As sidewalk delivery robots become increasingly integrated into urban life, this paper begins with a critical provocation: Is robot labor labor? More than a rhetorical question, this inquiry invites closer attention to the social and political arrangements that robot labor entails. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across two smart-city districts in Seoul, we examine how delivery robot labor is collectively sustained. While robotic actions are often framed as autonomous and efficient, we show that each successful delivery is in fact a distributed sociotechnical achievement--reliant on human labor, regulatory coordination, and social accommodations. We argue that delivery robots do not replace labor but reconfigure it--rendering some forms more visible (robotic performance) while obscuring others (human and institutional support). Unlike industrial robots, delivery robots operate in shared public space, engage everyday passersby, and are embedded in policy and progress narratives. In these spaces, we identify "robot privilege"--humans routinely yielding to robots--and distinct perceptions between casual observers ("cute") and everyday coexisters ("admirable"). We contribute a conceptual reframing of robot labor as a collective assemblage, empirical insights into South Korea's smart-city automation, and a call for HRI to engage more deeply with labor and spatial politics to better theorize public-facing robots.
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into social science research presents transformative opportunities for advancing scientific inquiry, particularly in public administration (PA). However, the absence of standardized methodologies for using LLMs poses significant challenges for ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. This manuscript introduces the TaMPER framework-a structured methodology organized around five critical decision points: Task, Model, Prompt, Evaluation, and Reporting. The TaMPER framework provides scholars with a systematic approach to leveraging LLMs effectively while addressing key challenges such as model variability, prompt design, evaluation protocols, and transparent reporting practices.
The rapid adoption of generative AI in the public sector, encompassing diverse applications ranging from automated public assistance to welfare services and immigration processes, highlights its transformative potential while underscoring the pressing need for thorough risk assessments. Despite its growing presence, evaluations of risks associated with AI-driven systems in the public sector remain insufficiently explored. Building upon an established taxonomy of AI risks derived from diverse government policies and corporate guidelines, we investigate the critical risks posed by generative AI in the public sector while extending the scope to account for its multimodal capabilities. In addition, we propose a Systematic dAta generatIon Framework for evaluating the risks of generative AI (SAIF). SAIF involves four key stages: breaking down risks, designing scenarios, applying jailbreak methods, and exploring prompt types. It ensures the systematic and consistent generation of prompt data, facilitating a comprehensive evaluation while providing a solid foundation for mitigating the risks. Furthermore, SAIF is designed to accommodate emerging jailbreak methods and evolving prompt types, thereby enabling effective responses to unforeseen risk scenarios. We believe that this study can play a crucial role in fostering the safe and responsible integration of generative AI into the public sector.
The American scientific community is reeling from funding cuts and policy directives that will debilitate scientific research and education. The underlying hostilities fueling these attacks have intensified in recent years as the COVID-19 pandemic increased suspicion of scientific experts and the institutional embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in 2020 prompted a backlash along longstanding political fault lines. Under the banner of anti-elitism, opponents of science and DEI have formed a coalition that sees attacks on higher education as a strategic means to achieve their political ends. While some of their arguments contain legitimate criticisms, academics must resist these attacks that seek to dismantle higher education altogether. Instead, we should engage the public in our research process, build a scientific practice representative of and accountable to the communities we serve, and interrogate the aims of our work by critically studying the history of science.
Nataliya A. Balabanova, Manh Hong Duong, The Anh Han
Understanding the emergence and stability of cooperation in public goods games is important due to its applications in fields such as biology, economics, and social science. However, a gap remains in comprehending how mutations, both additive and multiplicative, as well as institutional incentives, influence these dynamics. In this paper, we study the replicator-mutator dynamics, with combined additive and multiplicative mutations, for public goods games both in the absence or presence of institutional incentives. For each model, we identify the possible number of (stable) equilibria, demonstrate their attainability, as well as analyse their stability properties. We also characterise the dependence of these equilibria on the model's parameters via bifurcation analysis and asymptotic behaviour. Our results offer rigorous and quantitative insights into the role of institutional incentives and the effect of combined additive and multiplicative mutations on the evolution of cooperation in the context of public goods games.
