To provide a useful contextual backdrop to an exhibition at the Royal College of Psychiatrists this summer, we used a question and answer format to summarise the thoughts of its curator, Gavin Miller. Gavin has chosen 12 books published by Penguin between 1949 and 1975 to illuminate the relationship between psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists and the British media. He reflects on the opportunities and pitfalls that come with the association, the motivations of previous writers and provides practical advice for any media psychiatrists considering such a role in the future. The exhibition is open to visitors to the College building in London.

The HTAi Health Technology Assessment (eHTA) Working Group’s (WG) development of a consensus definition of early eHTA, as reported in Grutters et al. (1), represents a major step towards the establishment of eHTA as a distinct subdiscipline of HTA. In a global landscape in which growth in pharmaceutical spending is driven by the increasing number of high-cost specialty drugs (2–6), and where the cost of new entrants is not systematically associated with their clinical benefit (7;8), broader uptake of eHTA by pharmaceutical innovators offers a route to improving the value delivered by our collective investments in drug research and development (R&D). As we argue in this commentary, the WG’s report provides a coherent framework within which to further define appropriate eHTA methods for specific use cases as well as eHTA’s relationship to other decision-making tools currently used by health technology innovators and funders.

Detecting structural changes in economic relationships has been a longstanding challenge in econometrics. Most of the literature on structural breaks has considered abrupt structural breaks. Existing tests for detecting smooth structural change typically rely on kernel estimation. In this article, we introduce a novel tuning-parameter-free test that minimizes a criterion function over all possible nondecreasing or nonincreasing structural change functions. This test is pivotal (after appropriate scaling) in the scalar case and remains computationally simple even in multivariate settings. Compared to existing nonparametric tests, our method offers superior power against local monotonic structural changes and does not involve the choice of a bandwidth parameter. A simulation study and two empirical examples highlight the merits of the proposed test relative to some popular tests for structural changes in the literature.

Given a Hamiltonian torus action on a symplectic manifold, Teleman and Fukaya have proposed that the Fukaya category of each symplectic quotient should be equivalent to an equivariant Fukaya category of the original manifold. We lay out new conjectures that extend this story – in certain situations – to singular values of the moment map. These include a proposal for how, in some cases, we can recover the non-equivariant Fukaya category of the original manifold starting from data on the quotient.

To justify our conjectures, we pass through the mirror and work out numerous examples, using well-established heuristics in toric mirror symmetry. We also discuss the algebraic and categorical structures that underlie our story.

While the previous studies of the world history of literature are mostly concerned with the cross-cultural dissemination of literature, this article intends to analyse the intermediality of world literature in light of intermedial studies. It argues that the cross-cultural transmissions of literature are often entangled with and empowered by the intermedial interactions between literature and different forms of art. Under the theoretical framework of cross-cultural and intermedial studies, two representative Chinese literary works are discussed at length, namely Mulan ci (The Ballad of Mulan, sixth century) and Hong gaoliang (Red Sorghum, 1987). In addition to a careful analysis of their respective history of overseas transmissions, a comparative study of the two, an ancient poem and a modern novel, is carried out to show how the evolution of media has contributed to the cross-cultural transmissions of literature.

The intensity of the turbulence in tokamaks and stellarators depends on its ability to excite and sustain zonal flows. Insight into this physics may be gained by studying the ‘residual’, i.e. the late-time linear response of the system to an initial perturbation. We investigate this zonal-flow residual in the limit of a small magnetic mirror ratio, where we find that the typical quadratic approximation to RH (Rosenbluth & Hinton, 1998 Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 80, issue 4, pp. 724–727) breaks down. Barely passing particles are in this limit central in determining the resulting level of the residual, which we estimate analytically. The role played by the population with large orbit width provides valuable physical insight into the response of the residual beyond this limit. Applying this result to tokamak, quasi-symmetric and quasi-isodynamic equilibria, using a near-axis approximation, we identify the effect to be more relevant (although small) in the core of quasi-axisymmetric fields, where the residual is smallest. The analysis in the paper also clarifies the relationship between the residual and the geodesic acoustic mode, whose typical theoretical set-ups are similar.

