What normative compass can appropriately ground a theory for contemporary “non-Western” societies? This question has become urgent amid the pressure to decolonize political science and academia. The hybridity of numerous contemporary non-Western societies means that political theorists cannot refuse to engage with either Western-originated or premodern Indigenous concepts and ways of thinking that bear on the local public culture. However, these normative strands alone are unsuitable for grounding a contemporary theory. This methodological dilemma can be overcome if theorists adopt normative hybridity as a methodological stance. Normative hybridity suggests that hybridity is not only a feature of the theorist’s context of reference but should also be their modus operandi. Normative hybridity already underpins relevant works in contemporary Confucian political theory. Drawing from these works, I illustrate three methods to apply normative hybridity to theory building. This novel methodological approach uniquely addresses current political theory discussions and influences non-Western policymaking.

What was the impact of urban political structure on preindustrial wealth inequality? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher inequality in a panel of early-modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macro-relationship, I construct a unique individual-level panel dataset on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city-state of Nördlingen (1579–1700). I employ a difference-in-differences setting to show that political elites enriched themselves substantially, increasing inequality. To address endogeneity concerns, I exploit the Thirty-Years’ War as a shock to elites’ potential for enrichment from public office. Officials manipulated this crisis to enrich themselves further.

This essay examines an 1877 Gujarati translation of Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. It was the work of M. M. Bhownaggree, later a British MP. The essay explores the circumstances under which Bhownaggree undertook the translation, its content, and its intended audience. It closes with some observations on the book's place in the history of Indian royalism, the place of Indian royalism in the development of modern Gujarati literature, and the interplay of the Gujarati identity that was emerging in the latter part of the nineteenth century with both royalism and Indian nationalism.

For more than 80 years, the scientific community has extensively used International Centre for Diffraction Data's (ICDD®) Powder Diffraction File (PDF®) for material characterization, including powder X-ray diffraction analysis. Historically, PDF was made available for two major material types: one for inorganic analysis and the other for organic analysis. In the early years of the PDF, this two-material approach was implemented due to limited computer capabilities. With Release 2024, ICDD provides a comprehensive database consisting of the entire PDF in one database called PDF-5+, comprised of more than one million entries (1,061,898). The PDF-5+ with a relational database (RDB) construct houses extensive chemical, physical, bibliographic, and crystallographic data, including atomic coordinates and raw data, enabling qualitative and quantitative phase analysis. This wealth of information in one database is advantageous for phase identification, materials characterization, and several data mining applications in materials science. A database of this size needs rigorous data curation and structural and chemical classifications to optimize pattern search/match and characterization methods. Each entry in the PDF has an editorially assigned quality mark. An editorial comment will describe the reason if an entry does not meet the top-quality mark. The editorial processes of ICDD's quality management system are unique in that they are ISO 9001:2015 certified. Among several classifications implemented in PDF-5+, subfiles (such as Bioactive, Pharmaceuticals, Minerals, etc.) directly impact the search/match in minimizing false positives. Scientists with specific field expertise continuously review these subfiles to maintain their quality. This paper describes the features of PDF with an emphasis on the newly released PDF-5+.

Vernacular Victoria: The Queen in the Languages of South Asia began life as an international online colloquium hosted by the Department of English at Ashoka University, Haryana, in collaboration with the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad (India). Participants were invited to give papers based on an archive of vernacular eulogies, addresses, memorials, and biographies collected by Miles Taylor during the course of research for his book Empress: Queen Victoria and India (Yale University Press, 2018). Following the colloquium of April 26–27, 2021, further commissions were undertaken as the editors broadened the scope of the project.

Two new species of the genus Sectonema found in northern Iran are characterized, including morphological descriptions and molecular (18S-, 28S-rDNA) analyses. Sectonema tehranense sp. nov. is distinguished by its 7.22 – 8.53 mm long body, lip region offset by constriction and 24 – 31 μm wide with perioral lobes and abundant setae- or cilia-like projections covering the oral field, mural tooth 15.5 – 17 μm long at its ventral side, neck 1091 – 1478 μm long, pharyngeal expansion occupying 61 – 71% of the total neck length, female genital system diovarian, uterus simple and 3.9 – 4.2 times the corresponding body diameter long, transverse vulva (V = 49 – 59), tail short and rounded (44 – 65 μm, c = 99 – 162, c’ = 0.6 – 0.8), spicules 111 – 127 μm long, and 7 – 10 spaced ventromedian supplements with hiatus. Sectonema noshahrense sp. nov. displays a 4.07 – 4.73 mm long body, lip region offset by constriction and 23 – 25 μm wide with perioral lobes and abundant setae- or cilia-like projections covering the oral field, odontostyle 14 – 14.5 μm long, neck 722 – 822 μm long, pharyngeal expansion occupying 66 – 68% of the total neck length, female genital system diovarian, uterus simple and 2.4 – 2.7 times the corresponding body diameter long, transverse vulva (V = 54 – 55), tail convex conoid (39 – 47 μm, c = 91 – 111, c’ = 0.8 – 0.9), spicules 82 μm long, and seven spaced ventromedian supplements with hiatus. Molecular analyses confirm a maximally supported (Epacrolaimus + Metaporcelaimus + Sectonema) clade and a tentative biogeographical pattern, with sequences of Indolamayan taxa forming a clade separated from those of Palearctic ones. Parallel or convergent evolution processes might be involved in the phylogeny of the species currently classified under Sectonema. This genus is certainly more heterogeneous than previously assumed.

