Education as a thick epistemic concept (ETEC) is a thick epistemology project that highlights the role of education in both epistemic virtues acquisition and motivation. In this article, I argue that ETEC is not satisfactory because it relies on a version of virtue responsibilism (VR) that is also not plausible, in so far as it relies on the premise that both the motivation and the action-guidedness of epistemic and moral virtues are unified. By rejecting this unification premise, I show that an epistemically virtuous person is not necessarily a morally virtuous/caring person either. It might happen to be the case that an epistemically virtuous person is also a morally virtuous person. However, there is no necessary connection between the epistemic and moral virtues as VR and ETEC claim since there can be a sharp gap between their motivation and their action-guidedness. I also argue that there are bad forms of education that can further sharpen the gap between epistemic and moral virtues, further undermining ETEC. Thus, when it comes to education, a thick epistemology project should consider how different forms of education can sharpen the gap in the motivation and the action-guidedness of different types of virtues developed by learners.

In a paper from 1980, Shelah constructed an uncountable group all of whose proper subgroups are countable. Assuming the continuum hypothesis, he constructed an uncountable group G that moreover admits an integer n satisfying that for every uncountable $X\subseteq G$, every element of G may be written as a group word of length n in the elements of X. The former is called a Jónsson group, and the latter is called a Shelah group.

In this paper, we construct a Shelah group on the grounds of $\textsf {{ZFC}}$ alone – that is, without assuming the continuum hypothesis. More generally, we identify a combinatorial condition (coming from the theories of negative square-bracket partition relations and strongly unbounded subadditive maps) sufficient for the construction of a Shelah group of size $\kappa $, and we prove that the condition holds true for all successors of regular cardinals (such as $\kappa =\aleph _1,\aleph _2,\aleph _3,\ldots $). This also yields the first consistent example of a Shelah group of size a limit cardinal.

One of the persistent obstacles to trade liberalization is a government’s inability to commit and deliver compensation to trade losers. We argue that constitutional structures interact with the geographic profiles of industries to shape a government’s ability to commit to a compensation contract, defined as an interbranch contract whereby an executive branch promises compensation in exchange for legislative support for ratification. Our theory predicts that parliamentary systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically concentrated industries because party leaders enforce a contract with a smaller number of legislators. Presidential systems are more likely to liberalize and compensate geographically diffused industries because legislature enforces a contract with a larger number of legislators. Using novel product-level data on agricultural trade liberalization and remote-sensed cropland in 38 democracies, we find evidence consistent with our argument. Qualitative studies of the sugar industry and interviews with policymakers provide further evidence.

Our analysis covers 122 scientific publications about health issues in free-ranging Neotropical ungulates produced between 1990 and 2022, with an emphasis on the epidemiology of infectious diseases and parasites. Most studies focus on parasitology (43.4%) and bacteriology (15.6%), while body condition (0.8%), toxicology (1.6%), virology (6.6%), and health assessments (6.6%) are less studied. Brocket deer (Mazama americana and M. gouazoubira), followed by peccaries (Pecari tajacu and Tayassu pecari), and the lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris) were the most frequent species surveyed (61.4% of all publications). We detected considerably higher numbers of studies and health topics covered in Brazil (n = 64; 52.5% of the total) compared to other Latin American countries. We emphasize the need for further research focused on poorly known health aspects of Neotropical ungulates that have received little attention in the past, especially the Chacoan peccary (Catagonus wagneri), taruca deer (Hippocamelus antisensis), Northern pudu (Pudu mephistopheles), and the least known Mazama species. Ecotoxicology and pathology studies are necessary to evaluate the impact of agrochemicals and other human disturbances on Neotropical ungulate populations in the wild. We encourage further research on the human impacts and trends of change in the epidemiology of infectious diseases, parasites, and health status of Neotropical wild ungulate populations.

For a smooth affine group scheme G over the ring of p-adic integers and a cocharacter $\mu $ of G, we develop the deformation theory for G-$\mu $-displays over the prismatic site of Bhatt–Scholze, and discuss how our deformation theory can be interpreted in terms of prismatic F-gauges introduced by Drinfeld and Bhatt–Lurie. As an application, we prove the local representability and the formal smoothness of integral local Shimura varieties with hyperspecial level structure. We also revisit and extend some classification results of p-divisible groups.

Double-zero-event studies (DZS) pose a challenge for accurately estimating the overall treatment effect in meta-analysis (MA). Current approaches, such as continuity correction or omission of DZS, are commonly employed, yet these ad hoc methods can yield biased conclusions. Although the standard bivariate generalized linear mixed model (BGLMM) can accommodate DZS, it fails to address the potential systemic differences between DZS and other studies. In this article, we propose a zero-inflated bivariate generalized linear mixed model (ZIBGLMM) to tackle this issue. This two-component finite mixture model includes zero inflation for a subpopulation with negligible or extremely low risk. We develop both frequentist and Bayesian versions of ZIBGLMM and examine its performance in estimating risk ratios against the BGLMM and conventional two-stage MA that excludes DZS. Through extensive simulation studies and real-world MA case studies, we demonstrate that ZIBGLMM outperforms the BGLMM and conventional two-stage MA that excludes DZS in estimating the true effect size with substantially less bias and comparable coverage probability.

