The transformation of nineteenth-century governing classes remains one of the greatest themes of European history. This article focuses on the social and familial life of 116 high-ranking treasury clerks offering a different perspective on the development of the nineteenth-century state and the transformation of its governing classes. Instead of conceptualizing the formation of this new administrative elite exclusively in terms of administrative reform, career advancement based on individual merit, educational networks, or the result of connections with cabinet officers – as hitherto has been commonplace in the literature – this article will show that treasury clerks’ marriage ties, familial networks, and intergenerational support sustained their careers, families, and status during middle life and old age. By using class, life-cycle, and family lenses, this article argues that the consolidation, coherence, and cohesion of the new ‘administrative elite’, that is, the men who attained the top positions in the treasury and from there moved to other public establishments from 1850 to 1914, was also the result of transitions in their life cycle and family life. Apart from recasting the ascent of this group in social terms, this approach produces significant insights into the development of the nineteenth-century state, the transformation of governing classes, social classes, and family.

The volumes of historical data locked behind unstructured formats have long been a challenge for researchers in the computational humanities. While optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing have enabled large-scale text mining projects, the irregular formatting, inconsistent terminology and evolving printing practices complicate automated parsing and information extraction efforts for historical documents. This study explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) in processing and structuring irregular and non-standardized historical materials, using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Inventory books (1898–2008) as a test case. Given the frequent evolution of these historical records, we implemented a pipeline combining OCR, custom segmentation rules and LLMs to extract structured data from the scanned texts. It provides an example of how incorporating LLMs into data-processing pipelines can enhance the accessibility and usability of historical and archival materials for scholars.

In this work, we conclude our study of fibred $\infty $-bicategories by providing a Grothendieck construction in this setting. Given a scaled simplicial set S (which need not be fibrant) we construct a 2-categorical version of Lurie’s straightening-unstraightening adjunction, thereby furnishing an equivalence between the $\infty $-bicategory of 2-Cartesian fibrations over S and the $\infty $-bicategory of contravariant functors with values in the $\infty $-bicategory of $\infty $-bicategories. We provide a relative nerve construction in the case where the base is a 2-category, and use this to prove a comparison to existing bicategorical Grothendieck constructions.

Belief network analysis (BNA) has enabled major advances in the study of belief systems, capturing Converse’s understanding of the interdependence among multiple beliefs (i.e., constraint) more intuitively than many conventional statistics. However, BNA struggles with representing political divisions that follow a spatial logic, such as the “left–right” or “liberal-conservative” ideological divide. We argue that Response Item Networks (ResINs) have important advantages for modeling political cleavage lines as they organically capture belief systems in a latent ideological space. In addition to retaining many desirable properties inherent to BNA, ResIN can uncover ideological polarization in a visually intuitive, theoretically grounded, and statistically robust fashion. We demonstrate the advantages of ResIN by analyzing ideological polarization with regard to five hot-button issues from 2000 to 2020 using the American National Election Studies (ANES), and by comparing it against an equivalent procedure using BNA. We further introduce system-level and attitude-level polarization measures afforded by ResIN and discuss their potential to enrich the analysis of ideological polarization. Our analysis shows that ResIN allows us to observe much more detailed dynamics of polarization than classic BNA approaches.

This article introduces “CALL4,” a bilingual (Japanese and English) website created in 2019 to bring attention to public interest cases litigated in Japan’s courts. The open-access CALL4 website (https://www.call4.jp/) is designed to both stimulate public interest and raise money for litigation costs through crowdfunding. It presently covers more than 80 cases. CALL4 has become a standard reference for news reporters, lawyers, and others concerned with public interest cases. The site has also raised significant funding. This article profiles the founders and their strategies for reaching a broad audience to support public interest cases, including a significant reliance on student volunteers.

Wild rice is a high-value specialty crop in California. Weeds are an important pest issue in this crop, yet to date, only carfentrazone is registered for weed control in this crop. Herbicide field trials were conducted in 2022 and 2023 in Shasta and Yolo counties, California, in support of the IR-4 project’s mission to register new pesticides for specialty crops. Herbicides tested for efficacy and crop safety included cyhalofop-butyl, florpyrauxifen-benzyl, penoxsulam, propanil, and triclopyr at two application rates each, as well as carfentrazone applied at the labeled rate. At all sites, weed control was acceptable with most treatments and comparable to that of carfentrazone. Generally, florpyrauxifen-benzyl, penoxsulam, and triclopyr provided the greatest broad-spectrum weed control. In particular, uncommon weeds such as common spikerush and longleaf pondweed (Shasta County sites in 2022 and 2023, respectively) were controlled well with these herbicides. Propanil was also very effective against these two species, yet it provided only up to 25% control of ricefield bulrush. Crop response to herbicides was variable. Carfentrazone, cyhalofop-butyl, florpyrauxifen-benzyl, and propanil all caused minor and transient injury to the wild rice, characterized by chlorosis, leaf burn, and stunting. Florpyrauxifen-benzyl and triclopyr also caused some leaf deformation, which the wild rice did not recover from. The most significant crop injury was caused by penoxsulam, resulting in severe or complete stand loss at the low and high rates, respectively, across all site-years. Triclopyr also caused unacceptable lodging at both rates at all sites, significantly reducing yield at the higher rate. Crop yields in noninjured plots were similar to those from the untreated control and carfentrazone-treated plots, although the higher rate of florpyrauxifen-benzyl did reduce yields somewhat. These data provide important crop-safety information for wild rice and will inform further herbicide program research toward potential registration for wild rice in California.

