We consider the random series–parallel graph introduced by Hambly and Jordan (2004 Adv. Appl. Probab. 36, 824–838), which is a hierarchical graph with a parameter $p\in [0, \, 1]$. The graph is built recursively: at each step, every edge in the graph is either replaced with probability p by a series of two edges, or with probability $1-p$ by two parallel edges, and the replacements are independent of each other and of everything up to then. At the nth step of the recursive procedure, the distance between the extremal points on the graph is denoted by $D_n (p)$. It is known that $D_n(p)$ possesses a phase transition at $p=p_c \;:\!=\;\frac{1}{2}$; more precisely, $\frac{1}{n}\log {{\mathbb{E}}}[D_n(p)] \to \alpha(p)$ when $n \to \infty$, with $\alpha(p) >0$ for $p>p_c$ and $\alpha(p)=0$ for $p\le p_c$. We study the exponent $\alpha(p)$ in the slightly supercritical regime $p=p_c+\varepsilon$. Our main result says that as $\varepsilon\to 0^+$, $\alpha(p_c+\varepsilon)$ behaves like $\sqrt{\zeta(2) \, \varepsilon}$, where $\zeta(2) \;:\!=\; \frac{\pi^2}{6}$.

The relationship between populist attitudes and ideological orientations remains an area of considerable academic interest, yet much is still unknown about the ideological inclinations associated with populist attitudes. While many scholars acknowledge the link between populist attitudes and political ideology, existing studies often treat this relationship as either a given or a peripheral concern. This paper represents an initial exploration into the association between populist attitudes and political ideology. Utilizing data from the fifth wave (2016–2021) of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which encompasses 43 countries and 52 elections, this study aims to uncover how this relationship manifests cross-nationally. By employing a variety of rigorous methodological models, including the Generalized Additive Model, our results reveal a nonlinear relationship between populist attitudes and political ideology. Specifically, we find that political ideology and populist attitudes exhibit a U-shaped nonlinear relationship and that ideological extremism and populist attitudes demonstrate an exponential nonlinear relationship. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between ideological positions and populist attitudes, providing a deeper understanding of how they intersect.

In this paper, we study ordering properties of vectors of order statistics and sample ranges arising from bivariate Pareto random variables. Assume that $(X_1,X_2)\sim\mathcal{BP}(\alpha,\lambda_1,\lambda_2)$ and $(Y_1,Y_2)\sim\mathcal{BP}(\alpha,\mu_1,\mu_2).$ We then show that $(\lambda_1,\lambda_2)\stackrel{m}{\succ}(\mu_1,\mu_2)$ implies $(X_{1:2},X_{2:2})\ge_{st}(Y_{1:2},Y_{2:2}).$ Under bivariate Pareto distributions, we prove that the reciprocal majorization order between the two vectors of parameters is equivalent to the hazard rate and usual stochastic orders between sample ranges. We also show that the weak majorization order between two vectors of parameters is equivalent to the likelihood ratio and reversed hazard rate orders between sample ranges.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

Impending doom. Fire, drought, floods. This is the image of the environmental future our young people are shown and often set the challenged of “What are you going to do about it.” This is an enormous quest. It is directionless ambition without structure. It is the illusion of agency for change. This article showcases the design decisions of curricula and reflections on using of range of cli-fi and concludes with a set of continua that may help fellow educators in developing cl-fi learning activities including storytelling cards, design sprints, and sci-fi prototyping. They are iterations in the reflective approach to creating experiences that envision positive outcomes. These activities draw on research from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Plants for Space (P4S), which explores sustainable agriculture in extreme environments, like lunar habitats. P4S operates at the intersection of plants, people, technology, and sustainability, fostering critical and creative thinking. By framing sustainable futures in space context, we aim to alleviate environmental anxiety, encourages optimistic, innovative thinking, unconstrained by biological and societal norms. Climate fiction becomes a tool for imagining and realising new technologies, enabling students to create and critique possibilities beyond Earth’s current limitations.

