This scoping review evaluates the potential of four alternative protein sources (plant-based meats, cultivated meat, insects, and single-cell proteins) to contribute to a sustainable food system. Using a holistic framework, each option is assessed across four dimensions: environmental impact, production scalability, consumer acceptability, and animal welfare. Plant-based meats rank highest, with established infrastructure, growing consumer acceptance, and substantial environmental benefits. Single-cell proteins show promise despite scalability uncertainties, while cultivated meat faces significant technical and economic challenges. Insect-based proteins encounter barriers across all dimensions, including limited environmental advantages and widespread consumer rejection. This multidimensional comparative analysis supports prioritizing plant-based meats in policy and investment strategies while highlighting critical research needs for emerging alternatives, demonstrating the value of systematic head-to-head comparisons in guiding resource allocation for sustainable food system transitions.

Digital agriculture is frequently presented as a neutral technological solution to the intertwined challenges of food security, sustainability, and agricultural productivity. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), this paper argues instead that digital agricultural technologies embody particular distributions of power through their design, data infrastructures, and underlying sociotechnical imaginaries. Using Syngenta's introduction of pesticide-spraying drones to smallholder farmers in West Bengal, India, as a case study, I examine how corporate incentives shape both the technologies that are developed and the agricultural futures they seek to make possible. Integrating classical STS concepts - including scripts, interpretative flexibility, technological closure, infrastructure, and sociotechnical imaginaries - with recent scholarship on agricultural data governance and platformization, I argue that the commercial value of drones lies not only in their capacity to automate pesticide application but also in the agricultural data they generate, creating new forms of dependence between farmers and agribusiness. While drones are promoted through narratives of efficiency, sustainability, and feeding a growing global population, the empirical evidence for their benefits to smallholder farmers remains mixed when weighed against constraints of affordability, infrastructure, and unequal control over data. By situating the West Bengal case alongside historical precedents including the mechanical tomato harvester, the Green Revolution, and genetically modified crops in Africa, the paper identifies recurring patterns through which corporate and state actors privilege capital-intensive technological solutions while marginalizing smallholder priorities. It concludes that power in digital agriculture operates not only through markets but through the ability to shape technological design, govern data, and define the futures that agricultural innovation is imagined to secure.

Deepfake research has focused on audience responses to synthetic representations of other people, with limited attention to the self as the synthetic subject. We introduce Synthetic Self-Confrontation (SSC) as a mediated self-encounter defined by the simultaneous experience of recognition and dissociation when one’s identity is artificially reproduced. Drawing on six focus groups (n = 32) in which participants evaluated deepfakes of others and were then shown non-malicious deepfakes of themselves, we identify four facets of SSC: a stable moral framework that shifts when participants become the subject; an intensity shaped by trust and experienced as curiosity or threat depending on creator; a hierarchy of identity markers in which the voice is more intimate and less detachable than the face; and an awareness of identity vulnerability that shifts concern from audience deception to self-directed false attribution. Synthetic media introduce not only epistemic but also ontological uncertainty in relation to the self.

Open science contains many facets including open access, open data and open software. A further facet, open methods are far less frequently used or discussed. However, open methods support reproducibility, reusability and research integrity, particularly within ‘wet-lab’ sciences where pre-registration may not accurately describe the final methods. Within Parkinson’s Disease research, the funder Aligning Science Against Parkinson’s (ASAP), has a strict requirement to share methods. This analysis compares the presence of protocols.io links or methods journal citations between ASAP and other similar funders. Protocols.io links were found to be associated with ASAP funding, but were also associated with NIH funding. Methods Journal citations were also associated with NIH funding. The study concludes that funder requirements and culture can have a strong influence on the open research behaviour of its researchers, but that it may not need to be explicit.

cette communication propose une réflexion sur la refondation de l’État en articulant la pensée normative de Rousseau et la critique politico-anthropologique de Scott. En effet, selon Rousseau, la volonté générale est le fondement de l’État et de la cohésion du corps politique. Scott en revanche, met en évidence les mécanismes de lisibilité et de simplification par lesquels l’État cherche à rendre la société administrable. Ainsi, mettre ces deux perspectives en dialogue, permet d’examiner les conditions d’une gouvernance capable d’assurer à la fois l’unité politique et le respect de la pluralité sociale. La méthodologie adoptée repose sur une approche herméneutique et critique. Elle consiste en une analyse conceptuelle des notions de volonté générale et de lisibilité, en une mise en tension de leurs logiques respectives de légitimité et de contrôle étatique, puis en l’élaboration d’un cadre éthique comme condition sine qua non d’une véritable refondation de l’État. Les résultats montrent qu’une véritable refondation étatique requiert une transformation de ses modes d’action. En effet, plutôt que de renforcer la centralisation ou à l’inverse de prôner un retrait radical de l’État, il s’agit d’adopter une éthique de la gouvernementalité kénotique. L’argumentaire s’articulera autour d’un plan tripartite. Il consistera d’abord à la mise en perspective de l’État comme volonté générale sous les lanternes de Rousseau, ensuite à évaluer cette perspective rousseauiste à partir de la critique scottienne de “lisibilité” de l’État, et enfin, à proposer une éthique kénotique de gouvernementalité comme voie de refondation de l’État.

Political scientists often use aggregate spatial units like neighborhoods, precincts, and administrative districts. Statistics based on aggregate data are sensitive to boundary definitions, a well-known issue called the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Scholars struggle to investigate this issue because the number of possible aggregations in most applied problems is intractably large. We propose a sampling-based method for measuring geographic aggregation sensitivity. Building on graph partition algorithms developed for legislative redistricting, our approach allows researchers to sample alternative aggregations from a specified target distribution. Researchers can ensure aggregations are realistic for their setting by defining constraints, such as population targets and respect for geographic boundaries. Researchers can then compare estimates across aggregations. We illustrate our approach through applications measuring segregation, racially polarized voting, and the relationship between racial context and exclusionary attitudes. Alternative aggregations can shift estimates in these analyses by 11% to 44% depending on outcome and setting.

Secularization has been a feature of the western world for decades, with fewer people attending religious services regularly or claiming affiliation with a religious institution. However, critics of secularization theory point to growth among the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNRs) as evidence that religion is changing and not declining. Secularization theorists, instead, argue that SBNRs are best understood as moderately religious individuals who form part of a secular transition. I use a large, nationally representative survey of US adults to empirically assess these competing claims. I find that, while SBNRs are more “religious” and “spiritual” than secular individuals, they are both less “religious” and “spiritual” than traditional religious individuals across nearly every measure examined. These findings suggest that the change-not-decline thesis is empirically untenable and that a straightforward religious subtraction narrative is the most parsimonious and empirically justified explanation for contemporary religious trends.

In many societies, values such as honesty, integrity and solidarity are increasingly pushed to the margins by self-centred materialistic outlook that favours wealth, image, status and acquisition. Some of the consequences include decline in wellbeing, trust and social cohesion. This policy research note proposes the Triple-E model for social change as a framework for building self-transcendent values-led societies. The model integrates three aligned pillars: Education, which makes personal and civic values explicit, teachable and discussable; Enactment, which gives people repeated opportunities to practise those values; and Environment, which aligns prosocial conduct with policies, incentives and institutional norms. This note maintains that effective change process requires a simultaneous implementation of the model, by individuals, communities, organisations and nations.

On June 3, 2015, Ghana experienced a catastrophic twin disaster when torrential rains exceeding 150 millimeters caused severe flooding across Accra, followed by an explosion at a GOIL (Ghana Oil Company) petrol station that claimed between 150 and 250 lives. This study employs systematic content analysis of 42 verified sources spanning 2015–2025 to examine how stakeholders framed disaster causation, attributed responsibility, and constructed narratives about urban vulnerability. Eight major themes emerged: infrastructure inadequacy appearing in 89 % of sources, blame attribution conflicts in 82 %, emergency response challenges in 76 %, urban vulnerability stigmatization in 71 %, climate change marginalization in only 34 %, policy implementation gaps in 68 %, community resilience recognition in 45 %, and institutional coordination failures in 63 %. Academic discourse evolved toward sophisticated structural analysis emphasizing vulnerability production processes, while government discourse remained focused on behavioral factors. May 2025 flooding killed four people, one in Abokobi and three in Adenta, displacing 3,000 exactly ten years after 2015, demonstrating that stated policy commitments failed to translate into improved outcomes. The National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) admitted inadequate relief resources, contradicting a decade of capacity-building commitments. Recent research found 52 % of households blame weak enforcement with no rainfall correlation, while other studies found 59 % of flooded zones are deprived communities with formal models systematically underestimating vulnerability. Implementation gaps reflect weak accountability mechanisms, limited institutional capacity, political incentive structures favoring short-term projects, and insufficient civil society monitoring. Emerging partnerships including I-DIEM emphasizing equity-centered approaches and FAO promoting community-based response represent potential transformation directions, though effectiveness depends on sustained commitment and genuine institutional change. Keywords: disaster management, content analysis, urban flooding, Ghana, emergency response, urban vulnerability, institutional accountability

Digital flight-simulation networks present themselves as open, global spaces limited only by skill, but this paper argues the Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network (VATSIM) is unevenly inhabited, shaped by material thresholds, institutional availability, and the accumulated prestige of particular routes and regions. Reading VATSIM's procedural architecture as a site of infrastructural inheritances, the paper names the mechanism through which colonial-era route imaginaries, standards, and governance logics persist inside newer digital systems, shaping who becomes visible and what participation is recognised as legitimate. Drawing on postcolonial game studies, critical infrastructure studies, and platform governance theory, the paper treats VATSIM as a procedural environment rather than a self-contained game. A mixed-methods analysis drawing on StatSim network activity and event data, the Navigraph FlightSim Community Survey (2025, 2026), and semi structured interviews with pilots, controllers, and event organisers indicates that realism norms, voice communication, and governance capacity help produce corridors read as "alive" while others remain comparatively sparse, a pattern live maps intensify. South Asian participants account for 1.3 percent of baseline departures against Europe's 47.4 percent; the controller-hours disparity approaches 29:1; an eightfold gap in high-end GPU ownership tracks comparable shortfalls in documentation access and event geography. That these disparities cannot be explained by lower interest among underrepresented participants, who in the 2026 survey wave report higher, not lower, engagement with live air traffic control and group flying, points toward infrastructural filtering as the more adequate explanation. Three pathways carry this filtering forward: standards inheritance, documentation and route inheritance, and prestige and network inheritance. Cross the Pond, VATSIM's largest recurring transatlantic event, exemplifies how these pathways converge, functioning as a ritual infrastructure that periodically renaturalizes an Atlantic-centered geography of legitimate participation. The question the paper ultimately raises is not whether South Asian pilots and controllers want to participate in global virtual aviation, but on whose terms that participation is currently made possible.

Reading silicon sampling failure as evidence about the dominant human knowledge system, rather than as a technical deficiency of the model, requires a prior theoretical commitment about the nature of the trained substrate and the level at which its outputs should be interpreted. This paper proposes such a commitment. We read the trained model as an epistemic architecture, a distribution of costs and affordances deposited by the human corpus, rather than as a repository of opinions or an exceptional artificial mind. Two interlocking positions anchor this reading: that large language models are not an ontological rupture requiring exceptional categories but informational processing configurations analyzable with the same conceptual tools applied to any knowledge system; and that the appropriate level of interpretation is the cost gradient the corpus installs in the trained substrate, not the surface of generated text. Together with the anthropoepistemic stance that treats simulation failure as evidence about the dominant knowledge ecology, these positions form an integrated triad (non-exceptionalism, cost-architectural interpretability, anthropoepistemic diagnosis) that reframes silicon sampling discrepancies from noise into signal. We document the systematic absence of deaf and signing communities from the silicon sampling literature, propose a protocol centered on two instruments anchored in deaf populations and structurally opaque to any model corpus (the EACS and a normative-judgment task built on written Mexican Sign Language), and report qualitative tendencies from ten preliminary calibration runs. The aggregate statistical default that a model carries in place of a socially negotiated majority, what we term a stochastic collective, is named here and developed in companion work.

This is the first edition of an annual, data-first review of foreign direct investment in Vietnam, intended as a standing reference for investors, advisers, policymakers and researchers. It compiles the official record for 2025 and sets it in an eleven-year context (2015-2025), covering registered capital and its three components, realized (disbursed) capital and the implementation ratio, sector composition, provincial distribution, source economies, the position of Vietnam against its ASEAN peers on a comparable balance-of-payments basis, and the policy environment, including the 2024 adoption of the global minimum tax and the compensating Investment Support Fund. Vietnam attracted USD 38.42 billion of registered FDI in 2025 and disbursed a record USD 27.62 billion; the defining structural feature of the year was the continued rise of reinvestment by existing investors, with adjusted capital reaching USD 14.07 billion, roughly 37% of the total. The review is descriptive rather than argumentative; every figure is sourced to official Vietnamese statistics and international data, and the full series is provided in the data appendix. The intention is that each annual edition updates the same tables and charts, so that the series becomes a continuous reference on Vietnam's inward investment.

This new, normalized way of working remotely, since 2020, has created a unique social format: the self-surveiling worker who is constantly working for a dispersed audience, by means of several platforms at once. Using a methodology of forty semi-structured interviews with remote knowledge workers ranging in age from 25 to 40 from the Global North and West Africa, this paper proposes the notion of performative productivity: the need to publically and compulsively produce a sense of work effort as a mode of self-presentation of identity and the building of reputational capital. We claim that the spatialization of work/life has not erased surveillance, but has internalized it and made the worker the object and the agent of surveillance. These four dynamics – a visibility imperative, an anxiety–surveillance feedback loop, the commercialization of professional identity, and performative resistance that paradoxically serves as a reproduction of the very logics it challenges – have been uncovered through informed analysis of the themes in the interviews that emerged from this research. The results build on current theories of entrepreneurial self into the context of the particular architecture of remote digital platforms, with implications for labour policy, platform design, and the well-being of workers.

This study examines representations of the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in post-war Czechoslovak film production. It is based on the premise that film is one of the key media through which cultural memory is constructed and transmitted. Through an analysis of selected fiction and documentary films, the study explores how Roma wartime experiences are represented in cinematic narratives, as well as how these experiences are interpreted, framed, and incorporated into broader narratives of the Second World War in Czechoslovakia.

