Unorthodox Use Research Articles

HF01-08 THE ART OF CLEANLINESS: URINE AND LAUNDRY?

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 Apr 2023HF01-08 THE ART OF CLEANLINESS: URINE AND LAUNDRY? Maunil Patel Maunil PatelMaunil Patel More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000003243.08AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: For thousands of years, civilization found new and eccentric ways to make use of resources that were around them. A small group of people in ancient Rome who called themselves fullers did exactly that by finding a use for urine that became critical to societal constructs. The Romans exemplified what it means to have good hygiene in high society. They created an unorthodox way to use urine to clean their clothing. METHODS: A great level of interest in ancient Roman lifestyle sparked an investigation in the function of fullonicas in Roman society. Justification of the text comes from ancient Roman inscriptions and literature review. RESULTS: Washers and scourers in ancient Rome were called Fullers. They created fullonicas which are very similar to modern day laundromats. The concept of soap was non-existent at that time, so fullers relied on using urine to clean the tunics and stoals of those who belonged to the noble class. Fullonicas got abundant amounts of urine by having the poor sit on various street corners in town and collect urine from the citizens in jars. Once the jars were full, they would carry the jar to the nearest fullonica; being extra careful to not spill the jar on themselves. Once the urine was delivered, the cleaning process begins. Cleaning consisted of washing the clothes in a mixture of water, alkali metals, and urine; Ammonia was the active ingredient in this process which naturally came from stagnant urine. Next, the fullers would stomp on the clothes repeatedly until all the dirt, stains and oils were scrubbed off; this was called saltus fullonicus or the fullers jump. Lastly, the clothes would be rinsed with water and brushed with wool or the skin of a hedgehog. Fullonicas were a critical part in ancient Rome since many articles of clothing that were worn by the kings, queens, and clergy were all cleaned in the same manner. This process of cleaning resulted in glistening white clothing that were worn by the upper-class Romans. CONCLUSIONS: Throughout history, urine was used in a variety of ways in many aspects of life. Urology pertains to the storage and flow of urine, and it is not used for marketable purposes. Fullers of ancient Rome prided themselves on the unorthodox use of urine to keep the clothes of high-ranking nobles in Roman society clean. Source of Funding: None © 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 209Issue Supplement 4April 2023Page: e258 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Maunil Patel More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Photographic Process as Desire

Between 1986 and his death from AIDS-related causes in 1989, the Boston- and Jersey City–based photographer Mark Morrisroe produced a series of cameraless photographs with heterogenous material including fabric, pornography, and X-rays. This essay argues that these photograms move away from a dominant understanding of photography that celebrates stasis, legibility, and indexicality in favor of one concentrating on activity. Morrisroe’s photograms cast the photograph as a process: the image unfixable and always under development, its matter flexing, sputtering, and shifting over time. For Morrisroe, this project was inextricable from an understanding of desire itself as processual. The essay positions Morrisroe’s processual and desirous conception of photography as an instance of what has recently been theorized as queer formalism’s capacity to galvanize queer politics and resist social violence. Morrisroe’s formal experimentation with the medium and unorthodox use of darkroom materials countered mainstream, pathos-ridden representations of AIDS and imagined alternatives to the epidemic’s fragmentation of queer worldmaking projects. Through intertextual readings with Morrisroe’s contemporary Hervé Guibert, the essay shows how Morrisroe’s anti-indexical and processual cameraless photography demonstrates the medium’s potential as a vehicle for currents and transmissions knitting together spectators, bodies, and queer communities in flow.

Intelligent methods for impartial and objective evaluation of a course project

It is suggested that students' course projects be evaluated formally using an unorthodox use of the dichotomous Rasch model and fuzzy assessments of the criteria. The approach may be integrated into e-learning systems and enables program implementation. Keywords: E-learning in higher education; evaluation of written works of students; one-parameter Rasch model; Rasch measurement; formalization of the evaluation process; STEM.

