Securing Space for Local Peacebuilding: the role of international and national civilian peacekeepers

While large multilateral peace operations arrive with agendas extending into governance, economics, and other reforms, unarmed civilian peacekeeping (UCP) interventions focus on contributing to sufficiently safe space for local efforts at peacebuilding to proceed, at the request of local partners. They use a variety of nonviolent methods to increase the safety for local leaders and everyday people to engage in (re)building peace infrastructures and governance, within their own culture and contexts. This paper examines the potential for international interveners to support local efforts based on local invitations, local staff, conflict and context analysis, and living in conflict affected communities, followed by a case study of the Nonviolent Peaceforce South Sudan project. This project is helping to revitalize or create community peace infrastructures in coordination with local partners, other peacekeepers and humanitarian agencies, local government, army and other armed actors. This has saved lives, contributed to improved policing, improved relations between ethnic groups, supported local peace actors, and increased the effectiveness of multilateral peace operations and humanitarian aid work focused on physical safety

Studying Configurations with QCA: Best Practices in Strategy and Organization Research

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is increasingly applied in strategy and organization research. The main purpose of our essay is to support this growing community of QCA scholars by identifying best practices that can help guide researchers through the key stages of a QCA empirical study (model building, sampling, calibration, data analysis, reporting and interpretation of findings) and by providing examples of such practices drawn from strategy and organization studies. Coupled with this main purpose, we respond to Miller’s (2017) essay on configuration research by highlighting our points of agreement regarding his recommendations for configurational research and by addressing some of his concerns regarding QCA. Our article thus contributes to configurational research by articulating how to leverage QCA for enriching configurational theories of strategy and organization

Variazione degli stock di carbonio del suolo in seguito ai processi di abbandono dei coltivi: il caso studio dell\u2019isola di Pantelleria (TP)

The recent abandonment of marginal agricultural areas in the Mediterranean has caused an increase of the surface occupied by pre-forest and forest formations. In order to study the carbon accumulation processes on Pantelleria Island was selected a North-facing area. This area includes 5 stages of succession (sds) that compose a chronosequence (from 0 to 30 years) to understand soil C accumulation processes after abandonment. These are abandoned vineyards or caperbushes, not disturbed (grazing, fire) since agricultural abandonment, and they are situated in thermomediterranean belt and on the same parent material and consequently considered in the same ecological conditions. Samples at 1 cm, 10 cm and 40 cm depth, respectively, were taken for every sds in three different soil relief areas. Litter samples were taken too. Organic carbon content was determined for every sample. Carbon content increases from a sds to the next one. There is a duplication of C from sds0 (cultivated field) to sd1 (abandoned since few years) and from sds4 (abandoned since 16-30 years) to sds5 (abandoned since > 30 years). It seems that different types of vegetation play a key-role in soil C dynamics and there are 85 t C ha-1 in the top 40 cm of the soil after 30 years from the abandonment in the chronosequence and an annual C sequestration rate equal to 3.4 t ha-1. These results show that revegetation offers good opportunities to sequestrate CO2 from the atmosphere and, therefore, to mitigate the greenhouse effect as it is requested by international agreements

Analysis of hospitalizations due to intussusception in Sicily in the pre-rotavirus vaccination era (2003-2012)

Background: Intussusception is the most common cause of bowel obstruction in infants with an incidence ranging from 9-328 cases per 100,000 infants aged 0-11 months. Causes underlining this clinical manifestation are still unknown. Possible relationship with a withdrawn tetravalent rotavirus vaccine was not confirmed by post-licensure studies and actually no increased risk of intussusception was found between infants vaccinated with both the recently licensed rotavirus vaccines. Aim of this study is to analyze the intussusception hospitalizations in Sicily from 2003 to 2012 before the introduction of rotavirus universal vaccination and its possible relation with rotavirus gastroenteritis trend. Methods: Were collected data from hospital discharge records occurred from 1st January 2003 to 31st December 2012 in Sicily. Intussusception cases were defined as all hospitalizations with an ICD-9-CM code of 560.0 on any discharge diagnoses. As a proxy for the severity of cases were considered ICD-9-CM procedure codes accounting for surgical or radiologic reduction. Results: A total of 340 intussusception cases were hospitalized in Sicily from 2003 to 2012 in children aged 0-59 months. 46.8 % occurred in the age class 0-11 months. Hospitalization rate for intussusception was 11.4 cases per 100,000 per year (32.6 cases per 100,000 among 0-11 months children; 7.3 cases per 100,000 among 12-59 months children), with a M:F sex ratio of 1.8. During hospitalization only 25 % of intussusceptions had a spontaneous resolution, 56.5 % of cases required a surgical intervention. From 2003 to 2012 intussusception cases were equally distributed during the year without any seasonality, while gastroenteritis hospitalizations due to rotavirus infection have a typically late winter and spring distribution. Conclusions: In Sicily from 2003 to 2012 hospitalizations due to intestinal invagination were higher among children aged 0-11 months with observed rates similar to other European countries. Regional baseline data analysis of intussusception among 0-59 children is recognized as an evidence-based public health strategy by international health authorities. Indeed, this strategy is necessary to compare any post-licensure age or sex-related change in intussusception trend after universal rotavirus vaccination introduction

