In Scotland, for hundreds of years, juries have chosen between three criminal verdicts: “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “not proven.” The “not proven” verdict’s legal meaning remains mysterious. In this article, I aim to describe and solve the problem. Applying modern ideas about standards of proof to the intellectual history of “not proven” yields eight plausible meanings for the verdict. With the extent of the problem in mind, I offer a solution. In the three-verdict system, jurors should deliver a “guilty” verdict when they believe that the accused has committed the crime and a “not guilty” verdict when they believe that the accused has not committed the crime. The “not proven” verdict is for all other states of mind. Clarifying this question matters for determining whether the verdict’s existence is just. It also offers some evidence for how the criminal standard of proof works in other legal systems.

The Southern Cone has been at the forefront of the fight for abortion rights in Latin America. Due to the legacies of Hispanic legal traditions and the overwhelming political influence of the Catholic Church, the region historically has been known for its restrictive policies on abortion and reproductive rights more broadly.1 However, in the past 15 years, Southern Cone countries began to challenge those restrictions and embarked on a feminist revolution that led to what is now widely known as the “Green Wave” because of the color embraced by abortion-rights activists. Uruguay began this trend of legalizing abortion on demand in 2012, followed by Argentina in 2020. Chile experienced a moderate reform in 2017 when it moved from a total ban to a system of exceptions. Feminists have been trying ever since to pass abortion on demand through both legislative and constitutional reforms, which have not yet yielded the expected results.

The Magellanic Stream (MS), a tail of diffuse gas formed from tidal and ram pressure interactions between the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC) and the Halo of the Milky Way, is primarily composed of neutral atomic hydrogen (HI). The deficiency of dust and the diffuse nature of the present gas make molecular formation rare and difficult, but if present, could lead to regions potentially suitable for star formation, thereby allowing us to probe conditions of star formation similar to those at high redshifts. We search for $\text{HCO}^{+}$, HCN, HNC, and C$_2$H using the highest sensitivity observations of molecular absorption data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to trace these regions, comparing with HI archival data from the Galactic Arecibo L-Band Feed Array (GALFA) HI Survey and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS) to compare these environments in the MS to the HI column density threshold for molecular formation in the Milky Way. We also compare the line of sight locations with confirmed locations of stars, molecular hydrogen, and OI detections, though at higher sensitivities than the observations presented here.

We find no detections to a 3$\sigma$ significance, despite four sightlines having column densities surpassing the threshold for molecular formation in the diffuse regions of the Milky Way. Here we present our calculations for the upper limits of the column densities of each of these molecular absorption lines, ranging from $3 \times 10^{10}$ to $1 \times 10^{13}$ cm$^{-2}$. The non-detection of $\text{HCO}^{+}$ suggests that at least one of the following is true: (i) $X_{\text{HCO}^{+}{}, \mathrm{MS}}$ is significantly lower than the Milky Way value; (ii) that the widespread diffuse molecular gas observed by Rybarczyk (2022b, ApJ, 928, 79) in the Milky Way’s diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) does not have a direct analogue in the MS; (iii) the HI-to-$\text{H}_{2}$ transition occurs in the MS at a higher surface density in the MS than in the LMC or SMC; or (iv) molecular gas exists in the MS, but only in small, dense clumps.

In this research, we update the measure of case salience for state supreme courts originally developed by Vining and Wilhelm (2011). The original measure was compatible with the Brace-Hall State Supreme Court Data Project (SSCDP) and covered 1995 through 1998. Our updated measure is now compatible with the Hall–Windett Data on State Supreme Court Outcomes (2013), a more contemporary source for state supreme court information. Here we discuss the new dataset of salient cases from 1995 to 2019 and provide descriptive statistics.

Ethical guidelines and policy documents destined to guide AI innovations have been heralded as the solution to guard us against harmful effects or to increase public value. However, these guidelines and policy documents face persistent challenges. While these documents are often criticized for their abstraction and disconnection from real-world contexts, it also occurs that stakeholders may influence them for political or strategic reasons. While this last issue is frequently acknowledged, there is seldom a means or a method provided to explore it. To address this gap, the paper employs a combination of social constructivism and science & technology studies perspectives, along with desk research, to investigate whether prior research has examined the influence of stakeholder interests, strategies, or agendas on guidelines and policy documents. The study contributes to the discourse on AI governance by proposing a theoretical framework and methodologies to better analyze this underexplored area, aiming to enhance comprehension of the policymaking process within the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The findings underscore the need for a critical evaluation of the methodologies found and a further exploration of their utility. In addition, the results aim to stimulate ongoing critical debates on this subject.

1. 1. Understanding whether a species still persists, or the timing of its extinction is challenging, however, such knowledge is fundamental for effective species management.

