Search Results (573)

Africans are widely recognised for their deeply rooted communal orientation. This ethos is intricately embedded in cultural practices such as burial rites, matrimonial customs, ritual observances, and broader conceptions of kinship. Within many African societies, the notion of family transcends the boundaries of the living, encompassing ancestors often conceptualised as the “living-dead” as well as extended familial networks. Despite the historical introduction and sustained influence of missionary and colonial religions, particularly Christianity, African Traditional Religion (ATR) continues to shape the beliefs and practices of many South Africans. Although Christianity remains a dominant religious tradition in South Africa, the persistence of ATR generates both points of convergence and sites of tension within the lived religious experiences of adherents. Against this backdrop, the present study critically examines the intersections and complexities between ATR and Christianity in South Africa, with particular emphasis on the African philosophy of community. Employing a qualitative research design informed by social cognitive theory and utilising a self-selection sampling strategy, data were collected through interviews with young adults (aged 25–40) affiliated with three mainline churches in Mamelodi, Pretoria, South Africa. The findings indicate that, while notable convergences exist between ATR and Christianity, significant complexities persist, particularly when interpreted through the lens of African communal philosophy. Full article

This article examines the context and aims of We Feed the UK: a multi-site series of arts projects and exhibitions, organised by the Gaia Foundation, that were exhibited at venues across the United Kingdom from February 2024 to June 2025. These aims were to celebrate and advocate for diverse regenerative food production businesses and community initiatives through poetry and photography. The featured enterprises combine food production with objectives such as biodiversity renewal, community development, mental health support and social justice, and the article proposes that this combination of environmental advocacy and affective social issues appeals to a wide and diverse audience. It supports this proposal through an examination of the first photography project in the series: Johannes Pretorius’s Intervention and Renewal, that engaged with a Cumbrian dairy farm that successfully combines biodiversity regeneration, organic agriculture and educational initiatives. Drawing upon Actor–Network Theory and notions of time as they pertain to the photograph, this examination reveals a project that offers both familiar imagery of British pastoral tropes, and the contemporary realities of the British food production system. As such it offers multiple points of engagement for audiences, and an effective entry point for the We Feed the UK programme. Full article

This study examines the psychological and contextual factors associated with True Self disclosure on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), with particular emphasis on the role of temporal immersion. Drawing on structured interviews with 121 participants, the findings suggest that SNSs may provide users with opportunities to articulate aspects of their True Self that are often difficult to express in face-to-face interactions. Time spent on SNSs emerges as a key contextual factor: prolonged engagement appears to enhance users’ familiarity with the platform environment, reinforce the internalization of platform-specific norms, and gradually normalize disclosure as an expected and socially reinforced behavior. Within this temporally shaped environment, peer dynamics also emerge, reflected in reciprocal disclosure tendencies that further consolidate these evolving norms. Overall, the results suggest that temporal engagement, rather than abstract notions of control, functions as a key contextual condition in the shift from general, everyday identity-sharing to more selective expressions of the True Self within digital environments. Full article

The UK telecommunications sector’s 5G rollout is projected to consume 2.1% of national electricity by 2030, raising urgent sustainability concerns. This study empirically investigates, under controlled laboratory conditions, the energy performance and cost characteristics of two private 5G architectures—Vodafone’s Mobile Private Network (MPN) and an Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) via BubbleRAN—and contextualises them against public network references and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Two complementary dimensions of energy performance are assessed: absolute power consumption (Watts), reflecting total system draw regardless of throughput; and throughput efficiency (Mbps/W), capturing useful data delivered per unit of energy. In terms of absolute power, O-RAN consumes less (460 W active, 378 W idle) than MPN (645 W active, 620 W idle). In terms of throughput efficiency, MPN delivers 1.45 Mbps/W versus O-RAN’s 0.44 Mbps/W under these specific controlled, single-cell conditions, a difference that reflects the tested hardware configurations (n77 vs. n78 band; 936 Mbps vs. 202 Mbps throughput; 2 × 2 vs. 4 × 4 MIMO) as much as any intrinsic architectural distinction. Both architectures offer substantially lower annual energy costs (£1060–£1486) compared to public micro-cells (£1991–£2666), representing 44–60% savings. Session continuity was 100% across all controlled trials; this reflects short-term laboratory conditions and should not be extrapolated to a long-term network availability guarantee without extended field validation. These results are configuration-specific preliminary indicators; the relative efficiency advantage of each architecture is expected to vary with load, band, and deployment scale. By 2030, UK 5G network operations are projected to generate 795,347–1,260,532 tonnes of CO₂ annually across low-to-high demand scenarios; private deployment, by reducing site proliferation 15–33%, could displace a meaningful share of this footprint. These findings support SDGs 4, 8, 9, 12, and 13. Hybrid O-RAN–MPN pilots are recommended to maximise sustainability gains while advancing social equity and net-zero targets. Full article

