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In this paper, we describe an exploratory analysis of the possibilities of combining least cost path analysis and network analysis techniques. Accessibility is a potentially important site location factor. So far, the definition of accessibility has been approached through the creation of accumulated cost surfaces and least cost paths. However, these methods do not provide direct information on the foci of movement. Starting from networks created from least cost paths, network analysis and space syntax were used to obtain additional information on the structural features of the network. It is concluded that both techniques can be used with least cost path-based networks, and will provide new insights into the characteristics of the network. For most applications however the Space syntax measures that take the geographical dimension into account seem to be preferable to the simple network analysis measures used here.

Objective: The objective was to assess swallowing, mouth opening and speech function during the first year after radiation-based treatment (RT(+)) after introduction of a dedicated preventive rehabilitation program for stage III–IV oropharyngeal carcinoma (OPC). Methods: Swallowing, mouth opening and speech function were collected before and at six- and twelve-month follow-up after RT(+) for OPC as part of ongoing prospective assessments by speech-language pathologists. Results: Objective and patient-perceived function deteriorated until 6 months and improved until 12 months after treatment, but did not return to baseline levels with 25%, 20% and 58% of the patients with objective dysphagia, trismus and speech problems, respectively. Feeding tube dependency and pneumonia prevalence was low. Conclusion: Despite successful implementation, a substantial proportion of patients still experience functional limitations after RT(+) for OPC, suggesting room for improvement of the current rehabilitation program. Pretreatment sarcopenia seems associated with worse functional outcomes and might be a relevant new target for rehabilitation strategies.

Diamond Green G (CI 42040, Basic Green 1) is a triarylmethane dye mostly employed in the industrial dyeing of miscellaneous natural and artificial textile fibres, in the production of printing inks and as an anti-fungal agent for aquaculture products. Diamond Green (DG) tends to fade under light irradiation, similar to several other dyes and pigments belonging to the triarylmethane family. In this paper, an in-solution degradation study was carried out to shed light on DG photostability. The experiments were performed by artificially irradiating DG in water and dimethyl sulphoxide, and analysing aliquots sampled at different time intervals by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode array detector quadrupole and time of flight tandem mass spectrometry. The degradation products formed were characterised and the product-ion spectra discussed and interpreted. On the basis of the structure of the identified compounds and their kinetic trend in relation to the accelerated ageing time, degradation mechanisms were proposed for DG, taking into account the role played by the solvent. Finally, the dyeing formulation of an historical textile sample, collected from a stage costume worn in a Zeffirelli lyric opera, was determined utilising the information collected from the analysis of irradiated DG solutions.

Invisible and seemingly technical financial infrastructures have become the site of high geopolitics. Crucially, security sanctions are being leveraged through the global financial messaging network SWIFT. This article offers the term “infrastructural geopolitics” to draw attention to the ways in which hegemonic contestation and fracturing play out in and through payment infrastructures. Infrastructures are not passive sites to be used in the service of preexisting hegemonic power but can themselves route, block, challenge, or rework power in particular ways.We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.

At the familiar liquid-gas phase transition in water, the density jumps discontinuously at atmospheric pressure, but the line of these first-order transitions defined by increasing pressures terminates at the critical point, a concept ubiquitous in statistical thermodynamics. In correlated quantum materials, a critical point was predicted and measured terminating the line of Mott metal-insulator transitions, which are also first-order with a discontinuous charge density. In quantum spin systems, continuous quantum phase transitions (QPTs) have been investigated extensively, but discontinuous QPTs have received less attention. The frustrated quantum antiferromagnet SrCu$_2$(BO$_3$)$_2$ constitutes a near-exact realization of the paradigmatic Shastry-Sutherland model and displays exotic phenomena including magnetization plateaux, anomalous thermodynamics and discontinuous QPTs. We demonstrate by high-precision specific-heat measurements under pressure and applied magnetic field that, like water, the pressure-temperature phase diagram of SrCu$_2$(BO$_3$)$_2$ has an Ising critical point terminating a first-order transition line, which separates phases with different densities of magnetic particles (triplets). We achieve a quantitative explanation of our data by detailed numerical calculations using newly-developed finite-temperature tensor-network methods. These results open a new dimension in understanding the thermodynamics of quantum magnetic materials, where the anisotropic spin interactions producing topological properties for spintronic applications drive an increasing focus on first-order QPTs., 8+4 pages, 4+3 figures

New forms of mobility presuppose a technological factor that frames it as ‘topological proximity,’ regardless of the nature of the mobile agent (human being, robot ware, animal, virus, digital object). The appeal of the so-called linguas francas is especially evident in human beings showing high propensity to move, i.e., motility. They are usually associated with transnational communication in multilingual settings, linguistic justice, and globalization. Paradoxically, such global languages foster mobility, but, at the same time, they may hinder social inclusion in the hosting society, especially for people in mobility. The article compares English as a lingua franca and Esperanto in the European context, putting together the linguistic hierarchy of transnational communication (Gobbo, 2015) and the notion of linguistic unease, used to assess sociolinguistic justice (Iannàccaro, Gobbo, & Dell’Aquila, 2018). The analysis shows that the sense of belonging of their respective speakers influences social inclusion in different ways. More in general, the article frames the linguistic dimension of social inclusion in terms of linguistic ease, proposing a scale suitable for the analysis of European contexts.

