EDRS: Extremity-density representative selection for semi-supervised learning on imbalanced data

In this study, we combined an interpretable machine learning (ML) framework with a large language model (LLM) to investigate structure-reactivity trends in an acrylate/methacrylate radical reaction dataset constructed from density functional theory calculations. For the ML component, we employed modified convex clustering (regression) with direct representative selection (DRS) and direct representative prediction (DRP). Within this framework, the model selected representative samples from the training set (DRS) and formed predictions as weighted sums over these representatives (DRP). Consequently, this DRS/DRP design yielded instance-level interpretability and facilitated the extraction of chemically meaningful insights. In prior studies, these patterns were interpreted by human experts. In the present study, we introduced the LLM as an assistive interpreter and demonstrated that both chemical framing (prompt design) and model size systematically shaped the depth of mechanistic insight. Notably, the LLM is not intended to uncover entirely new mechanisms, but rather to assist human interpretation by providing alternative perspectives, which may help reveal implicit cognitive biases and support more balanced mechanistic reasoning. Specifically, stronger framing and larger models elicited more mechanism-oriented reasoning, whereas weaker framing or smaller models produced concise but more surface-level summaries. Altogether, DRS/DRP enabled a two-layer interpretability framework that linked quantitative attribution from the interpretable ML layer (modified convex regression) with the LLM's linguistic, mechanism-oriented analysis, thereby enabling structured extraction of physicochemical insights from datasets. Within this framework, mechanistic interpretations are systematically structured and accumulated with LLM assistance, providing a pathway toward future knowledge discovery.

ABSTRACT In The Principles of Representative Government (1997), Bernard Manin argues that the means of selection, elections producing representative democracy and drawing lots applied in direct democracy, create fundamentally different kinds of government. I argue that Manin's typology holds firm, but that it needs some modification. First, Daniela Cammack's analysis of the Athenian system for the impact of ‘interest' and ‘accountability' reveals representative elements within the Athenian direct democracy, further clarified with the distinction between ‘synecdochical' (part-for-the-whole) and ‘metaphorical' (transformed) representation as defined by Frank Ankersmit. Next, with these parameters, I investigate the multiple offices (archai) at Athens. In the selection of officials, a significant turn occurs from the means and conditions (synecdoche) to the outcome (metaphor), rendering the difference between allotted offices and elected ones arguably one of degree, rather than of kind. This inquiry further suggests that archē, the right to act with authority over one’s fellow citizens, holds by its very nature an element of representational distance and inequality that even drawing lots from all with high rotation cannot fully undo. This insight is relevant to any analysis of drawing lots for office in a political system in other historical periods as well as today.

ABSTRACT To gain deeper insight into the factors behind support for homeschooling in Czechia, we used representative survey data collected in February 2024. Analysis of the public opinion data suggests that homeschooling in Czechia is not tied to religious conservatism or populist distrust of elites, nor is it related to mistrust of the state or its political representatives. Instead, homeschooling appears to function primarily as pragmatic ‘escape route’ for children whose needs are not met in mainstream schools, for example due to poor educational quality, psychological distress, or academic failure, and it reflects a context-specific negotiation between parental autonomy, institutional regulation, and broader socio-cultural transformations in a post-communist society.

ABSTRACT This lecture, delivered in memory of Peter Mair, discusses how political scientists can account for the far right's evolving relationship with democracy as far-right actors become increasingly integrated into mainstream politics. Building on Mair's diagnosis of the hollowing out of representative democracy, I argue that this integration challenges the conceptual and empirical frameworks long structuring the study of the far right. Three key pathways are identified: (a) defining what far right is, as distinctions between extreme, radical, and mainstream actors have blurred; (b) understanding what the far right does in power, where focus on policy outcomes — especially immigration — has obscured how far-right actors embed coercion and targeted violence within state institutions; and (c) locating where the far right operates, as movements increasingly operate across both civil society and electoral politics. The lecture proposes expanding party-centred perspectives to view the far right as a nativist-authoritarian social movement integrating multiple actors across a spectrum from street violence to institutional governance. By situating the far right within the ‘void’ Mair described, I highlights how democratic withdrawal has created structural opportunities for movements challenging liberal democracy, offering new directions for research on the far right, democracy, political parties, and social movements.