Purpose: This paper argues that AI authoring is prompting an Information Shock and a new information science. The shock is not a matter of increased volume and variable quality of AI produced information. It comes as generative AI creates a new kind of author that dissolves the document, the field’s organizing unit. This forces a reconstitution of tools, literacies, and identity. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies a conceptual framework drawn from the history of Information Shocks, tracing how disruptions from cuneiform to post-World War II research data forced the field to rebuild around new objects and practices. AI is analyzed against that pattern. Findings: AI produces two modes of authorship: document-like objects that enter existing infrastructures, and transactional, co-authored exchanges with no stable unit to catalog, retrieve, cite, or verify. The second mode renders AI literacy inadequate, even in its current forms, because they presuppose an identifiable object and human interlocutors. Anticipated changes reach professional identity, tools, intellectual property, and education. Research limitations/implications: The argument is theoretical and prospective, and some anticipated changes remain speculative. The Information Shock outlined is anticipated to have major impacts for librarians and information professionals moving forward. Originality/value: The paper offers a historically grounded distinction between document-producing and transactional AI authorship, arguing that in this mode a nonhuman conversant takes the mediating position the field has long held.

Este artigo analisa os textos dos desenhos amostrais das mais de 52 mil pesquisas eleitorais registradas no Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) entre 2012 e 2024. Usando uma estratégia de classificação automatizada com grandes modelos de linguagem (LLMs), detectou-se nos textos a menção explícita a procedimentos de mitigação de erros de representação, como fontes demográficas, seleção multiestágio e métodos de ponderação. A análise revela dois padrões principais: por um lado, houve aumento geral no número de pesquisas, diversificação de institutos e modos de coleta, além maior transparência e maior nível de detalhamento dos registros; por outro, desigualdades substantivas entre institutos persistem. Pesquisas mais baratas, autofinanciadas e/ou registradas por microempresas sem experiência prévia -- identificadas via microdados de CNPJs da Receita Federal -- são grande parte dos registros e têm menor completude informacional em seus registros mesmo quando controlados efeitos fixos de eleição, estado e tendências temporais. O custo das pesquisas prediz completude dos textos inclusive quando analisadas apenas variações de um mesmo instituto. Em conjunto, os resultados mostram que institutos que fornecem relatos metodológicos mais detalhados recebem um prêmio no mercado de contratantes; e que a atual regulação eleitoral não impede o registro de pesquisas sem alguns dos aspectos requeridos pela legislação eleitoral. Complementarmente, o artigo oferece e valida uma solução escalável para auditar a transparência dos registros eleitorais no Brasil.

The Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI) was developed as a metric to evaluate middle-income countries in uniquely vulnerable positions. This includes Small Island Developing States (SIDS), many of which are represented in international forums by the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS). Our study (1) focuses on potential gaps in the MVI’s ability to capture public health considerations though health infrastructure may represent a significant vulnerability from climate shocks and (2) considers forward-looking climate indicators in the MVI calculation. We focus on the Caribbean region of AOSIS member states for our study given that they provide an accessible breadth of data in public health. They are also tightly concentrated geographically, which indicates shared risk factors. We find that the MVI does not consistently capture institutional public health capacity or preparedness while highly indebted SIDS exhibit sustained health spending reflecting expenditure burden rather than fiscal mismanagement. While forward-looking climate indicators would improve legitimacy of the MVI, the unfortunate reality is the principal barrier to adoption may not be the technical adequacy of the index itself, but in the institutional governance structures that actively shape allocation decisions.

To shift EU sustainability reporting from voluntary reporting towards legally binding accountability, The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, EU Sustainability Reporting standards and EU Taxonomy have been developed. The 2026 Omnibus reform pulls back partly this development by limiting which entities must report, setting bounds on value-chain data requests, easing reporting standards and reformulating corporate due diligence. This article discusses whether the post-Omnibus framework enhances substantive ESG accountability or widens scope for symbolic compliance. Relying on a qualitative legal doctrinal and conceptual approach it examines relevant EU legal instruments, regulations, supervisory advice and legal literature. It coins regulation-induced decoupling, a divergence between formal compliance and substantive accountability, arising from the design of a regulation not by firm conduct and frames it through five testable proposals: on market level data loss and on firm level compliant omissions. While simplification can be a welcome thing if it avoids double reporting, it dilutes accountability when narrower scope of reporting, lesser value-chain data and less strict materiality judgements provide firms with opportunities to omit challenging impacts while satisfying technical reporting rules.

This paper proposes a minimal axiomatic characterization of democratic procedures by combining structural requirements with conditions concerning individual freedom. Rather than starting from substantive conceptions of democracy, the paper treats a decision procedure as a function from profiles of individual expressions to collective outcomes, and asks under which minimal conditions such a procedure may still be called democratic. Four conditions are taken to be jointly required: universal expression, count-dependence, autonomy of judgement, and absence of coercion. The main distinction introduced by the model concerns two failures that are often treated together, although they occur at different levels: coercion in expression, where individuals cannot state what they judge, and lack of autonomy in judgement formation, where the judgement itself has been shaped by manipulation or systematic distortion. Once these two loci are separated, a procedure may satisfy universal participation and count-based aggregation, and nevertheless remain democratically defective because what is counted is either not freely expressed, or not autonomously formed. Methodologically, the paper adapts a measurement-theoretic distinction, that between latent and observed variables, to normative procedural theory. The resulting account remains institutionally neutral: it does not presuppose elections, representation, deliberation, or any specific institutional form, but provides a formal language for analyzing collective choice mechanisms, including referenda, digital voting systems, and algorithmic forms of governance.

In 2000, Robert Putnam documented a measurable decline in American social capital and named it a crisis. He explained how it happened, but not why. Without that explanation, there could be no real prescription for resolution. This paper argues that what Putnam observed was not cultural drift or technological change but a structural outcome. The systematic extraction of communal infrastructure from American life by market forces that profit from its absence was the mechanism driving the decline. The Social Nest is the term used here for what was lost: the web of informal, reciprocal relationships and shared spaces that historically provided resilience, childcare, elder support, food access, and psychological stability without market mediation. A mathematical framework represented by the Impact Curve is introduced for modeling the conditions under which community infrastructure can be rebuilt. Drawing on Centola et al.'s (2018) experimental confirmation of social tipping dynamics and Rogers' (2003) diffusion research, the framework identifies two critical thresholds (25% and 33% community adoption) that govern the momentum of cooperative formation. The Citadel is introduced as a proposed implementation model: a federated network of community pods designed to reconstitute the Social Nest at scale. This paper is explicitly theoretical. Its purpose is to provide a framework precise enough to test, and to invite the primary research that would validate or falsify its claims. Keywords: social capital, cooperative economics, community development, tipping points, structural isolation, social nest, impact curve

This paper develops a theoretical synthesis of the suppression of the sex worker rights movement in the United States and argues that the country is not merely an exporter of carceral anti-trafficking power, as a companion paper on Southeast Asia showed, but its laboratory of origin. Bernstein's (2018) concept of carceral feminism, which the Southeast Asia paper located extraterritorially in the US Trafficking in Persons Report, was itself developed through ethnographic engagement with domestic US anti-trafficking activism. Drawing on Chateauvert's (2014) history of the movement, on the legal scholarship on FOSTA-SESTA (Chamberlain 2019; Albert, Brundige and Lee 2021; Fuentes et al. 2025), and on biographical and organisational documentation of individual activists, the paper makes three claims. First, federal prosecution of movement founders - most visibly Robyn Few's 2002 arrest under Patriot Act-era federal authority - has historically produced rather than suppressed organising capacity. Second, FOSTA-SESTA (2018) functioned as a domestic rescue machine: legal scholarship and a systematic review of nine empirical studies (Fuentes et al. 2025) document reduced income, increased violence risk, and the loss of digital and physical assembly space, exemplified by the 2019 cancellation of the Desiree Alliance conference under fear of liability. Third, the movement's own history has never been free of internal marginalisation along lines of race and gender identity: Gloria Lockett's founding of CAL-PEP in 1984 arose from an explicit critique of COYOTE's focus on white and higher-status sex workers, a line of critique that continues in the present through Monica Jones's Outlaw Project and Akynos's Black Sex Worker Collective. The paper closes the arc of a four-part series by showing that the rescue machine was tested at home before it was exported.

This paper develops a theoretical synthesis of the suppression of the sex worker rights movement in the United States and argues that the country is not merely an exporter of carceral anti-trafficking power, as a companion paper on Southeast Asia showed, but its laboratory of origin. Bernstein's (2018) concept of carceral feminism, which the Southeast Asia paper located extraterritorially in the US Trafficking in Persons Report, was itself developed through ethnographic engagement with domestic US anti-trafficking activism. Drawing on Chateauvert's (2014) history of the movement, on the legal scholarship on FOSTA-SESTA (Chamberlain 2019; Albert, Brundige and Lee 2021; Fuentes et al. 2025), and on biographical and organisational documentation of individual activists, the paper makes three claims. First, federal prosecution of movement founders - most visibly Robyn Few's 2002 arrest under Patriot Act-era federal authority - has historically produced rather than suppressed organising capacity. Second, FOSTA-SESTA (2018) functioned as a domestic rescue machine: legal scholarship and a systematic review of nine empirical studies (Fuentes et al. 2025) document reduced income, increased violence risk, and the loss of digital and physical assembly space, exemplified by the 2019 cancellation of the Desiree Alliance conference under fear of liability. Third, the movement's own history has never been free of internal marginalisation along lines of race and gender identity: Gloria Lockett's founding of CAL-PEP in 1984 arose from an explicit critique of COYOTE's focus on white and higher-status sex workers, a line of critique that continues in the present through Monica Jones's Outlaw Project and Akynos's Black Sex Worker Collective. The paper closes the arc of a four-part series by showing that the rescue machine was tested at home before it was exported.

Archaeological assemblages dating the postglacial period of Central Asia document considerable variability in technological organization and adaptation, leading to ambiguity in terms of cultural attribution. The variability in assemblage attribution has been primarily based on techno-typological characteristics. The effect of raw material properties in shaping technological organization, however, remains less understood. Therefore, cultural attribution solely based on techno-typology risks overlooking the influence of local lithic raw material constraints. Here, we provide data from Tikenekti-2, an open-air archaeological site located in the northern Tian Shan, to explore patterns of raw material provisioning and their effects on technological organization during the Terminal Pleistocene. Our results suggest that the Tikenekti-2 hunter-gatherers procured locally-available rhyolite and porphyritic rhyolite as well as small nodules of chert, eroding from the nearby conglomerate boulders. Although raw material selection strongly conditioned the core and blank sizes, the reduction intensity remained broadly similar across the raw material categories. This suggests that raw material ecology played a significant role in shaping the technological organization, thus the degree of variability in the assemblage primarily reflects the raw material constraints.

This study analyses game theory as applied to an example that occurred during the FIFA World Cup. The matches in question are, of course, those between the national teams of Austria and Algeria, and those involving a third national football team, ranked amongst the best third-placed teams, namely the Iranian national team. Thus, the three teams are regarded as players A and B, with player C being the third party, respectively. Game theory applied to these teams during the World Cup matches shows that, in a context of interdependence, the decisions made by the players in dynamic interactions ultimately have a significant impact on the third party, namely player C. Thus, the evidence suggests, in particular, that a victory for the Austrian team could, in fact, guarantee the Iranian team’s qualification; on the other hand, a victory for the Algerian team would, naturally, guarantee the Iranian team’s qualification; thus, decisions benefiting one of the teams would, naturally, have a plausible and significant effect directly related to the Iranian team’s qualification. Considering a draw between the two national teams, on the other hand, this ultimately resulted in the elimination of the Iranian team and, naturally, in the qualification of both teams, Austria and Algeria; a draw between the two teams is, naturally, regarded in this approach as a dominant strategy. In this particular approach, the evidence shows that decisions tending to benefit two distinct players naturally exert a direct influence on the third player. Both teams decided to draw the match, considering this to be the best strategy for both sides; traditional game theory applied to businesses shows that the success of two companies that decide to cooperate depends both on the companies themselves and, on the other hand, on the other market players; however, this approach differs significantly from the current one. In the current approach, the actions of a third party have little significant relevance to the other parties in a dynamic strategic interaction, as the evidence in fact suggests

Since the 2025 Defence Capability Plan, New Zealand’s defence procurement framework requires every investment business case to begin by asking what Australia does. The framework stipulates interoperability with Five Eyes partners and discourages bespoke systems, yet the specific commercial platform choices through which that interoperability is achieved have received almost no public or parliamentary scrutiny. This article traces the emergence of a logic of interoperability through which alliance-mediated procurement routines come to normalise and entrench commercial platform dependency for small states. The empirical case explored here is New Zealand’s roughly fourteen-year integration with Palantir Technologies, with that investigation being further assisted by consideration of documentary evidence from the United Kingdom and a contrastive vignette from Switzerland. The paper argues that the logic of interoperability at play operates through a two-stage mechanism: anticipatory alignment narrows procurement options toward partner-compatible platforms before vendor selection, while infrastructural lock-in consolidates dependency through architecture, accreditation, training and exercise integration. Platform choices become progressively harder to revisit regardless of why they were initially made, raising questions about sovereignty and oversight that go beyond previous concerns about capability dependency and which demand closer scrutiny.

Abstract Paper 1 supplied a descriptive measurement framework for compulsory student time, and Paper 2 supplied a proposed institutional account of the recognition boundary. This article does not recalculate, revise, or crosswalk either contribution. It addresses a bounded policy-design question: how a legislature might later specify a student-beneficial restricted public-account architecture without premising the proposal on compensable student labor, wage entitlement, damages, restitution, or a claim that education lacks value. A Protected Student Inclusion Account (PSIA) is the article’s proposed candidate restricted public-account architecture for later jurisdiction-specific consideration. The article compares candidate mechanisms as design objects with unresolved legal, benefits, custody, access, fiscal, and administrative dependencies. Transition capacity is treated only as an authorial normative design objective and a possible pilot evaluation domain. The illustrative deposit arithmetic reports nominal student deposits under disclosed inputs; it is not a fiscal note or a statement about legal authority, fiscal conditions, administrative performance, or outcomes.

