Federal and local agencies have identified a need to create building databases to help ensure that critical infrastructure and residential buildings are accounted for in disaster preparedness and to aid the decision-making processes in subsequent recovery efforts. To respond effectively, we need to understand the built environment—where people live, work, and the critical infrastructure they rely on. Yet, a major discrepancy exists in the way data about buildings are collected across the United SStates There is no harmonization in what data are recorded by city, county, or state governments, let alone at the national scale. We demonstrate how existing open-source datasets can be spatially integrated and subsequently used as training for machine learning (ML) models to predict building occupancy type, a major component needed for disaster preparedness and decision -making. Multiple ML algorithms are compared. We address strategies to handle significant class imbalance and introduce Bayesian neural networks to handle prediction uncertainty. The 100-year flood in North Carolina is provided as a practical application in disaster preparedness.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.

This article reviews the emergence of “lawfare” as a term in vogue in recent years. Despite its complexity, lawfare is widely used by scholars and policy-makers in a disparaging and polemical sense. Efforts have been made to attribute a neutral tone to the term with a clearer analytical framework. Taking Viet Nam and the South China Sea disputes as an illustration, the article probes whether and how a small, peripheral country works out a lawfare strategy. It finds that Viet Nam has employed elements of lawfare strategy to counter China’s expansionist claims at sea by recalibrating its national interests and legal positions over time. Lawfare is a long game, yet it holds out hope for Viet Nam, a peripheral country, amidst intense superpower rivalry.

Competitive dressage’s social licence to operate is in jeopardy due to ethical concerns surrounding the use of horses for dressage. There is limited research that contributes to our understanding of Canadian equestrian perspectives on the use of horses in dressage. The objectives of this study were to: (1) explore the cultural context of the Canadian dressage industry, including how horse well-being is integrated within the culture; and (2) investigate coaches’ and riders’ perceptions and experiences with the use of horses for dressage. An ethnographic case study approach was employed, where MR spent 2–6 weeks with each of the four participating Equestrian Canada Certified dressage coaches and their riders (at least four riders per coach for a total of 19 riders). Data collection included direct observation, recording field notes and conducting at least one in-depth interview with each coach and rider. Interviews and field notes were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis leading to the development of three themes: (1) the systems that participants operate within; (2) how these systems foster a culture of contradiction in the industry; and (3) the ‘equestrian dilemma’ highlighting how participants navigate their love for horses with their horses’ well-being amid the sport’s demands. The three themes portray that the issues faced by the dressage industry may be rooted in systemic problems and could be described as a ‘wicked problem’. These results aim to inform future research initiatives that promote a holistic understanding of the challenges faced by the dressage industry and promote systems thinking solutions.

Discussions of Nazi law tend to centre upon Fuller’s desiderata of the rule of law. Whilst not disputing this connection, this essay argues that tyranny and oppression are marked by the (ab)use of law to invade the domain proper to individual moral thinking, and to transform citizens into models of conformity to whatever values the tyrant cherishes. Its main consideration is how a community can recover from periods of tyranny, and how the law can recover its dignity having shown itself capable of evil uses. So, it is focused more on ‘substantive’ rather than ‘procedural’ morality.

This invited, extended, paper compares and contrasts a number of different near-field (NF) to far-field (FF) transformation algorithms that can be used for the purpose of processing NF data acquired using multi-axis industrial robots. The merits and limitations of these various, commonly encountered algorithms are highlighted with comparison FF data presented across a frequency range spanning 3–15 GHz. Crucially, the paper explores the viability of using mixed mode acquisition geometries when performing antenna gain measurements where, prior to this work, several of the transforms yielded different transform gains, and electrical lengths. Here, we verify that at 8 GHz and above, where truncation effects were minimal, for a circa 30 dBi gain (at 8 GHz) test antenna the FF peaks were in agreement to better than ±0.02 dB, at 3σ irrespective of the acquisition geometry and transform algorithm used. In this invited, extended work, the existing simulation results are augmented with experimental results obtained from planar and spherical NF measurements of a pyramidal horn taken using a dual robotic antenna measurement system and a consistent distributed RF subsystem.

The earliest pottery vessels in the Arabian Gulf, appearing in the mid-sixth millennium BC, belong to two distinct traditions: Ubaid Ware was imported from Mesopotamia, but the origins of the Coarse Red Ware have remained obscure. Geochemical examination of pottery from Bahra 1, in modern-day Kuwait, and geological samples from the surrounding area reveal a regional origin for the clay. Further exploration of the Bahra 1 assemblage indicates that Coarse Red Ware was probably made at the site by low-skilled potters. This research provides insights into the organisation of pottery production and distribution in the Arabian Neolithic.

Let ${\mathcal {A}}$ be a unital ${\mathbb {F}}$-algebra and let ${\mathcal {S}}$ be a generating set of ${\mathcal {A}}$. The length of ${\mathcal {S}}$ is the smallest number k such that ${\mathcal {A}}$ equals the ${\mathbb {F}}$-linear span of all products of length at most k of elements from ${\mathcal {S}}$. The length of ${\mathcal {A}}$, denoted by $l({\mathcal {A}})$, is defined to be the maximal length of its generating sets. We show that $l({\mathcal {A}})$ does not exceed the maximum of $\dim {\mathcal {A}} / 2$ and $m({\mathcal {A}})-1$, where $m({\mathcal {A}})$ is the largest degree of the minimal polynomial among all elements of the algebra ${\mathcal {A}}$. As an application, we show that for arbitrary odd n, the length of the group algebra of the dihedral group of order $2n$ equals n.

