Recent years have seen a vast expansion of scholarly interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black British histories, and increasing calls to support the work of early-career scholars (ECRs) in this field. Yet ECRs continue to face several specific challenges in conducting this crucial research. This section consists of a brief introduction and two case studies based on the research and experiences of Ph.D. students Annabelle Gilmore and Montaz Marché. Gilmore aims to amplify the connections between the lives and labour of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica and the wealth and art collection of William Thomas Beckford, now held at Charlecote Park, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Marché seeks to trace the presence of Black women in eighteenth-century London, drawing on archival documents that provide traces of who these women may have been, and confronting the limitations of the traditional archive. Together, these pieces offer a glimpse into how these ECRs are positioning themselves within the historiography as well as considering how they hope to contribute to the field.

How do opinion diversity and belief polarisation affect epistemic group decision-making, particularly if decisions must be made without delay and on the basis of permissive evidence? In an agent-based model, we track the consistency of group opinions aggregated through sentence-wise majority voting. Simulations on the model reveal that high opinion diversity, but not polarisation, incurs a significant inconsistency risk. These results indicate that epistemic group decisions based on permissive evidence can be particularly difficult for diverse groups. The results also improve our understanding of what can reasonably be expected of expert groups, and where expert advice might have limits.

The number of clinical studies assessing the effects of time-restricted eating (TRE) has increased in recent years(1). The results of the studies conducted on humans demonstrate some health benefits, however, there is still a need to design larger and longer randomized clinical trials to prove the effectiveness and long-term benefits of these types of interventions(2). However, to ensure these health benefits, individuals need to be able to integrate its principles into their daily routines. This work aimed to associate daily habits with the potential adherence to different TRE protocols and to determine the factors that predict adherence to these protocols.

A cross-sectional study was conducted using an online questionnaire based on a previous study(3), to assess the dietary and sleeping habits, daily routines and willingness to adhere to different windows of time-restricted eating in a sample of Portuguese adults. To analyze the associations between variables, the Spearman correlation coefficient and the Chi-Square test were calculated, and multiple linear regression was performed to identify the predictive factors. Statistical analysis was conducted on IBM SPSS Statistics version 29.0.

130 responses were obtained (26% men, 74% women) with a mean age of 37.9±13.59 years old. On workdays, 60.0% of participants reported a daily eating window (the period between the first and last caloric intake) of 12h-14h, while on free days the highest percentage (41.5%) was between 10h12h. An inverse correlation was observed between age and willingness to adhere to a TRE protocol if there were health benefits (r=-0.356, p<0.001). Moderate correlations were also found between the availability to follow a TRE protocol on work days (r=0.538) and free days (r=0.598) and the potential health benefits of this type of intervention (p<0.001)). Associations were found between sex and potential adherence to the TRE protocol (χ2=10.644, df=2, p=0.005), with a tendency for more men not to adhere to a TRE protocol. There was also an association between body weight management and reducing the eating window by 1h-2h (χ² =24.883, df=12, p=0.015) and 2h-3h (χ²=22.367, df=12, p=0.034). The living situation, motivation for change, income, weight management, cooking knowledge, and working schedule were among the main factors predicting the willingness to adhere to TRE protocols (p<0.05).

People’s willingness and motivation to adhere to TRE protocols outside the controlled environment of a clinical study depends on several factors. The results presented herein provide information that may be central when considering the translation of study results into nutritional practice and counselling.

One of the most pronounced features of the war in Ukraine has been the heavy reliance of the Russian forces on convict-soldiers, most notably by the private military and security company (PMSC) the Wagner Group. In this essay, I explore the ethical problems with using convict-soldiers and assess how using them compares to other military arrangements, such as conscription or an all-volunteer force. Overall, I argue that the central issue with using prisoners to fight wars is their perceived expendability. To do this, I present three arguments. First, although many prisoners have been under major duress, using convict-soldiers may be somewhat preferable to using conscripts in this regard. Second, convict-soldiers are more likely to be subject to human rights abuses than other types of soldiers and this should be seen as the main problem with their use. Third, convict-soldiers’ liability to lethal force for fighting in an unjust war does not render it permissible to treat them as expendable.

The human sciences should seek generalisations wherever possible. For ethical and scientific reasons, it is desirable to sample more broadly than ‘Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic’ (WEIRD) societies. However, restricting the target population is sometimes necessary; for example, young children should not be recruited for studies on elderly care. Under which conditions is unrestricted sampling desirable or undesirable? Here, we use causal diagrams to clarify the structural features of measurement error bias and target population restriction bias (or ‘selection restriction’), focusing on threats to valid causal inference that arise in comparative cultural research. We define any study exhibiting such biases, or confounding biases, as weird (wrongly estimated inferences due to inappropriate restriction and distortion). We explain why statistical tests such as configural, metric, and scalar invariance cannot address the structural biases of weird studies. Overall, we examine how the workflows for causal inference provide the necessary preflight checklists for ambitious, effective, and safe comparative cultural research.

In the books reviewed there is a cumulative resistance to the normative discourse, shifting our attention away from the centre and to the margins. This might mean listening to marginalized women, from the poets themselves to characters in poetry, or people today who relate to those female characters’ experiences. It might mean pushing beyond spatial boundaries and encountering dislocation and disjunction in the hazy hinterland of the non-elite. It might mean moving the human to one side, so that nature and the nonhuman can come to the fore (and teach us about what it means to be human, along the way). These books give voice to suppressed groups including women, animals, and the land. They highlight axes of oppression, and give us tools to shift the balance of power: from the language we use to the way we relate to the world around us. And with stories of prophetic horses, sympathetic lions, and pensive pigs, their interpretations – as well as the classical tales they recount – are not to be missed!

