We extend the theoretical framework of proof mining by establishing general logical metatheorems that allow for the extraction of the computational content of theorems with prima facie “noncomputational” proofs from probability theory, thereby unlocking a major branch of mathematics as a new area of application for these methods. Concretely, we first devise proof-theoretically tame logical systems that allow for the formalization of proofs involving algebras of sets together with probability contents, that is probability measures which are only assumed to be finitely additive. Based on these systems, we provide extensions for the tame treatment of Lebesgue integrals on probability contents as well as $\sigma $-algebras and associated probability measures, all via intensional approaches. All these systems are then shown to be amenable to proof-theoretic metatheorems in the style of proof mining which guarantee the extractability of effective and tame bounds from large classes of ineffective existence proofs in probability theory. Moreover, these extractable bounds are guaranteed to be highly uniform in the sense that they will be independent of all parameters relating to the underlying probability space, particularly regarding events or measures of them. As such, these results in particular provide the first logical explanation for the success and the observed uniformities of the previous ad hoc case studies of proof mining in these areas and further illustrate their extent. Lastly, we establish a general proof-theoretic transfer principle that allows for the lift of quantitative information on a relationship between different modes of convergence for sequences of real numbers to sequences of random variables.

The Easter 1916 rebellion occasioned significant civilian casualties. Having initially resisted the idea of compensating bereaved or injured civilians, the British government relented by establishing the Rebellion (Victims’) Committee (RVC) which assessed 550 compensation applications for death and injury. Utilizing these applications as well as Dublin Castle, Treasury, press, and parliamentary records, this article examines five aspects of the state’s treatment of civilian casualties: why the government’s initial opposition to compensation was eventually reversed; the establishment of the RVC, the bureaucratic compensation process, and the surveillance of working-class claimants; what the compensation claims reveal about the nature and circumstances of civilian casualties during the rebellion; how the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906) was used to determine compensation awards and, consequently, how this minimized the state’s financial liabilities by treating civilian casualties not as victims of war but on a par with injured workers; and, lastly, why the workmen’s compensation legislation was an inadequate means of treating civilian war casualties. The RVC compensation records enable a unique case study of how the 1916 rebellion adversely affected the lives of ordinary men, women and children, and how the British state endeavoured to limit its obligations to make reparations to them.

This article theorizes the concept ‘ethnolinguistic infusion’ as a language socialization and language management practice. Infusion involves community members incorporating fragments of their group language, in which most members have little or no competence, in the context of a different dominant language, with the potential effect of fostering ideological links among the individual, group, and language. I explain the metaphor, enumerate several characteristics, and offer a categorization of different types of infusion. I contextualize ethnolinguistic infusion among related constructs in language contact, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, including translanguaging, postvernacularity, and metalinguistic communities, I explain its relationship to ethnolinguistic repertoire, and I distinguish it from out-group-initiated phenomena like crossing and mock language. I demonstrate how ethnolinguistic infusion plays out in my research on American Jewish summer camps. I offer empirical questions for future research, and I conclude by arguing for the utility of ethnolinguistic infusion, both for academic analysis and for language activism. (Language and ethnicity, heritage language, symbolic language, emblematic language, language and group identity, Hebrew, infusion, loanwords, language contact, translanguaging, metalinguistic community, postvernacularity, endangered languages, language reclamation, language revitalization)

Since its publication, Luis Laso de la Vega’s foundational text, Huei tlamahuiçoltica (1649), continues to influence Guadalupan devotion but has only recently been examined as a theological and pastoral work. Still missing from these treatments is a discussion of the significance of the text’s genre, hagiography. This paper continues to draw out the theological and pastoral depth of Huei tlamahuiçoltica, specifically as the first Guadalupan hagiography. Moreover, it argues for the text to be considered a communal hagiography of sixteenth-century Nahuas that seeks to shape Nahua-Christian identity through Guadalupan devotion.

