Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a representative study of private sector employers in the United States. The findings show that public childcare is relevant for those forms of employer childcare more plausibly explained as the result of employers’ normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that female leaders are highly relevant for employer childcare, but that this significance differs depending on whether the form of employer childcare is more likely of economic versus normative importance to employers. The study provides an empirical contribution in that it is the first to use representative data of the United States to examine the relevance of state-level public childcare and female leadership. Its theoretical contribution is to show that normative explanations for employer childcare provision are likely underestimated in U.S. employer family policy research.

We prove $\times a \times b$ measure rigidity for multiplicatively independent pairs when $a\in \mathbb {N}$ and $b>1$ is a ‘specified’ real number (the b-expansion of $1$ has a tail or bounded runs of $0$s) under a positive entropy condition. This is done by proving a mean decay of the Fourier series of the point masses average along $\times b$ orbits. We also prove a quantitative version of this decay under stronger conditions on the $\times a$ invariant measure. The quantitative version together with the $\times b$ invariance of the limit measure is a step toward a general Host-type pointwise equidistribution theorem in which the equidistribution is for Parry measure instead of Lebesgue. We show that finite memory length measures on the a-shift meet the mentioned conditions for mean convergence. Our main proof relies on techniques of Hochman.

Many philosophers sympathetic with Humeanism about laws have thought that the fundamental laws will include not only the traditional dynamical equations, but also two additional principles: the Past Hypothesis (PH) and the Statistical Postulate (SP). PH says that the universe began in a particular very-low-entropy macrostate M(0), and SP posits a uniform probability distribution over the microstates compatible with M(0). This view is arguably vindicated by the orthodox Humean Best System Account (BSA). However, I argue that recent developments of the BSA render the Past Hypothesis otiose. In particular, Pragmatic Humeanism does not support the idea that PH is a law.

Beardon and Minda gave a characterization of normal families of holomorphic and meromorphic functions in terms of a locally uniform Lipschitz condition. Here, we generalize this viewpoint to families of mappings in higher dimensions that are locally uniformly continuous with respect to a given modulus of continuity. Our main application is to the normality of families of quasiregular mappings through a locally uniform Hölder condition. This provides a unified framework in which to consider families of quasiregular mappings, both recovering known results of Miniowitz, Vuorinen and others and yielding new results. In particular, normal quasimeromorphic mappings, Yosida quasiregular mappings and Bloch quasiregular mappings can be viewed as classes of quasiregular mappings which arise through consideration of various metric spaces for the domain and range. We give several characterizations of these classes and obtain upper bounds on the rate of growth in each class.

In this observational study conducted in 2022, 12.3% of patients who shared a room with a patient positive for severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) also had a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, either at initial screening or during a 5-day quarantine. Therefore, screening and quarantine are still necessary within hospitals for close-contact inpatients during the SARS-CoV-2 omicron-variant dominant period.

The Trump administration implemented a controversial performance quota policy for immigration judges in October 2018. The policy’s political motivations were clear: to pressure immigration judges to order more immigration removals and deportations as quickly as possible. Previous attempts by U.S. presidents to control immigration judges were ineffective, but this quota policy was different because it credibly threatened judges’ job security and promotion opportunities if they failed to follow the policy. Our analysis of hundreds of thousands of judicial decisions before and after the policy’s implementation demonstrates that the quota policy successfully led immigration judges to issue more immigration removal orders (both in absentia and merits orders). The post-policy change in behavior was strongest among those judges who were less inclined, pre-policy, to issue immigration removal decisions. These findings have important implications for immigration judge independence, due process protections for noncitizens, and presidential efforts to control the federal bureaucracy.

This article examines the development of international human rights standards and oversight mechanisms directed at addressing the negative effects of imprisonment. We identify this as the rules-based prison-regulation project, widely endorsed by international organizations and legal scholars. However, with a focus on the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, we argue that this project has inherent limitations, as it is based on (a) a reductive understanding of carceral harms and (b) a rule-centric ontology of prisons. By challenging these foundations, we explore whether the project exemplifies “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011), where the pursuit of improved prison regulation could inadvertently hinder societal flourishing. We argue that the continuous search for new and better prison standards may perpetuate rather than alleviate the problems associated with imprisonment unless accompanied by explicit strategies for countering prison growth and dramatically reducing prisoner numbers, for building the democratic power of prisoners and communities targeted by imprisonment, and continual linkages between prison conditions and the wider political-economic institution of imprisonment. We conclude that engaging with prisons as sites of relational power in practice must underlie any quest to reduce the harms of imprisonment.

