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In the space of four years, from 1826 to 1829, the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal published three anonymous articles seemingly advocating doctrines inspired by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Decades of scholarship have initially attributed the most outspoken of the three articles, the 1826 "Observations on the Nature and Importance of Geology," to Robert Grant, and subsequently to Robert Jameson, thanks to a critical reassessment by James Secord (1991). More recently, scholars have also ascribed to Jameson an article published in 1829, "Of the Continuity of the Animal Kingdom by Means of Generation from the First Ages of the World to the Present Times." A third short contribution, the 1827 "Of the Changes which Life has Experienced on the Globe" has been credited to the Franco-German Ami Boué. Research undertaken over several years has led to the identification of the three authors hiding behind the veil of anonymity. They were not the ones scholars have agreed upon, nor were they really "Lamarckians." The discussion of the ways in which the three texts reached Edinburgh broadens our understanding of the daily working practices of contemporary periodicals and of the networks of circulation of texts at the Continental level. Finally, when considered within their proper conceptual and social context, the three articles throw light on the many ways in which, during the 1820s, European amateurs, naturalists, and journalists debated the succession of life forms throughout the history of the Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A set of four thematic articles dealing with "Community Participation for Landslide Disaster Risk Reduction" will be published in this issue of Landslides following a call for papers, promoted by the authors, aimed at gathering field experiences in implementing and adopting landslide risk reduction measures at the community level in different social and economic environments. This editorial article briefly introduces the topic, states the objectives and the main findings of the four research studies, and provides some concluding remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart home technology is expected to be widespread in the future and to accommodate a green transition to reduce and time-shift energy consumption. However, smart technologies also have social consequences, which are important to understand. At a basic level, we need to know more about learning to live with these technologies and how they influence our everyday practices and routines. Providing in-depth longitudinal insights into these processes, this paper presents an auto-ethnography of living with smart home technology: a 20-month diary kept by one of the authors. The paper uses theories of practice to investigate details of learning processes when interacting with three selected technologies: smart alarm and lighting management, smart control of heating, and a smart electric vehicle (EV). Theories of learning have a well-established tradition within theories of practice, and the concept of "knowing how to go on" and the concept of practical intelligibility are central in this work. This paper investigates the adoption of new smart technologies and how they interact with learning processes in different material and social contexts. Such an approach can lay the groundwork for further empirical research with a broader set of materials. It can also provide knowledge to assist in the design of better technologies and in developing policies and regulations to promote this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fitness apps on mobile devices are gaining popularity, as more people are engaging in self-tracking activities to record their status of fitness and exercise routines. These technologies also evolved from simply recording steps and offering exercise suggestions to an integrated lifestyle guide for physical wellbeing, thus exemplify a new era of "quantified self" in the context of health as individual responsibility. There is a considerable amount of literature in science, technology and society (STS) studies looking at this phenomenon from different perspectives, linking it with the sociology of self-surveillance and neoliberal regimes of health. However, the human-technology interface, through which the micro- (behavioral) and macro- (social) aspects converge, still calls for extensive examination. This paper approaches this topic from the postphenomenological perspective, in combination with empirical studies of design analysis and interviews of fitness apps, to reveal the human-technology link between the design elements and people's perception through the direct experiences and interpretations of technology. It argues that the intentionality of self-tracking fitness app designs mediates the human-technology relations by "guiding" people into a quantified knowledge regime. It shapes the perceptions of fitness and health with representations of meanings about a "good life" of individual success and management. This paper also gives a critique of current individual, performance-oriented fitness app designs and offers the possibility of seeking alternatives through the multistable nature of human-technology relations—how altering interpretation and meaning of the design with a cultural or social context could change the form of technological embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited diversity is a term employed in the context of Ragin's Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), but it describes a phenomenon which is widespread in social contexts: cases are usually not distributed evenly across all the possible combinations of factors linked to some outcome. Instead, they are often clustered together. To deal with limited diversity, the three solution types parsimonious, intermediate, and complex (or conservative) solution have been proposed. There is an ongoing debate as to the merits of each solution type. This paper contributes to the debate by focussing on what the implications of choosing each solution type are. In making this choice, researchers have to make certain assumptions, and the paper discusses what these are and how they vary depending on which solution type is being implemented, drawing on invented examples and examples from published work to bring out the consequences of these assumptions. It concludes that it is not obvious that any one solution type is superior, certainly not to the degree that the others always have to be ruled out. They rely on different kinds of assumptions and models of causation. Thus, depending on the research situation, it may be helpful to analyse different scenarios, including one(s) where we assume that our initial assumptions are wrong. Ideally, researchers are able to take steps to reduce or eliminate limited diversity since none of the existing solution types are without problems. However, since this is not always possible, it is best to be aware of the consequences of choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ego Network Model (ENM) is a model for the structural organisation of relationships, rooted in evolutionary anthropology, that is found ubiquitously in social contexts. It takes the perspective of a single user (Ego) and organises their contacts (Alters) into a series of (typically 5) concentric circles of decreasing intimacy and increasing size. Alters are sorted based on their tie strength to the Ego, however, this is difficult to measure directly. Traditionally, the interaction frequency has been used as a proxy but this misses the qualitative aspects of connections, such as signs (i.e. polarity), which have been shown to provide extremely useful information. However, the sign of an online social relationship is usually an implicit piece of information, which needs to be estimated by interaction data from Online Social Networks (OSNs), making sign prediction in OSNs a research challenge in and of itself. This work aims to bring the ENM into the signed networks domain by investigating the interplay of signed connections with the ENM. This paper delivers 2 main contributions. Firstly, a new and data-efficient method of signing relationships between individuals using sentiment analysis and, secondly, we provide an in-depth look at the properties of Signed Ego Networks (SENs), using 9 Twitter datasets of various categories of users. We find that negative connections are generally over-represented in the active part of the Ego Networks, suggesting that Twitter greatly