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Background and Purpose: Little scholarly attention has been paid to variations in local welfare provisions and how they frame beneficiaries' welfare‐work trajectories. This is unfortunate since increasingly a varied menu of services is provided locally and welfare‐work trajectories unfold in a local context. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate by examining the welfare‐work trajectories among young social assistance recipients in Norwegian municipalities and how they are related to the local setting and in particular the organization of the local welfare office. Data and Methods: National registers provide longitudinal information on all young social assistance recipients (N = 4654) in 2012. Information on municipalities (N = 373) and the local labour and welfare offices (N = 399) is collected from official government sources. Welfare‐work trajectories spanning seven years are created by sequence analysis forming eight clusters. The relationship between organizational features of the labour and welfare office and trajectory clusters is modelled by means of multinomial logistic regression, after controlling for variables on the individual, the municipal, and the regional level. Results: The analysis shows that: (a) among the individual variables, those reflecting poor health consistently predict trajectories characterized by benefit receipt and loose attachment to the labour market; (b) variables related to the municipal level are of limited importance, and (c) variables pertaining to the organization of the labour and welfare offices play a minor role. Conclusion: Once individual, municipal, and regional labour market factors are considered, characteristics of the welfare office are of marginal significance. [Correction added on 17 September 2024, after first online publication: The Abstract and Keywords have been added in this version.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewilding is a conservation concept and practice which has gained traction over the past two decades, and is often perceived as a powerful tool to reverse anthropogenic ecological degradation. In the UK, Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS) have introduced the idea of 'public money for public goods', making some rewilding initiatives more viable for landholders. Many conservation organisations work with landholders to promote rewilding as part of local conservation strategies, but there remains a lack of understanding of landholder perceptions and attitudes towards rewilding. This research used semi-structured interviews based on the gaps identified in the literature to explore these aspects in a sample population of 8 landholders in Surrey, UK. Thematic analysis interpreted the importance of emergent patterns and implications in relation to existing literature. This research found that landholders associate many different meanings towards rewilding. These perceptions fall along two spectra, ranging from passive to active forms of rewilding and with different levels of impact on human activities. Landholder valuations of rewilding are profoundly influenced by their perceptions of its meaning, with more favourable attitudes expressed towards 'low-impact', active forms of rewilding. Concern was expressed about the need to balance rewilding goals with food security. This emphasises that understanding local views is essential to improve consideration of practical constraints, whilst helping to reduce polarisation and mistrust about rewilding. Conservation organisations should facilitate collaboration among landholders to kickstart the implementation of acceptable and context-specific forms of rewilding, playing a key role in achieving local and national nature recovery targets. Key policy highlights: Recognising and incorporating local perspectives, needs, and expertise into land management decision-making is crucial for positive relationships between practitioners and advocates of rewilding and thus scheme success. Encouraging dialogue and collaboration among landholders and local conservation organisations would foster joint rewilding efforts based on shared values and best practices, helping to prevent mistrust and unlock the ecosystem services associated with this conservation approach. Enhancing landholder awareness of funding sources, in collaboration with external organisations, provides an opportunity to implement rewilding whilst addressing economic constraints. Embracing the diverse nature of rewilding, adapting it to context, and including people in its implementation, are essential for effective delivery of rewilding actions by landholders and conservation organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local economic decline has been presented as an explanation for populism, political alienation and geographic polarisation. This approach risks underestimating the complexity of observing local economic decline. Using original survey questions in the British Election Study, we theorise five models to explain who is likely to perceive local economic decline, and why. Using linked objective data, we analyse the relationship of perceptions to existing economic indicators, finding correspondence but also substantial and systematic variation driven by partisanship and heuristics, such as declining personal circumstances. These findings suggest that researchers should not equate objectively measured decline with homogeneous or direct effects of the local economy on vote choice, populist leanings, and localised discontent. There is value in establishing how voters reason about economic decline to both explain their choices and the way they are likely to respond to remedial policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether divorcees feel less worse-off when divorce is more prevalent around them. The 2013 Life Satisfaction Survey in Türkiye, which has approximately 196,000 observations and province-level representative data, is utilized. We used three province-level indicators about the prevalence of divorce to measure the impact of the social context on divorcees' well-being. First, we replicate the previous findings that divorce is associated with lower happiness. Secondly, regardless of the measure used, living in a divorce-prevalent setting slightly mitigates the happiness disadvantage of divorcees. Thirdly, perceived