We prove several new congruences for the overcubic partition triples function, using both elementary techniques and the theory of modular forms. These extend the recent list of such congruences given by Nayaka, Dharmendra and Kumar [‘Divisibility properties for overcubic partition triples’, Integers 24 (2024), Article no. a80, 9 pages]. We also generalise overcubic partition triples to overcubic partition k-tuples and prove arithmetic properties for these partitions.

This study employed a person-centred approach to investigate the digital divide in South Korea and its impact on life satisfaction among individuals. Six latent profiles were identified based on the following factors: digital device literacy, social capital, and digital self-efficacy. These factors denote different levels of the digital divide, highlighting the multifaceted nature of this issue and the importance of considering multiple factors that contribute to inequality. Additionally, sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, and educational level were found to play a role in determining group membership, emphasising the need to understand the underlying causes of the divide. Variations in life satisfaction among the groups emphasise their different effects on well-being. The findings can be used to inform targeted policies and interventions to bridge the digital divide in South Korea. To that end, this study provides data for designing tailored education, social networking, and support policies for vulnerable groups.

Proposals to change the institutional features of national high courts have been on the agenda recently in the United States and Israel. Using insights about endowment effects and prospect theory from behavioral economics, we theorize about how citizens may think about benefits from high courts and how those views can influence their support for change to those institutions. Mindful of differences across these countries, we employ a comparative experimental design to explore how people think about personal and societal benefits emanating from the Israeli and United States Supreme Courts. We find interesting differences in how experimental participants think about benefits from courts and how those views shape feelings about recent proposals to alter judicial institutions in each national context.

Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that works only under the best of circumstances. We argue that interbranch politics influences what aware citizens know and learn about their court, and we theorize how awareness interacts with individual-level and context-dependent factors to bolster public endorsement of judicial independence in previously unappreciated ways. We fielded surveys in the United States (US), Germany, Poland, and Hungary, countries which diverge in the extent to which the environments are hospitable or hostile to high courts, and whose publics vary greatly in both their awareness of courts and perceptions of executive influence with the judiciary. We suggest that in hospitable contexts, awareness correlates with support for judicial independence, but said association depends on perceptions of executive influence. In hostile contexts where executive interference is common, more aware citizens are more apt to perceive this meddling, and although it might undermine trust in the judicial authority, it does not diminish their demand for judicial independence. Together, these findings underscore that public awareness and support for judicial independence are greatly informed by the political environment in which high courts reside.

This article examines the writings of late 19th and early 20th-century Marxist theorists and political leaders from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and their influence on the chief Bolshevik theorist of Soviet nationality policies, Joseph Stalin. It argues that although many early Marxist theorists held divergent views on managing nationalism, they uniformly rejected biological or romantic spiritual conceptions of the nation and instead posited that nationalism and contemporary nations are relatively new, socially constructed phenomena arising from processes linked to economic and political modernization. These perspectives align with what contemporary academia labels as “modernist” theories of nationality and this analysis therefore challenges prevailing views on the genesis of these theories, tracing them back to early Marxist thinkers rather than late 20th-century Western European theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. This modernist understanding of nations as products of material forces and processes enabled socialists to envision steering nation formation. For the Bolsheviks and some of the later international revolutionaries they inspired, this meant that just as they believed they could accelerate the transition to a socialist future through active class management, so too they believed they could control and expedite the construction of national identities through carefully designed policies.

In his early serialist composition style, Einojuhani Rautavaara expressed indebtedness to the flexible usage of the twelve-tone system that was adapted by Alban Berg. The trace of Berg's influence becomes dramaturgically reminiscent when investigating the philosophical impact that Berg's opera Wozzeck had on Rautavaara's opera Vincent. This study aims to analyse the symbolic content of the Vincent libretto, with a secondary depiction of parallel attributes found in the libretto of Wozzeck. This examination demonstrates how the operas share a philosophical foundation that is based on an expression of metaphysical temporality inherent within the plots of both operas, which juxtapose the duality of the two temporal planes of empirical reality and metaphysical illusion. The outcome of such a comparison illustrates how Rautavaara's opera can be interpreted in a new framework of understanding that is based on the Finnish composer's mirroring of Berg's operatic and dramatic style as seen in Wozzeck.

Argon physisorption at 87 K is the new standard for texture analysis of microporous media recommended by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). However, geoscientists routinely use nitrogen (77 K) and carbon dioxide (273 K), both molecules with permanent polarization and the preference to interact with specific surface sites. In this work, N2, CO2, and Ar physisorption isotherms were measured and classical physisorption theories applied to investigate the suitability of Ar physisorption for the porosity assessment of mudrocks, clays, and (non)-porous analogs.

N2 and Ar physisorption isotherms are qualitatively similar with the most significant discrepancies in the submonolayer range. Textural parameters reveal linear relations but parameter ratios vary randomly, independent of the sorbent class. While N2 and CO2 (mostly) underestimate micropore volumes, nitrogen BET areas are consistently larger than argon BET areas. Those differences are probably associated with differences in polarization. But its effect on molecular orientation, for example, is presumably masked by microporosity and a narrow spacing of specific surface sites.