over-emphasises negative relationships with respect to "offline" social networks. Further, users who use social networks for professional reasons have an even greater share of negative connections. Despite this, we also found weak signs that less negative users tend to allocate more cognitive effort to individual relationships and thus have smaller ego networks on average. All in all, even though structurally ENMs are known to be similar in both offline and online social networks, our results indicate that relationships on Twitter tend to nurture more negativity than offline contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of homophily in hate speech generation on Twitter, aiming to deepen our understanding of online hate dynamics. Given the vast amount of information available on Twitter, computing familiarity and similarity–essential for discovering homophily–poses significant challenges. To address this, we introduce novel measures for computing familiarity and similarity on the platform. Hate speech on social media can manifest in various forms, including hate against gender, race, ethnicity, politics, and nationalism. Consequently, we propose methods to detect multiple forms of hate speech. Utilizing an empirical dataset from Twitter, we demonstrate the prevalence of homophily and explore its variations across different categories of hate speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK has a long history of providing and managing urban parks. The formal park and garden, developed as a morally improving 'place apart' in the city, can inform people's idea of what a park is. This paper aims to explore the legacy of this conceptualisation of the park through an extensive review of literature and policy documents. This paper examines prevailing discourses by locating them more accurately within its political, economic and social context of the times. The paper also examines why, despite being described as 'treasured assets' by national government today, UK urban parks continue to be undervalued and taken for granted? Why does the lamenting of the fate of UK urban parks sector persist in the twenty-first century? To answer this question, the paper will focus on the formal urban park by applying the analytical framework of place-keeping as a conceptualisation of long-term green space management and stewardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many theories support the idea that children's literacy learning develops as they learn to make meaning through interactions with others. These assertions are premised on the understanding that childhood literacy serves various social purposes and that these literacies are learned through participating in social contexts. In this position paper, we seek to reframe current, widely accepted understandings and definitions of literacy. We draw upon mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge/wisdom) concepts to illustrate Māori philosophical views about the nature of knowledge production. These concepts clearly delineate the link between knowledge, literacies, and power, a link often actively overlooked by western framing of literacy. We use a Māori whakataukī (proverbial saying) to re-conceptualise current understandings of literacy, positing varied literacies and literacy practices. Within this conceptual framework Māori children are re-positioned as maurea – treasures of the highest order, born of and with mana, an integral part of generations of whakapapa (genealogy), and an essential element in an intricate web linking all things (human and non-human). This paper proposes that children are inherently and inherited-ly literate; they are born literate—inheritors of multiple and cumulative genealogies of multimodal communication and knowledge sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of architectural forms is a significant field of study in modern hybrids of Chinese and foreign architecture. It involves exploring the integration of foreign buildings and their constituent elements into traditional Chinese local culture. The Composite capital is a key component in Western architecture. Research indicates that from the 1920s to 1930s, Composite capital designs in foreign architectural structures within the Jiangsu region exhibited period-specific evolutionary characteristics and variations among different cities. Therefore, the localisation of Composite capitals in Jiangsu is a gradual process. This paper proposes a research methodology combining formal analysis and social analysis to investigate the localisation of Composite capitals in Jiangsu during the modern period. The study yields two main conclusions: (1) Within the same social environment, there are common patterns in the localisation of Composite capital designs among different historical periods, reflecting shared developmental trends influenced by local traditional culture. (2) Different cities in the Jiangsu region, characterised by distinct social environments, exhibit unique patterns in the localisation of Composite capital designs, reflecting regional diversity and providing more possibilities for localisation. This paper investigates the localisation of Composite capital designs in modern Jiangsu and explores the factors that influence the form and value of capital designs, providing a systematic reference for the study of regional architectural localisation in the modern period in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In recent decades, cities worldwide are increasingly adopting vehicle access policies and technologies to alleviate the negative externalities related to high car use in the urban built environments. As such, car-oriented infrastructures and mobility policies implemented post-World War II are giving way to sustainable mobility strategies that aim to make cities healthier, more livable and more inclusive for all. Purpose: Most of these strategies are considered as stand-alone cases related to a specific environmental, political and social urban context. However, similarities and patterns between different strategies can provide information on the replicability of mobility strategies in other urban contexts. Methods: Through a literature review, this paper illustrates the wide range of urban vehicle access regulations (UVAR) applied within sustainable mobility strategies. In addition, we critically examine the process from ideation over design and implementation to operation phase for 12 West-European cities and define what measures are combined to end up with a sustainable mobility strategy. Results: This results in a taxonomy of UVAR interventions, subdivided in three categories: spatial interventions, pricing aspects and regulatory measures. We also highlight a number of complementary supportive measures implemented to counter the often restrictive nature of UVAR. Results: The paper shows that the strategies highlighted in the case studies are an amalgam of different UVAR and supportive measures. As such, deconstructing various sustainable mobility strategies enables us to shed light on the available UVAR options cities can combine to define consistent and robust sustainable mobility strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersection of time and relational economic sociology. Building on Viviana Zelizer's relational framework, I argue that analyzing the temporal dimensions of exchange provides insight into how social ties gain meaning through economic practices. The paper shows time's dual role as both an organizing structure bounding action, and a dynamic element that actors leverage to shape transactional contexts. As structure, time offers culturally-available templates like schedules and rhythms that facilitate coordination and signify predictable social meanings befitting particular relational categories. Yet time also constitutes relational work itself; strategic timing, duration, pacing, and sequencing of interactions signal context, manage expectations, and sustain bonds amidst entanglements. Synchronization through temporal agency prevents mismatches between transactions and social contexts that could strain ties. This agency in time ranges from passive adherence to dominant structures to active assertions of power resistance, enabling both domination and defiance across economic contexts. Analyzing shared temporal infrastructure within circuits of commerce further illuminates how actors distinguish those spheres of exchange at various scale from the impersonal market. Ultimately, incorporating temporality strengthens relational economic sociology by identifying a key mechanism