A spline is an assignment of polynomials to the vertices of a graph whose edges are labeled by ideals, where the difference of two polynomials labeling adjacent vertices must belong to the corresponding ideal. The set of splines forms a ring. We consider spline rings where the underlying graph is the Cayley graph of a symmetric group generated by a collection of transpositions. These rings generalize the GKM construction for equivariant cohomology rings of flag, regular semisimple Hessenberg and permutohedral varieties. These cohomology rings carry two actions of the symmetric group $S_n$ whose graded characters are both of general interest in algebraic combinatorics. In this paper, we generalize the graded $S_n$-representations from the cohomologies of the above varieties to splines on Cayley graphs of $S_n$ and then (1) give explicit module and ring generators for whenever the $S_n$-generating set is minimal, (2) give a combinatorial characterization of when graded pieces of one $S_n$-representation is trivial, and (3) compute the first degree piece of both graded characters for all generating sets.

While a role of language in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) is well established, the interplay with a child’s ability to understand structured scenarios remains unclear. A new scale (Pictorial Theory of Mind Scale), assessing true and false belief comprehension at different levels of linguistic complexity, was used to explore language effects on ToM while accounting for scenario comprehension. Thirty-nine children (aged 4–6 years; 53.8% female) participated in this study. Results showed that 46.8% of 4- to 6-year-olds can understand false beliefs from picture-based scenarios with limited language output. Both language and scenario comprehension contributed to ToM in first-order false beliefs, whereas only scenario comprehension predicted true beliefs. In contrast, only language predicted second-order false beliefs, highlighting their different roles in ToM development.

The article is concerned with contemporary changes in the spatialization of the Russian-Finnish borderland as an example of re-bordering politics. The main material is a long-term ethnographic study in the territory of former Finnish Karelia, ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union following World War II. By extending the historical context of bilateral relations between the USSR (later Russia) and Finland, the article questions the implications of changing international relations regimes for situational forms of borderwork. The article contributes to the debate on contemporary border practices and the contradictory effects of foreign diplomacy by combining institutional and situational approaches to border territoriality and by focusing on border memory and heritage as resources of local identity and instruments of soft power. Examining the successive shifts of de- and re-bordering regimes in the Russian-Finnish borderlands from the late Soviet period to the present, the article demonstrates the unforeseen impact of foreign relations on local life and memory.

In this article, I consider the 2012–13 productions of The Magic Flute in Lagos, Nigeria, by the Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON), as a means of rethinking broad conceptions of opera performance in postcolonial Africa. I explore the extent to which visual representation in this production creates cultural contact, exchange and hybridity, affording a pathway for experiencing opera from both Western and African perspectives without homogenisation or a clash of differences. Arguing against notions of race that pit Africa against the West, this study privileges Achille Mbembe’s writings on Afropolitanism as a framework for examining the multiple modes of meaning and identity created through this production. By scrutinising the textuality of visual elements and conceiving them as sites of localised ideological or identity struggles, I argue specifically that opera in Nigeria requires a critical framework that moves beyond notions of ‘whiteness’ and indigenisation. I will show that this staging invokes indigenous knowledge from Nigerian traditional religious and socio-cultural conceptions. In other words, mixed codes of visual elements operate as cultural signifiers that perpetuate an Afropolitan identity through which audiences interact with this art form.

This article explores a unique case of Jewish–Muslim cohabitation in colonial Algeria: the harat in the town of Sétif. Families from different religious communities shared communal facilities, private spaces and everyday activities in these housing complexes. At the same time, these neighbours arrived in the city under different historical conditions, possessed different legal statuses and occupied different positions in colonial society. Through a study of the setting, architecture and oral traditions of the harat, this article shows that being neighbours in colonial Algeria fostered a locally grounded sense of cohesion in an age when abstract forms of belonging gained ground.

Word frequency has long been considered an essential aspect of psycholinguistic theory. However, research has shown that measures of contextual and semantic diversity provide a better fit to lexical decision and naming data than word frequency. The current study examines the role of contextual and semantic diversity in picture naming ability across aging and bilingualism. A picture naming experiment was conducted with six groups of participants: younger monolinguals, older monolinguals, younger L1 English bilinguals, older L1 English bilinguals, younger L2 English bilinguals and older L2 English bilinguals. Consistent with previous findings, the contextual diversity measure accounted for more variance in the picture naming data than word frequency. Furthermore, older adults and L1 English bilinguals were more sensitive to semantic diversity information, while younger adults and L2 English bilinguals relied more on age of acquisition in their lexical organization.

