Adults have an interconnected lexicon in which two words are related because their referents belong to the same semantic category, because they occur in the same context, or both. This interconnection has been explored by means of the priming effect, in which people respond more rapidly to related than to unrelated words and benefit from the lexical boost when the two types of interconnections are combined. Although substantial research has reported on the memory problems of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), it remains unknown whether they experience problems with related words at these levels of comprehension. This study analyzed the lexical networks of older adults with AD and typically aging (TA) adults to understand their semantic memory related to word associations. We tested combined taxonomic-thematic, purely taxonomic, and purely thematic relationships using an eye tracker to analyze fixations to a named target picture preceded by a related or unrelated prime word. Participants with TA showed a priming effect in all three types of relationships, but those with AD showed this effect only with purely thematic pairs. Words that share more than one level of relationship seem to create competition, revealing a deficit in the lexical networks of people with AD.

Many historians continue to regard the killing of prisoners and potential prisoners on the battlefield as having been an absolute exception during the Great War, something that was ‘episodic’ and happened only ‘in isolated cases’. One reason for this assessment might be the fact that the subject has rarely been examined empirically. This article is the first study directly to compare the actions of the British and the Canadians, the Empire’s two largest armies on the western front. Drawing on a wide range of primary source material, including, for the first time, unit war diaries and after-action reports, this article reveals that documentary evidence exists for scores of separate instances of prisoner killing by British and Canadian troops deployed against German forces between August 1914 and November 1918, with the number of dead ranging from individual enemy soldiers to several hundred victims at once. Examples are recorded of prisoner killing by enlisted men, NCOs and officers, acting either in groups or alone, and furthermore of officers at platoon, battalion, regimental and even corps level either encouraging prisoner killing or issuing explicit ‘take no prisoners’ orders. The level of acceptance that commanders showed for these practices, the openness with which soldiers discussed them in their letters home to mothers, sisters and wives, and the almost complete absence of any disciplinary action against the perpetrators indicate that – on some level – they were regarded as legitimate.

The article analyses how Russian state-controlled media adapt narratives across their language versions to speak to specific national audiences. These media support the Kremlin by echoing its strategic narratives in the international arena. Our article stems from the assumption that the media tailor the narratives and do not deliver homogenous news. Texts published since the initial days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine were analyzed from Sputnik Czech Republic, Germany, and Sputnik World, known to spread the Russian regime’s propaganda. The central question was how the Russian regime depicted and explained the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in the chosen languages. Qualitative coding based on a predefined codebook, modified with codes inductively acquired during the analysis, was used to deeply understand strategic narratives and identify key differences among the Russian regime’s influence campaigns in various national contexts. Some narratives were found to differ based on the national contexts, strengthening the initial assumption. However, analyzed texts also consistently depict Russia as a victim and the West as a threat across the language versions.

Toxocara canis is a widespread parasite of canids with a wide range of paratenic hosts, but also one of the overlooked agents causing nervous system infections of humans. Previous experimental infections of mice demonstrated the impact of high infection doses of larvae on neurobehavioral disorders and pathological changes. In contrast to previous studies, we aimed to investigate the long-term (up to 100 weeks) impact of low- to high-dose infection in mice. We focused on their physical condition, motor skills, and the accompanying pathologies in the brain. Three groups of BALB/c mice were infected with 10, 100, and 1000 T. canis larvae/mouse and specific anti-T. canis excretory-secretory antigens immunoglobulin G antibody response, general condition, and motor skills were tested in defined intervals within 100 weeks after infection. The number of larvae in selected organs was assessed and the pathological changes in the brain were studied histologically. As a result, subtle to severe impairments in general condition and motor skills were detected, with generally earlier onsets occurring the higher the infection dose was. The specific immunoglobulin G antibody levels corresponding to the infection dose were detected in all infected groups. Necrosis, cellular infiltrations, and foamy cells developed in moderate- and high-infection dose mice, in contrast with hemorrhages detected in all groups. This study demonstrated the long-term negative impact of T. canis infection on the paratenic host, particularly at moderate and high infectious doses. Although pathological changes in the brain were observed even in low-infection dose mice, their physical and motor condition was comparable to the control group.

