Democratic backsliding occurs incrementally, but the empirical study of how citizens respond to undemocratic politicians has been predominantly static. I formulate and test predictions about how different sequences of backsliding shape accountability. Using a novel preregistered experiment ($N = 4,234$) capturing the reality that democratic transgressions are committed by elected officials step by step, I find that a majority of American respondents – against the backdrop of partisan and policy interests – are willing to electorally remove the incumbent as episodes of democratic backsliding unfold. Moreover, incumbents who incrementally decrease the severity of democratic transgressions are held accountable more promptly than incumbents who incrementally increase or sporadically vary the severity. By establishing a new experimental framework to study democratic backsliding, my dynamic approach not only paints a more nuanced picture of Americans’ willingness to defend democracy, but also demonstrates that sequence matters in shaping voter behavior amid incremental transgressions of democracy.

A complete classification of unimodular valuations on the set of lattice polygons with values in the spaces of polynomials and formal power series, respectively, is established. The valuations are classified in terms of their behavior with respect to dilation using extensions to unbounded polyhedra and basic invariant theory.

In this article, I argue that public political theorists need to adopt a different attitude and audience. If they are to help their fellow citizens learn collectively to engage critically with their future to take care of it, they must write and talk not only to their fellow theorists but also to their fellow citizens. To do this, they would need to focus on the opposite of the strictures of their specialised academic discipline that rewards internal debate, arcane language, and abstract theorising. They must provide a clear, persuasive understanding and critique of contemporary social, economic, and political narratives and structures of power. What matters is persuasion, not exclusive expertise; a change of attitude, not method; and a plurality of approaches. Perhaps most importantly, what they teach, write, and say must be comprehensively open to all, not beholden to corporate interests and canons, and they must act as “gadflies” in their society—public critics in battles over ideas, values, and power relations. While history is vital for this future-oriented craft, to bow down before predecessors is to miss the radical imaginative potential of thinking (and teaching) collectively in the present to provide for a better future: to change the world by changing oneself and thus one’s fellow travellers in improving how we live and love together. This would also make public political theory genuinely political.

Sequential photographic records of glacier termini go back to the mid-20th century, revealing climate-driven retreat. More recently, time-lapse imagery has enabled detailed analysis of glacier dynamics, including calving. Here, we use long-term, high-frequency (15 min) time-lapse images from May–October 2016 to manually investigate calving activity at Hansbreen, a marine-terminating glacier in Hornsund Fjord, Svalbard. We explore the spatio-temporal variability in calving frequency and styles along the glacier terminus and its relationship to environmental drivers. Average calving frequency was found to be 30 events d−1, and peaking at 60 d−1. The calving activity aligns well with air and ocean temperature at a seasonal scales, while some peaks in calving correspond to increased modeled meltwater runoff and rainfall. These links are inconsistent and reflect high complexity. Calving at Hansbreen varies greatly in time and across five delineated terminus zones. In two of the zones, over 60% of waterline events occur during ebb tide; these segments also experience regular ice cave formation. However, further efforts are needed to explore the high-frequency evolution of terminus morphology and its link to calving. Our dataset can also be used to train automated algorithms for calving detection from time-lapse imagery.

Conservative parties and politicians are often caught in a dilemma regarding immigration policies. Business interest groups and xenophobic populist forces both support conservative political parties but expect fundamentally different immigration policies. Japan is a rare case among advanced democracies that has experienced neither large-scale immigration nor the emergence of xenophobic populism. Yet, Japan’s conservative government, facing the reality of a rapidly aging and declining population, has begun to loosen immigration policy. We analyze the ruling party politicians’ policy positions on foreign worker intake and demonstrate that their views have shifted in a pro-foreign-worker direction, especially among legislators representing rural areas that have seen a sharp increase in foreign residents.

Lorsque des locuteurs produisent des néologismes à l’écrit, ils peuvent utiliser des marqueurs typographiques ou linguistiques pour mettre en saillance ces derniers. Cette étude, centrée sur des néologismes dénominaux suffixés en -ien, -ique et -esque, combine une analyse de corpus et une étude expérimentale de type questionnaire en ligne afin d’examiner, d’une part, le type et la proportion de ces marqueurs et, d’autre part, leur influence sur les jugements de néologicité. En production, les locuteurs marquent environ 23 % des néologismes, principalement avec des guillemets, puis avec des motifs syntaxiques et enfin avec des commentaires. En réception, la présence de ces marqueurs (guillemets et commentaires) augmente les taux de détection des néologismes. L’identification des néologismes est influencée par le cotexte. De plus, d’autres éléments semblent expliquer les variations des jugements de néologicité, tels que le suffixe du néologisme lorsque ce dernier est morphologiquement dérivé, et l’âge des locuteurs.

