Printed media can shape its audience’s political preferences. Research on governments influencing their narrative focuses on censorship of political scandals but largely ignores day-to-day political content. We analyze opinion columns from Mexico, a country with a democratic culture where outright censorship is unfeasible, and yet there is journalistic evidence on the government “sponsoring” the media to communicate messages with a less negative tone. We estimate the negative tone of over 200,000 opinion pieces from Mexico’s eight most prominent newspapers using sentiment analysis. We propose a novel metric of media capture that conveys the over-favoring of publicity spending by the government in news outlets. We find that captured media are less negative about the incumbent president and more negative about their main political rival, suggesting media organizations adapt their content to their advertisers’ preferences. The results are validated by rare qualitative evidence that uncovers the blacklisting of media deemed too negative of the incumbent.

Two Tocharian B manuscripts, PK AS 3B and IOL Toch 306, contain an ingredient läksañña klautso, lit. “fish ear”, that, in earlier editions and translations, has been interpreted as “(fish) gill”. However, no concrete evidence has been brought forward to interpret “fish ears” in this context as “gills”, nor is there convincing evidence for the use of “gills” in (traditional) medicine for the dermatological and gastrointestinal conditions described in these manuscripts. By examining the term for “shell” in Nakh-Dagestanian languages (e.g. Avar ччугlигlин /č:uʕiʕin/, lit. “fish ear”) and highlighting metaphorical associations of related words, e.g. German Ohrmuschel “auricle”, we argue that läksañña klautso refers to shells and conches rather than gills. Additionally, we provide instances of the use of conches and shells in Āyurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine to support our claim. Accordingly, we suggest that “ground shell (powder)” is the ingredient listed in these two remedies.

Despite the essential role that migrant domestic workers perform, their work—and human worth—is often disregarded. The issues facing migrant domestic workers go beyond harsh labor conditions and immigration regulations that tie their work permits to their employers. These issues—all of which migrant domestic workers have shared with me—involve a disregard for their humanity through policies that treat them as sources of contagion (e.g., mandatory annual HIV and pregnancy tests) and as wards (e.g., employers’ refusal to permit days off and the imposition of curfews). The problems facing migrant domestic workers stem from a devaluing of care and domestic work, alongside the routine ignoring of their own caring needs. A key principle of a caring society emphasizes the importance of meeting people’s caring needs (Glenn 2000). The inability of policymakers to recognize and meet migrant domestic workers’ need for care through policies shows migrant domestic workers’ invisibility.

This article introduces and analyzes a framework that accommodates general heterogeneity in regression modeling. It demonstrates that regression models with fixed or time-varying parameters can be estimated using the ordinary least squares (OLS) and time-varying OLS methods, respectively, across a broad class of regressors and noise processes not covered by existing theory. The proposed setting facilitates the development of asymptotic theory and the estimation of robust standard errors. The robust confidence interval estimators accommodate substantial heterogeneity in both regressors and noise. The resulting robust standard error estimates coincide with White’s (1980, Econometrica 48, 817–838) heteroskedasticity-consistent estimator but are applicable to a broader range of conditions, including models with missing data. They are computationally simple and perform well in Monte Carlo simulations. Their robustness, generality, and ease of implementation make them highly suitable for empirical applications. Finally, the article provides a brief empirical illustration.

India’s aging population faces escalating cognitive decline and neuropsychiatric challenges. This cross-sectional study examined relationships between geriatric depression, neuropsychiatric symptoms and cognitive performance among 1,013 community-dwelling elderly participants (≥60 years) in Gorakhpur using the ICMR-MUDRA Toolbox. Multistage random sampling was employed. Depression was assessed using GDS-30, and neuropsychiatric symptoms were assessed using NPI-Brief. It was observed that geriatric depression was present in 63.3% of participants, while neuropsychiatric symptoms affected 78.5%, predominantly agitation (15%) and irritability (12%). Cognitive performance declined significantly across depression severity in attention, executive function, memory, language and visuospatial domains (P < 0.001). Adjusted regression revealed that mild depression was negatively associated with executive function and memory, while severe depression showed stronger associations with language and visuospatial abilities. Neuropsychiatric symptoms independently impacted cognitive domains. These findings highlight the need for integrated mental health screening and early intervention strategies within routine geriatric care in India.

