This article offers new insights on Africa-China relations and discourses of authenticity and intellectual property by examining the trade and consumption of Chinese-made fashion goods in Mozambique from an ethics perspective. Ethnographic fieldwork in southern Mozambique between 2017 and 2024 shows that many traders and consumers see Chinese counterfeits as beneficial and desirable, enabling them to participate in fashion systems from which they have long been excluded. For traders and consumers in Mozambique, it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits. These goods are evaluated less in terms of legality than through pragmatic, everyday judgments about quality, care, and access. The Mozambican case complicates dominant narratives of Chinese-African trade and global intellectual property governance, showing how ethics of access and quality shape everyday globalization.

We introduce a framework for Riemannian diffeology. To this end, we use the tangent functor in the sense of Blohmann and one of the options of a metric on a diffeological space in the sense of Iglesias-Zemmour. As a consequence, the category consisting of weak Riemannian diffeological spaces and isometries is established. With a technical condition for a definite weak Riemannian metric, we show that the pseudodistance induced by the metric is indeed a distance. As examples of weak Riemannian diffeological spaces, an adjunction space of manifolds, a space of smooth maps and the mixed one are considered.

The position paper ‘The development of services for treatment of personality disorder in Adult Mental Health Services’ was published by the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland Personality Disorder Special Interest Group (PDSIG) in 2021. Following this, we are advocating for the development of a national treatment strategy for personality disorders in Ireland. As part of this process, we have examined international evidence and best practice guidelines for establishing personality disorder services. Key recommendations from the literature include access to services, continuity of care, a multidisciplinary approach, tiered models of care, collaboration with service users, staff training and supervision, and delivery of evidence-based interventions. These recommendations should form the backbone of a national personality disorder strategy for Ireland.

Crises of confidence in the relationship between academic research and broader society has led to an explosion in interest in community-led research methods, such as codesign, community-engaged research, and participatory action research. These methods are intended as a way of reconnecting scholarship and society during a period of intense polarization, but they remain far from mainstream. This reflection considers whether community organizing, and in particular the kind of approach initiated by Saul Alinsky that borrowed from a scholarly method at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and is now practiced in more than 99 cities around the world, can offer a practical guide for scholars keen to resolve this challenge. It outlines three elements of what is labeled the “relational method” that build on the philosophical and practical tools of community organizing: relationality, power, and uncertainty. It suggests that the principles and practices of the relational method can not only strengthen community-led research practice, but, if we take a lead from community organizing and recognize the importance of the relationship between the practice of social change and the institutions that seek to produce it, it can also help us to more clearly see how the diffusion of community-led research can align with the broader goal of creating more community-engaged universities.

Both armed groups and civilians have evoked historical memory in the Katiba Macina and Boko Haram related conflicts. Although not a cause of the conflicts, historical memory informs the perceptions and choices of both fighters and civilians. Based on interviews with members of the armed groups and local civilians, the authors demonstrate that how an individual perceives their own positionality within society and how they perceive their ancestors’ positionality affects how that person reacted to the armed groups’ evocation of historical memory, how they interpreted the source of greater threat, and their own self-protection strategies.

Jha et al. (2024) offer several objections to Lange’s account of “distinctively mathematical” scientific explanations (DMEs). This article argues that these objections fail. Jha et al.’s arguments fail to show that Lange is inconsistent in characterizing DMEs—that, by Lange’s lights, every causal explanation involving mathematical facts is a DME. Jha et al.’s arguments fail to suggest that on Lange’s account, DME’s are too common or explanatorily insubstantial to underwrite any philosophical lessons about explanation. Jha et al.’s arguments also fail to show that Lange relies on underhanded manipulations of the explananda targeted by DMEs.

The first international expositions appeal to the imagination and have an almost mythical status, but for most participating countries, they were just a form of good marketing. The prevailing idea in literature is that the expositions were platforms for nation-building undertaken by national governments. What is still lacking, however, is research into the intersection of urban, regional and national identities at these events, and the role of the city in this process. This article, which is part of the special issue Urban Tourism Promotion in Belgium and the Netherlands, addresses this gap by examining the presence of Belgian city pavilions at the expositions in Belgium between 1885 and 1958 through the lens of urban tourism promotion. By analysing the different groups involved in tourism promotion at these events, the article reveals that cities were not merely venues for large events, but also served as platforms for identity promotion through urban tourism promotion.