It is thought that isolated neutron stars receive a natal kick velocity at birth nearly aligned with their spin axis. Direct observational confirmation of this alignment is currently limited to a single source in a supernova remnant (PSR J0538+2817), for which the three-dimensional velocity has been well constrained. Meanwhile, pulsar polarisation statistics suggest the existence of a spin-kick correlation, though both aligned and orthogonal cases remain possible. However, if the velocities of radiopulsars are predominantly aligned with their spin axes, a systematic difference in the observed transverse velocities of pulsars with small and large magnetic obliquities would be expected. In particular, due to projection effects, weakly oblique rotators should exhibit smaller, less scattered transverse velocities. Conversely, the transverse velocities of pulsars with large magnetic inclination should reflect their actual three-dimensional velocities. This study uses this idea to analyse samples of 13 weakly and 25 strongly oblique pulsars with known distances and proper motions. We find that their peculiar velocities are distributed differently, with statistical confidence levels of 0.007 and 0.016 according to the Anderson–Darling and Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, respectively. We performed a detailed population synthesis of isolated pulsars, considering the evolution of their viewing geometry in isotropic and spin-aligned kick scenarios. The observed split in the transverse velocity distributions and its amplitude are consistent with the spin-aligned kick model, but not with the isotropic case. At the same time, an orthogonal kick would predict a similar effect, but with the opposite sign. This provides robust support for pulsar spin kick alignment based on statistics, independently of polarisation.

This article offers a four-part argument in favor of settlers adopting an ethics of recognition in negotiations with Indigenous peoples to support decolonization in North America. Part 1 examines theories of decolonization offered by Indigenous scholars, who show that ethical practices within Indigenous communities are necessary for decolonization. Part 2 focuses on James Tully’s revision of the liberal politics of recognition (LPR), arguing that Tully brings the LPR closer to the aims of decolonization. Part 3 argues that his innovations do not sufficiently acknowledge how inequality undermines the freedom he champions. Part 4 draws on Judith Butler’s interpretation of Hegelian recognition and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s idea of recognition to sketch an ethics that minimizes the inequalities of participants in the political negotiations Tully theorizes. Minimizing inequality will promote the greater freedom needed for the legitimacy of negotiations, making them a possible vehicle for decolonization.

New musical instruments of the electronic and digital eras have explored spatialisation through multidimensional speaker arrays. Many facets of 2D and 3D sound localisation have been investigated, often in tandem with immersive fixed-media compositions: spatial trajectory and panning; physics-based effects such as artificial acoustics, reverberation and Doppler shifts; and spatially derived synthesis methods. Within the realm of augmented spatial string instruments, the EV distinguishes itself through a unique realisation of the possibilities afforded by these technologies. Initially conceived as a tool for convolving the timbres of synthesised and acoustic string signals, the EV’s exploration of spatial sound has led to new experiments with timbre. Over time, additional sound-generation modules have been integrated, resulting in an increasingly versatile palette for immersive composition. Looking forward, the EV presents compelling opportunities for sonic innovation.

In many countries, overall animal experimentation is not significantly decreasing or becoming less severe. Does this show that these countries’ programs to promote alternatives and the “three Rs” of “replace, reduce, refine” are failing? Scholars and activists sometimes take this for granted, but representatives of “three Rs” programs have disagreed. This article makes two contributions to the debate: one conceptual and one normative. First, it draws attention to the distinction between evaluating impact (whether a program makes a difference) and evaluating sufficiency (whether a program makes enough of a difference to achieve its goals). Total numbers are typically unhelpful in assessing impact, but depending on goals, they can be relevant in assessing sufficiency. Second, this article argues that an overall decrease in harm to animals in experimentation is a sensible policy goal. This article concludes with suggestions for how to go beyond the “three Rs” to effect overall change.

We prove lower bounds on the density of regular minimal cones of dimension less than seven provided the complements of the cones are topologically nontrivial.

Both gesture and talk are basic building blocks of face-to-face conversation. In this study, we address the temporal dynamics of hand gesture phases relative to places and types of turn transition. We annotated gesture features and measured temporal aspects of gesture related to speech in two languages, German and Swedish. We found variation in the temporal relationships of gesture types and alignment of gesture phases that relate to the management of turn-taking in conversation. Specifically, the frequency of different gesture phases accompanying the offset of speech differed depending on whether the same speaker held the floor or whether a new speaker took up a turn. In addition, we found that differences in temporal alignment of gesture phases can distinguish between the type of turn transition that is upcoming up to a second before the place of transition is reached. Our results emphasize the importance of the interaction of the verbal and the gestural modality to maintain the smooth flow of conversation.