This article rethinks how colonial presence and foreign settlements reconfigured urban spaces beyond the treaty-port system by examining Chengdu, an inland, non-treaty-port city. Focusing on the 1930 boundary-wall controversy at West China Union University, a missionary college, it shows that anti-imperialism was refracted through local expectations of access to space and how everyday spatial practices had blurred the line between foreign enclave and local community. In the absence of colonial infrastructures, WCUU pursued indigenizing strategies to embed themselves in urban life; its later move to enclose the campus with walls was criticized as imperialist encroachment. Occurring amid heightened nationalism, the controversy drew force both from nationalist idioms and from ordinary residents’ everyday grievances—economic strain, insecurity, and disruptions to daily routines—in a notably turbulent interwar Chengdu. The conflict brought to the fore two visions of Chengdu’s urban identity: one championed by Western-educated local elites and another articulated by local people defending what they understood as public space. Moreover, I demonstrate how missionary institutions in less overtly colonial settings grappled with the contradictions inherent in their liminal status—simultaneously functioning as colonial enclaves and aspiring to integrate into local society.

We explore international reserve accumulation in Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), rationalizing policymakers’ belief that it counteracts the negative effects of capital inflows. Empirical evidence reveals that EMEs accumulate reserves in response to capital inflows driven by global push factors, especially when there are limitations on residents’ investments abroad. We elucidate these findings with a three-period model of a small open economy. In the first period, a large direct investment inflow occurs, prompting an EME to save abroad for consumption smoothing. If frictions hinder private overseas investments, the government can accumulate reserves to supplement insufficient private outflows. The theory highlights the role of reserves in managing capital inflows, as substantiated by our empirical findings.

This article revisits the linguistic periodization of the book of Jonah, focusing on E.B. Pusey’s 1860 commentary and its modern relevance. Pusey challenged claims that Jonah’s unusual lexicon and grammar required a post-exilic date, arguing instead for earlier, non-diachronic explanations such as dialect, foreign influence, and contextual usage. His nuanced treatment anticipated later methodological developments, especially the rule-governed approach of Avi Hurvitz, which identifies diagnostically late linguistic features through late distribution, classical opposition, and extrabiblical confirmation. Applying these criteria, the article surveys more than fifty features in Jonah deemed late by various scholars. Eleven emerge as strong indicators of lateness, while many others show partial or ambiguous significance, often explainable by genre, style-switching, or Phoenician/Aramaic influence. Taken cumulatively, the evidence suggests Jonah’s Hebrew belongs to a late stratum, most plausibly the sixth–fifth century BCE, within the Persian Period, though affinities with Rabbinic Hebrew complicate precise placement. While modern scholarship generally rejects Pusey’s pre-exilic dating, his sensitivity to methodological caution and non-diachronic variety remains instructive. Jonah thus stands as a linguistically peculiar text, chiefly Classical Biblical Hebrew, but with links to Late Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew, and Aramaic, that offers a valuable test case for theories of linguistic periodization.

The grounding zones of Antarctic ice shelves are among the continent’s most dynamic regions, where floating ice shelves buttress grounded upstream ice and tidal forcing drives cyclic flexure at the ice–ocean–bed interface. We use ICESat-2 altimetry and airborne ice-penetrating radar to constrain the effective Young’s modulus E* of ice in the flexure zone at three sites on the Ross Ice Shelf. By modeling ice as an elastic beam of variable thickness, we infer a single effective elastic parameter, E*, that encapsulates the combined flexural response of the ice–bed–ocean system. Our results show considerable spatial variability in E*, with values ranging from 1 to 9 GPa across sites, with a mean of 4.7 $\pm$ 2.4 GPa. This variability reflects intersecting basal, oceanographic and mechanical processes in the grounding zone, including fractures, bed stiffness, subglacial hydrology and viscoelasticity of ice. Because flexure of ice and bed cannot readily be distinguished in observations, we argue for a bulk interpretation of E* that allows uncertainty to be quantified in terms of a single effective elastic parameter. Because ice thickness and elastic modulus are coupled in the beam bending equations, constraining effective Young’s modulus is a critical step toward estimating ice shelf thickness and thickness gradient in grounding zones independent of the hydrostatic assumption.

Among little-known fragments of sacramentaries, two examples in insular half uncial in German libraries offer us significant evidence of the activities of early English missionaries and scribes. The first has long been known in German as the Sacramentary of Boniface, and its unique and archaic content shows it is among the only surviving evidence of liturgical practice in England itself in the eighth century. The second, in scattered fragments from the monastery of Groß Sankt Martin in Cologne, offers an important witness of the Gelasian of the eighth century (as distinct from the Old Gelasian Sacramentary), a compilation exclusively known on the Continent. Liturgical evidence offers a framework to go beyond the uncertain attempts to date and localize the particularly conservative script of these fragments. Analysis of their content shows how English scribes made a decisive input to the transformations of the continent’s liturgy and the dissemination of new forms of mass book.

