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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic exerted competing pressures on bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)—infection control aversion to rescue breathing versus a shift in arrests toward the home—yet reported effects have been inconsistent and evidence by arrest location and CPR method is scarce. Methods: Using the Korean Cardiac Arrest Research Consortium multicentre registry (January 2016–June 2025; 21,182 adults with home or public out-of-hospital cardiac arrest), we performed an interrupted time-series analysis across pre-COVID-19, pandemic (February 2020–May 2023) and endemic periods. Results: Both settings shared rising pre-COVID-19 trends; at the February 2020 interruption, the bystander CPR rate trajectory changed asymmetrically (home −0.278 versus public −0.151 percentage points/month), with block-bootstrap counterfactual shortfalls by series end of −17.6 (home) and −12.5 (public) percentage points. After adjustment, the location interaction was marginal overall (p = 0.065) but significant in witnessed arrests (p = 0.046). Conventional CPR fell abruptly and uniformly (level-change odds ratio 0.22), while compression-only CPR rose above 97% with no recovery through the endemic period. Period-by-location interaction was non-significant for return of spontaneous circulation, survival and good neurological outcome. Conclusions: COVID-19 produced a robust, uniform shift in bystander CPR methods toward compression-only CPR and a more limited and suggestive location-asymmetric change in the bystander CPR rate (marginal overall, significant only in witnessed arrests), without differential effects on short-term outcomes. Full article

Mo Yan’s stage play Crocodile (Eyu) marks a shift away from novel-centered scholarship in Mo Yan studies. Centered on a continually fed, ever-growing crocodile, the play moves the animal from a textual symbol to a stage image. Existing studies emphasize theme, symbolism, or genre but say less about how stage procedures establish the crocodile’s presence as a publicly perceptible fact and generate meanings around power, desire, and judgment. This article addresses that gap through a script-based, stage-oriented semiotic analysis. Drawing on Barthes’s denotation and connotation together with Hjelmslev’s expression and content planes, it analyzes how stage images organize perception and meaning. It argues that presence in Crocodile is produced through linked sensory, spatial, and verbal cues: at moments of concealment and disclosure, expansion, threshold, and loss of control, the play turns the crocodile into a collectively witnessable event rather than a mere symbol, while repeated cues consolidate associations around power, desire, and judgment, reorienting spectatorship toward the conditions of witnessing. By treating the stage image as an operative mechanism rather than a symbol to be decoded, the article shows how the play, through stage procedures, establishes the crocodile as a perceptible and witnessable stage presence that generates meaning. Full article

Although a myriad of cross-national studies featuring European countries, Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the United States, and many other nations around the world support the contention that religiosity is associated with life satisfaction (both positively and negatively), comparatively little is known about this association in Latin America, a continent known for its strong Catholic identification, an emerging evangelical influence, and a multitude of indigenous and non-Western religious traditions. Using unique data from 21 Latin American countries, we begin to fill this gap by addressing three previously unanswered questions. What is the association between religiosity and life satisfaction in Latin America? Which measure of religiosity is most frequently associated with life satisfaction in the region: social religiosity (e.g., frequency of service attendance) or individual religiosity (e.g., importance of religion and religious identification)? Do feelings of life satisfaction vary among religious groups in Latin America? First, our aggregate models suggest a positive association between religious importance and life satisfaction and between service attendance and life satisfaction, but the association between religious identity and life satisfaction is negative. Second, our more nuanced cross-country, comparative analysis reveals that the importance of religion to a respondent (individual religiosity) is more frequently (and positively) associated with life satisfaction across a broader array of Latin American countries than service attendance (social religiosity) and religious identity (individual religiosity), with the latter evincing a negative association with life satisfaction in select countries. Lastly, there is a hierarchy of life satisfaction among religious groups. Evangelicals register higher levels of life satisfaction than Catholics, who tend to have similar levels of life satisfaction to Protestants, mainline Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and members of the Jewish faith. However, Catholics enjoy higher levels of life satisfaction than atheists, agnostics, and adherents of indigenous and African religions (e.g., Candomblé, Umbanda, and Voodoo). We discuss the implications of our findings for future research. Full article

Public blockchain transactions need compliance support without exposing stable identity anchors. This paper presents a privacy-preserving transaction admission framework for regulated cryptocurrency transaction paths. It adds an admission and recovery layer to admission-aware applications, contracts, gateways, or chain policies without introducing a new cryptocurrency. In ordinary use, a user submits a public transaction object and a single Groth16 admission proof, which checks registration membership, current state, hidden home-domain membership, hidden home-domain policy compliance, transaction binding, replay control, and trace-object well-formedness while hiding identity-related witnesses. When a valid warrant targets an accepted transaction, recovery committees perform transaction-scoped trace recovery through outer opening and domain-local inner recovery. We implement an end-to-end prototype with off-chain modules and an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible public admission contract. The evaluation reports a 28,370-constraint circuit, 3.40 s average proving time, about 536k local EVM admission gas, 30/30 replay rejection, 8.46 ms local layered recovery latency, and 3.84 ms domain-dispatch latency. Full article

Endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) has revolutionized the management of superficial colorectal neoplasms, offering superior en bloc resection rates compared with conventional endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR). While ESD has been the standard of care in East Asian countries for over two decades, its adoption in Western countries has been considerably slower, hampered by the steep learning curve, prolonged procedural times, limited training infrastructure, and differences in disease epidemiology. However, recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift, with growing evidence from Western multicenter studies demonstrating outcomes that increasingly approach those reported from high-volume Eastern centers. The landmark RESECT-COLON randomized trial provided level-1 evidence supporting the superiority of ESD over piecemeal EMR for large colorectal polyps. Concurrently, novel training paradigms, technological innovations including traction-assisted devices and artificial intelligence (AI)-guided systems, and evolving societal guidelines from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), and European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ESGE) are accelerating Western adoption. This state-of-the-art review comprehensively examines the current landscape of colorectal ESD in Western practice, highlighting the evolution of outcomes, training pathways, guideline recommendations, technological advances, and future directions. We provide a critical appraisal of the East–West outcome gap and discuss strategies to bridge this divide, positioning colorectal ESD as an increasingly viable first-line therapy for appropriate lesions in Western endoscopy centers. Full article

High-latitude regions are witnessing unprecedented wildfires and accelerated warming. This study explored wildfire patterns and land changes within the high-latitude Indigenous Tłı̨chǫ territory in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It used the Two-Eyed Seeing approach, which combines Western science, or Scientific Ecological Knowledge (SEK), with Indigenous knowledge, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). This method integrated Earth observation data with insights from Tłı̨chǫ Elders and officials. We analyzed spatiotemporal variations in burned areas, land surface temperature (LST), albedo, snow cover, soil moisture, and land-cover types. A listening and storytelling session with community Elders provided an in-depth Indigenous perspective. Our findings indicate a concerning shift in wildfire activity on Tłı̨chǫ land, primarily driven by the interplay between climate change and land-cover changes. Land-cover estimates over the past fifteen years indicate that nearly half of the forested areas on Tłı̨chǫ-owned land have been converted to other land-cover types, with shrublands increasing twofold and grasslands expanding tenfold. We observed significant increases in spring and summer LSTs (p < 0.05), alongside decreases in precipitation and snow cover (p < 0.05), consistent with the Elders’ observations. The decline in topsoil moisture, coupled with rising temperatures, has triggered a positive feedback loop in forested areas, intensifying future wildfire risk. The study’s implications extend beyond the Tłı̨chǫ territory, suggesting a broader significance for climate resilience and Indigenous stewardship. It highlights the significance of place-based, integrated research for understanding complex wildfire behavior and land-cover transformations. The study indicates that the Two-Eyed Seeing approach, which weaves local Indigenous knowledge with quantitative Earth observations, not only improves analytical precision but also provides a collaborative framework for developing targeted strategies to mitigate the effects of increasingly severe fire regimes and land-cover changes. Full article

James Denney’s insistence that the church’s confession of faith “should be sung, not signed” encapsulates a theology of confession that is as provocative as it is neglected. This essay retrieves Denney (1856–1917)—conservative Scottish Calvinist, pastor, and Principal of the United Free Church College in Glasgow—not as a curiosity of Scottish church history but as a theologian whose work offers a coherent and still-urgent account of the church’s confessional vocation. Organized around Christ’s cross, Denney’s ecclesiology resists every temptation to deploy creeds and confessions as instruments of theological gatekeeping or institutional self-definition. Against such tendencies, he proposes their reorientation: from boundary markers to acts of doxological witness, from mechanisms of exclusion to expressions of trust in a gospel that exceeds the church’s own imagining. The essay traces Denney’s biography and pastoral career before examining his mature ecclesiology—on the nature and unity of the church, the function of creeds and confessions, and the promise and limits of ecumenism—setting his confessional minimalism in conversation with the Barmen Declaration (1934) and the Belhar Confession (1982). Together, these documents illuminate a pattern of Reformed confessional faithfulness in which the church’s identity remains open to the disturbing freedom of the gospel. Full article

