In this paper, we investigate the theory of heights in a family of stacky curves following recent work of Ellenberg, Satriano, and Zureick-Brown. We first give an elementary construction of a height which is seen to be dual to theirs. We count rational points having bounded ESZ-B height on a particular stacky curve, answering a question of Ellenberg, Satriano, and Zureick-Brown. We also show that when the Euler characteristic of stacky curves is non-positive, the ESZ-B height coming from the anti-canonical divisor class fails to have the Northcott property. We prove that a stacky version of a conjecture of Vojta is equivalent to the $abc$-conjecture.

The dual burden of malnutrition is characterised by the coexistence of undernutrition alongside overweight/obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases. It is a paradox which disproportionately affects women and is applicable to those who become pregnant after weight loss surgery. Obesity before and during pregnancy is associated with increased risk of adverse perinatal outcomes in both mother and child. Overall lifestyle interventions targeting weight loss in the preconception period have not proven effective, with people, and women in particular, increasingly seeking weight loss surgery. In women with severe obesity, surgery may normalise hormonal abnormalities and improve fertility. In those who become pregnant after surgery, evidence suggests a better overall obstetric outcome compared to those with severe obesity managed conservatively; however, there is heightened risk of maternal nutritional deficiencies and infants born small for gestational age. Specifically, pregnancy soon after surgery, in the catabolic phase when rapid weight loss is occurring, has the potential for poor outcomes. Lifelong micronutrient supplementation is required, and there is considerable risk of malnutrition if nutritional aftercare guidelines are not adhered to. It is therefore recommended that pregnancy is delayed until a stable weight is achieved and is supported by individualised advice from a multidisciplinary team. Further research is required to better understand how weight loss surgery affects the chances of having a healthy pregnancy and to ultimately improve nutritional management and patient care. In this review, we aim to summarise the evidence and guidance around nutrition during pregnancy after weight loss surgery.

This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure that can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to deal with non-classical measurement error in a binary treatment: set identification, bias reduction via sample restriction, and a parametric bias correction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by replicating four recent economic history papers. Relative to the initial analyses, our results yield markedly larger coefficient estimates.

It has long been recognized that the Semitic suffix conjugation and the Berber adjectival perfective suffix conjugation have striking similarities in their morphology, which has been correctly attributed to be the result of a shared inheritance from Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Nevertheless, the function of these conjugations in the respective language families is quite distinct. This article argues that ultimately this suffix conjugation is a predicative suffix in the common ancestor of Berber and Semitic, and moreover shows that Semitic and Berber have significant overlap in the stem formations of adjectives. It is argued that these formations must likewise be reconstructed for their common ancestor.

The COVID-19 global pandemic had a major impact on older people's mental health and resulted in changes in alcohol use, with more older adults increasing than decreasing consumption levels among the general population. So far, no studies have focused on older people who were already experiencing problem alcohol use. This qualitative research is the first to provide a nuanced understanding of changes to drinking patterns among older adults engaged in alcohol treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the implications of these for practice. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with people in alcohol treatment aged 55+ living in urban and rural areas across the UK. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. We found that changes in alcohol use varied depending on the social, economic and health impacts of the pandemic on older adults. Boredom, lack of adequate medical or emotional support, and key life changes experienced during the pandemic (such as bereavement or retirement) increased the risk of increased drinking. Moreover, some people in longer-term alcohol treatment were struggling to maintain abstinence due to lack of face-to-face peer support. For others, decreased drinking levels were a side-effect of lockdown policies and restrictions, such as alcohol-related hospitalisations, closure of social spaces or inability to source alcohol; these also supported those who decided to cut down on drinking shortly before the pandemic. Generally, older adults who developed home-based interests and self-care practices managed lockdown best, maintaining abstinence or lower risk drinking levels. Based on these results, we argue that multilevel interventions aimed at strengthening resilience are required to reduce drinking or maintain abstinence among older adults. Such interventions should address three domains: individual (coping strategies and mindset), social (support networks), and structural (access to resources). In preparation for supporting older alcohol users through prospective future pandemics, building digital literacy and inclusion are essential.

This study explores and understands transnational activism in Asia, specifically focusing on the crucial role played by individuals, particularly Thai youth activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, in shaping and constructing transnational networks and relations. The study argues that the networks individuals establish with other transnational actors serve as the primary source of inspiration for other individuals to engage in transnational activism. These networks are rooted in everyday life interactions in the era of globalisation, with activism reflecting this embeddedness and interconnectedness. The case study of Netiwit demonstrates how connections between Thai activists and activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan stem from the increased mobility of individuals in the globalised world, facilitating physical interactions. By analysing this dynamic, the study aims to offer a more nuanced explanation of transnational activism, the movement of knowledge, and the concept of globalisation in Asia.