Citation counts play a major role in scholarly visibility and often influence academic evaluation and career advancement. Open access (OA) publishing has long increased this visibility by removing paywalls. As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integrated into literature discovery and manuscript preparation, this advantage may intensify because retrieval systems cannot reliably access full text behind paywalls. We analyzed 10,475 papers across publication sources and disciplines in which authors explicitly disclosed AI use; each was compared with two non-disclosed controls from the same source, similar fields, and nearby dates. We then measured the OA share of cited references. AI-disclosed papers cited a higher share of OA literature than matched controls (+2.49 percentage points; 95% CI, 2.08 to 2.92; P = 2.38 x 10-36), with the largest shift when AI was used for literature or research assistance (+5.98 percentage points; P = 4.76 x 10-9). The pattern held across dataset, impact-factor, and cited journal-year analyses. These findings indicate that machine accessibility is emerging as an additional visibility factor in reference selection. Because generative AI adoption in science remains at an early stage, this pressure may grow as retrieval and drafting systems become more widely used. The risk is especially relevant for underfunded researchers, institutions, and less-resourced fields, because high OA publication fees may make subscription or non-OA publication routes more likely and leave their work easier to miss in machine retrieval.

On June 3, 2015, Ghana experienced a catastrophic twin disaster when torrential rains exceeding 150 millimeters caused severe flooding across Accra, followed by an explosion at a GOIL (Ghana Oil Company) petrol station that claimed between 150 and 250 lives. This study offers a narrative and discourse synthesis of academic literature, government and institutional statements, and news media coverage that spans 2015–2025, and examines how stakeholders framed disaster causation, attributed responsibility, and constructed narratives about urban vulnerability. Recurring patterns across these sources include persistent infrastructure inadequacy, conflicting attributions of blame between government and academic accounts, chronic emergency response capacity constraints, stigmatizing framing of informal settlements, limited emphasis on climate change relative to governance failures, and a widening gap between stated policy commitments and implementation outcomes. Academic discourse evolved toward structural analysis that situates vulnerability within the dynamics of informal urban development, while government discourse remained focused on behavioral factors. May 2025 flooding killed four people, one in Abokobi and three in Adenta, and displaced over 3,000 people almost exactly ten years after 2015. This pattern indicates that stated policy commitments did not translate into improved outcomes. The National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) publicly acknowledged inadequate relief resources, a statement in apparent tension with a decade of capacity-building rhetoric. Survey research finds that 52 % of households attribute flooding to weak enforcement of land use regulations, with no statistical correlation to rainfall intensity, while a separate citizen-science study found that 59 % of flooded zones in Accra are deprived communities where formal risk models often underestimate vulnerability. Evidence on community response indicates residents are neither passive victims nor simply unprepared, but active agents adapting with constrained resources and often more accurate local knowledge than formal risk models capture. Implementation gaps appear to reflect weak accountability mechanisms, limited institutional capacity, political incentive structures that favor short-term projects, and insufficient civil society monitoring. Emerging partnerships, including I-DIEM, which emphasizes equity-centered approaches, and FAO, which promotes community-based response, represent potential transformation directions, though their effectiveness depends on sustained commitment and genuine institutional change. Keywords: disaster management, discourse analysis, urban flooding, Ghana, emergency response, urban vulnerability, institutional accountability

Southeast Asia is the developing world's leading destination for foreign direct investment, drawing a record US$225 billion in 2024 and holding that position among developing regions for four years running. Yet comparing its economies against each other is a trap for the unwary, because the region's headline numbers are reported on three incompatible bases that are routinely, and wrongly, placed on the same axis. This compendium assembles the comparable evidence for the six largest ASEAN economies, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, and states, as its first contribution, the measurement rule that governs any honest comparison: balance-of-payments FDI is the only cross-country-comparable series, and national registered, approved or realised figures, several times larger and forward-looking, must never be benchmarked against it. On that comparable basis the picture is stark. Singapore alone accounts for about 64 percent of the region's inflows, a scale that reflects its role as a global holding and conduit hub rather than a host economy, and once it is set aside the real contest among the other five shows Vietnam as the only one rising every year since 2020. The compendium maps inflows, stock and intensity, the sources and sectors of the capital, the split between greenfield and acquisition, the region's weight in global flows, and the 2025 policy frontier of the global minimum tax and the China-plus-one relocation wave. It is built to be a standing annual reference, with every figure sourced, every measurement basis labelled, and the data gaps named rather than hidden.

Foreign direct investment in Vietnam is a national headline but a local phenomenon. Where the capital lands, and why, is decided at the level of the province, and the provincial map has just changed in two ways that this atlas sets out to chart. The first change is a shift in the flow of new investment from the historic southern core around Ho Chi Minh City toward the northern industrial belt: in 2024, for the first time, two northern provinces, Bac Ninh and Hai Phong, drew more registered FDI than Ho Chi Minh City, with Bac Ninh alone up 184 percent on the year, driven by the electronics and semiconductor cluster. The second change is administrative and abrupt: on 1 July 2025 Vietnam cut its provinces from 63 to 34, merging Binh Duong and Ba Ria-Vung Tau into an enlarged Ho Chi Minh City that now accounts for roughly 31 percent of national GDP, and folding Bac Giang into Bac Ninh. This paper maps the geography of Vietnamese FDI across four dimensions, the concentration of the flow, the northern shift, the role of provincial governance as measured by the Provincial Competitiveness Index, and the industrial-park infrastructure that hosts it, and then confronts the discontinuity the 2025 merger introduces into the data. It shows that while the flow of new investment has tilted north, the cumulative stock still favours the south, that provincial governance quality and FDI leadership overlap closely, and that the country's 433 industrial parks are filling fastest in the north. It closes with what the redraw means for reading Vietnamese FDI data going forward, and for investors deciding where to look next. Every figure is sourced and labelled as flow or stock.

Vietnam is the poster child of "China plus one," the strategy under which multinationals keep a China base but shift new capacity elsewhere to hedge geopolitical and tariff risk. On every visible metric Vietnam leads: it was ranked the single biggest mover in global business-environment terms, the top diversification destination across almost all manufacturing sectors, and the largest single beneficiary of the shift in the United States trade deficit away from China. Its exports to the United States nearly tripled between 2017 and 2024, and Chinese firms themselves have become one of its fastest-growing sources of investment, leading Vietnam by number of new projects. This paper argues that the boom carries a paradox: the very features that make Vietnam the leading China-plus-one destination are also its central vulnerability. The same investment and trade data that show Vietnam winning, roughly US$144 billion of imported Chinese inputs in 2024, a Chinese value-added content of some 16 to 25 percent embedded in its exports, a 314 percent surge in Chinese-owned firms rerouting through the country, and an export dependence on the United States equal to about 30 percent of GDP, are precisely the exposures that the 2025 United States tariff package, with its 40 percent levy on trans-shipped goods, was designed to hit. Drawing on the trade-rerouting literature, the paper decomposes Vietnam's export surge into genuine value-added, an estimated 84 percent, and rerouting, the remaining 16, and argues that Vietnam is a real winner rather than a mere laundering channel, but a winner whose gains are only as durable as its ability to convert assembly into domestic value. It closes with what that means for policymakers and for investors, for whom the location decision now turns on genuine local content rather than tariff arbitrage.

Framework-based teaching is widely recommended as a way to develop the judgement that applying International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) requires. In practice, it is often realised in a thin, 'referential' form: the conceptual framework is named or reproduced alongside a standard without being made to do explanatory work. This paper proposes a contextual extension. Established framework-based teaching moves from the framework to a requirement and then to the judgement a preparer makes in applying it. This paper adds a further object: the judgement the standard-setter made in writing the requirement, recorded in the documents that accompany a standard — particularly the Basis for Conclusions — and in the wider due process. Brought into teaching, that reasoning lets conceptual ideas interact with the economics of a transaction and the requirements of a specific standard. Standard-setter choices are treated as 'prior' judgements: contingent, negotiated and revisable. The paper develops a transferable critical overlay — what alternative was foregone, what is left silent, what precedent may be set — and two classroom sequences for deploying it. Intended for a final-year undergraduate or comparable postgraduate financial reporting module, it is demonstrated on revenue recognition (IFRS 15) with a short, worked appendix. The contribution is conceptual and pedagogical rather than empirical: a design for teaching, with a candid account of its costs and limits.

В статье рассматриваются основные подходы к концептуализации и опера- ционализации понятия жертвы в виктимизационных опросах. На основе обзора более чем полувековой исследовательской традиции выделяются нормативный и конструкти- вистский подходы к определению жертвы и анализируются их следствия для дизайна опросных инструментов. Во второй части работы реконструируются три традиции опе- рационализации виктимизации на материале пяти опросов: NCVS, CSEW, SES, ICVS и Всероссийского опроса жертв преступлений (RCVS). Авторы предлагают рассматривать эти исследования через матрицу двух измерений: фиксация факта (или стилизованного факта) виктимизации и фиксация самооценки респондента в качестве жертвы. Показано, что выбор конкретной стратегии измерения связан с систематическими трейд-офами между юридической строгостью, содержательной широтой охвата и сопоставимостью с официальной статистикой.

Friday Night Lights Out (FNLO) is a corpus of two-way radio transmissions broadcast by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). The corpus is a subset of a larger archive of more than 91 million radio transmissions recorded on sixteen radio receivers between 2016 and 2022. Selected from that archive, the FNLO corpus targets a single, meaningful window: the second hour after sunset on each Friday in 2017. A team of undergraduate research assistants first transcribed a selection of radio transmissions. In a second phase of work, the research assistants then cut short audio segments keyed to important words and codes spoken in the transmissions, producing a set of ground-truth examples. The result of the effort is three linked components: 138,067 short audio recordings spanning the year, 25,893 human transcriptions of a subset of the transmissions, and 14,267 keyword clips (more than half of which correspond to radio transmissions in the set of 25,893 first-stage transcriptions). This document provides an explanation of recording techniques for the full archive of radio transmissions, the rationale for selecting transmissions for transcription, the transcription process itself (including the guidelines given to transcribers), the codes and conventions needed to understand the transcripts, and the 2017 policing context in which the transmissions were broadcast (a year framed by a federal consent decree, an emergent corruption scandal, and elevated violent crime). Because the transmissions contain sensitive information about possibly identifiable individuals, the authors hope to arrange in the future for the corpus to be made available to other researchers under appropriate safeguards. For now, it is available only to researchers at the first author’s institution by joining the research team. This document represents a step toward providing broader access to the corpus.

How do anti-authoritarian protest movements shape electoral behavior? A recurring concern in both scholarly and public debates is that mobilization against democratic erosion and illiberal political actors may alienate moderates and generate electoral backlash. I examine this question by studying the electoral consequences of the West German student movement of the 1960s, a wave of leftist anti-authoritarian protest directed mainly against the German right. I combine city-level election results, protest event data, and a geo-located pre-election survey. Using a difference-in-differences design, I first show that exposure to protest did not generate electoral backlash at the city level. Instead, protest is associated with a differential increase in support for the center left. Individual-level survey evidence replicates these patterns and suggests that the observed shifts are driven primarily by voters defecting from the center right to the Social Democrats. Additional individual-level analyses provide evidence most consistent with framing effects: protest exposure is associated with a heightened perception of the far-right NPD as an extremist actor and with the belief that the center left was better able to curb political extremism. These findings suggest that anti-authoritarian protest can influence electoral behavior by shaping perceptions of democratic threats and underscore the potential of contentious movements to strengthen pro-democratic forces.

Being seen, valued, and respected matters, yet for students in vocational education and training (VET), recognition is far from guaranteed. Drawing on Honneth's recognition theory and Lamont and colleagues' sociocultural framework, this study explores how VET students in the Netherlands experience recognition and how they draw on cultural repertoires to construct a sense of self-worth in a context that often denies it. Based on qualitative interviews with 32 VET students (Mage = 19.5, 59.38% female), the findings reveal a consistent asymmetry across Honneth's three spheres of recognition. While students report meaningful recognition in close relationships, they encounter a marked deficit at the institutional and societal level, where a shared cultural script positions academic education as superior to vocational training. In navigating this gap, students both internalise and contest a dominant cultural logic that positions academic education as superior, while mobilising three cultural repertoires to construct alternative bases for dignity and worth: passion and authenticity, practical knowledge as value, and supported self-reliance. These repertoires are best understood as responses to misrecognition rather than resolutions of it. The findings point to the importance of addressing recognition through the cultural processes by which educational hierarchies are reproduced and contested by society.

Collective identities shape human social behavior, yet it remains unclear whether large-scale identities emerge and persist in heterogeneous societies. The European Union, uniting diverse populations of 27 countries, provides a unique setting to study a key question across the social sciences: Does political institution building go hand-in-hand with the emergence of a common identity? Using a Bayesian latent trait model of European identity spanning 1971–2024 based on 3.7 million survey responses across the EU-27 and United Kingdom, we reconstruct long-term identity trajectories despite fragmented data. We find that European identity has strengthened steadily across most member states and remained resilient during existential crises. Higher identity is associated with increased turnout in European Parliament elections, underlining the political relevance of European identity. Our findings show that large-scale collective identities can emerge and consolidate in diverse societies, and that such identities are linked to participation in supranational democratic institutions.

Across European democracies the gender gap in voting has largely closed, but its size and direction still differ markedly from one country to the next. This paper asks whether the strength of national gender quota regimes influence that gap, and whether any such effect depends on the gender-role norms prevailing in a given society. The analysis draws on eleven rounds of the European Social Survey (2002 to 2023), covering close to 330,571 respondents in 30 countries. Quota strength is measured with a newly constructed ordinal indicator from the Gender Equality Policy Dataset (GEPOD), which grades quota enforcement from no provisions to parity-based regimes rather than recording mere presence. A country-level index of gender-role egalitarianism, derived from the European Values Study, serves as the cultural moderator, with institutional and economic controls drawn from Varieties of Democracy and the Quality of Government projects. Multilevel logistic regressions show that the link between quota strength and the voting gap is conditional on culture rather than uniform. Stronger quotas coincide with a narrower gap in more gender-traditional settings, where the gap starts out widest, but make little difference where egalitarian attitudes already prevailed and the gap is small. The regional picture departs from the familiar North-South divide: the gap is smallest in Southern Europe, where moderate egalitarianism meets relatively strong quotas, and reverses in the Baltic states, where women report voting at higher rates than men despite weak provisions. Thus, quota enforcement appears to matter most where egalitarian gender-role norms remain weak.

