The study estimates the contribution of changes in world prices, exchange rates, and trade policies in explaining the variability of domestic prices under the scenario of incomplete transmission of changes and a counterfactual scenario of complete pass-through. We utilize data from the Indian wheat market for the period 2006–09 and 2017–20. The findings reveal an improvement in the pass-through of changes from the landed price to domestic markets. The price transmission elasticity increased from 50% in 2006/07–2008/09 to 67% during 2017/18–2019/20. The policy response to rising (declining) global prices of decreasing (increasing) import tariffs had a significant effect on prices. The variation in exchange rate offsets the impact of declining or rising global prices on domestic prices.

This paper presents a model specification for group comparisons regarding a functional trend over time within a trial and learning across a series of trials in intensive binary longitudinal eye-tracking data. The functional trend and learning effects are modeled using by-variable smooth functions. This model specification is formulated as a generalized additive mixed model, which allowed for the use of the freely available mgcv package (Wood in Package ‘mgcv.’ https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mgcv/mgcv.pdf, 2023) in R. The model specification was applied to intensive binary longitudinal eye-tracking data, where the questions of interest concern differences between individuals with and without brain injury in their real-time language comprehension and how this affects their learning over time. The results of the simulation study show that the model parameters are recovered well and the by-variable smooth functions are adequately predicted in the same condition as those found in the application.

We report the case of a 25 kg male with aortic isthmus atresia and small femoral arterial access. A BeGraft covered stent was percutaneously implanted after perforating the atretic segment. This case demonstrates the feasibility and safety of transcatheter treatment using the Bentley stent, which enables smaller femoral access compared to other balloon-expandable stent platforms.

The studies of descriptive political representation demonstrate that the share of women amongst local elected officials increases, but mayors are still predominantly men. This paper contributes to the literature on the link between the descriptive and substantive representation of women at the local level. It investigates the influence of mayors’ gender on the development of local childcare policies in Poland. We employ quasi-experimental research schemes (difference-in-differences and generalised synthetic control) to study changes in childcare provision and public spending on nurseries and kindergartens. We merged electoral data (changes on the mayoral position) and registry data on local budget expenditures and service availability covering a period of more than 16 years. We do not find any systematic causal link, suggested by the extant literature on substantive representation, between the election of a female mayor and the expansion of childcare services.

For many trematode species, individual reproductive parthenitae in first intermediate host colonies senesce, die, and are replaced by newly born parthenitae. The times involved in these processes are poorly understood. Here, we present an approach to estimate parthenita death rates and lifespans that uses readily obtainable data on senescent parthenita frequencies, brood sizes, and offspring (cercaria) release rates. The onset of parthenita senescence is often marked by the degeneration and disappearance of the germinal mass, its source of new offspring. Following germinal mass loss, the remaining viable offspring in a senescent parthenita finish development and are birthed before parthenita death. Therefore, a senescing parthenita’s remaining lifespan is the time it takes for all its viable offspring to mature and exit. We can estimate this time by measuring whole-colony (infected snail) cercaria shed rates, dissecting colonies to count reproductives, and then apply the per redia cercaria production rate to the observed brood sizes of senescent parthenitae. The per-capita parthenita death rate is then calculated as the proportion of parthenitae that are senescent divided by their average remaining lifespan. Reproductive parthenita lifespan is the inverse of this death rate. We demonstrate the approach using philophthalmid trematodes, first providing documentation of a free-floating germinal mass in 4 philophthalmids, and then, for 3 of those species, estimating parthenita senescence rates, death rates, and lifespans. This method should be broadly applicable among trematode species and help inform our understanding of trematode colony dynamics, social structure, and the evolution of parthenita senescence.

This paper reflects on the availability of a key document in the research integrity landscape: Reports of institutional and university misconduct investigations. It reviews how universities have typically responded to calls for disclosure, offers suggestions to mitigate concerns, and argues that the failure to release such reports creates a critical evidence gap. It closes with a call for disclosure of such reports as a default.

