For many trematode species, individual reproductive parthenitae in first intermediate host colonies senesce, die, and are replaced by newly born parthenitae. The times involved in these processes are poorly understood. Here, we present an approach to estimate parthenita death rates and lifespans that uses readily obtainable data on senescent parthenita frequencies, brood sizes, and offspring (cercaria) release rates. The onset of parthenita senescence is often marked by the degeneration and disappearance of the germinal mass, its source of new offspring. Following germinal mass loss, the remaining viable offspring in a senescent parthenita finish development and are birthed before parthenita death. Therefore, a senescing parthenita’s remaining lifespan is the time it takes for all its viable offspring to mature and exit. We can estimate this time by measuring whole-colony (infected snail) cercaria shed rates, dissecting colonies to count reproductives, and then apply the per redia cercaria production rate to the observed brood sizes of senescent parthenitae. The per-capita parthenita death rate is then calculated as the proportion of parthenitae that are senescent divided by their average remaining lifespan. Reproductive parthenita lifespan is the inverse of this death rate. We demonstrate the approach using philophthalmid trematodes, first providing documentation of a free-floating germinal mass in 4 philophthalmids, and then, for 3 of those species, estimating parthenita senescence rates, death rates, and lifespans. This method should be broadly applicable among trematode species and help inform our understanding of trematode colony dynamics, social structure, and the evolution of parthenita senescence.

We perform the first mapping of the ideological positions of European parties using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a “zero-shot” learner. We ask OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) to identify the more “right-wing” option across all possible duplets of European parties at a given point in time, solely based on their names and country of origin, and combine this information via a Bradley–Terry model to create an ideological ranking. A cross-validation employing widely-used expert-, manifesto- and poll-based estimates reveals that the ideological scores produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) closely map those obtained through the expert-based evaluation, i.e., CHES. Given the high cost of scaling parties via trained coders, and the scarcity of expert data before the 1990s, our finding that generative AI produces estimates of comparable quality to CHES supports its usage in political science on the grounds of replicability, agility, and affordability.

How does family diversity affect the choice of hybrid entrepreneurship? The effect of family dynamics has received little attention in research on the mode of entry into entrepreneurship. Building on the family embeddedness perspective, we hypothesize that the diversity of family households at surface (i.e., age and gender) and deep (i.e., work experience and education background) levels impacts the entrepreneur's adoption of a full-time or hybrid mode to start a new business. We further theorize that the effects of family diversity on entrepreneurial entry decisions are moderated by income stratification, which largely determines the ways entrepreneurs deal with family diversity. Using a sample of 1,320 individual-wave observations from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), our findings demonstrate that the choice of hybrid entrepreneurship is affected more by deep-level diversity than surface-level diversity among family households. Moreover, being from a high-strata family strengthens the relationship between surface-level diversity and the choice of hybrid entry, while weakening the effects of deep-level diversity. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion about family dynamics and entrepreneurship variations and provides important theoretical and practical implications.

This paper proposes a generalized method for designing tendon-driven serial-chained manipulators with an arbitrary number of tendon redundancy. First, a special class of tendon-driven structures is defined by introducing the controllable block triangular form (CBTF) of a null space matrix and its complementary CBTF of a structure matrix, satisfying physical constraints related to the minimal connection of tendons and to the placement of actuators. Then it is shown that any general design of tendon-driven serial manipulators can be reduced to the design of such a special class of tendon-driven structures. Two associated design problems are derived and solved. The first design problem is about finding a complementary CBTF structure matrix for a given CBTF null space matrix using algebraic relations, whereas the second one seeks the both matrices that optimize the wanted structural characteristics based on the result of the first design problem. Numerical design examples are provided to show the validity of the proposed method.

Verney Lovett Cameron (1844–1894) has now lapsed into relative obscurity, but in the late nineteenth century he was among the premiere British explorers, having established his credentials by completing a transcontinental African expedition (1872–76) from present-day Tanzania to Angola. This article, however, focuses on Cameron's status as the most prolific of a range of explorers who turned to the affordances of prose fiction. Imaginative literature provided supplements or alternatives to the expeditionary narrative that operated outside the parameters of institutional science and were not regulated by the same protocols. Drawing on Gérard Genette's narrative taxonomy of the “sequel” and the “serious transposition,” I argue that Cameron's fiction extended his preoccupations with “commercial geography” and private enterprise while also opening the way to surprising alternative conceptualizations of geographical travel. The Adventures of Herbert Massey (1887) uses fictional adventure to invite capitalist venture and specifically to advertise East Africa as amenable to administration by chartered company. The highly esoteric plot of The Queen's Land (1886), by contrast, offers a geographical allegory that at once celebrates the explorer's expertise and casts expeditions as the source of secret knowledge.

