Search Results (801)

This quantitative study investigates students’ perceptions of a virtual language exchange between two universities. By examining two successive cohorts, the research aimed to identify shared patterns, institutional differences, and changes over time. Two opinion questionnaires were administered at the beginning and at the end of the exchange in each academic period. The data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics globally, by institution, and longitudinally. The results support the integration of virtual language exchanges as a sustainable and effective component of internationalization at home in higher education since they offer students opportunities for authentic interaction and sensitivity to cultural diversity. Full article

Supply-side assessments show what services are available nearby, but not how far residents travel from home. We examine alignment between neighborhood service breadth and realized local travel across Shenzhen, Nanjing and Xuzhou using 93.5 million home-based weekday trips and point-of-interest (POI) data for 11,047 residential grids. Service breadth counts how many of the eight service categories are represented within 1 km; local travel is the percentage of home-based weekday trips no farther than 2 km. Because trips are not linked to POIs, this outcome measures travel proximity rather than verified service use. A high-breadth/low-local-travel screening group, identified using within-city percentile ranks, accounts for 19.3% of grids. Its mean breadth is close to that of aligned-high grids, but its short-trip share is about 19 percentage points lower. After adjustment for observed covariates and district fixed effects, each additional category is associated with a 0.30-percentage-point higher short-trip share, about 90% below the raw gradient. Among the city-specific trip-weighted estimates, only Nanjing’s is statistically distinguishable from zero. A joint test does not resolve whether the city slopes differ, and the pooled estimate should not be interpreted as a common association across all three cities. Count-sensitive scores also show positive pooled associations, but collinearity prevents separating the contributions of breadth and POI intensity. The framework identifies where independently measured provision and local travel diverge without establishing causality or service use. It provides a spatial diagnostic for further local investigation across the three eastern Chinese city contexts. Full article

This article introduces “experiential memory” as a new theoretical construct to explain a paradox in Israeli remembrance culture: why ancient Jewish days of commemoration (Passover, Tisha B’Av, Purim, Chanukah) retain their power after millennia, while Israel’s national memorial days—especially Holocaust Remembrance Day—show signs of weakening despite being far more recent. Building on, and moving beyond, Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory and Carver and Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, the article defines experiential memory as a commemoration mechanism combining four dimensions simultaneously: a textual dimension (a fixed, communally read text), a physical-sensory dimension (embodied acts such as eating, fasting, or lighting), a communal dimension (shared enactment rather than passive observation), and a dimension of cyclical recurrence (annual repetition that renews rather than becomes routine). Through the analysis of Seder Night, Sukkot, Chanukah, Purim, and Tisha B’Av, the article shows how Jewish tradition integrates all four dimensions to embed memory in the body rather than merely in consciousness. It then diagnoses Israel’s national memorial ceremonies as structurally deficient—textually fragmented, physically passive (the siren rather than embodied action), and communally observational rather than participatory—which explains the repeated failure of efforts, such as Shinan’s Holocaust Scroll, to institutionalize a shared commemorative text. In its applied section, the article proposes principles for building an experiential mechanism for Holocaust remembrance as the last survivors disappear: shifting from observing to doing, establishing a shared constitutive text, introducing a mandatory physical-sensory ritual such as synchronized home candle-lighting, and relocating commemorative action to smaller communities such as classrooms and families. Particular attention is given to the education system as the most viable arena for implementation, and to broadening the Holocaust narrative to include Mizrahi and Sephardi experience, addressing the ethnic disconnect some parts of Israeli society feel toward the Holocaust. The article closes by framing the central challenge as sustaining living memory once eyewitnesses are gone, and suggests that Holocaust remembrance may eventually adopt the same experiential logic long applied to the Exodus: “in every generation”. Full article

We develop a two-stage game with vertically differentiated products and endogenous environmental quality to study unilateral carbon pricing and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). A home EU firm and a foreign exporter choose environmental quality, then compete in prices. Under unilateral pricing, only the home firm is taxed, so the foreign exporter’s quality choice responds only indirectly through competition, not a direct tax-saving motive. CBAM corrects this by taxing imports, too. We show that this correction can defeat itself: the same charge that incentivizes upgrading also contracts the foreign firm’s margin and market share, and once the carbon price exceeds a parameter-dependent threshold, this contraction can dominate, leaving the firm choosing lower quality under CBAM than under unilateral pricing. We analytically show that, sufficiently close to free trade, the foreign firm’s equilibrium quality is higher under CBAM than under unilateral pricing, so quality backfire is a finite-carbon-price equilibrium reversal rather than a local artifact, and numerically show that the reversal occurs over a substantial part of the admissible parameter region and survives several robustness checks. A second channel, where CBAM narrows the quality gap, could increase aggregate emissions, but the backfire is not realized in our calibration. The results provide a game-theoretic explanation of how border carbon policies shape strategic quality competition in carbon-intensive trade. Full article

