Since 2001, hundreds of academic studies have examined the "political resource curse," meaning the claim that natural resource wealth tends to adversely affect a country's governance. There is now ...robust evidence that one type of mineral wealth, petroleum, has at least three harmful effects: It tends to make authoritarian regimes more durable, to increase certain types of corruption, and to help trigger violent conflict in low- and middle-income countries. Scholars have also made progress toward understanding the mechanisms that lead to these outcomes and the conditions that make them more likely. This essay reviews the evidence behind these claims, the debates over their validity, and some of the unresolved puzzles for future research.
Is Democracy Good for the Poor? Ross, Michael
American journal of political science,
October 2006, Letnik:
50, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Many scholars claim that democracy improves the welfare of the poor. This article uses data on infant and child mortality to challenge this claim. Cross-national studies tend to exclude from their ...samples nondemocratic states that have performed well; this leads to the mistaken inference that nondemocracies have worse records than democracies. Once these and other flaws are corrected, democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates. Democracies spend more money on education and health than nondemocracies, but these benefits seem to accrue to middle- and upper-income groups.
Research Summary
We study the performance implications of dynamic environments for a leader's rivalry‐based imitation efforts in a setting with multiple rivals. We disentangle competitive ...interactions from environmental changes to show that a leader's simple rules to either imitate the closest rival in terms of attributes (her neighbor) or the closest rival in terms of rank (her challenger) can help to maintain the performance gap to her competitors. Using a computational model and an empirical test, we find that environmental changes alter the trade‐offs between imitation accuracy and the responsiveness to threats from distant rivals. Consequently, when environmental changes are infrequent and minor, neighbor imitation is more effective in maintaining the lead, whereas challenger imitation prevails as environmental changes become more frequent and substantial.
Managerial Summary
By showing that imitating a lower‐ranked rival can help a leader to stay ahead, recent research has overturned the common thinking that imitation is only useful for those trying to catch up with the leader. However, these insights come from contexts in which the leader has only one competitor. Can imitation also be effective for a leader competing against multiple rivals, and whom should the leader imitate? We find that imitation can indeed help the leader to maintain their lead against multiple rivals, but that the choice of imitation target matters and should take the competitive environment into account. In relatively stable environments, imitating your most similar rival works best, while imitating whoever is in second place is a more effective approach in changeable environments.
▪ Abstract Studies of natural resource wealth and civil war have been hampered by measurement error, endogeneity, lack of robustness, and uncertainty about causal mechanisms. This paper develops new ...measures and new tests to address these problems. It has four main findings. First, the likelihood of civil war in countries that produce oil, gas, and diamonds rose sharply from the early 1970s to the late 1990s; so did the number of rebel groups that sold contraband to raise money. Second, exogenous measures of oil, gas, and diamond wealth are robustly correlated with the onset of civil war. Still, these correlations are based on a small number of cases, and the substantive effects of resource wealth are sensitive to certain assumptions. Third, petroleum and diamond production lead to civil wars through at least three different mechanisms. Finally, the only resource variable robustly linked to conflict duration is a measure of “contraband,” which includes gemstones, timber, and narcotics.
This Feature Article describes research on the optical properties of arrays of silver and gold nanoparticles, particles that exhibit localized surface plasmon resonances in the visible and ...near-infrared. These resonances lead to strong absorption and scattering of light that is strongly dependent on nanoparticle size and shape. When arranged into multidimensional arrays, the nanoparticles strongly interact such that the collective properties can be rationally designed by changing the dimensions of the array (one-, two-, or three-dimensional), interparticle spacing, and array shape or morphology. Emerging from this work is a large body of literature focusing on one-, two-, and three-dimensional arrays, which provide unique opportunities for realizing materials with interesting and unusual photonic and metamaterial properties. Electrodynamics theory provides an accurate description of the optical properties, often based on simple models such as coupled dipoles, effective medium theory, and anomalous diffraction. In turn, simple models and simulation methods allow for the prediction and explanation of a variety of observed optical properties. In one and two dimensions, these tunable optical properties range from extinction spectra that are red- or blue-shifted compared to the isolated particles to lattice plasmon modes that involve strong interactions between localized plasmon resonances in the nanoparticles and photonic modes that derive from Bragg diffraction in the crystalline array. Three-dimensional arrays can exhibit unique effective medium properties, such as negative permittivity that leads to metallic optical response even when there is less than 1% metal content in the array. They also can be rationally designed to have photonic scattering modes dictated and controlled by interactions between nanoscale plasmonic nanoparticles and the mesoscale superlattice crystal habit (i.e., the crystalline size, shape, and morphology). This discussion of plasmonic arrays across multiple dimensions provides a comprehensive description of those factors that can be easily tuned for the design of plasmon-based optical materials.
