Putin\u27s Chosen People: Theories of Russian Jewish Policy, 2000-2017

Despite support from and for right-wing elements and a deep-seeded national history of anti-Semitism, the policies of the Russian government under Vladimir Putin have been markedly devoid of anti-Semitism. Appeals to nationalist, imperialist, and Eurasianist ideologies, pragmatic politics, and foreign policy concerns fail to explain these policies adequately. The biography of Putin himself, which includes influential, positive relationships with Jews, provides a better explanation. The personalized influence of the president on Jewish policy suggests a personalized, hyper-centralized regime generally

Characterization of fracture healing in myocardin-related transcription factor-A deficient mice

INTRODUCTION: A recent area of interest has become adipose tissue of the bone marrow. Unlike fat found elsewhere in the body, it is able to respond to its microenvironment by expanding, contracting, and even releasing hormones of its own. The marrow adipose tissue (MAT) increases with age and even within anorexic patients. Changes in MAT may be directly linked to bone tissue, since both adipocytes and osteoblasts share a common progenitor cell population. This is supported by recent results showing that the constitutive deletion of the MRTF-A (Myocardin related transcription factor A) gene not only led to leaner mice leaner but also had a bone phenotype. The bones were shorter and had decreased bone mass; the female mice were more susceptible to osteopenia. It is unclear as to how this bone phenotype will respond to fracture repair, a coordinated process that is dependent upon differentiation toward the osteoblast lineage. Therefore, both male and female MRTF-A knockout (KO) and wild type (WT) mice were examined in a fracture study. METHODS: Male and female mice (KO and WT) aged 8-16 weeks were fractured using a closed, stabilized fracture model. Tissues were harvested as post-operative day 14, 21, and 37. Radiographic films and histological assessment were completed at each time point to visualize the progression of fracture repair. Gene expression studies using RT-qPCR were all done at time points 14 and 37. Results were compared between genotype and sex. RESULTS: Fracture calluses between WT and KO male and female mice appeared nearly identical via X-ray, suggesting that MRTF-A did not affect fracture repair. Only at the later time points did the histology show females had increased MAT regardless of genotype. Immunofluorescence with perilipin further confirmed this. Adipogenic, chondrogenic, and osteogenic markers also yielded differences in relative mRNA expression between the sexes. CONCLUSIONS: The MRTF-A KO mice did not show delayed or altered fracture repair compared to the WT mice. However, the data suggest difference in MAT deposition between male and female mice. Further work is necessary to fully understand this sex difference

Bayesian Optimal Design for Ordinary Differential Equation Models

Bayesian optimal design is considered for experiments where it is hypothesised that the responses are described by the intractable solution to a system of non-linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Bayesian optimal design is based on the minimisation of an expected loss function where the expectation is with respect to all unknown quantities (responses and parameters). This expectation is typically intractable even for simple models before even considering the intractability of the ODE solution. New methodology is developed for this problem that involves minimising a smoothed stochastic approximation to the expected loss and using a state-of-the-art stochastic solution to the ODEs, by treating the ODE solution as an unknown quantity. The methodology is demonstrated on three illustrative examples and a real application involving estimating the properties of human placentas

Ten Economic Facts About Crime and Incarceration in the United States

Crime and high rates of incarceration impose tremendous costs on society, with lasting negative effects on individuals, families, and communities. Rates of crime in the United States have been falling steadily, but still constitute a serious economic and social challenge. At the same time, the incarceration rate in the United States is so high -- more than 700 out of every 100,000 people are incarcerated -- that both crime scholars and policymakers alike question whether, for nonviolent criminals in particular, the social costs of incarceration exceed the social benefits

Investigating the Photorecombination Dynamics in Molecular High-Harmonic Spectra

The work presented in this dissertation will relate the photorecombination dynamics to photoionization dynamics in SF6 utilizing the self-probing mechanism, high harmonic generation (HHG). This work specifically aims to establish parameters for which the comparison is applicable and the macroscopic complications inherent in HHG do not interfere with the extraction of dynamic information. The first part of this work established the macroscopic experimental apparatus necessary for consistent spectroscopic observation. It is shown that using a gas jet that is an order of magnitude shorter than the Rayleigh length of the driving laser results in more consistent harmonic spatial profiles and location of spectroscopic features. The observation of photorecombination dynamic in HHG is extended to shape resonances in SF6 with a focus on separating the effects of phase matching from photorecombination. This is accomplished by varying the laser parameters including the location of the focal point with respect to the center of the gas jet and altering the strength of the electric field. This process allowed us to observe two high energy shape resonances in the HHG spectrum of SF6 and map the appropriate parameters at which our experimental results confirm theoretical calculations based on the quantitative rescattering theory conducted by collaborators at Texas A&M University. The shape resonance was then probed by adding ellipticity to the fundamental in order to determine if there was information related to the angular dependence of the shape resonance that could be extracted in a way unique to HHG

Hannah Crafts and The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative: rhetoric, religion, textual influences, and contemporary literary trends and tactics

