This study aims to discuss the chronology of the Egyptian 5th dynasty of the Old Kingdom and the tentative date of accession of king Djedkare based on material from his royal necropolis at South Saqqara and non-royal cemetery of Abusir South, Egypt. A series of radiocarbon (14C) dates were established through analysis of archaeological material from several monuments at the necropolis, including the king’s pyramid complex, pyramid complex of his queen, and two elite tombs (Isesiankh and Khuwy). In addition, two samples from non-royal tombs in the Abusir South cemetery, were taken into consideration for further precision during the modeling, associated with king Huni (end 3rd dynasty) and king Niuserre (5th dynasty). The contextualized 14C dates together with re-evaluation of historical evidence on Djedkare’s rule, results in a new model of temporal probability density which can be further refined with any new data from archaeological research. It shows that Djedkare’s reign can be currently modelled between 2503 and 2449 BCE (95.4%), thus slightly older than expected by literature. This presented model provides a more precise chronological frame for the late 5th dynasty period of Egyptian history, which was period of a significant socio-economic transformation.

The acquisition of nonnative flora and fauna was long framed by horticultural historians as the result of great British derring-do and hand-to-hand conflict. Yet nineteenth-century plant extraction actually involved comparatively few feats of physical bravery or scenes of Boys’ Own high drama. The letters of Victorian commercial plant-hunters reveal that the removal and exportation of plants entailed the deployment of emerging colonial and national infrastructures together with complex regional and local networks and knowledge systems. Much of a plant-hunter's day-to-day life, tellingly, involved paperwork: submitting drafts and bills of exchange, sending letters and cables to employers, and completing bills of lading to ship plants, in stages, to Europe, where they were received at customs houses before journeying on, by rail and by road, to nurseries, collectors, and auction houses. At the same time, emerging colonial infrastructures only took hunters so far; local and traditional knowledge systems were essential as well. Plant-hunting depended upon the support, expertise, knowledge, and traditions of local people—a fact the enduring narrative of hand-to-hand conflict and triumphant British vanquishing seems structured carefully to conceal.

This essay makes a case for viewing curriculum and the historical assemblages of slavery, racialization, and migration as infrastructures of Victorian literary studies. It does so by taking the recent curricular revision that the English department at Lehman College, a public, Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Bronx, New York, underwent as its starting point. I reflect on how this curricular overhaul, which was catalyzed by student activism, helped me see not only how curriculum has operated as an infrastructure of whiteness in my department and English studies at large but also how disentangling Victorian studies from its white Anglo assumptions will require reconceptualizing the methodological, epistemological, and historical foundations of the field.

Species’ declines are caused by a combination of factors that affect survival and/or breeding success. We studied the effects of a set of environmental and anthropogenic variables on the disappearance of Canarian Houbara Bustards Chlamydotis undulata fuertaventurae on Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), once the main stronghold of this endangered bird. Of 83 male display sites detected in 1997–1998, only 29 remained occupied in 2020–2021 (a 65% decrease in only 23 years). We compared habitat quality, density of conspecifics, other steppe birds and crows, presence of human infrastructure, and degree of environmental protection between these 29 extant sites and the 54 extinct sites using univariate analyses and generalised linear models (GLMs). The most influential variable in the abandonment of display sites was the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), an indicator of green vegetation productivity, which suggests a strong effect of habitat aridification due to climate change on the population’s extinction process. Powerline density was the second most important factor. This suggests that houbaras have survived where a greater abundance of food resources has enabled a higher breeding success, and where powerline fatalities have caused lower mortality over the years. Higher densities of houbaras, and other steppe birds and crows at extant display sites confirmed the better habitat quality in these areas. Extant display sites, located generally in protected areas, also had lower densities of human infrastructure (e.g. buildings, roads). We discuss the conservation implications of these results and provide management recommendations for this endangered subspecies.

