Bureaucratic agencies hold enormous power to affect citizens’ lives through agency rulemaking. These rules hold the force of law, though the officials writing them do not serve in elected positions. Resulting concerns about bureaucratic policymaking have given rise to prolific literature on political control by executives and legislatures seeking to limit the opportunity for moral hazard. I contend that other factors may restrain rulemaking that do not arise directly from other government institutions. Specifically, I assess whether and how state political culture checks bureaucratic power by affecting the number and content of regulatory proposals. Using a large dataset containing the nearly 200,000 proposed regulations from agencies in every US state over a 10-year period, I test the degree to which states with varying cultures utilize bureaucratic rulemaking. I then evaluate whether culture impacts the topics covered by regulation using a subset of six states representing each cultural type. Findings suggest that agencies in traditionalistic states issue fewer regulations than those in moralistic or individualistic states, but proposed rules in individualistic states cover a broader range of policy areas. These results deepen our understanding of the factors influencing regulatory politics, expanding the universe of bureaucratic control beyond government institutions to the broader environment.

This article re-examines the waqf al-dashīshah founded by the Mamluk sultan Qāʾitbāy (r. AH 872–901/1468–1496 CE) for the distribution of dashīshah (porridge) and bread in the Ḥaramayn (Mecca and Medina), particularly in Medina. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of MS Arabe 1118 (Bibliothèque nationale de France) alongside related sources, it reconstructs the operational logic and historical trajectory of this endowment. The article argues that Qāʾitbāy’s waqf al-dashīshah functioned not merely as a personal charitable foundation but as a centrally managed provisioning system that channelled agrarian surplus from Egypt to the Hijaz. Its property base, transport infrastructure, and involvement of officials embedded the waqf within the administrative practices of the Mamluk or Cairo Sultanate, while the frequent use of state treasury land further blurred the boundary between public finance and pious endowment. Tracing the waqf’s continued operation and adaptation under early Ottoman rule, moreover, the article demonstrates its durability as an institutional mechanism. Overall, it shows that the waqf al-dashīshah served simultaneously as charity, governance, and political representation, articulating the Cairo Sultanate’s claim to authority as khādim al-Ḥaramayn (the server of the Ḥaramayn) within a context of intensifying inter-Muslim competition.

Many social welfare measures will sometimes rank a large population of very well-faring people below a very large population of barely well-faring people. Thus, they entail the repugnant conclusion. If such rankings are indeed repugnant, there must be some mistake behind measures that imply them. This paper discusses what that mistake might be. After rejecting other proposals, I suggest that the mistaken assumption is that welfare values that are insignificant for individuals, due to being small, could have significant impact on social welfare. To avoid this mistake, two new measures are introduced that aggregate significant and insignificant welfare values differently.

The tail behavior of aggregates of heavy-tailed random vectors is known to be determined by the so-called principle of ‘one large jump’, be it for finite sums, random sums, or Lévy processes. We establish that, in fact, a more general principle is at play. Assuming that the random vectors are multivariate regularly varying on various subcones of the positive orthant $[0,\infty)^d$, first we show that their aggregates are also multivariate regularly varying on these subcones. This allows us to approximate certain tail probabilities rendered asymptotically negligible under classical regular variation. Second, we discover that depending on the structure of a particular tail event, the tail behavior of the aggregates may be characterized by more than a single large jump. Finally, we illustrate a similar phenomenon for regularly varying multivariate Lévy processes, establishing as well a relationship between regular variation of a multivariate Lévy process and multivariate regular variation of its Lévy measure on different subcones. The applicability of these results in financial and insurance risk management is discussed.

Trichuris muris infections in laboratory mice underpin current understanding of host-parasite interactions, yet the extent to which these insights apply to natural systems remains largely untested. In this study, we experimentally infected wild-caught Mastomys natalensis with Trichuris mastomysi under controlled conditions. Mice were assigned to either a single high-dose infection or repeated low-dose exposure. Larval infection success and intensity were assessed 21 days post-infection. Infection success was high in both exposure groups, and infection dose strongly influenced parasite burden, with high-dose animals carrying significantly more larvae than low-dose animals. These results demonstrate that T. mastomysi readily establishes in wild-caught M. natalensis and that exposure dose primarily affects early larval burden rather than infection success. By experimentally infecting a natural rodent host under controlled conditions, this study links mechanistic laboratory approaches with ecologically relevant host-parasite dynamics in the wild.

