Acouscapes is a software designed as a simple educational solution for the creation of soundscapes and their use in the composition of soundscape music in primary and secondary education. The software has slots in which the user must place the sounds that will make up the desired soundscape, allowing them to make different soundwalks by interacting with the graphic interface. Acouscapes allows the content of these soundscapes to be modified by means of sound and structural processing, and includes a recording function. This article aims to present the conceptual and educational foundations of Acouscapes, to describe the software technically and functionally, and to offer some applications of this software as a mediation artefact in educational processes.

To improve contact tracing for healthcare workers, we built and configured a Bluetooth low-energy system. We predicted close contacts with great accuracy and provided an additional contact yield of 14.8%. This system would decrease the effective reproduction number by 56% and would unnecessarily quarantine 0.74% of employees weekly.

The article explores the connection between the rule of law and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion from an empirical and theoretical perspective. The author posits that the two are not merely interdependent, but that freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is foundational for embedding the rule of law because a state needs to facilitate freedom of thought, conscience, and religion to encourage the exploration of virtue to inform consensus around society’s common norms. This virtue-building role of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion gives the human right its foundational role for creating the conditions required for embedding the rule of law. This conclusion is drawn from Martin Krygier’s analysis of the sociological conditions necessary to embed the rule of law and a comparison of the worldwide rule of law, religious freedom, and happiness indexes. To support a universal approach to the human right and to underpin the identified essentiality of it, the author proposes a theoretical approach grounded in the theory of common grace; Rowan Williams’s other-regarding communal approach to rights; and the framework for plural living together proposed by Herman Dooyeweerd. The author posits that this approach could be adapted with a plural metanarrative to accommodate dialogue around virtue building and dispute resolution within societies with very different outlooks.

This article investigates the transformation of the body of a female child murderer as she passed through specific spatial configurations in the urban setting of the seventeenth-century capital of Denmark–Norway. By using the case of Gertrud Nielsdatter, we explore the significance of public urban spaces in the bodily and material transformation of a woman from a condemned sinner to an object of scientific wonder. This transformation was facilitated by practices in diverse public spaces – controlled or influenced by government, city, church, as well as academic authorities and stakeholders – such as the city court, the place of execution, the university and, not least, the book shops across Europe selling books containing the print representing internal organs of Gertrud Nielsdatter. The case demonstrates how the physical body of an ordinary – yet outlawed – Copenhagener was repeatedly transformed in interaction with public spaces and the material culture of buildings, fixtures and fittings.

Cold-water immersion (e.g. adapted cold showers, partial or whole-body immersion, cold swimming) are nowadays increasingly being used as an adjunctive procedure to enhance the effects of primary treatment of various clinical conditions, including depressive and anxiety disorders. This brief article reviews the evidence regarding the beneficial effects of cold-water immersion on clinical depression and anxiety and outlines potential therapeutic mechanisms underlying the intervention. Promising avenues for future research and best practice recommendations are also discussed to improve the clinical effectiveness of cold-water immersion.

There is a mysterious twofold change in Du Châtelet’s position on Newtonian attraction: from acceptance thereof as an explanatory principle in Essai sur l’optique (ca. 1738–39), to rejection in the 1740 Institutions, and returning to acceptance again in her Commentary (1756) to Newton’s Principia. In this article, I suggest that we turn to the 1742 Institutions for answers. There, Du Châtelet introduces physical explanation and maintains that we can appeal to certain physical qualities (such as attraction) for explanatory force. Using this case study, I argue that the scholarship will benefit greatly from turning to the 1742 edition going forward.

The peristyle house kitchen in the legionary camp at Vindonissa is one of the few examples of a Mediterranean-style kitchen with a raised hearth in the northwestern provinces. The exceptional preservation of the kitchen made possible an interdisciplinary investigation combining archaeological, archaeobiological, and micromorphological analyses in order to reconstruct dietary and food-processing practices, kitchen maintenance, and waste disposal management in a 1st-c. CE legionary camp household in Germania Superior. The kitchen infrastructure, the large ceramic inventory, and the amphorae finds together indicate a sophisticated cuisine and also food preparation for a large number of people, most likely by servants. The archaeobiological finds provide evidence that the diet was strongly Roman influenced and luxurious. These results confirm that the diet and in general the whole lifestyle of military members was strongly determined by military rank. The house was most likely inhabited by a high-ranking officer of the 11th legion.

This article situates psychoanalysis, urbanity, and precarity apropos of the material, affective, and memory economy of the mutable metropolis marked by visuality, velocity, and violence. Responding to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, the article examines the interplay of visibility and invisibility in a metropolis and how that is in close and complex correspondence to the politics of precarity and privilege. Drawing on historical as well as recent research in psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, and cultural studies across various geopolitical settings, this article, through a response to and reading of Mukherjee’s book, aims to articulate and illustrate the unique relevance of literature and aesthetic education in a study of mental health conditions in the (un)seen city. It argues that such psychic and social situations may be uniquely encoded and addressed with ethics and empathy through the cognitive interiority and symbolic instrumentality afforded by the affective and liminal framework of aesthetic activity and fiction.

J. M. Coetzee’s late work exhibits a productive dialogue between fiction and other arts as part of his interest in the possibilities of thinking in mediums other than ordinary language. Focusing particularly on the Jesus novels, this article examines the critical role of music and how Coetzee uses musical forms as literary strategies that open up alternative possibilities of communication and thinking. Revisiting the famous “What is a Classic?” essay and the biographical moment that leads Coetzee to the music of J. S. Bach, I look at how Coetzee writes musically by considering questions of content, form, and technique, and then turn to the representation of music in relation to mathematics. I propose that the interest in music in the Jesus novels is part of his conscious engagement with ordinary language and his inherent desire to transcend it that characterizes the late work.