scholarly journals The Impact of Covid-19 on Abrahamic Fundamentalist Groups

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 406-425
Author(s):  
Nina Käsehage
Keyword(s):  
Religious Groups ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Abrahamic Religions ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This contribution discusses the question whether there is a general interlinking between the fundamentalist perception and practice of Abrahamic religions by some believers or groups and their (in-)ability to cope with pandemics such as Covid-19, or if this assumption is misleading. With the help of selected examples from fundamentalist groups of the Abrahamic religions, it will be shown that some fundamentalist actors see Covid-19 as a divine punishment and make use of the pandemic for radical mobilization of their members, while other religious groups and leaders concentrate on the resilience and healing aspects of their followers during the pandemic. The different responses of coping lead to the question whether monotheistic religions might be more susceptible to fundamentalist reactions to pandemics than other religions.

scholarly journals Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jedidiah Carlson ◽  
Kelley Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Research Evaluation ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Audience Segmentation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Game Developers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Media Audience

AbstractEngagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper’s social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from non-specialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the highly tweeted preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist where extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing research evaluation as well as shedding light on the unavoidable challenges of scientific discourse afforded by social media.

scholarly journals The Impact of Covid-19 On State-Religion Relations: A Study On Israel And Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Sevinç Alkan Özcan ◽  
Muhammed Hüzeyin Mercan
Keyword(s):  
State Intervention ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Mass Gatherings ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religion And State ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Regulations, measures and restrictions implemented by state authorities on public events and mass gatherings due to fear, anxiety, and panic caused by COVID-19 pandemic have made religious field more open to state intervention since the global pandemic started and religious practices underwent radical changes. Governments’ public health measures concerning the places of mass worship and religious gatherings to stop the spread of the pandemic and the reactions of religious groups against their orders and imposed restrictions emerged as a new dimension of the debates on state-religion and state-individual relations. In this regard, the main purpose of the study is to discuss the new global religious trends that emerged with the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, which reshapes state-religion relations through the regulations and measure for containing the virus, in light of the experiences in different regions and religious traditions, and to analyze the relationship between the religion and the state in the Middle East, specifically the cases of Israel and Iran as religious character is dominant and orthodox religious groups play a significant role within the social and political structure in both countries.

‘The Patron of Mankind’

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-212
Author(s):  
D.H. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
European System ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
The Impact ◽  
George Iii ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
Livingston Family

This chapter looks at the impact of geopolitical thinking on colonial conceptions of nationality. Paying particular attention to the influential parties that gathered around the Livingston family in New York and William Smith in Philadelphia during the 1750s, it shows how the idea of Britain as the ‘arbiter of Europe’ informed a continentalist understanding of Britain as a nation defined by its unique role in the European system. This, in turn, left an enormous mark on the way in which colonists conceived of the Hanoverian monarchy, underwriting the personality cults of George II and—in his early reign—George III. Similar phenomena affected other national leaders, most notably William Pitt the Elder. At the same time, the continentalist flavour of colonial nationalism promoted a porous kind of Britishness, allowing for the incorporation of settlers from other parts of Europe like the Netherlands and Germany, and even other religious groups—including, on some rare occasions, Roman Catholics and non-Europeans.

Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma

1950 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Herz
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
Vicious Circle ◽  
Security Dilemma ◽  
Atom Bomb ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Circle Of Security ◽  
The Impact

The heartbreaking plight in which a bipolarized and atom bomb-blessed world finds itself today is but the extreme manifestation of a dilemma with which human societies have had to grapple since the dawn of history. For it stems from a fundamental social constellation, one where a plurality of otherwise interconnected groups constitute ultimate units of political life, that is, where groups live alongside each other without being organized into a higher unity.Wherever such anarchic society has existed—and it has existed in most periods of known history on some level—there has arisen what may be called the ‘security dilemma’ of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.

scholarly journals Uncertain-tree: discriminating among competing approaches to the phylogenetic analysis of phenotype data

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1846) ◽  
pp. 20162290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark N. Puttick ◽  
Joseph E. O'Reilly ◽  
Alastair R. Tanner ◽  
James F. Fleming ◽  
James Clark ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Maximum Likelihood ◽  
Maximum Likelihood Estimation ◽  
Likelihood Estimation ◽  
Accurate Method ◽  
Morphological Data ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Phenotype Data ◽  
Bayesian Implementation ◽  
Phylogenetic Estimation ◽  
The Impact