South Africa has been receiving a high number of undocumented immigrants for years. As Africa’s second largest economy and the biggest in the South African Development Community region, it has witnessed a surge in illegal migration. Some undocumented immigrants marry local women, establishing spousal and familial relations. The government has taken a legal stand against undocumented immigrants. It deports thousands annually. A grassroots movement, Operation Dudula, has initiated efforts to locate undocumented immigrants. Its modus operandi has been condemned for lacking ubuntu. A void is left when undocumented immigrants are deported, leaving their families in South Africa. Some South African women have turned to TikTok to express their views on migration and familyhood. This study attempts to answer these questions: What are the TikTok discursive practices of South African women in spousal relations with African immigrants? In what ways do the women legitimise the relationships? How does TikTok function as a subaltern counter-public formation? Data were gathered through digital archival research and subjected to a multimodal critical discourse analysis. The findings show that the women celebrate the relations as an achievement. They construct them as pathways to prosperity. The women also invoked racial discourses to legitimise the relations. Through TikTok, they recontextualised discourses on migration by deconstructing dominant narratives that project African immigrants through lenses of criminality. Full article

This article offers a comparative reading of Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, examining how the two novels represent historical migration and contemporary displacement. It argues that, in both texts, migration cannot be reduced to physical movement from one place to another. Rather, it functions as a cultural rupture that reorders space, identity, belonging, memory, witnessing and alienation. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O frames forced migration from the Caucasus to Türkiye through homeland loss, family memory, genealogical continuity and the search for settlement. Huzursuzluk, by contrast, locates the Syrian war, the persecution of Yazidis, refugeehood, trauma and witnessing within the wider violence of the contemporary Middle East, tracing their effects on individual and cultural memory. Its central argument is that the two novels stage witnessing in two distinct modes. Read through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Kutlu’s novel renders witnessing as the intergenerational inheritance of homeland loss, whereas Livaneli’s stages the synchronic implication of a contemporary listener in another’s suffering; on this reading, migration fiction holds these two configurations together as simultaneous ethical possibilities rather than as successive literary phases. Full article

Since its introduction to China during the Han Dynasty, Buddhism has been deeply integrated with local culture. As an important carrier of Buddhism, Buddhist art has gradually formed a variety of expression forms. Marine culture, as an important part of Chinese civilization, has inextricable connections with Buddhist culture. This paper employs literature review and image analysis methods to systematically investigate marine elements in China’s Buddhist art, trace the historical origins of Buddhism and the ocean, analyze the specific manifestations of marine elements in Buddhist artifacts, paintings, and murals, explore their influence on the aesthetic style, regional development, and narrative content of Buddhist art, and reveal the cultural significance and spiritual value of marine elements in Buddhist art. The study finds that Buddhism has been closely related to the ocean since its origin, and the Maritime Silk Road has further promoted the in-depth integration of the two. Marine elements are widely integrated into Buddhist arts in the forms of artifacts such as corals, tridacna shells, and conchs, as well as paintings and murals, such as sea waves and navigation scenes. They not only shape the vivid and inclusive aesthetic characteristics of Buddhist arts and promote the innovation and regional development of artistic forms, but they also enrich the narrative content and spiritual expression of Buddhist arts, becoming an important witness to the visualization of Buddhist doctrines, the inheritance of regional culture, and the exchange between Chinese and foreign cultures. Full article

Neural metric learning is often assessed by retrieval accuracy, but a learned dissimilarity can rank examples well while failing to have norm-like algebraic structure. This paper studies a precise finite question: within a Euclidean-anchored residual family of neural dissimilarities, can one reduce sampled defects of homogeneity, subadditivity, and dyadic reconstruction on latent differences without destroying retrieval performance? The construction is inspired by asymptotically metrically normable (AMN) vector spaces, but its claims are finite, sampled, and latent: it does not prove global AMN rigidity or certify a metric on the input space. The framework is motivated by the observation that many learned similarities have the form $K=\exp (-E/\tau )$ and therefore encode an unbounded distance-like quantity or squared distance-like quantity behind a bounded affinity. The AMN-relevant object is this cost, not the bounded kernel value. We formalize bounded-perturbation stability of the large-scale specific energy $E(nv,0)/n$, the conversion of subadditivity into multiplicative affinity consistency, and the quotient interpretation in which directions of zero large-scale cost are collapsed. The mathematical development then introduces finite dyadic diagnostics, learned-gauge and convex-unit-ball interpretations, finite norm-envelope witnesses, dyadic stability bounds, and refinement towers of witness norms. The empirical part reports full official Fashion-MNIST experiments with supervised-contrastive and proxy-anchor-style Euclidean baselines, post hoc audits for shrinkage, residual flexibility, off-training scales, and latent extrapolation, and a ten-seed full-query/full-gallery UCI Human Activity Recognition benchmark. The results show that Euclidean objectives can be stronger for Recall@1, whereas AMN-inspired residual regularization substantially reduces finite norm-like defects inside the residual family. The contribution is therefore a finite diagnostic and regularization framework for learned latent dissimilarities, not a state-of-the-art retrieval objective. Full article

