Alex Anvi Eponon, Ildar Batyrshin, Christian E. Maldonado-Sifuentes
et al.
Current artificial intelligence systems struggle with systematic compositional reasoning: the capacity to recombine known components in novel configurations. This paper argues that the failure is architectural, not merely a matter of scale or training data, and that its origins lie in the psychological learning theories from which AI paradigms were derived. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, drawing on the systematicity debate in cognitive science and on the demonstration of Aizawa that neither connectionism nor classicism can make systematicity a structural consequence of the architecture, the paper establishes that the corrective techniques proliferating in modern AI, from chain-of-thought prompting to alignment through human feedback, function as auxiliary hypotheses that address symptoms without resolving the underlying architectural indifference to systematicity. Second, it traces the genealogy from psychological learning theory to AI methodology, showing that behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism each bequeathed a specific structural limitation to the AI paradigm it inspired: the exclusion of internal structure, the opacity of representation, and the absence of formal construction operators. A cross-cultural reappraisal of rote learning reveals a further underexploited pathway. Third, the paper introduces ReSynth, a trimodular conceptual framework that proposes the principled separation of reasoning, identity, and memory as a path toward architectures in which systematic behaviour is a structural consequence of design rather than a correction applied after the fact.
The unification of symbolic reasoning and neural networks remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence. Symbolic systems offer reliability and interpretability but lack scalability, while neural networks provide learning capabilities but sacrifice transparency. Tensor Logic, proposed by Domingos, suggests that logical rules and Einstein summation are mathematically equivalent, offering a principled path toward unification. This paper provides empirical validation of this framework through three experiments. First, we demonstrate the equivalence between recursive Datalog rules and iterative tensor contractions by computing the transitive closure of a biblical genealogy graph containing 1,972 individuals and 1,727 parent-child relationships, converging in 74 iterations to discover 33,945 ancestor relationships. Second, we implement reasoning in embedding space by training a neural network with learnable transformation matrices, demonstrating successful zero-shot compositional inference on held-out queries. Third, we validate the Tensor Logic superposition construction on FB15k-237, a large-scale knowledge graph with 14,541 entities and 237 relations. Using Domingos's relation matrix formulation $R_r = E^\top A_r E$, we achieve MRR of 0.3068 on standard link prediction and MRR of 0.3346 on a compositional reasoning benchmark where direct edges are removed during training, demonstrating that matrix composition enables multi-hop inference without direct training examples.
Migration has become an inescapable reality affecting South African families, extending its impact far beyond the immigrant to those staying behind. The geographical separation of parents from their adult children and grandchildren significantly alters family dynamics, creating logistical and emotional challenges. Participants in this study reveal a deeply felt need to physically reconnect with their loved ones, emphasizing the emotional solace derived from in-person interactions. The enduring parent-child bond motivates family members to find meaningful ways to maintain their connections across vast distances and differing time zones. Transnational visits serve as a crucial lifeline, enabling parents to experience their children’s new environments and strengthen bonds with their grandchildren. This article draws upon ongoing qualitative research exploring the lived experiences of South African parents with emigrant children and grandchildren, focusing on the barriers that hinder these transnational visits. It focusses on parents’ unique experiences travelling to visit their emigrant children, rather than return visits. While they are essential for sustaining familial bonds, visits are deeply layered experiences, shaped by financial constraints, the logistical complexities of long-distance travel and the emotional weight of farewells. These factors have the potential to render visits infrequent and emotionally complex.
Following genetic ancestry in eukaryote populations poses several open problems due to sexual reproduction and recombination. The history of extant genetic material is usually modeled backwards in time, but tracking chromosomes at a large scale is not trivial, as successive recombination events break them into several segments. For this reason, the behavior of the distribution of genetic segments across the ancestral population is not fully understood. Moreover, as individuals transmit only half of their genetic content to their offspring, after a few generations, it is possible that ghosts arise, that is, genealogical ancestors that transmit no genetic material to any individual. While several theoretical predictions exist to estimate properties of ancestral segments or ghosts, most of them rely on simplifying assumptions such as an infinite population size or an infinite chromosome length. It is not clear how well these results hold in a finite universe, and current simulators either make other approximations or cannot handle the scale required to answer these questions. In this work, we use an exact back-in-time simulator of large diploid populations experiencing recombination that tracks genealogical and genetic ancestry, without approximations. We focus on the distinction between genealogical and genetic ancestry and, additionally, we explore the effects of genome structure on ancestral segment distribution and the proportion of genetic ancestors. Our study reveals that some of the theoretical predictions hold well in practice, but that, in several cases, it highlights discrepancies between theoretical predictions assuming infinite parameters and empirical results in finite populations, emphasizing the need for cautious application of mathematical models in biological contexts.
