This article considers the question whether we can have direct, non-inferential knowledge of God, as experientialists such as Alston and Plantinga claim. Moreover, this needs to be done in a way that takes religious diversity into account. I contend that two developments in recent philosophy enable us to argue for direct knowledge of God in an inter-religious manner. The first is naturalized epistemology. I use a version of it in place of the epistemology employed by the experientialists. Specifically, I use methodological continuity between epistemology of science and epistemology of religion. This would help us to overcome dangers of religious balkanization and fideism. The second development is the increased focus on the importance of nature mysticism. This helps us to maintain the autonomy of religious experience. Since these experiences are considered universal, they enable us to engage in an experientialist version of natural theology in a manner that is at once continuous and discontinuous with Aquinas. It is continuous in its universality and generality and is discontinuous in using nature mystical experiences and not sense experience, as its starting point. The knowledge of God it gives is an inchoate awareness that finds different expression in different cultures.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

The study is based on data from Chinese listed companies and explores the impact of a company’s position in the global value chain (GVC) on internal wage distribution and income inequality. The results show that although the improvement of GVC status in enterprises has increased the average salary level of all employees, it has exacerbated the wage gap between management and grassroots employees, leading to widening income inequality, mainly achieved through rent-sharing mechanisms. In addition, companies with higher human capital can alleviate the income inequality effect caused by the rise of GVC status. Further analysis reveals that the impact of GVC status on internal income inequality in enterprises is heterogeneous regarding property rights, employee bargaining power, and enterprise size. The study provides a new perspective on exploring the income distribution effects of the GVC from a micro perspective, emphasising that enterprises need to pay attention to building a fair and reasonable income distribution structure while being open to others at a high level. It is significant for promoting the construction of micro-mechanisms based on enterprises, fostering social equity and inclusive growth.

Bovine trichomoniasis is a venereal disease that causes significant losses in the US beef industry. The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service views bovine trichomoniasis as endemic and delegates control to state agencies and producers. Disease management’s positive externalities are not reflected in a producer’s profit maximization problem, leading to potentially suboptimal levels of control. Our objective was to assess the economic impacts of 50% and 100% reductions of herd-level bovine trichomoniasis prevalence. The cumulative present value of net welfare increased by $388.856 and $193.222 million under the 100% and 50% scenarios, respectively. Feeder cattle producers and retail beef consumers benefit most from enhanced control.

Humanoid robots are highly redundant, and finding whole-body optimal trajectories for various tasks is very complex. This paper proposes a method to find an energy-optimal, dynamically balanced, and collision-free trajectory of the 20 degrees of freedom humanoid robot in pick and place application. The task of pick and place is divided into three subtasks using the Pseudoinverse Jacobian method of redundancy resolution. The three subtasks are end effector trajectory represented by \mathcal {T}_1$\mathcal {T}_1$, hip trajectory represented by \mathcal {T}_2$\mathcal {T}_2$, and maximizing the manipulability represented by \mathcal {T}_3$\mathcal {T}_3$. The Pseudoinverse Jacobian method is coupled with particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find the optimal trajectories. The main contribution of this paper is the decomposition of the whole-body task of the humanoid robot into three distinct subtasks to find energy-optimal, dynamically balanced, and obstacle-free trajectories. The concept of virtual surface is used to avoid dragging objects on the table surface. The problem is optimized with Particle Swarm Optimization. Simulations were conducted to pick up and place objects from a table and constrained spaces like a drawer. The results show that the robot can pick and place objects from defined locations on the table.

We perform simulations of a two-fluid–structure interaction problem involving liquid–gas flow past a fully submerged stationary circular cylinder. Interactions between the liquid–gas interface with finite surface tension and flow disturbances arising from the cylinder induce a variety of interfacial phenomena and wake structures. We map different interface regimes in a parameter space defined by the Bond number Bo \in [100, 5000]$Bo \in [100, 5000]$ and the submergence depth h/D \in [1, 2.5]$h/D \in [1, 2.5]$ of the cylinder while keeping the Reynolds (Re) and Weber (We) numbers fixed at 150 and 1000, respectively. The emerging interface features are classified into three distinct regimes: interfacial waves generated by Strouhal vortices, the entrainment of multi-scale gas bubbles and the reduced deformation state. In the interfacial wave regime, we demonstrate that the frequency of transverse interface fluctuations at a specific streamwise location is identical to the vortex shedding frequency. Additionally, the wavelength of interfacial waves is determined by the size of vortex pairs consisting of alternating Strouhal vortices. In the gas entrainment regime at Bo = 1000$Bo = 1000$, our bubble-size distributions reveal that the entrained bubbles have sizes ranging from one to two orders of magnitude smaller than the cylinder. These multi-scale bubbles are formed primarily through plunging and surfing breakers at h/D = 2.5$h/D = 2.5$. In contrast, at h/D = 1$h/D = 1$, smaller bubbles initially emerge from the breakup of a gas finger. Over time, some of these bubbles grow in size through coalescence cascades. The influence of Re \in [50, 150]$Re \in [50, 150]$ and We \in [700, 1100]$We \in [700, 1100]$ on gas entrainment is quantified in terms of mean bubble size and count. Lastly, we demonstrate how the deformability of the liquid–gas interface drives the hydrodynamic lift force acting on the cylinder. The net downward lift materializes only in the gas entrainment and reduced deformation regimes due to the broken symmetry of the front stagnation point. While our study focuses on two-dimensional simulations, we also provide insights into the three-dimensional gas entrainment mechanism for one of the extreme cases at h/D = 1$h/D = 1$.

