The Proetida likely represent the only surviving trilobite clade past the Devonian mass extinction event(s). Although members of order Proetida have long been studied, the global phylogenetic relationships across this pivotal time are still unresolved. I used a Bayesian phylogenetic approach to construct a subordinal level tree for members within the superfamily Proetoidea. Two models, a relaxed and strict clock model, were compared and used to assess past reconstructions of clades within the order. The trees from both models highlight key relationships among proetides across the Devonian and show paraphyly in groups that have been considered monophyletic in the past. Trees from both models also suggest that major groups, e.g., the genus Gerastos Goldfuss, 1843 and the family Phillispidae (which represents the most diverse post-Devonian proetide group under current taxonomic schemes) are polyphyletic. This in turn suggests, in a paleobiological context, a more complex pattern of survivorship over the Late Devonian than previously suggested as well as pervasive parallelisms toward certain ‘Gerastos’ or ‘phillipsid’ morphotypes.

Resilient Zulu moral economy compelled Natal’s sugar planters and white settler state to introduce Indian indentured workers since 1860. As concerns over productivity in a weak colonial economy informed this decision, meticulous management of labor time crucially shaped the treatment of migrant Indian indentees. Moreover, systemic violence in capital’s life processes formed the culture of work-discipline in the plantations and in other industrial sectors. Subsequently, as contract expired Indian indentees acquired relative economic mobility compared to Africans, they appeared in Zulu critiques of Natal’s settler colonial order. Ironically, dispossessed Zulus reproduced colonial logic of time management while discussing the comparative economic success of Indian “newcomers.” Zulu critiques of colonial labor management also complemented the racial exclusivity of migrant Indians. Analyzing the complex workings of capital, labor, and race in nineteenth-century Natal, this article explains how capital’s life processes shaped violent conflicts in the intimate domestic space of working-class lifeworld.

Minority governments are common across parliamentary systems, and a large body of literature has examined their stability and performance. Meanwhile, we know very little about how voters perceive this government type and whether they understand its political implications. We survey voters in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, three European countries with varying degrees of exposure to minority governments, about their knowledge and perceptions of minority governments. We find that voters have knowledge levels comparable to those about the role of political parties, and that this is independent of the respective prevalence of minority governments in each country. Informed voters express stronger preferences for majority governments. However, minority governments are associated with specific positive representational traits, specifically with the impression that such governments listen more to the demands of all voters, and general perceptions are stronger for knowledgeable voters. The findings have implications for how elites can formulate arguments in favour or against minority governments that may resonate with voters.

This article is concerned with finite rank stability theory, and more precisely two classical ways to decompose a type using minimal types. The first is its domination equivalence to a Morley product of minimal types, and the second is its semi-minimal analysis, both of which are useful in applications. Our main interest is to explore how these two decompositions are connected. We prove that neither determine the other in general, and give more precise connections using various notions from the model theory literature such as uniform internality, proper fibrations, and disintegratedness.

This article – arising from an ERC-funded project on the lived experiences of dictatorship – explores the development of and approaches to the history of everyday life under repressive political systems, presenting the historiographical, conceptual, and contextual points of contact, synergy, and divergence between historians working in and on Europe, Southern Africa, and Latin America. As a historiographical review article, this piece provides both a critical assessment of and novel intervention in these respective literatures, making the case for ‘decentring’ European histories and historiographies, to encourage greater engagement and collaboration between those working on different historical and geographical contexts.

The study explores the engagement of Russophone Ukrainians with educational policies that increase the status of the Ukrainian language, the standardized tests of Ukrainian, and the subject tests that could be passed in Ukrainian. It argues that this centralized unitary language policy has received support from Russophones. It does so by analyzing the language choices of Russophone students when taking standardized tests in various subjects, as well as admission policies and discussions of relevant policies in local media and social media of the Russophone city of Kharkiv. It shows that following the introduction of standardized tests, the value of Ukrainian has increased across various actors: students have been choosing Ukrainian more, universities have valued Ukrainian in the admission process, and local citizens have defended the status of Ukrainian, relying on decolonial rhetoric. It shows that the decolonial framing of the Ukrainization policies resonated with Russophones enough for them to support them, and not to result in a backlash.

