We use a novel experiment in China to examine the effects of having a quasi-official investor own a small number of shares on specific firm outcomes. We find that, relative to control firms, pilot firms experience an increase in dissenting votes from independent directors, a reduction in tunneling and earnings management activities, and an improvement in merger performance. Independent directors questioned by the quasi-official shareholder in activism events subsequently lose board seats in the director market. Overall, our results shed light on a new mechanism for enhancing the protection of minority shareholders.

In this article, I argue that iconographic pathography provides a transformational form of storytelling for ill persons and the communities around them. This work addresses the reduction of illness narration to clinical vocabularies. It targets often excluded communities—chronic and terminal narrators—as well as promotes ethical practices of creative and collaborative inclusion for ecclesial communities. I use Devan Stahl’s Imaging and Imagining Illness as an example of this distinctive form of pathography, first differentiating it from other narrative forms of the genre as well as contextualizing its decentralized narrational form with criteria drawn from icons’ emergence within early Christian art. I claim that such decentralized narration changes the trajectory of self-understanding for the ill person as well as the ethical response required for those who bear witness to such narratives.

Modular floating solar farms exhibit periodic open surface coverages due to the strip configuration of floating modules that support the photovoltaic (PV) panels on top. The associated modulations in the surface boundary layer and its turbulence characteristics are investigated in the present study under fully developed open channel flows. Different coverage percentages of 100 % (i.e. full cover), 60 %, 30 % and 0 % (i.e. open surface) were tested and measurements were obtained using particle image velocimetry. The results showed that the turbulence statistics are similar when the coverage decreases from 100 % to 60 %. However, with 30 %, both the turbulence intensities and Reynolds stresses increase substantially, reaching up to 50 % higher compared with the 100 % coverage, and the boundary layer thickness increases by more than 25 %. The local skin friction beneath the openings increases by 50 %. Analysis of spanwise vortices and premultiplied spectra indicates that the periodic coverage elongates the hairpin vortex packets and reduces their inclination angle, imposing limitations on sustainable coherent structures. At 30 %, flow detachment and smaller-scale vortices become dominant, reducing the mean velocities and increasing the turbulence intensities. Decreasing coverage percentage with flow detachment also shifts the energy transfer to higher wavenumbers, increasing energy dissipation and decreasing the bulk flow velocity. The kinetic energy and Reynolds stress carried by very large-scale motions decreases from 40 %–50 % with the 100 % and 60 % coverage to around 30 %–40 % with the 30 % coverage. Further research studies involving spanwise heterogeneity, higher Reynolds number and varying submergence of PV modules are needed for environmental considerations.

We propose a theoretical method to decompose the solution of a Stokes flow past a body immersed in a confined fluid into two simpler problems, related separately to the two geometrical elements of these systems: (i) the body immersed in the unbounded fluid (represented by its Faxén operators); and (ii) the domain of the confinement (represented by its Stokesian multipoles). Specifically, by using a reflection method, and assuming linear and reciprocal boundary conditions (Procopio & Giona, Phys. Fluids, vol. 36, issue 3, 2024, 032016), we provide the expression for the velocity field, the forces, torques and higher-order moments acting on the body in terms of: (i) the volume moments of the body in the unbounded ambient flow; (ii) the multipoles in the domain of the confinement; (iii) the collection of all the volumetric moments on the body immersed in all the regular parts of the multipoles considered as ambient flows. A detailed convergence analysis of the reflection method is developed. In light of the practical applications, we estimate the truncation error committed by considering only the lower-order moments (thus, truncating the matrices) and the errors associated with the approximated expressions available in the literature for force and torques. We apply the theoretical results to the archetypal hydrodynamic system of a sphere with Navier-slip boundary conditions near a plane wall with no-slip boundary conditions, to determine forces and torques on a translating and rotating sphere as a function of the slip length and of the distance of the sphere from the plane. The hydromechanics of a spheroid is also addressed.

We give a simple sufficient condition for Quinn’s ‘bordism-type’ spectra to be weakly equivalent to commutative symmetric ring spectra. We also show that the symmetric signature is (up to weak equivalence) a monoidal transformation between symmetric monoidal functors, which implies that the Sullivan–Ranicki orientation of topological bundles is represented by a ring map between commutative symmetric ring spectra. In the course of proving these statements, we give a new description of symmetric L theory which may be of independent interest.

This article presents a systematic review on the use of eye-tracking technology to assess the mental workload of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operators. With the increasing use of unmanned aircraft in military and civilian operations, understanding the mental workload of these operators has become essential for ensuring mission effectiveness and safety. The review covered 26 studies that explored the application of eye-tracking to capture nuances of visual attention and assess cognitive load in real-time. Traditional methods such as self-assessment questionnaires, although useful, showed limitations in terms of accuracy and objectivity, highlighting the need for advanced approaches like eye-tracking. By analysing gaze patterns in simulated environments that reproduce real challenges, it was possible to identify moments of higher mental workload, areas of concentration and sources of distraction. The review also discussed strategies for managing mental workload, including adaptive design of human-machine interfaces. The analysis of the studies revealed a growing relevance and acceptance of eye-tracking as a diagnostic and analytical tool, offering guidelines for the development of interfaces and training that dynamically respond to the cognitive needs of operators. It was concluded that eye-tracking technology can significantly contribute to the optimisation of UAS operations, enhancing both the safety and efficiency of military and civilian missions.