From the 1970s to the 2000s, formal sub-national government opposition – voiced through resolutions and other policy instruments -- to major federal policies on war, civil liberties and climate change, among others, had proliferated across the U.S., and dissent on the same policy had occurred in tens, even hundreds, of localities within short time spans. In the absence of sustained examination by social scientists, the purpose of this article is to generate a general classification and explanatory framework for formal sub-national government opposition to federal policy, including its ecological conditions and behavioral dynamics. After exploring a range of theoretical perspectives, we find that a synthesis of the contentious politics and the policy formation literatures most usefully classify formal sub-national government opposition. This “contentious policy” is a range of essentially symbolic government-level actions designed to confront policy enacted higher up the state hierarchy. To explore the conditions and dynamics of contentious policy, we describe the case of hundreds of local government oppositions to the USA Patriot Act (2002 – 2007). Formal sub-national government protest offers a meaningful perspective on political inequality within state structures and how protest and policy mingle. This unpublished article was written in 2013.

Despite an extensive literature on climate change news coverage, the long-form opinion and editorial journalism through which public arguments about climate policy are actively constructed has received comparatively little computational attention, particularly in the Australian context. This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of climate opinion discourse across five major English-language publications, comprising 28,801 articles from The Guardian (Australian edition), The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, and The Australian spanning 1987 to 2026. Thematic structure was identified using BERTopic paired with a long-context sentence embedding model capable of encoding full editorial texts without truncation, recovering 66 coherent topics grouped into 8 thematic categories. Differential topic attention was assessed using binomial representation ratios and z-scores. Letters to the editor (n = 1,238) were projected into the fitted topic space and treated as a sixth analytical unit. The results reveal a structural partition between outlets: The Guardian is significantly over-represented across all seven globally oriented topic groups including Energy Transition & Technology, Nature, Ecosystems & Food Systems, and Climate Science, while the four Australian mastheads concentrate their coverage overwhelmingly in Australian Politics & Policy. Letter writers align with the domestic orientation of the Australian titles, with significant over-representation only in Australian Politics & Policy and near-absence from every internationally framed group. These findings provide the first computational characterisation of Australian climate opinion journalism at scale, documenting systematic outlet-level differences in thematic emphasis that are not reducible to differences in corpus size, and establishing a baseline for subsequent framing and stance analyses.

Citizens express evaluative or critical trust in institutions when their trust results from assessing institutional performance against their own normative benchmarks. Yet empirical evidence on how such benchmarks shape evaluations is inconclusive. Three key limitations account for this ambiguity: prior research has focused on personal rather than injunctive norms, on consensual rather than contentious norms, and on prescriptive rather than descriptive norms. To address these gaps, we introduce and test a comprehensive model with three innovations. First, we conceptualize norms as preferences over normative trade-offs – choices between competing values – rather than as simple endorsements of universally supported principles. This approach better captures realistic moral reasoning while reducing ceiling effects. Second, we extend the focus beyond personal norms to incorporate perceived injunctive norms, thereby accounting for the broader normative environment in which citizens are embedded. Third, we theorize and test the effects of prescriptive norms (what individuals or groups believe politicians should do) and descriptive norms (what individuals perceive political elites actually do). This framework allows us to examine whether citizens benchmark their evaluations not only against the performance they desire but also against the performance they are used to observing. We test this model using a between-subjects vignette experiment embedded in a two-wave panel study with 13,462 respondents across eight European countries. Our results provide novel evidence in favor of the role of norms - especially personal norms – in the evaluative model of political trust.

Disability is usually framed as an individual condition, yet its associated consequences may extend through kinship networks. Despite this, the population reach of disability through kin remains unknown. We use demographic kinship matrix models combining fertility and mortality schedules with disability prevalence, to estimate population exposure to disability through grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren across ages in Europe in 2021. We quantify exposure using three complementary measures: the probability of having at least one kin with disability, the population-level number of individuals exposed, and the proportion of kin with disability. Our results show that exposure is both widespread and substantial: across all ages and kin types, 70% of women in Europe, corresponding to about 160 million women, have at least one close kin with disability. In childhood and early adulthood, more than half to three-quarters of European women have at least one grandparent with disability, with the age-specific number of exposed women peaking at about 1.5 million; in midlife, about one-third to nearly one-half have at least one parent with disability, with the population-level exposure peaking at about 1.4 million women. Throughout much of women’s lives, between 20% and 40% of their close kin have disability. These findings show that disability is not only an individual experience but also a relational exposure amplified by kinship structures. Exposure to kin disability constitutes a hidden source of inequality that accumulates over the life course and intersects with gender and socioeconomic inequalities.

Editorial boards play a central role in scholarly communication, yet gender representation in editorial authority remains insufficiently understood at scale. This study analyses more than 0.8 million editorial appointments from more than 10,000 journals across 15 major scholarly publishers, linking editorial-board composition with authorship, journal-impact indicators, and research-workforce benchmarks. Gender was inferred from first names and analysed across roles, publisher types, subject areas, journal quartiles, and countries of affiliation. Women account for approximately one third of editors with identified gender and are particularly underrepresented in executive positions, revealing a clear pattern of vertical segregation. Women’s representation as editors generally lags behind their participation as authors, although the gap varies by publisher type and discipline. Journals led by female or mixed-gender editors-in-chief show higher proportions of women authors, but this association should not be interpreted causally. Gender representation is weakly but positively associated with journal-impact indicators after accounting for structural differences. Country-level comparisons show that the proportion of women researchers exceeds that of women editors in most matched countries. These findings demonstrate that gender inequality in editorial governance involves not only access to editorial boards, but also access to editorial authority, visibility, and institutional recognition.

fuel price vulnerability

Drawing on qualitative critical discourse analysis of Restore Britain’s official policy texts, party materials and public-facing statements, this article examines the party’s remigration programme as a politics of revocable membership. It argues that Restore Britain does not merely intensify border-control rhetoric but extends removability from the border into the legally settled population, constructing residence, settlement and citizenship as conditional on economic productivity, English fluency, welfare status, cultural assimilation, absence of criminality, political loyalty and proximity to a preferred native-Christian national identity. The article contributes to scholarship on nativism, deportability, racialised religion and the politics of belonging by showing how prejudice can be bureaucratised through administrative tests of contribution, integration, loyalty and cultural fit. Restore Britain matters not because anti-immigration politics is new in Britain, but because it joins demographic anxiety, anti-Muslim cultural hierarchy, institutional regulation and revocable legal status into a programme of conditional belonging.

When voters receive real-time information about an ongoing election, do they coordinate strategically — and does that coordination respect ideological boundaries? I argue that viability signals produce ideologically bounded coordination: voters shift toward the most viable candidate within their political neighborhood rather than gravitating toward any national leader. To test this, I exploit a natural experiment in Peru's 2026 presidential election, where a logistical failure caused some polling stations to vote one day late, after partial results were already public, generating exogenous variation in information access across otherwise comparable voters. Informed voters concentrated their votes roughly 57 percent more than uninformed voters. A further test reveals that concentration rose sharply within the centrist bloc but not the right bloc, consistent with within-bloc rather than cross-ideological coordination. These findings illuminate how strategic voting operates under extreme party fragmentation and suggest that information revelation may strengthen rather than distort electoral representation.

The effect of adverse weather on election-day turnout is well studied, but evidence from developing countries remains limited. In this study, we examine how election-day weather influences voter turnout in India, the world’s largest democracy and a major developing-country context. Using a panel dataset of state legislative assembly (Vidhan Sabha) elections conducted since 2008, we find that both election-day rainfall and temperature reduce voter turnout, although the effects are non-linear across the distributions of temperature and rainfall. The negative impact of weather is substantially larger in economically poorer Indian states, suggesting that resource constraints amplify weather-related voting costs. We observe gender-specific differences: male voters are negatively affected only by high temperatures, while female voter participation is adversely affected by rain rather than temperature. Together, these findings show that weather-related barriers to participation vary systematically across socioeconomic and demographic groups, highlighting how environmental conditions can reinforce inequalities in electoral participation in developing democracies.

Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps stress the role of ideology: when people perceive scientists of a particular discipline to be ideologically like-minded, they tend to trust them more. Here, we report two findings: First, trust gaps between disciplines also exist in France: A representative sample of the French population (N = 1,012) trusted researchers in biology and physics more than researchers studying climate science, economics, or sociology. Second, the more precise and consensual participants perceive scientific findings to be, the more they tend to trust the scientists (across and within disciplines). While these findings are correlational, they align with a non-ideological explanation of trust in science: the rational impression account. This account proposes that people can come to trust scientists by relying on basic cognitive inference processes, which tend to be generally rational.

Generative artificial intelligence is frequently viewed through the lens of “deepfakes” and the risks of deception. This paper argues that such a framing obscures the potential of synthetic media as a rigorous research tool in the social sciences. We propose the neutral term “synthetic digital content” (SDC) and establish a framework for its responsible use based on three pillars: ethicality, methodological rigor, and researcher accountability. To maintain these standards, we advocate for a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) approach using open-source models rather than proprietary closed-system alternatives. We provide a practical roadmap for SDC production focusing on incorporating legal frameworks, ethical safeguards, and technical “recipes” and demonstrate its feasibility through an illustrative case study. By offering clear benchmarks for both the creation and evaluation of SDC, this paper provides a pragmatic guide for researchers, reviewers, and readers to leverage synthetic digital content in social science research while mitigating ethical and technical risks.

How do new far-right parties establish themselves in local communities despite lacking an established reputation and facing political stigmatization? This article argues that local candidates help overcome these barriers through two distinct mechanisms. Candidates with high socioeconomic status (SES) provide informational cues about competence and legitimacy, whereas locally rooted candidates mobilize interpersonal networks within local communities. I test these arguments using a novel dataset covering 455,817 candidacies in 1,362 county elections in Germany, linked to candidate characteristics and individual electoral performance. Exploiting open-list electoral rules, I show that both high-SES and locally rooted candidates receive an electoral bonus, but that these advantages are substantially larger for candidates of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) than for candidates of other parties. The electoral advantage of locally rooted AfD candidates is particularly pronounced in rural counties. To distinguish between network mobilization and cue-based mechanisms, I estimate candidates’ hometown advantage using individual-level vote returns. Whereas high-SES AfD candidates do not perform disproportionately well in their hometowns, locally rooted AfD candidates do, consistent with the mobilization of local interpersonal networks. Additional analyses indicate that the advantage of high-SES candidates increases where high-SES competitors are more common, while the local-roots advantage appears specific to the AfD rather than a general feature of new parties. The findings demonstrate that locally embedded elites play a distinctive role in facilitating the local breakthrough of new far-right parties and highlight the importance of interpersonal networks in explaining their electoral success.

While there is a large body of evidence on the effectiveness of educational interventions, the robustness of this evidence has not been systematically assessed. Here we conduct a preregistered systematic review, quality appraisal, and meta-analysis of all available estimates of the effects of four common supplementary learning interventions—tutoring, summer programs, afterschool programs, and extended instruction time—on children’s learning in mathematics and reading. We use multiple diagnostic techniques to assess the risk of bias of individual effect size estimates and to test for publication bias in the evidence base on supplementary learning interventions as a whole. We find that about half of all effect size estimates are at serious or critical risk of bias, with confounding and deviation from intended treatment being the most prominent risk-of-bias domains. We find substantial publication bias in the existing evidence base, indicated by a marked discontinuity in the distribution of test statistics at the conventional significance threshold and a significant association between magnitude and precision of effect size estimates. We combine five bias-correction techniques to estimate bias-adjusted effects for the four intervention types. Correcting for publication bias substantially reduces effect size estimates for tutoring, summer programs, and extended instruction time and renders estimates for afterschool programs statistically insignificant. After correction, tutoring is the only intervention that consistently yields positive and statistically significant effects. Our findings suggest that the existing evidence base substantially overestimates the effectiveness of commonly implemented supplementary learning interventions.

LGBTQ+ young people are likely to be overrepresented in the English care system and face disproportionately high levels of placement instability, discrimination, and poor mental health. Foster carers are expected to provide safe and affirming care but do so within a system characterised by inconsistent training, limited guidance, and increasing political contestation around gender and sexuality. This study explores how foster carers in England experience and enact LGBTQ+ inclusion through qualitative interviews with fifteen foster carers conducted in 2025. Drawing on a critical realist methodology and informed by the work of Nikolas Rose, Pierre Bourdieu, and Sara Ahmed, the analysis identifies a structural double bind at the heart of contemporary fostering. Carers are responsibilised for delivering inclusive practice while simultaneously having their relational expertise undermined by professional hierarchies and inadequate institutional support. The findings further suggest that organisational responses, including LGBTQ+ awareness training, often function as symbolic rather than enabling interventions, increasing uncertainty rather than confidence. Where affirming care occurs, it relies primarily on carers' relational commitment, experiential learning, and support from individual allies rather than coherent organisational infrastructure. The article argues that improving outcomes for LGBTQ+ young people requires structural reform that embeds LGBTQ+ inclusion within national standards, professional learning, and institutional culture.

Deservingness towards groups who are in need has predominantly been studied in relation to public support for welfare policies, but we argue that that deservingness is also a likely candidate for explaining participation in activism in solidarity with others. This study compares deservingness’ association with solidarity activism towards three disadvantaged groups: people without employment, people with disabilities, and refugees. Drawing on a sample of 16,916 survey respondents from Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, we examine and compare the associations between participating in solidarity activism and perceptions of deservingness towards people without employment, with disabilities and refugees, respectively. The results confirm that deservingness is a factor strongly associated with participation in solidarity activism. Although people with disabilities are generally considered the most deserving of the three groups, deservingness plays a more decisive role in mobilizing solidarity with refugees. The results have two-fold implications for the study of solidarity activism. First, deservingness should be considered a potential driver of solidarity activism that is distinguishable from social values and shapes participation in solidarity activism following different logics across groups. Secondly, we argue that the variation in the strength of the association between deservingness and activism across the three groups can be explained in terms of the level of contention over the group’s status as deserving.