social pressure plays a role in the lower happiness of divorcees regardless of the provincial divorce prevalence measures. Overall, the results show that the substantial psychological costs of divorce remain even after addressing the social dimensions of divorce with different measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing concerns of the impact of the Programmes for International Student Assessment (PISA) on education policymaking along with its global reach call for the need of evaluating PISA's impact on student learning. However, most extant studies focus on arguing its impact at the policy level, without taking a further look into it at the local and school levels. This paper empirically investigates the impact of PISA on student learning in schools in a local Chinese context, that is, the Fangshan District of Beijing, through engaging local stakeholders' perspectives. Based on the interviews with local educational policymakers and practitioners, the findings reveal that PISA has motivated substantive local policy initiatives aimed at improving student learning, which have been enacted in schools to varying degrees. In many of these initiatives, some PISA concepts were incorporated in different ways. We discuss PISA's impact on the local educational policy and propose a provisional mechanism of its impact on student learning in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies at the nexus of immigration, organizations, and migrant mobilizations find that the strategies that immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations (INOs) employ differ in cities with disparate levels of immigrant inclusion. Yet studies yield mixed results abound other shortcomings in the literature. This study draws from disparate literatures and theoretical frameworks to assemble an understanding on the interrelations between local context and strategies. I investigate the following questions: how does the level of citizenry inclusion impact the strategies employed by INOs, and do more inclusive cities facilitate or constrain contentious advocacy? I draw from a national sample of INOs to test the empirical relationship. The results have implications for political opportunity theory and future lines of research drawing from this framework. Research, nonprofit practice, and policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new scientific decade (2023-2032) of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) aims at searching for sustainable solutions to undesired water conditions – whether it be too little, too much or too polluted. Many of the current issues originate from global change, while solutions to problems must embrace local understanding and context. The decade will explore the current water crises by searching for actionable knowledge within three themes: global and local interactions, sustainable solutions and innovative cross-cutting methods. We capitalise on previous IAHS Scientific Decades shaping a trilogy; from Hydrological Predictions (PUB) to Change and Interdisciplinarity (Panta Rhei) to Solutions (HELPING). The vision is to solve fundamental water-related environmental and societal problems by engaging with other disciplines and local stakeholders. The decade endorses mutual learning and co-creation to progress towards UN sustainable development goals. Hence, HELPING is a vehicle for putting science in action, driven by scientists working on local hydrology in coordination with local, regional, and global processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we advocate for the incorporation of a novel pedagogical approach in educational practice to mitigate the effects of standardized and decontextualized neo-liberal curricula. Conscious knowledge of our physical surroundings ensures a collective sense of belonging, transfers learning through so-called imaginaries of proximity and promotes an arts education sensitive to daily life. This Creative Place-Based Education research incorporates place-based education studies with a creative approach inspired by the design of workshops for children. As artists and teachers in a teacher training faculty, our research primarily focuses on designing workshops and pedagogical materials, which emphasize the importance of incorporating ideas, methods, techniques and processes from the arts as fundamental tools for exploring, analysing and questioning our immediate reality. We exemplify this approach by analysing the proposal Inhabiting a Common Place, which was designed and carried out with different groups in primary and preschool education in L'Alcora, Valencian Community, Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Introduction: Local context is the most common concern regarding use of a single institutional review board (sIRB). Yet what “local context” constitutes remains underspecified. Developing a shared understanding of the goals of local context review, the categories of information that should be considered, as well as the types of studies for which sIRB review may be inappropriate, are critical for ensuring that sIRB review provides adequate protections for human subjects. Methods: We conducted a three-round modified Delphi process convening individuals with expertise in the conduct and oversight of multisite research. Delphi surveys explored: (1) the goals of local context review; (2) the types of information that should be considered; and (3) study types that should be exempted from sIRB requirements. Results: Twenty-one experts participated. Experts agreed that (1) local context review should aim to both protect local participants and ensure compliance and (2) that four types of information should be considered (population/participant-level characteristics; investigator and research team characteristics; institution-level characteristics; and state and local laws). There was less consensus about whether existing processes facilitated adequate consideration of this information. Experts agreed that exemptions from sIRB requirements should be permitted but disagreed about when and in what circumstances. Conclusion: There is overlapping consensus about both the goals of local context review and the types of information that should be assessed. Future work remains, however, to develop effective processes to best realize the goals of local context review – and do so with appropriate efficiency.

