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Purpose: The links between moral communication and legal communication have long been studied in sociology of law. Little has yet been said about moral communication invoking when communication in the legal system is impossible, ineffective or uncertain. The paper fills this gap to demonstrate that systems theory-based sociology of law can effectively recognise the role of moral communication in such situations. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents an empirical study of moral communication in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It focused on situations when SMEs' interactions with function systems, particularly the legal system, result in irremovable legal uncertainty. The data depict strategies of managing such uncertainty and were obtained in a paths-to-justice survey of 7,292 owners and managers of SMEs and 101 in-depth interviews. The findings are interpreted using the author's concept of "uncertainty translation", rooted in Luhmann's systems theory. It suggests that business organisations such as SMEs deal with the ubiquitous uncertainty in their operations by translating it into a convenient type. Findings: The study distinguishes between formative and absorbing moral communication and finds that both types play a role in steering the uncertainty translation mechanism in SMEs. Six scenarios of invoking moral communication are identified in SMEs dealing with legal uncertainty. In such scenarios, moral communication facilitates the translation of business uncertainty "away from law". Under some circumstances, this, in turn, leads to latent systematic results, reflexively affecting the legal system, the economic system and the SMEs. Research limitations/implications: In its core argument, the study is based on qualitative material. While it identifies empirical scenarios of invoking moral communication, it does not report the prevalence of these scenarios due to methodological limitations. Originality/value: The study results pose questions related to the staple theoretical issue in post-Luhmannian social systems theory: functional differentiation. If moral communication–a type of communication not linked to any social system–can produce far-reaching, systematic results that affect function systems, then the functional differentiation thesis should be less pronounced than Luhmann typically stressed. This said, the paper argues that the contradiction between the findings and Luhmannian theory of morality is only apparent and may be reconciled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the prevalence of COVID-19, the modeling of epidemic propagation and its analyses have played a significant role in controlling epidemics. However, individual behaviors, in particular the self-protection and migration, which have a strong influence on epidemic propagation, were always neglected in previous studies. In this paper, we mainly propose two models from the individual and population perspectives. In the first individual model, we introduce the individual protection degree that effectively suppresses the epidemic level as a stochastic variable to the SIRS model. In the alternative population model, an open Markov queueing network is constructed to investigate the individual number of each epidemic state, and we present an evolving population network via the migration of people. Besides, stochastic methods are applied to analyze both models. In various simulations, the infected probability, the number of individuals in each state and its limited distribution are demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ethnozootechnie is the property of Societe d Ethnozootechnie and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: This study aims to review Luhmann's theory of moral communication while focusing on symmetry conditions, in light of Armin Nassehi's criticism, to clarify issues regarding this concept. Then, Luhmann's symmetry condition is reconstructed as a concept containing double meaning via a case study in Japan. Correspondingly, interesting situations and characteristics of moral communication, such as "inflation," the "polemogene" and ubiquity of moral communication, are interpreted more consistently. Design/methodology/approach: In today's society, moral communication may spiral out of control and even be fatal. By examining Niklas Luhmann's theory, in this paper, the author elaborates on why and how this mechanism occurs. Findings: The author emphasizes that the suspicion pertaining to the asymmetry of communication is stressed in the case of anonymity. When an individual communicates using a moral code, it is impossible to discern whether the implications of self-bindingness are undermined or not through observations or consequences of communication and can only be questioned or confirmed through communication. However, criticizing the outburst of the masses and exchanging blame by isolating only one aspect of such a phenomenon will only be superficial. Originality/value: This study reveals that the very condition that makes moral communication possible enables people to communicate respectfully or contemptuously with others without any special qualification. Such an analysis can serve as a theoretical underpinning for the analysis of today's phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to discuss particular features of the public debate around the COVID-19 pandemic and its mitigation strategies in Croatian media from the beginning of 2020 to mid-September of the same year. Design/methodology/approach: The discussion is theoretically grounded on Luhmann's concept of moral communication combined with the key assumption of critical discourse analysis that language reflects a position of power of social actors. Based on these premises, the analysis of a sample of articles in a chosen online media was conducted to uncover the moral codes in the public debate concerning the corona outbreak and connect them with specific moral discourses of particular social actors. Findings: The findings clearly indicate that the communication about the pandemic is considerably imbued with moralization and that moral coding is profoundly used to generate preferred types of behaviour of citizens and their compliance with the imposed epidemiologic measures. In conclusion, Luhmann's claim of moralization as a contentious form of communication is confirmed as the examined public discussion fosters confrontations and generates disruptions rather than contributing to a productive dialogue among diverse social actors. Originality/value: The novelty of the approach lies in the combination of Luhman's conceiving of moral communication with critical discourse analysis that, taken together, entails a pertinent research tool for analysing relevant attributes of the ongoing vibrant debate on the coronavirus outbreak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society's insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann's (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author's analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems' binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems. Design/methodology/approach: The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann's conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters's (1999) "communication chasm" concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts. Findings: The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems' moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems' binary codes and communicate the climate crisis's urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems' code. Social implications: In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail. Originality/value: To the author's knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper combines the systems theoretical perspective on the evolution of societal differentiation and the emergence of codes in communication. By combining the approach by Niklas Luhmann with a historical theology on the development of Christian morality split between God and Devil, it recreates a sociological point of observation on contemporary moral forms by a temporary occupation of the retired Christian Devil. Design/methodology/approach: The article combines a Luhmannian systems theoretical perspective on the evolution of societal differentiation with a concept of emerging codes in communication. The latter is based on on the development of a Christian view of morality being split between God and Devil. It establishes a sociological point of observation on contemporary moral forms through the temporary invocation of the retired figure of the Christian Devil. Findings: The proposed perspective develops a healthy perspective on the exuberant distribution of a health(y) morality across the globe during the pandemic crisis of 2020–21. The temporary invocation of the retired Christian Devil as point of departure in this sociological analysis allows for a disturbing view on the unlimited growth of the morality of health and its inherent dangers of dedifferentiating the highly specialised forms of societal differentiation and organisation. Originality/value: By applying the diabolical perspective, the analytical framework creates a unique opportunity to observe the moral encodings of semantic forms in detail, while keeping the freedom of scientific enquiry to choose amongst available distinctions in the creation of sound empirical knowledge. This article adopts a neutral stance, for the good of sociological analysis. The applications of the term "evil" to observations of communication are indifferent to anything but itself and its qualities as scientific enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Asia; China; Health and Medicine; Mental Health Diseases and Conditions; Psychological EN Asia China Health and Medicine Mental Health Diseases and Conditions Psychological 76 76 1 04/24/23 20230424 NES 230424 2023 APR 24 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Mental Health Weekly Digest -- A new study on mental health diseases and conditions is now available. Asia, China, Health and Medicine, Mental Health Diseases and Conditions, Psychological. [Extracted from the article]

