The incidence of Kawasaki Disease has a peak in the winter months with a trough in late summer/early fall. Environmental/exposure factors have been associated with a time-varying incidence. These factors were altered during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was performed through the International Kawasaki Disease Registry. Data from patients diagnosed with acute Kawasaki Disease and Multiple Inflammatory Syndrome-Children were obtained. Guideline case definitions were used to confirm site diagnosis. Enrollment was from 1/2020 to 7/2023. The number of patients was plotted over time. The patients/month were tabulated for the anticipated peak Kawasaki Disease season (December–April) and non-peak season (May–November). Data were available for 1975 patients from 11 large North American sites with verified complete data and uninterrupted site reporting. The diagnosis criteria were met for 531 Kawasaki Disease and 907 Multiple Inflammatory Syndrome-Children patients. For Multiple Inflammatory Syndrome-Children there were peaks in January of 2021 and 2022. For Kawasaki Disease, 2020 began (January–March) with a seasonal peak (peak 26, mean 21) with a subsequent fall in the number of cases/month (mean 11). After the onset of the pandemic (April 2020), there was no clear seasonal Kawasaki Disease variation (December–April mean 12 cases/month and May–November mean 10 cases/month). During the pandemic, the prevalence of Kawasaki Disease decreased and the usual seasonality was abolished. This may represent the impact of pandemic public health measures in altering environmental/exposure aetiologic factors contributing to the incidence of Kawasaki Disease.

The self-generated magnetic field in three-dimensional (3-D) single-mode ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability (ARTI) relevant to the acceleration phase of a direct-drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF) implosion is investigated. It is found that stronger magnetic fields up to a few thousand teslas can be generated by 3-D ARTI rather than by its two-dimensional (2-D) counterpart. The Nernst effects significantly alter the magnetic field convection and amplify the magnetic fields. The magnetic field of thousands of teslas yields the Hall parameter of the order of unity, leading to profound magnetized heat flux modification. While the magnetic field significantly accelerates the bubble growth in the short-wavelength 2-D modes through modifying the heat fluxes, the magnetic field mostly accelerates the spike growth but has little influence on the bubble growth in 3-D ARTI. The accelerated growth of spikes in 3-D ARTI is expected to enhance material mixing and degrade ICF implosion performance. This work is focused on a regime relevant to direct-drive ICF parameters at the National Ignition Facility, and it also covers a range of key parameters that are relevant to other ICF designs and hydrodynamic/astrophysical scenarios.

This article constructs the moduli stack of torsion-free $G$-jet-structures in homotopy type theory with one monadic modality. This yields a construction of this moduli stack for any $\infty$-topos equipped with any stable factorization systems.

In the intended applications of this theory, the factorization systems are given by the deRham-Stack construction. Homotopy type theory allows a formulation of this abstract theory with surprisingly low complexity. This is witnessed by the accompanying formalization of large parts of this work.

We investigated the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the duration of untreated psychosis (DUP). First-episode psychosis admissions (n = 101) to the STEP Clinic in Connecticut showed DUP reduction (P = 0.0015) during the pandemic, with the median reducing from 208 days pre-pandemic to 56 days in the early pandemic period, and subsequently increasing to 154 days (P = 0.0281). Time from psychosis onset to antipsychotic prescription decreased significantly in the pandemic (P = 0.0183), with the median falling from 117 to 35 days. This cohort study demonstrates an association between greater pandemic restrictions and marked DUP reduction, and provides insights for future early detection efforts.

The paper introduces a method for creating a categorical generalized linear model (GLM) based on information extracted from a given black-box predictor. The procedure for creating the guided GLM is as follows: For each covariate, including interactions, a covariate partition is created using partial dependence functions calculated based on the given black-box predictor. In order to enhance the predictive performance, an auto-calibration step is used to determine which parts of each covariate partition should be kept, and which parts should be merged. Given the covariate and interaction partitions, a standard categorical GLM is fitted using a lasso penalty. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated using a number of real insurance data sets where gradient boosting machine (GBM) models are used as black-box reference models. From these examples, it is seen that the predictive performance of the guided GLMs is very close to that of the corresponding reference GBMs. Further, in the examples, the guided GLMs have few parameters, making the resulting models easy to interpret. In the numerical illustrations techniques are used to, e.g., identify important interactions both locally and globally, which is essential when, e.g., constructing a tariff.

