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Conceptualizing urban heat resilience as an infrastructure problem emphasizes the urgency with which we must adapt to global climate change, but also risks ignoring the continued marginalization that vulnerable populations experience as a result of infrastructure decisions. In this Viewpoint, I use my experience with participatory action research (PAR) in building urban heat resilience to show the ways in which an infrastructure framing presents opportunities, and the ways in which planners a) need to be aware of infrastructure as socio-technical systems and b) recognize spatial networks of social capital to appropriately approach interventions that benefit those most likely to be adversely affected by rising temperatures in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reciprocal exchanges of messages, likes, and pictures on social media are typical expressions of mobile youth culture. After all, it is well-established that young people's disclosure practices support their efforts to maintain relationships, gain autonomy, and, by large, consolidate a place in the world. What is often missing, however, is an exploration of how the specific socio-cultural contexts of ethno-religious minority youths shape and are shaped by social media appropriations. Therefore, we conducted a 15-month ethnographic study among ethno-religious minority youths in which we investigated networked gift-giving practices. We stress the notion of "networked" because the results illustrate how these young people appropriate the amplified visibility of their relational maintenance behaviors on social media in order to negotiate status and social ties. We connect these findings to the concept of a "distrustful society" as the participants hold a general distrust in society due to experiences of racism and marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how men of the rural 'middling sort' in late medieval England used movable goods to perform their status and gender by applying relational approaches from material culture studies to bequests in their wills and testaments. It is based on analysis of 403 wills produced by husbandmen, yeomen and gentlemen from Norfolk and Suffolk, c. 1425–1538. Ranking between the gentry and peasantry, these men were major landholders, administrators and consumers in the English countryside, but their mentalities and wills have received little attention. Wills provide evidence for how rural men interpreted their belongings in life and how they imagined objects could help them prolong their patriarchal authority after death. By focusing on three moments when wills intervened in the lifecycles of things – commodity exchange, gift-giving and animation – this analysis models the relational interpretation of medieval material culture and reveals how objects helped create male, middling-status identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the bureaucratic and legal processes that culminated in the creation of the modern national security classification system in Executive Order No. 10,290, issued by Harry Truman in 1951. It argues that classification was shaped by processes of improvisation endogenous to the federal bureaucracy, which produced the problems of overclassification, definitional vagueness, and ambiguous constitutional status that have haunted the secrecy regime until the present. In so doing, it provides new insight into the development of the modern presidency, the national security state, and American democracy, and suggests possible paths to reform the contemporary pathologies of the classification system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Close-kin ownership, to own one's kin, has been researched from the perspective of emancipatory strategies or economic exploitation, hereby overlooking the complexity of kinship bonds in slave societies. This paper addresses the complexities of slavery and kinship and analyses close-kin ownership from the perspective of kinship. In the process of manumission, relationships of obligation were created that continued in life after slavery. When former-owner and enslaved were kin, a layering of obligations took place that extended beyond the widely accepted dichotomy of viewing close-kin ownership as either an emancipatory strategy or economic exploitation. To analyse these concepts and relationships 44 examples of close-kin ownership were selected from a database of 392 manumission petitions from Suriname. In these 44 examples, kin owned enslaved kin. From this sample, five cases of presumed close-kin slavery were identified, kin not only owned enslaved kin, the enslaved were treated as any other slaves and kinship was no extenuating circumstance. By analysing these cases, we have found that close-kin ownership and slavery were interconnected practices that should be studied in unison to grasp the tension between emancipatory strategies and economic gain. Furthermore, the variety in circumstances shows that additional research is needed to continue the creation of a broader framework of kinship and slavery, so that this can be applied to slave societies around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers across the world have shown significant interest in the association between self-esteem and various aspects of life, including romantic relationships. The current study underscored the significance of self-esteem in understanding quality of relationships in terms of symptoms of relationship obsessive-compulsive disorder (ROCD) and investigated how specific romantic financial behaviors contribute to the incidence of ROCD. Data for this study came from a sample of 400 men and women aged 18–30 years, who were or had been involved in a heterosexual romantic relationship. We sought to define the mediating effect of gift-giving motive (positive, practical, and obligatory) on the relationship between self-esteem and ROCD symptoms. The findings revealed that practical gift-giving motive acted as a mediating variable between self-esteem and ROCD symptoms. Obligatory gift-giving motive, however, had a nonsignificant association with symptoms of ROCD but a significant connection with self-esteem. Implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article, based on a lecture, offers fragments for a genealogy of female entrepreneurship in the Global North. It argues that in business and management books and social texts, the entrepreneur has historically been overwhelmingly figured as male – as 'entrepreneurial man'. Yet, over the past few decades, encouraged by both gender mainstreaming and neoliberal feminism, the symbolic locus of entrepreneurialism in popular culture has increasingly gravitated towards women. It shows how we might trace a mediatised evolution of female entrepreneurialism and its ideologies: from tragic 1950s entrepreneurial stars, through to the plucky shoulder-padded heroines of women's magazines and films of the 1980s, through to the girlbosses, Instagram entrepreneurs and hustle culture of the present. What, it asks, is happening to the female entrepreneur in an era of neoliberal crisis? And what 'left feminist' alternatives to, or intersections with, this figure might be in our midst, or on the horizon? