Selecting appropriate texts for second language (L2) learners is essential for effective education. However, current text difficulty models often inadequately classify materials for L2 learners by proficiency levels. This study addresses this deficiency by employing the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) as its foundational framework. A cohort of expert English-L2 educators classified 1,181 texts from the CommonLit Ease of Readability corpus into CEFR levels. A random forest model was then trained using 24 linguistic complexity features to predict the CEFR levels of English texts for L2 learners. The model achieved 62.6% exact-level accuracy across the six granular CEFR levels and 82.6% across the three overarching levels, outperforming a baseline model based on three existing readability formulas. Additionally, it identified shared and unique linguistic features across different CEFR levels, highlighting the necessity to adjust text classification models to accommodate the distinct linguistic profiles of low- and high-proficiency readers.

Throughout the history of philosophy, numerous philosophers have formulated theories about the connection between law and freedom. However, few have suggested that freedom and love are inherently connected. According to Hegel, the family and marriage represent the initial tangible manifestation of freedom, embodied in ethical and self-conscious love. This contentious thesis pertains to Hegel’s endorsement of the modern bourgeois family and his assertion regarding a compulsory and heteronormative conception of conjugal love. I analyse Hegel’s family theory in what follows, emphasizing the marital relationship as delineated in Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. I examine the significance and ramifications of his dismissal of the marriage contract to illustrate how this creates a paradox. I propose an alternative interpretation of these passages by emphasizing the relationship between love and law within marital relations. I advocate the importance of law within the family and demonstrate its significance to marriage. I assert that Hegel’s understanding of the family, especially regarding marriage, highlights the tensions present in the complex relationship between the legal aspect of marriage as a contract and the ethical aspect rooted in self-conscious love. To achieve this, I firstly reconstruct Hegel’s conception of the family and explore his understanding of marriage as sexual drive, desire, passion and contract. Secondly, I explore Hegel’s notion of ethical and self-conscious love, examining the relationship between law and love to reveal the paradox of marriage. Third, I discuss Hegel’s views on divorce and marriage settlements to demonstrate why marriage cannot overcome the contract. Finally, I discuss why Hegel’s response to the issues he identifies in the theories of his contemporaries is inadequate and how marriage and conjugal love threaten freedom. My claim is that marriage entails a paradoxical relationship between love and law, which calls into question the suitability of marriage to realize freedom.

What role does racial/ethnic diversity in the American states play in racialized partisan and partisan-ideological sorting? We expand the commonly employed empirical frame of Whites’ partisan and partisan-ideological reactions to minority groups at the national level by leveraging the variation in racial/ethnic populations in the American states and accounting for both out-group and in-group size across White, Black, Latino, and Asian respondents. Using the pooled 2012–22 Congressional Election Study, the results demonstrate that Whites tend toward Republican orientations in states with larger Black and Foreign-Born populations and display stronger partisan-ideological sorting in more diverse states with large Black, Latino, or Asian populations. The analyses also reveal that partisan-ideological sorting is asymmetrical along both racial and partisan identities. White partisan-ideological sorting across state racial/ethnic contexts is driven by both Republican and Democratic identifiers, while Black, Latino, and Asian respondents show few signs of elasticity to state context in partisan identity or partisan-ideological sorting. The asymmetries in both PID and partisan-ideological alignment lead to larger racial/ethnic gaps in attachment and alignment in more diverse state contexts. These are well-understood conditions for greater partisan and factional conflict and polarized party and electoral politics.

Recently, several philosophers and physicists have increasingly noticed the hegemony of unitarity in the black hole information loss discourse and are challenging its legitimacy in the face of the measurement problem. They proclaim that embracing non-unitarity solves two paradoxes for the price of one. Though I share their distaste over the philosophical bias, I disagree with their strategy of still privileging certain interpretations of quantum theory. I argue that information-restoring solutions can be interpretation-neutral because the manifestation of non-unitarity in Hawking’s original derivation is unrelated to what’s found in collapse theories or generalized stochastic approaches, thereby decoupling the two puzzles.

