Rights and Resources

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained recognition as valuable assets across virtually all industries, yet they rely heavily on manually crafted input prompts. In real-world applications, the dependence on specialized staff, skilled prompt engineering, and domain-specific knowledge often leads to suboptimal performance and increased costs. This paper investigates the use of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to autonomously generate, evolve, and judge LLM prompts. Specifically, we customized a standard GA implementation to handle textual individuals, which are manipulated by LLM-guided genetic operators that iteratively create and enhance candidate prompts. Additionally, LLMs are employed to assess the correctness of outputs, forming the basis of our GA's fitness function. Our findings suggest that GA-driven prompt engineering can consistently produce solutions that are superior in both accuracy and efficiency compared to those acquired by prompt engineers who possess technical skills but lack domain-specific knowledge and a full understanding of vendor-specific prompting idiosyncrasies. This conclusion is supported by experimental results obtained from four public datasets and three modern LLMs developed by OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral AI. Ultimately, this study highlights the viability and potential of fully automated optimization tools in minimizing human effort in writing high-performance prompts.

Community conserved areas (CCAs) are gaining in importance for conservation and achieving global biodiversity targets. Sacred groves are one type of CCA occurring in most African villages and are important culturally. Unfortunately, they are under-recognized and under-valued as conservation and livelihood assets. Formal conservation tends to focus on official PCAs, which are often well documented, and not on CCAs. This chapter traces the evolution of CCAs from pre-colonial to colonial and post-colonial times. Colonial efforts focused on alienating lands and ignored CCAs. As a result, the literature on formal protected areas is well developed, much less so for CCAs, though this is starting to change. Yet CCAs can be key cultural and livelihood assets. There are many thousands of sacred groves in Africa—some say at least one per village. These still exist despite large land use pressures and are managed at minimal extra cost to government or conservation finance. This paper highlights the importance of sacred groves as an important type of CCA by demonstrating their extent in Africa and showing why they should be conserved. Sacred groves and CCAs can be the connection for conservation and rural stewards. Key lessons and research needs include respecting the scale, scope and numbers of CCAs; creating simple national registers for CCAs; integrating CCAs into “productive” land use; and respecting the local knowledge and institutions relating to CCAs—all this with a focus on why people conserve their CCAs and how this can be better understood and respected.

Every year, approximately 70 million persons lack a right by law to emergency medical care during law-enforcement interactions. Passage of the Medical Civil Rights Act would establish such a right.

We present a method to measure the the oblateness parameter q of the dark matter halos of gas rich galaxies that have extended HI disks. We have applied our model to a sample of 20 nearby galaxies that are gas rich and close to face-on, of which 6 are large disk galaxies, 8 have moderate stellar masses and 6 are low surface brightness (LSB) dwarf galaxies. We have used the stacked HI velocity dispersion and HI surface densities to derive q in the outer disk regions. Our most important result is that gas dominated galaxies (such as LSB dwarfs) that have M(gas)/M(baryons)>0.5 have oblate halos (q<0.55), whereas stellar dominated galaxies have a range of q values from 0.2 to 1.3. We also find a significant positive correlation between q and stellar mass, which indicates that galaxies with massive stellar disks have a higher probability of having halos that are spherical or slightly prolate, whereas low mass galaxies preferably have oblate halos. We briefly also discuss how the halo shape affects the disks of galaxies, especially the oblate halos.

La explicación de cómo sucedió el poblamiento en algunas subregiones del Caribe colombiano entre finales del siglo XVII y comienzos del XVIII, en particular del área del Sinú, ha sido hasta ahora elusivo para la historiografía nacional. Este artículo busca reconstruir lo qué pasó con los indígenas de Urabá durante dicho periodo, y cómo se llevó a cabo el poblamiento de la zona baja y media del río Sinú. Este análisis se fundamenta en información documental del Archivo General de Indias hasta ahora no publicada, complementada con información del Archivo General de la Nación de Colombia. El artículo detalla la forma como se desplazaron los indígenas de la región de Urabá hacia el río Sinú entre 1680 y 1721, huyendo principalmente de los ataques de los indígenas “Chocoes”, y atraídos por las promesas que les hicieron los colonos libres de recursos limitados de la región del Sinú, como acertadamente los llamó Fals Borda. Como resultado, durante el primer cuarto del siglo XVIII el llamado partido del Sinú tuvo un inusitado incremento de su población indígena, a diferencia de todas las otras subregiones de la provincia de Cartagena, las cuales continuaron con una incontrolable disminución.

X-shaped radio galaxies (XRGs) are those that exhibit two pairs of unaligned radio lobes (main radio lobes and "wings"), one of the promising models for the peculiar morphology is jet re-orientation. To clarify it, we conducted the European VLBI Network (EVN) 5 GHz observation of an XRG J0725+5835, which resembles the archetypal binary AGNs 0402+379 in radio morphology but it is larger in angular size. In our observation, two milliarcsec (mas) scale radio components with non-thermal radio emission are detected, each of them coincides with an optical counterpart with similar photometric redshift and (optical and infrared) magnitude, corresponding to dual active nuclei. Furthermore, with the improved VLA images, we find a bridge between the two radio cores and a jet bending in the region surrounding the companion galaxy, which further supports the interplay between the main and companion galaxies. In addition, we also report the discovery of an arcsec-scale jet in the companion. Given the projected separation of $\sim100$ kpc between the main and companion galaxies, XRG J0725+5835 is likely associated with a dual jetted-AGN system. In both EVN and VLA observations, we find signatures that the jet is changing its direction, which is likely responsible for the X-shaped morphology. On the origin of jet re-orientation, several scenarios are discussed.

Abstract As research and policies around securing tenure for people across the world grows, we have a deeper understanding of what works and what does not. Here, we draw attention to contemporary evidence gaps that continue to hinder efforts to strengthen land tenure security (LTS) for sustainable development. We also highlight areas ripe for policy testing and innovation and discuss promising pathways for advancing research and practice for LTS.