This manuscript introduces deep learning models that simultaneously describe the dynamics of several yield curves. We aim to learn the dependence structure among the different yield curves induced by the globalization of financial markets and exploit it to produce more accurate forecasts. By combining the self-attention mechanism and nonparametric quantile regression, our model generates both point and interval forecasts of future yields. The architecture is designed to avoid quantile crossing issues affecting multiple quantile regression models. Numerical experiments conducted on two different datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, we explore potential extensions and enhancements by incorporating deep ensemble methods and transfer learning mechanisms.

This article outlines one way in which Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology could contribute to reducing the risk humanity now creates to its own survival. Studies of ‘Existential Risk’ warn that hazards arising from Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Engineered Pathogens require mitigation to safeguard the future of the human race from a calamitous end. Preventative measures, however, entail sacrifice, and there is no shortage of resistance to regulation of behaviours and technological development. Ethics of empathy, utility, and duties reach breaking point when stretched to overcome the temporal and moral gap between present agency and future well-being.

This article proposes that Ratzinger’s theology of history and commitment to eschatological realism offers an intertwined double benefit: his warning about the danger of conflating hope in God’s Kingdom with hope in a future world humanity could perfect for itself opens up the uniquely rich ground of a trans-historical hope in Jesus Christ, in which an impactful relationship of love for humanity’s future can put down roots today.

Even though International Relations (IR) research increasingly recognises the unprecedented urgency of environmental degradation and the resulting ecological injustices, only few IR scholars have probed into the role of economic growth as a fundamental driver of global unsustainability. We level two critiques at the field of IR from a post-growth perspective. First, most IR theories are complicit in naturalising economic growth as a fundamental condition of global order. Second, IR scholarship has neglected to engage seriously with post-growth thinking. What happens when we start to question the background economic assumptions of the current international system? How might a global politics of post-growth challenge and enrich IR and environmental politics? This Editors Forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from across the globe to reflect on these pertinent questions. As a whole, the Forum begins to address the complicity and neglect critiques. To varying degrees, each contribution considers what IR can learn from post-growth research (both conceptually and empirically), and vice versa. In this introductory article, we set the stage for such an engagement by reviewing an interdisciplinary body of relevant work and synthesising the key contributions from a total of seven Forum articles.

Through the analysis of English in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Tokyo, this article demonstrates the diverse functions of English on signage and argues that the use of English in different areas of Tokyo mirrors the distinct socioeconomic characteristics of each area, aiming to highlight how English contributes to shaping the multifaceted Tokyo's cityscape. This study specifically contrasts the three areas: Asakusa and Tsukiji, Shibuya, and Roppongi and Azabu. The data consists of photographed signs, supplemented with fieldnotes, obtained from fieldwork in 2023. Considering all the aspects of the observed signs, the diverse English use on signage can be viewed as a manifestation of its proliferation and localisation as a global language, adapting to a diverse audience, including Japanese locals, visitors from overseas, and local foreign residents. As a result of such manifestation, along with the varied functions and interplay with social contexts, the aggregate of English signs of each area collectively crafts the complexity of Tokyo's mosaic cityscape.

The exclusion of the elderly and people with disabilities from cancer clinical research without appropriate justification is discriminatory and is at odds with the ethos of EU principles, laws and research regulations. It further limits study generalizability. Several primary EU laws fronted by the European Charter prohibit engaging in disparate impact discrimination on the grounds of age and disability in all of EU tasks.

This paper studies optimal defined-contribution (DC) pension management under stochastic interest rates and expected inflation. In addition to financial risk, we consider the risk of pre-retirement death and introduce life insurance to the pension account as an option to manage this risk. We formulate this pension management problem as a random horizon utility maximization problem and derive its explicit solution under the assumption of constant relative risk aversion utility. We calibrate our model to the U.S. data and demonstrate that the pension member’s demand for life insurance has a hump-shaped pattern with age and a U-shaped pattern with the real interest rate and expected inflation. The optimal pension account balance in our model resembles a variable annuity, wherein the death benefits are endogenously determined and depend on various factors including age, mortality, account balance, future contributions, preferences, and market conditions. Our study suggests that offering variable annuities with more flexible death benefits within the DC account could better cater to the bequest demands of its members.

