The war in Ukraine raises concerns for potential hazards of radiological incidents and their impact on humans, especially families. Preparedness and response to radiological and nuclear incidents necessitates familiarity with pharmaceutical countermeasures, including antidotes and cytokines. Searches found no published study comparing adult indications and dosing among standard references. This study addresses this gap by collecting, tabulating, and disseminating information to health care professionals. Expert consensus chose the following references to compare adult indications and dosing of medical countermeasures for radiation exposure and internal contamination with radioactive materials: Advanced Hazmat Life Support (AHLS) for Radiological Incidents & Terrorism, DailyMed, Internal Contamination Clinical Reference, Medical Aspects of Radiation Incidents, Medical Management of Radiological Casualties, Micromedex, National Stockpiles for Radiological and Nuclear Emergencies: Policy Advice, POISINDEX, and Radiation Emergency Medical Management (REMM). This is the first study comparing adult indications and dosing for medical countermeasures among common references for radiological and nuclear incidents.

This article investigates the introduction of human rights reforms in late colonial Africa, a period defined by the disintegration of European colonial rule. While existing scholarship often attributes these reforms to European efforts to ensure a smooth transition to independence, foster post-colonial stability, and address post-war geopolitical challenges, such analyses frequently overlook the agency of indigenous nationalist leaders and anti-colonial activists. These groups perceived the reforms as strategically motivated maneuvers by departing colonial powers and engaged with them accordingly. Focusing on the decolonisation era in Africa, this study argues that both colonisers and the colonised approached human rights rhetoric primarily as a tool for pragmatic objectives rather than as an expression of ideological commitment to human rights norms. European powers framed these reforms as altruistic, yet their underlying motivations were rooted in political and economic interests. Conversely, African leaders appropriated human rights discourse to expose colonial hypocrisy and advance their political agendas. This engagement underscores the tension between universal human rights ideals and the pragmatic realities of political strategy (realpolitik) during a transformative period in the development of the international human rights framework. It also highlights how political calculations constrained the realization of universal human rights principles such as dignity, equality, and inalienability.

People regularly get information about the political world in visual form, such as graphs of past economic growth, nonverbal cues from politicians, or projections of future climate change. Visual characteristics affect people’s preferences, but it is difficult to measure the extent of this effect precisely and concisely in surveys. We present a new adaptive design that measures the impact of visual characteristics on people’s preferences: The plot staircase. We apply it to graphs of time series data, identifying the effect of the slope of a sequence on evaluations of the sequence. The plot staircase replicates the existing finding that people have a strong preference for increasing trends. Using fewer survey questions than past approaches, it measures at the individual level how much overall welfare a survey respondent is willing to sacrifice for an increasing trend. We demonstrate the flexibility of the plot staircase across domains (economic growth, jobs creation, and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout) and across sequence characteristics. Survey measurement is more difficult for concepts that cannot be represented textually or numerically; our method enables researchers to measure preferences for graphical properties not reducible to the individual pieces of information.

Only 15% of African households possess a formal title for their agricultural land, despite the widespread availability of titles and their documented benefits. Local politics combine with national land regimes to explain this empirical anomaly. I combine 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries with a novel geospatial measure of land values and the returns to agricultural investment. Households in areas with high returns to potential agricultural investment title more. However, in countries with centralized land tenure regimes, strong customary institutions attenuate this relationship; in countries with decentralized land regimes, strong customary institutions reinforce it. I use a case study in Côte d’Ivoire, including an original survey of 801 households and 194 customary elites, to trace these mechanisms at work. This research documents granular variation in the uptake of land titles, illustrates how local politics explain this variation, and outlines conditions under which customary elites impede development.

Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—is an archive of displacement, containing the imprint of overlooked, erased, or forgotten (often violent) pasts stored in everyday things like trees, trash, talk, and translations. Uniting all these unintended archival deposits are the dead—especially the uncommemorated, forgotten, or abandoned dead—and the urban spaces they co-inhabit with the most marginalized of the living. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper centers on urban cemeteries as archival nodes that gather together impressions—physically and psycho-semiotically—of uncommemorated pasts that nevertheless have left their mark on the urban fabric and people’s lives. This material “documentation” embedded in the built environment provides a vernacular alternative to the “fantasy” of official, national archives, foregrounding the blurry colonial-postcolonial divide in ordinary people’s historical imaginaries. Urban traces of displaced people and pasts show how complex semiotic residues get carried across otherwise disparate urban spaces where the postcolonial present has yet to reckon fully with colonialism’s mortal remains.

