AI tools are increasingly suggested as solutions to assist public agencies with heavy workloads. In public defense, where a constitutional right to counsel meets the complexities of law, overwhelming caseloads and constrained resources, practitioners face especially taxing conditions. Yet, there is little evidence of how AI could meaningfully support defenders' day-to-day work. In partnership with the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, we develop the NJ BriefBank, a retrieval tool which surfaces relevant appellate briefs to streamline legal research and writing. We show that existing legal retrieval benchmarks fail to transfer to public defense search, however adding domain knowledge improves retrieval quality. This includes query expansion with legal reasoning, domain-specific data and curated synthetic examples. To facilitate further research, we provide a taxonomy of realistic defender search queries and release a manually annotated public defense retrieval dataset. Together, our work offers starting points towards building practical, reliable retrieval AI tools for public defense, and towards more realistic legal retrieval benchmarks.
In recent decades, innovation has achieved an extraordinary position in political, economic and cultural discourse. It has come to be seen as a universal remedy—a panacea capable of addressing social, environmental, economic and political challenges while simultaneously driving growth and competitiveness. As highlighted in the call for this thematic issue and as critically framed by several authors already, this belief rests on a powerful modern narrative: a fable of progress driven by science and technology, a promise that the future will inevitably be better than the present because innovation will carry us there. Yet this fable has obscured the social, political and environmental consequences of innovation systems designed around market logics, competition and technological determinism. It has eclipsed alternative imaginaries of collective flourishing and dismissed deeper questions about who benefits from innovation, who bears its risks, and what other futures might become possible.
In response, the field of Critical Studies of Innovation has emerged to interrogate these assumptions. Building on the foundational work of Godin, Vinck, Pfotenhauer and others, scholarship has exposed the ideological character of “innovationism” (Oliveira, 2011) —the belief that innovation is inherently good, that more is always better, and that societal problems are ultimately innovation deficits. The contributions gathered in this issue extend this critique, while also advancing conceptual and empirical foundations for alternative pathways. They address the contradictions of innovation regimes, expose the limits of ‘x-innovation’ (Gaglio et al., 2019) rebrandings, analyse the politics of governance and directionality, and foreground community-based, solidaristic and human-centred approaches that disrupt dominant models.
This issue has been deliberately structured to move from historical–epistemic critique, to sectoral and institutional analysis, to territorial experimentation, and finally to conceptual and methodological tools for rethinking innovation. Each article contributes a distinct lens, yet together they build a coherent argument: that the current innovation paradigm—rooted in neoliberalism, technological determinism and a narrow economic rationality—is neither inevitable nor desirable, and that viable, situated alternatives already exist, albeit often marginalised or invisible.
Anomaly detection plays a vital role in the inspection of industrial images. Most existing methods require separate models for each category, resulting in multiplied deployment costs. This highlights the challenge of developing a unified model for multi-class anomaly detection. However, the significant increase in inter-class interference leads to severe missed detections. Furthermore, the intra-class overlap between normal and abnormal samples, particularly in synthesis-based methods, cannot be ignored and may lead to over-detection. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Center-aware Residual Anomaly Synthesis (CRAS) method for multi-class anomaly detection. CRAS leverages center-aware residual learning to couple samples from different categories into a unified center, mitigating the effects of inter-class interference. To further reduce intra-class overlap, CRAS introduces distance-guided anomaly synthesis that adaptively adjusts noise variance based on normal data distribution. Experimental results on diverse datasets and real-world industrial applications demonstrate the superior detection accuracy and competitive inference speed of CRAS. The source code and the newly constructed dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/cqylunlun/CRAS.
Thomas Ågotnes, Rustam Galimullin, Ken Satoh
et al.