Vision-based sign language translation (SLT) targets to translate sign language videos into understandable natural language sentences. Current SLT methods ignore the utilization of contextual information in specific dialogue scenarios, which may lead to incorrect translations that do not match the dialogue content. Accordingly, this work proposes a novel framework for SLT in the question answering scenarios, called SLQA, which attempts to learn contextual knowledge from multimodal QA pairs between the hearing and the deaf to improve the model reasoning capabilities of SLT. The SLQA framework is composed of two main components: One is to integrate local context under the guidance of semantic relevance within the QA pair, and the other is to excavate the hierarchical memorized context from a three-layer memory hierarchy, i.e., scenario, dialogue and cue memory, by exploiting the logical dependency between QA pairs. To facilitate SLQA research, we further contribute the SLQA dataset with abundant natural language and sign language QA pairs. Extensive experimental results and analysis of our method are reported on SLQA and four public benchmark datasets. With the proposed SLQA framework, we obtain a substantial improvement over previous state-of-the-art SLT methods, showing about 13.2 improvements for BLEU-4 on the SLQA test set, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the issue of insufficient extraction of target features and the resulting impact on detection performance in long-range infrared aircraft target detection caused by small imaging area and weak radiation intensity starting from the idea of perceiving target context to enhance the features extracted by convolutional neural network, this paper proposes a detecting algorithm based on AWFGLC (adaptive weighted fusion of global–local context). Based on the mechanism of AWFGLC, the input feature map is randomly reorganized and partitioned along the channel dimension, resulting in two feature maps. One feature map is utilized by self-attention for global context modeling, establishing the correlation between target features and background features to highlight the salient features of the target, thereby enabling the detecting algorithm to better perceive the global features of the target. The other feature map is subjected to window partitioning, with max pooling and average pooling performed within each window to highlight the local features of the target. Subsequently, self-attention is applied to the pooled feature map for local context modeling, establishing the correlation between the target and its surrounding neighborhood, further enhancing the weaker parts of the target features, and enabling the detecting algorithm to better perceive the local features of the target. Based on the characteristics of the target, an adaptive weighted fusion strategy with learnable parameters is employed to aggregate the global context and local context feature maps. This results in a feature map containing more complete target information, enhancing the ability of the detection algorithm to distinguish between target and background. Finally, this paper integrates the mechanism of AWFGLC into YOLOv7 for the detection of infrared aircraft targets. The experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves mAP50 scores of 97.8% and 88.7% on self-made and publicly available infrared aircraft datasets, respectively. Moreover, the mAP50:95 scores reach 65.7% and 61.2%, respectively. These results outperform those of classical target detection algorithms, indicating the effective realization of infrared aircraft target detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Due to the highly globalized nature of communication and the increasing acknowledgement of the role of one’s social context in language learning, the intercultural dimension has increasingly been included in the EFL agenda. Nevertheless, the exploration of one’s own culture and local context still requires closer attention. Hence, this qualitative action-research study examines how ninth graders conceptualized their own culture and reflected upon their local cultural symbols and practices after the implementation of a pedagogic proposal based on an intercultural view of language teaching. Data were collected through surveys and class workshops. Thematic analysis was applied. Findings suggest that the students identified with Afro- Colombian culture and its symbolic representations. Furthermore, they discussed the meaning of Afro Culture and its diverse components. Similarly, some activities such as poster design, dancing performances, and oral presentations stood out as amongst the most useful to promote intercultural skills.

This research aims to explore the ethnoscience of the Terbang Gembrung percussion instrument of the indigenous community in Kampung Naga, Tasikmalaya, West Java, and its potential as a local context in physics education. The Terbang Gembrung percussion instrument of Kampung Naga employs an acoustic membrane of goat leather with an air column of albasia or manglid wood. The research methodology encompasses qualitative descriptive methods, including literature study and interviews, as well as observation methods involving the measurement of sound frequency generated using the Decibel X smartphone application under conditions where the instrument produces typical sound. The Terbang Gembrung tradition holds religious value and is commonly performed during significant celebrations such as Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, and other religious festivities. Based on the observation results, it was found that four types of percussion instruments produce sound frequencies at four harmonic levels according to the membrane size. The first harmonic has a frequency of approximately 199.0 Hz, the second harmonic around 211.5 Hz, the third harmonic approximately 231.5 Hz, and the fourth harmonic around 261.0 Hz. The design of the percussion instrument is in the form of a half-spherical cone, with the cross-sectional area decreasing from the membrane to the end of the air column. The potential application of science principles to the Terbang Gembrung percussion instrument makes it a cultural artifact that can serve as a local context in physics education at the high school level, focusing on the topics of sound waves, especially sound intensity and sound frequency.

