Vocal fold vibrations are more difficult to achieve in obstruents than sonorants due to the aerodynamic voicing constraint (AVC), i.e., the fact that a buildup of air pressure in the supraglottal cavity during oral closures reduces the transglottal airflow. The AVC can be circumvented by various voicing adjustment gestures, such as larynx lowering, tongue root advancement and tongue body lowering. The current study employed laryngeal and lingual ultrasound to investigate the use of these strategies in Canadian French. The vertical movement of the larynx was measured using optical flow analysis, while lingual movement was analyzed by tracking X and Y coordinates at distinct fanlines across consecutive images.

Results revealed that there was more pronounced larynx lowering in voiced obstruents and that it tended to be greater in voiced stops than in voiced fricatives. Tongue-related maneuvers displayed more interspeaker variation but tendencies showed that the tongue root was more advanced in voiced stops than in voiced fricatives and slightly more for /d/ than /b/. Significant tongue body lowering was observed for both voiced stops and voiced fricatives only preceding the vowel /a/. Finally, larynx lowering was strongly correlated with voicing duration in voiced obstruents. A similar but weaker correlation was found for tongue root advancement.

Overall, this study suggests that larynx lowering is an efficient strategy to circumvent the AVC in Canadian French but that some speakers may also resort to lingual adjustments. Additional strategies that are known to play a role, such as nasal or oral leakage, were not considered.

Jarai is a Chamic language of Vietnam and Cambodia that is traditionally described as preserving the original Austronesian voicing contrast in onset obstruents. However, there is anecdotal evidence that it has developed a register contrast, i.e. a binary contrast based on a bundle of spectral properties like pitch, voice quality and vowel quality. We conducted production and perception experiments of the voicing/register contrast in two Jarai varieties spoken in Saom Kaning, Cambodia, and Ea Sup, Vietnam, to determine if they preserve voicing and/or have developed a register contrast. Results show that both dialects have a register contrast primarily based on vowel height modulations (F1) and that onset voicing has become at best an optional secondary property of register. F1 is also the primary cue used for register identification in both dialects. Implications for the diachronic development of the register contrast in Chamic languages and in Mainland Southeast Asia in general are discussed.

The needle teeth of piglets are often cut shortly after birth to prevent damage to littermates and the sow's udder. This practise is, however, contested because the pain it inflicts to piglets may counterbalance its benefits. The purpose of this experiment was to assess the consequences of tooth resection over the subsequent days and weeks by histological examination. Two techniques were compared: tooth clipping with clippers, and tooth grinding with a rotating grindstone. Twenty piglets received each of three treatments (one treatment per half-jaw): clipping, grinding, and control (teeth left intact). Four piglets were slaughtered at each of the following stages: 3, 6, 13, 27 and 48 days after tooth resection. Their teeth were then collected and prepared for histological examination. The analysis revealed that both clipping and grinding induce lesions such as pulp cavity opening, fracture, haemorrhage, infiltration or abscess, and osteodentine formation. Wost of these effects appeared sooner and were of greater magnitude after clipping than after grinding. Because most of the observed histological alterations are known to cause severe pain in humans, it is likely that tooth resection — even when achieved through grinding — induces severe pain in piglets. Thus, the rationale of this practice should be re-evaluated.

The article focuses on judicial politics in three international regimes. The courts of these regimes are trustee courts, operating in an environment of judicial supremacy with respect to states. An international trustee court meets three criteria: (1) the court is the authoritative interpreter of the regime’s law; (2) the court’s jurisdiction is compulsory; and (3) it is virtually impossible, in practice, for contracting states to reverse the court’s important rulings. After developing a theory of trusteeship, we turn to how judges have used their powers. Although there is variation, each court has engaged in “majoritarian activism,” producing law that reflects standard practices or a high degree of state consensus but that would not have been adopted by states under unanimity decision rules. Majoritarian activism helps judges to develop the law progressively, to mitigate potential legitimacy problems, and to render efforts at curbing the growth of their authority improbable or ineffective.

We present a novel approach to developing a unified radiocarbon-based chronology for multiple sediment cores from a location where radiocarbon dating is challenging. We used 36 radiocarbon ages from eight terminal Pleistocene and Holocene sediment cores with correlated stratigraphies. Stratigraphic correlation was accomplished using a combination of high-resolution photography, high-resolution X-ray fluorescence-based elemental composition data, and volcanic tephra identification. Results show that despite problems associated with potential contamination or radiocarbon reservoir effect, a useful age-depth model has been created for the correlated lacustrine sections of these eight sediment cores, providing chronological controls for future paleoenvironmental analyses of the cores.

