There are several examples of best animal husbandry practices that are not adopted, leading to animal welfare compromises. Bridging this gap between advice and human behaviour is crucial in helping drive improvements in animal welfare. Inappropriate feeding of pregnant cows is common and associated with compromised health and welfare. Obesity and leanness can cause calving difficulty and reduce the vigour of newborn calves. One way to offset the problems associated with body condition extremes is to adopt body condition scoring (BCS) by hand. Knowing each animal’s condition helps the farmer identify ‘at risk’ cows leading to better feeding decisions and improved health and welfare. Despite the significant benefits of BCS, very few farmers routinely adopt this practice, relying more upon a visual assessment of condition. Some farmers also report that they do not BCS by hand, or by eye. The current study identified the key barriers and drivers of BCS by hand to develop an evidence-based intervention designed to encourage more adoption. We propose that human behaviour change frameworks, such as the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), present the opportunity to address other animal welfare issues where best management practices are rarely adopted. We also recommend that an interdisciplinary team of animal welfare and social scientists are best positioned to develop human behaviour change interventions that will more likely lead to tangible, persistent and positive change.

Most formal research on the imperative sentence type has focused on canonical imperatives, forms like Leave!, which are often characterized across languages by properties such as bare verbal morphology and omission of the subject. Noncanonical imperatives therefore offer an opportunity to investigate imperative properties from a different perspective. This article argues that negation-licensed commands, forms like No smoking!, first introduced in Iatridou 2021, contain an unusual combination of properties that offer a unique insight into the nature of canonical imperatives. This article has two main findings: (i) negation-licensed commands have a morphosyntax similar to that of existential declaratives, but a speech-act update similar to that of canonical imperatives, and (ii) their speech-act update is subtly different from canonical imperatives in a way that motivates a reevaluation of the speech-act operator in canonical imperatives. This article therefore demonstrates that noncanonical constructions are worth studying not only because of their interesting properties, but also because they offer insights into canonical constructions that could not be gathered otherwise.

This article presents the results of the first diachronic study of obsidian procurement patterns in the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast of Central America; it sheds light on the integration of the region in long-distance exchange systems. This study is based on portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF) analysis of all 713 obsidian artifacts collected from Terminal Classic and Postclassic contexts on Tigre Island, Honduras, and of 54 additional obsidian artifacts from two sites on the south coast of Honduras that are housed in museum collections. Analysis of obsidian artifacts collected in the excavation of the earlier occupation of the site of La Tigüilotada (AD 800–1200) on Tigre Island revealed the predominance of Ixtepeque obsidian and the lesser presence of Güinope obsidian. Obsidian artifacts from excavations of the reoccupation of La Tigüilotada (AD 1300–1500) and of the site of Gualorita (AD 1400–1550) relied almost exclusively on La Esperanza obsidian. Least-cost path analysis shows likely riverine routes connecting all three sources to the Gulf. We contextualize these results within prior obsidian sourcing studies from the region and conclude that precolonial island settlements took part in different transference networks from their mainland counterparts.

Cromwell [‘Homogeneous links’, J. London Math. Soc. (2) 39(3) (1989), 535–552] proved that the minimum v-degree of the HOMFLY polynomial of a homogeneous link L is bounded above by $1-\chi (L)$, where $\chi (L)$ is the maximum Euler characteristic of Seifert surfaces of L. We prove its slice version, stating that the minimum v-degree of the HOMFLY polynomial of a homogeneous link L is bounded above by $1-\chi _4(L)$, where $\chi _4(L)$ is the maximum four-dimensional Euler characteristic of L. As a byproduct, we prove a conjecture of Stoimenow [‘Some inequalities between knot invariants’, Internat. J. Math. 13(4) (2002), 373–393] that for an alternating link, the minimum v-degree of the HOMFLY polynomial is smaller than or equal to its signature.

We describe the behavior of a free reduced plane projective curve with respect to the addition, respectively, deletion, of a smooth conic. These results apply in particular to conic-line arrangements. We present some obstructions to the geometry and combinatorics of a free reduced curve, generalizing results known a priori only for free projective line arrangements.

This paper argues for a revised approach to religious literacy that I call the interreligious attentiveness (IA) approach. I argue that this approach is better than those endorsed by other scholars in the academic study of religion – namely, knowledge, analysis, and skills approaches. I draw attention to the limitations of these approaches by virtue of three challenges: conversion (exclusivist groups), multiple religious belonging, and motivation. I then argue that the IA approach offers a more effective response to these challenges and should be regarded as the preferred approach.

