On heterochrony: birthday gifts to Stalin, 1949

Gift relations have been traditionally theorized as antinomial to modernity or, within modernity, in the spheres of the personal relations and ideologies of altruism which dwell on the contrast with commodity and often cast themselves as residual, 'traditional' domains. This article explores claims to modernity that were made by public gift-giving to a modern head of state. It examines birthday gifts to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he received from both his Soviet subjects and international leaders and movements and that were put on public display in 1949-53 in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This article interprets gift-giving to Stalin as a dramatic example of socialist intervention in the modernist temporality, and it theorizes the notions of time that were culturally constructed through the socialist state gift economy. This article reflects part of an ongoing research project on gift-giving to Soviet leaders. It is based on fieldwork, oral-historical and archival research with designers, artisans, and ordinary citizens who were involved in the production of the gift items, as well as with curators and other specialists involved in this exhibition and in preservation of these gifts in different Russian state museums.     

Cases Concerning Sovereignty over Islands before the International Court of Justice and the Dokdo/Takeshima Issue

The article analyzes the recent jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice in relation to disputes concerning sovereignty over islands and considers the potential implications of this jurisprudence for the resolution of the Dokdo/Takeshima issue. It does so by examining the principles and rules of international law applied by the Court to the determination of title to territory, especially those concerning the question of original title and its interplay with state conduct in general (effectivités). The article also pays special attention to the different legal techniques applied by the Court in resolving each particular dispute and the Court's practical approach to dealing with questions of historical facts and other evidentiary matters in relation to small and uninhabited islands.     

Standby Consumption in Households Analyzed With a Practice Theory Approach

This article focuses on the energy consumption of households and the question of how daily routines can be changed in a more sustainable direction. It discusses different theoretical approaches with which to understand consumer behavior and introduces practice theory that emphasizes sociotechnical structures as the basis for analyzing stability of consumer practices and opportunities for change. Through analysis of ten in-depth interviews with families participating in a project aimed at reducing standby consumption, it is shown how technological configurations, everyday life routines, knowledge, and motivation constitute the practice and also structure the possibilities for change. The article concludes by contending that a conception of human behavior that is both less rational and less individualistic is needed to understand stability and change of households' energy consumption behavior.     

A novel mutation in the IHH gene causes brachydactyly type A1: a 95-year-old mystery resolved

Brachydactyly type A1 (BDA1) was the first disorder described in terms of autosomal dominant Mendelian inheritance. Early in the 1900s Farabee and Drinkwater described a number of families with BDA1. Examination of two of Drinkwater's families has revealed that, although they are not known to be related, both share a common mutation within the Indian hedgehog gene ( IHH). This novel mutation is a guanine to adenine transition at nucleotide 298, resulting in an Asn100Asp amino acid substitution. Both families demonstrate significant intrafamilial phenotypic heterogeneity among the affected individuals. Examination of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) has shown that the affected individuals in both families share SNPs within IHH consistent with that of a common founder. The identification of the same mutation in these families has answered a question that is nearly a century old about the genetic cause of their disease and supports the hypothesis that IHH plays a pivotal role in normal human skeletogenesis.     

Selective and divided attention in animals

This article reviews some of the research on attentional processes in animals. In the traditional approach to selective attention, it is proposed that in addition to specific response attachments, animals also learn something about the dimension along which the stimuli fall (e.g., hue, brightness, or line orientation). More recently, there has been an attempt to find animal analogs to methodologies originally applied to research with humans. One line of research has been directed to the question of whether animals can locate a target among distracters faster if they are prepared for the presentation of the target (search image and priming). In the study of search image, the target is typically a food item and the cue consists of previous trials on which the same target is presented. In research on priming effects, the cue is typically different from the target but is a good predictor of its occurrence. The study of preattentive processes shows that perceptually, certain stimuli stand out from distracters better than others, depending not only on characteristics of the target relative to the distracters, but also on relations among the distracters. Research on divided attention is examined with the goal of determining whether an animal can process two elements of a compound sample with the same efficiency as one. Taken together, the reviewed research indicates that animals are capable of centrally (not just peripherally) attending to selective aspects of a stimulus display.     

