The numbers of robots in organizations grow at an increasing rate. However, very little is known about how robotization (i.e., the implementation of robots at work) affects the work characteristics of the jobs it impacts. This qualitative study focuses on exploring the influence of industrial robots on perceived work characteristics. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with production line workers and supervisors of four Spanish manufacturing companies. Results showed benefits in physical demands, perceived skill variety, and improved social relationships. We found inconsistent results for job complexity, task variety, and autonomy. Based on our findings, we suggest specific moderators that may be influencing the relationship between robotization and some work characteristics. The findings of our study contribute to the existing literature by expanding work design theory, providing empirical evidence on the influence of an antecedent of work characteristics (robotization), and suggesting several moderators.

We extend a result of Lopes and Thieullen [Sub-actions for Anosov flows. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. 25(2) (2005), 605–628] on sub-actions for smooth Anosov flows to the setting of geodesic flow on locally CAT($-1$) spaces. This allows us to use arguments originally due to Croke and Dairbekov to prove a volume rigidity theorem for some interesting locally CAT($-1$) spaces, including quotients of Fuchsian buildings and surface amalgams.

This case note highlights fundamental errors of law committed by Mabuse J in MM v OM [2024] (3) SA 133 (GP). It demonstrates that the judge failed to appreciate that the phrase “pension interest” as defined in the Divorce Act refers to a benefit held by a retirement fund that only becomes due to be shared when the court dissolves a marriage where one of the spouses is a member of the retirement fund. Most importantly, it is shown that Mabuse J ignored the binding precedent of the Supreme Court of Appeal and failed to consider other judgments of the High Court, which clearly explain that where an exit event from the fund is anything but divorce, there can be no pension interest that the court can order to be shared. This note argues that the law was incorrectly applied in this case, and its approach, reasoning and conclusion must be rejected.

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.

The complex interconnection between socioeconomic disadvantage and drug use disorders has raised global interest in community-based approaches to substance abuse prevention and treatment. This article analyses the origins, implementation, and opportunities for diffusion in Latin America of an Argentine programme that promotes access to treatment through partnerships between the national drug policy agency and geographically dispersed care and support facilities managed by civil society organizations. It argues that severe socioeconomic crisis, rising drug use, and inadequate government response, at the turn of the century, created the conditions for social innovation in substance abuse treatment by civil society. Central aspects of the programme are ensuring accessibility through territorially based facilities and proactive outreach; attending multidimensional needs through the creation of local intersectoral support networks; and addressing addiction by building relationships. Remaining challenges include the need to improve coordination between national and subnational governments and develop a robust monitoring and evaluation system.

Following the large-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, policymakers and humanitarian actors urgently sought to anticipate displacement flows within Ukraine. However, existing internal displacement data systems had not been adapted to contexts as dynamic as a full-fledged war marked by uneven trigger events. A year and a half later, policymakers and practitioners continue to seek forecasts, needing to anticipate how many internally displaced persons (IDPs) can be expected to return to their areas of origin and how many will choose to stay and seek a durable solution in their place of displacement. This article presents a case study of an anticipatory approach deployed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Mission in Ukraine since March 2022, delivering nationwide displacement figures less than 3 weeks following the invasion alongside near real-time data on mobility intentions as well as key data anticipating the timing, direction, and volume of future flows and needs related to IDP return and (re)integration. The authors review pre-existing mobility forecasting approaches, then discuss practical experiences with mobility prediction applications in the Ukraine response using the Ukraine General Population Survey (GPS), including in program and policy design related to facilitating durable solutions to displacement. The authors focus on the usability and ethics of the approach, already considered for replication in other displacement contexts.

Residents’ attitudes towards wildlife and their management can be crucial in population control. Using a novel approach, we examined East Tennessee residents’ tolerance for American black bears and attitudes towards hunting. Most residents viewed black bears positively, tolerated their presence and preferred seeing them in their area. Attitudes were influenced by concern about future encounters, the values and benefits attributed to bears, prior experiences and perceptions of human–bear conflict and conflict frequency, whereas sociodemographic factors were less influential. Support for regulated hunting was influenced by sociodemographic factors more so than cognitive factors. Our findings suggest opportunities for managers to increase tolerance of black bears among residents through outreach emphasizing the benefits of living with the bears and guidance for avoiding negative encounters. Greater trust in the wildlife agency may result from such outreach, potentially leading to greater levels of tolerance among residents of bear-inhabited areas.

Among occultists, Hermetic writers, modern Templar groups, and conspiracy theorists, Michael Psellos has been imagined as a guardian of occult Hermetic knowledge, the secret founder of the Knights Templar, and a key figure in global conspiracy narratives. This article traces the development of this alternative reception in the West and explores its adoption by Turkish conspiracy theorists who, despite their anti-Western stance, have integrated it into their narratives about the New World Order. The dramatic reconstruction of Psellos’ scholarly pursuits in this modern underground reception has created a ‘double reality’ that diverges radically from academic interpretations of Psellos.

