A la caída de Teotihuacan, la ciudad no queda en total abandono; grupos culturales continuaron viviendo sobre las ruinas, reutilizando espacios y áreas a las que quizás, en algún momento, no les era permitido acceder. Hacia 600-650 dC comienza a prevalecer un nuevo complejo cerámico Coyotlatelco integrado por formas, diseños y estilos, y caracterizado por la decoración rojo sobre café. En el 800-850 dC el complejo cerámico Mazapa se encuentra en el área; sus formas y estilos (la decoración con líneas ondulantes y la olla blanco levantado cuyo origen se remonta a la región del Bajío) la hacen diferente. De 1390 dC a 1520 dC, el Complejo cerámico Azteca II, III tardío, IV y contacto está presente en Teotihuacan. Toda esta intensa actividad que se dio sobre la antigua urbe se ve reflejada en los túneles que se encuentran al este de la Pirámide del Sol. De 1987 a 1996, Linda R. Manzanilla lleva a cabo un proyecto interdisciplinario donde excava extensivamente cuatro túneles, y registra diferentes actividades al interior de ellos. Con el análisis detallado de la cerámica se pudieron identificar, ubicar cronológicamente y conformar los complejos cerámicos Coyotlatelco, Mazapa y Azteca en Teotihuacan.

Informed by institutional theories of microfoundations, this study elucidates how employment service caseworkers negotiated the configuration of welfare conditionality based on age, thereby establishing a microfoundation for policies aimed at extending job-seeking lives. Through conducting in-depth interviews with twenty-four frontline social workers and a context-mechanism-outcome analysis, the findings uncover how service providers incorporated age-specific considerations and redefined the meanings of work in later life. While organisational adjustments extended the service goals and mobilised extra resources, structural constraints forced caseworkers to adopt pragmatic attitudes towards workfare measures. Consequently, a ‘more-than-employment’ approach to older jobseekers was formulated concerned with age, relationship, and health. This research contributes to social policy studies by theorising welfare conditionality as a product of negotiated configuration that crafts the microfoundation of activation policies. Empirically, this study enriches the literature by linking extending job-seeking lives and older claimants to welfare conditionality within Hong Kong’s work-first model.

The article probes the analytical utility of the increasingly popular concept of ‘cognitive warfare’. It proceeds by reflecting writings associated with the concept’s mainstream meaning against selected insights from general strategic theory and affective science and finds cognitive warfare problematic in multiple aspects. From the perspective of general strategic theory, cognitive warfare misrepresents the nature of the challenge at hand, blurs the distinction between core aspects of strategic effort, and draws on questionable rather than sound strategic thought. From an affective science perspective, it relies on an increasingly outdated paradigm for explaining the human mind, provides little insight into how cognition shapes behaviour, and overlooks the beneficial roles of emotions in maintaining social cohesion. Integrating these perspectives, the article argues that information aggression is better understood as attempted subversion centred on specific emotions. The presented argument allows practitioners to better understand the nature of the challenges they face and to develop appropriate remedies, and academics to study the subject in a more focused manner.

In recent decades, theorists of disability rights have made the moral and legal case for supported decision-making. Whereas surrogate decision-making, the long upheld legal standard, looks to a third party to make a decision for a person deemed to lack the capacity to make that decision for themselves, support in decision-making empowers that person to make their own decisions. In this article, we argue for a significant shift in the norms governing enrollment in clinical trials. Rather than assume that support is only appropriate for individuals who cannot independently make sufficiently informed enrollment decisions, we propose “support in decision-making for all” when research protocols are beyond a certain risk threshold. Drawing inspiration from the universal design movement and feminist insights about autonomy, we argue that making support in decision-making the presumption has substantial expressive and practical benefits, and better empowers all potential research participants to make more informed, autonomous decisions.

This paper examines how practices of validation linked epistemic authority to administrative power, transforming procedures of science into instruments of governance. In the 1880s, US government chemists founded the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) to resolve conflicting fertilizer analyses and secure public authority over commercial chemistry. Through multi-laboratory studies, the AOAC adopted methods that were judged to produce uniform results – a process later known as ‘validation’. In doing so, the AOAC transformed methodological agreement into a foundation for national regulation and helped define analytical chemistry as a trusted instrument of governance. Nearly a century later, in the 1970s, the AOAC attempted to apply similar principles to toxicity testing but failed: most toxicologists resisted standardization, and methodological uniformity did not yield uniform results. Where the AOAC faltered, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) succeeded, convening scientists and regulators across the industrialized world to establish standard methods for evaluating chemical risk. While the AOAC’s original validation system defended public authority against industrial interests, the OECD’s framework reinforced industry centrality by restricting regulatory legitimacy to ‘validated’ studies. Together these cases reveal how validation translated consensus into authority and aligned scientific reliability with political and economic order.

It is easy to see that every k-edge-colouring of the complete graph on $2^k+1$ vertices contains a monochromatic odd cycle. In 1973, Erdős and Graham asked to estimate the smallest L(k) such that every k-edge-colouring of $K_{2^k+1}$ contains a monochromatic odd cycle of length at most L(k). Recently, Girão and Hunter obtained the first nontrivial upper bound by showing that $L(k)=O({2^k}/({k^{1-o(1)}}))$, which improves the trivial bound by a polynomial factor. We obtain an exponential improvement by proving that $L(k)=O(k^{3/2}2^{k/2})$. Our proof combines tools from algebraic combinatorics and approximation theory.

