Suchergebnisse

The Central Asian region, with its rich reserves of energy resources and unique geopolitical position, is of particular importance for the modern foreign policy strategy of the People's Republic of China. At the same time, the PRC's public diplomacy and soft power in the Central Asian republics remain relatively understudied, despite the overall emphasis given to these issues by the Chinese researchers. It is this gap that this paper is partly intended to fill. The first section of the paper examines the evolution of the discourse on 'public diplomacy' in China and its perception in the Chinese academic community. The second section identifies the reasons for mainstreaming public diplomacy agenda in China's foreign policy towards the Central Asian countries in recent years. The author shows that enhancement of economic and political cooperation between China and regional countries was not matched by a concurrent improvement of the China's public image, on the contrary there has been a noticeable rise in Sinophobia. It was against this background that the PRC turned its attention to the use of public diplomacy tools as it launched the Belt and Road Initiative. The third section outlines the main thrusts of the Chinese public diplomacy in the region, including PR-diplomacy, media-diplomacy and humanitarian diplomacy. The final section identifies both the endogenous and exogenous challenges faced by the PRC's public diplomacy in the Central Asian countries. The author argues that the competitiveness and effectiveness of China's public diplomacy could be increased through expanding cooperation in the humanitarian sphere, implementation of digital technologies and media 2.0, as well as by increased engagement of non-governmental commercial and non-profit actors in interaction with the regional public. Either way, the author concludes that the Central Asian region will play an increasing role in the Chinese public diplomacy.

The article discusses the state roles played by China in Central Asia from 2003 to the present, as well as the reactions of governments and civil society of the region to these roles. Within the framework of the theory of state roles the author characterizes four main Chinese roles in the Central Asian region: developer, connector, inter-governmental cooperation, and participant in regional security governance. The author also analyzes their influence on Chinese Central Asian policies. Furthermore, in the article the reactions of civil society and governments in the region to these Chinese roles are considered. Based on the analysis, the author presents two possible scenarios for the future development of Chinese policies towards Central Asian countries.

Abstract
Reliability and validity are key concerns for any researcher. We investigate these concerns as they apply to social network analysis programs. Six well-used and trusted programs were compared on four common centrality measures (degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector) under a variety of network topographies. We identify notable inconsistencies between programs that may not be apparent to the average user of these programs. Specifically, each program may have implemented a variant of a given measure without informing the user of its characteristics. This presents an unnecessary obfuscation for analysts seeking measures that are best suited to the idiosyncrasies of their data, and for those comparing results between programs.
Under such a paradigm, the terms in use within the social network analysis community become less precise over time and diverge from the original strength of network analysis: clarity.

We conducted imputation to the 1000 Genomes Project of four genome-wide association studies of lung cancer in populations of European ancestry (11,348 cases and 15,861 controls) and genotyped an additional 10,246 cases and 38,295 controls for follow-up. We identified large-effect genome-wide associations for squamous lung cancer with the rare variants BRCA2 p.Lys3326X (rs11571833, odds ratio (OR) = 2.47, P = 4.74 × 10−20) and CHEK2 p.Ile157Thr (rs17879961, OR = 0.38, P = 1.27 × 10−13). We also showed an association between common variation at 3q28 (TP63, rs13314271, OR = 1.13, P = 7.22 × 10−10) and lung adenocarcinoma that had been previously reported only in Asians. These findings provide further evidence for inherited genetic susceptibility to lung cancer and its biological basis. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that imputation can identify rare disease-causing variants with substantive effects on cancer risk from preexisting genome-wide association study data. ; We acknowledge The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for their contribution of lung cancer genomic data to this study (TCGA Project Number 3230). We also acknowledge support from the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at the Royal Marsden Hospital. This study was supported by the NIH (U19CA148127, R01CA055769, 5R01CA127219, 5R01CA133996 and 5R01CA121197). The work performed at ICR was supported by Cancer Research UK (C1298/A8780 and C1298/A8362), National Cancer Research Network (NCRN), HEAL, Sanofi-Aventis and National Health Service funding to the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research, as well as the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre. B.K. was the recipient of a Sir John Fisher Foundation PhD studentship. Work at ICR was also supported by NIH GM103534 and the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences at Dartmouth to C.I.A. The work performed in Toronto was supported by The Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute (020214), Ontario Institute of Cancer and Cancer Care Ontario Chair Award to R.J.H. and G.L. and the Alan Brown Chair and Lusi Wong Programs at the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation. The work performed at Heidelberg was supported by Deutsche Krebshilfe (70-2387 and 70-2919) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (EPIC-Heidelberg). The work performed at IARC was supported by the Institut National du Cancer, France, the European Community (LSHG-CT-2005-512113), the Norwegian Cancer Association, the Functional Genomics Programme of Research Council of Norway, the European Regional Development Fund and the State Budget of the Czech Republic (RECAMO, CZ.1.05/2.1.00/03.0101), the NIH (R01-CA111703 and UO1-CA63673), the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the US NCI (R01 CA092039), an FP7 grant (REGPOT 245536), the Estonian Government (SF0180142s08), the EU European Regional Development Fund in the frame of Centre of Excellence in Genomics and Estonian Research Infrastructure's Roadmap and the University of Tartu (SP1GVARENG) and an IARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (M.N.T.). Work at the NCI was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, the NCI, US Public Health Service contracts NCI (N01-CN-45165, N01-RC-45035, N01-RC-37004, NO1-CN-25514, NO1-CN-25515, NO1-CN-25512, NO1-CN-25513, NO1-CN-25516, NO1-CN-25511, NO1-CN-25524, NO1-CN-25518, NO1-CN-75022, NO1-CN-25476 and NO1-CN-25404), the American Cancer Society, the NIH Genes, Environment and Health Initiative in part by HG-06-033-NCI-01 and RO1HL091172-01, genotyping at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Inherited Disease Research (U01HG004438 and NIH HHSN268200782096C) and study coordination at the GENEVA Coordination Center (U01 HG004446). Work was also supported by NIH grants (P50 CA70907, R01CA121197, RO1 CA127219, U19 CA148127 and RO1 CA55769) and a Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas grant (RP100443). Genotyping was provided by the Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR). Work performed at Harvard was supported by the NIH (CA074386, CA092824 and CA090578). The Icelandic study was supported in part by NIH DA17932.