Theories of ecological function often appeal to the liberality criterion to evaluate a theory’s adequacy. The liberality criterion requires that a functional description successfully differentiates between functions and nonfunctions. A functional description is considered inadequate if it is excessively liberal or excessively restrictive. I criticize the deference that is shown to the liberality criterion. I present a hypothetical case to illustrate how the application of the liberality criterion needlessly problematizes the four general theories of ecological function. Instead, a theory’s functional description should be considered adequate as long as it produces a better understanding of the complex phenomenon under study.

This article contributes to the understanding of the scales of global capitalism by addressing labour relations from a historical perspective. Firstly, it suggests that the problem of the deadly cost of the expansion and shifting of commodity frontiers can be resolved only with an approach that scrutinizes humans’ consumption habits and lifestyles. Secondly, it proposes to explore the making of commodity frontiers through the respective sites of immobilization as well as workers’ means of escaping such immobilization. Thirdly, it explores the nexus of health, food, and labour by considering the agricultural production of commodities as toxic frontiers against which workers’ unions have historically organized to protect their safety. Finally, it sheds light on the ways in which the global scale of capitalism has met the micro scale of particles owing to the toxicity of twenty-first-century commodity frontiers.

Climate change impacts and stresses young people and although their pro-environmental behaviours have been studied their perspectives have not been widely heard. This creative output is a lo-fi comic engaging with themes of imagined alternative futures in climate fiction. It was constructed to provide an example of a multimodal text with a low barrier to entry for use in the classroom, to complement the study of solar punk texts. The methodology of an autoethnographic art provides a tool for reflection and provides a suitably rebellious outlet for their perspectives, a departure from factual poster assignments on environmental issues. This particular perzine discusses the challenges faced by young people in addressing environmental issues and sustainable practice with limited personal agency.

We develop anapproximation for the buffer overflow probability of a stable tandem network in dimensions three or more. The overflow event in terms of the constrained random walk representing the network is the following: the sum of the components of the process hits n before hitting 0. This is one of the most commonly studied rare events in the context of queueing systems and the constrained processes representing them. The approximation is valid for almost all initial points of the process and its relative error decays exponentially in n. The analysis is based on an affine transformation of the process and the problem; as $n\rightarrow \infty$ the transformed process converges to an unstable constrained random walk. The approximation formula consists of the probability of the limit unstable process hitting a limit boundary in finite time. We give an explicit formula for this probability in terms of the utilization rates of the nodes of the network.

This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of collective remembering of the American War in Vietnam, also known as the Vietnam War, as embodied in forty-nine photographs taken during the war and published in the digital edition of The New York Times on the Vietnam War’s forty-second anniversary commemoration. Collective memory and commemoration are understood as political and discursive practices that make up a site of contestation (Milani & Richardson 2022). This research attempts to unveil The New York Times’ semiotic control in presenting and recontextualizing a historical narrative of the Vietnam War to sustain a necropolitical architecture in the making of collective memory. Three major themes emerging from the data—dehumanized death, gendered death, and paternalized death—are discussed in the context of what we call necropolitical discourse of collective remembering of the Vietnam War. (Necropolitical discourse, Vietnam War, CMDA, collective remembering, lieu de dispute)

We present an extremely rare case of anomalous single coronary artery from the pulmonary artery in a 2-month-old infant with severe heart failure. Due to the unique coronary anatomy, a modified venous arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation technique was employed to maintain coronary perfusion and prevent coronary steal. Following surgical reimplantation, the patient showed significant recovery and remains stable at 2-year follow-up.

Focusing on the Šamac–Sarajevo railway project, this article examines how Yugoslavia’s Youth Labour Actions (Omladinska radna akcija; ORAs) served as incipient attempts by the Yugoslav state to develop its cultural diplomacy. Adopting a bottom-up perspective, it explores British volunteers’ participation in Yugoslavia’s post-war reconstruction, situating their mobilisation within broader contexts of international reconstruction, idealism and solidarity. Targeting enthusiastic leftist youth, the Yugoslav government strategically employed the ORAs to promote its image in Britain, turning an economic development project into a vehicle for cultural branding. This article argues that Yugoslavia’s attempt to promote its image through the inclusion of British youth was only partially successful. Despite the seemingly idealistic narratives offered by the brigadists, practical challenges and contradictions remained. It examines the complexities of the British youth brigades’ experiences and how their intended propagandistic role was met with scepticism in Britain.

