Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human-animal relations and the role of cultural norms in tiger conservation in the Idu Mishmi of Arunachal Pradesh, India

This thesis is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the role of local norms and cultural institutions in the conservation of the endangered tiger, which is typically protected in exclusive areas by national governments and transnational NGOs. I do this by investigating the factors – ecological, cultural and socio-political - that have allowed a newly identified tiger population to exist in an unprotected setting in the Dibang Valley region of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, the traditional homeland of the Idu Mishmi people. As the research question spans social and natural science realms, the study was conducted empirically using a combination of qualitative approaches such as participant observation, in-depth interviews, and quantitative methods, notably camera traps and longitudinal hunting offtake surveys. Following the theoretical framework, study site and methods chapters, the first data chapter is an ethnographic account of the Idu including cosmology, land relations, old and newly emerging political and economic stratifications, and Idu-animal relations. I argue that Idu practices in relation to wildlife must be understood within the broader socio-cosmological context as Idu natural, spiritual and social worlds are deeply interwoven. In the second data chapter, I assess socio-cultural regulations on hunting and consumption of wild animals by exploring how Idu hunting taboos regulate human-nature and human-human relations, and their changing nature. Through statistical models and interviews I show that Idu taboos do act to reduce wild meat consumption, however rich Idus and rich outsiders consume the most meat, often with little regard to taboos, while poorer Idus hunt to supply meat to the rich while observing taboos strictly. In the third data chapter, I assess the impact of Idu hunting on tigers and their prey by comparing animal densities and habitat use, derived from camera trap data, in three sites with different levels of hunting pressure. I do not find evidence for hunting-induced depletion of wildlife in any of the sites suggesting hunting sustainability. In the final data chapter, I explore the factors that may promote or undermine sustainability of Idu hunting. In particular, I demonstrate the nuanced role of cosmology in ensuring that tigers are conserved even in the face of rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances. In response to the thesis question, I conclude that tigers have continued to thrive in Dibang Valley due to a multi-layered interaction of Idu land tenure and land-use, hunting ontology and taboos grounded in cosmology, species ecology, and the Indian government’s protectionist policies that have so far restricted large-scale outsider settlement in Dibang Valley. I reflect on the tiger’s future in Dibang Valley in light of forthcoming hydropower dams and proposals for the state takeover of tiger conservation. I argue for ‘place-based’ conservation focused on contextually-relevant approaches formulated with local people.
Quality of life of family caregivers of cancer patients in Singapore and globally.

INTRODUCTION Family caregivers of cancer patients often suffer from impaired quality of life (QOL) due to stress arising from the responsibility of caregiving. Most research on such QOL impairments was conducted in Western populations. Thus, this exploratory study sought to (a) examine the QOL levels of family caregivers of cancer patients in an Asian population in Singapore, in relation to caregivers from other countries within and outside of Asia; and (b) investigate the association between sociodemographic factors and QOL impairments in family caregivers in Singapore. METHODS A total of 258 family caregivers of cancer patients who were receiving outpatient treatment completed the Caregiver Quality of Life Index-Cancer (CQOLC) and a sociodemographic survey. We compared the published CQOLC total scores from Turkey, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada with the Singapore dataset and examined the demographic relationships. RESULTS Caregivers in Singapore and Asia had lower CQOLC total scores than their Western counterparts. Caregivers who were male, of Chinese ethnicity, had parental relationships with their care recipient, or cared for advanced-stage cancer patients were found to have impaired QOL. CONCLUSION The findings of this study highlight possible areas in which support can be provided for family caregivers of cancer patients, and underscore the need to reconcile cultural diversity, values, societal expectations and demographic characteristics in Singapore.
Immature psychological defense mechanisms are associated with women's greater desire for and actual engaging in masturbation

Previous research found that frequency of penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) is associated with better health and satisfaction (sexual, relationship, life, mental health), with some opposite effects for masturbation (even when controlling for partnered sexual activity frequency). Previous research also found that depressed women have a greater desire to masturbate (but not to engage in PVI) than non-depressed women. Thus, we sought to examine if such associations might be due to a characterological issue. Immature psychological defense mechanisms indicate impaired characterological function, and are associated with specific sexual impairments. A sample of 132 women reported their frequencies of various sexual activities, and completed the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40) and a measure of social desirability responding. Multivariate analyses indicated that immature defense mechanisms are independently associated with (1) greater frequency of engaging in masturbation (beta = .50), younger age, and lower social desirability scores; and (2) greater frequency of desire to engage in masturbation (beta = .48), lesser frequency of desire to engage in PVI (beta = −.21), and younger age. The results should inform the practice of sex education, sex therapy, and understanding of the roles of personality, mood, and sexual behaviors.
The death penalty in Asia

