Historiographical accounts generally explain Belgian technocracy as a short-lived phenomenon of the 1930s, when the politicians Hendrik de Man and Paul van Zeeland unsuccessfully tried to reinforce state power by strengthening the role of experts (at the expense of the parliament). This article focuses on the overlooked ideas and activities of the political scientist Louis Camu, who, also during the 1930s, pushed for technocratic governance – with more success than van Zeeland and de Man. As ‘Royal Commissioner’ for civil service reform, Camu sought to transform Belgian politics and even the morality of the population at large. Yet despite his public prominence, Camu was far from a transparent political operator. While defending a Montesquieuan democracy in public, he covertly became involved in extreme-right politics during the latter years of the 1930s, culminating in his 1940 membership of a wartime reform committee that sought to abolish the liberal democracy.

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November 2023.

Individuals who experience divorce in childhood are more likely to divorce themselves as adults. Notably, the magnitude of the intergenerational divorce transmission is stronger for groups among whom divorce is rare. This transmission may reflect differences in mating strategies passed from parent to child, or differences in cultural norms between groups. Sociologists and demographers have struggled to disentangle socioeconomic and cultural factors, because groups that are less wealthy also tend to have higher divorce rates. We use data from Finland, where two native ethnolinguistic groups with comparable socioeconomic characteristics - but different divorce risks - live side by side; Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers. Using register data on the entire Finnish population (N=554,337 couples 1987-2020), we examine separation risk as a function of parental divorce. Data suggest that the intergenerational transmission is greater among Swedish speakers, who have an overall lower separation rate. Group differences in separation risk persist even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and each partner’s experience of parental divorce. Notably, Finnish-speaking couples who reside in Swedish-dominated areas have both somewhat lower separation risk, and higher intergenerational transmission than their peers in Finnish-dominated areas. These results point to a cultural transmission of separation, beyond strong socioeconomic factors.

Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension.

Past research shows that farm animal welfare (FAW) policies can reduce consumer and retailer welfare, but producer welfare implications are less certain. This study uses equilibrium displacement modeling of the U.S. wholesale shell egg market to determine how the transition to cage-free egg sales could affect short- and long-run producer welfare. Under varying assumptions and retailer demand shifts, the results consistently demonstrate that producer profits are expected to decline as retailers pivot toward cage-free purchasing, holding all else constant. These findings help explain the tension surrounding FAW policies across the supply chain and can be used to inform industry and policymaker discussions on the topic.

Fluridone was registered for use in rice in 2023, offering a new herbicide site of action for growers. However, little information is available on rice tolerance to this herbicide. Field experiments conducted in 2022 and replicated in 2023 near Colt, AR, evaluated the tolerance of twelve rice cultivars to fluridone, applied preemergence or at the 3-leaf growth stage, in separate experiments. Each experiment consisted of one cultivar. Fluridone rates were 0, 168 (1× label rate), and 336 (2× label rate) g ai ha⁻¹ in all experiments. Visible injury varied between years in all experiments, likely due to different environmental conditions. In 2022, injury following preemergence applications of fluridone was below 25% across cultivars. In contrast, in 2023, injury ≥ 30% occurred to five cultivars, with a maximum of 58% observed for the cultivar ‘DG263L’. Across both years, only three cultivars achieved injury ≥ 20% following fluridone applications at the 3-leaf rice. Fluridone negatively affected shoot density, groundcover, chlorophyll content, and days to 50% heading in most cultivars when applied preemergence. When fluridone was applied to 3-leaf rice, at least one of the variables evaluated was negatively affected in two and nine cultivars in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Grain yield reductions of at least 18% were observed in eight cultivars in 2022, and a grain yield decrease from 9% to 49% in eight cultivars occurred in 2023 in the preemergence experiments. Fluridone applied at the 3-leaf rice did not cause a yield penalty to any cultivar in 2022, whereas in 2023, eight cultivars had a yield loss. Yield loss in ‘DG263L’ occurred at the 1× rate in both experiments, indicating this cultivar appears sensitive to fluridone, regardless of the application timing. Based on these findings, fluridone tolerance is cultivar-dependent. Furthermore, preemergence applications of fluridone in rice should be avoided.