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamic mehir practices (dower) and other financial arrangements during a marriage reveal how marriage, gender and religion are understood and reconfigured in Istanbul today. Drawing on religious women's narratives of mehir and gifts of gold, this article examines the complex interplay between economic transactions and intimate marital relationships in Istanbul, as well as the relation between my interlocutors' practices of mehir and wedding gifts and their sense of propriety. It suggests that women's ways of understanding and practising economic marriage transactions are ambivalently shaped by intimate entanglements of religion, nuclear family, conjugal love, secular civil law, and reputation and honour. Women uneasily navigate the ambivalences of the intimate sphere as they make decisions and engage in practices related to economic marriage transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although both books discussed in this review essay address problems with relevance to our present day and its dilemmas, they have different chronological scopes and employ different methods of interpretation. Robertson focuses exclusively on the era of the "Enlightenment" (c. 1680-1790), eschewing overt "presentism" to treat a wide range of authors and works as they addressed one another in the context of the events and developments of the period, mainly in Britain, France, and Germany. Friedman's aim, emphasizing the role of "religious" thought, is to explore the roots of present-day "thinking" about economics as a "science" and debates about economic policy. His book, beginning its coverage in Western Europe in the later 17th century and, following a "history of ideas" approach, gives pride of place to Adam Smith's ideas in the formulation of a "coherent" economic theory, and then in a linear account, centered on America, describes the key steps that he argues led from Smith to the present. This review essay, concentrating on what each book has to say about the Enlightenment, juxtaposes their accounts of the era and offers critical judgment of their differing treatments of its character and accomplishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do humans develop hope in the face of seemingly irreparable harm against each other? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 30 BIPOC Christians and 40 White Christians whom they identified as long‐term allies, in this article, I consider how a slim minority of White Christians develop ways of hoping that sustain lasting antiracist engagement. I identify contributing factors to reorientations of hope, focusing on a type of catalytic event that I analyze as a form of exchange. As economic anthropologists from Marcel Mauss to David Graeber have elaborated, structures and moralities of gift giving reveal and define relationships. I extend that theory to argue that experiences of exchange relationships in turn shape the ways people hope. I trace a logic of exchange that interlocutors conceptualized using the term grace, an incongruous, freely given gift that anticipates future relationship in the context of unrepayable debt. As White Christians became highly aware of the systemic and historic immensity of racial injustice, their combined awareness of indebtedness and grace became formative to new kinds of relationship and hope. In response, they imagined and pursued a society in which love and repair across chasms of past harm are not taken for granted but are not impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the challenges faced by the Qiang ethnic minority in Longxi Township, China, during the reconstruction period following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The state-led reconstruction projects aimed to create a new homeland for the affected population, but failed to consider the Qiang people's conception of home. The Qiang villagers' traditional practices of rebuilding homes, based on the concepts of renqing and qi, were disrupted, leading to a dilution of social relations and territorial attachment. The rushed reconstruction process also resulted in the loss of traditional rituals and worship practices, weakening the community's connection to their traditions. The article emphasizes the importance of communal and relational ways of living in rebuilding homes and calls for further research on the struggles faced by ethnic minority groups in similar situations. [Extracted from the article]

In our societally extractive age, sport science risks being swept up in the intensifying desire to commodify the experiences of those that scientists proclaim to study. Coupled with the techno-digital revolution, this stems from a vertical (onto)logic that frames the sporting landscape as a static space filled with discrete objects waiting for us to capture, analyse, re-present and sell on as knowledge. Not only does this commodification degrade primary experience in the false hope of epistemological objectivity, it reinforces the unidirectionality of extractivism by setting inquirer apart from, and above of, inquiry. Here, we advocate for a different, more sentient logic grounded in the relationality of gifting as understood in indigenous philosophies. This foregrounds an ecological orientation to scholarship that sets out neither to objectify or describe that which is of concern, but to correspond with its becoming. On this, there are three threads we cast forward. First, in a corresponsive sport science, inhabitants are not objects of analysis, but lines in-becoming, who in answering to others, form knots in a meshwork. These knots constitute communal places in which inhabitants have joined with the differentiating coming-into-being of others. Second, knowledge is not authoritatively (re)cognitive, but humbly ecological; not produced vertically through imposition, but grown longitudinally in responsively moving from place to place. Third, research does not follow a vertically extractive (onto)logic, but is a practice of participant observation. This perspective appreciates that we, sport scientists, are also lines in-becoming that form parts of the knots in which we seek to know. In coda, our thesis is not a call for more qualitative or applied research in the sport sciences. It is a call to response-ably open up to that which sparks our curiosity, answering to what is shared with care, sensitivity and sincerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inaugural project of German Critical theory was to break away from the cult of facts in order to investigate the real possibilities of the present. Part of sociology has also made the possible and the relationship to the possible its central object. Such a task has met with a considerable effort on the part of government agencies to pre-empt the legitimate definition of what is possible. The social sciences were mobilised to this end. We offer a schematic account of these efforts in order to situate the extent to which the definition of possible futures is