The considerable literature on the value of a statistical life (VSL) documents the wage-mortality risk trade-offs for the working population. Regulatory analyses often must monetize risks to populations at the tails of the age distribution. Because of the longer life expectancy for children, there have been proposals to add a premium to their VSL, which would generate an inconsistency with revealed preference estimates of the VSL trajectory over the life cycle. The shorter life expectancy among older people has led to various arbitrary senior discounts for seniors’ life expectancy. Application of the value of a statistical life year (VSLY) can address valuation of small changes in life expectancy. Examples of inappropriate age adjustments that we discuss include practices by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Moral emotions such as shame, guilt and pride are crucial to young children’s social-emotional development. Due to the restrictions caused by hearing loss in accessing the social world, deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children may encounter extra difficulties in their development of moral emotions. However, little research so far has investigated the development trajectory of moral emotions during preschool years in DHH children. The present study used a longitudinal design to explore the development trajectories of shame, guilt, and pride, in a sample of 259 Chinese DHH and typically hearing (TH) preschoolers aged 2 to 6 years old. The results indicated that according to parent reports, DHH children manifested lower levels of guilt and pride compared to their TH peers, yet the manifested levels of shame, guilt, and pride increased throughout the preschool time at a similar pace in all children. Moreover, whilst guilt and pride contributed to increasing levels of psychosocial functioning over the preschool years, shame contributed to lower social competence and more externalizing behaviors in DHH and TH preschoolers. The outcomes imply that early interventions and adjustment to hearing loss could be useful to safeguard the social development of children with severe hearing loss, and cultural variances shall be taken into consideration when studying moral emotions in a Chinese cultural background.

Drosophila suzukii is a pest of global concern due to its great impact on several crops. The entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae was highly virulent to the larvae of the fly although some immune mechanisms were triggered along the infection course. Thus, to understand the gene activation profile we performed a comparative transcriptome of D. suzukii larvae infected with S. carpocapsae and Xenorhabdus nematophila to map the differentially expressed genes involved in the defence response. The analysis exposed the induction of genes involved in the humoral response such as the antimicrobial peptides and pattern-recognition receptors while there was a suppression of the cellular defence. Besides, genes involved in melanisation, and clot formation were downregulated hindering the encapsulation response and wound healing. After the infection, larvae were in a stress condition with an enrichment of metabolic and transport functionalities. Concerning the stress response, we observed variations of the heat-shock proteins, detoxification, and peroxidase enzymes. These findings set a genetical comprehensive knowledge of the host-pathogen relation of D. suzukii challenged with S. carpocapsae which could support further comparative studies with entomopathogenic nematodes.

This article offers small-scale research findings on the impact of narrative contextual clues as a form of scaffolding in Year 9 Latin lessons. The students of this research learned Latin via the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) (CSCP, 1998), which provides teachers and students with meaningful Latin in the form of interconnected stories (Hunt, 2016, 88). As Nuttall has argued, teaching students to read interconnected sentences and appreciate a text's meaning and overall message is what separates the act of reading from parsing vocabulary and grammatical structures (Nuttall, 1996, 2–3). Therefore, while the stories of the CLC can be read as isolated entities, the act of reading requires students to consider the overarching narratives of the stories. Furthermore, as students become confident in their Latin proficiency, it is possible to predict what is going to happen in a story just by thinking about what occurred in the previous line. For example, the first CLC story famously opens with the line Caecilius est in tablino (Caecilius is in the study). We can therefore predict that the story could take place in a Roman house and feature different rooms. Of course, this is exactly what happens in the story. This article focuses on the value of contextual clues in guiding students' predictions and promoting them to read rather than merely parse sentences. Ultimately, I argue that contextual clues, which can easily be overlooked as a form of scaffolding, serve as an invaluable aid for students when reading whole pages of Latin.

We hypothesized that the incubation for urethral gonorrhoea would be longer for men with oropharyngeal gonorrhoea than those without oropharyngeal gonorrhoea. We conducted a chart review of men who have sex with men with urethral gonorrhoea symptoms at a sexual health clinic between 2019 and 2021. The incubation period was defined as the number of days between men’s last sexual contact and onset of symptoms. We used a Mann–Whitney U test to compare differences in the median incubation for urethral gonorrhoea between men with and men without oropharyngeal gonorrhoea. There were 338 men with urethral symptoms (median age = 32 years; IQR: 28–39), and of these, 307 (90.1%) were tested for oropharyngeal gonorrhoea, of whom 124 (40.4%, 95% CI: 34.9–46.1) men had oropharyngeal and urethral gonorrhoea. We analyzed incubation data available for 190 (61.9%) of the 307 men, with 38.9% (74/190) testing positive for oropharyngeal gonorrhoea. The incubation for urethral gonorrhoea did not differ between 74 men (39%) with oropharyngeal gonorrhoea (median = 4 days; IQR: 2–6) and 116 men (61%) without oropharyngeal gonorrhoea (median = 2.5 days; IQR: 1–5) (p = 0.092). Research is needed to investigate gonorrhoea transmission from the oropharynx to the urethra.