ABSTRACT This study evaluated the accuracy, quality, and implications of outputs produced by generative artificial intelligences (AI) related to politics and electoral processes during the 2024 United States elections. We extend social media platform governance and content moderation theories to the study of AI, illustrating how large language models (LLMs), and the companies that own these technologies, shape and influence political information environments. Notably, we argue that the shift from social media to generative AI represents a fundamental evolution in platform power: a move from curative governance (providing information by sorting human speech) to generative governance (providing information by generating speech). Through a novel mixed-methods audit approach to studying ChatGPT-4o mini outputs regarding politics and elections collected less than two weeks before election day, we find that ChatGPT largely failed to provide users with accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information during a crucial election period. Our analysis identifies and categorizes potential democratic harms embedded in ChatGPT’s responses – such as inaccuracies, hedging, bullshit, and omissions – that paint a picture of a technology ill-equipped for democratic elections. This study illustrates the need for new frameworks for accountability in generative AI, particularly as voluntary industry safeguards fail to protect democratic information environments.

ABSTRACT Autocratization and democratic backsliding raise pressing questions about how democratic resilience and fragility affect the stability and reliability of foreign policy in electoral democracies. This article examines that relationship in South Korea through a paired case study of the 2015 “Comfort Women” Agreement and the 2023 Forced Labor Agreement with Japan, both concluded under conservative administrations. Drawing on democratic resilience theory and the V-DEM accountability framework, it conceptualizes weak democratic constraint as the erosion of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability under conditions of executive aggrandizement. The analysis shows how South Korea’s limited “onset resilience” and high democratic fragility enabled exclusive, informal diplomacy that systematically bypassed legislative, judicial, and societal checks, generating inconsistent and erratic foreign policy outcomes. By linking autocratization trajectories to international strategy, the study argues that the sustainability and reliability of international commitments are fundamentally linked to the robustness of domestic accountability. It thus highlights how democratic erosion engenders foreign policy volatility, posing broader risks for stable foreign relations while recursively exacerbating the underlying process of democratic erosion.

ABSTRACT In 2025, the State Library of NSW undertook a detailed local studies survey of NSW public libraries. This survey asked NSW public libraries about local studies, including planning, policies, preservation, collecting practices, including contemporary collecting, criteria for collecting, staffing, budgets and more. There were 116 responses to this survey. The purpose of the research was to obtain detailed information about how local studies collections and services in NSW public libraries are planned and managed. This includes what the opportunities are for this very local collecting, as well as what the challenges are that may impact this collection and service area, such as staff time. The significance of the research is to have a snapshot in time of how local studies, collections and services in NSW are planned, managed, maintained, preserved and made available for their communities. It may lead to discussions about what local studies work is possible in NSW public libraries, and the consideration of diversifying collecting methods and topics. The findings presented focus on the survey responses to questions on staffing, collecting recent material and digital collecting. The paper investigates some of the challenges described in the local studies survey data and considers ways that could be used to encourage and support a more informed representative selection of local studies material, or, in some cases, the inclusion of local studies material in addition to printed books, where this is not already happening. Some of the challenges identified in this research were that over 30 public libraries do not have allocated staff time to spend on any aspect of local studies collections, services, research or programmes. This is significant because it directly impacts what is possible to do. Another challenge is that there are relatively small amounts of recent content being collected. This directly impacts what is available for future research. The most used collecting methods by libraries were unsolicited donations, which risk increased bias in local studies collections. As local studies collections predominantly contain older items, it is important to reflect on the collecting methods undertaken and consider what changes are necessary for shaping the future of local studies collections as they document and reflect the diversity of communities in NSW.

Representative period selection for flexible control strategies on a reversible heat pump in cooling mode: A comparative case study

The physicochemical properties of pesticides specifically solubility, volatility, and molecular structure are the primary factors determining their mobility. These factors govern their movement within the plant and their transport through the soil. The present work evaluated how variation in physicochemical properties influences the adsorption and leaching behavior of nine commonly used pesticides in tomato fields. The study includes a representative selection of major insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides to provide a comprehensive overview of their behavior in the soil. The adsorption capacity of the bulk soil was evaluated using the batch equilibration technique following two models. According to the Freundlich model, tebuconazole and difenoconazole were exhibited the highest adsorption affinity. On the contrary, the Langmuir model identified pendimethalin as having the strongest binding affinity to the soil followed by indoxacarb. Regarding the leaching experiments conducted in packed Egyptian soil columns, metalaxyl demonstrated the highest mobility, with 15% of the applied amount recovered in the leachate followed by acetamiprid. In contrast, the remaining pesticides exhibited low mobility, with the highest concentrations retained in the upper soil profile. These findings are step forward to develop management practices that mitigate the risks of pesticides, ensuring the protection of agricultural water quality and prevent groundwater contamination.

