This study examines the impact of Colombia’s mental health system reforms (1999–2021) on suicide mortality trends using national vital statistics data (51,924 suicide-related deaths). Through joinpoint regression and interrupted time series analyses, we assessed age-standardized suicide rates (ASSRs) across demographic subgroups. Results revealed no statistically significant associations between policy reforms and suicide trends, despite Colombia’s progressive legislative advancements, including Law 1616 (2013) and expanded mental health services. Key findings include (1) declining ASSR for adolescents (−0.75% annually, p < 0.001) but rising rates among women (+3.8% post-2012, p < 0.05); (2) rural areas consistently exhibited higher ASSRs than urban settings; and (3) reforms showed nonsignificant immediate or sustained effects (p > 0.05). The study underscores the complexity of suicide determinants, suggesting that structural factors (e.g., socioeconomic disparities) may outweigh health-sector interventions. These findings highlight the need for integrated, context-specific suicide prevention strategies in Colombia and similar settings.

We introduce a generating function approach to the affine Brauer and Kauffman categories, and show how it allows one to efficiently recover important sets of relations in these categories. We use this formalism to deduce restrictions on possible categorical actions and show how this recovers admissibility results that have appeared in the literature on cyclotomic Birman–Murakami–Wenzl (BMW) algebras and their degenerate versions, also known as cyclotomic Nazarov–Wenzl algebras or VW algebras.

Visual exploration is a task in which a camera-equipped robot seeks to efficiently visit all navigable areas of an environment within the shortest possible time. Most existing visual exploration methods rely on a static camera fixed to the robot’s body to control its own movements. However, coupling the orientation of camera with robot’s body limits the extra degrees of freedom to obtain more visual information. In this work, we adjust the camera orientation during robot motion by using a novel camera view planning (CVP) policy to improve the exploration efficiency. Specifically, we reformulate the CVP problem as a reinforcement learning problem. However, two new challenges need to be addressed: 1) determining how to learn an effective CVP policy in complex indoor environments and 2) figuring out how to synchronize it with the robot motion. To solve the above issues, we create a reward function considering factors such as exploration area, observed semantic objects, and the motion conflicts between the camera and the robot’s body. Moreover, to better coordinate the policies of the camera and the robot’s body, the CVP policy takes the body actions and the egocentric 2D spatial maps with exploration, occupancy, and trajectory information into account to make motion decisions. Experimental results show that after using the proposed CVP policy, the exploration area is expanded by 21.72% and 25.6% on average in the small-scale indoor scene with few structured obstacles and large-scale indoor scene with cluttered obstacles, respectively.

Interpretability and explainability are at the core of applications developed for control of safety-critical systems, requiring low-complexity models, with physically meaningful insights, and maximum prediction accuracy. This can lead to two very distinct representations of non-linear systems: models purely based on first-principles, highly explainable but extremely difficult to use in practice, or data-intensive, with almost no interpretability but tailored to each specific application. To harness the advantages of both approaches, this paper introduces a novel polynomial linear-parameter-varying framework with stability guarantees to model gas turbine engines, with interpretable dynamical states. The identification problem is split into three stages: (i) identification of the scheduling variable mapping via least squares; (ii) identification of the state dynamics via constrained least squares optimisation involving linear matrix inequalities; (iii) identification of the output equation via least squares. The modelling framework inherits interpretability through the selection of physical variables as dynamical states, while model smoothness is enforced by the use of polynomial functions, which are amenable for control design and optimisation. A unique model for the gas turbine engine is obtained at sea level static, and then extended to wider operating conditions through transformations to referred variables. The effectiveness of the modelling framework is demonstrated on two scenarios, using an engine from the literature, in which low prediction errors were observed, including avoidance of instabilities. Potential applications range from digital-twins and Monte-Carlo simulations, to gain-scheduled and model predictive control, or even economic optimisation, among others.

