In recent years, Arctic states have accelerated investment in the design and construction of icebreakers. Following delays in U.S. icebreaking programs, construction of the first new American icebreaker in 30 years began in 2025, and sea trials of the Stotiz, which joined the U.S. Coast Guard last year, were conducted. Russia continues to expand its capabilities through the ongoing development of Project 22220 and Project Leader. This article examines the underlying motivations driving states to strengthen their icebreaking fleets. The study is particularly relevant given the strategic role icebreakers play in supporting Arctic energy projects and asserting influence in the region. Special attention is given to comparing the approaches of Russia and the United States. The findings suggest differing motivations: Russia emphasizes economic development and the integration of its northern territories, while the U.S. views icebreakers primarily as tools of geopolitical influence in military, political, and legal domains. The article argues that icebreaker development and NATO cooperation in this sphere are closely tied to the evolving geopolitical landscape, highlighting the need to assess the true objectives behind Arctic policy statements.
Guilherme N. Fasolin, Matias Spektor, Renan Marques
et al.
Abstract Climate change risk perceptions are subjective constructs that individuals use to interpret the potential harms of climate change and influence their engagement in mitigation and adaptation efforts. While research in high-income Western countries has identified cognitive processes, socio-cultural factors, and political ideology as key predictors of climate risk perceptions, their applicability to low- and middle-income regions remains uncertain. This study uses a cross-national survey conducted in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico (N = 5338) to assess climate risk perceptions in Latin America. We show that emotional responses, especially worry and perceived vulnerability to extreme weather, are the strongest predictors. In contrast, political ideology and socio-demographic factors exhibit weak and inconsistent associations, diverging from patterns observed in high-income countries. These findings highlight that climate change is not perceived as a politically divisive issue in the region, suggesting opportunities for cross-party collaboration on climate initiatives. Understanding these unique drivers in regions with emerging economies is crucial for developing effective, tailored risk communication strategies.
José Augusto Lacerda Fernandes, Natanael Silva Correia
Apesar de sua incontestável importância para a preservação da biodiversidade e para o combate às mudanças climáticas, a floresta amazônica está passando por um alarmante processo de destruição. Com índices de preservação muito acima da média geral, as terras indígenas evidenciam o papel central dos povos originários no enfrentamento do desmatamento e de outros tantos desafios amazônicos, convidando a olhares mais atentos para as práticas, estratégias e estruturas organizacionais adotadas no âmbito do movimento indígena. Atento para a relevância dos recursos financeiros na dinâmica dessas iniciativas, este artigo buscou compreender a construção e a gestão de um mecanismo de financiamento não apenas voltado para indígenas, mas também criado e gerido por eles. Por meio do caso do Fundo Podáali, apontamos como mecanismos de financiamento inovadores, adaptados às especificidades da Amazônia, podem desburocratizar o acesso a recursos e ainda fortalecer os saberes ancestrais e os modos de vida dos povos originários.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
This paper surveys the use of Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Claude, in computer science education, focusing on key aspects of accuracy, authenticity, and assessment. Through a literature review, we highlight both the challenges and opportunities these AI tools present. While Generative AI improves efficiency and supports creative student work, it raises concerns such as AI hallucinations, error propagation, bias, and blurred lines between AI-assisted and student-authored content. Human oversight is crucial for addressing these concerns. Existing literature recommends adopting hybrid assessment models that combine AI with human evaluation, developing bias detection frameworks, and promoting AI literacy for both students and educators. Our findings suggest that the successful integration of AI requires a balanced approach, considering ethical, pedagogical, and technical factors. Future research may explore enhancing AI accuracy, preserving academic integrity, and developing adaptive models that balance creativity with precision.
Ankan Mullick, Akash Ghosh, G Sai Chaitanya
et al.
Material science literature is a rich source of factual information about various categories of entities (like materials and compositions) and various relations between these entities, such as conductivity, voltage, etc. Automatically extracting this information to generate a material science knowledge base is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose MatSciRE (Material Science Relation Extractor), a Pointer Network-based encoder-decoder framework, to jointly extract entities and relations from material science articles as a triplet ($entity1, relation, entity2$). Specifically, we target the battery materials and identify five relations to work on - conductivity, coulombic efficiency, capacity, voltage, and energy. Our proposed approach achieved a much better F1-score (0.771) than a previous attempt using ChemDataExtractor (0.716). The overall graphical framework of MatSciRE is shown in Fig 1. The material information is extracted from material science literature in the form of entity-relation triplets using MatSciRE.
