Books on the topic 'Survival analysis studies'

In the sphere of the vast panorama of international studies on the family in the pre-industrial age, the 11th Study Week promoted by the Fondazione Datini explored the economic role played by the members of this fundamental group in the survival and evolution of society. Developing over the course of five centuries, and examining the peculiarities proper to the different geographical areas of Europe, the studies collected in this book analyse economic strategies aimed at generating and perpetuating financial and property fortunes, or even simply at protecting and preserving the family group. They also address the articulated economic functions which the various components performed within the family, and the manner in which such strategies integrated and interacted in a complex context of different entities and social brackets. Within this framework, the book presents not just a series of new studies on the individual family groups, but above all is intended to underscore the important collective function of the family, which played a significant role in the growth, stasis or decline of the societies of pre-industrial Europe.

This book presents a system of critical appraisal applicable to clinical, epidemiological and public health studies and to many other fields. It assumes no prior knowledge. The methods are relevant to students, practitioners and policymakers. The book shows how to assess if the results of one study or of many studies show a causal effect. The book discusses study designs: randomised and non-randomised trials, cohort studies, case-control studies, and surveys, showing the presentation of results including person-time and survival analysis, and issues in the selection of subjects. The system shows how to describe a study, how to detect and assess selection biases, observation bias, confounding, and chance variation, and how to assess internal validity and external validity (generalisability). Statistical methods are presented assuming no previous knowledge, and showing applications to each study design. Positive features of causation including strength, dose-response, and consistency are discussed. The book shows how to do systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and discusses publication bias. Systems of assessing all evidence are shown, leading to a general method of critical appraisal based on 20 key questions in five groups, which can be applied to any type of study or any topic. Six chapters show the application of this method to randomised trials, prospective and retrospective cohort studies, and case-control studies. An appendix summarises key statistical methods, each with a worked example. Each main chapter has self-test questions, with answers provided.

This chapter explains chance variation and statistical tests, including discrete and continuous measures, the concept of significance, one and two sided test, exact tests, precision and confidence limits. It shows tests of differences in proportions and chi-square tests, the Mantel-Haenszel test, and calculation of confidence limits, for simple tables and for stratified data. It covers heterogeneity tests, multiplicative and additive models, ordered exposure variables and tests of trend. It explains statistical tests for matched studies and in multivariate models. Multiple testing, the Bonferroni correction, issues of hypothesis testing and hypothesis generation, and subgroup analyses are discussed. Stopping rules and repeated testing in trials is covered. It explains how to calculate study power and the necessary size of the study. The chapter describes time to event analysis, including survival curves, product-limit and actuarial or life-table methods, and the calculation of confidence limits, relative survival ratios, the log rank test with control for confounding, and multivariate analysis.

The compelling reasons for palliative care continue to be better symptom management, better advanced care planning and medically appropriate goal setting, and transitions to hospice care. Other new-found compelling reasons include better survival with hospice care, better survival with concurrent palliative care, and lower cost to hospitals and government and insurance funders. In studies to date, hospice and palliative care have been associated with equal or better survival and equal or lower cost. This chapter defines the various types of cost and clinical studies (including cost minimization, cost-effectiveness, cost utility analysis, cost-benefit, cost avoidance) and discusses the available data about the economic challenges of palliative care, how to apply the available data, how to collect and present some useful and useable data, and new directions for research.

Charles Ortloff provides a new perspective on archaeological studies of the urban and agricultural water supply and distribution systems of the major ancient civilizations of South America, the Middle East, and South-East Asia, by using modern computer analysis methods to extract the true hydraulic/hydrological knowledge base available to these peoples. His many new revelations about the capabilities and innovations of ancient water engineers force us to re-evaluate what was known and practised in the hydraulic sciences in ancient times. Given our current concerns about global warming and its effect on economic stability, it is fascinating to observe how some ancient civilizations successfully coped with major climate change events by devising defensive agricultural survival strategies, while others, which did not innovate, failed to survive.

