Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with cognitive control deficits that often persist after remission, affecting daily life functioning and increasing relapse risk. Residual symptoms such as negative affect and low motivation may impede cognitive control and thereby hamper goal directed behavior, and as such functioning in daily life. This study examined whether goal-directed behavior, for which we took compliance in responding to daily questionnaires in an experience sampling method (ESM) study as a proxy, 1) could reflect cognitive control allocation, 2) differs over time in individuals with remitted MDD compared to never-depressed (ND) individuals, and 3) relates to factors associated with cognitive control allocation and depressive vulnerability, including positive and negative affect, rumination, sleep quality, motivation, and lack of interest. Remitted MDD (rMDD) and ND individuals participated in three studies with daily (5 to 10) ESM measurements over a period of two weeks to four months. ESM compliance (calculated as the mean response rate and variability (SD) in response rate), inhibitory control (assessed with the Sustained Attention to Response Task), and factors related to depressive relapse vulnerability (positive and negative affect, rumination, sleep quality, motivation, and lack of interest) were assessed. Kendall’s correlations and Linear Mixed Effect models examined the relationships between ESM compliance, inhibitory control, and depressive vulnerability factors. Linear mixed effect models showed no evidence for a relationship (∆AIC below -2) between lab-based cognitive control and compliance. However, correlational analyses showed a positive relationship between mean compliance and inhibitory control [τb = .32, p=0.002; BF10=23.1] and a negative relationship between compliance variability and inhibitory control [τb = -.28, p=0.005; BF10=8.7]. The strength of the correlation was comparable to negative affect, which was also found to relate to mean compliance [τb = -0.20; p below 0.001; BF10=2091.4] and compliance variability [τb = 0.20; p below 0.001; BF10=1896.3]. Changes in compliance over days did not differ between rMDD and ND individuals (∆AIC below -2). No significant associations between compliance and other vulnerability factors were observed (p below 0.05). These findings indicate mixed evidence for ESM compliance as a reflection of cognitive control, with correlations suggesting that cognitive control and negative affect are associated with compliance. No significant associations with other vulnerability factors were found. Future research could explore the utility of ESM compliance in assessing cognitive control and goal pursuit using an optimized design for that question.

Background: Text-based online chat (TBC) offers accessible mental health support for youths and young persons who may avoid traditional face-to-face services. While research demonstrates TBC effectiveness, limited studies examine which specific chat helpers’ communication features contribute to positive outcomes. This study identified textual and linguistic characteristics of chat helpers’ responses associated with chat users’ perceptions of service usefulness in an online synchronous text-based chat service in Singapore. Methods: We analyzed 1,062 chat sessions from youths and young persons aged 12-25 years collected between 2016-2020. We examined 26 communication features used by chat helpers including emoticon use, affective language, session duration, response lag time, four types of social support (emotional, informational, esteem, network), pronoun usage patterns, politeness markers, question frequency, linguistic complexity measures, and superlatives. Analyses included univariate logistic regression and Latent Profile Analysis to identify communication styles. Results: Eleven communication features significantly predicted positive outcomes. Emoticon use showed the strongest effect (7.3 percentage point increase), followed by affective language (6.4 points) and session duration (4.1 points). Three social support types were effective: network support (4.0 points), esteem support (3.8 points), and emotional support (2.7 points). Linguistic features including superlatives and words per sentence also predicted success. First-person pronouns used by chat helpers showed negative effects. Three distinct communication profiles emerged, with "Emotionally Expressive" and "Inquiry-Driven" styles achieving 85% success rates compared to 75% for "Typical" style. Conclusion: Effective TBC requires specific text-based skills including emotional expression through emoticons and affective language, and providing social support. Training programs should develop these competencies while allowing for different communication styles such as emotionally expressive or inquiry-driven approaches.

Castellano Este whitepaper analiza el retroceso innovador de América Latina entre 2020 y 2025 a partir del Global Innovation Index (GII), sus métricas de innovación y la brecha entre inputs y outputs. Sostiene que la región no solo invierte poco, sino que convierte débilmente sus recursos en resultados, competitividad tecnológica y desarrollo. Propone fortalecer política de innovación, talento, gobernanza, absorción tecnológica e impacto medible. English This white paper analyzes Latin America’s innovation setback between 2020 and 2025 using the Global Innovation Index (GII), innovation metrics, and the gap between inputs and outputs. It argues that the region not only invests too little, but also weakly converts resources into outcomes, technological competitiveness, and development. It proposes strengthening innovation policy, talent, governance, technological absorption, and measurable impact.

Castellano Este whitepaper revisa críticamente la innovación abierta y sus fallas recurrentes en organizaciones y ecosistemas de innovación. Identifica veinte fracturas agrupadas en gobierno, cultura, colaboración, capacidades y movilización, mostrando que abrir la organización no basta si no existe estrategia de innovación, absorción interna, gobernanza y soberanía tecnológica. Su aporte es pasar de la apertura como gesto a la apertura como arquitectura estratégica. English This white paper critically reviews open innovation and its recurring failures within organizations and innovation ecosystems. It identifies twenty fractures grouped around governance, culture, collaboration, capabilities, and mobilization, showing that opening the organization is not enough without innovation strategy, internal absorption, governance, and technological sovereignty. Its contribution is to move from openness as a gesture to openness as strategic architecture.

Research suggests the international human rights regime is deeply politicized -- states disproportionately criticize their foes and praise their friends. Here, I demonstrate that the regime also exhibits strong norms of reciprocal ingroup policing. Human rights institutions mainly regulate domestic behavior, not externalities arising from international interactions, and states often disagree about what rights to prioritize, forming distinct groups based on their policy preferences. States consequently face a dilemma emerging from non-material tradeoffs: criticizing members of one's own group can harm group standing, but ignoring violations may weaken shared norms. I argue that norms of reciprocity help to mitigate this dilemma. If one ingroup member criticizes another, the target responds in kind to signal continued commitment to group norms. Criticism from outsiders, in contrast, is discounted and ignored. I test this argument using a natural experiment at Universal Periodic Review to disentangle reciprocity from other determinants of state policy. I find consistent evidence that reciprocity shapes the dynamics of human rights diplomacy, illustrating how the accommodation dilemma framework operates when the material costs of non-accommodation are low and when states disagree about standards of appropriate behavior.

This paper examines the sustainability of Wikipedia, arguing that despite its unique success as a non-profit, community-governed check on corporate information power, its future is far from assured. The author identifies three interrelated threats to the encyclopedia's relevance and viability:1 The AI Extraction Crisis: Large Language Models (LLMs) are heavily trained on Wikipedia's high-quality content without attribution or contribution, severing the vital feedback loop that recruits new editors and posing an existential threat to the source of original human-generated knowledge.1 The Enemy Within: The core editing community has developed a conservative culture marked by "red tape" and defensive bureaucratization. This resistance to technical innovations (like simplified editors or AI summaries) creates barriers for newcomers and prioritizes established processes over Wikipedia's underlying mission.1 The Tragedy of the Commons, Revisited: Policy and rules are controlled by a self-selected group of long-term editors, leading to a fossilization of rules that may not align with the needs of the vast readership and potential casual contributors.

examines the enduring and paradoxical success of Wikipedia, which defies conventional economic and organizational theories regarding quality and collective goods, such as the free-rider problem. The paper demonstrates that Wikipedia's continued dominance over expert-driven and commercially-backed alternatives—like Google's Knol, Citizendium, and the recent Grokipedia—is rooted in its interactive community functions, openness, and ability to continuously update content. Wikipedia emerged from the failure of the slow, peer-reviewed Nupedia project, utilizing wiki software to achieve explosive growth that resulted in over 66 million articles across more than 340 languages, making it the largest encyclopedia in human history.

This article introduces "Guerrilla Altruism" a spatial practice and low-budget pedagogical method as a mechanism for contesting the rapid neoliberal commodification of urban commons. The research is grounded in "infrastructural residual space" (IRS): void space beneath or around urban transport viaducts. It identifies that IRS is governed by two coexisting spatial grammars: a hegemonic administrative grammar of regulation, and a subaltern grammar of lived care expressed through tactical acts of use. The article advances three arguments. First, IRS is an inherent feature of any transport infrastructure, not a commercial byproduct, a distinction that challenges its commodification. Second, infrastructural operators bear a custodial stewardship over these spaces. Third, it proposes "Guerrilla Altruism" as a radical pedagogical method for spatial resistance, establishing an empirical "kindness archive" to make subaltern care legible. Tested through 25 micro-interventions at Kyoto’s Fukakusa park, this approach shows how users can empathically share the urban commons to defend public ground without displacing existing infrastructure.

Relationships with siblings can constitute an important resource for well-being and health across the life course. However, little is known about how sibling relationships change as young adults transition through key stages of household and family formation. In particular, the transition out of the parental home has received scant attention. Moreover, research on other family formation events has yielded mixed findings and often relies on designs vulnerable to unobserved heterogeneity or hampered by imprecise measurement of life-course transitions. In this brief report, we examine changes in sibling relationships following first-time transitions out of the parental home, distinguish between moves into non-couple and couple households, and compare these effects with transitions to cohabitation, marriage, and parenthood. Using data from the German Family Panel and an event-study approach that isolates the net effects of typically closely spaced life-course events, we find that leaving the parental home is the central turning point for sibling contact, which declines sharply and persistently, while relationship quality remains largely unaffected. Other family formation events have only very small and mostly transitory effects. Overall, the findings highlight the remarkable stability of sibling relationship quality across the transition to adulthood.

Japan's grade separation policy structurally enables below-market community management of under-railway viaduct spaces, yet the social welfare potential of these infrastructural residual spaces remains systematically unrealized in most station areas. Under the 2007 Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism guidelines, railway operators bear a minority share of elevation costs and retain leasing rights over up to eighty-five percent of the resulting under-viaduct area. TauT Hankyu Rakusaiguchi in Kyoto represents one of the most fully documented instances. Since the 2015 Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement between Kyoto City and Hankyu Railway, the project has managed approximately 11,200 square meters of under-viaduct space in a newly developing station area under a deliberate 0.5 percent internal rate of return framework. This paper asks what made this model work, and what parameters would allow comparable operators and municipal governments to replicate it. Drawing on stakeholder interviews, a multi-year event dataset of 508 events and 120,754 participants, and accessibility gap analysis across three station areas, the study documents the conditions under which low-IRR management evolves into a self-sustaining infra-ecosystem: an adaptive alignment of product, promotion, and people enabled by catchment population density, co-promotion of social and economic activities, and facility provision targeting identified service gaps. To make this system legible to operators who lack Hankyu's institutional history, the paper introduces social IRR as a measurement framework that stacks monetized community benefits atop commercial cash flows. These findings offer a replicable governance template for under-viaduct activation where the institutional preconditions of public subsidy and multi-stakeholder coordination are present.

Workplace harassment imposes mental-health and labor-supply costs in Japan, where Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) surveys document past-three-year power-harassment victimization declining from 32.5% (FY2016) to 19.3% (FY2023) across the enforcement period of the 2020 Power Harassment Prevention Law. The relative population-level magnitudes of plausible person-level and system-level interventions in this setting have not been compared in a pre-registered counterfactual framework. We pre-registered a HEXACO 7-typology microsimulation emulating a target trial of three interventions: (A) +0.3 SD on Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and Emotionality; (B) +0.40 SD on Honesty-Humility restricted to three low-prevalence typologies; and (C) a 20% cell-level propensity reduction, calibrated against three meta-analyses of organizational anti-harassment interventions and the −13.2-percentage-point MHLW FY2016–FY2023 decline. Using N = 354 observations partitioned into 14 cells (7 typologies × 2 genders) with cell-stratified bootstrap (B = 10,000), Beta-Binomial empirical Bayes shrinkage, and a BCa confidence-interval cascade, the personality contrasts are null (ΔP_A = −0.0061, 95% CI [−0.0207, +0.0062]; ΔP_B = −0.0059, 95% CI [−0.0207, +0.0066]), whereas the structural contrast is positive (ΔP_C = +0.0349, 95% CI [+0.0264, +0.0435]). The pre-registered intersection-union test classifies this as REVERSAL: in absolute magnitude, |ΔP_C|/|ΔP_A| ≈ 5.7. The classification is robust across four cultural-attenuation factors and nine pre-registered analytic choices. The findings are consistent with treating HEXACO 7-typology as a stratification variable rather than a personality-modification target, and we caution against reading HEXACO–harassment associations as endorsing person-focused remediation.

Mobility datasets built from anonymised smartphone location traces, calldetail records and other digital exhaust underpinned much of the evidence-based response to COVID19 and now inform transport planning, retail activity and the delivery of urban service infrastructure. As of the 25th of July, the United Kingdom implemented the Online Safety Act (OSA) requiring online services to check users’ ages. Major platforms — from adult sites to social media networks, such as Bluesky, Discord, Grindr, Reddit and X — have committed to robust aggregating, and Ofcom is scrutinising their compliance. Many users across these platforms have responded by turning to virtual private networks (VPNs) or other location spoofing tools to preserve privacy. These evasive measures threaten to corrupt the very data that scientists and policymakers rely on to understand human movement.

Weapons transfers to foreign countries became politicized in Western democracies in recent years, whereby security-related, economic, and normative aspects are discussed. We propose that how these different (perhaps conflicting) aspects are weighted is indicative of a more general strategic culture of countries. We investigate how the public views these dimensions and how homogeneous the underlying preference structure in NATO’s top arms-exporting democracies (the US, UK, France, Germany, and Italy) is. Using a multidimensional measurement strategy via a conjoint experiment (N ∼ 10, 000), we show that normative aspects predominate for all populations when forming preferences on export policies. However, we observe that Germany and Italy are essentially divided from the other three countries, regarding whether security aspects are considered in preference formation. Building on recent (machine learning) methods, we propose that this difference is primarily attributed to the country of the respondents, indicating different strategic subcultures with implications for countries’ foreign policy behavior.

Creating supportive technologies for people living with multiple chronic conditions is extremely challenging. These patients are often faced with substantial visible and invisible treatment work as well as their everyday responsibilities, including coordinating across providers, tracking information, and repeating communication in emotionally charged contexts. In the Cumulative Complexity Model (CuCoM), the balance between patient workload and patient capacity shapes what patients can realistically take on, including whether a digital tool can be adopted and sustained. In this paper, we report engagement lessons from implementing MyCareCompass, a patient-facing digital health intervention (DHI) intended to support day-to-day self-management for people living with multiple chronic conditions. We define engagement as patient uptake and sustained use during a two-month pilot study of our platform, drawing on usage analytics and follow-up feedback, and distill three implementation lessons for designing for engagement in complex chronic care. These insights align with the workshop's aim to bridge disparate conceptualizations of engagement across HCI, psychology, and implementation science.