Home-based physiotherapy is performed without supervision, which leads to incorrect execution and motivates systems that assess movement automatically from inertial measurement units (IMUs). Such systems assign each repetition to a category, yet a relevant share of repetitions fall near a class boundary, where even trained raters disagree. Classifiers trained with one-hot labels collapse these borderline repetitions onto a single class and discard this ambiguity. To address this, we build on label distribution learning, which represents each repetition as a distribution over classes instead of a single label. We introduce a way to construct such distributions without a large rater pool by perturbing the thresholds of a rule-based evaluation procedure to simulate rater disagreement. We train a network to reproduce these distributions with a Kullback–Leibler objective, which we call the ambiguity approach, and compare it against a one-hot cross-entropy baseline on four IMU exercise datasets. From the predicted distribution we then determine whether a repetition is ambiguous and which classes are relevant to it. The ambiguity approach matched or exceeded the baseline classification on all four datasets and detected ambiguity and the relevant classes more reliably. Representing the label distribution in the training target therefore adds information about ambiguity at no cost to classification. Full article

Accurate and subject-independent recognition of shoulder physiotherapy exercises from wrist-worn inertial measurement unit (IMU) signals is essential for automated home-based rehabilitation monitoring, yet existing deep learning models are too parameter-intensive to deploy on resource-constrained smartwatch hardware. This paper presents ECA-ResNet1D-Lite, a lightweight one-dimensional depthwise separable residual network augmented with efficient channel attention (ECA), trained and evaluated on the SPARS9x dataset comprising six shoulder exercises recorded from 20 subjects using a commercial wrist-worn smartwatch at 50 Hz. Because 50% window overlap allows adjacent windows to share samples, we report three protocols—window-level five-fold, recording-level grouped five-fold, and leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation—with model selection performed throughout on validation data disjoint from the test partition. Under LOSO, the primary protocol, the model attains 99.1 ± 1.0% accuracy while requiring only 13,612 parameters and 0.46 M multiply–accumulate operations per window—the highest accuracy and the lowest between-subject dispersion of the seven architectures trained under an identical protocol, ahead of the strongest unconstrained baseline (InceptionTime, 98.8 ± 1.4%) at 36.3× fewer parameters and 213× fewer operations, and ahead of the parameter-efficient designs TinyHAR (97.4 ± 2.5%) and TinierHAR (97.4 ± 2.1%). An ablation over four attention variants (SE, ECA, CBAM, and multi-head self-attention) shows ECA to be the cheapest, adding six parameters (0.04% overhead), while delivering the largest LOSO gain over the same backbone without attention (+0.2 percentage points) and reducing the cross-subject standard deviation from 1.4% to 1.0%. Per-class analysis further reveals that shoulder girdle stabilization is the most challenging exercise under LOSO (F1-score: 96.4%), despite being the most represented class, attributable to its quasi-static, low-amplitude IMU signature. Deployed to an Apple Watch Ultra 2, the model classifies a 4-s window in 0.24 ms (duty cycle 0.012%), establishing that subject-independent shoulder physiotherapy monitoring is computationally feasible on current smartwatch hardware. Full article

