In the realm of global governance, the unique status and authority of expertise have traditionally been associated with its claims to rely on science and its often-associated qualities of ‘neutrality’, ‘impartiality’, and ‘objectivity’. Policymakers and technocratic experts have widely resorted to these attributes to render their knowledge credible and authoritative. While such claims to scientificity remain significant, we contend that contemporary global governance increasingly relies on alternative practices to confer knowledge its expert status. Global sites of governance are nowadays engaging in a broader set of practices of knowledge production and packaging, which include participatory experiments, aesthetic performances, calls to the imagination, and repertoires of benevolence. Such practices of knowledge pluralization have largely been seen as positive and unproblematic moves. Without contesting the need to pluralize expertise, we argue that such practices are not inherently democratizing, but part of an evolving technocratic repertoire of governing. Our introduction is structured around four sections: 1) a justification for the issue and contribution to the literature on expertise in International Relations; 2) the conditions of possibility or ‘context’ of the pluralization of expertise; 3) a discussion of novel practices of knowledge authorization and of their politics; and 4) an outline of our main contributions.

Historically the United States uses both bilateral aid and influence over multilateral development finance to further its geopolitical objectives. Past studies explain the choice between these two instruments based on either a divided government effect or whether the recipient government is a traditional US ally (the dirty work hypothesis). We advance a theory explaining the bilateral/multilateral choice in terms of the confluence of these factors and test its predictions using United Nations Security Council voting, US bilateral aid flows, and World Bank lending. Results confirm theoretical expectations: higher bilateral aid goes to allies who support the United States in the Security Council but only when the US government is not divided and higher World Bank lending goes to non-allies who support the United States in the Security Council but only when the US government is divided. This detailed understanding of the link between domestic politics and governance in international organizations has important implications as the international order moves beyond a US-dominated system.

Although weight loss programmes encourage exercise alongside dietary changes, some patients use exercise to compensate for perceived overeating and/or binge eating. Unlike non-compensatory exercise (which is not tied to eating or calories), this type of compensatory exercise can precipitate disordered eating, weight cycling and weight gain. Research is needed to understand the risks of compensatory exercise in weight management, and to inform interventions promoting non-compensatory exercise.

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) play a crucial role in promoting compliance with international norms through fact-finding and on-site monitoring missions. Many of these missions take place in authoritarian regimes, which often employ various tactics to control and suppress critics both domestically and internationally. Yet, in some cases, authoritarian states permit IGO missions to operate with little or no interference and may even establish collaborative relationships in politically sensitive issue areas. This study examines this puzzle by asking why and when IGO on-site monitoring missions can persist and foster collaboration in authoritarian contexts, a dynamic I label a pragmatic partnership. Theoretically, I argue that two key conditions must be met for such partnerships to emerge: international pressure and the development of interpersonal trust. However, I also contend that these partnerships can generate contestation, risk legitimizing autocratic practices, and marginalize pro-democratic forces. Empirically, I illustrate my argument through an in-depth analysis of the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s monitoring mission on child labour and forced labour in Uzbekistan. Methodologically, I employ process tracing covering the period 2005–2022 and draw on multiple sources of evidence. While such partnerships can contribute to incremental compliance with international norms, I also show that they generate contestation, risk legitimizing autocratic practices, and may marginalize pro-democratic forces.

To address the limitation of maximum jump height constrained by the maximum torque of hip joint motors in bipedal wheeled robots during trajectory planning using the dual-mass linear spring model (DMLSM), this study aims to reduce the maximum required hip joint torque for achieving equivalent jump heights. Concurrently, reducing the maximum rotational speed of hip joint demanded by equivalent jumps is essential to minimize motor wear and enhance system stability. Building upon the dual-mass model, we propose a trajectory planning method based on hip joint motor state optimization (TPM-HJMSO). This method integrates a nonlinear spring model, cubic polynomial interpolation, and a min–max optimization approach with nonlinear constraints. Simulation results demonstrate two critical advances: TPM-HJMSO achieves 163.16% higher jump heights than the DMLSM under identical maximum hip torque constraints, while reducing maximum hip motor speed by 37.17% when attaining equivalent jump heights. These outcomes validate the method’s superior performance. Precise trajectory tracking is demonstrated through feedforward-plus-PD control in both Webots simulations and physical prototype experiments, verifying TPM-HJMSO’s effectiveness.

The spiral structure of interventional robots is widely utilized for vascular dredging procedures. Variations in the spiral structural parameters of these robots exert a significant impact on the hemodynamic parameters within the vessel during the interventional process; therefore, optimizing the design of these parameters constitutes a crucial prerequisite for ensuring safe diagnosis and treatment. Based on the bidirectional fluid-structure interaction (FSI) between pulsatile blood and elastic blood vessels, theoretical calculations and experimental measurements of the fluid velocity inside the vessel during robotic intervention were conducted. The results demonstrate that the trends and magnitudes of the calculated values are essentially consistent with those of the measured values. Furthermore, the range and variance methods in orthogonal design were applied to numerically investigate the effects of three key spiral parameters – spiral pitch, spiral groove depth, and thread profile – on hemodynamic and vascular parameters, including blood velocity, blood pressure, vascular wall shear stress, and vessel deformation. The findings indicate that spiral groove depth is the primary and most significant factor influencing blood velocity, blood pressure, and vessel deformation. In contrast, spiral pitch emerged as the main and critical factor affecting vascular wall shear stress. Meanwhile, thread profile is found to be a secondary factor with relatively minor impacts on all the aforementioned parameters. To achieve the objective of safe interventional diagnosis and treatment, it is recommended that the robot’s spiral structure be designed with a smaller spiral groove depth, a moderate spiral pitch, and a thread profile featuring strong cutting capability.

