In this article, I critically examine the ‘Cyber Kill Chain’, a methodological framework for thought and action that shapes both contemporary cybersecurity practice and the discursive construction of security threats. The history and epistemology of the Cyber Kill Chain provide unique insight into the practice of contemporary cybersecurity, insofar as the Kill Chain provides cybersecurity practitioners with predetermined categories and indicators of threat that shape how threats are conceptualised and understood by defenders and suggests actions to secure against them. Locating the origins of the kill chain concept in US military operational logics, its transformation through the anticipatory inquiries of intelligence, and its automation in computational networks, this article argues that the Cyber Kill Chain is emblematic of a vigilant socio-technical logic of security, where human perception, technical sensing, and automation all respond to and co-produce the (in)security through which political security concerns are articulated. This practice makes politics; it excludes, includes, and shapes what is perceived to be dangerous and not, directly impacting the security constructed. Through a critical reading of the Cyber Kill Chain, this article provides insight into cybersecurity practitioners’ epistemic practice and as such contributes to discussions of cybersecurity expertise, threat construction, and the way in which cybersecurity is understood and practised as a global security concern.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mutual associations predominated in insuring the large fleet of ships that carried coal from Britain's northeast to London and other ports. The number of associations grew rapidly from the late 1770s, initially on the Tyne, then spreading to other ports on the east coast. They largely saw off the challenge from joint-stock companies created after the liberalisation of the marine insurance market in 1824. Low administrative and legal costs and the ability to mobilise local knowledge to minimise risks allowed the associations to offset the disadvantage of insuring vessels in the same trade facing similar adversities. This article discusses how mutual associations were organised and operated, traces their development on the Tyne and the competition they encountered there from Lloyd's of London and joint-stock insurance companies, and examines the incidence of mutual associations elsewhere in Britain.

Resolving trauma may contribute to mental health and parenting in mother with histories of childhood maltreatment. The concept of trauma-specific reflective functioning (T-RF) was developed to assess the complexity of thought processes regarding trauma. The study aimed to validate the T-RF scale applied to the Trauma Meaning-Making Interview by examining its psychometric properties, associations with measures of trauma-processing strategies, maternal reflective functioning and mental health (depression and post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]), as well as evaluating whether T-RF offered a unique contribution to maternal insightfulness. Good construct validity of the T-RF scale was confirmed in a sample of 112 mothers with histories of childhood maltreatment using an independent coding system of trauma-processing. Better mentalization of trauma was prospectively associated with higher parental reflective functioning and mothers with high T-RF were much more likely to be insightful regarding the child’s mental states than non-reflective mothers and mothers with limited T-RF. The association between T-RF and insightfulness was observed even when controlling for maternal reflective functioning, trauma-processing strategies, maternal education and sociodemographic risk. T-RF was associated neither with depression, PTSD nor the characteristics of trauma. Findings suggest that mentalizing trauma would be an important protective factor in the intergenerational trajectories of trauma.

The study of very short-period contact binaries provides an important laboratory in which the most important and problematic astrophysical processes of stellar evolution take place. Short-period contact systems, such as CC Com, are particularly important for binary evolution. Close binary systems, especially those with multiple system members, have significant period variations, angular momentum loss mechanisms predominance, and pre-merger stellar evolution, making them valuable astrophysical laboratories. In this study, observations of CC Com, previously reported as a binary system, and new observations from the TÜBİTAK National Observatory (TUG) and the space-based telescope TESS have revealed that there is a third object with a period of about eight years and a fourth object with a period of about a century orbiting the binary system. From simultaneous analysis of all available light curves and radial velocities, the sensitive orbital and physical parameters of the system components are derived. The orbital parameters of the components are P$_\mathrm{A}=0.2206868 \pm 0.0000002$ days, P$_\mathrm{B}=7.9\pm0.1$ yr, P$_\mathrm{C}=98\pm5$ yr, $e_3$ = 0.06, $e_4$ = 0.44 and the physical parameters as M$_\mathrm{A1}=0.712\pm0.009$ M$_{\odot}$, M$_\mathrm{ A2}=0.372\pm0.005$ M$_{\odot}$, $m_{B;i^{\prime}=90^\circ}=0.074$ M$_{\odot}$, $m_{C;i^{\prime}=90^\circ}=0.18$ M$_{\odot}$, R$_\mathrm{A1}=0.693\pm0.006$ R$_{\odot}$, R$_\mathrm{A2}=0.514\pm0.005$ R$_{\odot}$, L$_\mathrm{A1}$ = 0.103 L$_\odot$, L$_\mathrm{A2}$ = 0.081 L$_\odot$. Finally, the evolutionary status of the multiple system CC Com and its component stars is discussed.

This study investigates the changes in the Spanish lexical and grammatical skills of 26 Spanish–English dual language learners during their first year of preschool. We also explore the impact of age, gender, and maternal cultural orientation on children’s language outcomes over time. The results show that, despite one year of English-only instruction, the children’s Spanish productions became more intelligible, lexically diverse, and grammatical between 3;7 and 4;7. However, Spanish productions were mostly limited to sentence fragments and contained errors in grammatical gender, verb morphology, object clitic pronouns, and prepositions. Girls had an advantage over boys, as attested by the higher lexical diversity, mean length of utterance, and grammaticality of their Spanish productions. Both maternal enculturation and acculturation predicted the grammaticality of children’s utterances, suggesting that mothers with high levels of orientation to both Latinx and American culture may be the most successful at promoting Spanish in the United States.

