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Based on literature analysis, X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) use continues to increase exponentially. This increased use is accompanied by anecdotal reports and systematic analyses indicating a growing presence of significantly flawed data analyses. Recognition of this problem within the surface analysis community has increased with an understanding that both inexperienced users and increased use of XPS outside the surface analysis community contribute to the problem. The XPS community has initiated several efforts to help address the problem, which is not unique to XPS. This paper describes some of the specific problems identified and some of the community efforts intended to address them. Here, we describe activities focused on three specific issues: (i) requests for detailed guides and protocols and bite‐sized versions of information for non‐experts, (ii) incomplete data and analysis reporting, and (iii) the high rate of peak fitting problems. A 2019 survey identified the need for guides, protocols, and standards to assist XPS users. One set of such guides has been published, and another is being assembled. Providing incremental bites of useful information is the goal of a series of papers on specific challenges to surface analysis with example solutions has been initiated as Notes and Insights papers in Surface and Interface Analysis. Examination of XPS‐containing papers finds that information to establish the credibility and reproducibility of XPS results is often very incomplete. Unfortunately, ISO and ASTM standards require an amount of parameter reporting that seems excessive and unrealistic for many research publications. Initial approaches to develop and distribute a graded approach to parameter reporting are briefly described. Multiple efforts are underway to address the high rate of problems associated with photoelectron peak fitting. These include guides to peak fitting, guides to peak identification and fitting for specific elements, and the development of a peak fitting social network. The fitting social network is designed to facilitate interactions between new and experienced XPS users; analysts trying to fit XPS data (for publication or other reasons) can ask questions and establish dynamic conversations. Encouraging and enabling high‐quality XPS analysis and reporting requires several different types of effort from all members of the surface and interface analysis community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I J Community Psychol i , 49, 2609-2622. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22664 The above article, published online on July 09, 2021, in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the Editor, Michael Blank, and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Lyzhin, A. I., Sharov, A. A., Lopez, E. G., Melnikov, S. G., & Zaynullina, V. T. (2021). Following publication, concerns were raised by a third party. SP 1 sp Further investigation by the publisher revealed concerns about authorship and peer review. [Extracted from the article]

The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational—still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation—and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Indeed, there is a marked momentum, across the social sciences and humanities, from cultural geography to computer and Black studies, to read the reduction of the world to available ontic and ontological cuts and distinctions as a form of violence. In response, tropes of the non‐relational, non‐ontological, the negative, nothingness, the void, absence and the abyss, for examples—what could be called 'unavailable geographies'—are of growing appeal and interest. This paper, foregrounding the importance of tracking how the material forces of history are read as enabling for the emergence of any new problem space, provides a distinctive pathway into this sense of a critical shift in Western critique. By way of an illustrative example, it focuses upon how the proliferation of logistics (broadly framed here as the logic of obtaining the world by way of cuts and distinctions, from metric culture, to identity politics, to the grasping of ontology and relation) is increasingly understood to open up the power of an undifferentiating reality; one which expands and deepens the unavailable world as a problem space for critique. Thus, whilst geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today? The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational – still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation – and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Yet, whilst Geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking: why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today? By way of an example, the paper explores the proliferation of logistics in contemporary Western societies and how this opens up the lure of an unavailable world for both supporters and detractors of logistical world‐making alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of quality education in the field of sustainability. The paper highlights four different types of education related to sustainability, including environmental sustainability education, social sustainability education, education for sustainable development (SE), and green skills education. The statistical information on these types of education is summarized and presented in a table format. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for increased access to education in the field of sustainability to prevent environmental degradation and social problems and to prepare individuals for jobs that contribute to sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems thinking is deemed to be a key competence to systems engineering professionals and other professionals. Systems thinking is for all ages and can help solve world problems. This author believes and has demonstrated in this paper that you can start as early as primary school with children aged 7‐8 years old. The paper provides the details of a club run in the summer term (last term of the year) of a year 2 of primary school in the UK in a way that it can be re‐used widely. There were 8 sessions held focused on Sustainability around the school with the use of the systems thinking habits. The sessions were well attended and enjoyed by the students. These sessions can be extended further if needed or make it more concise as per the curriculum in the school implementing the club. