bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Increasing valence pushes DNA nanostar networks to the isostatic point
Authors: Conrad Nathaniel , Kennedy Tynan , Fygenson Deborah K. , Saleh Omar A.
Published: March 2019

Significance

Maxwell (1864) predicted that 3D networks of beams fixed to junctions through freely rotating joints will be rigid only if at least six beams emanate from each junction. This concept is key to macroscopic design of trussed structures, but its relevance to microscopic networks, where thermal fluctuations are large, such as in biomolecular gels, is not as clear. Here, we exploit DNA nanotechnology to create gels of defined connectivity and demonstrate that gel mechanics are controlled by an interplay between entropic effects, network structure, and Maxwell’s rigidity criterion.
Tree diversity regulates forest pest invasion
Authors: Guo Qinfeng , Fei Songlin , Potter Kevin M. , Liebhold Andrew M. , Wen Jun
Published: March 2019

Nonnative pests often cause cascading ecological impacts, leading to detrimental socioeconomic consequences; however, how plant diversity may influence insect and disease invasions remains unclear. High species diversity in host communities may promote pest invasions by providing more niches (i.e., facilitation), but it can also diminish invasion success because low host dominance may make it more difficult for pests to establish (i.e., dilution). Most studies to date have focused on small-scale, experimental, or individual pest/disease species, while large-scale empirical studies, especially in natural ecosystems, are extremely rare. Using subcontinental-level data, we examined the role of tree diversity on pest invasion across the conterminous United States and found that the tree-pest diversity relationships are hump-shaped. Pest diversity increases with tree diversity at low tree diversity (because of facilitation or amplification) and is reduced at higher tree diversity (as a result of dilution). Thus, tree diversity likely regulates forest pest invasion through both facilitation and dilution that operate simultaneously, but their relative strengths vary with overall diversity. Our findings suggest the role of native species diversity in regulating nonnative pest invasions.
Thermal analysis and phase transformation behaviour during additive manufacturing of Ti–6Al–4V alloy
Authors: Novotný Ladislav , Béreš Miloslav , de Abreu Hamilton Ferreira Gomes , Zajac Jozef , Bleck Wolfgang
Published: March 2019

Despite the fact that the additive manufacturing (AM) technique has been established for almost two decades, its optimisation is still performed by trial and error experimentation. In the present work, a finite element modelling approach was used to study both the temperature distribution and heat flux vector characteristics during multi-layer deposition of a Ti–6Al–4V alloy that take place in the AM process. The results revealed the difference between different powder deposition time intervals on thermal cycles, heat flux vectors and the resulting microstructures. Good agreement between the numerical and experimental results was found. The results obtained can be used for process optimisation.
The Importance of Identification When Measuring Performance in Addiction Treatment
Authors: Garnick Deborah , Horgan Constance , Mark Tami L. , Lee Margaret , Acevedo Andrea , Neager Sarah , O'Brien Peggy , Hashmi Ali , Marder Bill , Miller Kay
Published: March 2019

Background

Identifying and effectively treating individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs) is an important priority for state Medicaid programs, given the enormous toll that SUDs take on individuals, their families, and their communities. In this paper, we describe how the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measure “Identification of Alcohol and Other Drug Services” can be used, along with eligible population prevalence rates, to expand states’ ability to track how well their Medicaid programs identify enrollees with SUDs and link them with treatment (measured by initiation and engagement performance measures).

Methods

We use the 2009 Medicaid MAX data on utilization and enrollment along with information from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) to obtain state-level estimates of alcohol and drug abuse and dependence among Medicaid beneficiaries for 7 illustrative states. We calculate identification, initiation, and engagement measures using specifications from the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA).

Results

NSDUH data showed that the eligible population prevalence rate (the average rate of alcohol or drug abuse or dependence) among the 7 states was 10.0%, whereas the average identification rate was 2.9%. The gap between the prevalence and identification rates ranged from 5.1% to 11.0% among the 7 states. The initiation rates ranged from 36.9% to 57.1%. The states’ engagement rates ranged from 11.8% to 31.1%, although rates differ by age, gender, and race/ethnicity in some states.

