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This article examines the institutional pathology of corruption within the Nigerian Navy, and its broader manifestation and implications within Nigeria’s maritime industry. Beginning with an examination of the disappearance of the vessel, MT African Pride, in October 2003, the article reflects on the African Pride case to show that far from being a one-off incident, it was indicative of the opportunism and criminality that naval operations within the oil-rich Niger Delta have generated. Other primary case studies relevant to corruption within Nigeria’s maritime industry, and interrogated by the article, include the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA). The article shall also examine a range of secondary case studies. These are relatively brief meditations on incidents, individuals and maritime industry private contractors and government parastatals, which are relevant to the debate to naval and maritime corruption in Nigeria.

Commentators claim that drug repositioning (ie developing new uses for authorised drugs) significantly slows when generics are authorised and, therefore, law reform is necessary to encourage more R&D. This study empirically examines this claim by analysing records of clinical trials. It finds that once generics are authorised: i) commercial trials continue at ‘active’ rates for approximately half of the drugs studied, and ii) the number of hospital and university trials actually increases. These findings cast doubt on whether additional incentives are needed. They also indicate that a more effective way to reposition drugs is for recently established government programmes to embrace IP strategies and leverage the hospital and university trials as an R&D pipeline.Keywords: drug repositioning, patent law, regulatory protection, clinical trials, empirical study, generic drugs.

There are longstanding questions about the origins and ancestry of the Picts of early medieval Scotland (ca. 300-900 CE), prompted in part by exotic medieval origin myths, their enigmatic symbols and inscriptions, and the meagre textual evidence. The Picts, first mentioned in the late 3(rd) century CE resisted the Romans and went on to form a powerful kingdom that ruled over a large territory in northern Britain. In the 9(th) and 10(th) centuries Gaelic language, culture and identity became dominant, transforming the Pictish realm into Alba, the precursor to the medieval kingdom of Scotland. To date, no comprehensive analysis of Pictish genomes has been published, and questions about their biological relationships to other cultural groups living in Britain remain unanswered. Here we present two high-quality Pictish genomes (2.4 and 16.5X coverage) from central and northern Scotland dated from the 5(th)-7(th) century which we impute and co-analyse with >8,300 previously published ancient and modern genomes. Using allele frequency and haplotype-based approaches, we can firmly place the genomes within the Iron Age gene pool in Britain and demonstrate regional biological affinity. We also demonstrate the presence of population structure within Pictish groups, with Orcadian Picts being genetically distinct from their mainland contemporaries. When investigating Identity-By-Descent (IBD) with present-day genomes, we observe broad affinities between the mainland Pictish genomes and the present-day people living in western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumbria, but less with the rest of England, the Orkney islands and eastern Scotland-where the political centres of Pictland were located. The pre-Viking Age Orcadian Picts evidence a high degree of IBD sharing across modern Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Orkney islands, demonstrating substantial genetic continuity in Orkney for the last similar to 2,000 years. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA diversity at the Pictish cemetery of Lundin Links (n = 7) reveals absence of direct common female ancestors, with implications for broader social organisation. Overall, our study provides novel insights into the genetic affinities and population structure of the Picts and direct relationships between ancient and present-day groups of the UK. Author summary: We report two high-quality autosomal and eight mitochondrial genomes sequenced from individuals associated with the Pictish period of early medieval Scotland (ca. 300-900 CE). We demonstrate genetic affinities between the Pictish genomes and Iron Age people who lived in Britain, which supports current archaeological theories of a local origin. The autosomal genomes also allowed us to detect haplotype sharing between the Pictish genomes and present-day Europeans. Our results demonstrate a proportionally higher degree of haplotype sharing, and thus genetic affinity, between the Pictish genomes and individuals from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumbria. We also detected genetic structure in Scotland during the Iron Age, likely driven by the combination of genetic drift and small population size, which we also detect in present-day Orcadians. Lastly, the seven mitochondrial DNA from the Lundin Links cemetery showed that these individuals had no direct maternal ancestors which could suggest exchanges of people, or at least females, between groups during the Pictish period, challenging older ideas that the Picts were a matrilineal society. Overall, our results show that high-quality ancient genomes combined with haplotype imputation are highly informative for obtaining novel insights to population structure and migration over the past 2,000 years.

This paper explores universal basic income (UBI) in relation to crisis, from COVID-19 to techno-economic disruptions to work and prospective post-capitalist transition. Critical debates around automation, wage labour and post-work are brought into conversation with emerging trends in urban political economy around foundational infrastructure, smart cities and platform capitalism. To deliver the socio-economic transformations promised by UBI’s advocates, it is argued that more radical structural interventions in capitalist asset ownership and property relations, alongside democratized state investment in technological development, universal basic services and infrastructure, are necessary counterparts to any sufficient UBI – that is, if we hope to construct new systems of collective coordination capable of contending with complex epidemiological, economic and ecological crises.

An increasing number of researchers support reproducibility by including pointers to and descriptions of datasets, software and methods in their publications. However, scientific articles may be ambiguous, incomplete and difficult to process by automated systems. In this paper we introduce RO-Crate, an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research artefacts along with their metadata in a machine readable manner. RO-Crate is based on Schema$.$org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way for their use in a wide variety of situations. An RO-Crate is a structured archive of all the items that contributed to a research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and annotations. As a general purpose packaging approach for data and their metadata, RO-Crate is used across multiple areas, including bioinformatics, digital humanities and regulatory sciences. By applying "just enough" Linked Data standards, RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. An RO-Crate for this article is available at https://www.researchobject.org/2021-packaging-research-artefacts-with-ro-crate/ Comment: 42 pages. Submitted to Data Science

This article examines the varying historical expressions of activists in Women Strike for Peace (WSP) to assess how changing gender ideology and feminist beliefs influenced the memory of the women's peace movement. A transformation in collective identity occurred among WSPers in the late 1960s, causing the group to engage with the women's movement in a way that had not previously occurred. Exploring how activists understood their past, this article reveals that leaders revised their group's historical narrative to craft a collective memory that gave WSP a history of feminist activism. This is shown most prominently in the reappraisal of Bella Abzug and the histories produced by activist Amy Swerdlow. The article argues that interpretations of the history and memory of the women's peace movement must acknowledge how gender politics change over time. It asserts the significance of this transformation for historicizing feminist beliefs among women's peace activists.

With the increasing adoption of technology, more and more systems become target to information security breaches. In terms of readily identifying zero-day vulnerabilities, a substantial number of news outlets and social media accounts reveal emerging vulnerabilities and threats. However, analysts often spend a lot of time looking through these decentralized sources of information in order to ensure up-to-date countermeasures and patches applicable to their organisation’s information systems. Various automated processing pipelines grounded in Natural Language Processing techniques for text classification were introduced for the early identification of vulnerabilities starting from Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) data, including news websites, blogs, and social media. In this study, we consider a corpus of more than 1600 labeled news articles, and introduce an interpretable approach to the subject of cyberthreat early detection. In particular, an interpretable classification is performed using the Longformer architecture alongside prototypes from the ProSeNet structure, after performing a preliminary analysis on the Transformer’s encoding capabilities. The best interpretable architecture achieves an 88% F2-Score, arguing for the system’s applicability in real-life monitoring conditions of OSINT data.