Concettualizzazione e contestualizzazione dei beni culturali archeologici

This report describes the observations made while developing a new methodology for historic surveys used for the re-contextualisation of archaeological finds. This particular methodology avails itself of both traditional historic surveys as well as the representation of knowledge through ontology. The methodology described here was developed in reference to specific cases of re-contextualisation of archaeological artefacts from Pompeii which are now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples

Embracing Causal Complexity: The Emergence of a Neo-Configurational Perspective

Causal complexity has long been recognized as a ubiquitous feature underlying organizational phenomena, yet current theories and methodologies in management are for the most part not well suited to its direct study. The introduction of the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) configurational approach has led to a reinvigoration of configurational theory that embraces causal complexity explicitly. We argue that the burgeoning research using QCA represents more than a novel methodology; it constitutes the emergence of a neo-configurational perspective to the study of management and organizations that enables a fine-grained conceptualization and empirical investigation of causal complexity through the logic of set theory. In this article, we identify four foundational elements that characterize this emerging neoconfigurational perspective: 1) conceptualizing cases as set theoretic configurations; 2) calibrating cases’ memberships into sets; 3) viewing causality in terms of necessity and sufficiency relations between sets; and, 4) conducting counterfactual analysis of unobserved configurations. We then present a comprehensive review of the use of QCA in management studies that aims to capture the evolution of the neo-configurational perspective among management scholars. We close with a discussion of a research agenda that can further this neoconfigurational approach and thereby shift the attention of management research away from a focus on net effects and towards examining causal complexity

The efficacy of epidermal growth factor receptor-specific antibodies against glioma xenografts is influenced by receptor levels, activation status, and heterodimerization

Purpose: Factors affecting the efficacy of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAb) directed to the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) remain relatively unknown, especially in glioma. Experimental Design: We examined the efficacy of two EGFR-specific mAbs (mAbs 806 and 528) against U87MG-derived glioma xenografts expressing EGFR variants. Using this approach allowed us to change the form of the EGFR while keeping the genetic background constant. These variants included the de2-7 EGFR (or EGFRvIII), a constitutively active mutation of the EGFR expressed in glioma. Results: The efficacy of the mAbs correlated with EGFR number; however, the most important factor was receptor activation. Whereas U87MG xenografts expressing the de2-7 EGFR responded to therapy, those exhibiting a dead kinase de2-7 EGFR were refractory. A modified de2-7 EGFR that was kinase active but autophosphorylation deficient also responded, suggesting that these mAbs function in de2-7 EGFR–expressing xenografts by blocking transphosphorylation. Because de2-7 EGFR–expressing U87MG xenografts coexpress the wild-type EGFR, efficacy of the mAbs was also tested against NR6 xenografts that expressed the de2-7 EGFR in isolation. Whereas mAb 806 displayed antitumor activity against NR6 xenografts, mAb 528 therapy was ineffective, suggesting that mAb 528 mediates its antitumor activity by disrupting interactions between the de2-7 and wild-type EGFR. Finally, genetic disruption of Src in U87MG xenografts expressing the de2-7 EGFR dramatically enhanced mAb 806 efficacy. Conclusions: The effective use of EGFR-specific antibodies in glioma will depend on identifying tumors with activated EGFR. The combination of EGFR and Src inhibitors may be an effective strategy for the treatment of glioma

Forecasting Human-Object Interaction: Joint Prediction of Motor Attention and Actions in First Person Video

We address the challenging task of anticipating human-object interaction in first person videos. Most existing methods ignore how the camera wearer interacts with the objects, or simply consider body motion as a separate modality. In contrast, we observe that the international hand movement reveals critical information about the future activity. Motivated by this, we adopt intentional hand movement as a future representation and propose a novel deep network that jointly models and predicts the egocentric hand motion, interaction hotspots and future action. Specifically, we consider the future hand motion as the motor attention, and model this attention using latent variables in our deep model. The predicted motor attention is further used to characterise the discriminative spatial-temporal visual features for predicting actions and interaction hotspots. We present extensive experiments demonstrating the benefit of the proposed joint model. Importantly, our model produces new state-of-the-art results for action anticipation on both EGTEA Gaze+ and the EPIC-Kitchens datasets. Our project page is available at https://aptx4869lm.github.io/ForecastingHOI

Tailor-to-Target: Configuring Collaborative Shareholder Engagements on Climate Change

We study collaborative shareholder engagements on climate change issues. These engagements involve coalitions of investors pursuing behind-the-scenes dialogue to encourage target firms to adopt environmental sustainability practices. Drawing on a unique dataset of 553 engagements coordinated by the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)—and an innovative mixed-methods approach integrating fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) with regression analysis and qualitative interviews—we investigate how four coalition composition levers (coalition size, shareholding stake, experience, local access) combine to enable or hinder engagement success. We find that successful coalitions use four configurations of coalition composition levers that are tailored to target firms’ financial capacity and environmental predispositions—i.e., target firms’ receptivity. Unsuccessful configurations instead emphasize single levers at the expense of others. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we identify three mechanisms (synchronizing, contextualizing, overfocusing) that plausibly underly the identified configurations and provide investor coalitions with knowledge about target firms and their local contexts, thus enhancing communication and understanding between investor coalitions and target firms. Our study contributes an emerging “tailor-to-target” theory of collaborative shareholder engagement that extends the literature by showing the importance of designing investor coalitions for effective climate-related engagement; and the value of conceiving coalitions as different configurations of the same levers that can fit a target firm’s receptivity. From a practical perspective, our study prompts investors to move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to instead tailor their engagement strategies to target firms’ receptivity