While Supreme Court nominations have become increasingly high-salience political events, we know little about their prioritization relative to other issues by core constituency groups. We examine how individual donors and the mass public prioritize nominations, as well as factors they believe presidents should consider when selecting judges. To do so, we constructed original questions for a survey of over 7,000 validated donors and a comparison general population sample. We find donors are substantially more likely to prioritize nominations than their general public co-partisans, particularly Republican donors. Further analysis suggests the prioritization gap is consistent with theories that donors are motivated to move policy toward the ideological extremes. Analyzing policy positions, the largest donor-public difference occurs for diversity in appointments, but for all positions we find smaller differences than for prioritization. Overall, the findings highlight donors’ policy priorities may diverge from those of the public even more than policy positions do.

This critical appraisal of a Cochrane Review assesses the efficacy of ketamine for treating unipolar major depressive disorder. The review included 31 randomised controlled trials involving ketamine. Results indicate that intravenous (i.v.) ketamine significantly improves antidepressant response compared with i.v. saline and, to a lesser extent, i.v. midazolam within 24–72 h. However, the evidence is constrained by performance bias owing to masking (‘blinding’) concerns and study heterogeneity, necessitating further robust research to confirm ketamine's clinical potential.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have raised concerns about the relevance and reliability of current measures and indices of child well-being. This article aims to bridge a significant knowledge gap by examining how these indices respond to shocks and exploring attributes of shock-responsive indicators related to child well-being. Drawing on the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 16 on child well-being and the Korean Child Well-being Index, the study conducts a comparative analysis of differences in the design and purpose of indices that influence their resilience to shocks. Subsequently, it proposes an approach for evaluating the ‘shock-responsiveness’ of key outcome indicators of child well-being before going on to review how child income poverty measures performed during COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. After finding that child well-being indices, at present, are not able to fully capture the effects of covariate crises on children, the article concludes with insights for policymakers and researchers.

Embedding mandatory investment guarantees in individual retirement accounts (IRAs) can protect workers from equity market shortfalls, but policymakers must understand the economic costs of such guarantees as well as their incidence. Using a life cycle model calibrated for Germany, where investors have access to stocks, bonds, and tax-qualified IRAs, we show that abandoning the guarantee could enhance old-age consumption for over 75% of retirees without harming pre-retirement consumption. Investors averse to equity losses accumulate only moderately more in guaranteed accounts, as these offer only limited protection against market crashes.

The Forum Augustum represents one of the most important examples of the public and material dissemination of Augustan ideology. This paper offers a new model for understanding how the Forum's spatial and architectural design communicated that ideology. Departing from scholarly emphasis on the Forum's statuary programme, it examines how the Forum's spaces set up a series of contrasts that structured visitors’ experiences. In the porticoes, the extensive statue programme granted viewers a wide range of choices about what they could see. In the central square and hemicycles (exedrae), however, visitors were compelled by the paucity of material to encounter certain images and ideas. This argument shows a new way of understanding the Forum, where movement into and between certain spaces structured how Augustan ideology was communicated, received, and understood.

The ubiquity of office is rivaled only by its scholarly neglect. The stable realities and the debates and ethics attached to institutions of office are poorly reflected in political science and public administration. Offices serve as ministerial trusts (directed toward service, not to be owned, inherited or seized), they are structured by accountability institutions and ethics, and they are ineluctably relational – they exist in correspondence to other offices, those governed (who make claims upon offices), and notions of just and right. Examining public administrative offices from republican Rome through the medieval Catholic episcopacy to early modern England, I argue that institutions and ethics of office took shape that indelibly shaped American and Western public administration as we know it today. Fertile research agendas include the existence and evolution of public offices, the mechanics of their constraints upon behavior, oaths and commitment, their simultaneous embedment of obligation and authority, and rewards (fee, emolument, rent, benefice, salary).

Survey researchers increasingly recognize the need to update their gender questions to recognize the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. In this research note, we evaluate changes to the Canadian Election Study (CES) gender questions from 2019 to 2021. Our analyses suggest researchers should add “nonbinary” as a close-ended option and an open-ended response option to gender identity questions. They also suggest that researchers should not include “transgender” in a separate, mutually exclusive response option alongside men and women in gender identity questions but instead identify transgender men and women through a follow-up question. These recommendations can help guide the design of future surveys.

