The gated community is a unique site of social reproduction which has proliferated across India. Elite families are reproduced at the individual, household level but also at the communal level in service-rich private enclaves. These households rely heavily on specialised reproductive labourers who are deprived of worker status because they work in the private domain. Homeowners’ associations or resident welfare associations (RWAs) meanwhile regulate reproductive labour through surveillance and wage fixing and by regulating entry and exit. Despite their public function, RWAs claim no responsibility for worker welfare due to privity of contract and the exclusion of ‘domestic service’ from labour laws. We examine India’s new labour codes, establishment laws and constitutional law to pin responsibility on RWAs as public bodies for ensuring the fundamental rights and welfare of these workers.

Rasoul Namazi's Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought contains patient and perceptive readings of four texts Strauss devoted to Islamic political philosophy. My comments are limited to just one of those readings, that of “Fârâbî's Plato,” and to a single issue within it—the question of the identity of the philosopher or of philosophy. Namazi rightly recognizes the centrality of this question in “Fârâbî's Plato.” As Strauss writes in explaining Alfarabi's view of Plato's philosophy, “the central question concerns . . . the precise meaning of the philosopher” (361), and Namazi claims that it is “one of the main themes or even the theme of ‘Fârâbî's Plato’” (148, emphasis original).

The two distinct audiences Namazi identifies for his book are those interested in either Strauss or medieval Islamic philosophy. But his engrossing study of Strauss's engagement with Islamic political thought carries value for a wider audience beyond these specializations. Considering Strauss's engagement with medieval Islamic philosophy raises questions of significance regarding the relationship between European and Islamic thought. Namazi does not raise these questions directly, but this thoughtful study is valuable for those looking to understand and delineate the distinctiveness of European thought.

This paper describes a reverse engineering methodology so as to accomplish an aero-propulsive modelling (APM) through implementing a drag polar estimation for a case study jet aircraft in case of the absence of the thrust data of the aircraft’s engine. Since the available thrust force can be replaced by the required thrust force for the sustained turn, this approach allows the elimination for the need of the thrust parameter in deriving an aero-propulsive model utilising equations of motion. Two different modelling approaches have been adopted: (i) implementing the 6-DOF model data for sustained turn and climb flight to achieve induced drag model; and then incorporating the glide data to obtain the total drag polar model; (ii) using the 6-DOF model data together with introducing the effect of CL-α dependency. The error assessments showed that the derived CSA models were able to predict the drag polar values accurately, providing linear correlation coefficient (R) values equal to 0.9982 and 0.9998 for the small α assumption and CL-α dependency, respectively. A direct comparison between the trimmed CD values of 6-DOF model and the values predicted by the CSA model was accomplished, which yielded highly satisfactory results within high subsonic and transonic CL values.

The potential influence of the timing of eating on body weight regulation in humans has attracted substantial research interest. This review aims to critically evaluate the evidence on timed eating for weight loss, considering energetic and behavioural components to the timing of eating in humans. It has been hypothesised that timed eating interventions may alter energy balance in favour of weight loss by enhancing energy expenditure, specifically the thermic effect of food. This energetic effect has been suggested to explain greater weight loss which has been observed with certain timed eating interventions, despite comparable self-reported energy intakes to control diets. However, timed eating interventions have little impact on total daily energy expenditure, and the apparent effect of time of day on the thermic effect of food largely represents an artefact of measurement methods that fail to account for underlying circadian variation in resting metabolic rate. Differences in weight loss observed in free-living interventions are more likely explainable by real differences in energy intake, notwithstanding similar self-reported energy intakes. In addition, the energetic focus tends to overlook the role of behavioural factors influencing the timing of eating, such as appetite regulation chronotype-environment interactions, which may influence energy intake under free-living conditions. Overall, there is scant evidence that timed eating interventions are superior to general energy restriction for weight loss in humans. However, the role of behavioural factors in influencing energy intake may be relevant for adherence to energy-restricted diets, and this aspect remains understudied in human intervention trials.

We prove several new congruences for the overcubic partition triples function, using both elementary techniques and the theory of modular forms. These extend the recent list of such congruences given by Nayaka, Dharmendra and Kumar [‘Divisibility properties for overcubic partition triples’, Integers 24 (2024), Article no. a80, 9 pages]. We also generalise overcubic partition triples to overcubic partition k-tuples and prove arithmetic properties for these partitions.

This study employed a person-centred approach to investigate the digital divide in South Korea and its impact on life satisfaction among individuals. Six latent profiles were identified based on the following factors: digital device literacy, social capital, and digital self-efficacy. These factors denote different levels of the digital divide, highlighting the multifaceted nature of this issue and the importance of considering multiple factors that contribute to inequality. Additionally, sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, and educational level were found to play a role in determining group membership, emphasising the need to understand the underlying causes of the divide. Variations in life satisfaction among the groups emphasise their different effects on well-being. The findings can be used to inform targeted policies and interventions to bridge the digital divide in South Korea. To that end, this study provides data for designing tailored education, social networking, and support policies for vulnerable groups.