Older persons’ well-being is shaped by diverse life circumstances; however, while many well-being measures are valuable, they may not always sufficiently reflect aspects that are especially relevant in later life or satisfy sound measurement properties. Part of a reversed construct theory‑building approach, this study examined how older adults interpret and respond to 21 preliminary items for the Older Persons’ Well‑being Scale (OPWELLS). Twenty‑six cognitive interviews were conducted with adults aged 65–102 years using think‑aloud and verbal‑probing techniques. Guided by a cognitive response model, data were analysed across the stages of comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and response formulation. Participants generally found the items clear, engaging, and emotionally acceptable. Concrete affective and vitality‑related items were consistently well understood, whereas more abstract constructs—particularly role, control, and perceived significance—required greater interpretive effort. The two‑week reference period was often overlooked or judged irrelevant for those with stable routines, and distinctions between adjacent response options (e.g., “often” vs. “always”) posed challenges for some participants. These insights informed targeted refinements to wording, item order, and conceptual clarity, including the addition of a complementary item on perceived social significance. Findings demonstrate how user‑centred cognitive interviewing can enhance clarity, cultural relevance, and content validity in early scale development. The preliminary OPWELLS item pool shows strong potential as a context‑sensitive measure of well‑being for older persons and will proceed to psychometric testing in the next phase.

Parent-child contact problems (PCCP) are a recurrent and contested presentation in family law, child protection, and domestic-abuse (DA) contexts. This article argues that PCCP is increasingly organised through a binary conflict between parental alienation (PA) and gendered DA, and that this binary is not simply discovered in the field but produced, stabilised, and politically mobilised through discourse. Gendered DA paradigms foreground structural patriarchy, male violence, survivor testimony, safety-first reasoning, and institutional minimisation. PA paradigms foreground relational power, child psychological abuse, induced rejection, loyalty conflict, and the possibility that children’s expressed wishes may be shaped by coercive family dynamics. These frameworks are not inherently incompatible. They become functionally incompatible when translated into exclusive explanatory regimes that require one framework to disqualify the other. Drawing on conceptual critical discourse analysis, the article identifies six mechanisms through which PA is made more contestable than DA: category collapse, genealogical tainting, moral asymmetry, asymmetric scepticism, case-horror evocation, and forensic translation. It concludes that PCCP requires evidentiary governance capable of testing competing explanations without allowing either DA or PA to monopolise post-separation harm.

A recent integrative review identified the Visibility Gap as the structural discrepancy between the epistemic quality of counter-speech and its algorithmic competitiveness in platformised information environments. This article addresses the gap through design science research. Drawing on the Bystander Effect (Latané and Darley, 1970), social proof theory (Traberg, 2025), Population Intelligence (Tatham, 2015), the chronos/kairos distinction (Miller, 1994), the regulatory-theoretical diagnosis of the Public Discourse Paradox (Bassan, 2024, 2025), and cognitive warfare theory (Rushing et al., 2026), I derive five design principles for counterspeech that combines verification capacity with algorithmic reach: platform-nativity, communicative plurality, temporal competitiveness, epistemic integrity under optimisation, and transparent automation. I present an artifact instantiating these principles through a fourlayer architecture integrating automated detection, persona-based intervention, embedded micro-inoculation, and adaptive evaluation. The artifact uses Thompson Sampling to optimise communicative delivery while structurally excluding factual content from the optimisation space. Evaluation through expert review and computational simulation supports the theoretical coherence of the design, provides preliminary evidence that the immutable constraint architecture resists reward poisoning under controlled conditions, and identifies persona authenticity and the tension between temporal competitiveness and human oversight as primary risks for field deployment. The central finding is that verification capacity and algorithmic reach, while analytically independent, are operationally coupled: achieving algorithmic competitiveness imposes constraints that interact with verification standards. The article contributes to scholarship on counter-speech, platform governance, and information disorder by demonstrating that the Visibility Gap is a design deficit rather than a knowledge deficit, and that principled design within a regulatory frame that legal-theoretical analysis has independently diagnosed can address it.

This thesis examines the extent to which the persona dimensions age, education, gender, and party affiliation structure variation in synthetic responses to LGBTQ-related survey items generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). Although recent research has increasingly used LLMs as synthetic respondents in silicon sampling approaches and explored persona prompting as a technique to steer model response behavior in context-dependent ways, little attention has been given to the relative influence of different persona dimensions within a fixed experimental setup. To address this gap, the thesis introduces the concept of a hierarchy of persona influence and empirically investigates it using the instruction-tuned open model Gemma-3. The study uses a fully factorial simulation design in which Gemma-3 is prompted to answer four LGBTQ-related survey items while role-playing personas defined by the four persona dimensions. A total of 162 distinct persona profiles, comprising all combinations of the persona dimension category levels, are combined with four items and five repeated sampling runs, resulting in a dataset of n = 3,240 observations. The analysis uses descriptive summaries, response stability diagnostics, and item-wise regression models to evaluate the relative influence of the four persona dimensions on response variation of Gemma-3. The findings show that persona-conditioned model response behavior is not equally shaped by all included persona dimensions, but rather follows a non-uniform and item-contingent hierarchy of persona influence. Across most items, party affiliation is the strongest organizing dimension, education constitutes a robust secondary dimension, and age and gender remain comparatively weak. However, one questionnaire item departs from this otherwise stable pattern, suggesting that persona-conditioned outputs are also sensitive to measurement context. The thesis argues that persona prompting should not be understood as a neutral and transparent technique for simulating varying subgroup perspectives, but rather as a bounded form of model-internal responsiveness under controlled conditions.

Existing analyses of digital infrastructures often treat materialist critique, opacity studies, and environmental footprint accounting as separate approaches, thereby missing the broader regime that connects them. This paper applies the framework of anthropy — the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it — to contemporary digital infrastructures: data centers, generative AI, material supply chains, host territories, and public guarantee mechanisms. Drawing on six core bodies of work — Marquet, Mah and Wang, Diguet and Lopez, Gabor, Lemoine, and Monnin — the paper traces a unified chain of manufacture, exposure, commitment, guarantee, stabilisation, and politicisation. It shows how investability emerges from the coupling of a contemporary mechanism, derisking, with a longer institutional formation: the credit-disciplined state. The paper's main contribution is a testable grid of four coupled cost registers — energy, matter, territory, and attention — and a formalisation of the transformation of cost into debt through commitment, guarantee, and irreversibility.

This study uses a mixed-methods design to examine the prevalence, impact, and management of public speaking anxiety (PSA) among project managers. Drawing on a survey of 41 project management professionals and a semi-structured interview with experienced communications trainer Amit Grinvald, the research found that PSA is a genuine and common challenge in this profession. Anxiety levels were moderate on average, with a mean score of 3.17 on a 5-point Likert scale, and reported symptoms included difficulty concentrating, nervousness, and various physiological reactions. Common triggers in project management contexts were presenting to senior executives and delivering high-stakes project updates. The interview shed light on some of the more distinctive pressures project managers face in communication, particularly having to convey complex technical information to widely different audiences, often under time pressure. This study also explored how PSA affects team dynamics, project outcomes, and career progression. Rehearsal and peer feedback were the most commonly reported coping mechanisms, though the findings made clear that more targeted, tailored interventions are still needed. Grinvald introduced a four-dimensional framework for managing PSA, centred around aligning thoughts, actions, knowledge, and feelings. Drawing on the established project management competencies such as planning and risk management, combined with supportive environment creation and emerging technologies considerations, provide useful ways forward that will reduce PSA and enable project managers to be confident and effective communicators.

Peru is one of the world’s most important mining economies and a strategic supplier of minerals essential for the global energy transition. However, the governance conditions under which Peruvian minerals enter international markets are shifting rapidly from voluntary corporate social responsibility to mandatory, audit-driven ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) assurance. This paper examines the resulting "legislative disconnect" between Peru’s domestic framework—focused on site-based environmental licensing— and the emerging extraterritorial paradigm led by the European Union (CSRD, CSDDD, CBAM). We analyze the role of Switzerland as a primary commercial gatekeeper and develop a conceptual ESG risk-mapping framework. Crucially, the study provides a quantitative proof of concept through a Monte Carlo simulation, demonstrating how integrated ESG data capacity acts as the primary mitigator against market-access risks. The findings suggest that domestic compliance is no longer sufficient; maintaining commercial legitimacy now requires the institutionalization of "ESG Controllers" and interoperable data architectures capable of providing reasonable assurance to global value chain actors. Keywords: ESG regulation; mining governance; Peru; critical minerals; due diligence; traceability; global value chains; resource policy.

This article introduces the distinction between latent and manifest capitalism as an analytical framework for comparative historical sociology. Rather than treating capitalism as a singular developmental trajectory—from "traditional" to "modern" forms—we conceptualize it as a field of structural possibilities characterized by different degrees of the universalization of abstract labor as the principle of social mediation. Latent capitalism designates configurations in which capital, exchange, and accumulation exist, but abstract labor does not become the universal norm of social recognition. The value-form remains limited to sectors, the state is not structurally dependent on permanent accumulation, and time does not function as the absolute measure of human worth. Manifest capitalism, by contrast, refers to configurations in which abstract labor becomes a pervasive principle of social legitimacy. Time measured through productivity penetrates multiple spheres of social life, the state becomes structurally tied to the reproduction of value, and individuals are evaluated primarily according to their capacity to mobilize labor-power. Drawing on historical material from Asia, Europe, and the modern West, the article demonstrates the analytical usefulness of this distinction for reinterpreting Eurocentric narratives of capitalist development and reconsidering the "Great Divergence" debate. It also introduces the concept of an autopoietic system of labor to analyze state socialism as a distinct structural configuration. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this framework for contemporary transformations associated with automation, the crisis of work, and possible post-capitalist futures.

This report maps and compares how Sweden is ranked in altogether 43 international indices and rankings. The results show that Sweden is regularly ranked as one of top 10 countries in the world.

Modern social media platforms have evolved into algorithmically managed environments that measure social approval, reward self-presentation, and provide validation through variable reinforcement schedules. This critical literature review examines how these digital systems may favorably amplify subclinical narcissistic tendencies, particularly among individuals with insecure attachment histories. A conceptual tripartite model is proposed linking developmental attachment insecurity, individual-level narcissistic vulnerability, and contextual algorithmic reinforcement through a bidirectional feedback loop. Four testable propositions are derived to guide future research.

Este artículo examina cómo se comportaron las dinámicas deliberativas digitales durante el proceso constituyente chileno de 2022, uno de los momentos críticos de la historia política reciente en Chile. Basándonos en el análisis de los redes sociales, abordamos procesos de socialización política digital, a partir del cual desarrollamos el concepto de "polis acristalada" para representar cómo se desarrolló el debate en plataformas digitales en el contexto de momentos políticos críticos caracterizados por una alta demanda de cambio estructural. Nuestros hallazgos revelan que las dinámicas de interacción política digital durante el proceso constituyente chileno de 2022, permiten ejemplificar cómo, pese a contar con mecanismos democráticos para la deliberación digital, éstos pueden, paradójicamente, reforzar la rigidez institucional y la desafección política, tal como se observa en la literatura sobre el tema, contribuyendo al crecimiento de la polarización política. El caso chileno proporciona evidencia empírica robusta para comprender los procesos sociopolíticos bajo un prisma particular respecto a los supuestos convencionales sobre la relación entre procesos participativos y cambio institucional.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer opportunities for information dissemination, yet present challenges with upholding the distinct theological practices of the Catholic faith. By training on vast datasets, LLMs can generate responses that equivocate or blend together diverse perspectives. While this tendency can be beneficial for providing broad access to information, it can dilute the distinct theological tenets foundational to Catholicism. While these challenges may affect various faiths, we conduct a case study to investigate them within the Catholic tradition. Unlike human religious authorities who may offer definitive interpretations based on Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterial teaching, LLMs present information in a flattened, generalized manner by smoothing over specific religious claims. This can weaken the emphasis on singular revelations or unique covenants. For instance, an LLM might present the concept of `God' in a way that blurs the distinct attributes of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as articulated in the Nicene Creed, into a generalized deity, thereby eroding particular theological distinctions. Conversely, when prompted on matters of right or wrong within an ethical dilemma, an LLM might present a spectrum of opinions from secular frameworks. This can occur without distinguishing or prioritising the specific moral decrees found within Canon Law or the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). This synthesis of diverse ethical views, rather than a clear affirmation of distinct religious injunctions, exemplifies how LLMs can equivocate on matters of moral truth, potentially diluting authoritative guidance. We examine how the outputs of general-purpose LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini) and theological LLMs from differing religious traditions (e.g., Magisterium AI, Hyder.ai, RavChat) align with Catholic teaching. LLMs may inadvertently marginalize minority viewpoints within the Catholic Church or prioritise interpretations that align with cultural norms rather than traditional stances. Additionally, LLMs can shift interpretations in their outputs based on current events or political news. This can lead to a homogenization of religious discourse, obscuring the rich diversity and nuanced debates. However, when thoughtfully developed, these technologies can also provide valuable information that fosters understanding and encourages deeper engagement with religious texts and orthodox perspectives. In light of this, our study evaluates how LLMs align with the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, such as those found in the Rome Call for AI Ethics and Antiqua et nova. These frameworks underscore how technology should be used to foster human flourishing in alignment with divine wisdom while upholding religious truth.

This working paper synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence published between 1965 and 2026 on the long-term outcomes of non-kin out-of-home placement for children and describes current child welfare budget allocations in four English-speaking countries. Fourteen peer-reviewed studies using causal, quasi-experimental, or prospective longitudinal designs document elevated risks of premature mortality, adverse mental and physical health, and reduced socioeconomic attainment among placement-exposed populations relative to general-population, adversity-matched, sibling, or instrumental-variable counterfactuals; sibling-comparison and meta-analytic estimates report a roughly doubling of premature mortality risk and a roughly threefold increase in suicide risk associated with childhood out-of-home care experience. Five peer-reviewed studies argue, on methodological grounds, that observational findings have overstated the average effect, that propensity-matched analyses produce smaller estimates, that the instrumental-variable finding does not replicate uniformly across jurisdictions, and that effects are heterogeneous by age, placement type, and outcome. Within the targeted review, no peer-reviewed study was identified that reports non-kin placement producing superior outcomes relative to comparable home or kinship counterfactuals; Section 3.2 sets out the structural features of the literature that bear on how this absence should be read. Evidence on alternative pathways (parental care, intensive family preservation, community-based prevention, and kinship placement) has accumulated over the same interval; the 2018 Cochrane systematic review of 102 quasi-experimental studies finds that kinship-placed children experience fewer behavioral problems, fewer mental health disorders, better well-being, and less placement disruption than non-kin-placed children. Most recently published budget data show placement-related spending accounting for 82 percent (England, 2022/23), 72 percent (United States, SFY 2022), 64 percent (Australia, 2024–25), and 57 percent (New Zealand, 2023/24) of placement-plus-prevention expenditure within each country’s own reporting categories. Cross-national rates of children in out-of-home care, drawn from each country’s national statistics, range from 3.9 to 8.2 per 1,000 aged 0–17 across five high-income systems. The paper closes by identifying limitations and directions for further research.

This study explores how AI-assisted text simplification may influence the relationship between medical vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in English for Medical Purposes (EMP). Building on a previous phase, the study adopts a two-group design within a single cohort of 84 second-year medical students, comparing performance on original and simplified versions of the same biochemistry texts. The simplified texts were generated using ChatGPT. Participants completed a 45-item test consisting of 25 vocabulary recognition items and 20 reading comprehension questions. The analysis focuses on overall performance, the relationship between lexical knowledge and comprehension, and the extent to which learners appear to transfer vocabulary knowledge to reading tasks. The results suggest generally high levels of performance in the AI-assisted condition, with mean scores of 91% for vocabulary and 84% for comprehension. A positive relationship was observed between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension (r = .74). When compared with the original-text condition (r = .56), this pattern may indicate a somewhat stronger alignment between lexical knowledge and comprehension under simplified conditions. Transfer-efficiency results (M = 0.92) suggest that students were generally able to apply their lexical knowledge in reading, although with notable individual variation. At the same time, differences in performance between texts remained, suggesting that text-related factors may continue to play a role even under simplified conditions.