The URIEL+ linguistic knowledge base supports multilingual research by encoding languages through geographic, genetic, and typological vectors. However, data sparsity (e.g. missing feature types, incomplete language entries, and limited genealogical coverage) remains prevalent. This limits the usefulness of URIEL+ in cross-lingual transfer, particularly for supporting low-resource languages. To address this sparsity, we extend URIEL+ by introducing script vectors to represent writing system properties for 7,488 languages, integrating Glottolog to add 18,710 additional languages, and expanding lineage imputation for 26,449 languages by propagating typological and script features across genealogies. These improvements reduce feature sparsity by 14% for script vectors, increase language coverage by up to 19,015 languages (1,007%), and boost imputation quality metrics by up to 35%. Our benchmark on cross-lingual transfer tasks (oriented around low-resource languages) shows occasionally divergent performance compared to URIEL+, with performance gains up to 6% in certain setups.
This paper examines the connection between Marx and Foucault through Althusser's emphasis on the standpoint of social reproduction, as reinterpreted by queer-feminist philosopher Teresa de Lauretis. We argue that de Lauretis reconfigures Foucault's dispositif of sexuality, framing it as the culmination of Althusser's theory of ideology and Marx's research program on the "production of life." Developing a "queer standpoint of reproduction," the study draws connections between gender as an ideological apparatus and the sex/gender binary system, with a focus on heterosexuality as an intrinsic mechanism. By situating Foucault's analysis within a broader queer-feminist and Marxian materialist framework, we highlight the dispositif of sexuality's role in shaping generative reproduction and gender domination in capitalist societies. The article offers a queer-feminist perspective that integrates Marxian and Foucauldian insights, stressing the ongoing relevance of these theories for understanding contemporary capitalist society, and situates this contribution in critical dialogue with Social Reproduction Theory, Queer Marxism, and Trans Marxism.
This paper explores racialization as a historical-sociological concept and an ongoing, contemporary material praxis, using a Global Critical Race and Racism (GCRR) framework. Racialization is an ideological and material practice of colonial conquest that requires constant reification and maintenance. This paper examines how racialization and racial practices are positioned within Egyptian state tourism campaigns, through a media content and discourse analysis, as a function of contemporary national-racial identity formation. Histories of colonial archaeology, race science, and the European colonial domination and imagination of Egypt heavily contextualize this analysis. First, the paper outlines how the identity of ancient Egyptians was a racing project fundamental to white supremacy and global race and racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in ways that are intricately tied to contemporary nationalism, national identity formation, and nation-building in modern Egypt. The focus of this paper is Egypt’s agency in its national identity formation practices, wherein it acknowledges, negotiates, and markets aspects of its racialization that are economically and geopolitically advantageous, specifically within the tourism industry and in relation to Pharaonic Egypt. In this way, Egypt’s racialization is not simply externally imposed; the Egyptian state is engaging with global structures of race and racism by maintaining racial mythologies for Western imaginaries. Egypt’s contemporary national identity formation includes an engagement with its past that negotiates its position within a global hierarchy of nations across the racial-modern world system. This study explores notions of autonomy, acquiescence, and resistance under racialization by examining how nation-states engage with, resist, or leverage racialization.
