How the Eurosceptics brought down David Cameron: a serious case of supplier lock-in

David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on the EU was the result of intense Eurosceptic pressures from both within and outside his party. He found himself with little scope for manoeuvre as Ukip gained support and his backbenchers threatened rebellion. Pascal D König looks at what a competition theory usually applied to business can reveal about his misjudgment and eventual replacement as PM

Xenophobic violence after Brexit: how Britain could learn from Germany’s experience

Germany has experienced a rise in xenophobic attacks since it began to welcome refugees from Syria and elsewhere. Sebastian Jäckle and Pascal D. König have mapped these attacks and drawn some striking conclusions about their causes. They were more common in regions with a strong far-right presence and fewer migrants. One attack also tended to spark others – as did condemnation of xenophobia by national leaders, and Islamist terror. Britain saw a similar spike in xenophobic crime after the referendum. The authors ask whether the UK can learn from Germany’s painful experience

The liberal dream of smart detention? Algorithms and the politics of pretrial detention in the US states

In the 2000s and 2010s, US states have seen an important wave of change in criminal justice policies toward a “smart on crime” approach. In this context, several states have rolled out algorithmic risk assessment tools for statewide use in pretrial decisions, whereas some others have not, and still others are moving back from using such tools again. The present article examines the explanations for this variance. To this end, it tests competing expectations about the role of functional pressures, including fiscal strain and the party-political balance of power. The findings show that functional pressures, policy diffusion, and politics affect the likelihood that algorithmic tools will be used in criminal justice. Democratic control of both the state executive and legislative branches increases the likelihood that a state will use these tools, indicating that Republicans are reluctant to leave the “tough on crime” paradigm behind and to advance the “smart on crime” approach

Voting Advice Applications and the Estimation of Party Positions - A Reliable Tool?

Data contained in Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) is not only a prerequisite for the vote recommendations they provide but can also be used for estimating party positions in low‐dimensional spaces. Given that VAAs can be designed differently in terms of their number of items and their measurement level, how much can one trust the party positions obtained from this source? We tackle this question by exploiting relevant variation in a real‐world setting: three VAAs offered at the 2017 Lower Saxony election. Despite substantial design differences, the policy spaces extracted through an inductive scaling approach are highly convergent. Simulated random item removal from the pooled dataset of all three VAAs furthermore suggests that about 40 items yield satisfactory reliability of the party positions. Finally, we find that a priori assigning VAA‐items to ideological dimensions is potentially problematic as the interpretation of resulting party spaces may differ from the ones derived inductively

Drei Jahre Anschläge auf Flüchtlinge in Deutschland - welche Faktoren erklären ihre räumliche und zeitliche Verteilung?

Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland erlebte im Jahr 2015, vor allem ab dem letzten Quartal, eine immense Zuwanderung von Flüchtlingen, die bis ins darauffolgende Jahr anhielt. In der Folge kam es zu einem merklichen Anstieg der Anzahl von Anschlägen auf Flüchtlinge, die erst im Jahr 2017 allmählich zurückgingen. Der vorliegende Aufsatz repliziert eine Studie, die das Auftreten von Anschlägen in Deutschland im Jahr 2015 ergründet hat und prüft, ob die relevanten Erklärungsfaktoren auch in den beiden Folgejahren Gültigkeit haben. Die Analyseergebnisse zeigen, dass noch im Jahr 2015 politische, sozioökonomische und demographische Faktoren struktureller Art einen gewissen Erklärungswert für das Vorkommen von Anschlägen aufweisen. In 2016 und 2017 lässt die Erklärungskraft all dieser Variablen jedoch nach und es zeigt sich über das ganze Land verteilt ein deutlich diffuseres Anschlagsmuster. Als robust erweisen sich über den gesamten Zeitraum hinweg hingegen Ansteckungseffekte durch zeitlich wie räumlich nahe vorangehende fremdenfeindliche Ereignisse.In 2015, Germany took in a tremendous number of refugees, especially during the last quarter, and continued to do so well into 2016. A significant rise in the number of attacks against refugees followed these developments which only abated in 2017. This article replicates an analysis which analyzed the occurrence of attacks on refugees in Germany during 2015 and tests whether explanatory factors found relevant in that work are still valid for the two subsequent years. The results show that in 2015, political, socio-economic and demographic structural factors to some extent can explain anti-refugee violence. However, in 2016 and 2017 the explanatory power of these factors diminishes and we observe a notably more diffuse pattern of attacks throughout the entire country. At the same time, a contagion effect based on spatially as well as temporally close xenophobic violence remains robust for the entire period from 2015 to 2017

