Mangani-eckermannite, ideally NaNa2(Mg4Mn3+)Si8O22(OH)2, is a new member of the amphibole supergroup found at Tanohata Mine, Shimohei District, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. It occurs as prismatic crystals up to 0.3 × 0.2 mm and their aggregates up to 1 mm intergrown with braunite, vittinkiite and quartz. Mangani-eckermannite is cherry-red to very dark red and reddish-brown in thicker grains. It is translucent with a pinkish white streak and vitreous lustre. It is brittle, fracture is stepped along crystal elongation and uneven across a crystal. Cleavage is perfect on {110}. Mohs hardness is 6. Dmeas = 3.16(2) and Dcalc = 3.186 g/cm3. The mineral is optically biaxial (–), with α = 1.645(3), β = 1.668(2), γ = 1.675(3) (589 nm); 2Vmeas = 60(10)°, 2Vcalc = 57°. The empirical formula derived from electron microprobe analysis, secondary-ion mass spectrometry and single-crystal structure refinement and calculated on the basis of 24 (O+OH) atoms per formula unit (apfu) is A(Na0.74K0.24□0.02)Σ1.00 B(Na1.52Ca0.24Mn2+0.24)Σ2.00 C(Mg2.54Mn2+1.45Mn3+0.71Fe3+0.26Ti0.04)Σ5.00 T(Si7.97Al0.03)Σ8.00O22W[(OH)1.52O0.48]Σ2.00. Mangani-eckermannite is monoclinic, space group C2/m, a = 9.9533(4), b = 18.1440(7), c = 5.2970(2) Å, β = 103.948(4)°, V = 928.39(6) Å3 and Z = 2. The strongest lines of the powder X-ray diffraction pattern [d, Å (I, %)(hkl)] are: 8.52(100)(110); 4.54(25)(040); 3.41(29)(131); 3.16(23)(310,201); 2.721(37)(151); 2.533(26)($\bar{2}$02). The crystal structure was refined to R1 = 0.0264 for 1001 independent reflections with I > 2σ(I). The place of mangani-eckermannite in the nomenclature of the amphibole supergroup is discussed and the status of mangano-ferri-eckermannite as a valid mineral species and successor of ‘kôzulite’ is questioned.

A pessimistic view of the potential of deliberative mini-publics to effectively contribute to democratic decision making on highly contested issues in deeply divided places asserts that (1) deliberative quality would be low due to the bitterness prompted by discussion of divisive issues, and (2) levels of opinion change would be low given the stubbornly enduring nature of political attitudes in divided places. We empirically examined this pessimistic view using a quasi-experiment involving mini-publics on two separate issues in Northern Ireland: (1) the contentious ethno-national question of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status, and (2) the much less contested and non-ethno-national issue of social care. Contrary to the pessimistic view, we find evidence that from the perspective of the participants themselves, deliberative quality was higher in the mini-public on an ethno-national issue. However, in line with the pessimistic view, levels of self-reported opinion change were significantly lower in the ethno-national mini-public. Overall, the findings highlight the potential for carefully designed deliberative mini-publics to address divisive ethno-national issues: they provide a space for participants to engage with such issues in open and respectful discussion—even if the prospects for attitudinal change are more limited.

Applying tools of linguistic anthropology to ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court, this article analyzes how commentary by attorneys and judges about the language practices of parents and other communicative practices normalized the dismissal of the voices of marginalized lay actors throughout their cases. This commentary is an example of what linguistic anthropologists describe as “metapragmatic discourse,” or the use of language to foreground language itself and what language can accomplish in social exchanges. I introduce the concept of “metapragmatic dismissals” to describe how attorneys and judges in the child welfare context positioned parents’ language practices and overall personhood as suspect, often before parents even entered the courtroom. I identify practices of silencing, voicing figures of disbelief, and the use of metapragmatic labels of “lies” and “excuses” as common forms of metapragmatic dismissals that are supported by norms of court procedure, standards of evidence, and institutionalized discretion. This concept provides new insights into legal experiences in child welfare courts and, more generally, offers a valuable analytical framework for scholars who study the intersection of law, language, and power.

The decision by a narrow majority of British voters to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 was a political earthquake that few had seen coming. It produced new political divisions, not only between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe but also within the United Kingdom. In particular, the referendum campaign and the outcome generated two new political identities: “Leavers” and “Remainers.” These Brexit identities crosscut partisan identities and voters formed deep emotional attachments to them (Curtice 2018; Evans and Schaffner 2019). Moreover, this Brexit divide led to affective polarization in the form of out-group animosity and discrimination (Hobolt, Leeper, and Tilley 2021). It also shaped perceptions of the economy (Sorace and Hobolt 2021), attitudes toward immigration (Pickup et al. 2021), vote choices (Hobolt and Rodon 2020), and losers’ consent (Schaffner 2021; Tilley and Hobolt 2023a). Brexit identities have been shown to be salient and politically consequential. Yet, we know much less about whether these new identities are rooted in policy norms that go beyond preferences about the desirability of leaving the EU. In this article, we thus explore the nature of Brexit identities and how they relate to policy norms.