Efficacy of using walnuts as statin adjuvants in hypertension management

ABSTRACT Background Due to the widespread unorthodox use of nuts to improve cardiovascular health, this clinical trial was carried out to evaluate the efficacy of walnut as an adjuvant statin in hypertensive subjects. Method A single-blind placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial that lasted for 3 months. Forty-five screened hypertensive subjects on treatment, aged 45–65 years, were randomized into intervention and placebo groups according to their blood pressure defined by the American Heart Association criteria. Fifteen (15) normotensive subjects were also recruited for this study. The participants in the intervention group included daily 7 g of boiled walnut taken as snacks. The study was not controlled for type of diet and frequency of meals in a day. Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLc) was the primary endpoint for this study. Results The mean LDLc levels of the intervention groups (84.6 mg/dl and 79.7 mg/dl, respectively) were significantly (p < .005) lower than the placebo (137.6 mg/dl). The high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDLc) levels of the intervention groups were significantly higher than the placebo. The mean total cholesterol levels of the intervention groups were significantly lower than the placebo group. The intervention groups recorded a significantly lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure compared to the placebo. The supplementation of walnut significantly decreased the apolipoprotein E (APOE), proprotein convertase subtilisin kexin 9 (PCSK9), and cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) activities relative to the placebo. Conclusion The use of walnut as a statin adjuvant during hypertension treatment reduced LDLc levels within 42.1% and improved HDL levels by 33.6%, and the LDLc decrease related to reduced PCSK9 and APOE activities while the HDLc increase related to reduced CETP activities.

The Pearl of Muğam Philosophy: Qəzəl Poetry and Musical Hermeneutics in Independent Azerbaijan

Abstract The 650th anniversary of Azerbaijan's beloved poet Imadaddin Nasimi (1369–1417) in 2019 was marked by two compositions in which his famous qəzəl “Sığmazam” was set to music. Qəzəl poetry is usually performed in muğam, a branch of traditional Azerbaijani music, and its unorthodox use by pop stars in these two compositions sparked intense debates. In this article, I discuss how the deep significance and instrumentality that qəzəl poetry holds in the post-Soviet context explains the powerful impact of the two pieces. I show how interpretation and imagination of qəzəl meanings in muğam, especially the theme of the beyond, is a way to make social and political realities and articulate post-Soviet subjectivities that emerge through the narrative of loss and in relation to beliefs about the Soviet past.

A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III

Reviewed by: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil Warby William G. Thomas III Ted Maris-Wolf (bio) Slavery, Antislavery, Abolition, Legal history A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. By William G. Thomas III. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 418. Cloth, $35.00.) [End Page 156]Rarely have white historians of slavery sought relationships with descendants of those enslaved by their very own ancestors, let alone authored a scholarly monograph detailing the horrors of slaveholding and violence in their family history. William Thomas has done both. The resulting study, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War, is an ambitious and meticulously researched examination of slavery and law between the Revolution and the Civil War, as well as an unconventional and provocative call for historians to lead the way in fostering truth and racial reconciliation in today's society. Thomas challenges readers (especially those of us descended from enslavers) to reflect on our own relationships to the private and public pasts we inherit, study, and narrate. Are we open to hearing and acting on the calls of those enslaved by our own family members? Reckoning with revelations uncovered during the course of his research, Thomas asks, "How would I respond to the call of these ancestors? How would you?" (121). Thomas's unorthodox use of first-, second-, and third-person voice likely will inspire more scholars to follow his example (and that of others before him, including Saidiya Hartman, Edward Ball, and Thomas Norman DeWolf) in crafting more intimate historical explorations of the lives of the enslaved. Perhaps A Question of Freedomwill even precipitate the long-awaited moment when we historians of slavery acknowledge greater kinship with our cousins in anthropology by explicitly positioning ourselves (and our personal histories) to the subjects and people we study—something anthropologists have been doing for decades. It is just as likely, however, that Thomas's approach will alienate some who see his first-person interludes of "self-revelation" and attempts at racial reconciliation as distracting, overly personal, or even insulting, especially if they find these passages obscure the individuals at the center of the study—enslaved Black men and women who took the extraordinary step of petitioning for their freedom and challenging the very basis of legal slavery in Maryland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere (2). After all, must we be privy to the private ruminations and emotional journeys of the historian to appreciate brilliant scholarship? Thomas's bold narrative approach is reason enough to assign A Question of Freedomin any graduate seminar, but his remarkable archival detective work and resulting contributions make this one of the most [End Page 157]important recent works in legal history and, more broadly, the history of American slavery. Thomas recounts in painstaking detail the efforts of five generations of enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, to secure their freedom and that of others by directing white lawyers to file hundreds of freedom suits on their behalf in various courts—county, state, even the U.S. Supreme Court. Through their personal involvement in the conception of these suits, the Queens, Mahoneys, Bells, and other enslaved families "accumulated a substantial reservoir of legal experience and knowledge" that not only secured freedom for many of their own petitioners between 1787 and 1861 but also rattled the foundations of the institution of slavery in Maryland and beyond (149). One of Thomas's most important contributions is advancing our understanding of an increasingly robust Black legal culture between the Revolution and the Civil War and the role of enslaved petitioners and their freedom suits in fostering this tradition. Thomas recounts the complicated situations of dozens of petitioners who creatively, persistently, and often repeatedly challenged the property claims of their enslavers through law. In several early suits in Maryland, enslaved families evoked the Somersetv. Stewartruling of 1772 to argue that because an ancestor of theirs had set foot in England, they and all descendants were free, according to English common law...

