Circadian Timing of Food Intake Contributes to Weight Gain

Studies of body weight regulation have focused almost entirely on caloric intake and energy expenditure. However, a number of recent studies in animals linking energy regulation and the circadian clock at the molecular, physiological, and behavioral levels raise the possibility that the timing of food intake itself may play a significant role in weight gain. The present study focused on the role of the circadian phase of food consumption in weight gain. We provide evidence that nocturnal mice fed a high‐fat diet only during the 12‐h light phase gain significantly more weight than mice fed only during the 12‐h dark phase. A better understanding of the role of the circadian system for weight gain could have important implications for developing new therapeutic strategies for combating the obesity epidemic facing the human population today

Europeanization Subverted? The European Union’s Promotion of Good Governance and the Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus

In order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in its near abroad, the European Union has invoked the European Neighbourhood Policy that seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States in the post-Soviet space thus building a ring of friends that share European norms and principles of democracy, rule of the law, market economy, and good governance. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that the EU’s capacity to hit across its borders and to realize its reform agenda seems limited. Moreover, most neighborhood countries appear to be stuck in transition and suffer from serious problems of both weak state capacity and defect democracy. Hence, EU efforts may also bear the danger of unintended and negative effects on the domestic structures of states, as its policies and institutions do not only empower liberal reform coalitions, to the extent that they exist in the first place, but can also bolster the power of incumbent authoritarian and corrupt elites. This paper intends to capture this dark side of Europeanization (Schimmelfennig 2007). It thus conceptualizes ENP as a political opportunity structure that provides opportunities and constraints to both supporters and opponents of the European Union’s reform agenda. Which of the two ultimately get empowered depends not only on the EU’s capacity to push for reforms but also on the pull of domestic actors.neighbourhood policy; EU-South-Eastern Europe; EU-South-Eastern Europe; governance; Europeanization; Europeanization

Trademark Vigilance in the Twenty-First Century: An Update

The trademark laws impose a duty upon brand owners to be vigilant in policing their marks, lest they be subject to the defense of laches, a reduced scope of protection, or even death by genericide. Before the millennium, it was relatively manageable for brand owners to police the retail marketplace for infringements and counterfeits. The Internet changed everything. In ways unforeseen, the Internet has unleashed a tremendously damaging cataclysm upon brands—online counterfeiting. It has created a virtual pipeline directly from factories in China to the American consumer shopping from home or work. The very online platforms that make Internet shopping so convenient, and that have enabled brands to expand their sales, have exposed buyers to unwittingly purchasing fake goods which can jeopardize their health and safety as well as brand reputation. This Article updates a 1999 panel discussion titled Trademark Vigilance in the Twenty-First Century, held at Fordham Law School, and explains all the ways in which vigilance has changed since the Internet has become an inescapable feature of everyday life. It provides trademark owners with a road map for monitoring brand abuse online and solutions for taking action against infringers, counterfeiters and others who threaten to undermine brand value

“It’s Not the Abuse That Kills You, It’s the Silence”: The silencing of sexual violence activism in social justice movements in the UK Left

Widespread doubt and disbelief of women and non-binary survivors who disclose, speak out and demand accountability for the violence they have experienced within social justice movements in the UK Left reveals a painful impasse and persistent barrier in movement building. Systemic failures of criminal justice responses to rape, sexual assault and domestic violence coupled with State violence and regulation of social justice movements and marginalised groups has led to consideration of community alternatives to help transform activist communities into cultures of safety and accountability. However, ‘counter-organising’ (INCITE! 2003; 2006) can distort, scrutinise and dismantle the work of survivors and their supporters in developing community accountability and safer spaces processes. The salvage research project (Downes, Hanson and Hudson, 2016) used participatory action research approaches and qualitative interviews with 10 women and non-binary survivors to explore the lived experiences of harm, violence and abuse experienced in activist communities in the UK. This article will explore how resistance to disclosures of gendered violence and anti-violence activism can be as (or more) harmful than the violence initially experienced. Five key silencing strategies are explored: (i) discrediting survivors and supporters; (ii) questioning the legitimacy of claim; (iii) questioning the legitimacy of community accountability; (iv) avoiding troubling recognitions; and (v) placing burden on survivors. The silencing of survivors and their supporters permits unequal power relations to remain unchanged and removes any need for the misogyny and sexism produced in activist communities to be critically examined

A double-edged sword: Benefits and pitfalls of heterogeneous punishment in evolutionary inspection games

As a simple model for criminal behavior, the traditional two-strategy inspection game yields counterintuitive results that fail to describe empirical data. The latter shows that crime is often recurrent, and that crime rates do not respond linearly to mitigation attempts. A more apt model entails ordinary people who neither commit nor sanction crime as the third strategy besides the criminals and punishers. Since ordinary people free-ride on the sanctioning efforts of punishers, they may introduce cyclic dominance that enables the coexistence of all three competing strategies. In this setup ordinary individuals become the biggest impediment to crime abatement. We therefore also consider heterogeneous punisher strategies, which seek to reduce their investment into fighting crime in order to attain a more competitive payoff. We show that this diversity of punishment leads to an explosion of complexity in the system, where the benefits and pitfalls of criminal behavior are revealed in the most unexpected ways. Due to the raise and fall of different alliances no less than six consecutive phase transitions occur in dependence on solely the temptation to succumb to criminal behavior, leading the population from ordinary people-dominated across punisher-dominated to crime-dominated phases, yet always failing to abolish crime completely.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Scientific Report

Detecting child sexual abuse images: Traits of child sexual exploitation hosting and displaying websites

BackgroundAutomated detection of child sexual abuse images (CSAI) often relies on image attributes, such as hash values. However, electronic service providers and others without access to hash value databases are limited in their ability to detect CSAI. Additionally, the increasing amount of CSA content being distributed means that a large percentage of images are not yet cataloged in hash value databases. Therefore, additional detection criteria need to be determined to improve identification of non-hashed CSAI. ObjectiveWe aim to identify patterns in the locations and folder/file naming practices of websites hosting and displaying CSAI, to use as additional detection criteria for non-hashed CSAI. MethodsUsing a custom-designed web crawler and snowball sampling, we analyzed the locations and naming practices of 103 Surface Web websites hosting and/or displaying 8108 known CSAI hash values. ResultsWebsites specialize in either hosting or displaying CSAI with only 20% doing both. Neither hosting nor displaying websites fear repercussions. Over 27% of CSAI were displayed in the home directory (i.e., main page) with only 6% located in at least 4th-level sub-folder. Websites focused more on organizing images than hiding them with 68% of hosted and 54% of displayed CSAI being found in folders formatted year/month. Qualitatively, hosting websites were likely to use alphanumeric or disguised folder and file names to conceal images, while displaying websites were more explicit. ConclusionFile and folder naming patterns can be combined with existing criteria to improve automated detection of websites and website locations likely hosting and/or displaying CSAI