Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real-world experimental benchmarks. Leveraging exact ties in personal votes in local elections in Colombia and Finland, which are resolved by a random lottery, we assess the performance of various estimators featuring different polynomial degrees, bias-correction methods, optimal bandwidths, and approaches to statistical inference. Using re-running and re-election as outcomes, we document only minor differences in the performance of the various implementation approaches when the conditional expectation function (CEF) of the outcomes in the vicinity of the discontinuity is close to linear. When approximating the curvature of the CEF is more challenging, bias-corrected and robust inference with coverage-error-rate-optimal bandwidths comes closer to the experimental benchmark than more widely used alternative implementations.

The bank vole (Clethrionomys glareolus (Schreber, 1780)) is the dominant species in the primary fir-spruce forests of the Visim State Biosphere Reserve in the Middle Urals. Here, we studied the long-term population dynamics of small mammals and infection rates with cestode larvae (Cestoida) of bank voles from 1995 to 2021. In addition to the traditionally studied risk factors of parasite infection (e.g., age and sex, phase of population cycle of the host), we assessed the possible influence of the intermediate host population dynamics by contrasting parts of the time series with regular 3-year cyclicity and noncyclic regime. The overall risk of larval cestode infections was 5.0% (95% CI: 4–6%, Ninfected = 97, Ntotal = 1938). The infection rate was associated with the animals’ age and, unexpectedly, with the intermediate host population dynamics regime. The odds of finding cestode larvae in overwintered individuals were 4.3 times (2.8–6.6) higher than in young of the year, and in the noncyclic regime, the odds were 2.3 times (1.5–3.5) higher than in the 3-year cyclicity regime. No statistically significant higher risk of infection was found for males compared to females as the infection rate was only 1.4 times (0.9–2.1, ≈ 1) higher. The higher infection rates of overwintered individuals were as expected for individuals associated with longer exposure to the invasive parasite stages. We hypothesised that the noncyclic regime in long-term fluctuations of rodent numbers better resonates with the characteristic period of the cestodes’ life cycle, resulting in higher infection rates.

Rules of origin under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement constitute a vital trade instrument that forestalls freeriding by ensuring that only originating products and services benefit from preferential treatment within the free trade area. Functional rules of origin in design and implementation foster the sourcing of value content by producers, manufacturers and enterprises within Africa in accordance with the governing treaty. The sourcing of value content by producers, manufacturers and enterprises within Africa promotes economic activities, measured industrialization and socio-economic development. While the AfCFTA Agreement recognizes the capacities of both rules of origin and regional value chains, each standing alone or acting in a complementary manner to promote African development, a successful outcome will be determined by a critical adjustment that improves capacity and capability. Arguably, state parties to the AfCFTA Agreement should implement strategies for upscaling preference utilization and value chain growth, infrastructural investment and interventions that stimulate value chain trade.

In his “lost notebook,” Ramanujan used iterated derivatives of two theta functions to define sequences of q-series $\{U_{2t}(q)\}$ and $\{V_{2t}(q)\}$ that he claimed to be quasimodular. We give the first explicit proof of this claim by expressing them in terms of “partition Eisenstein series,” extensions of the classical Eisenstein series $E_{2k}(q),$ defined by

$$ \begin{align*}\lambda=(1^{m_1}, 2^{m_2},\dots, n^{m_n}) \vdash n \ \ \ \longmapsto \ \ \ E_{\lambda}(q):= E_2(q)^{m_1} E_4(q)^{m_2}\cdots E_{2n}(q)^{m_n}. \end{align*} $$

For functions $\phi : \mathcal {P}\mapsto {\mathbb C}$ on partitions, the weight $2n$ partition Eisenstein trace is

$$ \begin{align*}\operatorname{\mathrm{Tr}}_n(\phi;q):=\sum_{\lambda \vdash n} \phi(\lambda)E_{\lambda}(q). \end{align*} $$

For all t, we prove that $U_{2t}(q)=\operatorname {\mathrm {Tr}}_t(\phi _U;q)$ and $V_{2t}(q)=\operatorname {\mathrm {Tr}}_t(\phi _V;q),$ where $\phi _U$ and $\phi _V$ are natural partition weights, giving the first explicit quasimodular formulas for these series.

Fragment answers involve a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions and these answers can be hosted by the negator not (e.g. What was his motive? Not money). The central research questions for such a negative fragment answer concern what licenses the fragment, how we can obtain a sentential meaning from its non-sentential status and what its syntactic structure is. In attempting to answer these questions, there have been two main approaches: deletion-based sentential approaches and surface-oriented, direct interpretation (DI) approaches. This article first discusses attested data of such negated fragment answers that could challenge both directions and argues for a direct interpretation approach in which the interpretation of negative fragments is achieved by discourse machinery. The suggested approach shows that once we have a system that represents structured discourse structures, we could have straightforward mapping relations from a negated fragment answer to its proper propositional meaning.

