In this article, we first explicitly argue that disability associated with poor eyesight was a socially constructed category dependent on the needs of the Post Office as an employer and its ability to construct workplaces which ameliorated the impact of vision impairment. The second part of the article addresses the institutional responses and technological landscapes of work which comprised the contexts within which visual impairment needs to be interpreted. This involves examining the importance of medical inspection by Post Office doctors which worked to exclude those with significant sight loss from postal employment. However, what was understood to constitute significant or irreparable sight loss varied across different government agencies, and different definitions of what constituted significant sight loss served as a point of contention between Post Office management and the Civil Service Commission. .

How do elections affect credit-claiming and blame-shifting patterns in times of crisis? To answer this so far unanswered yet relevant question for crisis management, this study analyses government crisis communication in Germany’s consensus democracy, where federal elections took place in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirically, this study examines media conferences from January 2021 to December 2021, which reveal that the Minister of Health not only shifted responsibility and blame but also claimed credit – particularly before the election. He also opted for implicit rather than explicit forms of blame shifting within the political system and shifted responsibility to citizens. The strategies of citizen blaming and credit claiming were most frequent during the ‘federal emergency brake’ when responsibility was more centralised than in other moments of the pandemic. This research advances blame avoidance theory by combining situational factors (crisis and electoral pressure) and institutional moderators (form of government and governance structures) to explain credit-claiming and blame-shifting patterns. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that institutional factors can moderate blame games in particularly challenging situations when it is essential for political systems to address societal and underlying political problems instead of getting caught up in blame games.

Accurate assessment of adverse event (AE) incidence is critical in clinical research for drug safety. While meta-analysis serves as an essential tool to comprehensively synthesize the evidence across multiple studies, incomplete AE reporting in clinical trials remains a persistent challenge. In particular, AEs occurring below study-specific reporting thresholds are often omitted from publications, leading to left-censored data. Failure to account for these censored AE counts can result in biased AE incidence estimates. We present an R Shiny application that implements a Bayesian meta-analysis model specifically designed to incorporate censored AE data into the estimation process. This interactive tool provides a user-friendly interface for researchers to conduct AE meta-analyses and estimate the AE incidence probability using an unbiased approach. It also enables direct comparisons between models that either incorporate or ignore censoring, highlighting the biases introduced by conventional approaches. This tutorial demonstrates the Shiny application’s functionality through an illustrative example on meta-analysis of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor safety and highlights the importance of this tool in improving AE risk assessment. Ultimately, the new Shiny app facilitates more accurate and transparent drug safety evaluations. The Shiny-MAGEC app is available at: https://zihanzhou98.shinyapps.io/Shiny-MAGEC/.

The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black American, prompted massive protests across the USA and around the globe in the spring and summer of 2020. Like those south of their border, Canadian protesters gathered to bring renewed attention to a longstanding problem: systemic racism and police impunity. While race and dissatisfaction with the police have received a great deal of attention in popular media, surprisingly little political science research considers the relationship between race, attitudes towards the police and protest. Do attitudes towards police differ across racial groups in Canada? Are attitudes towards the police related to protest activity? We answer these questions using data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) Cycle 34, GSS Cycle 35 and Statistics Canada’s Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians’ Experiences of Discrimination. We find that Black and Indigenous Canadians express the lowest confidence in police relative to other People of Colour (POC) and compared with White Canadians. We also find more confidence in the police is associated with lower probability of protest (in general).

A transformation of labor relations in antebellum America pushed the Jeffersonian republican frame to its breaking point, drawing reformers into the wider ambit of transatlantic social-democratic politics. Nineteenth-century social-democratic thinkers invoked the emancipatory ideas of Thomas Paine and “Gracchus” Babeuf, the critique of political economy by Owenite socialists, and the conception of a divided peuple by the French revolutionary Constantin-François Volney, to forge a new kind of politics in response to what contemporaries called the “social question.” American labor reformers reached across national barriers to grasp the common predicament facing wage workers. And, like their European counterparts, they saw a civil society divided against itself, where a republican polity could not stand. The article focuses on the articulation of novel social themes in the political consciousness of labor reformers, which became an integral part of the transatlantic debates over a global “social republic,” a proposal to extend the reach of political power into the international sphere of social production and exchange. It shows how the development from radical republican ideas to social-democratic reform did not follow a unilinear path, moving neatly from old to new concepts. Core concerns remained constant: independence, the common good, and the rights of laboring citizens. Yet while the new ways of thinking about society were born in the shell of the old republican language, its content and application transformed. As pressure on domestic production in antebellum America gave rise to a dependent wage worker, debates across workingmen’s clubs, newspapers, and pamphlets displayed a growing anxiety over a novel “social tyranny” and the “tendencies of modern society to sink the masses in poverty and ignorance.” These unprecedented changes put into question the long-standing belief that American workers would be spared the unhappy fate of their European counterparts. In the age of capital, a shared condition tied social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, reformers diagnosed the problem as the “non-recognition and non-guarantee” of one of the “great fundamental rights of man … the right of labor,” which rendered all “other rights … to a very great extent unavailable and worthless.” To wrangle the otherwise unbridled transformation of society, nineteenth-century social democrats demanded greater control over the conditions of production which, they argued, held the republic hostage. The article traces the movement of ideas across antebellum labor reform circles calling for shorter hours, including the early Workingmen’s Parties of Boston and Philadelphia; Lowell’s women labor organizations; and the New England campaign for a “Second Independence Day.” It also takes up the common concerns as well as emerging differences among these reformers, which distinguished social-democratic horizons from republican ideas. Through newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and organizational minutes, this article connects laborers’ demands and intellectual genealogies across the Atlantic world, focusing on efforts in New York, Philadelphia, New England, Paris, and London as the centers of metropolitan life in the nineteenth century.

