Public health campaigns among Catholic Mexican American populations in New Mexico in the mid-twentieth century often relied on the expertise of anthropologists and sociologists to help tailor the campaigns to Mexican American culture. Social scientists produced several reports based on fieldwork that suggested that New Mexican village religious practices and beliefs, often referred to as “folk Catholicism,” were durable barriers to embracing scientific healthcare standards. This article uses those reports to reveal and analyze the role that public health campaigns and social science researchers played in defining and challenging Hispano religious healing traditions. It likewise examines the various intersections of science and racializing discourse in the reports. I argue that these social scientific studies of Spanish-speaking, New Mexican village culture were intended to facilitate the “right” kind of assimilation to Anglo cultural norms around health, one that paradoxically aimed to include Hispanos in modern medicine while simultaneously defining essential religio-racial difference. The regulation of Hispano bodies rested on social scientific discourses that racialized religion, science, and health.

This article responds to Wells & Giacco’s discussion of the theoretical frameworks that guide qualitative research. In addition to the methods they explore, I describe ethnography, focusing on the anthropological investigation of culture. I use examples from the research literature to highlight the unique values of ethnography. I describe what ethnography entails, before outlining illustrations of how ethnographic research has contributed to psychiatric clinical practice. Although it is difficult to generalise from the findings of ethnographic research, its focus on how social processes work and how people perceive them in a particular context makes it useful for advancing improvements in clinical care.

While a growing body of literature studies the effects of weather shocks on economic activity in low-income countries, relatively little is known about their impact on cross-border capital flows. This study investigates whether weather shocks, specifically deviations in precipitation and temperature from their long-term averages, trigger capital flight from Africa. Exploiting the variation in within-country exposure to weather shocks, we find that temperature shocks lead to increased capital outflows and trade misinvoicing. The long-run relationship between temperature and capital flight is conditional upon country-specific factors, such as reliance on oil exports, institutional frameworks and financial infrastructures. Our findings reveal a moderate role of state capacity in the relationship between weather shocks and capital flight, highlighting the need for further investigation into other potential mechanisms.

The aim of this study is to explore how large language models (LLMs) integrated with structured versus unstructured concept generation techniques (CGTs) influence designers’ creative thinking processes and outputs. Using human–human collaboration (HHC) as a baseline, a 2 × 2 mixed factorial design was adopted to investigate the effects of collaborator type (between-subjects: LLM-based agents vs. experienced designers) and CGT type (within-subjects: brainstorming vs. TRIZ). Two LLM-based agents, IntelliStorm and EvoluTRIZ, were developed for the study, with 32 participants randomly assigned to either the HHC or human–agent collaboration (HAC) groups. Brain activity was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, while outputs were assessed through expert evaluations. Results showed that designers exhibited lower cognitive load, better cognitive resource coordination, and enhanced fluency and flexibility in thinking in HAC than in HHC. Moreover, distinct patterns were revealed in different CGTs: brainstorming activated the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the core connectivity region, enhancing ideational fluency, whereas TRIZ activated the left dorsolateral PFC, facilitating refined thinking. Although HAC demonstrated stronger overall performance, HHC retained unique advantages in originality. This research offers novel neuroscientific insights and provides evidence-based guidance for developing more effective LLM-based design agents.

We study experimentally, numerically and theoretically the gravitational instability induced by dissolution of carbon dioxide with a forced lateral flow. The study is restricted to the model case of a vertical Hele-Shaw cell filled with water. While a transverse (horizontal) flow is continuously forced through the whole cell, the carbon dioxide is introduced above the liquid–gas interface so that a $\textrm {CO}_2$-enriched diffusive layer gradually forms on top of the liquid phase. The diffusive layer destabilises through a convective process which entrains the $\textrm {CO}_2$–water mixture towards the bottom of the cell. The concentration fields are measured quantitatively by means of a pH-sensitive dye (bromocresol green) that reveals a classic fingering pattern. We observe that the transverse background flow has a stabilising effect on the gravitational instability. At low velocity (i.e. for small thickness-based Péclet numbers), the behaviour of the system is hardly altered by the background flow. Beyond a threshold value of the Péclet number ($\textit{Pe} \sim 15$), the emergence of the fingering instability is delayed (i.e. the growth rate becomes smaller), while the most unstable wavelength is increased. These trends can be explained by the stabilising role of the Taylor–Aris dispersion in the horizontal direction and a model is proposed, based on previous works, which justifies the scalings observed in the limit of large Péclet number for the growth rate ($\sigma ^\star \sim \textit{Pe}^{-4}$) and the most unstable wavelength ($\lambda ^\star \sim \textit{Pe}^{\,5/2}$). The flux (rate mass transfer) of $\textrm {CO}_2$ in the nonlinear regime is also weakly decreased by the background transverse flow.

The Biden-Harris administration launched two important initiatives to expand public participation in the administrative state. These initiatives aimed to increase public engagement in developing federal regulations and reducing burdens in accessing public benefits. These two initiatives built on social science, especially political science. In this piece, I draw from my experience helping to lead the work to describe how political science research informed the design and implementation of both initiatives. I aim to open the “black box” of how federal policy makers use political science research. I also describe future research that could advance these initiatives. I conclude with a case study of such research, examining the barriers faced by food assistance applicants to sharing their experiences with government with a survey of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants. The survey points to barriers government must overcome to expand participation among SNAP applicants and strategies policy makers might use to do so.

