This interview with Peter Singer AI serves a dual purpose. It is an exploration of certain—utilitarian and related—views on sentience and its ethical implications. It is also an exercise in the emerging interaction between natural and artificial intelligence, presented not as just ethics of AI but perhaps more importantly, as ethics with AI. The one asking the questions—Matti Häyry—is a person, in the contemporary sense of the word, sentient and self-aware, whereas Peter Singer AI is an artificial intelligence persona, created by Sankalpa Ghose, a person, through dialogue with Peter Singer, a person, to programmatically model and incorporate the latter’s writings, presentations, recipes, and character qualities as a renowned philosopher. The interview indicates some subtle differences between natural perspectives and artificial representation, suggesting directions for further development. PSai, as the project is also known, is available to anyone to chat with, anywhere in the world, on almost any topic, in almost any language, at www.petersinger.ai

Examining regional variation across African American communities has advanced research on African American English beyond its treatment as a singular, uniform variety. While the earlier focus on inner-city, and often male, youth prioritized studying these speakers’ production of ethnolectal patterns, less attention was paid to other language practices of these speakers and their broader semiotic construction of identity. Drawing on ethnographic data and sociolinguistic interviews from African American speakers from Rochester, New York who identify as Hood Kids, I examine how the bought vowel can become a marker of a particular place-identity in Rochester. I argue that the Hood Kid is an adequation of an enregistered racialized NYC persona that reanalyzes bought while also drawing on other emblems of Black, street culture. Such variation suggests that speakers’ conceptualization of race and place ideologically scales beyond immediately local geographic boundaries. (African American Language, style, race and ethnicity, regional variation)*

Coronary ectasia is a very rare phenomenon seen in Noonan syndrome with only a few documented case reports. We describe a 14-year-old with Noonan syndrome and tetralogy of Fallot with described coronary artery ectasia since infancy who presented for possible transcatheter pulmonary valve placement and was found to have severe ectasia of bilateral coronary arteries.

Much of the research on public trust in courts focuses on countries with strong rule of law traditions and clear judicial norms. Less is known about such attitudes in young democracies with developing judicial institutions. To address this, we examine public confidence in Ghana’s court system. Ghana’s courts have faced various scandals, from judges’ personal conduct to separation of power conflicts. Using Afrobarometer data, we evaluate public attitudes toward Ghana’s courts. We find that Ghanaians generally have low trust in their courts, with factors such as partisanship, education, standard of living, and gender strongly influencing trust.

Although expressivism has been studied in relation to criminal justice since the emergence of modern international criminal law, an expressivist perspective in norms and criminal justice research resurfaced in the past decades, inviting a new viewpoint on the dynamic interplay between norms and symbolic action in International Relations (IR). Situated as an account of punishment, expressivism has been criticised for being too abstract and lacking an immanent meaning or for its dialectic position in relation to punishment. Addressing this theoretical shortcoming, this article remediates our understanding of expressivism, establishing new knowledge of the meaning of norm expressivism in IR and clarifying the relationship between expressivism and notions of punishment in criminal justice and norm research. To this end, it hermeneutically deconstructs the rhetoric of country delegates at the United Nations in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It examines crucial examples of expressivism: disagreement pronouncements, denunciation of norm violation, postulation of guilt, and penal analogies. While criminal justice research posits expressivism as a distinct account of punishment, the novelty of this article consists in illustrating how, even in the absence of prosecution in the courtroom, expressivist rationales can have a reinforcing effect on the international legal order.

The EU's non-financial reporting (NFR) regulations have significant impacts on Global South stakeholders, firms that must report, actors lower in the value chain, and organisations seeking investment from NFR-compliant firms or institutions. This paper sets forth six proposals to improve the global equity and sustainability implications of the EU's NFR from a Global South perspective. The proposals involve (1) developing regulation cooperatively with the Global South; (2) streamlining reporting to enable the regulations to have real effects and limit incorrect accounting; (3) digitalising reporting through accessible technologies for greater accountability and lower administrative burdens; (4) mandating scope 3 emissions accounting and incentivising related investment; (5) anchoring financial institutions' role in ethical investment and bridging Northern and Southern actors; and (6) strengthening citizen data and sustainability literacy to close the circle of incentives, implementation, and impact.

Let X be a compact Kähler manifold, and let $L \rightarrow X$ be a holomorphic line bundle equipped with a singular metric h such that the curvature $\mathrm {i}\Theta _{L,h}\geqslant 0$ in the sense of currents. The main result of this paper is the vanishing of $H^n(X,\mathcal {O}(\Omega ^p_X\otimes L)\otimes \mathcal {I}(h))$ for $p\geqslant n-\operatorname {nd}(L,h)+1$, which generalizes Bogomolov’s vanishing theorem and Watanabe’s result.

Significant thicknesses, a large number of paleosols, and an impressive chronological framework place the loess–paleosol series of the Afghan-Tajik depression on a par with the famous sections of the Chinese Loess Plateau. Based on the results of field stratigraphy, description of the macro- and micromorphological structure, field magnetic susceptibility measurements, and study of the chemical and grain-size compositions, a comprehensive characterization of the structure, properties, and formation conditions of paleosol horizons and loess layers was carried out. Three loess units and two pedocomplexes are distinguished in the late and upper middle Pleistocene deposits of the Obi-Mazar section. These sediments are characterized by high silt and carbonate content and the presence of loess with pedogenic features. Pedocomplex PC1, consisting of three paleosols, according to the stratigraphic position and absolute dating, corresponds to MIS 5. Pedocomplex PC2, consisting of two developed paleosols separated by loess, is correlated with MIS 7. The properties of the studied paleosols together with modern soil distribution in the region allow for the reconstruction of the soil type of PC1 and PC2 of the Obi-Mazar section with the genesis of the Calcisols–Kastanozems groups.

