It may be time to “de-territorialize historical narratives of the United States.”1 As the premise of this special issue demonstrates, American history has long been told through a land-centered lens—one that treats water as a backdrop or boundary. Yet when we shift perspective to view the U.S. past through water or the shifting interface between land and water, familiar narratives transform. In some instances, literature and film have offered ways of reorienting our perceptions by giving water prominence over land as a driving force behind such narratives. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic Dune does just that (Figure 1). He centers attention on the fictional desert planet, Arrakis, as the axis of his story. This choice seems to place aridity and desolation at the heart of the book. As the only source of the highly coveted “spice”—a substance that can “bend space” to make galactic travel possible—Arrakis becomes a battleground for interstellar warfare. Below the surface of the planet, figuratively and literally, the indigenous population of desert-savvy Fremen stores untold quantities of water, contrary to the popular view that Fremen society is weak because it is environmentally vulnerable without a sufficient water supply. However, the potential of their water to remake Arrakis is their hidden power, possibly more so than the presence of spice.2

Drawing on Joseph Carens’s social membership theory, originally developed in immigration ethics, I transpose this temporal logic to organizational spheres. I argue that as employees accrue tenure, they “sink roots”, integrating into the firm’s cooperative structure and subjecting themselves to its governance. This sustained integration generates increasingly strong moral entitlements to participate in decision-making, analogous to how long-term residents acquire claims to citizenship. I use this temporal framework to address the boundary problem in workplace democracy, defend a graduated workplace franchise that prioritizes long-term employees over transient stakeholders, and criticize fissured employment structures that block such membership over time.

The introduction of advanced automation and human-artificial intelligence (AI) teaming is expected to permit more efficient use of airspace in the face of increasing air transport demand. Additionally, the development of next-generation aircraft to support net-zero has introduced more complexity into the future flight deck and informational requirements. This study evaluates a design for an ‘intelligent assistant’ system that could share tasks with the pilot during engine failure and pilot incapacitation events, promoting greater reliance on system interaction as workload increases. Four professional pilots were split into two groups to perform six and eight scenarios, respectively. The aim was to identify the task-related information for the designed system to promote transparency to the pilots. Three modalities varied across each scenario (visual, auditory and physical) to evaluate the combination of modality to increase pilot monitoring and interaction with the system. Analysis of participant feedback indicated key limitations to existing human-machine-interaction design, with current operational procedures creating disparity between the system and pilots’ authority to handle the scenario. Additionally, the use of audio narration was negatively received by participants, primarily due to the potential overlap between other audio stimuli, masking the perception of task-critical audio prompts and delaying critical flight tasks from being performed. Design considerations were generated for future ‘intelligent assistant’ systems, with further research required to understand the effect of each modality on pilot reliance on these ‘intelligent assistant’ systems.

Children with CHD have demonstrated a rise in obesity, and have unique risks related to comorbidities of obesity, including feeding dysfunction and exercise limitations. The incidence and cause of obesity among patients with surgically corrected CHD are not fully understood. This single-centre, longitudinal, retrospective cohort study identified patients between 2004 and 2020 with surgical correction. Diagnoses were restricted to d-transposition of the great arteries, coarctation of the aorta, or tetralogy of Fallot with surgical repair by 6 months of life without long-term post-operative complications or chromosomal abnormalities. Evaluation of Body Mass Index by survival curve for endpoints of overweight and obesity, as well as descriptive analysis of the population, was performed compared to the expected prevalence in the state of Oregon (13.7%). Cohorts were divided into eras in 5-year increments. Of 240 patients identified, 87 (36.2%) were overweight and 50 (20.8%) obese, findings significantly higher than expected prevalence (p = <0.01) for the same time period in the state of Oregon. Patients with coarctation of the aorta had a higher prevalence than other diagnoses (p = <0.01). Patients in the 2004–2008 cohort had the highest rates of obesity compared to other cohorts (p = <0.01 and p = <0.01, respectively), likely due to a longer observational period. However, the 2014–17 cohort had the highest rate of increase in hazard ratio. Children with surgically corrected CHD demonstrate higher prevalences of obesity compared to the general population. There is variation by diagnosis, with coarctation of the aorta having comparatively higher prevalences of obesity. Several factors may impact this discrepancy, including sports participation restrictions and initial emphasis on weight gain.

During a period of universal admission respiratory virus testing, many events (5%–14%) that might have been classified as healthcare-associated respiratory viral infections (HARVI) during routine operations were found to be community-acquired. These findings emphasize unique challenges for HARVI surveillance and the impact that testing strategies have on reported rates.