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.     

Fast undersampled functional magnetic resonance imaging using nonlinear regularized parallel image reconstruction

In this article we aim at improving the performance of whole brain functional imaging at very high temporal resolution (100 ms or less). This is achieved by utilizing a nonlinear regularized parallel image reconstruction scheme, where the penalty term of the cost function is set to the L(1)-norm measured in some transform domain. This type of image reconstruction has gained much attention recently due to its application in compressed sensing and has proven to yield superior spatial resolution and image quality over e.g. Tikhonov regularized image reconstruction. We demonstrate that by using nonlinear regularization it is possible to more accurately localize brain activation from highly undersampled k-space data at the expense of an increase in computation time.     

Rituals of Death as a Context for Understanding Personal Property in Socialist Mongolia

This article proposes that we rethink the concept of 'personal property', and it uses the example of Mongolian rituals of death in the socialist 1980s as a context for exploring this idea. These rituals are not the occasion for dividing up property amongst inheritors (this has usually been agreed upon long before death) but involve a series of actions that specify the deceased's relations with material things. Objects become personal property through prolonged use and physical interaction. The rites are concerned with the deceased's relations with such things, focused on desire, relinquishment, dependence, and other emotions. The article thus shifts attention back to the 'person-thing' aspect of property. It also discusses the socio-political contexts in which such a relation becomes important and argues that socialist society did not eliminate but rather opened up contexts in which such personalization could occur. It is argued more generally that personal property so situated is quite different from the 'private property' that is so prominent in capitalist society. This in turn requires us to rethink the way that 'possession' may be imagined, and to consider forms of property that are conceptualized more in terms of human attachment to objects than as exclusionary relations vis-à-vis other owners. The Mongolian ethnography suggests that, just as people alter material things by long and intensive interaction with them, there are categories of personal property that also change their owners, since actions of using, giving up, donation, and so forth are ethical matters that transform the person.     

Profane Intuitions: Kurdish Diaspora in the Turkish City

Contemporary analysis of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey has often enough noted the recent explosion of Kurdish refugees and immigrants to the major Turkish cities. Interest in the re‐constitution of Kurdish identity in the metropolis, however, has been less evident. This article seeks to identify some of the main themes that need to be addressed in any such investigation. It begins by arguing that discourse on the ‘Kurdish question’ often frames the Kurds, rather than the Turkish state, as the problem. The response of the Turkish Republic to such a problem has been to assimilate the Kurds. The struggle against assimilation then is the common theme binding the multiple visions and experiences of the Kurdish diaspora.     

The sex reform movement and eugenics in interwar Poland

This paper focuses on the relations between a liberal group of sex reformers, consisting of writers and literary critics, and physicians from the Polish Eugenics Society in interwar Poland. It illustrates the paradoxes of the mutual co-operation between these two groups during the 1930s and analyses the reason why compulsory sterilisation was rejected by politicians. From the early 1930s two movements began to forge an alliance in Poland: the sexual reform movement which advocated freedom of the individual, and eugenics, which called for limiting the freedom of the individual for the collective good. This paper draws attention to several issues which emerged as part of this collaboration: population politics, the relationship between reformers, eugenicists and state institutions, and the question of how both movements--eugenics and sexual reform--perceived the question of sexuality, birth control and abortion. It will also focus on those aspects of their thinking that led to mutual co-operation.     

Adivasis,Communists, and the rise of indigenism in Kerala

Although the notion of the ‘adivasi’ has come under academic scrutiny and the ‘dark side’ of indigeneity discourses is increasingly criticized, there has been relatively little attention to the question of why, under adverse circumstances, activists have nevertheless started articulating their political program in the language of adivasi-ness while surpassing the particularistic politics of earlier tribal movements. Explaining the emergence of indigenist politics as a new democratic force is all the more pertinent for the case of Kerala since this state has the Communist movement as an obvious alternative for the articulation of such a transformative political agenda. This article therefore seeks to explore the forces that gave rise to the politics of indigenism. It begins with a discussion of shifts in the structural power context shaping subaltern activism in Kerala—particularly the impact of neoliberal restructuring and the new ideological environment created with the demise of the Communist block. The paper then moves to consider the political dynamics operating within this structural context that led indigenist activists to form a separate political movement. It looks particularly at the sense of both ideological and material disillusionment these activists feel toward the Communist party in Kerala.     

