We develop a phenomenological model of strong imbalanced magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence that accounts for intermittency and the reflection of Alfvén waves by spatial variations in the Alfvén speed. Our model predicts the slopes of the inertial-range Elsasser power spectra, the scaling exponents of the higher-order Elsasser structure functions and the way in which the parallel (to the magnetic field) length scale of the fluctuations varies with the perpendicular length scale. These predictions agree reasonably well with measurements of solar-wind turbulence from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP). In contrast to previous models of intermittency in balanced MHD turbulence, we find that intermittency in reflection-driven MHD turbulence increases the parallel wavenumbers of the energetically dominant fluctuations at small perpendicular length scales. This, like the PSP measurements with which our model agrees, suggests that turbulence in the solar wind and solar corona may lead to more ion cyclotron heating than previously realized.

This article classifies individual lexemes in Chinese dialects into four categories: popular, learnèd, colloquial, and literary. Popular and learnèd refer to the origins of a word: whether it has been transmitted orally or learned in an educational context. Colloquial and literary refer to usage. The traditional Chinese terms for distinguishing character readings, wén 文 and bái 白, literally ‘written’ and ‘spoken’, do not correspond neatly to the four categories that are proposed here. This article illustrates the differences between all six terms, mainly by using standard Mandarin and Běijīng dialect, and secondarily by using words from Mĭn and other dialects.

Real-world evidence (RWE) is increasingly used and accepted by health technology assessment (HTA) bodies as supportive evidence to inform the approval of new technologies. However, the criteria driving RWE acceptance are often unclear.

This study aims to improve understanding of the role and value of RWE in HTA decision-making and outline the best practices in building real-world external control arms (ECAs).

A mixed approach of a targeted literature review and HTA expert interviews was applied. The HTA reports of ten selected technologies and the expert interviews from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK informed the criteria driving the acceptance of RWE. Overall, the UK and Spanish HTA bodies are more receptive to accepting RWE, whereas the French and German are the least accepting. When RWE is used to substantiate efficacy claims, the level of scrutiny from regulators and HTA bodies is considerably higher than when RWE has different intended uses. Representativeness of the data source, overall transparency in the study and robust methodologies are the key criteria driving RWE acceptance across markets.

We focus on obtaining Block–Savits type characterizations for different ageing classes as well as some important renewal classes by using the Laplace transform. We also introduce a novel approach, based on the equilibrium distribution, to handle situations where the techniques of Block and Savits (1980) either fail or involve tedious calculations. Our approach in conjunction with the theory of total positivity yields Vinogradov’s (1973) result for the increasing failure rate class when the distribution function is continuous. We also present simple but elegant proofs for Block and Savits’ results for the decreasing mean residual life, new better than used in expectation, and harmonic new better than used in expectation classes as applications of our approach. We address several other related issues that are germane to our problem. Finally, we conclude with a short discussion on the issue of convolutions.

This study investigated how infants deal with cross-talker variability in the perception of native lexical tones, paying specific attention to developmental changes and the role of task demands. Using the habituation-based visual fixation procedures, we tested Cantonese-learning infants of different age groups on their ability to discriminate Cantonese Tone 1 (high level) and Tone 3 (mid level) produced by either multiple talkers or a single talker. Results demonstrated that the 12-month-old and 24-month-old groups showed reliable discrimination across talkers, whereas the 18-month-old group did not (Experiment 1), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast when the talker was held constant (Experiment 2). In a task that included a novel object as a referent to the sound, the 18-month-olds discriminated the contrast across talkers from Tone 1 to Tone 3 (Experiment 3). These results revealed a U-shaped developmental path and perceptual asymmetry in native lexical tone discrimination across talkers.

Most political science studies are, at root, about how people make decisions—how voters choose whether and for whom to vote, how prejudice influences political choices, and the effects of emotions and morals on political choice. However, what people are thinking during these decisions remains obscure; currently utilized methods leave us with a “black box” of decision making. Eye tracking offers a deeper insight into these processes by capturing respondents’ attention, salience, emotion, and understanding. But how applicable is this method to political science questions, and how does one go about using it? Here, we explain what eye tracking allows researchers to measure, how these measures are relevant to political science questions, and how political scientists without expertise in the method can nonetheless use it effectively. In particular, we clarify how researchers can understand the choices made in preset software in order to arrive at correct inferences from their data and discuss new developments in eye tracking methodology, including webcam eye tracking. We additionally provide templates for preregistering eye tracking studies in political science, as well as starter code for processing and analyzing eye tracking data.

