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Although previous studies have considered sensing constraints and UAV dynamics, most of them have used unrealistic sensing limitations and simplified dynamic models. Thus, these approaches can suffer from a significant discrepancy between simulation results and real-world deployment. To address this issue, this study incorporates high-fidelity sensing constraints and UAV dynamics into a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach, focusing on the practical interplay between FOV limitations and pursuit strategies. First, the proposed reward considers the sensing constraints via a gaze-alignment reward, which varies with the field-of-view condition, and a capturability reward that encourages transitions toward a capturable region. Second, realistic UAV dynamics, including lateral motion, forward motion, and yawing, are modeled in a simulation environment to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Quantitative evaluations demonstrated that the proposed formulation significantly improved the capture performance under diverse sensing conditions. The capturability reward increases the capture success rate by 11.4%. When the maximum speed of the evading UAV was 2 m/s faster than that of the pursuing UAVs, all capture trials failed when lateral motion was not used. However, when lateral motion was enabled, the success rate increased to 99.2%, highlighting the need for lateral motion. Full article

Pedestrian gender recognition plays an important role in pedestrian analysis and intelligent video applications, for example, in demographic statistics, soft biometric analysis, and context-aware person retrieval. However, it remains a challenging task owing to viewpoint variations, illumination changes, occlusions, and low image quality in real-world imagery. To address these issues, an effective adaptive decision fusion framework, termed the Decision Fusion Learning Network (DFLN), is proposed in this paper. The key novel aspect of DFLN is that it effectively explores both an appearance-centered view that emphasizes detailed texture and clothing information and a structure-centered view that captures rich contour and structural information for pedestrian gender recognition. To realize DFLN, a Parallel CNN Prediction Probability Learning Module (PCNNM) is first constructed to independently learn modality-specific probabilities from color image and edge maps. Subsequently, a learnable Decision Fusion Module (DFM) is designed to fuse the modality-specific probabilities and explore their complementary merits for realizing accurate pedestrian gender recognition. The DFM can be easily coupled with the PCNNM, forming an end-to-end decision fusion learning framework that simultaneously learns the feature representations and carries out adaptive decision fusion. Experiments on two pedestrian benchmark datasets, named PETA and PA-100K, show that DFLN achieves competitive or superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art pedestrian gender recognition methods. Extensive experimental analysis further confirms the effectiveness of the proposed decision fusion strategy and its favorable generalization ability under domain shift. Full article

In the late 1990s, there was much speculation on what music and music education would look like at the beginning of the 21st century. Few predicted the level of change that we have witnessed since then. In fact, developments in technologies, demographics, societies and global relations that have taken place in the world over the past 100 years would have been neigh unimaginable decade by decade, and keep coming with ever-increasing intensity. Travel, trade and technology have connected people and cultures in myriad and often wonderful ways. But inequities, divisions, and conflicts also reached new heights, with the first half of the 2020s subject to a seemingly endless stream of natural and manmade disasters and conflicts. Inevitably, all of these developments impacted on the world of music in general, and also on music education. In this essay, I try to summarise some key experiences and observations of my own first fifty years of living musical diversity (a world that started to open before me when I began learning Indian sitar in Amsterdam in 1975), and efforts across five continents that I have been involved in or researched. Juxtaposing this with key literature on the topic this provides a broad basis for presenting ideas and views on progress towards giving musical practices from across the globe an appropriate place in music education at all levels: in community settings, schools, and institutions for professional training of performers and educators. In that process, I identify three critical junctures which can simultaneously present obstacles and opportunities for positive change: (1) terminologies, social inclusion, and the politics of diversity; (2) musical dynamics, technology, and institutional change; and (3) evolutions and revolutions in music learning and teaching. These inform a challenging but clear agenda for scholars, policy makers, institutional leaders, practising musicians and music educators worldwide who strive for more inclusive, diverse, equitable and relevant practices. Full article