How animals behave is crucial to their survival and reproduction. Animal Behaviour: A Very Short Introduction discusses how animal behaviour has evolved, how behaviours develop in each individual (considering the interplay of genes, epigenetics, and experience), how we can understand animal societies, and how we can explain collective behaviour such as swirling flocks of starlings. The application of new molecular tools, such as DNA fingerprinting and genomics, and developments in computing and image analysis are causing a revolution in the study of animal behaviour. Combining these methods with field studies, it looks at mammals, butterflies, honeybees, fish, and birds, analysing what drives behaviour, and exploring instinct, learning, and culture.

The meta-analysis by McGeer investigates the benefits of parenteral nutritional support for patients with cancer undergoing chemotherapy. The study concluded that total parenteral nutrition (TPN) has a detrimental effect (decreased survival and poorer tumor response), with an increased infection risk but no significant effect on hematologic or gastrointestinal toxicity. The authors report a net harm with the use of TPN in patients undergoing chemotherapy and recommend that such interventions should be discouraged. This chapter describes the basics of the study, briefly reviews other relevant studies and information, gives a summary and discusses implications, and concludes with a relevant clinical case.

Habitat is crucial to the survival and reproduction of individual organisms as well as persistence of populations. As such, species-habitat relationships have long been studied, particularly in the field of wildlife ecology and to a lesser extent in the more encompassing discipline of ecology. The habitat requirements of a species largely determine its spatial distribution and abundance in nature. One way to recognize and appreciate the over-riding importance of habitat is to consider that a young organism must find and settle into the appropriate type of habitat as one of the first challenges of life. This process can be cast in a probabilistic framework and used to better understand the mechanisms behind habitat preferences and selection. There are at least six distinctly different statistical approaches to conducting a habitat analysis – that is, identifying and quantifying the environmental variables that a species most strongly associates with. These are (1) comparison among group means (e.g., ANOVA), (2) multiple linear regression, (3) multiple logistic regression, (4) classification and regression trees, (5) multivariate techniques (Principal Components Analysis and Discriminant Function Analysis), and (6) occupancy modelling. Each of these is lucidly explained and demonstrated by application to a hypothetical dataset. The strengths and weaknesses of each method are discussed. Given the ongoing biodiversity crisis largely caused by habitat destruction, there is a crucial and general need to better characterize and understand the habitat requirements of many different species, particularly those that are threatened and endangered.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 led to the fall of several heads of state, triggered wars in three countries, and threatened the survival of all eight monarchies in the Middle East. In the field of Middle East studies, these processes have led to a fundamental questioning of preexisting theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches. A more self-critical and self-aware research program now exists that seeks to trace the different political trajectories in the region. This chapter argues that comparative area studies (CAS) can further advance the study of the Arab uprisings by employing a broader analytic framework while remaining attentive to the regional context of the Middle East. While qualitative research remains mostly intra-regional, cross-regional comparisons are slowly emerging, utilizing insights from—and comparisons to—the fall of communism and European history. The conclusion considers the promises and pitfalls of CAS in the study of the Middle East and beyond.

As the cornerstone science of public health, evidence-based medicine, and comparative effectiveness research, a clear understanding of study designs is central to the study of epidemiology. Causal inference is increasingly being understood as the theoretical foundation underlying epidemiologic study designs and the science as a whole. This textbook takes a causal approach to traditional introductory epidemiology, through the organizing principle of study designs and the lens of modern causal inference approaches (potential outcomes, counterfactuals, identification conditions). The intended audience is first-year graduate students and advanced undergraduates in epidemiology and allied fields more broadly. Section I introduces measures of prevalence and incidence (survival curves, risks, rates, odds) and measures of contrast (differences, ratios), the fundamentals of causal inference, and principles of diagnostic testing, screening, and surveillance. Section II describes three key study designs through the lens of causal inference: randomized trials, prospective observational cohort studies, and case-control studies. For each, the author discusses logistics and conduct, advantages and disadvantages including biases, basic approaches to analysis, and briefly reviews several additional study designs. Section III extends material in previous sections, moving from concerns about internal validity (within a sample) to questions of external validity and population impact. This book provides new students with a rigorous foundation in epidemiologic methods and an introduction to methods and thinking in causal inference, serving as an excellent foundation for further study of the field.

