This paper presents the results of recent geophysical survey work in the vicinity of the Roman town of Isurium Brigantum (Aldborough, North Yorkshire). It combines results from research projects with information from developer-funded work to assess the nature of settlement in the area at the time of the foundation of the Roman town and through the period of its use. The work confirms that there was no major pre-Roman Iron Age centre in the area at the time of Roman annexation. It does, however, provide new evidence to show that the landscape was heavily exploited and occupied by rural settlements. The evidence revealed suggests that Iron Age society in this area may have been heterarchical.

This study examines how Egyptian law recognizes and deals with land that is stipulated as state property, but has been informally used and/or acquired by individuals as private property. A case in point is Warraq Island in Egypt, whose land became the target of the government’s initiative to remove illegal occupations on the so-called state-owned land. In July 2017, government forces arrived on the island to enforce the order, but they encountered fierce resistance from the residents. Since then, both parties have been involved in negotiations to agree on a viable solution. It is important to note that in Egypt, the state often exerts control over the legal system, based on its own interests. However, such actions tend to fail in light of legal challenges by various actors or widespread demonstrations that may not be legally sanctioned.

Sit-to-stand (STS) motion is an essential daily activity. However, this motion becomes increasingly difficult for older adults as their muscle strength declines with age. To assist individuals in standing up while maximizing their muscle strength based on the assist-as-needed (AAN) strategy, assistive devices must detect early STS intent, specifically before the buttocks leave the chair, to ensure timely assistance. This study proposes a novel method for detecting STS intent by applying external mechanical stimuli to the toes and analyzing the resulting changes in heel and toe-reaction forces. Moreover, a structured detection framework was developed by utilizing predefined thresholds for the change rate and magnitude of the heel and toe-reaction forces to detect STS intent. Offline tests for threshold setting of STS-intent detection were established in the offline tests: change rate and magnitude of the reaction forces on the heel and toes. The thresholds for each criterion were determined using the Pareto optimization method. Using the determined thresholds, these criteria were then applied in online tests to evaluate the performance of the proposed intent detection method. The results demonstrated that mechanical stimuli improved the performance of STS-intent detection, providing accurate and stable detection. This method can be applied to STS-assistive devices to effectively implement AAN functionality for standing assistance.

In this article I question a long-established, common-sense belief. Namely, that words contain meanings. This belief is the absolute presupposition underpinning the familiar question: ‘What does that word mean? Backed by John Locke, I argue that words don’t mean. Or as Locke puts it: ‘Words are an insignificant noise.’ Words become significant, meaningful, once we have each processed them through our own minds. In short, we subjectively make our own meanings. The role of words is to trigger the meanings we have made for ourselves. This is where the inescapable roots of misunderstanding lie. The words that do the triggering are public. The meanings we create for those words are unavoidably private and mobile. The bulk of the rest of the article addresses the question: ‘How far can we curb misunderstanding?’

We investigate the optimal asset allocation and repayment strategy of an agricultural loan under a guaranteed repayment condition in a continuous-time setting. We propose two forms of the problem: an analytically solvable “separable” problem and a more realistic “nominal” problem that is investigated numerically. In the numerical study, we calibrate our model to publicly available farm data and explore various forms of repayment structures. While the widely used constant repayment structure has a surprisingly outstanding performance, we also design two repayment structures for the nominal problem that perform quite well.

In this article we trace a biography of vacuum aspiration in Spain between the 1960s and 1980s. Analysing the local but transnationally connected history of vacuum aspiration during late Francoism and the democratic transition, we argue that this technology was since the mid-1960s reincarnated in mainstream medical discourse as vacuum curettage, presented as a major medical innovation in diagnosis and therapy. While abortion activists working at the end of the 1970s emphasized the group and political components of a technique they called the ‘Karman method’, doctors performing illegal abortions within the family planning network defined vacuum aspiration in terms of safety and medical innovation. As we demonstrate, this technique embodied meanings that at times overlapped, at others conflicted, contingent on whether aspirations were linked to medical innovation, pro-abortion activism, or social justice.

