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SocArXiv papers

• Testing the validity and adequacy of linguistic phylogenetic analyses
  Bayesian phylogenetics has become a standard tool in historical linguistics, and for the most part implements models borrowed from evolutionary biology. Not enough work has been done to validate the analysis set-up that has become standardised in phylolinguistics, which consists of binary data with ascertainment bias, data partitions with correlated site number and rate, the binary covarion substitution model, and the uncorrelated lognormal branch rate model. Here I perform a set of simulation-based calibration studies to test a typical phylolinguistic analysis in the software BEAST2. Although the analysis can correctly recover the parameters of the substitution model, complications arise due to the combination of ascertainment bias and partitions of unequal length and rate. Reweighting the partition-specific rates by the number of sites, as is the default behaviour, leads to poorly calibrated posteriors. An alternative approach, where each meaning is assumed to come from an alignment of equal length, behaves correctly in simulations and is found to fit better to empirical data. I also assess the adequacy of the covarion substitution model through posterior predictive simulations. The covarion is found to fall short of approximating the true process of lexical evolution, likely due to the prevalence of semantic shift and the non-independence of cognate substitutions in real data. This work highlights the importance of thorough testing of models and their implementation in phylolinguistics, as well as the need for further research on improving models of lexical evolution.
• Mining Transparency: Assessing Open Science Practices in Crime Research Over Time Using Machine Learning
  This pilot study addresses the current lack of systematic, large-scale evidence on Open Science Practices (OSPs) adoption in criminology and legal psychology. A scalable, machine-learning-based text classification pipeline is introduced to map the prevalence of Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD), Open Materials (OM), and Preregistration (PR). The analysis is based on publication metadata and a year-stratified sample of full texts from the top 100 journals in Criminology & Penology, Law, and Psychology (2013-2023). After identifying articles containing statistical inference (SI) via a high-performing classifier, the author utilized GPT-assisted coding and supervised learning to train specific classifiers for OD, OM, and PR. OA was classified using publicly available metadata. Among 1,763 SI articles with usable full text, design-based estimates reveal a significant disparity in OSP adoption. OA is relatively common (40.9%, 95% CI: 38.8-43.1) and has steadily increased from approximately 20% in 2013 to 50% in 2023. By sharp contrast, trends for OD, OM, and PR cannot be reliably quantified. Extreme class imbalance and the minimal number of positive cases indicate a very low underlying true prevalence for these practices in the assessed field. Methodologically, the study confirms that GPT-assisted coding supports accurate SI detection, but robust prevalence estimation for extremely low-frequency OSPs remains challenging for downstream classifiers. Overall, this project establishes a transparent and reproducible pipeline and provides critical baseline estimates for future, larger-scale assessments of research transparency in crime-related fields.
• Metamarks as the Hidden Forces Synchronizing Collective Intelligence
  This systematic literature review of 93 multilingual papers examines human stigmergy across disciplines. Found in Wikipedia, urban trails, and healthcare teams, metamarks (traces signaling transformations) create persistent communication channels enabling the emergence of collective behavior and complex coordination. Evidence reveals stigmergy's scalability from local interactions to global systems, bridging biological principles with digital governance and smart city applications. While demonstrating robust decentralized coordination across domains, the literature exposes tensions between narrow physical definitions and broader interpretations encompassing symbolic metamarks in human systems.
• How close is too close? Digital replicas and protection of the "unfixed" voice.
  Advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in the creation of 'digital replicas', have resulted in a significant increase in personal, ethical and legal concerns, leading to challenges in regulation and in public receptivity. This paper, arising from an interdisciplinary team, is the first to explore the legal challenges posed by digital replicas set within the broad context of sociological and linguistic perspectives. Owing to the prevalence of AI digital voice replicas in the creative industries, we use qualitative focus group data to focus on the legal implications and potential impact of AI digital voice replicas within this domain. To do this, we draw on the views of researchers, creatives and IP practitioners. Our focus group findings illustrated a range of responses to AI and voice cloning including skepticism, uncertainty, and a sense of inevitability. We find that the loss of what many refer to as the 'authentic voice' through cloning evokes an emotional response. The voice means a lot to people. As AI evolves, we posit that authenticity as a concept itself may need reconceptualising. Against this backdrop, we highlight the urgent need to address the legal vulnerability of the "un-fixed" voice, (a voice not permanently captured in traditional recordings), and the inadequacy of current United Kingdom (UK) Intellectual Property (IP) frameworks to protect it, we find that those lacking such status remain largely unprotected, highlighting a significant regulatory lacuna. This shortfall calls for a more robust protection of a 'personality right' in UK law.
