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Autocratic Revolving Doors: The Return of Authoritarian Elites to Democratic Cabinets
Get PDFWhich autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet in democracy? Elites’ incentives are at the core of the explanations of why, how and when democratization happens, yet existing studies on elites’ post-democratization trajectory is mostly anecdotal, case study-based, region
specific or based on aggregate, slow moving structural variables. This paper offers a novel theory and systematic empirical evidence of autocratic revolving doors that explain which former autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet positions under democracy. Using
a demand and supply logic of cabinet formation, the paper proposes that the return of former autocratic elites to cabinet is explained by the need of cabinet leaders for ministers with policymaking experience, and to appease old autocratic elites and their interests. More specifically, the theory proposes that the political experience and the characteristics of the position political elites held under autocracy explains which of them are more likely to meet these objectives and return to cabinet in democracy. These theoretical propositions receive support in a quantitative analysis using a novel measure of returning elites for 13,572 former autocratic elites from 72 new democracies between 1966 and 2020
Teachers learning to use student voice in primary physical education – ready, steady, go!
Get PDFPrimary physical education lags behind student voice developments in research and practice internationally (Gillett-Swan and Baroutsis, 2023) and in post-primary physical education (Howley and O’Sullivan, 2021; Iannucci and Parker, 2022a). Furthermore, evidence is lacking on how to guide primary teachers learning to implement student voice pedagogies in physical education successfully. This research begins to fill this gap by focusing on the research question: What direction can be taken from primary teachers’ experiences of learning to enact student voice in physical education? Insight on what mattered in teachers’ learning to enact student voice can guide how to promote student voice pedagogies as everyday primary physical education pedagogies. Within a professional learning community (n=10), nine primary teachers enacted student voice pedagogical strategies over a six-month period. Data sources included recordings of monthly collective meetings with teachers (n=7), mid-point (n=4) and/or end-point (n=6) individual interviews with the teachers, blog posts (n=2), conference presentations (n=2), and three focus groups with children (n=12). Drawing on teachers’ and children’s experiences, a roadmap for teachers getting started with enactment of student voice pedagogies is presented with attention to:
starting small, starting smart, and not stopping. Teachers valued the outcomes of enactment of student voice pedagogies for the children in their classes in ways that changed their teaching approaches and sustained their commitment to student voice pedagogies. The roadmap presented can be used to support teachers learning how to enact student voice as an everyday pedagogy in primary physical education
Synthetic-polymer-assisted antisense oligonucleotide delivery: targeted approaches for precision disease treatment
Get PDFThis review explores the recent advancements in polymer-assisted delivery systems for antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and their
potential in precision disease treatment. Synthetic polymers have shown significant promise in enhancing the delivery, stability, and
therapeutic efficacy of ASOs by addressing key challenges such as cellular uptake, endosomal escape, and reducing cytotoxicity.
The review highlights key studies from the past decade demonstrating how these polymers improve gene silencing efficiencies, particularly in cancer and neurodegenerative disease models. Despite the progress achieved, barriers such as immunogenicity, delivery limitations, and scalability still need to be overcome for broader clinical application. Emerging strategies, including stimuli-responsive polymers and advanced nanoparticle systems, offer potential solutions to these challenges. The review underscores the transformative potential of polymer-enhanced ASO delivery in personalised medicine, emphasising the importance of continued innovation to optimise ASO-based therapeutics for more precise and effective disease treatments
Motivators and barriers to mouthguard compliance by adult Gaelic football athletes
Get PDFDental injuries contribute to 57% of reported maxillofacial injuries in Gaelic Football, with associated psychological and economic impacts on the affected athletes. Mouthguards have been developed in efforts to mitigate the incidence and severity of dental injuries, and use is mandatory in Gaelic Football. Dental claims have reduced by over 50% since mouthguards became mandatory, but costs of dental injuries are still prevalent. The aim of this study was to determine the mouthguard compliance rates in adult Gaelic Football players, as well as the motivations and barriers to compliance.
Methods
This cross-sectional study utilised an online survey to determine the self-reported compliance of adult Gaelic Footballers with mouthguard use, the perceived peer compliance, and the motivations and barriers to compliance. Chi-square tests were used to examine differences between sex and between elite and sub-elite players.
