Search Results (724)

Background/Objectives: This qualitative study examines strengths and strains faced by professionals working with young carers throughout the United Kingdom (UK) in the context of society’s youngest carers; young carers in early childhood (YCEC) (0–8 years). Methods: The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) was utilised to map key findings of three focus groups. This conceptual lens offers a narrative-based understanding of ways in which power operates in society. Increasingly applied to explore experiences of individuals, communities, and groups, the PTMF proposes that concepts of distress are founded in broader contexts of injustice and social inequalities. Twenty-four participants were recruited from throughout the UK via the Carers Trust Young Carers Alliance. Results: Findings highlight the strength of legal, ideological, and economic power shaping societal beliefs and policy concerning YCEC. This informs constructs of perceived social norms regarding who young carers are most likely to be, and where they may be found. This power threatens the health and well-being of YCEC, impacting the ability of professionals to provide optimal support. Inappropriate policy formed from these assumptions disempowers those providing services to young carers at the frontline of service delivery. Professionals and adults with living experience of caring in their early childhoods reflect upon silent tensions that exist within society, suggesting that YCEC remain the ‘elephant in the room’. Conclusions: We make recommendations to review the efficacy of statutory mandates concerning the needs assessment of young carers in England, and to align policy concerning early childhood and young carers to embed young carers’ rights consistently, starting in early childhood. Full article

This paper investigates the planning problem of AC-integrated wind–photovoltaic–hydro–storage (WPHS) bundled transmission systems. To effectively capture the uncertainty and interdependence in renewable power outputs, a Copula-enhanced distributionally robust optimization (DRO) framework is developed, enabling a unified treatment of stochastic and correlated renewable generation within the system planning process. First, a location and capacity planning model based on DRO for WPHS generation bases is formulated, in which a composite-norm ambiguity set is constructed to describe the uncertainty of renewable resources. Second, the Copula function is employed to characterize the nonlinear dependence structure between wind and photovoltaic (PV) power outputs, providing representative scenarios and initial probability distribution (PD) support for the construction of a bivariate ambiguity set that embeds coupling information. The resulting optimization problem is solved using the column and constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm. In addition, an evaluation metric termed the transmission corridor utilization rate (TCUR) is proposed to quantitatively assess the efficiency of external AC transmission planning schemes, offering a new perspective for the evaluation of regional power transmission strategies. Finally, simulation results validate that the proposed model achieves superior performance in terms of system economic efficiency and TCUR. Full article

This study examines how Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is framed in Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean English-language mainstream media during four high-salience geopolitical events (2023–2025). Methodologically, it employs a qualitative comparative framing and discourse analysis of 28 systematically selected news articles from leading outlets in each media system, coded using Entman’s four framing functions (problem definition, causal attribution, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation) and supplemented by representational logics and explicitly stated platform-governance indicators. Drawing on framing theory, representation, platform governance, and critical geopolitics, the analysis finds that ASEAN is portrayed not as an autonomous actor but as a flexible signifier within nationally inflected narratives. Chinese media emphasize regional cooperation and developmental connectivity, Japanese outlets foreground liberal-normative order and security alignment, and South Korean coverage prioritizes technocratic and pragmatic partnership. The study argues that ASEAN’s mediated visibility is shaped by recurring editorial framing patterns and, where explicitly invoked, by infrastructural and platform-related cues, revealing ongoing narrative contestation over regional power and legitimacy in East Asia. Full article

The growing reliance on AI-powered EdTech solutions has prompted educators at all levels to rethink teaching and learning methodologies. This shift has fostered a renewed partnership among teachers, students, and society, repositioning AI from a passive support tool into a proactive agent in the classroom. This transformation calls for teachers to exercise leadership and judgement in guiding students’ use of AI, emphasising both responsible practices and ethical considerations within their broader socio-cultural contexts. To harness this potential, we leveraged AI-based solutions within the AECT academic association to reinterpret UNESCO’s four foundational pillars of learning, thereby impacting the broader educational community. This initiative underscores literacy in educational communities emerging from intra-national and international inequity. Hence, it is imperative to examine the exigency of fundamental rights in relation to ethics and norms to uphold the innovative opportunities of AI in education globally. In this regard, this study connects the Pedagogical AI-Tact concept to bridge the gap between theory and practice, fostering both interest and ethical engagement across diverse educational communities. This study valuably upholds Margaret Mead’s proposal that every child deserves universal educational rights, a principle in harmony with justice and freedom. Full article