This volume examines prehistoric copper mining in Europe, from the first use of the metal eight thousand years ago in the Balkans to its widespread adoption during the Bronze Age. The history of research is examined, as is the survival of this mining archaeology in different geological settings. There is information on the technological processes of mineral prospecting, ore extraction, and metal production, as well as the logistics and organization of this activity and its environmental impact. The analysis is broadened to consider the economic and societal context of prehistoric copper mining and the nature of the distinctive communities involved. The study is based on a review of field data and research produced over many decades by the collaboration of archaeologists and geologists in a number of different countries, and covers such famous mining centres as the Mitterberg in Austria, Kargaly in Russia, the Great Orme in Wales, and those in Cyprus, from where the name of this metal derives. These regional studies are brought together for the first time to present a remarkable story of human endeavour and innovation, which marks a new stage in the mastery of our natural resources.

This book looks at the threats that rulers face from their own armed forces. Can they make their regimes impervious to coups? This book shows that how leaders organize their coercive institutions has a profound effect on the survival of their regimes. When rulers use presidential guards, militarized police, and militia to counterbalance the regular military, efforts to oust them from power via coups d'état are less likely to succeed. Even as counterbalancing helps to prevent successful interventions, however, the resentment that it generates within the regular military can provoke new coup attempts. And because counterbalancing changes how soldiers and police perceive the costs and benefits of a successful overthrow, it can create incentives for protracted fighting that result in the escalation of a coup into full-blown civil war. Drawing on an original dataset of state security forces in 110 countries over a span of fifty years, as well as case studies of coup attempts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, the book sheds light on how counterbalancing affects regime survival. Understanding the dynamics of counterbalancing, the book shows, can help analysts predict when coups will occur, whether they will succeed, and how violent they are likely to be. The arguments and evidence in this book suggest that while counterbalancing may prevent successful coups, it is a risky strategy to pursue — and one that may weaken regimes in the long term.

The protection of soil and the sustainable management of soils is a precondition for sustainable development, food security and the survival of humankind. Africa is the continent with the least land degradation. Yet, the pressure on soils is already enormous and continuously increasing due to a range of factors, including poverty, over-exploitation, population growth and climate change. Drivers of unsustainable soil management include overstocking, overgrazing, water erosion, landslides, and over-application of agro-chemicals. In light of this, the underlying legal, societal and political conditions have been comparatively analysed in “African Soil Protection Law”. Distinct country studies from Kenya, Cameroon and Zambia serve to comparatively expose the serious impediments of soil in Africa. While mapping out options for model legislation for improved sustainable soil management in Africa, the publication addresses intertwined, interdisciplinary and complex questions pertaining to soils, which may also be of comparative interest to other continents and jurisdictions.

Archaeological evidence of medieval production is mostly in the form of residues rather than of workshops, although pits and hearths have been excavated. Apart from bone and antler, few organic products survive, unlike metal objects. This chapter considers the evidence for agricultural processing and production, textiles, metal-working, carcass products such as tanning, shoe-making, and bone-working, as well as stone, mineral (e.g. salt), and the more familiar clay products of pottery and tile production. Most recent developments have been in analyses, distribution studies, and considerations of the financial values and personal meanings of medieval objects. Most workshops were small scale and often temporary; only the cloth industry had the capacity to raise the capital required for substantial investment.