The article focuses on flat earthism, one of the most well-known contemporary conspiracy theories in popular culture. According to proponents of this theory, which has found a growing international following in recent years, political institutions such as the U.S. government and scientific institutions such as NASA would operate to deceive humanity about the real shape of our planet and the universe in which we live. In countering the data acquired by modern science and common sense knowledge, flat earthism stands as a heterodox theory and a radical critique of the authority of socially legitimized epistemic institutions. This article consists of two parts. The first part will offer a genealogical reconstruction of the flat-earth conspiracy, tracing its history from the 19th century to the exponents of the current movement. The second part will delve into the discourse of the proponents of flat earthism with specific reference to the Italian context, through documentary analysis of recent publications and online material available on YouTube and Telegram, which constitute some of the main channels for the discussion and dissemination of flat earthism in Italy today. On the basis of the data collected and analyzed, it will be shown how flat earthism represents a paradigmatic case of superconspiracy, that is, of a far-reaching theory capable of linking and including within itself a set of other, more circumscribed theories. To this end, flat earthism elaborates on a discourse that ambivalently combines two registers, scientific and religious language, proposing itself as a dissident narrative that if on the one hand rejects the knowledge of institutionalized and organized science and religion, on the other hand accredits an alternative and anti-intellectualist path of knowledge, accessible to the “common man” that aims to create a space of autonomy and opposition to the processes of secularization and globalization in which the flat earthers see the project of building a dystopian New World Order.
In the first decades of the 20th century, the Sámi movement developed a vision for how education could play a central role in the future of the Sámi people. Faced with expanding colonial school systems, teachers and intellectuals imagined what education could look like if it was to contribute to the flourishing of Sámi livelihoods. One key contributor to this project was Per Pavelsen Fokstad (1890–1973). This article outlines key elements in Fokstad’s philosophy of education and discusses his contribution to education theory in both his contemporary cultural interface and the one that we work in over 100 years later. The analyses are based on a hermeneutical reading of Fokstad’s published texts. The analyses show how Fokstad outlined a philosophy of education based in the mother tongue as a catalyst for the child’s development of a sense of self, a feeling of community, and a connection to land. This philosophy was revolutionary in his own time due to its redefinition of what was worth learning and knowing, and has grown in significance since.
We introduce a class of Markov coalescent processes on the continuous $d$-dimensional torus, in the most general setting of simultaneous multiple mergers, called the Brownian spatial coalescent. It is axiomatically defined through a property that is satisfied by the genealogies of any population model in which individuals follow independent Brownian motions forwards in time, regardless of the branching mechanism. We prove that a Brownian spatial coalescent is characterised by a set of "transition measures", reminiscent of the transition rates that characterise a non-spatial coalescent. We prove that it is sampling consistent in a suitable sense if and only if all transition measures are uniform with intensity given by the transition rates of a $Ξ$-coalescent. This defines the "Brownian spatial $Ξ$-coalescent", which we show describes the genealogies of neutral population models with Brownian movement in the limit of large population size, and in particular those of the $Ξ$-Fleming-Viot process - a generalisation of the well-known Fleming-Viot process - at stationarity. An important consequence of our results is that all spatial population models in which individuals follow independent Brownian motions and the branching mechanism is not neutral, that is, depends non-trivially on the spatial distribution, for example through local regulation, have non-Markovian genealogies. Byproducts of our results include explicit formulas for samples from the stationary distribution of a $Ξ$-Fleming-Viot process, and a representation of the backward dynamics of lineages in terms of Brownian motions with coupled drift. This includes calculations of the drift that leads to multiple or even simultaneous mergers in any dimension.
In this paper, I present a novel method to detect intellectual influence across a large corpus. Taking advantage of the unique affordances of large language models in encoding semantic and structural meaning while remaining robust to paraphrasing, we can search for substantively similar ideas and hints of intellectual influence in a computationally efficient manner. Such a method allows us to operationalize different levels of confidence: we can allow for direct quotation, paraphrase, or speculative similarity while remaining open about the limitations of each threshold. I apply an ensemble method combining General Text Embeddings, a state-of-the-art sentence embedding method optimized to capture semantic content and an Abstract Meaning Representation graph representation designed to capture structural similarities in argumentation style and the use of metaphor. I apply this method to vectorize sentences from a corpus of roughly 400,000 nonfiction books and academic publications from the 19th century for instances of ideas and arguments appearing in Darwin's publications. This functions as an initial evaluation and proof of concept; the method is not limited to detecting Darwinian ideas but is capable of detecting similarities on a large scale in a wide range of corpora and contexts.
