Focusing on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914, this book provides a perspective on the relationship between empire and globalisation. It shows how distinct structures of ...economic opportunity developed around the people who settled across a wider British World through the co-ethnic networks they created. Yet these networks could also limit and distort economic growth. The powerful appeal of ethnic identification often made trade and investment with racial 'outsiders' less appealing, thereby skewing economic activities toward communities perceived to be 'British'. By highlighting the importance of these networks to migration, finance and trade, this book contributes to debates about globalisation in the past and present. It reveals how the networks upon which the era of modern globalisation was built quickly turned in on themselves after 1918, converting racial, ethnic and class tensions into protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia. Avoiding such an outcome is a challenge faced today.
The breast cancer screening programmes in the United Kingdom currently invite women aged 50-70 years for screening mammography every 3 years. Since the time the screening programmes were established, ...there has been debate, at times sharply polarised, over the magnitude of their benefit and harm, and the balance between them. The expected major benefit is reduction in mortality from breast cancer. The major harm is overdiagnosis and its consequences; overdiagnosis refers to the detection of cancers on screening, which would not have become clinically apparent in the woman's lifetime in the absence of screening. Professor Sir Mike Richards, National Cancer Director, England, and Dr Harpal Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of Cancer Research UK, asked Professor Sir Michael Marmot to convene and chair an independent panel to review the evidence on benefits and harms of breast screening in the context of the UK breast screening programmes. The panel, authors of this report, reviewed the extensive literature and heard testimony from experts in the field who were the main contributors to the debate. 85 references
•I critically examine mangrove rehabilitation policies and practices in Thailand.•Institutional factors can influence how astutely ecological knowledge is used.•Actors often record the mangrove area ...planted instead of the survival rate.•Financing rehabilitation via CSR can shift decision-making power to corporations.•Bottom-up initiatives may be impeded by perverse top-down environmental policies.
Mangrove forest restoration is practiced across the (sub)tropics to suppress ongoing deforestation and degradation of coastal ecosystem services and biodiversity. This article critically assesses mangrove restoration policies and initiatives in Thailand, using a political ecology lens focussed on institutional arrangements and power dynamics. Analysis based on interviews with 44 respondents shows how formal and informal institutions created by weak actor relations can inhibit long-term success. Revealed are inconsistencies between national mangrove restoration policies and the financial capacity of the government agency tasked with policy implementation. This can create a reliance on private-sector funding via corporate social responsibility (CSR), which centres decision-making power with firms regarding how, where, and when mangrove rehabilitation is implemented. Loosely-defined national targets lead stakeholders to report ‘false successes’ based on the spatial area planted, rather than on the long-term survival rate of afforested or reforested mangroves. This creates a ‘cycle of failure’ with little institutional learning (i.e., feedbacks on the ecological reasons for failure), and duplicated rehabilitation efforts. The strong institution of corporate philanthropy in Thailand makes subsequent CSR money readily available, while coinciding restoration events with public holidays associated with the Thai Royal Family motivates local participants to try again. Contemporary narratives from two progressive mangrove rehabilitation projects – with long-term collaboration, cooperation, and monitoring – help identify recommendations for overcoming these long-standing institutional challenges. The article demonstrates how weak and unequal actor relations – resulting from capacity limitations, power asymmetries, and cultural ideologies – creates gaps between policy design and implementation, thus leading to ineffective environmental governance.
Abstract
Mangrove forests hold some of the highest densities of carbon recorded in any ecosystem, but have experienced widespread deforestation through conversion to aquaculture and agriculture. ...Alongside deforestation, mangroves have shown simultaneous natural expansion in some parts of the world, and considerable investments have been made into restoration programmes. Here we estimate net changes in the global mangrove carbon stock due to land cover change between 1996 and 2016, using data on mangrove deforestation and forestation, and proportional changes in carbon stock during processes of mangrove loss and gain. The global mangrove carbon stock declined by 158.4 Mt (95% CI = −156.8–525.9 Mt); a reduction of 1.8% of the stock present in 1996. Efforts to conserve and restore mangroves appear to have had some success, and - along with natural forestation - have contributed to relatively low net losses of mangrove carbon stocks over two decades.
