Drawing from the literature strands of philanthropy, business, and history, this work explores the business, prosocial, and political activities of a prominent family in the Scotch whisky industry, with specific emphasis on two brothers’ philanthropy and its impact on a place—the city of Perth, Scotland. In our analysis, we tell the story of the second-generation owners of Dewar’s Scotch whisky company, brothers John Alexander and Tommy Dewar, and their journey of prosocial place-based service and giving. Consistent throughout are the themes of global success, family, local and national networks, and regional embeddedness, alongside the role of formal and informal giving. We offer an analysis of the prosocial activities that represent unexplored dimensions of business success, placing them in both spatial and temporal contexts. Within this is the story of a multigenerational family business’s international growth and success.

Pro-environmental behavior, including waste sorting and recycling, involves a combination of future-oriented (futureness) and other-oriented (otherness) attributes. Inspired by the perspective of intergenerational choice, this work explores whether eliciting concerns for future others could increase public support for recycling policy and recycling behavior. Study 1 consisted of an online random controlled trial and a laboratory experiment. In Study 1A (N = 400), future other-concern was primed using a static text manipulation, whereas in Study 1B (N = 192), a dynamic virtual manipulation was employed. The results showed that people in the conditions that elicited future other-concern reported greater household recycling intentions and more actual recycling behavior than those in the control conditions. Study 2A (N = 467) and Study 2B (N = 600) generalized this effect on the acceptance of the ‘Certain Time Certain Place’ waste sorting policy in China. Consistent with the intergenerational choice model, envisioning the future of subsequent generations is more impactful in gaining policy approval than merely envisioning a future time. These findings provide a new method for promoting public policy approval and recycling behavior, suggesting that people could become environmentally friendly when they are guided to consider future others.

Discrimination is widely studied, with extensive research measuring discrimination on the housing and labor markets. This study examines how local governments address this well-documented issue, by conducting content analysis on 45 policy documents and by performing semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 alder(wo)men and diversity officers across nine Belgian cities. We introduce a temporal framework combining why, what, how, and when local anti-discrimination policy and actions are established. Such a framework is useful, as we do not approach policy as fixed, but pay attention to how actions evolve over time, even within one so-called anti-discrimination policy.This enables scholars and policymakers to identify decision-making patterns, predict changes over time, and understand contextual influences. Besides, unlike existing models rooted in integration or diversity policy, our framework captures the unique aspects of anti-discrimination policy, enabling a thorough understanding of the (non-)adoption of concrete anti-discrimination actions.

Mainstream parties have often shifted from initially portraying new competitors as undemocratic pariahs (i.e., a delegitimizing strategy) to portraying the same parties later as democratic (i.e., a legitimizing strategy). I argue that voters follow mainstream parties’ legitimizing strategies in their legitimacy evaluations of these parties. I investigate this argument with two independent survey experiments and a quantitative media content analysis in two countries that differ sharply in the nature of party competition—from mainstream parties delegitimizing a far-right party (i.e., Germany) to mainstream parties legitimizing it (i.e., Sweden). I find strong evidence that (a) mainstream parties can effectively legitimize pariah parties in the eyes of voters, (b) turning back to delegitimization has little effect, (c) legitimization is no less effective in the face of a third party’s delegitimizing strategy, and (d) legitimization resonates beyond co-partisans. The results suggest that mainstream party legitimization of pariah parties has far-reaching consequences.

This paper offers a socio-legal historical analysis of the process of formulation and evolution of Chinese marine insurance law by transplanting foreign laws, with a view to grasping from the material of legal history and social reality the deeper significance of the imported law’s relation to tradition, ideology and environmental context. The key argument is that this perspective reveals how transplanted law emerges as an authorless product shaped by social forces and processes. It is created by the operation of institutional arrangements of law-making, which provide the platform for the interplay of diverse traditions and interests generated by the social environment of the importing jurisdiction. This research integrates several lines of discussion of legal transplantation that lack connection, highlights the impact of the transplanting process and contributes to current theoretical debates by proposing potential interdisciplinary research for future studies of legal transplantation.

Large-scale investment projects often involve contestation over competing notions of ‘development’—from promises of economic growth and integration into global value chains to perspectives that emphasise strong connections between people, territory, culture and way of life. This contestation also echoes diverse theories that have variously conceptualised development as growth, freedom, right or sustainability. This article argues that, in the face of such diversity and complexity, the notion of development that underpins international investment law tends to prioritise economic considerations. In the context of investment disputes, this can marginalise the ideas of development advanced by local actors and indigenous peoples. By connecting human rights and development in immediate terms, ongoing discussions about the right to development can provide an arena to centre ‘peoples’ as the key actor in development processes. But this normative shift would also require ensuring that the wider frameworks of international economic law recognise and provide space for plural notions of development.