Honest behavior of public sector workers is an important quality of governance, impacting the functioning of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Scholars often assume that honesty is inherent to public sector culture, however empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on honest behavior is lacking. This research addresses this question by estimating the causal effect of priming public sector identity on the honest behavior of public employees. We validated an instrument for priming public sector identity and employed it in five preregistered incentivized experiments among civil servants in Germany, Israel, Italy, Sweden, and the UK (N = 2,827). We find no evidence for the effect of public sector culture on honest behavior in both individual (four studies) and collaborative (one study) tasks. The theoretical implications of these results for the study of moral behavior in the public sector are discussed.

In this article, I study non-material harm in cases of environmental liability. Environmental tragedy does not only come at great economic cost but often also brings about non-material loss – that is, loss that has no market value. In order to better recognize, assess, and measure this type of harm, more insight is needed into its psychological conception and parameters. Departing from the available legal frameworks on non-material harm in Belgium as well as in the Netherlands, I study how environmental psychology can help in recognizing, assessing, and measuring environmental non-material harm. More specifically, I focus on solastalgia, a notion that describes the psychological impact of negatively perceived changes to a familiar environment. Solastalgia describes a crisis of identity as a result of a disturbance in the way in which humans inhabit their environment. It describes a form of ecological grief over the loss of a familiar place – that is, the aggregate meanings, values, familiarity, and predictability attached to a specific environment. Using the available theoretical framework around solastalgia and the available empirical insights in the solastalgia literature, I show that solastalgia qualifies as a valid type of harm and bears significant advantages when implemented in environmental tort law frameworks.

This article examines the historical transformation of childhood vaccination in the Netherlands between 1872 and 1959. It analyses how vaccination was reframed from an individual parental responsibility to a collective practice through the establishment of the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ (National Immunisation Programme). I analyse this historical trajectory as a case of ‘public health atomism’, a strategy that achieves collective health by prioritizing individual health outcomes and local action. Rather than relying on top-down state mandates, the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ was a consequence of co-operation between general practitioners, municipal health officials, civil society organisations, and volunteers. Drawing from published medical sources, parliamentary records, and material from local and national archives, this article provides a detailed historical account of how local governance and autonomy shaped vaccination practices, highlighting the role of the ‘entgemeenschap’ (vaccination community) as a key organisational model for situated collaboration. As such, it revisits childhood vaccination as an archetypical example of biopolitical state intervention, demonstrating how localised, flexible co-operation was instrumental in integrating vaccination into Dutch society.

This article explores the semiotic and embodied dynamics of improvisation by focusing on tactile interaction, risk, and the temporal conditions under which meaning must emerge. Drawing on ethnographic examples from competitive and free solo rock climbing, as well as greeting practices among Swahili women in Lamu (Kenya) and Toronto (Canada), I explore how improvisation operates not as a deviation from routinized behavior, but as a generative force. Through an examination of these disparate tactile encounters, I argue that under high-stakes temporal pressure, improvisation becomes a form of semiotic labor: an interpretive responsiveness to emergent signs that are not only felt in the moment but are also anticipated and evaluated against embodied memory. Rock surfaces and handshakes are treated as communicative environments that elicit the anticipation of qualia and require semiotic attunement when such anticipation fails. In such moments, I argue, improvisation does not simply fill a gap but constitutes a recalibration of meaning through the body.

Loneliness is recognized as a significant public mental health issue, especially among adolescents. There is insufficient research on adolescent loneliness in countries such as Kenya, where adolescents make up 23% of the population. The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of loneliness among high school students living in different regions of Kenya. This cross-sectional study included 2,652 high school students from ten schools across three Kenyan regions, reflecting both urban and rural settings. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing socio-demographic, educational, and psychological factors, along with their experiences of loneliness over the past year. The level of loneliness was assessed by the question “During the past 12 months, how often have you felt lonely?”. Loneliness during the past 12 months (responses “always” and “most of the time”) were identified in 17.1% of males and 16.6% of females. Significant factors associated with loneliness included grade level, geographical location, family structure, and perceived economic status. Urban students and those attending schools in Nairobi and Kiambu, as well as those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, reported higher loneliness. The high prevalence of loneliness highlights the need for targeted interventions, particularly in urban and economically disadvantaged groups.

In this study, we investigate Hungarian Plain Language (PL) and Simple Language (SL) with the primary objective of training a machine-learning-based sentence-level PL model that flags sentences where expert intervention may be needed during PL-oriented rewriting. The analysis uses a legal-administrative PL corpus and a news-based SL corpus, currently the only publicly available high-quality Hungarian resources for PL and SL. In low-resource settings, PL data are typically scarce, so selective data augmentation is a natural candidate for improving model performance. Our aims are threefold: (i) to provide a feature-based descriptive comparison of these Text Simplification resources; (ii) to test whether selectively chosen SL sentences can augment PL training data; and (iii) to evaluate the impact of such augmentation on sentence-level PL detection. Methodologically, we extract handcrafted linguistic features spanning surface, morphosyntactic and discourse properties. We derive a PL-likeness score from logistic-regression coefficients and use it to select SL sentences most similar to PL for augmentation, followed by supervised sentence-level PL detection with XLM-RoBERTa-large. Results show clear differences between PL and SL in sentence length, lexical diversity, syntactic depth and connective use. Selective inclusion of SL sentences yields modest gains in constrained settings, whereas indiscriminate mixing reduces precision and reliability.