Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have driven a growing effort to create digital duplicates. These semi-autonomous recreations of living and dead people can be used for many purposes. Some of these purposes include tutoring, coping with grief, and attending business meetings. However, the normative implications of digital duplicates remain obscure, particularly considering the possibility of them being applied to genocide memory and education. To address this gap, we examine normative possibilities and risks associated with the use of more advanced forms of generative AI-enhanced duplicates for transmitting Holocaust survivor testimonies. We first review the historical and contemporary uses of survivor testimonies. Then, we scrutinize the possible benefits of using digital duplicates in this context and apply the Minimally Viable Permissibility Principle (MVPP). The MVPP is an analytical framework for evaluating the risks of digital duplicates. It includes five core components: the need for authentic presence, consent, positive value, transparency, and harm-risk mitigation. Using MVPP, we identify potential harms digital duplicates might pose to different actors, including survivors, users, and developers. We also propose technical and socio-technical mitigation strategies to address these harms.

The US plan to impose reciprocal tariffs is a game changer. If you ask The Economist, Trump's tariffs ‘really mean chaos for global trade’. If managed well, the opposite could be true: it could be the largest round of trade negotiations since the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and a much-needed rebalancing of global trade relations to catch up with fundamental changes that occurred, but remained unaddressed, for close to a quarter century.

This study investigated the effect of conservation agriculture (CA) practices (e.g. no-tillage (NT) and maize-soybean (MS) intercrops) on the yield and profitability of maize and cotton within the first two years of a crop rotation system. A factorial design that compared two tillage practices (conventional tillage, CT and NT) and two cropping systems (sole maize, M and MS) was implemented on an experimental station in Northern Benin. All treatments were replicated thrice in 2022 and 2023. Soybean yield, maize grain yield and yield components, and seed-cotton yield and yield components were measured. Gross margin, labour productivity, and benefit:cost ratio were calculated, and a sensitivity analysis was done on the economic indicators under five scenarios (S0: gross margin calculation based on actual costs; S1: 30% higher fertiliser price; S2: 30% lower fertiliser price; S3 and S4, respectively: considering +/−1 standard deviation to the maize grain + soybean and seed-cotton yield). Tillage options and cropping systems significantly affected maize and cotton performance, but effects tended to vary between seasons. Treatment NT+MS produced the highest grain yield (4487 kg ha–1) and rain use efficiency (4.12 kg mm–1) in 2022, while CT+M produced the highest grain yield (3195 kg ha–1) and rain use efficiency (2.84 kg mm–1) in 2023. In the case of cotton, NT produced higher seed-cotton yield (1720 kg ha–1), boll number (7.38 bolls/plant), and rainfall use efficiency (1.56 kg mm–1) compared to CT in 2022. In 2023, cotton preceded by maize-soybean intercrops (NT+MS and CT+MS) produced significantly higher yield, aboveground and belowground biomass than cotton preceded by sole maize (NT+M and CT+M). For maize plus soybean, treatment NT+MS resulted in a significant increase in the gross margin, with an average of 582 US$ ha–1 with respect to CT+M under all scenarios in 2022, whereas CT+M and NT+MS attained a significantly higher maize/soybean gross margin in 2023. In the case of cotton, NT increased gross margin by 90-314% compared to CT across the sensitivity analysis scenarios in 2022. In 2023, cotton preceded by MS intercrops (NT+MS and CT+MS) showed a higher gross margin than preceded by sole crops (NT+M and CT+M) across all scenarios. To the well-documented effects of diversification on crop productivity, this study adds evidence on its positive impact on economic performance in a West African context. On-farm research and rural extension are necessary to further fine-tune these practices to fit the reality of smallholder cotton-based cropping systems of Benin.

This article makes two important contributions. Firstly, it provides valuable insights into the motivations of working-class migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, adding a new dimension to a scholarship focused on studies of forced migration or middle-class empire building. Its analysis of a rich body of published and unpublished letters from former institutionalized children reveals the primacy of financial gain in the migration decision and shows that working-class Britons saw the world beyond the British Isles as a space of opportunity, where they could leverage their mobility in pursuit of profit. Secondly, by arguing that juvenile emigrants need to be viewed as a heterogeneous body where age and gender made a difference in terms of experience, the article provides an important new perspective on institutional migration that has implications for wider literatures on childhood and youth. The average age of the boys studied for this article was sixteen and the research shows that they were active participants in the emigration process, shaping their own futures through their diverse decisions. Recognizing this significantly undermines the modern discourses of blame and victimhood that dominate the historiography and encourages us to re-evaluate our approach to nineteenth-century juvenile migration.