In recent years, the L2 Motivational Self System has faced increasing scrutiny over its theoretical clarity and empirical rigor. One element of this model, the L2 Learning Experience, remains ambiguously defined and theoretically underdeveloped. This study examined the content validity of the L2 Learning Experience scale and its potential overlap with intrinsic motivation, a cornerstone of self-determination theory. Using a panel of experts, we assessed to what extent items traditionally associated with the L2 Learning Experience scale align with their intended construct. Findings revealed that the items were predominantly identified as intrinsic motivation, not the L2 Learning Experience. These results suggest a significant overlap between the two constructs and raise concerns about a potential jangle fallacy. Our results also underscore the need for greater theoretical and terminological clarity in the field. Aligning language learning motivation research with broader psychological frameworks could lead to more parsimonious and robust theoretical models.

In the early twentieth century, the steady increase of women entering higher education led to mixed gender university theatre groups. The lack of extant archival documentation complicates the task of reconstructing such experiences in many contexts and cultures. A notable exception to this widespread situation is La Barraca, a state-funded university theatre group created during the short-lived Spanish Second Republic (1931–6). The intimate relations between one of Europe’s first mixed gender university groups with national politics and education policies left behind a rich assortment of primary materials, including but not limited to journalistic coverage, memoirs, interviews, photos and film recordings. This article provides socio-political context for La Barraca before going on to critically interrogate what I will maintain was its most important legacy, the active participation of female students. In the process, I offer new insights into the gender dynamics within and beyond the university in the politically charged build up to the Spanish Civil War.

Smartphones, as more sophisticated versions of mobile phones, are expected to significantly influence how rural households manage their farms. This paper examines the extent to which smartphone ownership affects the adoption of modern agricultural inputs and technologies at the extensive margin. Using a rich, nationally representative household-level dataset from Nigeria and appropriate identification strategies, we find that smartphone ownership increases the likelihood of hiring labor, using phytosanitary inputs, and operating tractors. These findings suggest that promoting the diffusion of modern digital tools in rural areas can complement traditional agricultural input support programs, offering a promising avenue to enhance agricultural productivity and livelihoods in Nigeria.

Archaeologists in North America often think of the bow and arrow as appearing more or less instantaneously, a conception baked into many culture-historical schemes. However, this specialized technology likely has a more complex history. From a single Old World origin, it is thought to have spread throughout North America from the Arctic after about 5000 cal BP. From there, it seems to have moved from north to south, but the specific timing of the arrival of this important technology is not known in great detail throughout most of California. Rather than using typological or culture-historical categories to discern this technological replacement, this study plots salient artifact attributes from a large sample of projectile points from central and northern California through continuous time to provide more detail on the timing of the spread of this important prehistoric technology. Results suggest the bow and arrow entered northeastern California before 2000 cal BP and moved southward, arriving at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as much as 1,000 years later. The changepoint analysis method introduced here should be broadly applicable to a wide variety of similar archaeological patterns.

This paper draws on two seemingly disparate moments – standing witness to protest in Guatemala and unpacking programme design in New York City – to explore the connections, linkages and methodological insights brought forward by front-line organisers. These individuals, though not typically recognised as policy experts, offer crucial knowledge that challenges dominant approaches to law and policy. Turning to their actions and framing, this paper argues that these organisers share a deep and urgent analysis of institutional and state violence. Their perspectives highlight the inadequacies of conventional institutional lenses, which often exclude or dismiss such grassroots expertise. The paper emphasises the importance of how these voices are heard and responded to, particularly given the historical and ongoing marginalisation of such knowledge holders. Drawing on multiple examples, it critiques institutional investments in spatial and bureaucratic schemes that deflect responsibility for violence, and that distance possibilities for accountability. This raises the question of what orientation or sensibility is necessary to engage with and to listen to these collective voices differently, especially from within administrative and bureaucratic systems. Grappling with the possibilities and limitations of what a category of ‘activist-scholar administrator’ could mean, this paper identifies three key lessons: the need for bureaucratic imagination, an iterative approach and expanded analytical frameworks. I argue that much more thinking and action are needed to navigate bureaucratic systems – whether in universities or state institutions – in ways that centre community knowledge and respond meaningfully to calls for broader accountability.

We show that each connected component of the moduli space of smooth real binary quintics is isomorphic to an open subset of an arithmetic quotient of the real hyperbolic plane. Moreover, our main result says that the induced metric on this moduli space extends to a complete real hyperbolic orbifold structure on the space of stable real binary quintics. This turns the moduli space of stable real binary quintics into the quotient of the real hyperbolic plane by an explicit non-arithmetic triangle group.

We experimentally study how individuals strategically disclose multidimensional information to a Naive Bayes algorithm trained to guess their characteristics. Subjects’ objective is to minimize the algorithm’s accuracy in guessing a target characteristic. We vary what participants know about the algorithm’s functioning and how obvious are the correlations between the target and other characteristics. Optimal disclosure strategies rely on subjects identifying whether the combination of their characteristics is common or not. Information about the algorithm functioning makes subjects identify correlations they otherwise do not see but also overthink. Overall, this information decreases the frequency of optimal disclosure strategies.