This study examines how CEOs’ hobby of reading fiction reinforces empathy and, in turn, is associated with higher corporate philanthropy. Grounded in the Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis, we propose that fiction-reading sustains and deepens a multidimensional yet integrated empathic capacity, which motivates prosocial organizational decisions. With a large dataset of CEOs from non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) listed in China’s A-share market from 2001 to 2018, we show robust evidence that firms led by fiction-reading CEOs engage more in corporate philanthropy; additionally, we confirm that empathy mediates this positive relationship. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences analysis with CEO transition data reveals a significant increase in corporate philanthropy with a newly appointed fiction-reading CEO. Supplementary results show that fiction-reading CEOs promote broader prosocial practices, including employee welfare and ethical governance. By introducing fiction-reading as an unobtrusive, verifiable measure of empathy, this study offers a novel methodological approach for tracing the micro-foundations of corporate social responsibility.

In this article, Composing for Acoustic Robots (COMACROB) serves as a case study on the posthuman ontology of digital instruments. COMACROB is an instrumental system composed of live coding, AI-generated symbolic music and mechanically actuated acoustic instruments, such as the Yamaha Disklavier and MIDI pipe organ. The system challenges traditional distinctions between instrument, scoring and performance. The study borrows key notions from Thor Magnusson’s organology theory, presenting COMACROB as a layered system of inscriptions. It then attempts to delineate COMACROB’s speculative realism, drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as two complementary theoretical frameworks. ANT is employed to present how agency in COMACROB is distributed across a network of translating actions between human and nonhuman agents, whereas OOO places the focus of inquiry on the autonomy and resistance of the objects that constitute the system. At the core of the study lies the notion that algorithmic processes are not external control agents, but intrinsic functions that co-constitute the identity of the instrument. The article overall posits that COMACROB is a case of posthuman model of musical organology, according to which digital instruments are participant agents in the process of music authorship.

No standardized cognitive aid (CA) exists to support the first medical responder during the initial organizational phase of a mass casualty incident (MCI). We aimed to develop such a tool through expert consensus using the Delphi method.

A 2-round Delphi process was conducted with 20 expert prehospital physicians. Following a structured literature review, 46 items were submitted for evaluation using a 9-point Likert scale. Consensus criteria were defined a priori in accordance with HAS methodological guidelines. Retained items were ergonomically optimized using the Cognitive Aids in Medicine Assessment Tool (CMAT).

All 20 experts participated in round 1 (100%); 18 completed round 2 (90%). After 2 rounds, 31 items were retained (acceptance rate 67%): 20 with strong agreement and 11 with relative agreement. The final CA is organized along the operational timeline of the first medical responder.

This Delphi-based CA provides a structured, consensus-derived support tool for first medical responders during MCIs. Prospective studies in real or high-fidelity simulation settings are needed to evaluate its operational impact.

In vivo anthelmintic assay models are essential for evaluating candidate compounds in target species. Several rodent-helminth systems have been developed, with the Cobb-Wistar rat-T. colubriformis model emerging as promising for early-stage screening. Although this model has demonstrated utility, the development of an alternative model using a more widely accessible rat strain represents a valuable opportunity for advancing in vivo screening of anthelmintics. This study evaluated different immunosuppressants and regimens to identify treatments yielding the highest and most consistent worm burdens in experimentally infected Sprague-Dawley rats. Thirty rats were assigned to five groups (n = 6). Group 1 received unmedicated feed (negative control), while Groups 2, 3, and 4 received hydrocortisone acetate (HCA) in their diet at 60 ppm, 80 ppm, and a two-phase regimen of 200 ppm followed by 60 ppm, respectively. Group 5 received intramuscular methylprednisolone acetate (MPA) on three occasions. All animals were orally infected with T. colubriformis third-stage larvae, and necropsies were performed on Day 13 post-infection to recover worm burdens. Treatment had no effect on worm counts. The 80-ppm HCA group produced the highest mean burden with high variance; the 200:60 ppm group showed lower counts but less variance, and the 60-ppm HCA and MPA groups were comparable to controls. There was insufficient evidence to support the Sprague-Dawley rat-T. colubriformis model but, given the results of this study, further investigation and development are warranted.

This paper presents a differential split-ring resonator sensor, designed for the analysis of small volumes around 20 µl of liquid. One resonator is filled with a reference liquid while the other contains the liquid under test. Although the differential configuration reduces the influence of environmental parameters, it can lead to resonance overlap when the dielectric properties of the two liquids are close to each other. To overcome this limitation, a post-processing method based on Lorentzian fitting is used to accurately extract resonance parameters such as frequency and width, even when the resonances strongly overlap. The method is validated through experiments with water–ethanol mixtures of different concentrations. This shows excellent agreement between measured and calculated values. Eigenmode simulations are also performed to analyze field distributions, providing additional insight into resonance behavior. The proposed approach offers a reliable and general methodology for the analysis of differential resonant sensors.

