Nordic Institute of Asian Studies

studies, cannabidiol (CBD) seems to be a promising candidate for the treatment of both somatic and psychiatric disorders. The aim of this review was to collect dose(s), dosage schemes, efficacy and safety reports of CBD use in adults from clinical studies. A systematic search was performed in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane library for articles published in English between January 1, 2000 and October 25, 2019. The search terms used were related to cannabis and CBD in adults. We identified 25 studies (927 patients; 538 men and 389 women), of which 22 studies were controlled clinical trials (833 patients) and three were observational designs (94 patients) from five countries. Formulations, dose and dosage schemes varied significantly between studies. Varying effects were identified from the randomized controlled trials (RCTs), more apparent effects from non-RCTs and minor safety issues in general. From the controlled trials, we identified anxiolytic effects with acute CBD administration, and therapeutic effects for social anxiety disorder, psychotic disorder and substance use disorders. In general, studies were heterogeneous and showed substantial risks of bias. Although promising results have been identified, considerable variation in dosage schemes and route of administration were employed across studies. There was evidence to support single dose positive effect on social anxiety disorder, short medium-term effects on symptomatic improvement in schizophrenia and lack of effect in the short medium-term on cognitive functioning in psychotic disorders. Overall, the administration was well tolerated with mild side effects.

We construct an effective Lagrangian which illustrates why color deconfines when chiral symmetry is restored in hot gauge theories with quarks in the fundamental representation. For quarks in the adjoint representation we show that, while deconfinement and the chiral transition do not need to coincide, entanglement between them is still present. Extension to the chemical potential driven transition is discussed.

Abstract— A series of 468 teeth with root fractures, mainly caused by corrosion of root canal pins and/or posts, was evaluated to determine the clinical and radiographic criteria which may be used in diagnosing these fractures. The fractures could be seen directly in a radiograph in only one‐third of the cases. Indirectly, evidence of a fracture could be demonstrated radiographically by the presence of corrosion products from the pin or post or by dissolution of the pin in 71.8 % of the cases. Marginal pocket formation, a widening, or blurring of the periodontal space was observed in 79.8% of the cases. In 53.8 % an apical radiolucency was present, whereas 10 cases (2.7 %) showed no radio‐graphic signs. The findings emphasize the importance of always considering the possibility of a root fracture when dealing with teeth containing pins, posts, and crowns.

The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.

The origin, development, and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscan civilization from the central region of the Italian peninsula known as Etruria have been debated for centuries. Here we report a genomic time transect of 82 individuals spanning almost two millennia (800 BCE to 1000 CE) across Etruria and southern Italy. During the Iron Age, we detect a component of Indo-European–associated steppe ancestry and the lack of recent Anatolian-related admixture among the putative non–Indo-European–speaking Etruscans. Despite comprising diverse individuals of central European, northern African, and Near Eastern ancestry, the local gene pool is largely maintained across the first millennium BCE. This drastically changes during the Roman Imperial period where we report an abrupt population-wide shift to ~50% admixture with eastern Mediterranean ancestry. Last, we identify northern European components appearing in central Italy during the Early Middle Ages, which thus formed the genetic landscape of present-day Italian populations.

Background Though clinical guidelines for assessment and treatment of chronic subjective tinnitus do exist, a comprehensive review of those guidelines has not been performed. The objective of this review was to identify current clinical guidelines, and compare their recommendations for the assessment and treatment of subjective tinnitus in adults. Method We systematically searched a range of sources for clinical guidelines (as defined by the Institute of Medicine, United States) for the assessment and/or treatment of subjective tinnitus in adults. No restrictions on language or year of publication were applied to guidelines. Results Clinical guidelines from Denmark, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the United States were included in the review. There was a high level of consistency across the guidelines with regard to recommendations for audiometric assessment, physical examination, use of a validated questionnaire(s) to assess tinnitus related distress, and referral to a psychologist when required. Cognitive behavioural treatment for tinnitus related distress, use of hearing aids in instances of hearing loss and recommendations against the use of medicines were consistent across the included guidelines. Differences between the guidelines centred on the use of imaging in assessment procedures and sound therapy as a form of treatment for tinnitus distress respectively. Conclusion Given the level of commonality across tinnitus guidelines from different countries the development of a European guideline for the assessment and treatment of subjective tinnitus in adults seems feasible. This guideline would have the potential to benefit the large number of clinicians in countries where clinical guidelines do not yet exist, and would support standardisation of treatment for patients across Europe.

