Neoliberal reform and protest in Latin American democracies: A replication and correction

Do neoliberal economic reforms in Latin American democracies mobilize citizens to overcome their collective action problems and protest? A recent addition to the scholarship on this crucial question of the relationship of markets and politics, Bellinger and Arce (2011), concludes that economic liberalization does have this effect, working to repoliticize collective actors and reinvigorate democracy. We reexamine the article’s analyses and demonstrate that they misinterpret the marginal effect of the variables of theoretical interest. Thus, the article’s optimistic claims about the consequences for democracy of economic liberalization in the region are not supported by its own empirical results. It is argued here that its results suggest instead that protests became more common in autocracies when they moved away from markets. Rather than speaking to how people have mobilized to protest against liberal reforms in Latin America’s democracies, the work’s analyses illuminate only when people protested against the region’s dictatorship

Electronic Structure and Insulating Gap in Epitaxial VO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e Polymorphs

Determining the origin of the insulating gap in the monoclinic VO2(M1) is a long-standing issue. The difficulty of this study arises from the simultaneous occurrence of structural and electronic transitions upon thermal cycling. Here, we compare the electronic structure of the M1 phase with that of single crystalline insulating VO2(A) and VO2(B) thin films to better understand the insulating phase of VO2. As these A and B phases do not undergo a structural transition upon thermal cycling, we comparatively study the origin of the gap opening in the insulating VO2 phases. By x-ray absorption and optical spectroscopy, we find that the shift of unoccupied t2g orbitals away from the Fermi level is a common feature, which plays an important role for the insulating behavior in VO2 polymorphs. The distinct splitting of the half-filled t2g orbital is observed only in the M1 phase, widening the bandgap up to ∼0.6 eV. Our approach of comparing all three insulating VO2 phases provides insight into a better understanding of the electronic structure and the origin of the insulating gap in VO2

Male-like sexual behavior of female mouse lacking fucose mutarotase

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mutarotases are recently characterized family of enzymes that are involved in the anomeric conversions of monosaccharides. The mammalian fucose mutarotase (FucM) was reported in cultured cells to facilitate fucose utilization and incorporation into protein by glycosylation. However, the role of this enzyme in animal has not been elucidated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We generated a mutant mouse specifically lacking the fucose mutarotase (FucM) gene. The <it>FucM </it>knockout mice displayed an abnormal sexual receptivity with a drastic reduction in lordosis score, although the animals were fertile due to a rare and forced intromission by a typical male. We examined the anteroventral periventricular nucleus (AVPv) of the preoptic region in brain and found that the mutant females showed a reduction in tyrosine hydoxylase positive neurons compared to that of a normal female. Furthermore, the mutant females exhibited a masculine behavior, such as mounting to a normal female partner as well as showing a preference to female urine. We found a reduction of fucosylated serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in a mutant embryo relative to that of a wild-type embryo.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The observation that <it>FucM</it>^-/-female mouse exhibits a phenotypic similarity to a wild-type male in terms of its sexual behavior appears to be due to the neurodevelopmental changes in preoptic area of mutant brain resembling a wild-type male. Since the previous studies indicate that AFP plays a role in titrating estradiol that are required to consolidate sexual preference of female mice, we speculate that the reduced level of AFP in <it>FucM</it>^-/-mouse, presumably resulting from the reduced fucosylation, is responsible for the male-like sexual behavior observed in the FucM knock-out mouse.</p

Learning from My Friends: Few-Shot Personalized Conversation Systems via Social Networks

Personalized conversation models (PCMs) generate responses according to speaker preferences. Existing personalized conversation tasks typically require models to extract speaker preferences from user descriptions or their conversation histories, which are scarce for newcomers and inactive users. In this paper, we propose a few-shot personalized conversation task with an auxiliary social network. The task requires models to generate personalized responses for a speaker given a few conversations from the speaker and a social network. Existing methods are mainly designed to incorporate descriptions or conversation histories. Those methods can hardly model speakers with so few conversations or connections between speakers. To better cater for newcomers with few resources, we propose a personalized conversation model (PCM) that learns to adapt to new speakers as well as enabling new speakers to learn from resource-rich speakers. Particularly, based on a meta-learning based PCM, we propose a task aggregator (TA) to collect other speakers' information from the social network. The TA provides prior knowledge of the new speaker in its meta-learning. Experimental results show our methods outperform all baselines in appropriateness, diversity, and consistency with speakers