In this paper, I bring together several strands of criticism of experimental philosophy and draw out certain lessons for the nascent field of experimental philosophy of religion (XPoR). I argue that the negative/positive distinction conflates several underlying questions that conceptually come apart, thus undermining the framework such that XPoR need not try to accommodate the framework. I then argue that for certain topics of study in XPoR, the folk may actually be treated as a kind of ‘expert’ class, thus defending the utility of gauging folk beliefs on those issues. Lastly, I offer some reflections on the etic/emic distinction as it relates to the philosopher/folk divide with respect to topics in XPoR.

In the present study, the High Score Plus software (Malvern Panalytical, 2014), combined with the PDF-4+ database release 2023 (ICDD, 2018), was used to perform phase identification from all the powder XRD data sets of 0.5 g by weight of the crystalline deposits from various units of refineries and gas plants. Subsequently, the Rietveld method with the generalized spherical harmonic description for preferred orientation correction [Von Dreele (1997). Journal of Applied Crystallography 30: 517–25; Sitepu (2002). Journal of Applied Crystallography 35: 274–77; Sitepu et al., (2005). Journal of Applied Crystallography 38: 158–67; Sitepu (2009). Powder Diffraction 24: 315–26] were used to determine texture and crystal structure refinement of scale deposits (calcite – CaCO3) from the boiler equipment at a gas plant and quantitative phase analysis of (i) iron oxide corrosion products from the boiler tube, (ii) synthetic mixtures of 87.0 wt% by weight of barite (BaSO4), 10.0 wt% by weight of hematite (Fe2O3), and 3.0 wt% by weight of quartz (SiO2), (iii) iron oxide corrosion products from the affected equipment parts in a refinery, (iv) vanadium oxide (V2O5), sodium vanadium oxide (NaV2O5), sodium vanadium sulfate hydrate (Na2V(SO4)2⋅H2O), and mackinawite (FeS) compounds found in the ash deposits from an external surface of the boiler tubes in a refinery, and (v) iron sulfide corrosion products found at the affected equipment in the sulfur recovery unit. The results revealed that the phase identification of powder XRD data is an excellent tool to determine the nature, source, and formation mechanism of crystalline deposits – part of the scale and corrosion products formed by the processes in the various units of refineries and gas plants. The quantitative Rietveld analysis results serve to guide the engineers at the refinery and gas plants to overcome the problems by applying the right procedures. For example, for iron oxide corrosion products, at a high temperature, magnetite will coat the iron/steel to prevent oxygen reaching the underlying metal. At low temperature, lepidocrocite formed and with time it transformed into the most stable goethite. Akaganeite is formed in marine environments. Additionally, for iron sulfide corrosion products, pyrophoric iron sulfide (pyrrhotite – FeS) results from the corrosive action of sulfur compounds (H2S) and moisture on the iron (steel). Additionally, for the crystalline ash samples from an external surface of the boiler tubes in a refinery, if sodium and vanadium compounds appear, the fuel oil is poor. For the boiler crystalline deposits, if a hematite phase appears, it means that the boiler feed water contains dissolved oxygen; and if the metallic copper appears among the crystalline deposits, it indicates erosion in the boiler tubes, and therefore, special precaution is required to prevent the plating out of copper during cleaning operations. Finally, for crystalline deposits from the steam drum equipment at the sulfur recovery unit, if magnetite has a high quantity, it indicates the presence of dissolved oxygen in the boiler feed water.

The decision by developing countries to open up their economies to foreign trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s was a momentous event in world history. How and why did this trade policy revolution take place? Most accounts of trade politics stress domestic interest groups or trade agreements as driving policy changes, but these explanations fail in this period. This paper notes that many import restrictions were imposed for balance of payments purposes, as a way of avoiding a devaluation and protecting foreign exchange reserves from depletion under fixed exchange rates. A shortage of foreign exchange in the mid-1980s forced countries, under the guidance of economists, to shift to a more flexible exchange rate system that boosted export earnings and made import controls unnecessary for payments balance. Just as seen during the Great Depression, the exchange rate regime was a key factor in a country’s trade policy.

