Laminopathies represent a group of inherited disorders, with emerging novel and atypical manifestations. We present the case of a 17-year-old boy with LMNA mutation, showing dilated cardiomyopathy, aortic root dilatation, pontine cavernous angiomas, sensorineural hearing loss, and osteogenic sarcoma. These findings expand the known phenotypic spectrum of laminopathies and highlight the need for multidisciplinary evaluation from a young age.

The Flint water crisis was a lead-in-water disaster that occurred in Flint, Michigan. The Center for Children’s Integrated Services Assessment Center (CISAC) was established to provide neuropsychological assessments and recommendations for exposed children. Our objective was to describe the implementation of the CISAC and report the clinical diagnoses of the first cohort of children who received comprehensive assessments. The CISAC’s eligibility criteria were broad and allowed referrals from physicians, schools, community organizations, and parents. A cross-sectional, descriptive analysis was conducted for 376 children who received initial neurodevelopmental assessments. About 60% of assessed children (ages 3-18) were diagnosed with ADHD, and 70% were diagnosed with ≥2 conditions. Most (96.8%) children received recommendations for new or continued educational, medical, and mental health services. Recognizing the implications of lead exposure and community-wide trauma on neuropsychological trajectories, the CISAC provides longitudinal assessments, secondary prevention efforts to mitigate potential sequelae, and trauma-informed treatment.

In this paper, we show that for any nonautonomous discrete time dynamical system in a Banach space if its linear part has a dichotomy and the composition of a generalized Green function and the nonlinear term of the system has a weighted integrable Lipschitz constant then the system has the weighted Lipschitz shadowing property for a type of weighted pseudo orbits in the whole phase space. Additionally, if the generalized Green function is the Green function for the dichotomy and the evolution operator restricted to the stable subspace (resp. unstable subspace) tends to 0 in weight as time tends to $+\infty$ (resp. $-\infty$) then the system has the weighted generalized forward (resp. backward) limit shadowing property. By the same approach we prove that a C1 map with a compact hyperbolic invariant set has the weighted Lipschitz shadowing property and the generalized weighted limit shadowing property for weighted pseudo orbits in the hyperbolic set. We also give the parallel results for differential equations.

Créé par l’Institut Fraser et l’Institut économique de Montréal au début du siècle, le palmarès des écoles secondaires du Québec constitue une stratégie d’influence visant à réformer le système scolaire en offrant aux familles de l’information afin d’amplifier les comportements de marché en éducation. Cette étude portant sur 108 écoles de Montréal et de Laval montre que, de 2000 à 2020, les écoles faiblement cotées dans les palmarès et celles ayant décliné d’un écart-type ou plus ont connu une baisse de leur population comme le voulait la théorie économique de l’éducation sur laquelle reposent ces classements. Or, les données recueillies montrent que, sur vingt ans, les scores des écoles sont davantage influencés par des facteurs socio-économiques se traduisant par une amplification de la ségrégation scolaire générée par une concentration accrue des élèves présentant des difficultés ou provenant de milieux défavorisés dans les établissements figurant au bas des classements.

When deciding new issues, judges face uncertainty about how cases map into their existing understanding of the law. This uncertainty can lead to conflicting decisions on the same legal question, generating inconsistent law. I develop a formal theory of judicial decision making, where courts learn about and rule on new legal issues. I find that courts learn most from their ideological allies; however, increasing the ideological distance between courts can either increase or decrease legal uniformity. Using an original dataset of cases of first impression in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, I find that increasing the ideological distance between two courts increases the probability of disagreement if the previous court’s decision is in-line with their relative bias, and decreases disagreement when the decision runs counter to their relative bias. My findings highlight the ways that courts can use decisions from even ideologically distant peers to learn about new legal issues.

Aiming at the issues of more difficult to solve and lower precision of six-axis robotic arm in inverse kinematics (IK) solution, a multi-strategy improved dung beetle optimization algorithm (ECDBO) is proposed. It improves performance in four aspects: population initiation, global search capability, search direction perturbation and jumping out of local optima. Sobol sequence strategy was introduced to initialize the dung beetle population, resulting in a more even distribution of individual dung beetles and increasing the diversity of initial population. Boundary optimization strategy is adopted to balance the requirements on search capability at different times. This approach enhances global search capability at the beginning and local search capability at the end of an iteration. Propose hybrid directional perturbation strategy to change the search direction of rolling dung beetles and stealing dung beetles. It allows for more detailed exploration and improves convergence accuracy. The Levy flight strategy is incorporated to perturb current optimal solution, enhancing algorithm’s ability to jump out of the local optimum. In order to verify performance of ECDBO algorithm, CEC2017 function tests and robotic arm IK solving experiments were conducted and compared with other algorithms. ECDBO ranked first on 21 functions in the 30 dimensions tested in CEC2017 and on 27 functions in the 100 dimensions. ECDBO performs well in the IK solving experiments of two robotic arms with better accuracy than other algorithms. The experimental results show that the ECDBO algorithm significantly improves the convergence and accuracy, and also performs excellently on the IK solving problem.