Hydrogen refueling stations (HRSs) are a critical enabling infrastructure for fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), yet their deployment in dense metropolitan areas often faces a dual challenge: limited travel-time accessibility for users and low public acceptance driven by perceived safety risks. This study develops an integrated, city-scale framework to quantify HRS accessibility and resident acceptance and to identify expansion priorities for Seoul, South Korea. We combine (i) an online perception survey of 1000 adult residents (October 2024) capturing environmental awareness, perceived safety, siting preferences, and willingness-to-travel distance; (ii) spatial demand data on FCEV registrations by administrative dong (n = 2443 vehicles, 2022); and (iii) network-based travel-time analysis using the Seoul road network and the current HRS supply (n = 10, 2024). Accessibility is evaluated under three travel-time thresholds (10, 15, and 20 min), with service-area delineation and demand-weighted underserved-area diagnosis. Candidate expansion sites are generated and screened using operational and regulatory constraints (e.g., site area and proximity to protected facilities), followed by a p-median location-allocation optimization to select five additional sites that minimize demand-weighted travel impedance. Results indicate that, under the 20 min threshold (7.7 km at an average operating speed of 23.1 km/h), 50 of 425 dongs (11.8%) and 244 of 2443 FCEVs (10.0%) are outside the baseline service coverage. After adding five sites (total n = 15), underserved dongs decrease to 5 (1.2%) and underserved FCEVs to 26 (1.1%) for the 20 min threshold, with consistent improvements across shorter thresholds. Survey responses further reveal that only 12.5% of respondents perceive HRSs as safe, while 46.5% report a maximum willingness-to-travel distance of up to 5 km, underscoring the need for both accessibility enhancement and risk-aware communication. The proposed workflow offers a transparent, reproducible approach to support equitable and risk-informed HRS planning by jointly considering network accessibility, demand distribution, and social acceptance, thereby contributing to sustainable urban mobility, low-carbon transport transition, and socially acceptable hydrogen infrastructure deployment. Beyond local accessibility improvement, the study is framed in the broader context of sustainability, as equitable and socially acceptable hydrogen refueling infrastructure can support low-carbon urban transport transitions and more resilient metropolitan energy-mobility systems. Full article

Identifying noise sources in exceedance-triggered audio is essential for targeted source tracing and sustainable urban social noise governance. While accurate models require massive labeled data, the acoustic complexity, high redundancy, and imbalanced class distributions of real-world recordings incur prohibitive manual annotation costs, hindering their widespread application in IoT networks. To tackle this bottleneck, we present a label-efficient active learning framework designed to minimize annotation costs by dynamically selecting the most valuable audio samples. Specifically, rather than treating uncertainty, class balance, and diversity as separate query criteria, it encodes uncertainty and dynamic class-aware learning needs into a weighted acoustic feature space, so that diversity-based selection can be performed in a unified manner. Experiments on the UrbanSound8K benchmark and a realistic exceedance-triggered monitoring dataset demonstrate consistent label-efficiency advantages over mainstream methods. Notably, our approach reaches 98% of the fully supervised upper bound on the real-world dataset while reducing the training annotation workload by 85.0% compared to random sampling. On the real-world dataset, the proposed framework yields higher F1-scores for several challenging under-represented categories and reduces the misclassification of dominant sound events relevant to social noise source tracing. Furthermore, cross-site generalization experiments reveal rapid localized adaptation to new monitoring environments, reaching the fully supervised upper bound with only 13% of the target-domain training data. Overall, this study provides a scalable and cost-effective classification framework for urban noise monitoring, offering practical support for noise regulatory authorities and city managers in more targeted noise source tracing and governance. Full article

