The Bayesian approach offers a systematic framework for updating finite element (FE) models and quantifying the remaining uncertainty given measured data. However, an inappropriate formulation of the probabilistic model can compromise accuracy. This paper presents an improved hierarchical Bayesian method for FE model updating by formulating the likelihood function in a fully probabilistic manner and incorporating time-varying stiffness parameters. A key methodological novelty lies in latent variable treatment of unmeasured mode shapes within the Bayesian hierarchy, yielding the joint inference of structural parameters and modal quantities in a fully generative manner without explicit eigenvalue decomposition. Furthermore, the geometric nature of mode shapes is rigorously respected by constraining them to the unit hypersphere using a Bingham distribution. A Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampling algorithm is developed to approximate the posterior distribution, with QR and Cholesky decompositions ensuring computational efficiency and accuracy. Three case studies, including synthetic, lab, and field test data, validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The updated model can be used as a reference model for structural damage detection and condition assessment in structural health monitoring.

Torri’r Llech (TLl) (Welsh for ‘breaking the rickets’) was a bloodletting practice which remained popular in Wales from at least the mid-nineteenth up to the mid-twentieth centuries. The practice involved cutting the ear (pinna) to induce bleeding. Indications were numerous and dynamic. Vernacular medical practices, including bloodletting, have enjoyed a long history in Wales and were influenced by a multitude of conceptual paradigms over the centuries. By drawing on original oral histories, newspaper accounts, as well as existing secondary source material, this article aims to situate TLl within the wider framework of bloodletting practices in Wales and Britain more broadly. In doing so, this paper also considers the ways in which TLl changed over time and how this dynamism proved a persistent threat to the authority of official medical institutions in Wales. By then discussing how TLl itself appeared to draw on diverse conceptual frameworks, it is argued that it may more accurately be defined as a practice within the confines of popular humoralism – a syncretic medical paradigm influenced by humoralism, astrology, Christianity, as well as local belief systems. Ultimately, TLl exhibited remarkable longevity and may have been practised as late as the 1970s–80s in parts of the Upper Swansea Valley, potentially representing the latest example of a humoral bloodletting practice native to the British Isles. This analysis challenges more linear narratives of biomedical ascendancy, showcasing how TLl coexisted with orthodox medicine in a pluralistic medical marketplace in which Welsh patients consistently exercised agency over their own care.

Health insurers systematically underinvest in prevention. Programme costs are immediate but claims benefits accrue over years, and actuaries have lacked a formal mechanism to translate behavioural intervention evidence into pricing-ready claims adjustments. This paper introduces the Behavioural Adjustment Factor (BAF), a multiplicative actuarial framework that quantifies the claims impact of behavioural interventions by decomposing reach, efficacy, clinical translation, and durability into a single pricing-ready construct. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the BAF is the first actuarial framework to decompose behavioural intervention impact into condition-specific claims projections suitable for pricing and reserving. Drawing on randomised controlled trial evidence, the framework distinguishes interventions that generate reliable claims savings from those that do not. Programme architecture is shown to matter more than incentive magnitude, and the distinction between disease management and general lifestyle programmes emerges as the principal axis along which actuarial expectations should diverge. A worked hypertension example illustrates how the four BAF components combine to produce a defensible claims-adjustment range, and a sensitivity analysis highlights the dominant role of effect persistence. The framework provides confidence intervals, Monte Carlo integration for Solvency II capital modelling, a milestone-based pilot funding structure, and a clear pathway from international evidence to UK-calibrated practice.

This article takes as its empirical reference the phenomenon of ‘migration in transit’, which gained relevance in 2018 with the arrival of thousands of migrants, mainly from Africa, on the southern coast of Spain, bound for other European countries. Based on a series of specific cases of irregular migrants, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors or those at risk of statelessness involved in this phenomenon, I have attempted to trace their ‘legal routes’ and their determining factors (regulatory assumptions, legal documents, time frames, etc.) as if they were movements across the map of migration and asylum law. I conclude that, similar to geographical (im)mobility, although these legal itineraries are largely constructed on the basis of the legal provisions (requirements, deadlines, bureaucracy, etc.) set out in immigration and asylum regulations, there are also elements of social practice, such as legal advice, solidarity or social perceptions, which facilitate the transition between legal statuses.

Listeners flexibly adapt utterance interpretation based on speaker characteristics, but less is known about how this works in multiparty conversations, particularly for pragmatic inferences like Mutual Exclusivity (MEI) – the tendency to map novel terms onto unnamed referents. MEI may reflect a flexible, speaker-sensitive process or a rigid default. This study tested whether listeners modulate MEI based on speaker-specific referential consistency in multiparty conversations. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted (Exp 1: N = 32, English; Exp 2: N = 44, Spanish), where participants followed instructions from two speakers. In experimental conditions, one speaker was consistent (reused labels), while the other was inconsistent (sometimes relabeled objects). Control conditions featured two consistent speakers. Results showed robust and early MEI across conditions. No speaker-specific adaptation occurred, but Experiment 1 showed context-general adaptation: exposure to an inconsistent speaker within a conversation reduced MEI overall. Findings suggest that in high-demand communicative contexts, MEI operates as a strong default heuristic, largely resistant to speaker-level inconsistency. Evidence for sensitivity to broader contextual reliability was observed in Experiment 1 but did not replicate in Experiment 2, leaving open whether MEI exhibits limited contextual flexibility or whether the initial finding reflected design-specific factors.