Technicians play a centrally important role in research and teaching. However, the historical low status of technical staff in institutional hierarchies presents them with a range of challenges, and has arguably hampered research and innovation. In response to this situation, the Technician Commitment was established in the UK in 2017. It encouraged signatory universities and research institutions to commit to tackling key challenges across four ‘pillars’ - visibility, recognition, career development, and sustainability. The programme has now expanded internationally, growing from 37 to 112 signatories. In this paper, we interrogate the best available administrative datasets in order to assess the impact of the Technician Commitment. The Higher Education Statistics Agency’s staff record spanning 2012/13 to 2022/23 is used to evaluate whether any system-level changes accruing from the wide-scale uptake of the Technician Commitment can be identified. Using a provisional theory of change logic model, and operationalising the four pillars into workable evaluation measures, one key change is identified. There has been an increase in the number of technicians in senior roles in signatory institutions, which is a necessary for the leadership of strategic planning and for implementation. We discuss whether this is what would have been expected at this time in the Commitment’s maturation and given the theory of change. We also compare these findings with earlier UK national system-change programmes - the Athena Swan and Race Equality charters - and their evaluations, discussing the challenges of enacting systemic change in the complex higher education sector.

Research documents immigrant-native gaps in girls’ participation in organized leisure activities across Western Europe, particularly among Muslim immigrant-origin girls. While parental characteristics are often assumed to shape these gaps, less is known about which parental factors matter most and whether their influence persists into adulthood. Using German longitudinal data from CILS4EU and CILS4EU-DE, we address these questions by examining participation gaps among non-Muslim and Muslim immigrant-origin girls relative to native girls across the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, by estimating a structural equation model that distinguishes between initial parental effects in adolescence, path-dependent effects linking adolescent and adult participation, and persistent parental effects in early adulthood. Differences in parental participation and socioeconomic resources explain a substantial share of participation gaps, whereas parental gender values play no independent role. Although participation gaps narrow over time, they persist, primarily through path-dependent processes, as lower participation during adolescence is carried forward into adulthood. Persistent parental effects remain but are comparatively modest. While participation gaps are larger among Muslim immigrant-origin girls, the underlying mechanisms are broadly similar across immigrant-origin groups. The findings highlight how family-based inequalities shape participation trajectories and contribute to the production and reproduction of participation gaps across the life course.

Empirical researchers often replace continuous or finely graded regressors with coarse categories to allow flexible comparisons. This paper shows that such categories can create an overlooked problem when coefficients are compared across differently adjusted models. A category coefficient represents a contrast in the underlying continuous variable, and that contrast need not remain invariant once covariates are added. When the underlying variable is related to the adjustment set, residual variation in category membership may come from a different part of the continuous distribution than the marginal category contrast. As a result, coefficients on the same category indicators can change across specifications even when added covariates have no direct role in the continuous-scale outcome process. I call this problem category non-equivalence. I formalize the mechanism, use simulations to show how it varies with covariate predictive power and category coarseness, and illustrate it empirically with maternal age at birth in the Generations and Gender Survey. The paper concludes with practical recommendations for assessing non-equivalence and interpreting coefficient changes.

Communication has recently started a conversation on open science. In this narrative overview, I share perspectives on how the field of Communication is doing regarding the implementation of open science practices and principles, highlighting positive examples and suggesting missed opportunities. I discuss this process using the open science – science reform wheel, which differentiates 10 different principles and practices: transparency, accessible publishing, research process, research practices, public discourse, inclusion, research infrastructures, publication system, incentivization, and teaching and training. Although overall levels are still low, Communication has made substantial progress in terms of data sharing and preregistration. On the other hand, still no ICA journal has introduced the publication format of registered reports, which is a missed opportunity to reduce publication bias and to improve research quality.

People often seek to alleviate boredom, a common negative emotion, through smartphone use. However, current literature diverges on whether smartphones effectively alleviate boredom: mood management perspectives suggest they could, while psychologists warn they may merely provide superficial relief. Before assessing the regulatory potential of smartphones for state boredom, we first need to better understand how state boredom is related to smartphone use in daily life. Capturing boredom multifacetedly through valence, arousal, fatigue, and meaning, the present study examined how state boredom precedes day-to-day smartphone use and how bored smartphone use takes shape. Three-day field data were analyzed from N=44 young adults with smartphone unlocks triggering n=607 ecological momentary assessments and continuous Screenomics smartphone use data. Participants felt substantially bored preceding smartphone use in one-third of smartphone unlocks, with bored smartphone use peaking in the late afternoon and early evening. Bayesian Multivariate Mixed Models revealed multifaceted boredom patterns influencing smartphone app, activity, and switching behaviors, demonstrating distinct bored smartphone use patterns. Overall, bored smartphone use is complex, shaped by its related correlates, highlighting the need for multifaceted approaches in studying everyday smartphone use and its regulatory potential when people feel bored.

Although social communication, knowledge transfer, and resource exchanges are inherently asymmetric, classical network formulations of group solidarity traditionally operationalize relational architecture through symmetric, undirected topologies. This paper resolves this theoretical and methodological limitation by extending White and Harary’s concept of structural adhesion to directed graphs, introducing a formal framework based on directed edge-disjoint pathways. Positioned as a relation-centered counterpart to vertex-based structural cohesion, this framework measures a collective's robustness against channel disruption rather than actor turnover. We evaluate the empirical utility of this methodology using 28 web-based interaction networks spanning thousands of actors. The findings demonstrate that sequential partitioning through higher-order directed adhesive layers—specifically the Largest Strongly Connected Component ($LSCC$) and the Largest 2-Edge-Connected Component ($L2ECC$)—induces a progressive, monotonic densification of individual prestige and structural capital. Furthermore, topological analysis reveals that this edge-redundant structural layer systematically contracts into an elite core whose constituent nodes occupy the highest percentiles of expertise, functioning as an automated sieve for structural closure. Ultimately, this framework provides a rigorous, robust operational tool for quantifying relational reliability, tracking information retention, and locating elite structural subcultures within asymmetric social systems.

Supercomputers and high-performance computing in general are increasingly important in science, innovation, and development. With this importance in mind, the research note presents a few relevant geospatial insights on the European supercomputing ecosystem built around EuroHPC, a legal and funding entity created by the European Union (EU). The focus of the insights presented is on the geographic locations of the EuroHPC’s supercomputers as well as the geographic locations of scientific and other organizations having used the supercomputers. In addition, a few relevant observations are made with respect to funded science projects to which the EuroHPC ecosystem has participated.

Belonging has become a key metric in immigrant integration research, with established predictive power for labor market outcomes, civic participation, and mental health. Yet the field lacks a theoretical account of what produces belonging. Standard frameworks operate at two levels—macro-institutional conditions and micro-individual endowments—and cannot explain systematic variation in belonging outcomes among immigrants with identical human capital and policy contexts. This paper proposes community capital as a meso-level theoretical construct: the accumulated informal collective infrastructure of an ethnic or origin-based group, produced when bounded solidarity operates through network effects over time. The paper (1) defines community capital and specifies its constitutive dimensions, (2) distinguishes it from adjacent concepts (social capital, bounded solidarity, ethnic enclave, collective efficacy), (3) synthesizes parallel observations from five research traditions that have seen the phenomenon without naming it, and (4) demonstrates the concept’s explanatory work: the immigrant paradox, the invisibility of dominant group infrastructure, and the redirection of integration policy. Community capital is not a new phenomenon but a new way of seeing one—the missing mechanism between what states provide and what individuals bring.

This paper studies the socializing effects of literature for preteen children and discusses their theoretical implications. Drawing methodologically on the Strong program in Cultural sociology, it analyses the global bestseller series Little People Big Dreams: a series of books that trace the biographic journeys of famous figures from “little dreamers” to later fame. The analysis shows that the series’ appeal lies in the sacralisation of a particular brand of expressive individualism, with four key motives: (1) courage to dream, (2) belief in oneself, (3) sacralisation of uniqueness and (4) a unity of person and action. Framing their biographies within these motives makes the heroes relatable to the contemporary audiences, because it echoes the present-day experience of living in a condition of individualization and privatization of risk. Paradoxically, famous figures – some more than 200 years old – become bearers of a highly contemporary expressive individualism that obscures the precarity of life and the decline of institution in favour of a strong, exceptional individual. While overall, the series promotes an emancipatory message, it also socializes its young audiences into an individualized society. The paper concludes that expressive individualism has become a cultural framing for the process of individualization, obscuring its risks and instead assigning heroic status to the overburdened individual forced to follow their own path in a world where common paths are increasingly hard to find.

The question of the sense and definition of the terms “secular” and “lay” is both important and topical, notably in the field of international politics. The relationship between the religious and the political, and how it should be dealt with in practical terms, is an age-old problem. Nevertheless, it appears that our era is relatively ill-equipped to meet this challenge. To do so it is necessary to consider both the relationship and the distinction between the religious and the political – in other words to have a conceptualisation which is both effective and acceptable for the parties concerned. In practical terms, the problem can be posed as it was two thousand years ago: how to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. How to render to politics what is political, and to religion what is religious. There is no single answer to this question. A certain discourse, to which perhaps unfortunately the term “modern” has been attributed, wants to see religion and politics as different parts of a static landscape. These entities, specifically the religious and the political, are conceived as institutional realities with a permanent and essential nature. According to this approach, each element simply needs to be put back in its proper place. In this way, religion and politics should be found in distinct spheres tightly sealed from one another, from where they should never have escaped. Another approach considers the relationship between religion and politics in a completely different manner, based on a different conception of language and its role in the construction of reality. It understands the imperative to “render to Caesar…” as a rule for action, a marching order. The command is not given with the aim of achieving a final result which is known in advance, nor does it prescribe a predictable end to be achieved. It leads rather to a process of shared searching, an approach which is neither pre-programmed nor ever definitively attained either as an institutional outcome or as a set of ideas or concepts. Thus, according to this approach, the term “secularism” is not a natural state, a universal fundamental principle, a position anterior to religion or an a priori. It is rather the result of a certain approach, which could be described as internal to the religious, and which gives it the means to act in a manner, which is independent of but not separate from the religious.

One of the most commonly used definitions of conflict focuses on the goals of the conflicting parties and sees conflict as a relationship between parties with perceived incompatible goals. However, the scope of conflict and its roots may be broader than the goals of the parties. In his theory of conflict presented in The Unleashed Thunderbolts, the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyyai provided the basis for a typology of conflict that goes beyond the goals of the parties to include their references and the processes by which they achieve their goals. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim’s typology of conflict. It begins with an introduction to the concept of conflict and the duty of conflict transformation in the Islamic tradition; it then presents the conflict typology proposed by Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim, gives some examples of conflicts of different types in Muslim majority contexts, and elaborates on how to deal with each type.

Given China’s rapid rise as a global science power and recent changes in the geopolitical landscape, exploring China’s international research collaborations is essential for a broader understanding of the global research system. This study examines the development of China’s international collaborations between 2014 and 2023 across six major disciplines. We analyze the level of international collaboration for China and other leading scientific countries, the global distribution of China’s bilateral collaborations with other countries, and developments in China’s bilateral collaborations with key partners, focusing on its top eight partner countries, the European Union (EU), and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. Our results reveal notable shifts in China’s collaborative landscape over the last decade. China’s level of international collaboration has declined since 2019. This is particularly due to a major drop in China’s collaboration with the United States. China has diversified its partnerships by increasingly engaging with the BRI countries, the EU, and the United Kingdom. This study highlights the evolving nature of China’s scientific collaborations, shaped by political, social, and strategic factors, and underscores the growing importance of regional partnerships in China’s future research endeavors.

We never directly see a relationship. What we see are events related to it, and each event can disclose only a slice of the relationship from a particular position. This paper calls the observational unit through which limited relational evidence becomes visible an “event window.” To understand a relationship is to assemble multiple event windows and, within a process in which the relationship continuously changes and no static original exists, approach an object that can never be fully reached and remains in motion. Reasoning forward from an unresolved case and drawing on findings from attachment research, social cognition, and memory science as corroborating evidence, this paper develops the Directed Social Relational Recognition framework (DSRR). DSRR represents relationships as directed recognitions: A’s recognition of B is not B’s recognition of A. Each directed recognition distinguishes Social Relational Recognition (SRR) from Personal Recognition (PR), while momentary state changes how an event window is read. Relational contamination occurs when a relational dimension inappropriate to the current task is activated and comes to govern judgment. When events are connected across time, each event is interpreted through the relational state available at that moment and may update different components. Between events, maintenance, decay, forgetting, and experiences available to only one party continue to change the relationship. When the present relational state retrieves the past, earlier events are not recovered unchanged but are retrospectively reinterpreted and re-rendered through mechanisms of encoding and retrieval. DSRR thereby provides an analytical framework spanning relational structure, single events, and the longitudinal event stream, and advances nine falsifiable propositions. Quantitative measurement, coding, and formalization are left for future work.

With India introducing the Multiple Entry and Exit System (MEES) through its National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, higher education, while remaining multilayered and rigorous, has been made more flexible, accessible, and interdisciplinary by and large. This paper evaluates the impact of MEES by exploring its positive aspects such as greater flexibility, better skill development, and facilitating lifelong learning, as well as its negative aspects which include administrative difficulties, the danger of lowering academic standards, and justice problems. This study aligns quickly and effectively the viewpoints of students, teachers, administrators, and policymakers in not only making a well-argued decision but also providing relevant points for the successful operation of the system. Effective execution of MEES at the Indian education level, the paper maintains, requires strong support networks, proper quality assurance, and regular channels for feedback.

