Transnational cocaine trafficking: multiple data sources for network construction

Adverse Cardiovascular, Cerebrovascular, and Peripheral Vascular Effects of Marijuana Inhalation: What Cardiologists Need to Know

If it is possible to overcome significant data challenges, social network analytics could be used to expose structural vulnerabilities in transnational drug smuggling operations, offering clear targets for crime control efforts that aim to disrupt transhipment. This study explores the extent to which data inclusion decisions might distort the emergent structure of nation-to-nation smuggling networks mapped with aggregate intelligence using United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) incident level seizure data (2010–2016). Bivariate exponential random graph models (ERGM) show that relaxing data inclusion standards exposes illicit backchannels (reciprocity) and a more complete picture of major transhipment activity (activity and popularity spread) than would be otherwise undetected. Relaxed data inclusion standards may help to adjust for the data limitations associated with the detection of rare events and inconsistent reporting practices, if usage rules are followed.

Rapid industrialization and urbanization in the 20th century have led to increasing volumes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere[...]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Remote sensing (RS) has unique advantages over traditional satellite RS, including convenience, high resolution, affordability and fast acquisition speed, making it widely used in many fields. To provide an overview of the development of UAV RS applications during the past decade, we screened related publications from the Web of Science core database from 2010 to 2021, built co-author networks, a discipline interaction network, a keywords timeline view, a co-citation cluster, and detected burst citations using bibliometrics and social network analysis. Our results show that: (1) The number of UAV RS publications had an increasing trend, with explosive growth in the past five years. The number of papers published by China and the United States (US) is far ahead in this field; (2) The US has currently the greatest influence in this field through the largest number of international cooperations. Cooperation is mainly concentrated in countries and institutions with a large number of publications but is not widely distributed. (3) The application of UAV RS involves multiple interdisciplinary subjects, among which “Environmental Science and Ecology” ranks first; (4) Future research trends of UAV RS are expected to be related to artificial intelligence (e.g., artificial neural networks-based research). This paper provides a scientific basis and guidance for future developments of UAV RS applications, which can help the research community to better grasp the developments of this field.

According to the last United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report (2016), 247 million people aged between 15 and 64 years used drugs at least once in the past year, with cocaine being the best-selling of the goods from the ‘Ndrangheta. In this case, the drugs trade is 60% of the systemic gain due to illicit trafficking that allowed the spreading of the Calabrian criminal organization across five continents. Nevertheless, this sometimes little-known apparently harmless organization, which comes from the Aspromonte heartland in Calabria, was included by the United States in the blacklist of the 75 most dangerous drug-trafficking organizations only in 2008. Therefore, this investigative study, based on reference literature, aims to analyse what are the aspects that make the Calabrian criminal organization “local” and “global” at the same time as well as the strengths and weaknesses in combating ‘Ndrangheta’s drug trafficking.

From over-the-counter to criminal evidence: Pharmacological profiles, analytical methods, and forensic insights into diphenhydramine's role in drug-facilitated crime.

To the Editors:We read with great interest the report of the Results of the National Institute of Mental Health Collaborative HIV/Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention Trial of a Community Popular Opinion Leader (C-POL) Intervention.1 This trial tested whether a well-described and effective commun

Studying team-based primary care using 100% national outpatient Medicare data is not feasible, due to limitations in the availability of this dataset to researchers. We assessed whether analyses using different sets of Medicare data can produce results similar to those from analyses using 100% data from an entire state, in identifying primary care teams through social network analysis. First, we used data from 100% Medicare beneficiaries, restricted to those within a primary care services area (PCSA), to identify primary care teams. Second, we used data from a 20% sample of Medicare beneficiaries and defined shared care by 2 providers using 2 different cutoffs for the minimum required number of shared patients, to identify primary care teams. The team practices identified with social network analysis using the 20% sample and a cutoff of 6 patients shared between 2 primary care providers had good agreement with team practices identified using statewide data (F measure: 90.9%). Use of 100% data within a small area geographic boundary, such as PCSAs, had an F measure of 83.4%. The percent of practices identified from these datasets that coincided with practices identified from statewide data were 86% versus 100%, respectively. Depending on specific study purposes, researchers could use either 100% data from Medicare beneficiaries in randomly selected PCSAs, or data from a 20% national sample of Medicare beneficiaries to study team-based primary care in the United States.

