Contextual integrity has now become a (the?) dominant academic theory of privacy. It identifies privacy as both complex and social, two alluring attributes that other leading theories reject. Scholars who engage contextual integrity mostly do so only to convey their confidence in it as their working framework. Even passingly critical notes are rare. This article offers a legal realist critique: Were contextual integrity adopted as a legal standard, it would undermine the very values it was intended to protect, systematically favoring data-hungry corporations at the expense of an already shrinking zone of protected individual privacy. Contextual integrity is dangerous precisely because of the complexity and sociality that draw so many scholars to it. In an adversarial courtroom that pits corporate data interests against aggrieved individuals, these theoretical virtues favor the more sophisticated, well-funded, repeat player.

We examine the role of systematic mispricing and risk compensation in explaining cryptocurrency returns using instrumented principal component analysis. We demonstrate that both elements make meaningful contributions to the variation in returns through distinct economic mechanisms. Mispricing primarily operates through behavioral channels, capturing speculative demand and liquidity frictions. A pure-alpha strategy delivers large and significant Sharpe ratios, confirming the economic importance of mispricing. Risk compensation is driven by fundamental factors, including past performance and exposures to both cryptocurrency and equity market risk. Consistent with this equity exposure, we document increasing correlation between cryptocurrency and equity returns over time.

Public attitudes toward nuclear weapons remain a critical issue in international security, yet the thinking behind individuals’ support or opposition to their use is not well understood. This study examines how the American public reasons about whether to deploy nuclear weapons in a hypothetical war between the United States and Iran. Participants were asked to state their preference between continuing a ground war, deploying a nuclear strike resulting in 100,000 civilian casualties, or deploying a strike killing 2 million civilians. They then provided an open-ended answer where they described the reasons for their decision. Using Structural Topic Modeling, we identified 10 distinct patterns in participants’ thinking. Some responses emphasized concerns about deterrence or saving lives, while others focused on national security, or retaliation, among other reasons. The type of thinking participants employed was found to be related to their preceding choice, as well as to individual characteristics, such as gender, political affiliation, punitive–authoritarian–nationalist attitudes, and the influence of the relative emotional impact of the 2 bombs (i.e., the better bomb effect). These findings highlight the complexity of the thinking underlying nuclear decision making and help shed light on potential avenues for reducing the risk of a nuclear weapon being deployed again.

Reliably identifying and understanding temporal precursors to extreme wind gusts is crucial for early warning and mitigation. This study proposes a simple data-driven approach to extract key predictors from a dataset of historical extreme European winter windstorms and derive simple equations linking these precursors to extreme gusts over land. A major challenge is the limited training data for extreme events, increasing the risk of model overfitting. Testing various mitigation strategies, we find that combining dimensionality reduction, careful cross-validation, feature selection, and a nonlinear transformation of maximum wind gusts informed by Generalized Extreme Value distributions successfully reduces overfitting. These measures yield interpretable equations that generalize across regions while maintaining satisfactory predictive skill. The discovered equations reveal the association between a steady drying low-troposphere before landfall and wind gust intensity in Northwestern Europe.

Spacecraft assembly facilities (SAFs) house clean rooms where interplanetary spacecraft are built, thereby reducing the bioburden on spacecraft to protect planetary environments from terrestrial microbes that may interfere with the search for life or disturb potential native ecosystems. The most plausible environments for living systems on celestial bodies involve brines with depressed freezing points. Here, we specifically measure the abundance of salinotolerant microbes on SAF surfaces. Most probable number analyses performed with salty liquid media were applied to washes of SAF floor wipes. Microbial abundance was measured using Salt Plains medium at low salt or supplemented with (all w/v) 10% NaCl (1.7 M; aw = 0.92), 50% MgSO4 (2.0 M as epsomite; aw = 0.94), 5% NaClO3 (0.5 M; aw = 0.98), or 5% NaClO4 (0.4 M; aw = 0.98). The abundance of salinotolerant microbes was generally 1 to 10% (102 to 104 cells m−2) of the total population of microbes observed in low-salt medium (105 cells m−2). Microbes were isolated by repetitive streak-plating of positive enrichment cultures and then characterized. All of the 38 isolates were Gram-positive bacteria, mainly spore-forming Bacillaceae, with some Staphylococcus. The isolate collection showed strong tolerance to high concentrations of NaCl (to 30%), MgSO4 (to 50%) and sucrose (to 70%). There also was substantial tolerance to pH (5 to 10) and temperature (4 to 60 °C). Taken together, these SAF isolates are polyextremophiles that are in substantial abundance in the clean rooms where spacecraft are assembled.

Underactuated Cable-Driven Parallel Robots (UACDPRs) typically rely on relative internal sensors to estimate the end-effector (EE) state. Therefore, at startup, the reference values of the quantities measured by these sensors are unknown, and so is the initial pose of the EE. The problem of determining the reference values of the internal sensors is called initial-pose self-calibration. The latter is often formulated as an overdetermined system of nonlinear equations and solved using nonlinear weighted least-squares methods, minimizing the error between modeled and measured variables, and its effectiveness is highly influenced by the choice of measurement configurations, as well as the motion planning and control strategy used to reach them. This work presents two practical data acquisition methods for initial-pose self-calibration of UACDPRs, aiming to reduce the overall time required by the procedure and enhance process automation. The first method is slower but richer in data, as it relies on equilibrium poses and, therefore, can leverage cable-tension data, whereas the second method is faster and is based on geometric constraints only. The performance of the methods is evaluated in terms of acquisition time, number of measurements, and calibration accuracy on a 4-cable UACDPR prototype. The results highlight the merits and shortcomings of both methods, namely, trade-offs between the velocity of data collection and the precision of pose estimation.

