The prehistoric human habitation of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is well evidenced by the archaeological record, but poorly constrained in time and space. To test the plausibility of in situ survival during the last glacial maximum (LGM) and the coldest periods of the Pleistocene, this paper gauges the effects of LGM conditions and varying local ice coverage on the climate. Three different climate model scenarios are generated, and their outputs are used to drive vegetation simulations. This allows us to evaluate 10 archaeological sites that show evidence of human activity either pre- or post-LGM as possible human refugia. The results show that the higher the level of ice coverage on the plateau, the colder and drier the climate becomes, and barren unproductive land extends farther south. However, there are sites that remain habitable in all scenarios, with the southern and northeastern plateau identified as the areas with the highest likelihood of refugia during the LGM, specifically at the locations of Baishiya Karst Cave and Siling Co. There is a high probability of the TP being habitable during the LGM, as even the scenario with the most ice yields some regions with favourable conditions that are within the habitability criteria.

Between 1980 and 2020, more than 120 countries—Canada included—enfranchised emigrants. While the diffusion of democratic practices is a well-established international phenomenon, we know little about the domestic process. How does international policy diffusion influence domestic debate? To explain the structure of Canadian debate about emigrant voting rights, we draw on concepts from the constructivist literature on international norms. In examining the structure of normative discourse within a domestic context, we argue that emulation involves three rhetorical elements that can generate disagreement: (1) setting peer countries to emulate; (2) identifying existing policy positions; and (3) envisioning the preferred policy position vis-à-vis peers. We find that in the Canadian debate about emigrant voting, contestation increased over time; where only peer groups were contested in the early debates leading up to the initial 1993 enfranchisement, all three elements were contested when discussing the removal of temporal restrictions two decades later.

Abductive reasoning is a popular non-monotonic paradigm that aims to explain observed symptoms and manifestations. It has many applications, such as diagnosis and planning in artificial intelligence and database updates. In propositional abduction, we focus on specifying knowledge by a propositional formula. The computational complexity of tasks in propositional abduction has been systematically characterized – even with detailed classifications for Boolean fragments. Unsurprisingly, the most insightful reasoning problems (counting and enumeration) are computationally highly challenging. Therefore, we consider reasoning between decisions and counting, allowing us to understand explanations better while maintaining favorable complexity. We introduce facets to propositional abductions, which are literals that occur in some explanation (relevant) but not all explanations (dispensable). Reasoning with facets provides a more fine-grained understanding of variability in explanations (heterogeneous). In addition, we consider the distance between two explanations, enabling a better understanding of heterogeneity/homogeneity. We comprehensively analyze facets of propositional abduction in various settings, including an almost complete characterization in Post’s framework.

Bringing one’s authentic self to work is important to employees’ psychological well-being and performance. Although literature has examined how organizational factors influence authentic self-expression, it has largely overlooked the role of leaders. Drawing from leadership research, this study investigates the impact of perceived leader concern on authentic self-expression and its downstream effects on job attitudes. Findings provide empirical support for our predictions. Specifically, perceived leader concern is positively associated with authentic self-expression, which in turn relates positively to perceived self-concept-job fit. Regarding downstream outcomes, self-concept-job fit is positively related to organizational commitment and negatively to turnover intentions. Serial mediation analyses show that leader concern indirectly affects commitment and turnover intentions through authentic self-expression and self-concept-job fit. These findings highlight that leaders who show genuine concern foster open communication and authentic self-expression, enhancing alignment between identity and work, thereby strengthening commitment and reducing turnover. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

While the impact of the two world wars and other inter-state conflicts on the history of humanitarianism has been a major area of research for some time now, comparatively little work has been done on the question of how internal wars impacted on the ways in which transnational actors and institutions approached the issue of offering relief to populations caught up in armed conflicts. Through seven articles and a thematic introduction, this collection covers conflicts that occurred in the years 1917–1949 when Europe experienced a remarkable spike in civil war violence, from Russia to Spain, and from Ireland to Greece. Collectively, these articles offer a fresh analysis of the connections between civil wars and the evolution of modern humanitarianism during Europe’s mid-twentieth-century crisis, highlighting transnational connections between humanitarian practices and actors across several conflicts.

Many societies allocate wealth and status through competitions. These competitions may be seen as unfair if the playing field is uneven or if the competitors are of unequal strength. We run two experiments to document the extent to which people are willing to compete against others in situations with varying fairness concerns. In a between-subject experiment, we show that people’s willingness to compete is largely unaffected by the impact their choice has on the payoff of an opponent, no matter whether the opponent had a choice about whether to compete or not. In a within-subject experiment, we show that most people are willing to compete against opponents who have been exogenously disadvantaged or are known to be weaker. People who choose competition against weak or disadvantaged opponents are also more willing to give themselves an advantage by sabotaging the performance of their opponent.

Panpsychists commonly hang onto the ‘realist’ assumption that our world with its structures has an observer-independent, often spatial element to it, even while they claim that those structures are realized by the experiences of subjects. I argue that this assumption is the ‘worm in the apple’ that lurks behind two of panpsychism’s major problems: the subject (de)combination problem and what I call the ‘inner-outer gap problem’. Abandoning this assumption sidesteps those problems, but commits panpsychism to anti-realism.

