Critiques of international economic law have attacked the tendency of transnational legal processes, including investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), to undermine states' sovereignty. In response to these criticisms, many states have limited the power of investment tribunals by reasserting their sovereignty. There are reasons, however, to be critical of endorsing sovereignty, particularly in the context of global distributive inequalities. This is because assertions of sovereignty are normatively ambivalent in their effects: they can be used to entrench and naturalize the unequal assets held by each state, rather than to empower states to exercise their right to regulate. These potential tensions can be resolved if sovereignty is understood as a term that is used in many different ways. Critics of ISDS often conflate two distinct meanings of sovereignty: sovereignty understood as the right to be free from external influence, and sovereignty understood as states' right to regulate. Because states are constrained by differences in resources and capacity, withdrawing from ISDS cannot always secure the conditions for effective domestic regulation. Sovereignty understood as the right to be free from interference may even stand in the way of states' ability to regulate, by allowing states to gatekeep resources that were accumulated through historical injustice

In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire and aspiration, shame and punishment, in storylines that move between a past of enslavement and indentureship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a present of political and psychological stasis or upheaval in the 1950s, 1970s, or the early twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discussions about fire hydrants or standpipes index a British Caribbean colony's evolving landscape of modernization and the disagreements about what shape and speed this process should take, and recent fiction allows us to discern how these amenities inherit and bequeath associations of trauma.

According to Charles Travis, Frege’s principle to “always to sharply separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” involves a move called “the fundamental abstraction.” I try to explain what this abstraction is and why it is interesting. I then raise a problem for it, and describe what I think is a better way to understand Frege’s principle.

In this textual comparison of seventeenth-century herbals, I show in detail that most of the descriptions and medicinal uses of English herbs included in Culpeper’s small folio The English Physitian (1652) and its enlargement of the following year were lifted straight out of the works of John Parkinson, apothecary. This was a deliberate act by Culpeper, to make available to the people of England the best information on native plant medicines for use in treating their illnesses. He attacked the College of Physicians of London, whom the great majority of the population could not afford to engage, for trying to keep this knowledge secret. Among later historians of the herbal tradition, Culpeper’s work was not accorded the same status as the great English herbals of William Turner, John Gerard, and John Parkinson, not because this borrowing was recognised but because its astrological content worked to divert attention from the quality and source of much of its guidance on treatment. Even contemporaries of Culpeper did not recognise the extent of the borrowing. Comparisons also reveal the limitations of Culpeper’s powers of plant description and his lack of interest in the developing science of botany. The editorial decisions Culpeper made to reduce a great folio herbal to a much smaller book to be sold for 3d touch on domestic and other non-medical uses, while points of discussion common to both authors such as the doctrine of signatures and superstitious beliefs about plants are explored.

A perennial problem for sociolinguists interested in morphosyntactic variation is that such forms are often low frequency, making quantitative analysis difficult or impossible. However, sociolinguists have been generally reluctant to adopt methodologies from syntax, such as acceptability data gleaned from speaker intuition, due to the belief that these judgments are not necessarily reliable. In this article we present data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, which employs sociolinguistic methodologies in spoken data alongside the results of acceptability judgments. We target three morphosyntactic variables and compare and contrast these across the two data types in order to assess the reliability of the judgment data at community level. The results show that reliability is variable-dependent. For some variables, there is clear correlation; with others, it appears that, as Labov (1996) phrased it, ‘intuitions fail’. We discuss how factors such as salience, social stigma and local identity combine to govern the reliability of judgment data.

The article analyzes a period when public officials withdrew children from the labor market and assigned them to the school system. While existing research delves into the reasons behind this process, focusing on sociopolitical reforms, economic factors and changing concepts of childhood, there is limited understanding of how working-class families responded. The article aims to fill the gap by examining the social impact on families when their children were barred from factory work by political-administrative authorities, shedding light on class formation and political subjectivation. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s book Proletarian Nights the article specifically investigates the Swiss canton of Aargau, where the clash between industrial child labor and liberal school reforms around 1830 provides a unique perspective. The conflict prompted the mobilization of proletarian families, compelling them to organize, unite politically and collectively advocate for their children to rejoin the labor market.