A recent essay in this journal lamented ‘how few articles or book reviews appear by French authors’ (Daems, 2007: 319), but a more important problem in this and related publications is the dearth of work about punishment and society in Asia, a region that is home to more than half the planet’s population and to several of the most rapidly changing societies on earth. This Special Issue introduces readers to some of the Englishlanguage scholarship about the death penalty in Asia. Asia is the regional capital of capital punishment because that is where more than 90 percent of the world’s judicial executions occur – the large majority of them in China. Asia also covers a vast geographic area and a wide variety of cultures, political systems, and capital punishment policies. The geographical focus of this symposium is the jurisdictions of East Asia – the People’s Republic of China (two articles), Taiwan (one article), and South Korea (one article). For English-language accounts of capital punishment in Japan, the other East Asian country most frequently categorized with these three, see my own article in this journal (Johnson, 2006) and the works cited therein. The main method employed by the authors in this symposium is the case study of a single jurisdiction (an exception is the overview by Franklin Zimring and David Johnson). The limitations of the case study approach need to be acknowledged. Can one generalize from death penalty developments in East Asian nations to Muslimmajority societies such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan? What about nations like Mongolia and Nepal that are not very developed? And how does capital punishment in East Asia relate to death penalty practice in other retentionist strongholds such as the Middle East and the southern United States? Some scholars have tried to discern the determinants of the death penalty worldwide (Anckar, 2004; Neumayer, 2006), but in some respects they have had limited success. The case study approach employed here has two primary virtues: sustained attention to local context, and the experience that the researchers bring to their studies from having lived and worked in the contexts about which they write (Flybjerg, 2001).
A Continual Multiagent Planning Approach to Situated Dialogue

Situated dialogue is usually tightly integrated with behavior planning, physical action and perception. This paper presents an algorithmic framework, Continual Collaborative Planning (CCP), for modeling this kind of integrated behavior and shows how CCP agents naturally blend physical and communicative actions. For experiments with conversational CCP agents we have developed MAPSIM, a software environment that can generate multiagent simulations from formal multiagent planning problems automatically. MAPSIM permits comparison of CCP-based dialogue strategies on a wide range of domains and problems without domain-specific programming. Despite their linguistic capabilities being limited MAPSIM agents can already engage in fairly realistic situated dialogues. Our ongoing work is taking this approach from simulation to real human-robot interaction.
Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth

emerging powers. The chapter on China explores the paradoxical situation that China faces: its economic success constrains rather than aids its ability to aggressively pursue its own interests in trade liberalization within the WTO. China has thus eschewed a leadership role in the WTO to avoid the backlash of both western countries and countries in the South that tend to see China as a threat. The India chapter provides a powerful challenge to the United States’s rhetoric that the emerging economies are not holding up their end of the trade liberalization bargain. Hopewell demonstrates that India is not spoiling the trade liberalization party but rather has significant interests in the liberalization of services and has indeed pursued substantial unilateral liberalization. However, India must balance the interests of its internationally competitive IT sector with less competitive, politically sensitive sectors like agriculture. This mercantilist approach to WTO negotiations is not illiberal but rather central to the design of the WTO; moreover, it reflects the strategy long used by the United States and other advanced-industrialized states. Overall, this is an engaging and important book that is essential for anyone studying the global trade system, including students in graduate and undergraduate classes on globalization, development, and trade. At its root, Hopewell reminds us that inter-state competition is an enduring feature of the global capitalist system that shapes who wins and loses at different historical moments.
Productivity, Efficiency and Economic Growth: East Asia and the Rest of the World

This study compares the sources of growth in East Asia with the rest of the world, using a methodology that allows one to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) growth into technical efficiency changes (catching up) and technological progress. It applies a varying coefficients frontier production function model to aggregate data for the period 1970-1990, for a sample of 45 developed and developing countries. Our results are consistent with the view that East Asian economies were not outliers in terms of TFP growth. Of the high-performing East Asian economies, our methodology identifies South Korea as having the highest TFP growth, followed by Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. Our methodology also allows us to separately estimate technical efficiency change, which is a component of TFP growth, and we find that, in general, the estimated technical efficiency of the high-performing East Asian economies was not out of line with the rest of the world.
Quaternary Vicariance of Lotic Coeliccia in the Ryukyu-Taiwan Islands Contrasted with Lentic Copera

