In this prospective cohort study, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole direct oral challenge (DOC) for hospitalized adults reporting a low-risk sulfa antibiotic allergy was safe with 75/76 (99%) inpatients delabeled. Within 90-days of DOC, immunocompromised patients were more likely to receive trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, compared with non-immunocompromised patients (adjusted OR 5.6 95% CI 1.3, 23.0).

Caregiver sensitivity to infant cues is well-established as a predictor of child development. Infants also actively influence their social environment, especially their caregivers, even from their earliest days. Sensory reactivity, characterized as hypo- (under) and hyper- (over) responding to environmental stimuli, is one domain of development that is likely to influence caregiver-infant interaction, due to its role in regulating emotions and responses to both physical and social stimuli. Although sensory reactivity could be an important target for improving caregiver-child interaction, the longitudinal, reciprocal relations between infant sensory reactivity and caregiver behaviors are currently unknown. In the present proof-of-concept study, we examined these associations in a community sample of mother-infant dyads (N = 252) at infant ages 6 and 12 months using a cross-lagged panel modeling approach. Preliminary findings, which will benefit from replication using a validated measure of sensory reactivity, indicated that maternal sensitivity may decrease infant hyperreactivity, and infant hyporeactivity may be associated with increases in maternal sensitivity. Maternal intrusiveness appears to exacerbate infant hyperreactivity over time and attenuate later infant hyporeactivity. The results of this study provide preliminary evidence for the mutually influential nature of infant sensory reactivity and maternal behavior and signals the importance of future investigation of these concepts.

Treaties are the most visible, some would even say the ‘main source of international law’. This is true not only at the global level, but even more so in Europe. However, these treaties hardly explain the idiosyncratic, sometimes exceptionalist ways in which international law is identified, interpreted, and applied in this region. Still less do they explain the disproportionate normative influence of European legal rules outside Europe. Attributing these particularities and imbalances to ‘eurocentrism’ in international law is considered almost a truism these days. Yet, when examining how the European legal tradition translates into positive international law one category of rules has received little attention so far: the unwritten European rules that are resorted to within and beyond Europe. The idea of ‘unwritten’ European rules is not only historically charged but also conceptually vague. However, this article argues that a close analysis of their role is central to both understanding and overcoming the persistence of ‘eurocentrism’ in international law. To demonstrate this claim, the article introduces the term ‘unwritten’ European rules in international law. A historical section illustrates their ambivalent role since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It then analyses the continuing relevance of unwritten European rules in contemporary legal practice. The final section discusses how a common framework of secondary rules can help to distinguish between hegemonic and integrative uses of unwritten European rules, before concluding.

Does deference to religious authority undermine support for democratic norms, including those forbidding the use of violence for political ends? Scholars have struggled to answer this question, in part, we believe, because they have typically employed proxies for religious deference (e.g. Biblical literalism, worship attendance, and self-reported religiosity) instead of measuring it directly. We develop a new measure of deference to religious authority in politics (DRAP), using the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears. We find that (1) DRAP is strongly correlated with support for political violence; (2) other common measures of religiosity (e.g. Biblical literalism and self-reported religiosity) are generally uncorrelated with support for political violence once the effects of our new measure are taken into account; and (3) the positive relationship between DRAP and support for political violence is more pronounced among respondents with low levels of religious participation.

Powassan virus (POWV), a tick-borne flavivirus, is an emerging public health threat in the United States. In New York State (NYS), incidence of human POWV infection has increased in recent years. We describe the epidemiology of confirmed and probable POWV infection cases reported in NYS from 2013 to 2023. A total of 44 human cases were reported over the study period, with the highest incidence rates in Columbia and Putnam counties. Most cases occurred in White, non-Hispanic males over age 50. Hospitalization was reported in 91% of cases, and 11% were fatal. Human case data and tick surveillance results were analysed to assess spatiotemporal patterns of disease emergence. Spatial analysis revealed clustering of human cases in the Capital and Metropolitan regions of NYS. The prevalence of POWV in adult tick populations increased significantly statewide, and entomological risk was positively but modestly correlated to disease incidence at the ZIP code level. These findings suggest that POWV infection is emerging in geographically concentrated areas of NYS, highlighting the need for enhanced surveillance and targeted prevention efforts in high-risk regions.

