Search Results (98)

South Africa has been receiving a high number of undocumented immigrants for years. As Africa’s second largest economy and the biggest in the South African Development Community region, it has witnessed a surge in illegal migration. Some undocumented immigrants marry local women, establishing spousal and familial relations. The government has taken a legal stand against undocumented immigrants. It deports thousands annually. A grassroots movement, Operation Dudula, has initiated efforts to locate undocumented immigrants. Its modus operandi has been condemned for lacking ubuntu. A void is left when undocumented immigrants are deported, leaving their families in South Africa. Some South African women have turned to TikTok to express their views on migration and familyhood. This study attempts to answer these questions: What are the TikTok discursive practices of South African women in spousal relations with African immigrants? In what ways do the women legitimise the relationships? How does TikTok function as a subaltern counter-public formation? Data were gathered through digital archival research and subjected to a multimodal critical discourse analysis. The findings show that the women celebrate the relations as an achievement. They construct them as pathways to prosperity. The women also invoked racial discourses to legitimise the relations. Through TikTok, they recontextualised discourses on migration by deconstructing dominant narratives that project African immigrants through lenses of criminality. Full article

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are widely presented as an integrated framework for social, economic, and environmental progress, yet recent assessments indicate substantial implementation shortfalls. This scoping review maps post-2015 scholarship on one of the framework’s most contested fault lines: the relationship between Goal 8 (economic growth) and the ecologically oriented goals, especially Goals 6, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Following established scoping review guidance, 32 sources published between 2015 and 2026 were identified from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, citation searching, and selected grey literature. The synthesis indicates four main patterns in the included corpus. First, a substantial share of the reviewed literature characterizes continued growth-centred development and ecological sustainability as difficult to reconcile under current technological and institutional conditions, particularly given evidence on material throughput, emissions, and planetary boundaries. Second, the corpus recurrently describes three mechanisms through which this tension is muted within the SDG architecture: the rhetorical absorption of ecological limits into “green growth” discourse, strategic vagueness in targets and indicators, and the marginalization of alternative development ontologies. Third, the review synthesizes these mechanisms under the interpretive concept of paradigmatic stacking. Fourth, the corpus identifies alternative resources for a successor framework, including relational and plural conceptions of well-being associated in the reviewed literature with Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, and Gross National Happiness. Taken together, the findings suggest that debates about SDG underperformance cannot be reduced to implementation alone but also involve questions of conceptual design. The article concludes by outlining ontological pluralism as a possible direction for post-2030 framework design. Full article

Advanced cyber threats increasingly exploit volatile memory to execute malicious payloads without touching persistent storage, rendering traditional disk-centric forensic tools insufficient for comprehensive digital investigations. This paper presents Forensic-BERT, an AI-driven forensic framework that automatically extracts and classifies potentially relevant artifacts from unstructured memory dumps across heterogeneous operating environments. The framework combines byte-boundary-preserving Hex-to-ASCII conversion, sliding-window Shannon entropy filtering ($H>7.2$ bits per byte, 256-byte windows) to isolate high-probability artifact regions, and a binary-aware WordPiece tokenizer extended with 2048 domain-specific tokens covering hexadecimal byte patterns, Windows API names, and Linux system-call sequences. These components feed a transformer-based classifier fine-tuned from bert-base-uncased (110 M parameters) on memory-derived text, with sliding-window inference and majority-vote aggregation for large images. A SHAP DeepExplainer module and averaged 12-head attention heatmaps provide transparent, analyst-accessible explanations for classification decisions. We evaluate the framework on a multi-source corpus of 735 labeled memory segments drawn from 197 distinct images across four independent collections, MemLabs, the DARPA Transparent Computing program, Digital Corpora, and live sandbox execution traces from Any.run and Joe Sandbox, spanning Windows XP through Windows 11, Ubuntu Linux 16.04/18.04, and FreeBSD. Source-stratified five-fold cross-validation yields an overall F1-score of $0.92\pm 0.02$ and AUC-ROC of $0.95\pm 0.01$ (95% CI). Forensic-BERT outperforms all six baselines, Volatility with YARA rules (F1 $=0.71$), Random Forest (F1 $=0.82$), BiLSTM with GloVe embeddings (F1 $=0.85$), MRm-DLDet (F1 $=0.87$), SPECTRE (F1 $=0.89$), and SecBERT (F1 $=0.90$), with every pairwise difference statistically significant under the McNemar test with Bonferroni correction. Explainability quality is independently confirmed by a Spearman rank correlation of $\rho =0.81$ between model SHAP token rankings and expert forensic-indicator rankings and by a System Usability Scale score of 73.2 among certified examiners. The complete pipeline processes 512 MB memory images in 7.5–10.2 s (GPU) or 38–52 s (CPU-only), scaling to 4 GB images with near-linear throughput. These results indicate that, on the corpus evaluated here, combining domain-adapted NLP preprocessing, transformer-based sequence modeling, and quantified explainability can improve the effectiveness and usability of analyst decision support and investigative triage for volatile memory analysis. Full article

