The purpose of this study is to reveal the impact of pilot free trade zones (PFTZs) on local governance quality (LGQ) to provide a reference for driving governance reforms in China. Based on provincial panel data from 2004 to 2020 in China, the impact of the establishment of PFTZs on LGQ is analyzed by employing the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) method. The results show that the establishment of PFTZs can significantly enhance the governance quality of local governments, but there is heterogeneity in location and establishment batches. PFTZs improve LGQ through the effects of institutional spillover, factor allocation, and talent agglomeration. FDI spillover can partially substitute for promoting the effect of PFTZs on LGQ, and economic growth pressures can distort the positive effect of PFTZs on LGQ. Therefore, policymakers should clarify the functional positioning of PFTZs and leverage their effects, which are institutional spillover, factor allocation, and high-end factor agglomeration, to enhance LGQ.

Diflufenican is a selective phenyl ether, Group 12 herbicide. Limited information exists on the weed control efficacy of diflufenican and the potential improvement in weed control when it is co-applied with isoxaflutole. Three field studies were conducted in Ontario to evaluate preemergence applications of isoxaflutole and diflufenican alone and in combinations for weed control in corn. Isoxaflutole applied at 52.5, 79, and 105 g ai ha−1 provided effective control of velvetleaf (83% to 89%, 91% to 98%, and 92% to 97%), green pigweed (73% to 85%, 85% to 91%, and 94% to 97%), common ragweed (81% to 86%, 93% to 97%, and 95% to 97%), and common lambsquarters (88% to 89%, 96% to 99%, and 98% to 100%), respectively when evaluated at 2, 4, and 8 wk after treatment (WAT). Diflufenican applied alone at 75 to 150 g ai ha−1 provided ≤3% control of velvetleaf, ≤38% of green pigweed, ≤7% of common ragweed, and ≤20% of common lambsquarters. Isoxaflutole applied alone provided 16% to 75% control of barnyardgrass, while diflufenican was ineffective (<3%). The co-application of isoxaflutole + diflufenican improved control to 34% to 86%, with synergistic effects of barnyardgrass control observed at several rates. Isoxaflutole and diflufenican, applied alone controlled green foxtail by 15% to 72% and 0% to 12%, respectively. The co-application of isoxaflutole + diflufenican improved green foxtail control to 25% to 89% with synergistic responses at some rates and evaluation timings. There was minimal corn injury with these treatments. Weed interference reduced corn yield by up to 69%. Weed interference with diflufenican applied alone resulted in corn yields of 4570 to 4750 kg ha−1, which is similar to yields from the nontreated control (3.33 T ha−1). Reduced weed interference with isoxaflutole alone and in mixtures with diflufenican resulted in corn yields of 8.36 to 10.83 T ha−1, which is higher than yields from both the nontreated control plots and those that received diflufenican treatments. Overall, isoxaflutole provided consistent broadleaf weed control, while synergistic interactions with diflufenican enhanced barnyardgrass and green foxtail suppression.

As technology continues to shape how we engage with the world, museums are increasingly encouraged to adapt in order to appeal to younger audiences. Promoting exhibits through platforms such as Instagram and TikTok can be an effective way to attract visitors, but that doesn’t mean museum spaces themselves need to become more digitally driven. For a generation already saturated with screens, adding more technology to exhibitions may actually detract from the experience. In this essay, I explore the effects that excessive screen use has on us and argue that museums can offer something more meaningful by providing a break from the digital overload. To support my argument, I conducted a straw poll survey to better understand how other young people feel about technology in museum settings.

Podcasting, with its focus on voices, remains a compelling topic for African studies research, which has historically put orality at the center of the field. Recognizing sparse audience inclusion in existing research on African podcasting, the authors conducted focus groups with listeners in urban Ghana to document consumption practices and attitudes toward this form of new orality. Using the concept “deep listening” drawn from participant comments, the researchers theorize that listeners and producers experience a form of sound-mediated, affective resonance from podcasts that utilize audience collaboration and local sonic aesthetics, linking the affordances of openness and freedom to the medium.

