Becoming interested—the evolvement of research interest in case study research on sports

This article challenge research political assumptions of research interests as context specific phenomena predefined by researchers and others in case study research on sports. By adopting a Deleuzian perspective of materiality, the aim is to overturn academic power dimensions as well as anthropocentric focuses and instead explore how research interests emerge in case-assemblages. This is a radical shift that re-theorizes the production of research interests as co-produced capacities in researching bodies. The analysis is done by mapping territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing affects as well as molar and molecular affects. We use these affects to explore how our research interest evolved in a case study on a swimming event. We conclude by extending this critical exploration to the production of research interests in general and the exaggerated belief that research interests are attributes of specific human bodies (researchers) that precede studies.

The Third Wave of Liberation Theology. From the Catholic Enfant Terrible to Vehicle of Ecumenism, Interreligious and Social Dialog?

The past decade has seen a radical shift in the Church's stance toward liberation theology. At the same time, the complexity of its description has greatly increased. The issue has grown beyond South America and intra-ecclesiastical affairs. The multicultural and multireligious nature of liberation theology presents, on the one hand, a methodological difficulty and, on the other hand, an opportunity to look at faith and religion in different cultures and denominations through a new unifying key. According to the author, we are dealing with the “third wave” of liberation theology nowadays. Efforts are needed to utilize it more productive than the better known South American “infant terrible” of the Church.

Dancing in the Darkroom

Russian émigré Alexey Brodovitch, best known for leading a radical shift in magazine design in the United States during his twenty-four-year tenure (1934–58) as art director of Harper’s Bazaar, also pursued innovative practices in other fields of art, design, and education. His ballet photography, made during rehearsals and performances of touring dance companies in New York City from 1935 to 1938, explored unusual methods of capturing dancers in motion. Brodovitch’s images would eventually come to be celebrated for their unconventional approach, but at the time, Brodovitch was not sure of his direction. Recent archival discoveries suggest that Brodovitch reframed this graphic “problem” into curriculum for his classes at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, inspiring students to delve into a number of experimental photographic techniques and pioneering the teaching of such practices in American classrooms.

PlantPathMarks (PPMdb): an interactive hub for pathways-based markers in plant genomes

AbstractOver the past decade, the problem of finding an efficient gene-targeting marker set or signature for plant trait characterization has remained challenging. Many databases focusing on pathway mining have been released with one major deficiency, as they lack to develop marker sets that target only genes controlling a specific pathway or certain biological process. Herein, we present the PlantPathMarks database (PPMdb) as a comprehensive, web-based, user-friendly, and interactive hub for pathway-based markers in plant genomes. Based on our newly developed pathway gene set mining approach, two novel pathway-based marker systems called pathway gene-targeted markers (PGTMs) and pathway microsatellite-targeted markers (PMTMs) were developed as a novel class of annotation-based markers. In the PPMdb database, 2,690,742 pathway-based markers reflecting 9,894 marker panels were developed across 82 plant genomes. The markers include 691,555 PGTMs and 1,999,187 PMTMs. Across these genomes, 165,378 enzyme-coding genes were mapped against 126 KEGG reference pathway maps. PPMdb is furnished with three interactive visualization tools (Map Browse, JBrowse and Species Comparison) to visualize, map, and compare the developed markers over their KEGG reference pathway maps. All the stored marker panels can be freely downloaded. PPMdb promises to create a radical shift in the paradigm of the area of molecular marker research. The use of PPMdb as a mega-tool represents an impediment for non-bioinformatician plant scientists and breeders. PPMdb is freely available at http://ppmdb.easyomics.org.

Internet of Everything: A Global Solution to Digital world

The trend of the digital world is the transition from machine-to-machine, machine-to-people, and information technology to human technology with expanded digital to the maturity stage of the internet of everything. The (IoE) is the addition of connectivity and intelligence to every device in order to give them special functions. It embraces four components, namely, people, process, data, and things, and also four technical points of view which are smartness, interconnectivity, big data, and semantic interoperability to deploy the solutions that offer programmability, improved flexibility, and enhanced policy management by the various private and public sectors. The architecture of IoE includes applications, service platform, Internet, gateways, communications, and nodes and attract a security need that will be ubiquitous and able to protect the devices, applications, networks, data, users, and things that make up the Internet of Everything. These systems work collaboratively and smartly with each other and perform the desired task. IoE will be a radical shift to think on how we live, solve the problem, create value, secure environment to keep people, data, processes, and things under digital hamlet. The network capabilities will create new experiences, capabilities, and economic opportunities for individuals, businesses, and governments as a solution to the digital world. The internet of everything is a philosophy of one thing, which is everything.

