Here's an overview of one of the more ingenious attempts to criticize religious belief. Antony Flew argues that if the religious won't allow anything to count as evidence against what they believe, then they don't actually believe anything. The religious aren't making false claims; rather, they're not making any claims at all.

On 15 November 1956, Mao Zedong 毛泽东 delivered a speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Eighth CCP Congress. The official written version of this speech was published belatedly, in 1977, in the fifth volume of Mao's Selected Works. In this text, Mao was supposed to be talking about the Dalai Lama's forthcoming stay in India, and he had no difficulty in envisaging the Dalai Lama's eventual departure into exile. This passage, obviously, seems problematic as it contradicts the policy of the CCP leadership towards the Dalai Lama at that time. Tsering Shakya (The Dragon in the Land of Snows, Pimlico, 1999), Li Jianglin 李江琳 (1959 Lhasa, New Century Press, 2010), Melvyn Goldstein (A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 3, University of California Press, 2013), and Liu Xiaoyuan 刘晓原 (To the End of Revolution, Columbia University Press, 2020) have successively sought to understand the reason for this. The probable reason seems to be simply that Mao most likely never made these remarks about the Dalai Lama on the date in question, and that this passage was added later in the written version of the speech, to avoid Mao losing face.

Underwater archaeology is of great significance for historical and cultural transmission and preservation of underwater heritage, but it is also a challenging task. Underwater heritage is located in an environment with high sediment content, objects are mostly buried, and the water is turbid, resulting in some of the features of objects missing or blurred, making it difficult to accurately identify and understand the semantics of various objects in the scene. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a global enhancement network (GENet) underwater scene parsing method. We introduce adaptive dilated convolution by adding an extra regression layer, which can automatically deduce adaptive dilated coefficients according to the different scene objects. In addition, considering the easy confusion in the process of fuzzy feature classification, an enhancement classification network is proposed to increase the difference between various types of probabilities by reducing the loss function. We verified the validity of the proposed model by conducting numerous experiments on the Underwater Shipwreck Scenes (USS) dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithm under three different conditions: conventional, relic semi-buried, and turbidified water quality. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs best in different situations. To verify the generalizability of the proposed algorithm, we conducted comparative experiments on the current publicly available Cityscapes, ADE20K, and the underwater dataset SUIM. The experimental results show that this paper achieves good performance on the public dataset, indicating that the proposed algorithm is generalizable.

Firmly grounded in local sociopolitical constraints, language policies at Istanbul's Kurdish-run eating establishments often place Kurdish employees’ cultural identity construction at odds with their workplaces’ economic viability. In the face of rigid structures that cement the dominance of Turkish, the Kurdish managers highlighted in a previous study exercise limited agency to enact language policies that align with their pro-Kurdish ideologies, rendering Kurdish largely invisible. This article revisits these themes by examining a nearby Kurdish-run restaurant with a language policy that violates this norm. Applying Darvin & Norton's (2015) model of investment, analyses of observations and interviews consider identity, ideology, and economic capital vis-à-vis employees’ perceived valuation of Kurdish as a workplace language. Results suggest that capital ownership emboldens the audible articulation of Kurdish identities, which emerge from pluricentrically oriented ideologies, fostering resistance to local language policy norms. (Investment, language policy, capital, Kurdish, ideology, pluricentricity)

Let G be a semiabelian variety defined over an algebraically closed field K of prime characteristic. We describe the intersection of a subvariety X of G with a finitely generated subgroup of $G(K)$.

In this paper, we prove a support theorem of Stroock–Varadhan type for pinned diffusion processes. To this end, we use two powerful results from stochastic analysis. One is quasi-sure analysis for Brownian rough path. The other is Aida–Kusuoka–Stroock’s positivity theorem for the densities of weighted laws of non-degenerate Wiener functionals.

Under conditions of anarchy, the predominant assumption is that scarcity leads to conflict. I contrast traditional Inuit walrus hunt practices to Rousseau’s stag hunt to demonstrate how mainstream international relations has it wrong on three counts: (1) radical scarcity need not lead to conflict-prone outcomes, (2) the historical eighteenth-century context of the stag hunt does not prove a predisposition against cooperation, and (3) the conditions of anarchy are irreducible to cultural institutions or to material constraints alone. I leverage Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” to demonstrate that ideas and things have an equal potential to structure the culture of anarchical relations and to build on the literature which has established that comparative cultural data can be used to theorize anarchy. Rethinking the logic of anarchy is especially important in the age of the Anthropocene, given the prospects for radical ecological change in the near future.

The 2018 amendments to the People's Republic of China (PRC) Constitution saw the establishment of a system of supervisory commissions, which is a landmark development not only for anti-corruption, but also constitutional law in China. After providing an overview of the background and legal framework of the reform, this article discusses its constitutional implications from three perspectives. First, the reform alters the long-established state structure and creates interesting dynamics of institutional interactions among various branches of state structure. Second, it marks a reversal from the principle of ‘party-state separation’ and raises difficult issues of interface and transition between the party disciplinary system and the formal legal system. Finally, it legalises the previously extralegal practice of shuanggui (‘double specifications’) and affects the individual rights of those subject to investigation. The article concludes with some brief reflections on what this development indicates for the future of the rule of law in China, and highlights the potential for further research.