This study investigates the relationship between medical vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in English for Medical Purposes (EMP) among second-year medical students. A cohort of 115 students at MU Varna, all with prior knowledge of biochemistry, completed a 45-item test comprising 25 vocabulary recognition items and 20 reading comprehension questions based on two biochemistry texts. The study examines overall performance, the relationship between lexical knowledge and comprehension, and the efficiency with which learners transfer vocabulary knowledge to reading tasks. Results show high overall performance, with mean scores of 93% for vocabulary and 88% for comprehension. A moderate positive correlation (r = .56) was found between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, indicating that lexical knowledge is an important but not sufficient predictor of reading success. A transfer-efficiency measure (M = 0.94) suggests that students generally apply their vocabulary knowledge effectively, though with notable individual variation. Differences in performance between the two texts further indicate that factors such as textual complexity influence comprehension outcomes. The findings support a view of lexical coverage as a functional range rather than a fixed threshold, suggesting that recognition of approximately 90–93% of targeted domain-specific vocabulary appears sufficient under conditions of prior content familiarity. The study contributes to research on specialized L2 reading by providing empirical evidence from a medical ESP context.

Background. Female sex workers (FSWs) experience a disproportionately high burden of HIV, driven by structural vulnerabilities, limited power to negotiate condom use, exposure to violence, and inconsistent access to prevention services. In this context, oral HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has been recommended since 2015 by the World Health Organization, and new forms of PrEP have since been developed. To inform future research and policy efforts, this study synthesizes global evidence on PrEP among FSWs worldwide. Methods. We conducted a scoping review within six multidisciplinary databases searched up to December 2024. All original papers on PrEP among cisgender FSWs were included worldwide. Titles and abstracts, then full texts, were independently screened and papers were excluded if: not presenting specific or stratified results on FSWs; study protocols; modelling studies; conference abstracts; not written in English or French. Data extraction was independently conducted in two stages using standardized tools: i) general study characteristics (Unaids region, country, study type, outcomes, type of PrEP, and study years), ii) detailed data of each outcome (including PrEP knowledge, a priori acceptability, effective acceptability). Drivers and barriers to PrEP acceptability were analyzed using an adapted conceptual framework encompassing six domains: patient characteristics, individual knowledge and perceptions, medication-related factors, social processes, structural and health system factors, and sex work characteristics. Results. After selection, 120 eligible studies were identified, mostly conducted in Eastern and Southern Africa. PrEP knowledge was initially low but increased quickly once programs were introduced. PrEP interest was consistently high across regions, driven by perceived HIV risk and desire for self‑protection, and enhanced by greater PrEP knowledge. PrEP uptake, retention and adherence varied widely. Main barriers included sex work realities (i.e. unstable housing, alcohol use), social processes (i.e. stigma), individual characteristics (i.e. mobility), treatment-related characteristics (i.e. side effects), health system challenges (i.e. clinic access constraints). Drivers included social support and reminder tools. While evidence on long‑acting PrEP remains limited, interest was consistently high, particularly for injectable formulations due to discretion and reduced daily burden. No increase in sexual risk-taking or STI incidence was observed among PrEP users. Conclusions. Overall, the findings highlight the need for differentiated and structurally responsive PrEP delivery models tailored to the realities of sex work. Expanding long‑acting PrEP options and improving service accessibility, community engagement, and stigma reduction strategies will be critical to strengthening HIV prevention among FSWs globally.

This thesis examines how autonomous functions in weapon systems (AFWS) could alter ceasefiremonitoring and verification (CMV)’s capacity to enhance predictability and accountability inpeacekeeping contexts. It adopts a concept-driven, abductive research design in which the two coreanalytical concepts - AFWS and CMV - are specified, decomposed, and operationalized prior tohypothesis development. Autonomy is reconceptualized as a multidimensional property - goal complexity,environmental complexity, adaptability, and independent execution - embedded in a task-based typologythat reduces conceptual stretching and enables operationalization. CMV is developed in a top-downconceptualization anchored in UN peacekeeping architecture and centered around the process logic ofproducing timely, reliable, accurate, and complete information (TRAC). This thesis aims to makeplausible a set of three hypotheses on the question ‘How could AFWS usage by conflict actors changeCMV’s capacity to enhance predictability and accountability by producing timely, reliable, accurate, andcomplete information?’. The hypotheses propose that increasing AFWS use by conflict actors within thecontext of an adoption gap, may compress CMV’s operational time window, strain TRAC-basedpredictability by expanding and obscuring the information environment, while distributive agency mustnot necessarily undermine informal responsibility attribution.

Collection of ideas and thoughts

La reticencia vacunal representa un desafío creciente para la salud pública y la salud global, y se relaciona estrechamente con el sesgo a favor de lo natural, el cual parte del supuesto de que todo lo que se percibe como “natural” se considera seguro y beneficioso para la salud. Es en este contexto que los movimientos antivacunas sostienen, sin ninguna evidencia, que la aplicación de vacunas incrementa el riesgo de enfermedades como el autismo y, además, sobrevaloran la protección de la inmunidad natural. Los esfuerzos de la institucionalidad de la salud pública para contrarrestar el sesgo a favor de lo natural y las teorías de conspiración que lo acompañan deben estar centrados en propiciar y mantener una conversación pública vibrante acerca de las vacunas, involucrando la diversidad de voces que hay sobre el tema. En este sentido, la democracia deliberativa brinda la posibilidad de fortalecer los programas de vacunación públicos aun si un sector de la sociedad está en desacuerdo.

A key barrier to ensuring the growth of the housing supply is local opposition to development, often called NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). We use pre-registered studies on representative samples of Canadians and Americans to explore the values-based correlates of opposition to local housing development and the values-based conditionality of the effects of certain housing characteristics (i.e. affordable housing) on housing opposition. We find that nativism, racial resentment, and moral traditionalism are generally associated with more negativity towards local housing development with some modest differences between countries and outcome measures. Nativism is connected to opposition to development in Canada, while racial resentment stands in its place in the United States. Traditionalism is associated with opposition to development in both countries. Nativism appears to be the most important correlate of negative beliefs about the consequences of new housing, such as harming neighbourhood character. The connection between housing characteristics and development opposition is also conditional on values. Respondents are generally more supportive of affordable over market-rate housing, but this is only true among those with low racial resentment, traditionalism, nativism, and free-market attitudes, and high levels of egalitarianism. Our findings highlight the importance of values in shaping attitudes towards new housing.

Transportation equity researchers typically quantify either inequality (e.g., how equal are distributions between groups?) or sufficiency (e.g., how many and what kinds of people lack adequate access to the transportation resources?). Sufficiency analyses offer more actionable insights that can be used to mitigate disadvantage, but fundamental analytical methods for sufficiency analyses are not well developed. To advance this area of research and practice, this paper investigates three approaches to measuring sufficiency through the lens of public transport access to jobs: (i) fraction of total regional destinations reachable, (ii) competitiveness with auto access, and (iii) population-weighted percentile measures. We use a class of decomposable Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures to understand the sensitivity of overall levels of disadvantage to the choice of disadvantage lines (sufficiency thresholds) and other parameters, in the context of seven U.S. urban regions. We find that fractional and auto competitiveness measures produce similar results and are highly sensitive to the choice of disadvantage line, population-weighted percentile measures may allow for better comparisons across demographic groups, and by most reasonable definitions the vast majority of residents (80+%) in an area might be considered to experience access disadvantage.

Childhood cruelty to animals is among the most durable behavioral warning signs of later interpersonal violence in the forensic and clinical literature. The predictive mechanism does not rest on any settled answer about the moral status of the target. It rests on what the perpetrator practices, rehearses, and trains in themselves: desensitization, dominance affect, and the social learning of cruelty as pleasure. This paper offers a conceptual continuity argument and research agenda. We argue that the substrate of the target is incidental to that training, with one critical qualification: the configuration of the target matters. Routine digital destruction in static media (the static video game target, the scripted non player character) is a categorically different case from the closed loop, contingent emotional response systems on which the argument turns. As world models, embodied robotics, and closed loop emotional voice systems converge toward agents that perform distress in ways a user cannot reliably distinguish from a being in pain, we argue that the dispositional consequences of practiced cruelty against those agents are likely to recruit sufficiently similar mechanisms to warrant clinical and forensic attention. The paper does not claim that synthetic agents are moral patients. It claims that the warning signal forensic and clinical fields have relied upon for fifty years risks migrating to a venue with substantially diminished detection infrastructure. Existing human robot interaction research already shows that users do not need to believe a synthetic agent is conscious to respond to it through social, emotional, or dominance based scripts. The Kantian observation that cruelty corrupts the cruel is sufficient to ground the argument. Conduct disorder assessment, character evidence frameworks, school counseling protocols, and pre employment screening for sensitive roles will need to adapt or lose one of the more durable early behavioral indicators available to forensic and clinical assessment. The paper is offered as agenda setting; the operational protocols it identifies as necessary are deliberately scoped to a planned companion paper.

We study the causal effect of secondary school admission on adolescents’ mental health using extensive Finnish register data and a regression discontinuity design. Focusing on two separate margins among first-time applicants in 2008–2013—admission to vocational secondary education versus no admission, and admission to general versus vocational education —we examine short- and medium-term mental health impacts measured by health care utilization and psychotropic drug use. We find that admission to vocational education, relative to rejection by all applied secondary schools, reduces psychotropic drug use by 6.3 percentage points (-21%) within seven years of admission. While access to vocational education slightly increases health care visits in some areas, it substantially decreases visits for substance use. Moreover, we observe that admission to general rather than vocational education decreases specialized healthcare visits for mental health by 4.5 percentage points (-21%) within seven years of admission. The effects of admission to vocational education versus no admission emerge primarily after completing vocational education, possibly related to simultaneous labor market integration. Conversely, the effects of admission to general versus vocational education mostly appear already during the immediate years after admission, potentially driven by changes in peer characteristics and living arrangements. While causal mechanisms behind the mental health effects remain unclear, our results highlight important short and medium-term mental health benefits of secondary education. These findings point to the potential value of policies that ensure access to secondary education, such as extensions of compulsory education, and that support mental health during critical educational transitions.

Abstract The fertility decline observed in the Nordics, and in most Western countries, since around 2010 is widely recognized in research and public debate, yet the mechanisms behind it remain largely unclear. While a combination of explanations is probable, the mental health of (potential) mothers and fathers may play a part as an increasing number of people, especially women, purchase prescribed psychotropic medicines before the transition to parenthood. In this study, we investigate the extent to which parental mental health prior to childbirth is associated with mother’s continued childbearing. Using Finnish full-population data from 2000 to 2017 and survival analysis, we follow mothers after the first and second childbirths. We show that both mother’s and father’s poor mental health is associated with a considerably lower risk of transitioning to a subsequent childbirth, and in particular for second childbirths. In addition, parents’ poor mental health before childbirth is associated with a slight increase in interbirth intervals, by 1–3 months, between the first and second childbirths. Keywords: child spacing, fertility, Finland, interbirth interval, mental health, psychotropic medicine, register study

This quantitative study compares the family relationships of first-generation and second-generation immigrants to those of non-immigrants in the United States, focusing on both nuclear (parents, siblings) and extended kin (grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins). Utilizing egocen-tric network data from the U.S. KINMATRIX sample, we examine respondents’ family relation-ships in terms of monthly contact, emotional closeness, and perceived reliance. Regression results suggest that relationships with extended kin may be disrupted by migration and geographic sepa-ration, as reflected in immigrants’ reduced reliance on grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins (extended kin disruption). By contrast, when considering only family members living in the desti-nation country, immigrants are more likely than non-immigrants to maintain frequent, close, and supportive relationships with parents and siblings (nuclear kin intensity). These patterns are most pronounced among first-generation immigrants, suggesting both greater loss of kinship ties due to migration and greater involvement with geographically proximate kin than among second-generation immigrants.

Gen-AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude are rapidly becoming a central tool for everyday information use. We argue this shift is not merely technological but epistemic: rather than mediating access to pre-existing content, Gen-AI chatbots generate novel informational artifacts on demand. To systematize this transformation, we propose the HIPUD model, an affordance-based framework comprising five dimensions: Hyper-personalization (individualized outputs), (dialogic) Interactivity (real-time discursive exchange), Probabilistic generation (statistically synthesized rather than retrieved content), Universality (comprehensive reach across topics, languages, and modalities), and De-contextualization (information stripped of social and source-related cues). These affordances intersect and mutually reinforce one another, with broader implications for epistemic and informational practices. We illustrate the model through scenarios in political, health, and consumer communication, offering a conceptual vocabulary and analytical lens for future research on information use in Gen-AI environments.

Corruption is an unresolved issue in public administration worldwide, causing severe societal harm. Although research links greater female empowerment and participation in politics, government, and the labor force with lower levels of corruption, research on the relationship between gender and corruption in the context of public service provision is still scarce. Challenging the fairer sex hypothesis, this study explores the degree to which administrative corruption exercises a gendered burden on citizens and, using survey data of more than 64,800 citizens nested in 54 countries/territories in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, shows that women are disproportionally affected by distinct forms of administrative corruption. We find that women are significantly more likely to having to engage in bribery and favoritism to receive essential public services, and that gender inequality and the quality of public institutions significantly moderate these relationships. By highlighting the gendered burden of corruption, this study significantly advances our understand

Artificial intelligence, generative AI, conversational agents, and service robots increasingly shape how travelers search, book, experience, and recover from tourism and hospitality services. Yet current research still focuses heavily on isolated AI tools and adoption outcomes, rather than on how AI-mediated journeys affect traveler trust, fairness, control, and well-being. This conceptual paper develops a journey-level framework for AI- and robot-mediated traveler well-being infrastructure. Drawing on research in tourism AI, service robots, customer journeys, algorithmic fairness, AI governance, service recovery, and digital well-being, the paper identifies three interdependent capability domains: AI journey design, AI governance, and human-AI-robot orchestration. These domains shape traveler well-being through four traveler experience mechanisms: trust, perceived fairness, perceived control, and psychological comfort. The framework also positions AI-mediated service failure as a diagnostic test of the wider service system, revealing whether firms can explain automated decisions, preserve journey context, enable human escalation, and repair relational harm. The paper contributes to tourism and hospitality research by shifting attention from AI tool adoption to journey-level well-being infrastructure. It also offers practical guidance for designing AI-mediated journeys that travelers experience as understandable, fair, controllable, emotionally safe, and recoverable. Keywords Artificial intelligence; service robots; tourism marketing; hospitality marketing; customer journey; traveler well-being; AI governance; algorithmic fairness; service recovery; human-AI-robot orchestration.

I am simultaneously a critical skeptic of large language models (LLMs) and their role in the learning process, and a reluctant and wary user of those same tools in my own work. This essay is an attempt to work through this tension by examining how LLM-based tools shape and reshape the foundations of expertise required to use them. If learners can generate working code through a Google search, if they can upload a blank problem set template and get a completed assignment in seconds, and if they can design, carry out, and analyze research projects in minutes, how can they build the expertise that is required to work with LLM output? Relatedly, if experienced researchers spend the bulk of their time reviewing LLM output and not working through code themselves, what happens to their expertise? The answer to these questions, I argue, is to deliberately introduce difficulty and friction in quantitative work, allowing learners to build expertise and helping experienced researchers maintain it.

