Este estudio analiza la influencia de las estrategias de comunicación en la inclusión de estudiantes con necesidades educativas específicas, centrándose en aquellos con discapacidad visual, en la Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación Social de la Universidad de Guayaquil. El propósito es identificar las barreras comunicacionales y las prácticas efectivas que favorecen entornos de aprendizaje equitativos en el aula. Se aplicó un enfoque cualitativo, mediante entrevistas semiestructuradas a estudiantes con discapacidad visual y a diez docentes que han participado en experiencias inclusivas. Los datos fueron procesados a través de un análisis temático, identificando patrones relacionados con la comunicación, la accesibilidad y la interacción pedagógica. Los hallazgos muestran que las estrategias de comunicación inclusivas como el uso de recursos tecnológicos, materiales adaptados, lenguaje inclusivo y la empatía de la relación con docente y el estudiante contribuyen al fortalecimiento de la participación y el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes con discapacidad visual. No obstante, se evidencian limitaciones asociadas a la escasa capacitación docente en este ámbito, la falta de lineamientos institucionales claros y la insuficiente integración de criterios de accesibilidad en los programas académicos. El estudio confirma que las estrategias comunicacionales desempeñan un papel central en la inclusión en la educación superior. Se recomienda mejorar la implementación de políticas institucionales, y el uso sistemático de tecnologías adaptativas. Más allá de la accesibilidad, los resultados resaltan la importancia de construir una cultura universitaria justa, participativa y sensible.
Dietary diversity is essential for healthy diets and crucial for academic research and policymaking. However, existing measures often lack conceptual clarity, which limits their interpretability. This study proposes a new framework that classifies dietary diversity indices along two dimensions: whether they account for nutritional functional dissimilarity and whether they incorporate dietary guidelines. Based on this framework, four index types are defined. Using per capita consumption data for 14 food categories across countries from 1981 to 2022, eight indices were applied to assess global dietary diversity and its variation across 13 dietary patterns. The results show a general upward trend in global dietary diversity and dietary quality, with notable regional disparities influenced by dietary patterns, resources, culture, and socioeconomic factors. This study also finds non-linear links between dietary diversity, income, and urbanization, consistent with Bennett’s Law and empirical evidence. These findings underscore the utility of the proposed indices in capturing complex dietary dynamics. This study recommends context-specific use of indices, policy attention in developing countries to maintain diversity during dietary transitions, and the development of more inclusive dietary guidelines that emphasize not only variety but also balance and nutritional function.
This study investigates the competitive and cooperative relationships within urban agglomerations, specifically focusing on the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). Using the Lotka–Volterra model from ecology, the research aims to analyse and predict the dynamic relationships among cities in this area. The purpose is to understand how competition and cooperation influence regional integration, and their complex economic connections. This paper employs both qualitative and quantitative methods, including time-series analysis and the application of the Lotka–Volterra model, to evaluate economic interactions and the roles of various cities or regions within the GBA. The study reveals that mutualistic, competitive, predatory, commensal, and parasitic relationships coexist among them, with core cities such as Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macao assuming pivotal roles in shaping the overall dynamics. The findings highlight the importance of functional division, regional cooperation, and innovative collaboration to enhance sustainable development. Policy recommendations are provided to foster a balanced and integrated growth model, emphasizing inter-city cooperation, resource sharing, and avoidance of industrial homogeneity.
Ziv Epstein, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, Tiziano Piccardi
et al.
The value alignment of sociotechnical systems has become a central debate, but progress depends on how human values are perceived in the content these systems surface and how such perceptions can be measured at scale. Social media platforms are a prominent class of sociotechnical systems where algorithmic curation shapes exposure to value-laden content at scale. Large-language models offer new opportunities for measuring expressions of human values (e.g., humility or equality) in social media data, but value expressions can be subjective: different people will annotate the same post with different values. In this paper, we draw on the Schwartz value system as a broadly encompassing and theoretically grounded set of basic human values, and introduce a framework to personalize the measurement of expressions of Schwartz values in social media posts at scale. We collect 32,370 ground truth value expression annotations from N=1,079 people on 5,211 social media posts representative of real users' feeds. Due to the subjectivity of the task, we observe low levels of inter-rater agreement between people, and low agreement between human raters and LLM-based methods. In response, we construct a personalization architecture for classifying value expressions by learning from a small number of highly informative calibration annotations per user. In evaluation, we find that modeling these differences successfully yields value expression predictions that people agree with more than they agree with other people. These results contribute new methods and understanding for the measurement of human values in social media data.