ABSTRACT This article examines the functioning and consolidation of the Turkish reserve officer system, as well as its social significance, during the Second World War. While Turkey remained officially non-belligerent, prolonged partial mobilization and rapid military expansion generated an acute shortage of officers, making reserve officers indispensable. Building on the late Ottoman legacy, the Republican regime consolidated the system institutionally and ideologically, integrating educated men into the army as both conscripts and officers. Drawing on archival documents, legislation, press coverage, and memoirs, the study analyzes how reserve officership functioned simultaneously as a practical manpower solution and as a symbolic instrument of the militarist ‘nation-in-arms’ ideal. The article also highlights the system’s limits, particularly regarding discriminatory practices towards non-Muslim citizens. By focusing on lived experiences and memory, it demonstrates how reserve officers navigated their dual status between command and conscription, revealing the complex entanglement of military mobilization, citizenship, and ideology in wartime Turkey.

BackgroundArtificial intelligence is becoming more visible in democratic politics not only as a campaign tool or communication aid, but also as a publicly presented political persona. In several democratic contexts, AI-based candidates and parties have emerged that invite citizens to interact with synthetic interfaces as if they were political representatives, leaders, or candidates in their own right. This article conceptualises these initiatives as synthetic political actors and examines them as an emerging phenomenon in democratic politics.MethodsThe article draws on scholarship on party politics and digital politics to develop a six-dimensional analytical framework covering political goals, political agency, normative assumptions, entrepreneurship, organisational structure, and participation. It examines ten synthetic political candidates and parties across eight national contexts through qualitative document analysis and theoretically informed thematic analysis.ResultsSynthetic political actors do not form a coherent ideological or organisational family. They differ in how they distribute authority between humans and AI systems, how they justify the political role of AI, and how they organise participation and representation. Some pursue institutional electoral ambitions, while others remain primarily symbolic, demonstrative, or experimental. In most cases, synthetic politics is marked by limited organisational development, interface-centred participation, and a shift away from party-based linkage towards algorithmically mediated representation.ConclusionsSynthetic political actors are best understood as a diverse and still developing set of initiatives rather than a uniform category of political actor. The article offers a comparative framework for analysing this phenomenon and shows how these cases complicate established understandings of democratic delegation, representation, and linkage. Their emergence also underlines the need for further research on their institutional trajectories, democratic implications, and regulatory treatment.

ABSTRACT Under the Traffic Light Coalition government formed in 2021 by the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the FDP, the electoral system for the German Bundestag was changed in 2023 for the fourth time since 2011. This article analyses the process and the outcome of this electoral system reform. On the one hand, the reform proposed by the Traffic Light Coalition appears more convincing in conceptual and technical terms than the corresponding attempts made by previous federal governments. On the other hand, the emergence of ‘vacant’ constituencies also has significant side effects that undermine the reform’s political acceptance. Given that the new federal government formed in 2025 and led by the CDU/CSU wants to reverse the 2023 reform, the institutional stability of the electoral system required for a representative democracy remains at risk.

Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral College, which selects the president and vice-president. This happens through a process of re-weighting based on geographic units (congressional districts and states) that can introduce substantial distortion. In this article, I propose quantitative measures of this distortion that can be applied to demographic groups, using Census data, to assess and visualize these distorting effects. These include the absolute weight of votes under these systems and the excess population represented in the bodies through the distortions. Visualizing these metrics from 2000–2020 shows persistent malapportionment in key demographic categories. White (non-Hispanic) residents, residents of rural areas, and owner-occupied households are overrepresented in the Senate and Electoral College; Black and Hispanic people, urban dwellers, and renter-occupied households are underrepresented. For urban residents, this underrepresentation is the equivalent of 25 million fewer residents in the Senate and nearly 5 million in the Electoral College. I discuss implications for further research on the effects of these distortions and their interactions with other features of the electoral system.

ABSTRACT Although youth often constitute a significant portion of a country’s population, they remain underrepresented in national parliaments around the world. While previous research has highlighted some of the causes and effects of youth underrepresentation, we aim to examine the unexplored relationship between compulsory voting and youth representation. We hypothesize that because youth electoral turnout should equalize with older adult’s electoral turnout under compulsory voting, parties will have an incentive to nominate more young candidates, which should also lead to more youth representatives. We test this stipulation using a unique dataset with nearly 500 elections in democracies from 1945 to 2024. Empirically, we find a null relationship between compulsory voting and higher youth representation. For the larger literature on youth representation, this implies that compulsory voting is not the panacea that can render parliaments more representative with society in terms of their age representation.

Direct or representative democracy? Co-Voting!