This dissertation observes how disciplines shared data practices. Data practices enable scholars and scientists to transform observations into data that can be systematically collected and analysed. The sharing of these practices between disciplines shows that disciplinary boundaries are permeable, it does not explain how they are maintained. Practices of data collection and analysis from observations were shared between disciplines while at the same time disciplines also enforced certain boundaries. This tension between shared practices and creating boundaries, between the disciplinary and interdisciplinary, is the central theme of this dissertation. Two historical case studies exemplify the tension: the first considers the application of statistical methods developed by Adolphe Quetelet in the discipline of botany and the second discusses how the questionnaire method developed by, amongst others, Jules Gilliéron was adopted in the discipline of linguistics. The separate yet connected research cases are both situated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mostly in France and Belgium. While both cases focus on different data practices and disciplines, together they illustrate the development of emerging social science disciplines, and demonstrate how international disciplinary congresses are important sites of disciplinary and interdisciplinary interaction. By tracing the sharing of data practices between disciplines this dissertation provides a practice-based perspective on discipline formation. It not only suggests interesting cases, but also provides a historiographical framework to research them. In a time when knowledge is increasingly considered a multi, inter, or even extra-disciplinary product, historical studies into the dynamics of disciplines can be both informative and reflexive.

This thesis presents experimental and computational modeling studies on the mental representations of the natural language quantifiers (e.g., most, many, few, more than half, and fewer than half). According to the dominant logical approach in cognitive semantics, the meaning of quantifiers can be expressed in the form of truth conditions. The thesis argues that the logical perspective on quantifiers is insufficient to capture psychological phenomena related to the processing of quantified sentences. The logical perspective thus should be extended to a cognitive perspective. The cognitive perspective considers both truth-conditional representations of quantifiers and individual differences in meaning representations. It also stresses the importance of computational modeling in experimental semantics. The thesis consists of seven chapters: Introduction, five chapters presenting experimental studies, and Conclusions. Chapters 2 and 3 of the thesis present experimental and modeling findings on individual differences in quantifier representations. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the differences in the processing of positive (e.g., more than half) and negative (e.g., fewer than half) quantifiers in behavioral and electroencephalography experiments. Chapter 6 presents an experiment that tested the learnability explanation of semantic universals.

This dissertation gathers a series of studies on speech acts that appear in contexts of disagreement, and non-cooperative conversations. With these essays, I open some avenues to study dissent and disagreement within and beyond the field of speech acts theory. By showing both how speech acts behave in conflictual settings, and impact our pragmatic understanding of linguistic items, I integrate agonistic practices of discourse in our understanding of conversation. In situations of disagreement, speakers use specific speech acts to prevent conversational moves from being made. Incurvati and Schlöder’s weak rejection (2017) and weak assertion (2019) are such speech acts. Chapter 2 delineates the norms and normative effects of rejection on conversations. Chapter 3 applies a speech acts analysis of assertion and rejection to a semantic problem: adversative markers. By means of corpus examples, chapter 4 provides linguistic evidence for the speech act of weak assertion, triggered by the linguistic marker perhaps. When they wish to renege on their commitments, speakers use retractions, that cancel the effect of a previous utterance. Chapter 5 stresses the proposal aspect of retractions, that need to be accepted by participants to affect the Common Ground. The study of speech acts that express disagreement leads naturally to studying speech acts in non-ideal contexts. Chapter 6 applies the idea that contexts can be non-ideal, such that speaker and audience have different conversational goals, to the picture of silence. Chapter 7 sketches a broader notion of communication and applies it to the characterisation of Fregean colourings.

This dissertation is a collection of essays almost exclusively focussing on Bernard Bolzano's theory of collections, and its connections to his conception of mathematics. The first significant contribution of this work is that it develops a novel approach for comparing and appraising Bolzano’s collections against the alternatives offered by set theory and mereology. This approach consists in focusing not on the metaphysical comparison but on the role Bolzano's collections play in his mathematics vis à vis the role the sets of set theory (ZFC) play for modern-day mathematics. The second important contribution of this dissertation is a novel interpretation of the interaction between Bolzano's theory of concepts on the one hand, and his way of comparing the size of infinite collections of natural numbers on the other. This culminates in a completely new interpretation of Bolzano's famous Paradoxes of the Infinite as a work that is not an anticipation of Cantorian set theory, but an attempt at deploying philosophical insights on the infinite to develop a sound treatment of infinite series, both converging and diverging ones.

The rise of news content on social media has been accompanied by a hope that people with lower socioeconomic status and less interest in political affairs would be “accidentally” exposed to news. By combining tracking and survey data from a Dutch online panel (N = 413), we analyze how political interest, income, and education influence social media news exposure and consumption. Higher levels of political interest are associated with higher amounts of news exposure on Facebook and more news items consumed via social media. Users engage less often in news-related follow-up behavior after consuming news items via social media than after consuming news items referred via news websites. If social media news use seems to occur particularly for those who are already interested in current affairs and makes follow-up consumption less likely, the specificities of the social media ecosystems might accelerate rather than level inequalities in news use.

Spraying is a widely used method to produce a liquid sheet that breaks up into droplets of a certain size distribution. When spraying simple liquids, it is known which experimental parameters determine the droplet size distribution. For many applications, however, surfactants are added, producing a hitherto unknown effect on the droplet size distribution. Using two generic types of spraying nozzles, we sprayed solutions of different types of aqueous surfactants and measured the droplet size distribution of the sprays. We find that the breakup of surfactant solutions is similar to that of pure water but results in droplets that are smaller. The resulting droplet size distribution can be well described using the predictions for simple liquids provided that we replace the parameter of the equilibrium surface tension with the dynamic surface tension of the surfactant solution at a surface age of 15 ms, which is the characteristic time for destabilization and breakup of the liquid sheet. By rescaling with the mean droplet size, the droplet size distributions of water and sprays with different concentrations of surfactants all collapse onto a single curve that is given by the compound Gamma function found previously for pure liquids.

