Focusing on famine novels by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope and drawing upon Sianne Ngai's account of aesthetic categories, this article questions how the “interesting,” as an aesthetic category, accommodates cultural difference and distance, on one hand, and demonstrates how material interests shape and delimit the expansion of the public sphere, on the other. It argues that Irish novels present Ireland as aesthetically interesting insofar as it differs from England—suggesting strangeness, peculiarity, unpredictability. Yet including Ireland in a vision of a shared public tends to require the opposite—the assimilation of Irish people into British interests—rendering Ireland conventional and familiar. In other words, the strangeness or novelty that makes Ireland aesthetically interesting is the very thing that prevents Irish people from being incorporated into the liberal idea of a public or a vision of British public interest.

When the British East India Company (EIC) conquered the West Himalaya region in the 1810s, it faced a critical challenge commonly encountered by colonial empires: determining the extent of intervention in intracommunity criminal matters among colonized subjects. This article examines the archived correspondence of colonial officials regarding this challenge and scrutinizes the various arguments made for and against intervention. It shows that the alterity of the subject population was strategically employed by both sides of the debate, who simultaneously promoted contradictory agendas: for those advocating intervention, alterity rendered involvement in criminal matters necessary and just, whereas those averse to intervention employed the very same notion to justify the opposite stance. This dual usage is explained by exposing the contemporary ideas about criminal justice that underlay each of these positions: that criminal law should represent the general will of society, and that it must be executed by a centralized power so as to maintain public order. While these two tenets are commonly perceived as supporting one another, the analysis reveals their decoupling in colonial settings. The debates of EIC officials thus demonstrate how the colonial setting distorts ideas foundational to modern criminal law systems, casting doubt over whether they were ever truly in harmony to begin with.

This study utilized a novel, observational paradigm to identify functional patterns of father responsiveness to child distress. In particular, we sought to identify a pattern of caregiving deactivation characterized by parenting behavior that functioned to minimize activation of the caregiving behavioral system. We also sought to identify a pattern of caregiving hyperactivation characterized by parenting behavior that functioned to maintain or heighten caregiving system activation. In turn, we examined whether caregiving deactivation and hyperactivation were differentially associated with children’s socioemotional development over a two-year period. Participants included 235 fathers (55% White) and children (Mage = 2.97; 55% female) who visited the laboratory at two measurement occasions spaced approximately two years apart. A path model analysis revealed that caregiving deactivation was uniquely associated with decreases in children’s oppositional defiance and hostility over a two-year period. In contrast, caregiving hyperactivation was uniquely associated with increases in children’s anxiety and social disengagement two years later. The findings highlight the importance of considering both form and function in parenting behavior and provide evidence on the importance of considering fathers’ caregiving behavior.

The calibration between national regulatory oversight and local policy autonomy is a prominent feature in the discussion regarding social assistance institutions in large countries. The complex principal-agent structure embedded within such institutions and the resultant information asymmetry make it difficult for the national principal to monitor the behaviour of subnational agents, resulting in prevalent mis-targeting of welfare benefits and petty corruption. Built on a principal-agent framework, this study seeks to explain the puzzling shrinkage of China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (Dibao) in recent years. Accountability mechanisms are found to exert major impacts on the scale of welfare programs. Using a unique city-level panel dataset and difference-in-differences (DID) strategy, this quantitative study finds that discipline inspection by upper-level government leads to a significant decrease of Dibao coverage in a city, a link reinforced by the local intensity of China’s anti-corruption campaign. Blame avoidance and the defensive reaction of local agents triggered by draconian enforcement of accountability result in distorted welfare administration on the ground. Building informational capacity presents a useful approach in mitigating the vertical control–autonomy dilemma illustrated in this study.

In this work, we investigate the arithmetic properties of $b_{5^k}(n)$, which counts the partitions of n where no part is divisible by $5^k$. By constructing generating functions for $b_{5^k}(n)$ across specific arithmetic progressions, we establish a set of Ramanujan-type congruences.

It is not unusual to find the content of an epistemic agent’s utterance unwanted and immediately reject such an utterance because it elicits a repulsive reaction in us. What could explain this sort of reaction to a speaker’s utterance? In this paper, I propose an “epistemic disgust” concept to explain this reaction to a speaker’s utterance. Epistemic disgust refers to a phenomenon whereby an epistemic agent is repulsed by a speaker’s utterance either due to the speaker’s personality or the content of the speaker’s utterance, thus causing the agent to reject the speaker’s utterance from contributing to her epistemic system.