This article is the first to quantify the interindividual effects of different major life events (MLEs) on retrospective perceptions of individual-level linguistic change across the adult lifespan. In this cross-sectional study, 701 German-speaking participants from Austria completed an online survey measuring the extent to which MLEs in the educational, occupational, and personal domain are associated with perceived changes in productive and affective-attitudinal aspects of the sociolinguistic repertoire. Bayesian modeling revealed that events such as beginning a tertiary degree, entry into the workforce, and retirement were perceived to impact participants’ varietal use. Overall, however, affective-attitudinal factors such as dialect identity appear to be more readily susceptible to perceived MLE-related change. These results help pave a new path for variationist agendas that approach lifespan linguistic change not as a result of chronological age, but rather as a phenomenon influenced by individual experiential factors complexly intertwined with the process of aging.

To protect inframarginal rents, rivals react to competition shocks by increasing product differentiation or lowering costs by standardizing products and production processes. We test these two mutually exclusive reactions by exploiting changes in rivals’ idiosyncratic stock return comovement following significant tariff cuts. While increased product differentiation implies a reduction in return comovement, greater standardization implies the opposite (a comovement increase). Difference-in-differences (DID) tests indicate that tariff cuts cause a significant increase in return comovement—in particular among within-industry “followers.” Treatment effects on cash flows, product counts, similarity scores, and business segment counts further support cost-cutting strategies.

Narrow row spacing and layered residual herbicides are recommended for season-long control of herbicide-resistant weeds, but limited research is available to describe interactions between the two practices. The integration of narrow row spacing with layered residual herbicides in herbicide-resistant soybean was evaluated in four site-years. A split-split plot treatment arrangement where the whole plot was soybean trait (LLGT27 or EnlistE3), the subplot was row spacing (38 or 76 cm), and the sub-subplot factor was herbicide program with five treatments: nontreated, preemergence herbicide only (PRE), PRE followed by postemergence (PRE fb POST), PRE fb POST with overlapping residual herbicide (POR), and weed free. Weed control was evaluated through R7 soybean, and weed biomass was collected before POST applications and at R7 soybean. Soybean yield was recorded. Data were subjected to analysis of variance and means separation (α = 0.05). Row spacing had minimal effects on weed control and mixed effects on yield. Waterhemp and Venice mallow control ranged from 83% to 100% 4 weeks after treatment (WAT). POST and POR treatments provided ≥ 94% control of Palmer amaranth 4 WAT; however, PRE resulted in 33% Palmer amaranth control. All treatments resulted in ≥ 95% Palmer amaranth and yellow foxtail control at Scandia during 2021. The greatest income in rainfed site-years was Enlist soybean planted in 76-cm rows with PRE herbicide treatment. The greatest income in the irrigated site-year was with Enlist soybean planted in 38-cm rows with PRE herbicide treatment. Both POST and POR increase weed control compared to PRE, regardless of row spacing in the soybean varieties evaluated, although POR resulted in less income than POST treatments. However, this research did not evaluate weed seed production, which is crucial for long-term weed management and profitability.

Indaziflam was evaluated in Connecticut and Tennessee, USA, for weed control and safety of container-grown ornamental plants. Indaziflam was applied at 49, 98, or 196 g ha-1 to container-grown ornamental plants on an outdoor gravel pad and preemergence or early postemergence to weeds in greenhouse. Ornamental plants were treated twice annually in 2020 and 2021 in Connecticut, and in 2019 and 2020 in Tennessee, with approximately six weeks between applications. Chinese pyramid juniper, common juniper, eastern hemlock, eastern white pine, and Norway spruce in Connecticut, USA, and 'Andorra Compacta’ creeping juniper and 'Black Dragon’ Japanese cedar, ‘Blue Rug’ creeping juniper, and ‘Blue Pfitzer’ Chinese pyramid juniper in Tennessee, USA, were not injured with indaziflam regardless of rate applied. Preemergence application of indaziflam reduced densities of creeping woodsorrel, hairy bittercress, giant foxtail, and large crabgrass 72 to 100%, depending upon the indaziflam rate applied, by 28 d after treatment (DAT). When applied early postemergence, indaziflam provided 97 to 99% control of creeping woodsorrel (1- to 2-leaf), fringed willowherb (4- to 6-leaf), hairy bittercress (cotyledon to 1-leaf), and mouse-ear chickweed (2- to 4-leaf) by 28 DAT. Compared with the nontreated control, the total fresh shoot biomass reduction was 86 to 100% and 78 to 100% following preemergence or postemergence applications. Indaziflam offers a new site-of-action with excellent safety and weed control in the tested ornamental plants.