This article focuses on two fragmentary constructions in English: why-fragments (WFs), such as Why (deal with) why-fragments?, and Mad Magazine sentences (MMs), such as (Me) paint the house purple? While both types can be equivalent in meaning to their corresponding fully fledged interrogative sentences, they can also be used to convey a specific nuance of scepticism regarding a particular proposition. To explore the specific nuance enriching the canonical interpretation (i.e. equivalent to that of the corresponding complete questions) of WFs and MMs, and their potential constructionalisation in contemporary English, two corpus-based studies were conducted using data from the BNC1994 DS, Spoken BNC2014 and COCA. The results show that MMs seem to be fully constructionalised, while the significant trends attested for WFs indicate an ongoing process of constructionalisation, at least in contemporary British English. The evidence also shows that both may be classed as examples of an umbrella ‘Sceptical Small’ construction.

The Fourth Republic is Nigeria’s longest experience in democratic practice. It is a democracy founded upon the ideal of separation of powers; each branch checks the other two within defined boundaries. To act as an effective check on the political branches of government, the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, is built around structures that guarantee its independence. This article assesses the Supreme Court of Nigeria’s use of discretion within this web and argues that the court now inevitably allows powerful actors to bank on its legitimacy and induce it to overstretch its competence to satisfy their individual policy and political preferences. This trend, the article finds, is antithetical to the concept of judicial independence. A court’s independence is not only apparent when it is able to do what it is meant to do but also when it is able to refrain from what it is not meant to do.

The realities of the Anthropocene, from climate change to pandemics to plastics, necessitate substantially different ways of understanding what it means to act in the world today. In response, feminist scholars within the field of new materialism have attempted to rethink the nature of agency and action. This article focuses on two unresolved challenges with their framework: first, it lacks a way to make distinctions or draw boundaries between different entities and actors and, second, it simplifies the relationship between ontology and ethics, implying that an ontological transformation will lead to more ethical and just relationships with the more-than-human world. I argue that to address these challenges new materialism should look to ecofeminism, particularly the philosophy of Val Plumwood; this pairing is especially pertinent considering the often overlooked or downplayed genealogical connections between them. I also argue, however, that new materialism has something to offer Plumwood: its reconceptualization of agency better responds to contemporary circumstances in ways foreclosed by Plumwood’s more limited account. I conclude that a coalition between new materialism and ecofeminism—a new materialism supplemented and modified by aspects of Plumwood’s account—provides valuable conceptual tools with which to respond to the Anthropocene condition.

Let $\mathbb{P}_\kappa(n)$ be the probability that n points $z_1,\ldots,z_n$ picked uniformly and independently in $\mathfrak{C}_\kappa$, a regular $\kappa$-gon with area 1, are in convex position, that is, form the vertex set of a convex polygon. In this paper, we compute $\mathbb{P}_\kappa(n)$ up to asymptotic equivalence, as $n\to+\infty$, for all $\kappa\geq 3$, which improves on a famous result of Bárány (Ann. Prob. 27, 1999). The second purpose of this paper is to establish a limit theorem which describes the fluctuations around the limit shape of an n-tuple of points in convex position when $n\to+\infty$. Finally, we give an asymptotically exact algorithm for the random generation of $z_1,\ldots,z_n$, conditioned to be in convex position in $\mathfrak{C}_\kappa$.

A balanced growth path that accounts for a decline in hours worked per worker approximates the evolution of today’s industrialized countries since 1870. This stylized fact is explained in an overlapping generations (OLG) model featuring two-period lived individuals equipped with per-period utility functions of the generalized log-log type proposed by Boppart and Krusell (2020) and a neoclassical production sector. Technological progress drives real wages up and expands the amount of consumption goods. The value of leisure increases, and the supply of hours worked declines. Technological progress moves a poor economy out of a regime with low wages and an inelastic supply of hours worked into a regime with high wages and a declining supply of hours worked. The balanced growth path is unique and stable. In the high wage regime, the equilibrium difference equation is available in closed form. A balanced growth path with declining hours worked may also be obtained with endogenous technological progress as in Romer (1986).

Let G be a compact group, let $\mathcal {B}$ be a unital C$^*$-algebra, and let $(\mathcal {A},G,\alpha )$ be a free C$^*$-dynamical system, in the sense of Ellwood, with fixed point algebra $\mathcal {B}$. We prove that $(\mathcal {A},G,\alpha )$ can be realized as the G-continuous part of the invariants of an equivariant coaction of G on a corner of $\mathcal {B} \otimes {\mathcal {K}}({\mathfrak {H}})$ for a certain Hilbert space ${\mathfrak {H}}$ that arises from the freeness of the action. This extends a result by Wassermann for free and ergodic C$^*$-dynamical systems. As an application, we show that any faithful $^*$-representation of $\mathcal {B}$ on a Hilbert space ${\mathfrak {H}}_{\mathcal {B}}$ gives rise to a faithful covariant representation of $(\mathcal {A},G,\alpha )$ on some truncation of ${\mathfrak {H}}_{\mathcal {B}} \otimes {\mathfrak {H}}$.