International law has become a fixture before the courts of the United Kingdom (UK). But how is it actually used and how does this use relate to its means of reception into domestic law? Scholarship has tended to focus on how judges interpret and apply international law, to the exclusion of how it is deployed by litigants. In doing so, it also overlooks the relationship between the way an international norm is received into domestic law and its use in court. This article asks whether there are differences in the kinds of international law readily available to different litigants and how this plays out in the cut and thrust of domestic litigation—whether it is used as a sword or a shield, on the basis of domestic statute or the common law and what kinds of arguments are run in the absence of domestic footholds. This raises a broader point about the politics of statutory transposition, the practice of argument and the difficulties of litigating unincorporated international law.

A recent fluorescence of geophysical and archaeological research in Catholic cemeteries illustrates the benefits and challenges of community-engaged projects. Focusing on four ongoing case studies in coastal Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region)—St. Mary’s Basilica (Norfolk, Virginia); Brent Cemetery (Stafford County, Virginia); Sacred Heart Church (Prince George’s County, Maryland); and St. Nicholas Cemetery (St. Mary’s County, Maryland)—this article explores a variety of archaeological strategies in the context of community engagement. These approaches are shaped by the physical characteristics of cemetery sites, the Catholic diocesan or church communities that oversee them, and the African American descendant communities affected by them. The built environment of cemeteries highlights the way that racism and segregation have shaped both the landscape and public memory of Catholic cemeteries in the Chesapeake region.

Amia Srinivasan is interviewed about her classic paper ‘The Aptness of Anger’, which challenges a common response to those who express anger at injustice: that their anger is counterproductive.

This small project was initiated to create a broader understanding of the working properties of sarsen and its challenges. This notoriously durable coarse-grained sandstone is most familiarly associated with the Phase 3 monument at Stonehenge, Wiltshire, although its exploitation persisted into the twentieth century. Discussion has focused on the probable methods employed in prehistory to work the stone: splitting, flaking and pecking. These techniques have rarely been applied in practice, but have been considered broadly in this project. The preliminary results, obtained from a single block of saccharoidal sarsen, have reawakened understanding and appreciation of the potential provided by shock waves to split and shape this intractable silicate successfully and repeatedly using direct percussion, techniques that were familiar to Neolithic communities to work flint. The flaking properties of the stone are considered together with attributes of hammer mode in comparison with data from prehistoric stone assemblages at Stonehenge. The discussion questions to what extent flaking could be controlled repeatedly to form a major part of monolith production. Results derived from the laborious nature of pecking supplement previous attempts to recreate dressed surfaces at Stonehenge. Efficiency was not improved by applying heat to the surface of the stone; indeed, it confirmed that uncontrolled, excessive heat shatters the structure of sarsen, rendering it unworkable.

This article explores how water conditions in geographical contexts could influence the construction of teachers’ professional identities and, consequently, their knowledge and beliefs about water sustainability. Water sustainability is defined as the responsible management of water from a perspective that integrates environmental, social and economic sustainability principles. This quantitative study employed an ad hoc questionnaire, inspired by the New Water Culture principles as a conceptual sustainability framework. The instrument, designed with Google Forms, was administered to 221 secondary school teachers from two cities with contrasting water and cultural conditions: Bogotá (Colombia) and Melilla (Spain). Results indicate that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs in both cities are not aligned with water sustainability principles, with no significant differences between the two groups due to their different water conditions. However, there are partial differences related to the respective personal experiences: in Bogotá, teachers show greater concern for water quality, whereas in Melilla the focus is more on the quantity available. These findings underline the importance of promoting teachers’ professional development in water sustainability aligned with professional identities, as a key strategy for nurturing aware and engaged citizens. This approach is fundamental to tackle water stress challenges and foster a paradigm shift towards more responsible, sustainable lifestyles globally.

This paper discusses Roman Jakobson’s concept of metonymy as a form of theatre and performance historiography. Following traces of elephants in Europe during the early modern period, the paper suggests that these fragmentary documents – be they textual, visual or material – do not align with a grand récit but hint at multiple layers of cultural negotiation, concerning questions of ontology, anthropology, politics and even technology. The proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ is a provocation to reflect on these larger categories, while its cultural impact is firmly grounded in its theatrical and performative qualities. Drawing on the paradigm of critical media history, fragmentary and scattered documents become legible as part of a larger process of cultural formation.