AI-generated images are increasingly prevalent on social media, raising concerns about trust and authenticity. This study investigates how different levels of label detail (basic, moderate, maximum) and content stakes (high vs. low) influence user engagement with and perceptions of AI-generated images through a within-subjects experimental study with 105 participants. Our findings reveal that increasing label detail enhances user perceptions of label transparency but does not affect user engagement. However, content stakes significantly impact user engagement and perceptions, with users demonstrating higher engagement and trust in low-stakes images. These results suggest that social media platforms can adopt detailed labels to improve transparency without compromising user engagement, offering insights for effective labeling strategies for AI-generated content.
Background. Domestic diplomacy and international legal science played a leading role in the formation of the institution of peaceful resolution of international disputes. It was Russia that initiated two Hague Peace Conferences in 1899 and 1907. However, this issue has not received sufficient attention from domestic and foreign researchers, the latter, however, actively studied the role of the United States, Great Britain, France and other countries in terms of the development of the institution of peaceful resolution of international disputes. In this regard, the study of the content and results of the Second Peace Conference and its historical significance seems relevant and scientifically significant. The purpose of the work is to identify the main directions and achievements of the Hague Peace Conference of 1907 in the context of the development of the institution of peaceful resolution of international disputes. Materials and methods. These objectives are achieved by analyzing the official materials of the 1907 Hague Peace Conference, official acts of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assessments of the conference's achievements given by its participants themselves, as well as international treaties and scientific literature. Results. The work analyzes the work and results of the 1907 forum from the point of view of the development of the institution of peaceful resolution of international disputes. Conclu-sions. The study allows us to draw a conclusion about the special role of Russian diplomacy and international legal science in the codification of the institution of peaceful resolution of international disputes and the progressive development of international law in general.
The friendship paradox in social networks states that your friends have more friends than you do, on average. Recently, a stronger variant of the paradox was shown to hold for most people within a network: `most of your friends have more friends than you do.' Unlike the original paradox, which arises trivially because a few very popular people appear in the social circles of many others and skew their average friend popularity, the strong friendship paradox depends on features of higher-order network structures. Similar to the original paradox, the strong friendship paradox generalizes beyond popularity. When individuals have traits, many will observe that most of their friends have more of that trait than they do. This can lead to the Majority illusion, in which a rare trait will appear highly prevalent within a network. Understanding how the strong friendship paradox biases local observations within networks can inform better measurements of network structure and our understanding of collective phenomena in networks.
This article presents the almost century-long history of the development of futures studies in a comprehensive review. Futures studies, rooted in sociology and policy sciences, had become an academic discipline by the 1960s. One of the major global communities representing the discipline, the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2023. In the 1970s, the focus was placed on discourses on global problems and preferred futures. Futures studies then developed a global institutional community and become a mature discipline by the 1980s and 1990s. Futurists by then had already mutually shared theoretical perspectives, objectives, ethics, and methods, and had produced empirical results. A wide range of comprehensive publications at that time synthesized the foundations and preceding results of futures studies. From the turn of the millennium, active discourse took place on the forthcoming role of futures studies. By that time, the theoretical, methodological, and practical knowledge foundations of the discipline had also appeared in internationally well-documented curricula. Since around 2010, the discipline has been characterized by the development of practical foresight projects. Based on notable trends and identified research gaps, this article formulates up-to-date expectations and research directions within which futures studies might develop in the future.