We report the radio continuum detection of well-known Galactic Planetary Nebula (PN) NGC 5189, observed at 943 MHz during the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) survey. Two detections of NGC 5189 have been made during the survey, of better resolution than previous radio surveys. Both measurements of the integrated flux density are consistent with each other, at $S_{\rm{943\,MHz}} = 0.33\pm0.03$ Jy, and the spectral luminosity is $L_{\rm{943\,MHz}}$ = 8.89 $\times$ 10$^{13}$ W m$^{-2}$ Hz$^{-1}$. Using available flux density measurements for radio detections of NGC 5189, we calculate a radio surface brightness at 1 GHz and measure $\Sigma_{\rm1\,GHz}$ = 6.0 $\times$ 10$^{-21}$ W m$^{-2}$ Hz$^{-1}$ sr$^{-1}$, which is in the expected range for Galactic PNe. We measure an apparent size of $3\rlap{.}^\prime4\,\times\,2\rlap{.}^\prime2$ corresponding to physical diameters of 1.48 pc $\times$ 0.96 pc and combine available radio observations of NGC 5189 to estimate a spectral index of $\alpha$ = 0.12 $\pm$ 0.05. Hence, we agree with previous findings that NGC 5189 is a thermal (free–free) emitting nebula. Additional measurements of the optical depth ($\tau = 0.00246$) and electron density ($N_{e} = 138{\rm cm}^{-3}$) support our findings that NGC 5189 is optically thin at 943 MHz. Furthermore, the radio contours from the ASKAP–EMU image have been overlaid onto a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 image, demonstrating that the radio morphology closely traces the optical. Notably, the contour alignment for the innermost region highlights the two envelopes of gas previously reported to be low-ionisation structures, which is considered a defining feature of post common–envelope PNe that surround a central Wolf-Rayet star.

We report new findings from an empirical study of scientists from seven disciplines and scholars working in history and philosophy of science regarding their views about scientific realism. We found that researchers’ general disposition to endorse or reject realism was better predicted by their views regarding scientific progress than their views about the mind-independence of scientific phenomena or other common theses in the realism debate. Age and gender also significantly predicted endorsement of scientific realism. Implications of these findings for philosophical debates about scientific realism and scientific progress are considered.

In February 1799, the British East India Company rounded up French civilians in Pondicherry and put them on a ship loaded with prisoners of war. The ship continued its journey to Portsmouth in England, by way of the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. Handwritten lists were the main tool used to select these deportees. If analyzed superficially, colonial lists can seem to depoliticize the violence of deportation by presenting it as the answer to technical problems. Instead, this article approaches the list as a media technology employed by colonial and military officials, and thereby highlights its iterative rather than fixed nature. The lists were unstable and based on contingent and constantly evolving information that bureaucrats and army officers on the ground inherited from previous colonial regimes, as well as from local populations. The act of listing encapsulates a tension between the agents who identified, categorized, selected, and trapped people on paper, and the tactics of these people, who sometimes found creative ways to jam this process. As illustrated by the breakup of “mixed race” families, these paper documents also reveal the conflicts and contradictions that ran within the imperial state between the twin imperatives of maintaining both security and humanitarian principles.

Research suggests that the texts produced using machine translation (MT) do not fully represent the linguistic traits of the natural language. Yet, the ever-increasing quality and access to MT is resulting in its steady adoption by both language professionals and general users. According to contact linguistic theories, such adoption might result in MT-specific language traits permeating the target languages. This work takes a first step into considering the changes that a language might endure over time by observing the variation of linguistic trends along a series of MT generations. We train ten sequential engines using each to produce the target side of the training corpus of the following and calculate a number of metrics to observe linguistic diversity at a lexical, morphological, and syntactic level for a large, fixed test set. Quantitative results show an initial loss of lexical diversity, which, albeit gradually, only continues at a much slower pace in the following MT generations. In turn, structural variations and, in particular, morphological variations across generations are less marked, which might indicate a more stable behaviour regarding grammatical consistency. Overall, the resulting MT language seems increasingly homogeneous, marked by the reduced presence or disappearance of low-frequency words, and compact, with a decreasing proportion of function words relative to content words.

