While much discussion has focused on what researchers do and should do in second language proficiency assessment, less attention has been given to why persistent trends continue. This study investigated second language acquisition (SLA) researchers’ beliefs, reported practices, and decision-making rationales regarding proficiency assessment. Using an online survey, we collected responses from 111 SLA researchers. Findings revealed that while researchers generally endorsed recommended methodological standards, practical constraints—such as time, accessibility, and ease of administration—frequently influenced their reported practices. A consistent belief–practice gap emerged across several key areas. Notably, reduced redundancy tests were rated favorably for both validity and practicality, reflecting a growing shift toward efficient, validated tools. These findings suggest that although methodological awareness is high, practical barriers continue to challenge the adoption of more rigorous proficiency assessment practices in SLA research.

Triage approaches for treating individuals in disaster settings historically have been focused on identifying acute decompensation, injuries, and death. For displaced populations that had limited function prior to ta disaster event, the emphasis during and after a disaster becomes identification of the proper level of support needed to survive in a shelter and selection of an appropriate post-shelter destination. The US Public Health Service Rapid Deployment Force team PHS-1 developed tools to address the needs of such displaced populations. The tools, described in detail in this report, address assessment, tracking, planning, resource utilization, and decision making and were field tested over the course of multiple deployments to refine them and validate their utility.

This study examines the transformation of environmental public interest lawyering in China within an ever-tightening legal order, where activists confront both state suppression and co-optation. Utilizing qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews with 49 environmental lawyers and activists, participant observations, and online ethnography, the research delineates two divergent models of legal mobilization. The conventional model prioritizes compliance with state regulations, employing impact litigation and consensus-building with state institutions to drive incremental environmental reforms, often at the cost of aligning with state priorities. In contrast, guerrilla lawyering emerges as an innovative strategy, leveraging decentralized networks, experimentalist litigation, flexible funding, and diffused media tactics to sustain activism while preserving autonomy. By transforming courts into platforms for generating critical information and exposing systemic vulnerabilities, guerrilla lawyering resists assimilation into state-controlled schemes. This approach not only ensures movement survival amidst repression but also enriches theoretical understandings of legal mobilization under authoritarianism by addressing the understudied risk of co-optation. These findings illuminate the resilience and ingenuity of activists in China’s constrained environmental advocacy landscape and offer a transferable framework for resistance for social movements in other authoritarian contexts, amid the global rise of authoritarian legality.

In 1967, the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Council of Scientific Unions launched the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), which lasted until 1982. The primary goals of the programme were international cooperation in global atmospheric observation to improve weather forecasting and to study climatic changes. This article examines the development phase of GARP from approximately 1961 to 1967, focusing on the US meteorologists Jule Charney and Thomas Malone and the Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, who contributed to its organization. It shows a variety of relationships between science and politics, beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s call for scientific cooperation to ease international political tensions, followed by the diverse efforts of Charney, Malone, Bolin and others to help secure political support, and finally the protracted negotiations within the International Council of Scientific Unions to shape and organize the Global Atmospheric Research Program.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) holds significant importance in health and human-machine interaction. However, recognizing actions from 2D information faces challenges like occlusion, illumination variation, cluttered backgrounds, and view invariance. These hurdles are particularly pronounced in indoor patient monitoring settings due to fluctuating lighting conditions and cluttered backgrounds, which compromise the accuracy of activity recognition systems. A new architecture named IlluminationRevive has been proposed to tackle this issue, which utilizes an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) and image post-processing blocks to enhance the image’s visual appearance. A new dataset comprising seven indoor physical activities has been proposed, created with contributions from thirty individuals aged 20–45. A hybrid fusion architecture is proposed to classify activities, integrating motion sequence information and body joint features. The proposed classification model incorporates generated Skeleton Motion History Images (SMHIs), collected human joint motion features from video frames, and novel kinematic and geometric features within window frames as inputs. The model can extract spatial and temporal feature vectors by integrating ResNet50-ViT (Residual Network-50 layers, Vision Transformer) and CNN-BiLSTM (Convolutional Neural Network-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) layers. The suggested classification model was evaluated alongside state-of-the-art models using the LNMIIT-SMD (The LNM Institute of Information Technology-Skeleton Motion Dataset) and established NTU-RGBD (Nanyang Technological University’s Red Blue Green and Depth information) dataset. The evaluation aimed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed classification model architecture. Results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, achieving impressive accuracies of 98.21% on real-time data, 98.45% on the proposed dataset, and 97.12% on the NTU-RGBD dataset. This high-accuracy, low-latency approach enhances robotic perception for healthcare applications, enabling service robots to perform real-time patient monitoring and assistive tasks in dynamic indoor environments.

Despite the recent “epistemic turn” in the philosophy of measurement, philosophers have ignored a nearly 80 year controversy about the relationship between statistical inference and measurement theory. Some scholars maintain that measurement theory places no constraints on statistics, whereas others argue that the measurement scale (e.g., ordinal or interval) of one’s data determines which statistical methods are “permissible.” I defend an intermediate position: even if existing measurement theory were irrelevant to statistical inference, it would be critical for scientific inference, which requires connecting statistical hypotheses to broader research hypotheses.

John Carter’s fervour as a recorder and polemicist for Gothic architecture has been debated since his lifetime, but his classical designs have attracted less interest. However, these give some insight into the influences upon aspiring young Georgian architects, as Carter was in the 1770s. His two sets of designs for Bywell Hall, Northumberland, the first published in the Builder’s Magazine in 1776, and a more detailed portfolio now in a private collection, are presented together for the first time. This is an opportunity to examine Carter’s early ideas and his thoughts on the appropriate styles to be employed for public, domestic and ecclesiastical buildings. Analysis of Carter’s designs demonstrates his desire to create impressive interior spaces, but poor consideration of the practicalities for family and servant life in country houses. Carter’s preference for Gothic over classical architecture, combined with humble origins and personality traits, prevented his aspiration to be an architect, but his drawing skills secured fame as one of the foremost architectural draughtsmen.