There has been a boom in the availability of wearable neuromodulator devices for the treatment of mental health problems. These can be purchased outside of medical practitioner oversight or prescription. Psychiatrists need to know what these can offer and consider whether, and how, they may be integrated into psychiatric practice. This article briefly considers examples of these devices and their evidence base. It describes the experiences of the author and her husband in using such devices for their own mental healthcare and well-being.

In this discussion note, we contrast two models of pluralistic policy advice that have recently been proposed: Stephen John’s (2025) representative model and our integrative model (Bschir & Lohse 2022, 2024). We believe that the contrast between representative and integrative pluralism is of high relevance for the broader philosophical discussion on scientific policy advice.

Existing characterizations of ‘trace’ in the philosophy of the historical sciences agree that traces need to be downstream of the long-past event under investigation. I argue that this misses an important type of trace used in historical reconstructions. Existing characterizations of traces focus on what I propose to call direct traces. What I call circumstantial traces (i) share a common cause with a past event and (ii) allow an inference to said event via an intermediate step. I illustrate the significance of checking the alignment between direct and circumstantial traces in historical reconstructions through a case study from (micro-)palaeontology.

Which Canadian Members of Parliament (MPs) are on Bluesky and what types of content do they share? Taking up calls for more mere description of how emerging social media platforms are used in their initial period of operation, this research note describes how many MPs are using Bluesky and what types of content they share. Of the 123 MPs already on Bluesky, we find that they apply the same logic and understanding of platform affordances from Twitter (now X), with posts most frequently discussing policy, the Ottawa bubble and their constituency. This research note contributes to our understanding of how MPs use Bluesky to communicate with the public in a high-choice media environment.

Since its rediscovery in the context of nineteenth-century colonial India, the study of the ancient Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara (northern Pakistan) has been hampered by very limited information about the provenance of finds. This is the result of poorly documented expeditions by archaeologists and antiquarians, as much as the enduring appeal of classically-influenced Gandharan art to collectors. The present study casts light on the modern itineraries of antiquities recovered on the North-West Frontier of late colonial India with new discoveries about the extraordinary Evert Barger expedition of 1938.

Although it made a major contribution to the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, its nominal sponsor, the Barger expedition was characterised by a surprisingly haphazard and unstrategic approach, even by the standards of the day, and it straddled the diplomatically sensitive boundary between the official jurisdiction of British India and the princely state of Swat. By exploring new information about three Barger sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, two of which were previously unprovenanced, this study unpacks the complex history of the Barger antiquities, correcting past misapprehensions and adding depth to a story of colonial archaeology that has tended to rely on generalisations.

Using constructivist representation theories, this article presents a framework for understanding how political staff shape representation. Using a survey of 366 parliamentary and constituency staff working for members of Parliament (MPs), I identify four key roles: proxies, liaisons, advisors, and gatekeepers. Proxies embody absent elected officials. Liaisons facilitate communication between elected officials and constituents. Advisors’ expertise and experience shape elected officials’ actions. Gatekeepers manage people’s and ideas’ access to elected officials. Constituency staff primarily act as proxies and liaisons, emphasizing local service and constituent connection. Parliamentary staff more often take on advisory and gatekeeping roles, which can influence elected officials’ perspectives. This framework provides insight into how staff mediate the representative process between elected officials and constituents. Staff actively shape who is heard and which issues gain attention, ultimately influencing the quality and inclusivity of democratic political representation. Thus, understandings of representation without staff are inherently incomplete.

We strengthen the maximal ergodic theorem for actions of groups of polynomial growth to a form involving jump quantity, which is the sharpest result among the family of variational or maximal ergodic theorems. As two applications, we first obtain the upcrossing inequalities with exponential decay of ergodic averages and then provide an explicit bound on the convergence rate such that the ergodic averages with strongly continuous regular group actions are metastable (or locally stable) on a large interval. Before exploiting the transference techniques, we actually obtain a stronger result—the jump estimates on a metric space with a measure not necessarily doubling. The ideas or techniques involve martingale theory, non-doubling Calderón–Zygmund theory, almost orthogonality argument, and some delicate geometric argument involving the balls and the cubes on a group equipped with a not necessarily doubling measure.

