The consensus view in the growth literature is that R&D scale effects are absent in mature industrialized economies but may be present in emerging economies undergoing transition. Scale effects imply a proportional relationship between a stationary $I(0)$ regressand (growth rates of real per capita GDP and/or TFP) and a non-stationary $I(1)$ regressor (the scale of R&D), which gives rise to the problem of unbalanced regression and spurious parameter estimates. This issue has not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. Furthermore, emerging economies have received relatively little attention in this context. We address these issues by (i) accurately measuring R&D scale and (ii) adopting an appropriate econometric specification and estimator. We find significant scale effects in a panel of emerging countries, but not in developed countries. We propose an endogenous growth model that captures these properties—presence of scale effects during growth transitions, but not at the long-run equilibrium—thereby reconciling our results. Our model predicts that the long-run growth rates of per capita real GDP and TFP are driven by the growth rates of technological innovation and aggregate employment—although, in the case of emerging economies, only technological innovation significantly contributes to TFP growth.

This study investigates how stress and metathesis interact in Sevillian Spanish, focusing on how their interaction sheds light on representation. Metathesis affects /s/–voiceless stop sequences, moving a debuccalised coda /s/ to the release of the following stop ( → [patha]). This process plausibly changes syllable structure: the syllable where /s/ originated is closed at one representational level, but open on the surface ([pah.ta] → [pa.tha]). The change in syllable structure could affect weight-sensitive stress, depending on the level speakers refer to in assigning stress. In a stress judgement task, Sevillian listeners treated syllables from which an /s/ had metathesised out similarly to heavy penults and differently from light penults. I outline a range of analyses to account for their behaviour, and suggest that a comprehensive analysis could include gestural representations and separate stress from metathesis, so that phonetic variability in the realisation of metathesis is permitted but does not affect stress.

Iraya Volcano, situated at the northern tip of Batan Island in the Batanes group, marks the northernmost extent of the Philippine archipelago. Aside from the presence of accessible tephra deposits, the numerous archaeological sites on the island provide key insight into tephrochronology and volcanic hazard assessment. This paper presents stratigraphy and 21 radiocarbon ages of Holocene tephra layers distributed on the island. The eruption ages of the Holocene tephra are approximately 12.4 cal ka BP for Rolling Hills at the bottom, 4.5–4.9 cal ka BP for San Antonio, 2.1–2.5 cal ka BP for Mahatao, 1.6 cal ka BP for Basco, and 1.2–1.6 cal ka BP for Boulder Beach, with most of the tephra concentrated in the latter half of the Holocene. Artifacts excavated from Reydante Cabizon Property Site, San Antonio, Basco can be thought to date to around 4 to 2 cal ka BP, which is consistent with tephrochronology.

This article examines the relationship of the Argentine Socialist Party (PS) with international socialist organizations between 1889 and 1940. During this period, the PS emerged as the leading Latin American social-democratic organization and one of the few non-European members of both the Second International and the Labour and Socialist International. The article argues that the PS’s unique trajectory is best understood through the concept of “peripheral inter-nationalism”. This framework analyses how a socialist party in a non-colonial state built by mass European immigration engaged in a competitive nation-building project. The PS sought to construct its own version of the nation for a largely immigrant working class while simultaneously confronting the official nationalism being forged by the Argentine state. By analysing this dual challenge, the article complicates existing understandings of socialist “inter-nationalism”, revealing a distinct path to reconciling national and international loyalties. Drawing on archival research on the PS and the Internationals, the article shows how Argentine socialists actively translated and contested European norms, ultimately contributing to the historiography of international socialism by addressing the underexplored role of non-European parties.