How does ideology affect relations between armed groups within a state? While existing research has underscored how ideological proximity can foster alliances among armed groups, this article posits that ideological proximity can also breed hostility among them. When organizations share foundational narratives, they gain access to each other’s ideational resources, which can, in turn, pose challenges to these groups’ cohesion and leadership status. These challenges manifest in the form of questioning the sincerity and authenticity of each other’s beliefs, thereby threatening the group’s survival, sometimes overshadowing the risks posed by their shared ideologically distant adversaries. Focusing on Iran’s Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), this article highlights its evolution as one of the first armed groups to transform Islam into a potent ideology before transitioning to Marxism and later reverting to Islamism. It examines how the organization’s ideological proximity with other Islamist and Marxist actors led to conflict and outbidding violence instead of cooperation. Drawing upon a trove of the MKO’s secret documents, this article reveals how a significant portion of the rhetoric and actions of armed groups is directed at outperforming their ideologically similar rivals, rather than confronting ideologically distant adversaries.

Wireless channel propagation parameter estimation forms the foundation of channel sounding, estimation, modeling, and sensing. This paper introduces a deep learning approach for joint delay and Doppler estimation from frequency and time samples of a radio channel transfer function.

Our work estimates the 2D path parameters from a channel impulse response containing an unknown number of paths. Compared to existing deep learning-based methods, the parameters are not estimated via classification but in a quasi-grid-free manner. We employ a deterministic preprocessing scheme that incorporates a multichannel windowing to increase the estimator’s robustness and enables the use of a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. The proposed architecture then jointly estimates the number of paths along with the respective delay and Doppler shift parameters of the paths. Hence, it jointly solves the model order selection and parameter estimation task. We also integrate the CNN into an existing maximum-likelihood estimator framework for efficient initialization of a gradient-based iteration, to provide more accurate estimates.

In the analysis, we compare our approach to other methods in terms of estimate accuracy and model order error on synthetic data. Finally, we demonstrate its applicability to real-world measurement data from a anechoic bistatic RADAR emulation measurement.

The study of hermeneutical injustice tends to restrict the category of “hermeneutical resources” to discursive resources: words, concepts, and expressive styles. This article foregrounds a diverse set of nondiscursive hermeneutical resources, including embodied skills, habits, comportments, and dispositions, and argues that such resources are vitally important for theorizing self-interpretative dysfunction. I reconstruct four accounts of gendered embodiment from Nancy Tuana, Bat-Ami Bar On, Iris Marion Young, and Simone de Beauvoir, and I argue that each implicitly treats embodied practices, comportments, and dispositions as hermeneutical resources. I also consider several implications of and objections to incorporating nondiscursive hermeneutical resources into the study of hermeneutical injustice, and argue that doing so complicates standard accounts of the relationship between hermeneutical injustice and epistemic injustice.

A terrain and path following control scheme is designed for ground detection mission of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) considering the attitude constraint. The attitude of the UAV should be maintained for efficient exploration, leading to the degradation of mission performance. The proposed controller makes the attitude of the UAV remain in a desired range, which alleviates the mission performance degradation. The proposed algorithm consists of the guidance law and the nonlinear flight path controller. The guidance law is designed by combining a terrain-following altitude controller and a horizontal path following controller based on the Lyapunov control scheme. The generated command by the guidance law is used as a reference input to be followed in the flight path controller. The flight path controller is designed considering the attitude constraint. Especially, the roll and pitch angles of the UAV are considered as attitude constraints so that the angles remain within the desired range. To design a flight path controller satisfying the attitude constraint, the control system is decomposed into three feedback loops. State-feedback controllers are designed using the sliding mode control scheme for flight path control in the outermost loop as well as for angular rate control in the inner loop. In the second-outer loop, a quadratic programming (QP)-based controller is designed to control the sideslip angle while satisfying the attitude constraint. The control Lyapunov function is adopted to determine the QP constraint for the sideslip angle control, and the control barrier function is used to obtain the QP constraint for the attitude constraint. Numerical simulation is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Quorum sensing governs bacterial communication, playing a crucial role in regulating population behaviour. We propose a mathematical model that uncovers chaotic dynamics within quorum sensing networks, highlighting challenges to predictability. The model explores interactions between autoinducers and two bacterial subtypes, revealing oscillatory dynamics in both a constant autoinducer submodel and the full three-component model. In the latter case, we find that the complicated dynamics can be explained by the presence of homoclinic Shilnikov bifurcations. We employ a combination of normal-form analysis and numerical continuation methods to analyse the system.

We evaluate the role of taxes on overseas trade in the development of imperial Britain’s fiscal-military state. Influential work, for example, Brewer’s Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating excise revenues from traded and domestic goods. We find substantial growth in revenue from traded goods, accounting for over half of indirect taxation around 1800. This challenges conventional wisdom, attributing the development of the British state to domestic factors. International factors mattered, too.

