Abstract Background Patients with very early onset inflammatory bowel disease (VEOIBD) often present with severe disease course and require escalation to biologics. Exclusion of pediatric patients from clinical trials lead to scarcity of efficacy and safety data on TNFa antagonists therapy in VEOIBD. We aimed to assess safety and efficacy of adalimumab (ADM) induction and maintenance therapy in patients with VEOIBD. Methods This was a retrospective study involving 31 sites affiliated with the IBD Porto Group and IBD Interest Group of ESPGHAN, as well as centers in North America. Demographic, clinical and laboratory data were collected from patients diagnosed with VEOIBD who commenced ADM therapy before 6 years of age between 2014 to 2023. Results We identified 77 VEOIBD patients with a median age at diagnosis of 2.6 years (interquartile range [IQR] 1.3–4.1), of whom 29 (38%) were diagnosed at age <2 years (infantile-onset IBD). Thirty-seven (48%) patients were diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, 25 (32%) with ulcerative colitis and 15 (20%) with IBD-unclassified. Five (9%) from those genetically tested were diagnosed with monogenic disease. Median age at initiation of ADM was 4.2 (IQR 2.8-5.1) years. Forty-four patients (57%) were Infliximab experienced, discontinued mainly due to pharmacokinetic (20 [45%]) and pharmacodynamic (13 [30%]) failures. At initiation of ADM, concomitant corticosteroids and immunomodulators were given in 37 (48%) and 29 (37%) patients, respectively. The median wPCDAI and PUCAI scores at baseline were 45 [37.5-60] and 45 [27.5-57.5], respectively. Median follow-up time was 85.4 (IQR 40.4-139.2) weeks. While patients with CD showed significant clinical improvement after 26 and 52 weeks (PCDAI decreased to 10 [0-33.4], p<0.001, and 10 [0-25], p<0.05, respectively), No significant improvement in PUCAI score was observed among patients with UC (Figure 1). Inflammatory markers and calprotectin showed a gradual decrease over time (Figure 1). Weight and Height Z scores did not differ significantly throughout the follow-up period. ADM discontinuation rates after 1 and 3 years were 40% and 65%, respectively, mainly due to primary non-response (14, 29.8%) and loss of response (19, 40.4%). Drug discontinuation rates were not dependent on concomitant immunomodulator treatment or ADM initiation or on age (less or above 3 years). Four patients (5.2%) developed severe infections, including a patient with TTC7A mutation who died following septic shock. Conclusion Adalimumab therapy was relatively safe and seemed more effective in young patients with Crohn’s disease, but not in those with ulcerative colitis. Durability was relatively low due to high rates of primary non-response and secondary loss of response.

Corrupt elites steal money from governments, distort elections, evade taxes, and capture privileges through backroom deals. Yet, the fight against corruption is not always what it seems, ending too often in the rise of neoliberal authoritarians. Drawing on the case of Brazil, the current article argues that the affinity between anti-corruption and neoliberal authoritarianism is due to 1) an upper-class alliance among rising and declining factions of capital; 2) middle-class and consumer support mobilized around anti-elite, anti-state, and pro-majoritarian narratives; 3) a political alliance of neoliberal, oligarchic, and authoritarian elites, and 4) actors supposedly operating above and outside domestic politics such as the judiciary, media, military, and foreign interests.

Unmedicated mildly hypertensive Type A men were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: stress management intervention training (N = 15), Type A management (N = 15), and delayed Type A management intervention. Significantly greater reductions in blood pressure at rest and during the Type A structured interview were found following the active interventions than during the minimal treatment control period of the delayed intervention. Type A management was more successful in changing a number of Type A behaviours, including anger, hostility and global Type A behaviour. Changes on measures of anger-in, -out, hostility, and SI ratings of Type A behaviour were associated with changes in systolic and diastolic blood pressure reactivity during interview.

