Unpredictable Turns Research Articles

Complexity-aware principles for agri-food system interventions: Lessons from project encounters with complexity

CONTEXTComplexity has long been recognised as a key feature of agri-food systems. Yet, it remains largely theoretical or poorly addressed in practice, hampering the potential of international development projects to address agriculture and food-related challenges in the Global South. OBJECTIVEThe paper identifies and examines six sources of complexity that can manifest in projects, namely: unpredictability; path dependencies; context-specific dynamics; power relations; multiple temporal and spatial scales. It then proposes and tests six agri-food system principles that could be drawn upon to more successfully navigate this complexity. The aim of the paper is to illustrate how these principles could help projects respond to the changing circumstances and unpredictable turns of agri-food systems contexts in a different way, which flexibly embraces complexity. This flexibility is essential in an age of uncertainty and transformation. METHODSComparative case study analysis of six projects implemented by the CGIAR: aflatoxin control in groundnuts in Malawi (1), pigeonpea in Eastern and Southern Africa (2), sorghum beer in Kenya (3), sweet sorghum for biofuel in India (4), precooked beans in Uganda and Kenya (5), Smart Foods in India and Eastern Africa (6). The projects aimed to either increasing smallholder farmers' incomes or addressing food and nutrition security, or both. They were specifically selected as all they were affected by some of the sources of complexity, which hampered the projects to different extents. This makes the cases relevant for not only illustrating manifestations of complexity, but also help reflect on alternative strategies to tackle it. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONThe analysis of the case studies reveals how complexity can frustrate objectives of development interventions under several aspects. It also serves to discuss how complexity can be more successfully navigated (within but also beyond the selected cases) by applying the set of proposed agri-food system principles. The principles are also presented as ways future interventions could avoid clinging to what is “known to work” and instead venture into more powerful pathways of change. SIGNIFICANCEThe following complexity-aware principle are proposed: Welcome surprises and openly discuss trade-offs; Shun orthodoxies; Engage with context-specificity; Expose patterns of power; Embrace the lengthy nature of change; Understand the multi-scale (in terms of space and time) nature of agri-food systems contexts. These principles could be used by project designers and implementors to cope with the complexity and uncertainty that will inevitably be encountered in agri-food system interventions, and can no longer be ignored.