Oil, Islam, and Women ROSS, MICHAEL L.
The American political science review,
02/2008, Letnik:
102, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Women have made less progress toward gender equality in the Middle East than in any other region. Many observers claim this is due to the region's Islamic traditions. I suggest that oil, not Islam, ...is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many other countries. Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions. I support this argument with global data on oil production, female work patterns, and female political representation, and by comparing oil-rich Algeria to oil-poor Morocco and Tunisia. This argument has implications for the study of the Middle East, Islamic culture, and the resource curse.
Copper is uniquely active for the electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) to products beyond carbon monoxide, such as methane (CH4) and ethylene (C2H4). Therefore, understanding ...selectivity trends for CO2 electrocatalysis on copper surfaces is critical for developing more efficient catalysts for CO2 conversion to higher order products. Herein, we investigate the electrocatalytic activity of ultrathin (diameter ∼20 nm) 5-fold twinned copper nanowires (Cu NWs) for CO2 reduction. These Cu NW catalysts were found to exhibit high CH4 selectivity over other carbon products, reaching 55% Faradaic efficiency (FE) at −1.25 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode while other products were produced with less than 5% FE. This selectivity was found to be sensitive to morphological changes in the nanowire catalyst observed over the course of electrolysis. Wrapping the wires with graphene oxide was found to be a successful strategy for preserving both the morphology and reaction selectivity of the Cu NWs. These results suggest that product selectivity on Cu NWs is highly dependent on morphological features and that hydrocarbon selectivity can be manipulated by structural evolution or the prevention thereof.
Obstetricians and gynecologists belong to 1 of the medical specialties with the highest rate of litigation claims. Among birth injury cases, those cases with cerebral palsy outcomes account for ...litigation settlements or judgments often in the millions of dollars. In cases of potential perinatal asphyxia, a threshold level of metabolic acidosis (base deficit ≥12 mmol/L) is necessary to attribute neonatal encephalopathy to an intrapartum hypoxic event. With increasing duration or severity of a hypoxic stress resulting in metabolic acidosis, newborn infant umbilical artery base deficit increases. It may be alleged that, as base deficit levels increase beyond 12 mmol/L, there is an increased likelihood and severity of cerebral palsy. As a corollary, it may be claimed that an earlier delivery (by minutes) would reduce the base deficit and prevent or reduce the severity of cerebral palsy. This issue is of relevance to obstetricians as defendants, because retrospective “expert” analysis of cases may suggest that optimal management decisions would have resulted in an earlier delivery. In addressing the association of metabolic acidosis and cerebral palsy, base deficit should be measured as the extracellular component (base deficitextracellular fluid) rather than the commonly used base deficitblood. Studies suggest that, beyond the base deficit threshold of 12 mmol/L, the incidence and severity of cerebral palsy does not significantly increase (until ≥20 mmol/L), although the risk of neonatal death rises markedly. Thus, among most infants with hypoxia-associated neonatal encephalopathy, the occurrence of cerebral palsy is unlikely to be impacted by delivery time variation of few minutes, and this argument should not serve as the basis for medical legal claims.
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of modular, crystalline, and porous materials that hold promise for storage and transport of chemical cargoes. Though MOFs have been studied in bulk forms, ...ways of deliberately manipulating the external surface functionality of MOF nanoparticles are less developed. A generalizable approach to modify their surfaces would allow one to impart chemical functionality onto the particle surface that is independent of the bulk MOF structure. Moreover, the use of a chemically programmable ligand, such as DNA, would allow for the manipulation of interparticle interactions. Herein, we report a coordination chemistry-based strategy for the surface functionalization of the external metal nodes of MOF nanoparticles with terminal phosphate-modified oligonucleotides. The external surfaces of nine distinct archetypical MOF particles containing four different metal species (Zr, Cr, Fe, and Al) were successfully functionalized with oligonucleotides, illustrating the generality of this strategy. By taking advantage of the programmable and specific interactions of DNA, 11 distinct MOF particle–inorganic particle core–satellite clusters were synthesized. In these hybrid nanoclusters, the relative stoichiometry, size, shape, and composition of the building blocks can all be independently controlled. This work provides access to a new set of nucleic acid–nanoparticle conjugates, which may be useful as programmable material building blocks and as probes for measuring and manipulating intracellular processes.
PDF