This review of Jörg Nowak’s Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India highlights the book’s ambition and hopefulness. It ambitiously explores an area of labor- and social-movement theory in which powerful minds have offered insights but important leaps forward are necessary to make sense of the current moment. The book is additionally ambitious because it tackles recent phenomena in two disparate, enormously complex, and influential countries: Brazil and India. The book is hopeful in its identification of patterns and openings, seen through the lens of mass strikes in these countries, by which working classes might lead a transition from the current “long depression” into a more socially just and equitable socialist future.

Decolonizing development seeks to replace the binary and hierarchical relations between North and South that combine racism, colonialism, and capitalism. Fortunately, embryonic decolonizing alternatives already exist, and these reflect authentic knowledge from below, built on the unevenness of peripheral experiences with development and resistance. At the heart of decolonization is a relational view of community interactions with the natural world and the global system. Decolonization draws on cultural traditions and class struggles specific to each context to outline an alternative modernity that combines 1) the progress of modernity with the relational worldviews of the South and 2) productive relations that do not depend on the hyper-exploitation of land and labor. The resulting combination is forward-looking and liberatory, as it makes possible an alternative future that liberates not only those in the South, but also those in the North.

Mobility restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic ostensibly prevented the public from transmitting the disease in public places, but they also hampered outdoor recreation, despite the importance of blue-green spaces (e.g., parks and natural areas) for physical and mental health. We assess whether restrictions on human movement, particularly in blue-green spaces, affected the transmission of COVID-19. Our assessment uses a spatially resolved dataset of COVID-19 case numbers for 848 administrative units across 153 countries during the first year of the pandemic (February 2020 to February 2021). We measure mobility in blue-green spaces with planetary-scale aggregate and anonymized mobility flows derived from mobile phone tracking data. We then use machine learning forecast models and linear mixed-effects models to explore predictors of COVID-19 growth rates. After controlling for a number of environmental factors, we find no evidence that increased visits to blue-green space increase COVID-19 transmission. By contrast, increases in the total mobility and relaxation of other non-pharmaceutical interventions such as containment and closure policies predict greater transmission. Ultraviolet radiation stands out as the strongest environmental mitigant of COVID-19 spread, while temperature, humidity, wind speed, and ambient air pollution have little to no effect. Taken together, our analyses produce little evidence to support public health policies that restrict citizens from outdoor mobility in blue-green spaces, which corroborates experimental studies showing low risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission. However, we acknowledge and discuss some of the challenges of big data approaches to ecological regression analyses such as this, and outline promising directions and opportunities for future research.

Disfluency detection models now approach high accuracy on English text. However, little exploration has been done in improving the size and inference time of the model. At the same time, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are moving from server-side inference to local, on-device inference. Supporting models in the transcription pipeline (like disfluency detection) must follow suit. In this work we concentrate on the disfluency detection task, focusing on small, fast, on-device models based on the BERT architecture. We demonstrate it is possible to train disfluency detection models as small as 1.3 MiB, while retaining high performance. We build on previous work that showed the benefit of data augmentation approaches such as self-training. Then, we evaluate the effect of domain mismatch between conversational and written text on model performance. We find that domain adaptation and data augmentation strategies have a more pronounced effect on these smaller models, as compared to conventional BERT models.

Drawing on comparative resource curse literature and American literature on the determinants of corruption, we argue that the impact of natural resource extraction on corruption outcomes is state-dependent. That is, in environments where corruption is already high, natural resource windfalls allow political actors and economic elites to take advantage of state brokerage, further increasing corruption. However, in previously less-corrupt states, increased natural resource extraction will not induce corruption. We rely on hierarchical linear models to interpret federal corruption convictions data for the fifty American states between 1976 and 2012 and employ generalized method of moments estimators to account for potential endogeneity. The findings are robust to alternative specifications and have implications for the management of new resource extraction opportunities.

Changes to citizenship regimes help explain differences in tax structure in Brazil and India. Citizenship regimes change by mobilizing new collective identities, articulating substantive demands, and institutionalizing group linkages to public life. When excluded groups mobilize and gain access, they provide new sources of state legitimacy, allowing states to expand their capacity, for example in tax. Changes to tax can be evaluated in terms of levels of revenues, degrees of progressivity, and the universality of application of tax across sectors and regions. Since the 1970s in Brazil and India, excluded groups gained access to citizenship regimes and deepened democracy, but differences in collective identities, demands, and mechanisms of linkage played out in differences in state capacity.

