The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal[a] public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree-awarding examination board for students holding certificates from University College London and King's College London and "other such other Institutions, corporate or unincorporated, as shall be established for the purpose of Education, whether within the Metropolis or elsewhere within our United Kingdom". This fact allows it to be one of three institutions to claim the title of the third-oldest university in England,[b] and moved to a federal structure in 1900. It is now incorporated by its fourth (1863) royal charter and governed by the University of London Act 2018.It was the first university in the United Kingdom to introduce examinations for women in 1869 and, a decade later, the first to admit women to degrees. In 1913, it appointed Caroline Spurgeon as only the second female professor at a British university, and in 1948 was the first British university to appoint a woman as its vice chancellor (chief executive).[c] The university's member institutions house the oldest teaching hospitals in England.The university consists of 17 member institutions and three central academic bodies. The university has around 48,000 distance learning external students and campus-based internal students, making it the largest university by number of students in the United Kingdom. For most practical purposes, ranging from admissions to funding, the member institutions operate on an independent basis, with many awarding their own degrees whilst remaining in the federal university. The largest colleges by enrolment are UCL, King's College London, City, Queen Mary, Birkbeck, the London School of Economics, Royal Holloway, and Goldsmiths, each of which has over 9,000 students. Smaller, more specialist, colleges are the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), St George's (medicine), the Royal Veterinary College, London Business School, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the Royal Academy of Music, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Institute of Cancer Research. Imperial College London was formerly a member from 1907 before it became an independent university in 2007, and Heythrop College was a member from 1970 until its closure in 2018. City is the most recent constituent college, having joined on 1 September 2016. Under the 2018 act, member institutions ceased to be termed colleges and gained the right to seek university status without having to leave the federal university: Birkbeck, City, Goldsmiths’, King's College London, the LSE, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Queen Mary, the Royal Veterinary College, Royal Holloway, SOAS, St George's and UCL have all indicated that they intend to do so.As of 2015, there are around 2 million University of London alumni across the world, including 12 monarchs or royalty, more than 60[d] presidents or prime ministers in the world (including 1 prime minister of the United Kingdom),[e] 85 Nobel laureates,[f] 5 Fields Medallists, 4 Turing Award winners, 6 Grammy winners, 2 Oscar winners, 3 Olympic gold medalists and the "Father of the Nation" of several countries.[g] The university owns University of London Press..
Robust design optimisation (RDO) of performance-based seismic design (PBSD) has been established as a rigorous approach for obtaining optimal solutions that are minimally sensitive to record-to-record (RTR) variability of ground motions used in nonlinear response history analysis (NLRHA). However, this method is not able to explicitly account for the suite-to-suite (STS) variability due to the epistemic uncertainties associated with ground motion selection, especially when each suite is selected and scaled based on the requirements of the seismic design codes currently in force. To account for this uncertainty, this paper proposes a novel formulation for robust optimisation, which explicitly accounts for ground motion suite variability. In this method, one objective is to minimise the dispersion in the probability of limit state violation due to STS variability and the other objective is to minimise the economic costs. To increase the computational efficiency of the proposed method, surrogate seismic demand models are developed and applied to assess the probability of limit state violation. The application of the proposed framework is demonstrated using a case study of a typical reinforced concrete (RC) highway bridge with cylindrical piers, and the ability of the RDO framework to account for the STS variability is discussed. Finally, the Pareto-optimal solutions obtained from the proposed approach are compared with those given by the conventional RDO approach.
