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In queueing systems where queues are invisible, it is critical for companies to make decisions about the timing of announcing the anticipated delay to customers. In this paper, a simulation model is built to simulate an invisible queueing system, and several queueing scenarios are considered, including different system congestion and different company goals, to explore the impact of different announcement timings. In the modeling of customer behavior, we argue that it is difficult for companies to announce perfectly accurate delay and rarely have customers fully trust the announcement, so the quantal-response model is included to model customers' probabilistic choice behavior due to the bounded rationality. Meanwhile, we consider customer heterogeneity, assign customers different initial patience and, as an extension, also assume that patience will be updated. We perform simulation experiments and analyze the experimental data to dissect the underlying reasons, and then give sound management suggestions. The experiments show that the optimal announcement timing is different for different scenarios, which shows that in practical decisions, companies should adopt different announcement strategies for different scenarios. What's more, in some scenarios, delayed announcement at specific time is better than on-arrival announcement, which suggests that when we judge the value of announcement, we should add the definite word of specific timing to the announcement. The breakthrough point of this paper is to consider customers' bounded rationality and the dynamic patience; meanwhile, it fills the gap of announcement timing research and explores the value of additional announcements after the initial announcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article analyses local contestation of data centres in the Dutch province of North Holland. I explore why and how local councillors and citizen groups mobilized against data centres and demanded democratization of decision-making processes about digital infrastructure. This analysis is used as a vantage point to problematize existing policy and academic narratives on digital sovereignty in Europe. I show, first, that most debates on digital sovereignty so far have overlooked the sub-national level, which is especially relevant for decision making on digital infrastructure. Second, I insist that what matters is not only where digital sovereignty lies, that is, who has the power to decide over digital infrastructural projects: for example, corporations, states, regions, or municipalities. What matters is also how power is exercised. Emphasizing the popular democratic dimension of sovereignty, I argue for a comprehensive democratization of digital sovereignty policies. Democratization in this context is conceived as a multimodal multi-level process, including parliaments, civil society and citizens at the national, regional and local levels alike. The shape of the cloud should be citizens' to decide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use Sen's capability approach to identify factors able to increase the effective freedom of working parents when deciding the length of their parental leave. We conducted a factorial survey experiment (FSE) with a Spanish sample of employees aged between 25 and 45. Respondents were asked to imagine that they were first-time parents and several descriptions of hypothetical situations or vignettes (where aspects of the leave system, workplace and family environment were randomly varied) were presented to them. Our goal was to identify the causal effect of a number of dimensions on their hypothetical decisions about the total number of weeks they would be on parental leave. A longer statutory duration and a higher replacement rate (of the paid part of the leave), having job security, and a workplace with friendly practices and cultures, were found to have a significant positive impact on the duration of parental leave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The buzzword "smart borders" captures the latest instantiation of media technologies constituting state bordering. This article traces historical techniques of knowledge-production and decision-making at the border, in the case of Ellis Island immigration station, New York City (1892–1954). State bordering has long been enabled by media technologies, engulfed with imaginaries of neutral, unambiguous, efficient sorting between desired and undesired migrants—promises central to today's "smart border" projects. Specifically, the use of "proxies" for decision-making is traced historically, for example, biometric or biographic data, collected as seemingly authentic and neutral stand-ins for the migrant. Techniques of selecting, storing, and correlating proxies through media technologies demonstrate how public health anxieties, eugenics, and scientific technocracy of the Progressive Era formed the context of proxies being entrusted to enable decision-making. This pre-digital history of automation reveals how the logics and politics of proxification endure in contemporary border regimes and automated media at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managerial bias is a major source of workplace inequality and a central target of employer diversity efforts, yet we know little about the content of stereotypes and where they prevail. Stereotypes can be ambivalent, mixing negative and positive dimensions. Ambivalent stereotypes can rationalize discriminatory decision-making but they may also be more amenable to change. This article examines the prevalence of wholly negative and ambivalent age-based stereotypes across organizational contexts. Data on 551 managers reveals, first, that the modal manager holds ambivalent stereotypes about older workers, with positive perceptions of their personal attributes and negative perceptions regarding their employability. Second, both negative and ambivalent stereotypes are common in the presence of a labour union. Their prevalence declines, however, in different contexts: ambivalent stereotypes decline with increased intergroup contact and negative stereotypes decline when accountability triggers are implmented. Implications for research on work, organizations, older workers, and diversity management are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to present and discuss the results of a systematic literature review on workers buyout (WBO) cooperatives. More specifically the authors analyzed 44 documents, comprising 29 journal articles and 15 book chapters published up to December 2022 based on the '5Ws and 1H' (who-what-where-when-why and how) questions. The findings show that the authors of these documents mostly focused on the definition of cooperatives, and the triggers of the operation, while stages of the decision-making and implementation process are rarely investigated, in particular those following the constitution of the WBO cooperative. Avenues for further research are then presented and discussed at the level of a