Smart rings are emerging as a promising class of sensing devices that enable unobtrusive, always-available interaction with Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. These wearable devices support intuitive gesture-based control while minimizing user attention and preserving mobility. However, despite rapid advances in sensing hardware and gesture recognition algorithms, little is known about how users associate ring-based shared gestures with smart-home commands. To fill this gap, this paper presents Oringano, a framework for designing and evaluating a vocabulary of shared ring-based gestures for controlling IoT devices in a smart home. These gestures are original in that members of the same group can share the same gestures for the same actions, as well as gestures customized by each individual. The proposed approach combines (i) a synthesis of contemporary smart ring-based gesture interaction literature, (ii) a user-centered requirements elicitation identifying representative smart-home control actions, (iii) a gesture elicitation study involving $N=30$ participants to derive a vocabulary of shared ring-based gestures for 15 IoT control actions, (iv) an empirical analysis of gesture agreement and usability of Oringano, a smartphone prototype for managing shared ring-based gestures, and (v) a set of implications for designing shared gestures for future smart-ring systems. Experimental results demonstrate high agreement for concrete actions such as selection, navigation, and media control, whereas abstract actions exhibit greater variability, highlighting opportunities for personalized gestural interaction. The shared gestures benefit from a higher average agreement rate (+84%), a slightly lower goodness of fit (−13%), and a longer thinking time (+115%) than normal ring-based gestures. The subjective satisfaction resulting from the usability evaluation of Oringano, based on the elicited vocabulary, is overall positive (4.5/5). These results advance the design of next-generation ring-based systems by bridging user-centered gesture interaction with practical sensing technologies for IoT interaction. Full article

As health services shift to digital delivery, older adults face practical online risks, including operational errors, difficulty interpreting clinical information, unclear privacy consent procedures, and telecommunications fraud. Existing empirical work mostly adopts questionnaire and interview designs to document older adults’ real-world digital usage, yet few studies systematically analyze policy documents as an external intervention system and assess how they address four core usage barriers: limited digital proficiency, constrained service access, weak sustained participation, and individualized online safety threats. This paper analyzes 1008 policy records extracted from the Peking University Legal Database covering 2007–2025, and develops a four-dimensional analytical framework split into B1 (Digital Capacity and Age-Friendly Support), B2 (Digital Health Management Support), B3 (Home- and Community-Based Care Support), and B4 (Institutional Care and Risk Governance). The analytical toolkit combines a Capability–Opportunity–Motivation–Behavior (COM-B) diagnostic model, an M1–M4 intervention-mechanism coding protocol, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, and two indices: the Digital Adaptation Policy Orientation Index (DAPOI) and the Behavioral Intervention Diversity Index (BIDI). Coding outputs reveal a pronounced structural imbalance in policy allocation for older adults’ digital health in China: community and institutional governance clauses (B3, B4) dominate the corpus, while person-centred support including one-on-one operational coaching, clinical data interpretation guidance and offline manual backup channels accounts for a marginal share of all coded entries (B1, B2). Age-friendly digital policies issued circa 2020 serve primarily short-term emergency adjustments instead of permanent institutional arrangements. Built on full-text policy coding outputs, this work defines policy-supported digital resilience as a holistic protective system formed by coordinated institutional clauses. Every result reported is sourced exclusively from supply-side policy records, which provides policy-level evidence for subsequent behavioral research on older adults’ digital risk management and digital welfare construction. Full article

The central point of evolutionary ecology is understanding the drivers of variation in life-history strategies among organisms. The post-fledging dependence period is a critical life-history stage in the life cycle of altricial birds, influencing their future long-term survival, fitness, and reproduction. This period represents the transition between fledging and the onset of natal dispersal or migration, when offspring are highly dependent on parental care. In this study, we used GPS-GSM telemetry to analyze for the first time the duration of this phase and the size of the ranging area of Lesser Spotted Eagles during the dependence period, testing the importance of various extrinsic (habitat type, territory, region) and intrinsic (body condition, sex, fledging date, fledging age) factors. Our survey was conducted between 2020 and 2025 in Bulgaria, SoutheastEurope. The mean duration of the post-fledging dependence period (PFDP) in the juveniles was 47 ± 5 days (SD) (n = 14). The age of independence of eagles ranged from 71 to 110 days (median = 95 days). Our results show that the fledging date is the main determinant shaping the dependence period both temporally and spatially. The size of the ranging area (90% home range) of juveniles during the PFDP varied from 0.03 to 16.72 km², with a mean value of 2.41 km² ± 4.34 SD (n = 14). Home range was influenced mainly by surrounding habitats (grassland types and forests). In line with our hypothesis, we found that birds are habitat-selective, strongly preferring forests and avoiding human-modified landscapes (infrastructure and agricultural fields) during this early life-history stage. We established a relatively small ranging area inhabited by eagles and a low-mobility pattern with a gradual increase in movements that is highly individual-specific. In general, forests occupied the largest share of the home range of eagles, ranging from 0.38% to 87.45%, with a mean value of 49.47% ± 26.57. The duration of the post-fledging dependence period and the size of the ranging area were constrained by the onset of first migration, coinciding with the beginning of birds’ independence. The home range overlap of eagles varied from 56.35% to 100%, with an average value of 87.94%. The high similarity among ranging areas identified in this study emphasizes the importance and consistency of environmental conditions, such as habitat features, compared to others that would vary yearly. The key aspects (spatial and temporal) of the post-fledging dependence pattern, identified by our study, are important for species conservation and must be integrated into future landscape planning. Our results also contribute to a better understanding of the complex factors shaping raptors’ space-use pattern in this key, a poorly studied life-history trait of raptors, thus enhancing knowledge for similar species of conservation concern. Full article

