Search Results (493)

Lead remains a public health priority, in spite of long-standing mitigation efforts. In drinking water, the source of lead is primarily the domestic distribution system. Thus, regulatory compliance monitoring fails to capture the magnitude of the problem. In order to assess lead concentrations in drinking water and identify populations at risk of lead exposure via drinking water, a nationally representative survey was carried out in Hungary. Municipalities were categorized and, where necessary, subdivided into neighborhoods based on the type of municipality, the corrosive nature of the supplied drinking water, and the potential presence of lead pipes in the mains and the domestic distribution systems. A total of 58 representative residential areas were selected for a 6-month sampling campaign. Random daytime (RDT) and 1 min flushed samples were collected from residential and public buildings and analyzed for lead by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Non-compliance rates were significantly higher in buildings built before 1945 (25% compared to 7% in newer buildings), when the use of lead pipes was general practice. Flushing reduced lead levels significantly, corresponding to 14% and 6% non-compliance in the RDT and flushed samples, respectively. No association was found with corrosive versus protective water quality. High risk areas were primarily identified in the capital and historic centers of cities. The results were translated into public information tools including a searchable map of lead risk areas and a simplified risk assessment tool for consumers. The survey outcomes also support national risk assessment for lead in drinking water, an upcoming obligation under the recast European Union drinking water regulation. Full article

Background/Objectives: Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is a major and growing public health concern, yet awareness of its nature, consequences, and management options remains inadequately studied in the Middle Eastern context. In Saudi Arabia, cochlear implantation is provided free of charge through the public healthcare system; however, adult uptake remains critically low, suggesting that awareness—rather than access—constitutes the primary barrier to timely intervention. In collective healthcare cultures, family members play a central role in healthcare decision-making for older individuals, making family-level awareness a critical determinant of early identification and treatment. This study aimed to assess public awareness, beliefs, and attitudes toward ARHL and its management options among adults in Saudi Arabia, applying the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a theoretical framework. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted using a structured questionnaire adapted from a previously validated survey, with cultural modifications for the Saudi context. The questionnaire was distributed electronically to adults aged 18 years and above across Saudi Arabia. A total of 506 consenting responses were included in the final analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations. Results: The majority of participants correctly identified hearing loss as a reduction in the ability to hear (84.6%), and 95.3% regarded good hearing as personally important. However, significant knowledge gaps were observed, with 53.8% believing hearing loss can be cured and 50.4% believing it can be halted. Notably, 34.2% believed cochlear implants benefit children exclusively. Doctors and the internet were the primary sources of medical information, yet 39.3% reported no preventive healthcare visits and 23.9% did not seek any information about hearing problems. When faced with a hypothetical hearing loss, 75.3% indicated they would consult an ENT specialist. Conclusions: Adults in Saudi Arabia demonstrate good awareness of the signs and consequences of hearing loss but exhibit significant knowledge gaps regarding its clinical course and available management options, most notably the belief that cochlear implantation is exclusively a pediatric intervention. These findings highlight the urgent need for culturally adapted awareness campaigns targeting family members of older adults, and support the development of community-based hearing health promotion strategies in Saudi Arabia and comparable collective healthcare societies. Full article

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat to democratic institutions, public trust, and crisis management, particularly as it becomes a central tactic in coordinated information operations. This paper explores the application of machine learning (ML) algorithms in detecting and classifying disinformation as a means of supporting experts engaged in combating influence campaigns. We utilize a labelled English dataset, and a custom collected Bulgarian news dataset gathered using version 1 of the NewsData.io API, as indicated by the /api/1/ endpoint. After translating the Bulgarian content and generating synthetic fake news from real articles, we construct a multilingual training set. We evaluate the performance of three ML models demonstrating that advanced ML approaches can significantly enhance the identification of disinformation. These findings highlight the potential for machine learning to assist intelligence analysts, cybersecurity professionals, and policy makers in detecting and countering modern information operations at scale. Full article