Abstract Less academic: Terrorist, rebel, and insurgent groups face myriad challenges. Between state repression and fears of infiltration and defeat, it is no surprise they are prone to infighting, instability, and division. And these divisions are meaningful: one led the Islamic State to break from Al Qaeda, and others have perpetually plagued the Irish Republican Army, Palestinian militants, and many more. This book analyzes how armed groups fracture and how splinter groups behave. It is the first to look inside these organizations and to understand the specific disagreements leading fractures to occur. It shows how disagreements are commonly driven by disputes over ideology, leadership, and strategy. Drawing on research from organizational studies to social psychology, and by leveraging analogies from business firms to religious sects, the book shows how these disputes uniquely shape the behavior and survivability of breakaway splinters. When motivated by single, shared disagreement, splinters tend to exhibit higher cohesion, clearer objectives, and greater survivability. And when motivated by strategy in particular, splinters typically attract the most hardline operatives and subsequently adopt increasingly lethal tactics and strategies. The book tests these claims comprehensively. Statistical analyses reveal a clear link between internal disagreements and splinter behavior across countries and over time. Case studies of republican militants in Northern Ireland, Basque militants in Spain, and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq then confirm these trends. As a result, this book demystifies a complex albeit common event with ramifications for counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and understanding increasingly fragmented conflicts around the globe. More academic: Armed groups are tenuous organizations. They face difficult environments and uncertain challenges that make instability, division, and organizational fractures common. But when fractures occur, what explains how breakaway groups behave? Drawing on social and group dynamics that afflict everything from political parties to religious sects, this book shows how a splinter group’s trajectory is not predetermined, but is in fact shaped by its motivations for breaking away. Splinters emerging from a single, shared internal disagreement form with clear organizational objectives that attract a highly cohesive base of recruits. This lowers the odds of defection and infiltration, making it easier to decentralize operations and ultimately survive. Armed groups also break apart for a variety of reasons. Ideological, strategic, and leadership disputes each uniquely shape the goals and membership composition of breakaway groups. Strategic disagreements create the most radical splinters since they usually attract dissatisfied hardliners away from the parent. These claims are tested using a mixed-methods research design. Statistical analyses of a new data set reveal strong support for the theory across countries and over time, while in-depth case studies of republican militants in Northern Ireland, Basque militants in Spain, and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq confirm the theory’s more specific implications. As a result, this book refocuses attention away from external dynamics, like state repression and conciliation, and towards internal dynamics that can better explain how armed groups fragment, operate, and survive.

Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of: incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. Possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in cases studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural: Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential – across genres, periods and places – for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking.

This chapter applies the conclusions of the previous chapters to two cases of controversial belief: atheistic belief and the denial of psychic phenomena (psi). In both cases, in line with so-called “phenomenal conservatism,” the felt obviousness—to the denier—of the non-existence of what they’re denying figures large in their knowledge, if they have it. In both cases, the deniers’ knowledge runs up counterarguments—for example, the fine tuning argument or meta-analyses of a number of controlled studies that purport to demonstrate the existence of psychic phenomena. But these arguments need not destroy knowledge, even if the atheist or psi-denier can’t figure out what’s wrong with those arguments. Knowledge can survive precisely because some atheists and psi-deniers lack sufficient methodological expertise, though it’s crucial that there is no consensus of trustworthy experts offering testimony that the counterarguments are sound.

