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Get PDFArticle on the social and scientific meanings of sea waves (English title: 'Where there are waves there are stories'
Prison population rates before and during the pandemic: lessons from COVID-19 about over-incarceration and its consequences for health (In: The Impact of Covid-19 on Prison Conditions and Penal Policy)
Get PDF'The Impact of COVID-19 on Prison Conditions and Penal Policy' presents the results of a worldwide exchange of information on the impact of COVID-19 in prisons. It also focuses on the human rights questions that have been raised during the pandemic, relating to the treatment of prisoners in institutions for both juveniles and adults worldwide.
When COVID-19 first emerged, over two-thirds of countries worldwide had prison systems operating above official capacity, following decades of unchecked growth in pre-trial and sentenced prisoner populations. The resulting overcrowded prison conditions presented a high risk of infection. The greater prevalence of underlying health conditions among prisoners, and the possibility of outbreaks spreading to local communities, presented further challenges for disease control. Prisons responded with a range of measures, including severe and prolonged restrictions on prisoners’ interactions with family members and external organisations’ staff involved in providing work, training or rehabilitation in prisons. These restrictions and the additional time spent locked in cells have negatively impacted prisoners’ mental and physical health and will be detrimental to long-term outcomes
Constructing identities, ascribing nationalities: the Polish minority in Ukraine during late-imperial and early-Soviet rule
Get PDFThis article investigates underlying state intentions behind the counting and standardizing minority populations in view of the dire need to modernize the country. It takes a close look at the statistics regarding the Polish minority provided by the 1897 Imperial and 1926 Soviet censuses to understand how, within a span of only thirty years, the abstract figures of language, religion, and social status came to represent rigidly ascribed and hereditary national categories. The article also explores how the category of “nationality” was understood and how its meaning, political, and economic significance changed in the decades between these two censuses
Surface faulting earthquake clustering controlled by fault and shear-zone interactions
Get PDFSurface faulting earthquakes are known to cluster in time from historical and
palaeoseismic studies, but the mechanism(s) responsible for clustering, such
as fault interaction, strain-storage, and evolving dynamic topography, are
poorly quantified, and hence not well understood. We present a quantified
replication of observed earthquake clustering in central Italy. Six active normal
faults are studied using 36Cl cosmogenic dating, revealing out-of-phase periods
of high or low surface slip-rate on neighboring structures that we interpret as
earthquake clusters and anticlusters. Our calculations link stress transfer
caused by slip averaged over clusters and anti-clusters on coupled fault/shearzone
structures to viscous flow laws. We show that (1) differential stress fluctuates
during fault/shear-zone interactions, and (2) these fluctuations are of
sufficientmagnitude to produce changes in strain-rate on viscous shear zones
that explain slip-rate changes on their overlying brittle faults. These results
suggest that fault/shear-zone interactions are a plausible explanation for
clustering, opening the path towards process-led seismic hazard assessments
Clarke dare not speak its name: defining sexuality in imperial earth
No full textBook synopsis: Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke explores the author’s representations of gender and sexuality, his location within post-war science fiction, his engagement with religion and ecology, his influence on such writers as Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter and Liu Cixin, and his enduring legacy through the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. We follow his imagination and thought from the depths of the ocean to the moons of Jupiter and, indeed, beyond the infinite
{{Re}} Groups of diverse problem-solvers outperform groups of highest-ability problem-solvers - most of the time
Get PDFProblem-solving teams are becoming increasingly diverse, which has been suggested to improve performance. Pioneering computational work by Hong & Page (2004) suggested that diversity indeed trumps ability when it comes to finding the peaks in a random landscape. Recently, Grim and colleagues (2019) extended the model to consider more structured landscapes and suggested that the original claim only holds under limited circumstances. In this paper, I replicate the main findings of the two works, and provide modular, extensible code to facilitate future research into this paradigm. Overall, the replications were successful, even though a closer look at the data suggests that the limitations highlighted by Grim and colleagues are less severe than initially presented, so that diversity on the whole still appears to trump ability within this paradigm. The code for the agent-based models and my analyses is available on https://github.com/LukasWallrich/diversity_abm_replicatio
Environmental and stratigraphic bias in the Hominin Fossil Record: implications for theories of the climatic forcing of human evolution
No full textBook synopsis: Humans evolved in the dynamic landscapes of Africa under conditions of pronounced climatic, geological and environmental change during the past 7 million years.