Results
A total of 545 Gaelic Footballers completed the survey. During training, 22% of players reported to always wear a mouthguard, with 48% never wearing it, and 30% occasionally wearing it. For games, 48% of players reported to wear a mouthguard, with 11% never wearing it and 41% occasionally wearing it. Motivating factors included teeth protection, gum protection and the rules of the game. The main barriers were discomfort, difficulty breathing and difficulty speaking. Females had significantly poorer compliance in training, but had significantly better compliance in games when compared to males.
Conclusion
Mouthguard compliance is relatively poor amongst adult Gaelic Football players. Although compliance improves for games compared to training, there are still 1 in 2 players not wearing a mouthguard for games. Discomfort and challenges with breathing and speaking suggest that players may benefit from having a custom-fit mouthguard. Coaches, refereeing officials and governing bodies should strive to implement the rules more often and improve education around the benefits of mouthguard use within the sport
Gender-Focused Technology Design and Care Ethics Integration: Addressing Social and Practical Challenges
Get PDFThis paper examines the integration of care ethics into the design of gender-focused technologies, addressing the socio-political and practical challenges in the Information Technology (IT) sector. It argues that these technologies often reflect interests embedded within predominant social structures and ethical conceptions, with the underrepresentation of women in tech leadership roles as a symptom perpetuating existing disparities rather than addressing the actual needs of marginalized groups. Drawing on an extensive review of gender-focused technology literature and care ethics case studies, we critique traditional ethical
frameworks for their failure to address these challenges. We explore how care ethics, emphasizing relational and contextual morality, can provide a more inclusive and effective approach while highlighting theoretical and
practical issues that hamper implementation. We propose addressing and reinterpreting these criticisms as opportunities to leverage the strengths of care ethics, creating technologies that empower and resonate with
user groups, fostering a more equitable future
Enhancing Subject-Independent P300 Classification in RSVP-Based BCIs with Deep Learning
Get PDFBrain-computer interfaces offer transformative potential across a variety of fields, such as assistive technologies and neurorehabilitation. Traditional machine learning methods for P300 classification are typically subject-specific, which can lead to reduced generalizability. This study explores the subject-independent classification of P300 responses elicited through RSVP across 20 subjects. Three models — Bayesian Ridge, CNN-based, and EEGNet — were evaluated for their performance. The results revealed that EEGNet outperformed both Bayesian Ridge (ROC-AUC: 0.732) and CNN-based approaches (ROC-AUC: 0.763), attaining an average ROC-AUC score of 0.767. Additionally, the impact of varying the amount of training data was examined, demonstrating that larger training datasets significantly improved classification performance. Furthermore, fine-tuning EEGNet on individual test subjects significantly enhanced its performance, increasing the average ROC-AUC to 0.813. A paired t-test confirmed the statistical significance of the improvement, highlighting EEGNet’s robust potential for generalizable P300 classification
A prelude to revisionism? The stalemated peace model and the emergence of multipolarity in international order
Get PDFStalemated peace processes are indicative of serious problems for international order, relating to its legitimacy and viability. They may indicate potential opportunities or herald revisionist moments. Yet, the dominant research methodologies, conceptual, and practical doctrines of the post-Cold War order, related to peacemaking, have indicated a convergence around limited goals for peacemaking, peace missions, international mediation, and conflict resolution. At best, this has led to negative forms of peace, stalemates, or a victor’s peace in many conflict-affected states and regions. Such problemsolving approaches, which operate within the often contradictory frameworks of the liberal international order, Realism, multipolarity, and geopolitical pragmatism, have led to unintended consequences because of such parsimony. This article examines the post-Cold War consequences of these developments in peacemaking and related UN and other peace approaches in practice and in theory. It focuses on the emergence of the concept of
“stalemated peace”
Leveraging Multimodal Models for Enhanced Neuroimaging Diagnostics in Alzheimer’s Disease
Get PDFThe rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great potential in medical diagnostics, particularly in radiology, where datasets such as X-rays are paired with human-generated diagnostic reports. However, a significant research gap exists in the neuroimaging field, especially for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, due to the lack of comprehensive diagnostic reports that can be utilized for model fine-tuning. This paper addresses this gap by generating synthetic diagnostic reports using GPT-4o-mini
on structured data from the OASIS-4 dataset, which comprises
663 patients. Using the synthetic reports as ground truth for
training and validation, we then generated neurological reports
directly from the images in the dataset leveraging the pre-trained
BiomedCLIP and T5 models. Our proposed method achieved
a BLEU-4 score of 0.1827, ROUGE-L score of 0.3719, and
METEOR score of 0.4163, revealing its potential in generating
clinically relevant and accurate diagnostic reports
