Uphill Battle Research Articles

Chinese politics in the era of Xi Jinping: renaissance, reform, or retrogression?

1. Factors Behind Xi Jinping's Rise: Factional Intrigue and Controversies Over the Future of Reform 2. The Making of a New Helmsman 3. Xi Jinping's Ideology and Politics 4. Economics vs. Politics: Beijing's Uphill Battle to Retool the China Model 5. China's Great Leap Outward 6 Conclusion: Xi Jinping and the Closing of the Chinese Mind

Targeting 1-Deoxy-D-xylulose-5-Phosphate Synthase (DXS) in Plasmodium Species for New Generation of Antimalarial

Malaria is one of the most dreadful diseases on the planet earth and nearly half of the world population is at a risk of this infection. Because of the advancement in medication and therapeutics, malaria related death toll has seen a 48% drop from estimated 839,000 in 2000 to 438,000 in 2015 . Most of this life-threatening disease causality is in tropical climate of Sub-Saharan Africa (90%) and South-East Asia (7.5%) and because of the weak infrastructure in some countries the challenge to fight this disease has been an uphill battle. Multiplied with the parasitic, intra-cellular life cycle of the Plasmodium species (P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae and P. ovale) makes it even harder to develop vaccine. Current antimalarial medications such as artemisinin, chloroquine, sulfonamides, pyrimethamine, etc. are failing in treatment of malaria because of increasing drug-resistance by Plasmodium species.

Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards

Reviewed by: Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards Michael S. Green (bio) Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment. By Leonard L. Richards. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 306. Cloth, $30.00.) Long after his Senate tenure, discussing the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage, Lyman Trumbull would tell law students, “Gentlemen, this good right hand wrote this amendment to the Constitution.” More than a century later, people who marveled at the brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln (or was it Lincoln’s performance as Daniel Day-Lewis?) without having studied the amendment’s passage in depth might have believed that maneuvering and bribery by a few shrewd political operators ended slavery. In both cases, the story was far more complex. A few historians have tried to unpack what actually happened. Their interpretations range from Michael Vorenberg suggesting that War Democrats deserve far more credit than they have received, to James Oakes emphasizing that Republicans had long been more united on the goal of ending slavery than scholars have believed, to scholars of slavery arguing for the “self-emancipation thesis”—that slaves, acting on what they knew politicians ultimately would have to do, forced Lincoln’s hand. Leonard L. Richards has waded into the debate with a combination of narrative and analysis focusing mainly on the political players and factors that shaped the movement toward the amendment. Richards laments the popularity of the mistaken belief that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. Interviews with teachers led him to conclude that “few knew anything about the Thirteenth Amendment, and virtually no one knew that getting it through Congress was an uphill battle” (x). To explain that battle, Richards finds the pivot for his story in the efforts of James Ashley, a Radical Republican congressman from Ohio who had been a stalwart early opponent of slavery. Throughout the book, Ashley’s story unfolds, including the political difficulties he faced at home, the principles he upheld (and his regret when he failed to uphold them), and his support for and management of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. After the House rejected the amendment in 1864, Ashley became more strategic. The two chapters that Richards devotes to the radical congressman’s efforts to round up votes provide a valuable lesson in politics. Richards focuses on Ashley’s quest for border-state support from two political enemies, Frank Blair of Missouri and Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, bringing to life this “odd couple,” as he calls them, with the same verve with which he portrays Ashley. The border-state congressmen included lame ducks whose distaste for emancipation could be overcome with persuasion or patronage. Richards simply states that “Ashley got the [End Page 291] support of eighteen of the nineteen men that Blair and Davis helped him line up. Had three of those men voted no, the amendment would have gone down to defeat” (153). Similarly, Ashley looked for help from northern Democrats and got it, whether they voted yes or simply did not vote. Richards is unsparing in his description of their party’s willingness to play the race card, and his examination makes clear that northern Democrats were crucial to passage but had little genuine desire to end slavery and thereby, as Democrat-turned-Republican Montgomery Blair suggested, eliminate the issue that had deprived them of power. The elder Blair was utterly loyal to Abraham Lincoln, and Richards is judicious and thoughtful in parsing the president’s role. He tends to let Lincoln’s failures speak for themselves, subtly criticizing the border states for their obstinacy on compensated emancipation and Lincoln for sticking to that idea and colonization. He also demonstrates that these ideas were hardly original to Lincoln. He is fair in discussing Lincoln’s emphasis on keeping Kentucky in the Union at the expense of moving faster against slavery, as Ashley and his allies wished. Richards also assesses the charges that corruption helped ensure the amendment’s passage: “Although there is no proof ‘beyond a shadow of doubt’ that Lincoln himself made deals, there is ample reason to believe that he allowed others to do...

Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck

Reviewed by: Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck James J. Gigantino II (bio) KEY WORDS Slavery, Privateers, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Freed slaves Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts. By Emily Blanck. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. Pp. 217. Cloth, $49.95.) Emily Blanck uses a little known interstate dispute to discuss some sweeping issues in the legal history of slavery and the larger historiography of the nation’s founding. Tyrannicide tells the tale of a group of thirty-four slaves captured by British privateers from their South Carolina plantations during the American Revolution who, by varieties of happenstance and chance, ended up captured by the American privateer Tyrannicide and escorted to Boston in 1779. Their story is the backdrop for Blanck’s analysis of the fissures that developed between North and South concerning the institution of slavery during the revolutionary period. Blanck organizes her work very much as a tale of two states, showing the divergent paths that South Carolina and Massachusetts had embarked on from the colonial period forward. By the onset of the Revolution, both remained slaveholding states, yet the economic purpose and overall understanding of the institution’s in each state was quite different in opinion and especially law. The author’s exploration of the colonial [End Page 405] legal past identifies some strong differences between both locales as they emerged as states in 1776, with Massachusetts being quite comfortable identifying slaves as persons under the law and therefore entitled to certain fundamental rights. South Carolina, on the other hand, repeatedly affirmed slaves as property and therefore unable to access those rights, most importantly habeas corpus, which Massachusetts slaves had successfully used in the late colonial period to argue for freedom. Beyond the differences in their colonial past, Blanck illustrates how the revolutionary experience dictated separate reactions to the continuation of slavery. South Carolinians, surrounded by an enslaved population hungry to seize the freedom offered by the British, created laws that further regulated the institution, while Massachusetts residents, who had far fewer slaves for the British to coopt, became more interested in abandoning it. Blanck argues that they would have done just that if the institution’s destruction would not have shattered the fragile unity that held the various states together in the midst of war. The divergence of the states on the role of slavery comes into full view when those thirty-four South Carolina slaves arrived in Massachusetts. Though more than half quickly returned to South Carolina, fourteen lived in Boston and its environs for the next four years as their owners could not afford to easily reclaim them. Those fourteen individuals not only soaked up the revolutionary rhetoric and ideas promulgated by the city’s free black community but also possessed a front-row seat for a series of court battles from 1780 to 1783 that started Massachusetts toward the path of becoming a free state. By 1783, when the owners tried to reclaim their slaves, they faced an uphill legal battle that tested the new union between the states in respecting each other’s property. At its core then, Tyrannicide explores the tension between the post-revolutionary governments of South Carolina and Massachusetts over the fate of these fourteen slaves. Officials from both states traded numerous letters that reveal just how different the two states’ legal systems were on the issue of slavery during this critical period. In a process fraught with legal misunderstandings on both sides, the fourteen individuals gained de facto freedom as their South Carolina owners and the state’s representatives declined to continue advocating the case against their northern neighbors. Blanck shows how this episode tested the limits of colonial unity and created the first fissures that would eventually come to bear on the constitutional debate over the fugitive slave clause. The Tyrannicide affair acted as a rehearsal for those issues and powerfully [End Page 406] shows that contention between slave and free states pre-dated the Constitution and remained a divisive concern from the nation’s very beginning. Although Blanck sets up a clear dichotomy between crumbling Massachusetts slavery and...

