For the first time in well over half a century, a Church of England bishop has been elected archbishop of an Australian metropolitan diocese with the election of Ric Thorpe, the Bishop of Islington in London, as Archbishop of Melbourne. It has come as a considerable surprise, not only for Melbourne but also for the Anglican Church of Australia. This paper will begin by dissecting the May election, contrasting it with previous Melbourne elections, before outlining the progressive character of Melbourne Diocese that exists no more. It will then discuss how the dramatic changes the election has revealed have come about, before turning to the impact on the broader Australian church.

Recent voter turnout data has revealed a consistent and growing turnout gap between Black and White Americans since the 2012 Presidential election. Scholars have attributed this gap to an increase in restrictive voting laws. However, few have considered the decreased effectiveness of long-standing models of political behavior on Black voter turnout as the American political landscape has shifted. This note seeks to uncover patterns in recent Presidential elections that display a lack of effectiveness of prominent voter turnout models for Black Americans due to disparate socializing experiences in a post-Obama context like voter suppression and a global pandemic. It employs models previously used by Leighley and Vedlitz (1999) to evaluate and compare turnout models for Black and White individuals with mini-meta analysis. This paper utilizes the 2016 and 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS) and the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Study to establish models and measure their impact on Black and White voter turnout. I find support that prominent turnout models behave differently in a post-Obama context like income, length of residence, group consciousness, and group threat while some models behave differently for Black and white voters like political interest and political efficacy. These findings assert that new turnout models need to be established to better understand the Black electorate in a post-Obama context.

A flexible power assistive exoskeleton is proposed in this study to overcome limitations in range of motion, assistance, and comfort existing in current exoskeletons. The flexible power assistive exoskeleton is made of three springs that store energy from shoulder movements to provide assistance. It uses biomechanical models to simulate muscle forces. It is highly portable and comfortable, with only 83.29 g weight. A theoretical model was established to address the relationship between body work and output force. An evaluation system is proposed to assess the comfort effect of the assistive exoskeleton. Results show that the assistive exoskeleton can support all ranges of motion for the human upper limbs. It can offer up to 14.2% assistance. It also has a mass-to-assistance value of 120. For a comforting evaluation, its satisfaction rate reaches 93.4%. In summary, we present a highly flexible power-assisted exoskeleton with a large motion range, noticeable assistance effect, and high comfortability. This work contributes to the development of flexible assistive exoskeletons and comforting evaluation strategies for wearable devices.

For a multidimensional Itô semimartingale, we consider the problem of estimating integrated volatility functionals. Jacod and Rosenbaum (2013, The Annals of Statistics 41(3), 1462–1484) studied a plug-in type of estimator based on a Riemann sum approximation of the integrated functional and a spot volatility estimator with a forward uniform kernel. Motivated by recent results that show that spot volatility estimators with general two-sided kernels of unbounded support are more accurate, in this article, an estimator using a general kernel spot volatility estimator as the plug-in is considered. A biased central limit theorem for estimating the integrated functional is established with an optimal convergence rate. Central limit theorems for properly de-biased estimators are also obtained both at the optimal convergence regime for the bandwidth and when applying undersmoothing. Our results show that one can significantly reduce the estimator’s bias by adopting a general kernel instead of the standard uniform kernel. Our proposed bias-corrected estimators are found to maintain remarkable robustness against bandwidth selection in a variety of sampling frequencies and functions.

The existing intelligent optimization algorithms face challenges related to premature convergence in the synthesis of array antennas, resulting in low solution accuracy and a tendency to get stuck in local optima. In this paper, a logistic chaos and spiral flight dandelion optimizer (LSDO) algorithm is applied to sparse antenna array synthesis with constraints. To optimize the positions of the array elements and reduce sidelobe levels, the logistic chaotic mapping is employed for population initialization, which generates a diverse and uniformly distributed initial population. Additionally, the dandelion optimizer (DO) algorithms utilize a spiral flight strategy to enhance local exploitation capability and escape from the local optimum of the sidelobe level. For algorithm performance, numerical experimental results show the stability and robustness of the LSDO algorithm. For the optimization of planar sparse arrays, the LSDO algorithm significantly outperforms conventional optimization methods, achieving a peak sidelobe level (PSLL) reduction of 15.5% for DO, 9% for PSO, and 14.56% for IWO. These results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm.