Context. Debris disks have commonly been studied around intermediate-mass stars. Their intense radiation fields are believed to efficiently remove the small dust grains that are constantly replenished by collisions. For lower-mass stars, in particular M-stars, the dust removal mechanism needs to be further investigated given the much weaker radiation field produced by these objects. Aims. We present new polarimetric observations of the nearly edge-on disk around the pre-main sequence M-type star GSC 07396-00759, taken with VLT/SPHERE IRDIS, with the aim to better understand the morphology of the disk, its dust properties, and the star-disk interaction via the stellar mass-loss rate. Methods. We model our observations to characterize the location and properties of the dust grains using the Henyey-Greenstein approximation of the polarized phase function and evaluate the strength of the stellar winds. Results. We find that the observations are best described by an extended and highly inclined disk ($i\approx 84.3\,^{\circ}\pm0.3$) with a dust distribution centered at a radius $r_{0}\approx107\pm2$ au. The polarized phase function $S_{12}$ is best reproduced by an anisotropic scattering factor $g\approx0.6$ and small micron-sized dust grains with sizes $s>0.3\,\mathrm��$m. We furthermore discuss some of the caveats of the approach and a degeneracy between the grain size and the porosity. Conclusions. Even though the radius of the disk may be over-estimated, our results suggest that using a given scattering theory might not be sufficient to fully explain key aspects such as the shape of the phase function, or the dust grain size. With the caveats in mind, we find that the average mass-loss rate of GSC 07396-00759 can be up to 500 times stronger than that of the Sun, supporting the idea that stellar winds from low-mass stars can evacuate small dust grains from the disk., 22 pages, 17 figures, 4 tables

In the communicative spaces of digital media with their expanded base of user participation, emotions or the social circulation of feelings play a crucial role in the manner in which political positions are articulated and everyday negotiations with politics are performed. The articles in this Special Issue stem from an international workshop held in July 2017 at the University of Amsterdam titled ‘Emotions, political work and participatory media’, where participants working on diverse regions spoke about social media and the role of affect and emotions in the facilitation of politically engaged publics. In this Special Issue, politics emerges in community networks as well as in networks based on an abiding interest in matters of national interests. Both kinds of networks are affective (bound by sentiments of solidarity and belonging) and do deeply political work, in that their performances and interactions concern matters of community building but also identity formation.

Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such exchanges across disciplinary boundaries often signal innovation, intellectual change, and breakthroughs. A satisfactory framework from which the historical phenomenon of epistemic transfer between disciplines can be studied systematically, however, has not yet been proposed. This essay introduces the notion of “cognitive goods,” a tool of knowledge making that can be transferred across disciplinary boundaries. Cognitive goods include, for example, methods, concepts, and instruments. The essay proposes to study historical interactions between disciplines as instances of the “flow” of cognitive goods. The notion of cognitive goodsmay serve as a springboard for a systematic analysis of flows occurring throughout the history of the disciplines. Such an analysis could be instrumental for an integrated historiography of knowledge, including the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

In contrast to the extensive debate on the influence of algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) on individual news diets, the interaction between such systems and journalistic norms and missions remain under-studied. The change in the relationship between journalists and the audience caused by the transition to personalized news delivery has profound consequences for the understanding of what journalism should be. To investigate how media practitioners perceive the impact of ANRs on their professional norms and media organizations’ missions, and how these norms and missions can be integrated into ANR design, this article looks at two quality newspapers from the Netherlands and Switzerland. Using an interview-based approach conducted with practitioners in different departments (e.g. journalists, data scientists, and product managers), it explores how ANRs interact with organization-centred and audience-centred journalistic values. The paper’s findings indicate a varying degree of prominence for specific values between individual practitioners in the context of their perception of ANRs. At the same time, the paper also reveals that some organization-centred (e.g. transparency) and most audience-centred (e.g. usability) values are viewed as prerequisites for successful ANR design by practitioners with different professional backgrounds.

The heterogeneity of lead isotope ratios of lead white paints within individual paintings is evaluated. The analyses of five different 17th-century Dutch paintings, sampled in different locations, identifies the presence of isotopic heterogeneity in lead white within a single painting. Pure pigment in the form of cones of 16th-century Venetian lead white, in contrast, was found to be isotopically homogeneous. The study evaluates the origins of the increased heterogeneity of lead isotope ratios in the evolution from the pure pigment to the artwork.

What is an object? In this thesis it is this seemingly trivial concept which is up for investigation. Inspired by insights of Immanuel Kant, the concept of object is given a transcendentalist treatment, the central idea of which is that the practice of viewing all of reality in terms of objects, having properties and being related in certain ways, is a human mode of understanding, inherent in our cognitive system. It is argued that first-order logic should be seen as an expression of the main principles guiding human cognition. These principles are intended to describe what I call ‘the draft ontology’, our intuitive picture of the world. It is argued that the study of the human cognitive system is an essential element of the methodology to arrive at a more systematic ontology. The transcendentalist approach is worked out in the form of what will be called ‘image theory’, a theory centred around the modules of the human cognitive system (‘images’) that perform procedures on what is perceptually available to us. It is these that determine properties and thereby effect the ‘emergence’ of the objects themselves. These ideas are put to work for analysis of two major ways in which new objects arise out of existing ones: mereological fusion and abstraction. Abstraction—the emergence of objects like ‘the’ tiger and whiteness out of tigers and white things respectively—is a phenomenon showing many similarities with mereological fusion. Image theory also turns out to be relevant for the conditions of being real, being unreal, and being halfway, as they figure in issues like existence, fiction, imagination, and modality.