Masayoshi Kozai, Yoshimasa Tanaka, Shuji Abe
et al.
The AMIDER, Advanced Multidisciplinary Integrated-Database for Exploring new Research, is a newly developed research data catalog to demonstrate an advanced database application. AMIDER is characterized as a multidisciplinary database equipped with a user-friendly web application. Its catalog view displays diverse research data at once beyond any limitation of each individual discipline. Some useful functions, such as a selectable data download, data format conversion, and display of data visual information, are also implemented. Further advanced functions, such as visualization of dataset mutual relationship, are also implemented as a preliminary trial. These characteristics and functions are expected to enhance the accessibility to individual research data, even from non-expertized users, and be helpful for collaborations among diverse scientific fields beyond individual disciplines. Multidisciplinary data management is also one of AMIDER's uniqueness, where various metadata schemas can be mapped to a uniform metadata table, and standardized and self-describing data formats are adopted. AMIDER website (https://amider.rois.ac.jp/) had been launched in April 2024. As of July 2024, over 15,000 metadata in various research fields of polar science have been registered in the database, and approximately 500 visitors are viewing the website every day on average. Expansion of the database to further multidisciplinary scientific fields, not only polar science, is planned, and advanced attempts, such as applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to metadata, have also been considered.
Emma K. Dahl, Naomi Rowe-Gurney, Glenn S. Orton
et al.
The Ice Giants represent a unique and relatively poorly characterized class of planets that have been largely unexplored since the brief Voyager 2 flyby in the late 1980's. Uranus is particularly enigmatic, due to its extreme axial tilt, offset magnetic field, apparent low heat budget, mysteriously cool stratosphere and warm thermosphere, as well as a lack of well-defined, long-lived storm systems and distinct atmospheric features. All these characteristics make Uranus a scientifically intriguing target, particularly for missions able to complete in situ measurements. The 2023-2032 Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology prioritized a flagship orbiter and probe to explore Uranus with the intent to "...transform our knowledge of Ice Giants in general and the Uranian system in particular" (National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, 2022). In support of this recommendation, we present community-supported science questions, key measurements, and a suggested instrument suite that focuses on the exploration and characterization of the Uranian atmosphere by an in situ probe. The scope of these science questions encompasses the origin, evolution, and current processes that shape the Uranian atmosphere, and in turn the Uranian system overall. Addressing these questions will inform vital new insights about Uranus, Ice Giants and Gas Giants in general, the large population of Neptune-sized exoplanets, and the Solar System as a whole.
Building on previous work, this paper extends the modeling of political structures from simplicial complexes to hypergraphs. This allows the analysis of more complex political dynamics where agents who are willing to form coalitions contain subsets that would not necessarily form coalitions themselves. We extend topological constructions such as wedge, cone, and collapse from simplicial complexes to hypergraphs and use them to study mergers, mediators, and power delegation in political structures. Concepts such as agent viability and system stability are generalized to the hypergraph context, alongside the introduction of the notion of local viability. Additionally, we use embedded homology of hypergraphs to analyze power concentration within political systems. Along the way, we introduce some new notions within the hypergraph framework that are of independent interest.
Instruction-finetuned Large Language Models inherit clear political leanings that have been shown to influence downstream task performance. We expand this line of research beyond the two-party system in the US and audit Llama Chat in the context of EU politics in various settings to analyze the model's political knowledge and its ability to reason in context. We adapt, i.e., further fine-tune, Llama Chat on speeches of individual euro-parties from debates in the European Parliament to reevaluate its political leaning based on the EUandI questionnaire. Llama Chat shows considerable knowledge of national parties' positions and is capable of reasoning in context. The adapted, party-specific, models are substantially re-aligned towards respective positions which we see as a starting point for using chat-based LLMs as data-driven conversational engines to assist research in political science.