Torri’r Llech (TLl) (Welsh for ‘breaking the rickets’) was a bloodletting practice which remained popular in Wales from at least the mid-nineteenth up to the mid-twentieth centuries. The practice involved cutting the ear (pinna) to induce bleeding. Indications were numerous and dynamic. Vernacular medical practices, including bloodletting, have enjoyed a long history in Wales and were influenced by a multitude of conceptual paradigms over the centuries. By drawing on original oral histories, newspaper accounts, as well as existing secondary source material, this article aims to situate TLl within the wider framework of bloodletting practices in Wales and Britain more broadly. In doing so, this paper also considers the ways in which TLl changed over time and how this dynamism proved a persistent threat to the authority of official medical institutions in Wales. By then discussing how TLl itself appeared to draw on diverse conceptual frameworks, it is argued that it may more accurately be defined as a practice within the confines of popular humoralism – a syncretic medical paradigm influenced by humoralism, astrology, Christianity, as well as local belief systems. Ultimately, TLl exhibited remarkable longevity and may have been practised as late as the 1970s–80s in parts of the Upper Swansea Valley, potentially representing the latest example of a humoral bloodletting practice native to the British Isles. This analysis challenges more linear narratives of biomedical ascendancy, showcasing how TLl coexisted with orthodox medicine in a pluralistic medical marketplace in which Welsh patients consistently exercised agency over their own care.

This article takes as its empirical reference the phenomenon of ‘migration in transit’, which gained relevance in 2018 with the arrival of thousands of migrants, mainly from Africa, on the southern coast of Spain, bound for other European countries. Based on a series of specific cases of irregular migrants, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors or those at risk of statelessness involved in this phenomenon, I have attempted to trace their ‘legal routes’ and their determining factors (regulatory assumptions, legal documents, time frames, etc.) as if they were movements across the map of migration and asylum law. I conclude that, similar to geographical (im)mobility, although these legal itineraries are largely constructed on the basis of the legal provisions (requirements, deadlines, bureaucracy, etc.) set out in immigration and asylum regulations, there are also elements of social practice, such as legal advice, solidarity or social perceptions, which facilitate the transition between legal statuses.

An interview with Peter Klarén where he discusses his studies and his career of many decades as a prominent Peruvianist.

With advances in deep learning for signal recovery based on sparse representation, this paper proposes two efficient sparse recovery (SR) networks to solve the target detection problem and generate range-Doppler maps in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based passive radar systems. First, by unfolding the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) into a deep network with learnable parameters, a deep unfolding SR-ADMM-Net is developed, which avoids manual parameter configuration and achieves superior performance to ADMM. However, SR-ADMM-Net integrates sparsity prior information into the sparse recovery task via regularization but access only partial data domain knowledge. Therefore, this work proposes another method leveraging generative priors, which is derived from the least squares generative adversarial network (LSGAN) framework and termed SR-LSGAN. Generative priors can capture complex structural features of clutter and target signals, but their effectiveness depends on the solution space of the pre-trained generator. SR-LSGAN leverages prior distributions from the generative model and extends the solution space by dynamically fine-tuning parameters through gradient descent and internal learning, thereby improving recovery accuracy and target detection performance. Experiments on simulated and measured data demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of the proposed networks.

This article explores the data entry labour demands of electronic death registration systems (EDRS), the jurisdiction-specific software systems developed in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s to ‘reengineer’ the process that informs vital statistics officials of deaths. Over decades of deliberations about how best to design and implement the tools, officials knew of two key issues that challenged death registration historically: the system moved slowly, and the data it produced was not always accurate. This article explores the techno-solutionism that led to the framing of EDRS as a tool that could solve these two issues simultaneously, improving both ease of data entry and the data’s integrity. But this flawed optimism about EDRS’s dual affordances, the paper argues, contributed to the tool’s sluggish implementation.

A Swahili proverb states ‘mafiga mawili hayaivishi chungu – two stones would not properly hold a cooking pot’. It suggests that complex relationships may inform even what appears to be simple. This paper suggests that this pattern may usefully be applied to thinking about, and living out, the doctrine of the Atonement. Indeed, it may usefully be adapted to the dictum of Prosper of Aquitaine: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex bene vivendi. A full engagement with the doctrine will have epistemic, relational and behaviour components. Recognizing the Scriptural grounding of the doctrine in the practice of sacrifice and its attendant rituals shows how the doctrine may be believed, related to the personal response and relationship to God (prayer), and lived out liturgically, which is in turn an expression of an ethic to be embraced. Christian life must embrace both orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

The shipborne 3UPS-3SS parallel mechanism is widely used in ship barge operation, but it has problems such as large volume and poor force transmission and acceleration performance. In order to solve the above problems, the kinematic/dynamic performance analysis and multi-objective optimization of scale parameters were carried out on the mechanism. The vector method is used to construct the position inverse solution model and constraint equations, and the kinematic inverse solution and velocity expression are derived, and the velocity Jacobian matrix is obtained. The fast polar coordinate search method was used to plot the reachable workspace by MATLAB software, and the volume expression of the workspace of the mechanism was obtained. The analytical equation of velocity and acceleration of each moving part was established by the differential method; the mechanism dynamics model was established by combining the virtual work principle, and the condition number was calculated and visualized based on the average mass matrix. Based on the distribution of the condition number of the velocity Jacobian matrix and average mass matrix, the force transferability and dynamic dexterity of the mechanism are evaluated. In the end, the workspace volume of the mechanism increased by 7.14%, the average minimum singular value increased by 196.43%, and the dynamic dexterity decreased by 55.69%, which provided a theoretical basis for the control and practical application of the mechanism.