Motivated by ideas from the model theory of metric structures, we introduce a metric set theory, $\mathsf {MSE}$, which takes bounded quantification as primitive and consists of a natural metric extensionality axiom (the distance between two sets is the Hausdorff distance between their extensions) and an approximate, non-deterministic form of full comprehension (for any real-valued formula $\varphi (x,y)$, tuple of parameters a, and $r < s$, there is a set containing the class and contained in the class $\{x:\varphi (x,a) < s\}$). We show that $\mathsf {MSE}$ is sufficient to develop classical mathematics after the addition of an appropriate axiom of infinity. We then construct canonical representatives of well-order types and prove that ultrametric models of $\mathsf {MSE}$ always contain externally ill-founded ordinals, conjecturing that this is true of all models. To establish several independence results and, in particular, consistency, we construct a variety of models, including pseudo-finite models and models containing arbitrarily large standard ordinals. Finally, we discuss how to formalize $\mathsf {MSE}$ in either continuous logic or Łukasiewicz logic.

Self-reflection is central to the development of psychotherapeutic competence. Given the positive reports of video analysis use in psychotherapy training, we suggest that self-reflection based on video analysis may be particularly effective. The aim of this study was to test whether video-based structured self-reflection (VSR) is superior to memory-based structured self-reflection (MSR) in terms of its effect on students’ psychotherapeutic competence and the therapeutic alliance. As part of a university seminar within a Master’s program, N=34 psychology students (M=25 years; n=32 identifying as female) were randomly assigned to 4 weeks of practice with either VSR (n=16) or MSR (n=18). Independent raters assessed students’ psychotherapeutic competence and the alliance before and after the practice phase (pre- and post-assessment). Students additionally rated their own competence during the practice phase. The written self-reflections were analysed using qualitative content analysis and frequency analysis. A repeated measures MANOVA revealed no significant differences between the study groups in the development of externally rated psychotherapeutic competencies from pre- to post-assessment. An analysis of students’ self-reported competencies during the practice phase revealed a significant time effect (η2G=0.12). Analysis of the written self-reflections showed that students focused mainly on the positive aspects of their behavior. The assumption that VSR is particularly beneficial was not confirmed. It seems that self-reflection requires additional guidance, feedback, and a sufficient time frame to effectively improve trainee skills.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To find out whether video-based structured self-reflection is an effective means of developing students’ psychotherapeutic skills and the therapeutic alliance.

2. (2) To identify the main characteristics of students’ self-reflections and the benefits and challenges they perceive during the self-reflection process.

3. (3) To draw methodologically valid conclusions for the implementation of self-reflection in the university context.

The corporate responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is seen increasingly as having a legal dimension, grounded in human rights, due diligence laws, and tort law. Corporate climate strategies often rely on carbon credits to offset emissions, but available credits typically fail to deliver real reductions. This raises doubts about their suitability for meeting responsibilities to reduce emissions.

This article examines the issue through the lens of due diligence, a key concept in defining corporate obligations. Due diligence demands that firms prioritize preventive and effective action to address the climate impacts of their business activities. Available carbon credits meet neither condition; accordingly, they are, as a rule, unsuitable for fulfilling a corporate duty to reduce GHG emissions.

The article also evaluates exceptions suggested in guidance documents, particularly the use of credits for offsetting residual and Scope 3 emissions. It concludes that these exceptions are difficult to justify from a due diligence standpoint, given the limited effectiveness of credits.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in motivated memory as a psychological determinant of economic outcomes. According to motivated memory, people tend to better recall pleasant information because it serves their psychological needs. Another phenomenon, however, predicts the same pattern: According to mood congruence, pleasant information is easier to recall for individuals in nonnegative mood, regardless of any psychological needs. Since most people tend to have some need for self-esteem and to experience more positive than negative feelings during the day, the two phenomena predict similar outcomes in most ordinary situations, but not all. To test the predictive power of these two phenomena, we collect data from a laboratory experiment and from a nationally representative survey. We study how individuals in a temporarily induced negative mood (via a video clip) or those who report a low baseline mood (relative to the population) recall negative feedback. Our results meet the predictions of motivated memory: Individuals better recall positive than negative feedback, even when they are in negative mood. Motivated memory is not just a matter of mood.