This work studies upper-limb impairment resulting from stroke or traumatic brain injury and presents a simple technological solution for a subset of patients: a soft, active stretching aid for at-home use. To better understand the issues associated with existing associated rehabilitation devices, customer discovery conversations were conducted with 153 people in the healthcare ecosystem (60 patients, 30 caregivers, and 63 medical providers). These patients fell into two populations: spastic (stiff, clenched hands) and flaccid (limp hands). Focusing on the first category, a set of design constraints was developed based on the information collected from the customer discovery. With these constraints in mind, a powered wrist-hand stretching orthosis (exoskeleton) was designed and prototyped as a preclinical study (T0 basic science research) to aid in recovery. The orthosis was tested on two patients for proof-of-concept, one survivor of stroke and one of traumatic brain injury. The prototype was able to consistently open both patients’ hands. A mathematical model was developed to characterize joint stiffness based on experimental testing. Donning and doffing times for the prototype averaged 76 and 12.5 s, respectively, for each subject unassisted. This compared favorably to times shown in the literature. This device benefits from simple construction and low-cost materials and is envisioned to become a therapy device accessible to patients in the home. This work lays the foundation for phase 1 clinical trials and further device development.

In this paper, we study ergodic $\mathbb {Z}^r$-actions and investigate expansion properties along cyclic subgroups. We show that under some spectral conditions, there are always directions which expand significantly a given measurable set with positive measure. Among other things, we use this result to prove that the set of volumes of all r-simplices with vertices in a set with positive upper density must contain an infinite arithmetic progression, thus showing a discrete density analogue of a classical result by Graham.

This article investigates the relationship between intra-party leadership contestations on levels of satisfaction with democracy among party voters, trying to identify the impact of the former on the latter. The article draws on empirical data for a cross-sectional analysis from three different data sets that cover 11 countries, including a more case-specific analysis that utilizes panel data from Germany. Overall, the study aims to capture the dynamics of intra-party politics and the magnitude of its effect on perceptions of democracy among parties' voters. We find that intra-party politics at its probably most competitive version, that is elections for the head of the party, does not seem to exercise any significant influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy.

Research on nutraceutical and dietary interventions in psychiatry has grown substantially, but progress is hindered by methodological inconsistencies and limited reporting standards. To address this, the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research presents the first guidelines on clinical trial design, conduct, and reporting for future clinical trials in this area. Recommendations were developed using a Delphi process including eighteen researchers with considerable clinical trial expertise and experience in either methodology, nutraceutical, or dietary interventions in psychiatry. These guidelines provide forty-nine recommendations for clinical trial design and outcomes, five for trial reporting, and seven for future research priorities. The recommendations included in these guidelines are designed to inform both nutraceutical and dietary clinical trial interventions in Nutritional Psychiatry. Common themes include an emphasis on the importance of a multidisciplinary research team and integration of co-design processes into the conduct and design of clinical research, methods to improve transparency and replicability of trial outcomes, and measures to address common biases in nutrition trials. Furthermore, we provide recommendations for future research including examining a greater variety of nutraceutical and dietary interventions, scalable delivery models, effectiveness and implementation studies, and the need to investigate these interventions in the prevention and management of less studied psychiatric conditions (e.g. schizophrenia and bipolar disorder). Recommendations included within these guidelines are intended to improve the rigor and clinical relevance of ongoing and future clinical trials in Nutritional Psychiatry.

Biodynamic farming is a growing branch of organic farming which uses various so-called biodynamic preparations with the aim to enhance plant growth and soil quality. These preparations comprise plant parts fermented in animal sheaths (e.g., cow intestines or deer bladders) which are then applied to manures and composts before applying to the field (compost preparations). Two special preparations based on manure and silica are applied to the crops as field sprays (spray preparations). The effect of these biodynamic preparations, however, is a matter of debate. In a long-term experiment over 27 yrs, within an organic crop rotation, the use of biodynamic compost preparations has recently been shown to impact the soil biological community. Using the same experiment, we investigated whether these soil-level effects also displayed in agronomic parameters of arable crops. We found that the use of biodynamic compost preparations, when compared with farmyard manure (FYM) compost application without preparations, had no effect on yield in any of the investigated crops (spring wheat, winter wheat, oats, winter rye, faba bean, potatoes, maize, and grass/clover), or when data from all crops were pooled. Temporal yield stability of spring wheat and grass/clover was also unaffected by the biodynamic compost preparations. The application of FYM compost, however, led to significant increases in both yield and yield stability as compared to the non-fertilized control. We conclude that while biodynamic compost preparations did influence biological processes in the soil, they did not increase the crop yields in our long-term trial.

The radical innovation design (RID) comparator is an unprecedented method for design comparison. It overcomes the limitations of traditional methods with a nuanced, structured approach that emphasizes detailed analysis over simple grading. At its core, the RID comparator employs a novel ontology based on the RID building blocks, enabling a precise alignment of activities and solutions. This alignment is deepened through the innovative “quantities of pain” metric, a tool that allows for a refined evaluation and comparison of solutions, facilitating the calculation of effectiveness indicators in a data-driven manner. The true impact of the method is demonstrated through an industrial use case on solutions for cleaning solar panels. The RID comparator demonstrates its practical efficacy in addressing complex, multifactorial design challenges, by constructing a cognitive model of the cleaning activity not only encapsulating the myriad aspects of the design problem but also generating a wealth of discussion and consensus-building among stakeholders. The resultant cognitive model serves as a pivotal tool in redefining the process of generating innovation briefs, deeply rooted in the actual needs and constraints of real-world scenarios. In essence, the RID comparator method significantly enhances the efficiency and quality of innovation processes, particularly in complex industrial contexts.

