English employs a variety of comparative formation strategies. Theoretical and corpus-based research has established that their distribution depends on a variety of factors. In this article, we take an experimental approach to test analytic, synthetic and double comparative forms in relation to register in American and British English. We report on a rating study investigating the appropriateness and interpretation in terms of evaluativity of the three comparative forms. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that the comparative variants are not considered equally appropriate, but the effect is not as strong as would be expected under the hypothesis that frequency of occurrence is directly related to linguistic judgments. The analytic and double comparative alternatives exhibit lower appropriateness levels than the synthetic comparative. Analytic and double comparative forms are rated as less appropriate in formal than in informal contexts, which did not show an effect on the synthetic form. Furthermore, the analytic variant shows a different behavior in terms of the interpretation than the other forms in that a stronger effect of evaluativity is detected. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for certain hypotheses emerging from corpus-based research.

The experimentally backed and hitherto overlooked empirical observation of the paper is a contrast among indefinite Positive Polarity Items regarding their possibility of being rescued under certain operators with different rescuing potential. If/surprise/only/don’t think can rescue some-indefinites, suspending their anti-licensing (i.e., their impossibility to occur in the scope of a clausemate negation): while some-pronouns (in English and French) and des-indefinites in French exhibit the expected rescuability, English some-NPs remain unexpectedly degraded. Our account relies on the hypothesis that ‘rescuing’ is due to sentential negation being interpreted as ‘external’ (vs. nullified as in most literature). The definition we propose for external negation is syntactic: rescuing operators allow sentential negation to raise to an illocutionary functional projection above Tense Phrase (TP). Thus at LF (Logical Form), the negation takes that higher projection (rather than TP) as complement and becomes harmless for some-indefinites. The semantic correlate of this syntactic proposal is the interpretation of external negation as a propositional operator. As it involves the illocutionary periphery, rescuing is pragmatic in nature. The different rescuing potential between some-pronouns and some-NPs arises from the interplay between their distinct LF-representations and a minimal-event pragmatic constraint on rescuing.

The silent patent ductus arteriosus is currently considered a benign lesion with some practitioners dismissing these patients from cardiac follow-up. We present a 5-year-old male with no known cardiac history who presented with endarteritis in a silent patent ductus arteriosus and underwent successful antibiotic treatment and transcatheter device occlusion.

This article examines the place of colonial Jews and Judaism in the Protestant imagination through the history of Hebrew printing in early America. While scholarship in Christian Hebraism has emphasized points of commonality and interreligious dialogue through shared texts between Judaism and Christianity, this study explores treatments of Hebrew that foreclosed collaboration and conversation between the two groups. The essay offers the term “Protestant Hebrew” to describe how colonial Anglo-American Protestants performed Hebrew to support ministerial authority and to imagine a receptive English-speaking captive Jewish audience for their works. In contrast, diasporic Sephardic Jews treated Hebrew as a necessary instrument for sustaining identity and communication networks across the Atlantic. This disparity was most evident through the publishing culture around Hebrew text types. Colonial printing presses carried just enough Hebrew type for Protestant productions to occasionally adorn their text with Hebrew characters, but never enough to treat it as its own language. Limited types would become a point of frustration for Jewish and Protestant authors who had to rely on printers overseas or on manuscript circulation to publish in Hebrew to a wider audience. Protestant Hebrew demonstrates how the constraints of Anglo-Protestant culture could materialize through the very mechanisms of colonial publishing.

For American archaeology, ceramic styles have historically played a key role in assigning different regional and temporal cultural traditions. San Francisco is one of the earliest pottery styles in northwestern Argentina (NOA; 2000-1500 BP) and has been considered a chronological marker, as it laid the foundation for the development of other ceramic traditions in the NOA region during the Formative period. It is characterized by polished incised gray pieces, bichrome designs, and zooanthropomorphic or anthropomorphic pipes. Regarding the discovery of San Francisco pottery beyond what is considered its core area—the valley of the same name in the eastern part of Jujuy Province—various interpretations have been proposed over the past three decades. These range from the effective occupation of new territories to the exchange, circulation, or imitation of vessels. Based on the composition of ceramic pastes, this research suggests the existence of specific recipes, allowing for the identification of potential local productions and testing hypotheses about the circulation or non local production of San Francisco pottery. Furthermore, the frequent incorporation of grog (chamote) into the fabric is highlighted, reflecting a cohesive manufacturing tradition that persisted over the centuries.

In model-based diagnostics, a simulation model is used to simulate the same operating conditions as the system to be diagnosed to detect and identify anomalies. For this type of analysis, the diagnostic results may be affected by multiple sources of uncertainty. The most common uncertainty to consider is measurement noise. Other sources of uncertainties may originate from the simulation model, instrumentation setup and numerical issues, such as tolerances. While these are often overlooked, they may affect the result to various extent.

In this paper, a multi-point model-based gas path analysis method is proposed and evaluated in the presence of both measurement noise and model uncertainties. The multi-point algorithm addresses the issue of the diagnostic system being underdetermined, having more health parameters than measurements available for diagnostics. It obtains a unique solution through an optimization, where the deviation in health parameter estimation for the operating conditions going into the analysis is minimised. Model uncertainties are introduced in the system by intentionally skewing the characteristics of the rotating components. The objective function is then reconfigured with a, for the gas turbine diagnostic field, novel method taking model uncertainties of the component maps into account. Through this it is possible to reduce the effect of model uncertainties on the diagnostic result. The study shows that through this approach, the uncertainties in diagnostic results are reduced by $3.7{\rm{\% }}$ for the evaluated operating conditions.

We discuss the Singer conjecture and Gromov–Lück inequality $\chi\geq |\sigma|$ for aspherical complex surfaces. We give a proof of the Singer conjecture for aspherical complex surfaces with residually finite fundamental group that does not rely on Gromov’s Kähler groups theory. Without the residually finiteness assumption, we observe that this conjecture can be proven for all aspherical complex surfaces except possibly those in Class $\mathrm{VII}_0^+$ (a positive answer to the global spherical shell conjecture would rule out the existence of aspherical surfaces in this class). We also sharpen the Gromov-Lück inequality for aspherical complex surfaces that are not in Class $\mathrm{VII}_0^+$. This is achieved by connecting the circle of ideas of the Singer conjecture with the study of Reid’s conjecture.

This paper describes the application of the differential evolution (DE) method for synthesizing radiation patterns of two 4×4 microstrip planar antenna arrays. The performance of the DE algorithm was evaluated by optimizing beam steering with simultaneous sidelobe level (SLL) control. Additionally, the algorithm optimizes the cross-polarization decoupling (XPD) to improve the polarization purity. In the optimization process, the active element patterns were incorporated into the DE algorithm to account for mutual coupling and truncation of the ground plane and the substrate in the determination of the excitation coefficients of each array element. The results demonstrate that the DE method can be effectively used to optimize radiation patterns particularly in terms of main beam pointing direction, SLL control, and XPD with fast convergence and low computational cost.

Türkiye is a country with many seismic fault lines and has experienced major earthquakes throughout its history. In history, 2 major earthquakes occurred in Kahramanmaraş province in 1544 and 1795, causing serious destruction and damage. On February 6, 2023, 2 major earthquakes of 7.7 Mw and 7.6 Mw occurred, centered in Kahramanmaraş (Elbistan and Pazarcık). This great disaster affected 11 cities (about 14 million people), mostly Kahramanmaraş, Hatay, and Malatya. According to the latest official report, it resulted in 50 783 deaths and more than 122 000 injuries.1,2