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Older men face significant health inequities compared to women, with the transition to retirement often exacerbating these differences.
Objective
This study explored the benefits of participation in the Squamish Men’s Shed (SMS) in British Columbia, Canada.
Methods
Using a case study design, semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 members aged 55 and older.
Findings
Thematic analysis identified four overarching themes: A Meaningful Use of Time, The Desire to Give Back, Finding Friendship Within the Shed, and Well-Being as a By-Product. Findings described the Shed as a valuable space to maintain structure and purpose postretirement, foster community engagement, and cultivate social connection. While mental health was rarely an explicit motivation for participation, members described enhanced well-being as an indirect outcome. The Shed also provided opportunities for intergenerational contribution, reinforcing a sense of usefulness and generativity.
Discussion
The findings highlight the Shed’s potential as a community-based model that promotes men’s mental health rather than formalized interventions.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Portugal launched armed campaigns to subdue its African colonies, following the example of neighbouring powers. The Ovambo peoples of southern Angola mounted strong resistance to Portuguese encroachment. Lisbon’s anxieties were compounded by the German presence in South West Africa. In late 1914, the Ovambo seized upon the Portuguese military defeat by German forces to lead an unprecedented uprising. Portugal retaliated in mid-1915 with a large-scale campaign that employed systematic terror. These tactics caused a famine that killed tens of thousands and arguably constituted genocide. This article examines the 1915 campaign in southern Angola, focusing on the devastating impact of Portuguese repression. It reflects on the links between colonialism, violence, and genocide, and considers the political reverberations of this violence in metropolitan Portugal.
This study aimed to evaluate the independent effect of parental smoking on early markers of atherosclerosis in children, specifically carotid intima-media thickness and epicardial adipose tissue thickness.
Methods:
A total of 106 healthy children aged 6–16 years were enrolled, including 53 with parental smoking exposure and 53 unexposed controls. Participants underwent clinical evaluation, laboratory assessment, transthoracic echocardiography, and carotid ultrasonography. Data on parental smoking habits, sociodemographic characteristics, and children’s daily sleep duration were collected. Multivariable analyses were performed to assess the independent association between parental smoking and subclinical atherosclerotic markers.
Results:
Children exposed to parental smoking demonstrated significantly greater epicardial adipose tissue thickness and carotid intima-media thickness compared with controls (p = 0.014 and p = 0.001, respectively). Lipid parameters did not differ significantly between groups. Daily sleep duration was negatively correlated with epicardial adipose tissue thickness (r = –0.325, p = 0.018) and carotid intima-media thickness (r = –0.484, p < 0.001). Parental smoking remained independently associated with both markers after adjustment for relevant covariates.
Conclusions:
Parental smoking is associated with early atherosclerotic changes in children, demonstrated by increased carotid intima-media thickness and epicardial adipose tissue thickness, independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors.
Vasovagal syncope is the most common cause of syncope in children, and there is no satisfactory treatment currently. We evaluated the response to midodrine treatment in patients with vasovagal syncope who failed to benefit from conventional, non-pharmacologic treatments.
Materials and methods:
The study was a single-centre retrospective study. The data of 44 children between the ages of 6 and 18 years, who were diagnosed with recurrent vasovagal syncope, did not benefit from non- pharmacological treatments, and received midodrine treatment from 2015 to 2022 were enrolled in the study.
Results:
In total, 44 patients, 38 (86.4%) were girls, and 6 (13.6%) were boys. The primary outcome measure was the change in frequency of vasovagal syncope episodes from baseline to 6 months after treatment with midodrine. Patients received a midodrine treatment at an average of 2.5–5 mg/day and were followed for a median of 23.07 (8–72) months. The median number of syncope was 4.2 (3–9.8)/year prior to treatment and 1.2 (1–5)/year (p = 0.01) following the treatment. There was a significant improvement in syncope episodes in all patients.
Conclusion:
Vasovagal syncope is the common cause of syncope in children, and its treatment has not yet been found satisfactory. Midodrine treatment was found to be effective and safe in paediatric patients with recurrent vasovagal syncope. However, further research is needed to determine the most effective treatment for this condition.
There is evidence that the two most common subtypes of functional neurological disorder, functional seizures (FSs) and functional motor symptoms (FMDs), have differences between them beyond symptom type, creating debate as to whether they may best be considered distinct disorders. However, most research has studied FS or FMD separately, and the few studies that have directly compared them have been relatively small. We used the large TriNetX electronic health database to see whether the differences previously identified would be confirmed in a larger sample of both subtypes.
Methods
All cases of FMD without FS were compared with cases of FS without FMD, extracted from the TriNetX electronic health records database. Previously identified between-group differences in demographics, comorbidity, and antecedents were compared between groups.
Results
Over 120,000 cases of FMD and FS were extracted. They confirmed that people with FS were significantly younger and had a younger onset than those with FMD, were more likely to be Black and less likely to be Asian, and had higher rates of all comorbid mental health diagnoses, other than somatoform diagnoses, which were more common in FMD. The onset of FS was more commonly preceded by psychological injury, as measured by preceding depression or stress reactions.
Conclusion
The differences between FMD and FS previously identified in small studies were confirmed in this much larger dataset. They provide indirect support for differences in etiology and mechanism, which may in turn support a nosological distinction between FMD and FS.