The English modals have been used as case studies in many domains of linguistic enquiry. Their diachronic development and patterns of synchronic variation in historical and contemporary corpora have been used to develop theories of linguistic representation, to further understanding of correlations between structure and use, and to investigate relationships between form and meaning. However, much of this research explores only the modals themselves: relatively little attention has been given to the study of modal collocations. In this article, we explore variation and change in collocational patterns of two modals (may and might) when they appear directly adjacent to the adverb well. Our analysis is corpus based, using quantitative data to explore macro-level trends in recent American English, and qualitative analysis to explore micro-level variation, particularly with regard to the development of concessive uses of may and might, and post-modal meanings more generally. We foreground the idea that modals show subtly different diachronic trends in specific collocations compared to perceived trends when looked at as an isolated class of auxiliary verbs.

Fārābī had an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s Harmonics and was deeply immersed in it. The evidence is internal to Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-kabīr. A passage can be found at the end of the first book of the madḫal in which Ptolemy is mentioned by name and his treatise on music also receives explicit mention. The puzzle is that, according to Fārābī, Ptolemy acknowledges directly in the Harmonics that he could not discriminate different patterns of attunement by ear, but Ptolemy nowhere makes any comment about his level of musicianship. The best way to understand Fārābī’s puzzling claim is as an inference from Ptolemy’s attempt to disprove Aristoxenus’ argument that the fourth is equal to two and a half tones. The paper argues that the inference is plausible, that Fārābī drew it and that he could not have drawn it without being intimately familiar with Ptolemy’s Harmonics.

Archaeologists have long investigated the rise of inequality in prehistoric Europe. I argue that images of steadily increasing inequality are usually based on cherry-picking outstanding cases and selectively interpreting the results. Based on a large-scale qualitative assessment of the Central Mediterranean, I make two claims. First, a broad review of evidence suggests that social inequality was not a major organizing principle of most prehistoric societies. Instead, throughout prehistory, inequality formed part of a heterogeneous, heterarchical social order. Second, this was not simply due to historical chance or stagnation. As my outline of the “people’s history” of prehistoric Europe suggests, many of the archaeologically most visible developments in every period were actively aimed at undermining, encapsulating, or directing the potential development of hierarchy. In this sense, Europe’s long prehistory of limited and ambiguous hierarchy does not represent a failure of social evolution but rather widespread success in developing tactics for maintaining equality.

Archaeology has been closely entangled with dominant power structures since its formal emergence in the nineteenth century. Recent scholarly work has sought to challenge this relationship and destabilize the fundamental Eurocentrism of archaeological theory and praxis. The extent to which this effort is reflected beyond academia has, however, not been as widely explored. In this article, the author presents evidence concerning the production of archaeological knowledge within the academy, the dissemination of knowledge of the past in schools and the media, and the consumption of this knowledge by members of the British public, including adults and secondary school pupils aged 11–14. He concludes that there exists a fundamental disjuncture between contemporary scholarly work and popular perceptions of the past and suggests some ways the academy may challenge the continued prevalence of Eurocentric perspectives of the past in popular discourse.

We report the results of an experiment on selective exposure to information. A decision maker interested in learning about an uncertain state of the world can acquire information from one of two sources that have opposite biases: when informed on the state, they report it truthfully; when uninformed, they report their favorite state. A Bayesian decision-maker is better off seeking confirmatory information unless the source biased against the prior is sufficiently more reliable. In line with the theory, subjects are more likely to seek confirmatory information when sources are symmetrically reliable. On the other hand, when sources are asymmetrically reliable, subjects are more likely to consult the more reliable source even when prior beliefs are strongly unbalanced and this source is less informative. Our experiment suggests that base rate neglect and simple heuristics (e.g., listen to the most reliable source) are important drivers of the endogenous acquisition of information.

Multi-judge courts may seem like paradigmatic examples of group agents. For instance, they issue decisions in the name of a group. Like other groups, courts arrive at these decisions by means of a vote that is not always unanimous. Unlike other groups, courts do not need a majority vote to issue a decision. Plurality judgements can occur, where the court’s decision is formed by multiple sets of reasons, none of which represents a majority of the judges. These show that a court’s decisions on issues and outcomes are distinct. Minority reasons may influence the state of the law on a particular issue if they agree with another set of reasons. This allows the court to preserve decision-making both on outcome and on premises. The result is that Kornhauser and Sager’s doctrinal paradox, sometimes called the discursive dilemma, is not the same for courts as it is for other group agents.

Near-infrared spectra (NIRS) from plant tissues can be used to predict traits owing to their relationship to internal biochemical states, shaped by both environmental and genetic components. Here, we tested the use of NIRS as predictors of budbreak the following year. We measured NIRS on leaf and bud tissue, collected at several dates during the growing season, of 240 dessert apple cultivars in 2021 and 2022. NIRS collected in 2021 and budbreak of 2022 were used to train partial least squares (PLSR) models, then tested using NIRS of 2022 to predict budbreak in 2023. A GWAS using these predictions identified a QTL, previously associated to budbreak in apple, indicating a significant genetic component was maintained in the predictions. Our results demonstrate the potential of NIRS to predict future developmental stages, such as budbreak, by detecting the metabolic states that precede them and could aid in genetic studies of difficult-to-measure traits.

It is often assumed that the rural identity is linked to the Republican Party and the urban identity to the Democratic Party, but little scholarship has investigated how voters connect thiese identities to the parties in an electoral context and how that perception may influence their electoral preferences. Furthermore, recent elections have seen various political elites employ rural and Evangelical Christian identity labels in virtually synonymous ways in their association with the Republican Party. But are these partisan stereotypes really how Americans perceive these candidate identities? Utilizing a novel survey experiment, we find important distinctions between religious and place-based candidate cues. Our results show the enduring power of religion in partisan politics and suggest America’s urban-rural divide may be asymmetric in the minds of voters. These findings are subsequently meaningful for the study of religion’s place in America’s growing array of politicized social identities.