In the context of advancing communication technologies and digital spaces, Moroccan youth are increasingly engaging with concepts of mobility, presenting both opportunities and challenges in a liquid modern digital landscape. While digital identities and mobility have been extensively studied among Western youth, non-Western youth, including those in Morocco, are often viewed through a lens of being “at risk,” which biases objective analysis. This study addresses this gap by examining how digital mobility fosters culturally hybrid identities among Moroccan youth in a globalised world. Methods: An interdisciplinary ethnographic content analysis was conducted on youth digital productions and interactions on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. The study draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity and Stuart Hall’s theory of representation to explore identity formation. Results: Digital mobility enables Moroccan youth to navigate between local cultural influences (Amazigh, Islamic, African, and Arab) and global Western narratives, leading to hybrid identities. Challenges include cultural erosion through practices like Western-style dating shows and sexual freedoms that challenge social norms, potentially widening generational gaps. Opportunities arise from platforms like SAWT, where youth discuss taboo topics, create hybrid cultural artefacts, and engage in glocalisation, enhancing agency and global integration. Conclusions: Digital mobility acts as a catalyst for cultural hybridity, supporting global integration while highlighting the need for addressing accessibility disparities and unsupervised interactions. This framework contributes to digital youth studies by emphasising mobility’s role in identity evolution, advocating for balanced glocality over cultural protectionism or homogenisation. Full article

The ambition of policymakers to ‘raise aspirations’ among young people from disadvantaged backgrounds as a means for improving social mobility in Britain has been a mainstay of political rhetoric for the last three decades. Reports such as Higher Education in the Learning Society in 1997, Unleashing Aspiration in 2009, and Success as a Knowledge Economy in 2016 are all underpinned by an ideology of neoliberal meritocracy that has transcended political parties and governments since the Thatcher administration. Even those who lean more to the left of the Labour Party within contemporary Britain have perpetuated this narrative by reframing it as ‘working-class ambition’. This paper advances an alternative view which reconceptualises the way in which young people from non-privileged backgrounds experience and perceive the world, and their place within it. Drawing upon our work on Connected Belonging in 2025 and our research on the From the Centre to the Periphery project in 2025, we suggest that ‘hopeful optimism’ offers a more realistic lens through which to understand what is needed to address the ‘personal troubles and public issues’ that young people face. Unlike aspiration, which has an inherently individualistic and future-orientated framing, with value systems directed by dominant hegemonic notions of ‘success’ that are commonly positioned in economic terms, we recognise optimism as being a holistic and relational process that resides in the present as well as looks to the future. Optimism, grounded within principles of hope, allows young people the freedom to be and to dream; by celebrating who they are and their interconnectedness, it protects them from fears of failure; by reimaging what success might mean, it liberates them as creators. Full article

Depression is notable for high rates of disability. The medical model typically characterizes depression as a physiological dysfunction or psychological disorder. However, both views fail to appreciate the phenomenology of depressed experience. Drawing on the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this article contends that the lived experience of chronic depression is marked by a disturbance between the body-subject and the world. More specifically, the experience of depression is characterized by alienation from the world, self and others. While anti-depressants have long been the first line of treatment of depression, many governments subsidize cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as an adjunct treatment. CBT is said to be the gold standard psychotherapeutic treatment given that it is evidence-based, cost-effective, and short in duration. However, not only are these justifications questionable, but the theoretical underpinnings of CBT have ideological significance. Rather than approaching depressed persons as body-subjects, CBT casts service users as neo-liberal subjects, insofar as depression is characterized as disordered thinking that is independent of a person’s situated life. The emphasis on quickly returning people to work to reduce strain on welfare systems, while a valid economic concern, is not a valid therapeutic concern. The limited choice of subsidized psychotherapeutic options fails to recognize that depression is a heterogenous phenomenon, meaning that the CBT model of disordered thinking is not necessarily representative of the way in which depression manifests. Full article

Near-miss events, defined as hazardous traffic interactions without actual collisions, provide valuable indicators for proactive traffic safety assessment. However, existing studies mainly focus on collision detection or object-level perception, while near-miss interactions and their severity remain insufficiently explored. This study proposes a video-based framework for real-time near-miss detection and risk evaluation in complex urban intersections. The framework integrates an enhanced YOLOv11 detector with a small-object detection head, BoT-SORT multi-object tracking, and bird’s-eye-view (BEV) transformation to accurately extract trajectories and motion features of heterogeneous road users. A Near-Miss Risk Index (RI) is developed by jointly considering spatial proximity, time-to-collision, and motion intensity to quantify near-miss severity levels. Experimental results on real-world CCTV data demonstrate that the proposed method effectively identifies high-risk interactions among vehicles, motorcycles, and pedestrians, providing interpretable severity assessment and supporting proactive traffic safety analysis for intelligent transportation systems. Full article