Radio galaxy remnants are a rare subset of the radio-loud active galactic nuclei (RLAGN) population, representing the quiescent phase in the RLAGN lifecycle. Despite their observed scarcity, they offer valuable insights into the AGN duty cycle and feedback processes. Due to the mega-year timescales over which the RLAGN lifecycle takes place, it is impossible to observe the active to remnant transition in real-time. Numerical simulations offer a solution to follow the long-term evolution of RLAGN plasma. In this work, we present the largest suite (to date) of three-dimensional, hydrodynamic simulations studying the dynamic evolution of the active-to-remnant transition and explore the mechanisms driving cocoon evolution, comparing the results to the expectations of analytic modelling. Our results show key differences between active and remnant sources in both cluster environments and in lower-density group environments. We find that sources in low-density environments can remain overpressured well into the remnant phase. This significantly increases the time for the remnant lobe to transition to a buoyant regime. We compare our results with analytic expectations, showing that the long-term evolution of radio remnants can be well captured for remnants whose expansion is largely pressure-driven if the transition to a coasting phase is assumed to be gradual. We find that remnants of low-powered progenitors can continue to be momentum-driven for about 10 Myr after the jets switch-off. Finally, we consider how the properties of the progenitor influence the mixing of the remnant lobe and confirm the expectation that the remnants of high-powered sources have long-lasting shocks that can continue to heat the surrounding medium.

Compounded by 14 years of public welfare austerity, health equality presents a challenge that extends beyond healthcare in isolation because it also engages the more recondite politics of public health. Recent policy has addressed the issue by requiring National Health Service (NHS) bodies to integrate their services with those of local authorities. We consider how this adds significant new difficulty to the already complex process of NHS resource allocation. We argue that these duties require a new framework to gauge the values, evidence and criteria needed to set priorities for public health; not simply as a desirable objective, but a necessity in law. We consider current approaches to priority setting for medical treatment, and the responses already offered by current ethical frameworks. We then discuss the new ethical, political, and practical challenges posed by public health priority setting for health equality. Informed by this context, we engage an intersectional lens to explore a ‘non-ideal’ solution grounded in Professor Sir Michael Marmot’s framework to reduce health inequalities.

We develop a high-order asymptotic expansion for the mean first passage time (MFPT) of the capture of Brownian particles by a small elliptical trap in a bounded two-dimensional region. This new result describes the effect that trap orientation plays on the capture rate and extends existing results that give information only on the role of trap position on the capture rate. Our results are validated against numerical simulations that confirm the accuracy of the asymptotic approximation. In the case of the unit disk domain, we identify a bifurcation such that the high-order correction to the global MFPT (GMFPT) is minimized when the trap is orientated in the radial direction for traps centred at $0\lt r\lt r_c :=\sqrt {2-\sqrt {2}}$. When centred at position $r_c\lt r\lt 1$, the GMFPT correction is minimized by orientating the trap in the angular direction. In the scenario of a general two-dimensional geometry, we identify the orientation that minimizes the GMFPT in terms of the regular part of the Neumann Green’s function. This theory is demonstrated on several regular domains such as disks, ellipses and rectangles.

How should you respond to higher-order evidence which says that you have made a mistake in the reasoning from your first-order evidence? It is highly plausible that you should reduce your confidence in your first-order reasoning. However, attempts to precisely formulate how this works have run into problems. I will argue that we should appeal to an independently motivated normative contextualism. That is, normative words like ‘ought’ and ‘reason’ have a different reference in different contexts. The result is that different answers to our question are true in different contexts.

Motivated by the construction of the free Banach lattice generated by a Banach space, we introduce and study several vector and Banach lattices of positively homogeneous functions defined on the dual of a Banach space E. The relations between these lattices allow us to give multiple characterizations of when the underlying Banach space E is finite-dimensional and when it is reflexive. Furthermore, we show that lattice homomorphisms between free Banach lattices are always composition operators, and study how these operators behave on the scale of lattices of positively homogeneous functions.

This article suggests that the ‘self-destruct’ phase of the late-colonial state was marked by rival projects to construct a durable political settlement in the face of the divisions wrought by development initiatives and security policy. A triangular contest between outgoing colonial administrators, a new generation of educated moderate nationalists, and those the colonial state pejoratively called ‘bush politicians,’ marked the twilight years of colonial rule. As the case of Nyeri District in Central Kenya, still reeling from the Mau Mau Uprising, indicates, these conflicts regularly concerned the meaning of post-conflict justice and the terms on which a community could be reconciled. The work of the Nyeri Democratic Party is illustrative, resisting disempowerment in the transition to independence and demanding that much more be done to heal the breaches wrought by colonial violence. This period laid the groundwork for a competitive post-colonial political arena, albeit underpinned by the sometimes dangerous rhetoric of ethnic unity. Using official documents from Kenyan and British archives, especially those in the previously closed Migrated Archive, this article illustrates the mutual bargaining that formed the political settlement in post-colonial Central Kenya.

What can a Hegelian perspective contribute to addressing the ecological crisis? This paper argues that, for Hegel, a transformative yet sustainable relation with nature is a requirement for a free form of life. Drawing on both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right, it contends that Hegel’s notions of work, bad infinity and habit help us understand how societies become entrenched in unsustainable practices. At the same time, by pointing to the notion of limit, these concepts illuminate what an alternative form of life could look like. Modern subjective and objective structures that resemble a ‘bad infinity’—in the sense of an imperative of endless wealth accumulation—come at the cost of human and non-human nature. To respond to this, work must be reoriented toward social needs, mutual recognition and cooperation. However, achieving this vision requires more than individual moral commitments; it demands the transformations of sedimented habits, socio-economic relationships and their material expressions.