Discussions of term limits are happening in the United States and abroad. In July 2024, President Biden announced his support for limiting the number of years that federal judges may serve. Surveys suggest that limits for judges are popular with Americans.1 Relatedly, voters have historically supported term limits for members of Congress, with the most recent survey (from July 2023) finding support among 87%.2 For now, limits are unlikely to be imposed on federal judges or members of Congress, but there are recent changes in the states. Voters in North Dakota imposed limits on their state legislators in 2022, and those limits will take effect in 2028. In Michigan, also in 2022, voters shortened the long-standing lifetime limits for their legislators from 14 to 12 years. Discussions or reforms, including the elimination of limits, have also occurred outside of the United States. In Russia, voters seemingly reset the term limits that applied previously to President Vladimir Putin, thereby allowing him to serve in office until 2036. In China, where limits for various leaders including the president were first added to the country’s constitution in 1982, limits were abolished in 2018. Although these are prominent examples of limits being lifted, a remarkable number of new limits have been enacted elsewhere, with limits on executives being imposed in 17 countries within the past decade alone. To date, only a handful of countries, most of which are in the Americas, have legislative limits.3 Conversely, nearly every country limits the service of judges.4

Flavonoids are a key class of polyphenols, i.e., phytochemical compounds present in foods and beverages, which have been described as having health benefits in preventing several chronic diseases. Estimating flavonoid intake has already been conducted in several countries but has yet to be performed in Portugal. This study included 5,005 participants aged 3-84 years and aimed to estimate dietary flavonoid intake in the Portuguese population, using data from the National Food and Physical Activity Survey 2015-2016, providing information on intake, main food contributors, and the socio-demographic factors associated with the intake. Food intake data from the Survey was converted to flavonoid intake using a database built to include the most updated USDA databases on flavonoids, isoflavones and proanthocyanidins, and the Phenol-Explorer database. The rationale for combining food consumption data and different flavonoid databases using the FoodEx2 classification system was established. Linear regressions assessed the associations between socio-demographic factors and dietary flavonoid intake. The total flavonoid intake of the Portuguese population was estimated to be 107.3 mg/day. Flavanols were the most representative subclass, followed by flavonols, anthocyanidins, flavanones, flavones and isoflavones. Fruits and vegetables were the primary food contributors, providing 31.5% and 12.4% of the total flavonoid intake. Adolescents had the lowest total flavonoid intake, and older adults had the highest. This study provides information on the Portuguese population’s dietary flavonoids, allowing for international comparisons. It can also streamline forthcoming investigations into the link between flavonoid consumption and its impact on health, contributing to the future establishment of dietary reference values.

This article traces the conceptual history of key terms used to describe and criticize bad political regimes, focusing on the displacement of “tyranny” by “dictatorship” and “authoritarianism.” Classical Greek thought understood tyranny primarily in terms of the character of rulers, whereas the modern idea of dictatorship emerged from a Roman conceptual framework that focused on authority and its legitimation. New problems of legitimation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diminished the utility of the character-centric concept of tyranny and increased the fruitfulness of dictatorship for political analysis. The emergence of the modern state in the nineteenth century shaped the conceptual field by increasing the salience of problems concerning the appropriation or usurpation of sovereignty, the distortion of popular legitimation and accountability, and the incentives for submission to illegitimate orders. I conclude that the use of “authoritarianism” is likely to increase in prominence, but that retaining multiple regime concepts enriches analysis.

As the Arctic warms and growing seasons start to lengthen, governments and producers are speculating about northern “climate-driven agricultural frontiers” as a potential solution to food insecurity. One of the central ecological factors in northern spaces, however, is permafrost (perennial frozen ground), which can drive cascading environmental changes upon thaw. Considering the land requirements for expanded agriculture and the unique challenges of northern farming, national and subnational governments are grappling with and facilitating this speculative boom in different ways. Analysing agricultural land use policy instruments from the US State of Alaska and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia, this paper investigates if and how permafrost factors into their legal frameworks and what impacts this has on agricultural development, conservation, and food security. Alaska and the Republic of Sakha were chosen for reasons including both having at least 100 years of agricultural history on permafrost soils, both containing extensive amounts of permafrost within their landmasses and both containing permafrost that is ice-rich. Comparing legal texts as indicative of state capacities and strategies to govern, the paper finds that the two regions diverge in how they understand and regulate permafrost, and suggests that these approaches could benefit from one another. Bringing together geoclimatic and sociocultural concerns to problematise static policy divisions, this paper gestures to a path forward wherein subnational policy can balance needs for food, environmental, and cultural security in the North.

