This study aimed to assess Well-Being Index scores in paediatric cardiac ICU (PCICU) registered nurses and advanced practice providers. Secondary objectives included identifying factors correlating with at-risk Well-Being Index scores and exploring predictors of these scores, with attention to the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. A multicentre electronic survey was conducted between October 2021 and January 2022. Registered nurses and advanced practice providers working in PCICUs at US centres participating in the Collaborative Research from the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society were included.

The survey included the nine-item Well-Being Index and questions about demographics and factors influencing well-being, such as coronavirus disease 2019. The Well-Being Index is a validated tool to predict workforce distress and well-being. Out of 218 participants (180 registered nurses, 38 advanced practice providers), 137 registered nurses (76%) and 15 advanced practice providers (39%) had at-risk Well-Being Index scores. A total of 61% of nurses and 34% of advanced practice providers reported an intent to leave. Intent to leave was significantly linked to lower well-being for registered nurses (p = 0.002). Leadership support reduced registered nurses’ distress risk by 68% compared to no support (p = 0.04). Increased stress since coronavirus disease 2019 raised registered nurses’ poor well-being risk by four times (p = 0.001). PCICU registered nurses and advanced practice providers are at risk for poor well-being, exacerbated by the pandemic. Those with poor well-being may be more likely to leave. Leadership support is vital for nurses’ well-being. Further research is needed to establish baseline well-being.

This article examines a 40-year policy history of efforts to redress survivors of egregious violations, such as torture, massacres, and genocides. Using oral history interviews and document analysis, it first focused on the ideas and creative advocacy that undergirded a burgeoning redress movement. By juxtaposing classic ideas with a relatively obscure statute (the Alien Tort Statute or ATS) and modern strategies, advocates won an improbable court case. Their case inspired Congress to introduce, debate, and pass the Torture Victim Protection Act, explicitly to support, affirm, and expand the ATS and the idea of universal jurisdiction, locally and globally. After advocates further developed these ideas with new court cases and NGOs, the Supreme Court began whittling the policies away, despite congressional intent, prioritizing the ideas that Congress had rejected, until the Court stripped the ATS of its universal jurisdiction power. This human rights retrenchment in the United States drove the advocates to seek new bases for human rights justice and to develop their ideas abroad where legal actions have succeeded in advancing some redress. In expounding this history, the article sheds light on four phenomena: the power and limitations of aspirational and practical ideas in constructing new pathways to justice; the role of creative advocacy to frame and amalgamate ideas toward developing paradigm-shifting policy and law; the flow and interactions between government branches and civil society with the ideas and policies, including how the courts initially led in advancing human rights redress then later reversed and truncated the pathway counter to Congressional intent.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are permeating all domains of our lives. Aside from the many opportunities they raise, their deployment can also hamper individual and societal interests. To counter these risks, regulators across the globe are therefore adopting normative initiatives to govern the technology. While these mostly consist of the promulgation of ethics guidelines and non-binding recommendations, the European Union (EU) opted for binding rules instead. In Spring 2024, it adopted a landmark regulation titled the Artificial Intelligence Act. The Act entered into force on August 1, 2024, and most of its provisions become applicable after two years. Since it systematically and punctiliously regulates the use of AI across sectors rather than focusing on a specific application domain, the AI Act is heralded as the first legal instrument of its kind. Its trendsetter status in the global AI regulatory landscape, coupled with its extraterritorial scope, means the Act is likely to shape the course of AI's uptake in Europe and beyond.

Predominant climate club research emphasizes state-centric clubs that alter the incentive structure and bargaining context for climate cooperation. This focus on national governments, however, leaves climate clubs vulnerable to political turbulence afflicting individual club members. Subnational governments are an important yet often overlooked type of actor in the club literature. This article contributes to understanding the role and nature of subnational government-led clubs in transnational climate governance and lawmaking through qualitative case studies of the Western Climate Initiative and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. I identify the distinguishing characteristics that these clubs manifest in their membership and functions, as formalized through legal arrangements. I demonstrate that these clubs have the potential to increase structural stability, withstand political changes, and enhance the legitimacy and efficacy of climate action. They do so by functioning not only as organizations that create incentives for committing to legal norms and mechanisms for deterring free riding but also as communities of practice that generate shared understandings, resources, and norms to sustain club cooperation in pursuing a shared commitment to climate action. As such, each club applies a mix of rationalist approaches to benefit generation and constructivist approaches to community building.

This article examines Immanuel Kant’s evolving ideas on race and inheritance, focusing on his early lectures on physical geography. It highlights his engagement with contemporary debates on physiological defects and adaptation. The notes of Georg Hesse, a student of Kant, are analysed to show how Kant’s ideas matured before his first published essay on race in 1775. The article also contextualizes Kant’s relationship with the works of Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Henry Baker, showing how their studies on hereditary anomalies influenced Kant’s ideas. Finally, it sheds light on how Kant navigated the challenges of explaining race and inheritance, balancing environmental and hereditary factors in his conceptualization of human variation.

The preferential attachment model is a natural and popular random graph model for a growing network that contains very well-connected ‘hubs’. We study the higher-order connectivity of such a network by investigating the topological properties of its clique complex. We concentrate on the Betti numbers, a sequence of topological invariants of the complex related to the numbers of holes (equivalently, repeated connections) of different dimensions. We prove that the expected Betti numbers grow sublinearly fast, with the trivial exceptions of those at dimensions 0 and 1. Our result also shows that preferential attachment graphs undergo infinitely many phase transitions within the parameter regime where the limiting degree distribution has an infinite variance. Regarding higher-order connectivity, our result shows that preferential attachment favors higher-order connectivity. We illustrate our theoretical results with simulations.

