Powerful Allies Research Articles

A stepwise docking and molecular dynamics approach for enzymatic biolubricant production using Lipase Eversa® Transform as a biocatalyst

Biolubricants have gained a notable market share in the last decade due to the increased interest in replacing petroleum-based lubricants in various applications. Biolubricants are produced by using renewable raw materials such as vegetable oils, and enzymes such as lipases . The latter can be used as catalysts for biolubricant synthesis, which renders these processes environmentally friendly. Among the several innovations enabled by enzymatic engineering tools, the lipase Eversa® Transform 2.0 stands out as a genetically-modified and low-cost enzymatic formulation that has shown high activity in the production of biodiesel , fatty acids, and biolubricants. In addition to enzymatic engineering, advanced computational tools, such as docking and molecular dynamics, can also be powerful allies in the development of competitive products that impart low negative impact in the environment. These simulation tools enable the elucidation and understanding of reaction mechanisms, cut reagent costs, and inform choices regarding materials and conditions to be used in related industrial processes. Thus being, this work proposed the analysis and modeling of the synthesis reactions of biolubricants derived from oleic acid via the use of n-octanol and isoamyl alcohol, with lipase Eversa® Transform 2.0. Molecular dockings showed that the predominant interactions between the ligands and the amino acid residues that make up the active site of the enzyme and its surroundings were of Van der Waals and hydrophobic nature. Through simulations via molecular dynamics, it was found that these interactions were responsible for the stability of the lipase-ligand complex, given the low number of hydrogen bonds formed during the simulations. Furthermore, the low variation in the position of the lipase-ligand complexes comparatively to their initial conformations over the production stages attested that the chosen docking poses were adequate to describe the ligand conformations in the region of the active sites of the enzyme. These results also provide a structural view of the interactions between lipase Eversa® and the fatty esters used as lubricants, and confirm the potential in the use of these alcohols in this process. Finally, an in vitro validation showed improved results of esterification activity of the lipase with isoamyl alcohol. This hinted that the substrate that was in closer conformation and that showed shorter and more stable hydrogen bonds with the active sites of the enzyme demonstrated better use potential for the biolubricant production system that has been proposed. • The synthesis of biolubricant was evaluated through docking and molecular dynamics studies. • Most interactions of the lipase-ligand complex are Van der Waals or hydrophobic. • The interactions provided the stability of the lipase-ligand complex. • Docking positions exposed the conformations of the ligands in the lipase active site.

Reading Wiredu, by Barry Hallen

<i>Reading Wiredu</i>, by Barry Hallen

Diasporic assistance in authoritarian settings: Evidence from military Brazil

The study of diasporas in international politics concentrates on migrants and their descendants in liberal democratic host countries; however, diasporas in non-democratic states experience significantly different political relationships that warrant investigation. Such diasporas are not only numerous but can also be influential. Their participation in international politics and assistance to the homeland require navigating distinct political affiliations. This article explains what enables an authoritarian host country's consent to such diasporic assistance. It proposes that assistance is likely to be tolerated insofar as it does not conflict with the host country's interests, the diaspora member donors have powerful allies within the regime, and they are not identified with the opposition. This theoretical framework is illustrated by analyzing evidence from the Jewish diaspora in authoritarian Brazil (1964–1985). A comprehensive online appendix provides additional background, discusses refuted hypotheses, and details the research process toward making this article transparent and the research replicable.

The Turkey-China rapprochement in the context of the BRI: a geoeconomic perspective

ABSTRACT This article examines how the rise of geoeconomics vis-à-vis geopolitics has influenced the Turkish-Chinese rapprochement. It focuses on the impacts of the rise of geoeconomics on the long-term military alliances established in the Cold War and the strategic autonomy of smaller states that were once primarily dependent on their great power allies for their economic and regime security. Besides, it deals with the case-specific factors pushing Turkey towards China such as the rising authoritarian tendencies in Turkey and Ankara's disagreements on regional security issues with its traditional Western allies. Those factors have had negative repercussions on Turkey's economy, while the government has been facing a strong domestic imperative to continue infrastructure and construction projects which had contributed to the rapid economic growth in the 2000s. This situation has facilitated China's geoeconomic power projections seeking to create asymmetrical interdependence with Turkey and to influence Ankara's significant political and economic decisions. This article also underlines the limits of Turkish-Chinese rapprochement like Turkey's long-standing interdependence with the West and the relatively small role played by China in the Turkish economy. It concludes that Sino-Turkish ‘geoeconomic rapprochement' would neither ensure Turkey’s economic recovery nor increase its strategic autonomy unless Turkish-Western relations are ameliorated.