Subsequent to the 2016 modifications concerning the strengthening of the administrative requirements on dolphin-safety outside the ETP fishery zone, the second WTO compliance proceedings have finally found the US Dolphin-Safe labelling scheme compatible with the multilateral trade system. We provide an overview of the long-running US–Mexico dispute and assess the final findings of the WTO adjudicators attempting to determine the effects of the multilateral litigation on the involved non-trade values and the real winners of the case. We find an improvement in dolphin protection, though more could be achieved through a qualification of the US measure under the principle of sustainable development also contemplated in the Preamble of the WTO Agreement, as well as an enhancement on consumer information, since declaration of dolphin-safety may now be better monitored and enforced through the new discipline for non-Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean tuna products. However, we also observe that with no change to the appearance of the label or an informational campaign, the improved credibility of the label may hardly be passed-through to the average consumer. Furthermore, despite an increase in the stringency of the regulation for their competitors, Mexican producers do not gain greater access to the US and instead have been diversifying towards other markets. We then highlight that the Appellate Body missed an opportunity to reinforce the transparency of the system by supporting the first-ever decision to grant partially open panel meetings.

The relation of social cognitive disorders and schizophrenic symptoms are well-established. Yet, assessment methods have not reached a consensus. In addition, causal paths between neurocognition, social cognition, symptoms and functional expression are not clearly understood. During the past few years, some authoritative accounts proposed specialized batteries of tests and emphasized theory of mind, emotion recognition, and interpretation bias constructs:

– NIMH's “Social cognition psychometric evaluation” battery (Pinkham AE, Penn DL, Green MF, Harvey PD. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2015);

– “Social cognition and functioning in schizophrenia” (Green MF, Lee J, Ochsner KN. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2013).

Interestingly, these accounts stemming either from expert consensus and psychometric considerations or from neuroscience knowledge recognized some difficulties in providing a fully usable set of instruments. The project described here (EVACO protocol, funded by the Programme Hospitalier de Recherche Clinique national) follows an alternative approach and aims at providing a psychometrically validated battery. Based on a cognitive neuropsychology view on schizophrenic functional disability, several tests were gathered and are assessed in a 12-months multi-center follow-up of 160 individuals with schizophrenia. The FondaMental foundation network of Expert Centers is involved in recruiting patients from eight centers (Clermont-Ferrand, Colombes, Créteil, Grenoble, Marseille, Montpellier, Strasbourg, Versailles). To-date, the first evaluation of the population has been achieved. Experience reports and inclusions follow-up demonstrate the good acceptability of this battery both on the patients and the evaluator's side. We emphasize the usefulness of this project to meet the clinicians’ needs of validated social cognition tools, by describing different scenarios of use.

Bailey [1] proposed in 1972 that a nanoscale antenna coupled with a rectifier can harvest broad range electromagnetic radiation from visible to infrared. To incorporate this concept in practical systems, there were two main technological bottle necks that have to be overcome: antenna miniaturization and rectification in terahertz frequency. With current technology and equipment [2], we are proposing a third-generation rectenna-based solar cells composed of Ag nanocubes to harvest ambient visible and infrared electromagnetic waves coupled to ferrocene-based molecular diodes [3] capable of switching at terahertz frequency to convert this received energy into DC power. The function of these molecular diodes is two-fold: they rectify and provide an uniform nano-cavity between silver top electrode and gold bottom electrode. These nano-cavities are capable to support gap plasmon modes and absorption of light in both narrow and broad range, depending on the nanocube size and dispersion. A self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of ferrocene alkane-dithiol is deposited in this nano-cavity making it possible to form molecular sized nano-gaps well below the usual 3 nm, and this structure is robust and reproducible [4]. This SAM can be deposited directly or via a two-step click chemistry on the surface to have along with control over the orientation of the molecule. By tuning the orientation and position of the ferrocene moiety, the direction of rectification can be controlled [3]. Hence, the SAM does not only act as a rectifier but also provides mechanical support combining photonic and electrical properties. This paper focuses on studying the electrical and supramolecular structure of these molecular diode based SAMs.

Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40–50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a “sweet spot” of maximum likelihood of minority candidate electoral success as a function of minority population share of the district and the proportion of the district that votes Republican. Past racial redistricting legal challenges often focused on cracking concentrated racial minorities to prevent the creation of majority-minority districts. Future lawsuits may also follow in the steps of recent successful court challenges against racially motivated packing that resulted in the reduction of minority population percentage in a previously majority-minority district in order to enhance minority opportunity in an adjacent non-majority-minority district.

The fact that two senators are elected from each state offers the potential for natural paired comparisons. In particular, examining historical and geographic patterns in terms of changes in the number of divided US Senate delegations (i.e., states whose two senators are of different parties) is a useful route to testing competing models of American politics, including theories of split-ticket voting, party polarization, and realignment. Brunell and Grofman (1998) used divided Senate delegations to indirectly examine evidence for realignment. We hypothesized that a partisan realignment will necessarily lead to a cyclical pattern in the number of divided Senate delegations. We predicted that the number of divided Senate delegations at the state level would decline after 1996 because we conjectured that there had been a realignment cusp around 1980. We tested this prediction with data from 1952–2016 and our prediction was confirmed.

There is no consensus on the nature, or even the existence, of Vietnamese word stress. While some authors have proposed that it is morphosyntactically conditioned (Thompson 1963, Thompson 1965, Cao 2003 [1978], Ngô 1984), others have adopted the view that it is consistently word-final (Trần 1967; Nguyễn & Ingram 2006, 2007b; Phạm 2008; Nguyễn 2010) or that it lacks stress altogether (Emeneau 1951). This is due to the elusive nature of word prominence in Vietnamese, and to the small number of studies that tackle the issue experimentally. In this paper, acoustic experiments designed to test previous hypotheses and tease apart possible types of prominence are presented. Southern Vietnamese disyllabic words with various morphosyntactic structures were recorded in controlled environments to test for stress and phrasal effects. Their duration, mean intensity, mean f0, f0 range and formants were then measured to assess word prominence. Results suggest that there is little evidence for word stress in Southern Vietnamese and that reports of final stress can be reinterpreted as phrase-final lengthening. Focus-marking strategies bring no additional evidence for the existence of stress, but they seem to be partly speaker- and tone-specific, which supports results obtained in studies of Northern Vietnamese (Michaud 2005).

Paleoenvironmental reconstructions are important for understanding the influence of long-term climate variability on ecosystems and landscape disturbance dynamics. In this paper we explore the linkages among past climate, vegetation, and fire regimes using a high-resolution pollen and charcoal reconstruction from Morris Pond located on the Markagunt Plateau in southwestern Utah, USA. A regime shift detection algorithm was applied to background charcoal accumulation to define where statistically significant shifts in fire regimes occurred. The early Holocene was characterized by greater amounts of summer precipitation and less winter precipitation than modern. Ample forest fuel and warm summer temperatures allowed for large fires to occur. The middle Holocene was a transitional period between vegetation conditions and fire disturbance. The late Holocene climate is characterized as cool and wet reflecting an increase in snow cover, which reduced opportunities for fire despite increased availability of fuels. Similarities between modern forest fuel availability and those of the early Holocene suggest that warmer summers projected for the 21st century may yield substantial increases in the recurrence and ecological impacts of fire when compared to the fire regime of the last millennium.

Fire is one of the most important natural disturbances in the coniferous forests of the US Rocky Mountains. The Rocky Mountains are separated by a climatic boundary between 40° and 45° N, which we refer to as the central Rocky Mountains (CRM). To determine whether the fire regime from the CRM was more similar to the northern Rocky Mountains (NRM) or southern Rocky Mountains (SRM) during the Holocene, a 12,539-yr-old sediment core from Long Lake, Wyoming, located in the CRM was analyzed for charcoal and pollen. These data were then compared to charcoal records from the CRM, NRM and SRM. During the Younger Dryas chronozone, the fire regime was characterized as frequent at Long Lake. The early and middle Holocene fire regime was characterized as infrequent. A brief interval from 4000 to 3000 cal yr BP, termed the Populus period, had a frequent fire regime and remained frequent through the late Holocene at Long Lake. In comparison to sites from the NRM and SRM, the fire regime at Long Lake was most similar to the SRM during the past 12,539 cal yr BP. These results suggest the disturbance regime in the CRM has a greater affinity with those of the SRM.