This study analyses how care regimes in South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Sweden shape the roles of and support policies for informal caregivers within long-term care systems for older adults. South Korea considers informal caregivers both as resources and co-clients, but its well-being support is limited, financial aid criteria are relatively strict, and while employment-care reconciliation policies exist, familistic culture hinders their use. The United Kingdom assigns co-worker and co-client roles, offering well-being support, broader financial aid, and expanding employment-care reconciliation. Sweden prioritises formal care and recognises informal caregivers as co-clients, placing the strongest emphasis on improving their well-being while strictly regulating financial aid and employment-care reconciliation. Despite differences, all three countries emphasise informal caregiver well-being and have established frameworks for financial support and employment-care reconciliation policies. Future policies should enhance quality control, regulate financial aid, strengthen employment-care reconciliation support, and expand formal care, while addressing the potential negative impacts of dual caregiver roles.

The modal auxiliary form must plus perfect aspect (must have +V-en) has recently acquired the meaning of direct evidentiality in Multicultural London English, the new London dialect. Because the new meaning is a recent innovation we have a rare opportunity to witness its development at first hand, unlike earlier changes in the history of must. Our analysis supports the view that the classic definition of evidentiality in terms of information source is too narrow to explain the expression of evidentiality in spoken interaction, and that a broader definition in terms of epistemic authority is more appropriate. We argue that the direct evidential meaning is a coherent further step in the semantic changes undergone by must during its history. It represents a previously undocumented pathway in the grammaticalisation of evidentiality. It also supports the view that evidentiality is not a purely lexical phenomenon in English.

This paper presents the design, control strategy, and preliminary testing of Epi.Q, a modular unmanned vehicle (UGV) tailored for challenging environments, including exploration and surveillance tasks. To manage the complexities of the articulated structure, including lateral slip and the risk of jackknifing, a fuzzy logic-based traction control system was implemented. To improve traction stability by modulating power distribution between modules, the system optimally controls steering and traction. Subsequently, the paper introduces the fuzzy control system and presents preliminary validation experiments, including hill-climbing, obstacle navigation, steering, and realignment tests. Preliminary results indicate that the proposed fuzzy control strategy significantly improves traction and maneuverability even on steep inclines and uneven surfaces. These findings highlight the potential for fuzzy logic control to improve UGV performance.

This paper draws together the connections between the concepts of critical human security and state capacity and explores their relevance as a novel analytical framework for exploring the global pandemic and its aftermath, with a particular focus on Europe and East Asia. The paper highlights the relevance of integrating a ‘state capacity for human security’ analytical lens and policy philosophy to inform an understanding of human (in)security as well as its relevance for concerns around social protection, sustainability, and inequality. We argue that the long-held and taken-for-granted assumption that larger, high-spending welfare states produce greater well-being security can no longer be an automatic supposition given the nature and sources of risk and insecurity in the contemporary world. We argue that that widening the parameters and focus of social policy analysis towards state capacity for critical human security might better highlight the multi-dimensional challenges that welfare states should seek to address.

As more governments commit to feminist foreign policies (FFPs), this commitment trickles down to a central foreign policy area: peacebuilding. As a field, peacebuilding has historically been dominated by western states and western-dominated institutions performing interventions along the hegemonic liberal peacebuilding paradigm (Lederach 1997; Mac Ginty 2008). This has, in turn, provoked significant feminist criticisms and interventions (Duncanson 2016; Hewitt and True 2021; McLeod 2018). When Germany, the largest peacebuilding funder globally (Rotmann, Li, and Stoffel 2021; UN Peacebuilding 2024), announced their FFP in 2023, this development opened up the prospect for substantial feminist change, but also raised questions about what such change might look like in practice.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘defective’. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society’s Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited ‘mental defect’. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred on very different types of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary ‘defects’. In addition to exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society’s propagandistic data practices, this episode underscores the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives into our histories of eugenics.

Surgical sterilisation practices significantly increased in contraceptive capacity as the twentieth century unfolded. Despite this prolific uptake, sterilisation is markedly absent from histories of birth control and family planning and instead has remained addressed within histories of eugenics and coercion. The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, to demonstrate a voluntary, contraceptive history of sterilisation that is distinct from, though connected to, involuntary and eugenic sterilisation; and secondly, to explain the integral role that individual doctors and their private practice played in the rise of contraceptive sterilisation in twentieth-century Australia. Through a combination of archival material and oral history interviews with twentieth-century practitioners of tubal ligation and vasectomy, this article reframes the history of surgical sterilisation, situating it firmly within the history of birth control.

The automation of assembly operations with industrial robots is pivotal in modern manufacturing, particularly for multispecies, low-volume, and customized production. Traditional programing methods are time-consuming and lack adaptability to complex, variable environments. Reinforcement learning-based assembly tasks have shown success in simulation environments, but face challenges like the simulation-to-reality gap and safety concerns when transferred to real-world applications. This article addresses these challenges by proposing a low-cost, image-segmentation-driven deep reinforcement learning strategy tailored for insertion tasks, such as the assembly of peg-in-hole components in satellite manufacturing, which involve extensive contact interactions. Our approach integrates visual and forces feedback into a prior dueling deep Q-network for insertion skill learning, enabling precise alignment of components. To bridge the simulation-to-reality gap, we transform the raw image input space into a canonical space based on image segmentation. Specifically, we employ a segmentation model based on U-net, pretrained in simulation and fine-tuned with real-world data, significantly reducing the need for labor-intensive real image segment labels. To handle the frequent contact inherent in peg-in-hole tasks, we integrated safety protections and impedance control into the training process, providing active compliance and reducing the risk of assembly failures. Our approach was evaluated in both simulated and real robotic environments, demonstrating robust performance in handling camera position errors and varying ambient light intensities and different lighting colors. Finally, the algorithm was validated in a real satellite assembly scenario, achieving a success rate of 15 out of 20 tests.