This research examines the ways the hostile environment in the UK utilises domestic violence as a deterrent measure, weaponising this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as state violence. I frame this in the context of what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. The active exclusion of migrant women from these monitoring mechanisms embeds both an affective and a very real empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. This ontological insecurity is both inside and outside of state, making ontological security for some while unmaking it for others.

This article explores Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1954 “Natural Right” course transcript. One of the significant features of this transcript is that it contains an original interpretation and tentative critique of Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Although Strauss considered Tocqueville to be an indispensable observer of modern liberal democracy, he saw significant limits to Tocqueville’s thought. By comparing him with Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others, Strauss criticizes Tocqueville’s understanding of justice, history, and democracy. Strauss concludes that Nietzsche offers a more profound critique of liberal democracy, but one that leads to right-wing extremism. Strauss urges his students to be satisfied with Tocqueville’s more moderate and humane criticisms. Although Strauss’s tentative critique is illuminating and worth careful consideration, I challenge his interpretation and offer a Tocquevillian response to his overly intellectualized conception of social and political change.

The article deals with isometric dilation and commutant lifting for a class of n-tuples $(n\ge 3)$ of commuting contractions. We show that operator tuples in the class dilate to tuples of commuting isometries of BCL type. As a consequence of such an explicit dilation, we show that their von Neumann inequality holds on a one-dimensional variety of the closed unit polydisc. On the basis of such a dilation, we prove a commutant lifting theorem of Sarason’s type by establishing that every commutant can be lifted to the dilation space in a commuting and norm-preserving manner. This further leads us to find yet another class of n-tuples $(n\ge 3)$ of commuting contractions each of which possesses isometric dilation.

In this article, a qualitative work has been carried out based on airborne pulsed Doppler (PD) RF sensor consist of its operational requirements in terms of phase noise modeling and associated contributing factors. Precise and efficient theoretical modeling of phase noise requirement for airborne-PD radar or long-range RF sensor is presented. This work also emphasis on the limitation of conventional phase noise modeling practices used for PD RF sensor. An improved equation has been derived for accurate phase noise estimation considering the range correlation effect and inline flicker contribution on residual phase noise requirement. Random vibrations causes increase in phase noise level around low frequency offsets region in local oscillator. The proposed phase noise model is efficient enough to counter phase noise degradation at lower frequency offsets. The proposed model is also experimentally validated. Improved modeling offers benefit in reducing the stringent RF sensor phase noise specifications at close-in frequency offsets using range correlation effect and precise inclusion of inline flicker contribution. Present work can be used to mitigate random vibration effects at close-in phase noise offsets, which avoids complex stabilization practices and stringent oscillator design phase noise specification.

Previous observational studies have suggested an association between natural hair color and the risk of endometriosis; however, the causal relationship remains unclear. Here, we conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study to evaluate the potential causal link between natural hair color and endometriosis using 428 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as genetic instruments derived from a genomewide meta-analysis comprising over 4511 cases and 227,260 controls of European ancestry. Our findings indicate that dark brown hair is associated with a decreased risk of developing endometriosis (dark brown IVW OR: 0.844, 95% CI [0.725, 0.984], p < .05). Conversely, dark hair color and lighter hair colors (red, blonde, and light brown) did not demonstrate a significant association with endometriosis risk (dark IVW OR: 0.568, 95% CI [0.280, 1.15], p = .117; red IVW OR: 1.058, 95% CI [0.719, 1.558], p = .77; blonde IVW OR: 1.158, 95% CI [0.886, 1.514], p = .28; light brown IVW OR: 1.306, 95% CI [0.978, 1.743], p = .07). These results provide compelling MR evidence supporting a causal association between natural hair color and endometriosis risk. Our findings underscore the need for larger scale studies and randomized controlled trials to delineate the biological mechanisms driving the association between hair color and endometriosis.

During embryogenesis in Danio rerio (zebrafish), the earliest morphological patterning events are dependent on the precise temporal translation and/or localization of specific maternal mRNAs/proteins. Dorsoventral patterning in particular requires the translocation of maternal factors that are present in the Balbiani Body from the vegetal region of the unfertilized egg to the future dorsal side of the embryo (Fuentes et al., 2020), leading to the localized activation of the β-catenin pathway in the cells in that region. Since zebrafish are chordates, this dorsoventral patterning then leads to the formation of neural tissue on the dorsal side of the embryo. What is not yet clear is the identity of all maternal and zygotic factors that first establish dorsoventral patterning, and which factors lead to the establishment of neural versus non-neural tissue. Taking an evolutionary approach to this question, we investigated a gene in zebrafish, zsquidlike-A (hnrnpaba), that is homologous to a key dorsoventral patterning gene in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) called squid (Kelley, 1993). While dorsoventral patterning in flies and fish looks quite different both morphologically and at the molecular level, we demonstrate that not only has a key dorsoventral patterning gene in flies been conserved in fish, maternal fish zsquidlike-A protein is synthesized precisely as dorsoventral patterning is unfolding in fish embryos, and in its absence, dorsoventral patterning is severely disrupted.