Aiming at multi-agent interest demands and environmental benefits, a distributionally robust game-theoretic optimization algorithm based on a green certificate–carbon trading mechanism is proposed for uncertain microgrids. At first, correlated wind–solar scenarios are generated using Kernel Density Estimation and copula theory and the probability distribution ambiguity set is constructed combining 1-norm and $\infty$-norm metrics. Subsequently, with gas turbines, renewable energy power producers, and an energy storage unit as game participants, a two-stage distributionally robust game-theoretic optimization scheduling model is established for microgrids considering wind and solar correlation. The algorithm is constructed by integrating a non-cooperative dynamic game with complete information and distributionally robust optimization. It minimizes a linear objective subject to linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints and adopts the column and constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm to determine the optimal output for each device within the microgrid to enhance its overall system performance. This method ultimately yields a scheduling solution that achieves both equilibrium among multiple stakeholders’ interests and robustness. The simulation result verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method. Full article

In the digital age, social media platforms homogenize beauty standards and intricately link clothing choices to social norms and class identities. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital, supplemented by Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma, this study examines how social media amplifies pre-existing socio-cultural pressures that influence Turkish women’s decisions to abandon the hijab. The research has practical implications for understanding and addressing hijab abandonment. It employs a qualitative design based on semi-structured interviews with 13 participants, analyzed through a phenomenological approach. The findings reveal that the pursuit of social acceptance and resistance to social exclusion are more decisive factors in hijab abandonment than direct social media influence. While social media serves as a crucial amplifier of aesthetic ideals and a gateway to digital legitimacy, the primary drivers are deeply rooted in the pursuit of social acceptance and resistance to long-standing mechanisms of socio-cultural exclusion, stigmatization, and symbolic violence—processes intensified and mediated through digital platforms. The analysis uncovers the operation of a dual-sided neighborhood pressure, whereby women face scrutiny from both religious communities enforcing idealized piety norms and secular circles perpetuating stigmatizing labels such as backwardness or ignorance. Crucially, participants reported that unveiling was strategically employed as a means of overcoming barriers to professional advancement, gaining access to elite social spheres, and escaping the constant burden of representation. The study concludes that hijab abandonment emerges as a complex strategy of social navigation, where digital platforms act as powerful accelerants of pre-existing class- and identity-based conflicts. Full article

Community gardening has become an important urban sustainability initiative that integrates ecological restoration with social participation. However, little is known about the psychological and social mechanisms that drive citizens’ willingness to engage in such activities, particularly in densely populated cities with limited green space. This study develops and empirically tests an integrative behavioral model combining environmental psychology, social cognitive theory, and environmental identity theory to explain citizens’ participation in community gardening in Tehran, Iran. Using survey data from 416 residents and analyzing results through structural equation modeling, the study evaluates the effects of six key predictors, including childhood nature experience, connectedness to nature, self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, psychological restoration, and collective environmental responsibility, on willingness to participate. The model explained 54% of the variance in participation, indicating high explanatory power. Five predictors significantly influenced willingness to participate: childhood nature experience, connectedness to nature, outcome expectancy, psychological restoration, and collective environmental responsibility, while self-efficacy was not significant. The findings reveal that engagement in community gardening is shaped more by emotional, restorative, and moral motivations than by perceived capability alone. Theoretically, this research advances understanding of pro-environmental participation by integrating memory-based, affective, and normative dimensions of behavior. Practically, it provides actionable insights for urban planners and policymakers to design inclusive, emotionally restorative, and collectively managed green initiatives that strengthen citizen participation and enhance urban resilience. Full article

