Naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) are geographic areas that have come to house a high proportion (≥30%) of older residents. Implementing onsite social programming in NORCs, or other places where older adults are clustered, can support aging in place. As such it is important to be able to identify sites that could benefit. We describe a data and equity-driven process used to select NORC and social housing sites for a program aimed at empowering older adults and strengthening aging in place in Toronto, Canada. We (1) created a data-driven shortlist of buildings with population-level data, (2) prioritized equity by targeting buildings with high health needs and neighbourhood-level diversity, and (3) facilitated building and resident engagement to assess interest and suitability. This process offers a novel and replicable approach for selecting sites for enhanced, place-based programming that can inform site selection for other community-based programming for older adults across diverse contexts.

It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra‐party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote‐seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party‐in‐a‐district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party‐in‐a‐district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra‐party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote‐seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote‐seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra‐party competition on personal vote‐seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.

In this paper, we calculate the available energy, an upper bound on the thermal energy released that may in turn drive turbulence, due to an ion-temperature-gradient instability driven by curvature in the presence of adiabatic electrons. This is done by choosing an appropriate set of invariants that neglect parallel dynamics, whilst keeping the density profile fixed. Conditions for vanishing available energy are derived and are found to be qualitatively similar to conditions for stability derived from gyrokinetic theory, including strong stabilisation if the ratio of the temperature and density gradient, $\mathrm{d} \ln T / \mathrm{d} \ln n =\eta$, falls in the range $0 \leqslant \eta \leqslant 2/3$. To assess the utility of the available energy, a database consisting of $6 \times 10^4$ local gyrokinetic simulations in randomly sampled tokamak geometries is constructed. Using this database and a similar one sampling stellarators (Landreman et al. 2025 J. Plasma Phys. vol. 91, E120), the available energy is shown to exhibit correlation with the ion energy flux as long as the parallel dynamics is unimportant. Overall it is found that available energy is good at predicting the energy flux variability due to the gradients in density and temperature, but performs worse when it comes to predicting its variability arising from geometry.

The 1920s to 1950s was a period of significant transformation and conflict in South and East Asia, marked by the forces of (anti-)imperialism, nationalism, and militarism, eventually escalating into the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. For a long time, internationalist initiatives hoped that de-escalation and peace could be achieved through diplomacy and exchange. Part of this approach included Asian Christians moving in the milieu of Protestant internationalism, a movement long dominated by American organizations and actors, which after the First World War saw a shift towards Asia—both in terms of representation from and interest in the region.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, numerous international conferences, organized by missionary associations and organizations such as the World Student Christian Federation or the international Young Men’s Christian Association, debated the political future of Asia in a changing and increasingly belligerent world. The period also witnessed numerous exchanges of Christian delegations between individual countries. By analysing the interrelated histories of three Asian Protestant internationalists—T. Z. Koo of China, Kagawa Toyohiko of Japan, and Augustine Ralla Ram of India—the article offers an examination of the mechanics of Christian diplomacy before, during, and after war. It shows that Protestant internationalist diplomacy, fellowship, and solidarity were often overshadowed by national and political ideologies. However, the article further argues that, despite its shortcomings, which challenged transnational solidarity and fellowship, Christian diplomacy was characterized by a resilience and reach that allowed its Asian protagonists a remarkable international operating space by providing useful networks, opportunities, and resources.

Efforts to drain Lake Maliq, in the Korça Basin of eastern Albania, during the 1940s and 1950s revealed waterlogged wooden structures that were excavated in the 1970s and identified as Neolithic pile-dwellings. Fifty years later, new excavations are exposing the exceptional organic preservation and complex stratigraphy of the Dunavec site. Through a combination of dendrochronological and radiocarbon dating, the authors provide the first secure absolute dates for the structures, placing early activity at the site within the beginning of the fifty-third century BC and creating a chronological anchor for our understanding of Neolithic communities in the western Balkans.

Between a plasma and a solid target lies a positively charged sheath of several Debye lengths $\lambda _{D}$ width, typically much smaller than the characteristic length scale $L$ of the main plasma. This scale separation implies that the asymptotic limit $\epsilon = \lambda _{D} / L \rightarrow 0$ is useful to solve for the plasma-sheath system. In this limit, the Bohm criterion must be satisfied at the sheath entrance. A new derivation of the kinetic criterion, admitting a general ion velocity distribution, is presented. It is proven that, for $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$, the distribution of the velocity component normal to the target, $v_x$, and its first derivative must vanish for $|v_x| \rightarrow 0$ at the sheath entrance. These two conditions can be subsumed into a third integral one after it is integrated by parts twice. A subsequent interchange of the limits $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$ and $|v_x| \rightarrow 0$ is invalid, leading to a divergence which underlies the misconception that the criterion gives undue importance to slow ions.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Protestant internationalism and missions turned their attention to social and economic matters. The 1920/30s saw an agricultural turn that was paralleled by a global discourse on the “improvement” of the rural. While the transformations in Protestant internationalism have been addressed in view of theological, ecumenical, and geopolitical changes, historians have yet to acknowledge the complex interplay of their local and global effects. By focusing on the work of a particular agent in agricultural missions, the International Missionary Council and its rural expert Kenyon L. Butterfield, and their engagement with rural reconstruction in India, China, and Japan, this article argues that impactful schemes necessitated the cooperation of a wide array of actors, from private to state, from foreign missionaries to local Christian and non-Christian communities and activists. Missionary and Christian rural reconstruction in Asia in the interwar period was shaped by forces of nationalism, (anti-)colonialism, and secularization that could benefit, halt, and transform comprehensive schemes. While the impact of missionary rural reconstruction was eventually hampered by its inherently universalist and invasive nature, its drive for professionalization led to manifold cooperations and careers that transitioned well into and in many ways anticipated and prepared a post-World War II development discourse.