This article explores the data entry labour demands of electronic death registration systems (EDRS), the jurisdiction-specific software systems developed in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s to ‘reengineer’ the process that informs vital statistics officials of deaths. Over decades of deliberations about how best to design and implement the tools, officials knew of two key issues that challenged death registration historically: the system moved slowly, and the data it produced was not always accurate. This article explores the techno-solutionism that led to the framing of EDRS as a tool that could solve these two issues simultaneously, improving both ease of data entry and the data’s integrity. But this flawed optimism about EDRS’s dual affordances, the paper argues, contributed to the tool’s sluggish implementation.

Prolonged field care is increasingly important in military operations, where austere environments and delayed medical evacuations necessitate extended injury management. Tibia and fibula fractures are common, survivable battlefield injuries that demand such care. Current treatment options involve simple splints, which require the injured Service member to be carried on a litter, and exoskeletons, which are not suited for use in combat environments. The Intrepid Battlefield Exoskeleton (IBEX) was developed to address this critical gap in battlefield trauma care by stabilizing lower leg fractures and enabling independent mobility in prolonged care scenarios. This study evaluated the usability of two IBEX prototypes through sequential laboratory and field testing under two user conditions: medic and casualty. In laboratory testing, 20 participants completed a series of functional tasks with and without the IBEX and provided quantitative usability ratings and qualitative feedback via self-report measures and interviews. In field testing, 12 participants used the IBEX during a simulated mass casualty event and completed the same usability assessments. Quantitative results indicated high overall user satisfaction. Thematic analysis of qualitative feedback revealed recurring comments on usability, portability, comfort, security, and durability. Overall, results indicated moderate usability in both environments, with room to improve ease of fitting and adjustability. Findings highlight the value of a mixed-methods approach to device evaluation and underscore the importance of iterative design and testing. Ongoing work will compare the IBEX with the current standard of care and further refine the design for operational use.

This article examines Russian national future thinking during the war in Ukraine. It views future thinking as a form of mediated action that is dependent on narrative tools and explores the structure and function of various types of narratives that play a role, including schematic narrative templates and national narrative projects. The first section of the article goes into conceptual issues on plot, the sense of an ending and other features of narrative logic that assign meaning to events. The second part of the article goes into how these issues play a role in shaping Russian ideas about the war in Ukraine. Using sources such as Russian social media, we examine how the narratives used by Putin and widely accepted by the broader population have changed over the course of the war in Ukraine. After initially focusing on denazification and other issues specific to Ukraine, the Russian narrative has moved on to more established and general themes about existential threats from military threats and alien ideas from the West. To recognize what has changed and what has not, we harness the notion of a national narrative project, which is an underlying code in the form of a national autobiography for Russia. The sense of an ending for this national narrative template has religious overtones and a telos about redemption that follows suffering. It is narrative with a sense of an ending in the future, which means using it has the future and future thinking built into it.

This research provides the first systematic assessment of contemporary Canadian public opinion on the prospect of annexation by the United States and its correlates, a topic that has gained attention since Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election. Leveraging original survey data collected just before and after the implementation of major US trade tariffs, we find that support for annexation was very low (less than 10%). While some sociodemographic factors are associated with supporting the merging, the main drivers were political. Feeling close to the Conservative Party or the People’s Party of Canada was associated with a higher likelihood of favouring a merging. We provide a first test explaining these differences and show that more positive feelings towards Donald Trump (but not the US) explain most of these relationships and are the strongest predictors of support for annexation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for Canadian politics.

This is the fourth in a sequence of four papers, where we prove the arithmetic Siegel–Weil formula in co-rank $1$ for Kudla–Rapoport special cycles on exotic smooth integral models of unitary Shimura varieties of arbitrarily large even arithmetic dimension. Our arithmetic Siegel–Weil formula implies that degrees of Kudla–Rapoport arithmetic special $1$-cycles are encoded in near-central first derivatives of unitary Eisenstein series Fourier coefficients.

In this paper, we pin down precise normalizations for some $U(m,m)$ Siegel Eisenstein series, give local Siegel–Weil special value formulas with explicit constants, and record a geometric Siegel–Weil result for degrees of complex $0$-cycles. Using these, we complete the proof of our arithmetic Siegel–Weil results by patching together the local main theorems from our companion papers.

We show that the canonical anticommutation relations (CAR) algebra admits a Cantor spectrum $\mathrm {C}^\ast $-diagonal that is not conjugate to the standard AF diagonal. We obtain this by classification theory of $\mathrm {C}^\ast $-algebras, and the diagonal arises by realizing the CAR algebra as the crossed product of a free minimal action on the Cantor space, where the acting group is the product of a locally finite group with the infinite dihedral group. The main ingredient in the construction is a binary subshift associated to the well-known regular paper-folding sequence. Moreover, we show that the CAR algebra in fact admits countably many, pairwise non-conjugate, Cantor spectrum diagonals which are distinguished by the different values of their diagonal dimension, as defined by Li, Liao and the second named author.

We show that no matter what subset of a normed space is given, a typical 1-Lipschitz mapping into a Banach space is non-differentiable at a typical point of the set in a very strong sense: the set of partial limits of its derivative ratios, which is separable, contains all linear operators of norm at most $1$ from any fixed separable subspace of the operator space.

For subsets of finite-dimensional normed spaces which can be covered by a countable union of closed purely $1$-unrectifiable sets this extreme non-differentiability holds for a typical Lipschitz mapping at every point.

Both results are new even for Lipschitz mappings with a finite-dimensional codomain.

This survey of the public, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals identified factors affecting implementation of antibiotic stewardship in Canadian community pharmacies. Lack of support from non-pharmacist healthcare providers and pharmacy leadership were common barriers. Facilitators included providers’ perceived importance of antibiotic stewardship, pharmacists’ role as educators, and potential for healthcare cost savings.