through which practices of exchange become relationally meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is man-made with the purpose of serving humans. An emotional machine is designed to meet the demands of human emotion. Science fiction and films provide many stories about the emotional development of AI/robots/androids/clones. This paper argues that there is an evolutionary emotional process for AI and that humans should finally accept the coexistence of humans and AI. Paolo Bacigalupi, in his novel The Windup Girl, provides clues regarding AI's evolutionary emotions and subjectivity construction. The novel describes how one AI breaks away from rules designed to elicit obedience to develop herself as someone who knows the world in her own right. This paper explains the concepts of AI and its embodiment, concurs with emotional theorists in stressing the relationship between embodiment and emotion, and argues that there is an evolutionary emotional process in the character Emiko—the main character in The Windup Girl—in that it is bodily pain and a sense of humiliation that prompts her to fight back. She wrestles with the expectation of mere obedience rule and with her own hatred. Biopolitics, including patriarchy and anthropocentrism, eventually urges Emiko to become an independent entity. Finding and creating people like her enables Emiko to be a completely new and independent being. Inherited genes and an unjust social environment provide the impetus for Emiko to be the opposite of a human. My paper concludes with the view that accepting otherness is the key step for determining the relationship between humans and AI. To be just and caring toward others is the ultimate solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abandoned baggage poses a potential threat to public safety, which needs to be monitored to avoid catastrophic effects. Identifying left baggage, the owner of the baggage, and the intention of the owner leaving the baggage are the challenging tasks in an automated video surveillance system. This paper aims at detecting abandoned objects by recognising and tracking the person carrying the object with context sensing. Here, a well-organised background modelling strategy and background subtraction in the HSV colour plane is proposed that yield a complete foreground image. The retrieved foreground blobs were identified as pedestrians, luggage, or other moving items using the prior model built with deep features. Further, deep features with kernel canonical correlation analysis and the cosine similarity index are used for tracking the person by re-identification in successive frames. The gait energy image generated for the tracked individual is identified for the condition of the carried baggage, and thus the owner of the bag is recognised. The duration of stay of the person carrying an object and the behavioural cues displayed by the person serve as the defining features for threat assessment. The PETS 2006, AVSS 2007, and ABODA data sets were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the experiments demonstrate promising results comparable to state-of-the-art techniques. The results suggest that the proposed method can effectively detect abandoned objects in public places by recognising and tracking the person carrying the object and using context sensing. The method's performance is comparable to state-of-the-art techniques and can be used in real-world scenarios to enhance public safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the 50th anniversary special issue of Higher Education recounts the history of the journal and reflects on the evolution and expansion of the journal and the field. Higher education studies is an object-oriented field that combines academic explanations with practical interventions. The journal takes an agnostic approach to disciplinary frameworks, theories, and methodologies and an eclectic and inclusive approach to topics. It began in 1972 with a preoccupation with the nature and implications of mass higher education systems, including internationally comparative analyses, and with a focus on policy and planning. Most of the earlier themes of research in the field have continued to the present, but as mass higher education systems have spread across the world, so has the journal's author list and editorial group. Higher education studies remain biased to the Anglophone and Euro-American worlds in their topics, theorizations, and author lists. Between 1996 and 2018, the USA and other English-speaking countries accounted for about 70% of authorship in the six journals with the highest impact factor. However, in Higher Education, that proportion was just over 45%, indicating some progress in the journal's efforts to pluralize, partly through the growth of papers from China. The introduction looks forward, anticipating growth in contributions from the global South, and further inquiry into the purposes of higher education and into its relations in social context. Finally, the introduction discusses the 50th anniversary papers that follow, contributed by twelve present and past editors of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mobility shapes the material landscape, for the majority of ordinary people, their movements are structured by space. For this reason, ordinary people bear the bodily and financial costs of commuting to the metropolitan core areas from their peripheries. In particular, the city's core areas and peripheries are shaped by privatisation, racism and other forces of change, each driving urban change in particular, complementary ways (Pierce and Lawhon, 2018; Czegledy, 2004). That said, there are interpretations that the city's core areas are multiple and shifting, with their peripheries being unstable and indeterminable. In this sense, the city's peripheries do not always coincide with the spatial distribution of marginality and deprivation (Pieterse, 2019). Howe's (2021) idea of popular centralities through popular agency may in some ways be seen to transcend these diverging accounts of the city's uneven spatial structure. This paper uses the case of the Mabopane Station precinct in northern Tshwane to give content to this transcending idea of popular centralities. With respect to popular agency, Coe and Jordhus-Lier's (2010) forms of agency (resilience, reworking and resistance) are useful for further analysing the resilience of the residents and commuters of northern Tshwane. The paper demonstrates some of the ways through which popular centralities are constituted—how movement becomes space; and also that it is in specific places (which are always constituted by the local and the elsewhere) where resilience is exercised in ways that perpetuate and even overcome peripherality. In this sense, the paper treats a social and cultural context seriously, highlighting ordinary people's cautious uses of and intuitive, creative reuses of peripheral spaces as they turn some of them into urbanisms of self-realisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of cloud computing, mobile devices and mobile applications, mobile social cloud has gradually become a very potential technology. Mobile social cloud is a mobile application platform with collaboration as the core and resource sharing as the main purpose to carry out social interaction, so there are complex social relationships among cloud members. This paper analyzes the design characteristics of intelligent hardware products from the perspective of interaction mode, and studies the innovative design method of entity interaction. This paper summarizes the research results of interaction design of intelligent hardware products, and the research status of entity interaction and its design methods. Based on the research results of intelligent hardware product design and entity interaction theory, this paper proposes an intelligent hardware product design method based on entity interaction with "library" as the core. Voice is the most commonly used way to transmit and exchange information. With the development of science and technology, more and more products add voice function, using text processing technology, so that the machine, APP, web page can understand the user's intention, and complete the human–computer interaction between products and users. In the cloud social voice environment, this paper studies the data analysis framework of visual interactive product design. The complex information environment is constructed for the further study. The experiment analysis is provided for the testing of robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I shall set out the pros and cons of assigning legal personhood on artificial intelligence systems (AIs) under civil law. More specifically, I will provide arguments supporting a functionalist justification for conferring personhood on AIs, and I will try to identify what content this legal status might have from a regulatory perspective. Being a person in law implies the entitlement to one or more legal positions. I will mainly focus on liability as it is one of the main grounds for the attribution of legal personhood, like for collective legal entities. A better distribution of responsibilities resulting from unpredictably illegal and/or harmful behaviour may be one of the main reasons to justify the attribution of personhood also for AI systems. This means an efficient allocation of the risks and social costs associated with the use of AIs, ensuring the protection of victims, incentives for production, and technological innovation. However, the paper also considers other legal positions triggered by personhood in addition to responsibility: specific competencies and powers such as, for example, financial autonomy, the ability to hold property, make contracts, sue (and be sued). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reflects on papers assembled for a special issue about the impact of Bruner's idea of "beyond the information given." The assembled papers are examined in relation to three cross-cutting issues that they illustrate: 1) processes of reflection in autobiographical recollection; 2) links between meaning and emotion; and 3) the idea of going beyond the individual mind as well as beyond the given information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the cornerstone of enterprises, employees have played a pivotal role in navigating the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuring the survival and growth of businesses. The global wave of unemployment triggered by the pandemic has given rise to innovative work engagements, including remote work and employee sharing. This shift prompts employees to reconsider their relationship with the organization, the extent of their collaboration, and their commitment to sustaining the enterprise's viability and development. Amidst the diverse performance level of employees, the question arises: will they redouble their efforts to showcase their value or succumb to a state of inertia? Additionally, the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has brought about adverse impacts, making enterprises think about how to inhibit employees' social loafing, stimulate their enthusiasm, and to rely on collective strength to overcome the crisis. During the pandemic, uncertainty of the work environment was elevated, and the factors influecing employees' social loafing, perception of organizational justice, and organizational commitment became more significant. Based on the social exchange theory, this paper conducts research on how employees' perception of organizational justice level weakens their social loafing and incorporates organizational commitment into the research framework in order to explore new presentations of relationships between these variables in the context of the epidemic. Through the data analysis of 276 questionnaires, the study found that: (1) the organizational justice has a negative impact on the social loafing of employees; (2) the organizational commitment plays a complete mediating role between the organizational justice and employees' social loafing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Clarke's research has shifted the focus of classroom research in mathematics education from study of cultural patterns to study of patterns of participation and the learning that can result in highly complex social environments. His Complementary Accounts Methodology which informed the Learner's Perspective Study design included multi-source data collection generated through the latest technological advances at that time. That research design enriched the author's doctoral research which was situated within the Learner's Perspective Study. One intention of this paper is to highlight ways in which Clarke's methodology added to the richness of the study Williams undertook, in particular, the flexibility of Clarke's methodology in enabling adaptation to support a theoretical framework that included but extended beyond social theories of learning. In doing so, this paper draws attention to an aspect of Clarke's methodological legacy, the potential for his Complementary Accounts Methodology to contribute to support of researchers employing diverse theoretical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-pandemic era has transformed work-life boundaries, driven by factors such as working hours, an increased number of working women and single parents, the implementation of various ICTs, and the rise of flexible work arrangements. This study examines the role of female workers and entrepreneurs in establishing and managing coworking spaces (CSs) designed to improve work-life balance through flexible scheduling and location options. The challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in promoting an inclusive society and economic system are also explored, as well as the benefits experienced by independent workers and teleworkers in terms of networking, social interaction, knowledge exchange, and community building. The "She Economy" is analyzed in three stages: germination, growth, and maturity, considering challenges from both family and workplaces. This paper investigates the background of female identity and the ideological transformation of female identity in the consumption process after the pandemic, using mass media, especially female-focused media, as a lens. Finally, the paper proposes recommendations for the future development of the "She Economy" from the perspectives of communicators, women, and the social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation greatly impacts sporting activities. The paper examines the impact of effective communication skills within the team on the development of athletes' motivation when it comes to their professional development, as well as motivation's impact on the development of sports skills. The study was conducted among 150 track and field students from Xihua University, Physical Education Institute. A quasi-experimental design was proposed to implement the experimental intervention, in which the experimental group learned effective communication and conflict resolution skills prior to athletic training. Student motivation variables in the experimental group are notably better. The experimental group showed better academic performance in track and field skills. There was a very significant difference in sports walking (5.98), springboarding (21.66), and ball throwing (20.97) skills, with the significance level reaching p < 0.01. The findings are consistent with previous research, and they also offer practical and theoretical opportunities for future and demonstrate effectiveness of effective communication skills in physical activity for athletes' motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the autonomy of artificial systems, robotic systems in particular, is certainly one of the most debated issues, both from the perspective of technological development and its social impact and ethical repercussions. While theoretical considerations often focus on scenarios far beyond what can be concretely hypothesized from the current state of the art, the term autonomy is still used in a vague or too general way. This reduces the possibilities of a punctual analysis of such an important issue, thus leading to often polarized positions (naive optimism or unfounded defeatism). The intent of this paper is to clarify what is meant by artificial autonomy, and what are the prerequisites that can allow the attribution of this characteristic to a robotic system. Starting from some concrete examples, we will try to indicate a way towards artificial autonomy that can hold together the advantages of developing adaptive and versatile systems with the management of the inevitable problems that this technology poses both from the viewpoint of safety and ethics. Our proposal is that a real artificial autonomy, especially if expressed in the social context, can only be achieved through interdependence with other social actors (human and otherwise), through continuous exchanges and interactions which, while allowing robots to explore the environment, guarantee the emergence of shared practices, behaviors, and ethical