scholarly journals Visualising policy responses during health emergencies. Learning from the COVID-19 policy trackers

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110489
Author(s):  
Jean-Benoît Falisse ◽  
Boel McAteer
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Information ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
Policy Area ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Policy Tool ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Policy Solutions

Data visualisations are intimately connected to the emergence of public health as a discipline and policy area. Besides the mapping of cases and deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of attempts to track policy responses. They have come from actors sometimes initially unfamiliar with public and global health. In this paper, we analyse seven of the most successful tracker initiatives that have sought to map governments’ reactions to COVID-19 and reflect on our own. When not led by international organisations, the trackers primarily rely on networks of volunteer country expert contributors (who need to be incentivised in the medium term). The vertical crowdsourcing approach means that, despite good intentions, contributors have a relatively limited agency in shaping the trackers. Maps and timelines comparing countries are the most popular visualisations; they suggest that (some) policy solutions can be found abroad and rely on policy taxonomies established by the trackers’ core teams. We contend that such taxonomies, which compete with each other, constitute attempts to frame the complex issue of which policies matter in responding to COVID-19. All the projects are large and complex and often without a well-defined intended audience. We hypothesise that the popularity (in terms of backlinks) of the most successful tracker arises from the fact that it sums up COVID-19 policies in one easily visualisable indicator. We suggest that the trackers are a more helpful emergency policy tool when they provide contextual information, keep policy details or refer to them (rather than only reduce them to categories), and suggest ways to link different elements—including the relationship between health or societal outcomes and policies.

scholarly journals Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation for Korean Honorific Expressions

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 1589
Author(s):  
Yongkeun Hwang ◽  
Yanghoon Kim ◽  
Kyomin Jung
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Deep Neural Networks ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Context Aware ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Relationship

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the text generation tasks which has achieved significant improvement with the rise of deep neural networks. However, language-specific problems such as handling the translation of honorifics received little attention. In this paper, we propose a context-aware NMT to promote translation improvements of Korean honorifics. By exploiting the information such as the relationship between speakers from the surrounding sentences, our proposed model effectively manages the use of honorific expressions. Specifically, we utilize a novel encoder architecture that can represent the contextual information of the given input sentences. Furthermore, a context-aware post-editing (CAPE) technique is adopted to refine a set of inconsistent sentence-level honorific translations. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, honorific-labeled test data is required. Thus, we also design a heuristic that labels Korean sentences to distinguish between honorific and non-honorific styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms sentence-level NMT baselines both in overall translation quality and honorific translations.

Jauna slota tīri slauka jeb muižnieka Bernharda Magnusa fon Vulfa tiesas prāva pret mācītāju Frīdrihu Danielu Vāru

2021 ◽  
pp. 122-136
Author(s):  
Ginta Pērle-Sīle
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Show

The subject of this article is a court case between Aumeisteri nobleman Berhard Magnus von Wulf (1732–1784) and the minister of Palsmane and Aumeisteri parishes Friedrich Daniel Wahr (1749–1827) about the suspension of the minister from his duties from 1775 to 1779. The aim of the research is to approach the court case as evidence of the different opinions of several social groups where extreme colonial ideas in Vidzeme meet Enlightenment ideas from Western Europe. At the same time, the court case is a source of contextual information for a better understanding of the development of Wahr’s literary and folkloristic heritage. The research is based on studies of documents found in the Latvian State History Archive that are approached using the culture-historical and comparative methods, thus trying to contextualize certain events in a specific place and time. The results of the research show the Palsmane and Aumeisteri society as typical of the second part of the 18th century. The existence of specific social groups, particularism, and the implementation of colonial attitudes by the local nobility are also evident. The attitude of Wahr towards Latvian peasants shows the influence of Enlightenment, especially his efforts in education. The relationship between the parish and its minister incorporates evidence of a syncretic praxis with pagan and Christian traditions. In the light of political events of that particular time, i. e. peasant rebels in Vidzeme, the court case allows Wulf’s accusations to be treated as an opportunity to decrease the implementation of Enlightenment ideas, thus safeguarding the local nobility’s power. At the same time, the court case is a source of biographic, private, and daily life details. The broad range of the parish territory which was often challenging to navigate, the modest means of the minister, and distancing of the local nobility on the one hand, along with the influence of enlightenment ideas, on the other hand, are the most probable grounding for Wahr’s folkloristic and literary work.

