To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 seeks universal access to safe drinking water for all by 2030, yet persistent disparities remain even in high-income countries. Indigenous, remote and small communities are disproportionately affected by poor drinking water quality, but comparable evidence to evaluate performance across communities is very limited due to inconsistent monitoring and reporting. To this end, we constructed a community-level meta-panel dataset of 839 communities (4,137 observations) across 4 Australian jurisdictions (Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia) and Ontario, Canada, over the period 2018–2022. Drinking water quality was assessed using the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines and Canadian Boil Water Advisories. Logistic regression was employed to estimate the probability of accessing good-quality drinking water, with Indigenous status, remoteness, population size and socio-economic condition as key explanatory variables. Results reveal systematic disparities: Indigenous and very remote communities are statistically significantly less likely to have good-quality drinking water than non-Indigenous and regional communities after controlling for other factors. Our findings indicate that structural inequities – rather than geographic or demographic variation alone – are critical determinants of poor drinking water outcomes in small, Indigenous communities in both Australia and Canada.
The consensus on the need to regulate artificial intelligence is clear, but the how remains elusive. Private regulation, as proposed by the tech industry itself, and state regulation, as embodied in the recent EU Artificial Intelligence Act, are two common forms of governance. We advance a third option that has received very little attention to date: professional regulation. Professional regulation is modeled after hybrid public-private regulatory structures found in medicine, such as those put forth by the American Medical Association. Such governance schemes develop both technical and ethical standards, shaping professional training, continuing knowledge, and conduct. We contend that it is the most practical means of ensuring the development of human-centered AI in an era of rapid technological change and intensely opposing views of what regulation ought to do. This article places the responsibility of acting ethically on the group that knows the technology best and can anticipate its effects: AI developers. But unlike other voluntary standards, professional regulation articulates and enforces standards to certify individuals. Professional licensing is an alternative that provides public protections based on privately developed standards that ensure the safety of AI prior to their release.
A high serum total cholesterol (TC) concentration is a major risk factor for CVD, and lifestyle modifications including a healthy diet are among the first-line strategies for lowering cholesterol concentration and reducing CVD risk. Several studies in rodents have demonstrated a lower circulating TC concentration after intake of cetoleic acid (CA, C22:1n-11). The primary aim was to investigate the effect of consuming herring oil (HERO) containing CA or a CA concentrate (CECO) on the circulating TC concentration in obese hypercholesterolaemic rats. Secondary aims included investigating effects of CA on a selection of hepatic enzymes and receptors involved in cholesterol metabolism, lipogenesis and VLDL assembly. Thirty male obese Zucker fa/fa rats were fed a diet containing either HERO or CECO, containing 0·70 or 1·40 wt% CA, respectively, or a Control diet with soyabean oil for 5 weeks. Data were analysed using one-way ANOVA. The serum TC concentration was lower in the HERO and CECO groups compared with the Control group (17 and 20 percent, respectively). Both the HERO and the CECO diets down-regulated de novo lipogenesis, cholesterol esterification and lipidation of VLDL in the liver compared with the Control diet, but did not affect the hepatic cholesterol synthesis, the LDL receptor or the faecal excretion of cholesterol and bile acids. To conclude, rats fed the HERO or CECO diets had a lower serum concentration of TC, probably as a result of down-regulated VLDL secretion in response to lower lipogenesis. This may have relevance for lowering TC in hypercholesterolaemic humans.
Positioning Indian and Iranian elite tourists to the Tokugawa pilgrimage town of Nikko in relation to their European and American counterparts, this article shows how Meiji-era modern hotels served as mechanisms for an informal and amateur mode of learning about Japanese culture. What enabled Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan, Maharajah Jagatjit Singh, Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, and Ali Asghar Khan to visit the inland shrine town was its integration into the modern tourist infrastructure of the Meiji period by way of the rail connection to Tokyo; the construction of the Kanaya Hotel; and the availability of guides and guidebooks. Consequently, Nikko—and the Kanaya Hotel in particular—functioned as venues for pioneering Indian and Middle Eastern encounters with ‘authentic’ Japanese culture, subsequently published in Urdu and Persian. Japan’s ties to a global tourist system of hotels, restaurants, guides, guidebooks, postcards, photographs, and souvenirs thus contributed not only to Euro-American Japonisme, but also to nascent Indian and Middle Eastern appreciations of Japanese culture.
Unsteadiness lies at the heart of turbulent fluid dynamics, eddy formation and instabilities in flows, thus making it central to both understanding and controlling fluid systems. In this work, we present an objective measure for the unsteadiness of a time-dependent velocity field, the deformation unsteadiness, derived from a spatio-temporal variational principle, allowing for a frame-independent assessment of the unsteadiness of a given flow field. Additionally, as an application of our main result, we define an objective analogue of the classical $Q$-criterion based on extremisers of unsteadiness minimisation. We apply our results to several examples of analytical flows as well as simulated flow data sets in two and three dimensions. In particular, we apply our newly derived vortex criterion to several explicit, time-dependent solutions of the Navier–Stokes equation and compare the results with existing vortex criteria. We give a physical interpretation of the deformation unsteadiness and discuss future research directions.
