We present a deterministic method for the spatio-spectral characterization of intense ultrashort laser pulses via far-field speckle analysis. By mapping vacuum propagation to a linear forward model, we replace slow, error-prone iterative algorithms with a direct least-squares minimization. This enables high-speed retrieval of spectrally resolved wavefronts with rigorous uncertainty quantification. Demonstrated at the ATLAS-3000 petawatt facility, our in situ architecture utilizes only a pinhole mask for both attenuation and speckle generation. By eliminating complex downstream optics and minimizing systematic errors, this approach provides a robust, real-time diagnostic essential for the optimization of high-intensity lasers.

Cases of identity confusion raise a challenge for convention-based meta-semantics. David Lewis’s influential account of convention, as it applies to language use, fails to distinguish, among two candidate languages, the one used by the population in question. The problem extends to Paul Grice’s influential account of sentence meaning.

What is access and how has accessibility—as a perceptual frame, a discourse, a box to check, and a relationship—infiltrated our everyday lives and become a means for adjudicating whether we live in inhabitable worlds in India and internationally? This article draws from a roundtable discussion at a 2024 disability studies and disability justice conference held in Kolkata, India, as well as interviews and participant observation conducted with disabled Indians to explore the meanings of access and to think about alternative concepts or frameworks that are used instead.

This essay examines the Peasants Land Bank, a state-run financial institution established in 1882 to accelerate the transfer of land to peasants in the Russian Empire. Initially designed as a credit provider, the Bank gained new powers in the 1890s, when the government granted it unprecedented authority to assemble its own land fund. This shift transformed the institution into a key instrument of imperial governance. By controlling access to land and credit, it privileged the idealized “all-Russian” Orthodox peasantry and systematically excluded groups outside this category, including indigenous groups (such as the Bashkirs), non-Orthodox subjects, individuals of foreign origin as well as women and urban dwellers who technically belonged to the peasant estate. The Bank’s practices of exclusion enable us to examine how a state financial institution, rather than a neutral intermediary, can perpetuate multiple hierarchies through its routine credit decisions.

We study the existence and the distribution of “long” chains in the Weihrauch degrees, mostly focusing on chains with uncountable cofinality. We characterize when such chains have an upper bound and prove that there are no cofinal chains (of any order type) in the Weihrauch degrees. Furthermore, we show that the existence of coinitial sequences of non-zero degrees is equivalent to $\mathrm {CH}$. Finally, we explore the extendibility of antichains, providing some necessary conditions for maximality.

Recent US policy changes, including abortion bans and reductions to social safety nets, have intensified structural pressures on reproductive decision-making. Research has examined interpersonal and clinical forms of reproductive coercion, but legal and policy forces remain undertheorized. This commentary introduces and defines sociolegal reproductive coercion as occurring when individuals feel pressured or constrained in their reproductive choices due to legal and policy landscapes that are reinforced and reified by social and cultural forces. These pressures operate collectively to make certain options, such as long-acting reversible contraception, feel obligatory even when undesired, by amplifying risks associated with pregnancy, abortion, and parenting. Sociolegal coercion interacts with clinical practice, shaping provider counseling and narrowing perceived options, and disproportionately affects marginalized communities already subject to systemic inequities. We situate this construct within existing scholarship on constrained choice and social control, propose a conceptual framework, and outline implications for research, clinical care, and policy. Recognizing sociolegal reproductive coercion is critical for understanding how health policy and sociocultural dynamics jointly constrain autonomy and for informing reforms that advance reproductive justice in a post-Roe landscape.

Not-reached (dropout) and omitted (intermittent missingness) behaviors are often inevitable in timed computerized tests. These missingness behaviors may be related to the subject’s latent traits, the difficulty of the item, or even the unobserved item response itself. In order to better understand the underlying test-taking behaviors, a Bayesian hierarchical framework is adopted to jointly model the item response, the item response time, the not-reached, and the omitted behaviors. For missing data, a sequential multinomial model is developed for the not-reached behavior, and a conditional model is proposed for the omitted behavior conditioning on the not-reached behavior. A decomposed logarithm of the pseudo marginal likelihood (LPML) is then developed to assess the fit of the missing data models. It can be further used to quantify the importance of modeling item response and response time jointly versus individually in identifying the missing data mechanism. The empirical performance of the proposed models and the model assessment criterion are examined through extensive simulations. The proposed methodology is further applied to analyze the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 Test.

During Czechoslovakia’s first decade, the state promoted public health reform and sponsored research surveys on healthcare and social welfare resources. Czechoslovak government leaders and healthcare professionals embraced a rhetoric of American progressivism and de-Austrianization to portray their country as forward-looking, democratic, and rational. Through the work of President Tomáš G. Masaryk’s daughter, Alice G. Masaryková, Czechoslovakia developed partnerships with American organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Young Women’s Christian Association, which provided funding, training, and personnel. A major undertaking of the early 1920s was the Social Survey of Greater Prague, a massive study based on American sociology methods, which helped determine state priorities in health and welfare. Yet, this strategy of partnering with American professionals and organizations obscured key continuities with the Habsburg era. Despite the influence of American health professionals in Czechoslovakia, the new state’s public health system developed within a centralized bureaucratic and legal structure inherited from Austria. As the capital of a centralized state, Prague replaced and even exceeded Vienna’s former role as the arbiter of health and welfare policies and practices.