Abstract Social sustainability is a key pillar of sustainable development that usually receives less focus and emphasis when compared to other environmental or economic aspects. This entails the need to address this gap, should the concept of urban sustainability be comprehensively tackled. Despite such importance, social sustainability is considered a relatively difficult pillar to measure, considering its entanglements with the concerned individuals, communities, and stakeholders. This study aimed to identify the key barriers to achieving social sustainability in the context of Jordan. It relied on the opinions of three groups of experts, including academics, practitioners, and end users to reach a comprehensive account of understanding such barriers within a multi-faceted approach. The methodology relied on the Delphi technique by identifying areas of consensus and variance in provided opinions. The Kruskal–Wallis test was then applied to identify the inter-group differences and explore the key causes for such differences. The study concluded by developing a comprehensive framework of identified barriers weighed according to their relative importance considering the provided cumulative feedback. In so doing, it represents a step towards a comprehensive model that would assist in understanding, and later enabling, the successful achievement of social sustainability in the studied local context.

Innovation networks help to create innovation ecosystems by strengthen interactions between government, academia, business, and special institutions. The purpose of the article is to identify the relationship between the local context, i.e., the conditions and environment in which the Local Government Unit operates and their participation in the innovation networks. The analysis is based on a survey of 184 local government authorities in Poland, Local Administrative Unit level 2. The present study examines the hypothesis that the more supportive the local context is in the Polish municipalities and cities on district rights, the greater the engagement of local government authorities in local or regional innovation networks. The supportive local context was defined by a set of institutional, economic, geographical, demographic, cultural, political, managerial, and administrative factors. The research findings indicate that the key factors that influence the engagement of local government in local or regional innovation networks are institutional factors.

In 2020, Arizonans approved Proposition 207, the Smart and Safe Arizona Act, which legalized recreational marijuana sales. Previous research has typically used non‐spatial survey data to understand marijuana legalization voting patterns. However, voting behavior can, in part, be shaped by geographic context, or place, which is unaccounted for in aspatial survey data. We use multiscale geographically weighted regression to analyze how place shaped Proposition 207 voting behavior, independently of demographic variations across space. We find significant spatial variability in the sensitivity of voting for Proposition 207 to changes in several of the predictor variables of opposition and support for recreational marijuana legalization. We argue that local statistical modeling approaches provide a more in‐depth understanding of ballot measure voting behavior than the current use of global models. Related Articles: Branton, Regina, and Ronald J. McGauvran. 2018. "Mary Jane Rocks the Vote: The Impact of Climate Context on Support for Cannabis Initiatives." Politics & Policy 46(2): 209–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12248. Brekken, Katheryn C., and Vanessa M. Fenley. 2020. "Part of the Narrative: Generic News Frames in the U.S. Recreational Marijuana Policy Subsystem." Politics & Policy 49(1): 6–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12388. Fisk, Jonathan M., Joseph A. Vonasek, and Elvis Davis. 2018. "'Pot'reneurial Politics: The Budgetary Highs and Lows of Recreational Marijuana Policy Innovation." Politics & Policy 46(2): 189–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12246. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Social sustainability is a key pillar of sustainable development that usually receives less focus and emphasis when compared to other environmental or economic aspects. This entails the need to address this gap, should the concept of urban sustainability be comprehensively tackled. Despite such importance, social sustainability is considered a relatively difficult pillar to measure, considering its entanglements with the concerned individuals, communities, and stakeholders. This study aimed to identify the key barriers to achieving social sustainability in the context of Jordan. It relied on the opinions of three groups of experts, including academics, practitioners, and end users to reach a comprehensive account of understanding such barriers within a multi-faceted approach. The methodology relied on the Delphi technique by identifying areas of consensus and variance in provided opinions. The Kruskal–Wallis test was then applied to identify the inter-group differences and explore the key causes for such differences. The study concluded by developing a comprehensive framework of identified barriers weighed according to their relative importance considering the provided cumulative feedback. In so doing, it represents a step towards a comprehensive model that would assist in understanding, and later enabling, the successful achievement of social sustainability in the studied local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A communication system based on extended contextual semantic features was proposed by using an end-to-end integrated design method based on deep learning.Unlike existing research that focused only on local context while neglecting global context, the proposed system integrated both local and global contextual knowledge, semantic encoding and decoding was utilized by extended contextual knowledge, thereby enhancing the reliability of the semantic communication system.At the transmitter, efficient semantic representation was achieved through extended contextual semantic encoding.At the receiver, the accuracy of semantic inference was improved by combining mechanisms such as historical communication text mining, contextual semantic feature learning, and heuristic graph-based decoding strategy.When comparing with the traditional communication system and the existing semantic communication systems, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improves the reliability of the communication system under low signal-to-noise ratio.