The Malvaceae is the 12th largest angiosperm family with ten subfamilies, 243 genera and c. 4000 species of trees, shrubs, herbs and a few climbers. Subfamilies originated in the Upper Cretaceous-Palaeocene, and their divergence times range from 71.6 to 33.0 Ma. Seeds have a folded, investing or spatulate embryo, and they may be nondormant (ND) or have physical (PY) and/or physiological (PD) dormancy. Of the 365 species for which dormancy/germination data were found, 34.0% had ND seeds and 46.6% PY; 1.6%, PD&ND; 13.1%, PY&ND; and 4.7% PY+PD. Seeds with PY have a palisade layer of Malpighian cells (with a light line) in the outer epidermis of the inner integument, and a chalazal plug is the water gap. Seeds of 168 species of wet tropical trees, in all ten subfamilies, were ND (57.2%) or had PY (19.7%), but seed collections of many species were a mixture of ND & PY (20.2%); 2.9% had PD&ND. We found 13 tree species in wet tropics with recalcitrant seeds and 57 species in 28 genera in seven subfamilies in various habitats with persistent soil seed banks. Malvoideae is the most species rich and widely distributed subfamily and is found in tropical and temperate regions but rarely in subalpine/boreal or Arctic/alpine tundra vegetation. Few if any Malvaceae, in particular Malvoideae, grow as herbaceous perennials in tundra vegetation; possible reasons for this are considered.

Research on the associations between refugee children’s socioemotional development and bilingual outcomes is limited, although this population has unique migration experiences that could affect such development. This study examined Syrian refugee children’s socioemotional development, including well-being difficulties and acculturation, 4.5 years after their resettlement in Canada (N = 112; mean age = 11.97). It also investigated how socioemotional development was associated with refugee children’s bilingual outcomes in English and Arabic. The findings suggested that, although the children were developing an integration orientation of acculturation, a large proportion of them reported well-being difficulties. Socioemotional development had both direct and mediated associations with bilingual outcomes: children’s identification with Syrian culture influenced English outcomes positively, and their enjoyment of Arabic language activities influenced Arabic outcomes positively. Children’s enjoyment of Arabic language activities was related to less sibling interaction in English, which, in turn, was negatively associated with English outcomes. Somewhat similarly, identification with Canadian culture was related to less parent interaction in Arabic, which was negatively associated with Arabic outcomes. Well-being difficulties were negatively associated with outcomes in both languages. We conclude that refugee children are faced with unique challenges in their socioemotional development, which in turn influences their bilingual outcomes.

The C2 dominance effect in cluster simplification, in which the second consonant is preserved over the first (V1C1C2V2 → V1C2V2), has been attributed to the perceptual salience of prevocalic consonants. However, this P-map account fails in classic Optimality Theory when syncope feeds cluster simplification (V1C1V0C2V2 → V1C1C2V2 → V1C2V2), as the input and output contexts do not differentiate C1 from C2. This article proposes a solution to this problem using correspondence constraints that reference acoustic transitions from and to vowels. Since syncope removes the targeted vowel and its associated transitions, Ident [transition] constraints cannot refer to the eliminated transitions. Specifically, the transition from C2 is protected by the relevant Ident [release transition] constraint, while C1’s transition is not. Thus, under the ranking of Ident [release transition] over Ident [closure transition], C1, despite being underlyingly prevocalic, remains subject to the C2 dominance effect and is targeted for deletion. This proposal also addresses interactions between syncope and other cluster reduction processes, such as major place assimilation and debuccalisation.

This study estimates correlates of willingness-to-pay (WTP) for routine, elective, and urgent equine veterinary services in the United States. Through a nationwide online survey of US horse owners aged 18 and older, a payment card approach was utilized to elicit WTP for annual vaccinations, a lameness exam, and emergency colic surgery. Based on the results from an interval regression model, we found that financial capacity, income level, and the number of horses owned were significant predictors of WTP across all three service types. These findings have implications for equine veterinary practice management and client communication regarding treatment costs.

