This paper analyses one of the early and probably underestimated institutional lenders in northern Europe, the Church, using Sweden as a case study. Lending escalated from the 1770s onwards, making the church the dominant institutional lender in the mid-18th century. As other institutional lenders became stronger, lending declined. The success of church funds was a result of their strong local presence, being controlled by parishioners and overwhelmingly used by them, certainly by freehold farmers and local officials, and in the second half of the nineteenth century also by the landless. Even townspeople can be found among the borrowers. However, in previous studies of borrowing based on probate inventories, loans from the church have been scarce, leading to the conclusion that the church played a minor role as a lender. By combining probate inventories and church accounts, we can show that the church was an important lender in certain areas, but that most loans were medium-term and taken early in the life cycle, and therefore rarely visible in probate inventories, which were predominantly made after middle-aged or old people.

This article examines Charles Bell’s experimental practices by drawing historiographical attention away from the priority disputes over the spinal nerve functions for which he was most famous. I argue that Bell’s primary research interest was the expression of emotions. To this end, he developed a programme of vivisection that explored the underlying mechanisms of emotion. However, this also resulted in a profound contradiction between his experimental practices and his worldview – conducting painful experiments on beloved animals despite moral revulsion towards animal experimentation. This opens up three interconnected areas. Firstly, it allows an exploration of disciplinary identity in medicine, particularly the way that disciplines demanded specific practices and behaviours. Secondly, vivisection more generally required methods and ethics that opposed the growing anti-cruelty voice. Here, a combination of animal choice and the importation of techniques from the slaughterhouses was critical. Thirdly, vivisectors navigated a complex emotional landscape between their professional obligations and broader cultural sensibilities. These three areas are linked together using Boddice’s concept of moral economies, the affective frameworks that structured feelings. Particularly important were the sentimental and Romantic economies, both of which impacted Bell and his research. At the same time, Bell always struggled to reconcile the tensions between his disciplinary identity and his sentimental and Romantic beliefs, ultimately leading him to abandon experimentation after his assistant John Shaw’s death. I conclude by identifying the guarantees provided by character for licensing ostensibly cruel behaviours, thus allowing for the maintenance of probity within competing moral economies.

Evidence synthesis findings hinge upon well-designed, effective search strategies. When developing these strategies, evidence synthesis teams make multiple decisions (e.g., selecting information sources, developing search string architecture, and picking supplementary search methods) that directly affect the breadth of discovered evidence and thus evidence synthesis outcomes. Despite the number of decisions required when developing search strategies, limited guidance exists to inform these decisions using a data-driven approach. To help address this gap, we developed CiteSource, an R package and accompanying Shiny application, that supports data-driven search strategy development and reporting. CiteSource allows users to assign and retain metadata across three custom fields: source, label, and string to indicate where the records were found, what method or string was used to find them, and whether they were included after screening. CiteSource allows users to visually map the overlap between sets of records, create data summaries of citation records, and export citation records with the newly assigned metadata. CiteSource’s analysis and visualization outputs can be harnessed for a variety of use cases, such as optimizing literature source selection, honing and understanding the effectiveness of search strings, and evaluating the impacts of literature sources and supplementary search methods. Overall, CiteSource provides a tool for evidence synthesizers to make informed data-driven decisions that boost the efficiency, rigor, and transparency of search strategies and associated reporting.

Charles Taylor’s idea of “deep diversity” has played a major role in debates over multiculturalism in Canada and around the world. Originally, the idea was meant to account for how different groups within Canada — anglophone Canadians, francophone Quebecers, and Indigenous — conceive of their belonging to the country in different ways. Taylor, however, conceives of these differences strictly in terms of irreducibility; that is, he fails to see that they also mean that the country cannot be said to form a unified whole. After giving an account of the philosophical as well as theological reasons for this, I explore its political implications.

Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker’s intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed. We investigated how 10-year-olds’ working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 girls and 51 boys) were analysed. Results showed that children with stronger empathy skills had higher irony comprehension accuracy and were less likely to reread ironic phrases. Higher working memory was linked to faster processing of irony but did not lead to higher comprehension. Conversely, lower working memory was associated with more accurate irony comprehension. Child gender was not related to irony comprehension. These results imply that working memory and emotional perspective-taking are important for children’s irony comprehension, underscoring theories that take individual differences into account.