During World War II, a prolific Kiowa composer named Lewis Toyebo initiated a new choreo-musical genre called War Mother songs for the Kiowa War Mothers Chapter 18 as a means of encouragement while their sons deployed overseas. This article examines how these songs simultaneously evoke pre-reservation and post-reservation chronotopes of Kiowa martial motherhood. Through ethnographic research with Kiowa Elders, singers, War Mothers, and descendants of Kiowa composers, I analyze how War Mother songs express these chronotopes through musical (War Journey drumbeat), functional (preparing warriors for deployment and honoring returning veterans), and linguistic means (blending “Old Kiowa” and “Modern Kiowa”). Analysis of these chronotopes reveals how Kiowas creatively responded to settler colonialism to maintain gendered roles and personhoods that were important to their cultural identity. This article provides an ethnomusicological perspective on how chronotopes of gender are expressed through dynamic forms of music and dance.

Contemporary historiography of philosophy addresses the philosophy produced in Greek after the Fall of Constantinople and until the Modern Greek Enlightenment through two frameworks: that of post-Byzantine philosophy and that of Corydallism, preceded by a ‘pre-Corydallic’ and followed by a ‘post-Corydallic’ period. Despite their differences, both frameworks posit a continuity of this philosophy with Byzantine philosophy. I argue that the structure and contents of the treatises and handbooks of logic produced in the Heptanese and in Ottoman Greece during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can by no means be accounted for with reference to Byzantine philosophy.

Depersonalisation (DP) and derealisation (DR) experiences can cause clients and therapists a lot of confusion and anxiety. Therapist confusion has led to the under-recognition of DP and DR symptoms, under-confidence in working therapeutically with this client group and unequal client access to effective cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) interventions. Client confusion has resulted in missed opportunities to engage in meaningful discussions with therapists about their DP and DR experiences and under-confidence that CBT can be of help. This article seeks to provide clarity for clinicians and clients around key misconceptions we have identified from the authors’ clinical experience of using CBT to treat DP/DR, both when presenting as symptoms in the context of other diagnoses and when presenting as a primary depersonalisation derealisation disorder (DDD). In addressing symptom misconceptions, we want to increase clinicians’ confidence when assessing DP and DR. We hope this will lead to productive discussions with clients and the inclusion of these symptoms in clinical formulations. We draw attention to client misconceptions in the hope that this facilitates better therapeutic dialogues about DP and DR and the potential benefit of CBT. Finally, we address therapist misconceptions about the use of CBT with this population in the hope that we can encourage more CBT therapists to work more proactively, confidently and effectively with DP and DR.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To help therapists better recognise depersonalisation (DP) and derealisation (DR) symptoms when in the context of another disorder and when presenting as primary depersonalisation derealisation disorder (DDD).

2. (2) To recognise therapist misconceptions leading to under-confidence in working with clients whose presentation includes symptoms of DP/DR and/or diagnoses of DDD.

3. (3) To understand misconceptions clients might hold about their DP and DR experiences and how these may impact engagement with CBT.

4. (4) To help therapists engage with clients in helpful discussions about the effectiveness of CBT to help with DP and DR, both when experienced in the context of another disorder and when conceptualised as DDD.

Cet article examine l’important rôle du Canada dans le développement du mécanisme de règlement des différends de l’Accord général sur les tarifs douaniers et le commerce, puis de l’Organisation mondiale de commerce. Face à un système initialement bloqué par le consensus, le Canada a œuvré dès les années 1980 à sa transformation en un cadre plus contraignant, transparent et juridictionnalisé. Ses propositions ont influencé les réformes du cycle de Tokyo, la réforme intérimaire de 1989, et ont été intégrées aux négociations du cycle d’Uruguay. Le Canada a notamment été moteur dans la juridictionnalisation de la procédure de règlement des différends, dans l’instauration du consensus inversé et dans la création d’un organe d’appel. Depuis 1995, le Canada demeure un acteur actif de l’Organe de règlement des différends par sa participation à de nombreux différends et par la présence d’experts canadiens dans les panels et à l’Organe d’appel. Face à la paralysie actuelle de ce dernier, le Canada a initié des solutions provisoires telles que l’Arrangement multipartite pour une procédure arbitrale d’appel provisoire et il continue de jouer un rôle moteur dans les négociations en cours sur la réforme du mécanisme, combinant attachement au multilatéralisme et pragmatisme. Son engagement illustre une volonté constante de défendre un système commercial multilatéral fondé sur la règle de droit et prévisible.

