As Western society becomes increasingly digitally dependent and many older adults actively engage in the online world, understanding the experiences of those who largely do not use digital technology in their daily lives is crucial. Individual interviews were conducted (pre-pandemic) with 23 older adults who, based on self-identification, did not regularly use digital technology, exploring how their experiences as limited digital technology users may have impacted their daily lives. An iterative collaborative qualitative analysis demonstrated three main themes: internet concerns, frustrations with digital technology, and conflicting motivators to use digital technology. Findings suggest that addressing digital concerns and providing effective digital skill learning opportunities may encourage some older adults to become more digitally engaged. However, as people, including older adults, can be uninterested in using these technologies, organizations and institutions should work to offer ways to support people of all ages who are not engaged online.

Social support is often considered an environmental factor affecting health, especially in aging populations. However, its genetic underpinnings suggest a more complex origin. This study investigates the heritability of social support through applying a threshold model on data of a large adult sample of twins (N = 8019) from the Netherlands Twin Register, collected between 2009 and 2011. The study employed the Duke – UNC Functional Social Support Questionnaire to assess social support quality. Our analysis revealed genetic contributions to social support, with heritability estimated at 37%, without a contribution of shared environment and no differences between men and women in heritability. The study’s results underscore the complexity of social support as a trait influenced by genetic and environmental factors, challenging the notion that it is solely an environmental construct.

Let $M$ be an oriented smooth manifold and $\operatorname{Homeo}\!(M,\omega )$ the group of measure preserving homeomorphisms of $M$, where $\omega$ is a finite measure induced by a volume form. In this paper, we define volume and Euler classes in bounded cohomology of an infinite dimensional transformation group $\operatorname{Homeo}_0\!(M,\omega )$ and $\operatorname{Homeo}_+\!(M,\omega )$, respectively, and in several cases prove their non-triviality. More precisely, we define:

• • Volume classes in $\operatorname{H}_b^n(\operatorname{Homeo}_0\!(M,\omega ))$, where $M$ is a hyperbolic manifold of dimension $n$.

• • Euler classes in $\operatorname{H}_b^2(\operatorname{Homeo}_+(S,\omega ))$, where $S$ is an oriented closed hyperbolic surface.

We show that Euler classes have positive norms for any closed hyperbolic surface and volume classes have positive norms for all hyperbolic surfaces and certain hyperbolic $3$-manifolds; hence, they are non-trivial.

The Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) works with countries worldwide to implement testing in the areas of science, mathematics and reading through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) every three years, and this process is recognised to influence education systems through areas such as curriculum. Over the past decade, the OECD increasingly has acknowledged the need to include a greater emphasis on environmental issues, including developing student competencies specifically in this area. For the 2025 PISA round, we were invited as environmental science education experts to contribute to the Science Framework, which underpins the science assessment. This paper explains how we responded to that invitation, including foregrounding the urgent need to understand the competencies of 15 year-olds to address critical socio-ecological challenges such as climate change. We argue that this provides environmental education practitioners and scholars with a powerful opportunity to gain world-scale data for research and advocacy, which could enhance the visibility and leverage for our field in curriculum, whilst also recognising the political process within which we were engaged.

In Estate Origins, Tomila Lankina sheds new light on the logic of persistence and resilience in the Russian social structure that shapes political possibilities in Russia to the present day. It is a wonderful and rewarding read on the historical origins of social requisites of democracy, such as greater civic activism and more pluralistic political competition. To understand variation in attitudinal and behavioral support for democracy in contemporary Russia, according to Lankina, we must go back to tsarist Russia’s estate institutions. A set of institutions that codified the rights and privileges of different social groups, the estates system created incentives for an eclectic and growing stratum of urban dwellers known as meshchane to invest in education while simultaneously fostering the creation of institutional “infrastructures”—professions, educational institutions, charitable, civic, and local governance bodies—that retained during the communist period a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the state. This, Lankina argues, allowed the meshchane’s distinct value orientations to persist over time.

Kahneman’s criticism of neoclassical rationality was central to his research programme. He argued that rationality understood as temporal consistency among preferences and beliefs is inapt as a descriptive and prescriptive standard of decision-making. Descriptively, consistency ignores high decision costs and biases, such as framing effects. Prescriptively, it is problematic since it neglects the processual nature of choice and the crucial role of regret. Instead, Kahneman argued in favour of using reasonableness as a standard, though he did not fully develop the concept in his work.

This study reports the outcomes of a speaker evaluation experiment conducted in a higher educational context in Flanders, in which we investigated the influence of language variety (Standard vs. Colloquial Dutch), accent (Flemish vs. Eastern European) and name (Flemish vs. Eastern European) on students’ perceptions of a female university instructor. The results suggest that participants exhibited a relatively high level of tolerance toward both non-conforming speech and non-conforming speakers. Whereas Colloquial Dutch scored lower than Standard Dutch on standardness, we observed no negative effects of Colloquial Dutch on the teacher’s didactic competence, status, or social attractiveness. We did not find any evidence of a negative bias triggered by an Eastern European name. Whereas the Eastern European accent did have a negative impact on the teacher’s social attractiveness, we did not find any evidence of an accent bias affecting judgements of the teacher’s didactic competence and status.

As with many other musical traits, the social environment is a key influence on the development of singing ability. While the familial singing environment is likely to be formative, its role relative to other environmental influences such as training is unclear. We used structural equation modeling to test relationships among demographic characteristics, familial environmental variables (early and current singing with family), vocal training, and singing ability in a large, previously documented sample of Australian twins (N = 1163). Notably, early singing with family, and to a lesser extent vocal training, predicted singing ability, whereas current singing with family did not. Early familial singing also mediated the relationship between sex and singing ability, with men who sang less with family during childhood showing poorer ability. Bivariate twin models between early familial singing and singing ability showed the phenotypic correlation was largely explained by shared environmental influences. This raises the possibility of a sensitive period for singing ability, with sociocultural expectations around singing potentially differentiating the developmental trajectories of this skill for men and women.

One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.

The study of the transmission of Latin texts has received an important new addition: the second volume of Stephen Oakley's Studies in the Transmission of Latin Texts, dedicated to the text of Vitruvius, the agricultural treatises of Cato and Varro, Porphyrio's commentary on Horace (or, rather, the abbreviated commentary transmitted under his name in manuscript V and younger related manuscripts), and Priscian's Latin translation of Dionysius’ Periegesis.1 In meticulous analyses and close work with manuscripts and incunables, Oakley traces the transmission of these texts and the genealogical relationships of individual (groups of) manuscripts as well as the progress of the scholarship on their transmission. The book is nicely illustrated by fifty-one images of some of the key manuscripts, and Oakley provides information of how to access these and others online as well.