We present a method to solve numerically the Cauchy problem for the defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation with a box-type initial condition (IC) having a nontrivial background of amplitude $q_o \gt 0$ as $x\to \pm \infty$ by implementing numerically the corresponding inverse scattering transform (IST). The Riemann–Hilbert problem associated with the inverse transform is solved numerically by means of appropriate contour deformations in the complex plane following the numerical implementation of the Deift–Zhou nonlinear steepest descent method. In this work, the box parameters are chosen so that there is no discrete spectrum (i.e., no solitons). The numerical method is demonstrated to be accurate within the two asymptotic regimes corresponding to two different regions of the $(x,t)$-plane depending on whether $|x/(2t)| \lt q_o$ or $|x/(2t)| \gt q_o$, as $t \to \infty$.

We evaluate the effect of reciprocal trust within pairs of individuals—gauged by total potential earnings in a trust experiment—on the probability of relationship formation, in comparison with well-known determinants of social ties, such as time of exposure and homophily along demographic traits. We measured trust and trustworthiness for every individual in an incoming cohort of undergraduate students before they began interacting. Using relationship data sourced from surveys and campus entry/exit times between one month and two years after the trust experiment, we find that reciprocal trust is neither a statistically nor an economically significant factor in determining the students’ social networks. Instead, time of exposure, prior acquaintance, and other demographic characteristics play important and persistent roles in relationship formation.

Foreign archaeologists working in the Maya region collaborated with the United Fruit Company during the first half of the twentieth century. In Guatemala, the Company funded research projects in Quiriguá (1910–1915) and Zaculeu (1946–1949). These collaborations supported the broad objectives of U.S. imperialism in the region, but comparing the projects suggests the fact of collaboration did not determine how they operated in the field. Drawing on theories of racialization, I suggest that the Company functioned as a conduit through which broader political economies of race and labor conditioned the practice of archaeology. In Quiriguá, archaeologists’ reliance on United Fruit’s administrative mechanisms led to the reproduction of the Company’s notorious labor practices and the exploitation of Afrodescendant labor in the context of a field site. In Zaculeu, a comparable dependence resulted in scientific methods being used to demonstrate Indigenous deficiency and racial continuity in the service of Company public relations and tourism development objectives. Despite wide-ranging changes in archaeological practice and governmental policy, comparing the cases illustrates how the operations of a corporate firm tied a field science into broader political economies of racialized labor. In so doing, I seek to shift analytical attention from the circulation of ideas about the past to the context of archaeological fieldwork, in which relationships of exploitation were renewed—and in which they might be contested today.

This article reassesses the history of reparations after World War I from the perspective of organized labour in early Weimar Germany. It does so by investigating trade union proposals to send German construction workers to Northern France in an effort to rebuild French villages damaged or destroyed in the war. The article argues that organized workers in early Weimar Germany rallied behind these proposals not only because they hoped that sending fellow workers abroad would contribute to international reconciliation, ease the overall reparations burden, and create employment opportunities, as previous research has suggested. Rather, it shows that Weimar’s “free” (that is, socialist) trade union movement supported the idea of “reparation through labour power” because its members were convinced that it would prevent the rebuilding of Northern France from becoming a playground for private builders. Analysing various German trade union sources, the article suggests that, by involving the country’s nascent Bauhütten movement, a network of building companies owned and controlled by organized labour, trade union functionaries hoped to turn Northern France into a laboratory for non-profit construction. In doing so, they sought to advance a broader transformation of the building sector from a profit-seeking industry benefiting a few wealthy builders into a public service that promoted the interests of workers and the wider community alike. By exploring these trade union proposals for the reconstruction of Northern France, the article also sheds light on a neglected episode in transnational labour history that witnessed the first timid attempts at trade union representation across borders.

This article examines the work of Emil Schlagintweit (1835–1904), one of Germany's most prominent nineteenth-century Tibetologists in order to challenge some common assumptions regarding Orientalist scholarship and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism. Schlagintweit began to work on Tibetan religion and language in the wake of an expedition led by three of his brothers in the 1850s, and his work can provide important nuances to existing understandings of German Orientalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that German scholars did indeed emphasize rigorous analysis in line with the notion of Wissenschaftlichkeit, yet it also demonstrates that their work could go beyond this and rely on a wider array of methodologies and traditions. Interpretations which treat German Orientalists as fundamentally different from other European scholars should therefore be treated with caution. At the same time, the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and imperial realities remained ambivalent for scholars such as Schlagintweit.