As rates of new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases decline across Europe owing to nonpharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing policies and lockdown measures, countries require guidance on how to ease restrictions while minimizing the risk of resurgent outbreaks. We use mobility and case data to quantify how coordinated exit strategies could delay continental resurgence and limit community transmission of COVID-19. We find that a resurgent continental epidemic could occur as many as 5 weeks earlier when well-connected countries with stringent existing interventions end their interventions prematurely. Further, we find that appropriate coordination can greatly improve the likelihood of eliminating community transmission throughout Europe. In particular, synchronizing intermittent lockdowns across Europe means that half as many lockdown periods would be required to end continent-wide community transmission.

This article uses prototypes and continuous dimensions to place social entrepreneurship in relation to other organizational forms. This approach is more fruitful than classical attempts to stipulate essential characteristics and establish boundaries. A prototype and continuous dimension approach allows consideration of the way social entrepreneurship functions similarly to and differently from related concepts, such as traditional entrepreneurship, public social services, and collectivism. These categories can be distinguished according to the degree to which control over the way value is created, allocated, and distributed occurs socially or entrepreneurially. This approach offers the additional advantage of making the concept more precise, as subdimensions clarify the relationship to practices such as volunteerism and theories such as antidevelopment. By mapping the network of organizational forms in which social entrepreneurship can be located, we can focus on the viability and advisability of different ways of solving social problems.

In Brazil, a cross-class coalition of popular sector and middleclass groups have won incorporation and provided support to a high-capacity tax regime. A cross-class alliance was produced by specific strategies and sequences as groups clamored for access and brought down the military regime in the 1980s. The group consolidated their alliance in opposition to neoliberal stabilization in the 1990s and institutionalized their participation in politics in the neo-developmentalist strategies of the 2000s. This trajectory of incorporation provided support for an ambitious effort to raise tax capacity, but it could not overcome the institutional legacies of previous patterns of incorporation that permitted economic and political elites to preserve elements of particularism and regressivity in the tax system.

Taxation in postcommunist states is at least doubly peculiar: States must learn to tax wealth in private hands that barely existed previously, and societies must learn to relate to tax institutions that barely existed previously. Gerald Easter has provided a comprehensively researched and grippingly written account of how these twin tests were met in Poland and Russia. To summarize the argument of this book, Polish state actors encountered a private sector of petty capitalists and workers, and their interaction struck a consensual bargain over tax powers, citizen obligations, and the nature of public benefits in a “contractual state.” By contrast, the Russian economy was dominated by large-scale extractive industries available only through elite bargains imposed with coercive authority in a “predatory state.” The contrast serves to demonstrate the gradual accretion of political struggles and institutional forms, diverse varieties of tax regimes, and the contribution to our understanding of state—society relations made by the postcommunist experience, where “the flow of power ran from state to society, rather than in the opposite direction” (p. 187).

This valuable review of my book identifies core points and three potential areas of deepening: newly emerging elites, additional cases, and the challenge of fiscal sociology research in Central America. I address each in turn. As noted, contemporary elites share many characteristics with traditional elites, who are accurately described as incestuous, exclusive, and self-perpetuating. Some of the newly emerging elites are indeed drawn from the very families and networks that produced prior generations of elites. This evolution has been usefully described in ethnographic work by Central Americans such as Marta Casaús Arzú and North Americans such as Jeffrey Paige. They note that despite continuities, there are important differences in contemporary elites, perhaps because of the democratic regimes in which they operate, and especially because of their location atop transnationally integrated production processes. Still, while this structural position produces both conflicts and coincidences of interest with traditional elite actors, the precise pattern of intraelite relations is the outcome of contingent social processes captured by the dimensions of cohesion and dominance. Different combinations of cohesion and dominance in intraelite relations serve as a useful beginning to the analysis of tax-regime outcomes.