Purpose: This paper aims to build around an abductive argument: the epistemological value of the Arts-derived knowledge is equivalent and may be supplementary to that of science, contributing to the literature on the epistemological mistrust between both systems of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach: This essay proposes a conceptual model – a tool, in Kuhn's terms – grounded on the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Schütz, 1951), to frame the apprehension of reality from a social perspective, and the philosophical pragmatism (Peirce, 2012), considering the fixation of beliefs as the seminal concept that leads to the legitimation of knowledge in society. The proposed conceptual model guides analysis on the epistemological value of the knowledge derived from the Arts and supports reflection on the commonalities between both finite provinces of meaning. Findings: Reproducibility, doxastic grounding, community/membership, intersubjectivity and evidence are criteria identified as commonalities between the Arts and Science. Acceptance and legitimation across finite provinces of meaning emerge to produce minimally acceptable objectivity, made possible by the mutual validation of impressions. Research limitations/implications: The discussion on greater levels of aesthetic appreciation has been eclipsed by the authors' intention to find specific epistemological properties of knowledge derived from the Arts. Practical implications: As practitioners in applied social science, management researchers are supposed to have mastery over how to apply what they know. So, the findings suggest participation (becoming accepted, first of all) in communities of practice, learning from and contributing to distinct finite provinces of meaning. The role of organizations in the understanding of knowledge derived from the Arts and its application might be that of a protagonist, promoting creativity and innovation through openness to new perspectives on knowledge. Originality/value: This essay rescues knowledge as not a justified true belief, but the result of fixed beliefs continuously and socially legitimated. This rescue escapes previous attempts that appeal to Gettier-type counterexamples. A conceptual model was proposed to frame knowledge from a philosophical and sociological perspective and represent a methodological contribution of this essay. The proposition of third-order interdisciplinarity, also represents a contribution, of conceptual nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes an integrated lens with an epistemological base in social work, sociology and theology that facilitates multidimensional, multidisciplinary analysis of the strengths and challenging aspects of society and their impacts. It describes the steps of the integrated approach to analysis and its development due to gaps in knowledge about rurality, particularly the rural Anglican church's engagement with different groups. It discusses examples showing the efficacy of the lens.