Some humanities fields, understanding the growing importance and relevance of public work, have been relatively quick to incorporate teaching public work into their courses. But the arts have been slow to catch up, for example, the relatively recent fields of public musicology and public music theory. However, teaching students how to do public work and why it is important is often removed in favor of course coverage. The reality is that teaching students to do public-facing work can enhance a course’s coverage while also teaching valuable workforce skills, in or out of the arts. At a time when applied careers in the performing and visual arts are dwindling, it is crucial to include the pedagogy of public-facing work in one’s arts classroom to show students what careers are possible using their disciplinary knowledge. In this manifesto, I discuss the importance of teaching public arts methods with a view from my own field, public musicology. As a case study, I will show how teaching public musicology can be both incorporated into stand-alone courses and built into programs, as I have done in the only public musicology undergraduate program in the United States.

In early modern Venice, credit was ubiquitous, with various lenders offering long- and short- term loans. This article traces the structure of the Venetian credit market in the eighteenth century and examines the borrowing opportunities available to the local population, focusing in particular on consumer credit. The research studies how people approached credit in a pre-industrial society, and what factors may have shaped the ways through which they accessed borrowing. More broadly, how did Venetian households cope with uncertainty? Was the local credit market able to offer borrowers multiple, equally viable options? The article explores the interaction between the supply and demand for credit, emphasising the organised nature of the Venetian market. Ultimately, it argues that even loans that appeared to have unfavourable conditions could, in practice, be quite attractive to borrowers.

Premised on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease theory and on the limited effectiveness of antenatal interventions, interventions in the preconception period are being conducted to potentially improve intergenerational health and non-communicable disease burdens. The Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) is an international health research consortium primarily investigating the intergenerational effects of behavioural interventions on obesity via a complex four-phase intervention initiated preconceptionally, through pregnancy, and into early childhood. HeLTI, in partnership with the World Health Organization, aims to generate evidence that will shape health policy focused on preconception as part of a life course approach to population health. It is necessary to ensure that a renewed public health focus on preconception prioritises justice and equity in its framing. This article presents collaborative interdisciplinary work with HeLTI-South Africa. It applies a feminist bioethics methodology, which is empirical, situated, intersectional, and fundamentally concerned with justice, to investigate what South African HeLTI community health workers, or ‘Health Helpers’, who deliver the complex behavioural intervention, think about preconception health and responsibility. Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with HeLTI-SA Health Helpers, and data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Our findings show that Health Helpers’ perceptions of preconception health and related responsibility were significantly gendered, heteronormative, and concerned with child-bearing intentionality and desires. These themes were inflected with Health Helpers’ perceptions about how attributions of responsibility are shaped by culture, demonstrating the situated nature of epistemologies. Their ideas also highlight how preconception health knowledge can distribute responsibility unjustly. Understanding the contextual impact and relevance of values around responsibility is critical to prospectively design preconception health interventions that promote equity and fairness. This understanding can then be used for effective policy translation, with the goal that public health policy is founded upon contextual responsivity and justice for the public it aims to serve.

Regenerative involution is crucial for renewing the mammary gland and maximizing milk production. However, the temporal profiles indicators of oxidative status during this phase are still unclear. In this study, Experiment 1 aimed to investigate the dynamic changes in indicators of oxidative status in plasma during regenerative involution. The dairy goats were dried off at 8 weeks (wk) before kidding (−8 wk, n = 14) or −12 wk (n = 6). The blood samples taken at −8, −7, −6, −5, −4, −3, −2, −1 wk, on the day for kidding (0 wk) and the first week after kidding (+1 wk, milk production 1.28 ± 0.31 kg per day). Experiment 2 aimed to investigate the dynamic changes in indicators of oxidative status in mammary cells. Seven selected goats were biopsied for tissue collection and cell isolation at −8, −4, −1, +1 wk (milk production 1.28 ± 0.31 kg per day), respectively. Plasma analysis in Experiment 1 showed an increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, peaking at −4 wk (P < 0.01). No significant differences were observed between the dry-off treatments (P = 0.36). The activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) in plasma remained stable from −7 wk to the first week after kidding (+1 wk), while glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) activity peaked at −4 wk. An increased catalase activity was observed at +1 wk (P < 0.01), indicating its response to lactation. In Experiment 2, an increase in ROS levels in isolated mammary cells was observed at −4 wk, while SOD, GSH-Px, and malondialdehyde levels in tissue homogenates rose around kidding (P < 0.01). The dynamic change of the oxidative status suggests that targeted antioxidant strategies would be helpful for regenerative involution of mammary gland in ruminants.