Within the scope of this article, security threats against web applications and the effects of Web Application Firewall (WAF) usage on security were examined. The aim of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the open-source ModSecurity-based WAF structure against application layer attacks and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. For this purpose, a test environment with an Ubuntu and Apache2-based reverse proxy architecture was created, and HTTP traffic was analyzed using the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS), custom security rules, and the mod_qos module. In the experimental studies, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and DoS attack scenarios were applied, and custom ModSecurity rules operating on HTTP parameters, URI, and request body were also developed and tested. The obtained results were evaluated through log records and system performance metrics. When ModSecurity was disabled, it was observed that total CPU usage reached the level of 83% during the DoS attack. After ModSecurity and mod_qos configurations were enabled, CPU usage was determined to have decreased to the level of 25%. Log analyses showed that ModSecurity and OWASP CRS rules successfully analyzed attack traffic and detected abnormal request behaviors and protocol violations. In addition, it was verified that the developed custom rules successfully blocked requests with the HTTP 403 status code in tests performed on HTTP parameters, URI, and request body. It was observed that while the security mechanisms limited attack traffic, they did not block legitimate user access and normal client requests continued to be processed successfully. The experimental results show that the ModSecurity-based WAF architecture provides an effective security solution in terms of detecting attack traffic, protecting system resources, and ensuring service continuity. Full article

The rapid expansion of generative AI (GenAI) in higher education offers transformative opportunities but raises complex ethical concerns that demand rigorous examination. The existing literature is dominated by Global North perspectives, with African contexts accounting for only 11.4% of studies and Ghana for only 2.8%, leaving significant gaps in understanding ethical GenAI integration in post-colonial, multilingual and resource-constrained environments. This review synthesises global and African evidence to examine the ethical considerations, stakeholder responses, institutional frameworks, and future research priorities for the responsible use of GenAI in higher education. Guided by the PRISMA framework, this review analysed 246 studies published between 2018 and 2025, using narrative synthesis, thematic analysis, and framework synthesis to integrate the empirical and theoretical contributions. Five ethical domains consistently emerged: academic integrity, privacy and data security, transparency and accountability, equity and access, and AI literacy. These concerns manifest differently across contexts, with African institutions highlighting issues such as Ubuntu-informed ethics, infrastructural constraints, digital sovereignty and epistemic justice. Institutional responses remain uneven, and Ghanaian institutions show limited systematic governance. This review highlights the need for contextualised ethical frameworks, curriculum redesign, authentic assessments, capacity building and adaptive governance to ensure equitable and responsible GenAI integration, particularly in African higher education. Full article

Across sub-Saharan Africa, Deaf congregants often remain excluded from worship, leadership, and theological formation because church practices privilege spoken communication and underinvest in sign-language access. This article develops a hearing-mediated, contextual artificial intelligence (AI) theology of disability for the African church through qualitative document analysis of the published literature on disability, Ubuntu, African ecclesiology, and emerging AI accessibility tools. This article does not report primary empirical data, but offers a conceptual synthesis requiring Deaf-led validation. Using the Contextual Disability Paradigm and Ubuntu philosophy as interpretive lenses, the article argues that AI can expand access through offline-first translation and captioning tools, but it can also weaken embodied, cross-ability relationship if technology becomes a substitute for relational labour, sign-language learning, and Deaf leadership. The article’s central contribution is the concept of the efficiency-relationality paradox: the more efficiently AI removes communicative barriers, the less incentive may remain for embodied mutuality. Because the analysis is based entirely on secondary sources and includes no Deaf-produced materials, the findings are provisional and structurally limited. The article concludes that any credible AI theology of disability in Africa must be offline-first, data-just, denominationally adaptable, and directed toward Deaf-led co-research and co-theology. Full article