Proposals to change the institutional features of national high courts have been on the agenda recently in the United States and Israel. Using insights about endowment effects and prospect theory from behavioral economics, we theorize about how citizens may think about benefits from high courts and how those views can influence their support for change to those institutions. Mindful of differences across these countries, we employ a comparative experimental design to explore how people think about personal and societal benefits emanating from the Israeli and United States Supreme Courts. We find interesting differences in how experimental participants think about benefits from courts and how those views shape feelings about recent proposals to alter judicial institutions in each national context.

Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that works only under the best of circumstances. We argue that interbranch politics influences what aware citizens know and learn about their court, and we theorize how awareness interacts with individual-level and context-dependent factors to bolster public endorsement of judicial independence in previously unappreciated ways. We fielded surveys in the United States (US), Germany, Poland, and Hungary, countries which diverge in the extent to which the environments are hospitable or hostile to high courts, and whose publics vary greatly in both their awareness of courts and perceptions of executive influence with the judiciary. We suggest that in hospitable contexts, awareness correlates with support for judicial independence, but said association depends on perceptions of executive influence. In hostile contexts where executive interference is common, more aware citizens are more apt to perceive this meddling, and although it might undermine trust in the judicial authority, it does not diminish their demand for judicial independence. Together, these findings underscore that public awareness and support for judicial independence are greatly informed by the political environment in which high courts reside.

This article examines the writings of late 19th and early 20th-century Marxist theorists and political leaders from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and their influence on the chief Bolshevik theorist of Soviet nationality policies, Joseph Stalin. It argues that although many early Marxist theorists held divergent views on managing nationalism, they uniformly rejected biological or romantic spiritual conceptions of the nation and instead posited that nationalism and contemporary nations are relatively new, socially constructed phenomena arising from processes linked to economic and political modernization. These perspectives align with what contemporary academia labels as “modernist” theories of nationality and this analysis therefore challenges prevailing views on the genesis of these theories, tracing them back to early Marxist thinkers rather than late 20th-century Western European theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. This modernist understanding of nations as products of material forces and processes enabled socialists to envision steering nation formation. For the Bolsheviks and some of the later international revolutionaries they inspired, this meant that just as they believed they could accelerate the transition to a socialist future through active class management, so too they believed they could control and expedite the construction of national identities through carefully designed policies.

In his early serialist composition style, Einojuhani Rautavaara expressed indebtedness to the flexible usage of the twelve-tone system that was adapted by Alban Berg. The trace of Berg's influence becomes dramaturgically reminiscent when investigating the philosophical impact that Berg's opera Wozzeck had on Rautavaara's opera Vincent. This study aims to analyse the symbolic content of the Vincent libretto, with a secondary depiction of parallel attributes found in the libretto of Wozzeck. This examination demonstrates how the operas share a philosophical foundation that is based on an expression of metaphysical temporality inherent within the plots of both operas, which juxtapose the duality of the two temporal planes of empirical reality and metaphysical illusion. The outcome of such a comparison illustrates how Rautavaara's opera can be interpreted in a new framework of understanding that is based on the Finnish composer's mirroring of Berg's operatic and dramatic style as seen in Wozzeck.

Argon physisorption at 87 K is the new standard for texture analysis of microporous media recommended by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). However, geoscientists routinely use nitrogen (77 K) and carbon dioxide (273 K), both molecules with permanent polarization and the preference to interact with specific surface sites. In this work, N2, CO2, and Ar physisorption isotherms were measured and classical physisorption theories applied to investigate the suitability of Ar physisorption for the porosity assessment of mudrocks, clays, and (non)-porous analogs.

N2 and Ar physisorption isotherms are qualitatively similar with the most significant discrepancies in the submonolayer range. Textural parameters reveal linear relations but parameter ratios vary randomly, independent of the sorbent class. While N2 and CO2 (mostly) underestimate micropore volumes, nitrogen BET areas are consistently larger than argon BET areas. Those differences are probably associated with differences in polarization. But its effect on molecular orientation, for example, is presumably masked by microporosity and a narrow spacing of specific surface sites.

Mesopore size distributions and Gurvich (total) pore volumes agree well for N2 and Ar indicating similar pore size and pore volume access. Combining both parameters proves effective in identifying saturation pressure offsets which pose the largest uncertainty factor in the present study. Ar-based micropore size distributions reveal three distinct classes of mudrocks differing in organic matter maturity, and its contribution to microporosity. Empirical αs plots corroborate this classification underlining the discrepancies in the micropore range of mudrocks. Comparative hysteresis loop analysis indicated cavitation as one dominant evaporation mechanism in mudrocks and clays effecting a sample-specific compartmentalization of their pore networks.