This article explores the complex cultural processes that engineered the production and circulation of British evangelical periodicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It draws on a vast collection of missionary archival material from Tahiti to show the patched-together character of evangelical periodicals, constituted by highly mobile texts that connected readers across vast geographic distances. Furthermore, it illustrates how readers responded to periodicals: how they represented the intellectual worlds of the early missionaries and complicated their conceptualizations of home and mission, in particular. The article avoids characterizing periodicals as purely propaganda, instead examining how they worked to extend evangelical networks and how they fit into wider systems of knowledge production. The article makes contributions to the study of religion, media, and the materiality of knowledge, bringing the evangelical knowledge industry into a globalized context that intersected with the mission field.

Wages earned by men are often used as an indicator of the material standard of living (MSoL). However, this indicator relies on several assumptions when used for comparisons across time and space. Considering these assumptions will improve estimates of the MSoL from wages. One necessary assumption is that households in the compared populations relied on the primary income of the male head of household to a comparable degree. I demonstrate that the degree of reliance on the male income was closely associated with the complexity of households within the population. Nuclear households – typical of English-speaking countries – were more reliant on the male income than more complex households found elsewhere. Consequently, estimates based on male wages are less accurate for populations with complex households, likely underestimating their MSoL. While the complexity of households in historical populations is seldom known, it can be predicted using demographic and economic indicators. I conclude that populations at similar stages of industrialization and the demographic transition are the most comparable when using male wages to estimate their MSoL. Further, I use a reductive model to show that a household’s MSoL is determined by the following three factors: time spent on productive work, the market wage for men, and the female/male (F/M) wage ratio. My analysis shows that including the F/M wage ratio does not change the ranking of the MSoL based on male wages. Nonetheless, I argue that there are compelling reasons to expect the wage ratio to be a useful addition when comparing the MSoL of historical populations.

The high-Rayleigh-number asymptotic behaviour of three-dimensional steady exact coherent states (ECS) in Rayleigh–Bénard convection is studied. The steady square and hexagonal convection cell states, whose horizontal scales are optimised to maximise Nusselt number, persist into the Rayleigh-number regime where a clear asymptotic trend emerges. A detailed asymptotic analysis of the governing equations reinforces that this trend persists in the limit of infinite Rayleigh number, with the corresponding Nusselt number following the classical scaling to leading order. The optimised Nusselt number of the three-dimensional ECS far exceeds that of the two-dimensional roll solutions, which are believed to bound currently available experimental and simulation results, reaching nearly twice the typical experimental values. This is an interesting result from an applied perspective, although our solutions are unstable at high Rayleigh numbers.

How does femonationalism, defined as the selective invocation of gender equality to promote exclusionary anti-immigrant policies, affect citizens? While increasingly common across Western democracies, its impact on citizens’ preferences remains underexplored. This paper provides evidence from a preregistered survey experiment with 3,118 U.S. citizens, showing that femonationalist rhetoric can enhance opposition to pluralist policies in defense of progressive gender achievements. The effect is conditional on citizens’ prior immigration attitudes: anti-immigration individuals liberalize their gender views, while pro-immigration individuals demand stricter integration policies. The findings suggest that citizens are not consistent in their ideological preferences, especially when political elites frame liberal values as conflicting.

Images can help us to better understand how the laws of war and international humanitarian law have developed. As images transmit several messages simultaneously, they can reveal contextual, ideological, political and emotional dimensions that legal texts may not fully capture. This article aims to be an exercise seeking to demonstrate how a painting can serve not only as a historical source but also as a trigger for curiosity, prompting deeper exploration into the past and into the history of the laws of war. The painting in question, an 1881 piece by the Mexican artist Francisco de Paula Mendoza entitled The Pardon of the Belgians or The Exchange of Belgian Prisoners, will transport us to a mid-nineteenth-century exchange of prisoners of war (PoWs) and will remind us of the long-forgotten chapter of the Belgian volunteer force in what is known as the French Intervention in Mexico (1862–67). Drawing on primary and secondary sources, the article will offer new perspectives on the status of PoWs, the practice of the exchange of PoWs, and the doctrinal underpinnings of these ideas, and will reveal the entanglements between the laws of war, the principle of equal sovereignty, self-determination, non-intervention and republicanism in nineteenth-century Latin America. It will also reveal the interest of Latin American republics like Mexico in formalizing and standardizing the practice of the laws of war.

An avoshift is a subshift where for each set C from a suitable family of subsets of the shift group, the set of all possible valid extensions of a globally valid pattern on C to the identity element is determined by a bounded subpattern. This property is shared (for various families of sets C) by, for example, cellwise quasigroup shifts, totally extremally permutive (TEP) subshifts, and subshifts of finite type (SFTs) with a safe symbol. In this paper, we concentrate on avoshifts on polycyclic groups, when the sets C are what we call ‘inductive intervals’. We show that then, avoshifts are a recursively enumerable subset of subshifts of finite type. Furthermore, we can effectively compute lower-dimensional projective subdynamics and certain factors (avofactors), and we can decide equality and inclusion for subshifts in this class. These results were previously known for group shifts, but our class also covers many non-algebraic examples as well as many SFTs without dense periodic points. The theory also yields new proofs of decidability of inclusion for SFTs on free groups, and SFTness of subshifts with the topological strong spatial mixing property.