Reflexões situadas em uma identidade sino-utiel-valenciana-wenzhounesa-espanhola são vistas como experiências particulares e minoritárias pela hegemonia ocidental, que atribui rótulos de hipersexualização, fetichização, exotismo e criminalização às mulheres asiáticas. Diante do cânone reconhecido pelas instituições educativas eurobrancas como literatura universal, autoras e criadoras migrantes e pessoas racializadas reivindicam espaços com obras literárias e artísticas sobre noções críticas como identidade, legado ou memória, em linguagens fronteiriças, mestiças, fraturadas. Assim, desarmam o sujeito dessubjetivado e desencarnado chamado “autor”, que domina um sistema literário que exclui ao invés de incluir.
The tourism industry is dependent on travel and factors that inhibits travel, including pandemics such as COVID-19, may have a profound impact on the industry. Although the precise scope and long-term effects of COVID-19
have not yet been determined, industry analysts predict that some irreversible changes will occur in the future. SMMEs, which represent approximately 80% of licensed tourism and tourism-related businesses worldwide, were
acutely affected by the crises. Tourism SMMEs have been more directly affected, as people who live in vulnerable communities who depend on tourism for their livelihoods have been adversely affected by the collapse of SMMEs.
This research investigated the recovery possibilities of tourism SMMEs from COVID-19 in the city of Polokwane in Limpopo province. This research adopted a qualitative approach with in-depth semi-structured interviews as a
data collection tool from 13 owners of tourism SMMEs registered in the Polokwane Local Municipality database, the inclusion condition for these SMMEs was that they should have been in operation for a minimum of five (5)
years and to have been formally registered with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission of South Africa (CIPC). The key findings of the study shows that tourism SMME owners believe that their businesses will recover to the state they were before COVID-19, though the recovery would be slow and that SMME owners are of the view that the recovery is subject to rooting out of corruption activities withing government. Overall, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of SMMEs resilience and recovery from pandemics and disasters.
Hospitality industry. Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food service, Business
Dalsiza Cláudia Macedo Coutinho, Lanna Jackelyne de Alencar Arrais, Léia Lediane Gross
et al.
O trabalho apresenta o debate sobre proteção social às famílias no contexto de crises, em que se realiza reflexões sobre o desenvolvimento das políticas de proteção social no capitalismo e os desafios postos a essas políticas diante da crise, do ajuste fiscal e do avanço das tendências neoliberais, tendo como campo de análise a realidade vivenciada pelas
famílias brasileiras, considerando o contexto da pandemia do Covid-19. Entende-se, portanto, a oferta e a consolidação das seguranças sociais às famílias como responsabilidades do Estado e a concepção de seguridade social para além da legalidade constitucional. A metodologia se deu a partir de uma revisão de literatura, e de reflexões e debates acumulados construídos no processo acadêmico de pesquisa e extensão vinculadas ao Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Proteção Social e Famílias (GEPPSFAM) da Universidade Federal do Tocantins (UFT).
Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Dana Alshwayat, Hamzah Elrehail, Esam Shehadeh
et al.
The banking industry has undergone significant shifts as innovations have enabled new banking services and created new customer requirements. While banks strive to incorporate innovation and change systems, they also face various obstacles. The primary aim of this qualitative exploratory case study is to determine the key perceived barriers to change and innovation in a Jordanian commercial case bank from the perspective of senior management. Nuanced interpretations were investigated, resulting in new insights that have not been previously obtained from research in this field. The analysis used a qualitative systematic approach to grounded theory articulation that inductively generated new concepts while adhering to highly rigorous standards. The methodology was based on interviews with eight senior managers. The emergent findings revealed that high bureaucracy, lack of communication, lack of employee involvement, middle managers' resistance, and risk aversion were major barriers to innovation and change. Overall, this study contributes to developing a thorough understanding of top managers' perceptions of barriers to innovation and change and offers managers and practitioners guidance on improving organizational conditions to support innovation and change in the banking industry. Finally, this study provides avenues for future research in this area.
Jinichi Sakaguchi, Keisuke Nakayama, Katsuaki Komai
et al.
