“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early-emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

In this paper, a phase-change model based on a geometric volume-of-fluid (VOF) framework is extended to simulate nucleate boiling with a resolved microlayer and conjugate heat transfer. Heat conduction in both the fluid and solid domains is simultaneously solved, with interfacial heat-transfer resistance (IHTR) imposed. The present model is implemented in the open-source software Basilisk with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), which significantly improves computational efficiency. However, the approximate projection method required for AMR introduces strong oscillations within the microlayer due to intense heat and mass transfer. This issue is addressed using a ghost fluid method, allowing nucleate boiling experiments to be successfully replicated. Compared with previous literature studies, the computational cost is reduced by three orders of magnitude. We investigated the impact of contact angle on nucleate boiling through direct numerical simulation (DNS). The results show that the contact angle primarily influences the bubble growth by altering the hydrodynamic behaviour within the microlayer, rather than the thermal effect. An increase in contact angle enhances contact line mobility, resulting in a slower bubble growth, while maintaining an approximately constant total average mass flux. Furthermore, the sensitivity of bubble dynamics to the contact angle diminishes as the angle decreases. Finally, a complete bubble cycle from nucleation to detachment is simulated, which, to our knowledge, has not been reported in the open literature. Reasonable agreement with experimental data is achieved, enabling key factors affecting nucleate boiling simulations in the microlayer regime to be identified, which were previously obscured by limited simulation time.

This paper examines trends in wage, income, and consumption inequality in Turkey from 2002 to 2023, a period marked by unorthodox economic policymaking before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using microdata from the Turkish Statistical Institute’s Household Budget Survey and the Survey of Income and Living Conditions, we document several salient distributional patterns. Wage inequality declined steadily over two decades, including during the recent episode of policy experimentation – coinciding with sustained minimum wage hikes and a rising share of university-educated workers. Income inequality also fell, though less markedly, before reversing in recent years due to widening disparities in capital and entrepreneurial income. In addition, consumption inequality rose dramatically during the unorthodox policy period, exceeding income inequality growth and driven primarily by a surge in durable goods consumption among top-decile households. These findings reveal the complex and multi-dimensional distributional consequences of unconventional economic policy in emerging markets and highlight the importance of examining inequality across multiple dimensions when evaluating policy effectiveness.

A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can shift voters’ electoral choices. Yet there remains a mismatch between reliance on aggregated municipal data and individual-level theories focused on retrospective rewards or reduced vulnerability to clientelism. Since CCTs also produce plausible spillovers on nonbeneficiaries, verifying who reacts, and how, is crucial to understanding their electoral effects. To empirically unbundle individual and spillover effects, the analysis exploits plausibly exogenous variation between beneficiaries of Brazil’s Bolsa Família and those on the waiting list. The evidence suggests that CCTs strengthen beneficiaries’ attitudes against clientelism, but they vote no differently than nonbeneficiaries. However, spillovers are strong: As CCT coverage expands, both beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries turn against local incumbents. This pattern is inconsistent with existing theory, which relies on either polarization or positive spillovers. Instead, I propose a theory of collective confidence derived from strategic voting incentives in which CCT expansion fortifies all voters in resisting clientelism.

In this work, we derive higher-order transport equations starting from the Boltzmann equation using a second-order accurate distribution function within the 13-moment framework. The equations are shown to be unconditionally linearly stable and consistent with Onsager’s symmetry principle. We also show that the equations comply with the second law of thermodynamics by establishing the non-negativity of the bulk entropy generation rate using the linearised form of the proposed equations. The force-driven Poiseuille flow problem, a standard benchmark problem, is selected to establish the validity of the equations. A complete analytical solution for this problem is proposed and compared against the Navier–Stokes, regularised 13, Grad 13 solutions and direct simulation Monte Carlo data. The proposed solution captures key rarefaction effects, including the Knudsen layer, non-uniform bimodal pressure profile, non-Fourier heat flux and the characteristic temperature dip at the centre. The analytical solution for the field variables indicates that the equations outperform the existing models in the slip- and transition-flow regimes for the problem considered. These satisfactory results point to the accuracy and applicability of the proposed equations, and the equations hold significant promise for rarefied gas dynamics at large Knudsen numbers.

