This study investigates the constructed meanings and symbolic functions of the Chinese English buzzword ‘city walk’, which has evolved into a significant cultural phenomenon for young urbanites in China. The term gained popularity as the COVID‑19 pandemic catalyzed the emergence of micro‑tourism. Drawing on an adapted framework of the symbolic power of language (Kramsch 2020), the researchers conducted a thematic analysis of the metapragmatic discourse of ‘city walk’ from Xiaohongshu, a popular Chinese social media platform. The findings reveal two key symbolic dimensions: (1) ‘city walk’ functions as a symbol of global imagination and cultural taste, with its meaning reconstructed to index users’ pursuit of fashion and cosmopolitanism; and (2) it serves as a form of ritual resistance against the ‘sense of powerlessness’ against societal pressures like overwork culture, while its resistive meaning has been complicated by its subsequent incorporation into consumerism and tourism promotion narratives. These findings reveal how ‘city walk’ functions as a symbolic resource for young people to articulate and negotiate complex identities that bridge global imaginations and specific local socio‑economic contexts, underscoring language’s role as a dynamic mirror of social change.

We identify a novel pathway that links financial globalization to politics. We emphasize the effect of globalization on the relationship between governments and domestic business owners, who, like all borrowers, are subject to “Global Credit Cycles” originating from the U.S. Downturns in these cycles, stemming from high U.S. interest rates, reduce credit availability, depress asset prices, and broadly worsen the outlook for private sector profits. While politicians have limited power to address the underlying financial conditions, they can adopt business-friendly politics to signal their willingness to compensate firms for the higher borrowing costs driven by higher U.S. interest rates. We support our argument with evidence from party manifestos across 59 countries, covering 1963 to 2017. Our paper documents a new connection between global credit cycles and party positions during an era of largely unrestricted capital mobility.

Biodesign education increasingly engages with living and bio-based materials whose temporal, relational, and ecological properties challenge established modes of material archiving and teaching. Conventional material libraries, oriented toward stabilisation and preservation, are poorly equipped to address growth, contamination, and decay as constitutive material processes. This paper proposes a reconceptualisation of material libraries as living material archives: dynamic epistemic infrastructures that foreground transformation, care, and finitude rather than control. Drawing on feminist technoscience and material culture studies, the paper develops three conceptual lenses – cross-contamination, sympoiesis, and the website as garden – to examine how material and digital archives can support situated knowledge production in biodesign education. These perspectives are grounded in a detailed case study of the Living Library, a hybrid analogue–digital teaching project developed at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. The paper demonstrates how temporary, process-oriented archives can operationalise ecological responsibility, disciplinary openness, and regenerative learning practices.

Mechanical cultivation can utilize more than one type of weed control implement in the same pass. Implements may even be synergistically “stacked” to maximize efficacy. However, in previous trials, stacked setups caused unacceptable damage to crops. In this study, several changes to previously used cultivation setups were made, including adding global positioning system guidance, using sweeps rather than torsion weeders, and spacing the implements farther from the crop. In test crops of snap beans and beets, stacked three-tool combinations resulted in greater weed-control efficacy with no significant decrease in the survival of well-established crops – thereby providing improved selectivity. Within one-, two-, or three-tool categories, there were few differences, except that the harrow-type implements were often less aggressive than the other tools. Combining all our trials, the crop-to-weed height ratio appeared to be a main driver of intrarow cultivation success, but stacking still provided a benefit. Specifically, to achieve successful cultivation with 80% weed control and 5% or less crop mortality, we modeled that one, two, and three tool combinations required crop-to-weed height ratios of at least 6.2, 5.6, and 3.6, respectively. Based on these trials, farmers may improve their cultivation selectivity by creating conditions in which their crops are as large as possible relative to weeds and by using precisely guided, stacked cultivation implements adjusted to minimize contact with crops.