principles, which otherwise could not be imposed with a top-down approach, if not at the price of giving up the same artificial autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of ICT in teaching and learning enables the paradigm shift for education system by creating a possibility for learner to learn anywhere and anytime through variety of communication system. To enhance effective learning for a large number of learners, online learning requires effective personalized learning method. For decades, recommendation system is responsible for providing personalized learning to the learners by considering several related learners information such as individual characteristic, learning style, and knowledge background. With context aware computing perspective, this paper thus proposes the context-aware recommendation system to promote effective personalized online learning for each learner individually. Instead of employing ordinary individual context, this paper focuses also on the social context which is the interaction between learning objects and the learners. The gathered social context is classified with K-nearest neighbor and decision tree for classifying appropriate types of learners. Consequently, the appropriate learning paths are recommended by using association rule. The empirical study is conducted with the learners having scientific and non-scientific backgrounds studying in two different content modules of basic computer skill course. The results show that the proposed social context-aware recommendation system is able to provide acceptable classification accuracies from both classifiers. Additionally, the proposed system is potentially able to recommend appropriate learning path to different group of learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students' achievement-related self-beliefs, as manifest in values, goal orientations, perceived efficacy, mindsets, and a sense of autonomy and self-determination, have been the centerpiece of motivation theories that describe learning and development. The premise of the current special issue is that these intrapersonal beliefs tell us only half the story. We argue that what is missing from much of the current work on motivation is recognition of the rich and nuanced characteristics of students' interpersonal relationships, learning contexts, and cultures and their attendant social processes, all of which can influence an individual student's motivation and engagement. We believe that unless the processes that explain how these influences take place are explicitly acknowledged and studied in greater depth and frequency, the field of motivation will not move forward in meaningful ways. Toward this end, we have invited authors in this special issue to highlight theoretical frameworks and targeted motivation constructs that inform these issues, describe specific social constructs and processes that might explain contextual influences, and propose new directions for motivation science that will integrate these social perspectives with more traditional intrapersonal models of motivation. Their papers focus on a range of social processes emanating from interpersonal contexts most central to children's lives, and they focus on ways in which these processes support (or undermine) students' motivation to learn. Additional topics include discussion of how characteristics of these relationships intersect with and are shaped by the broader social contexts in which they are embedded, such as socially engineered learning structures and culturally based ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of multiple goals has been advanced through the lines of research that focus on their pursuit of academic achievement goals and of academic and social goals. These prior efforts, however, are not free from conceptual and methodological limitations. To further advance the field, we put this paper together with two purposes in mind. First, we propose a goal complex model as a new approach to studying the coordination, consequences, and social contexts of pursuing multiple goals. In doing so, we highlight the role of academic goals as the means towards pursuing social goals as the end goals. Second, we proffer a model that explains sociocultural influences on the development of social and academic goals as well as goal complexes. To this end, we highlight the role of parents, teachers, and classmates/peers in promoting students' social and academic goals and in facilitating the formation of goal complexes through these key social agents' influences on the students' goal-related beliefs. Conceptual implications and methodological recommendations for future research on students' multiple goals are discussed. Together, the goal complex approach and the sociocultural model we present in this paper provide the field with directions for future research that seeks to better understand students' pursuit of multiple goals as they navigate complex sociocultural demands in their day-to-day tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The role played by language in our cognitive lives is a topic at the centre of contemporary debates in cognitive (neuro)science. In this paper we illustrate and compare two theories that offer embodied explanations of this role: the WAT (words as social tools) and the LENS (language is an embodied neuroenhancement and scaffold) theories. WAT and LENS differ from other current proposals, because they connect the impact of the neurologically realized language system on our cognition to the ways in which language shapes our interaction with the physical and social environment. Examining these theories together, their tenets and supporting evidence, sharpens our understanding of each, but also contributes to a better understanding of the contribution that language might make to the acquisition, representation and use of abstract concepts. Here we focus on how language provides a source of inner grounding, especially metacognition and inner speech, and supports the flexibility of our thought. Overall, the paper outlines a promising research program focused on the importance of language to abstract concepts within the context of a flexible, multimodal, and multilevel conception of embodied cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the insights of scholarship highlighting specific aspects of the forming of place meanings and experiences during running (events), this paper aims at applying a more holistic perspective on how meanings attached to and experiences of place by local runners are shaped through both individual and collective sense-making. Conceptually, the paper combines (post-)phenomenological and symbolic interactionist approaches. Empirically, the paper focuses on the Dutch city of Rotterdam and draws on extensive fieldwork conducted at the 2018 edition of the NN Marathon Rotterdam, and two smaller scale, non-commercially oriented running events organized by a local running club in 2017. Based on this qualitative research, the paper demonstrates that individual local runners' understandings and embodied experience of the physical and social environment is always situated in, and interwoven with, broader social meanings and instances of shared embodiment. At the same time, the paper reflects on the methodological challenges faced by research on running (events) and calls for a more explicit acknowledgement of the multiple character of the running world(s) studied, and of the trade-offs between the different research techniques applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many decentralised systems can be represented as graphs, and the detection of their community structure can uncover important properties. Several community detection algorithms have been proposed, however, only a few solutions are suitable for detecting and managing communities in a distributed and highly dynamic environment. This lacking is mainly due to the difficulty of defining self-organising solutions in the presence of a high rate of dynamism. The main contribution of this paper is DISCO, a distributed protocol for community detection and management in a Peer-to-Peer dynamic environment. Our approach is mainly targeted to Decentralised Online Social Networks (DOSNs), but it can be applied in other distributed scenarios. In the context of DOSNs, DISCO allows to discover communities in the local social network of a user, named ego network, and to manage their evolution over time. DISCO is based on a Temporal Trade-off approach and exploits a set of super-peers for the management of the communities. The paper presents an extensive evaluation of the proposed approach based on a dataset gathered from Facebook and shows the ability of DISCO to orchestrate a set of nodes to detect and manage communities in a highly dynamic and decentralised environment. The paper also proposes a comparison with a state of the art approach, showing that it is capable of reducing the number of critical community lifecycle events by over 25%, and reducing the average loading factor by up to 50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The determinants of health are influenced by genetics, lifestyle, social environment, medical conditions, etc. As an informal system, social capital plays an increasingly recognized role in individual health. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the direct and indirect effects of social capital on individual health in China. Using cross-sectional data from the China Family Panel Studies 2016, this paper explores the effects of cognitive and structural social capital on individual health from a micro perspective. The results show that both types of social capital have significant positive effects on individual health, and this effect remains after endogeneity is considered. The two types of social capital show obvious heterogeneity in age samples, urban and rural samples and north–south samples. In addition, the mechanism analysis shows that the health promotion effects of the two types of social capital are mainly derived from the effects of informal finance and access to medical resources. Based on the above findings, this paper puts forward policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem health (EH) is important for ensuring sustainable development, and the main goal of environmental protection and governance, especially for ecological fragile areas. Scientific assessment of EH can improve decision-making ability and inform sustainable development. In this paper, the effects of natural and social environment were integrated to reflect the characteristics of EH based on a comprehensive assessment system including ecosystem vigor (EV), ecosystem organization (EO), ecosystem resilience (ER), and the ratio of supply to demand of ecosystem services (ESDR) from the perspectives of ecological integrity and human demand for ecosystem services (ES). The Entire-Array-Polygon (EAP) method was applied to calculate an ecosystem health index (EHI) and analyze spatio-temporal change from 2000 to 2020 in Hexi Corridor (HC), Northwest China. The results showed that: (1) The spatial distribution of EV, EO, ER, and ESDR was generally consistent, with a low spatial distribution in the northwest and high in the southeast, the values showed an overall increasing trend from 2000 to 2020. (2) The spatial distribution of EHI was high in the northwest and central regions, and low in the southwest, reflected a moderate health level. The proportion of area with well and relatively well health was increasing, which indicated that EH showed an improving trend. (3) The significantly decrease areas of EHI were mainly located in urban areas, and the increases areas were mainly located outside of urban areas. The distribution of the EH condition has obvious orientation characteristics. The results of the study provide theoretical and practical implications for regional ecological conservation and management. Highlights: The ratio of supply and demand of ecosystem services was included in the ecosystem health evaluation. The Entire-Array-Polygon (EAP) method was used to calculate the ecosystem health index and analyze its spatial and temporal variation characteristics. The ecosystem vigor (EV), ecosystem organization (EO), ecosystem resilience (ER), and the ratio of supply and demand of ecosystem services (ESDR) were considered to construct evaluation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ethics in publishing has been increasingly debated, there seems to be a lack of a theoretical framework for making sense of existing rules of behavior as well as for designing, managing and enforcing such rules. This letter argues that systems-oriented disciplines, such as complexity science and human factors, offer insights into new ways of dealing with ethics in publishing. Some examples of insights are presented. Also, a call is made for empirical studies that unveil the context and details of both retracted papers and the process of writing and publishing academic papers. This is expected to shed light on the complexity of the publication system as well as to support the development of a just culture, in which all participants are accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence for the following novel insights: (1) People's economic decisions depend on their psychological motives, which are shaped predictably by the social context. (2) In particular, the social context influences people's other-regarding preferences, their beliefs and their perceptions. (3) The influence of the social context on psychological motives can be measured experimentally by priming two antagonistic motives—care and anger—in one player towards another by means of an observance or a violation of a fairness norm. Using a mediation approach, we find that the care motive leads to higher levels of cooperation which are driven by more optimistic beliefs, a different perception of the game as well as by a shift towards more pro-social preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next location recommendation aims to mine users' historical trajectories to predict their potentially preferred locations in the next moment. Although previous studies have explored the idea of incorporating location or social contextual information for recommendation, they still suffer from several major limitations: (1) not fully considering the semantic associations between locations, (2) not considering the heterogeneity in preferences of socially linked users, (3) not fully utilizing contextual information from distinctive sources to further improve the recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-context-based next location recommendation model that incorporates location context, trajectory context, and social context to obtain comprehensive users' preferences while allowing for interactions between contexts. Specifically, we first develop an efficient method combining both high-order location graphs and location semantic graphs to characterize subtle associations between locations. Then we explore the social contextual information and introduce the location subgraph which considers heterogeneous preferences among friends. Finally, we use the LSTM and geo-dilated LSTM to capture the spatio-temporal associations between users' trajectories and integrate various contextual information to improve model performance. Extensive experiments on three real datasets show that our model has superior results in the next location recommendation task over other baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic legitimacy is often grounded in proceduralist terms, referring to the ideal of political equality that should be mirrored by fair procedures of decision-making. The paper argues (§1) that the normative commitments embedded in a non-minimalist account of procedural legitimacy are well expressed by the ideal of co-authorship. Against this background, the main goal of the paper is to argue that structural forms of epistemic injustice are detrimental to the overall legitimacy of democratic systems. In §2 I analyse Young's notion of political powerlessness and claim that in structurally unjust social contexts members of powerless groups often are not properly acknowledged as functioning members of the polity, hence being jeopardized in their ability to develop part of their personal identity. In §III, I define gerrymandering as an example of political disempowerment that involves an epistemic harm for oppressed citizens, namely, to be prejudicially excluded from the community of epistemic trust. My thesis is that being epistemically disempowered has a negative impact on the way in which citizens understand themselves as political actors, since they suffer a lack of social recognition that may impede a proper development of their reflexive agency. In §IV, I discuss the proposal of granting epistemic privilege to members of oppressed groups, given their specific experience of social injustices. I introduce two concerns about this proposal, one morally grounded and one pragmatically oriented. Finally, in §V, I briefly sketch some institutional remedies that can be employed in order to politically fight systemic forms of epistemic injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People seeking asylum are at an increased risk of mental disorder compared to refugees and other migrants. This paper aims to understand the impact of postmigration social–environmental factors to help inform efforts to reduce rates of mental disorder. We conducted a systematic review searching 11 databases, as well as 6 government and nongovernment websites. We asked 5 experts for recommendations, and carried out forwards and backwards citation tracking. From 7004 papers 21 were eligible and had the appropriate data. Narrative synthesis was conducted. 