Models of visual word recognition in Latin script assume rapid abstraction of letter identities from perceptual features, reflected in the absence of visual similarity effects for pseudowords (e.g., viotin and viocin yield similar response times in lexical decision). Whether this principle extends to Arabic-derived scripts remains unclear because visual similarity in Arabic can be confounded with preservation of consonantal root structure in a Semitic language. We examined this issue in Persian, an Indo-European language written in an Arabic-derived script that preserves dot-based letter contrasts but lacks Semitic root-based morphology. In two lexical decision experiments, pseudowords were formed by replacing one internal letter in words with (1) a visually similar letter (e.g., موسیفی /musifi/ [base word: موسیقی /musiqi/, music]), (2) a visually dissimilar letter preserving ligation (موسیلی /musili/) or (3) a visually dissimilar letter altering ligation (موسیزی /musizi/). Experiment 1 presented the stimulus until response, whereas Experiment 2 limited presentation to 200 ms. Response times were slower for visually similar pseudowords than for visually dissimilar pseudowords preserving ligation, and the two visually dissimilar conditions did not differ reliably. These findings support the view that lexical access in Arabic-derived scripts operates over abstract letter identities, while dot-based visual similarity can produce a processing cost.

Females with autism, and especially young females, have been underrepresented in research on students with autism. Females with autism are typically diagnosed later than are males, due in part to differences in their presentation and lack of awareness of autism in females. This means that potentially serious mental health disorders originating in preadolescence in females can go unnoticed and untreated. We addressed this gap by examining the school-related wellbeing of females with autism aged 7–14 through an anonymous online survey completed by 38 parents. Seven key themes were identified: social issues, sensory issues, change issues, bullying, lack of understanding of autism, academic issues, and issues related to food or eating. By mapping these issues against aspects of wellbeing identified in the literature, we highlight their negative impacts on social and emotional wellbeing among females as young as 7 years and conclude that greater awareness and understanding of autism among young females is needed.

This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

The paper presents a framework to automatically identify crack patterns and the related features in existing reinforced concrete (RC) bridges. The challenge of this work is to define a tool for detecting the focused defect and highlighting the number and the orientation of cracks, allowing for correct interpretation and driving further evaluations on the residual life of the structure. The study is framed within the increasing interest in monitoring the structural health of existing bridges through automated tools, able to support engineers in the phase of visual assessment and interpretation of structural defects. When dealing with periodic inspection of large bridge portfolios, the support provided by automated tools can be fundamental for planning further strategies aimed at ensuring the structural safety and preventing future disasters. Given a stack of photos of a bridge structural element, an image stitching procedure is proposed to produce a near-complete image of the entire element. On the latter, a pipeline of deep-learning (DL) algorithms is employed to automatically detect and identify cracks (as a combination of object detection and segmentation algorithms). Finally, the proposed tool extracts cracks for counting and defines their orientation (i.e., vertical, horizontal, diagonal), in order to provide near-complete information about the crack pattern for the structural element. A full description of the methodology and the proposed algorithms is reported throughout the manuscript, showing the main pros and cons and assessing the effectiveness of the tool on a real-life case study.

Digital care platforms are reshaping how migrant care work is organised and governed. Drawing on an original dataset of over 15,000 worker profiles from four care platforms in Türkiye and combining biterm topic modelling with online ethnographic observations, this article examines how migrant care workers are represented on care platforms at the intersection of platformisation, migration governance and care markets. We argue that platforms formalise visibility rather than employment, absorbing a feminised migrant workforce excluded from formal channels while displacing legal and compliance risks onto workers. Migrant women are substantially overrepresented relative to their share of formal work permits, and wage expectations are stratified along nationality and gender lines. Workers produce a hybrid persona that combines professional and affective repertoires, in which legal status functions as a selective visibility resource. The article contributes to debates on how platformisation is reshaping social care governance across various welfare systems, with a focus on gendered and racial inequalities.

Children’s growth extends beyond gains in height and weight: it includes non-physical achievements. This paper reviews the research conducted by the International Union for Nutritional Sciences Task Force ‘Towards a Multidimensional Approach to Child Growth’, which developed a Multidimensional Index of Child Growth (MICG) framed within a capability- and human-rights- based conceptualisation of child growth across interconnected dimensions, including physical health, love and care, mental wellbeing, participation, autonomy, mobility, and safety. Qualitative research in Bangladesh and southeastern Tanzania informed the operationalisation of the MICG, showing that caregivers understand child growth as a multidimensional capability set distributed across children, caregivers, and households. Quantitatively, we prototyped the MICG using Young Lives Survey data from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. The MICG reveals patterns of deprivation not captured by anthropometric indicators alone, such as compounded shortfalls in education, mobility, and mental wellbeing among rural girls in Peru, despite similar physical growth profiles. Regression and quantile analyses indicate that community participation in the design of WASH programmes is associated with higher multidimensional achievements, particularly among the most deprived children. To bridge observed achievements and unrealised potential, we extend the MICG using a Bayesian stochastic-frontier approach to estimate context-specific capability distributions and identify children at risk of being left behind. Finally, we propose a spiderweb growth chart for monitoring multidimensional child growth, complementing WHO anthropometric charts. Overall, the MICG offers an equity-sensitive tool for evaluating nutrition interventions, strengthening child growth surveillance, and advancing the Sustainable Development Goal commitment to leave no child behind.