Verticality in the peripatetic genre: deceleration, microspection and confinement in Robert Macfarlane’s travel books

ABSTRACT This article proposes a discussion of Robert Macfarlane’s travel series The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012) and Underland (2019), with a close focus on pedestrianism. The peripatetic aspect of these books can be understood as a mode of writing in which the rhythm of the walk settles into the rhythm of the text and a mode of locomotion, in which pedestrianism emerges as a vantage point of perceiving the world. At the same time, this interpretation draws upon the concept of verticality, with its key instruments of deceleration, microspection, multisensory engagement in the outer world, physical proximity and confinement. The unorthodox use of tactility, pedestrian senses and privileging of the tactile-kinaesthetic sustain the idea of a body–subject and disrupt the supremacy of sight and a growing sense of disembodiment in the travel genre. By and large, Macfarlane’s celebration of the metaphysics of place questions conventional horizontalism.

“Unpresidented!” or: What happens when the president attacks the federal judiciary on Twitter

ABSTRACT There are many things that make Donald Trump a controversial figure in American politics, not least of which is his prominent and unorthodox use of Twitter to attack his opponents. The federal judiciary is a frequent target of the president’s ire: during his campaign and tenure as president, Trump has not hid his disdain for federal judges who disagree with him, and has on occasion taken to Twitter to express these feelings. This unprecedented form of going public provides the opportunity to shed light on the malleability of support for politically insulated institutions. We evaluate the hypothesis that Trump’s statements erode specific and diffuse support for the federal judiciary using a survey experiment in which real tweets written by the president are manipulated as the experimental treatment. We find that specifice, but not diffuse, support for the Court changes in response to his attacks, but those changes are conditioned on respondents' preexisting support for democratic values.

In Pursuit of Recognition and the Expression of Power? Making Sense of Vulgarity in Zimdancehall

While there are many refined musical productions, Zimdancehall is epitomised by the use of explicit vulgar lyrics. This article attempts to make sense of vulgarity in the musical genre against the knowledge that, although vulgarity is obnoxious in the public sphere, it is functional in specific contexts among the Shona people of Zimbabwe. Deploying a theoretical gaze that is grounded in concepts of indigenous knowledge systems, aesthetics of vulgarity and subalternity, the article grapples with Zimdancehall artists’ pursuit of creative power and recognition through unorthodox use of vulgar lyrics. The article shows the expediency of vulgarity in artists’ expressions of power, and how it is used to gain fame in a highly competitive music industry with established musicians. Such artistic power is gained through the “diss” modus, that is, through the appropriation of masculine supremacy and the subversion of femininity. Counter-hegemonic discourses are used to contest the dominance of rival artists by employing vulgar humour. It is one thing to pursue recognition, but it is another to be recognised. The use of vulgar lyrics alone does not always translate into artistic power and fame.