The global ex situ conservation system reflects the collective efforts of individual genebanks, each influenced by its unique history, opportunities for acquisition and user demands. As a result, acquisition activities in most genebanks have been opportunistic rather than strategic to support representation of national crop diversity or driven by clearly identified conservation priorities.

The objective of this study was to characterize the composition of national collections in 20 countries within the global ex situ conservation system. It assessed the representation of crop genetic diversity that originated nationally within the global system and evaluated the composition balance, as it relates to duplication and gaps in conservation. Across these 20 countries, numerous genebanks are conserving large number of accessions for only a few genera, while a much smaller number of genebanks are conserving fewer than 10 accessions from a broader range of genera. The findings indicate that ex situ conservation, both nationally and globally, has significant potential duplications and gaps in the genetic resource coverage.

Individual institutes in the global system must carefully reconsider the composition of their collections, especially given the significant costs and limited financial and human resources available for long-term ex situ conservation. As national genebanks and the global system become increasingly important resources for the future, it will be essential for genebanks to ensure that the composition of their collections meets future demands.

Hybrid stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are a useful tool for modeling continuously varying stochastic systems modulated by a random environment, which may depend on the system state itself. In this paper we establish the pathwise convergence of solutions to hybrid SDEs using space-grid discretizations. Though time-grid discretizations are a classical approach for simulation purposes, our space-grid discretization provides a link with multi-regime Markov-modulated Brownian motions. This connection allows us to explore aspects that have been largely unexplored in the hybrid SDE literature. Specifically, we exploit our convergence result to obtain efficient and computationally tractable approximations for first-passage probabilities and expected occupation times of the solutions to hybrid SDEs. Lastly, we illustrate the effectiveness of the resulting approximations through numerical examples.

Hannah Arendt did not live to complete her anticipated work on judgment, a faculty she considered essential for resuscitating political life against the threat of totalitarianism. Scholars have attempted to reconstitute it, primarily through her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Yet when discussing her turn to judgment, Arendt cites the ancient Greek historian Herodotus as a model, claiming that recovering the ancient sense of histor (judge) is crucial to reclaiming human dignity. Herodotus is in fact central to her depiction of the Greeks throughout her work. Excavating his influence not only helps clarify her theory of judgment; it also reveals how she both distances herself from Heidegger and yet retains certain core agreements. Her reading of Herodotus thus helps delineate the intellectual relationship between two of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers, while inviting us to reflect on how and why to read the Greeks today.

This article examines a case of phonological opacity in Uyghur resulting from an interaction between backness harmony and a vowel reduction process that converts harmonic vowels into transparent vowels. A large-scale corpus study shows that although opaque harmony with the underlying form of a reduced vowel is the dominant pattern, cases of surface-apparent harmony also occur. The rate of surface-apparent harmony varies across roots and is correlated with a number of factors, including root frequency. These data pose problems for standard accounts of opacity, which do not predict such variation. I propose an analysis where variation emerges from conflict between a paradigm uniformity constraint mandating that the harmonising behaviour of a root remains consistent, and surface phonotactic constraints. This is implemented in a parallel model by scaling constraint violations according to certainty in a root’s harmonic class. This aligns with past work suggesting some opacity is driven by paradigm uniformity.

In order to solve the problem of poor quality of paths generated by the traditional Q-RRT* algorithm and blind random search, an improved APF-QRRT* algorithm is proposed in this paper. The improved APF-QRRT* algorithm obtains a set of discrete critical path points connecting the start point and the end point by the Q-RRT* algorithm, and then fine-tunes the paths by using the local optimization capability of the APF to improve the smoothness and safety of the paths. The traditional Q-RRT* algorithm is improved, and the fast alternating expansion of two random trees is realized by introducing a bidirectional search strategy of two random trees and adopting node greedy expansion, where the nearest node of the tree is used as the reference for the expansion of this tree during the iterative process of path node generation. The experimental results show that the improved APF-QRRT* algorithm reduces the path planning time by 20.3%, the path length by 1.8%, the number of path nodes by 33.3%, and the number of sampling points by 23.6% compared with the standard APF-QRRT* algorithm in a complex environment. In this paper, a system test platform is constructed and utilized to carry out multi-AGV path planning experiments in real environments, and the experimental results show that the proposed hybrid path planning algorithm has good path planning effects.