This study deploys netnography to investigate online reaction to suzhi jiaoyu, China’s national curriculum. Few papers have attempted to gauge popular opinion on the curriculum, despite state rhetoric that, once universally implemented, it will revolutionize China’s development. I analyse 1,644 posts of netizens’ judgements of ongoing suzhi jiaoyu reforms, uploaded to China’s most popular “question-and-answer” site, Zhihu. Deploying grounded theory to gauge the levels and nature of consensus/dissent across opinions, my study details the unpopularity of suzhi jiaoyu among users of Zhihu. Most appropriate suzhi jiaoyu discourse to criticize China’s unequal distribution of resources and, implicitly, the failure of state initiatives to address these inequalities. Users perceive the previous national curriculum to be fairer, noting the absence of sufficient state intervention in this area. I conclude by examining the broader implications of Zhihu users’ engagement with social problems in China.

Continuum robots inspired by biological life forms are favored for their flexibility, compliance, and adaptability to confined environments. However, flexible structure and coupled dynamics include challenges, especially under external forces. This paper presents a dynamic-model-based control framework for a two-section planar-to-spatial tendon-driven continuum manipulator (P2S-TDCM), which integrates a comprehensive Euler–Lagrange model that accounts for tendon stiffness, viscous damping, and backbone flexibility. A genetic algorithm (GA)-optimized PID controller is designed and tested on deterministic and robustness-oriented tuning modes. To further enhance real-time robustness against external disturbances, an online disturbance observer (DOB) is integrated into the control loop to estimate and compensate for unmeasured external wrenches. Numerical results showed that the robust tuning strategy achieved consistently lower RMSE (up to ∼ 25% improvement compared to the deterministic approach) and reduced sensitivity to parameter uncertainties such as vertebra mass by ±2%, backbone Young’s modulus by ±5% under external tip forces. Experimental validation of the deterministic controller further confirmed the model’s accuracy and feasibility. The combined GA-PID-DOB framework improves trajectory tracking stability and disturbance rejection, establishing a robustness-oriented control for P2S-TDCM. This work demonstrates that integrating DOB-based compensation with GA-optimized control enhances robustness and 3D trajectory tracking in TDCMs. Future work will extend the framework to account for distributed external forces along the manipulator body and explore adaptive or learning-based controllers for real-time uncertainty compensation.

In this paper I present a case study of the creation of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which provided the first image of a black hole shadow (April 2019) and that of the central black hole of the Milky Way (May 2022), as one in which the collaborative approach was primarily motivated by strong epistemic needs. To this end, I introduce and explore the notion of “epistemic constraint,” meaning any component of the world that prevents us from gaining some definite kind of knowledge in a specific manner and allows or promotes some other specific kind of knowledge in defined ways. The collaborative approach that led to the recent images of black hole shadows through the EHT is described in terms of “epistemically constrained collaboration” – i.e., a collaborative mode of research where the epistemic constraints prevail over other factors – and the most important features of this concept are expounded.

For Markov chains and Markov processes exhibiting a form of stochastic monotonicity (higher states have higher transition probabilities in terms of stochastic dominance), stability and ergodicity results can be obtained with the use of order-theoretic mixing conditions. We complement these results by providing quantitative bounds on deviations between distributions. We also show that well-known total variation bounds can be recovered as a special case.

Glutathione is a key intracellular antioxidant involved in redox balance, detoxification, and immune support. However, oral glutathione supplementation is limited by poor bioavailability due to gastrointestinal degradation and low membrane permeability. Liposomal formulations offer a promising strategy to enhance delivery and therapeutic efficacy. This study aimed to compare the biological activity and systemic availability of a novel liposomal glutathione formulation (LipoDuo™ Glutathione) with plain glutathione using both in vitro cellular models and in vivo human pharmacokinetic evaluation. Human embryonic kidney (HEK-293T) cells were treated with LipoDuo™ or plain glutathione to assess intracellular uptake, optimal dosing, cell proliferation, and wound healing. In a parallel-arm, open-label human study, 12 healthy subjects (n = 6 per group) received a single oral dose of either LipoDuo™ or plain glutathione (1 g), and plasma glutathione levels were monitored over 24 h using LC-MS/MS. Uptake: LipoDuo™ demonstrated ∼1.9-fold higher cellular uptake than plain glutathione, peaking at 6 h (45% vs 23%). Proliferation: LipoDuo™ increased cell proliferation by upto 3-fold over control, superior to plain glutathione. Wound healing: LipoDuo™ achieved 100% closure at 24 h, vs. 59.8% for plain glutathione. Pharmacokinetics: LipoDuo™ achieved a Cmax of ∼1800 ng/mL (6× higher than plain), showed a bimodal absorption pattern, and maintained plasma levels >500 ng/mL at 24 h. LipoDuo™ Glutathione significantly improves cellular delivery, biological activity, and systemic bioavailability compared to conventional glutathione. Its bimodal distribution and prolonged plasma retention position it as a next-generation antioxidant supplement with clinical potential in oxidative stress management, skin health, and metabolic recovery.