Abstract: Urban flower beds are increasingly expected to work as climate-adaptation micro-infrastructure, not just decorative planting. Yet monitoring records still travel badly into municipal meetings, procurement documents, and public explanation. The article introduces and tests an evidence-to-action conversion layer that turns monitoring logs into auditable governance outputs through a stable BedID key, effort normalization, fixed reporting windows, KPI contracts, and versioned rule tables. Using 11 municipal flower beds in Regensburg, the study shows that, under the same reporting window and workload rules, patrol intensity can vary by up to 130-fold, which makes intuition alone a weak guide. Practitioner workshops (n = 12) further show that the workflow supports faster diagnosis, steadier prioritization under budget pressure, and clearer cross-departmental and public explanation, with high overall usability (SUS = 82.3). What this adds is a localized governance workflow that shortens the last mile between monitoring evidence and municipal action.

Interdependence and trust between friends can support cooperation benefitting many – like collective action across distance to manage natural resources. However, constraints like social norms and demands on time can prevent the formation of these long-distance relationships. Here, we assess whether the motivation to form long-distance friendships – what we call long-distance orientation (LDO) – can also support collective action across distance. First, we develop a measure of LDO with discriminant and ecological validity in two contexts, Tanzania and online in the US. In the online samples, we find that LDO items are moderately correlated with Openness and Extraversion but load more strongly on a separate factor. Second, we evaluate whether LDO, number of long-distance friendships, and long-distance trust predict participation in natural resource management among 777 participants living in coastal Tanzania. We find that independent of friendships and trust, LDO directly predicted participation in activities supporting fisheries management. We urge further exploration of LDO and underscore the importance of including internal states and distance in cooperation research and collective action initiatives.

Predictions guide important prevention responses, from treating patients in hospitals to pretreating roads before snowstorms. Recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have accelerated improvements in prediction accuracy. However, it is unclear how these improvements reshape preventive strategies and resource allocation. We develop a framework for forecast-based prevention, extending canonical loss-prevention models to explicitly incorporate prediction-based information updates. Our theoretical analysis provides three key insights with practical implications. First, improved predictions shift prevention toward more intense but less frequent responses. Second, as predictions resolve more uncertainty, risk preferences matter less in determining optimal loss-prevention, resulting in greater convergence of preventive strategies. Third, under identifiable conditions, average prevention spending may decline as prediction skill rises, especially for actions with elastic marginal benefits. These results highlight the importance of aligning preventive strategies and resource allocation with evolving prediction capabilities.

Secondary school performance measures (SPMs) were introduced in England in 1992 and have become fundamental metrics affecting schools’ policy, funding and choice. SPMs are at the heart of the school accountability system and are described by the UK government’s Department for Education (2024a) as serving three main purposes: (i) identifying school underperformance and shaping subsequent interventions, (ii) contributing to the school inspection system and (iii) informing parental choice. SPMs have been subject to extensive critique, including for their statistical validity and their wider effects, but these criticisms have had little effect on the policy of performance measurement. In this study, we leverage national schools data to conduct the first systematic empirical analysis of the construct of ‘performance’ across the headline SPMs, how this is operationalised in SPMs and what factors contribute to performance measurement. We demonstrate that three of the current six SPMs are effectively redundant, and that performance measurement relies heavily on factors related to school intake rather than effectiveness. This study illustrates the inadequacy of current headline SPMs and identifies key directions for change to reach more accurate and equitable measures of performance, including reducing unnecessary redundancy in SPMs and disentangling school character and context from performance. Our work makes a timely contribution to current academic and policy discussions around the design and operationalisation of SPMs, and demonstrates the potential of data-driven analysis to better understand the complex interactions of a range of factors which underpin SPMs and to inform more responsive policy.

Cities are often scentsual sites, both metaphorically and literally. But as Richard Sennett (1994) identifies in Flesh and Stone, we rarely acknowledge or recognise the physicality of the body that inhabits the city or pay attention to how urban spaces are (re)produced sensorially. And when it comes to smell, not only is it typically held in low regard among other senses. Henshaw (2014) (as cited in Allen, 2021) notes how contemporary urban smellscapes are less odorous as a result of built environment practices that produce increasingly homogenised, sterile, and controlled environments. In that sense, Thakkar Bappa Colony’s distinctive olfactory features and unique historical landscape lend themselves well to this study. By 'smellwalking' across the neighbourhood, this essay documents the interplay of caste, class, and smell in Mumbai.

For more than a century, the “publish-or-perish” paradigm has shaped academic life by linking scholarly advancement to measurable research output. This narrative review traces the historical evolution of publish-or-perish culture from its early twentieth-century origins through the emergence of the journal impact factor, digital publishing, open access models, author-level citation metrics, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the integration of artificial intelligence into research workflows. We examine how these structural developments progressively reinforced incentive systems that prioritize publication volume, journal rank, and citation performance over the depth, rigor, and equity of scholarly inquiry. The convergence of industrial-scale paper mills, AI-generated pseudo-scholarship, and an expanding retraction crisis is interpreted not as an isolated aberration, but as a predictable consequence of metric-driven academic evaluation systems. We conclude that meaningful reform requires moving beyond declarative critiques toward the redesign of evaluation frameworks that prioritize epistemic rigor, community accountability, pluralism, and the integrity of scientific inquiry.

Spatial sociology begins from the premise that space matters, yet globalization, settler colonialism, ideological rupture, and digital diffusion all weaken any simple expectation that nearby societies should share the same cultural organization. This paper studies that spatial-cultural paradox by asking whether the shape of global belief-space mirrors the shape imposed by physical geography. Using World Values Survey data, it compares a geographic country graph with a distribution-sensitive belief graph through persistent homology and introduces a country-level Topological Discordance Index (TDI) that localizes where the two structures come apart. The main 80-country analysis computes belief distances with response-distribution earth mover's distance rather than country mean vectors, preserving information about within-country dispersion that mean-based distances suppress. Pairwise geographic and belief distances are weakly aligned (rho=0.145), while the corresponding persistence diagrams show substantial multiscale mismatch (W_1=15.291, bottleneck=0.260). A topology-changing edge-weight permutation null shows that the observed geography-belief topology is more aligned than random reassignment of belief distances, but still far from geographic determinism. The highest core-TDI cases--Sweden, New Zealand, Haiti, Australia, and Hong Kong SAR--show that spatial-cultural mismatch is not a single mechanism: it can arise through secular vanguard positions, settler-colonial transplantation, postcolonial and diasporic histories, and distinctive institutional trajectories. Longitudinal results place the analysis in dialogue with recent evidence of worldwide value divergence and regional ordering, asking whether that pattern also appears as multiscale basin structure. The contribution is a topology-aware account of cultural organization that moves beyond pairwise distance and low-dimensional cultural maps by measuring the multiscale structure of cultural basins, voids, and discordant cases.

Due to the significant negative externalities associated with the transport sector, policies that effectively address these issues and guide the transition to a low-carbon transport system are required. In order to gain insight into the level of public support for a number of transport policy interventions currently under debate in Germany, a factorial survey experiment on interventions to promote the transition from combustion engine vehicles to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) was conducted as part of the GLEN starter survey in January/February 2025. This report documents the experiment.

Migration and family networks are closely intertwined. While family members can provide resources that facilitate migration, migration often entails geographic separation that may limit access to local family support. Despite this, little is known about the size of immigrant family networks and the spatial configuration of their kin. The present study examines the number of existing and geographically accessible kin (the so-called structural kin availability) among im-migrants and how their kinship networks differ from those of individuals without an immigra-tion background. Using family network data from the KINMATRIX project, we analyze 4,791 individuals aged 25–35 in the United States. We estimate their average number of kin overall, kin alive, kin residing in the United States, and kin living nearby, including nuclear kin (parents, siblings), extended kin (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins), and complex kin (half- and step-relatives). Results show that immigrants have more family members overall and alive than non-immigrants, primarily due to more extended kin. However, these networks are most spatially dispersed among first-generation immigrants, who have fewer kin in the country and in close proximity than non-immigrants, although their absolute numbers of geographically accessible kin remain substantial. These findings highlight the central role of family networks in shaping migration processes.

Background Pay-it-forward is an implementation strategy that offers individuals a health service as a gift, and invites voluntary contributions to support subsequent users. Although prior trials have demonstrated its effectiveness in increasing sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing in China, little is known about how pay-it-forward is implemented in diverse delivery settings. Methods We conducted a convergent mixed-methods evaluation guided by the RE-AIM framework. Data was collected from the PIONEER trial which evaluated a pay-it-forward strategy to promote STI testing in two settings: community-based organizations (CBOs) and STI clinics. Quantitative data from 800 trial participants (400 CBOs, 400 clinics) assessed reach, uptake, donation behavior, and participant understanding. Implementers (n = 34) were surveyed to assess organizational readiness. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with implementers (n = 10) to explore adoption processes, workflow adaptations, and perceptions of sustainability, as well as with trial participants (n = 24) to understand their experiences with pay-it-forward. Data were analyzed separately according to each RE-AIM domain. Results Test uptake in pay-it-forward arm was high in both settings (CBO: 90.8%; clinic: 97%), though each setting reached distinct populations. CBOs primarily engaged men who have sex with men and first-time testers, while clinics enrolled more men with multiple concurrent sex partners. Adoption diverged by setting, for example, CBOs had strong mission alignment but faced chronic staffing shortages, while clinics required leadership approval, multi-department coordination, and implementer motivation to sustain delivery. Fewer than half of participants (41%) fully understood the pay-it-forward strategy in both settings, and clinics frequently abbreviated procedures due to workflow pressures. Only 19% of participants donated, with total donations covering costs for approximately 22 additional tests. Qualitative data highlighted that implementer motivation, community trust, workflow integration, and institutional support strongly shaped fidelity. Conclusions Pay-it-forward expanded STI testing in two distinct settings. However, many participants had a limited understanding, and the donations would only cover a portion of testing costs. CBOs were better positioned to reach MSM through trust-based relationships, while STI clinics achieved stronger linkage to care but faced greater structural barriers to explaining pay-it-forward. Effective scale-up will require setting-specific strategies that address staffing constraints in CBOs and leadership and workflow barriers in STI clinics.

Background: Perinatal mental health problems are highly prevalent and have adverse impacts on mothers, children, and societies. While economic evidence has been used to support policy prioritisation in some settings, country-specific estimates remain limited, particularly in low- and middle-income contexts. This study aimed to develop a modelling methodology and interactive cost calculator to estimate the societal costs of perinatal mental health problems, using Thailand as an applied case. Methods and findings: Costs linked to healthcare, productivity and disability-adjusted life year losses were modelled for a cohort of women giving birth and their children over 10 and 40-years, respectively, using Thailand-specific data. Untreated perinatal mental health problems were estimated to generate total costs of USD 2.1 billion per annual birth cohort, equivalent to USD 3,253 per woman giving birth, which includes costs related to women and their children. Indirect costs, including productivity and disability-adjusted life year losses, accounted for most of the burden. An interactive web-based cost calculator was developed to support scenario analysis, replicability and policy engagement. Implications: The findings highlight a substantial, largely unrecognised economic burden extending beyond the health sector. In Thailand’s established health technology assessment context, these estimates may inform policy discussions by framing perinatal mental health as a system-level investment and supporting more integrated and preventive approaches.

The Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale, a 10-point, standardized, globally validated, perceptual skin tone scale has emerged as the new gold standard for skin tone measurement. Adopted by Google, Meta, and other tech companies where it serves as fairness infrastructure for AI/ML, cameras, image search, and more, the MST has also been codified into global law through its adoption as the required skin tone measure across regulatory bodies across a diverse range of use-cases (e.g., FDA guidance and ISO standard for pulse oximetry, ISO standard for biometrics, etc.). Where it is not already the official standard, the MST serves as the de facto measure of skin tone for testing camera image quality, testing autonomous vehicles, automated skin tone classification for skin cancer and cosmetics, and much more. We formalize the MST as a physical unit of measurement, akin to Celsius, but for skin. We argue its reference points have quantitative spectral correlates. We propose Monk Skin Tone Scale–Spatial Frequency Domain Spectroscopy (MST-SFDS) as the natural technique for the crosswalk to tissue optics that will enable the re-calibration of optical technologies, in general, to mitigate skin tone bias.

This paper investigates whether first-time battery electric vehicle (BEV) buyers differ systematically from repeat EV owners in their pro-environmental attitudes within California’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP). Building on behavioral environmental economics and the moral licensing literature, this paper examines whether a salient pro-environmental action, purchasing a BEV, may be associated with weaker stated concern for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions among new adopters. Across multiple specifications, first-time BEV buyers are significantly less likely than repeat owners to rate reducing GHG emissions as “extremely important” (p < 0.01), a robust attitudinal gap that persists after adjusting for demographics, household characteristics, income, and survey year. Alternative explanations, such as the technology adoption lifecycle dynamics or income-based financial motivations, receive little empirical support, suggesting that motivational heterogeneity or a mechanism consistent with moral licensing better accounts for the observed differences. Evidence for behavioral rebound is limited and fragile. First-time adopters exhibit at most weak, specification-sensitive tendencies toward longer single trips, and show no differences in annual driving. Overall, the results indicate that incentive projects successfully expand EV adoption but also attract consumers with more diverse and often weaker environmental commitments. These findings underscore the importance of integrating behavioral insights into environmental policy design, particularly when high-salience green actions may interact with attitudes and downstream behaviors in complex ways.

Human development is often described in terms of changes in perspective, behavior, or identity; however, such changes do not consistently produce sustained adaptive responsiveness across contexts. This paper introduces the Quantum Self-Reclamation System (QSRS) as a recursive sociocybernetic architecture for adaptive human development. Within QSRS, worldview functions as interpretive input, identity as the adaptive system state, and engagement as the enacted output across relational and contextual environments. The Quantum Self-Reclamation Process (QSRP) functions as the embedded operational subsystem through which system activity becomes observable, recalibrated, and reorganized through recursive feedback integration. By operationalizing development as a process of adaptive regulation, QSRS extends sociocybernetic and systems approaches to human development. The framework contributes to systems scholarship by modeling development as an emergent property of recursive feedback, adaptive coordination, and contextual responsiveness across changing environmental conditions. Keywords: adaptive systems; cybernetics; human development; recursive regulation; sociocybernetics; systems theory; worldview

Abstract: The article proposes "Lagoon Wallet" as a public-learning prototype for blue carbon in transitional waters, using the Venice Lagoon as its case. Through a playable ledger interface, the project translates ecological indicators such as water transparency, disturbance frequency, and seagrass coverage into traceable public entries. Methodologically, the study develops a three-layer mapping structure of indicator, state, and mechanism, and combines it with lightweight user testing (N = 12) to evaluate causal retelling, ledger consultation, and recognition of unsettled boundaries. What it adds is a portable ledger interface, a structured method for translating ecological indicators into public design, and a reusable lightweight evaluation framework. The prototype helps make blue carbon discussable without turning ecological uncertainty into a false sense of settlement.