This article examines how Indigenous Peoples who depend on World Heritage sites for their culture and livelihood can appeal to the Committee when State Parties fail to comply with their obligations. While scholars criticize the World Heritage Convention for the lack of participation of Indigenous Peoples, particularly in the inscription and management processes, the framework of the Convention also allows representation and visibility. Indeed, compliance mechanisms offer opportunities for Indigenous advocates to negotiate Land sovereignty and environmental protection. TWAIL, which places the worldview of Indigenous Peoples at the center of legal practice, is crucial to understanding the interactions between Indigenous Peoples and the 1972 UNESCO Convention. TWAILers highlight how international law historically denies sovereignty rights to Indigenous Peoples. Article 6(1) echoes this absence of sovereignty. This article examines three cases in which Indigenous advocates petition to protect Native Lands against environmental degradations and colonization: Kakadu, Wood Buffalo, and Uluru. Ultimately, the challenges of Indigenous activists in their quest to preserve nature and culture reveal that the absence of sovereignty prerogatives remains a substantial issue. While the Convention provides a venue for advocacy and international awareness, Indigenous Peoples still must negotiate Land autonomy and cultural sovereignty with the State.

This paper reflects on representations of the convergence of Islam and feminism in light of the recent uprising of Iranian women. Most of the existing literature discussing Muslim women’s rights are locked in a dichotomy of approaches, one being prejudicial and the other apologetic. The prejudicial approach is a (neo-)Orientalist one. It understands Muslim societies as backward and their redemption in abandoning Islam and following the lead of the “West.” The apologetic approach is a multiculturalist one, advocating most prominently by academic feminists based in Europe and United States. In trying to reclaim agency for Muslim women, this approach denies real oppressions happening in Muslim societies, and as a result of Islamic practices. Inspired by Iranian women’s fight for freedom, this paper challenges the aforementioned dichotomy, and instead calls for a third approach that begins with, and responds to, the lived experiences of women living in Muslim societies.

The EUMigraTool (EMT) provides short-term and mid-term predictions of asylum seekers arriving in the European Union, drawing on multiple sources of public information and with a focus on human rights. After 3 years of development, it has been tested in real environments by 17 NGOs working with migrants in Spain, Italy, and Greece.

This paper will first describe the functionalities, models, and features of the EMT. It will then analyze the main challenges and limitations of developing a tool for non-profit organizations, focusing on issues such as (1) the validation process and accuracy, and (2) the main ethical concerns, including the challenging exploitation plan when the main target group are NGOs.

The overall purpose of this paper is to share the results and lessons learned from the creation of the EMT, and to reflect on the main elements that need to be considered when developing a predictive tool for assisting NGOs in the field of migration.

There is evidence that social contagion plays a role in shaping the clinical presentation of some psychiatric symptoms, particularly affecting features that vary over time and culture. Some symptoms can increase so rapidly in prevalence that they become ‘epidemic’. The mechanism involves a spread through peers and/or the media. Within broader domains of psychopathology, this process draws from a ‘symptom pool’ that can determine which specific symptoms will appear. This article illustrates these mechanisms by focusing on non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), a syndrome that has been subject to social contagion and whose prevalence may have increased among adolescents.

A common statistical modelling paradigm used in actuarial pricing is (a) assuming that the possible loss model can be chosen from a dictionary of standard models; (b) selecting the model that provides the best trade-off between goodness of fit and complexity. Machine learning provides a rigorous framework for this selection/validation process. An alternative modelling paradigm, common in the sciences, is to prove the adequacy of a statistical model from first principles: for example, Planck’s distribution, which describes the spectral distribution of blackbody radiation empirically, was explained by Einstein by assuming that radiation is made of quantised harmonic oscillators (photons). In this working party we have been exploring the extent to which loss models, too, can be derived from first principles. Traditionally, the Poisson, negative binomial, and binomial distributions are used as loss count models because they are familiar and easy to work with. We show how reasoning from first principles naturally leads to non-stationary Poisson processes, Lévy processes, and multivariate Bernoulli processes depending on the context. For modelling severities, we build on previous research that shows  how graph theory can be used to model property-like losses. We show how the methodology can be extended to deal with business interruption/supply chain risks by considering networks with higher-order dependencies. For liability business, we show the theoretical and practical limitations of traditional models such as the lognormal distribution. We explore the question of where the ubiquitous power-law behaviour comes from, finding a natural explanation in random growth models. We also address the derivation of severity curves in territories where compensation tables are used. This research is foundational in nature, but its results may prove useful to practitioners by guiding model selection and elucidating the relationship between the features of a risk and the model’s parameters.

