Decades before educators were forced to confront the disruption posed by widely accessible generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, language learners, instructors, and researchers began dealing with its game-changing predecessor: machine translation (MT). Researchers began assessing MT systems and proposing language teaching applications for them as soon as universities and schools gained access to them in the mid-1980s (*Anderson, 1995*; Ball, 1989*; Corness, 1985; French 1991; Lewis, 1997; Richmond, 1994*). These inquiries accelerated in the early 2000s, when internet-enabled computer labs and increasingly smarter devices put free online MT services such as Babel Fish and Google Translate (GT) at students' fingertips, triggering concerns over output quality, academic dishonesty, and the short-circuiting of actual learning. In recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of research on MT's role in and impact on language teaching and learning, with many dozens of peer-reviewed articles published in the past five years alone, as documented in a handful of comprehensive literatures reviews (Gokgoz-Kurt, 2023; Jiang et al., 2024; Jolley & Maimone, 2022; Klimova et al., 2023; Lee, 2023). The present article provides a timeline of this rapidly expanding research domain.

The drinking party at Medius’ in Babylon on 31 May 323 b.c., marking the onset of Alexander’s terminal illness, is explored from contemporary and later texts. Close reading of fragments by Nicobule and Aristobulus, set beside the reticence of the court daybooks (Ephemerides) and the studied vagueness of secondary sources, clarifies in detail the sequence of events. Justin, Plutarch and the author of the Liber de morte Alexandri cast light on the silence imposed by the King’s successors. A narrative emerges of the day itself, the spread of rumour, the two false explanations for Alexander’s death that were successively propagated, and the third explanation, most probably correct, that Aristobulus was first to publish.

Let X be a smooth projective variety over a complete discretely valued field of mixed characteristic. We solve non-Archimedean Monge–Ampère equations on X assuming resolution and embedded resolution of singularities. We follow the variational approach of Boucksom, Favre, and Jonsson proving the continuity of the plurisubharmonic envelope of a continuous metric on an ample line bundle on X. We replace the use of multiplier ideals in equicharacteristic zero by the use of perturbation friendly test ideals introduced by Bhatt, Ma, Patakfalvi, Schwede, Tucker, Waldron, and Witaszek building upon previous constructions by Hacon, Lamarche, and Schwede.

Weeds incur up to A$4 billion in economic loss annually to Australian agriculture. Despite this knowledge, few quantitative data exist on yield loss and control costs caused by weeds. This article discusses the economic cost of managing the invasive Navua sedge weed to the grazing and cropping (sugarcane) industries of northern Queensland, Australia, following its introduction into the region in the 1970s. Between 2020 and 2022, through a survey questionnaire distributed to affected farmers, information on control cost, yield loss, and infestation history were documented. Collated data were analyzed using primarily nonparametric statistics due to the skewed or qualitative nature of many of the responses. The weed has invaded farming properties over the past 10 to 20 yr, the infestation level is considered to be low to moderate (median, 22.5%), and it varies appreciably among properties. The median cost of managing Navua sedge was A$72.91/ha when the study was conducted (the current value is now A$82.06). Neither this cost nor the type of management tactics (chemical vs. integrated weed management [IWM]) did not vary between land use types; however, labor, relative to chemical and machinery costs, was the greatest expense. The currently approved herbicide, halosulfuron-methyl (Sempra), is largely ineffective in controlling the weed due to its inability to deplete the weed’s belowground tubers. Correlation analyses suggest that control costs will continue to increase with increasing Navua sedge infestation over time, especially in grazing lands. Farmers are highly aware of the challenge of managing this new weed. Farmers are using a myriad of strategies, including being willing to impose strict biosecurity measures and IWM tactics, while waiting for more effective herbicides and promising biocontrol agents to minimize the spread and impact of the weed.

This study explores the role of influencers in shaping public opinion about feminism in Spain, a country where gender equality and feminist discourse have gained relevant public prominence. Although the figure of the influencer may appear novel, the process of opinion formation mirrors that which has historically prevailed for celebrities in traditional media. However, the inherent characteristics of social media endow influencers with even greater tools of persuasion. We test this argument by collecting a representative survey of the Spanish population and analyzing posts and videos from influencers’ profiles, employing manual content analysis. Our findings reveal that audiences of incidental feminist influencers exhibit stronger pro-feminist attitudes, while those of incidental anti-feminist influencers lean toward anti-feminist views. Additional analysis using propensity score matching offers further evidence of the persuasive power of influencers, even after adjusting for potential selection biases in their audiences.