single cooperative, country/market and policy maker. Lastly, the article provides a useful operational reference for implementing a WBO operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work aspires to empowerment ideals, including taking a 'non-expert' position of professional curiosity, and validating the perspectives of people in contact with services. Yet in child protection, social workers are involved in practice that refutes the views and opinions of people and are positioned by their role as an identifier of abuse and risk manager. Social workers and people who are subject to child protection services can be locked into meaning battles regarding the effect of parental behaviour and the representation of risks to children. These negotiations over meanings are especially difficult in the pre and perinatal period, where who controls the representation of the baby's voice or best interests is fundamental to decision outcomes. Using Fricker's concept of 'testimonial injustice' as an analytical lens, this article draws on studies in two different contexts: Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland, to examine the implications of the intense mediation of meanings that affect child protection practice. We find that concepts relating to the importance of mothering, love for children, and extended family relationships were sources of mother's disagreements with professional views of risk, but that through qualified agreement or advocacy from community workers, a shared risk narrative could be constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores employer perspectives on the extension of behavioural conditionality to working social security claimants ('in-work conditionality'). As policymakers across Europe and other developed nations have pursued increasingly interventionist approaches to activating the unemployed through conditional welfare policies, the UK has gone a significant and 'unprecedented' step further by requiring those in receipt of in-work benefits to demonstrate their efforts to increase their working hours and/or pay. As the actors ultimately in control over the jobs people can access and progress in, understanding employer perspectives on this new policy development is critical, which, however, has so far been overlooked by policymakers and researchers. We address this omission through presenting original analysis of 84 semi-structured interviews conducted with a diverse group of employers. We find that while the UK's Work First approach to activation has seemingly encountered little resistance from employers to date, this new Work First, Work More approach may be a step too far. We contribute theoretically by identifying a potential role for employers as latent path disruptors in policy development, and challenge the commonly-held assumption that employers are typically supportive of extensions of behavioural conditionality to social security claimants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To move from a traditional end of pipe approach into a more sustainable solid waste management system, the Jordanian Government has recently passed a set of new regulations The National Solid Waste Management Strategy has put a road map to encourage circular economy practices. One of the considered policy instruments is the adoption of the extended producer responsibility (EPR). The current study aimed to adopt a multi-criteria decision-making method to select the most convenient EPR structure within the Jordanian context. The study used analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy AHP (FAHP) techniques to select the suitable type of producer responsibility organization (PRO) structure. A four-level hierarchy model was constructed with 4 criteria, 10 sub-criteria and 3 PRO alternatives. The analysis revealed that the legal and administrative criteria is the most important one (0.47) followed by environmental criteria (0.22), whereas the least important ones were socio-economic (0.17) and technical criteria (0.13). The most preferable PRO alternative was found to be PRO with profit. There were slight differences between all weight values under AHP and FAHP. Despite the availability of several laws, there is a need to develop the legal and administrative framework to enable the adoption of EPR in Jordan. Research should be the first step in the process of EPR system design. None of the previous studies conducted used the AHP and FAHP in assessing and selecting the EPR systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The messy politics of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by the confusion caused by the global (dis)infodemic, have propelled conspiracism from the fringes of society into the public mainstream. Despite the growing political impact of digitally enabled conspiracy theories, they are predominantly delegitimized on three fronts – as psychopathology, pseudoscience, and/or parapolitics. In contrast, this article employs three non-pathologizing conceptual counteroffers borrowed from critical theory, deconstructionist historiography, and citizenship studies – namely, cognitive mapping, narrative emplotment, and performative citizenship – to politicize conspiracy theorizing 'from below'. Using QAnon as a case-in-point, the article introduces two novel concepts that invite a sociological approach to conspiracism: first, the epistemic communities of the unreal, which designates the participatory, interactive, and decentralized nature of collaboratively creating unreal explanations of the real world; and second, grassroots conspiracism, which denotes the ways in which these bottom-up, horizontal, and collective meaning-making practices and knowledge-production processes are expanding spaces of and for politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The review explored how serious games are utilized for preventing adolescents' social exclusion. Four original articles were retrieved using six databases. The use of serious games to prevent adolescents' social exclusion was rare, but there are potential areas where serious games could be utilized. Serious games may be a promising new intervention to use in adolescents' social rehabilitation and social work, preventing social exclusion, reducing the risk of unemployment, lack of education and training. These early findings suggest using serious games as a part of adolescents' social work and social rehabilitation to prevent social exclusion among adolescents, along with other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a diffusion approximation method to the continuous-state Markov decision processes that can be utilized to address autonomous navigation and control in unstructured off-road environments. In contrast to most decision-theoretic planning frameworks that assume fully known state transition models, we design a method that eliminates such a strong assumption that is often extremely difficult to engineer in reality. We first take the second-order Taylor expansion of the value function. The Bellman optimality equation is