This article describes local normal forms of functions in noncommuting variables, up to equivalence generated by isomorphism of noncommutative Jacobi algebras, extending singularity theory in the style of Arnold’s commutative local normal forms into the noncommutative realm. This generalisation unveils many new phenomena, including an ADE classification when the Jacobi ring has dimension zero and, by taking suitable limits, a further ADE classification in dimension one. These are natural generalisations of the simple singularities and those with infinite multiplicity in Arnold’s classification. We obtain normal forms away from some exceptional Type E cases. Remarkably, these normal forms have no continuous parameters, and the key new feature is that the noncommutative world affords larger families.

This theory has a range of immediate consequences to the birational geometry of 3-folds. The normal forms of dimension zero are the analytic classification of smooth 3-fold flops, and one outcome of NC singularity theory is the first list of all Type D flopping germs, generalising Reid’s famous pagoda classification of Type A, with variants covering Type E. The normal forms of dimension one have further applications to divisorial contractions to a curve. In addition, the general techniques also give strong evidence towards new contractibility criteria for rational curves.

The discovery of CRISPR has fuelled the debate surrounding new genomic techniques (NGTs). This is of paramount importance given their potential impact on societies and ecosystems. Despite early enthusiasm about the potential of NGTs to “democratize” genome editing, it is increasingly evident that their introduction poses substantial challenges from a democratic point of view. Although greater engagement with the public sphere is urgently needed, it is something that is currently not widely studied from a political science standpoint. In this paper we offer an overview of the actors who have mobilized in relation to NGTs, with a particular focus on unduly neglected actors, such as civil society organizations. We also consider the views of those who have made proposals regarding the governance of NGTs more generally. The perspectives of these actors are not easy to reconcile with those of stakeholders, and we reflect on the democratic implications of this aspect.

The precautionary principle is invoked in a number of important personal and policy-related decision contexts. Peterson shows that certain ways of making the principle precise are inconsistent with other criteria of decision making. Some object that the results do not apply to cases of deep uncertainty or value incommensurability, which are alleged to be in the principle’s wheelhouse. First, I show that Peterson’s impossibility results can be generalized considerably to cover cases of both deep uncertainty and incommensurability. Second, I contrast an alternative way of giving voice to the precautionary impulse.

The design of fusion devices is typically based on computationally expensive simulations. This can be alleviated using high aspect ratio models that employ a reduced number of free parameters, especially in the case of stellarator optimization where non-axisymmetric magnetic fields with a large parameter space are optimized to satisfy certain performance criteria. However, optimization is still required to find configurations with properties such as low elongation, high rotational transform, finite beta and good fast particle confinement. In this work, we train a machine learning model to construct configurations with favourable confinement properties by finding a solution to the inverse design problem, that is, obtaining a set of model input parameters for given desired properties. Since the solution of the inverse problem is non-unique, a probabilistic approach, based on mixture density networks, is used. It is shown that optimized configurations can be generated reliably using this method.

This article explores the cremation burial practices of a pre-Tarascan community at Los Tamarindos, focusing on the perceptions of the bodies of those cremated. To reconstruct this element of mortuary practices in the Middle Balsas River basin during the Postclassic period, we analyzed the thermal alterations, anatomical arrangements, and spatial distribution of cremains within funerary urns. Our findings shed light on the low efficiency of cremation processes, which affect the resistance of cremains to mechanical damage and influences the spatial distribution of cremains in the burials. As a result, we were able to register only one case of an intentional distribution of human remains within a funerary urn: skull fragments were dominant in the upper part of the funerary vessel, with a gradual reduction in favor of the lower limb fragments toward the bottom. We also explored the potential presence of intentional manipulation of human remains in the majority of adult burials, offering new perspectives on cremation mortuary rites during the Middle and Late Postclassic period in the Middle Balsas region.

In her review, Emily Conroy-Krutz writes that “One of the joys of working in scholarly community is learning from each other when we approach the same set of sources with different questions and different interpretive lenses.” The essays in this roundtable reflect the questions and lenses that these brilliant scholars bring from their respective areas of expertise, and they reflect the joy of being in conversation and community with each other. I so appreciate Michael Baysa, Conroy-Krutz, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Rachel Wheeler for engaging with my work so generatively and generously. I am also grateful to Katherine Carté for organizing the panel on Heathen at the 2024 American Society of Church History meeting and to Jon Butler for organizing our comments into this roundtable. While I do not have space to respond to every point raised, I will respond to themes that I see cutting across the reviews.