Inequality has increased over recent decades in many advanced industrial democracies, but taxes have rarely become more progressive. One possible explanation for the lack of a policy response is that, despite rising inequality, voters support higher taxes on incomes weakly, if at all. Using original representative surveys in Austria and Germany, we elicit voters’ preferences over the progressivity of income tax policy and examine whether exposing them to accurate information about inequality affects those preferences. Voters, we find first, express an abstract preference for progressivity but concretely support tax plans that are only somewhat more progressive than the status quo in Austria and less progressive than the status quo in Germany. Second, we find evidence that certain kinds of information about inequality moderately increase progressive tax preferences in Germany; however, we find no equivalent effects in Austria. While information on inequality does seem able to affect tax policy views in certain contexts, it seems unlikely that lack of this information can fully account for the lack of rising redistribution through the income tax system in the face of increasing inequality.

Given a family of pairs over a smooth curve whose general fiber is a log Calabi–Yau pair in a fixed bounded family, suppose there exists a divisor on the family whose restriction on a general fiber is ample with bounded volume. We show that if the total space of the family has relatively trivial log canonical divisor and the special fiber has slc singularities, then every irreducible component of the special fiber is birationally bounded.

Negami found an elegant splitting formula for the Tutte polynomial. We present an analogue of this for Bollobás and Riordan’s ribbon graph polynomial, and for the transition polynomial. From this we deduce a splitting formula for the Jones polynomial.

We consider the question of when a Jacobian of a curve of genus $2g$ admits a $(2,2)$-isogeny to a product of two polarized dimension g abelian varieties. We find that one of them must be a Jacobian itself and, if the associated curve is hyperelliptic, so is the other.

For $g=2,$ this allows us to describe $(2,2)$-decomposable genus $4$ Jacobians in terms of Prym varieties. We describe the locus of such genus $4$ curves in terms of the geometry of the Igusa quartic threefold. We also explain how our characterization relates to Prym varieties of unramified double covers of plane quartic curves, and we describe this Prym map in terms of $6$ and $7$ points in $\mathbb {P}^3$.

We also investigate which genus $4$ Jacobians admit a $2$-isogeny to the square of a genus $2$ Jacobian and give a full description of the hyperelliptic ones. While most of the families we find are of the expected dimension $1$, we also find a family of unexpectedly high dimension $2$.

This article provides new exploratory information on child support amounts expected for non-resident fathers of children living with low-income, unemployed mothers in Colombia, Finland, Peru, the United States, and Uruguay. Using vignette data obtained through extensive interviews with judicial and social service personnel and child support experts, we investigated whether child support is expected and its amount when single mothers are unemployed, considering four different levels of earnings for fathers. In all countries but Finland, child support is expected when the father has only temporary employment. For the lowest income fathers, child support expectations in Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay are similar or higher than the United States and higher in Finland. In all countries except Colombia, child support expectations are higher when father’s income is higher. We discuss implications for policy and future research.

This article traces the visual culture of human genetic engineering over the past decade, focusing on the CRISPR genome editing technology. We argue that the representations surrounding CRISPR exemplify, and to an extent define, this visual culture. We examine the history of CRISPR, particularly its human applications from 2012 to 2022, through a periodization that includes the CRISPR craze, gene therapy initiatives, the He Jiankui controversy and clinical trials. Employing an expanded interpretation of intermediality within science communication, this work addresses the role of figuration across the relationships between specialist science reporting and the mainstream press and between traditional and social media. Using a mixed-methods approach combining visual and social-media analysis, the article presents an empirical analysis of three key figures – the double helix, the scientist and the human subject – and their roles across the discussed phases. The study concludes by articulating the stabilizing, amplifying and affective functions of intermedial figuration within science communication.

The evolution of a rotationally symmetric surface by a linear combination of its radii of curvature is considered. It is known that if the coefficients form certain integer ratios the flow is smooth and can be integrated explicitly. In this paper the non-integer case is considered for certain values of the coefficients and with mild analytic restrictions on the initial surface.

We prove that if the focal points at the north and south poles on the initial surface coincide, the flow converges to a round sphere. Otherwise the flow converges to a non-round Hopf sphere. Conditions on the fall-off of the astigmatism at the poles of the initial surface are also given that ensure the convergence of the flow.

The proof uses the spectral theory of singular Sturm-Liouville operators to construct an eigenbasis for an appropriate space in which the evolution is shown to converge.

The multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problem aims to find plans for multiple agents in an environment within a given time, such that the agents do not collide with each other or obstacles. Motivated by the execution and monitoring of these plans, we study dynamic MAPF (D-MAPF) problem, which allows changes such as agents entering/leaving the environment or obstacles being removed/moved. Considering the requirements of real-world applications in warehouses with the presence of humans, we introduce (1) a general definition for D-MAPF (applicable to variations of D-MAPF), (2) a new framework to solve D-MAPF (utilizing multi-shot computation and allowing different methods to solve D-MAPF), and (3) a new answer set programming-based method to solve D-MAPF (combining advantages of replanning and repairing methods, with a novel concept of tunnels to specify where agents can move). We have illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of this method by experimental evaluations, from the perspectives of computational performance and quality of solutions.

This article was submitted to the ‘The Legacy of Giovanni Sartori’ symposium on IPSR/RISP – Italian Political Science Review. The goal of this note is to suggest an alternative approach to the of party family. The literature agrees that individual party families should be ideologically distinct and cohesive but maintains a broad understanding of ‘ideology’. This comes with conceptual and operational complications, including rarely explicit definitions of party family and frequently inconclusive empirical evidence. Instead, I suggest that the historically rooted ideological distinctiveness and uniqueness of party families should be conceived at the issue level. Accordingly, an alternative conceptualisation of party family is proposed: groups of parties whose patterns of issue salience ideologically reflect their historical origins. Importantly, this approach revolves around the identification of party families’ core issues, based on their cleavage/historical origins. Parties belonging to a party family will be the most consistent emphasizers of their core issues within their party system. This note provides a first discussion of how this alternative approach may provide party family scholars with greater clarity, both conceptually and in proposed empirical applications.

This article analyses the agony column ‘Voi e il cinema’, launched in November 1938 in Cine illustrato, one of the most popular film magazines of the time. ‘Voi e il cinema’ invited readers to share their acting aspirations, but also to send in photographs of themselves that might contain the defining feature of a diva: photogenicity. The magazine was flooded with images of ‘ordinary young Italian women’ that created an intermediate visual grammar. Focusing on both the photographs and the editors’ responses, the article reveals how shared consumption practices redefined the relationship between public and private space. It also highlights the distance of the readers’ self-representations from Fascist models and sheds light on the role of American star culture in creating the ‘modern’ subject. Although they were not politically opposed to Fascist models, the photographs reveal a strong desire for social change and the perception of such change, particularly in relation to traditional female roles.