Eating disorders (EDs) are psychiatric conditions with profound impacts on physical health, emotional well-being, and quality of life. They are associated with reduced employment participation and increased healthcare costs, representing a significant public health concern.

Major EDs, including Anorexia Nervosa (AN), Bulimia Nervosa (BN), Binge-eating disorder (BED), and Other Specified Feeding and Eating Disorders (OSFED), are closely linked to oral health complications, which serve as both diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets in ED management. This narrative review explores 22 studies, organised around transdiagnostic behavioural and physiological risk factors, including caloric restriction, purging behaviours, binge episodes, and oral hygiene neglect. Evidence indicates that malnutrition, vomiting-induced acid exposure, high intake of cariogenic foods, and inconsistent hygiene practices contribute to the deterioration of dental and periodontal health. The review highlights the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of oral assessments in ED management, underscoring the importance of early detection.

A dedicated section addresses the role of dental professionals, proposing individualised care pathways and the use of clinical indices such as the Basic Erosive Wear Examination (BEWE) and Schiff Air Index, alongside emerging tools like tele dentistry. The findings advocate for a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating nutritional support, psychological therapy, and targeted dental treatment, which is crucial for developing comprehensive care plans. Such collaboration enhances the effectiveness of interventions, addressing both the physiological and psychological dimensions of EDs to improve patient outcomes.

The article considers a method for obtaining a rational layout of the design of a multi-robotic system for aliquoting biomaterial, consisting of two robots with different architectures, based on the analysis of safety zones. The first robot has a serial structure and ensures the continuous operation of the second robot, performing auxiliary work related to the movement of biological samples. The second robot, which is a parallel robot, directly performs the workflow of extracting and dosing liquid into aliquots. An algorithm for determining the safety zones for each of the robots is presented, based on which the optimal mutual arrangement of the two robots is obtained. Three-dimensional models of safety zones were created, on the basis of which the digital design of the mounting frame for the two robots was performed using the method of topological optimization of material distribution in the structure. This made it possible to obtain a rational design of the mounting frame, which does not intersect with the safety zones of the robots. The surface of the robotic system mounting frame, obtained as a result of topological optimization, is transformed into a metal structure suitable for manufacturing. The strength characteristics of two variations of the mounting frame are compared: the first one, obtained through topological optimization, and its transformed analog made from a standard profile.

The Viewpoint Alberta Consolidated Dataset is a novel resource for understanding political attitudes and behaviours in Alberta which includes over 10,000 interviews across nine waves in 5 years. The Viewpoint dataset combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal (panel) data on Albertans’ attitudes towards political parties, federalism, democracy, social movements, energy transitions, media and a range of issue areas. We demonstrate some of these potential applications in this note. To our knowledge, this dataset is the largest and most comprehensive dataset of political attitudes in a single province that has ever been publicly released. This matters because we know much less about provincial politics than national politics in Canada, despite many of the most interesting and important political developments taking place at the provincial level. Furthermore, by following the same respondents over multiple periods of time, we can develop a much greater understanding of individual-level changes across a range of key issue domains

Co-morbid mental health diagnoses present challenges for services structured to provide disorder-specific models of treatment, such as NHS Talking Therapies services. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) has been identified as both disorder specific and transdiagnostic, although little research explores transdiagnostic approaches to treatment of IU alone. A transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy treatment targeting IU, the ‘Making Friends with Uncertainty’ (MFWU) group, was developed and piloted in a Talking Therapies primary care service in an earlier evaluation (Mofrad et al., 2020). The aim of this study was to replicate and further evaluate the intervention. Twenty people presenting with a range of anxiety disorders started the intervention in two groups. The study used a single group, within-subjects quasi-experimental design, collecting data at eight points for routine outcome measures of anxiety, depression and functioning, and five points for measures of anxiety disorder-specific symptoms and IU. Intention-to-treat analyses showed improvement on a general measure of anxiety as well as improvement on the measure of IU. Significantly there was improvement on the disorder specific measures even though the intervention was aimed at the underlying process of IU, rather than the particular symptoms targeted by these measures. The MFWU group may be an efficient and effective way to deliver a highly specified transdiagnostic intervention for intolerance of uncertainty when people are treated in a mixed group format.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To consider the effectiveness of a transdiagnostic group targeting IU.

2. (2) To develop understanding of a group intervention for building tolerance to uncertainty.

3. (3) To consider the impact of targeting IU on specific anxiety disorders.

4. (4) To offer a methodological framework for effectively evaluating a group intervention in routine practice.

Cold War historiography has long assumed an interruption of most pan-European, West–East economic relations between 1945 and 1989, before the circulation paradigm imposed the idea of a porosity of the ‘iron curtain’. This article offers a double displacement in the analysis of pan-European economic connections during the Cold War. It first highlights the legacy, up to the late 1950s, of pan-European economic debates about socialist economics that have been developed in the interwar period within the communist parties’ network in Europe. Second, it shows how these networks created opportunities in the people’s democracies for challenging the implementation of the Soviet economic model. A clear Cold War divide in the field of economic ideas was delayed, at least until the beginning of the 1960s. A pan-European discussion about the limits of the equation between central planning and socialist economics, developed in capitalist interwar Germany, lived on.