Academic health centers (AHC) characterized by an integrated mission serving education, research and clinical care reflect these values in the institution’s vision, decision-making and culture. Embracing this strategy, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) created a novel, competitive funding initiative through its faculty practice with the Health Services Foundation General Endowment Fund (HSF-GEF). This partnership with the faculty practice leveraged faculty and staff creativity to inform and lead capacity-building and innovation in patient-oriented and laboratory research, clinical care development and education aligned with the best interests of the enterprise. Since 1996, the HSF-GEF has invested over $66M in 442 peer-reviewed proposals led by transdisciplinary teams representing strategic advances with strong potential to generate future extramural support, to improve healthcare delivery, to enhance research capacity and to promote active learning. Beyond financial return on investment, program evaluation revealed benefit on culture, collaboration, camaraderie and infrastructure. By engaging the broad workforce to articulate, select and implement projects, UAB has fostered a purpose-driven culture of collaboration within the AHC that thrives on broad representation, enthusiasm, and ingenuity as well as peer engagement across multiple schools in the academic community.

Do parties respond to inequality? Despite the relevance of inequality and its consequences, existing studies fail to capture parties’ emphasis on economic equality and redistribution or to differentiate between existing levels of inequality and increases in inequality. Based on 850,000 party statements from 12 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries (1970–2020), we introduce a crowd-coded dataset that allows us to distinguish positive references to economic equality and redistribution from upward-trending equal-rights/anti-discrimination rhetoric. We show that responses found in previous studies do not capture economic equality and redistribution. In reassessing the impact of inequality, we argue that low visibility, status quo bias, and turnout effects discourage party responses to high inequality levels, while rising inequality poses a visible status quo change and a threat that left parties respond to. We find that left parties respond to inequality increases (except less tangible gains among the most affluent) but not to (high) inequality levels. This helps to understand why inequality is not self-correcting.

Contributing to a growing interest in disability in political science, this article makes the case for the central role of disability in upholding the belief in work as requisite for full citizenship. Turning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it shows how disability and the figure of the disabled worker were used to fortify emergent understandings of work against the changes wrought by industrial capitalism. Focusing on three sites of disabled labor—the school-based workshop, custodial institution, and industrial factory—it reveals the crucial ideological work performed by disability in sustaining the myth of the independent worker-citizen. Where existing scholarship has focused on disability either as an identity category or as a target of rights and policy, this article models an alternative approach, arguing for the relevance of disability as a concept that is integral to, and productive of, the ways we understand citizenship and political belonging.

Malacological surveys were conducted in 2021 in the Kimpese region of Central Kongo Province, west of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Snail specimens were collected following a standardised protocol, identified using morphological and molecular methods, and tested for schistosome infection using a diagnostic PCR assay. Positive snail samples were sequenced to characterise the infecting schistosome species. Partial mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COX1) gene sequences were used in phylogenetic analyses to explore the evolutionary position of these snail species within the broader African context. At least four intermediate snail hosts were identified: Bulinus truncatus, Bulinus forskalii, Biomphalaria pfeifferi, and a Biomphalaria species belonging to the Nilotic species complex (tentatively named Biomphalaria cf sudanica), of which the species identity needs to be confirmed. A total of 37 out of 1,196 snails (3.1%) tested positive for schistosome infection, with an infection prevalence of 7.4% for B. truncatus with Schistosoma haematobium and 1.5% for Biomphalaria spp. with Schistosoma mansoni. The S. mansoni sequence retrieved from these samples formed a basal clade relative to Zambian isolates, whereas S. haematobium grouped with the most frequently characterised haplotype cluster previously identified across mainland Africa. It is important to note that no animal schistosome species were identified in this study. Both the sequences from the snail hosts and the parasites represent novel contributions from the DRC. Additionally, the findings update the current knowledge of schistosomiasis transmission in the Kimpese region by providing insight into the phylogenetic placement, species diversity, and infection status of local snail populations.

It is commonly assumed that the “classical” concept of sovereignty, bequeathed by Jean Bodin, stands in tension with fundamental commitments of liberal modernity, including cosmopolitanism and the aspiration to establish a global legal order. We argue, in contrast, that Bodin’s theory of sovereignty presupposes a universal legal order that imposes binding and enforceable constraints on sovereigns. To substantiate this claim, we examine Bodin’s curious assertion that God, the sovereign ruler of the cosmos, employs a celestial government or administration of angels and demons to enforce His laws. By situating Bodin’s earlier political works alongside his later religious and philosophical writings, we demonstrate that his political thought was neither “absolutist” nor “constitutionalist,” in the ordinary sense of those terms; rather, he was a theorist of what we propose to call “demonic constitutionalism.”