Practice-based approaches to the philosophy of mathematics have gone mainstream over the past several decades. As the paradigm has grown in popularity, however, there’s been little sustained meditation—and still less any explicit consensus—on what precisely it means for philosophy to take practice seriously. The field’s lack of a clear common methodology has begun to make itself felt in slowed and uncertain progress on core problems. Here, I review the methodological situation and propose five canons to guide future research. I focus throughout on the study of explanation in mathematics as a guiding example.

We examine the construction of a pan-European economic space from the perspective of the activities of the Liaison Committee of the International Chamber of Commerce with the Chambers of Commerce of the Socialist Countries. We make three important contributions. First, we show that the Cold War does not mark the end of economic exchanges between Eastern and Western Europe but is part of a longer history in which Eastern Europe was an economic periphery of Western Europe. Second, we emphasise that some Eastern European actors from Czechoslovakia and Hungary used the Committee to develop their contacts with the West and gain some independence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Western European businessmen also sought to expand their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, to the detriment of their American competitors. Third, we highlight the complex relationship between states and business in both blocs and the porosity between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ issues during the Cold War.

Cette note de recherche examine le nationalisme identitaire de la Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) depuis son arrivée au pouvoir, à travers une analyse qualitative des débats parlementaires à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec (2018–2023). En s’appuyant sur les discours des élus caquistes, elle explore comment la CAQ définit et met en oeuvre son nationalisme identitaire, caractérisé par un interventionnisme fort en matière d’immigration, de laïcité et de protection de la langue française. Il s’agit de montrer que, face à une réforme du fédéralisme bloquée et au refus de la souveraineté à deux reprises par la population, la CAQ substitue aux aspirations déchues de souveraineté du Québec et aux tentatives de réforme de la fédération une affirmation franche des « frontières imaginées » de la nation québécoise, c’est-à-dire des marqueurs qui définiraient « un vrai Québécois ». Grâce à un large corpus de débats parlementaires et à un codage thématique qualitatif, l’analyse met en évidence l’ubiquité du discours identitaire dans l’action gouvernementale de la CAQ. Enfin, cette note de recherche souligne le potentiel heuristique de l’analyse des discours parlementaires pour mieux comprendre les transformations contemporaines du nationalisme québécois.

Given the tropicalization of a complex subvariety of the torus, we define a morphism between the tropical cohomology and the rational cohomology of their respective tropical compactifications. We say that the subvariety of the torus is cohomologically tropical if this map is an isomorphism for all closed strata of the tropical compactification.

We prove that a schön subvariety of the torus is cohomologically tropical if and only if it is wunderschön and its tropicalization is a tropical homology manifold. The former property means that the open strata in the boundary of a tropical compactification are all connected and the mixed Hodge structures on their cohomology are pure of maximum possible weight; the latter property requires that, locally, the tropicalization verifies tropical Poincaré duality.

We study other properties of cohomologically tropical and wunderschön varieties, and show that in a semistable degeneration to an arrangement of cohomologically tropical varieties, the Hodge numbers of the smooth fibers are captured in the tropical cohomology of the tropicalization. This extends the results of Itenberg, Katzarkov, Mikhalkin and Zharkov.

Mandibular and dental material of hyaenids from the Central Asian localities of Zasukhino-3 (Russia) and Nalaikha (Mongolia), dating to the late Early Pleistocene (0.9–0.78 Ma) was identified as giant hyena Pachycrocuta brevirostris based on morphological and size similarities. Comparative analysis of Eurasian P. brevirostris from different stratigraphic levels (from 2.1 to 0.5 Ma) revealed two evolutionary stages of the lower cheek teeth of the giant hyenas. The stages are determined as morphotypes A and B, directed toward the differentiation of the function of premolar and enhancing the cutting function of m1. We traced the microprocesses that occurred during the transition from the primitive structure of the m1 talonid to its more advanced state. This event occurred during the transition from the late Villafranchian to the Epivillafranchian (ca. 1.1–0.9 Ma). The stabilized advanced morphotype B was found in samples from Zasukhino-3, Nalaikha, and other close-in-age localities such as Lakhuti-2. The new finds from Asian Russia and Mongolia suggest that P. brevirostris from these regions represent a single giant hyena population occupying the northernmost part of their Asian range.

The sentiment expressed in a legislator’s speech is informative. However, extracting legislators’ sentiment requires human-annotated data. Instead, we propose exploiting closing debates on a bill in Japan, where legislators in effect label their speech as either pro or con. We utilize debate speeches as the training dataset, fine-tune a pretrained model, and calculate the sentiment scores of other speeches. We show that the more senior the opposition members are, the more negative their sentiment. Additionally, we show that opposition members become more negative as the next election approaches. We also demonstrate that legislators’ sentiments can be used to predict their behaviors by using the case in which government members rebelled in the historic vote of no confidence in 1993.