This study explores some consonantal and vowel features of the variety of American English spoken in Dearborn, MI. Recent research shows that Dearborners recognize their English variety as distinct. Past studies on Dearborn English have primarily focused on vowel patterns, while some emerging sociolinguistic work has paid attention to the consonantal features. The present study contributes to this emerging literature by presenting a preliminary analysis of some consonantal features of Dearborn English in addition to a description of its vowel pattern. To do so, the speech of MENA Americans in Dearborn has been compared to that of non-Dearborner MENA Americans from the US Upper Midwest. The results show that pre-vocalic word-final /t/ glottalization, convergence of voice onset time of lenis and fortis members of bilabial and velar stops, shorter Euclidean distances for vowels, and a vowel pattern not consistent with local patterns could be parts of an ethnolinguistic repertoire for Dearborners.

Let X be a smooth projective variety of dimension $n\geq 2$ and $G\cong \mathbf {Z}^{n-1}$ a free abelian group of automorphisms of X over $\overline {\mathbf {Q}}$. Suppose that G is of positive entropy. We construct a canonical height function $\widehat {h}_G$ associated with G, corresponding to a nef and big $\mathbf {R}$-divisor, satisfying the Northcott property. By characterizing the zero locus of $\widehat {h}_G$, we prove the Kawaguchi–Silverman conjecture for each element of G. As for other applications, we determine the height counting function for non-periodic points and show that X satisfies potential density.

Opponents of authoritarian regimes are often assumed to desire democracy in place of the current regime. In this paper, we show that authoritarian dissidents hold divergent attitudes towards democracy and identify a key bloc within the regime opposition: “non-democratic critics” (NDCs) or those who are dissatisfied with the current regime but resist adopting democracy. We develop the concept of NDCs, theorize why they exist and how they differ from supporters of democracy and the status quo, and test implications of this framework using interviews and an original survey across China. We find that nearly half of respondents who oppose the current Chinese regime are non-democratic critics who also do not support democracy. Compared to democracy and status quo supporters, NDCs have a distinct set of political and socio-economic demands and higher uncertainty about the performance of democracy in meeting these demands. We also find that NDCs are economically better off than democracy supporters, suggesting that unequal access to the benefits of state-led economic development may motivate differing attitudes toward democracy among regime opponents. These findings put forth an important explanation for why the world’s largest authoritarian regime endures—those who oppose the regime have divergent and unclear visions of what political system should be adopted in its place.

The Inclusuem is a collaborative project established in 2012 with international reach and global impact. The three co-directors, Aletheia Whitman, Dr. Rose Paquet, and Dr. Porchia Moore share a mission to “advance new ways of being a museum through dialogue, community building, and collaborative practice related to inclusive practice in museums.” We have provided a platform for over a decade which prompts arts and cultural heritage professionals to push the bounds of museum work to be as expansive and inclusive as possible while enacting structural change. In this piece, we focus on museums as sites where the humanities are made public. Our manifesto proposes a vision for the public humanities in a changing political landscape and will introduce new perspectives for both an emerging museum and an emergent new understanding for the public humanities within museums faced with an antagonistic intellectual and cultural ecosystem.

Semiotic indeterminacy describes the basic observation that signs are always unstable and open to interpretation. As such, semiotic indeterminacy can become a resource for the strategic pursuit and exploitation of political goals. In this article, I examine the role and multiple dimensions of semiotic indeterminacy in nuclear nonproliferation, the global governance project to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Taking as an illustrative example the controversy around the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I demonstrate that when the transparency practices implemented to close down on the semiotic indeterminacy of nuclear materials fail, nuclear verification turns from a techno-rational project into a moral-evaluative one with the aim of uncovering the hidden intentions of a state. This transduction of one semiotic register into another derives from transparency’s dual tradition as both a rationalizing imperative as well as a moralized norm of sincerity. Attending to the semiotic dimensions of liberal forms of governance offers a new perspective on its contradictions.

African yam bean (AYB) is an underutilized legume with significant potential for food security in sub-Saharan Africa, yet limited research exists on optimizing its seed yield through selective breeding. In this study, the seed yield (SY) performance and relative importance of some yield-related traits on SY in AYB were assessed. One hundred and ninety-six accessions of AYB were evaluated for 2 years in three agro-ecologies of Nigeria. The experimental design was a 14 × 14 lattice design with three replicates. Data were recorded on SY and 13 SY-related traits. Positive significant genotypic correlations were found between SY and 11 of these traits. Pod length (PL) had a negative significant relationship (rg = −0.44**) with SY. Path coefficient analysis identified days to maturity (DM), pod weight (PW), shelling percentage (SP), number of seeds per pod (NSPD), 100-seed weight (HSW) and seed thickness (ST) as traits with positive direct effects on SY. The additive main effect and multiplicative interaction analysis revealed highly significant accession, environment, accession × environment interaction and interaction principal components effects for SY. Accessions TSs-119, TSs-101, 138A, TSs-4, TSs-157A and TSs-61 were identified as superior and stable, and should be considered for further breeding purposes. Selection criteria for improved SY in AYB should include DM, PW, SP, NSPD, HSW and ST. The identified stable, high-yielding accessions and key yield-related traits provide a framework for accelerating AYB improvement across diverse agro-ecologies.