Football refereeing involves rapid decision-making in dynamic, uncertain, and socially demanding environments. This study examined an integrative cognitive-behavioral model of football refereeing performance, focusing on perceptual processing speed (PPS), attentional control (AC), and social intelligence (SI). Sixty-one male football referees (M_age = 30.04, SD = 4.06) enrolled in a national talent development program across multiple competitive seasons participated in the study. At the beginning of each season, referees completed standardized, ability-based assessments of PPS (processing speed task), AC (selective and inhibitory task), and SI (performance-based social intelligence measure). Refereeing performance was operationalized using season-standardized end-of-season officiating ratings assigned by the national refereeing authority. Mediation analyses did not support AC or SI as mechanisms transmitting the effect of PPS on performance. However, moderation analyses revealed a significant PPS × AC interaction, indicating that attentional control amplified the positive association between perceptual processing speed and refereeing performance. PPS emerged as a robust predictor of performance, particularly among referees with high attentional control. Social intelligence showed a positive bivariate association with performance but did not function as a mediator or moderator in multivariate models. These findings support an interactive and ecological view of applied intelligence in football refereeing, emphasizing functional coordination highlighting the functional coordination of cognitive resources rather than isolated cognitive abilities as key to performance under real-world competitive demands. Full article

A stereo vision framework is designed to improve disparity estimation in occluded and boundary regions, targeting autonomous driving scenarios. The proposed architecture combines frozen Distilled Internally Normalized Optimized Version 2 features with a modular three-stage attention fusion strategy, which consists of bottom-up semantic propagation, top-down detail enhancement, and cross-view attention mechanisms. These stages jointly enforce semantic consistency, structural integrity, and accurate correspondence modeling. The fused features are then processed by an Iterative Geometry Encoding and Volumetric regression-based disparity estimation module for multi-stage regression and iterative refinement. A three-phase training pipeline is employed, including pretraining on SceneFlow, fine-tuning on virtual Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute (KITTI) benchmarks, and adaptation to the KITTI and ETH Zurich 3D benchmark dataset. The model achieves an out-of-center, non-occluded pixel error of 7.45% on KITTI2012 and a D1-all error of 4.10% on KITTI2015. Beyond quantitative performance, the proposed method produces visually superior disparity maps. The enhancements of boundary sharpness, occlusion completion, and structural coherence demonstrate the strong potential of the proposed algorithm for real-world deployment in dynamic and complex environments. Full article

Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate; however, evidence suggests that this decline occurs far more slowly on Indigenous-owned land. This can be attributed to cultural worldviews in which protecting nature and living in harmony with the environment are fundamental principles, an ethos central to African societies and many other Indigenous communities worldwide. This study examines the role of Vhavenda traditional belief systems, Indigenous knowledge, and cultural practices in the management and conservation of natural resources and the environment. In contemporary Limpopo Province, the Vhavenda clans of northern South Africa remain among the country’s most traditional communities, continuing rituals and practices that have been transmitted across generations. According to the 2022 national census, the area inhabited by the Vhavenda tribe, records the country’s highest concentration of centenarians, a demographic pattern which they attribute to the region’s cultural continuity and relative geographical isolation, which have enabled the preservation of its spiritual and ecological heritage. The research employed an insider ethnographic methodology, collecting data through personal interviews and a focus group discussion. Findings reveal that Indigenous beliefs, knowledge systems, and taboos play a substantial role in promoting sustainable land use. They restrict development on ecologically sensitive landscapes and discourage harmful practices, such as deforestation and cultivation along water bodies. These practices are enforced through complex customary laws, often articulated through prohibitive norms (“thou shalt not”), that safeguard plants, animals, water sources, and other natural resources. The study further illustrates that these prohibitions reflect a nuanced understanding of the biophysical environment, with the most sensitive and vulnerable ecosystems and ecologically important species, including keystone, foundation, and indicator species, receiving protection. Overall, the research shows the importance of recognising, protecting, and integrating Indigenous cultural systems as a critical component of effective biodiversity conservation. Full article

In many countries today, the practice of health care has become a complicated system of services. The notion of health prevalent in this system is that of catering to physical needs and functions. The role of healthcare professionals becomes a function of this system. This runs against the experience and the worldview of many that professional systems and practices can never be morally and existentially neutral. Traditionally, health care and in particular nursing care have been understood as an element of fostering human flourishing. The question arises: what is lost when health care is no longer thus understood? In this article, the ‘raison d’etre’ of nursing care is explored by highlighting the Judeo-Christian notions of health and care as elements of shalom. The meaning of this concept is illuminated by recent nursing literature. Furthermore, Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of ‘social practices’ explains how such a concept runs deep in the capillaries of health care practices like nursing care. It is argued how shalom permeates nursing’s professional values (what nurses aim for), norms (how nurses ought to act), and virtues (who nurses ought to be). This ‘DNA’ of nursing care can combine professional clinical language with religious-moral language, enriching its understandings of health, care, and professional identity. Full article

