This inaugural presidential address of the Asian Law and Society Association features three recently published monographs to draw attention to research by the next generation of scholars and to show how they contribute to the field. Although the three books differ in terms of focus, methods, and findings, they share a hallmark of law and society, that is, they investigate practices, beliefs, and objects that are often taken for granted. At the same time, the three studies arrive at dissimilar conclusions about law, which reflects another unifying hallmark of law and society—its diversity. Together, the inconsistent findings expose the many profiles of law and demonstrate its fascinating nature. They remind us that we do not yet know the intricacies of law, and we need all kinds of law and society scholarships—on Asian societies and elsewhere—to continue advancing the field.

Individuals on the autism spectrum or with elevated autistic traits have shown difficulty in recognizing people’s facial emotions. They also tend to gravitate toward anime, a highly visual medium featuring animated characters whose facial emotions may be easier to distinguish. Because autistic traits overlap with alexithymia, or difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, alexithymia might explain the association between elevated autistic traits and difficulty with facial emotion recognition. The present study used a computerized task to first examine whether elevated autistic traits in a community sample of 247 adults were associated with less accurate emotion recognition of human but not anime faces. Results showed that individuals higher in autistic traits performed significantly worse on the human facial emotion recognition task, but no better or worse on the anime version. After controlling for alexithymia and other potentially confounding variables, autistic traits were no longer associated with performance on the facial emotion recognition tasks. However, alexithymia remained a significant predictor and fully mediated the relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition of both human and anime faces. Findings suggest that interventions designed to help individuals on the autism spectrum with facial emotion recognition might benefit from targeting alexithymia and employing anime characters.

Given a general polarized $K3$ surface $S\subset \mathbb P^g$ of genus $g\le 14$, we study projections of minimal degree and their variational structure. In particular, we prove that the degree of irrationality of all such surfaces is at most $4$, and that for $g=7,8,9,11$ there are no rational maps of degree $3$ induced by the primitive linear system. Our methods combine vector bundle techniques à la Lazarsfeld with derived category tools and also make use of the rich theory of singular curves on $K3$ surfaces.

On 23 September 1920, when the Inter-Allied boundary commission arrived in the town of Gmünd (Cmunt), residents participated in a large demonstration about the small border change set to take place along the Lower Austrian-Bohemian border. While boundary commissions in Europe have historically acted as intermediaries between local and state interests, this article argues that the Inter-Allied commission members departed from this role when they refused to undergo any public consultation or meet with any demonstrators about the border change. Examining the (in)actions of the postwar Inter-Allied and state boundary commission representatives alongside the concerns of the local population in Gmünd reflects how international, state, and local actors all perceived Europe’s boundaries as malleable and negotiable over a year after the signing of the post-World War I (WWI) treaties. The lead-up to and demonstration in Gmünd in September 1920 further nuances the relationships between the Allied Powers, postwar states, and local populations during the boundary-making process in the wake of WWI, illuminating both successful and unsuccessful claim making strategies pursued by state and local actors.

This paper concerns an insurance firm’s surplus process observed at renewal inspection times, with a focus on assessing the probability of the surplus level dropping below zero. For various types of inter-inspection time distributions, an explicit expression for the corresponding transform is given. In addition, Cramér–Lundberg-type asymptotics are established. Also, an importance sampling-based Monte Carlo algorithm is proposed, and is shown to be logarithmically efficient.

In this article, I present the immunological account of physiological individuality courtesy of Thomas Pradeu and the evolutionary account of biological individuality from Ellen Clarke. I argue that in combination, the logic of these two accounts implies that all physiological individuals are capable of undergoing evolution by natural selection. The main objection to this view is the case of holobionts. Here I argue that this objection is unjustified and that holobionts meet basic criteria for evolutionary individuality. As such, this supports the view that physiological individuals are also evolutionary individuals.

Businesses from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) aiming for a global reach must navigate through different levels of rule of law—with different degrees of strength—to access foreign markets. The rule of law is essential from a business perspective as it reduces the costs of transactions on the global market. However, the paper aims to demonstrate that there are transaction costs due to the frictions between the rules of law in the multilevel system, which the MENA business must take into consideration in its search for contract partners and new markets. The focus is on the overall rule of law components of the World Trade Organization, the European Neighbourhood Policies, and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and their interaction.

There is an “underrepresentation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change. We present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change.

