Dual Questions Research Articles

Dominant party politics and ethnic coordination after conflict: the Serb List in Kosovo

ABSTRACT Since entering Kosovo politics in 2013, the Serb List (SL) monopolized political representation in the Kosovo Serb community. This study addresses dual questions of why a dominant party emerged within a distinct ethnic community in 2013, and how it monopolized representation. I argue that a dominant party was strategically developed to coordinate preferences and reduce intra-communal opposition, allowing representatives to participate uncontested in Kosovo’s institutions. The dominant party constrained political pluralism and constituent engagement in the intra-ethnic arena, allowing for freer bargaining in the inter-ethnic arena. Findings from an in-depth case study of the SL demonstrate the SL was formed to curb in-group opposition to negotiated settlements and coordinate disparate political factions in distinct ethnic enclaves. It monopolized political representation by coopting parallel structures of patronage and administration, moderate parties and elite cadres, and coercive mechanisms previously deployed to enforce ethnic closure. The outcome demonstrates that dominant parties can remedy problems of consociational representation, but at the cost of intra-group competition.

CHOICE AND INTENSITY OF CLIMATE VARIABILITY ADAPTATION STRATEGIES: EVIDENCE FROM MAIZE FARMERS IN SOUTHERN GHANA

ABSTRACT Embedded in a quantitative approach focused on smallholder maize farmers in southern Ghana, this article addresses the dual questions of what climate variability strategies remain adopted? And what is the intensity of adoption as well as the factors that influence the choice and intensity of adaptation strategies? The related literature presents mixed conclusions. Even more compelling is an understanding of how our research questions intersect with socio-demographic factors in mediating and shaping climate variability adaptation strategies. We find drought-resistant varieties, pest and disease control, early/late planting, and the application of indigenous knowledge to be the dominantly adopted climate variability adaptation strategies. The adoption intensity shows three climate adaptation strategies to be the highest (22.34 percent), followed by two (19.29 percent), with the least (0.5 percent) being ten. Farming experience, household size, and farm size positively correlated with the intensity of climate variability adaptation strategies. Temperature perception is inversely correlated with climate variability adaptation intensity. The findings suggest that social capital and other socio-demographic characteristics are relevant for the adoption of climate variability adaptation strategies in southern Ghana.

Emotional reactions to immigration and support for EU cooperation on immigration and terrorism

ABSTRACTWhat explains variation in European citizens’ support for common EU immigration and counter-terrorism policies? We advance extant literature that focuses on the utility versus identity debate by focusing on individuals’ emotional reactions. Drawing on theories of affect, we show that citizens’ emotions about immigration are integral to their preferences for EU cooperation on the dual questions of immigration and terrorism. We hypothesise that while anger about immigration is associated with opposition to cooperation on both policies, fear about immigration is associated with support for a common EU counter-terrorism strategy. Using a large-N cross-sectional survey conducted in Germany and the Netherlands, our analyses confirm our hypotheses. Our findings have implications for the progress of European integration and the scope of public approval of EU common policies.

Maternal health services in China’s western rural areas: uptake and correlates

Purpose Many public health systems have struggled with the dual questions of (1) why the uptake rate of maternal health services is low among some subpopulations; and (2) how to raise it. The objective of this study is to assess the uptake rate of a new set of maternal health services in poor rural areas of China. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on the survey responses of women’s representatives and village cadres from almost 1000 villages in June 2012 as part of a wide-scale public health survey in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces in the western part of China. Findings We find that the uptake rate of maternal health services (including in-hospital delivery, antenatal care visits and post-partum care visits) in poor rural areas of western China are far below average in China, and that the rates vary across provinces and ethnic groups. Our analyses demonstrate that distance, income, ethnicity and availability appear to be systematically correlated with low uptake rates of all maternal health services. Demand-side factors seem to be by far the most important sources of the differences between subpopulations. We also find that there is potential for creating a Conditional Cash Transfer program to improve the usage of maternal health services. Originality/value We believe that our results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the dual questions that many public health systems have struggled with (1) why the uptake rate of maternal health services is low among some subpopulations; and (2) how to raise it.