Never giving up.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that can cause unusual activities such as loss of consciousness or seizures. Looking at this definition, you probably think my disease is one that someone would have to live with forever. I can tell you from firsthand experience that it is not just another one of those diseases that is looked at, treated, and then cured; it was an uphill battle everyday. I dealt with Epilepsy for most of my life, but today I am cured. It wasn‘t easy, and let me tell you I have seen many doctors and had my fair share of seizures. But, today I am not only cured of epilepsy, but I am an independent woman and stronger because of my experience. The earliest signs of my seizures occurred due to the many high temperatures I had when I was a baby. My first seizure happened when I was 12 years old. My fall off of a balance beam triggered my seizures. During my years of epilepsy, my seizures ranged from temporal lobe seizures to grand mals. My body would quickly get immune to the medications my doctor prescribed me. I was having 2–3 seizures everyday, and I was not happy that my doctors could not control them. During my years of seizures, I would always worry about being stared at or judged. I also thought people would not like me because of my seizures. Because I was very unhappy, I decided to do something about it. I read and studied everything I could about epilepsy surgeries. My doctors could not control the seizures because, when they would change my medicine every few months, my body would get immune to the medication. With all of the trouble I was having with my body getting immune to medication, I read about surgery for epilepsy patients. I had a great doctor talk to me about epilepsy surgery, and he explained everything about testing for the surgery and the surgery itself. So, the only thing that I could think of was how could epilepsy surgery help me?! So, I read all about it and watched any tapes I could possibly get my hands on about the procedure. All the knowledge I obtained about the epilepsy surgery came from books, magazines, articles, and tapes. Everything I could possibly read about the epilepsy surgery I did. At that time we were not as fortunate to have the resources to study and research seizures as we are so privileged to have now. When my doctors gave me the option to either change my medication or go through the testing for the procedure, I did not hesitate for even a second. I was definitely ready to go through the testing for surgery. Through the two and a half years leading up to the surgery, I went through many tests including EEG, MRI, PET Scan, and Wada testing, as well as many hospital visits. Finally, in August of 2000, I was set to have my surgery at the Emory Hospital in Atlanta in Georgia. Fifteen years has gone by since my surgery, and I am off my medications and seizure free! I am back to doing things such as riding my horses, driving, and working. I have also been given the privilege to speak about my epilepsy surgery to the Emory Symposium and NSDF. I have also started HOPES, Helping Others Prepare for Epilepsy Surgery, on Facebook. People need to hear from someone who has had a good experience from the epilepsy surgery. I feel very strongly that people, like me, who have benefited from the surgery should speak out and let others know the knowledge they have obtained on seizures and how it is beneficial to everyone.

"Don't worry, I am going to be okay!" Advice to parents of dancers

“Don’t worry, I am going to be okay!” Sometimes, you have to reassure your parents that majoring in dance is not so crazy—there are actually careers out there, and a good education can lead you in many directions. by Sarah Hong As graduation nears, I hear myself saying, “Don’t worry, I am going to be okay!” in response to the dreaded question, “What are you going to do with a degree in dance?” Coming from parents who are first-generation immigrants, it reflects their concerns. Choosing to get an education in dance was an absolutely absurd choice to them, and it was definitely an uphill battle to finally get them to come to terms with my decision. Along with many other aspirational immigrant parents, they came to America to work for “a better life” for their children. Unfortunately for dance majors, that “better” life means being a doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, engineer or any profession along that route. Dancer was nowhere to be seen on that list. This made me wonder why those professions stand out above being a dancer. The first, obvious reason? Money. In America, money is tied to success and power. Most immigrant families started off with low economic status upon arriving, so it’s only natural for parents to not want their beloved children working as hard as they did for every penny earned. I believe there is a second, underlying reason as well, and that is the unfamiliarity of dance as a career. The notion of the “starving artist” is most prevalent when a parent is first informed that their child is choosing a career in dance. They are not aware that within the last decade or so, dance has played a more significant role in people’s lives and the opportunities that come with dance are grand. The rise in awareness of dance careers can be credited to the increase of dance in media. Dance shows like So You Think You Can Dance, Dancing with the Stars, and Dance Moms along with dance films like the Step Up series, Stomp the Yard and Make It Happen have made dancing more visible and may have helped remind society how important it is to keep dancing alive. Even so—do most people understand that there can be success after graduating as a dance major? It took a while even for me to come to this conclusion, which delayed my decision to major in dance. My parents were very much against me choosing dance as a career and did everything they could to make me believe that dance wasn’t the right path for anyone, especially me. In my case, I believe my decision was made because dance chose me just as much as I chose it. I wouldn’t accept the idea that a dance career is impossible to obtain, so I searched for ways I could possibly make a living using a dance education. So, one may wonder, what can life look like with a dance degree? The more well-known options include performing, choreographing, and teaching dance. A dancer can perform in many ways including professional companies of all styles of dance, in music videos, on tour with singers, yachts, parades, professional sports teams, etc. All of these performances require a choreographer too, another skill learned and practiced at universities. Teachers are needed at various places such as dance studios, high school dance teams, and colleges and universities.

Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards

Reviewed by: Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards Ira Lee Benjamins Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment. By Leonard L. Richards. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. x, 306. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-17820-2.) During the sesquicentennial celebrations for various Civil War milestones, the Thirteenth Amendment has often seemed to get lost in the mix. Significant remembrances were staged of the firing on Fort Sumter, numerous battles, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the surrender at Appomattox, yet celebration of the constitutional amendment that ended slavery has been muted. In his latest work, Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment, Leonard L. Richards aims to place the Thirteenth Amendment at center stage. Unlike previous studies, such as Michael Vorenberg’s Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York, 2001) and James Oakes’s Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2013), that focus on party politics and Lincoln’s role in the process, Richards’s study skillfully recounts the inner workings of the congressional process and the difficulties faced by the amendment’s lead advocate, Republican congressman James M. Ashley. In the first three chapters Richards sets the stage by recounting slaveholders’ grip on Congress, analyzing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and describing the impact that arming black troops had on both the war and support for the amendment. After the amendment was passed by the Senate but defeated in the House on June 15, 1864, Ashley faced an uphill battle. It is at this point readers will make note of Richards’s adept writing abilities. He not only makes the legislative process understandable for the uninitiated but also presents a captivating story. One aspect of the process readers will find interesting was that Ashley voted against his own amendment before he voted for it. After determining that his initial effort to pass the amendment would fail, Ashley used a legislative procedure to ensure he could bring the measure up again in the lame-duck congressional session after the fall elections of 1864. The most interesting chapter of the book is the climax of the story, examining that lame-duck congressional session. Ashley needed only eleven votes for the amendment to pass, and in the end, he was able to garner enough support that the amendment passed with two votes to spare. Celebrations began in Washington, D.C., as human chattel slavery was abolished in the [End Page 446] United States. Richards’s book successfully reestablishes the Thirteenth Amendment as a fundamental aspect of the story of the Civil War, yet it does not fully answer the question posed in the book’s title. Clearly, Ashley played a significant role in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. However, scholars of slavery, abolitionism, and Abraham Lincoln may argue that by limiting the focus to Ashley’s legislative fight, much of the groundwork laid by others that made his efforts possible is ignored. Nevertheless, Richards has produced a solid contribution to the scholarly literature on the Thirteenth Amendment. One troubling aspect of the book should also be noted. The historiographical essay included as Appendix B begins with a paragraph shockingly similar to the first paragraph of a review written in 2002 for H-Net by the late David Kyvig. One hopes this was an accidental lapse and that it is modified prior to future printings of an otherwise solid study. Ira Lee Benjamins Houston Memorial High School Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Enhanced Oxygen Permeation Behavior of Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3−δ Membranes in a CO2-Containing Atmosphere with a Sm0.2Ce0.8O1.9 Functional Shell

The deployment of clean energy technologies has faced an uphill battle to reduce the cost. Ion-conducting membranes for cost-effective oxygen production help to overcome this bottleneck. The existing high-performance perovskite membrane, such as Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3−δ (BSCF), is featured with a short running life as a result of the low material stability; surface decoration with a robust ion-conducting layer is one of the important strategies for improvement. To this purpose, in this work, an ultrathin dense Sm0.2Ce0.8O1.9 (SDC) with approximate 100 nm thickness has been successfully coated on the BSCF perovskite membrane surface for highly efficient oxygen production. In comparison to the pristine BSCF membrane, this new modified structure offers the enhanced performance of oxygen flux as a result of the better surface-exchange kinetics. Most importantly, the long-term oxygen permeation test under a CO2 atmosphere shows that the SDC-shell-protected BSCF membrane has improved stability comparable to the...

