Exploring the elusive agenda-setting hypothesis pertaining to democratically-elected leaders, we test whether Duterte’s 2016 inauguration speech systematically shifted Filipinos’ policy agenda ...towards prioritizing illegal drugs. To do this, we examine daily Google searches (in a country that tops internet usage worldwide) and identify a large increase in drug-related searches right after the speech, both in absolute terms and relative to other prominent policy topics. We find no similar increase in neighboring countries, for potentially confounding topics, or after other key events (like his declaration of candidacy). Complementing this analysis, individual-level surveys reveal an increase in the share of respondents considering crime reduction the top national priority. To better identify causality, we exploit the historical timing of local festivals, which left some provinces less exposed to the speech. Results show less-exposed provinces exhibit smaller increases in drug-related Google searches and survey-elicited crime prioritization.
•Rodrigo Duterte’s inauguration speech highlighted illegal drugs as a policy issue.•We document significant increases in drug-related Google searches after his speech.•The prioritization of crime reduction, measured through surveys, also increased.•We exploit the historical timing of local festivals to determine causality.•Results support the hypothesis that the speech causally affected policy priorities.
This paper provides empirical evidence that suicide attacks systematically draw more media attention than non-suicide terrorist attacks. Analyzing 60,341 terrorist attack days in 189 countries from ...1970 to 2012, I introduce a methodology to proxy for the media coverage each one of these attack days receives in the New York Times. Suicide attacks are associated with significantly more coverage. In the most complete regression, one suicide attack produces an additional 0.6 articles-a magnitude equivalent to the effect of 95 terrorism casualties. This link remains robust to including a comprehensive list of potentially confounding factors, fixed effects, and country-specific time trends. The effect is reproduced for alternative print and television outlets (BBC, Reuters, CNN, NBC, CBS), but remains weak for Google Trends (worldwide and in the U.S.), a more direct proxy for people's interests, and is non-existent for C-SPAN, a television station dedicated to broadcasting political discussions directly. Thus, the media appears to cover suicide missions in an extraordinary fashion, which may in turn explain their prominence among terrorist organizations.
Complex mixtures of cuticular waxes coat plant surfaces to seal them against environmental stresses, with compositions greatly varying between species and possibly organs. This paper reports ...comprehensive analyses of the waxes on both above- and below-ground organs of potato, where total wax coverages varied between petals (2.6 μg/cm2), leaves, stems, and tubers (1.8–1.9 μg/cm2), and rhizomes (1.1 μg/cm2). The wax mixtures on above-ground organs were dominated by alkanes, occurring in homologous series of isomeric C25–C35 n-alkanes, C25–C35 2-methylalkanes, and C26–C34 3-methylalkanes. In contrast, below-ground organs had waxes rich in monoacylglycerols (C22–C28 acyls) and C18–C30 alkyl ferulates, together with fatty acids (rhizomes) or primary alcohols (tubers). The organ-specific wax coverages, compound class distribution, and chain length profiles suggest highly regulated activities of wax biosynthesis enzymes, likely related to organ-specific ecophysiological functions.
Cuticular waxes coat aerial plant surfaces to protect tissues against biotic and abiotic stress. The waxes are complex mixtures of fatty-acid-derived lipids formed on modular biosynthetic pathways, ...with varying chain lengths and oxygen functional groups. The waxes of most plant species contain C
26
–C
32
alcohols, aldehydes, alkanes, and fatty acids together with their alkyl esters, and comparisons between diverse wax mixtures have revealed matching chain length distributions between some of these compound classes. Based on such patterns, the biosynthetic pathways leading to the ubiquitous wax constituents were hypothesized early on, and most of these pathway hypotheses have since been confirmed by biochemical and molecular genetic studies in model species. However, the most abundant wax compounds on many species, including many important crop species, contain secondary functional groups and thus their biosynthesis differs at least in part from the ubiquitous wax compounds with which they co-occur. Here, we survey the chemical structures of these species-specific specialty wax compounds based on a comprehensive CAS SciFinder search and then review relevant reports on wax compositions to help develop and refine hypotheses for their biosynthesis. Across the plant kingdom, specialty wax compounds with one, two, and three secondary functional groups have been identified, with most studies focusing on Angiosperms. Where multiple specialty wax compounds were reported, they frequently occurred as homologous series and/or mixtures of isomers. Among these, it is now possible to recognize series of homologs with predominantly odd- or even-numbered chain lengths, and mixtures of isomers with functional groups on adjacent or on alternating carbon atoms. Using these characteristic molecular geometries of the co-occurring specialty compounds, they can be categorized and, based on the common structural patterns, mechanisms of biosynthesis may be predicted. It seems highly likely that mixtures of isomers with secondary functions on adjacent carbons arise from oxidation catalyzed by P450 enzymes, while mixtures of isomers with alternating group positions are formed by malonate condensation reactions mediated by polyketide synthase or ketoacyl-CoA synthase enzymes, or else by the head-to-head condensation of long-chain acyls. Though it is possible that some enzymes leading to ubiquitous compounds also participate in specialty wax compound biosynthesis, comparisons between co-occurring ubiquitous and specialty wax compounds strongly suggest that, at least in some species, dedicated specialty wax compound machinery exists. This seems particularly true for the diverse species in which specialty wax compounds, most notably nonacosan-10-ol, hentriacontan-16-one (palmitone), and very-long-chain β-diketones, accumulate to high concentrations.