Physical vapor deposited (PVD) molybdenum disulfide (nominal composition MoS2) is employed as a thin film solid lubricant for extreme environments where liquid lubricants are not viable. The tribological properties of MoS2 are highly dependent on morphological attributes such as film thickness, orientation, crystallinity, film density, and stoichiometry. These structural characteristics are controlled by tuning the PVD process parameters, yet undesirable alterations in the structure often occur due to process variations between deposition runs. Nondestructive film diagnostics can enable improved yield and serve as a means of tuning a deposition process, thus enabling quality control and materials exploration. Grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD) for MoS2 film characterization provides valuable information about film density and grain orientation (texture). However, the determination of film stoichiometry can only be indirectly inferred via GIXRD. The combination of density and microstructure via GIXRD with chemical composition via grazing incidence X-ray fluorescence (GIXRF) enables the isolation and decoupling of film density, composition, and microstructure and their ultimate impact on film layer thickness, thereby improving coating thickness predictions via X-ray fluorescence. We have augmented an existing GIXRD instrument with an additional X-ray detector for the simultaneous measurement of energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectra during the GIXRD analysis. This combined GIXRD/GIXRF analysis has proven synergetic for correlating chemical composition to the structural aspects of MoS2 films provided by GIXRD. We present the usefulness of the combined diagnostic technique via exemplar MoS2 film samples and provide a discussion regarding data extraction techniques of grazing angle series measurements.

Premodern medicine used a variety of mineral substances for therapeutic purposes. The present article deals with pitch-asphalt, and, in particular, a precious kind of it called mūmiyāʾ originating in Persia. It was first described in detail in the Arabic pharmacological tradition, and its fame spread throughout the medieval Mediterranean, including Byzantium. By editing and examining for the first time a previously unexplored medieval Greek text on mūmiyāʾ, this study offers new insights into the medicinal uses of this substance. It also significantly increases our understanding of the intense cross-cultural transfer of medical knowledge from the Islamicate world to Byzantium by showing that this was not merely based on the translation of a few Arabic medical works into Greek, but was a multifaceted phenomenon involving a complex nexus of sources that require further investigation.

Animal experimentation raises value conflicts between animal protection and other goods, such as freedom of inquiry or health and safety. If governments can phase out the practice by non-prohibitive incentive-setting, the pro tanto moral rationale for doing so is obvious. So why should they not? This article first sketches a fictional scenario in which a government adopts a phase-out plan for animal experimentation. It then considers two moral objections to this plan: First, the plan unduly restricts freedom of inquiry, and second, it merely displaces animal experimentation across borders and thus fails to reduce animal suffering. Both arguments are refined premise by premise to articulate their strongest versions. The two objections can help to narrow down desiderata for good phase-out plans. However, they do not provide a compelling case against phase-out planning as such because they miss its incremental and constructive nature. Unless better arguments can be provided, it appears that government inaction on phasing out animal experimentation lacks moral justification.

Congenital mitral stenosis is a rare anomaly. We report successful surgical management of congenital mitral stenosis in a patient with Kabuki syndrome. A 15-month-old male with Kabuki syndrome was referred and echocardiography showed isolated congenital mitral stenosis. The valve was not repairable as it was showing severe stenotic features in multilevel fashion. Valve was replaced with mechanical valve. Postoperative course was uneventful without any rhythm problem and he has been doing well clinically during the 25 months follow-up with regular international normalized ratio checks.

The field of International Studies has often been concerned with either negative conceptualisations of freedom and liberty (i.e. freedom from obstacles and interference) or positive notions of freedom (i.e. the possibility to act and develop). Further, these two notions of freedom have been conceived of as rival and incompatible. Drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity (1947), this article rejects such a binary conceptualisation of freedom and instead puts forward a relational understanding of freedom. This article also begins to sketch the possibilities offered by such an understanding of freedom via a nascent dialogue between this relational freedom and the ethics of care. Specifically, it is posited that care and freedom weave together to form the very ethical space and conditions in and through which in becomes possible to pursue various life projects in the first place. Care and freedom, it is suggested, may thus provide one orientation for studying and practising international relations in a manner that moves towards building, amending, and maintaining relations that better support everyone (where this, crucially, also entails the ending of relations which oppress, harm, and cause suffering).

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a legal institution embedded in international politics. Politics shaped the Rome Statute of the ICC, which is rooted in norms and rules of European lineage and security interests of party states. Politics constrains and influences the operation of the Court, which has adapted in response to oversight and governance of the Assembly of States Parties, and to political actions extrinsic to institutional rules. The ICC also has political effects in situation states. A brief history shows that application of Rome Statute triggers across state parties with different social conditions skewed geographic distribution of its investigations and prosecutions towards Africa, a structural bias that catalysed a legitimation crisis for the ICC. Subsequent exercises of expansive jurisdiction aimed at nationals of non-African, non-party states – including Israel and some of the world's great powers – have dampened African complaints and advanced the ICC agenda, but intensified non-legitimacy claims by powerful non-party states. To survive, Court organs must follow legal mandates, yet be responsive to pressing international political demands, continuously risking the legitimacy of the ICC as a legal institution and adverse political reactions by antagonised governments. Careful management of the tension between law and politics at the ICC may modestly reduce antagonism towards the Court, but that tension cannot be resolved, and confrontations over the ICC's legitimacy are certain to recur.