We formalise the notion of an anonymous public announcement in the tradition of public announcement logic. Such announcements can be seen as in-between a public announcement from ``the outside" (an announcement of $φ$) and a public announcement by one of the agents (an announcement of $K_aφ$): we get more information than just $φ$, but not (necessarily) about exactly who made it. Even if such an announcement is prima facie anonymous, depending on the background knowledge of the agents it might reveal the identity of the announcer: if I post something on a message board, the information might reveal who I am even if I don't sign my name. Furthermore, like in the Russian Cards puzzle, if we assume that the announcer's intention was to stay anonymous, that in fact might reveal more information. In this paper we first look at the case when no assumption about intentions are made, in which case the logic with an anonymous public announcement operator is reducible to epistemic logic. We then look at the case when we assume common knowledge of the intention to stay anonymous, which is both more complex and more interesting: in several ways it boils down to the notion of a ``safe" announcement (again, similarly to Russian Cards). Main results include formal expressivity results and axiomatic completeness for key logical languages.
Advanced space technology systems often face high fixed costs, can serve limited non-government demand, and are significantly driven by non-market motivations. While increased entrepreneurial activity and national ambitions in space have encouraged planners at public space agencies to develop markets around such systems, the very factors that make the recent growth of the space economy so remarkable also challenge planners' efforts to develop and sustain markets for space-related goods and services. I propose a graphical framework to visualize the number of competitors a market can sustain as a function of the industry's cost structure; the distribution of government support across direct purchases, direct investments, and shared infrastructure; and the magnitude of non-government demand. Building on public goods theory, the framework shows how marginal dollars invested in shared infrastructure can create non-rival benefits supporting more competitors per dollar than direct purchases or subsidies. I demonstrate the framework with a stylized application inspired by NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations program. Under cost and demand conditions consistent with public data, independent stations generate industry-wide losses of \$355 million annually, while shared core infrastructure enables industry-wide profits of \$154 million annually. I also outline key directions for future research on public investment and market development strategies for advanced technologies.
AbstractThis article argues that industrial relations (IR) in the German public sector are not just a replica of private sector IR. It suggests that neither the structures, nor the outcomes can be sufficiently explained by derivation from private sector IR processes. Primarily, the specifics and developments of the public sector explain public sector IR. It is of fundamental importance whether trade unions operate in a profit‐driven market environment or a publicly financed environment that is under public control. Differences between the public and the private sector result not least in the distinct relevance and meanings of trade union power resources. This influences the ways in which industrial action in the private and the public sector works and is relevant for trade union strategies.
In the last decades, an increasing attention has been given to the relationship between job satisfaction and employee motivation in the public sector. In a world of constant change and growing demands, it is crucial for public sector organizations to understand and promote a work environment that supports both employee satisfaction and motivation. This article explores this complex relationship and proposes ways in which managers and leaders in the public sector can improve job satisfaction and employee motivation. This article reviews the literature on public service motivation and job satisfaction. In the first part we conduct a brief literature review of the concepts involved. In the main part of the article, we examine 33 WoS articles on the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction. In the discussion section, we stress some points relevant for public management practice.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)
The book titled “Towards Resilient Organizations and Societies: A Cross-sectoral and Multi-disciplinary Perspective” is part of the series “Public Sector Organizations “, a series that covers issues such as: the methodology for studing public sector’ organizations, the public sector’s autonomy, bureaucratic politics, networks analysis, leadership and organizational change. This volume, edited by Romulo Pinheiro, Maria Laura Frigotto, Mitchell Young, is the result of the panel “The Surprinsing Nature of Resilience Organizations”, held in Tallin, Estonia, hosted by the European Group of Public Administration. Its aim is to offer a holistic and deep understanding of the concept of resilience in order to support public managers from different public organizations, polimakers, local or regional planers, scholars in their effort of pursuing resilience in the context of multiple crises.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)
The core insight of this thoughtful and provocative article is that science has become engineering and must be re-governed appropriately. Science today is as much artefact constructing as it is knowledge-producing. Certified knowledge is found through certified construction; science has become technoscience. As such, received practices of and models for governance need re-examining.
It is not possible here to address the full range of insights and questions that René von Schomberg’s challenging paper puts on the table. His argument is clearly the outgrowth of years of critical reflection in the science policy trenches of the European Commission. I would wager that there’s no one who has thought longer, harder, and at greater depth about these issues. I will concentrate my comments on the question concerning engineering.
