Conceptualizing Resilience

"This commentary provides an overview of the idea of resilience, and acknowledges the challenges of defining and applying the idea in practice. The article summarizes a way of looking at resilience called a 'resilience delta', that takes into account both the shock done to a community by a disaster and the capacity of that community to rebound from that shock to return to its prior functionality. I show how different features of the community can create resilience, and consider how the developed and developing world addresses resilience. I also consider the role of focusing events in gaining attention to events and promoting change. I note that, while focusing events are considered by many in the disaster studies field to be major drivers of policy change in the United States disaster policy, most disasters have little effect on the overall doctrine of shared responsibilities between the national and subnational governments." (author's abstract

During Disaster: Refining the Concept of Focusing Events to Better Explain Long-Duration Crises

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most significant public health crises in modern history, killing over 2 million people worldwide (Johns Hopkins, 2021). Unsurprisingly, a chorus of popular commentators has come to label it a “focusing event” capable of yielding broad social and political change across virtually every sector of society (Jenkins, 2020; Reville, 2020; Burgess, 2020; Olshan, 2020; Zenko, 2020). Jeremy Olshan (2020) of MarketWatch writes: “Social scientists say a c..

Comparative Microbial Modules Resource: Generation and Visualization of Multi-species Biclusters

The increasing abundance of large-scale, high-throughput datasets for many closely related organisms provides opportunities for comparative analysis via the simultaneous biclustering of datasets from multiple species. These analyses require a reformulation of how to organize multi-species datasets and visualize comparative genomics data analyses results. Recently, we developed a method, multi-species cMonkey, which integrates heterogeneous high-throughput datatypes from multiple species to identify conserved regulatory modules. Here we present an integrated data visualization system, built upon the Gaggle, enabling exploration of our method's results (available at http://meatwad.bio.nyu.edu/cmmr.html). The system can also be used to explore other comparative genomics datasets and outputs from other data analysis procedures – results from other multiple-species clustering programs or from independent clustering of different single-species datasets. We provide an example use of our system for two bacteria, Escherichia coli and Salmonella Typhimurium. We illustrate the use of our system by exploring conserved biclusters involved in nitrogen metabolism, uncovering a putative function for yjjI, a currently uncharacterized gene that we predict to be involved in nitrogen assimilation

Virology Experts in the Boundary Zone Between Science, Policy and the Public: A Biographical Analysis

This article aims to open up the biographical black box of three experts working in the boundary zone between science, policy and public debate. A biographical-narrative approach is used to analyse the roles played by the virologists Albert Osterhaus, Roel Coutinho and Jaap Goudsmit in policy and public debate. These figures were among the few leading virologists visibly active in the Netherlands during the revival of infectious diseases in the 1980s. Osterhaus and Coutinho in particular are still the key figures today, as demonstrated during the outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1). This article studies the various political and communicative challenges and dilemmas encountered by these three virologists, and discusses the way in which, strategically or not, they handled those challenges and dilemmas during the various stages of the field’s recent history. Important in this respect is their pursuit of a public role that is both effective and credible. We will conclude with a reflection on the H1N1 pandemic, and the historical and biographical ties between emerging governance arrangements and the experts involved in the development of such arrangements

An introduction to the policy process : theories, concepts, and models of public policy making /

Includes bibliographical references (pages 408-413) and index

An introduction to the policy process : theories, concepts, and models of public policy making / by Thomas A. Birkland.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-323) and index.xx, 339 pages