Interrupting Ableism in Stuttering Therapy and Research: Practical Suggestions

Purpose: The purposes of this tutorial are (a) to critically review the ways in which stuttering therapy and research are both constrained by and resistant to ableism and (b) to offer practical suggestions for further interrupting stuttering-related ableism in the discipline of speech-language pathology. Method: At the beginning of the tutorial, the concept of ableism is introduced and the effects of ableism on people who stutter are discussed. Following an overview of the discipline's current strengths in resisting ableism associated with stuttering, five practical suggestions for further interrupting ableism are provided. To illustrate how these suggestions might be enacted, real and hypothetical clinical and research scenarios are presented throughout. Although this tutorial draws heavily on the experiences of adults who stutter, many of the concepts are also relevant to kids and teens who stutter. Conclusion: Speech-language pathologists can be change agents in interrupting ableism associated with stuttering and powerful allies to people who stutter.

Difficult decisions: Coercion in asymmetric security cooperation

How do minor states protect themselves against coercion from their major power allies? Asymmetric security cooperation is often reduced to tradeoffs between security and autonomy, but coercion is another factor that minor states fear while cooperating. Coercing partner states can take the form of major powers threatening or undertaking regime change, and minor states must weigh the benefits of cooperation against this risk. To this end, I suggest that minor states with anti-major power political oppositions cooperate more extensively with their major power partners than minor states with pro-major power oppositions. A pro-major power opposition provides opportunities for major powers to threaten or replace the incumbent regime; therefore, such minor states limit their cooperation out of fear of coercion. I employ original data on opposition characteristics to present evidence from security relations between the United States and 65 minor states during 1950–1991 to support the hypothesis.

Building Performance Simulations and Architects against Climate Change and Energy Resource Scarcity

In Europe, 40% of the total energy is consumed by buildings; in this sense, building performance simulation tools (BPSTs) play a key role; however, the use of these tools by architects is deficient. Therefore, this study aims to detect the architects’ perception on BPSTs. To this end, an online survey was conducted to determine the selection criteria of these BPSTs and non-users, to investigate the reasons for not using the tools. The outcomes showed that there was a wide gap between architects and the management of simulation programs in Spain, mainly due to the lack of training. BPSTs are described as a kind of intellect amplifiers, as they are perceived as powerful allies between professors and students of architecture and between architects and architectural design; therefore, through BPSTs, sustainability is taken very much into consideration to make buildings more energy efficient. Therefore, it is primarily concluded that further and higher education must undergo significant improvement to use simulations as part of the architectural design.

Special Issue on In-Memory Computing

The articles in this special section focuses on in-memory computing. Computer designers have traditionally separated the role of storage and compute units. Memories and caches stored data. Processors’ logic units computed them. Is this separation necessary? A human brain does not separate the two so distinctly. Why should a processor? In-/near-memory computing paradigm blurs this distinction and imposes the dual responsibility on memory substrates: storing and computing on data. Modern processors and accelerators have over 90% of their aggregate silicon area dedicated to memory. In-/near-memory processing converts these memory units into powerful allies for massively parallel computing, which can accelerate a plethora of applications including neural networks,

“I'm not your reality show:” Perspectives of bereaved mothers' engagement with the news media to advance drug policy reform

