This article investigates whether campaign contributions and lobbying are complementary, substitutive, or distinct forms of organizational political engagement. Our study reveals minimal overlap between organizations that engage in lobbying and those that make campaign contributions despite the perception that these activities are interchangeable forms of “money in politics.” Using comprehensive contribution and lobbying report data from 1998 to 2018, we find that most politically active organizations focus exclusively on either lobbying or making campaign contributions. Only a small percentage of organizations engage in both activities. This finding challenges the assumption that these forms of political activity are inherently linked. The majority of organizations engaged in political activity do so exclusively through lobbying. However, the top lobbying groups spend the most money and almost always have affiliated political action committees (PACs). Most lobbying money is spent by a small number of big spenders—organizations that also have affiliated PACs. Organizations that both lobby and make campaign contributions tend to be well resourced and rare.

Robin perches on a branch overlooking small humans below who are sat around a campfire. Robin notices. Robin responds. What happens when we notice Robin noticing us?

I land with a thud on the floor of the school and scurry off behind a chair, climb the walls, move away, camouflaging. I sense in ways intangible, magical, unknown.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of Posthumanist Climate Fiction (Posthuman Cli-Fi) by proposing practice-as-research-as-pedagogy for educational futures. This practice involves a generative, relational process of creative writings with more-than-human collaborators in everyday encounters in educational settings. Situated within the entangled realities and speculative futures of climate change, Posthuman Cli-Fi challenges the anthropocentric tendencies of traditional Climate Fiction by decentring human experiences and foregrounding relational ontologies. Drawing on our research in two distinct educational contexts—an urban forest school in London and a wall-less school in Bali—we explore how creative writing practices can engage with the stormy contours of living and educating with pastpresentfutures. Posthuman Cli-Fi offers a situated practice that creates possibilities for attuning to and attending to our shared worlds, offering pathways towards more response-able educational futures.

We consider an optimal stopping problem of a linear diffusion under Poisson constraint where the agent can adjust the arrival rate of new stopping opportunities. We assume that the agent may switch the rate of the Poisson process between two values. Maintaining the lower rate incurs no cost, whereas the higher rate requires effort that is captured by a cost function c. We study a broad class of payoff functions, cost functions and diffusion dynamics, for which we explicitly characterize the solution to the constrained stopping problem. We also characterize the case where switching to the higher rate is always suboptimal. The results are illustrated with two examples.

Although the harm-reduction approach to policy is most familiar from debates over public health and drug abuse, it provides a perfectly general framework for thinking about normative aspects of policy in non-ideal contexts. This paper seeks to apply a generalized harm reduction approach to the problem of attitudinal racism. Psychological research suggests that racism is unlikely to be completely eradicated, as a result of which a zero-tolerance approach risks becoming both counterproductive and overly punitive. Harm reduction recommends minimization of prevalence with respect to the primary phenomenon combined with attenuation of impact for the ineliminable portion.

Asymptotic dimension and Assouad–Nagata dimension are measures of the large-scale shape of a class of graphs. Bonamy, Bousquet, Esperet, Groenland, Liu, Pirot, and Scott [J. Eur. Math. Society] showed that any proper minor-closed class has asymptotic dimension 2, dropping to 1 only if the treewidth is bounded. We improve this result by showing it also holds for the stricter Assouad–Nagata dimension. We also characterise when subdivision-closed classes of graphs have bounded Assouad–Nagata dimension.

Despite general public support, efforts to build affordable housing often encounter stiff resistance due to “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) attitudes, which are often rooted in false or unsupported beliefs about affordable housing and its impacts on surrounding communities. Would correcting these misperceptions increase support for building affordable housing? To answer this question, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment measuring how support for affordable housing in the U.S. varies at different distances from where respondents live (one-eighth of a mile away, two miles away, or in their state). Our results indicate that correcting stereotypes about affordable housing and misperceptions about its effects increase support for affordable housing. Contrary to expectations, these effects are often larger for affordable housing near the respondent’s home (rather than at the state level), suggesting that debunking myths about affordable housing may help to counter NIMBY attitudes.

Le régime québécois d’encadrement du lobbyisme exclut actuellement de son champ d’application les lobbyistes travaillant au sein d’organismes à but non lucratif (OBNL). Cette exception fait l’objet de critiques de la part de plusieurs acteurs du milieu. Le Commissaire au lobbyisme du Québec suggère d’ailleurs au législateur de modifier la loi afin d’inclure plus de lobbyistes dans son champ d’application, ce à quoi s’opposent plusieurs OBNL. La récente initiative médiatique du Commissaire au lobbyisme visant à promouvoir le droit à la transparence et à proposer une réforme de l’encadrement du lobbyisme au Québec constitue une occasion propice pour analyser l’idée d’assujettir tous les OBNL à la Loi sur la transparence et l’éthique en matière de lobbyisme. Pour éclairer cet enjeu, l’analyse vise à déterminer les impacts potentiels d’une modification législative sur la légitimité des OBNL en tant que groupes d’intérêt. L’article offre ainsi une nouvelle perspective sur le débat relatif à l’inclusion des lobbyistes travaillant au sein d’OBNL dans le champ d’application du régime québécois d’encadrement du lobbyisme.

This article develops a model to explain the emergence and persistence of shared memory, providing a practical toolkit for empirical research in memory studies. It begins with a review of the concepts of individual and collective memory, highlighting their limitations. In response, the article introduces two alternative concepts – subjectivised memory and hegemonic memory – that capture the interdependence of individual and collective memory while moving beyond their dichotomy. These concepts form the theoretical basis of the proposed model. The article applies the model to the example of Holocaust remembrance in Germany, illustrating how memory becomes hegemonic and persists over time.

