A positive even number is said to be a Maillet number if it can be written as the difference between two primes, and a Kronecker number if it can be written in infinitely many ways as the difference between two primes. It is believed that all even numbers are Kronecker numbers. We study the division and multiplication of Kronecker numbers and show that these numbers are rather abundant. We prove that there is a computable constant k and a set D consisting of at most 720 computable Maillet numbers such that, for any integer n, $kn$ can be expressed as a product of a Kronecker number and a Maillet number in D. We also prove that every positive rational number can be written as a ratio of two Kronecker numbers.

Although many return migrants had planned to go back to their country of origin, other return migrants who had originally planned to pursue the immigrant dream––the idea that one can have a better life by migrating—eventually change their mind and return to their society of origin. Just as the identity of individuals must adjust to the loss of a relationship, job, or membership of a group, many formerly aspiring immigrants give up on immigrating. I analyze data from oral history interviews and social media narratives of 121 Chinese ex-immigrants from 16 different countries. I show how disappointments, the language barrier, cultural alienation, racial-ethnic discrimination, intersectional-gender issues, barriers to upward socioeconomic mobility, and/or restrictive immigration policies interact with each other to constitute ex-immigrant subjectivity. This article highlights why immigration is a far less certain process than many perceive it to be, contributing to the broader sociological literature on how in different and similar ways processes of abandoning important social endeavors, like a romantic partnership, political party, or religious faith, transform subjectivities and social identities in other domains of social life.

Between 1881 and 1914, Hungarian governments established at least 36 agricultural colonies in today’s territory of Romania (nine new villages and 25 neighborhoods attached to existing ones). After 1894, a separate government fund was created for land purchases and the venture was entrusted to a Department of Colonization within the Ministry of Agriculture. This article gives an archival-based account of the political, financial, agricultural, and logistical aspects of the settlement program and compares it with its better-researched Prussian model. Investigating it as a series of interactions between settlers, the dedicated government agency, local potentates, and the surrounding population, it identifies structural impediments to the endeavor. Although there was a broad unity across political parties behind the idea of conquering new territories for the ethnic nation, the settlement program rested on a fragile consensus within the elite. Its expansion after 1900 was mainly due to Minister Ignác Darányi, whereas the steps of other high officials give nuances to Hungarian nationalities policies. When Prime Minister István Tisza dropped the program on the eve of the First World War, it was already in a state of hibernation because the governing party had realized that the settlers posed a political liability for them.

We study a variant of the color-avoiding percolation model introduced by Krause et al., namely we investigate the color-avoiding bond percolation setup on (not necessarily properly) edge-colored Erdős–Rényi random graphs. We say that two vertices are color-avoiding connected in an edge-colored graph if, after the removal of the edges of any color, they are in the same component in the remaining graph. The color-avoiding connected components of an edge-colored graph are maximal sets of vertices such that any two of them are color-avoiding connected. We consider the fraction of vertices contained in color-avoiding connected components of a given size, as well as the fraction of vertices contained in the giant color-avoidin g connected component. It is known that these quantities converge, and the limits can be expressed in terms of probabilities associated to edge-colored branching process trees. We provide explicit formulas for the limit of the fraction of vertices contained in the giant color-avoiding connected component, and we give a simpler asymptotic expression for it in the barely supercritical regime. In addition, in the two-colored case we also provide explicit formulas for the limit of the fraction of vertices contained in color-avoiding connected components of a given size.

We study a pair consisting of a smooth 3-fold defined over an algebraically closed field and a “general” ${\Bbb R}$-ideal. We show that the minimal log discrepancy (“mld” for short) of every such a pair is computed by a prime divisor obtained by at most two weighted blow-ups. This bound is regarded as a weighted blow-up version of Mustaţă–Nakamura’s conjecture. We also show that if the mld of such a pair is not less than 1, then it is computed by at most one weighted blow-up. As a consequence, ACC of mld holds for such pairs.

State violence against Belarusian women involved in protest activities after the fraudulent presidential election in 2020 and onward has been unprecedented in the country’s history. Women’s activism has challenged the patriarchal authoritarian regime, which was ill-prepared to deal with women. However, after a short period of adaptation by the repressive institutions, women became their “special clients.” With reference to gender-sensitive academic research, we investigate diverse forms of state violence against women and analyze how they perceive their experiences of incarceration for political reasons. This article is based on available datasets, a series of nine semi-structured interviews, and insights from participant observation. The research reveals that Belarusian women incarcerated for political reasons fall under the “demanding clients” category: they comprehensively challenge the state-sponsored brutal patriarchy and expect the repressive apparatus to meet their specific needs. These women experience multidimensional physical discomfort and psychological pressure, including targeted offensive and dehumanizing elements. At the same time, incarcerated women do not feel ostracized by society; they share the feeling that their “crimes” are supported by civil society, and they endure the pains of punishment as targeted violence from a state fighting cynically for its own survival.