This article presents the findings of a study on the factors influencing entrepreneurial behavior in Albania. The research examines the role of social capital, cognitive biases, and environmental factors in shaping entrepreneurial activity. The study reveals that social capital, including professional networks and financial support, has a positive impact on entrepreneurial engagement. Cognitive biases, particularly overconfidence, also play a significant role in entrepreneurial behavior. The study highlights bureaucratic hurdles and limited funding as challenges faced by entrepreneurs, while motivational factors like incentives and training have positive influences. The research emphasizes the importance of nurturing social capital, addressing cognitive biases, and improving the business ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship in Albania. [Extracted from the article]

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

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on healthcare systems around the world, and lack of resources, lack of adequate preparedness and infection control equipment have been highlighted as common challenges. Healthcare managers’ capacity to adapt to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial to ensure safe and high-quality care during a crisis. There is a lack of research on how these adaptations are made at different levels of the homecare services system and how the local context influences the managerial strategies applied in response to a healthcare crisis. This study explores the role of local context for managers’ experiences and strategies in homecare services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A qualitative multiple case study in four municipalities with different geographic locations (centralized and decentralized) across Norway. A review of contingency plans was performed, and 21 managers were interviewed individually during the period March to September 2021. All interviews were conducted digitally using a semi-structured interview guide, and data was subjected to inductive thematic analysis. Results The analysis revealed variations in managers’ strategies related to the size and geographical location of the homecare services. The opportunities to apply different strategies varied among the municipalities. To ensure adequate staffing, managers collaborated, reorganized, and reallocated resources within their local health system. New guidelines, routines and infection control measures were developed and implemented in the absence of adequate preparedness plans and modified according to the local context. Supportive and present leadership in addition to collaboration and coordination across national, regional, and local levels were highlighted as key factors in all municipalities. Conclusion Managers who designed new and adaptive strategies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic were central in ensuring high-quality Norwegian homecare services. To ensure transferability, national guidelines and measures must be context-dependent or -sensitive and must accommodate flexibility at all levels in a local healthcare service system.

This article introduces a framework for predicting the survival of brain tumor patients by analyzing magnetic resonance images. The prediction of brain tumor survival is challenging due to the limited size of available datasets. To overcome the issue of overfitting, we propose a self-supervised learning method that involves identifying image patches from the same or different images. By recognizing intra- and inter-image differences, the network can learn the relationships between local spatial windows in the same image and across different images. In addition to analyzing local information, we also incorporate a global structure awareness network to capture global information from the entire image. Our proposed method shows a strong correlation between local spatial relationships and survivor class prediction in FLAIR MRI brain images. We evaluate our method using the BraTS 2020 validation dataset and observe that our method outperforms others in accuracy and SpearmanR correlation metrics.

This article examines women's activism and feminism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on marginalised women's groups and organisations that are often excluded from academic research and international donor interests. The theoretical section presents the main characteristics of the development of women's organisations in post-war BIH, addressing the problem of NGO-isation of activism and feminism, which marginalises groups of women and organisations that do not belong to prominent liberal feminist organisations that pursue gender mainstreaming. Qualitative research based on in-depth interviews and analysis shows that these organisations mostly focus on the local level to meet diverse, specific, and sometimes urgent needs of women (e.g., Roma women, rural women, impoverished as well as women in small local communities) facing particular challenges while doing so. Although most of them do not clearly profess a feminist identity, they are aware of the patriarchal context, especially in their local communities, and their interpretations are mostly in line with the feminist ethics of care. However, the lack of organisational capacity, sustainable funding, and a clear feminist agenda in their work undermine their critical potential to be triggers for social change.

Background: Evidence that house design can provide protection from malaria is growing. Housing modifications such as screening windows, doors, and ceilings, and attaching insecticide-impregnated materials to the eaves (the gap between the top of the wall and bottom of the roof), can protect against malaria. To be effective at scale, however, these modifications must be adopted by household residents. There is evidence that housing modifications can be acceptable, but in-depth knowledge on the experiences and interpretation of modifications is lacking. This qualitative study was carried out to provide a holistic account of the relationship between experiences and interpretations of four types of piloted housing modifications and the local context in Jinja, Uganda. Methods: Qualitative research was conducted between January to June 2021, before and during the installation of four types of housing modifications. The methods included nine weeks of participant observations in two study villages, nine focus group discussions with primary caregivers and heads of households (11–12 participants each), and nine key informant interviews with stakeholders and study team members. Results: Most residents supported the modifications. Experiences and interpretation of the housing modifications were shaped by the different types of housing in the area and the processes through which residents finished their houses, local forms of land and property ownership, and cultural and spiritual beliefs