In response to the challenges of drastic illumination variations, large differences in fruit scale, and severe occlusion in real-field environments, this paper proposes a lightweight end-to-end detection model, termed EMBS-DETR, for tomato maturity detection. The proposed method is built upon the RT-DETR-R18 baseline framework, retaining the advantages of global modeling and end-to-end detection enabled by the Transformer architecture, while introducing targeted improvements in feature extraction and multi-scale feature fusion. In the feature extraction stage, a C2f-FDConv module is incorporated to enhance the modeling capability of high-frequency fine-grained features, such as the surface texture and color gradients of tomatoes, while reducing redundant parameter overhead. For high-level semantic representation, an improved parameter-free attention mechanism, SimAM-TF, is designed. By jointly modeling neuron energy functions and color-aware modulation, it effectively enhances feature representation under complex lighting and occlusion conditions. For multi-scale feature fusion, a novel EMBS-FPN structure is proposed. Based on bidirectional feature flow and a multi-scale weighted fusion mechanism, this structure integrates multi-branch receptive field modeling with an efficient upsampling strategy, enabling adaptive fusion of P3–P5 feature layers. This design significantly improves representation stability for objects of varying scales while maintaining model lightweight characteristics. To evaluate the proposed method, a real-field tomato maturity dataset was constructed, consisting of 2327 images collected from facility-grown pink large-fruit tomato varieties widely cultivated in North China. According to agricultural industry standards and physicochemical properties, the dataset is categorized into three classes: immature (796 images), turning stage (718 images), and mature (813 images). Experiments were conducted on an Ubuntu 20.04 platform with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU. The input resolution was set to 640 × 640. Standard evaluation metrics, including Precision, Recall, mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5:0.95, as well as Params, GFLOPs, and Model Size, were used for comprehensive assessment. The experimental results demonstrate that EMBS-DETR achieves 90.9% Precision, 85.7% Recall, 89.9% mAP@0.5, and 79.8% mAP@0.5:0.95. Meanwhile, with only 37.03 M parameters, 25.2 GFLOPs computational cost, and a model size of 46.3 MB, the proposed model maintains low computational and storage overhead, achieving a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency. Compared with mainstream YOLO-based models, the proposed method demonstrates superior overall performance in complex field environments, providing effective technical support for automated tomato maturity perception and intelligent visual understanding in precision agriculture. Full article

Centralised architectures in contemporary manufacturing systems impose structural constraints on resilience, scalability, and operational transparency that existing approaches have failed to resolve. This work reports the development and empirical validation of AgentBlock, a framework integrating blockchain technology with multi-agent robotic systems to enable decentralised autonomous manufacturing. The architecture operates across three functionally decoupled layers: a React-based decentralised application interface, an Ethereum Sepolia blockchain interaction layer with Solidity 0.8.18 smart contracts following an upgradeable proxy architecture (EIP–1967) coordinated through an Industrial PoA consensus mechanism, and a physical execution layer comprising two heterogeneous robotic agents (KUKA youBot and UFactory Lite 6) and one edge validation agent on an NVIDIA Orin platform that also hosts Q-Learning optimisation, with inter-agent coordination provided by ROS Noetic Ninjemys under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Experimental validation conducted over 15 days across 1500 training episodes in a controlled 5 m × 3 m industrial laboratory reveals a task success rate of 95.58%, sustained throughput of 49.0 tasks per hour, average cycle time of 1.224 min, blockchain transaction latency below 15 s (mean: 11.4 s), and gas costs averaging US $0.000669 per operation. These findings establish that blockchain-enabled autonomous manufacturing is not merely theoretically sound but operationally viable, delivering immutable traceability, decentralised coordination, and transparent verification at performance levels compatible with Industry 4.0 and 5.0 production demands. Full article

