We develop a formal framework for accumulating evidence across studies and apply it to develop theoretical foundations for replication. Our primary contribution is to characterize the relationship between replication and distinct formulations of external validity. Whereas conventional wisdom holds that replication facilitates learning about external validity, we show that this is not, in general, the case. Our results show how comparisons of the magnitude or sign of empirical findings link to distinct concepts of external validity. However, without careful attention to the research design of constituent studies, replication can mislead efforts to assess external validity. We show that two studies must have essentially the same research designs, i.e., be harmonized, in order for their estimates to provide information about any kind of external validity. This result shows that even minor differences in research design between a study and its replication can introduce a discrepancy that is typically overlooked, a problem that becomes more pronounced as the number of studies increases. We conclude by outlining a design-driven approach to replication, which responds to the issues our framework identifies and details how a research agenda can manage them productively.

Japan's Kobe City Museum holds a unique yet overlooked xylographic print of an early seventeenth-century composition that centres on a Chinese-language world map, mounted as a scroll. At first glance, the scroll seems to contain a copy of a well-known composition attributed to the Jesuit Giulio Aleni that is extant at two Italian libraries. It is known in the literature as Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖, after the title of only one of three constitutive parts. Detailed comparison shows that the hitherto unstudied Kobe sheet is significantly older. This observation initiates a discussion of the contents and materiality of the Kobe sheet in three steps. First, a reconstruction of intertextual connections to late Ming books based on the introductory text illustrates the function of the sheet map. Second, the origins of the maps proper are investigated, which, unlike the introductory text, can be traced back to a collaborative book project. In a last step, the afterlife of these map sheets is discussed, further illuminating the genealogy of maps that facilitated the production of the Kobe sheet. Throughout, this article highlights the local co-creation of map artefacts and the necessity to study maps in context, beyond the analysis of their cartographic contents.

This study examines video recordings of activities within an elderly care home, particularly focusing on interactions involving people with dementia. The study presents instances where the relevance of the current conduct—and consequently the generation of a fitting response—appears indeterminate to the co-participant. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the mutually understood ‘constitutive expectancies’ (Garfinkel 1963) and a lack of shared understanding of ‘motivational relevancies’ (Schutz 1970), the participants continue to engage with one another. The analysis reveals that, in the face of an unrecognizable set of conduct and the indeterminacy of subsequent actions before closing down the activity, participants strive to maintain some degree of intersubjectivity by preserving or revisiting the constitutive order of their interaction. This commitment to the ‘co-operative’ nature of human actions (Goodwin 2018) is argued to be central to their interactions. (People with dementia, co-operative actions, conversation analysis, multimodality, ethnomethodology, intersubjectivity)*

This study investigates fragments of the type last I heard/checked based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which shows a steep increase in frequency for this construction in recent decades. Syntactically, ‘last I fragments’ are disjuncts that are positionally mobile with respect to their host clause and their ‘elliptical’ form can be linked to different ‘full’ forms, viz. specificational sentences and temporal adjuncts. Functionally, their underlying evidential meaning gives rise to different, more specific discourse functions depending on contextual use: viz. downtoner, booster and ironic use. A comparison with unreduced (full) forms shows that these fragments are more likely to have evidential meaning, with reduced form thus acting as an important functional signal. Finally, it is argued that their grammatical status is best captured by a constructional account, which identifies them as constructionalizing units, rather than a simple ellipsis account.

We suggest a novel theoretical analysis of what is known as the reactive what-x construction. This construction, which has recently been noticed and described in Põldvere & Paradis (2019, 2020), has primarily clarificational properties and requires the presence of an antecedent in the preceding context. We begin by summarizing its syntactic properties and main functions, based on data drawn from the London–Lund Corpora of spoken British English, and then address a pattern that has escaped notice thus far, i.e. that the majority of the instances of this construction feature a type of ellipsis known as fragments. Departing from the analysis articulated in Põldvere & Paradis (2020), we present one that captures the elliptical properties of the reactive what-x construction by assimilating it to two classes of fragments: those serving as reprise utterances and those serving as direct utterances. Our analysis relies on Ginzburg & Sag's (2000) detailed analysis of reprise and direct fragments couched within a non-sententialist approach to ellipsis. This allows us to analyze the reactive what-x construction as a type of an in-situ interrogative clause whose elliptical properties are licensed by a version of the constraint Ginzburg & Sag (2000) use to license fragments.