The thesis characterises logic as a formal presentation of a guide to undertaking a rational practice, a guide which is itself constituted by epistemic norms and their consequences. There in general may be more than one "good" presentation, more than one "good" practice, and more than one way to conceive of the practice. This is a pragmatic conception of logical pluralism we call thoroughgoing logical pluralism. The thesis consists in a defence of thoroughgoing logical pluralism, and a case for how such a characterisation of logic is helpful in addressing problems in logical revision, semantic paradoxes, and the incommensurability of logical theories. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the aforementioned view of logic (clarifying what is meant by "formal" and "epistemic norms"), and defends it against the usual objections to logical pluralism and treats of a few rival approaches to logical pluralism. The second chapter of the thesis defends the view that logical revision is a form of narrow reflective equilibrium with respect to the norms which constitute the practice that the logic is formalising, and the formalisation itself. The third chapter of the thesis outlines a family of pragmatic solutions to the liar paradox along the lines of the practitioner identifying the norms they wish to keep, and changing their practice or formalisation in accordance with either keeping a truth predicate in her logical language or not. Either way, paradoxical statements do not appear in the extension of a truth predicate in this language. This comes about through identifying the existence of paraconsistent (dual) Kripke fixed point-defined truth predicate extensions of a family of languages of arithmetic, starting from simply that of arithmetic and stretching into a hierarchy of predicates: the truth predicate, and a proper class of ordinal-indexed "paradoxicality" predicates. Such a language is defined and the existence of fixed points for the extensions of a hierarchy of predicates for paraconsistent models of arithmetic is proven. The fourth chapter of the thesis outlines how, through a modification of Craige Roberts' Questions Under Discussion framework, one can provide an account of how practitioners of different logics may understand and learn from each-other's proofs—to the extent that a formal translation sufficient to do this is allowed, given linguistic constraints. This is managed on the basis of a characterisation of the potential ability of the formal mathematician to make the relevant inferences. This account of logic provides the beginning of an answer to the question of how logic is normative for thought. A terse response to the question in light of this account is that logics are normative for thought insofar as they outrun the mental capacities of practitioners to think through the consequences of their norm-following. Further suggestions of how to elaborate on this response, particularly in how to amend it for applications of logics outside of descriptive languages, are provided at the end of the thesis.

Textbook narratives of a nation’s past often present a limited frame of reference, which impedes the aim of teaching history from multiple perspectives. This study aims to explore the use of multiperspectivity in teachers’ lesson designs for 10th grade students based upon a text that includes multiple perspectives (HP) (N=8) compared to a text that hardly includes multiperspectivity (LP) (N=10). The lesson designs were analyzed on multiperspectivity regarding aims, instruction, materials and learning activities, and also on actors, elements of scale, dimensions, historians interpretations and students’ perspectives. We found that different dimensions (for example, political, economic) were more often incorporated in the lesson designs based upon text HP, but that students’ perspectives were more often included in the designs based upon text LP. Only one fifth of the lesson designs reflected a high overall level of multiperspectivity. Nevertheless, text HP generated more multiperspectivity with respect to aims and instruction, dimensions, scale and historiography than text LP. Interviews with the teachers showed that the interpretation of the exam program – either a focus on learning historical reasoning or acquiring a chronological overview of knowledge – seemed decisive in the design of the lessons. This study calls for careful incorporating multiperspectivity in textbook by authors, and in their lessons by teachers who seek to do justice to multiple perspectives.

We evaluate the use of direct intrinsic word embedding evaluation tasks for specialized language. Our case study is philosophical text: human expert judgements on the relatedness of philosophical terms are elicited using a synonym detection task and a coherence task. Uniquely for our task, experts must rely on explicit knowledge and cannot use their linguistic intuition, which may differ from that of the philosopher. We find that inter-rater agreement rates are similar to those of more conventional semantic annotation tasks, suggesting that these tasks can be used to evaluate word embeddings of text types for which implicit knowledge may not suffice.

Non-symbolic computation (as, e.g., in biological and artificial neural networks) is astonishingly good at learning and processing noisy real-world data. However, it lacks the kind of understanding we have of symbolic computation (as, e.g., specified by programming languages). Just like symbolic computation, also non-symbolic computation needs a semantics—or behavior description—to achieve structural understanding. Domain theory has provided this for symbolic computation, and this thesis is about extending it to non-symbolic computation. Symbolic and non-symbolic computation can be described in a unified framework as state-discrete and state-continuous dynamical systems, respectively. So we need a semantics for dynamical systems: assigning to a dynamical system a domain—i.e., a certain mathematical structure—describing the system’s behavior. In part 1 of the thesis, we provide this domain-theoretic semantics for the ‘symbolic’ state-discrete systems (i.e., labeled transition systems). And in part 2, we do this for the ‘non-symbolic’ state-continuous systems (known from ergodic theory). This is a proper semantics in that the constructions form functors (in the sense of category theory) and, once appropriately formulated, even adjunctions and, stronger yet, equivalences. In part 3, we explore how this semantics relates the two types of computation. It suggests that non-symbolic computation is the limit of symbolic computation (in the ‘profinite’ sense). Conversely, if the system’s behavior is fairly stable, it may be described as realizing symbolic computation (here the concepts of ergodicity and algorithmic randomness are useful). However, the underlying concept of stability is limited by a no-go result due to a novel interpretation of Fitch’s paradox. This also has implications for AI-safety and, more generally, suggests fruitful applications of philosophical tools in the non-symbolic computation of modern AI.

This dissertation aims at the logical modelling of aspects of human reasoning, informed by facts on the bounds of human cognition. We break down this challenge into three parts. In Part I, we discuss the place of logical systems for knowledge and belief in the Rationality Debate and we argue for systems that formalize an alternative picture of rationality -- one wherein empirical facts have a key role (Chapter 2). In Part II, we design logical models that encode explicitly the deductive reasoning of a single bounded agent and the variety of processes underlying it. This is achieved through the introduction of a dynamic, resource-sensitive, impossible-worlds semantics (Chapter 3). We then show that this type of semantics can be combined with plausibility models (Chapter 4) and that it can be instrumental in modelling the logical aspects of System 1 (“fast”) and System 2 (“slow”) cognitive processes (Chapter 5). In Part III, we move from single- to multi-agent frameworks. This unfolds in three directions: (a) the formation of beliefs about others (e.g. due to observation, memory, and communication), (b) the manipulation of beliefs (e.g. via acts of reasoning about oneself and others), and (c) the effect of the above on group reasoning. These questions are addressed, respectively, in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. We finally discuss directions for future work and we reflect on the contribution of the thesis as a whole (Chapter 9).