Policy and professionalism go hand in hand. When safeguarding policy is all but absent as it is in the Church of England, it leaves clergy and others ill equipped to diagnose or to respond to concerns over abuse. Complex issues such as conflict of interest, evaluation based on verifiable objectives linked to safeguarding priorities, setting a balance between confidentiality and disclosure, safe recruitment and implementing the recommendations of safeguarding reviews are in effect left dangling. Expertise and professional judgement are needed both to develop policy and to apply it in real-world cases of prospective and actual abuse. Statistics about safeguarding cases covering associated resources, expenditure and outcomes are not readily available. Safeguarding reviews, mostly about particular cases, are difficult to generalise and ‘lessons learned’ are typically left at that without evidence of how safeguarding has changed as a result. The focus of safeguarding should be on the welfare of the people concerned, including survivors and perpetrators as well as congregations and church workers. Confrontational and legalistic approaches are all too common and do more harm than good. The objective should be to restore broken relationships, not necessarily between the survivor and the perpetrator, but between everyone involved in the case and the church.

Conventional oil drilling fluids often fail under extreme (high-pressure high-temperature, HPHT) conditions, leading to wellbore instability and formation damage, causing substantial economic losses in the drilling industry. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of Claytone-ER, a novel rheological additive for oil-based drilling fluids (OBDF), compared with a conventional organoclay (OC). Claytone-ER improved the drilling fluid performance significantly, including enhancement of the emulsion stability by 3% (863 V to 891 V), mitigation of sagging behavior, and substantial improvement in key rheological parameters such as plastic viscosity (PV) by 26.5%, yield point (YP) by 98%, and apparent viscosity (AV) by 36.5%. Additionally, Claytone-ER enhanced gel strength (GS) and improved filtration properties, reducing filtrate volume by 8% (5.0 cm3 to 4.6 cm3) and filter cake thickness by 6% (2.60 mm to 2.45 mm). These results demonstrated the potential of Claytone-ER to enhance the stability and performance of OBDFs under extreme HPHT conditions, leading to improved drilling efficiency, reduced non-productive time, and cost savings for drilling operations. Furthermore, the enhanced rheological properties, sag resistance, and filtration control contribute to better wellbore stability and minimize the risk of formation damage, ensuring long-term well productivity. This study represents a significant advancement in drilling fluid technology, paving the way for safer and more efficient drilling operations in challenging HPHT environments. Future research will focus on field trials to validate the efficacy of Claytone-ER in real-world HPHT drilling scenarios.

The electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) resolution revolution has shifted structural biology into a new era, enabling the routine structure determination of macromolecular complexes at an unprecedented rate. Building on this, electron cryotomography (cryo-ET) offers the potential to visualise the native three-dimensional organisation of biological specimens, from cells to tissues and even entire organisms. Despite this huge potential, the study of tissue-like multicellular specimens via cryo-ET still presents numerous challenges, wherein many steps in the workflow are being developed or in urgent need of improvement. In this review, we outline the latest techniques currently utilised for in situ imaging of multicellular specimens, while clearly enumerating their associated limitations. We consider every step in typical workflows employed by various laboratories, including sample preparation, data collection and image analysis, to highlight recent progress and showcase prominent success stories. By considering the entire structural biology workflow for multicellular specimens, we identify which future exciting developments in hardware and software could enable comprehensive in situ structural biology investigations, bringing forth a new age of discovery in molecular structural and cell biology.

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in exploring how common macroeconomic factors impact different economic results. We propose a semiparametric dynamic panel model to analyze the impact of common regressors on the conditional distribution of the dependent variable (global output growth distribution in our case). Our model allows conditional mean, variance, and skewness to be influenced by common regressors, whose effects can be nonlinear and time-varying driven by contextual variables. By incorporating dynamic structures and individual unobserved heterogeneity, we propose a consistent two-step estimator and showcase its attractive theoretical and numerical properties. We apply our model to investigate the impact of US financial uncertainty on the global output growth distribution. We find that an increase in US financial uncertainty significantly shifts the output growth distribution leftward during periods of market pessimism. In contrast, during periods of market optimism, the increased uncertainty in the US financial markets expands the spread of the output growth distribution without a significant location change, indicating increased future uncertainty.

The growing concern over cyber risk has become a pivotal issue in the business world. Firms can mitigate this risk through two primary strategies: investing in cybersecurity practices and purchasing cyber insurance. Cybersecurity investments reduce the compromise probability, while cyber insurance transfers potential losses to insurers. This study employs a network model for the spread of infection among interconnected firms and investigates how each firm’s decisions impact each other. We analyze a non-cooperative game in which each firm aims to optimize its objective function through choices of cybersecurity level and insurance coverage ratio. We find that each firm’s cybersecurity investment and insurance purchase are strategic complements. Within this game, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium and demonstrate its inefficiency. These theoretical results form the foundation for our numerical studies, allowing us compute firms’ equilibrium decisions on cybersecurity investments and insurance purchases across various network structures. The numerical results shed light on the impact of network structure on equilibrium decisions and explore how varying insurance premiums influence firms’ cybersecurity investments.