The article analyses the Jewish militias that were established in Galicia during the fall of the Habsburg empire in 1918 and the creation of new nation-states. As public order collapsed and the region descended into violence, Jews throughout Galicia took up arms to protect and organize their communities and to take an active part in the transformation of the region. They mirrored the efforts of their non-Jewish neighbors, creating paramilitary forces that aimed to fill the vacuum left behind by the disintegrating imperial state. The militias were more than a means of self-defense. They actively participated in the establishment of the new states’ monopoly on violence but did so on their own terms—integration was only possible through separation. At the same time, the militias served a decidedly internal, Jewish purpose by replacing traditional leaderships and imposing discipline in the community, at times through universal conscription.

undate is an ambitious, in-progress effort to develop a pragmatic Python package for computation and analysis of temporal information in humanistic and cultural data, with a particular emphasis on uncertain, incomplete, and imprecise dates and with support for multiple calendars. The development of undate is grounded in domain-specific work on digital and computational humanities projects from multiple institutions, including Shakespeare and Company Project, Princeton Geniza Project, and Islamic Scientific Manuscript Initiative. With increasing support for different formats and calendars, Undate aims to bridge technical gaps across different communities and methodologies. In this article, we describe the undate software package and the functionality of the core Undate and UndateInterval classes to work with dates and date intervals. We discuss why this software exists, how it expands on and generalizes prior work, how it compares to other approaches and tools, and its current limitations. We describe the development methodology used to create the software, our plans for active and continuing development, and the potential undate has to impact computational humanities research.

We establish some interactions between uniformly recurrent subgroups (URSs) of a group G and cosets topologies $\tau _{\mathcal {N}}$ on G associated to a family $\mathcal {N}$ of normal subgroups of G. We show that when $\mathcal {N}$ consists of finite index subgroups of G, there is a natural closure operation $\mathcal {H} \mapsto \mathrm {cl}_{\mathcal {N}}(\mathcal {H})$ that associates to a URS $\mathcal {H}$ another URS $\mathrm {cl}_{\mathcal {N}}(\mathcal {H})$, called the $\tau _{\mathcal {N}}$-closure of $\mathcal {H}$. We give a characterization of the URSs $\mathcal {H}$ that are $\tau _{\mathcal {N}}$-closed in terms of stabilizer URSs. This has consequences on arbitrary URSs when G belongs to the class of groups for which every faithful minimal profinite action is topologically free. We also consider the largest amenable URS $\mathcal {A}_G$ and prove that for certain coset topologies on G, almost all subgroups $H \in \mathcal {A}_G$ have the same closure. For groups in which amenability is detected by a set of laws (a property that is variant of the Tits alternative), we deduce a criterion for $\mathcal {A}_G$ to be a singleton based on residual properties of G.

We generalize Baker–Bowler’s theory of matroids over tracts to orthogonal matroids, define orthogonal matroids with coefficients in tracts in terms of Wick functions, orthogonal signatures, circuit sets and orthogonal vector sets, and establish basic properties on functoriality, duality and minors. Our cryptomorphic definitions of orthogonal matroids over tracts provide proofs of several representation theorems for orthogonal matroids. In particular, we give a new proof that an orthogonal matroid is regular if and only if it is representable over ${\mathbb F}_2$ and ${\mathbb F}_3$, which was originally shown by Geelen [16], and we prove that an orthogonal matroid is representable over the sixth-root-of-unity partial field if and only if it is representable over ${\mathbb F}_3$ and ${\mathbb F}_4$.

Microwaves (MWs) have emerged as a promising sensing technology to complement optical methods for monitoring floating plastic litter. This study uses machine learning (ML) to identify optimal MW frequencies for detecting floating macroplastics (>5 cm) across S, C, and X-bands. Data were obtained from dedicated wideband backscattering radio measurements conducted in a controlled indoor scenario that mimics deep-sea conditions. The paper presents new strategies to directly analyze the frequency domain signals using ML algorithms, instead of generating an image from those signals and analyzing the image. We propose two ML workflows, one unsupervised, to characterize the difference in feature importance across the measured MW spectrum, and the other supervised, based on multilayer perceptron, to study the detection accuracy in unseen data. For the tested conditions, the backscatter response of the plastic litter is optimal at X-band frequencies, achieving accuracies up to 90% and 80% for lower and higher water wave heights, respectively. Multiclass classification is also investigated to distinguish between different types of plastic targets. ML results are interpreted in terms of the physical phenomena obtained through numerical analysis, and quantified through an energy-based metric.