Human faces with pointed ears: exploring lycanthropy in Early Anglo-Saxon England

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Lisa Brundle ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Information ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Human Element ◽  
Human Faces ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literate Society

In Early Anglo-Saxon England, Style I anthropomorphic and zoomorphic motifs played a key role in shaping identity and communicating ideas in a non-literate society. While the zoomorphic designs are well discussed, the meaning of the human element of Style I remains underexplored. This paper addresses this imbalance by examining a rare and overlooked group of anthropomorphic images: human faces with small, pointed ears depicted on fifth- to sixth-century female dress fittings recovered from archaeological contexts in eastern England. This paper identifies quadrupedal creatures as a stylistic parallel within the menagerie of Style I, including equine, lupine and porcine creatures. Although it is difficult to identify the character/s depicted with ears, there are notable affinities between the anthropomorphic masculine face with pointed ears and the ancient Germanic practice of warriors donning wolf and bear pelts. The facial motif with pointed ears appears on feminine metalwork within East Anglia, the historic region of the sixth-century Wuffingas (Little Wolf) dynasty – Wuffa being Wolf and the -ingas suffix meaning ‘people/descendants of Wuffa’. This paper explores this rare design with contextual information from pictorial and historical texts of shapeshifting and considers the relationship between this motif, the object, and the wearer/user.

scholarly journals FEATURES OF DISTRIBUTION OF SEISMIC ACTIVITY IN DIFFERENT REGIONS OF EARTH OVER PHASES OF THE 11-YEAR SOLAR CYCLE

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-101
Author(s):  
Valeriy Ruzhich ◽  
Elena Levina
Keyword(s):  
Solar Cycle ◽  
Seismic Activity ◽  
Time Parameter ◽  
Superposition Method ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
Activity Distribution ◽  
Middle Latitudes ◽  
Northern Regions ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

We discuss the relationship of solar activity with the seismicity of Earth and reasons for the differences in the results of studies of various authors. Using the epoch superposition method, we analyze the differences in seismic activity distribution over phases of the 11-year solar cycle for the whole world, hemispheres, sectors, latitudinal belts, and individual regions. The northeastern sector of Earth has been shown to make the main contribution to the planetary distribution of seismic activity over phases of the 11-year solar cycle. We have revealed a pattern in the distribution of seismic activity over latitudinal belts: the solar cycle phases, at which the main maximum of seismic activity occurs, increase with increasing latitude in both hemispheres. For some regions, the results may differ from the generalized results for Earth due to the influence of local geodynamic conditions during the destruction of the earth's crust. In middle latitudes, the maximum number of earthquakes is shifted to the later phases of the solar cycle from west to east, which was not found for the northern regions. We discuss possible reasons for various manifestations of solar-terrestrial relationships for different regions, taking into account their different structure and geodynamic development modes. The presence of pronounced maxima of the seismic activity distribution over the 11-year solar cycle phases allows us to use them for refining the “time” parameter in the medium-term prediction of dangerous earthquakes.

scholarly journals Medium-term influence of tetracyclines on total and specific microbial biomass in cultivated soils of Galicia (NW Spain)

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Santás-Miguel ◽  
M. Díaz-Raviña ◽  
A. Martín ◽  
E. García-Campos ◽  
A. Barreiro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Biomass ◽  
Bacterial Biomass ◽  
Similar Response ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
Gram Positive ◽  
Gram Negative ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Higher Doses ◽  
Tetracycline Group ◽  
Cultivated Soils