Algebraic effects and handlers is an increasingly popular paradigm for programming with effects. A key benefit is modularity: programs with effects are defined against an interface of operations, allowing the implementation of effects to be defined and refined without changing or recompiling programs. The behavior of effects is specified using equational theories, with equational proofs inheriting the same modularity. However, higher-order operations (that take computations as arguments) break this modularity: while they can often be encoded in terms of algebraic effects, this typically breaks modularity as operations defined this way are not encapsulated in an interface, inducing changes to programs and proofs upon refinement of the implementation. In this paper, we show that syntactic overloading is a viable solution to this modularity problem by defining hefty algebras: a formal framework that captures an overloading-based semantics of higher-order effects by defining modular elaborations from higher-order effect trees into primitive algebraic effects. We demonstrate how this approach scales to define a wide range of known higher-order effects from the literature and develop modular higher-order effect theories and modular reasoning principles that build on and extend the state of the art in modular algebraic effect theories. We formalize our contributions in Agda.

Elected politicians regularly over-estimate the conservatism of their constituents’ preferences. While these findings have concerning implications for democratic representation, the magnitude and sources of so-called “conservative over-estimation” are poorly understood. We show that a novel approach to measuring politicians’ perceptions—which asks politicians to draw the distribution of their constituents’ preferences, rather than provide a point estimate—clarifies the magnitude and causes of conservative over-estimation. While the vast majority of politicians exhibit a conservative bias, our “perceived-distribution” task cuts the size of this bias in half. Moreover, psychological projection counterbalances conservative over-estimation among left-wing politicians but reinforces it among right-wing politicians. Our results raise questions about existing accounts of elite misperceptions and help to identify the psychological causes of conservative over-estimation.

An important question in evolutionary biology and macroecology is whether taxa show systematic trajectories in occupancy, the proportion of geographic area occupied, over macroevolutionary timescales. Past studies have used fossils to document these trajectories, showing a symmetric rise and fall. In this study, I focus on several biases in the analyses of fossil occupancy trajectories that have been unaccounted for. First, better sampling of boundary bins in a taxon’s stratigraphic range, paradoxically, results in lower mean occupancy of taxa in those bins. This is because better sampling allowed more taxa with low occupancies to be included in the mean occupancies of those bins compared with intermediate bins. Second, the possibility that taxa may have incomplete durations within boundary bins could also lower occupancies in those bins. Finally, a bias can also exist when the number of sampled sites is not constant throughout a taxon’s stratigraphic range. I use simulations to show that the first bias can be corrected by conditioning these boundary bins to be sampled in the same way as intermediate bins. To mitigate the second bias, I use higher-resolution time bins to constrain the intervals over which taxa’s occupancies are measured so that they are comparable between boundary and intermediate time bins. I also present an approach that can correct for the last bias by subsampling geographic sites, testing its impact in a simulation. Considering these factors, the occupancy trajectories of marine animal genera look to be a relatively gradual rise post-origination with a sudden decline before extinction.

Efforts to integrate intelligent chatbots into academic courses, particularly for language learning, have been gaining popularity. However, the impact of chatbot-supported collaborative learning (CL) on student engagement and English speaking skills is under-researched. This study explored the impact of utilizing intelligent chatbot–supported CL on student engagement and speaking skills of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. It investigated how chatbot-supported CL influences student engagement and speaking skills. The experimental group was taught using chatbot-supported CL, while the control group followed conventional CL. A total of 75 first-year undergraduate students participated, with 39 students in the experimental group and 36 in the control group. Data were collected through a 14-item engagement questionnaire, a speaking test based on the IELTS speaking evaluation rubric for both groups, and a 5-item CL questionnaire administered solely to the experimental group. The data were analyzed using repeated measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) and linear regression analysis. The RM-ANOVA results showed that chatbot-supported CL positively affected student engagement and speaking skills. The linear regression analysis further indicated that CL supported by intelligent chatbots influenced student engagement, which in turn significantly impacted speaking skills. The findings suggested that active engagement in CL speaking classes is crucial for improving EFL speaking skills and that intelligent chatbots can be valuable and effective tools for promoting such engagement.