Recent developments in the foundations of physics have given rise to a class of views suggesting that physically meaningful descriptions must always be relativized to a physical perspective. In this article, I distinguish between strong physical perspectivalism, which maintains that all facts must be relativized to a perspective, and moderate physical perspectivalism, which maintains that all empirically meaningful descriptions must be relativized to a perspective. I argue that scientific evidence and philosophical considerations support moderate physical perspectivalism over strong physical perspectivalism. In particular, motivations connected to epistemic humility and the social nature of science are more compatible with the moderate approach.

Health technology assessment (HTA) agencies assess evidence to support decision making about which technologies to provide and pay for in the health system. HTA impact is understood as the influence that HTA report findings can have in the health system, including impacts on reimbursement decisions, changes to health outcomes, or broader system or societal impacts. The International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) is a global network of publicly funded HTA agencies. INAHTA’s mission, in part, is to advance the impact of HTA to support reimbursement decisions and the optimal use of health system resources. Each year, INAHTA awards the David Hailey Award for Best Impact Story to the member agency that shares the best story, as voted by fellow members, about HTA impact. The impact story sharing program in INAHTA contributes to a deeper understanding of what works well (or not so well) in achieving HTA impact. This paper provides six impact stories from agencies that were finalists for the 2021 and 2022 David Hailey Impact Award for Best Impact Story: the Institut national d’excellence en santé et en services sociaux, the Malaysian Health Technology Assessment Section, Ontario Health, the Center for Drug Evaluation, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and Health Technology Wales. These stories demonstrate that HTA agencies can, in differing ways, effectively support governments in their efforts to place evidence at the centre of decision making.

Civil wars are not only destructive: they can also generate new, long-lasting social, political, and economic structures and processes. To account for this productive potential and analyse post-conflict outcomes, I argue that we should analyse civil wars as critical junctures. Civil wars can relax structural constraints, opening opportunities for wartime processes to generate changes or to reinforce, rather than transform, the status quo. Changes or stasis may then be locked in by conflict outcomes, creating path dependencies. Studying civil wars as critical junctures allows for a clearer understanding of what variables mattered and interacted at different points in the conflict process, and the varying roles of structure and agency in producing institutional change or reinforcing pre-existing conditions. I explore the potential benefits of a critical juncture approach in the civil wars literature on different aspects of post-conflict politics and illustrate them in analysing the literature on women’s empowerment during and after civil wars. Applying the critical junctures framework to civil wars’ effects on institutions and socio-behavioural patterns can provide analytical clarity about complex processes and contexts, can facilitate comparison across cases and studies, and draws critical attention both to what civil wars change and to potential pathways not taken.

This paper aims to explore alternative representations of the physical architecture using its real-world sensory data through artificial neural networks (ANNs). In the project developed for this research, a detailed 3-D point cloud model is produced by scanning a physical structure with LiDAR. Then, point cloud data and mesh models are divided into parts according to architectural references and part-whole relationships with various techniques to create datasets. A deep learning model is trained using these datasets, and new 3-D models produced by deep generative models are examined. These new 3-D models, which are embodied in different representations, such as point clouds, mesh models, and bounding boxes, are used as a design vocabulary, and combinatorial formations are generated from them.

Neuromuscular controllers (NMCs) offer a promising approach to adaptive and task-invariant control of exoskeletons for walking assistance, leveraging the bioinspired models based on the peripheral nervous system. This article expands on our previous development of a novel structure for NMCs with modifications to the virtual muscle model and reflex modulation strategy. The modifications consist firstly of simplifications to the Hill-type virtual muscle model, resulting in a more straightforward formulation and reduced number of parameters; and second, using a finer division of gait subphases in the reflex modulation state machine, allowing for a higher degree of control over the shape of the assistive profile. Based on the proposed general structure, we present two controller variants for hip exoskeletons, with four- and five-state reflex modulations (NMC-4 and NMC-5). We used an iterative data-driven approach with two tuning stages (i.e., muscle parameters and reflex gains) to determine the controller parameters. Biological joint torque profiles and optimal torque profiles for metabolic cost reduction were used as references for the final tuning outcome. Experimental testing under various walking conditions demonstrated the capability of both variants for adapting to the locomotion task with minimal parameter adjustments, mostly in terms of timing. Furthermore, NMC-5 exhibited better alignment with biological and optimised torque profiles in terms of timing characteristics and relative magnitudes, resulting in less negative mechanical work. These findings firstly validate the adequacy of the simplified muscle model for assistive controllers, and demonstrate the utility of a more nuanced reflex modulation in improving the assistance quality.