Morphological data provide the only means of classifying the majority of life's history, but the choice between competing phylogenetic methods for the analysis of morphology is unclear. Traditionally, parsimony methods have been favoured but recent studies have shown that these approaches are less accurate than the Bayesian implementation of the Mk model. Here we expand on these findings in several ways: we assess the impact of tree shape and maximum-likelihood estimation using the Mk model, as well as analysing data composed of both binary and multistate characters. We find that all methods struggle to correctly resolve deep clades within asymmetric trees, and when analysing small character matrices. The Bayesian Mk model is the most accurate method for estimating topology, but with lower resolution than other methods. Equal weights parsimony is more accurate than implied weights parsimony, and maximum-likelihood estimation using the Mk model is the least accurate method. We conclude that the Bayesian implementation of the Mk model should be the default method for phylogenetic estimation from phenotype datasets, and we explore the implications of our simulations in reanalysing several empirical morphological character matrices. A consequence of our finding is that high levels of resolution or the ability to classify species or groups with much confidence should not be expected when using small datasets. It is now necessary to depart from the traditional parsimony paradigms of constructing character matrices, towards datasets constructed explicitly for Bayesian methods.

scholarly journals RELIGIOUS VOTING IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: TESTING ALTERNATIVE THEORIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-281
Author(s):  
Lyman A. Kellstedt ◽  
James L. Guth
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Election Study ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Partisan Realignment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Alternative Theories

Scholars of American electoral politics have documented the recent partisan realignment of religious groups. Indeed, careful analysts often find that religious variables are better predictors of partisan choice than classic socioeconomic divisions. Still, there has been relatively little effort to put this religious realignment in both theoretical and historical perspective. In this article, we update our previous work on the historical evolution of religious partisanship, demonstrating the continued relevance of ethnocultural (or ethnoreligious) theory, utilized by political historians, and restructuring theory, an important sociological perspective. Both viewpoints help us understand presidential elections since the 1930s, as we demonstrate with data from a wide range of surveys. After utilizing the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to examine the contemporary voting of ethnoreligious groups in greater detail, we test the impact of religious variables controlling for other demographic, attitudinal, and partisan influences and find that religious identities and orientations often retain independent influence even under stringent controls for other factors shaping the presidential vote.

scholarly journals Randomised Badger Culling Trial: Impact, based on more extensive data

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hendy
Keyword(s):  
Health Agency ◽  
Outer Ring ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Extensive Data ◽  
Badger Culling ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Scientific Group ◽  
Surrounding Areas ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

In 2007 the Independent Scientific Group (ISG) reported to the UK government the impact on bovine tuberculosis (TB) in cattle of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT). Badgers were culled between 1998 and 2005 across 100 km2 (nominal) zones in the West of England. The results were based on a model of confirmed New Herd Incidence (NHI). It was concluded that reactive culling generated overall detrimental effects, while proactive culling achieved very modest overall benefits at the cost of elevated incidence in surrounding areas. This work looks at more extensive RBCT data to examine if these findings hold true. Instead of presenting the results of a model, this work directly illustrates the data. The Animal and Plant Health Agency supplied this data in March 2016. Such data covers a greater number of years (1986 to 2012) and includes the prevalence of herd restrictions as well as herd incidence. Whilst the proactive culls substantially reduced confirmed NHI in treated areas, such culls did not significantly increase NHI in the surrounding outer ring. In fact, between 1998 and 2012 these NHI slightly reduced in the outer ring . Between 2006 and 2012 they dropped by 28%, 1% and 18% in the treated, outer 2km ring, and combined areas respectively. Based on the total number of confirmed NHIs prevented between 1998 and 2012, a break-even cost to complete a badger removal exercise was calculated to be £8,693 per km2 with benefits continuing in 2012. Proactive culling only reduced confirmed NHIs with no significant impact on unconfirmed NHIs. The more limited reactive culls had no impact on both the treated area and the outer 2km ring. Conclusions in the RBCT Final Report, which were based on the results of a model of time-shifted early data, poorly reflect the overall greater benefits seen in this more extensive data. Badger culling is highly contentious in the UK and many press reports adversely report the effectiveness of badger culling in general and the culls which started in 2013 in particular. The RBCT conclusions are often cited to add credence to these press reports. After the first year of substantial culling in the RBCT, this work found that 9 years of data were needed to clearly see the full extent by which TB dropped when plotted against calendar year. This delay should be reflected on when accounting for the circumstances and assessing impact of the 2013 culls. This work was restricted to looking at data showing total TB breakdowns over all zones. Further work to examine breakdowns by zone or groups of zones may reveal more.

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