How can electoral competition remain stable despite a weak party system? We argue that ideological identification can stabilize electoral behavior, serving as a substitute for weak or delegitimized political parties. Focusing on Chile, we combine repeated cross-sectional surveys, a conjoint experiment, and text analysis. We find that while partisanship has declined sharply over the past three decades, ideological self-placement remains remarkably stable. Conjoint results show that ideological alignment outweighs issue alignment in shaping vote choice. Drawing on survey questions and topic modeling of open-ended responses, we uncover emotionally charged and moralized language tied to ideological groups, suggesting that ideology in Chile displays features of a social identity, including intergenerational transmission, symbolic boundaries, and in-group affect. We also examine how intense political events, such as a plebiscite to end a dictatorship, shape long-term ideological attachments. Our findings offer insight into how electoral competition can remain ideologically structured even in the absence of strong parties, a pattern increasingly relevant in contemporary democracies.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been frequently associated with an increased risk of obesity and metabolic disorders, including dyslipidaemia. However, research on lipid profiles and dietary intake in this population remains scarce. This cross-sectional study aimed to evaluate dietary patterns and their association with serum lipid profile in children and adolescents diagnosed with ASD. The study included 233 individuals from 2 to under 19 years assisted by the public health system in Pelotas, Brazil. Fasting blood samples were collected and analysed for serum concentrations of total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and TAG. Dietary intake was assessed using three non-consecutive 24-h food recalls (two weekdays and one weekend day). Dietary patterns were derived through reduced rank regression, using food group intakes as predictors and fibre density, energy density, carbohydrate and saturated fat intakes as response variables. Standardised pattern scores were calculated to assess individual adherence, and linear regression models, adjusted for potential confounders, were applied to examine the association between the dietary pattern scores and lipid profiles. Elevated TAG concentrations were observed in 48·9 % of the participants. Four dietary patterns were identified: Healthy, sugar and starches, mixed and dairy and biscuits. After adjustment, no significant associations were observed between dietary pattern scores and lipid profile. These findings underscore the complex nature of lipid metabolism in individuals with ASD and suggest that dietary patterns alone may not fully explain variations in lipid profiles. This reinforces the need for further research and development of appropriate nutritional interventions for this population.

Nuancing the conventional wisdom that informal economic activities endure by marginalizing, circumventing, or colluding with the law, we use original court data from China to reveal a counterintuitive mechanism: informal finance can endure through formal litigation. Drawing on 66,843 judicial decisions, case studies of seven top-filers, and interviews, we examine how sophisticated moneylenders, inactive debtors, and embedded courts collectively helped sustain unlicensed moneylending in China before 2020. Moneylenders—whether operating through Fintech or offline channels—leverage superior legal resources to enforce semilegal debts. Debtors facing moneylenders suffer from serious hurdles in accessing justice, especially lacking professional legal help that could potentially change case outcomes. Courts, despite concerns over debtor protection, largely tolerate the semilegal lending in alignment with the pre 2020 regulatory environment that valued the expansion of private financing, particularly through Fintech. Beyond China and the financial market, this litigation-endured mechanism of informal economy reflects a pattern in high-volume civil dockets where litigation is strategically used to bypass regulation, which has contributed to access-to-justice crises in other jurisdictions, including the USA. Theorizing these dynamics raises pressing questions about the institutional role of courts in either sustaining or remedying welfare pathologies, and in shaping a just society.

I am modest about my spelling accuracy. Oops, I cannot consistently believe that! Modesty about my spelling entails I underestimate my spelling. If I indeed underestimate my spelling accuracy, then my ignorance about spelling accuracy is contagious. For if I believe you and I are equals at spelling, then my modesty commits me to underestimating your spelling. In addition to my ignorance of my merit spreading to my ignorance of your merit, my ignorance can make you ignorant. After all, how do you know that I am modest rather than accurate? In general, any modesty I possess robs my peers.

This paper presents an innovative hybrid approach that integrates traditional control strategies with deep reinforcement learning for robotic assembly. By fusing multimodal information from visual and force feedback, the method leverages admittance control to ensure safe force feedback while using deep reinforcement learning to process visual input, enabling precise control and real-time correction of assembly actions. This multi-sensor feedback mechanism not only enhances the stability and accuracy of the assembly process but also improves the robot’s robustness and adaptability in uncertain environments. Additionally, a twin-delay deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm based on residual reinforcement learning is proposed. The design of a task-specific reward function, which simultaneously considers visual goals, force compliance, and contact stability, effectively addresses challenges such as difficult state information acquisition and sparse rewards in assembly tasks. This improves the robot’s interaction capabilities and task execution efficiency in real-world environments. Experimental results demonstrate that the method designed in this paper effectively reduces the training time for reinforcement learning from 400 epochs to 100 epochs, significantly decreases the magnitude of contact forces during the assembly process, and shortens the contact time.

