For a given graph $H$, we say that a graph $G$ has a perfect $H$-subdivision tiling if $G$ contains a collection of vertex-disjoint subdivisions of $H$ covering all vertices of $G.$ Let $\delta _{\mathrm {sub}}(n, H)$ be the smallest integer $k$ such that any $n$-vertex graph $G$ with minimum degree at least $k$ has a perfect $H$-subdivision tiling. For every graph $H$, we asymptotically determined the value of $\delta _{\mathrm {sub}}(n, H)$. More precisely, for every graph $H$ with at least one edge, there is an integer $\mathrm {hcf}_{\xi }(H)$ and a constant $1 \lt \xi ^*(H)\leq 2$ that can be explicitly determined by structural properties of $H$ such that $\delta _{\mathrm {sub}}(n, H) = \left (1 - \frac {1}{\xi ^*(H)} + o(1) \right )n$ holds for all $n$ and $H$ unless $\mathrm {hcf}_{\xi }(H) = 2$ and $n$ is odd. When $\mathrm {hcf}_{\xi }(H) = 2$ and $n$ is odd, then we show that $\delta _{\mathrm {sub}}(n, H) = \left (\frac {1}{2} + o(1) \right )n$.

In 1206 Chinggis Khan replaced the warring factions of Mongolia with a single polity, the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Mongqol Ulus). The ulus was ruled by a khan, who allocated pastures, households and revenues to his relatives as shares (qubi). Chinggis granted the first allocation to his brothers and senior sons in 1207 but many more redistributions took place in the coming decades. Many of these appanages grew so large that their holders challenged the khan's dominance and even broke free of his control to form their own polities (uluses). This article will explore the fluidity of the Mongol appanage system by taking the qubi of Chinggis Khan's grandson Ariq Böke (d. 1266) as a case study. The Ariq Bökids established their own secondary ulus in Inner Asia, before fragmenting and lending their support to neighbouring khans in the fourteenth century.

We consider equational theories based on axioms for recursively defining functions, with rules for equality and substitution, but no form of induction—we denote such equational theories as PETS for pure equational theories with substitution. An example is Cook’s system PV without its rule for induction. We show that the Bounded Arithmetic theory $\mathrm {S}^{1}_2$ proves the consistency of PETS. Our approach employs model-theoretic constructions for PETS based on approximate values resembling notions from domain theory in Bounded Arithmetic, which may be of independent interest.

This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Michael Otsuka’s book, How to Pool Risk Across Generations. Following Otsuka, one may distinguish three distinct systems of cooperation within a standard pension arrangement: the retirement system, the longevity risk pool and the investment risk pool. It is important to observe, however, that only the retirement system constitutes a genuine system of intergenerational cooperation, the other two are essentially intragenerational, in that they pool risks among members of a cohort. Otsuka is faulted for being occasionally less than clear on these distinctions.

Michael Otsuka argues that collective pension schemes are forms of social cooperation on equal terms for mutual advantage and thus, matters of social justice. In this way Otsuka wants to understand collectively funded pensions in Rawlsian terms. I argue that not all forms of social cooperation are the same and that the specific kind of social cooperation Rawls has in mind is, in at least three central respects, different from the kind of social cooperation involved in the collective pension schemes Otsuka describes.

To clarify the effects of kefir in critical periods of development in adult diseases, we study the effects of kefir intake during early life on gut microbiota and prevention of colorectal carcinogenesis in adulthood. Lactating Wistar rats were divided into three groups: control (C), kefir lactation (KL), and kefir puberty (KP) groups. The C and KP groups received 1 mL of water/day; KL dams received kefir milk daily (108 CFU/mL) during lactation. After weaning (postnatal day 21), KP pups received kefir treatment until 60 days. At 67 days old, colorectal carcinogenesis was induced through intraperitoneal injection of 1, 2-dimethylhydrazine. The gut microbiota composition were analyzed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing and DESeq2 (differential abundance method), revealing significant differences in bacterial abundances between the kefir consumption periods. Maternal kefir intake strong anticancer power, suppressed tumors in adult offspring and reduced the relative risk of offspring tumor development. The gut microbiota in cecal samples of the KL group was enriched with Lactobacillus, Romboutsia, and Blautia. In contrast, control animals were enriched with Acinetobacter. The administration of kefir during critical periods of development, with emphasis on lactation, affected the gut microbial community structure to promote host benefits. Pearson analysis indicated positive correlation between tumor number with IL-1 levels. Therefore, the probiotic fermented food intake in early life may be effective as chemopreventive potential against colon tumor development, especially in lactation period.

