This article explores how and why English armies changed between the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It thereby addresses a topic that has hitherto not received the attention it deserves, especially the issue of change and continuity across the late medieval and early modern divide. Administrative sources, such as indentures of war and inventories, are examined to trace changes in the terminology used to describe soldiers, the weaponry with which they were equipped and ratios of different types of combatants. This evidence is used to demonstrate that the role of men-at-arms and archers changed markedly over the course of the fifteenth century, with the latter evolving into a form of hybrid infantry. The reign of Henry VII was especially significant, with key developments including the emergence of new categories of soldiers. Contrary to past assessments, the bill only became the preferred English melee weapon in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, with the pike used alongside it in large numbers. European influences were important in driving these changes, which were integrated into a distinctive English style of warfare.

Invasive plants negatively impact natural areas and impose huge costs associated with control and management. A new approach to significantly reduce these effects is to identify species in the earliest stages of spread, using data collected by public gardens across North America. Known as Public Gardens as Sentinels against Invasive Plants (PGSIP), this network includes multiple gardens, each contributing reports of these problematic species to a shared database using standardized guidelines. We examined this dataset to identify newly spreading species being noticed within gardens within different regions and determined whether they have been reported as state-listed/regulated/noxious outside gardens. As of November 2024, 53 PGSIP gardens in 28 U.S. states and Canadian provinces had submitted 996 reports, consisting of 597 unique species. The most commonly listed species were Amur corktree (Phellodendron amurense Rupr.), burning bush [Euonymus alatus (Thunb.) Siebold], and wintercreeper [Euonymus fortunei (Turcz.) Hand.-Maz.]. Other less frequently listed species included golden rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata Laxm.), Norway maple (Acer platanoides L.), and castor aralia [Kalopanax septemlobus (Thunb.) Koidz.]. Of the 597 species, 36% were not listed by any state or province; gardens also had several species on watchlists, including Japanese tree lilac [Syringa reticulata (Blume) H. Hara] and Siberian squill (Scilla siberica Andrews). Our results demonstrate the utility of the approach and value of the database. This information can now inform the efforts of land managers, invasion biologists, the horticultural industry, and agencies tasked with invasive plant monitoring and assessment.

Despite the prevalence of slavery in world history, our understanding of its persistence remains limited. Most previous studies focus primarily on slavery as a labour contract, indistinguishable from other coercive arrangements such as serfdom. More recent literature on slavery in the United States shows that enslaved people also played an important role as financial instruments. In this article, we extend the investigation by comparing slavery in the United States with that in Brazil and the Cape Colony. We show that despite significant geographic, demographic, and economic differences, slavery was not merely a labour arrangement in the three cases but a unique institution that gave enslavers complete rights over mobile property. Slavery provided access to both labour and capital, with the capital investment dimension being key to understanding its persistence. We argue that understanding slavery’s persistence requires recognizing enslaved people as both sources of labour and capital investment.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal implications of New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) “from vineyard to glass” in the European Union (EU). NGTs promise to address sustainability challenges in the wine sector by enhancing grapevine resilience while preserving varietal identity. Yet their use in the EU remains legally complex. The paper explains their treatment under the current framework for genetically modified organisms and the ongoing reform proposal aimed at establishing a separate regime for NGT-derived plants. It then examines how NGTs challenge the legal notion of “variety” that underpins the regimes for Plant Variety Rights, Plant Reproductive Material and Wine Law. Finally, it discusses legal options to accommodate NGTs while protecting market structures and varietal heritage. It argues for an autonomous definition of variety in wine law that better reflects the expectations of both producers and consumers.

This study examined the malleability of beliefs and preferences about ground beef when presented with information about the environmental, animal welfare, and food safety impacts of organic and conventional beef production. Two online discrete choice experiments were used to illicit respondents’ beliefs and preferences for ground beef. Information treatments were then introduced to assess modification of belief parameters. We find information, particularly negative information, modified respondents’ beliefs about the relationship between credence attributes and perceived quality. Correspondingly, willingness-to-pay for organic status on ground beef changed an average of –70.50% (22 cents) to +38.96% (52 cents) depending on information treatment provided.

