In the aftermath of the Second World War, Poland faced immense public health challenges amidst widespread destruction and political transformation. This article explores the largely overlooked medical mission of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Poland, situating it within both humanitarian and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on archival research and press accounts, the study reconstructs the USC’s multifaceted aid efforts, including its Medical Teaching Mission, the establishment of the Piekary Śląskie hospital, and tuberculosis control initiatives. The analysis highlights how the USC combined direct medical assistance with educational outreach, aiming to support long-term recovery. However, operating behind the Iron Curtain, the Committee’s activities were subject to both surveillance and propaganda, revealing the entanglement of health and politics in Cold War Europe. This case offers new insights into the role of non-governmental actors in shaping postwar public health and diplomacy in Eastern Europe.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act introduces a novel regulatory category of “unacceptable risk,” prohibiting specific AI practices that are deemed fundamentally incompatible with human rights and ethical principles. While much attention has focused on the regulation of high-risk AI systems, particularly in medical contexts, the AI Act’s outright bans under Article 5 have received far less scrutiny. This paper addresses that gap by examining how these prohibitions apply to healthcare and public health, which are domains defined by rapid technological uptake, structural vulnerability, and ethically sensitive decision-making. Drawing on the European Commission’s 2025 interpretative Guidelines, the paper argues that several health-related AI applications, such as emotion recognition tools, biometric categorisation systems, and technologies that influence or target vulnerable populations, may fall within the scope of the bans. It also shows that the Act’s medical and safety exceptions risk weakening the vulnerability protections that the prohibitions aim to secure. By integrating legal analysis with real-world health examples, the paper offers a framework for interpreting these prohibitions and assesses how they should guide the ethical boundaries of AI in healthcare, within and beyond the European context.

Taking Singapore’s Nanyang University (Nantah) as a case study, this article examines Cold War American efforts to reshape higher education in Southeast Asia, and the efforts of local elites to leverage these resources for their own agendas. Best known as the only ‘Chinese’ university outside of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Nantah has been variously critiqued as an institutional home for leftist-student activism and Chinese communal interests in decolonizing Southeast Asia. This article argues that it was also a centrepiece in an American-led political agenda to contain communist China by supporting ‘Free Chinese’ educational facilities in the diaspora. It demonstrates how American policies aimed at supporting Chinese higher education outside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) encountered the local politics of decolonization in Singapore, producing new educational infrastructures in the region oriented towards American universities. While Nanyang University was initially the locus of American attention in the early Cold War, its strategic significance as a ‘Chinese’ university in Southeast Asia was increasingly sidelined by an assertive Singapore government eager to leverage American resources for its own developmental needs. Arguably, the longer term legacies of this episode can be discerned through Singapore’s centrality in the globalization of American higher education in Asia, and the broader reorienting of intellectual networks and epistemologies in Singapore which endures to the present day.

Infradiaphragmatic total anomalous pulmonary venous return is a rare CHD often requiring emergent cardiac surgery. Options are limited for premature infants. We describe successful transcatheter palliation of a premature infant utilising stenting of the ductus venosus followed by transhepatic portal venous access for stent placement in an obstructed vertical vein with hepatic tract closure using the VASCADE Vascular Closure System (Cardiva Medical Inc., Santa Barbara, CA).

Community structure in networks naturally arises in various applications. But while the topic has received significant attention for static networks, the literature on community structure in temporally evolving networks is more scarce. In particular, there are currently no statistical methods available to test for the presence of community structure in a sequence of networks evolving over time. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful test using e-values, an alternative to p-values that is more flexible in certain ways. Specifically, an e-value framework retains valid testing properties even after combining dependent information, a relevant feature in the context of testing temporal networks. We apply the proposed test to synthetic and real-world networks, demonstrating various features inherited from the e-value formulation and exposing some of the inherent difficulties of testing on temporal networks.

