This paper presents an eight wire-driven parallel robot (WDPR-8) designed to serve as a suspension manipulator for aircraft models during wind tunnel testing. The precision of these tests is significantly influenced by the system’s stability and workspace, both of which are shaped by the geometric configuration of the structure and the tension in the wires. To acquire the efficiency principle of the suspension scheme design for the model, a kinematics model for a WDPR-8 was established. Based on the kinematics model, the stiffness of a WDPR-8 was theoretically studied, and the analytical expression of stiffness matrix of a WDPR was deduced. The stiffness matrix was composed of two terms, one of which is determined by the configuration of suspension system and the other term is determined by the wire tension. Based on the analysis result, a set of suspension scheme was discussed under the calculation of stiffness matrix and workspace analysis. In the discussion process, in addition to the stiffness-maximum calculation, another criterion as force closure is presented, which is useful for increasing the stiffness and workspace of the robot. Finally, a prototype was established according to the analysis result, and the workspace experiments are conducted. Test results indicate that the workspace meets the design requirements, validating the system suspension design method of a WDPR for aircraft model suspension in wind tunnel test considering of the systematic stiffness and workspace.

This study aims to discuss the chronology of the Egyptian 5th dynasty of the Old Kingdom and the tentative date of accession of king Djedkare based on material from his royal necropolis at South Saqqara and non-royal cemetery of Abusir South, Egypt. A series of radiocarbon (14C) dates were established through analysis of archaeological material from several monuments at the necropolis, including the king’s pyramid complex, pyramid complex of his queen, and two elite tombs (Isesiankh and Khuwy). In addition, two samples from non-royal tombs in the Abusir South cemetery, were taken into consideration for further precision during the modeling, associated with king Huni (end 3rd dynasty) and king Niuserre (5th dynasty). The contextualized 14C dates together with re-evaluation of historical evidence on Djedkare’s rule, results in a new model of temporal probability density which can be further refined with any new data from archaeological research. It shows that Djedkare’s reign can be currently modelled between 2503 and 2449 BCE (95.4%), thus slightly older than expected by literature. This presented model provides a more precise chronological frame for the late 5th dynasty period of Egyptian history, which was period of a significant socio-economic transformation.

New time series photometry of WISE J152614.95-111326.4, an eclipsing binary candidate, has been obtained. Full cycles of variation were covered in five filters, ranging from B to z. Archival time series photometry is also available from several sources. The phased light curve shape changes from a double wave form in the red, to a single wave at shorter wavelengths. Analysis of the spectral energy distribution and SALT spectra shows the presence of a cool ($\sim$7 250–7 900 K) white dwarf and an M6 star. The light curves can be explained by a hot spot on the opposing hemisphere of the white dwarf. The star may be in a pre-cataclysmic variable phase with a very low rate of mass flow from the red dwarf to the white dwarf, such that no flickering is evident. Evidence in favour of this hypothesis is that the period of the system (2.25 h) is in the cataclysmic variable period gap. It is speculated that a weak magnetic field associated with the white dwarf funnels accreted material onto a magnetic pole. Amplitudes of the W1 and W2 WISE light curves are anomalously large. The possibility is discussed that variability in this spectral region is primarily driven by electron cyclotron radiation.

The acquisition of nonnative flora and fauna was long framed by horticultural historians as the result of great British derring-do and hand-to-hand conflict. Yet nineteenth-century plant extraction actually involved comparatively few feats of physical bravery or scenes of Boys’ Own high drama. The letters of Victorian commercial plant-hunters reveal that the removal and exportation of plants entailed the deployment of emerging colonial and national infrastructures together with complex regional and local networks and knowledge systems. Much of a plant-hunter's day-to-day life, tellingly, involved paperwork: submitting drafts and bills of exchange, sending letters and cables to employers, and completing bills of lading to ship plants, in stages, to Europe, where they were received at customs houses before journeying on, by rail and by road, to nurseries, collectors, and auction houses. At the same time, emerging colonial infrastructures only took hunters so far; local and traditional knowledge systems were essential as well. Plant-hunting depended upon the support, expertise, knowledge, and traditions of local people—a fact the enduring narrative of hand-to-hand conflict and triumphant British vanquishing seems structured carefully to conceal.

This paper considers the utilisation, appropriation, and renegotiation of colonial knowledge in the form of land and population registers by local litigants in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka. Using a database compiled from thirty-three civil court cases held before the Landraad rural council of Colombo, I highlight how Lankan litigants frequently used the colonial thombo registers as evidence to have their property recognised. Moreover, I show that these registers were not just utilised but also altered through this process, particularly through the promotion of alternative knowledge in the form of local witness testimonies and ola palm leaf documents during court cases. I subsequently argue that we should reconsider how we view colonial knowledge. Rather than a static, top-down view from a foreign bureaucracy on a colonised society, this knowledge could be appropriated and even altered through the acts of local agents, in turn changing what was known by the colonial state and thus creating a “looping effect” of knowledge production.

