This study examines how human activities influenced soil development at two contrasting Arctic sites: Maiva, a 19th-century farmstead, and Snuvrejohka, a seasonal Sámi reindeer herding settlement in the Lake Torneträsk region, northern Sweden. Using geochemical and geophysical soil analyses, we explore the spatial distribution and vertical development of anthropogenic signals in the soil. At Maiva, prolonged agricultural use and earthworm bioturbation have led to extensive soil mixing and altered soil horizons, resulting in elevated phosphate, lead, and organic matter concentrations in Ap and Ah horizons. In contrast, Snuvrejohka displays more stratified profiles with localized chemical enrichment around hearths, primarily within E horizons. These results highlight how different land-use practices leave distinct geochemical fingerprints in Arctic soils and emphasize the need for sampling strategies adapted to site-specific soil formation processes. Our findings demonstrate that even short-term or seasonal human activities can leave distinct and detectable signatures in Arctic soils. Through an integrated approach combining soil science, geoarchaeological methods, and historical data, this study provides new insights into the reconstruction of past land-use practices and highlights the vulnerability of archaeological soil records in Arctic environments facing rapid climate-driven change.

Explorations of ideology retain special significance in contemporary studies of judicial politics. While some existing methodologies draw on voting patterns and coalition alignments to map a jurist’s latent features, many are otherwise reliant on supplemental proxies – often directly from adjacent actors or via assessments from various prognosticators. We propose an alternative that not only leverages observable judicial behavior, but does so through jurists’ articulations on the law. In particular, we adapt a hierarchical factor model to demonstrate how latent ideological preferences emerge through the written text of opinions. Relying on opinion content from Justices of the Supreme Court, we observe a discernible correlation between linguistic choices and latent expressions of ideology irrespective of known preferences or voting patterns. Testing our method against Martin-Quinn, we find our approach strongly correlates with this validated and commonly used measure of judicial ideology. We conclude by discussing the intuitive power of text as a feature of ideology, as well as how this process can extend to judicial actors and institutions beyond the Supreme Court.

Aristotle’s views about the female body are commonly held to be an insurmountable obstacle to aligning his philosophy with feminism. Sarah Borden Sharkey, however, has attempted a robust Aristotelian feminism that alters only the minimum. She argues that to succeed it must give positive and detailed reasons for sexual equality, a task that she leaves open. Building on Sharkey’s work, this essay argues that Thomas Aquinas’ view of the will allows such a position, by combining it with Aristotle’s notion of thumos as the main dividing factor between the sexes. The result is an Aristotelian–Thomistic view that keeps female biological difference, while allowing equality in attaining virtue and prudence.

The analyzed data provide evidence for sound changes that involve cumulative effects in the phonologization of phonetic duration. The data come from Kashubian, an understudied, endangered language spoken in northwestern Poland, and illustrate two historical processes: preservation and loss of ultra-short vowels (jers) and compensatory lengthening. The unified analysis of the two processes hinges on a reinterpretation of phonetic vowel duration as phonological length. Phonetic duration is contextual: Vowels in head syllables, in open syllables, and before voiced consonants tend to be longer than vowels in non-head syllables, in closed syllables, and before voiceless consonants. The effects are cumulative in the sense that all three conditions must co-occur on a single vowel. The discussed changes provide support for phonological models that (i) allow phonological constraints to access fine-grained phonetic information and (ii) are capable of deriving cumulative effects. The data contribute to the typology of cumulative processes by providing novel evidence of alternations that are simultaneously conditioned by the prosodic and segmental context.