Pascal stressed the importance of ‘reasons of the heart’ in leading us to God, and insisted that the God to whom he turned during his ‘night of fire’ on 23 November 1654 was ‘not the God of the philosophers and scholars’, but the God of the patriarchs and of Jesus Christ. This suggests a very different approach from that of Thomas, who characterises God in seemingly abstract terms, such as ‘being itself’ and ‘goodness itself’. This paper first explores the methodological and epistemological lessons to be drawn from Pascal’s notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ and argues that we have good reason to take them seriously. The second half of the paper discusses Aquinas’s apparently more impersonal conception of the deity, as an ‘infinite ocean of substance’ (John of Damascus) on which all things depend. But it then explores Aquinas’s account of the passage in Exodus where God addresses Moses in personal terms, and argues that this account, together with what Aquinas has to say on the subject of prayer, indicates that the God of his philosophical deliberations can indeed be reconciled with the intensely personal God of Scripture to whom Pascal turned during his night of fire.

Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2021. Our analysis reveals limited OSP use: less than 1% of research articles involve replication and approximately 3.5% provide full data access, despite an increase in the past decade to almost 8% of articles published in 2020. Open publishing has increased, reaching almost 50% of publications in recent years. The article concludes by discussing how OSP can contribute to improving the practice of DI and the policy effects of institutional design. Researchers who understand institutional design for inclusive collective action are best placed to make the changes required to promote open science.

The thought that intellectual arrogance consists in, roughly, overconfident resilience in one’s beliefs has been influential in philosophy and psychology. This thought is in the background of much of the philosophical literature on disagreement as well as some leading psychological scales of intellectual humility. It is not true, however. This paper highlights cases (of “stubborn fools” and the “arrogantly open-minded”) that cause trouble for equating intellectual arrogance with overconfident belief resilience. These cases are much better accommodated if we see intellectual arrogance as, instead, a form of vicious intellectual distraction by the ego.

We construct universal G-zips on good reductions of the Pappas-Rapoport splitting models for PEL-type Shimura varieties. We study the induced Ekedahl-Oort stratification, which sheds new light on the mod p geometry of splitting models. Building on the work of Lan on arithmetic compactifications of splitting models, we further extend these constructions to smooth toroidal compactifications. Combined with the work of Goldring-Koskivirta on group theoretical Hasse invariants, we get an application to Galois representations associated to torsion classes in coherent cohomology in the ramified setting.

Edward MacDowell held a liminal position in the late nineteenth century, well-known and active in Europe but also championed as a leading figure of US musical identity. In the first concert of his 1887 American Festival, conductor Frank Van der Stucken programmed MacDowell’s Hamlet, positioning MacDowell and his composition as important components of American music. However, MacDowell’s symphonic poem holds layers of cultural meaning in its various associations with European artistic, dramatic and musical figures.

MacDowell composed Hamlet. Ophelia. Zwei Gedichte für grosses Orchester in Frankfurt in 1884, shortly after he and his wife returned from their honeymoon in London, a city imbued with cultural Wagnerism. The style and motivic material of MacDowell’s symphonic poem are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, suggesting an aesthetic and thematic connection. Furthermore, MacDowell dedicated his composition to the famous Shakespearean actors, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, indicating their impact on his work.

These rich cultural layers of MacDowell’s Hamlet implicate issues of national identity and aesthetic value, issues that clarify the competing positions of the composer: as a nuanced cosmopolitan composer exhibiting English, French and Germanic elements in his work; as a US composer valorized to promote national identity; and as a proponent of aesthetic value transcending national origin. This article explores each cultural layer of MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia to position the symphonic poem as a microcosm of the rich cultural landscape of the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.

Over the last 15 years, scholars, universities, and foundations have promoted numerous efforts to link the scholarly and policy communities of international relations. Increasing evidence suggests that scholars are succeeding in getting their ideas and findings in the press, and their success bodes well for their ability to influence public and elite opinion. Despite these strides, we know little about when journalists may pick up on academic ideas and evidence or how they will report it in their stories. We seek to fill this gap. To explore the role of media as a conduit for academic knowledge, we surveyed more than 1,000 foreign policy journalists about their views on IR experts and expertise. We asked when, how, and how often respondents seek out IR scholars and scholarship in the course of their reporting. We also asked about the barriers to consuming peer-reviewed, scholarly research, if and how journalists interact with IR scholars on social media, and how IR scholars’ influence compares to that of scholars in other disciplines. Finally, we asked whether respondents cover a story differently if there is consensus among experts than if there is little agreement. In addition to providing empirical answers to these questions, we used our first-of-its-kind survey of foreign policy journalists to test several arguments from literature on the media and experts, including that journalists rely heavily on experts and expertise in developing and writing their stories, they rely more heavily on social science experts than other specialists, and they tend to inaccurately portray the level of consensus among the relevant experts. Our findings largely support these claims. First, foreign policy journalists often seek out IR experts and expertise for use in their stories, suggesting that the media acts as an important conveyor belt for academic knowledge. These journalists use academic expertise at several key stages, especially when researching background information. Second, foreign policy journalists, like journalists more generally, favor social science experts and expertise over experts from other disciplines. Finally, foreign policy journalists are no different than journalists overall in their tendency to create “false balance;” they underrepresent the degree of consensus among experts and oversample dissenters when scholars overwhelmingly favor a particular policy or interpretation of events.