Musculoskeletal disorders have the highest prevalence of work-related health problems. Due to the aging population, the prevalence of shoulder pain in workers in physically demanding occupations is increasing, thereby causing rising costs to society and underlining the need for preventive technologies. Wearable support structures are designed to reduce the physical work load during physically demanding tasks. Here, we evaluate the physiological benefit of the DeltaSuit, a novel passive shoulder exoskeleton, using an assessment framework that conforms to the approach proposed in the literature.

In this study, 32 healthy volunteers performed isometric, quasi-isometric, and dynamic tasks that represent typical overhead work to evaluate the DeltaSuit performance. Muscle activity of the arm, neck, shoulder, and back muscles, as well as cardiac cost, perceived exertion, and task-related discomfort during task execution with and without the exoskeleton were compared.

When working with the DeltaSuit, muscle activity was reduced up to 56% (p < 0.001) in the Trapezius Descendens and up to 64% (p < 0.001) in the Deltoideusmedius. Furthermore, we observed no additional loading on the abdomen and back muscles. The use of the exoskeleton resulted in statistically significant reductions in cardiac cost (15%, p < 0.05), perceived exertion (21.5%, p < 0.001), and task-related discomfort in the shoulder (57%, p < 0.001).

These results suggest that passive exoskeletons, such as the DeltaSuit, have the potential to meaningfully support users when performing tasks in overhead postures and offer a valuable solution to relieve the critical body parts of biomechanical strains for workers at high risk of musculoskeletal disorders.

This work reports on the development and numerical implementation of the linear electromagnetic gyrokinetic (GK) model in a tokamak flux-tube geometry using a moment approach based on the expansion of the perturbed distribution function on a velocity-space Hermite–Laguerre polynomials basis. A hierarchy of equations of the expansion coefficients, referred to as the gyro-moments (GMs), is derived. We verify the numerical implementation of the GM hierarchy in the collisionless limit by performing a comparison with the continuum GK code GENE, recovering the linear properties of the ion temperature gradient, trapped electron, kinetic ballooning and microtearing modes, as well as the collisionless damping of zonal flows. An analysis of the distribution functions and ballooning eigenmode structures is performed. The present investigation reveals the ability of the GM approach to describe fine velocity-space-scale structures appearing near the trapped and passing boundary and kinetic effects associated with parallel and perpendicular particle drifts. In addition, the effects of collisions are studied using advanced collision operators, including the GK Coulomb collision operator. The main findings are that the number of GMs necessary for convergence decreases with plasma collisionality and is lower for pressure gradient-driven modes, such as in H-mode pedestal regions, compared with instabilities driven by trapped particles and magnetic gradient drifts often found in the core. The accuracy of approximations often used to model collisions (relative to the GK Coulomb operator) is studied in the case of trapped electron modes, showing differences between collision operator models that increase with collisionality and electron temperature gradient, consistent with the results of Pan et al. (Phys. Rev. E, vol. 103, 2021, L051202). Such differences are not observed in other edge microinstabilities, such as microtearing modes. The importance of a proper collision operator model is also confirmed by analysing the collisional damping of geodesic acoustic modes and zonal flows.

Climate models are primary tools for investigating processes in the climate system, projecting future changes, and informing decision makers. The latest generation of models provides increasingly complex and realistic representations of the real climate system, while there is also growing awareness that not all models produce equally plausible or independent simulations. Therefore, many recent studies have investigated how models differ from observed climate and how model dependence affects model output similarity, typically drawing on climatological averages over several decades. Here, we show that temperature maps of individual days drawn from datasets never used in training can be robustly identified as “model” or “observation” using the CMIP6 model archive and four observational products. An important exception is a prototype storm-resolving simulation from ICON-Sapphire which cannot be unambiguously assigned to either category. These results highlight that persistent differences between simulated and observed climate emerge at short timescales already, but very high-resolution modeling efforts may be able to overcome some of these shortcomings. Moreover, temporally out-of-sample test days can be assigned their dataset name with up to 83% accuracy. Misclassifications occur mostly between models developed at the same institution, suggesting that effects of shared code, previously documented only for climatological timescales, already emerge at the level of individual days. Our results thus demonstrate that the use of machine learning classifiers, once trained, can overcome the need for several decades of data to evaluate a given model. This opens up new avenues to test model performance and independence on much shorter timescales.