Previous research indicates that strong right-hand preference predicts performance in other skills, such as vocabulary size and executive function (EF). The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between these functions, as well as social competence (SC), in a sample of preschool children. We used parent questionnaires and/or tabletop assessments to measure hand preference, fine motor skills, language, EF, and SC in 81 three- to five-year-old children. The results strengthened the evidence of a connection between right-hand use for pointing and vocabulary performance but indicated that right-hand use was not related to EF or SC. Further, the findings revealed a reciprocal connection between vocabulary and SC as well as EF and SC, but not vocabulary and EF. We discuss the implications of these connections for early childhood development.

Each year, I brace for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the intensely rich and active national holiday that takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. With community partners, we often discuss how to best make use of this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs. As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language and there are more than 50 million speakers of Spanish. We can use this national public holiday to unearth and commemorate more widely – and loudly – that Spanish is also an American language. However, we might also realize that honoring our national Hispanic heritage needs more than one month.

A decisive voter’s exact ideological preferences can be hard to predict, even for seasoned candidates. We develop a novel theory of electoral competition where candidates are evaluated on ideological and nonideological dimensions. The key feature of our theory is that an electorate’s partisan leaning serves as a signal of the median voter’s ideological position where extreme leanings are more informative about voters than centrist leanings. We show that this leads to an endogenous sorting of districts between “extreme” and “centrist” and that an increase in the importance of candidate competence for voters increases polarization—but only in extreme districts. We evaluate our theory using data from mayoral elections in Brazil’s 95 largest municipalities and exploit COVID-19 as a shock to the salience of candidate competence. We show that COVID-19 increases the salience of competence in these elections, leading to increased political polarization, which is concentrated in cities with extreme partisan leanings.

Safety accounts of knowledge intend to explain why certain true and intuitively justified beliefs fail to be knowledge in terms of such beliefs falling prey to a modal veritic type of luck. In particular, they explain why true and intuitively justified beliefs in “lottery propositions” (highly likely propositions reporting that a particular statistical outcome obtains) are not knowledge. In this paper, I argue that there is a type of case involving lottery propositions that inevitably lies beyond the scope of any reasonable safety account of epistemic luck. I offer counterexamples to accounts of epistemic luck in terms of safety conditions that involve both “locally” and “globally” reliable ways of forming beliefs in nearby worlds. All such counterexamples present a lottery case illustrating the next possibility: the process of selecting the lottery winner might be such that any world in which it delivers a different outcome is extremely far away from the actual world. In addition to being a case of safe ignorance, this type of lottery case shows that, ultimately, either veritic epistemic luck is not unsafe true belief or beliefs in lottery propositions are not epistemically luckily true.

Let M be a von Neumann algebra, let \varphi $\varphi$ be a normal faithful state on M and let L^p(M,\varphi )$L^p(M,\varphi )$ be the associated Haagerup noncommutative L^p$L^p$-spaces, for 1\leq p\leq \infty $1\leq p\leq \infty$. Let D\in L^1(M,\varphi )$D\in L^1(M,\varphi )$ be the density of \varphi $\varphi$. Given a positive map T\colon M\to M$T\colon M\to M$ such that \varphi \circ T\leq C_1\varphi $\varphi \circ T\leq C_1\varphi$ for some C_1\geq 0$C_1\geq 0$, we study the boundedness of the L^p$L^p$-extension T_{p,\theta }\colon D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} MD^{\frac {\theta }{p}}\to L^p(M,\varphi )$T_{p,\theta }\colon D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} MD^{\frac {\theta }{p}}\to L^p(M,\varphi )$ which maps D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} x D^{\frac {\theta }{p}}$D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} x D^{\frac {\theta }{p}}$ to D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} T(x) D^{\frac {\theta }{p}}$D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} T(x) D^{\frac {\theta }{p}}$ for all x\in M$x\in M$. Haagerup–Junge–Xu showed that T_{p,{\frac {1}{2}}}$T_{p,{\frac {1}{2}}}$ is always bounded and left open the question whether T_{p,\theta }$T_{p,\theta }$ is bounded for \theta \not ={\frac {1}{2}}$\theta \not ={\frac {1}{2}}$. We show that for any 1\leq p<2$1\leq p<2$ and any \theta \in [0, 2^{-1}(1-\sqrt {p-1})]\cup [2^{-1}(1+\sqrt {p-1}), 1]$\theta \in [0, 2^{-1}(1-\sqrt {p-1})]\cup [2^{-1}(1+\sqrt {p-1}), 1]$, there exists a completely positive T such that T_{p,\theta }$T_{p,\theta }$ is unbounded. We also show that if T is 2$2$-positive, then T_{p,\theta }$T_{p,\theta }$ is bounded provided that p\geq 2$p\geq 2$ or 1\leq p<2$1\leq p<2$ and \theta \in [1-p/2,p/2]$\theta \in [1-p/2,p/2]$.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid sparse array design utilizing Delaunay Triangulation algorithm for element positioning and Convex algorithm for element excitation optimization. This Delaunay Triangulation algorithm yields a radiation pattern devoid of grating lobes. Then Convex algorithm is used to optimize the element excitations to further decrease side-lobe-level. The minimum inter-element distance is as large as 8 times of wavelength. The peak-side-lobe-level can be −17.3 dB. Furthermore, beam steering can be achieved with good performance within 80° field-of-view range.