We give a general construction of the motivic path space based at tangential basepoints, extending previous works of P. Deligne, A. B. Goncharov and M. Levine, which were limited to ordinary basepoints or to specific varieties. Given a smooth variety over a field endowed with a simple normal crossings divisor, we encode its tangential basepoints using the language of logarithmic geometry. Building on the recent construction by F. Binda, D. Park and P. A. Østvær of a stable $\infty $-category of $\mathbb {A}^1$-invariant logarithmic motives and its comparison with the usual category of motives, we define in a functorial manner the associated motivic pointed path spaces. In the presence of a motivic t-structure, truncating yields the motivic fundamental groupoid. In general, we construct Betti and de Rham realization functors for logarithmic motives (linearizing the construction of F. Binda, D. Park and P. A. Østvær for the Betti case) and we show that the periods of the motivic fundamental groupoid are given by regularized iterated integration of logarithmic differential $1$-forms, thus yielding a general version of Chen’s theorem with tangential basepoints.

Establishing causality in nutritional science is difficult. Human diets are complex, and individuals vary substantially in how they respond to dietary exposures. The nutrition literature mostly relies on observational studies, which are vulnerable to confounding and measurement error. Twin-based randomized controlled trials (RCTs), especially the co-twin control design, offer a compelling methodological solution to many of these challenges. This design enables researchers to distinguish genetic from environmental influences on health outcomes. The present scoping review was conducted to systematically map twin RCTs in nutrition science, evaluate their methodological approaches, and identify gaps and opportunities for future research. A comprehensive search across clinical trial registries and electronic databases yielded only 13 eligible studies, demonstrating that co-twin randomized dietary interventions remain rare relative to standard study designs using nontwins or twins assigned to the same arm. The interventions used in these eligible RCTs could be classified into four groups: dietary pattern interventions, nutrient- or supplement-based interventions, dietary component modification, and behavioral or multimodal interventions. This limited number of studies may be explained by recruitment challenges and concerns about generalizability. Greater international collaboration, standardized trial protocols, and integration of emerging technologies could expand the utility of twin designs in nutrition science.

In an effort to conceptually replicate prior work on persuasion and campaign effects, we conducted three randomized survey experiments to evaluate the persuasive effects of political advertisements during the 2025 Canadian federal election. We tested a total of 15 campaign advertisements on 3,346 respondents. Our results are consistent with what seems to be three robust findings about the effects of campaign advertising: (1) they can change candidate evaluations and vote intentions, but (2) the effects are very small, and most importantly, (3) persuasive treatment effects seem to be mostly homogeneous. We offer new empirical evidence that strengthens previous findings on the homogeneity of persuasive treatment effects of political advertising in Canada that challenges the extent to which microtargeting improves candidates and advocacy groups’ ability to sway public opinion.

This paper analyzes two interrelated strategies for using mechanistic evidence as a political instrument of social power, the Wedge and the Buttress. I compare two policy skirmishes over contraception and abortion pills. First, Pro-Life critics of emergency contraception aimed to undermine the switch to over-the-counter access. They drove a Wedge into the proposed mechanism, stalling policy change by raising politically motivated doubts. Second, Pro-Choice advocates of medication abortion tried counteracting mail-order restrictions. They Buttressed with new evidence to preempt their opponents before the COVID-19 pandemic. I explain the interplay between these strategies, their political motivations, and their relative empirical character.

In this paper, we introduce the symmetric normaliser graph of a group G. The vertex set of this graph consists of the elements of the group. Vertices x and y are adjacent if x lies in the normaliser of $\langle y \rangle $ and y lies in the normaliser of $\langle x \rangle $. We investigate the position this graph occupies in the hierarchy of graphs defined on groups. We show that the existing hierarchy is further refined by this graph and that the edges of this graph lie between the edges of the commuting graph and the nilpotent graph. For finite groups, we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the symmetric normaliser graph to be equal to the commuting graph, and similarly, for equality with the nilpotent graph. The edge set of the symmetric normaliser graph is also a subset of the edge set of the Engel graph of a group and has connections to the nongenerating graph of a group.

It is an ugly and dispiriting thing to bear witness to the full measure of horror in the United States’ past and present of racial domination. A history running from genocide, colonization, and enslavement through lynch law and Jim Crow to contemporary mass incarceration and organized abandonment attests not only to the longevity of white supremacy, but its creative capacities for reorganization and institutional innovation. In view of this long national nightmare, what could sustain faith in the dream of a multiracial democracy that has not yet materialized—and may never come to be?