The study aims at comprehending the relationship between the cyberfeminism and online gender-based violence (OGBV) in the Indian context. It aims to build a theoretical and contextual approach to tackle the injustices of digital gender. The study examines OGBV issues in India on social media and the impact of the types of OGBV on social media by covering cyberfeminist theory. It analyses and evaluates India's position with other G20 countries and how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated online violence. The gaps in response to digital violence are also assessed and policy and legal frameworks are also reviewed. The methodology of this research is qualitative analysis by literature study, policy study, secondary data analysis with comparative analysis. The issue of power dynamics, intersectionality and online power are explored using Cyberfeminist strategies. Comparative and contextual analyses of urban-rural and global data also feature in the study. It concludes that OGBV is pervasive and multifaceted in India. Women and gender diverse people are harassed, cyberbullied and their images distributed without their consent, causing trauma, self-censorship and hindering online participation. There is legislation in place, though reporting and enforcement is challenging, and has worsened during the pandemic. There is a social implication of this study. It emphasises the importance of a multi-faceted approach to raising digital literacy, policy and community awareness. The need for cyberfeminism is emphasized to facilitate the creation of safe and equal/collaborative online environment. The paper's originality can be attributed to its synthesis of cyberfeminist theory, contextual analysis of digital spaces of India, and comparison with G20. It is a continuation and further development of existing digital gender justice projects, and also features a multi-dimensional concept of digital cyberfeminism which addresses policy change, digital literacy and grassroots community work. This research highlights two important aspects of interaction that are often overlooked when considering social environment for safe and equitable online communities: collective and collaborative.

Metaphors are deeply embedded in ecology and evolutionary biology. They help scientists communicate unfamiliar ideas, generate hypotheses, and organize complex phenomena into intuitive conceptual frameworks. Consequently, metaphors have often been portrayed as indispensable tools for scientific progress. Here, we argue that this view is only partly correct. Although metaphors can stimulate discovery during the early stages of research, their continued use as research areas mature can become counterproductive. Through examples drawn from ecology, evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, and the history of biology, we show how metaphors simplify complex phenomena, encourage reification, constrain alternative explanations, generate derivative and increasingly uninformative metaphors, and perpetuate scientific misconceptions through feedbacks between science and society. In general, metaphors in ecology and evolutionary biology appear to follow two contrasting trajectories. In one that contributes to scientific understanding, metaphors serve as temporary heuristic devices that eventually give way to increasingly precise mechanistic explanations. In the other, metaphors become treated as literal descriptions of reality, ultimately slowing conceptual progress. We conclude that the value of metaphors lies primarily in initiating inquiry and communicating ideas to broader audiences, but scientific explanations used in teaching and research should progressively replace metaphorical language with precise conceptual and mechanistic descriptions.

Survey-based social science research increasingly depends on digital questionnaires, browserbased data collection, automated statistical workflows, and reproducible reports. Yet the integrity of the research objects that connect these stages remains weak in many projects. Questionnaire files, response datasets, analysis scripts, and reports are often stored as separate artefacts, and when any one of them is changed after fieldwork or after submission, reviewers and institutions may lack a simple way to verify whether the file is identical to the version used earlier. This paper proposes Social Science Research 6.0 as a proof-of-integrity framework for tamper-evident survey workflows. The framework uses SHA-256 hashing to assign verifiable digests to survey instruments, response datasets, analysis plans, scripts, and report outputs, and records them in a structured manifest that can be verified at any later point. The approach is demonstrated using surveyframe, an open-source R package that represents a questionnaire as a typed survey object, saves it as a hashed .sframe file, validates item and scale structure, reads response data, checks quality, scores scales, prepares analysis plans, and generates reproducible reports. A synthetic proof-of-concept confirms that the framework detects instrument modification, response tampering, and analysis-plan drift in all tested scenarios. The contribution is a low-cost, software-only method for improving trust, transparency, and auditability in digital social science research without requiring blockchain infrastructure or proprietary survey platforms.

Bug bounty programs and coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) frameworks are widely regarded as means of aligning the interests of independent security researchers with that of software vendors. This paper argues that the ethical sustainability of these frameworks depends not on their formal structure but on the quality of moral give-and-take (reciprocity) between researcher and organization. Drawing on Cialdini's (2006) principle of reciprocity, Fricker's (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, and the existing ethics of disclosure literature, this paper examines the case of Nightmare Eclipse - a security researcher who shifted from cooperative disclosure to publicly releasing a series of zero-day exploits targeting Microsoft Windows, including core components such as Windows Defender and BitLocker, after experiencing what they describe as systemic dismissal, undervaluation, and legal intimidation. The case is notable for its scale, as three of the first six disclosed vulnerabilities were exploited in the wild, attackers were able to chain them with ransomware deployments, and the researcher's GitHub and GitLab accounts were swiftly suspended in what can only be described as an institutional effort to suppress further disclosure. These were not vulnerabilities in a niche product either - Windows runs on over 1.4 billion active devices worldwide (Mehdi, 2025), dominates the global desktop market (StatCounter, 2026) and serves as the backbone of most enterprise IT environments - meaning the fallout affected businesses, hospitals, governments and critical infrastructure that depend on it every day. The argument is that this case exposes a structural failure - and a form of epistemic injustice - in how organizations conceive of their moral obligations toward vulnerability reporters and that the resulting harm to end users, enterprises and the broader international security environment constitutes a foreseeable consequence of institutional bad faith. The paper proposes a normative framework focused on the concept of reciprocal disclosure - a reframing that puts the same expectations on both sides and accounts for the fact that the researcher and the organization do not hold equal power in this relationship.

What is the optimal level of questionnaire detail required to measure bilingual language experience? This empirical evaluation compares alternative measures of language exposure of varying cost (i.e., questionnaire detail) in terms of their performance as predictors of oral language outcomes. The alternative measures were derived from Q-BEx questionnaire data collected from a diverse sample of 121 heritage bilinguals (5- to 9-years of age) growing up in France, the Netherlands and the UK. Outcome data consisted of morphosyntax and vocabulary measures (in the societal language) and parental estimates of oral proficiency (in the heritage language). Statistical modelling exploited information theoretic and cross-validation approaches to identify the optimal language exposure measure. Optimal cost-benefit was achieved with cumulative exposure (for the societal language) and current exposure in the home (for the heritage language). The greatest level of questionnaire detail did not yield more reliable predictors of language outcomes.

The term independence is commonly perceived as a simple political term but how individuals use and navigate it can differ dramatically across cultures. This paper has investigated the mental representation of independence in three national situations by evoking discrete free associations of 286 university students (Russia n = 80, Nigeria n = 132, Pakistan n = 74) in reaction to a single stimulus (independence / независимость). Each participant generated a single first-response association thematically coded and analysed by chi-square tests and correspondence analysis. The findings indicate that Nigerian respondents had a strong association with independence and strongly related terms of autonomy, Pakistani respondents had their associations spread between historical-national markers (14 August, Jinnah, 1947), while Russian respondents had a predisposition to connect independence with personal and financial self-reliance (money, apartment, from parents). The combination of these cross-national comparisons suggests that the same lexical word triggers different conceptual neighbourhood of different mental lexicons, which confirm a thinking for speaking perspective of politically charged words and underline that translation equivalence of key political words cannot be presumed easily in cross-cultural research and communication.

Biodiversity conservation is undergoing a transformation in governance, rhetorically shifting from traditionally public sector–led approaches toward models that increasingly involve private investment and private enterprise. Despite growing interest, the literature on biodiversity-related business models remains fragmented across disciplines including conservation science, finance, innovation and management studies, and the implications of different models for biodiversity remain understudied. We review five types of biodiversity business models (BBMs) with different pathways to biodiversity impact, distinguishing between models that aim to: (1) generate biodiversity as a co-benefit of other economic activities; (2) deliver biodiversity as a direct and often commodified output; (3) assist biodiversity management (nature tech); (4) generate biodiversity gains through technological improvements in traditionally damaging economic sectors to reduce or substitute away from biodiversity impacts; and (5) integrate biodiversity to reduce risks and/or increase resilience (or value) of otherwise exposed (or inviable) assets. Drawing on case studies throughout, we review evidence on the biodiversity impacts of different models and summarise existing methodologies and future research directions. We also address key conceptual challenges with applying the business model lens to biodiversity. We reveal that many businesses with BBMs already exist; many commercially viable business models have unproven biodiversity benefits; very few attract pure private finance but those that do play a major role in specific contexts such as Southern Africa’s wildlife economy; and, despite increased uptake of BBMs, public policy and public investment remains indispensable for scaling conservation.

Public responses to energy infrastructure are commonly assessed through attitudinal measures of acceptance, yet less is known about whether these evaluations translate into civic engagement. Using a preregistered cross-national vignette experiment across six European countries (N = 9,026), we examined both dimensions. Respondents evaluated a proposed local power plant – solar, wind, nuclear, or an unspecified sustainable project – and reported willingness to engage in civic actions varying in effort, or to select explicit inaction. Technology effects on attitudes are pronounced: solar and wind receive substantially higher support than nuclear across all countries. In contrast, behavioural engagement varies little across technologies. Where engagement occurs, it concentrates in low-effort actions, while medium- and high-effort mobilisation remains rare. Neutral respondents exhibit the highest explicit inaction, indicating limited mobilisation in the absence of a clear evaluative stance. Attitudinal differentiation across energy technologies thus translates only weakly into behavioural engagement, which is structured primarily by evaluative stance and effort thresholds.

Purpose — Rural tourism destinations in southeastern Nigeria lie at the crossroads of three unstable spaces the endangered native language (Igbo), a commodifying cultural heritage and the promise of livelihood that tourism offers to the locals, yet has not fulfilled. This paper investigates the interaction between language, culture and tourism and how they influence the livelihoods of the host community in Awgu Local Government Area (LGA), Enugu State, and the structural contexts within which community based tourism can be a pro-poor approach to development. Design/methodology/approach - A concurrent mixed-methods design was assumed in the framework of a pragmatist paradigm. The quantitative data were obtained based on a structured questionnaire filled out by 384 residents in seven host communities using a multistage sampling procedure that was based on Cochran (1977) formula whereas the qualitative data were obtained based on 18 semi-structured interviews with residents and 18 elders in the community, artisans, traditional rulers and tourism officials as well as photographic records of four tourism sites Descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis in SPSS v.28 analysed quantitative data; SPSS data were analysed with the help of a thematic analysis of qualitative data in the reflexive approach suggested by Braun and Clarke (2022). A synergistic analysis framework that incorporates the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (DFID, 1999), Linguistic Landscape Theory (Landry and Bourhis, 1997) and the theory of staged authenticity by Cohen (1988) informed the interpretation. Findings - Host communities are highly supportive of tourism development (86.2% acceptance); tourism has a statistically significant but small impact on perceived livelihood outcomes (β = 0.355, p < .05); but the linguistic and cultural resources capable of making Awgu stand out in an overcrowded ecotourism market are not well catalogued, unattributed, and largely invisible in the visible linguistic environment

Why do some local communities become more susceptible to far-right mobilization than others? Existing research has emphasized elite rhetoric, mainstream party strategies, demographic change, and economic shocks, but has paid comparatively little attention to the organizational foundations of democratic competition. I argue that the electoral success of far-right parties depends not only on their own mobilization efforts but also on the organizational embeddedness of mainstream parties in local civil society. As mainstream parties become increasingly detached from civic associations through processes of partisan dealignment, cartelization, and the professionalization of politics, they leave behind organizational vacuums that anti-democratic challengers can exploit. I test this argument using novel longitudinal data on local party candidates in Germany, which I link to their involvement in civic associations and combine with municipality-level electoral returns. Exploiting within-municipality variation over time, I show that declining civic embeddedness of mainstream party elites is associated with higher electoral support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The findings are robust across multiple measures of organizational embeddedness and are particularly pronounced in West Germany. More broadly, the paper qualifies existing work on social capital by showing that the political consequences of civic associations depend on the organizational presence of mainstream democratic parties. Far-right mobilization, I argue, is best understood as the culmination of a long-term process of organizational withdrawal by mainstream parties from local civil society.

Political parties have traditionally maintained close ties to local communities through voluntary associations, providing an important organizational foundation for democratic representation. Although scholars frequently argue that parties have become increasingly detached from civil society, direct evidence on the civic engagement of local party elites remains scarce. This paper examines how the civic embeddedness of county-level political candidates in Germany has evolved between 2008 and 2026. I assemble a novel longitudinal dataset linking 45,998 county council candidate observations to leadership positions in registered civic associations, allowing me to trace the associational involvement of local party elites over nearly two decades. The analysis provides three main findings. First, local party elites are disproportionately active in organizations closely connected to politics, education, and the local economy, while being comparatively underrepresented in recreational associations such as sports clubs. Second, the composition of civic engagement has shifted over time, with a growing share of civically active candidates holding leadership positions in political interest organizations. Third, trends in civic embeddedness differ markedly across regions: while associational engagement has remained largely stable in West Germany, it has declined substantially in many eastern regions, particularly among candidates from several established mainstream parties. By documenting these patterns, the paper provides new evidence on an overlooked dimension of party organization and contributes to understanding the changing societal foundations of representative democracy.

This study examines how audiences cognitively and affectively evaluate benign deepfakes of deceased celebrities and how these evaluations relate to viral behavioral intentions. In a between-subjects online experiment with U.S. adults (N = 587), participants either viewed a high-production deepfake exemplar or received no visual exposure. Structural equation modeling indicated that perceived desecration and ethical concerns were negatively associated with cognitive attitudes but not with affective ones, while misinformation concerns were negatively associated with both cognitive (and affective attitudes. Informational and emotional value were positively associated with both cognitive and affective attitudes. Both attitude types were positively associated with viral behavioral intentions. Ethical and misinformation concerns were lower, and perceived informational and emotional value higher, among participants who evaluated deepfakes after viewing a concrete exemplar. Overall, the findings suggest that engagement with benign posthumous deepfakes is more strongly associated with cognitive–affective appraisals than with exemplar exposure alone.

