A finite-time adaptive composite integral sliding mode control strategy based on a fast finite-time observer is proposed for trajectory tracking of the Stewart parallel robot, considering unmodeled uncertainties and external disturbances. First, a global finite-time converging sliding mode surface composed of intermediate variables and integral terms is established to eliminate steady-state tracking errors. Next, a fast finite-time extended state observer is designed to compensate for uncertainties and external disturbances, improving the robustness of the control system. Finally, based on this, a finite-time sliding mode control rate is designed. The gain value is adjusted through an adaptive reaching law to reduce sliding mode chattering, and global finite-time convergence of the system is theoretically proven using Lyapunov theory. Experimental verification shows that the proposed control strategy has stronger robustness to uncertainties and external disturbances, faster error convergence, less chattering, and higher stability accuracy.

The archives of the London Corn Trade Association shed light on how open competitive commodity markets expanded during the First Global Era in spite of hard, non-cooperative geopolitics. This private body, fully controlled by elite merchants, standardised supply, turning grains into fungible commodities; it arbitrated disputes; and it offered to traders standard contracts that integrated the international value chains. Enforcement rested on market power: few merchant houses in the world dared being expelled from the London market. Private rules and contracts thus applied extra-territorially, without being much affected by the political regimes on the ground. But they were also upheld by the London courts and the Bank of England, so that they were both local and global, therefore imperial. Market power, private ordering, and legal pluralism should be seen as a defining feature of Britain’s global economic governance.

This study examines how to counter the legalization of proceeds from illicit drug trafficking in the context of Kazakhstan’s digitalizing economy. It analyses industry reports and applies Walker’s gravity formula and a related conceptual model. Such proceeds account for 2 to 5% of annual gross domestic profit globally, highlighting a serious economic issue. In Kazakhstan, this problem is intensified by the country’s location on major drug trafficking routes and insufficient alignment of its financial sector with international standards for monitoring financial transactions. The risks are worsened by the anonymity and speed of digital tools, which hinder the detection and blocking of suspicious activity. Criminals exploit digital technologies – such as debit cards, peer-to-peer platforms and privacy coins – to launder illicit funds. To combat this, the study recommends using big-data analytics to detect risks, machine learning to respond to them, international cooperation to establish transaction standards, and continuous monitoring to ensure compliance. Implementing these measures will require multi-sectoral reforms and coordinated efforts across public administration.

An effective and just Financial Mechanism will be crucial to the success of the Global Plastic Treaty. The content in the latest Chair’s Text from INC-5.1 on finance (primarily in Article 11) could be strengthened to avoid replicating shortcomings in existing financing models, which have often been insufficient and have not always provided the necessary resources for global sustainable development. Experiences with climate finance mechanisms reveal a pattern of misdesign that needs to be addressed. The current Article 11 reflects the deep divisions evident in the two main proposals tabled at INC-5.1 in November 2024. In the light of past precedents and tensions, we argue that several core design principles related to scope, scale and social and health considerations could ensure that the Global Plastics Treaty’s Financial Mechanism supports just, ambitious and transformative global action on plastic pollution. Furthermore, we argue that several elements in the current treaty text may undermine the design and implementation of an effective and just Financial Mechanism for the future Global Plastics Treaty. These risks include overemphasizing waste management; missing connections between finance and other measures in the treaty; risks of not addressing the most effective responses; not adequately addressing plastic leakage, releases and emissions; sustaining financial investments in techno-economic lock-ins lacking sufficient safety and sustainability criteria, standards and monitoring requirements and the prospect of plastic credits, which risks repeating past false solutions. There is an opportunity for the treaty to overcome these challenges with a financial mechanism that addresses overproduction and incentivizes safer, more sustainable, accessible and cost-effective upstream solutions.

Excessive car ownership in cities has led to issues including congestion, air pollution and resource consumption. This paper investigates the impact of rail transit openings on automobile purchases in China based on detailed car sales data during 2013–2015 and using two-way fixed effects panel models. Our study reveals an average decrease of 2.27 per cent in car sales due to rail transit openings. Further analyses of cars with different fuel economy reveal stronger effects on fuel-efficient cars, indicating larger substitution elasticity between public transportation and driving for people with less income. Results also show the negative impact of rail transit openings is larger in cities with more developed economies, higher public revenue, larger population, bigger area and fewer buses. The decline in car sales translates into savings of 7.9 billion liters of gasoline and a reduction of about 20.3 million tons in life-cycle carbon emissions.