Elastic textiles play a critical role in passive wearable solutions for musculoskeletal load management in both passive exosuits and resistance clothing. These textiles, based on their ability to stretch and retract, can exhibit ambivalence in their load-modulating effects when used in occupational, rehabilitation, exercise, or everyday activity settings. While passive exosuits and resistance garments may appear similar in design, they have opposing goals: to reduce the musculoskeletal load in the case of exosuits and to increase it in the case of resistance clothing. Despite this intrinsic connection, these two approaches have not been extensively linked together. This review aims to fill this gap by examining the common and distinct principles of elastic textiles in passive exosuits and resistance clothing, shedding light on their interactions and the complex dynamics of musculoskeletal load systems. The effectiveness of different designs in passive exosuits that mimic musculoskeletal function and resistance clothing that increase the workload for strength training are critically reviewed. Current challenges in practical implementation and opportunities to improve critical issues, such as preload, thermal comfort, skin friction, and donning and doffing are also highlighted.

The wide adoption of occupational shoulder exoskeletons in industrial settings remains limited. Passive exoskeletons were proved effective in a limited amount of application scenarios, such as (quasi-)static overhead handling tasks. Quasi-active devices, albeit representing an improved version of their passive predecessors, do not allow full modulation of the amount of assistance delivered to the user, lacking versatility and adaptability in assisting various dynamic tasks. Active occupational shoulder exoskeletons could overcome these limitations by controlling the shape of the delivered torque profile according to the task they aim to assist. However, most existing active devices lack compactness and wearability. This prevents their implementation in working environments. In this work, we present a new active shoulder exoskeleton, named Active Exo4Work (AE4W). It features a new flexible shaft-driven remote actuation unit that allows the positioning of the motors close to the wearer’s center of mass while it maintains a kinematic structure that is compatible with the biological motion of the shoulder joint. in vitro and in vivo experiments have been conducted to investigate the performance of AE4W. Experimental results show that the exoskeleton is kinematically compatible with the user’s workspace since it does not constrain the natural range of motion of the shoulder joint. Moreover, this device can effectively provide different types of assistance while the user executes various dynamic tasks, without altering perceived comfort.

A central question in Arithmetic geometry is to determine for which polynomials $f \in \mathbb {Z}[t]$ and which number fields K the Hasse principle holds for the affine equation $f(t) = \mathbf {N}_{K/\mathbb {Q}}(\mathbf {x}) \neq 0$. Whilst extensively studied in the literature, current results are largely limited to polynomials and number fields of low degree. In this paper, we establish the Hasse principle for a wide family of polynomials and number fields, including polynomials that are products of arbitrarily many linear, quadratic or cubic factors. The proof generalises an argument of Irving [27], which makes use of the beta sieve of Rosser and Iwaniec. As a further application of our sieve results, we prove new cases of a conjecture of Harpaz and Wittenberg on locally split values of polynomials over number fields, and discuss consequences for rational points in fibrations.

Paid sick leave, or the ability to remain home from work in the event of illness and receive compensation, has risen in prominence after the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the OECD countries, all but two, the United States and South Korea, have national paid sick leave (PSL) policies. Yet despite federal inaction in the United States, states have been adopting PSL, with 15 plus the District of Columbia having done so by the end of 2020. In the absence of federal policy, what drives states to adopt PSL mandates? In this article, we investigate two possible explanations – women in politics and jurisdictional competition. In the former, we suggest that increases in female representation in state-level governance make it more likely that a state will adopt a PSL policy. In the latter explanation, we suggest that jurisdictional competition in the form of cities or counties adopting municipal PSL policies creates pressure on the state-level government to enact statewide policies to harmonize policy, in a process of “bottom-up” federalism. To evaluate our hypotheses, we create a dataset of all state and municipal PSL policies in the United States. We find strong support for the gender representation argument, but not for the jurisdictional competition argument.

The study of popular music in the Soviet-controlled East-Central European region has yet to receive the attention it merits. The objective of this study was to fill this gap by investigating the genealogy of popular music research in East Central Europe prior to 1989. It provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of popular music research in socialist East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany. It delineates the challenges encountered by researchers in reconciling their work with the complex cultural and political conditions of the era. Furthermore, it considers the influence of Marxist ideology on musicology and sociology, and how this may have shaped research. It offers new perspectives on the history of popular music studies in this domain, which has been lightly explored until now. It seeks to shed light on the intricate relationship between music, politics and ideology behind the Iron Curtain.

