The Democratic Peace Controversy. A Critical Survey

The central idea of “democratic peace” theory (DP) is that democracies do not go to war with another. Since the 1960s this theory has been extremely popular among political scientists, but there are a number of methodological problems attached to the exploration of DP theory. Quantitative tests with few variables raise the question of validity. How to distinguish between war and peace, and how to define democracy are but a few of the problems “democratic peace” theorists must encounter. This study discusses several different concepts of democracy, showing that there has been a huge variety of more or less democratic systems through history; a point which is often lost when using cases spanning over a highly diversified universe in terms of space and time. Another problematic aspect of the theory is that of democratisation as such. Democratisation has proven to be a potentially dangerous transformation process with the capacity of breeding lethal nationalism and intolerance. In spite of all these problems, there are regions in the world where democracies have been peaceful neighbours for decades. However, the idea of “democratic peace” does not satisfactorily explain these phenomena, and there is a need for further historical research into this field

Line Bundles and Curves on a del Pezzo Order

Orders on surfaces provide a rich source of examples of noncommutative surfaces. Other than some existence results, very little is known about the various moduli spaces that can be associated to them. Even fewer examples have been explicitly computed. In this paper we compute the Picard and Hilbert schemes of an order on the projective plane ramified on a union of two conics. Our main result is that, upon carefully selecting the right Chern classes, the Hilbert scheme is a ruled surface over a genus two curve. Furthermore, this genus two curve is, in itself, the Picard scheme of the order

Association between drug intake and incidence of malignancies in patients with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: a nested case-control study

Background: Several medications for treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) are considered to be carcinogenic. Therefore, the aim was to assess whether there is an association between therapeutic interventions and malignancies in JIA patients. Findings: A nested case-control study was carried out within a retrospective cohort study of 3698 JIA patients diagnosed between 1952 and 2010. All 48 JIA patients with a diagnosis of a malignant tumour and up to four matched controls for each received a questionnaire about their use of medication. Subsequently treatment was compared between cases and controls and analyses performed for 37 cases and 125 controls (response 88.5 %). Treatment with DMARD (84 %) was most frequently used, followed by glucocorticoids (66 %) and immunosuppressives (65 %). Twenty percent reported to have ever been taking biologics. Medication use did not differ significantly between cases and controls. Conclusions: Our results did not show an association between medications used and malignancies in JIA patients

Education and employment in patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis - a standardized comparison to the German general population

Background: Although several studies show that JIA-patients have significantly lower employment rates than the general population, the research on educational and occupational attainments in patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) remain conflicting most likely due to small sample sizes. Therefore, aim of this study is to compare the educational achievements and employment status of 3698 JIA-patients with the German general population (GGP). Methods: "SEPIA" was a large cross-sectional study on the current status of a historic cohort of JIA-patients treated in a single center between 1952 and 2010. For the analyses of education and employment a sub-cohort was extracted, including only adult cases with a confirmed diagnosis of JIA (N = 2696). Participants were asked to fill out a standardized written questionnaire on education and employment. Outcome measures (education/unemployment) were directly standardized to the GGP using data obtained from the National Educational Panel Study 2013 (N = 11,728) and the German Unemployment Statistics 2012 of the Federal Statistical Office (N = 42,791,000). Results: After age-and sex-standardization, 3% (95% Confidence Interval 1.9 to 4.1%) more of the JIA-patients (26%) than of the GGP (23%) had only reached primary education. In contrast, parents of JIA-patients had similar levels of education as parents in the GGP. With a standardized difference of 0.2% (95% CI: 0.16 to 0.19%), the unemployment rate in JIA-patients was slightly, but not significantly higher than in the GGP. Stratifying for disease duration and the current treatment status, differences were confirmed for persons diagnosed before 2001, whilst for patients diagnosed after 2000, differences were found only in JIA-patients with ongoing disease. Medium and high educational achievements did not differ statistically significant between JIA patients and the GPP. Conclusion: Educational achievements in German JIA-patients are significantly lower than in the GGP. Furthermore we were able to identify a slightly higher level of unemployment, especially in those with still under treatment and longer disease duration. Better treatment options as well as further development of social support programs might help to overcome this lifelong secondary effect of JIA

Ultrafast Structural Dynamics of BlsA, a Photoreceptor from the Pathogenic Bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii

Acinetobacter baumannii is an important human pathogen that can form biofilms and persist under harsh environmental conditions. Biofilm formation and virulence are modulated by blue light, which is thought to be regulated by a BLUF protein, BlsA. To understand the molecular mechanism of light sensing, we have used steady-state and ultrafast vibrational spectroscopy to compare the photoactivation mechanism of BlsA to the BLUF photosensor AppA from Rhodobacter sphaeroides. Although similar photocycles are observed, vibrational data together with homology modeling identify significant differences in the β5 strand in BlsA caused by photoactivation, which are proposed to be directly linked to downstream signaling