This paper explores the impact of return-to-office (RTO) mandates on workplace inequality, particularly within the context of recent shifts in federal policies. The rapid adoption of remote and hybrid work, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, offered significant benefits in terms of flexibility and work-life balance. However, recent regulatory changes, including RTO mandates, threaten to reverse these gains, disproportionately affecting women, caregivers, employees with disabilities, and low-wage workers. This paper critically examines the equity implications of RTO mandates and offers recommendations for industrial-organizational psychologists, organizational leaders, and policymakers to develop equitable, evidence-based approaches to remote and hybrid work that promote employee well-being and organizational effectiveness.

This paper proposes a conceptual model of decision-making tying specific preferences to broader individual goals. Specifically, we consider terminal goals, representing fundamental objectives, and instrumental goals, serving as complexity-reducing intermediate steps toward achieving terminal goals and determining eventual preferences. Notably, the hierarchical goal structure allows for contextual misalignments between different instrumental goals, which may lead to suboptimal decisions – as evaluated from an outside perspective. Thus, applied to the discussion about nudging and paternalism, the model provides a methodological justification for paternalistic interventions as it is compatible with arguments in favour of interventions aimed to correct such choices.

In this article, we introduce a new logarithmic Q-type space $Q_{\ln ,\lambda }^{p,l,k}(\mathbb R^{n})$ to study the well-posedness of the classical/fractional Naiver–Stokes equations. We show that $\nabla \cdot (Q_{\ln ,\lambda }^{p,l,k}(\mathbb R^{n}))^{n}$ covers the well-known critical spaces $BMO^{-1}(\mathbb R^{n}), Q_{\alpha }^{-1}(\mathbb R^{n})$ and $\mathcal {Q}_{0}^{-1}(\mathbb R^{n})$ for the classical Naiver–Stokes equations. Moreover, it covers the fractional counterparts $BMO^{-(2\beta -1)}(\mathbb R^{n}), Q_{\alpha }^{\beta ,-1}(\mathbb R^{n})$ and even the largest critical space $\dot {B}^{-(2\beta -1)}_{\infty ,\infty }(\mathbb R^{n}).$ In doing so, we first establish some basic properties of $Q_{\ln ,\lambda }^{p,l,k}(\mathbb {R}^{n}).$ Then, via the fractional heat semigroups, we characterize the extension of $Q_{\ln ,\lambda }^{p,l,k}(\mathbb R^{n})$ to $\mathscr H_{K_{\ln }^{(l,k)}}^{p,\lambda }(\mathbb R_+^{n+1})$ which is a function space related to the weight function $K_{\ln }^{(l,k)}(\cdot )$. This extension provides a semigroup characterization of $Q_{\ln ,\lambda }^{p,l,k}(\mathbb R^{n})$. With this in hand, we establish the well-posedness of mild solutions to fractional Naiver–Stokes equations and fractional magneto-hydrodynamic equations, respectively, with small data in $\nabla \cdot \left (Q_{\ln ,\frac {4(1-\beta )}{n}}^{2,k,l+2(1-\beta )}(\mathbb {R}^{n})\right )^{n}$ for $k\in \mathbb {N}$ and $l>n+2\beta -4.$