This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. It argues that filmmakers and spectators actively define and reconfigure Hong Kong cinema and media by fostering them as a public sphere, where contesting affects associated with these political lives’ shifting extraterritorial conditions and positions can be negotiated. Based on a combination of archival research, industrial studies, textual analysis and media and political philosophies, Extraterritoriality studies how creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewrite and reconfigure the way Hong Kong cinema and media are defined and located. These stylistically and political diverse works and practices seek – in their respective manners – to foster new ways to live with Hong Kongers’ double occupancy and double ostracisation that constantly deindividuate, desubjectivise, and deautonomise them, and how they can survive in their constant state of exception.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies in the period to 2030, the 17 goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas, such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace and justice. Assessed against common agreed targets and indicators, the goals should facilitate inter-governmental cooperation and the development of regional and even global development strategies. However, each goal presents considerable challenges in terms of collecting and analysing relevant data and producing the statistics needed to measure progress. Most governments in lower resourced countries simply do not yet have the systems and controls in place to produce high quality, reliable data and statistics, and it is questionable whether the quality and integrity of the available information is adequate to support meaningful decisions and set direction for the future. There are substantial implications: where progress cannot be measured accurately because of inadequate or flawed statistics, the result can be misguided decisions, doubts about achievement of the goals and significant wasted resources. Getting statistics ‘right’ depends upon the quality and integrity of the data used to produce them and on the quality of the processes for collecting, manipulating and analysing the data. Without a documentary records as evidence of how the data were gathered and analysed or how statistics were produced and disseminated, it is not possible to confirm that the statistics are complete, accurate and relevant. Various global organisations do recognise the importance of high quality data and statistics for measuring the SDG indicators reliably, but there has been little attention to the role of records in providing the evidence needed to trust the data and statistics. There is, moreover, a lack of awareness that digital information simply will not survive without policies and procedures to manage and preserve it through time. As a result, digital data, statistics and records are being lost regularly on a large scale, particularly in lower resource countries, where the structures needed to protect and preserve them are not yet in place. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the substantial challenges for assembling reliable data and statistics to address pressing development challenges, particularly in Africa. Hopefully, by highlighting the enormous potential value of creating and using high quality data, statistics and records as an interconnected resource and describing how this can be achieved, the book will contribute to defining meaningful and realistic global and national development policies in the critical period to 2030.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

Any public debate about air pollution starts with the premise that air pollution cannot be good for you, so we should have less of it. However, it is much more difficult to determine how much is dangerous, and even more difficult to decide how much we are willing to pay for improvements in measured air pollution. Recent UK estimates suggest that fine particulate pollution causes about 6500 deaths per year, although it is not clear how many years of life are lost as a result. Some deaths may just be brought forward by a few days or weeks, while others may be truly premature. Globally, household pollution from cooking fuels may cause up to two million premature deaths per year in the developing world. The hazards of black smoke air pollution have been known since antiquity. The first descriptions of deaths caused by air pollution are those recorded after the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. In modern times, the infamous smogs of the early twentieth century in Belgium and London were clearly shown to trigger deaths in people with chronic bronchitis and heart disease. In mechanistic terms, black smoke and sulphur dioxide generated from industrial processes and domestic coal burning cause airway inflammation, exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, and consequent heart failure. Epidemiological analysis has confirmed that the deaths included both those who were likely to have died soon anyway and those who might well have survived for months or years if the pollution event had not occurred. Clean air legislation has dramatically reduced the levels of these traditional pollutants in the West, although these pollutants are still important in China, and smoke from solid cooking fuel continues to take a heavy toll amongst women in less developed parts of the world. New forms of air pollution have emerged, principally due to the increase in motor vehicle traffic since the 1950s. The combination of fine particulates and ground-level ozone causes ‘summer smogs’ which intensify over cities during summer periods of high barometric pressure. In Los Angeles and Mexico City, ozone concentrations commonly reach levels which are associated with adverse respiratory effects in normal and asthmatic subjects. Ozone directly affects the airways, causing reduced inspiratory capacity. This effect is more marked in patients with asthma and is clinically important, since epidemiological studies have found linear associations between ozone concentrations and admission rates for asthma and related respiratory diseases. Ozone induces an acute neutrophilic inflammatory response in both human and animal airways, together with release of chemokines (e.g. interleukin 8 and growth-related oncogene-alpha). Nitrogen oxides have less direct effect on human airways, but they increase the response to allergen challenge in patients with atopic asthma. Nitrogen oxide exposure also increases the risk of becoming ill after exposure to influenza. Alveolar macrophages are less able to inactivate influenza viruses and this leads to an increased probability of infection after experimental exposure to influenza. In the last two decades, major concerns have been raised about the effects of fine particulates. An association between fine particulate levels and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity was first reported in 1993 and has since been confirmed in several other countries. Globally, about 90% of airborne particles are formed naturally, from sea spray, dust storms, volcanoes, and burning grass and forests. Human activity accounts for about 10% of aerosols (in terms of mass). This comes from transport, power stations, and various industrial processes. Diesel exhaust is the principal source of fine particulate pollution in Europe, while sea spray is the principal source in California, and agricultural activity is a major contributor in inland areas of the US. Dust storms are important sources in the Sahara, the Middle East, and parts of China. The mechanism of adverse health effects remains unclear but, unlike the case for ozone and nitrogen oxides, there is no safe threshold for the health effects of particulates. Since the 1990s, tax measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions have led to a rapid rise in the proportion of new cars with diesel engines. In the UK, this rose from 4% in 1990 to one-third of new cars in 2004 while, in France, over half of new vehicles have diesel engines. Diesel exhaust particles may increase the risk of sensitization to airborne allergens and cause airways inflammation both in vitro and in vivo. Extensive epidemiological work has confirmed that there is an association between increased exposure to environmental fine particulates and death from cardiovascular causes. Various mechanisms have been proposed: cardiac rhythm disturbance seems the most likely at present. It has also been proposed that high numbers of ultrafine particles may cause alveolar inflammation which then exacerbates preexisting cardiac and pulmonary disease. In support of this hypothesis, the metal content of ultrafine particles induces oxidative stress when alveolar macrophages are exposed to particles in vitro. While this is a plausible mechanism, in epidemiological studies it is difficult to separate the effects of ultrafine particles from those of other traffic-related pollutants.