After EU accession, Croatia has leveraged the advantages of EU membership, such as access to a large market and EU funds, to accelerate economic growth and reduce the development gap in comparison to advanced EU economies. Although EU membership has stimulated economic growth, it has also brought negative effects, such as labor emigration to more developed EU economies with higher wages and increased inflation due to price convergence and the adoption of the Euro. The weak growth of labor productivity in Croatia is a consequence of the slow transformation towards technology-intensive industries, the dominance of traditional labor-intensive sectors such as construction and hospitality, and the rapid growth of employment in the public sector. The novelty of the research lies in applying an input–output model to estimate direct and indirect labor requirements in Croatia, an example of a small, service-oriented economy that, after joining the EU, witnessed a significant increase in final demand. Research is based on the Eurostat FIGARO database. The increase in gross value added across industries during 2015–2024 is separated into price and real growth effects. Analysis indicates that the current Croatian growth model is unsustainable because of high labor requirements and slow productivity growth. Results imply that European Union membership brings many advantages, but if not coupled with an adequate industrial development strategy, economic growth based exclusively on increasing final demand could reach its limits. Labor constraints and continued demand growth without substantial structural changes could result in rising wages and prices rather than real GDP growth. Full article

This article examines Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868) to explore how memoirs written by Black women become literary spaces of rebellion. Writing from within elite white domestic interiors as a dressmaker and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley challenges the racialized structures that sought to confine Black women to silence, labor, and invisibility. Using a Black feminist literary methodology grounded in close reading, historical contextualization, and the concepts of radical interiority and Reflexive Identity Narration (RIN), this article analyzes how Keckley converts domestic labor, witnessing, and narrative self-definition into acts of insurgent authorship. The analysis demonstrates that Keckley’s narrative exposes the contradictions of white domesticity, asserts Black women’s intellectual and emotional autonomy, and transforms the domestic interior into a site of political critique. By claiming narrative authority and strategically shaping what is revealed and withheld, Keckley enacts a form of rebellion rooted in self-authorship and witnessing. This article concludes that Behind the Scenes offers an early blueprint for Black feminist rebellion, expanding conventional structures of the genre of slave narratives. Full article

Objective: Delays in prehospital stroke care are often influenced by the actions of first witnesses (e.g., family, bystanders). However, evidence on what shapes their responses remains fragmented. This scoping review synthesizes these factors and maps them onto the Capability–Opportunity–Motivation–Behavior (COM-B) model. Methods: Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, eight international and Chinese databases were searched for studies published between 2019 and 2024. Two reviewers independently screened records and charted data. Because no eligible study directly recruited first witnesses, all included studies focused on stroke patients or the general public. We therefore adopted a conservative interpretive approach: we extracted factors occurring at the stroke scene before professional contact and, where a logical low-inference link existed, interpreted their potential relevance to first-witness behavior. These interpreted determinants were then mapped onto the COM-B framework. Results: Forty-eight studies involving approximately 257,000 participants from more than 20 countries were included. Factors identified across the literature covered all domains of the COM-B framework. Physical opportunity was the most frequently coded domain (33/134 codings, 24.6%), followed by psychological capability (26/134, 19.4%) and reflective motivation (22/134, 16.4%). Key barriers included insufficient stroke knowledge, limited access to emergency services, and delayed decision-making due to weak urgency perception. Conclusions: This scoping review identified behavioral factors potentially relevant to first-witness response, as interpreted from patient and public evidence. The findings suggest that prehospital stroke delays may be associated with the co-occurrence of limited capability, constrained opportunity, and insufficient motivation. These barriers often coexist and may interact with one another, highlighting the potential value of behavior-informed strategies for improving prehospital stroke response and reducing delay. Full article

X-ray testing is a cornerstone nondestructive testing (NDT) technique in the nondestructive testing of welds. To address the challenges posed by minute defects such as cracks and pinholes—characterized by small size, weak features, and a tendency to be confused with noise—this paper proposes a minute defect recognition framework based on sparse representation. (1) Median filtering was selected as the basic denoising method. In combination with image enhancement, the discriminability of weld regions and defect features was improved. (2) A segmented ROI extraction method combining Otsu threshold segmentation and Sobel edge detection was proposed. This method can better adapt to inclined or curved weld images and effectively reduce background interference. (3) A micro-defect recognition method based on sparse representation was proposed. By constructing an SDR and combining dictionary learning with sparse solving models, effective representation and classification of micro-defect regions were achieved. Its effectiveness and engineering application value were verified through actual engineering data, third-party witness tests, and competition results. Full article