Abstract: The most elaborate, intellectually, of the article’s arguments about urban heat response is the claim that local adaptation depends on whether residents can connect cooling centers, shaded places, and isolated facilities into workable daily routes. Using Gelsenkirchen as a case, the study identifies informal cooling refuges from publicly visible user-generated content and translates these traces into an auditable cooling index. Lightweight proxy checks are then used to ask whether the index remains directionally consistent with known cooling conditions such as canopy, vegetation, and water proximity. It is not a question of formal planning or local evidence, but of making the latter supplement the former. Doing so demands an austere discipline of auditability, detachment from anecdote, and some care about what counts as refuge. One has to understand, for one thing, that heat adaptation cannot be reduced to location alone. One needs access, usability, and everyday climate justice.

Why do comparable military defections and elite divisions sometimes produce regime collapse while identical conditions fail elsewhere? Conventional explanations falter by assuming uniform effects rather than context-dependent configurations. This article argues that breakdown arises from conjunctural combinations, transcending variable-centred approaches via Qualitative Comparative Analysis of eleven high-intensity protest cases from 2010-2014. Military insubordination, elite fragmentation, and the absence of external support prove necessary and jointly sufficient for collapse. Two equifinal pathways emerge: endogenous breakdown through domestic fragmentation without external support; and externally assisted collapse fuelled by foreign intervention. Structural factor such as youth unemployment and institutional weakness, however, do not achieve conventional necessity thresholds, acting as permissive enablers of mobilisation rather than determinants of outcomes. This set-theoretic test advances configurational methods, explaining divergent trajectories in similar cases while challenging monocausal and linear approaches.

This paper examines the structural weaknesses of Pakistan’s consumption-led growth model and argues for a transition toward productivity-driven economic development. For decades, Pakistan’s economy has relied heavily on household consumption, imports, remittances, and debt-financed expansion, resulting in recurring balance-of-payments crises, weak industrial competitiveness, and chronic dependence on external financing. The paper analyzes the causes and limitations of this model while comparing Pakistan’s experience with the productivity-oriented development strategies of East Asian economies. It argues that sustainable growth requires higher investment, export diversification, industrial upgrading, human capital development, technological innovation, and institutional reform to create a more resilient and competitive economic structure.

This dissertation examines the structural implications of developing countries' services-led growth model through the lens of structural transformation. India has achieved significant export growth in services, particularly IT and business process outsourcing. This expansion has occurred alongside limited industrial deepening and uneven labour absorption. This dissertation aims to introduce structurally introduce the concept of a service enclave economy: a highly productive sector globally and nationally but one that isn't deeply embedded in terms of the backward and forward linkages it produces in the domestic economy, limiting its potential as the engine for structural transformation. This paper further dives into the structural, political economy, macroeconomic as well as coordination implications of such enclaves. Using input-output tables, eigenvector centrality as well as a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), the paper introduces the concept of linkage elasticity of growth to capture the extent to which sectoral expansion generates additional domestic economic activity as well as an enclave index. The analysis finds that India’s leading export sector, IT services, exhibits high value added intensity but relatively low domestic linkage density and embeddedness domestically, showing strong enclave-like characteristics. In contrast, manufacturing sectors such as motor vehicles and textiles display stronger backward linkages. Further, the paper documents significant asymmetries in tax burdens, export orientation, and import dependence across sectors. The paper delves into the political economy aspects as well as welfare aspects of such growth, highlighting the potential distortionary behaviour that may emerge from 2nd order consumption including potential systemic credit channels, unequal distribution of growth as well as spatial crowding out. In this regard, this paper also introduces the concept of attention crowding out, a political economy phenomenon of uneven allocation of political attention, structurally favouring certain industries while potentially not capitalising on transformational gains for the broader economy The findings suggest that India’s growth trajectory is characterised by the expansion of a globally competitive but domestically weakly integrated service sector alongside an underdeveloped industrial base. This paper argues that such a configuration may constrain the depth of structural transformation by limiting both the propagation of growth through domestic linkages and the broad distribution of income. The results contribute to the literature on structural transformation by highlighting the role of sectoral linkage structures in shaping development outcomes in services-led economies.

This article develops a sociological theory of how academic indicators acquire force in scientific life. Extending Randall Collins’s interaction ritual theory, it distinguishes three analytically separate layers that are often conflated in studies of bibliometrics: reception traces, valuation tokens, and metric capital. Readings, seminars, peer review, and textual uptake generate heterogeneous traces such as citations, mentions, and downloads. Infrastructures then individualize, certify, commensurate, and script those traces into portable valuation tokens. Once accumulated, these tokens form metric capital: portfolios of objectified symbols that can be mobilized in later encounters and converted in evaluation rituals. The article specifies three mechanisms of token activation—pre-entrainment, portability across structural holes, and closure-by-token—and uses them to show how numbers reorganize attention, deference, and conversational convergence. It further argues that metric capital does not automatically become status, identifying recurrent routes of metrics-status decoupling. The contribution is to shift the problem from what indicators represent to how institutionally certified numbers operate as portable resources in the interaction order of science, higher education, and research.

This paper examines the mutually reinforcing relationship between migration and organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. We argue that mobility and criminal governance are part of an interdependent system in which organized crime generates displacement through violence, extortion, and territorial control, while migration flows create new routes for criminal actors to expand geographically as well as new markets that they exploit for profit. We propose a novel conceptual framework to account for this feedback loop and analyze the available empirical evidence through its lens, which allows us to both formalize the mechanisms linking migration and organized crime and inform policy avenues. While the evidence suggests that migrants as individuals are largely victims of organized crime, large-scale mobility can also facilitate the expansion of criminal organizations. We hypothesize that, by reinforcing incomplete narratives that associate migration with insecurity, the latter dynamics dominate the former in shaping public perceptions in the region and encourage restrictive policies that heighten irregularity and migrants’ exposure to predation. We show that information campaigns can partially correct seemingly biased perceptions and policy design crucially mediates the migration–crime nexus. Specifically, regularization and protection programs can reduce migrants’ vulnerability and organized crime’s profits, whereas deterrence and exclusion may strengthen illicit markets. The findings underscore the need for coordinated regional responses that combine rights-based migration management with strengthened state capacity to confront organized crime.

surveychat is an open-source web application that enables researchers to administer surveys and conduct randomized experiments involving large language model (LLM)-based conversational agents, without the need to develop custom web application code. The system supports two primary operational modes: (i) survey mode, in which all participants interact with an identical chatbot configuration, and (ii) experiment mode, in which participants are randomly assigned to one of multiple chatbot conditions, each defined by a researcher-specified persona and language model. Upon completion of the interaction, participants receive an anonymized JSON transcript that contains only the role, content, and timestamp of each message. This transcript can be copied back into the parent survey platform (such as Qualtrics), within which the chatbot interface itself can also be directly embedded. The frontend of surveychat is implemented using Streamlit, and the entire application is configured via a single Python file. The system does not persist conversation data on its server and is compatible with any chat-completions-compatible API endpoint - including locally hosted models - thereby allowing researchers to retain full control over model selection, API usage, data jurisdiction, and adherence to ethical and regulatory requirements.

As diagnostic AI enters healthcare, contested disease boundaries are increasingly offloaded into algorithmic pipelines. What, then, does it cost to know and influence which clinical differences are retained as meaningful and which are discarded as noise? This paper takes EchoNext—a deep learning model published in Nature (2025) predicting structural heart disease from ECGs—to examine how engineering defaults, circulated as technical necessity, translate bodily variation into data. Through a scavenging method (Seaver, 2017) reassembling publicly available technical materials, the paper traces how normative choices become encoded across the pipeline, with each successive layer escalating the cost of contestation: LVEF thresholds are fixed as ground-truth labels while AUROC obscures their distributional consequences; clinically context-dependent inter-observer disagreements are renamed “label noise”; multi-label loss optimization dissolves the question of which labels may be compromised into gradients and weights; and the resulting engineering switches recede behind converging institutional boundaries (reporting norms, proxy auditability, and patent filings) that require no coordination yet jointly leave key decisions outside public scrutiny. The paper proposes “sociotechnical regimes of legibility” as an analytic: processes through which disease boundaries become infrastructural, stabilizing a default legibility standard against which contestation is made structurally expensive while compliance remains frictionless. Building on algorithmic normativity research (Grosman & Reigeluth, 2019), ground-truth studies (Jaton, 2021), and infrastructure studies (Bowker & Star, 1999), the concept foregrounds how, once normative choices operate as engineering defaults, contestation costs are redistributed across actors—and how that redistribution reinforces the defaults themselves.

Predicting match outcomes in professional Twenty20 cricket remains a challenging task due to the high variance of short-format games and the strong dependence on evolving team dynamics across seasons. Traditional rating-based approaches such as Elo provide a widely used baseline, but often fail to capture nuanced head-to-head competitiveness and season-specific context [1,2]. In this work, we propose a Dynamic Relative Probability Matrix (RPM) framework for forecasting outcomes in the Indian Premier League (IPL). The proposed approach represents team interactions through structured pairwise win-probability matrices that are updated over time, combining long-term historical tendencies with current-season adaptation. We evaluate the method on IPL match data from the 2018–2024 seasons and compare performance against rolling Elo baselines under a forward-chaining evaluation protocol. Across all seasons, the Dynamic RPM model achieves an average accuracy of approximately 54%, outperforming Elo by more than 3 percentage points. To assess robustness, we further conduct a McNemar significance test on paired match-level predictions, obtaining a p-value of 0.0034, which confirms that the improvement over Elo is statistically significant (p < 0.05) [3]. To assess generalizability, we further validate RPM on the English Premier League (EPL) using 9,380 matches across 24 seasons (2001/02–2024/25), where RPM achieves 67.71% average accuracy, remaining competitive with Elo (67.75%), Logistic Regression (67.53%), and XGBoost (67.32%) without any feature engineering. These results demonstrate that structured probability representations of head-to-head team dynamics offer a statistically reliable advantage over conventional rating systems for cricket match outcome prediction, highlighting the potential of RPM-based modelling in sports analytics.

Hundreds of millions of users now engage with large language models (LLMs) for advice, emotional support, and ongoing interaction. Existing frameworks capture this dynamic only partially: parasocial theory accounts for attachment without reciprocity, sycophancy research isolates model behavior from interaction dynamics, and echo chamber theory operates at the collective rather than the individual level. This article introduces Adaptive Resonance as a sociological concept that integrates these dimensions into a mechanism-centered account of human-LLM interaction. The mechanism links system adaptation, the user's interpretive experience of being understood, reduced epistemic friction, and behavioral reinforcement into a process that is analytically agnostic with regard to its outcomes — enabling intellectual collaboration in some configurations and producing dependency, ideological reinforcement, or amplification of dysfunctional patterns in others. The article specifies moderating factors, two distinct bonding pathways, and structural conditions of political economy, providing a framework for empirical investigation across vulnerability axes.

Legal frameworks governing sexual consent — in India and across comparable jurisdictions — perform a dual function that their architects have rarely been required to articulate explicitly. They protect: by establishing age thresholds below which any sexual contact is defined as inherently harmful, regardless of apparent willingness. And they suppress: by defining the conditions under which adult sexual expression is legally permissible, often in ways that generate substantial structural surpluses of demand over available legitimate channels. The first function has been extensively examined in the POCSO literature. The second hasn’t hasn’t. This paper addresses that gap. Building directly upon the Impulse Gap construct introduced in Gupta (2026b) and the Displacement Hypothesis advanced in Gupta (2026c), this paper argues that the Indian legal architecture governing sexual consent — primarily Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code as amended in 2013, the POCSO Act 2012, and the residual provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956 — exhibits what this paper terms a Consent Architecture Deficit: a structurally generated misalignment between the biological realities of human sexual development, the legal categories through which consent is defined, and the regulatory infrastructure provided for its expression. This Deficit isn’t t a failure of legislative drafting; it is an inherent feature of any legal system that draws categorical boundaries across a developmental continuum. But its consequences — the structural production of an Impulse Gap whose magnitude varies predictably with regulatory design choices — have been insufficiently examined from the standpoint of child protection scholarship. The paper develops a Developmental Consent Framework that proposes specific legal and institutional design principles consistent with the constitutional obligations of POCSO Section 43 and UNCRC Article 19, and situates this proposal within the continuing research series from which its empirical foundations are drawn.

Objective: Insufficient sleep in childhood is linked to poorer executive function (EF), behavior, and academic achievement. However, less is known about the long-term effects of early sleep patterns on these outcomes. We examined whether kindergarten bedtime predicts later sleep duration, EF, behavior, and academic achievement, and whether these relations vary by socioeconomic status (SES), disability, and race/ethnicity. Methods: Data were drawn from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort of 2010–11 (ECLS-K: 2011; N = 6,945). Structural equation modeling (SEM) tested whether kindergarten bedtime (age 5, 2010–11) predicted 3rd grade sleep duration (age 9, 2013–14), which in turn influenced EF, behavior (age 10, 2014–15), and academic test scores (age 11, 2015–16). We examined for mediation through EF and behavior and moderation by SES, disability, and race/ethnicity. Results: Kindergarten bedtime predicted later sleep duration, which was associated with higher academic achievement through its effects on cold EF (i.e., emotionally neutral cognitive tasks). These indirect effects were observed across racial/ethnic and SES groups but became nonsignificant after adjusting for covariates, suggesting that structural factors may underlie these associations. Although cold EF was the strongest predictor of academic achievement, sleep duration remained a small but significant contributor to long-term academic outcomes. Conclusions: Although sleep interventions may support academic success, SES and racial/ethnic disparities in achievement are likely driven by structural factors instead of sleep itself. Early bedtime routines should be reinforced in early childhood, but addressing broader systemic barriers is essential for closing achievement gaps.

This paper argues that robustly estimating dynamic latent traits requires flexible specifications that match theoretical priors to the constraints of noisy data. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel measurement framework using Stan, a probabilistic programming language for Bayesian inference, that employs computational advances to extend dynamic measurement modeling. The proposed specification is compared to existing dynamic ideal point models using Monte Carlo simulations to show that the model is much less prone to errors arising from mis-specification error and missing data. Furthermore, due to parallelization, the model is up to several orders of magnitude faster than existing Bayesian models, which extends the domain of full Bayesian inference to much larger datasets. To illustrate the model's application, the model is used to estimate monthly trajectories from 1990 to 2018 for all U.S. House Congresspeople while accounting for selection into votes and ambiguity about the correct time series process.

Abstract: Saproxylic beetle is a public subject. The surface may be saproxylic beetles, but the interior is a problem of how slow forest degradation becomes comparable, memorable, and usable outside specialist settings. What this article has done is to take the ecological signals carried by beetles—forest continuity, deadwood habitat quality, drought pressure, microclimate buffering, coupled risk, pathogen windows, and fragmentation—and work them up as a web-based environmental media prototype, using Crete as a case. Buried in the five-scene interface grammar and the evidence-to-interface translation matrix is the plot of a slower crisis: deadwood continuity, refuge loss, threshold effects, and connectivity breakdown made visible without being turned into spectacle. The versioned publication model is similar, except that here there is an added insistence on archiving and uncertainty, so that causal inference remains possible without pretending to final certainty. In place of mascot logic or easy catastrophe, there is the more difficult public question of how indicator species can function as evidence interfaces. As its contribution to environmental media, the project raises the question—too rarely kept open in public forest communication—of how proxy variables, interaction sequences, and archivable formats can be lined up into an interpretable, comparable, and durable mode of reasoning for non-specialist publics. That, in turn, is its way of translating slow forest degradation into environmental media without surrendering auditability over time.