The authors offer reflections and lessons learned in a single pediatric tertiary center’s experience during a pediatric mass casualty incident (MCI). The MCI occurred at a holiday parade and the patients were brought to multiple community emergency departments for initial resuscitation prior to transfer to the Pediatric level 1 trauma center. In total, 18 children presented with severe blunt force trauma after a motor vehicle entered the parade route. Following initial triage in emergency departments, 10 of 18 children injured during the incident were admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, collectively representing a system-wide stressor of emergency medicine, critical care, and surgical services. Institutional characteristics, activation of personnel and supplies, and psychosocial support for families during an MCI are important to consider in children’s hospitals’ disaster preparedness planning.

There is a pressing need for novel approaches to help address climate change and for a workforce that is equipped with a combination of new and different types of knowledges. The One Health (OH) core competencies perhaps offer the new knowledges, skills, and attitudes that will be needed in a future generation of practitioners that does not shy away from complexity. The objective of this research was to identify overlapping and transferable OH-climate change competencies that are needed of professionals working to address climate change. Using focus groups and qualitative content analysis, 23 professionals from across Canada whose employment positions had a key focus on climate change were brought together across five sessions. Participants agreed that the OH competencies were applicable to their employment roles and responsibilities, but they identified four key missing areas that are important for graduates: evaluative and reflective practice, personal resilience, turning knowledge into action, and having an openness to other knowledges (particularly Indigenous and non-Western viewpoints). This work also provided a first iteration of a process that should be continually used to bridge the gap between theory and practice, as employer needs are a key consideration during the development of educational programs.

In this article, we extend, with a great deal of generality, many results regarding the Hausdorff dimension of certain dynamical Diophantine coverings and shrinking target sets associated with a conformal iterated function system (IFS) previously established under the so-called open set condition. The novelty of the result we present is that it holds regardless of any separation assumption on the underlying IFS and thus extends to a large class of IFSs the previous results obtained by Beresnevitch and Velani [A mass transference principle and the Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture for Hausdorff measures. Ann. of Math. (2) 164(3) (2006), 971–992] and by Barral and Seuret [The multifractal nature of heterogeneous sums of Dirac masses. Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 144(3) (2008), 707–727]. Moreover, it will be established that if S is conformal and satisfies mild separation assumptions (which are, for instance, satisfied for any self-similar IFS on $\mathbb {R}$ with algebraic parameters, no exact overlaps and similarity dimension smaller than $1$), then the classical result of Hill–Velani regarding the shrinking target problem associated with a conformal IFS satisfying the open set condition (and for which the Hausdorff measure was later computed by Allen and Barany [On the Hausdorff measure of shrinking target sets on self-conformal sets. Mathematika 67 (2021), 807–839]) can be extended.

This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households’ productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards – as measured by the contents of probate inventories – but the labouring households’ ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and dependency on wage labour. For labourers’ and farmers’ households alike, textile production at home became more important; in the 1860s, half of the labouring households owned spinning wheels and weaving looms, and for farmer households, the shares were even higher. Our study reveals not only the dynamism of the rural pre-industrial Swedish economy but also the unequal nature of this dynamism.

Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to semantic-relatedness to differentiate associative vs. predictive processes, the present study used eye-tracking to begin to disentangle the contributions of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms to infants’ real-time language processing. Replicating prior results, infants (14-19 months old) use successive semantically-related words across sentences (e.g., eat, yum, mouth) to predict upcoming nouns (e.g., cookie). However, we also provide evidence that using successive semantically-related words to predict is distinct from the bottom-up activation of the word itself. In a second experiment, we investigate the potential effects of repetition on the findings. This work is the first to reveal that infant language comprehension is affected by both associative and predictive processes.

Within bioethics, two issues dominate the discourse on suffering: its nature (who can suffer and how) and whether suffering is ever grounds for providing, withholding, or discontinuing interventions. The discussion has focused on the subjective experience of suffering in acute settings or persistent suffering that is the result of terminal, chronic illness. The bioethics literature on suffering, then, is silent about a crucial piece of the moral picture: agents’ intersubjectivity. This paper argues that an account of the intersubjective effects of suffering on caregivers could enrich theories of suffering in two ways: first, by clarifying the scope of suffering beyond the individual at the epicenter, i.e., by providing a fuller account of the effects of suffering (good or bad). Second, by drawing attention to how and why, in clinical contexts, the intersubjective dimensions of suffering are sometimes as important, if not more important, than whether an individual is suffering or not.

Wood apple (Limonia acidissima L., Rutaceae) is a medium to large-sized semideciduous tree native to Indian subcontinent. The Indian systems of medicine recognized this tree for its medicinal properties and nutritional fruit. The present study evaluates chemotypic diversity by using HPTLC method for identification of elite genotypes among 96 accessions of wood apple leaves collected from diverse populations across 16 states of India. Here, the multivariate analysis, including the extent of variation, broad sense heritability, genetic advance, correlation of mean value of each replicate were assessed with respect to four target bioactive molecules (quercetin, stigmasterol, psoralen and niloticin) extracted from leaves of wood apple. The results showed that the analysis of variance revealed significant variabilities for all the four biomolecules analysed. The hierarchical clustering grouped all the accessions into eight clusters. Out of which, cluster II and VI contained a maximum of 20 and 18 genotypes, respectively. Cluster VIII consisted of only three genotypes. The intra-cluster distance ranged from 0 (cluster II to VIII) to 6.83 (cluster I). The highest inter-cluster distance was found between clusters V and VII (22.52). Positive correlation was found between chemotypic traits at both the genotypic and phenotypic level. The broad sense heritability was recorded highest for quercetin (97.7%). The high genetic advance was noticed for niloticin (217.4). This study detected significant chemotypic variation among the accessions. The elite accessions identified in this study could be utilized to enhance the quality, efficacy and economic value of medicinal products.