Advancing environmental monitoring through coordinated autonomous systems is central to sustainable smart region governance and data-driven territorial management. The article presents an engineering-oriented architecture and deployment methodology for an integrated wildfire monitoring and response system that combines unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and stationary sensor networks (SNs). We formalise hub-and-spoke infrastructure placement as a mixed-integer optimisation problem that accounts for platform types, endurance, travel times and logistical constraints, and propose a practical pre-processing pipeline (confidence scoring, resampling, Kalman/median filtering, strategy fusion) for heterogeneous telemetry and imagery. The system couples multimodal neural network processing (image backbones, clustering and time-series models) with online resource-allocation and mission-planning mechanisms to prioritise UAV/UGV sorties and dynamically select launch sites. The article describes scenario-driven operational modes (early warning, alarm verification, autonomous local extinguishing, post-fire recovery, sensor-gap compensation, and inter-hub reinforcement), defines validation protocols (synthetic experiments, precision/recall/F1, and hardware-in-the-loop testing), and proposes KPIs to assess environmental, social, and economic impacts for smart regions. The contribution is a reproducible, deployment-focused blueprint that bridges conceptual UAV–UGV–SN research and practical implementation, highlighting trade-offs in reliability, communication redundancy, and sustainability, and outlining directions for simulation, field pilots and algorithmic refinement. Full article

Against the backdrop of global sustainable development and ecological civilization construction, tourism ecological security at cultural landscape heritage sites faces both opportunities and challenges. This study constructs a cultural landscape heritage tourism ecological security (CLHTES) evaluation system based on the Driver–Pressure–State–Impact–Response (DPSIR) framework. It dynamically assesses CLHTES in the Yangtze River Delta Integrated Demonstration Zone (YRDIDZ) from 2014 to 2023 using the entropy-weighted Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and linear stretching transformation, identifies obstacle factors with the obstacle degree model, and predicts CLHTES trends for 2024–2030 using a radial basis function (RBF) neural network. Results show that: (1) The CLHTES index in the YRDIDZ presented a three-stage fluctuating upward trend during 2014–2023, with medium-clustered security levels and divergent evolution across the DPSIR criteria layers; (2) CLHTES obstacles feature a multi-level differentiated structure, with rising barriers in D and P layers, the R layer as the future core obstacle, and high-frequency barriers concentrated in cultural and social indicators; (3) Under the assumption of structural continuity in current trajectories, the conditional trend projection suggests that the CLHTES index of the YRDIDZ may sustain a general upward tendency during 2024–2030, with a possibility of approaching Level VII after 2028; however, these projections should be interpreted as exploratory and scenario-like rather than as robust forecasts, given the short annual series and the absence of exogenous disturbance variables. This study explores tourism-ecology interactions from a social-ecological complex system perspective, supporting synergistic tourism development and ecological protection of cultural landscape heritage. Full article

(1) Background: As security breaches rise, the “Security by Design” approach is imperative for software organizations. (2) Problem: A significant gap remains between declared security priorities and actual developer behavior. This gap widens in hybrid environments, where social mechanisms that reinforce security norms weaken. (3) Objective: This research investigates the organizational mechanisms translating security priorities into secure coding behavior and proposes a framework to maintain them in distributed teams. (4) Methods: We surveyed 244 software developers across international sites of a large IT enterprise. Using validated measures, we tested a mediation model linking priorities, climate, and behavior, with remote work as a moderator. (5) Results: Organizational Security Climate mediates the relationship between priorities and behavior. Crucially, remote work significantly weakens this mediation, showing that “hybrid friction” disrupts the transmission of security norms. (6) Conclusions: We created a framework for building a security climate in hybrid teams by introducing explicit mechanisms, such as traceable leadership signals and structured network hubs. This ensures clear DevSecOps integration and consistent security implementation across all locations. Full article