Indoor air pollution (IAP) is an important public health issue in urban households, particularly in hot climates where residents spend substantial time indoors. While the health risks of indoor air pollution are increasingly recognised, gender differences in exposure-related behaviours, risk perception, and health communication preferences remain underexplored in Gulf cities. This study examined gender differences in awareness, household practices, and preferred information channels related to IAP among English-speaking adults in Dubai. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1014 adults using a structured questionnaire. Descriptive, bivariate, and multivariable regression analyses were used to examine gender-based patterns. Overall, participants showed moderate awareness of IAP; gender differences emerged across each of the four behavioural domains examined, with women more likely to use chemical-based cleaners and to open windows for ventilation. After controlling for age and education, women were significantly more likely than men to use traditional chemical-based cleaners (β = 0.69; p < 0.001) and to open windows for ventilation (β = 0.78; p < 0.001), while men more frequently relied on mechanical methods such as air filters and ceiling fans. Women were more likely to express interest in learning about IAP (adjusted OR = 2.55; 95% CI: 1.71–3.79) and to prefer community-based, informal channels such as awareness campaigns and social media. These gender differences persisted after adjustment for age and education, suggesting that indoor air quality behaviours and communication preferences may vary systematically by gender in this sample. Among this English-speaking convenience sample, gender differences were observed in household practices and preferred communication channels. These findings provide preliminary evidence that may help inform future public health communication strategies in Dubai but should not be interpreted as representative of the wider Dubai population. Full article

The increasing convergence of enterprise architecture and IT governance frameworks, such as TOGAF 9.2, COBIT 5, and NIST CSF 1.1, with LegalTech regulations including GDPR 2016/679, eIDAS 910/2014, and NIS2 2022/2555, has created a growing need for rigorous and automated governance-validation mechanisms. However, to date, no formal approach exists to assess semantic conformance between a normative ontological model and its operational implementation in microservice-based systems, leaving critical governance gaps difficult to detect in legally sensitive environments. This paper proposes MALTG (Multidimensional Architecture for LegalTech Governance), a configurable and reusable formal framework that combines OWL 2 ontology engineering, a JSON-LD-based SDT (Structural Digital Twin), semantic conformance mapping, a hierarchical coverage function, and a conformance gap metric to support automated governance assessment and prioritised remediation. The framework accepts any organisational architecture as input, enabling application to arbitrary LegalTech case studies by replacing the reference SDT. The proposed framework models nine governance dimensions through an ontology of 59 classes and 15 properties and validates them against a semi-real, public-source SDT composed of 39 microservice components and 54 directed connections. The reference SDT was populated through an ontology-driven data-collectionprocess: a scraping campaign guided by the MALTG ontology (data/MALTG_Ontology.owl) harvested public information from the official portal of Ecuador’s Council of the Judiciary (Consejo de la Judicatura, CJ)—probing its technological-maturity level and digital-governance compliance—which was condensed into a single JSON-LD artefact, enforcing domain rigour and traceability on the search for LegalTech governance evidence. Experimental results demonstrated an overall ontological score of 82.6 and an SDT score of 73.7, with a mean conformance gap of 8.9. Five dimensions achieved full conformance, while the LegalTech dimension presented the largest gap. Graph-theoretic validation further confirmed monotonic improvement throughout the remediation sequence. Overall, the findings suggest that MALTG provides a formally grounded and reproducible approach for automating multi-framework LegalTech governance conformance assessment while maintaining semantic and structural traceability between normative models and operational architectures. As a proof of concept, this validation relies on a configurable, ontology-driven public-source (semi-real) SDT; external validity in real production LegalTech organisations remains untested and is left for future work. Full article

Social and behavioral research often needs to examine policy shocks, information interventions, platform-mediated attention, and governance feedback, but direct experiments on real populations are constrained by ethical risks, intervention costs, and limited repeatability. This study proposes Multi-Agent Social Simulation (MASS), a protocolized form of large language model-driven agent-based modeling (LLM-driven ABM) designed as a low-risk, repeatable, and auditable pre-experimental simulation method for quantitative research. MASS embeds LLMs in an agent-based modeling (ABM) framework and uses role settings, round-based scheduling, information control, background-rule control, structured outputs, harness checks, reason-action logs, and replication manifests to transform open-ended language generation into recordable, checkable, and statistically analyzable agent-round observations. The method is evaluated through the New Jersey–Pennsylvania minimum wage natural experiment, the 2016 UK Brexit digital campaigning context, and the 2023 Zibo barbecue tourism public-opinion event. Results show that protocolized LLM-driven ABM can generate analyzable and empirically assessable outputs across policy-shock, information-intervention, and governance-feedback scenarios. The strongest evidence concerns rule-shock identification, declining undecided share under targeting, and mechanism-chain consistency among governance response, public sentiment, and behavioral intention. MASS is not a substitute for real-world experiments or causal inference; it is a pre-experimental simulation method for mechanism rehearsal, risk identification, counterfactual comparison, and research design preparation. Full article

Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) has a long tradition in North Macedonia and is internationally recognized for its high quality. Despite this, cultivated areas have steadily declined, reaching only 35 hectares in 2022, with capsule yields of 300 kg ha⁻¹ and seed yields of 583 kg ha⁻¹. The SWOT analysis shows that opium poppy production has several important strengths. The country has favorable agroclimatic conditions, domestic varieties, experienced farmers, and support from government subsidies. The presence of a pharmaceutical buyer is also an important advantage, because it gives this production a clearer market direction. However, there are still many limits that slow down further development. Production is mostly based on small farms, while yields and prices are often low. Many farmers also use outdated machinery, which makes production less efficient. Another problem is the limited interest of buyers and the lack of a secure market for poppy seed. In addition, legal restrictions make the export of capsules more difficult. There are also several opportunities for future growth. The TOWS matrix suggests that the sector could become more competitive through value-added products, stronger cooperation between farmers, modernization of machinery, public information campaigns, and public–private investment. Although opium poppy production faces many challenges, it still has good potential to develop from a declining traditional activity into a sustainable and competitive niche sector, but this requires coordinated institutional support, modernization, market diversification, and the development of value-added products. With better policies and a clearer market strategy, it could develop into a more sustainable and competitive agricultural sector. Full article

X-ray reflection spectroscopy provides one of the most effective electromagnetic routes to measuring the dimensionless spin parameter of accreting black holes. The method has produced spin constraints for both stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries and supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, and it is central to the science objectives of present and future X-ray telescopes. At the same time, this method is vulnerable to a set of coupled observational and modeling systematics: continuum-reflection degeneracy, insufficient passband, unresolved distant reflection or absorption, detector effects, source variability, accretion-state dependence, and assumptions built into the reflection model itself. This article synthesizes the talks and discussions held at the 2025 Wake Forest workshop Recent Progress on Black Hole Spin Measurements Across the Electromagnetic and Gravitational Spectra; motivated by them, we propose a practical quality-control framework for assessing whether a published reflection-based spin measurement should be treated as robust, provisional, or not assessable from the published information alone. We organize the problem around three pillars: detectability, meaning that the relativistic reflection signal is unambiguously present in the data; uniqueness, meaning that the relativistic component can be separated from the continuum, from distant reflection, absorption, and instrumental effects; and robustness, meaning that the inferred spin is stable against plausible changes in model assumptions, data selection, and accretion-state treatment. We then translate these principles into applicable criteria, a tiered quality-classification scheme, and a reporting checklist for future analyses. The quantitative calibration of each criterion requires a dedicated campaign of simulations over realistic scenarios, which we outline here and defer to a future publication. We aim to define a reproducible path toward a curated, community-maintained compilation of reliable spin constraints and to guide the implementation of reflection spectroscopy in the high-throughput, high-resolution era. Full article

Background: Public acceptance of vaccines during emerging infectious disease outbreaks is influenced by perceptions of safety, accessibility, and cost. Understanding these determinants during the early phase of a pandemic is important for informing vaccination policy and communication strategies. This study examined the role of vaccine cost and safety perceptions in shaping COVID-19 vaccination intention among adults in Saudi Arabia prior to national vaccine rollout. Methods: A cross-sectional electronic survey was conducted among adults residing in Saudi Arabia between August and September 2020. Participants were recruited through online distribution using social media and electronic communication channels. The questionnaire assessed socio-demographic characteristics, knowledge and perceptions regarding COVID-19, and intention to receive COVID-19 vaccination under five hypothetical scenarios reflecting vaccine cost and the availability of scientific safety and efficacy evidence. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to identify factors associated with vaccination intention. Results: A total of 1293 respondents completed the survey. When vaccination was offered free of charge, 57.5% of participants reported that they would likely receive the vaccine. Vaccination intention declined as the hypothetical vaccine price increased, reaching 38.7% when the cost exceeded 100 SAR. Intention was lowest when vaccination was presented under conditions in which safety and efficacy evidence had not yet been confirmed. Age, gender, educational attainment, and prior seasonal influenza vaccination were associated with COVID-19 vaccination intention across several scenarios. Conclusions: Perceived vaccine affordability and confidence in scientific safety and efficacy evidence were important factors associated with COVID-19 vaccination intention during the early phase of the pandemic in Saudi Arabia. Providing vaccination without direct cost to recipients and communicating safety and efficacy evidence transparently may support public confidence and vaccine acceptance during future large-scale immunization campaigns. These findings should be interpreted as an early-pandemic baseline and should not be extrapolated to current post-rollout attitudes. Full article

