Scholars, policymakers, and citizens alike remain invested in the impact of infectious diseases worldwide. Studies have found that emerging diseases and disease outbreaks burden global economies and public health goals. This article explores the potential link between measles outbreaks and various forms of civil unrest, such as demonstrations, riots, strikes, and other anti-government violence, in four central African countries from 1996 to 2005. Using a difference-in-differences model, we examine whether disease outbreaks have a discernible impact on the prevalence of civil unrest. While our findings indicate that the relationship between disease and civil unrest is not as strong as previously suggested, we identify a notable trend that warrants further investigation. These results have significant implications for health and policy officials in understanding the complex interplay between state fragility, civil unrest, and the spread of disease.

Whole-body tissue protein turnover is regulated, in part, by the postprandial rise in plasma amino acid concentrations, although minimal data exist on the amino acid response following non-animal-derived protein consumption. We hypothesised that the ingestion of novel plant- and algae-derived dietary protein sources would elicit divergent plasma amino acid responses when compared with vegan- and animal-derived control proteins. Twelve healthy young (male (m)/female (f): 6/6; age: 22 ± 1 years) and 10 healthy older (m/f: 5/5; age: 69 ± 2 years) adults participated in a randomised, double-blind, cross-over trial. During each visit, volunteers consumed 30 g of protein from milk, mycoprotein, pea, lupin, spirulina or chlorella. Repeated arterialised venous blood samples were collected at baseline and over a 5-h postprandial period to assess circulating amino acid, glucose and insulin concentrations. Protein ingestion increased plasma total and essential amino acid concentrations (P < 0·001), to differing degrees between sources (P < 0·001), and the increase was further modulated by age (P < 0·001). Postprandial maximal plasma total and essential amino acid concentrations were highest for pea (2828 ± 106 and 1480 ± 51 µmol·l−1) and spirulina (2809 ± 99 and 1455 ± 49 µmol·l−1) and lowest for chlorella (2053 ± 83 and 983 ± 35 µmol·l−1) (P < 0·001), but were not affected by age (P > 0·05). Postprandial total and essential amino acid availabilities were highest for pea, spirulina and mycoprotein and lowest for chlorella (all P < 0·05), but no effect of age was observed (P > 0·05). The ingestion of a variety of novel non-animal-derived dietary protein sources elicits divergent plasma amino acid responses, which are further modulated by age.

If advanced high school English classrooms remain some of the few spaces where young people, especially young people of color, might read the Victorian novel, what opportunities for political work might we expect, innovate, demand from those encounters? Drawing from experiences directing LitLabs, immersive, site-specific, design-based approaches to studying literature with South LA teens, the author argues for expanding the geographies literary works reference to include readers’ embodiment in place so that Victorian studies can strengthen and nurture a sense of place for readers often displaced by engagements with the Western literary canon. The essay traces the conflicted, but rewarding, processes for reading literature with an agenda for placekeeping, as one avenue for producing a self-affirming communal consciousness among readers as users of urban space. The essay turns to David Copperfield, where a typical mode of individualized, absorptive reading is contrasted to LitLabs’ model of “emplaced reading” through its adaptations of a core urban humanities “fused practice” of thick-mapping.

Municipal and state governments are often constitutionally bound to ask voters to approve new government debt through voting on bond referendums. Generally, politicians expect voters to balk at higher-cost bonds and be more willing to approve lower-cost bonds. However, there is minimal research on how the amount of a bond affects voter support. We implement a survey experiment that presents respondents with hypothetical ballots, in which the cost of proposed bonds, the number of bonds on the ballot, and the order in which they are presented, are all randomized. Our results suggest that support is not responsive to the amount of the bond, even when the cost is well outside what is typical and within the bounds of what the government can afford. In contrast, we find other aspects of the ballot matter significantly more for bond referendum approval. The more bonds on the ballot and being placed lower on the ballot both reduce support significantly.

By exploring how the taxation of sex work is interpreted and explained, this article aims to expand theoretical and empirical understandings of tax imaginaries – the collectively formed meanings ascribed to taxes, taxpaying, and the purposes they serve – and how gender is mobilised in their construction. It argues that tax imaginaries created and circulated through online expert commentaries on the taxation of prostitution in Italy discredit sex workers through well-established stigmatising gendered tropes, trivialise the predicaments that they face as taxpayers, and ignore or dismiss systemic ambiguities and discriminations that disadvantage sex workers as citizens. Old prejudices against sex workers are thus reinforced and new ones constituted through these tax imaginaries, while the social inequality and marginalisation experienced by sex workers is obscured.

