Women's representation and legislative committee appointments : the case of the Argentine provinces

Artículo originalOver the last two decades a large number of countries worldwide have adopted a gender quota to increase women’s political representation in the legislature. While quotas are designed to improve women’s representation in legislative positions, it is unclear if electing more women to legislative office is sufficient to accomplish institutional incorporation. Once women are elected to office, are they being incorporated into the legislative body and gaining their own political power, or are they being marginalized?Using an original data set that tracks committee appointments in the twenty-two Argentine legislative chambers over an eighteen-year period (from 1992-2009), I evaluate the extent to which women have access to powerful committee appointments –beyond traditional women’s domains committees– andhow women’s access to committee appointments changes over time. I hypothesize that while women may initially be sidelined, as they gain more experience in the legislature they may overcome institutional barriers and develop institutional knowledge that will better equip them to work within the system to gain access to valuable committee appointment

Making Space for Women: Explaining Citizen Support for Legislative Gender Quotas in Latin America

Gender quotas have been adopted in over a hundred countries in an effort to address gender disparities in national legislatures. Yet the determinants of citizen support for gender quota policies remain largely understudied. We develop a theory that emphasizes the impact of institutional performance and political values to explain citizen support for gender quotas and how these two factors differentially influence men’s and women’s quota support. Based on data for 24 Latin American countries, we find that citizens in countries with relatively good governance quality who express a strong preference for government involvement to improve citizens’ well-being show the highest levels of quota support. Further, whereas good governance increases quota support at a higher rate among men than women, preferences for government involvement exert a stronger influence on women’s support for quotas. Consequently, good governance quality reduces the gender gap in quota support by substantially increasing men’s support for quotas

Gender Quotas, Women’s Representation, and Legislative Diversity

Diversity in the characteristics of political leaders increases the quality of policy, perceptions of legitimacy, and accountability to constituents. Yet, increasing leaders’ diversity proves one of the most difficult challenges facing modern democracy. Efforts like gender quotas shift descriptive representation on the targeted characteristic, but critics argue that women selected via quotas are as homogenous as those selected via traditional methods. In this article, we theorize that quotas (re)conceptualize views of potential political leaders and transform party recruitment networks. In doing so, quotas increase the diversity of all leaders in office. We evaluate these claims with a new measure of diversity and a data set of over 1,700 legislators in Argentinian subnational government. We show that quotas increase the professional and personal diversity of women and men in office over time, suggesting that electoral gender quotas transform parties, political networks, and how women (and men) perceive political office

Assessment of the Presence of Women in Subnational Cabinets of Argentina (1992-2016)

¿Cuáles son los factores que explican la inclusión de las mujeres en puestos políticos subnacionales? La literatura convencional ha examinado las designaciones de mujeres en gabinetes nacionales, pero escasa atención se ha prestado a los gobiernos provinciales. Para abordar este vacío, adoptamos el enfoque de oferta y demanda. De este modo, utilizando una base de datos sobre las 24 jurisdicciones subnacionales argentinas desde 1992 a 2016, encontramos que los factores del lado de la demanda son más relevantes. Esto se explica, en primer término, ya que la probabilidad de que sean nombradas ministras aumenta junto al tamaño del gabinete, cuando hay una gobernadora mujer y, finalmente, si el gobernador pertenece a la coalición peronista. Por otro lado, se ven perjudicadas a medida que aumenta el contingente legislativo del partido del gobernadorWhat explains women’s inclusion in sub-national cabinet positions? While much of the existing literature has examined women’s appointments to national ministerial cabinets, scholars have not considered women’s access to provincial level cabinets. To address this gap, we adopt the conventional wisdom of a supply and demand approach to evaluate the findings at the subnational level. Using an original time series dataset from 1992-2016 across all 24 subnational jurisdictions, we find that demand factors are more relevant as the probability that women are appointed ministers increases when cabinets are larger, when there is a female governor, and when the governor belongs to a peronist coalition; conversely, a larger legislative contingent of the governor’s party decreases the probability of appointing women.Fil: Barnes, Tiffany D.. University of Kentucky; Estados UnidosFil: Ciocci Pardo, Tomás. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Departamento de Ciencia Política y Estudios Internacionales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Lopreite, Debora Cecilia. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentin

Towards an Intelligent Tutor for Mathematical Proofs

Computer-supported learning is an increasingly important form of study since it allows for independent learning and individualized instruction. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to developing an intelligent tutoring system for teaching textbook-style mathematical proofs. We characterize the particularities of the domain and discuss common ITS design models. Our approach is motivated by phenomena found in a corpus of tutorial dialogs that were collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. We show how an intelligent tutor for textbook-style mathematical proofs can be built on top of an adapted assertion-level proof assistant by reusing representations and proof search strategies originally developed for automated and interactive theorem proving. The resulting prototype was successfully evaluated on a corpus of tutorial dialogs and yields good results.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453

Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor Romidepsin Induces HIV Expression in CD4 T Cells from Patients on Suppressive Antiretroviral Therapy at Concentrations Achieved by Clinical Dosing