Dose-Finding Trials: Optimizing Phase 2 Data in the Drug Development Process.

Clinical trials in drug development are commonly divided into 3 categories or phases. The first phase aims to find the range of doses of potential clinical use, usually by identifying the maximum tolerated dose. The second phase aims to find doses that demonstrate promising efficacy with acceptable safety. The third phase aims to confirm the benefit previously found in the second phase using clinically meaningful end points and to demonstrate safety more definitively. Dose-finding trials—studies conducted to identify the most promising doses or doses to use in later studies—are a key part of the second phase and are intended to answer the dual questions of whether future development is warranted and what dose or doses should be used. If too high a dose is chosen, adverse effects in later confirmatory phase 3 trials may threaten the development program. If too low a dose is chosen, the treatment effect may be too small to yield a positive confirmatory trial and gain approval from a regulatory agency. A well-designed dose-finding trial is able to establish the optimal dose of a medication and facilitate the decision to proceed with a phase 3 trial. Selection of a dose for further testing requires an understanding of the relationships between dose and both efficacy and safety. These relationships can be assessed by comparing the data from each dose group with placebo, or with the other doses, in a series of pairwise comparisons. This approach is prone to both false-negative and false-positive results because of the large number of statistical comparisons and the relatively small number of patients receiving each dose. These risks can be mitigated by combining data from patients receiving multiple active doses into a single treatment group for comparison with placebo (“pooling”), but only if it is possible to reliably predict which doses are likely to be effective. In general, dose-response relationships are best examined through dose-response models that make flexible, justifiable assumptions about the potential dose-response relationships and allow the integration of information from all doses used in the trial. This can reduce the risk of both false-negative and false-positive results; incorporating all data into the estimates of efficacy and safety for each dose produces more accurate estimates than evaluating the response to each dose separately. In this issue of JAMA, Gheorghiade et al 1 report the results of

The post-1994 South African spatial planning system and Bill of Rights: A meaningful and mutually beneficial fit?

With a new planning system taking shape, and a new Bill of Rights embodied in a transformative Constitution having been introduced in South Africa in 1994, this article grapples with the dual questions as to whether the new spatial planning system fits within the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights assists the new spatial planning system in the realisation of its objectives. As a prequel to the engagement with these questions, a brief overview of the events leading to institution of the Bill of Rights and its contents is provided. This is followed by a brief historical overview of the creation of the South African spatial planning system and a summary of its key features. These features can be reduced to the following basic components: (1) meaningful participation in all aspects of spatial planning; (2) an open, inclusive and just decision-making process where information is readily available; (3) recognition of religion and culture and equal treatment in application and decision-making; (4) an awareness of environmental issues; and (5) the significance of property and housing. The way in which these components are addressed in the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provides the starting point to determine the extent to which there is a meaningful and mutually beneficial fit between the planning system and the Bill of Rights.

IAN W. MCLEAN. Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth.

In a series of articles written over many years, Ian W. McLean has addressed the dual questions of how Australia attained high levels of prosperity less than a century after European settlement and why it has since remained amongst the wealthiest of nations. Although this book is not a comprehensive study of Australian economic history, it builds on this earlier body of work and brings together his answers to these questions. It is engagingly written, helped by the minimal use of technical material and the creation of counterfactual scenarios in several places. Most important of all is McLean's impressive use of the comparative approach. While arguing that Australia's path of development has been strongly shaped by international influencesimmigration, investment, trade, and political institutionshe interrogates closely its performance relative to that of other specific nations to tease out national differences as well. These are appropriately selected in most cases: the role of differences in land ownership patterns and political institutions with Argentina, or the greater connection of Canada's timber and grain industries to manufacturing than Australia's wool and mining. However, New Zealand might have featured more strongly in the comparative story.