Abstract
M. R. Holman, J. L. Merolla and A. Zechmeister (2022) propose women (compared to men) political leaders experience significant drops in public approval ratings after a transnational ...terrorist attack. After documenting how survey‐based evaluations of then‐Prime Minister Theresa May suffered after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, Holman et al. (2022) assemble a country–quarter level panel database to explore the generality of their hypothesis. They report evidence suggesting women (compared to men) leaders systematically experience decreased public approval rates after major transnational terrorist attacks (‐value of 0.020). We find that result disappears once
any
of the following adjustments is implemented: (i) excluding election quarter covariates (), (ii) correcting objective coding errors in the election quarter covariates (), (iii) excluding the May–Manchester observation () or (iv) clustering standard errors at the country level (). Exploring all combinations of the five control groups Holman et al. (2022) incorporate in their specification, none of them clears the 5% threshold of statistical significance once the corrected election quarter variables are employed. We conclude that the empirical evidence does not provide sufficient support for Holman et al.'s (2022) abstract claim that “conventional theory on rally events requires revision: women leaders cannot count on rallies following major terrorist attacks.”
Résumé
De la validité empirique de l'hypothèse avancée dans l'article « Gendered reactions to terrorist attacks can cause slumps not bumps » (Holman et coll., 2022)
. Mirya R. Holman, Jennifer L. Merolla et Elizabeth J. Zechmeister (2002) proposent que les dirigeantes (par rapport aux dirigeants) politiques voient leur cote d'approbation publique baisser de façon considérable après un attentat terroriste transnational. Après avoir décrit la façon dont les évaluations par sondage de Theresa May, alors première ministre, ont souffert après l'attentat au Manchester Arena en 2017, les autrices assemblent une base de données trimestrielles recueillies au moyen d'un panel à l'échelon du pays afin d'explorer la généralité de leur hypothèse. Elles font état de données probantes indiquant que les dirigeantes (par rapport aux dirigeants) connaissent systématiquement des taux d'approbation publique inférieurs après des attaques terroristes transnationales majeures (valeur p de 0,020). Nous constatons que ce résultat disparaît lorsque l'un des ajustements suivants est mis en œCuvre : (i) exclusion des covariables du trimestre électoral (p = 0,104); (ii) correction des erreurs de codage objectives dans les covariables du trimestre électoral (p = 0,058); (iii) exclusion de l'observation de l'attaque perpétrée à Manchester au mois de mai (p = 0,098); (iv) regroupement des erreurs‐types à l'échelon du pays (p = 0,558). En explorant les 25 combinaisons des cinq groupes témoins que les autrices intègrent à leurs spécifications, aucune d'entre elles ne franchit le seuil de 5 % de signification statistique une fois que les variables corrigées des trimestres électoraux sont employées. Nous concluons que les données probantes empiriques n'étayent pas suffisamment l'affirmation du résumé des autrices selon laquelle « la théorie conventionnelle sur les rassemblements doit être révisée : les dirigeantes ne peuvent pas compter sur des rassemblements à la suite d'attaques terroristes majeures ».
The vital importance of plant surface wax in protecting tissue from environmental stresses is reflected in the huge commitment of epidermal cells to cuticle formation. During cuticle deposition, a ...massive flux of lipids occurs from the sites of lipid synthesis in the plastid and the endoplasmic reticulum to the plant surface. Recent genetic studies in Arabidopsis have improved our understanding of fatty acid elongation and of the subsequent modification of the elongated products into primary alcohols, wax esters, secondary alcohols, and ketones, shedding light on the enzymes involved in these pathways. In contrast, the biosynthesis of alkanes is still poorly understood, as are the mechanisms of wax transport from the site of biosynthesis to the cuticle. Currently, nothing is known about wax trafficking from the endoplasmic reticulum to the plasma membrane, or about translocation through the cell wall to the cuticle. However, a first breakthrough toward an understanding of wax export recently came with the discovery of ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporters that are involved in releasing wax from the plasma membrane into the apoplast. An overview of our present knowledge of wax biosynthesis and transport and the regulation of these processes during cuticle assembly is presented, including the evidence for coordination of cutin polyester and wax production.
