Challenging ITQs: Legal and Poltical Action in Iceland, Canada and Latin America

The research for this paper was triggered by a stunning judgement of the Icelandic Supreme Court in December 1998, which declared as unconstitutional existing fisheries laws on individual transferable quotas (ITQs), because they privileged those who derived their fishing rights from ownership of vessels during a specific period over which their "fishing history" was established (Pálsson 1999, Copes 1999a, Gudmundsdóttir 1999). In Iceland, as elsewhere, it has been the practice to start up ITQ systems by giving away quotas for free to individuals or companies owning licensed fishing vessels at the time an ITQ regime is introduced. The amount of quota allocated to recipients is usually calculated in relation to their recent catch history. The Court decided that this privileged allocation violates both the constitutional provision against discrimination and the provision concerning the "right to work". This set the stage for intensified legal and political discussions in Iceland about ITQs. There are potential implications for the constitutionality or legality of similar systems elsewhere. The ruling is interesting, in its own right, to legal scholars, anthropologists, political scientists, and investigators concerned with common property regimes and public-trust doctrines. In our paper we explore emerging constitutional and political challenges to ITQ systems in Iceland, Canada and South America

From Enslavement to Emancipation: Naming Practices in the Danish West Indies

AbstractIn most contexts, personal names function as identifiers and as a locus for identity. Therefore, names can be used to trace patterns of kinship, ancestry, and belonging. The social power of naming, however, and its capacity to shape the life course of the person named, becomes most evident when it has the opposite intent: to sever connections and injure. Naming in slave society was primarily practical, an essential first step in commodifying human beings so they could be removed from their roots and social networks, bought, sold, mortgaged, and adjudicated. Such practices have long been integral to processes of colonization and enslavement. This paper discusses the implications of naming practices in the context of slavery, focusing on the names given to enslaved Africans and their descendants through baptism in the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Danish West Indies. Drawing on historiographical accounts and a detailed analysis of plantation and parish records from the island of St. Croix, we outline and contextualize these patterns and practices of naming. We examine the extent to which the adoption of European and Christian names can be read as an effort toward resistance and self-determination on the part of the enslaved. Our account is illuminated by details from the lives of three former slaves from the Danish West Indies.This paper is part of a project (CitiGen) which has received generous funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under grant agreement No. 649307

A Lockpick's Guide to dataARC: Designing Infrastructures and Building Communities to Enable Transdisciplinary Research

The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) community initiated dataARC to develop digital research infrastructures to support their work on long-term human-ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. These infrastructures were designed to address the challenges of sharing research data, the connections between those data and high-level interpretations, and the interpretations themselves. In parallel, they were also designed to support the reuse of diverse data that underpin transdisciplinary synthesis research and to contextualise materials disseminated widely to the public more firmly in their evidence base. This article outlines the research infrastructure produced by the project and reflects on its design and development. We outline the core motivations for dataARC's work and introduce the tools, platforms and (meta)data products developed. We then undertake a critical review of the project's workflow. This review focuses on our understanding of the needs of stakeholder groups, the principles that guided the design of the infrastructure, and the extent to which these principles are successfully promoted in the current implementation. Drawing on this assessment, we consider how the infrastructure, in whole or in part, might be reused by other transdisciplinary research communities. Finally, we highlight key socio-technical gaps that may emerge as structural barriers to transdisciplinary, engaged, and open research if left unaddressed

Common and rare variants associated with kidney stones and biochemical traits.

To access publisher's full text version of this article, please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field or click on the hyperlink at the top of the page marked Files. This article is open access.Kidney stone disease is a complex disorder with a strong genetic component. We conducted a genome-wide association study of 28.3 million sequence variants detected through whole-genome sequencing of 2,636 Icelanders that were imputed into 5,419 kidney stone cases, including 2,172 cases with a history of recurrent kidney stones, and 279,870 controls. We identify sequence variants associating with kidney stones at ALPL (rs1256328[T], odds ratio (OR)=1.21, P=5.8 × 10(-10)) and a suggestive association at CASR (rs7627468[A], OR=1.16, P=2.0 × 10(-8)). Focusing our analysis on coding sequence variants in 63 genes with preferential kidney expression we identify two rare missense variants SLC34A1 p.Tyr489Cys (OR=2.38, P=2.8 × 10(-5)) and TRPV5 p.Leu530Arg (OR=3.62, P=4.1 × 10(-5)) associating with recurrent kidney stones. We also observe associations of the identified kidney stone variants with biochemical traits in a large population set, indicating potential biological mechanism.Rare Kidney Stone Consortium 5U54DK083908-07 National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN) Rare Kidney Stone Consortiu

The sequences of 150,119 genomes in the UK Biobank

Detailed knowledge of how diversity in the sequence of the human genome affects phenotypic diversity depends on a comprehensive and reliable characterization of both sequences and phenotypic variation. Over the past decade, insights into this relationship have been obtained from whole-exome sequencing or whole-genome sequencing of large cohorts with rich phenotypic data(1,2). Here we describe the analysis of whole-genome sequencing of 150,119 individuals from the UK Biobank(3). This constitutes a set of high-quality variants, including 585,040,410 single-nucleotide polymorphisms, representing 7.0% of all possible human single-nucleotide polymorphisms, and 58,707,036 indels. This large set of variants allows us to characterize selection based on sequence variation within a population through a depletion rank score of windows along the genome. Depletion rank analysis shows that coding exons represent a small fraction of regions in the genome subject to strong sequence conservation. We define three cohorts within the UK Biobank: a large British Irish cohort, a smaller African cohort and a South Asian cohort. A haplotype reference panel is provided that allows reliable imputation of most variants carried by three or more sequenced individuals. We identified 895,055 structural variants and 2,536,688 microsatellites, groups of variants typically excluded from large-scale whole-genome sequencing studies. Using this formidable new resource, we provide several examples of trait associations for rare variants with large effects not found previously through studies based on whole-exome sequencing and/or imputation

