Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely resolve) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research.

Situated at the southernmost limits of the late Pleistocene Eurasian permafrost zone, the loess–paleosol sequences of the Lower Volga region contain numerous traces of cryogenesis. Cryogenic features are represented by thin vertical wedges in loess and paleosols, and involutions and wedges in alluvial deposits. Here we describe and interpret four stages of cryogenesis during the late Pleistocene, based on analysis of cryogenic structure morphology, morphoscopy of quartz grains, and micromorphology of subaerial sediments, in addition to calculation of the Cryogenic Weathering Index and a new luminescence chronology derived from published ages. These stages differ in type and distribution of cryostructures and formed in different paleogeographic conditions. Stage I, dated 95–90 ka (Marine Isotope Stage [MIS] 5b), is characterized by the existence of continuous permafrost in northern part of the Lower Volga valley. Stage II (75–70 ka, MIS 5a/MIS 4) is characterized by dry and cold conditions and widespread permafrost. During stage III (52–45 ka, MIS 3b/c), the permafrost was thin and of sporadic distribution. Stage IV (37–35 ka, MIS 3a) is characterized by thin and rare sporadic permafrost. The processes of cryogenic transformation of sediments in the region during these stages took place under both permafrost and seasonal frost conditions. The results obtained significantly improve current understanding of the extent of the permafrost in the south of the East European Plain during the late Pleistocene.

We study why suffering a negative economic shock, i.e., a significant loss, may trigger a change in other-regarding behavior. We conjecture that people trade off concern for money with a conditional preference to follow social norms and that suffering a shock makes extrinsic motivation more salient, leading to more norm violation. This hypothesis is grounded on the premise that preferences are norm-dependent. We study this question experimentally: after administering losses on the earnings from a real-effort task, we analyze choices in prosocial and antisocial settings. To derive our predictions, we elicit social norms for each context analyzed in the experiments. We find evidence that shock increases deviations from norms.

This article demonstrates how the application of a broad and decontextualized distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” Muslims can undermine our assessment of an Islamic identity, security, and radicalization. It compares how this distinction has been used by the British colonial administrators (in Raffles, Crawfurd, Marsden, and Swettenham) in nineteenth-century Malaya and by Malaysia's Prime Ministers (Mahathir, Badawi, and Najib) in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This comparison demonstrates that both groups, despite their very different backgrounds (Western non-Muslim and Muslim non-Western), introduced a similar distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” driven more by socio-political objectives than by religious ones. Furthermore, the article stresses the importance of considering the socio-political and contextual dimensions of Islamic identity before attempting to explain the process of radicalization and its implications for security. Such an approach discourages reference to broad categories such as “moderate,” “extremist,” “Islamism,” or “Salafism,” and allows for discussion of their contextual and socio-political connotations.

This paper explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) within economic institutions, focusing on bounded rationality as understood by Herbert Simon. Artificial Intelligence can do many things in the economy, such as increasing productivity, enhancing innovation, creating new sectors and jobs, and improving living standards. One of the ways that AI can disrupt the economy is by reducing the problem of bounded rationality. AI can help overcome this problem by processing large amounts of data, finding patterns and insights, and making predictions and recommendations. This insight raises the question: can AI overcome planning problems – could it be that central planning is now a viable option for economic organisation? This paper argues that AI does not make central planning viable at either the nation-state level or the firm level, simply because AI cannot resolve the knowledge problem as described by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

Under what conditions do countries lose their status as the leading global financial center? Some scholars argue that such shifts follow shortly after transitions in the distribution of other key capabilities (e.g. GDP), while others argue that path dependence or other more bespoke capabilities might be able to sustain financial leadership long after decline in other capabilities. This paper aims to understand the causes of the Anglo-American financial transition. I argue that the ability to manage political risk for investors is critical to the position of countries as financial entrepôts. In the case of British financial leadership, I argue that Britain’s position as an entrepôt hinged on its power projection capability, which enabled Britain to limit political risk for investors in ways that other states could not replicate. The gradual loss of those capabilities, in turn, saw Britain eventually become overshadowed by the United States. I support my claims with a TERGM analysis of the interwar sovereign debt network.

Notre recherche visait à mettre en lumière les pratiques bientraitantes des préposées aux bénéficiaires en milieux d’hébergement pour aînés au Québec. L’objet de l’article est de faire ressortir la dichotomie entre les définitions de la bientraitance et son opérationnalisation. Dans la première partie, la notion de bientraitance dans le cadre de deux politiques gouvernementales québécoises est présentée. Ensuite, il est question du travail des préposées aux bénéficiaires en tant que vectrices de cette bientraitance dans la pratique. La troisième partie présente les résultats de notre recherche qui viennent soulever trois constats remettant en cause l’applicabilité des politiques publiques en cette matière : l’absence de reconnaissance d’un métier par définition bientraitant; les injonctions normatives à l’encontre du sens attribué à la bientraitance, et les obstacles organisationnels et sociopolitiques à la bientraitance. Ces constats sont réexaminés à la lumière des écrits dans la discussion, laquelle ouvre sur la notion de maltraitance organisationnelle.

Quantifying the distance between cultural groups has received substantial recent interest. A key innovation, borrowed from population genetics, is the calculation of cultural FST (CFST) statistics on datasets of human culture. Measuring the variance between groups as a fraction of total variance, FST is theoretically important in additive models of cooperation. Consistent with this, recent empirical work has confirmed that high values of pairwise CFST (measuring cultural distance) strongly predict unwillingness to cooperate with strangers in coordination vignettes. As applications for CFST increase, however, there is greater need to understand its meaning in naturalistic situations beyond additive cooperation. Focusing on games with both positive and negative frequency dependence and high-diversity, mixed equilibria, we derive a simple relationship between FST and the evolution of group-beneficial traits across a broad spectrum of social interactions. Contrary to standard assumptions, this model shows why FST can have both positive and negative marginal effects on the spread of group-beneficial traits under certain realistic conditions. These results provide broader theoretical direction for empirical applications of CFST in the evolutionary study of culture.

