One of the earliest discoveries of Permo-Carboniferous terrestrial vertebrates in North America occurred in 1875 along Horseshoe Bend, a cutbank on the Salt Fork of the Vermilion River west of Danville, Vermilion County, east-central Illinois. The discovery was soon eclipsed by the description of similar but much more complete remains from the Lower Permian of Texas in 1878. The deposit itself was obliterated by slumping and erosion in the earliest 1900s and has not been collected since despite repeated efforts. Previously unreported outcrop records and subsurface data indicate that the deposit originated as a paleochannel fill in the Inglefield Sandstone Member of the Patoka Formation, which underlies the Macoupin Limestone Member (early Missourian Stage of the Midcontinent, early Kasimovian Stage of global Carboniferous time scale). In addition to aquatic to terrestrial tetrapods, teeth of lungfishes (Sagenodus Owen, 1867, Conchopoma Cope, 1877a, Gnathorhiza Cope, 1883a) and teeth, occipital spines, and coprolites of a xenacanth shark (Orthacanthus Agassiz, 1838) are known from Horseshoe Bend. The teeth of the marine petalodont shark Janassa Münster, 1839, also are present in the collection but presumed to have been derived from one of the beds on the cutbank that produced brackish to marine invertebrate fossils. Alhough not diverse, the tetrapod assemblage is significant in that it contains the oldest diplocaulid amphibian (Diplocaulus salamandroides Cope, 1877a), fragmentary remains of the oldest diadectid and limnoscelid stem reptiles, and possibly the oldest captorhinid eureptile, all of which have not been adequately described. The ophiacodontid synapsid Clepsydrops Cope, 1875, is the most common fossil at Danville, which could be an artifact of primitive collecting methods that did not promote the recovery of articulated material. An accurate stratigraphic placement of the Horseshoe Bend deposit and a review of other late Carboniferous tetrapod localities reveals that this important Illinois locality combines an overlooked vanguard of terrestrial taxa regarded as Permo-Carboniferous (Kasimovian-Asselian) and amphibious to aquatic forms known from older, Moscovian deposits.

Let F be a non-archimedean local field of characteristic not equal to 2. In this article, we prove the local converse theorem for quasi-split $\mathrm {O}_{2n}(F)$ and $\mathrm {SO}_{2n}(F)$, via the description of the local theta correspondence between $\mathrm {O}_{2n}(F)$ and $\mathrm {Sp}_{2n}(F)$. More precisely, as a main step, we explicitly describe the precise behavior of the $\gamma $-factors under the correspondence. Furthermore, we apply our results to prove the weak rigidity theorems for irreducible generic cuspidal automorphic representations of $\mathrm {O}_{2n}(\mathbb {A})$ and $\mathrm {SO}_{2n}(\mathbb {A})$, respectively, where $\mathbb {A}$ is a ring of adele of a global number field L.

This article examines recent developments in English language education in Vietnam, contextualising them within contemporary sociopolitical and cultural discourses. It begins by tracing the historical emergence and evolution of English in Vietnam before examining its role in the education system. The article then critically discusses Project 2020, Vietnam's largest language education initiative, and its profound impact on the country's language education landscape. Finally, it presents three notable trends significantly shaped by Project 2020: the increasing prevalence of IELTS preparation, the rise of second-career language teachers, and the emergence of communities of practice for English teachers.

Chan and Seceleanu have shown that if a weighted shift operator on $\ell^p(\mathbb{Z})$, $1\leq p \lt \infty$, admits an orbit with a non-zero limit point then it is hypercyclic. We present a new proof of this result that allows to extend it to very general sequence spaces. In a similar vein, we show that, in many sequence spaces, a weighted shift with a non-zero weakly sequentially recurrent vector has a dense set of such vectors, but an example on $c_0(\mathbb{Z})$ shows that such an operator is not necessarily hypercyclic. On the other hand, we obtain that weakly sequentially hypercyclic weighted shifts are hypercyclic. Chan and Seceleanu have, moreover, shown that if an adjoint multiplication operator on a Bergman space admits an orbit with a non-zero limit point then it is hypercyclic. We extend this result to very general spaces of analytic functions, including the Hardy spaces.

Multi-party systems play an important role in African democracy and constitutionalism. Against the African backdrop, political parties are indispensable in promoting constitutional values, enhancing political stability and realizing the effectiveness of constitutions. Recognizing the importance of political parties, African constitutions introduce many provisions confirming rights relating to political parties, recognizing their central role in elections, enhancing the internal solidarity of the parties and protecting the opposition. Meanwhile, due to concern regarding the negative impact of party politics, African constitutions also show hesitation about public funding to political parties, set controls on their programmes and organization, and demand many public office holders to be party neutral. Therefore, in African constitutions one can find a high expectation on political parties as constitutional institutions, while deep suspicion against them as individual organizations, which reflects the dilemma that African constitutionalism and democracy is facing in its development.