The Use of Executive Orders and Proclamations to Create Immigration Policy: Trump in Historical Perspective

Executive Summary This article examines presidential immigration policy making through executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. Donald Trump’s overall volume of EOs has been remarkably similar to that of other presidents, while his number of proclamations has been relatively high. His immigration-related EOs and proclamations, however, diverge from those of his predecessors in several ways. Of the 56 immigration-related EOs and 64 proclamations issued since 1945, Trump has issued 10 and nine, respectively. Overall, about 1 percent of all EOs and proclamations during this period have been immigration related, compared to 8 percent of Trump’s EOs and 2.4 percent of Trump’s proclamations. In a sharp departure from previous presidents, a greater share of his EOs and proclamations have been substantive policy-making documents intended to restrict admissions of legal immigrants and increase enforcement along the border and in the interior of the United States. This article explores Trump’s unorthodox use of executive tools to make immigration policy, circumventing Congress and even members of his own administration. It recommends that: Congress should hold oversight hearings and should consider revoking or modifying EOs and proclamations that have been issued pursuant to the authority provided to the president by Congress, as opposed to those based on the executive’s constitutional authority. Advocacy organizations should continue to challenge the president’s executive actions, the insufficient process and consultation leading to them, their statutory or constitutional justification, and their impact. Congress should take an inventory of the immigration authorities it has delegated, both explicitly and implicitly, to the executive branch and determine when this authority can and should be limited. Congress should pass legislation to update and reform the US immigration system, and thus clarify its intentions regarding US immigration law, policy, and executive authority in this area.

Postgenomics function monism

The ENCODE project has made important new estimates of human genome functionality, now revising the percentage considered functional to more than 80%, which is in stark contrast to the received view, which estimated that less than 10% of the conserved parts of the human genome are functional. ENCODE's unorthodox use of the notion of biological function has stirred the so-called ENCODE controversy, involving conflicting views about the correct notion of function in postgenomics. The debate hinges on the traditional philosophical contrast between the causal role (CR) and selected effects (SE) approaches. In this paper, we examine the ENCODE controversy in terms of the distinction between function monism and pluralism. We propose to apply a weak etiological account to genomic function ascriptions. In this approach, we can ascribe a function to a genomic structure of an organism if and only if performing the function persists in causally contributing to the organism's and its ancestors' fitness. In comparison to the strong etiological (i.e., the selected effects) approach, the present account does not require there to be selection for the structure in question. This is a monistic approach that enables us to avoid the main difficulties of CR, as well as SE's overdependence on natural selection, while still preserving an evolutionary-constrained notion of biological functions. Our proposal is much more moderate in accommodating the estimates of the functionality of the human genome than both ENCODE's proposal itself and the views of the critics relying on a version of the SE account of functions.

New Directions in Gestalt Group Therapy: Relational Ground, Authentic Self

New Directions in Gestalt Group Therapy: Relational Ground, Authentic Self

The creative use of absences

AbstractIn an article published in this journal,Partington (2014)addresses the criticism often made against corpus linguistics that it is apparently unable to cope with absences. He convincingly argues that corpus linguistics is better suited to account for absences than has been claimed. I resume the debate by discussing a type of absence not fully addressed inPartington (2014)which I have termed ‘creative absences’. With a focus on corpus stylistics, I consider the way in which the author Henry Green dispenses with a compulsory element in the grammatical structure of Standard English, i.e. the determiner (mainly, the definite article). By means of a manual analysis as well as two corpus stylistic analyses (keyness and text-type analysis) of the novelLiving(Green 1929), I explore the effects of such an unorthodox use and argue, alongsidePartington (2014), for the usefulness of corpus approaches to account for at least certain types of absences.

Orthodox and Unorthodox Uses of Electronic Cigarettes: A Surveillance of YouTube Video Content.