The WEAR project is developing integrative methods to analyse and predict use-related shape transformation of Neolithic stone tools from Central Europe through experimental archaeology and computational modelling.
Political parties play important roles in contemporary and historical contexts. With the digital turn in the humanities, historians and, increasingly, political scientists are turning to party archives for doing comparative analysis. Party archives provide unique insights on the role of party structures, actors, motivations, and discourses in real time. Yet despite their institutional and scholarly importance, comparative analysis is difficult given the heterogeneous landscape of party archives. This article aims to facilitate comparative analysis. We show that the establishment of different types of party archives follows distinct motivations before we link common obstacles (location, content, searchability, and usage) arising in comparative archival work to them. These obstacles’ severity is often connected to the type of archive, where personal and scholarly archives mark the extremes. The findings can help scholars gain deeper, broader, and, above all, comparable insights about political parties.
Why would a strong authoritarian state choose not to enforce its own policy? We extend the theory of forbearance to autocracies, highlighting its distinct incentives and characteristics. Using China’s social insurance policies as a case study, we argue that promotion-driven local officials under intense interjurisdictional competition allow firms to evade payroll taxes to boost economic performance and advance their careers. This effect is most significant among domestic private firms and foreign firms. We conduct one of the first systematic analyses of firm-level social insurance contributions in an authoritarian context, supplemented by individual-level survey data. Our findings show that bureaucratic forbearance of China’s social insurance policies has a pro-business bias, undermining the policies originally designed to address inequalities during market reforms.
In this paper, I explore the poetic virtue of filmmaking. In the first part, I look at the virtue of art more generally, drawing on Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s Aquinas-inspired conception of poetic virtue. In the rest of the paper, I then map Maritain’s poetic virtue onto the artform of the moving image, its processes of production and reception. Here, I show how poetic intuition is conceived by filmmakers such as David Lynch and translated into the realities of filmmaking in the Sci-Fi mystery thriller, The Silent Messenger, in which I was involved in as producer and performer. Enlisting the help of film philosopher Alain Badiou and film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack, I claim that for the poetic virtue of film to come into full presence, both filmmaker and viewer need to take responsibility for their moral capacity for gaze. It is only when the viewer loses themselves (their self) in the shared sight of the filmmaker, and the artist respects the audience’s own intellectual creativity, that film can teach us that seeing is always a relational enterprise, one that brings our human relationships – in all its tragedy and beauty – into shared vision.
We develop generalized Petersson/Bruggeman-Kuznetsov (PBK) formulas for specified local components at non-archimedean places. In fact, we introduce two hypotheses on non-archimedean test function pairs $f \leftrightarrow \pi (f)$, called geometric and spectral hypotheses, under which one obtains “nice” PBK formulas by the adelic relative trace function approach. Then, given a supercuspidal representation $\sigma $ of $\operatorname {\mathrm {PGL}}_2(\mathbb Q_p)$, we study extensively the case that $\pi (f)$ is a projection onto the line of the newform if $\pi $ is isomorphic to $\sigma $ or its unramified quadratic twist, and $\pi (f) = 0$ otherwise. As a first application, we prove an optimal large sieve inequality for families of automorphic representations that arise in our framework.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a neuro-immune, oxidative, and nitrosative stress (NIMETOX) disorder, in which peripheral immune-redox pathways intersect with metabolic networks leading to neurotoxicity within the limbic-prefrontal affective circuits. Comprehensive metabolomics analysis in well-phenotyped patients is vital to elucidate their metabolic profile.
Objectives:
To identify metabolic abnormalities that differentiate in patients with severe MDD from healthy controls(HCs) through high-resolution, untargeted metabolomics.
Methods:
Serum samples from 125 MDD inpatients and 40 HCs were analyzed utilizing liquid chromatography(LC) and mass spectrometry(MS). A meticulously regulated multistage machine-learning pipeline with leakage-prevention protocols was employed to analyze differences between MDD and controls and to predict phenome scores.
Results:
Feature selection showed that 16 metabolites and 6 functional modules reliably distinguished MDD. The functional profile of the metabolites indicates a convergence of lipotoxicity, phospholipid(PL) remodeling, disruptions in fatty acid(FA) metabolism, mitochondrial redox imbalance, ether-lipid metabolism, and antioxidant depletion. This MDD metabotype was not affected by metabolic syndrome(MetS). A substantial portion of the variance in overall depression severity (72.5%), physiosomatic symptoms (55.8%), and suicidal ideation(SI) (23.6%) was accounted for by increased lipotoxicity, PL remodeling, and FA storage/signaling. The recurrence of illness (27.7%) was associated with a self-reinforcing lipid-redox-inflammatory module that maintains cellular stress.
