While there have always been those in the American public who mistrust science and scientists’ views of the world, they have tended to be a minority of the larger public. Recent COVID-19 related events indicate that could be changing for some key groups. What might explain the present state of mistrust of science within an important component of the American public? In this study, we delve deeply into this question and examine what citizens today believe about science and technology and why, focusing on core theories of trust, risk concern, and political values and on the important role of science optimism and pessimism orientations. Using national public survey data, we examine the correlates of science optimism and pessimism and test the efficacy of this construct as drivers of biotechnology policy. We find that science optimism and pessimism are empirically useful constructs and that they are important predictors of biotechnology policy choices.

The purpose of this note is to obtain an improved lower bound for the multidimensional Bohr radius introduced by L. Aizenberg (2000, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 128, 1147–1155), by means of a rather simple argument.

The north-western Negev is an under-researched ecotonal region. We excavated two late Middle Palaeolithic open-air sites and recovered rich lithic industries that could be refitted, as well as remains of fauna, and charcoal. Palaeoenvironmental information and dates indicate interesting inter-site differences.

The model for capacity assessment in the United States and much of the Western world relies upon the demonstration of four skills including the ability to communicate a clear, consistent choice. Yet such assessments often occur at only one moment in time, which may result in the patient expressing a choice to the evaluator that is highly inconsistent with the patient’s underlying values and goals, especially if a short-term factor (such as frustration with the hospital staff) distorts the patient’s preferences momentarily. These challenges are particularly concerning in cases, which arise frequently in hospital settings, in which patients demand immediate self-discharge, often during off-hours, while faced with life-threatening risks. This paper examines the distinctive elements that shape such cases and explores their ethical implications, ultimately offering a model for such situations that can be operationalized.

We construct finitely generated groups of small period growth, i.e. groups where the maximum order of an element of word length n grows very slowly in n. This answers a question of Bradford related to the lawlessness growth of groups and is connected to an approximative version of the restricted Burnside problem.

A Bourdieusian analysis of gender relations within political organizations is highly instructive. This kind of analysis might provide insight into the intertwinement of gender and politics by illuminating the construction process of gendered political identities. Drawing upon memoirs written by the members of the left-wing organizations in Turkey and interviews conducted with them, this article argues that the narratives of members of the Turkish left reflect the multidimensional nature of what Pierre Bourdieu called masculine domination.

We develop a Thom–Mather theory of frontals analogous to Ishikawa's theory of deformations of Legendrian singularities but at the frontal level, avoiding the use of the contact setting. In particular, we define concepts like frontal stability, versality of frontal unfoldings or frontal codimension. We prove several characterizations of stability, including a frontal Mather–Gaffney criterion, and of versality. We then define the method of reduction with which we show how to construct frontal versal unfoldings of plane curves and show how to construct stable unfoldings of corank 1 frontals with isolated instability which are not necessarily versal. We prove a frontal version of Mond's conjecture in dimension 1. Finally, we classify stable frontal multigerms and give a complete classification of corank 1 stable frontals from $\mathbb {C}^3$ to $\mathbb {C}^4$.

In this article, we study the Bohr operator for the operator-valued subordination class $S(f)$ consisting of holomorphic functions subordinate to f in the unit disk $\mathbb {D}:=\{z \in \mathbb {C}: |z|<1\}$, where $f:\mathbb {D} \rightarrow \mathcal {B}(\mathcal {H})$ is holomorphic and $\mathcal {B}(\mathcal {H})$ is the algebra of bounded linear operators on a complex Hilbert space $\mathcal {H}$. We establish several subordination results, which can be viewed as the analogs of a couple of interesting subordination results from scalar-valued settings. We also obtain a von Neumann-type inequality for the class of analytic self-mappings of the unit disk $\mathbb {D}$ which fix the origin. Furthermore, we extensively study Bohr inequalities for operator-valued polyanalytic functions in certain proper simply connected domains in $\mathbb {C}$. We obtain Bohr radius for the operator-valued polyanalytic functions of the form $F(z)= \sum _{l=0}^{p-1} \overline {z}^l \, f_{l}(z) $, where $f_{0}$ is subordinate to an operator-valued convex biholomorphic function, and operator-valued starlike biholomorphic function in the unit disk $\mathbb {D}$.

In 1936 the author, politician and garden designer Harold Nicolson bought four, round antique altars and a Corinthian capital from the sale of Shanganagh Castle, Co Wicklow. Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, placed these marbles in a garden compartment at Sissinghurst that was intended to evoke the landscape and antiquities of the Cycladic island of Delos. These are among the most important antiquities in the collections of the National Trust, yet their provenance and significance has been obscured by their presumed status as ‘mere’ ornaments to the celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst Castle. This paper traces the provenance of this group of antiquities back to Delos and their discovery by a hero of the Greek War of Independence. Historic context for Vita and Harold’s use of the altars as adornments to their garden will be examined in the context of earlier use of similar Delian altars in earlier garden design – the seventeenth-century ‘garden museum’ at Arundel House, Strand, London, or the eighteenth-century gardens at Wrest Park. Finally, entry of the Sissinghurst altars into British collections will be examined through a political lens and through Nicolson’s philhellenism.

Even though wide access to any warranted information in the modern age, the problem of unfounded belief is still relevant, since these beliefs often lead to negative consequences (e.g., vaccination refusal, homeopathic treatment, etc.). The aim of this study was testing the relationship of social worldviews with paranormal beliefs and conspiracy beliefs. We assumed dimensionality hypothesis based on functional standpoint that there should be a general factor (underlying all the domains of paranormal beliefs and generic conspiracist beliefs), which has associations with the social worldviews as well. Derived our analysis from the survey of 228 participants (Mage = 30.6, SD = 11.7), we found that (a) the structure of paranormal and generic conspiracist beliefs can be described by a bifactor model; (b) the general factor of paranormal and generic conspiracist beliefs in the bifactor model was positively associated with global belief in just world and dangerous worldview; (c) paranormal beliefs were positively associated with global belief in just world and negatively associated with competitive worldview; (d) generic conspiracist beliefs were positively associated with dangerous worldview, competitive worldview, and zero-sum game belief; (e) contrary to our hypotheses, there was no evidence for any negative association of paranormal beliefs with dangerous worldview or zero-sum game belief and for any negative association of generic conspiracist beliefs with global belief in just world. We claim that the unfounded beliefs can be of some functional nature, demonstrating a connection with social worldviews, which opens up new perspectives for considering this problem within the framework of social psychology.