then approximated by a partial differential equation, which only relies on the first and second moments of the transition model. By combining the kernel representation of the value function, we design an efficient policy iteration algorithm whose policy evaluation step can be represented as a linear system of equations characterized by a finite set of supporting states. We first validate the proposed method through extensive simulations in 2 D obstacle avoidance and 2.5 D terrain navigation problems. The results show that the proposed approach leads to a much superior performance over several baselines. We then develop a system that integrates our decision-making framework with onboard perception and conduct real-world experiments in both cluttered indoor and unstructured outdoor environments. The results from the physical systems further demonstrate the applicability of our method in challenging real-world environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning approaches are increasingly being used to make decisions in contested and dynamic environments, which tend to be wildly different from the environments used to train them. As such, there is a need for a more in-depth understanding of their resilience and robustness in conditions such as network partitions, node failures, or attacks. In this article, we propose a modeling and simulation framework that explores the resilience of four c-MARL models when faced with different types of attacks, and the impact that training with different perturbations has on the effectiveness of these attacks. We show that c-MARL approaches are highly vulnerable to perturbations of observation, action reward, and communication, showing more than 80% drop in the performance from the baseline. We also show that appropriate training with perturbations can dramatically improve performance in some cases, however, can also result in overfitting, making the models less resilient against other attacks. This is a first step toward a more in-depth understanding of the resilience c-MARL models and the effect that contested environments can have on their behavior and toward resilience of complex systems in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young adults are at high risk of experiencing economic abuse—a form of intimate partner violence (IPV)—and Chinese young adults in non-marital cohabitation are especially vulnerable. To reduce economic abuse, an important question to answer is: What factors are associated with economic abuse? After controlling for constructs (e.g., demographic information and other types of IPV) that were linked to economic abuse, we investigated how financial behaviors (i.e., individuals' money management capability) were associated with power (im)balance (i.e., whether individuals shared equal influence with the romantic partner) and, in turn, economic abuse among non-marital cohabitating Chinese young adults. We also investigated whether associations among financial behaviors, power (im)balance, and economic abuse varied across young adults' gender and SES. We used a Qualtrics survey to collect data from 445 non-marital cohabitating Chinese young adults (53.3% male vs. 46.7% female; 22.7% lower socioeconomic status [SES] vs. 77.3% higher-SES). A structural equation model was conducted to test the associations of research interests. We found that money management capability (e.g., spending within budget and tracking expenses) is associated with balanced power—the individual sharing equal influence with the partner in the decision-making process—and, in turn, less experience of being economically abused. These associations were statistically equivalent across gender and SES. Collectively, our findings suggested that promoting money management capability be a timely and new avenue for reducing economic abuse among Chinese young adults in non-marital cohabitation, possibly because this population faces common and severe economic abuse but generally lacks the opportunity to learn money management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extraneous neuroscience information improves ratings of scientific explanations, and affects mock juror decisions in many studies, but others have yielded little to no effect. To establish the magnitude of this effect, we conducted a random-effects meta-analysis using 60 experiments from 28 publications. We found a mild but highly significant effect, with substantial heterogeneity. Planned subgroup analyses revealed that within-subjects studies, where people can compare the same material with and without neuroscience, and those using text, have stronger effects than between-subjects designs, and studies using brain image stimuli. We serendipitously found that effect sizes were stronger on outcomes of evaluating satisfaction or metacomprehension, compared with jury verdicts or assessments of convincingness. In conclusion, there is more than one type of neuroscience explanations effect. Irrelevant neuroscience does have a seductive allure, especially on self-appraised satisfaction and understanding, and when presented as text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the indigenisation of social work gathering momentum, the lens of universalism and relativism can highlight some critical social justice concerns. Sociocultural beliefs around human rights and gender equality, reproductive health and traditional fostering, among others, pose unprecedented dilemmas for social workers in Africa and indigenous societies globally. Furthermore, the blind pursuit of indigenisation can reinforce discriminatory and oppressive beliefs and practices. To rectify this, developing ethical decision-making screens and additional research promoting indigenous cultural competency within the social justice goal of social work is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, an emerging discourse on various social media platforms has drawn attention to the enduring, yet unspoken, distress experienced by a considerable number of Chinese women who have utilized intrauterine devices (IUDs) for extended durations. Using corpus linguistics and thematic analysis, this article seeks to explore the use of metaphors in discussions about IUDs on Weibo and how the public makes sense of roles of spouses in the decision of using IUDs. The findings reveal three distinct metaphors about IUDs within multi-layered family and social relationships: a time bomb, a blood-stained wedding ring, and a lethal weapon. Furthermore, three metaphorical representations of the spousal roles in relation to the use of IUDs are identified: participants versus observers regarding contraception, perpetrators versus victims within societal frameworks, and the nurturing cornerstone of the family versus instrumental means for procreation. These metaphors, deeply rooted in war metaphors, not only reflect the oppressive forces imposed on women by state power, patriarchal society, and traditional beliefs but also function as a form of resistance against such forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]