Species’ declines are caused by a combination of factors that affect survival and/or breeding success. We studied the effects of a set of environmental and anthropogenic variables on the disappearance of Canarian Houbara Bustards Chlamydotis undulata fuertaventurae on Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), once the main stronghold of this endangered bird. Of 83 male display sites detected in 1997–1998, only 29 remained occupied in 2020–2021 (a 65% decrease in only 23 years). We compared habitat quality, density of conspecifics, other steppe birds and crows, presence of human infrastructure, and degree of environmental protection between these 29 extant sites and the 54 extinct sites using univariate analyses and generalised linear models (GLMs). The most influential variable in the abandonment of display sites was the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), an indicator of green vegetation productivity, which suggests a strong effect of habitat aridification due to climate change on the population’s extinction process. Powerline density was the second most important factor. This suggests that houbaras have survived where a greater abundance of food resources has enabled a higher breeding success, and where powerline fatalities have caused lower mortality over the years. Higher densities of houbaras, and other steppe birds and crows at extant display sites confirmed the better habitat quality in these areas. Extant display sites, located generally in protected areas, also had lower densities of human infrastructure (e.g. buildings, roads). We discuss the conservation implications of these results and provide management recommendations for this endangered subspecies.

The global justice debate has increasingly moved toward the analysis of concrete issues in global politics, such as trade, migration, or climate change. This raises a methodological question: should the demands of justice in these domains be theorized independently or in conjunction with one another? Integrationists have championed the latter approach, arguing that it is better suited to guide our practical judgments. In contrast, internalists maintain that each domain is governed by its own set of principles. This paper defends the plausibility of the internalist approach against integrationist challenges. By examining different interpretations of internalism, it first seeks to provide a clearer overview of the methodological dispute. It then analyzes various arguments for integrationism, showing that their implications are more limited than their proponents believe. Finally, it focuses on the question of practical guidance, highlighting the value of idealized domain-specific theorizing in guiding transitions toward just arrangements.

Intensifiers are known for their dynamic nature, due in part to the expressive function they serve. However, while the quantitative patterning of English intensifiers has been studied extensively, the intensifier system of French has yet to be well documented. This study therefore examines intensifier use from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective in the ESLO corpus of spoken Hexagonal French. The quantitative distributions of adjective intensifiers are compared across two corpora collected in 1970 and 2010. Results show a significant decrease in intensification rate over time. Analysis of individual intensifiers show some to have decreased in use over time (e.g. très, tellement), others to have increased (e.g. vraiment, tout), and others to appear only in the later sample (e.g. super, hyper). Longitudinal change is also found in the adjectival function (predicative vs. attributive) and collocational width of intensifiers. Relating to social factors, no significant gender difference is found between female and male speakers’ intensification rate over time. Furthermore, très dominates as the preferred intensifier among older generations, while younger speakers favour more varied intensifiers. Analyzing such changes in the use of intensifiers over the past half century contributes to a better understanding of the structure and development of the French intensifier system.

In environmental science, where information from sensor devices are sparse, data fusion for mapping purposes is often based on geostatistical approaches. We propose a methodology called adaptive distance attention that enables us to fuse sparse, heterogeneous, and mobile sensor devices and predict values at locations with no previous measurement. The approach allows for automatically weighting the measurements according to a priori quality information about the sensor device without using complex and resource-demanding data assimilation techniques. Both ordinary kriging and the general regression neural network (GRNN) are integrated into this attention with their learnable parameters based on deep learning architectures. We evaluate this method using three static phenomena with different complexities: a case related to a simplistic phenomenon, topography over an area of 196 $ {km}^2 $ and to the annual hourly $ {NO}_2 $ concentration in 2019 over the Oslo metropolitan region (1026 $ {km}^2 $). We simulate networks of 100 synthetic sensor devices with six characteristics related to measurement quality and measurement spatial resolution. Generally, outcomes are promising: we significantly improve the metrics from baseline geostatistical models. Besides, distance attention using the Nadaraya–Watson kernel provides as good metrics as the attention based on the kriging system enabling the possibility to alleviate the processing cost for fusion of sparse data. The encouraging results motivate us in keeping adapting distance attention to space-time phenomena evolving in complex and isolated areas.