about houses. Conclusions: To maximize the uptake and benefit of housing modifications against malaria, programme development needs to take local context into account. Forms of local land and house ownership, preferences, the social significance of housing types, and religious and spiritual ideas shape the responses to housing modifications in Jinja. These factors may be important in other setting. Trial registration Trial registration number is NCT04622241. The first draft was posted on November 9th 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Semantic parsing is a challenging task mapping a natural language utterance to machine-understandable information representation. Recently, approaches using neural machine translation (NMT) have achieved many promising results, especially the Transformer. However, the typical drawback of adapting the vanilla Transformer to semantic parsing is that it does not consider the phrase in expressing the information of sentences while phrases play an important role in constructing the sentence meaning. Therefore, we propose an architecture, PhraseTransformer, that is capable of a more detailed meaning representation by learning the phrase dependencies in the sentence. The main idea is to incorporate Long Short-Term Memory into the Self-Attention mechanism of the original Transformer to capture the local context of a word. Experimental results show that our proposed model performs better than the original Transformer in terms of understanding sentences structure as well as logical representation and raises the model local context-awareness without any support from external tree information. Besides, although the recurrent architecture is integrated, the number of sequential operations of the PhraseTransformer is still O (1) similar to the original Transformer. Our proposed model achieves strong competitive performance on Geo and MSParS datasets, and leads to SOTA performance on the Atis dataset for methods using neural networks. In addition, to prove the generalization of our proposed model, we also conduct extensive experiments on three translation datasets IWLST14 German-English, IWSLT15 Vietnamese-English, WMT14 English-German, and show significant improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/phuongnm94/PhraseTransformer.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial towns are often framed as marginalized and less innovative compared with service-oriented urban agglomerations. Their specific trajectories create both opportunities and constraints for new concepts, such as social innovation. However, little is known about their innovative capacity in relation to societal and cultural norms and social capital. The objective of this article is therefore to analyse the capacity of an industrial town to generate social innovation on the case study of Velenje, Slovenia. By employing a concept of industrial culture and an interactive process of research and action with the local community, we try to link territorially embedded norms, values and social capital to producing past, present-day and possible future social innovations. Velenje can be described as 'innovative milieu' since many social innovations, strongly territorially and historically embedded, were developed in the town. The main drivers of these innovations seem to be socialist and industrial values, which largely persist in the modern era, also due to very engaged youth. The town's capacity to produce social innovation is further enhanced by a culture of collaboration. The article challenges contemporary notions of non-innovative (post-socialist) industrial towns and highlights the capability of industrial culture to unlock the local innovation potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schlenker (Semant Pragmat 2(3):1–78, 2009; Philos Stud 151(1):115–142, 2010a; Mind 119(474):377–391, 2010b) provides an algorithm for deriving the presupposition projection properties of an expression from that expression's classical semantics. In this paper, we consider the predictions of Schlenker's algorithm as applied to attitude verbs. More specifically, we compare Schlenker's theory with a prominent view which maintains that attitudes exhibit belief projection, so that presupposition triggers in their scope imply that the attitude holder believes the presupposition (Karttunen in Theor Linguist 34(1):181, 1974; Heim in J Semant 9(3):183–221, 1992; Sudo in The art and craft of semantics: a festschrift for Irene Heim, MIT Press, 2014). We show that Schlenker's theory does not predict belief projection, and discuss several consequences of this result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the long-term development of two strategic alliances between major Spanish (RUI and Iberostar) and German (TUI and Neckermann) tourist firms. Our research builds on the literature on foreign direct investment and institutionalism applied to cross-border cooperation, yet using business history research methods. The study aims to understand how the local Spanish context shaped the interaction between foreign and domestic firms and how this interaction influenced the development of the Spanish companies. Our cases suggest that the Spanish institutional framework affected the nature and strength of alliances. Foreign partners were crucial in providing financial and commercial support, brand consolidation, market knowledge and reputation. However, local actors also played an important role as proactive partners eager to develop their domestic business and upgrade their existing capabilities. Ultimately this strategy would contribute to the internationalisation of Spanish firms after 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on healthcare systems around the world, and lack of resources, lack of adequate preparedness and infection control equipment have been highlighted as common challenges. Healthcare managers’ capacity to adapt to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial to ensure safe and high-quality care during a crisis. There is a lack of research on how these adaptations are made at different levels of the homecare services system and how the local context influences the managerial strategies applied in response to a healthcare crisis. This study explores the role of local context for managers’ experiences and strategies in homecare services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A qualitative multiple case study in four municipalities with different geographic locations (centralized and decentralized) across Norway. A review of contingency plans was performed, and 21 managers were interviewed individually during the period March to September 2021. All interviews were conducted digitally using a semi-structured interview guide, and data was subjected to inductive thematic analysis. Results: The analysis revealed variations in managers’ strategies related to the size and geographical location of the homecare