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.

We analyzed the diagnostic yield of repeat urine cultures in a retrospective study of adult inpatients. Most urine cultures repeated at less than 6 days provided redundant information. This was true whether the index culture was positive or negative, and whether the threshold for positivity was 10,000 or 100,000 CFU/mL.

Tuberous sclerosis complex is syndrome that affects several organs. Cardiac manifestations include rhabdomyoma, which could lead to intracardiac obstruction of blood flow. In the present case, the so far lowest documented Everolimus blood level of 2–3 ng/ml led to tumour regression. Repeated Everolimus stopping and restarting for clinical reasons serves as a proof-of-concept for Everolimus therapy in tuberous sclerosis complex.

The term resilience has begun to proliferate in regional economic literature over the last decade as more and more authors have sought to connect the term to economic shocks. Resilience as a concept is not new, particularly for ecology and engineering, but its use in regional economic analysis is more recent. Many authors have sought to define and measure the resilience of regions to exogenous shocks, utilizing multifaceted interdisciplinary approaches. This paper uses a bibliometric approach to conduct an in-depth critical review of both the definitions and metrics associated with regional resilience. We found 98 unique studies that were reviewed to collate and analyze methods and indicators used to measure regional economic resilience. Our analysis identified 202 unique metrics (e.g., educational attainment) associated with regional economic resilience that can be aggregated into 15 overarching themes (e.g., demographics), and represented in 3 distinct clusters (e.g., community development).

In this study, we established an annually resolved chronology for the upper 98.5 m of a 210.5 m deep ice core (Styx-M core) drilled at the Styx Glacier plateau (SGP) in northern Victoria Land, East Antarctica, to reconstruct the multi-centennial variations of the snow accumulation rate (SAR). The core was dated via the annual layer counting of highly resolved impurities exhibiting seasonal cycles. The layer counting result was constrained using multiple temporal markers, including the 239Pu peaks that resulted from atmospheric weapon tests as well as five large volcanic eruptions in recorded history. These approaches show that the Styx-M core chronology covered 755 years (1259–2014 CE), with the estimated dating uncertainties of ±8 years. The annual accumulation record was derived using the depth-age scale and depth-density relationships of the core. This record revealed a long-term trend of a ∼30% increase in the SARs over the past 755 years, overlapping the pronounced inter-decadal and multi-decadal fluctuations. Further study will be needed to reveal the complex interaction of oceanic and atmospheric processes controlling the temporal fluctuations of SARs in the coastal areas of northern Victoria Land, combining multiple proxy records in the Styx-M core.

This study examines how infant temperament, particularly fear, influences physiological improvements in infants following maternal postpartum depression (PPD) treatment. Forty infants of birthing parents with major depressive disorder and 40 healthy controls were recruited. Parents with PPD participated in a nine-week cognitive-behavioral therapy intervention. Infant emotion regulation was assessed using high-frequency heart-rate variability (HF-HRV) and frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) at baseline (T1), immediately post-treatment (T2), and three months later (T3). Birthing parents also reported on their infant’s temperamental fear using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised Short-Form at these times. A significant increase in HF-HRV was observed immediately after treatment in the PPD group which persisted at T3. While no Group × Visit × Fear interaction emerged from repeated measure models, follow-up regression analyses within the PPD group revealed that higher baseline fear was associated with smaller increases in HF-HRV from T1 to T2 or T3. Although FAA shifted leftward over time, fear did not significantly predict FAA changes. No associations between fear and physiology were observed in the control group. The study suggests that infant fear may reduce the physiological benefits of maternal PPD treatment for infants, underscoring the importance of considering infant characteristics when assessing the impact of maternal PPD interventions.

Diplomatic events are frequently cited as key determinants of public opinion on foreign countries. However, the process of political socialisation also plays a critical role in shaping such views over time. In this study, we examine trends in Japanese perceptions of China, Russia, and, as a comparative background, the U.S., focusing on the influences of age, period, and cohort effects. Utilising data from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitude & Trends Survey (2007–2022), we apply the hierarchical age–period–cohort model to disentangle these three effects. Our findings indicate that while the older tend to hold more negative views of these three countries, the influence of age appears weaker than initially hypothesised. While major international crises tend to worsen perceptions across the board, regional disputes exert additional fluctuations (period effect). In comparison to the age and the period effects, cohort effects reveal a generational divide: First, contrasting with the U.S. case, different cohorts exhibit different perceptions toward China and Russia. Second, those born before or after the Cold War generally have more positive attitudes towards the two countries than those born during it. Notably, regional events appear to have little impact on these cohort-based attitudes. We also find that the age effect is more pronounced in the case of Russia, while period and cohort effects are more significant in the case of China. Our conclusions remain robust when controlling for other demographic factors. This study provides a temporal dynamics of Japanese foreign perceptions, utilising sociological methods to explore issues within international relations.

This study examines Israeli judges’ incorporation of the Arabic language and Islamic religious sources in court rulings within Israel and the West Bank military courts. Analysing seventy-eight judicial decisions (1997–2024) and interviews with legal professionals, we identify six themes motivating this practice: persuasion, authority reinforcement, cultural bridging, mutual respect, substantiation and alternative reasoning. Both Arab and Jewish judges employ this approach across criminal, family and civil law cases. This linguistic and cultural integration enhances court decision legitimacy among Arabic-speaking litigants and fosters intercultural understanding within the legal system. The study contributes to discussions on legal pluralism, judicial behaviour and the role of language in multicultural judicial systems, illuminating how the Israeli legal system navigates its multicultural reality and the interplay between law, language and cultural identity.

I give an account of ecology’s subject matter and generalizations in terms of functional roles. Functional roles are functionally defined kinds which include multiple species or general abiotic factors as members and occur in generalizations which hold across different ecological systems. Functional roles include central objects of study in ecology, like predator, parasite, and producer. I use functional roles to interpret and reorient major controversies in philosophy of ecology, including the metaphysics of ecological systems and the concept of “function.”