Open electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) systems are customizable by consumers and often allow for potential "unorthodox" use of the product; that is, use not as intended by the manufacturer. Little is known about the types and prevalence of unorthodox uses and how these practices are transmitted via popular social media. Monthly searches of YouTube were conducted from June through November 2016 using the following search terms: "e-cigarettes," "vaping," and "e-juice." After collecting static and dynamic data on the 150 videos identified, two coders independently coded videos for general information, unorthodox use behaviors, health claims, and production quality and characteristics for orthodox and unorthodox use. Intercoder reliability was high (Cohen's κ 0.81, p < .001). One hundred fifty videos were included in the study with a total of 115 551 563 views. We identified nine categories of unorthodox uses of e-cigarettes. Unorthodox use was three times as prevalent as orthodox use. Seventy-seven percent of the unorthodox use videos included recreational e-cigarette use, 57% included modification of mechanical parts and components, and 44.6% included unorthodox substance application (dripping). There were more than twice as many social media links in videos depicting unorthodox compared to orthodox use, but the level of engagement was lower for unorthodox use. E-cigarette unorthodox use on YouTube is more prevalent than orthodox use, suggesting the need to further investigate the prevalence of unorthodox use among e-cigarette users and the influence of social media on consumer uptake of unorthodox and orthodox uses of e-cigarettes. The US Food and Drug Administration has regulatory authority over e-cigarettes, parts and components. Many e-cigarettes currently marketed are open systems. Closed systems may allow less manipulation and may influence the safety of these products. This study provides valuable information on ways that open system e-cigarettes are used and it can inform safety tests that can be conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration to determine whether or not these products should remain on the market. In addition, our definitions of unorthodox use can be incorporated into the Population Assessment of Tobacco on Health Study to better understand the prevalence of these behaviors.

Unconventional patterns in the experimental poetry of E. E. Cummings: A stylistic approach to punctuation marks

For some time scholars have examined unconventional linguistic patterns in E. E. Cummings’ poetic style. Of all the aspects under consideration, it is grammar, lexis and morphology that have been most widely researched, while only a small number of studies have looked at graphology or, least of all, punctuation. This article is a contribution to the latter research field, and is aimed at developing a systematic approach to the use of punctuation marks in E. E. Cummings’ experimental poetry. I deal with two fundamental research questions: What foregrounding patterns are present in E. E. Cummings’ unorthodox use of punctuation marks, and what effects derive from his singular use of marks? Using 157 experimental poems as a corpus, I identify any instances of unconventional punctuation and classify the different devices that break with convention, determining the meaning implications (if any) that derive from these particular uses. An in-depth analysis of these poems reveals that there are three basic unconventional devices in Cummings’ use of punctuation marks (substitution, omission and insertion) and that these help Cummings to achieve a variety of purposes: emphasize certain elements within the poem, shift the tempo of the lines, create chaotic scenes, produce iconic effects, schematize any unit within the poem, omit letters and words, signal heteroglossia, indicate imperative voice, articulate the poem into different layers, create plays on words, and reproduce features of spoken language.