Although the negative relationship between BMI and academic achievement (AA) is well documented, no prior studies have investigated the potential bi-directional relationship between BMI and AA in childhood. We investigated the longitudinal relationships between child BMI and AA across different school subjects (reading, math and science) and sexes. To do so, we employed the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study kindergarten cohort (2011), which is a nationally representative sample of American children who entered kindergarten in 2010–2011. We utilised the kindergarten–fifth grade longitudinal sample (n 17 480) and applied cross-lagged panel models with fixed effects to address unobserved heterogeneity. Our results showed significant but small reciprocal relationships between BMI and math/science achievement for girls (n 8540) (year-to-year effect sizes ranged from –0·01 to –0·04), but not for reading. In contrast, we did not find any evidence of reciprocal relationships between BMI and AA for boys (n 8940). Our results reveal that early weight status and academic performance may be jointly responsible for a vicious cycle of poor AA and unhealthy weight. Breaking the cycle from AA may complement existing obesity prevention strategies, particularly for girls in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field.

In the late 1960s, Ghanaians joined the global conversation about Black Power. Despite the absence of President Nkrumah and attempts to dampen local interest in radical political movements, young Ghanaian students, musicians, and audience members were well informed of the global implications of white supremacy. Okuda examines how Ghanaians expanded the legacy of Black Power into an African context, seizing opportunities to connect with African Americans via popular media, exchange programs, and soul music to show their solidarity with the fight against racist policies and practices abroad and to stay vigilant against neo-imperialism at home.

Do people’s political beliefs alter the emphasis they place on different symbols when constructing their “personal” national identity (Cohen 1996)? Does the content of their national identity affect how they vote? These are the central questions we address in this article, focusing on England but using the United States as a comparative case to demonstrate common dynamics.

This article presents an analysis of vowels in the goat set and /r/ in the Collection of Nineteenth-century Grammars (CNG) (cf. Anderwald 2016). My central questions concern the extent to which grammarians provide evidence for early diphthongisation in goat words and for changes in the distribution of /r/ variants in nineteenth-century prestige accents. I furthermore evaluate how far grammars are suitable as a source for researching historical sound changes. I show that monophthongs are the most frequently proposed variants for goat and are often referred to as ‘improper diphthongs’. Some diphthongal descriptions exist for words in open syllables, before /l/ and before plosives in words like know, soul and boat respectively. Concerning the distribution of /r/, I show that most grammars continued to propose two sounds, which were almost exclusively described as ‘rough’ or ‘trilled’, and ‘smooth’ or ‘soft’. However, some grammarians also argued for /r/ having only one sound in all positions and complete post-vocalic /r/ absence. Overall, the grammars in the CNG display a considerable amount of what I assume to be copying from scholars such as Walker (1791) and Murray (1795). Thus, I argue that great care is required when attempting to infer phonological changes from nineteenth-century grammars.

It is well-known that marital status is an important predictor for life expectancy. However, non-married individuals are often misclassified as singles which ignores the heterogeneity within the group. This paper shows the importance of distinguishing between types of singles, and in particular whether they are cohabiting, when predicting life expectancies. We use unique and detailed longitudinal register data to track marital status throughout the individual's lifetime. We find that all types of singles consistently benefit from living with a spouse, i.e., after divorce, becoming widower or being never married. This result holds for both men and women. For certain types of cohabiting singles we reject significant differences in life expectancy compared to married individuals. Finally, we use a case study to show that, like married individuals, all types of singles that cohabit also serve as informal caregivers and have the potential to limit the end-of-life long-term care expenditure levels.

This article proposes to look back onto the Black Canadian works produced around the turn of the twenty-first century to establish some of the decolonial practices they promoted, arguing that they remain pivotal in decentering the colonial gaze that to this day is at the root of anti-Black hatred. In the face of continued structural violence and anti-Black racism preeminent across Canada to date, it attempts to unpack the purpose and means deployed in their early texts by two pioneer Black Canadian women writers, Djanet Sears and M. NourbeSe Philip, to decolonize African cultural memory from the diaspora by teaching us to value African legacies outside of Eurocentric standards. Drawing from feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, it contends that these texts perform a “counter-pedagogy of cruelty,” that is, an act of resistance to all those sociocultural practices by which people are taught, trained, and hardened to the ongoing commodification of others.

