Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, infection control protocols, and health outcomes at the population level. AI/ML also has the potential to exacerbate existing health disparities, underscoring the necessity of developing, testing, and evaluating models with equity-centered frameworks. In this review, we highlight current work and future directions in implementing AI/ML to improve health equity in healthcare epidemiology. AI/ML models can improve the quality of data collected in electronic health records, especially with regard to race and ethnicity, aid in identifying vulnerable populations via classification modeling, and help guide equitable intervention protocols by identifying disparities through predictive modeling. However, data-, algorithm-, and deployment-centric biases must be considered at every step of model synthesis, utilizing fairness metrics to assess the presence of bias and employing ideal mitigation strategies to create equitable AI/ML models for healthcare epidemiology.

This article examines the International Committee of the Red Cross–Swedish Red Cross cooperation model for strengthening mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) capacity in conflict settings, drawing on the multi-year initiative implemented in Syria. It argues that sustainable access to quality MHPSS services in contexts of armed conflict requires long-term investment in local professional capacity, progressive learning, and structured supervision – elements that are often absent from traditional humanitarian programming. Through analysis of the partnership’s modular, competency-based training and multidisciplinary approach, the article illustrates how intertwined psychological, somatic and social dimensions of trauma necessitate coordinated professional competencies and integrated care pathways. The Syrian case study demonstrates both the potential and the limitations of implementing such an approach in a protracted crisis marked by insecurity, fragmentation and resource constraints. The article concludes by identifying key lessons for International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement components, humanitarian actors and donors on designing, implementing and sustaining MHPSS capacity-building initiatives that translate policy commitments into practice and contribute to more resilient national MHPSS systems.

Field trials were conducted in 2022 and 2023 in Lafayette, Indiana, to determine the response of a watermelon crop (cultivar Fascination) grown in plasticulture and weed control efficacy after pretransplant herbicide applications directed to the row middles, with or without a layby row middle application. Pretransplant herbicides included 1) ethalfluralin + clomazone, 2) fomesafen + S-metolachlor, 3) flumioxazin + S-metolachlor, and 4) flumioxazin + pyroxasulfone applied to row middles 1 d before the watermelon crop was transplanted. Each pretransplant treatment received one of three layby options: 1) no herbicide, 2) bicyclopyrone, or 3) imazosulfuron. A nontreated weedy control was included for comparison. At 2 wk after planting (WAP), the greatest weed control was provided by flumioxazin + S-metolachlor (95%), followed by flumioxazin + pyroxasulfone (92%), and ethalfluralin + clomazone (88%), but control was greater than when fomesafen + S-metolachlor (85%) was applied. By 8 WAP, weed control ranged from 69% (fomesafen + S-metolachlor) to 88% (flumioxazin + S-metolachlor). Flumioxazin + pyroxasulfone and ethalfluralin + clomazone provided 84% and 71% weed control, respectively. Weed control did not differ among layby herbicide treatments. Foliar crop injury was observed 1 wk after applying layby treatments of bicyclopyrone (7%) and imazosulfuron (2%), but it was minimal and not persistent. Relative to the nontreated weedy control, pretransplant herbicide treatments increased marketable yield by 59% to 68%, fruit number by 53% to 60%, and mean fruit weight by 4% to 10%. Pooled across all pretransplant applications, a layby application of bicyclopyrone resulted in a greater relative increase in marketable fruit number and fruit weight than when no layby herbicide was applied.

The Article revisits the public/private distinction to discuss, in this framing, the dispute over the classified documents and the immunity ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, both concerning the President of the United States. After introducing the relevant provisions of the Presidential Records Act and the Espionage Act, the conflict is analyzed by means of a matrix distin, as well as public or private property and the public or private nature of the location where the presidential papers were stored. Guided by arguments taken from the theoretical discourse, the property-related public/private distinction is submitted to a review of its critical situations. The Article closes with four different readings of the public/private distinction—liberal, authoritarian, perspectival, and symbolic—that are applied to the conflict concerning the classified documents and the immunity ruling.

The contemporary listening environment is characterised by extensive mediation, in which environmental recordings are continually detached from their original contexts and reconfigured elsewhere. Earlier soundscape research used the term schizophonia to describe the separation of sound from its source and the consequent result of a disembodied and unsettling sonic experience. However, this framing has come under growing criticism for regarding mediation as a defect. This article proposes an alternative concept, ‘mediated auditory dislocation’, to describe an analytically non-normative condition in which environmental sounds are recorded, displaced from their original time and place, and re-embedded within new audiovisual and interactive settings. The argument is developed through a practice-based case study of Shifting Horizons (Bai 2025), an interactive VR audiovisual soundscape work. The case study shows how control over sonic layering, electroacoustic processing, and audiovisual coupling allows listeners to reconfigure the relation between recorded sound and its mediated presentation, making mediation itself available for comparative and reflexive listening. The article concludes by introducing a three-layer collaborative media model that clarifies how VR can support comparative and reflexive listening through parameterised layer control. The model is proposed as a transferable analytic heuristic, intended to be tested and refined across further VR soundscape works.

The elderly are an overlooked cohort in early modern urban spaces. Where studies of old age have tended to focus on the spaces of the home or the hospital, studies of street space and urban mobility have often not considered age, or have focused on youth groups. This article examines the relationship between urban space and mobility, and old age in early modern Venice. It shows how elderly people used urban spaces and were a visible presence in the early modern city. In so doing, it demonstrates that attending to how and where elderly people moved can shed light on strategies for self-sufficiency and on histories of disability and care, as well as shedding new light on how urban populations used city spaces.

What does violence against women in politics (VAWIP) look like in authoritarian regimes that are widely portrayed as stable and “peaceful”? Existing scholarship largely centers on democracies, leaving nondemocratic contexts understudied. This article addresses the gap by examining Kuwait, the Gulf’s most democratic monarchy, where women’s educational and professional gains are highlighted even as political contestation remains tightly controlled. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, and activists, we theorize VAWIP as a core mechanism of women’s exclusion, enabled by the collusion of hollow formal institutions and patriarchal kinship networks. In this patriarchal peace, overt physical repression is rare, but women are governed through psychological harassment, semiotic attacks, and economic pressure that constrain their resources, competence, and visibility. Conversely, male respondents report low-risk political careers. Our analysis extends VAWIP research beyond democracies, generating hypotheses on how regime type and kin-based networks shape nonphysical coercion in ostensibly peaceful authoritarian regimes.

This study investigates how school leaders interpret and mobilize the traits and competencies required to initiate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in school contexts. Using a qualitative single-case study design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight school leaders involved in the Johor Sustainable Education Action Plan (JSEAP). Thematic analysis reveals three interrelated dimensions of leadership practice: a positive orientation towards change, substantive ESD-related knowledge and interpersonal competence. Rather than operating as static attributes, these dimensions emerge as relational and contextually shaped capacities, developed through leaders’ ongoing engagement with institutional constraints, policy expectations and school-level realities. The findings suggest that early-stage ESD leadership is less a matter of technical readiness than a process of situated sense-making, in which leaders negotiate meaning, capability and context simultaneously. This study advances ESD scholarship beyond competency frameworks towards a more complex understanding of how sustainability-oriented change is initiated in schools.