Search Results (2,496)

Digital governance in higher education represents a complex systemic challenge, shaped by the intricate interplay of socio–economic–political contexts, technological infrastructures, and multiple stakeholders. Yet existing scholarship tends to examine these factors in isolation, lacking an integrated theoretical lens capable of capturing their systemic interdependencies and dynamic interactions. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the Social–Ecological Systems (SES) framework—a well-established systems theory for analyzing coupled social and ecological dynamics—to construct an integrated analytical framework for university digital governance. The framework organizes governance into three interconnected dimensions: external contexts, internal systems, and interaction effects. External contexts—including technological ecosystems and socio–economic–political factors—shape opportunities and constraints for universities. Internal systems, comprising resource systems, resource units, governance structures, and actors, form a complex network through information flows, resource flows, and institutional arrangements. Interaction effects emerge from these networks and are observed in both social outcomes and ecological outcomes, encompassing both positive and negative dimensions. The framework advances theory by extending the SES perspective to higher education, integrating multiple governance elements, and operationalizing core variables for measurement. Practically, it provides universities with a systematic tool for diagnosing digital governance performance, identifying gaps, and guiding optimization, while also supporting cross-institutional benchmarking and longitudinal monitoring. Future research should empirically test the framework, refine the operational indicators, and explore its applicability across diverse institutional and cultural contexts. Full article

Human–AI systems often involve repeated interaction among users, organizations, and AI components rather than isolated model outputs. In such settings, cooperation can be pursued either by changing agent incentives or by adding an explicit accountability layer. We formalize the Institutional Monitoring and Ledger (IML) framework, which augments a Markov game with monitoring, evidence logging, delayed settlement, and review while leaving the base dynamics unchanged. We derive conservative incentive checks that clarify how detection quality, review accuracy, settlement delay, and sanction size jointly shape deterrence and wrongful-penalty risk. We then provide pilot evidence in two canonical sequential social dilemmas, Harvest and Cleanup, using five agents, PPO training, five training seeds per condition, and comparisons against PPO, inequity aversion, social influence, and IML ablations. In these settings, IML avoided some of the optimization instability observed in the representative internalization baselines tested here, made monitoring error directly visible through ledger records, and showed how false positives can accumulate into a persistent welfare cost. Agent-level analyses in these symmetric environments found nearly uniform measured enforcement burden, while temporal analyses showed that late-stage enforcement is increasingly dominated by residual false positives. These results do not establish legitimacy in human-facing settings or deployment readiness. They instead position IML as a framework with pilot evidence for studying accountability mechanisms in cooperative human–AI systems and highlight measurement error, review design, and due process as central design constraints. Full article

Backgrounds: Ports are critical nodes in global logistics and supply chains, yet their operations generate substantial environmental and social externalities. Existing evaluation frameworks have limited capability to address uncertainty, ambiguity, and expert hesitation. Moreover, prior studies frequently examine isolated performance dimensions, overlooking the interconnected roles of port authorities as landlords, regulators, operators, and community stakeholders. Methods: This study proposes an integrated evaluation framework using the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (IF-AHP) to assess environmentally sustainable port performance under uncertain decision environments. By incorporating membership, non-membership, and hesitation degrees, the approach improves the robustness of expert judgments and applies a dual consistency check to reduce bias. Empirical data are obtained from Malaysian port management professionals, enabling the development of a comprehensive framework that includes four main functions and twenty sub-functions. Results: Results reveal that the landlord function holds the highest priority, while operational sustainability dimensions receive the greatest emphasis, with a global weight of approximately 0.105. In contrast, community engagement and social initiatives are assigned relatively lower importance. Conclusions: The IF-AHP framework offers an uncertainty-aware tool that prioritizes sustainability functions, especially environmental mitigation and energy efficiency, enabling informed resource allocation, strategic planning, and policy formulation for balanced, sustainable port overall performance. Full article