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counterfeiting has become a major social problem because of the consequences for consumers, businesses and governments. The objective is to describe the current state of counterfeiting research, define the main thematic areas, identify gaps and highlight key findings. A bibliometric analysis of the growing number of publications addressing the counterfeiting problem in the existing literature is conducted. The articles are taken from a search of the Scopus database. After excluding some scientific‐technological subareas, 1984 papers are analyzed, to which 23 outstanding papers were added at a later stage. In more recent years, most of the articles focus on the development of technologies. Four conceptual areas have been identified: technological development, social behavior, economic aspects and legal aspects. The latter two are the least studied. Also identified in the social area are two topics of interest that have been little addressed, namely, the effect of prior purchase experience and the development of theories describing consumer behavior towards counterfeits. The value derived from this research is the identification of new lines of research with the economic and legal area, it would be of interest to initiate a research program that studies what proportion of counterfeits are sanctioned, to which interest group the sanction is directed and if the sanction is proportional to the damage caused to society and the company. In addition, with regard to the study of counterfeit consumer behaviour, its development can provide information to guide the definition of public awareness strategies and help to adapt companies' marketing campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dissemination and reception of Bernard Bolzano's ideas were not only mediated by his personal circumstances and context but also by the vicissitudes of his work. This paper traces the fate of his works from his death in 1848 to the publication of the first volume of his Gesamtausgabe in 1969, and it does so with the help of one of the last published volumes of this edition, namely the Bolzano‐Gesamtbibliographie 1804–1999. As the paper shows, this book is more than a mere list of publications and constitutes a highly valuable resource for anyone interested in Bolzano studies, the use of which is explained in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on critical phenomenology with reflections on its method. The key argument is that critical phenomenology should be understood as a form of historico‐transcendental inquiry and therefore it cannot forgo the phenomenological reduction. Rather, this methodological step should be centered in critical phenomenology, and appropriated in problematized and rethought forms. The methodological assessment of critical phenomenology has implications also for how we read its canon. The paper shows that while Simone de Beauvoir did not adopt the phenomenological reduction in its full Husserlian meaning, her analyses of experience did not remain on the level of personal or experiential description either. The contention is that if we want to read her as a critical phenomenologist, we should focus on her seminal modification of the historico‐transcendental method of phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical discursive analyses offer possibilities for equity‐oriented research, and are a resource for addressing resistant social problems, such as child neglect and abuse (CN&A). A key challenge for discourse analysts in health disciplines is the tensions between materiality and social constructions, particularly at the site of the body. This paper describes how Donna Haraway's ideas of figuration and technobiopower can augment critical discourse analysis to address this tension. Technobiopower, an intensification of biopower in the context of technoscience, is seen as underpinning the melding of material and semiotic practices. The subject is no longer a material body, but a hybrid body that exists in tropic figuration between the real and unreal. This paper uses an analysis of the figuration of The Monstrous Perpetrator from a study of nursing responses to CN&A to illustrate how Haraway's figuration aligns with and provides an analytical tool to extend critical discursive analyses. Specifically, this methodology offers new ways to identify the discursive qualities of bodies, and how material aspects of bodies are exaggerated, concealing their hegemonic ideologies and discriminatory effects. By identifying discourses within or inscribed upon the body, they can be disrupted, opening new possibilities for social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social innovations (SIs) offer creative solutions to complex social problems and often require the exchange of necessary resources, knowledge, and expertise among various actors. These actors form an ecosystem that can support the development of successful SIs. In this special topic forum introduction, we first discuss the literature related to the support function of ecosystems. We use the theoretical lens of prosocial behavior to explain the various types of support in an ecosystem. We argue that there are three archetypes of support in ecosystems, namely, altruistic, communitarian, and commercial support. Subsequently, we present the three papers accepted for publication in the special topic forum. One paper refers to the three support archetypes, although indirectly, while the other two refer to one specific archetype of ecosystem support for SIs. This introductory paper concludes with discussion on the opportunities for future research. Without a clear understanding of the different archetypes of support, it would be difficult for both scholars and practitioners to design vibrant ecosystems in assistance to SI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Chalmers has recently developed a novel strategy of refuting external world skepticism, one he dubs the structuralist solution. In this paper, I make three primary claims: First, structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, even if it is combined with a functionalist approach to the metaphysics of minds. Second, because structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, the structuralist solution vindicates far less worldly knowledge than we would hope for from a solution to skepticism. For, solipsism threatens surprisingly vast swathes of worldly knowledge across multiple domains, including at least some knowledge about: political affairs, religious practices, artistic movements, historical events, and cultural trends. Third, the significance of these results exceeds their implications for the structuralist solution; these results suggest that no solution to external world skepticism which does not also solve the problem of other minds will ultimately yield the kind of solution we might have hoped for. Relatedly, these results suggest that the problem