LSE Research: increased territorial power-sharing inMuseveni’s Uganda has led to the decline of civil wa

Dr Stefan Lindemann is a recent LSE graduate and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He was commissioned to conduct the research of the paper, Just Another Change of Guard? Broad-based Politics and Civil War in Museveni’s Uganda by the LSE-based Crisis States Research Centre programme and funded by the UK Department for International Development

eine Zwischenbilanz aus umweltpolitischer Sicht

Ansätze strategischer Nachhaltigkeitsplanung haben sich seit der Konferenz von Rio (1992) weltweit überdurchschnittlich schnell ausgebreitet. Dennoch bleiben ihre Funktion und Qualität weiter umstritten. Ausgehend von dieser Debatte werden hier exemplarisch die Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien Deutschlands und der Europäischen Union aus umweltpolitischer Sicht bewertet. Die Analyse der beiden Strategien zeigt, dass diese überwiegend hinter dem Steuerungsmodell der Agenda 21 zurückbleiben. Insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Ziel- und Ergebnisorientierung sowie die Förderung der horizontalen Umweltpolitikintegration sind erhebliche Defizite zu beobachten. Vor diesem Hintergrund sollten Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien zukünftig als institutioneller wie thematischer Rahmen aufgewertet werden, in dem die ökologische, ökonomische und soziale Langzeitperspektive der Gesellschaft systematisch und koordiniert zur Sprache kommt. Konkrete Verbesserungsvorschläge umfassen dabei insbesondere die Festlegung von Langfristzielen, die Verbesserung von Monitoring und Evaluation, horizontale Politikintegration durch integrierte Nachhaltigkeitsprüfung sowie eine gezielte Stärkung der institutionellen Basis des Nachhaltigkeitsprozesses

Elite bargains and the politics of war and peace in Uganda and Zambia.

This PhD thesis starts from the puzzle of striking differences in civil war occurrence across Sub-Saharan Africa, exemplified by the two countries of Uganda and Zambia. While post-colonial Uganda has experienced no less than 15 cases of civil war, Zambia has been able to avoid civil war since independence in 1964. To explain this extreme variation in the two countries' vulnerability to civil war, I first review the five most influential theoretical approaches in the civil war literature. While most of these approaches fall short of resolving my puzzle, several arguments that emphasise the need for elite power-sharing offer a promising starting point. Against this backdrop, I go on to develop a theoretical approach that focuses on the inclusiveness of elite politics. I argue that a country's propensity for war or peace is determined by the inclusiveness of the 'elite bargain', i.e. the distribution of access to positions of state power (political, military, economic and territorial) between contending social groups. This hypothesis is confirmed by my empirical findings, which are based on 103 interviews, a comprehensive set of original data on the inter-group distribution of political, military, economic and territorial posts, and in-depth historical analysis. In Uganda, I trace recurrent civil war back to the persistence of exclusionary elite bargains. By contrast, Zambia has been able to contain the spectre of civil war by forging and maintaining inclusive elite bargains. My detailed two-country comparison reveals that differences in civil war occurrence reflect variation in the relative trend, depth, scope, authenticity and perception of the elite bargain. There is also evidence for the relevance of several complementary explanatory factors, including violent state repression, socioeconomic inter-group inequalities, political leadership, levels of urbanisation, and regional spillover effects

Visual Analysis of Polarization Domains in Barium Titanate during Phase Transitions

In recent years, the characteristics of ferroelectric barium titanate (BaTiO3) have been studied extensively in materials science. Barium titanate has been widely used for building transducers, capacitors and, as of late, for memory devices. In this context, a precise understanding of the formation of polarization domains during phase transitions within the material is especially important. Therefore, we propose an application that uses a combination of proven visualization techniques in order to aid physicists in the visual analysis of molecular dynamic simulations of BaTiO3. A set of linked 2D and 3D views conveys an overview of the evolution of dipole moments over time by visualizing single time steps as well as combining multiple time steps in one single static image using flow radar glyphs. In addition, our system semi-automatically detects polarization domains, whose spatial relation can be interactively analyzed at different levels of detail on commodity hardware. The evolution of selected polarization domains over their lifetime can be observed by a combination of animated spatial and quantitative views

Determinants of Bicycle Crashes at Urban Signalised lntersections

Bicycle usage is increasing in urban (as well as rural) areas, which increases demand for better and safer infrastructure. Whilst the total number ofbicycle fatalities in European countries has been stable over the last ten years (:::: 2.000 fatalities per year for all European Union member states), bicycle fatalities and injuries in Germany have been increasing in this time. About two-thirds of all bicycle crashes in Germany occur at intersections, this proportion is highe:r than in Denmark and the N ethe:rlands (three-fi:fths). lntersections are tbus of high relevance for bicyclists' safety andin addition, they require sophisticated research methods because of their complex designs and the high numbers and types of uscr interactions and conflicts compared to street sections. This study analyses determinants of bicycle crashes at 269 signalised intersections in two major eitles in Germany (Dresden, Munich) as the basis for developing evidence-based recomm.endations for improving bicyclists' safety at existing intersections and for ensuring high safety levels at newly planned intersections from the very beginning. This study is part ofthe research project SiRou (nrvp.de/21520). The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport within the National Cycling Plan 2020(NRVP)

