This article offers a counter-reading of the Ghaznavid panegyric that resists reducing its idiom of praise to an effect of political legitimation, as dominant accounts of the genre have done. By highlighting how two panegyrics, one by ʿUnṣurī and the other by Farrukhī, subvert the aesthetic-didactic expectations surrounding praise born from Islamicate rhetorical and poetic theory, it contends that Persian panegyric poetry does not transparently deploy praise. To this end, the article first proposes four structures of praise that render praise both legible and susceptible to ironizing: evidentiary agreement, intradistich agreement, interdistich agreement, and metapoetic balance. A subsequent analysis of ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī’s panegyrics reveals how ostensibly laudatory claims can ironize these structures to produce effects of delegitimation, rather than legitimation, while maintaining a posture of praise.

At ANSTO, we have developed an automated dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) processing line, known as A-DIC, designed to sequentially process 10 water samples for radiocarbon analysis without any operator intervention. The A-DIC works at ambient pressure using helium (He) gas as a carrier. It includes a water pump capable of drawing adjustable sample volumes between 22-180 mL into a 250 mL reaction vessel. Upon the addition of 5 mL of phosphoric acid to the vessel, the sample is sparged with helium (He) gas at a rate of 45 mL/min for 16 min. The desorbed CO2 from the sample is then carried along with He through a series of traps: water vapor traps at –75 °C, a sulphur (SOx) trap containing silver wires at 650 °C, and two CO2 traps at –196 °C. The A-DIC is automated via a Python script executed on a PC connected via USB. It demonstrates consistent performance and CO2 trapping efficiency across batches of up to 10 samples. For contamination study, the CO2 gas collected is transferred to graphitization units to be converted into graphite for AMS analysis.

The intrinsic width and scattering distributions of fast radio bursts (FRBs) inform on their emission mechanism and local environment, and act as a source of detection bias and, hence, an obfuscating factor when performing FRB population and cosmological studies. Here, we utilise a sample of 29 FRBs with measured high-time-resolution properties and known redshift, which were detected using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) by the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients Survey (CRAFT), to model these distributions. Using this sample, we estimate the completeness bias of intrinsic width and scattering measurements and fit the underlying, de-biased distributions in the host rest-frame. In no case do our model fits prefer a down-turn at high values of the intrinsic distributions of either parameter in the 0.01–40 ms range probed by the data. Rather, when assuming a spectral scattering index of $\alpha = -4$, we find that the intrinsic scattering distribution at 1 GHz is consistent with a log-uniform distribution above 0.04 ms and that this functional form is strongly favoured over the lognormal descriptions used by previous works. We also find that the intrinsic width distribution rises as a Gaussian in log-space in the 0.03 – 0.3 ms range, with a log-uniform distribution above that slightly preferred to a lognormal distribution. This confirms previous works suggesting that FRB observations are currently strongly width- and scattering-limited, and we encourage FRB searches to be extended to higher values of time-width. It also implies a bias in FRB host galaxy studies, although the form of that bias is uncertain. Finally, we find that our updated width and scattering models – when implemented in the zDM code – produces $\sim$10% more FRBs at redshift $z=1$ than at $z=0$ when compared to alternative width/scattering models, highlighting that these factors are important to understand when performing FRB population modelling.

Work on the relationship between regulation and bribery suggests that bribes are a joint function of the demands of bureaucrats and the supply of business managers willing to pay them. However, due to biases in measurement, empirical work has concentrated on country-level, demand-side drivers, while research on factors that lead businesses to bribe remains theoretically rich but empirically underdeveloped. We contribute to the burgeoning work on the supply of bribery with a formal model that predicts poorly managed firms may strategically initiate bribes because resource constraints and/or poor service quality necessitate shortcuts in regulatory compliance. To test these theories, we present two connected studies. The first demonstrates that the predictions are consistent with cross-national business survey data. The second, a field experiment, randomly assigned firms to management training courses in Vietnam. Using detailed accounting books, we find that firms in the management course paid monthly bribes less than one-fifth the size ($227 less) of the placebo group, and, consistent with our predictions, had higher levels of regulatory compliance.

The article discusses why Classics is important and why its study benefits not just university students but also young children. It was runner-up in the Intermediate Category for a Classical Association competition in 2025. The article explores the value of Classics as a wonderfully diverse subject involving the study of history, archaeology, architecture, art, and literature. Classics enables students to study over a thousand years of history, to uncover cultural values, to discover how language operates, to develop critical analysis skills, and to delight in its timeless literature. The article explores how the study of Classics can benefit young students’ reading and writing proficiency and can be especially beneficial for those with special educational needs. It explores how Latin translation builds code cracking and cognitive skills, not only developing grammatical knowledge but also encouraging problem-solving suited to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-based subjects such as computer science and maths. The article looks at the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and the benefits of learning Latin and Greek vocabulary for language learning and science.

