This paper discusses the teaching of Ancient History in Brazil through the experience of Projeto Vocabulário Político da Antiguidade (Political Vocabulary of Antiquity Project). This project has been developed at the Federal University of Paraíba in João Pessoa, Brazil, since 2016, with a team consisting of professors and students from undergraduate History and Classics programs. The project’s main goal is to create didactical materials that facilitate the teaching of politics and Antiquity to students aged 11 to 17, based on the translation of Greek and Latin texts. This paper will present two educational games developed by this project to teach the theory of forms of government in an engaging and enjoyable way. The positive results of the project highlight the importance of modernizing the teaching of forms of government regbased on the works of authors such as Herodotus, Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the study of Antiquity can effectively contribute to the political awareness of young citizens.

The ctrdata package has been created to boost the use of data available in public registers of clinical trials. It enables user-friendly, reproducible workflows to identify trials of interest, download protocol- and results-related data, and conduct sophisticated analyses, across multiple registers and trials. ctrdata works in the widely used R environment, and its databases can be used with other tools. The package is open source with a permissive licence, to facilitate collaboration.

This report provides an overview of ctrdata, including its implementation, cases of interest to researchers in public health, medicines, and regulatory science, as well as potential limitations and further developments. At this time, ctrdata works with the European Union (EU) Clinical Trials Information System (CTIS), the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR), the US Clinicaltrials.Gov (CTGOV), and the ISRCTN—the UK’s Clinical Study Registry. The registers are complementary in scope and scientific value, yet differences in data models, variable definitions, search parametrisations, and retrieval options hamper efficient scientific workflows, calling for a scientific-technical, programmatic solution and driving the development of ctrdata.

By employing ctrdata to comprehensively use and easily leverage trial register data, researchers can effectively address a variety of questions, gain useful insights into evolving policies and practices of drug development, and inform further clinical research. Patients and their organisations, developers, policymakers, and other interested parties can build on ctrdata to create solutions for their use cases.

Statistical regularities can be acquired from usage. To examine language speakers’ statistical metacognition about multiword expressions (MWEs), we collected ratings for frequency, dispersion, and directional association strength of English binomials from L1, advanced and intermediate L2 speakers. Mixed-effects modeling showed all speakers had limited speaker-to-corpus consistency but significant sensitivity to statistical regularities of language, supporting usage-based (Gries & Ellis, 2015) and statistical learning theories (Christiansen, 2019). Their statistical metacognition was also shaped by word-level cues, consistent with dual-route model (Carrol & Conklin, 2014). Despite similarities, frequency metacognition showed the strongest speaker-to-corpus consistency, while dispersion metacognition was the hardest to develop. Advanced L2 speakers showed the greatest speaker-to-corpus consistency and sensitivity, while lower-proficiency speakers relied more on word-level cues in metacognitive judgments, supporting the shallow-structure hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006). Overall, L1 and L2 speakers develop diverse statistical metacognition, with L2 speakers not necessarily inferior, suggesting that statistical metacognition is not solely shaped by usage-based experience.

This article sheds light on the understudied significance of Islam, Communism, and global politics in defining what constituted an acceptable “religion” (shūkyō 宗教) in wartime Japan. An analysis of the Japanese Imperial Diet’s debates on the place of Islam in the Religious Organizations Law of 1939, which defined state-sanctioned religious organizations, reveals that Muslim attention from around the world, international politics, the global spread of Communism, and the relatively short history of Islam in Japan, affected politicians’ decision not to mention Islam as a religious organization in the law. While previous literature on the Religious Organizations Law has not adequately addressed the significance of international and non-Euro-American transnational influences, this article argues that lawmakers viewed the power of transnational Muslim and Communist networks as crucial when defining both officially acceptable “religion” and the Shrine (jinja 神社), or Shrine Shinto, as the national core to be protected under this law. The debates surrounding Islam offer fertile ground for examining the significance of global affairs in determining acceptable forms of “religion” in Japan, as well as the broader implications of what Japanese state officials called “religion” and “thought” (shisō 思想) in wartime Japanese and world politics.