With the development of radiocarbon dating methods in the last decade, the Andean archaeological community has successfully leaned into the problem of the chronology of the expansion of the Inca State. While this chronology was based on ethnohistorical accounts (Rowe 1945), it has been possible to verify its foundations precisely in the last decade. The results from the Maucallacta region are part of these discussions and are intended to add new data from the Inca province of Kuntisuyu, which was neglected in this debate until now. The project encompasses archaeological investigations near the snow-covered volcano Coropuna, frequently mentioned by chroniclers of the 16th and 17th centuries as an oracle worshiped since pre-Inca times. This includes a large complex known as Maucallacta-Pampacolca, located approximately 170 km northwest of Arequipa in the southern highlands of Peru, within the District of Pampacolca, Province of Castilla, Department of Arequipa (LS; 3750 m asl). Due to its location, it holds a unique relationship with the Coropuna landscape. The site is a vast administrative center featuring over three hundred stone buildings, tombs, and ceremonial structures. Among them, the most important is the large ceremonial platform with ushnu and the dumps deposited beneath it. The analysis of ceramics and animal bones, combined with stratigraphic analysis and the results of new calibrations and interpretations of radiocarbon dates, provides a comprehensive picture of the formation and use of ceremonial dumps at the site, making them one of the most thoroughly examined collections in this regard.

An important strand of argument in Alastair Norcross's Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands is the rejection of the standard account of harm, which underwrites non-comparative statements of the form “act A harms person X.” According to Norcross, the correct account of harm is a contextualist one that only underwrites comparative statements of the form “act A results in a worse world for X than alternative act B, and a better world than alternative act C.” This article criticizes Norcross's contextualist account and his rejection of the standard account. It follows that moral theorists of all kinds should not be deterred by Norcross's arguments from continuing to rely on the standard account and using it to non-comparatively categorize some acts as harmings.

All biochemical reactions directly involve structural changes that may occur over a very wide range of timescales from femtoseconds to seconds. Understanding the mechanism of action thus requires determination of both the static structures of the macromolecule involved and short-lived intermediates between reactant and product. This requires either freeze-trapping of intermediates, for example by cryo-electron microscopy, or direct determination of structures in active systems at near-physiological temperature by time-resolved X-ray crystallography. Storage ring X-ray sources effectively cover the time range down to around 100 ps that reveal tertiary and quaternary structural changes in proteins. The briefer pulses emitted by hard X-ray free electron laser sources extend that range to femtoseconds, which covers critical chemical reactions such as electron transfer, isomerization, breaking of covalent bonds, and ultrafast structural changes in light-sensitive protein chromophores and their protein environment. These reactions are exemplified by the time-resolved X-ray studies by two groups of the FAD-based DNA repair enzyme, DNA photolyase, over the time range from 1 ps to 100 μs.

This article examines the role played by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino as a kind of cultural laboratory for experiments in operatic staging in 1930s Italy. Founded in 1933, Florence's opera and arts festival was a key testing ground for ‘modern’ approaches both to set and costume design and to opera direction, two areas in which northern Europe (especially Germany) is normally held to have led the way, and through which the Maggio helped to reinvent Italian mise-en-scène as an act of independent, artistic creation. Setting the festival's overall project in the context of 1930s aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural debates about theatre, opera, and cinema, and drawing on a rich archive of as-yet-unexplored primary source materials, the article retraces an intellectual and cultural history of Italian staging c. 1930 that resonates productively with several present-day critical and scholarly concerns: from changing attitudes to the nineteenth-century operatic canon, to the early stirrings of Regietheater, to the intertwining histories of opera and film.

