Change point analysis of historical battle deaths

It has been claimed and disputed that World War II has been followed by a `long peace', an unprecedented decline of war. We conduct a full changepoint analysis of well-documented, publicly-available battle deaths datasets, using new techniques that enable the robust detection of changes in the statistical properties of such heavy-tailed data. We first test and calibrate these techniques. We then demonstrate the existence of changes, independent of data presentation, at around 1910 and 1950 CE, bracketing the World Wars, and around the 1830s and 1994 CE. Our analysis provides a methodology for future investigations and an empirical basis for political and historical discussions.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figure

Climate and colonialism

Recent years have seen a growth in scholarship on the intertwined histories of climate, science and European imperialism. Scholarship has focused both on how the material realities of climate shaped colonial enterprises, and on how ideas about climate informed imperial ideologies. Historians have shown how European expansion was justified by its protagonists with theories of racial superiority, which were often closely tied to ideas of climatic determinism. Meanwhile, the colonial spaces established by European powers offered novel ‘laboratories’ where ideas about acclimatisation and climatic improvement could be tested on the ground. While historical scholarship has focused on how powerful ideas of climate informed imperial projects, emerging scholarship in environmental history, history of science and historical geography focuses instead on the material and cognitive practices by which the climates of colonial spaces were made known and dealt with in fields such as forestry, agriculture and human health. These heretofore rather disparate areas of historical research carry great contemporary relevance of studies of how climates and their changes have been understood, debated and adapted to in the past

Living on the edge: precariousness and why it matters for health

The post-war period in Europe, between the late 1940s and the 1970s, was characterised by an expansion of the role of by the state, protecting its citizens from risks of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity. This security began to erode in the 1980s as a result of privatisation and deregulation. The withdrawal of the state further accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, as countries began pursuing deep austerity. The result has been a rise in what has been termed ‘precariousness’. Here we review the development of the concept of precariousness and related phenomena of vulnerability and resilience, before reviewing evidence of growing precariousness in European countries. It describes a series of studies of the impact on precariousness on health in domains of employment, housing, and food, as well as natural experiments of policies that either alleviate or worsen these impacts. It concludes with a warning, drawn from the history of the 1930s, of the political consequences of increasing precariousness in Europe and North America

Kualitas Hidup Pasien Diabetes Melitus Tipe 2 di Puskesmas Se Kota Kupang

Diabetes Mellitus is well known as a chronic disease which can lead to a decrease in quality of life in all domains. The study aims to explore the diabetic type 2 patient\u27s quality of life and find out the factors affecting in type 2 diabetic mellitus patients. The cross-sectional study design is used that included 65 patient with type 2 diabetes mellitus, in 11 public health centers of Kupang City. Data were collected by using Short Form Survey (SF-36) that assessed 8-scale health profile. Independent sample t-test is used to analyze the correlation between the factors affecting and the quality of life. the study showed that the QoL of DM patients decreased in all 8- health profile including physical functioning, social functioning, mental health, general health, pain, change in the role due to physical problems and emotional problems. The Study also showed there was a relationship between gender, duration of suffering from Diabetes mellitus, and complications to the quality of life. Male perceived a better quality of life than female

Climate change and COP26: Are digital technologies and information management part of the problem or the solution? An editorial reflection and call to action

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot be underestimated, there exists a technical perspective where digital and IS technology has a role to play in the monitoring of potential solutions, but also an integral element of climate change solutions. We explore these aspects in this editorial article, offering a comprehensive opinion based insight to a multitude of diverse viewpoints that look at the many challenges through a technology lens. It is widely recognized that technology in all its forms, is an important and integral element of the solution, but industry and wider society also view technology as being part of the problem. Increasingly, researchers are referencing the importance of responsible digitalization to eliminate the significant levels of e-waste. The reality is that technology is an integral component of the global efforts to get to net zero, however, its adoption requires pragmatic tradeoffs as we transition from current behaviors to a more climate friendly society

A window into a genebank : GRIN-Global as a tool to support use of the UK Vegetable Genebank collections

Collections of plant genetic resources represent the valuable tool of genetic diversity, required by users such as crop breeders, plant scientists and farmers. In order to use germplasm from ex situ collections such as genebanks, potential users must first understand what material is available and make an assessment of its suitability based on the available data, and then request seeds from the relevant collection. This includes not only passport data which provides information on taxonomy, provenance and origin, but also any characterisation data, including images. Characterisation data can be in a multitude of formats, and also may have been generated by other users and published in scientific literature. We describe our use of the software tool GRIN-Global, developed collaboratively by The Crop Trust, Biodiversity International and the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA, which is a tool for collection management and provides a means for users to browse, search for and order germplasm. We are populating our installation of GRIN-Global with available data on our accessions, including images and publications, and where available we will include characterisation data. The GRIN-Global platform will also allow us to link to other data repositories to indicate which accessions have sequence or other genotypic data. Facilitating access to a range of associated data will aid users of the collection and also allow better collection management, highlighting unique material as conservation priorities

Counting carrots : conservation and use of apiaceous crops – from genebank to data

The UK Vegetable Genebank (UKVGB – https://warwick.ac.uk/gru/genebank) holds a collection of ~14,000 seed samples from a range of vegetable and herb crops. The collections include apiaceous crops such as carrot, parsnip and celery and herbs like coriander and parsley. Collections of plant genetic resources are conserved to ensure current and future access to crop genetic diversity. Genebanks like the UKVGB actively support utilisation by breeders, researchers and farmers but once samples are distributed, it is challenging to keep track of use and data generated. Data generated by users is a valuable resource to support future use, aiding selection of appropriate germplasm and reducing duplication of effort. We have tracked the use of our apiaceous crops through the scientific literature as part of our work to facilitate access by potential users of the collections to existing data. We examine how UKVGB germplasm has been used to screen for key traits as well as other investigations in areas such as domestication, phylogenetics and ecogeography, highlighting the vital role played by collections of plant genetic resources in plant and crop science

A relativistic opinion mining approach to detect factual or opinionated news sources

19th International Conference on Big Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery, DaWaK 2017; Lyon; France; 28 August 2017 through 31 August 2017The credibility of news cannot be isolated from that of its source. Further, it is mainly associated with a news source’s trustworthiness and expertise. In an effort to measure the trustworthiness of a news source, the factor of “is factual or opinionated” must be considered among others. In this work, we propose an unsupervised probabilistic lexicon-based opinion mining approach to describe a news source as “being factual or opinionated”. We get words’ positive, negative, and objective scores from a sentiment lexicon and normalize these scores through the use of their cumulative distribution. The idea behind the use of such a statistical approach is inspired from the relativism that each word is evaluated with its difference from the average word. In order to test the effectiveness of the approach, three different news sources are chosen. They are editorials, New York Times articles, and Reuters articles, which differ in their characteristic of being opinionated. Thus, the experimental validation is done by the analysis of variance on these different groups of news. The results prove that our technique can distinguish the news articles from these groups with respect to “being factual or opinionated” in a statistically significant way.Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey under contract number 114E78