scholarly journals Mini-Public Replication: Emotions and Deliberation in the Citizens' Initiative Review Redux

Author(s):  
Michael E. Morrell ◽  
Genevieve Fuji Johnson ◽  
Laura W Black

Scholars have increasingly urged researchers to evaluate prior findings through replication studies that can help test, refine, and extend claims made in previous research. We agree that this is an important aspect of social science that deliberative scholarship has underutilized. To help fill this lacunae, we test our previous findings from an analysis of data from Citizen Initiative Reviews (CIRs) in 2016 by replicating our methodology on data from CIRs in 2018. We set out to determine if the patterns we discovered earlier and developed into the Deliberative Procedures Frame theory appeared again in 2018 CIRs. We find repeating across the two sets of data, including consistent levels of enthusiasm, slow rising happiness, and the relationships between certain emotions on the final day and participants’ evaluations of deliberative quality, and these indicate that our theory remains a viable explanation for emotions in mini-public deliberation. We remain confident that the sources of anger and frustration identified in our previous analysis remains correct. On the basis of this replication, we clarify that what we call the Procedures Frame enables the identification of the most likely time points during deliberation when the threat to democratic legitimacy and the risk to quality deliberation will most likely arise and result in expressions of emotion. Finally, our study reinforces how important deliberative design is to the role of emotions in the success of mini-publics.

Author(s):  
Petar Halachev ◽  
Victoria Radeva ◽  
Albena Nikiforova ◽  
Miglena Veneva

This report is dedicated to the role of the web site as an important tool for presenting business on the Internet. Classification of site types has been made in terms of their application in the business and the types of structures in their construction. The Models of the Life Cycle for designing business websites are analyzed and are outlined their strengths and weaknesses. The stages in the design, construction, commissioning, and maintenance of a business website are distinguished and the activities and requirements of each stage are specified.


Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (7) ◽  
pp. 1041-1051 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Spartalis ◽  
Eleftherios Spartalis ◽  
Antonios Athanasiou ◽  
Stavroula A. Paschou ◽  
Christos Kontogiannis ◽  
...  

Atherosclerotic disease is still one of the leading causes of mortality. Atherosclerosis is a complex progressive and systematic artery disease that involves the intima of the large and middle artery vessels. The inflammation has a key role in the pathophysiological process of the disease and the infiltration of the intima from monocytes, macrophages and T-lymphocytes combined with endothelial dysfunction and accumulated oxidized low-density lipoprotein (LDL) are the main findings of atherogenesis. The development of atherosclerosis involves multiple genetic and environmental factors. Although a large number of genes, genetic polymorphisms, and susceptible loci have been identified in chromosomal regions associated with atherosclerosis, it is the epigenetic process that regulates the chromosomal organization and genetic expression that plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. Despite the positive progress made in understanding the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, the knowledge about the disease remains scarce.


Author(s):  
Dieter Grimm

This chapter examines the role of national constitutional courts in European democracy. It first provides an overview of national constitutional courts in Europe, focusing on the requirements that they impose on national institutions and the consequences of those requirements at the treaty level—i.e., transferring national powers to the European Union and regulating how these powers are exercised; at the level of the EU’s exercise of these powers; and at the level of implementing European law within national legal systems. The chapter also discusses how the European Court of Justice’s jurisprudence enabled the European treaties to function as a constitution; the non-political mechanism of EU decisions and how it promotes economic liberalization; and how the design and function of European primary law undermine democracy. The chapter suggests that the democratic legitimacy imparted to the EU’s decisions by its citizens can only develop within the framework of the European Parliament’s powers.


Author(s):  
Amy Strecker

The final chapter of this book advances four main conclusions on the role of international law in landscape protection. These relate to state obligations regarding landscape protection, the influence of the World Heritage Convention and the European Landscape Convention, the substantive and procedural nature of landscape rights, and the role of EU law. It is argued that, although state practice is lagging behind the normative developments made in the field of international landscape protection, landscape has contributed positively to the corpus of international cultural heritage law and indeed has emerged as a nascent field of international law in its own right.


Universe ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Koks

I analyse the role of simultaneity in relativistic rotation by building incrementally on its role in simpler scenarios. Historically, rotation has been analysed in 1 + 1 dimensions; but my stance is that a 2 + 1 -dimensional treatment is necessary. This treatment requires a discussion of what constitutes a frame, how coordinate choices differ from frame choices, and how poor coordinates can be misleading. I determine how precisely we are able to define a meaningful time coordinate on a gravity-free rotating Earth, and discuss complications due to gravity on our real Earth. I end with a critique of several statements made in relativistic precision-timing literature, that I maintain contradict the tenets of relativity. Those statements tend to be made in the context of satellite-based navigation; but they are independent of that technology, and hence are not validated by its success. I suggest that if relativistic precision-timing adheres to such analyses, our civilian timing is likely to suffer in the near future as clocks become ever more precise.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ganna Rozhnova ◽  
Christiaan H. van Dorp ◽  
Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen ◽  
Martin C. J. Bootsma ◽  
Janneke H. H. M. van de Wijgert ◽  
...  

AbstractThe role of school-based contacts in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 is incompletely understood. We use an age-structured transmission model fitted to age-specific seroprevalence and hospital admission data to assess the effects of school-based measures at different time points during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Our analyses suggest that the impact of measures reducing school-based contacts depends on the remaining opportunities to reduce non-school-based contacts. If opportunities to reduce the effective reproduction number (Re) with non-school-based measures are exhausted or undesired and Re is still close to 1, the additional benefit of school-based measures may be considerable, particularly among older school children. As two examples, we demonstrate that keeping schools closed after the summer holidays in 2020, in the absence of other measures, would not have prevented the second pandemic wave in autumn 2020 but closing schools in November 2020 could have reduced Re below 1, with unchanged non-school-based contacts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 088506662199232
Author(s):  
Xiaojuan Zhang ◽  
Xin Li

Septic shock with multiple organ failure is a devastating situation in clinical settings. Through the past decades, much progress has been made in the management of sepsis and its underlying pathogenesis, but a highly effective therapeutic has not been developed. Recently, macromolecules such as histones have been targeted in the treatment of sepsis. Histones primarily function as chromosomal organizers to pack DNA and regulate its transcription through epigenetic mechanisms. However, a growing body of research has shown that histone family members can also exert cellular toxicity once they relocate from the nucleus into the extracellular space. Heparin, a commonly used anti-coagulant, has been shown to possess life-saving capabilities for septic patients, but the potential interplay between heparin and extracellular histones has not been investigated. In this review, we summarize the pathogenic roles of extracellular histones and the therapeutic roles of heparin in the development and management of sepsis and septic shock.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 362-376
Author(s):  
Rebecca Andrews ◽  
Penny Van Bergen

This study investigated the characteristics of educators’ talk about decontextualised events with young children in seven early childhood long day care centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were partnered with up to six children aged between 27 and 60 months. Across two time points, 85 educator–child dyads discussed past and future events. Educators’ use of questions, contextual statements, evaluations and prompts and children’s use of questions, open-ended responses, yes-no responses and spontaneous information statements were examined. Educators’ evaluative statements were highly correlated and educators’ questions were moderately correlated with children’s open-ended responses in past event conversations. Educators’ evaluative statements were highly correlated with children’s open-ended responses in future event conversations and were the only significant predictor for children’s talk. Given the important role of educators in scaffolding children’s thinking and communication skills, the recommended strategies for educators’ talk in decontextualised conversations include: sharing the conversational load, making frequent contextual statements and following the child’s lead/interests.


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