This study investigated phonetic backward transfer in the ethnolinguistic minority of first-generation bilingual immigrant Indians in Glasgow ‘Glasgow-Indians’ in relation to Flege’s Speech Learning Model, which predicts ‘assimilation’ and ‘dissimilation’ of sound categories. The study explored whether and how sounds of Glasgow-Indian native language (Hindi) and dialect (Indian English) are influenced by sounds of the dominant host language/dialect (Glaswegian English). The role of their Glaswegian and Indian Identity was also examined. Two control groups (Indians and Glaswegians) and the experimental group (Glasgow-Indians) were recorded reading in English and Hindi words containing two phones (/t/ and /d/− voice onset time (VOT)). In both languages, Glasgow-Indian VOT became more Glaswegian-like (assimilation) and to a greater degree in English than Hindi in /t/. Increasing Glaswegian Identity increased assimilation in /t/ but had no effect on /d/, whereas increasing Indian Identity decreased assimilation in /d/ but had no effect on /t/.

Weed diversity plays an important role in the functioning of agroecosystems. Moreover, a number of endangered/threatened plant species occur as weeds in arable fields and/or field boundaries. Agricultural intensification has imposed negative consequences on weed diversity in general, and the survival of the endangered/threatened plant species in particular. The objective of this review is to provide a theoretical framework for promoting cropland weed diversity through precision agriculture. A systematic review was conducted based on literature analysis, existing knowledge gaps, and current needs to identify a suitable approach for promoting cropland biodiversity while protecting crop yields. While nonchemical weed management methods and economic threshold–based approaches are touted to improve weed diversity, they are either ineffective or insufficient for this purpose; long-term economic consequences and the risk of weed adaptation are major concerns. A plant functional trait-based approach to promoting weed diversity, one that considers a plant’s ecosystem service potential and competitiveness with the crop, among other factors, has been proposed by researchers. This approach has tremendous potential for weed diversity conservation in commercial production systems, but field implementation has been limited thus far due to our inability to selectively control weeds at the individual-plant level. However, recent advancements in computer vision, machine learning, and site-specific weed management technologies may allow for the accurate elimination of unwanted plants while retaining the important ones. Here, we present a novel framework for the utilization of precision agriculture for the conservation of cropland weed diversity, including the protection of endangered/threatened plant species, while protecting crop yields. This approach is the first of its kind in which the control priority is ranked on an individual-plant basis, by integrating intrinsic weed trait values with field infestation characteristics, while management thresholds are tailored to specific goals and priorities.

Funisia dorothea Droser in Droser and Gehling, 2008 is an inferred metazoan-grade tubular organism, endemic to the Ediacara Member, Rawnsley Quartzite, of South Australia (~555–550 Myr), which is characterized by a hollow, elongate body constructed of uniserially repeating modular elements and is one of the most abundantly reported members of the Ediacara biota. Thus, Funisia Droser in Droser and Gehling, 2008 has broad significance for developing understanding of the Ediacara biota and provides a large dataset for testing hypotheses on the biological traits of Ediacaran tubular organisms. This study investigates size changes in Funisia’s modular elements to provide further insight into the paleobiology of this organism through the development of a holistic growth model. Results demonstrate that growth in Funisia was highly regulated to maintain uniform modular element width along the length of an individual and, thereby, an overall cylindrical form despite increasing module width throughout ontogeny. The growth model proposed here is compared with the pre-established growth model for another modular Ediacaran tubular organism, Wutubus annularis Chen et al., 2014, demonstrating that the two taxa had distinct growth patterns and disparate autecological strategies, despite a shared constructional morphology.

This article argues that the infrastructural and regulatory politics of Accra’s town council in the early twentieth century highlight competing and transforming understandings of ‘neighbour’ and ‘neighbourhood’. British officials and their elite African allies on the town council championed new forms of physical, social and economic infrastructure, which they touted as ‘modern’ improvements that would bring Accra in line with other major cities and improve life for its inhabitants. Accra residents did not reject all reform or innovation, but they did insist that urban development take place on their terms and in ways that would support their interests, informed by indigenous notions of civic virtue, social responsibility, moral community and spatial organization.