Analysing hierarchical design processes is difficult due to the technical and organizational dependencies spanning over multiple levels. The V-Model of Systems Engineering considers multiple levels. It is, however, not quantitative. We propose a model for simulating hierarchical product design processes based on the V-Model. It includes, first, a product model which structures physical product properties in a hierarchical dependency graph; second, an organizational model which formalizes the assignment of stakeholder responsibility; third, a process model which describes the top-down and bottom-up flow of design information; fourth, an actor model which simulates the combination of product, organization and process by using computational agents. The quantitative model is applied to a simple design problem with three stakeholders and three separate areas of responsibility. The results show the following phenomena observed in real-world product design: design iterations occur naturally as a consequence of the designers’ individual behaviour; inconsistencies in designs emerge and are resolved. The simple design problem is used to compare point-based and interval-based requirement decomposition quantitatively. It is shown that development time can be reduced significantly by using interval-based requirements if requirements are always broken down immediately.

Growing evidence highlights the critical role of patient choice of treatment, with significant benefits for outcomes found in some studies. While four meta-analyses have previously examined the association between treatment choice and outcomes in mental health, robust conclusions have been limited by the inclusion of studies with biased preference trial designs. The current systematic review included 30 studies across three common and frequently comorbid mental health disorders (depression N = 23; anxiety, N = 5; eating disorders, N = 2) including 7055 participants (Mage 42.5 years, SD 11.7; 69.5% female). Treatment choice most often occurred between psychotherapy and antidepressant medication (43.3%), followed by choice between two different forms of psychotherapy, or elements within psychotherapy (36.7%). There were insufficient studies with stringent designs to conduct meta-analyses for anxiety or eating disorders as outcomes, or for treatment uptake. Treatment choice significantly improved outcomes for depression (d = 0.17, n = 18) and decreased therapy dropout, both in a combined sample targeting depression (n = 12), anxiety (n = 4) and eating disorders (n = 1; OR = 1.46, 95% CI: 1.17, 1.83), and in a smaller sample of the depression studies alone (OR = 1.65, 95% CI: 1.05, 2.59). All studies evaluated the impact of adults making treatment choices with none examining the effect of choice in adolescents. Clear directions in future research are indicated, in terms of designing studies that can adequately test the treatment choice and outcome association in anxiety and eating disorder treatment, and in youth.

The zeal for ‘modality’ in French modernist composition drew sustenance from the Indo-European hypothesis (or ‘Aryan myth’) of a linguistic-turned-‘racial’ patrimony linking India, Greece, and Europe, prevalent in Francophone intellectual, including musicological, discourse. Against this backdrop, the central case study traces how the Karnatic melakarta system of rāga classification travelled from Southern India, via British imperial networks, to French universities and conservatoires, whereupon it found widespread interest among composers and pedagogues including Roussel, Emmanuel, Tournemire, and Dupré. Yet the melakartas’ enduring imprint upon French music is found not simply in the use of individual scales, but in the premise of a fecund ‘modal republic’, inspired by the system’s generative logic and resonant in the rationalized modalism of the 1920s and ’30s, including Messiaen’s ‘modes of limited transposition’. The article concludes by proffering a novel conceptualization of the entanglements between Karnatic and French scale systems (and epistemologies of music) in the early twentieth century.

