Within this paper, glocalization is presented to explain the heterogeneity of the Uruk Expansion/Phenomenon, a process which saw extensive interactions and cultural integration across Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium bce, characterized by the spread of southern Mesopotamian material culture and cultural practices. Through close examination of archaeological data from the Adhaim-Sirwan Drainage Basin, southern Iraqi Kurdistan, a region which is emerging as a focus of intense culture-contact during the Uruk Phenomenon, I contend that a glocalized perspective of this phenomenon better illuminates its regional nuances and complexities, as well as the interactions between local and Uruk communities within the Adhaim-Sirwan. By employing a glocalizing framework, this paper demonstrates that cultural interactions led to varied adaptations of the Uruk Phenomenon and illustrates the dynamic interplay between global influences and local responses. Ultimately, this paper advocates for a nuanced understanding of the Uruk Phenomenon, highlighting its regional variability and the importance of local agency in shaping cultural outcomes, thereby framing it as a distinctly glocalized process rather than an expression of globalization.

During the fourth millennium BC, public institutions developed at several large settlements across greater Mesopotamia. These are widely acknowledged as the first cities and states, yet surprisingly little is known about their emergence, functioning and demise. Here, the authors present new evidence of public institutions at the site of Shakhi Kora in the lower Sirwan/upper Diyala river valley of north-east Iraq. A sequence of four Late Chalcolithic institutional households precedes population dispersal and the apparent regional rejection of centralised social forms of organisation that were not then revisited for almost 1500 years.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted gaps in infection control knowledge and practice across health settings nationwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with funding through the American Rescue Plan, developed Project Firstline. Project Firstline is a national collaborative aiming to reach all aspects of the health care frontline. The American Medical Association recruited eight physicians and one medical student to join their director of infectious diseases to develop educational programs targeting knowledge gaps. They have identified 5 critical areas requiring national attention.

Statesman and scholar Alexis de Tocqueville (1876) once noted, “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” In other words, history has a habit of repeating itself, and we can deduce cycles and patterns that likely will recur. Such stability and inertia should bode well for prediction. Nevertheless, when it comes to election forecasting, especially in the United States, most prognostications rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we adopt a structural approach but depart from existing literature by focusing on historical party and governance dynamics in the vein of de Tocqueville to establish whether they offer solid guidance regarding the performance of Democrats in US congressional elections. Our ex-post political history models provide solid predictions of which party will control Congress and the Democrats’ seat tally in each chamber between 1946 and 2022. This creates conditions to assume that political history may help us forecast Campaign 2024. Our study applied this political history model to predict the 2024 congressional elections. It forecast Democrats to lose control of the Senate with a net loss of three seats and estimated an exceptionally close race for House control, with the point estimate for the House suggesting that the Democrats would fall short of winning control.

Our political economy model, as it has come to be called, has offered up forecasts of the American presidential election outcome since the early 1980s. The model, based on referendum theory, as measured by the job performance of the president and the economy (1948 to the present), yields a forecast from data available in the summer of the election year. We consider alternative specifications of this parsimonious model, examining the possible effects of other economic measures, Covid-19, and incumbency advantage on forecasting. The current point estimate of the core political economy model predicts the Democratic candidate will receive 48 percent of the two-party popular vote, which translates into a narrow Electoral College loss for the incumbent party. This point forecast, however, comes with a considerable amount of uncertainty. There is an 11-point spread around our point estimate, which effectively means we have a horserace on our hands, with both horses close to the finish line.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) is associated with periodontitis and tooth loss in older adults. A total of 2346 adults underwent a detailed dental examination as part of the health assessment of a national population study – The Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing. 25(OH)D analysis was performed on frozen non-fasting total plasma using LC-MS. The analysis included both multiple logistic regression and multinominal logistic regression to investigate associations between 25(OH)D concentration, periodontitis and tooth loss, adjusting for a range of potential confounders. Results of the analysis found the mean age of participants was 65·3 years (sd 8·2) and 55·3 % of the group were female. Based on the quintile of 25(OH)D concentration, participants in the lowest v. highest quintile had an OR of 1·57 (95 % CI 1·16, 2·13; P < 0·01) of having periodontitis in the fully adjusted model. For tooth loss, participants in the lowest v. highest quintile of 25(OH)D had a RRR of 1·55 (95 % CI 1·12, 2·13; P < 0·01) to have 1–19 teeth and a RRR of 1·96 (95 % CI 1·20, 3·21; P < 0·01) to be edentulous, relative to those with ≥ 20 teeth in the fully adjusted models. These findings demonstrate that in this cross-sectional study of older men and women from Ireland, 25(OH)D concentration was associated with both periodontitis and tooth loss, independent of other risk factors.

This study identified 26 late invasive primary surgical site infection (IP-SSI) within 4–12 months of transplantation among 2073 SOT recipients at Duke University Hospital over the period 2015–2019. Thoracic organ transplants accounted for 25 late IP-SSI. Surveillance for late IP-SSI should be maintained for at least one year following transplant.

Empowering the Participant Voice (EPV) is an NCATS-funded six-CTSA collaboration to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate a low-cost infrastructure for collecting timely feedback from research participants, fostering trust, and providing data for improving clinical translational research. EPV leverages the validated Research Participant Perception Survey (RPPS) and the popular REDCap electronic data-capture platform. This report describes the development of infrastructure designed to overcome identified institutional barriers to routinely collecting participant feedback using RPPS and demonstration use cases. Sites engaged local stakeholders iteratively, incorporating feedback about anticipated value and potential concerns into project design. The team defined common standards and operations, developed software, and produced a detailed planning and implementation Guide. By May 2023, 2,575 participants diverse in age, race, ethnicity, and sex had responded to approximately 13,850 survey invitations (18.6%); 29% of responses included free-text comments. EPV infrastructure enabled sites to routinely access local and multi-site research participant experience data on an interactive analytics dashboard. The EPV learning collaborative continues to test initiatives to improve survey reach and optimize infrastructure and process. Broad uptake of EPV will expand the evidence base, enable hypothesis generation, and drive research-on-research locally and nationally to enhance the clinical research enterprise.

Large research teams and consortia present challenges for authorship. The number of disciplines involved in the research can further complicate approaches to manuscript development and leadership. The CHARM team, representing a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional genomics implementation study, participated in facilitated discussions inspired by team science methodologies. The discussions were centered on team members’ past experiences with authorship and perspectives on authorship in a large research team context. Team members identified challenges and opportunities that were used to create guidelines and administrative tools to support manuscript development. The guidelines were organized by the three values of equity, inclusion, and efficiency and included eight principles. A visual dashboard was created to allow all team members to see who was leading or involved in each paper. Additional tools to promote equity, inclusion, and efficiency included providing standardized project management for each manuscript and making “concept sheets” for each manuscript accessible to all team members. The process used in CHARM can be used by other large research teams and consortia to equitably distribute lead authorship opportunities, foster coauthor inclusion, and efficiently work with large authorship groups.