This paper is a case study that reflects on the intricate process of crafting a specialised private training pool, located in Highgate, London. The client is KP, a woman in her 50s who developed Multiple Sclerosis (MS) more than a decade ago. In her everyday life, KP uses a wheelchair and relies on continuous support. She can navigate semi-independently without the wheelchair by using her arms and upper body to push and pull herself through space with sufficient support such as from (door) frames, furniture, handlebars, etc. She has one side that is more dependent with one foot less responsive. When overcoming thresholds, for example, she therefore often requires additional help lifting. Generally, independent movement through space is slow, and her navigation and speed are inherently determined by the availability of surrounding support. This paper explores the multifaceted journey of delivering a training pool that embraces a holistic approach and encompasses the physical, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of the client’s needs. To reflect on these important issues, it draws on an interview between the client and author, who is also the architect.

The rise of global history has fundamentally reshaped historical scholarship over recent years. Questions about class structures, however, have rarely been specifically addressed by global historians. Scholars of social history, meanwhile, have traditionally studied social stratification within national frameworks. The introduction to this special issue addresses these shortcomings, exploring global social history as a new field of historical inquiry. Interweaving global and social history, it demonstrates that we cannot understand the emergence and transformation of social groups across the modern world – groups such as the aristocracy, the economic bourgeoisie, the educated middle classes, the peasantry, or nomadic groups – without considering how they were influenced by global entanglements. Moreover, it points out that we have to examine globalization as a social process that was shaped by particular social groups. The special issue will connect the study of global connectivity with that of the emergence and evolution of social structures.

Effective ex situ conservation of plants in botanic gardens requires sufficient wild accessions to represent wild diversity. In Rhododendron L. (Ericaceae), c. 64% of the taxa are threatened or require field investigation. As a case study of the analysis of ex situ conservation gaps we used ecogeographical representation as a proxy for genetic representation in ex situ collections of the 65 taxa of Rhododendron subsection Maddenia. We compiled the first list profiling both wild distributions and ex situ wild collections of all taxa in subsection Maddenia. Our results reveal that 55 Maddenia taxa are in cultivation. Of the 18 threatened taxa all are in cultivation but nine require further collection to capture adequate wild diversity. There are 12 Data Deficient taxa: these await further field investigation of wild populations and nine of them require wild collections to conserve genetic diversity. The UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and China are the top five countries holding ex situ collections of subsection Maddenia; in these countries nearly 66% of the ex situ sites hold > 86% of the global living collections of subsection Maddenia. We recommend that wild collections of endemic species of subsection Maddenia should be established in all 10 countries of origin and that data should be shared internationally for metacollections. In addition to proposing priorities, our case study highlights the challenges facing data and collection management to help achieve effective ex situ conservation for Rhododendron species.

The Xuanquan postal station is to date the most well-documented example of a working postal station from the Han period. This paper presents a corpus of 115 excavated horse names recorded in Xuanquan administrative documents. Analysis of these names not only clarifies what tasks these horses were expected to perform at the station, but two unique naming conventions further articulate the complex relationships forged between humans and horses at this frontier site: giving horses human surnames and venerating aged horses. This article thus centers the act of naming individual animals as being of significant importance for future studies of human-animal interactions.

This article tells the story of Lottie Beth Hobbs, one of the most important figures of the anti-ERA movement – and therefore a founding mother of the Religious Right. Although opposition of fundamentalist women to the ERA increasingly has been recognized in the founding of the Religious Right, Hobbs’s role remains underexplored. Relying on a moral and political framework indebted to her lifelong commitment to the Churches of Christ, Hobbs spearheaded a rhetorical and ideological shift that first united disparate conservative causes under a “pro-family” banner, then focused their attention on the threat of a tentacular secular humanism. By focusing on Hobbs’s career, this article bridges two scholarly foci on modern American conservatism, one highlighting anti-ERA organizing in the 1970s and the other focused on “family values” activism during the Reagan administration.

This essay argues for considering wartime Ukrainian poetry in the broader context of Ukrainian artistic projects investigating the relationship between observation, agency, and responsibility. It highlights the profoundly democratic features of this process that explores the ways art can help one process trauma and engage in difficult but necessary conversations. It argues that Ukrainian poetic activity can be viewed as a unified corpus across multiple languages, while problematizing approaches to Russophone Ukrainian poetry that treat is as part of an allegedly unified Russophone discursive space. It also emphasizes the ethical imperative for greater scholarly engagement with Ukrainian literary texts.