The German low-voltage (LV) distribution grid faces stress from the build-out of distributed photovoltaic (PV) units. Battery storage is widely proposed as a solution, yet the literature is partitioned by storage scale, placement, and how ageing is treated. This study introduces a unified cross-class assessment of the three structurally distinct LV storage classes under one methodology: residential PV home storage (Class I, 5 kWh), feeder-level DSO string storage (Class II, 10–50 kWh, one unit per feeder end), and market-coupled district storage (Class III, 50–500 kWh, EPEX-scheduled). All classes share the same 1 min load and PV time series, the same voltage-guided $P_{\mathrm{net}}\left(U\right)$ dispatch with class-specific extensions, and the same Naumann–Wang LFP ageing model with rainflow counting, evaluated to a 20-year state-of-health horizon across representative and limiting multi-feeder German LV networks, with degradation treated as a dispatch outcome. Correctly modelled networks prove largely voltage-robust; on the limiting Kerber feeders studied, storage does not restore grid-code compliance at any tested size. Grid-supportive operation yields little grid benefit and is ageing-neutral only where it is not needed, becoming costly without adequate benefit on the stressed feeders studied. The value of LV storage therefore rests on dispatch-resolved lifetime, self-consumption and curtailment reduction, and market participation rather than grid service. Full article

The home and preschool settings serve as important contexts for children’s early language and literacy development. There is limited research on parent–preschooler shared reading and children’s comprehension of information texts that vary in their format, structure, or mode of presentation. Comparing different types of information texts can help identify which features are associated with particular forms of parental scaffolding and children’s understanding, be used to guide parents, and perhaps find ways to promote children’s comprehension of these important text types. As such, this exploratory quantitative study examined shared reading of non-rhyming, rhyming, and magazine information texts and children’s listening comprehension, taking into consideration parental education, children’s age and gender, frequency of reading information texts at home, and total parents’ words in the interaction. The participants were 63 children (28 boys and 35 girls) and one of their parents (55 mothers and 8 fathers). On average, the children were 5 years, 11 months old (SD = 10.18 months). Data were collected in January–February of 2021 during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Parent–child dyads participated in three recorded online meetings, sharing two texts during each meeting and six texts in total: two non-rhyming information texts, two rhyming information texts, and two information magazine texts. Following each text, children answered two literal and two inferential comprehension questions. Negative binomial regression with generalized estimating equations revealed that overall, parents tended to ask more open questions and included significantly more elaborations and references to illustrations when reading the non-rhyming information texts. Children answered significantly more literal than inferential questions for both the non-rhyming and magazine texts compared with the rhyming texts. Various parent and child characteristics predicted parent talk and children’s comprehension. Results highlight how adult, child, and text characteristics can relate to the shared-reading discourse and children’s understanding. Future studies should be conducted to replicate and extend these findings. Full article

In recent decades, the digital transformation has increasingly influenced structures and practices in community social services in Spain and other European countries. The progressive integration of telecare systems, home automation, mobile applications, and digital tools into the community sphere has enabled the optimisation of certain interventions, but it has also generated ethical dilemmas and new forms of inequality. This article examines how technologies are incorporated into community social services and home care practices in Spain within a context marked by gender, class, and age inequalities. Drawing on qualitative research involving thirty-two interviews with care recipients, carers, and representatives of social organisations, we analyse the socio-technological networks that mediate care, their impact on self-determination, and the limits and resistance to digitalisation. Our findings indicate that, within the community sphere, technologies can only contribute effectively to greater well-being when they are integrated into an ethical framework that prioritises human accompaniment, social co-responsibility, and the recognition of care as a right. We further discuss the tensions faced by cooperative and community organisations in providing sustained inclusive and dignified services within a precarious socio-economic context that highlights shared responsibility. Finally, we offer reflections on technological innovation, advocating for interdisciplinary collaboration that strengthens community networks and advances social justice. Full article