In the introduction for their recent state-of-the-art volume on English at the grassroots, Meierkord and Schneider (2021) point out the recurrent problem of Creolistic study not being fully incorporated into the World Englishes paradigm, arguing, like Mufwene (1997; 2001) and others, that English-based Creoles are best viewed as varieties of English ‘and, as such, require their integration into existing models and theories, too’ (11). Further work which seeks to overtly integrate Creole varieties within studies of English at the grassroots – the ‘new player in the World Englishes paradigm’ (Buschfeld 2001, 25) – has not been quickly forthcoming, though, with most of the work in the field focusing on ‘typical’ multilingual settings. In an attempt to remedy this, the current paper discusses the language situation in Trinidad, the last island in the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles. In Trinidad, Trinidadian English Creole (TEC) and Trinidadian English (TE) interact in a complex where English might be best viewed as a second dialect (ESD), rather than in one of the prototypical ENL, ESL, or EFL situations of acquisition or use (cf. Deuber 2014). After an exploration of the limited research that has been done on language use and social class in Trinidad, this paper compares those previous findings on morphosyntactic features with new data from short semi-structured interviews conducted with speakers who can be described as grassroots.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant health threat to people in corrections facilities due to communal living, inability to social distance, and high rates of comorbidity among incarcerated populations. Combined with the First Step Act of 2018, which granted incarcerated individuals seeking compassionate release access to the courts, the pandemic increased the number of people in federal prisons petitioning for early release due to health risk. Analysis of federal compassionate release case law throughout the pandemic reveals inconsistent judicial reasoning related to COVID-19-based requests. Inconsistently interpreted compassionate release factors include vaccination status, COVID-19 reinfection, and the “degree” of extraordinary circumstances considered. Varied application among federal districts produced inequitable access to compassionate release. Therefore, this analysis provides insight into how an unclear policy can create disparate public health outcomes and considerations for compassionate release determinations in future times of uncertainty, such as a pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic-driven nationalism surged in China, exemplified by widespread mockery and disparagement of India’s handling of the crisis in Chinese cyberspace. Adopting a linguistically grounded approach, this study scrutinizes how India is discursively constructed as an inferior Other amid COVID-19. It conducts a linguistically informed discourse analysis of a highly viewed text on Zhihu (China’s largest online Q&A platform). Drawing mainly on Halliday’s transitivity theory, this study unpacks the linguistic features in the chosen text, which, within a discourse of modern medicine, depicts the Indian people as trapped between hopelessly passive and absurdly overactive in the face of the pandemic. The text also casts the Indian government as an impotent foil to the Chinese government, a representation situated within a discourse of strong-state pandemic governance. By interrogating the non-official social media text through a linguistic lens, this study contributes to understanding China’s representational politics of Othering the non-West within the intertextual nexus between official and non-official spheres. It also contributes to making sense of the multidimensionality and ambivalence underlying Chinese national identity-making as well as “Orientalism within the ‘Orient’” in the Chinese context.

How does anti-immigrant rhetoric by mainstream politicians affect norms of tolerance? How does this compare to similar statements made by radical-right politicians? Drawing on experimental evidence, we find that statements by mainstream politicians lead to more norm erosion than similar statements by radical-right politicians. Subsample analyses suggest that this is because statements by mainstream-right politicians erode norm perceptions of right-wing individuals, while those by radical-right politicians induce backlash among left-wing individuals, who hold closer to the norm in place. The latter effect (backlash by the left) disappears when similar statements are made by mainstream right politicians. We argue that this difference occurs because mainstream politicians represent the views of a larger part of the population or have a higher status. Our results highlight the pivotal role of mainstream politicians in enforcing or eroding democratic norms, and that similar political statements can have different effects depending on their sender.

This study analyses the regulation of “heterogeneous products”—those incorporating interdisciplinary technologies subject to multiple agencies and regulations. Despite recognising the need for coordinated regulatory approaches, no systematic frameworks exist. We developed a framework to analyse both heterogeneous product composition and corresponding regulatory design, exploring their interrelationships. Applying this to case studies of vertical takeoff and landing and roadable aircraft, we found that regulatory interpretations of similar product characteristics varied, leading to differing regulatory responses. Our findings demonstrate a strong link between product classification and applicable regulations, highlighting the importance of considering both concurrently when designing new products or regulations.

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the massive political scandal of 2023–2024, in which dozens of lawmakers from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) received undeclared funds from their factions. First, it provides a detailed timeline of the scandal and places it within the broader historical context of political scandals in Japan. Next, it examines the roles and actions of key participants, including power actors (politicians, secretaries, whistleblowers, prosecutors, and the prime minister) and media actors (mainstream newspapers, tabloid magazines, and political papers). Finally, the paper discusses two possible outcomes of the scandal: an optimistic scenario, where the scandal spurs meaningful reforms, and a pessimistic scenario, where it results in minimal or no transformative change.

The Secretary of the US Department of Health & Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr is leading a political agenda against vaccination. This is undermining the delivery of life-saving vaccination programmes and provision of evidence-based information on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for the public and health professionals. Inconsistent and conflicting messaging between health practitioners and government health agencies erodes trust in public health programmes, creating a vacuum which is often filled with mis/disinformation that presents severe consequences for families. Due to the transnational spread of diseases, we consider the implications of events in the US for routine childhood vaccination programmes in the UK. Public health agencies across the world need to be ‘Kennedy ready’; pragmatic steps must be taken to mitigate threats posed to vaccine confidence and the control of vaccine preventable diseases.