This review essay explores the complex subject of peace in Africa by reviewing six volumes. While the African Union and the United Nations identify peace as providing the foundation for development, the quest for sustainable peace in regions of postcolonial Africa has remained elusive. Several works have sought to examine the contemporary pathways to peace currently being explored on the continent. The works under review must be located in this search for sustainable peace in Africa.

This article highlights the challenges of external reactions to authoritarian higher education governance in certain Central and Eastern European countries, especially Hungary and Poland. It interprets the political change in these countries as an authoritarian cultural backlash, which is not just a legal or political problem, but a kind of post-fascist cultural revolution contesting the liberal script. First, the article explains the framework of authoritarian policing in academia based on the more general works of Bob Altemeyer and Zeev Sternhell. Second, it tries to answer the question: What tools could counter these tendencies from the perspective of the European Union? As the article interprets the rise of authoritarianism as a phenomenon rooted in the cultural deficit of the countries concerned, it argues that a programme for a democratic and pluralist cultural counter-revolution should be implemented. However, no nation can be democratized solely by external actors, and the basics of democratic thinking should be developed from the grassroots level. If the crisis in academia is rooted in a value-crisis within the societies concerned, then measures countering this phenomenon should also include promoting Enlightened pluralism at all levels of these societies.

Since its inception in England and Wales, the partial defence to murder of loss of control has generated a steady stream of appeals. Individually, those appeals have illuminated key aspects of the plea's operation. This paper, though, is the first to explore that operation via a systematic analysis of every loss of control appeal to date (110 cases). Using that data, the paper frames more effectively, and thus improves understanding of, a neglected phenomenon in the plea: specifically, the decision-making roles of criminal justice ‘gatekeepers’ – principally trial judges, juries and prosecutors – in governing access to loss of control. In doing so, the paper assesses how far these gatekeepers interpret the plea's requirements in a ‘civilising’ way – one which prioritises meritorious loss of control claims above those which are unmeritorious. It contends that each gatekeeper struggles to regulate loss of control in such a way. Ultimately, this diminishes the symbolic value these reforms may have had and frustrates any civilising potential of homicide law reform.

This Introduction provides an overview of the topics covered in this special issue on ‘Academic freedom: Global variations in norm conceptualization, diffusion and contestation’, which explores what academic freedom means, how this may vary on a global level, how the norm spread around the world and what current contestations look like. The Introduction defines some terms essential to this debate, such as the freedom of science, academic freedom, freedom of scientific research and the right to science, and offers an analytical framework for the various contributions of the special issue. This includes, in particular, a distinction between illiberal and liberal science scripts and their relationship with academic freedom, as well as between different forms of contestations and limitations of academic freedom. Authors from varying disciplinary and regional backgrounds address different aspects of this theme in their respective contributions, of which the introduction gives a brief summary.

We provide a general recursive method for constructing transfer systems on finite lattices. Using this, we calculate the number of homotopically distinct $N_{\infty} $ operads for dihedral groups $D_{p^n}$, $p \gt 2$ prime, and cyclic groups $C_{qp^n}$, $p \neq q$ prime. We then further display some of the beautiful combinatorics obtained by restricting to certain homotopically meaningful $N_\infty$ operads for these groups.

In Republican China, the Factory Act was first promulgated in 1929, after almost thirty years of unregulated industrialization. Little academic effort has been made to comprehend its actual implementation. Some academics have dismissed it as completely useless, while others have credited it with various enhancements in working conditions. This article focuses on workplace health and safety issues and critically evaluates the implementation of the law to scrutinize its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) in addressing workers’ life and death matters. This article aims to reassert the Factory Act in China's modern history of industrial development. It points out that despite its inadequate enforcement, the law was significant in laying the foundation for the national institutionalization of state responsibility to systematically monitor and regulate workplace health and safety and paving the way for further safety legislation. Nevertheless, the law fell short of safeguarding workers’ rights during industrial accidents.

If the consumer is insured under the group insurance contract and becomes a party to that contract, the consumer shall enjoy the protection envisaged under the Unfair Terms Directive. As a result, the consumer shall be allowed to get acquainted with the terms of the contract, otherwise the consumer is entitled to rely on protection against unfair terms even if they relate to the insurance cover (author’s summary).

We conducted a retrospective cohort study in Ontario, Canada between December 1, 2020 and June 31, 2021 to compare the incidence of neurological events (hospitalization or emergency room visit) within six weeks of COVID-19 vaccination in Chinese, South Asian and Other ethnic groups. Compared to Others, the crude rates after the first dose for Bell’s palsy, ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage were lower in Chinese (34, 159 and 48 per 1,000,000 doses) and in South Asians (44, 148 and 32), but similar after adjusting for age, sex and vaccine type. Our findings should help encourage vaccination for all, irrespective of ethnicity.

