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Relating electoral laws to electoral integrity has long been a focus of academic research. Using the strategic-relational approach, as outlined in this special issue, it is possible to better understand how electoral laws shape the voter experience and electoral outcomes. This paper contributes to this understanding by looking at Voter Identification (ID) laws. With no consolidated dataset of voter ID laws existing outside the U.S.A. it is difficult to answer research questions put forward in this special issue, especially the second. This paper begins to address this shortfall by presenting the Comparative Voter ID Law (CVIL) index. Which has collected data on 246 individual electoral jurisdictions. Data presented show how voter ID laws are distributed globally, regionally, by regime type and level of democracy. The second part of the analysis goes on to describe voter ID laws by whether a jurisdiction has compulsory ID laws, how many different types of ID are accepted and the minimum number of ID documents that must be shown. Thirdly, other variables within the dataset are described. The CVIL will provide opportunities to understand how Voter ID laws are part of institutional design, are used by actors, shape the voter experience and electoral out-comes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how Generative AI intersects with Competition Law, focusing on Foundation Models (FMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). It examines industry dynamics and identifies key competition issues like entry barriers, tying, leveraging, and acquisitions. It highlights the supply chain's importance and looks at how FMs are integrated into search software, chatbots, and productivity tools, particularly noting entry barriers such as computing power and data collection. It suggests that FMs might require new approaches to market delineation, possibly creating a separate relevant market for data. The paper also discusses various cases pertaining to tying and leveraging and highlights the difficulty in proving tying due to the blurred lines between traditional search engines and AI chatbots. It illustrates how competition assessments for acquisitions may require changes due to data being a highly flexible commodity for the industry. The paper concludes by calling for increased scrutiny and regulation for the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport has undergone a data revolution. The unrelenting extraction of athlete data has become a topic of controversy and the focus of recent public campaigns and policy proposals. However, research and governance are lagging in addressing the full scope and complexity of sport's data ecosystem and the commercial assemblage involved in the generation and subsequent exploitation of athlete data. This paper examines the need to move beyond the current emphasis on the role and use of data as a product of situated surveillance practices in the sporting workplace to the capitalist orientation at the centre of a burgeoning data economy. In so doing, two interdependent theoretical concepts – surveillance culture and surveillance capitalism – are introduced as an analytical framework to shape future research, policy and debate aimed at understanding and protecting the rights of athletes in the light of their exposure to highly surveillant digital technologies used in the production of elite performance, and sport as a multi-mediated form of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New tools are being explored to provide collective and participatory means of governing data to promote the management of data in ways that benefit those from whom data is collected. This paper discusses whether data trusts are feasible structures in an African context by outlining specific considerations that should be prioritised in the development of bottom-up and collective models of data governance on the continent. Making use of international instruments, principles and established values like Ubuntu, the paper analyses the importance of collective decision-making through collective and participatory governance, women's empowerment, and capacity-building, and how the alignment of data trusts to African contexts could help balance historical power differentials, and emphasise heterogeneity as the starting point of all discussions in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has shed light on how data-driven food systems may entrench productivist and neo-productivist visions of 'feeding the world.' In this paper, we examine the narratives and institution-building practices of global development actors, asking: What stories do they tell about how data will transform food systems? Whose 'data' are legitimized and whose are overlooked? Our findings point to an emerging imaginary of data productivism—which constructs the making and accumulation of data as a socially intrinsic good. We examine the implications of data productivism for reconfiguring global capitalism, reproducing the modern-colonial order, and inciting social movements to anticipate its hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most secondary (high) schools in a broad range of jurisdictions internationally engage in various forms of high stakes, standardized assessment and related qualifications. In this paper, we interrogate how educational achievement regimes – especially via the reporting of curriculum and assessment ‘data’ – continue to mobilize particular gender norms. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of haunting we explore how such regimes impose and reinscribe stable and binary gendered patterning and create what Barad has named ‘entangled relationalities of inheritance’ [https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206,] despite young people (and many schools) moving towards greater recognition of non-binary genders. Drawing on assessment data from Aotearoa New Zealand, we look at both generalized reporting of educational achievement data along the lines of ‘male’ and ‘female’ and on reporting of a single (historically gendered) curriculum subject – health education. We argue that such systems are ‘haunted’ by stable gender categorizations and hierarchies and we ask what this means for the reporting of educational assessment data and the erasure of identities that don’t align with the binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors have used Block Chain technology for tie-line power transferred data in respect to trustworthy monitoring, non-tamper proof and traceability. Nepanagar–Dharni tie-line between MP Electricity Board and Maharashtra Electricity Board is considered. Also, an example of a solar power plant connected to the grid and a consumer is considered to show the security concern using Block Chain Technology. The intrinsic features of decentralized block chain technology enable the grid owner, utility and consumer to maintain the privacy and security of the data set and Image sharing of tie-line power transferred data and Image. The smart contract can register and authorize the grid corporation authority to access the tie-line power transferred during the period and make payments to the concern in compliance with the regulatory and involved parties' consent policy. Security's role as a trust model is used to sort out the discrepancy in the exchange for power monitored by the phase measurement unit. Distributed and scalable data models based on the block chain are implemented using a heterogeneous set of MYSQL database management systems, hosted on the AWS cloud. If the power is