This paper presents an illustrated tutorial for conducting an embedded Mixed-Method Social Network Analysis (MMSNA) to examine the dynamic interplay between human agency and social networks. We draw on an empirical study in education that investigated how teachers enact relational agency within their school networks to support the integration of migrant students. We propose a replicable method and stepwise procedure for designing, implementing and evaluating an embedded MMSNA. While the potential of MMSNA has long been recognized across disciplines, its purpose and operationalization are often underexplained. We illustrate how MMSNA can be used to analyze both network structures and the agency of actors embedded within them, in alignment with specific research objectives and theoretical perspectives.

Formation of a high-beta plasma in a mirror magnetic field is studied for the first time using three-dimensional semi-implicit particle-in-cell simulations providing a fully kinetic description of not only ions but also electrons. It is shown that, in addition to the longitudinal jump in electric potential between the centre of the trap and the wall, a radial electric field appears in the plasma. Due to this radial field, almost all of the azimuthal electric current required for equilibrium is created by electrons. It was also found that continuous model injection of plasma into the centre of the trap does not result in reaching the magnetohydrodynamic pressure limit ($\beta =1$) due to the development of the flute instability with an azimuthal number $m=1$. The instability growth rate in such a compact system is found to be comparable to the ion-cyclotron frequency. No stabilising effect is observed either from conducting ends or from the perfectly conducting sidewall. The probable reason for that is fast fluctuations of electric field localised inside the injection region that prevent electrons from being frozen into the field lines.

John Rawls proposed a theory of justice for the basic structure of society. Surprisingly, his suggestions for tax institutions were not well articulated. Rawls’s principles of justice do not prescribe a unique set of tax recommendations, but his remarks on tax matters reflect his vision of society as a cooperative venture in which everyone must work. This paper makes two contributions. First, it offers a chronological, systematic, and contextual analysis of what Rawls wrote on taxation. Rawls’s comments on taxation reveal his lifelong concern for preserving market incentives and his rejection of ability-to-pay as a principle of taxation. Second, the paper argues that some of Rawls’s tax proposals belong to nonideal theory because they depend on a conception of individuals in tension with the conception of moral persons developed in his theory.

This article studies the relation between research reactors, the development of nuclear research centres and the pharmaceutical industry in the recent history of nuclear medicine. While existing scholarship has rightfully highlighted how medical applications served as a useful argument to de-militarize the image of large-scale nuclear research infrastructure during the Cold War, this study extents this perspective beyond the Cold War era. Using the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre as a case study, this article highlights how their orientation was negotiated within economic and political considerations. From the 1990s onwards, therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals experienced increasing attention, while the amount of radioisotope-producing reactors was decreasing. In an era that had become more critical of nuclear infrastructure, this article shows how the production of radioisotopes became a social-political argument in the preservation of test reactors.

This article explores possible connections between health crises, economic policy choices, and the rise of populist movements, drawing on evidence from the interwar period. It considers how differing policy responses to the Great Depression may have been associated with contrasting trajectories in both public health and political developments. In Germany, the adoption of austerity measures in the early 1930s appears to have coincided with worsening economic conditions, declining health indicators, and growing electoral support for far-right movements. By contrast, expansionary initiatives introduced under the New Deal in the U.S. were likely accompanied by strengthened social protections, improvements in health outcomes, and what some observers have interpreted as a mitigation of pressures toward political radicalisation. Taken together, these historical experiences offer insights into contemporary developments, where perceived inadequacies in responding to intertwined health and economic crises could potentially contribute to eroding institutional trust and increasing receptiveness to populist narratives.

This article approaches the 1886 British annexation of the Shan States in Burma from the perspective of small polities responding to British rule and border demarcation by European powers, the Qing empire, and Siam, a regional power centred at Bangkok. It investigates how Shan/Tai polities responded to changing allegiance from the Burman to the British Crown through the case of the Kengtung (Chiang Tung) polity. Britain’s demarcation of borderlines compelled polities originally feudatory to Kengtung to switch allegiance to the Siamese and the French. This response sprang from the traditional Shan/Tai tactic of strategic fluidity rather than actions founded in a clear understanding of the implications of fixed borders. Civil war in the Shan States lying west of the Salween River from the early 1870s uprooted large numbers of Shan people. The Kengtung ruler mobilized them as manpower to consolidate his polity and opened new land in the Mae Sai and Mekok river areas on the Chiang Saen plain, a frontier zone between Kengtung and the Lan Na polity of Chiang Mai. Kengtung’s frontier shrank due to two processes: first, aggression by Siam-controlled Lan Na, and second, by Britain’s choice of border demarcation points in Chiang Saen. By demonstrating the ability of Shan/Tai polities to manoeuvre through intense imperial rivalry for territory this article seeks to counter the assumption that only powerful empires played important roles in the formation of colonial states.