In recent years, the emergence of both the spatial and spectral turns has meant a more intense focus on the importance of space in supernatural narratives, especially within modern, industrialized cities. Less has been said, however, about the importance of understanding the affective resonances of space in early modern tales. This article examines tales of ghost sightings in London and Southwark that appeared in print. It argues that these hauntings created affective topographies that had both individual and communal resonances. In turn, the article explores how these emotional responses contributed to conceptions of space, community and neighbourhood in early modern London. As such, it demonstrates how paying attention to supernatural narratives can reveal a hidden geography of the city, one that is shaped by supernatural storytelling, emotions and close conceptions of community.

Luminescence dating and profiling are important analytical methods for providing chronological constraints and reconstructing depositional histories from sediment cores. However, sediment cores have often been exposed to ionising radiation sources during geophysical analyses, which potentially contaminates natural luminescence signals and may compromise the accuracy and reliability of luminescence analyses. Variable water content down-core is another potential issue for the rapid analysis of sediments, as water attenuates luminescence and may limit the comparability of samples. Here, we use a portable optically stimulated luminescence reader to test the influence of two common geophysical analyses—X-radiography and gamma-ray logging—on the luminescence properties of sediments in marine cores. We demonstrate that both techniques cause negligible changes to luminescence signals with doses <100 mGy. We test the effect of variable water content on luminescence and show that net signals are reduced by up to 70% at 30% moisture, relative to dry sediments. Accurate and reliable luminescence signals can be obtained from sediment cores despite prior exposure to ionising radiation from geophysical loggers or variable water content. However, the accuracy of luminescence measurements does require taking appropriate steps before analysis, like assessing the doses given by geophysical instruments at specific laboratories or drying samples.

Identity is a permanent integral feature of archaeological research. Even when it seems marginal to the current archaeological agenda, identity is brought back into the discussion by the urgency to engage with—often homogenizing—identity-based policies in contemporary politics. Lately, the emphasis placed on difference, fluidity and multivocality within archaeology has sensibly advanced the debate. Nevertheless, immutable identities continue to arise in studies of antiquity, replicating essentialist assumptions on the human past built around binary structures and simplistic equations of culture-historical reminiscence between material culture/practices and identities. The contributors to this special issue show how informing archaeological discourse with a semiotic methodology enhances the visibility of social dynamism, cultural complexities, among ancient human groups. This is particularly true for the communities silenced by history. These papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of archaeology by envisaging the archaeological record as a set of interconnected signs, whose cognitive potential overcomes the material space they occupy so that they become meaningful to different individuals and communities in diverse ways. Their stance maintains that semiotics holds the largely unexplored potential to enhance our understanding of the complexity of the past, ultimately offering a compelling standpoint to engage with contemporary identity-centred political debates.

In this note, we prove that minimizers of convex functionals with a convexity constraint and a general class of Lagrangians can be approximated by solutions to fourth-order Abreu-type equations. Our result generalizes that of Le (Twisted Harnack inequality and approximation of variational problems with a convexity constraint by singular Abreu equations. Adv. Math. 434 (2023)) where the case of quadratically growing Lagrangians was treated.

Herein, we respond to a recent call by Kay and Dzierzewski for works describing the importance of sleep and circadian rhythms in psychological functioning. The premise of this paper is to emphasize the need to enhance medical education by addressing the interplay between sleep health, cognitive functioning and patient care among medical residents. We focus on three key areas: first, the physiological basis of sleep and circadian rhythms; second, the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive functioning in medical residents; and third, practical implications and policy recommendations for schedule management with optimization for sleep sufficiency and circadian alignment in medical residents. Context on typical resident work schedules and international policy models, including the European Working Time Directive, highlights the global scope of this issue. The outcomes are intended to inform improvements in physician training and have broader implications for patient care and support the need for institutional change to enhance residents’ well-being and performance.