A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.

The enhancement of jet engine components may result in the expansion of the established design space. In particular, the trend towards short and therefore highly aggressive inter compressor ducts (ICD) extends the traditional design space. The potential for fuel savings resulting from a reduction in engine weight is in contrast to the emergence of a more complex flow field. Many studies consider the secondary flow system of highly aggressive ICDs at the design point, but there is a lack of off-design considerations. To fill this gap, the present study investigates in detail the off-design performance of the new German Aerospace Center (DLR) test case. Firstly, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of different typical operating points allow detailed considerations of the flow field under off-design conditions. Secondly, a variation of the inlet conditions describes the sensitivity of highly aggressive ICDs to different low-pressure compressor operating points. Finally, the comparison of the CFD stagnation pressure loss with the loss predicted by a preliminary off-design method validates the use of traditional off-design prediction during the preliminary design of highly aggressive ICDs.

The Participation Opportunities Act (POA) came into force in Germany in January 2019 with the aim of making publicly subsidised employment accessible to the long-term unemployed, whose prospects of regular employment are poor. The POA responds to a two-fold exclusion suffered by this group: exclusion from the labour market and a kind of ‘internal exclusion’ from social services. We argue that the POA can therefore be understood as a ‘policy of dignity’ and thus as a challenge to the neoliberal recognition order. The aim of this paper is an empirical examination of this thesis based on qualitative interviews with managers and professionals at German job centres. We apply Honneth’s theory of recognition as a theoretical framework and examine two levels of implementation: the interpretation of the law and how it is put into practice from 2019-2023.

We use instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama 3, MiXtral, or Aya to position political texts within policy and ideological spaces. We ask an LLM where a tweet or a sentence of a political text stands on the focal dimension and take the average of the LLM responses to position political actors such as US Senators, or longer texts such as UK party manifestos or EU policy speeches given in 10 different languages. The correlations between the position estimates obtained with the best LLMs and benchmarks based on text coding by experts, crowdworkers, or roll call votes exceed .90. This approach is generally more accurate than the positions obtained with supervised classifiers trained on large amounts of research data. Using instruction-tuned LLMs to position texts in policy and ideological spaces is fast, cost-efficient, reliable, and reproducible (in the case of open LLMs) even if the texts are short and written in different languages. We conclude with cautionary notes about the need for empirical validation.

We give a complete combinatorial classification of the parabolic Verma modules in the principal block of the parabolic category $\mathcal{O}$ associated with a minimal or a maximal parabolic subalgebra of the special linear Lie algebra for which the answer to Kostant’s problem is positive.

Understanding protein fermentation in the hindgut of pigs is essential due to its implications for health, and ileal digesta is commonly used to study this process in vitro. This study aimed to assess the feasibility of utilising in vitro digested residues as a replacement for ileal digesta in evaluating the protein fermentation potential. In vitro residues from cottonseed meal, maize germ meal, peanut meal, rapeseed cake, rapeseed meal, soyabean meal and sunflower meal were analysed using a modified gas production (GP) technique and curve fitting model to determine their fermentation dynamics and compare with the use of ileal digesta. Significant variations were observed in GP parameters between in vitro digested residues, indicating differences in nitrogen utilisation by fecal microbiota. Soyabean meal and sunflower meal exhibited the highest maximum GP rates (Rmax), with values of 29·5 ± 0·6 and 28·0 ± 1·2 ml/h, respectively, while maize germ meal showed slowest protein utilisation (17·3 ± 0·2 ml/h). A positive relationship was found between the Rmax of in vitro residues and ileal digesta (R2 = 0·85, P < 0·01). However, GP potential (GPs) showed a tendency for a negative relationship (R2 = 0·39, P < 0·1), likely due to narrow observed GPs values and the presence of varied endogenous proteins in ileal digesta. Our results demonstrate the potential of using in vitro digested residues as a substitute for ileal digesta in assessing the fermentation potential of protein ingredients, particularly regarding the rate of protein fermentation.