To date, Article 2 TEU has mainly been construed as a negative obligation to refrain from violating the values enshrined therein. In light of the Repubblika case law, which established a duty to prevent any regression in the protection of Article 2 TEU values, this paper considers whether Article 2 TEU can be construed in such a way as to bring about a positive obligation on the part of the Member States to take preventive action to safeguard the EU’s foundational values and thus prevent (or at least mitigate the risk of) violations of those values. We first consider the doctrinal and normative bases for such an obligation. We then argue that such an obligation arises whenever Article 2 TEU values are presently under threat (or when a threat is imminent), and when such a threat is sufficiently grave or systemic. We believe that an interpretation of Article 2 TEU that requires Member States to act, at source, to prevent national actors from committing violations of EU values, contributes to enhancing constitutional resilience in the EU. Consequently, we propose a novel legal approach that could, under certain circumstances, better equip the EU to address future threats to Article 2 TEU.

People who experience mental ill-health are typically more disadvantaged across a range of social and economic domains compared with the general population. This disadvantage is further heightened for people from marginalised communities. Social and economic adversities can limit both the access to, and effectiveness of, interventions for mental ill-health; however, these challenges are often overlooked by mental health services. Therefore, adequate support for social needs is urgently required, particularly for those from marginalised and vulnerable groups. We conducted a PRISMA-compliant systematic review of three academic databases to identify social and/or economic interventions which were adapted or developed bespoke for people from marginalised or minoritised communities living with mental ill-health. All records were screened blind by two reviewers; quality appraisal was conducted with the Kmet tool. Seventy-eight papers were included, deriving mostly from high-income countries. The identified interventions targeted nine sociodemographic or socioeconomic groups including: people experiencing homelessness or unstable housing (n = 50), people with an offending history (n = 9), mothers (n = 6), people experiencing economic disadvantage (n = 3), older adults (n = 3), caregivers (n = 2), minority ethnic groups (n = 2), women with experience of intimate partner violence (n = 1), and people with comorbid intellectual disabilities (n = 1). All identified interventions demonstrated feasibility, acceptability, or effectiveness on at least one social and/or economic outcome measure, suggesting that targeted intervention can help to address social and economic needs and reduce systemic inequalities in mental health care. However, the evidence base is still sparse, and further replication is warranted to inform commissioners and policy makers.

A COVID-19 pandemic gown conservation strategy for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) asymptomatically colonized patients caused no significant difference in healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) bacteremia, healthcare-associated VRE (HA-VRE) bacteremia, or healthcare-associated Clostridioides difficile infections (HA-CDI) versus prepandemic contact precautions (CP). Postpandemic HA-VRE and HA-CDI rates mirrored national trends.

Comparative legal literature increasingly stresses the fundamental importance of informal norms that underpin democratic and constitutional governance. A particular species of these informal norms is the constitutional convention. Although there is wide recognition of the fact that populism constitutes a key issue of constitutional resilience in our time, the issue of constitutional resilience with regard to the relationship between populist political style and constitutional conventions has been largely overlooked. This article maps the extent to which populism threatens constitutional resilience in democratic systems which rely substantively on constitutional conventions. Bringing together political science and legal theory, we engage in a conceptual analysis of conventions and of populism as a political style. In doing so we seek to explain the perceived tension between the two phenomena. We argue that populism should be conceived as a transgressive political style, which is fundamentally hostile to the notion of unwritten constitutional law or practice. In view of the crucial connection between constitutional conventions and the resilience of the constitutional system, and the vulnerability of conventions as norms of self-restraint (lacking independent enforcement mechanisms), we conclude that the populist political style indeed constitutes a problem of constitutional resilience.

We focus on the existence of ground state solutions to the following class of elliptic equations

\begin{equation*}-\Delta_{\mathbb{B}^N} u+V(x)u=f(u) \quad \hbox{in} \quad \mathbb{B}^N,\end{equation*}

where $\mathbb{B}^N$ is the disc model of the Hyperbolic space and $\Delta_{\mathbb{B}^N}$ denotes the Laplace–Beltrami operator with $N \geq 2$, $V:\mathbb{B}^N \to \mathbb{R}$ and $f:\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ are continuous functions that satisfy some technical conditions. With different types of the potential V, by introducing some new tricks handling the hurdle that the Hyperbolic space is not a compact manifold, we are able to obtain at least a positive ground state solution using variational methods.

As some applications for the methods adopted above, we derive the existence of normalized solutions to the elliptic problems

\begin{equation*}\left\{\begin{aligned}&-\Delta_{\mathbb{B}^N} u+V(x)u=\mu u+f(u) \quad \hbox{in} \quad \mathbb{B}^N,\\&\int_{\mathbb{B}^N}|u|^{2}\,dV_{{\mathbb{B}^N}}=a^{2},\end{aligned}\right.\end{equation*}

where a > 0, $\mu\in \mathbb{R}$ is an unknown parameter that appears as a Lagrange multiplier and f is a continuous function that fulfils the L2-subcritical or L2-supercritical growth. We do believe that it seems the first results to deal with normalized solutions for the Schrödinger equations in the Hyperbolic space.