Despite abundant scholarship on religious architecture and urban history, a systematic city-wide analysis that treats the parish system as a territorially relevant infrastructure for planning remains uncommon. This article examines Barcelona’s network of 132 Catholic parish churches as a cartographic layer for interpreting distributed centralities and their relationships with public space. The study is grounded in an exhaustive inventory based on on-site visits and archival consultation, and on a standardised redrawing protocol (Sitte and Nolli conventions) developed from municipal cartography and architectural plans. Synthesis maps and fabric-specific drawings document spatial patterns that vary across phases of urban growth, as well as recurrent typologies of relationships between churches, squares, and urban axes. Across the corpus, at least 25 churches are associated with squares and can be grouped into four recurrent arrangements (12 with a single frontal square; 4 with concatenated lateral squares; 3 surrounded by open space; and 6 with squares severed by through-traffic infrastructure). District plates further reveal contrasting typological distributions between Ciutat Vella (n = 16), Eixample (n = 19), Gràcia (n = 11), and Nou Barris (n = 14). The findings show that Barcelona’s Catholic parish cartography constitutes a key interpretative layer for understanding the city’s complexity, including its social and urban transformations, neighbourhood-level mechanisms of resilience, and the interaction between religious networks, urban form, and civic culture. The resulting cartographic protocol is reproducible and transferable to studies of urbanisation and regional development, offering an operational framework for planning debates on the governance of public space, heritage conservation, and urban sustainability. Full article

Adolescents increasingly engage with digital technologies, yet understanding patterns of smartphone use and fostering reflective awareness remain challenging. Traditional assessments in clinical or school settings may limit participation and self-reflection. This study evaluated the feasibility and impact of a Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) approach to monitor smartphone use, provide immediate individualized feedback, and support peer-mediated dissemination in a public science engagement context. Across three editions of the European Researchers’ Night in Rome (2023–2025), 807 adolescents aged 10–19 completed the SAS-SV questionnaire via on-site tablets or personal devices using QR codes. Smartphone use was categorized into Low Involvement, At-Risk, or Problematic. Participants were encouraged to share the survey link with peers, enabling snowball-mediated recruitment. Participant acceptance was assessed through the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Snowball participation accounted for the majority of responses, highlighting the effectiveness of peer-mediated diffusion. SAS-SV categorization indicated 46% Low Involvement, 39% At-Risk, and 15% Problematic use, with minimal gender differences. NPS values ranged from +69 to +79, with snowball participants reporting slightly higher satisfaction than on-site attendees. These results underscore high engagement, perceived value, and the role of peer networks in promoting reflective digital behavior. Integrating CAWI assessment, immediate feedback, and peer-mediated diffusion created a socially situated environment supporting self-reflection and voluntary dissemination. Peer networks extended both the temporal and social reach of the initiative beyond the public event, demonstrating a scalable and non-stigmatizing model. CAWI-based monitoring combined with feedback and peer-driven diffusion is feasible and effective for adolescent digital wellbeing interventions. This approach fosters reflective digital citizenship, supports self-awareness, and leverages social networks to enhance the reach and impact of youth-centered health promotion initiatives. Full article

Intra-urban commuting plays a fundamental role in shaping urban spatial structure and daily mobility patterns. Existing studies have largely explained commuting flows using attribute-based or distance-centred approaches. Such approaches overlook the interdependent and relational nature of commuting within complex urban systems. This study constructs a subdistrict-level commuting network using anonymised mobile phone signalling data from Hangzhou, China, and a valued exponential random graph model (valued ERGM) to examine how commuting flows are generated through the interaction of network self-organization, local job-housing conditions, and multi-dimensional proximity. The results reveal strong endogenous dependence exemplified by reciprocal commuting ties. Employment agglomeration and public rental housing provision are associated with stronger integration of subdistricts within the commuting network, while high housing prices and certain residential amenities are associated with reduced inter-subdistrict commuting. Beyond geographic distance, metro connectivity, administrative affiliation, and social interaction are significantly associated with commuting flows. This study advances a relational explanation of intra-urban commuting and demonstrates the methodological value of valued ERGMs for analysing weighted urban flow networks. The findings have implications for integrated transport, housing, and governance strategies, particularly transit-oriented development, cross-jurisdictional coordination, and the strategic siting of affordable housing, aimed at promoting more locally embedded and sustainable urban mobility. Full article