This article describes the creation of the Minority-Serving Institution Research Academy (MSIRA), a training and apprenticeship program for undergraduate political science students supported by the National Science Foundation and launched at the University of California, Riverside, in 2023. MSIRA is a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in which students spend 10 weeks learning basic research methods through active-learning and team-based exercises. After the 10-week course, students provide 25 hours of research assistance for faculty mentors. We examine focus group and survey data from the first cohort of MSIRA fellows to describe its impact and to draw parallels and distinctions with other CUREs.

On the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Asian-African Conference (Bandung Conference)—the first gathering of the leaders of Asian and African countries in history—the legacy of that historical event and its continued relevance in today’s world present interesting questions for study. The significance of the Bandung Conference undoubtedly lies in its ushering in the Non-Aligned Movement in international politics and related developments such as the “New International Economic Order” of the 1960s and 1970s.1 From a policy perspective, the Ten Principles announced at the end of the Bandung Conference (Bandung Principles) have defined Third World values in post-war international relations. This essay argues that the perspective of the People’s Republic of China (China or PRC) with regard to international law has been influenced to a considerable extent by the Bandung Principles. As a conference participant, China endorsed the outcome. Its view of the international legal order has evolved during the intervening years; indeed, it was only in 1971 that China took back its rightful seat in the UN system and began to engage with the international community at all levels. Bandung has nonetheless remained a referent throughout its rise to the status of a major world power. Tracing the evolution of Bandung’s influence on China, and vice versa, is meaningful, given that the international order is presently facing existential challenges of climate change, pandemics, and rifts in interstate relations.

The limited stop-loss transform, along with the stop-loss and limited loss transforms – which are special or limiting cases of the limited stop-loss transform – is one of the most important transforms used in insurance, and it also appears extensively in many other fields including finance, economics, and operations research. When the distribution of the underlying loss is uncertain, the worst-case risk measure for the limited stop-loss transform plays a key role in many quantitative risk management problems in insurance and finance. In this paper, we derive expressions for the worst-case distortion risk measure of the limited stop-loss transform, as well as for the stop-loss and limited loss transforms, when the distribution of the underlying loss is uncertain and lies in a general $k$-order Wasserstein ball that contains a reference distribution. We also identify the worst-case distributions under which the worst-case distortion risk measures are attained. Additionally, our results also recover the findings of Guan et al. ((2023) North American Actuarial Journal, 28(3), 611–625), regarding the worst-case stop-loss premium over a $k$-order Wasserstein ball. Furthermore, we use numerical examples to illustrate the worst-case distributions and the worst-case risk measures derived in this paper. We also examine the effects of the reference distribution, the radius of the Wasserstein ball, and the retention levels of limited stop-loss reinsurance on the premium for this type of reinsurance.

The Final Communiqué of the Bandung conference included a set of ten principles that emphasized “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” and “abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.”1 In this essay, I examine the impact of these emphases on the domestic law of one of the Bandung states, specifically the law of citizenship in India. Given the significance of state sovereignty and the demarcation of the domestic and international spheres, international law has only generated partial and uneasy responses to questions of citizenship and the intentional creation of statelessness through state policy.2 Using the Indian case study, I argue that Bandung’s focus on borders has facilitated the disenfranchisement of religious minorities, requiring a rethink of the nation-state as the basis of the international order.