Tens of millions of individuals are displaced due to violence, and most are hosted by other households in their home countries. We ask what motivates people to host the forcibly displaced. We are interested in whether empathy increases the willingness to host but also consider alternative explanations. To explore the correlates of hosting we collected survey data from 1,504 households in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fielded in-depth interviews, and implemented an experiment. We employ a novel strategy to measure hosting behavior, where household characteristics are measured prior to the arrival of displaced persons. We find that households with higher empathy are more likely to host in the 10-month period following the survey. There is no evidence that ethnicity, religiosity, or wealth affect hosting behavior. Results from the experiment suggest that it is difficult to increase hosting propensity in the longer term (4+ months) through simple interventions.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the number of cases being brought before national courts addressing the constitutional rights of children and future generations (FG) in the context of environmental protection. These cases have required courts to devote increasing attention to a wide-ranging and complicated array of constitutional rights claims involving the short- and longer-term impacts of environmental harm on children and FG. This article argues that both litigation and judicial efforts in this area have been hampered by the lack of precision of definitions of ‘future generations’ under comparative constitutional and international human rights law, in particular vis-à-vis children. This lack of precision poses a major challenge to both the delineation and enforcement of rights claims in the context of such litigation. After outlining how these cases are being brought and how courts are addressing (or not) the complexities involved in defining children and FG respectively, the article highlights the lack of authoritative definitions of FG in comparative constitutional law – a lacuna that, the author argues, is exacerbated by the ongoing lack of a clear definition of FG in the international human rights law context. The article concludes by identifying key challenges faced by litigators and courts seeking to engage with the rights of children and FG that result from this definitional gap.

We developed and trained a custom AI text classifier to assist Latin language learners in internalising idioms, with a focus on Ciceronian composition. Idioms are mostly language-, sometimes author-specific expressions that cannot be translated directly into another language. The classifier provides interactive feedback on learners' output, effectively gamifying the process of writing in Latin and motivating students to produce more linguistic output. This not only helps learners build confidence, but also acquire a ‘toolbox’ of idioms useful for both output- and input-based activities. We present the results of our experiment conducted across a number of secondary classes in Switzerland. Our tool is freely available at https://latin-ia.hepl.ch/classifier.

This article outlines and evaluates several unique challenges associated with legal support to special operations. It describes the essential differences between special tactics, techniques and procedures and conventional military operations. It offers a US perspective on how treaty and customary international laws apply to various special operations, including precision attacks against “high-value targets”, hostage rescue missions, and support to partner and proxy forces. It examines the benefits and drawbacks of heavy reliance on special operations during armed conflict, including an assessment of the legal challenges that arise when special operations forces become a primary feature of a military campaign. Finally, it highlights how the assumption of substantial military and political risk impacts the application of international law to special operations at the tactical level.

This longitudinal study investigated modifications in lexical tones and intonation in Cantonese infant-directed speech (IDS) to children aged 15 and 23 months. The results showed that to children at both ages, mothers increased intonational pitch height and pitch variability across utterances, and produced lexical tones with generally larger tonal space and greater intra-talker tone variation within categories in IDS compared to adult-directed speech. No significant changes were found in either lexical tones or intonation in IDS between the two ages. In addition, positive correlations were found between the degree of age-related changes in tonal space and intonational exaggerations in IDS as children grow older. The findings were discussed with a focus on the co-occurrence of an increase in tone variation along with tonal space expansion, the age-related changes in lexical tones and intonation, and the associations between the lexical and prosodic pitch modifications.

This article examines shifts towards onshoring pharmaceutical manufacturing, a response to the vulnerabilities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in global supply chains. It delves into how globalization, public policy, and geopolitical tensions have shaped pharmaceutical markets, compelling nations to seek solutions that ensure reliable medicine access and reduce dependency on foreign supplies. The study highlights disparities in regulatory oversight and geographic concentration of production, which contribute to frequent shortages, particularly of generic medicines. The pandemic intensified these issues, prompting increased state interventions and heightening concerns over geopolitical risks. As a result, onshoring efforts, often encapsulated in local content measures, have expanded, and are now driven by both economic motives and imperatives of national security and public health.