Behavioral dynamics of visually-guided heading alignment in pedestrian following

The collective behavior of human crowds is thought to emerge from the local interactions between individual pedestrians, such as the coordination of walking speed and direction (heading). This coordination is guided by visual information about the motion of one’s neighbors. A critical interaction assumed by many models of collective behavior is the alignment of heading with neighbors. Using a behavioral dynamics framework, we simulated experimental data on pairs of pedestrians to formulate a dynamical model of heading alignment. On each trial, a “follower” either walked behind or beside a “leader” for 20m, while the leader made two unpredictable turns. The initial distance and position, turn sequence, magnitude, and timing varied. Head trajectories were recorded with a 16-camera motion capture system. Results show that the follower’s heading direction was closely coordinated with that of the leader (mean cross-correlation r = 0.92, mean delay between pedestrians = 984 ms for behind; r = 0.93, delay = 219 ms for side-by-side). We tested four models against this data to characterize the follower’s change in heading during alignment, using a least-squares criterion. In the simplest model, the follower's angular acceleration is proportional to the sine of the heading difference (mean r = 0.72, gain k = 0.81 for behind; r = 0.70, k = 0.69 for side-by-side); additional terms did not improve fit. An alternative model that incorporates the mean time delays yielded similar gains (mean r = 0.71, k = 1.17 for behind; r = 0.71, k = 1.21 for side-by-side), thus generalizing across different leader-follower positions. The results show heading alignment is controlled by nulling the difference in heading with a neighbor. This provides a cognitively-grounded model of heading alignment that may be generalized to larger-scale crowd dynamics. We are currently investigating the optical variables that control these interactions. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”: The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld Philipp Löeffler (bio) Critics like to speak in superlatives when they measure the impact of Don DeLillo on postwar American fiction, but there is considerable disagreement about the precise nature of his greatness.1 According to John Duvall, DeLillo is “one of the most important American novelists since 1970” because of “his fiction’s repeated invitation to think historically.”2 Duvall’s assessment is a viable starting point, because however central Don DeLillo’s work really is, it no doubt reflects an almost obsessive interest in the history of the postwar decades. DeLillo’s novels are all—in some way or another—focused on the extent to which the Cold War has shaped American culture in ways that are not documented in official, textbook versions of the twentieth century. His novels remind us constantly to think beyond the confines of the ordinary and to look at those figures that often evade the frameworks of historiography proper. And yet the point of DeLillo’s fiction is not mainly to envision alternative plots and speculative counterhistories that would oppose more traditional accounts of the postwar era. That would be a traditional postmodernist agenda, asking what we can or cannot know about history. For DeLillo, American history is relevant as a very practical archive of stories that people need to get a grip on their own lives—here and now—and not primarily as a field of epistemological inquiry or skepticism. In this article, I plan to discuss this shift in focus—from history understood as an epistemological object to history understood as a site of memory—in the context of DeLillo’s much acclaimed novel Underworld (1997). The novel celebrates individual moments of commemoration as a legitimate and reliable form of historical sense-making and thus provides a contrast to more traditional versions of postmodernist historiographic metafiction. As readers of Underworld delve into the worlds of the postwar decades, they learn about the uses rather than the truth of history that such literary encounters enable. That is to say, readers learn that how we perceive a series of historical events [End Page 91] is conditioned by the ways we conceptualize them within a coherent narrative. DeLillo seems to be suggesting that we need such narratives to stabilize our individual life worlds, rather than to find out about what really happened at a particular point in time. This is why for DeLillo the Cold War period is integral as a cultural reference frame: not because we need additional knowledge about the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John. F. Kennedy, or Watergate, but because the Cold War period itself sparked the coevolution of a historical vocabulary that allowed people in the postwar decades to know what they believed in and what their stories about life in America meant. Hence, my argument will be that Underworld is a novel dedicated not exclusively to crucial events of the Cold War decades but also to the mechanisms of storytelling and a corresponding belief system that helped people to define themselves meaningfully as historical subjects. The second claim I want to make pertains to the problem of storytelling and how Underworld appropriates the history of postwar American baseball, more particularly the history of the Dodgers versus Giants series in October 1951. Many critics read DeLillo’s baseball obsession as just another moment of allegorizing the Cold War decades, famously suggested by the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in John Drebinger’s article for the New York Times.3 But the incorporation of baseball into the novel goes way beyond mere allegorical symbolism. The cultural logic of baseball is inextricably entwined with Underworld’s theoretical commitment to a memory discourse in which the subjectivity of individual experiences supplants the authority of “objective” history, as it were. Like baseball, history depends on sudden and often unpredictable turns of events. Such events evade traditional analytical categories and become meaningful only through their incorporation into the story worlds of very personal lives. This is how they are endowed with meaning and reliability no matter how implausible their...

Parkinson's Disease and Segmental Coordination during Turning: I. Standing Turns

Many of the falls among people with Parkinson's disease (PD) occur during sudden, on-the-spot turning which requires systematic reorientation of axial segments towards the new direction. We examined whether a disturbance in the coordination of segmental reorientation is an important cause of turning difficulty in individuals with PD and is altered by dopaminergic medication. The sequence and timing of segmental reorientation during 45° and 90° on-the-spot turns was examined in fourteen individuals with PD while "off" and "on" medication and nineteen healthy controls (HC). Regardless of the magnitude of the turn, HC reoriented their head, shoulder, and pelvis simultaneously followed by mediolateral foot displacement. PD patients displayed temporal coordination patterns similar to the HC. PD however, reduced the velocity and early magnitude of reorientation of each body segment which were both slightly improved by dopaminergic medication. Our finding that the HC and PD patients turn en bloc when the turn is predictable and there are no time constraints shows that the strategy of en bloc turning is not wrong if the movement parameters are unconstrained. However, in real life situations, which usually require quick and unpredictable turns, the en bloc strategy may be unsafe and more likely to result in falls. While in such situations HC are able to change the strategy from en bloc to sequential segmental turning, PD patients may not be able to do so and continue to turn en bloc.