According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.

Inspired by K. Fujita's algebro-geometric result that complex projective space has maximal degree among all K-semistable complex Fano varieties, we conjecture that the height of a K-semistable metrized arithmetic Fano variety $\mathcal {X}$ of relative dimension $n$ is maximal when $\mathcal {X}$ is the projective space over the integers, endowed with the Fubini–Study metric. Our main result establishes the conjecture for the canonical integral model of a toric Fano variety when $n\leq 6$ (the extension to higher dimensions is conditioned on a conjectural ‘gap hypothesis’ for the degree). Translated into toric Kähler geometry, this result yields a sharp lower bound on a toric invariant introduced by Donaldson, defined as the minimum of the toric Mabuchi functional. Furthermore, we reformulate our conjecture as an optimal lower bound on Odaka's modular height. In any dimension $n$ it is shown how to control the height of the canonical toric model $\mathcal {X},$ with respect to the Kähler–Einstein metric, by the degree of $\mathcal {X}$. In a sequel to this paper our height conjecture is established for any projective diagonal Fano hypersurface, by exploiting a more general logarithmic setup.

The Strength of Weak Ties is among the most influential social theories of the past 50 years. However, its prediction that weak ties are especially useful for obtaining novel information is sometimes not supported. To understand why, I investigate whether social networks typically satisfy the theory’s assumptions, and whether the theory’s prediction is robust to violations of its assumptions. First, examining a diverse corpus of 56 empirical social networks, I show that empirical social networks (nearly) satisfy some but not all of the theory’s assumptions. Second, using a simulation of information diffusion, I show that the predicted utility of weak ties is not robust to violations of these assumptions. When the assumptions of the theory are violated, as is common in social networks, access to novel information depends on bridging ties, regardless of their strength. Moreover, when they exist, strong bridges (i.e., bridges with high bandwidth) are more useful than weak bridges (i.e., bridges with low bandwidth). I conclude by recommending that research applying this theory should first consider whether its assumptions are satisfied, and that a tie’s strength and bridgeness should be measured and modeled independently.

Since commencing its illegal invasion in 2022, the Russian military and authorities have committed numerous war crimes against the people of Ukraine. These include the mutilation and execution of combatants; the torture, kidnapping, forced expulsion, rape, and massacre of civilians; and indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas. In this essay, I evaluate the strategic implications of this misconduct, focusing exclusively on Western responses. I argue that war crimes can and often do negatively impact the strategic goals of the perpetrator, but whether and how this occurs is rarely governed exclusively by the offending action. Western perceptions of battlefield atrocity, shaped as they are by identity, race, and politics, may radically shift from one context to another. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, the status of both the participants and the conflict itself has helped inculcate a particular sensitivity among Western actors to the battlefield criminality of Russia. Drawing on evidence from the 2022 Bucha massacre and the ongoing bombing of Ukrainian civilians, I argue that Russian misconduct has consolidated Western support for the Ukrainian military effort, politically, diplomatically, and materially.

Classical archaeological chronologies are steeped in relative dating, but the application of absolute methods does not always support such clear-cut seriation. Here, the authors consider the significance of a Macedonian vase in reconciling the conventional and absolute chronologies of Early Iron Age Greece. Decorated with compass-drawn concentric circles and found in a Late Bronze Age context at ancient Eleon, Boeotia, the authors argue that this vessel establishes a chronological anchor and supports a twelfth-century BC emergence of the Protogeometric style in central Macedonia. A model for the indigenous development and dispersal of the Macedonian Protogeometric style is presented for future elaboration.

Now in its third year, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine remains at the very top of the international security agenda. This conflict has largely refocused the West's attention away from the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz went so far as to declare that the invasion signaled a zeitenwende, or “dawn of a new era.”1 Russia's aggression and the threat of having to fight a peer or near-peer competitor raises difficult questions, many of which are ethical in nature. The essays gathered in this roundtable seek to provide answers to some of those questions. They are the result of a workshop I organized for the King's College London Centre for Military Ethics in October 2023. One of my ambitions for this workshop was to put leading academics working on the ethics of war into discussion with military practitioners, making sure to include Ukrainian voices. I was very fortunate to succeed in these objectives, and I am convinced that the published essays have benefited enormously from our conversations.

Theorists of human evolution are interested in understanding major shifts in human behavioral capacities (e.g., the creation of a novel technological industry, such as the Acheulean). This task faces empirical challenges arising both from the complexity of these events and the time-depths involved. However, we also confront issues of a more philosophical nature, such as how to best think about causation and explanation. This article considers such fundamental questions from the perspective of a prominent theory of causation in the philosophy of science literature, namely, the interventionist theory of causation. A signature feature of this framework is its recognition of a family of distinct types of causes. We set out several of these causal notions and show how they can contribute to explaining transitions in human behavioral complexity. We do so, first, in a preliminary way, and then in a more detailed way, taking the origins of behavioral modernity as our extended case study. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which the approach developed here might be elaborated and extended.

In 1988, Haagerup and Størmer conjectured that every pointwise inner automorphism of a type ${\rm III_1}$ factor is a composition of an inner and a modular automorphism. We study this conjecture and prove that every type ${\rm III_1}$ factor with trivial bicentralizer indeed satisfies this condition. In particular, this shows that Haagerup and Størmer's conjecture holds in full generality if Connes’ bicentralizer problem has an affirmative answer. Our proof is based on Popa's intertwining theory and Marrakchi's recent work on relative bicentralizers.