In recent years, the upstream of Large Language Models (LLM) has also encouraged the computer vision community to work on substantial multimodal datasets and train models on a scale in a self-/semi-supervised manner, resulting in Vision Foundation Models (VFM), as, e.g., Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). The models generalize well and perform outstandingly on everyday objects or scenes, even on downstream tasks, tasks the model has not been trained on, while the application in specialized domains, as in an industrial context, is still an open research question. Here, fine-tuning the models or transfer learning on domain-specific data is unavoidable when objecting to adequate performance. In this work, we, on the one hand, introduce a pipeline to generate the Industrial Language-Image Dataset (ILID) based on web-crawled data; on the other hand, we demonstrate effective self-supervised transfer learning and discussing downstream tasks after training on the cheaply acquired ILID, which does not necessitate human labeling or intervention. With the proposed approach, we contribute by transferring approaches from state-of-the-art research around foundation models, transfer learning strategies, and applications to the industrial domain.
We are increasingly subjected to the power of AI authorities. As AI decisions become inescapable, entering domains such as healthcare, education, and law, we must confront a vital question: how can we ensure AI systems have the legitimacy necessary for effective governance? This essay argues that to secure AI legitimacy, we need methods that engage the public in designing and constraining AI systems, ensuring these technologies reflect the community's shared values. Constitutional AI, proposed by Anthropic, represents a step towards this goal, offering a model for democratic control of AI. However, while Constitutional AI's commitment to hardcoding explicit principles into AI models enhances transparency and accountability, it falls short in two crucial aspects: addressing the opacity of individual AI decisions and fostering genuine democratic legitimacy. To overcome these limitations, this essay proposes "Public Constitutional AI." This approach envisions a participatory process where diverse stakeholders, including ordinary citizens, deliberate on the principles guiding AI development. The resulting "AI Constitution" would carry the legitimacy of popular authorship, grounding AI governance in the public will. Furthermore, the essay proposes "AI Courts" to develop "AI case law," providing concrete examples for operationalizing constitutional principles in AI training. This evolving combination of constitutional principles and case law aims to make AI governance more responsive to public values. By grounding AI governance in deliberative democratic processes, Public Constitutional AI offers a path to imbue automated authorities with genuine democratic legitimacy, addressing the unique challenges posed by increasingly powerful AI systems while ensuring their alignment with the public interest.
This paper explores the environment of European bureaucracy starting from the research question regarding the role and place of consultative institutions (the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Committee of the Regions) in the European institutional system. The purpose of our investigation is to explain the nature and functionality of the institutions mentioned in the multilevel governance architecture of the European Union (EU). To achieve the proposed objective, we analyse the condition of advisory institutions as actors/agents of the European structure through the prism of the rationalist current and then we argue, through the grid of social constructivism, that the institutions in question serve, through their consultative attribute, also a role of legitimising supranational legislation with subnational applicability in the EU, against the background of the precariousness of legislative powers at regional and local level. Our research identifies the way in which the consultative institutions of the EU legitimise the community legislative process, a context in which the results obtained show the existence of a significant discordance between the need for legislation at the regional level and the much undersized legislative attribute at this level as a result of the constitutional limitations of the member states. The specified phenomenon feeds an imperfect subsidiarity and a deficient proximity within the EU, for the remedy of which the feasible solution consists in improving the administrative-legal cohesion in the EU through a potential reconsolidation of the Union treaties, which would generate a more homogeneous distribution of the administrative-territorial devolution.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)
This study is the first to investigate whether pawnshops, financial institutions for low-income populations, have contributed to the decline in mortality in the early twentieth century. Using ward-level panel data from Tokyo City, this study revealed that the popularity of public pawnshops was associated with a 4% and 5% decrease in infant mortality and fetal death rates, respectively, during 1927-1935. The historical context implies that the potential channels of the relationships were improving nutrition and hygiene and covering childbirth costs. Moreover, a cost-effectiveness calculation highlighted that the establishment of public pawnshops was a cost-effective public investment for better public health. Contrarily, for-profit private pawnshops showed no significant association with health improvements.