Vassar College was one of the few North American undergraduate institutions to offer a concentration in Victorian studies. From 1970 until 2021, when the program transformed into Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, nearly ninety majors and minors passed through the program. Drawing on surveys and interviews with the program's graduates, the essay contends that Vassar's Victorian studies program engendered certain mental habits as well as specific approaches to activism, which the essay broadly defines to include activist scholarship and journalism, working for change within institutions, and reimagining family life and child-rearing. The Vassar alums who participated in the surveys and interviews made direct links between their activist commitments and an undergraduate education that emphasized primary-source research as well as multidisciplinarity.

The introduction of the 2012 Labour Code is considered ‘groundbreaking’ in industrial relations in Vietnam. However, knowledge about the effects of this law is still minimal. This study provides the first evidence of the impacts of the law on worker outcomes, disaggregated by location and migration status. The Vietnam Labour Force Survey is used as the primary dataset. Both difference-in-differences and fixed-effect models are applied in the investigation. The estimated results show a relationship between the introduction of the law and the labour supply of contracted workers in urban areas, especially long-term migrant workers. Furthermore, income for these long-term migrant contract workers was affected significantly by the introduction of the law. A link between the law and health insurance participation was also found among non-migrant contracted workers in urban areas. We also perform estimations using a short panel sample and find notable results. The study likewise reveals disadvantages of rural workers compared to urban workers in terms of earnings, and of short-term migrants compared to other workers, in terms of labour supply.

The principle of filial piety underpinned both parent–child relations and, more broadly, Qing legal and social order. Entering the turbulent years of the Qing–Republic transition, filial piety went through substantial changes. Drawn from the local legal archives in Jiangjin county, Sichuan, this research traces the transformation of filial piety in legal practice during the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that two overlapping processes—legal reforms and nation-state building—synergized to restructure the meaning of filial piety from a largely integrated principle in Qing, which bridged the gaps between filiality and loyalty to the emperor and between personalized morality and imperial state legitimacy, to divergent new interpretations of filial piety, including the individualist filial piety, nationalist filial piety, legal filial piety, and sentimental filial piety. Each new interpretation inherits only part of its original meaning and incorporates newly introduced legal knowledge of legal equality and property ownership. The article concludes that various, sometimes contradictory interpretations of filial piety indicate the Republican legal reforms as an in-between, dynamic spectrum of legal change with vigorous negotiations among different legal actors and knowledge regimes.

Unilateral absence of the pulmonary artery is a rare congenital cardiovascular anomaly that can lead to pulmonary hypertension and poor outcomes. We report the case of a 1-month-old infant with isolated unilateral absence of the pulmonary artery and severe pulmonary hypertension on the right and left sides, respectively. The patient was unresponsive to multiple medications for pulmonary hypertension, and surgical revascularisation was unfeasible. However, iloprost inhalation was effective.

This paper examines the issue of derivative pricing within the framework of a fractional stochastic volatility model. We present a deterministic partial differential equation system to derive an approximate expression for the derivative price. The proposed approach allows for the stochastic volatility to be expressed as a composition of deterministic functions of time and a fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. We apply this method to the European option pricing under the fractional Stein–Stein volatility model, demonstrating its feasibility and reliability through numerical simulations. Our numerical simulations also illustrate the impact of the parameters in the fractional stochastic volatility model on the option price.

Let H be the Hermite operator $-\Delta +|x|^2$ on $\mathbb {R}^n$. We prove a weighted $L^2$ estimate of the maximal commutator operator $\sup _{R>0}|[b, S_R^\lambda (H)](f)|$, where $ [b, S_R^\lambda (H)](f) = bS_R^\lambda (H) f - S_R^\lambda (H)(bf) $ is the commutator of a BMO function b and the Bochner–Riesz means $S_R^\lambda (H)$ for the Hermite operator H. As an application, we obtain the almost everywhere convergence of $[b, S_R^\lambda (H)](f)$ for large $\lambda $ and $f\in L^p(\mathbb {R}^n)$.