This book brings together detailed records of the paleontological and archaeological sites in Africa that provide the basic evidence for understanding the environments in which we evolved.
Chapters cover specific sites, with comprehensive accounts of their geology, paleontology, paleobotany, and their ecological significance for our evolution.
Other chapters provide important regional syntheses of past ecological conditions.
This book is unique in merging a broad geographic scope (all of Africa) and deep time framework (the past 7 million years) in discussing the geological context and paleontological records of our evolution and that of organisms that evolved alongside our ancestors.
It will offer important insights to anyone interested in human evolution, including researchers and graduate students in paleontology, archaeology, anthropology and geology
Defining the genes required for survival of Mycobacterium bovis in the bovine host offers novel insights into the genetic basis of survival of pathogenic Mycobacteria
Get PDFTuberculosis has severe impacts on both humans and animals. Understanding the genetic basis of survival of both Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the human-adapted species, and Mycobacterium bovis, the animal-adapted species, is crucial to deciphering the biology of both pathogens. There are several studies that identify the genes required for survival of M. tuberculosis in vivo using mouse models; however, there are currently no studies probing the genetic basis of survival of M. bovis in vivo. In this study, we utilize transposon insertion sequencing in M. bovis AF2122/97 to determine the genes required for survival in cattle. We identify genes encoding established mycobacterial virulence functions such as the ESX-1 secretion system, phthiocerol dimycocerosate (PDIM) synthesis, mycobactin synthesis, and cholesterol catabolism that are required in vivo. We show that, as in M. tuberculosis H37Rv, phoPR is required by M. bovis AF2122/97 in vivo despite the known defect in signaling through this system. Comparison to studies performed in species that are able to use carbohydrates as an energy source, such as M. bovis BCG and M. tuberculosis, suggests that there are differences in the requirement for genes involved in cholesterol import (mce4 operon) and oxidation (hsd). We report a good correlation with existing mycobacterial virulence functions but also find several novel virulence factors, including genes involved in protein mannosylation, aspartate metabolism, and glycerol-phosphate metabolism. These findings further extend our knowledge of the genetic basis of survival in vivo in bacteria that cause tuberculosis and provide insight for the development of novel diagnostics and therapeutics
State dependence of fiscal multipliers: the source of fluctuations matters
Get PDFWe develop a general theory of state-dependent fiscal multipliers in a framework featuring two empirically relevant frictions: idle capacity and unsatisfied demand. Our key novel finding is that the source of fluctuations determines the cyclicality of multipliers. Policies that stimulate demand, such as government spending, have multipliers that are large in demand-driven recessions, but small and possibly negative in supply-driven downturns. Conversely, policies that boost supply, such as cuts in payroll taxes, are ineffective in demand-driven recessions, but powerful if the downturn is supply-driven. Austerity, implemented by a reduction in government consumption, can be the policy with the largest multiplier in supply-side recessions and demand-driven booms, provided elasticities of labor demand and supply are sufficiently low. We obtain model-free empirical support for our predictions
by developing a novel econometric specification that allows to estimate spending and tax multipliers in recessions and expansions, conditional on those being either demand- or supply-driven
Categorization templates modulate selective attention
Get PDFMany models of attention assume that categorization (the individuation of events based on the feature dimension relevant for response selection) occurs only after an object has been selected and encoded in working memory (WM). In contrast, we propose that the match between an item and the currently activated set of possible response features (categorization template) already modulates selective perceptual processing prior to WM encoding. To test this proposal, we measured electrophysiological markers of attentional engagement (N2pc components) and behavioural interference effects from post-target distractors (PTDs) as a function of whether these distractors matched the categorization template. Participants were presented with rapid serial visual presentations (RSVPs) of digits and letters, and had to identify a target indicated by a surrounding shape in these RSVP streams. Targets were drawn from a subset of items within an alphanumeric category. Accuracy was highest when the PTD belonged to the irrelevant alphanumeric category, lower when the PTD matched the target’s alphanumeric category target but not the categorization template, and lowest when the PTD matched the categorization template. On trials with template-matching PTDs, target-elicited N2pc components were temporally extended, indicative of additional attentional amplification triggered by these PTDs. We propose that this amplification produces increased competition between targets and PTDs, resulting in performance costs. These results provide new evidence for the continuous nature of evidence accumulation and attentional modulations during perceptual processing. They show that attentional selectivity is not exclusively mediated by search templates, but that categorization templates also play an important and often overlooked role
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