Emanuele Musumeci, Michele Brienza, Vincenzo Suriani
et al.
In the last years' digitalization process, the creation and management of documents in various domains, particularly in Public Administration (PA), have become increasingly complex and diverse. This complexity arises from the need to handle a wide range of document types, often characterized by semi-structured forms. Semi-structured documents present a fixed set of data without a fixed format. As a consequence, a template-based solution cannot be used, as understanding a document requires the extraction of the data structure. The recent introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled the creation of customized text output satisfying user requests. In this work, we propose a novel approach that combines the LLMs with prompt engineering and multi-agent systems for generating new documents compliant with a desired structure. The main contribution of this work concerns replacing the commonly used manual prompting with a task description generated by semantic retrieval from an LLM. The potential of this approach is demonstrated through a series of experiments and case studies, showcasing its effectiveness in real-world PA scenarios.
Administering elections is costly, requiring considerable resourcing. The extent to which election administration is funded can reveal government priorities towards democratic rights and affects every potential voter. Yet, little is known of this crucial aspect of public administration, in any type of democracy. This research innovates by seeking to establish overall levels of variation in public funding of election administration in a national general election, and by applying this to the local level to investigate whether socio-economic, administrative or political factors are more important as drivers of costs. The article deploys a unique dataset which integrates rare government election administration budgeting data, with Census and political data to provide an exploratory analysis from a British general election. It finds that key production costs of voting infrastructure appear to drive funding. While socio-economic and political aspects have less of an impact, levels of ethnic minority voters and regional effects also appear important determinants.
A afirmativa de que a Constituição Federal de 1988 garante o direito e o acesso das crianças pequenas à educação infantil, por meio das ações positivadas do Estado democrático brasileiro, precisa ser reiterada. Trazer à tona os compromissos, por meio dos dispositivos legais, com os cidadãos de pouca idade é urgente, sobretudo em tempos de ataque frontal à jovem democracia brasileira, no sentido de construir a totalidade dos dizeres legais na sua origem constitucional e na efetivação do direito no acesso e na oferta. Nessa perspectiva, o objetivo do artigo é levantar e analisar a oferta de vagas públicas para a educação infantil no estado do Tocantins, Brasil, entre os anos de 1990 e 2020, descortinando a evolução do acesso e a subtração do benefício para muitas crianças tocantinenses.
Amir Hossein Shaddel, Mohammad Saeid Taslimi, Mohammad Ali Lessani Fesharaki
Objective
This study aims to identify the organizational responsibilities of managers in providing employees with “commands” and its related derivatives by examining the verses of the Holy Quran.
Methods
The methodology used in this study to explore the role of command in organizational culture in the light of the Holy Quran is the subjective research method within the Holy Quran. Hadiths, interpretive, translation, and lexical sources were also utilized to enrich the research. Thematic axes were designed, and the extracted concepts were organized under them.
Results
Competent managers issue commands by assessing the situation and considering various conditions to ensure their successful implementation. These conditions include adherence to organizational rules and regulations, clear communication of rules and commands, continuous development and self-improvement of managers, fostering an organizational environment that resembles a family where managers pay attention to employees as if they were family members, implementing an employee meal plan, managing based on individual employee characteristics, encouraging organizational participation of employees, managing the organization with trust in God (a vital value that affects all managerial duties), and employing a system of encouragement and punishment.
Conclusion
The responsibilities of managers in commanding employees within organizations encompass three distinct phases: pre-commanding, commanding, and post-commanding, each involving various components.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The causal relationship between human interference in both climate change and decrease in biodiversity is unquestionable. This fact supports the need to act effectively against those illegal activities affecting wildlife. Hungary is also involved in wildlife crimes, but there is a noticeable deficit in the processes of uncovering these actions, gathering proof and punishing those responsible. In this study the Authors examine what role forensics may play in the fight against wildlife crime.
Aim: Present the characteristics of wildlife crimes and outline the main features of wildlife forensics.
Methodology: The current national and international legal background and norms and guidelines for professional conduct are surveyed. The Authors also reviewed the most important relevant Hungarian and international scientific literature.