This article presents the first sustained narratological analysis of the embedded stories in Nikephoros Bryennios’ Material for History. It argues that pleasure in storytelling was a valued feature of Byzantine historiography and that Bryennios’ anecdotes derive their appeal from four interrelated features: eventfulness, tellability, narrativity, and immersion. The article further contends that, by mimicking oral storytelling through rhetorical questions, direct speech, and vivid sensory detail, Bryennios crafts narratives suited to performative settings while preserving a sense of authenticity. It concludes by proposing narratological criteria for identifying and analysing anecdotes across Byzantine historiography and reassessing the role of pleasure in historical writing.

In latent space item response models (LSIRMs), subjects and items are embedded in a low-dimensional Euclidean latent space. As such, interactions among persons and/or items can be revealed that are unmodeled in conventional item response theory models. Current estimation approach for LSIRMs is a fully Bayesian procedure with Markov Chain Monte Carlo, which is, while practical, computationally challenging, hampering applied researchers to use the models in a wide range of settings. Therefore, we propose an LSIRM based on two variants of regularized joint maximum likelihood (JML) estimation: penalized JML and constrained JML. Owing to the absence of integrals in the likelihood, the JML methods allow for various models to be fit in limited amount of time. This computational speed facilitates a practical extension of LSIRMs to ordinal data, and the possibility to select the dimensionality of the latent space using cross-validation. In this study, we derive the two JML approaches and address different issues that arise when using maximum likelihood to estimate the LSIRM. We present a simulation study demonstrating acceptable parameter recovery and adequate performance of the cross-validation procedure. In addition, we estimate different binary and ordinal LSIRMs on real datasets pertaining to deductive reasoning and personality. All methods are implemented in R package ‘LSMjml’ which is available from CRAN.

Organomontmorillonite-type (O-Mnt) antibacterial agents are less susceptible to development of resistance by bacteria. The aim of the present study was to test the effects of O-Mnt samples, which were reported to be effective against Staphlococcus aureus and Streptococcus mutans in previous studies and to act as a scavenger for opportunistic pathogenic microorganisms, Actinomyces viscosus and Bacteroides fragilis, which cause severe infections such as periodontal diseases, endocarditis, and lung infections. O-Mnt samples with single and mixed surfactant layers, namely benzethonium montmorillonite (Mnt-BZT) and cetylpyridinium and N-lauroyl sarcosinate montmorillonite (Mnt-CP-SR), were subjected to X-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis, attenuated total reflectance-fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and zeta potential analyses to determine some key structural properties. Within the scope of the present study, detailed X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses were performed to elucidate the external surface structures, which are important in explaining their antibacterial properties. There have been few studies on XPS analysis in terms of types of surfactants used in O-Mnt preparation. These analyses made it possible to estimate the interaction between the surfactants on the external surface and the bacterial cell wall leading to lysis. A. viscosus, a facultative anaerobe, and B. fragilis, a strict anaerobe, required specific culture conditions, and their antibacterial susceptibility testing was conducted with caution due to challenges in isolation and antimicrobial resistance. Antibacterial susceptibility tests including the agar well diffusion test, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) determinations and time-kill assay showed that both OMnt samples were effective against the bacteria used. The XPS analyses of the exterior surface structure of O-Mnt revealed that contact killing was the mechanism of antibacterial effect. In vitro cytotoxicity and in vivo animal studies indicated that both O-Mnt samples can be used safely as antibacterial agents in oral and topical applications.

The study of Koszul binomial edge ideals was initiated by V. Ene, J. Herzog, and T. Hibi in 2014, who found necessary conditions for Koszulness. The binomial edge ideal $J_G$ associated to a finite simple graph G is always generated by quadrics. It has a quadratic Gröbner basis if and only if the graph G is closed. However, there are many known nonclosed graphs G where $J_G$ is Koszul. We characterize the Koszul binomial edge ideals by a simple combinatorial property of the graph G.

When using tests to assess individuals, precision of individual test scores is of great importance. Although it is generally known that different test scores are measured with varying precision, traditionally, measurement precision is quantified using a single value known as the standard error of measurement. In the practice of testing, the standard error of measurement is used as a one-size-fits-all measure for each test score. This practice emphasizes the need for a conditional precision estimate that shows which scores are precise and which scores lack precision. We discuss several conditional precision estimates based on classical test theory and item response theory, and provide open-source statistical software included in the software package JASP that enables computation of these estimates. Using conditional precision estimates, decisions based on test scores are expected to show less bias than the common unconditional standard error of measurement.

