Search Results (10,740)

Introduction: Low back pain (LBP) is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with substantial variation in prevalence across regions. It is associated with a wide range of biophysical, psychological, social, and lifestyle factors, as well as comorbid conditions. Given its high impact, identifying population-level correlations of LBP is essential for informing prevention strategies. This study aimed to assess demographic, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and health-related factors associated with LBP in Hungary. Methods: A repeated cross-sectional analysis was conducted using secondary data from three waves of the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS) carried out in Hungary in 2009, 2014, and 2019. Results: The prevalence of LBP increased over the study period. Female sex, higher educational attainment, normal body mass index, non-smoking status, abstaining from alcohol, and good self-perceived health were associated with lower odds of LBP. In contrast, older age (≥65 years), unfavorable financial status, residence in socioeconomically disadvantaged regions, use of over-the-counter medications, and several chronic conditions were associated with higher odds. Conclusions: Reducing the impact of low back pain requires its integration into comprehensive public health frameworks that combine chronic disease management with consideration of socioeconomic inequalities at the population level. Full article

Culturally unsafe mental health services contribute to persistent inequities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, yet existing cultural safety frameworks lack clear, prioritised, community-endorsed implementation guidance. This study aimed to establish Aboriginal consensus on cultural safety principles, implementation priorities and practical actions for culturally safe mental health services. A three-round modified Delphi study was conducted with 37 Aboriginal participants from Western Australia with expertise in mental health, social and emotional wellbeing and lived experience. In Round 1, participants completed an online survey rating the importance of cultural safety principles and identifying those requiring urgent action. In Rounds 2 and 3, facilitated yarning sessions reviewed findings, refined principles, grouped them into implementation domains, and identified priority actions. Aboriginal Participatory Action Research ensured Aboriginal leadership and governance throughout. All principles achieved strong consensus for importance. The most urgent priorities were trustworthiness, Aboriginal governance, trauma-informed care, addressing racism and strengthening the Aboriginal workforce. Participants organised the refined principles into six implementation domains, with Leadership and Governance identified as foundational to reform. Trustworthiness was reframed as an aspirational outcome requiring structural change. This study provides a community-endorsed, prioritised framework for translating cultural safety principles into mental health service practice and policy. Full article

Migrant and refugee women are vulnerable to gender-based violence (GBV) at multiple points along the migratory pathway, including after they arrive in Canada. Their vulnerability in Canada is related to legal and policy frameworks to (im)migration, settlement and integration but also to the precarious nature of social services for migrant and refugee survivors of GBV. Drawing upon theorizing on intersectionality, vulnerability and precarity, this article describes findings from a qualitative study involving the reflexive thematic analysis of 43 interviews with professionals engaged with government policy and the provision of public services for migrant and refugee women survivors of GBV in Canada. Our analysis reveals their marginalization within social systems and their involvement in unintentionally reproducing obstacles faced by migrant and refugee women. The findings add to and nuance the small body of research on the experiences of professionals involved in Canadian GBV services for migrant and refugee women. We make contributions to theorizing, highlighting the structural components that impact service provision to migrant and refugee survivors of GBV, and suggest recommendations for policy change. Full article

Urban tourism is frequently promoted as a driver of regeneration, competitiveness, and local economic growth. However, its expansion increasingly generates overtourism, environmental degradation, social inequality, gentrification pressures, and cultural commodification in densely populated cities. Although existing tourism research has examined these challenges from managerial, planning, and sustainability perspectives, less attention has been paid to their ethical foundations. This conceptual paper addresses that gap by developing an integrated ethical framework for sustainable urban tourism through a structured, theory-driven synthesis of literature in environmental ethics, social justice theory, virtue ethics, and urban tourism studies. The paper makes three main contributions: it reframes urban tourism growth as a moral and normative issue rather than merely an economic one; it organizes the key ethical dilemmas of urban tourism as interconnected outcomes of growth-oriented development; and it links ethical principles to stakeholder responsibilities and desired governance outcomes. The proposed framework positions tourists, businesses, and policymakers as moral agents and identifies ecological integrity, social equity, and cultural protection as core criteria for evaluating tourism development. As a conceptual study, however, the framework remains theoretical and requires future empirical application and testing across different urban contexts. Full article