Compressed Sensing, Sparsity, and Dimensionality in Neuronal Information Processing and Data Analysis

The curse of dimensionality poses severe challenges to both technical and conceptual progress in neuroscience. In particular, it plagues our ability to acquire, process, and model high-dimensional data sets. Moreover, neural systems must cope with the challenge of processing data in high dimensions to learn and operate successfully within a complex world. We review recent mathematical advances that provide ways to combat dimensionality in specific situations. These advances shed light on two dual questions in neuroscience. First, how can we as neuroscientists rapidly acquire high-dimensional data from the brain and subsequently extract meaningful models from limited amounts of these data? And second, how do brains themselves process information in their intrinsically high-dimensional patterns of neural activity as well as learn meaningful, generalizable models of the external world from limited experience?

Appropriate storage for high-penetration grid-connected photovoltaic plants

This paper addresses the dual questions: What is the appropriate storage size and its related properties for matching very large photovoltaic plants to the grid; and what are the available technologies for achieving this end. For this purpose a “Usefulness Index” is defined, which, for any grid flexibility, leads to a PV-storage combination that allows high grid-penetration without storage being wastefully large. The paper then examines the sensitivity of this “appropriate storage size” to variations in our assumptions. The specific case of the Israeli electricity grid is employed for numerical discussion, but the formalism should be useful for wider application. In particular, the “appropriate storage size” deduced in this manner is argued to be a valuable point of departure for optimizations of a more sophisticated nature. Regarding available storage technologies, none is found to have all of the required properties for massive PV-grid penetration, but hybrid combinations should be capable of achieving this end.

A Communication-Efficient Nonlocal Measurement With Application to Communication Complexity and Bipartite Gate Capacities

Two dual questions in quantum information theory are to determine the communication cost of simulating a bipartite unitary gate, and to determine their communication capacities. We present a bipartite unitary gate with two surprising properties: 1) simulating it with the assistance of unlimited EPR pairs requires far more communication than with a better choice of entangled state, and 2) its communication capacity is far lower than its capacity to create entanglement. This suggests that 1) unlimited EPR pairs are not the most general model of entanglement assistance for two-party communication tasks, and 2) the entangling and communicating abilities of a unitary interaction can vary nearly independently. The technical contribution behind these results is a communication-efficient protocol for measuring whether an unknown shared state lies in a specified rank-one subspace or its orthogonal complement.

Ethical Issues in Sex and Love Addiction Treatment

Sex and love addiction treatment can involve many complex ethical issues. Awareness of these potential problems can assist clinicians in improving efficacy and, at the same time, reducing risk. Ethical difficulties flow from the fundamental principle that counseling is a fiduciary relationship. Sex and love addicts present with multiple addictions, strong psychological defenses, and trauma histories, which often result in lengthy treatments. Over the course of such treatment many challenging ethical areas surface including transference/counter-transference problems, evocative and provocative behaviors in clients, questions of therapist self-disclosure, confidentiality concerns, trauma reenactment possibilities, boundary issues, dual relationship questions, competence issues, diagnostic dilemmas, and fees problems. Examples and positive solutions for these and other ethical areas are given to foster the best result for both client and clinician.

Information management for estimating system reliability using imprecise probabilities and precise Bayesian updating

Engineering design decision-making often requires estimating system reliability based on component reliability data. Although this data may be scarce, designers frequently have the option to acquire more information by expending resources. Designers thus face the dual questions of deciding how to update their estimates and identifying the most useful way to collect additional information. This paper explores the management of information collection using two approaches: precise Bayesian updating and methods based on imprecise probabilities. Rather than dealing with abstract measures of total uncertainty, we explore the relationships between variance-based sensitivity analysis of the prior and estimates of the posterior mean and variance. By comparing different test plans for a simple parallel-series system with three components, we gain insight into the tradeoffs that occur in managing information collection. Our results show that to consider the range of possible test results is more useful than conducting a variance-based sensitivity analysis.