Averaged operators are important in Convex Analysis and Optimization Algorithms. In this article, we propose classifications of averaged operators, firmly nonexpansive operators, and proximal operators using the Bauschke–Bendit–Moursi modulus of averagedness. We show that if an operator is averaged with a constant less than $1/2$, then it is a bi-Lipschitz homeomorphism. Amazingly the proximal operator of a convex function has its modulus of averagedness less than $1/2$ if and only if the function is Lipschitz smooth. Some results on the averagedness of operator compositions are obtained. Explicit formulae for calculating the modulus of averagedness of resolvents and proximal operators in terms of various values associated with the maximally monotone operator or subdifferential are also given. Examples are provided to illustrate our results.

Lightweight, adjustable, and affordable devices are needed to enable the next generation of effective, wearable adjuncts for rehabilitation. Used at home or in a rehabilitation setting, these devices have the potential to reduce compound pressures on hospitals and social care systems. Despite recent developments in soft wearable robots, many of these devices restrict the range of motion and lack quantitative assessment of moment transfer to the wearer. The decoupled design of our wearable device for upper-limb rehabilitation successfully delivers almost the full range of motion to the user, with a mean maximum flexion angle of 149° (SD = 8.5). In this article, for the first time, we show that in tests involving a wide range of participants, 82% of the moment produced by the actuator is applied to the wearer. This testing of elbow flexion moment transfer supports the effectiveness of the device. This research is a step toward effective pneumatic soft robotic wearable devices that are adaptable to a wide range of users – a necessary prerequisite for their widespread adoption in health care.

Language is known to interact flexibly with non-verbal representations, but the processing mechanisms governing these interactions remain unclear. This article reviews general cognitive processes that operate across various tasks and stimulus types and argues that these processes may drive the interactions between language and cognition, regardless of whether these interactions occur cross-linguistically or within a language. These general processes include goal-directed behaviour, reliance on context-relevant semantic knowledge and attuning to task demands. An overview of existing findings suggests that resorting to language in non-verbal or multi-modal tasks may depend on how linguistic representations align with current task goals and demands. Progress in understanding these mechanisms requires theories that make specific processing predictions about how tasks and experimental contexts encourage or discourage access to linguistic knowledge. Systematic testing of alternative mechanisms is necessary to explain how and why linguistic information influences some cognitive tasks but not others.

Forgetting, an attendant to culture change, is the stuff of history. When cultural innovations, exchange and adoption occur, previous customs, knowledge, technology and other dimensions of culture are often lost—they are forgotten. This paper considers the phenomenon of forgetting and its permutations—the passive forgetting that is more or less an accepted outcome of change, the unintentional forgetting that is accidental and undesired, and the intentional forgetting of wilful erasure—as a way of contemplating agency and culture loss/change among the Dorset Paleo-Inuit peoples of the central and eastern North American Arctic, and more broadly, in Arctic archaeology.

Australia, Canada and the United States are settler-colonial federations comprising two types of federal units. The first are states/provinces: full, permanent federal partners, securely settler controlled. The second are territories. Historically, territories were “partners in waiting,” slated for federal incorporation once settlers achieved control of the jurisdiction, outnumbering and disempowering Indigenous peoples. The “rights revolution” made achieving control by force less acceptable. Meanwhile, in Australia, Canada and the US, there remain several territories where Indigenous peoples hold significant power. I find today’s remaining territories experience a new way settlers target Indigenous power, not through force but through rights-challenges. Further, I show these rights-challenges provoke “constitutive contests,” the outcome of which are consequential, potentially “re-constituting” territories in a manner fostering settler control. Finally, I explore why territories might be especially vulnerable to re-constitution through settler-rights challenges.

In this article, we examine how domestic heating technologies functioned as instruments of spatial reconfiguration and imperial power in twentieth-century Iran. The replacement of the traditional floor-based korsi with portable oil heaters like the Aladdin catalyzed a shift in how domestic space was materially organized. Whereas the heating ecology centered around the korsi unfolded on the ground and resisted Western objects such as sofas, refrigerators, and stoves that needed elevated or upright usage above the floor, the Aladdin enacted a subtle but powerful form of imperialism by reorienting bodies and their spatial modes of habituation toward upright “civilized” living. We argue that this technological shift and spatial elevation enabled the inflow of Western goods into Iranian homes, helping to affix Iran as a semiperipheral state within the global capitalist economic system. Rather than treating materiality as neutral or derivative, this study foregrounds its role as a mediator of social transformation, in which heating technology becomes a vector of governance and spatial elevation a proxy for progress. By centering the home as a site of techno-political encounter, we reveal how imperial rationalities were naturalized through mundane objects within the space of domesticity.