2. 2. For the vast majority of species our understanding of their existence is based solely on sighting data that can range from museum specimens and clear photographs, through vocalisations, to markings and oral accounts.

3. 3. Here we review the methods that have been developed to infer the extinction of species from a sighting record, providing an understanding of their assumptions and applications. We have also produced an RShiny package which can be used to implement some of the methods presented in the article.

4. 4. While there are a number of potential areas that could be further developed, the methods reviewed provide a useful tool for inferring species extinction.

A core normative assumption of welfare economics is that people ought to maximise utility and, as a corollary of that, they should be consistent in their choices. Behavioural economists have observed that people demonstrate systematic choice inconsistences, but rather than relaxing the normative assumption of utility maximisation they tend to attribute these behaviours to individual error. I argue in this article that this, in itself, is an error – an ‘error error’. In reality, a planner cannot hope to understand the multifarious desires that drive a person’s choices. Consequently, she is not able to discern which choice in an inconsistent set is erroneous. Moreover, those who are inconsistent may view neither of their choices as erroneous if the context reacts meaningfully with their valuation of outcomes. Others are similarly opposed to planners paternalistically intervening in the market mechanism to correct for behavioural inconsistencies, and advocate that the free market is the best means by which people can settle on mutually agreeable exchanges. However, I maintain that policymakers have a legitimate role in also enhancing people’s agentic capabilities. The most important way in which to achieve this is to invest in aspects of human capital and to create institutions that are broadly considered foundational to a person’s agency. However, there is also a role for so-called boosts to help to correct basic characterisation errors. I further contend that government regulations against self-interested acts of behavioural-informed manipulation by one party over another are legitimate, to protect the manipulated party from undesired inconsistency in their choices.

Based on a new cored succession at Winterswijk, evidence is uncovered of the end-Triassic mass-extinction (ETME) event in a subsurface sedimentary succession of the Netherlands. The ETME was one of the most devastating events for the biosphere during the Phanerozoic era. Massive volcanism from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province initiated the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea and resulted in terrestrial and marine extinction pulses, which drastically altered the course of life on Earth. The newly cored material reveals a sedimentary succession representing a shallow marine setting dominated by laminated black shale and claystone deposits. A high-resolution palynostratigraphic dataset provides evidence for a late Rhaetian vegetation assemblage that displays a stepwise decline of arborescent tree vegetation that is transiently replaced by a community of ferns and fern allies. Geochemical records link this major disturbance in palynofloral biodiversity to a pulse of volcanic activity as evidenced by a negative excursion in stable organic carbon isotopes. Shifts towards drier climate conditions, as inferred from sedimentary elemental composition, suggest continental aridification strongly influenced the terrestrial realm following volcanic pulses. Presence of reworked material suggests unstable soils that were affected by increased erosion rates, inhibiting the re-establishment of conifer tree vegetation. Comparison of our findings with other contemporaneous European Triassic-Jurassic boundary sections confirms the progression of the end-Triassic extinction, which exhibits a two-phased structure. The presence of the ETME in the subsurface of the Netherlands provides further evidence towards our understanding of terrestrial extinction with emphasis on the decline of vegetation.

This essay focuses on the concept of “international order” and its uses and misuses. It argues that the concept of “order” should not be conflated with the concept of a “system,” and that it makes more sense to speak of world order than international order because the former accommodates political units beyond the nation-state. Drawing on my recent book Before the West (2022) I show how the concept of “world order” travels better in history and also speculate about how it can help us think about the future as well.

The maser instability associated with the loss-cone distribution has been widely invoked to explain the radio bursts observed in the astrophysical plasma environment, such as aurora and corona. In the laboratory plasma of a tokamak, events reminiscent of these radio bursts have also been frequently observed as an electron cyclotron emission (ECE) burst in the microwave range ($\mathrm{\sim }2{f_{\textrm{ce}}}$ near the last closed flux surface) during transient magnetohydrodynamic events. These bursts have a short duration of ~10 μs and display a radiation spectrum corresponding to a radiation temperature ${T_{e,\textrm{rad}}}$ of over $30\ \textrm{keV}$ while the edge thermal electron temperature ${T_e}$ is only in the range of $1\ \textrm{keV}$. Suprathermal electrons can be generated through magnetic reconnection, and a loss-cone distribution can be generated through open stochastic field lines in the magnetic mirror of the near-edge region of a tokamak plasma. Radiation modelling shows that a sharp distribution gradient $\partial f/\partial {v_ \bot } > 0$ at the loss-cone boundary can cause a negative absorption of ECE radiation through the maser instability. The negative absorption then amplifies the radiation so that the microwave intensity is significantly stronger than the thermal value. The significant ${T_{e,\textrm{rad}}}$ from the simulations suggests the potential role of the loss-cone maser instability in generating the ECE burst in a tokamak.