This paper reexamines the sources used by N. Fancy and M.H. Green in “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)” (Medical History, 65/2 (2021), 157–177). Fancy and Green argued that the Arabic and Persian descriptions of the Mongol sieges in Iran and Iraq, and in particular, in the conquest of Baghdad in 1258, indicate that the besieged fortresses and cities were struck by Plague after the Mongol sieges were lifted. This, they suggested, is part of a recurrent pattern of the outbreak of Plague transmitted by the Mongol expansion across Eurasia. Fancy and Green concluded that the primary sources substantiate the theory driven by recent paleogenetic studies indicating that the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century set the stage for the massive pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The link between the Plague outbreak and the Mongol siege of Baghdad relies on three near-contemporaneous historical accounts. However, our re-examination of the sources shows that the main text (in Persian) has been significantly misunderstood, and that the two other texts (in Syriac and Arabic) have been mis-contextualized, and thus not understood properly. They do not support the authors’ claim regarding Plague epidemic in Baghdad in 1258, nor do other contemporary and later Arabic texts from Syria and Egypt adduced by them, which we re-examine in detail here. We conclude that there is no evidence for the appearance of Plague during or immediately after the Mongol conquests in the Middle East, certainly not for its transmission by the Mongols.

We define a notion of substitution on colored binary trees that we call substreetution. We show that a point fixed by a substreetution may (or not) be almost periodic, and thus the closure of the orbit under the $\mathbb {F}_{2}^{+}$-action may (or not) be minimal. We study one special example: we show that it belongs to the minimal case and that the number of preimages in the minimal set increases just exponentially fast, whereas it could be expected a super-exponential growth. We also give examples of periodic trees without invariant measures on their orbit. We use our construction to get quasi-periodic colored tilings of the hyperbolic disk.

China's cattle trade before 1949 is effectively invisible to historians. With no geographic center, few dominant firms, and little government oversight, cattle trade left behind no clear archive of sources, leaving scholars to the mercy of conjecture and episodic evidence. Combining insights from business and social history, we focused our attention on trade intermediation as the key to understanding the operations of a diffuse trade system. In the absence of a top–down archive, we composited hundreds of local sources on intermediation in cattle trade and remotely interviewed 80 former brokers. These sources revealed large numbers of individuated trade routes, which we break into three types: persistent supply, specialized demand, and resource circulation. Each type of trade called for distinct forms of intermediation with relatively little overlap between specialized networks. This recreation of China's cattle trade reveals a sophisticated market for animal labor that calls into question the direct causal link between imperialist resource extraction and rural immiseration, and suggests the utility of applying tools and perspectives of social history to other sorts of decentered commercial systems.

Focus groups have become increasingly popular in political science alongside the growth in field experimental and other causal inference-oriented work in comparative politics. Yet, scholars rarely provide details about recruitment processes and descriptive statistics on focus-group participants. This situation is problematic given the likelihood of self-selection and the fact that scholars often use focus groups to pretest or refine experimental treatments or survey questionnaires. By leveraging a series of focus groups that were recruited from a pool of large-N survey respondents, this article demonstrates a method for assessing which variables drive the decision to participate. I recommend that scholars diagnose self-selection into focus groups whenever possible; that they compare participants to relevant baselines when working with samples of convenience; and that they always provide descriptive statistics and details on how focus-group members were recruited.

We give algorithms for approximating the partition function of the ferromagnetic $q$-color Potts model on graphs of maximum degree $d$. Our primary contribution is a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for $d$-regular graphs with an expansion condition at low temperatures (that is, bounded away from the order-disorder threshold). The expansion condition is much weaker than in previous works; for example, the expansion exhibited by the hypercube suffices. The main improvements come from a significantly sharper analysis of standard polymer models; we use extremal graph theory and applications of Karger’s algorithm to count cuts that may be of independent interest. It is #BIS-hard to approximate the partition function at low temperatures on bounded-degree graphs, so our algorithm can be seen as evidence that hard instances of #BIS are rare. We also obtain efficient algorithms in the Gibbs uniqueness region for bounded-degree graphs. While our high-temperature proof follows more standard polymer model analysis, our result holds in the largest-known range of parameters $d$ and $q$.