transferred to a tie line connected to the Railway traction system, the data and Image of the train and its status can be secured with block chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an intriguing topic in a mathematical modelling course where Lanchester models are taught to our students. Lanchester models are some of the earliest and most important models used for combat modelling. We describe modelling activities and the use of technology that can be implemented in teaching this topic in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a hauntological frame, this article investigates how the ghosts of colonial pasts are re-emerging in India's national universal biometric identity system, Aadhaar, and a software infrastructure built on top of it, India Stack. It shows how Aadhaar and India Stack facilitate the extraction of data as a form of 'data colonialism.' Examining data colonialism through an enquiry of how the multifarious and unstable relations of colonialism are bound up with the extractive processes of digital data, the article uses a historical approach considering the shifting trajectories of identity ecologies in India to see what is dispossessed through Aadhaar and India Stack. In doing so it continues a trend in spectral writing – forcing an intervention between colonial pasts and presents. Detailing a specific chronology of events, the article reveals how 'data relations' have been co-produced by the Indian state and corporate fintech bodies over the last decade to coerce populations into a 'digital financialisation.' Using the metaphor of 'structural-shape-shifting', it shows how colonial relations continue within data relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is expected that public policy should be based on evidence rather than on any ideology, or any pre-decided goal. Public policymaking should ideally be 'evidence-based.' Data and information constitute evidence. Data needs to be processed and analysed to be used as evidence. To process and analyse data, we need data literacy. The Covid-19 crisis revealed the importance of data and data literacy for sound policy decisions. In the post-pandemic world, data literacy will be an essential skill for policymakers and civil servants. Data literacy should be an essential part of the relevant undergraduate and post-graduate degree curriculums, but also of the in-service training programmes for civil servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transformation of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) is being hailed as a panacea for the sectors' problems, with major actors in government and business promoting it as a benevolent harbinger of greater efficiency, productivity, better quality, and environmental performance. However, advancing digitalization in AEC is intertwined with a distinct political-economic logic that involves new constraints, dependencies, and a reconfiguration of power relations. Specifically, Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a digital convergence of three-dimensional building models, databases, and interfaces for multidisciplinary collaboration operates as a runway technology for digitalization and an entry point for platformization impelled by global software giants, such as this article's empirical case of software company Autodesk and its BIM product portfolio shows. BIM's linkage of governmental policy strategies with the techno-economic platform logic of software subscription models, open application programming interfaces, and cloud-enabled collaboration ensures management and control of construction data and software interoperability. At the same time, BIM's techno-economic and political configuration facilitates a near-monopolistic structure in the global architecture and construction software market. It thus grants one hegemonic company immense power to define what formats, standards, and data for building models and design processes are being used in creating the built environment. The expansive, intersecting logics of assetization, platformization, and datafication have been taking hold in the AEC sector, raising questions about their stratifying effects in the built environment and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schooling in Australia has become subject to increased processes of data-based governance. This article draws upon the insights of an experienced teacher, 'Meriam', who, having taught more than 34-years over almost a 50-year span, reflected upon the nature of such changes. Utilising theorising in relation to datafication processes and accountability logics, the article elaborates Meriam's efforts to engage productively with increased attention to measuring and monitoring students' performance via various modes of data. This is in the context of increased pressure in the state of Queensland to justify teachers' practices, and to show how their students' learning had shown improvement on these data over short periods of time. In this sense, the article challenges a more post-performative conception of professionalism as Meriam struggled to comprehend how the increased attention to a plethora of data could serve as a useful vehicle to inform teachers' work and learning; this was the case even as she found some benefits in increased attention to her own practice and learning. The article delineates the constraints associated with increased attention to data, and how current managerial and neoliberal policy conditions in schools may contribute to potentially significant and harmful effects for both teacher and student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from seven R1 and R2 universities in Ohio, this study seeks to determine the extent of usage of full-text e-journal articles stored across multiple platforms. Specifically, COUNTER 5 data is presented from five major academic journal publishers (Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Oxford, Wiley, and Springer), looking at usage within each of the publishers' respective platforms, as well as in EBSCO, JSTOR, and OhioLINK's Electronic Journal Center platform. The overarching goal of the analysis is to identify where exactly usage occurred for this e-journal content within the different platforms, especially in cases where an individual title has duplicate full-text access. Analysis of this data was conducted using Tableau and Excel. Findings raise significant questions about end-user behavior in terms of students' and faculty's ability to locate full text, regardless of whether it is discoverable from Google or other commercial search engines. The findings also suggest a strong connection between EBSCO usage and the academic calendar, with peak usage (as a percentage of overall usage) occurring in October, November, March, and April. Lastly, findings for Taylor & Francis e-journals within EBSCO call into question what these duplicate holdings mean for "big deal" subscription packages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A standard element of the undergraduate ordinary differential equations course is the topic of separable equations. For instructors of those courses, we present here a series of novel modeling scenarios that prove to be a compelling motivation for the utility of differential equations. Furthermore, the growing complexity of the models leads to the development of various types of separable equations. Finally, survey data of the student experience of modeling indicates a general appreciation for modeling tasks such as this and a positive indication of their educational value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]