an issue of struggle in which Critical theory and sociology have a role to play. The article examines the question of the future through its close link to the category of the possible, at two levels that are often treated separately: at the level of the problem of 'governmentality' and its close link to the question of forecasting and probability; and at the level of the 'regimes of historicity' from which to consider the possible with a view to collectively reappropriating the determination of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many jobs serve a social purpose beyond profit maximization, contributing positively to society. This paper uses a modified principal-agent gift-exchange game with positive externality (prosocial treatment) to study how workers' prosocial motivation interacts with the use of efficiency wages in stimulating effort. We find that prosocial motivation and efficiency wages are independent in stimulating effort: compared to a standard gift-exchange game (GE treatment), the presence of the externality shifts the agents' effort choice function upwards without affecting its slope. Thus, if principals were profit-maximizers, wage offers should be the same in both treatments. However, principals offer higher wages in the prosocial treatment. We show that this is due to principals in the GE treatment highly underestimating agents' reciprocity and thereby offering wages below the profit-maximizing level. Results from robustness-checks further suggest that our findings are unlikely to be driven by a simple efficiency effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of material culture as a method for studying the history of philanthropy. The author, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, discusses the surprise and misconceptions surrounding the focus on philanthropy as a collection and exhibition topic. The article emphasizes the need to shift the focus from money to material experiences in understanding the historical development of philanthropy. It also mentions other public history institutions and exhibitions that have explored this topic. The article concludes by discussing the emotional responses and interpretative possibilities of studying philanthropy through material culture, and suggests strategies for engaging visitors in exploring the complex stories behind philanthropy objects. [Extracted from the article]

Purpose: The boom in live streaming has intensified competition among streamers for viewers' gifts, which makes it meaningful to study the factors that affect the viewers' gifting behavior. Given the emotional attachment between streamers and viewers, the authors set out to elucidate a new driver on viewer gifting: expressions of the streamer. This research aims to explore the impact of streamer emotions on the viewer gifting behaviors, including free and paid gifting. The loyalty level of the viewers is also introduced as a moderating factor to investigate the heterogeneous effect of streamer emotions on gifting behavior. Design/methodology/approach: The dataset the authors collected consists of two parts, including 1809.69 h of live streaming videos and 358,002 gift giving records. Combined with deep learning methods and regression analysis, the authors performed empirical tests on the 81,110 valid samples. Several robustness checks were also conducted to ensure the reliability of main results. Findings: The empirical results show that streamer emotions do have effects on viewers' free and paid gifting behavior. The authors' findings show that positive streamer expressions, such as happiness and surprise, have a positive influence on viewer gifting behavior. However, some negative expressions, like sadness, can also have a positive impact. Moreover, the authors discovered that higher viewer loyalty amplifies the positive effect of streamer emotions and reduces the negative effect. Originality/value: This research contributes to the study about streamer emotions and viewers' consumption behavior, which extends the application of emotion as social information model (EASI model) in the live streaming setting. The authors carefully divide the gifting behavior into two types: free and paid, and study how these two types are affected by streamer emotions. Besides, these effects are analyzed within viewers of different loyalty levels. This study offers practical emotion management strategies for streamers and live streaming platforms to gain more economic profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that our moral concern for future well-being should reduce over time due to important practical considerations about how humans interact with spacetime. After surveying several of these considerations (around equality, special duties, existential contingency, and overlapping moral concern) we develop a set of core principles that can both explain their moral significance and highlight why this is inherently bound up with our relationship with spacetime. These relate to the equitable distribution of (1) moral concern in a universe that we can only causally affect in one temporal direction; (2) access to the benefits from using spacetime as a resource; and (3) the burdens of care given (1) and (2). We conclude by considering the practical implications of our argument and find that, while it is often assumed that a preference for present over future well-being weakens the case for existential risk mitigation, this likely is not the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatists are interested primarily not in representing a purportedly unchanging Reality but in articulating prophetic future possibilities on the basis of the values most venerated by a culture/society in the present. This makes pragmatism sound a little like 'Conceptual Engineering'. Conceptual engineers too are interested in transforming our ways of talking, which implies some notion of how such improvements are to be evaluated. Nevertheless, this paper argues that accounts of conceptual engineering that regard it as key to the project of elucidating an externalist semantics find it difficult to accommodate on their own terms the problem-phenomena taken to be of shared interest: regions of discourse where the demand for change are at their most pressing culturally. This difficulty takes the form of what I call the Conceptual Engineering Dilemma (CED), an inability to accommodate simultaneously the ethical and ameliorative dimensions of contestation. I argue that acknowledging the formalist commitments that undergird CED should make pragmatism more appealing to the practically-orientated analytic philosopher and conclude with a brief survey of some of the tools that it makes available for the pressing work of changing minds for the better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such materially unfavorable conditions, why do consumers transfer their money to these producers? The present research answers this question by introducing the concept of a "market-fostering gift system": a social contract that entices consumers to fund the creation and enhancement of market offerings by mobilizing the logic