Understanding the processes that allow phylogenetically related plant species coexist is important to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that structure biological communities. In this study, we investigated how the species Erythroxylum simonis, Erythroxylum pauferrense and Erythroxylum citrifolium share ecological niche dimensions according to the abiotic characteristics of their environments of occurrence. To this end, in ten pre-established plots in an Atlantic Forest remnant in northeastern Brazil, we carried out a population survey of the three species and characterised their abiotic niche by measuring light availability, humidity and the physical–chemical properties of the soil. We used generalised linear models to test whether abiotic variables influence species abundance. Our results indicate that the three species coexist along the different environmental gradients, with some level of niche overlap. The species E. simonis is the best competitor, showing generalist behaviour and the highest abundance in all environmental gradients. We emphasise that the adult populations of the species have adapted to various environmental and ecological challenges. Thus, the results reported are influenced by their ability to perform well in terms of physiology, growth and survival in their early-life stages.

This paper examines two responses to the global constitutional crises in the twentieth century, with a focus on a comparison between Carl Schmitt, a notorious German political theorist and critic of liberal constitutionalism and Zhang Junmai, a constitutionalist in Republican China. After the First World War, both Germany and China experienced constitutional crises, which prompted critical reflections among intellectuals. My paper is the first to discover and examine the latent element of Carl Schmitt in Zhang Junmai’s acceptance of the Weimar Constitution. My research shows that Zhang’s 1930 article, “Hugo Preuss (Author of the New German Constitution), His Concept of the State and His Position in the History of German Political Theory” (德國新憲起草者柏呂斯之國家觀念及其在德國政治學說史上之地位) is his Chinese translation of Carl Schmitt’s 1930 article, “Hugo Preuss: His Concept of the State and His Position in German State Theory” (“Hugo Preuss: Sein Staatsbegriff und seine Stellung in der deutschen Staatslehre”). Instead of simply regarding Zhang’s writing as plagiarism, my paper interrogates the gaps between Carl Schmitt’s original text and Zhang’s translation. By examining the intertextual relation between Carl Schmitt and Zhang Junmai, this paper reveals a latent aspect of the spectrum of Constitutionalism in the twentieth century and shows a special dialogue between a German critic of constitutionalism and a Chinese constitutionalist.

Law enforcement institutions in India are undergoing fundamental media technological transformations, integrating digital media technologies into crime investigation, documentation, and presentation methods. This article seeks to understand these transformations by examining the curious case of 65-B certificates, a mandatory paper document that gatekeeps and governs the life of new media objects as evidence in the Indian legal system. In exploring the tensions that arise when bureaucratic institutions change their means of information production, the article reflects on the continued stubborn presence of paper at this transformative juncture in the life of legal institutions. By studying the role of paper in bureaucratic practices, analyzing jurisprudential debates and case law surrounding 65-B certificates, and thinking through some scattered ethnographic encounters around these certificates involving police officers, forensic scientists, and practicing lawyers, this article argues that despite ongoing digital transformations, law essentially remains a technology of paper.

Let P be a pointed, closed convex cone in $\mathbb {R}^d$. We prove that for two pure isometric representations $V^{(1)}$ and $V^{(2)}$ of P, the associated CAR flows $\beta ^{V^{(1)}}$ and $\beta ^{V^{(2)}}$ are cocycle conjugate if and only if $V^{(1)}$ and $V^{(2)}$ are unitarily equivalent. We also give a complete description of pure isometric representations of P with commuting range projections that give rise to type I CAR flows. We show that such an isometric representation is completely reducible with each irreducible component being a pullback of the shift semigroup $\{S_t\}_{t \geq 0}$ on $L^2[0,\infty )$. We also compute the index and the gauge group of the associated CAR flows and show that the action of the gauge group on the set of normalized units need not be transitive.

Drawing from Erving Goffman's seminal work on face-to-face interaction, this article introduces the concepts of digital face-work and the digital interaction in order to make sense of digital interaction. The theoretical framework emphasizes the sociotechnical aspects of face-work, portraying digital platforms not merely as spaces for interaction but as active participants co-shaping users’ face-work. Focusing on the political arena, the study examines how politicians use digital platforms to construct and maintain their digital face in relation to ‘small scandals’. Through a case study of Flemish nationalist politician, Theo Francken, trying to save face after a scandal erupted, it illustrates the complexities of digital face-work in a hybrid media system. The article underscores the challenges of managing face in the digital landscape, where context collapse and platform directives complicate self-presentation strategies. It also explores the interplay between individual agency and platform dynamics in shaping the digital interaction order. (Digital face, digital interaction order, political scandals, small scandals)

A 16-year-old male with newly diagnosed granulomatosis with polyangiitis presented to the emergency room with chest pain. He was found to have a myocardial infarction involving the right coronary artery and the left circumflex artery. He underwent mechanical thrombectomy and stent placement without significant sequelae. This is a rare complication associated with granulomatosis with polyangiitis.

