The following essays are part of a collaboration between the Journal of Law and Religion and Political Theology. Editors from both journals selected the two texts interrogated and interpreted here—James Baldwin’s essay “Equal in Paris” and the United States Supreme Court decision in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). The purpose of the collaboration was twofold. The first purpose was to see what new interpretations arise when scholars working primarily in law read the essay by Baldwin, who has been a touchstone in much contemporary Black theology, and when scholars working in religious studies read the legal decision in Wong Kim Ark, a case in which the Supreme Court extended citizenship to the child of Chinese immigrants who conceived and bore him on American soil. The second purpose was to divide publication between the journals, with each journal publishing three of the six essays, with a view to building bridges between readers of each journal over a topic at the intersection of both law and political theology.

We assessed infection prevention in Swiss hospitals via a national survey focusing on infection prevention practices prior to a large national infection prevention initiative. Of the 59 hospitals that responded (77%), 98% had infection prevention teams and 40% very good or excellent leadership support. However, a minority of hospitals used recommended infection prevention practices and surveillance systems regularly.

Tall ironweed is a troublesome perennial weed that infests cool-season grass pastures in Kentucky. Field experiments were conducted in 2000 through 2003 to evaluate the efficacy of fall-applied herbicides on established tall ironweed following a midsummer mowing. Triclopyr-containing treatments showed the greatest suppression of tall ironweed 12 mo after treatment (MAT), across all years. With triclopyr at 0.56 and 0.63 kg/ha, tall ironweed control was 80% or greater in 2 of the 3 yr. Dicamba initially provided 87% control 8 MAT in 2 of 3 yr and declined to less than 60% 12 MAT. Tall ironweed shoot density was also reduced 66% or more 12 MAT with fall-applied triclopyr-containing treatments. In contrast, tall ironweed density increased approximately twofold in dicamba-treated plots between 8 to 12 MAT in all 3 yr. The impact of herbicide treatment on dry matter (DM) yield of spring-seeded red clover (Trifolium pratense L.), tall ironweed, and forage grasses was also evaluated. Red clover DM yield in the herbicide-treated plots in 2002 showed no significant differences from the untreated control. However, red clover DM yield in 2003 was lowest for the two triclopyr + clopyralid treatments, indicating a decrease in DM production compared with that of the nontreated control. Results indicated that fall-applied triclopyr-containing herbicides following a midsummer mowing is an effective program for removing tall ironweed from grass pastures, but further research is needed to evaluate the establishment of red clover following herbicide treatment.

This study examined subjective and objective cognitive functioning in 26 female breast cancer survivors (BCS) who received chemotherapy treatment that finished .5 to 5 years prior to testing and compared their results to 25 demographically matched women with no history of cancer. Participants were assessed on prospective memory (PM) tasks; neuropsychological tests of processing speed, attentional flexibility with greater cognitive load, executive function, and verbal memory; self-report measures of cognitive dysfunction and PM failures; and distress. The BCS group showed significantly slower speed of processing and reduced attentional flexibility, and reported significantly more cognitive complaints and PM failures than the control group on five of six self-report measures. The groups did not differ on other PM or neuropsychological measures or on a measure of distress. Subjective cognition correlated with some neuropsychological tests and with a virtual reality PM task. Objective cognitive impairments were associated with reduced quality of life in the BCS group. The results provide some evidence of both self-reported impairment and objective cognitive dysfunction following chemotherapy treatment.

Speaking more than one language demands a language control system that allows bilinguals to correctly use the intended language adjusting for possible interference from the non-target language. Understanding how the brain orchestrates the control of language has been a major focus of neuroimaging research on bilingualism and was central to our original neurocognitive language control model (Abutalebi & Green, 2007). We updated the network of language control (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) and here review the many new exciting findings based on functional and structural data that substantiate its core components. We discuss the language control network within the framework of the adaptive control hypothesis (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) that predicts adaptive changes specific to the control demands of the interactional contexts of language use. Adapting to such demands leads, we propose, to a neural reserve in the human brain.

Bilingual speakers can use one of their languages in a given interactional context or switch between them when addressing different speakers during the same conversation. Depending on community usage bilingual speakers may insert single lexical forms from one language into the morphosyntactic frame of another or alternate between languages at clause boundaries. They may also engage in dense code switching with rapid changes of language within a clause during a conversational turn (Green & Li, 2014). These varieties of language use configure the same speech production mechanism and so a theory of code-switching must be part of a theory that accounts for the range of bilingual speech. Does the proposal described in Goldrick, Putnam and Schwartz (2016) meet these criteria?

A 76-year-old male with a severely deforming rheumatoid arthritis, eosinophilic!, polymyositis, and episcleritis developed a transient tonic pupil. The episcleritis, and a muscle biopsy revealing an occlusive arteritis with eosinophilia, suggest that a widespread rheumatoid arteritis caused a reversible ischemic insult to the ciliary ganglion and thus created a transient denervation of the pupil.

Emmorey, Giezen and Gollan (Emmorey, Giezen & Gollan) in their Key Note article review data bearing on language control in bimodal bilinguals and provoke questions critical to theoretical advance. I consider here two interrelated questions: one on multimodal synchrony and one on the control of serial order.

An important proposal in the insightful Keynote Article by Baum and Titone is that the field of bilingualism research needs to attend more closely to intersubject variability in order to understand the nature of neuroplastic changes in the brains of bilingual speakers as they age. I agree. Understanding such variability and its drivers (such as the contexts of language use that Baum and Titone nicely comment on in the Montreal milieu) will help us develop theoretical accounts of the cognitive control processes recruited in bilingual speakers and establish how adaptive changes to these processes mediate the effects of normal aging; yield protective effects against neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer disease; and modulate language recovery poststroke in bilingual speakers. In this commentary I explore some aspects of this variability and commend, in line with the views expressed in the Keynote Article, the value of relating behavioral indices to whole brain structural magnetic resonance imaging for enriching our understanding of experience-dependent changes. Allied to tractography studies, such research can help us develop a rich picture of the major drivers of neuroplastic changes.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give us an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the transient sky at radio wavelengths. In this paper we present VAST, an ASKAP survey for Variables and Slow Transients. VAST will exploit the wide-field survey capabilities of ASKAP to enable the discovery and investigation of variable and transient phenomena from the local to the cosmological, including flare stars, intermittent pulsars, X-ray binaries, magnetars, extreme scattering events, interstellar scintillation, radio supernovae, and orphan afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. In addition, it will allow us to probe unexplored regions of parameter space where new classes of transient sources may be detected. In this paper we review the known radio transient and variable populations and the current results from blind radio surveys. We outline a comprehensive program based on a multi-tiered survey strategy to characterise the radio transient sky through detection and monitoring of transient and variable sources on the ASKAP imaging timescales of 5 s and greater. We also present an analysis of the expected source populations that we will be able to detect with VAST.

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian–English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by the gender of the speaker, either a male or a female, and this varied over trials, where the target was spoken in a male voice the distractor was spoken in a female voice and vice versa. In contrast to other work showing a bilingual disadvantage in sentence comprehension under conditions of noise, we show that in this task, where voice permits selection of the target, adult bilingual speakers are in fact better able than their monolingual Italian peers to resist sentence-level interference when comprehension demands are high. Within bilingual speakers we also found that degree of proficiency in English correlated with the ability to resist interference for complex sentences both when the target and distractor were in Italian and when the target was in English and the distractor in Italian.