We study bracket words, which are a far-reaching generalization of Sturmian words, along Hardy field sequences, which are a far-reaching generalization of Piatetski-Shapiro sequences $\lfloor n^c \rfloor $. We show that sequences thus obtained are deterministic (that is, they have subexponential subword complexity) and satisfy Sarnak’s conjecture.

This article considers, summarises, and analyses the merits of various arguments regarding options for regulating (or not regulating) ‘gig work’, concluding with observations about currently proposed legislation. There is a strong argument for regulating gig work. Many workers are vulnerable, and many of the arguments against any form or regulation – in terms of innovation, productivity, employment, or the inevitability of this trend – lack merit. Current definitions of employment, indeed current labour law, are not adequate and many, but not all, gig workers are like employees in terms of the control exercised over them. However, treating gig workers as employees would encounter several problems. The outcomes would be uncertain. Not all would be covered. Many gig workers would be opposed (despite wanting protection). The gig firms could render such legislation ineffective, or alternatively succeed in mobilising opposition, almost ensuring such legislation would be revoked at the next change of government. Regulating gig work as a form of contracting is a viable alternative. It has the potential to attract support from gig workers themselves, undermining opposition by the gig firms, and attract support from some parts of capital. The New South Wales experience shows us that regulation of gig work as contracting is feasible and politically sustainable. Despite limitations, the ‘Closing the Loopholes’ Bill provides a sustainable model for regulating and protecting many ‘gig economy’ workers. It is time to envisage labour law as something that extends not just to employees but to many contractors as well.

This article analyzes how litigation, court rulings, and legal mobilization have influenced law and policy making related to death from overwork (karōshi) and suicide from overwork (karōjisatsu) in Japan over the course of half a century. It highlights the gradual, but substantial, impact of litigation and court rulings on different levels of governmental measures. By taking a longer-term perspective to assess the political effects of different stages of the judicialization process and focusing on the actors of legal mobilization—particularly, cause lawyers—this study provides a more accurate depiction of the overall process of social and legal changes observed in the recent Japanese labor law reform.

This article asks how, in early post-World War II Canada, Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese communities claimed whiteness in the context of Canada’s racially restrictive immigration regulations that defined them as “Asiatics,” and hence inadmissible. But, it also examines how Canadian politicians and immigration bureaucrats responded to those claims. Using so-far untapped archival records, this article shows that immigration authorities were unwilling to redefine the racial status of these groups out of fear that doing so would provide a wedge for other groups of “Asiatics” to press for the ability to migrate to Canada. In this case, Syrians, Armenians, and Lebanese could be regarded as experiencing collateral damage in the politics of whiteness. While Canadian immigration authorities seemed to privately accept the white/European identity claims of these groups, they were nonetheless unwilling to publicly grant them one of the privileges of whiteness – namely the ability to migrate to Canada on a basis equal to that of other white immigrants. Instead, the government used “merit-based” orders-in-council as an under the radar administrative mechanism to admit members of these groups. This allowed the government and the immigration department to avoid a larger public debate about racial discrimination against “Asiatic” immigrants.

Imitating nature is an ever more popular strategy in many fields of science and engineering research, from ecological engineering to artificial intelligence. But while biomimetics and related fields have recently attracted increased attention from philosophers, there has been relatively little engagement with what I suggest we see as their basic epistemological presupposition: that we may acquire knowledge from nature. I argue that emphasizing and exploring this presupposition opens up a new approach to epistemology, based on a shift from a conventional epistemological relationship to nature as object of knowledge to a biomimetic relationship to nature as source of knowledge.

In this paper, we study the Dirichlet problem of Hessian quotient equations of the form $S_k(D^2u)/S_l(D^2u)=g(x)$ in exterior domains. For $g\equiv \mbox {const.}$, we obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions on the existence of radially symmetric solutions. For g being a perturbation of a generalized symmetric function at infinity, we obtain the existence of viscosity solutions by Perron’s method. The key technique we develop is the construction of sub- and supersolutions to deal with the non-constant right-hand side g.

This article offers a reconstruction of how the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) justifies the territorial scope of application of EU law. Scholarship on this issue tends to advocate for an expansive projection of EU norms in the pursuit of global values, subject to the external limits of public international law. This article will develop a critique of this approach by pointing to its underlying assumptions as to the territorial dimension of the EU's rule, the insoluble practical issues that it leads to, and the need to consider differently the EU's spatial identity and relation to the wider world. It will also be argued that, in fact, other case law sometimes already reflects an alternative vision, by imagining the EU implicitly, not as a ‘global actor’ promoting universal values, but as a concretely situated and spatially bounded community. It will be shown that this is so with the methodological help of private international law, and in particular three doctrines that are traditional to this discipline—the localisation of cross-border relations, international imperativeness, and the public policy exception. This will ultimately allow for a more sophisticated understanding of the EU's territory to emerge—irreducible to the physical coordinates of its acts of intervention, or the mere sum of the physical spaces under Member State sovereignty, but as a distinct space of social relations, informed and delineated by the particular axiology and structure of the EU legal system.

We give a new proof of rationality of stable commutator length (scl) of certain elements in surface groups: those represented by curves that do not fill the surface. Such elements always admit extremal surfaces for scl. These results also hold more generally for non-filling $1$–chains.

Currently, much of the literature surrounding Black politics in the 1920s and 1930s understates the role that Black citizens and politicians played in challenging Jim Crow and white supremacy at the national level. Instead, different factors like the “cage” that white Southerners placed on Civil Rights legislation or the influence that New Deal programs had on electoral decisions in the Black community. After realignment, Black Americans and their allies were then able to launch more effective challenges against white supremacy. Although these narratives contain much explanatory power, oftentimes they overlook critical aspects of Black politics during this period that complicate this narrative. Examining the career of Oscar DePriest, the first Black congressman elected in the twentieth Century, this article argues that Black citizens and their representatives were able to explicitly affect politics at the local, state, and federal levels through DePriest’s career prior to realignment.

Two types of formal models—landscape search tasks and two-armed bandit models—are often used to study the effects that various social factors have on epistemic performance. I argue that they can be understood within a single framework. In this unified framework, I develop a model that may be used to understand the effects of functional and demographic diversity and their interaction. Using the unified model, I find that the benefit of demographic diversity is most pronounced in a functionally homogeneous group, and decreases with increasing functional diversity.