Although it is largely overlooked, Thomas Hobbes spent the final years of his life translating Homer’s epic poetry. Despite an overwhelmingly popular extant English edition of the Iliad by George Chapman, Hobbes chose to proffer his own account, often taking great liberties with the source material. Juxtaposed against Chapman’s translation, we see that Hobbes implicitly critiques the political philosophy it commends—a philosophy which disrespects kingly power, misunderstands sovereign authority, and abdicates human virtue. Hobbes sees these elements as corrupting the poetic imagination of England, precipitating much of the unrest we see in the seventeenth century. In correcting and reframing these tales for a new world, Hobbes provides a moral scaffolding for his political philosophy through one of the most widely read classical texts of his time.

An existing approach for deriving analytical expressions for slip-flow properties of Stokes flow is generalised and applied to a range of micro and nanoscale applications. The technique, which exploits the reciprocal theorem, can generate first-order predictions of the impact of Navier or Maxwell slip boundary conditions on surface moments of the traction force (e.g. on drag and torque). This article brings dedicated focus to the technique, generalises it to predict first-order slip effects on arbitrary moments of the surface traction, numerically verifies the technique on a number of cases and applies the method to a range of micro and nano-scale applications. Applications include predicting: the drag on translating spheres with varying slip length; the efficiency of a micro journal bearing; the speed of a self-propelled particle (a ‘squirmer’); and the pressure drop required to drive flow through long, straight micro/nano channels. Certain general results are also obtained. For example, for low-slip Stokes flow: any surface distribution of positive slip length will reduce the drag on any translating particle; and any perimetric distribution of positive slip length will reduce the pressure loss through a straight channel flow of arbitrary cross-section.

Conventional benefit–cost analysis is well-established and widely used to assess interventions designed to improve public health and welfare. While it has many advantages, it has well-known limitations. Chief among these is its inattention to the distributional equity of the impacts. To measure individual well-being, the conventional approach relies on individuals’ willingness to exchange their own income for the outcomes they experience. To measure societal welfare, it relies on simple aggregation of these values across individuals. This approach reflects a relatively narrow conception of welfare and ignores how impacts are distributed across advantaged and disadvantaged individuals. Social welfare analysis has been proposed as an alternative approach to address these limitations, but real-world applications are rare due largely to the complexity of the calculations. This article provides a pragmatic approach for conducting equity-sensitive benefit–cost analysis globally that addresses data limitations and other challenges, illustrated with example applications. It formally develops and implements equity weights that adjust for the decreasing marginal value of money and for additional moral considerations, prioritizing increases in welfare for those who are worse off.

We contribute to the study of generalizations of the Perfect Set Property and the Baire Property to subsets of spaces of higher cardinalities, like the power set ${\mathcal {P}}({\lambda })$ of a singular cardinal $\lambda $ of countable cofinality or products $\prod _{i<\omega }\lambda _i$ for a strictly increasing sequence $\langle {\lambda _i}~\vert ~{i<\omega }\rangle $ of cardinals. We consider the question under which large cardinal hypothesis classes of definable subsets of these spaces possess such regularity properties, focusing on rank-into-rank axioms and classes of sets definable by $\Sigma _1$-formulas with parameters from various collections of sets. We prove that $\omega $-many measurable cardinals, while sufficient to prove the perfect set property of all $\Sigma _1$-definable sets with parameters in $V_\lambda \cup \{V_\lambda \}$, are not enough to prove it if there is a cofinal sequence in $\lambda $ in the parameters. For this conclusion, the existence of an I2-embedding is enough, but there are parameters in $V_{\lambda +1}$ for which I2 is still not enough. The situation is similar for the Baire property: under I2 all sets that are $\Sigma _1$-definable using elements of $V_\lambda $ and a cofinal sequence as parameters have the Baire property, but I2 is not enough for some parameter in $V_{\lambda +1}$. Finally, the existence of an I0-embedding implies that all sets that are $\Sigma ^1_n$-definable with parameters in $V_{\lambda +1}$ have the Baire property.