This article examines the feasibility of enforcing Singapore money judgments in Cambodia, focusing on the “guarantee of reciprocity” – an ambiguous yet critical condition. It is ambiguous because Cambodian courts have not yet interpreted it. It is critical because it is perceived as the main obstacle to enforcing foreign judgments. Without a treaty-based mutual enforcement mechanism between Cambodia and Singapore, it is unclear whether a Singapore money judgment could be enforced in Cambodia or if a judgment creditor’s application would be dismissed in any event citing lack of reciprocity. Following an analysis of the laws of Cambodia, Singapore, and Japan, the article concludes that there is no legal obstacle before the Cambodian courts to enforce a Singapore money judgment. The flexible interpretation of the guarantee of reciprocity outlined in this article would enhance access to justice, eliminate a trade barrier, and make the investment environment more attractive in Cambodia.

We study the planar FitzHugh–Nagumo system with an attracting periodic orbit that surrounds a repelling focus equilibrium. When the associated oscillation of the system is perturbed, in a given direction and with a given amplitude, there will generally be a change in phase of the perturbed oscillation with respect to the unperturbed one. This is recorded by the phase transition curve (PTC), which relates the old phase (along the periodic orbit) to the new phase (after perturbation). We take a geometric point of view and consider the phase-resetting surface comprising all PTCs as a function of the perturbation amplitude. This surface has a singularity when the perturbation maps a point on the periodic orbit exactly onto the repelling focus, which is the only point that does not return to stable oscillation. We also consider the PTC as a function of the direction of the perturbation and present how the corresponding phase-resetting surface changes with increasing perturbation amplitude. In this way, we provide a complete geometric interpretation of how the PTC changes for any perturbation direction. Unlike other examples discussed in the literature so far, the FitzHugh–Nagumo system is a generic example and, hence, representative for planar vector fields.

Studies of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) over the last dozen years or so have seen the rise to prominence of a new orthodoxy to explain its outcome. This new orthodoxy argues that population control under the Briggs Plan's resettlement programme (mid-1950 to mid-1952) became increasingly effective and was the principal reason that the Malayan Communist Party was forced to change policy by issuing the October 1951 Resolutions. These events, it is contended, turned the tide in the fighting and led to the government's eventual victory. Paying particular attention to the sources used, this analysis shows how the research of a wide range of scholars over the years since the end of the Emergency, challenges the core propositions of the new orthodoxy. The analysis also illustrates that the focus on the new orthodoxy has inhibited the examination of alternative explanations for the course and result of the Emergency, which could usefully be explored.

Following a decade of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), how do Chinese state companies and governments react to international resistance to the initiative? Pushbacks against the BRI have been well documented, yet there is limited study on how China has responded to such resistance. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia and China between 2014 and 2023, this paper presents two of the response mechanisms adopted by Chinese state actors in the face of institutional gaps and information deficits. The first is that Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) innovate public relations strategies and then promote these practices to Beijing for dissemination. The second mechanism allows information to be directly transmitted to Beijing, via the internal reporting system (neican), so that Beijing can respond promptly to overseas incidents. On a theoretical level, this paper contributes to the adaptive governance literature by analysing the overseas practices of Chinese state actors and underlining that host country social actors are key drivers of these changes. On an empirical level, this article focuses on the feedback mechanism of the Belt and Road Initiative in an attempt to fill the gap in related research in this field.

The discipline of political science faces significant disparities in the representation and participation of underrepresented groups in graduate education, including first-generation college students, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Underrepresentation has a wide variety of limiting effects, including a narrower range of questions being explored within the field. This article proposes a template for teaching and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to enhance their opportunities in graduate programs. Specifically, it examines the Mobilization and Political Economy (MPE) Summer Program, an in-residence graduate pipeline program designed to equip participants to study and conduct research on political mobilization, social movements, and political economy. The MPE Summer Program aims to develop and sustain broad-scale collaborative infrastructures that prefigure reciprocal and equitable pathways to increase participation in the social sciences across the United States.

Healthcare facilities in the U.S. are well positioned to assist with measles control by timely identification and isolation of suspected or confirmed cases and, as measles is nationally notifiable, by informing local health departments about both suspected and confirmed cases. However, responding to measles cases in acute healthcare settings presents unique challenges, is disruptive, and requires an intense outlay of resources before, during, and afterward primarily due to exposure investigations. We describe our measles preparedness efforts to improve identification of measles cases, facilitate appropriate isolation, reduce exposures, and provide timely post-exposure prophylaxis.