After suffering heavy losses from a string of natural disasters in the early 1990s, the US (re)insurance sector embraced a new technology called catastrophe, or 'cat', models to help solve pervasive ...underestimations of risk. These first models succeeded in crafting consensus about how risks for future disasters should be spread via (re)insurance, but as extreme weather begins to diverge from historical records, cat-modelling firms have struggled to integrate new information about climate change and climate variability into their forecasts. Initial attempts to upgrade models have generated contentious reactions from homeowners and regulators, casting doubt on modellers' position as privileged arbiters of risk. As a result, this case shows how efforts to incorporate knowledge about climate impacts into routine economic processes, such as insurance pricing, trigger broader political disputes about how these risks should be socially distributed. These disputes are decoupled, to an extent, from the epistemological validity of how risks are actually calculated.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers ...and vendors towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (DWMs), commercial websites accessible via free software, have gained significant popularity. Here, we analyse 851,199 listings extracted from 30 DWMs between January 1, 2020 and November 16, 2020. We identify 788 listings directly related to COVID-19 products and monitor the temporal evolution of product categories including
Personal Protective Equipment
(PPE),
medicines
(e.g., hydroxyclorochine), and
medical frauds
. Finally, we compare trends in their temporal evolution with variations in public attention, as measured by Twitter posts and Wikipedia page visits. We reveal how the online shadow economy has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the importance of a continuous monitoring of DWMs, especially now that real vaccines are available and in short supply. We anticipate our analysis will be of interest both to researchers and public agencies focused on the protection of public health.
We identified two novel mouse mutants with abnormal head-shaking behavior and neural tube defects during the course of independent ENU mutagenesis experiments. The heterozygous and homozygous mutants ...exhibit defects in the orientation of sensory hair cells in the organ of Corti, indicating a defect in planar cell polarity. The homozygous mutants exhibit severe neural tube defects as a result of failure to initiate neural tube closure. We show that these mutants, spin cycle and crash, carry independent missense mutations within the coding region of Celsr1, encoding a large protocadherin molecule 1. Celsr1 is one of three mammalian homologs of Drosophila flamingo/starry night, which is essential for the planar cell polarity pathway in Drosophila together with frizzled, dishevelled, prickle, strabismus/van gogh, and rhoA2, 3. The identification of mouse mutants of Celsr1 provides the first evidence for the function of the Celsr family in planar cell polarity in mammals and further supports the involvement of a planar cell polarity pathway in vertebrate neurulation.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Precision medicine has captured the imagination of the medical community with visions of therapies precisely targeted to the specific individual’s genetic, biological, social, and environmental ...profile. However, in practice it has become synonymous with genomic medicine. As such its successes have been limited, with poor predictive or clinical value for the majority of people. It adds little to lifestyle medicine, other than in establishing why a healthy lifestyle is effective in combatting chronic disease. The challenge of lifestyle medicine remains getting people to actually adopt, sustain, and naturalize a healthy lifestyle, and this will require an approach that treats the patient as a person with individual needs and providing them with suitable types of support. The future of lifestyle medicine is holistic and person-centered rather than technological.
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A new and improved method for the preparation of (PhPSe2)2 (Woollins reagent (WR), 1) is reported. Reaction of dichlorophenylphosphine with Na2Se, (prepared from the reaction of elemental selenium ...and sodium in liquid ammonia) gives WR with excellent purity, high yield and on a larger scale than was previously possible. Four novel phosphorus–selenium heterocycles, including a spirocyclic heterocycle exhibiting a four‐membered P2SeC ring, were obtained from the reaction of WR with two reactive substrates (diphenylcyclopropenone and methyl phenylpropiolate). Useful selenocarbonyl and thiocarbonyl compounds were obtained from the reaction of both WR and Lawesson's reagent with diphenylcyclopropenone. All new compounds were characterised spectroscopically and three demonstrative X‐ray structures are reported.
(PhPSe2)2 continues to surprise: A spiro P2SeC3 system (see figure) is the latest remarkable molecule.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Influenza surveillance systems vary widely between countries and there is no framework to evaluate national surveillance systems in terms of data generation and dissemination. This study aimed to ...develop and test a comparative framework for European influenza surveillance.