Det Norske Misjonsselskap (Norwegian Missionary Society, NMS) was founded in Stavanger, Norway, in 1842. Having established its first mission field in Africa, it then made plans to work in Asia. In 1902, the first missionaries were sent out to Hunan, an inland, culturally isolated, and conservative Chinese province that experienced particularly strong anti-foreigner and anti-Christian waves. This article argues that the NMS developed a distinctive, pragmatic strategy of political accommodation—rooted in its Pietistic Lutheran social ethos and a Norwegian pioneering spirit—to ensure its institutional survival in Hunan. Examining the NMS’s responses to two major political turning points, the Anti-Christian Movement (1924–1927) and the New Life Movement (1934–1937), the article reveals three key findings: First, the NMS’s proclaimed “neutrality” was not merely a passive stance but an active survival tactic, evolving from a claim grounded in Norway’s geopolitical neutrality into a strategic rhetoric for navigating local political risks. Second, the missionaries’ “excessive expectations” of the Nationalist government, particularly during the New Life Movement, stemmed from a structural cognitive bias shaped by their deep institutional embedding in the KMT-governed local order. Third, their ultimate withdrawal was less a simple political misjudgement than the logical endpoint of a survival model that lacked a contingency plan for revolutionary change. By tracing this specific case, the article contributes to the historiography of Christianity in modern China by illuminating the diversity of missionary strategies beyond the dominant Anglo-American coastal narratives. Full article

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) increasingly rely on player-developed third-party tools to extend functionality and personalise gameplay, creating a complex software ecosystem that introduces both usability benefits and security risks. This study investigates whether such tools can be exploited as an attack vector for cybercrime by designing and implementing a proof-of-concept add-on within a widely deployed commercial MMORPG using its native scripting and application programming interface. The developed tool supports automated player discovery, chat capture, target inspection, and local data persistence, enabling a systematic evaluation of how cyber-assisted and cyber-dependent crimes could be facilitated within the game client. Empirical testing demonstrates that while the platform’s protected execution model and interface restrictions prevent direct credential theft and remote code execution, the add-on architecture allows extensive behavioural data collection and social-engineering-relevant monitoring, making several forms of cyber-enabled crime technically feasible. These findings show that MMORPG add-on frameworks represent a non-trivial socio-technical attack vector in next-generation online platforms, where security depends not only on code isolation, but also on how user-generated extensions interact with human behaviour. The results highlight the need for architecture-aware security controls and governance mechanisms to mitigate emerging threats in large-scale, extensible virtual environments. Full article

The purpose of this study is to examine how three pedagogical interventions, collaborative learning, authentic problem-solving, and ongoing formative feedback, are associated with student engagement in a design thinking course. While prior research has examined these interventions in isolation, less is known about their relative contributions when implemented concurrently. This study employs a quantitative survey design, with data collected from 77 undergraduate students working in self-selected teams on industry-sponsored design thinking projects. The course design integrated the three interventions to foster active, reflective learning, and regression analysis was used to examine their relative influence on student engagement. All three interventions positively predicted engagement, with authentic problem-solving and collaborative learning emerging as the strongest contributors. Formative feedback exerted a significant but smaller effect, suggesting its impact depends on how students internalise and apply it within group processes. Findings suggest that engagement in design thinking education can be understood through social, cognitive, and regulatory interventions, although the interaction between these dimensions was not empirically tested in this study. The study contributes a layered conceptual model of engagement and offers practical guidance for designing engaging learning environments. While the results provide useful insights, they are based on a single course context and self-reported data, and should therefore be interpreted with appropriate caution. Full article