As a result of analysis of the ice cover, geological structure and tectonics of the underlying rocks in the Lake Vostok area of Antarctica, a layered sub-horizontal structure of the ice cover and a distribution of the parameters of the ice composition were established. The physical and mechanical properties of the underlying rocks were determined experimentally. Complex tectonics revealed an increase in geothermal flow in the Vostok Basin region, which plays a role in the evolution of the Earth's crust and in shaping the morphology of its physical properties. A three-dimensional geomechanical model of the unified system ‘glacier-Lake Vostok-bedrock ’ was constructed and investigated. Regularities in the changes to the stress-strain state were revealed. Zones of development of plastic deformation in the ice cover along the perimeter of Lake Vostok and their distribution over the lake were established, which were confirmed by results from field observations. Modelling of geomechanical processes shows that the change in the mechanical state of the Earth's crust, taking into account the creep deformation of the ice sheet, relates more to nonlinear dynamic systems, which are characterized by unstable changes and should be considered as fractal systems.

A modeling method of multi-objective optimization design for parallel mechanisms (PMs) is proposed, whose implementation is illustrated with 2RPU-RPS mechanism as an example. The orientation of biased output axis on moving platform is depicted by spherical attitude angles, and its kinematic model is deduced through vector method. With screw theory as mathematic tool, a comprehensive evaluation method of kinematic performance for PM is established. On this basis, the expensive constrained multi-objective optimization model of dimensional parameters for the discussed mechanism is constructed. The NSDE-II algorithm, formed by replacing the genetic algorithm operators in non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) with DE operators, is utilized to solve this multi-objective optimization problem, thus obtaining multiple Pareto optimal solutions with engineering application significance, which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed modeling method and algorithm. Moreover, the normalization coverage space and the minimum adjacent vector angle are proposed to evaluate the computational performance of NSDE-II. Finally, the potential engineering application value for the optimized 2RPU-RPS PM is presented.

We prove a full measurable version of Vizing’s theorem for bounded degree Borel graphs, that is, we show that every Borel graph $\mathcal {G}$ of degree uniformly bounded by $\Delta \in \mathbb {N}$ defined on a standard probability space $(X,\mu )$ admits a $\mu $-measurable proper edge coloring with $(\Delta +1)$-many colors. This answers a question of Marks [Question 4.9, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 29 (2016)] also stated in Kechris and Marks as a part of [Problem 6.13, survey (2020)], and extends the result of the author and Pikhurko [Adv. Math. 374, (2020)], who derived the same conclusion under the additional assumption that the measure $\mu $ is $\mathcal {G}$-invariant.

In October 2022, the Church of England commissioned a study of the likely impacts of allowing the blessing or marriage of same-sex couples in church. This paper reports on a survey of key informers (bishops or chief executive officers) in dioceses in the seven provinces of the Anglican Communion that had at that time allowed either same-sex blessings (SSB) or same-sex marriages (SSM). Of 183 provinces or dioceses contacted, 62 (31%) replied to an online survey of which 74% had decided to allow SSB and 55% to allow SSM. While all provinces reported some losses of clergy or congregations, these were not as great as some had expected. Smaller provinces that had made spaces and time for those of differing opinions to meet together tended to report more positive outcomes than those where processes were dominated by synodical debates.

Quantitative analysis using two scales of internal (church-facing) and external (society-facing) impact showed that dioceses that allowed SSM rather than just SSB reported more positive external impact. Those that had allowed SSM reported better internal and external impact compared with those who allowed only SSB or neither. Open answers offered critical reflections highlighting important lessons learnt in the process of making decisions.

This article discusses the history and the prospects of the climate change negotiations and seeks to show that they are structurally and systematically disadvantageous to the countries and the peoples of the Third World/Global South. The article uses the TWAIL approach to discuss the North-South divide and the differing approaches to climate justice. The article then discusses the history of climate change negotiations, in particular, climate finance and loss and damage, and shows that modes of these negotiations have been disadvantageous to the Third World and are unlikely to fulfil their aspirations. The article highlights the need for incorporating certain principles of fairness, not just in substantive law, but also in how negotiations are conducted. It concludes with thoughts on what these principles of fairness may look like, and the role international and domestic courts can play in evolving them.