This paper analyzes the use of rubu unpaid “traditional” labor in Toro District in western Uganda during the colonial period. It explores how the “traditional” roots of the unpaid labor system were negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor through wrangling over exemptions and commutations for the work which, then, shaped British responses to the forced labor regime. Chiefs managed rubu labor on the ground and wielded a lot of exploitative power. However, the British administration used intermediaries, luwalo inspectors, to monitor rubu labor and delimit the power of chiefs. This paper also investigates the growth of commutations from so-called traditional labor as a colonial revenue generator.

This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

Digital care platforms are reshaping how migrant care work is organised and governed. Drawing on an original dataset of over 15,000 worker profiles from four care platforms in Türkiye and combining biterm topic modelling with online ethnographic observations, this article examines how migrant care workers are represented on care platforms at the intersection of platformisation, migration governance and care markets. We argue that platforms formalise visibility rather than employment, absorbing a feminised migrant workforce excluded from formal channels while displacing legal and compliance risks onto workers. Migrant women are substantially overrepresented relative to their share of formal work permits, and wage expectations are stratified along nationality and gender lines. Workers produce a hybrid persona that combines professional and affective repertoires, in which legal status functions as a selective visibility resource. The article contributes to debates on how platformisation is reshaping social care governance across various welfare systems, with a focus on gendered and racial inequalities.

This study examined the influence of personality and negative life events during adolescence on depression in young adulthood, and the extent to which common genetic and environmental influences contributed to these associations. The data come from a Norwegian population based twin sample (N = 3,394). Depression was predicted by higher neuroticism and loneliness, as well as lower sense of coherence, self-efficacy, and resilience. Additionally, weak positive associations were found between negative life events and depression. Common genetic influences accounted for most of the phenotypic associations between depression and both personality and negative life events. The findings emphasize the importance of assessing personality characteristics early in adolescence, as they may serve as vulnerabilities for the development of depression later in life.

Private currencies can facilitate intertemporal exchange under limited commitment but exhibit excessive volatility when backed by productive assets subject to news shocks. I develop a model where banks issue deposits backed by firms’ output as collateral, with deposits circulating as currency. Adverse news about firm productivity—even when socially uninformative—induces binding debt constraints and deposit volatility, creating liquidity shortages that depress economic activity. With household heterogeneity, deposits are priced at a premium in liquidity-constrained economies. Interest-bearing central bank money provides an additional policy tool beyond traditional money growth. The interest rate influences asset prices through an investment channel: banks hold interest-bearing reserves as insurance against productivity shocks. This enables welfare-improving policies requiring positive inflation and nominal interest rates—departing from the Friedman rule. Calibrating the model to the US economy, I find that interest-bearing money generates a welfare gain of 2.54%, with the welfare cost of departing from the Friedman rule being roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the cost of operating with a suboptimal transfer. As an extension, I examine private information about consumer preferences, showing that illiquid bonds become essential for achieving efficiency. Cash-in-advance constraints on deposits can improve welfare by preventing destabilizing arbitrage, enabling coexistence of government and private currencies.

It is known that for a uniform morphic sequence $\boldsymbol u = \langle u_n\rangle _{n=0}^\infty $ and an algebraic number $\beta $ such that $|\beta |>1$, the number $[\![ \boldsymbol {u} ]\!] _\beta :=\sum _{n=0}^\infty ({u_n}/{\beta ^n})$ either lies in $\mathbb Q(\beta )$ or is transcendental. In this paper, we show a similar rational–transcendental dichotomy for sequences defined by irreducible Pisot morphisms on binary alphabets. Subject to the Pisot conjecture (an irreducible Pisot morphism has pure discrete spectrum), we generalise the latter result to arbitrary finite alphabets. In certain cases, we are able to show transcendence of $[\![ \boldsymbol {u}]\!] _{\beta }$ outright. In particular, for $k\geq 2$, if $\boldsymbol u$ is the k-Bonacci word, then $[\![ \boldsymbol {u}]\!] _{\beta }$ is transcendental.

Building on Beilinson’s work, ‘constructible sheaves are holonomic’, we introduce the notion of holonomicity for étale sheaves, without assuming a priori constructibility. We establish the converse of Beilinson’s result, showing that holonomic sheaves are indeed constructible. This can be seen as an étale analogue of Kashiwara’s theorem on holonomic ${\mathcal D}_X$-modules.

We study the identification of individual-level associations when only aggregate data are available. We characterize the biases of, and relationships among, canonical ecological inference (EI) estimators. We use these results to develop a partial identification approach: monotone EI. The approach exploits information about one or both of the following conditional associations: (1) outcome differences between groups within the same neighborhood and (2) outcome differences within the same group between neighborhoods with different group compositions. We show how assumptions about the sign of these conditional associations, whether individually or in relation to one another, can yield informative sharp bounds. We illustrate our results using county-level data to study differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates among Republicans and Democrats in the United States.

In this work, the life cycle of Gnathostoma turgidum was studied both in natural temporary water bodies and under experimental conditions, with materials collected from the municipality of San Francisco Ixhuatán, Oaxaca. Adult nematodes inhabit the interstitial layers of the stomach in the definitive host (Didelphis virginiana) and release their eggs into the environment via faeces, typically in a dry environment. Under these conditions, the eggs remain quiescent until the onset of the rainy season. Development of early third-stage larvae occurs in cyclopoid copepods. Fry acts as transport and/or intermediate hosts, while frogs (Lithobates forreri) serve as obligatory intermediate hosts for advanced third-stage larvae, ultimately transmitting the parasites to the definitive host. Notably, the precocity phenomenon, typical of larval development in intermediate hosts, occurs in this species within the definitive host. Precocity is likely a response to host behaviour or other ecological factors that restrict transmission to narrow spatial and temporal windows. Adults die at the end of the rainy season. The marked seasonality of this species is mainly attributed to the combination of two factors: (i) the seasonal predation of frogs by the definitive host, and (ii) expulsion of adult stages as immune-mediated ‘self-cure’. This study represents the first documentation of birds acting as paratenic hosts for this nematode.

Let $\{Y_{n}$, $n \geq 1\}$ be a critical branching process with immigration having finite variance for the offspring number of particles and finite mean for the immigrating number of particles. In this paper we study lower deviation probabilities for $Y_{n}$. More precisely, assuming that $k,n \to \infty$ so that $k={\mathrm{o}} (n)$, we investigate the asymptotics of $\mathbb P(Y_{n} \leq k )$ and $\mathbb P(Y_{n} = k )$. Our results clarify the role of the moment conditions in the local limit theorem for $Y_n$ proved by Mellein (1982).