Conventional tests of Bell’s inequality rely on entangled photon pairs. Here, we replace entangled pairs with two independent photons of orthogonal polarization and demonstrate that Bell’s inequality is still violated. Given the inherent local realism of independent photons, this experiment proves that Bell’s inequality cannot falsify the local realism of photons. We thus conjecture that the violation of Bell’s inequality by entangled photon pairs originates from their orthogonal polarizations rather than the breakdown of local realism. To interpret this unexpected violation with independent photons, we further substitute the two photons with two monochromatic light beams and calculate the transmittance correlation through polarizers via Malus’s law and Karl Pearson’s correlation formula. We show that this correlation also defies Bell’s inequality. Retracing the derivation of Bell’s inequality reveals that its validity is restricted to binary events, which accounts for the observed violation with light beams. Finally, we propose a thought experiment involving the gradual attenuation of light intensity down to the single-photon regime and hypothesize that single-photon transmission through a polarizer does not constitute a binary event. This hypothesis provides a unified interpretation for both our experimental findings and all canonical Bell inequality tests reported to date. Full article

The transition to low-emission road transport in Europe depends not only on the growth of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) uptake, but also on the timely expansion of publicly accessible charging infrastructure. This article provides a descriptive and diagnostic assessment of the relationship between electrification dynamics and public charging infrastructure development in Europe. The analysis combines a long-run descriptive window (2015–2024, with 2025 treated separately as a scenario observation) and a core diagnostic window (2020–2024) for which a consistent proxy of potential infrastructure strain—plug-in vehicles per public recharging point (VPP)—is available. The results show a strong increase in PEV share in new registrations, from 1.0% in 2015 to 20.92% in 2024, while the number of public recharging points rose from 67,064 to 900,000 over the same period. In the core sample, VPP declined from 15.24 in 2020 to 13.92 in 2024, which is consistent with a catch-up phase in infrastructure deployment after 2021. At the same time, the short-window relationship between PEV share, infrastructure scale and average CO₂ emissions of newly registered cars remains weak and unstable, indicating the role of additional structural factors. The article contributes a transparent, replicable indicator-based framework for describing infrastructure strain in aggregate European data. In policy terms, the findings support a shift from simple point-count targets toward functionally and spatially differentiated infrastructure planning, including interoperability, power structure, and accessibility in underserved areas. Full article

In this paper, we give some new Jensen, Jensen–Mercer, and Hermite–Hadamard inequalities for uniformly $\delta$-geometric convex functions. In addition, some limit bounds for Caputo–Fabrizio fractional integral operators are established as an application in the case of uniformly $\delta$-geometric convex functions. Some new examples and graphical representations are provided in order to illustrate the validity of our results. Full article

Financial exclusion remains a critical barrier to sustainable economic development in emerging economies, particularly among microentrepreneurs who depend on informal financial credit (IFC) to sustain their livelihoods. This study aims to examine the determinants and consequences of IFC utilization and their relationship with distinct delinquency patterns among microentrepreneurs in the Peruvian Amazon. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 310 microentrepreneurs from the central market of Yurimaguas during the first quarter of 2024 using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Four determinants of IFC—motivation, lender choice, loan conditions, and financial stress—were tested alongside their influence on three delinquency types: accidental, intentional, and negligent. The results indicate that psychological motivation and social lender choice are the primary and statistically significant drivers of IFC utilization, whereas loan conditions showed no significant association. Regarding delinquency outcomes, IFC is significantly and positively associated with accidental and intentional delinquency, yet paradoxically shows a significant negative association with negligent delinquency, suggesting that trust-based social enforcement mechanisms embedded in informal lending relationships may constrain negligent default behavior. These differentiated effects underscore the dual nature of informal credit as both a livelihood-sustaining mechanism and a source of financial vulnerability. The findings contribute to the understanding of financial sustainability in excluded populations by providing empirical evidence that effective interventions must address the psychological and relational dimensions of credit behavior, rather than focusing solely on structural loan characteristics. Key limitations include the cross-sectional design, which precludes causal inference, and the geographic focus on a single market in the Peruvian Amazon, which restricts generalizability. This study offers actionable insights for policymakers and microfinance institutions seeking to design inclusive financial strategies aligned with Sustainable Development Goals 1 (No Poverty), 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and 10 (Reduced Inequalities). Full article

In this paper, we investigate the partial approximate controllability of a class of fractional diffusion control systems with three-parameter damping and nonlinear perturbations. First, based on the theory of $(\mu ,\nu ,\xi ,e,k)$-resolvent families developed in our previous work, we define the mild solution of the system. Then, by constructing a proper objective functional and using the strict convexity, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the minimal norm control. Furthermore, employing the Arzelà–Ascoli theorem and variational inequalities, we establish the precompactness of the solution family and derive the key controllability estimate. Finally, we provide an example to illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results. Full article

