It is June 2022 and the premiere of R.U.R. Torrent of Light, a multimedia opera, in Toronto is enthralling audiences. Inspired by Karel Čapek’s play that introduced the word ‘robot’ into 20th-century vocabulary, composer Nicole Lizée and librettist and playwright Nicholas Billon have conceived a science-fiction opera for our current fascination with AI (artificial intelligence). The production by Toronto’s Tapestry Opera Theatre is in partnership with the research and creation of new technologies at the Social Body Lab and the Digital Futures Initiatives at Ontario College of Art & Design University. It has been conceived to embed technologies into the scenographic dramaturgy as projections, wearable art and spatialisation of sound and light through the costuming and neologisms in instrumentation to create a ‘unique electronica-classical sound’ of the neo-futurist worlding. After the hiatus of the last two years, this live performance highlights our growing recognition of scenographic vocabularies of programmable performance affecting behaviours, as well as expanded definitions of sound and digital integration as contemporary opera. Such interdisciplinarity has often brought the spectator into fresh relationships with opera in performance, thereby activating the event of spectatorship.

Wearable-based seizure detection devices hold promise in reducing seizure-related adverse events and relieving the daily stress experienced by people with epilepsy. In this work, we present the latest evidence regarding the performance of three seizure detection wearables (eight studies) commercially available in Canada to provide guidance to clinicians. Overall, their ability to detect focal-to-bilateral and/or generalized tonic-clonic seizures ranges between 21.0% and 98.15% in sensitivity, with the 24h false alarm rates ranging from 0 to 1.28. While performance in epilepsy monitoring units show promise, the lack of evidence in outpatient settings precludes strong recommendations for their use in daily life.

Why is the police role so broad in the United States today? Carceral state scholars have investigated how and why policymakers have treated so many social problems as policing problems, but they have not yet recognized the degree to which the call-for-service system has marginalized political control over police strategy. This Article traces the historical sources of this arrangement through extensive archival research into its evolution. We find that over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of new communications technologies gradually shifted the power to decide which problems are proper subjects of police attention to private individuals, eventually channeling their demands through centralized call centers that had been stripped of the authority and contextual knowledge needed to govern them in a meaningful way. That process fundamentally altered the character of public oversight over policing, elevating a distinctive set of individual interests as largely unchallenged determinants of the kinds of situations that are policeable. By illustrating how sociotechnical change unintentionally reallocated the authority to define the scope of an important institution’s mandate, this case sheds new light on the factors that shape the police role and the role the public plays in defining it.

This paper reports a complete secondary analysis of Jeon and Yamashita’s (2022) systematic review to build the second language (L2) model of the simple view of reading (SVR). The same meta-analytic methodologies were maintained, with the exception of applying meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM). This study successfully replicated some of the aggregated correlations but not others, owing to (a) the recoding of the original raw data to recreate a dataset and (b) the motivated change in sample selection from a longitudinal study for MASEM. The MASEM results extended previous findings that L2 comprehension skills contribute more to L2 reading comprehension than L2 decoding skills, and together explain a large amount of variance in L2 reading comprehension. The SVR model with metalinguistic skills showed their contribution to L2 decoding and comprehension skills, but no direct impact on L2 reading comprehension, supporting the parsimonious structure of SVR in L2.

This article traces the fraught history of the file system’s adoption by the Japanese Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, decentralized the PPO’s power and transformed it into a “democratic” judicial agency. This is also a postwar history of the introduction of Taylorism-derived scientific management to white collar office work and Weberian visions of bureaucratic rationality into government offices, as part of the democratization of public administration steered by various sections within GHQ. Among the key changes was a guarantee of the right to receive a “speedy trial.” The essay argues that, while that guarantee was meant to secure human-rights protections for the accused, the file system introduced to the PPO translated the constitutional imperative of the rights of the accused into the pursuit of efficient scientific management, in which democracy was an operationalized socio-technical achievement. This logistical channel led to the co-emergence of democracy and modern rational bureaucracy, with each evincing mutual cause and effect. American reforms invested technicality with the promise of “democracy,” but as this essay shows, senior Japanese officials envisioned it as a means to rebuild a centralized information network.

