Despite the substantial volume of literature on the Second Sophistic, only rarely do current approaches focus on a formal analysis of its language and the ways in which it correlates to the contemporary debate on language correctness. The present paper suggests that such an analysis could be a fruitful field of enquiry and offers several suggestions as to how it might be executed to enhance our literary appreciation of these texts. It focuses on the use of Attic phonology and morphology in two literary texts (Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Aristides’ Panathenaic Oration) and a second-century CE Eleusinian inscription. By exploring the roles played by language and sound, the paper highlights how imperial high-register prose interweaves nostalgic motifs and innovative practices in a programmatic mixture of archaising elements and contemporary koine features that engenders a novel style.

Superior vena cava obstruction following paediatric cardiac surgery is a rare yet serious complication. After arterial switch operations, four neonates diagnosed with acute superior vena cava thrombosis were treated using transcatheter interventions. The importance of early recognition and implementation of transcatheter intervention for a successful outcome is emphasised.

Prolonged grief disorder therapy (PGDT) is designed to help clients resolve a persistent and debilitating grief reaction. Clinical trial and routine evaluation evidence supports the efficacy of PGDT in resolving stuck grief, but as yet no qualitative evaluation has been undertaken. The current study qualitatively examined client experiences and views of PGDT delivered within the context of a National Health Service Talking Therapies (NHS-TT) quality improvement project in Devon, United Kingdom (UK). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 clients after completing PGDT which were analysed using the Framework Method. Clients reported being stuck with grief before treatment. PGDT was experienced as being acceptable to clients, resulting in profound changes to wellbeing and functioning. PGDT supported clients to move from denial and avoidance to acceptance and approach of their loss. Perceived change processes included normalising and validating grief, reconnecting to life values and goals, re-establishing social connection, and building emotional self-management skills, consistent with the logic model underpinning the intervention. A flexible, tailored therapeutic approach was emphasised as important for enhancing treatment experience and outcomes. Suggesting minor areas for improvement, some clients experienced homework tasks as repetitive and laborious, imaginal conversations were challenging for some, and the ending of therapy was at times described as painful. Clients felt PGDT was a valuable offering for NHS-TT services, offering something distinct from existing treatment pathways.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To gain insight into clients lived experience of prolonged grief disorder (PGD).

2. (2) To become familiar with prolonged grief disorder therapy (PGDT) as a treatment for PGD in NHS Talking Therapies (NHS-TT) services.

3. (3) To understand client views of PGDT, including what brought them to treatment, impacts of treatment, how the therapy may work, helpful and unhelpful aspects of PGDT, and if PGDT is seen as acceptable.

4. (4) To understand client views of feasibility of implementation of PGDT in an NHS-TT setting.

In this paper, we investigate the dimension theory of the one-parameter family of Okamoto’s function. We compute the Hausdorff, box-counting, and Assouad dimensions of the graph for a typical choice of parameter. Furthermore, we study the dimension of the level sets. We give an upper bound on the dimension of every level set, and we show that for a typical choice of parameter, this value is attained for Lebesgue almost every level set.

Measuring the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation presents empirical and theoretical challenges. This article makes a distinctive empirical contribution that draws on the latest theoretical developments on the substantive representation of women (SRW). I provide an explorative qualitative analysis of representative claims in French parliamentary debates over a twenty-year period. I focus on three core questions: who is making claims? What are the claims saying? Which women are represented by the claims? The analysis considers the interplay between these questions and finds that SRW is complex and full of contestations. Most SRW comes from women and parties of the left, while most resistance (anti-SRW) comes from men and parties of the right. However, some women cross party lines to work together, while ideological differences emerge between women sharing descriptive traits. Crucially, I find that support for SRW is often restricted to claims that uphold the gendered and racialized status quo.