The debate concerning whether Aquinas changed his view on the perfection of the separated soul’s natural cognition, i.e., the cognition not elevated by God’s supernatural grace, remains to be settled. Anton Pegis has argued that according to Aquinas’s earlier view, a separated soul ‘will function perfectly as a separate substance’. However, according to Aquinas’s mature view, it ‘does not have the intellectual power to function properly as a separate substance’, so Aquinas changed his view. In contrast, John Wippel has denied that Pegis showed any radical change in Aquinas’s works on this issue. In this paper, I intend to advance this debate by arguing that, in his Commentary on Sentences IV (1252–56) d. 49, q. 1, a. 4, qc1, Aquinas expounded a view on the perfection of the separated soul’s natural cognition that is incompatible with his view in Summa Theologiae I (1265–68), q. 89, a. 1, co. I will also identify two markedly different views on the implication of the human soul-body union for the perfection of the separated soul’s cognition in these two texts. I contend that the incompatibility between the views in these two texts suggests that Aquinas changed his view.

Consensus-based optimisation (CBO) is a versatile multi-particle metaheuristic optimisation method suitable for performing non-convex and non-smooth global optimisations in high dimensions. It has proven effective in various applications while at the same time being amenable to a theoretical convergence analysis. In this paper, we explore a variant of CBO, which incorporates truncated noise in order to enhance the well-behavedness of the statistics of the law of the dynamics. By introducing this additional truncation in the noise term of the CBO dynamics, we achieve that, in contrast to the original version, higher moments of the law of the particle system can be effectively bounded. As a result, our proposed variant exhibits enhanced convergence performance, allowing in particular for wider flexibility in choosing the noise parameter of the method as we confirm experimentally. By analysing the time evolution of the Wasserstein-$2$ distance between the empirical measure of the interacting particle system and the global minimiser of the objective function, we rigorously prove convergence in expectation of the proposed CBO variant requiring only minimal assumptions on the objective function and on the initialisation. Numerical evidences demonstrate the benefit of truncating the noise in CBO.

This article describes a series of steps to integrate multiple modes of archaeological mapping in arid and agricultural settings. We use the coastal region of Peru as a case study and share our recent field experience at Cerro San Isidro, a multicomponent hill site located in the agriculture-intensive and mid-elevation (about 500 m asl) Moro region of the Nepeña Valley. In June and July 2022, we spent eight weeks deploying a combination of drone aerial imagery, pedestrian GPS reconnaissance, and GPR survey to map the surface and subsurface features at the site and in the adjacent agricultural fields. Our efforts suggest that the ancient settlement extended over an area of at least 50 ha, well beyond the visible surface architecture. Using a multimodal approach to confirming the partial destruction of archaeological vestiges by modern agricultural encroachment is both time-effective and noninvasive. The article offers insights from our experience, including the sequence of field operations, technical troubleshooting, and the collection and integration of datasets. We discuss the methodological potential and implications of this combination of multimodal mapping and its deployment in coastal Peru, a region that, like many others in the world, is increasingly subject to rapid agricultural expansion and other anthropogenic developments.

The purpose of this clinical improvement project was to instill a streamlined process of identifying social determinants of health (SDOH) in our clinic’s diverse patient population and provide resources that address these barriers to health and well-being. At each clinic visit, patients self-identified SDOH through an easy-to-use Social Assessment Form. Using an online database, Community Relay (CR), providers had access to location-based community resources. In addition to accomplishing the above-mentioned goals, we were left with a more well-rounded understanding of our patients. Unique struggles were identified and barriers to care were revealed, allowing for more patient-centered medical care.