The following article discusses the significance of a stool carried by persons referred to in ancient Greek sources (from Old Comedy to Plutarch) as diphrophoroi. As I argue, the iconography suggests that this piece of furniture was often used by attendants responsible for their mistresses’ outfit, make-up and hairstyle. By extension, the most famous representation of two girls with stools on their heads on the east Parthenon frieze can be interpreted as an allusion to the ritual dressing and embellishing of Athena's statue.

Expressivist theories of law focus not only on what legal arrangements do but also what they communicate. The expressivist view has gained special currency in the context of religious establishment. Even when governmental involvement with religion is not coercive or does not materially violate anyone’s rights, it may nevertheless be undesirable by virtue of expressing a preference for a certain religion or a privileged status for certain religious groups over others. The existing literature, however, lacks an equivalent expressivist analysis of the related but distinct domain of free exercise of religion. What is expressed when a religious individual or group is granted special relief from the legal requirements that would otherwise apply to them? I argue that just like religious establishments, religious exemptions not only implicate rights and material interests but also have important expressive dimensions that both help account for their value and impose limits on their desirability.

In this paper, we give Pieri rules for skew dual immaculate functions and their recently discovered row-strict counterparts. We establish our rules using a right-action analogue of the skew Littlewood–Richardson rule for Hopf algebras of Lam–Lauve–Sottile. We also obtain Pieri rules for row-strict (dual) immaculate functions.

Interventions aimed at reducing prejudice toward refugees have shown promise in industrialized countries. However, the vast majority of refugees are in developing countries. Moreover, while these interventions focus on individual attitude change, attitudes often do not shift in isolation; people are embedded in rich social networks. We conducted a field experiment in northwestern Uganda (host to over a million refugees) and find that perspective-taking warmed individual attitudes there in the short term. We also find that the treatment effect spills over from treated households to control ones along social ties, that spillovers can be positive or negative depending on the source, and that peoples’ attitudes change based on informal conversations with others in the network after the treatment. The findings show the importance of understanding the social process that can reinforce or unravel individual-level attitude change toward refugees; it appears essential to designing interventions with a lasting effect on attitudes.

The papers in this 20th Anniversary Special Issue reflect to a large extent how the fields of pension economics and pension finance have developed in the past two decades, although there remain very clear connections to the research published in the Journal's first issue. While there has been great progress in research on pensions and retirement economics over the last 20 years, there remain important outstanding questions for future study.

This article explores the moral permissibility of sweatshop boycotts. We build explicitly on Tomhave and Vopat’s (2018) framework for evaluating the moral permissibility of boycotts in general for the specific case of sweatshop labor. We argue that sweatshop boycotts are more likely to be morally justified when targeting forced labor compared to free labor and we explore the relevant moral tradeoffs associated with boycotts of free labor sweatshops. We analyze the morality of three cases of sweatshop boycotts—Indonesia in the 1990s, Bangladesh following the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, and the Uyghur region in China—and then discuss how insights from these cases might provide a model to guide activists and business ethicists in analyzing the morality of other sweatshop boycotts.

While much work on expertise has explored the mobilisation and production of knowledge, the development of epistemic communities, and the mechanisms through which expertise operates – little work has been done exploring how expertise is understood across academic literature on particular regional cases such as the Arctic. In this article, I scope a broad literature review of the Arctic, seeking out how expertise has been depicted and framed in academic and theoretical literature. The results are framed around five different themes: (1) expertise serving the interests of great powers, (2) recognition of the overall importance of expertise in Arctic governance, (3) the purpose of experts, (4) science diplomacy and expertise: a murky barrier, and (5) how to study experts, but also find that Indigenous knowledge is often left out of literature that relies upon Western frameworks of expertise. This incongruity suggests that there are two competing conceptualizations of Arctic expertise, one in theory and another in practice – which has consequences for how the region and its expertise are narrated.