This essay examines two travel narratives written by Hardevi, a woman from Lahore who traveled to London for Queen Victoria's jubilee in 1887. The accounts contain Hardevi's narration of her journey by ship and describe the celebrations. Hardevi showcases the queen's marital home and her conjugal life, seamlessly accommodating them within reformist constructions of a modern, educated, pativrata (conjugally virtuous) Indian woman. Hardevi's encounter with the queen at the heart of the empire opens up a conceptual space of possibilities for a modern, gendered self. This article examines her deployment of a mode of subjectivity that allows her to be, simultaneously, an obedient and fascinated colonial subject of the imperial spectacle and also a citizen-subject who claims the agency of critique.

Using aerial sketch map data spanning more than 1 000 000 km2 across Canada, I use cluster analysis to show that outbreaks of forest tent caterpillar, Malacosoma disstria Hübner (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae), through the 20th century have occurred regularly every decade or so; however, there are two distinct aspects to the patterning of outbreaks. The dominant mode of variability is a nonrecurring pattern of singular spike anomalies, lasting just a few years, that are regional in extent but are not synchronised across the country. The regional time series derived from cluster analysis that are dominated by these singular spike eruptions exhibit extreme skewness and kurtosis, are not stationary in mean or variance, and are not amenable to classical time-series analysis. Although these regional-scale eruptive anomalies tend to occur periodically in aggregate, their central location always varies in an unpredictable manner, resulting in aperiodic local behaviour. Range-wide periodicity is thus an emergent property from asynchronous, aperiodic eruptions aggregated across regions. The second mode of variability is a low-amplitude fluctuation of weak periodicity that is weakly synchronised across the country. These observations support a hybrid cyclic–eruptive theory of outbreak occurrence that is not consistent with the simpler idea of spatially synchronised cycling.

On 17 December 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a town in inland Tunisia, instigated the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab Revolutions – a wording that I will use here as a translation from the Arabic al-thawrât al-`arabiyya. Observers were shocked at the radical protests arising in these regions, where authoritarian regimes had crushed all serious opposition over the decades. Conflicts governed by geopolitics, in particular the ongoing Israeli–Arab and Israeli–Palestinian hostilities, and the focus on political Islam and jihadism as the only globalized locus of political protest, have arrogated any attention for societies, their transformation, and their mobilization.

The death of Queen Victoria occasioned the publication of commemorative narratives in early twentieth-century Odisha. They serve as site for understanding how feminine authority was imagined as the Odia literati engaged in a fraught movement for the formation of a separate province of Odisha. They imagined an Odia motherland in relation to figures of maternal authority such as mother India and mother Victoria. This article explores this vernacular representation of the queen as mother in the work of the poet Madhusudan Rao. By drawing on traditions of lament and maternal authority, the article illustrates how Rao used lament to carve out a palimpsest of multiple identities, from imperial subjecthood to regional belonging.

This article examines how realized variances predict cryptocurrency returns in the cross section using intraday data. We find that cryptocurrencies with higher variances exhibit lower returns in subsequent weeks. Decomposing total variances into signed jump and jump-robust variances reveals that the negative predictability is attributable to positive jump and jump-robust variances. The negative pricing effect is more pronounced for smaller cryptocurrencies with lower prices, less liquidity, more retail trading activities, and more positive sentiment. Our results suggest that cryptocurrency markets are unique because retail investors and preferences for lottery-like payoffs play important roles in the partial variance effects.

Assume that M is a transitive model of $ZFC+CH$ containing a simplified $(\omega _1,2)$-morass, $P\in M$ is the poset adding $\aleph _3$ generic reals and G is P-generic over M. In M we construct a function between sets of terms in the forcing language, that interpreted in $M[G]$ is an $\mathbb R$-linear order-preserving monomorphism from the finite elements of an ultrapower of the reals, over a non-principal ultrafilter on $\omega $, into the Esterle algebra of formal power series. Therefore it is consistent that $2^{\aleph _0}>\aleph _2$ and, for any infinite compact Hausdorff space X, there exists a discontinuous homomorphism of $C(X)$, the algebra of continuous real-valued functions on X.

Carbon leakage – the increase of greenhouse gas emissions in foreign jurisdictions following the introduction of domestic or regional climate mitigation measures – raises key questions in the climate change debate. This includes whether carbon leakage constitutes a threat to the environmental integrity of climate policies and, if so, how this could be mitigated. Through the use of four hypothetical models of international climate change regime, this article argues that international climate change law is a key factor in answering this two-part question. Firstly, the article demonstrates that the architecture of international climate change law affects whether carbon leakage can be considered as undermining the mitigation objective of climate policies. Secondly, it draws attention to the interaction – and potential tension – between carbon leakage prevention measures and international climate change law.