The common ground on which interlocutors base their interactional contributions involves not only the preceding interaction and expectations vis-à-vis each other, but is also based on shared knowledge of (implicit) conversational norms and preferences. Deviations are usually noticed and interpreted as uncooperative, or even impolite. Although insights gained within Conversation Analysis are based on research of modern natural language data, this paper will illustrate how they are also reflected in the interactional structures of literary dialogues in Latin comedy, focusing mainly on principles of sequencing and preference structure.

In this paper the authors attempt to make some inroads into compiling a survey of expressions of past tense habituality across Slavic languages – to date a lacuna. Slavic languages share an aspectual system that is binary (perfective opposes imperfective) and lack a specific habitual aspect. Nevertheless, aspect does play a part in the expression of habituality, which is not restricted to imperfective verbs. That said, habituality usually “arises” in context and needs to be studied as such, also in order to establish its actual nature: a matter that we will only be able to touch upon. The starting point of our inventory is twofold: first we attempt to demonstrate the different use of the aspects in the context of a past narrative passage from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and point out the variety of aspect choice amongst Slavic languages in situations of habituality. Then we list and discuss expressions sourced from the available literature and some own research. Especially as specific studies into habituality for quite a few Slavic languages are lacking to date, this contribution is not exhaustive.

Personalizing users' experience and the ability to perform complex tasks on smart devices and environments such as smart speakers and smart homes are changing the way people are doing their daily tasks. Checking the weather and planning to visit a museum is as simple as asking your smart speaker at home to read out loud the weather condition and commanding the Intelligent Assistant integrated with the smart speaker to book a ticket to visit the museum. To improve user experience in physical spaces such as smart homes, museums, and cities while performing their daily tasks, effective modeling of users interacting with smart devices is required. The overall goal of this thesis is to improve users' experience in physical spaces such as smart cities and environments by modeling user interactions with smart devices. Smart devices hold the promise to bring the powerful tools of the online world into the physical world, and our results highlight similarities and differences with user interactions in traditional search and recommendation settings, and help promote the user experience while interacting with smart devices.

Four different methods for measuring droplet size distributions are evaluated: the Image Analysis VisiSizer technique, a stroboscopic imaging method developed in-house, phase Doppler particle analysis (PDPA), and laser diffraction (Malvern Spraytec). We find that the larger the droplets, the bigger the differences between the results obtained by the different methods. The Image Analysis VisiSizer technique yields results that are comparable with those of the stroboscopic imaging method, provided that the raw Visisizer data are used, as the VisiSizer software makes corrections that can skew the results. Our measurements confirm how the limitations of PDPA can influence its outcomes; the presence of air bubbles inside droplets will cause PDPA to mistake them for smaller droplets. The fact that PDPA reports no droplets larger than 1200 μm might be caused by large drops often not being spherical. The results of the laser diffraction technique are influenced by its fitting method to obtain the droplet size distribution and by overestimation of the number of small droplets due to their low velocity and thus higher concentration in the sample volume. Our results emphasize the need for selecting the size measurement technique to fit the physical nature and expected range of droplet parameters.

Soil respiration (Rs), the production of carbon dioxide in soils, increases dramatically from deserts to forested ecosystems. Rs values thus provide a potential tool to identify past ecosystems if recorded in sedimentary archives. Here, we propose a quantitative method to reconstruct past Rs values from paleosols. This method reverses the soil paleobarometer, a proxy that estimates past atmospheric CO2 concentration values (CO2atm) from paleosols while considering a narrow range of variation for Rs. We use past CO2atm values from marine proxies to reconstruct soil respiration from a 20 million year-long isotopic record from northeastern Tibet covering the transition from the Eocene greenhouse to the Oligocene icehouse. We show that Rs dropped at least 4-fold through the transition into the Oligocene icehouse, marking the spread of boreal desert-steppes of Central Asia. We show that increasing aridity and the decline of monsoonal rainfall, in parallel with global cooling, caused the fall of soil respiration. These highly dynamic Rs emphasize the need for a systematic screening of paleosol isotopic data before using the soil paleobarometer to reconstruct CO2atm

The early identification of unstable glass objects in museum collections is essential for their conservation, but as yet cannot be accomplished straightforwardly. Accordingly, this paper describes the development and validation of a simple protocol for quantitative determination of ions characteristic of the chemical decay of historic glass, using surface swabbing combined with ion-exchange chromatography. The establishment of a robust protocol is an important step in the development of an early warning system for the chemical deterioration of unstable glass. Using a model system, the protocol was validated for specificity, linearity, accuracy, precision, limits of detection, and limits of quantification for 10 anionic species (fluoride, acetate, formate, chloride, nitrite, bromide, nitrate, carbonate, sulfate and phosphate) and 6 cationic species (lithium, sodium, ammonium, potassium, magnesium and calcium). Good validation parameters (R2 > 0.995; RSD < 5%; Recovery 90-100%) were obtained for acetate, formate, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate, lithium, sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. Chloride (R2 = 0.934; RSD = 13.6%; recovery 71.4%) and carbonate (R2 = 0.993; RSD = 10.3%; recovery 120%) had poor validation parameters. Sulfate had low recovery (78.2%), but high reproducibility (RSD = 4.32%) with R2 = 0.997. Limits of quantification were below 1 mg/L for all analytes, which is satisfactory for the study of unstable glass in museum collections. The validated sampling protocol was trialled using artificially aged unstable glass fragments, which resulted in a high relative standard deviation (between 1 and 30%). The ability to achieve improved care of historic glass by application of the validated protocol in museum collections is discussed in the context of a pilot study undertaken at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Over the past 15 years, YouTube has emerged as a large and dominant social media service, giving rise to a ‘platformed media system’ within its technical and regulatory infrastructures. This paper relies on a large-scale sample of channels (n=36M+) to explore this media system along three main lines. First, we investigate stratification and hierarchization in broadly quantitative terms, connecting to well-known tropes on structural hierarchies emerging in networked systems, where a small number of elite actors often dominate visibility. Second, we inquire into YouTube’s channel categories, their relationships, and their proportions as a means to better understand the topics on offer and their relative importance. Third, we analyze channels according to country affiliation to gain insights into the dynamics and fault lines that align with country and language. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the inductive character of this research, by highlighting the many follow-up questions that emerge from our findings.

