How do state actors interpret and share information? Theories of the state have long recognized the role of legibility – the modes and practices by which states render society and nature knowable through intervention and information collection – in constructing and maintaining state power. Yet, research has only begun to explore the processes by which information is created and diffused within state administrations. Drawing upon theories of agency relations in states, this article explores how administrators’ communicative practices shape knowledge and legibility. Through examining memos, legislative studies, and draft legislation for decrees recognizing water rights in the French Protectorate in Morocco, I identify a set of common patterns in the construction of bureaucratic information as it moves from street-level administrators to central officials. In analyzing these patterns, I demonstrate how administrators’ obligations and their understandings of the state’s political projects determined not only how French officials collected information, but what they communicated to others. As information moved across administrative levels, officials iteratively changed information. Joining critiques and extensions of legibility theory that emphasize the role of non-state actors in the construction of state knowledge, I argue that we must also attend to intra-state dynamics. In tracing communication and information, I demonstrate that information is iteratively constructed by state agents according to their administrative position and transformed by its particular bureaucratic routes. Modeling legibility and the development of state knowledge requires attending to administrators’ agency, their relationships with each other, and their understanding of the state’s goals.

Although women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science and psychology (i.e., leadership studies) is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. This research often relies on a reference group to develop leaders’ profiles in comparison to other elites. They are predominantly populated, however, with male leaders. This article suggests a remedy and introduces a women leaders reference group for operational code analysis, which is a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics. We gathered American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, we developed a norming group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. Whereas our findings indicate noticeable differences and suggest similarities with existing reference groups, we aspire to initiate a conversation and hope that more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. This reference group can serve as a crucial tool in providing contextualized political-personality profiles of American women leaders and also provide an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States (and beyond).

Fourier analysis is the standard tool of choice for quantifying the distribution of kinetic energy amongst the eddies in a turbulent flow. The resulting spectral energy-density function is the well-known energy spectrum. And yet, because eddies are distinct from waves, alternative approaches to finding energy-density functions have long been sought. Townsend (1976) outlined a promising approach to finding a spatial energy-density function, $V\!(r)$, where $r$ is the eddy size. Notably, this approach led to two distinct and mutually inconsistent formulations of $V\!(r)$ in homogeneous, isotropic turbulence. We revisit Townsend’s proposal and derive the corresponding three-dimensional $V\!(r)$ as well as introduce its one-dimensional variants (which, to our knowledge, have not been explicitly discussed before). By training our focus on the associated dimensionality of the function, we resolve the discrepancies between the previous formulations. Additionally, we generalise our analysis to include anisotropic flows. Finally, by means of concrete examples, we illustrate how one-dimensional spatial energy-density functions are useful for analysing empirical data. Some notable findings include new insights into the $k_1^{-1}$ scaling (where $k_1$ is the streamwise wavenumber) and a possible resolution of the enigmatic sizes of organised motions at large scales.

This article proposes the creation of constituency juries to enhance accountability and check oligarchy in representative governments. Constituency juries would be made up of randomly selected citizens from an electoral constituency who exercise oversight over that constituency’s elected representative. Elected representatives would be required to give a regular account of their actions to the constituency jury, and the jury would have the power to sanction the representative. In addition to this general model of constituency juries, I offer a more specific institutional design that shows how the general model can be operationalized and realistically incorporated into existing representative governments. In contrast to lottocratic proposals that replace elections with sortition, constituency juries are a promising way to combine the two to address the oligarchic tendencies of elections in representative government.

Shock interactions on a V-shaped blunt leading edge (VBLE) that are commonly encountered at the cowl lip of an inward-turning inlet are investigated at freestream Mach numbers ($ M_\infty$) 3–6. The swept blunt leading edges of the VBLE generate a pair of detached shocks with varying shapes due to the changes in $ M_\infty$ and $L/r$ (i.e. the ratio of the leading-edge length $L$ to the leading-edge blunt radius $r$), which causes intriguing shock interactions at the crotch of the VBLE. Three subtypes of regular reflection (RR) and a Mach reflection (MR) are produced successively with increasing $ M_\infty$ for a given $L/r$, which appear in the opposite order to those with increasing $L/r$ for a given $ M_\infty$. These shock interactions identified in numerical simulations are verified in supersonic and hypersonic wind tunnel experiments. It is demonstrated that the relative position of the shocks is crucial in determining the transitions of shock interactions by varying either $L/r$ or $ M_\infty$. Transition criteria between subtypes of RR and from RR to MR are theoretically established in the parameter space $(M_\infty,L/r)$ by analysing the shock structures, showing good agreement with the numerical and experimental results. Interactions between either immature or fully developed detached shocks are embedded in these criteria. Specifically, the transition criteria asymptotically approach the corresponding critical $ M_\infty$ when $L/r$ is sufficiently large. These transition criteria provide guidelines for improving the design of the cowl lip of an inward-turning inlet in supersonic and hypersonic regimes.