The syncranial osteology of the southern eel-cod family Muraenolepididae, with comments on its phylogenetic relationships and on the biogeography of sub-Antarctic gadoid fishes

The monogeneric gadoid family Muraenolepididae has been neglected both taxonomically and anatomically. Without good evidence it has been the opinion of most authors that the family possesses mainly primitive features. A comparison of the syncranial osteology with that of other taxa shows that this can be refuted and that Muraenolepis is a relatively derived 'higher' gadoid, having its relationships close to the Phycidae and Gadidae. The circum-Antarctic distribution of Muraenolepis is unique within gadoids and poses the question of its origin. This is discussed with reference to bipolar distributions exhibited by some other gadoid families. It is concluded that gadoids have evolved with the Atlantic continental shelves and their distribution (and bipolarity) is a consequence of the geological processes which have formed the Atlantic Ocean.     

Economy and ethics in the cosmic process⋆

When T.H. Huxley lectured on evolution and ethics in 1893, his critique of the amoral laws of the ‘cosmic process’ left his audience puzzled. While Huxley paid little attention to political and economic institutions, this article draws attention to the historical materialism of that era and its twentieth-century legacies. Empirically, it analyses the rise and fall of a Hungarian state farm with reference to the comparative literature on twentieth-century socialist societies. Theoretically, socialism is considered as the combination of a materialist philosophy of history with an axial ethical impulse. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Eurasian socialist order in the 1990s, we can see why Huxley was right to deplore the ‘fanatical individualism’ of his age. His humanism resembles that of the early Karl Marx and he stands closer to Émile Durkheim than to contemporary currents in the anthropology of ethics.     

The end times and the near future: the ethical engagements of Russian Old Believers in Romania

Despite growing insights into the secular practices of former socialist states, we are yet to grasp fully their resonance in religious lives. Taking socialist modernity and Old Belief as distinct ethical projects, in this article I discuss the ethical engagements of Russian Old Believers in socialist Romania as reflected in individual biographies. Their struggle to maintain an ascetic Orthodox culture in the midst of an intrusive atheist state was at odds with the urge to join a modernizing project that preached the collective good. This tension was managed through a temporary ‘secularization’ which allowed for differentiated generational commitments and the successful reproduction of their tradition within the socialist system. Old Believers’ return to the church in old age reveals their attempt to shape their lives through ethical action based on the obligation to continuity, to carry on the old faith. It shows how the pursuit of continuity in the Old Belief is a virtuous practice leading to moral exemplarity in a space of equivocal moralities.     

Pharmacogenetic testing, informed consent and the problem of secondary information

Numerous benefits for patients have been predicted if prescribing decisions were routinely accompanied by pharmacogenetic testing. So far, little attention has been paid to the possibility that the routine application of this new technology could result in considerable harm to patients. This article emphasises that pharmacogenetic testing shares both the opportunities and the pitfalls with 'conventional' disease-genetic testing. It demonstrates that performing pharmacogenetic tests as well as interpreting the results are extraordinarily complex issues requiring a high level of expertise. It further argues that pharmacogenetic testing can have a huge impact on clinical decisions and may influence the therapeutic strategy as well as the clinical monitoring of a patient. This view challenges the predominant paradigm that pharmacogenetic testing will predict patients' responses to medicines, but that it will not provide any other significant disease-specific predictive information about the patient or family members. The article also questions published proposals to reduce the consent procedure for pharmacogenetic testing to a simple statement that the physician wishes to test a sample of the patient's DNA to see if a drug will be safe or whether it will work, and presents an alternative model that is better suited to protect patient's interests and to obtain meaningful informed consent. The paper concludes by outlining conditions for the application of pharmacogenetic testing in clinical practice in a way that can make full use of its potential benefits while minimising possible harm to patients and their families.     