In post-imperial European states, debates about imperial legacies – centred on issues such as colonial statues, police treatment of minorities, and school curricula – have intensified in recent years. Yet little systematic research examines public attitudes towards empire or their political impact. We develop a framework linking imperial nostalgia with political preferences and present findings from Britain using a national survey and conjoint experiment. First, we identify a distinct public opinion dimension on empire, ranging from nostalgic to critical. Second, we show that imperial nostalgia strongly predicts party evaluations and vote intentions, with effects comparable to those of immigration attitudes and left–right economic values. Finally, a conjoint experiment reveals that elite positions on empire influence voter preferences, but do so asymmetrically: right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support. These findings underscore the contemporary political relevance of imperial nostalgia in post-imperial Europe.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in the effect of different types of adversarial perturbations in data classification problems. Many of these models incorporate the adversarial power, which is an important parameter with an associated trade-off between accuracy and robustness. This work considers a general framework for adversarially perturbed classification problems, in a large data or population-level limit. In such a regime, we demonstrate that as adversarial strength goes to zero that optimal classifiers converge to the Bayes classifier in the Hausdorff distance. This significantly strengthens previous results, which generally focus on $L^1$-type convergence. The main argument relies upon direct geometric comparisons and is inspired by techniques from geometric measure theory.

Droughts are becoming increasingly common in India, where 50 per cent of the labour force works in agriculture, and most agricultural production is rainfall-dependent. This paper investigates the extent to which rural households adapt to drought – defined as rainfall deficiency – by reallocating labour from agriculture to other sectors of the economy. We estimate a household-level fixed-effects regression model and find that household agricultural employment declines in the year following a drought. Furthermore, these effects are mediated by job skills and land ownership. We find that households with working members who have completed primary education account for most of the workers who exit the agricultural sector. In contrast, we find that households that own land increase their agricultural labour share after experiencing a drought. Thus, while we find that drought causes households to diversify away from agriculture on aggregate, the extent of this structural change is mitigated by the behaviour of landowners.

For more than 150 years, politicians, the federal government, and missionary churches misled Canadians about deaths, abuse, and the genocidal intent in residential schools for Indigenous children. More recently, the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites has triggered a renewed spread of misinformation denying the harmful legacy of residential schools. To what extent does the Canadian public endorse residential school denialism? Can education counter this misinformation? In this study, we develop and test a scale for measuring residential school denialism. We find that nearly one in five non-Indigenous Canadians agree with denialist claims, while an equal share feel they do not know enough to offer an opinion. Denialist beliefs are more common among men, conservatives, those with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and white Canadians who strongly identify with their racial in-group. In an experiment, we also show that educational information reduces non-opinions and increases the likelihood of rejecting denialist arguments.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Neurodegeneration and Dementia (COMPASS-ND) is an observational study of more than 1100 participants across the dementia spectrum. This research note describes the development and features of the neuropsychological research battery, which is available in English and French. The training of staff and procedures for quality assurance are described. The battery assesses learning and memory, processing speed, attention, executive function, visuoperceptual processing, and language, and the available test scores are described. We outline our goals for future work including: (1) increasing the sociodemographic diversity of the participant cohorts, (2) determining the psychometric properties of the battery, (3) establishing robust normative data from control participants followed longitudinally, and (4) examining longitudinal data on individuals at risk of dementia and across the dementia spectrum. The COMPASS-ND neuropsychology data will provide a unique open-access database of deeply phenotyped participants with or at risk of dementia for Canadian and international researchers.

A landmark result of Erdős, Ginzburg, and Ziv (EGZ) states that any sequence of $2n-1$ elements in ${\mathbb {Z}}/n$ contains a zero-sum subsequence of length n. While algebraic techniques have predominated in deriving many deep generalizations of this theorem over the past sixty years, here we introduce topological approaches to zero-sum problems which have proven fruitful in other combinatorial contexts. Our main result is a topological criterion for determining when any ${\mathbb {Z}}/n$-coloring of an n-uniform hypergraph contains a zero-sum hyperedge. In addition to applications for Kneser hypergraphs, for complete hypergraphs our methods recover Olson’s generalization of the EGZ theorem for arbitrary finite groups. Furthermore, we give a fractional generalization of the EGZ theorem with applications to balanced set families and provide a constrained EGZ theorem which imposes combinatorial restrictions on zero-sum sequences in the original result.