This study examines coronavirus disease 2019-related law-drafting using Finnish data. The impact assessments of 17 government bills are analyzed using content analysis. These 17 government bills have been selected based on their societal significance and are related to restrictions on fundamental rights under the Finnish constitution. The purpose of this study is to examine how ex ante impact assessments and the planning of forthcoming implementation and ex post impact assessments have been carried out in these regulatory projects. The results indicate that, based on the ex ante assessments presented in the government bills, it is not possible to conclude that the benefits of the proposed restrictions would exceed the costs. Despite the rush, uncertainty and the incompleteness of information caused by the pandemic, the government bills should clearly justify why the presented regulation is the preferred alternative. Furthermore, the subsequent ex post impact assessment measures have been planned to produce information only about the general development of the pandemic situation instead of the functionality of individual restriction regulations. In this respect, special attention should have been paid to the individual restriction measures.

Despite the destruction it inevitably engenders and the opposition it often elicits, war remains a near-human universal. There is almost no society, across time or place, that has not experienced some form of violent conflict, whether internally or against its neighbors or adversaries. The most common explanations for the causes of war and conflict tend to center around social and material factors, such as conflicts over resources, territory, or regime type. Certainly, these factors play a role in many conflicts, but they cannot alone explain every war. Other arguments, however, drawn from evolutionary psychology and biological anthropology, based on fundamental aspects of human nature with regard to male coalitionary psychology, do posit specific sources for conflict that provide an underlying platform for its emergence and can help explain its wide variety across time and space. A comprehensive and accurate understanding of the nature of war must include these considerations.

The “home–field” dichotomy has long been a core assumption of fieldwork in political science. As in other social science disciplines, political scientists rely on these categories to contextualize our research within particular time–space nexuses and to separate our personal lives and private dwellings and institutions from our sources, participants, and broader research environments. Although the spatial, temporal, and emotional divisions between our “homes” and “fields” have always been arbitrary, they are increasingly blurred when we use remote and online methods for research, especially for qualitative studies. This article problematizes the home–field dichotomy within the context of remote and online political science field research. We contend that the overlap of our homes and fields in digital fieldwork poses different challenges for our professional boundaries than offline research, particularly in terms of separating our personal and research lives, mitigating risk, and protecting our mental health. Given the growing use of remote and online methods, we argue that the discipline of political science must account more seriously for the muddling of our homes and fields to support rigorous, transparent, and ethical empirical research.

This letter to the editor explores the importance of a just transition for waste pickers in the context of the global plastics treaty. It sets out ideas for just transition at the level of production reduction, replacements and substitutes, systems change and waste management.

A key challenge in advancing slushflow management is the limited record of past incidents. Identifying their starting points and enhancing the quality of slushflow documentation are important in order to improve the regional early warning and develop slushflow numerical runout models and susceptibility maps. Here we investigate three major slushflow events at Kistrandfjellet, northern Norway and quantify the differences between registered slushflows in the national rapid mass movement database and the actual events. We use unique image datasets from the events in February 2021, January 2023 and January 2024, and identify slushflow starting points and flow paths. The curvature of the starting point locations is examined to assess how local topography influences slushflow release at the field site. Our mapping reveals 25 slushflows across the three events, whereas only five were registered in the database. For the 2021 event, we found six times as many slushflows as were officially registered. Comparison of our mapped slushflows to modeled drainage pathways and FKB-Vann (the official surface water dataset of Norway), yielded an average overlap of 35%. To improve slushflow management, we recommend establishing a standardized protocol for future data collection.

We construct a novel family of difference-permutation operators and prove that they are diagonalized by the wreath Macdonald P-polynomials; the eigenvalues are written in terms of elementary symmetric polynomials of arbitrary degree. Our operators arise from integral formulas for the action of the horizontal Heisenberg subalgebra in the vertex representation of the corresponding quantum toroidal algebra.

Recognizing the distributed nature of agency in human–AI interactions, this article proposes a framework for examining the power dynamics that undergird the use of generative AI (GenAI) for language learning. Drawing on Darvin and Norton’s model of investment, it adopts a critical sociomaterial lens to cast a light on the entanglement of bodies, objects and discourse in these interactions, while highlighting how issues of positioning, access to resources, and ideological reproduction emerge from this perspective. Human agency both interacts with and is constrained or amplified by the functionalities of GenAI. To invest in agentive GenAI practices that enable meaningful learning and the achievement of their own intentions, learners must not only recognize the power of GenAI to steer interactions and promote specific ways of thinking, but also resist fully delegating the production of meaning and texts to technology. Cultivating critical digital literacies that recognize how power operates in human-AI interactions is integral to fostering reflexive, inclusive and equitable language learning and teaching in the age of GenAI.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mid-Atlantic States expanded guardianship to include habitual drunkards. Legislators in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey empowered courts to put habitual drunkards under guardianship, a legal status that stripped them of their rights to own property, enter into contracts, make wills, and, in some states, even vote. Amid the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of male suffrage, the habitual drunkard signified a masculine failure of self-government that disqualified propertied men from the privileges of full citizenship. The struggle to define habitual drunkenness, detect the habitual drunkard, and put him under guardianship transformed the courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of compulsion, policing respectable manhood, and drawing the borders of full citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States.

