What is the optimal level of questionnaire detail required to measure bilingual language experience? This empirical evaluation compares alternative measures of language exposure of varying cost (i.e., questionnaire detail) in terms of their performance as predictors of oral language outcomes. The alternative measures were derived from Q-BEx questionnaire data collected from a diverse sample of 121 heritage bilinguals (5–9 years of age) growing up in France, the Netherlands and the UK. Outcome data consisted of morphosyntax and vocabulary measures (in the societal language) and parental estimates of oral proficiency (in the heritage language). Statistical modelling exploited information-theoretic and cross-validation approaches to identify the optimal language exposure measure. Optimal cost–benefit was achieved with cumulative exposure (for the societal language) and current exposure in the home (for the heritage language). The greatest level of questionnaire detail did not yield more reliable predictors of language outcomes.

Pygoscelis penguins are valuable indicators of the effects of rapid warming in the Antarctic Peninsula. In the western Antarctic Peninsula, Adélie penguins show a declining population trend, whereas gentoo penguins are expanding. The notably low reproductive success of Adélie but not gentoo penguins at Ardley Island during the 2023/2024 breeding season provided an opportunity to explore the potential effects of weather conditions and food availability as possible determinants of reproductive output. We explore associations between reproductive output, air temperature, wind speed, wind chill temperature and accumulated rain and snow. As a proxy for food availability, we used data of penguins’ foraging trips, which reflect krill abundance. A late-winter storm at the end of October 2023 led to a record-low wind chill temperature and sustained snow cover, negatively affecting the number of eggs that hatched successfully and/or the number of chicks that survived the first days after hatching. The effects were similar for both species, yet for gentoo penguins chick survival in the late stage of the chick-rearing phase was remarkably higher, possibly due to high food availability and a longer nestling period. As previously suggested, the greater plasticity of gentoo penguins may allow them to mitigate the negative effects of environmental variability, potentially explaining this divergent breeding success despite unusually harsh meteorological conditions.

This article analyses the activities conducted by the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in Spain between 1936 to 1943 to understand Italian policy towards the Francoist regime during that period. In doing so, this piece argues that it is important to adopt a political economy approach that looks at production, trade and industrial investments, always in relation to politics, diplomacy, law, culture and government. In fact, this article establishes that, for the main actors in Rome at the time, all these considerations were inseparable when it came to the Italian policy towards Franco’s Spain. Furthermore, I argue that the BNL initiatives are better understood when situated within the larger history of the Fascist regime in Italy and its imperialistic policies in the Mediterranean area.

The EU has been represented as a singular ‘Digital Empire’ speaking with one voice on matters of EU digital regulation. Closer examination of discrete areas of EU digital regulation reveals a more nuanced picture suggesting clear institutional divergence between the EU institutions regarding the substantive protection afforded by EU law. A detailed analysis of EU data protection adequacy decisions brings to the surface intra-EU tensions concerning the substance of core EU fundamental rights. This analysis reveals that the EU Commission has taken on a more prominent role in adequacy decision-making since the entry into force of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation at the expense of other relevant stakeholders. Furthermore, the Commission’s decisional practice does not align fully with the stance of the Court of Justice on the right to data protection. New sites of intra-EU human rights tensions are therefore uncovered with consequences for the legitimacy of the EU as a digital regulator and the role of the Commission as a guardian of the treaties.

The Stable Roommates problems are characterized by the preferences of agents over other agents as roommates. A solution is a partition of the agents into pairs that are acceptable to each other (i.e., they are in the preference lists of each other), and the matching is stable (i.e., there do not exist any two agents who prefer each other to their roommates and thus block the matching). Motivated by real-world applications, and considering that stable roommates problems do not always have solutions, we continue our studies to compute “good-enough” matchings. In addition to the agents’ habits and habitual preferences, we consider their networks of preferred friends and introduce a method to generate personalized solutions to stable roommates problems. We illustrate the usefulness of our method with examples and empirical evaluations.

Building on previous scholarship on “genetic capital” and the politicization of animal economies, this paper examines how animal breeds and their transnational movement became geopolitical issues in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In particular, it examines how the French government’s efforts to emulate English and Spanish wool pro-duction, and to overcome the economic advantage stemming from its rivals’ superior sheep breeds, intensified in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Despite bans on the exportation of live sheep from Britain and Spain, the French strove to improve their flocks through illicit imports and diplomatic agreements. These efforts culminated in the 1760s, as the Bureau of Commerce began to collaborate with agriculturalists, naturalists, diplomats, and smugglers to bring superior breeds of sheep across the Anglo-French maritime border and the Pyrenean frontier with Spain. These projects developed in tandem with new conceptions of the permanence of race and breed, according to which animals would retain their characteristics in new climates and environments. Combining perspectives from economic, agricultural, political, and cultural history, this article uses the concept of animal mercantilism to open up the geopolitical stakes inherent in understandings of animals, race, and climate.

