While the abolition of secondary school fees has expanded educational access across low-income countries, empirical research has focused predominantly on student outcomes and institutional or elite perspectives, overlooking how ordinary citizens perceive such reforms or the factors shaping those perceptions. This gap is especially salient in Ghana, where the Free SHS policy, arguably the most comprehensive in Sub-Saharan Africa, is both nationally lauded and politically contested. Drawing on policy feedback theory and deservingness heuristics, this article explores how Ghanaians interpret the policy’s goals, trade-offs, and implementation using a nationally representative sample of 1915 respondents. Latent Class Analysis reveals five classes, from Universal Access Champions down to Ambivalent Observers. A follow-up multinomial logistic regression shows that partisanship, education, civic engagement, and economic outlook significantly predict class membership. These findings highlight that sustaining support for large-scale reforms requires not just expanded access, but also public trust in their fairness and responsiveness.

We establish a relation between the continuity of the fiber entropy and the continuity of the fiber Lyapunov exponents for skew products with two-dimensional fibers. This result extends the theorem for surfaces proved by Buzzi, Crovisier, and Sarig. As a consequence, we are able to obtain classes of skew products that satisfy the strong positive recurrence property, in particular, these maps have finite number of measures of maximal entropy, all exponentially mixing with good statistical properties.

While modelling deterioration or ageing of devices, first-passage times of Markov processes play a significant role, especially when the devices are subject to shocks and wear during their operation. In view of this, obtaining sufficient conditions for first-passage times to belong to specific ageing families constitutes an important problem. There exists a rich literature dealing with this class of problems; see for example [11], [18], [35], [67]. We address the same problem in the context of some new ageing classes such as DMTTF (IMTTF), IMIT, and DRHR. In this connection, some issues in [11] have also been investigated. We wind up by including certain examples to highlight the practical relevance of the results.

We develop a topological framework for Engel expansions that treats both directions of the correspondence between points of $(0,1]$ and nondecreasing digit sequences. We endow the sequence space with the product topology to study the evaluation map, and we fix a nonterminating digit algorithm to study the digit coding map. We also record the correspondence between cylinder sets and fundamental intervals and give an application to Baire category results for functions of the digits.

In this article, a new triple-loop recurrent neural network and observer-based two-stage fast terminal sliding mode controller (TRNNO-TFTSMC) is proposed for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with nonlinear dynamics and external disturbances. The two-stage fast terminal sliding mode control scheme is designed to guarantee fast convergence of trajectory tracking within a finite time. In the architecture of the flight control system, the triple-loop recurrent neural network (TRNN) is designed to approximate the nonlinear dynamics, which include system uncertainties and known nominal terms. Furthermore, to mitigate the impact of external disturbances and the approximation error of TRNN on the performance of the control system, an observer is employed. Finally, the closed-loop stability of the quadrotor system is ensured based on Lyapunov theory, and the outperformance of the proposed flight control scheme is clearly demonstrated through a comparative study with other techniques.

Canids increased in cursoriality through the Cenozoic, as environments transitioned from closed-canopy forest to open grassland and steppe. Canids have evolved through a series of radiations since their origin in the Eocene, but it is unclear if cursorial adaptations appeared in the earliest of these radiations. In the middle Oligocene, the basal hesperocyonines ecologically diversified, and the coyote-sized Mesocyon coryphaeus exemplified the transition from smaller, omnivorous canids to larger, hypercarnivorous forms. M. coryphaeus is exclusively known from the John Day Formation of North America. Although M. coryphaeus is a relatively common fossil in this formation, first recognized in the late 19th century, no postcranial material from this species has ever been formally described. Here, we present a near-complete skeleton of M. coryphaeus, JODA 3366, which includes a complete cranium, near-complete presacral spine, all long bones, elements of both the manus and pes, and a baculum. The short, robust limbs, mobile elbow joint, and tarsal morphology of M. coryphaeus indicate that this species retained a plantigrade to semidigitigrade posture, similar to the earliest canid Hesperocyon, and lacked the cursorial adaptations found in more derived canids. Based on this morphology, we interpret M. coryphaeus as a terrestrial ambush predator, more similar to large mustelids than extant canids, likely hunting small prey like hypertragulids. Although the habitat of M. coryphaeus would have been cooler and more open than the dense closed-canopy forests of the Eocene, enough vegetation cover was still present in the Oligocene for ambush hunting to remain a successful strategy.

During the 1990s, the Conurbano, the vast urban area surrounding Buenos Aires, became the site of an innovative popular politics, as poor people responded to a deepening crisis provoked by neoliberalism with a new repertoire of collective action. At the same time, the Conurbano was also the site of a hugely popular music and dance scene, the so-called Movida Tropical. Breaking with interpretations that depict tropical music as explicitly apolitical, consumerist, even frivolous, this article argues that the Movida Tropical helped create the conditions that made possible a political culture of resistance to neoliberalism. The Movida constituted its participants as a counterpublic, a visible, audible collective whose joyful social interactions expressed opposition to dominant aesthetic hierarchies. Operating within the spaces afforded by neoliberalism’s contradictions, it embodied a working-class aesthetic that resisted appropriation, marginalization, and dismissal while revalorizing provincial roots and sparking new Latin American affiliations.

This paper examines the management of spiritual services in late medieval and early modern Europe through the case of the Monastery and Shrine of Guadalupe, one of the most prominent Marian pilgrimage destinations of the fifteenth century. After the Hieronymite Order assumed control in 1389, the monastery expanded into a diversified enterprise that encompassed agriculture, livestock, crafts, as well as charitable and spiritual services. We argue that this expansion resulted from three interrelated factors: the human capital accumulated within monastic management, the development of a recognizable spiritual brand centered on the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and its endorsement by the Order’s founding values and by the principal legal authorities of the time—the Church and, more decisively, the Spanish Monarchy. The paper thus contributes to scholarship by identifying early forms of branding and endorsement, and highlighting the role of spiritual services in the consolidation of monastic economies.

We investigate explicit extreme values of the argument of the Riemann zeta-function in short intervals. As an application, we improve the result of Conrey and Turnage–Butterbaugh concerning r-gaps between zeros of the Riemann zeta-function.

This article brings Cotterrell’s legal concept of community based on trust-based interactions in social life to expand the critical horizons of economic sociology of law (ESL) in its analytical, normative and empirical aspects for law and development in Africa. Dominant law and economics approaches sometimes see informal economic activity as an aberration and/or an obstacle in development. This article proposes an alternative way of looking at informality in development in Africa through the lens of ESL. As part of wider social life, economic life is about social interactions in production, exchange, distribution and consumption while legal life is about social relations in and under the law. Furthermore, ‘legal and economic life shape and are shaped by each other, as well as by the wider social, and more-than-human, world’. This calls for a framework that reconceptualises law in ways that are inclusive of the many state, social, economic and other normative orders such as informal economic activity in African societies that are continually interacting as part of wider social life.