and practices of gift-giving. This conceptualization includes the core stakeholders, processes, outcomes, and shortcomings of reward-based crowdfunding, providing theoretical structure to this consequential articulation of platform capitalism. In addition, this conceptualization advances theory about how gift and market economies intersect. Whereas previous research emphasizes the tensions that characterize their interface, this article brings to the fore the complementary, scalable relationship between gift-giving and market exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An instrument of wealth accumulation and racial segregation in housing markets, the intersections between zoning and labor are often overlooked. Extending theories of space, race, and class, and drawing on historical and archival evidence, I elaborate three ways that American land-use zoning emerged to shape labor markets in the early 20th century: (1) zoning constrained households from engaging in subsistence and direct market activity, acting as a regulatory source of labor commodification; (2) zoning first emerged as a xenophobic tool for regulating labor competition; and (3) zoning introduced racialized boundaries distinguishing formal work from a sphere of economic informality. I illustrate these theoretical-historical propositions with a study of the frontier origins of American land-use zoning laws in late-19th -century Los Angeles. This first and influential approach to residential zoning emerged amid racial dynamics of western settlement and the class politics of a national "free" labor market. I demonstrate how efforts to regulate the settlement and labor practices of poor urban households and Chinese immigrants on in Los Angeles became the direct legal basis for the dichotomous categories of "residential" and "industrial" districts that the city first defended before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915. By theorizing the intersections of land-use zoning and labor markets, this paper provides a theoretical framework and historical genealogy for future work to consider entanglements of housing and labor politics amid the concurrent flexibilization of work and land use in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to smoking, apprentices are considered a 'vulnerable' population. They have been the subject of targeted approaches based on the assumption of common characteristics. In contrast to most public health studies, that assume homogeneity of vulnerable groups, this article, based on Lahire's 'theory of the plural individual', aims to examine inter- and intra-individual variability in relation to tobacco exposure. It is based on a secondary analysis of 30 interviews with apprentices in France on the stigma attached to their use in their different living environments. Our study confirms that the family and the Centre de Formation des Apprentis, as a whole, encourage smoking. It also provides a better understanding of the mechanisms by which inequalities are perpetuated (permissive rules, loans and gifts of cigarettes, spillover effects, lack of incentives to quit). Nevertheless, it allows us to observe that, in some families and in some companies, smoking is denormalised, even stigmatised. Several apprentice profiles emerge: those who are protected from tobacco and seem to be able to quit easily; those who are permanently confronted with it and for whom it is difficult to consider quitting or reducing; and those who are confronted with a plurality of norms, who seem ambivalent and whose consumption varies significantly. These results will allow us to adapt the interventions according to the profile of the apprentices and by including their entourage. In particular, it will be necessary to propose a 'go-to' approach that goes beyond the school setting and involves the family and the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical framework to think about employees' effort choices, and applies this framework to assess the ability of existing experimental designs to identify the effect of pay inequality on worker effort. The analysis shows that failure to control for a number of confounds—such as reciprocity towards the employer in multi-lateral gift-exchange games (vertical fairness), or the incentive to increase effort when feeling underpaid under piece rates (income targeting)—may lead to inaccurate interpretation of evidence of treatment effects. In light of these findings, the paper provides a set of recommendations on how to improve identification in the design of controlled experiments in the future. • We develop a model to study employees' effort choices in experiments. • We formally assess the design of experiments on the effect of pay inequality on effort. • We find a number of confounds that may impair identification of treatment effects. • Confounds include vertical fairness, income targeting, repeated interactions, procedural fairness. • A set of recommendations to improve identification in experiments is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes visible austerity-based infant food exchange as a contemporary food acquisition practice outside of commercial and regulated foodscapes. It presents results from a netnography conducted within two popular online platforms in Canada between April 2017 and February 2018: the Kijiji classified advertising site, and Facebook. Qualitative analysis of over 2000 user generated secondhand exchange ads show practices from selling, trading, sharing, and seeking whereby infant foods works as a form of currency to acquire either economic capital when sold, an alternative food capital when traded, or are gifts in the moral economy of exchange. While infant food exchange is often collaborative in nature, it is austerity-driven involving different forms of capital parents have or seek to accomplish the responsibility of feeding. As excluded consumers, posters are motivated by a complex mixture of desperation, innovation, ecological concerns, and morality to care for others when mainstream food access is out of reach within the current political and economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people want to conduct a transaction, but doing so would be morally disreputable, they can obfuscate the fact that they are engaging in an exchange while still arranging for a set of transfers that are effectively equivalent to an exchange. Obfuscation through structures such as gift-giving and brokerage is pervasive across a wide range of disreputable exchanges, such as bribery and sex work. In this article, we develop a theoretical account that sheds light on when actors are more versus less likely to obfuscate. Specifically, we report a series of experiments addressing the effect of trust on the decision to engage in obfuscated disreputable exchange. We find that actors obfuscate more often with exchange partners high in loyalty-based trustworthiness, with expected reciprocity and moral discomfort mediating this effect. However, the effect is highly contingent on the type of trust; trust facilitates obfuscation when it is loyalty-based, but this effect flips when trust is