Dysnoetoporidae is a family of cheilostome bryozoans including only the genus Dysnoetopora Canu and Bassler, 1926, with three recognized species from the Late Cretaceous of the United States, Crimea, and Germany. The aim of this study was to record for the first time the presence of a fossil dysnoetoporid bryozoan in South America by describing Chenquepora miocenica new genus new species. This taxon was found in Miocene deposits of the Chenque Formation (early Langhian, ~15.37 Ma), on the Atlantic coast of Argentine Patagonia. Chenquepora n. gen. differs from Dysnoetopora in its encrusting colony and, consequently, in the absence of an endozone with long zooids arranged parallel to growth direction. This new record extends its paleobiogeographic distribution to the Southern Hemisphere and its stratigraphic range from the Campanian (Late Cretaceous) to the Miocene, showing that this extinct family survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass-extinction event.

We analyse the effect of natural catastrophes on insurance demand in a developing economy and the role of insurance regulation in this relationship. The analysis is based on a theoretical model and a panel regression using data for Vietnam. What makes Vietnam especially interesting is the fact that it is strongly affected by natural catastrophes and experienced a change in insurance regulation in recent years. The theoretical results indicate that a loss experience likely has a less positive effect on demand in developing economies than in developed economies. A higher insurance penetration and a tighter insurance regulation, however, can make the impact of a loss event more positive. These findings are mirrored by our empirical analysis: overall natural catastrophes decrease insurance demand of affected households in Vietnam. The enhancement of regulation was not only accompanied by increased insurance demand but it also reverses the effect of natural catastrophes on demand.

Target tracking technology is a key research area in the field of mobile robots, with wide applications in logistics, security, autonomous driving, and more. It generally involves two main components: target recognition and target following. However, the limited computational power of the mobile robot’s controller makes achieving high precision and fast target recognition and tracking a challenge. To address the challenges posed by limited computing power, this paper proposes a target-tracking control algorithm based on lightweight neural networks. First, a depthwise separable convolution-based backbone is introduced for feature extraction. Then, an efficient channel attention module is incorporated into the target recognition algorithm to minimize the impact of redundant features and emphasize important channels, thereby reducing model complexity and enhancing network efficiency. Finally, based on the data collected from visual and ultrasonic sensors, a model predictive control strategy is used to achieve target tracking. Validation of the proposed algorithm is conducted using a mobile robot equipped with Raspberry Pi 4B. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves rapid target tracking.

Adverse environmental conditions during early life are known to determine adult metabolic phenotype in laboratory species and human populations. However, less is known about developmental programming of adult metabolic phenotype in livestock, given their size and longevity compared to laboratory animals. As maternal and/or fetal glucocorticoid (GC) concentrations rise in stressful conditions during pregnancy, GCs may act as a common mechanism linking early-life environmental conditions to the subsequent metabolic phenotype. This review examines prenatal and longer-term postnatal programming of metabolism by early-life GC overexposure in livestock species with a particular emphasis on sheep. It examines the effects of both cortisol, the natural glucocorticoid and more potent synthetic GCs used clinically to treat threatened pre-term delivery and other conditions during pregnancy. It considers the effects of early- life GC overexposure on the metabolism of specific feto-placental and adult tissues in relation to changes in the growth trajectory, other metabolic hormones and in the functioning of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis itself. It highlights the role of GCs as maturational and environmental signals in programming development of a metabolic phenotype fit for survival at birth and future homeostatic challenges. However, the ensuing metabolic phenotype induced by early GC overexposure may become inappropriate for the prevailing postnatal conditions and lead to metabolic dysfunction as functional reserves decline with age. Further studies are needed in livestock to establish whether the metabolic outcomes of early-life GC overexposure are sex-linked, more pronounced in old age and inherited transgenerationally in these species.

There are any number of arguments against the idea that it is possible to write the history of Habsburg Jews, or even to locate a common, coherent, Jewish experience in the Habsburg lands. These include the inherent disunity of the empire itself, the geographic dispersion of its Jewish population, and the multiplicity of legal jurisdictions under which Jews lived. This essay nevertheless makes the case for a Habsburg Jewish experience that surpassed differences in geography, legal jurisdiction, local culture. The Habsburg monarchy itself, in its quest for imperial expansion, administrative and legal reform, and social control, had much to do with this process. So, too, did the consolidation of an Ashkenazi rabbinic leadership that was both authoritative and distinctive to Central Europe, and the laying down of an intricate network of cross-regional family and communal ties, which themselves were partly a response to repressive state legislation. Jews in the Habsburg Empire moved about, reassembled and regrouped in ever new ways, while maintaining an overarching structure of human connection.