How do local officials in China initiate and sustain policy experiments within a bureaucratic system that often obstructs innovation? This article examines local policy experimentation through the lens of bureaucratic power networks, identifying three key challenges: agenda-setting challenges related to superiors, coordination challenges involving peers and implementation challenges concerning subordinates. When formal power networks fail, entrepreneurial officials develop informal interpersonal networks, positioning themselves as “uninvited advisors” to superiors, “rhetorical allies” to peers and “supportive mentors” to subordinates. Using the case of “police–business cooperation” in Shanghai, the study reveals how the committee on comprehensive management of public security mobilized property management companies to maintain social stability. This article contributes to research on policy experimentation by situating experiments within bureaucratic power dynamics and highlighting the role of informal networks in overcoming institutional barriers. It also reveals the mechanisms by which the Party assigns social control tasks to commercial entities.

This Research Communication describes a pilot study to validate a rumination sensor for pre-weaned dairy calves. There is increasing interest in precision livestock farming (PLF) tools to capture behaviours and health parameters in farm animals. However, much of the research has focused on devices suitable for adult animals, and few devices have been validated for young animals. The aim of our pilot study was to validate the rumination estimates from Nedap rumination sensors® (NRS) when worn by dairy calves less than 2 months of age. Eight Norwegian Red dairy calves were raised in a cow-directed cow-calf-contact system such that cows could visit their calves through a smartgate. At 21 days of age, an NRS was secured around the neck of each calf, to record the amount of time spent ruminating/24 h. Cameras were placed above the calf areas to record the calves for the entirety of the study. When the calves were 28 and 58 d old, four trained observers recorded rumination behaviour 24 h/d from the video recordings. The video data and the NRS data recorded over 24 h on the same days were compared using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, the Spearman’s rank correlation and concordance correlation. NRS estimates were moderately correlated with calf rumination behaviour as measured from video observations but underestimated the duration of time spent ruminating by approximately 76%. Perhaps the calves’ rumination movements were too subtle for the NRS to detect, or the NRS needed a different placement on the calf’s small neck to record the behaviour accurately. Although automatic recordings from PLF tools may save observation time, our results indicate that the NRS may not yet accurately detect rumination behaviour in pre-weaned dairy calves.

Thoracotomy-assisted arterial duct stenting is a palliative option for patent ductus arteriosus-dependent systemic circulation, typically reserved for infants at high risk for open-heart surgery, such as those with genetic syndromes or very low birth weight. We report the first documented case of thoracotomy-assisted arterial duct stenting in a patient with Kleefstra syndrome, resulting in systemic stabilisation and long-term survival.

We prove that in the space of $C^r$ maps $(r=2,\ldots ,\infty ,\omega )$ of a smooth manifold of dimension at least 4, there exist open regions where maps with infinitely many corank-2 homoclinic tangencies of all orders are dense. The result is applied to show the existence of maps with universal two-dimensional dynamics, that is, maps whose iterations approximate the dynamics of every map of a two-dimensional disk with an arbitrarily good accuracy. We show that maps with universal two-dimensional dynamics are $C^r$-generic in the regions under consideration.

The magician Robert Heller performed virtuoso piano repertoire as part of his magic act while touring in the 1860s. He linked other musical performances in his shows to minstrelsy and spiritualist seances, and briefly featured an unsuccessful musical effect, ‘Tartini’s Dream’, that illustrated the limits of transnational marketing. Expectations of recital audiences shifted in the 1870s, leading to questions about Heller’s capacity to play ‘serious’ repertoire. Throughout his career, he benefited from an emergent celebrity culture that treated conjurers and virtuosos as kin, with musicians like Liszt, Thalberg, and Paganini frequently described in magical terms. Heller’s musical virtuosity functioned as an illusory effect, transforming the piano’s sound while masking his physical presence.

This paper investigates the impact of environmental regulations on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) using a novel index that distinguishes between the implementation and enforcement of environmental policy across 111 countries from 2001 to 2018. Leveraging bilateral FDI data and a structural gravity model, we find robust evidence of a Pollution Haven Effect: weaker environmental regulations in host countries are associated with higher levels of inward FDI. The effect is more pronounced in emerging markets and in environments with higher corruption. Importantly, we show that FDI responds more strongly to policy implementation, capturing formal regulatory commitment, than to enforcement, measured as deviations between predicted and actual emissions. In addition, bilateral FDI patterns are shaped by the environmental stringency gap between source and host countries, consistent with regulatory arbitrage behavior.

A pattern knot in a solid torus defines a self-map of the smooth knot concordance group. We prove that if the winding number of a pattern is even but not divisible by 8, then the corresponding map is not a homomorphism, thus partially establishing a conjecture of Hedden.

We determine explicit generators for the ring of modular forms associated with the moduli spaces of K3 surfaces with automorphism group $(\mathbb {Z}/2\mathbb {Z})^2$ and of Picard rank 13 and higher. The K3 surfaces in question carry a canonical Jacobian elliptic fibration and the modular form generators appear as coefficients in the Weierstrass-type equations describing these fibrations.