The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 by Rachel Price

Reviewed by: The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 by Rachel Price Rebecca Kosick Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968. Northwestern UP, 2014. 272 pp. In The Object of the Atlantic, Rachel Price develops an historically-rooted theory of "concretude" that takes shape in the Atlantic region between empire and globalization. Through readings of writers such as José Marti, Joaquim de Sousândrade, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Brazilian concrete and neoconcrete poets and artists, Price demonstrates how a shared aesthetic interest in concretude alternately mirrors, engages, and anticipates economic shifts from objects to networks. The book's definition of its central theme is wide-ranging, moving between spectrums that include the endpoints of material and immaterial, presence and absence, "thingly" and virtual. Within these categories is further variety still. Objects are contrasted to networks, processes, dematerialization, and voids, and they are paired with materiality, commodities, products, and the everyday remnants of material culture, among other things. Materiality, in turn, sometimes refers to the fact of these various objects as depicted in writing and other times refers to the materiality of writing itself. The materiality of writing includes written form, as in Price's discussion of a "signature use of colons" in Martí's late-nineteenth-century New York chronicles. Price describes how Martí's chronicles, a series of newspaper articles written by the Cuban poet while living in New York City, "juggle distant geographies and carefully modulated paces, miming the global operation of capital" (53). She argues that, in these chronicles, frequent and unorthodox use of colons "visually string together far-flung places and times into a delicately connected whole—a concrete diagram" (53). Just as the chronicles "mime" global capital, the colons create a diagram-like effect. Later, Price describes how their "form enacts the culture of the stock market: harried, pitching, linking far and near through the exchange of commodities—made equivalent, as the colons make chunks equivalent" (55; emphasis added). The materiality of writing here is thus a formal and visual strategy that serves to imitate an extratextual material reality. Later, Price pushes back against a dominant reading of mid-twentieth-century Brazilian concrete poetry that suggests the movement's aesthetics were straightforwardly reflective of "the euphoric national developmentalism characteristic of the era of President Juscelino Kubitschek" (166). Instead, Price shows that what concrete poets Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, and Haroldo de Campos called "'ultimate' or 'total' realism" had specifically to do with "a desire to make word equal thing" (167). Here, she argues that the materiality of writing is not a visual and formal "representation of external reality but reality itself" (167) and makes the case for prescient links between concrete poetry and the coming rise of "a more networked, more virtual, and more extensive capitalism" (21). Though the neoconcrete movement that formed in (somewhat antagonistic) response to concrete poetry and art accused concrete poetry of "a naïve fidelity to a scientific objectivity that conflated antilyrical anti-expressionism with a fetishizing of objecthood," [End Page 539] Price argues that concrete poetry already showed an interest in the pairing of the material and immaterial that would predate later moves away from the objectual and toward the processual in neoconcretism as well as in the poema/processo movement that coincided with the dawning digital age. A careful revealing of this type of insight—one in which literature anticipates coming aesthetic and political-economic shifts—is one of The Object of the Atlantic's strongest claims. And the book's meticulous, historical exploration of transatlantic networks of power juxtaposed with close readings of the region's aesthetic output helpfully reveals further ways aesthetic concretude relates to extraaesthetic reality. One example would be Price's address of the complex relationship between Spain and Latin America as it engages questions of objecthood and subjecthood at turn of the twentieth century. Resisting the persistent divide between Latin American and Penninsular studies, her discussion of Spanish critic and theorist Ramiro de Maeztu shows how Cuba's "independence (or loss) is but one event in a dense web of multiple, interrelated movements throughout the...

Toward combined delignification and saccharification of wheat straw by a laccase-containing designer cellulosome

Efficient breakdown of lignocellulose polymers into simple molecules is a key technological bottleneck limiting the production of plant-derived biofuels and chemicals. In nature, plant biomass degradation is achieved by the action of a wide range of microbial enzymes. In aerobic microorganisms, these enzymes are secreted as discrete elements in contrast to certain anaerobic bacteria, where they are assembled into large multienzyme complexes termed cellulosomes. These complexes allow for very efficient hydrolysis of cellulose and hemicellulose due to the spatial proximity of synergistically acting enzymes and to the limited diffusion of the enzymes and their products. Recently, designer cellulosomes have been developed to incorporate foreign enzymatic activities in cellulosomes so as to enhance lignocellulose hydrolysis further. In this study, we complemented a cellulosome active on cellulose and hemicellulose by addition of an enzyme active on lignin. To do so, we designed a dockerin-fused variant of a recently characterized laccase from the aerobic bacterium Thermobifida fusca The resultant chimera exhibited activity levels similar to the wild-type enzyme and properly integrated into the designer cellulosome. The resulting complex yielded a twofold increase in the amount of reducing sugars released from wheat straw compared with the same system lacking the laccase. The unorthodox use of aerobic enzymes in designer cellulosome machinery effects simultaneous degradation of the three major components of the plant cell wall (cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin), paving the way for more efficient lignocellulose conversion into soluble sugars en route to alternative fuels production.