Two months after its premiere in Leipzig, Ernst Krenek’s Leben des Orest (1930) came to the Berlin Kroll Opera, a notorious centre for experimental, modernist productions. Inevitably, critics compared the two productions, much to the Berlin production’s detriment. In particular, critics faulted the Berlin stage designs by Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. I argue that this reception reflected a fundamental divergence in Krenek and de Chirico’s neoclassicism, which was only exacerbated by how neither Krenek nor de Chirico’s neoclassicism aligned with pre-existing expectations about the Kroll Opera’s production aesthetic, as exemplified in Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (staged at the Kroll in 1928). Attending to these differences not only explains the troubled reception of Leben des Orest at the Kroll, but also provides fertile ground to examine the complicated and sometimes contradictory meanings ascribed to neoclassicism in the interwar period, especially as it moved between media and across national borders.

Novel utility computing paradigms rely upon the deployment of multi-service applications to pervasive and highly distributed cloud-edge infrastructure resources. Deciding onto which computational nodes to place services in cloud-edge networks, as per their functional and non-functional constraints, can be formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem. Most existing solutions in this space are not able to deal with unsatisfiable problem instances, nor preferences, i.e., requirements that DevOps may agree to relax to obtain a solution. In this article, we exploit Answer Set Programming optimisation capabilities to tackle this problem. Experimental results in simulated settings show that our approach is effective on lifelike networks and applications.

We present the first results from the COS-EDGES survey, targeting the kinematic connection between the interstellar medium and multi-phase circumgalactic medium (CGM) in nine isolated, near-edge-on galaxies at $z\sim0.2$, each probed along its major axis by a background quasar at impact parameters of $D=13-38$ kpc. Using VLT/UVES and HST/COS quasar spectra, we analyse Mgi, Mgii, Hi, Cii, Ciii, and Ovi absorption relative to galaxy rotation curves from Keck/LRIS and Magellan/MagE spectra. We find that low ionisation absorption for 8/9 galaxies lies below the halo escape velocity, indicating bound inflow or recycling gas, while 6/9 galaxies have high ionisation gas reaching above the halo escape velocity, suggesting some unbound material. We find that at lower $D/R_{\textrm{vir}}$ ($0.12\leq D/R_{\textrm{vir}} \leq0.20$), over 80% of absorption in all ions lies on the side of systemic velocity matching disk rotation, and the optical-depth–weighted median velocity ($v_{abs}$) is consistent with the peak rotation speed. At higher $D/R_{\textrm{vir}}$ ($0.21\leq D/R_{\textrm{vir}} \leq0.31$), the kinematics diverge by ionisation state: For the low ionisation gas, the amount of co-rotating absorption remains above 80%, yet $v_{abs}$ drops to roughly 60% of the galaxy rotation speed. For the high ionisation gas (Ovi), only 60% of the absorption is consistent with co-rotation and $v_{abs}$ drops to 20% of the galaxy rotation speed. Furthermore, the velocity widths, corresponding to 50% of the total optical depth ($\Delta v_{50}$) for low ionisation gas is up to 1.8 times larger in the inner halo than at larger radii, while for Ciii and Ovi $\Delta v_{50}$ remains unchanged with distance. The 90% optical-depth width ($\Delta v_{90}$) shows a modest decline with radius for low ionisation gas but remains constant Ciii and Ovi. At high $D/{R}_{\textrm{vir}}$, both $\Delta v_{50}$ and $\Delta v_{90}$ increase with ionisation potential. These results suggest a radially dependent CGM kinematic structure: the inner halo hosts cool, dynamically broad gas tightly coupled to disk rotation, whereas beyond $\gtrsim 0.2 R_{\textrm{vir}}$, particularly traced by Ovi and Hi, the CGM shows weaker rotational alignment and lower relative velocity dispersion. Therefore, low-ionisation gas likely traces extended co-rotating gas, inflows and/or recycled accretion, while high-ionisation gas reflects a mixture of co-rotating, lagging, discrete collisionally ionised structures and volume-filling warm halo, indicating a complex kinematic stratification of the multi-phase CGM.

A growing literature explores the representational detail of infants’ early lexical representations, but no study has investigated how exposure to real-life acoustic-phonetic variation impacts these representations. Indeed, previous experimental work with young infants has largely ignored the impact of accent exposure on lexical development. We ask how routine exposure to accent variation affects 6-month-olds’ ability to detect mispronunciations. Forty-eight monolingual English-learning 6-month-olds participated. Mono-accented infants, exposed to minimal accent variation, detected vowel mispronunciations in their own name. Multi-accented infants, exposed to high levels of accent variation, did not. Accent exposure impacts speech processing at the earliest stages of lexical acquisition.

Situated at the junction of Cognitive Semantics and Experimental Phenomenology, this study investigates how participants perceive the structure of 18 perceptual dimensions of opposites across the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensory modalities. The structures include three components: two poles (high; low) and an intermediate (neither high nor low). Participants were asked to provide examples of contexts for each dimension for which they could experience the five sensory modalities and then describe their experiences of the structures with respect to whether the poles were experienced as a single property (Point), or a range of properties with or without a precise limit (Bounded Range or Unbounded Range respectively). For the intermediate region, they described if they experienced a single property (Point) or many (Range) or none (No Intermediates). The study centres on two main questions. Is the perceptual structure invariant across the sensory modalities? If not, how do the structures differ? The study shows that the overall structure of all dimensions was stable in at least two of the modalities, and many structures were stable across more than two modalities. Stability was particularly pertinent across the visual and tactile modalities, and the gustatory and olfactory modalities.