The initial and updated Society of Thoracic Surgeons-European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (STAT and STAT 2020) and Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-1 and Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-2 scoring systems are validated to predict early postoperative mortality following congenital heart surgery in children; however, their ability to predict long-term mortality has not been examined. We performed a retrospective cohort study using data from the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium, a US-based registry of cardiac interventions in 47 participating centres between 1982 and 2011. Patients included in this cohort analysis had select congenital heart surgery representing the spectrum of severity as determined by STAT and Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-1 and were less than 21 years of age. We applied STAT, STAT 2020, Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-1, and Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-2 for prediction of early mortality and long-term postoperative survival probability by surgical risk category. Long-term outcomes were obtained by matching Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium patients with deaths reported in the National Death Index through 2021. Of 20,753 eligible patients, 18,755 survived the postoperative period and 2,058 deaths occurred over a median follow up of 24.4 years (Interquartile Range: 21–28.4). Each scoring system performed well for predicting early postoperative mortality with the following c-statistics: STAT: 0.7872, Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-1: 0.7872, STAT 2020: 0.7724 and Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-2: 0.7668. The predictive ability for long-term risk of death was as follows: STAT: 0.6995, Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-1 c = 0.6741, Risk Adjusted Classification for Congenital Heart Surgery-2: 0.7156 and STAT 2020: c = 0.7156. Risk-adjusted score systems for congenital heart surgery maintain adequate but diminishing discriminative power to predict long-term mortality. Future efforts are warranted to develop a tool with improved long-term survival prediction.

Historians have written copiously about the shift to ‘germ theories’ of disease around the turn of the twentieth century, but in these accounts an entire continent has been left out: Antarctica. This article begins to rebalance our historiography by bringing cold climates back into the story of environmental medicine and germ theory. It suggests three periods of Antarctic (human) microbial research – heroic sampling, systematic studies, and viral space analogue – and examines underlying ideas about ‘purity’ and infection, the realities of fieldwork, and the use of models in biomedicine. It reveals Antarctica not as an isolated space but as a deeply complex, international, well-networked node in global science ranging from the first international consensus on pandemic-naming through to space flight.

Dynamic models of aggregate public opinion are increasingly popular, but to date they have been restricted to unidimensional latent traits. This is problematic because in many domains the structure of mass preferences is multidimensional. We address this limitation by deriving a multidimensional ordinal dynamic group-level item response theory (MODGIRT) model. We describe the Bayesian estimation of the model and present a novel workflow for dealing with the difficult problem of identification. With simulations, we show that MODGIRT recovers aggregate parameters without estimating subject-level ideal points and is robust to moderate violations of assumptions. We further validate the model by reproducing at the group level an existing individual-level analysis of British attitudes towards redistribution. We then reanalyze a recent cross-national application of a group-level item response theory model, replacing its domain-specific confirmatory approach with an exploratory MODGIRT model. We describe extensions to allow for overdispersion, differential item functioning, and group-level predictors. A publicly available R package implements these methods.

Dynamic latent variable models generally link units’ positions on a latent dimension over time via random walks. Theoretically, these trajectories are often expected to resemble a mixture of periods of stability interrupted by moments of change. In these cases, a prior distribution such as the regularized horseshoe—that allows for both stasis and change—can prove a better theoretical and empirical fit for the underlying construct than other priors. Replicating Reuning, Kenwick, and Fariss (2019), we find that the regularized horseshoe performs better than the standard normal and the Student’s t-distribution when modeling dynamic latent variable models. Overall, the use of the regularized horseshoe results in more accurate and precise estimates. More broadly, the regularized horseshoe is a promising prior for many similar applications.

In many species with encapsulated larval development, the larvae play an active role in hatching. However, the factors that control when the larvae hatch from each egg-capsule within an egg-mass are largely unknown. Advanced egg-masses of the gastropod Crepipatella peruviana were used to determine the hatching time of capsules from each egg-mass. After each female was detached, the egg-mass was also removed from the substrate and all capsules were then counted and measured. All capsules were examined to determine the time of hatching and the order in which capsules hatched from each egg-mass. Larvae were collected from each hatched egg-capsule and the number, size and weight of larvae from each capsule were determined. After 50–60% of the capsules from each egg-mass had hatched, the same characteristics of the remaining unhatched larvae from sister capsules were documented. Larvae were found to have hatched when they reached a size of 354 ± 22 μm (n = 245). Larvae from capsules within the same egg-mass hatched over a period of up to 12-days. The order of hatching in capsules from the same egg-mass was determined by larval content: capsules with fewer larvae and smaller capsules with heavier larvae hatched first. The hatching from one capsule in any given egg-mass did not induce the hatching of its sister capsules. Furthermore, hatching also occurred successfully in the mother absence, suggesting that this process is largely or completely controlled by the encapsulated larvae, although a possible maternal role in synchronizing hatching cannot be excluded.

Ionella fimbriata sp. nov. is described from a pair of bopyrid isopods attached to a male specimen of the ghost shrimp Neocallichirus grandimana collected in Veracruz, Mexico. This is the fifth species belonging to Ionella but the first one recorded from the Atlantic Ocean, which represents an important extension of its distribution range because until now all Ionella species were known from the Pacific Ocean. Females of I. fimbriata sp. nov. can be differentiated from the others of the genus by a barbula with one stout, acute, falcate projection on each side and medial margin with triangular rounded projections; seven pairs of pereopods with elongate cuticular extensions on bases and ischia, and five pairs of tuberculated biramous pleopods of pinnate shape. Males can be recognized by five pairs of globose biramous pleopods, in which endopods are longer than exopods, and uropods longer than pleopods. Description and illustrations of both the female and male I. fimbriata sp. nov. are provided, as well as keys for both sexes of all species in the genus. The fecundity, embryo size and volume of I. fimbriata sp. nov. are reported.