Promoting pro-environmental behavior is crucial for addressing environmental challenges and achieving sustainable development. Social norms, as a powerful situational force, are considered an effective strategy for encouraging environmental protection actions. However, the mechanisms and boundaries of different types of social norms remain unclear. This study focuses on the pro-environmental donation context, aiming to reveal how social norms influence donation intentions, particularly the mediating role of personal norms and the moderating effect of social distance. Through two online experimental studies, this study manipulates norm types and social distance while measuring participants’ personal norms and donation intentions. The findings suggest that injunctive social norms are more effective than descriptive norms in promoting donation intentions, with personal norms mediating this effect. Social distance moderates the effect of norm type: descriptive norms are more effective in close social distance, while injunctive norms have a stronger impact in distant social distance. This study not only systematically outlines the psychological pathway through which social norms drive pro-environmental behavior but also reveals a “norm type-psychological distance” matching effect, providing a theoretical basis and practical guidance for targeted and context-specific environmental communication and donation interventions. Full article

Quantitative mineralogy plays a vital role in exploration geology by defining mineral assemblages, identifying metal-bearing phases, and providing clues to optimize ore processing. In peraluminous rare-metal granites such as those at Beauvoir (France), mineral quantification is challenging, especially in altered facies where partial replacement complicates the estimation of muscovite and feldspars. The present study applies micro-X-ray fluorescence (micro-XRF) to quantify mineral assemblages of the Beauvoir granite. Modal abundances were compared with normative proportions derived from whole-rock geochemistry. In fresh facies with Li contents between 4000 and 6000 ppm, albite and quartz dominate (~40% and 25%), respectively, while lepidolite averages 20%–25%. During alteration to greisen, feldspars and lepidolite are partly replaced by muscovite, reducing lepidolite by up to threefold and increasing muscovite to ~30%. The obtained results demonstrate that micro-XRF provides a fast and reliable method for quantifying mineral distributions in rare-metal granites. Combined with complementary microscale techniques, quantitative mineralogy offers a powerful approach to characterize Li-bearing granites, assess alteration intensity, and improve predictions of ore quality and processability. Full article

As AI workloads move to edge devices, the von Neumann architecture is hindered by memory- and power-wall limitations We present an SRAM-based compute-in-memory binary convolution accelerator that stores and transports only 1-bit weights and activations, maps MACs to bitwise XNOR–popcount, and fuses BatchNorm, HardTanh, and binarization into a single affine-and-threshold uni. Residual paths are handled by in-accumulator summation to minimize data movement. FPGA validation shows 87.6% CIFAR 10 accuracy consistent with a bit-accurate software reference, a compute-only latency of 2.93 ms per 32 × 32 image at 50 MHz, sustained at only 1.52 W. These results demonstrate an efficient and practical path to deploying edge models under tight power and memory budgets. Full article

This paper presents new aggregation operators for $p,q,r$-fractional fuzzy sets based on the Frank t-norm and t-conorm. We introduce the $p,q,r$-fractional fuzzy Frank weighted average and $p,q,r$-fractional fuzzy Frank weighted geometric operators and discuss their algebraic properties, including closure, boundedness, idempotency, and monotonicity. Based on new operations, we develop a multi-criteria group decision-making framework that integrates the evaluations of multiple experts via the proposed Frank operators and ranks the alternatives under $p,q,r$-fractional fuzzy information. The model is applied to a cryptocurrency stability assessment problem, where four coins are evaluated with respect to six criteria. The results show that both aggregation operators yield consistent rankings with good discriminatory power among the alternatives. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to check the stability of the model under parameter variations. A comparative study further demonstrates the compatibility and advantages of the proposed method over several existing decision-making approaches. The proposed framework is well suited to decision-making scenarios in which multiple experts’ opinions must be integrated within a complex fuzzy information environment. Full article

In constrained nonlinear optimization, we aim to achieve two goals: one is to minimize the objective function, and the other is to satisfy the constraints. A common way to balance these competing targets is to use penalty functions. Suppose that an algorithm generates a descent direction and produces a step that decreases the objective function value but increases the constraint violation—a phenomenon known as the Maratos effect. This leads to the rejection of the full step by the non-smooth penalty function; therefore, superlinear convergence is not preserved. This work leverages a piecewise convexity model to solve the optimal PMU placement. A quadratic objective function is minimized subject to a non-convex equality constraint within box constraints [0, 1] × [0, 1] ⊂ R². The initial non-convex region is reconsidered as a union of piecewise line segments. This decomposition enables algorithms to converge to a local optimum while preserving superlinear convergence near the solution. An analytical solution is presented using the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions. First-and-second-order optimality conditions are applied to find the local minimum. We show how the Maratos effect is avoided by adopting the piecewise convexity without needing a non-smooth penalty function, second-order corrections or employing the watchdog methods. Simulations demonstrate that the algorithms partially search the space along the line segments—avoiding zig-zag trajectories—and reach (0, 1) or (1, 0), where both feasibility and optimality are satisfied at once. Full article