The rapid growth of social media as a news platform has raised significant concerns about the influence and societal impact of biased and unreliable news on these platforms. While much research has explored user engagement with news on platforms like Facebook, most studies have focused on publicly shared posts. This focus leaves an important question unanswered: how representative is the public sphere of Facebook's entire ecosystem? Specifically, how much of the interactions occur in less-public spaces, and do public engagement patterns for different news classes (e.g., reliable vs. unreliable) generalize to the broader Facebook ecosystem? This paper presents the first comprehensive comparison of interaction patterns between Facebook's more public sphere (referred to as public in paper) and the less public sphere (referred to as private). For the analysis, we first collect two complementary datasets: (1) aggregated interaction data for all Facebook posts (public + private) for 19,050 manually labeled news articles (225.3M user interactions), and (2) a subset containing only interactions with public posts (70.4M interactions). Then, through discussions and iterative feedback from the CrowdTangle team, we develop a robust method for fair comparison between these datasets. Our analysis reveals that only 31% of news interactions occur in the public sphere, with significant variations across news classes. Engagement patterns in less-public spaces often differ, with users, for example, engaging more deeply in private contexts. These findings highlight the need to examine both public and less-public engagement to fully understand news dissemination on Facebook. The observed differences hold important implications on content moderation, platform governance, and policymaking, contributing to healthier online discourse.
Nowadays, it is thought that there are only two approaches to political economy: public finance and public choice; however, this research aims to introduce a new insight by investigating scholastic sources. We study the relevant classic books from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries and reevaluate the scholastic literature by doctrines of public finance and public choice. The findings confirm that the government is the institution for realizing the common good according to scholastic attitude. Therefore, scholastic thinkers saw a common mission for the government based on their essentialist attitude toward human happiness. Social conflicts and lack of social consent are the product of diversification in ends and desires; hence, if the end of humans were unified, there would be no conflict of interest. Accordingly, if the government acts according to its assigned mission, the lack of public consent is not significant. Based on the scholastic point of view this study introduces the third approach to political economy, which can be, consider an analytical synthesis among classical doctrines.
Despite the salience of racism and other “isms” woven into the fabric of US society, there is a dearth of industrial relations (IR) scholarship that engages critical race and intersectional theory (CRT/I) to deeply understand how structural racism and other social identity-based systems of oppression govern labor and employment systems. The authors call for the incorporation of CRT/I into IR to address the erasure of vital counter-narratives and to expand our empirical cases for labor and employment research. Focusing on leading scholarship on worker organizing, the authors confront white dominance in our research questions, methodologies, and analyses to illustrate how traditional “color-blind” and meritocracy-based IR theories lead to the exclusion of relevant knowledge. In an era of heightened public discourse and worker uprisings in response to deep-rooted systemic inequities, critical industrial relations research is vital to the field’s relevance and its expertise in explaining the nature and consequences of contemporary labor contestations and their impact on the future of the labor movement.
No less rife with the cosmetic products number outside, skin care products in Indonesia lately have many fans ranging from all ages women and men. This means that the awareness level of the Indonesian people towards skin care is starting to increase, due to healthy and beautiful skin could increase the wearer confidence. This is the EDVI Beauty Glow Skincare focal point with the main goal of improving Indonesian skin problems. In this case study, researchers analyze how the EDVI public relations strategy in building products brand awareness using the PENCILS analysis method (Publications, Events, News, Community Involvement, Inform or Image, Lobbying and Negotiation, and Social Responsibility). This study uses a qualitative descriptive method with a narrative approach. Data collection techniques by interviews means, observation, and documentation. Interviews were conducted with the main informants, namely the EDVI owner, the Public Relations Division Head and two customers. The results show that EDVI implements the strategy of the PENCILS analysis method and what media is used. Strategies in the product form and company publicity, implementing program events, creating news, building good relations with the community, brand image, lobbying and negotiating skills, and corporate social responsibility to the community are PENCILS strategy forms that have proven successful in EDVI's efforts to build brand awareness.
