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Review of 'Shedd, M./Tandy, S./Schott, J. Remembering Nicaea. The Ecclesiastical History of Anonymous Cyzicenus (Atlanta: SBL Press)'
No full textGet Britain Working? Continuity and Change in Labour’s Post-2024 Welfare and Employment Strategy
Get PDFFrom manifesto pledges to election victory in 2024, the Labour Party has positioned ‘spiralling economic inactivity’ as the central employment and welfare challenge. This article critically examines Labour’s first year in power, with a focus on employment policies at the intersection of in-work poverty, economic insecurity, and inactivity. We begin by outlining the current labour market context, questioning the narrative underpinning Labour’s welfare reform agenda. We then analyse key policy shifts in social security and employment support, especially as they affect marginalised groups. This is followed by a review of Labour’s wider labour market strategy, including the Employment Rights Bill, Pathways to Work, Get Britain Working, and the significance of devolution. The article concludes by assessing the current direction of travel, and explores the tension between the structural roots of work insecurity and the incremental policy responses likely to leave the deeper labour market challenges across the UK largely intact
Negotiating Permission to Dance: Care-Embedded Serious Leisure in Urban China
Get PDFBased on six months of ethnography in a third-tier Chinese city, this article shows how middle-aged and older women pursue square dancing as serious leisure while navigating caregiving and gendered time. Access is negotiated—not freely chosen—through household bargaining, moral justification, and temporal coordination. Framed by an ethic of care, participants legitimized dancing via health, duty, and family well-being and, when risks to dependents arose, sometimes withdrew to preserve future permission. The article theorizes care-embedded serious leisure and specifies three sustaining mechanisms under routine interruption: emotional seriousness (dance’s felt necessity), relational legitimacy work (earning and maintaining permission at home), and the interrupted relational leisure career, marked by readiness and rapid reentry. The study contributes to feminist leisure research and extends serious-leisure theory beyond liberal-individualist assumptions by reconceptualizing perseverance as readiness plus return and by foregrounding household authorization and between-practice work, not only skill or identity
A coupled material point method radial basis functions for free-surface water waves by large deformations in bottom topography
No full textWe propose a hybrid numerical framework that couples the Material Point Method (MPM) with Radial Basis Functions (RBF) to simulate free-surface water waves generated by large deformations in bottom topography. The governing system consists of a nonlinear dynamic elastoplastic model for seabed deformation, coupled with the nonlinear shallow water equations for the surface wave propagation. To efficiently capture large deformations in the seabed, we implement various constitutive models, including a non-associative elastoplastic model incorporating Drucker–Prager, Mohr Coulomb and von Mises yield criteria, tailored for undrained soil conditions. The coupling between the solid and fluid domains occurs dynamically at the bed-water interface, where both deformation and frictional forces are exchanged. Based on its Lagrangian formulation, MPM accurately resolves complex and large soil deformations, while the RBF solver, formulated in a meshless framework, resolves the fluid flow using a predictor–corrector scheme. The predictor stage employs the method of characteristics to compute numerical fluxes, and the corrector stage recovers the conservation laws. Time integration of the coupled system is performed using an explicit scheme, with transfer conditions at the bed-water interface imposed directly at combined collocation points, eliminating the need for interpolation. To ensure the robustness in scenarios involving dry or near-dry beds, a wet/dry treatment is incorporated, enabling stable and accurate simulations even as the water depth approaches zero. We validate the performance of the proposed hybrid MPM/RBF method through a series of benchmark scenarios, including a dam-break problem, a tunnel collapse, and a slope failure. The results demonstrate the method accuracy and capability in capturing the complex interplay between large bottom deformations and free-surface water dynamics
KASVA: A Variational Deep Learning Framework for Measuring Regional Sustainability and Inequality
Get PDFAssessing regional sustainability is challenged by the multidimensional, non-linear, and highly correlated nature of socio-economic and environmental indicators. Conventional composite indices often rely on linear aggregation and fixed weighting schemes, which can obscure structural interdependencies and amplify scale dominance. To address these limitations, this study proposes the Knowledge-Aware Sustainability Variational Assessment (KASVA), a deep-learning-based framework that integrates variational representation learning, latent-space clustering, and robustness analysis to construct a composite sustainability index. Using a comprehensive set of demographic, economic, social, and environmental indicators for Turkish Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics level 2 (NUTS2) regions, KASVA learns a compact latent representation that captures non-linear interactions among indicators exhibiting strong multicollinearity, with pairwise correlations frequently exceeding 0.8. The resulting Global Territorial Variational Sustainability Index (GTVSI) reveals substantial regional heterogeneity and pronounced spatial inequality. Latent-space clustering identifies distinct regional sustainability regimes, with silhouette scores predominantly in the range 0.4–0.5, indicating stable and well-separated clusters. Robustness analysis based on 1000 bootstrap resamples demonstrates high ranking stability, with a median Spearman rank correlation of approximately 0.69 and the majority of correlations exceeding 0.6. Compared with conventional equal-weight and principal component analysis (PCA)-based indices, the proposed framework yields more coherent and stable regional rankings. Overall, KASVA provides a data-driven, robust approach to sustainability assessment, offering improved interpretability and reliability for regional policy analysis and evidence-based decision-making