The exploration and retrieval of information from large, unstructured document collections remain challenging. Unsupervised techniques, such as clustering and topic modeling, provide only a coarse overview of thematic structure, while traditional keyword searches often require extensive manual effort. Recent advances in large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) introduce new opportunities by enabling focused retrieval of relevant documents or chunks tailored to a user’s query. This allows for dynamic, chat-like interactions that streamline exploration and improve access to pertinent information. This article introduces Topic-RAG, a chat engine that integrates topic modeling with RAG to support interactive and exploratory document retrieval. Topic-RAG uses BERTopic to identify the most relevant topics for a given query and restricts retrieval to documents or chunks within those topics. This targeted strategy enhances retrieval relevance by narrowing the search space to thematically aligned content. We utilize the pipeline on 4,711 articles related to nuclear energy from the Impresso historical Swiss newspaper corpus. Our experimental results demonstrate that Topic-RAG outperforms a baseline RAG architecture that does not incorporate topic modeling, as measured by widely recognized metrics, such as BERTScore (including Precision, Recall and F1), ROUGE and UniEval. Topic-RAG also achieves improvements in computational efficiency for both single and batch query processing. In addition, we performed a qualitative analysis in collaboration with domain experts, who assessed the system’s effectiveness in supporting historically grounded research. Although our evaluation is focused on historical newspaper articles, the proposed approach more generally integrates topic information to enhance retrieval performance within a transparent and user-configurable pipeline effectively. It supports the targeted retrieval of contextually rich and semantically relevant content while also allowing users to adjust key parameters such as the number of documents retrieved. This flexibility provides greater control and adaptability to meet diverse research needs in historical inquiry, literary analysis and cultural studies. Due to copyright restrictions, the raw data cannot be publicly shared. Data access instructions are provided in the repository, and the replication code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/KeerthanaMurugaraj/Topic-RAG-for-Historical-Newspapers.

The relationship between international law and democracy is fraught with contestation, shaped by diverging histories, political priorities, and normative commitment.2 This essay argues that Africa’s engagement with democracy and the law that seeks to promote and protect it has not been merely reactive or derivative but normatively generative, drawing from local traditions, continental solidarities, and hybrid legal innovations. Situating Africa as both a site of contestation and innovation, this essay interrogates the democratic imaginaries that have shaped international legal discourse, exploring the interface between democracy and international law through the lens of Pan-Africanism. It foregrounds Pan-Africanism as a normative project that both challenges and contributes to global understandings of democratic governance. In doing so, this essay advances a core conceptual framing: the distinction between a law of democracy—emerging organically through local practices, historical struggles, and normative pluralism—and a law on democracy—often projected from dominant political centers through treaties, conditions, and monitoring mechanisms.3 While these two registers can reinforce each other, they also produce frictions when universalized standards clash with locally grounded forms of legitimacy.

This study explored the acquisition of Spanish nominal morphology in 116 children aged 4;0 to 6;11, grouped according to language ability (developmental language disorder [DLD] and typical development [TD]) and bilingualism (Spanish–English bilingual and Spanish monolingual). Monolinguals produced more target-like articles and direct object clitics than bilinguals, as did children with TD compared to peers with DLD. Bilinguals with TD produced more target-like morphology than monolinguals with DLD, particularly clitics. Children with DLD were more likely to omit clitics than peers with TD, but this contrast did not extend to bilinguals compared to monolinguals. Children produced singular default articles in plural contexts. Overall, our results suggest that clitics function better than articles for identifying DLD in bilinguals on quantitative and qualitative grounds.

This article presents the methodological reflections of two anthropological studies in Oaxaca, the Guiengola Archaeological Project and the San Carlos Yautepec Ethnographic Landscape Project. Both projects emphasize not only the involvement of local people, descendant communities, or both in archaeological work as temporary workers or spectators of the research results but more importantly as active participants in development of the archaeological research design. This includes involvement in such processes as the proposal of and reflection on an anthropological study, the formulation of relevant questions, ontological considerations when interpreting the results, and participation in dissemination tasks after these studies are concluded. Involving people from local and descendant communities does not detract from the scientific nature of anthropological work but instead results in much richer data, as the mapping of the archaeological city of Guiengola and the analysis of pre-highway pedestrian mobility patterns in Oaxaca in the past demonstrate.

