Search

If it continues, deglobalization may lead not to atomization but two overlapping international orders: a liberal one (LIO) led by the United States, and an authoritarian–capitalist one (ACIO) led by China. This equilibrium could emerge because a central purpose of international orders is to preserve the domestic regimes of their Great Power sponsors. The United States and China have markedly different domestic regimes, and so as China continues to grow in power and influence, tension over the content of international order should continue to grow. I borrow from Darwinian evolution the notion of ‘niche construction’: just as organisms alter phenotype selection by manipulating their natural environments, states can alter the ‘selection’ of domestic regimes by shaping their international environments. Modes of international niche construction include foreign regime promotion, interdependence, transnational interaction and multilateral institutions. The liberal democratic niche constructed by the United States and its allies after the Second World War preserved democracy for many decades. Today, China is attempting through various means to build a niche that will eliminate the liberal bias in international institutions and safeguard its own Market-Leninist regime. The resulting ACIO would select for autocracy and hence be partially separate from the LIO, which selects for liberal democracy.

It is very difficult to know how international social linkages affect domestic ideological polarization because we can never observe polarization occurring both with and without international connections. To estimate this missing counterfactual, we employ a new statistical method based on Bayesian item-response theory that permits us to disaggregate polarization after the Arab Uprisings into domestic and transnational components. We collected a dataset of Twitter accounts in Egypt and Tunisia during the critical year of 2013, when the Egyptian military overthrew the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. We find that the coup increased retweets among Egyptian ideological allies by 50% each day following the coup and decreased cross-ideological retweets by 25%. Tunisian Twitter communities also showed stronger intragroup retweeting although at lower levels than in Egypt. Counter-intuitively, our model shows that the additional polarization in Tunisia after the coup appears to have dampened further polarization among Islamists in Egypt.

Many diseases have oxidative stress and inflammation as underlying pathological features, including metabolic and inflammatory/autoimmune disorders, diseases of the lung, liver, kidney, gastrointestinal tract, cardiovascular and nervous systems. A leading physiological mechanism for oxidative stress is the nuclear erythroid-related factor 2-like 2/antioxidant response element (Nrf2/ARE) signaling pathway. It maintains intracellular homeostasis and protects cells from oxidative damage by inducing phase II detoxifying and oxidative-stress responsive genes. Nrf2 transcription factor functions as the key controller of the redox homeostatic gene regulatory network, and is tightly controlled by the repressor protein, Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (Keap1). Pharmacological agents to inhibit Keap1 and boost effectiveness of the Nrf2/ARE pathway have been developed and more are in development. This chapter elucidates the importance of hemodynamic laminar shear stress in oxidative homeostasis and examines hemodynamic induction of the shear stress (SS)/Krupple-like factor2 (KLF2) /Nrf2/ARE pathway as a means to combat oxidative stress through hemodynamics.

The concepts of learning communities, open educational practices and co-created teaching and learning are topics of current debate, particularly since the switch to online learning in 2020/21 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This case study uses student feedback to evaluate a new assessment method introduced within an online distance learning Master of Public Health programme. The assessment required students to blog about their motivations for studying public health, submitting their reflections to an open online platform, resulting in the co-creation of a shared, open-learning resource for current and future students. The assessment design was informed by the benefits of open educational practices and co-created teaching and learning, with the overall aim of developing an online learning community that will continue to grow and develop beyond the initial assessment and cohort. Feedback suggests that the open, reflective nature of the assessment had a positive impact on the student learning experience and contributed towards a sense of learning community through enhanced social cohesion within the group.

Sino-Russian security and economic cooperation has broadened and deepened in nonlinear but progressive fashion since the late 1990s. Contra realism, it is not simply American material power that drives this increasing cooperation; US power has at best remained constant. Instead, two conditions combine to deepen Sino-Russian cooperation. First, enduring liberal hegemony, or a combination of material power, prestige, and the ability to set and enforce rules, makes America threatening, under broad conditions, to any authoritarian regime’s domestic power and foreign influence. Hegemony is an interaction of material power and ideas; each augments the other. Second is the steady 20-year movement of Russia’s regime under Vladimir Putin away from liberal democracy. These two conditions make cooperation on either side of the liberal–nonliberal ideological divide increasingly easier than cooperation across it. Several types of qualitative evidence support these claims, including: (1) private and public statements from both Beijing and Moscow on the liberal-democratic threat; (2) specific deepening of bilateral cooperation after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014; (3) efforts by Moscow and Beijing to counter liberal hegemony’s spread in their regions; (4) the tendency for anti-liberal elites in neighboring states to cooperate more with China or Russia. I address realist counter-arguments skeptical of any systematic causal role for ideology. Insofar as America tires of its role as liberal hegemon, or the “China Model” becomes so prestigious as to threaten the Putin regime, the impetus to Sino-Russian cooperation identified here will fade.

The Problem: There is an urgent need for innovative solutions for new and improved treatments and therapies. Often clinical research data is “silo-ed” within an organization, preventing the broader research community from leveraging aggregated information from individuals and studies globally. This isolation of data limits the discoveries possible within a disease preventing the discovery of new scientific links between disease areas. Inconsistent and ambiguous data representation leads to a lack of transparency, traceability and reproducibility, in turn fostering inefficiencies and inaccuracies in research that loses time and increases costs. Simply put Are we being good stewards of our study data? Data Standards and Data Sharing as part of the solution: Describing data consistently using data standards can bring clarity to data that amplifies its value. The T1D Data Standards Project builds on existing CDISC diabetes standards by describing concepts relevant to T1D in the areas of: • Pediatrics and Devices (Released Sep 2020) • Exercise and Nutrition (Due Q2-2021) • Screening, Staging and Monitoring for Pre-Clinical Type 1 Diabetes (Due Q3-2021). The team of CDISC standards experts, T1D experts from CDISC member organizations and T1D subject matter experts from academia and industry followed a consensus-driven process to ensure the final standards are fit for use within the research community, reinforced by the open community review. How data standards help overcome some of the challenges: Publicizing the availability and promoting adoption of consistent standards brings clarity to data, reduces data collection, organization and analysis time, and facilitates interoperability that promotes data re-use and operational efficiencies. When researchers speak the same harmonized language, talking and understanding each other is much easier leading to the sharing of common, understandable data within the research community, thereby promoting scientific and therapeutic advances general confidence in the data. Disclosure R. Baker: None. J. M. Owen: None. Funding The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust (G-2018PG-T1D069)