Rousseau’s civil religion in the Social Contract has been interpreted as either an authoritarian institution that reinforces the collectivist ideal of the Social Contract or as a non-coercive proposal aimed at promoting toleration. This article offers an alternative account that emphasizes popular sovereignty as both the source and object of civil religion. On this reading, civil religion is a democratic choice by a sovereign people of the kind of beliefs and behavior they want to collectively endorse and expect from each other. When established by the people, civil religion serves the higher function of exemplifying and preserving political freedom in a political community. Recognizing the popular roots of civil religion helps us to understand it as an essential condition for maintaining the body politic that Rousseau envisions in the Social Contract and an important component of his democratic thought.

Interest is growing in how relational ontologies and more-than-human design methodologies – so-called ‘entanglement’ theories – might inform digital music research. To what extent does the growing popularity of such theories portend a change in technical or musical practices versus putting new gloss on long-standing ideas? Can or should entanglement theories be distilled into concrete design frameworks? This paper starts from the opposite premise: rather than offering an unambiguous roadmap for designers, entanglement theories are at their most powerful in destabilising ideas and worldviews that have become so ingrained as to become invisible. In digital musical instrument (DMI) design, this barely visible infrastructure consists partly of an ecosystem of stable, context-agnostic concepts about music: analytical descriptors such as notes, pitches, onsets and gestures which get inverted into the building blocks of sound-producing technical systems. However, design is not as simple as inverted analysis. This paper argues that treating familiar musical concepts as authoritative is responsible for several long-standing conundrums facing DMI research. The paper juxtaposes ideas from entanglement literature with brief vignettes concerning instruments new and old, arguing that musical instruments enact the very concepts they take as pre-existing, and that everything about musical discourse and practice should remain up for grabs.

We introduce the relative Matsui spectrum, a new invariant associated with a stable infinity category equipped with an action. This construction generalizes both Balmer’s tensor triangular spectrum and Matsui’s triangular spectrum and provides a unified framework for classifying thick submodules. We establish its fundamental properties, including universality, comparisons with existing spectra and Stevenson’s support, fiberwise decomposition, and descent. Applications show that the relative Matsui spectrum recovers the underlying classical geometric spaces from categorical data in various settings: categories of perfect complexes of schemes, twisted derived categories, categories of singularities, and derived matrix factorization categories. Thus, the relative Matsui spectrum extends tensor triangular geometry beyond settings with a global tensor structure, while preserving geometric intuition.

In this paper, we construct an implementable algorithm that solves the conjugacy problem in twisted right-angled Artin groups (T-RAAGs). In certain cases, the complexity is known to be linear, by reducing the problem to the twisted conjugacy problem in RAAGs. We also show that T-RAAGs are biautomatic, providing an alternative solution to the conjugacy problem.

Although functional reasoning is ubiquitous in biology, and philosophers have concentrated intensely on theorizing function naturalistically, the measurement of function has largely been ignored. Given its centrality in life science practices, there is good reason to scrutinize functional measurement in detail. I undertake a preliminary analysis of this issue by focusing on the measurement of function in the context of biomechanics to make several observations (e.g., functioning is a complex organismal property that cannot be reduced to a single measured variable) and then draw out novel consequences for debates about biological function and philosophy of science discussions of measurement.

For the notion of degree of categoricity, we study an analogous notion for punctual structures. We show that such notions coincide for non-$\Delta _{1}^{0}$-categorical injection structures, and construct an example of a $\Delta _{1}^{0}$-categorical injection structure for which these notions differ. Additionally, we also show that in every non-zero c.e. Turing degree, there exists a PR-degree that is low for punctual isomorphism (to be defined), and also a PR-degree that is a degree of punctual categoricity.

Alisa Bokulich and Wendy Parker (2021) provide an account of data modeling they call the pragmatic-representational view (PR view). According to this view, data models are akin to theoretical models in that they should be evaluated based on their adequacy for particular purposes. In this paper, I present a challenge for the PR view. I argue that a separation between data generators and users can prevent adequacy-for-purpose from being a good evaluative tool. I analyze an example from microbiome bioinformatics to illustrate my critique of Bokulich and Parker’s view and then propose a tripartite disambiguation of the term ‘data model’.

Precision agriculture has significantly advanced in recent years and is now widely used to improve the quality and sustainability of agricultural products by applying the right treatment, in the right place, at the right time. This paper presents the development and testing of AGRIMARO.Q (AGRIcultural MAte RObot), a novel omnidirectional, three-wheeled robot designed for agricultural applications in structured environments such as greenhouses. The platform features a reconfigurable track-widening mechanism that enhances its versatility by allowing it to navigate crop rows of varying widths. The paper provides a detailed discussion of the robot’s design, focusing on the track adjustment system and steering wheel drive subsystems, as well as the kinematic model and low-level control systems. Then, experimental tests are presented to evaluate both the robot’s energy consumption and its behavior in executing certain trajectories, such as row traversal and inter-row transitions, in different terrain types, replicating typical greenhouse operations.