In recent years, multielectrode arrays and large silicon probes have been developed to record simultaneously between hundreds and thousands of electrodes packed with a high density. However, they ...require novel methods to extract the spiking activity of large ensembles of neurons. Here, we developed a new toolbox to sort spikes from these large-scale extracellular data. To validate our method, we performed simultaneous extracellular and loose patch recordings in rodents to obtain 'ground truth' data, where the solution to this sorting problem is known for one cell. The performance of our algorithm was always close to the best expected performance, over a broad range of signal-to-noise ratios, in vitro and in vivo. The algorithm is entirely parallelized and has been successfully tested on recordings with up to 4225 electrodes. Our toolbox thus offers a generic solution to sort accurately spikes for up to thousands of electrodes.
Household cookstove emissions are an important source of carbonaceous aerosols globally. The light-absorbing organic carbon (OC), also termed brown carbon (BrC), from cookstove emissions can impact ...the Earth's radiative balance, but is rarely investigated. In this work, PM2.5 filter samples were collected during combustion experiments with red oak wood, charcoal, and kerosene in a variety of cookstoves mainly at two water boiling test phases (cold start CS, hot start HS). Samples were extracted in methanol and extracts were examined using spectrophotometry. The mass absorption coefficients (MACλ, m2 g−1) at five wavelengths (365, 400, 450, 500, and 550 nm) were mostly inter-correlated and were used as a measurement proxy for BrC. The MAC365 for red oak combustion during the CS phase correlated strongly to the elemental carbon (EC)/OC mass ratio, indicating a dependency of BrC absorption on burn conditions. The emissions from cookstoves burning red oak have an average MACλ 2–6 times greater than those burning charcoal and kerosene, and around 3–4 times greater than that from biomass burning measured in previous studies. These results suggest that residential cookstove emissions could contribute largely to ambient BrC, and the simulation of BrC radiative forcing in climate models for biofuel combustion in cookstoves should be treated specifically and separated from open biomass burning.
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•BrC absorption from wood-cookstove emissions is uniquely measured in this work.•BrC absorption depends on burn conditions only for cold start wood combustion.•BrC absorption from cookstove emissions are much stronger than open biomass burning.
The radiative forcing of light-absorbing OC from cookstove emissions need to be considered in climate models, and should be treated separately from open biomass burning.
Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cookstoves are considered to be an important solution for mitigating household air pollution; however, their performance has rarely been evaluated. To fill the data and ...knowledge gaps in this important area, 89 laboratory tests were conducted to quantify efficiencies and pollutant emissions from five commercially available household LPG stoves under different burning conditions. The mean thermal efficiency (±standard deviation) for the tested LPG cookstoves was 51 ± 6%, meeting guidelines for the highest tier level (Tier 4) under the International Organization for Standardization, International Workshop Agreement 11. Emission factors of CO2, CO, THC, CH4, and NO x on the basis of useful energy delivered (MJd) were 142 ± 17, 0.77 ± 0.55, 130 ± 196, 5.6 ± 8.2, and 46 ± 9 mg/MJd, respectively. Approximately 90% of the PM2.5 data were below the detection limit, corresponding to an emission rate below 0.11 mg/min. For those data above the detection limit, the average emission factor was 2.4 ± 1.6 mg/MJd, with a mean emission rate of 0.20 ± 0.16 mg/min. Under the specified gas pressure (2.8 kPa), but with the burner control set to minimum air flow rate, less complete combustion resulted in a visually yellow flame, and CO, PM2.5, EC, and BC emissions all increased. LPG cookstoves met guidelines for Tier 4 for both CO and PM2.5 emissions and mostly met the World Health Organization Emission Rate Targets set to protect human health.
Salicylic acid (SA) and pipecolic acid (Pip) play important roles in plant immunity. Here we analyzed the roles of transcription factors TGACG-BINDING FACTOR 1 (TGA1) and TGA4 in regulating SA and ...Pip biosynthesis in Arabidopsis thaliana.
We quantified the expression levels of SYSTEMIC ACQUIRED RESISTANCE DEFICIENT 1 (SARD1) and CALMODULIN-BINDING PROTEIN 60g (CBP60g), which encode two master transcription factors of plant immunity, and the accumulation of SA and Pip in tga1-1 tga4-1 mutant plants. We tested whether SARD1 and CBP60g are direct targets of TGA1 by chromatin immunoprecipitation–polymerase chain reaction (ChIP-PCR).
In addition to promoting pathogen-induced SA biosynthesis, we found that SARD1 and CBP60g also positively regulated Pip biosynthesis by targeting genes encoding key biosynthesis enzymes of Pip. TGA1/TGA4 were required for full induction of SARD1 and CBP60g in plant defense. ChIP-PCR analysis showed that SARD1 was a direct target of TGA1. In tga1-1 tga4-1 mutant plants, the expression levels of SARD1 and CBP60g along with SA and Pip accumulation following pathogen infection were dramatically reduced compared with those in wild-type plants. Consistent with reduced expression of SARD1 and CBP60g, pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP)-induced pathogen resistance and systemic acquired resistance were compromised in tga1-1 tga4-1.
Our study showed that TGA1 and TGA4 regulate Pip and SA biosynthesis by modulating the expression of SARD1 and CBP60g.
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