In the mid to late 19th century, much of Africa was under colonial rule, with the colonisers exercising power over the labour and territory of Africa. However, as much as Africa has predominantly gained independence from traditional colonial rule, another form of colonial rule still dominates the African landscape. This similitude of these different forms of colonialism is found in the power dominance exhibited by Western technological corporations, just like the traditional colonialists. In this digital age, digital colonialism manifests in Africa through the control and ownership of critical digital infrastructure by foreign entities, leading to unequal data flow and asymmetrical power dynamics. This usually occurs under the guise of foreign corporations providing technological assistance to the continent.

By drawing references from the African continent, this article examines the manifestations of digital colonialism and the factors that aid its occurrence on the continent. It further explores the manifestations of digital colonialism in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) while analysing the occurrence of data exploitation on the continent and the need for African ownership in cultivating the digital future of the African continent. The paper also recognises the benefits linked to the use of AI and makes a cautious approach toward the deployment of AI tools in Africa. It then concludes by recommending the implementation of laws, regulations, and policies that guarantee the inclusiveness, transparency, and ethical values of new technologies, with strategies toward achieving a decolonised digital future on the African continent.

A case of hermaphrodism in a wild Pacific bluefin tuna Thunnus orientalis from the Sea of Japan is reported. Morphologically and macroscopically, the gonad seemed to have both ovarian and testicular surfaces. Histological analysis showed that the gonad consisted of only sexually mature testis in all the sections examined, suggesting that the individual was male. Genetic analysis, however, indicated that the tissue samples from this individual had no male-specific genome region, resulting in it being inferred as a female. The observed inconsistency between genetic and histological analysis could help future understanding of the sex development of tunas.

The ambition of this article is to provide a phonological account of an intricate pattern of lenition and gemination in Campidanese Sardinian. The data show two things: that a model of phonology needs some way of showing strength and weakness as positional effects and that neither can be reliably understood in phonetic terms. In this analysis, the discovery procedure does not depend on raw phonetic facts, but rather on a rich model of abstract phonological representations. These representations are of two kinds, melodic and prosodic, and they allow for a substance-free phonological analysis of lenition and fortition in Campidanese that is not confronted by the difficulties inherent in surface-oriented approaches.

Negative human–wildlife interactions are a growing problem, particularly for people living near protected areas and wildlife refuges. In Kenya, African savannah elephants Loxodonta africana threaten food security for subsistence farmers by crop foraging, which can jeopardize conservation efforts if farmers retaliate against elephants. To inform conservation and management, this study had three objectives: (1) to evaluate stakeholder participatory models of human–elephant conflict; (2) to note any novel or underrepresented variables in the models; and (3) to determine if there were indicators for assessing the success of mitigation programmes using a biocultural approach. We conducted participatory modelling sessions in six villages in rural Kenya using fuzzy cognitive mapping (n = 206 participants). Farmers created group visual models with variables related to conflict with elephants. A total of 14 variables were common across all six villages, with the two highest centrality scores (a measure of importance to overall dynamics) associated with income and feelings of security. Most variables fell into two categories: environmental interactions, and policy and management. Multiple variables such as road infrastructure (drivers) and soil compaction (consequences) were identified as aspects of conflicts that are under-reported or absent in scientific literature, as well as potential socio-cultural indicators. The participatory method used is a tool for gaining more refined insights into interactions with elephants, with implications for other complex conservation issues or wildlife interactions. A more holistic view of the impacts of human–elephant interactions as demonstrated here can lead to sustainable, co-developed programmes that benefit both farmer livelihoods and elephant conservation.