The Trouble with Using Risk Assessment Instruments to Quantify the Chance of Future Offending

Risk assessments in carceral settings have proliferated in recent decades and are now prominent in numerous states and regions. A ubiquitous variety is actuarial risk assessment instruments that are used on children and adults to predict their future chance for misconduct (e.g., recidivism) in several vital decision points in carceral processing (e.g., pretrial confinement). These instruments rely on information about past behavior (e.g., criminal history) and an understanding of offending (e.g., antisocial personality) that is thought to be neutral, reliable, and enjoys predictive validity. However, it will be argued that when justice system personnel assess the chance of unwanted behavior in the future, several risk domains are differentially prevalent and more frequently experienced by some groups. Much of this disparity is caused by, or due to, forces external to those being assessed, for instance, inequitable social and economic conditions and inequitable decisions by justice personnel to arrest, charge, or sentence people of color. As such, risk assessment instruments inevitably and disproportionately mark some groups of people as a higher risk to violate rules, conditions, orders, or laws. Consequently, risk assessment instruments systematically disfavor disadvantage, and by inference, favor advantage, leading to the need for a radical shift in the taxonomy of classifying risk for future misconduct.

Is COVID-Era Assertiveness in Chinese Foreign Policy Novel?

China has responded to criticisms of its handling of the COVID outbreak by an assertive foreign policy style referred to as ‘wolf-warrior diplomacy’. This study argues that this does not represent a radical shift in Chinese foreign policy but exacerbates a pre-existing trend. We say that this assertiveness builds upon the twin pillars of ‘core interests and the unambiguous exposition of the ‘striving for achievement’ policy adopted by China since Xi Jinping’s elevation as the President in 2012. We outline China’s response to its competition with the United States, based on heightened nationalism and practiced through centralised decision making.

Postcolonial Thought and the Emergence of Global Architectural Histories

In the last quarter of the 20th century theories of the postcolonial were usually closely tied to the experience of British and French colonialism in a band of North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian colonies stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. During this period, Edward Said’s book Orientalism and the early work in subaltern studies both challenged the supposedly dispassionate character of Western scholarship on North Africa and Asia by demonstrating the degree to which it had been skewed by racial and class bias. Although architectural historians took more than a decade to fully absorb its implications, there are few humanities or social sciences disciplines that since the 1990s have been more thoroughly transformed by this once radical shift in perspective, which has changed how the architecture of almost all parts of the world is understood. Whether or not they fully engaged with the theories articulated in scholarship whose initial focus was the analysis of literature, in the case of Said, or of history, in that of subaltern studies, 21st-century architectural historians have paid unprecedented attention to the post-1500 architecture of the Global South, to colonial architecture and its relationship to economic exploitation, to post-independence architecture especially in relation to international modernisms, and to the impact that colonialism had on the architecture of the metropole. While the second and third of these had long been addressed in relation to British settler colonies, architectural history’s global turn meant that they could no longer be considered in isolation from new comprehensive histories of imperialism.

Deepening Not Departure: Xi Jinping's Governance of China's State-owned Economy

To what extent has governance of China's state-owned economy changed under Xi Jinping? Against the background of momentous shifts in the political arena since 2012, some observe a decisive departure in Xi's approach to managing state-owned enterprises (SOEs): towards tight centralized control by the Chinese Communist Party and away from gradual marketization. Analysing the main aims and methods of SOE governance over the last two decades, we find that SOE policy under Xi exhibits a deepening of pre-existing trends rather than a departure. First, the essential vision of SOE functions articulated under Xi is strikingly consistent with that of his predecessors. Second, his administration's approach to governing SOEs is not novel; it relies on established mechanisms of bureaucratic design, the cadre management system, Party organizations and campaigns. While Xi has amplified Party-centred tools of command and control, this appears to be an incremental rather than a radical shift in approach.