Substance Use and Abuse and Its Effects on Mental Disorders in Trinidad and Tobago - The Available Prevention and Management Strategies.

This paper deals with the relationship between substance abuse and mental illness in Trinidad and Tobago, its implications and management strategies. Dealing with mental health issues is an uphill battle and an attempt will be made in this paper to address the major issues at hand.

How to Improve the Health of American Adolescents

The major threats to the health of American teenagers are behavioral—risky and reckless things adolescents do that threaten their well-being and that of others. The primary approach to preventing adolescent risk taking has been classroom-based health education. Yet, most systematic research indicates that even the best programs are successful mainly at changing adolescents’ knowledge but not in altering their behavior. Research on adolescent brain development has revolutionized our understanding of this stage of life, but our approach to deterring adolescent risk taking remains grounded in old, antiquated, and erroneous views of the period. Classroom-based health education is an uphill battle against evolution and endocrinology, and it is not a fight we are likely to win. Instead of trying to change teenagers into something they are not, we should try to reduce the risks they are exposed to. We should spend less money and effort trying to influence how adolescents think, and focus more on limiting opportunities for their inherently immature judgment to hurt themselves or others. Although there is evidence that some programs aimed at strengthening adolescents’ self-regulation may also deter risky behavior, our public health policies should emphasize changing the context in which adolescents live, rather than solely attempting to change adolescents themselves.

Can Plant Breeding Go Open Source?

Can Plant Breeding Go Open Source?

On the Future of Social Security Systems

This paper elaborates and tries to extend, here and there, a key vision from Kim Jinsoo (of Yonsei University) that social security systems are subject to an uphill battle in the coming decades around the world, which they are most likely -- if they abstain from responding quickly in appropriate terms, and to full extent -- to lose. The reasons for which have been determined and explained further. The extent and timing of them to impact is, however, yet uncertain, and certainly will vary from country to country. They are here already, and working against the inner, fincancial, logic of current insurance-based social security systems (be they Bismarckian or Beveridgean in nature). This paper, as the findings of Kim Jinsoo before, tries to sensibilize the issue of a future of social insurance-based social security systems that stands on, for sure, shaky grounds, if not much worse, given particularly, but not only, the current situation and trends of societal aging and labor market changes around the world.

Access to File under European Competition Law

The present survey focuses on recent judgments that deal with the right of damage claimants to access the Commission’s file in cartel cases and with the type of information the Commission may include in the public version of its cartel decisions. On the first point, access to the file through the EU Transparency Regulation remains an uphill battle for cartel damage claimants. The General Court confirmed the general presumption that access to the file would undermine the protection of commercial interests or the purpose of the Commission’s investigations and the Ombudsman found that refusing access to the file on that basis does not amount to maladministration on the part of the Commission. The EU Damages Directive that was adopted last year provides the most efficient and reliable avenue for cartel damage claimants to obtain access to the Commission’s file. On the second point, the General Court effectively legitimised the Commission’s new policy on publication of cartel decisions. Damage claimants should now expect longer and more detailed public versions of cartel decisions that should contain more information relating to the operation of the sanctioned cartel and serve as a better source of evidence in actions for damages before national courts.

Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography by Shelby M. Balik (review)

Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England's Religious Geography. By Shelby M. Balik. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Pp. 295. Cloth, $60.00.)Reviewed by Nathan S. RivesGod, it seems, had to fight uphill battle in northern New England in the early republic. The rugged, mountainous topography of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine isolated settlers from one another and from the communities that nurtured their spiritual needs. The region's culture, as Shelby Balik explains in her compelling book, was bound to the experience of physical and spiritual space. Significantly, space is not fixed in Balik's religious geography. Motion across space is equally important, for northern New England was region of restless mobility, which its culture self-consciously accommodated (1). Using church and town records, the personal writings and correspondence of laity and clergy, books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Balik has written engaging, ground-level history with larger implications.Northern New England's geography followed two competing spatial models. One was the town church of the region's dominant Congregationalism. Inherited from the colonial Puritan mission, town churches were tied to territorial parishes with fixed boundaries. Enjoying the privileges of legal incorporation and compulsory tax support, the Congregationalist parishes understood themselves to speak for all residents within their boundaries, whatever their preferences. Permanent meetinghouses symbolized idealized unity, and when members moved, town churches extended their spiritual space like canopy of protection through letters of dismission and recommendation that migrants carried with them to new places of residence (30). This town-church model flourished in southern New England but was tough sell to the north. New settlements lacked the funds and the sense of personal interconnectedness upon which permanent ingathering depended. Upstart churches-especially regular and Freewill Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists-turned instead to itinerancy. Here Balik puts persuasive twist on seemingly familiar story: Itinerancy was not merely stopgap measure conceived by wandering ministers operating independently, she insists, but an intentional strategy centrally managed and monitored by missionary societies, regional conferences, and ecclesiastical hierarchies (45). Though bearing ideology of unbounded freedom, itinerants were extending order through unmapped spaces.Nonetheless, the spatial order projected by town churches and itinerants differed. The former sought stability in fixed spaces with local roots; the latter understood space in terms of movement and fluidity. Scattered met in fields, barns, or schoolhouses; revivals and conferences served as temporary gathering points for far-flung believers (171). These spatial differences had import. Rooted Congregationalist town churches often emphasized unity over orthodoxy and were sometimes reluctant to dismiss members over differences. But dispersed itinerant churches could not rely on proximity to forge unity, and identified with one another through distinctive doctrines and practices. The paradoxical upshot, as Balik puts it, was geographic fluidity married to doctrinal rigidity (73). Upstart religions were frequently more concerned with orthodoxy and less democratic than their Congregationalist rivals. In short, popularity was not populism, in contrast to Nathan Hatch's classic view of democratization in the early republic. Lay choices did not imply rejection of clergy or hierarchy. Instead, clergy and laity were part of a complex conversation about the nature of religiosity, in which concentric circles of faith extended outward from individuals to larger communities, making room for churches and minister-directed rituals like communion and baptism alongside prayer meetings, family worship, and private acts of faith (111). …

Media Reform: An Overview

Media reform is a great and formidable challenge. Across international contexts, reformers are inspired by what the late C. Edwin Baker referred to as the democratic distribution principle for communicative power: ‘a claim that democracy implies as wide as practical a dispersal of power within public discourse’ (Baker, 2007, p. 7). The challenge is made manifest in battles over the future of investigative journalism, media ownership, spectrum management, speech rights, broadband access, network neutrality, the surveillance apparatus, digital literacy and many others waged in pursuit of the normative ideals at the heart of Baker’s vision. At the same time, those committed to media reform confront formidable challenges: entrenched commercial interests and media conglomerates; sometimes powerful, sometimes disorganized and sometimes neoliberal governments; a general public often disenfranchised, digitally illiterate and not focused on issues of media reform; and always, the uphill battle of organization, mobilization and influence that is the work of any activist.In light of these significant challenges, the central question addressed by this volume is: what strategies might be utilized to overcome these obstacles in the pursuit of media reform? The chapters included in this volume aim to present and analyze successful strategies that have helped to advance media reform efforts in a variety of countries and contexts throughout the world.The remainder of this introductory chapter includes a working definition of media reform in light of the many challenges we currently face, and concludes with an overview of the chapters included in the volume.

Still hope for schistosomiasis vaccine

Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease caused by helminths belonging to the Schistosoma genus. Approximately 700 million people are at risk of infection and 200 million people are currently infected. Schistosomiasis is the most important helminth infection, and treatment relies solely on the drug praziquantel. Worries of praziquantel resistance as well as high disease burden are only some of the justifications which support the development of a vaccine against schistosomiasis. To date, only 2 schistosome vaccines have made it into clinical trials: Sh28GST (Bilhvax) and Sm14. However, there are several vaccine candidates, such as TSP-2, sm-p8, and Sm-Cathepsin B, which are generating promising results in pre-clinical studies. Schistosomiasis vaccine development has been an uphill battle, and there are still several hurdles to overcome in the future. Fortunately, the research groups involved in the research for vaccine development have not abandoned their work. Furthermore, in the last few years, schistosomiasis has garnered some additional attention on a global scale due to its significant impact on public health.