The idea of decolonization that animated the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference continues to power imaginations of an alternative to the world Bandung inhabited. In this essay, we look upon Africa from Bandung, and simultaneously from Africa to Bandung, to recover an “otherwise”—a seeing of the future from Africa’s pasts. In the future envisioned in Bandung and beyond, flag independence was regarded as the first stop in the project of decolonization.1 The conference was to provide both “guidance to mankind … [on] the way which it must take to attain safety and peace” and “evidence that Asia and Africa have been reborn, nay, that a New Asia and a New Africa have been born!”2 As critical accounts have noted, the alternative “otherwise” Bandung offered was far from singular; it was multivocal and divergent, and this diversity is integral to the multiple readings and memories of Bandung.3 This multivocality made Bandung a successful performance of different visions of the world, including those of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Yet, Bandung was far from an ecumenical platform that offered little more than a cacophony of diverse voices and visions. The remedies may have been varied but the diagnoses of the malaise were unanimous—cultural imperialism and the racialism (i.e., racial and religious subordination) that instantiated and sustained it. Bandung was an opportunity to reimagine a world beyond imperial hierarchies. In what follows, we scrutinize Bandung’s legacy through the lens of Africa’s pasts. We note that for all the decolonial ethos that powered Bandung, its insistence on colonial legal forms inadvertently sustained rather than overturned imperial forms of subordination. We then offer an alternative mode of reimagining the world by drawing on recent recoveries of international legal histories of Africa prior to European colonization.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic condition that impairs health and function. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based treatment traditionally delivered face-to-face. Recently, digital CBT delivered online has gained prominence because of access barriers and user preferences. Although many digital CBT studies have emerged, few systematic reviews have directly compared digital and face-to-face CBT in adults with AUD. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to evaluate their comparative effectiveness. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines, a comprehensive search identified 25 randomized controlled trials (n = 2,065) comparing these formats. A random-effects meta-analysis evaluated pre- and post-effectiveness by calculating the standardized mean change using raw score standardization (SMCR). For drinking quantity, digital CBT showed a significant pre–post effect (SMCR = 1.21, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.38 to 2.04; p = 0.004). Face-to-face CBT showed no overall significant effect (SMCR = 0.69, 95% CI: −0.16 to 1.53; p = 0.110). However, subgroup analysis of face-to-face trials showed significance for active treatment (SMCR = 1.09), but a nonsignificant negative effect for relapse prevention (SMCR = −0.72). For drinking frequency, both interventions yielded statistically significant effects; however, face-to-face CBT demonstrated a stronger effect (SMCR = 1.02, 95% CI: 0.30 to 1.74; p = 0.006) than digital CBT (SMCR = 0.54, 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.79; p < 0.001). Forest plots were generated, and Begg’s test was used to assess publication bias.

The supersingular locus of the $\mathrm {GU}(1,n-1)$ Shimura variety at a ramified prime p is stratified by Coxeter varieties attached to finite symplectic groups. In this article, we compute the $\ell $-adic cohomology of the Zariski closure of any such stratum. These are known as closed Bruhat–Tits strata. We prove that the cohomology groups of odd degree vanish, and those of even degree are explicitly determined as representations of the symplectic group with a Frobenius action. Each closed Bruhat–Tits stratum is linearly stratified by Coxeter varieties attached to smaller symplectic groups. Thanks to results of Lusztig who computed the cohomology of Coxeter varieties for classical groups, we make use of the spectral sequence associated with this stratification and describe explicitly all the terms at infinity. We point out that the closed Bruhat–Tits strata have isolated singularities when the dimension is greater than 1. Our analysis requires discussing the smoothness of the blow-up at the singular points, as well as comparing the ordinary $\ell $-adic cohomology with intersection cohomology. A by-product of our computations is that these two cohomologies actually coincide, so that surprisingly the presence of singularities does not interfere with the cohomology.

This article explores the theory of racial whitening’s role in the political attempt to reshape the national collective in the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930) to explain the theory’s origins and characteristics and suggest its international relevance. It is argued that this theory—which proposed that Brazil could modernize through interracial marriage and mass European immigration—was not a Brazilian or Latin American peculiarity but was aligned with a transformist strand of previous scientific racialism. The main novelty came from wide political resonance, not intellectual newness. In addition, the article demonstrates that racial whitening oriented the First Republic to construct ambiguous, yet effective, structures of discrimination, aimed at molding the national collective. These structures seem to have anticipated the transformation of racial relations elsewhere, preceding the global shift in the justification of institutional racism from biological to cultural bases after 1945. The article then underscores the importance of understanding historical dependencies and subtle mechanisms through which racism can be perpetuated, especially in societies that claim to be racially progressive.