The UK has experienced alarming increases in the number of individuals living with food insecurity as a result of the rise in the cost of living. The mechanisms linking household economic insecurity to food insecurity, and perceived health outcomes, are not well understood. The aim of this study was to explore how individuals with lived experience of food insecurity are coping with the rise in the cost of living, the trade-offs they might be making between food and other household expenses, and how these might impact eating behaviours and health outcomes. Using a qualitative inductive approach rooted in hermeneutic phenomenology, nine semi-structured interviews were conducted among individuals using charity-run food provision services in Bristol, UK. Narrative accounts from these interviews were analysed thematically. Almost all participants were recipients of benefits at the time of interviews and were living under high levels of economic insecurity. The rise in the cost of living forced complex budget management strategies, including relying on donated food and shoplifting. It also influenced eating behaviours through altered cooking strategies to save energy, substituting food for cheaper, less-nutritious, alternatives, and rationing meals. Food insecurity was experienced as a form of psychosocial violence, engendering high levels of stress, particularly for individuals with diet-related chronic diseases. There is therefore an urgent need for policies that tackle structural causes of overall household economic insecurity, and improve economic access to adequate nutritious foods, to prevent further entrenching social inequalities.

This article uses the postwar trial of Fascist Italy’s most prominent general, Rodolfo Graziani, to examine issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian Fascism and colonialism after 1945. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as the nation’s colonial ‘hero’ despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. His position as minister of defence in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Salò Republic in 1943–5, however, threatened his heroic reputation as he worked with Nazi commanders and became responsible for atrocities against Italian civilians. After the Second World War, Graziani was tried for Nazi collaborationism at the Supreme Court in 1948, but his colonial conduct was left unquestioned. Unlike in the Nuremberg Trials in post-Nazi Germany, few Italians were tried for war crimes after 1945. This historical inquiry analyses the legal proceedings, transnational representation and outcome of Rodolfo Graziani’s 1948 trial as an emblematic case study to explore de-fascistisation and decolonialisation initiatives and their limitations in post-Fascist postcolonial Italy.

Recently, it is proven that positive harmonic functions defined in the unit disc or the upper half-plane in $\mathbb{C}$ are contractions in hyperbolic metrics [14]. Furthermore, the same result does not hold in higher dimensions as shown by given counterexamples [16]. In this paper, we shall show that positive (or bounded) harmonic functions defined in the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ are Lipschitz in hyperbolic metrics. The involved method in main results allows to establish essential improvements of Schwarz type inequalities for monogenic functions in Clifford analysis [24, 25] and octonionic analysis [21] in a unified approach.

This research note contributes to moving the scholarly field of international investment law beyond its dominant focus in recent decades on issues of post-admission investment protection and investor–State dispute settlement (ISDS). Specifically, it maps a future research agenda focusing on issues of investment facilitation and investment liberalization. This research note analyses several common and important themes that arise in relation to treaty-based investment facilitation and investment liberalization commitments. These include the value-added of international legally binding obligations, the impact of international commitments on States' applied policies, and a notable shift away from investor–State arbitration towards State–State dispute settlement only and mechanisms for ongoing cooperation between the treaty parties. These themes raise challenging questions, which often call for future empirical research employing methods other than traditional legal analysis. Nevertheless, this research note suggests that the scholarly field of international investment law has much to gain from shifting some of its focus away from well-versed issues of investment protection and ISDS towards under-researched questions concerning investment facilitation and investment liberalization commitments.

The Torelli theorem establishes that the Jacobian of a smooth projective curve, together with the polarization provided by the theta divisor, fully characterizes the curve. In the case of nodal curves, there exists a concept known as fine compactified Jacobian. The fine compactified Jacobian of a curve comes with a natural stratification that can be regarded as a poset. Furthermore, this poset is entirely determined by the dual graph of the curve and is referred to as the poset of quasistable divisors on the graph. We present a combinatorial version of the Torelli theorem, which demonstrates that the poset of quasistable divisors of a graph completely determines the biconnected components of the graph (up to contracting separating edges). Moreover, we achieve a natural extension of this theorem to tropical curves.

In this paper, we show that for a large natural class of vertex operator algebras (VOAs) and their modules, the Zhu’s algebras and bimodules (and their g-twisted analogs) are Noetherian. These carry important information about the representation theory of the VOA, and its fusion rules, and the Noetherian property gives the potential for (non-commutative) algebro-geometric methods to be employed in their study.

