The notions of “emergence” and “becoming” have become widely adopted in relational studies in archaeology, but their definition and application remain nebulous. We advocate a middle-range approach to the incorporation of these related concepts into the study of migration and pronounced cultural shifts. Our study relies on the Bayesian modeling of a significant corpus of radiocarbon dates from Mississippian sites in the Tombigbee Valley of southeastern North America. This investigation has identified the likelihood of two broad migration episodes that we hypothesize are related to cultural rephrasings of landscape and temporality.

This paper aims to theorise how virtual reality (VR) can contribute to the development of contextual architecture. We start by considering how an architectural context may translate into a virtual domain, introducing preliminary definitions of what a virtual design context (VDC) could entail. We then discuss a proposed taxonomy that guides the creation of such a VDC, anchored in principles drawn from virtual realism in art philosophy and contextualism within architecture. This taxonomy is envisioned as a preliminary framework for developing VR-driven design environments with a focus on context. Next, we conducted expert user-testing with 24 architects using two VDCs developed according to the taxonomy. The goal of this step was to gain insights regarding the cognitive load of designers and their user experience while engaged in different types of VDCs. Results suggest that designing in these virtual environments enhanced contextual learning, supported conceptual and creative insight and helped maintain manageable cognitive load. The paper concludes by underscoring the real-world applicability of this taxonomy, highlighting how VR can breathe new life into contextual design, not by reducing context into a digital replica, but by opening new dimensions through which its richness can be explored, interpreted and reimagined.

In the particular world of contemporary EU law, European society has the meaning of a place. Appreciating this requires considering the relationship between European society and another key concept, that of EU values. This relationship is one of mutual balance but also tension: while the latter are abstract calls for offensive action on the part of EU institutions, the former is identified as a concretely located space that must be preserved and defended. The paper begins with a close textual reading of Article 2 TEU, focusing on the provision’s specific architecture. There, European society appears as a singular reality – that of a concretely situated perimeter of social relations that the EU claims as its own – which pre-exists the EU’s institutionality and enables its foundational commitments to the realisation of a series of values. The second and most important part of the paper then contends that this particular arrangement should be understood as a function of the EU’s evolving external ambitions and self-positioning vis-à-vis the outside world. Thus, contrary to the common tendency to see the EU’s external projections as resulting from its own internal identity and dynamics, I will argue that here it is the internal that follows the external. On this basis, it will be shown that the complementary relationship between European society (as place) and EU values (as action) that I identified in the architecture of Article 2 TEU is reflective of the delicate compromise between the rise of the EU’s neo-imperial ambitions at the regional and global levels (for which values serve as a vehicle) and the construction of an increasingly hard boundary between an inside and an outside to the EU order (which the concept of European society serves to draw, justify and implement).

Test fairness is a major concern in psychometric and educational research. A typical approach for ensuring test fairness is through differential item functioning (DIF) analysis. DIF arises when a test item functions differently across subgroups that are typically defined by the respondents’ demographic characteristics. Most of the existing research focuses on the statistical detection of DIF, yet less attention has been given to reducing or eliminating DIF. Simultaneously, the use of computer-based assessments has become increasingly popular. The data obtained from respondents interacting with an item are recorded in computer log files and are referred to as process data. In this article, we propose a novel method within the framework of generalized linear models that leverages process data to reduce and understand DIF. Specifically, we construct a nuisance trait surrogate with the features extracted from process data. With the constructed nuisance trait, we introduce a new scoring rule that incorporates respondents’ behaviors captured through process data on top of the target latent trait. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach through extensive simulation experiments and an application to 13 Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments items from the 2012 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies assessment.

Drylands are still widely perceived as marginal areas, unsuitable for food production and long-term human settlement. This view, reinforced by mainstream global land use models, stands in sharp contrast with archaeological and ethnographic evidence showing that sustainable agriculture and pastoralism have long existed even in hyperarid regions. In this perspective article, we argue for the importance of applying archaeology to build a long-term narrative of land use management in drylands, highlighting the relevance of nonmechanized, resilient subsistence strategies as forms of biocultural heritage and sustainable alternatives rooted in indigenous priorities put in place over centuries. We contend that archaeology is key to shifting this narrative by documenting long-term socio-ecological adaptation in drylands. To this end, we present a range of archaeological methodologies that have helped trace techno-cultural developments in drylands, challenging persistent assumptions about the limits of human occupation and food production in arid environments.