Lotic dragonflies and damselflies are expected to be more affected by vicariance than lentic sister species. We demonstrated that severe vicariant speciation acted on lotic Coeliccia in contrast to lentic Copera damselflies, which are both included in the family Platycnemididae. We constructed maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference trees of these Platycnemididae species from the continental islands of Ryukyu (Amami, Okinawa, and Yaeyama islands), Taiwan, and Japan relative to Chinese species using raxmlGUI and BEAST, based on the mitochondrial COI gene (682 bp), COII gene (494 bp), 16SrRNA (478 bp), and the nuclear 28SrRNA gene (807 bp). In BEAUti, we calibrated the splitting age of the MRCA of all the Coeliccia species as 1.55−0.15 million years ago (Ma), a date that corresponds to a geologic constraint: the Okinawa trough and associated straits, including the Yilan basin in Taiwan, began to rift at 1.55 Ma, isolating the Ryukyu-Taiwan islands from the Chinese continent. The vicariance split Coeliccia into the Ryukyu-side clade of Coeliccia ryukyuensis (Coe. r. ryukyuensis in Okinawa and Coe. r. amamii in Amami) and Coeliccia flavicauda (Coe. f. masakii in Yaeyama and Coe. f. flavicauda in southern Taiwan), and the Chinese-side clade of Coeliccia cyanomelas (northern Taiwan and China), separated by the Okinawa trough. These Coeliccia species were further deeply differentiated to form local populations on the major islands and some of the minor islands. The Copera clade constituted a sister of the lotic Coeliccia clade, but genetic differentiation was not recognizable in lentic Copera between China, Taiwan, and Japan. Base substitution rates applying a strict clock model were estimated for COI: 0.0783, COII: 0.0803, 18SrRNA: 0.0186, 28SrRNA: 0.00577, and combined: 0.0408 substitutions/site/myr, and these rates are relatively high.
Introduction: New Media in New Europe-Asia

THIS COLLECTION OFFERS AN IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION of the role of new media in the political, social and cultural life in the region of Europe-Asia, which is defined loosely as Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and Central Asia. This region shares a common cultural and ideological past which has been shaped by histories of imperial expansion, the rise of national identities and rapid entry into the global community in the 1980s and 1990s. By focusing on new media, which is understood primarily as internet-enabled networked social practice, the collection puts forward a political redefinition of the region which is determined by the recognition of the diversity of new media uses in the countries included in the study. At the same time it is apparent that media use in all countries in the region is characterised by ‘dissent’, whereby protests are directed against political regimes, local governments, cultural traditions or forces of globalisation. In this regard, new media in Europe-Asia displays the same potential for social intervention and political reform that has been manifested in other regions, particularly in the Arab world. While cognisant of the 2011–2012 protest movements in Arab countries, China, Russia and other places, the contributions to this collection focus on the period prior to the advent of ‘internet revolutions’. This is because the research presented here aims to capture new media use in the region at its pivotal moment—at the time of its entry into the post-broadcast era—and thus the collection documents this transitional moment and relates it to the history of change in post-communist states. By focusing on the countries’ transition from the broadcast to the post-broadcast era, this collection builds on concerns put forward in a 2007 special issue of EuropeAsia Studies which explored the impact of the mass media on society, politics and culture. That collection, ‘Symposium on the Post-Soviet Media’, focused predominantly on print and televised media, whereas ‘New Media in New Europe-Asia’ considers internet-enabled media. In spite of the change of focus, the two collections have a lot in common. First, both of them are concerned with the involvement of (new) media in political processes; in fact, the collections consider political activity in
Suing the Leviathan - An Empirical Analysis of the Changing Rate of Administrative Litigation in China

This article analyzes the changing rate of administrative litigation in China. Using a set of provincial‐level data over seven years (2003–2009), the article evaluates a number of hypotheses derived from extant theories of social litigiousness, state‐society relations in authoritarian regimes, Chinese elite politics, and Chinese administrative law. It finds evidence that the rate of administrative litigation varies according to different levels of lawyer density and urbanization. It also finds preliminary evidence that casts doubt on the effects of top‐down legal and policy changes in China. The article is the first longitudinal study of the Chinese administrative litigation system, and it answers questions that have long been underexplored. In addition, the research contributes to our understanding of state‐society relations in authoritarian regimes. This article also evaluates the role of elite politics in the development of the administrative law regime and adds new evidence to the debate about lawyers' role in China's legal reforms. Finally, the article contributes to empirical and comparative studies of litigation rates, especially the less researched area of administrative litigation.
The concentration of anticitrullinated protein antibodies in serum and synovial fluid in relation to total immunoglobulin concentrations

Background Anticitrullinated protein antibodies (ACPA) are one of the best predictors for the development of rheumatoid arthritis. Nonetheless, relatively little information is present on the absolute concentration of ACPA in relation to total immunoglobulin (Ig) concentrations. Such information would be of relevance to compare ACPA levels to other antibody levels. Here, we estimated the relative abundance of ACPA Ig in serum and synovial fluid using a quantitative approach. Methods ACPA were purified using HiTrap Streptavidin columns coupled with biotinylated cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP2). Total Ig and anti-CCP2 isotype reactivities were measured by ELISA. Results ACPA were successfully isolated as substantial antibody amounts were eluted from sera of ACPA-positive patients and neglectable antibody amounts were eluted from sera of ACPA-negative patients. Up to 1 in 80 IgG-molecules were estimated to be ACPA. Strikingly, IgM-ACPA was most abundant in synovial fluid (with the highest enrichment in the range of one IgM-ACPA for every eight IgM-antibodies). Conclusions ACPA-IgG levels are estimated to be within the range of peak levels of protective antibody responses against recall antigens. IgM-ACPA is abundantly present in synovial fluid, suggesting the presence of a continuous ongoing autoimmune response in the synovial compartment.
Personalizing Treatment Targets in Rheumatoid Arthritis by Using a Simple Prediction Model