Fractional Brownian motion, with its long-time correlated increments, has been applied in many fields in recent years. Since volatility was shown to be rough by Gatheral, Jaisson, and Rosenbaum, fractional Brownian motion has gained popularity as a financial model. In this work, we revisit the definitions and properties of the univariate and multivariate fractional Brownian motions, and consider four simulation methods. We demonstrate the issues associated with applying the standard Euler scheme for simulating stochastic processes driven by fractional Brownian motion with $H < \frac{1}{2}$ (which we call the rough models). We then introduce a novel approximate method for simulating such rough models based on the fast algorithm by Ma and Wu, which accounts for a factor of 10 speedup. Finally, we consider applications of these methods to option pricing.

This paper presents a new series of Mexico’s foreign trade for the period 1821–1870, using foreign sources to reconstruct it, given the scarcity of Mexican-origin data. It then employs the new series with a twofold purpose: to indicate the type of economy and society that they reveal, showing the kind of articles that the country acquired and sent to the exterior, on the one hand, and building some of the measures used in the international literature to assess the performance of the external sector, on the other. In the end, the paper evaluates the functioning of the Mexican economy that those series expose.

Climate change is a significant challenge for biodiversity conservation in Australia and globally; conservation practitioners, researchers and policymakers need to find new ways to protect species, communities and habitats from the impacts of it. These new approaches – or adaptation interventions – require testing, approvals, permissions, funding and, in many cases, social licence. As such, there is a strong appetite for peer-to-peer sharing of research, new ideas and experiences in adapting biodiversity conservation to climate change, as well as an increasing need to communicate adaptation approaches to decision-makers and communities. We surveyed 80 people working in biodiversity conservation in Australia to elicit the ways in which stories about adaptation are used to support the planning and implementation of adaptation interventions and what information is most useful in these learning examples. We found that individuals working in biodiversity conservation in Australia have diverse roles and areas of focus. Accordingly, there are diverse needs and uses for stories, and there is a large and unmet appetite for accessible, relevant and credible information. Our findings could help guide the development and sharing of learning examples in the rapidly growing field of climate change adaptation for biodiversity conservation that will speed progress towards implementation.

This paper examines how past experience and legacies of epidemics shaped Sierra Leone’s response to COVID-19 and how these influences evolved over time. COVID-19 unfolded in the wake of the West African Ebola epidemic (2013–2016), a crisis which was unprecedented in scale. Despite differing markedly in both transmission patterns and clinical outcomes, the Sierra Leonean government repeatedly invoked Ebola when responding to COVID-19, framing the new outbreak through the lens of the old. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with policymakers, response personnel, health workers, and members of the public, the paper analyses how Ebola’s imprint surfaced across four domains of the COVID-19 response: public and governmental framings, the design and implementation of key control measures, disputes over incentives and hazard pay, and practices of data and testing. It shows that when confronting a new outbreak, the past manifests in diverse ways. The analysis reveals how these ‘epidemic pasts’ – contained in lessons, memories, legacies, and assumptions – actively constitute ‘epidemic presents’; and should be understood as politically mobilised and socially contested, shaping responses in both enabling and constraining ways. As such, it is suggested that past experience has been under-explored in preparedness and response, and that formal ‘lessons learned’ exercises offer a limited view of how the past is relevant.

The academic training of professionals influences the evolution and future direction of scientific disciplines. However, the training background and demographic composition of weed science faculty have not been systematically characterized. To address this, we conducted an Internet-based survey of weed science faculty at universities in the United States of America that included the academic fields of the degrees these faculty had received, the institutions that granted these degrees, which U.S. states or countries (if outside the United States) the degrees came from, the current academic rank of each faculty member, whether the faculty held leadership positions at their universities, and the gender of each faculty member. We identified 223 faculty at 50 universities. They received their degrees from institutions in 24 countries and 39 U.S. states. Most of their BS degrees were in agronomy and crop science or plant science, physiology, and genetics, with a few weed science and ecology degrees. Weed science and ecology representation increased at the MS level and became the most common doctoral training area. A plurality of the faculty were professors (48.9%), followed by assistant professors (28.7%), associate professors (19.7%), lecturers (0.9%) and unidentified rank (1.8%). Men made up 82.5% of the faculty with women at 17.5%. Men also held more of the leadership positions (84.4%) than women (15.6%). These findings provide the first comprehensive overview of the weed science academic workforce of the United States and establish a baseline for evaluating future trends in training pathways, disciplinary identity, workforce diversity, and potential continental or international comparisons.