This article attempts to map some of Vietnam’s national identities that were constructed in the early twentieth century (1900s-1930s). Instead of treating Vietnamese national identity either as a monolithic entity or as too fragmented to be considered a useful concept, it shows that at least three interactive and overlapping national identities emerged, each with its own political significance and state institutionalisation. To map them, this article re-traces several key nationalists in the early twentieth century. It situates each of their national imaginations within interconnected global relations, namely, Civilisational relations of hierarchy, cultural relations of equality, and radical relations of exploitation and oppression. This analytical approach to mapping national identity offers a framework that may prove valuable for cross-national comparative studies.

The smallest eigenvalue of a graph is the smallest eigenvalue of its adjacency matrix. We show that the family of graphs with smallest eigenvalue at least $-\lambda $ can be defined by a finite set of forbidden induced subgraphs if and only if $\lambda < \lambda ^*$, where $\lambda ^* = \rho ^{1/2} + \rho ^{-1/2} \approx 2.01980$, and $\rho $ is the unique real root of $x^3 = x + 1$. This resolves a question raised by Bussemaker and Neumaier. As a byproduct, we find all the limit points of smallest eigenvalues of graphs, supplementing Hoffman’s work on those limit points in $[-2, \infty )$.

We also prove that the same conclusion about forbidden subgraph characterization holds for signed graphs. Our impetus for the study of signed graphs is to determine the maximum cardinality of a spherical two-distance set with two fixed angles (one acute and one obtuse) in high dimensions. Denote by $N_{\alpha , \beta }(d)$ the maximum number of unit vectors in $\mathbb {R}^d$ where all pairwise inner products lie in $\{\alpha , \beta \}$ with $-1 \le \beta < 0 \le \alpha < 1$. Very recently Jiang, Tidor, Yao, Zhang, and Zhao determined the limit of $N_{\alpha , \beta }(d)/d$ as $d\to \infty $ when $\alpha + 2\beta < 0$ or $(1-\alpha )/(\alpha -\beta ) \in \{1,\sqrt 2,\sqrt 3\}$, and they proposed a conjecture on the limit in terms of eigenvalue multiplicities of signed graphs. We establish their conjecture whenever $(1-\alpha )/(\alpha - \beta ) < \lambda ^*$.

Expectations about election outcomes shape voter behavior, yet little research has examined how expectations regarding the post-election formateur influence voting decisions. This study examines the conditions under which voters engage in formateur optimization – strategically supporting parties with a realistic chance of forming the government rather than their most preferred party. We argue that while formateur uncertainty plays a key role, its effect depends on voters’ preferences regarding their most preferred party and their preferred formateur. Using modules 1–5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and German pre-election surveys (1998–2021), we find that formateur optimization is more likely in tightly contested elections. However, our results also show that voters’ preferences moderate the effect of formateur uncertainty: formateur optimization remains low even under high uncertainty when voters strongly favor a non-formateur party over the formateur’s party. Furthermore, we find that voters who expect their preferred formateur candidate to lose behave similarly to those uncertain about the outcome – and still engage in formateur optimization. These findings highlight the interplay between expectations and preferences in shaping voting decisions in coalition systems, offering new insights into voter calculations in multiparty democracies.

Cinco do Oriente is Timor-Leste’s most famous band. It was active for a relatively short period (1972 to 1975) and mainly performed songs made famous by Western groups. Yet Cinco do Oriente is praised today as a pioneer of the local music scene. The band was definitely popular, but it was not the only one performing at the time, and it was not the first. It is argued here that Cinco do Oriente has become a legend, not because of its music, but as a symbol of the resistance movement against Indonesia. This is because three of its members are believed to have been killed by the Indonesian military due to alleged revolutionary activities. This is discussed referencing various popular culture theorists. The article also examines the development of other bands of the era, Portuguese and Indonesian cultural missions in Timor, the Indonesian invasion and occupation, and other matters.