The shaping of anticipation: The networked development of inferential capacity in governing Southeast Asian deltas

Motivated by foreseeable changes in the Earth's systems, governments across the world learn to anticipate the consequences. Understanding how such anticipation comes about should ease its further development. We therefore explore the central capacity within anticipatory governance: the capacity to infer future consequences. Such inferential capacity consists of tools, techniques, and practices increasing an agent's options to infer consequences. We examine the development of this capacity for two Southeast Asian deltas, using data from a multi-sited ethnography and a social network analysis. These methods combine the small-scale ‘lived’ perspective of agents and the multiscale network in which these agents deploy strategies to entrench tools, techniques, and practices for inferential capacity. Strategic choices in positioning for network effects and fostering reciprocity matter, while values and historical contingencies cannot be brushed aside

How networked organisations build capacity for anticipatory governance in South East Asian deltas

Building capacity for governments to make inferences about future developments enhances their ability to anticipate and plan for climate change adaptation. This study examines the question: how do networked organisations build capacity for anticipatory governance through project-based interactions? We analyse a global network of organisations that mobilise climate and hydrological modelling technologies into the Chao Phraya and Ayeyarwaddy deltas. The methodology innovatively combines ethnographic data with policy analysis and social network analysis. Findings suggest that organisations consolidate technology and knowledge transfer through a global network. However, their governance effect in enhancing anticipatory decision making is found to be marginal at the local level. We argue that anticipatory governance practices need a balancing of foresight tools and techniques with local institutional arrangements in order to be effective. We further demonstrate that technology transfer projects need to be backed up with social and strategic capacity building in order to nurture consistent anticipatory governance in different cultural contexts. We conclude that preventive actions, together with transparent operational response frameworks, could significantly improve resilience and adaptability of local knowledge systems and institutions dealing with climate change adaptation. Such integration could enable anticipatory response measures to better manage risk, as well as increase institutional cooperation for long term environmental planning

Position representations of moving objects align with real-time position in the early visual response

When interacting with the dynamic world, the brain receives outdated sensory information, due to the time required for neural transmission and processing. In motion perception, the brain may overcome these fundamental delays through predictively encoding the position of moving objects using information from their past trajectories. In the present study, we evaluated this proposition using multivariate analysis of high temporal resolution electroencephalographic data. We tracked neural position representations of moving objects at different stages of visual processing, relative to the real-time position of the object. During early stimulus-evoked activity, position representations of moving objects were activated substantially earlier than the equivalent activity evoked by unpredictable flashes, aligning the earliest representations of moving stimuli with their real-time positions. These findings indicate that the predictability of straight trajectories enables full compensation for the neural delays accumulated early in stimulus processing, but that delays still accumulate across later stages of cortical processing

Difficult travels: Delta plans don't land in the Chao Phraya delta

Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand have large river deltas. The first three deltas have international commitments for so-called delta plans: large-scale national efforts to reshape deltas in light of future economic growth and climate change. Thailand’s Chao Phraya delta has no such commitments. Why is this the case? This article proposes that Thailand’s absence of a colonial past has retained a differently ordered institutional capacity and that Delta plans embed assumptions that fit poorly with a Thai worldview. The article relies on literature and adds original research collected on three separate field visits to Thailand

Women in healthcare in Imperial Russia: the contribution of the surgeon Nikolay I. Pirogov

Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov, one of the greatest Russian surgeons of the 19th Century, was convinced of the importance of deploying nurses to care for the casualties of war. With the support of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, sister-in-law of Tsar Nikolas I, Pirogov realised the idea during the Crimean war when Russia became the first country to send female nurses to the battle front. Later in the 19th century, large numbers of Russian women trained as nurses under the auspices of the Russian Red Cross, founded in 1867. In peacetime, their expertise was extremely valuable.</p

Thromboembolic involvement and its possible pathogenesis in COVID-19 mortality: lesson from post-mortem reports

The emergence of Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) as a pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide since its initial breakout. With increasing reports from clinical observations and autopsy findings, it became clear that the disease causes acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), as well as a broad spectrum of systemic and multiorgan pathologies, including angiopathy, endothelialitis, and thrombosis. Coagulopathy is associated with the activity of megakaryocytes, which play crucial roles in modulating the platelet homeostasis. Only a few autopsy reports include findings on thrombosis formation and the presence of megakaryocytes. Here we review and summarize the possible involvement and the pathophysiology of the thromboembolic events in COVID-19 patients based on post-mortem reports. We reviewed post-mortem reports from March 2020 to September 2020. Eleven autopsy reports that demonstrated thromboembolic involvement findings, either macroscopically or microscopically, were included in this review. All studies reported similar pulmonary gross findings. Not all studies described thrombi formation and megakaryocyte findings. Pulmonary embolism, coagulopathy, severe endothelial injury, and widespread thrombosis are frequent in COVID-19 patients, following many patients with high-level D-Dimer, increased fibrinogen, abnormal prothrombic coagulation, and thrombocytopenia. Reports showed that thrombus was also found in the lower extremities' deep veins and the prostatic venous plexus. In conclusion, a complex interaction of SARS-CoV-2 virus invasion with platelets, leukocytes, endothelial cells, inflammation, immune response, and the possible involvement of megakaryocytes may increase the cumulative risk of thrombosis by a yet unclear cellular and humoral interaction.Orthopaedics, Trauma Surgery and Rehabilitatio