This essay theorizes a problem for feminism posed by a particular form of trauma discourse. Feminists have played an important role in developing cultural and clinical conceptions of trauma, but one result of the destigmatization of trauma has been that trauma discourse is sometimes used as a form of cultural capital to reinforce existing hierarchies. In a novel application of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, we show how, when instrumentalized as cultural capital, trauma discourse can be used to reinforce patriarchy and other systems of oppression. We trace a critical feminist history of the struggle to understand and treat trauma. Using examples from contemporary US popular culture, we illustrate the appropriation of trauma discourse to entrench existing structures of gender, class, and racial oppression. First, the misuse of trauma discourse as cultural capital can encourage the instrumental use of trauma claims for cultural power, ultimately reinforcing patriarchy. Second, it might erode the legitimacy of trauma, a conceptual tool pioneered by feminists and still essential to their political claims. This discussion has important implications for not only mental health practitioners and trauma survivors but also feminist theorists, trauma studies scholars, and those interested in deconstructing structural injustice and relations of inequality.

While the 7th/13th-century Persian Muslim scholar of the Mongol era ʿAzīz-i Nasafī actively engaged with Sufi traditions in his writings, he also introduced an overlooked distinction by drawing a line between Sufis (ahl-i taṣavvuf) and monists (ahl-i vaḥdat), aligning himself with the latter. This paper argues that Nasafī's clear differentiation between these two groups reflects broader transformations in the intellectual landscape of the Persianate Mongol world. These changes marked the emergence of new modes of thought not easily explainable by the established linguistic conventions of classical Sufism. Consequently, Nasafī's works serve as a window into the intellectual and linguistic challenges faced by Muslim intellectuals as they endeavored to shape the pre-modern and early modern Islamic cosmopolis (7th/13th–9th/15th centuries), revealing points of convergence and divergence with their intellectual predecessors.

Elvira Basevich, Martin Sticker, and Helga Varden offered generative criticism of my monograph, Kant’s Theory of Labour. In this response, I explore how the resources they offer for thinking about gender, labour, and the state’s responsibility to ensure the material conditions of freedom can deepen both our attentiveness to patterns of systemic injustice in Kant’s political philosophy, and the resources Kant offers for addressing contemporary patterns of intersectional and material injustice.

In their detailed comments, Das et al. (2023) try to discount our arguments that the strata cropping out at the so-called Jhura pond locality are not Late Jurassic in age but Miocene. We wrote this paper (Fürsich et al., 2023) because of the far-reaching conclusions that have been drawn from the molluscan fauna at that locality, in particular with respect to the evolution of turritellid gastropods and the evolution of drilling predation by naticid gastropods. We still maintain that the beds containing abundant turritellids are not Jurassic but Neogene, most probably Miocene, in age. In no way do we contest the various analyses on the material collected from the outcrop by the authors, but just the erroneous age assignment of the strata. In order to keep this reply short, we support our point by referring to just to two aspects: the position of the outcrop and the composition of the fauna. Rather than refuting each of the other arguments of Das et al. (2023), we think that a joint visit to the locality would be more productive for arriving at a consensus on the origin and age of the fauna of the Jhura pond locality.

This study examines the copy raising constructions in Chinese and proposes an integrated analysis built on the insights of the prominent proposals from recent years. It argues that the matrix subject in Chinese copy raising is base-generated and requires a coindexed copy in the complement. Though concurring with Landau’s (2011) predication theory that recognizes theta assignment and predication as two ways of semantically licensing an argument, this squib differs from him in assuming that languages like Chinese can be parametrized in not treating the perceptual source as thematic. It is further argued that in Chinese, the perceptual source construal of the subject does not come from theta assignment but rather as an implicature which interprets the matrix subject to be involved in the topic event denoted by the perception verb.

The Fiery Test of Critique describes Kant’s indirect proof of idealism from the Antinomy of Pure Reason as the ‘nugget of gold’ in the Critique of Pure Reason’s Transcendental Dialectic. Here, I offer critical reflections on Proops’s reading of Kant’s indirect proof.

Obtaining accurate radiocarbon (14C) results from wood samples requires the extraction of cellulose. In the past, this has been done using different combinations of methods including acidified bleaching, acid-base-acid, and strong bases. This often becomes a time-consuming task in most analyses, especially when single ring isotope chronologies are needed from wood samples. Using 14C and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), we tested four different pretreatment methods to determine their ability to produce high quality cellulose. We then adjusted the best methods to determine a method for pretreating wood laths of multiple rings. A sequence of base-acid-base-acid-bleach + strong base (BABAB+) and BABAB produced the most accurate results when compared to the Bomb20 Northern Hemisphere Zone 1 curve with an average difference in Δ14C of 1.3‰ and 5.8‰ respectively. These methods were adjusted to pretreat an entire wood lath and a comparison of the FTIR results suggest that our adjusted BABAB+ and BABAB produced high quality cellulose comparable to that of an individually pretreated ring. The possibility to pretreat wood lath samples has the potential to more than double the number of tree rings which can be pretreated in a week. This is a significant reduction in time when creating long tree ring chronologies.