Between 2000 and 2019, Portugal and Spain adopted divergent youth-oriented active labor market policies (ALMPs) to address rising youth unemployment. Drawing on data from the LABREF database, National Reform Programmes, and key economic indicators, we show that Portugal targeted higher education graduates with internship and innovation schemes aligned with its transition to a knowledge-based economy. In contrast, Spain developed a dual vocational education and training system centered on apprenticeships to support its manufacturing sector. These contrasting approaches reflect distinct national growth strategies and demonstrate how governments shape ALMPs in line with broader economic objectives. The findings offer a comparative perspective on policy divergence in Southern Europe and highlight the role of growth strategies in explaining variation in activation policies, even among countries with similar institutional and macroeconomic conditions.

Expert-produced information and data hold significant potential for adoption by decision-makers; however, this potential can be compromised by barriers related to language, communication channels, and formats. The literature emphasizes the differing languages, timelines, and incentives between specialists and lay decision-makers who seek practical solutions to real-world issues, rather than theoretical dilemmas. We conducted a mixed-method study, based on a survey and interviews with Italian regional lawmakers and local decision-makers in land-use planning. This is an area characterized by high levels of technicality and hence appears challenging to most decision-makers. We discovered that when they easily grasp the meaning and implications of policy documents, their understanding seems more influential in their legislative behavior. Consequently, a key challenge in promoting evidence-informed policy-making seems to translate expert knowledge into accessible languages and codes for laypeople and to present it in practical and concise ways.

Double white dwarf (DWD) binaries are natural outcomes of binary stellar evolution and key sources for future space-based gravitational wave (GW) observatories such as Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). We investigate how different binary interaction channels shape the physical and orbital properties of DWD systems, focusing on component masses, orbital separations, core compositions, and mass transfer rates. Using the binary population synthesis code compas, we evolve $10^7$ binaries with physically motivated initial distributions of binary parameters. Our simulations reproduce the strong bimodality in the final orbital separations, including a pronounced deficit of systems around 100–500 $\mathrm{R}_\odot$, arising from distinct evolutionary pathways: wide DWDs predominantly originate from stable Roche lobe overflow (RLOF), while close DWDs form through unstable RLOF leading to at least one common envelope (CE) phase. Moreover, we show that the core compositions of WDs provide a powerful tracer of evolutionary history: He-core WDs are strongly concentrated in close systems, whereas CO-core WDs span the full separation range and exhibit a small mass gap in wide binaries. We further identify a correlation between the donor mass transfer rate and the final orbital separation, highlighting the impact of non-conservative mass transfer on the resulting orbital configuration of DWD systems. These results underscore the links among evolutionary channels, chemical composition, and mass transfer rates; thereby provide a unique framework for interpreting Gaia DWD samples and forecasting the joint electromagnetic and GW population accessible to LISA.

Comment les professionnels du droit et de la médecine construisent-ils, au tribunal, le statut légal et l’état mental des patients, et comment ces derniers participent-ils à ces constructions? Cet article s’appuie sur l’analyse de 300 audiences à Paris et à New York, au cours desquelles des personnes hospitalisées sans consentement demandent leur sortie. Dans les deux villes, les tribunaux rejettent la grande majorité des requêtes. Ils le font en mobilisant, selon des modalités propres à chaque système, des répertoires juridiques et des capacités de contrôle qui transforment les patients en différents types de sujets utilisables: des personnes dont les droits sont formellement pris en compte à l’audience, mais qui sont néanmoins classées comme nécessitant les interventions sans consentement que la psychiatrie a les moyens d’assurer. À Paris, les professionnels du droit insistent sur les garanties procédurales tout en s’en remettant aux évaluations médicales du consentement des patients, entendu comme une disposition sous-jacente à accepter un traitement au long cours. À New York, les avocats contestent plus directement l’expertise psychiatrique, mais négocient avec médecins et patients autour de la compliance, comprise comme une acceptation de court terme de la médication. L’article propose ainsi de déplacer le regard des figures de sujets autonomes que les dispositifs médico-légaux et sociaux hybrides prétendent produire vers des formes plus contingentes et situées de sujets utilisables, qui rendent possible la coopération professionnelle et le traitement institutionnel dans un contexte de ressources limitées et d’extension des droits des patients.