Background/Objectives: The processing and evaluation of behavior, actions or events that go against social (moral) norms can be assumed to operate on mental representations of the world and of how people typically behave. These mechanisms and representations may therefore be shared by the processing of meaning in general. The current study investigated whether the processing of deviations of morality can be distinguished from processing of semantic inconsistencies. Methods: Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from English speakers while they read short written texts in English for comprehension. Texts contained words that constituted moral violations, semantic violations and neutral controls depending on the context, allowing for a direct comparison. Results: Using trial-based analyses, we found different ERP responses to semantic and moral violations: the moral violation elicited a long-lasting, posterior Late Positive Component (LPC) starting at around 300 ms, whereas the semantic violation elicited a positivity that started later and was descriptively more frontally distributed. Furthermore, the LPC amplitudes could be explained by the moral acceptance scores over and above plausibility scores, but not vice versa. Conclusions: The outcomes are compatible with the view that the processing of moral deviations engages at least some mechanisms that are different from the processing of semantic deviations. Full article

In low-altitude complex environments, accurately reconstructing the three-dimensional (3D) flight trajectories of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) without onboard positioning modules remains challenging. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-view ground camera-based UAV 3D trajectory detection method founded on an optical imaging geometric model. Multiple ground cameras are used to synchronously observe UAV flight, enabling stable 3D trajectory reconstruction without relying on onboard Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). At the two-dimensional (2D) observation level, a lightweight object detection model is employed for rapid UAV detection. Foreground segmentation is further introduced to extract accurate UAV contours, and geometric centroids are computed to obtain precise image plane coordinates. At the 3D reconstruction stage, camera extrinsic parameters are estimated using a back intersection method with ground control points, and the UAV spatial position in the world coordinate system is recovered via multi-view forward intersection. Field experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves stable 3D trajectory reconstruction in real urban environments, with a median error of 4.93 m and a mean error of 5.83 m. The mean errors along the X, Y, and Z axes are 2.28 m, 4.58 m, and 1.09 m, respectively, confirming its effectiveness for low-cost UAV trajectory monitoring. Full article

Understanding material surfaces from sparse visual cues is critical for applications in robotics, simulation and material perception. However, most existing methods rely on dense or full scene observations, limiting their effectiveness in constrained or partial view environments. This gap highlights the need for models capable of inferring surfaces’ properties from extremely limited visual information. To address this challenge, we introduce SMARC, a unified model for Surface MAterial Reconstruction and Classification from minimal visual input. By giving only a single 10% contiguous patch of the image, SMARC recognizes and reconstructs the full RGB surface while simultaneously classifying the material category. Our architecture combines a Partial Convolutional U-Net with a classification head, enabling both spatial inpainting and semantic understanding under extreme observation sparsity. We compared SMARC against five models including convolutional autoencoders, Vision Transformer (ViT), Masked Autoencoder (MAE), Swin Transformer and DETR using the Touch and Go dataset of real-world surface textures. SMARC achieves the highest performance among the evaluated methods with a PSNR of 17.55 dB and a surface classification accuracy of 85.10%. These results validate the effectiveness of SMARC in relation to surface material understanding and highlight its potential for deployment in robotic perception tasks where visual access is inherently limited. Full article

An f-HINe diagram represents real-world clinical histories, primarily of chronic patients with multiple pathologies, who therefore interact with multiple specialists. Therefore, considering the different specialties and the fact that a health problem in a clinical history may refer to multiple medical specialties, an f-HINe diagram presents different specialty swimlanes. Furthermore, the health problem can be organized according to different perspectives, creating logical-conceptual spaces or levels of analysis. The presence of swimlanes and levels allows for the generation of different views from a clinical case, extracted and anonymized from an electronic medical record (reference case). Another way to generate a view can be based on focusing attention on the clinical case over a period of time. The goal of this paper is not only to present the various ways of extracting a view from a clinical case but also to identify an indicator (the educational flexibility of a clinical history) for determining the number of views that can be extracted from a reference case. Indeed, the definition of flexibility has many similarities with the view-based search, as the view provides the guide for calculating this indicator. It is also rooted in the psychological and educational construct of flexibility. The value of flexibility depends on the type of view considered and how the specialty swimlanes, levels, analysis levels, and time intervals of analysis are combined. Since not all views are medically interesting, the indicator’s usefulness is to show all potentially extractable views and allow the clinician to choose the most useful and meaningful ones for their teaching and education objectives. Full article