Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

Commemorations of the Confederacy remain pervasive throughout the Southern U.S. Historians have long established that many of these symbols were erected during the Jim Crow era to reinforce white political dominance in public spaces. Yet, little is known about how these enduring symbols shape perceptions among people of different racial identities today. This study examines Confederate monuments where they are most prominently placed: courthouse grounds. Using an original survey experiment of Black, white, and Latino Southerners, it investigates whether the presence of a Confederate monument in front of a courthouse influences feelings of personal safety and welcomeness, as well as perceptions of the fairness of the court system. Findings reveal that a Confederate monument made Black and Latino Southerners feel less safe and welcome at the courthouse and led Black Southerners to perceive the court system as less fair toward people like them. In contrast, Confederate monuments had no overall effect on white Southerners’ perceptions of courthouses or the judicial system. These results underscore the role of contentious symbols in reinforcing inequalities in public spaces.

Bone and tissue fractions, obtained in 2017 following hip replacement surgery on a healthy Caucasian male, born in 1944, reflect in their 14C concentrations the integrated effect of the lifetime metabolic uptake and replacement of atmospheric bomb 14C at different tissue-specific turnover rates. The 14C content of hair and nails reflects recent carbon uptake. The 14C values in healthy cartilage and bone collagen/apatite correspond to those of the “local” atmosphere during the 2005–2009 Northern Hemisphere growing seasons, while those from damaged areas of the femur head correspond to the atmosphere in 2013–2014. A simple bone growth and regeneration model used in combination with the NH atmospheric 14C concentrations indicates remodelling rates around 9% per year in the healthy bone and a doubling to tripling in the damaged area depending on the model chosen. The differences in 14C concentration observed in the fractions provide both a caveat for sample selection for the 14C dating of archaeological bones and an indication of its potential in forensics and as a diagnostic tool for turnover rates in medical studies.

A popular method to perform adversarial attacks on neural networks is the so-called fast gradient sign method and its iterative variant. In this paper, we interpret this method as an explicit Euler discretization of a differential inclusion, where we also show convergence of the discretization to the associated gradient flow. To do so, we consider the concept of $p$-curves of maximal slope in the case $p=\infty$. We prove existence of $\infty$-curves of maximum slope and derive an alternative characterization via differential inclusions. Furthermore, we also consider Wasserstein gradient flows for potential energies, where we show that curves in the Wasserstein space can be characterized by a representing measure on the space of curves in the underlying Banach space, which fulfil the differential inclusion. The application of our theory to the finite-dimensional setting is twofold: On the one hand, we show that a whole class of normalized gradient descent methods (in particular, signed gradient descent) converge, up to subsequences, to the flow when sending the step size to zero. On the other hand, in the distributional setting, we show that the inner optimization task of adversarial training objective can be characterized via $\infty$-curves of maximum slope on an appropriate optimal transport space.

In the context of urban traffic control, traffic signal optimisation is the problem of determining the optimal green length for each signal in a set of traffic signals. The literature has effectively tackled such a problem, mostly with automated planning techniques leveraging the PDDL + language and solvers. However, such language has limitations when it comes to specifying optimisation statements and computing optimal plans. In this paper, we provide an alternative solution to the traffic signal optimisation problem based on Constraint Answer Set Programming (CASP). We devise an encoding in a CASP language, which is then solved by means of clingcon 3, a system extending the well-known ASP solver clingo. We performed experiments on real historical data from the town of Huddersfield in the UK, comparing our approach to the PDDL+ model that obtained the best results for the considered benchmark. The results showed the potential of our approach for tackling the traffic signal optimisation problem and improving the solution quality of the PDDL + plans.

Auditory verbal hallucinations are a common phenomenon in the general population, with many people without psychological issues reporting the experience. In the ‘White Christmas’ method to induce auditory hallucinations, participants are told that they will be played a portion of the song ‘White Christmas’ and are asked to report when they hear it. Participants are presented only with stochastic noise; still, a large proportion of participants report hearing the song. The experiments reported here investigate how masking relationships modulate verbal hallucinations in the White-Christmas effect. Specifically, we tested how the effect is modulated by different kinds of maskers (multi-talker babble versus spectrally matched speech-shaped stochastic noise) and different kinds of expectation of the speech being masked (expecting a ‘normal’ modal voice versus a whispered voice behind the masking). The White Christmas effect was replicated, and the rate of verbal hallucinations was higher for multi-talker babble than for spectrally-matched speech-shaped stochastic noise. In addition, a trend for a higher rate of hallucination for whispered voices was found. These results confirm the role of masking relations in the White Christmas effect and reinforce the similarity between the White Christmas effect and continuity illusions such as phoneme restoration.

In this article, the authors contend that three blades, archaeometrically identified as made of obsidian from the Nemrut Dağ source in eastern Anatolia, were recovered from bona fide archaeological contexts at two sites in Poland. This is supported by somewhat contentious contextual evidence, which is thoroughly reviewed. If the findspots are accepted as genuine, these artefacts would mark the furthest western distribution of Nemrut Dağ obsidian, approximately 2200 km away from the source, more than three times the previously recorded western distribution of this material. The known history of recovery and curation of these artefacts, their techno-typological features, and their raw material source (based on EDXRF analysis) are assessed, and an interpretation of this unusual material is offered.

We examine hidden orders usage by algorithmic traders (ATs) and nonATs. ATs extensively use hidden orders but of smaller size than nonATs, who are the primary contributors to hidden volume. ATs’ relative share of hidden volume decreases with volatility, adverse selection costs, and the relative tick-size. Proprietary ATs (HFTs), who differ from agency ATs (AATs) in their information sets and potential gains from trade, hide orders to reduce competition for liquidity provision, whereas AATs use hidden orders to conceal information in their more informed orders and manage picking-off risk. Finally, superior technology provides limited benefit for hidden order execution.

Despite the clear divisions in current archaeological theories, in the last 30 years a ‘new consensus’ is emerging; this is the recognition that materials can actively shape human behaviour and cognition. While this recognition offers major opportunities for explaining changes in the archaeological record without just succumbing to individual simplistic models – such as migration or diffusion, or acculturation or convergence – there is still a need to formulate a framework that allows schematising this new consensus into our classifications and analyses of archaeological materials. Our paper aims to take a first step in this direction by formalising some mechanisms through which human behaviour and cognition can be modified by the material world. Operating at the interstices between theories about material engagement, cognition, and practice, three mechanisms of transformation are formalised, i.e., visual enchantment, mechanical degradation and obtrusion. As a further step to integrate these mechanisms, we stress the need to factor in human expectations, the changing states of materials and contingent situations into our schematisations and reconstructions of human–material relations.

Partial correctness of imperative or functional programming divides in logic programming into two notions. Correctness means that all answers of the program are compatible with the specification. Completeness means that the program produces all the answers required by the specifications. We also consider semi-completeness – completeness for those queries for which the program does not diverge. This paper presents an approach to systematically construct provably correct and semi-complete logic programs, for a given specification. Normal programs are considered, under Kunen’s 3-valued completion semantics (of negation as finite failure) and the well-founded semantics (of negation as possibly infinite failure). The approach is declarative, it abstracts from details of operational semantics, like, for example, the form of the selected literals (“procedure calls”) during the computation. The proposed method is simple and can be used (maybe informally) in actual everyday programming.