In this paper, I argue that the literature on victims’ duties to resist their own oppression has not paid enough attention to the heterogeneity of victims and how this affects their duties. The main aim of the paper is to introduce considerations and complications—informed by an intersectional analysis, and particularly the concept of privilege—that must be taken into account when determining how to assign duties to resist. I argue that failure to recognize these nuances results in an overcautiousness when it comes to assigning duties of resistance, and that a blanket reluctance to assign such duties is of most detriment to the most marginalized.

The vast majority of researchers, actuaries, and demographers use standard time series analysis techniques to project time-varying parameters of popular mortality forecasting methods such as the Lee–Carter and Li–Lee models. However, spatial dependence can be as significant as temporal autocorrelation in these time series, and the underlying panel structure of the data is often neglected. We draw on techniques from panel and spatial econometrics, including ordinary and spatial dynamic panel linear models, spatiotemporal autoregressive integrated moving average processes, and spatial eigenvector filters, to capture such dependence and improve projections. We present a methodology to estimate the parameters of these techniques from spatial multipopulation mortality series, select their optimal hyperparameters, and use them for forecasting. We propose a tailor-made robust selection framework to identify the best model–technique combinations for each country, as well as a bootstrap-based procedure to quantify projection uncertainty with accurate nominal coverage on a separate validation period and a strategy for assessing the quality of the resulting prediction intervals. We test these methods on mortality data from 22 European countries. The results show that the proposed techniques yield a clear advantage in both point and interval forecasts for several populations, and these findings are corroborated by a robust selection design and additional robustness checks. These improvements have the potential to deliver meaningful gains for life insurance, pensions, and other contexts involving longevity risk.

This article examines how the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) functioned as a contested arena where divergent projects of labour internationalism and decolonization intersected in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the Indian communist trade union leader Shripad Amrit Dange (1899–1991). Drawing on the concept of subaltern internationalism, it analyses how Dange, as WFTU vice-president and executive committee member, sought to appropriate the federation as a vehicle for anti-colonial projects, and how his scope for action was shaped by colonial and post-colonial repression, structural inequalities, and Cold War ideological conflicts. Using materials from the WFTU and All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) collections, along with contemporary journals, the article reconstructs three key phases: the 1945 founding conferences; the contested development of a WFTU Colonial Department and a Pan-Asian initiative; and the post-1949 period, when the federation reoriented itself towards a more explicit anti-colonial programme after the split. Methodologically, the article employs a biographical lens to trace how Dange’s reflections on colonial capitalism and the social composition of the Indian working class fed into debates on decolonization within the WFTU, challenged dominant Western notions, and articulated a vision of post-colonial labour internationalism that linked workplace struggles “from below” to institutional measures “from above”, culminating in his interventions at the fourth world congress in Leipzig in 1957.

This study investigates bilingual language control across comprehension and production. In three experiments, Chinese–English bilinguals alternated between tasks on every trial. In the comprehension task, participants judged the meaning of a written word (Experiment 1) or a spoken word (Experiments 2 and 3) in either language. In the production task, they named pictures in only one language (Experiments 1 and 2) or in either language (Experiment 3), with half of the trials involving language switching. Thus, salient visual language cues were available only in Experiment 1, and within-production language switching occurred only in Experiment 3. Language switch costs from comprehension to production emerged only in Experiment 2, where spoken word comprehension was paired with single-language production. These findings suggest that reduced saliency of language cues encourages a shared language control mechanism across comprehension and production when within-production control demands are low, supporting the adaptive nature of bilingual language control.

This study examined the incidence, type of electrocardiogram abnormalities, and associated risk factors in healthy paediatric athletes. A single-centre retrospective cohort study was conducted on a local male youth competitive soccer programme, ages 11–18. The primary outcome was the incidence of electrocardiogram abnormalities. The secondary outcomes were recurrence and the type of electrocardiogram abnormalities. Covariables were age, race, family history, and current medications. Statistical analysis program was used for analysis. There was a total of 368 electrocardiograms reviewed from 2021–2024, of which 68 (18.5%) had at least one abnormality. 182 unique athletes were screened. A higher proportion of multi-racial and African American athletes had electrocardiogram abnormalities (p-value 0.02). In our sample of healthy paediatric athletes, electrocardiogram abnormality incidence was similar to that noted in other studies. There were no significant cardiac findings noted after further evaluation on any of the athletes with abnormal electrocardiogram findings. Our data support that universal electrocardiogram screening of healthy paediatric athletes is not beneficial.