ethics-based. Our findings not only offer insights into the important role of relational context in shaping moral understandings and choices about disreputable exchange, but they also contribute to scholarship on trust by demonstrating that distinct forms of trust can have diametrically opposed effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the historical significance of football and stadium development at Wake Forest University. It discusses the challenges faced in establishing and maintaining football as a sport on campus, including concerns about violence and student behavior. The article highlights the efforts made by students and alumni to raise funds and improve athletic grounds, leading to the construction of the Gore Athletic Field and later Groves Stadium. These developments helped increase enrollment, improve athletic programs, and enhance the reputation of the school. The article also emphasizes the emotional connections and shared experiences that football and stadiums created among students, alumni, and the community. [Extracted from the article]

Background: Grief in parents has been described as a very intense long-lasting experience, characterized by deep sadness, and social isolation, therefore, the recommendation of scientific societies in pediatrics is to provide bereavement care to parents and relatives of deceased children who have previously been cared for by health professionals. Objetive: A bereavement workshop for parents is proposed as an intervention strategy, providing accompaniment to the families of deceased patients who received pediatric palliative care (PPC). Methods: This is a descriptive, qualitative, and exploratory study. Two focal group sessions were performed in 2019 with 23 families who were formal caregivers of pediatric patients in the Programa de Cuidando de ti (Program "Taking Care of You"), Cali, Colombia. These sessions, guided by the pediatric palliative care group. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Results: 60 families received the personalized letter of condolences with invitation to the workshop, 23 families attended the workshop. From the gratitude activity, families made 49 thank you cards, the following categories were highlighted: Communication, Hope, compassion, acceptance, humanization, learning, gratitude, active listening, coping strategies, regards, faith and humanization. Conclusion: Strategies that favor adequate emotional management of the grieving process should be promoted. This study reflects the perceptions of parents attending a bereavement workshop. It highlights the gratitude, feelings and reflections of the family members during the health process and the death of the child while receiving accompaniment by a pediatric palliative care team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the book "Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300–1600: Gifts as Objects," edited by Lars Kjær and Gustavs Strenga. The book explores the practice of gift-giving in medieval and early modern Europe, focusing on the symbolic and material aspects of gifts. It examines various types of gifts, such as marriage rings, chairs, and alms, and their significance in different social contexts. The chapters also discuss the role of reciprocity, the exchange of gifts between humans and the divine, and the importance of saints in gift-giving traditions. The book provides case studies from different regions of Europe, including the Baltic region, and offers valuable insights into the cultural and social dynamics of gift-giving during this period. [Extracted from the article]

This document provides a detailed account of the gifts presented to Polish-Lithuanian King Stephen Báthory during his visit to Riga in 1582. The citizens of Riga warmly welcomed the king and presented him with valuable gifts, including a golden cup filled with 1000 Hungarian guilders. The document emphasizes the significance of gift-giving in establishing and strengthening relationships, as well as the efforts made by the citizens of Riga to accommodate and care for the king and his entourage during their stay. [Extracted from the article]

This paper analyzes the role of accounting in disaster mitigation and the importance of transparency to avoid corruption. During the Ukrainian war, accounting has allowed the redistribution of war material, the quantification of economic aid, or the efficient management of humanitarian aid. This paper aims to set a research agenda on transparency and corruption in foreign aid to a fragile and conflict‐affected country. In order to analyze the situation of corruption in Ukraine during the war, first a review of the latest corrupt events is carried out and its position in the Corruption Perception Indicator is analyzed. Subsequently, we analyze the aid that Ukraine has received from other countries and institutions, and whether it is transparent. The possible dependence of the Corruption Perception Indicator on the transparency index of each country in the management of aid to Ukraine is studied. This article links corruption, transparency and accounting in the context of the Ukrainian war, highlighting the important role of auditing and financial controls, and presents proposals for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue demonstrates how theorizing the present in terms of crisis generates insights into contradictory experiences of historical time. The core questions addressed are these: What are the temporal forms through which crisis is expressed today, and what are the political implications? The contributors pay close attention to the nonsynchronicity and the discordance of times that constitute the present. The contributors ask how contemporary crisis can be better understood with reference to long-term and ongoing colonial and racial histories. This article functions as both an introduction to the special issue as well as a development of some of the key theoretical coordinates, first thinking through the relationship between crisis and everyday politics, disentangling crisis theory from its association with determinism, and then showing how crisis theory challenges conventional understandings of political agency. Recent work in Black studies offers significant ways of understanding how subaltern actors improvise and forge unfamiliar forms of agency in times of brutal constraint. With reference to this work, the article argues that understanding crisis not only as an "object" of study but as a "method" has generative implications for theorizing the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of one's identity in late modernity is sometimes viewed as a project of the autonomous self in which one's identity may shift or change over the course of one's existence and development. For the Christian, however, one's identity is both a divine gift, and a task of ecclesial formation, and for both the gift and the task, Christian baptism is fundamental. Baptism represents the death of the self and its rebirth in Christ, a decisive breach with the life that has gone before. Baptism establishes a new identity, a new affiliation, a new mode of