This article investigates Berita Filem, one of the key Malay film magazines published in the 1960s, through the lens of minor fame: a form of temporary, localized celebrity status granted to aspiring actors, beauty pageant contestants, and other participants in the magazine’s interactive features. It charts some of the ways in which Berita Filem constructed fandom as a participatory endeavour, and how that participation was tied to ideas of modernity and Muslim belonging. Fan magazines were instructive in circulating images of stars, as well as forging a sense of collective culture for moviegoers before the advent of social media. While the last decade has witnessed a proliferation of historiographies centred on fan magazines and their content, both visual and textual, such studies remain largely limited to the Global North. In aiming to close this gap, this article examines three of Berita Filem’s regular columns, which took distinctive formats. ‘Our autograph column’ (Ruangan autograph kita) modelled itself after school yearbook pages, ‘Queen of Berita Filem’ (Ratu Berita Filem) was a beauty pageant, and ‘From heart to heart with Latifah Omar’ (Dari hati ke hati oleh Latifah Omar) was an advice column written by a movie star. At the core of this investigation is the question of historical readership at a time when Malaysia was a newly independent and rapidly changing nation.

The Cape Town Convention is widely regarded as the most successful international convention in terms of ratifications. This essay aims to explore the fundamental reasons behind this success. While it is undeniable that the Cape Town Convention receives substantial industrial support in response to urgent market demands and the innovative protocols it established, this essay argues that this alone does not fundamentally explain its success.

Instead, the underlying reason lies in the Convention’s ability to avoid the trap of a false dichotomy – where one side seeks to convince the other to agree with its viewpoint. Rather, the key is to strive for a viable compromise that accommodates the perspectives of both, or even multiple stakeholders. This proposition will be illustrated by drawing on the social science concept of coordination, through a comparative analysis of the drafting processes of the Cape Town Convention and the Hague Securities Convention.

In this article, we develop a novel high-dimensional coefficient estimation procedure based on high-frequency data. Unlike usual high-dimensional regression procedures such as LASSO, we additionally handle the heavy-tailedness of high-frequency observations as well as time variations of coefficient processes. Specifically, we employ the Huber loss and a truncation scheme to handle heavy-tailed observations, while $\ell _{1}$-regularization is adopted to overcome the curse of dimensionality. To account for the time-varying coefficient, we estimate local coefficients which are biased due to the $\ell _{1}$-regularization. Thus, when estimating integrated coefficients, we propose a debiasing scheme to enjoy the law of large numbers property and employ a thresholding scheme to further accommodate the sparsity of the coefficients. We call this robust thresholding debiased LASSO (RED-LASSO) estimator. We show that the RED-LASSO estimator can achieve a near-optimal convergence rate. In the empirical study, we apply the RED-LASSO procedure to the high-dimensional integrated coefficient estimation using high-frequency trading data.

Inadequate eating habits in adolescence are an important risk factor for obesity and other chronic non-communicable diseases in adulthood. The school environment can have a relevant impact on adolescent behaviour, since many habits acquired in this phase affect the individual throughout life, with visible effects on health. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the association between food sales at Brazilian schools and ultra-processed food consumption among adolescents. The Study of Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Adolescents (ERICA) was a nationwide, school-based survey conducted from 2013 to 2014, including public and private schools in 121 Brazilian cities. Dietary intake was assessed via a 24-h recall, and foods were divided according to the Nova classification based on the degree of processing. Unadjusted and adjusted linear regression models were used to assess the association between exposure to school food sales and intake of ultra-processed food. The prevalence of exposure to food sales was 55·2 %, and the mean diet share of ultra-processed foods was 34·5 %. Exposure to food sales in schools was associated with higher consumption of ultra-processed food (β = 0·11; P = 0·002). The results were similar when the analyses were stratified according to sex, usual intake of school meals and public school attendance (β = 0·11; P = 0·002). The association between exposure to food sales in schools and higher consumption of ultra-processed food suggests that school sales can influence adolescents’ food choices.