In Canada in 2021, people with non-life-limiting health conditions and disabilities became eligible for medical assistance in dying (MAiD). New legislative safeguards include a ninety-day assessment period and a requirement that health professionals engage with the person requesting MAiD about ‘means available to relieve their suffering’ (MARS). Government communications about the MARS safeguards emphasise distinct policy objectives, that we illustrate by analysing two texts. We then report on an ongoing study with health professionals involved in MAiD. In interviews, participants described supporting patients to imagine possibilities for feeling differently, creatively devising interventions, and actively connecting patients with (and in some cases bringing about) services and resources. Drawing on literature on front-line policy making we show how discourses of expert communication, care, and advocacy animate a specific translation of the MARS safeguards, one that recognises social and relational as well as deliberative autonomy, and reflects a range of MAiD policy goals.

The collapse of the three empires governing divided Poland after the First World War left thousands of imperial civil servants out of work and forced to recalibrate their political affiliations. Those who did not flee with retreating armies faced a rigorous filtration process that screened them for loyalty, stressing their commitment to ‘Polishness’. This article argues that despite what has been characterised as a nationalising state, the early years of the Polish Second Republic witnessed a negotiated filtration process, in which functionaries demonstrated their commitment to Poland by appealing to a combination of non-national characteristics, including ties to locale, to professional acumen, and to the civil service in general. Officials who were not ethnically Polish thus succeeded in retaining their positions in the government hierarchy. This surprising outcome of post-imperial vetting suggests that lingering elements of respect for national difference continued to resonate in postwar Poland and that pressure for an ethnically pure nation-state was far from universal.

We study a version of the stochastic control problem of minimizing the sum of running and controlling costs, where control opportunities are restricted to independent Poisson arrival times. Under a general setting driven by a general Lévy process, we show the optimality of a periodic barrier strategy, which moves the process upward to the barrier whenever it is observed to be below it. The convergence of the optimal solutions to those in the continuous-observation case is also shown.

The nutritional environment during fetal and early postnatal life has a long-term impact on growth, development, and metabolic health of the offspring, a process termed “nutritional programming.” Rodent models studying programming effects of nutritional interventions use either purified or grain-based rodent diets as background diets. However, the impact of these diets on phenotypic outcomes in these models has not been comprehensively investigated. We used a previously validated (C57BL/6J) mouse model to investigate the effects of infant milk formula (IMF) interventions on nutritional programming. Specifically, we investigated the effects of maternal diet type (i.e., grain-based vs purified) during early lactation and prior to the intervention on offspring growth, metabolic phenotype, and gut microbiota profile. Maternal exposure to purified diet led to an increased post-weaning growth velocity in the offspring and reduced adult diet-induced obesity. Further, maternal exposure to purified diet reduced the offspring gut microbiota diversity and modified its composition post-weaning. These data not only reinforce the notion that maternal nutrition significantly influences the programming of offspring vulnerability to an obesogenic diet in adulthood but emphasizes the importance of careful selection of standard background diet type when designing any preclinical study with (early life) nutritional interventions.

Is the era of the reference book coming to an end? Publishers evidently don't think so. Not only have we seen an explosion in the number of handbooks, companions and dictionaries produced by the mainstream academic press in recent years, but even older, well-established ‘brands’ continue to flourish. Here is the fourth edition of Oxford University Press's ‘flagship’ Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC), considerably expanded and revised from the third edition. Yet although libraries continue to buy works such as this, and academic colleagues to use them and refer to them, students often – if my experience is anything to go by – prefer the easier, cheaper, faster route of online sourcing, and particularly Wikipedia. A review of this edition of the ODCC has to reckon, then, not only with evaluating the content of the work itself, but, more sharply than perhaps was necessary before, with the questions of who exactly is likely to use it, and how it stands up in comparison with the competition.

Let $2\leq p<\infty $ and X be a complex infinite-dimensional Banach space. It is proved that if X is p-uniformly PL-convex, then there is no nontrivial bounded Volterra operator from the weak Hardy space $\mathscr {H}^{\text {weak}}_p(X)$ to the Hardy space $\mathscr {H}^+_p(X)$ of vector-valued Dirichlet series. To obtain this, a Littlewood–Paley inequality for Dirichlet series is established.

This paper studies the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a school construction program in the early twentieth-century South. Using a new sample linking Social Security and census records, we find that exposure to Rosenwald schools raised Black women’s labor force participation and occupational standing in 1940; however, we find little evidence that Black men’s occupational standing significantly improved. Blacks made no discernible gains in jobs where they were underrepresented, while the gains they achieved were concentrated in jobs where they were commonly found. This suggests that the scope for Black occupational advancement was limited around 1940.

We give sufficient conditions for the essential spectrum of the Hermitian square of a class of Hankel operators on the Bergman space of the polydisc to contain intervals. We also compute the spectrum in case the symbol is a monomial.