Archaeological investigations in the Prut-Dniester region during the Roman Imperial Period have yielded numerous Sarmatian culture necropolises and isolated graves. Establishing a precise chronology for these remains has long been a challenge due to the limitations of typological dating alone. This study integrates radiocarbon (14C) analysis of 11 human bone samples from selected funerary contexts with traditional typological methods, refining the chronological framework of the Sarmatian culture in this region. The radiocarbon analyses were subjected to Bayesian modeling, which allowed for the delineation of these samples into distinct phases, thereby adjusting and improving the periodization established through traditional methods. The results not only confirm but also refine previously established chronologies, offering deeper insights into the cultural, social, and economic dynamics of Sarmatian communities in the Prut-Dniester Barbaricum. These findings represent a significant contribution to the broader understanding of the Roman Imperial Period beyond the Eastern Limes.

In the face of ever accelerating climate change, the ability to resist such change and work with nature to secure a more environmentally just future poses a striking but necessary challenge. From this perspective, the present article asks: Can a posthuman reimagining of the human, non-human, and more-than-human nexus in the context of a semiotic landscape analysis of the seas (henceforth, seascape) create new possibilities beyond the Anthropocene? This approach, which I call MARA—mapping and applying a rhizomatic assemblage of the seascape—aims to offer an exploratory framework for rethinking the interaction of the multispecies entanglement and the consequences in terms of vulnerability and resilience to climate change. This is achieved through a multisensory semiotic landscape approach to a case study of a blue tourism initiative in Ireland’s seascape. The results of the case study serve to undo the previously accepted binary structure of power which favours human over non-human. (Multisensory semiotic landscape, seascape, rhizomatic assemblage)

Given a holomorphic Lie algebroid on an m-pointed connected Riemann surface, we define parabolic Lie algebroid connections on any parabolic vector bundle equipped with parabolic structure over the marked points. An analog of the Atiyah exact sequence for parabolic Lie algebroids is constructed. For any Lie algebroid whose underlying holomorphic vector bundle is stable, we give a complete characterization of all the parabolic vector bundles that admit a parabolic Lie algebroid connection.

During the inter-war years, the Musées royaux du Cinquantenaire in Brussels launched a publicity campaign aimed at attracting foreign tourists, Belgian day-trippers and local visitors. Using traditional methods (posters, postcards) alongside innovative techniques (radio interviews, department store exhibitions), the museum tapped into emerging urban tourism marketing trends. Inspired by American practices, director Jean Capart collaborated with travel publishers, railway companies and tourism associations to brand the museum as a must-see destination. While official tourist offices played a minor role, private stakeholders were crucial. These efforts reflected broader societal shifts: a push for more democratic access to culture, economic challenges post-World War I and a growing belief in the power of advertising. Marketing was seen as a solution to financial pressures on the museum, aiming to boost attendance and public support. Although the campaign raised the museum’s visibility and enhanced Brussels’ appeal, visitor numbers remained low, limiting its overall success.

The Anthropocene concept has been widely embraced, with scholars and practitioners demonstrating its potential to challenge the most tenacious frameworks of modernity even as the Holocene remains the officially designated geological epoch. This special issue takes up the Anthropocene’s conceptual provocations as a heuristic for the study of space and semiosis, laying groundwork for new theoretical and methodological frameworks through which sociolinguistics can address planetary crisis. After locating the sociolinguistic study of space within the field of linguistic and semiotic landscapes, this introduction critically reviews the colonial origins of the Anthropocene. Three directions for the study of space and semiosis are then proposed: (i) entangled and expanded space, (ii) attunement as method and praxis, and (iii) political economy as planetary actor. Six contributing articles are summarized, followed by a discussion that charts a path forward for sociolinguistics in planetary crisis. (Linguistic/semiotic landscape, environment, nature, posthumanism, climate change, space, attunement, political economy, coloniality)

This paper presents the design and characterization of a unit cell for dual-polarized liquid crystal (LC)-based reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), as well as an efficient, full-wave simulation methodology for the far-field beam-steering capabilities of large-scale LC-RIS. Within this framework, the unit cell relies on defected delay lines with a 4.6 μm thin LC layer aperture coupled to a patch antenna. This delay line architecture aims towards simultaneous optimization of loss, bandwidth and response time. Full-wave simulations of the unit cell in a periodic environment show an operating frequency between 26.5 and 29.5 GHz with wide angle radiation. Measurements of the unit cell in a 3 $\times$ 3 rectangular grid exhibit wideband impedance matching and overall good agreement with simulations. Furthermore, a simulation methodology is introduced that evaluates large-scale LC-RIS far-field beam-steering capabilities without requiring full-wave simulations of the entire structure, but just few unit cells. Within this scope, the LC-RIS achieves a maximum efficiency of 20.8% with a beam-steering range from −48° to +48°, despite the use of a lossy glass substrate and gold as a conductor. It exhibits a minimum bandwidth of 8.2% for an efficiency of at least 10% across all analyzed steering angles in E-Plane and H-Plane.