This article analyses the Museo de los Desplazados (Museum of the Displaced), a collaborative platform conceived by the Left Hand Rotation collective to foster shared reflection on gentrification processes. This project takes the form of a collective and decentralised digital archive, functioning as an open, ‘in-process’ collaborative tool. Within the context of the proliferation of self-organised digital archives, this study explores how the Museum acts as a dynamic social object that articulates dispersed narratives. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of the ‘anarchive’, the research validates the hypothesis that there is a direct relationship between the profiles of autonomous collectives and their specific epistemic practices. The findings reveal that activists utilise the archive as a tool for legal defence, ‘heat-of-the-moment’ ethnography, and networking, thereby resisting ‘archival violence’ and constructing collective counter-memory. Ultimately, the Museum demonstrates that memory is not a guarded site, but a living network built through horizontal and rhizomatic collaboration. Full article

Background/Objectives: The multifaceted concept of body image (BI) refers to an individual’s attitudes and impressions of their body. Negative BI is associated with a number of harmful health consequences, including obesity, eating disorders, and symptoms of sadness. The contemporary digital era, marked by the dominance of platforms, has brought about a considerable transformation in the landscape of BI issues. This study’s goal is to compile and assess the connections between social media (SM) use, body weight, and BI in adult populations. Methods: This is a narrative review that comprehensively searches across multiple academic databases, such as PubMed, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Studies that used SM (online blogs, microblogs, content communities, or social networking sites) for engagement (e.g., sharing, commenting, liking) or image-related activities (e.g., viewing, posting, or engaging with images) with healthy adults (aged 18–70 years) of any body mass index (BMI kg/m²) met the inclusion criteria. Included were observational and experimental studies that examined habitual SM use. Only peer-reviewed works published in English between 2015 and 2025 met the search criteria. Results: The currently available findings suggest that obese people are more dissatisfied with their bodies than people of normal weight, and obese women are more dissatisfied with their bodies than their peers of normal weight. Furthermore, experimental studies have demonstrated that immediate BI is adversely affected by acute exposure to idealized social media photographs. Conclusions: Policies should support specialized training that emphasizes a holistic approach to health and puts functionality and health above attractiveness. This training is crucial for dispelling weight-related stigmas and enabling healthcare providers to offer compassionate treatment that supports mental and physical health. Future research must concentrate on internalization and social pressure or reinforcement because these subjects have not gotten as much emphasis in prior studies. Such mechanism research could help better contextualize the role of recently introduced SM items. Full article

Rural communities in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain isolated from reliable access to critical sites and social services due to inadequate transport connectivity. Formal planning approaches to improve rural networked transport infrastructure (RNTI) remain limited, underfunded and deprioritized relative to urban systems. Where resources do exist, they largely emphasize roads, despite the fact that nearly one-third of the global rural population lives more than two kilometers from an all-weather road and relies primarily on walking and intermediate modes of transport (IMTs), such as bicycles, motorcycles, and animal-powered vehicles. This review examines planning approaches for RNTI with a focus on non-car-centric, multimodal mobility. It assesses prioritization frameworks, including multi-criteria analysis, that incorporate social, environmental, accessibility, and economic considerations. Long-term outcomes are strengthened by participatory methods, multimodal planning and cross-sectoral integration that align transport investments with health, education, agriculture, and renewable resource goals. Addressing persistent barriers such as funding constraints, data gaps, and maintenance challenges requires improved spatial mapping and travel-time analysis to better identify mobility needs and guide investment decisions. The limited body of formal literature on the topic of RNTI necessitates the inclusion of grey literature and practitioner sources and underscores the call for additional research. Full article