Simulations of critical phenomena, such as wildfires, epidemics, and ocean dynamics, are indispensable tools for decision-making. Many of these simulations are based on models expressed as Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). PDEs are invaluable inductive inference engines, as their solutions generalize beyond the particular problems they describe. Methods and insights acquired by solving the Navier–Stokes equations for turbulence can be very useful in tackling the Black-Scholes equations in finance. Advances in numerical methods, algorithms, software, and hardware over the last 60 years have enabled simulation frontiers that were unimaginable a couple of decades ago. However, there are increasing concerns that such advances are not sustainable. The energy demands of computers are soaring, while the availability of vast amounts of data and Machine Learning(ML) techniques are challenging classical methods of inference and even the need of PDE based forecasting of complex systems. I believe that the relationship between ML and PDEs needs to be reset. PDEs are not the only answer to modeling and ML is not necessarily a replacement, but a potent companion of human thinking. Algorithmic alloys of scientific computing and ML present a disruptive potential for the reliable and robust forecasting of complex systems. In order to achieve these advances, we argue for a rigorous assessment of their relative merits and drawbacks and the adoption of probabilistic thinking for developing complementary concepts between ML and scientific computing. The convergence of AI and scientific computing opens new horizons for scientific discovery and effective decision-making.

We propose a two-sided market entry game and present experiments studying coordination behavior in the game. The two-sided market in the game is operated by an intermediary monopoly platform, serving two sides (i.e., customers and service providers) and featuring asymmetric agents, cross-side network effects, and endogenous market capacity. The game has multiple pure-strategy Nash equilibria if at least one side has a high willingness to enter the market and the other side’s willingness is not very low. We conduct a laboratory experiment involving three treatments corresponding to different combinations of willingness to enter the market among customers and service providers. The experimental results indicate that willingness to enter the market and cross-side network effects significantly influence coordination behavior in two-sided markets. When the multiple pure-strategy Nash equilibria are Pareto ranked on both sides, customers and service providers can coordinate their behavior to the payoff-dominant equilibrium via tacit coordination under strategic uncertainty. However, when the multiple pure-strategy Nash equilibria are Pareto ranked on one side but Pareto equivalent on the other side, coordination failure and disequilibrium occurred, and the equilibria cannot predict the aggregate behavior well. Our experimental results indicate that a thriving two-sided market should coordinate both sides on board.

Haemonchosis is a fatal disease of livestock caused by Haemonchus contortus (HC) – a blood-sucking parasite of the abomasum. This parasite is quite prevalent in sheep, causing mortality and production losses. The suppressor of cytokine signalling-2 (SOCS2) gene plays a vital role in sheep’s immune response against gastrointestinal parasites. This study aimed to estimate the parasitic load of HC in three sheep breeds (Balkhi, Ghalji, and Michni) through faecal egg count and to identify SNPs in the SOCS2 gene associated with the susceptibility of sheep against HC. The results showed that the mean number of HC eggs per gram (EPG) was higher in the faecal samples of Ghalji (4022 ± 1162 EPG), followed by Michni (1988 ± 367 EPG), while the HC EPG was the lowest in Balkhi sheep (1535 ± 552 eggs/gm). Sequencing results showed polymorphisms in the SOCS2 gene between the low-infection and high-infection categories of the three sheep breeds. A total number of six genic variants were observed, of which three were SNPs, one was insertion, and two were deletions. Polymorphisms were observed in the intronic and 3′ UTR regions of the SOCS2 gene. A deletion (c.1083delGCA) in intron 1 and an insertion (c.3304insT) in intron 2 showed positive correlations (0.833 and 0.889, respectively) with the HC infection, while one SNP in the 3′ UTR region showed negative correlation (–0.654). This study provides a basis for selecting resistant sheep against HC infection based on the SOCS2 gene molecular markers.