In this note, we study the relationship between tax evasion and economic growth in a model where public expenditure allows to improve private capital productivity, and it is financed by both taxes and public debt. Here, we define debt to be sustainable if the debt/GDP ratio resulting from agents optimization converges toward a finite equilibrium that is endogenous to the model. We show that: (i) the level of public expenditure which maximizes growth does not depend on audit parameters, (ii) evasion reduces the range of parameters for which the debt/GDP ratio is sustainable, and (iii) the debt/GDP ratio is sustainable if the total factor productivity is sufficiently high.

In August 2023, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare received reports of a potential cluster of pneumococcal pneumonia cases among shipyard employees in Turku, Finland. Considering a similar outbreak in the same shipyard in 2019, we initiated a case–control study to investigate individual and environmental risk factors specific to this occupational setting in order to inform targeted prevention measures. In total, 14 hospitalized cases were identified from 19 August to 15 October 2023. Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes 4 and 9 V were isolated from blood cultures of seven cases. Eleven cases and 67 controls working at the shipyard were included in the case–control study. Compared with controls, cases were more likely to be living in an apartment/studio or a hotel/hostel, and less likely in a house or with family. Furthermore, cases were more likely to have a shorter duration of employment (< 1 year) at the shipyard compared to controls. Control measures, including an information and a vaccination campaign, were implemented. We emphasize shipyard-wide hygiene improvements and recommend nationwide consideration of expanding pneumococcal vaccination eligibility to all shipyard construction employees as an occupational high-risk group.

Trap colour can be an important consideration in detection programmes for arboreal and saproxylic beetles. Green and purple intercept traps are more attractive than black intercept traps to the emerald ash borer, Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire (Coleoptera: Buprestidae), an invasive species in North America. In four experiments, I tested three commercial multiple-funnel traps (green, purple, and black), baited with various lure blends, to determine the relative effects of trap colour on catches of other bark and woodboring beetles, and their associated predator species, in north–central Georgia, United States of America. I captured numerous species of Cerambycidae (Coleoptera) (n = 51), Curculionidae (Coleoptera) (n = 33), and associated predators (Coleoptera) (n = 22) across the four experiments. However, the majority of the species captured were either unaffected by trap colour or were caught in greater numbers in black and purple traps than in green traps. The two exceptions were the predators Enoclerus ichneumonus (Fabricius) (Coleoptera: Cleridae) and Pycnomerus sulcicollis LeConte (Coleoptera: Zopheridae), which were more abundant in green traps than in black traps. Purple traps performed better than black traps for the following species: Cnestus mutilatus (Blandford) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), Cossonus corticola Say (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), Xylobiops basilaris (Say) (Coleoptera: Bostrichidae), Buprestis lineata Fabricius (Coleoptera: Buprestidae), and Namunaria guttulata (LeConte) (Coleoptera: Zopheridae).

This article discusses European copyright law as applied to the development and training of generative AI and natural language processing in public interest research institutions and libraries. The article focuses on the scope of the new exceptions from copyright law for text and data mining (TDM) for research purposes and discusses them from the perspective of research ethics and principles of open science in publicly financed research. The public interest mission of research institutions and libraries includes the open dissemination of research results but the exceptions from copyright are focused only on the training phase in AI development. Regulation on data transparency is fragmented. The article finds that while new exceptions open for developing language models under research institutions and libraries’ public interest mission to preserve national languages, the regulation is not adapted to principles of research ethics and open science, and legal uncertainty remains.

We report the results of a field experiment designed to increase honest disclosure of claims at a U.S. state unemployment agency. Individuals filing claims were randomized to a message (‘nudge’) intervention, while an off-the-shelf machine learning algorithm calculated claimants’ risk for committing fraud (underreporting earnings). We study the causal effects of algorithmic targeting on the effectiveness of nudge messages: Without algorithmic targeting, the average treatment effect of the messages was insignificant; in contrast, the use of algorithmic targeting revealed significant heterogeneous treatment effects across claimants. Claimants predicted to behave unethically by the algorithm were more likely to disclose earnings when receiving a message relative to a control condition, with claimants predicted to most likely behave unethically being almost twice as likely to disclose earnings when shown a message. In addition to providing a potential blueprint for targeting more costly interventions, our study offers a novel perspective for the use and efficiency of data science in the public sector without violating citizens’ agency. However, we caution that, while algorithms can enable tailored policy, their ethical use must be ensured at all times.

