Suchergebnisse

Around 1500 Chagos Islanders were expelled from the Chagos Archipelago and moved to Mauritius and Seychelles between 1965 and 1973. Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos, became a US military base. The Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA) was established in 2010 and currently acts as legal ammunition against Chagossians' claims for their rights of return and abode. This article uncovers the multi-layered impacts of the Chagos MPA as fortress conservation by conducting a multiscale spatial analysis and addresses the epistemic system(s) of power. It pays particular attention to colonial and imperial legacies in the construction of environmental science, a planetary-scale archipelagic network, and the rhetoric of ecological (in)security. The politics of coconut manifested in the Barton Point restoration project substantiates claims of spatial and epistemic violence. This article further describes Chagossian strategies of resistance using the works of Clement Siatous and Shenaz Patel. It concludes by arguing against the coupling of military occupation with an environmental fortress that conceals and perpetuates historical injustice. Chagos ecology is storied, layered and laminated through human–land interactions. Chagossians' imaginative accounts of a shared homeland are inspirational manifestos.

Around 1500 Chagos Islanders were expelled from the Chagos Archipelago and moved to Mauritius and Seychelles between 1965 and 1973. Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos, became a US military base. The Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA) was established in 2010 and currently acts as legal ammunition against Chagossians' claims for their rights of return and abode. This article uncovers the multi-layered impacts of the Chagos MPA as fortress conservation by conducting a multiscale spatial analysis and addresses the epistemic system(s) of power. It pays particular attention to colonial and imperial legacies in the construction of environmental science, a planetary-scale archipelagic network, and the rhetoric of ecological (in)security. The politics of coconut manifested in the Barton Point restoration project substantiates claims of spatial and epistemic violence. This article further describes Chagossian strategies of resistance using the works of Clement Siatous and Shenaz Patel. It concludes by arguing against the coupling of military occupation with an environmental fortress that conceals and perpetuates historical injustice. Chagos ecology is storied, layered and laminated through human–land interactions. Chagossians' imaginative accounts of a shared homeland are inspirational manifestos.

The use of benchmark dose (BMD) calculations for dichotomous or continuous responses is well established in the risk assessment of cancer and noncancer endpoints. In some cases, responses to exposure are categorized in terms of ordinal severity effects such as none, mild, adverse, and severe. Such responses can be assessed using categorical regression (CATREG) analysis. However, while CATREG has been employed to compare the benchmark approach and the no‐adverse‐effect‐level (NOAEL) approach in determining a reference dose, the utility of CATREG for risk assessment remains unclear. This study proposes a CATREG model to extend the BMD approach to ordered categorical responses by modeling severity levels as censored interval limits of a standard normal distribution. The BMD is calculated as a weighted average of the BMDs obtained at dichotomous cutoffs for each adverse severity level above the critical effect, with the weights being proportional to the reciprocal of the expected loss at the cutoff under the normal probability model. This approach provides a link between the current BMD procedures for dichotomous and continuous data. We estimate the CATREG parameters using a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation procedure. The proposed method is demonstrated using examples of aldicarb and urethane, each with several categories of severity levels. Simulation studies comparing the BMD and BMDL (lower confidence bound on the BMD) using the proposed method to the correspondent estimates using the existing methods for dichotomous and continuous data are quite compatible; the difference is mainly dependent on the choice of cutoffs for the severity levels.

ABSTRACTWe test whether geographical location, audit quality, and equity offering play a role in the earnings quality of reverse merger (RM) firms. We provide evidence that, contrary to the popular focus on foreign reverse mergers by the business press, earnings management is equally likely in both U.S. and foreign RM companies. We find that firm characteristics are more indicative of the likelihood to manage earnings than geographical location. The presence of a Big 4 auditor for RM firms is associated with higher earnings quality and a survival rate almost twice as high in comparison to RM firms audited by a non-Big 4 auditor. Moreover, we find that while earnings management is a common practice at all RM firms, it is especially pervasive for RM firms that are issuing new equity after the reverse merger.

To date, the variant Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease (vCJD) risk assessments that have been performed have primarily focused on predicting future vCJD cases in the United Kingdom, which underwent a bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic between 1980 and 1996. Surveillance of potential BSE cases was also used to assess vCJD risk, especially in other BSE‐prevalent EU countries. However, little is known about the vCJD risk for uninfected individuals who accidentally consume BSE‐contaminated meat products in or imported from a country with prevalent BSE. In this article, taking into account the biological mechanism of abnormal prion PrPres aggregation in the brain, the probability of exposure, and the expected amount of ingested infectivity, we establish a stochastic mean exponential growth model of lifetime exposure through dietary intake. Given the findings that BSE agents behave similarly in humans and macaques, we obtained parameter estimates from experimental macaque data. We then estimated the accumulation of abnormal prions to assess lifetime risk of developing clinical signs of vCJD. Based on the observed number of vCJD cases and the estimated number of exposed individuals during the BSE epidemic period from 1980 to 1996 in the United Kingdom, an exposure threshold hypothesis is proposed. Given the age‐specific risk of infection, the hypothesis explains the observations very well from an extreme‐value distribution fitting of the estimated BSE infectivity exposure. The current BSE statistics in the United Kingdom are provided as an example.

Emerging evidence suggests that the risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease, is significantly increased in military personnel and contact sports players who have been exposed to repetitive trauma brain injury (TBI). Unfortunately there are no effective medications currently available for prevention and treatment of CTE. Here we demonstrate that inhibition of monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL), the key enzyme that metabolizes the endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) in the brain, significantly reduced CTE-like neuropathologic changes in a mouse model of repetitive mild closed head injury (rmCHI). Inhibition of 2-AG metabolism promoted neurologic recovery following rmCHI and reduced proinflammatory cytokines, astroglial reactivity, expression of amyloid precursor protein and the enzymes that make Aβ, as well as formation of Aβ. Importantly, neurodegeneration, TDP-43 protein aggregation, and tau phosphorylation, which are the neuropathologic hallmarks of CTE, were significantly suppressed by MAGL inactivation. Furthermore, alterations in expression of glutamate receptor subunits and impairments in basal synaptic transmission, long-term synaptic plasticity, and spatial learning and memory were recovered by inhibition of 2-AG metabolism in animals exposed to rmCHI. Our results suggest that MAGL inhibition, which boosts 2-AG and reduces 2-AG metabolites prostaglandins in the brain, may lead to a new therapy for CTE.