In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users' understandings of a policy's impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Normal articulation before school start is a main objective in cleft palate treatment. The aim was to investigate if differences exist in consonant proficiency at age 5 years between children with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) randomised to different surgical protocols for primary palatal repair. A secondary aim was to estimate burden of care in terms of received additional secondary surgeries and speech therapy. DESIGN: Three parallel group, randomised clinical trials were undertaken as an international multicentre study by 10 cleft teams in five countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. METHODS: Three different surgical protocols for primary palatal repair were tested against a common procedure in the total cohort of 448 children born with non-syndromic UCLP. Speech audio- and video-recordings of 391 children (136 girls and 255 boys) were available and transcribed phonetically. The main outcome measure was Percent Consonants Correct (PCC) from blinded assessments. RESULTS: In Trial 1, arm A showed statistically significant higher PCC scores (82%) than arm B (78%) (p = .045). No significant differences were found between prevalences in Trial 2, A: 79%, C: 82%; or Trial 3, A: 80%, D: 85%. Across all trials, girls achieved better PCC scores, excluding s-errors, than boys (91.0% and 87.5%, respectively) (p = .01). CONCLUSIONS: PCC scores were higher in arm A than B in Trial 1, whereas no differences were found between arms in Trials 2 or 3. The burden of care in terms of secondary pharyngeal surgeries, number of fistulae, and speech therapy visits differed. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN29932826.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Adequate velopharyngeal function and speech are main goals in the treatment of cleft palate. The objective was to investigate if there were differences in velopharyngeal competency (VPC) and hypernasality at age 5 years in children with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) operated on with different surgical methods for primary palatal repair. A secondary aim was to estimate burden of care in terms of received additional secondary surgeries and speech therapy. DESIGN: Three parallel group, randomised clinical trials were undertaken as an international multicentre study by 10 cleft teams in five countries: Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK. METHODS: Three different surgical protocols for primary palatal repair were tested against a common procedure in the total cohort of 448 children born with a non-syndromic UCLP. Speech audio and video recordings of 391 children (136 girls, 255 boys) were available and perceptually analysed. The main outcome measures were VPC and hypernasality from blinded assessments. RESULTS: There were no statistically significant differences between the prevalences in the arms in any of the trials. VPC: Trial 1, A: 58%, B: 61%; Trial 2, A: 57%, C: 54%; Trial 3, A: 35%, D: 51%. No hypernasality: Trial 1, A: 54%, B: 44%; Trial 2, A: 47%, C: 51%; Trial 3, A: 34%, D: 49%. CONCLUSIONS: No differences were found regarding VPC and hypernasality at age 5 years after different methods for primary palatal repair. The burden of care in terms of secondary pharyngeal surgeries, number of fistulae, and speech therapy visits differed. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN29932826.