The expansion of schooling in the early 20th Century required the modernization of state governments at the subnational level and related fiscal policy reform. Organized educators in California and Washington promoted legislation in 1920 that would increase each state’s support for schooling. In spite of similar fiscal policy goals and a shared commitment to the support of public schooling in both states, the legislation passed in California and failed in Washington. This comparative analysis of fiscal policy reform in the two states demonstrates the relationship between education fiscal policy and state formation, between tax policy and social change, the role of states as subnational sites for fiscal policy experimentation in the early twentieth century, and the role of policy feedback in fiscal policy reform. A close study of factors contributing to the divergent legislative outcomes illuminates underlying relationships between fiscal policy and associative action at state levels over the 70-year-period preceding the 1920 reform campaigns and demonstrates the centrality of education to research in fiscal sociology and political development.

Nations are revising dietary guidelines to include sustainability recommendations in response to climate change concerns. Given low adherence to current guidelines, consumer inertia is a challenge. A proliferation of nutrition information providers and dietary messages contributes to confusion. All this suggests that health professionals will face considerable obstacles in facilitating a population shift towards sustainable and healthy (SuHe) diets. This review explores the role of nutrition science in shaping dietary behaviour and the challenges of shifting the nutrition narrative to encompass both health and sustainability. Societal transformation towards the ‘asks’ of a SuHe diet will rely on consumer-level transformation of food acquisition, preparation, consumption, storage and disposal behaviours. Acceptance of a higher share of plant-based food and a reduction in animal protein in the diet is likely to provoke disorientations as consumers’ previously unexamined beliefs are challenged. The challenges presented by portion size distortion, protein reduction and replacement, and the role of ultra-processed food are discussed here in terms of sources of confusion. The routes to change involve deeper understanding of responses to disorientations through processes of belief formation and transformation, which are the foundations of subjective knowledge and attitudes, likely mediated through affective factors. In tandem with introducing new potentially disorienting-to-consumers information, health professionals need to consider the environments where this information is presenting and consider how these environments are designed to support action. In doing so, reactance and backlash through belief rejection and behavioural non-adherence could be reduced.

Long-term growth expectations are central to investment analysis and corporate valuation. Despite a dominant effect on firm value, the academic literature and practitioner conventions provide little guidance on determining this long-term growth rate. This article takes a step in addressing this gap: we estimate the relationship between long-term growth and an extensive selection of firm, industry, and market characteristics. Market prices do not seem to fully capture long-term growth information. Cross sectional tests yield substantial positive abnormal returns for firms with high expected long-term growth.

We provide a fine classification of bisimilarities between states of possibly different labelled Markov processes (LMP). We show that a bisimilarity relation proposed by Panangaden that uses direct sums coincides with “event bisimilarity” from his joint work with Danos, Desharnais, and Laviolette. We also extend Giorgio Bacci’s notions of bisimilarity between two different processes to the case of nondeterministic LMP and generalize the game characterization of state bisimilarity by Clerc et al. for the latter.

The dissolution kinetics occurring on clay minerals are influenced by various factors, including pH, temperature and mineral lattice structure. However, the influence of the surfactant is rarely studied. In the present work, cationic surfactants were investigated in terms of the dissolution of clay minerals in acidic environments. Kaolinite was selected as the representative clay mineral. The cationic surfactant inhibited the dissolution of clay minerals because it limited the attack of H+ on the kaolinite surface and then inhibited the dissolution of kaolinite by modifying the hydrophilicity of the kaolinite surface towards hydrophobicity. The inhibition ability of the surfactant might be related to its molecular structure and the type of acid used in dissolution experiments.

We address the inverse problem for holomorphic germs of a mapping of the complex line near a fixed point which is tangent to the identity. We provide a preferred parabolic map $\Delta $ realizing a given Birkhoff–Écalle–Voronin modulus $\psi $ and prove its uniqueness in the functional class we introduce. The germ is the time-$1$ map of a Gevrey formal vector field admitting meromorphic sums on a pair of infinite sectors covering the Riemann sphere. For that reason, the analytic continuation of $\Delta $ is a multivalued map admitting finitely many branch points with finite monodromy. In particular, $\Delta $ is holomorphic and injective on an open slit sphere containing $0$ (the initial fixed point) and $\infty $, where the companion parabolic point is situated under the involution ${-1}/{\mathrm {Id}}$. One finds that the Birkhoff–Écalle–Voronin modulus of the parabolic germ at $\infty $ is the inverse $\psi ^{\circ -1}$ of that at $0$.

Macroscopically, a Darcian unsaturated moisture flow in the top soil is usually represented by an one-dimensional volume scale of evaporation from a static water table. On the microscale, simple pore-level models posit bundles of small-radius capillary tubes of a constant circular cross-section, fully occupied by mobile water moving in the Hagen–Poiseuille (HP) regime, while large-diameter pores are occupied by stagnant air. In our paper, cross-sections of cylindrical pores are polygonal. Steady, laminar, fully developed two-dimensional flows of Newtonian water in prismatic conduits, driven by a constant pressure gradient along a pore gradient, are more complex than the HP formula; this is based on the fact that the pores are only partially occupied by water and immobile air. The Poisson equation in a circular tetragon, with no-slip or mixed (no-shear-stress) boundary conditions on the two adjacent pore walls and two menisci, is solved by the methods of complex analysis. The velocity distribution is obtained via the Keldysh–Sedov type of singular integrals, and the flow rate is evaluated for several sets of meniscus radii by integrating the velocity over the corresponding tetragons.