This paper examines the performance of smallholder crop farmers across different land ownership categories in Ghana. Using a metafrontier model, the study estimates technical efficiencies and productivity levels among farmers with formal land deeds, those without deeds, and non-landowners. The results show that land, labor, and capital significantly impact crop production across ownership categories, while social capital, income, and demographics influence managerial performance. Farmers with formal land deeds and those cultivating family-owned land exhibited superior production technologies. Enhancing access to extension services, credit, and farmer-based organizations, alongside collaboration with traditional chiefs and family heads, can improve land tenure security and productivity.

In this essay, “Writing Gone Wao,” I begin by reiterating my own sense of the book’s (Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, Duke UP, 2022) priorities. I then turn to the probing and generous responses by Glenda Carpio, Mónica González García, Gerald Torres, Marina De Chiara, and Ato Quayson to my work. I conclude by examining Díaz’s recent writings published after my book appeared, including his complex, erudite Substack series “StoryWorlds with Junot Díaz,” and his short story, “The Ghosts of Gloria Lara” (The New Yorker, 2023), where he explores dramatic issues of decolonial love and the political unconscious.

Let $N \ge 1$, $k \ge 2$ even, and $\sigma$ denote a sign pattern for N. In this paper, we first determine the exact proportion of forms in $S_k(N)$ and $S_k^{\mathrm{new}}(N)$ with a given Atkin–Lehner sign pattern $\sigma$. Then we study the asymptotic behaviour of the Hecke operators $T_p$ over the subspaces of $S_k(N)$ and $S_k^{{\mathrm{new}}}(N)$ with Atkin–Lehner sign pattern $\sigma$. In particular, for the p-adic Plancherel measure $\mu_p$, we show that the Hecke eigenvalues for $T_p$ over these subspaces are $\mu_p$-equidistributed as $N+k \to \infty$.

Comparing the coverage by The New York Times and two Black newspapers of four episodes of protests about police violence in New York in the late 1990s reveals key differences in the implicit political agendas of the two sources. The New York Times implicitly reinforced dominant political institutions and focused on short-term issues. It emphasized partisan politics as protest motivations, quoted police extensively and often printed material sympathetic to police, and typically portrayed protesters as angry or motivated by politics. Black newspapers emphasized collective resistance to long-term systemic problems with police, moral condemnation of police violence, the connection of current protests with past oppression and struggles, the involvement of youth, and Black immigrants’ growing awareness of anti-Blackness. The findings of this study explain how racialized collective memories and collective identities are formed, sustained, and/or erased in interaction with institutional politics in media discourse.

This paper presents a novel self-octuplexing substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity-backed slot antenna for eight-band wireless communication services. This antenna employs eight semi-elliptical-shaped slots on an octagonal SIW cavity with different lengths to radiate at eight different frequencies. The eight radiating frequencies are 2.7, 3, 3.3, 3.6, 3.9, 4.2, 4.5, and 4.72 GHz, with impedance matching is less than −10 dB. Each radiator is backed by an eighth-mode SIW cavity and excited by a 50 Ω microstrip line. A designed prototype of the antenna is fabricated and tested. It has more than 34 dB measured isolation among any two ports. The maximum measured antenna gains are 4.4, 4.19, 4.11, 4.03, 4.19, 4.28, 5.2, and 5.44 dBi at the respective operating frequencies. It has a measured cross-polarization level of below −24.2 dB in the boresight direction and a front-to-back ratio of more than 10.4 dB in all the bands. All the slots can be tuned independently to radiate at the desired frequency band. This antenna can easily be integrated with other planar circuits due to an unperturbed ground plane.

If change is the only constant, how does the law keep pace with technology? Without a centralized judiciary, international law should be especially susceptible to disruption, yet it can be remarkably resilient in practice. I argue that efforts to minimize legal ambiguity, long seen as integral to compliance, can hinder its application to new technologies. Drawing on first principles from psycholinguistics, my theory differentiates between what I call convergent and divergent forms of flexibility. Unlike divergent flexibility, which gives rise to contestation, convergent flexibility tends to promote consensus, even when (1) technology is unprecedented and (2) regulatory interests sharply diverge. To test the theory, $450$ trained legal professionals were commissioned to take part in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that varied technological novelty, legal precision, and political incentives. Participants collectively contributed 280,000 words over 10,000 hours in defense of their professional legal opinions, offering a novel (agent-subjective) measure of compliance. To establish external validity, the experiment is complemented with research into the legal impact of two breakthrough chemical weapons technologies: “super tear gas” and novichok. The findings contribute a general theoretical framework for understanding when and why emerging technologies are legally disruptive.