This article explicates the border as a metaphor for an English Canadian nation and for Canadian philosophy in English Canada. The concept of the nation is explicated with reference to Winthrop Pickford Bell. The role of metaphor in philosophy is justified while maintaining its distinction from literature or poetry. Key features of the concept of “border” are division, distinction, and relation. The fact that the border is open to two different interpretations testifies to its viability. Use of the border as a metaphor in philosophy and related cultural expressions suggests that it has a limited, though persisting, duration.

Marco Lippi was born in Rome in 1943. An indefatigable and inspiring pedagogue, he has been teaching mathematics, economics, the history of economic thought, and econometrics to generations of students at the Universities of Perugia, Rome (La Sapienza, Tor Vergata, and LUISS), Modena, the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, and the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) in Brussels. As a fellow of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF), he still teaches, with the indomitable enthusiasm that has become legendary among his students and colleagues, Master and Ph.D. courses offered by this renowned Roman institution.

This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

Energy poverty remains a persistent challenge in Nigeria, where over 40% of the population lacks reliable electricity despite vast renewable energy potential. While SDG 7 frames universal energy access as a justice imperative, renewable energy transitions generate complex social and environmental trade-offs that remain underexamined. This study assesses Nigeria’s renewable energy transition through the lens of energy justice, incorporating distributional, procedural, recognition, and restorative dimensions. Guided by three research questions, it evaluates: (1) the integration of energy justice principles in policy, (2) their implementation in practice, and (3) whether the transition can be considered just overall. Drawing on qualitative expert interviews, findings reveal multidimensional non-economic impacts. Benefits include improved health, enhanced educational access, livelihood opportunities, and environmental gains. However, significant harms persist, including displacement, land-use conflicts, electronic waste, cultural disruption, and gender-based vulnerabilities. While justice principles are often articulated in policy, implementation remains uneven: participation is frequently tokenistic, benefits are short-lived or unevenly distributed, vulnerable groups are insufficiently recognised, and reparative mechanisms are weak or absent. By linking these deficits to the persistence of energy poverty, the study shows that Nigeria’s transition remains incomplete from a justice perspective, underscoring the need for more inclusive and accountable governance frameworks.

Quantifying the contribution of vortex structures to wall forces is essential for identifying the primary sources of forces. The traditional force-element method focuses on the contribution of flow structures to the resultant force. However, the contribution of flow structures to the distributed force cannot be identified. This work proposes a distributed force element method to address this issue. Inspired by the framework of matched asymptotic expansions, the method resolves the surface pressure by matching the fundamental solutions of the outer wave and inner flow regions. The pressure is thus decomposed into contributions from a convective acceleration term, a boundary acceleration term and a boundary vorticity term. The method is implemented by solving the resulting linear system with singular value decomposition. The volume source is further decomposed into direct radiation and boundary scattering components. It is found that compared with the direct radiation component, the boundary scatter component decays fast in the wake. Consequently, the direct radiation component is dominant in the far wake. A finite-domain pressure correction is proposed based on the direct radiation component. The distributed force element method is validated using several benchmark cases: two-dimensional configurations including laminar flow around stationary and oscillating circular cylinders; three-dimensional cases comprising laminar flow past a sphere, subcritical flow past a sphere and laminar flow over an inclined spheroid. The results suggest that the proposed distributed force element method enables the precise quantification of how flow structures in the wake and around the bluff bodies contribute to the surface pressure.

