Recent scholarship on the democratization and Europeanization of the Western Balkans as well as the field of media studies have not amply dealt with the concept of political clientelism in the media in this region, which has been a major feature of the post-Milošević democratic transition in Serbia. This article examines the gradual political instrumentalization of the media landscape in Serbia under the ruling party since 2012. It will argue that despite the adoption of the new media laws first in 2014 and their amendments in 2023, government influence of the media outlets vis-à-vis more subtle mechanisms of control, has served to undermine media freedom rather than fostering democratic changes through genuine domestic reforms. This type of more subtle mechanism of indirect control is visible through the captured regulatory authority, state subsidies in the media vis-à-vis project co-financing, advertising contracts where the government serves as an intermediary, and the recent amendments to the new media laws adopted in October 2023 that practically “legalized” government interference in the Serbian media.

This article offers the first gendered history of African radio audiences. It uses a comparative approach to demonstrate that colonial development projects in Ghana and Zambia successfully created mass African audiences for radio between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when most radio sets on the continent were owned by white settlers. However the gendered impact of the projects was uneven. In Zambia the promotion of battery-operated wirelesses inadvertently created a male-dominated audience, while the construction of a wired rediffusion system in Ghana attracted equal numbers of male and female listeners. Ghana’s radio project offers new perspectives on the history of colonial development as a very rare example of a scheme that benefitted women as much as men. Differences in the voice of Ghanaian and Zambian radio also reveal that these early radio schemes had a lasting influence on broadcast content and listening culture in both countries beyond the 1950s.

Among maritime accidents, fishing vessel collisions are particularly prone to both high frequency and severity. This study aims to identify the correlation between effective collision speed (Delta-V) and the severity of hull damage in fishing vessel collisions. Using data from collisions in South Korea, the study examines the influence of collision-related factors including Delta-V, collision location, collision subject, collision angle and the hull material of the impacted vessel on the extent of vessel damage. Statistical analyses and binary logistic regression were employed to assess trends and relationships between these variables. The findings confirm direct associations between hull damage severity and factors such as tonnage, collision location, the striking vessel and the extent of hull damage.

The risk of losing access to crucial means-tested programs — like Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — poses a barrier to the enrollment of low-income Americans in clinical trials. This burden likely disproportionately affects members of racial and ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, elderly individuals, and rural populations, and may frustrate efforts to reflect the US population in clinical trial enrollment. To help achieve representative clinical trials for myriad conditions, Congress should pass legislation excluding payments to clinical trial participants from gross income and expand the clinical trial compensation exclusions for means-tested programs established in the Ensuring Access to Clinical Trials Act of 2015.

Approximately 60 million individuals worldwide are currently living with dementia. As the median age of the world’s population rises, the number of dementia cases is expected to increase markedly, and to affect ∼150 million individuals by 2050. This will create a huge and unsustainable economic and social burden across the globe. Although promising pharmacological treatment options for Alzheimer’s disease – the most common cause of dementia – are starting to emerge, dementia prevention and risk reduction remain vital. In this review, we present evidence from large-scale epidemiological studies and randomised controlled trials to indicate that adherence to healthy dietary patterns could improve cognitive function and lower dementia risk. We outline potential systemic (e.g. improved cardiometabolic health, lower inflammation, modified gut microbiome composition/metabolism, slower pace of aging) and brain-specific (e.g. lower amyloid-β load, reduced brain atrophy and preserved cerebral microstructure and energetics) mechanisms of action. We also explore current gaps in our knowledge and outline potential directions for future research in this area. Our aim is to provide an update on current state of the knowledge, and to galvanise research on this important topic.

