Integrating nature and green space into urban areas is a growing social challenge. The dollar value that renters place on public amenities when choosing where to live is essential for policymakers and urban planners looking to provide equitable access to environmental amenities and other public goods. This study estimates renter willingness to pay (WTP) for urban green space in the greater Boston area, utilizing a sorting model framework with data on census, transit, and neighborhood quality measures. My results suggest that renter household WTP is between $1.17 and $1.64 for an additional percentage point of urban green space in their location decisions. I examine differences in WTP for green space between white and minority renters, uncovering both shared and divergent sorting behaviors, as well as disparities in the distribution of environmental benefits across groups.

Since the 1990s, Pine Island Glacier (PIG) has been a focal point of research due to its vulnerability within the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Decades of research have interrogated this dynamic glacier system with a focus on its main trunk and the ice shelf section bordering and stabilizing PIG to the south (the ‘south shelf’), receiving comparatively less attention. Using satellite-derived observations from 2017 to 2023, we document marked dynamic changes on the south shelf, particularly following PIG’s 2018 calving event, which removed >60 km2 of ice from this section. Measurements of surface deformation, ice velocity and strain rates from synthetic aperture radar and optical imagery show localized acceleration and structural weakening of the south shelf near-coincident with this loss. Our findings, highlighting the role of peripheral ice shelves in glacier-system stability, suggest that PIG’s new configuration—characterized by weakening margins and a compromised south shelf—may result in a geometry that grows progressively unstable.

Rituals are sites of personal and social transformations. However, we still do not have a sophisticated theory for how these rituals were embedded and generated within specific political economies, nor how communities used ritual activities to conceptualize the cosmos. This paper develops a theoretical framework exploring pragmatism and materialism to articulate the relationship between imperial political economies and ritual activities, situating the latter in the former. This framework will then be applied to ritual activities in southern Roman Britain, exploring how ritual activities emerged within the imperial political economy. The emergence of Roman imperialism in Roman Britain materially impacted upon not only the nature and range of ritual activities, but also the cosmologies of local communities. Ritual activities are materializations of cosmological beliefs, and both were determined by the imperial political economy. It is this process by which cosmologies emerged to naturalize socially constructed relations and activities that I call ontogenesis.

This study investigated the effects of audience design and goal bias in Chinese speakers’ message generation of source-goal motion events (e.g., A bird flies from the tree to the house), using picture description and memory tasks. The status of the source (e.g., the tree) or the goal (e.g., the house) was manipulated as known or unknown to the confederate addressees. The findings revealed that the participants were more likely to omit the sources when they were mutually known to the addressee than when they were not. However, participants showed similar accuracy in detecting source changes, regardless of whether the sources were known to the addressee. Moreover, they consistently mentioned goals and showed similar accuracy in detecting goal changes, regardless of whether the goals were known or unknown to the addressee. The results suggest that audience design influenced the speakers’ mention of sources, but not their memory of them. It did not affect either the mention or the memory of goals. Goal bias was not consistently observed across the two experiments, both linguistically and in memory. This suggests a fragile goal bias in Chinese. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that audience design and goal bias influence the message generation of motion events in Chinese speakers.

The aim of this study is to explore how large language models (LLMs) integrated with structured versus unstructured concept generation techniques (CGTs) influence designers’ creative thinking processes and outputs. Using human–human collaboration (HHC) as a baseline, a 2 × 2 mixed factorial design was adopted to investigate the effects of collaborator type (between-subjects: LLM-based agents vs. experienced designers) and CGT type (within-subjects: brainstorming vs. TRIZ). Two LLM-based agents, IntelliStorm and EvoluTRIZ, were developed for the study, with 32 participants randomly assigned to either the HHC or human–agent collaboration (HAC) groups. Brain activity was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, while outputs were assessed through expert evaluations. Results showed that designers exhibited lower cognitive load, better cognitive resource coordination, and enhanced fluency and flexibility in thinking in HAC than in HHC. Moreover, distinct patterns were revealed in different CGTs: brainstorming activated the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the core connectivity region, enhancing ideational fluency, whereas TRIZ activated the left dorsolateral PFC, facilitating refined thinking. Although HAC demonstrated stronger overall performance, HHC retained unique advantages in originality. This research offers novel neuroscientific insights and provides evidence-based guidance for developing more effective LLM-based design agents.

The Biden-Harris administration launched two important initiatives to expand public participation in the administrative state. These initiatives aimed to increase public engagement in developing federal regulations and reducing burdens in accessing public benefits. These two initiatives built on social science, especially political science. In this piece, I draw from my experience helping to lead the work to describe how political science research informed the design and implementation of both initiatives. I aim to open the “black box” of how federal policy makers use political science research. I also describe future research that could advance these initiatives. I conclude with a case study of such research, examining the barriers faced by food assistance applicants to sharing their experiences with government with a survey of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants. The survey points to barriers government must overcome to expand participation among SNAP applicants and strategies policy makers might use to do so.

The English modals have been used as case studies in many domains of linguistic enquiry. Their diachronic development and patterns of synchronic variation in historical and contemporary corpora have been used to develop theories of linguistic representation, to further understanding of correlations between structure and use, and to investigate relationships between form and meaning. However, much of this research explores only the modals themselves: relatively little attention has been given to the study of modal collocations. In this article, we explore variation and change in collocational patterns of two modals (may and might) when they appear directly adjacent to the adverb well. Our analysis is corpus based, using quantitative data to explore macro-level trends in recent American English, and qualitative analysis to explore micro-level variation, particularly with regard to the development of concessive uses of may and might, and post-modal meanings more generally. We foreground the idea that modals show subtly different diachronic trends in specific collocations compared to perceived trends when looked at as an isolated class of auxiliary verbs.

