The central Maya lowlands (CML) display an uncommon demographic history—the absence of a millennial population rebound from its former occupational peak, about 800 CE. Here we postulate why the loss of a well-populated CML during the Late Classic-Terminal Classic periods failed to regain substantial occupation during the subsequent 700-800 years before the Spanish conquest of the Maya realm. Updating the narrative of stressful human-environmental conditions, shifts in trade routes, and long-term paucity of occupation in the CML, we examine push-pull factors that affected Postclassic Maya population geography. These factors include population pressures, environmental hazards, resource conditions, and livelihood standards that existed in the Postclassic Period between northern and coastal lowlands and the CML. The advantages that the CML maintained before Postclassic times, foremost regaining superior environmental conditions for agriculture, were insufficient pull factors given the low levels of push factors in the northern and coastal lowlands. We draw attention to the under-treated problem—the failure of a population rebound in the CML—and encourage improvements in systematic data and analytics to address it, including consideration of non-material, socio-cultural factors.

English employs a variety of comparative formation strategies. Theoretical and corpus-based research has established that their distribution depends on a variety of factors. In this article, we take an experimental approach to test analytic, synthetic and double comparative forms in relation to register in American and British English. We report on a rating study investigating the appropriateness and interpretation in terms of evaluativity of the three comparative forms. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that the comparative variants are not considered equally appropriate, but the effect is not as strong as would be expected under the hypothesis that frequency of occurrence is directly related to linguistic judgments. The analytic and double comparative alternatives exhibit lower appropriateness levels than the synthetic comparative. Analytic and double comparative forms are rated as less appropriate in formal than in informal contexts, which did not show an effect on the synthetic form. Furthermore, the analytic variant shows a different behavior in terms of the interpretation than the other forms in that a stronger effect of evaluativity is detected. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for certain hypotheses emerging from corpus-based research.

Prior research shows that, when making causal inferences, people can control for alternative causes. However, these studies utilize artificial inter-trial intervals on the order of seconds; in real-life situations, people often experience data over days and weeks (e.g., learning the effectiveness of two new medications over multiple weeks). Across two experiments, participants learned about two possible causes from data presented either in a more naturalistic paradigm (one trial per day for multiple weeks via smartphone) or in a traditional trial-by-trial paradigm (a rapid series of trials). The results show that people can control for alternative causes when learning over long timeframes, but they also exhibit non-normative discounting. The results also reveal that the extent to which people control and learn simple relations is suboptimal across both short and long timeframes.

When and why do wealthy individuals support redistribution? Under standard political economy models, preferences for redistribution are a function of material conditions. The partisanship literature, on the contrary, argues that partisan identification determines redistributive preferences. We move beyond this dichotomy to argue that the ideology of the government enacting redistribution is a key factor explaining support for redistribution among the wealthy. Through survey experiments during the 2022 Colombian election, we find that the wealthy are more likely to support redistribution under a right-wing government and expect redistribution under the Right to be more efficient and less economically disruptive. We find heterogeneous treatment effects across ideological groups. However, regardless of ideology, the wealthy do not expect macroeconomic instability from right-wing redistribution.

The experimentally backed and hitherto overlooked empirical observation of the paper is a contrast among indefinite Positive Polarity Items regarding their possibility of being rescued under certain operators with different rescuing potential. If/surprise/only/don’t think can rescue some-indefinites, suspending their anti-licensing (i.e., their impossibility to occur in the scope of a clausemate negation): while some-pronouns (in English and French) and des-indefinites in French exhibit the expected rescuability, English some-NPs remain unexpectedly degraded. Our account relies on the hypothesis that ‘rescuing’ is due to sentential negation being interpreted as ‘external’ (vs. nullified as in most literature). The definition we propose for external negation is syntactic: rescuing operators allow sentential negation to raise to an illocutionary functional projection above Tense Phrase (TP). Thus at LF (Logical Form), the negation takes that higher projection (rather than TP) as complement and becomes harmless for some-indefinites. The semantic correlate of this syntactic proposal is the interpretation of external negation as a propositional operator. As it involves the illocutionary periphery, rescuing is pragmatic in nature. The different rescuing potential between some-pronouns and some-NPs arises from the interplay between their distinct LF-representations and a minimal-event pragmatic constraint on rescuing.

Organic strawberry production using the annual hill system relies predominantly on polyethylene (PE) mulch for weed control. However, although nonbiodegradable PE mulches are allowed to be used in organic production, albeit with restrictions, they pose environmental risks, and disposal can be a problem. We assessed cellulose-based hydromulches (HMs) as a PE mulch substitute in organic strawberry production. HMs made from shredded newsprint, water, guar gum (6% of HM dry mass), and with or without a biochar-based colorant were applied to raised beds, then day-neutral strawberry plants were transplanted. Four HM treatments combining dark (D) or light (L) colored and low (L) 5,800 or high (H) 8,700 kg DW ha−1 rates, were tested against paper mulch (PAP), white-on-black PE mulch, and weedy and weed-free checks at two sites in North Dakota: Absaraka (with a sandy soil, common purslane-dominated) and Fargo (with a clay soil, Venice mallow-dominated). At Fargo, high-rate HMs suppressed weed density as effectively as PE mulch. At Absaraka, HMs reduced weed density less effectively than PE and PAP mulches; low-rate HMs performed poorly compared with high rates (35 and 40 weeds m−2 vs. 4 and 17 weeds m−2), likely because of rainfall after HM application and location-specific differences in the weed communities and soil types. At Absaraka, strawberry yield from the use of HM-DH was greater than PE (272 vs. 144 g plant−1), whereas yield from HM-LH, HM-DL and HM-LL mulches (215, 168 and 141 g plant−1, respectively) were similar to yield with PE mulch. At Fargo, yield for all HMs (287, 223, 211, and 162 g plant−1) did not differ from that of PE (253 g plant−1). Although only high-rate HMs at Fargo suppressed weeds similarly to PE, fruit yield and quality were similar to that of PE with all HMs. Therefore, HMs could be promising sustainable alternatives to PE mulch for use in organic strawberry systems.