To address the issues of low positioning accuracy and weak robustness of prior visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) systems in dynamic environments, a semantic VSLAM (Sem-VSLAM) approach based on deep learning is proposed in this article. The proposed Sem-VSLAM algorithm adds semantic segmentation threads in parallel based on the open-source ORB-SLAM2’s visual odometry. First, while extracting the ORB features from an RGB-D image, the frame image is semantically segmented, and the segmented results are detected and repaired. Then, the feature points of dynamic objects are eliminated by using semantic information and motion consistency detection, and the poses are estimated by using the remaining feature points after the dynamic feature elimination. Finally, a 3D point cloud map is constructed by using tracking information and semantic information. The experiment uses Technical University of Munich public data to show the usefulness of the Sem-VSLAM algorithm. The experimental results show that the Sem-VSLAM algorithm can reduce the absolute trajectory error and relative attitude error of attitude estimation by about 95% compared to the ORB-SLAM2 algorithm and by about 14% compared to the VO-YOLOv5s in a highly dynamic environment and the average time consumption of tracking each frame image reaches 61 ms. It is verified that the Sem-VSLAM algorithm effectively improves the robustness and positioning accuracy in high dynamic environment and owning a satisfying real-time performance. Therefore, the Sem-VSLAM has a better mapping effect in a highly dynamic environment.

Late talkers (LTs) exhibit delayed vocabulary development, which might stem from a lack of a typical word learning strategy to generalise object labels by shape, called the ‘shape bias’. We investigated whether LTs can acquire a shape bias and whether this accelerates vocabulary learning. Fourteen LTs were randomly allocated to either a shape training group (Mage = 2.76 years, 6 males), which was taught that objects similar in shape have the same name, or a control group (Mage = 2.61 years, 4 males), which was taught real words without any focus on object shape. After seven training sessions, children in the shape training group generalised trained labels by shape (d = 1.28), but not unfamiliar labels. Children in the control group extended all labels randomly. Training did not affect expressive vocabulary.

Scholars and policymakers warn that with rising affective polarization, politicians will find support from the public and permission from military professionals to use military force to selectively crack down on political opponents. We test these claims by conducting parallel survey experiments among the US public and mid-career military officers. We ask about two hypothetical scenarios of domestic partisan unrest, randomly assigning the partisan identity of protesters. Surprisingly, we find widespread public support for deploying the military and no significant partisanship effects. Meanwhile, military officers were very resistant to deploying the military, with nearly 75 percent opposed in any scenario. In short, there is little evidence that public polarization threatens to escalate domestic disputes, and strong evidence for military opposition.

This study extends the line of linguistic relativity research by assessing the effect of the French grammatical gender system on French speakers' and learners' perception of objects. Four groups of 140 adults (English monolinguals, French monolinguals, English–French bilinguals and French–English bilinguals; N = 35 each) rated 32 selected objects' gender by assigning them a masculine/feminine voice on a slider. We also assessed the participants' second-language (L2) proficiency. Multilevel modelling results revealed that French monolinguals and English–French bilinguals rated objects' gender in line with the French grammatical gender system. The effect of French on perception was not reduced by acquiring English, as French–English bilinguals performed on par with French monolinguals. Moreover, the effect was independent of L2 proficiency. These findings suggest that learning a gendered L2 affects the perception of objects – thus supporting the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

The tombstone of an Italian woman, Caterina Vilioni, in Yangzhou (1342) is a rare and important testimony to Christianity in Yuan China. By exploring the visual language and the multicultural geopolitical context of Caterina's funerary monument, this article sheds light on the dynamic processes behind how cultural and religious barriers were negotiated in the premodern Eurasian world. Despite the increasing scholarly interest in the European import of Asian luxury merchandise along the Silk Roads, movement of objects, persons, and ideas the other way around from Europe to Asia is much less explored. Moreover, the expansion of European networks towards the east was written from the perspective of men: friars, diplomats and merchants. Yet, the Yangzhou tombstone directs attention to the overlooked presence of non-elite Christian women in the cosmopolitan port cities of south-east China well before the era of modern global maritime exchange. While previous scholars traced the tombstone to Buddhist and Christian art, I argue that the visual language intentionally projected cultural ambiguity. By comparing it to the Mongol paiza (safe conduct pass), this article proposes that Caterina's burial marker functioned as an ‘otherworldly passport’, which invoked spiritual protection and facilitated the passage between two realms.