Discussion:
The MDD metabotype represents a cohesive metabolic network that is associated with the NIMETOX pathogenesis of MDD. Metabolomics provides a comprehensive foundation for subtyping and precision psychiatry. Lipoxygenase-15, lipotoxicity, phospholipase A2, and lipid-redox intersections might be important drug targets to treat MDD.
Liquid sheets arise in curtain coating, polymer processing and sprays. When a fluid is ejected from a die (nozzle) to form a liquid sheet, its cross-section is rectangular albeit for the two rounded ends. The latter retract due to surface tension. The retraction dynamics is also affected by stresses owing to bulk rheology, which may be viscous and/or viscoelastic in nature, and surface rheology, which may be due to the presence of surface-active agents. We analyse theoretically and numerically the retraction dynamics of highly viscous Newtonian liquid sheets when surface viscous stresses are present. While it has been shown recently that viscoelasticity increases retraction rate, it is demonstrated that surface viscosity operates synergistically with bulk viscosity to decrease retraction rate. As the two surfaces of a retracting sheet remain flat outside of the two tip regions, an exact analytical solution is obtained for the transient sheet thickness in terms of the Lambert W function. An asymptotic solution for sheet thickness, valid for early times, is also obtained and shown to agree well with the analytical solution and simulations. An energy analysis is performed to rationalise that at early times, the rate of energy dissipation due to the action of surface viscous stresses can be dominant in slowing retraction, but it can wane in importance and be overtaken at large times by the rate at which energy is dissipated due to the action of bulk viscous stresses.
Social scientists routinely characterize religious influence in electoral politics as conservative and left-wing parties as fundamentally secular. Against these claims, I argue that the relationship between religion and electoral politics is shaped by the redistributive beliefs and preferences of religious leaders, who can become valuable allies of left-wing parties. I evaluate this argument in Brazil following the appointment of Pope John Paul II, leveraging as-if random variation in municipalities’ exposure to progressive Catholic bishops. I show that bishops who actively supported state-led redistribution were essential to the electoral success of the left-wing Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]). Voters in municipalities with longer exposure to these bishops supported the PT at higher rates. The findings highlight the under-examined role of religious leaders in shaping the electoral influence of religion and provide evidence that these leaders can, in fact, be key for the development of left-wing parties, especially in the developing world.
We investigate the Stark operator restricted to a bounded domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb {R}^2$ with Dirichlet boundary conditions. In the semiclassical limit, a three-term asymptotic expansion for its individual eigenvalues has been established, with coefficients dependent on the curvature of $\Omega $. We analyse the accumulation of eigenvalues beneath the leading-order terms in these expansions, establishing Weyl-type asymptotics. Furthermore, we derive weak asymptotics for the density of the spectral projector onto these low-lying states.
This article focuses on how to answer the question: How can we better characterize the more significant epistemic advantages in knowledge-how of the members of oppressed social groups who are participating within scientific communities? My approach diverges from previous ways of answering this question by focusing on the epistemic advantages that are associated with the processes of critical reflection through which agents develop their conceptual frameworks. In particular, I argue that developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks gives agents epistemic advantages in their abilities to both identify potentially problematic assumptions of these frameworks and to improve upon those assumptions that are judged to be problematic. That is to say, this paper aims to show both that there is a scientifically relevant knowledge-how of critically reflecting on the under-examined assumptions within one’s conceptual frameworks and that insider-outsider members of scientific communities will have certain epistemic advantages when it comes to developing this knowledge-how.
‘It was aimed to establish the validity and reliability of the “Mothers’ Breastfeeding Empowerment Scale”’.
Method:
Content validity was evaluated with the content validity index (CVI) agreed upon by experts. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used for construct validity. Before factor analysis, the sample size was decided using KMO and Bartlett’s Sphericity test. For the reliability study of the scale, Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient and total score correlation coefficients of parallel forms were examined.
Results:
While 49.9% of the infants were between 4–6 months old, the average age of the infants was determined as 3.64 ± 1.77. 70.6% of the mothers were between the ages of 26–43 and the average age of the mothers was 28.83 ± 5.38. In the factor analysis it was found that item loadings of the scale was between 0.57 and 0.95. Also, the fit values of the scale were within acceptable limits. Additionally, it was determined that there was a high-level positive relationship between the scale used for the parallel form and our scale.
Conclusion:
The use of the scale in Turkish society is valid and reliable. Validity and reliability analyses support this.
Inter-party communication is crucial in representative democracies, facilitating information exchange and dialogue among political parties. Despite its importance, research on this topic remains limited due to lacking conceptual clarity and challenges in large-scale measurement. This article offers a comprehensive definition of inter-party communication as public communication by parties about others, with a positive, neutral, or negative stance, focusing on collaboration, policy, or personal issues. To effectively measure this phenomenon, we introduce a novel transformer-based approach capable of automatically classifying large volumes of text. Case studies on coalition signals in Germany and negative campaigning in Austria demonstrate its effectiveness. The study deepens our understanding of party competition, advances methods of automated text classification, and enables new research on political communication.