Archaeology has been closely entangled with dominant power structures since its formal emergence in the nineteenth century. Recent scholarly work has sought to challenge this relationship and destabilize the fundamental Eurocentrism of archaeological theory and praxis. The extent to which this effort is reflected beyond academia has, however, not been as widely explored. In this article, the author presents evidence concerning the production of archaeological knowledge within the academy, the dissemination of knowledge of the past in schools and the media, and the consumption of this knowledge by members of the British public, including adults and secondary school pupils aged 11–14. He concludes that there exists a fundamental disjuncture between contemporary scholarly work and popular perceptions of the past and suggests some ways the academy may challenge the continued prevalence of Eurocentric perspectives of the past in popular discourse.

We report the results of an experiment on selective exposure to information. A decision maker interested in learning about an uncertain state of the world can acquire information from one of two sources that have opposite biases: when informed on the state, they report it truthfully; when uninformed, they report their favorite state. A Bayesian decision-maker is better off seeking confirmatory information unless the source biased against the prior is sufficiently more reliable. In line with the theory, subjects are more likely to seek confirmatory information when sources are symmetrically reliable. On the other hand, when sources are asymmetrically reliable, subjects are more likely to consult the more reliable source even when prior beliefs are strongly unbalanced and this source is less informative. Our experiment suggests that base rate neglect and simple heuristics (e.g., listen to the most reliable source) are important drivers of the endogenous acquisition of information.

Can the dead subject later generations to their will? Legal and political philosophers have long worried about this question. But some have recently argued that subjection between generations that do not overlap is impossible. Against these views, we offer an account of this kind of subjection and the conditions under which it may occur—the Mediated Subjection View. On this view, legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations occurs when past generations seek to guide the future’s behavior, and legal officials in the future deem the norms and legal frameworks inherited from the past as reason-giving and action-guiding, and have the effective power to enforce them. Under these circumstances, we argue, future legal officials act as intermediaries of the past, enabling past generations to subject later ones to their laws. We first inspect the normative significance of subjection and introduce and motivate the Mediated Subjection View. We next scrutinize four objections to the possibility of legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations and show how our view can answer them.

Multi-judge courts may seem like paradigmatic examples of group agents. For instance, they issue decisions in the name of a group. Like other groups, courts arrive at these decisions by means of a vote that is not always unanimous. Unlike other groups, courts do not need a majority vote to issue a decision. Plurality judgements can occur, where the court’s decision is formed by multiple sets of reasons, none of which represents a majority of the judges. These show that a court’s decisions on issues and outcomes are distinct. Minority reasons may influence the state of the law on a particular issue if they agree with another set of reasons. This allows the court to preserve decision-making both on outcome and on premises. The result is that Kornhauser and Sager’s doctrinal paradox, sometimes called the discursive dilemma, is not the same for courts as it is for other group agents.

It is often assumed that the rural identity is linked to the Republican Party and the urban identity to the Democratic Party, but little scholarship has investigated how voters connect thiese identities to the parties in an electoral context and how that perception may influence their electoral preferences. Furthermore, recent elections have seen various political elites employ rural and Evangelical Christian identity labels in virtually synonymous ways in their association with the Republican Party. But are these partisan stereotypes really how Americans perceive these candidate identities? Utilizing a novel survey experiment, we find important distinctions between religious and place-based candidate cues. Our results show the enduring power of religion in partisan politics and suggest America’s urban-rural divide may be asymmetric in the minds of voters. These findings are subsequently meaningful for the study of religion’s place in America’s growing array of politicized social identities.

Did women’s suffrage affect media sentiment toward voting rights and narratives about women more generally? I identify pro- and anti-suffrage language using publications that explicitly argued for or against early voting reform. I then measure media sentiment using language in newspapers and topic modeling to identify common themes about either suffrage or women. Difference-in-differences estimates show that newspaper coverage of suffrage increased when women won the vote but then declined below baseline. Newspaper sentiment moved in opposition to the status quo, with average sentiment becoming more anti-suffrage. Lastly, suffrage increased discussions of women in politics for several years.

Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) under the distribution semantics is a leading approach to practical reasoning under uncertainty. An advantage of the distribution semantics is its suitability for implementation as a Prolog or Python library, available through two well-maintained implementations, namely ProbLog and cplint/PITA. However, current formulations of the distribution semantics use point-probabilities, making it difficult to express epistemic uncertainty, such as arises from, for example, hierarchical classifications from computer vision models. Belief functions generalize probability measures as non-additive capacities and address epistemic uncertainty via interval probabilities. This paper introduces interval-based Capacity Logic Programs based on an extension of the distribution semantics to include belief functions and describes properties of the new framework that make it amenable to practical applications.

For nearly a decade, the concept of feminist foreign policy1 (FFP) has garnered global attention, with numerous countries adopting or expressing the intent to adopt such policies. However, the roles of Africans within these discourses, as both target and agents of FFP, has been uncertain. The particular attention paid by FFP to the Global South makes the exclusion of African knowledges especially jarring.