This review of recent scholarship (RRS) paper is a follow-up of the first, published in this journal in 2014. For this RRS paper, we identified and included 304 mixed-methods research (MMR) papers published in 20 top-tier applied linguistics (AL) journals. We used a six-pronged quality and transparency framework to review and analyze the MMR studies, drawing on six quality frameworks and transparency discussions in the MMR literature. Using the quality and transparency framework, we report on: (1) which sources AL MMR researchers use to frame their studies, (2) how explicitly they explain the purpose and design structure of the MMR studies, (3) how transparently they describe method features (sampling procedures, data sources, and data analysis), and (4) how they integrate quantitative and qualitative data and analyses and construct meta-inferences. The results of the analyses will be reported and will show how MMR has developed and is represented in the published articles in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The discussion of the results will also highlight the areas future AL MMR researchers need to consider to make their studies and reports more rigorous and transparent.

In our paper, we study multiplicative properties of difference sets $A-A$ for large sets $A \subseteq {\mathbb {Z}}/q{\mathbb {Z}}$ in the case of composite q. We obtain a quantitative version of a result of A. Fish about the structure of the product sets $(A-A)(A-A)$. Also, we show that the multiplicative covering number of any difference set is always small.

In noncausal explanations, some noncausal facts (such as mathematical, modal, or metaphysical) are used to explain some physical facts. However, precisely because these explanations abstract away from causal facts, they face two challenges: (1) it is not clear why one rather than the other noncausal explanantia would be relevant for the explanandum; and (2) why would standing in a particular explanatory relation (e.g., “counterfactual dependence,” “constraint,” “entailment,” “constitution,” and “grounding”), and not in some other, be explanatory. I develop an explanatory relevance account that is based on erotetic constraints and show how it addresses these two challenges.

Acteonellids were one of the most significant groups of marine macro-invertebrates in the Late Cretaceous biota of the Tethyan Realm. They were common faunal elements associated with Cretaceous carbonate platform communities most notable for their abundance of rudist frameworks and thrived in coeval lagoons. The Upper Cretaceous fossil-bearing Karababa Formation, cropping out in southeastern Turkey, yields a remarkable assemblage of acteonellid gastropods and rudists. Cretaceous gastropods from sedimentary successions in Turkey barely have been studied over the past 80 years. The subgenus Trochactaeon, a very successful and widespread taxon of heterobranch gastropods within the family Acteonellidae, dominated acteonellid assemblages throughout the Late Cretaceous. In the present work, we present the first record of Trochactaeon (Trochactaeon) giganteus subglobosus from Turkey. It is from a single lower Campanian bed in the upper part of the Karababa Formation of the Gölbaşı region (south of Adıyaman), corresponding to the northwestern part of the Arabian Platform. This record complements information on the temporal and spatial distribution of Trochactaeon at the southern margin of the Tethyan Ocean during the last part of the Cretaceous Period. This discovery increases the documented diversity of the paleofauna from the Upper Cretaceous succession in southeastern Turkey and provides new insights into the paleoenvironment of the carbonate ramp of the northern Arabian plate, and the paleobiogeography of Campanian gastropods in general.

Infrastructure has been the focus of geopolitically significant regional strategies, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Highway. Mega-infrastructure projects are thought to offer crucial stimulus to support economic recovery and “infrastructure diplomacy” efforts. Transportation projects, like roads, are material objects that offer complex questions for international law, most obviously when projects or their impacts cross borders. They are long-term and long-distance, with varying impacts upon closer and further populations and environments across the construction and life of the asset. This article draws on insights from new materialism to analyse what infrastructure's entanglements might suggest about international law. The relationship between international law and transportation infrastructure is contingent. However, there is a pattern to this contingency that foregrounds funding “gaps”, investment protections, and risk assessments, which minimizes intersecting impacts and human/non-human relationships.

The “psychologist’s green thumb” refers to the argument that an experimenter needs an indeterminate set of skills to successfully replicate an effect. This argument is sometimes invoked by psychological researchers to explain away failures of independent replication attempts of their work. In this article, I assess the psychologist’s green thumb as a candidate explanation for individual replication failure and argue that it is potentially costly for psychology as a field. I also present other, more likely reasons for these replication failures. I conclude that appealing to a psychologist’s green thumb is not a convincing explanation for replication failure.

Branched-chain amino acids (BCAA: leucine, isoleucine and valine) are three of the nine indispensable amino acids, and are frequently consumed as a dietary supplement by athletes and recreationally active individuals alike. The popularity of BCAA supplements is largely predicated on the notion that they can stimulate rates of muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and suppress rates of muscle protein breakdown (MPB), the combination of which promotes a net anabolic response in skeletal muscle. To date, several studies have shown that BCAA (particularly leucine) increase the phosphorylation status of key proteins within the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signalling pathway involved in the regulation of translation initiation in human muscle. Early research in humans demonstrated that BCAA provision reduced indices of whole-body protein breakdown and MPB; however, there was no stimulatory effect of BCAA on MPS. In contrast, recent work has demonstrated that BCAA intake can stimulate postprandial MPS rates at rest and can further increase MPS rates during recovery after a bout of resistance exercise. The purpose of this evidence-based narrative review is to critically appraise the available research pertaining to studies examining the effects of BCAA on MPS, MPB and associated molecular signalling responses in humans. Overall, BCAA can activate molecular pathways that regulate translation initiation, reduce indices of whole-body and MPB, and transiently stimulate MPS rates. However, the stimulatory effect of BCAA on MPS rates is less than the response observed following ingestion of a complete protein source providing the full complement of indispensable amino acids.