24 Social–environmental factors were identified and categorised into 7 themes: working conditions, social networks, economic class, living conditions, healthcare, community and identity, and the immigration system. Evidence suggests that discrimination and post-migration stress are associated with increased rates of mental disorder. The post-migration environment influences the mental health of people seeking asylum. Discrimination and post-migration stress are key factors, warranting further research and public attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematicians' use of external representations, such as symbols and diagrams, constitutes an important focal point in current philosophical attempts to understand mathematical practice. In this paper, we add to this understanding by presenting and analyzing how research mathematicians use and interact with external representations. The empirical basis of the article consists of a qualitative interview study we conducted with active research mathematicians. In our analysis of the empirical material, we primarily used the empirically based frameworks provided by distributed cognition and cognitive semantics as well as the broader theory of cognitive integration as an analytical lens. We conclude that research mathematicians engage in generative feedback loops with material representations, that they use representations to facilitate the use of experiences of handling the physical world as a resource in mathematical work, and that their use of representations is socially sanctioned and enabled. These results verify the validity of the cognitive frameworks used as the basis for our analysis, but also show the need for augmentation and revision. Especially, we conclude that the social and cultural context cannot be excluded from cognitive analysis of mathematicians' use of external representations. Rather, representations are socially sanctioned and enabled in an enculturation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China, known as the largest carbon emitter and the second largest economy worldwide, has continued to put effort into the understandings of the main drivers of carbon emission and their decoupling statuses from its economic growth. Considering the significant differences of natural and social environments in different regions of China, this paper presents a regional-scale decomposition of energy-related carbon emission and its decoupling from economic growth by using the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) and the Tapio decoupling method. The decoupling results indicate that carbon emissions in all regions show a stable decoupling trend from their economic development, which means that China is now on the right road for achieving a low-carbon economy. However, the decoupling status by the end of 2016 also indicates that most of the regions are still in the states of expansive coupling or weak decoupling, especially in Northwest (NW), which implies that the speed of decarbonization process is still not high enough. The decomposition results show that in all regions except NW, GDP per capita is the most influential factor leading to increasing carbon emissions, while energy intensity is the largest factor in reducing carbon emissions. In NW, both GDP per capita and energy intensity drive the increase in carbon emissions. The results in this paper could benefit China's regional policy-making and national strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current "AI Summer" is marked by scientific breakthroughs and economic successes in the fields of research, development, and application of systems with artificial intelligence. But, aside from the great hopes and promises associated with artificial intelligence, there are a number of challenges, shortcomings and even limitations of the technology. For one, these challenges arise from methodological and epistemological misconceptions about the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Secondly, they result from restrictions of the social context in which the development of applications of machine learning is embedded. And third, they are a consequence of current technical limitations in the development and use of artificial intelligence. The paper intends to provide an overview of current challenges which the research and development of applications in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning have to face, whereas all three mentioned areas are to be further explored in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there seems to be an agreement on what slurs are, many authors diverge when it comes to classify some words as such. Hence, many debates would benefit from a technical definition of this term that would allow scholars to clearly distinguish what counts as a slur and what not. Although the paper offers different definitions of the term in order to allow the reader to choose her favorite, I claim that 'slurs' is the name given to a grammatical category, and I consequently trace a difference in kind between slurs and other kinds of group pejoratives. I rely on a novel approach to slurs that characterizes them based on their membership to a particular kind of register category, an often neglected sociolinguistic notion determining the social contexts in which registered terms are expected, tolerated or unacceptable. The paper also points out to the close link between words registered as [+derogatory] (slurs) and their usage in the context of dominance relations of different kinds between users and recipients of slurs. By pointing out to this link I hope to underscore the political significance of slur usage, as well as to contribute further to the explanation why slurs are so damaging and unacceptable in most social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of housing management has often been contested between two main orientations, business-like (i.e. economic efficiency) and social welfare (i.e. social support), reflecting the dual identity of social housing providers, as both private enterprises and welfare promoters. Research shows that housing management is particularly susceptible to transformations in the broader social housing sector. Considering the last two decades, the demand for social housing has increased across Western Europe, involving different social categories, e.g. low-middle income and, more recently, asylum seekers. On the supply side, housing providers have become keener to involve residents in delivering and managing housing-related services. This paper explores how innovative management strategies are emerging in the context of broader changes in social rented sectors and welfare policies in countries characterised by different typologies of housing systems, Italy and the Netherlands. By means of case studies and semi-structured interviews, this paper scrutinizes specific management approaches, i.e. Integrated Social Management and self-management, in two recent social housing projects in Milan and Amsterdam, which target socially mixed tenants, i.e. status-holders, low-income and young locals. Despite several differences, management approaches in both cases aim to increase tenants' responsibilisation but with different focus: towards the community, i.e. social integration of vulnerable tenants in the housing project (Dutch case), and towards individual dwellings, i.e. boosting individuals' self-agency in relation to the maintenance of properties (Italian case). This paper discusses how distinct, and sometimes normative, premises underlying tenants participation in housing management shape specific relationships between residents and housing providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations that aim to encourage or mitigate social change frequently face strategic trade-offs between changing the behaviour of individuals or institutions. This paper provides a conceptual analysis of this trade-off and an initial