Time-varying coefficient modeling (TVCM), which represents regression coefficients as smooth functions of continuous time, provides a flexible framework for uncovering complex patterns of change in levels and associations in intensive longitudinal data. However, conventional TVCM remains limited to investigating directional effects across individuals. By introducing a TVCM formulation of the multivariate normal distribution, the present study extends TVCM to explore change in undirected associations (couplings) and variability, thereby broadening its utility for psychological research. We discuss three versions of this approach: an aggregate-level model and two hierarchical versions capturing interindividual differences in unfolding change, either via person-specific intercepts accounting for onset differences or through fully person-specific coefficient functions smoothed via partial pooling. To illustrate the proposed developments, we apply them to six weeks of intensive longitudinal data from 16 anxiety patients undergoing therapy and examine unfolding changes in the level and volatility of nervousness and threat monitoring, their coupling, as well as between-person heterogeneity in each of these. We further show how inspecting first-order derivatives of the coefficient functions supports identifying periods of stability and change. Finally, we discuss extensions incorporating person-level characteristics to explain heterogeneity in patterns of change and predict outcomes.

Pulmonary artery sling is a rare congenital anomaly in which the left pulmonary artery arises anomalously from the right pulmonary artery. With rigorous pre-operative assessment, we successfully repaired isolated pulmonary artery sling using left thoracotomy in a highly selected group of children. In this modern series, we have achieved satisfactory surgical outcomes without using cardiopulmonary bypass support.

Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have been a persistent feature of global governance. However, only recently have they become the focus in governance scholarship. Why are they created, and how do they vary in their composition and afterlife? We examine AHCs since 1919 across health and security governance challenges. Our analysis rests on archival material from international organizations (IOs) and national governments. We argue that, in bringing together political rivals, AHCs serve three primary purposes. Firstly, as agenda setters, they address new governance challenges. Secondly, as capacity generators, they reshuffle membership compositions. Finally, as decision accelerators, they enable their members to bypass existing IOs. Beyond these commonalities, notable differences exist that are rooted in relative issue salience. Less salient issues are often led by bureaucrats and experts, glossing over political agendas and mediating between rivals. This set-up often leads to permanent cooperative structures. Issues that decision-makers perceive as highly salient occupy the attention of politicians who want to keep the coalition small. As a result, rivalries can easily come to the fore, leading to short-lived coalitions. Overall, AHCs point to more or less exclusionary action that serves as a testing ground for international cooperation in times of uncertainty and (geo)political crises.

Since stochastic differential equations (SDEs) driven by G-Brownian motion are of great importance in modeling situations that incorporate ambiguity, it is essential to address efficient numerical schemes to approximate the solution of such equations. The stream of research related to the numerical solutions of G-SDEs under standard assumptions is to some extent well understood. In this note, we are interested in designing an implicit $\theta$-Euler–Maruyama scheme to approximate the solution of G-SDEs under locally Lipschitz continuous coefficients. The convergence of the proposed scheme is established using the stopping time technique. In addition, we investigate the exponentially/quasi-surely asymptotic stability property of the scheme.

Land snails of the genus Poecilozonites, endemic to Bermuda, have undergone precipitous declines, and both extant species, P. bermudensis and P. circumfirmatus, are categorized as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Here we report on recovery efforts to reintroduce P. bermudensis derived from a remnant wild population and ex situ breeding programme to within the species’ indigenous range. Follow-up monitoring of initial reintroductions on the small Nonsuch Island carried out over 7 years revealed that the snails rapidly established a self-sustaining population at one of three release sites. By 2023, the snails, released in 2016, had increased their area of occupancy to 6,849 m2, moved up to 92 m from the release site, and reached an estimated mean density of up to 44.2 adult snails/m2. Across the archipelago, we released 105,970 P. bermudensis (adults and juveniles) to 11 offshore islands and 16 main island sites from 2019 to 2022. Based on persistence, reproduction, and expansion from the release site after at least 1 year from release, reintroductions to six offshore islands were successful, but those on the main island failed, possibly because of higher predation pressure and paucity of suitable refuges. Controlling predators, such as rodents, and safeguarding these offshore islands against predator incursion is essential to ensure continued survival of the reintroduced populations.