Taking into consideration the socio-political history and politics of identity in Latin America, Indigenous peoples’ current demands and the contemporary context of pressure on Indigenous territories from powerful groups who deny and challenge Indigenous identities and organisations in their pursuit to appropriate the natural and cultural resources of these territories, this paper argues for the necessity of an engaged, activist Indigenous archaeology in Latin America that is committed to the goals, claims and struggles of native peoples. The argument is that archaeology should move beyond critically reflecting on the discipline’s colonial history to develop a politically oriented and theoretically informed praxis that is in tune with Indigenous peoples’ project of dual decolonisation – the decolonisation of themselves and the decolonisation of the State. This praxis must be based on two principles: respecting Indigenous peoples as subjects of collective rights and political subjects, and embracing interculturality. The paper offers four examples of the challenges faced in making archaeology available to the subaltern.

Older people with long-term care (LTC) needs represent a growing and vulnerable group in European societies. A focus on the interrelation between pension and LTC policies can be useful in determining the extent to which European welfare states address this group’s social risks. This paper asks how European welfare states differ in the extent to which their institutional constellations of pension and LTC policies address older people’s social risks. We systematically measure the generosity of both policy fields at the institutional level to investigate cross-national differences in five European countries representing different welfare regime types. Furthermore, we develop a typology with four types of institutional constellations: residual, pension-oriented supplementary, LTC-oriented supplementary, and complementary. Our empirical results show that the studied welfare states differ in their pension and LTC policy constellations, which has different consequences for the coverage of older people’s social risks.

Recent UK legislative reform has further empowered the UK Executive, degrading horizontal and vertical constraints on powers interfering with human rights, and this has largely taken place via the ‘back door’ through repeated marginalisation of Parliament. Between 2021 and 2023, 11 pieces of primary legislation were given Royal Assent which narrowed Executive accountability mechanisms in relation to coercive and administrative powers identified as weakening human rights protections by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Echoing both recent and long-standing trends in UK law-making, such reform has been sent through Parliament while employing mechanisms of parliamentary marginalisation, undermining the ability of parliamentarians and broader civil society to scrutinise the changes. The passing of a constitutionally significant group of legislation in this manner created a ‘back door’ through which the UK Executive was able to expand its powers with minimal scrutiny. Such backdoor Executive empowerment supports scholarship highlighting the lack of firm UK constitutional constraints of the Executive. While the paper’s analysis does not make a claim on the overall status of UK democracy, it does argue that the recent legal reform mirrors dynamics identified with respect to democratic erosion, suggesting the need for further assessment of the UK’s democratic health.

This article reconciles conflicting views about the political landscape of corporate America with new data on the revealed political preferences of 97,469 corporate directors and executives at 9,005 different U.S. companies. Driven largely by turnover, I find that average observed ideology for directors and executives has shifted meaningfully to the left over time, changing from modestly conservative in 2001 to roughly centrist by 2022. This finding supports a middle-ground position between conventional wisdom casting “big business” as a conservative stronghold and revisionist views holding the opposite. Counterfactual simulations and a difference-in-differences design suggest multifaceted reasons for these changes, and hand-collected data on corporate stances on LGBTQ-related legislation suggest a strong connection between corporate political activity and individual views. Overall, this transformation has profound implications for American politics, as the individuals comprising one of the most powerful interest groups—corporate elites—appear to be fracturing ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.

Increasing prevalence of diet-related non-communicable diseases in India is attributed to overconsumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor diets and ultra processed foods (UPF) may potentially contribute to this consumption pattern. Applying standard UPF definition and developing appropriate tools can better capture its consumption among Indians. This cross-sectional study aimed to validate the ‘Nova-UPF Screener (for India)’ and explore its potential to objectively capture UPF consumption among Indian adults. The screener, adapted in prior formative research study from a tool for Brazilian population, was subjected to content, face and concurrent criterion validation. Subject matter experts (n 74) participated in online consultations to determine its content validity. Adults (18–60 years) from different geographical regions of India were included for face (n 70) and concurrent criterion (n 304) validations. The screener comprised twenty-four UPF categories specific to Indian food environment. Critical inputs from experts on screener’s appropriateness were incorporated to enhance its content. For face validation, overall percentage agreement of 99·4 % for all questions indicated a strong agreement for retaining screener attributes in each question. Half the participants (49·4 %) who were administered the finalised screener had Nova-UPF scores between 2 and 4 out of 24. There was almost perfect agreement (Pabak index = 0·85) between distribution of participants based on Nova-UPF scores and fifths of dietary share of UPF (as energy %) assessed by 24-h dietary recall. Nova-UPF Screener (for India) is a valid tool to capture UPF consumption in India that can be used for rapid assessment of UPF consumption and informing policies to improve Indian diets.

Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s national partisanship, consistent with existing literature. However, we find that voting for local nonpartisan offices and ballot measures is much less partisan. National partisanship explains more than 80% of the within-contest variation in voting for partisan state and local offices but less than 10% for local nonpartisan contests and local ballot measures. The degree of partisanship in local spending measures varies by the type of service—for example, education, roads, public safety, housing. Finally, we find evidence of structure in the pattern of votes on local spending measures.

Evaluation teams have been critical to the success of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) programs funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Given the limited resources often available to evaluation teams and the growing emphasis on impact evaluation and continuous quality improvement (CQI), CTSA programs may need to develop innovative strategies to build capacity for effectively implementing CQI and impact evaluation, while still tracking commonly reported metrics. To address this challenge, the Boston University (BU) Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) partnered with the BU Hariri’s Software and Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) to develop a web-based digital tool, known as TrackImpact, that streamlines data collection, saving significant time and resources, and increasing evaluation team capacity for other activities. Time and cost saving analyses are used to demonstrate how we increased evaluation team capacity by using this innovative digital tool.

An integrative approach addressing diet and other lifestyle factors is warranted in studying obesity and its related diseases. The objective of this study is to examine the associations of lifestyle patterns with overweight/obesity among children in the United Arab Emirates. Data were derived from a cross-sectional survey of children aged 4–9 years living in Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi (n 426). Dietary intake was collected using a 24-h dietary recall and evaluated with the Healthy Eating Index. The Youth Physical Activity Questionnaire assessed physical activity, while other lifestyle factors included the presence of a live-in household helper, number of electronic devices in the child’s bedroom, eating while watching TV, family dinner frequency, fast-food and breakfast consumption and hours of sleep. Factor analysis was used to identify the lifestyle patterns. Two lifestyle patterns emerged: an unhealthy pattern marked by higher fast-food intake, eating while watching TV, having a live-in household helper and lower family dinners and a healthy pattern with higher physical activity, better Healthy Eating Index, more sleep, micronutrient supplements and breakfast consumption. The healthy lifestyle pattern was linked to a 30 % reduction in overweight/obesity odds (OR = 0·7, 95 % CI: 0·53, 0·93). A healthy lifestyle pattern, characterised by higher physical activity, better dietary quality, adequate sleep and breakfast consumption, is associated with lower odds of overweight/obesity among children in the United Arab Emirates. These findings highlight the importance of promoting comprehensive lifestyle interventions to effectively address childhood obesity in this population.

This article reflects on the pitfalls of the combined search for big and better data and argues for more attention to everyday experiences and incidental evidence. It proposes that including spatial aspects, perspectives from cultural, colonial, and women’s history, as well as widening the source base helps to remedy these challenges, and encourages historians to abandon their hesitations and embrace the uncertainties in doing so. It draws on the results of a research project at the University of Amsterdam that utilizes incidental evidence to enhance our understanding of gendered spatial patterns in premodern cities.

