Large Language Models (LLMs) could facilitate both more efficient administrative decision-making on the one hand, and better access to legal explanations and remedies to individuals concerned by administrative decisions on the other hand. However, it is an open research question of how performant such domain-specific models could be. Furthermore, they pose legal challenges, touching especially upon administrative law, fundamental rights, data protection law, AI regulation, and copyright law. The article provides an introduction into LLMs, outlines potential use cases for such models in the context of administrative decisions, and presents a non-exhaustive introduction to practical and legal challenges that require in-depth interdisciplinary research. A focus lies on open practical and legal challenges with respect to legal reasoning through LLMs. The article points out under which circumstances administrations can fulfil their duty to provide reasons with LLM-generated reasons. It highlights the importance of human oversight and the need to design LLM-based systems in a way that enables users such as administrative decision-makers to effectively oversee them. Furthermore, the article addresses the protection of training data and trade-offs with model performance, bias prevention and explainability to highlight the need for interdisciplinary research projects.

I argue that Murayama and Jach's claim that higher-order motivational constructs face the “black-box” problem is misconceived because it doesn't clearly distinguish between personal and subpersonal explanations. To solve it they propose interpreting motivations as causal effects of mental computational processes. I suggest that their solution might be more compellingly presented as providing a fictionalist perspective on some personal-level constructs.

Percutaneous interventions have become significant in the management of congenital heart diseases, with transcatheter procedures being increasingly used for valve dysfunction, particularly for cases requiring repetitive surgeries. This abstract presents a successful transcatheter valve-in-valve implantation in a 16-year-old patient with severe tricuspid regurgitation following a bioprosthetic tricuspid valve replacement. The procedure involved transcatheter tricuspid valve implantation using the Mammoth 25x40 mm balloon catheter and the 26 mm Myval transcatheter heart valve system (Meril Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd, Vapi, Gujarat, India), resulting in immediate improvement in right atrial pressure and regurgitation. The patient underwent an electrophysiological assessment as part of the follow-up and was discharged with a normal sinus rhythm. Tricuspid valve interventions, although less common, are essential in congenital heart diseases, which necessitate prosthetic heart valve implantation due to long-term complications. The valve-in-valve procedure offers a safe alternative, especially in paediatric patients, for reducing risks caused by repetitive surgeries, providing a valuable treatment option in experienced centres.

Metacognitive feelings are an integral part of mental computational processes and influence the outcome of computations. We review supporting evidence on affect inherent in perceptual processes, fluency in study decisions, metacognitive feelings in aha-experiences and intuition, and affect in early phases of interest development. These findings connect to recent theories that combine metacognitive feelings with computational models.

Murayama and Jach critically evaluate the idea that motivation is a dynamic that determines behavior and propose alternatively that it might be an emergent property that people construe through perceived regularities in experience and action. The critique has value but fails to appreciate the progress that has been made in moving beyond the idea of which the authors are critical.

The following is a list of learning and research resources on topics that are central to this themed section, namely the male-breadwinner and adult worker models, and their alternatives; intersectionality; the views of employers and workplace culture; the role and influence of informal care; and the tendency toward dualisation.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) offers the reader fantastical versions of two seemingly realistic office technologies: shorthand writing and polyglot dictionaries. In both cases, Stoker’s changes allow the reader to see varieties of spoken language in ways that the real technologies would not have allowed. Representing dialect through shorthand, as Mina Harker does, would have been impossible with Pitman shorthand as well as antithetical to the principles behind that writing system. And no books existed that could have enabled the translations that Jonathan Harker claims to make with his polyglot dictionary. However, Stoker uses standard English spelling when representing characters of higher status, such as Van Helsing, Morris, and Dracula, all of whom represent national types that were routinely marked by dialect respelling in other fictions of Stoker’s time. The novel therefore exhibits two contrary tendencies: Stoker uses nonstandard spelling when he could easily have avoided it, and he avoids it when he could easily have used it. We place that contradiction in Victorian debates about spelling reform and language purity. We argue that the novel uses standard spelling to reinforce an alliance of Anglo-Teutonic elites, whereas the heteroglossia and polyglossia of these language technologies undermine that trajectory.