Literature about the discovery of the leprosy bacterium Mycobacterium leprae usually mentions the Hansen-Neisser controversy. It is an established narrative that Neisser tried to present himself as the discoverer of the leprosy bacterium. However, Neisser’s first publication on Mycobacterium leprae refers explicitly to Hansen’s original discovery. How did the notion of Neisser trying to claim Hansen’s discovery emerge? A thorough source-critical examination of Hansen’s and Neisser’s scientific and popular publications between 1874 and 1897 as well as of the literature dealing with the so-called controversy brought interesting new results. The notion that Neisser tried to steal Hansen’s discovery is based on a misreading of Neisser’s publications by Hansen’s biographer. But Neisser tried indeed to bypass Hansen in trying to prove that Mycobacterium leprae was the contagion causing leprosy. The competition between the two scientists resulted in a personal enmity. This study shows how the history of modern science is prone to myths and underlines the importance of source criticism when dealing with established narratives.

Indonesia has ranked as the world’s most generous nation for seven consecutive years, yet the processes through which personal values shape humanitarian intention giving remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Norm Activation and Value–Belief–Norm (NAM/VBN) frameworks, warm-glow, and signaling/trust theories, this study examined donation intentions in Aceh—the nation’s most charitable province—using a moderated value–resources model that integrated socioeconomic position, altruistic, social, and emotional values and organizational reputation, with religiosity as a moderating factor. Data from 400 adult respondents were analyzed via Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), revealing that altruistic, social, and emotional values, together with organizational reputation, significantly influenced humanitarian giving, whereas socioeconomic status showed no effect. Religiosity amplified these relationships, acting as a moral compass that transformed personal values into durable commitments to donate. These findings indicate that, in Aceh, moral and religious principles rather than material wealth primarily drive sustained philanthropic behavior. Based on these results, humanitarian organizations can improve fundraising effectiveness by segmenting donors according to religiosity and value orientation, using faith-consistent messaging, and providing transparent, real-time reporting of fund utilization. By uniting individual, organizational, and religious dimensions in a theory-informed framework, the study advances understanding of value-based humanitarian engagement in Muslim-majority contexts. The results, therefore, offer operational guidance for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), policymakers, and faith-based institutions seeking to strengthen donor trust, engagement, and long-term participation.

On August 7, 1942, Allied forces began their first offensive action against Japan on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Over the next few years, thousands of Solomon Islanders assisted Allied soldiers as construction workers, local scouts, and messengers. Based on oral histories and soldiers’ memoirs, this article argues that these islander war workers not only played a crucial role in the ultimate Allied success in the Pacific war but were also part of a longer history of foreigners in the service of the U.S. empire. In fact, recruiting and managing non-combat workers of color became an important source of U.S. military and imperial power during World War II. Despite pervasive racism and demeaning work conditions, Solomon Islanders managed to create new opportunities both for themselves and for their home societies.

This study addresses the challenges of performing narratological analysis on low-resource languages, with a focus on Old Church Slavonic. Understanding the roles, interactions, and networks of persons is central to narrative analysis, yet such investigation is hindered by the scarcity of experts and the limited availability of annotated resources. We explore both established natural language processing (NLP) methods and large language models (LLMs) for analyzing pre-modern Slavic Lives of Saints, including several Slavic versions, the Greek original, and an English translation. Pre-modern Slavic texts pose particular difficulties due to rich morphology, orthographic variation, and limited standardization, which complicate the application of both traditional NLP tools and off-the-shelf LLMs. Through experiments using annotated and non-annotated ground truth data, we demonstrate that while conventional NLP methods often reach their limits on such low-resource, highly variable texts, LLMs provide complementary capabilities that can support narratological insights, especially in tracking persons and their interactions, albeit with important caveats regarding accuracy and coverage.

Several U.S. states expanded vote-by-mail in 2020, while other states made no changes. This uneven expansion occurred in a highly racialized policy context. We explore how the United States’ history of race-based disenfranchisement, racialized elite rhetoric, and the uneven policy expansion interact to shape voting methods and trust in government across racial groups. Using data from three national surveys and coarsened exact matching, we compare the behavior of voters across adopting and non-adopting states. We find that adopting no-excuse absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail in 2020 is associated with increased mail voting across racial groups, despite Black Americans’ historically rooted mistrust in new forms of voting. We also find that expanding mail voting was associated with increases in government trust in some cases. While prior work finds modest short-term increases in turnout, vote-by-mail may also affect perceptions of government, which can help close racial turnout gaps in the long term.