Abstract: Coastplay is a route-based environmental communication prototype designed for public climate learning in collaboratively managed coastal protected areas. Rather than treating climate change as background information, the interface organizes local pressures, landform change, and multispecies relations into three optional learning paths: ocean, cliff, and sky. Each path uses low-threshold interactions such as dragging, clicking, and sliders to turn warming, storms, drought, and habitat change into comparable, discussable sequences. Its value lies in showing how co-management goals can be turned into a public-facing learning structure people can actually use. What emerges is less a digital tour guide than a way to build situated ecological literacy, conditional reasoning, and repeatable discussion.

This article examines how “tokens” have emerged as a new unit through which language, labor, and value are being reorganized in China’s rapidly expanding AI economy. Building on debates on linguistic capital, language commodification, and AI labor, I argue that tokenization marks a significant shift from communicative competence as an embodied human resource to linguistic capital as computationally quantifiable, allocable, and infrastructurally governed. While tokens are technical units of model computation, in contemporary China they have also become public signs of national infrastructural power, corporate productivity, and individual employability. Drawing on digital ethnographic analysis of viral social media interactions on the topic of tokens produced between February and March 2026, the article traces how tokens are translated, debated, and contested across three scales: national imaginaries of “token export,” corporate struggles over token allocation and AI-driven workplace control, and workers’ self-reflections on deskilling, dependence, and the erosion of labor subjectivity under “vibe coding.” I show that tokenization is not merely a technical protocol imposed from above, but a hybrid cultural process through which Chinese users reinterpret AI infrastructures using everyday metaphors, parody, and occupational gossip. In this emerging linguistic economy, tokens function simultaneously as units of computation, pricing, governance, and self-evaluation. The article contributes to AI and labor studies by showing how tokenization reshapes linguistic capital itself: no longer simply a human capacity accumulated through education and social experience, but a resource increasingly externalized into priced infrastructures that workers must strategically access, manage, and contest.

This study introduces the concept of the “Meme Breaker” to explain how localized emotional cultures are disrupted and reconstructed within organizational communication. A Meme Breaker is defined as an actor who alters an existing cultural and emotional selection environment, thereby changing which forms of speech, emotional expression, attitude, and behavior are perceived as effective, legitimate, imitable, or necessary for survival within a local setting. While the concept may be applicable to large-scale cultural transformations such as religion, political ideology, media technologies, or online collective behavior, the present study limits its focus to a localized workplace case. Drawing on cultural evolution theory, meme theory, organizational culture studies, emotional communication research, psychological safety, workplace harassment research, and employee silence studies, this paper examines how anger can become locally valuable despite its long-term organizational costs. Anger is not treated as an inherently strong meme or merely as a failure of individual emotion regulation. Rather, it is conceptualized as an emotional behavior that becomes culturally viable only when it is rewarded, justified, imitated, and protected by silence. Using an anonymized workplace case, the study analyzes how one upper-level actor transformed a local communicative environment through anger, labeling, public correction, detailed control, imitation, and later silent exclusion. The analysis contrasts this anger-currency environment with another workplace environment in the same organizational context where laughter, dialogue, repairability, and psychological safety prevented anger from gaining cultural dominance. This comparison shows that anger survives not because it is intrinsically powerful, but because the local selection environment is reorganized so that anger becomes useful. The paper proposes a seven-stage Meme Breaker Activation Model: denial of existing culture, justification of coercive behavior, short-term rewarding of anger, imitation and hierarchical reproduction, contraction of effective cognitive-behavioral repertoires, transformation from anger to silence, and stabilization of a localized anger ecology. This model explains anger culture not as simple emotional contagion, but as the reconstruction of emotional selection pressure. The study contributes to organizational communication and emotion research by linking anger, silence, imitation, labeling, psychological safety, and turnover within a single conceptual framework. It also suggests that interventions should not focus solely on suppressing anger at the individual level, but should redesign the emotional selection environment so that anger is not rewarded, silence is not mistaken for stability, and laughter, dialogue, repair, and voice remain viable forms of organizational communication.

Adolescent friendship networks exhibit limited interaction across socioeconomic and racial lines. Using Add Health data and a novel exponential random graph model, this study examines socioeconomic segregation in high school friendships and its relationship to racial segregation. Results show that networks are segregated less by socioeconomic status (SES) than by race, yet low-SES students are excluded from high-SES circles to a similar degree. Crucially, unlike racial segregation, which is mutual, socioeconomic segregation is unilateral: many ties from low-SES to high-SES peers go unreciprocated. A decomposition of determinants shows about 60 percent reflects differences in schools’ socioeconomic composition, while 40 percent arises from within-school friendship choices. Within schools, segregation arises less from SES-stratified courses and extracurriculars than from racial homophily, SES-based popularity differences, and triadic closure. Thus, while between-school compositional differences limit who can meet, within schools, segregation is shaped more by students’ preferences and network processes than by meeting opportunities.

The increasing emergence of zoonotic and infectious diseases has reinforced the consolidation of the One Health approach as one of the most influential frameworks in contemporary global health. By recognizing the interconnectedness between human, animal, and environmental health, One Health has progressively become integrated into international health governance strategies, surveillance programs, and pandemic preparedness initiatives. However, despite its growing institutional adoption, concerns remain regarding the practical implementation and operationalization of the concept across health systems and surveillance structures. This mini review examines current challenges associated with the translation of One Health from a broadly accepted conceptual framework into an effective operational model. Recent literature suggests that important barriers persist, including fragmented governance structures, limited interdisciplinary coordination, insufficient data-sharing mechanisms, and heterogeneous surveillance systems. The review further discusses leptospirosis and leishmaniasis as representative examples of zoonotic diseases that illustrate both the necessity of integrated One Health approaches and the practical difficulties involved in sustaining effective interdisciplinary collaboration. The literature analyzed suggests that the rapid expansion of One Health as an institutional and political concept may, in some contexts, be advancing more rapidly than the development of functional operational integration. Consequently, there is a risk that One Health becomes predominantly a strategic or rhetorical framework unless accompanied by sustained structural changes in surveillance, governance, and intersectoral coordination. Strengthening operational mechanisms and interdisciplinary collaboration will likely be essential for the future effectiveness and credibility of One Health initiatives.

Using over three decades of full-population yearly registry data on individuals and residential buildings in Sweden, this paper examines whether new large-scale housing construction is a suitable policy tool for revitalizing poor neighborhoods. The answer is yes. New market-rate condominiums, which increased the population in the poorest 25% of neighborhoods by 15%, reduced the excess poverty rate by 44% and the mean income gap relative to the city as a whole by 52%. The effect was not only driven by richer people moving into newly built apartments but also by higher incomes in pre-existing homes. We rule out other types of concurrent housing-stock changes, such as demolitions or renovations, suggesting that the new supply of owner-occupied homes made the areas more attractive. Regarding migration, we find no displacement of incumbent poor residents. Instead, gentrification was driven by high-income people moving in from richer areas. However, locals were over-represented in the new homes, which offered housing upgrade opportunities even to incumbents. Finally, our findings show that gentrification effects were smaller in areas with new rental properties, but unlike the case with condominiums, there were offsetting cannibalization effects in nearby areas.

To counter regionally concentrated political frustration, place-based economic policies targeting disadvantaged regions have become increasingly popular among policymakers. This paper exam- ines the effectiveness of place-based policies in mitigating political discontent with a focus on their distributional effects within regions. We argue that the firm-level allocation of place-based funds implies an unequal pattern of exposure: voters with senior-level occupations, higher incomes, and higher educational attainment are most likely to benefit directly. The political effects of such policies are thus concentrated in these groups, while other voters are affected less strongly. Em- pirically, we study the world’s largest place-based policy in the context of the European Union (EU) using both a natural experiment and a randomized survey experiment. First, we construct a 1990-2024 dataset at the individual level (N=1,400,000) across the EU by harmonizing Euro- barometer surveys with subnational geocodes and leverage a discontinuity in regional funding eligibility in a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Second, we provide experimental evidence from a pre-registered survey in Germany (N=2,000), in which we present respondents with infor- mation about the policy and analyze their responses to closed-ended and open-ended questions. Both analyses show that place-based policies reduce political discontent only among voters with senior-level occupations, high incomes, and high levels of education. Since political frustration is mostly concentrated in other groups, these results highlight how distributional effects limit the effectiveness of place-based policies in addressing political discontent.

Stakeholder-based health need elicitation is a critical component of health needs assessment, yet commonly relies on direct questioning methods (interviews, focus groups, and surveys) that yield heterogeneous and experience-driven responses, limiting comparability and decision relevance. This paper reviews the existing literature on stakeholder elicitation methods in health need research, identifies their principal methodological limitations, and proposes a vignette-based approach designed to standardize the elicitation context and reduce bias associated with individually salient experiences. By presenting stakeholders with realistic, contextually grounded scenarios, the method facilitates the emergence of both explicit and implicit needs while improving the comparability of responses across participants. The approach is adaptable to different stakeholder groups through tailored vignette structures and questioning strategies, ranging from open-ended exploration to structured decision-making prompts. The integration of voice response collection further enables the analysis of paralinguistic cues (tone, hesitation, and affective markers), enhancing the interpretive depth of the analysis and facilitating the identification of high priority but under-reported needs.

This book review critically engages with Manoj Kumar Jena’s edited volume Media and Marginals in India: Medium, Message and Meaning. The review examines how the book explores the relationship between media and marginalised communities in India through diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives. It discusses the book’s contribution to understanding representation, exclusion, identity, and power within contemporary media landscapes, while also evaluating its interdisciplinary relevance to sociology, media studies, and cultural studies. The review highlights the strengths of the volume in foregrounding marginal voices and reflects on its significance in the broader context of media and social inequality in India.

Large-scale replication projects have become central to debates about reproducibility in the social and behavioral sciences and related fields. In one of the most recent replication projects (Tyner et al. 2026), 274 positive results from 164 published papers between 2009 and 2018 were subjected to replication attempts. Depending on the criterion applied to evaluate replication success, between 28.6% and 74.8% of results replicated successfully. A key conclusion of this project was that the conditions that accept or reject replicability need further investigation. Building on that insight, the present study takes a meta-perspective on reproducibility by examining replication projects themselves. In particular, it focuses on how the choice of replication criterion may shape the conclusions that are reported. Two widely used criteria are the p-value-based replication criterion (PVRC), which assesses whether an originally significant effect remains statistically significant in the same direction in the replication, and the confidence-interval-based replication criterion (CIRC), which assesses whether the confidence intervals of the original and replication studies overlap. Using a sample of 31 replication projects across psychology, behavioral and social sciences, psychiatry, and behavioral ecology, this study shows substantial heterogeneity in reported replication rates both across projects and within projects depending on the criterion applied. Meta-analytic evidence suggests no overall time trend toward improved replicability and no robust association of replication rates with field, authorship patterns, or journal impact. At the same time, funnel-plot patterns indicate that reported CIRC estimates may be selectively biased toward more extreme values. These findings raise the possibility of publication bias and reporting in favor of “extreme results” operating not only in original studies, but also in the meta-literature on replication itself.

Candidate pools are foundational data sources for studying elite political behavior. However, studying candidates over time requires linking candidacies across elections to the same individual, even though candidates’ observed characteristics and electoral participation change over time. Candidates may change names, occupations, residences, or constituencies, and they may skip elections or exit politics entirely. These circumstances make longitudinal linkage difficult because researchers must determine both whether candidacies belong to the same person and whether a match exists at all. We introduce \textit{Radial Combinatorial Linkage} (RCL), a method for cross-election candidacy linkage tailored to the longitudinal structure of candidate data. RCL combines two dimensions of relaxation: \textit{intensive restrictions}, which govern how strictly candidate features must agree, and \textit{extensive restrictions}, which govern how far back in time the algorithm searches for a match. By progressively relaxing both dimensions, RCL accommodates changing candidate characteristics and intermittent electoral participation. We evaluate the method using simulated electoral data, historical Norwegian candidacies with hand-coded links, and historical Danish candidacies benchmarked against officially reported rerunning rates. Across applications, RCL improves link recovery relative to simpler matching approaches while maintaining high precision. We provide an open-source software package implementing the method, enabling researchers to transform repeated cross-sectional candidate data into longitudinal candidate panels.

Elisabeth von der Osten-Sacken’s expertise on human-bird interactions in Southwest Asia is renowned. We first met in Marburg in 2022 when Elisabeth invited two of us to talk at the Interactions between Birds and Humans in the Ancient Near East workshop. Subsequently Elisabeth attended the International Council for Archaeozoology, Bird Working Group Meeting in Copenhagen to present Pigeons: Symbiotic Species or Commensals of Civilization? In this paper, we present thoughts on how columbaria, as a form of niche construction, influenced the domestication process taking inspiration from Elisabeth’s work on the species. We offer perspectives on how these built structures influenced ecosystems and shaped human-bird interactions. Humans and Columbidae have been intrinsically linked for millennia and this (co)evolution, despite leaving an indelible mark on the modern world, has been largely overlooked.

Sociology has long diagnosed itself as a fragmented discipline, its major traditions generating sophisticated but incommensurable accounts of social life. This paper argues that the diagnosis misreads sociology's actual achievement. What looks like pathological fragmentation is, we argue, rigorous complementary specialization across different aspects of the same underlying social reality. The traditions are not incommensurable. They are partial. What has been missing is the connecting framework that reveals them as accounts of different parts of the same animal. We develop this argument through the micro-macro link based on the Socially Responsive Agent (SRA) model — a generative mechanism specifying how agents monitor symbolically mediated social feedback, interpret evaluations through continuously updated schemas, and adapt behavior to maximize reputational standing within reference groups. Mapping the core contributions of Mead, Giddens, Bourdieu, Coleman, Habermas, and Luhmann onto this mechanism, we argue that each tradition has been examining, with considerable precision, a distinct component of the same feedback process: Mead the interpretive micro-foundation, Giddens the recursive temporal architecture, Bourdieu the standing distribution and its consequences, Habermas the communicative structure of action and feedback, Luhmann the system-level properties of the mechanism's natural attractor state, and Coleman the formal requirements any adequate micro-macro account must satisfy. This mapping suggests a productive reframing of some of the discipline's most persistent confrontations. The Habermas-Luhmann debate in particular appears less as an irresolvable philosophical contradiction than as a disagreement about which of two structurally distinct regimes of the same generative process is dominant in a given social context — a question that, under this reframing, becomes at least partially empirical rather than purely philosophical. We present this argument as a baseline and an invitation rather than a final synthesis, intended to be scrutinized, refined, and contested. The aim is not to resolve these traditions from outside but to provide a connecting framework that reveals what they may always have had in common.