Background: Vaccine hesitancy has traditionally been understood as a multifactorial phenomenon shaped by individual beliefs, risk perceptions, and access barriers. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed the relationship between citizens, science, and public institutions, raising the question of whether vaccine hesitancy has evolved into a broader form of institutional distrust. Objective: This narrative review synthesizes evidence on vaccine confidence, trust dynamics, misinformation, and post-pandemic attitudes to propose a new conceptual framework, i.e., institutional hesitancy, that reframes vaccine acceptance within the wider context of institutional credibility, transparency, and legitimacy. Methods: We conducted a narrative synthesis of peer-reviewed literature, surveillance reports, and cross-national surveys published between 2015 and 2026, focusing on trust in science, governments, public health agencies, healthcare systems, and regulatory authorities as determinants of vaccination behavior. Results: The evidence consistently demonstrates that institutional trust is among the strongest predictors of vaccine acceptance, often surpassing traditional demographic and knowledge-based variables. The pandemic exposed and amplified pre-existing fractures in the relationship between citizens and institutions, creating a legacy of institutional skepticism that extends beyond COVID-19 vaccines to routine immunization programs, seasonal vaccination campaigns, and future pandemic preparedness. Traditional information-based approaches, which assume that knowledge deficits drive hesitancy, have proven insufficient when trust is compromised. Instead, rebuilding vaccine confidence requires sustained investment in institutional transparency, community engagement, and accountable governance. Conclusions: The post-pandemic era calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of vaccine hesitancy. We propose the institutional hesitancy framework as a complementary lens that shifts the analytical focus from individual knowledge deficits to relational dynamics between citizens and institutions. Addressing this challenge requires moving beyond communication campaigns toward long-term strategies that restore institutional trust and strengthen the resilience of public health systems. Full article

Conservation is consistently expressed across the American craft brewery sector, with breweries routinely promoting wildlife protection, public land stewardship, and waste reduction through marketing schemes and materials. However, little attention has been directed at the patterns and themes characterizing such pro-environment marketing. Accordingly, this qualitative multi-case study explores the designs of pro-environment labels (i.e., eco-labels) and adjacent materials (e.g., product descriptions) from six purposively selected breweries across three regions: the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. We aim to (a) pinpoint design variations in pro-environment marketing and (b) conceptualize a pro-environment marketing device (PEMD) typology to better inform pro-social marketing campaigns. The resulting PEMD typology features two dimensions: (1) indication (hedonism–conservation–environmentalism) and (2) orientation (greenwashing–environmental voyeurism–environmental stewardship). We contextualize these dimensions along an iconological progression (pre-iconography–iconology) to reveal the complexities and risks of pro-environment branding, especially by unintentionally leveraging the environment as an inauthentic sales prop (i.e., greenwashing). This typology helps pro-social marketers design and advance genuine pro-environment messaging. Additionally, it offers sustainability researchers a novel lens to interrogate how marketing design choices affect perceived brand authenticity and subsequent consumer behaviors regarding conservation and environmentalism. Full article

University students face dietary transitions shaped by time constraints, campus food environments, and intensive exposure to food-related content on social media, yet the mechanisms linking digital exposure to observable food choices and overall diet quality remain insufficiently modeled in Latin American contexts. This study examined whether social media-driven food norms (NI) and in-restaurant food choices (CD) sequentially mediate the effect of Instagram (IG) and TikTok (TK) exposure on overall diet quality (Y), while incorporating physical activity (PA) as an independent predictor. This is a quantitative cross-sectional study based on a paper questionnaire administered face-to-face to 615 university students (53.2% women; M = 21.7 years; 39.2% public, 60.8% private universities) eating in campus restaurants in La Libertad, northern Peru. Data were analyzed through PLS-SEM (SmartPLS 4) with 5000 bootstrap resamples and BCa 95% confidence intervals; Y was operationalized through a culturally adapted KIDMED index. All five structural hypotheses were supported: TK → NI (β = 0.479) exceeded IG → NI (β = 0.349); NI → CD (β = 0.473) and PA → CD (β = 0.216) operated as independent pathways; and CD → Y (β = 0.255) confirmed the distal link. NI fully mediated both digital pathways toward food choices. Diet quality in university restaurants is reconfigured primarily through normative, not informational, digital mechanisms, suggesting norm-based interventions over nutrition-information campaigns. Reflective measures showed adequate internal consistency for IG, TK, and NI (Cronbach’s α = 0.874–0.889; CR = 0.907–0.923) and convergent validity (AVE = 0.620–0.751); the structural model explained 55.5% of the variance in NI, 30.8% in CD, and 34.8% in overall diet quality. Full article