This descriptive and exploratory observational case series examined intestinal colonisation and subsequent bacteraemia due to ESBL-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (ESBL-Kp) in preterm neonates in Morocco. Prospective bacteriological cultures and antibiotic susceptibility testing were supported by phenotypic methods, including Brilliance ESBL Agar and the NG-Test CARBA-5 assay, for the rapid detection of ESBL and carbapenemase producers. Molecular analysis using PCR was also undertaken to identify specific resistance genes. A total of 567 rectal swabs were collected from 339 preterm neonates, yielding 293 K. pneumoniae isolates. ESBL-producing strains were identified in 53.6% of the neonates (182/339). Detected resistance genes included blaSHV (26.3%), blaCTX-M-1 (42.8%), blaTEM (30.2%), blaOXA-48 (50.0%), blaNDM(15.3%), and blaVIM (4.9%). Principal risk factors for colonisation were low birth weight (OR 1.69), very preterm birth (OR 6.24), enteral tube feeding (OR 2.02), and prolonged use of third-generation cephalosporins (OR 1.26). Among the neonates studied, 32 (9.4%) developed healthcare-associated bacteraemia, with 56.2% of these cases preceded by intestinal colonisation with ESBL-Kp. Clinically, severe respiratory distress and alveolar haemorrhage were strongly associated with increased mortality (aRR = 29.32 and 4.45, respectively). The findings highlight the clinical importance of early screening to guide infection control and antimicrobial stewardship in neonatal intensive care settings.

This article examines the significance of Christina Rossetti’s caregiving responsibilities and suggests that the relationship between caring and writing is a central, if critically neglected, concern of her poetics. I focus on two periods in Rossetti’s life to show how her creative practice was shaped by her duties as a carer, and vice versa. In the 1840s, when the adolescent Rossetti suffers a breakdown while caring for her father, Gabriele, her physician, Dr. Charles Hare, helps her find solace in self-reflection and writing poetry. Forty years later, Rossetti revisits Hare’s holistic approach when looking after her mother and aunts. During this period, she produces Time Flies, the experimental, hybrid form of which addresses and accommodates her struggles to balance writing and caring. I conclude by arguing that Rossetti’s efforts to live and write with divided attention provide fresh opportunities for exploring the connections between domestic labor and creativity. As well as endorsing Talia Schaffer’s call for “a literary criticism that is predicated on care,” I propose that writing as an act of care has implications beyond the academy: I end with a short discussion of the ongoing poetry workshops for carers that were directly inspired by my research on Christina Rossetti.

This study was conducted to evaluate the supplementation of anionic salt products to pre-partum diets on dry matter (DM) intake, nutrient digestibility, blood metabolites, and milk composition of cows during the transition period. Twenty-four Holstein cows [614±21.3 kg body weight (BW) and 2.0±0.9 parity number] were blocked by parity and expected calving date, and randomly assigned to the following treatments: Animate (ANI), anionic salts (Animate, Phibro Animal Health, Teaneck, US) fed at 2.85 %DM; or Meganion (MEG), anionic salts (MegAnion, Barentz Animal Nutrition, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands) fed at 1.85 %DM. Treatments targeted -150 mEq/kg diet DM and were provided starting at 30 d of the expected calving date. Treatment effects were evaluated until 56 days in milk. Pre-partum diets presented -55.9 and -32.1 mEq/kg diet DM for ANI and MEG, respectively. Dry matter intake and BW were similar across treatment groups during the pre-partum and post-partum periods. Post-partum body condition score tended to be greater for MEG. Pre-partum urine pH was similar between treatment groups (6.33 and 6.49 for ANI and MEG, respectively). Cows fed MEG had greater neutral detergent fibre digestibility on weeks 5 (53.2 vs. 49.8 %) and 6 (53.5 vs. 49.6 %) of lactation than ANI. Serum concentration of Mg was greater in cows fed MEG during the pre-partum. No treatment differences were found for blood concentrations of ionized Ca, non-esterified fatty acids, beta-hydroxybutyrate, or insulin. Milk yield was not affected. Both anionic salts maintained adequate calcium metabolism during the transition period and resulted in similar performance.