The aim of the paper was to determine the influence of root systems of chosen tree species found in the Polish Flysch Carpathians on the increase of soil shear strength (root cohesion) in terms of slope stability. The paper's goal was achieved through comprehensive tests on root systems of eight relatively common in the Polish Flysch Carpathians tree species. The tests that were carried out included field work, laboratory work and analytical calculations. As part of the field work, the root area ratio (A IA) of the roots was determined using the method of profiling the walls of the trench at a distance of about 1.0 m from the tree trunk. The width of the. trenches was about 1.0 m, and their depth depended on the ground conditions and ranged from 0.6 to 1.0 m below the ground level. After preparing the walls of the trench, the profile was divided into vertical layers with a height of 0.1 m, within which root diameters were measured. Roots with diameters from 1 to 10 mm were taken into consideration in root area ratio calculations in accordance with the generally accepted methodology for this type of tests. These measurements were made in Biegnik (silver fir), Ropica Polska (silver birch, black locust) and Szymbark (silver birch, European beech, European hornbeam, silver fir, sycamore maple, Scots pine, European spruce) located near Gorlice (The Low Beskids) in areas with unplanned forest management. In case of each tested tree species the samples of roots were taken, transported to the laboratory and then saturated with water for at least one day. Before testing the samples were obtained from the water and stretched in a. tensile testing machine in order to determine their tensile strength and flexibility. In general, over 2200 root samples were tested. The results of tests on root area ratio of root systems and their tensile strength were used to determine the value of increase in shear strength of the soils, called root cohesion. To this purpose a classic Wu-Waldron calculation model was used as well as two types of bundle models, the so called static model (Fiber Bundle Model — FIRM, FBM2, FBM3) and the deformation model (Root Bundle Model— RBM1, RBM2, mRBM1) that differ in terms of the assumptions concerning the way the tensile force is distributed to the roots as well as the range of parameters taken into account during calculations. The stability analysis of 8 landslides in forest areas of Cicikowicleie and Wignickie Foothills was a form of verification of relevance of the obtained calculation results. The results of tests on root area ratio in the profile showed that, as expected, the number of roots in the soil profile and their ApIA values are very variable. It was shown that the values of the root area ratio of the tested tree species with a diameter 1-10 ram are a maximum of 0.8% close to the surface of the ground and they decrease along with the depth reaching the values at least one order of magnitude lower than close to the surface at the depth 0.5-1.0 m below the ground level. Average values of the root area ratio within the soil profile were from 0.05 to 0.13% adequately for Scots pine and European beech. The measured values of the root area ratio are relatively low in relation to the values of this parameter given in literature, which is probably connected with great cohesiveness of the soils and the fact that there were a lot of rock fragments in the soil, where the tests were carried out. Calculation results of the Gale-Grigal function indicate that a distribution of roots in the soil profile is similar for the tested species, apart from the silver fir from Bie§nik and European hornbeam. Considering the number of roots, their distribution in the soil profile and the root area ratio it appears that — considering slope stability — the root systems of European beech and black locust are the most optimal, which coincides with tests results given in literature. The results of tensile strength tests showed that the roots of the tested tree species have different tensile strength. The roots of European beech and European hornbeam had high tensile strength, whereas the roots of conifers and silver birch in deciduous trees — low. The analysis of test results also showed that the roots of the studied tree species are characterized by high variability of mechanical properties. The values Of shear strength increase