Surveillance systems were evaluated qualitatively in five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) by a panel of influenza experts and researchers from each country. Seven surveillance sub-systems were defined: non-medically attended community surveillance, virological surveillance, community surveillance, outbreak surveillance, primary care surveillance, hospital surveillance, mortality surveillance). These covered a total of 19 comparable outcomes of increasing severity, ranging from non-medically attended cases to deaths, which were evaluated using 5 comparison criteria based on WHO guidance (granularity, timing, representativeness, sampling strategy, communication) to produce a framework to compare the five countries.
France and the United Kingdom showed the widest range of surveillance sub-systems, particularly for hospital surveillance, followed by Germany, Spain, and Italy. In all countries, virological, primary care and hospital surveillance were well developed, but non-medically attended events, influenza cases in the community, outbreaks in closed settings and mortality estimates were not consistently reported or published. The framework also allowed the comparison of variations in data granularity, timing, representativeness, sampling strategy, and communication between countries. For data granularity, breakdown per risk condition were available in France and Spain, but not in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. For data communication, there were disparities in the timeliness and accessibility of surveillance data.
This new framework can be used to compare influenza surveillance systems qualitatively between countries to allow the identification of structural differences as well as to evaluate adherence to WHO guidance. The framework may be adapted for other infectious respiratory diseases.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Oxo-stabilised phosphonium ylides are found to form crystalline hydrogen-bonded adducts with aromatic carboxylic acids, as confirmed by X-ray diffraction. There is also strong hydrogen bonding in ...solution as indicated by 13C NMR spectroscopy and this confirmed adduct formation with acetic acid, benzamide, thiobenzamide, benzyl alcohol, benzenesulfinic acid and diphenylphosphinic acid. The X-ray structure of the benzamide adduct was also determined, showing a hydrogen-bonded dimeric structure. A bis(stabilised ylide) was also prepared and is found to form a complex hydrogen-bonded adduct with benzoic acid, ethanol and water.
Developing Leaders For Real: Proven approaches that deliver impactpresents chapters from international experts analysing approaches to developing leaders that have actually delivered results, ...capturing how executives at all levels really learn to become better organizational leaders.
As the physical impacts of the Anthropocene begin to make themselves felt around the globe, maintaining current levels of economic prosperity, in many communities, will consume an increasing portion ...of public finances. This is because existing investments in property and capital will require new forms of protection if they are to continue generating stable streams of public revenue. Since Anthropocene impacts are unevenly distributed, some territories will be under more pressure than others to shift limited public spending to cope with growing levels of exposure. The sinking of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands provides a clear example of this trend of accelerating local vulnerability due to human-induced environmental change. With the bulk of state revenue tied to activities concentrated along Louisiana’s coasts, the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has launched an ambitious plan of government-backed expenditures that seek to defend the economic viability of these zones. Yet, many actions aimed at preventing immediate loss also work to secure incumbent extractive industries, such as offshore oil and gas drilling, which themselves contribute to the very vulnerabilities requiring state intervention in the first place. This paper, borrowing from the environmental sociology of Allan Schnaiberg, considers the social consequences of this dynamic, dubbed the “treadmill of protection.”
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Climate finance involves the transfer of money from advanced economies into developing countries in order to contribute to carbon mitigation or climate adaptation efforts while simultaneously ...advancing poverty alleviation and sustainable development objectives. Dominant carbon mitigation efforts resemble what Michel Callon calls 'civilizing markets', a deliberate harnessing of formal markets to achieve social goals by engaging with multiple political constituencies in market design. This paper looks at carbon marketization in the Democratic Republic of Congo and finds that, despite inclusive planning, climate finance experts produce unintended consequences by assigning social and environmental goals separate strategies within a national portfolio of climate finance interventions. Resulting from the challenges of finding commensurate criteria for measuring market impacts in both social and environmental domains, this programmatic segregation obscures the interconnections between poverty, forest use and climate change in the Congo. Findings suggest a need to reconcile the design of environmental-focused markets with the difficult-to-measure embedded social benefits of informal natural resource economies.
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