I explore and defend the unusual view that the replacement of matter taking place in the human body undermines egoistic reasons, and that we therefore have little or no basis for long-term egoistic concern. I begin by arguing that you should not have egoistic concern for a replica, i.e. a person resulting from a complete and sudden replacement of matter. I then argue that when it comes to egoistic concern, replication is not relevantly different from the slower and more gradual form of replacement found in human metabolism: if the former undermines egoistic reasons, so does the latter. I grant that the resulting view is, in some respects, hard to accept, but I conclude that we should at least treat it as a serious possibility.

The money-burning game (MBG) is widely used to study anti-social or destructive behavior. We extend the design of the MBG to separate three motives that could lead subjects to burn their partner’s money – spite, reciprocity, and inequality aversion. We detect that reciprocity is the dominant reason: Most of our subjects would only burn their partner’s money if they believed that their partner would burn theirs. This finding has important implications for the interpretation of the behavior of the game.

Youth unemployment has been a primary concern for the European countries, especially after the 2008 Great Recession. In 2013 a Recommendation of the Council of the European Union established the Youth Guarantee (YG) as a political commitment to ensure that all young people receive a high-quality offer of employment, training or continued education within 4 months of becoming unemployed. To financially support the implementation of the YG in European countries and regions, the EU turned to the European Social Fund and created the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI). The YEI used regional disparities as a guiding criterion for the allocation of resources, but it has not been assessed at the regional level. We fill this gap by assessing the impact of the YEI on the labour market and educational outcomes of young people in EU regions that received funding between 2014 and 2018. The findings demonstrate that the YEI had a positive impact on youth opportunities in EU regions, supporting labour market integration and the return to education and training.

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

A new, ground-up narrative of the Buddhist Mobilization of Huế in central Vietnam in the summer of 1963 highlights the voices of its participants – the ‘People of the Pagoda’. Drawing on local records and personal narratives, the article explores the process of how the ‘People of the Pagoda’ forged a collective identity from daily activism and protests for religious equality. Months of various nonviolent collective actions – in the form of demonstrations, hunger strikes, and self-immolations – developed a strong, broad community within the distinctive spaces of Buddhist temples. The article emphasizes the relevance of culture, morals, emotions and identity in the Buddhist Mobilization’s enduring impacts on personal awareness and community networks. In contrast to much top-down, politically-oriented, and Sài Gòn-centric scholarship on this event in Vietnam War historiography, this essay examines the mobilization as a social movement in its own right and seeks to restore Huế’s significant historical role as the birthplace of this movement.

Psychiatrists and anthropologists both rely on observation, discourse analysis and access to participants’ internal and external worlds. Ethnographic fieldwork, a key method in medical anthropology, offers a powerful tool to establish a robust evidence base of how to address mental health inequalities in ethnic minority communities.

Human milk oligosaccharides offer unique benefits for infant growth and development. Buffalo milk, characterized by a mild flavor and high nutritional value, has attracted considerable interest. To characterize the oligosaccharide profile and composition of buffalo milk, we conducted qualitative and quantitative analysis of milk oligosaccharides at the early- and late-lactation stages of crossbred (Nili-Ravi × Murrah × local) buffaloes from Guangxi, China. The results revealed a total of 97 oligosaccharides including 17 novel oligosaccharides, with concentrations of 416.6 ± 25.86 and 368.3 ± 10.29 mg/L in milk from early- and late-lactation stages, respectively. The most abundant oligosaccharides were 3’-sialyllactose (3’-SL), difucosyllactose (DFL), 6’-sialyllactose (6’-SL), and a newly discovered compound, 2142. The oligosaccharides in crossbred (Nili-Ravi × Murrah × local) buffaloes demonstrated greater diversity than those found in the milk of other dairy animals, highlighting its potential as a high-quality nutritional resource for adults and infants.

What shapes fossil-fuel investment and divestment decisions? What are pension funds’ climate-related considerations? And how do conceptions of portfolio risk influence these issues? Danish pension funds constitute a rare and understudied cohort of investors who have undertaken comparatively progressive fossil-fuel investment decisions. Simultaneously, diversification and market rationality have frequently been invoked as obstacles to divestment and active ownership. Using the Danish experience, this article conducts an archaeological analysis of the concept of portfolio risk, unearthing the various ways in which it has shaped fossil-fuel investment decisions. The analysis identifies five key aspects through which the concept has hampered Danish pension funds’ active ownership and fossil-fuel divestment decisions (sector diversification, externalities, market rationality, dispersed ownership, and passive index investing). The article argues that these discursive aspects have reinforced a passive tendency within finance capitalism to bolster the status quo, thereby supporting prevailing market actors and the continued extraction of fossil fuels.