In this article, I defend the contemporary significance of Hegel's thought on subjectivity and dialectic by involving Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Hans-Georg Gadamer in a dialogue, and then, by clarifying the characteristics of spirit and concept. Hegel's theory of subjectivity and his thought on dialectic face many criticisms. One such critic is Gadamer; however, Gadamer's philosophy is, in fact, quite close to Hegel's. I take the Hegel-Gadamer relationship as one illustration of Hegel's relevance and influence. I then further demonstrate Hegel's contemporary importance by analyzing the characteristics of spirit and concept. Finally, I propose that Hegel's absolute spirit and concept remain significant.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic necessitated a rapid uptake of remote health care services. This qualitative descriptive study was designed to gain an understanding of older adults’ experiences of remote care (telephone or online video conference appointments) for specialized health services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-one older adults (ages 65 years and older; 8 men and 13 women) living in eastern Canada participated in a semi-structured telephone interview. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The vast majority of older adults were overall satisfied with their remote experiences of specialist care. Advantages to remote care for specialized services included convenience, safety during the pandemic, comfort, efficiency, and ease of visit. Disadvantages included communication not as effective, feeling depersonalized or disembodied, missing the human relationship, and wanting reassurance of physical assessment. It is important that health professionals understand the disadvantages for older adults of remote care visits in order to mitigate them.

Much scholarship on customary international law has examined the merits of induction, deduction, and assertion as approaches to custom identification. Save for where international tribunals identify custom by assertion, writers have viewed custom identification that does not rely on evidence of State practice and opinio juris as an example of deductive reasoning. However, writers have stated that, at best, deduction is reasoning from the general to the particular. This article draws on legal philosophy to define the contours of deductive reasoning and argues that pure deduction, namely deduction not combined with other forms of reasoning, is an unsound approach to custom identification. This argument is tested by reference to cases of custom identification by the International Court of Justice, categorised according to three types of deduction: normative, functional, and analogical. This article also explores the authority and utility of custom identification by pure deduction and its impact on content determination.

Nuts are an important component of a healthy diet, but little has been known about their effects on muscle health. Therefore, this study examined the association between nut consumption and low muscle strength among Korean adults. This cross-sectional analysis was conducted using single 24-h recall and handgrip strength data from 3962 younger adults 19–39 years, 6921 middle-aged adults 40–64 years and 3961 older adults ≥65 years participated in the seventh cycle (2016–2018) of the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Low muscle strength was defined as handgrip strength <28 kg for men and <18 kg for women. Sex-specific OR were obtained for younger, middle-aged and older adults using multivariable logistic regression analyses. About one in four Korean adults were consuming nuts (using a culinary definition) with peanut being the most frequently consumed type. After adjustment for age, BMI, total energy intake, household income, alcohol consumption, smoking, resistance exercise, medical history and dietary protein intake, nut consumption was associated with the lower risk of low muscle strength among older adults ≥65 years (men: OR 0·55, 95 % CI (0·38, 0·79); women: OR 0·69, 95 % CI (0·51, 0·93)); however, this association was not observed among younger adults 19–39 years or middle-aged adults 40–64 years. Our results suggest that consuming nuts might be beneficial in lowering the risk of low muscle strength among Korean older adults.

In his article ‘Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism’ Stephen Maitzen (2006) develops a permutation of the argument from divine hiddenness which focuses on the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the globe. Max Baker-Hytch (2016) responds to this argument by providing a theodicy which appeals to the fact that humans are epistemically interdependent. In this article I argue that Baker-Hytch's response is at best incomplete and at worst relies on a faulty modal judgement. After exploring some ways Baker-Hytch might salvage his theodicy and maintaining their failure, I conclude with the success of Maitzen's argument.

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.

Postmenopausal osteoporosis is a major concern for women worldwide due to increased risk of fractures and diminished bone quality. Recent research on gut microbiota has suggested that probiotics can combat various diseases, including postmenopausal bone loss. Although several preclinical studies have explored the potential of probiotics in improving postmenopausal bone loss, the results have been inconsistent and the mechanism of action remains unclear. To address this, a meta-analysis was conducted to determine the effect of probiotics on animal models of postmenopausal osteoporosis. The bone parameters studied were bone mineral density (BMD), bone volume fractions (BV/TV), and hallmarks of bone formation and resorption. Pooled analysis showed that probiotic treatment significantly improves BMD and BV/TV of the ovariectomised animals. Probiotics, while not statistically significant, exhibited a tendency towards enhancing bone formation and reducing bone resorption. Next, we compared the effects of Lactobacillus sp. and Bifidobacterium sp. on osteoporotic bone. Both probiotics improved BMD and BV/TV compared with control, but Lactobacillus sp. had a larger effect size. In conclusion, our findings suggest that probiotics have the potential to improve bone health and prevent postmenopausal osteoporosis. However, further studies are required to investigate the effect of probiotics on postmenopausal bone health in humans.