Conclusion

Including identification along with initiation and engagement measures allows states to determine how well they are performing in a more complete spectrum from need, to recognition and documentation of enrollees with SUDs, to initiation of treatment, to continuation of early treatment.
Impaired human hematopoiesis due to a cryptic intronic GATA1 splicing mutation
Authors: Abdulhay Nour J. , Fiorini Claudia , Verboon Jeffrey M. , Ludwig Leif S. , Ulirsch Jacob C. , Zieger Barbara , Lareau Caleb A. , Mi Xiaoli , Roy Anindita , Obeng Esther A. , Erlacher Miriam , Gupta Namrata , Gabriel Stacey B. , Ebert Benjamin L. , Niemeyer Charlotte M. , Khoriaty Rami N. , Ancliff Philip , Gazda Hanna T. , Wlodarski Marcin W. , Sankaran Vijay G.
Published: March 2019

Studies of allelic variation underlying genetic blood disorders have provided important insights into human hematopoiesis. Most often, the identified pathogenic mutations result in loss-of-function or missense changes. However, assessing the pathogenicity of noncoding variants can be challenging. Here, we characterize two unrelated patients with a distinct presentation of dyserythropoietic anemia and other impairments in hematopoiesis associated with an intronic mutation in GATA1 that is 24 nucleotides upstream of the canonical splice acceptor site. Functional studies demonstrate that this single-nucleotide alteration leads to reduced canonical splicing and increased use of an alternative splice acceptor site that causes a partial intron retention event. The resultant altered GATA1 contains a five–amino acid insertion at the C-terminus of the C-terminal zinc finger and has no observable activity. Collectively, our results demonstrate how altered splicing of GATA1, which reduces levels of the normal form of this master transcription factor, can result in distinct changes in human hematopoiesis.
Highly sensitive piezotronic pressure sensors based on undoped GaAs nanowire ensembles
Authors: Calahorra Yonatan , Husmann Anke , Bourdelain Alice , Kim Wonjong , Vukajlovic-Plestina Jelena , Boughey Chess , Jing Qingshen , Fontcuberta i Morral Anna , Kar-Narayan Sohini
Published: March 2019

Semiconducting piezoelectric materials have attracted considerable interest due to their central role in the emerging field of piezotronics, where the development of a piezo-potential in response to stress or strain can be used to tune the band structure of the semiconductor, and hence its electronic properties. This coupling between piezoelectricity and semiconducting properties can be readily exploited for force or pressure sensing using nanowires, where the geometry and unclamped nature of nanowires render them particularly sensitive to small forces. At the same time, piezoelectricity is known to manifest more strongly in nanowires of certain semiconductors. Here, we report the design and fabrication of highly sensitive piezotronic pressure sensors based on GaAs nanowire ensemble sandwiched between two electrodes in a back-to-back diode configuration. We analyse the current–voltage characteristics of these nanowire-based devices in response to mechanical loading in light of the corresponding changes to the device band structure. We observe a high piezotronic sensitivity to pressure, of ~7800 meV MPa−1. We attribute this high sensitivity to the nanowires being fully depleted due to the lack of doping, as well as due to geometrical pressure focusing and current funnelling through polar interfaces.
Observation of accelerated beam ion population during edge localized modes in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak
Authors: Galdon-Quiroga J. , Garcia-Munoz M. , McClements K.G. , Nocente M. , Denk S.S. , Freethy S. , Jacobsen A.S. , Orain F. , Rivero-Rodriguez J.F. , Salewski M. , Sanchis-Sanchez L. , Suttrop W. , Viezzer E. , Willensdorfer M.
Published: March 2019

The interaction between fast-ions and edge localized modes (ELMs) is investigated by means of fast-ion loss detector measurements. Fast-ion losses are increased during ELMs exhibiting a 3D filamentary-like behaviour. An accelerated beam ion population has been observed during ELMs in a tokamak for the first time. Tomographic inversion of the measured fast-ion losses reveal multiple velocity-space structures. Attending to the experimental observations, an acceleration mechanism is proposed based on a resonant interaction between the beam ions and parallel electric fields emerging during the ELM crash. The key experimental observations can be qualitatively reproduced by full-orbit following simulations of fast-ions in the presence of the ELM magnetic and electric perturbation fields. Our findings may shed light on the possible contribution of fast-ions to the ELM stability and the transient heat loads on plasma facing components.
Representations of Women in Southern Literature
Authors: McHaney Pearl Amelia
Published: March 2019

