In this article, we reflect on factors which may tempt psychiatrists to move from working in the UK to Australia. A comparison between the UK and Australian healthcare systems is presented. Following this, G.W. offers personal reflections on his transition between working in the UK and Australia, including an experience of being a patient, the benefits of working and training in the respective countries, and personal sacrifices which must be considered. We conclude that individual clinicians must weigh up the positives and negatives of the system which they want to work within, with the best option for each person being specifically individual to them.

In Faces of Inequality, Sophia Moreau puts forward a pluralistic theory of how discrimination wrongs people. I approach Moreau's ideas not as a legal philosopher or theorist, but as an empirical and socio-legal scholar of equality law. In this commentary, I pick up on five provocations that emerge for me from Moreau's work: on reasonable accommodations, on comparison in equality law, on the public/private divide, on the justification of discrimination, and on discrimination as a personal wrong. While Moreau's work is grounded in the common themes or shared features that emerge from equality laws across jurisdictions, I consider what these themes mean for the uncommon ground, drawing on exceptional developments in discrimination law in some Australian jurisdictions, and our experience with the “exceptional” protected characteristic of age.

We obtain the following embedding theorem for symbolic dynamical systems. Let G be a countable amenable group with the comparison property. Let X be a strongly aperiodic subshift over G. Let Y be a strongly irreducible shift of finite type over G that has no global period, meaning that the shift action is faithful on Y. If the topological entropy of X is strictly less than that of Y and Y contains at least one factor of X, then X embeds into Y. This result partially extends the classical result of Krieger when $G = \mathbb {Z}$ and the results of Lightwood when $G = \mathbb {Z}^d$ for $d \geq 2$. The proof relies on recent developments in the theory of tilings and quasi-tilings of amenable groups.

To understand the p-adic étale cohomology of a proper smooth variety over a p-adic field, Faltings compared it to the cohomology of his ringed topos, by the so-called Faltings’ main p-adic comparison theorem, and then deduced various comparisons with p-adic cohomologies originating from differential forms. In this article, we generalize the former to any proper and finitely presented morphism of coherent schemes over an absolute integral closure of $\mathbb {Z}_p$ (without any smoothness assumption) for torsion abelian étale sheaves (not necessarily finite locally constant). Our proof relies on our cohomological descent for Faltings’ ringed topos, using a variant of de Jong’s alteration theorem for morphisms of schemes due to Gabber–Illusie–Temkin to reduce to the relative case of proper log-smooth morphisms of log-smooth schemes over a complete discrete valuation ring proved by Abbes–Gros. A by-product of our cohomological descent is a new construction of Faltings’ comparison morphism, which does not use Achinger’s results on $K(\pi ,1)$-schemes.

Angesichts der fortschreitenden Publikation der Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR), der Weiterarbeit an den Bänden des Evangelisch-Katholischen Kommentars zum Neuen Testament (EKK) und der Fortsetzung von Blackwell's Kommentarserie Through the Centuries lautet die Leitfrage des vorliegenden Artikels: Wie kann zur Theoretisierung und Methodisierung einer Rezeptionsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments beigetragen werden? Um diese Frage zu beantworten und Perspektiven zu entwerfen, unternimmt der Artikel den Versuch einer neuerlichen Klärung der Begriffe ‘Wirkungsgeschichte’ / ‘wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein’, ‘Auslegungsgeschichte’, ‘Rezeptionsgeschichte’ und schlägt zwei Fragenkataloge vor, die das Vorgehen einer cross-temporal und cross-cultural ausgerichteten Rezeptionskritik des Neuen Testaments inhaltlich und methodisch reflektieren und kontrollieren.

Radiocarbon observations (Δ14C) in dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) of seawater provide useful information about ocean carbon cycling and ocean circulation. To deliver high-quality observations, the Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics (LIP) at ETH-Zurich developed a new simplified method allowing the rapid analysis of radiocarbon in DIC of small seawater samples, which is continually assessed by following internal quality controls. However, a comparison with externally produced 14C measurements to better establish an equivalency between methods was still missing. Here, we make the first intercomparison with the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) facility based on 14 duplicate seawater samples collected in 2020. We also compare with prior deep-water observations from the 1970s to 1990s. The results show a very good agreement in both comparisons. The mean Δ14C of 12 duplicate samples measured by LIP and NOSAMS were statistically identical within one sigma uncertainty while two other duplicate samples agreed within two sigma. Based on this small number of duplicate samples, LIP values appear to be slightly lower than the NOSAMS values, but more measurements will be needed for confirmation. We also comment on storage and preservation techniques used in this study, including the freezing of samples collected in foil bags.

Hermann Lotze argued that the fact that consciousness simultaneously “holds objects together as well as apart” such that they can be compared implies (a) that there is a simple thinker and (b) that consciousness is an ‘indivisible unity.’ I offer a reconstruction and evaluation of Lotze’s Argument from Comparison. I contend that it does not deliver (a) but makes a good case for (b). I will relate Lotze’s argument to the contemporary debate between “top-down” and “bottom-up” views of the unity of consciousness and locate it in its historical context. (Kant and Herbart figure prominently here.)

When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a “larger” comparative (“A is larger/longer/higher/more than B”) or a “smaller” comparative (“B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A”). This choice matters because it affects people’s inferences about the absolute magnitudes of the compared items, and influences the perceived truthfulness of the comparative sentence itself. In 4 studies (total N = 2335), we investigated the language that people use to describe ordinal relations between attributes. Specifically, we examined whether demography, emotion, and personality predict the tendency to use “larger” comparatives rather than “smaller” ones. Participants viewed pairs of items differing in a single attribute and indicated the word they would use to describe the relationship between them; they also completed a series of self-report measures. Replicating previous work, we found a robust tendency to use “larger” comparatives, both when people chose between two adjectives and when they freely produced their own words in a sentence completion task. We also found that this tendency was more pronounced in older participants, those with positive mood or outlook, and among people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. However, these effects were very small, with meta-analytic effect sizes indicating they explain less than 1% of the variance. We conclude that, although people’s use of comparative adjectives is influenced by properties of the items that are being compared, the way that people describe magnitude relations is relatively stable across variation in a range of important traits and dispositions, protecting decision-makers from a potentially undesirable source of bias in their inferences and representations of described options.