多氯联苯类污染物对人类健康的影响

多氯联苯(PCBs)为一类广泛存在的环境污染物,在环境中的分解速度缓慢且可通过食物链富集.文中讨论了PCBs对人类健康的影响,阐述了人体暴露于PCBs污染可能存在致癌作用,影响内分泌和生殖系统,以及刺激皮肤等.但目前尚无充分证据表明环境中的PCBs污染与癌症和内分泌失调存在必然联系.     

Succession effects in presidential elections

What is the impact of ex-presidents on the electoral performance of their party's successor candidates for the office and how long after a president has left office are successor effects electorally significant? Mattei and Weisberg (1994) argue that successor effects are large primarily when the vice president runs for office immediately at the end of the term of the president under whom they served. Timeliness and the association between presidents and their vice presidents account for succession effects. This paper challenges the Mattei-Weisberg successor effects perspective, arguing that significant successor effects can be possible for non-vice presidential candidates and long after a president has left office. Using American National Election Study data, I add numerous successions to those Mattei and Weisberg investigated. Analysis finds that succession effects apply to non-vice presidential candidates. Further, some ex-presidents may influence voting decisions long after they left office. There is also a hint in these data that succession effects have climbed over time, because as polarization has increased, the linkage between presidents and their parties has tightened.     

How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?

How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”     

硒对汞致雏鸡肝功能损伤的拮抗作用

选用健康伊沙褐雏鸡250只,分为对照组、汞中毒组、3个水平的硒保护组,研究汞对血清中门冬氨酸氨基转移酶(AST)、丙氨酸氨基转移酶(ALT)、碱性磷酸酶(ALP)、肝组织中谷胱甘肽过氧化物酶(GSH-Px)活性和丙二醛(MDA)含量的影响以及硒与汞之间的相互作用效应.试验结果表明,汞可使血清中AST、ALT、ALP活性显著升高(P＜0.01),使肝组织中GSH-Px活性降低(P＜0.01),引发肝组织脂质过氧化,致使肝组织中MDA含量显著增高(P＜0.01),且有时间-效应关系;硒可使血清中AST、ALT、ALP活性显著降低(P＜0.01),使肝组织中GSH-Px活性显著升高(P＜0.01),阻止肝组织脂质过氧化,致使肝组织中MDA含量显著降低(P＜0.01),且有时间-效应关系.从而说明汞中毒损伤肝功能;硒对汞致肝功能的损伤具有拮抗作用.     

The association between Ugandan adolescents’ viewing of specific television genres and sex-related normative beliefs and behaviours

Growing evidence in Western nations indicates that exposure to high levels of sexual media content influences adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behaviours in those countries. Although media in many sub-Saharan markets contain increasingly higher levels of sexual content, little research has investigated the effects of that content on adolescents’ HIV-related risk and protective behaviours. This project used cultivation theory to examine Ugandan adolescents’ media use, and to test the relationship between their exposure to specific television genres and their sex-related normative beliefs and behaviours. Three hundred and sixty secondary school students from four purposively sampled schools filled out a questionnaire about their television viewing, their beliefs about the prevalence of sexual intercourse among their peers, and their own sexual behaviours. Preliminary evidence of relationships between watching comedy and cartoon programming, and high estimates of the proportion of adolescents who engage in sexual intercourse, were observed. Watching comedy programming and non- African programming was associated with the higher likelihood to have ever had sexual intercourse.     

Why bother campaigning? Campaign effectiveness in the 2009 European Parliament elections

This paper explores the effectiveness of European Parliament candidates' campaigns. We analyze the relationship between candidates' spending and their likelihood of success, controlling for a range of relevant co-varying factors. We then investigate whether the effects of electoral spending are conditioned by two variables: ballot design and incumbency. We find that, ceteris paribus, spending was positively related to a candidate's likelihood of electoral success in the 2009 campaign, though this effect is small in scale. We also reveal that the electorally positive effects of spending are observable across both 'party-centered' and ‘candidate-centered’ ballot structures, and that there is some evidence that incumbent spending is less effective than challenger spending.     