Terrain traversability analysis is essential for realizing autonomous navigation. This paper proposes a real-time light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-based network for terrain traversability classification in off-road environments. This network incorporates a fast BEV (Bird’s Eye View) feature map generation module, which performs dynamic voxelization, pillar feature encoding and scatter on point cloud, and a traversability completion module that generates accurate and dense BEV traversability maps. The network is trained with dense ground truth labels generated through offline data processing, enabling accurate and dense traversability classification of the surrounding terrain centered on the ego vehicle, with an inference speed reaching 110 + FPS. Finally, we conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on the RELLIS-3D off-road dataset and SemanticKITTI on-road dataset, which demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach.

Leveraging a unique dataset (the English Longitudinal Study of Aging) containing polygenic scores (PGSs) — estimated using meta-analytically-derived single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for the Big Five (BF) — the General Factor of Personality’s (GFP) existence as a veritable psychometric entity was investigated. Exploratory tests involving a subsample of 200 participants revealed that while the BF PGSs were adequate for factor analysis, parallel analysis suggested the presence of zero factors, indicating no “genetic GFP” among these PGSs, but did indicate the presence of a robust latent GFP among the phenotypic BF. Confirmatory factor analysis involving an independent sample of 4,533 participants was used to compete three models: full mediation by the GFP of PGS effects on the BF (common pathway or reflective); full mediation by the BF of PGS effects on the GFP (independent pathways or formative); and a mixed model. All models exhibited good fit, with the reflective model having the greatest parsimony. Statistically significant covariances were also observed among the PGSs, potentially consistent with pleiotropy. Even though the reflective model fit best, the common paths were extremely weak (and could be set to zero in most cases), with only the (negatively signed) path from the extraversion PGS to the GFP reaching significance. This finding is (weakly) consistent with the hypothesis that the GFP is a valid entity.

This paper presents the first reported design of a balanced nonreciprocal bandpass filter with both common-mode (CM) and differential-mode (DM) reflectionless characteristics. The nonreciprocal behavior is achieved using a time-modulated resonator, which isolates in-band backward interference signals, thereby protecting preceding circuits from their negative effects. To solve the negative effects of reflected waves of the reflection-based CM noise suppression and reflection-based DM stopband attenuation, CM and DM reflectionless structures are integrated at both the input and output ports, ensuring reflectionless operation for both CM and DM signals. Meanwhile, the implementation of DM reflectionless characteristics effectively addresses the issue of reflection zero degradation typically observed in time-modulated resonator-based nonreciprocal filters. The proposed filter exclusively transmits differential forward signals, which will greatly improve the anti-interference ability and stability of the balanced RF circuits. To validate the concept experimentally, a 1.5-GHz microstrip prototype is designed, simulated, fabricated, and characterized.

We prove that the non-properness set of a local homeomorphism $\mathbb R^n \to \mathbb R^n$ cannot be ambient homeomorphic to an affine subspace of dimension n − 2. This particularly provides a partial positive answer to a conjecture of Jelonek, that claims the global invertibility of polynomial local diffeomorphisms having non-properness set with codimension greater than 1. Our reasons to obtain this result lead us to some properties of the non-properness set when it has codimension 2, the heart of Jelonek’s conjecture. We also provide a global injectivity theorem related to this conjecture that turns out to generalize previous results of the literature.

This article examines the heritagization of nuclear urbanity as a distinctive form of Soviet industrial urbanism. The research focuses on the satellite settlement of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, which exemplifies the ‘presentism’ characteristic of Soviet heritage – an entanglement of multiple temporalities alongside goals of propaganda and preservation. We argue that local engagements with nuclear cultural heritage are rooted in the fact that commemorative practices were embedded from the inception of the atomic town’s development. This early transformation of nuclear urbanity into heritage ensured that the former Soviet atomic town preserved not only material traces but also a lasting infrastructure of social memory and urban imagery, mobilized by various actors for identity building and future negotiations.

Changing legal environments create new opportunities for legal mobilization by civil society groups. At stake is mobilization in Germany and Europe for the prosecution of agents of the Syrian Assad regime accused of committing core international crimes. Changes in the legal environment include the (a) spread of universal jurisdiction; (b) increasing use of “crimes against humanity”; (c) new prosecutorial and policing units specialized in core international crimes; and (d) new prosecutorial practices, such as structural investigations. Coinciding with an influx of Syrian refugees, these opportunities give rise to a collaborative network of (I)NGOs that feed witnesses and evidence into prosecutorial agencies. Interaction between agencies and (I)NGOs contributes to the transnational ordering of criminal law and constitutes a Prosecutorial-NGO (P-NGO) Complex. (I)NGOs finally diffuse court narratives to a broad audience and shape public knowledge of grave violations of human rights. We focus on the P-NGO Complex for the al-Khatib universal jurisdiction trial before the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany. Empirical tools include an analysis of (I)NGO network structures and websites, interviews with court observers, activists, and prosecutorial staff, and an analysis of media reporting.