This article reconstructs the first outbreak of epidemic dropsy recorded in documentary evidence, which occurred in Calcutta, Mauritius, and northeastern India and Bengal in 1877–80. It uses current medical knowledge and investigations into the wider historical contexts in which the epidemic occurred to re-read the colonial medical literature of the period. It shows that colonial policies and structures in the context of variable enviro-climatic conditions increased the likelihood that an epidemic would break out, while also increasing the vulnerability of certain populations to infection and mortality. Additionally, it shows how the trans-regional nature of the epidemic contributed to varying understandings of the disease between two colonial medical establishments, which influenced each other in contradictory ways. The article’s core contributions are to recent trans-regional perspectives on disease transmission and colonial medical knowledge production in the Indian Ocean World.

This article introduces the Clairaut conformal Riemannian map. This notion includes the previously studied notions of Clairaut conformal submersion, Clairaut Riemannian submersion, and the Clairaut Riemannian map as particular cases, and is well known in the classical theory of surfaces. Toward this, we find the necessary and sufficient condition for a conformal Riemannian map $\varphi : M \to N$ between Riemannian manifolds to be a Clairaut conformal Riemannian map with girth $s = e^f$. We show that the fibers of $\varphi $ are totally umbilical with mean curvature vector field the negative gradient of the logarithm of the girth function, that is, $-\nabla f$. Using this, we obtain a local splitting of M as a warped product and a usual product, if the horizontal space is integrable (under some appropriate hypothesis). We also provide some examples of the Clairaut conformal Riemannian maps to confirm our main theorem. We observe that the Laplacian of the logarithmic girth, that is, of f, on the total manifold takes the special form. It reduces to the Laplacian on the horizontal distribution, and if it is nonnegative, the universal covering space of M becomes a product manifold, under some hypothesis on f. Analysis of the Laplacian of f also yields the splitting of the universal covering space of M as a warped product under some appropriate conditions. We calculate the sectional curvature and mixed sectional curvature of M when f is a distance function. We also find the relationships between the total manifold and the fibers being symmetrical and, in particular, having constant sectional curvature, and from there, we compare their universal covering spaces, if fibers are also complete, provided f is a distance function. We also find a condition on the curvature tensor of the fibers to be semi-symmetric, provided that the total manifold is semi-symmetric and f is a distance function. In turn, this gives the warped product of symmetric, semi-symmetric spaces into two symmetric, semi-symmetric subspaces (under some hypothesis). Also if the Hessian or the Laplacian of the Riemannian curvature tensor fields is zero, or has a harmonic curvature tensor, then the fibers of $\varphi $ also satisfy the same property, if f is also a distance function. By obtaining Bochner-type formulas for Clairaut conformal Riemannian maps, we establish the relations between the divergences of the Ricci curvature tensor on fibers and horizontal space and the corresponding scalar curvature. We also study the horizontal Killing vector field of constant length and show that they are parallel under appropriate hypotheses. This in turn gives the splitting of the total manifold, if it admits a horizontal parallel Killing vector field and if the horizontal space is integrable. Finally, assuming that $\nabla f$ is a nontrivial gradient Ricci soliton on M, we prove that any vertical vector field is incompressible and hence the volume form of the fiber is invariant under the flow of the vector field.

The article, ‘Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England’, Medical History, 67, 2 (2023), 91–108, by Niall Boyce is devoted to criticising my historical research pertaining to 1) the predominance of segmented sleep in the pre-industrial Western world and 2) the nineteenth-century transition of sleep to today’s pattern of continuous slumber that most people in modern societies seek to achieve, albeit not always successfully. This response addresses Boyce’s reinterpretation of the evidence and indicates whether this is erroneous or selective. My analysis thereby reasserts the predominance of segmented sleep in pre-modern Western Europe. Boyce’s assessment rests not on his original investigation of primary sources but on my first study relating to segmented sleep, published in 2001. Not least of the flaws of ‘Have We Lost Sleep?’ is its surprising inattention to my subsequent works that have expanded, modified, and bolstered this initial publication.