Keeping an up-to-date three-dimensional (3D) representation of buildings is a crucial yet time-consuming step for Building Information Modeling (BIM) and digital twins. To address this issue, we propose ICON (Intelligent CONstruction) drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to navigate indoor environments autonomously and generate point clouds. ICON drone is constructed using a 250 mm quadcopter frame, a Pixhawk flight controller, and is equipped with an onboard computer, an Red Green Blue-Depth camera and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensor. The UAV navigates autonomously using visual-inertial odometer and frontier-based exploration. The collected RGB images during the flight are used for 3D reconstruction and semantic segmentation. To improve the reconstruction accuracy in weak-texture areas in indoor environments, we propose depth-regularized planar-based Gaussian splatting reconstruction, where we use monocular-depth estimation as extra supervision for weak-texture areas. The final outputs are point clouds with building components and material labels. We tested the UAV in three scenes in an educational building: the classroom, the lobby, and the lounge. Results show that the ICON drone could: (1) explore all three scenes autonomously, (2) generate absolute scale point clouds with F1-score of 0.5806, 0.6638, and 0.8167 compared to point clouds collected using a high-fidelity terrestrial LiDAR scanner, and (3) label the point cloud with corresponding building components and material with mean intersection over union of 0.588 and 0.629. The reconstruction algorithm is further evaluated on ScanNet, and results show that our method outperforms previous methods by a large margin on 3D reconstruction quality.

Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights’ when combined with states’ anti-imperialist victim branding, and uncritical anti-imperialist solidarities give rise to a reactionary politics I call the ‘Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights’. Here, anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of culture are recast as victims, and the state is treated as synonymous with the population it rules. Western imperialism, the human rights corpus, and those deploying human rights conceived of as extensions of Western imperialism are recast as the savages. Finally, leftist thinkers, anti-imperialist thought, and the resisting victim state and its constructions of Indigenous culture become the saviors. This politics eclipses local populations’ agency and lived experiences by (1) diminishing the moral weight of both the state’s transgressions and the human rights paradigm, (2) interrupting a sustained focus on the anti-imperialist-branding state’s acts of subjugation, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture as traditional saviourism does (but valorising rather than vilifying it), and (4) adhering to notions of moral complexity which deny or obscure the elements of moral clarity encompassed.

According to a well-known aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon, knowledge is power. But what does it mean for knowledge to be power? This paper addresses the question not by offering a new theory of knowledge, but by examining how, and under what conditions, knowledge places an epistemic subject at an advantage over those who lack it. The account developed here does two things: first, it explicates the widely held intuition that possessing knowledge confers an empowering advantage; second, it explains why, in certain contexts, increased knowledge can paradoxically generate a sense of powerlessness. This account diverges from both causal and practicalist views of the power of knowledge: the former takes power to be a causal consequence of possessing knowledge, while the latter understands knowledge as inherently linked with the ability to perform potentially useful actions. In contrast, I argue that the power of knowledge is best understood as a probabilistic advantage, namely, an increase in the likelihood that an epistemic subject will be more successful in interacting with the outside world.

Positive health outcomes are realized when individuals receive interprofessional care, which also includes collaboration with family and care providers. We used social network analysis to explore interprofessional care networks and experiences of independent, community-dwelling older adults and how they perceive collaboration between different medical and non-medical network members. Twenty-three participants were interviewed and asked to name individuals contributing to their health and well-being (network of care) and position them in a concentric circle to reflect the relative strength of relationships. The average network size was 11. Closest relationships were with spouses, children, and family physicians. Relationship strength with network members was marked by frequency, accessibility, longevity, and impact of interactions. Participants were ardent self-advocates for their care, but reported few apparent episodes of collaboration between network members. Our study highlights that coordinated and collaborative care for independent community-dwelling older adults is lacking and does not routinely engage non-medical network members.

Minimal kinematics identifies likelihood degenerations where the critical points are given by rational formulas. These rest on the Horn uniformization of Kapranov–Huh. We characterize all choices of minimal kinematics on the moduli space $\mathcal{M}_{0,n}$. These choices are motivated by the CHY model in physics and they are represented combinatorially by 2-trees. We compute 2-tree amplitudes, and we explore extensions to non-planar on-shell diagrams, here identified with the hypertrees of Castravet–Tevelev.