The myths of southern women include mammies, belles, ladies, and mulattos. In southern fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir, these categories of women are both perpetuated and disrupted. Much southern literature also portrays these stereotypes as independent women deliberately confronting the systems of oppression including patriarchy, slavery, and racism. Such independent women struggle for and often attain agency. Other literary characters are more succinctly called rebels, openly fighting against class, social, economic, and racist constraints. Many representations of women in southern literature were popularized in the 19th century by northerner Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and in the 20th century by southerner Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind (1936). Between these two novels, with new publications of 19th-century fictions by African Americans, and from the 1940s into the 21st century, concurrent with modernism, feminism, and increased publication opportunities, women in southern literature are often depicted seeking agency, finding voice, and acting independently. Representations of antebellum southern women as mothers, black and white, illustrate the enormous difficulties of birthing and nurturing children to adulthood. Mothers, daughters, sisters, and young girls (black and white) in the 20th century evidence a diminishing presence of the southern past as well as vastly changing family dynamics. In southern literature of the 21st century, women vigorously explore their sexualities, races, ethnicities, social and economic classes confluent with a redefined global south, climate change, drug epidemics, and political activism. Women in 21st-century southern literature successfully challenge the hegemony of white authors and white characters and the binary of black and white.
The Asian American Movement and Critical Practice
Authors: Ishii Douglas S.
Published: March 2019

Though Asian American literary studies bears its critical legacy, the Asian American Movement (1968–1977) is largely invisible within Asian American literary studies. This has led to a critical murkiness when it comes to discerning the extent of the Movement’s influence on Asian American literary criticism. The Movement is often remembered in literary scholarship as the activities of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP)—a collective of four writers who were only loosely associated with Asian American Movement organizations. As metacritical scholarship on “Asian American” as a literary category has suggested, CARP’s introductory essay to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) is simultaneously held as the epitome of cultural nationalism’s misogynist tendencies and as the prototypical theorization of Asian American literature. However, this essentializing of CARP as the Movement ignores how the collected writings of the Asian American Movement, Roots (1970) and Counterpoint (1976), identify literary production and criticism as sites of racial critique in distinction from CARP’s viewpoints.

Literary and cultural scholarship’s deconstruction of “Asian American” as a stable term has provided the tools to expand what constitutes the literature of the Movement. As Colleen Lye notes, the Asian American 1960s novel has emerged as a form that challenges the direct association of the era with the Movement. The historical arc of the Movement as centered on campuses highlights the university as an institution that enables Asian American student organizing, from the 1968 student strikes to contemporary interracial solidarity actions, as well as their narrativization into literary forms. Expanding what counts as literature, the decades of Asian American activism after the Movement proper have been documented in the autobiographies of organizers. In this way, the Asian American Movement is not a past-tense influence, but a continuing dialectic between narration and organizing, and literature and social life.
Interpersonal Trust in Organizations
Authors: Ma Jingjing , Schaubroeck John M. , LeBlanc Catherine
Published: March 2019

Interpersonal trust refers to confidence in another person (or between two persons) and a willingness to be vulnerable to him or her (or to each other). In contemporary organizational science, research conducted within organizations has extensively investigated personal, dyadic, and contextual factors that motivate interpersonal trust (i.e., trust between two persons) and the consequence of interpersonal trust for the trustor and the trustee. This line of work distinguishes between two orientations that researchers have taken when conceptualizing interpersonal trust: unidirectional trust and bidirectional trust. Unidirectional trust refers to a focus on one person’s trust in another without regard to the reciprocation of that trust. Unidirectional trust research investigates trust in another party at a higher hierarchy level (e.g., followers’ trust in the leader), a lower hierarchy level (e.g., the leader’s trust in followers), or at the same hierarchy level (e.g., employees’ trust in coworkers). Bidirectional trust focuses on the shared trust in a dyad. Research on bidirectional trust helps to provide insights about the complex pattern and evolution of interpersonal trust over time. However, research investigating bidirectional trust is relatively limited compared to unidirectional trust. Besides research on interpersonal trust within the same work unit, there is also a recent trend toward investigating interpersonal trust across work unit and organizational boundaries. Another important line of literature regarding interpersonal trust is the investigation of the causes and consequences of interpersonal trust violations and the effectiveness of remedies (e.g., apologies) for these violations.
The Resource-Based View of the Firm
Authors: Miller Douglas
Published: March 2019

The Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV) is a set of related theories sharing the assumptions of resource heterogeneity and resource immobility across firms. In this view, a firm is a bundle of resources, capabilities, or routines which create value and cannot be easily imitated or appropriated by competitors due to isolating mechanisms. Grounded in the economic traditions of the “Chicago School” of economic efficiency, the “Austrian School” of economics, and organizational economics, the RBV comprises theories that explain the existence of (sustained) competitive advantage and of economic rents. Empirical research from this perspective addresses both firm performance and firm behavior at the level of business strategy (e.g., within-industry competition) and corporate strategy (e.g., acquisitions). Initially developed through a series of papers by several authors in the 1980s–1990s, major extensions and refinements of the RBV include the knowledge-based view of the firm (KBV), dynamic capabilities, and the relational view, which recognizes capabilities can be developed and shared through alliances between firms.
Citizen Journalism
Authors: Miller Serena
Published: March 2019

The emergence of citizen journalism has prompted the journalism field and scholars to readdress what constitutes journalism and who is a journalist. Citizen journalists have disrupted news-media ecosystems by challenging the veracity and representativeness of information flowing from mainstream news-media newsrooms. However, the controversy related to the desired level of citizen involvement in the news process is a historical debate that began before the citizen-journalism phenomenon. As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes.

This questioning of citizen involvement in news reemerged as an issue with the citizen journalism phenomenon around the late 1990s. People with no news-media organizational ties have taken advantage of the convenience and low cost of social computing technologies by publishing their own stories and content. These people are referred to as citizen journalists. Scholars have assessed the quality and credibility of citizen-journalism content, finding that citizen journalists have performed well on several standards of traditional news-content quality. Levels of quality differ dependent upon citizen journalists’ goals and motivations, such as serving the public interest, increasing self-status, or expressing their creative selves.

As it is an emerging area of study, unarticulated theoretical boundaries of citizen journalism exist. Citizen-journalism publications emphasize community over conflict, advocacy over objectivity, and interpretation over fact-based reporting. In general, citizen journalists have historically acted when existing news-media journalists were not fully meeting their community’s informational needs. Scholars, however, vary in how they label citizen journalists and how they conceptually and empirically define citizen journalism. For example, researchers have shifted their definitional focus on citizen journalists from one of active agents of democratic change to people who create a piece of news content. The mapping of the citizen-journalism literature revealed four types of citizen journalists based on their levels of editorial control and contribution type: (1) participatory, (2) para, (3) news-media watchdog, and (4) community. Taken together, these concepts describe the breadth of citizen-journalist types. For those of us interested in journalism studies, a more targeted approach in the field of citizen journalism can help us build community around scholarship, understand citizen journalists’ contributions to society and practice, and create a more a stable foundation of knowledge concerning people who create and comment on news content.
Conflict and Journalism
Authors: Anderson Fay
Published: March 2019

The 20th century was defined by violent conflict: war, genocide, and military occupation. World War I left approximately 10 million dead and World War II had a death toll estimated at 55 million. It has been conservatively calculated that the total number of dead killed in wars during the century was 108 million, as the casualties shifted from armed combatants to victims of mass extermination in civil wars and wars of colonization. Civilian collateral damage and the targeting of civilians by ethnicity and religion became tragically common.

Journalists have witnessed and chronicled the seismic military, social, cultural, and political transformations, as well as providing a vital democratic function. Paralleling this age of devastation was the ascendant power of legacy media and its golden age in the West. The combination of technological advancement, the professionalization of the industry, greater literacy and expanded newspaper readerships, and mass culture brought the press to the frontline in unprecedented numbers and in a new and intimate relationship. Journalists functioned and continue to operate as witnesses, communicators, recorders, and interpreters, on both the battlefield and the home front, as well as negotiating the competing demands of their media organizations, the public, political, and military elites, and their professional lives.

This century had barely dawned when armies and a largely jingoistic press were marshalled in Afghanistan and Iraq after the attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The nature of warfare had evolved—from limited wars with clearly identified armies on demarcated fronts to non-conventional wars and wars of insurgency—and, with it, changes in the relations between the state, military, and media. The conflicts in this millennium provoked both long-standing and new debates surrounding the role of the press and how it actively mediates conflict, censorship, and patriotism in a hostile media environment.