In an era of globalization, increasingly interconnected labor markets have intensified competition for skilled talent, particularly among countries in the Global North such as Canada. While Canada’s immigration policy prioritizes education and professional experience, these same credentials are often devalued upon arrival, as systemic barriers limit access to commensurate employment. This study examines the employment experiences of skilled, racialized immigrants in British Columbia, exploring how institutional narratives of meritocracy conceal exclusion, credential systems reinforce epistemic hierarchies, and settlement services pathologize migrant experiences. Using a qualitative design with four focus group discussions (n = 18), the study integrates critical migration theory, intersectionality, and decolonial social work to analyze the structural marginalization of skilled, racialized immigrants. Findings reveal a central paradox: the very system that celebrates global talent simultaneously erodes its value through credential gatekeeping, discriminatory hiring practices, and labor market practices that privilege local over global expertise. By situating these barriers within broader colonial and epistemic hierarchies, the study argues that integration must be understood not as individual adaptation but as institutional transformation. It contributes to critical debates on skilled migration, equity, and the reproduction of colonial logics within Canada’s labor market.

One third of greenhouse gas emissions comes from the production, distribution and disposal of food. Animal products generally have a higher environmental footprint than plant-based foods, with grains, fruits and vegetables having the lowest impact and ruminant meat having the highest. Reducing meat consumption benefits the environment – but also improves health outcomes; for example, reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Consumers have some degree of freedom in their daily behaviour and can contribute to both planetary sustainability and personal health through their food choices. In this article, we focus on consumers as key actors in the food system and propose a framework for communication goals to stimulate changes in food choices. We argue that communication efforts need to (1) frame food choices as both healthy and sustainable (‘dualistic framing’), and (2) inform about the health and sustainability consequences of food choices. Moreover, we argue that communication efforts also need to (3) support the socio-emotional readiness to make healthy and sustainable food choices, for example by emphasizing the hedonic value of plant-based foods. The conceptual framework will be useful both to inspire future research and guide practical campaign work.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of reflectarray antennas at spherical surfaces aimed at achieving an optimal compromise between electrical performance and mechanical deployability for satellite antenna solutions based on offset reflector configurations. By implementing printed reflectarray elements on a spherical surface, the phase-shifting elements mitigate spherical aberration, leading to enhanced focusing capabilities comparable to those of parabolic reflectors. The spherical geometry inherently simplifies the folding mechanism due to the rotational symmetry of the reflecting surface and minimizes the differential spatial phase delay, improving the reflectarray in-band performance. Simulation results demonstrate that large-aperture spherical reflectarrays can replicate the gain and beam quality of parabolic reflectors with smoother phase distributions than flat or multifaceted reflectarrays. The integration of spherical reflectarrays in dual-antenna configurations is evaluated to realize compact and efficient antenna systems for next-generation satellites.

This essay develops the notion of Dark Pedagogy as a framework for responding to climate and ecological disruption. It begins with the claim that climate breakdown exemplifies the metacrisis: a structural condition in which the very knowledge of ecological catastrophe coexists with inaction, denial, or disavowal. Climate disruptions thus reflect not only material devastation but also the erosion of social, political and cognitive frameworks that normally enable collective response. Dark Pedagogy foregrounds the parallel between the metacrisis and the psychological dynamics of disavowal, showing how familiar narratives of progress, harmony and control both obscure ecological realities and perpetuate ineffective responses. Against educational approaches that rely on hope or reassurance, Dark Pedagogy emphasises dwelling with unsettling affects as a means of confronting the uncanny instability of the world, using Giacomo Leopardi’s reflections on nature as an exemplary case. Anguish, in this context, is treated not as a symptom to be overcome but as a critical signal: it reveals the fragility of our assumptions, alerts us to the limitations of familiar frameworks and opens a horizon for education rooted in reflection, ethical engagement and attentiveness to the unpredictable, often hostile realities of the current geological era.

On July 11, 1924, the Lincoln reached Angel Island, the desolate and remote location of the infamous immigration station in California. Aboard the ship were nine Chinese wives, hopeful that they would soon reunite with their spouses who had preceded them to the United States. Until then, despite harsh immigration laws, many Chinese women had been admitted to the country because they were married to noncitizen merchants or to American citizens. Building on coverture principles that a man’s care and comfort were so important that his wife’s status should follow his, Chinese husbands had often argued successfully that their right to reunite with their families took precedence over existing immigration laws, which excluded Chinese immigrants because of their race. It was these laws, they contended, that had forced many Chinese migrants into transnational marriages in the first place. Despite these precedents, the immigration officers who inspected the women on the Lincoln rejected them all, regardless of their age, education, and class.

Managers confronting important strategic decisions often receive diagnostic information sequentially over time. As new information becomes available, they may need to update their understanding of the situation and possibly revise their preferences. During a decision, as a preference develops for one alternative course of action, a nonconscious goal of maintaining consistency between that preference, however tentative, and the new information can lead to an interpretation of that information so as to support the current preference. This tendency to bias or distort information to support the currently preferred option can in turn lead to even greater confidence in that leading option, despite the increase in confidence being unwarranted by the information itself. The result of such a biased decision process can be overconfidence in the chosen course of action. To show this, in the current work, experienced managers engaged in a realistic business decision task with their levels of information distortion and confidence tracked throughout the decision. Over the course of the decision, confidence in the leading action increased as a function of distortion. The results confirmed that distortion-driven confidence can develop even when decision makers have no prior preference for one of the outcomes.