services. The opportunities to apply different strategies varied among the municipalities. To ensure adequate staffing, managers collaborated, reorganized, and reallocated resources within their local health system. New guidelines, routines and infection control measures were developed and implemented in the absence of adequate preparedness plans and modified according to the local context. Supportive and present leadership in addition to collaboration and coordination across national, regional, and local levels were highlighted as key factors in all municipalities. Conclusion: Managers who designed new and adaptive strategies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic were central in ensuring high-quality Norwegian homecare services. To ensure transferability, national guidelines and measures must be context-dependent or -sensitive and must accommodate flexibility at all levels in a local healthcare service system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning-based monocular visual odometry (VO) has lately drawn significant attention for its robustness to camera parameters and environmental variations. The correlation of ego-motion in the local time dimension, denoted as the local context, is crucial for alleviating accumulated errors of VO problems. Unlike most current learning-based methods, our approach, called ContextAVO, focuses on the effectiveness of local contexts to improve the estimation recovered from consecutive multiple optical flow snippets. To retain the pose consistency in the temporal domain, we design the Context-Attention Refining component to adaptively ameliorate current inference by exploiting the continuity of camera motions and aligning corresponding observations with local contexts. Besides, we employ the multi-length window to make ContextAVO more suitable for general scenarios and less dependent on the fixed length of the input snippet. Extensive experiments on outdoor KITTI, Malaga, ApolloScape, and indoor TUM RGB-D datasets have demonstrated that our approach efficiently produces competitive results against classic algorithms. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins, improving up to 7.40% and 48.56% for translational and rotational estimation, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do perceptions of local immigrant populations influence immigration policy views? Building on findings that Americans may not accurately perceive population dynamics, we argue that objective measures do not fully capture the effects of local context on public opinion. Our research uses novel subjective experimental reminders about current levels of and recent changes in local immigrant populations to explore how these perceptions impact immigration policy views. In a survey experiment, we asked 2,400 Americans to consider current levels of or recent changes in their local immigrant population. Asking subjects to consider current levels of local immigrant populations modestly increases support for pro-immigrant policies, with particularly strong effects among non-White and Republicans. These effects may be driven by positive perceptions of immigrants and have implications for understanding the role of local community frames in shaping public opinion about immigration, particularly for groups who do not typically support permissive immigration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study explores the role of cultural traditions in maintaining identity for the city's sustainability by looking at the relationship between cultural traditions, conservation, and urban design. Local culture, customs, and traditions are recognized as forming the character of space that gives identity. So cultural sustainability becomes a higher emphasis in sustainable development activities. Tradition can be understood and even creates a sense of place for local communities towards their environment in globalization if the principle of cultural essence is not threatened. Gianyar City, Bali, was chosen as a case study representing other cities with possibly similar characteristics. This area has the potential to fulfill a sustainable urban revitalization initiative. The study shows three urban form determinants, the dominant characteristics that project the attributes of fixedness and permanence: (1) Desa Adat, (2) pempatan agung (catuspatha), and (3) spatial division based on direction orientation (mandala and luan teben). It proves that tradition can bridge the change and development of community culture by ensuring that the basic beliefs of a group can be expressed and maintained in a residential environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Emphasising local participation preserves local traits and strengthens social bonds. • Promoting sustainable living practices supports socioenvironmental goals. • Merging traditional skills with modern technology fosters sustainability. • Local control in construction promotes resilience and self-sufficiency. The built environment consumes vast resources and energy but can shift from a major climate polluter to a catalyst for sustainable development, especially in urban planning. This article proposes integrating advanced technology with traditional wisdom to create smart and contextually rooted built environments. Through two case studies in Greece, it identifies four key contributions: holistic planning informed by traditional insights, multidisciplinary technology integration, resilient community-centric solutions, and convivial construction. These findings emphasise the potential for truly sustainable built environments and the importance of local practices in tackling global sustainability challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Neighborhood sustainability has assumed a pole position as a topic of interest in the past years, addressed through dedicated strands of most of the globally adopted sustainability rating tools, such as LEED and BREEAM. Considering sustainability assessment, the social sustainability of neighborhoods assumes a certain particularity, not only in terms of its high context dependence pertaining to its locality, but in its means of assessment as well, with people as a key potential evaluator for matters that are not bound to quantitative aspects. This research focused on developing a framework for rating social sustainability in neighborhoods, utilizing a quantitative approach that builds upon insights obtained by an extended group of experts and end users. It combines the Delphi and AHP techniques along with the case study approach to develop a framework that suits the Jordanian local context, where a particular neighborhood, Dahiyat Al Hussein in Amman, is used for validation. The research revealed that rating the social sustainability of neighborhoods is not only highly guided by the local context it addresses, but is also reliant on the level of understanding and adoption of the concept itself as attained by the people.