One of the most pressing challenges for contemporary local governments is how to provide public services of sufficient quality when resources are scarce. This is particularly acute in peripheral or rural areas facing depopulation, where downsizing or closing public service units is often the only viable option. While much research has focused on the citizens negatively affected by such cuts, this study examines the perspective of decision-makers tasked with these difficult choices. Through an in-depth study of three Swedish municipalities and their handling of public indoor swimming pools, we explore how political representatives and public officials reason and navigate these dilemmas. The analysis identifies two overarching courses of action: “preserve,” which focuses on upholding service provision through strategies such as creative cost-cutting and quiet prioritizations, and “adapt,” characterized by efforts to centralize services, engage in post-decision dialogue, and offer compensatory measures. By shedding light on these approaches, the article contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of local democracy under pressure and offers insights into how decision-makers balance economic, symbolic, and political considerations in contentious public service decisions. • Public decision-makers navigate public service location dilemmas through two main courses of action: preserve or adapt. • Preserve include treading water , quiet prioritization , and quiet quitting. • Quiet practices capture previously underexplored ways of handling service decline without making explicit decisions. • Adapt include inducing realistic expectations, selling change as a fresh new start, and offering compensation. • The article highlights democratic implications of quiet practices in local service provision under pressure.

Morocco and Algeria have shared a long historical relationship of genuine fraternity and friendship; however, there have been times when this comradeship has resembled the brotherhood of Cain and Abel, fraught with tensions and characterized by tragic turning points. Throughout the history of the countries' interactions, particularly at the level of diplomacy as well as the military sphere, official political speeches of Moroccan and Algerian political representatives always reflect subliminal ideologies that can be revealed within a systematic analysis of political texts, relying on a solid theoretical framework. Such methodological examination enables this study to establish a logical link between the linguistic features used by those politicians and some social and geopolitical consequences. In pursuit of this, this paper examines the linguistic choices used by King Mohammed VI in approaching Algeria diplomatically, specifically those mirroring the Moroccan monarch's policy of the 'outstretched hand'. The samples used in this study were chosen based on purposive sampling and were analyzed according to Fairclough's three-dimensional model. The findings indicate that the Moroccan king consistently uses specific lexical choices that depict a discourse marked by fraternity. In contrast, the Algerian state has shown no tangible engagement with this Moroccan initiative.

Adherence in pediatric and elderly eye care is a system outcome shaped by patient, caregiver, treatment, service design, and affordability. This narrative review synthesizes recent evidence on magnitude, determinants, and consequences of nonadherence across a representative selection of major pediatric and older adult conditions, and proposes a practice- and policy-ready agenda. Using the ABC taxonomy (initiation, implementation, and persistence) as an organizing frame, we appraise measurement methods, map phase-specific barriers, and collect effective or promising strategies at patient, clinic, and system levels. Evidence indicates that avoidable vision loss often reflects failures in initiation (e.g., delayed start or first follow-up), day-to-day implementation (technique, tolerability, routine friction), or long-term persistence (retention, affordability), with objective measures typically revealing lower adherence than self-report. Multicomponent, age-tailored bundles (relational care, regimen simplification, proactive recall, caregiver support, school- or community-linked access) are more effective and scalable than education alone when co-designed and adequately supported; digital tools show potential but require validation, usability, and equity safeguards. We also identify priorities for research (harmonized, phase-specific outcomes, validation of age- and condition-specific measures, pragmatic and hybrid effectiveness-implementation designs with economic evaluation) and for policy/system reform (quality dashboards with equity-disaggregated indicators, supportive reimbursement for coordination/counseling, and outcome-linked procurement of digital solutions). We define "effective adherence" pragmatically as adherence sufficient to achieve intended clinical outcomes for a given therapy, and outline a three-pillar roadmap (Clinical, Research, Policy/System) to embed measurement, support, and accountability into routine care. Together, these steps can translate conceptual clarity into equitable and sustainable improvements in vision and eye care outcomes.

This paper undertakes a comprehensive legislative framework analysis of the One Nation, One Election (ONOE) proposal in India. ONOE envisions the simultaneous conduct of elections to the Lok Sabha and all State Legislative Assemblies, thereby eliminating the cycle of staggered polls that currently characterises Indian electoral democracy. The analysis examines the constitutional provisions governing the terms of Parliament and State Assemblies, the authority vested in the President and Governors for dissolution, the tensions inherent in India's federal structure, and the amendments required to the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951. The paper critically evaluates the Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, 2024, and the HighLevel Committee Report led by former President Ram Nath Kovind. It examines doctrines such as the Basic Structure, the Remainder Term, the Appointed Date mechanism, and the proposed Logistical Deferment clause. Drawing upon landmark judicial decisions including Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, S.R. Bommai v. Union of India, and Samsher Singh v. State of Punjab the paper assesses the constitutional validity of ONOE and the procedural prerequisites for its implementation. The paper concludes by mapping the legislative roadmap and identifying the unresolved federal tensions that continue to delay ratification of the proposed amendments.