Experiments were performed that (i) document the effect of the steady spanwise buffer layer blowing on the mean characteristics of the turbulent boundary layer for a range of momentum thickness Reynolds numbers from 4760 to 10 386, and (ii) document the effect of the buffer layer blowing on the unsteady characteristics and coherent vorticity in a boundary layer designed to provide sufficiently high spatial resolution. The spanwise buffer layer blowing of the order of $u_{\tau }$ is produced by a surface array of pulsating direct current (pulsed-DC) plasma actuators. This was found to substantially reduce the wall shear stress that was directly measured with a floating element coupled with a force sensor. The direct wall shear measurements agreed with values derived using the Clauser method to within $\pm 0.85$ %. The degree to which the buffer layer blowing affected $\tau _w$ was found to primarily depend on the inner variable spanwise spacing between the pulsed-DC actuator electrodes, i.e. ‘blowing sites’. Utilizing pairs of $[u,v]$ and $[u,w]$ hot-wire sensors, the latter experiments correlated significant reductions in the $\omega _y$ and $\omega _x$ vorticity components that resulted from the buffer layer blowing and translated into lower Reynolds stresses and turbulence production. The time scale to which these observed changes in the boundary layer characteristics would return to the baseline condition was subsequently documented. This revealed a recovery length of $x^+ \approx 86\,000$ that translated to a streamwise fetch of $x \approx 66\delta$. Finally, a comparison with the recent work by Cheng et al. (2021, J. Fluid Mech. vol. 918, A24) and Wei & Zhou (2024 in TSFP13, June 25–28, 2024) that followed our experimental approach to achieve comparable wall shear stress (drag) reductions has led to a new scaling based on the baseline boundary layer $\textit{Re}_{\tau }$ and buffer layer blowing velocity.

Democracy requires responsiveness. While empirical responsiveness research tends to focus on opinion polls, there are other ways elites listen to public opinion. Therefore, we need to examine those forms of public opinion that elites see and hear. This is explored through a dataset of letters to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, coded consistent with the Comparative Agendas Project. I find evidence of deliberate, systemic non-responsiveness in the political agenda (measured by the topics of Mr Howard’s speeches) to the volume of letters. Mr Howard knowingly, deliberately ignored this public opinion. There are, however, indications that the topics of the letters are responding to government announcements. The findings highlight the selective nature of elite engagement with public opinion. The study contributes to understanding political agenda-setting, representation and the institutional conditions under which public input is ignored. These results have implications for theories of representation and responsiveness in policymaking.

Securitization scholars in Canada have investigated how settler-colonial governments discursively construct extractive infrastructure and policing on Indigenous lands as “critical” for Canada’s economic security. Less literature exists about how Indigenous activists through provincial institutions counter colonial securitization discourse and legislation. This article interrogates discourse in the Manitoba Legislature pertaining to three “critical infrastructure” bills presented by the PC government during the fall 2020 and winter 2021 sessions: Protection of Critical Infrastructure Act (Bill 57), Animal Diseases Amendment Act (Bill 62), and The Petty Trespassers Amendment and Occupiers’ Liability Amendment Act (Bill 63). The study combines an analysis of the bills’ debates, drawn from Hansard, with an interview with then-official opposition house leader, Nahanni Fontaine, to explore the interactions between securitization and counter-securitization discourse(s) and defeat of Bill 57. The study hypothesizes that Indigenous MLAs’ counter-securitization discourse reconstructed the bills as attacks on Indigenous ontological, environmental, and physical security.