For the Saskatchewan Party (SKP), identifying with the Western populist tradition was essential to both its creation and initial electoral viability, leading many political commentators to regularly refer to the SKP as a right-wing populist party. Yet scholars have been much more reticent to classify the SKP as an authentically Canadian populist party in the style of the Reform Party of Canada. Part of this disconnect is a result of the SKP's uneven and opportunistic use of populism throughout its history. Indeed, this article argues that the SKP's initial commitment to populism was largely performative, embraced to fend off the challenge of a potential provincial Reform Party. Once the utility of the SKP's performative populism threatened its electoral viability, most of the party's symbolic nods to populism were abandoned. Yet, more recently, the SKP has embraced a new form of populism that merges its pro-business support for the region's oil and gas industry with right-wing policies that are often linked to its rural base. This form of populism, defined as extractive populism, demonstrates that the SKP continues to use populist discourse opportunistically when its right-wing base is threatened.

In this paper, a novel dual-mode spherical resonator is proposed. By rotating the coupling irises, perturbations are generated to split the degenerate modes. The proposed filter is cascaded by a dual-mode resonator and two single-mode resonators, which are placed in a rotary way. Four poles appear in three resonators by only changing the rotation angle (φ) without any additional design. It forms the BSCT, generating a transmission zero (TZ) at the upper stopband. Furthermore, by adjusting φ further, the CT coupling topology can be obtained, resulting in a TZ at the lower stopband. Finally, slots are etched on the surface of the resonators for spurious response suppression. With the above methods, the out-of-band selectivity and suppression are greatly improved. For the fast validation, the filter is 3-D printed and measured. As a result, the measured results match well with the simulated ones.

This article reflects on the phrase ‘early medieval’ as applied to European history between the end of Roman political rule in the West and some indeterminate point in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It is framed with reference to Michael Wallace-Hadrill’s 1974 lecture entitled ‘Early Medieval History’, which serves as a foil for a discussion of the evolving historiographical landscape from 1974 to 2024. The origins and the chronology of the term’s adoption into English usage are reviewed and, with an eye to discourses of modernity, the elements of middle-ness and early-ness are dissected. Points of comparison and contrast with the notion of ‘early modernity’ are noted, while an emphasis on the entanglement of middle-ness with European-ness leads into a discussion of whether the term has any applicability to extra-European history. The article concludes by highlighting the value of the weak relationship of ‘early medieval’ to modernity.

Let $\{\omega _n\}_{n\geq 1}$ be a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables on a probability space $(\Omega , \mathcal {F}, \mathbb {P})$, each uniformly distributed on the unit circle $\mathbb {T}$, and let $\ell _n=cn^{-\tau }$ for some $c>0$ and $0<\tau <1$. Let $I_{n}=(\omega _n,\omega _n+\ell _n)$ be the random interval with left endpoint $\omega _n$ and length $\ell _n$. We study the asymptotic property of the covering time $N_n(x)=\sharp \{1\leq k\leq n: x\in I_k\}$ for each $x\in \mathbb {T}$. We prove the quenched central limit theorem for the covering time, that is, $\mathbb {P}$-almost surely,

$$ \begin{align*}\frac{N_n(x)-\mathbb{E}_{\mathbb{P}}(N_n(x))}{\sqrt{\sum_{k=1}^n \ell_k(1-\ell_k)}}\end{align*} $$

converges in law to the standard normal distribution.

In this paper, on–off switching digitization of a W-band variable gain power amplifier (VGPA) with above 60 dB dynamic range is introduced for large-scale phased array. Digitization techniques of on–off switching modified stacking transistors with partition are proposed to optimize configuration of control sub-cells. By the proposed techniques, gain control of a radio frequency variable gain amplifier (VGA) could be highly customized for both coarse and fine switching requirements instead of using additional digital-to-analog converters to tune the overall amplifier bias. The designed VGA in 130 nm SiGe has achieved switchable gain range from −46.4 to 20.6 dB and power range from −25.0 to 15.7 dBm at W band. The chip size of the fabricated VGPA is about 0.31 mm × 0.1 mm.