Private currencies can facilitate intertemporal exchange under limited commitment but exhibit excessive volatility when backed by productive assets subject to news shocks. I develop a model where banks issue deposits backed by firms’ output as collateral, with deposits circulating as currency. Adverse news about firm productivity—even when socially uninformative—induces binding debt constraints and deposit volatility, creating liquidity shortages that depress economic activity. With household heterogeneity, deposits are priced at a premium in liquidity-constrained economies. Interest-bearing central bank money provides an additional policy tool beyond traditional money growth. The interest rate influences asset prices through an investment channel: banks hold interest-bearing reserves as insurance against productivity shocks. This enables welfare-improving policies requiring positive inflation and nominal interest rates—departing from the Friedman rule. Calibrating the model to the US economy, I find that interest-bearing money generates a welfare gain of 2.54%, with the welfare cost of departing from the Friedman rule being roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the cost of operating with a suboptimal transfer. As an extension, I examine private information about consumer preferences, showing that illiquid bonds become essential for achieving efficiency. Cash-in-advance constraints on deposits can improve welfare by preventing destabilizing arbitrage, enabling coexistence of government and private currencies.

It is known that for a uniform morphic sequence $\boldsymbol u = \langle u_n\rangle _{n=0}^\infty $ and an algebraic number $\beta $ such that $|\beta |>1$, the number $[\![ \boldsymbol {u} ]\!] _\beta :=\sum _{n=0}^\infty ({u_n}/{\beta ^n})$ either lies in $\mathbb Q(\beta )$ or is transcendental. In this paper, we show a similar rational–transcendental dichotomy for sequences defined by irreducible Pisot morphisms on binary alphabets. Subject to the Pisot conjecture (an irreducible Pisot morphism has pure discrete spectrum), we generalise the latter result to arbitrary finite alphabets. In certain cases, we are able to show transcendence of $[\![ \boldsymbol {u}]\!] _{\beta }$ outright. In particular, for $k\geq 2$, if $\boldsymbol u$ is the k-Bonacci word, then $[\![ \boldsymbol {u}]\!] _{\beta }$ is transcendental.

Building on Beilinson’s work, ‘constructible sheaves are holonomic’, we introduce the notion of holonomicity for étale sheaves, without assuming a priori constructibility. We establish the converse of Beilinson’s result, showing that holonomic sheaves are indeed constructible. This can be seen as an étale analogue of Kashiwara’s theorem on holonomic ${\mathcal D}_X$-modules.

We study the identification of individual-level associations when only aggregate data are available. We characterize the biases of, and relationships among, canonical ecological inference (EI) estimators. We use these results to develop a partial identification approach: monotone EI. The approach exploits information about one or both of the following conditional associations: (1) outcome differences between groups within the same neighborhood and (2) outcome differences within the same group between neighborhoods with different group compositions. We show how assumptions about the sign of these conditional associations, whether individually or in relation to one another, can yield informative sharp bounds. We illustrate our results using county-level data to study differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates among Republicans and Democrats in the United States.

In this work, the life cycle of Gnathostoma turgidum was studied both in natural temporary water bodies and under experimental conditions, with materials collected from the municipality of San Francisco Ixhuatán, Oaxaca. Adult nematodes inhabit the interstitial layers of the stomach in the definitive host (Didelphis virginiana) and release their eggs into the environment via faeces, typically in a dry environment. Under these conditions, the eggs remain quiescent until the onset of the rainy season. Development of early third-stage larvae occurs in cyclopoid copepods. Fry acts as transport and/or intermediate hosts, while frogs (Lithobates forreri) serve as obligatory intermediate hosts for advanced third-stage larvae, ultimately transmitting the parasites to the definitive host. Notably, the precocity phenomenon, typical of larval development in intermediate hosts, occurs in this species within the definitive host. Precocity is likely a response to host behaviour or other ecological factors that restrict transmission to narrow spatial and temporal windows. Adults die at the end of the rainy season. The marked seasonality of this species is mainly attributed to the combination of two factors: (i) the seasonal predation of frogs by the definitive host, and (ii) expulsion of adult stages as immune-mediated ‘self-cure’. This study represents the first documentation of birds acting as paratenic hosts for this nematode.

A massive amount of research examines the representation of public opinion by policymakers, increasingly on actual policy actions. The work often provides evidence of a positive association between expressed public preferences and policy, but only some of the time and only to some degree, and there is even less evidence of responsiveness. This essay delves into the conditions for responsiveness, focusing on public demand for policy and policy supply, building on what research on the subjects reveals. The examination makes clear that policy responsiveness requires a great deal of both the represented and the representatives (and scholars too) and that these conditions are not easily met, though sometimes are. The emergent structure seemingly is much as empirical democratic theory would predict, and helps account for patterns of policy “responsiveness” we observe. The concluding section contemplates future research.