are mainly related to the number and size (diameter) of the roots in the soil profile as well as their tensile strength and pullout resistance, although they can also result from the used calculation method (calculation model). The tests showed that the distribution of roots in the soil and their tensile strength are characterized by large variability, which allows the conclusion that using typical geotechnical calculations, which take into consideration the role of root systems is exposed to a high risk of overestimating their influence on the soil reinforcement. hence, while determining or assuming the increase in shear strength of soil reinforced with roots (root cohesion) for design calculations, a conservative (careful) approach that includes the most unfavourable values of this parameter should be used. Tests showed that the values of shear strength increase of the soil reinforced with roots calculated using Wu-Waldron model in extreme cases are three times higher than the values calculated using bundle models. In general, the most conservative calculation results of the shear strength increase were obtained using deformation bundle models: RBM2 (RBMw) or mRBM1. RBM2 model considers the variability of strength characteristics of soils described by Weibull survival function and in most cases gives the lowest values of the shear strength increase, which usually constitute 50% of the values of shear strength increase determined using classic Wu-Waldron model. Whereas the second model (mRBM1.) considers averaged values of roots strength parameters as well as the possibility that two main mechanism of destruction of a root bundle - rupture and pulling out - can occur at the same. time. The values of shear strength increase calculated using this model were the lowest in case of beech and hornbeam roots, which had high tensile strength. It indicates that in the surface part of the profile (down to 0.2 m below the ground level), primarily in case of deciduous trees, the main mechanism of failure of the root bundle will be pulling out. However, this model requires the knowledge of a much greater number of geometrical parameters of roots and geotechnical parameters of soil, and additionally it is very sensitive to input data. Therefore, it seems practical to use the RBM2 model to assess the influence of roots on the soil shear strength increase, and in order to obtain safe results of calculations in the surface part of the profile, the Weibull shape coefficient equal to 1.0 can be assumed. On the other hand, the Wu-Waldron model can be used for the initial assessment of the shear strength increase of soil reinforced with roots in the situation, where the deformation properties of the root system and its interaction with the soil are not considered, although the values of the shear strength increase calculated using this model should be corrected and reduced by half. Test results indicate that in terms of slope stability the root systems of beech and hornbeam have the most favourable properties - their maximum effect of soil reinforcement in the profile to the depth of 0.5 m does not usually exceed 30 kPa, and to the depth of 1 m - 20 kPa. The root systems of conifers have the least impact on the slope reinforcement, usually increasing the soil shear strength by less than 5 kPa. These values coincide to a large extent with the range of shear strength increase obtained from the direct shear test as well as results of stability analysis given in literature and carried out as part of this work. The analysis of the literature indicates that the methods of measuring tree's root systems as well as their interpretation are very different, which often limits the possibilities of comparing test results. This indicates the need to systematize this type of tests and for this purpose a root distribution model (RDM) can be used, which can be integrated with any deformation bundle model (RBM). A combination of these two calculation models allows the range of soil reinforcement around trees to be determined and this information might be used in practice, while planning bioengineering procedures in areas exposed to surface mass movements. The functionality of this solution can be increased by considering the dynamics of plant develop¬ment in the calculations. This, however, requires conducting this type of research in order to obtain more data.