Some leading UK politicians have claimed that a culture of welfare dependency exists and that a sizeable number of unemployed benefit claimants lack an appropriate commitment to employment. Such claims were used to justify the 2012 Welfare Reform Act’s new measures to steer unemployed claimants towards applying for and retaining jobs they might not want. The statistical analysis presented here is the first to explore possible connections between people’s attitudes towards disliked/unattractive jobs, their parents’ employment status, and the total time they have spent in unemployment. Logistic regression analysis used Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)/Next Steps data on people born in 1989/90 to predict whether they spent an unusually long time unemployed between age eighteen and twenty-five; an attitude favouring joblessness over a disliked/unattractive job was a nonsignificant predictor in eleven of twelve multivariate models, and a weak predictor (OR = 1.32) in the other.

People experience heritage at historic sites as landscapes that include both environmental and cultural meaning. Heritage as social action overcomes the dichotomies of nature versus culture and past versus present, which are obstacles to resiliency and sustainability in this era of rising sea levels. That insight is exemplified by a program addressing climate change on the Florida Gulf Coast. The program includes community conversations on climate change and initial steps at multiscalar research using techniques from archaeology, environmental studies, and biology. At the broadest scales, the approach reconstructs the distribution of coastal heritage locations from the decades preceding human-caused sea-level rise to the present. At finer levels of temporal and spatial resolution, research documents vegetation, marine invertebrates, and material changes. At the finest scales, studies of microorganisms that inhabit historic and archaeological sites are inventoried. Integrating those scales through community-based archaeology offers the social meanings for coastal heritage under threat of rising sea levels, both to motivate actions to preserve the past and to prepare the public for the coming landscape transformations as an avenue for community conversations.

Site-specific herbicide applications with remotely piloted aerial application systems (RPAASs) offer the potential for reducing herbicide inputs in turfgrass systems. However, information on spray nozzle selection and application volume for this approach is lacking. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of nozzle type and spray volume on the efficacy of site-specific herbicide application to turf using an RPAAS, focusing on large crabgrass control with quinclorac. The research was conducted in 2022 at two sites in College Station, TX. The treatments were combinations of three nozzle types (XR 80-015 [conventional, extended range], DG 80-015 [drift guard], and AI 80-015 [air induction] flat-fan nozzles) and two spray volumes (10 and 15 L ha−1), applied with a single-nozzle RPAAS. A spray volume of 102 L ha−1 applied with a CO2-pressurized four-nozzle boom backpack sprayer served as a check for comparison. Two additional treatments were also included: a pure formulated herbicide application (without dilution in water) using an RPAAS equipped with an XR 80-005 flat-fan nozzle at 4.6 L ha−1, and an untreated control. The backpack sprayer application resulted in the highest spray solution deposits on large crabgrass plants (12 times more on average), compared to the RPAAS applications. Nevertheless, applications using the RPAAS with the DG and AI nozzles at 10 or 15 L ha−1 provided similar levels of weed control as that of the backpack sprayer at 102 L ha−1, indicating that RPAAS can be effectively used for site-specific herbicide applications to turf. This study also suggests that large crabgrass can be controlled using RPAAS with a range of spray nozzle types at low application volumes to turfgrass. Further research is needed to assess the efficacy of RPAAS-based herbicide applications across a range of herbicides, weed species, and environmental conditions.

This paper assesses a major transition in energy usage and distribution in the United Kingdom (UK) between 1953–73 as domestic coal gave way to electricity, and a centralized electricity generation and distribution system reached every home in the country. Our analysis significantly extends and reinterprets the business history of the National Grid by exploring the consequences of its completion. We argue that the National Grid facilitated the removal of the railways as an energy distribution network and enabled prototype “Net Zero” policies in the context of atmospheric pollution. We tie these themes together to conclude that the construction of the national grid was a major environmental success but removed an essential rationale for much of the rail network.

This paper characterizes irreducible phase-type representations for exponential distributions. Bean and Green (2000) gave a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a phase-type distribution with an irreducible generator matrix to be exponential. We extend these conditions to irreducible representations, and we thus give a characterization of all irreducible phase-type representations for exponential distributions. We consider the results in relation to time-reversal of phase-type distributions, PH-simplicity, and the algebraic degree of a phase-type distribution, and we give applications of the results. In particular we give the conditions under which a Coxian distribution becomes exponential, and we construct bivariate exponential distributions. Finally, we translate the main findings to the discrete case of geometric distributions.