Queen’s Gambit Declined: The Gender-Equality Paradox in Chess Participation Across 160 Countries

The gender-equality paradox refers to the puzzling finding that societies with more gender equality demonstrate larger gender differences across a range of phenomena, most notably in the proportion of women who pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math. The present investigation demonstrates across two different measures of gender equality that this paradox extends to chess participation ( N = 803,485 across 160 countries; age range: 3–100 years), specifically that women participate more often in countries with less gender equality. Previous explanations for the paradox fail to account for this finding. Instead, consistent with the notion that gender equality reflects a generational shift, mediation analyses suggest that the gender-equality paradox in chess is driven by the greater participation of younger players in countries with less gender equality. A curvilinear effect of gender equality on the participation of female players was also found, demonstrating that gender differences in chess participation are largest at the highest and lowest ends of the gender-equality spectrum.

City Diplomacy: Another Generational Shift?

City diplomacy has a long history and has witnessed a clear sprawl over the last century. Successive “generations” of city diplomacy approaches have emerged over this period, with a heyday of networked urban governance in the last two decades. The covid-19 pandemic crisis presents a key opportunity to contemplate the direction of city diplomacy amid global systemic disruptions, raising questions about the effectiveness of differing diplomatic styles across cities but also the prospect of a new generational shift. This essay traces the history of generations in city diplomacy, examines prospects for novel ways of understanding city diplomacy, and contemplates how the pandemic’s impact heralds not the demise of internationalization in urban governance but an era in which city diplomacy is even more crucial amid fundamental limitations.

BoneJ2 - refactoring established research software

Research software is often developed with expedience as a core development objective because experimental results, but not the software, are specified and resourced as a project output. While such code can help find answers to specific research questions, it may lack longevity and flexibility to make it reusable. We reimplemented BoneJ, our software for skeletal biology image analysis, to address design limitations that put it at risk of becoming unusable. We improved the quality of BoneJ code by following contemporary best programming practices. These include separation of concerns, dependency management, thorough testing, continuous integration and deployment, source code management, code reviews, issue and task ticketing, and user and developer documentation. The resulting BoneJ2 represents a generational shift in development technology and integrates with the ImageJ2 plugin ecosystem.

An attempt to comprehend the phenomenon of patriotism in the context of generational change and its upbringing in the domestic education system.

In the article, the problem of patriotism is considered as a meaningfully changing social phenomenon from the point of view of its nature and essence, which are not invariable. Special attention is paid to the fact that patriotism locked onto itself the unfulfilled hopes of social groups and strata of society, whose expectations turned out to be higher than its political and cultural capabilities. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it speaks of the dependence of patriotism on a generational shift or generational change, since the emergence of a new capable subject of social action, possessing not only a post-material independent of the departed Soviet nature, but also a new idealized system of values, is capable of predetermining changes in patriotic sentiments in society. The paper argues that various interpretations of patriotism, despite its seeming naturalness and eternity, create the preconditions for the emergence of stereotyped chimerical constructions. It is noted that the traditionally form of patriotic fetishism is the institution of education, reduced to the logic of "service" – to the provision of educational services, built in accordance with a given vertical of values and priorities outlined by the state, within which patriotism is not brought up, but proclaimed. The Institute of Education, for which the frame of education of patriotism has ceased to be an organizing principle, is no longer stitched with strong temporary ties within the direct contact of generations, their semantic dialogue. As a result, patriotic education is poorly integrated into the educational process. Another consequence of this situation is the blindness of the institution of education in modern Russia in relation to generational shifts and their impact on social development. Today it is much more important for the Russian state (its political elite) to reproduce the form of patriotism at the level of official formulas, but not its literal meaning. The article is based on the principles of science, objectivity and creativity.

A New Generation of Sustainability Governance: Potentials for 2030 Agenda Implementation in Swiss Cantons

Governments and administrations at all levels play a central role in shaping sustainable development. Over the past 30 years, many have developed differentiated sustainability governance arrangements (SGAs) to incorporate sustainability into their governing practice. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which the UN adopted in 2015, brings with it some significant conceptual shifts in sustainability thinking that, in turn, entail new governance requirements. Starting from practical calls for improved understanding of the requirements and conditions of 2030 Agenda implementation ‘on the ground,’ this article examines existing SGAs’ potential to deal with the generational shift that the 2030 Agenda implies. To this end, four ideal-typical SGAs representing an early generation of sustainability governance at the subnational level in Switzerland are related to five specific governance requirements emerging from the 2030 Agenda. The analysis highlights different possibilities and limitations of the four SGAs to meet 2030 Agenda requirements and points to the need for context-specific reforms of first-generation sustainability governance in the wake of the new Agenda.

BoneJ2 - refactoring established research software

Research software is often developed with expedience as a core development objective because experimental results, but not the software, are specified and resourced as a project output. While such code can help find answers to specific research questions, it may lack longevity and flexibility to make it reusable. We reimplemented BoneJ, our software for skeletal biology image analysis, to address design limitations that put it at risk of becoming unusable. We improved the quality of BoneJ code by following contemporary best programming practices. These include separation of concerns, dependency management, thorough testing, continuous integration and deployment, source code management, code reviews, issue and task ticketing, and user and developer documentation. The resulting BoneJ2 represents a generational shift in development technology and integrates with the ImageJ2 plugin ecosystem.

The Year 1979 as a Turning Point in Syrian Theatre: From Politicization to Critical Humanism

This chapter investigates a crucial turning point in the writing of Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941–1997) in the late 1970s. This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose political and artistic identities were strongly shaped by the question of Palestine. After the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the resulting Egypt-Israel peace treaty, signed in 1979, Wannous attempted suicide and stopped writing plays for more than ten years. This chapter shows how the plays he published after this self-imposed silence moved away from a didactic, political theater and towards psychological studies focusing on individuals as well as minority and gender issues. This chapter asks whether the significant aesthetic and conceptual turn in Wannous’s work from the early 1990s onwards might go beyond the concerns of a specific individual artist. To what extent does it mark a generational shift in regard to the meaning and connotations of political art?

To vote or not to vote? The political orientations of Millennials in a comparative perspective

This article concentrates on the transformative potential of the Millennial generation within the framework of the political landscapes of the United States, several European countries and Russia. Generational experiences frame the context for the comparative examination of the democratic order and the perspectives for democratic transition. In Western countries, the group is a potentially powerful political force, yet its members do not pursue traditional forms of civic engagement – they are sceptical about institutional forms of participation and have little trust in public authority. Embedded in a youth-marginalization discourse, the public identities of the Millennials are seen rather as a manifestation of the failures of democratic representation, rather than as forms of agency seeking new ways of political expression. The orientations of this distinct group also present a puzzle when the future of authoritarian regimes is discussed: Millennials’ openness to political change is often questioned, despite the prominent role they play in the rise of the opposition forces that gained influence during Vladimir Putin’s third term. Nevertheless, in both contexts, the ongoing generational shift has become an increasingly important area for social-scientific investigation and it is being directly related to broader arguments about the nature of political change.