The ‘inclusion–moderation thesis’ suggests that populist parties will be tamed by government inclusion. However, empirical evidence is mixed. We argue that this may be explained by different strategic contexts. We hypothesize that populist parties that rely on coalition partners will reduce their populist communication when they have credible government prospects. We analyse multiple years of political communication by two radical-right populist parties, the Swiss People's Party (SVP) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Although the two parties are rather similar ideologically, this is a most different systems design (MDSD). While the SVP is a typical governing party that was only in opposition once (2007/2008), the FPÖ is typically in opposition, with recent government experience (2017–2019). This empirical analysis focuses on these crucial periods. We find evidence of moderation before joining government for both parties in our pooled analysis. However, individual analyses suggest that this was much clearer for the SVP.

In this paper, we study the sphere packing problem in Euclidean space where we impose additional constraints on the separations of the center points. We prove that any sphere packing in dimension $48$, with spheres of radii r, such that no two centers $x_1$ and $x_2$ satisfy $\sqrt {\tfrac {4}{3}} < \frac {1}{2r}|x_1-x_2| <\sqrt {\tfrac {5}{3}}$, has center density less or equal than $(3/2)^{24}$. Equality occurs for periodic packings if and only if the packing is given by a $48$-dimensional even unimodular extremal lattice. This shows that any of the lattices $P_{48p},P_{48q},P_{48m}$ and $P_{48n}$ are optimal for this constrained packing problem, and gives evidence towards the conjecture that extremal lattices are optimal unconstrained sphere packings in $48$ dimensions. We also provide results for packings up to dimension $d\leq 1200$, where we impose constraints on the distance between centers and on the minimal norm of the spectrum, showing that even unimodular extremal lattices are again uniquely optimal. Moreover, in the one-dimensional case, where it is not at all clear that periodic packings are among those with largest density, we nevertheless give a condition on the set of constraints that allows this to happen, and we develop an algorithm to find these periodic configurations by relating the problem to a question about dominos.

The contemporary field of American political behavior lacks a methodological tradition of in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we illustrate the causes and consequences of this gap and argue for a renewal of methodological pluralism. First, we situate the current dearth of qualitative approaches within two key methodological debates during the behavioral turn in political science, showing that scholars initially embraced open-ended interviews and fieldwork but that these methods were ultimately sidelined. Although qualitative approaches persisted in historical and institutional research on American politics, their marginalization within the field of American political behavior has come at significant conceptual cost. Second, to redress this loss, we draw on existing discussions of the comparative advantages of qualitative methods to propose a framework for reintegrating interviews and ethnography into the study of American political behavior. We identify four “modes of inquiry” that should inform qualitative and mixed-methods research design in the subfield: innovating theoretically through the discovery of surprising findings, innovating theoretically through research design and case selection, identifying how contexts shape meaning-making, and tracking dynamic processes of change.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests dramatically increased the salience of police reform, yet the US Congress failed to pass any reforms. In contrast, state governments have passed hundreds of police-related bills since 2020. I summarize the plethora of state reforms passed over this period by grouping them into 18 key areas, including 14 I classify as pro-reform and four I classify as anti-reform. Next, I describe how party control and public opinion relate to state reforms. I find that state party control is a robust predictor of enacting pro-police reform policies, and that reforms are more likely in states with more Democratic and more pro-reform publics. While police reforms are responsive to public opinion, they are also typically incongruent.

Covert contraceptive use is a strategy to avoid unintended pregnancy. However, evidence regarding the multilevel factors linking past experiences of unintended pregnancy with covert contraceptive use is limited. The objective of this study was to identify the compositional and contextual factors associated with covert contraceptive use among women with a prior unintended pregnancy. Framed by the socio-ecological model, a cross-sectional study was conducted using data from Round 5 of the Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020 project in Nigeria. Non-pregnant women aged 15–49 years who reported a previous mistimed or unwanted pregnancy were included (N = 1631). Multilevel logistic regression models with random intercepts were specified to investigate the relationship between covert contraceptive use and compositional and contextual factors. Approximately 4.54% (95% CI = 3.28–6.25) of women reported covert contraceptive use. At the individual level, having less than secondary education (aOR = 5.88, 95% CI = 1.20–28.72) and being single (aOR = 11.29, 95% CI = 2.93–43.56) were associated with higher odds of covert contraceptive use. There was no significant association between covert contraceptive use and the type of unintended pregnancy (mistimed: aOR = 3.13, 95% CI = 0.88–11.13). At the community level, living in a community with average poverty levels (aOR = 6.18, 95% CI = 1.18–32.55) and high exposure to family planning mass media (aOR = 6.84, 95% CI = 1.62–29.11) were associated with higher odds of covert contraceptive use. Measures of variation showed significant variation in covert contraceptive use across communities. Further research is warranted to better understand the underlying mechanisms in these observed associations and variations in covert contraceptive use among women following the experience of an unintended pregnancy. Additionally, there is a need to design family planning strategies that integrate community-level structures.