Chipped stone tools termed perforators and gravers are characterized by projections. Although the implied function of these tool types differs, there are no guidelines for classifying perforators and gravers based on their morphology. Consequently, researchers classify these tools differently, which precludes meaningful comparisons of the frequencies of these types between assemblages. A use-wear study confirmed the hypothesis that specimens with a thin projection and a sharp distal angle often had perforation use wear. Specimens with graver use wear were characterized by a range of projection perimeters and distal angles. We recommend that specimens with a projection perimeter of 20 mm or less and a distal angle of 40 degrees or less be classified as perforators and those with greater dimensions as gravers. This will achieve a consistent classification system for perforators and gravers, although it must be recognized that these type names may not be indicative of the function of individual specimens.

In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” John Rawls implied that a well-ordered society would be a deliberative democracy and said that public reason is essential to it. After his turn to political liberalism, he was chary about claims of truth. In Section 1, I lay out essential features of Rawlsian deliberative democracy. In Section 2, I introduce some prominent commentary on Rawls’s treatment of truth and public reasoning. On these readings—collectively “the non-permissive reading”—Rawls’s treatment of truth has problematic implications for public reasoning and therefore for deliberative democracy. In Section 3, I survey those implications. In Section 4, I argue that the texts which are taken to support the non-permissive reading support a very different reading. In Section 5, I argue that Rawls does not endorse the theses imputed to him by the non-permissive reading and that his view does not have the implications surveyed in Section 3.

For a group G, a subgroup $U \leqslant G$ and a group A such that $\mathrm {Inn}(G) \leqslant A \leqslant \mathrm {Aut}(G)$, we say that U is an A-covering group of G if $G = \bigcup _{a\in A}U^a$. A theorem of Jordan (1872), implies that if G is a finite group, $A = \mathrm {Inn}(G)$ and U is an A-covering group of G, then $U = G$. Motivated by a question concerning Kronecker classes of field extensions, Neumann and Praeger (1990) conjectured that, more generally, there is an integer function f such that if G is a finite group and U is an A-covering subgroup of G, then $|G:U| \leqslant f(|A:\mathrm {Inn}(G)|)$. A key piece of evidence for this conjecture is a theorem of Praeger [‘Kronecker classes of fields and covering subgroups of finite groups’, J. Aust. Math. Soc. 57 (1994), 17–34], which asserts that there is a two-variable integer function g such that if G is a finite group and U is an A-covering subgroup of G, then $|G:U|\leqslant g(|A:\mathrm {Inn}(G)|,c)$, where c is the number of A-chief factors of G. Unfortunately, the proof of this theorem contains an error. In this paper, using a different argument, we give a correct proof of the theorem.

We study time-dependent density segregation of granular mixtures flowing over an inclined plane. Discrete element method (DEM) simulations in a periodic box are performed for granular mixtures of same size and different density particles flowing under the influence of gravity. In addition, a continuum model is developed to solve the momentum balance equations along with the species transport equation by accounting for the inter-coupling of segregation and rheology. The particle force-based density segregation theory has been used along with the $\mu {-}I$ rheology to predict evolution of flow properties with time for binary and multicomponent mixtures. The effect of particle arrangements on the transient evolution of flow properties for three different initial configurations is investigated using both continuum and DEM simulations. Continuum predictions for various flow properties of interest such as species concentration, velocity, pressure and shear stress at different time instants are compared with DEM simulations. The results from the discrete and continuum models are found to be in good agreement with each other for well-mixed and heavy-near-base initial configurations. Kinetic theory-based predictions of segregation evolution, however, show good quantitative agreement only for the heavy-near-base configuration with a much slower evolution for the well-mixed case. Interestingly, the continuum model is unable to predict the flow evolution for the light-near-base initial configuration. DEM simulations reveal the presence of an instability driven, quick segregation for this configuration which is not predicted by the one-dimensional model and requires generalisation to three dimensions.

On 22 January 2025, an international conference titled “Patrimoine en péril?” was held at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. It was organized by the UNESCO Chair in the International Law of the Protection of Cultural Heritage (University of Geneva), the Museum of Art and History (MAH), and the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (ALIPH) Foundation. This event was part of the eponymous exhibition at MAH,1 commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the entry into force of the Swiss Cultural Property Transfer Act. The conference explored these two themes, bringing together international experts from academia, law, and heritage conservation and management, reflecting a cross-disciplinary perspective on the protection of cultural property in times of crisis. In his opening remarks, Marc-Olivier Wahler (Director of the MAH) highlighted the evolving role of museums in contemporary society. The conference was split into five sessions, each addressing various critical issues related to cultural property, and were moderated by Béatrice Blandin (MAH), Antoinette Maget Dominicé (University of Geneva), and Marc-André Renold (University of Geneva).