Mediation is characterised as a voluntary, consensual process, with self-determination a core value. The literature does, however, indicate a significant evolution in its role within society. Scholars contend that government-backed mediation exhibits capacity to ‘govern’ where the process has disputants reconfigure their selves and orientation to the conflict and align their behaviour with a guiding norm (or ideal). In this way, ‘mentalities’ can be moulded by the state to secure wider political aims. This paper provides empirically grounded insights into the efficacy of mediation-based governance in the context of environmental disputes. It analyses complaints submitted to National Contact Points (NCPs) by interested parties (eg individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) against multinational enterprises. NCPs are state-based non-judicial grievance mechanisms which seek to assist the resolution of alleged breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. I argue that the empirical reality exposes tensions within mediation-based governance which present challenges and opportunities for it: (in)consistency in the state’s influence over negotiations, background levels of (dis)trust between disputants and (future-orientated) temporal focus. Until these are remedied, it will remain incapable of realising wider political aims, such as sustainable development. Private interests are too deeply ingrained and prevailing power structures too dominant.

The term “customary law” is a label given by outsiders to what is simply the “law” for the local people. This article proposes an analytical framework for the case studies in this special issue in observing the normative contests through land and forestry dispute resolution in Asia and Africa, as a challenge to a changing regime of positive law under the pressures of contemporary “legal transplant.” A comparative view across jurisdictions may tell us the commonalities as well as the variation of the modes of normative modification through dialogues. As an attempt to demonstrate such an analytical approach, this article looks into the cases of normative resistance by local communities, similarly facing the eviction orders in the context of post-disaster reconstruction: in post-2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, and Moken villages in southern Thailand; in the post-2013 Typhoon Yolanda in Leyte, the Philippines; and post-2011 tsunami-affected communities in the East Japan.

Meter-scale large-aperture gratings are essential in petawatt-class picosecond laser systems. Their grating mounts must support heavy-load arrays and high alignment accuracy due to high energy density and long beam paths. However, nonlinear errors from parasitic motions and transmission gaps can significantly degrade precision. This study presents a kinetostatic modeling and error calibration framework for the grating mount, incorporating an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The nonlinear error model combines energy-based and pseudo-rigid-body methods, with equivalent representations of structural gaps and parasitic motions. To capture multi-source nonlinear interactions, a global–dynamic multi-subgroup PSO enhances calibration via coordinated global exploration and local refinement. Experiments indicate that, compared with conventional models, first-round compensation reduces average errors by over 65.4%, 79.8% and 74.8% in rotation, tip and tilt, respectively. The method integrates nonlinear pose modeling, unified gap representation and an enhanced PSO strategy, offering an effective solution for error compensation in meter-scale, heavy-load compliant mechanisms.

Self-rated health (SRH) is widely used as an indicator of health in population studies, and there has been an increased interest in cross-national variations. Numerous studies have found an association between SRH and health, including whether there are interactional effects at both the micro and the macro levels. This article compares the effect of social meetings on SRH across different welfare regimes in Europe. We discuss whether differences in welfare design may explain some of the variations in the impact of social meetings on SRH. We observe regime-specific patterns and identify cross-national variations. One main finding is that the effect of social meetings on SRH is stronger in all other welfare regimes compared to the social-democratic regime. Examining the pattern of association between SRH and social meetings across welfare regimes offers valuable insight into whether welfare systems may moderate potential health risks stemming from fewer social meetings.

Judicial authority relies heavily on the reader’s perception that judges make fair and legitimate decisions. Do such perceptions rest primarily on the reader’s agreement with the decision? Or does an opinion’s reasoning style, as distinct from outcome, impact a reader’s perceptions of legitimacy? In this study, we test whether incorporating elements of procedural fairness into judicial opinions impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, distinct from their agreement with the decision. In doing so, we also test whether members of the public are sensitive to elements of procedural fairness in written judicial opinions — a different context from the interpersonal interactions in which procedural fairness has been most often studied. We ran two survey experiments that sort participants into four conditions, varying the outcome of the case and whether the judicial opinion employs elements of procedural fairness. After reading a procedurally fair or one-sided opinion, participants reported on their perceptions of fairness and judicial legitimacy. We found strong support for the hypothesis that agreement with the outcome impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, and weak support for the hypothesis that procedural fairness impacts these perceptions.