Economic images and social change in the Romanian socialist transformation

Conclusion To summarize the uses of economic images in the socialist transformation, change in local and state forms both modeled changes in national class relations and sought to shape that same process. Clearly, though, state images have triumphed for the moment. Though first less than compelling when opposed to the symbolically expressed solidarity of the local community, they have since come to dominate the ideological evaluations of local workers. Simultaneously the local community witnessed a massive social transformation where such unity as it existed, however artificial, was replaced by a more atomized social structure partially eroded by the promise of material plenty.Thus, at first, state images assisted the formation of the Romanian proletariate as a class in itself. Today, however, with political stability generally assured and increased production an absolute necessity, one can observe the reformulation of class boundaries via state-promulgated differentiation as well as the erosion of working class consciousness, class for itself, under consumerist pressures.Workers' solidarity, purposefully engendered in post-war state images, was rarely achieved in the Fgra region. Since the mid-1960s the expansion of consumerist images especially prevents its formation. Over time the counterhegemonic qualities of local images are replaced by those which accept the socialist system and question only certain of its material results. Until the recent debt crisis local images have been hauntingly silent about production relations.This need not be permanent. The disaggregation of the local community, assisted by state image manipulaton, is a historical moment. The hegemony of state iconography also carries the possibility of its own dissolution. The spectra of Romania as socialist and luxurious may yet foment worker solidarity due to unfulfilled expectations. As the debt crisis deepens, dependency intensifies, and workers experience more of the rationing and shortages common of late, the legitimacy of Romania's hyper-industrialization may once again be questioned.It is in great measure through economic iconography that Romania's socialist governments have legitimized themselves. As hierarchy is elaborated and on-line production relations made stringent to address the current fiscal crisis, it is through industry, as expressed in local folk images, that such legitimacy may be undermined.David A. Kideckel is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Central Connecticut State University.     

Governing stem cell research in California and the USA: towards a social infrastructure

Owing to the restrictive human embryonic stem cell (hESC) policies of the US government, the question of whether to pursue human embryonic stem cell experiments has dominated the ethical and political discourse concerning such research. Explicit attention must now turn to problems of implementing the research on a large scale: in the 2004 US elections, California voters approved a state initiative for stem cell research, earmarking $3 billion in direct spending over 10 years. This article explores three ethical and political problem areas emerging out of the California program, the resolution of which will help set the trajectory of hESC research in the US and abroad, and then proposes an institutional approach to help address them: a network of public stem cell banks in the US that feature transparent and shared governance.     

利用人工智能预测癌症的易感性、复发性和生存期

癌症具有较高的发病率和致死率,对人类健康具有重大威胁。癌症预后分析可以有效避免过度治疗及医疗资源的浪费,为医务人员及家属进行医疗决策提供科学依据,已成为癌症研究的必要条件。随着近年来人工智能技术的迅速发展,对癌症患者的预后情况进行自动化分析成为可能。此外,随着医疗信息化的发展,智慧医疗的理念受到广泛关注。癌症患者作为智慧医疗的重要组成部分,对其进行有效的智能预后分析十分必要。本文综述现有基于机器学习的癌症预后方法。首先,对机器学习与癌症预后进行概述,介绍癌症预后及相关的机器学习方法,分析机器学习在癌症预后中的应用;然后,对基于机器学习的癌症预后方法进行归纳,包括癌症易感性预测、癌症复发性预测、癌症生存期预测,梳理了它们的研究现状、涉及到的癌症类型与数据集、用到的机器学习方法及预后性能、特点、优势与不足;最后,对癌症预后方法进行总结与展望。     

The July 2016 Arbitral Award,Interpretation of Article 121(3) of the UNCLOS,and Selecting Examples of Inconsistent State Practices

This article discusses the insufficient consideration of the role of state practice in the interpretation and implementation of Article 121(3) of the UNCLOS by the Arbitral Tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration Case. The article argues that the Tribunal's view on the “threshold” established and its conclusion that there was no evidence that an agreement existed based upon state practice on the interpretation of Article 121(3) are open to question.