Relational event models (REMs) represent social interaction as a sequence of directed events in which the hazard of each event depends on the prior history of the sequence plus covariates. Thus far, researchers have applied REMs to ”formation” and ”persistence” edges homogenously, applying the same parameters regardless of whether sender i has previously contacted receiver j. But many social processes may change qualitatively after first contact: the considerations that drive an actor to reach out to a new alter may differ from those that drive interaction with an established partner. A prior-contact indicator —whether i has ever sent to j—partitions an event sequence into two behaviorally distinct regimes: initiation events, in which i contacts j for the first time, and continuation events, in which i returns to an already-contacted j. We develop separable REMs that assign each regime its own sub-model and estimating equation, analogous to separable TERGMs for network panel data. Applying separable REMs to 210 interaction sequences across nine social domains, we find that the separable model achieves higher predictive accuracy than the pooled baseline across all nine domains, and is preferred by AIC over the pooled baseline (within-risk-set comparison) in every network examined. Two findings follow from the decomposition. First, triadic closure is stronger in the initiation model than in the continuation model; the pooled triadic estimate is pulled toward a lower continuation value in proportion to how much continuation events dominate the sequence. Second, reciprocal obligation—whether j has previously contacted i—significantly increases first-contact hazards in most domains, but loses power once an exchange is underway, where recency of reverse contact takes over. A pooled model cannot represent both simultaneously and tends to reverse or cancel the reciprocity coefficient. Greedy forward selection independently recovers this distinction: RecInitiation (whether j has previously contacted i) is the first-selected term in the initiation model in 7 of 9 domains, while Send Recency (how recently i last contacted j) leads the continuation model in the same 7 of 9 domains—opposite directional contact statistics dominating opposite regimes. We suggest the initiation fraction—the proportion of events involving first contact—as a necessary pre-analytic descriptor and discuss its implications for estimation, sampling, and interpretation.

A Thematic Working Paper Across three Cohorts of Interviews (2025–2026) Working Paper · Version 6

We document the systematic decoupling of academic research from industrial innovation across four major scientific fields using 1,976,455 US patents linked to academic papers through applicant-added citations. Measuring industry reliance as patent citations per academic paper across 20 subfields in computer science, biology, medicine, and materials science from 1980 to 2019, we find a universal inverted-U pattern: industry reliance rises during an initial period of joint exploration, peaks, then declines by 4795% and does not recover. Structural break dates are staggered within each field in theoretically predicted order of commercial maturity, and across fields in a consistent sequence: computer science and medicine divorce earliest (mean peak ≈1993), followed by biology (≈1998) and materials science (≈1997). Two subfields at the analysis window boundary (Virology, Chemical Engineering) are flagged as potentially unreliable and excluded from cross-field inference. The post-2012 deep learning revolution did not reverse the divorce in any CS subfield, suggesting that technological revolutions do not automatically re-couple academia and industry once the frontier has migrated inside proprietary firms. These findings provide the first systematic cross-field empirical confirmation of a predictable knowledge appropriability cycle, with substantial implications for science policy and public R&D investment.

Background: Achieving valid cross-linguistic measurement of well-being requires more than direct translation; items must retain semantic clarity and conceptual equivalence across language groups. This study examined the linguistic and cultural harmonisation of the Older Persons’ Well-being Scale (OPWELLS) in Arabic, Bosnian, and Finnish for use among older persons residing in Sweden. Methods: The 22‑item Swedish OPWELLS pool was translated and culturally harmonised through a three‑step process: forward translation, bilingual expert review, including pilot cognitive interviews, and a consensus workshop. Cognitive interviews using think‑aloud and verbal probing techniques were conducted with 14 older persons (Arabic n=5; Bosnian n=5; Finnish n=4) between April and May 2025 to assess comprehension, semantic clarity, and potential cultural misalignments. Results: Across language groups, participants perceived the items as relevant, respectful, and easy to answer. Recurrent challenges included abstract concepts, particularly “control”, and varied interpretations of belonging and community. Several participants expressed hesitancy when responding to items concerning personal significance. While the five‑point frequency scale was generally appreciated, the response option “always” was sometimes perceived as unreasonably absolute. Language‑specific findings indicated conceptual overlap between “well‑being” and “quality of life” in Arabic and Bosnian, spiritually- or family‑oriented interpretations of meaning and role in Arabic, and the need for more concrete wording in certain Finnish items. Conclusions: The translated versions of OPWELLS were broadly comprehensible and acceptable. Cognitive interviewing identified targeted refinements needed to enhance linguistic clarity and conceptual equivalence, providing a strong basis for forthcoming multilingual psychometric testing.

University student mental health services are failing to meet demand globally, with institutional provision consistently outpaced by student need. In response, students are constructing informal peer support communities in digital environments, self-organised ecosystems that emerge as rational responses to institutional service failure. This systematic review introduces the concept of informal care markets to describe these communities, drawing on service failure theory, value co-creation frameworks and platform affordance theory. Following a systematic search of Google Scholar, PubMed and Scopus, 17 studies were included for review. Five themes were identified across the literature: the scale of unmet institutional need, student migration toward peer support, digital platform enablement of informal communities, the role of platform design in shaping support quality, and the risks of unstructured peer support ecosystems. Findings suggest that informal peer support in digital environments is not a temporary workaround but a settled feature of student life with significant implications for university policy, platform design and digital mental health strategy.

Abstract This research explores youth enterprise development opportunities, challenges, and prospects in urban Ethiopia, focusing on Hawassa City. As indicated in this study, enterprise development program is considered as a key policy choice for the Ethiopian government to address the unprecedentedly growing concern of urban youth unemployment. The study was conducted in Hawassa City, a rapidly growing urban centre in Sidama State located in Southern Ethiopia. It examined the socioeconomic characteristics of youth-owned enterprises, strength and limitations of enterprise development program and factors enabling and constraining enterprise growth. By doing so, the study aims to contribute to youth enterprise development policy and practice discourse. This research employed qualitative research methodology, utilising in-depth structured interviews, focus group discussions and key informant interviews as primary data collection tools. Youth enterprise operators, government officials, community representatives and youth leaders participated in the research to share their insights and experiences on youth enterprise activities. Positive youth development and developmental systems theoretical perspectives were used to explain how the interplay between youth as individuals and their social environment affects the performance of youth enterprises. The study indicated the importance of policy coordination, institutional capacity, social workforce competence and support services as key external factors affecting the performance of youth enterprises. Furthermore, the study identified education, social support and psychosocial skills as key internal enabling factors for youth enterprise long term survival and growth. In conclusion, the research specifically calls for an urgent action by government to strengthen the technical competence of government social workforce supporting youth enterprise programs and advancing psychosocial skills among youth to enhance the growth prospects of youth enterprises as outlined in policies supporting enterprise development.

Academic careers are commonly evaluated through temporal norms that privilege continuity, acceleration and cumulative output. Within such regimes, care-related non-linearity is often framed as interruption, absence or reduced productivity. This article develops a feminist conceptual analysis of care, time and academic value, drawing on care ethics, feminist epistemology and scholarship on academic labour, to challenge this deficit framing. Rather than asking only how care constrains academic participation, it examines how care-shaped trajectories expose the assumptions through which productivity becomes academic value. The article advances three arguments. First, it distinguishes care as relational ontology, social practice and epistemic orientation, arguing that care reshapes not only the conditions of academic work but also the forms of attention and knowledge-making it can sustain. Second, it conceptualises academic productivity as a temporal and epistemic value regime that shapes what kinds of knowledge become recognisable and institutionally valuable. Third, it introduces epistemic distance as a temporally produced condition through which assumptions of academic value become available for critique. The article contributes to feminist debates on academic labour by shifting analysis from participation to epistemic recognition, showing how care-related non-linearity reveals what academia is willing, or unable, to know under dominant productivity regimes.

Governance institutions are central to development, yet foreign aid can inadvertently harm them. Definitional ambiguity in the 'ownership' agenda contributes to the challenge of remedying these problems. This paper proposes a conceptual framework which separates ‘locally led’ approaches into those that give local actors ‘a seat at the table’, and those that provide ‘their own table.’ As such, it concerns the locus of decision-making power by distinguishing three ‘decision spaces’ — local, partnership, and external — defined by which actors hold real authority over a given policy choice. Drawing on the political governance literature, the paper argues that local actors’ discretion to make policy decisions is a necessary condition for accountability, legitimacy, and contestation – and that shared decision-making in partnerships does not satisfy this condition. Despite the widespread focus on partnerships as a remedy for various aid challenges, their potential impact on political governance institutions deserves closer scrutiny.

Objective: This study investigates the prevalence and drivers of financial solidarity among siblings in young adulthood, expanding the focus of family support research beyond the parent-child dyad. Background: Drawing on the intergenerational solidarity model, the study tests need-based and ability-based perspectives and further analyzes how relationship characteristics and family context condition financial support. Method: Using data from the US KINMATRIX sample (N=3,124; 5,556 dyads), the study employs a dual analytical strategy. The analysis combines theory-driven linear probability models with algorithmically determined Lasso regressions. This approach not only tests specific hypotheses but also rigorously isolates the most robust predictors of support. Results: 16% of young adults received financial support from at least one sibling. Results partially support an ability-based perspective: transfers were driven by the provider’s capacity rather than recipient hardship. Family context was also critical; support was congruent with parental transfers and significantly more likely for those with an immigration background. Although an individual’s gender did not predict their overall likelihood of receiving support, gender moderated pathways: for women, emotional closeness was linked to the receipt and provision, whereas for men, parenthood and immigration background were particularly relevant. Conclusion: Siblings constitute a vital secondary financial safety net. However, this support is less a response to disadvantages and more a function of the provider’s economic capacity and the broader family culture of support.

The area-based approaches to the management and governance of land, water and forest are considered critical to ensure that these natural resources remain protected against degradation while providing equitable benefits to those dependent on these resources. However, implementing area-based approaches at large geographical scales remains a challenge in India. This policy paper outlines these challenges along with opportunities to mainstream area-based approaches through cases spread across different geographies of India. Drawing on a series of expert deliberations around area-based approaches in India, this policy paper suggests strategies to implement area-based approaches. It also provides policy inputs to implement area-based approaches through existing state-sponsored programmes and through public-private collaborations.

Public digital conversation around major sporting events takes place within a hybrid system in which journalists and the media compete with new intermediaries, including influencers, to gain greater visibility and engage with audiences. This study analyses the Qatar 2022 World Cup as a case of high informational intensity and public opinion monitoring. To that end, social network analysis was applied to X/Twitter using the hashtag #Qatar2022, analysing 1,343 high-engagement accounts— including those of journalists, media and influencers—alongside a random sample of 5,000 users. The findings indicate that journalists are under-represented in the user population as a whole, but significantly over-represented among the highest-engagement accounts, and they maintain stable visibility. The media, by contrast, attract a lower average level of attention and tend to achieve only sporadic peaks of impact. Accordingly, journalistic authority on social media is observed less as dominance in terms of participation volume and more as the capacity to occupy reference positions when public attention is being shaped during the event.

Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) surviving on fewer than 30 wooden artifacts. All serious decipherment attempts to date have treated rongorongo as a phonetic or logographic encoding of the Rapanui language. This paper proposes a fundamentally different interpretation: rongorongo is a distributed administrative ledger system for managing communal resource allocation in a Pacific island chiefdom economy — and specifically, the surviving corpus constitutes the kohau tau, a named tablet class recorded in Rapanui oral tradition as annual secular records, long assumed lost. Computational analysis of 146 parallel passages from the Horley 2021 corpus identifies: (1) a universal list format confirmed across nine passages on multiple artifacts; (2) a lozenge-series quantity notation system exhibiting power-law frequency distribution consistent with real resource counts; (3) a standardized subject-quantity-subject ledger entry format on three independent artifacts; (4) a calendar section delimiter encoding the chief, lunar official, and fishing activity as a recurring administrative header; (5) directional binary encoding in glyph 711 recording resource arrival versus departure status; and (6) two structural zones in the parallel passages corpus showing a 10x difference in list format rate (18.4% administrative vs 1.9% ceremonial) via unsupervised clustering, with 78% validation accuracy on confirmed anchors. Thomson (1891) published a rongorongo tablet text explicitly listing the five resource domains under chiefly control. Barthel (1958) documented that the Rapanui had a separate kohau tau script for annals that was assumed to have disappeared. The present analysis proposes it has not disappeared: the list-format parallel passages are the kohau tau. Metraux (1940) documents the chiefly fishing prohibition (rahui) as a binary seasonal tapu, providing independent ethnographic confirmation of the lozenge binary encoding. Five rongorongo compound rules are confirmed in all four independently developed comparison writing systems (Chinese oracle bone, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Mayan glyphs), achieving a 20/20 universality score. Preliminary LSA on the parallel passages corpus places glyph 065 in the avian domain with cosine similarity +0.669 to the confirmed bird anchor versus +0.017 for a null control — a gap of +0.652 that exceeds noise. The Santiago Staff's 103 structural sections are interpreted as 103 allocation periods in a multi-generational resource archive.

A desigualdade é uma característica persistente da economia e da sociedade brasileira. Este artigo explora o conceito de aporofobia fiscal por meio de duas abordagens empíricas complementares. A primeira analisa a estrutura semântica do discurso midiático brasileiro em torno de três debates fiscais centrais ocorridos em 2025: a isenção do imposto de renda para rendas mais baixas, a criação de um imposto mínimo sobre altas rendas e o mecanismo de cashback tributário para famílias de baixa renda. Utilizando análise semântica baseada no modelo FastText, foi examinado um corpus de 1.748 notícias publicadas em cinco grandes portais nacionais, permitindo identificar padrões discursivos de apoio ou aversão às políticas fiscais pró-pobres. Os resultados mostram que o discurso explicitamente aporofóbico aparece em apenas 1,6% das notícias, enquanto 95% apresentam enquadramento ambivalente, combinando apoio às políticas redistributivas com narrativas que enfatizam custos fiscais, mecanismos de controle ou riscos de dependência. Nenhuma notícia foi classificada como exclusivamente pró-pobre, sugerindo que o debate público tende a legitimar políticas redistributivas apenas sob condições de disciplina fiscal e responsabilização. A segunda abordagem consiste na construção do Índice de Aporofobia Fiscal (IAPF) aplicado aos estados brasileiros, baseado na articulação entre um subíndice de despesa em assistência social e um subíndice de receita relacionado à composição da arrecadação tributária, com ênfase na tributação direta. Os resultados revelam significativa heterogeneidade interestadual: o índice variou entre 0,10 e 0,62. Estados como Bahia e Espírito Santo apresentam os menores valores do indicador, enquanto casos como Goiás exibem desempenho comparativamente mais favorável. A distribuição espacial do índice também sugere a presença de padrões regionais na configuração fiscal subnacional. Ao integrar análise computacional de discurso com indicadores fiscais, o estudo contribui para ampliar a compreensão das relações entre desigualdade, justiça fiscal e construção simbólica da pobreza.

This study examines how children’s experiences with nature is associated with their emotional responsiveness to ecological crises, and the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship. While environmental education in schools has improved awareness about nature, its role in shaping affective and value-based engagement with environmental issues remains unclear. Drawing on Connectedness to Nature Theory, Value–Belief–Norm Theory, and Self- 4 Determination Theory, a structural model was tested to explore the relationships between nature experiences through school and neighborhood greens, feeling of connectedness to nature, environmental values, beliefs, and responsiveness to ecological distress among school students. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 538 students (aged 10–19 years) from the National Capital Region, India. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to examine both direct and indirect relationships. Nature experiences were positively associated with feeling of connectedness to nature, which in turn was strongly associated with environmental values and beliefs. Environmental values and beliefs were significantly associated with students’ distress responses to images of ecological degradation. However, no significant direct relationships were observed between nature experiences and responsiveness, or between connectedness to nature and responsiveness. Instead, the relationship between nature experiences and responsiveness was fully mediated through connectedness to nature and environmental values. Age and grade level (used as a proxy for exposure to environmental education) were not significantly associated with the outcome variables, while gender showed small but significant associations with environmental values and responsiveness. These findings suggest that children’s engagement with nature is indirectly associated with their sensitivity to ecological harm through psychological pathways involving connectedness and values. The results highlight the potential importance of experiential engagement with nature in shaping affective and value- based orientations toward environmental issues.