Remembering Nyerere: Political rhetoric and dissent in contemporary Tanzania

This article examines the changing uses of political rhetoric around the burial of Julius Nyerere in 1999. It argues that the ruling party uses rhetoric as a means of ‘soft power’, but also documents how this rhetoric, though geared towards legitimizing Nyerere's successors, employed tropes that were rejected by some people and were used by others to critique leaders who were perceived to lack the selfless integrity attributed to Nyerere. The article compares funerary songs by a government-sponsored band, popular at the time of Nyerere's death, with memories of Nyerere in rural areas in the early to mid-2000s. While the image of Nyerere in the funeral songs as a benign family patriarch writ large still persists, it coexists with strongly divergent constructions of Nyerere as an authoritarian ruler or a self-seeking profiteer. Moreover, the ‘official’, benign Nyerere has been employed not only by government and party faithful, but also by striking workers, opposition politicians, and critical newspapers as a measure of the shortcomings of his successors. The invocation of Nyerere as a paragon of an endangered ideal of virtue in public office indicates widespread anxieties towards a state that often disappoints but occasionally delivers, in unpredictable turns, and the limits of the government's ability to shut down dissent.

Strategising as a complex responsive leadership process

This paper, based on a narrative of one of the authors, explores management reality where a chosen strategy developed into a different direction than expected. The authors offer an insight in a manager's daily struggle, where power, gossip and conflict can influence the strategising process. The plans and strategic ambitions chosen at the outset did not seem to work, yet a strategic organisational change was highly necessary due to new governmental regulations. The story follows unpredictable turns and surprises, becoming an example of real political life in organisations. We propose that the kind of leadership practice that takes seriously the unpredictable responsive processes of spontaneously changing circumstances described here can enhance the possibilities of successful outcomes.

Time on the Crooked Road: Isochrony, Meter, and Disruption in Old-Time Country and Bluegrass Music

T Virginia Heritage Music Trail, otherwise known as “The Crooked Road,” is a site of cultural preservation and promotion that links important centers of traditional music for the region. Winding through the southwestern part of the state, the trail connects Galax, for example, where the historic Old Fiddlers’ Convention continues to draw some of area’s best old-time and bluegrass musicians, and Bristol, where Ralph Peer recorded country music’s formative “Bristol sessions” in 1927. Traveling between museums, record stores, live performance stages, and informal jam sessions, visitors to the trail engage with the music of Ralph Stanley, the Carter Family, Dock Boggs, and others who have played a defining role in bluegrass and old-time music. It is significant that the Crooked Road has come to symbolize the musical heritage of the region and, in part, the genres of old-time and bluegrass themselves, since the suggestion is that like the trail, the music winds through unique and satisfyingly unpredictable turns. Lacking the standardized homogeneity and commercial influence of a modern interstate, the geographical idiosyncrasies of the local roads comprising the trail can represent distinct points of cultural pride for local residents and authentic sites of discovery for tourists. The organizers of the Virginia Heritage Music Trail chose the name because of this geographical/ musical metaphor: on the one hand, Highway 58, through which much of the trail passes, has long had the title of the “Crooked Road” as its nickname. On the other hand, as Brandi Hart (one of the project coordinators) remarked, a fiddler can “take the crooked road” by “playing a backstep on the instrument” (personal communication, July 2007). This article’s goal is to investigate and provide an explanatory basis for the type of musical phenomenon referenced by this remark. The term “crooked

Little Blog on the Prairie (review)

