As social and educational landscapes continue to change, especially around issues of inclusivity, there is an urgent need to reexamine how individuals from diverse linguistic backgrounds are perceived. Speakers are often misjudged due to listeners’ stereotypes about their social identities, resulting in biased language judgments that can limit educational and professional opportunities. Much research has demonstrated listeners’ biases toward L2-accented speech, i.e., perceiving accented utterances as less credible, less grammatical, or less acceptable for certain professional positions, due to their bias and stereotyping issues. Then, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has emerged as a viable alternative to mitigate listeners’ biased judgments. It serves as a tool for assessing L2-accented speech as well as establishing intelligibility thresholds for accented speech. It is also used to assess characteristics such as gender, age, and mood in AI facial-analysis systems. However, these AI systems or current technologies still may hold racial or accent biases. Accordingly, the current paper will discuss both human listeners’ and AI’ bias issues toward L2 speech, illustrating such phenomena in various contexts. It concludes with specific recommendations and future directions for research and pedagogical practices.

An highly miniaturized multiband polarizer for C to Ka-band applications is proposed. The polarizer design consists of resonating patch printed on top of the FR-4 grounded substrate. During reflection, the x/y polarized incident EM wave becomes circularly polarized with Axial Ratio (AR ≤ 3 dB) from 7.88 to 8.01 GHz, 9.01 to 11.65 GHz, 15.36 to 36.57 GHz, and 31.88 to 35.38 GHz, respectively. In addition, this design also demonstrates linear–cross conversion with a minimum 90% Polarization Conversion Ratio (PCR) from 8.28 to 8.60 GHz, 12.56 to 14.19 GHz, and 28.26 to 30.59 GHz. Transfer Matrix Method (TMM) explains the polarization conversion phenomena, and surface current distribution at resonant frequencies supports the multi-polarization conversion phenomena. The proposed design is compact with a periodicity of 0.063λL × 0.076 λL, where λL is the free-space wavelength corresponding to the lowest operating frequency. The fabricated prototype is verified experimentally. The authors believe that the features of the proposed design, like multiband, miniaturized unit cell architecture, and better angular stability, make it a promising contender for satellite applications.

One of the central insights of critical and constructivist International Relations (IR) scholarship is that identity-seeking matters in world politics. Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has expanded on this insight, emphasising that actors may prioritise maintaining a stable sense of self over physical security and other concerns. Yet the question of radical identity change, particularly its affective dimension, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we draw on Lacanian psychoanalysis and argue that ontological security is sustained by fantasies aimed at filling a primordial lack that can never be resolved. This lack generates anxiety, which actors attempt to soothe by attaching their desires to empirical signifiers – objects-cause of desire – that promise wholeness. Our argument centres on the idea that the rearticulation of desire occurs through the affective mechanism of catharsis, manifesting as either metaphor or metonymy. We illustrate our argument through the case of Serbia’s cathartic (re)articulation of Kosovo as its object-cause of desire. In particular, we juxtapose earlier successful articulations of Kosovo as a metaphoric substitution for other desires with more recent, less effective attempts to rearticulate the north of Kosovo and the submerged cultural heritage in Gazivode Lake as metonymic substitutions for the rest of the territory.

The study will focus on the German philosopher, Richard Schaeffler (1926–2019). Schaeffler wanted to create a new transcendental philosophy by developing Kant’s thought and thereby a new form of Christian philosophy. In his texts, he not only sketched the contours of a possible Christian transcendental philosophy, but his philosophy is already just such a philosophy. The aim of the study is to answer two questions: How did Schaeffler understand Christian philosophy, and what is specific about his Christian philosophy? In answering these questions, I will briefly compare Richard Schaeffler and Gianni Vattimo, who considered his philosophy to be Christian. The specific character of Christian philosophy – not only of Schaeffler’s – will be highlighted against the background of Vattimo’s philosophy, and the limits and deficiencies of Vattimo’s ‘Christian philosophy’ will be shown against the background of Schaeffler’s thought.

We establish the higher fractional differentiability for the minimizers of non-autonomous integral functionals of the form

\begin{align*}\mathcal{F}(u,\Omega):=\int_\Omega \left[ f(x,Du)- g \cdot u \right] dx ,\end{align*}

under (p, q)-growth conditions. Besides a suitable differentiability assumption on the partial map $x \mapsto D_\xi f(x,\xi)$, we do not need to assume any differentiability assumption on the function g.

We investigate the Lorentzian analogues of Riemannian Bianchi–Cartan–Vranceanu spaces. We provide their general description and emphasize their role in the classification of three-dimensional homogeneous Lorentzian manifolds with a four-dimensional isometry group. We then illustrate their geometric properties (with particular regard to curvature, Killing vector fields and their description as Lorentzian Lie groups) and we study several relevant classes of surfaces (parallel, totally umbilical, minimal, constant mean curvature) in these homogeneous Lorentzian three-manifolds.