North America's overdose crisis is one of the most urgent public health issues of our time and parents bereaved from substance use are a prominent voice within the news media. To date, however, the experiences of bereaved mothers who have shared their stories with the media has not been well-documented, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of their political advocacy efforts.In 2017, we conducted qualitative interviews with 43 mothers across Canada who participated in drug policy advocacy following the substance-related death of their child. We used a narrative interview approach and thematic analysis to distill key themes in recounting bereaved mothers’ stories of engaging with reporters, their perspectives on media representation and the personal impacts of sharing their stories with news media.Participants viewed the news media as powerful allies in educating the public, changing attitudes, and ultimately influencing policy in support of people who use substances. However, there was a personal cost that accompanied this media advocacy which included the potential for sensationalism, news media complacency, insensitive comments by journalists, and having one's story misrepresented.Our study highlights the complex relationship between mothers bereaved by substance use and the news media who hold tremendous power in framing their stories. By examining bereaved mothers as social movement actors and reflecting on the structural context in which news stories are delivered, we outline strategies to ensure parents bereaved by substance use can safely share their stories with media and continue their work in countering stigma and misinformation.

Powerful Allies and Weak Consensus: Towards a Deeper Understanding of how Health-Harming Industries Seek to Influence Global Health Governance Comment on "Competing Frames in Global Health Governance: An Analysis of Stakeholder Influence on the Political Declaration on Non-communicable Diseases".

Suzuki et al have identified commonalities in the policy positions adopted at a global forum by commercial sector actors and high-income countries (HICs), on the one hand, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), on the other, in ways that may allow commercial sector actors to block or delay evidence-based policies through the creation of political controversy. The ability of industry actors to draw on the support of the most politically and economically powerful countries for their favoured policy agenda is an important contribution to understanding the dynamics of global health governance in the area of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and beyond. Here we assess the relevance of this paper for the field of corporate actors' research and the potential avenues this opens up for further study. More specifically we emphasize the need for comparative, cross disciplinary research to examine the power of heath-harming industries and the relevance of these findings for decolonizing global health.

The Fall of Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush was at the forefront of American research policy during World War II, but he suffered a steep fall after the war, and by 1948 had left government service altogether. What motivated such a significant loss of influence? Drawing on previously unexamined sources, this article traces the causes of Bush’s decline in authority to his loss of powerful allies, particularly with the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the retirement of Henry Stimson; to his long-standing feuds with military leaders; and to several political missteps on Bush’s part that alienated figures in Congress and elsewhere. Continued examples of personal conflict in the postwar period not only impacted Bush’s career, but also shaped the structure of the resulting institutions that emerged to fund Cold War–era science. Rather than an abrupt change occurring immediately after the war, the postwar transition to public institutions was both gradual and influenced by the personal networks that preceded it. Bush’s quiet departure from government was tied to the emergence of military dominance in American research, largely at the expense of civilian scientific leaders. Such a shift in control of research policy had a dramatic effect on resulting postwar initiatives, closely connecting scientific advancements to national security.

Can Powerful Allies Save the CEO? The Effect of the CEO’s Subgroup on CEO Dismissal

While existing research on power and CEO dismissal predominantly focuses on CEO power over the board, we examine how CEO power as well as power dynamics among subgroups in the board influence CEO dismissal. We use a faultline approach to identify subgroups in the board based on directors’ demographic attributes (i.e., gender, race, and age) and examine how the power and size of the subgroup that includes the CEO affect the likelihood of CEO dismissal. We argue that the risk of CEO dismissal is reduced when the CEO is more powerful, the CEO belongs to a powerful subgroup, or the CEO belongs to a larger subgroup in the board. Using data from S&P 500 boards, we find that the risk of CEO dismissal decreases as CEO power increases, the power of the CEO’s subgroup (i.e., subgroup including the CEO in the board) increases, and the size of CEO’s subgroup increases.

The future of entrepreneurship: the few or the many?

Gazelles (high-growth), unicorns (ventures valued at $1 billion), and decacorns (ventures valued at $10 billion) appear to be dominating the landscape of entrepreneurship. In 2021, there were more than 700 ventures that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists, and there seems to be a continued trend in more arising. However, the facts show that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for over 90% of businesses and 50% of employment of the worldwide population, contributing up to 55% of GDP in developed economies. Thus, it is clear that in developed countries, small firms are the economy. However, the entire realm of entrepreneurship appears to drifting slowly away from the importance of smaller firms and focusing the entire emphasis on the relatively few tech giants. These giant corporations are now viewed through the prism of entrepreneurship. Thus, we ask quo vadis — where will the focus of entrepreneurship be post-COVID-19 — centralization or democratization? For researchers and policy makers, shedding some light on this question may help in the formulation of research agendas and policy directions.