The global justice debate has increasingly moved toward the analysis of concrete issues in global politics, such as trade, migration, or climate change. This raises a methodological question: should the demands of justice in these domains be theorized independently or in conjunction with one another? Integrationists have championed the latter approach, arguing that it is better suited to guide our practical judgments. In contrast, internalists maintain that each domain is governed by its own set of principles. This paper defends the plausibility of the internalist approach against integrationist challenges. By examining different interpretations of internalism, it first seeks to provide a clearer overview of the methodological dispute. It then analyzes various arguments for integrationism, showing that their implications are more limited than their proponents believe. Finally, it focuses on the question of practical guidance, highlighting the value of idealized domain-specific theorizing in guiding transitions toward just arrangements.

Intensifiers are known for their dynamic nature, due in part to the expressive function they serve. However, while the quantitative patterning of English intensifiers has been studied extensively, the intensifier system of French has yet to be well documented. This study therefore examines intensifier use from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective in the ESLO corpus of spoken Hexagonal French. The quantitative distributions of adjective intensifiers are compared across two corpora collected in 1970 and 2010. Results show a significant decrease in intensification rate over time. Analysis of individual intensifiers show some to have decreased in use over time (e.g. très, tellement), others to have increased (e.g. vraiment, tout), and others to appear only in the later sample (e.g. super, hyper). Longitudinal change is also found in the adjectival function (predicative vs. attributive) and collocational width of intensifiers. Relating to social factors, no significant gender difference is found between female and male speakers’ intensification rate over time. Furthermore, très dominates as the preferred intensifier among older generations, while younger speakers favour more varied intensifiers. Analyzing such changes in the use of intensifiers over the past half century contributes to a better understanding of the structure and development of the French intensifier system.

This paper presents new radiocarbon dates for two Aboriginal archaeological complexes situated on the cliff-lines of the Murray River in South Australia (SA); at Pooginook Flat and Tanamee. These dates represent the first age estimates for archaeological sites within the Upper Gorge section of the Murray River. The dates ranged from ca. 11 cal ka to the Late Holocene. The research supports previous evidence which has indicated that sites located along the Murray cliffs preserve much of the oldest evidence of Aboriginal peopling along the Murray River corridor in SA. The new dates also allow us to contribute to discussions concerning broader chronological trends in Aboriginal lifeways within the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). Specifically, the new ages add some insight into the nature and timing of early Aboriginal occupation along the Murray River corridor in SA and further evidence that the LGM acted as a significant inhibitive factor for intensive occupation of this riverscape. The conservation of these significant and informative cliff-top sites remains precarious, however, and there is an imperative to continue to record and sample the extant sites.

The political geography of empire transformed with the Victorian rise of steam power and its infrastructure, especially with the emerging dominance of steam as the primary means of transoceanic travel and shipping. Oceanic infrastructure was a new feature of the British Empire especially in the period after 1860, when steamships were increasingly replacing sailing ships and when the material exigencies of fueling and refueling required the installation of coaling stations to support long-haul transport for steam-powered ships. In this essay we explore how these changes registered in literature and discourse, with Joseph Conrad as our prime example. We analyze two of Conrad's works that feature coaling stations and steam-carrying, Victory (1915) and The Mirror of the Sea (1906). Drawing on infrastructure studies, critical ocean studies, and the energy humanities, we make a case for more attention to oceangoing coal as part of a broader reconsideration of empire in the Anthropocene. We also make a case for Conrad as one of the great observers of environmental-infrastructural change in the early fossil-fuel era, worth revisiting now as both witness and interpreter.

The West Atlantic trumpetfish Aulostomus maculatus is a species of little commercial importance, but it is frequently used as a study organism in behavioural ecology, and it has been traded in the aquarium industry to some extent. The adult life stage is well described, however its early life history is nearly unknown. This paper provides the first description of post-flexion larvae of A. maculatus, including detailed illustrations, photographs, morphological data, and collection site data of specimens collected during a multipurpose research survey conducted within the Sargasso Sea Subtropical Convergence Zone. The collection site also implies a geographic range expansion, off the continental shelf, of the pelagic larvae stage. This paper hence advances the scientific knowledge about the early life stages, distribution and ecology of this species.