Maternal drinking of alcohol: the newborn has the worst hangover

In this issue of The Journal of Physiology, Dubois et al. (2008) report that breathing is greatly altered in animals born of mothers who consumed alcohol during the pregnancy. Upon finishing the paper by Dubois et al. we are not left with the dual questions which are often asked of contemporary studies in respiratory neurophysiology: What does this mean? How do these findings related to normal breathing in an intact animal? In many studies, investigators must attempt to fit results from greatly reduced preparations, containing only limited portions of the brainstem respiratory control system, into various models as to how normal breathing is generated. This task becomes especially daunting as the brainstem respiratory control system can generate multiple types of breathing, in addition to normal breathing or eupnoea. One other type of breathing is gasping, which replaces normal breathing under conditions of severe hypoxia or ischaemia, and can serve as a mechanism of autoresuscitation to restart normal breathing. Much experimental evidence supports the conclusion that different brainstem mechanisms are responsible for generating normal breathing and gasping (Paton et al. 2006; Paton & St.-John, 2007). Other breathing patterns may represent variants of eupnoea or gasping or, in fact, may be generated by other neurophysiological mechanisms in different regions of the brainstem (Smith et al. 2007). Thus, are results from reduced preparations applicable to the genesis and control of eupnoea, gasping or neither of these breathing patterns?

Two dual questions on zeros of characters of finite groups

For a finite group G and a non-linear irreducible complex character χ of G write υ(χ) = {g ∈ G|χ(g) = 0}. There are two dual questions as follows: what are the finite groups G such that υ(χ) is a conjugacy class for all but one of the non-linear irreducible characters χ of G, and what are the finite groups G whose character table has the property that all but one of the columns have at most one zero entry. We completely answer the two questions using the classification of finite simple groups.

Town Hall Meetings Without the Town: Were the Denver Three's First Amendment Rights Violated?

On March 21, 2005, three Denver residents were removed from a town-hall style meeting where President George W. Bush discussed his administration's plans for Social Security reform. According to initial reports, the residents were identified and removed because of a bumper sticker visible on the car they drove to the event which stated “No More Blood for Oil.” The incident raises dual questions of whether the individuals responsible for the trio's removal can be considered “state actors” for purposes of analyzing a constitutional claim on their behalf and whether, even if state action is present, the removal violated their First Amendment rights. This article concludes that a case can be made for both the presence of state action and a First Amendment violation.

Town Hall Meetings Without the Town: Were the Denver Three's First Amendment Rights Violated?

Abstract On March 21, 2005, three Denver residents were removed from a town-hall style meeting where President George W. Bush discussed his administration's plans for Social Security reform. According to initial reports, the residents were identified and removed because of a bumper sticker visible on the car they drove to the event which stated “No More Blood for Oil.” The incident raises dual questions of whether the individuals responsible for the trio's removal can be considered “state actors” for purposes of analyzing a constitutional claim on their behalf and whether, even if state action is present, the removal violated their First Amendment rights. This article concludes that a case can be made for both the presence of state action and a First Amendment violation.

Conference stresses relevenace of marine strata to today's issues

The dual questions of how marine strata are formed on continental shelves and slopes and how they stack into diagnostic sedimentary sequences have particular relevance to many pressing scientific and societal issues being studied today. The issues that confront scientists on these topics are complex and range from drainage basin dynamics to sediment transport theory to sea level histories. Indeed, many of the scientific concepts employed to understand coastal pollution, hydrocarbon and groundwater reservoirs, landslide hazards, and other similar issue‐driven studies are deeply rooted in sediment transport and sedimentary sequence evolution. Development of threshold advances in the application of these disciplines often requires the use of new technologies, combined with innovative modeling in large multi‐investigator programs [see, e.g., Nittrouer and Kravitz, 1995].