanings for specific groups and for specific settings.

An unprecedented march for science.

As hundreds of thousands joined some 600 gatherings around the globe, local concerns blended with a unifying message of support for science.

Solving Society's Big Ills, A Small Step

We look at a collection of conjectures with the unifying message that smaller social systems, tend to be less complex and can be aligned better, towards fulfilling their intended objectives. We touch upon a framework, referred to as the four pronged approach that can aid the analysis of social systems. The four prongs are: 1. The Uncertainty Principle of the Social Sciences 2. The Objectives of a Social System or the Responsibilities of the Players 3. The Need for Smaller Organizations 4. Redirecting Unintended OutcomesSmaller organizations mitigating the disruptive effects of corruption is discussed and also the need for organizations, whose objective is to foster the development of other smaller organizations. We consider a way of life, which is about respect for knowledge and a desire to seek it. Knowledge can help eradicate ignorance, but the accumulation of knowledge can lead to overconfidence. Hence it becomes important to instill an attitude that does not knowledge too seriously, along with the thirst for knowledge. All of this is important to create an environment that is conducive for smaller organizations and can be viewed as a natural extension of studies that fall under the wider category of understanding factors and policies aimed at increasing the welfare or well-being to society.

Solving Society’s Big Ills, A Small Step

We look at a collection of conjectures with the unifying message that smaller social systems, tend to be less complex and can be aligned better, towards fulfilling their intended objectives. We touch upon a framework, referred to as the four pronged approach that can aid the analysis of social systems. The four prongs are:1. The Uncertainty Principle of the Social Sciences2. The Objectives of a Social System or the Responsibilities of the Players3. The Need for Smaller Organizations4. Redirecting Unintended OutcomesSmaller organizations mitigating the disruptive effects of corruption is discussed and also the need for organizations, whose objective is to foster the development of other smaller organizations. We consider a way of life, which is about respect for knowledge and a desire to seek it. Knowledge can help eradicate ignorance, but the accumulation of knowledge can lead to overconfidence. Hence it becomes important to instill an attitude that does not knowledge too seriously, along with the thirst for knowledge. All of this is important to create an environment that is conducive for smaller organizations and can be viewed as a natural extension of studies that fall under the wider category of understanding factors and policies aimed at increasing the welfare or well-being to society.

Solving Society's Big Ills, A Small Step (Presentation Slides)

We look at a collection of conjectures with the unifying message that smaller social systems, tend to be less complex and can be aligned better, towards fulfilling their intended objectives. We touch upon a framework, referred to as the four pronged approach that can aid the analysis of social systems. The four prongs are: 1. The Uncertainty Principle of the Social Sciences 2. The Objectives of a Social System or the Responsibilities of the Players 3. The Need for Smaller Organizations 4. Redirecting Unintended Outcomes Smaller organizations mitigating the disruptive effects of corruption is discussed and also the need for organizations, whose objective is to foster the development of other smaller organizations. We consider a way of life, which is about respect for knowledge and a desire to seek it. Knowledge can help eradicate ignorance, but the accumulation of knowledge can lead to overconfidence. Hence it becomes important to instill an attitude that does not knowledge too seriously, along with the thirst for knowledge. All of this is important to create an environment that is conducive for smaller organizations and can be viewed as a natural extension of studies that fall under the wider category of understanding factors and policies aimed at increasing the welfare or well-being to society.

Persia to China: the Silk Road of Restorative Justice I

This paper to the 2016 Beijing meeting of the Asian Criminological Society is the first of two lectures on the theme of The Silk Road of Restorative Justice. The second is the annual lecture of the European Forum for Restorative Justice held jointly with the Asia-Pacific Forum for Restorative Justice in Milan (Braithwaite 2017). This first paper opens the idea of restorative justice as a way of thinking that flows back and forth along the Silk Road with a special focus on the development of relational, republican, and feminist thought in ancient and modern China and Persia. Both contemporary China and Iran are left today with quite a universal yet modest national policy of support for restorative justice. Some co-optation of restorative justice by the state and disengagement from it by many key justice professionals are evident in both China and Iran. The second paper argues more normatively for openness to hybridity along the Silk Road. It identifies virtues of being a republican-socialist-capitalist-feminist advocate of restorative justice in light of what we learn along the Silk Road. The unifying message of both papers is that excellence in restorative justice is nurtured by travelling many roads in search of helpful hybrids.

What the obesity prevention field can learn from the gay marriage movement.

What the obesity prevention field can learn from the gay marriage movement.

Adjunct Faculty and NFL Referees: The Appropriation of Value from Professional Part‐Time Workers

This article distinguishes a particular category of “part‐time worker”—the professional who works part‐time—and traces how such workers have the value of their professional skill appropriated by their employers. We do this by a comparison of the NFL Referees' Strike of 2012—NFL referees are part‐time employees—with the debate over whether adjunct faculty should be covered by the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These two seemingly disparate labor actions are joined in the analysis by the fact that both involved a series of textual constructions. These textual constructions are explored using sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's patterning of modern global capitalism as a system divided into “the local actualities of lived experience” where the world's work is done and “the extra‐local relations of ruling” where “texts” are created that pattern and appropriate that work. We consider the NFL Referees' Strike as a “teachable moment” when public attention was turned to a labor issue; we then question whether the debate over the ACA and adjunct faculty might serve the same purpose. We conclude that the diversity among adjunct faculty in terms of their financial and career relation to adjunct teaching—which contrasts with a uniformity among NFL referees—makes it hard to craft a unifying message. We end by suggesting that the relations of ruling are perhaps well served by the current lack of information about adjunct faculty, a lack that makes it hard for organizers to mobilize them.

Both/And Instead of Either/Or

On both questions about the political makeup of academia and conservative activism on educational issues, Gross makes definitive causal claims. He postulates a variation of self-selection that relies on political typing of occupations. On conservative activism he argues that moral entrepreneurs utilize animosity towards progressives in higher education to express a populist ideology uniting distinct elements within the conservative movement. As it concerns potential political bias, I argue that self-selection and barriers of discrimination and bias both play important roles in producing progressive academic institutions. On issues of conservative activists’ attention to educational issues, I contend that concern about progressive academics is both a unifying populist message and a realistic assessment of a political threat. I largely agree with the content of Gross’s finding but disagree with the degree the processes he outlines answers these two research questions. I have a both/and approach whereby other factors must be taken into consideration. Ideally future research will assess not only the different factors within these answers, but also which factors have the most explanatory power relative to other factors.