Epidemiologic evidence on the association between dietary choline, betaine and mortality risk remains limited, particularly among non-Western populations. We examined the association of dietary choline and betaine with all-cause mortality in Chinese adults using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey 1991–2015. We included 9027 men and 8828 women without CVD and cancer at baseline. Dietary intake was assessed using 3-day 24-hour dietary recalls and household food inventories. Death was ascertained through household surveys in each wave. Time-dependent Cox proportional hazards regression models estimated multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) and 95 % CIs. During a median follow-up of 9·1 years, 891 men and 687 women were deceased. Higher total choline intake was associated with lower all-cause mortality in both men (HRQ5 v. Q1 = 0·58 (95 % CI: 0·45, 0·74)) and women (HRQ5 v. Q1 = 0·59 (95 % CI: 0·44, 0·78)). The dose–response curve were reverse J-shaped in men and L-shaped in women (both P-nonlinear ≤ 0·005). Similarly, fat-soluble choline intake was inversely associated with mortality in both men (HRQ5 v. Q1 = 0·59 (95 % CI: 0·46, 0·75)) and women (HRQ5 v. Q1 = 0·53 (95 % CI: 0·40, 0·70)), showing reverse J-shaped patterns (both P-nonlinear < 0·001). A J-shaped association between water-soluble choline and mortality was observed in women (P-nonlinear < 0·001), but a null association was found in men. Betaine intake was not associated with all-cause mortality in either sex. Our findings suggest that adequate choline intake is linked to reduced all-cause mortality in Chinese adults with predominantly plant-based diets.

Ce numéro spécial est le résultat de la collaboration entre les membres du Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur la normativité (GRIN) durant l’année 2023-2024. Principalement situé dans les universités de l’île de Montréal, ce groupe a pour objectif d’explorer le thème de la normativité en philosophie selon trois axes principaux : normativité et société, normativité et affectivité, normativité et connaissance. Une visée commune s’est progressivement révélée au fil de nos rencontres : dévoiler de manière critique les différentes sortes de normativité qui ont été soit oubliées, soit ignorées. Cela nous a donc laissé croire que certaines normes pourraient avoir été perdues de vue, et c’est de là que nous sont venus le titre et le thème de ce numéro spécial : « À la recherche des normes perdues ». La présente introduction donne un aperçu des huit articles qui forment le numéro.

Special Ricci–Hessian equations on Kähler manifolds $(M,g)$, as defined by Maschler [‘Special Kähler–Ricci potentials and Ricci solitons’, Ann. Global Anal. Geom. 34 (2008), 367–380], involve functions $\tau $ on M and state that, for some function $\alpha $ of the real variable $\tau\kern-0.8pt $, the sum of $\alpha \nabla d\tau\kern-0.8pt $ and the Ricci tensor equals a functional multiple of the metric g, while $\alpha \nabla d\tau\kern-0.8pt $ itself is assumed to be nonzero almost everywhere. Three well-known obvious ‘standard’ cases are provided by (non-Einstein) gradient Kähler–Ricci solitons, conformally-Einstein Kähler metrics, and special Kähler–Ricci potentials. We show that, outside of these three cases, such an equation can only occur in complex dimension two and, at generic points, it must then represent one of three types, for which, up to normalizations, $\alpha =2\cot \tau\kern-0.8pt $, $\alpha =2\coth \tau\kern-0.8pt $, or $\alpha =2\tanh \tau\kern-0.8pt $. We also use the Cartan–Kähler theorem to prove that these three types are actually realized in a ‘nonstandard’ way.

This article describes how Egyptian state documents are scattered between governmental institutions, private collections, and the second-hand book and paper market. This scattering raises a practical question about the conditions under which official documents become discardable and commodifiable by bureaucrats, their families, and second-hand dealers. This scattering also raises a theoretical question about the nature of a state which takes uneven care in keeping a record of its own institutional past. After outlining the difficulties of access one faces in official archives in Egypt, the article fleshes out the sociological profile of different custodians of state paperwork—including families of bureaucrats, peddlers, and dealers—and the conditions under which state documents become commodified to this day. The overarching objective is not just to show the well-known limitations of national archives as a source of historical material, but also to show how actually existing “state archives” go well beyond the remit of official institutions, with notable consequences over our conception of the state.