For researchers studying Chinese politics, the concern is not whether factions are important, but rather how to identify them. In the Chinese context, factional affiliations are often concealed, requiring researchers to devote extensive efforts to parse them. Faction detection methods have transformed over time, from the “rumours-have-it” approach of first-generation scholars, to the “backgrounds-in-common” framing of the second generation, and the “practices-of-patronage” focus of the current generation. This article offers a systematic review of these approaches and finds Junyan Jiang’s patronage-focused, “within-tenure promotion” approach to be the most accessible and justifiable. Building on Jiang’s work, we propose two additional criteria to this identification method, “double promotion” and “promotional grooming.” Finally, we test all the verifiable approaches against the odds of China’s prefectural-level leaders crossing career thresholds between 2000 and 2020. The test results show that the background-based approach has limited validity and Jiang’s patronage-based approach thus requires further refinement. In contrast, our revised identification methods prove to be effective in clarifying the factional factor. This study thus proposes an improved, verified approach to identifying factions in Chinese politics and provides researchers with a reliable tool for identifying the “people factor” in the comparative study of political elites.

Dust-winds across the southern Iran-Iraq borderlands in the past decade have played a crucial role in how the Iranian state invests in both maintaining its major oil sites, despite intensive sanctions, and organising cooperation with local farmers to block the transmission of dust across its sovereign territory. This paper extends the ethnographic exploration of economic sanctions to their environmental interventions, studying the everyday lives of people in Khuzestan province. Environmental historians have examined landscapes altered by military activities and sanctions, but an anthropological approach to the essential entanglement of meteorological upheaval and sanctions characterized by bad air is lacking. Drawing on critical theories of breathing, I trace the explosion of dust into Iranian geopolitics as a conundrum of how the power dynamics of sanctions and sovereignty intermingle with aerosols. Within the frame of state-sponsored projects, engineers, scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and traders cooperate and compete in atmospherically focused coalitions to stabilize soil and dust against their spread. As a voluminous entity that is dispersed across the bodies of breathers, these atmospherically focused coalitions give visibility to the sanctions and the gaps in the state’s sovereignty.

Published in 1913, General Psychopathology blends philosophy, rigorous conceptual analysis and detailed clinical examples. Jaspers makes the case that psychopathology requires two different methods (explaining and understanding) to address the predicament of the subjective nature of experience and what it was to be human. Key contributions from General Psychopathology to psychiatry include the conceptual framework for delusions, the issue of somatic prejudice, empathy as the key tool at our disposal in thinking about another person’s subjectivity, and the whole versus the part (gestalt). Jaspers was a proponent of the existential school of philosophy, which is evident throughout the work.

Despite increased interest in dining as part of worship practices, accounts of cult meals often focus primarily on benefaction and consumption, ignoring or downplaying the practices of food preparation in and around sanctuaries. Synthesizing and analyzing kitchen spaces and their assemblages in sanctuaries dedicated to Mithras for the first time, we argue that the labor of food-making was also central to group-making in ancient cult. The display of kitchens and cooks, and the entailments of cooking installations, emphasized meat dishes and worked to create vertically stratified worship communities. At the same time, the diversity of food-production practices in Mithraic sanctuaries also suggests significant variety in how practices might have structured cult groups.

We discuss the logical principle of extensionality for set-valued operators and its relation to mathematical notions of continuity for these operators in the context of systems of finite types as used in proof mining. Concretely, we initially exhibit an issue that arises with treating full extensionality in the context of the prevalent intensional approach to set-valued operators in such systems. Motivated by these issues, we discuss a range of useful fragments of this full extensionality statement where these issues are avoided and discuss their interrelations. Further, we study the continuity principles associated with these fragments of extensionality and show how they can be introduced in the logical systems via a collection of axioms that do not contribute to the growth of extractable bounds from proofs. In particular, we place an emphasis on a variant of extensionality and continuity formulated using the Hausdorff-metric and, in the course of our discussion, we in particular employ a tame treatment of suprema over bounded sets developed by the author in previous work to provide the first proof-theoretically tame treatment of the Hausdorff metric in systems geared for proof mining. To illustrate the applicability of these treatments for the extraction of quantitative information from proofs, we provide an application of proof mining to the Mann iteration of set-valued mappings which are nonexpansive w.r.t. the Hausdorff metric and extract highly uniform and effective quantitative information on the convergence of that method.

Recent changes instituted by the US government pose a sinister threat to the integrity of science worldwide. We roundly refute the many contrived assertions that have been unfairly levelled against scientists and their natural philosophy and implore them to champion the apodictic principles of science.