Stress is a response to external environmental conditions that encourages individuals to pursue changes in their lives. We examine the relationship between stress and federal and provincial political leaders’ approval ratings. We theorize that, as a strategy to cope with the pandemic stresses outside of their direct control, individuals will redirect their frustrations toward incumbents. We hypothesize that greater experiences with stress will negatively correlate with the approval of political incumbents even among members of incumbents’ political in-group. We analyze data from the COVID-19 Monitor survey, a multi-wave, cross-sectional survey of over 56,000 Canadians. On three out of four measures, we find that stress negatively impacted incumbent approval, and that these negative impacts occur among the incumbent’s supporters and non-supporters. On the fourth measure, we find the effect of stress on approval is moderated, positive or negative, by whether regional leaders took action to limit the spread of coronavirus disease 2019.

In 2024, the U.S. Government introduced, and then quickly rescinded, a new policy to oversee Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential (PEPP). This research explores how biosafety practitioners interpreted and assessed the policy itself and discussed challenges to implementation. An inductive, grounded theory approach was used to identify key insights from qualitative data generated at a 2-day deliberative workshop with 45 biosafety officers, compliance professionals and researchers; analysis was supported using NVivo software. Participants described the policy’s ambiguous language, lack of actionable federal guidance, limited legal scope and unfunded administrative burdens as significant barriers to implementation. Although supportive of the policy’s goals, workshop participants stressed the need for more precise definitions, practical examples and practitioner-informed implementation strategies. The findings demonstrate that durable and effective biosafety and biosecurity oversight requires early, substantive engagement with those operationalizing policy.

Modern Elections can be conceived as a socio-technical system, as the electoral process in many ways relies on technological solutions: voter information, identification and registration, collecting, verifying and counting the votes – in some countries these steps are conducted by using innovative technologies. But how do those devices and processes actually become part of the official legislation and can finally deployed during this sensitive and important democratic procedure? Over time, the State of California has developed a robust regulatory ecosystem for integrating innovative technology into the electoral process and is also able to change and modernize its rules and regulations. Although technologies currently used are more static, hardware-based and usually do not include algorithmic systems, the overall structure of the process may also function as a blueprint for regulating more dynamic algorithm-based or even AI-based technologies.

A novel family of statistical distributions, called enriched truncated exponentiated generalized family, is theoretically developed to model heavy-tailed data. One of the three-parameter sub-models of this family derived from log-logistic distribution is comprehensively studied. The statistical properties are explored, including moments and Fisher information matrix. In addition, tail-heaviness is studied using the tail-index approach. The method of maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation, and existence and uniqueness of these estimators are shown. The flexibility of the new family is further validated by applying to the Norwegian fire insurance claim dataset. The goodness-of-fit measures are used to illustrate the adequacy of the proposed family of distributions. Furthermore, a backtesting procedure is conducted for well-known risk measures to assess the accuracy of the right tail fit.

In this article we study the theories of the infinite-branching tree and the r-regular tree, and show that both of them are pseudofinite. Moreover, we show that they can be realized by infinite ultraproducts of polynomial exact classes of graphs, and provide a characterization of the Morley rank of definable sets in terms of the degrees of polynomials measuring their non-standard cardinalities. This answers negatively some questions from [2], where it is asked whether every stable generalised measurable structure is one-based.