Ultra-faint Milky Way Satellites Discovered in Carina, Phoenix, and Telescopium with DELVE Data Release 3
Get PDFWe report the discovery of three Milky Way satellite candidates: Carina IV, Phoenix III, and DELVE 7, in the third data release of the DECam Local Volume Exploration survey (DELVE). The candidate systems were identified by cross-matching results from two independent search algorithms. All three are extremely faint systems composed of old, metal-poor stellar populations (τ ≳ 10 Gyr, [Fe/H] ≲−1.4). Carina IV (MV = −2.8; r1/2 = 40 pc) and Phoenix III (MV = −1.2; r1/2 = 19 pc) have half-light radii that are consistent with the known population of dwarf galaxies, while DELVE 7 (MV = 1.2; r1/2 = 2 pc) is very compact and seems more likely to be a star cluster, though its nature remains ambiguous without spectroscopic follow-up. The Gaia proper motions of stars in Carina IV ( M⋆=2250−830+1180M⊙ ) indicate that it is unlikely to be associated with the LMC, while DECam CaHK photometry confirms that its member stars are metal poor. Phoenix III ( M⋆=520−290+660M⊙ ) is the faintest known satellite in the extreme outer stellar halo (DGC > 100 kpc), while DELVE 7 ( M⋆=60−40+120M⊙ ) is the faintest known satellite with DGC > 20 kpc
The very faint X-ray transient Swift J174610–290018 at the Galactic center
Get PDFContext. Very faint X-ray transients (VFXTs) are a class of X-ray binary systems that exhibit occasional outbursts with peak X-ray luminosities (LX ≲ 1036 erg s−1) much lower than those of typical X-ray transients. On 22 February 2024, during its daily Galactic center monitoring, Swift-XRT detected a VFXT 7 arcmin from Sgr A*, dubbing it Swift J174610–290018.Aims. We aim to characterize the outburst that occurred in 2024 and a second, distinct outburst in 2025 to understand the nature and accretion flow properties of this new VFXT.Methods. Swift-XRT light curves were used to constrain the duration of the two events. We carried out X-ray spectral analysis, exploiting XMM-Newton and NuSTAR data. We used Chandra and XMM-Newton observations from the last 25 years to constrain the quiescent luminosity of the source and to compare the two most recent outbursts with previous detections of the source.Results. During the 2024 outburst, which lasted about 50 days, the source reached a luminosity in the 2–10 keV band (L2–10) of ≃1.2 × 1035 erg s−1 (assuming it is located at the Galactic center, i.e., at a distance of 8.2 kpc). The 2025 outburst is shorter (about 5 days) and reached L2–10 ≃ 9 × 1034 erg s−1. The spectral features of the source include an excess at 6.5–7 keV, which can be associated either with a single reflection line or with the ionized Fe XXV and XXVI lines. The same source was identified in both the XMM-Newton and Chandra catalogs of point sources (known as 4XMM J174610.7–290020 and 2CXO J174610.7–290019). During previous detections the source displayed luminosity levels ranging from L2–10 ≃ 2 × 1032 to L2–10 ≃ 3 × 1033 erg s−1 between 2000 and 2010. Moreover, it exhibited a potential type I X-ray burst in 2004.Conclusions. The analysis of the outbursts and the potential type I burst strongly suggests that the VFXT Swift J174610–290018 is a neutron star low-mass X-ray binary. The source can be described as being an accretion disk corona source (as has been recently proposed by an XRISM/Xtend analysis). This scenario explains the overall low luminosity of this transient and the peculiar iron lines in the spectrum
Big Picture Ethics? Why Normativity is Unavoidable in the Big Picture.
No full textThis chapter considers Buzan’s approach to ethics and normative theory and theorising in his big picture approach. It critiques his argument that normative theorising remains an essential component of thinking about the big picture but is the work of specialists. This chapter suggests this is problematic for two reasons and that normative theory is an essential counterpoint to Buzan’s empirical focus rather than being a separate, specialist, activity. First, I set out that normativity is embedded in methodological choices about what to look for and how to look for it in the big picture. A contrapuntal approach reveals unacknowledged normative choices substantively shaping analyses of how international society forms and functions, and its fragility. Second, the chapter argues that an empirical big picture must make room for the normativity inherent in politics. Visions of a ‘better’ world may be almost limitless in their diversity, but this is the core language of advocating change and a key motivational factor in bringing people to enact change. Normative theoretical counterpoint to Buzan’s big picture approach reveals much about the political processes that make global society and why we unavoidably analyse it in normatively significant ways
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