Objective. To develop a personalized treatment target approach in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) based on baseline risk factors for joint damage progression in combination with disease activity over time. Methods. Data were used from the Nijmegen early RA cohort. Presence or absence of anticyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (anti-CCP), high erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and erosions were translated into 4 risk profiles: 0, 1, 2, and 3. Joint damage progression was assessed with the Ratingen score, and disease activity with the original Disease Activity Score (DAS) over 3 years. The probability for joint damage progression was calculated for each risk profile and each DAS category using logistic regression models. The probabilities were translated into personalized disease activity treatment targets. Results. More risk factors at baseline as well as a higher DAS level resulted in a higher probability for joint damage progression in a dose-dependent way. Low DAS corresponded with a probability of 0.0, 0.08, 0.20, and 0.58 in patients with 0, 1, 2, and 3 risk factors, respectively. Moderate DAS corresponded with a probability of 0.06 in patients with 0 risk factors and 0.35 with 1 risk factor. High DAS resulted in a probability of 0.50 with no risk factors present at baseline. Conclusion. Presence of anti-CCP, acute-phase response, and erosions at baseline can be used to set individual treatment targets in RA. In patients without these risk factors, a moderate DAS as a target is sufficient, while for patients with all 3 risk factors, a low DAS is not strict enough to limit the risk for joint damage.
Efficacy of an HIV Intervention in Reducing High-Risk Human Papillomavirus, Nonviral Sexually Transmitted Infections, and Concurrency Among African American Women: A Randomized-Controlled Trial

Objective:This trial evaluated the efficacy of an HIV-intervention condition, relative to a health-promotion condition, in reducing incidence of nonviral sexually transmitted infections (STIs; Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis), oncogenic human papillomavirus (HPV) subtypes 16 and 18, sexual concurrency, and other HIV-associated behaviors over a 12-month period. Design:Randomized-controlled trial. Data analysts blinded to treatment allocation. Setting:Kaiser Permanente, GA. Subjects:A random sample of 848 African American women. Intervention:The two 4-hour HIV intervention sessions were based on Social Cognitive Theory and the Theory of Gender and Power. The intervention was designed to enhance participants’ self-sufficiency and attitudes and skills associated with condom use. The HIV intervention also encouraged STI testing and treatment of male sex partners and reducing vaginal douching and individual and male partner concurrency. Main Outcome Measure:Incident nonviral STIs. Results:In generalized estimating equations’ analyses, over the 12-month follow-up, participants in the HIV intervention, relative to the comparison, were less likely to have nonviral incident STIs (odds ratio [OR] = 0.62; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.40 to 0.96; P = 0.033) and incident high-risk HPV infection (OR = 0.37; 95% CI: 0.18 to 0.77; P = 0.008) or concurrent male sex partners (OR = 0.55; 95% CI: 0.37 to 0.83; P = 0.005). In addition, intervention participants were less likely to report multiple male sex partners, more likely to use condoms during oral sex, more likely to inform their main partner of their STI test results, encourage their main partner to seek STI testing, report that their main partner was treated for STIs, and report not douching. Conclusions:This is the first trial to demonstrate that an HIV intervention can achieve reductions in nonviral STIs, high-risk HPV, and individual concurrency.
China’s integration into the global financial system

This article critically reviews theories of global economic networks and refines their application to China’s state-controlled financial sector. Current approaches view global production networks and global financial networks (GFNs) through an agency focus on inter-firm relations and a structural emphasis on neoliberal forces. This market-driven perspective exposes several shortcomings when it comes to understanding the governance of GFNs in China. In the Chinese context, these networks are characterized by complex bargaining that bridges different levels of the Chinese party-state and corporate interests. This article exploits the theoretical synergies between economic geography and theories of Chinese elite politics and institutional change to develop a politically sensitive reading of GFNs. It identifies channels through which multilevel bargaining in the Chinese party-state shapes the competitive positions of firms. By integrating recent findings on Chinese cross-border finance, the article develops an empirically grounded theoretical approach of GFNs ‘with Chinese characteristics’. This opens up a promising research agenda in the GFN literature on the role of the state as an architect and entrepreneur behind GFNs and the outcomes they produce.