This paper investigates the effects of the German national minimum wage introduction and its subsequent up-rating on job finding rates of unemployed welfare recipients. While the literature is inconclusive on the sign of overall employment effects of the minimum wage, the range of estimates suggests that if effects are negative, they are likely to be rather small. However, such overall effects may mask negative effects on employment prospects of unemployed welfare recipients, who tend to be only loosely attached to the labour market. For the analysis, this paper uses a sample of unemployed welfare recipients based on high-quality administrative data and employs a difference-in-differences strategy by exploiting regional variation in the bite of the minimum wage in order to estimate the effects of the minimum wage. While theoretically ambiguous, estimates show that minimum wages had a beneficial and rather homogeneous impact on job finding rates of unemployed welfare recipients. Sensitivity analyses highlight the robustness of these findings.

We exploit heterogeneity in decreasing returns to scale (DRS) parameters across mutual funds to analyze the importance of scalability for investors’ capital allocation decisions. We find strong evidence that steeper DRS attenuate flow sensitivity to performance. We calibrate a rational model of active fund management and show that a large fraction of cross-sectional variation in assets-under-management is due to investors anticipating the effects of scale on return performance. We conclude that DRS play a key role in achieving equilibrium in the intermediated investment management market.

The quality by design (QbD) framework holds promise for improving success rates for completion of clinical studies, which often fail to complete on time. Initially used in manufacturing, the framework is now frequently applied to clinical trials to anticipate risks and avoid challenges that impact study completion or the credibility of results. The Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute created and implemented a program based on QbD to increase the success of research studies, including clinical trials and other study designs, being conducted by scholars in our Mentored Career Development Program and awardees in our Pilot Grant Programs. The program’s three components are QbD Design Studios, project management, and team science support. The overall goal is to increase study quality and efficiency, thereby improving study completion success rates and, ultimately, driving innovations in healthcare and public health. The current article describes QbD program elements in detail, along with preliminary results from initial implementation, approaches for evaluating the program’s implementation and impact on study success, and plans to disseminate the program widely.

In recent years, there has been a skyrocketing success of global histories of states and regions that have not been the traditional foci of global history. Since 2017, a series of volumes has appeared on the global history of Sicily, Catalonia, Spain, Portugal and Hungary, among others. In this article, we offer some cautionary tales and challenges; we explore emerging directions in the field, as well as its potential limitations, and advocate for a dynamic approach, which allows us to see how East-Central and Southern European societies played a crucial if not always glorious part at specific historical turning points and eras, be it in the first era of globalisation before 1914, during the First and Second World Wars or in the Cold War. In the absence of the Southern and East-Central European perspective, the global history of colonialism, decolonisation or modern warfare is at best incomplete; at worst, skewed.

This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of statecraft, essential for sustaining market functionality and social stability. Law’s multifaceted nature—encompassing legislation, specialist interpretations, adjudication, legal education, professional manuals, and popular knowledge—challenges the simplistic view of Confucian values as inherently anti-commerce. Instead, it shows how these values supported the uniformity and practicality of legal interpretations and judicial decisions. Moreover, the Chinese case points to a broader analytical framework with cross-cultural relevance: economic justice and market efficiency are not inherently opposed but can be mutually reinforcing when grounded in a shared set of values and legal regulations.

A three-valued logic is subclassical when it is defined by a single matrix having the classical two-element matrix as a subreduct. In this case, the language of can be expanded with special unary connectives, called external operators. The resulting logic is called the external version of , a notion originally introduced by D. Bochvar in 1938 with respect to his weak Kleene logic. In this paper we study the semantic properties of the external version of a three-valued subclassical logic . We determine sufficient and necessary conditions to turn a model of into a model of . Moreover, we establish some distinctive semantic properties of .