living, and a new life orientation, direction, and purpose. This paper explores the role of baptism in the formation of Christian identity, finding that Christian identity is both extrinsic to the self and yet also an identity into which we are called and into which we may continually grow. The essay proceeds in three sections. It begins with a survey of recent philosophical reflection on the concept of identity, continues by reflecting on the nature of Christian baptism in dialogue with this reflection, and concludes by considering in practical terms how baptism functions in the process of conversion–initiation toward the formation of mature Christian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the long-standing assumption that Chan Buddhism began as a meditation movement is outdated and needs to be replaced by a paradigm that sees the origins of Chan in a set of literary inventions that took form in the mid-Tang era and were designed to prove that the totality of tradition was owned by certain masters of the day. These bold claims to own perfect tradition were bolstered by newly invented genealogies that worked to show that this or that master was, in effect, a descendant of the Indian Buddha, and, thus, a quasi-Buddha himself. Further finessing these efforts to take over final authority in the world of Tang Buddhism was the studied use of Daoist tropes to naturalize and soften these aggressive claims, all in order to make them more appealing to elite readers who could now be impressed by decidedly Chinese-looking portrayals of perfect Buddhism, set on the timeless ground of the Great Dao, where there could be no competition, envy, literary pretensions, or even Buddhist practices—just pure and total truth in the body of a Chinese man. In trying to make sense of this cycle of carefully rewriting the past in order to control the present (and future), it should be clear that we need to switch to a paradigm that accepts that the seductive reinvention of tradition was done consciously and with no small amount of craft and cunning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how football players and scouts in Sweden narrate their stories of transfers within the Swedish football system. This article presents first-person narrations as male players as well as scouts from elite clubs were interviewed in connection to transfer patters to, from and within Sweden. The aim is to analyse how the transfer system takes shape in stories presented by scouts and players, and what it can tell about the football transfer market. The interviewed persons present story logic while constructing a narrative of transfer patterns. Theoretically, the study is framed using Marcel Mauss concept of gift economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museum artifacts are the main way for visitors to experience and learn about cultural heritage. Augmented reality (AR) allows for high interactivity and is increasingly applied in museums to improve tourists' experience and learning. It also supports the extension of museum experience to outside of the physical museum space, contributing to the visiting trajectory and takeaway experience. In this paper, we present our design of two tangible AR interfaces for cultural artifacts: Postcard AR and CubeMuseum AR, followed by three user studies that evaluate and optimize the design. In Study 1, we conducted a within-subjects study (N = 24) that compares the two AR interfaces with a baseline condition (Leaflet). Our results demonstrate the positive effects of tangible AR interfaces on users' motivation and engagement in learning cultural heritage. In Study 2, we further explored how to optimize CubeMuseum AR by adopting a user-centered design approach. Through the analysis of expert interviews (N = 7) and an online survey (N = 207), the results specify a series of requirements and design guidelines for tangible AR interfaces to be used as a learning tool and a hybrid gift. Based on the findings, the design of the CubeMuseum AR was optimized and evaluated in Study 3. A between-subjects user study was conducted (N = 32) to compare the optimized design with the initial design. The results verified the positive effects of gamified tangible AR interfaces on users' motivation, engagement, and performance in learning cultural heritage. We present our design and evaluation results, and discuss the implications of designing tangible AR interfaces for cultural heritage learning and museum gifting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humor, as part of our lives, is also extremely important in different professional settings. Speech and language therapy (SLT) sector is addressing both children and adults with specific language disorders or with non-specific language disorders, secondary to different syndromes or disabilities. In the SLT area, humor is a way through which therapy sessions can be easily introduced, it being an intrinsic modality of approaching children and adults. This article illustrates the data collected in the first Romanian study regarding humor use in the SLT sector, focusing on the way humor is perceived by specialists, but at the same time on the participants’ needs regarding the enriching of the SLT field with more materials both digitally born and/or printed. This study presents extended descriptive data that help us consider humor as a vital element during speech therapy sessions, independently of the professionals’ age, gender, experience and to create a collection of data regarding humor use in speech therapy for future therapeutic effective interventions. Thus, the most relevant collected data are as follows: of the 210 participants in this research just 12 (5.7%) responded that they do not use humor in their professional sector; 94.3% use humor in language disorder therapy activities; 39% use humor in every therapeutic session; more than 68% of participants use verbal humor during their sessions; 199 (94.8%) say that therapeutic materials with humorous content are mainly presented in traditional format (physical material resources); 129 responded they use humor (61.4%) in virtual format too - (digital resources); 68 % of the participants strongly agree/agree that a humor assessment tool is necessary for the effective use of humor in language disorder therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like borders, refugee protection settings beyond the EU often serve as testing grounds for technologies. This article takes a socio-legal perspective to show how humanitarian experimentation in these contexts is made possible through different, interacting challenges to sovereignty. It argues that the understanding that actors or their positions are "exceptional" allows for and justifies data practices that would otherwise not be legally permissible. Examples of data practices in refugee protection settings are connected to work in geopolitics, science and technology studies, and sociology of law. The article shows how the position of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as negotiator on behalf of refugees and an emergency-driven techno-solutionism not only interacts with