Due to the increasing price of office rentals in Jakarta every year, coworking space has become a phenomenon for workspace facilities that can be rented at affordable costs. As a result, there are many enthusiasts, increase in numbers in coworking spaces in Indonesia, especially Jakarta, even in the pandemic era. This makes the marketing public relations team required to be more creative and critical in seeing opportunities and circumstances for how to build and create brand awareness for a product. There needs to be a communication and marketing strategy that is designed to achieve this goal by utilizing existing media. The public relations theory used is mix model, namely the P.E.N.C.I.L.S. theory. Qualitative research approach with exploratory case study method. Researchers collect data by observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation. The result of the research is that public relations and marketing of Gaspace Coworking Space apply a strategy to build brand awareness initiated by Thomas L. Harris which is called the theory of the public relations mix, namely P.E.N.C.I.L.S which consists of Publicity, Event, News, Community Involvement, Inform or Image, Lobbying Negotiation, and Social Responsibility in introducing Gaspace to the wider community. Akibat harga sewa perkantoran di Jakarta semakin meningkat setiap tahunnya, coworking space hadir menjadi fenomena untuk fasilitas ruang bekerja yang dapat disewa dengan biaya terjangkau. Akibatnya banyaknya peminat maka terdapat peningkatan pada jumlah coworking space yang berada di Indonesia terlebih Jakarta meskipun di era pandemi. Hal ini membuat team marketing public relations dituntut untuk lebih kreatif dan kritis dalam melihat kesempatan dan keadaan untuk bagaimana membangun dan menciptakan brand awareness bagi suatu produk. Perlu adanya strategi komunikasi juga marketing yang dirancang untuk mencapai tujuan tersebut dengan memanfaatkan media yang ada. Teori yang digunakan adalah model bauran public relations yaitu teori P.E.N.C.I.L.S. Untuk pendekatan penelitian kualitatif dengan metode studi kasus eksploratori. Peneliti mengumpulkan data dengan observasi, wawancara mendalam, serta dokumentasi. Hasil penelitian adalah Public relations dan marketing Gaspace Coworking Space menerapkan strategi untuk membangun brand awareness yang diprakarsai oleh Thomas L. Harris yang disebut teori bauran public relations yaitu P.E.N.C.I.L.S yang terdiri dari Publicity, Event, News, Community Involvement, Inform or Image, Lobbying Negotiation, dan Social Responsibility dalam memperkenalkan Gaspace kepada masyarakat luas.
ALPOPI Cristina , BURCEA Ștefan-Gabriel , POPESCU Ruxandra-Irina
et al.
The article evaluates the progress made by Romania in order to achive the sustainable development goal regarding sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11). The 10 indicators and targets associated with SDG 11 are taken into account from the point of view of the evolution recorded by Romania in the period 2010-2020. This exploratory study aims to analyse secondary data collected from the Eurostat platform dedicated to SDG-related indicators. Thus, we aim to track the extent to which Romania has progressed toward achieving each target associated with SDG 11 and to identify the target(s) for which progress has been most significant.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)
Integrated territorial investments represent the latest instrument of the cohesion policy introduced to solve the local problems, especially in urban and functional urban areas. The main objective of this article is to explore the content of research in the field of integrated territorial investments. In this regard, a review of the literature was carried out in order to collect, review, and synthesize 49 papers related to this concept published during 2014-2022. The publications were identified by using the selected keywords in the title or in the abstract, and the search was done in several databases (ISI Web of Science/Clarivate Analytics, Scopus, Sage, Springer, ScienceDirect, Emerald, JSTOR, ProQuest) set for the field of administrative sciences in accordance with the Romanian legislation in force. The overview of the literature revealed integrated territorial investments to be a promising new area of research, especially since the implementation of the mechanism continues in the programming period 2021-2027.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)