This article addresses the transformative role of ethnoarchaeology in reshaping the study of pastoralism. Long marginalized by dominant scientific and political discourses, pastoralism is now increasingly seen as a sophisticated, adaptive livelihood strategy – especially in contexts of high environmental variability. Since pastoralism is predominantly practiced in drylands – arid and semiarid regions historically viewed as peripheral – its study has helped reframe these environments as dynamic landscapes of innovation and resilience. This reevaluation has been pushed, this article argues, also by the contributions of ethnoarchaeology. As a field that bridges past and present, it has enabled the generation of new concepts, the challenge of traditional archaeological frameworks and the integration of Indigenous knowledge systems.

The naming of cityscapes has never been a disinterested or straightforward affair. This article, which introduces the special issue on multifunctional urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire, opens by providing an overview of recent developments in critical place-name studies and bringing this field into dialogue with the historiography of the empire. It then delineates the main waves of toponymic changes in the empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and proposes a typology of the main categories of imperial toponyms used for (re)naming. Our main argument is that place names performed a wider array of functions, beyond just orientational and ideological, and were also used to gain socio-economic capital and enhance the social desirability and economic value of urban areas. Having introduced the contributions to the special issue, the article then outlines several avenues for future research.

This study investigates second language (L2) phonetic categorization and phonological encoding of L2 words (hereafter, phonolexical encoding1) with phonemic and allophonic cross-linguistic mismatches. We focus on the acquisition of Spanish /ɾ/-/l/ and /ɾ/-/t/ contrasts among Spanish learners with American English (AE) and Mandarin Chinese (hereafter, Chinese) as first languages (L1s). [ɾ] and [t] are positional allophones in AE but separate phonemes in Spanish. The phoneme /ɾ/ is absent in Chinese. AE learners showed nativelike phonetic categorization and little between-contrast difference in phonolexical encoding, suggesting that L1 positional allophony does not necessarily impede L2 contrast acquisition. Chinese learners showed persistent perceptual difficulties with both contrasts due to perceptual similarity. Phonetic categorization significantly predicted phonolexical encoding for /ɾ/-/t/ contrasts for Chinese learners bidirectionally, while AE learners showed this relationship only when /t/ was incorrectly replaced by /ɾ/ in Spanish words. This asymmetry can be driven by the fact that [t] is the dominant allophone of /t/ in AE, while [ɾ] is a positional allophone. It suggests L1 allophonic knowledge heightens perceptual monitoring when evaluating substitutions that conflict with L1 phonological expectations. This study calls for more nuanced treatment of L1 influence in L2 phonological acquisition models, especially at the allophonic level.

This paper presents the development of a graph autoencoder architecture capable of performing projection-based model-order reduction (PMOR) using a nonlinear manifold least-squares Petrov–Galerkin (LSPG) projection scheme. The architecture is particularly useful for advection-dominated flows modeled by unstructured meshes, as it provides a robust nonlinear mapping that can be leveraged in a PMOR setting. The presented graph autoencoder is constructed with a two-part process that consists of (1) generating a hierarchy of reduced graphs to emulate the compressive abilities of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and (2) training a message passing operation at each step in the hierarchy of reduced graphs to emulate the filtering process of a CNN. The resulting framework provides improved flexibility over traditional CNN-based autoencoders because it is readily extendable to unstructured meshes. We provide an analysis of the interpretability of the graph autoencoder’s latent state variables, where we find that the Jacobian of the decoder for the proposed graph autoencoder provides interpretable mode shapes akin to traditional proper orthogonal decomposition modes. To highlight the capabilities of the proposed framework, which is named geometric deep least-squares Petrov–Galerkin (GD-LSPG), we benchmark the method on a one-dimensional Burgers’ model with a structured mesh and demonstrate the flexibility of GD-LSPG by deploying it on two test cases for two-dimensional Euler equations that use an unstructured mesh. The proposed framework is more flexible than using a traditional CNN-based autoencoder and provides considerable improvement in accuracy for very low-dimensional latent spaces in comparison with traditional affine projections.

The Salapunku archaeological site is located within the Historic Sanctuary – National Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu (HS-NAPM) in the Cusco area of Peru. Although Salapunku is related to the Inca settlements of the HS-NAPM, during archaeological excavations, we distinguished different moments of cultural occupation from the earliest human presence to complex pre-Hispanic societies such as the Inca and finally to the colonial period. Previous research on the site’s chronology was based on typological analyses of pottery and other artifacts found during archaeological research. This radiocarbon analysis, the first of its kind in this area, establishes a chronology of the cultural history of this significant settlement, considered the gateway to the Cordillera of Vilcabamba.