Interethnic marriage amongst China’s ethnic population has not received the attention it deserves. This is partly due to the hesitation and resistance of the more prominent ethnic groups—Tibetans and Uyghurs—to enter an interethnic marriage. Still, it is less so for China’s Mongols, who now have an interethnic marriage rate of almost 90 percent. The intermarriage pattern had previously involved urbanities, but over the last twenty years, it has included those living in townships and villages, suggesting that the integration of Mongols within the People’s Republic’s mainstream society was gradual and arose from shared cultural beliefs and practices among Mongols and Han Chinese. It further indicates that marital issues will be like those in non-ethnic marriages. The paper explores prevailing attitudes toward interethnic marriages of the 1980s and the 2000s. The analysis highlights commonalities and shifts in marital expectations initially grounded in ethnic reaffirmation that is motived more out of personal commonality, commitment, and affection, suggesting that the offspring from these unions have hybridized or mixed ethnic identities, whereby urban Mongols entertain two identities—one ethnic and the other national.
This article describes two distinct periods in the migratory flow of the Japanese to Mexico under the framework of settler colonialism. A historical review revealed that some agriculture colonies were formed by the Japanese in the south of Mexico with the goal to settle those lands. This was possible thanks to inter-governmental agreements in the early 1900s. Recently, the migration flow of the Japanese to Mexico is due to corporate mobility, mainly in the Bajío region in Mexico where many Japanese automakers are located. The implications of both types of immigration in both regions are described as part of this research. This research contributes to the understanding of migration flows and mobility patterns of the Japanese in Mexico.
Reinforced Galton-Watson processes have been introduced in arxiv:2306.02476 as population models with non-overlapping generations, such that reproduction events along genealogical lines can be repeated at random. We investigate here some of their sample path properties such as asymptotic growth rates and survival, for which the effects of reinforcement on the evolution appear quite strikingly.
A goat is one of the most influential animals in human culture, and it has been given particular and distinct characteristics in different parts of the world. In Iranian motifs, this animal is represented as “intelligence, astuteness, the protector of the earth and the tree of life, and is associated with water, the moon, and femininity.” By highlighting the noteworthiness of the goat’s role and images as well as its relationship with both water and the tree of life, this article attempts to introduce and analyze the myth of the goat in Iran and the world through linguistics, describes the roots and genealogy of the myth. Also, this research investigated and traced the words šahāz in Lori meaning “a goat leading the herd”, ožka in Lithuanian and այծ in Armenian, meaning “goat”, in the aforementioned motifs. The primary purpose of the research is to determine the modality of the process of concocting the sign of the goat as a symbol of water and guardian of the tree of life accomplished.
The analytical research method commensurate with linguistics was used to explore the links between the roots of the goat words and the myths of the world. Additionally, the frequent appearance of this animal in artistic motifs has been studied.In keeping with the findings of this scrutiny, it has been demonstrated that mythological symbols in mankind originate from straightforward and non-abstract signifiers that in goats encompassing “leaping, fighting, smelling, chewing”.
В статье анализируются цельнолитые серьги в виде калачика из комплексов IV–VII вв. Представлена сводка артефактов из 79 памятников (Франция, Болгария, Россия, Украина, Словакия, Чехия, Австрия). На основании точных топогеодезических данных составлена карта украшений. Серьги-калачики первоначально были распространены в Северном Причерноморье и имели широкий хронологический диапазон бытования, начиная с античных памятников VI–Vвв. дон.э. до раннего средневековья (IV–Vвв.н.э.). Калачиковидная серьга для комплексов IV–VII вв. является маркером аланского присутствия. Но гунны, судя по всему, переняли изначально аланскую эстетику и символику. Кавказ, Северное Причерноморье и Нижнее Поволжье в первой половине I тыс. контролировались племенами сармат (аорсов, аланов) и гуннов. На этих территориях расположено более половины памятников нашей выборки комплексов с серьгами-калачиками. Подунавье (Австрия, Чехия, Словакия, Болгария) – еще один регион, где в археологических материалах представлены эти украшения. Также серьги-калачики найдены в Бретани в могильнике Vв. Ла-Мезьер (недалеко от Орлеана), в Бургундии и Нормандии. На юго-западе Франции (Окситания, департамент Восточные Пиренеи) известно несколько находок калачиковидных серег. Два региона Галлии (Франции) в письменных источниках названы в связи с расселением алан; в этих же регионах найдены и калачиковидные серьги. В регионе «Волга – Кама – Арал» учтено 25 закрытых комплексов с калачиковидными серьгами. Таблица взаимовстречаемости элементов погребального обряда и инвентаря в комплексах демонстрирует однородность материалов в регионах, разделенных тысячами километров. Простые серьги-калачики в регионе «Волга – Кама – Арал» могут
быть датированы IV–VI вв., серьги с гроздью/пирамидкой – второй половиной VI – VII вв. Их носителями в данном регионе были сармато-аланы.
