With Biden’s election, Johnson’s Irish border gambles look increasingly risky

What effect might the outcome of the US election have on the current Brexit negotiations? Joe Biden’s victory signals a dramatic shift in American foreign policy. This means that Boris Johnson’s Irish border gambles look increasingly risky, argues Colin Provost (UCL)

Ableism and the Labour Market

In 2016, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Disability commissioned a report that found up to 48,000 disabled people are managed out of their jobs every year. Although the 2010 Equality Act gives disabled workers the right to ask for reasonable adjustments and to challenge unfair dismissal before an employment tribunal, the managing out process continues. This study sought to understand why this process of managing disabled people out of work occurs. It found that the Equality Act and Access to Work are failing to live up to their potential, and that while some employers succeed in institutionalising disability rights into organisational culture, procedures, and routines, many others struggle to do so for a variety of reasons. While it is unrealistic to expect the disability employment gap to disappear overnight, the research argues that changing the frame of reference around disability may go some way towards making workplaces more inclusive

Fluctuation, time-correlation function and geometric Phase

We establish a fluctuation-correlation theorem by relating the quantum fluctuations in the generator of the parameter change to the time integral of the quantum correlation function between the projection operator and force operator of the ``fast'' system. By taking a cue from linear response theory we relate the quantum fluctuation in the generator to the generalised susceptibility. Relation between the open-path geometric phase, diagonal elements of the quantum metric tensor and the force-force correlation function is provided and the classical limit of the fluctuation-correlation theorem is also discussed.Comment: Latex, 12 pages, no figures, submitted to J. Phys. A: Math & Ge

Ingredients of Institutional Reputations and Citizens’ compliance with agency recommendations

The purpose of this study is to examine the link between the reputational components of efficacy and moral reliability of institutions, and citizens' compliance with institutional recommendations. Research on bureaucratic reputations highlights the significance of positive political reputations based on credibility and legitimacy, but the impact of these components is not systematically isolated and studied. We draw insights from political psychology to move beyond a positive-negative valence-based approach of reputation, and highlight the different effect of efficacy and moral reliability components of reputation on citizens' cooperation, engagement in water saving activities, and levels of complaints. We use the Cypriot Water Authority as a case study and inquire how its institutional reputation influences Cypriot citizens' behavior regarding water use. Our data was collected via a representative national survey administered to a random sample of 800 Cypriots in the spring of 2009 and show that favorable perceptions of particular components of institutional reputation shape the levels of satisfaction with specific organizational outputs.</p

Change and Continuity in the Role of State Attorneys General in the Obama and Trump Administrations

During the Trump Administration, state attorneys general (AGs) have become entrenched as integral policymaking actors in the United States. Their expanding policymaking role fits broader patterns of polarized politics, as partisan coalitions of AGs are increasingly willing to sue the federal government, a trend that gathered steam in the Obama Administration and has reached a crescendo in Trump’s first year. However, state AGs do cooperate, particularly in corporate litigation to address allegedly widespread, illegal behavior. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of multi-state lawsuits and Supreme Court amicus briefs, we identify continuity and change in how AGs have employed their powers, by examining their activities during the first year of the Trump presidency and placing these activities in the context of previous administrations. This analysis is accompanied by a pair of case studies, one on conflictual AG environmental litigation and another on bipartisan efforts to address the opioid epidemic. Both demonstrate AG’s prominent policymaking power, a power unlikely to abate anytime soon

Pharmacogenomics of the efficacy and safety of Colchicine in COLCOT

© 2021 The Authors. Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine is published on behalf of the American Heart Association, Inc., by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.Background: The randomized, placebo-controlled COLCOT (Colchicine Cardiovascular Outcomes Trial) has shown the benefits of colchicine 0.5 mg daily to lower the rate of ischemic cardiovascular events in patients with a recent myocardial infarction. Here, we conducted a post hoc pharmacogenomic study of COLCOT with the aim to identify genetic predictors of the efficacy and safety of treatment with colchicine. Methods: There were 1522 participants of European ancestry from the COLCOT trial available for the pharmacogenomic study of COLCOT trial. The pharmacogenomic study's primary cardiovascular end point was defined as for the main trial, as time to first occurrence of cardiovascular death, resuscitated cardiac arrest, myocardial infarction, stroke, or urgent hospitalization for angina requiring coronary revascularization. The safety end point was time to the first report of gastrointestinal events. Patients' DNA was genotyped using the Illumina Global Screening array followed by imputation. We performed a genome-wide association study in colchicine-treated patients. Results: None of the genetic variants passed the genome-wide association study significance threshold for the primary cardiovascular end point conducted in 702 patients in the colchicine arm who were compliant to medication. The genome-wide association study for gastrointestinal events was conducted in all 767 patients in the colchicine arm and found 2 significant association signals, one with lead variant rs6916345 (hazard ratio, 1.89 [95% CI, 1.52-2.35], P=7.41×10-9) in a locus which colocalizes with Crohn disease, and one with lead variant rs74795203 (hazard ratio, 2.51 [95% CI, 1.82-3.47]; P=2.70×10-8), an intronic variant in gene SEPHS1. The interaction terms between the genetic variants and treatment with colchicine versus placebo were significant. Conclusions: We found 2 genomic regions associated with gastrointestinal events in patients treated with colchicine. Those findings will benefit from replication to confirm that some patients may have genetic predispositions to lower tolerability of treatment with colchicine.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Political Control and Policymaking Uncertainty in Executive Orders: The Implementation of Environmental Justice Policy

Environmental justice (EJ) has represented an important equity challenge in policymaking for decades. President Clinton’s Executive Order (EO) 12898 in 1994 represented a significant federal action, requiring agencies to account for EJ issues in new rulemakings. We examine the impact of EO 12898 within the larger question of how executive orders are implemented in complex policymaking. We argue that presidential preferences will affect bureaucratic responsiveness and fire alarm oversight. However, EJ policy complexity produces uncertainty leading to bureaucratic risk aversion, constraining presidential efforts to steer policy. We utilize an original dataset of nearly 2,000 final federal agency rules citing EO 12898 and find significant variation in its utilization across administrations. Uncertainty over the nature of the order has an important influence on bureaucratic responsiveness. Our findings are instructive for the twin influences of political control and policymaking uncertainty and raise useful questions for future EJ and policy implementation research

Monitoring Corporate Compliance through Cooperative Federalism: Trends in Multistate Settlements by State Attorneys General

Recent scholarship on U.S. regulatory federalism has tended to focus on conflict between the states and state resistance to federal initiatives. Less attention has been given to federal–state cooperation and how it affects regulatory enforcement. In this article, we examine intergovernmental cooperation in multistate lawsuits filed by state attorneys general to ascertain trends in multistate regulatory enforcement through litigation over time. We pay particular attention to the increasing use of compliance monitoring by both state and federal regulators, including through monitors independent of the regulated industries. Relying upon a dataset of legal settlements, scoping interviews, and two case studies of recent multistate litigation, we find that federal–state cooperation in multistate lawsuits has become more institutionalized over time. This increased cooperation has created a two-way street in which state and federal regulators often combine resources and learn from each other through the process of compliance monitoring