Robotic lower limb exoskeletons are wearable devices designed to augment human motor functions and enhance physical capabilities mostly adopted in healthcare and rehabilitation. The field is strongly dominated by rigid exoskeletons driven by electromagnetic actuators constituted by electrical motors, gearboxes, and cylinders. This review focuses on the design and specifications of the actuation systems of lower limb exoskeletons, with the ultimate goal of providing reporting guidelines to allow for full reproducibility. For each paper, we assessed the quality and completeness of technical characteristics with two ad hoc rating scales for motors and reducers; we extracted the main parameters of the actuation unit and a quantitative analysis of the mechanical characteristics of the individual components was carried out considering the exoskeleton application. Overall, we observed a lack of details in reporting on actuation systems equipped on exoskeletons. To overcome this limitation, herein we conclude by proposing a data form and a checklist to provide researchers with a common approach in reporting the mechanical characteristics of the actuation unit of their lower limb exoskeletons. We believe that the convergence of exoskeletons’ literature toward a clearer standardization of design and reporting will boost the development of this technology and its diffusion outside the laboratory.

Recent archaeological discoveries, as well as new readings of the epic, suggest that the poet of the Iliad was well aware of hero cult. The funeral of Patroklos in Iliad 23 has long been recognized as also representing the funeral of Achilles. But moving away from Neoanalysis and Neo-neoanalysis, I argue that the rituals Achilles performs on behalf of his friend point to the future establishment of Achilles’ own cult that will eternally link his name to that of Patroklos. Each action Achilles performs on behalf of his friend offers a blueprint or a script for the rituals intended to constitute the dromena of Achilles’ future cult. While no actual cult of Achilles may have followed this scenario, the Homeric audience would have understood its components – mourning, feasting, ritual impurity, hair offerings, holocausts, and funeral games – as an aition, a ritual foundation, inaugurating Achilles’ cult.

Let s be a fixed positive integer constant and let $\varepsilon $ be a fixed small positive number. Then, provided that a prime p is large enough, we prove that, for any set ${\mathcal M}\subseteq \mathbb {F}_p^*$ of size $|{\mathcal M}|= \lfloor { p^{14/29}}\rfloor $ and integer $H=\lfloor {p^{14/29+\varepsilon }}\rfloor $, any integer $\lambda $ can be represented in the form

$$ \begin{align*} \frac{m_1}{x_1^s}+\frac{m_2}{x_2^s}+\frac{m_3}{x_3^s}\equiv \lambda \bmod p \quad\text{with } m_i\in {\mathcal M} \text{ and } 1\leqslant x_i\leqslant H, \, i=1,2,3. \end{align*} $$

When $s=1$, we show that, for almost all primes p, if $|{\mathcal M}|= \lfloor p^{1/2}\rfloor $ and $H=\lfloor p^{1/2}(\log p)^{6+\varepsilon }\rfloor $, then any integer $\lambda $ can be represented in the form

$$ \begin{align*} \frac{m_1}{x_1}+\frac{m_2}{x_2}\equiv \lambda \bmod p \quad\text{with } m_i\in {\mathcal M} \text{ and } 1\leqslant x_i\leqslant H, \, i=1,2. \end{align*} $$

From the books I received this term, some titles immediately grabbed my attention. I begin with two in-depth studies of equally complex and intriguing aspects of Aristotle's philosophy. One is Fractured Goodness by Christopher Shields. In this book, the author invites us to rethink Aristotle's response to the Form of the Good. The monograph is a follow-up to his earlier work on the highest good in Aristotle, this time with a comprehensive treatment mainly focused on Nicomachean Ethics I 6, but paying considerable attention to Eudemian Ethics I 8 and other relevant passages, too. Its most salient feature may be Shields’ masterful elegance in walking through the minefield of exegetical difficulties and scholarly disagreements without losing focus or sounding dismissive, uncharitable, or partisan.

Research suggests that caregivers of patients with disorders of consciousness such as minimally conscious states (MCS) believe they suffer in some way. How so, if they cannot experience sensations or feelings? What is the nature of their suffering? This paper explores non-experiential suffering (NES). It argues that concerns about NES are really concerns about harms (e.g., dignity-based harms), but still face problems. Second, it addresses the moral importance of bearing witness to suffering. It explores several possible accounts: epistemic (bearing witness generates important knowledge), consequentialist (witnesses’ interests also matter), and deontological (there is a duty to bear witness). It argues that witnessing suffering creates epistemic advantages and disadvantages for determining a patient’s interests; that clinicians’ interests to not bear witness may have considerable moral weight; and that the obligation to bear witness to NES is unclear.