Embedding scientific information into forestry praxis: Explaining knowledge transfer in transdisciplinary projects by using German case

The Horizon 2020 project, ALTERFOR, generated knowledge about forest management alternatives. Researchers modelled a future, sustainable provision of ecosystem services, where a salient question was one of how to facilitate the application of these innovative scientific results in praxis. Our qualitative study uses a method mix and the analytical Research-Integration-Utilisation (RIU) Model to provide in-depth explanation of the knowledge transfer going on between the ALTERFOR research project and the forestry praxis. The leading assumption related to this communication process is that selected pieces of information are de-embedded from their scientific context of the research project and re-embedded into the existing knowledge of specific forestry actors, who utilise them to implement science-based management solutions in their forest. This assumption is empirically corroborated by using ALTERFOR's German case. For the approximately 100, 000 ha of Augsburg Western Woods (south-western Bavaria) the researchers simulated five scenarios, showing which ecosystem services would be provided by different forest management models over the next 100 years. The integration of scenario results into the praxis comprised three integration forums. Within the first forum (pre-study) the alternatives focusing on “recreation” and “hunting” were dropped due to a lack of supportive powerful allies from praxis. Within the second forum (bilateral meeting) the three other scenarios - “timber production”, “multifunctional” and “set aside” scenarios, all remained in the discourse of praxis. Yet, the third forum (multilateral meeting - workshop) triggered the toughest selection. Most project results were either ignored or declined strongly, so that only a few pieces of scientific information found acceptance by particular actors, who utilised them either through support or resistance: (i) the State Forest used the information about the “multifunctional” scenario to legitimise the solution which was already in use (multifunctional management), whereas the Private Forest used the information for the possibility to increase timber harvests in a sustainable way, in order to push for (an otherwise contested) strategy of maximized timber harvesting; (ii) the State Forest resisted the possibility of increasing sustainable timber harvesting, whereas the Private Forest rejected the implementation of set asides. Both actors had sufficient power capabilities to realise their interests, even against the interests of other landowners or political groups. These results show that it is not complex scientific knowledge that makes it through the selection process, but rather, pieces of scientific information, de-embedded from their theory-based context of the research project, are re-embedded into the context of powerful actors in praxis, who then utilise these to either support or resist their own science-based solutions. Based on this, we suggest that the ambitious Horizon 2020 goal of facilitating knowledge transfer is attained more effectively when the project opens up multiple options for dialogue between researchers and different groups from praxis (multi-actor approach), abandoning the idea of one, best solution and offering different alternatives instead.

‘In Google we trust’? The Internet giant as a subject of contention and appropriation for the Russian state and civil society

This article explores an apparent paradox related to the use of Google services in Russia: several NGOs based in the country consider the Internet giant as a protector of civil liberties. The highly polarized Russian political context, in which local technological companies are increasingly controlled by the State, explains the widespread uses of Google services in daily practices of NGOs. We show how their risk model is focused on the threat emanating from the State, seen as more important than risks emanating from global private companies. In this context, “big tech” solutions are preferred to open source software as they are valued for their usability. Internet giants, such as Google, are understood by civil society actors as powerful allies in this internal confrontation, as their dominant economic role is seen as a guarantee that they will not yield to pressure from authorities. Finally, we will see how, in parallel, self-regulatory virtues of the competitive global IT market, and the strength of global public opinion, are supposed to “naturally” force these companies to comply with ethical standards in data use.

