Human-centered design involves designing for users who may have social identities that are dissimilar from designers’ social identities. These differences could impact designers’ ability to understand users’ needs and integrate considerations of social identity into design decisions. Reflective interventions could encourage designers to actively consider social identity in design and our aim in this research is to explore this hypothesis through an experimental study. We tested the effects of completing a social identity-based reflection exercise on novice designers’ task clarification behavior. We also qualitatively examined the quality and content of the reflection responses. We find that participants who completed the intervention generated more social identity-focused design requirements, irrespective of the persona provided to them. Additionally, the content analysis revealed that designers who occupy minority identities (e.g., women and students of color) were more likely to provide deeper and higher-quality reflection responses. These findings suggest that reflective interventions could be an effective mechanism to promote inclusive design, leading to the design of products that users across social identities can use equitably. Furthermore, designers with different social identities may require different reflection cues (e.g., ones more focused on their personal experiences), to encourage deeper reflection on the effects of social identity in design.

This article examines the democratic control over the European Union’s unilateral trade policy. It takes as a starting point how crises like COVID-19 and geopolitical tensions have led to the “weaponisation” of trade, making global commerce unpredictable. The EU has responded by modernising its trade instruments, such as anti-dumping measures and new regulations like the Anti-Coercion Instrument. However, these instruments often allow the European Commission to act without parliamentary approval, challenging democratic accountability. The article questions whether a democratic, yet effective, unilateral trade policy is possible for the EU. It reviews the processes behind the EU’s unilateral trade policy, critiques current legitimacy mechanisms and proposes reforms to enhance democratic oversight. Ultimately, it argues that a degree of democratisation of trade policy is feasible without Treaty changes, contributing to broader discussions on maintaining democratic control over executive actions in crises.

The view that epistemic peers should conciliate in cases of disagreement – the Conciliatory View – had been an important view in the early days of the peer disagreement debate. Over the years, however, the view has been the target of severe criticism; an “obituary” was already written for the view, and, as a recent proclamation has it, there is “no hope” for it. In this paper, I will argue that we should keep the hope alive by defending the Conciliatory View of peer disagreement. The primary strategy of my defense will be to separate the claims made by the view specific to peer disagreement and claims that concern higher-order evidence more generally. This separation allows us to see which problems cannot be addressed in the context of peer disagreement alone. As I will argue, the upshot of making this distinction is that although the jury is still out on whether higher-order evidence should affect our first-order doxastic states, the Conciliatory View likely follows if it does.

We study weighted Sobolev inequalities on open convex cones endowed with α-homogeneous weights satisfying a certain concavity condition. We establish a so-called reduction principle for these inequalities and characterize optimal rearrangement-invariant function spaces for these weighted Sobolev inequalities. Both optimal target and optimal domain spaces are characterized. Abstract results are accompanied by general yet concrete examples of optimal function spaces. For these examples, the class of so-called Lorentz–Karamata spaces, which contains in particular Lebesgue spaces, Lorentz spaces, and some Orlicz spaces, is used.

Narratives from autistic children, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing children were compared for attributions of intentionality in descriptions of two animations, one inviting descriptions of social events like fighting, another one inviting descriptions of physical events like orbiting planets. The analysis was based on a semantic and syntactic classification of clauses in terms of whether the verbs require their arguments to refer to beings with subjective experience, that is, intentionality attribution as a first step in the understanding of others as beings with mental states and processes. The autistic children did not have difficulties attributing intentionality to geometric figures. Moreover, the children with DLD made more intentionality attributions in their descriptions of the physical animation than the typically developing peers. Both diagnostic groups reported fewer relevant events than the typically developing children, which is interpreted as difficulties with narrative macrostructure. The results are discussed in relation to earlier studies and with respect to what they tell us about intentionality attribution and narrative structure in autism.

While the indirect evidence suggests that already in the early scholastic period the literary production based on records of oral teaching (so-called reportationes) was not uncommon, there are very few sources commenting on the practice. This article details the design of a study applying stylometric techniques of authorship attribution to a collection developed from reportationes – Stephen Langton’s Quaestiones Theologiae – aiming to uncover layers of editorial work and thus validate some hypotheses regarding the collection’s formation. Following Camps, Clérice, and Pinche (2021), I discuss the implementation of an HTR pipeline and stylometric analysis based on the most frequent words, POS tags, and pseudo-affixes. The proposed study will offer two methodological gains relevant to computational research on the scholastic tradition: it will directly compare performance on manually composed and automatically extracted data, and it will test the validity of transformer-based OCR and automated transcription alignment for workflows applied to scholastic Latin corpora. If successful, this study will provide an easily reusable template for the exploratory analysis of collaborative literary production stemming from medieval universities.

This study explores the moderating role of women’s political empowerment in addressing child poverty across European Union (EU) countries, using macro-panel data from 27 EU countries between 2006 and 2023. The study investigates how key socio-economic factors – such as unemployment and government expenditure as mitigating factors – interact with women’s political empowerment in affecting child poverty. The findings show that the political empowerment of women mitigates the negative effects of high unemployment and enhances the impact of public spending. However, no significant moderating effect was observed for early school leaving and income inequality. The study highlights the importance of women’s political participation in shaping inclusive policies for child welfare, especially in contexts of high unemployment or limited public spending. By empowering women politically, policymakers can foster environments that better target child poverty through tailored interventions and improved social policies, offering valuable insights for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

In April 2023, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a draft of revisions to Circular A-4, the first changes proposed since its publication in 2003. Following a public comment period, OMB published the final revised Circular A-4 in November 2023. In this article, we provide a section-by-section comparison describing the similarities and differences between the April draft and the November revision of Circular A-4. Among other observations, we note that the revised Circular A-4 changes the default social rate of time preference from 1.7 to 2.0%, retains recommendations for using distributional weighting in benefit–cost analysis, and retains recommendations to use a global point of view when determining the spatial scope of the analysis.

Recent reports suggest that New Zealanders underestimate the burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) on society, perceiving NCDs as standalone problems to be managed by affected individuals. This belief conflicts with the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis that NCD risk is rooted in early-life environmental exposures. For the research community to contribute towards shifting societal beliefs, we need to know more about NZers’ understanding of how NCDs develop and have the potential to track this over time. To address this, we conducted a face-to-face survey of 702 Auckland adults in 2015–16, repeated in 2022–23 with 814 online and 96 face-to-face respondents. An increased recognition of links between mental health and obesity was the only change observed between the earlier and later cohorts. Overall, of the 59% familiar with the term ‘non-communicable disease’, 73% accurately described NCD characteristics and gave examples. Online, tertiary-educated and non-male respondents were more likely to identify various social determinants of health in addition to individual behaviours as contributors to metabolic disease risk. More than twice as many subjects strongly agreed that preconception health of mothers could affect the health of the child than that of fathers. Maternal nutrition was recognised by most as important for fetal health, but 49% disagreed or did not know if it could affect adult health. These results indicate that regardless of subject sampling or data collection method, adult New Zealanders have little appreciation of the significance of the early-life environment in relation to NCD risk across the lifespan.