This article introduces the forum on food shortages during the post-Habsburg transition in the Bohemian Lands and Slovenia. Using examples from these regions, it first outlines the food crisis that developed during World War I and contributed to the internal disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. The article then turns to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, successor states which, despite their victorious status and optimistic prospects for the future, had to contend with food shortages that lasted well beyond 1918. Shortages remained one of the main challenges to the consolidation of these newly formed states. Finally, and most importantly, the article provides an overview of the state of the art in Czech, Slovene, and international historiography, identifies gaps in knowledge, and presents our approach to the topic.

We provide an overview of transnational non-state actors and their agency that shape today’s out-of-home childcare around the world, specifically institutional residential childcare. Based on existing studies and desktop research, we reveal a broad range of complexly inter-related for-profit and non-profit actors promoting diverse, often conflicting policies and practices – with ambiguous implications for children in care. We focus on secular and faith-based international non-governmental organisations, transnational companies, private regulators, and individuals. Many of them promote family- and community-based care, yet many others support orphanages and other forms of institutional care. The growing number of transnational actors in residential childcare, the emergence of private regulatory frameworks, the advance of market-based, for-profit players, and the involvement of well-resourced religious communities make the future of child institutionalisation uncertain. We discuss how this transnational agency compares with other policy fields and propose directions for future investigations of how transnationalism impacts children in care.

This article illustrates the socioeconomic background of rural political discontent in the post-imperial Yugoslav border region Prekmurje. The author argues that during the post-Habsburg political transition and ensuing social transformation, the fundamental lack of loyalty to the Yugoslav state among an important segment of the rural population of Prekmurje was rooted in insufficient access to food. Documents of court proceedings, official state reports, and findings of individuals with deep understandings of the situation on the ground reveal that this rural political mobilization was not so much a reflection of Hungarian propaganda or a “lack of appropriate national identification” among the local population—although, of course, these two factors cannot be ignored in a contested and linguistically and ethnically diverse region—but rather an outcome of the impoverishment of large sections of the peasant population.

In the last century, beauty has not often found itself enlisted in struggles for justice. As Alexander Nehemas recounts, beauty's severance from goodness and truth in the modern period renders beauty dangerous, its charm easily wielded as an instrument of oppression in the hands of the powerful. While some scholars have argued for a return to the pre-modern metaphysics that binds beauty to truth and goodness, the abuse of beauty is not simply a modern phenomenon, and its resistance requires more than a pre-modern solution. Beauty is eschatological; thus its abuse points to a failure to order it properly to its eschatological end. This article will argue that the abuse of beauty can be resisted not by spiritualising beauty, but by ordering physical beauty to its eschatological end. This end is most clearly seen in the ascended Christ, with his beautiful body that is human, wounded and hidden.

Using a 1-year longitudinal design, we examined the role of personal demands and personal resources in long-term health impairment and motivational processes among master students. Based on the job demands-resources theory and transactional model of stress, we hypothesized that students’ personal demands (i.e., irrational performance demands, awfulizing and irrational need for control) predict perceived study demands one year later, and indirectly relate to burnout. Furthermore, we predicted that personal resources indirectly associate with study engagement via students’ perceived study resources one year later. These hypotheses were tested in a sample of Dutch master students (N = 220 at T1 and T2) using structural equation modelling. As hypothesized, personal demands and personal resources at T1 predicted study demands and study resources one year later (T2, β = .25–.42, p <. 05), respectively. Study-home interference [study demand] mediated the association between personal demands and burnout (β = .08, p = .029), whereas opportunities for development [study resource] mediated the association between personal resources and study engagement (β = .08, p = .014). Hence, personal demands and personal resources relate indirectly to students’ burnout and engagement one year later via a heightened level of specific study demands and study resources. Accordingly, the present research expands the propositions of the JD-R Theory by proposing personal demands as a relevant factor for students’ long-term well-being.

We conduct a systematic study of the Ehrhart theory of certain slices of rectangular prisms. Our polytopes are generalizations of the hypersimplex and are contained in the larger class of polypositroids introduced by Lam and Postnikov; moreover, they coincide with polymatroids satisfying the strong exchange property up to an affinity. We give a combinatorial formula for all the Ehrhart coefficients in terms of the number of weighted permutations satisfying certain compatibility properties. This result proves that all these polytopes are Ehrhart positive. Additionally, via an extension of a result by Early and Kim, we give a combinatorial interpretation for all the coefficients of the $h^*$-polynomial. All of our results provide a combinatorial understanding of the Hilbert functions and the h-vectors of all algebras of Veronese type, a problem that had remained elusive up to this point. A variety of applications are discussed, including expressions for the volumes of these slices of prisms as weighted combinations of Eulerian numbers; some extensions of Laplace’s result on the combinatorial interpretation of the volume of the hypersimplex; a multivariate generalization of the flag Eulerian numbers and refinements; and a short proof of the Ehrhart positivity of the independence polytope of all uniform matroids.

Women as a social category have been the subject of numerous recent studies considering their lived experience in the Late Antique and Byzantine Mediterranean. However, their representation in the narrative sources continues to shape modern reconstructions of women's agency within their social and economic contexts, often with unsatisfactory results. Building on the twentieth-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's model of social capital, this article will use the documentary papyri from Egypt to suggest a paradigm in which the agency of individual women can be viewed and incorporated into micro-historical narratives of the patriarchal society of Late Antiquity.