Journalism also experienced profound change technologically and industrially. With the fragmentation of the media business model and editorial gatekeeping, and liberated by new media, the legacy media’s relationship with conflict has changed. New voices have gained prominence. Non-Western journalists have been accorded greater recognition when reporting invasion and conflict from a local perspective. Civilians also became both an important conduit and problematic source of news, there has been an upsurge of government and military propaganda, and terrorists have become chilling media producers. For other state media organizations in the East, their global footprint has expanded rather than diminished. Nevertheless, the debates about the image and role of journalism during armed conflict; censorship; media power, technology, and mediatization; and the physical and psychological dangers experienced by journalists when witnessing and reporting conflict, prevail.
News Agencies from Telegraph Bureaus to Cyberfactories
Authors: Rantanen Terhi
Published: March 2019

News agencies (press association, wire service) over the years have operated in almost every country in the world. Many of them are now facing significant transformations, and some of these long-standing institutions may soon cease to operate. Much of the academic research is considered outdated or has focused on the largest Western agencies, with very little research done on agencies outside the West. News agencies have also been studied either without a theoretical lens, or with a theoretical lens that does not necessarily help us to understand the essentially transnational character of news agencies, many of which operate both nationally and internationally.
Objectivity and Bias in Journalism
Authors: Ward Stephen J. A.
Published: March 2019

Journalism objectivity or news objectivity had its origins in Western media cultures, especially in the United States, in the early 20th century. The principle, however, has found its way into codes of ethics and journalism education in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In 2018, objectivity is a controversial norm. Within the field of journalism ethics, the issue is whether objectivity as traditionally understood—a neutral reporting of “just the facts”—remains a valid ideal. In society, the debate swirls around the future of democratic public spheres and the need for reliable news sources. Misinformation and partisan voices threaten to swamp public channels of information. How can citizens distinguish truth from falsity in journalism? Objective from subjective reports? Informed analysis from biased opinion?

The prehistory of objectivity is, in large part, the history of objectivity, truth, and fact in the culture. This is because journalists defined their notion of objectivity by adapting notions from philosophy, science, and the ambient culture.

The central notion of news objectivity is that reporters should be neutral stenographers of fact, eliminating their opinions and interpretations from their reports. By the middle of the 1900s onward, this idea of objectivity as just the facts was subjected to a withering critique by journalists who sought a more engaged journalism and academics who rejected the idea of neutral facts. Also, the early 21st-century digital revolution created online communication that favored an interpretive journalism skeptical of neutrality and objectivity.

The study and advancement of truth and objectivity in journalism is thus left in a difficult position. Should journalists go back to a 19th-century libertarian view of truth and democracy as requiring only a free clash of opinion? Should they revive or redefine news objectivity? Or should they rethink journalism ethics from the ground up, leaving news objectivity behind?
Public Service Journalism
Authors: Harrison Jackie
Published: March 2019

For some scholars, the role of public service journalism is profoundly ethical, though it exists amidst a diversity of incommensurate but not necessarily incompatible views and values. Public service journalism exists as part of a global media that has been referred to as a “mediapolis”: descriptively, a place, a communicative system where the world is constituted, and by means of which we learn about others. Normatively it is an ideal of communication, a place where information and opinion may be expressed civilly to enable good choices to be made and public concerns to be thoughtfully addressed. As such, it is a place of equal expression. However, practically it must contend with finding a way to identify, value and integrate a wide array of voices. A mediapolis needs to become a place where a just and hospitable media enables the fundamental process of finding ways of living together.

A key principle for the governance of mediapolis concerns “journalism”: uncensored, diverse, reliable journalism is essential to the making of well-informed decisions and a healthy political life. To this end and in order to anticipate a digital future where there exists an ethical mediapolis for global public benefit and where the internet and good journalism go hand in hand and are no longer antagonistic, contemporary public service journalism should reconceive the news as discursive rather than monological and informational, and the public as consisting of an interpreting, acute audience of citizens, rather than one of informed readers. If such a consummation were to be achieved then critical news judgements would be the norm, no matter how large or small the audience. Journalism would be an effective watchdog because government would be perpetually aware that a sufficient number of confident, attentive citizens is following the news and that, in consequence, it must function knowing that there is a constant risk of shame, disgrace, conviction and loss of popularity and office. In sum, public service journalism consists of civil expression of information, accommodating a multiplicity of voices, the news conceived of as discursive rather than merely informational, and the public conceived of as critical interpreting citizens rather than informed readers.
The Public Sphere and Journalism
Authors: Garman Anthea
Published: March 2019