Abstract According to the constructivist theory of liberal democratic peace, intersubjective social realities are often more important in the construction of pacific unions of interstate peace. In order to demonstrate the importance of social construction rather than objective matters as a source of peace, previous studies have discussed cases where democracies appear to have fought one another. This article, instead of showing how objective factors fail to contribute to liberal democratic peace if the intersubjective consensus is lacking, shows how the intersubjective consensus about the common interests, norms, and identity has contributed to the interstate peace among the illiberal non-democracies of Southeast Asia. The long peace among the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1968-94 is compared to the bellicose period of the Malaysian confrontation, when most of the objective bases for the perception of common interests, common commitment to democratic procedures and liberal norms, and institutional restraints on war were arguably stronger than during the long peace. The intention is to show how even the political elite groups of illiberal non-democracies can manipulate the social consciousness for the purpose of creating a pacific union, similar to the one which has been socially constructed by liberal democracies. At the same time the study provides indirect support for the constructivist theory of liberal democratic peace.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Longstanding uncertainty surrounds the selection of surgical protocols for the closure of unilateral cleft lip and palate, and randomised trials have only rarely been performed. This paper is an introduction to three randomised trials of primary surgery for children born with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP). It presents the protocol developed for the trials in CONSORT format, and describes the management structure that was developed to achieve the long-term engagement and commitment required to complete the project. METHOD: Ten established national or regional cleft centres participated. Lip and soft palate closure at 3-4 months, and hard palate closure at 12 months served as a common method in each trial. Trial 1 compared this with hard palate closure at 36 months. Trial 2 compared it with lip closure at 3-4 months and hard and soft palate closure at 12 months. Trial 3 compared it with lip and hard palate closure at 3-4 months and soft palate closure at 12 months. The primary outcomes were speech and dentofacial development, with a series of perioperative and longer-term secondary outcomes. RESULTS: Recruitment of 448 infants took place over a 9-year period, with 99.8% subsequent retention at 5 years. CONCLUSION: The series of reports that follow this introductory paper include comparisons at age 5 of surgical outcomes, speech outcomes, measures of dentofacial development and appearance, and parental satisfaction. The outcomes recorded and the numbers analysed for each outcome and time point are described in the series. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN29932826.

In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia's earliest farmers.

The anti-whaling campaign has been with us for about two decades by now, and - not surprisingly - the arguments against whaling have changed during these years. The ecological argument that the whales are endangered is losing ground as it becomes clear that the stocks of some species of whales can sustain regulated harvest. Therefore, during the last few years more and more people have argued whaling on moral and ethical grounds. Whales have come to hold a special place in the animal kingdom. Three related themes are addressed in this paper. First, the process by which whales are turned into a symbol is analyzed. By combining characteristics found in a number of different whale species, a picture of a "super-whale" has emerged. Second, it is argued that whales have such potential as symbols because 1) whales are anomalous animals difficult to categorize, 2) they live in salt water, which symbolizes the ultimate purity, 3) they have a long history, and 4) they have qualities that we would like to see in our fellow human beings. It is argued that whales are turned into totems, thus dichotomizing mankind into "good guys" (protectors of whales) or "bad guys" (whalers). Finally, it is shown that by turning whales into totems and imposing an indefinite moratorium on whaling, the resource base of communities in northern Norway has been narrowed significantly, which has serious implications for the viability of these communities.Key words: whales, whaling, management, protectionism, symbolism, totem, rhetoric, impact, northern Norway

Abstract The issue of security has recently gained acute relevance for theoreticians and policymakers, but the way in which culture relates to security has yet to be given the attention it deserves. This article argues that all discourses and practices of security – ours as well as those of others – are cultural in nature, are historically positioned, and therefore inescapably plural. The article uses a case study of today's revival of Buddhism in Cambodia to illustrate how an anthropological approach may be applied in order to begin challenging the inherent ethnocentricity of much security theory. It explores a particular indigenous scheme of security, and how that scheme relates to power and moral legitimacy. The way Cambodians understand and deal with danger should, it is contended, alert us to the need for social scientists and policymakers to seek culturally sensitive understandings of security. This may help us make sense of local behaviour that may seem unreasonable according to our values; it can provoke us to check and refine our theory rather than indiscriminately apply it; and it may help limit the hegemony of privileged systems of ideas and the violence these can sometimes do to disempowered systems.