Western plainsong studies have typically focused on fully notated manuscripts, which provide the most complete witnesses to the repertories that have interested scholars in the field. Recent work, however, has shown that partially notated manuscripts, fragments, and marginalia can yield different kinds of insights into manuscript culture, as well as the uses and functions of musical notation. This article explores how a partially notated manuscript preserving the Old Hispanic rite, Toledo, Cathedral Archive, MS 35–6 (T6), can expand our knowledge of Old Hispanic chant, its scribal practices, manuscript culture, and notation. We identify the specific palaeographical traits and melodic dialects associated with each scribe. On this basis, we hypothesize that scribes used notation for a variety of reasons: to train in singing and writing, to practise writing, to correct particular melodies and notational forms, to preserve particular versions within a variant melodic tradition, and as an aide-memoire. T6 offers new insights into the various ways that the Old Hispanic oral tradition could be supported by writing.

Amid a new era of disruption spawned by looming climate threats and significant geopolitical tensions, an increasing number of countries have favored a more robust green industrial policy (GIP) to reduce carbon emissions and achieve other economic, political, and geostrategic objectives. The use of multi-purpose GIPs not only raises questions regarding the policies' compatibility with the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules but also, more broadly, profoundly implicates the interface between energy, trade, and the environment. This article selects China, the United States, and the European Union as case studies and provides a thorough analysis of the specific text and context of their GIPs to identify the new trends that deviate from past practices in order to capture the policy transformation. It highlights the disruptively adverse implications of the multi-purpose GIPs on the multilateral trading system. However, the WTO has an opportunity to mitigate such disruptions and avoid a seemingly unavoidable clash by facilitating international cooperation and coordination in the design and implementation of multi-purpose GIPs, particularly among major clean energy producer countries. In doing so, the WTO can strengthen its credibility and stability while also minimizing the misalignment of the diverse objectives and ensuring the decarbonization efforts will not undermined.

This article focuses on the history of the Czechoslovak sociology of popular music, which formed at the beginning of the 1960s. The article first examines the origins of thinking about ‘mass music genres’ in the Czech lands in the interwar period. It further discusses considerations of mass music genres and their audiences after World War II in light of the communist takeover in 1948, Stalinism of the 1950s and liberalisation of the 1960s. Finally, the article presents the situation after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. Based on analysis of archival sources and original theoretical texts, hitherto unknown in the context of Anglophone scholarship, this article seeks to show how the specific political background of the Central European state behind the Iron Curtain determined the foundation, scholarly focus and social role of the sociology of popular music and how it differed from the situation in Western capitalist countries.

In this article, a coupled line diplexer (operating at 2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz) which can be used as single-band filter with tunable attenuation characteristics in the pass band has been designed. Multilayer graphene (MLG) pads are used to achieve tunable features in this circuit. The graphene pads are placed at each branch of the diplexer. Single-band tunable attenuation characteristics are achieved by applying bias to graphene pads placed at optimum locations on the filter. The proposed tunable coupled line attenuating diplexer is realized on FR-4 glass epoxy substrate of thickness 1.58 mm with a total size of 45 × 75 mm2. By varying the bias voltage (0 V –6 V) of MLG pads the resistance of graphene pad placed in the circuit gets decreases thereby attenuating/controlling the transmission power to the other port in the required band. In lower pass band (2.28–2.55 GHz) the signal is attenuated from 3 to 10.8 dB and in higher pass band (3.2–3.58 GHz) signal is attenuated from 5 to 13 dB. Simulations of the structure with and without graphene pads have been carried out and are in good agreement with measured results.

Fuentes Históricas del Perú (FHP) se ha convertido en un recurso imprescindible para la investigación histórica en el país. Esta iniciativa, liderada por estudiantes de universidades peruanas, representa un avance significativo en el proceso más amplio de creación de recursos digitales para la investigación histórica y el desarrollo de las humanidades digitales en Perú. En esta entrevista, realizada a fines de 2023 por Paulo Drinot con Jair Miranda Tamayo, Erika Caballero Liñán y Carlos Paredes Hernández, los tres fundadores de FHP, se ofrece una perspectiva sobre los orígenes de FHP, sus características y sus objetivos.