of external world skepticism should perhaps be construed as two different problems, since the problem might turn out to require two substantively different solutions, one for knowledge of the kind that is not dependent on other minds and one for knowledge that is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Youth violence, victimization, and bullying are pervasive in schools across the United States and are detrimental for learning and healthy development. K‐12 school safety is an increasingly urgent issue to research and understand from multiple perspectives. Physical and psychological safety in school is linked to better student and school outcomes and is fundamental to fostering well‐being and prosocial behavior. METHODS: Despite research demonstrating positive outcomes associated with school safety, there is no comprehensive conceptual model in the literature that considers precursors, strategies, mechanisms, and outcomes of school safety together. The current paper presents an equity‐centered comprehensive model of school safety, which is intended as a holistic representation of the multiple factors and pathways that contribute to school safety and positive youth development. RESULTS: This model can guide research and practice through an equity‐centered and comprehensive approach. This model can enable practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to make informed decisions and reach consensus regarding planning and decisions related to reducing violence and establishing supportive school environments. CONCLUSION: Our model suggests that a comprehensive approach can ensure the safety and well‐being of students and staff. By thinking ecologically, schools, communities, and stakeholders can ensure that all aspects of the school context are included in school safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international literature links mining booms with social disruption. The rapid economic and population growth that mining brings increases urban crime and social problems. But insufficient attention has been paid to the reverse situation: the social disruption that can accompany the closure of a mine. We compare crime statistics for four categories of small city, known in South Africa as "intermediate city municipalities," from 2009 to 2018. Contrary to the findings of international studies, we find that those where mining was in decline had some of the highest crime rates, particularly in the category of sexual offences, whereas those where mining was growing had the lowest. Our research shows that mine decline and closure can contribute to social disruption. We argue that South African government policy has exacerbated this problem in the context of mine decline and that several dependencies created by mining further contribute to the problem. We challenge the assumption that fast population growth and an increase in the male population are prerequisites for social disruption. Our paper suggests the need for modifications to social disruption theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn's (1886–1959) views about technological unemployment, which were intimately connected to his analysis of the social impacts of technological developments and resulting social problems due to cultural lag. We trace the development of his views as seen through his well‐known 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, his important contributions to the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), and his lesser‐known pamphlets designed for a broader audience—Living with Machines (1933), You and Machines (1934), and Machines and Tomorrow's World (1938). He used these pamphlets to educate the public about the dangers of new machines and technological unemployment. In doing so, he drew upon sociological analysis in his professional scholarly writings and his long‐standing personal interests in social betterment and social reform. Our analysis also calls into question the adequacy of existing scholarship on Ogburn that has emphasized his commitment to a statistical, dispassionate, and "objectivist" approach to social science research. We call for a revised, richer, and more complex view of Ogburn's work and legacy as one of the nation's leading social scientists during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology has long been interested in innovating solutions to social problems. However, this desire has also been a source of controversy as it can conflict with the discipline's ambition also to be recognized as a hard science. This paper critically reviews sociological contributions to the study of social innovation. It first contextualizes these contributions by discussing the origins of sociology's interest in transforming society, the growing tension between that interest and sociology's other aspiration to create objective knowledge about the social world, and how more sociologists have relocated to business schools where most research on social innovation is now being conducted. Next, it summarizes sociologists' contributions, which emphasize how social innovation is organized by institutions, networks, social movements, and organizations themselves. It then discusses criticisms of this work and responses to these critiques. It concludes by asking whether sociologists' research on social innovation has advanced their discipline's dual mission of reforming and explaining society and what additional studies are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety and security of straits and canals have been playing an important role in maritime transportation. The disruption of a strait or canal will lead to increased transportation costs and world trade problems. Therefore, an advanced approach incorporating fuzzy logic and an evidential reasoning (ER) algorithm is developed to conduct the vulnerability assessment of straits or canals in this paper. A hierarchical structure is first developed taking into account both qualitative and quantitative factors. The fuzzy rule‐based transformation technique is applied to convert quantitative factors into qualitative ones, which enables the application of a fuzzy ER method to synthesize all the information from the bottom to the top along the developed hierarchical structure. The software of intelligent decision system (IDS) is used to facilitate the process of vulnerability assessment. The developed framework then is validated and demonstrated in a case study for vulnerability prioritization which can be used as a reference to ensure the safety and security of straits and canals for decision‐makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence shows that appropriate use of technology in education has the potential to increase the effectiveness of, eg, teaching, learning