Carbon capture and storage due to photosynthesis activities has been proposed as a carbon sink to mitigate climate change. To enhance such mitigation, previous studies have shown that freshwater lakes should be included in the carbon sink, since they may capture as much carbon as coastal areas. In eutrophic freshwater lakes, there is uncertainty about whether the equilibrium equation can estimate the partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2), owing to the presence of photosynthesis due to phytoplankton, and pH measurement error in freshwater fluid. Thus, this study investigated the applicability of the equilibrium equation and revealed the need to modify it. The modified equilibrium equation was successfully applied to reproduce pCO2 based on total alkalinity and pH through field observations. In addition, pCO2 at the water surface was lower than the atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide due to photosynthesis by phytoplankton during strong stratification. The stratification effect on low pCO2 was verified by using the Net Ecosystem Production (NEP) model, and a submerged freshwater plants such as Potamogeton malaianus were found to have high potential for dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) sequestration in a freshwater lake. These results should provide a starting point toward more sophisticated methods to investigate the effect of freshwater carbon on DIC uptake in freshwater stratified eutrophic lakes.
Joseph A Boscarino,1 Richard E Adams,2 Thomas G Urosevich,3 Stuart N Hoffman,4 H Lester Kirchner,1 Xin Chu,5 Weixing Shi,5 Joseph J Boscarino,6 Ryan J Dugan,1 Carrie A Withey,1 Charles R Figley7 1Department Population Health Sciences, Geisinger Clinic, Danville, PA, 17822, USA; 2Department Sociology, Kent State University, Kent, OH, 44242, USA; 3Ophthalmology Service, Geisinger Clinic, Mount Pocono, PA, 18344, USA; 4Department Sleep Medicine, Geisinger Clinic, Danville, PA, 17822, USA; 5Obesity Institute, Geisinger Clinic, Danville, PA, 17822, USA; 6Department of Neurosurgery and Brain Repair, University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine, STC 7, Tampa, FL, 33606, USA; 7School of Social Work, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70112, USACorrespondence: Joseph A BoscarinoDepartment Population Health Sciences, Geisinger Clinic, 100 N. Academy Ave., 44-00, Danville, PA, 17822, USATel +1 570-214-9825Email joseph.boscarino@gmail.comIntroduction: Since veteran suicide is a concern and our knowledge of predictive factors is still limited, our objective was to assess risk factors for suicide, including genetic factors, among deployed veterans.Methods: For this study, we surveyed 1730 veterans who were outpatients in a multi-hospital system in Pennsylvania. Altogether, 1041 veterans (60%) provided a DNA sample. The genetic risk variants investigated were within loci previously associated with PTSD and substance misuse, including CRHR1, CHRNA5, RORA, and FKBP5 genetic variations, which were used to calculate a polygenic risk score (range=0– 8, mean=3.6, SD=1.4).Results: Most veterans (56.2%) were deployed to Vietnam while significant numbers were deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other post-Vietnam conflicts. Overall, 95.1% of the veterans were male, their mean age was 56.2 (SD=12), and 95.6% were Caucasian. Among the veterans, 24% had high combat exposure. The prevalence of lifetime suicidal thoughts was 11.3%. Additionally, 5.7% ever developed a suicide plan or attempted suicide in their lifetimes. Among those with a history of a lifetime suicide attempt or suicide plan, the PTSD genetic risk score was significantly higher (OR=3.96 vs 3.55, p=0.033), but for suicidal thoughts, this association was not significant (p=0.717). In multivariable analysis (MVA) logistic regression, significant predictors of attempting suicide or having a suicide plan were history of depression (OR=5.04, p< 0.001), PTSD genetic risk score (OR=1.25, p=0.036), history of childhood abuse/neglect (OR=2.24, p=0.009), and lifetime marijuana use (OR= 1.56, p=0.020). Conversely, rural residence was protective for suicide risk (OR=0.49; p=0.031). For suicidal thoughts, in the MVA genetic risk score was not significant (p=0.697), but history of child abuse/neglect (p< 0.001), history of depression (p> 0.001), low psychological resilience (p=0.004), and lifetime marijuana use (p=0.022) were significant.Discussion: In this study, we identified genetic risk variants and other predictors for suicide among veterans that may have implications for future screening and clinical care. Further research is advised.Keywords: veterans, warzone deployment, suicide, genetic factors, patient screening, precision medicine
This review paper discusses the science of astrometric catalogs, their current applications and future prospects for making progress in fundamental astronomy, astrophysics and gravitational physics. We discuss the concept of fundamental catalogs, their practical realizations, and future prospects. Particular attention is paid to the astrophysical implementations of the catalogs such as the measurement of the Oort constants, the secular aberration and parallax, and asteroseismology. We also consider the use of the fundamental catalogs in gravitational physics for testing general theory of relativity and detection of ultra-long gravitational waves of cosmological origin.
