Rethinking rehabilitation of salt-affected land: new perspectives from Australian experience

Soil salinity is emerging as a major threat to the sustainability of modern agricultural production systems and, historically, land and water degradation due to salinity has defeated civilisations whenever the cost of remediation exceeded the benefits. This work discusses the complexity inherent in working with salinity, and the opportunities where salt damaged land and water is viewed as a resource. It takes a wider look at land and waterscapes, seeing them as systems that link damage and repair across time and space to bridge the divide between the main beneficiaries of ecosystem services and the main actors, farmers, and land managers. We first discuss the mechanistic basis of crop reduction by salinity and evolution of ideas about how to shape the plant-soil-water nexus. We then discuss the needs of farmers and other land users required for adequate planning and land management within the constraints of existing policy. Lastly, an approach that provides a new technical and economic tool for the remediation of land in several land use categories is presented. We conclude that a more concerted effort is required to turn payments for ecosystem services into a true market, accepted as such by the land managers, whose agency is essential so the ‘knowledge of what can be done can be transformed into benefits’. Achieving this will require a transformation in the paradigm of how natural resources are managed.

Marriage Ties in England in First Half of 17th Century: Sermons to Newlyweds by Thomas Gateaker

The author of the article examines the evolution of ideas about marriage and matrimonial duties in the 17th century in England. The study is based on sermons to newlyweds published in the 1620s by the famous moderate Puritan Thomas Gataker: “A Summary of Marital Responsibilities” (1620), “A Good Wife is a Gift of God” (1620/23), and “A Perfect Wife” (1623). It is emphasized that these sermons are a rich source of early modern marriage. Addressing them allows us to understand the origins of changes in traditional gender practices introduced by the Puritans in the 17th century. The author demonstrates that, unlike Anglicans and Catholics, Puritans put the friendship between a man and a woman in the first place for the purpose of marriage, which serves as a salvation from loneliness, and not the birth of children. The author also concludes that the Puritans relied on traditional ideas about the patriarchal foundations of the marriage union, but the place and role of women in it was actively revised and fe-male virtue began to take its rightful place in a pious community.

Deconstruction of the legal personhood of artificial intelligence

Calls to rethink the content of “legal personhood” are increasingly being heard at the present time: to recognize animals, artificial intelligence, etc. as a subject. There are several explanations for this: firstly, a change in ideas about a person and their position in society, and secondly, attempts to rethink the traditional categories of law. Throughout long periods of history, the definition of legal personhood depended on the definition of subjective right; the subjective right was associated with the legally significant will of the person. Consequently, a change in views on the will theory of subjective right inevitably lead to a revision of the content of the person. The main purpose of this article is to determine the essence of the legal personhood. To do this, using the historical method, the evolution of ideas about the legal personhood is revealed. It is argued that Hohfeld’s approach to understanding subjective-legal structures made it possible to look differently at the content of the category of legal personhood: it became possible to recognize animals or artificial intelligence as the owners of various subjective-legal categories. Nevertheless, the logic of modern commentators, as well as supporters of such a flexible approach to the definition of legal personhood, is not free from shortcomings. Using the method of analytical jurisprudence, the author demonstrates the emerging problems.

Transformation of the image of power on the medals of the last Valois during the Religious wars

The article is devoted to the study of images of Royal power that were used by the last Valois dynasty’s representatives, reflecting the transformations that occurred in connection with the attempt to strengthen the Royal authority with intensification of secular power and gaining spiritual power. Studying the French Royal medals of the end of the XVI century, it is possible to identify the main trends of changes in the image of the Royal power during the development of religious conflict, demonstrating the increasing role of certain Christian symbols that were used both to indicate their religious position and its presentation to society during the state crisis. The study analyzes the medals of the time of Charles IX, in particular in memory of St. Bartholomew’s night, and the medals of Henry III. Analysis of these images allows us to come to the conclusion about the evolution of ideas about the king and his power from the image of the ancient hero king that was formed at the time of the beginning of religious wars, to the restoration of the idea of the most Christian king and peacemaker king, common in the pre-Renaissance era, and which is most clearly shown in the images of Henry III.