Research on school leadership preparation and development on the African continent has been growing significantly in recent years. A close examination of this literature reveals a deficit bias that presents leadership preparation as inadequate leading to perceptions of ineffective leadership practice. In this literature, leadership preparation is understood as the formal training of school principals and those who hold similar positions of authority. The paper argues that this conception is premised on Western models that center individualism and the hierarchy of leadership and is incongruent with the socio-cultural realities within the African context. Within this contextual dissonance, leadership learning is narrowly conceptualized and is thus constraining to the applied context. The paper adopts a critical post-structural analysis to make a case for a dialogical and transformative approach to leadership preparation and development. It draws upon Global South philosophies of Paulo Freire—a South American philosopher whose approach to leadership development centers dialogue, critical consciousness and continuous engagement; Sophie Oluwole, a Nigerian philosopher from the Yoruba tribe, whose philosophy centers cultural acceptance that promotes dialogue and continuous criticism; and the Ubuntu-centered philosophy of Mogobe Ramose, which encourages critical dialogue between knowledge systems. The constant engagement and dialogue espoused in the three philosophical stances allow for contestation and fluidity that serve as bedrocks for healthy and trusting environments for leadership development, permitting a more nuanced understanding of how leadership is learned. The proposed approach politicizes leadership learning and recognizes it as contextual, collectivist and contested. The paper thus advances a radical way of thinking about school leadership preparation and development, which arguably holds better prospects for leadership that is more responsive, inclusive, and sustainable. Full article

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are central to the industrial fabric of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Yet, they confront increasing demands to implement sustainability practices originating from institutional contexts markedly different from their own. Existing research has tended to neglect the cultural and institutional negotiations inherent in this process, often framing sustainability adoption as a technical or compliance-oriented exercise rather than as a multifaceted cultural adaptation. This study proposes and empirically examines the concept of sustainability acculturation—the process by which firms align global sustainability norms with local business cultures. Drawing on Institutional Theory, the Resource-Based View, and Berry’s Acculturation Model, we present a context-specific framework, tested using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach: survey data from 284 manufacturing SMEs across six SSA countries, followed by 24 semi-structured interviews. Structural equation modeling reveals that international market pressure and owner–manager values are direct drivers, whereas local regulatory pressure exhibits only a weak association with deep cultural integration. Managerial commitment and organizational learning mediate these relationships, while Ubuntu values enhance social sustainability integration, and institutional voids diminish regulatory effectiveness. The model accounts for 57% of the variance in sustainability acculturation. Findings show that SSA SMEs employ distinct acculturation strategies—Integration, Assimilation, Resilient Adaptation, and Decoupling—shaped by the interplay of external pressures, internal capabilities, and contextual conditions. The study underscores the importance of culturally attuned, context-specific interventions for sustainable industrial development in SSA. Full article

This article examines the assumed dichotomy between the Black church and the juke joint within African American cultural discourse. Often portrayed as moral opposites—one sacred and the other secular—this study argues that such a binary reflects a Eurocentric interpretive framework rather than the actual historical realities of Black communal life. Through cultural and historical analysis, the article asserts that both institutions originated from similar conditions of racial exclusion and served as complementary spaces that nurtured African American identity, resilience, and community connections. Using the film Sinners as a key cultural text, the study explores how contemporary media narratives complicate rigid distinctions between sacred and secular Black spaces, identities, music, and spirituality. The character Sammie illustrates the permeability between these spaces, embodying a cultural logic where spiritual refuge and expressive release coexist. The analysis places this view within the African philosophical concept of Ubuntu, which emphasizes relational identity and the inseparability and oneness of the Black community. Drawing on the scholarship of James H. Cone, the article also shows that spirituals and blues share roots in African diasporic musical traditions. These traditions demonstrate the deep interconnection between religious and secular forms of Black expression. Ultimately, the study concludes that the Black church and the juke joint should be understood not as opposing institutions but as interconnected cultural spaces that collectively sustain African American spiritual, social, and artistic life. Full article

Scholars across disciplines are urging a rethinking of human–nature relationships beyond anthropocentrism, but these ideas remain difficult to convey to broader audiences and to implement in environmental management practices. This study analyses the design and performance of a serious game (used in 12 sessions with 99 participants in total) developed to encourage participants to reflect on modes of attention and relationships with non-humans in an everyday environment. The game draws on storytelling and art-based approaches to guide players through a thought experiment in which humans and non-humans can gradually communicate and coordinate. A series of game features have been designed to challenge players’ perception of ownership, stakeholders and agency beyond humans. In the sessions played, players initially competed against each other. The revelation, throughout the game, of non-humans’ presence in the landscape, and among the game’s characters themselves, led players to cooperate. Yet they mostly cooperated among human characters to address the needs of non-humans, but they rarely engaged directly with the non-human characters themselves through voluntary interactions. Engaging participants to act as, and interact with, non-humans through role-play allows questioning established interpretations and power dynamics in land or resource management. It offers an imaginative yet embodied experience for exploring what happens if non-humans are treated as active partners with whom we can directly communicate and coordinate to address environmental challenges. Full article