Bureaucratic agencies hold enormous power to affect citizens’ lives through agency rulemaking. These rules hold the force of law, though the officials writing them do not serve in elected positions. Resulting concerns about bureaucratic policymaking have given rise to prolific literature on political control by executives and legislatures seeking to limit the opportunity for moral hazard. I contend that other factors may restrain rulemaking that do not arise directly from other government institutions. Specifically, I assess whether and how state political culture checks bureaucratic power by affecting the number and content of regulatory proposals. Using a large dataset containing the nearly 200,000 proposed regulations from agencies in every US state over a 10-year period, I test the degree to which states with varying cultures utilize bureaucratic rulemaking. I then evaluate whether culture impacts the topics covered by regulation using a subset of six states representing each cultural type. Findings suggest that agencies in traditionalistic states issue fewer regulations than those in moralistic or individualistic states, but proposed rules in individualistic states cover a broader range of policy areas. These results deepen our understanding of the factors influencing regulatory politics, expanding the universe of bureaucratic control beyond government institutions to the broader environment.

RUCAI is an AI-based open-source software platform designed for humanities and social sciences educational workflows that require traceability to assigned course materials. RUCAI has a teacher-only workspace in which teachers can curate class exercises grounded in curriculum documents (articles, book chapters, and notes). From here, the teacher can set up workspaces grounded explicitly in curriculum materials, learning outcomes, and course requirements for students to use throughout the course. The system is set up to run on institution-controlled infrastructure using FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and a local LLM model serving via Ollama, and is intended to be deployable on a GPU-enabled virtual machine. RUCAI’s primary contributions are practical: (1) it presents a software architecture for local-first, source-grounded educational AI that treats the course as the primary software object; (2) it documents concrete implementation choices for reliable ingestion and retrieval across heterogeneous course materials, including a three-tier extraction pipeline, word-based chunking, and intent-aware retrieval; and (3) it describes a publish-to-student mechanism that lets teachers freeze course context and prompt constraints into student-facing instances. The paper also reports pilot observations, current limitations, and future development directions.

This article re-examines the waqf al-dashīshah founded by the Mamluk sultan Qāʾitbāy (r. AH 872–901/1468–1496 CE) for the distribution of dashīshah (porridge) and bread in the Ḥaramayn (Mecca and Medina), particularly in Medina. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of MS Arabe 1118 (Bibliothèque nationale de France) alongside related sources, it reconstructs the operational logic and historical trajectory of this endowment. The article argues that Qāʾitbāy’s waqf al-dashīshah functioned not merely as a personal charitable foundation but as a centrally managed provisioning system that channelled agrarian surplus from Egypt to the Hijaz. Its property base, transport infrastructure, and involvement of officials embedded the waqf within the administrative practices of the Mamluk or Cairo Sultanate, while the frequent use of state treasury land further blurred the boundary between public finance and pious endowment. Tracing the waqf’s continued operation and adaptation under early Ottoman rule, moreover, the article demonstrates its durability as an institutional mechanism. Overall, it shows that the waqf al-dashīshah served simultaneously as charity, governance, and political representation, articulating the Cairo Sultanate’s claim to authority as khādim al-Ḥaramayn (the server of the Ḥaramayn) within a context of intensifying inter-Muslim competition.

Many social welfare measures will sometimes rank a large population of very well-faring people below a very large population of barely well-faring people. Thus, they entail the repugnant conclusion. If such rankings are indeed repugnant, there must be some mistake behind measures that imply them. This paper discusses what that mistake might be. After rejecting other proposals, I suggest that the mistaken assumption is that welfare values that are insignificant for individuals, due to being small, could have significant impact on social welfare. To avoid this mistake, two new measures are introduced that aggregate significant and insignificant welfare values differently.

This paper overviews an overlapping generations financial cash flow valuation model that evaluates the financial sustainability of English NHS Trusts. It quantifies the financial sustainability constraints related to societal demographic shifts that affect their ability to maintain service delivery quality. The financial model computes a new long-term financial sustainability performance metric based on the notion of the Social Return on Investment (“SROI”). The measure evaluates the financial sustainability of two English acute care hospital foundation Trusts. Significant generational imbalances are identified for both sample NHS Trusts, both within different cohorts of existing generations, and between existing and future generational cohorts. Suggestions are provided for implementing these ideas and expanding actuaries’ expertise and skill sets.