Who Sets the Agenda? Analyzing Key Actors and Dynamics of Economic Diversification in Kazakhstan Throughout 2011–2016

This contribution attempts to answer the key question: Who sets the agenda for economic diversification in the context of Kazakhstan? This question remains critical in current scholarly debates. Although Kazakhstan, a young post-Soviet developing nation, has received fair scholarly attention with regard to the agenda setting stage of the policy cycle, the existing literature has yet failed to (1) empirically establish who actually sets the agenda for a certain policy issue and (2) employ the Internet research methods. This paper seeks to fill these gaps. The literature review of Kazakh-specific agenda setting publications suggests that among the major actors, the government tends to exert predominant influence, though other actors may also play a role, for example, media and academia. This research is driven by Internet penetration rate data and focuses on the period from January 2011 until December 2016. The findings lead to two key conclusions. First, think tanks seem to set the government agenda for economic diversification policy in Kazakhstan. Second, the government, while exhibiting the larger agenda setting magnitude vis-à-vis the other actors, shapes the subsequent debates as measured by the number of relevant references in media, think tanks, and academic publications. This research seeks to contribute to existing agenda setting theories in the Internet era by defining the most important actor(s), specifically in the Kazakh context based on longitudinal dynamics in attention

Polymorphic nodal elements and their application in discontinuous Galerkin methods

In this work, we discuss two different but related aspects of the development of efficient discontinuous Galerkin methods on hybrid element grids for the computational modeling of gas dynamics in complex geometries or with adapted grids. In the first part, a recursive construction of different nodal sets for hp finite elements is presented. They share the property that the nodes along the sides of the two-dimensional elements and along the edges of the three-dimensional elements are the Legendre–Gauss–Lobatto points. The different nodal elements are evaluated by computing the Lebesgue constants of the corresponding Vandermonde matrix. In the second part, these nodal elements are applied within the modal discontinuous Galerkin framework. We still use a modal based formulation, but introduce a nodal based integration technique to reduce computational cost in the spirit of pseudospectral methods. We illustrate the performance of the scheme on several large scale applications and discuss its use in a recently developed space-time expansion discontinuous Galerkin scheme

Testing the Plant Growth-Defense Hypothesis Belowground: Do Faster-Growing Herbaceous Plant Species Suffer More Negative Effects from Soil Biota than Slower-Growing Ones?

According to the growth-defense hypothesis in ecology, faster-growing plant species should suffer more from herbivores and pathogens than slower-growing species. Tests of this hypothesis have focused on aboveground plant tissues, herbivores, and pathogens; however, it should also apply to root defense. To test whether faster-growing species suffer more negatively from soil biota than slower-growing species, we estimated first-season growth rates of 34 herbaceous plant species and used weighted linear regressions to assess the relationship between growth rates and responses to being grown in sterilized versus unsterilized soil (biotic soil effects) and to growing in soil previously occupied by conspecifics versus a mixture of species (conspecific soil effects). We found a negative relationship between relative growth rate and biotic soil effects, with slower-growing species tending to suffer less or even benefit from the presence of soil biota, while faster-growing species were more negatively affected. Biotic soil effects were also negatively related to size-corrected growth rates. These relationships remained negative after accounting for influential species, but a large amount of variation remained unexplained. Moreover, there was no clear relationship between growth rates and conspecific soil effects. A simple relationship between growth and defense aboveground may not be so clearly reflected belowground because of the many interacting antagonistic and mutualistic organisms likely involved

Outcome of kidney transplantation from very senior donors in Switzerland - a national cohort study.

Kidney transplantation from older and marginal donors is effective to confront organ shortage. However, limitations after transplantation of kidneys from very marginal kidney donors remain unclear. We compared patient and graft outcome, achieved allograft function and quality of life of renal transplantations from Very Senior Donors (VSD, defined as donors aged 70 years and older) with Senior Donors (SD, aged 60-70 years) and Regular Donors (RD, aged younger than 60 years) in Switzerland. We evaluated the outcome of 1554 adult recipients of deceased donor kidney transplantations from 05/2008 to 12/2019; median follow-up was 4.7 years. Failure-free survival (freedom from graft loss or death), glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and quality of life at 12 months were analyzed for RD (reference group, n = 940), SD (n = 404), and VSD (n = 210). Failure-free survival decreased with increasing donor age, mainly attributable to premature graft loss. Still, overall 5-year failure-free survival reached 83.1%, 81.0%, and 64.0% in the RD, SD, and VSD subgroups, respectively. eGFR 12 months post-transplantation was significantly higher in RD compared with SD and VSD. The acceptance rate of donor candidates for kidney TPL was 78% for the entire cohort (87% for RD, 79% for SD, and 56% for VSD). Deceased donor kidney transplantation from donors aged 70 years or older is associated with an inferior, yet acceptable failure-free outcome, with sustained quality of life