Successful language-based interaction depends on the reciprocal interplay of two or more speakers. The production of structural fragments rather than ‘full’ clausal units plays a crucial role for this interplay. This article provides an outline of a descriptive framework labeled ‘dual-mind syntax’, which is designed for describing the social signature in spoken syntax. Fragments are not analyzed as deficient and ‘incomplete’ syntactic units, but as a communicative practice used to design structures in a responsive-contingent fashion in social interaction. Based on empirical data coming from recorded natural interactions, it will be shown how speakers use syntactic fragments for coordinating actions and collaborative structure-building and for contributing to the emergence of a structurally integrated, coherent whole.

This study focused on a detailed mineralogical and crystal-chemical analysis of Mg-smectites from four bentonite samples from Turkey. Mg-rich smectites, mainly associated with alkaline and evaporitic depositional conditions, are formed in environments such as salt lakes, brine springs, and sabkhas, as well as in hydrothermal systems, in some cases by transformation from other phyllosilicates. Saponite has also been documented on the surface of Mars. The systems that produce Mg-smectites are less common than those that produce dioctahedral Al-smectites and consequently Mg-rich smectites are less abundant than dioctahedral smectites. For this reason, information on nanoscale mineralogy and crystal chemistry of Mg-smectites is relatively lacking. In this study, X-ray diffraction, thermal analysis and electron microscopy were used to study Mg-smectites. The crystal chemistry of single crystals determined with analytical electron microscopy in transmission electron microscopy (AEM-TEM) revealed that all samples had notable variability in the composition of individual crystals, such that no point analysis resulted in ideal structural formulae for saponite, stevensite, sepiolite, or palygorskite. They contain SiO2 content greater than that corresponding to a Mg-smectite, even stevensite, and often are intermediate to Mg-smectites and the sepiolite-palygorskite series. Meanwhile, the number of octahedral cations is small for fibrous clay minerals. Neither the point analysis of smectitic particles nor the mean structural formula fit properly for Mg-smectites showing crystallochemistry complexity. The results of these point analyses, in which no contamination has been observed, suggest that these smectites have intermediate compositions between trioctahedral smectites and sepiolite-palygorskite, indicating nanometer-scale intergrowths of these minerals in Mg-rich clay deposits.

We have used multiple regression analyses to develop a series of metabolisable energy prediction equations from chemical analyses of pig diets that can be extended to murine diets. We compiled four datasets from an extensive range of published metabolism studies with grower/finisher and adult pigs. The analytes in the datasets were increasingly complex, comprising (1) the proximate or Weende analysis, (2) the previous analysis but with neutral detergent fibre replacing crude fibre, (3) the neutral detergent fibre package plus starch and (4) the neutral detergent fibre package plus starch and sugars. Diet manufacturers routinely provide most of the analytes for batches of murine diet, or they are easily obtainable. The study uniquely compares the four analytical packages side by side. The number of records in the datasets varies from 367 to 827. With increasing analytical complexity, adjusted R2 values for metabolisable energy prediction improved from 0·751 to 0·869 and the mean absolute error from 0·422 to 0·289 kJ/g. Overall, the models’ prediction interval improved from 1 to 0·7 kJ/g, which is ± 7 to 5 % for a typical dietary metabolisable energy density of 14·8 kJ/g. Although prediction accuracy increases as one extends the range and complexity of the analytes measured, the improvement is slight and may not justify the substantial increase in analytical cost. The equations were validated for use on future datasets by k-fold analysis. Although the equations are developed from pig data, they are suitable for rat and mouse diets, based on comparable digestibility measurements, and substantially improve existing methods.

Prokaryotic microorganisms, comprising Bacteria and Archaea, exhibit a fascinating diversity of cell envelope structures reflecting their adaptations that contribute to their resilience and survival in diverse environments. Among these adaptations, surface layers (S-layers) composed of monomolecular protein or glycoprotein lattices are one of the most observed envelope components. They are the most abundant cellular proteins and represent the simplest biological membranes that have developed during evolution. S-layers provide organisms with a great variety of selective advantages, including acting as an antifouling layer, protective coating, molecular sieve, ion trap, structure involved in cell and molecular adhesion, surface recognition and virulence factor for pathogens. In Archaea that possess S-layers as the exclusive cell wall component, the (glyco)protein lattices function as a cell shape-determining/maintaining scaffold. The wealth of information available on the structure, chemistry, genetics and in vivo and in vitro morphogenesis has revealed a broad application potential for S-layers as patterning elements in a molecular construction kit for bio- and nanotechnology, synthetic biology, biomimetics, biomedicine and diagnostics. In this review, we try to describe the scientifically exciting early days of S-layer research with a special focus on the ‘Vienna-S-Layer-Group’. Our presentation is intended to illustrate how our curiosity and joy of discovery motivated us to explore this new structure and to make the scientific community aware of its relevance in the realm of prokaryotes, and moreover, how we developed concepts for exploiting this unique self-assembly structure. We hope that our presentation, with its many personal notes, is also of interest from the perspective of the history of S-layer research.