This is a paper about three problems that public political philosophers are likely to encounter and how some underrecognized forms of public philosophy might help overcome them. After clarifying what I take public political philosophy to be, I present the three problems—the problem of academic overrepresentation, the problem of the critical intellectual, and the problem of novel values. These problems are especially acute for a particular form of public philosophy—namely, writing for a general audience. I describe four alternative models of public political philosophy—the organizing model, the participatory model, the policy model, and the bureaucratic model—and give examples of each. For each model, I describe some of its pros and cons, and in particular how it handles (or does not) the three problems. I conclude with some suggestions about the significance of the discussion for philosophical education.

Language AI has become a popular tool across the humanities and social sciences, but it has yet to gain traction in socio-cultural anthropology. Fieldnotes, the core data for anthropologists, present a unique opportunity and challenge for applying language AI to understand diverse human behavior and experience. Anthropological fieldnotes are communicative products in cultural contexts through immersive, extensive and idiosyncratic fieldwork. To read fieldnotes, anthropologists typically engage in qualitative, reflexive interpretations, attuned to local meaning systems and intersubjective encounters. This paper demonstrates a novel synergy, combining anthropological expertise and various AI technologies to analyze natural observation texts about children’s peer-interactions, especially their moral dramas, in the historical context of rural Taiwan during the Cold War. These fieldnotes were collected by the late anthropologists Arthur Wolf and Margery Wolf in the world’s first anthropological study focused on Han Chinese children. Engagement with AI in this project began as methodological cross-fertilization, transforming raw fieldnotes into a text-as-data pipeline and discovering how ethnographic close-reading, machine-learning techniques (e.g., unsupervised topic modeling), transformer models (e.g., S-BERT) and generative models (e.g., GPT) can complement and augment each other’s value. Capitalizing on the systematic nature of Arthur Wolf’s fieldnotes, as well as the special protagonists of these fieldnotes – playful children, the most voracious learners – this paper compares how children, the anthropologist and AI make sense of pretend-fight moral dramas. Such a human–AI hybrid experiment embodies layered-interdisciplinarity at methodological, epistemological and, to some extent, ontological levels, anchored at children’s social cognition. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, digital humanities, developmental science and data science, this work sheds light on the similarities and differences in how machines and humans learn and make sense of morality, and by doing so, critically reflect on the nature of socio-moral intelligence.

Salmonella enterica serovar Dublin is host-specific to cattle, causing severe symptoms and economically impacting milk herds. Despite an eradication programme in Denmark, levels of infection have not decreased and suspicion has fallen on the common starling Sturnus vulgaris as a potential vector between herds. The number of breeding starlings in Denmark declined by 60% between 1976 and 2015, a trend correlated with decreases in the number of cattle grazing outside. Ironically, more starlings are now coming into Danish cattle sheds to feed on maize silage outside the breeding season, so it is increasingly important to understand the role of starlings in dispersing Salmonella between cattle herds. We caught and tested 394 different starlings at seven separate dairy farms infected with Salmonella Dublin by swabbing breast feathers, legs, feet and undertail coverts as well as taking faecal samples at these and four other infected farms. We found no trace of the pathogen, indicating that starlings are highly unlikely to be significant in spreading Salmonella Dublin between Danish cattle herds. We recommend investigating alternative contacts that may occur between herds as the cause of disease spread.

The article analyzes whether regulatory sandboxes are a legally intended and useful instrument to create pathways for law enforcement agencies using cutting-edge AI systems in compliance with fundamental rights. It takes a deeper look at the provisions of the EU AI Act for regulatory sandboxes and testing under real-world conditions in contexts relevant to law enforcement. Using a legislative process in Germany as a case study, the article shows the imminent tension of innovative AI systems between modern investigation tools in the digital age, as well as potential pathways towards disproportionate surveillance of citizens. The author suggests taking the extra mile through regulatory sandboxes instead of crafting legal foundations quickly under the influence of current political pressure: On the long run this can save tax money, avoid dependencies to tech companies and pave a European way of AI systems that respect digital human rights in an appropriate manner.

