Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are a striking case of policy diffusion in Latin America. Almost all countries in the region adopted the model within one decade. While most theories of diffusion focus on the international transference of ideas, this article explains that surge of adoptions by analyzing presidents’ expectations. Out of all ideas transmitted into a country, only a few find their way into enactment and implementation, and the executive has a key role in selecting which ones. Policies expected to boost presidents’ popularity grab their attention. They rapidly enact and implement these models. A process-tracing analysis comparing CCTs and public-private partnerships (PPPs) shows that presidents fast-tracked CCTs hoping for an increase in popular support. Adoptions of PPPs, however, followed normal procedures and careful deliberations because the policy was not expected to quickly affect popularity—which, in the aggregate, leads to a slower diffusion wave.

I write in solidarity with Chrystul Kizer, a criminalized Black teen survivor of sexual violence in Wisconsin, to detail how her ongoing legal fight occurs in a tilted sociopolitical and epistemological landscape with weighted opponents. I offer a theory of disparate failures of knowledge-attribution for survivors of sexual violence, a structural epistemological problem that I call constructed pragmatic encroachment (CPE). CPE explains that pragmatic encroachment is a nonneutral knowledge-attribution problem whereby attributors are empowered to affirm or deny a subject's knowledge-claim based on the subject's constructed practical stakes. Constructed practical stakes here refers to the potential costs/consequences of acting on knowledge of some p for some subject, “S,” constructed by their practical environment. Examining CPE in Kizer's self-defense case, I highlight why real-world pragmatic encroachment is exceptionally alarming for survivors of sexual violence, especially criminalized survivors. The epistemological problem is not merely whether people in powerful positions are frequently fallible, but the convergence of sociopolitical and epistemic power to deny what survivors know about our own experiences of violence, and power to punish survivors for acting on what we know.

Estimating the numbers of residences, and thus the residential densities and populations, of ancient settlements remains a significant problem. This is true even for ‘greenfield’ sites due to the differential visibility of structures made of different materials in aerial and geophysical surveys. In this paper, we take advantage of statistical relationships among elements of the built environments of Roman cities in Britannia and more broadly across the Empire, to estimate the total number of buildings, total population and population density of Silchester. The results indicate that the current site plan dramatically under-represents these values. We also consider the implications of our results for broader discussions of urbanism in Britannia.

In 1789, the Academy of Ancient Music replaced Benjamin Cooke with Samuel Arnold as its musical director. This article offers a detailed analysis of an autograph copy of the address Cooke delivered to the Academy responding to their action, and of a letter to Cooke from Arnold countering accusations made regarding his conduct in the affair. Both documents are annotated by Henry Cooke, who used them in writing a biography of his father. These documents enable a new understanding of the significant changes made within the Academy in the 1780s and of the reasons Academy subscribers replaced Cooke with Arnold.

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of shortening the dry period in high-yielding cows of different body condition scores (BCS). We report colostrum and milk quality, some serum metabolites, BCS changes, and some reproductive parameters with measurements being made over the first two months of lactation. Cows were grouped based on the length of the dry period (normal: about 50 d and short: about 28 d) and BCS (moderate: 2.75 to 3.5 and high ≥ 3.5). Short dry period decreased colostrum volume and, in combination with high BCS only, caused a decrease in milk production. Short dry period moderate BCS cows had the highest serum insulin concentration on day 14 after calving and highest glucose concentration on day 28, but neither differed significantly when measured over the whole period. By contrast, short dry period cows had significantly lower concentrations of non-esterified fatty acids and beta-hydroxybutyrate measured over the whole period. Post-partum loss of BCS was less in short and especially so in the short, moderate BCS group. Following a synchronization protocol at 35 d postpartum. The cows with a short dry period and moderate BCS had lower open days, days to first postpartum estrus and services per conception. It was concluded that short dry periods and moderate BCS had a positive influence on serum metabolites, BCS changes and reproductive parameters.