Market failure, around credit provision, typically centres on adverse selection and moral hazard. We utilise a Diverse Economies Framework to distinguish between different types of lender (mainstream, alternative, and non-market) and neoclassical economic theory as an analytic framework to introduce three additional forms of market failure – diseconomies of small scale, externalities, and excess demand and oversupply. This suggests market failure in the UK sub-prime consumer credit market is more comprehensive than previously recognised, increases the argument for government intervention and points to four policy responses – public subsidies, patient capital, regulation, and taxation – to complement and supplement market responses. Without support, not-for-profit sub-prime lenders, such as Community Development Finance Institutions, will continue in their struggle to survive, further exposing an already-vulnerable group of borrowers to even greater debt and associated worse health and wellbeing.

Especially as regards Commonwealth restrictions, Ireland's immigration policy has been seen as (surreptitiously) dependent on UK policy. Although the Common Travel Area imposed serious limits, Irish discretion was in fact significant and restrictive. In 1948–9 the United Kingdom secured Ireland's public commitment to extend reciprocal citizenship rights to all the Commonwealth, notwithstanding its secession, but Ireland avoided this vis-à-vis the ‘new’ Commonwealth and left its aliens exemption law deliberately opaque. Whilst broadly mirroring the UK Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Ireland retained apartheid South Africa as partially privileged and only comprehensively exempted British citizens born within the United Kingdom. From 1973, the United Kingdom largely abandoned any privileged treatment but, in entirely removing this in 1975 and selectively imposing visas from 1976, Ireland went beyond even this. These divergences reflected that, compared to the United Kingdom, it had left an increasingly diverse Commonwealth in 1949 and had a stronger homogenous nationalism.

Phonotactic learning has been a fertile ground for research in the field of phonology. However, the challenge of lexical exceptions in phonotactic learning remains largely unexplored. Traditional learning models, which typically assume all observed input data to be grammatical, often blur the distinction between lexical exceptions and grammatical words, consequently skewing the learning results. To address this issue, this article innovates a categorical-grammar-plus-exception-filtering approach that harnesses the discrete nature of categorical grammars to filter out lexical exceptions using statistical criteria adapted from probabilistic models. Applied to naturalistic corpora from English, Polish and Turkish, the learnt grammars showed a high correlation with the acceptability judgements in behavioural experiments. Compared to benchmark models, the model performs increasingly better with data that contain a higher proportion of lexical exceptions, reaching its peak in learning Turkish non-local vowel phonotactics, highlighting its ability to handle lexical exceptions.

The objective of this study was to to describe perinatal outcomes in monochorionic twin pregnancies after selective fetal reduction using bipolar cord coagulation (BCC) or interstitial laser ablation (ILA). This retrospective cohort study included monochorionic twin pregnancies requiring selective fetal reduction between 2008 and 2023 at a referral center in Spain. Maternal and perinatal data were collected and analyzed to compare outcomes between BCC and ILA techniques. The primary outcome was the survival of the co-twin, while secondary outcomes included gestational age at delivery, the incidence of PPROM, birth weight and long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes. Eighty-four procedures were performed (30 ILA, 54 BCC). The overall co-twin survival rate was 80%, with BCC showing a higher survival rate (87%) compared to ILA (67%, p = .026). Fetal death before 24 weeks was more common in ILA (30%) than BCC (7.4%, p = .010). The mean gestational age at delivery was lower in BCC (36.6 weeks) than ILA (38.6 weeks, p = .021), and preterm delivery was more frequent in BCC (50%) compared to ILA (14%, p = .005). BCC seems to have a better overall survival than ILA in complicated monochorionic twins’ selective terminations. However, we could not clarify whether this difference was due to the technique itself or the different gestational age at the time of the procedure as well as the specific indication.

In this paper, we present the design, simulation, fabrication, and measurements of an on-chip dielectric resonator (DR)-fed millimeter-wave high-gain antenna system with in-antenna power combining capability. A low-profile resonant cavity antenna is fed by four spherical DR, showcasing the antenna’s multi-feed capabilities. Each DR is fed by two microstrip resonators located diagonally opposite on a planar circuit board and are excited via coaxial connectors. The design incorporates a printed partially reflecting superstrate, reducing the antenna’s overall size and profile while simultaneously enhancing directivity by approximately $10\,\mathrm{dB}$ at the design frequency of $30\,\mathrm{GHz}$. The antenna exhibits wideband matching. Key performance metrics, such as directivity, gain, beamwidth, and bandwidth, predicted by full-wave electromagnetic simulations align well with the results from experimental measurements.

