Assessing the Effect of Bilateral Trade on Health in the Asian Region: Does Digitization Matter?

A recurrent theme of the literature and wider public discourse is that trade and digitization are good for health as it promotes economic prosperity. The present study investigates the impact of trade and digitization on health in 12 selected Asian economies for the period 1991–2019. The study applied FMOLS and DOLS approaches for confirming the panel and economy-wise findings. The core findings of the panel FMOLS confirm the significant negative impact of trade and digitization on mortality rate, and trade and digitization have significantly positively contributed to life expectancy in selected Asian countries in the long run. The study deduces some imperative policy implications related to trade, digitization, and health, specifically for Asian economies.

Brainstem Circuits for Locomotion

Locomotion is a universal motor behavior that is expressed as the output of many integrated brain functions. Locomotion is organized at several levels of the nervous system, with brainstem circuits acting as the gate between brain areas regulating innate, emotional, or motivational locomotion and executive spinal circuits. Here we review recent advances on brainstem circuits involved in controlling locomotion. We describe how delineated command circuits govern the start, speed, stop, and steering of locomotion. We also discuss how these pathways interface between executive circuits in the spinal cord and diverse brain areas important for context-specific selection of locomotion. A recurrent theme is the need to establish a functional connectome to and from brainstem command circuits. Finally, we point to unresolved issues concerning the integrated function of locomotor control. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Volume 45 is July 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Expansion of Life

The story of life tells of relentless expansion from obscure beginnings to smother the earth in organized biochemistry. First came the prokaryotes, Bacteria and Archaea, followed some two billion years later by eukaryotic microbes. The latter pattern of organization underpins the rise of multicellular organisms, and their spectacular proliferation over the past 600 million years. There have been no fundamentally new kinds of organisms since, but the rise of mind culminating in humanity may signal a new phase in life’s history. Life has expanded in both quantity and quality, a gyre of mounting size, complexity, and functional capacity; in some elusive sense evolution is progressive. Multicellularity, the key invention, is not singular but happened multiple times in several eukaryotic lineages. The proliferation of higher organisms was probably enabled by increased energy flow, and dependent on the increase in atmospheric oxygen. It is studded with innovations in structure, physiology, and behavior, whose origin is a recurrent theme in evolutionary biology. Novelty is rooted in mutational events at the gene level, supplemented by the acquisition of genes from the outside by both gene transfer and symbiosis, and possibly by other avenues. Chance events were scrutinized and culled by natural selection. There appears to be no intrinsic progressive drive, but natural selection generally favors the more functional and better organized.

Turkey

Turkey is a country that has been the outcome of domestic and global political, economic, societal challenges over two thousand years of massive transformations, from the nomadic Asian steppe to the Mediterranean agrarian world, to Islam, and to modernity, as well as from the cosmopolitan Ottoman ruling class to the modern Turkish nationalist elite and, recently, globalization and identity politics. Turkey’s history has been marked by confusion about the Ottoman Empire, which has been viewed as too European/Roman to be considered distinctly Asian and too Eastern to be considered European. Its successful centuries-long rule in Southeastern Europe has been a matter of curiosity, as has its turbulent modernization, which started pretty soon after the French Revolution. Its heir, the Turkish Republic, has been a typical modern state in accordance with the European political geography. Yet another recurrent theme has perhaps been the curious paradox of strong state and low state capacity. No matter whether foreign or domestic policy, economy or politics, history or present-day, (self-)perceptions and studies have oscillated between a strong Turkish state and its lower capacity on such issues as institutions, identity cleavages, class, gender, regional inequalities, protracted poverty and deprivation, and so on. Turkey has often been thought of as a latecomer to modern development, and this tension of missing and catching universal development has often been a recurrent theme since the Ottoman modernization in the 1830s or the proud new Republic’s substantial reforms in the 1920s, and at a level ranging from everyday life conversations to the highest level of official discourse. The political elite have often failed in state-society relations, but the country has often been subject to discussions on democratic consolidation; the economy has often been unstable, but it is still a member of the G20. In sum, the Republic of Turkey has been but one manifestation of world history: a modern state heir to a universal agrarian empire that disappeared like its fellows, a swift authoritarian modernization in the interwar years whose heritage still occupy minds, a Cold War security state that has developed in America-centered global capitalism, a post–Cold War state of neoliberal globalization trying to find its way in the turbulences of world politics and economy, with a failed desire of leadership in its neighborhood. Accordingly, the more than eighty sources cited and annotated here guide the readers through various manifestations of Turkey within historical, political, cultural, societal, economic, and foreign policy (with focus on the regional and the European dimensions) contexts. All in all, Turkish society has always been able to cope with all the above-mentioned challenges and manifestations, but it has been often very difficult for those earning and enjoying life with their honest labor.