East Asia is both the densest subsystem of the global liner shipping network and the home basin of its signature hazard, the typhoon. This study quantifies the relationship in both directions, as a stress test of the sustainability of maritime connectivity, across Alphaliner-based reconstructions of the 2017 and 2021 networks that cover every port with at least one scheduled liner service. A Typhoon Vulnerability Index built from validated IBTrACS exposure, betweenness sensitivity, and national adaptive capacity scores 330 and 272 affected ports. The risk geography anchors in East Asia in both years and more strongly in the second, as the regional share of affected ports is 29 percent in 2017 and 44 percent in 2021, the 2017 top five are all East Asian, and the 2021 top four are all Chinese, led by Shanghai. Removing every indexed typhoon port in descending risk order destroys 47.5 and 41.3 percent of baseline efficiency. Equal-sized random removals destroy a similar share at the end, so the information of the hazard ordering lies earlier and elsewhere, in early losses that run about forty percent above the random expectation, in seven of the ten earliest failures being invisible to degree screening, and in the identity of the removed ports, while equal-depth-degree targeting destroys far more at every stage. An East Asia-only attack reproduces a third of the full attack’s damage in 2017 and half in 2021. Under one fixed baseline, East Asia carries 23.8 and 24.6 percent of global efficiency before the attack and its survivors retain 7.1 and 3.6 percent after it. On the evidence of these two years, the typhoon corridor is a jointly held systemic asset, its protection is a problem shared by the three economies, and the bidirectional accounting gives sustainable maritime transport a measurable resilience baseline under a warming climate. Full article

Background: In line with international aging policies, most people with dementia receive care at home. Community-based respite services aim to relieve, support, or share caregiving responsibilities. More person-centered knowledge based on experiences from this group is needed to increase informed decisions about planning of qualitative respite care. The aim of this study is to describe how people with dementia experience respite care with alternating housing, i.e., living partly at home, partly in residential care, refer to their everyday life and well-being. Methods: A mixed-methods design was used. The qualitative approach focused on variations of dilemmas in interviews with people with dementia who were granted and received respite care (n = 8). Also, a quantitative approach focused on quality of life using behavioral and psychological symptom scores. Results: Everyday life at the respite care accommodation described by people with dementia included morning routines, variation in the environment, activities in the company of roommates, but also a lack of activities. Social belonging was described by people with dementia through living with roommates and through social contact with the healthcare staff. Quality of life and behavioral and psychological ratings varied between individuals and settings, but no consistent pattern was identified. Conclusions: Respite care appears to maintain a high quality of life and a low level of psychological symptoms for most of the people with dementia. Although the sample was small, these results are nevertheless an important contribution to the phenomenon, experiences of respite care by people with dementia, that need further research. Furthermore, these results can give decision-makers guidance for professional care efforts. Full article

Home-rearing environments are integral to early childhood development. However, it remains unclear whether their developmental significance has changed over time. This study aimed to examine the temporal changes in home-rearing environments and their longitudinal associations with child developmental atypicality in Japan, using baseline assessments from 1999 to 2023 and follow-up assessments through 2024. Data were obtained from the Japanese Childcare Cohort Study, a nationwide childcare-based developmental surveillance project. The analysis included 40,627 1-year observation pairs of 18,210 children enrolled in childcare centers. Home-rearing environments were assessed using the Index of Child Care Environment, and developmental atypicality was evaluated using the Child Development Scale across six domains. Logistic regression models were used to examine the associations between baseline home-rearing environments and developmental atypicality 1 year later, adjusting for baseline developmental status, sex, and age. Generalized additive models and rolling-window analyses were used to assess temporal trends and time-varying associations. Overall, the Index of Child Care Environment scores increased gradually throughout the study period, although social stimulation declined after the mid-2010s. Higher-quality home-rearing environments were generally associated with a lower risk of subsequent developmental atypicality. Protective associations strengthened over time, particularly in the social, communication, vocabulary, and intellectual domains. Home-rearing environments and their developmental implications changed over the 25-year observation period. These findings highlight the continued importance of promoting direct caregiver–child interactions, including shared activities and social engagement. Early childhood surveillance should be periodically re-evaluated to remain relevant to evolving caregiving practices and family contexts. Full article