Trifludimoxazin is a new PPO-inhibiting herbicide that is being evaluated for the control of small-seeded annual broadleaf weeds and grasses in several crops. Currently, no information is available regarding peanut cultivar response to trifludimoxazin and its utility in peanut weed control systems. Three unique field experiments were conducted and replicated in time from 2019 through 2022 to determine the response of seven peanut cultivars (AU-NPL 17; FloRun 331; GA-06G; GA-16HO; GA-18RU; GA-20VHO; and TifNV High O/L) to preemergence (PRE) applications of trifludimoxazin and to determine the efficacy of trifludimoxazin at multiple rates and tank-mixtures with acetochlor, diclosulam, dimethenamid-P, pendimethalin, and S-metolachlor for weed management. Cultivar sensitivities to trifludimoxazin were not observed. Peanut density was not reduced by any trifludimoxazin rate. Trifludimoxazin at 75 g ai ha-1 increased leaf necrosis by 18%, peanut stunting by 10%, and reduced yield by 6% when compared to the non-treated control in 2019. However, this rate only increased leaf necrosis by 4%, stunting by 3% to 5%, and had no negative impact on yield in 2020-2021. Generally, peanut injury from PRE applied trifludimoxazin was similar to or less than that observed from flumioxazin at 2 wk after application (WAA). Peanut yield in the weed control study was reduced 11 to 12% when treated with trifludimoxazin at 150 g ha-1 rate (4X) when compared to the 75 g ha-1 rate. However, yield was not different from the flumioxazin treatment. Palmer amaranth control with trifludimoxazin systems was ≥ 91% at 13 WAA, wild radish control was ≥ 96% at 5 WAA, and annual grass control was ≥ 97% at 13 WAA. Peanut is sufficiently tolerant of 38 g ha-1 of trifludimoxazin and when tank-mixed with other residual herbicides provides weed control similar to flumioxazin-based systems.

The notion of a strongly dense subgroup was introduced by Breuillard, Green, Guralnick and Tao: a subgroup Γ of a semi-simple $\mathbb{Q}$ algebraic group $\mathcal{G}$ is called strongly dense if every pair of non-commuting elements generate a Zariski dense subgroup. Amongst other things, Breuillard et al. prove that there exist strongly dense free subgroups in $\mathcal{G}({\mathbb{R}})$ and ask whether or not a Zariski dense subgroup of $\mathcal{G}(\mathbb{R})$ always contains a strongly dense free subgroup. In this paper, we answer this for many surface subgroups of $\textrm{SL}(3,\mathbb{R})$.

In institutional design, public policy and for society as a whole, securing freedom of choice for individuals is important. But how much choice should we aim for? Various theorists argue that above some level more choice improves neither wellbeing nor autonomy. Worse still, psychology research seems to suggest that too much choice even makes us worse off. Such reasons suggest the Sufficiency View: increasing choice is only important up to some sufficiency level, a level that is not too far from the level enjoyed by well-off citizens in rich liberal countries today. I argue that we should reject the Sufficiency View and accept Liberal Optimism instead: expanding freedom of choice should remain an important priority even far beyond levels enjoyed in rich liberal countries today. I argue that none of the arguments given for the Sufficiency View work. Neither psychological evidence nor any broader social trends support it. If anything, they support Liberal Optimism instead. I also show why further increases are possible and desirable, and sketch some implications for debates around immigration, economic growth, markets and the value of community.

Comparative speech-act studies have found that British English directives tend to include the pragmatic marker please at about twice the rate of American English directives. Nevertheless, lexical please is often as frequent in American English corpora as in British ones – indicating that sincere directives are only part of this pragmatic marker’s story. This article reports on British and American please usage in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE; Davies 2013). GloWbE shows similar numbers of non-verbal please on American and British websites, but also differences in what please is used for. This contributes to a larger picture of pragmatic variation in which British English uses a more bleached and routine please, whereas American please might be more at home effecting im/politeness in contexts of greater face-threat.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formations for bearing-only passive detection are increasingly important in modern military confrontations, and the array of the formation is one of the decisive factors affecting the detection accuracy of the system. How to plan the optimal geometric array in bearing-only detection is a complex nondeterministic polynomial problem, and this paper proposed the distributed stochastic subgradient projection algorithm (DSSPA) with layered constraints to solve this challenge. Firstly, based on the constraints of safe flight altitude and fixed baseline, the UAV formation is layered, and the system model for bearing-only cooperative localisation is constructed and analysed. Then, the calculation formula for geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) in the observation plane is provided, this nonlinear objective function is appropriately simplified to obtain its quadratic form, ensuring that it can be adapted and used efficiently in the system model. Finally, the proposed distributed stochastic subgradient projection algorithm (DSSPA) combines the idea of stochastic gradient descent with the projection method. By performing a projection operation on each feasible solution, it ensures that the updated parameters can satisfy the constraints while efficiently solving the convex optimisation problem of array planning. In addition to theoretical proof, this paper also conducts three simulation experiments of different scales, validating the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method for bearing-only detection array planning in UAV formations. This research provides essential guidance and technical reference for the deployment of UAV formations and path planning of detection platforms.