This work examines the results of a soil incubation experiment in the laboratory, under controlled conditions of humidity and temperature. The purpose was to determine the medium-term influence of the presence of antibiotics on the total and specific microbial biomass, determined by means of the phospholipid fatty acids (PLFAs) analysis (total microbial biomass, and specific fungal, bacterial, actinobacterial, Gram-negative bacterial and Gram-positive bacterial biomass), as well as the relationship between some of these groups (fungal biomass/bacterial biomass, Gram-negative-bacterial /Gram-positive bacterial). The experiment was performed with four different cultivated soils with a similar pH but different organic matter (OM) content, to which eight doses of three antibiotics of the tetracycline group (tetracycline, oxytetracycline and chlorotetracycline) were added. Microbial biomass measurements (total and specific groups) were performed after 42 days of incubation. As expected, the total and specific microbial biomass values were different in the four soils studied. Both the total and the specific microbial biomass showed a similar response to the presence of antibiotics, although in several cases the data were inconsistent and difficult to interpret. In general, in all soils the addition of chlorotetracycline and tetracycline slightly modified or increased, to a greater or lesser extent, the values of both total and specific microbial biomass, particularly at higher doses. However, in certain cases, biomass values decreased due to the addition of the highest dose of oxytetracycline. With regard to fungal/bacterial and Gram<sup>-</sup>bacteria/Gram<sup>+</sup> bacterial biomass ratios, values slightly changed after the addition of the antibiotics.

Congressional District Results

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-100
Author(s):  
Daron R. Shaw ◽  
John R. Petrocik
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Information ◽  
Demographic Variables ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Congressional District ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Congressional Districts ◽  
Age Profile ◽  
Democratic Vote ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Variables

There are demographic and political factors beyond turnout that matter for elections. Congressional districts are sufficiently small and homogeneous to permit an examination of turnout in the context of relevant political and demographic variables. That controlled analysis is presented here. For the two most recent decades, this chapter uses data sets that include relevant demographic and political variables for each of the congressional districts, including the ethnicity of the electorate, its age profile, and district income to account for the effect of socioeconomic status on the Democratic vote share. This contextual information presses the analysis one level further. An estimation of the relationship between turnout and Democratic vote is strengthened when other factors that are known to influence support for the Democrats are considered and included in the models.

scholarly journals The possibilities and limits of political contestation in times of ‘urban austerity’

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (9) ◽  
pp. 2087-2106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispian Fuller ◽  
Karen West
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
City Government ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Policy Area ◽  
Planning Policy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Logics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework in which to examine the social practices of contemporary austerity programmes in urban areas, including how these relate to different conceptions of crisis. Of current theoretical interest is the apparent ease with which these austerity measures have been accepted by urban governing agents. In order to advance these understandings we follow the recent post-structuralist discourse theory ‘logics’ approach of Glynos and Howarth (2007), focusing on the relationship between hegemony, political and social logics, and the subject whose identificatory practices are key to understanding the form, nature and stability of discursive settlements. In such thinking it is not only the formation of discourses and the mobilisation of rhetoric that are of interest, but also the manner in which the subjects of austerity identify with these. Through such an approach we examine the case of the regeneration/economic development and planning policy area in the city government of Birmingham (UK). In conclusion, we argue that the logics approach is a useful framework through which to examine how austerity has been uncontested in a city government, and the dynamics of acquiescence in relation to broader hegemonic discursive formations.

The Environment and Health: An Alternative Perspective

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Health Policy ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Environment And Health ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Policy Solutions

A theoretical approach which may be used to increase understanding of the dynamics of environmental and health policy is outlined. The approach deals with conceptualisations or 'ways of knowing', and, as such, tends to raise questions for debate, rather than advance policy solutions. First, it considers ways in which people have thought about and 'known' the world around them and traces how this has been important in shaping our attitudes and values in relation to it, especially in influencing environmental and health policy. Three aspects are considered: the legacy of Enlightenment and Romantic philosophical frameworks, the significance of underlying contradictory assumptions within these frameworks, and some of the implications of this for public policy. Second, it advances a specific theoretical approach ? the dialectic ? as a means of exploring the relationship between ways of thought and providing insight into the complex dynamics of policy making. It looks briefly at the example of sewage disposal policy before arguing that a dialectic approach may be applied to a range of environmental and health policy situations.

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