When analyzing the nation-state, studies of Pakistan often portray the Pakistani state as autocratic and dictatorial. While the Pakistani nation-state performs various hegemonic roles, it is also “cultured.” This article illustrates this point by focusing on the nation-state’s patronage of cultural projects in the 1960s (and beyond), tracing the genealogies of sites in Lahore’s Greater Iqbal Park (the Minar-e-Pakistan monument, Hafeez Jalandari mausoleum, and the National History Museum) along with the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum in Karachi. The article centers these as “sites of memory,” exploring the hybrid tensions between tourism, citizenship, and modern memory in postcolonial Pakistan.

Distributional learning enables listeners to form phonetic categories by extracting statistical regularities from speech input. Younger Cantonese speakers can acquire the Mandarin level-falling (T1–T4) contrast through distributional learning, with bimodal exposure facilitating category formation and unimodal exposure suppressing it, and with fine-grained pitch sensitivity predicting success. However, aging is associated with declines in pitch sensitivity and phonetic boundary formation, which may disrupt this process. This study examined whether Cantonese-speaking older adults exhibit distributional learning of Mandarin T1–T4 and whether individual cognitive factors predict learning success. Sixty-four participants completed a pretest–training–posttest procedure with bimodal or unimodal exposure. While older adults improved in tone discrimination, no group differences emerged. Further analysis showed that those with lower pitch-related auditory memory failed to learn from unimodal input. On the other hand, fine-grained pitch perception abilities did not predict learning outcomes. These results suggest that older adults may rely on alternative learning mechanisms, such as memory-based strategies, when exposed to ambiguous input distributions. The findings indicate a shift from perceptual encoding to memory-driven processing in aging and highlight the limits of passive statistical learning in older adulthood.

The paper analyses the creation of socialist Poland’s foreign and foreign economic policies from 1957 to 1967, focusing on the country’s involvement with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the European Economic Community (EEC). It argues that for the Polish policymakers, the interest in accession to GATT went beyond economic benefits such as alleviating the EEC’s protectionism and securing better terms for exports to the Common Market. Joining the Agreement was also important for the political goals of Polish diplomacy and was considered a part of a general drive for rapprochement with the West and implementation of the principle of peaceful coexistence. Redefining the scope of foreign policy, Polish diplomats attempted to embed Poland in a network of international interdependency and wanted to see the country as a pioneer of the East–West détente.

Amid declining public standing, many political parties seek to regain disaffected voters through various institutional strategies. One key approach is democratizing legislative candidate selection to grant party members or voters greater influence and signal improved responsiveness, transparency, and legitimacy. Yet does this strategy pay off electorally? The growing literature on this topic provides conflicting answers and limited evidence. We argue that more inclusive candidate selection does not have meaningful effects at the polls despite its merits. Whereas voters favor such procedures in principle, as some suggest, they underprioritize them in favor of other considerations when electing parties. We support this argument with observational and experimental data, including a matching difference-in-differences estimation of party performance across thirty-four democracies and a survey democracies and a survey experiment in three countries. This article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between party institutions and voter behavior in an age of eroding public trust and rising anti-establishment sentiment.

Who do we blame when bad things happen? Has division in American society made us less sympathetic to victims of tragedies? In previous trying times (e.g., 9/11 and Columbine), Americans rallied together to support victims and seek government solutions. In a highly polarized era, however, we have witnessed further division rather than unity. In this paper, I leverage original, pre-registered survey experiments to examine how much Americans blame and sympathize with someone who has tragically died from COVID-19. The studies find consistent evidence that partisans blame victims who hold an anti-vaccine perspective, regardless of partisanship. Less consistent evidence suggests that Democrats also blame victims who were Republican, but less than they do victims who held anti-vaccination views. Further, partisans are less sympathetic when the victim was anti-vaccine, but Democrats and Republicans are also less sympathetic when the person who died was an outpartisan. These results indicate that animosity towards outpartisans persists even through tragedy, but demonstrates limits to affective partisan polarization paired with evidence of rational blame and sympathy responses.