Gender-Based Violence in Moroccan Folktales

Men in Morocco have always employed many strategies whereby they have established their domination over women. Their patriarchal tendencies have proven incommensurable with the discourse of wisdom they purport to advocate. Accordingly, they have had to concoct elaborate stories and excuses to actualize their proclivities. Patriarchal hegemony has manifested itself in different ways and resulted in many phenomena, the most influential of which is undoubtedly violence against women that is predominant in the domestic sphere and the public sphere. This omnipresence accentuates through its portrayal in popular culture, including proverbs and folktales. Since folktales encapsulate a culture’s inherited customs, traditions, and values, this article’s primary concern is to investigate whether Moroccan folktales represent the logic dictated by Moroccan patriarchal institutions, aiming at reinforcing the oppression of women through violence. Specifically, the article seeks to address the representations of violence against women in folktales collected by Inea Bushnaq and Malika El Ouali Alami. The findings in this article prove that Moroccan folktales validate the Moroccan cultural norms that highlight the position of women as subordinate characters ready to follow the rules of patriarchal institutions. A recurrent theme throughout these tales is Gender-Based Violence. Thus, this article attempts to demonstrate the representations of GBV in Bushnaq’s and Alami’s tales.

The Ancient Civilizations

This chapter provides an interpretive synthesis of the current state of knowledge of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Central America from the time of earliest human habitation until European contact. In terms of cultural affinities, the northern portion of the area formed the southeastern periphery of the culture area of Mesoamerica, and the southern regions pertained to the Isthmo-Colombian area (or Intermediate Area). With its relatively high population density, the area is highly susceptible to volcanic, seismic, and climatic natural disasters such as droughts, tropical storms, flooding, and landslides, and the same was true in the past. A recurrent theme in the study of ancient Central American civilizations is the impact of natural disasters and societal responses to cataclysmic events.

Introduction: The First World War and its Aftermath: Literary Networks and Cultural Encounters

This introduction offers a survey of some important critical approaches to the ways in which the First World War and its aftermath have been studied, conceptualized, represented and commemorated. In particular, it notes recent scholarly interest in issues of gender, as well as a focus on widening the geographical range of the conflict beyond a dominant European paradigm. A recurrent theme is the emergence of new types of modernity in the post-war era, and the ways in which literature and the arts do not merely reflect that modernity, but actively shape and constitute it.

NEO: NEuro-Inspired Optimization—A Fractional Time Series Approach

Solving optimization problems is a recurrent theme across different fields, including large-scale machine learning systems and deep learning. Often in practical applications, we encounter objective functions where the Hessian is ill-conditioned, which precludes us from using optimization algorithms utilizing second-order information. In this paper, we propose to use fractional time series analysis methods that have successfully been used to model neurophysiological processes in order to circumvent this issue. In particular, the long memory property of fractional time series exhibiting non-exponential power-law decay of trajectories seems to model behavior associated with the local curvature of the objective function at a given point. Specifically, we propose a NEuro-inspired Optimization (NEO) method that leverages this behavior, which contrasts with the short memory characteristics of currently used methods (e.g., gradient descent and heavy-ball). We provide evidence of the efficacy of the proposed method on a wide variety of settings implicitly found in practice.

„Chleba naszego poprzedniego daj mi…”. Językowy obraz wiary w poezji Wiesławy Kwinto-Koczan

A recurrent theme in Wiesława Kwinto-Koczan’s poetry is faith, whose picture is shaped with the use of various stylistic devices. They have a poetic function; they glorify creation, add picturesqueness to the evoked elements of the natural world, and above all, they illustrate the motif of faith in its various aspects. The composition of the analyzed works that include the motif of faith resembles that of a prayer, which is emphasized by the use of apostrophes to God and Jesus Christ. The relation of man to nature and the Creation to the Creator is shown mainly in poems referring to Franciscan philosophy.

An Analysis on the Implementation of the Evidence-based PCOS Lifestyle Guideline: Recommendations from Women with PCOS

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrinological disorder affecting women of reproductive age, affecting 8–13% in this group. Women with PCOS are more likely to have excess BMI, which in turn exacerbates the symptoms of PCOS in these women. The latest evidence-based guideline recommends lifestyle management as the first-line treatment for PCOS. However, the implementation of this recommendation through health services faces a significant challenge. As part of the mapping of the implementation plan for lifestyle management in PCOS, citizen panels and semi-structured interviews were conducted to capture the voices of consumers. Women with PCOS expressed the need for multidisciplinary, integrated care as a recurrent theme. Other important considerations included health professionals who listen and are open to learning about PCOS, the empowerment of women to self-manage PCOS and the provision of peer support. Women with PCOS also expressed the key recommendation of focusing on practical skills when providing lifestyle advice. Within that, both individual and group lifestyle sessions were valued for privacy and peer support respectively and delivery by a dietitian is preferred. These recommendations by women with PCOS should be considered when developing the implementation plan for the PCOS lifestyle guideline.