The question arises when developing and testing Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) Manoeuvring Autonomy (MA): ‘is the performance we are seeing in our current on-water tests better than that of the last autonomy software version we deployed?’ An approach to answer this question is inspired by educators’ rubrics, in which a teacher grades a student’s work to objective criteria and then sums the individual criteria to determine the student’s overall grade. Here, individual metrics are used to evaluate a USV manoeuvring within range of another vessel. A weighted average is then applied to determine the overall score. With that objective performance value now obtained, similar manoeuvring tests can be compared between autonomy software versions to determine if the autonomy under development is progressively improving. This paper does not determine the threshold score needed to establish that a USV is safe to operate; thresholding of sufficient performance is recommended for future study.

In Croatia, due to local histories of violence, purist language ideologies, and the essentialist belief that nations and languages form an inseparable nexus, the ability to speak pure “Croatian” (čisti hrvatski) is perceived as a sign of morality while the use of “Serbian” indexes immorality. Through repetition over time and institutional support – through ethno-linguistic enregisterment – linguistic practises are able to map ethnicity and morality onto the bodies of speakers, making the use of language in Croatia a delicate and politicized performance. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the ways in which linguistic performances of čisti hrvatski by the newly minoritized Serbs in Vukovar become an integral part of performing political subjectivity. The eagerness of some of my interlocutors to perform čisti hrvatski in the public sphere becomes a way to embody exemplary minority subjectivity and to negotiate their stigmatized ethnic difference by demonstrating a sense of belonging to the Croatian nation-state.

In 2023, Princeton University Press published Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. It is a book of comparable mass to Alfred Chandler’s 1977 The Visible Hand and equally ambitious.1 The erudition is vast. (The bibliography alone runs 78 closely-printed pages. There are 122 pages of equally closely-printed footnotes to the 522-page main text whose own font is not large.) A production such as this seemed worth more than the usual traditional-form reviews, and in the September following its publication, the Penn Economic History Forum put on a symposium to discuss it. Interest was widespread: attendance in the room was agreeably substantial and came from far beyond the seminar’s usual catchment area, and there were requests for the Zoom link to the proceedings from around the world. (The expense was not vast and the ratio of impact to expense was almost certainly favorable relative to ordinary seminars. The economic history community might not suffer from putting on more such events when suitable occasions arise.)

This research proposes an adaptive human-robot interaction (HRI) that combines voice recognition, emotional context detection, decision-making, and self-learning. The aim is to overcome challenges in dynamic and noisy environments while achieving real-time and scalable performance. The architecture is based on a three-stage HRI system: voice input acquisition, feature extraction, and adaptive decision-making. For voice recognition, modern pre-processing techniques and mel-frequency cepstral coefficients are used to robustly implement the commands. Emotional context detection is governed by neural network classification on pitch, energy, and jitter features. Decision-making uses reinforcement learning where actions are taken and then the user is prompted to provide feedback that serves as a basis for re-evaluation. Iterative self-learning mechanisms are included, thereby increasing the adaptability as stored patterns and policies are updated dynamically. The experimental results show substantial improvements in recognition accuracy along with task success rates and emotional detection. The proposed system achieved 95% accuracy and a task success rate of 96%, even against challenging noise conditions. It is apparent that emotional detection achieves a high F1-score of 92%. Real-world validation showed the system’s ability to dynamically adapt, thus mitigating 15% latency through self-learning. The proposed system has potential applications in assistive robotics, interactive learning systems, and smart environments, addressing scalability and adaptability for real-world deployment. Novel contributions to adaptive HRI arise from the integration of voice recognition, emotional context detection, and self-learning mechanisms. The findings act as a bridge between the theoretical advancements and the practical utility of further system improvements in human-robot collaboration.