Agustina, Heni, Elfita, Rizki Amalia, Soelistya, Djoko
et al.
During the current Covid-19 pandemic, it is undeniable that many companies are experiencing a decline in turnover, and some companies have even been forced to go out of business. Due to the many fraud incidents, corporate governance is vital in ensuring earnings persistence by considering many audit committee structures. Based on this phenomenon, the purpose of this study is to determine how significant the role of corporate governance is in overcoming earnings persistence moderated by the number of audit committees. This study is quantitative descriptive with a population of all companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Index (IDX), and the number of samples with several criteria found as many as six companies. This research period was conducted from 2011-2019. This result implies a positive influence on corporate governance moderated by the audit committee on earnings persistence. This led to point out that the power of corporate governance has a positive effect on earnings persistence.
The broadly used pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system is intrinsically wrong. The essence of the problem is that the PAYG system distributes the yield of raising children, i.e., of human capital investment (which is essentially the pension contribution), in such a way that it disregards the extent to which individuals have contributed to this, and even whether it has occurred at all. This error can be corrected if we take the pension contribution to be the yield on an investment of human capital, and as such use this to pay back the costs and expenses of the raising of the contribution payer—overall to those who paid these costs and expenses at the time. Accordingly, the central question of my study is whether it is possible to construct a consistent pension system based on the above foundations, and how my ideas may be inserted into the Diamond–Samuelson model. The method of the study was logical analysis and the construction of a theoretical mathematical model. The results of the study show that it is possible to construct a public pension system that operates according to a different logic than today’s system, a system which is free from the effects of demographic fluctuations, which does not motivate the refusal to have children, and which will remain self-sufficient under all circumstances. The study achieves this by presenting a possible pension system of this kind in detail. Via the suitable modification of the Diamond–Samuelson model, I have succeeded in showing that the pension system I am proposing increases the willingness to have children up to the social optimum, in contrast to the fully (but traditionally) funded and PAYG systems. This system currently only exists in theory and may be regarded as a major theoretical innovation, which naturally has certain (although not particularly extensive) antecedents. Its introduction could enable the resolution of the contradictions of existing pension systems and could also provide a solution to the as yet unsolved problem of the increasingly expensive regeneration of human capital, and as such, its potential practical implications are immeasurable.
While social media make it easy to connect with and access information from anyone, they also facilitate basic influence and unfriending mechanisms that may lead to segregated and polarized clusters known as "echo chambers." Here we study the conditions in which such echo chambers emerge by introducing a simple model of information sharing in online social networks with the two ingredients of influence and unfriending. Users can change both their opinions and social connections based on the information to which they are exposed through sharing. The model dynamics show that even with minimal amounts of influence and unfriending, the social network rapidly devolves into segregated, homogeneous communities. These predictions are consistent with empirical data from Twitter. Although our findings suggest that echo chambers are somewhat inevitable given the mechanisms at play in online social media, they also provide insights into possible mitigation strategies.
Data-driven analysis of large social networks has attracted a great deal of research interest. In this paper, we investigate 120 real social networks and their measurement-calibrated synthetic counterparts generated by four well-known network models. We investigate the structural properties of the networks revealing the correlation profiles of graph metrics across various social domains (friendship networks, communication networks, and collaboration networks). We find that the correlation patterns differ across domains. We identify a non-redundant set of metrics to describe social networks. We study which topological characteristics of real networks the models can or cannot capture. We find that the goodness-of-fit of the network models depends on the domains. Furthermore, while 2K and stochastic block models lack the capability of generating graphs with large diameter and high clustering coefficient at the same time, they can still be used to mimic social networks relatively efficiently.