A recent report from Yerevan State University discusses the role of societal discourse in shaping breastfeeding practices. The research argues that understanding breastfeeding practices requires examining the discourse that represents and constructs them. Using Armenia as a case study, the report explores various sources of discursive practices around child feeding, including pre-industrial customs, Soviet political ideology, and modern Western values. The research proposes a new approach to studying breastfeeding practices by considering the influence of different discourses. [Extracted from the article]

In 1960, Science published a paper by Heinz von Foerster predicting that on Friday, 13 November 2026, the “human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia.” Just a few years after this preposterous doomsday alarm, the annual growth of global population peaked at about 2.1 percent and immediately began to decline. By 2020 the growth rate stood at just a bit more than 1 percent, the result of the steadily declining total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children born to a woman during her reproductive period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Sociology of Modern Civilization at the Collège de France in 1970. Topics include great achievement was to uncover the complicity between nihilism and ideological fanaticism; and uncompromising critic of historical and sociological determinism, he defended the human element, the "margins of liberty" available to citizens.

The article introduces the companion document to the higher education information literacy community and shares ideas for how it might be used in the classroom. It explains the essential concepts that consist the Sociological Literacy Framework for undergraduate students, including sociological eye, social structure, socialization, stratification and social reproduction.

In this article, we study the problem of guaranteed display ads (GDAs) allocation, which requires proactively allocate display ads to different impressions to fulfill their impression demands indicated in the contracts. Existing methods for this problem either assume the impressions that are static or solely consider a specific ad’s benefits. Thus, it is hard to generalize to the industrial production scenario where the impressions are dynamical and large-scale, and the overall allocation optimality of all the considered GDAs is required. To bridge this gap, we formulate this problem as a sequential decision-making problem in the scope of multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL), by assigning an allocation agent to each ad and coordinating all the agents for allocating GDAs. The inputs are the states (e.g., the demands of the ad and the remaining time steps for displaying the ads) of each ad and the impressions at different time steps, and the outputs are the display ratios of each ad for each impression. Specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical MARL (HMARL) method that creates hierarchies over the agent policies to handle a large number of ads and the dynamics of impressions. HMARL contains: 1) a manager policy to navigate the agent to choose an appropriate subpolicy and 2) a set of subpolicies that let the agents perform diverse conditioning on their states. Extensive experiments on three real-world data sets from the Tencent advertising platform with tens of millions of records demonstrate significant improvements of HMARL over state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nuova Secondaria is the property of Edizioni Studium S.r.l and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses analysis and control of the SIR model of infectious diseases in the framework of input-to-state stability (ISS) with respect to the net flow of susceptible individuals into a region in both disease-free and epidemic situations. The key development is the construction of a continuously differentiable strict Lyapunov function. First, this article clarifies that a continuously differentiable Lyapunov function whose derivative is nonpositive can deduce asymptotic stability on the whole state space. Second, it is demonstrated that a new idea of rendering the derivative strictly negative allows one to detect a margin proving ISS of the SIR model. The accomplishment is based on the pursuit of a Lyapunov function that is not entirely separable into components. It contrasts with previously studied and popular Lyapunov functions that are proven to be incapable of assessing robustness properties such as ISS. Third, two types of feedback control laws are proposed for mass vaccination of immigrants and inhabitants by making use of the strict Lyapunov functions. One type modifies the other type by focusing on the reduction of peaks of the infected population within the ISS guarantees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces and solves a structural controllability problem for continuum ensembles of linear time-invariant systems. All the individual linear systems of an ensemble are sparse, governed by the same sparsity pattern. Controllability of an ensemble system is, by convention, the capability of using a common control input to simultaneously steer every individual systems in it. A sparsity pattern is structurally controllable if it admits a controllable linear ensemble system. A main contribution of the article is to provide a graphical condition that is necessary and sufficient for a sparsity pattern to be structurally controllable. Like other structural problems, the property of being structural controllable is monotone. We provide a complete characterization of minimal sparsity patterns as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This articleproposes an extension to a family of evolutionary game dynamics called escort replicator dynamics (ERD), defined by (Harper, 2011) based on information-geometric concepts. Specifically, the objective of this article is to propose three types of convenient so-called escort functionsand evaluate the stability of ERD under the use of these functions. Since it is proven that ERD is stable using the proposed definitions, ERD is able to confine trajectories of the state vector in regions defined by upper and lower boundaries which can be, but are not required to be, nonnegative. From an engineering application perspective, these proposed escort functions are convenient since they allow to extend replicatorlike dynamics applications to engineering problems with feasible regions more general than the standard simplex or the nonnegative orthant. From a population dynamics perspective the proposed escort functions are useful to represent upper and lower limits on the share of a population that is allowed to play a given pure strategy of the underlying symmetric game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitive noncooperative online decision-making agents whose actions increase congestion of scarce resources constitute a model for widespread modern large-scale applications. To ensure sustainable resource behavior, we introduce a novel method to steer the agents toward a stable population state, fulfilling the given coupled resource constraints. The proposed method is a decentralized resource pricing method based on the resource loads resulting from the augmentation of the game's Lagrangian. Assuming that the online learning agents have only noisy first-order utility feedback, we show that for a polynomially decaying agents step size/learning rate, the population's dynamic will almost surely converge to generalized Nash equilibrium. A particular consequence of the latter is the fulfillment of resource constraints in the asymptotic limit. Moreover, we investigate the finite-time quality of the proposed algorithm by giving a nonasymptotic time decaying bound for the expected amount of resource constraint violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study conducted at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University examined the relationship between self-esteem and persistence, optimism, activity, and responsibility. The study involved 200 students aged 18 to 23 from six universities in Kazakhstan. The results showed that self-esteem was related to factors such as optimism, activity, sociability, responsibility, sports, self-belief, parental support, satisfaction with appearance and studies, academic performance, suicidal thoughts, and loneliness. The study provides new insights into the role of self-esteem in shaping self-image and behavior, and has practical implications for developing psychological programs and techniques for working with students' self-esteem. [Extracted from the article]

