Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 policymakers, experts and scholars, this paper employs a principal-agent framework to analyse China’s carbon market governance. The findings reveal that institutional misalignment between central and local priorities undermines market efficacy. While mechanisms like the Target Responsibility System (TRS) and environmental inspections aim to enforce compliance, fragmented incentives and passive central supervision exacerbate policy incoherence. Owing to competing mandates, local governments prioritize short-term GDP growth over the development of the carbon market, thereby relegating emissions trading to a peripheral status. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) dominate market participation, fulfilling compliance through political alignment but distorting price signals and marginalizing private actors. China’s hybrid governance model, which combines top-down controls with decentralized experimentation, generates systemic contradictions where weak enforcement, ritualistic compliance and data opacity persist as the dominance of SOEs colludes with local developmentalism to weaken carbon pricing. Overall, carbon market governance mechanisms have paradoxically incentivized regulated entities to prioritize developmental goals over improving carbon market infrastructure.

With increasing age, many elderly individuals will not be able to stand normally. To solve this problem, a knee exoskeleton is designed. The knee joint is designed as a variable stiffness structure. It can adjust its stiffness according to the body’s movement state, ensuring precise assistance while also enhancing human comfort. The variable stiffness mechanism consists of an elastic output actuator and a stiffness-adjusting actuator. The elastic output actuator is mainly responsible for the output of the joint torque. The stiffness-adjusting actuator is mainly responsible for adjusting the joint stiffness. These two mechanisms are analysed separately. Based on their relationship with the whole mechanism, a stiffness model of the entire knee joint is established. Experiments are subsequently conducted to evaluate the variable stiffness joint. The stiffness identification experiment indicates that the actual stiffness of the whole knee joint is essentially consistent with the theoretical value. The trajectory tracking experiment demonstrates that the joint exhibits excellent trajectory tracking capability, although stiffness has a certain effect. The exoskeleton assistive effect experiment demonstrates the ability of the exoskeleton to assist in standing. Additionally, the experiment on subjects with exoskeletons of different stiffnesses determines the impact of stiffness on human comfort.

Epistemic injustice theorists have proposed various strategies for resisting oppressive knowledge structures, with José Medina’s concept of epistemic friction and the principle of acknowledgement and engagement standing as a central model. However, this paper argues that such strategies can unintentionally impose epistemic and emotional burdens on the very subjects they aim to empower. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of undertaking qualitative empirical research into epistemic injustice, particularly resistance. Drawing on original qualitative interviews with LGBTQIA+ individuals, allies, and parents of transgender children, I identify the burden that is often placed on them to be educators of their own sexuality and/or identity. I also offer alternative suggestions for resistance, including redistributing the labour of education to allies and creating a space for indirect engagement via entertainment and social media. This paper integrates empirical research with normative theory to expose how resistance efforts can reproduce structural inequalities – and how they might be transformed.

The ICH E9(R1) addendum provides guidelines on accounting for intercurrent events in clinical trials using the estimands framework. However, there has been limited attention to the estimands framework for meta-analysis. Using treatment switching, a well-known intercurrent event that occurs frequently in oncology, we conducted a simulation study to explore the bias introduced by pooling together estimates targeting different estimands in a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) that allowed treatment switching. We simulated overall survival data of a collection of RCTs that allowed patients in the control group to switch to the intervention treatment after disease progression under fixed effects and random effects models. For each RCT, we calculated effect estimates for a treatment policy estimand that ignored treatment switching, and a hypothetical estimand that accounted for treatment switching either by fitting rank-preserving structural failure time models or by censoring switchers. Then, we performed random effects and fixed effects meta-analyses to pool together RCT effect estimates while varying the proportions of trials providing treatment policy and hypothetical effect estimates. We compared the results of meta-analyses that pooled different types of effect estimates with those that pooled only treatment policy or hypothetical estimates. We found that pooling estimates targeting different estimands results in pooled estimators that do not target any estimand of interest, and that pooling estimates of varying estimands can generate misleading results, even under a random effects model. Adopting the estimands framework for meta-analysis may improve alignment between meta-analytic results and the clinical research question of interest.

This article reflects on the emergence of volumetric capture as a means to render human experience in three dimensions and how its applications in medicine, performance, and digital archiving are reshaping our relationship to documentation and embodiment. From 360-degree imagery to the advanced rendering techniques of Gaussian Splatting, these tools raise questions about the ethics of visualisation and the power to represent. This article draws on the work of scholars such as Taylor, Schneider, Kenderdine, Holling, and DeNora to challenge the notion of archives as neutral or static repositories and asks: in an age where our movements can be stored and repurposed, how do we navigate the tension between visibility and consent, between preservation and autonomy?

How have preventive and curative medical breakthroughs shaped life expectancy and the dispersion of age at death in the United States over the past century? We address this question by developing a life-cycle model in which both health and lifespan are endogenous. The model distinguishes between preventive innovations, which reduce the incidence of disease, and curative advances, which lower mortality risks associated with existing health conditions. Our quantitative analysis shows that while both types of medical innovation have contributed to increased life expectancy since 1935, curative advances have been the primary driver of the decline in the dispersion of age at death. Medical innovations have also improved welfare – measured in terms of a consumption-equivalent metric – by an average of 0.11% per year, with curative advances representing the most significant contribution. These findings are robust across different scenarios and parametrization strategies.