and student support. There is also evidence that technology can introduce new problems and ethical issues, eg, student privacy. This article maps some limitations of technological approaches that ensure student data privacy in learning analytics from a critical data studies (CDS) perspective. In this conceptual article, we map the claims, grounds and warrants of technological solutions to maintaining student data privacy in learning analytics. Our findings suggest that many technological solutions are based on assumptions, such as that individuals have control over their data ('data as commodity'), which can be exchanged under agreed conditions, or that individuals embrace their personal data privacy as a human right to be respected and protected. Regulating student data privacy in the context of learning analytics through technology mostly depends on institutional data governance, consent, data security and accountability. We consider alternative approaches to viewing (student) data privacy, such as contextual integrity; data privacy as ontological; group privacy; and indigenous understandings of privacy. Such perspectives destabilise many assumptions informing technological solutions, including privacy enhancing technology (PET). Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Various actors (including those in higher education) have access to and collect, use and analyse greater volumes of personal (student) data, with finer granularity, increasingly from multiplatforms and data sources.There is growing awareness and concern about individual (student) privacy.Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) offer a range of solutions to individuals to protect their data privacy.What this paper adds A review of the assumption that technology provides adequate or complete solutions for ensuring individual data privacy.A mapping of five alternative understandings of personal data privacy and its implications for technological solutions.Consideration of implications for the protection of student privacy in learning analytics.Implications for practice and/or policy Student data privacy is not only a technological problem to be solved but should also be understood as a social problem.The use of PETs offers some solutions for data privacy in learning analytics.Strategies to protect student data privacy should include student agency, literacy and a whole‐system approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a Critical Physical Geography perspective, this paper problematises conceptualisations of the Anthropocene landscape of the Waimatā catchment on the East Cape, Gisborne district of Aotearoa New Zealand, through three lenses: forestry, restoration and indigeneity. Historical practices of arbitrary land division and resultant unsustainable forestry have caused multiple environmental, social and cultural problems within the catchment. Despite significant efforts of restoration groups and volunteers to remedy this, as yet programmes do not align with holistic Māori ideologies of seeing themselves as the land from which they trace their tribal identity. Fragmentation of the land has disrupted senses of identity and place. A kinship‐based worldview between humans, the universe and everything in it suggests a more holistic lens through which humans are conceived as inseparable from nature. Such a more‐than‐human lens exposes a critical flaw in interpretations of the Anthropocene. Even when only considering its lexical construction, the word ‘Anthropocene’ innately centres the human. Continued use of such framings extends inequitable and unjust practices that imprint colonial forcings on the landscape and its people in ways inconsistent with intertwined Māori views of people, land and ancestors. No matter the lens through which it is interpreted, the Anthropocene term has little practical value in Aotearoa New Zealand, especially when considered in relation to emerging socio‐natural river‐centric perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since slavery, racism and discrimination have continued to impact the social outcomes of Blacks despite efforts and laws put into place to alleviate the disadvantages. A contemporary project developed by Nikole Hannah‐Jones and the New York Times called for the re‐examination of the legacy of slavery. With re‐examining the consequence of slavery, the lens has been widened, resulting in a more robust interpretation of racism. Social issues have historic roots and thus require a multilayered approach to map out and examine the culminated effects of phenomenon. In this paper, the author uses Beckert and Rockman's DNA analogy (2016) to merge biology, history, and sociology to provide a critical overview of theories of racism that have emerged since slavery, and to detail the phenomenon of contemporary racism. By connecting past eras of racism using something familiar, racial discourse can potentially move beyond the frustration of racism being a permanent entity in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various models of specialized foster care have been developed, but research on them is limited. This longitudinal, exploratory study analysed data on adaptive functioning, emotional and social problems and self‐concept in a specialized foster care service in Sweden. The focus of the study was on the development of the children and young people in placement. The Adaptive Behaviour Assessment System (ABAS‐II) was used to measure adaptive functioning, and the Beck Youth Inventories of Emotional and Social Impairment (BYI) was used to measure self‐rated emotional and social problems and self‐concept. Self‐ratings showed significant improvements in disruptive behaviour, anger, anxiety and depression. Adaptive functioning as rated by foster parents improved but not enough to catch up with the non‐clinical norm group. The average adaptive functioning among the participants at baseline was considerably below the Swedish norm group. Similar to the results of a previous study of the same treatment model, children and young people rated improvement while their foster parents did not do so to the same extent. Possible explanations for this are discussed in the paper. The study is limited by the lack of a control group and by data attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current philosophical paper brings the concepts of community, complex adaptive systems, wicked problems, and Kirton's (2011) adaption‐innovation (A‐I) theory together as a model to encourage practitioners to recognize the importance of cognitive diversity for sustainable and impactful solutions. Leadership and change practitioners often face the complexity of addressing community based wicked problems. A‐I theory offers an additional perspective