In this post hoc analysis of a quasi-experimental pilot/feasibility trial, a bundled diagnostic stewardship intervention safely reduced respiratory culturing rates without increasing ventilator-associated events (VAEs). Using difference-in-differences methodology, we observed a significant reduction in possible ventilator-associated pneumonia (PVAP) events, suggesting the intervention may reduce pneumonia overdiagnosis without compromising patient safety.

This study presents the first sponge biodiversity inventory of Los Picos reef in Veracruz, Mexico. Although the Veracruz Reef System is known for its high sponge diversity, several recently discovered submerged reefs – including Los Picos – had remained biologically uncharacterised until this investigation. Our comprehensive inventory documents 37 species, identified at the species level, all belonging to Demospongiae; 15 of which are new records for the Mexican coast, and 13 for the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). Six species are described as new: Psammocinia alcoladoi sp. nov., distinguished by a dermal surface armoured with sand and spongin filaments, lightly fasciculated primary fibres, and non fasciculated secondary with long conules and slender fiber diameters; Hyatella hyattus sp. nov., distinguished by its soft and lobular habitus, and slender fiber diameters; Zyzzya marinagreenae sp. nov., is an open fistula with acanthostrongyles irregularly spined and both, acanthostrongyles and isochelae, smaller in size; Desmapsamma paulumharenae sp. nov., has an encrusting shape with larger spicules than D. anchorata; Phorbas veracruzanus sp. nov., consists of conule-shaped processes on an embedded layer and morphometric differences on spicules; and Timea citlallitzina sp. nov., stands out by the lumpy tips of the oxyaster type. The whole, highlighted by two genera, Psammocinia and Zyzzya, both reported for the first time in the GoM. Samples were obtained by SCUBA surveys at 10–16 m depth, between August and October 2017.

In the 1980s, Erdős and Sós initiated the study of Turán problems with a uniformity condition on the distribution of edges: the uniform Turán density of a hypergraph $H$ is the infimum over all $d$ for which any sufficiently large hypergraph with the property that all its linear-size subhypergraphs have density at least $d$ contains $H$. In particular, they asked to determine the uniform Turán densities of $K_4^{(3)-}$ and $K_4^{(3)}$. After more than 30 years, the former was solved in [Israel J. Math. 211 (2016), 349 – 366] and [J. Eur. Math. Soc. 20 (2018), 1139 – 1159], while the latter still remains open. Till today, there are known constructions of $3$-uniform hypergraphs with uniform Turán density equal to $0$, $1/27$, $4/27$, and $1/4$ only. We extend this list by a fifth value: we prove an easy to verify sufficient condition for the uniform Turán density to be equal to $8/27$ and identify hypergraphs satisfying this condition.

How do Chinese courts punish corruption? This paper demonstrates how China strategically leverages its court system to signal anti-corruption resolve by transferring high-level corruption cases to local courts in distant jurisdictions. Assigning cases to distant courts insulates the judiciary from local political interference through geographic recusal and prevents the formation of a focal point for elite coordination by creating uncertainty about which court will be designated. Using an original dataset of high-ranking officials convicted of corruption since the 18th Party Congress, this paper finds that: 1) during the court designation stage, the more severe the case, the more distant the court, and the specific location of the court cannot be easily inferred from previous assignment records or case profiles; and 2) at the conviction stage, given the same case severity, courts that are farther away tend to impose longer sentences. These findings suggest that despite the prevalence of local judicial capture and protectionism, the local court system can still be strategically employed as an institutional tool for punishing corruption.

Using a rolling cross-section survey of 54,000 voters conducted between mid-October and mid-December, a panel survey of 6,000 voters interviewed in both October and December, and surveys of 1,400 local political elites and officials conducted in both October and December, this study characterizes how confidence in the accuracy of national elections changed with the projected election of President Trump on Election Day. Among voters, Republican confidence immediately increased by 31 percentage points (123% change) and Democrats’ confidence declined by 12 percentage points (16% change) such that the confidence among partisan voters was almost identical by mid-December. The most polarized partisans exhibited the largest confidence changes. Among local political elites, the increase in Republicans’ confidence mirrored the increase among Republican voters (106% change), but the confidence among Democratic political elites remained high throughout. These findings highlight troubling concerns for sustaining a shared confidence in the accuracy and legitimacy of future elections.

This article contributes to the “praxiological turn” in legal pluralism studies by offering an ethnomethodological re-reading of Masaji Chiba’s theory. Responding to critiques of its “rigidity,” it reframes Chiba’s theoretical “three dichotomies” not as static classificatory categories, but as a set of heuristic questions for discovering the practical methods members use to accomplish a pluralistic legal order. This approach reveals how legal pluralism is achieved in situ. It demonstrates that normative tensions—such as official/unofficial—are not pre-existing structures but are dynamically produced by participants in their moment-to-moment interaction. An analysis of Japanese lay judge deliberations illustrates how these dichotomies function as practical resources that members use to organize and negotiate “contested modernities.” This perspective unlocks the potential of Chiba’s legacy for empirically elucidating the interactional foundations of law as a lived phenomenon.