From Illiberal to Incorrigible: A New Strategy for Humanitarian Enforcement Action in Syria

The Syrian civil war has caused heartbreaking human suffering. Proponents of decisive action to end this suffering have tended to frame their case in terms of liberal values such as democracy, human rights and the rule of law. In framing the humanitarian issue in this way, advocates of UN Security Council involvement have emphasized the illiberality of the ‘Assad regime’ in order to promote the acceptability of coercive enforcement action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. I argue that this rationale is counterproductive as it guarantees that the Russian Federation will veto any proposal for Chapter VII measures. Russia favours an inclusive Syrian-led political solution to the Syrian civil war and fears that any invocation of Chapter VII will provide Western powers with carte blanche for regime change, effectively repeating – in Russia’s eyes – NATO’s action in Libya in 2011. This article offers an alternative way of framing arguments for humanitarian enforcement action that is intended to side-step Russia’s objections. This strategic re-framing replaces the logic of illiberality with the logic of incorrigibility. This strategy takes its inspiration from Michel Foucault’s work on disciplinary power, making an admittedly unorthodox use of Foucauldian analytics to do so. The incorrigibility strategy seeks to bypass Russian fears about regime change by adopting a threshold for Chapter VII action based on a measured phenomenon – the repeated failure by the parties to correct their behaviour in line with UNSC prescriptions. Apart from providing a threshold for enforcement action, the logic of incorrigibility also shapes the eventual Chapter VII measures taken because it focuses on correcting the parties’ behaviour and because it yields highly specified and relatively controllable mandates for coercive action which limit states’ interpretation of what is required of them to carry out the UNSC’s decisions.

Evaluation of levels of select toxic metals in commonly used herbal medicines in Benin city, south-south Nigeria

Background : Herbal medicine has been gaining growing attention as medicinal plants are now the major remedy to diseases in some places, especially in Africa. Some herbal preparations are made without standard manufacturing and safety standards, a practice that makes the products susceptible to contaminants which may include toxic metals. Even at low concentrations or levels of exposure, toxic metals have also been reported to pose health risks to man. Aim : To evaluate the levels of toxic metals in herbal medicines commonly prepared and used in Benin City, Edo state, Nigeria. Materials / Methods :Herbal medicines (n=8) were purchased from on-the-street vendors and evaluated for levels of five toxic metals (Lead, Nickel, Mercury, Cadmium and Arsenic).Analysis of toxic metals was carried out in the analytical services laboratory of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Ibadan using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry. Results :Lead (mg/L) respectively detected in the eight sampled herbal preparations were 0.025, 0.022, 0.092, 0.088, 0.052, 0.074, 0.051 and 0.092; while nickel levels (mg/L) were 0.075, 0.066, 0.277, 0.265, 0.153, 0.158, 0.029, and 0.052;and Levels of cadmium in mg/L detected were 0.014, 0.013, 0.052, 0.50, 0.029, 0.029, 0.153 and 0.277. In addition, Levels of mercury (mg/L) observed in the respective herbal samples were 0.035, 0.031, 0.129, 0.124, 0.071, 0.072, 0.071 and 0.129; and arsenic (mg/L) levels as observed were 0.002, 0.002, 0.007, 0.006, 0.004, 0.004, 0.004 and 0.007. Conclusion : Data obtained from this study indicate that the herbal preparations studied contain detectable amounts of toxic metals and by implication, the frequent and unorthodox use of these herbal preparations may increase the body burden of these metals which have been reported to be toxic at any level of exposure. Key Words : Herbal medicine, Medicinal plants, Contaminants, Toxic metals.

G.D.H. Cole's International Thought: the Dilemmas of Justifying Socialism in the Twentieth Century

This article examines G.D.H. Cole's international thought. It focuses on Cole's treatment of the state as well as his contributions to the tradition of international functionalism. It argues that Cole's thought is unique in its unorthodox use of various intellectual traditions as well as its commitment to civic activism. His social theory, which rejected the state as a desirable form of political organisation, was inspired by Rousseau's republicanism and French syndicalism, and led Cole first to a variation of anarchist internationalism, and then, in light of the economic depression and Fascism, to a version of international functionalism. In the 1930s and 1940s, he accepted the state as an agent of constitutional reform and international planning as a means to bring about change in international relations within a broader supranational economic framework, even if he remained unwilling to attach any intrinsic value to the state. This article argues that Cole's thought still provides a vital resource for those who seek to think beyond the welfare state and the liberal international order.