This study examines the political economy of international trade and perpetual peace proposed by the agronomist Jean-Baptiste Rougier-Labergerie under the French Directory. Drawing on Rougier-Labergerie’s treatise on commerce and peace, this article shows how a political economy that was rooted in natural jurisprudence navigated the challenges of subsistence and war through turbulent times that extended beyond the Thermidor. Similar to eighteenth-century intellectuals who witnessed large-scale wars waged with public debt in the name of national interest, Rougier-Labergerie considered the possibility of peace and prosperity to be intricately linked to the question of commercial rivalry between nations. He thereby recognized the pressing need to mitigate—by different means from those deployed by the radicals of Year II—the jealousy of trade that plagued Europe in the 1790s. This examination provides a more nuanced dimension to the established categories in historical inquiries into the international political economy of the revolutionary period.

Personal experiences with public officials influence how those officials are perceived. We question whether these experiential effects extend to other officials. If people draw on what they know to make inferences about unfamiliar evaluative targets, then interactions with one actor may shape evaluations of other independent actors. Focusing on police and courts, analyses of data from two surveys reveal that personal interactions with public officials produce spillover effects on appraisals of officials in different sectors. The findings indicate that experiential spillover constitutes an underappreciated force in public opinion, one that operates outside the control of the actors being evaluated.

This paper applies Structure-Preserving Doubling Algorithms (SDAs) to solve the matrix quadratic that underlies linear DSGE models. We present and compare two SDAs to other competing methods—the QZ method, a Newton algorithm, and an iterative Bernoulli approach—as well as linking them to the cyclic and logarithmic reduction algorithms included in Dynare. Our evaluation, conducted across 142 models from the Macroeconomic Model Data Base and multiple parameterizations of the Smets and Wouters (2007) model, demonstrates that SDAs generally provide more accurate solutions in less time than QZ. We also establish their theoretical convergence properties and robustness to initialization issues. The SDAs perform particularly well in refining solutions provided by other methods and for large models.

This study presents a surrogate-model-assisted Quasi-Newton optimisation framework for simultaneously improving the aerodynamic performance and radar stealth characteristics of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational electromagnetics (CEM) simulations are integrated through surrogate models generated via a face-centred central composite design within a design of experiments framework. Quadratic polynomial response surface equations are constructed for key aerodynamic and radar cross-section (RCS) metrics, enabling analytical gradient evaluation. A gradient-based quasi-Newton method with Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno Hessian updates is employed to minimise a scalarised objective function combining normalised maximum lift coefficient, overall RCS and frontal RCS. Constraints are imposed on the lift-to-drag ratio ($L/D \geq 10$) and static longitudinal stability (${C_{m0}} \geq 0$). Analytical derivatives from the response surface equations (RSEs) eliminate the need for direct numerical differentiation of CFD/CEM outputs, reducing computational cost and eliminating simulation noise. An interior-point sequential quadratic programming strategy is used to ensure satisfaction of nonlinear constraints during the optimisation process. The optimised UAV design demonstrates a $12{\rm{\% }}$ increase in maximum lift coefficient and a $30{\rm{\% }}$ reduction in both overall and frontal RCS compared to the baseline configuration. The results are confirmed through high-fidelity CFD and RCS simulations and are further validated experimentally in an anechoic chamber, with close agreement across all measured frequencies. The proposed methodology provides an efficient and experimentally verified approach for integrated aerodynamic and stealth optimisation in UAV design.