How can existing experiences of regulatory experimentation inform AI sandbox design in Europe? This paper explores the ‘responsible AI’ sandbox of the Norwegian Data Protection Agency (DPA), a GDPR-oriented regulatory experiment created in 2020 with four projects per annum. Through an interpretive policy analysis of documents (exit reports and workshop transcripts) and semi-structured interviews with officials, we explore how the Norwegian DPA approached its mandate of ‘helping with responsible innovation’, where it identified role conflicts, and what scope conditions and challenges it perceived around sandbox work. Sandboxing represented a ‘new way of working’ for the regulatory authority: in an idea-based intervention mode, the DPA moves from rule-based interventions as a watchdog to becoming a dialogue-oriented partner in solution-finding, a concretiser of ambiguous GDPR rules, and a keen learner from sectoral and technical experts. Critical engagement with our data suggests that sandbox design should not be reduced to technical and procedural questions. It requires regulators’ critical reflexivity on their ambivalent role and power relations in the regulatory experiment: how to strategically select relevant projects and issues, how to navigate budgetary constraints and the lack of follow-ups, and how sandboxing affects more interventionist regulatory duties.

This study examines how party size shapes voters’ likelihood of engaging in protest, moving beyond a simple winner–loser categorization of parties. In European democracies, where coalition governments are prevalent, policy-making often requires compromises among parties with differing issue positions, leading to varying levels of voter representation. Junior coalition parties, overshadowed by majority partners, have limited decision-making influence, which increases the likelihood that their voters will protest to shape policy agendas. However, smaller coalition parties still offer better representation than those in opposition. As a key indicator of a party’s capacity to represent its voters, party size significantly shapes motivations for protest among both government and opposition parties. Using data from eight waves of the European Social Survey (2004–2018), the article finds that voters of junior coalition parties are more likely to protest than those of senior coalition partners. Additionally, smaller party size correlates with a higher probability of protest participation, particularly among opposition party voters.

This article addresses the questions of when mental health advance planning documents are created, the points when circumstances which they are intended to address arise and what consequences should flow when such a situation does arise. It addresses these points primarily from the perspective of what the law could/should be at a conceptual level. It looks at three stages: (a) creation of the document; (b) the period between the creation of the document and the point at which the intended circumstances arise; and (c) the point at which the intended circumstances arise. It does not purport to provide solutions at each stage, but rather to frame the dilemmas to aid discussion. In similar vein, it draws upon case studies from England & Wales, not to purport to dictate similarities of approach, but to flesh out dilemmas that have arisen to stimulate consideration.

The famous Sidorenko’s conjecture asserts that for every bipartite graph $H$, the number of homomorphisms from $H$ to a graph $G$ with given edge density is minimised when $G$ is pseudorandom. We prove that for any graph $H$, a graph obtained from replacing edges of $H$ by generalised theta graphs consisting of even paths satisfies Sidorenko’s conjecture, provided a certain divisibility condition on the number of paths. To achieve this, we prove unconditionally that bipartite graphs obtained from replacing each edge of a complete graph with a generalised theta graph satisfy Sidorenko’s conjecture, which extends a result of Conlon, Kim, Lee and Lee [J. Lond. Math. Soc., 2018].

Against the backdrop of the European Union (EU)’s objective that artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory sandboxes under the EU AI Act should both foster innovation and assist with compliance, considerable challenges are identified for Member States around capacity-building and the design and operationalisation of regulatory sandboxes. The article charts Member States’ early-stage preparations for implementing AI regulatory sandboxes and contends that there is a risk that differing approaches being taken by individual national sandboxes could lead to fragmentation and jeopardise a uniform interpretation of the AI Act in practice. This could also motivate innovators to play sandbox arbitrage. With sandbox participation being voluntary, the possibility that AI regulatory sandboxes may prove unattractive to innovators on their compliance journey is also explored. Confidentiality concerns, the inability to relax legal rules during the sandbox and the inability of AI regulatory sandboxes to deliver a presumption of conformity with the AI Act are identified as pertinent concerns for innovators contemplating applying to AI regulatory sandboxes as compared with other direct pre-market compliance routes provided to them in the form of application of harmonised standards and conformity assessment procedures.