Scholarship on brewing in early modern London is torn between two irreconcilable stories, one positing stunning growth before 1560 and the other insignificant change until after 1720. Careful attention to company and court records as well as state papers, however, reveals that by 1600 London brewing had boomed, likely making it Europe’s largest brewing centre, led by individual houses operating on scales close to the largest of the mid-eighteenth century. Such breweries were accurately perceived to be large scale and highly profitable, clustered along the Thames in urban industrial zones.

We present a 15-year retrospective study comparing the epidemiology of Parkinson’s disease (PD) between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in the Greater Toronto Area. A cohort of 88 patients with PD revealed that Chinese patients (N = 36) had a significantly lower mean age at diagnosis (67.3 ± 12.6 years) compared to non-Chinese patients (72.1 ± 9.2 years) (p = 0.039). Higher obesity rates were found in non-Chinese patients (p = 0.0004). Chinese patients experienced more motor fluctuations (p = 0.028) and amantadine use (p = 0.041). These findings underscore the importance of future research on ethnic variations in PD.

This article examines fragment sentences and imperative clauses in carefully edited journalistic writing, specifically in editorials of The Economist. Fragments (e.g. What to do?) and imperatives (e.g. Take spending cuts as an example) share formal and functional properties, such as being shorter than canonical clauses and typically having non-truth-conditional semantics. As demonstrated in our analysis, both sentence types tend to appear prominently within a paragraph, typically at the beginning or the end. Additionally, within the entire editorial, they are often found in the second paragraph, where the writer presents a contrasting view from the opening paragraph, or in the concluding paragraph. This article argues for considering stylistic properties in the characterisation of grammatical constructions.

Typically, the fuselage of a modern military aircraft is designed in such a way that the propulsion system is integrated into it. The main reasons are reduction of installation space and minimisation of radar signature. Those requirements can be achieved by using highly bent engine intakes, which are occluding a direct line of sight to the compressor system. Depending on their design, secondary flows and flow separation can be expected due to the strong curvature of the intake system. In this study, a serpentine intake in front of the Larzac 04 test engine is investigated experimentally and its performance compared with and without flow stabilising measures. In detail, a configuration with vortex generators was compared experimentally with a configuration of active flow control by injected air. In order to analyse and compare the efficiency of both systems, the dimensionless total pressure coefficient, the distortion coefficient (DC60) and detailed surface pressure distributions as well as the aerodynamic interface plane are evaluated. In addition, different throttle lines were recorded for surge line evaluation of the low pressure compressor of the Larzac engine and compared for each flow-stabilising measure investigated. It was found that the application of injecting air showed a larger improvement in surge margin and reduction in distortion coefficients compared to the passive flow control.

This work focuses on a pattern of tonal alternation that is intertwined with a pattern of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin. In the language, verbs are reduplicated to iconically express iteration. To convey that the iterated event occurs in an irregular or dispersive manner, the verb bears a low tone (L) on all its tone-bearing units (TBU), while the reduplicant bears a high tone (H) on all its TBUs. The resulting L-H tonal melody is considered the exponent of an irregular marker, while the intertwined reduplication is considered the exponent of an iteration marker. Due to the similarity between the exponent of the irregular marker and the iconic tonal melody of ideophones that express the semantic notions of irregularity across languages, the form-meaning mapping of the irregular marker is regarded as a grammaticalised form of the tone melody in the substrate ideophones. This suggests that ideophones can contribute to the emergence and expansion of grammar, as well as the typology of grammatical tone. Considering that perceptual resemblance between linguistic structures and the structural components of real-world elements is the basis of iconicity, the pattern of tonal alternation in Nigerian Pidgin suggests that the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory is not purely phonetic and phonological but also includes the crossmodal perception of sensory imagery.

In this paper, we designa robust Successive Generalised Dynamic Inversion (SGDI) flight control system for high-performance trajectory tracking of target sun-synchronous orbit Satellite Launch Vehicles (SLVs). The robust SGDI control system is designed to track an optimal reference trajectory such that the desired orbital terminal conditions of the ascent flight phase are achieved. The proposed SGDI is composed of two loops. The attitude control loop employs Dynamically Scaled Generalised Inversion (DSGI) of Servo Constraint Dynamics (SVD) in the deviations of Euler attitude angles from their desired optimal trajectories. The inner-dynamics control loop employs DSGI of an SVD in the SLV angular velocity components. Robustification control elements are augmented within the two loops of the baseline SGDI control system to overcome control performance degradation due to dynamic scaling of the Moore-Penrose generalised inverse, modeling and parametric uncertainties, and exogenous disturbances. The robust SGDI control system works to enforce global convergence of the SLV attitude trajectories to the reference trajectories. The high-performance attributes of the robust SGDI control system are verified via comparisons with a classical sliding mode control system, and by performing numerous runs of Monte Carlo simulations under various types of uncertainties and external wind disturbances.