Abandoned mine methane can remain active beneath post-mining cities long after mine closure, creating environmental and public-safety challenges when urban works reactivate subsurface gas-migration pathways. This study assesses methane hazard in Lupeni, Romania, where unexpected gas emissions were detected during commissioning tests for a new natural gas pipeline in August 2024. The analysis uses a monitoring database of 41 fixed points surveyed during three field campaigns (123 observations in total). Descriptive statistics showed a strongly right-skewed concentration field, with an overall mean of 5.65% vol., a median of 1% vol., and a maximum of 54% vol. Campaign-to-campaign correlations (Pearson r = 0.746–0.923) indicated short-term recurrence of hotspot behaviour over the monitored period. To translate these observations into decision-relevant risk information, a fully reproducible monitoring-driven probabilistic screening model was implemented. Consequence severity was mapped from measured methane concentration, while the probability component was derived from alert-threshold recurrence across the three campaigns using a Beta posterior and Monte Carlo resampling (50,000 iterations). The mean point-level risk was 6.97, indicating that the typical monitored location was not uniformly critical. However, a hotspot-envelope indicator defined as the 95th percentile of point-level risk across monitoring points had a mean of 19.40, and the model-derived probability that it exceeded the critical threshold of 17 was 97.6%. The findings suggest that the Lupeni hazard was localized but severe, supporting targeted monitoring, excavation control, and hotspot-focused intervention rather than generalized alarmism. More broadly, the workflow may provide a practical screening approach for other post-mining urban areas where repeated monitoring data are available but mechanistic subsurface characterization remains incomplete. Full article

For over a century, the South African secular state refused to legally recognise Islamic marriages (nikah), primarily due to their potentially polygynous nature. This statutory exclusion left Muslim women without civil legal protections during marriage, upon divorce, and at the death of a spouse. This article examines the fifteen-year strategic litigation campaign led by the Women’s Legal Centre (WLCT), which culminated in the landmark 2022 Constitutional Court judgment. Utilising a qualitative analysis of public court filings, legal pleadings, and judicial decisions, the author explores how marginalised Muslim women used civil courts to bypass and challenge the exclusive authority of conservative male clerical councils (ulama). The article analyses this legal trajectory through two primary theoretical lenses: Robert Cover’s concept of jurispathy (the state’s suppression of a community’s laws) and Afro-feminist frameworks. The findings reveal a critical tension in state-led legal reform. While the 2022 judgment secured vital financial and proprietary protections for women, it simultaneously introduced the limitations of ‘state feminism’ by replacing informal religious control with a rigid state bureaucracy. The paper argues that developing an authentic decolonial family law requires a jurisprudence that enforces the material and financial rights of African Muslim women without forcing their religious unions to conform entirely to Western, secular concepts of civil marriage. Full article

Information disorders condition electoral processes, becoming a major institutional concern. In response, the European Union and various fact-checking organisations co-organised the Elections24Check project to curb disinformation in the 2024 European elections. This research analyses the activities, strategies, and editorial behaviour of the five Spanish fact-checking agencies that are integrated into the initiative. Through a content analysis applied to 3256 publications, the findings demonstrate the maturity of the Spanish ecosystem, which led the project by contributing 32.8% of the total content. Strategically, reactive action predominated, except for Newtral, which prioritised prebunking (62.6%). Political scrutiny was minor (6.6%), focusing on major coalitions and far-right leaders. Thematically, highlights included war conflicts, migration, and national/regional frameworks utilised for emotional polarisation, displacing the focus from the strictly European debate. In conclusion, Spain consolidates itself as a cornerstone of European fact-checking. However, the results reveal inefficiencies in the project’s extended timeframe, suggesting more constrained and effective frameworks for election campaigns. Furthermore, the persistence of narratives anchored to local agendas evidences a strategic fragmentation that hinders the construction of a fully pan-European public space. Full article