While we are aware that algorithms are at play in the background of much of what we do in our day-to-day life they are still widely misunderstood, says Sarah A Sutherland, the founder and principal consultant at Parallax Information Consulting. Here Sarah talks us through how we should approach our technology adoption by considering what algorithms are being used for and what the underlying technology and data that supports them actually is.

In a new era of regulatory oversight, the US Supreme Court upended traditional Chevron deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous Congressional provisions in Loper in June 2024. Federal courts were instructed to make their own assessments of statutory authorities amid an onslaught of public health agency challenges surfacing nationally. Even so, SCOTUS may be eyeing further limits on agency powers despite clear and substantial repercussions for the health of the nation.

Modern accounts of Sicilian history in the late fifth century b.c.e. and its relations with Athens often follow Thucydides’ Athenocentric narrative closely, largely ignoring the Sicilian background. This article instead foregrounds the actions and concerns of two important Sicilian cities, Segesta and Leontini, whose perspectives Thucydides chose to leave out or downplay. In particular, Segesta was involved in the complex cross-cultural dynamics of western Sicily, while Leontini demonstrated resilience in its resistance to Syracusan imperialism. Both cities’ relations with Athens emerged from their pre-existing policies and strategies. This article thus develops an alternate narrative of these events that complements Thucydides’ Athenocentric one. To accomplish this, it argues for a more nuanced approach to Thucydides’ narrative: reading it against the grain, supplementing it with data from Diodorus and epigraphy, and placing it in its Sicilian historical and cultural context. In this way, the article develops a new approach to the methodological issues involved in writing the history of poleis that are not emphasized in major extant narrative sources. Recognizing Segesta and Leontini as political actors with their own goals and agendas enables both a new reading of Thucydides and a less Athenocentric account of late fifth-century Sicilian history.

Highly portable and accessible MRI technology will allow researchers to conduct field-based MRI research in community settings. Previous guidance for researchers working with fixed MRI does not address the novel ethical, legal, and societal issues (ELSI) of portable MRI (pMRI). Our interdisciplinary Working Group (WG) previously identified 15 core ELSI challenges associated with pMRI research and recommended solutions. In this article, we distill those detailed recommendations into a Portable MRI Research ELSI Checklist that offers practical operational guidance for researchers contemplating using this technology.

The Mesolithic has been characterised as temporally homogeneous: a period of stagnation or degeneration with hunter-gatherers focused on routine economic practices in an endlessly repeating seasonal round. Characterisation of the Mesolithic as timeless and unchanging derives in part from our current poor internal chronological resolution, which appears even more acute given the recent ground-breaking advances for chronological precision in adjacent time periods. However, these tendencies are exacerbated by a focus in Mesolithic studies on an outdated and simplified bipartite typological framework for the period, linked to a small number of well-preserved sites that come to stand for human lifeways across millennia. These approaches produce a peculiar temporal model within Mesolithic studies. We argue that we need both more accurate and precise chronologies, and narrative approaches that write stories of these people in their own emergent and uncertain times. To begin to do so, this paper presents a new chronological framework for British Mesolithic assemblages, based on collation, audit, and Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon measurements associated with particular microlith forms. With this new approach, we outline different understandings of temporality and inhabitation for the period c. 9800–3600 cal bc.

As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the History of Economics Society (HES), this issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought marks a significant milestone. The journal, as the official publication of the society, seeks to participate in commemorating this important occasion and acknowledging the society’s substantial contributions to the scholarly community over the past five decades. The society’s efforts have not only advanced research in the history of economic thought but have also fostered a vibrant intellectual community of historians and economists.

Farming developed in Britain during the Neolithic period but across much of England the earliest good archaeological evidence for fields and enclosures in which crops were grown and livestock kept dates from the Middle Bronze Age, c. 1600/1500 bc. While these Bronze Age sub-divided agricultural landscapes are widespread across southern and eastern England, Suffolk and Norfolk were, until recently, essentially a ‘blank’ in their distribution. Over the last 15 years an increasing number of such field systems have been excavated, particularly in Norfolk, and some have started to appear in print. This article adds to this developing picture by briefly describing parts of seven additional Bronze Age – and probable Bronze Age – field systems that have been investigated through recent development-led excavation in south-east Suffolk. Currently published and unpublished evidence from elsewhere in the county is also considered, with the aims of identifying how widespread such land divisions were and establishing the current state of knowledge regarding the location, date, development, layout, and agricultural function of Bronze Age fields in the county. Some of the implications are of wider interest for understanding Bronze Age landscape organisation and land use in lowland England.

The post-World War II liberal international order coupled trade liberalization with a range of flanking measures, both outward-looking and inward-looking. This system, coupling domestic-level compensation with international-level flexibility, no longer functions as effectively as it once did. To consider how a renewed set of flanking policies might address, or even prevent, a backlash against trade liberalization, we explore why the earlier system (embedded liberalism plus temporarily tolerated relief) did not always function effectively. We note the challenges associated with generous domestic compensation schemes, especially in the face of capital mobility and fiscal pressures. We discuss the interstate tensions generated by the use of temporary relief measures, such as escape clauses and safeguards, and we also discuss how the expansion in membership of the multilateral trade system (and particularly the inclusion of countries with a greater array of economic institutions and factor endowments) exacerbates these challenges. Finally, we consider how the domestic politics of flanking policies could differ from those used in an earlier era.