How might the ideas and practices of Global South migrants and activists inform normative frameworks and conceptual repertoires that political theorists and activists bring to bear on questions regarding justice and migration? Taking seriously the call for conceptual innovation to move beyond Eurocentrism this article builds on oral histories collected from refugees and migrants from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan to argue that the concept of haqq raises important questions about the reliance on statist justice in contemporary theorizing about migration ethics and provides insights into alternative ethical concerns. Ideas and practices of haqq foreground social relationships as well as the imbrication of responsibility and entitlement for communities and individuals. Crucially, engagement with haqq helps dislodge assumptions regarding state-enforced rights as universal vehicles of justice. Consequently, different ethical questions and imaginaries become available for consideration that resonate much beyond debates about migration.

We investigate a class of adjective phrases composed of a deadjectival adverb ending in -ly and an adjective head (e.g. staggeringly incompetent, absolutely terrific, fiscally responsible), a compact construction whereby two adjectives may jointly contribute to evaluative meaning. Using corpus methodologies on more than 1 million examples and relying on semantic analyses of about 1,000 instances, we propose that the construction can be divided into different semantic subtypes, including Degree (deeply disturbing), Focus (utterly ridiculous), Manner (delightfully performed), Reaction (strangely compelling), Topical (historically inaccurate) and Epistemic (intuitively obvious), among others. Using this typology, we investigate the relative distribution of each subtype across several registers of written English. We found a high frequency of the Reaction subtype in book, film and art reviews, and we suggest a discourse-functional explanation for this, linked to the perceived value of originality in expressive writing. This investigation reveals the power of semantically informed, corpus methodologies to shed light on the distribution of specific constructions.

We investigate the relationship between a galaxy cluster’s hydrostatic equilibrium state, the entropy profile, K, of the intracluster gas, and the system’s non-thermal pressure (NTP), within an analytic model of cluster structures. When NTP is neglected from the cluster’s hydrostatic state, we find that the gas’ logarithmic entropy slope, $k\equiv \mathrm{d}\ln K/\mathrm{d}\ln r$, converges at large halocentric radius, r, to a value that is systematically higher than the value $k\simeq1.1$ that is found in observations and simulations. By applying a constraint on these ‘pristine equilibrium’ slopes, $k_\mathrm{eq}$, we are able to predict the required NTP that must be introduced into the hydrostatic state of the cluster. We solve for the fraction, $\mathcal{F}\equiv p_\mathrm{nt}/p$, of NTP, $p_\mathrm{nt}$, to total pressure, p, of the cluster, and we find $\mathcal{F}(r)$ to be an increasing function of halocentric radius, r, that can be parameterised by its value in the cluster’s core, $\mathcal{F}_0$, with this prediction able to be fit to the functional form proposed in numerical simulations. The minimum NTP fraction, as the solution with zero NTP in the core, $\mathcal{F}_0=0$, we find to be in excellent agreement with the mean NTP predicted in non-radiative simulations, beyond halocentric radii of $r\gtrsim0.7r_{500}$, and in tension with observational constraints derived at similar radii. For this minimum NTP profile, we predict $\mathcal{F}\simeq0.20$ at $r_{500}$, and $\mathcal{F}\simeq0.34$ at $2r_{500}$; this amount of NTP leads to a hydrostatic bias of $b\simeq0.12$ in the cluster mass $M_{500}$ when measured within $r_{500}$. Our results suggest that the NTP of galaxy clusters contributes a significant amount to their hydrostatic state near the virial radius and must be accounted for when estimating the cluster’s halo mass using hydrostatic equilibrium approaches.

We investigated whether individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) produce language with a bias towards statistical properties of word combinations rather than grammatical rules, resulting in an overuse of holistically stored, familiar phrases. We analysed continuous speech samples from English children with WS (n = 12), typically developing (TD) controls matched on chronological age (n = 15) and TD controls matched on language age (n = 14). Alongside word count, utterance length, grammatical complexity, and morphosyntactic errors, we measured familiarity of expressions by computing collocation strength of each word combination. The WS group produced stronger collocations than both control groups. Moreover, the WS group produced fewer complex sentences, shorter utterances, and more frequent function words than chronological-age matched controls. Language in WS may appear more typical than it is because familiar, holistically processed expressions mask grammatical and other difficulties.

Caregiver-child interactions are commonly used to examine children’s language learning environment. However, few studies consider interaction configurations beyond dyadic interactions or explore the conceptual complexity of caregiver talk. Thus, we examined if the complexity of a caregiver’s opportunities to respond (OTR) varied when sampled across three interaction configurations. Our study included twelve preschool-aged children with Down syndrome and both of their biological parents. Our preliminary findings suggest no differences in mothers’ and fathers’ frequency of OTRs across complexity levels during dyadic interactions. However, caregivers produced fewer OTRs across complexity levels during family choice than dyadic interactions.