We consider $L^q$-spectra of planar graph-directed self-affine measures generated by diagonal or anti-diagonal matrices. Assuming the directed graph is strongly connected and the system satisfies the rectangular open set condition, we obtain a general closed form expression for the $L^q$-spectra. Consequently, we obtain a closed form expression for box dimensions of associated planar graph-directed box-like self-affine sets. We also provide a precise answer to a question posed by Fraser [On the $L^q$-spectrum of planar self-affine measures. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 368(8) (2016), 5579–5620] concerning the $L^q$-spectra of planar self-affine measures generated by diagonal matrices. An interesting observation of the closed form expression is that it is possible to calculate the $L^q$-spectrum of a measure without involving the exact $L^q$-spectra of its projections to the axes.

States are measured and ranked on an ever-expanding array of country performance indicators (CPIs). Such indicators are seductive because they provide actionable, accessible, and ostensibly objective information on complex phenomena to time-pressed officials and enable citizens to hold governments to account. At the same time, a sizeable body of research has explored how CPIs entail ‘black boxing’ and depoliticisation of political phenomena. This article advances our understanding of the consequences of governance by indicators by examining how CPIs generate specific forms of politicization that can undermine a given CPI’s authority over time. We contend that CPIs rely upon two different claims to authority that operate in tension with one another: i) the claim to provide expert, objective knowledge and ii) the claim to render the world more transparent and to secure democratic accountability. Analysing CPIs in the field of education, economic governance, and health and development, we theorize and empirically document how this tension leads to three distinct forms of politicisation: scrutiny from experts that politicises the value judgements embodied in a CPI; competition whereby rival CPIs contest the objectivity of knowledge of leading CPIs; and corruption, where gaming of CPIs challenges its claim to securing transparent access to social reality. While the analysis identifies multiple paths to the politicization and undermining of specific CPIs’ authority, the article elaborates why these processes tend to leave intact and even reproduce the legitimacy of CPIs as a governance technology.

In the decay region around the centreline of three qualitatively different turbulent plane wakes, the turbulence is non-homogeneous and two-point turbulent diffusion counteracts the turbulence cascade all the way down to scales smaller than the Taylor length. It is found that the sum of the inter-space transfer rate and the horizontal part of the inter-scale transfer rate of horizontal two-point turbulent kinetic energy is approximately proportional to the turbulence dissipation rate in the inertial range with a constant of proportionality between $-0.6$ and $-1$ depending on wake and location within the wake, except at the near-field edge of the decay region.

This paper presents a highly isolated diplexer-antenna and a dual-band filtenna with high-frequency selectivity. The precise design procedure for the diplexer based on substrate-integrated waveguide technology is presented and effectively integrated with magnetoelectric dipole antenna/microstrip patch antennas to achieve a diplexer-antenna and dual-band filtenna. The proposed configuration enables the design and control of the filtering response of the channels individually. To verify the proposed method, a diplexer-antenna and a dual-band filtenna with operating frequencies of 26.5–27.5 and 28.5–29.5 GHz, a fourth-degree Chebyshev response, and two symmetric radiation nulls for each band are designed and simulated. Finally, the proposed dual-band filtenna is fabricated and measured. The measured peak realized gains for the lower and higher bands are 4 and 4.5 dBi, respectively. Besides, a high out-of-band suppression with a deep roll-off of better than 20 dBi is obtained.

This paper addresses the gap between theoretical modeling of cyber risk propagation and empirical analysis of loss characteristics by introducing a novel approach that integrates both approaches. We model the development of cyber loss counts over time using a discrete-time susceptible-infected-recovered process, linking these counts to covariates, and modeling loss severity with regression models. By incorporating temporal and covariate-dependent transition rates, we eliminate the scaling effect of population size on infection counts, revealing the true underlying dynamics. Simulations show that this susceptible-infected-recovered framework significantly improves aggregate loss prediction accuracy, providing a more effective and practical tool for actuarial assessments and risk management in the cyber risk context.

This study investigates the feasibility of reconstructing the last closed flux surface in the DIII-D tokamak using neural network models trained on reduced input feature sets, addressing an ill-posed task. Two models are compared: one trained solely on coil currents and another incorporating coil currents, plasma current and loop voltage. The model trained exclusively on coil currents achieved a mean point displacement of $0.04$ m on a held-out test set, while the inclusion of plasma current and loop voltage reduced the error to $0.03$ m. This comparison highlights the trade-offs between input feature complexity and reconstruction accuracy, demonstrating the potential of machine learning algorithms to perform effectively in data-limited environments, such as those expected in fusion power plants due to diagnostic constraints imposed by the presence of blankets and shielding.