Prompted by the gaps in archival evidence for writing histories of minoritized lives, scholars, archivists, and artists have increasingly adopted speculative archival methods. Shaped by queer temporalities, Black feminist epistemologies, and decolonial approaches, speculative approaches use techniques from narrative fiction to envision and reconstruct the past while acknowledging the limitations of documentary evidence. This essay seeks to expand the potential of fictional character for writing minoritized historical subjects by reexamining the institutionalization of archives in the nineteenth century and their effect on what counts as archival proof. To do so, it looks to the archivist's queer other, the Victorian miser. First, the essay reads Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) to show how the miser's hoarding challenges the desire to cash out an archival find while frustrating the researcher's desire for completeness and depth. Next, it moves on to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) to demonstrate the affordances of minor character for speculative knowledge, which has previously relied on the protagonist model for representing absent historical subjects. Through the figure of the miser, this essay embraces opacity and superficial intimacies as valuable approaches to depicting minoritzed figures of the past.

This methodological synthesis surveys study and instrument quality in L2 pronunciation research by scrutinizing methodological practices in designing and employing scales and rubrics that measure accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility. A comprehensive coding scheme was developed, and searches were conducted in several databases. A total of 380 articles (409 samples) that employed 576 target instruments and appeared in peer-reviewed journals from 1977 to 2023 were synthesized. Results demonstrated, among other findings, strengths in reporting several listener and speaker characteristics. Areas in need of improvement include (a) more thorough evaluation and reporting of interrater reliability and instrument validity and (b) greater adherence to methodological transparency and open science practices. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for researchers and researcher trainers; by raising awareness of methodological and ethical challenges in psychometric research on L2 speech perception; and by providing recommendations for advancing the quality of instruments in this domain.

Calcifying macroalgae play a critical role in coastal ecosystems, but rising sea temperatures pose a significant threat to their survival. This study aims to investigate the thermal sensitivity of the three marine macroalgal species Padina boryana, Halimeda opuntia, and H. macroloba. Photosynthetic performance, metabolism, pigment content, and oxidative stress–related parameters were measured at temperatures of 28°C, 32°C, 36°C, and 40°C and the thermal performance curves (TPCs) were determined for Fv/Fm, Fv/F0, ϕPSII, and oxygen production to assess maximum rate (Rmax), optimum temperature (Topt), critical thermal maximum (CTmax), and thermal safety margin (TSM) of these three macroalgal species. The results showed that 40°C had the most negative effect on all three species with P. boryana demonstrating better performance compared to both Halimeda species. TPCs from photosynthetic performance revealed thermal sensitivity variations by species and P. boryana exhibited a broader thermal tolerance range compared to Halimeda. On the other hand, TPCs of oxygen production provided similar CTmax values. Based on TPC projections, all three species might survive future ocean warming and marine heatwaves, though these conditions will have significant effects, with P. boryana showing greater tolerance than both Halimeda species. This study highlights the differential thermal responses and sensitivities of these macroalgae, contributing to understanding their potential resiliencies under future climate change scenarios.

Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China has systematically centralized decision-making power over a wide range of policy areas while strengthening the organizational capacity of Party institutions to implement the Party’s agenda. The Party has expanded its presence and influence across government agencies, private enterprise and non-profit organizations. The final frontier for Party control lies in the countryside, where villages have enjoyed relative autonomy and civic organizational status since decollectivization in the early 1980s. This article explains how the Party has systematically deepened its penetration into China’s villages by empowering village-level Party branches and Party agents to take control of village affairs. The policies have sought to turn village committees into party-state implementation agencies, but messy realities on the ground raise questions about the efficacy of the measures for policy implementation and formal Party control. Drawing on interviews with villagers, village leaders and township officials in several rural Chinese counties in western and eastern parts of China, alongside Party documents and Chinese-language academic journal articles, this article examines the Party’s strategy for taking greater control of China’s 600,000 plus villages and presents observations about the impacts and consequences of the recent centralization initiatives for rural governance in China.

This study addresses the Aircraft Reactive Scheduling Problem (ARSP) on multiple parallel runways in response to operational disruptions. We specifically consider three disruptive event types; flight cancelations, delays and unexpected arrivals. Interruptions to aircraft schedules due to various reasons (e.g. bad weather conditions) may render the initial schedule not optimal or infeasible. In this paper, the ARSP is conceptualised as a multi-objective optimisation problem wherein considerations encompass not only the quality of the schedule but also its stability, defined as its conformity to an initial schedule, are of interest. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is introduced to obtain optimal solutions under different policies. Repair and regeneration heuristic approaches are developed for larger instances for which optimal solutions are time-consuming to obtain. While prevailing literature tends to concentrate on individual disruption types, our investigation diverges by concurrently addressing diverse disruption types through multiple disruptive events. We introduce alternative reactive scheduling methodologies wherein the model autonomously adapts by dynamically choosing from a range of candidate solution methods, considering conflicting objectives related to both quality and stability. A computational study is conducted, and we compare the solutions of heuristics to optimal solutions or the best solution found within a time limit, and their performances are assessed in terms of schedule stability, solution quality and computational time. We compare the solutions of heuristics and optimal solutions (i.e. the best solution found so far), and their performances are assessed in terms of schedule stability, solution quality and computational time.