In this study, we present a low-numerical-aperture (NA) confined-doped fiber architecture that synergistically mitigates transverse mode instability (TMI) through combined optical waveguide engineering and spatially tailored gain distribution. The individual and combined benefits of low-NA fiber design and the confined-doped fiber design strategy on TMI mitigation are numerically investigated. Building upon these theoretical analyses, a self-developed fiber, featuring a core/cladding diameter of approximately 26/400 μm, a core NA of approximately 0.045 and a core doping ratio of approximately 75%, is fabricated. Further experimental validation in a master oscillator power amplifier demonstrates 6.74 kW output power with near-single-mode (M${}^2\sim$1.49) beam quality, validating the design’s efficacy. This study establishes a novel fiber design paradigm that concurrently addresses TMI mitigation, beam quality maintenance and power scalability, offering a viable pathway toward robust high-power fiber laser sources with near-diffraction-limited beam quality.

Left-populist narratives of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world, including the twentieth-century Middle East, often construe it as a process whereby multinational fossil capital encloses and commodifies land held in common. Although such narratives may capture the experience of communities along certain oil and gas frontiers, they do not account for the social terrains and political trajectories of extractive land grabs in areas where private property in land already underpins commercial agriculture. How do energy companies engage with an existing market in land, and reorient a commodity frontier around extractive rather than agrarian capitalism? This article explores that question by examining property struggles in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the multinational Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) sought to acquire land still devoted to cash crop agriculture. Drawing on business records and material from Iraqi archives entirely new to Anglophone scholarship, I show how land conflicts on the Basra oil frontier came to revolve less around the IPC as such than the Iraqi state. The latter’s expanding remit entailed both the revival of older powers of sovereign landlordism and the deployment of novel capacities, as the state sought to mediate conflicting legal claims on land and its value and manage the social consequences of territorial dispossession. Ultimately, this article historicizes the political-legal status of postcolonial landlord states like Iraq in an era of hydrocarbon extraction, locating the origin of their powers as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructures as in the monopoly over oil rents.

Attaining the target of <0.1% HBsAg positives in children aged <5 years in vaccinated populations by 2030 is a WHO indicator of hepatitis B elimination. We aimed to calculate the prevalence of HBsAg- and anti-HBc-positive children and adolescents in the low-prevalence country of Germany. In total, 3567 children and adolescents aged 3–17 years participated in a national population based cross-sectional study. Data were collected between 2014 and 2017 using questionnaires and health examinations, including blood samples. Applying a weighted analysis to account for survey design and participant characteristics, we calculated the HBsAg and anti-HBc prevalence and described them by anti-HBs positivity. In total, 3007 participants had all three sero-markers measured. None were found HBsAg and anti-HBc positive. Seven (0.3%, 95% CI: 0.1–0.8) were anti-HBc positive and HBsAg negative; six were also anti-HBs positive. All anti-HBc-positive participants were aged ≥7 years and three had no migration background. Four anti-HBc-positive participants had known vaccination status; three had been vaccinated according to national recommendations. This very low hepatitis B virus sero-prevalence among children and adolescents indicates that Germany is reaching some hepatitis B virus elimination targets. We recommend maintaining preventive measures, in particular a high vaccination coverage, in order to reach hepatitis B elimination.

Changing environmental, societal, and business conditions shift the priority given to the ‘most valuable’ design solutions to be developed, which risks causing rework and mistakes during the development process. To maintain consistency among changes in what ‘value’ means in evolving business contexts, this paper presents a method – value-driven model-based systems engineering (VD-MBSE) – implemented in a software tool (named Club Design). The method is demonstrated through a case study related to aerospace electrification, highlighting its ability to maintain consistency during the iterations between business development and the design of technical solutions.

People often probability match: they select choices based on the probability of outcomes. For example, when predicting 10 individual results of a spinner with 7 green and 3 purple sections, many people choose green mostly but not always, even though they would be better off always choosing it (i.e., maximizing). This behavior has perplexed cognitive scientists for decades. Why do people make such an obvious error? Here, we provide evidence that this difficulty may often arise from statistical naïveté: Even when shown the optimal strategy of maximizing, many people fail to recognize that it will produce better payouts than other strategies. In 3 preregistered experiments (N = 907 Americans tested online), participants made 10 choices in a spinner game and estimated the payout for each of 3 strategies: probability matching, maximizing, and 50/50 guessing. The key finding across experiments is that while most maximizers recognize that maximizing results in higher payouts than matching, probability matchers predict similar payouts for each .

Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.