Limited partnerships (LPs) have received considerable press and policy attention over the past five years, culminating in legal reforms which provide an ability to align LP law more closely to company law. This paper challenges the wisdom of exercising this ability without prior analysis. It draws on historical, conceptual, and empirical methodologies to make three arguments. First, the LP is conceptually different from the company, with LPs being a legal transplant copied from other legal systems, and remaining distinctive: with (mostly) one manager which is meant to have unlimited liability. Secondly, LPs have clear policy aims which are different to those in company law. I use limited liability of an illustration of a policy issue that will be missed by aligning LP law to company law. Thirdly, the LP is overwhelmingly a Scottish vehicle. Recent company law reforms have been argued to be dissonant to Scottish company law, questioning the wisdom of aligning the LP’s regulation to companies.

Existing research shows a significant relationship between state racial minority population, the proportion of racial minority welfare recipients, and state levels of racial resentment with the proposal and adoption of punitive welfare policies. This article contributes to the extant literature by expanding on Ledford’s (2018) 2008–2014 analysis of state drug testing proposals by evaluating state-level racial factors and the diffusion of drug testing proposals from 2009 to 2018. Moreover, the author accounts for the potential influence of drug-related variables on the proposal probability by including variables measuring opioid overdose deaths and illicit drug use estimates. Event history analyses do not find that the size of a state’s Black population or the percentage or proportion of Black welfare recipients significantly affects the proposal rates. However, higher estimates of state-level racial resentment increase the likelihood of proposing drug testing for welfare legislation, supporting Ledford’s conclusion that racial biases matter in the diffusion of these policies. In addition, the author has found evidence that while opioid overdoses are negatively associated with the likelihood of proposal, estimates of illicit drug use have the opposite effect. Finally, analyses suggest that liberalism in state governments actually increases the probability of a proposal.

Margaret Marshall Saunders's best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1893) has long been indexed as anthropomorphic children's literature. This article examines the novel to illuminate the connection between nineteenth-century literature and animal-focused research, including studies of the science of the mind. My analysis seeks to coalesce what I see as neighboring discourses, both historical and contemporary, in literature and science about what it means to be a thinking, feeling “self.” In doing so, I reveal how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to literary criticism and the wider culture through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of consciousness, anthropomorphism, and representation.

Turbofan engines are having a growing role in modern aircraft maintenance. Due to this increase, estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) of these engines is an important area of study in the field of reliability and maintenance optimisation. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that combines deep learning models with similarity-based methods for accurate RUL estimation. For a better comparison, we evaluate four architectures: dropout long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM, convolutional neural network 1D (CNN 1D), and multi-layer LSTM. The FD002 subset of NASA’s Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation dataset is used in the case study. Root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) were used for performance metrics. The main output of the study suggests that the dropout LSTM model achieves the best prediction accuracy with an RMSE score of 26.547 and a MAE score of 18.749. It is worth noting that these are achieved despite requiring higher computational resources compared to multi-layer LSTM. Furthermore, all models had difficulties with smaller test trajectory lengths such as 50–100 due to training data imbalance. Overall, the findings highlight the promise of hybrid deep learning and similarity-based approaches for RUL prediction. However, potential advancements such as hyperparameter optimisation and data augmentation still hold potential for further improvements.

Despite their overlapping fin de siècle New Woman communities in London and their correspondence, few scholars have compared the literary works of South African writer Olive Schreiner and Jewish author Amy Levy directly. Reading allegories from Schreiner's first collection, Dreams (1890), in relation to two of Levy's early verse works, “Xantippe” (1881) and Medea (1884), I argue that they both imagine new futures for queer community as an alternative to the oppressive status quo of imperialist England. This paper suggests that Schreiner and Levy, feminist writers with fraught relationships to Englishness, can best be understood as members of a rich community of late Victorian visionaries. When they turn their attention to the forms of allegory and dramatic monologue, Schreiner and Levy are able to explore radical possibilities for gender and community that did not exist in their real lives or their realist fiction. Schreiner and Levy share a deep skepticism about the benefits of marriage, family, and other conventional sources of community, and both offer queer visions of suspended present states or undetermined futures as alternatives.