The Citizen Initiative (CI) in the context of the legislative process is now a common mechanism in different parts of Europe and Latin America. However, it is rarely used as a participatory formula in constitution-making processes. This article documents the case of the CI (Iniciativas Populares de Norma) in Chile’s two failed constitution-making processes between 2021 and 2023, during which more than a million people actively participated in its formulation. The Chilean case matters for comparative constitutional studies due to its innovative use of technology to advance forms of digital democracy and the demonstrable impact of the CI standards on both constitutional proposals, which were ultimately rejected in the final national referendums. We argue that despite these rejections, the CI as a participatory mechanism is likely to endure over time and in future constitution-making processes. The article provides a detailed study of the Chilean experience and seeks to draw lessons for other countries’ attempts at participatory constitutional reform.

Bentonite is mined globally for use in commercial and industrial applications. In these applications, smectite content and composition are the paramount factors of the bentonite material and control its properties. As bentonite composition and properties can vary significantly over a large mining district or within a single mine, quality control is required including: mineral composition, especially smectite content; cation exchange capacity (CEC); exchangeable cation composition; and smectite crystallochemical features. Differences in bentonite composition locally or over a spatial area stem from the different geological settings present throughout bentonitization. The study aims were to: (1) determine the layer charge (LC) variation of dioctahedral smectite over the Bavarian mining district and within individual mines in the area; and (2) assess the error in smectite content calculations based on CEC data resulting from the actual range of experimentally determined LC values. This information has been missing in the scientific literature, as previous LC methods were laborious or subject to assumptions, making a comprehensive study over a large spatial area impractical. This study employed the use of the recently developed efficient and precise spectroscopic ‘O-D method’, which enabled the LC measurement of 40 samples from eight mines in the Bavarian bentonite mining district, covering an area of 250 km2, within the North Alpine Foreland Basin. Results showed LC values calibrated against the alkylammonium method (LC (AAM)) generally ranged between 0.29 and 0.30 eq per formula unit (FU), with only 10% of samples showing LC values >0.31 eq/FU. This narrow LC range has positive implications for the accuracy of determining smectite content calculated from CEC data, during routine quality control of Bavarian and other bentonites. The average error of the CEC-based smectite contents resulting from LC variations was, on average, ±3 wt.%.

Ferroåkermanite, Ca2FeSi2O7 – a new member of the melilite group, has been found in coarse-grained kirschsteinite-bearing paralava in the Hatrurim Basin outcrop between the Zohar and Halamish Wadies of the Hatrurim Complex in Israel. Ferroåkermanite rarely forms single subhedral light-yellow crystals up to 30–50 μm in size with a prismatic habit. The most common are irregular grains, aggregates and intergrowths with gehlenite or ferroåkermanite crystals with perovskite inclusions. The mineral is transparent, exhibits vitreous lustre and has a distinct cleavage on (001). It is non-fluorescent, brittle and has a conchoidal fracture, a Mohs hardness of ∼4.5–5 and a calculated density of 3.20 g/cm3. Ferroåkermanite is uniaxial (–), ω = 1.652(3) and ε = 1.643(3) (λ = 589 nm), and exhibits a visible pleochroism from light-yellow (ω) to intense yellow (ε). The empirical formula of ferroåkermanite calculated on the basis of 7 O is (Ca1.77Na0.18Sr0.02Ba0.02K0.02)Σ2.01(Fe2+0.68Al0.28Mg0.04)Σ1.00(Si1.93Al0.07)Σ2.00O7. The chemical data obtained confirm the presence of ferroåkermanite–gehlenite solid solution (Fe2+ + Si4+ ↔ 2Al3+) in the studied rock, which was verified by Raman spectroscopy investigation. The crystal structure of the new mineral was refined to R = 0.0617 in the space group P$\overline4$21m with the following unit-cell parameters a = 7.7813(7) Å, c = 5.0114(5) Å, V = 303.43(6) Å3, Z = 2. Ferroåkermanite has a melilite-type structure with layers consisting of (Si2O7)6– disilicate units and (Fe2+O4)6– tetrahedra intercalated by layers formed of eightfold-coordinated Ca atoms. Moreover, the T1 site in the holotype specimen shows a mixed occupancy refined to 0.63(3) Fe2+ and 0.37(3) Al. The presence of rock-forming minerals such as gehlenite or rankinite suggests that the paralava analysed formed under high-temperature conditions, confirming that the new mineral ferroåkermanite is indeed a high-temperature phase. Furthermore, the presence of Fe2+-bearing phases, such as kirschsteinite, ferroåkermanite, chromite, ulvöspinel and bennesherite indicates the reduced conditions.

We apply a synthesis review to revisit the concept, measurement, and operationalisation of social inclusion and exclusion in the context of comparative social policy, integrating the vast literature on the concepts, with the aim of elucidating a clearer understanding of the concepts for use by scholars and policymakers around the planet. In turn, we outline the conceptual development of the concepts, how they have been operationalised through social policy, and how they have been measured at the national and individual levels. Through our review, we identify limitations in extant conceptualisation and measurement approaches and suggest directions for refining conceptual and measurement frameworks to enhance their utility in social inclusion policy, emphasising the concepts’ multidimensional, multilevel, dynamic, and relational essence and highlighting their connection to related concepts such as social capital, social integration, and social citizenship.