Management of broadleaf weeds in chile pepper may be improved by including a rotation with sorghum treated with selective, non-residual herbicides. However, herbicides applied to sorghum specifically for managing weeds in subsequent chile pepper crops have not been evaluated. This study evaluated two herbicide treatments applied to sorghum for their effects on broadleaf weed density and hand hoeing time in chile pepper crops the following year, and compared the treatments for their net economic benefits across sorghum and chile pepper growing seasons. Treatments included 1) a sorghum nontreated control; 2) one herbicide application, which was a premix combination of 2,4-D (0.35 kg ai ha−1), bromoxynil (0.35 kg ai ha−1), and fluroxypyr (0.14 kg ai ha−1) applied at the 4-leaf stage of sorghum; 3) two herbicide applications, which included the aforementioned premix combination followed by bromoxynil (0.28 kg ai ha−1) applied at the 6-leaf stage of sorghum; and 4) weed-free sorghum using hand hoeing. Results indicated that broadleaf weeds covered less than 10% of the ground where sorghum had been treated with herbicides. The two-application treatment resulted in 24% fewer broadleaf weeds in chile pepper than in sorghum that had been hoed by hand, and 63% fewer than the one-application treatment. Hand hoeing time for chile pepper was similar among the two-application treatment, one-application treatment, and weed-free sorghum. A partial budget analysis indicated that the one-application treatment provided greater net economic benefit than the two-application treatment (US$6,550 ha−1 vs. US$5,894 ha−1), due to lower input costs and greater overall gross revenue. These findings indicate that a two-application treatment maximizes reductions of broadleaf weeds in chile pepper caused by rotational sorghum; however, the one-application treatment may be a cost-effective approach to reducing broadleaf weeds in chile pepper.

There is a lack of knowledge available on how cats adjust their macronutrient partitioning due to the consumption of single-macronutrient meals. The objective of this study was to evaluate consumption of a single meal of ingredients that contained foods of strictly carbohydrates (CHO), fat (FAT) or protein (PRO), on energy expenditure (EE) and macronutrient metabolism in cats. Ten domestic shorthair adult cats (1·9 years; 4·12 kg) were fed 22–24 g of chicken fat (FAT), 56–62 g of whey protein solution (PRO) or 54–56 g of cornstarch solution (CHO) for a single day in a randomised complete block design. Indirect calorimetry was conducted for 24 h post-feeding. Mean average EE over 24 h was highest in cats fed PRO (44 kcal/kg BW) and FAT (43 kcal/kg BW) compared with that in cats fed CHO (42 kcal/kg BW; P < 0·01). During 0 to 4 h, cats fed FAT had greater EE (49 kcal/kg BW), suggesting that cats respond to oxidising more dietary fat over protein in the early postprandial stage. Mean 24 h respiratory quotient (RQ) was greatest for cats fed CHO (0·76) followed by PRO (0·75) and FAT (0·74; P < 0·05). During 4 to 8 h, the RQ of cats fed PRO was the greatest (0·77), suggesting that cats initially increase gluconeogenesis from amino acids for subsequent glucose oxidation. In comparison to omnivores and herbivores, obligate carnivores have unique responses to single macronutrient intake, where they apparently generate energy from carbohydrate metabolism and rely more on gluconeogenic precursors.

Shakespeare’s Cymbeline explores the tension between the desire for freedom and the obligations individuals owe to their social and political communities. Through the course of the play, characters seek freedom from the authority of their fathers, kings, emperors, and gods with devastating consequences. Tragedy is only averted once these characters understand that the freedom and authority they variously desire is only fulfilled in a mutual love or good will that is bolstered by forgiveness. The play’s setting at the birth of Christ is carried through in the Christian argument and outcome of the plot.