Reviewed by: Little Blog on the Prairie Karen Coats Bell, Cathleen Davitt . Little Blog on the Prairie. Bloomsbury, 2010. [288p]. ISBN 978-1-59990-286-9 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Gen's mother has decided that it's time to take her dream vacation—a summer-long family stay on a farm that replicates the living conditions of the 1890s. Now Gen's stuck in an electricity-free zone with three other families and the snooty, know-it-all daughter of the camp's owners, who looks down on Gen because she doesn't know how to milk a cow or weed a cornfield. Unbeknownst to anyone, however, she has sneaked her precious cell phone into the camp, and she is texting her friends about her adventures while the battery lasts. They, meanwhile, are posting her texts on a blog, which goes viral. Complications ensue when she gets caught and get even more complicated when a TV crew turns up looking for the mysterious blogger. Despite some predictable lesson-like messages about family values and the consequences of selfish behavior, the plot takes enough unpredictable turns to provoke engagement on multiple levels as Gen learns about nineteenth-century farm life, the wondrous adaptability of little brothers, the dangers of getting to know your food, and the sheer deliciousness of Diet Coke and Quiznos when you've eaten nothing but beans and corn for weeks. Interestingly, it appears that only the children are called out for selfishness; the adults who chose the experience are never interrogated for the imposition of their desires on their families, even when it turns out that they too hate much of what they're doing. That subtext is there, however, adding yet another layer to ponder as readers suffer through their own parent-chosen vacation venues. [End Page 471] Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Traversing the chiasms of lived experiences: phenomenological illuminations for practitioner research

This article juxtaposes Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology of sense perception and practitioner research as well as demonstrating their potential to become integrated into powerful educational research and practice. The paper elaborates on Merleau‐Ponty’s metaphor of chiasm, extends its symbolic meaning to practitioner research and illustrates its application to the practice of martial and pedagogical arts. Expressed by the Greek letter χ (chi), chiasm means a crisscrossing of the perceiving and the perceived, self and other, language and meaning. Chiasm also signifies an intertwining, an intersection, reversibility, or the process of flowing of phenomena one into another. Chiasm is a contextual encounter of individuals and groups who, by taking action together, can change and transform their life‐worlds. Chiasm can symbolically represent practitioner research as an intertwining of theory and practice. Like the crosspiece, practitioner research can become an endless journey and the meeting place of a researcher’s self with the world of different and unique experiences, unpredictable turns, challenges and wonders. Merleau‐Ponty urges educators to explore and transform the life‐worlds of children and adults. The author of the article suggests that we traverse new intersections of practitioner research illuminated by phenomenological investigations.

Beijing Red Guard Factionalism: Social Interpretations Reconsidered

A generation of research on red guard politics has traced the origins of its debilitating factionalism to social and political divisions that were well established among students on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. These social interpretations impute political motives to student activists according to their positions in the pre-Cultural Revolution status quo. However, a closer examination of events in Beijing during the summer and early autumn of 1966—where the Red Guards and their factional divisions first emerged—suggests a different interpretation. Factions emerged when student activists from similar social backgrounds responded differently to ambiguous and rapidly changing political signals. These initial acts left students on opposite sides of an emerging political divide and exposed them to unforeseen risks as the movement took unpredictable turns. In this interpretation, student divisions are rooted in political interactions in the early phases of the conflict itself. Red Guard factions did not emerge in Beijing as expressions of opposed group interests based on preexisting social divisions, but as struggles to vindicate earlier actions and to avoid the harsh fate of political victims.

After Oslo: A single state in Israel/Palestine?

Summary With the current suspension of the Oslo Agreements, one of the two pillars of the Israeli‐Palestinian peace process is for the timebeing defunct What therefore, are the prospects for the other pillar ‐ the two‐state solution? The recent history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been charcterised by unpredictable turns of events: the Oslo Accords, the Rabin‐Arafat handshake, increased autonomy for the Palestinian people. These events demonstrated that what conventional wisdom holds to be impossible today, may be a viable solution tomorrow. Whilst the viability and desirability of an independent Palestinian state is highly questionable; the creation of a single secular democratic state may ultimately be the key to a peaceful settlement in the region.

Learning to Converse in a Foreign Language: The Reception Game

The RECEPTION GAME is an exercise for teaching ordinary social conversational skills to adult foreign language learners who use such skills in their professional work at posts abroad. Of all the tasks carried out in the target language at post, learners claim to experience the most difficulty participating in ordinary social conversation. The properties of ordinary social conversation imply that language learners practice following unpredictable turns in topic, displaying involvement, and producing unplanned speech. Challenges for teaching social conversation lie with classroom interactional patterns whose characteristic turn-taking structure is unlike that of ordinary social conversation. This design for teaching conversational skills-combining elements of simulation and experiential learning-takes into account conversation's rapport-building function, turn-taking mechanisms, and open-ended structure, as well as listening demands for following rapid shifts in topic and displaying understanding and involvement in the interaction.

Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas.

I don't know of any other book that deals with the hermeneutical problem of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in the way this one does. Full of cunning and unpredictable turns, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother addresses the question of the elder brother's fate by opposing two sets of readings, Christian and Jewish, ancient and modern, figural and midrashic. No one, after reading this book, will any longer connect Judaism and Christianity with a hyphen. Gerald L. Burns, University of Notre Dame Through a creative reading of the prodigal son parable, Jill Robbins demonstrates the hermeneutical impasse of the Christian exegete who must and yet cannot incorporate the Old Testament. Having disclosed the aporia at the heart of Christian hermeneutics, she proposes an alternative approach to the Hebrew Bible and new interpretations of Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, and Levinas. Robbins brilliantly integrates the discourses of biblical texts, literary works, and critical analysis. Mark C. Taylor, Williams College

The Concept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas

The Concept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas ANTHONY J. CELANO MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF Thomas Aquinas' use of the distinction between perfect and imperfect beatitude in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (EN=Ethica Nicomachea) of Aristotle. Modern scholars, most notably R.-A. Gauthier and P. Mercken, view Thomas' notion of "beatitudo imperfecta" as an indication of Thomas' "transformation" of the ethics of Aristotle.' They argue further that because of this transformation, Thomas' commentary on the EN is a defective work and of little help in understanding Aristotle's intention in his great treatise on moral philosophy. In examining the claims of modern scholars we shall focus on two different, though related, problems in the work of Thomas Aquinas: the concept of "beatitudo imperfecta," which signifies Thomas' concept of worldly beatitude and the modern assertion of a Thomistic transformation of Aristotelian ethics. Thomas' own notion of worldly beatitude arises from his reading of the tenth and eleventh chapters of the first book of the EN where Aristotle resolves the problem of the effects of chance on the human good, which is called eudaimonia (felicitas or happiness). In this discussion Aristotle implies a distinction between the essential nature of happiness, which consists in the ' R.-A. Gauthier's introductions to both the L'Ethique ~ Nicomaque, tr. and comm. by R.-A. Gauthier and Y. Jolif (Louvain, 197o), 131 and the Leonine edition of the Sententia libriEthicorum (hereafter SLE) in S. Thomae de Aquino Operaomnia (Rome, 1969),47: ~35"-57" contain his judgment on the commentary of Thomas. See also P. Mercken, "Transformation of the Ethics of Aristotle in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas," Tommaso d'Aquino nel suo settimo centenario,Atti del CongressoInternazionale (Rome, Naples; April 1974),5: a51-56; B. Mondin, "II fine naturale della vita humana, quale fondamento ultimo della morale nel Commento alle Sentenze di San Tommaso d'Aquino," Sapienza 28 (1975): 385-9~. [215] 216 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:2 APRIL 1987 exercise of both intellectual and moral virtue, and a state of blessedness, which is characterized by the benefits of good fortune, enhancing the life of virtue. In Aristotelian terms, to makarion (beatitude or blessedness) encompasses eudaimonia, in that it refers to a state of happiness marked by an abundance of external goods.' The crucial text for understanding the medieval interpretation of the concept of worldly beatitude occurs when Aristotle concludes his discussion of the effects of chance on the human good with the phrase: makar/ous d'anthr6pous. ~ The Latin rendering of these words as "beatos ut homines" led Thomas and many of his contemporaries to speculate on the exact meaning of human beatitude, as understood by Aristotle. When they read these words they saw the clearest expression of the distinction made by Aristotle between the essential constituent of happiness and the life of blessedness, which is, to some extent, dependent upon good fortune. Thomas understood Aristotle to have raised the question of earthly beatitude in the course of his discussion on the role of chance in the production of human happiness. Indeed, the entire question of the effects of chance on the human good is raised during Aristotle's resolution of a much broader problem: the cause of human happiness. Thomas notes that Aristotle offers three possible solutions to the question on the origin of happiness: a gift from the gods, the product of human endeavors, or the result of good fortune.4 Thomas, as a Christian, cannot exclude divine causality from his own resolution of this problem, but asserts correctly that Aristotle emphasizes the actions of man in bringing about his own happiness. Thomas concludes that man cooperates with God in causing happiness.5 Thomas, like Aristotle, realizes that fate does have some role to play in human lives, for human actions can be severely influenced by the unpredictable turns of fortune's wheel, and happiness may somehow be adversely affected by many terrible misfortunes. Thomas, however, views the role of chance as having only a limited influence on the human good. Happiness itself, Thomas argues, cannot arise from good fortune, because it results from virtuous human actions; chance affects only the attainment of...