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are politically visible yet institutionally invisible, long categorized as “white” by the U.S. government despite neither self-categorizing nor racially assigned as such. Most forms—across public and private sectors—still lack a “MENA” category option. What are the political consequences of institutional invisibility? Across two survey experiments and in-depth interviews, I find that exclusion from official identity categories triggers the experience of categorization threat, a psychological response rarely linked to political behavior. When MENA Americans experience categorization threat, they respond by expressing opinions on politics in ways that attempt to signal and assert their MENA identity and, to a lesser extent, Person of Color (POC) identity. Such identity assertion demonstrates that bureaucratic categorization influences expressions of public opinion on politics, not simply how people self-categorize. Researching the effects of category exclusion on public opinions creates opportunities for more accurate and democratic scholarship.

We investigated the potential yield of conducting active case finding for tuberculosis (TB) within a defined geographic radius (50 or 100 m) around the households of individuals diagnosed with TB at health facilities. In a well-defined geographic area within Kampala, Uganda, residential locations were determined for 85 people diagnosed with TB at local health facilities over an 18-month period and for 60 individuals diagnosed with TB during a subsequent community-wide door-to-door screening campaign. Ten of the individuals diagnosed through community screening lived within 50 m of an individual previously diagnosed with TB in a local health facility (TB prevalence: 0.98%), and 15 lived at a distance of 50–100 m (prevalence: 0.87%). The prevalence ratio was 1.4 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.7–2.9) for those <50 m and 1.2 (95% CI 0.6–2.2) for those 50–100 m, compared to >100 m. Using TB notifications to identify areas for geographically targeted case finding is at most moderately more efficient than screening the general population in the context of urban Uganda.

Critical-Level Utilitarianism entails one of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, depending on the critical level. Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism is a version of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where it is indeterminate which well-being level is the critical level. Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where additions of lives in a range of well-being between the good and the bad lives make the resulting outcome incomparable to the original outcome. These views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, they avoid the Sadistic Conclusion, and they agree on all outcome comparisons not involving indeterminacy or incomparability. So it may seem unclear whether we have any reason to favour one of these theories over the other. But I argue that Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism still entails the disjunction of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, which is also repugnant. By contrast, Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism does not entail this conclusion.

Divorce is increasingly common and can have a significant impact on later-life work and retirement. However, the lived experience of choice and control around divorce and its financial ramifications is not adequately understood. This article demonstrates how women and men differentially experience divorce as a long-run lifecourse factor, which can impact an individual’s scope for choice and control about working in later life, and how and when to retire. From a dataset of 47 in-depth interviews of workers aged over 50 in the United Kingdom from the international Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment project, findings show that the extent of choice and control at the time of divorce was constrained by individual and gendered lifecourse factors, by gendered, asymmetrical access to salient financial information and by emotional responses to relationship breakdown. Drawing on cumulative (dis)advantage over the lifecourse as a theoretical lens, this article demonstrates the ways in which short-term choices reinforce existing gendered and socio-economic (dis)advantage while instigating new pathways for (dis)advantage that have long-term implications for work and retirement.

This article documents the survival of gender inequalities in UK archaeology. We discover how an early equality and diversity agenda (Morris 1992) was dismantled in the late 1990s and explore the impact this had on women’s careers. Analysis of data from Chartered Institute for Archaeologists1 employment surveys for the period 1999–2008 enables a developed understanding of why many women, often reluctantly, left archaeology in their 30s, in a continual ‘leaky pipeline’, as volunteer group British Women Archaeologists was established. We find core issues linked to this ‘sector exodus’ as a gendering of tasks/under-employment, lack of support around parenting, and gendered promotion, leading to pay disparity. We argue that a refusal in the late 1990s to modernize employment structures around women workers’ needs underpins ongoing economic precarity in the sector.