Following the life of a charismatic woman committed to reform, The Pragmatic Ideal provides an introduction to the politics that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century, ideas that are ...the basis for much of today's progressive thought. As one of the "new women" who came of age during the Progressive era, Mary Field Parton, a close friend of Clarence Darrow, pursued social justice as a settlement house worker and as a leading writer on labor organizing, transforming pragmatic principles into action. Mark Douglas McGarvie shows how, following the upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberals such as Mary Field Parton turned to pragmatism, hoping to generate greater social awareness from constructions of values rooted in personal experiences instead of philosophical or religious truths. The Pragmatic Ideal reveals how Mary Field Parton sought to expand her rights as a woman while nonetheless denigrating rights as artificial legal impediments to social progress. The issues she faced and the options she considered find important currency in the political divisions confronting Americans a century later.
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a ubiquitous viral pathogen associated with large-scale morbidity and mortality in humans. However, there is considerable uncertainty over the time-scale of its origin and ...evolution. Initial shotgun data from a mid-16th century Italian child mummy, that was previously paleopathologically identified as having been infected with Variola virus (VARV, the agent of smallpox), showed no DNA reads for VARV yet did for hepatitis B virus (HBV). Previously, electron microscopy provided evidence for the presence of VARV in this sample, although similar analyses conducted here did not reveal any VARV particles. We attempted to enrich and sequence for both VARV and HBV DNA. Although we did not recover any reads identified as VARV, we were successful in reconstructing an HBV genome at 163.8X coverage. Strikingly, both the HBV sequence and that of the associated host mitochondrial DNA displayed a nearly identical cytosine deamination pattern near the termini of DNA fragments, characteristic of an ancient origin. In contrast, phylogenetic analyses revealed a close relationship between the putative ancient virus and contemporary HBV strains (of genotype D), at first suggesting contamination. In addressing this paradox we demonstrate that HBV evolution is characterized by a marked lack of temporal structure. This confounds attempts to use molecular clock-based methods to date the origin of this virus over the time-frame sampled so far, and means that phylogenetic measures alone cannot yet be used to determine HBV sequence authenticity. If genuine, this phylogenetic pattern indicates that the genotypes of HBV diversified long before the 16th century, and enables comparison of potential pathogenic similarities between modern and ancient HBV. These results have important implications for our understanding of the emergence and evolution of this common viral pathogen.
Following the life of a charismatic woman committed to reform,
The Pragmatic Ideal provides an introduction to the
politics that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century,
ideas that are ...the basis for much of today's progressive thought.
As one of the "new women" who came of age during the Progressive
era, Mary Field Parton, a close friend of Clarence Darrow, pursued
social justice as a settlement house worker and as a leading writer
on labor organizing, transforming pragmatic principles into
action.
Mark Douglas McGarvie shows how, following the upheavals of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberals such as
Mary Field Parton turned to pragmatism, hoping to generate greater
social awareness from constructions of values rooted in personal
experiences instead of philosophical or religious truths.
The Pragmatic Ideal reveals how Mary Field Parton
sought to expand her rights as a woman while nonetheless
denigrating rights as artificial legal impediments to social
progress. The issues she faced and the options she considered find
important currency in the political divisions confronting Americans
a century later.
In the current climate ecolinguistic research has arguably never been more important, as its basic premises regard the survival of life on Earth and key philosophical questions hitherto ...under-acknowledged by mainstream science. In recent decades, environmental thinking has made great advances in shaping current opinions towards nature and the non-human world. The goal of this paper is to explore certain currents of mediated thinking in modern Britain regarding nature, in order to assess how far expressions of sorrow for the felling of a prominent tree might correspond to a genuine ecological sentiment. The study explores public responses to an apparent case of eco-vandalism, the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023 in Northumberland, using data taken from social media and other online sources such as e-newspapers. From the point of view of Ecolinguistic theory and that of Positive Discourse Analysis it applies critical lenses such as Evaluation and Discourse Pragmatics to dig beneath the surface of texts produced on the topic, in order to explore diverse current attitudes to trees in the UK. The paper finds that, though there are instances in which people appear to express grief for the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree, it is possible to account for these in ways that lessen the likelihood that they are motivated by purely ecological sentiment. In practice human attitudes towards trees tend to be superficial and instrumental, and this tendency is also found here. The Sycamore Gap event brings many latent social attitudes into play, and this paper thus contributes to the developing field of Ecolinguistics by focusing on tree-centred narratives, distinguishing between inherent ideologies of pseudo- and authentic environmental sensitivity.
Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is one of the most widespread liver diseases in the world. It is currently incurable and can lead to liver cirrhosis and cancer. The considerable impacts on society caused ...by CHB through patient mortality, morbidity, and economic loss are well-recognised in the field. This is, however, a narrow view of the harms, given that people living with CHB can be asymptomatic for the majority of their life-long infection. Of less-appreciated importance are the psychosocial harms, which can continue throughout an affected person's lifetime. Here we review the broad range of these impacts, which include fear and anxiety; financial loss and instability; stigma and discrimination; and rejection by society. Importantly, these directly affect patient diagnosis, management, and treatment. Further, we highlight the roles that the research community can play in taking these factors into account and mitigating them. In particular, the development of a cure for hepatitis B virus infection would alleviate many of the psychosocial impacts of CHB. We conclude that there should be a greater recognition of the full impacts associated with CHB to bring meaningful, effective, and deliverable results to the global community living with hepatitis B.
Human e/migration across the Mediterranean increased significantly in the first part of the 21st century. At the mercy of people smugglers, migrants who succeed in crossing the seas face uncertain ...futures in Europe. Such immigration is at the heart of political debate in Europe, where right-wing populist parties have made significant gains because of their opposition to it. These parties tend to view human migration as a negative phenomenon, using familiar and by now even clichéd cultural and socio-political arguments against it. This study explores some of these discursive tropes. Rather than following studies that use a critical discourse paradigm, the paper’s main aim is to identify positive discourse and practice that might represent models for future behaviour in this context. It focuses on a discussion on recent migration involving Italy and, by applying tools of pragmatic analysis, united to knowledge of the socio-political background, traces some underlying trends in migrant reception. The data analysed were gathered by interviewing an Italian mayor who has attracted hostility from right-wing media for his novel approach to migrants, whose needs are met by finding them a place in the local social context. Findings suggest that, in certain circumstances, the migratory phenomenon may benefit not just the subjects involved but also the places concerned. The study thus foregrounds the degree to which welcoming the cultural other counters social discourses that currently appear triumphant in mainstream media and electoral processes.
The combustion of coal in a mixture of pure O
2 and recycled flue gas is one variant of a novel combustion approach called oxy-fuel combustion. With the absence of N
2, this approach leads to a flue ...gas stream highly enriched in CO
2. For many applications, this flue gas stream can then be compressed and sequestered without further separation. As a result, oxy-fuel combustion is an attractive way to capture CO
2 produced from fossil fuel combustion. When coal is burned in this O
2 and CO
2 rich environment, its combustion characteristics can be very different from conventional air-fired combustion. In CETC-O, a vertical combustor research facility has been used in the past years to investigate the combustion characteristics of several different coals with this variant of oxy-fuel combustion. This included flame stability, emissions of NO
x
, SO
x
and trace elements, heat transfer, in-furnace flame profiles and flue gas compositions. This paper will report some of the major findings obtained from these research activities.
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