This article examines the central role of West Central Africa in the development of a global capitalist economy during the eighteenth century. Using a rich and overlooked set of records in English, Portuguese, and French, the article explains that rulers and brokers on the Loango coast championed ideas and practices of free trade and free markets from the rise of the Atlantic slave trade through at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The article shows that European slave traders opposed a free market by fiercely competing to obtain full control of the trade in African captives along the Atlantic Africa. In contrast, the West Central African states of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango, located north of the Congo River, fully embraced free trade and free markets during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a critical lung condition caused by trauma or infection. This study explores the development and evaluation of human lung phantoms to investigate the feasibility of using microwave frequencies for ARDS detection. Both physical semisolid phantoms and their numerical models were developed in inflated and deflated states to replicate the dielectric properties of healthy and affected lungs. Three phantom sets with varying water and air content were fabricated to simulate different stages of respiratory distress. The geometric parameters of the phantoms were derived from CT scans of 166 ARDS patients. Dielectric permittivity and conductivity were measured using a Keysight N1501A dielectric probe over a 0.5–13 GHz range, showing strong agreement with IFAC’s reference data. To validate the models, horn antennas operating between 8.2–12.4 GHz were used to measure S-parameters (S11 and S21) in both physical and numerical phantoms. The results demonstrated consistent changes in transmission and reflection characteristics corresponding to variations in lung volume and dielectric properties. These findings support the potential of microwave imaging as a non-invasive tool for early ARDS detection by effectively distinguishing between healthy and distressed lung states based on measurable electromagnetic response.

This article investigates tax disputes between Luyi County, Henan Province, and its two neighboring counties during the Qing. It shows that the Qing central government and the provincial authorities allowed local governments to use an expedient scheme called “equal sharing” to fulfill tax quotas on a particular type of farming land—the former princely estates of the Ming that became known as “renamed lands.” In Luyi local elites’ fight against the perceived unfair tax practice, local gazetteers played an important role as evidence in the disputes and as reminders of the unresolved issue for Luyi people. In the final analysis, this case study points to the Qing state’s flexibility in fulfilling the land tax quotas, while attempting to keep transaction costs low and revenue sources sustainable, both of which were ironically conditioned by its limited tax basis and therefore its limited administrative capacity.

Two important tasks for theorists of justice are to determine the bounds of justice, which explain why some claims are matters of justice and others are not, and to determine the demands of justice, which settle conflicts that fall within those bounds. In this paper, we clarify the distinction between bounds and demands, revealing two striking things. First, while thresholds have typically been understood to be demands of justice, their use as such is confusing and arguably implausible. Second, thresholds appear to be better understood as demarcating the bounds of justice, if a suitable explanation for their use can be found. We explore three explanations for why thresholds can demarcate bounds and assess the prospects for seeing thresholds in this new and different role. These are satiability of the value of goods, satiability of justice, and conceptual engineering.

Internal rural–urban migration and its implications for children’s education are critical factors in understanding China’s rapid pace of urbanization. However, previous studies relying on cross-sectional data often treat migration as a one-off event, oversimplifying the migration process. This study uses data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) for 2010–2018, along with a newly developed analytic strategy, to estimate the effect of children’s migration trajectories on their educational outcomes. Using panel data, this study examines various migration trajectories by considering the directions and frequencies of migrations. Results show the heterogeneities among migrants. First, while permanent migration does not adversely affect children’s education, return migration and multiple migrations lead to increased educational penalties. Beyond the segregation between urban and rural areas, the findings highlight the significant disadvantages linked to migration between provinces, which profoundly affect educational outcomes compared to migration within provinces. Finally, the findings suggest there are gender differences in the impact of migration experiences, with boys facing greater challenges to their education.

This piece explores the parallel development of two fisheries management regimes in mid-twentieth-century Lake Malawi: one imposed by the British colonial government over the lake and the other by Senior Chief Makanjira focused on Mbenji Island. The parallel development of these regimes provides opportunity for close analysis of how fisheries management centred on different knowledge and practices led to distinctive legacies of governance legitimacy and efficacy. Given the increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the future sustainability of fisheries globally, we contend that it is imperative to recognise the ways in which colonial pasts have embedded knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary decision-making processes within national fisheries governance regimes that continue to obstruct capacities to bring different knowledges, practices, and management approaches together effectively and appropriately.