This project investigates how skin tone and gender of Black political candidates work together to influence White Americans’ evaluations. Drawing on the colorism literature and group position theory, I develop a theoretical framework anticipating how the skin tone of Black candidates may influence White voters’ perceptions. Two survey experiments were conducted on nationally representative samples. Both studies highlight that skin tone is meaningful to White voters’ evaluations, but in nuanced ways based on gender. Specifically, the darker-skinned Black female candidate is evaluated more positively than her lighter-skinned female and darker-skinned male counterpart across multiple domains, including vote choice and expected job performance. These findings suggest that gender can attenuate the negative stereotypes typically associated with darker skin tone in some contexts. These findings underscore the importance of theorizing about race as a multidimensional construct, with implications for understanding hierarchy, intergroup relations, and electoral politics in a diversifying American racial landscape.

Modern gravestones have been a common sight in European towns and cities for just over three hundred years. They provide a wealth of information beyond simply names and dates, and can teach us a great deal about the time and place in which they were erected and the people who built them. I have been recording and conserving gravestones for fifteen years, and here I present some of the techniques, sources, and hard-learned lessons of using gravestones as archival material that will enable you to see your local graveyard in a whole new light.

On July 4, 1895, U.S. flags fluttered alongside red Chinese lanterns outside 753 Clay Street, the newly claimed San Francisco headquarters of the Native Sons of the Golden State (NSGS).1 Inside, NSGS president Chun Dick rose to speak. Standing at five feet two inches with short-cropped black hair, he shared that at least fifty men in NSGS were birthright citizens and ready to vote, and that more Chinese American voters would follow.2 Chun Dick, members of the Chinese community in attendance, their guests, and journalists in the room reflected a new political reality: Chinese American children, born in the United States, were coming of age and claiming a place in U.S. politics. Chinese immigrants constituted the largest racial minority in the state, and while many were ineligible to vote, their children who could were organizing to do so. Therefore, this moment on July 4 in San Francisco marked a turning point.

This article uses Israel’s prolonged effort to join the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to examine how post-war Europe negotiated the institutional and symbolic boundaries of continental belonging. Drawing on FIFA archives, diplomatic correspondence, and Hebrew-language media, it traces how football became a stage where affiliation was both asserted and tested by those seeking entry and those empowered to grant it. UEFA’s rejection of Israel was framed in geographic terms, yet its eventual inclusion followed neither territorial logic nor legal reform, but a quiet politics of accommodation: informal gestures, deferred decisions and precedent-setting exceptions. Within Israel, the campaign served as a proxy for broader debates over the country’s geopolitical direction between Asia and Europe. By linking institutional deliberations to domestic discourse, the article argues that Europe’s post-war map took shape less through design than through the incremental negotiation of memory, strategy and symbolic positioning.

For efficient wind farm management and optimized power generation under adverse weather conditions, understanding the causal meteorological drivers is essential. In this paper, we investigate the temporal causal influences of wind speed-related meteorological processes within a wind farm using the Heterogeneous Graphical Granger model (HMML). HMML is applied to synthetically generated wind power production data from Eastern Austria. To assess the plausibility of the identified causal processes, we compare the results with those obtained using the state-of-the-art LiNGAM method. Both methods are applied and evaluated across six different scenarios, each defined by distinct hydrological periods. The scenarios are defined by a set of time intervals characterized by either low/high extreme wind speeds or moderate wind speeds. We applied both methods across these scenarios and conducted causal reasoning to identify potential causes of extreme wind speeds within the wind farm. The sets of causal parameters obtained using HMML were found to be more realistic than those derived from LiNGAM. Combining the knowledge of causal variables affecting wind speed at the turbine hub, identified by HMML in each scenario, with weather forecasts can offer practical guidance for wind farm operators. Specifically, this knowledge can support more informed planning regarding when wind turbines should or should not be generating energy. For instance, the strong Granger-causal linkage identified between wind speed and temperature can inform curtailment strategies. In scenarios where rising temperatures are predictive of declining wind speeds, operators may preemptively adjust turbine output or schedule maintenance to optimize efficiency and reduce wear. Moreover, such predictive insights can feed into energy market models, where anticipated curtailment due to meteorological dependencies affects both generation forecasts and pricing strategies. By integrating these causal relationships into operational planning, the proposed tool offers a pathway toward more adaptive and economically efficient wind energy management.