the already precarious legal context most people seeking refuge find themselves in. It coincides with the legal positioning of International Organisations and with citizenship-oriented conceptions of privacy, further constituting people seeking refuge as (digital) rights optional. This is problematic not least because of concerns about adequate data protection or the implications of bias. Data flows and algorithms are generative of the politics of contemporary societies, implying that the structural undermining of digital rights of people seeking refuge in the present can also hinder their access to rights in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite intense interest in how social capital can facilitate informal learning, few attempts have been made to synthesize the interface between social capital and informal learning. Social capital is an important factor in the application of informal learning, especially in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This paper first presents a review of the literature that has explored the relationship between social capital and informal learning in STEM education. We then present two case studies illustrating how social capital plays a pivotal role in enhancing informal learning outcomes in postsecondary STEM education. These cases offer insights on how to promote optimal informal learning in STEM education. Implications for understanding the importance of social capital in informal learning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the formation of new verbs, Persian very productively employs complex predicates, while the derivation of simple verbs has been held to be marginal or even inexistent. We use data from internet fora, blogs, and messaging services to argue that the derivation of simple verbs from nominals is a productive process at least among speakers of colloquial Persian who actively use online media. Two acceptability tests of seven verbs and two 'placebo verbs' conducted among 58 participants produced more than 7,000 gradings. They show that such verbs are surprisingly well accepted, with statistically significant differences depending on age, gender, region, TAM form, and the individual verbs. Some of these results seem quite straightforward (e.g., acceptance declining with age), others rather not (for instance, the present and past progressive is very well accepted). The results run counter to the assumption that a gradual substitution of synthetic structures (simple verbs) by analytical ones (complex predicates) is a unidirectional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The funeral rite, locally called oshwue-aji, is a funeral condolence outing among the Nsukka Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria. It features performances, enlivened with art objects and costumes. It is imbued with remarkable social significance. This paper examines varying performances and costumes associated with the oshwue-aji rite. The condolence trip displays exquisitely crafted bracelets, pendants, clothing, and other fashion accessories worn by the bereaved – children, daughters, sons, as well as daughters' and sons’ in-laws with their spouses. Relying on Paul Horwich's use theory of meaning, this paper discusses the distinctive nature of these visual art objects to understand their symbolic and social functions. It equally presents the phenomenon of oshwue-aji, directed towards understanding the nature of sociality these incorporated artistic dimensions generate within the social space per time. Interviews and personal observations were relied on for data collection from people performing the oshwue-aji rite because they are bereaved. Being a qualitative study, the art forms and related objects that constitute the data were analyzed descriptively. Beyond serving to epitomize vivacity and gaiety, these artistic creations remain an orchestration to appreciate, publicize, and promote. The paper finds that people's engagements in funerals with creative elements and donations and/or exchange of gifts build social solidarity in traditional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Terahertz Continuous Wave spectroscopy (THz-CW) as a novel approach in the Cultural Heritage field. • First characterization of atacamite and antlerite in the THz spectral range. • Identification of pure pigments in binary mixtures. • Retrieval of the relative concentrations in the mixture. In this work, the optical properties of atacamite, antlerite and azurite are characterized for the first time by exploiting a high-resolution coherent THz-CW spectrometer in the spectral range 0.1–2.8 THz adopting transmission configuration; the spectral response of atacamite and antlerite is reported for the first time in literature in this frequency range. The absorption spectra of the two copper-based pigments showed the presence of distinct absorption peaks defining their fingerprints. In particular, atacamite presents a peak centered at 2.45 THz and antlerite presents two spectral fingerprints centered at 1.77 and 2.52 THz; the retrieved average refractive index is 1.19 and 1.29, respectively. The absorption spectrum of azurite is in good agreement with previous works in the far infrared region and presents two sharp peaks centered at 1.83 and 2.23 THz with an average value of the refractive index of 1.65. Furthermore, by means of the same technique, it is possible to discriminate and quantify pure components in binary mixtures. This result is of great interest for the identification of pigments and metallic corrosion products, and it demonstrates that THz-CW spectroscopy can open the way to an innovative approach for the Cultural Heritage field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the establishment and development of the Toshiba Library for Japanese Legal Research at Columbia Law School. The library was built through donations from Japan and holds a diverse collection of print, digital, and microform titles. The efforts of individuals like Walter Gellhorn and Michael K. Young were instrumental in realizing the vision for the library. The article also discusses the challenges faced by the library, including a reorganization in 2014 that resulted in a decline in quality. However, the author expresses hope that the library will continue to foster mutual understanding between the United States and Japan. [Extracted from the article]