Persistent latent reservoir of replication-competent proviruses in memory CD4 T cells is a major obstacle to curing HIV infection. Pharmacological activation of HIV expression in latently infected cells is being explored as one of the strategies to deplete the latent HIV reservoir. In this study, we characterized the ability of romidepsin (RMD), a histone deacetylase inhibitor approved for the treatment of T-cell lymphomas, to activate the expression of latent HIV. In an in vitro T-cell model of HIV latency, RMD was the most potent inducer of HIV (EC50 = 4.5 nM) compared with vorinostat (VOR; EC50 = 3,950 nM) and other histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors in clinical development including panobinostat (PNB; EC50 = 10 nM). The HIV induction potencies of RMD, VOR, and PNB paralleled their inhibitory activities against multiple human HDAC isoenzymes. In both resting and memory CD4 T cells isolated from HIV-infected patients on suppressive combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), a 4-hour exposure to 40 nM RMD induced a mean 6-fold increase in intracellular HIV RNA levels, whereas a 24-hour treatment with 1 μM VOR resulted in 2- to 3-fold increases. RMD-induced intracellular HIV RNA expression persisted for 48 hours and correlated with sustained inhibition of cell-associated HDAC activity. By comparison, the induction of HIV RNA by VOR and PNB was transient and diminished after 24 hours. RMD also increased levels of extracellular HIV RNA and virions from both memory and resting CD4 T-cell cultures. The activation of HIV expression was observed at RMD concentrations below the drug plasma levels achieved by doses used in patients treated for T-cell lymphomas. In conclusion, RMD induces HIV expression ex vivo at concentrations that can be achieved clinically, indicating that the drug may reactivate latent HIV in patients on suppressive cART

Research priorities for the sustainability of coral-rich western Pacific seascapes

Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-ecological unpredictability and risk, scientists and policymakers working towards SDG 14 in the Asia–Pacific region need to know: (1) How are seascapes changing? (2) What can global society do about these changes? and (3) How can science and society together achieve sustainable seascape futures? Through a horizon scan, we identified nine emerging research priorities that clarify potential research contributions to marine sustainability in locations with high coral reef abundance. They include research on seascape geological and biological evolution and adaptation; elucidating drivers and mechanisms of change; understanding how seascape functions and services are produced, and how people depend on them; costs, benefits, and trade-offs to people in changing seascapes; improving seascape technologies and practices; learning to govern and manage seascapes for all; sustainable use, justice, and human well-being; bridging communities and epistemologies for innovative, equitable, and scale-crossing solutions; and informing resilient seascape futures through modelling and synthesis. Researchers can contribute to the sustainability of tropical seascapes by co-developing transdisciplinary understandings of people and ecosystems, emphasising the importance of equity and justice, and improving knowledge of key cross-scale and cross-level processes, feedbacks, and thresholds

Joint analysis of psychiatric disorders increases accuracy of risk prediction for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder

\ua9 2015 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Genetic risk prediction has several potential applications in medical research and clinical practice and could be used, for example, to stratify a heterogeneous population of patients by their predicted genetic risk. However, for polygenic traits, such as psychiatric disorders, the accuracy of risk prediction is low. Here we use a multivariate linear mixed model and apply multi-trait genomic best linear unbiased prediction for genetic risk prediction. This method exploits correlations between disorders and simultaneously evaluates individual risk for each disorder. We show that the multivariate approach significantly increases the prediction accuracy for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder in the discovery as well as in independent validation datasets. By grouping SNPs based on genome annotation and fitting multiple random effects, we show that the prediction accuracy could be further improved. The gain in prediction accuracy of the multivariate approach is equivalent to an increase in sample size of 34% for schizophrenia, 68% for bipolar disorder, and 76% for major depressive disorders using single trait models. Because our approach can be readily applied to any number of GWAS datasets of correlated traits, it is a flexible and powerful tool to maximize prediction accuracy. With current sample size, risk predictors are not useful in a clinical setting but already are a valuable research tool, for example in experimental designs comparing cases with high and low polygenic risk

Frontiers in attributing climate extremes and associated impacts

The field of extreme event attribution (EEA) has rapidly developed over the last two decades. Various methods have been developed and implemented, physical modelling capabilities have generally improved, the field of impact attribution has emerged, and assessments serve as a popular communication tool for conveying how climate change is influencing weather and climate events in the lived experience. However, a number of non-trivial challenges still remain that must be addressed by the community to secure further advancement of the field whilst ensuring scientific rigour and the appropriate use of attribution findings by stakeholders and associated applications. As part of a concept series commissioned by the World Climate Research Programme, this article discusses contemporary developments and challenges over six key domains relevant to EEA, and provides recommendations of where focus in the EEA field should be concentrated over the coming decade. These six domains are: (1) observations in the context of EEA; (2) extreme event definitions; (3) statistical methods; (4) physical modelling methods; (5) impact attribution; and (6) communication. Broadly, recommendations call for increased EEA assessments and capacity building, particularly for more vulnerable regions; contemporary guidelines for assessing the suitability of physical climate models; establishing best-practice methodologies for EEA on compound and record-shattering extremes; co-ordinated interdisciplinary engagement to develop scaffolding for impact attribution assessments and their suitability for use in broader applications; and increased and ongoing investment in EEA communication. To address these recommendations requires significant developments in multiple fields that either underpin (e.g., observations and monitoring; climate modelling) or are closely related to (e.g., compound and record-shattering events; climate impacts) EEA, as well as working consistently with experts outside of attribution and climate science more generally. However, if approached with investment, dedication, and coordination, tackling these challenges over the next decade will ensure robust EEA analysis, with tangible benefits to the broader global community