Individual level dynamics of PTV change across the electoral cycle

Propensity-to-vote (PTV) scores are ever more commonly used in electoral research as a measure of electoral utilities. Yet a growing literature employs them as dependent variable in the voting equation in place of the lower information granted by vote recall questions. However, this choice can be seen as problematic because of the very structure of election survey research. To the extent that voters' PTVs are measured in post-election surveys (as it is often the case) these are likely to result endogenously produced by actual voting behavior in the past election – thus partly undermining the validity of the PTV question which, ideally, should not be related to any specific election. In this paper, we try to disentangle the relationship between short-term political attitudes (leader evaluations, issue proximity, economic assessments) and voters' changing patterns of propensities to vote in both an electoral and a non-electoral context. The latter scenario serves as a means to rule out the potentially contaminating effect of voting choices on voters' PTVs. The data comes from two panel surveys of Italian voters conducted by ITANES in occasion of the 2006 general election, and in 2011 (that is, in a non-electoral year) respectively.     

With an Eye Open and a Round Chambered: Explaining the Afghan Insider Threat and its Implications for Sustained Partnership

This article presents ethnographic data and an analytical framework concerning the recent spike in Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) ‘insider’ or ‘green-on-blue’ attacks on NATO forces. This data was collected as part of an in-depth, multi-level case study of NATO partnering efforts with the Afghan Defence and Interior ministries, the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and Afghan Local Police. Preliminary findings support the argument that, in addition to ANSF infiltration and coercion by the Taliban and Haqqani network, cross-cultural friction and contextual stress on Afghan troops are strong contributors to the rise in insider attacks. Additionally, emotional intelligence, cultural awareness and conflict resolution skills are shown to be important mitigating factors.     

Using a cognitive analytic approach to formulate a complex sexual and violent offender to inform multi-agency working: developing a shared understanding

Abstract

Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) is a collaborative time-limited psychotherapy developed by Ryle. The approach aims to formulate how early experiences influence the development of unhelpful patterns that maintain a person's current difficult experiences. Within the UK, forensic services personnel are increasing their uses of CAT approaches within contextual, i.e. treatment teams, settings. Offending behaviour is relational (perpetrator to victim), and CAT is a relational model. Within the context of National Health Service consultation service (Serious Offender Liaison Service) working with the Police and Criminal Justice Social Work to assess, formulate and give advice regarding working with serious sexual and violent offenders, often with personality disorders, a case example is presented. The paper suggests that utilising a relational model, such as CAT, and applying one of the main the tools of this approach, through diagrammatic representations (maps) of the formulation, can enable agencies working with an individual to share a common formulation and language.     

A critical understanding of good governance and leadership concepts written in the context of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the challenges to contextual discourse on Africa's development paradigms1

ABSTRACT

Good governance is a value-laden concept that is characteristically nebulous; it can mean different things to different people, depending on the context in which it is used. The same applies to leadership. Concepts, as Pauw (1999a, 465) puts it, are ‘tools of thinking’ and contexts are ‘the environments or frameworks in which they [concepts] operate’. Lucidity in the meanings of concepts is fundamentally important for shaping debate and enriching discourses. To maintain their power, concepts must be used in their proper contexts. This necessitates an understanding of the art of contextual discourse. Good governance is used in NEPAD as a principle and emphasised as a sine qua non for sustainable development in Africa. On the other hand, NEPAD premises Africa's re-birth or Renaissance on good governance and leadership, with a vision and commitment to repositioning the continent in global power balances. In this article good governance and leadership are considered as concepts. NEPAD is a textual context within which the two key concepts are used and should, consequently, be engaged. The article attempts a critical review of African scholarship engagement with good governance and leadership within the NEPAD context to determine the extent to which contextual discourse is practised. It further grapples with the immediate historical background to scholarship on Africa's development between the 1960s and early 1990s. The exercise reveals that much of the accumulated body of African scholarship and scholarship on Africa's development reviewed does not suffciently contextualise discourse on good governance and leadership within NEPAD, and its key assessment and monitoring device, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and offers an alternative framework.