New political actors in Europe: Beppe Grillo and the M5S

New social and political movements from radically different political positions are emerging across Europe using social media, posing a new challenge to existing political parties and structures. The Pirate Party in Germany and the Occupy movement are examples of movements that have employed social media to grow rapidly and create a significant political and social impact – all in the last three years. Beppe Grillo, the Italian comedian and blogger, is one of the first political figures to have embraced this change. He has used social media to communicate, recruit and organise, growing the Moviment 5 Stelle from practically nothing to a major political force in Italy in the space of three years, with it expected to play a crucial role in the 2013 Italian elections. His anti-establishment message has resonated with many against a backdrop of declining trust in political institutions, falling political party membership and ever-lower voter turnout. This report presents the results of a survey of 1,865 Facebook fans of Beppe Grillo and the Movimento 5 Stelle. It includes data on who they are, what they think, and what motivates them to shift from virtual to real-world activism. It also compares them with other similar parties in Western Europe and their attitudes to those of the Italian population. This report is the seventh in a series of country specific briefings about the online support of populist parties across Europe

(In)Consistencies in responses to sodium bicarbonate supplementation: a randomised, repeated measures, counterbalanced and double-blind study

Objectives: Intervention studies do not account for high within-individual variation potentially compromising the magnitude of an effect. Repeat administration of a treatment allows quantification of individual responses and determination of the consistency of responses. We determined the consistency of metabolic and exercise responses following repeated administration of sodium bicarbonate (SB). Design and Methods: 15 physically active males (age 25 ± 4 y; body mass 76.0 ± 7.3 kg; height 1.77 ± 0.05 m) completed six cycling capacity tests at 110% of maximum power output (CCT 110% ) following ingestion of either 0.3 g.kg -1 BM of SB (4 trials) or placebo (PL, 2 trials). Blood pH, bicarbonate, base excess and lactate were determined at baseline, pre-exercise, post-exercise and 5-min post-exercise. Total work done (TWD) was recorded as the exercise outcome. Results: SB supplementation increased blood pH, bicarbonate and base excess prior to every trial (all p ≤0.001); absolute changes in pH, bicarbonate and base excess from baseline to pre-exercise were similar in all SB trials (all p > 0.05). Blood lactate was elevated following exercise in all trials (p ≤ 0.001), and was higher in some, but not all, SB trials compared to PL. TWD was not significantly improved with SB vs. PL in any trial (SB1: +3.6%; SB2 +0.3%; SB3: +2.1%; SB4: +6.7%; all p > 0.05), although magnitude-based inferences suggested a 93% likely improvement in SB4. Individual analysis showed ten participants improved in at least one SB trial above the normal variation of the test although five improved in none. Conclusions: The mechanism for improved exercise with SB was consistently in place prior to exercise, although this only resulted in a likely improvement in one trial. SB does not consistently improve high intensity cycling capacity, with results suggesting that caution should be taken when interpreting the results from single trials as to the efficacy of SB supplementation. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT0247462

Dynamic thermal-hydraulic modelling of the EU DEMO HCPB breeding blanket cooling loops

A global, system-level thermal-hydraulic model of the EU DEMO tokamak fusion reactor is currently under development and implementation in a suitable software at Politecnico di Torino, including the relevant heat transfer and fluid dynamics phenomena, which affect the performance of the different cooling circuits and components and their integration in a consistent design. The model is based on an object-oriented approach using the Modelica language, which easily allows to preserve the high modularity required at this stage of the design. The first module of the global model will simulate the blanket cooling system and will be able to investigate different coolant options and different cooling schemes, to be adapted to the different blanket systems currently under development in the Breeding Blanket (BB) project. The paper presents the Helium-Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) module of the EU DEMO blanket cooling loops system model. The model is used to compare different schemes for the cooling of the different components of the HCPB BB, and to suggest improvements aimed at optimizing the pumping power required by the cooling system. The model is then used to analyse a pulsed scenario, characteristic of the EU DEMO operation

Antenatal automatic diagnosis of cleft lip via unsupervised clustering method relying on 3D facial soft tissue landmarks

Objectives Ultrasound (US) is the first-choice device to detect different types of facial dysmorphisms. Anyway, at present no standard protocol has been defined for automatic nor semi-automatic diagnosis. Even though the practitioner's contribution is core, steps towards automatism are to be undertaken. We propose a methodology for diagnosing cleft lip on 3D US scans. Methods A bounded Depth Minimum Steiner Trees (D-MST) clustering algorithm is proposed for discriminating groups of 3D US faces relying on the presence/absence of a cleft lip. The analysis of 3D facial surfaces via Differential Geometry is adopted to extract landmarks. Thus, the extracted geometrical information is elaborated to feed the unsupervised clustering algorithm and produce the classification. The clustering returns the probability of being affected by the pathology, allowing physicians to focus their attention on risky individuals for further analysis. Results The feasibility is tested upon the available 3D US scans data and then deeply investigated for a large dataset of adult individuals. 3D facial Bosphorus database is chosen for the testing, which seven cleft lip-affected individuals are added to, by artificially creating the defect. The algorithm correctly separates left and right-sided cleft lips, while healthy individuals create a unique cluster; thus, the method shows accurate diagnosis results. Conclusions Even if further testing is to be performed on tailored datasets made exclusively of fetal images, this techniques gives hefty hints for a future tailored algorithm. This method also fosters the investigation of the scientific formalisation of the "normotype", which is the representative face of a class of individuals, collecting all the principal anthropometric facial measurements, in order to recognise a normal or syndromic fetus