Hendrix, Vasko, Gordon, and Bernal raise challenging questions and illuminate key dimensions of Remapping Sovereignty. Their interventions explore the stakes of my interpretive method; probe close readings of the book’s six key thinkers; animate my mapping of Indigenous political theory in longer histories and expanded geographies; and press on the implications of my theorizations of colonial sovereignty and earthmaking for Indigenous and anti/decolonial thought and movements. To synthesize, their comments touch on dual aspects of the book, and how I weave connections between them: on one hand, the historical and interpretive work of (re)mapping Indigenous political theory; on the other, the conceptual insights gleaned through close reading of Indigenous political theory. I address their contributions in turn, starting first with the historical-interpretive dimensions, and next, the political-philosophical implications of guiding conceptual frameworks.

This paper considers $A_\infty$-algebras satisfying an analytic bound with respect to a fixed norm. We define a notion of right Calabi–Yau (CY) structures on such $A_\infty$-algebras and show that these give rise to cyclic minimal models satisfying the same analytic bound. This strengthens a theorem of Kontsevich and Soibelman [Stability structures, motivic Donaldson–Thomas invariants and cluster transformations, Preprint (2008), arXiv: 0811.2435], and yields a flexible method for obtaining the analytic potentials of Hua and Keller [Quivers with analytic potentials, Preprint (2019), arXiv: 1909.13517]. We apply these results to the endomorphism differential graded algebra (DGA) of polystable sheaves considered by Toda [Moduli stacks of semistable sheaves and representations of Ext-quivers, Geom. Topol. 22 (2018), 3083–3144], for which we construct a family of such right CY structures obtained from analytic germs of holomorphic volume forms. As a result, we find a canonical cyclic analytic $A_\infty$-structure on the Ext-algebra of a polystable sheaf, which depends only on the analytic-local geometry of its support. This yields an extension of Toda’s result [Geom. Topol. 22 (2018), 3083–3144] to the quasi-projective setting, and a new method for comparing cyclic $A_\infty$-structures of sheaves on different Calabi–Yau varieties.

Current approaches to measurement of diet quality lack precision, do not translate well beyond academia and may have unintended consequences. A novel metric ‘unrefined plantfoods’ (UP) is proposed. The UP metric is grounded in established science, precise, easy to measure, consistent with wider nutrition agendas and policies, reduces potential commercial and ideological exploitation of public health nutrition goals, is unbiased, translatable and inclusive. The concept is value-aware and grounded in a harm minimisation approach.

This study focuses on reconstructing paleoclimate changes between 830 BC and 650 BC, a period of critical significance marked by the Hallstatt Catastrophe, a shift from a warm and dry climate to a cool and humid one. This period also coincides with the onset of the plateau on the radiocarbon calibration curve. The research material consisted of oak tree trunks G24 and G58, discovered in Poland (Grabie village). Dendrochronological methods were employed to date the two trunks. The identification of the Miyake event around 660 BC in the Δ14C results from the Grabie tree rings corroborated the dendrochronological dating. This study presents an analysis of changes in stable carbon isotope composition in α-cellulose extracted from annual growth increments and variations in growth ring widths.

Research on the relationship between inequality and political engagement has yielded varying conclusions. Some studies suggest that inequality fosters political action, while others indicate the opposite, and some find no significant connections. This study demonstrates that individuals’ reactions to inequality are influenced by their attribution of the causes of low income. Based on a survey of over 3,700 residents in Hong Kong, a region known for its high levels of inequality, this research finds that blame attribution significantly affects intentions to participate in collective action. Individuals often attribute income inequality to three types of factors: structural, fatalistic, and individualistic. Those who attribute inequality to structural factors are more likely to engage in collective and disruptive actions, whereas those who attribute it to personal factors are less likely to participate. Consequently, reducing inequality can contribute to social stability by decreasing the potential for collective action.

This study provides an account of the puzzling difference in case marking of the object of two-argument verbs like aider (accusative) and obéir (dative) in French. Cross-linguistically, these two verb types usually mark their object identically (e.g., accusative in English, dative in German), but French historically shows divergent trajectories. Employing logistic regression modelling and clustering techniques, this corpus-based study examines 77 verbs over 1000 years of textual record to show that aider-type verbs and obéir-type verbs systematically diverge in their case selection by the 16th century and that they have been stable ever since. We argue that their trajectories reflect the narrowing of an oblique linking rule, defined in terms of Talmy’s theory of force dynamics, which targets the difference between helping and hindering verbs on the one hand and verbs of reacting and resisting on the other. The analysis dispels long-held views that the diachronic changes were random or based strictly on analogy, and methodologically, it provides an empirical basis for connecting historical change to developmental approaches to grammar.