The public sphere is a social entity with an important function and powerful effects in modern, democratic societies. The idea of the public sphere rests on the conviction that people living in a society, regardless of their age, gender, religion, economic or social status, professional position, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, or nationality, should be able to publicly express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions about issues that matter to them and impact their lives. This expression should be as free as possible in form and function and should operate through means and methods that people themselves deem suitable, so not via channels that are official or state-sanctioned. The classic Habermasian idea of the public sphere is that it is used by private individuals (not officials or politicians) who should be able to converse with each other in a public-spirited way to develop opinions that impact state or public-body decisions and policies. Also contained within this classic idea is the conviction that public sphere conversations should be rational (i.e., logical, evidence-based, and properly motivated and argued using an acceptable set of rhetorical devices) in order to convince others of the usefulness of a position, statement, or opinion. In commonsensical, political, and journalistic understandings, the public sphere is a critical component of a democracy that enables ordinary citizens to act as interlocutors to those who hold power and thereby hold them to account. As such it is one of the elements whereby democracy as a system is able to claim legitimacy as the “rule of the people.”

Journalism’s imbrication in the social imaginary of the public sphere dates back to 17th- and 18th-century Europe when venues like coffee houses, clubs, and private homes, and media like newspapers and newsletters were being used by a mixture of gentry, nobility, and an emerging middle class of traders and merchants and other educated thinkers to disseminate information and express ideas. The conviction that journalism was the key vehicle for the conveyance of information and ideas of public import was then imbedded in the foundations of the practice of modern journalism and in the form exported from Western Europe via colonialism to the rest of the world. Journalism’s role as a key institution within, and vehicle of, the public sphere was thus born. Allied to this was the conviction that journalism, via this public sphere role and working on behalf of the public interest (roughly understood as the consensus of opinions formed in the public sphere), should hold political, social, and economic powers to account. Journalists are therefore understood to be crucial proxies for the millions of people in a democracy who cannot easily wield on their own the collective voices that journalism with its institutional bases can produce.
The Advent of Climate Science
Authors: Coen Deborah R.
Published: March 2019

The advent of climate science can be defined as the historical emergence of a research program to study climate according to a modern definition of climate. Climate in this sense: (1) refers not simply to the average state of the atmosphere but also to its variability; (2) is multiscalar, concerned with phenomena ranging from the very small and fast to the very large and slow; and (3) is understood to be influenced by the oceans, lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. Most accounts of the history of climate science to date have focused on the development of computerized general circulation models since World War Two. However, following this definition, the advent of climate science occurred well before the computer age. This entry therefore seeks to dispel the image of climate science as a recent invention and as the preserve of an exclusive, North American elite. The historical roots of today’s knowledge of climate change stretch surprisingly far back into the past and clear across the world, though the geographic focus here is on Europe and North America. The modern science of climate emerged out of interactions between learned and vernacular knowledge traditions, and has simultaneously appropriated and undermined traditional and indigenous forms of climate knowledge. Important precedents emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it was in the late 19th century that a modern science of climate coalesced into a coordinated research program in part through the unification of divergent knowledge traditions around standardized techniques of measurement and analysis.
Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Trends Over Mainland China
Authors: Ren Guoyu , Tang Guoli , Wen Kangmin
Published: March 2019

Based on a dataset of national reference and basic stations, which have been quality controlled and inhomogeneity processed, updated surface air temperature (SAT) series of the past 67 (1951–2017) and 113 (1905–2017) years for mainland China are constructed and analyzed. The new temperature series show significant warming trends of 0.24°C/10yr and 0.09°C/10yr respectively for the two periods. The rapid regional warming generally begins from the mid-1980s, about a decade later than the northern hemisphere average SAT change. Warming during the period of 1951–2017 is larger and more significant in the northeast, north, northwest and the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, and the most significant SAT increase usually occurs in winter and spring except for the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau where winter and autumn undergo the largest warming. The slowdown of the warming can be clearly detected after 1998, especially for autumn and winter. The effect of urbanization on trends of the region averaged annual and seasonal mean SAT as calculated from the national reference and basic stations has not been adjusted, despite it being generally large and significant. In north China, the increasing trend of annual mean SAT induced by urbanization for the national stations is 0.10°C/10yr for the period 1961–2015, accounting for at least 31% of the overall annual mean warming. The contribution of urbanization to the overall warming of the past half century in Mainland China has also been summarized and discussed referring to the previous studies.
The Challenges of Making Research Collaboration in Africa More Equitable
Authors: Dodsworth Susan
Published: March 2019