Archaeologists have relied on the presence of European material on Indigenous New England sites as the main indicator that a site was occupied during the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries—a span often characterized as the Contact period. The AD 1480–1630 span is particularly difficult to sequence because it lies on a radiocarbon calibration plateau. Here we report on a program of AMS dating from an Indigenous site on Great Island on Cape Cod in Massachusetts that highlights evidence of widespread activity during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—absent European material culture. Furthermore, the archaeological evidence indicates that a previously excavated colonial tavern in the same area on Great Island was the last in a long-term occupation in which “European contact” was not a defining event. Instead, the evidence points to a continuous Indigenous presence extending from the Middle Woodland period. Later colonial period activities, including those associated with European material, were mapped onto a long-standing Indigenous task-scape.

We perform the first mapping of the ideological positions of European parties using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a “zero-shot” learner. We ask OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) to identify the more “right-wing” option across all possible duplets of European parties at a given point in time, solely based on their names and country of origin, and combine this information via a Bradley–Terry model to create an ideological ranking. A cross-validation employing widely-used expert-, manifesto- and poll-based estimates reveals that the ideological scores produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) closely map those obtained through the expert-based evaluation, i.e., CHES. Given the high cost of scaling parties via trained coders, and the scarcity of expert data before the 1990s, our finding that generative AI produces estimates of comparable quality to CHES supports its usage in political science on the grounds of replicability, agility, and affordability.

Western contemporary educational systems tend to re-produce, and thus maintain, the existent non-sustainable social structures, failing to live up to the present critical times. Their aim is confined to preparation for financial “success,” whereas they disregard the imminence of environmental crises and global social shifts and are rooted in the human sense of superiority over nature, that is, anthropocentrism. The present article acknowledges the need for reconsideration of humans’ place and role in the ecosystem and focuses on the importance of a more ecocentric pedagogy. A holistic in-service teacher training was designed and implemented in Greece, inspired by the wild pedagogies touchstones, mainly the notion of nature as co-teacher. Twelve participants met for the course of a year to immerse themselves in nature-centred, affective, relational, “wild” experiences. Changes were recorded using pre/post-semi-structured interviews to inquire into participants’ perceptions of self versus Self (i.e. acknowledging oneself as part of a larger whole) and perceptions of (environmental) education. It appears that deep, relational nature experiences (a) can shift the perception of individualised self towards Self, (b) can shift the perception of teacher identity towards that of a change agent and (c) can set ethics and values education as a priority among trainee-teacher participants.

Interstellar hydrogen atoms (H atoms) penetrate into the heliosphere through the region of the solar wind interaction with the interstellar plasma due to their large mean free path. Resonant charge exchange of H atoms with protons has been considered as the main interaction process between the components. In the majority of models, other processes like elastic H-H and H-p collisions are not included. Moreover, it has been assumed that the velocities of the colliding particles remain unchanged during charge exchange. This corresponds to the scattering on the angle of π in the centre mass rest frame.

The goal of this paper is to explore effects of the elastic H-H and H-p collisions as well as the angular scattering during charge exchange on the distribution of the interstellar atoms in the heliosphere and at its boundary.

We present results of simple (and therefore, easily repeatable) kinetic model of the interstellar atom penetration through the region of the solar and interstellar winds interaction into the heliosphere. As a result of the model we compute the distribution function of the interstellar atoms at different heliospheric distances. Further, this distribution function is used to compute its moments and potentially observable features such as absorption and backscattered spectra in the Lyman-alpha line.

Results show that there are differences in the behavior of the distribution function when considering elastic collisions and the changes in the moments of the distribution achieve 10%. Therefore, in cases where precise calculation of H atom parameters is essential, such as in the modeling of backscattered Lyman-α emission, elastic collisions must be considered.

How does family diversity affect the choice of hybrid entrepreneurship? The effect of family dynamics has received little attention in research on the mode of entry into entrepreneurship. Building on the family embeddedness perspective, we hypothesize that the diversity of family households at surface (i.e., age and gender) and deep (i.e., work experience and education background) levels impacts the entrepreneur's adoption of a full-time or hybrid mode to start a new business. We further theorize that the effects of family diversity on entrepreneurial entry decisions are moderated by income stratification, which largely determines the ways entrepreneurs deal with family diversity. Using a sample of 1,320 individual-wave observations from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), our findings demonstrate that the choice of hybrid entrepreneurship is affected more by deep-level diversity than surface-level diversity among family households. Moreover, being from a high-strata family strengthens the relationship between surface-level diversity and the choice of hybrid entry, while weakening the effects of deep-level diversity. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion about family dynamics and entrepreneurship variations and provides important theoretical and practical implications.