A recent study from University College London (UCL) explores the relationship between the sociology of aging and social gerontology. The research argues that the sociology of aging has been overshadowed by social gerontology, which focuses more on policy and advocacy for older people. The study suggests that separating the two fields and employing contemporary sociological theory can help develop a more comprehensive understanding of aging. By analyzing the social structures, symbolic representations, and personal experiences of aging, a re-envisioned sociology of aging can provide valuable insights into the "new aging." [Extracted from the article]

A personal narrative is presented which explores the authors experience of being difference in quality between some anonymous crazy on TikTok and a peer-reviewed article.

Epidemiology, Health and Medicine, Human Development, Pandemic, Science Keywords: Epidemiology; Health and Medicine; Human Development; Pandemic; Science EN Epidemiology Health and Medicine Human Development Pandemic Science 844 844 1 09/19/23 20230922 NES 230922 2023 SEP 24 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at TB & Outbreaks Week -- Fresh data on human development are presented in a new report. [Extracted from the article]

Keywords: Philadelphia; State:Pennsylvania; United States; North and Central America; Eye Diseases and Conditions; Health and Medicine; Myopia; Ophthalmology; Refractive Errors EN Philadelphia State:Pennsylvania United States North and Central America Eye Diseases and Conditions Health and Medicine Myopia Ophthalmology Refractive Errors 5236 5236 1 05/22/23 20230526 NES 230526 2023 MAY 26 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health & Medicine Week -- Investigators discuss new findings in Eye Diseases and Conditions - Myopia. Keywords for this news article include: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, North and Central America, Eye Diseases and Conditions, Health and Medicine, Myopia, Ophthalmology, Refractive Errors, Temple University. Philadelphia, State:Pennsylvania, United States, North and Central America, Eye Diseases and Conditions, Health and Medicine, Myopia, Ophthalmology, Refractive Errors. [Extracted from the article]

Keywords for this news article include: Victoria University, Pandemic, Epidemiology, Health and Medicine. Keywords: Epidemiology; Health and Medicine; Pandemic EN Epidemiology Health and Medicine Pandemic 2023 FEB 12 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at TB & Outbreaks Week -- New study results on epidemiology have been published. [Extracted from the article]