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How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors' political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government's COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, we examine all 79 sets of slides when briefings occurred. We identify a reactive phase focused on communicating knowledge about the pandemic in a boundedly rational manner, and a proactive phase that created new policy-based narratives of the pandemic. Besides contributing to emerging pandemic-related policy scholarship, we argue that conceiving these visualizations as visual narrative assemblages is relevant more broadly because it shifts attention to the interaction and interdependence of multiple visualizations as they enable policymakers to perform their authority to govern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of "shock mobility" as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emergency flights from epicentres, mass repatriations, lockdowns, quarantines. Patterns of shock mobility and immobility are not new categories of movement, but rather are significant alterations to the timing, duration, intensity, and relations among existing movements. Many of these alterations have been induced by governments' reactions to the pandemic in both migrant-sending and receiving contexts, which can be especially consequential for migrants in and from the Global South. Our interventions explore these processes by highlighting experiences of Afghans and Kurds along Iran's borders, Western Africans in Europe, Filipino workers, irregular Bangladeshis in Qatar, Central Americans travelling northwards via Mexico, and rural-urban migrants in India. In total, we argue that tracing shocks' dynamics in a comparative manner provides an analytical means for assessing the long-term implications of the pandemic, building theories about how and why any particular post-crisis world emerges as it does, and paving the way for future empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative biologists are often interested in inferring covariation between multiple biological traits sampled across numerous related taxa. To properly study these relationships, we must control for the shared evolutionary history of the taxa to avoid spurious inference. An additional challenge arises as obtaining a full suite of measurements becomes increasingly difficult with increasing taxa. This generally necessitates data imputation or integration, and existing control techniques typically scale poorly as the number of taxa increases. We propose an inference technique that integrates out missing measurements analytically and scales linearly with the number of taxa by using a post-order traversal algorithm under a multivariate Brownian diffusion (MBD) model to characterize trait evolution. We further exploit this technique to extend the MBD model to account for sampling error or nonheritable residual variance. We test these methods to examine mammalian life history traits, prokaryotic genomic and phenotypic traits, and HIV infection traits. We find computational efficiency increases that top two orders-of-magnitude over current best practices. While we focus on the utility of this algorithm in phylogenetic comparative methods, our approach generalizes to solve long-standing challenges in computing the likelihood for matrix-normal and multivariate normal distributions with missing data at scale. for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors comment on an article in the periodical, which focuses on ethical aspects of physicians refusing to perform abortions and role of conscience in it. Topics discussed include the need to accommodation women's rights with the rights of physicians for conscientious objection to abortion; the refusal to abortion in life-threatening emergencies; and the risk for women at the Michigan Catholic hospitals.

The proceedings of the 2nd Annual Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank summarize the most contemporary clinical, electrophysiological, and computational work on DBS for the treatment of neurological and neuropsychiatric disease and represent the insights of a unique multidisciplinary ensemble of expert neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, scientists, engineers and members of industry. Presentations and discussions covered a broad range of topics, including advocacy for DBS, improving clinical outcomes, innovations in computational models of DBS, understanding of the neurophysiology of Parkinson's disease (PD) and Tourette syndrome (TS) and evolving sensor and device technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent discussion in critical border studies has reaffirmed the validity and necessity of multiperspectival approaches which move beyond state-centric outlooks to include diverse viewpoints of people at or on borders. One understudied aspect of everyday border life involves how international development organisations fit within wider dynamics of cross-border activities. Drawing upon experiences of development projects at a key border crossing between Kenya and Uganda, I explore (1) how perceptions of risk and danger contribute to constructions of the border towns as places in need of development interventions, and (2) how this border also adds to practical and logistical concerns already held by development organisations as they deliver these interventions. I argue that the place-based mix of location, material forms, and perceptions or practices impacts how ‘inter-national development’ is rationalised in border regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note reflects on the gaps and limitations confronting the development of ethical principles regarding the accessibility of large-scale data for civil society organizations (CSOs). Drawing upon a systematic scoping study on the use of data in the United Kingdom (UK) civil society, it finds that there are twin needs to conceptualize accessibility as more than mere availability of data, as well as examine the use of data among CSOs more generally. In order to deal with the apparent “digital divide” in UK civil society – where, despite extensive government rhetoric about data openness, organizations face not only the barriers of limited time, funds, and expertise to harness data but also the lack of representation within existing data – we present a working model in which ethical concerns accompanying data utilization by civil society may be better accounted. This suggests there is a need for further research into the nexus of civil society and data upon which interdisciplinary discussion about the ethical dimensions of engagement with data, particularly informed by insight from the social sciences, can be predicated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that the climate is changing and that the changes are largely due to increased levels of carbon emissions into the atmosphere that are caused by human activities. The recommended response from society to climate change involves two sets of activities: mitigation and adaptation. Adaptation includes activities that attempt to adjust or respond to changes to the environment caused by climate change. For wildlife, a consensus is forming around an approach to adaptation planning that would improve the ability of an ecosystem to resist dramatic changes to habitats; build resilience into the ecosystem to recover from extreme weather events and changes in temperature and precipitation that may cause increased floods, wildfires, insect outbreaks, etc.; and lastly build realignment into our ecosystems through wildlife corridors or other connections through matrix landscape types that allow species to shift their ranges and transition into new areas when the need becomes inevitable. This commentary outlines a climate change adaptation strategy for wildlife within an eight-state region (Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio) of the Midwest United States (US) focused on the design of an interconnected green infrastructure network of natural areas that helps refine future wildlife habitat conservation priorities while also providing other natural and human benefits to residents of the Midwest US. A landscape-scale green infrastructure network will be developed for this area within the next 18–24 months thanks to a grant from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to the eight Midwest states, and the strategy outlined here serves as the foundation for implementing effective wildlife habitat protection projects in response to climate change.Environmental Practice 14:45–56 (2012) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past decade, green infrastructure has evolved from a novel buzzword into a recognized planning practice. Definitions of green infrastructure inevitably have been tailored to appeal to diverse constituents with message points that address a particular professional discipline or resource issue. Commonly accepted definitions emphasize the interconnected network concept and are mostly differentiated by the scale at which green infrastructure planning is implemented. This commentary lays out an operational framework for green infrastructure that can be advanced at all scales, from the largest landscape to the smallest site, and illustrates examples of operationalizing the framework at each scale. What is ultimately needed is a seamless quilt of planning and implementation across scales and jurisdictional boundaries that make sense in terms of their benefits but also in terms of their economics, and every one can play a part in making that a reality in their communities.Environmental Practice 14:17–25 (2012) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]