In the early 1900s, Maillet [Introduction a la theorie des nombres transcendants et des proprietes arithmetiques des fonctions (Gauthier–Villars, Paris, 1906)] proved that the image of any Liouville number under a rational function with rational coefficients is again a Liouville number. The analogous result for quadratic Liouville matrices in higher dimensions turns out to fail. In fact, using a result by Kleinbock and Margulis [‘Flows on homogeneous spaces and Diophantine approximation on manifolds’, Ann. of Math. (2) 148(1) (1998), 339–360], we show that among analytic matrix functions in dimension $n\ge 2$, Maillet’s invariance property is only true for Möbius transformations with special coefficients. This implies that the analogue in higher dimensions of an open question of Mahler on the existence of transcendental entire functions with Maillet’s property has a negative answer. However, extending a topological argument of Erdős [‘Representations of real numbers as sums and products of Liouville numbers’, Michigan Math. J. 9 (1962), 59–60], we prove that for any injective continuous self-mapping on the space of rectangular matrices, many Liouville matrices are mapped to Liouville matrices. Dropping injectivity, we consider setups similar to Alniaçik and Saias [‘Une remarque sur les $G_{\delta }$-denses’, Arch. Math. (Basel) 62(5) (1994), 425–426], and show that the situation depends on the matrix dimensions $m,n$. Finally, we discuss extensions of a related result by Burger [‘Diophantine inequalities and irrationality measures for certain transcendental numbers’, Indian J. Pure Appl. Math. 32 (2001), 1591–1599] to quadratic matrices. We state several open problems along the way.

Previous accounts have suggested a potential divergence between Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang in their approaches to economic governance. This study examines the policy orientations of the two leaders concerning state–market relations, providing empirical evidence for the recent manifestation of what insiders have termed the “dispute between north and south houses” (nanbeiyuan zhi zheng) and its economic implications. By applying semi-supervised machine learning methods to textual data, this study demonstrates that Li favoured market-oriented policies, whereas Xi displayed a pronounced preference for state-centric strategies. The findings notably indicate an initial divergence in policy orientation, which was followed by a considerable convergence during Xi's second term. Our analysis further reveals that Li's market-oriented rhetoric was particularly prominent during “Mass innovation week,” indicating a campaign-style policy mobilization. Moreover, the analysis identifies that the discursive differences between the two leaders are associated with a decline in firm-level investment, suggesting that disparities in policy orientation may engender political uncertainty. This study contributes to the extant literature on the impact of leadership dynamics on economic policy, the implications of mixed signals from the central leadership and the phenomenon of campaign-style mobilization in China.

Let $\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$ be the mapping class group of the closed orientable surface of genus $g \geq 1$, and let $\mathrm{LMod}_{p}(X)$ be the liftable mapping class group associated with a finite-sheeted branched cover $p:S \to X$, where X is a hyperbolic surface. For $k \geq 2$, let $p_k: S_{k(g-1)+1} \to S_g$ be the standard k-sheeted regular cyclic cover. In this paper, we show that $\{\mathrm{LMod}_{p_k}(S_g)\}_{k \geq 2}$ forms an infinite family of self-normalising subgroups in $\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$, which are also maximal when k is prime. Furthermore, we derive explicit finite generating sets for $\mathrm{LMod}_{p_k}(S_g)$ for $g \geq 3$ and $k \geq 2$, and $\mathrm{LMod}_{p_2}(S_2)$. For $g \geq 2$, as an application of our main result, we also derive a generating set for $\mathrm{LMod}_{p_2}(S_g) \cap C_{\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)}(\iota)$, where $C_{\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)}(\iota)$ is the centraliser of the hyperelliptic involution $\iota \in \mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$. Let $\mathcal{L}$ be the infinite ladder surface, and let $q_g : \mathcal{L} \to S_g$ be the standard infinite-sheeted cover induced by $\langle h^{g-1} \rangle$ where h is the standard handle shift on $\mathcal{L}$. As a final application, we derive a finite generating set for $\mathrm{LMod}_{q_g}(S_g)$ for $g \geq 3$.

Oral argument is the most public and visible part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision-making process. Yet what if some advocates are treated differently before the Court solely because of aspects of their identity? In this work, we leverage a causal inference framework to quantify the effect of an advocate’s gender on interruptions of advocates at both the Court-level and the justice-level. Examining nearly four decades of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript data, we identify a clear and consistent gender effect that dwarfs other influences on justice interruption behavior, with female advocates interrupted more frequently than male advocates.

In this study, we investigated the diversity and survival of aestivating snails in dry-season rice paddies, focusing on their role as intermediate hosts for trematodes. A total of 1,159 snails from various families were collected and analysed, revealing nine species, primarily from the Bithyniidae family, with Bithynia siamensis siamensis being the most abundant. Of the nine species collected, the most common species, B. s. siamensis, exhibited a relatively high survival rate of 81.5% throughout the three-month dry period post-harvest, whereas the remaining eight species had survival rates below 24.0% (0–23.1%). Four snail species, B. s. siamensis, Filopaludina martensi martensi, F. sumatrensis polygramma, and F. doliaris, were found infected with larval trematodes, with an overall prevalence of 8.46% (57/674). The larval trematodes identified were categorized into four types: echinostome metacercaria, Thapariella anastomusa metacercaria, unidentified metacercaria, and unidentified rediae. These findings demonstrate that trematode infections can persist in aestivating snails despite the challenging conditions during the dry season, emphasizing the potential of aestivating snails to act as vectors for trematode transmission in agricultural settings. This underscores the need for effective management strategies to mitigate the risks associated with trematode transmission.