This article asserts that the particularly personal nature of Lutheran preaching compels preachers to be personally present with the words they proclaim and the people in front of them as they give them the gift of the gospel. Lutheran preaching prioritizes and drives toward the explicit proclamation of Christ crucified that declares Christ's promises to be true "for you." This is personal. The gospel is proclaimed not in general for all, but for each. The preacher gives the gospel to the people in front of them, just as the bread and cup are given to the people in Holy Communion. Such an intimate task invites an intimate presence. After unpacking the term "personally present," this essay outlines three interrelated elements of Lutheran preaching that reveal the importance of the presence of the preacher, and a few words are offered to suggest ways in which these learnings may be of interest to those of other traditions. Finally, four exercises are provided to help homileticians foster this presence in their students and to assist preachers in fostering this presence during their preaching preparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A liberal politics is, in moral principle at least, a universalist politics: a politics that assumes that there is no "other"; there is only "us," all entitled to equal treatment. This ideal inspired the 1951 Refugee Convention, which now faces a crisis of consent in Western societies because of the sheer numbers of people claiming refugee protection. Public opinion is also turning against the universalist premise. Citizens ask why they should extend citizenship rights to strangers and why their state shouldn't be able to exclude whom it wants from its borders. How to respond to this crisis of consent? By defending the universalist right of persons in distress to seek asylum, but also by appealing to citizens to reconceive their relationship to strangers as a gift: they give welcome to strangers as a gift that confers obligations on the beneficiary, namely the obligation to live by the rules of the society that made the gift of asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigated the potential of a short industry-facilitated masterclass in virtual product development to inform future curriculum development and teaching and learning approaches within the context of Higher Education. An action research approach was adopted with fashion business student participants (n = 22). A pre-class survey, field notes, discussions, and reflections during the four-day masterclass provided data for the study. This study actively engaged student participants to inform curriculum development to advance the digital transformation of the industry. The fashion business students reported the experience as helpful to understand the potential of 3D or 'virtual' technologies within more sustainable product development processes, and to understand their roles as fashion marketing and/or management professionals within the emerging Design/Present/Sell/Produce-model. This study contributes to the literature on how to advance digital skills in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims: During recent years, there have been major insight into the pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). We aim to evaluate modifications of the clinical‐epidemiological phenotype of AIH patients from 1980 to our days. Methods: Single‐centre, tertiary care retrospective study on 507 consecutive Italian patients with AIH. Patients were divided into four subgroups according to the decade of diagnosis: 1981–1990, 1991–2000, 2001–2010 and 2011–2020. We assessed clinical, laboratory and histological features at diagnosis, response to treatment and clinical outcomes. Acute presentation is defined as transaminase levels >10‐fold the upper limit and/or bilirubin >5 mg/dL. Complete response is defined as the normalization of transaminases and IgG after 12 months. Clinical progression is defined as the development of cirrhosis in non‐cirrhotic patients and hepatic decompensation/hepatocellular carcinoma development in compensated cirrhosis. Results: Median age at diagnosis increased across decades (24, 31, 39, 52 years, p <.001). Acute onset became more common (39.6%, 44.4%, 47.7%, 59.5%, p =.019), while cirrhosis at diagnosis became less frequent (36.5%, 16.3%, 10.8%, 8.7%, p <.001). Complete response rates rose (11.1%, 49.4%, 72.7% 76.2%, p <.001) and clinical progression during follow‐up decreased (54.3%, 29.9%, 16.9%, 11.2%, p <.001). Anti‐nuclear antibodies positivity increased (40.7%, 52.0%, 73.7%, 79.3%, p <.001), while IgG levels/upper limit progressively decreased (1.546, 1.515, 1.252, 1.120, p <.001). Liver‐related death and liver transplantation reduced from 17.1% to 2.1% (p <.001). Conclusions: In the new millennium, the typical AIH patient in Italy is older at diagnosis, more often presents with acute hepatitis, cirrhosis is less frequent and response to treatment is more favourable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Delta State University Library in Mississippi has been a selective depository library for US government documents since 1975. The library houses a collection of over 26,000 tangible documents and online resources, with a focus on civil rights and voting rights. The article provides usage data, including the top ten checked-out documents and website statistics. The establishment of the collection has been seen as a valuable resource for the community, especially during a time when physical access to government information was crucial. The library's role as a depository for government documents is confirmed by various sources, including a letter from the library to the Library Division of the Superintendent of Documents in 1975 and an article published in The Clarion Ledger Jackson Daily News in 1976. [Extracted from the article]

This article presents selected results from a large‐scale, mixed‐methods, federally funded investigation of US‐based language study‐abroad alumni of all ages, which included a nationwide survey (N = 4,899) followed by professional life history interviews with 54 participants. Here, we focus on three questions heretofore unaddressed: (a) How do these alumni continue to use their additional languages? (b) How is long‐term language use associated with various study‐abroad program features? and (c) How is the role of program features reflected in life history narratives? We found that 79% of participants use their languages in at least one of the activities listed on the survey, though this use is generally confined to informal, interactive tasks. Our examination of program features using multiple regression revealed that while all features were statistically significant predictors for long‐term language use, those involving engagement with local communities (e.g., close personal relationships) showed more relative importance. Contextualized with a sample of our qualitative data, findings from this study offer a macrolevel confirmation that local engagement during study abroad retains its significance for language use over the long term and provide implications for designing study‐abroad programs that involve language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the type of fraud being encountered by multiple researchers while conducting qualitative studies wherein study participants give false information to get incentives.

The article discusses the leadership dynamics of megachurches in urban centers of the Philippines, examining the doctrinal beliefs, attitudes, and responses of leaders from two prominent megachurches, Christ Commission Fellowship (CCF) and Victory Christian Fellowship (VCF). Topics include the historical formation of CCF and VCF, their growth trajectories, and the methodology used to study their leadership dynamics, including survey instruments and data collection procedures.