In Iambus 6 Callimachus describes Phidias’ statue of Zeus to a friend of his about to leave for Olympia. However, as can be inferred from the Diegesis and the fragmentary text of the iambus, the poet does not elaborate on the statue’s iconography, nor does he mention the impression which it made on the viewers within the temple setting. Instead, he focusses solely on its measurements and technical details. This article sheds new light on this much-debated poem by exploring its playful and humorous tones within the broader context of Callimachus’ poetical and aesthetic principles. It argues that Callimachus deliberately avoided providing a literary ekphrasis of Phidias’ Zeus akin to other known examples of Hellenistic ekphrasis and to other ekphraseis of divine statues which Callimachus offered in the Iambi and the Aetia. By doing this, he avoided crafting a too loudly resounding poem, thereby adhering to his own poetical and aesthetic credo.

This Research Paper addresses the hypothesis that wastewater characteristics in the dairy industry vary with product type and operational procedures, and that current treatment methods face limitations in managing such variability. The study examined raw and clean-in-place (CIP) wastewater from a Serbian dairy plant over three years. Physico-chemical and microbiological analyses included pH, protein, fat, carbohydrates, total solids, total microorganisms, E. coli, Enterobacteriaceae, chemical oxygen demand (COD), total suspended solids (TSS), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and dissolved oxygen (O2).Dairy plants produced 0.2–10 L wastewater per litre of milk. Protein content ranged 0.07–0.31 g/100 ml, fat 0.01–0.19 g/100 ml, and carbohydrates up to 1.37%. Total solids were 0.13–2.95%. pH varied from 4.41 to 12.76, affected by lactic fermentation and cleaning agents. COD values (529–12,476 mg/l) indicated strong organic loads. Microbiological counts were highly variable, with E. coli up to 103 cfu/ml and total microorganisms up to 1 × 108 cfu/ml. Nitrogen ranged 36–104 mg/l and phosphorus reached 10.91 mg/l, sometimes exceeding limits. Principal component analysis (PCA) explained 61.86% of variance, driven by N, pH, P, E. coli, Enterobacteriaceae, and oxygen content. Seasonal patterns were identified: higher TSS during spring and summer, and increased microbial loads, COD, and oxygen fluctuations in autumn and winter. The findings demonstrate that dairy wastewater is complex and variable, requiring adaptive treatment strategies. Optimised management, including pH control, nutrient removal, and combined biological and advanced technologies, can improve treatment efficiency, support reuse, and mitigate environmental impact.

While much discussion has focused on what researchers do and should do in second language proficiency assessment, less attention has been given to why persistent trends continue. This study investigated second language acquisition (SLA) researchers’ beliefs, reported practices, and decision-making rationales regarding proficiency assessment. Using an online survey, we collected responses from 111 SLA researchers. Findings revealed that while researchers generally endorsed recommended methodological standards, practical constraints—such as time, accessibility, and ease of administration—frequently influenced their reported practices. A consistent belief–practice gap emerged across several key areas. Notably, reduced redundancy tests were rated favorably for both validity and practicality, reflecting a growing shift toward efficient, validated tools. These findings suggest that although methodological awareness is high, practical barriers continue to challenge the adoption of more rigorous proficiency assessment practices in SLA research.

Triage approaches for treating individuals in disaster settings historically have been focused on identifying acute decompensation, injuries, and death. For displaced populations that had limited function prior to ta disaster event, the emphasis during and after a disaster becomes identification of the proper level of support needed to survive in a shelter and selection of an appropriate post-shelter destination. The US Public Health Service Rapid Deployment Force team PHS-1 developed tools to address the needs of such displaced populations. The tools, described in detail in this report, address assessment, tracking, planning, resource utilization, and decision making and were field tested over the course of multiple deployments to refine them and validate their utility.