Collaborative research has a critical role to play in furthering our understanding of African politics. Many of the most important and interesting questions in the field are difficult, if not impossible, to tackle without some form of collaboration, either between academics within and outside of Africa—often termed North–South research partnerships—or between those researchers and organizations from outside the academic world. In Africa in particular, collaborative research is becoming more frequent and more extensive. This is due not only to the value of the research that it can produce but also to pressures on the funding of African scholars and academics in the Global North, alongside similar pressures on the budgets of non-academic collaborators, including bilateral aid agencies, multilateral organizations, and national and international non-government organizations.

Collaborative projects offer many advantages to these actors beyond access to new funding sources, so they constitute more than mere “marriages of convenience.” These benefits typically include access to methodological expertise and valuable new data sources, as well as opportunities to increase both the academic and “real-world” impact of research findings. Yet collaborative research also raises a number of challenges, many of which relate to equity. They center on issues such as who sets the research agenda, whether particular methodological approaches are privileged over others, how responsibility for different research tasks is allocated, how the benefits of that research are distributed, and the importance of treating colleagues with respect despite the narrative of “capacity-building.” Each challenge manifests in slightly different ways, and to varying extents, depending on the type of collaboration at hand: North–South research partnership or collaboration between academics and policymakers or practitioners. This article discusses both types of collaboration together because of their potential to overlap in ways that affect the severity and complexity of those challenges.

These challenges are not unique to research in Africa, but they tend to manifest in ways that are distinct or particularly acute on the continent because of the context in which collaboration takes place. In short, the legacy of colonialism matters. That history not only shapes who collaborates with whom but also who does so from a position of power and who does not. Thus, the inequitable nature of some research collaborations is not simply the result of oversights or bad habits; it is the product of entrenched structural factors that produce, and reproduce, imbalances of power. This means that researchers seeking to make collaborative projects in Africa more equitable must engage with these issues early, proactively, and continuously throughout the entire life cycle of those research projects. This is true not just for researchers based in the Global North but for scholars from, or working in, Africa as well.
Trade Union Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Bernards Nick
Published: March 2019

Although unionized workers have rarely represented more than a small minority of the population anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, trade unions have played, and continue to play, a significant political role. Trade unions still occupy strategic choke points in many African economies, particularly around transport infrastructure, and retain a spatially concentrated organizational base as well as a degree of symbolic power drawn from participation in struggles against colonialism, apartheid, and authoritarianism. Three persistent dilemmas have strongly shaped the role of African trade unions and driven much of the academic debate about them. First are debates about the relationships between trade unions and political parties. These date to the often-fraught relationships between unions and anti-colonial movements in the last years of colonial rule. Pitched struggles, both within trade unions and between unions and governing parties, were often fought in the decade after the end of formal colonization over the degree of autonomy that unions should have from governing parties. These were often resolved through the widespread repression of politically independent unionism in the 1970s. This relationship, however, became untenable under processes of structural adjustment, and unions have often played a significant role in protests against neoliberal reforms, which have spurred widespread political transformation. Second are debates about the relationships of trade unions to non-unionized workers, especially the unemployed or the “informal” sector. Critics on both left and right have long pointed to the relatively privileged position of trade unions. This has consistently been invoked by governments seeking to justify the limited political role of trade unions as well as policies for wage restraint, state retrenchment, or currency devaluation that have negatively affected organized labor. However, given the increasingly widespread nature of informality and unemployment in contemporary Africa, trade unions have begun to make tentative steps toward organizing informal and unemployed workers in some cases. Finally, the relationships of African unions to the international labor movement and to international organizations have often been important. African unions have frequently drawn on links to international trade unions, regional institutions, or the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a way of compensating for domestic weaknesses. These strategies, however, have often engendered significant conflicts around the differing objectives of African and metropolitan actors, between African unions over access to international resources, and concerning “imperialism” by American and European unions.
Small States in the European Union
Authors: Panke Diana , Gurol Julia
Published: March 2019