to help teams foster structural changes in these complex adaptive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing food, feed, and fiber in a manner sustainable for future generations is the starting point for improved food security. As the world population continues to grow, it is imperative to improve many aspects of agronomic production systems to better suit local conditions. This special issue of Agronomy Journal examines what agronomists see as today's or near future problems that are currently looming for different regions of the world. Authors from Africa, Asia, and South and North America were invited to write forum papers for this special issue. Some of the current agronomic practices and policies are unsustainable for diverse reasons. Workforce development, climate challenges, soil degradation, water limitations, and pest problems are discussed. Suggested solutions to these problems include integrated techniques, which need to be implemented in knowledgeable systems approaches, to sustain the environment and improve food security. It is hoped that this special issue serves as an outreach platform to the global community to improve communication and spark new collaborations. Core Ideas: Food insecurity must be addressed.Agronomic production systems must suit local conditions.Near‐term challenges need to be addressed to maintain productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical action—behaviours aimed at dismantling systems of oppression—must be examined within youths' racialized experiences and should incorporate cultural and sociohistorical factors. We considered an expansive list of items capturing youth behaviours to create a novel four‐factor (service, community change, expression, and care) measure of critical action for Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth. Multiple distinct profiles of critical action were identified within both racial‐ethnic groups, and associations between the profiles and sociodemographic and contextual support variables were explored. Gender differences in the type of critical action were found in both racial‐ethnic groups, pointing to the potential influence of gender roles on critical action among these populations. Differences in critical action patterns were also found between those born in the U.S. versus those born outside the U.S.; access to critical action may differ within racial‐ethnic groups depending on birthplace and associated nuances in familial and cultural contexts. This paper demonstrated a need for attending to variation between and within groups in the study of critical action in order to effectively support racialized youth's coping within and resistance against systems of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the "inhomogeneity" of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls "transcendental schemata," which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumption Sufficiency (i.e., that subsuming an object under a transcendental schema is sufficient to subsume it under the corresponding category) and Real Possibility (i.e., that it is really possible to subsume objects under each of the transcendental schemata). These two principles, together with a trivial modal one (the Subsumption‐Possibility Link), entail that it is possible to subsume objects under categories; in other words, the argument of the Schematism is valid. The main work of the paper consists in reconstructing Kant's arguments for, and explanations of, these premises. I argue that they hinge on Kant's claim that transcendental schemata are "time‐determinations," which I interpret to mean: rules for reflexively representing the temporal relations among our own representational states. On the basis of this reading, I reconstruct Kant's argument for Subsumption Sufficiency, category by category. I also explain why Real Possibility follows almost immediately. Granting Kant the argument up to this point in the Critique, the argument of the Schematism is sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been argued that market economies feature an inherent advantage over centralized economies because they are subject to fewer information processing needs. However, very little work has investigated the role of these needs in explaining differences in optimal production decisions between centralized and market economies. This paper uses a rational inattention approach to study the decision problem of a social planner who faces uncertainty about households' preferences and can reduce this uncertainty by allocating scarce resources to processing information. The model shows that costly information processing has important implications for optimal production decisions, including for the trade‐off between consumption and leisure, the optimal range of different goods produced, and the role of correlated consumer preferences. Overall, the results suggest that differences in empirical production decisions between socialist and capitalist countries may be driven by the different information needs and associated costs of processing information inherent to each economic system, rather than by differences in ideology or political preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that bullshit is a practical resource for self‐deceiving individuals, or those who merely prefer to avoid self‐examination, insofar as it is able to provide a mask for poor doxastic hygiene. While self‐deception and bullshit are distinct phenomena, and bullshit does not cause self‐deception, bullshit disrupts the capacity to interrogate the motivational biasses that fuel deception. The communicative misdirection engaged in by ordinary social bullshitters is applied reflexively by the self‐deceiver to distort, evade, and obfuscate the self‐deceiver's self‐accounting. This discussion presupposes a broadly narrative approach to self‐awareness and discusses how a motivated susceptibility to bullshit offers an explanation how our reports about ourselves can be frequently at odds with reality, and suggests that a complacency about rational validation of belief outside of self‐certainty, i.e., the prevalence of bullshit, is even more of a threat than Frankfurt thought it to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To uncover pathways for understanding and alleviating poverty, this paper offers an alternative approach for examining the real and unseen processes of destitution and in‐work poverty which shape the lives of consumers. We apply a critical realist paradigm structured around three core tenets—stratified realities, complex causations and generative structures—to surface the nuanced complexities of these issues. A critical realist lens encourages impact by focusing on the deep causes of enduring social problems