This article examines the role of primary ethnographic materials – of field notes, letters and photographs – and even of the shelves and bookcases – in building accounts of the human condition. We trace the lives of incomplete and not-yet-found manuscripts, which have been treated as representative of whole archives, as well as closely held convictions and ideas in the history of anthropology. In so doing, we employ the notion of a ‘proxy’, or a set of signs and images which point the audience in particular directions, without determining their overall destination. Our research is based on a few episodes from the histories of paper and digital copies of manuscripts and photographs of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, who conducted ethnographic, linguistic and some archaeological research, first on the borderlands between China and Russia, and then later within China. We aim to show the complexity and social and intellectual vibrancy of their ethnographic field archives, which have been scattered across countries, institutions and personal collections. We conclude by suggesting that engaging anthropologically with field archives enables us to approach existing perspectives on archives in a new way, viewing them not as containers of catalogued information, but as entanglements reflecting social relations in local communities, the trajectories of ethnographers, and the aspirations of scholars asking questions today.

Among the artefacts recovered from Warwick, an English ship wrecked in Bermuda at the end of November 1619, was a small wooden navigational device. Discovered during the 2010 archaeological field season, the object was cleaned, analysed, and later conserved. It has been identified as an analogue navigational tool known as a plain scale. A novel instrument at the time, the device showed real-world applications of complex mathematical formulas for charting a course on a map. Its presence on Warwick is striking; it is believed to be the earliest known example of a plain scale in use on board an English ship sailing to the colonies. The goal of this paper is to present the artefact, provide its historical and archaeological background, and discuss the current body of research related to its purpose in resolving navigational problems.

The Cladonia cervicornis group comprises lichen-forming fungi characterized by having scyphi with central proliferations. It includes c. 20 species globally. The taxonomy of this group is poorly resolved, with many species not thoroughly disentangled. The focus of this study is the European species in the C. cervicornis group. In order to estimate the phylogenetic relationships of these species, six loci were used: ITS rDNA, IGS rDNA, RPB1, RPB2, ef1α and cox1. Species delimitation methods (ASAP, PTP and GMYC) were used to infer the species boundaries based on four loci, ITS rDNA, IGS rDNA, cox1 and RPB2. A morphological analysis based on multivariate methods was performed to assess the importance of phenotypic differences among the lineages. The phylogenetic reconstructions placed the species of this group in the subclade Cladonia. Five lineages were recovered, corresponding to C. cervicornis, C. macrophyllodes, C. pulvinata, C. verticillata and a new lineage that we describe here, C. teuvoana. Our analyses revealed that Cladonia cineracea, C. stricta and C. trassii are polyphyletic.

I am so grateful to have been able to think with these authors while reading their books, for both have challenged me to think differently about my previous work and my upbringing in the “Golden State.” Those of us who study religion in the American West know it is still relatively marginalized in our guild, but I see such great hope in these sorts of studies. Not only do these books reveal a great deal about California both as a site of religious coercion and resistance, but they bring to our attention methods, sources, and ways of thinking about the interpenetration of traditionally “religious” ideas and material objects with labor, capital, foodways, photography, office spaces, and domestic interiors.

“Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry: Wartime and Poetic Time” raises questions about the significance of new technology, new media, and the concept of “real time” by showing how poetry, even the new forms of poetic reportage coming out of present-day Ukraine, makes its own time.

We show that for an oriented 4-dimensional Poincaré complex X with finite fundamental group, whose 2-Sylow subgroup is abelian with at most 2 generators, the homotopy type of X is determined by its quadratic 2-type.

This article aims to bring out the problematic nature of condensation and rarefaction for early modern natural philosophers by considering two historically significant attempts to deal with it, first by Sir Kenelm Digby in his Treatise on Body (1644), and subsequently by Isaac Newton, chiefly in manuscript works associated with the Principia (1687). It is argued that Digby tried to sidestep the problem of variation in density and rarity by making it a fundamental starting point for his physics. But he also brought out the difficulties of dealing with condensation and rarefaction within the mechanical philosophy, whether that philosophy was plenist or allowed for void space. The problems became exacerbated after experiments with the air-pump achieved extreme rarefactions. It is argued that these led Newton to first consider a retiform or net-like structure of matter, before adopting the radical innovation of supposing repelling forces operating at a distance between the particles of the rarefied bodies. Eventually, Newton came to believe that extreme rarity was inexplicable ‘by any other means than a repulsive Power’.