Despite recent advances in the scholarship of history and architectural history, the practice of urban slavery is distinctly understudied in North American archaeology in contrast to plantation archaeologies. This is due largely to the fundamental challenge of investigating urban households, where many individuals of differing social and economic status (free and unfree, Black and white) occupy the same limited space and dispose of their refuse in shared locations, thereby contributing to a highly mixed archaeological record that is difficult—if not impossible—to parse. However, when the researcher pivots to imagining individual entanglements within a shared material world, new interpretations emerge in the noise and dissonance of urban life. This article considers the narratives of three enslaved individuals (two men and one woman) who lived and labored at 87 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, during the eighteenth century. Although this is an illuminating approach, traversing archival (archaeological) silences and highlighting individual lives and worlds in the archaeological record demands considerable interpretive caution and care.

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that distributes model training to multiple clients while allowing clients to keep their data local. Although the technique allows one to break free from data silos keeping data local, to coordinate such distributed training, it requires an orchestrator, usually a central server. Consequently, organisational issues of governance might arise and hinder its adoption in both competitive and collaborative markets for data. In particular, the question of how to govern FL applications is recurring for practitioners. This research commentary addresses this important issue by inductively proposing a layered decision framework to derive organisational archetypes for FL’s governance. The inductive approach is based on an expert workshop and post-workshop interviews with specialists and practitioners, as well as the consideration of real-world applications. Our proposed framework assumes decision-making occurs within a black box that contains three formal layers: data market, infrastructure, and ownership. Our framework allows us to map organisational archetypes ex-ante. We identify two key archetypes: consortia for collaborative markets and in-house deployment for competitive settings. We conclude by providing managerial implications and proposing research directions that are especially relevant to interdisciplinary and cross-sectional disciplines, including organisational and administrative science, information systems research, and engineering.

Increasing recognition of the diverse benefits of human-animal interactions (HAIs) has propelled related studies. Although most of the benefits have been illustrated by academic literature (e.g. journal articles, academic theses, and project reports), the grey literature contributes to a comprehensive understanding of HAIs and offers new perspectives, informing prospective research, practices, and policies. Adapting the Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach, this rapid review examined 151 articles covering HAIs from 2016–2022. The univariate analysis results revealed that the sources covered various animal species (e.g. dogs, cats, birds), types of animals (e.g. companion animals, therapy animals, zoo animals), and vulnerable populations (e.g. older adults, people with disabilities). HAIs could be found across different settings, such as households, schools, healthcare facilities, and more. The thematic analysis identified three primary categories associated with HAIs’ benefits in public education: (1) HAIs benefit the well-being of individuals, families, and animals; (2) HAIs promote prosocial behaviours and community development; and (3) HAIs improve disaster preparedness and response. The results highlight the multifaceted positive influences of HAIs on human well-being, animal welfare, and building healthy and resilient communities. Grey literature plays an essential role in knowledge mobilisation through public education, promoting the interconnectedness between human well-being and animal welfare.

Dmitri Gallow has recently proposed an ingenious accuracy-first vindication that our credence should be updated in accordance with conditionalization. This paper extends his idea to cases where we undergo only a partial learning experience. In particular, I attempt to vindicate, in the spirit of accuracy-first epistemology, that when we undergo what is called ‘Jeffrey partial learning’ in this paper, our credences should be updated in accordance with Jeffrey conditionalization, or at the very least, the update should be rigid. In doing so, I propose what I call the ‘Jeffrey-accuracy function.’ This function is not strictly proper and, at first glance, seems to rationalize ill-motivated credence updating. However, this turns out not to be the case.

Direct numerical simulations are carried out to investigate the underlying mechanism of the low-frequency unsteadiness of a transitional shock reflection with separation at $M=1.5$. To clarify the nonlinear mechanisms, the incoming laminar boundary layer is forced with two different arrangements of oblique unstable modes. Each wave arrangement is given by a combination of two unstable waves such that their difference in frequency falls in a low-frequency range corresponding to a Strouhal number (based on the length of interaction) of 0.04. This deterministic forcing allows the introduction of nonlinearities, and high-order statistical tools are used to identify the properties of quadratic couplings. It is found that the low-frequency unsteadiness and the transition to turbulence are decoupled problems. On the one hand, the unstable modes of the boundary layer interact nonlinearly such that energy cascades to higher frequencies, initiating the turbulent cascade process, and to lower frequencies. On the other hand, the low-frequency quadratic coupling of the oblique modes is found to be responsible for low-frequency unsteadiness affecting the separation point. The direction of the quadratic interactions is extracted and it is shown that, in the presence of low-frequency unsteadiness, these interactions enter the separated zone just before reattachment and travel both downstream and upstream, extending beyond the separation point, hence feeding the low-frequency bubble response. In addition to the two main arrangements of oblique modes, two other combinations are analysed, including multiple oblique waves and streaks. Interestingly, their inclusion did not alter the low-frequency unsteadiness phenomenon. Furthermore, the effect of the forcing difference frequency is examined and it is shown that the breathing phenomenon is sensitive to the range of frequencies present in the system due to a low-pass filter effect.