The Asian American Literature We’ve Constructed

This article deploys text mining and quantitative analysis to survey the breadth of the Asian American literary corpus and the scholarship framing it. We have built a database covering all scholarship in the MLA bibliography, Amerasia, and the Journal of Asian American Studies that studies a literary work under the rubric of Asian American. For the works and authors cited, we collected a wealth of metadata from publisher and genre to gender, ethnicity, and more. Asian Americanists have long debated the definition of Asian American literature, but we have not traced the choices of scholarly attention that have accreted over decades and hundreds of publications to shape a canon. The results here reveal the systemic effects and inequalities generated by those choices. They confirm a long-suspected bias toward contemporary literature. They reveal troubling ethnic inequalities. The literatures of Asian American ethnic groups beyond the six most studied groups receive minimal attention. Korean American literature has leaped to second most studied, resulting in a reconfigured East Asian American hegemony: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. This was enabled by a troubling decline in studies of Filipinx American literature, once central to the field. Much Filipinx American literature is today studied outside the Asian American framework entirely. Meanwhile, the conflation of Chinese American literature with Asian American literature has intensified. The field’s rhetoric of diversification has masked persistent inequalities in our critical practices. More encouragingly, the corpus has surpassed gender equity, placing women writers at the center of the field. The work of building the Asian American corpus we would want is far from over. Data-driven methods can be powerful allies in the self-scrutiny necessary to this work.

Extraordinary Renditions and Human Rights: Short Observations on the French Case

The collusion of many European states in the CIA’s notorious practice of extraordinary rendition during the Bush Administration is by now well-documented. Indeed, it was in the context of concerns about the potential involvement of the United Kingdom in the practice (one of the USA’s closest and most powerful allies on the continent) that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) first defined the phenomenon of extraordinary rendition as: ‘… the extra-judicial transfer of persons from one jurisdiction or State to another, for the purposes of detention and interrogation outside the normal legal system, where there is a real risk of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.’ This definition connects two important components, namely the extra-judicial nature of the transfer (i.e., involving a covert operation, including resort to ‘secret facilities’) and the use of torture. Those European States that connived with the practice of extraordinary rendition flights were close allies of the USA and/or had the facilities (i.e., NATO bases) which accommodated flight transfers. Not all allies were involved, however, and the notable absence of France from the list of high-profile, complicitous offending States is striking. Was France not involved at all in the practice of extraordinary rendition flights? Were the French authorities involved but the collaboration with the CIA was even more covert and investigations not pursued? The aim of this short article is not to provide definitive answers to these questions from an empirical point of view. Rather the object of this piece is to make observations about the French case in two related directions. First, the article seeks to describe and contextualize the wider role of France in counter-terrorism cooperation in the aftermath of 9/11, noting in particular the collaboration of the French intelligence services with their American counterparts (including as regards allegations of collusion in torture). Secondly, it outlines French law on State liability and demonstrates how, despite the latter’s broad scope, it still allows for limits where ‘secret defense’ and ‘actes de gouvernement’ are involved.

Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan

Reviewed by: Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan Anna Mae Duane (bio) Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America kelly a. ryan New York University Press, 2019 400 pp. When Abigail Adams asked her husband to "remember the ladies" as he drafted the laws for the new nation, John Adams scoffed, arguing that loosening the controls on one aspect of "our Masculine systems" threatened to set off a dangerous chain reaction. Already, he worried, there were reports that children and apprentices had grown disobedient, that schools had become turbulent, that Native Americans disrespected their guardians, and that enslaved people had grown rebellious. If even one group was to advance, Adams suggested, the shift in power would topple the order of society. In the years surrounding the American Revolution, a large part of the population was included in one of the legally disempowered groups that Adams describes, and it is this population that Kelly A. Ryan analyzes in Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America. As Ryan uncovers the multiple tactics people in these groups deployed in order to escape the violence that dominated their lives, the book chronicles how the sporadic and uneven advances made by one group sometimes emerged in competition against, but often came in tandem with, others who also sought to convince the public that the brutality they endured was unacceptable. Ryan has gathered a remarkable archive of legal records from New York and Massachusetts, supplemented by print literature, diaries, and letters of people seeking relief from abuse. Even as the geography of the study is largely circumscribed to New York and greater New England, the demographic scope of the inquiry itself is ambitiously diverse. Ryan draws from several different, but sometimes overlapping, categories of legally disempowered [End Page 580] people in this capacious study, including white wives, child servants and apprentices, and enslaved African Americans. As Ryan leads us through a harrowing archive of court cases and newspaper accounts, we learn the names of people like Katherine Naylor, a seventeenth-century Massachusetts wife who sought help to escape marital violence so severe it threatened her life (47). We are introduced to an enslaved eighteenth-century trio known only Mark, Phillip, and Phoebe, who conspired to kill their brutally cruel enslaver (77). We are confronted with the fate of a fourteen-year-old white servant boy named John Walker whose abuse at the hands of his employer did not merit any judicial notice until his beaten and frostbitten body scandalized the town (30). As extensive as Everyday Crimes's collected archive of cases is, Ryan readily admits its limitations. Not everyone suffering as Naylor, Phoebe, and Walker did sought outside help in ways that would become legible. People isolated in rural environments and people prevented by mental or physical disability from making powerful allies rarely appear in such records. Even as we read of the horrific violence visited on individuals like Katherine Naylor or Mark, Phillip or Phoebe, Everyday Crimes reminds us that there were thousands upon thousands whose situations were still more dire, and whose stories we will likely never know. Drawing from such a wide swath of the population is a bold and, arguably, a risky strategy. Scholars have often separated the study of enslaved people from the study of white women and children to avoid the possibility of diminishing the unique atrocities attributable to slavery by conflating it with other disempowered positions. As nineteenth-century authors including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs demonstrated, white women often deployed their (admittedly circumscribed) power to harm the enslaved people under their control. Ryan's own case studies indicate that white children were fully capable of doing the same. In one striking case Ryan documents, an enslaved man was pushed to retaliatory violence as his enslaver's young son mimicked his father's cruelty, taunting and hitting the enslaved man as he went about his work. In recent years, critics including Karen Sánchez Eppler, Martha Jones, and others have demonstrated how white women made metaphorical alliances with Black people for political advantage, while refusing to include Black women in the gains. While there...

Regulators without borders? Latin American labour inspectors in transnational context

AbstractThe domestic bases of trans‐governmental regulatory networks are controversial. While rational choice accounts expect insecure regulators to join larger networks that promise to bolster and justify their authority back home, public interest accounts expect independent regulators to join smaller networks populated by like‐minded and informative peers. Are regulatory networks more likely to attract self‐aggrandizing servants of insecure agencies or public‐spirited representatives of their independent counterparts? What are the implications for network size and orientation? I address these questions by examining the regulators who administer labour and employment law in Latin America and find that, in keeping with the public interest account, they are more likely to go abroad when they are independent bureaucrats than when they are vulnerable to political pressure, and less likely to join larger networks of powerful allies than to teach and learn from their Iberian and Latin American peers. The results suggest that trans‐governmental networks rest on Weberian foundations – themselves mediated by linguistic, cultural, and historical factors – that contribute to the reproduction of a multipolar regulatory world.

The Relationship between a Western Amazonian Society and Domesticated Sedges (Cyperus spp.)

The article discusses the relationships between the Ashaninka people from Peruvian Amazonia and the domesticated sedges (Cyperus spp.) cultivated in almost every Ashaninka home garden, and mostly exchanged within family circles. An over-differentiation phenomenon is observed, in which four species of Cyperus correspond to 86 folk species. The names of folk species are formed by secondary lexemes, composed of a semantically active constituent and a generic suffix (i)benki. The names contain mnemonic cues to differentiate otherwise morphologically similar plants, and their meanings correspond to Ashaninka ontological categories, thus revealing many levels of connectivity between them and non-humans. The wide scope of specific uses (approx. 60 registered) assigned to Cyperus spp. is only partly supported by phytochemicals and ergot alkaloids in the fungus-infested sedges. The key to understanding the ibenki’s (Cyperus) agency lies in local cosmologies, in which domesticated sedges are viewed as plant-persons and kin. The Ashaninka are engaged in producing the bodies of their kin, the ibenki. Simultaneously, ibenki are powerful allies in restoring harmonious social relations and protecting people against the intentional actions of other humans and non-humans.