The tomato leafminer, Phthorimaea absoluta (synonym Tuta absoluta Meyrick, 1917), is a transboundary plant pest that poses a serious threat to global tomato cultivation and production, with significant negative social and environmental impact from increased insecticide usage for its management. We present three P. absoluta draft mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from Malawi and South Africa, thereby increasing the mitogenome resources for this invasive agricultural pest. Comparative analysis with Spain, China, and Kenya samples revealed at least seven maternal lineages across its current invasive ranges, supporting multiple introductions as a major factor for the spread of invasive populations. Mitogenome results therefore identified unexpected diversity as compared to the use of the partial mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (mtCOI/cox1) gene marker for the inference of P. absoluta invasion biology. The whole-genome sequencing approach further identified alternative mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gene regions necessary to improve diversity estimates, and enables concurrent characterisation of insecticide resistance genes. Characterisation of the VSSG (Para) and AChE-1/ace-1 gene profiles that underpin pyrethroid and organophosphate (OP) resistances, respectively, confirmed co-introductions of pyrethroid and OP resistance genes into Malawian and South African populations. Our study highlights the need for additional P. absoluta mitogenome resources, especially from native populations that is needed for more accurate interpretations of introduction pathways and the development of future sustainable management strategies.

Despite symbolic boundaries between civil and criminal law, sociolegal scholars note their conceptual and operational overlap, or hybridity. Values (e.g., restoration vs. punishment) and practices (e.g., monetary compensation vs. incarceration) thought distinct to each manifest in both, and contact with one legal system can generate involvement with the other. Scholars typically attribute hybridity’s emergence to top-down mechanisms like legislation. This article presents interviews with sexual violence plaintiffs’ attorneys who describe their efforts to improve case outcomes by incorporating criminal legal artifacts like police reports, police evidence and criminal convictions into civil litigation and inserting civil legal artifacts, including costly evidence, victim support and monetary compensation, into criminal prosecutions. Building on organizational theories of boundary work, this article argues that attorneys, in taking purposive action to win their cases, blur distinctions between civil and criminal law from the bottom-up, a distinct mechanism through which civil-criminal hybridity emerges.

Peat is formed by the accumulation of organic material in water-saturated soils. Drainage of peatlands and peat extraction contribute to carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Most peat extracted for commercial purposes is used for energy production or as a growing substrate. Many countries aim to reduce peat usage but this requires tools to detect its presence in substrates. We propose a decision support system based on deep learning to detect peat-specific testate amoeba in microscopy images. We identified six taxa that are peat-specific and frequent in European peatlands. The shells of two taxa (Archerella sp. and Amphitrema sp.) were well preserved in commercial substrate and can serve as indicators of peat presence. Images from surface and commercial samples were combined into a training set. A separate test set exclusively from commercial substrates was also defined. Both datasets were annotated and YOLOv8 models were trained to detect the shells. An ensemble of eight models was included in the decision support system. Test set performance (average precision) reached values above 0.8 for Archerella sp. and above 0.7 for Amphitrema sp. The system processes thousands of images within minutes and returns a concise list of crops of the most relevant shells. This allows a human operator to quickly make a final decision regarding peat presence. Our method enables the monitoring of peat presence in commercial substrates. It could be extended by including more species for applications in restoration ecology and paleoecology.

Insufficient sleep’s impact on cognitive and emotional function is well-documented, but its effects on social functioning remain understudied. This research investigates the influence of depressive symptoms on the relationship between sleep deprivation (SD) and social decision-making. Forty-two young adults were randomly assigned to either the SD or sleep control (SC) group. The SD group stayed awake in the laboratory, while the SC group had a normal night’s sleep at home. During the subsequent morning, participants completed a Trust Game (TG) in which a higher monetary offer distributed by them indicated more trust toward their partners. They also completed an Ultimatum Game (UG) in which a higher acceptance rate indicated more rational decision-making. The results revealed that depressive symptoms significantly moderated the effect of SD on trust in the TG. However, there was no interaction between group and depressive symptoms found in predicting acceptance rates in the UG. This study demonstrates that individuals with higher levels of depressive symptoms display less trust after SD, highlighting the role of depressive symptoms in modulating the impact of SD on social decision-making. Future research should explore sleep-related interventions targeting the psychosocial dysfunctions of individuals with depression.