In this article, we delve into the optimal scheduling challenge for many-to-many on-orbit services, taking into account variations in target accessibility. The scenario assumes that each servicing satellite is equipped with singular or multiple service capabilities, tasked with providing on-orbit services to multiple targets, each characterised by distinct service requirements. The mission’s primary objective is to determine the optimal service sequence, orbital transfer duration and on-orbit service time for each servicing satellite, with the ultimate goal of minimising the overall cost. We frame the optimal scheduling dilemma as a time-related colored travelling salesman problem (TRCTSP) and propose an enhanced firefly algorithm (EFA) to address it. Finally, experimental results across various scenarios validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm. The principal contribution of this work lies in the modeling and resolution of the many-to-many on-orbit service challenge, considering accessibility variations — a domain that has, until now, remained unexplored.

This article presents an ultrawide bandpass filter structure developed along a notch band using a small rectangular impedance resonator. The proposed filter structure consists of a coupled rectangular resonator (CRR), open stub, and composited split ring resonator (CSRR) at the bottom of the structure. In-band and out-of-band properties are improved by the CRR and open stub. The notch band is obtained by placing CSRR below the rectangular resonator. A filter with a compact size of 0.15 × 0.10 λg is obtained at a lowered cutoff frequency of 3.0 GHz, where λg is the corresponding guided wavelength. The proposed structure has been constructed on 5880 Rogers substrate with a thickness of 0.787 mm and a dielectric constant of 2.2. Additionally, equivalent lumped parameters were obtained, and a lumped equivalent circuit was created to explain how the suggested filter operated. The Electromagnetic (EM)-simulated results are in good agreement with the circuit-simulated and measured result. The various machine learning approaches such as artificial neural network, K-nearest neighbour, decision tree, random forest (RF), and extreme gradient boosting algorithms are applied to optimize the design, in which RF algorithms achieve more than 90% accuracy for predicting the S parameters of the ultrawideband filter.

Alexis de Tocqueville highlights a paradox at the heart of the democratic spirit. Egalitarians are allergic to markers of social hierarchy and are on the hunt to identify and abolish remnants of the old regime’s entrenchment of aristocratic rank. The resulting abolition of personal hierarchy, however, does not deliver equality and freedom. Rather it inclines democrats to accept depersonalized forms of discipline at the hands of public opinion, the tutelary state, and the market economy. Tocqueville argues that the commitment to an “imaginary equality” lies at the root of the soft despotism he finds across democratized institutions, mores, and economic relationships. He develops a distinct account of the emergence of domination under conditions of formal equality. Social dependence in liberal societies does not derive from a new class of elites or the rise of capitalist economic formations. Equality is itself connected to new, impersonal forms of servitude.

This article argues that in the age of social media, the affective power of music can dare listeners to become complicit with misogyny and right-wing populism. It investigates the weaponization of dubstep in internet trolling strategies by examining the genre's relationship with a type of user-generated content called ‘Major League Gaming [MLG] Montage Parodies’. Mixing musical and audiovisual analysis with digital methods, the article considers the origins of MLG Montage Parodies and then investigates the content's development from 2011 to 2016. As a memetic timbral topic, the dubstep drop was initially deployed in MLG Montage Parodies as a form of pubescent power play to troll young male gamers. But then in 2014, it was redeployed as anti-feminist ammunition amid the toxic masculinity of #GamerGate. Finally, it was weaponized by alt-right trolls during the 2015–2016 ‘Great Meme War’ that accompanied the US Presidential Race. The closing remarks reflect on the ethical, ontological, and disciplinary implications of the research and issue a call for memetic musical literacy.

This study presents the initial results of carbon-14 dating after performing sample preparation and graphite production processes at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in an intercomparison with the same processes performed at the Radiocarbon Laboratory of the Fluminense Federal University (LAC-UFF). Both laboratories are located in Brazil. The accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) system at LAC-UFF was used for radiocarbon measurements. To verify any possible contamination sources during sample preparation, we initially performed swipe tests at UFBA, which were subsequently processed and the graphite samples were produced at LAC-UFF. After UFBA, several reference materials (IAEA-C1, -C2, -C6, -C9, and OXII standards) were prepared and converted into graphite. In addition, the sample material was first partially prepared at UFF and UFBA and then analyzed with the AMS system at LAC-UFF. Subsamples were prepared for additional measurements of the δ13C composition with an elemental analyzer coupled to an isotope ratio mass spectrometer (EA–IRMS) in LFNA-UFBA to study the isotopic fractionation and yield of the graphitization reaction. The obtained values closely aligned with the reference values, demonstrating reproducibility and quality and indicating minimal contamination during chemical and graphitization processes. In the future, samples from different matrices will be prepared at UFBA for application in paleoenvironmental and archaeological studies.