This article considers how European mountaineers, Bolivian elites, and Aymara communities perceived mountains, glaciers, and one another in the final years of the nineteenth century at the height of a campaign to dispossess Indigenous communities’ land and determined Aymara resistance. To do so, it takes a microhistorical approach, focusing on the interactions among Aymara community members, members of the Sociedad Geográfica de La Paz, and British mountaineer Martin Conway and his Swiss guides during Conway’s 1898 climbs in the Cordillera Real. Each of these groups was devoted to glaciated mountains, but in different ways and for diverging purposes. While Aymaras revered mountains as powerful ancestral deities, paceño geographers valued them as sites of marketable resources. For foreign mountaineers, glaciated peaks were sites for adventure, conquest, and profit. Divergent approaches to mountains and glaciers led to conflicts between foreign mountaineers and Aymara community members rooted in deeper disputes over race, gender, and nature.

We possess a limited understanding of Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and political attitudes. Previous research has mainly focused on explaining Indigenous electoral abstention and has faced constraints, mainly because of small sample sizes. Drawing on data from both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, which encompass an unprecedented number of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis respondents, we explore Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and attitudes toward public spending at the federal level in Canada. We show that while Indigenous respondents remain more likely to consider abstention, they can also be more supportive of third parties than their non-Indigenous counterparts and adopt views spanning the traditional left–right ideological spectrum. These findings encourage a redefinition of the expectations regarding the political behaviors and attitudes of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully engage with diverse political cultures.

In this paper, we explore the concept of modularity in first-order answer set programming (ASP). We introduce a new formalism called parametric modular logic programs, which allows defining subprograms with parameters and intensionality statements. We demonstrate how this formalism can capture the semantics of clingo-programs with collective control, a feature that enables structuring and instantiating subprograms. We provide theoretical foundations for modular ASP, illustrate its usefulness, and connect to traditional non-modular ASP.

Functional neurosurgery can modulate the pathological brain circuits that underlie psychiatric symptoms. For select disorders it is safe, precise and evidence-based; for others, it holds real promise. Nevertheless, referrals remain strikingly low relative to the burden of refractory illness – a gap that could be meaningfully addressed by closer psychiatry–neurosurgery collaboration.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly supporting targeting, intelligence analysis and operational planning across military domains, reshaping how commanders use force through human–machine teaming (HMT). HMT offers operational advantages, but risks such as automation bias, adversarial manipulation and degraded performance pose challenges for the ability of deployers to use AI systems in compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL). This article argues that adherence to IHL cannot be deferred until hostilities arise; system design, testing, governance and training must be structured in advance to establish the conditions under which AI-enabled human–machine teams can exercise appropriate human judgement consistent with IHL obligations. The paper proposes an HMT Assurance Card, a cross-disciplinary life-cycle instrument integrating IHL obligations, civilian harm pattern analysis and AI governance frameworks into measurable standards applicable across the AI system life cycle, defence institutions and coalition environments.

This article introduces the global Women’s Safety Index (WSI), outlining its rationale, purpose, and potential applications. The Index consist of three dimensions: Equity, Protection, and Resources, identified as foundational to women’s safety. Key indicators within each dimension are selected based on theoretical relevance and empirical evidence. We detail the statistical methodology and framework used to construct the Index and present validation analyses demonstrating its ability to capture changes in women’s safety, particularly in response to external disruptions. The WSI is available on an interactive digital platform, enabling users to explore, visualize, and compare women’s safety data across regions and over time.

Why are contemporary central banks – institutions designed to be narrow, technical, and apolitical – suddenly publishing extensively on non-monetary topics? This research essay explores how knowledge production has become central banks’ primary tool for managing a fundamental tension: expanding the scope of their interventions while maintaining technocratic legitimacy. By analysing their knowledge production across two key domains – climate change and digital currencies – we identify two axes of ‘scientisation’: boundary-pushing/keeping; and proactive/reactive. This suggests scientisation can be seen as a strategic response to mandate uncertainty, transforming expert knowledge into both a vehicle for negotiating central banks’ political mandate and a shield against democratic accountability. The implications of our findings extend beyond central banks, speaking to fundamental questions over technocratic power in an era of perpetual crisis.

