The literature has shown that, in developing countries, large cash transfers to older people improve the wellbeing of the recipients and their families. While social pensions have recently emerged in East Asia to deliver small cash benefits to older people, there is little consistent evidence of their effects. We examine the effects of the Basic Pension Scheme, a social pension in South Korea, on income and consumption poverty among older adults. We apply a difference-in-differences event study design and other complementary approaches to data covering the full period of program development from 2006 to 2021. The results show that the social pension decreases income poverty but not consumption poverty. While this study analysed the best data currently available, using better-quality data in future research would enable more robust analysis. Further research is also warranted to find how to improve the effectiveness of a non-contributory pension programme as a tool for reducing income and consumption poverty among older adults.

Let $(A,\mathfrak{m})$ be a regular local ring of dimension $d \geq 1$, I an $\mathfrak{m}$-primary ideal. Let N be a nonzero finitely generated A-module. Consider the functions

\begin{equation*}t^I(N, n) = \sum_{i = 0}^{d}\ell(\text{Tor}^A_i(N, A/I^n)) \ \text{and}\ e^I(N, n) = \sum_{i = 0}^{d}\ell(\text{Ext}_A^i(N, A/I^n))\end{equation*}

of polynomial type and let their degrees be $t^I(N) $ and $e^I(N)$. We prove that $t^I(N) = e^I(N) = \max\{\dim N, d -1 \}$. A crucial ingredient in the proof is that $D^b(A)_f$, the bounded derived category of A with finite length cohomology, has no proper thick subcategories.

As climate change progresses, natural hazards are projected to continue to increase in frequency and intensity, posing a new form of social risk, implicating both the welfare and environmental state and raising the salience of ecosocial policy as a mechanism to attend to the distributional effects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This study posits a novel conceptual framework for ecosocial policy and offers the US ecosocial safety net as a case analysis. While we conceptualise disaster relief policy as a mode of the environmental state, it includes unique ecosocial policies that constitute the backbone of the US ecosocial safety net. This study describes and compares the developmental and functional synergies between the US welfare and environmental state manifested in the form of an ecosocial safety net by explicating the Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program. Our findings reveal synergies between US disaster relief and welfare, including parallel developmental trends, philosophies of deserving/undeserving, functions of racial capitalism and relationships with economic growth. This study and its conceptual framework of ecosocial policy offer a groundwork for the study of ecosocial policy in other contexts.

The relationship between nutrition and ageing is complex. The metabolism and synthesis of micronutrients within the gut microbiome can influence human health but is challenging to study. Furthermore, studying ageing in humans is time-consuming and difficult to control for environmental factors. Studies in model organisms can guide research efforts in this area. This review describes how the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans can be used to study how bacteria and diet influence ageing and inform follow-on studies in humans. It is known that certain bacteria accelerate ageing in C. elegans. This age-accelerating effect is prevented by inhibiting folate synthesis within the bacteria, and we propose that in the human microbiome, certain bacteria also accelerate ageing in a way that can be modulated by interfering with bacterial folate synthesis. Bacterial-derived folates do not promote ageing themselves; rather, ageing is accelerated by bacteria in some way, either through secondary metabolites or other bacterial activity, which is dependent on bacterial folate synthesis. In humans, it may be possible to inhibit bacterial folate synthesis in the human gut while maintaining healthy folate status in the body via food and supplementation. The supplement form of folic acid has a common breakdown product that can be used by bacteria to increase folate synthesis. Thus, supplementation with folic acid may not be good for health in certain circumstances such as in older people or those with an excess of proteobacteria in their microbiome. For these groups, alternative supplement strategies may be a safer way to ensure adequate folate levels.

Over recent decades it has consistently been shown that disabled adults in the UK fare worse in the labour market and have lower levels of wellbeing than non-disabled adults. However, this is in part due to the selection into dis-ability of those with existing socio-economic disadvantages. In this article, we use panel data from the combined British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society, covering the 27 years from 1991 to 2018, to distinguish between the effect of selection, the effect of dis-ability onset and the effect of dis-ability duration on a range of labour market and wellbeing outcomes. We show that there is important selection both into dis-ability and into longer experience of dis-ability on the basis of observable characteristics. We also show the importance of controlling for time-invariant unobservable individual characteristics that similarly affect selection into dis-ability and duration of dis-ability. Even after controlling for both forms of selection, we find significant negative effects of dis-ability onset and duration, and offer policy solutions to address them.