A model-free adaptive robust control based on time delay estimation (TDE) is proposed for robot in the presence of disturbance and input saturation. TDE is utilized to estimate the complicated nonlinear terms of the robot including unknown dynamics and disturbance, and a TDE error observer is developed to estimate the inevitable TDE error. When the input torque of the robot exceeds the upper or lower limit of the input saturation, an auxiliary system and a saturation deviation boundary adaptive law are employed to mitigate the negative impact of input saturation on the position tracking. Finally, the robust control law is obtained by backstepping. The stability of the closed-loop system is proved by Lyapunov functions, and the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparative simulations and experiments. Compared with the model-based controllers and other model-free controllers, the proposed method does not necessitate the accurate dynamic model of the complicated system and with lower computation. Moreover, it can guarantee the desired position tracking performance of the robot even subject to disturbance and input saturation simultaneously.

Mortality shocks such as the one induced by the COVID-19 pandemic have substantial impact on mortality models. We describe how to deal with them in the period effect of the Lee–Carter model. The main idea is to not rely on the usual normal distribution assumption as it is not always justified. We consider a mixture distribution model based on the peaks-over-threshold method, a jump model, and a regime switching model and introduce a modified calibration procedure to account for the fact that varying amounts of data are necessary for calibrating different parts of these models. We perform an extensive empirical study for nine European countries, comparing the models with respect to their parameters, quality of fit, and forecasting performance. Moreover, we define five exemplary scenarios regarding the future development of pandemic-related mortality. As a result of our evaluations, we recommend the peaks-over-threshold approach for applications with a possibility of extreme mortality events.

Rhetoric surrounding the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on continued European Union (EU) membership frequently has invoked the “will of the people.” Addressing the House of Commons in March 2019, then–Prime Minster Theresa May stated that “my sense of responsibility and duty has meant that I have kept working to ensure that we deliver on the result and the will of the people” (March 27, 2019).1 May’s successor, Boris Johnson, appealed to the same notion when suggesting in the Daily Telegraph (September 15, 2019) that opposition parties were “united in wanting to cancel the referendum result…and overturn the will of the people.” On the other side of the debate, Caroline Lucas (currently the sole Member of Parliament for the UK’s Green Party) stated that “[e]very recent opinion poll shows that the will of the people has changed since [the referendum]” (December 4, 2018).

Hobson v. Hansen (1967) is best known as the first federal court case to rule against discriminatory use of standardized tests in the context of educational tracking. It was also significant as one of the first desegregation cases after Brown v Board of Education (1954) to use psychological evidence in its ruling. This essay briefly examines the debates over ability testing before Hobson, the contexts of post-desegregation D.C. educational politics that shaped the case, the social scientific evidence presented in the case, and its application to the court’s ruling. It argues that while scholars have correctly acknowledged the court’s mistaken assumptions about testing, the evidence presented of testing bias nevertheless cogently illustrated a broader constellation of discriminatory District practices. A review of the testimony suggests that while the psychological evidence was central to the court’s ruling, the opinion rested less on the resolution of social scientific debates over testing bias than it did on the need to determine the justification of ability testing in the context of District tracking practices. Although sweeping in scope, the decision did little to resolve long running disputes over ability testing. Instead, it only helped inaugurate a more heated and contentious legal environment for educational testing in the coming decades.

This essay conceptualizes five recipes to solve secession conflicts that have taken place in postcommunist territories—federalization, land-for-peace, protectorate policy, reconquest, and the destruction of the parent state by the patron state—and investigates their merits and demerits. This essay provides case studies of the South Ossetian War in 2008 and its aftermath (as an example of the protectorate policy), the Second Karabakh War in 2020 (reconquest), and the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 (destruction of the parent state by the patron state). We observe the tendency that the ineffectiveness of federalization and land-for-peace induces parties of conflict to move on to unilateral or even coercive recipes.

An ageing population increases pressure on health and social care, welfare payments and pensions in public funded systems. There is no simple measure linking population health to economic disadvantage or the resulting tax burden. We imagine a situation in which local areas are responsible for financing their own public services. We hypothesize a local tax is levied to cover healthcare costs, welfare benefits for those who are sick, and pensions. We partition the costs based on years spent in ill health, disability and pensionable years over the life course using the average costs per person per year for each. We argue that area differences in tax rates provide a summary measure of inequality since a higher tax burden would fall on areas least able to afford it. We show that a one year improvement in healthy life expectancy would add 4.5 months to life expectancy (LE) and 3.4 months to working lives whilst reducing taxes by around 0.5%. We cast doubt on the target to increase health expectancy by five years by 2035; however, were it to be achieved it would add 23 months to LE, 17 months to work expectancy and reduce taxes by 2.4%.