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the hundreds of youth-inspired mass protests staged in Thailand during 2020. It argues that while calling for reforms and flirting with revolutionary rhetoric, the protestors lacked a clear programmatic agenda and were primarily engaged in disrupting dominant narratives about the country’s politics, especially in relation to the previously taboo question of the political role of the monarchy. Despite the ad hoc and sometimes incoherent nature of the protests, the students mounted a dramatic challenge to Thailand’s ruling elite. Ultimately, the conflict exemplified a generational divide: people from Generation Z, aged under 25, have radically different understandings of power, deference and legitimacy from older population groups. Whatever happens to the protest movement in the short term, the demonstrators have made a decisive break with the old social consensus that existed during the long reign of the late King Bhumibol (1946–2016).

Drawing on the shrinkage of manufacturing districts, the transformation of waterfronts, the rise of edge cities, and the delocalization and deepening commodification of real property, this article reflects on the “newness” of the contemporary city. It argues for the simultaneous existence of historical continuities and discontinuities and the presence of novel spatial arrangements that originated in enduring trends. The contemporary city is never complete and thus never totally different from its predecessors.

Despite the fact that the phenomenon of labor migration has always involved the active participation of independent women, conventional migration studies have typically ignored gender- specific analyses. This is related to prevailing definitions of labor and the nature of women's work in general, as well as to globally restrictive immigration policies. Current experiences of female immigration—particularly from Asia, the biggest exporter of female labor—are characterized by the overwhelming presence of women migrants in the sex sector, in domestic labor and in the commercial marriage market. This paper draws on the author's previous research on international labor migration and international marriage. It contributes a viewpoint on labor migration by introducing a gender-specific analysis that goes beyond conventional definitions of labor by including in the discussion the issue of an international marriage market and trafficking in women, set within the broader context of a gendered political economy and a global patriarchal system. The paper argues for the abandonment of the strict distinction between voluntary labor migration and trafficking in women. A more flexible approach in immigration policies is needed to cater for the complex situations of female migrants and to protect their human rights.

The question of saturation of self-organized criticality in the ``game of Life'' is analyzed through finite-size scaling. We have carried out connection-machine simulations for lattices up to 1024\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}1024. In that range we find no evidence of saturation. We do, however, find finite-size exponents that seem inconsistent with a single length-scale picture at criticality.

For several decades, the cosmetic preservatives imidazolidinyl urea (IU) and diazolidinyl urea (DU) have not only been poorly characterized but have also had misleading chemical structures assigned to them. The most common trade names of IU and DU are Germall 115 and Germall II, respectively. This publication gives an insight into what these 2 well-known contact allergens consist of and their degradation patterns. Approximately, 30-40% of both products can be characterized by mixtures of allantoin (synthetic starting material), (4-hydroxymethyl-2,5-dioxo-imidazolidin-4-yl)-urea (compound HU) and presumably 1-(3,4-bis-hydroxymethyl-2,5-dioxo-imidazolidin-4-yl)-1,3-bis-hydroxymethyl-urea (compound BHU). A full chemical characterization of compound HU is shown. The remaining part of both IU and DU are believed to be polymers of allantoin-formaldehyde condensation products. The analytical methods used to characterize IU and DU are capillary electrophoresis and nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy studies.

Abstract This article attempts to build on insights on scholarship that tries to explain the successfulness of ASEAN and tries to produce some tested conclusions on what it is that explains ASEAN's success best. This is done by using slightly stricter criteria of explanation that has been used before and by exploiting the newest quantitative data on conflicts. Stricter explanation is attempted through greater care in defining the variables of explanation, as well as by trying to avoid the Western biases that many of the existing international relations theories have. When explaining how ASEAN manages to reach many of its political objectives, the focus in this article is on material realties as well as perceived and constructed ones. The explanation attempts to be careful in assessing what is to be explained. This is why this article first defines the criteria of success by looking at what it is that ASEAN attempts to do and then employs the quantitative data to see whether the existence of ASEAN is correlated to the desired outcomes. At the end of this article, the concluding explanation of ASEAN will be relativized by looking at the new challenges to which ASEAN should or could respond. The elitism of the ‘old ASEAN Way’ will need to give way to a more broad-based approach to stability, if ASEAN wants to remain relevant as an organization in the future.