It was proved in [11, J. Funct. Anal., 2020] that the Cauchy problem for some Oldroyd-B model is well-posed in $\dot{B}^{d/p-1}_{p,1}(\mathbb{R}^d) \times \dot{B}^{d/p}_{p,1}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ with $1\leq p \lt 2d$. In this paper, we prove that the Cauchy problem for the same Oldroyd-B model is ill-posed in $\dot{B}^{d/p-1}_{p,r}(\mathbb{R}^d) \times \dot{B}^{d/p}_{p,r}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ with $1\leq p\leq \infty$ and $1 \lt r\leq\infty$ due to the lack of continuous dependence of the solution.

Earth oven baking pits are common occurrences within the Indigenous archaeological record of North America, yet archaeologists have paid minimal attention to evaluating how earth oven technology varies over the long term. The extensively sampled record of thermal features from Wyoming represents a unique opportunity to evaluate changes in earth oven technology through time and consider how earth ovens relate to other facets of Indigenous land use and subsistence strategies. This article is based on a sample of nearly 1,300 radiocarbon-dated features dating from 11,000 to 4000 cal BP. It evaluates diachronic shifts in feature morphology from the Early through Middle Holocene. Major changes in earth ovens include increasing size and the use of cook stone, first after 10,000 cal BP and then after 7500 cal BP. The observed variation indicates that Indigenous peoples adapted their cooking technology to address changes in types and quantities of resources processed, as well as changing requirements of the overall adaptive system. Recognizing how the diversity of thermal features and earth ovens change through time and across space allows researchers to ask more specific questions about Indigenous cooking technology, subsistence resources, and the role(s) these features played within broader lifeways.

Changes like the shift of tropical forests into savannah in the Amazon highlight the potential for deforestation to drive ecosystems past potentially irreversible tipping points. Reforestation may avert or delay tipping points, but its success depends on the degree to which secondary and primary forests are substitutes in the production of ecosystem services. This article explores how deforestation, reforestation and substitutability between forest types affect the likelihood that a forest system will cross a tipping point. Efforts to ensure that secondary forests better mimic primary forests only yield a small improvement in terms of delaying ecosystem collapse. The most significant effects on tipping points arise from an increase in the relative costs of clearing primary forests or a decrease in the costs of protecting land tenure in secondary forests. Our results highlight the importance of the latter, which are often ignored as a policy target, to reduce the risk of ecosystem collapse.

Let $(R, \mathfrak{m})$ be a d-dimensional Noetherian local ring that is formally equidimensional, and let M be an arbitrary R-submodule of the free module $F = R^p$ with an analytic spread $s:=s(M)$. In this work, inspired by Herzog-Puthenpurakal-Verma in [10], we show the existence of a unique largest R-module Mk with $\ell_R(M_{k}/M) \lt \infty$ and $M\subseteq M_{s}\subseteq\cdots\subseteq M_{1}\subseteq M_{0}\subseteq q(M),$ such that $\deg(P_{M_{k}/M}(n)) \lt s-k,$ where q(M) is the relative integral closure of $M,$ defined by $q(M):=\overline{M}\cap M^{sat},$ where $M^{sat}=\cup_{n\geqslant 1}(M:_F\mathfrak{m}^n)$ is the saturation of M. We also provide a structure theorem for these modules. Furthermore, we establish the existence of coefficient modules between $I(M)M$ and M, where I(M) denotes the 0th Fitting ideal of $F/M$, and discuss their structural properties. Finally, we present some applications and discuss some properties.

Addiction was considered ‘alien to Socialism’. At least, that was the narrative upheld by the socialist East German state, which thus followed the traditional argumentation of socialist and social democratic movements since the turn of the century. While the state clung to this ideological claim, the consumption and abuse of beer, spirits, and benzodiazepines continued to increase. However, there was never a central strategy for the treatment and prevention of addiction in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The hesitation and ignorance of the state authorities created a vacuum that was filled by local initiatives and expert discussions aimed at improving the situation of people with addictions. In this article, I analyse the introduction of new treatment methods in a psychiatric hospital in the GDR and show that doctors, psychologists, patients, and local officials had certain freedoms to test new approaches, many of which originated in the West. Even though they had to adapt concepts such as the ‘therapeutic communities’ of British reformer Maxwell Jones to the specific socialist and East German context to avoid restrictions by state authorities, the Berlin Wall did not prevent the transfer of knowledge. This article, therefore, paints a nuanced picture of the therapeutic methods used to treat people with addiction in the GDR. From condemning individuals as outcasts of socialist society for socially deviant drinking behaviour and relying exclusively on aversion therapy and moral accusations, there was a shift towards a mixture of treatments that became increasingly specialised and individualised, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, comparable to Western standards.