This article provides an overview of key challenges in second language (L2) pronunciation learning and teaching within the context of instructed second language acquisition (SLA), with the goal of identifying promising directions for future research. It begins by examining persistent difficulties in L2 pronunciation instruction, such as the typically limited quality of input and the dominant emphasis on grammar and vocabulary in communicative language teaching (CLT). These conditions often result in learners having limited awareness of their pronunciation needs and teachers facing challenges in incorporating pronunciation instruction into CLT-based curricula. The article then reviews emerging instructional approaches that aim to integrate attention to phonetic form within CLT, highlighting the need for further empirical investigation. In addition, several pronunciation training techniques, some underexplored (HVPT, shadowing, embodied pronunciation training, captioned video, accent imitation, and pronunciation self-assessment), are briefly described, with an emphasis on their pedagogical potential both inside and outside the classroom. Finally, the article considers the role of individual differences in L2 pronunciation development and proposes directions for future research in instructed SLA.

Meta-research and evidence synthesis require considerable resources. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to assist in these processes, yet their performance varies across models, limiting their reliability. Taking advantage of the large availability of small size (<10 billion parameters) open-source LLMs, we implemented an agreement-based framework in which a decision is taken only if at least a given number of LLMs produce the same response. The decision is otherwise withheld. This approach was tested on 1020 abstracts of randomized controlled trials in rheumatology, using 2 classic literature review tasks: (1) classifying each intervention as drug or nondrug based on text interpretation and (2) extracting the total number of randomized patients, a task that sometimes required calculations. Re-examining abstracts where at least 4 LLMs disagreed with the human gold standard (dual review with adjudication) allowed constructing an improved gold standard. Compared to a human gold standard and single large LLMs (>70 billion parameters), our framework demonstrated robust performance: several model combinations achieved accuracies above 95% exceeding the human gold standard on at least 85% of abstracts (e.g., 3 of 5 models, 4 of 6 models, or 5 of 7 models). Performance variability across individual models was not an issue, as low-performing models contributed fewer accepted decisions. This agreement-based framework offers a scalable solution that can replace human reviewers for most abstracts, reserving human expertise for more complex cases. Such frameworks could significantly reduce the manual burden in systematic reviews while maintaining high accuracy and reproducibility.

Judging an individual’s loyalty in security-sensitive roles is a high-stakes task, yet little is known about the extent and sources of variability in such judgments. This study examined how 58 participants with experience in personnel security assessment evaluated applicant profiles connected to five different countries. Each participant reviewed five protocols and judged whether the case contained information relevant to a personnel security clearance, then rated the applicant’s loyalty on a 7-point scale. Using Bayesian probit regression and an ordinal item response model with hierarchical structure, we analyzed both binary judgments and rating patterns, accounting for country of connection, applicant gender, and participant-specific variability. Results revealed substantial between-participant variability (‘noise’) in how likely judges were to flag foreign ties as relevant. Pattern noise, reflecting idiosyncratic differences in how individuals interpret the same case, was evident in loyalty ratings. Connections to Brazil and Thailand were associated with systematically lower loyalty ratings and heightened disagreement between judges, reflecting both bias and pattern noise. Contrary to policy guidance, fewer than half of foreign connections were judged as relevant, and this tendency did not vary by participant gender. The findings underscore the risk of inconsistency in high-stakes assessments and highlight the need for structured conceptual calibration in personnel vetting.

We characterize the subsets E of a metric space X with doubling measure whose distance function to some negative power $\operatorname{dist}(\cdot,E)^{-\alpha}$ belongs to the Muckenhoupt A1 class of weights in X. To this end, we introduce the weakly porous sets in this setting, and show that, along with certain doubling-type conditions for the sizes of the largest E-free holes, these sets characterize the mentioned A1-property. We exhibit examples showing the optimality of these conditions, and simplify them in the particular case where the underlying measure satisfies a qualitative annular decay property. In addition, we use some of these distance functions as a new and simple method to explicitly construct doubling weights in ${\mathbb R}^n$ that do not belong to $A_\infty.$