Urban co-creation is an approach to urban design that actively involves stakeholders and end-users in the design process. As designers increasingly use digital tools to manage design information, stakeholders and residents may find it difficult to participate, resulting in a lack of engagement. The emergence of metaverse technologies offers a crucial opportunity to employ user-friendly and collaborative tools, enabling more effective participation. In the study presented in this article, a custom-designed digital game with virtual reality environment was used to facilitate a series of co-creation workshops. The study focused on changes in participants’ experience by comparing baseline and endline survey results against the design outputs. It employed a holistic framework considering four dimensions: game design, participatory experience, learning outcomes and co-creation results. The findings indicate that the digitally gamified approach helped enhance participation and knowledge sharing, and even though game design ratings varied, the use of video games motivated engagement, particularly in an intergenerational context. The co-creation workshop design documented in this article offers new methods to enhance community engagement in urban design. Especially during digital transformation, it opens renewed discussions on balancing traditional output-driven approaches with more participant-centric methods and design objectives.

We show that if one of various cycle types occurs in the permutation action of a finite group on the cosets of a given subgroup, then every almost conjugate subgroup is conjugate. As a number theoretic application, corresponding decomposition types of primes effect that a number field is determined by the Dedekind zeta function. As a geometric application, coverings of Riemannian manifolds with certain geodesic lifting behaviours must be isometric.

Poursuite de l’invasion de l’Ukraine, guerre dans la bande de Gaza, crise alimentaire, transition énergétique sans précédent, rééquilibrage géostratégique, montée du populisme, ingérence de toute sorte, explosion du recours à l’intelligence artificielle, inflation à maîtriser, voilà autant de traits caractérisant l’année 2023 et ayant eu le potentiel de redéfinir les relations commerciales mondiales. Dans ce contexte, mu par une nouvelle diplomatie pragmatique,1 le Canada tente d’innover tout en renouant avec son rôle d’antan: préserver ses partenaires usuels tout en développant de nouvelles relations d’opportunité (au risque parfois de piler sur ses valeurs), réinvestir les enceintes internationales avec le dessein de les moderniser, diversifier ses relations en déployant des forces diplomatiques dans de nouveaux territoires et réaffirmer sa souveraineté face à toute sorte de menaces que ce soit en Arctique ou dans le cadre électoral canadien. Ce contexte a nécessairement eu des impacts sur les choix que fait le Canada en matière commerciale.

Anthropogenic climate change is a significant driver of disasters, such as tropical storms, floods, drought and loss of biodiversity, amplifying their frequency and severity worldwide. The annual incidence of extreme weather-related events increases with growing human exposure to risks. The Sendai Framework and its associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise the interlinkages between disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and sustainable development. However, despite the best intentions of disaster planners, the current efforts are suboptimal in promoting implementation. Education is a critical goal to achieve sustainable development. Environmental Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) seeks to equip students with the knowledge, skills, values and agency necessary to address the complex challenges of climate change and global warming. One example of such an educational programme is the “Speak to Me in Numbers” programme. This interdisciplinary ESD programme educates 9th graders in SDG-related scientific content through scientific data analysis. It strives to inspire students to develop their agency and become responsible future citizens by taking local climate action to bring about sustainable development in their communities. Empowered young people who become agents that bring about global changes are crucial in the context of the climate crisis. However, such efforts should be undertaken cautiously to avoid doing more harm than good by evoking climate anxiety. These implications are discussed.

There has long been debate about the capacity of the US Supreme Court to achieve “progressive” social change. Recent decisions of the court also point to a new worry for American progressives: the court may not only have a limited capacity to drive such change. In some cases, it may actively stand in the way of such change or help reverse it. This invites us to rethink when, or under what conditions, courts are likely to be effective in driving change—whether in a positive, dynamic, or else more obstructionist or regressive direction.