Human resource procurement remains a critical determinant of public sector performance and governance quality across Africa. Although formal civil service systems emphasize merit, transparency, and accountability, recruitment processes in many African countries continue to be shaped by politicization, patronage networks, clientelism, and weak institutional capacity. This study systematically examined the structural challenges affecting human resource procurement in African public administration and evaluated the effectiveness of neoliberal reform instruments introduced through Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and New Public Management (NPM) reforms. A PRISMA-guided systematic literature review was adopted, drawing on Institutional Theory to examine the interaction between formal administrative rules and entrenched informal institutions, including elite bargaining and patronage politics. Peer-reviewed literature published between 1990 and 2025 was synthesized using thematic analysis to identify recurrent governance patterns and reform outcomes. The review identified three dominant trajectories: relative reform success in contexts characterized by stronger institutional enforcement; hybrid adaptation, in which formal merit-based recruitment coexisted with informal patronage practices; and reform stagnation or failure in fragile governance environments where institutional weaknesses persisted. The findings indicate that although neoliberal reform instruments improved procedural standardization, introduced managerial innovations, and strengthened administrative frameworks in selected countries, their overall effectiveness remained dependent on political commitment, enforcement capacity, and institutional coherence. In many instances, reforms were implemented symbolically without fundamentally transforming underlying incentive structures or reducing political interference in recruitment processes. The study concludes that sustainable human resource procurement requires stronger institutions, credible oversight mechanisms, and greater alignment between reform design, administrative capacity, and domestic political realities. It recommends strengthening merit-based recruitment systems, enhancing institutional accountability, promoting transparent recruitment procedures, and reinforcing independent oversight bodies to improve public sector governance across African states.

Este trabajo examina en qué medida la irrupción de los grandes modelos de lenguaje (LLM) a partir de 2022 completa el «golpe epistémico» que Shoshana Zuboff apenas esbozó en su actualización de 2022 al marco del capitalismo de vigilancia. A partir de una revisión crítica de la literatura reciente sobre modelos de lenguaje y poder (Chaudhary y Penn, 2024; Olof-Ors y Smit, 2025), se sostiene que estos sistemas no solo profundizan la lógica extractiva clásica —ampliando la superficie de captura de datos hacia el razonamiento, las dudas y las intenciones de los usuarios—, sino que producen una mutación cualitativa: de una extracción conductual a una extracción epistémica, en la que lo capturado no es lo que hacemos sino cómo pensamos. El trabajo articula tres hipótesis —continuidad estructural, mutación cualitativa y nuevo poder predictivo— y las contrasta con un análisis de las políticas de datos de OpenAI, Google, Meta y Anthropic. Se concluye que, aunque la evidencia empírica disponible es todavía parcial, existen razones teóricas y empíricas suficientes para hablar de una fase emergente del capitalismo de vigilancia, que aquí se denomina capitalismo epistémico de vigilancia

AI afterlife systems transform digital traces of deceased persons into interactive posthumous representations. Current literature describes these systems as griefbots, deathbots, ghostbots, postmortem avatars, digital resurrection, and digital legacy, but the field remains fragmented across information systems, psychology, ethics, philosophy, theology, and anthropology. This paper develops a conceptual framework for AI Afterlife Agents as socio-technical systems of posthumous presence. It contributes three linked artifacts: a socio-technical design-space model, a lifecycle model, and a prompt/state-machine architecture. The design-space model explains how identity-corpus construction, interaction modality, user interpretation, psychological and cultural effects, and governance mechanisms jointly shape risks and experiences. The lifecycle model operationalizes these dimensions across data elicitation, directed recognizability training, bereavement use, and decommissioning. The paper argues that responsible AI afterlife design requires traceability between personal data, consent, prompts, safeguards, user boundaries, and retirement procedures. Next steps involve stakeholder validation, prototype-based experimentation, and longitudinal research with data donors and authorized bereaved users.

Selecting which messages are promising for further testing is a critical phase for message effects research and campaign development. However, this process is often constrained by limited resources and a lack of overall structure. We introduce the SMART (Select Messages via Attribute-based Ranking and Testing) framework as a systematic formative research framework for message selection consisting of five steps: (1) Develop candidate messages, (2) Select message evaluation metrics, (3) Gather message evaluation data, (4) Multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) analysis, and (5) Select top-performing messages for further testing. We illustrate SMART using a case study that included a survey measuring the perceived message effectiveness and message perceptions of 54 tobacco education messages among adults who use cigarettes. Following the framework, five messages were selected: two focused on the harm of combustion from cigarette smoking, two focused on nicotine education, and one focused on the benefits of completely switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes. The SMART framework is a systematic approach that can yield a reproducible shortlist of messages. It is broadly applicable across message contexts to assist in message selection for further resource-intensive testing.

Ample research shows that social learning is subject to a similarity bias: People are more likely to copy the behavior of those who resemble themselves. Here we hypothesize that in situations where different approaches must be combined to improve a solution, individuals may instead be more open to learning from dissimilar others because they expect valuable solutions from them. We test this expectation in a preregistered experiment where 859 individuals first developed suboptimal approaches to a problem-solving task and were subsequently exposed to the behavior of a demonstrator. The demonstrator pursued an alternative suboptimal approach; and participants could learn to optimize their own approach by combining it with what they observed. A 2x2 experimental design varied whether the demonstrator had shared or dissimilar characteristics, and whether (dis-)similarity related to ideological leaning or the outcome of a fictional cognitive style test. Results show that participants optimized more often after exposure to someone with a different versus similar cognitive style. Ideological (dis-)similarity, on the other hand, did not affect optimization. Our study shows that characteristics pointing to differences in perspectives can promote social learning, challenging the common assumption that people learn best from those similar to themselves.

This article reports an exploratory qualitative case study of parent-led, home-based sandplay sessions conducted with a preschool-aged child after a distressing experience involving a sudden fire alarm. The study examines the potential role of artificial intelligence (AI) as a consultative and reflective support tool for a parent without formal psychological training, rather than as a diagnostic, prescriptive, or autonomous therapeutic agent. Ten sandplay sessions were documented longitudinally through written observations, and these records were subsequently reviewed with AI-assisted analysis focusing on symbolic themes, play organization, and reported behavioral change over time. Across sessions, the child’s play appeared to shift from motifs of danger, destruction, and disorganization toward scenes characterized by rescue, structure, cooperation, and calmer imaginative engagement. The parent also reported improvements in sleep onset, reduced distress in response to loud sounds, and greater emotional ease in daily life. AI was used as a reflective support tool for the parent, providing psychoeducational guidance and post-session analysis of written observations. The AI did not interact with the child or make diagnostic or treatment decisions. As a single-case qualitative study without standardized outcome measures or a control condition, the findings are exploratory and intended to generate hypotheses for future research on ethically bounded AI-assisted family-centered practices.

Political power often justifies itself through legality, expertise, emergency, efficiency, tradition, democratic authorization, or necessity. These vocabularies can be normatively serious, but they can also hide baseline choices, narrow the field of alternatives, obscure incidence, block evidence review, avoid failure conditions, or shift burdens to challengers. This article develops a six-standard framework for assessing the sufficiency of political justification. A political justification is insufficient when it asks others to accept coercion, cost, risk, authority, institutional continuation, or emergency discretion while leaving structurally important parts of the reason unavailable for challenge. The framework is adjacent to public reason, public justification, proportionality analysis, administrative reason-giving, republican anti-arbitrariness, and democratic experimentalism. It asks a different question: not which reasons are admissible, which outcome is correct, or whether a rights limitation is proportionate, but what structure a political reason must disclose before it may claim justificatory sufficiency. The six standards are Baseline Explicitness, Comparative Justification, Incidence Accounting, Epistemic Testability, Failure and Reversibility Conditions, and Burden and Authority Discipline. The article tests the framework through three cases: COMPAS risk assessment, EU ETS free allocation, and early COVID-19 border restrictions. The cases show three distinct forms of justificatory insufficiency: black-box authority, public data with broken causal and distributive accountability, and emergency evidence shortage presented as necessity. The article then develops methodological limits, including symmetry in use, zero-sum boundary conditions, value pluralism, epistemic pluralism, the minimum public-field condition, emergency compression, and rationalization theater. The framework does not promise correct outcomes or consensus. Its contribution is diagnostic: it identifies what remains missing when public power demands acceptance while insulating its baseline, alternatives, incidence, evidence, failure conditions, or authority structure from challenge.

Modern institutions often continue by default. Reformers must show why change is necessary, while institutional guardians frequently need not show why continuity remains justified. This article argues that default continuity is not merely stability; it is a procedural privilege that allocates the burden of justification. Once the factual, normative, or institutional conditions supporting an arrangement have materially changed, continuity should be re-earned through lawful review procedures calibrated to institutional layer, rights impact, reversibility, coordination value, and transition costs. The article develops a lifecycle diagnostic organized around five questions: what has drifted, where the mismatch is located, who benefits from default continuity, what renewal procedure is required, and what lawful default applies if review fails. Renewal may reaffirm, recalibrate, restrict, redesign, monitor, shorten, or terminate an arrangement; it is not a bias toward reform. The argument builds on historical institutionalism, sunset clauses, deliberative democracy, adaptive governance, policy feedback, and policy-termination research, but shifts the object of analysis from institutional change to the default procedural status of institutional continuity.

The paper, based on the inaugural lecture of Professor Wouter Boon at Utrecht University, explores the imperative of ‘responsibly scaling up innovations’ to address pressing societal challenges in healthcare, energy, and mobility. While traditional innovation science views ‘diffusion’ primarily as a communication problem characterized by the S-curve, Boon argues these dominant models suffer from ‘pro-innovation bias’ and often overlook “hidden” innovations, mundane technology adaptations, and local initiatives. The paper highlights that standard “one-size-fits-all” scaling strategies frequently ignore significant hidden implementation costs, such as the intensive man-hours required to integrate AI into education or the environmental and social externalities of mass adoption. To address these shortcomings, he proposes a framework for ‘responsible scaling’. Responsible scaling requires innovators and stakeholders to align new technologies with public values, institutional regulations, and diverse user practices from the very beginning of the innovation process. The paper identifies critical issues regarding responsible scaling: - Navigating value trade-offs (e.g., speed versus safety). - Establishing institutional guardrails to avoid persistent problems or “lock-ins”. - Managing responsible replacement to redistribute the costs and benefits of creative destruction. - Recognizing the value of ‘scaling deep’ through meaningful, local human interaction. - Adapting to restricted global movement through ‘open strategic autonomy’. Ultimately, the paper concludes that diffusion is not value-free; achieving genuine societal impact requires shifting focus from simple market conquest to responsible scaling that ensures long-term equity and sustainability.

Avian predation is a persistent but understudied threat to outdoor aquaculture, and little is known about how producers in the United States North Central Region (NCR) experience and respond to it. We surveyed outdoor aquaculture producers across ten NCR states to better understand their experience with bird predation and bird-deterrent technologies. Nearly all respondents (96%) reported fish-eating birds—most often Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias), cormorants (Phalacrocoracidae), and osprey (Pandion haliaetus)—and attributed roughly 19% of annual fish mortality to birds (median estimated loss $7,000). Producers combined multiple deterrent methods; the most common were lethal control (58%), active human presence (56%), explosive deterrents (55%), and physical exclusion (53%). Those using lethal control operated larger farms and showed evidence of integrated pest management, layering more methods in an attempt to deter birds. In open-ended comments, lethal removal and netting were rated most effective, while habituation was the dominant explanation for failure—revealing a gap between the scare-based methods producers most often use and the exclusion or removal methods they consider most effective. Producers preferred to receive information through in-person talks, videos, and one-on-one conversation over live or recorded online formats. These findings point to an Extension need for durable, economically viable deterrent strategies delivered through producers' preferred, largely in-person channels.

This systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression evaluates twenty years of literature on data-driven identification of common PTSD symptom trajectories following potentially traumatic events. Traditional, machine learning- and large language model–assisted systematic search approaches were combined to identify eligible articles applying statistical Growth Mixture Modeling to longitudinally assessed PTSD symptom severity. Ninety-nine studies representing 113 independent samples and 215,136 participants from 21 countries were included. We identified five prototypical PTSD symptom trajectories that commonly occurred across samples. We determined pooled relative trajectory prevalence estimates across samples observing these specific trajectories with the low symptoms trajectory being the most and the increasing symptoms trajectory the least prevalent. Using meta-regression, various socio-demographic, exposure-related and methodological moderators of sample-level relative trajectory prevalences were identified. Our findings provide empirical support and further refinements of leading theoretical PTSD conceptualizations. Furthermore, the obtained relative prevalence estimates and sample-level moderators may inform population-tailored trauma-related mental health care.

Influential accounts of the 1918 influenza pandemic report that many Indigenous Pacific populations escaped the pandemic uninfected. In particular, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Norfolk Island are supposed to have escaped due to an Australian policy of protective sequestration. In fact, archival accounts from local colonial officials, newspapers, and missionaries document how sequestration failed and severe influenza epidemics broke out across each of these territories in 1918–20. These “missing” epidemics challenge our understanding of the pandemic’s virulence, evolution, incubation period, and interaction with prior immunity, as well as how difficult it was to implement sequestration. These islands also reveal the global dispersion of the pandemic’s herald wave, and they help reveal the highly deadly wave of the pandemic that struck the Southern Hemisphere in mid-1921. We also document how early twentieth-century biomedical hubris and racist notions of Indigenous islanders’ health conspired to obscure the history of the pandemic in this region.

This paper constructs the first long-run estimates of top wealth concentration in South Korea from 1970 to 2021, using newly assembled estate tax tabulations and applying a simplified mortality multiplier method. The series uncovers a pattern that diverges sharply from the gradual postwar increase in wealth inequality seen in many Western economies. Korea experienced two distinct regimes: a two-decade period of low and stable concentration from 1970 to 1990, when the top 0.1 percent held a roughly stable 3 to 5 percent of wealth, followed by a substantial rise beginning in the late 1990s to a new, higher plateau of around 10 percent. This abrupt “Great Unleveling,” plausibly linked to institutional and market changes surrounding the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, coincided with a shift in elite portfolios from land-based to financial assets. Independent property-tax records show that land concentration stayed flat across this break, indicating that the rise originated in financial rather than landed wealth. In international perspective, Korea moves from a low-inequality profile typical of developing economies to a moderately high-inequality regime similar to contemporary France and Japan. The findings highlight how sudden institutional breaks, rather than gradual trends alone, shape the long-run distribution of wealth. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)

The history of official statistics in Alaska is fraught with mismanagement and difficulty. Qualitative sources show that the 1918–19 influenza pandemic was an immense tragedy for Indigenous communities in Alaska (Alaska Natives), but at the time of the pandemic, most deaths of Alaska Natives and a sizable proportion of the Alaska Native population itself went uncounted. A recent excess mortality analysis estimated that Alaska Natives died in the main waves of the pandemic at a rate that was 8.7 times higher than that of non-indigenous Alaskans (Alaska non-natives). However, this estimate does not account for the differential extent of Alaska Native versus non-native death registration and census completeness, nor does it account for the fact that Alaska non-natives had an age and sex structure that increased their risk of pandemic mortality relative to Alaska Natives. Age- and sex-standardisation increases Alaska Natives’ estimated risk ratio of pandemic mortality to 12.0 (a 38% increase). Then, drawing on a formal demographic approach and archival materials from the US Census Bureau, it is possible to estimate group- and time-varying death registration incompleteness relative to the census. Accounting for that incompleteness increases Alaska Natives’ estimated risk ratio to between 28.6 and 49.2 (a further 138–311% increase) under the main specification adopted. Uncertainties remain about Alaska Natives’ true level and pattern of baseline mortality and census completeness in this period, as well as whether death registration completeness worsened or may have actually improved during the pandemic. However, these findings highlight the extreme burden of mortality that Indigenous communities in Alaska faced in 1918–19: an estimated 8.5–14.7% of Alaska Natives died during the pandemic’s main waves. Like the experience of COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa, this case illustrates how deficiencies in data and differences in demographic structure can obscure the mortality experienced by impoverished populations during crises.