Microbial catabolic activities are naturally selected by metabolic energy harvest rate

The fundamental trade-off between yield and rate of energy harvest per unit of substrate has been largely discussed as a main characteristic for microbial established cooperation or competition. In this study, this point is addressed by developing a generalized model that simulates competition between existing and not experimentally reported microbial catabolic activities defined only based on well-known biochemical pathways. No specific microbial physiological adaptations are considered, growth yield is calculated coupled to catabolism energetics and a common maximum biomass-specific catabolism rate (expressed as electron transfer rate) is assumed for all microbial groups. Under this approach, successful microbial metabolisms are predicted in line with experimental observations under the hypothesis of maximum energy harvest rate. Two microbial ecosystems, typically found in wastewater treatment plants, are simulated, namely: (i) the anaerobic fermentation of glucose and (ii) the oxidation and reduction of nitrogen under aerobic autotrophic (nitrification) and anoxic heterotrophic and autotrophic (denitrification) conditions. The experimentally observed cross feeding in glucose fermentation, through multiple intermediate fermentation pathways, towards ultimately methane and carbon dioxide is predicted. Analogously, two-stage nitrification (by ammonium and nitrite oxidizers) is predicted as prevailing over nitrification in one stage. Conversely, denitrification is predicted in one stage (by denitrifiers) as well as anammox (anaerobic ammonium oxidation). The model results suggest that these observations are a direct consequence of the different energy yields per electron transferred at the different steps of the pathways. Overall, our results theoretically support the hypothesis that successful microbial catabolic activities are selected by an overall maximum energy harvest rate

Genome Sequencing of SHH Medulloblastoma Predicts Genotype-Related Response to Smoothened Inhibition

SummarySmoothened (SMO) inhibitors recently entered clinical trials for sonic-hedgehog-driven medulloblastoma (SHH-MB). Clinical response is highly variable. To understand the mechanism(s) of primary resistance and identify pathways cooperating with aberrant SHH signaling, we sequenced and profiled a large cohort of SHH-MBs (n = 133). SHH pathway mutations involved PTCH1 (across all age groups), SUFU (infants, including germline), and SMO (adults). Children >3 years old harbored an excess of downstream MYCN and GLI2 amplifications and frequent TP53 mutations, often in the germline, all of which were rare in infants and adults. Functional assays in different SHH-MB xenograft models demonstrated that SHH-MBs harboring a PTCH1 mutation were responsive to SMO inhibition, whereas tumors harboring an SUFU mutation or MYCN amplification were primarily resistant

BrAPI-an application programming interface for plant breeding applications

Motivation: Modern genomic breeding methods rely heavily on very large amounts of phenotyping and genotyping data, presenting new challenges in effective data management and integration. Recently, the size and complexity of datasets have increased significantly, with the result that data are often stored on multiple systems. As analyses of interest increasingly require aggregation of datasets from diverse sources, data exchange between disparate systems becomes a challenge. Results: To facilitate interoperability among breeding applications, we present the public plant Breeding Application Programming Interface (BrAPI). BrAPI is a standardized web service API specification. The development of BrAPI is a collaborative, community-based initiative involving a growing global community of over a hundred participants representing several dozen institutions and companies. Development of such a standard is recognized as critical to a number of important large breeding system initiatives as a foundational technology. The focus of the first version of the API is on providing services for connecting systems and retrieving basic breeding data including germplasm, study, observation, and marker data. A number of BrAPI-enabled applications, termed BrAPPs, have been written, that take advantage of the emerging support of BrAPI by many databases