We consider a robust optimal investment–reinsurance problem to minimize the goal-reaching probability that the value of the wealth process reaches a low barrier before a high goal for an ambiguity-averse insurer. The insurer invests its surplus in a constrained financial market, where the proportion of borrowed amount to the current wealth level is no more than a given constant, and short-selling is prohibited. We assume that the insurer purchases per-claim reinsurance to transfer its risk exposure to a reinsurer whose premium is computed according to the mean–variance premium principle. Using the stochastic control approach based on the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation, we derive robust optimal investment–reinsurance strategies and the corresponding value functions. We conclude that the behavior of borrowing typically occurs with a lower wealth level. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate our results.

Gender equity and authorship diversity are believed to be the essential parts of building a dynamic scientific atmosphere. The purpose of the present study was to determine the status of gender equity in research on echinococcosis and the editorial diversity in major parasitology journals over the past four decades. All articles were retrieved from major databases from the years 1980, 2000, 2010, 2015, and 2020. Journals belonging to the four quartiles of parasitology journals listed in the Journal Citation Report were selected, and the gender and region of each editorial member were identified. Among the 3583 first authors of the articles published in all selected years, 2236 (62.4%) were men, whereas 1040 (29%) were women. There was a significant increase in women’s contributions as the first author, from 6.8% in 1980 to 35.8% in 2020 (P < .001). A greater gender gap was found for the senior authors, showing 2391 (66.7%) men and 837 (23.4%) women. The gender gap has been narrowed in most of the six regions of the world, particularly for the Western Pacific region, where the gender inequity had almost diminished in 2020; i.e. the man-woman ratios of the first and last authors from this region were 2.25 and 1.75 in 1980, reaching 1.04 and 0.97, in 2020, respectively. Our findings also indicated that articles authored by men received 2.5 to 3.1 times more citations than women authors. Gender distribution of the editors-in-chief, associate editors, and editorial board members across all quartiles showed that 78.7%, 69.5%, and 72.7% were men, respectively, and mostly affiliated with the European and American regions. Findings of the present study showed that gender inequity is still present and women researchers continue to be the minority in the field of parasitology, particularly in the research on echinococcosis.

This article examines Herman Bavinck's inclusion of the body in the image of God in comparison with the positions of Reformed orthodox theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It demonstrates that while it is uncommon for earlier figures to consider the body to be properly included within the image, Bavinck's position is not unprecedented and applies lines of reasoning consistent with the tradition's anthropological convictions. First, an embodied imago Dei is advanced by sources such as the Leiden Synopsis and Petrus van Mastricht. Second, the Reformed orthodox in general adhere to the conviction that human beings are a body–soul unity, and that the image of God includes the uprightness of the whole person, positions that lead to the body being related in some way to God's image. Therefore, while Bavinck's account of an embodied image is a unique contribution, it is nonetheless in continuity with the tradition he receives.

Motion assistance for elderly people is a field of application for service robotic systems that can be characterized by requirements and constraints of human–machine interaction and by the specificity of the user’s conditions. The main aspects of characterization and constraints are examined for the application of service systems that can be specifically conceived or adapted for elderly motion assistance by having to consider conditions of motion deficiency and muscular strength weakness as well as psychological aptitudes of users. The analysis is discussed in general terms with reference to elderly people who may not even suffer from specific pathologies. Therefore, the discussion focuses on the need for motion exercise in proper environments, including domestic ones and frame familiar to a user. The challenges of such applications oriented toward elderly users are discussed as requiring research and design of solutions in terms of specific portability, user-oriented operation, low costs, and clinical-physiotherapeutic functionality. Results of the author’s team experiences are presented as an example of problems and attempted solutions to meet the new challenges of service systems for motion assistance applications for elderly people.

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem “Heredity”—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time.

Logistics is the science and art of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit; though it has become synonymous with the rise of the shipping container, its history is as old as trade itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient human action of loading and shipping boxes became part of a globalizing network of refrigerated supply chains and transoceanic shipping. Appearing briefly as a detail in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), the “cold chain” nonetheless orchestrates the plot and governs the vampiric mythology. This temperature-cooled supply and distribution network imbued the times, spaces, and aesthetics of human life with the new capability to ship perishable food, or in the novel's metaphor, “un-death.”