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the regions in Antarctica that has experienced notable and extensively studied warming since the mid-twentieth century. Meteorological data, although limited and mostly dating back to the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), reveal dramatic climate changes in both the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, with the Antarctic Peninsula showing the highest warming trends on the continent. One major manifestation of this warming is the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme warm events. This study utilizes temperature data from the Artigas Antarctic Scientific Base provided by National Weather Service, Uruguayan Institute of Meteorology (INUMET), which have not previously been used or quality-controlled. Data were processed and analysed, and a quality hourly database was built for the period 1 January 1998 to 11 December 2016 for the surface temperature, constructing a complete time series interpolating the data with two other nearby Antarctic stations (C.M.A. Eduardo Frei Montalva and King Sejong). Temperature presented an annual cycle with marked interannual and seasonal variability, with the cold season being the one with the highest variability and the largest anomalies, both positive and negative. No significant trend was found for the monthly mean temperature. A study of warm temperature events was conducted at three points on King George Island, defining warm events and extreme warm events as those in which the mean daily temperature was above the 90th and 99th percentile, respectively, for at least 3 consecutive days. A high frequency of occurrence was found (all years except 2015) mostly in the cold season of the year, and with large interannual variability. In turn, it was found that certain atmospheric dynamics favour the generation of these extreme warm events, and that their occurrence is higher during La Niña years. Although the majority of the extreme warm events occurred during positive phases of the Southern Annular Mode, the statistical correlations were not significant.

This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable narratives of progress that developed in the postwar period: aesthetic autonomy and Holocaust remembrance. As far-right and illiberal parties have gained power across Europe, they adapted these foundational narratives of the liberal-democratic West to assert their own legitimacy and to reimagine the cultural inclinations of the European Union. This article examines how this process has taken place in the reception of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest (2023) and Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (2023)—both international co-productions produced during the repressive eight-year reign of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. A close reading of these films and their reception in different contexts, exposes a world more complicated than one-dimensional dichotomies between the liberal and the illiberal. Likewise, the reception of the two films makes apparent the entanglement of the national and transnational, as well as a process of translation and mistranslation that takes place as cultural materials move across geographical and ideological boundaries. Understanding such dynamics helps us to comprehend the options for criticism available to artists working within repressive contexts.

This work compares the use of palace diplomacy and propaganda by the rulers of Constantinople and Mexico-Tenochtitlan. It builds on studies of the cultural exchange between the Roman and Sasanian empires from the third to sixth centuries a.d., which led to a diplomatic protocol shared by these two realms. This protocol and Liudprand of Cremona’s account of diplomatic receptions are the basis for comparative analysis. Drawing on Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc’s Crónica Mexicana and other sixteenth-century sources, this study identifies key characteristics of diplomacy in Mesoamerica. It explores how Mexico-Tenochtitlan employed palace diplomacy and propaganda from the reign of Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina to Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin. Through this analysis, we find that the diplomatic and propaganda objectives of Constantinople and Mexico-Tenochtitlan had distinct focuses. The Byzantine rulers aimed to maintain their existing empire, while the Tenochca rulers sought not only to preserve but also to expand their domain. As a result, Constantinople’s strategy emphasized palace diplomacy, whereas Mexico-Tenochtitlan’s focused more on propaganda. Despite these differences, both approaches share several similarities. Both began with invitations, and their protocols included the same components: visual (architecture, wealth, and terror), ceremonial (including aural, olfactory, gustatory, ludic, haptic, somatic, and terror elements), and diplomatic (interviews and gift exchanges).