In July 1939, Wang I-lü, a recent high school graduate, was reported to have fallen down a staircase while wearing high heels. The accident triggered heated public debates in Shanghai. Some condemned high heels as dangerous and decadent; others defended them, while Wang’s classmates denied Wang had ever worn them. Amid these conflicting voices, this article treats the death of Wang I-lü not as a question of forensic fact but as a historically situated event, one that maps the cultural trajectory of the high heel in modern China. Wang I-lü’s accident is indeed not an isolated incident: high-heeled women were frequently depicted falling down. The falling-down girl phenomenon encapsulates, as argued, a mixture of male affects, including fears of modernity, voyeuristic fascination, nationalist concerns, and the urge to control the female body. Meanwhile, women also held ambivalent attitudes toward high heels, though in different ways. They either regarded the high heel as a sign of vanity or employed it to negotiate visibility and identity. The high heel thus constitutes not only an object of foot fetishism, one that fuses Freudian male desire with Foucauldian biopolitical control, but also a thing utilized by women for imagining and enacting varied forms of womanhood, forms that were not necessarily resistant to men nor entirely emancipatory or conservative but rather responded to women’s own diverse circumstances.

By accepting a later dating for the composition of the Histories, this article argues that Herodotus mirrors Athenian imperialism in his account of the First Persian War to convey a political message to contemporary recipients. In doing so, he departs from the prevailing tradition of the expedition of Datis and Artaphrenes by creating a narrative that manipulates Persian methods of conquest, presenting them in a manner that appears emblematic of Athenian imperialism. In this way, the Herodotean Persians do not adhere to their expected cultural script, but act out the Athenian script. This reading offers a new understanding of Herodotus’ account of the Persian campaign as conveying a message to the Athenians who began to recognize that their former policies toward their allies were transgressive imperialism. As a result, his account of the First Persian War is a sophisticated meditation on the effects of imperialism rather than a straightforward depiction of historical events.

This article theorises Pakistan’s role in the Afghan–Soviet War (1979–1989) as a form of ‘conflictual world-making’ – a process through which postcolonial states and societies simultaneously contest and reproduce global orders. Moving beyond Eurocentric narratives of superpower rivalry, it demonstrates how Pakistan’s state and societal actors actively reshaped the Cold War from the margins. Drawing on state archives and movement periodicals, the analysis reveals a dialectical struggle: while the military establishment enforced a U.S.-led imperial order, borderland movements pursued alternative, anti-imperial world-making projects. The article develops the concept of ‘imperial-anti-imperial relationism’ to capture this entanglement. By centring these South-South encounters and transboundary mobilisations, it recasts the Afghan war not as a mere proxy conflict between the superpowers, but as a decisive crucible where late Cold War geopolitics collided with the unfinished project of decolonisation. The argument compels a rethinking of world order struggles, insisting that the Global South’s generative margins are essential to understanding the end of the Cold War and the violent birth of our contemporary world disorder.

Approximate lattices of Euclidean spaces, also known as Meyer sets, are aperiodic subsets with fascinating properties. In general, approximate lattices are defined as approximate subgroups of locally compact groups that are discrete and have finite co-volume. A theorem of Lagarias [Meyer’s concept of quasicrystal and quasiregular sets. Comm. Math. Phys. 179(2) (1996), 365–376] provides a criterion for discrete subsets of Euclidean spaces to be approximate lattices. It asserts that if a subset X of $\mathbb {R}^n$ is relatively dense and $X - X$ is uniformly discrete, then X is an approximate lattice. We prove two generalizations of Lagarias’ theorem: when the ambient group is amenable and when it is a higher-rank simple algebraic group over a characteristic $0$ local field. This is a natural counterpart to the recent structure results for approximate lattices in non-commutative locally compact groups. We also provide a reformulation in dynamical terms pertaining to return times of cross-sections. Our method relies on counting arguments involving the so-called periodization maps, ergodic theorems and a method of Tao regarding small doubling for finite subsets. In the case of simple algebraic groups over local fields, we moreover make use of deep superrigidity results due to Margulis and to Zimmer.

This study examined longitudinal associations between maternal mindful parenting and child social–emotional, behavioral, and language development. Maternal mindful parenting at 18 months was tested for associations with concurrent observed maternal responsivity and lack of punishment toward the child and as a predictor of child internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, social competence and productive language 6 months later, independent of maternal depressive symptoms (a known predictor of both parenting and child outcomes). We also tested whether child negative emotionality (NE) moderated associations between mindful parenting and child outcomes. Participants (N = 316 mothers) were low-income (mean annual income = $19,024), racially and ethnically diverse mothers (48.4% Black; 43.0% Latinx) recruited from Pittsburgh, PA and New York City, NY. Higher mindful parenting was concurrently associated with higher observed maternal responsiveness toward the child and longitudinally associated with all four child outcomes in expected directions; maternal depression was a significant predictor of child internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Contrary to hypotheses, at moderately high levels of child NE, the positive effects of mindful parenting on child outcomes were attenuated. Results provide preliminary evidence that mindful parenting is meaningfully associated with parenting behaviors and early childhood developmental outcomes above and beyond symptoms of maternal depression.