Wahi pana aloha ʻāina, storied places of resistance, is a historical and political research device that perpetuates contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty history, and can serve as a political intervention between Kanaka (Hawaiian people) and the State of Hawaiʻi. Wahi pana aloha ʻāina are places where movements and resistance in the name of aloha ʻāina occur. Aloha ʻāina is a founding quintessential concept to a Hawaiian worldview and epistemology. The genealogy of aloha ʻāina traditions, equipped generations of Kanaka with environmental keenness through a deep love for and connection to the land. During the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in the 1890s, aloha ʻāina became the political identity of Kanaka in the struggle for sovereignty of Hawaiʻi during the illegal encroachment by the United States. In the 1970’s during the Hawaiian renaissance (cultural re-awakening), leaders of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana (the group who organized the first contemporary resistance by Kanaka against the U.S.) re-discovered and reclaimed aloha ʻāina to re-awaken the Hawaiian consciousness after decades of imposed American indoctrination. The Hawaiian renaissance led to a series of land movements that arose in opposition to America’s control of Hawaiian lands and became the basis for the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, or, the current Hawaiian political movement for better self-determination and the return of Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty to Kanaka. This legacy of storied places of resistance has been effectively written over by colonial historiography and the State of Hawaii’s legacy of American expansionism. This has manifested into a legacy of prejudice in the State of Hawaiʻi judicial system that favors non-Kanaka entities, initiatives and agendas, while disapproving and discrediting Kanaka self-determination initiatives and sovereignty agendas. Due to this, there is no concern from the State of Hawaiʻi in remedying the political conflicts that arise between Kanaka and the State. I argue that the normalization of wahi pana aloha ʻāina, can assist Kanaka in overcoming the negative impact of the colonial footprint of the State of Hawaiʻi over Kanaka ancestral legacies and land histories, and be used to reclaim Kanaka land rights. In this paper, I lay out the research behind the theory of wahi pana aloha ʻāina, and how it functions as a research tool in the field of Kanaka land struggles, with a specific focus on historical colonial resistance. Second, I exemplify the use of wahi pana aloha ʻāina through telling the story of the wahi pana aloha ʻāina of my own moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) in Keaukaha on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, and how my family and community maintain our moʻokūʻauhau and kuleana (rights/privilege/responsibility) through the practice of perpetuating wahi pana aloha ʻāina.
This article examines the ways that Danish gang exit programs engage police officers and gang defectors in a pervasive work on belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. In urban Denmark, the majority of gang exit candidates are of ethnic-minority background and form part of the street-gang environment in marginalized migrant neighborhoods. This is an intimate social environment constituted by diasporic kinship networks, where gang formations are entangled with kinship formations. Hence, when gang defectors leave their gang, they also often leave their family and childhood home for a life in unfamiliar places and positions. As I show, gang desistance is thus a highly dilemmatic process in which gang defectors find themselves “unhinged” from meaningful social and kinship relationships and in search of new ways of embedding themselves into a social world. Based on an ethnographic study of gang exit processes in Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus, this article shows how police officers and gang defectors seek to (re)shape ties of belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. The process, I argue, illuminates the intimate aspect of the notion of belonging, in which kin and state relatedness is deeply rooted in interpersonal spaces and relationships.