The study of Machiavelli was recurrent in Louis Althusser. Machiavelli allowed him to rethink political action without supposing the a priori existence of a subject in whom Political Theory should axiomatically recognize the ability to carry out this action. This article aims to analyze the lecture Althusser gave in 1977 at the Institute of Political Sciences of Paris. Then, Althusser not only suggested this reading of Machiavelli, but also offered a non-cumulative conception of history, which enables a differentiated appropriation of Antiquity.
This paper discusses the argumentative turn amongst farmers and the other different stakeholders in the case of land disputes, Kebumen, Central Java, Indonesia. While policy makers insisted that the land function conversion from agriculture and tourism to mining was needed to support local development as through the absorption of labors into employment sector, as well as to improve local people’s income, local farmers insisted that the conversion merely uprooting their ownership of land and let them back to periods where they were jobless and lack of source of income decades ago. This paper applied qualitative research supported with observation and interviews with parties involved in the case, to highlight the argumentative turn within land policy, which in the case of Kebumen leads to policy conflict. This paper identifies the elite-driven policy in the land dispute cases in Kebumen has led policy close to discussions with various stakeholders, which are necessary to be heard in the policy making. This finding highlights the idea that policy creates within itself politics that is in-line with the interest of the elites, and yet, resulted in the feedback loop, manifested through the strong resistance of the community.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
This article examines the linkage of markets and democracy in the post-1989 Czech transition as a neoliberal populist discourse that delegitimized alternatives to the market as a return to authoritarianism. Using Laclau’s concept of equivalential linkages, I analyze Václav Klaus’
texts surrounding the voucher privatization program to determine how he formulated this linkage and communicated it to the public. Framing
markets as natural, essential, and fundamentally Czech, Klaus constructed the people as a virtuous community of market individuals while othering
those who opposed markets as communist holdouts and, elitists. Klaus further legitimized marketization through identification with international
neoliberal projects and thinkers. Through his moralized and dichotomized discourse, Klaus communicated to the public that there could be no freedom
without markets, nor markets without freedom: a circular formulation that continues to influence Central and Eastern European political economy.
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent and deadly than prior pandemics. I develop a quantitative economic model to assess the social returns to science, taking into account benefits to health and income, and forecast damages from new biological capabilities enabled by science. I set parameters for this model based on historical trends and forecasts from a large forecasting tournament of domain experts and superforecasters, which included forecasts about genetically engineered pandemic events. The results depend on the forecast likelihood that new scientific capabilities might lead to the end of our advanced civilization - there is substantial disagreement about this probability from participants in the forecasting tournament I use. If I set aside this remote possibility, I find the expected future social returns to science are strongly positive. Otherwise, the desirability of accelerating science depends on the value placed on the long-run future, in addition to which set of (quite different) forecasts of extinction risk are preferred. I also explore the sensitivity of these conclusions to a range of alternative assumptions.
As one of the most visible aspects of political life in recent years, the populist rises imply the ‘crisis of representation’ that means the existing institutional mechanism of representative democracy is ineffective in representing the variety of social demands. While this situation, according to the liberal democratic approach, warns of the revival of mass society and new versions of authoritarianism, the radical democratic approach considers it a possibility to retrieve democracy. Which variables determine the contending evaluations of the impact of populism on democracy? The present paper presupposes that the contending evaluations are driven by different conceptions of the principal constituent of democracy (rule of law or general will?) and the populism entity (a manner of governance or a movement constructing collective will?). Given the postulates of the contending democratic theories (liberal and radical), the paper hypothesizes that evaluating the effects of populism on democracy depends on the way of interaction of some variables: a) the content of the populist discourse (egalitarian articulation of plural demands or discriminatory one?); b) the context in which the populist movement arises (democratic structure of opportunity or authoritarian one?) c) the mutual strategy of political actors whether from opposition or in position ones (the connection between street politics and institutional one or disconnection?). Taking advantage of the contending democratic theories (liberal and radical) in a combinative theoretical framework, the paper attempts to justify the hypothesis by highlighting the fact that both democratic theories are built on one aspect of the conception of democratic order. Marking the