Multiple myeloma is a bone marrow cancer and is responsible for the death of approximately 12,000 people yearly in the United States. Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer and is characterized by the over-production and secretion of monoclonal antibodies. This can cause patients to have immune dysfunction, bone destruction, and ultimately kidney failure. Currently, multiple myeloma is not considered curable. One ideal treatment for this disease would be to target the Rab proteins, which play a role in trafficking of monoclonal proteins. This might be done by targeting the geranylgeranylation of Rab proteins by diminishing the synthesis of the IBP substrate geranylgeranyl diphosphate (GGPP) via inhibition of the enzyme geranylgeranyl diphosphate synthase (GGDPS). Our research team has developed one class of GGDPS inhibitors, known as isoprenoid triazole bisphosphonates, and found them to be potent and selective towards GGPDS inhibition in the nM concentration range. A series of modifications at different locations of the bisphosphonates has been achieved, and the new compounds have both higher potency towards GGDPS inhibition. Compounds modified at the ꙍ position lacked biological activity but were able to alter in vivo biodistribution through linkage to a drug delivery agent. A series of modifications at the α position was accomplished, and these compounds were demonstrated to have an impact on GGPDS. These findings encourage future efforts to improve cellular entry of these bisphosphonates and to enhance potency by incorporating these modifications into other isoprenoid triazole bisphosphonate structures.

2012 Commission on Narcotic Drugs: Report of Proceedings – IDPC Report

In 2008, the United Nations, through the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the International Narcotics Control Board (incb) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (unodc), continued to strengthen international cooperation in countering the world drug problem. Activities focused on carrying out the 1998 Action Plan against Illicit Manufacture, Trafficking and Abuse of Amphetamine-type Stimulants and Their Precursors; the 1998 Action Plan on International Cooperation on the Eradication of Illicit Drug Crops and on Alternative Development; and the 1999 Action Plan for the Implementation of the Declaration on the Guiding Principles of Drug Demand Reduction.

This article bridges two important approaches in the study of global trade – social network analysis and the gravity model – and examines how countries’ structural locations in the global trade network influence bilateral trade from 1948 through 2000. The authors identify a cohesion effect of structural equivalence (the degree to which two nodes have similar ties with other nodes in the network) in global trade: two structurally equivalent countries develop more bilateral trade even after controlling for conventional dyadic factors. This is because common trading ties with other countries promote similar sociocultural values, information flows, and converging institutions, thereby boosting bilateral trade. The authors further demonstrate that the cohesion-generating role of structural equivalence has become more salient over time in the increasingly complex global trade network. Overall, this study shows that bilateral trade is embedded within the structural context of the overall global trade network, and this structural effect is historically contingent on the evolving nature of global economic activities.

Every day in the United States, health professionals confront the effects of firearm injury. In emergency rooms, trauma centers, ambulatory offices, and acute care and rehabilitation facilities, health professionals and the health systems they work within attempt to heal the wounds that firearms can inflict on individuals and their families. Thus, hospitals and health systems are in a position to grasp the scope of the issue and find opportunities to prevent firearm injury and death. In 2016 and 2017, the physicians and nurses at Kaiser Permanente treated more than 3,400 gunshot victims. These patients—from a single health system among the hundreds that operate across the United States—are a sobering reminder of the toll of firearm injury. Firearm injury—including other-directed, self-directed, and unintentional injury and death—is a broad-based public health issue. In 2016, more than 38,000 people were killed by firearms.1 In the same year, half of those who died by suicide used a firearm, and three quarters of homicides involved a firearm.1 Firearm death is the third leading cause of death for children under age 17 in the United States. A social network analysis by Kalesan and colleagues2 showed that almost everyone in the United States, at some point, will know someone injured or killed by a firearm. The nature of the injury varies—homicide is the more likely cause of a firearm death in an urban area, whereas suicide is more likely in a rural area—but every community in every geographic region and every socioeconomic stratum is … Address correspondence to: Questions or comments should be directed to Melissa French at mfrench{at}nas.edu.

Towards spatially disaggregated cocaine supply chain modeling

ABSTRACTAnthropologists often call attention to the problems posed by social inequality, but academic anthropology also reproduces many of the very inequalities that its practitioners work to critique. Past research on US academic hiring networks has shown evidence of systematic inequality and hierarchy, attributed in significant part to the influence of academic prestige, which is not necessarily a reflection of merit or academic productivity. Using anthropology departments’ websites, we gathered information on all tenured and tenure‐track faculty in PhD‐granting anthropology programs in the United States, totaling 1,918 individuals in all. For each faculty member, we noted their current institution and PhD‐granting institution, which we treated as a “tie” between those academic programs. With those data, we applied both statistical and social network analysis (SNA) methods to explain variation in faculty placement as well as the network's overall structure. In this article, we report on our findings and discuss how they can be used to help rethink academic reproduction in American anthropology. [academia, anthropology, social inequality, hiring networks, social network analysis]