This paper presents PhAST (Phase-field Autograd Solver in Torch), an open-source, portable, differentiable PyTorch implementation of a matrix-free finite-element method for dynamic phase-field fracture. Explicit finite-element operations are evaluated as element-wise tensor contractions with scatter accumulation, so no global sparse mechanics-stiffness matrix is assembled, and the same native PyTorch code runs on CPU and NVIDIA GPU backends without hand-written compiled extensions. The formulation supports the Ambrosio–Tortorelli AT1 and AT2 models with the Miehe spectral split and the Amor tension–compression (volumetric–deviatoric) split under plane strain or plane stress. The differentiable framework provides sensitivities through the explicit mechanics steps, and a custom implicit backward rule differentiates the interior AT2 damage solve without storing the conjugate-gradient iteration tape. Benchmark evaluations span dynamic and quasi-static fracture problems, capturing straight mode-I propagation, shear-induced kinking, dynamic branching, crack–hole interaction, and reference quasi-static load–displacement responses. Cross-code verification against FEniCS, DOLFINx, and Akantu on matched meshes shows excellent full-field agreement. Runtime compilation of the damage operator via PyTorch Inductor further accelerates single-thread CPU execution. Gradient-based parameter recovery is demonstrated through scalar toughness identification, cross-mesh recovery against a fine-mesh reference, and joint identification of toughness and regularisation length from displacement, strain, and reaction histories, with the damage field evaluated separately for crack-path comparison. By coupling matrix-free mechanics with native reverse-mode automatic differentiation, PhAST provides an extensible computational foundation for gradient-based parameter identification and scientific machine learning.
Empathy, defined as sharing and understanding others’ emotional experiences, is key to the formation of social groups and plays an important role in children’s social development. While enhancing this skill in early education has been a focus in the field, whether trainings employed succeed at enhancing children’s empathy, and what the mechanisms are behind their effectiveness, is still unknown. Importantly, understanding this is crucial to effective intervention. A meta-analysis of 30 studies (44 effect sizes) measuring empathy before and after a training, including 2,820 preschool children (Mage = 5.08, range 3.41 to 6.46), was conducted using robust variance estimation to account for multiple effect sizes within the same study. Results revealed that interventions had a small to medium-sized effect in improving children’s empathy (Hedges’s g = 0.49, CI: 0.32, 0.66; p < 0.0001). Further, the impact of interventions on children’s empathy was moderated by intervention leader and the size of intervention classes, with researcher-led interventions delivered in groups having a larger effect on children’s empathy development than other interventions (g = 0.77, CI: 0.55, 0.98; p = 0.002 vs g = 0.34, CI: 0.14, 0.54; p < 0.0001). Child age and intervention dosage (number of intervention sessions times the length of each session) did not moderate the effect of interventions on children’s empathy. Our in-depth results urge researchers to use a variety of empathy measures to gain a better understanding of empathy development in early childhood, and encourage practitioners to target empathy in small groups, performing activities linked to emotion understanding, or book-reading and discussing characters’ emotions. Further implications for future research and practice are discussed.
In the years between Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution (2013-14) and the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion (2022), Ukrainian theater-makers revolutionized their country’s culture of performance practice. After the occupation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas, theater artists increasingly began using their craft as a form of civic activism. Among the most distinct expressions of Ukraine’s re-envisioning of its national theater practice during these years was a notable interest in documentary theater. This co-authored chapter analyzes Ukrainian documentary theater both before and after 2022. It illustrates how the form came to constitute a form of anticolonial resistance and made an important contribution to the country’s remarkable culture of defiance and resilience in the face of Russian aggression.
Whether a particular entity is a ‘moral agent’ determines the sense in which its behaviour is morally evaluable. Theories of moral agency aim to capture and explain commonsense distinctions between the possession or absence of moral agency across different kinds of being. But little is known about the ordinary concept of moral agency, its application across different entities, and its relation to the more specific notion of moral responsibility. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of moral agency through philosophical analysis and two empirical studies. We draw conceptual distinctions between three components of moral agency: intentional action (acting rather than behaving), moral action (acting morally rightly or wrongly), and responsible action (being blameworthy for one's actions). We then investigate whether people differentiate between the three components of moral agency, and the extent to which their judgments depend on the perceived psychological and behavioural capacities of the entity in question. We find that people attribute varying degrees of moral agency to different entities while differentiating between the proposed components. These moral agency attributions are partly, but not fully, explained by people's attributions of underlying capacities. While intentional action ascriptions were linked to the attribution of mental states like desires, beliefs, and sensations, moral action and moral responsibility were linked to ascriptions of capacities for a ‘deep self’. Philosophical theories of moral agency should account for these patterns in folk attributions.