The 2002 discovery by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of a manuscript titled The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative, written by a woman identifying herself as Hannah Crafts, presents a unique opportunity to examine the unpolished writing of an African American woman who had been a slave. The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative, incorporating both novelistic and seemingly autobiographical elements to present Craft\u27s rhetorical appeals against the injustices of slavery, has many similarities with more canonical works of antebellum African American literature, including Harriet Jacobs\u27s Incidents, Frederick Douglass\u27s Narrative, and Harriet Wilson\u27s Our Nig. Among the most significant of these similarities are those involving the prefaces of the respective works as meta-text, in which the authors directly address the audience outside of their narratives\u27 frames of reference, and those involving the attitudes of the authors and their protagonists toward Christianity and the attempts of the authors and their black characters to retain faith while rejecting the perversions of religion for which the institution of slavery was responsible. To date, critical attention paid to The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative has been largely concerned with proving Crafts to have been white or black in a perhaps oversimplified static racial binary that Crafts actually critiques within her text. Nevertheless, the preponderance of the evidence within the text of The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative suggests that Crafts is best identified as black. This evidence includes the aforementioned similarities with her African American contemporaries, her treatment of black characters within the text, and her adherence to common black religious beliefs and attitudes of the day. Other critical attention has focused on Craft\u27s literary influences, most notably Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Some critics believe Craft\u27s use of Dickensian material to be tantamount to plagiarism, while others feel that it is inappropriate to apply 21st century definitions of plagiarism to Crafts due to her intents and writing context. The concept of intellectual property itself plays an intriguing role in this debate, both because of the antebellum pro-slavery notion that human beings could be property and because of disagreement by literary theorists such as Hirsch and Barthes on the relation of an author to his or her text

Perturbed polyhedra and the construction of local Euler-Maclaurin formulas

A polyhedron P is a subset of a rational vector space V bounded by hyperplanes. If we fix a lattice in V , then we may consider the exponential integral and sum, two meromorphic functions on the dual vector space which serve to generalize the notion of volume of and number of lattice points contained in P, respectively. In 2007, Berline and Vergne constructed an Euler-Maclaurin formula that relates the exponential sum of a given polyhedron to the exponential integral of each face. This formula was "local", meaning that the coefficients in this formula had certain properties independent of the given polyhedron. In this dissertation, the author finds a new construction for this formula which is very different from that of Berline and Vergne. We may 'perturb' any polyhedron by tranlsating its bounding hyperplanes. The author defines a ring of differential operators R(P) on the exponential volume of the perturbed polyhedron. This definition is inspired by methods in the theory of toric varieties, although no knowledge of toric varieties is necessary to understand the construction or the resulting Euler-Maclaurin formula. Each polyhedron corresponds to a toric variety, and there is a dictionary between combinatorial properties of the polyhedron and algebro-geometric properties of this variety. In particular, the equivariant cohomology ring and the group of equivariant algebraic cycles on the corresponding toric variety are equal to a quotient ring and subgroup of R(P), respectively. Given an inner product (or, more generally, a complement map) on V , there is a canonical section of the equivariant cohomology ring into the group of algebraic cycles. One can use the image under this section of a particular differential operator called the Todd class to define the Euler-Maclaurin formula. The author shows that this formula satisfies the same properties which characterize the Berline-Vergne formula

Invasion of Ukraine Discourse on TikTok Dataset

We present a dataset of videos and comments from the social media platform TikTok, centred around the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an event that launched TikTok into the geopolitical arena. The discourse around the invasion exposed myriad political behaviours and dynamics that are unexplored on this platform. To this end we provide a mass scale language and interaction dataset for further research into these processes. An initial investigation of language and social interaction dynamics are explored in this paper. The dataset and the library used to collect it are open sourced to the public

Cost effectiveness of HPV Vaccination : a systematic review of modelling approaches

Background A large number of economic evaluations have been published that assess alternative possible human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination strategies. Understanding differences in the modelling methodologies used in these studies is important to assess the accuracy, comparability and generalisability of their results. Objectives The aim of this review was to identify published economic models of HPV vaccination programmes and understand how characteristics of these studies vary by geographical area, date of publication and the policy question being addressed. Methods We performed literature searches in MEDLINE, Embase, Econlit, The Health Economic Evaluations Database (HEED) and The National Health Service Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED). From the 1189 unique studies retrieved, 65 studies were included for data extraction based on a priori eligibility criteria. Two authors independently reviewed these articles to determine eligibility for the final review. Data were extracted from the selected studies, focussing on six key structural or methodological themes covering different aspects of the model(s) used that may influence cost-effectiveness results. Results More recently published studies tend to model a larger number of HPV strains, and include a larger number of HPV-associated diseases. Studies published in Europe and North America also tend to include a larger number of diseases and are more likely to incorporate the impact of herd immunity and to use more realistic assumptions around vaccine efficacy and coverage. Studies based on previous models often do not include sufficiently robust justifications as to the applicability of the adapted model to the new context. Conclusions The considerable between-study heterogeneity in economic evaluations of HPV vaccination programmes makes comparisons between studies difficult, as observed differences in cost effectiveness may be driven by differences in methodology as well as by variations in funding and delivery models and estimates of model parameters. Studies should consistently report not only all simplifying assumptions made but also the estimated impact of these assumptions on the cost-effectiveness results