Party mandates and the politics of attention:Party platforms, public priorities and the policy agenda in Britain

This paper develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues, and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the “promissory agenda”) with a need to continuously adapt their policy priorities in response to changes in public concerns and to deal with unexpected events and the emergence of new problems (i.e. the “anticipatory agenda”). Parties elected to office also have incentives to respond to issues prioritized by the platforms of their rivals. To test this theory, time series cross-sectional models are used to investigate how the policy content of the legislative program of British government responds to governing and opposition party platforms, the executive agenda, issue priorities of the public and mass medi

Entre la vie et la mort: le changement organisationnel dans les bureaucraties de l’État central dans une perspective comparative transnationale

Identifier et expliquer les changements dans la structure des bureaucraties de l’État central et les déterminants de la survie des organisations publiques individuelles sont deux domaines de recherche étroitement liés dans l’administration publique. Nous cherchons à combler le fossé entre ces deux principaux courants d’études du changement organisationnel en présentant une nouvelle approche de la collecte de données sur l’historique des événements pour les organisations publiques. Nous avons développé ce cadre dans le cadre du projet « Structure et organisation des gouvernements », qui vise à cartographier l’ensemble des bureaucraties de l’État central dans trois pays d’Europe occidentale. Notre approche est suffisamment flexible pour décrire les macro-tendances des populations d’organisations du secteur public et pour expliquer ces tendances en analysant l’histoire des événements des organisations qu’elles comprennent. En plus de présenter notre cadre et la manière dont nous l’avons appliqué pour créer cet ensemble de données, nous présentons également quelques premières comparaisons transnationales de la répartition des types d’événements enregistrés, et soulignons les premiers résultats et les pistes prometteuses pour des recherches ultérieures.NWOORA 464-13-113The politics and administration of institutional changeSecurity and Global Affair

The PopuList: A Database of Populist, Far-Left, and Far-Right Parties Using Expert-Informed Qualitative Comparative Classification (EiQCC)

Abstract With a proliferation of scholarly work focusing on populist, far-left, and far-right parties, questions have arisen about the correct ways to ideologically classify such parties. To ensure transparency and uniformity in research, the discipline could benefit from a systematic procedure. In this letter, we discuss how we have employed the method of ‘Expert-informed Qualitative Comparative Classification’ (EiQCC) to construct the newest version of The PopuList (3.0) – a database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties in Europe since 1989. This method takes into account the in-depth knowledge of national party experts while allowing for systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time. We also examine how scholars have made use of the previous versions of the dataset, explain how the new version of The PopuList differs from previous ones, and compare it to other data. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of The PopuList dataset.</jats:p

Lost in translation: Returning germline genetic results in genome-scale cancer research

Background: The return of research results (RoR) remains a complex and well-debated issue. Despite the debate, actual data related to the experience of giving individual results back, and the impact these results may have on clinical care and health outcomes, is sorely lacking. Through the work of the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative (APGI) we: (1) delineate the pathway back to the patient where actionable research data were identified; and (2) report the clinical utilisation of individual results returned. Using this experience, we discuss barriers and opportunities associated with a comprehensive process of RoR in large-scale genomic research that may be useful for others developing their own policies. Methods: We performed whole-genome (n = 184) and exome (n = 208) sequencing of matched tumour-normal DNA pairs from 392 patients with sporadic pancreatic cancer (PC) as part of the APGI. We identified pathogenic germline mutations in candidate genes (n = 130) with established predisposition to PC or medium-high penetrance genes with well-defined cancer associated syndromes or phenotypes. Variants from candidate genes were annotated and classified according to international guidelines. Variants were considered actionable if clinical utility was established, with regard to prevention, diagnosis, prognostication and/or therapy. Results: A total of 48,904 germline variants were identified, with 2356 unique variants undergoing annotation and in silico classification. Twenty cases were deemed actionable and were returned via previously described RoR framework, representing an actionable finding rate of 5.1%. Overall, 1.78% of our cohort experienced clinical benefit from RoR. Conclusion: Returning research results within the context of large-scale genomics research is a labour-intensive, highly variable, complex operation. Results that warrant action are not infrequent, but the prevalence of those who experience a clinical difference as a result of returning individual results is currently low

Transient tissue priming via ROCK inhibition uncouples pancreatic cancer progression, sensitivity to chemotherapy, and metastasis.

The emerging standard of care for patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer is a combination of cytotoxic drugs gemcitabine and Abraxane, but patient response remains moderate. Pancreatic cancer development and metastasis occur in complex settings, with reciprocal feedback from microenvironmental cues influencing both disease progression and drug response. Little is known about how sequential dual targeting of tumor tissue tension and vasculature before chemotherapy can affect tumor response. We used intravital imaging to assess how transient manipulation of the tumor tissue, or "priming," using the pharmaceutical Rho kinase inhibitor Fasudil affects response to chemotherapy. Intravital Förster resonance energy transfer imaging of a cyclin-dependent kinase 1 biosensor to monitor the efficacy of cytotoxic drugs revealed that priming improves pancreatic cancer response to gemcitabine/Abraxane at both primary and secondary sites. Transient priming also sensitized cells to shear stress and impaired colonization efficiency and fibrotic niche remodeling within the liver, three important features of cancer spread. Last, we demonstrate a graded response to priming in stratified patient-derived tumors, indicating that fine-tuned tissue manipulation before chemotherapy may offer opportunities in both primary and metastatic targeting of pancreatic cancer