African contemporary choreographers increasingly delink from Eurocentric performance conventions and work toward establishing local conditions of production and consumption by performing in public spaces. Although the labor undertaken to shift power asymmetries does not always result in structural changes, their art may be considered decolonial creative expression. Based on ethnographic research at the third and fourth editions (2022 and 2023) of Fatou Cissé’s street performance festival, La ville en mouv’ment (The City in Movement), in Dakar, Senegal, the author argues that decolonial potentiality extends beyond the precarious economic conditions to encapsulate the artists’ return to public space and futurist aesthetics.

Plant postures are affected by environmental stimuli. When the gravitational direction changes, the Arabidopsis thaliana mutants myosin xif xik (xif xik) and atp-binding cassette b19 (abcb19) exhibit aberrantly enhanced organ bending. Whether their phenotypes are due to the same mechanism is unknown. We characterized the primary root postures of these mutants. Their roots exhibited enhanced gravitropic bending with the same root-tip angles. The wavy roots of vertically grown plants were quantitatively evaluated using four indices. The straightness index (root base-to-tip length to total root-length ratio) was similar for xif xik and abcb19, and it slightly decreased for xif xik abcb19. The curvature index was similar for abcb19 and xif xik abcb19, but it decreased for xif xik, suggesting the ABCB19 deficiency caused the roots to curve more sharply. Combination of these indices for quantitative analyses of root postures may distinguish between similar wavy-root phenotypes and clarify genetic relationships.

Recently, Alanazi et al. [‘Refining overpartitions by properties of nonoverlined parts’, Contrib. Discrete Math. 17(2) (2022), 96–111] considered overpartitions wherein the nonoverlined parts must be $\ell $-regular, that is, the nonoverlined parts cannot be divisible by the integer $\ell $. In the process, they proved a general parity result for the corresponding enumerating functions. They also proved some specific congruences for the case $\ell =3$. In this paper we use elementary generating function manipulations to significantly extend this set of known congruences for these functions.

In the study of plane curves, one of the problems is to classify the embedded topology of plane curves in the complex projective plane that have a given fixed combinatorial type, where the combinatorial type of a plane curve is data equivalent to the embedded topology in its tubular neighborhood. A pair of plane curves with the same combinatorial type but distinct embedded topology is called a Zariski pair. In this paper, we consider Zariski pairs consisting of conic-line arrangements that arise from Poncelet’s closure theorem. We study unramified double covers of the union of two conics that are induced by a $2m$-sided Poncelet transverse. As an application, we show the existence of families of Zariski pairs of degree $2m+6$ for $m\geq 2$ that consist of reducible curves having two conics and $2m+2$ lines as irreducible components.

We study global-in-time dynamics of the stochastic nonlinear beam equations (SNLB) with an additive space-time white noise, posed on the four-dimensional torus. The roughness of the noise leads us to introducing a time-dependent renormalization, after which we show that SNLB is pathwise locally well-posed in all subcritical and most of the critical regimes. For the (renormalized) defocusing cubic SNLB, we establish pathwise global well-posedness below the energy space, by adapting a hybrid argument of Gubinelli-Koch-Oh-Tolomeo (2022) that combines the I-method with a Gronwall-type argument. Lastly, we show almost sure global well-posedness and invariance of the Gibbs measure for the stochastic damped nonlinear beam equations in the defocusing case.

As the US Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Mexican Supreme Court issued a series of sweeping rulings to liberalize abortion—part of a larger trend across Latin America (Daby and Moseley 2022; Fernandez Anderson 2017; Reuterswärd 2020; Ruibal 2014). Mexico has created a nationwide standard of access to abortion services, whereas the United States has abandoned universal legal abortion and embraced a patchwork system in which each state has different laws regulating reproductive healthcare. Why are these two neighbors on such divergent paths? This contribution to the symposium compares the ways that federalism and judicial politics have interacted in Mexico and the United States to explain the different trajectories of abortion policy. The divergent paths of the United States and Mexico can be explained by the two countries’ different experiences with democracy and political and institutional differences between the judiciaries. A different civil-society and constitutional context also has played a role.

Congenital left ventricle to coronary sinus fistulas are exceptionally rare, and only a few case reports of this condition exist. These fistulas may isolated or occur in conjunction with other CHDs. In this case report, we describe an 18-month-old boy who presented to our centre with a diagnosis of mitral valve insufficiency and a coronary sinus-type atrial septal defect. Upon echocardiographic evaluation, he was found to have a rare congenital left ventricle to coronary sinus fistula. Echocardiographic examination established the diagnosis. Contrary to initial suspicions, mitral regurgitation and atrial septal defect were not present. Instead, the echocardiogram revealed a left ventricular to coronary sinus fistula accompanied by dilation of the coronary sinus. These findings were corroborated by CT angiography. The fistula was then successfully occluded using a transcatheter method. Follow-up assessments at one-year post-procedure showed no complications and no evidence of significant shunting on echocardiography.