Are people more inclined to help strangers when they’ve experienced similar hardships? People who have experienced displacement could be tremendous allies to the newly displaced, but they are relatively understudied. This study explores how people who have experienced wartime displacement respond to refugees fleeing new violence. I prime Serbs who experienced wartime displacement with either (1) their experience of displacement or (2) their ethnic identity. I then measure their altruism toward Syrian refugees traveling the Balkan route. Compared to participants who were reminded of their ethnic identity, participants who were reminded of their displacement were no more generous toward displaced Syrians. In fact, participants who experienced displacement, as well as wartime violence, were more generous toward the refugees when they were reminded of their ethnic identity. These results suggest that shared hardship alone may not necessarily enhance refugee inclusion. The results further suggest that interventions may benefit from calling out the differences between hosts and refugees—in this case, on the dimension of ethnicity. These findings caution humanitarians to construct their interventions with care.

This article derives four propositions for conceptualizing resistance to the Americanization of finance in advanced economy states. Resistance entails truncation of market-based financial innovations in line with political profit-sharing arrangements between governments, bankers, and other coalitional interests locked in a game of bank bargains. Resistance transpires through two key power structures in the national architecture for economic statecraft: the political executive and the financial supervisory system. Since change does not occur in a vacuum, resistance manifests as political bricolage amid idiosyncratic enabling and constraining factors comprising the broader public policy environment. Lastly, resistive capacity by state bricoleurs is contingent upon leeway for executive power and coherence of the financial supervisory system in relation to the underlying system of representative democracy. Using Canada as an exploratory case, it is shown that federal policymakers effectively truncated the Americanization of Canadian finance through strategic political and regulatory interventions geared toward preserving the incumbent profit-sharing arrangement with its Big Six banks. In line with the growing body of scholarship illuminating neoliberalism as governance through markets rather than a freeing of market forces, the findings suggest that truncation enabled re-regulation of Canadian finance along the grain of financial globalization as opposed to deregulation per se.

High-power laser systems require thin films with extremely low absorption. Ultra-low-absorption films are often fabricated via ion beam sputtering, which is costly and slow. This study analyzes the impact of doping titanium and annealing on the absorption characteristics of thin films, focusing on composition and structure. The results indicate that the primary factor influencing absorption is composition. Suppressing the presence of electrons or holes that do not form stable chemical bonds can significantly reduce absorption; for amorphous thin films, the structural influence on absorption is relatively minor. Thus, composition control is crucial for fabricating ultra-low-absorption films, while the deposition method is secondary. Ion beam-assisted electron-beam evaporation, which is relatively seldom used for fabricating low-absorption films, was employed to produce high-reflectivity films. After annealing, the absorption at 1064 nm reached 1.70 parts per million. This method offers a cost-effective and rapid approach for fabricating ultra-low-absorption films.

In prognosis studies with time-to-event outcomes, the survivals of groups with high/low biomarker expression are often estimated by the Kaplan–Meier method, and the difference between groups is measured by the hazard ratios (HRs). Since the high/low expressions are usually determined by study-specific cutoff values, synthesizing only HRs for summarizing the prognostic capacity of a biomarker brings heterogeneity in the meta-analysis. The time-dependent summary receiver operating characteristics (SROC) curve was proposed as a cutoff-free summary of the prognostic capacity, extended from the SROC curve in meta-analysis of diagnostic studies. However, estimates of the time-dependent SROC curve may be threatened by reporting bias in that studies with significant outcomes, such as HRs, are more likely to be published and selected in meta-analyses. Under this conjecture, this paper proposes a sensitivity analysis method for quantifying and adjusting reporting bias on the time-dependent SROC curve. We model the publication process determined by the significance of the HRs and introduce a sensitivity analysis method based on the conditional likelihood constrained by some expected proportions of published studies. Simulation studies showed that the proposed method could reduce reporting bias given the correctly-specified marginal selection probability. The proposed method is illustrated on the real-world meta-analysis of Ki67 for breast cancer.

This article explores the use of speech representation verbs in Late Modern English. Drawing data from CLMET3.0, it focuses on paralinguistic verbs in narrative fiction texts from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, as in blubbered in ‘“And only last Sunday – afternoon,” Mr. Povey blubbered.’ (CLMET3.0; 1908, Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale). The results show a drastic increase of these verbs, both in tokens and types, across the Late Modern English period, especially in direct speech constructions. I argue that this trend is linked to developing conventions for and experimentation with speech representation in the growth of especially the novel in the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond: the paralinguistic verbs offer a flexible tool for writers not only to structure dialogue, but also to convey stance and hence influence reader interpretation of characters, roles, situations and themes. The results underscore the importance of studying literary texts for understanding the general development of speech representation mechanisms in the history of English.

Matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) has been increasingly applied in health technology assessments (HTA). By reweighting subjects from a trial with individual participant data (IPD) to match the summary statistics of covariates in another trial with aggregate data (AgD), MAIC enables a comparison of the interventions for the AgD trial population. However, when there are imbalances in effect modifiers with different magnitudes of modification across treatments, contradictory conclusions may arise if MAIC is performed with the IPD and AgD swapped between trials. This can lead to the “MAIC paradox,” where different entities reach opposing conclusions about which treatment is more effective, despite analyzing the same data. In this paper, we use synthetic data to illustrate this paradox and emphasize the importance of clearly defining the target population in HTA submissions. Additionally, we recommend making de-identified IPD available to HTA agencies, enabling further indirect comparisons that better reflect the overall population represented by both IPD and AgD trials, as well as other relevant target populations for policy decisions. This would help ensure more accurate and consistent assessments of comparative effectiveness.