Development promises change. It is fundamental to the word both in English and in Lao: an improvement towards a pre-determined goal, but it is a process that is never entirely complete. In the Lao-speaking parts of Thailand, promises of development have formed the key commitments of particular regimes: military and monarchical, neoliberal and capitalist. Each presents a future that is nationally focused, guided by a paternalistic hand, be it that of a general, monarch, or tycoon. Spirits, too, play into such regimes, ensuring that development projects will fulfil their promises and that more such projects will come.

But what happens when these goals shift towards distant centres of power? Here, I examine the magico-religious aspect of these promises. As large-scale hydropower on the Mekong, part of Chinese infrastructure projects, throws the river into chaos, new regimes of development arise. In the realm of popular religion, the link between spirits and development, too, has altered, with old powers’ promises growing stale, and new ones yet to appear.

And between these two conflicting orders of power—orders that collapse state and religious dimensions—emerge different pathways towards navigating the uncertain world: an appeal towards other sources of monarchical authority, a search for survival in a newly shifting and globalized realm, and a waiting for a future as yet unrevealed.

Client service skills are the human side of the work of an information professional. Whatever type of legal research environment we work in, our internal clients will expect that we have the right technical skills to support their work. But technical excellence in our day-to-day professional lives will amount to nothing if we cannot also deliver excellent client service. The benefit derived from this will be a more relevant research service, powered by experts, while the profile of the services provided will also be raised. In this article Jas Breslin aims to set out some of the behaviours that can be used to build a rapport and trust with clients, so that they can benefit from an information team that better understands their needs.

New data covering 23 countries reveal that banking crises of the Great Depression coincided with a sharp international increase in deposits at savings institutions and life insurance. Deposits fled from commercial banks to alternative forms of savings. This fueled a credit crunch since other institutions did not replace bank lending. While asset prices fell, savings held in savings institutions and life insurance companies increased as a share of GDP and in real terms. These findings provide new explanations for the fall in credit and aggregate demand in the 1930s. They illustrate the need to consider nonbank financial institutions when studying banking crises.

The Sino-German coproduction Mouzhong leisi yu wode didong: xinshi pianduan explores the medical process of a heart transplant and its aftermath through the Foucauldian theoretical framework of the “clinical gaze.” The doctors’ “biomedical reductionism” is caricatured for its lack of humanness; patients’ physical and emotional agony denies the possibility of peaceful coexistence of the human self and technology. Cynical irony is one way of coping with the identity loss, pain, and techno-human condition of organ-transplant survivors.

Three-dimensional mapping-aided (3DMA) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning improves the positioning in urban canyons for non-precision GNSS receivers. However, the 3DMA GNSS algorithms often produce a multimodal position solution, and simply taking the average of these modes reduces accuracy. A further problem, named ‘solution shifting’, is the effect of large numbers of low-scoring candidates shifting the overall position solution away from high-scoring regions. This study uses a clustering method to separate the different modes and exclude low-scoring regions from the position solution. Factor graph optimisation (FGO) is then used to integrate clustered 3DMA GNSS position and GNSS Doppler measurements or estimated velocity over multiple epochs. Positioning performance is assessed using data collected in London. The results show that the clustering method can successfully mitigate the multimodal effect, and integrating the FGO can mitigate the occurrence of multimodality and solution shifting. Static experiments in London achieve an RMSE of approximately 10 m for FGO 3DMA GNSS with clustering and 11 m without clustering.

This study relies on a linear programming model to estimate welfare ratios in Spain between 1600 and 1800. This method is used to find the food basket that guaranteed the intake of basic nutrients at the lowest cost. The estimates show that working families in Toledo had higher welfare ratios than in those in Barcelona. In addition, the welfare ratios of Spain were always below those of London and Amsterdam. The divergence between Northern Europe and Spain started before the Industrial Revolution and increased over time.