“Administrative collaboration” is an important theoretical and methodological requirement proposed by the Chinese government to advance the environmental governance of the Yellow River Basin (YRB). In the governance of Yellow River water pollution, it has been regarded as a key strategy to respond to and resolve pollution issues. Administrative collaboration refers to the timely linkage and cooperation that government departments in different administrative regions of the basin carry out when water pollution occurs. China’s current legal documents have stipulated provisions on this; however, most of these provisions are only guiding rather than obligatory, so collaboration between government departments mainly relies on their respective willingness. As a result, administrative power barriers are difficult to break through, making it hard to implement collaborative governance. To address this, relevant entities should be endowed with obligations through legal provisions. This study innovatively proceeds from the perspective of normative texts, establishes administrative collaborative governance as a legal obligation that government departments at all levels must fulfill, and proposes a series of operable and specific supervision requirements. This is intended to ensure the effective implementation of administrative collaboration in governance practice, realize the value of sustainable basin development, and at the same time provide legislative references for governments around the world in carrying out collaborative governance of major rivers. Full article

Background: Handgrip strength (HGS) is a simple, low-cost indicator of muscle function and predictor of morbidity and mortality in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Objective: To establish sex- and age-specific normative values for HGS in Colombian patients undergoing hemodialysis and to examine its association with clinical and biochemical factors. Methods: A multicenter, cross-sectional study was conducted between August and September 2023 in five cities across Colombia. A total of 436 hemodialysis patients aged 15 to over 80 years were assessed. HGS was measured post-dialysis using a CAMRY EH101 digital dynamometer in both flexion and extension of each arm. The Box–Cox Power Exponential (BCPE) model within the GAMLSS framework was used to generate percentile curves by sex. Comparisons were performed by sex, diabetes status, and occupation. Spearman’s correlation was used to explore associations between HGS and biochemical variables. Results: Males exhibited significantly higher HGS than females (mean difference: 8.09 kg; p < 0.001). Lower HGS was observed among individuals with diabetes and those unemployed. HGS showed a moderate inverse correlation with alkaline phosphatase (r = −0.29, p = 0.0014) and a weak inverse correlation with KT/V (r = −0.22, p = 0.02). No other biochemical markers showed significant associations. Reference percentiles (P3 to P97) were constructed for both sexes. Conclusions: These normative values for HGS represent the first reference standards for Colombian patients on hemodialysis. HGS assessment may support early identification of functional impairment and inform clinical decisions related to rehabilitation and nutritional support. Full article

Insects constitute a vital component of terrestrial ecosystems, yet their ongoing global decline underscores the urgency of identifying the factors that facilitate or hinder public engagement in their conservation. This study identifies the key psychological drivers of insect-related conservation behavior within a Romanian context, an understudied geographical and sociocultural setting. Using data collected from 346 adult respondents via an online questionnaire, the predictive performance of the Value–Belief–Norm (VBN) theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and an integrated VBN–TPB framework was examined through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The VBN model exhibited superior explanatory power relative to TPB, with biospheric values, ecological worldviews, and personal moral norms emerging as the most influential determinants of behavioral intention and self-reported action. Although participants demonstrated moderate levels of general entomological knowledge, awareness of specific insect-friendly practices was notably limited and frequently characterized by misconceptions. Perceived barriers, particularly informational deficits, time constraints, and financial considerations, exerted significant inhibitory effects on conservation engagement. The findings indicate that effective interventions must extend beyond knowledge transmission, incorporating strategies that activate moral norms, strengthen affective and identity-based motivations, and reduce structural barriers to action. Full article