The widespread use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has introduced significant security challenges, including unauthorised intrusions and privacy breaches. Conventional identification methods, such as radar and visual surveillance, often struggle to accurately distinguish between different UAV types or individual devices, limiting their effectiveness in countering these threats. To address these concerns, an enhanced empirical mode decomposition method has been developed. This method employs the Welch algorithm to extract power spectral density (PSD) features, which are then used to form the radio frequency fingerprint (RFF). Finally, a statistical classifier is employed to recognise and classify UAVs. The results of experimental studies indicate that this technique yields an average precision of 97% in binary classification (drone vs. no drone) and 84.7% in quaternary classifications (identifying four drone models). A comprehensive performance evaluation, conducted using confusion matrices and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, demonstrates that the classifier performs well across all categories, with low misclassification rates.

The maximum take-off weight (MTOW) affects many aspects of aircraft design, such as performance, stability and control. It is the first and most important design variable that affects numerous aircraft design decisions. Understanding how parametric changes to the major design variables would likely affect the MTOW in the early stages of the preliminary design phase is crucial. This research introduces a ground-breaking approach to precision weight estimation in light aircraft design. Employing a statistical approach, specifically multilinear regression alone and coupled with p-value analysis, the study focuses on predicting the MTOW using datasets from aircraft still ‘in production’ and/or ‘in service’. The aircraft are categorised by landing gear arrangement and number of engines. Eight crucial design parameters that influence aircraft weight are used to determine the empirical models. The developed models successfully predict the MTOW with an error of less than 5% and outperform existing weight estimation techniques, empowering designers to conduct parametric studies that include essential design parameters at the early stages of aircraft design. The proposed methodology represents a paradigm shift in the field, offering a reliable and practical means of achieving precision in light aircraft weight predictions.

This article critically examines the broad claims of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) that the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) is the ‘competent’ and ‘comprehensive’ framework for governing marine biodiversity in the area covered by its constituent instruments, implying that the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) is therefore inapplicable within that same area under the ‘not undermine’ clause in its Article 5(2). Focusing on the specific topic of marine bioprospecting governance, our analysis breaks down ‘competence’ into spatial (where the ATS has legal authority to govern) and functional (the activities or subject matter it is empowered to regulate) dimensions and evaluates whether existing competences, as exercised, result in ‘comprehensive’ governance. We find the ATCPs’ claims to be legally and practically unsubstantiated to justify the complete or de facto exclusion of the BBNJ Agreement’s application in the area covered by the constituent instruments of the ATS: the jurisdictional competence of the ATS is fragmented, its functional competence is narrowly confined to the early, in situ dimensions of bioprospecting regulation, and its operational record of governing marine bioprospecting is negligible, relying on generic, non-tailored rules long recognized as inadequate. As such, the Antarctic marine bioprospecting case illustrates that a regime’s exclusionary claims regarding the BBNJ Agreement should be viewed with scepticism. Failing to do so may conceal the very gaps that the BBNJ Agreement was created to address.

We consider a smooth fibration equipped with a flat complex vector bundle and a hypersurface cutting the fibration into two pieces. Our main result is a gluing formula relating the Bismut-Lott analytic torsion form of the whole fibration to that of each piece. This result solves a conjecture proposed at a conference in Göttingen in 2003. This result also leads to a higher Cheeger-Müller/Bismut-Zhang theorem. Our approach combines an adiabatic limit along the normal direction of the hypersurface and a Witten-type deformation on the flat vector bundle.

Let $\Omega$ be a lattice in $\mathbb C$ with invariants $g_2,g_3$ and let $\wp(z), \zeta(z)$ be the associated Weierstrass elliptic and zeta functions, respectively. In this paper, we prove that if $\omega$ is any non-zero period of $\wp(z)$ and $u_1,u_2$ complex numbers such that $u_1,u_2, \omega$ are $\mathbb{Q}$-linearly independent with $({\mathbb{Z}} u_1+{\mathbb{Z}} u_2)\cap\Omega=(0),$ then at least two of the numbers

\begin{equation*}g_2,g_3,\omega, \eta,u_1,u_2,\wp(u_i),\zeta(u_i)~~(1\leq i\leq 2)\end{equation*}

$\mathbb{Q},$

$\eta$

$\zeta(z)$

$\omega.$