Wildlife conservation on private land is an important approach that is increasingly utilized to protect biodiversity and can help contribute to the 30 by 30 target of the Global Biodiversity Framework. In 2018, a Chilean non-profit conservation organization launched a land conservation programme aiming to build long-term partnerships with private landowners to protect critical habitat for threatened amphibians in Chilean Patagonia. Here we describe a new locality record of the micro-endemic, Endangered Barrio's frog Insuetophrynus acarpicus found at a site that joined the programme in 2020. Barrio's frog is ranked 11th in the list of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered amphibians. Our systematic literature search showed that most aspects of the natural history and ecology of this species are unknown, limiting our ability to provide actionable science to inform its conservation. The newly described Barrio's frog population is the eighth known locality of this species and one of only three occurring within a protected area. Habitat quality assessments indicated optimal conditions for most of the measured habitat parameters in the high-gradient stream where the species occurs. This case study illustrates that long-term partnerships between private landowners and conservationists can be used as an effective tool to protect the habitat of highly threatened amphibians.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that individual differences in declarative memory may be an important predictor of second language (L2) abilities. However, the evidence comes from studies using different declarative memory tasks that vary in their reliance on verbal abilities and task demands, which preclude estimating the size of the relationship between declarative memory and L2 learning. To address these concerns, we examined the relationship between verbal and nonverbal declarative memory abilities within the same task while controlling for task demands and stimulus modality, to estimate the upper bound of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal declarative memory. Results indicate that when task demands and stimulus modality are controlled, verbal and nonverbal declarative memory abilities shared a medium-to-large amount of underlying variance. However, future studies should exercise caution in appraising associations between declarative memory abilities and L2 learning until a more precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms is achieved.

The waterscape, including the sea, rivers, and lakes, was highly important to communities living during the Nordic Early Bronze Age (1800/1700–1100 bc). Waterways acted as highways that facilitated journeys, trade, and warfare, enabling maritime warriors and others to distinguish themselves. This is reflected in the maritime location of rock art and important Early Bronze Age burials, which have been used to reconstruct the Nordic Bronze Age cosmology. This centres on the journey of the sun across the sky during the day, and the underworld during night. This article analyses the use of water-related resources, such as seaweed, petrified organics, beach pebbles, and molluscs, in the construction of burials, which has received little attention despite renewed interest in the maritime seascape. The data demonstrate that local communities used different resources, indicating that a common belief system was realised in local differences. These marine materials were collected from the beach, which can be conceptualised as the liminal zone between the land of the living and the sea of the dead. It is suggested that these materials, in line with other funerary practices, helped to guide the recently deceased into the afterlife in the sea.

This research investigated the impact of the number of talkers with whom children engage in daily conversation on their language development. Two surveys were conducted in 2020, targeting two-year-olds growing up in Japanese monolingual families. Caregivers reported the number of talkers in three age groups and children’s productive vocabulary via questionnaires. The results demonstrated significant effects of variability in talkers in fifth grade or above in Study 1 (N = 50; male = 23; r = .372) and in adult talkers in Study 2 (N = 175; non-nursery going; male = 76; r = .184) on children’s vocabulary development, after controlling for language exposure time and demographic variables. Possible mediating factors are discussed. This research extends previous findings from immigrant bilingual children to monolingual speakers in Japan, suggesting the potential contribution of available talkers other than caregivers in conversational environments.

We took a multilevel developmental contextual approach and characterized trajectories of alcohol misuse from adolescence through early midlife, examined genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in those trajectories, and identified adolescent and young adult factors associated with change in alcohol misuse. Data were from two longitudinal population-based studies. FinnTwin16 is a study of Finnish twins assessed at 16, 17, 18, 25, and 35 years (N = 5659; 52% female; 32% monozygotic). The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a study of adolescents from the United States, who were assessed at five time points from 1994 to 2018 (N = 18026; 50% female; 64% White, 21% Black, 4% Native American, 7% Asian, 9% Other race/ethnicity). Alcohol misuse was measured as frequency of intoxication in FinnTwin16 and frequency of binge drinking in Add Health. In both samples, trajectories of alcohol misuse were best described by a quadratic growth curve: Alcohol misuse increased across adolescence, peaked in young adulthood, and declined into early midlife. Individual differences in these trajectories were primarily explained by environmental factors. Several adolescent and young adult correlates were related to the course of alcohol misuse, including other substance use, physical and mental health, and parenthood.

There is evidence that seaweed production can involve a variety of physical risks, but there has been little study of how wider contextual factors – such as enterprise size, economic and business relations, and forms of employment arrangements – may affect workers’ safety. This study explores the impact of such aspects on workers’ experiences of occupational safety and health (OSH) risks and their management in the developing seaweed industry, in North West Europe. Based on qualitative findings from a survey and discussions with owners/managers, workers and stakeholders in the industry, the study identified a number of issues relating to OSH in seaweed production. These include the predominance of micro small enterprises, the presence of significant risks to health and safety and limitations in the capacity of owners/managers to address them, as well as structural and economic factors in the sector that promote precarious work, and the low visibility and inaccessibility of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) to both public and private regulations. The paper discusses experiences of these issues in the emergent industry and relates them to the wider literature about work health and safety in micro and small firms and precarious and non-standard forms of work, typically found in agriculture and food production. Findings point to the need for better orchestration of public and private regulatory influences and further research to determine if strategies that are seen as successful in other sectors could be transferred to the emergent European seaweed industry.