We study the asymptotic growth rate of the labels of high-degree vertices in weighted recursive graphs (WRGs) when the weights are independent, identically distributed, almost surely bounded random variables, and as a result confirm a conjecture by Lodewijks and Ortgiese (‘The maximal degree in random recursive graphs with random weights’, preprint, 2020). WRGs are a generalisation of the random recursive tree and directed acyclic graph models, in which vertices are assigned vertex-weights and where new vertices attach to $m\in\mathbb{N}$ predecessors, each selected independently with a probability proportional to the vertex-weight of the predecessor. Prior work established the asymptotic growth rate of the maximum degree of the WRG model, and here we show that there exists a critical exponent $\mu_m$ such that the typical label size of the maximum-degree vertex equals $n^{\mu_m(1+o(1))}$ almost surely as n, the size of the graph, tends to infinity. These results extend results on the asymptotic behaviour of the location of the maximum degree, formerly only known for the random recursive tree model, to the more general weighted multigraph case of the WRG model. Moreover, for the weighted recursive tree model, that is, the WRG model with $m=1$, we prove the joint convergence of the rescaled degree and label of high-degree vertices under additional assumptions on the vertex-weight distribution, and also extend results on the growth rate of the maximum degree obtained by Eslava, Lodewijks, and Ortgiese (Stoch. Process. Appl. 158, 2023).

Due to the widescale impact of 212 Action's anti-blasphemy campaign in 2016, there has been a spike in Islamic moral panic discourse and religiously driven vigilante attacks targeting LGBTQ citizens in Indonesia. Simultaneously, gender nonconforming citizens who have gained social recognition, like a segment of transwomen communities called waria, have continued to carve out alternative spaces and subvert anti-LGBTQ discourse. Waria activists in Yogyakarta, for instance, created the world's first trans-led Islamic boarding school in 2008. Despite suffering attacks from Front Jihad Islam members in 2016, the school has managed to reopen and even to expand its services further for waria communities. In capturing the recent trajectory of activism at the waria Islamic boarding school, this article highlights the multifaceted conditions of precarity faced by Muslim waria in Yogyakarta in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Presenting ethnographic data from the summer of 2022, this paper argues that since the pandemic, in addition to demanding the right to practice Islam, Muslim waria activists have increasingly focused on wellbeing (e.g., food sustainability and emergency shelter) in their rights advocacy in Yogyakarta. Merely perceiving the Islamic boarding school as a site of religious activism diminishes a fundamental aspect of its current grassroots efforts, which is to gain access to basic welfare — a key strategy for the survival of LGBTQ citizens in Yogyakarta and beyond. With greater socioeconomic and psychological uncertainties sparked by COVID-19, human rights for waria and what holistic security means for Indonesian LGBTQ citizens, must also be carefully understood through a lens of health, welfare, and wellbeing.

Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for Aelita remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings Aelita's cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.

We consider Gaussian approximation in a variant of the classical Johnson–Mehl birth–growth model with random growth speed. Seeds appear randomly in $\mathbb{R}^d$ at random times and start growing instantaneously in all directions with a random speed. The locations, birth times, and growth speeds of the seeds are given by a Poisson process. Under suitable conditions on the random growth speed, the time distribution, and a weight function $h\;:\;\mathbb{R}^d \times [0,\infty) \to [0,\infty)$, we prove a Gaussian convergence of the sum of the weights at the exposed points, which are those seeds in the model that are not covered at the time of their birth. Such models have previously been considered, albeit with fixed growth speed. Moreover, using recent results on stabilization regions, we provide non-asymptotic bounds on the distance between the normalized sum of weights and a standard Gaussian random variable in the Wasserstein and Kolmogorov metrics.

We prove a weak version of the cross-product conjecture: $\textrm {F}(k+1,\ell ) \hskip .06cm \textrm {F}(k,\ell +1) \ge (\frac 12+\varepsilon ) \hskip .06cm \textrm {F}(k,\ell ) \hskip .06cm \textrm {F}(k+1,\ell +1)$, where $\textrm {F}(k,\ell )$ is the number of linear extensions for which the values at fixed elements $x,y,z$ are k and $\ell $ apart, respectively, and where $\varepsilon>0$ depends on the poset. We also prove the converse inequality and disprove the generalized cross-product conjecture. The proofs use geometric inequalities for mixed volumes and combinatorics of words.