Compound interaction screen on a photoactivatable cellulose membrane (CISCM) identifies drug targets

Identifying the protein targets of drugs is an important but tedious process. Existing proteomic approaches enable unbiased target identification but lack the throughput needed to screen larger compound libraries. Here, we present a compound interaction screen on a photoactivatable cellulose membrane (CISCM) that enables target identification of several drugs in parallel. To this end, we use diazirine-based undirected photoaffinity labeling (PAL) to immobilize compounds on cellulose membranes. Functionalized membranes are then incubated with protein extract and specific targets are identified via quantitative affinity purification and mass spectrometry. CISCM reliably identifies known targets of natural products in less than three hours of analysis time per compound. In summary, we show that combining undirected photoimmobilization of compounds on cellulose with quantitative interaction proteomics provides an efficient means to identify the targets of natural products

Exploring differences between average and critical engineering changes : survey results from Denmark

Change or modification has always been a fundamental part of engineering design. Changes to a design are the rule and not the exception [Clark & Fujimoto 1991]. Engineering changes (ECs), as Jarratt et al. [2005] describe, are alterations made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the design process. Over the past decades, engineering change management has gained prominence in engineering design and product development literature, with a number of in-depth case studies (e.g. [Clarkson et al. 2004; Fricke et al. 2000; Giffin et al. 2009; Jarratt et al. 2010; Lindemann & Reichwald 1998; Loch & Terwiesch 1999; Vianello & Ahmed-Kristensen 2011]), industry surveys (e.g. [Deubzer et al. 2005; Huang & Mak 1999; Huang et al. 2003]), and reviews (e.g. [Ahmad et al. 2011; Jarratt et al. 2010; Wright 1997]). Researchers describe and analyse a number of aspects of changes, such as characterisations of changes, causes, initiators, objectives, effects, and potential strategies, and software support to anticipate and handle changes. Studying characterisations of changes, some investigate late engineering changes (e.g. [Coughlan 1992]), others describe strategies to detect avoidable and to cope with unavoidable changes [Fricke et al. 2000], yet others characterise initiated design changes and the associated emergent modifications according to their development over time and potential effects on implementation within the allotted amount of time forming ripple, blossom, or avalanche patterns [Eckert et al. 2004]. Whilst differing in terms of focus and research design what all studies have in common is differentiating between engineering changes for better understanding of patterns of change, ultimately better to manage engineering changes. In this paper, we aim to continue this line of investigation and - examine differences between average and critical changes according to results from a survey with industry participants, and thereby - explore as to what makes changes critical. In this paper, we focus our description on results from an industry survey. With this in mind, the remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes in brief what motivated criticality of engineering changes as the research focus of this paper and outlines the data acquisition and analysis procedure. We present results of this study in Section 3. Section 4 summarises contributions and concludes with suggestions for further work

Plasma Lipocalin 2 in Alzheimer’s disease: potential utility in the differential diagnosis and relationship with other biomarkers

Background Lipocalin-2 is a glycoprotein that is involved in various physiological and pathophysiological processes. In the brain, it is expressed in response to vascular and other brain injury, as well as in Alzheimer's disease in reactive microglia and astrocytes. Plasma Lipocalin-2 has been proposed as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease but available data is scarce and inconsistent. Thus, we evaluated plasma Lipocalin-2 in the context of Alzheimer's disease, differential diagnoses, other biomarkers, and clinical data. Methods For this two-center case-control study, we analyzed Lipocalin-2 concentrations in plasma samples from a cohort of n = 407 individuals. The diagnostic groups comprised Alzheimer's disease (n = 74), vascular dementia (n = 28), other important differential diagnoses (n = 221), and healthy controls (n = 84). Main results were validated in an independent cohort with patients with Alzheimer's disease (n = 19), mild cognitive impairment (n = 27), and healthy individuals (n = 28). Results Plasma Lipocalin-2 was significantly lower in Alzheimer's disease compared to healthy controls (p < 0.001) and all other groups (p < 0.01) except for mixed dementia (vascular and Alzheimer's pathologic changes). Areas under the curve from receiver operation characteristics for the discrimination of Alzheimer's disease and healthy controls were 0.783 (95%CI: 0.712-0.855) in the study cohort and 0.766 (95%CI: 0.627-0.905) in the validation cohort. The area under the curve for Alzheimer's disease versus vascular dementia was 0.778 (95%CI: 0.667-0.890) in the study cohort. In Alzheimer's disease patients, plasma Lipocalin2 did not show significant correlation with cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers of neurodegeneration and AD-related pathology (total-tau, phosphorylated tau protein, and beta-amyloid 1-42), cognitive status (Mini Mental Status Examination scores), APOE genotype, or presence of white matter hyperintensities. Interestingly, Lipocalin 2 was lower in patients with rapid disease course compared to patients with non-rapidly progressive Alzheimer's disease (p = 0.013). Conclusions Plasma Lipocalin-2 has potential as a diagnostic biomarker for Alzheimer's disease and seems to be independent from currently employed biomarkers