10. Local Government

This chapter examines the institution of local government. This topic is often neglected in constitutional law studies, on the rather simplistic basis that since the United Kingdom is not in a legal sense a ‘federal country’ it is only the national governmental system that merits close attention. The suggestion made here is that analysis of the role played by local government institutions reveals a great deal about the nature of ‘democracy’ within our modern constitution. The chapter focuses in general terms on the evolution of ideas relating to localism, tradition, and the ‘modernisation’ of local government and on local government’s changing constitutional status during the course of the twentieth century. More specifically, the chapter examines trends in the institutional structure of the local government sector (and especially the abolition of the Greater London Council and metropolitan counties in the mid-1980s), developments relating to the fiscal autonomy of local government throughout that period, the role played by the judiciary in determining the limits of local government autonomy, and changes in one of the most important areas of local authority activity – the provision of council housing.

“Thought I’d Share First” and Other Conspiracy Theory Tweets from the COVID-19 Infodemic: Exploratory Study

Background The COVID-19 outbreak has left many people isolated within their homes; these people are turning to social media for news and social connection, which leaves them vulnerable to believing and sharing misinformation. Health-related misinformation threatens adherence to public health messaging, and monitoring its spread on social media is critical to understanding the evolution of ideas that have potentially negative public health impacts. Objective The aim of this study is to use Twitter data to explore methods to characterize and classify four COVID-19 conspiracy theories and to provide context for each of these conspiracy theories through the first 5 months of the pandemic. Methods We began with a corpus of COVID-19 tweets (approximately 120 million) spanning late January to early May 2020. We first filtered tweets using regular expressions (n=1.8 million) and used random forest classification models to identify tweets related to four conspiracy theories. Our classified data sets were then used in downstream sentiment analysis and dynamic topic modeling to characterize the linguistic features of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as they evolve over time. Results Analysis using model-labeled data was beneficial for increasing the proportion of data matching misinformation indicators. Random forest classifier metrics varied across the four conspiracy theories considered (F1 scores between 0.347 and 0.857); this performance increased as the given conspiracy theory was more narrowly defined. We showed that misinformation tweets demonstrate more negative sentiment when compared to nonmisinformation tweets and that theories evolve over time, incorporating details from unrelated conspiracy theories as well as real-world events. Conclusions Although we focus here on health-related misinformation, this combination of approaches is not specific to public health and is valuable for characterizing misinformation in general, which is an important first step in creating targeted messaging to counteract its spread. Initial messaging should aim to preempt generalized misinformation before it becomes widespread, while later messaging will need to target evolving conspiracy theories and the new facets of each as they become incorporated.

Formation of the Concept of “Regional Security” in the History of World Philosophical Thought

The relevance of the article is due to the increasing importance of the regional security factor in modern conditions, where the level of regional self-awareness and the desire for relative autonomy are growing within the framework of the general process of developing the security system. The article is devoted to the analysis of the security concepts existing in the history of philosophy in order to identify the evolution of ideas about “regional security”. The study uses comparative, systemic and hermeneutic methods, the action of which is aimed at identifying aspects of regional security in texts devoted to the problems of state, national and public security. The novelty of the research is associated with the development of the idea of the evolution of ideas about regional security from abstract ideas to various aspects of regional practice. The result of the study is evidence that, being originally one of the aspects of general management theory, the ideas of regional security at the end of the twentieth century became the core of the concept of “regional security complexes”. The next result was the substantiation that modern criticism of this concept is the basis of the theoretical constructions of regional security in the 21st century, which are based on a synthesis of ideas about the need to adopt rules adopted by states that support the stability of world security and the influence of regions with their own interests. The conclusion of the study is to assert that modern concepts of regional security are based on the synthesis of methodologies of the systemic and constructivist approaches. This methodology is used to substantiate the assertion that any state is forced to deal with the security problems of its regions, to pay attention to the existing threats and regional interests in them, which may be of a constructive nature and may pose a real danger associated with challenges from the political, economic, military, environmental, and social spheres. Keywords: regional security, philosophical discourse of security, state security, national security, social security, theory of regional security complexes