The *Rui Liangfu bi, a previously unattested Warring States manuscript held by Tsinghua University, purports to record two admonitory songs that Rui Liangfu (fl. ninth century bce) presented to King Li (r. 853/57–841 bce) and his derelict ministers at court. The genre identity of the manuscript text is contested, owing in part to two similar texts, a shi-poem preserved in the Odes and a shu-document in the Yi Zhou shu, also traditionally interpreted as Rui Liangfu’s speech at the same event. Although none of the three texts share anything literatim with one another, they all rhyme and cleave closely to a well-known legend. Proceeding from complete translation of the manuscript text, I show that it diverges significantly from the canonical categories thus far used to classify it, with regard to both prosody and theme. Moreover, a structural analysis reveals that the manuscript’s paratextual encapsulation demonstrates an early precedent for the explicit, historical contextualization of songs that became pervasive in the Mao Odes. On the basis of structure, the manuscript can also be classed with a set of verse collections known only in manuscript form, save for one “forgery” preserved in the ancient-script Documents.

In this paper, we consider the normalized ground state solutions for the following biharmonic Choquard type problem

\begin{align*}\begin{split}\left\{\begin{array}{ll}\Delta^2u-\beta\Delta u=\lambda u+(I_\mu*F(u))f(u),\quad\mbox{in}\ \ \mathbb{R}^4, \\\displaystyle\int_{\mathbb{R}^4}|u|^2dx=c^2,\quad u\in H^2(\mathbb{R}^4),\\\end{array}\right.\end{split}\end{align*}

where $\beta\geq0$, c > 0, $\lambda\in \mathbb{R}$, $I_\mu=\frac{1}{|x|^\mu}$ with $\mu\in (0,4)$, F(u) is the primitive function of f(u), and f is a continuous function with exponential critical growth in the sense of the Adams inequality. By using a minimax principle based on the homotopy stable family, we obtain that the above problem admits at least one normalized ground state solution.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Make America Great Again (MAGA) activists during the 2020 presidential campaign, we explore the status dynamics behind the appeal of Donald Trump’s right-wing populism. While existing explanations emphasize partisanship, economic anxiety, racial resentment, rural identity, and media polarization, we underscore a less-explored explanation for Trump’s core support: it is a status-based social movement. We find that Trump’s activists are not simply voters responding to policy preferences or culture-war appeals but are also participants in a grassroots social movement organized around a shared perception of lost honor, declining esteem, and institutional disrespect. To make this argument we use the concept of the symbolic politics of status to explain how political conflict extends beyond contests over material distribution or moral values to include battles over whose values and lifestyles are considered worthy. For MAGA activists, reclaiming lost status means seeking public affirmation for identities they feel have been unfairly denigrated. The MAGA movement blends grievance with joy, cultivating pride, belonging, and celebration alongside anger at elites. By centering status in our analysis, we offer an integrative framework that connects material, cultural, and emotional motivations into a broader account of MAGA as a right-wing social movement grounded in grassroots populism.

This study considers why public abattoirs of the Republican era failed to function effectively and were unpopular with contemporaneous Chinese people. In the early twentieth century, Chinese officials began to rely on biomedical parameters to define safe food, a critical step in the modernization of social control strategies. Tianjin was among the first Chinese cities to launch government-run slaughterhouses that combined safety inspection with monopolized animal slaughtering. However, how such slaughterhouses operated has received little academic attention. The municipal authorities introduced a series of laws covering slaughterhouses’ construction and operations to ensure meat safety. However, Tianjin’s public slaughterhouses failed to uphold their new duties toward public health and even became menaces to urban sanitation. City officials lacked the ethics of modern public servants, and the slaughterhouses provided them new opportunities for rent-seeking practices. The collection of slaughter tax superseded meat safety inspection as the municipality’s primary concern, which undermined the effectiveness of food hygiene regulation. Therefore, city residents regarded the public slaughterhouses as predatory tax collectors. Taking Tianjin as an example, this article demonstrates the gap between the modernization of governmental agencies modeled on Western countries and the persistence of traditional, exploitive governing practices in Republican China.