case study on the grand challenge of industrial animal agriculture. The nascent movement attempting to address this global issue has so far heavily focused on changing individual consumption with central messages like 'go vegan' and tactics like handing out pro-vegetarian leaflets. This paper critiques that focus, proposing instead what we call an institutional approach that focuses on changing governments, firms, social norms, and the like, particularly through developing and commercializing new food technologies. This paper argues from a perspective of effective altruism, aiming to maximize positive impact, that an increased use of the institutional approach may help organizations more effectively achieve their ethical goals. There are some cost-effective uses for the individual approach, so it should not be abandoned entirely, but a significant reduction may be prudent, at least in this context, and further research is warranted on this trade-off in other social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing human activity-aware navigation with a cognitive architecture raises several difficulties integrating the components and orchestrating behaviors and skills to perform social tasks. In a real-world scenario, the navigation system should not only consider individuals like obstacles. It is necessary to offer particular and dynamic people representation to enhance the HRI experience. The robot's behaviors must be modified by humans, directly or indirectly. In this paper, we integrate our human representation framework in a cognitive architecture to allow that people who interact with the robot could modify its behavior, not only with the interaction but also with their culture or the social context. The human representation framework represents and distributes the proxemic zones' information in a standard way, through a cost map. We have evaluated the influence of the decision-making system in human-aware navigation and how a local planner may be decisive in this navigation. The material developed during this research can be found in a public repository (https://github.com/IntelligentRoboticsLabs/social%5fnavigation2%5fWAF) and instructions to facilitate the reproducibility of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, there are millions of smart devices connected to the Internet. The purpose of these devices is to make people's lives easier. Thanks to the collaboration among them, the possibilities that the Internet of Things brings can grow exponentially. However, many manufacturers develop closed protocols and devices to protect their market share, limiting in many ways this collaboration. This paper presents a conceptual architecture that improves the proactive collaboration between IoT devices regardless of the protocols developed by their manufacturers. This architecture aims to identify entities in smart environments, describe their features and interfaces, and identify strategies fostering their collaborations. As a result, devices from different manufacturers can communicate to create a collaborative environment in a simple, efficient, and affordable way. This architecture has been evaluated in a real and a simulated environment, to validate its feasibility and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If transdisciplinary sustainability research is to contribute to sustainability transitions, issues of power dynamics need to be understood and accounted for. However, examples of concrete methods that put this into practice are sparse. This paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework that develops a better understanding of the power phenomenon, while providing actionable knowledge. By focussing on the context of social innovation in energy transitions, we demonstrate how different theoretical conceptualisations of power can be translated into a collaborative, transdisciplinary research design. In a facilitated process, researchers, policy workers and practitioners from diverse social innovation fields developed and tested the Transformative Power Lab approach and co-wrote a 'Power Guide' as a strategic exploration of power dynamics in sustainability transitions, specifically regarding social innovation in energy transitions. Based on the insights that emerged during this process, we discuss how transdisciplinary and action-oriented approaches in sustainability transition studies might benefit from this approach and, potentially, develop it further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a persistence puzzle involving two sports clubs with a somewhat intertwined history. As one might assume, the implications of the puzzle go far beyond a mere plea for a precise metaphysical analysis of certain perplexing quandaries regarding sports clubs and represents a challenge for our everyday understanding of social groups. To overcome the supposed impediment to the puzzle, as a starting point, I will accept the assumption that these entities are both social groups and abstract artifacts and will further argue that they are temporal abstract objects. Since temporal objects are in time, it will be determined that the cause of the conundrum is the seeming inability to correctly account for the I-relation between the temporal parts, and I will elaborate on why such an explanation is required. Ultimately, I'll introduce the notion of I-shifting, which will explain how temporal abstract objects persist through time and consequently solve the puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of social quality has garnered increasing attention as a composite indicator of the well-being of societies as well as individuals embedded within them. Prior research suggests four domains of social quality: socio-economic security, social cohesion, social inclusion, and social empowerment, based on the assumption that these domains influence health and well-being. In this paper, we investigate whether and to what extent social quality environments defined with reference to the cross-cutting social quality domains reliably predict various types of health, using data collected in a municipality in Switzerland as part of a participatory action research project. We found that social inclusion had the highest predictive power for mental health and functional health, while economic security had the highest predictive power for physical capacity and overall self-rated health. Results indicate interaction among various domains of social quality for a subset of health measures. Findings suggest that environments defined as combinations of social quality domains effectively distinguish between population segments with varying levels of health. Social quality represents a promising avenue for policy and intervention development, particularly from the social determinants of health perspective, as it jointly captures the multiple domains of social well-being relevant to population health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-life social interactions occur in continuous time and are driven by complex mechanisms. Each interaction is not only affected by the characteristics of individuals or the environmental context but also by the history of interactions. The relational event framework provides a flexible approach to studying the mechanisms that drive how a sequence of social interactions evolves over time. This paper presents an introduction of this new statistical framework and two of its extensions for psychological researchers. The relational event framework is illustrated with an exemplary study on social interactions between freshmen students at the start of their new studies. We show how the framework can be used to study: (a) which predictors are important drivers of social interactions between freshmen students who start interacting at zero acquaintance; (b) how the effects of predictors change over time as acquaintance increases; and (c) the dynamics between the different settings in which students interact. Findings show that patterns of interaction developed early in the freshmen student network and remained relatively stable over time. Furthermore, clusters of interacting students formed quickly, and predominantly within a specific setting for interaction. Extraversion predicted rates of social interaction, and this effect was particularly pronounced on the weekends. These results illustrate how the relational event framework and its extensions can lead to new insights on social interactions and how they are affected both by the interacting individuals and the dynamic social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]