This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-century Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul, Auguste Jaba, cannot be called either a “native informant” nor an “orientalist scholar”. After providing some historical background, I discuss Bayazîdî’s main writings and their significance. I then discuss his conceptions of language, literature, local tradition or culture, and history, concluding that none of these bears any traces of modern Western philology or romantic nationalism. Hence, his work cannot be qualified as “internalized orientalism”, but, as it is written in a vernacular language, neither can it be wholly assimilated to classical Islamic learning.

In the context of globalizing transboundary environmental challenges, strategies to protect and secure the local commons such as water resources have been increasingly scaled up. Consequently, local communities have started to engage in transnational mobilisations to defend their rights and express their concerns. This often implies the adoption and institutionalisation of emerging global norms, principles and modes of framing and claiming – such as the Human Right to Water or the Rights of Nature – which will interfere with and may even go against local understandings, meaning, and rooted struggles or initial claims made by grassroots movements. On the one hand, the appropriation of expert knowledge and technical idiom may improve their recognition and access to political and financial support. On the other hand, transnational involvement may (re)produce misrecognition or exclusion on the ground for community-based organisations. Studying cases from Latin American countries, and combining commons and social movements theories, this paper examines in what ways professionalisation and commensuration strategies as deployed and implemented by transnational grassroots movements impact the local commons.

This exploration is based on joint fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary research team in the city of Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. It uses the notion of commoning as an analytic lens to understand social transformations in this intermediate city, and in contemporary Latin America at large. The interplay of commoning, de-commoning and re-commoning processes draws attention to the cocreation and collective production of tangible and intangible resources happening at different scales. The proposed commoning perspective further aims to critically assess the binary contrasts and presumed dualisms that inform academic and policy approaches to social change, in order to create a better understanding of the drivers, interactions and practices of transformation in intertwined rural-urban contexts. Resumen: Comunizar Xela: Negociando espacios colectivos alrededor de una ciudad intermedia centroamericana Esta exploración se basa en un trabajo de campo conjunto realizado por un equipo de investigación interdisciplinario en la ciudad de Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. Utiliza la noción de “comunizar” ('commoning') como una lente analítica para comprender las transformaciones sociales en esta ciudad intermedia y en la América Latina contemporánea en general. La interacción de los procesos de comunizar, descomunizar y recomunizar llama la atención sobre la creación conjunta y la producción colectiva de recursos tangibles e intangibles que ocurren a diferentes escalas. La perspectiva de “comunizar” propuesta tiene como objetivo evaluar críticamente los contrastes binarios y los supuestos dualismos que informan los enfoques académicos y de política para el cambio social, a fin de crear una mejor comprensión de los impulsores, las interacciones y las prácticas de transformación en contextos rurales-urbanos entrelazados.

We analyze argument structure of whole-entity and handling classifier predicates in four sign languages (Russian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, German Sign Language, and Kata Kolok) using parallel datasets (retellings of the Canary Row cartoons). We find that all four languages display a systematic, or canonical, mapping between classifier type and argument structure, as previously established for several sign languages: whole-entity classifier predicates are mostly used intransitively, while handling classifier predicates are used transitively. However, our data sets also reveal several non-canonical mappings which we address in turn. First, it appears that whole-entity classifier predicates can be used unergatively, rather than unaccusatively, contrary to expectations. Second, our data contain some transitive uses of whole-entity classifier predicates. Finally, we find that handling classifier predicates can express various complex event structures. We discuss what these findings imply for existing theories of classifier predicates in sign languages.

Feel like living in a dystopia? Take a deep breath, get a strong coffee, and let us challenge your ideas of where reality ends, and sci-fi begins…

In the present paper, we compare L2 English influence on French third language acquisition (L3A) in first-year and third-year bilingual stream secondary school students and in third-year mainstream secondary school students by means of a gap-filling task. We found that the influence of L2 English on French L3A increases from first- to third-year bilingual students, which is not the case in the mainstream group. This raises the question if L2 influence on L3A in bilingual education is the result of the increased L2 exposure or of a higher L2 proficiency, factors that both have been claimed to play a role in L3A-research (Hammarberg, 2001;Tremblay, 2006;Jaensch, 2009). The results of this study show that there is no individual correlation between L2 English proficiency and influence of English in L3 French learning. Therefore, we suggest that it is L2 exposure rather than L2 proficiency that leads to more influence of the L2 in L3 French.

This longitudinal study investigates negative transfer from L1 Dutch and L2 English into L3 French in the first three years of French education in a Dutch/English secondary immersion school. We focus on two word order constructions in declarative root clauses where the three languages differ: V-to-C movement (+Dutch, −French) and V-to-T movement (−English, +French). The results of a grammaticality judgement task and a gap-filling task show that the L3 learners transfer a large amount from L1 Dutch in the initial stages of the first year of French education followed by a dramatic decline in the second and third year of French education. At the onset of L3 learning, L2 English is less activated; however, its influence intervenes and stays stable in later years of learning.