Online panels have become an important resource for research in political science, but the compensation offered to panelists incentivizes them to become “survey professionals,” raising concerns about data quality. We provide evidence on survey professionalism exploring three US samples of subjects who donated their browsing data, recruited via Lucid, YouGov, and Facebook (total $n = 3,886$). Survey professionalism is common, but varies across samples: by our most conservative estimate, we find 1.7% of respondents on Facebook, 7.$\color {black}6$% on YouGov, and 34$\color {black}.7$% on Lucid to be professionals (under the assumption that professionals are as likely as non-professionals to donate data after conditioning on observable demographics available from all online survey takers). However, evidence that professionals lower data quality is limited: they do not systematically differ demographically or politically from non-professionals and do not exhibit more response instability. They are, however, somewhat more likely to speed, straightline, and attempt to take questionnaires repeatedly. To address potential selection issues in donating of browsing data, we present sensitivity analyses with lower bounds for survey professionalism. While concerns about professionalism are warranted, we conclude that survey professionals do not, by and large, distort inferences of research based on online panels.

Public authorities often enforce pollution abatement through monitoring and penalties. However, monitoring is costly and only a small percentage of firms are monitored. Inspectors may be corrupt and permit evasion for a bribe. For firms in developing countries, it is expensive to enter formally and install costly abatement technologies, which are accessible only to formal firms. This paper studies a framework where firms, depending on abatement cost, the probability of inspection, the likelihood of a corrupt inspector and the bribe, choose whether to organize formally or informally and whether to abate before inspection. Firms that do not abate beforehand are liable to either pay a penalty and abate or close down post-inspection. Greater monitoring and lower abatement costs encourage firms to move towards formal organization, while excessively high penalties may discourage entry.

Let $\{u_n\}_n$ be a nondegenerate linear recurrence sequence of integers with Binet’s formula given by ${u_n= \sum _{i=1}^{m} P_i(n)\alpha _i^n.}$ Assume $\max _i \vert \alpha _i \vert>1$. In 1977, Loxton and Van der Poorten conjectured that for any $\epsilon>0$, there is an effectively computable constant $C(\epsilon )$ such that if $ \vert u_n \vert < (\max _i\{ \vert \alpha _i \vert \})^{n(1-\epsilon )}$, then $n<C(\epsilon )$. Using results of Schmidt and Evertse, a complete noneffective (qualitative) proof of this conjecture was given by Fuchs and Heintze [‘On the growth of linear recurrences in function fields’, Bull. Aust. Math. Soc. 104(1) (2021), 11–20] and, independently, by Karimov et al. [‘The power of positivity’, Proc. LICS 23 (2023), 1–11]. In this paper, we give an effective upper bound for the number of solutions of the inequality $\vert u_n \vert < (\max _i\{ \vert \alpha _i \vert \})^{n(1-\epsilon )}$, thus extending several earlier results by Schmidt, Schlickewei and Van der Poorten.

To investigate the effects of vocabulary practice timing on lexical learning and neural processing during communication tasks, we engaged 80 Japanese learners of English (40 pairs) in information-gap tasks with vocabulary practice in the pre-task or post-task phase. Learning of verb-noun combinations was orally assessed through translation and narrative tasks one week later. To quantify neural coupling between participants during task-based interaction, hyperscanning with fNIRS was used to measure inter-brain synchronization (IBS). Results showed that pre-task vocabulary practice led to greater learning, while post-task practice resulted in higher IBS in the brain region underlying language processing. Better vocabulary practice performance predicted more automatic use of multiword expressions in the post-task condition. IBS in the brain regions underlying social cognition and language processing predicted multiword learning. These findings reveal how practice timing influences neural synchronization and language acquisition, highlighting the importance of balancing lexical learning with communication processes in task-based language teaching.