A first integrative survey of the genus Usnea in the southern Philippines, taking into account morphological, anatomical, chemical and molecular characters, resulted in the recognition of 20 taxa, including three species new to science: Usnea angulata Ach., U. baileyi (Stirt.) Zahlbr., U. bismolliuscula Zahlbr., U. brasiliensis (Zahlbr.) Motyka, U. confusa Asah., U. croceorubescens Stirt., U. dasaea Stirt., U. himalayana C. Bab., U. krogiana P. Clerc, U. longissima Ach., U. nidifica Taylor, U. norsticornuta A. Gerlach & P. Clerc sp. nov. (characterized by a moderately thick cortex and by the presence of norstictic acid), U. paleograndisora A. Gerlach & P. Clerc sp. nov. (characterized by an orange subcortical pigmentation in the medulla, with enlarging soralia and a moderately thick and shiny cortex), U. pectinata Taylor, U. pygmoidea (Asahina) Y. Ohmura, U. rubicunda Stirt., U. rubrotincta (Stirt.) Zahlbr., U. spinulifera (Vain.) Motyka, U. subscabrosa Motyka and U. yoshihitoi P. Clerc & A. Gerlach sp. nov. (characterized by a lax medulla with non-conglutinated hyphae). Usnea krogiana is a new record for Asia; Usnea brasiliensis, Usnea confusa and U. croceorubescens are new records for the Philippines. This is the first phylogenetic study to include DNA sequences of Usnea from the Philippines. Molecular data from the ITS rDNA (76 newly generated sequences) are presented for most taxa except for U. himalayana, U. longissima and U. subscabrosa. At least six further taxa remain unidentified, awaiting the collection of additional specimens.

If all national identity is performative, the Northern Irish national identity offers a particularly pronounced model of this performative instability. Such precarity was emphasized when the 2016 UK EU ‘Brexit’ referendum raised contentious questions over Northern Irish citizenship. This article explores how two recent Northern Irish performance pieces, David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue (2016) and Clare Dwyer Hogg’s Hard Border (2018), probe the unsettled plurality of Northern Irish national identity through the casting of actor Stephen Rea in their respective central roles. Rea’s own personal and professional history, as a figure inflected in the public mind with an extreme range of potential ‘Northern Irish identities’, encapsulates the shifting boundaries of an unstable, performative spectrum of ethno-national selfhood. This article explores how the lingering memories of Rea’s on- and offstage past offer a fittingly multilayered, even contradictory, representation of contemporary Northern Irish identity.

This paper reports the preliminary results from three seasons of excavations in the Christian cemetery by the Tunisian-British Bulla Regia Archaeological Project. In 2017–2019, excavations in, and around, the Late Antique church in the western cemetery uncovered a complex funerary landscape with a variety of different tomb types, including mosaic caisson tombs, simple masonry tombs, amphora tombs, and earthen graves and multiple funerary mensae. The mosaics, inscriptions and finds (ceramics, glass, coins) studied in 2022 support a fourth to seventh century date for the main period of use of the cemetery.

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession a central tenet of their analyses. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history than most of the previous scholarship has adopted to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can illuminate major historiographical debates such as the history of tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to study a wider array of school finance policies beyond the surface of state school funding formulae to make the role of policymakers at all levels of education policy more visible, and to further ground school finance developments in their racial contexts.

This Research Communication aims to compare the effect of A1A2 and A2A2 cow milk diets on the biochemical and histological parameters of rats. The rats were divided into four groups and fed with a normal diet, A2 milk powder, A1A2 or A2A2 cow milk diets for 90 d. Blood glucose, kidney function, liver function and lipid profile were examined during the experimental period. The study showed an increase in the body weight of the A1A2 group whereas a slight decrease in the A2A2 group, and blood glucose levels increased from d 0 to day 90 in all experimental groups. However, none of these changes were found to be statistically insignificant (P > 0.05). Moreover, no significant changes were recorded in other parameters (serum glutamic pyruvic transferase and serum glutamic-oxaloacetic transaminase for liver function, bilirubin direct, cholesterol, triglycerides, creatinine and uric acid). The histology of the liver, kidney and pancreas also showed no changes in all groups. Overall, this study revealed no significant difference in the nutritional values of A1A2 and A2A2 milk types and hence equally beneficial for health. Although the present study showed no significant difference in the effect of both milk types in 90 d, further studies might be conducted to evaluate their longer term effects.