The present study establishes a general theory for fluid-element rotation and intrinsic vorticity decompositions within the framework of vorticity kinematics. We propose two direction-dependent vorticity decompositions (DVDs) based on the analysis of rotation of directed material line and surface elements, with the rigid-rotation and spin modes of vorticity being explicitly defined. Intrinsic coupling relations are then derived for a pair of orthogonal line and surface elements, demonstrating their complementary roles in both kinematics and geometry. Notably, the surface-element-based spin mode is shown to coincide with the relative vorticity in the generalized Caswell formula, thereby providing a faithful representation of surface shear stress in Newtonian fluids. Correspondingly, another two DVDs are constructed based on the geometry of streamlines and streamsurfaces in the field description. Furthermore, within the characteristic algebraic description, in terms of the rotational invariants $(\psi ,\gamma )$ in the real Schur form of the velocity gradient tensor, two invariant vorticity decompositions (IVDs) are formulated. The first IVD with positive spin aligns with the Liutex-shear decomposition, which corresponds to the Klein–Kaden–Betz (KKB) mechanism by which wrapping shear layers form axial vortices. The second IVD is indispensable for understanding unidirectional swirling motion around a point on the rotation-axis-normal plane ${\mathcal{P}}$, corresponding to an anti-KKB mechanism/phenomenon characterized by the negative spin. Importantly, it is proved that the DVD vorticity modes are rigorously bounded by the IVD vorticity modes $(R_{N}^{\pm },s_{N}^{\pm })=(2\psi ^{\pm },\gamma ^{\pm })$ on ${\mathcal{P}}$. Finally, distinctive features and applicability of these kinematic tools are demonstrated with representative examples. The results indicate that a coupled IVD–DVD approach provides a powerful diagnostic tool for unravelling the subtle structures and fundamental physics inherent to complex flow fields.

The influence of hydrodynamic interactions on the schooling behaviour of fish is still poorly understood. This paper numerically investigates the collective motion of two parallel fish that move freely in both the longitudinal and lateral directions, focusing on the effects of wavelength and phase difference on their stable formations, swimming speed and energy efficiency. It is found that two parallel fish can achieve stable formations in both longitudinal and lateral directions, only via the hydrodynamic interactions. Three distinct modes are classified based on the cycle-averaged longitudinal speed, i.e. the steady slow mode, the steady fast mode and the fluctuating fast mode; which mode occurs depends on the wavelength and phase difference. Compared to a single fish, two fish in the steady slow mode swim slower, whereas they swim faster in both the steady fast and fluctuating fast modes, with a maximum speed increase of 12 % observed in the latter mode. Moreover, the fish school exhibits higher propulsive efficiency than a single fish in most cases. Furthermore, the power consumption and propulsive efficiency of each fish in different modes are discussed in detail. Finally, the mechanism behind the stable formations has been analysed. These results may shed some light on understanding the underlying mechanisms of fish schooling behaviour.

The ‘culturomics’ and other big data approaches have been widely used to trace the development of human cognition and social change. In this cross-lingual study, we examine historical changes in the frequency of discourse connectives (DCs) in Chinese, English, French, German and Spanish over the last two centuries. Our analyses reveal a robust and long-term decline in the frequency of most DCs in English, French, German and Spanish between 1800 and 2000. These diachronic trends closely parallel changes in other stylistic indicators, pointing to coherent shifts in language use and register evolution. Although our findings align with previous studies and recent observations of changing patterns in linguistic rationality, they should not be interpreted as evidence of declining human capacities for logic or rational reasoning. Instead, the observed patterns reflect a broad and sustained process of ‘colloquialization’ in written language, driven by socio-cultural transformations and evolving communicative norms. This study advances our understanding of historical language change and its underlying mechanisms, offering insights into the coevolution of language, cognition and society.

Radiocarbon dating is essential for establishing robust chronologies in archaeological and paleoenvironmental contexts spanning the last 55,000 years. Pottery, pervasive in the archaeological record, offers a crucial framework for dating human activity during the Holocene. Traditionally, radiocarbon dating of pottery has relied on targeting carbonaceous inclusions such as organic temper or measuring stratigraphically associated materials like bone and charcoal. Inaccuracies can arise, however, if the targeted fraction does not reflect the timing of vessel use or if stratigraphic associations are uncertain. An alternative involves radiocarbon dating of lipid residues, particularly fatty acids absorbed into the ceramic matrix during the processing and storage of plant and animal-derived resources. This approach holds promise for delivering highly accurate measurements directly correlating to vessel use. At the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, efforts have been made to develop this methodology through compound-specific radiocarbon dating of pottery, employing a gas chromatography (GC)-preparative fraction collector (PFC) approach. Here, we describe the protocol and present preliminary findings, including analyses conducted on pottery samples sourced from an archaeological site with an established chronology.