The rise of anti-immigrant parties has reshaped global politics, forcing mainstream parties to recalibrate their strategies. This study examines how Turkish political parties responded to the emergence of the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi) in 2021, which placed immigration at the center of political debate. Drawing on 1,089 parliamentary group speeches (2011–2023) and elite interviews with key party figures, we identified three key factors shaping party responses: voter overlap with radical-right parties; reputational risks associated with shifting policy positions; and access to political power. Our findings revealed five strategies: issue avoidance; amplification; cooptation; repositioning; and reinforcement. Unlike conventional models that emphasize voter competition, we highlight the role of political power in shaping party strategies, particularly in competitive authoritarian settings. This study advances the understanding of how mainstream parties navigate niche party pressures, offering a broader perspective beyond Eurocentric and electoralist frameworks.

The Civil War pension system was the most comprehensive social policy in the late nineteenth-century United States. Between 1880 and 1910, approximately a quarter of the federal government’s expenditure was devoted to this enormous system of military benefits. Scholars have typically charted the development of the pension system through a series of legislative watersheds, detailing its gradual expansion and liberalization. Yet, as this article shows, this was not the only path that the pension system could have followed. By investigating Commissioner of Pensions John Bentley’s five-year administration of the Pension Bureau during the late 1870s, this article explores a story of suppressed – rather than successful – state-building. While Bentley attempted to administer the pension system according to the shibboleths of the contemporary civil service reform movement, the nation’s veterans and their allies pursued a pension system predicated upon an incipient theory of veterans’ entitlements and rights. The Civil War pension system, this article thus reminds us, was not simply the sign of a precocious nineteenth-century state, but the product of a specific type of state, one that reflected a preference for distributive policies and decentralized administration rather than administrative centralization and broad grants of bureaucratic discretion.

Based on excerpts from the author’s book, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019), this article explores the passage and early implementation of Japan’s infamous prewar law, the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijihō). Enacted in March 1925, this law was utilized to arrest over 70,000 people in the Japanese metropole and tens of thousands more in Japan’s colonial territories until being repealed by order of Allied Occupation authorities in October 1945. Proponents initially explained that the law was to suppress communists and anticolonial activists for threatening the national polity, although how to exactly define such threats remained ambiguous. By the 1930s the purview of the law expanded and was used to detain academics, other activists, and members of religious groups who were seen as challenging imperial orthodoxy. This article focuses on the interpretive debates over the law’s central category—kokutai, or national polity—and how its interpretation started to transform as the law was first applied in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The occasion of the Peace Preservation Law’s centennial invites us to consider its history and legacy, especially as policing and state power have expanded since the so-called war on terror.

The human need for rehabilitation, assistance, and augmentation has led to the development and use of wearable exoskeletons. Upper limb exoskeletons under research and development are tested on human volunteers to gauge performance and usability. Direct testing can often cause straining of the joints, especially the shoulder joint, which is the most important and flexible joint in the upper extremity of the human body. The misalignment of joint axes between the exoskeleton and the human body causes straining. To avoid this, we propose designing and developing a novel human shoulder phantom mimicking the shoulder complex motion and the humeral head translation that can help in the real-time testing of exoskeletons without the need for human volunteers. The device can be used to test the interaction forces and the maximum reachable position of the exoskeleton. It consists of three degrees of freedom (DOF) passive shoulder girdle mechanism and seven DOF glenohumeral joint mechanisms, of which six are passive revolute joints and one is an active prismatic joint mimicking the humeral head translation. All the passive joints are spring-loaded and are incorporated with joint angle sensors. A custom-made, three-axis force sensor measures the human–exoskeleton interaction forces. The design details, selection of joint springs, linear actuation mechanism, and the analysis of the phantom’s reachable workspace are presented. The device is validated by comparing the interaction forces produced during the conventional exoskeleton-assisted and human-assisted phantom arm elevation.

Researchers applying evolutionary theory to political psychology discover that in democracies, most citizens struggle to select political leaders based on their ideologies. Rather, they tend to concentrate on procedural fairness during public decision-making when evaluating their leaders. We re-examine such evolutionary propositions in China using eight Wason selection experiments. In autocracies, where accountability systems are weak or absent, little is known about how citizens judge politicians’ ideologies and their cheating behaviors. Our findings show that Chinese citizens are incapable of identifying political leaders’ ideological orientations; instead, they rely on a cheater-detection mechanism, evaluating leaders based on their adherence to procedural fairness. These results contribute to our understanding of democratic competence and the cognitive mechanisms of political judgment in autocratic contexts.