elements such as individual subjectivity, rationality, the rule of law, pluralism, etc. as characteristics of democratic order, a liberal democratic approach considers populist popular and exclusionary (i.e., determined by populists’ particular definition of the people) orientation as a threat to democracy. It is because such orientation restricts public debates and leads to weakening democratic institutions, the opposition’s rights, and the plurality of society. On the contrary, the radical democratic approach points to the significance of the populist mobilization for the democratization of status quo democracies owing to re-politicization of the issues neglected by the sovereign elite, provided that to articulate accumulated demands around a democratic egalitarian nodal point. Such evaluation emanates from the fact that this approach identifies democracy with collective subjectivity, general will, participation, and so on. It seems that a non-paradoxical and justifiable reference to both the above-mentioned approach in an analysis of the effect of populism on democracy entails taking their different concentrations into account. It means ‘populism-in-power’ (as a way of governance) puts the structural foundations of democracy in danger and facilitates the emergence of authoritarianism due to its anti-institutionalism, anti-pluralism, and tendency to mass politics. It is whilst, in the status of ‘opposition’ (a mobilizing movement), populism might be an opportunity to revive democratic politics. This argument resorts to the action of constructing a new collective will, in populist strategies of mobilizations, which reveals shortages of representative systems such as the monopoly of a minority, technocratic elitism, and so on. Nevertheless, the actualization of the progressive effects of the populist movements on democracy depends heavily on the interaction of variables which are as follows. a) If the populist discourse articulates accumulated social demands around a democratic egalitarian will, then the populist moment (as the moment of crisis in a representative democracy) can be of progressive connotations for democracy-deepening. Conversely, discriminatory articulation (like racist or class populism) paves the way for authoritarianism. Hence in terms of democratization and de-democratization, various populisms can be imagined; ranging from democratic populism to authoritarian, leftist to far-right. b) Realization of the above-mentioned progressive version of populism depends on the ‘democratic structure of political opportunity’. The possibility of mobilization by democratic egalitarian populism is only imaginable where the rules of the democratic competition are guaranteed. In other words, if there is no equal and fair opportunity to declare the policies in electoral campaigns and implement them after taking into power, then there can be just governmental types of populism that mobilize the mass for advocating governmental policies and decisions. Here, populism appears in its authoritarian face in a mass society. c) The third variable is the strategy that political actors of both realms, movement, and institution, in a political structure adapt. If the populist movement ties its street activism with institutional bargaining (e.g. by resorting to parliamentary parties) and, mutually, the government opens up the policy-making input to populist demands (rather than rejecting them), then the rise of a democratic egalitarian populist movement might result in democracy- deepening. Otherwise, populism can bring about some contending de-democratizing mass mobilizations, whether in the shape of authoritarian up-to-down governmental populism or fruitless gross-root radical populism. In brief, the paper maintains that by vindicating ‘popular sovereignty’, populism has double-edged effects in terms of weakening or strengthening democracy; ranging from an infertile radicalism leading to authoritarianism to radical reformism containing the possibility of retrieval of democracy. Hence democratic theory needs to develop an order that balances the rule of law and public will as two sides of democracy. It calls for a new social contract based on a balanced relationship between specialism and democratic responsibility. To reach such a situation, more inclusive politics should be targeted by current-day democracies. The key, however, is hearing the demands of populist advocators rather than populist leaders’ programs.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
This document was prepared by the XRISM Science Team to introduce the XRISM mission, its onboard instruments, figures of merit, and examples of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy to general astronomers and students.
Communities of color, suffering equity gaps and disproportionate COVID-19 effects, also must resist ongoing disinformation campaigns designed to impede their political influence. A representative, national survey (N=1264) of adults conducted June-July 2020 found that nonwhite respondents tended to report less COVID-19 knowledge, media literacy, and voting intent than white respondents, but more acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation and for risks associated with protesting for social justice. General media literacy skills are associated with COVID-19 knowledge and political engagement, while science media literacy is associated with less acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation. Media literacy skills appear important for empowering and informing communities of color.
Osvrt na knjigu Poreklo porodice, privatne svojine i države Fridriha Engelsa (Friedrich Engels.1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press, 180 p.)