This study proposes a new strongly convergent iterative framework obtained by combining a Krasnosel’skiǐ–Mann type subgradient extragradient process with a hybrid projection strategy and an inertial extrapolation mechanism. The method is applied to address hierarchical fixed-point problems (HFPPs) for nonexpansive and quasi-nonexpansive mappings as well as variational inequality problems (VIPs) involving a pseudomonotone operator in real Hilbert spaces. The proposed scheme employs step sizes that are restricted by the inverse of the Lipschitz constant of the underlying cost operator. Strong convergence of the iterates is achieved under mild hypotheses on the inertial parameter and control sequences. The method is further applied to problems arising in optimization and monotone operator theory. The results show that the proposed framework generalizes and integrates a number of existing approaches while offering improved computational performance. Full article

The paper addresses the second law of thermodynamics through the Clausius–Duhem inequality in its general form, with entropy flux and entropy production given by suitable constitutive functions. For definiteness the paper investigates possible models of elastic solids where, to account for non-local properties, the stress depends on strain gradients up to second order. While previous approaches are developed through variational formulations or by applying the virtual power method, here it is shown that no change in the energy balance or the form of kinetic energy is necessary; it is sufficient that the entropy flux be given by a suitable constitutive function. The paper also emphasizes that non-local constitutive properties arise from the Clausius–Duhem thermodynamic inequality, while variational formulations and the virtual power method are in fact limited to the purely mechanical context, as they involve only the equation of motion. Full article

COVID-19 was a prolonged public-health shock that disrupted mobility, access to services, and household spending. Although the official U.S. poverty rate declined to 11.1%, the Supplemental Poverty Measure rose to 12.9%, suggesting that material hardship persisted unevenly across places. This study asks whether pre-existing livelihood vulnerability and local epidemic burden translated into geographically concentrated consumption losses during 2020–2022. Because sustained consumption loss can erode households’ health-related spending, tracking where spending declines concentrate helps connect local social and environmental conditions to how communities withstand a health crisis. We analyze consumer expenditure, unlike prior research relying on aggregate retail sales, to capture fine-grained economic strains as a proxy for shock-absorption capacity. A Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) was calculated for each U.S. county using 16 socio-economic variables, and counties were classified as high- or low-risk. A multilevel model then examined how socio-economic and COVID-19 factors at county and census tract levels shaped consumption changes. Higher-risk communities experienced greater consumption reductions. At the census tract level, the non-White ratio, vacancy rate, built year, per capita income, education level, and housing value were significant. At the county level, COVID-19 cases and deaths, crowding, public transportation use, and vehicle availability mattered most. These findings support place-targeted strategies that combine public-health response with socio-environmental interventions to reduce disparities rooted in pre-existing vulnerability. Full article

Interconnected systems have attracted significant attention in numerous engineering applications such as energy, water, and oil, as well as gas distribution networks. However, due to their high complexity, it is enormously difficult to ensure a reliable and effective cooperation of such interconnected systems under limited communication and interaction capacities. In addition, uncertainty consideration poses further challenges in developing an efficient distributed optimization approach to such interconnected systems. Furthermore, satisfying the constraints of shared states between subsystems under uncertainty leads to conflict issues and has not been properly studied yet. This study proposes a chance-constrained distributed optimization approach to the optimal operation of interconnected systems by considering conflicting reliability levels of satisfying shared state constraints. A compromised reliability level for such constraints is determined by an averaged weighting. We establish that the optimal cost is Lipschitz-continuous with respect to the compromised reliability level, providing a theoretical basis for quantifying the marginal cost of reliability, and we show that the compromise is robust to perturbations in the subsystem weights. We develop a numerical solution framework based on the inner–outer approximation method. For the efficient computation of the high-dimensional integrals, we use Hoeffding’s inequality to determine a suitable sample size. The optimal operation of three interconnected energy distribution networks is used as a case study to demonstrate the proposed approach. Full article

Contemporary educator preparation programs face sociopolitical constraints that limit critical discussions surrounding how systemic, structural, and institutional inequities influence teaching and learning, leaving future educators underprepared to meaningfully nurture diverse ways of knowing in K-12 schools. To address this challenge, in this study we explored how video-mediated transcultural dialogues between 60 pre-service educators from Taiwan and the U.S. influenced the development of essential critical cultural competencies. Using a nested theoretical perspective, we analyzed participants’ discussions related to internalized notions of teaching and learning across diverse ecologies. Analysis revealed that through these conversations, incremental development of interconnected global awareness, self-determination, reflexive relationality, and social justice orientations occurred. Modest individual perspective shifts transpired as participants cultivated emerging critical cultural competencies. Despite limitations including a small sample size and a term duration, this pedagogical innovation demonstrated a possible pathway for further exploration to develop future educators’ critical cultural competencies while bridging global relations even within restrictive sociopolitical contexts. Full article