A sequence variant at 4p16.3 confers susceptibility to urinary bladder cancer

To access publisher full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links fieldPreviously, we reported germline DNA variants associated with risk of urinary bladder cancer (UBC) in Dutch and Icelandic subjects. Here we expanded the Icelandic sample set and tested the top 20 markers from the combined analysis in several European case-control sample sets, with a total of 4,739 cases and 45,549 controls. The T allele of rs798766 on 4p16.3 was found to associate with UBC (odds ratio = 1.24, P = 9.9 x 10(-12)). rs798766 is located in an intron of TACC3, 70 kb from FGFR3, which often harbors activating somatic mutations in low-grade, noninvasive UBC. Notably, rs798766[T] shows stronger association with low-grade and low-stage UBC than with more aggressive forms of the disease and is associated with higher risk of recurrence in low-grade stage Ta tumors. The frequency of rs798766[T] is higher in Ta tumors that carry an activating mutation in FGFR3 than in Ta tumors with wild-type FGFR3. Our results show a link between germline variants, somatic mutations of FGFR3 and risk of UBC.info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7/21807

Physical and cognitive impact following SARS-CoV-2 infection in a large population-based case-control study

© 2023. The Author(s).BACKGROUND: Persistent symptoms are common after SARS-CoV-2 infection but correlation with objective measures is unclear. METHODS: We invited all 3098 adults who tested SARS-CoV-2 positive in Iceland before October 2020 to the deCODE Health Study. We compared multiple symptoms and physical measures between 1706 Icelanders with confirmed prior infection (cases) who participated, and 619 contemporary and 13,779 historical controls. Cases participated in the study 5-18 months after infection. RESULTS: Here we report that 41 of 88 symptoms are associated with prior infection, most significantly disturbed smell and taste, memory disturbance, and dyspnea. Measured objectively, cases had poorer smell and taste results, less grip strength, and poorer memory recall. Differences in grip strength and memory recall were small. No other objective measure associated with prior infection including heart rate, blood pressure, postural orthostatic tachycardia, oxygen saturation, exercise tolerance, hearing, and traditional inflammatory, cardiac, liver, and kidney blood biomarkers. There was no evidence of more anxiety or depression among cases. We estimate the prevalence of long Covid to be 7% at a median of 8 months after infection. CONCLUSIONS: We confirm that diverse symptoms are common months after SARS-CoV-2 infection but find few differences between cases and controls in objective parameters measured. These discrepancies between symptoms and physical measures suggest a more complicated contribution to symptoms related to prior infection than is captured with conventional tests. Traditional clinical assessment is not expected to be particularly informative in relating symptoms to a past SARS-CoV-2 infection.Peer reviewe

RELACIONES BIOSOCIALES DE PRODUCCIÓN

A partir de Marx, este texto argumenta que la realidad de la biosocialidad, fusión entre lo biológico y lo social a través de la biotecnología moderna, disuelve el concepto dual de lo biosocial como complementariedad de las esferas de la biología y la sociedad. Igualmente sugiere que la noción relaciones biosociales de producción puede ser útil para capturar las nuevas jerarquías y articulaciones de lo social y lo biológico en la reproducción de la vida. Se concluye con la constatación de que la vida se está remodelando, lo que exige nuevos tipos de conceptos, políticas y éticas, como los que abre la categoría biosocialidad

Storied Lines : Network Perspectives on Land Use in Early Modern Iceland

It is a truism nowadays to say that an archaeological site is embedded in extensive networks of relations. Connectivity has played a role in archaeological thinking for a considerable amount of time, and the adoption by archaeologists of both theoretical and methodological frameworks centring connectivity has become widespread. One such example is network analysis, which has seen a significant surge in interest within the field over the past two decades. Archaeological network analysis is far from a mature science, however, and the character of the archaeological record tends to yield networks with richly contextualised nodes connected by ties that, in stark contrast, are often based on very limited evidence for connectivity. Furthermore, archaeological networks are often accompanied by limited discussion about the implications for a connection between two sites interpreted through a commonality in material culture. In particular, the use of historical records to contextualise the interactions between sites remains somewhat uncommon. This paper takes an archaeo-historical network perspective by characterising land-use practices in early modern Iceland by mapping property records describing relations of ownership, resource claims and social obligations alongside comprehensive field archaeological surveys as extensive networks of interdependence between the known farmstead sites occupied at the time. This approach shows that these vibrant networks, documented both spatially and historically, regularly show signs of emergent properties. As these intersite relations begin to exert their own agency, the networks are cut, and the network lines begin to bundle up in knots and entanglements. The study, therefore, does not aim to quantify the presented networks using formal network analysis, but to use the networks as a starting point to investigate the properties that emerge as people aim to enact and materialise networks of property rights, resource claims and exchange