The Aswan High Dam was a cornerstone of two overlapping political projects. For Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dam symbolized a bright future in which the decolonized Egyptian people could finally claim their destinies and triumph over the twin forces of imperialism and nature. The Soviet-assisted megaproject acquired such symbolic importance that Nasser’s security apparatus carefully policed its representations in Egyptian society, culture, and intellectual life. For the USSR, by contrast, the dam symbolized Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s break with the Stalinist past, initiated in his famous February 1956 “secret speech” that criticized Stalin’s draconian repressions, isolationism in international affairs, and neglect of “the East.” Even as it led to economic, scientific technical, and cultural agreements with Afro-Asian states including Egypt, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization agenda loosened controls over political speech at home, unleashing powerful new political ideas, forces, and artistic trends. This brief essay will explore the overlap between the two projects, asking where they met and diverged and what this means for studies of political, cultural, and environmental history.

This paper reviews two important design choices for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). First, how CBDC intermediaries should be compensated for their services. Second, how payments from traditional banks into CBDC wallets should be cleared. Both of these design choices have important implications for the financial stability of the banking system.

The continuing emergence of new variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could be ameliorated by infection prevention through daily diet. In this study, we examined the anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of 10 commercially available dairy products. They did not show any cytotoxicity against VeroE6/transmembrane protease serine 2 (TMPRSS2) cells (CC50 > 4 mg/ml). Importantly, these cells were checked using the cytopathic effect (CPE) assay, and 4 mg/ml dairy products reduced virus-induced CPE by more than 30%. Notably, Icreo akachan milk, an infant formula, showed the highest antiviral activity with an IC50 of 1.4 mg/ml. We assessed the effects of the dairy products on the entry of SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus. R1 and Yakult, lactic acid bacterial beverages, inhibited viral entry with IC50 of 2.9 and 3.5 mg/ml, respectively. Collectively, these results indicate that commercially available dairy products moderately inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection and may reduce the incidence of viral infections.

Theory suggests that policy benefits delivered directly by government are most likely to affect the voting behavior of beneficiaries. Nearly every empirical study, however, analyzes a policy or program that meets this criterion. To address this limitation, I compare the electoral impacts of two New Deal-era employment programs—the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA)—which differed primarily in their traceability to government. Though both programs provided employment, the WPA directly hired and paid employees. In contrast, the PWA subsidized private sector employment. Across two datasets, I find that the WPA increased support for the enacting Democratic Party. As expected, however, the PWA had no discernible causal effect on voting patterns. These results offer the strongest evidence to date that whether policy beneficiaries can easily see government as responsible for their benefits shapes the development of mass policy feedback effects.

Few studies have investigated historical pandemics from a public health perspective. This paper offers new perspectives on how legislation was implemented in Norway during the 1918–1920 Influenza pandemic. We argue that despite good intentions, individual interpretations, different knowledge and level of decision-making played an important role in the use of the legislation during this Influenza pandemic. Following the 1918–1920 Influenza pandemic there were significant advancements in public health and the establishment of public health laws in Norway. Given its severity, it was expected an active involvement of health authorities at all levels in decision-making to fight the outbreak through the enforcement of health laws and regulations. This paper explores the implementation of health legislation during this pandemic, offering valuable insights from public health and legislative perspectives. Historical sources reveal a wide array of societal challenges and various levels of medical expertise among health boards across the country. The effectiveness of existing legislation depended heavily on doctors’ knowledge and the abilities of health boards. The article shows that coordinated and well established non-pharmaceutical interventions may be necessary to effectively shield the healthy from the sick during a pandemic produced by a novel pathogen.

The September 2015 military intervention launched in Syria by Vladimir Putin at the invitation of Bashar al-Asad marked Russia’s tangible return to the Middle East and initiated a 180-degree turn in the course of the ongoing war. Four years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, its repression, and its escalation into war, Moscow’s military involvement became a testing ground for Russian martial strategies, including “nonmilitary” measures and communication strategies. By exploring both textual and visual content posted on social media by Russian war reporters deployed in Syria between September 2015 and January 2020, in this essay I seek to highlight the ties between the embedded narratives around the on-site military intervention for Russian-speaking audiences, and the longstanding Russian Orientalist fascination with the Middle East.

‘Sound, Image and Motion’ (SIM) is a unique interdisciplinary programme in Brazilian higher education, blending visual arts, audiovisual and sound creation. We start with a brief historical overview of avant-garde traditions in Bahia and delve into the university’s principles and guiding plan in order to situate SIM among art courses and its available resources. We explore its flexible curriculum in detail, considering the limitations posed by a new university with scarce resources, and describe the curricular structure to analyse experiences with teaching and constructing an interdisciplinary sound creation qualification within this programme.

The central role of economic elites in shaping public policy in Latin America has become increasingly clear. Yet most of the recent literature on the subject focuses on democratic contexts. This paper analyses pension privatisation in Chile as a case study for improving our understanding of business–state interaction in authoritarian contexts. Globally, the 1981 pension reform carried out during the Pinochet dictatorship became an example for pension privatisation elsewhere. Analysis of the policy-making process, based on novel empirical material, shows that from 1973 financial groups accumulated growing power which enabled them to first (a) defeat their opponents within the economic elite, (b) overpower their rivals within the state and, finally, (c) force Pinochet into passing pension privatisation legislation. Our results stress the need to include the study of different actors’ power resources – along with ideological issues and the regime structure – in attempts to understand the outcome of policy processes in authoritarian contexts.

This study aimed to estimate live body weight from body measurements for Holstein × Zebu dairy cows (n = 156) reared under conditions of humid tropics in Mexico using multivariate adaptive regression splines algorithm (MARS) with several train-test proportions. The body measurements included withers height, rump height, hip width, heart girth, body length and diagonal body length. The data were divided into 65:35, 70:30 and 80:20 split data for training and testing sets, respectively. The MARS algorithm was used to construct a prediction model, which predicted the body weight from the body measurements of the test dataset. The results emphasized that the MARS algorithm had an explanation rate for 80:20 train and test set of 0.836 and 0.711, respectively, with minimum Akaike information criterion values. This indicates that it is a reliable way of predicting body weight from body measurements. The results suggest that body weight prediction can be performed with the MARS algorithm in a reliable way, therefore, this algorithm may be a useful tool for animal breeders and researchers in the development of feeding and selection-aimed approaches.

This research paper describes a validation study evaluating the ability of IceTag accelerometers (Peacock Technology, UK) to detect play behaviour in weaned dairy calves. Play behaviour is commonly observed in young animals and is regarded as an indicator of positive welfare states. Eight Holstein Friesian calves aged three to five months old were monitored using leg-mounted accelerometers for 48 h. Data generated by accelerometers to quantify calf activity included step count, lying times and a proprietary measure of overall activity termed ‘motion index’ (MI). Calf behaviour was filmed continuously over the same 48-h period using closed circuit television cameras and analysed using one-zero sampling to identify the presence (1) or absence (0) of play within each 15-min time period. A positive correlation between MI and visually recorded play was found. Visual observations were compared with accelerometer-generated data and analysed using 2 × 2 contingency tables and classification and regression tree analysis. A MI value of ≥69 was established as the optimum threshold to detect play behaviour (sensitivity = 94.4%; specificity = 93.6%; balanced accuracy = 94.0%). The results of this study suggest that accelerometer-generated MI data have the potential to detect play behaviour in weaned dairy calves in a more time efficient manner than traditional visual observations.