We investigate whether judges’ political ideology affects corporate tax behaviors. We find that firms engaging in less aggressive tax planning when Circuit Court judges are more liberal. Cross-sectionally, the deterrent effect of liberal judge ideology is more pronounced for firms that engage in judiciary-sensitive tax strategies, face higher enforcement risk from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), or have larger reputational costs from tax disputes. Our findings further suggest that liberal judge ideology reduces firms’ R&D investments and market value by constraining tax planning. Overall, our evidence highlights the importance of judge ideology for firm behavior in the context of corporate tax planning.

The suitability of marine limpet shells for radiocarbon dating may depend on potential offsets due to diet and habitat, especially with regard to grazing mollusks on carbonate substrates (Dye 1994; England et al. 2013). A previous study on one grazing limpet species on the coast of Ireland found no offsets from carbonate substrates (Allen et al. 2019), but a similar study from mediterranean coasts found significant offsets on carbonate substrates (Ferguson et al. 2011). We carried out a new study of radiocarbon and stable carbon isotopes, using multiple species of mollusks collected live from the coasts of Gibraltar and Sardinia, from both carbonate and non-carbonate substrates. The 14C results indicate that one species, inhabiting the upper shore, has a significant offset at the carbonate locations. This species, Patella rustica, has adapted to tolerate desiccation and may have biological traits that result in higher metabolic-derived carbon incorporated in its shell. The results of this preliminary study imply that selected species of grazing mollusks are suitable for radiocarbon dating, even in areas of carbonate geology.

This article explores the evolving Chinese representations of Queen Victoria from the First Opium War (1839) to her Diamond Jubilee (1897), beginning with early Qing official histories that deliberately omitted or delegitimized her presence, portraying her implicitly as a female usurper whose rule violated Confucian gender norms and dynastic orthodoxy. Such initial silencing is later juxtaposed with increasingly complex portrayals across a broad spectrum of textual and visual sources, including painting captions, diplomatic travelogues, private poems, newspaper reports, and illustrations. Focusing on envoys like Binchun, whose cautious official diary contrasts with his more admiring private poetry, and Zhang Zuyi, whose pseudonymous writings convey ambivalence and critique, the essay examines how rhetorical strategies were shaped by genre, anonymity, and audience. The analysis also extends to popular and elite print culture, particularly Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shenbao, to trace how Queen Victoria’s image circulated among both literate and semiliterate readers. Throughout, the article argues that acts of translation and mediation—visual, linguistic, and ideological—shaped not only perceptions of the British monarch but also reflected the fractured modernity of the Qing empire. The study contributes to global Victorian studies by foregrounding non-Western receptions and complicating imperial iconography through a Sinocentric lens.

The presence of right-to-left shunt has been proposed as a prominent mechanism of paradoxical embolism in patients with active cancer. We conducted a retrospective observational study including patients presenting to the Ottawa Hospital between January 2020 and December 2022 with ischemic stroke with and without active cancer. Among 491 patients (36.9% female, median age 53), 43 (8.8%) had active cancer, with 12 (27.9%, 95% CI 15–44) having a shunt. Of 448 patients without cancer, 133 (29.7%, 95% CI 25–34) had a shunt. Overall, our finding does not support the hypothesis that cancer-associated stroke is related to right-to-left shunting.

Karapetrović conjectured that the norm of the Hilbert matrix operator on the Bergman space $A^p_\alpha $ is equal to $\pi /\sin ((2+\alpha )\pi /p)$ when $-1<\alpha <p-2$. In this article, we provide a proof of this conjecture for $0\leq \alpha \leq \frac {6p^3-29p^2+17p-2+2p\sqrt {6p^2-11p+4}}{(3p-1)^2}$, and this range of $\alpha $ improves the best known result when $\alpha>\frac {1}{47}$ and $\alpha \not =1$.

Several authors have investigated the structure of groups in which each subgroup satisfies a property $\mathcal {X}$ or a property which is antagonistic to $\mathcal {X}$. This point of view will be adopted here, considering groups in which each subgroup is either nearly normal or contranormal.

A pair of Dehn fillings on a compact, orientable 3-manifold M with a torus boundary $\partial M$ is said to be purely cosmetic if the resulting 3-manifolds are orientation-preservingly homeomorphic. In this article, we show that if $\partial M$ is incompressible, then there are only finitely many pairs of purely cosmetic fillings.

Political science is a field rich in multimodal information sources, from televised debates to parliamentary briefings. This paper bridges a gap between computer and political science in multimodal data analysis using audio. The adoption of multimodal analyses in political science (e.g., video/audio with text-as-data approaches) has been relatively slow due to unequal distribution of computational power and skills needed. We provide solutions to challenges encountered when analyzing audio, advancing the potential for multimodal data analysis in political science. Using a dataset of all televised U.S. presidential debates from 1960 to 2020, we focus on three features encountered when analyzing audio data: low-level descriptors (LLDs), such as pitch or energy; Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs); and audio embeddings/encodings, like Wav2Vec. We showcase four applications: (a) forced alignment of audio text using MFCCs, time-stamping transcripts, and speaker information; (b) speech characterization using LLDs; (c) custom-made classification models with audio embeddings and MFCCs; and (d) emotional recognition models using Wav2Vec for classification of discrete emotions and their valence-arousal dominance. We provide explanations to help understand how these features can be applied for different political research questions and advice on vigilance to naive interpretation, for both experienced researchers and those who want to start working with audio.

Radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) requires transforming samples into graphite, a step that typically depends on liquid nitrogen and high-purity carrier gases, increasing both cost and operational complexity. We present μGRAPHILINE, a fully automated, modular combustion–graphitization line that removes these dependencies by combining dual-zone combustion with iron–zinc reduction. Performance was evaluated on more than 180 standards and reference materials targets measured on two independent AMS systems. The μGRAPHILINE consistently achieved >90% graphitization yields, stable backgrounds of ∼0.24 pMC (≈48,500 BP), and sample throughput of ∼3.5 hours per target. Reliable operation was demonstrated for a broad sample-size range, from routine 1 mg C down to ∼0.2 mg C, with ion currents sufficient for precise AMS analysis. The system’s automation, modularity, and low memory effect support improved laboratory throughput and operator efficiency. These results indicate that μGRAPHILINE provides a robust and efficient approach to radiocarbon sample preparation with broad potential applications.

Are nuclear weapons useful for coercion, and, if so, what factors increase the credibility and effectiveness of nuclear threats? While prominent scholars like Thomas Schelling argue that nuclear brinkmanship, or the manipulation of nuclear risk, can effectively coerce adversaries, others contend nuclear weapons are not effective tools of coercion, especially when designed to achieve offensive and revisionist objectives. Simultaneously, there is broad debate about the incorporation of automation via artificial intelligence into military systems, especially nuclear command and control. We develop a theoretical argument that nuclear threats implemented with automated nuclear launch systems are more credible compared to those implemented via non-automated means. By reducing human control over nuclear use, leaders can more effectively tie their hands and thus signal resolve, even if doing so increases the risk of nuclear war and thus is extremely dangerous. Preregistered survey experiments on an elite sample of United Kingdom Members of Parliament and two public samples of UK citizens provide support for these expectations, showing that in a crisis scenario involving a Russian invasion of Estonia, automated nuclear threats can increase credibility and willingness to back down. From a policy perspective, this paper highlights the dangers of countries adopting automated nuclear systems for malign purposes, and contributes to the literatures on coercive bargaining, weapons of mass destruction, and emerging technology.

We develop a methodology for conducting inference on extreme quantiles of unobserved individual heterogeneity (e.g., heterogeneous coefficients and treatment effects) in panel data and meta-analysis settings. Inference is challenging in such settings: only noisy estimates of heterogeneity are available, and central limit approximations perform poorly in the tails. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition under which noisy estimates are informative about extreme quantiles, along with sufficient rate and moment conditions. Under these conditions, we establish an extreme value theorem and an intermediate order theorem for noisy estimates. These results yield simple optimization-free confidence intervals (CIs) for extreme quantiles. Simulations show that our CIs have favorable coverage and that the rate conditions matter for the validity of inference. We illustrate the method with an application to firm productivity differences across areas of varying population density. By analyzing the left tails of the productivity distributions, we find no evidence of stronger firm selection in more densely populated areas.

Welwitschia mirabilis, a unique gymnosperm native to Namibia and Angola, is a keystone plant species in the Namib Desert. It represents the only extremely long-lived non-clonal plant species occurring under hyperarid desert conditions, yet limited attempts have been made to accurately determine its age. Here, we present radiocarbon dates from a dead, sectioned Welwitschia of moderate size. We find the outer caudex tissue growth to progressively increase in age from the leaf base towards the ground level in this dwarf tree, while the inner cortex tissue becomes younger. Our sampling strategy revealed that the oldest tissue from this Welwitschia, found at the base of the caudex in the middle of the lobe, was dated to 531 ± 20 14C years, suggesting a vertical growth rate of approximately 0.47 to 0.67 mm/year. These findings can serve as a basis for future dating of larger, living individuals.

We investigated the epizoic diatoms colonizing the carapace of the spider crab Hyastenus hilgendorfi inhabiting Lake Timsah in the Suez Canal. A total of 63 individuals, free of macro-epibionts, were examined to assess the diversity, abundance, and seasonal dynamics of their associated diatom communities. A total of 61 diatom taxa belonging to 31 genera were recorded, with raphid pennate diatoms being the most dominant, particularly Navicula lanceolata. Diatom density and diversity exhibited clear seasonal variation, where Summer had the highest richness and Spring the highest cell densities. Overall, males hosted more diatom taxa than females, however, sex-specific differences fluctuated seasonally. The cluster analysis revealed distinct diatom assemblages between sexes and seasons, showing subtle but significant variation in epibiont structure. These findings provide the first detailed characterization of epizoic diatom assemblages on H. hilgendorfi. They suggest that seasonal variations in diatom communities may influence the crab’s camouflage effectiveness by altering biofilm characteristics which facilitate macro-epibiont settlement.

Given a number field F with ring of integers $\mathcal {O}_{F}$, one can associate to any torsion free subgroup of $\operatorname {SL}(2,\mathcal {O}_{F})$ of finite index a complete Riemannian manifold of finite volume with fibered cusp ends. For natural choices of flat vector bundles on such a manifold, we show that analytic torsion is identified with the Reidemeister torsion of the Borel-Serre compactification. This is used to obtain exponential growth of torsion in the cohomology for sequences of congruence subgroups.