Gestational weight gain (GWG) can be defined as the total weight gained throughout pregnancy and is required for healthy foetal growth, however gaining excessive weight during pregnancy has been linked with several adverse effects. This review aims to consider the evidence on weight management during pregnancy, with a focus on the key challenges surrounding GWG and the practical considerations related to assessing weight changes. It is estimated that nearly 50% of women gain excessive weight during pregnancy, nevertheless this can be difficult to quantify due to the lack of global consensus on recommended GWG guidelines. Currently there are no GWG guidelines in the UK and Ireland, as reiterated in the recent NICE guidelines, due to the lack of evidence about what the optimal total weight change in pregnancy should be. This is further complicated by the conflicting results of interventions aimed at preventing excessive GWG and their resultant inconsistent effects on adverse pregnancy outcomes. Accurate calculation of GWG requires measurement of pre-pregnancy weight and weight prior to the onset of labour. However, several practical considerations are associated with obtaining these weights, as in practice, estimated or self-recalled weights are often used as an alternate, thereby introducing variability into the measurement of GWG and the potential for inaccuracies in analysis. These limitations highlight the need for a more uniform approach in assessing GWG. The World Health Organisation are in the process of developing global GWG standards, this could potentially establish a uniform gold standard for assessing GWG and reintroduce routine weighing.

The modern business corporation emerged from the medieval and chartered corporations. The medieval tradition of legal pluralism was replaced by two ‘pure’ disciplines – Law and Economics – that left no conceptual space to understand its hybrid nature, decentralizing law-making and centralizing market transactions, or to frame its person-thing duality. Under intellectual monopoly capitalism, this hybrid nature has degenerated: corporations have monopolized knowledge, outsourced production to dependent peripheral firms, and become deeply intertwined with financial markets and geopolitical rivalries – lending substance to notions of techno-feudalism, while marking a profound break with the medieval tradition of open science that first made competitive markets possible.

Despite his support for the creation of the West Indies Federation in the late 1950s, the anticolonial activist and political thinker CLR James expressed severe reservations regarding the process that led to its creation. While his criticisms are brief, this paper reconstructs a Jamesian critique of the plebiscite as a means of anticolonial self-determination. Situating his discussion of the plebiscite in the broader arc of his political thought from the 1930s to the 1960s, I identify three lines of critique that revolve around broad questions of mass leadership and the reproduction of colonial domination. First, drawing on his discussion of the tragic flaw of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership during the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the plebiscite enabled popular leaders to skirt their responsibility to effectively communicate with the revolutionary masses. Second, James feared that the plebiscite fixed the principle of territorial sovereignty in place in advance of the process of decolonization by tethering popular authority to clearly bound territorial constituencies. Third, by giving the people a simple choice between two options, James worried that the plebiscite would undermine radical processes of democratic self-constitution. Against conventional critiques of the plebiscite as a means of consolidating dictatorial power under the guise of vox populi, James reveals how ostensibly popular political forms, such as the plebiscite, undercut the enactment of popular agency in colonial contexts.

This endeavor encompasses establishing a dynamic model for a constrained joint module system in collaborative robots, predicated upon the Udwadia-Kalaba equation and constraint-following methodologies. Additionally, a leakage-type adaptive robust controller is developed to assuage uncertainties and disturbances. The structure of the dynamic model is methodically crafted, accommodating uncertain parameters to delineate the behavioral dynamics of the system. Furthermore, a meticulous derivation of a second-order representation of the constraint equations is undertaken to facilitate precise boundaries of the limitations imposed by the system. The proposed controller demonstrates adeptness in tailoring its strategies to the characteristics of both known and unknown attributes of the system, deftly navigating the intrinsic uncertainties of the system. Systematic simulations and empirical analyses have been performed to authenticate the efficacy of the advocated approach in regulating the joint module system. The research outcomes not only augment comprehension of robust control techniques for joint module systems but also furnish invaluable insights to propel future advancements within this specialized domain.

Vaccine hesitant sentiments are reported among some ethnic and racial minority communities. This study argues that their vaccine hesitancy stems from distrust in the government that marginalizes them. Building on existing studies on ethnicity, health, and political trust, this study offers an original contribution by using causal mediation analyses to provide suggestive evidence of a mediating relationship between ethnic marginalization and vaccination intention and by focusing on African countries. We conduct causal mediation analyses of nationally representative survey data across 14 African countries and find that trust in government mediates the effect of perceived ethnic marginalization on COVID-19 vaccination intention. Perceived marginalization decreases government trust and thus reduces vaccination intention. The findings have implications beyond the pandemic era. A path dependent consequence of marginalization during non-crisis times hinders collective actions during crisis times. Governments must put efforts into combating ethnic marginalization during non-crisis times.