An analytical framework is presented for determining the ground states of a collisionless plasma with a given density profile, and its associated available energy, which bounds the field energy, is calculated. We show that the bound can be tightened by enforcing that the ground state is physically realisable, i.e. that the released energy is consistently stored in the fields supported by the density profile. A simple waterbag model is employed to retrieve nonlinear bounds for particularly simple conditions, further finding a phase-transition-like behaviour at the critical energy where the constraint of non-negative number densities becomes relevant. We verify the derived bounds with one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, where it is found that the true energy released is typically ${\sim} 20\,\%$ of the bound derived. Next, we present an asymptotic framework for calculating ground states with given density profiles of distribution functions close to this ground state. This framework is employed to describe a magnetised plasma, where it is shown that the ground state seeks long-wavelength structures for large electron-to-ion temperature ratios, highlighting unfavourable transport properties in this regime. By using the corrected adiabatic response in toroidal geometry (with a flux-surface average subtracted), it is found that the ground state seeks long-wavelength zonal structures. Furthermore, a crude model of a toroidal, multispecies, quasineutral plasma highlights that there is non-trivial dependence on the impurity content with certain optimal mixing ratios. A similar model is constructed to capture the effects of a fast-ion population, showing a non-trivial dependence on the exact shape of the fast-ion distribution. These results provide rigorous, density-aware limits on energy release in collisionless plasmas, and similar methods may be used to account for electromagnetic effects.

In this study, we develop epidemic reaction-diffusion models by incorporating the dependency of the diffusion rate of susceptible individuals on new infection cases, employing both Fickian and Fokker–Planck-type diffusion laws. As the first part of a two-part series, we focus on epidemics driven by frequency-dependent incidence. We explore linear, exponential and algebraic relationships between diffusion rate of the susceptible population and new infection cases to provide deeper biological insights. Our analysis establishes the global existence of solutions and characterizes the threshold dynamics using basic reproduction numbers. We find that in quasilinear parabolic systems, the Fokker–Planck-type diffusion law tends to induce spatial segregation of susceptible and infected individuals, while the Fickian law favours spatial homogenization of susceptible individuals. Additionally, the Fokker–Planck-type model, where the diffusion rate of infected individuals depends on new recovery cases, more accurately captures the cognitive diffusion behaviour of individuals.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the city of Bruges, a considerable trading centre in the County of Flanders, witnessed a noticeable increase in rape prosecutions. Drawing on final judgments by the city magistrates, many of whom imposed the death penalty, this article examines how these prosecutions were shaped by broader concerns for social order and urban prosperity. It argues that deep-rooted anxieties about disorder and deviance among both civic authorities and the wider community fostered a more standardized policy towards sexual violence. This, in turn, enables the reconstruction of the late medieval ‘criminal-rapist’: an outsider associated with brutal and dishonourable violence, deemed particularly intolerable in ‘a city of high repute’.

The experimental study of the effects of religious messages and endorsements by religious leaders on political attitudes has a relatively short history yet has coalesced around three main claims: religious treatments are especially effective because of their religious character, effects are larger for religious affiliates than nonaffiliates, and effects are larger for high religiosity types than low religiosity types. Here, we meta-reanalyze the experimental record (58 treatment-outcome pairs drawn from 43 studies reported in 26 papers) to probe the generalizability of these claims. Our findings indicate that these three headline claims do not generalize straightforwardly across contexts: effects are large in some cases and close to zero in others, and we find no evidence in favor of the claimed heterogeneities by religious affiliation or religiosity. Based on a census of the estimands in this literature, we offer suggestions for future research that would enhance commensurability and synthesis.

This note examines the semantics of figs in Greek and Roman culture, pointing to their association with the opposition between truth and falsehood. The relevance of this association is explored in relation to a detail in the story of Brutus (Postumius Albinus, FRHist F2 = Macrob. Sat. 3.20.5) and an aetiological episode in Ovid’s Fasti (Ov. Fast. 2.243–66).