This paper presents new radiocarbon dates for two Aboriginal archaeological complexes situated on the cliff-lines of the Murray River in South Australia (SA); at Pooginook Flat and Tanamee. These dates represent the first age estimates for archaeological sites within the Upper Gorge section of the Murray River. The dates ranged from ca. 11 cal ka to the Late Holocene. The research supports previous evidence which has indicated that sites located along the Murray cliffs preserve much of the oldest evidence of Aboriginal peopling along the Murray River corridor in SA. The new dates also allow us to contribute to discussions concerning broader chronological trends in Aboriginal lifeways within the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). Specifically, the new ages add some insight into the nature and timing of early Aboriginal occupation along the Murray River corridor in SA and further evidence that the LGM acted as a significant inhibitive factor for intensive occupation of this riverscape. The conservation of these significant and informative cliff-top sites remains precarious, however, and there is an imperative to continue to record and sample the extant sites.

The political geography of empire transformed with the Victorian rise of steam power and its infrastructure, especially with the emerging dominance of steam as the primary means of transoceanic travel and shipping. Oceanic infrastructure was a new feature of the British Empire especially in the period after 1860, when steamships were increasingly replacing sailing ships and when the material exigencies of fueling and refueling required the installation of coaling stations to support long-haul transport for steam-powered ships. In this essay we explore how these changes registered in literature and discourse, with Joseph Conrad as our prime example. We analyze two of Conrad's works that feature coaling stations and steam-carrying, Victory (1915) and The Mirror of the Sea (1906). Drawing on infrastructure studies, critical ocean studies, and the energy humanities, we make a case for more attention to oceangoing coal as part of a broader reconsideration of empire in the Anthropocene. We also make a case for Conrad as one of the great observers of environmental-infrastructural change in the early fossil-fuel era, worth revisiting now as both witness and interpreter.

The West Atlantic trumpetfish Aulostomus maculatus is a species of little commercial importance, but it is frequently used as a study organism in behavioural ecology, and it has been traded in the aquarium industry to some extent. The adult life stage is well described, however its early life history is nearly unknown. This paper provides the first description of post-flexion larvae of A. maculatus, including detailed illustrations, photographs, morphological data, and collection site data of specimens collected during a multipurpose research survey conducted within the Sargasso Sea Subtropical Convergence Zone. The collection site also implies a geographic range expansion, off the continental shelf, of the pelagic larvae stage. This paper hence advances the scientific knowledge about the early life stages, distribution and ecology of this species.

How does the public support a coalition in which pro-democracy advocates and policy-based protesters join forces in street protests? When policy-based and pro-democracy groups protest together, they create a collective action frame that includes a policy component and a democracy component. In this article, I develop the frame salience theory, arguing that support for a policy–democracy protest coalition depends on which component of the joint frame is perceived to be more dominant. I argue that in authoritarian regimes, the policy component typically dominates the coalition because it is more accessible and available to the public. This perception shifts public support for the alliance towards the baseline level of support for the policy movement. In other words, public support for the alliance defaults to the baseline level of support for the policy movement. I find evidence for my argument using a survey experiment administered to 1,209 Vietnamese respondents. This article highlights a dilemma pro-democracy groups face: joining policy-based movements may boost support, but sustaining democracy after the protest becomes challenging.

Logistics is the science and art of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit; though it has become synonymous with the rise of the shipping container, its history is as old as trade itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient human action of loading and shipping boxes became part of a globalizing network of refrigerated supply chains and transoceanic shipping. Appearing briefly as a detail in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), the “cold chain” nonetheless orchestrates the plot and governs the vampiric mythology. This temperature-cooled supply and distribution network imbued the times, spaces, and aesthetics of human life with the new capability to ship perishable food, or in the novel's metaphor, “un-death.”

X-ray frequency combs (XFCs) are of great interest in many scientific research areas. In this study, we investigate the generation of high-power tunable XFCs at the Shanghai soft X-ray Free-Electron Laser facility (SXFEL). To achieve this, a chirped frequency-beating laser is employed as the seed laser for echo-enabled harmonic generation of free-electron lasers. This approach enables the formation of an initial bunching of combs and ultimately facilitates the generation of XFCs under optimized conditions. We provide an optical design for the chirped frequency-beating seed laser system and outline a method to optimize and set the key parameters that meets the critical requirements for generating continuously tunable XFCs. Three-dimensional simulations using realistic parameters of the SXFEL demonstrate that it is possible to produce XFCs with peak power reaching 1.5 GW, central photon energy at the carbon K edge (~284 eV) and tunable repetition frequencies ranging from 7 to 12 THz. Our proposal opens up new possibilities for resonant inelastic X-ray scattering experiments at X-ray free-electron laser facilities.