Smaller European Union member states face size-related challenges in the EU multilevel system, such as weighted voting in day-to-day policymaking in which EU secondary law is produced or high workloads and fewer resources during intergovernmental conferences (IGC) to set EU primary law. Coping with these challenges is paramount to smaller states’ success. Thus, they can use different strategies, most notably selective engagement and negotiation strategies that do not require much material power, such as persuasion, framing, and coalition-building, as well as the Council Presidency as a window of opportunity to influence the agenda. Applying these strategies allows small states to punch above their weight. Yet, doing so is easier the longer states have been members of the EU. Older, smaller states have more extensive networks, more insights about past policies, and in-depth knowledge on best practices that help them in effectively navigating day-to-day EU negotiations as well as IGCs.
Voting Advice Applications
Authors: Garzia Diego , Marschall Stefan
Published: March 2019

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that assist citizens with their voting decisions. They are offered to voters before elections in many countries and have experienced remarkable success. Recently flourishing research on VAAs addresses this phenomenon and provides explanations for the dissemination and popularity of these tools. Moreover, VAAs have been analyzed regarding their effects on political parties, candidates, and on voters in regard to their electoral behavior. Research shows that using a VAA indeed makes a difference, while the effect depends strongly on the way a VAA is designed and by whom it is used. The abundance of data generated by VAAs bears potential for comparative studies of public opinion and party systems over time and across countries, and thereby bridges research on VAAs to general questions of political science research.
Genocide and Religion in Times of War
Authors: Midlarsky Manus I.
Published: March 2019

To understand the relationship between religion and genocide in time of war, one needs to distinguish between sacred and secular political religions. Among the genocidal events inspired by political religions based on sacred texts are the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Sack of Magdeburg, the British Civil War in Ireland, and Bosnia. I also examine several groups pursuing a genocidal agenda claiming religious justification: al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Civil religions and secular political religions discussed are the French Revolution, Italian Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinist Communism. Lacking the restraints found in traditional religions, secular political religion is most dangerous. Large-scale genocides are best explained by diachronic processes entailing subordination followed by gain and then loss by the perpetrators. The presence of loss in various forms is found in virtually all cases. Emotions that typically do not influence routine politics—such as anger and fear—are engaged. All of the cases, even those of minimal loss, are influenced by international events. Without the presence of war, genocides like the Holocaust, and those of the Armenians and Tutsis, are inconceivable. Even as an exclusionary ideology, traditional religion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for all forms of genocide in time of war. But religion can be an enabler that together with other antecedents can lead to genocide. Sacred religious sites can be sensitive locations whose violation inspires violence. Radicalization of religious leaders can occur when their religion appears to be under attack, especially during or following a period of widespread violence.
Responses to Economic Crisis in Africa
Authors: Lewis Peter M.
Published: March 2019

In the era following the decolonization of Africa, the economic performance of countries on the continent can be traced across three periods. The early postindependence years reflected moderate growth and policy variation, with occasional distress in some countries. From the 1980s through the late 1990s, the region was gripped by a sweeping crisis of growth and solvency shaped by a steep economic downturn and a slow, stuttering recovery. This was also a period of convergence and restrictions on policy space. By the early 2000s, accelerated growth buoyed most economies in Africa, although commodity price shocks and the global economic slump of 2008–2009 created episodic problems. Different approaches to policy and strategy once again marked the landscape. A number of influences help to explain variations in the occurrence of economic crisis across Africa, and the different responses to economic distress. In addition to structural factors, such as geography, resource wealth, and colonial legacies, middle-range political conditions contributed to these downturns. Key institutions, core constituencies, and fiscal pressures were domestic causes and external factors include donor convergence, access to finance, and policy learning.

One framework of analysis centers on three factors: ruling coalitions, the fiscal imperative, and policy space. The ruling coalition refers to the nature of the political regime and core support groups. The fiscal imperative refers to the nature of state finance and access to external resources. And the policy space comprises the range of strategic alternatives and the latitude for governments to make choices among broad policy options. Applying the framework to Africa’s economic performance, the first period was marked by distributional imperatives, a flexible fiscal regime, and considerable space for policy experimentation. During the long crisis, regimes came under pressure from external and domestic influences, and shifted toward a focus on macroeconomic stabilization. This occurred under a tight fiscal imperative and a contraction of policy space under the supervision of multilateral financial institutions. In the 2000s, governments reflected a greater balance between distributional and developmental goals, fiscal constraints were somewhat relaxed, and policy variation reappeared across the region. While the early 21st century has displayed signs of intermittent distress, Africa is not mired in a crisis comparable to those of earlier periods. Developmental imperatives and electoral accountability are increasingly influential in shaping economic strategy across the continent.