This contribution explores the non-aligned era labor migration of Yugoslav men to postcolonial Zambia. Based on oral history and archival research conducted in Lusaka and Belgrade, it seeks to provide a gendered account of Yugoslavs negotiating their role as white Europeans in a postcolonial milieu and the ways in which Zambian colleagues understood Yugoslavs to have positioned themselves. Drawing upon contemporary social anthropological research from post-Yugoslav space, I argue that two modes of masculinities were in simultaneous operation and can help to make sense of the tensions inherent in the role of Yugoslav male workers in Zambia. An adventuring young Yugoslav man (frajer) might have driven fast, drunk heavily, and boasted about sexual conquests, but according to the motif of the “father,” the same person would also understand himself as a provider, whose responsible, serious, and protective characteristics would be used in assisting Zambians to develop as industrial workers.

The increasing concern related to radiological and nuclear threats within the European Union (EU) has intensified the regional preparedness needs. The anticipated number of injured, contaminated, and irradiated individuals may range from a few to hundreds of thousands, necessitating immediate emergency medical care and hospitalization. Given this potential influx of casualties, the medical teams responsible for initial management may become rapidly overwhelmed, facing immense pressure to formulate appropriate response strategies and treatment options. Therefore, it is critical to establish appropriate supra-national recommendations and appropriate national protocols to guide medical decision-making in such extraordinary circumstances. The EU is proactively preparing for this worst-case scenario. Drawing on a robust and remaining state-of-the-art reference consensus regarding the medical management of mass radiation exposure, a well-established network of 550 European Society for Bone and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) centers and emergency medicine specialists, and two decades of collective experience in managing acute radiation syndrome (ARS) patients. The European Commission (EC), in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) Europe, is accelerating the dissemination of medical response protocols. This initiative includes the education of healthcare professionals and the implementation of a strategic stockpile of medical countermeasures to address nuclear-related threats effectively.

Chung (2023) purports to derive conditions under which a Utilitarian society, which maximizes total welfare, Pareto dominates a Rawlsian society, which maximizes the income of the least advantaged members of society. We show that Chung’s analysis is doubly flawed. First, his analysis assumes that a Rawlsian government chooses an inefficient tax rate when it could do otherwise. Second, his analysis violates his assumption that citizens must choose a non-negative amount of labour. We show that Chung’s headline result does not hold once we enforce this assumption.

Grasp detection is a significant research direction in the field of robotics. Traditional analysis methods typically require prior knowledge of the object parameters, limiting grasp detection to structured environments and resulting in suboptimal performance. In recent years, the generative convolutional neural network (GCNN) has gained increasing attention, but they suffer from issues such as insufficient feature extraction capabilities and redundant noise. Therefore, we proposed an improved method for the GCNN, aimed at enabling fast and accurate grasp detection. First, a two-dimensional (2D) Gaussian kernel was introduced to re-encode grasp quality to address the issue of false positives in grasp rectangular metrics, emphasizing high-quality grasp poses near the central point. Additionally, to address the insufficient feature extraction capabilities of the shallow network, a receptive field module was added at the neck to enhance the network’s ability to extract distinctive features. Furthermore, the rich feature information in the decoding phase often contains redundant noise. To address this, we introduced a global-local feature fusion module to suppress noise and enhance features, enabling the model to focus more on target information. Finally, relevant evaluation experiments were conducted on public grasping datasets, including Cornell, Jacquard, and GraspNet-1 Billion, as well as in real-world robotic grasping scenarios. All results showed that the proposed method performs excellently in both prediction accuracy and inference speed and is practically feasible for robotic grasping.

How does gender shape patterns of parliamentary speechmaking? We theorize and test three types of effects. The direct effect posits that female MPs speak less than their male peers. The access effect claims that the feminization of parliaments and parties is associated with higher gender bias in speech levels. The career effect foresees a greater gender bias in speech levels among MPs holding positions of power. Drawing on parliamentary speeches in South Africa (1999–2024), where high rates of female representation coexist with sexist norms and practices, we find evidence for all three effects. Female MPs make fewer speeches, and the growing feminization of institutions and the appointment of female MPs to leadership roles are not sufficient to reverse entrenched gender biases against women. Our findings highlight the need to go beyond the politics of presence and focus on the informal mechanisms that hinder women from performing their roles even when occupying positions of power.