The article examines how the Czech courts addressed restrictions on the right to conduct business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although grounded in the Czech authorities’ response to the health crisis, the analysis extends to broader conclusions about the necessity of upholding rule-of-law principles. The article therefore highlights how constitutional imperatives of proportionality, equality and the justification of government actions must be preserved in judicial review, even in times of crises.

The use of rumūz – symbols or ciphers – is pervasive across the Islamicate alchemical corpus. Historians have long debated how such symbols should be interpreted, with some emphasizing the spiritual or mystical idiom often employed by alchemists, and others seeking to decrypt alchemical literature for its technical or proto-scientific content. This paper proposes that one fruitful way to approach rumūz is to compare depictions of alchemy drawn from three distinct genres of source material: alchemical treatises, literary works and pedagogical encyclopedias. By tracing how each treats the purpose, form and interpretation of rumūz, I show how these differences illuminate the scholarly practices, pedagogical methods and intellectual positioning of alchemists in the Mamlūk period. More broadly, the study demonstrates the value of widening the evidentiary base beyond specialist treatises, revealing how alchemical discourse intersected with wider literary culture, reading practices and the transmission of esoteric knowledge in the later medieval Islamicate world.

We investigated variations in biomass among oil palm progenies and quantified K and Mg uptake by assessing the distribution pattern of these minerals throughout plant organs, including roots and bunches. A split-plot trial was set up in which potassium chloride (KCl: 60% K2O) and kieserite (MgSO4: 27% MgO) were applied as main factors, each with three levels: 0, 1.5, 3.0 kg KCl palm˗1 year˗1; and 0, 0.75, 1.5 kg MgSO4 palm˗1 year˗1. Each fertiliser combination was applied to subplots containing four oil palm progenies (C1 to C4). Samples of oil palm organs were collected to assess their dry matter (DM) and mineral contents. Oil palm biomass was significantly different among progenies, with C3 having the highest biomass (268 kg DM palm˗1). K and Mg contents in the entire palm also varied among progenies. C2 and C3 progenies exhibited the highest amounts of K (3.81 and 3.86 kg K palm˗1, respectively), whereas C1 and C4 displayed 3.35 and 3.31 kg K palm˗1, respectively. However, C4 progeny showed the highest leaflet K concentration, revealing the dilution phenomenon and the inequal mineral distribution among palm organs. Progeny C3 had the highest Mg content (0.54 kg palm˗1) and was the most productive, exporting more K and Mg through harvest than other progenies. Our results indicate genetic variability in K and Mg uptake by oil palm, and planting materials with high K and Mg uptake efficiency would be valuable for farmers and breeders.

We consider the problem of predicting the next bit in an infinite binary sequence sampled from the Cantor space with an unknown computable measure. We propose a new theoretical framework to investigate the properties of good computable predictions, focusing on such predictions’ convergence rate.

Since no computable prediction can be the best, we first define a better prediction as one that dominates the other measure. We then prove that this is equivalent to the condition that the sum of the KL divergence errors of its predictions is smaller than that of the other prediction for more computable measures. We call that such a computable prediction is more general than the other.

We further show that the sum of any sufficiently general prediction errors is a finite left-c.e. Martin-Löf random real. This means the errors converge to zero more slowly than any computable function.

The establishment of state authority over the movement of people and goods across borders became a key marker of statehood after decolonization. In South Asia, India and Pakistan gradually and unevenly asserted territorial and fiscal sovereignty along their new borders. This article examines how the early Pakistani state confronted border anxieties through the bureaucratic practices and discourses of local officials, who embodied state authority at the frontier. This article further explores how the state attempted to regulate and classify cross-border movement and how borderland communities responded—sometimes complying, sometimes negotiating, and at times subverting these controls. Using archival sources and oral histories, the article argues that categories such as “regional” and “national,” “self” and “other” were not fixed or natural, but were produced through contingent interactions between state functionaries and local populations. In doing so, this article highlights the complex and negotiated nature of sovereignty in Pakistan’s borderlands.