Findings: One of the most important and vital tasks of modern civilization is the preservation and protection of the environment – with an emphasis on life on Earth. As part of this process there is a place for law enforcement to detect, punish and prevent further criminal activity connected with illegal activities involving wildlife. In Hungary the major barriers to effective punishment of those responsible for wildlife crimes are primarily: the lack of forensic technicians with sufficient specialized knowledge and practice; missing specialized standard operational protocols; insufficient knowledge of biology within law enforcement; insufficient funding of non-human genetic laboratories and the lack of adequate non-human (genetic) databases.
Value: For the first time in Hungary, the Authors outline the basic characteristics of wildlife forensics.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
A családon belüli erőszak szankcionálására természetesen korábban is volt lehetőség, azonban 2013. július 1. napjától a magyar Btk. önálló bűncselekményi tényállásban és kibővített tartalommal rendelkezik a hozzátartozók sérelmére elkövetett bántalmazásokról. Jelen tanulmány bemutatja a szabályozás lényegét, az elmúlt tíz év statisztikai adatait, illetve a jogalkalmazás során felmerült nehézségeket és jó gyakorlatokat.
Cél: A tanulmány célja a kapcsolati erőszak bűncselekmény országos joggyakorlatának és tanulságainak első összegző ismertetése.
Módszertan: A tanulmány hátterét képező kutatások módszertanát kriminálstatisztikai és jogszabályelemzés, kerekasztal, fókuszcsoport, mélyinterjúk és iratvizsgálatok képezték.
Megállapítások: Számos teendő fogalmazódik meg a jövőre nézve, többek között: utóvizsgálat lefolytatása, egységes joggyakorlat kialakítása, ORFK utasítás népszerűsítése, gyermekvédelmi jelzőrendszer felelősségvállalásának növelése, célirányos oktatások és képzések szervezése, szakmai együttműködések és a sértetti felvilágosítás erősítése, a büntetéskiszabási gyakorlat szigorítása, valamint a kommunikációs irányok megváltoztatása szükséges.
Érték: A bűncselekményi tényállás első tíz évének számos aspektusból történő összefoglaló elemzése segít levonni a következtetéseket és megtalálni a követendő irányokat.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
Understanding the heterogeneity of mechanisms that form public attitudes towards science and technology policymaking is essential to the establishment of an effective public engagement platform. Using the 2011 public opinion survey data from Japan (n = 6,136), I divided the general public into three categories: the Attentive public, who are willing to actively engage with science and technology policymaking dialogue; the Interested public, who have moderate interest in science and technology but rely on experts for policy decisions; and the Residual public, who have minimal interest in science and technology. On the basis of the results of multivariate regression analysis, I have identified several key predispositions towards science and technology and other socio-demographic characteristics that influence the shift of individuals from one category of the general public to another. The findings provide a foundation for understanding how to induce more accountable, evidence-based science and technology policymaking.
The debate surrounding the provision of welfare by state institutions has been widely discussed in the field of political economics since the 1930s. Related research also focuses on welfare supply at an international system level. This article assesses whether international cooperation in the area of sharing remote sensing data leads to the supply of global public goods, which to date has not yet been discussed in related scholarly literature. The supply of global public goods is assessed within the GEO international regime and leads to the use of the non-rivalrous GEOSS, which can be accessed by every socio-economic group in every UN member country including future generations. However, providing the benefit of GEOSS is not always favourable because of the low number of financially participating consumers.
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For example, could design or framing choices interact with viewers' social cognitive biases in ways that promote political polarization? When reporting on U.S. attitudes toward public policies, it is popular to highlight the gap between Democrats and Republicans (e.g., with blue vs red connected dot plots). But these charts may encourage social-normative conformity, influencing viewers' attitudes to match the divided opinions shown in the visualization. We conducted three experiments examining visualization framing in the context of social conformity and polarization. Crowdworkers viewed charts showing simulated polling results for public policy proposals. We varied framing (aggregating data as non-partisan "All US Adults," or partisan "Democrat" and "Republican") and the visualized groups' support levels. Participants then reported their own support for each policy. We found that participants' attitudes biased significantly toward the group attitudes shown in the stimuli and this can increase inter-party attitude divergence. These results demonstrate that data visualizations can induce social conformity and accelerate political polarization. Choosing to visualize partisan divisions can divide us further.