To assess the psychosocial functioning concerning obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) comorbidity in people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder diagnosed in a large case register database in Southeast London. Data were retrieved from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust Biomedical Research Centre (SLaM BRC) register using Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) system, a platform allowing research on full but de-identified electronic health records for secondary and tertiary mental healthcare services. Information of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder diagnosis and OCS/OCD status was ascertained from structural or free-text fields through natural language processing (NLP) algorithms based on artificial intelligence techniques during the observation window of January 2007 to December 2016. Associations between comorbid OCS/OCD and recorded Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS) for problems with activities of daily living (ADLs), living conditions, occupational and recreational activities, and relationships were estimated by logistic regression with socio-demographic confounders controlled. Of 15,412 subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder, 2,358 (15.3%) experienced OCS without OCD, and 2,586 (16.8%) had OCD recorded. The presence of OCS/OCD was associated with more problems with relationships (adj.OR = 1.34, 95% CI: 1.25–1.44), ADLs (adj.OR = 1.31, 95%CI: 1.22–1.41), and living conditions (adj.OR = 1.31, 95% CI: 1.22–1.41). Sensitivity analysis revealed similar outcomes. Comorbid OCS/OCD was associated with poorer psychosocial functioning in people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder. This finding highlights the importance of identification and treatment of comorbid OCS among this vulnerable patient group.

Cell and gene therapies derive from a substantial manipulation of cells or the application of gene editing techniques. They are promising products because they enable therapy personalisation, are potentially helpful for treating rare or resistant diseases, and may become useful in future epidemics. Because of this strategic worth, the infrastructure needed for manufacturing these therapies is turning into a subdomain within the domain of critical infrastructures (CIs), understood as the structures whose operation is key for the integrity and security of a nation. This paper analyses why cell and gene therapy infrastructure can be considered as an emergent CI domain, stressing three aspects: automated manufacturing equipment; software solutions (including the growing adoption of artificial intelligence and cloud technology); and human expertise. These complex manufacturing systems, which are becoming increasingly automated and digitalised, may be surrounded by new risks and vulnerability points, which requires adequate regulatory solutions and governance initiatives. A comprehensive approach is therefore advanced here, where therapy manufacture has medical and technological relevance, but is equally crucial from the viewpoint of nations’ public health and internal stability.

The electroosmotic flow (EOF) fields in the vicinity of solids with high dielectric permittivity are studied for the case of charge-asymmetric electrolyte solutions. Corresponding solutions of the coupled Poisson–Nernst–Planck and Navier–Stokes equations are obtained analytically and numerically. When a direct-current (DC) electric field is applied to a high-permittivity uncharged sphere, a net EOF develops that translates into a non-zero electrophoretic mobility of the sphere, although it does not carry any charge. Similarly, a DC field acting on a channel in a high-permittivity material results in a net flow through the channel, although the solid is uncharged. Such phenomena are expected to occur frequently whenever high-permittivity solids are immersed in charge-asymmetric electrolyte solutions and do not rely on special scenarios such as ion crowding. Also, the net flow velocities are very significant for realistic values of the electric field strength. The derived scaling relationships even predict giant net flow velocities through nanochannels of the order of metres per second for practically relevant scenarios.

It is a revealing exercise to search for variations of the word “colonial” in the indexes and tables of contents of these recent monographs in Anglophone literary studies. As the subdiscipline begins to chronicle contemporary cultural developments in which the British Empire’s legacies grow ever-less marked, it is perhaps inevitable that the terms and concepts that governed the preceding phase of scholarship—colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism—begin to recede into the background. The sudden and sharp recession of these terms, however, raises fundamental questions regarding the study of English-language texts from the Caribbean, South Asia, West, and East Africa (among other locales). Among the foremost of such questions may be: does the term “postcolonialism” now designate a mere literary period, as opposed to being what scholars over the last several decades seem to have agreed it also is, namely a critical method? What are the effects and implications of this shift, wherein not just literary works newly arrived to a world scene still marked and structured by colonial legacies, but older ones long identified as definitionally “postcolonial,” are increasingly treated without such concepts and terms? Suggestions of answers to such questions arise throughout these three books, all of which seek to reconsider one of the keystone concerns of postcolonial studies, namely the relationship between contemporary Anglophone writing and the authors and texts of the British literary canon.

For given positive integers $r\ge 3$, $n$ and $e\le \binom{n}{2}$, the famous Erdős–Rademacher problem asks for the minimum number of $r$-cliques in a graph with $n$ vertices and $e$ edges. A conjecture of Lovász and Simonovits from the 1970s states that, for every $r\ge 3$, if $n$ is sufficiently large then, for every $e\le \binom{n}{2}$, at least one extremal graph can be obtained from a complete partite graph by adding a triangle-free graph into one part.

In this note, we explicitly write the minimum number of $r$-cliques predicted by the above conjecture. Also, we describe what we believe to be the set of extremal graphs for any $r\ge 4$ and all large $n$, amending the previous conjecture of Pikhurko and Razborov.