Inter-basin water transfer projects (IBWTPs) play a pivotal role in alleviating the spatiotemporal imbalances of water resources. However, their operation is exposed to multiple, highly interdependent safety risks that can significantly undermine system stability and water supply reliability. Existing studies predominantly focus on isolated risk factors or rely heavily on subjective data, which limits their ability to capture the complex interrelationships among risks and reveal their underlying propagation mechanisms. To address these limitations, this study proposes a novel risk correlation analysis framework that integrates Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) with copula functions. ISM is first employed as a preprocessing tool to structure expert knowledge and develop an initial risk correlation framework. It is then used to hierarchically organize the complex interrelationships among risks. Subsequently, copula functions are utilized to model nonlinear dependencies and tail behaviors among risk variables. This enables a quantitative assessment of correlation strengths and facilitates the construction of a risk topological network. An empirical case study is conducted based on the Middle Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. The results reveal 13 significant correlations among six second-level risk categories. Natural risks (e.g., floods and geological hazards) are identified as the primary driving factors. They exhibit a strong positive correlation (0.6155) with engineering risks and serve as the most critical nodes for proactive risk prevention and control. Engineering risks function as central intermediary hubs in the risk transmission process, whereas water quality and economic risks are characterized as terminal endpoints. Furthermore, three principal risk propagation pathways are identified: (1) natural risks → engineering risks → economic risks; (2) natural risks → operational scheduling risks → social risks; and (3) engineering risks → water quality risks → economic risks. The resulting risk topological network demonstrates significant small-world properties, indicating highly efficient risk transmission within the system. Ultimately, this study provides a robust quantitative approach for analyzing risk interactions in complex engineering systems and enriches the theoretical framework of engineering risk management. It also identifies critical nodes and key transmission pathways for risk prevention and control in IBWTPs, thereby offering significant practical implications for operational safety. Full article

Automatic detection of deceptive intent in negotiation dialogue remains difficult because deceptive utterances are rare, context-dependent, and pragmatically subtle. This study develops a deployment-oriented evaluation pipeline for negotiation analytics using the Diplomacy corpus and compares sparse, dense, and imbalance-aware neural models under a unified protocol. The pipeline integrates context-window benchmarking, validation-based threshold selection, 10-seed robustness analysis, model-agnostic explanation case studies, and controlled perturbation stress tests. Across binary speaker-intention and receiver-perception tasks, contextualized inputs consistently outperform isolated utterances, confirming that deception-related interpretation is inherently sequential. The sparse term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) model remains the strongest and most efficient overall benchmark, whereas stronger imbalance-aware neural baselines can improve minority deceptive-instance sensitivity at substantially higher computational cost. Error analysis further shows that socially mediated deception-quadrant prediction is markedly harder than direct binary in-tent prediction, with many failures collapsing toward majority straightforward cases. Controlled perturbation tests show that sparse modeling is especially stable under light-weight surface corruption, while neural robustness remains architecture-dependent. The main contribution is therefore a practical decision framework for selecting among efficient sparse monitoring, dense baselines, and minority-sensitive neural detection under operational constraints. Full article

Population aging intensifies the need for built environments that support healthy and independent living while reducing preventable risks. This integrative review examines how architectural design, safety measures, and corporate security can function as an integrated, layered system for creating age-friendly environments across public spaces, housing, and intergenerational community settings. Drawing on a systematic search of literature published between 2010 and 2026 across databases including Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and PubMed, supplemented by international standards and policy documents, the review analyses how universal design principles, injury prevention strategies, and governance routines intersect to sustain mobility, reduce harms, and protect data, devices, and operational continuity. The findings indicate that gaps in any layer, such as inaccessible layouts, poorly maintained safety systems, or weak cybersecurity, can undermine overall effectiveness, compromise trust, and affect older adults’ autonomy. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed these interdependencies, accelerating smart technology adoption while exacerbating digital inequality and social isolation, particularly in rural settings. This review concludes that age-friendly environments require not only barrier-free architecture and proportionate safety measures, but also robust governance structures that ensure accountability, lifecycle maintenance, and responsible data practices. Integrating these three domains provides a foundation for resilient, trustworthy, and health-promoting environments that enable older adults to remain active, socially connected, and secure. Full article