An Ounce of Prevention Saves Tons of Lives: Infection in Burns.

Modern day burn care continues to wage an uphill battle against an enemy that evolves faster than we can develop weapons. Bacteria (bioburden) are everywhere and can infiltrate anywhere within our susceptible population of burn patients. This is why prevention of infection is key to improving their survival and outcome. To reduce the incidence of infection in the burn patient population. Review of pertinent recent literature regarding infection prevention and control in the intensive care unit setting. We propose that bioburden is one of the central elements in the infectious cycle that is ever-present in burn units. The mechanism of bacterial entry into the unit and subsequent transmission and infection are delineated. Recommendations for mitigating this risk are provided to guide future clinicians in their care of burn patients. The treatment of infection and sepsis against highly adaptable bacteria is often insurmountable by ill patients. In this process, bioburden needs to be corralled to have any success. Thus, preventing organisms from entering the unit and transferring onto other patients, and eliminating the bacteria dwelling in the unit are all necessary actions in this battle. Ultimately, maintaining a culture that is constantly wary of this risk only can achieve this goal.

Public Policies toward Aboriginal Peoples: Attitudinal Obstacles and Uphill Battles

AbstractThis paper examines public attitudes towards aboriginal policy in Canada, focusing on evidence from two surveys conducted in Saskatchewan, a province with a large and growing Aboriginal population. We show that although non-Aboriginals are collectively divided on Aboriginal public policies, expressing considerable support for some, but strong reservations when it comes to others; the individual-level evidence indicates that there is a single Aboriginal policy agenda in the minds of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Support for, and opposition to, the privileging of Aboriginal claims is structured in part by prejudice toward outgroups but also by non-Aboriginal people's more general position on the role of government in society. Moreover, the impact of positions about the role of government in society on attitudes toward Aboriginal policies is moderated by people's level of political sophistication: the more educated and politically interested they are, the greater the impact of those ideological views.

Africa’s Response to r2p

Although the idea of r2p had been enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union (au) shortly before the term was coined by the iciss, the au has been slow to live up to the commitment. Balancing r2p, on the one hand, with non-interference within the domaine reservé of the state, on the other hand, has proven an uphill battle. r2p sceptic member states have persistently opted for non-interference, and at most, a “non-indifference” approach representing a non-committal stance with regards to r2p. This paper offers reflections about the particular African construction of the third r2p “collective global” pillar, and explains the African reticence about the original iciss and 2005 World Summit Outcome versions of r2p. It expounds on the key reasons for this tempered reception and sheds light on the global governance security challenge as it plays out in the un-au politics of regional collaboration.

Albania's Rocky Road of Transition: An Unfinished Journey

The primary question that this paper seeks to explore is: Why Albania did not successfully democratize in the aftermath of Communism although it did not have the nation-building problems that others, from neighboring republics of former Yugoslavia to Baltic countries faced? Intuitive hypotheses would have predicted the Albanian case as a likely case of rapid democratization, given its ethnically homogeneous population of the youngest age in Europe, coming out of the most isolated communist regime with strong totalitarian tendencies. Quite the opposite, not only Albania is facing an uphill battle to democratize to the date, but the quality of political representation has worsened and currently the main debate evokes the question of decriminalization of political elite. In the eve of the 25 anniversary of regime change in Albania, this question seeks additional attention to explore the barriers Albania faced and why they have persisted for so long? In the present study I undertake a critical approach of political antagonism and I argue that the increasing authoritarian tendencies and lack of institutional bedrock as the primary factors that can explain the Albanian case synchronically from 1992 to present day. I particularly focus at certain critical junctures which I deem to have had more impact in Albania`s lack of progress. To investigate the course of events in the two countries I use both discourse and content analyses. Through process tracing I investigate particular critical juncture that I render to be more significant than others to explain shifts in Albania`s democratization process and analyze why the transition has been a challenge. The structure consists in a short overview of democratization process in Eastern Europe, then it focuses on Albania`s transition, before it continues with an emhpasizes of external constraints. It further follows with a discussion of domestic challenges before it concludes with a summary of findings.