The Convention on Biological Diversity, ratified by 196 countries including South Korea, aims to protect at least 30% of the world’s land, inland waters and marine areas by 2030 as part of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Beyond increasing protected areas (PAs), promoting biodiversity by protecting different ecosystem types is crucial. We investigated whether South Korea’s PAs evenly cover various ecosystem types. We examined overlaps between the Korean Database of Protected Areas (KDPA) and the Korean adapted Ecosystem Typology (KET) map, which modified the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Ecosystem Typology (GET) three-level ecosystem functional group map based on South Korea’s land cover. Compared to the biogeographical ecoregion map, the KET map provides finer ecological detail on representation within PAs and reveals the under-representation of human-influenced ecosystems; eight human-influenced ecosystem functional groups, including rice paddies and urban and industrial ecosystems that may contribute to biodiversity or cultural value, had <10% protection. The T2.2 deciduous temperate forest type dominates, covering 54.79% of PA area across 18 of 27 PA categories. This concentrated protection has led to up to 24 overlapping PA designations in certain locations. Expanding protection for under-represented ecosystems and diversifying governance could help South Korea align with global biodiversity goals.

The population changes in waterbirds are recognised as a global issue. Many waterbird species, especially migratory ones, are undergoing population changes. Monitoring these changes is crucial for waterbird conservation. However, the lack of data to quantify these populations hinders comprehension of the factors responsible for these changes. Although a few studies have investigated the long-term trends of waterbirds in the Republic of Korea (ROK), most have concentrated on a limited number of species and groups. Understanding these changes enables us to identify which species are vulnerable and develop more effective conservation measures accordingly. This study aimed to investigate the population dynamics of waterbirds in the ROK from 2000 to 2024. Data from the Winter Waterbird Census of Korea were used to analyse trends across various waterbird groups and species. The results showed diverse population trajectories, with some species experiencing notable increases while others underwent severe declines. Among the observed trends, several globally threatened species, such as the White-naped Crane Grus vipio and Oriental Stork Ciconia boyciana, exhibited significant population growth. This is largely a testament to the effectiveness of conservation interventions aimed at these species. However, the study also identified population declines of some species, such as the Tundra Swan Cygnus columbianus and Common Pochard Aythya ferina, indicating pervasive threats due to habitat loss and degradation. Lastly, several recommendations are made regarding the identified population trends that should be used to guide future conservation efforts in the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. This study, with its comprehensive and detailed findings, reiterates the importance of long-term monitoring data for developing effective conservation measures.

The current study aims to assess associations between trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) levels and mortality, and to investigate modification effects of genetics. A total of 500 participants from a family-based cohort study were enrolled from 2005 to 2017 and followed up until 2020 in Fangshan District, Beijing, China. Serum TMAO levels were measured using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit. The primary outcomes were all-cause mortality, and deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke. During a median follow-up time of 7.38 years, 38 deaths were recorded, including 20 deaths due to CVD and 19 deaths due to stroke. Compared with the lowest TMAO quartile group, the hazard ratio (HR) for all-cause mortality was 1.35 (95% CI: 0.44,4.15), 1.65 (95% CI: 0.58,4.64), and 2.45 (95% CI: 0.91,6.57), respectively in higher groups. No association was observed between TMAO and CVD mortality. However, compared with the lowest TMAO concentration group, the HRs for stroke mortality was 1.93 (95% CI: 0.40,9.39), 1.91 (95% CI: 0.41,8.96), and 4.16 (95% CI: 0.94,18.52), respectively in higher groups (P for trend=0.046). Furthermore, polygenic risk score (PRS) for longevity modified the association of TMAO with all-cause mortality (P for interaction=0.008). The risk of mortality (HR=2.20, 95% CI: 1.06,4.57) was higher among participants with lower PRS compared with higher PRS (HR=1.00, 95% CI: 0.71,1.40). The study indicates that elevated serum TMAO levels are potentially associated with long-term mortality risk in rural areas of Northern China, especially for stroke deaths. Additionally, it provides novel evidence that genetic variations might modify the association.