On July 25, 2025, the French Court of Cassation handed down an important decision concerning the existence in international law of possible exceptions to the functional immunity of agents of a foreign state. The Court of Cassation reached the conclusion that the “principle of functional immunity from jurisdiction in criminal matters” recognized for foreign agents acting in the exercise of their functions cannot be invoked in cases of prosecutions for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. However, the Court’s internationalist approach, which sought to identify the evolution of custom on the issue by examining relevant state practice, remains exclusively Eurocentric, by examining the practice of only five states, all from the same region of the world.

The rise of nationalist and populist candidates worldwide provides compelling evidence that parties win elections, not by appealing to voters’ policy preferences alone, but rather by connecting those preferences to group identities. This state-of-the-field article argues that party scholars need to integrate constructivist insights from neighboring fields to better understand the role of group identities in party competition. We review recent demand- and supply-side studies on the role of group identities in elections and bring them into conversation with the literature on ethnic politics and nationalism and political economic models of identity politics. On this basis, we suggest a research agenda that models voters as having both policy preferences and desires for self-esteem and self-consistency, which are mediated by their identification with social groups. Voters want to benefit others they see as being similar to themselves, to raise the status of the groups they identify with, and to maintain self-consistency by narrowing the gap between themselves and members of groups with which they identify. Political parties strategically combine policy offers with group appeals to address – and shape – all these motivations. Shifting from a ‘policy-only’ towards a ‘policy-cum-identity’ paradigm will enable the field of party politics to better understand the dynamics of real-world electoral competition and to reconcile its models with the latest developments in the political theory of representation.

The study is one of the first in its field to be grounded in extensive, original qualitative data on the lived experiences of senior managers in financial firms. Its principal aim is to construct a comprehensive, empirically-based typology of culture in finance, drawing on findings from 29 semi-structured interviews with current and former senior managers in UK financial firms and regulatory personnel. The study employs a rigorous participant selection and thematic analysis process that reflects the diverse array of financial firms, sectors, roles and perspectives on culture. It does so by applying appropriate theoretical frameworks on organisational culture to unearth the nuances and typology of culture in the UK finance industry. Our findings indicate that financial firms are in a state of transition between two distinct types of culture, from an old and heavily criticised archetype (which still holds sway) towards a not yet fully realised vision of a new transformed culture. Beyond its theoretical interest, our analysis reveals ways to improve culture in finance and provides recommendations for the development of financial regulation and broader policymaking, aiming for a whole-hearted shift from principles-based regulation to outcomes-based regulation.

This paper addresses the challenge of balance control for the underactuated triple pendulum robot (UTPR) using a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) strategy. A curriculum-based Soft Actor-Critic strategy, with a quadratic form and an integral term in the reward function (CSAC-QI), is proposed. By incorporating the integral of cumulative joint angle errors into the reward function, the CSAC-QI method significantly reduces steady-state errors and enhances control precision. CSAC-QI improves convergence efficiency through an adaptive curriculum learning (CL) framework that enables a structured transition from simpler to more complex tasks. To enhance control robustness, motor friction identification and domain randomization are implemented during training, thereby equipping the UTPR to cope with real-world uncertainties. Simulation experiments demonstrate superior performance of the CSAC-QI method in handling larger initial joint deviations, achieving accurate end-effector positioning, and maintaining balance under dynamic randomization, sensor noise, and external disturbances. Notably, the trained policy is directly deployed on the UTPR prototype, where it successfully maintains balance in real-world conditions.

Compared to land-terminating glaciers, lake-terminating glaciers generally experience a higher mass loss due to the feedback from processes such as calving, dynamic thinning and flow acceleration associated with proglacial lakes. These processes often result in substantial changes in glacier length. We analyzed the evolution of the Jiongpu Co lake-terminating glacier on the Tibetan Plateau between October 2014 and November 2015, during which the glacier retreated by approximately 800 m. This dramatic retreat of the Jiongpu Co Glacier was mainly caused by calving from March to May 2015, leading to a mean retreat rate of 7.6 m d−1 during this period. The total mass loss of the glacier during the study period was 0.15 ± 0.01 Gt, with frontal ablation accounting for 74 ± 9% of this loss. Our findings highlight that the rapid calving event of the Jiongpu Co Glacier during 2014–2015 was likely associated with both accelerated velocity and a reduction in ice thickness above the flotation height at the terminus, which together enhanced frontal ablation and contributed to the observed rapid retreat.

Le fonctionnement normal des municipalités associe trois pôles : le conseil municipal, le maire ou la mairesse, et l’administration. Pourtant, dans quinze villes québécoises, on trouve également un comité exécutif, souvent présenté comme l’équivalent local d’un conseil des ministres. Rarement analysé, sa présence interroge pourtant la politisation des institutions municipales, conçue ici en référence avec la place croissante des partis politiques ainsi que la prise en main du processus décisionnel par les élus et les élues. À partir d’une analyse institutionnelle et documentaire, l’article montre que le comité exécutif participe à la politisation des institutions municipales de trois façons. Lieu de l’action municipale efficace, il est aussi celui du jeu politique et partisan sous l’autorité mayorale, ainsi que celui de la professionnalisation politique. Sa présence sur la scène médiatique défie également l’étiquette apolitique traditionnellement attribuée aux municipalités. En outre, il illustre une certaine hétérogénéité dans le fonctionnement des municipalités québécoises, qui tiennt compte des différentes réalités politico-territoriales par-delà des modèles institutionnels relativement semblables.