Fine-grained scene graph generation aims to parse the objects and their fine-grained relationships within scenes. Despite the significant progress in recent years, their performance is still limited by two major issues: (1) ambiguous perception under a global view; (2) the lack of reliable, fine-grained annotations. We argue that understanding the local context is important in addressing the two issues. However, previous works often overlook it, which limits their effectiveness in fine-grained scene graph generation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a Local-context Attention Learning method that concentrates on local context and can generate high-reliability, fine-grained annotations. It comprises two components: (1) The Fine-grained Location Attention Network (FLAN), a multi-branch network that encompasses global and local branches, can attend to local informative context and perceive granularity levels in different regions, thereby adaptively enhancing the learning of fine-grained locations. (2) The Fine-grained Location Label Transfer (FLLT) method identifies coarse-grained labels inconsistent with the local context and determines which labels should be transferred through the global confidence thresholding strategy, finally transferring them to reliable local context-consistent fine-grained ones. Experiments conducted on the Visual Genome, OpenImage, and GQA-200 datasets show that the proposed methods achieve significant improvements on the fine-grained scene graph generation task. By addressing the challenge mentioned above, our method also achieves state-of-the-art performances on the three datasets. • A model that can capture local context and strengthen the learning of fine-grained locations. • A method that can generate reliable relabeled fine-grained annotations. • Achieving state-of-the-art performances on three major fine-grained SGG benchmarks. • Can be integrated with various baseline models in a plug-and-play manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a project report to introduce the Comprehensive Sexuality Education Technical Guideline—Adaptation of Global Standards for Potential Use in China (First Edition) (hereafter referred to as the Guideline) as the first adaptation of the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education (ITGSE) in China. The project was supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from 2018 to 2022. The development process included rounds of participatory consultation, validation, and revisions led by the project team and a group of technical advisers from diverse backgrounds. The Guideline is developed to respond to the increasing demands of a technical tool integrating international standards and local context that can be used by all comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) stakeholders in China. While keeping the structure of the ITGSE, the Guideline made modifications and additions in light of the up-to-date Chinese policies, laws, and relevant national programs, as well as Chinese culture and social norms. It is expected that the Guideline could be widely acknowledged, distributed, and used to inform and support the future development of CSE in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Head detection is a fundamental task, and it plays an important role in many head-related problems. The difficulty in creating the local and global context in the face of significant lighting, orientation, and occlusion uncertainty, among other factors, still makes this task a remarkable challenge. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes an effective detector, the Context Refinement Network (CRN), that captures not only the refined global context but also the enhanced local context. We use simplified non-local (SNL) blocks at hierarchical features, which can successfully establish long-range dependencies between heads to improve the capability of building the global context. We suggest a multi-scale dilated convolutional module for the local context surrounding heads that extracts local context from various head characteristics. In comparison to other models, our method outperforms them on the Brainwash and the HollywoodHeads datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this research is to develop instructional multimedia with local context of Lombok Island for junior high school students. The development of instructional multimedia is oriented towards numeracy skills on the probability topic. This research is development research based on the design research model by Plomp which consists of 3 phases, namely Preliminary Research, Development or Prototyping, and Assessment. The subjects in this research were grade IX junior high school students consisting of 24 students. The data were collected using practicality questionnaire to determine the practicality of multimedia and numeracy skills test to determine the effectiveness of multimedia. The results showed that instructional multimedia met the practical and effective criteria. The results of the teacher's assessment showed a total score is 32 in practical classification. Then 83% of students gave an assessment of being in the very practical classification and 17% were in the practical classification. The results of the effectiveness of the numeracy skills test showed that 79% of students achieved the Minimum Completeness Criteria score. Therefore, instructional multimedia is practical and effective for mathematics learning oriented to students' mathematical numeracy skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional salient object detection models cannot differentiate the importance of different salient objects. Recently, two works have been proposed to detect saliency ranking by assigning different degrees of saliency to different objects. However, one of these models cannot differentiate object instances and the other focuses more on sequential attention shift order inference. In this paper, we investigate a practical problem setting that requires simultaneously segment salient instances and infer their relative saliency rank order. We present a novel unified model as the first end-to-end solution, where an improved Mask R-CNN is first used to segment salient instances and a saliency ranking branch is then added to infer the relative saliency. For relative saliency ranking, we build a new graph reasoning module by combining four graphs to incorporate the instance interaction relation, local contrast, global contrast, and a high-level semantic prior, respectively. A novel loss function is also proposed to effectively train the saliency ranking branch. Besides, a new dataset and an evaluation metric are proposed for this task, aiming at pushing forward this field of research. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model is more effective than previous methods. We also show an example of its practical usage on adaptive image retargeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]