Human language shows combinatoriality in its phonology (both in speech and in sign language) and its grammar, while both types appear to be absent in the communication systems of our closest evolutionary relatives. In this article, we observe that productive combinatoriality is difficult to evolve, because it requires multiple components to be put in place simultaneously for it to function. To understand how it nevertheless evolved in human language, we focus on combinatoriality in phonology, for which most evidence is available. We discuss findings and theories from three domains: linguistics (descriptive, experimental and corpus linguistics), comparative biology (including some fossil indicators) and (computer) models. We tentatively conclude that many of the biological prerequisites for combinatorial phonology and compositional semantics are shared with other animals, but that a uniquely human pressure for large vocabularies and uniquely human processes of cultural evolution are key in understanding the origins of combinatoriality in language.

In this article we investigate data from digital interactions between native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) dyads of English during synchronous computermediated communication. As opposed to most studies into the NS–NNS interface, we reversed the expert-learner participant roles: during the task performance, the NS was the (cultural) learner and the NNS the expert. Our aim was to observe the influence of these reversed participant categories on participant behavior and task performance, i.e., to see if NNS behavior as described in earlier studies also applies to the NSs in a similar apprentice position during a cross-cultural exchange, and vice versa. We found that, in both video calls and written chats, the NSs and NNSs behave in a similar manner when cast in both apprentice and learner roles. We conclude that, in task design and telecollaboration practice, the situated identities of the participants should be taken into account.

We describe how, during the 17th century, the business corporation gradually emerged in response to the need to lock in long-term capital to profit from trade opportunities with Asia. Since contractual commitments to lock in capital were not fully enforceable in partnerships, this evolution required a legal innovation, essentially granting the corporation a property right over capital. Locked-in capital exposed investors to a significant loss of control, and could only emerge where and when political institutions limited the risk of expropriation. The Dutch East India Company (VOC, chartered in 1602) benefited from the restrained executive power of the Dutch Republic and was the first business corporation with permanent capital. The English East India Company (EIC, chartered in 1600) kept the traditional cycle of liquidation and refinancing until, in 1657,the English Civil War put the crown under strong parliamentary control. We show how the time advantage in the organizational form had a profound effect on the ability of the two companies to make long-term investments and consequently on their relative performance, ensuring a Dutch head start in Asian trade that persisted for two centuries. We also show how other features of the corporate form emerged progressively once the capital became permanent. (JEL: G30, K22, N24).

This dissertation advances the debate on how we have justified beliefs about non-actual possibilities. It evaluates imagination-based and similarity-based approaches to the epistemology of possibility, develops novel accounts of each of them, and examines the role of possibility-judgements in philosophy itself. A common theme throughout this work is modal modesty: even though we can come to justifiably believe ordinary possibility claims, this ability is limited when it comes to more exotic possibilities. Part I explores the suggestion that being able to imagine something provides us with justification for believing its possibility. Different prominent interpretations of imagination are evaluated for their potential as a foundation for an imagination-based epistemology of possibility. It is concluded that these theories are unable to (ultimately) explain our knowledge of non-actual possibilities. A new interpretation of imagination, as sensori-motor simulation, is proposed, which does not succumb to the issues raised against the other theories and can provide us with some knowledge of non-actual possibilities. Part II assesses the suggestion that we justify beliefs about possibilities by extending our beliefs about the actual world through similarity reasoning. First, the notion of relevant similarity is critically evaluated and many interpretations of it are argued to be problematic. A new similarity-based epistemology of possibility is proposed, which relies on the notion of (natural) kind, our ability to categorise objects as being of a particular kind, and our ampliative reasoning skills related to this. The resulting epistemology of possibility is argued to be cognitively plausible, in line with empirical findings, and modally modest. Part III discusses the reliance of philosophy itself on possibility-judgements. It extends an important objection against non-exceptionalist theories of thought experiments. A solution is proposed, raising the question of whether humans can come to justifiably believe philosophically interesting possibilities. It is argued, pace experimental philosophers, that we do in fact can reliably judge whether philosophically significant possibilities are true. However, exotic philosophical cases remain out of our epistemic reach.

This dissertation brings together logics of agency, counterfactuals, and norms in order to address important issues arising from a formal analysis of the notion of causal responsibility. We work within two modal traditions in the logic of action: STIT logic (the logic of “seeing to it that”) and dynamic logic, specifically Propositional Dynamic Logic and Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL). Part I aims at modeling the agency of individuals and groups in causing certain results and studying the logical and epistemic features of counterfactual statements about actions that could have been (but have not been) done. We start, in Chapter 3, by including causal notions in STIT. This allows us to formalize three tests for causal responsibility and fruitfully analyze a number of key examples. Chapter 4 extends the framework from Chapter 3 and investigates the philosophical and logical implications of three new STIT-semantics for counterfactuals. By combining ideas from STIT, epistemic logic, and subject matter semantics, Chapter 5 advances a model of the mental activity used to evaluate counterfactual statements (i.e., imagination) and studies how it generates knowledge. Part II of the dissertation focuses on normative reasoning. Chapter 6 presents a dynamic deontic logic to reason about what ought to be done when violating some norms is inevitable. Chapter 7 zooms in on a main category of such situations: those involving normative conflicts. Using techniques from DEL, we design a system to capture the dynamics leading to a conflict and key differences between conscientious objection and civil disobedience.