and provides transformative consumer research scholars with an integrative way to work toward transformative policy action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time‐dependent reliability‐based design optimization (RBDO) is a computationally tough problem that needs to be addressed urgently. The difficulty of solving the time‐dependent RBDO mainly comes from the time‐dependent reliability analysis involved in probabilistic constraints, which itself is one of the thorny problems in the reliability community and makes the computational cost become much more onerous. In this paper, a deep‐learning‐assisted approach is proposed to solve the time‐dependent RBDO. The proposed approach leverages the classification capability of the deep learning, and constructs the alternative model for the actual probabilistic constraint function in the so‐called augmented reliability space, so as to make the trained alternative model accurate wherever it will be invoked. Moreover, a sequential sampling technique utilizing the classification probability provided by the deep learning is proposed to further reduce the computational cost. Then, the time‐dependent reliability analysis involved in the time‐dependent RBDO is conducted by the cheaper alternative model instead of the original computing‐intensive probabilistic constraint function, which evidently reduces the computational burden. The presented examples showcase the performance of the proposed approach. Especially, for the complicated engineering application, the proposed approach saves about 10% of the computational cost compared with the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers are working toward the goal of finding a treatment that halts or even reverses the aging process of the human body, a treatment that would make the recipient potentially immortal. The hope that they will succeed in the relatively near future is gaining ground among academics and laypeople alike. What will happen if this hope becomes reality? Specifically, how will our political and social institutions and practices be affected by that discovery? These are the questions raised in the present paper. Concretely, I will discuss three political and social problems that the invention of an immortality treatment is likely to provoke, namely the struggle for access to that treatment, the threat of overpopulation, and the friction between potentially immortal individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents findings collected in 2016–2017 from a multi‐method ethnographic study of Shirebrook, Derbyshire in the English East Midlands, examining the narratives used by the local authority (LA) and local residents that construct immigration as a social problem. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on race and migration by extending analysis beyond metropolitan localities with long histories of multi‐ethnic settlement, to consider a relatively small, peripheral former colliery town. The paper demonstrates how migration is framed as a social problem by central government funding streams with consequences for localities, and the influence this has on local narratives of social change. The construction of immigration as a social problem is rooted in the constraints of austerity and longer‐term processes of deindustrialization and economic restructuring, with representations and understandings of place being constitutive of anti‐immigrant sentiment. This article deepens our understanding of responses to immigration in the UK, and has broader implications for understanding the relationship between place, state polices and local narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluntary sector acts as the last line of defense for some of the most marginalized people in societies around the world, yet its capacities are significantly reduced by chronic resource shortages and dynamic political obstacles. Existing research has scarcely examined what it is like for voluntary sector practitioners working amidst these conditions. In this paper, we explore how penal voluntary sector practitioners across England and Scotland marshaled their personal and professional resources to "keep going" amidst significant challenges. Our analysis combines symbolic interactionism with the concept of story‐lines. We illuminate the narratives that practitioners mobilized to understand and motivate their efforts amidst the significant barriers, chronic limitations, and difficult emotions brought forth by their work. We position practitioners' story‐lines as a form of emotion work that mitigated their experiences of anger, frustration, overwhelm, sadness, and disappointment, enabling them to move forward and continue to support criminalized individuals. Our analysis details three story‐lines—resignation, strategy, and refuge—and examines their consequences for practitioners and their capacities to intervene in wicked social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Multi‐layer networks are often used to represent multiple types of relationships between nodes in network studies. In this paper, we investigate the community detection problem in multi‐layer networks. Specifically, we consider the multi‐layer stochastic block model (MLSBM), which assumes that the community memberships are shared across all network layers, while other model parameters can be different between different layers. Variational methods have been developed to fit the MLSBM, but they do not scale well to very large networks. Inspired by the iterative pseudo‐likelihood maximization strategy for single networks, we develop a pseudo‐likelihood based algorithm to fit the MLSBM and estimate the community labels, and we also extend the proposed algorithm to the degree‐corrected case to deal with degree heterogeneity. The proposed algorithms are fast and can cope with multi‐layer networks with up to millions of nodes. The advantages of the proposed methods in both community detection and computational efficiency are demonstrated by numerical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, a gendered reform movement – the Slander of Women Acts – swept through the British common law world, making it easier for women to sue for defamatory allegations of sexual immorality. By examining two slander cases brought by women in early New South Wales and radical reforms passed in 1847, this article locates the Australian colonies within this global campaign. Arguing that slander worked to reinscribe a woman's colonial category, police 'savage' speech and rectify respectability for economic purposes, it shows how ideas of reputation and its protection diverged across the UK, USA and Australia at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British and