After World War II, Japan was severely degraded, and its people were generally devastated. For the country’s very survival, the beleaguered Japanese people sought to rebuild economically and reputationally. During this postwar period, Japanese business, union, and government leaders grappled with lagging progress and the necessary abandonment of prior transwar social and business arrangements. They sought new strategies to stimulate advancement in the wake of a governmental vacuum, labor unrest, and the threat of communism. In this context, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) took root in some areas of Japan during the period when Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $102 billion in 1945 to $420 billion by 1961. MRA introduced Western-oriented societal values, intended to help nurture individual and societal change, including collaborative relations between unions and management. Of the first eight Japanese prime ministers after World War II, six either worked openly with or endorsed the MRA movement.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in 2017 has generated a lively debate. While advocates argue that ascribing personhood to natural entities is a powerful tool for redressing historical injustices against Indigenous peoples and for protecting the environment, critics argue that it is incompatible with Western legal and political systems. In this article, we use Thomas Hobbes’s theory of personhood to develop a novel account of ecological personhood. Hobbes explains how natural entities can be empowered to speak and act through authorized representatives, much as states, corporations, and wards do. Our Hobbesian account has three main payoffs. First, it offers a bridge between different legal orders and ontologies of nature. Second, it explains how “ecoship” is normatively different from corporate personhood and guardianship. Third, it highlights both the transformative potential of ecological persons and the ways in which they can be coopted and subverted.

We present a deep learning architecture that reconstructs a source of data at given spatio-temporal coordinates using other sources. The model can be applied to multiple sources in a broad sense: the number of sources may vary between samples, the sources can differ in dimensionality and sizes, and cover distinct geographical areas at irregular time intervals. The network takes as input a set of sources that each include values (e.g., the pixels for two-dimensional sources), spatio-temporal coordinates, and source characteristics. The model is based on the Vision Transformer, but separately embeds the values and coordinates and uses the embedded coordinates as relative positional embedding in the computation of the attention. To limit the cost of computing the attention between many sources, we employ a multi-source factorized attention mechanism, introducing an anchor-points-based cross-source attention block. We name the architecture MoTiF (multi-source transformer via factorized attention). We present a self-supervised setting to train the network, in which one source chosen randomly is masked and the model is tasked to reconstruct it from the other sources. We test this self-supervised task on tropical cyclone (TC) remote-sensing images, ERA5 states, and best-track data. We show that the model is able to perform TC ERA5 fields and wind intensity forecasting from multiple sources, and that using more sources leads to an improvement in forecasting accuracy.

Government efforts to improve land productivity during 1917–1918 encouraged a wider interest in land drainage schemes. Building on the efforts of the County War Agricultural Executive Committees, new legislation brought local authorities into play to provide governance and direction; a proliferation of local bodies managing drainage schemes ensued, with a common aim that those benefitting from improved drainage should fund these schemes. Government support, in the form of financial assistance, remained firm after the War as such schemes were seen as opportunities to create employment for former servicemen. But in a scheme to clear rivers flowing across north Hampshire, west Surrey, and south Berkshire, landowners pushed back, manoeuvring to gain control of the scheme with the aim of reducing charges on landowners. A successful scheme ensued, managed by a prominent land agent working for one of the largest estate owners, but was marred by disagreement over its finances, scope and benefits.

We aimed to compare the mean sodium content of New Zealand (NZ) packaged breads in 2013 and 2023 and assess compliance with the NZ Heart Foundation (HF) and World Health Organization (WHO) sodium reduction benchmarks. Sodium data were obtained from a supermarket food composition database. Mean differences between years were assessed using independent samples t-tests and chi-square tests. There was a significant reduction in the sodium content of all bread from 2013 (n=345) to 2023 (n=309) of 46 mg/100g (p<0.001). In 2013, 20% (n=70/345) of breads met the HF benchmarks, and 10% (33/345) met the WHO benchmarks; corresponding values for 2023 were 45% (n=138/309) and 18% (n=57/309) (p<0.001 for both). If continued, the modest reduction in sodium content and increase in the percentage of NZ breads meeting relevant sodium reduction benchmarks could positively affect public health, particularly if extended across the packaged food supply.

Partisanship is the primary driver of voter decision-making in the United States. Partisans expect to prefer their party’s candidates’ issue stances and personal characteristics. Even when they learn negative information, motivated reasoning often keeps them from changing their candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, there is a “tipping point” at which partisans will update their priors and may vote against their preferred party’s candidate. This study seeks to determine whether voters are more likely to reach that tipping point when they see a woman in their party, and under what circumstances. We use a unique experimental design to vary a candidate’s gender, congruence with major elements of the party platform, and their participation in a scandal. We find that women are often evaluated more negatively and that subjects rely on substantive information more when evaluating women candidates. Our findings suggest that campaigns and campaign information may matter more for women candidates.

The extent to which EU competition law applies in the healthcare context remains a contested question. The contemporaneous publication of the European Commission’s Evaluation of State Subsidy rules for health and social services of general economic interest (SGEI) in December 2022, and of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s April 2023 judgment in Casa Regina Apostolorum regarding state support to hospitals in Italy, underscore uncertainty and appear to indicate an impasse. These publications unfold against the backdrop of two tensions: between state and market, and between the EU and national levels. Hospitals illustrate these tensions well due to the expansion of competition mechanisms into the hospital sector (notably expanding private provider delivery of public hospital services, often supported by “patient choice” policies), and of hospitals remaining typically local or regional in character rather than supranational. This article provides a timely and original analysis of the Casa Regina Apostolorum judgment in light of Commission policy regarding SGEI and hospitals and how EU Member States engage with this. It offers insights into the potential legacy of Casa Regina Apostolorum, and indicates where future legal challenges may focus.