In the history as well as historiography of Chinese Buddhism, the tradition has often been closely associated with death-related cultural practices and ideas, an association that has frequently carried negative connotations. Early twentieth-century reformers such as Taixu famously criticized Buddhism as a religion of ghosts and funerals and sought to redirect Mahāyāna Buddhism toward engagement with an urban, modernizing society. Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhists have realized many aspects of this socially engaged vision. Yet concern with death remains deeply embedded in Buddhist life. Far from standing in contradiction to social engagement, this concern has become one of its central expressions, most visibly in the emergence of modern Buddhist palliative care. Focusing on the writings of the scholar-monk Shi Huimin, this article examines the development of Buddhist palliative care in Taiwan in response to a secular, multireligious, and rapidly aging society, with primary attention to Huimin’s conceptual work. Rather than treating death in isolation, Huimin situates dying within a broader ethical horizon that links good death to good aging, good living, and community formation. Through his reinterpretation of the Five Śīlas and his notion of a Community Pure Land, he extends prevailing concerns with dying well toward a more comprehensive reflection on everyday moral cultivation, healthy lifestyles, and communal responsibility. In this sense, the study reads Buddhist palliative care as a site that “provincializes” dominant Euro-American frameworks of spiritual and palliative care, highlighting their particular historical and Christian-inflected origins while tracing how they are reconfigured and made productive in a multireligious, secular context. By foregrounding Huimin’s conceptual contributions, this study highlights how palliative and spiritual care are localized and reworked within Taiwanese Buddhism, connecting end-of-life care to broader questions of life, aging, and community well-being. Full article

Introduction: Financial support is a key driver of international student mobility. This study examines whether the financial incentives attracting international students to Hungary also translate into meaningful academic and social integration and a sense of belonging, comparing scholarship holders with self-funded students. Methods: A mixed-methods, cross-sectional online survey was conducted among international students enrolled in Hungarian higher education institutions (N = 232). The survey assessed motivations for choosing Hungary, academic and social integration, and willingness to recommend the country as a study destination. Group differences were analysed using independent-samples t-tests, Mann–Whitney U tests and multivariate analyses, while open-ended responses were examined using thematic analysis. Results: Scholarship programmes, academic quality, and Hungary’s relative affordability emerged as dominant motivational factors. While no significant difference was observed in overall academic integration (p = 0.127), scholarship recipients reported stronger inclusion within the Hungarian community (p = 0.032) and were markedly more likely to recommend Hungary (p < 0.001). Nonetheless, language barriers, limited interaction with host-country students, and social isolation persisted across groups, indicating that financial support alone does not ensure holistic engagement. Conclusion: Scholarship schemes yield the greatest impact when paired with institutional and social initiatives that actively foster integration, inclusion, and a sense of belonging. The study offers empirical insights from a non-traditional study destination, highlighting strategies to enhance international student experiences and strengthen Hungary’s competitiveness globally. Full article

Despite growing attention to social sustainability in tourism, employment relations remain predominantly studied at the firm level, overlooking the broader systemic contexts that shape how workforces function. This paper argues that Sustainable Human Resource Management (SHRM) in tourism cannot be fully understood without examining what workers expect from employment before they enter it, and how those expectations are formed. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory (SET) and revisiting the longstanding vocational–liberal debate in hospitality and tourism education, the paper reframes education as a formative mechanism shaping social exchange expectations prior to labour market entry. An integrative framework is developed, bringing together four literature streams—tourism labour markets and employment precarity, hospitality and tourism education, SET, and destination governance—to connect educational orientations, SHRM practices, and destination-level governance structures. Education conditions how workers read and respond to HR practices, while governance arrangements determine whether the relational foundations of employment are sustained or eroded across destination labour markets. Workforce sustainability thus emerges from coordinated social exchange relations embedded across tourism destination systems rather than from isolated HR initiatives. The framework’s main contribution lies in repositioning education as a relational mechanism central to SHRM theory, framing workforce sustainability as a system-level outcome, and offering practical directions for destination governance bodies, policymakers, and curriculum designers seeking to strengthen the institutional foundations of sustainable tourism employment. Full article