This study examines how human activities influenced soil development at two contrasting Arctic sites: Maiva, a 19th-century farmstead, and Snuvrejohka, a seasonal Sámi reindeer herding settlement in the Lake Torneträsk region, northern Sweden. Using geochemical and geophysical soil analyses, we explore the spatial distribution and vertical development of anthropogenic signals in the soil. At Maiva, prolonged agricultural use and earthworm bioturbation have led to extensive soil mixing and altered soil horizons, resulting in elevated phosphate, lead, and organic matter concentrations in Ap and Ah horizons. In contrast, Snuvrejohka displays more stratified profiles with localized chemical enrichment around hearths, primarily within E horizons. These results highlight how different land-use practices leave distinct geochemical fingerprints in Arctic soils and emphasize the need for sampling strategies adapted to site-specific soil formation processes. Our findings demonstrate that even short-term or seasonal human activities can leave distinct and detectable signatures in Arctic soils. Through an integrated approach combining soil science, geoarchaeological methods, and historical data, this study provides new insights into the reconstruction of past land-use practices and highlights the vulnerability of archaeological soil records in Arctic environments facing rapid climate-driven change.

Explorations of ideology retain special significance in contemporary studies of judicial politics. While some existing methodologies draw on voting patterns and coalition alignments to map a jurist’s latent features, many are otherwise reliant on supplemental proxies – often directly from adjacent actors or via assessments from various prognosticators. We propose an alternative that not only leverages observable judicial behavior, but does so through jurists’ articulations on the law. In particular, we adapt a hierarchical factor model to demonstrate how latent ideological preferences emerge through the written text of opinions. Relying on opinion content from Justices of the Supreme Court, we observe a discernible correlation between linguistic choices and latent expressions of ideology irrespective of known preferences or voting patterns. Testing our method against Martin-Quinn, we find our approach strongly correlates with this validated and commonly used measure of judicial ideology. We conclude by discussing the intuitive power of text as a feature of ideology, as well as how this process can extend to judicial actors and institutions beyond the Supreme Court.

Aristotle’s views about the female body are commonly held to be an insurmountable obstacle to aligning his philosophy with feminism. Sarah Borden Sharkey, however, has attempted a robust Aristotelian feminism that alters only the minimum. She argues that to succeed it must give positive and detailed reasons for sexual equality, a task that she leaves open. Building on Sharkey’s work, this essay argues that Thomas Aquinas’ view of the will allows such a position, by combining it with Aristotle’s notion of thumos as the main dividing factor between the sexes. The result is an Aristotelian–Thomistic view that keeps female biological difference, while allowing equality in attaining virtue and prudence.

The analyzed data provide evidence for sound changes that involve cumulative effects in the phonologization of phonetic duration. The data come from Kashubian, an understudied, endangered language spoken in northwestern Poland, and illustrate two historical processes: preservation and loss of ultra-short vowels (jers) and compensatory lengthening. The unified analysis of the two processes hinges on a reinterpretation of phonetic vowel duration as phonological length. Phonetic duration is contextual: Vowels in head syllables, in open syllables, and before voiced consonants tend to be longer than vowels in non-head syllables, in closed syllables, and before voiceless consonants. The effects are cumulative in the sense that all three conditions must co-occur on a single vowel. The discussed changes provide support for phonological models that (i) allow phonological constraints to access fine-grained phonetic information and (ii) are capable of deriving cumulative effects. The data contribute to the typology of cumulative processes by providing novel evidence of alternations that are simultaneously conditioned by the prosodic and segmental context.

Epidemiologic evidence on the association between dietary choline and betaine and mortality risk remains limited, particularly among non-Western populations. We examined the association of dietary choline and betaine with all-cause mortality in Chinese adults using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) 1991-2015. We included 9,027 men and 8,828 women without cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. Dietary intake was assessed using 3-day 24-hour dietary recalls in combination with a household food inventories. Death was ascertained through household surveys in each wave. We used time-dependent Cox proportional hazards regression models to estimate multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). During a median follow-up of 9.1 years, 891 men and 687 women were deceased. Higher total choline intake was associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality in both men [HRQ5 vs. Q1 = 0.58 (95% CI: 0.45, 0.74)] and women [HRQ5 vs. Q1 = 0.59 (95% CI: 0.44, 0.78)]. The dose-response curve followed a reverse J-shape in men and an L-shape in women (both P-nonlinear ≤ 0.005). Similarly, fat-soluble choline intake was inversely associated with the risk of all-cause mortality in both men [HRQ5 vs. Q1 = 0.59 (95% CI: 0.46, 0.75)] and women [HRQ5 vs. Q1 = 0.53 (95% CI: 0.40, 0.70)], showing reverse J-shaped patterns (both P-nonlinear < 0.001). A J-shaped association between dietary water-soluble choline and all-cause mortality was observed in women (P-nonlinear < 0.001), but a null association was found in men. Betaine intake was not associated with all-cause mortality in either sex. Our findings suggest that adequate choline intake, but not betaine, is linked to reduced all-cause mortality in Chinese adults with predominantly plant-based diets, with both insufficient and excessive choline intake potentially increasing mortality risk.