Sudden death due to congenital malformation of the left coronary artery: A case report

A case of sudden death during heavy exercise in a young athletic man due to a rare but well-known congenital coronary malformation is reported, and the main aspects concerning the condition are discussed.     

Reflections on self-reflections – On framing the analytical implications of the Arab uprisings for the study of Arab politics

The Arab uprisings have not only impacted large parts of the Arab world. They have also left their mark on scholarship about Arab politics. Following the unexpected events, scholars have been engaged in a self-reflective debate on whether their assumptions and theoretical approaches to Arab politics have proven inadequate and their reasoning flawed, and if some kind of rethink is necessary for how this is supposed to take place. The present article, which belongs in the realms of meta-studies, reflects on these self-reflections. By presenting and evaluating some of the specific positions within this more inward-looking part of the Arab uprisings debate, the article brings attention to how this line of more self-reflective questions can – and has been – addressed within very different kinds of “frames” and how these are associated with very different ways of discussing the analytical applications of the Arab uprisings for Arab politics. More specifically, the article identifies three kinds of framing: (i) a who-has-been-vindicated-and-made-obsolete framing, where the core interest is in picking winners and losers among the last decades’ (post)democratization currents in Middle East studies; (ii) a how-do-we-synthesize-and-upgrade framing, where the ambition is to revise and combine insights from the analytical toolboxes of both authoritarian resilience and democratization; and finally (iii) a how-do-we-get-beyond-the-democratization/authoritarianism-paradogma framing, which perceives the Arab uprisings as an opportunity to engage in a more basic reflection about how (Arab) politics has been and should be debated and whether it is time to make the study of Arab politics into a “genuine science of politics” instead of being reduced mainly to topics of democratization and authoritarian resilience.     

Metric Sex Determination of the Human Coxal Bone on a Virtual Sample using Decision Trees

Decision trees provide an alternative to multivariate discriminant analysis, which is still the most commonly used in anthropometric studies. Our study analyzed the metric characterization of a recent virtual sample of 113 coxal bones using decision trees for sex determination. From 17 osteometric type I landmarks, a dataset was built with five classic distances traditionally reported in the literature and six new distances selected using the two-step ratio method. A ten-fold cross-validation was performed, and a decision tree was established on two subsamples (training and test sets). The decision tree established on the training set included three nodes and its application to the test set correctly classified 92% of individuals. This percentage was similar to the data of the literature. The usefulness of decision trees has been demonstrated in numerous fields. They have been already used in sex determination, body mass prediction, and ancestry estimation. This study shows another use of decision trees enabling simple and accurate sex determination.     

Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The “Arab Spring” as a Critical Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics

The basic characteristics and historic significance of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 are given a multitude of interpretations, not least in light of the dramatic events that have followed. This article seeks to understand the uprisings as expressions of an unfolding crisis in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in the region within a historic-sociological approach to citizenship as a “contractual relationship.” A brief discussion of Egyptian developments is used to illustrate the approach. The mass mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s inspired by Nasserism and the “authoritarian bargaining” introduced at the time is contrasted with the demands for a new social contract that mobilized millions during the recent uprisings. The uprisings clearly represent a critical juncture in contemporary Arab history, but their long-term impact on the direction of the future political order in the Arab region remains an open question.     

No Offense! On the Offense Principle and Some New Challenges

A central aim within criminal justice ethics is to give a plausible justification concerning which type of acts ought to be criminalized by the state. One of the principles of criminalization which has been presented and critically discussed in the philosophical literature is the Offense Principle. The primary aim of this paper is to argue that unless a rather special and implausible objective list theory of well-being is accepted, the Offense Principle should be subsumed in the Harm Principle.     

Interpreting Performance Information: Motivated Reasoning or Unbiased Comprehension

A main rationale of performance information is to empower citizens to make informed decisions by presenting them with unambiguous information about the performance of institutions. However, even objective, clear, and unambiguous performance information is subject to biased interpretation depending on whether the information is consistent with the prior beliefs held by those who receive the information. Integrating the theory of motivated reasoning with the literature on performance information, the authors hypothesize that performance information that is inconsistent with prior beliefs is less likely to be interpreted correctly than belief‐consistent information. Using randomized survey experiments in which respondents were presented with quantitative performance data, the authors show that subjects systematically interpret performance information in ways that conform with their prior beliefs. The findings question the assumption that providing performance information automatically increases knowledge about government performance, let alone improves political decisions.