Conduct disorder is a psychological condition marked by persistent patterns of rule-breaking, aggression and disregard for societal norms. As pornography consumption becomes increasingly prevalent among young adults, concerns have emerged regarding its potential psychological and social implications. This study explores how pornography consumption may contribute to conduct disorder symptoms among young adults through an in-depth qualitative analysis. Using a case-study approach, four individuals with a history of frequent pornography consumption and behavioural issues linked to conduct disorder were selected. Data were collected through detailed interviews, focusing on their experiences, behavioural patterns and psychological effects. The analysis revealed that prolonged exposure to certain types of pornography was associated with increased impulsivity, aggression and rule-breaking tendencies. Participants also reported social and emotional challenges, further reinforcing conduct disorder symptoms. This study suggests that specific patterns of pornography consumption may play a role in the development or worsening of conduct disorder symptoms. Recognizing these behavioural links is crucial for creating effective prevention and intervention strategies, especially for young adults at risk of engaging in deviant or criminal behaviour.

Aircraft maintenance is a multifaceted process that requires highly skilled, qualified and experienced personnel. Effective maintenance processes optimise aircraft operational lifespan, minimise lifecycle costs and improve reliability by reducing the probability of unexpected maintenance events. The initial diagnostic phase relies on detailed visual inspections conducted by certified technicians. Following inspections, data assessment leads to the development of a comprehensive maintenance plan, along with the sourcing of necessary resources and spare parts. As the maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) sector transitions into the era of Industry 4.0, there is a growing emphasis on integrating data analytics and cyber-physical systems into maintenance practices. A key objective in this evolution is the adoption of robotic systems for inspection tasks. This shift requires the reconfiguration of formal inspection procedures to ensure compatibility with robotic operations. Moreover, it is critical to address the specific requirements of robotics and to incorporate smart hangar technologies that take advantage of real-time data to improve both efficiency and effectiveness in maintenance operations. This study provides a comprehensive review of the MRO landscape and maintenance checks, with a particular focus on robotic aircraft inspection systems, navigation and smart hangar infrastructure. The discussion concludes with an examination of defect detection methods using machine vision along with relevant metrics to compare with human performance.

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses.

The remote center of motion (RCM) mechanism is one of the key components of minimally invasive surgical robots. Nevertheless, the most widely used parallelogram-based RCM mechanism tends to have a large footprint, thereby increasing the risk of collisions between the robotic arms during surgical procedures. To solve this problem, this study proposes a compact RCM mechanism based on the coupling of three rotational motions realized by nonlinear transmission. Compared to the parallelogram-based RCM mechanism, the proposed design offers a smaller footprint, thereby reducing the risk of collisions between the robotic arms. To address the possible errors caused by the elasticity of the transmission belts, an error model is established for the transmission structure that includes both circular and non-circular pulleys. A prototype is developed to verify the feasibility of the proposed mechanism, whose footprint is further compared with that of the parallelogram-based RCM mechanism. The results indicate that our mechanism satisfies the constraints of minimally invasive surgery, provides sufficient stiffness, and exhibits a more compact design. The current study provides a new direction for the miniaturization design of robotic arms in minimally invasive surgical robots.

The social category of “youth” occupies liminal space with blurred boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Dominant modes of socio-legal inquiry into youth typically yield adult-centered, criminological accounts that place adult interests and perspectives at the core of their analyses, focusing ultimately on remedies to quell troubled adolescents and suppress disruptive delinquents. Youth-centered accounts, by contrast, locate young people as agents negotiating the contradictory expectations of adults and their institutions while forging socio-legal orders of their own making. This review essay draws from six key works on youth published over the past century—Kathryn Abrams’s Open Hand, Close Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State, James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education, Nikki Jones’s Beyond Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence, C. J. Pascoe’s, Nice Is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High, Forrest Stuart’s The Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy, and Frederick Thrasher’s 1927 text The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago—to explore how young people constitute their own socio-legal orders. This exploration suggests a new front in research on legal pluralism while identifying mechanisms through which youth-centered socio-legal orders influence adult-centered orders via mobilization, cooperation, imitation, and imbrication.

This article addresses the doctrine of remoteness in tort in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Armstead v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Co. Ltd. Armstead further attenuates an already weak control on tortious liability. In outline, it does so in two ways: first, by establishing that contractual liabilities incurred as a result of tortiously caused property damage comprise non-remote damage provided that those liabilities represent a reasonable pre-estimate of the counterparty’s loss; and, secondly, by allocating the burden of proof in respect of remoteness to defendants. This article explores these rules. It contends, in particular, that the first collides with the fundamental principle that the extent of the claimant’s loss in tort is irrelevant to the issue of remoteness while the second means that, oddly, the onus of proof in relation to remoteness in tort differs from that in contract.