We adapt the post-Newtonian gravitational-radiation methods developed within general relativity by Epstein and Wagoner to the gravitation theory with torsion, recently proposed by Hehl et al., and show that the two theories predict in this approximation the same gravitational radiation losses. Since they agree also on the first post-Newtonian level, they are at the present time - observationally - indistinguishable.
O artigo relaciona os estudos da socióloga francesa Liora Israël com a teoria da legística. Por meio de estudo bibliográfico, compreende-se a legitimidade da lei e suas crises, que levam à ascensão dos direitos humanos e propiciam o pluralismo jurídico. Disso surge a ambivalência do direito, que opera tanto como arma quanto como escudo e pertence tanto ao Estado quanto à sociedade. Identifica-se a possibilidade de grupos de resistência se valerem dessa característica para utilizar o direito como recurso em lutas sociais. A legística, por sua vez, demonstra que uma elaboração legislativa com ampla participação popular gera leis mais eficazes e com maior impacto. As lutas sociais, portanto, têm a elaboração legislativa como cenário estratégico para mobilização do direito, em movimentos que não apenas contribuem para a criação do próprio direito como também facilitam mobilizações pela sua devida aplicação.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Political science (General)
RPYS is a bibliometric method originally introduced in order to reveal the historical roots of research topics or fields. RPYS does not identify the most highly cited papers of the publication set being studied (as is usually done by bibliometric analyses in research evaluation), but instead it indicates most frequently referenced publications - each within a specific reference publication year. In this study, we propose to use the method to identify important researchers, institutions and countries in the context of breakthrough research. To demonstrate our approach, we focus on research on physical modeling of Earth's climate and the prediction of global warming as an example. Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe were both honored with the Nobel Prize in 2021 for their fundamental contributions to this research. Our results reveal that RPYS is able to identify most important researchers, institutions, and countries. For example, all the relevant authors' institutions are located in the USA. These institutions are either research centers of two US National Research Administrations (NASA and NOAA) or universities: the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Stony Brook.
Abstract This article seeks to describe the ways in which municipal administration and informal networks among political elites during the French mandate contributed to the poor state of public health in North Lebanon, in general, as well as an outbreak of typhoid in Tripoli by the late 1930s. This study largely stems from archival research in France and Lebanon. By examining state-building efforts within what came to be known as the annexed territories of Lebanon, this article will highlight the ways in which public health, as a function of colonial state formation, reproduced political and socio-spatial inequality. In turn, the effects of this inequality can be seen in the crumbling infrastructure and spread of infectious disease in North Lebanon. In these ways, the article will show how the mandate institutions and practices designed to centralize authority ultimately reproduced neo-patrimonialism and rather than create a new relation of power that bound residents to the metropole, further divided the population, widened inequality and set the precedent whereby control of public infrastructure became a political object to exploit while public infrastructure itself was left to erode overtime amid the contests for the spoils of office.
<p>The current paper explores the relationship between urban regeneration, tourism and culture, and offers a common approach that each of these three concepts can bring. The paper proposes and develops a new and integrated conceptual analytical framework. The analysis uses the example of the capital Skopje, which provides a suitable framework for interpreting the process. The study uses combined research methods and analysis to obtain a critical synthesis. Skopje has catalyzed a new example of urban regeneration driven by tourism and the ‘Skopje 2014’ project. The results show that, except for the old city’s core, which was generally refurbished with the ‘Skopje 2014’ project, new tourist values were also promoted in other peripheral municipalities of the city. The number, spatial concentration and nationality of foreign tourists have changed in the analyzed period. As well, the findings indicate changes in the geography and business of hotels/accommodation establishments and their increasing use in recent years. This study fits into the theoretical debate on the determinants of tourism/culture-led urban regeneration and provides appropriate theoretical contributions to literature, as well as a set of recommendations that can be useful for public sector authorities and policymakers.</p>
Political institutions and public administration (General)