Early researchers of Yezidis, a small religious minority of the Middle East, often noted with dismay that Yezidis did not say or know prayers. This observation is partially supported by modern-day research, as knowledge of orally transmitted religious texts and their performance is mostly limited to people recognized as religious experts. However, there exists a special sub-genre of prayers which are known and recited by “ordinary” Yezidis. Although they are referred to as “prayers” (dua), these texts do not constitute part of formal religious performances during ceremonial occasions. They could better be described as verbal charms or incantations aimed at healing sickness or warding off evil. This article gives a translation of four previously unrecorded such “prayers”, describes their role in oral tradition, and finally shows how they are now being transformed from performed (and practical) oral religion to written heritage by the younger generation.

While most higher taxa in the Hemiuroidea exhibit remarkable diversity and thrive worldwide in marine ecosystems, a few groups have successfully radiated into freshwater environments. Among them, species of Thometrema are well known from freshwater and brackish fishes in the New World. In this study, specimens of Thometrema from a single specimen of the endangered pimelodid catfish Steindachneridion scriptum in the Upper Paraná River basin, State of São Paulo, Brazil, were subjected to morphological, ultrastructural (first scanning electron microscopy data for the genus) and molecular analyses. Newly obtained sequences of the partial large subunit nuclear ribosomal RNA (28S rDNA) and partial mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI mtDNA) provided strong evidence supporting the identification of the specimens as T. patagonicum, a trematode previously known only from endemic percichthyid fishes (Percichthyidae) in the Argentinian Patagonia. This unexpected finding, along with critical morphological evaluation of new and deposited material, led us to propose T. overstreeti and T. bonariense as junior synonyms of T. patagonicum. Moreover, we reassessed certain morphological features, revealed new potential distinguishing characters (papillae) and raised doubts about the taxonomic value of commonly used features for species differentiation (e.g., vitellarium masses). To overcome taxonomic problems in Thometrema due to the paucity of morphological features to clearly set species boundaries, new descriptions could leverage integrative approaches, as employed here, to establish robust species hypotheses and ultimately unravel the actual species composition in the Americas.

This study aimed to assess the perception of disaster risk and the level of earthquake awareness among students enrolled in the Department of Nursing at Artvin Çoruh University, Faculty of Health Sciences. The study sample comprised 274 students enrolled in the Department of Nursing at Artvin Çoruh University, Faculty of Health Sciences. The data were gathered utilizing the Sociodemographic Characteristics Form, Disaster Risk Perception Scale, and Sustainable Earthquake Awareness Scale. The data was obtained using the SPSS 24.0 program and analyzed using t tests, One-way ANOVA, and Pearson correlation analyses. The study’s findings indicate that most students have yet to undergo disaster training, yet most are interested in such training. Furthermore, it was ascertained that most students had not encountered any calamity. However, they wanted to participate actively and voluntarily in disaster scenarios. A statistically significant difference was observed between the students’ class and the average total scores of disaster risk perception scale and sustainable earthquake awareness scale. Courses on disaster management should be added to nursing education curricula. In order to provide disaster risk perception and sustainable earthquake awareness to nursing students, they need to take part in different activities in the field of disaster management.

We report the case of a 25 kg male with aortic isthmus atresia and small femoral arterial access. A BeGraft covered stent was percutaneously implanted after perforating the atretic segment. This case demonstrates the feasibility and safety of transcatheter treatment using the Bentley stent, which enables smaller femoral access compared to other balloon-expandable stent platforms.

The studies of descriptive political representation demonstrate that the share of women amongst local elected officials increases, but mayors are still predominantly men. This paper contributes to the literature on the link between the descriptive and substantive representation of women at the local level. It investigates the influence of mayors’ gender on the development of local childcare policies in Poland. We employ quasi-experimental research schemes (difference-in-differences and generalised synthetic control) to study changes in childcare provision and public spending on nurseries and kindergartens. We merged electoral data (changes on the mayoral position) and registry data on local budget expenditures and service availability covering a period of more than 16 years. We do not find any systematic causal link, suggested by the extant literature on substantive representation, between the election of a female mayor and the expansion of childcare services.