Work-related conditionality policy in the UK is built around the problematic assumption that people should commit to ‘full-time’ work and job search efforts as a condition of receiving benefits. This is potentially in conflict with the idea that what is required of people should be tailored to their circumstances in some way – ‘personalised conditionality’ – and implies a failure to recognise that conditionality is being applied to a diverse group of people and in a context where the paid work that is available is often temporary and insecure. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality whilst receiving Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance in Manchester, the paper explores the work-related time demands that people were facing and argues that these provide a lens for examining the rigidities and contradictions of conditionality policy. The findings indicate that expectations are often set in relation to an ideal of full-time hours and in a highly asymmetric context that is far from conducive to being able to negotiate a reasonable set of work-related expectations. Work search requirements affect people differently depending on their personal circumstances and demand-side factors, and can act to weaken the position of people entering, or already in, work.

Weighing matrices with entries in the complex cubic and sextic roots of unity are employed to construct Hermitian self-dual codes and Hermitian linear complementary dual codes over the finite field $\mathrm {GF}(4).$ The parameters of these codes are explored for small matrix orders and weights.

Big Tech companies such as Meta, the owner of Facebook, are increasingly accused of enabling human rights violations. The proliferation of toxic speech in their digital platforms has been in the background of recent episodes of mass atrocity, the most salient of which recently transpired in Myanmar and Ethiopia. The involvement of Big Tech companies in mass atrocity raises multiple normative and conceptual challenges. One is to properly conceptualize Meta’s responsibility for the circulation of toxic speech. On one view, endorsed by the corporation itself, Meta can be absolved from any significant share of responsibility for these atrocities because toxic speech is the speech of some (rogue) users, hosted but neither created nor endorsed by the company; if anything, Meta is responsible for failing to anticipate and swiftly remove that speech. I will argue that this view is misleading, as it misses the underlying forces crafting toxic speech. Meta’s business model relies on what one might call the algorithmic capture of attention, which it achieves by manipulating its users and by creating an environment in which manipulative practices of some users thrive over others. This fact alone turns the company into a co-creator of toxic speech rather than a mere conduit of the toxic speech of others. As a result, it is safe to claim that Meta bears significant causal responsibility and sufficient moral responsibility for the dissemination of toxic speech, such that it justifies its inclusion in transitional justice processes and grounds its moral obligation to act in ways that advance these processes.

Oceania is currently facing a substantial challenge: to provide sustainable and ethical food systems that support nutrition and health across land and water. The Nutrition Society of Australia and the Nutrition Society of New Zealand held a joint 2023 Annual Scientific Meeting on ‘Nutrition and Wellbeing in Oceania’ attended by 408 delegates. This was a timely conference focussing on nutrition challenges across the Pacific, emphasising the importance of nutrition across land and water, education settings, women’s health and gut health. Cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary and collaborative research was presented in a 4-day programme of keynote presentations, workshops, oral and poster sessions, breakfast and lunch symposiums and early career researcher sessions. The conference highlighted the importance of collaboration between nations to address the challenge facing nutrition and wellbeing across Oceania. A systems approach of collaboration among scientists, industry and government is vital for finding solutions to this challenge.

Dualities of resolving subcategories of module categories over rings are introduced and characterized as dualities with respect to Wakamatsu tilting bimodules. By restriction of the dualities to smaller resolving subcategories, sufficient and necessary conditions for these bimodules to be tilting are provided. This leads to the Gorenstein version of both the Miyashita’s duality and Huisgen-Zimmermann’s correspondence. An application of resolving dualities is to show that higher algebraic K-groups and semi-derived Ringel–Hall algebras of finitely generated Gorenstein-projective modules over Artin algebras are preserved under tilting.

A complete Reidemeister characterisation of welded links is a long-standing open problem. We present a Reidemeister theorem for a related class of four-dimensional links: solid ribbon torus links, that is, immersed solid tori in $\mathbb {R}^4$ with only ribbon singularities, considered up to generalised ribbon isotopy.