The new mineral argentopearceite (IMA2020-049) was found at the mine dump of the abandoned Lehnschafter mine, Mikulov–Hrob district (holotype), and later at museum samples (cotypes) from the Moldava fluorite deposit, both in the Krušné hory Mountains, Czech Republic. Argentopearceite is associated with proustite in quartz gangue (Mikulov) or acanthite and proustite in fluorite gangue (Moldava). The new mineral occurs as tabular (pseudo)hexagonal crystals up to 0.8 mm (Mikulov) and 3 mm (Moldava), and as groups and aggregates up to 1 cm. Argentopearceite from Mikulov is steel grey to black. Mohs hardness is ca. 3; the calculated density is 6.29 g.cm–3. In reflected light, argentopearceite is grey with a greenish shade. Bireflectance was not observed and pleochroism is very weak. Anisotropy under crossed polars is moderate with weak greenish and green–blue tints. Internal reflections were not observed. Reflectance values of argentopearceite in air (Rmin/Rmax, %) are: 27.3/30.0 at 470 nm, 26.6/29.3 at 546 nm, 26.2/28.8 at 589 nm, and 25.9/28.1 at 650 nm). The empirical formula for argentopearceite, based on electron-microprobe analyses (n = 15), is (Ag15.95Cd0.02)Σ15.97(As1.82Sb0.11)Σ1.93(S11.03Cl0.05Te0.01)Σ11.09. The ideal formula is Ag16As2S11, which requires (in wt.%) Ag 77.45, As 6.72 and S 15.83, total of 100.00. Argentopearceite is trigonal, P321, a = 14.8583(5), c = 12.3038(15) Å, with V = 2352.38(15) Å3 and Z = 4. Its crystal structure was refined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction data to a final R1 = 0.0773 on the basis of 6594 unique reflections with Fo > 3σ(F) and 242 refined parameters. The structure of argentopearceite mostly conforms to the general architecture of the As-dominant members of the pearceite–polybasite family of minerals.

Our received theories of self-deception are problematic. The traditional view, according to which self-deceivers intend to deceive themselves, generates paradoxes: you cannot deceive yourself intentionally because you know your own plans and intentions. Non-traditional views argue that self-deceivers act (sub-)intentionally but deceive themselves unintentionally and unknowingly. Some non-traditionalists even say that self-deception involves a mere error (of self-knowledge). The non-traditional approach does not generate paradoxes, but it entails that people can deceive themselves by accident or by mistake, which is rather controversial. I argue that a functional analysis of human interpersonal deception and self-deception solves both problems and a few more. According to this analysis, my behavior is deceptive iff its function is to mislead; I may but need not intend to mislead. In self-deception, then, the self engages in some deceptive behavior and this behavior misleads the self. Thus, while it may but need not be intended, self-deception is never an accident or a mistake.

The silent patent ductus arteriosus is currently considered a benign lesion with some practitioners dismissing these patients from cardiac follow-up. We present a 5-year-old male with no known cardiac history who presented with endarteritis in a silent patent ductus arteriosus and underwent successful antibiotic treatment and transcatheter device occlusion.

In model-based diagnostics, a simulation model is used to simulate the same operating conditions as the system to be diagnosed to detect and identify anomalies. For this type of analysis, the diagnostic results may be affected by multiple sources of uncertainty. The most common uncertainty to consider is measurement noise. Other sources of uncertainties may originate from the simulation model, instrumentation setup and numerical issues, such as tolerances. While these are often overlooked, they may affect the result to various extent.

In this paper, a multi-point model-based gas path analysis method is proposed and evaluated in the presence of both measurement noise and model uncertainties. The multi-point algorithm addresses the issue of the diagnostic system being underdetermined, having more health parameters than measurements available for diagnostics. It obtains a unique solution through an optimization, where the deviation in health parameter estimation for the operating conditions going into the analysis is minimised. Model uncertainties are introduced in the system by intentionally skewing the characteristics of the rotating components. The objective function is then reconfigured with a, for the gas turbine diagnostic field, novel method taking model uncertainties of the component maps into account. Through this it is possible to reduce the effect of model uncertainties on the diagnostic result. The study shows that through this approach, the uncertainties in diagnostic results are reduced by $3.7{\rm{\% }}$ for the evaluated operating conditions.

We discuss the Singer conjecture and Gromov–Lück inequality $\chi\geq |\sigma|$ for aspherical complex surfaces. We give a proof of the Singer conjecture for aspherical complex surfaces with residually finite fundamental group that does not rely on Gromov’s Kähler groups theory. Without the residually finiteness assumption, we observe that this conjecture can be proven for all aspherical complex surfaces except possibly those in Class $\mathrm{VII}_0^+$ (a positive answer to the global spherical shell conjecture would rule out the existence of aspherical surfaces in this class). We also sharpen the Gromov-Lück inequality for aspherical complex surfaces that are not in Class $\mathrm{VII}_0^+$. This is achieved by connecting the circle of ideas of the Singer conjecture with the study of Reid’s conjecture.