Economic policy and research rely on the accurate measurement of welfare. In nearly all instances, measuring welfare requires collecting data via long household surveys. If survey response patterns change over the course of a survey to introduce measurement error, this measurement error can be either classical (i.e., changing distributions, leading to noise) or non-classical (i.e., changing expectations, leading to bias). We embed an experiment in a survey by randomly assigning a questionnaire with either the assets module near the beginning of the survey or the assets module at the end of the survey, delaying enumeration of assets by about 60 minutes. We find no evidence in the full sample that survey ordering introduces differential response patterns, either in the number of reported assets or the reported value of those assets. In exploratory analysis of heterogeneity, we find evidence of non-classical measurement error due to survey ordering within sub-samples of respondents who (i) are from larger households or (ii) have low levels of education. Our experimental design can be generalized to serve as an ex-post test of data quality with respect to questionnaire length.

Data-driven neural word embeddings (NWEs), grounded in distributional semantics, can capture various ranges of linguistic regularities, which can be further enriched by incorporating structured knowledge resources. This work proposes a novel post-processing approach for injecting semantic relationships into the vector space of both static and contextualized NWEs. Current solutions to retrofitting (RF) word embeddings often oversimplify the integration of semantic knowledge, neglecting the nuanced differences between relationships, which may result in suboptimal performance. Instead of applying multi-thresholding to distance boundaries in metric learning, we compute taxonomic similarity to dynamically adjust these boundaries during the semantic specialization of word embeddings. Benchmark evaluations on both static and contextualized word embeddings demonstrate that our dynamic-fitting (DF) approach produces SOTA correlation results of 0.78 and 0.76 on SimLex-999 and SimVerb-3500, respectively, highlighting the effectiveness of incorporating multiple semantic relationships in refining vector semantics. Our approach also outperforms existing RF methods in both supervised and unsupervised semantic relationships recognition tasks. It achieves top accuracy scores for hypernymy detection on the BLESS, WBLESS, and BIBLESS datasets (0.97, 0.89, and 0.83, respectively) and an F1 score of over 0.60 on four types of semantic relationship classification in the shared Subtask-2 of CogALex-V, surpassing all participant systems. In the analogy reasoning task of the Bigger Analogy Test Set, our approach outperforms existing RF methods on inferring relational similarity. These consistent improvements across various lexical semantics tasks suggest that our DF approach can effectively integrate distributional semantics with symbolic knowledge resources, thereby enhancing the representation capacity of word embeddings in downstream applications.

Despite worldwide uptake, there has been little published evaluation of actually delivering the World Health Organization (WHO) Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) in typical low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This paper aims to evaluate the impact of a pilot study in which mhGAP guidelines for mental health sensitisation of community leaders were implemented in 1-day training events across 25 urban and rural health facilities (n = 1004 community leaders) in Uganda. A multiple choice mental health questionnaire was used to assess the community leaders’ mental health knowledge before and after completing the training. Training was evaluated across multiple sites and qualitative feedback comments were used to identify key themes on the impact of the training. The sensitisation training was found to be affordable, accessible and effective, and could be replicated in other LMICs and settings with local adaptations.

The Taylor–Melcher leaky dielectric (LD) model is often used to study the physics of electrosprays operating in the cone-jet mode. Despite its success, there are electrospraying conditions in which the ion concentration fields must be retained, which requires an electrokinetic model. This article reproduces cone-jets with two electrokinetic formulations: the standard Poisson–Nernst–Planck (PNP) equations, and a modified electrokinetic (MEK) model that accounts for overscreening and overcrowding of electrolytes, which is important in fluids with high electrical conductivities such as ionic liquids (Kilic et al. 2007 Phys. Rev. E vol. 75, no. 2, 021502, 021503; Bazant et al. 2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 106, no. 4, 46102). In the case of liquids with low electrical conductivities, it is observed that the LD and PNP models agree under certain limiting conditions, but they are less restrictive than previously proposed (Baygents & Saville 1990 AIP Conf. Proc. vol. 197, 7–17; Schnitzer & Yariv 2015 Fluid Mech. vol. 773, 1–33); the effects of dissimilar ion diffusivities are also investigated. In the case of liquids with high electrical conductivities, in particular ionic liquids, overscreening and overcrowding effects are important, resulting in significant differences between the solutions of the PNP, MEK and LD models. In particular, the electrokinetic models yield increased dissipation and self-heating, leading to higher temperature variations and currents, in agreement with measurements. Furthermore, the MEK formulation describes the ion concentration fields with higher fidelity than the PNP equations.