This article investigates whether campaign contributions and lobbying are complementary, substitutive, or distinct forms of organizational political engagement. Our study reveals minimal overlap between organizations that engage in lobbying and those that make campaign contributions despite the perception that these activities are interchangeable forms of “money in politics.” Using comprehensive contribution and lobbying report data from 1998 to 2018, we find that most politically active organizations focus exclusively on either lobbying or making campaign contributions. Only a small percentage of organizations engage in both activities. This finding challenges the assumption that these forms of political activity are inherently linked. The majority of organizations engaged in political activity do so exclusively through lobbying. However, the top lobbying groups spend the most money and almost always have affiliated political action committees (PACs). Most lobbying money is spent by a small number of big spenders—organizations that also have affiliated PACs. Organizations that both lobby and make campaign contributions tend to be well resourced and rare.

Robin perches on a branch overlooking small humans below who are sat around a campfire. Robin notices. Robin responds. What happens when we notice Robin noticing us?

I land with a thud on the floor of the school and scurry off behind a chair, climb the walls, move away, camouflaging. I sense in ways intangible, magical, unknown.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of Posthumanist Climate Fiction (Posthuman Cli-Fi) by proposing practice-as-research-as-pedagogy for educational futures. This practice involves a generative, relational process of creative writings with more-than-human collaborators in everyday encounters in educational settings. Situated within the entangled realities and speculative futures of climate change, Posthuman Cli-Fi challenges the anthropocentric tendencies of traditional Climate Fiction by decentring human experiences and foregrounding relational ontologies. Drawing on our research in two distinct educational contexts—an urban forest school in London and a wall-less school in Bali—we explore how creative writing practices can engage with the stormy contours of living and educating with pastpresentfutures. Posthuman Cli-Fi offers a situated practice that creates possibilities for attuning to and attending to our shared worlds, offering pathways towards more response-able educational futures.

We consider an optimal stopping problem of a linear diffusion under Poisson constraint where the agent can adjust the arrival rate of new stopping opportunities. We assume that the agent may switch the rate of the Poisson process between two values. Maintaining the lower rate incurs no cost, whereas the higher rate requires effort that is captured by a cost function c. We study a broad class of payoff functions, cost functions and diffusion dynamics, for which we explicitly characterize the solution to the constrained stopping problem. We also characterize the case where switching to the higher rate is always suboptimal. The results are illustrated with two examples.

Although the harm-reduction approach to policy is most familiar from debates over public health and drug abuse, it provides a perfectly general framework for thinking about normative aspects of policy in non-ideal contexts. This paper seeks to apply a generalized harm reduction approach to the problem of attitudinal racism. Psychological research suggests that racism is unlikely to be completely eradicated, as a result of which a zero-tolerance approach risks becoming both counterproductive and overly punitive. Harm reduction recommends minimization of prevalence with respect to the primary phenomenon combined with attenuation of impact for the ineliminable portion.

Asymptotic dimension and Assouad–Nagata dimension are measures of the large-scale shape of a class of graphs. Bonamy, Bousquet, Esperet, Groenland, Liu, Pirot, and Scott [J. Eur. Math. Society] showed that any proper minor-closed class has asymptotic dimension 2, dropping to 1 only if the treewidth is bounded. We improve this result by showing it also holds for the stricter Assouad–Nagata dimension. We also characterise when subdivision-closed classes of graphs have bounded Assouad–Nagata dimension.