Ensuring ongoing endpoint security compliance across diverse, hybrid IT infrastructures poses a continual operational challenge, especially in enterprise Linux systems, where manual verification methods are difficult to scale and prone to inconsistency. This study offers an empirical assessment of an automated methodology for monitoring endpoint compliance and security, applied within a mid-sized IT consulting firm. The suggested methodology incorporates automated compliance scanning, malware detection, endpoint verification, and remediation utilising open-source technology, all orchestrated through centralised automation and reporting systems. The evaluation follows an observational comparative methodology, contrasting manual compliance operations with automated enforcement across 60 Linux endpoints (30 Fedora and 30 Ubuntu systems) over two equivalent eight-week operational periods. The analysis emphasises operational parameters such as administrative workload, configuration uniformity, and audit preparedness. The findings demonstrate that automation reduced manual compliance-related tasks by roughly 70–80%, enhanced configuration consistency across endpoints through continuous enforcement, and enabled automated production of audit-ready compliance reports. The findings provide concrete evidence that operational security automation can markedly improve endpoint compliance management in business Linux and hybrid IT environments. Full article

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transitioned from a specialized research area to a ubiquitous socio-technical infrastructure influencing sectors from healthcare and law to manufacturing and defense. In tandem with its transformative promise, AI has created an exponentially expanding ethics literature questioning, fairness, transparency, accountability, and justice. This review synthesizes publications and key policy developments between 2019 and 2025, bringing sectoral discourses together with cross-cutting frameworks. Grounded in a systematic scoping review methodology, we frame the field along four meta-dimensions: trust and transparency, bias and fairness, governance & regulation, and justice, while we investigate their expression across diverse sectors. Special attention is dedicated to healthcare (patient trust and algorithmic bias), education (integrity and authorship), media (misinformation), law (accountability), and the industrial sector (data integrity, intellectual property protection, and environmental safety). We ground abstract principles in concrete case studies to illustrate real-world harms and mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we incorporate pluralistic ethics (e.g., Ubuntu, Islamic perspectives), environmental ethics, and emerging challenges posed by Generative AI and neuro-AI interfaces. To bridge theory and practice, we propose an operational governance framework for organizations. We contend that success involves transitioning from principles toward ethics-by-design, pluralistic governance, sustainability, and adaptive oversight. This review is intended for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers who need a comprehensive and actionable framework for navigating the complex landscape of AI ethics. Full article

Scientists estimate that humanity has exceeded seven of nine planetary boundaries, threatening the entire planet with potentially catastrophic consequences for all species. We therefore have a moral imperative for future generations and other species to return to the safe side of those boundaries. Threats to these boundaries take the form of social dilemmas, defined as situations in which individuals acting in their own interest undermine collective welfare, which can only be solved through cooperation. Western economic theory has conditioned us to believe that humans are inherently selfish. This assumption has led economists, scientists, and policymakers to increasingly pursue market-based solutions to conservation approaches, which have yielded limited success. In contrast, this article argues that humans are inherently cooperative. We employ Multi-Level Selection Theory (MLS) to depict the evolutionary advantages of cooperation and to define morality as putting the group ahead of the individual. We examine two examples of MLS in action: Territories of Life (TOL) and Ubuntu. The paper provides guidance for pathways of Ecozoic governance, planning, and restoration. Applied in a Western context in Burlington, Vermont, the philosophies hold true, showing that social norms and group identity already shape ecological behavior in Burlington residents’ lawn care practices. Ultimately, providing an alternative economic model built on these ethical foundations, we introduce the Neighbor’s Goodwill that reframes social dilemmas in a game theory context. The Neighbor’s Goodwill demonstrates how loyalty, reciprocity, and social belonging alter payoff structures. This research is founded on the fact that humans are inherently social and tend to make decisions in the interest of the whole group over their own. Full article