Irish Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (BIC‐ISMRM) held a workshop entitled "Steps on the path to clinical translation" in Cardiff, UK, on 7th September 2022. The aim of the workshop was to promote discussion within the MR community about the problems and potential solutions for translating quantitative MR (qMR) imaging and spectroscopic biomarkers into clinical application and drug studies. Invited speakers presented the perspectives of radiologists, radiographers, clinical physicists, vendors, imaging Contract/Clinical Research Organizations (CROs), open science networks, metrologists, imaging networks, and those developing consensus methods. A round‐table discussion was held in which workshop participants discussed a range of questions pertinent to clinical translation of qMR imaging and spectroscopic biomarkers. Each group summarized their findings via three main conclusions and three further questions. These questions were used as the basis of an online survey of the broader UK MR community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current approaches employed by U.S.‐based clearinghouses to rate the efficacy of interventions to address social problems typically do not result in sufficient information to help practitioners. Current standards of evidence employed across the United States apply a positivist notion of validity with quantitative research criteria that discourage answering important how and why questions, explicitly privilege quantitative/RCT evidence, offer few contextual insights, and rarely discuss disparities in outcomes across participants differing by race, gender, and ethnicity. We offer a set of standards of evidence to assess qualitative and mixed methods studies, as well as RCTs and quasi‐experimental designs, and probe the extent to which the studies address context and equity. We applied our proposed new standards of evidence to all intervention studies rated as the highest quality by the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education from 2017 to 2021 to demonstrate the usefulness of our standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative economy emerged as a response to the need of people to exchange, produce and share in a more humane and cooperative manner. However, the growth of collaborative economy organizations and the terminological confusion have led to debates about their possible effects, both positive and negative. In this study, we have created a guideline that can be used to evaluate the contribution of organizations considered within collaborative economy to common good. We used the conceptualization of common good, which, from its Aristotelian‐Thomist philosophy, was developed by the personalist‐humanist perspective of management. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the evaluation of the contribution of any organization to the common good must take into account how the participants develop their virtues, the creation of the community and its impact on the common good of society. At the end of the article, we present the aspects that society must take into account regarding collaborative economy. Firstly, society, in general, must approach collaborative economy as a tool that must complement others in the search for solutions to economic and social problems and, secondly, the governance of the platform‐network is essential to foster organizational models that favour the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay summarizes key insights across the essays in the Hastings Center Report's special report "Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science." These insights concern trust and trustworthiness as distinct concepts, competence as a necessary but not sufficient input to trust, trust as a reciprocal good, trust as an interpersonal as well as structural phenomena, the ethical impermissibility of seeking to win trust without being trustworthy, building and borrowing trust as distinct strategies, and challenges to trustworthiness posed by the contingent nature of science. Together, these insights stand to advance an area of research that we believe has been historically stymied by conceptual confusion and a long‐standing insistence on treating trust as a purely instrumental good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws a decade of experience editing and publishing TheSocietyPages.org, and four more years editing Contexts magazine. Both projects work to bring sociological research and insight to broader public audiences, visibility, and impact. Here we build upon Herbert Gans' original call for public sociology and his emphasis on the translation and dissemination of sociological research, insight, and context on social issues and problems for broad public audiences. We begin by detailing the general challenges of such communication‐oriented public outreach and engagement. We then use our work with The Society Pages, one of the largest sociological hubs on the internet, as a case study for doing this work and addressing these challenges. Key points of emphasis include: (1) the core challenges and key principles of writing for general, nonacademic audiences; (2) organizational and infrastructure‐related needs and some pragmatic recommendations for institutionalizing publicly engaged sociology; and (3) the critical role of graduate students in these endeavors. We conclude that sociologists ourselves are best positioned to share our work with public audiences and we identify some benefits for the discipline in doing such engaged scholarship over a sustained period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic, most countries have adopted strict regulation strategies such as travel restrictions, gathering restrictions, and daily health reporting. With the normalization of the pandemic, people have shown resistance to these highly intensive regulations. Yet few studies have explored the mechanisms of behavioral change from compliance to non‐compliance from the perspective of vicarious experiences. Based on the social cognitive theory, we constructed a model linking vicarious experiences, risk perception, and non‐compliance behavior to reveal the mechanism of why individuals do not comply with pandemic prevention rules and regulations. A sample of 1080 Chinese participants was obtained from a time lagged design. The results indicated that vicarious experiences could influence non‐compliance with prevention rules and regulations via perceived probability and perceived consequence of being caught. In addition, public trust in the government could negatively moderate the direct effect of the intention of violating prevention rules and regulations on non‐compliance. This direct effect is stronger for citizens with low levels of public trust in the government than for those with high levels. Our findings advance the understanding of the mechanisms behind the way vicarious experiences affect citizens' non‐compliance behavior with COVID‐19 prevention rules and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an attendee at the Discussion Group on Social Problems, Henri was unfailingly present, participatory, and, even though sometimes passionately disagreeing with the content of the material presented, always maintaining a civil and collegial style of discourse. It is a privilege to publish the Tributes that were delivered at Henri Parens' Celebration of Life held on Saturday, April 2, 2022, following Henri's death on Saturday, February 19, 2022, at the age of 94. What follows are the shared reminiscences of both Henri's colleagues and friends, as well as those of his eldest son, Erik, those of Henri's young adult grandchildren, as well as that of his non-blood brother. [Extracted from the article]