In 1948, the Nationalist Party of South Africa implemented apartheid, a policy of strict racial segregation that governed the country for forty-six years until 1994. Apartheid’s proponents legislated several measures to entrench racial separation under the direction of its proclaimed architect Hendrik Verwoerd. This included passing the Group Areas Act, which set aside enclaves for different racial groups, and the Population Registration Act which required every citizen to declare a racial category in 1950. These promulgations further enforced the 1945 Groups Areas Act. Passed during the segregation era from 1910 to 1948, this law determined where Africans could live, work, and travel within the metropolitan spaces.
Gödel algebras are the Heyting algebras satisfying the axiom $(x \to y) \vee (y \to x)=1$. We utilize Priestley and Esakia dualities to dually describe free Gödel algebras and coproducts of Gödel algebras. In particular, we realize the Esakia space dual to a Gödel algebra free over a distributive lattice as the, suitably topologized and ordered, collection of all nonempty closed chains of the Priestley dual of the lattice. This provides a tangible dual description of free Gödel algebras without any restriction on the number of free generators, which generalizes known results for the finitely generated case. A similar approach allows us to characterize the Esakia spaces dual to coproducts of arbitrary families of Gödel algebras. We also establish analogous dual descriptions of free algebras and coproducts in every variety of Gödel algebras. As consequences of these results, we obtain a formula to compute the depth of coproducts of Gödel algebras and show that all free Gödel algebras are bi-Heyting algebras.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 3000–8000 Africans and African descendants from Brazil relocated to the Bight of Benin and developed a very successful settlement system in what is today Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo. Kangni Alem’s Les Enfants du Brésil (2017) and Florent Couao-Zotti’s Les Fantômes du Brésil (2006) portray these Brazilian returnee communities, also known as Aguda, who wielded considerable economic and political power. The analysis mobilizes Christin Hess’s concept of reverse diaspora to reveal the complexity of returnee identity and the ambiguous notion of home. Both novels mediate the diasporic returnee experience using specific writing strategies, such as diversity of narrative voices, intertextuality, and a nonlinear structure. Moreover, Alem and Couao-Zotti infuse their novels with historical and ethnological elements that are transformed by literature through what Alem calls “material imagination.” This approach showcases the power of fiction to recover history and reconstruct collective narratives.
We propose a novel stability criterion for incompressible shear flows by combining input–output analysis and the small gain theorem. The criterion yields an explicit threshold on the magnitude of velocity perturbations about a given base flow that guarantees stability. If this threshold is crossed – either due to non-modal growth, exponential growth or a bypass transition scenario – our analysis predicts a loss of stability that may lead to transition to turbulence. We consider three approximated models for nonlinearity: unstructured, structured with non-repeated blocks and structured with repeated blocks. We show that the imposed threshold obtained by these three methods complies with a hierarchical relationship, where the unstructured case is the most conservative, imposing the lowest bound on disturbance magnitude. We apply this approach to three canonical and well-studied base flows: Couette, plane Poiseuille and Blasius. For these three base flows, we compare our results with experiments, direct numerical simulation results, non-modal nonlinear stability results and linear stability theory (LST). In the limit of infinitesimally small perturbation magnitude, our stability criterion for the unstructured case recovers the results of LST. For finite perturbations, the structured cases that account for nonlinear interactions provided stability thresholds that are consistent with experimental observations and simulation results of transition at both subcritical and post-critical Reynolds numbers for the considered base flows in our study. In particular, we utilise our stability criterion to demonstrate that Couette flow can become unstable and transition can be triggered at different Reynolds numbers, which is consistent with past experimental observations.
We introduce a correlation number for two strictly positive locally Hölder continuous independent potentials with strong entropy gaps at infinity on a topologically mixing countable state Markov shift with big images and pre-images (BIP) property. We define in this way a correlation number for pairs of cusped Hitchin representations. Furthermore, we explore the connection between the correlation number and the Manhattan curve, along with several rigidity properties of this correlation number.
In From the Wreck (2017), Australian author and environmentalist Jane Rawson imagines that her great-great-grandfather George Hills, one of the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Admella, is rescued by a more-than-human shapeshifting being, who subsequently destabilizes his identity as a settler living in colonial South Australia. In this essay, I argue for the importance of bringing together speculative histories, the New Weird, and critical ocean studies, whose intersections are embodied in the more-than-human being as a character in Rawson’s novel. I suggest that this constitutes an important critical tool for interrogating the ways in which we remember settler colonial history in Australia, especially a history that is depicted as independent of the environment and one that marginalizes the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. In this way, I demonstrate how the New Oceanic Weird as a genre can highlight reciprocity on an individual and a collective level to emphasize the entangled and reciprocal histories between the human and the more-than-human alongside those of settler colonialism and environmental destruction.
From the 1870s through the 1930s, Parsi entrepreneurs based in Bombay financed large professional theatre companies. Their extensive tours brought live stage entertainment to all parts of the subcontinent. Female performers were one of Parsi theatre’s chief attractions. This article focuses on three celebrated women whose trajectories took them in different directions. Jamila Begam came from Iraq to India but achieved her ambition of running a theatre company in colonial Burma. Mary Fenton, ‘the English actress’, was born in India and escaped poverty by performing in Urdu and Gujarati on stages across North India. Nanhi Jan worked in Parsi theatre, recorded art music on phonographs, and yet was best known for her postcard image as a quintessential ‘nautch girl’. Each actress can be verified from memoirs, newspaper ads, official records, or photographs. Their experiences underscore the hazards of mobility as well as the ways in which travel enabled performing women to occupy a larger world professionally, socially, and economically.