The Quiet RevolutionRevisited

Abstract The Quiet Revolution has taken some unpredictable turns since first chronicled in 1971. Hawaii—the set piece of die original book—remains prototypical in many respects, though die changes there are reflected elsewhere in die country as well. Among diem: resurgence of local government as a major factor in die shaping of land use decisions; the concommitant resurgence in local planning; the proliferation of permits required to undertake development; die tremendous federal incursion into the business of land use control; increased—and increasingly organized—citizen participation in land use control decisions; die taking issue.

The glia-neuronal interaction: Some observations

UNTIL some 10 years ago, the functions performed by glial cells in the brain and peripheral nerves lay almost entirely in the realm of speculation. As an example, CAJAL, in an early paper entitled “Anatomical Mechanisms of Thought, Association and Attention”l attributed two different roles to the cortical glia, each dependent upon the motility of glial processes which his extensive microscopic examinations of stained material seemed to him to support. He supposed, on the one hand, that glial processes might insinuate themselves between pre- and post-synaptic elements and by impeding the flow of ‘nervous currents’ there produce mental relaxation and natural or induced sleep. Retraction of the neuroglial pseudopods would allow reestablishment of the synapse and “the brain would pass from the relaxed to the active stage.” These glial contractions, which might occur “automatically or by an act of will” in his scheme, could direct associative processes in specific directions. “The unpredictable turns that associations sometimes take-the fading away of ideas and words, the momentary halting of speech, the obsessive persistence of memory, the repression of an idea or experience as well as all types of erroneous motor reactions and other psychological phenomena can be understood . . . by supposing the neuroglia of the gray matter serve as an insulating and switching mechanism for nervous currents, permitting connections when they are active, and acting as insulators during repose.” His second hypothesis holds that when the perivascular astrocytes contracted, their endfeet attached to the walls of brain capillaries would pull on the wall of the vessel, enlarge its lumen, and thus increase local blood flow. To explain attention, he hypothesized that such contractions were voluntarily initiated in the cortical zone appropriate for the perceptions or recollections in order to produce and sustain the increased metabolism there. Apparently these ideas soon lost their appeal for CAJAL since he does not mention them in the two volumes on neuroanatomy that insure for him a permanent place in the history of science.2 Though SCHLEICH~ restates the glial switchboard idea in a fanciful way, neither of Cajal’s ideas seems to have received much currency nor, to my knowledge has either of them been directly tested experimentally. This despite Cajal’s statement about them at the end of his paper: “Needless to point out, a hypothesis represents a new path, opened up by experiments and observations, and even if it does not immediately reveal the truth, it

BEHIND THE MARKETS

RETURN TO ISSUEPREVNewsNEXTBEHIND THE MARKETSBusiness in amino acids has taken unpredictable turns, with feed markets offering producers their most important volume market . . . Foreign demands for crude sulfur not fully met in 1949 as stocks declinedHARRY STENERSONView Author Information Associate EditorCite this: Chem. Eng. News 1950, 28, 7, 506Publication Date (Print):February 13, 1950Publication History Published online5 November 2010Published inissue 13 February 1950https://doi.org/10.1021/cen-v028n007.p506Copyright © 1950 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETYArticle Views3Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (114 KB) SUBJECTS:Monomers,Peptides and proteins,Redox reactions,Transfer reactions Get e-Alerts