Summary Some scholars have proposed concepts that differ from traditional notions of independence, such as interdependence and multi-dependence. The objective of this study was to develop the Social Multi-Dependence Scale (SMDS) and evaluate its psychometric properties, as well as its associations with self-dependence (including self-determination, performing roles, and emotional and cognitive control) and subjective well-being (SWB). This study used data from two online surveys: main survey (n = 1453) and subsequent survey (n = 341). The SMDS operationalizes the concept of multi-dependence by quantifying the number of individuals a respondent could depend on during times of adversity and includes six specific situations for measurement. We performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and calculated Cronbach’s alpha, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). In addition, we examined associations between SMDS score and self-dependence and SWB stratified by three groups: non-distality and non-caregiver group, disability group, and caregiver group. Findings The result of CFA demonstrated that model and data were fitted well. We found a Cronbach's alpha of 0.86, an ICC of 0.80, and no evidence of systematic bias. In addition, higher SMDS scores were associated with greater self-dependence and higher SWB, with these associations being particularly pronounced among people with disabilities and family caregivers. Applications While we should note the potential floor effect, use of the SMDS is valid and reliable. The findings suggest the need to move beyond the norm of “independence” toward fostering societies in which individuals can live through diversified interdependent relationships.

The individualization of personal life has spurred a shift in relationship ideals, from instrumental, role-based marital arrangements to partnerships emphasizing autonomy, emotional fulfillment, and mutual compatibility. However, this process unfolds differently for women and men. This study examines gendered ideals and quests for compatibility in contemporary relationships across key sociodemographic and ideational attributes. Drawing on data from a factorial survey experiment conducted among 1,225 never-married adults in China’s largest metropolises, the results reveal that women hold more progressive ideals than men, prioritizing not only a partner’s socioeconomic status but also egalitarian traits, such as the willingness to share housework. Unlike men, who show strong aversion to childfree partners, women are generally neutral toward a partner’s fertility intentions. Furthermore, while men apply ideational standards in a more rigid and absolute manner, women display greater flexibility, seeking alignment between their own and their potential partner’s ideational traits, especially for marriage. These findings underscore the persistent gender asymmetries underlying the transition toward individualized forms of partnership.

This article provides a book review of The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies by Guillaume Pitron. The book takes readers on an exploration of the hidden corners behind the digital and energy revolutions, revealing the ecological and geopolitical consequences tied to the global rare metal supply chain. Through a summary and commentary on the core arguments of the work, the review clarifies misconceptions regarding the absolute “cleanliness” of green technology, the paradox of mining pollution shifting from Western countries to developing nations, and the restructuring of the global power balance. On that basis, the review discusses Pitron's challenging propositions to call for a reflexive awareness of both national and individual responsibilities in the process of development and transition. Bài viết này là một bài điểm sách về tác phẩm Cuộc chiến kim loại hiếm: Mặt tối của chuyển đổi số và năng lượng sạch của tác giả Guillaume Pitron. Cuốn sách đưa người đọc khám phá những góc khuất đằng sau cuộc cách mạng năng lượng và kỹ thuật số, cho thấy những hệ lụy về sinh thái và địa chính trị gắn liền với chuỗi cung ứng kim loại hiếm. Thông qua việc tóm tắt và bình luận các luận điểm cốt lõi của tác phẩm, bài viết làm rõ những lầm tưởng về tính “sạch” tuyệt đối của công nghệ xanh, nghịch lý về sự dịch chuyển ô nhiễm khai khoáng từ phương Tây sang các quốc gia đang phát triển và sự xoay chuyển trật tự quyền lực toàn cầu. Từ đó, bài điểm sách thảo luận về đề xuất mang tính thách thức Pitron đối với vấn đề này nhằm kêu gọi nhận thức phản tư về trách nhiệm của quốc gia lẫn cá nhân trong quá trình phát triển và chuyển đổi.

Across many countries, national reform agendas have steered rapid and sustained changes across multiple sectors, with education increasingly positioned as a strategic pillar for long-term economic and social development. In response, universities have increasingly engaged in internationalization of their curricula, particularly through adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI).While this shift aligns with national aspirations for global competitiveness, it has also resurfaced complex pedagogical, linguistic and institutional challenges that require urgent and coordinated attention. This handbook is therefore designed to support educators and institutions by offering practical guidance that bridges the gap between policy and practice. It aims to align subject specialists with policy expectations while providing the necessary linguistic awareness, and support pathways necessary to improve coherence of implementation. The handbook is conceived as part of a dynamic and cyclical process of institutional learning and development in which evidence from research informs practice and classroom realities in turn shape policy refinement . As a result, it promotes cultures of continuous reflection, adaptation, communication, and shared professional learning, which are essential for effective EMI implementation given its strong dependence on pedagogical design, teacher preparedness, and contextual conditions .

This thesis develops an end-to-end pipeline for analyzing sentiment and emotion in Bangla Facebook comments collected during a 19-day protest period in Bangladesh. First, we performed comprehensive data cleaning and preprocessing—removing URLs, non-Bangla characters, digits, and stop words—using regex and the bnltk tokenizer to produce a high-quality comment corpus. A subset was manually labeled for sentiment polarity (positive, neutral, negative), emotion category (five basic emotions), and topic, and these labels were encoded with sklearn's Label Encoder. We fine-tuned a multi-task Bangla-BERT model to automatically classify sentiment, emotion, and topic, then applied this model to auto-label the full dataset. We aggregated comment-level sentiment into daily and hourly sentiment-intensity time series. For forecasting, we compared two deep sequence models, an LSTM network and a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), against traditional SARIMA and Prophet baselines. Models were trained on past sentiment windows and evaluated by MAE and RMSE; the TCN achieved the lowest MAE (0.70) and RMSE (0.88), outperforming LSTM (MAE 0.76), SARIMA (MAE 1.20), and Prophet (MAE 1.05). Residual-based anomaly detection (σ- and percentile thresholds) on LSTM and TCN forecasts highlighted key protest events with higher precision than change-point detection. Beyond forecasting, we used K-means clustering on hourly sentiment profiles to identify two dominant daily patterns (silhouette ≈ 0.64) and computed an emotion transition probability matrix to reveal that anger states persist between consecutive comments (transition entropy ≈ 1.26). Topic–emotion correlation via chi-square tests (χ² ≈ 7486, p < 0.001) showed "government resignation" discussions dominated by negative emotions, whereas "advice" and "blessing" topics correlated with more positive affect. Finally, a Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of emotion durations demonstrated differing persistence across emotion states.

Toda cláusula penal es la cólera del contrato: el castigo que las partes pactan por anticipado para el día del incumplimiento. Cuando esa cólera pierde la medida, el inciso final del artículo 1544 del Código Civil entrega su corrección a la «prudencia del juez», facultándolo para «moderarla» cuando, «atendidas las circunstancias», la pena «pareciere enorme». Este trabajo lee esa potestad desde la ética estoica y sostiene una tesis: la moderación del artículo 1544 es una positivación jurídica de la templanza. Las tres palabras rectoras de la norma reproducen la estructura conceptual de la Estoa: lo enorme es el pleonasmos —el impulso que rebasó su límite—; moderar es la operación propia de la templanza (sōphrosynē), que reconduce el exceso a la medida sin aniquilar el vínculo; y la prudencia es la phronēsis / prudentia, el saber práctico de lo que conviene en el caso concreto. Apoyándose en la distinción senequiana entre clementia —virtud que «rationi accedit»— y misericordia —vicio que «fortunam spectat»—, se muestra que el juez modera desde la razón y no desde la lástima, de modo que el estándar de enormidad atiende a la causa (la desproporción) y no a la fortuna (la desgracia del obligado); y se propone que la disciplina estoica obliga en ambas direcciones: el juez templado no se deja arrastrar ni por la compasión hacia el deudor ni por la indignación contra el acreedor. El Código, al convertir la virtud en potestad, no presupone un sabio en el estrado: institucionaliza la templanza para que el oficio supla lo que el carácter pudiera no alcanzar. La propuesta se formula como reconstrucción racional y no como genealogía histórica, con expresa constancia de que la influencia del estoicismo sobre la jurisprudencia romana y sobre el Estado moderno es materia discutida. De ella se extraen consecuencias dogmáticas: la moderación de oficio en las obligaciones de valor indeterminado, el carácter objetivo del estándar de enormidad y sus límites —moderar no es reescribir—.

El pensamiento crítico se ha asociado históricamente con la educación formal, la argumentación racional, la evaluación de evidencia y la toma de decisiones fundamentadas. Sin embargo, en el contexto contemporáneo su relevancia excede el ámbito académico. La expansión de plataformas digitales, la sobreabundancia de contenidos, la circulación acelerada de información, la desinformación, la polarización y el desarrollo de sistemas de inteligencia artificial han modificado las condiciones bajo las cuales las personas buscan, interpretan y validan conocimiento. Este artículo propone una revisión narrativa sobre el pensamiento crítico en la era del ruido informativo, entendido no solo como exceso de información, sino como una combinación de volumen, velocidad, fragmentación, baja trazabilidad, carga cognitiva, señales emocionales y dificultad para distinguir información confiable de contenido irrelevante, manipulado o falso. A partir de literatura sobre pensamiento crítico, alfabetización informacional, sobrecarga informativa, desinformación, sesgos cognitivos, redes sociales e inteligencia artificial, se plantea que el problema actual no consiste únicamente en acceder a información, sino en desarrollar criterios para evaluarla, contextualizarla y utilizarla de manera responsable. El texto sostiene que el pensamiento crítico debe entenderse como una práctica de regulación del juicio: una competencia educativa, ciudadana, profesional y personal para orientarse en entornos donde la atención se disputa, la evidencia se fragmenta y la apariencia de conocimiento puede producirse con facilidad.

Esta revisión analiza la agricultura familiar en el Perú hacia 2030 a partir de su estructura productiva, marco normativo, arquitectura institucional y brechas de acceso a servicios. Mediante una revisión documental narrativa de fuentes oficiales, normativas e institucionales publicadas entre 2015 y 2026, se identificó que la agricultura familiar constituye la forma predominante de organización agraria del país, pero mantiene baja cobertura de asistencia técnica, financiamiento, seguro agropecuario, riego tecnificado, inocuidad, poscosecha y articulación comercial. El análisis muestra que el principal problema no es la ausencia de instrumentos públicos, sino su limitada articulación territorial y su débil capacidad para acompañar trayectorias productivas diferenciadas. Se concluye que la agenda hacia 2030 debe transitar desde una política centrada en instrumentos hacia una política territorial de servicios integrados, con énfasis en extensión, gestión del riesgo, calidad, digitalización funcional y acceso a mercados.

Relationalities, as ways of knowing, doing and being, are increasingly the focal points of sustainability research and practice. This Perspective piece synthesises insights from 25 contributions to the Special Issue, ‘A relational turn in sustainability towards radical social-ecological transformation – a Special issue that draws from diverse traditions of thinking and practice’ This piece describes what, according to these 25 contributions, relationality means and what it practically entails – i.e., what relationality, does. We identify six interwoven relational practices enacted in different ways across the 25 articles: living-healing, situating-connecting, understanding-resonating, recognising-valuing, resisting-refusing and reworking-transforming. Enacting these practices generates several shared areas of interest (or ‘matters of care’) discussed across the 25 papers, encompassing generative tensions, possibilities and future pathways for engaging with relationality in sustainability research, policy and practice. These matters of care include: (i) thinking through the descriptive and normative nature of different relational traditions, (ii) negotiating general and contextual meanings of relationality, (iii) addressing both the pragmatic and radical aspects of relationality, and (iv) engaging with care in the knowledge politics among relational approaches and building agonistic and constructive alliances across difference towards shared interests. Through this synthesis, our intention is to deepen the ongoing exploration of meaningful ways of knowing, doing and being to nurture transformations towards social-ecological justice.

This article develops an analytical framework for understanding climate-related institutional strain in museum environmental management. Rather than treating museum climate pressure primarily as visible disaster, public communication, or individual climate anxiety, the study examines how climate uncertainty becomes legible through ordinary institutional routines: environmental monitoring, threshold checks, intervention logs, IPM activity, maintenance work, and professional accounts of control, tempo, and future stability. The study draws on four anonymized museum case prototypes, six interviews with museum professionals, environmental monitoring records, IPM logs, maintenance data, and a short questionnaire on perceived control, care/work tempo, and future sustainability. These materials are used interpretively, not as a clinical or psychometric measure of anxiety. Climate-anxiety literature is treated as a contextual lens, while the main object of analysis is institutional strain: the gap between current operational effectiveness and weakening confidence in long-term baseline recovery and sustainable care routines. The article argues that design-led analysis can make scattered institutional clues visible, comparable, and discussable without converting them into generalizable psychological outcomes. By tracing threshold drift, intervention density, compressed judgment windows, care rhythm, and perceived future stability, the framework shows how museums absorb, distribute, and reveal climate pressure through everyday care practices. The contribution is a methodological and interpretive account of how museum climate adaptation can be read through institutional care, operational rhythm, and the hidden tempo of environmental pressure.