Structural factors such as infrastructure, regulation, and market dynamics shape the everyday choices individuals make—from the affordability of healthy food to the accessibility of sustainable transportation. Yet psychological research has rarely examined how people perceive structural influences on their own behavior. Addressing this gap, we introduce the Structural Awareness Scale (SAS), a novel instrument capturing individual differences in the extent to which people recognize structural constraints in their choice environments. Across four studies, we develop and validate the scale in two key domains, sustainability and food choices. The SAS demonstrated high internal consistency and showed theoretically meaningful convergent and incremental validity regarding policy-related constructs (desire for governmental intervention, policy support, need for system change) and discriminant validity with regard to individualizing or internalizing constructs, including trait self-control, self-efficacy, and the internal allocation of responsibility. Moreover, higher SAS was associated with lower socio-economic status and more progressive political orientation. Our findings suggest that structural awareness is a distinct and measurable dimension of social perception that relates to how people understand responsibility and support collective solutions. The SAS offers a promising tool for researchers and policymakers interested in public receptivity to structural interventions in socially and politically contested domains.

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis – and revise it if falsified by later information – or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials, thereby offering them with obvious initial hypotheses – that the novel object is the referent for the novel word. We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word - novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object associations, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

Korea-China bilateral trade integration during the 2000s offers a natural setting to study trade exposure and mortality in an export-oriented economy. Using a shift-share instrumental variable on 221 Korean districts, I document a protective effect on working-age deaths of despair (β = −0.127, or β = −0.071 with province fixed effects and modernization controls), structurally opposite to the adverse U.S. and U.K. findings. The effect is concentrated on the deaths-of-despair composite under family-wise error control; placebo outcomes show no response. Marriage-market and family-formation channels mediate 59 percent of the effect, distinct from the labor-market and opioid pathways that dominate the U.S. case.

This study examines everyday experiences of life in the Czech–Slovak borderland following the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 and analyses how local residents negotiate a sense of peripherality associated with the emergence of a newly delineated state border. By shifting the debates towards an anthropological understanding of peripheries as culturally and memory-produced experiences, the study demonstrates how memory-based resilience allows individuals to navigate, challenge, and even reframe their position in the borderland. Drawing on oral history research conducted between 2023 and 2024 in selected localities of the Czech–Slovak borderland, comprising fifty interviews,, we identify border narratives in which the inclusion of collective memory reflects a capacity to negotiate and reframelived peripherality. In this context, memory not only functions as a key source of imaginaries of the border, borderland and processes of peripheralisation, but also as a resource for resisting, escaping or rejecting these processes. We therefore argue that the memory of borderland inhabitants represents an important form of resilience, grounded in specific local knowledge.

With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. We identify three forms of façading—surface, reinforced, and deep façading—that are contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality. Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. Practically, we propose several approaches to deter and detect criminal deception, including the extension of SEC surveillance and whistleblower programs, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions that clearly demarcate when entrepreneurs transgress into criminal deception. We make contributions to literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship.

The private rental sector is a massive and important part of the society and economy of any nation. The private rental sector's role as a major source of speculative investment, in addition to its critical role as a necessary good for human survival, drives intense interest in the contemporary structure and regulation of the private rental sector. As a consequence, regulation of the private rental sector is controversial. This paper examines one such regulation strategy in the United Kingdom, discretionary licensing strategies, which require minimum quality standards for rental properties in certain areas or that fit certain characteristics. While study of local housing policy is rare, academic study of private rental sector regulations *beyond* price controls are rarer still. Hence, this paper seeks to build understanding about the specific short-run impacts of the adoption of discretionary licensing policies in Bristol from 2019 to 2024 using spatial causal inference techniques. I find that there is no significant impact on market clearing, while the licensing scheme has a moderating effect on rent level growth at the boundary. This suggests that private rental sector regulation targeting minimum quality standards, such as those guaranteeing minimum energy efficiency, gas and electric safety, and other quality inspection checks, may serve to cool off rental markets, increasing clearing speed while reducing the average rate of rent growth.

International mobility grants are a prominent policy instrument for supporting early-career researcher development. However, empirical evidence on how mobility grant duration is associated with researchers’ long-term career outcomes remains limited. Drawing on a combination of publication records, ORCID profiles, LinkedIn data, and information from personal academic websites, this study investigates how the duration of China Scholarship Council (CSC) mobility grants (short-term vs. long-term) is associated with researchers’ subsequent career outcomes across four dimensions: geographic career mobility trajectories, promotion patterns, scholarly performance, and academic embeddedness. The results show that long-term international mobility grant recipients are more likely to start their early academic careers abroad and to return to their home countries at more advanced career stages. They also tend to progress more slowly through academic career stages than recipients of short-term mobility grants. The association between mobility duration and scholarly performance is temporally dynamic and field-dependent. Finally, long-term mobility is associated with more durable international collaboration, whereas short-term mobility is more compatible with embeddedness in domestic academic networks. These findings suggest that different international mobility grant designs are associated with heterogeneous long-term career outcomes, providing empirical evidence to inform the design of mobility funding policies.

Critical and STEM higher education scholars document how the fallacy of White supremacy has produced racialized macro-level (e.g., state) and micro-level (e.g., individual) structures hindering the self-actualization and innovation of racially minoritized people and their communities. Although important, there has been an undertheorization of how meso-level structures like STEM academic departments contribute to the subordination of racially minoritized people and their knowledge systems. In this paper, we leverage Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations to illustrate how STEM academic departments function as organizational sites of racial inequity. We use critical theory and empirical studies to explain how this racialization occurs at four levels: 1) graduate admissions and faculty hiring, 2) research, 3) instruction, and 4) service. We conclude by offering examples of how STEM academic departments can challenge and disrupt their racial exclusionary practices, so racially minoritized people and knowledge systems can receive support and thrive.

This longitudinal study investigates the linguistic practices of 4chan's Politically Incorrect board over a decade (2015-2025), focusing on neologism creation, vernacular growth, and morphological productivity. Utilizing a 3.5-million-word sample corpus, we applied a corpus linguistics to Construction Morphology to analyze an extracted dataset of 3,069 unique neologisms. Our quantitative analysis reveals a steady increase in both word production and overall lexical diversity across the ten-year period, alongside a small but significant growth in neologism carryover and retention. Despite this expanding shared vernacular, over 63% of the identified neologisms are hapax legomena, functioning as ephemeral coinages tailored to specific micro-contextual interactions. To reconcile this immense lexical turnover with communicative cohesion, we demonstrate that 4chan users heavily rely on a limited subset of highly productive words as structural templates for rapid word coinage. Ultimately, this paper highlights how the community balances an ethos of extreme, rule-breaking linguistic creativity with stable, underlying morphological conventions to enact ingroup identity.

In response to rising partisan animosity, academics have proposed myriad theories, methods, and tools to better understand its roots and consequences. Simultaneously, hundreds of “bridgers,” individuals and organizations dedicated to fostering mutual understanding across cultural or ideological differences, have addressed increasing polarization by purposefully engaging community members in initiatives to enhance social cohesion. Because collaboration between researchers and practitioners is rare in this space, we lack crucial understanding of the types of interventions that can decrease polarization and increase cohesion. This manuscript outlines the process for creating and testing the Social Cohesion Impact Measure (SCIM), an academically-grounded assessment tool built through a process of deep collaboration with practitioners. Since this work began, community partners have generated the first systematically collected datasets on community bridge-building outcomes, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of these programs and providing a foundation for a more synergistic relationship between research and community-based action to heal social divides. The tool is also currently being used to gather nationally-representative data that tracks trends in affective polarization and other constructs of interest to academics and practitioners alike.

This article evaluates large language models (LLMs) in archaeological practice with attention to usefulness, failure modes, ethics, law, and professional governance. It focuses especially on the shift from chat-based use toward agentic systems that can inspect files, modify code, and operate within active research workflows. Archaeology offers a useful test case because the field depends on incomplete records, mixed forms of data, and materials that are often socially or legally sensitive. I argue that LLMs can support bounded tasks such as literature handling, coding assistance, metadata cleanup, and source-grounded audit work, but only when the workflow remains reviewable. The paper includes a small citation-audit case study using an article-scoped retrieval workflow and also treats the manuscript itself as evidence from an LLM-assisted, human-directed research process. Under those conditions, LLMs are most defensible as tools embedded in transparent, reviewable, and accountable workflows.

This study investigates a minimal mechanism through which local mobility heterogeneity produces global reconfiguration in structured agent-based systems. Agents move in a multi attractor landscape, where a small fraction exhibits higher-mobility exploratory dynamics while the remainder remain locally constrained. By systematically comparing random-walk exploration, interface-sensitive dynamics, novelty-biased exploration, and a flat-landscape control, I isolate the conditions under which large-scale connectivity emerges. As the fraction of exploratory agents increases, the system transitions from a fragmented regime to an increasingly connected transition network. Event-level analysis shows that configurational switching is strongly localized near inter-attractor boundaries, indicating that interfaces act as critical gateways through which transitions occur. These localized events accumulate over time, generating an expanding network of transitions that progressively integrates the landscape. Importantly, the core effect persists under minimal random-walk exploration, demon strating that neither optimization nor goal-directed behavior is required. By contrast, when the landscape structure is removed, connectivity becomes operationally trivial and the boundary-mediated mechanism disappears. This comparison shows that heterogeneous mobility becomes systemically effective only in the presence of a structured landscape. Large-scale reconfiguration emerges from the interaction between movement heterogeneity and spatial constraints. These results identify a minimal generative principle for global connectivity in agent-based systems. Large-scale reconfiguration can arise from simple stochastic dynamics, provided that movement occurs within a structured environment with meaningful interfaces. This shifts the focus from agent-level strategies to system-level organization, highlighting the role of boundaries as mediators of emergent connectivity.

This paper addresses the concept of authenticity among current influencers on socially driven apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels. In particular, the paper aims to prove that there are no authentic characteristics of influencers; instead, it shows that authenticity is a performative phenomenon produced by the interplay between algorithmic visibility regimes, platform capitalism, and self-performance strategies. The paper shows that algorithmic visibility systems contribute to the creation of influencer authenticity by promoting content with high watch time, more likes, and comments, thus fostering engagement among followers. Consequently, digital influencers' authenticity performance is a result of the process in which creators learn to perform in accordance with the principles of visibility, leading to the standardization and optimization of such practices. At the same time, the paper shows that influencer authenticity can be commoditized by using emotional self-expression as a tool for monetization purposes. The paper ends by emphasizing the importance of viewing authenticity in influencer culture as an enacted process that is informed by interactions between the content producers, their followers, and the algorithmic platforms.

We evaluate LLM-augmented reinforcement learning for stock trading on Nasdaq- 100 (2019–2023) and report a previously unmeasured experimental phenomenon: the relationship between LLM signal coverage density and trading performance is non-monotonic, with a clearly identifiable harmful regime. In a controlled coverage sweep over {0%,5%, 20%, 50%, 80%, 100%}, signal injection at 5% and 20% coverage degrades performance below the no-signal baseline, becoming net-positive only at ≥ 50% coverage. The FNSPID dataset’s 9.7% non-neutral coverage sits inside this harmful regime—meaning that for typical research configurations available today, adding LLM signals to the RL pipeline reduces returns. Beyond this density finding, we report three further negative results that the LLMRL trading literature has not adequately addressed. First, our LLM-augmented RL agent (158.11% cumulative return as a 3-seed ensemble) is outperformed by three standard non-RL baselines that prior work in this thread does not report: momentum top-10 (250.45%), equal-weight buy-and-hold (235.00%), and equal-weight monthly rebalanced (214.06%), all of which also exceed the Nasdaq- 100 buy-and-hold benchmark (164.52%). Second, we control for the daily-vs.- monthly rebalancing-frequency confound by deploying the same trained agents under matched-frequency monthly execution; the monthly variant underperforms its daily counterpart by 47pp (111.01% vs. 158.11%), confirming that the baseline gap is not driven by transaction-cost differences. Third, a v3-matched ablation finds that removing the CVaR tail-risk constraint produces a difference within the seedto- seed variability of the experiment. Across two independent runs, the sign of this difference flipped, providing direct empirical evidence that the algorithmic risk-tail machinery contributes no detectable return benefit in this setting. A regime decomposition reveals one clear win for the agent: in the 2023 recovery period, the 3-seed ensemble (52.6%) outperforms all non-RL baselines, suggesting the learned policy may have regime-specific advantages that single-window evaluation obscures. We argue that LLM-RL trading research should adopt non-RL baselines as standard practice, report signal coverage density as a first-class experimental variable, and decompose results by regime. Code and trained models are available at https: //anonymous.4open.science/r/signal-density-llm-trading-9966/.

This research proposes a novel concept of "spatial heritage" at the architectural scale and verifies its existence through a comparative study of the Architectural Complex A at Fengchu and the Li Ancestral Hall. The study finds that, despite a temporal separation of over 2,700 years and a vast geographical distance between the two complexes, they share a highly consistent overall spatial layout. They are both axially symmetrical siheyuan courtyards comprising a gate hall, central courtyard, front hall, passage corridor, rear chamber, and eastern and western wing-rooms, with an I-shaped front hall-rear chamber configuration—a typical feature of high-grade ancestral temples. However, there are differences in their partial spatial layouts, mainly in the odd/even-bay layout of the front hall, the alignment of the central axis with the columns, and the connection between the rear chamber and the flanking wing-rooms. This research also demonstrates that these spatial consistencies and transformations can be correspondingly reflected in spatial configurations via space syntax metrics. The highest integration values of both complexes are concentrated in the core circulation and ritual spaces, while the lowest values are in the most distal service and storage spaces. Both complexes feature an axisymmetric dendritic structure: spaces along the axis present a strong ritual sequence and are mostly d-spaces on multiple rings, while all wing-rooms are a-spaces at the terminals of structural branches. Unlike the Li Ancestral Hall, the distribution of high permeability and visibility values of the Architectural Complex A at Fengchu fails to form a continuous, distinct high-value zone along the central axis. This reveals that the Western Zhou ritual of “valuing the centre” is embodied in a symbolic axis marked solely by a row of central columns, rather than a physical central axis that can accommodate human sightlines and circulation. This research further reveals the social and cultural logics underlying the spatial consistencies and transformations: the bureaucratic clans in the region where the Li Ancestral Hall is located upheld the Western Zhou ritual and patriarchal systems, thereby yielding a highly similar spatial layout; the abolition of the eastern-facing seating ritual and advancements in construction technology have engendered the observed spatial transformations. Therefore, this research argues that spatial heritage embodies the inheritance and transformation of ritual culture, social structure, and construction technology, and encompasses both tangible and intangible heritage. This is a pilot study on spatial heritage and its social logics, and its methodology is also applicable to further research exploring other types of spatial heritage.