Neoadjuvant treatment of breast cancer Thompson, A M; Moulder-Thompson, S L
Annals of oncology,
09/2012, Letnik:
23 Suppl 10, Številka:
Suppl 10
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Neoadjuvant treatment of breast cancer has become established as the safe and often effective therapeutic approach of choice for larger primary and for locally advanced breast cancer. The neoadjuvant ...approach offers the advantages of downstaging the disease, potentially reducing the extent of surgery and in an era of individualization of therapy, testing the efficacy of therapy administered to patients. The preoperative setting is also an effective way to study the activity of novel agents or therapeutic combinations in vivo against human breast cancer. For new therapies, preoperative trials avoid the issue of adaptive resistance and pretreatments that can be problematic in the advanced disease setting. For evidence of a drug targeting the cancer in vivo, comparisons of endocrine therapy, chemotherapy agents and/or targeted agents can provide data on activity and efficacy with a much shorter time frame and many fewer patients than for adjuvant trials; effects seen in neoadjuvant trials may even reflect what is found in the adjuvant setting. Patient benefits from the neoadjuvant approach may be greatest for those who experience complete pathologically documented response (and the consequent survival benefits) and women for whom breast conservation, rather than mastectomy, becomes possible.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will significantly change both industrial manufacturing and our daily lives. Data collection and 3-D positioning of IoT devices are two indispensable services of such ...networks. However, in conventional networks, only terrestrial base stations (BSs) are used to provide these two services. On the one hand, this leads to high energy consumption for devices transmitting at cell edges. On the other hand, terrestrial BSs are relatively close in height, resulting in poor performance of device positioning in elevation. Due to their high maneuverability and flexible deployment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could be a promising technology to overcome the above shortcomings. In this article, we propose a novel UAV-assisted IoT network, in which a low-altitude UAV platform is employed as both a mobile data collector and an aerial anchor node to assist terrestrial BSs in data collection and device positioning. We aim to minimize the maximum energy consumption of all devices by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and devices' transmission schedule over time, while ensuring the reliability of data collection and required 3-D positioning performance. This formulation is a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem, and an efficient differential evolution (DE)-based method is proposed for solving it. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed network and the optimization method achieve significant performance gains in both energy-efficient data collection and 3-D device positioning, as compared with a conventional terrestrial IoT network.
In 1990, Andrew Bakun proposed that increasing greenhouse gas
concentrations would force intensification of upwelling-favorable winds
in eastern boundary current systems that contribute substantial ...services
to society. Because there is considerable disagreement about whether
contemporary wind trends support Bakun's hypothesis, we performed a
meta-analysis of the literature on upwelling-favorable wind
intensification. The preponderance of published analyses suggests that
winds have intensified in the California, Benguela, and Humboldt
upwelling systems and weakened in the Iberian system over time scales
ranging up to 60 years; wind change is equivocal in the Canary system.
Stronger intensification signals are observed at higher latitudes,
consistent with the warming pattern associated with climate change.
Overall, reported changes in coastal winds, although subtle and
spatially variable, support Bakun's hypothesis of upwelling
intensification in eastern boundary current systems.
Electronic government is being increasingly recognized as a means for transforming public governance. Despite this increasing interest, information systems (IS) literature is mostly silent on what ...really contributes to the success of e-government Web sites. To fill this gap, this study examines the role of trust in e-government success using the updated DeLone and McLean IS success model as the theoretical framework. The model is tested via a survey of 214 Singapore e-government Web site users. The results show that trust in government, but not trust in technology, is positively related to trust in e-government Web sites. Further, trust in e-government Web sites is positively related to information quality, system quality, and service quality. The quality constructs have different effects on "intention to continue" using the Web site and "satisfaction" with the Web site. Post hoc analysis indicates that the nature of usage (active versus passive users) may help us better understand the interrelationships among success variables examined in this study. This result suggests that the DeLone and McLean model can be further extended by examining the nature of IS use. In addition, it is important to consider the role of trust as well as various Web site quality attributes in understanding e-government success.
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