Humans learn to solve complex problems and uncover underlying concepts and relations given limited, noisy or inconsistent observations and draw successful generalizations based on them. This rests largely on the poverty of the stimulus argument, or what is sometimes called Plato’s problem: “How do we know so much when the evidence available to us is so meagre?” In contrast, the success of today’s data-driven machine learning models is often strongly correlated with the amount of available high-quality labeled data and teaching machines using imperfect supervision remains a key challenge. In practice, however, for many applications, large-scaled high-quality training data is not available, which highlights the increasing need for building models with the ability to learn complex tasks with imperfect supervision, i.e., where the learning process is based on imperfect training samples. When designing learning algorithms, pure data-driven learning, which relies only on previous experience, does not seem to be able to learn generalizable solutions. Similar to human’s innately primed learning, having part of the knowledge encoded in the learning algorithms in the form of strong or weak biases, can help learning solutions that better generalize to unseen samples. In this thesis, we focus on the problem of the poverty of stimulus for learning algorithms. We argue that even noisy and limited signals can contain a great deal of valid information that can be incorporated along with prior knowledge and biases that are encoded into learning algorithms in order to solve complex problems. We improve the process of learning with imperfect supervision by (i) employing prior knowledge in learning algorithms, (ii) augmenting data and learning to learn how to better use the data, and (iii) introducing inductive biases to learning algorithm. These general ideas are, in fact, the key ingredients for building any learning algorithms that can generalize beyond (imperfections in) the observed data. We concentrate on language understanding and reasoning, as one of the extraordinary cognitive abilities of humans, as well as a pivotal problem in artificial intelligence. We try to improve the learning process, in more principled ways than ad-hoc and domain or task-specific tricks to improve the output. We investigate our ideas on a wide range of sequence modeling and language understanding tasks.

Psycholinguistic studies have repeatedly demonstrated that downward entailing (DE) quantifiers are more difficult to process than upward entailing (UE) ones. We contribute to the current debate on cognitive processes causing the monotonicity effect by testing predictions about the underlying processes derived from two competing theoretical proposals: two-step and pragmatic processing models. We model reaction times and accuracy from two verification experiments (a sentence-picture and a purely linguistic verification task), using the diffusion decision model (DDM). In both experiments, verification of UE quantifier ‘more than half’ was compared to verification of DE quantifier ‘fewer than half’. Our analyses revealed the same pattern of results across tasks: Both non-decision times and drift rates, two of the free model parameters of the DDM, were affected by the monotonicity manipulation. Thus, our modeling results support both two-step (prediction: non-decision time is affected) and pragmatic processing models (prediction: drift rate is affected).

An important challenge for communication scientists is to characterize and understand hybrid genres. Satirical news is such a hybrid genre and comprises a blend of the genres of comedy, news, and political opinion. This theoretical article aims to contribute to this discussion by further specifying the concept of discursive mode. Discursive modes designate certain communicative orientations toward a particular genre element. We make our argument concrete by introducing a typology of metaphorical humor in satirical news. Our humoristic metaphors in satirical news (HMSN) typology, demonstrates that satirists can realize and switch between 4 different discursive modes through metaphors. These discursive modes comprise different combinations of core rhetorical functions in satirical news (humor, education, and evaluation). We describe each type of metaphor in our typology and present a research agenda identifying key issues that require future research and empirical verification.

This thesis investigates rhythm perception using computational modeling techniques. It develops a set of tools and techniques for the definition and evaluation of probabilistic generative models of music perception. It argues that previously proposed computational models of rhythm perception insufficiently account for the shaping of rhythm perception by prior experiences, practice, and training of listeners. Motivated by predictive processing theories of perception, the thesis proposes a probabilistic generative model of meter perception which, compared with previous models, to a greater extent learns from regularities in datasets of rhythms (representing a musical environment). The outcome of this learning process simulates the effects of the long-term exposure to rhythms in the musical environment of listeners. The model is introduced via a novel framework, introduced in this thesis, in which probabilistic generative models of music cognition can be formulated as dynamic Bayesian networks with deterministic constraints. The thesis furthermore presents cross-cultural simulations in which the novel model introduced in this thesis is compared to a model that represents classical theories of rhythm perception on two datasets that respectively represent rhythms from Western folksongs and Turkish makam music. The results show that both datasets contain regularities that allow the novel model but not the model representing classical theories to infer meter from individual rhythms. The results furthermore show that some of these regularities are specific to Western or Turkish rhythms, although regularities by which meter can be inferred also appear to be shared to a significant extent between Turkish and Western rhythms.

Deze literatuurstudie is geschreven ter ondersteuning van de voorbereiding op een peiling naar de leeropbrengsten van het onderwijs in ‘Mens & Maatschappij’. Het doel is om in het peilingsonderzoek gebruik te kunnen maken van de kennis bekend uit onderzoek. Bovendien moet de literatuurstudie voor een breder publiek te lezen zijn. Deze literatuurstudie had als doel het identificeren van factoren waarvan we op basis van onderzoek kunnen zeggen dat ze van belang zijn voor het realiseren van leeruitkomsten met betrekking tot aardrijkskunde en geschiedenis. Deze factoren kunnen dan worden meegenomen in een volgende peilingvoor wereldoriëntatie. We hebben gezocht naar Engelstalige artikelen die verslag doen van onderzoek naar aardrijkskunde- en geschiedenisonderwijs op de basisschool en die in de periode van 2010 tot en met maart 2020 zijn gepubliceerd. Bijlage 1 bevat een overzicht van de publicaties die rapporteren over empirische studies gericht op aardrijkskunde (42) en geschiedenis (48). Veel van de gevonden studies waren kleinschalig (een of twee klassen) en leeruitkomsten zijn lang niet altijd op een systematische manier gemeten. Webespreken hieronder de belangrijkste bevindingen van onze literatuurstudie en doen in aansluiting daarop aanbevelingen voor de peiling.