In the aftermath of formal independence, two institutions, the East African Court of Appeal (EACA) and the University of Dar es Salaam School of Law, became important international barometers of the potential of post-colonial legal radicalism. Due to the unique power of federal Pan-Africanism in East Africa, the EACA survived the wave of dissolution that claimed similar colonial courts of law. If the EACA represented the formal apotheosis of one version of supranational law, it was the law school at the University of Dar es Salaam, which produced a deeper and wider development of legal thought about the circumstances of law in East Africa. The scholarship produced in Dar es Salaam not only undergirded the legal academies of multiple East African nations but proved globally influential for several left and left-liberal schools of thought. Despite the loose and imperfect coordination of these parallel bodies, the project of East African law shared by the Court and University provides unique insights into the opening for anticolonial or heterodox visions of the law that existed in the opening of twentieth century decolonization and independence. The legal institutions of federal Pan-Africanism usefully illustrate both the unexpected successes and structural limitations on atypical iterations of internationalist Global South legal radicalism.

This article explores the discursive and multimodal strategies through which leadership is accomplished collectively among the coaches of a professional football team. We demonstrate the benefits of using a modified version of Drath and colleagues’ (2008) DAC ontology in sociolinguistic research, and we show what can be gained by conceptualising leadership as a process rather than a set of behaviours or traits associated with an individual in a senior position. Drawing on authentic audio- and video-recordings of the interactions among the coaches of a national football team during a live match, and utilising the analytical concepts of epistemic and deontic status and stance (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2014), we describe some of the complex discursive and multimodal processes through which leadership unfolds across a web of different interactions, taking place at different moments and in different locations throughout the match. (DAC ontology, collective leadership, professional football, web of leadership)

Modern aviation supports an ever-broader range of civil and military missions, and the airframes designed for these missions must satisfy stringent safety and performance requirements. The takeoff and landing phases are the most accident-prone portions of a flight despite representing only a short interval of the total block time, which makes the accurate prediction of takeoff speed a safety-relevant problem. A previous machine learning study addressed the takeoff-speed prediction problem of the Boeing 737-300 with classical regressors using pressure altitude, outside air temperature, gross weight and flap angle as the predictors. In the present work, the same regression problem is revisited under the deep learning paradigm. Four neural architectures are trained on an identical pre-processing pipeline and train-validation partition, namely a multilayer perceptron, a one-dimensional convolutional network, a long short-term memory network and a wide-and-deep architecture incorporating multi-head self-attention. Among the four candidates, the long short-term memory network attains the lowest root mean square error and mean square error on the unseen test file and is subsequently subjected to Bayesian hyperparameter optimisation through the Keras Tuner library. The predicted and the measured takeoff speeds are reported side by side for the first time in the deep learning literature for this airframe, and the simulation results indicate that the developed networks constitute an effective alternative tool for takeoff-speed prediction.

The article examines politically loaded catchphrases and their development and transformation in the discourses of Russian-speaking social media users. It focuses on how propaganda catchphrases, used to transmit political messages, acquire new meanings and applications in online communication, and how this process is shaped by the specific context of the Baltic states, where the Russian population underwent minoritization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The data was collected in the course of longitudinal (2021–2025) ethnographic online observation, primarily from posts and comments in public Facebook groups localized in Estonia. Applying conversational analysis of online data, the article investigates the life cycle of specific words and phrases to show how they evolve into complex indexical signs and even systems of signs used to define not only the referenced objects but also the speaking subjects, their audiences, and the sets of ideas they tend to identify with. Using them as discourse devices, Baltic Russian speakers in their public online communication oppose the official discourses of their respective states; in doing so, however, they do not simply transmit the Kremlin propaganda, but rather creatively repurpose local discourses and contexts, building echo chambers of their own.

Drawing data from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and employing 14 quantitative syntactic complexity metrics, this study investigates the relationships between British English (BrE), Canadian English (CanE), American English (AmE), Northern Ireland English (IreNE), Southern Ireland English (IreSE), Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE). The study found that: 1) Compared with BrE, the other six varieties demonstrate a measurable trend towards structural simplification, primarily characterized by a lower proportion of subordinate clauses (DC/T, DC/C, CT/T, C/T), fewer verb and complex noun phrases (VP/T, CN/T), shorter mean length of sentence and T-unit (MLS, MLT), and simpler sentence structure (C/S). Meanwhile, they exhibit complexification features in coordination structures (CP/C, T/S) and clause length (MLC). 2) CanE, AmE, IreNE, IreSE, AusE and NZE show similar syntactic complexity patterns, which differ from BrE. Language history and language contact resulting from population mobility are important factors influencing CanE, AmE, IreNE, IreSE, AusE and NZE to present more similar syntactic complexity patterns. The insight provided by this study is that although these English varieties all belong to the Inner Circle in Kachru’s Three Circles Model, they still show differences in syntactic complexity. This finding once again shows that language is a human-driven complex adaptive system.