Social workers are an integrated part of the criminal justice system. In this field, criminal justice social workers (CJSWs) face challenges related to structure and professional autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, correctional services (CS) implemented strict infection control measures through early releases, lockdowns in prisons with isolation, and the cessation of visits. This research explores how CJSWs experienced working during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on perceived influence on their working conditions, changes in users’ needs, and adaptation to new demands related to infection control. This is a mixed-methods study of a small sample of social workers in Norway’s criminal justice sector (N = 75). Findings indicated that they experienced a negative impact of COVID-19 on their contact with colleagues and their target group, as well as on their ability to provide services to the latter. In addition, there is an indication of a heavier workload for CJSWs during COVID-19. Our results are analysed using the job demand–resource model (JD-R). The results suggest that infection control measures created additional demands and strain on CJSWs in caring for vulnerable and at-risk groups, while at the same time reducing contact with their own colleagues and supervisors, experiencing what we address as a ‘double negative’. Full article

This paper examines how scam compounds, money mules and crypto-assets operate as interdependent elements of contemporary money-laundering chains. It assesses whether existing anti-money laundering (AML) and crypto-asset regulatory frameworks are capable of disrupting these chains holistically, rather than addressing individual components in isolation, with particular reference to scam-compound activity in Southeast Asia. The study adopts a qualitative comparative case-study methodology grounded in legal and regulatory analysis. Four empirically grounded cases are examined: two Southeast Asian scam-compound enforcement cases (Cambodia and Myanmar) and two European crypto-asset seizure cases (Ireland and Italy). Judicial decisions, enforcement actions and regulatory instruments are analysed through a chain-based analytical framework aligned with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards, the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) framework. The analysis reveals a structural divergence in enforcement strategies: Southeast Asian responses increasingly prioritise network- and infrastructure-level disruption of scam compounds, whereas European approaches remain largely centred on post-offence crypto-asset seizure through traditional proceeds-of-crime mechanisms. Across all jurisdictions, money mules emerge as a critical yet systematically under-regulated intermediary layer enabling the resilience of crypto-laundering operations. The paper advances existing AML typologies by conceptualising scam compounds, money mules and crypto-assets as interconnected components of a single crypto-laundering chain. This chain-based perspective offers a novel analytical and regulatory lens for understanding organised crypto-enabled fraud. The study is based on a qualitative, case-based design and does not aim for statistical generalisation. However, the analytical framework developed is transferable to other jurisdictions experiencing similar scam-compound and crypto-laundering dynamics. The findings suggest that effective AML enforcement requires coordinated intervention across multiple nodes of the laundering chain, including scam compound infrastructure and money mule networks, alongside traditional asset-seizure mechanisms and CASP supervision. By highlighting the structural links between scam compounds, coercive labour and crypto-laundering mechanisms, the paper underscores the broader social harms of crypto-enabled fraud and the need for integrated regulatory responses that address both financial crime and human exploitation. Full article

Background: Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is the most common sensory disorder in older adults and has been identified as a potentially modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline and dementia. Increasing evidence suggests that auditory dysfunction may contribute to adverse cognitive trajectories through multiple interacting pathways. This narrative review examines the mechanisms underlying the association between ARHL and cognitive decline, evaluates the impact of hearing rehabilitation, and discusses future research priorities. Methods: A narrative synthesis of epidemiological, neurobiological, and interventional studies was conducted, with emphasis on longitudinal cohort studies, neuroimaging research, and clinical investigations of hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs). Results: ARHL is consistently associated with accelerated cognitive decline and increased dementia risk. Proposed mechanisms include sensory deprivation-related cortical reorganization, increased cognitive load during effortful listening, shared neuropathological processes, and social disengagement. Neuroimaging studies demonstrate structural and functional alterations in auditory and associative brain regions in individuals with hearing loss. Emerging evidence suggests that HA and CI may improve cognitive performance and potentially attenuate decline, although long-term randomized data remain limited. Conclusions: Current evidence supports ARHL as a clinically relevant and potentially modifiable contributor to cognitive decline. Clarifying causal pathways and optimizing early hearing rehabilitation strategies represent key priorities for future dementia prevention research. Full article