The Austrian school reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by the mindset of the democratic and civic revolutions of 1848, turned a predominantly feudal and religious school system into a modern one and brought basic education to the masses. In the following decades, literacy increased, basic knowledge spread, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church in school matters diminished. Yet, as an “unintended consequence,” these reforms also had great implications for the process of building what turned out to be “the Slovene nation.” This article aims to illustrate that the formation of Slovene national identity—based on the use of the Slovene language as the main marker of Slovene ethnicity—was implemented to a large extent with the help of the Austrian school system and its efforts at centralization, systematization, and modernization. Measures like the creation of a school subject for the Slovene language, Slovene reading materials in school textbooks, and statistical categorization within school administrations played a crucial role in that process.

On September 22, 2022, the Supreme Court Chamber (SCC) of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) pronounced its judgment against Khieu Samphan, a key figure in the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled the country in the late 1970s. The appellate SCC upheld the Trial Chamber's conviction of Khieu Samphan for war crimes and genocide, as well as all but two convictions against him for crimes against humanity. The SCC also found him responsible for additional crimes and affirmed his life sentence. On December 23, 2022, the court published the full written judgment, bringing to a close Case 002/02, the third and final trial at the ECCC.

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.