Davidsonian event semantics (Davidson 1967) is widely accepted as a powerful framework for formal semantics. It has brought about many benefits in semantic construction, which may be summarised into two categories: one is to provide a satisfactory solution to a seemingly intractable problem of variable polyadicity, and the other consists of those benefits that come from the availability of the entities called events that correspond to verb actions. This paper provides an analysis of event semantics from a general viewpoint of dependent type theory. First, it is shown that the problem of variable polyadicity can be solved by means of dependent typing, without the employment of events. To do this, we only extend the simple type theory with two type constructors and the resulting semantic definitions not only allow variable polyadicity as desired but also obtain logical inferences as expected. We shall discuss why the solution is natural from a type-theoretical point of view (as compared with that in set theory). We then discuss that most (if not all) of the other benefits of event semantics may already be obtained by alternative means without introducing events as ontological entities. To this end, we consider the evidence for event semantics discussed by Parsons (1990), focusing on two particular aspects: event talks and perception words, showing that the former is mostly concerned with timing, and the latter can be dealt with a special case without introducing events in general.

Traditional philosophy of religion has been put under pressure to reform from different theoretical camps in the last few decades. One of the most salient charges is that the focus on belief as the mark of religion fails to capture a wide variety of religious phenomena and practices, particularly those outside of the Abrahamitic traditions. As a response to this challenge, this article proposes and develops the notion of religious alief as an additional analytical tool to conceptualize religious phenomena that elude characterization in terms of belief. This article first introduces religious aliefs as largely automatic, habitual mental states that influence behavior, feelings, and attitudes, even when a person does not hold an overt or tacit belief in the supernatural content involved. Subsequently, this article argues that religious phenomena such as apotropaic rituals, purification rituals, spontaneous prayer in crisis, jinx (and other folk-religious notions), certain taboos, and the recently coined Somethingism can be explained in terms of religious aliefs.

This paper studies two approaches to relativizing the notions of complete and precomplete numbering. The first one was introduced by Selivanov in the late 1980s, and it strengthens the standard definitions of complete and precomplete numbering. The second one was introduced by Badaev, Goncharov, and Sorbi in the early 2000s, and it is the full relativization of these two concepts. In the first part of the paper, we study how these two approaches differ from each other. In the second part, we study Mal’cev’s object uniquely for the relativized complete numberings.

The response to disasters or mass casualty incidents requires a multi-hazard approach and a rapid, comprehensive response. Community Emergency Response Teams have been formed around the world, where civilians, often laypersons, are integrated into local disaster response. Professionals have been organized into Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, where they are deployed to respond to a distant site. During the October 7, 2023, large-scale attacks in southern Israel, the country found itself in a new and unfamiliar reality. Initiatives began to prepare the population for possible future MCIs. The objective of this article is to describe initiatives that have developed throughout Israel to train medical professionals, including physicians, nurses, and paramedical personnel in local disaster response. These became known as Professional Community Emergency Response Teams. This includes those trained through Magen David Adom, Israel’s National Emergency Medical Service, and those through a Frontline Emergency Medicine model.

Spectral-line results from a new cryogenic phased array feed (cryoPAF) on the Murriyang telescope at Parkes are presented. This array offers a significant improvement in field of view, aperture efficiency, bandwidth, chromaticity and survey speed compared with conventional horn-fed receivers. We demonstrate this with measurements of sky calibrators and observations of 21-cm neutral hydrogen (HI) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the nearby galaxy NGC 6744. Within 0.3 deg of the optical axis, the ratio of system temperature to dish aperture efficiency (Tsys/ηd) is 25 K and the ratio with beam efficiency (Tsys/ηmb) is 21 K (at 1.4 GHz). For the previously measured Tsys = 17 K, respective efficiency values ηd ≈ 0.7 and ηmb ≈ 0.8 are derived. Our HI observational results are in good agreement with previous results, although detailed comparison with multibeam observations of the LMC suggests that the earlier observations may have missed an extended component of low-column-density gas (∼ 8 × 1018 cm−2). We use the cryoPAF zoom-band and wideband data to make a preliminary investigation of whether the large number of simultaneous beams (72) permits the use of novel data reduction methods to reduce the effects of foreground/background continuum contamination and radio-frequency interference (RFI). We also investigate if these methods can better protect against signal loss for the detection of faint, extended cosmological signals such as HI intensity maps. Using robust higher-order singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques, we find encouraging results for the detection of both compact and extended sources, including challenging conditions with high RFI occupancy and significant sky continuum structure. Examples are shown that demonstrate that 3D SVD techniques offer a significant improvement in noise reduction and signal capture compared with more traditional layered 2D techniques.

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the historiography, dredges played an essential role in expanding and retaining the American empire in the Pacific. Dredges built a string of ports on the Pacific Coast, from Seattle, WA to San Diego, CA. Dredges constructed seaports in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i and Manila Bay in the Philippines. Dredges turned atolls and desert isles, such as Midway, Guam, and Wake, into a constellation of harbors for ships and seaplanes. In short, dredges literally built the infrastructure of the empire.1