Bentazon, a photosystem II–inhibiting postemergence herbicide, has been used in corn (Zea mays L.), soybean, wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), and vegetables to manage common lambsquarters (Chenopodium album L.), although growers have reported reduced efficacy across the country. The aim of this study was to describe the sensitivity response of C. album to bentazon and identify whether reported escapes could be considered to be cases of herbicide resistance evolution. We evaluated C. album populations collected from lima and snap bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) fields across Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and Oregon. Dose–response experiments with 25 populations were conducted to create a reference response to bentazon, using rates that ranged from 0 to 8,406 g ai ha−1. Injury ratings and biomass were assessed at 28 d after herbicide application, and the herbicide rates required to reduce growth by 50% (I50 or GR50) and 80% (I80 or GR80) were calculated. Results indicated C. album responses to bentazon varied within and across states. Across all populations studied, the GR50 for biomass reduction ranged from 159 to 816 g ha−1, and GR80 from 230 to 1,944 g ha−1 with populations from Oregon exhibiting the highest average GR50, followed by those from New York, the Northcentral states, and Delaware. Based on our criteria that the injury rating- or biomass-based resistance index (ratio between I50 or GR50 of the suspected resistant and a local selected susceptible population) had to be at least 2, and the I80 or GR80 should be greater than the labeled field rate, one population from New York (NY6) and one from Oregon (OR29) were considered to be resistant. This research underscores the wide variation in C. album response to bentazon across the United States and the importance of herbicide resistance diagnostic strategies that account for local population variation, and highlights the increasing challenge of C. album management in specialty crops.

We introduce the concept of dual Lyapunov exponents, leading to a multiplicative version of the classical Jensen’s formula for one-frequency analytic Schrödinger cocycles. This formula, in particular, gives a new proof and a quantitative version of the fundamentals of Avila’s global theory [3], fully explaining the behavior of complexified Lyapunov exponent through the dynamics of the dual cocycle. The key concepts of (sub/super) critical regimes and acceleration are all explained (in a quantitative way) through the duality approach. In particular, for trigonometric polynomial potentials, we establish partial hyperbolicity of the dual symplectic cocycle and show that the acceleration is equal to half the dimension of its center, this holding also in the appropriate sense for the general analytic case. These results lead to a number of powerful spectral and physics applications.

This paper estimates the impacts of an experiment that provided Canadian high-school students with exogenous amounts and types of financial aid. We collected data ten years later to assess short and long-run effects on educational and financial trajectories. While the average impacts on enrollment, graduation, debt, and earnings appear to be limited in the overall sample, we find that loan offers have heterogeneous effects in different institutional environments, shifting students from two to four-year programs in Quebec while producing the opposite effect in other provinces. Our results also reveal that parents respond to financial aid by increasing their transfers, especially outside of Quebec and among students coming from lower-educated backgrounds. Among the latter population, we additionally find that raising grant amounts by $1,000 reduces the probability of completing the first program of study by 14pp, an effect that is not observed in the rest of the sample.

Willingness to help a needy person may depend on whether the person is perceived as responsible for their predicament. However, information regarding the cause is not always available, and people often ‘look the other way’ when it is. The present research explores whether potential donors choose to obtain information about the cause of the other’s need and, more importantly, how this choice to pursue information is affected by the donors’ feelings of entitlement. Across four studies, we find that decision makers who pursue information about why others are in need are more likely to offer help. Yet we also measure and manipulate the feelings of entitlement and find that those who are high in entitlement are more likely to seek the information regarding the person in need. Their higher tendency to pursue more information makes them more likely to help than they would otherwise.

This article illuminates the powerful role of law in shaping the EU’s political economy. I argue that the neo-liberal architecture and, ultimately, the lack of a socio-economic equilibrium ingrained in the EU legal framework and in the (case) law of the ECJ are crucial with regard to their effects on the political and (socio-)economic spheres. Solutions to this and the restoration of socio-economic balance are limited. As Treaty change seems unrealistic, I argue that the Court should develop a new (self-)understanding that replaces the ‘integration through law’ paradigm with something that could be understood as ‘integration sustained by law’.