Additive main effects and multiplicative interactive effect stability model (AMMI) was used in the present study to understand the impact of season × genotype interaction (SGI) on pod yield and its attributing traits. A total of 86 determinate growth habit type French bean germplasm were evaluated in randomized block design with two replications in three different seasons. Significant variability was observed for genotypes, seasons and SGI. The component ‘seasons’ contributed more than 50% of variability to pod yield, pod number per plant and days to flowering (DFL), and ‘genotypes’ accounted more than 50% of phenotypic variation for pod length and pod width. The SGI signals were observed for pod yield per plant, number of pods per plant, pod weight and DFL, and SGI accounted for more than 20% phenotypic variability for all traits. We identified IIHR-155 and IIHR-11 as the promising genotypes across three seasons based on their position on AMMI biplots, stability indices combined with high trait mean, estimates of best linear unbiased prediction and minimal crossover interaction. The results from the present study are highly useful for utilization in crop improvement programmes to evolve the season-specific varieties and varieties with wide adaptability in French bean.

Whole Trait Theory (and other dynamic theories of personality) can illuminate the process by which motivational states become traits. Mental computational processes constitute part of the explanatory mechanisms that drive trait manifestations. Empirical work on Whole Trait Theory may inform future research directions on mental computational processes.

This article examines the development of offshore commercial and financial services in tax havens between 1955-1979. The geographic locus of this paper is the Caribbean region, mainly focusing on the island tax havens that had been part of the British empire prior to decolonization. The article examines the relationship between the development of tax havens and decolonisation, and explores questions of international capital movement, the institutional structure of tax havens, the development of banking and commercial services in tax havens, and other offshore business activities. The article presents new data on international capital investment and capital movement, and provides empirical evidence in relation to the structure and function of businesses located in tax havens. This evidence is used to engage with emerging debates with reference to the history of tax havens: specifically, the nature of capital movement and the importance of beneficial ownership rights, and the relationship between the (re)location of business to tax havens and the mitigation of political risk and instability. We demonstrate that the development of tax havens in this period was a consequence of substantial innovation by business and finance to create advantageous environmental conditions in relation to taxation and governance. This was supported by an isomorphic process that spread similarly favourable regimes of law and regulation between different tax havens, as well as the development of a range of supportive commercial and financial services. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research on this topic.

One of the metaepistemology’s most central debates revolves around the question of what the source of epistemic normativity is. Epistemic instrumentalism claims that epistemic normativity is a species of means-ends normativity. One of the most prominent objections against epistemic instrumentalism features cases of epistemic indifference: Cases where there’s evidence that p yet believing that p wouldn’t promote any of the agent’s aims, wants, or needs. Still, there’s an epistemic reason for the agent to believe that p and thus epistemic instrumentalism is false. In response, instrumentalists have modified their views in various ways, with new contributions still forthcoming. Here, we investigate a neglected aspect of this debate: Laypeople’s judgements on cases of epistemic indifference. In two studies, we investigated whether laypeople agree with the verdict in cases of epistemic indifference as well as the key ideas behind the more recent instrumentalist replies. Our findings indicate that a significant amount of participants found it hard to buy into the cases of epistemic indifference as Kelly has constructed them. Participants did generally share Kelly’s judgement in cases of epistemic indifference. Lastly, some instrumentalist replies are well suited to explain participants’ judgements that agents ought to believe in cases of epistemic indifference.

Murayama and Jach rightfully aim to conceptualize motivation as an emergent property of a dynamic system of interacting elements. However, they do not embrace the ontological and paradigmatic constraints of the dynamic systems approach. They therefore miss the very process of emergence and how it can be formally modeled and tested by specific types of computer simulation.