It has been widely suggested in recent years that exposure to and use of multiple languages can affect cognitive performance, with bilinguals frequently being argued to demonstrate superior cognitive performance to their monolingual peers. The current study investigates whether there are any effects of minimal exposure to second-language (L2) Welsh on the cognitive skills of English-speaking emergent bilingual primary school children in Wales. Participants were divided into two language groups based on their school year, with performance between monolingual (N = 25) and emergent bilingual (N = 38) children compared on a variety of executive function (EF) tasks. Results revealed superior performance for the bilingual children in Reception and Year 1 on all EF tasks aside from the Forward digit recall compared to monolingual peers, with no differences between groups in Year 2. This suggests that the cognitive benefits of bilingualism emerge at very early stages of second-language exposure.

This study examines how late adolescent Mandarin-English heritage speakers (HSs) process different types of Mandarin pronouns in real time and how individual differences in cognitive and experiential factors modulate this process. Using a web-based visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested the interpretation of pronominals (ta), simplex reflexives (ziji), and complex reflexives (taziji), which differ in their reliance on narrow syntax versus syntax-discourse-semantic integration. At the group level, taziji was interpreted locally, while ziji and ta were interpreted as referring to long-distance (LD) antecedents. Working memory and inhibition modulated the processing of ziji and ta, whereas only current heritage language (HL) exposure influenced the processing of taziji. These findings indicate that domain-general cognitive resources are recruited during the resolution of pronouns involving LD and interface-level dependencies, while narrow syntactic structures are more sensitive to variation in language exposure. The results point to structural asymmetries in how cognitive and experiential factors affect real-time HL pronoun resolution.

We investigated moral judgments about transgressions of social conventions and moral rules in two studies. In Experiment 1, we compared socially problematic juveniles from Youth Educational Centres (YEC, aged 14–18) with control juveniles from technical schools. Control juveniles judged moral transgressions as more severe than conventional transgressions, whereas YEC juveniles showed the opposite pattern. This reversal allowed for approximately 70% accurate classification of group membership. In Experiment 2, we tested whether the degree of moral-conventional differentiation predicted socialization outcomes in a general sample of secondary school students (N = 204). Students who more clearly differentiated moral transgressions from social convention violations on a goodness scale received higher teacher-assigned behavior grades. Reversal of normal moral-conventional differentiation predicts poor socialization in at-risk adolescents; within a general school sample, the strength of that differentiation predicts teacher-rated behavior.

In this paper, we propose using Learning from Answer Sets to approximate black-box models, such as Neural Networks (NN), in the specific case of learning user preferences. We specifically explore the use of ILASP (Inductive Learning of Answer Set Programs) to approximate preference learning systems through weak constraints. We have created a dataset on user preferences over a set of recipes, which is used to train the NNs that we aim to approximate with ILASP. Our experiments investigate ILASP both as a global and a local approximator of the NNs. These experiments address the challenge of approximating NNs working on increasingly high-dimensional feature spaces while achieving appropriate fidelity on the target model and limiting the increase in computational time. To handle this challenge, we propose a preprocessing step that exploits Principal Component Analysis to reduce the dataset’s dimensionality while keeping our explanations transparent.

Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Recent evidence suggests that oligarchs hold disproportionate influence over electoral representative institutions and limit people’s participation in both formal and informal spaces of democratic politics. Drawing on phenomenology, I develop the concept of oligarchic fatigue to describe the political exhaustion that arises when people’s attempts to engage in democratic practices are obstructed by oligarchic domination. Oligarchic fatigue materializes through two analytically distinct mechanisms: people experience fatigue either (1) when they actively participate within formal political spaces, but their options for participation are constrained due to oligarchic control over political institutions; or (2) when their political participation is deemed illegitimate and functionally denied by oligarchy. The corrective to oligarchic fatigue, I contend, is a renewed focus on political freedom as a constitutive element of democratic innovations and anti-oligarchic institutional design.