This article demonstrates how international human rights treaties have the potential to fill the gaps in constitutional provisions and constitute therefore the extension of the constitutional bill of rights. Since human rights are formulated in approximately the same way in both the Francophone countries’ constitutions and in regional and international human rights treaties, through a casuistic approach, the article argues that the decisions of the human rights treaty bodies should serve as a guide to the interpretation of constitutional provisions by the Beninese constitutional judges. By being reluctant and disinterested in the decisions of its treaty monitoring bodies, the Beninese Constitutional Court deprives itself of an interpretation technique that is susceptible to strengthening the court’s legitimacy and independence. Hence, the article posits a dialogue between the Constitutional Court and the regional and international human rights treaty bodies. If at the global level, the use of UN treaties in constitutional adjudication is an essential step towards judicial globalization in human rights adjudication, at the regional level, the use of African Union treaties in constitutional adjudication is a strong signal of African “judicial” integration and therefore of Pan-Africanism.

A national food guide for the UK, providing food based dietary guidelines was first issued in 1995. It was last revised and published as the Eatwell Guide in 2016. The Guide is a pie chart indicating the proportions of foods from different food groups that should make up the ideal diet from a health perspective. The number of segments for the pie chart, the names of the food groups that comprise those segments and the list of individual foods that fit into the wider food groups was in essence decided in around 1995 and have remained essentially unchanged since then. The 2016 edition of the guide – the Eatwell Guide – was the first to employ optimisation modelling to calculate the angles of the segments of the pie chart. This was a significant improvement to the scientific basis to the guide. But still the Eatwell Guide leaves much to be desired and it is time for its revision. This review paper outlines the aims of the guide, provides a brief history of the Eatwell Guide, outlines its strengths and weaknesses and suggests some ways by which the Eatwell Guide might be improved.

Quasi-periodic X-ray eruptions (QPEs) are a new class of repeating nuclear transient in which repeating X-ray flares are observed coming from the nuclei of generally low-mass galaxies. Here, we present a comprehensive summary of the radio properties of 12 bona-fide quasi-periodic eruption sources, including a mix of known tidal disruption events (TDEs) and AGN-like hosts. We include a combination of new dedicated radio observations and archival/previously published radio observations to compile a catalogue of radio observations of each source in the sample. We examine the overall radio properties of the sample and compare to the radio properties of known TDEs, given the apparent link between QPEs and TDEs. Overall we find compact, weak radio sources associated with 5/12 of the QPE sources and no signatures of strong AGN activity via a luminous radio jet. We find no radio variability on hour- to day-timescales corresponding to the X-ray QPEs, but do detect significant changes over year timescales in some sources, implying that the mechanism that produces the X-ray flares does not generate strong radio-emitting outflows. The compactness of the radio sources and lack of correlation between radio luminosity and SMBH mass is very unusual for AGN, but the radio spectra and luminosities are consistent with outflows produced by a recent TDE (or accretion event), in both the known TDE sources and the AGN-like sources in the sample.

The opioid overdose crisis has become a global public health emergency, claiming more than 100,000 lives each year. In North America, shifting opioid prescribing practices in response to the crisis have profoundly affected people living with chronic pain, who now face reduced access to prescription opioids. Against this backdrop, pain stakeholders have become increasingly active in policymaking arenas to shape how opioids and pain are understood. This study examines the Canadian Pain Task Force (CPTF) — a federal advisory body charged with creating a national pain strategy — by analyzing its reports, public and patient consultations, and internal documents. Through qualitative framing analysis, we find that stakeholders overwhelmingly depicted the overdose crisis as the result of illicit and irresponsible opioid use, while positioning stigma as both a driver and consequence of the crisis that compounded the challenges faced by people with chronic pain. From these problem definitions flowed policy proposals centered on expanding opioid access, reducing stigma, and advancing patient-centered care. These findings demonstrate how pain stakeholders shape, and are simultaneously shaped by, opioid policy debates — with consequences for both overdose prevention and chronic pain management.

During the Fascist period, the extractive industry played an important role in Italy’s economic and political landscape, and sulphur was considered the autarkic mineral par excellence. This article reveals how the rhetoric surrounding the vigorous extraction of sulphur in Sicily was part of a larger project of reconstruction and reorganisation, which involved the division of land, reclamation efforts, military operations and colonisation. Drawing on examples of visual and written narratives from public reports, essays, illustrated magazines and exhibitions of the time, the article demonstrates that extraction was both the actual site of resource extraction and the Fascist extractive logic of consensus. The use of specific discourses and definitions enabled and justified the portrayal of humans and lands as extractable resources, creating images and imaginaries that normalised exploitation and transformation, and the regime’s extractive force.

The emitted internal wave groups and generating source at a double ridge-valley topography on the Norwegian Continental Shelf are determined. The location is 69 degrees north and 14 degrees east on the eastern boundary of the Norwegian Sea. Combination of two data sources – an ocean general circulation model and a set of satellite images – predicts the dominant shelf/slope current, the tide and the density stratification. The internal linear long-wave speed provides the reference velocity. The particular flow–topography interaction results in two compact internal tidal troughs, extending across the shelf, orthogonal to the current and separated by the diurnal internal tidal wavelength. The strongly nonlinear trough emits the wave groups advancing upstream at the diurnal frequency. Satellite data determine the spatial frequency and the number of groups. The dimensionless nonlinear excess propagation speed of 0.32 of the wave groups is compared to KdV theory and the model of internal solitary waves. Possible instability and supply of nutrients for a downstream cold-water coral reef are discussed. The data from satellite in combination with ocean model calculations at the mesoscale is general for the identification of nonlinear internal wave generation and propagation.