Polymer-based composites modified with organoclay are economically beneficial candidates for a variety of applications. Different types of impurities accompany montmorillonite phases in various bentonites, which impact the quality and cost of organoclays and final composites. To obtain organoclays for clay composite applications, eight Iranian raw bentonites from different geographical locations were selected as the candidates and characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD). Sample IB was chosen due to its high purity and lower cristobalite content than the other samples. It was purified by centrifugation or sedimentation methods using a sodium hexametaphosphate (NaHMP) dispersant. The cation-exchange capacity (CEC) was measured for bentonite before and after purification by sedimentation, and it showed a significant increase from 6.944 to 12.128 eq g–1, confirming successful purification. Organoclays were prepared using purified bentonite (sedimentation method) with two surfactants (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide and octadecylamine), and the amount of octadecylamine was optimized. Purified bentonite and organoclay were characterized by XRD, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray fluorescence. The results indicate that most of the impurities were removed after purification, and the interlayer space of organoclays increased to 35 Å in the optimized sample prepared with an amount of octadecylamine that was twice the CEC in purified bentonite. The prepared organoclay was used to improve low-density polyethylene (LDPE) polymer properties. The clay–polymer composite properties were studied by field emission SEM, thermogravimetric analysis and tensile strength tests. The organoclay was fully dispersed in the LDPE matrix and in the sample with 5 wt.% of organoclay, where Ti (the temperature at which 10% of the sample is decomposed) and T50% (the midpoint of degradation) were 17°C and 13°C greater than those of polyethylene, respectively. Additionally, the sample residue with 5 wt.% of organoclay at 600°C was 43.4%. The tensile strength of polyethylene increased from 8.67 to 9.03 MPa in the sample with 4 wt.% of organoclay.

We investigate here the behaviour of a large typical meandric system, proving a central limit theorem for the number of components of a given shape. Our main tool is a theorem of Gao and Wormald that allows us to deduce a central limit theorem from the asymptotics of large moments of our quantities of interest.

A low-cost and computer-controlled graphitization system connected to an elemental analyzer (EA) has been designed and built at the NTUAMS Lab. This semiautomatic system equips 6-unit reactors for the graphitization of CO2 with H2 on the iron catalyst. The entire procedure takes about 7 hours for iron conditioning, sample combustion and loading, and graphitization. The system can produce good-quality graphite for samples containing 0.5–1.6 mg carbon mass, with the pressure yield of graphitization ranging from 57.7% to 87.1%. The average values of OXI and OXII agree well with the consensus value, but the result of ANU sucrose was observed to be slightly higher than the reported one. The background samples of anthracite over ten months yielded an average of 0.38±0.10 pMC (n=21) corresponding to a 14C age of 45 kyr BP. Intercomparison samples L and M of FIRI exhibit that the measured 14C ages are almost identical to the consensus values and have a small spread in these values. The system has been carrying out graphitization for total organic carbon (TOC) of peat samples, and providing a more efficient and convenient way for AMS 14C dating.

In this article, a new microstrip dual-narrowband bandpass filter employing parallel-coupled transmission lines and open stubs is presented, investigated, and fabricated. The proposed dual-narrowband bandpass filter is analyzed and its exact scattering parameters are calculated, simulated, and measured. So, calculated scattering parameters offer a deep inside view of the performance of the proposed filter. To analyze the proposed filter, the even- and odd-mode excitation are utilized. The input impedance under even- and odd-mode excitation are achieved by transmission line theory and inserted in the scattering parameter equations. Finally, the accurate scattering parameters are derived and compared with simulation results. Simulation results prove the theoretical results. Then, an optimized proposed filter is fabricated and matched with simulation results. The center frequency bands are 4.5 and 6.8 GHz. The optimized filter occupies 0.12 $ \times $ 0.096$\lambda _g^2$, which is small. Its fractional bandwidth of the first and second passband are 1.5 and 2.5%, respectively. Furthermore, wide and strong rejection levels in the stopbands are offered. The structure of the proposed filter provides many freedoms to design. There is an agreement between experimental and simulation results.