Since its inception, the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) has become increasingly influential in the field of second language (L2) education. In an effort to define the grammatical structures that English learners acquire at each CEFR level, the English Grammar Profile (EGP) provides a list of over 1,200 structure-level mappings derived from largely manual analysis of learner corpora. Though highly valuable for the design of didactic materials and examinations, the EGP lacks comprehensive quantitative methods to verify the acquisition levels it proposes for the grammatical structures. This paper presents an approach for revisiting the EGP structure-level mappings with empirical statistics. The approach utilizes automatic grammatical construction extraction, a large learner corpus, and statistical testing to empirically determine the level of each structure. The structure-level mappings resulting from our approach show limited agreement with that of the original EGP proposals, suggesting that frequency data alone does not provide enough evidence for the acquisition of the grammatical structures at the levels presented by the EGP.

The interaction of helminth infections with type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been a major area of research in the past few years. This paper, therefore, focuses on the systematic review of the effects of helminthic infections on metabolism and immune regulation related to T2D, with mechanisms through which both direct and indirect effects are mediated. Specifically, the possible therapeutic role of helminths in T2D management, probably mediated through the modulation of host metabolic pathways and immune responses, is of special interest. This paper discusses the current possibilities for translating helminth therapy from basic laboratory research to clinical application, as well as existing and future challenges. Although preliminary studies suggest the potential for helminth therapy for T2D patients, their safety and efficacy still need to be confirmed by larger-scale clinical studies.

We describe two new species of green algae in Dasycladales from Lower Cretaceous strata of the Eastern Carpathians (Romania), Suppiluliumaella schlagintweitii n. sp. and Triploporella loducai n. sp. The two new species display mineralization that coats most of the thallus, possibly casting light on their growth patterns. Suppiluliumaella schlagintweitii n. sp. displays a differentiated, club-shaped thallus with a very elongated vegetative part below the fertile zone (“head”) and a corticated external layer, suggesting a Neomeris type of growth. We further describe a possible mineralized juvenile growth stage. Triploporella loducai n. sp. is characterized by a rather short cylindrical thallus with a reduced vegetative region (sharp tapering rounded lower end), seemingly following a growth type resembling that of spherical Bornetella.

A family of arbitrarily high-order energy-preserving methods are developed to solve the coupled Schrödinger–Boussinesq (S-B) system. The system is a nonlinear coupled system and satisfies a series of conservation laws. It is often difficult to construct a high-order decoupling numerical algorithm to solve the nonlinear system. In this paper, the original system is first reformulated into an equivalent Hamiltonian system by introducing multiple auxiliary variables. Next, the reformulated system is discretized by the Fourier pseudo-spectral method and the implicit midpoint scheme in the spatial and temporal directions, respectively, and a second-order conservative scheme is obtained. Finally, the scheme is extended to arbitrarily high-order accuracy by means of diagonally implicit symplectic Runge–Kutta methods or composition methods. Rigorous analyses show that the proposed methods are fully decoupled and can precisely conserve the discrete invariants. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes are effective and can be easily extended to other nonlinear partial differential equations.

This article traces the unique set of factors that allowed mid-nineteenth-century coeducation at a medical college traditionally reserved for men. I argue that in the period 1850-1856, a window of opportunity offered a small group of women the chance to pursue medical education at the traditionally all-male regular Cleveland Medical College, at a time when medical training was inaccessible to women. A unique confluence of factors inspired this development, including a temporary fluidity of standards in medical training and practice, rising prospects for women’s access to higher education, the rapidly changing Cleveland urban environment and its progressive women’s network, and the College’s internal dynamics. The female graduates of the Cleveland Medical College joined a pioneer generation of women physicians in the mid-nineteenth-century US who chipped away at long-standing barriers limiting the role of women in medicine.

Globally, gender equality is the next frontier for social transformation, and women’s economic empowerment is promoted as the pathway to achieve this goal, particularly in countries of the Global South. Women’s economic empowerment is broadly defined as women’s capacity to contribute to, and benefit from, economic activities on terms that recognise the value of their contributions. Advocates for women’s economic empowerment state that it has the potential to be a safeguard against poverty and precarity by enhancing women’s wellbeing. Using a critical-feminist lens, we explore the benefits and risks of the global trend towards women’s economic empowerment. After providing an overview of the evolution of the concept of empowerment, we review the benefits of women’s economic empowerment: economic growth, improved rates of tertiary education and market participation for women, and growth of women’s autonomy. We then examine the risks of the global focus on women’s economic empowerment, which we distil into three key areas: (a) women seen as a country’s ‘natural resource’, used as instruments for economic prosperity and reproduction without considering their wellbeing; (b) a focus on women’s market participation without adequately factoring in current labour market realities; and (c) pushing the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward without fully considering the scope of unpaid reproductive work undertaken by women. We conclude with an analysis of how UN Women (2024) is shifting the agenda by providing a holistic framework for thinking about women’s economic empowerment. We suggest that there is room for cautious optimism if this framework is widely adopted.