On the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, archaeologists encounter evidence that challenges conventional understandings of early state formation as a transition from ‘small-scale, egalitarian’ to ‘large-scale, stratified’ societies. One such location is the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Başur Höyük, which presents evidence of grand funerary rituals—including ‘retainer burials’ and spectacular deposits of metallic wealth—in an otherwise small-scale, egalitarian setting. A further, puzzling feature of this cemetery is the preponderance of teenagers in the richest tombs. Here we describe the combined results of archaeological and anthropological analysis at Başur Höyük, including ancient DNA, and consider the challenges they pose to traditional accounts of early state formation.

The Diene Report of 2005 represents an instance in which an international organization investigated Japanese official treatment of minority communities in Japan in relation to international standards, and their findings strongly supported the Ainu activists. The United Nations sent Doudou Diene, their Special Rapporteur, to Japan to look into discrimination and racism. Diene's report harshly criticized the racism that exists in Japan and suggested that improved measures are necessary to protect the Ainu and other minorities there. This article is a response to his report by five Japanese individuals who have long been committed to countering discrimination and racism in the country. Four of the five contributors agree with the overall content of the Diene report and provide further information. They see the report as a small but positive impetus that will help the 21st century activism that further counters discrimination and racism in Japan. On the other hand, William Wetherall criticizes the report as seriously flawed, because he thinks it misunderstands the main aspects of the issue.

Williams v Commonwealth of Australia is a landmark decision of the High Court on the scope of federal executive power in s 61 of the Constitution. The decision is also important for the interpretive methodology adopted by the Court. Notably, each judge based their understanding of s 61 upon federal readings of the Constitution. This methodology raises fresh questions about how the Constitution is to be interpreted, and whether Williams marks a break from orthodox understandings of that task. This article assesses the significance of Williams for constitutional interpretation in Australia, and whether it lays the foundation for a more robust protection of state interests by the High Court.

Confidence intervals are ubiquitous in the presentation of social science models, data, and effects. When several intervals are plotted together, one natural inclination is to ask whether the estimates represented by those intervals are significantly different from each other. Unfortunately, there is no general rule or procedure that would allow us to answer this question from the confidence intervals alone. It is well known that using the overlaps in 95% confidence intervals to perform significance tests at the 0.05 level does not work. Recent scholarship has developed and refined a set of tools for inferential confidence intervals that permit inference on confidence intervals with the appropriate type I error rate in many different bivariate contexts. These are all based on the same underlying idea of identifying the multiple of the standard error (i.e., a new confidence level) such that the overlap in confidence intervals matches the desired type I error rate. These procedures remain stymied by multiple simultaneous comparisons. We propose an entirely new procedure for developing inferential confidence intervals that decouples the testing and visualization that can overcome many of these problems in any visual testing scenario. We provide software in R and Stata to accomplish this goal.

A reflective analysis is presented on the potential added value that actuarial science can contribute to the field of health technology assessment. This topic is discussed based on the experience of several experts in health actuarial science and health economics. Different points are addressed, such as the role of actuarial science in health, actuarial judgment, data inputs and their quality, modeling methodologies and the use of decision-analytic models in the age of artificial intelligence, and the development of innovative pricing and payment models.

International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) billing data used in outpatient stewardship metrics is under-described for acute and chronic sinusitis. We found that different sinusitis ICD-10 definitions impacted antibiotic prescribing rates (APRs). Chronic sinusitis ICD-10s dilute overall sinusitis APR, particularly in primary care settings and should be examined separately.

Even amidst a decline in religious affiliation, nearly half of the U.S. population still attends religious services at least once a month, and congregations remain the single largest non-profit organizational type across the nation. Therefore, congregational influence on political attitudes and behavior is a crucial line of inquiry. We analyze interviews of 94 congregational leaders to better understand why they address or avoid political issues when preaching. Our research reveals that clergy use theological and pragmatic reasoning to determine whether they explicitly include political discourse in their sermons. Our findings are noteworthy in that clergy from a wide range of religious traditions use similar reasoning, and the same rationale can lead different clergy to adopt contrasting approaches to political content in sermons. Thus, this paper provides nuanced insight into the relationship between religion and politics and may help foster greater mutual understanding in a deeply divided political and social climate.

Galaxy Zoo is an online project to classify morphological features in extra-galactic imaging surveys with public voting. In this paper, we compare the classifications made for two different surveys, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) imaging survey and a part of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), in the equatorial fields of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. Our aim is to cross-validate and compare the classifications based on different imaging quality and depth. We find that generally the voting agrees globally but with substantial scatter, that is, substantial differences for individual galaxies. There is a notable higher voting fraction in favour of ‘smooth’ galaxies in the DESI+zoobot classifications, most likely due to the difference between imaging depth. DESI imaging is shallower and slightly lower resolution than KiDS and the Galaxy Zoo images do not reveal details such as disc features and thus are missed in the zoobot training sample. We check against expert visual classifications and find good agreement with KiDS-based Galaxy Zoo voting. We reproduce the results from Porter-Temple+ (2022), on the dependence of stellar mass, star formation, and specific star formation on the number of spiral arms. This shows that once corrected for redshift, the DESI Galaxy Zoo and KiDS Galaxy Zoo classifications agree well on population properties. The zoobot cross-validation increases confidence in its ability to compliment Galaxy Zoo classifications and its ability for transfer learning across surveys.

Young stellar objects (YSOs) are protostars that exhibit bipolar outflows fed by accretion disks. Theories of the transition between disk and outflow often involve a complex magnetic field structure thought to be created by the disk coiling field lines at the jet base; however, due to limited resolution, these theories cannot be confirmed with observation and thus may benefit from laboratory astrophysics studies. We create a dynamically similar laboratory system by driving a $\sim$1 MA current pulse with a 200 ns rise through a $\approx$2 mm-tall Al cylindrical wire array mounted to a three-dimensional (3-D)-printed, stainless steel scaffolding. This system creates a plasma that converges on the centre axis and ejects cm-scale bipolar outflows. Depending on the chosen 3-D-printed load path, the system may be designed to push the ablated plasma flow radially inwards or off-axis to make rotation. In this paper, we present results from the simplest iteration of the load which generates radially converging streams that launch non-rotating jets. The temperature, velocity and density of the radial inflows and axial outflows are characterized using interferometry, gated optical and ultraviolet imaging, and Thomson scattering diagnostics. We show that experimental measurements of the Reynolds number and sonic Mach number in three different stages of the experiment scale favourably to the observed properties of YSO jets with $Re\sim 10^5\unicode{x2013}10^9$ and $M\sim 1\unicode{x2013}10$, while our magnetic Reynolds number of $Re_M\sim 1\unicode{x2013}15$ indicates that the magnetic field diffuses out of our plasma over multiple hydrodynamical time scales. We compare our results with 3-D numerical simulations in the PERSEUS extended magnetohydrodynamics code.