Collaborative governance has become prevalent in public service provision as both government and nonprofit sectors face pressure to solve multidimensional social problems in communities while improving performance. Drawing on collaborative governance and homeless services literature, this article explores how providing services in a collaborative governance network through government and nonprofit service providers differentially relates to multiple dimensions of performance—effectiveness, internal efficiency, social efficiency, and service heterogeneity—at the community level. By using a two‐way fixed effects estimator and a unique nonprofit and homeless services dataset, the findings indicate that collaborative governance between government and nonprofit service providers relates to increased effectiveness (e.g., less homelessness), and mixed results for service heterogeneity relative to using one sector. The composition of collaborative governance networks matters for performance, but its precise relationship with community‐level performance depends on the specific aspect of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child maltreatment is a significant social problem that responds to neighborhood conditions, including disorder and support. Using administrative sources with the census response rate and geocoded nonprofit tax forms in a cross‐sectional ecological design (N = 443), this article explores two understudied supportive factors in neighborhoods: aggregate social capital and nonprofit organizations. A series of Poisson models show aggregate social capital and nonprofit density are negatively related to child maltreatment rates, while the relationship between social capital and child maltreatment rates varies by the number of nonprofits present in the neighborhood. The results provide new insights into the ecology of child maltreatment and illustrate the importance of norms and formal organizations when addressing collective action problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the new practitioner in government, design can seem exciting, inspiring, hopeful, and fun because over the past decade it has quickly become a popular and novel way to approach city policy and service design. City governments are employing design to help develop innovative and viable solutions to the increasingly complex problems their communities face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to evaluate a quantitative driving index for implementing green building in Vietnam as a case study in developing countries. Using literature review and expert interviews, 19 driving forces affecting green building implementation were identified in the Vietnamese context. Via obtained data from a questionnaire survey, four principle factors were grouped from defined drivers. The fuzzy synthetic evaluation method was utilized to develop a driving index (DI) for developing the green building in Vietnam. DI model indicated that environmental impact is the most crucial group for green building implementation in Vietnam. Apart from this, the result of the comparative analysis also indicated that most driving forces for adopting green building in developing countries related to environmental and social problems. These results provide the decision‐makers with a comprehensive tool to assess the expectations for green building implementation in both Vietnam and other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and cultural critics have criticized the "women can have it all" slogan of a successful career and family life as an impossible dream. But why do educationally and economically privileged women continue to invest in this myth? Drawing on interviews with 19 upper middle class, highly educated women, this article highlights the fusion of postfeminism and emotion work in what I call, practices of alignment, visible in the ways they talk about gender inequalities without addressing sexism. I argue these women use self‐silencing, individualizing, minimizing, and normalizing strategies to rationalize the realities of sexism and patriarchy in their households and workplaces. These practices of alignment "handle" other people's feelings and their own to reaffirm their identities as "nice" women who can succeed despite blatant and subtle forms of sexism in their lives. In so doing, these women continue to translate the broader social problems of continued gender inequality into individual issues, which masks the ways their economic and social lives are shaped by sexism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the present study, we argue for the urgency of including a metacognitive attitude in decision‐making processes in complex social problems, with insights for the debate on decision sciences. We explore overlooked possibilities from the understanding of metacognitive schemes, subjectivity, and the intersubjective elements that participate and interfere in the decision‐making process. We discuss the relationship between metacognition as a state of consciousness, decision making, and the paradoxical nature of complex systems. We also propose a method to help eliciting personal and group metacognitive content named Complex Holographic Assessment of Paradoxical Problems—CHAP2. It intends to support decision making through the graphic visualization of mental schemas, thus enhancing metacognition. This, in turn, emerged as a promising way to promote a more systemic view of a given social problem. We believe that this work contributes with pathways to develop this metacognitive approach and achieve consensus solutions, obtained through the interaction between different agents, with the problematic situation being modeled according to the particular views of the actors involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]