Mesopore size distributions and Gurvich (total) pore volumes agree well for N2 and Ar indicating similar pore size and pore volume access. Combining both parameters proves effective in identifying saturation pressure offsets which pose the largest uncertainty factor in the present study. Ar-based micropore size distributions reveal three distinct classes of mudrocks differing in organic matter maturity, and its contribution to microporosity. Empirical αs plots corroborate this classification underlining the discrepancies in the micropore range of mudrocks. Comparative hysteresis loop analysis indicated cavitation as one dominant evaporation mechanism in mudrocks and clays effecting a sample-specific compartmentalization of their pore networks.

I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame facilitates moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to a blamer’s standing serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue, is blaming hypocritically, or is complicit in the wrongdoing at issue. In contrast, I argue that three widely recognized conditions on standing to blame—the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions—serve as epistemically tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame. Standing matters because, and to the extent that, it indirectly informs our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.

The logico-algebraic study of Lewis’s hierarchy of variably strict conditional logics has been essentially unexplored, hindering our understanding of their mathematical foundations, and the connections with other logical systems. This work starts filling this gap by providing a logico-algebraic analysis of Lewis’s logics. We begin by introducing novel finite axiomatizations for Lewis’s logics on the syntactic side, distinguishing between global and local consequence relations on Lewisian sphere models on the semantical side, in parallel to the case of modal logic. As first main results, we prove the strong completeness of the calculi with respect to the corresponding semantical consequence on spheres, and a deduction theorem. We then demonstrate that the global calculi are strongly algebraizable in terms of a variety of Boolean algebras with a binary operator representing the counterfactual implication; in contrast, we show that the local ones are generally not algebraizable, although they can be characterized as the degree-preserving logic over the same algebraic models. This yields the strong completeness of all the logics with respect to the algebraic models.

A broadband ±45° dual-polarized base-station antenna based on crossed-dipoles with parasitic elements has been presented in this study. This antenna consists of printed dipoles fed by integrated baluns, parasitic elements, and a ground plane below them. As a result of using parasitic elements on the dipoles and creating a suitable coupling between them, the antenna’s impedance bandwidth has been improved, and its dimensions have been reduced. The experimental results show that the proposed antenna can cover the frequency band of 1.58–2.73 GHz with |S11| < −15 dB and isolation better than 17 dB. The measured peak gain for the proposed antenna in the frequency band is reported as 7.8 dB. Also, the antenna’s half-power beamwidth equals 62.15° ± 1.45°. The proposed antenna is fabricated with overall dimensions of 0.67λ0 × 0.67λ0 × 0.17λ0 and has been measured in the antenna laboratory.

Since 1974, two out of every five constitutions (40.3%) were prepared via processes that included public consultation. The reasons for adopting these participatory mechanisms, however, are largely unexplored. I argue that public consultation is a tool for elite contestation of power. Introducing an original dataset of public consultations in constitution-making processes from 1974–2021 (n = 300), I find that in democracies, factional majorities and newcomer elites use public consultation to legitimate a break from the status quo. In autocracies, governing coalitions that depend on performance and enjoy greater party institutionalization push for public consultation to preserve favorable power-sharing arrangements.

International courts are increasingly serving as bulwarks of democracy. These courts, however, often depend on the cooperation of the very governments they seek to hold accountable, exposing them to potential retaliation for attempting to constrain their behavior. As governments’ response to adverse decision-making is often conditional on public support, we explore whether citizens actually support international courts’ judicial power over questions of democracy. We argue that citizens’ support for this form of judicial power depends on their democratic values and their desire for institutional checks and balances against the executive. Furthermore, we contest that this support is conditional on partisanship, with this relationship holding for opposition partisans while government partisans are generally opposed to international courts’ judicial power. We support our expectations using original survey data collected from Hungary before their 2022 national legislative elections, and examining citizens’ support for judicial power for the Court of Justice of the European Union.

An awareness of the controversy surrounding Strauss pervades Namazi's work. His apologia is a labor of love: erudite, painstaking, uncompromising. Namazi highlights Strauss's contribution to Islamic political thought and argues for the continued relevance of the Straussian approach. There is much to recommend in the book but I restrict myself to what I take to be its more problematic aspects.

Numerous studies highlight the adverse impacts of agriculture on farmland biodiversity. Balancing increased agricultural production along with biodiversity conservation is a critical global challenge, especially in India. Amphibians and reptiles face the greatest threats from agriculture. This perspective article highlights the need to conserve amphibian and reptile diversity in farmlands, presenting evidence of their decline and emphasizing their ecological importance. It calls for forward-looking research and policies to combat unprecedented biodiversity loss. Furthermore, I propose strategies aimed at redesigning agricultural landscapes to transition towards ecological intensification, thereby maintaining productivity and profitability while safeguarding biodiversity and regenerating rather than undermining the ecological processes that sustain food production. As agricultural intensification increases, it should be aligned with nature, leveraging biodiversity to sustain ecological functions rather than replacing them.