• The Neuroarchitected Organization: From Inclusion Retrofit to Cognitive Variance
  Traditional management frameworks remain structurally aligned with neurotypical norms, rendering neurodivergent talent underutilized and excluded by design. This paper introduces a neurodiversity-native theory of management that redefines cognitive variance not as a challenge to be accommodated, but as a core system property to be architected for. We argue that "inclusion" frameworks, while well-intentioned, function as retrofits to inherently exclusionary systems and fail to unlock the full potential of heterogeneous cognition. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across cognitive science, organizational theory, and critical disability studies, we propose a paradigm shift: Neuromanagement by Default (NbD). This model replaces compliance-driven accommodation with participatory design principles, modular work systems, and leadership practices grounded in cognitive pluralism. We synthesize emerging evidence that shows how reimagining work environments to center neurodivergence fosters innovation, resilience, and collective intelligence. Rather than assimilating difference into dominant norms, NbD designs for difference from the outset. The paper concludes with a call to reengineer the epistemology of management itself, treating neurodiversity not as a demographic feature, but as the infrastructure of organizational adaptability in a complex world.
• Measuring the Protest Paradigm: LLM coding and machine learning approaches to Selection and Framing
  The protest paradigm has been a central concept in research on media and social movements, documenting systematic patterns of protest marginalization through emphasis on violence, disruption, and official authority. Yet existing studies vary in how they operationalize the paradigm, raising a critical empirical question: do measures designed to capture media attention, the selection and salience of textual elements, converge with measures designed to capture framing, the interpretive structures that construct meaning? This study disentangles these dimensions by comparing two computational approaches: (1) document-level frame identification using a generative large language model (LLM), producing both content and framing scores, and (2) a sentence-level classifier to identify the same categories and aggregated via article structure and attention metrics into a weighted composite measure at the document level. Using news wire data from Latin America and Southern Europe (2000-2025), we examine nine protest-paradigm categories. Results reveal strong convergence for lexically concrete, recurrent frames (e.g., Violence, Law and Order, Decay of Morals) and weak or inconsistent alignment for interpretive or context-dependent frames (e.g., Troublemakers, Nuisance, Righteous Struggle). These findings highlight systematic methodological differences: LLMs capture implicit, cross-sentence framing, while sentence-level classifiers can validate only structurally explicit frames. The study underscores the importance of transparent aggregation procedures and human validation, and demonstrates that conclusions about protest coverage, media bias, and framing are contingent on the operationalization employed. By clarifying the boundary between attention and framing, this research contributes both to computational media analysis and to the conceptual refinement of the protest paradigm.
• A macroecological theory of social complexity
  How are scale and complexity related in human societies? To answer this long-standing question, we develop a theoretical model of polities as territorial social networks that are functionally integrated by institutions. Our model hypothesizes how agricultural intensity, territorial area, and social complexity are related and how they scale relative to population size. We test the model's predictions using data from "Seshat: Global Databank" which describe hundreds of polities worldwide from across the Holocene. We find that intensity, territory, and complexity scale with population size as predicted. Our results provide evidence in support of theories of social complexity that emphasize its role in fostering large-scale cooperation.
• Life on the Edge: Mesolithic Population Size and Viability on Malta
  Recent discoveries in Malta and Tunisia provocatively point to a possible web of Mesolithic/Epipalaeolithic sea crossings, encounters, and exchanges that linked continents long before the age of the sail (Lipson et al. 2025; Scerri et al 2025). Determining whether such connections were singular events or sustained episodes is therefore critical to illuminate the scale of early seafaring. Here, we model how patterns of sea-level change impacted land connectivity between Sicily and Malta and predict potential population sizes through time from the Last Glacial Maximum to evaluate whether Mesolithic hunter-gatherers could have persisted on Malta, or if sustained connections would have been required. To achieve this, we use reconstructions of sea-level change and modern bathymetric models to evaluate changes in land size areas and connectivity. We calculate Net Primary Productivity values for a high-resolution palaeoclimate dataset, which we translate to population density by comparisons to ethnographic datasets. Finally, we calculate changes in estimated population sizes through time for Malta and Sicily, as well as minimum distances of sea voyages. Our results show that following disconnection from Sicily, Malta would have been unsuitable to support a viable, persistent forager population, including for the minimum 1000-year timespan of the Maltese Mesolithic record. As a result, only repeated, long-distance sea voyaging can explain the longevity of Mesolithic occupations of Malta, opening up the possibility that other south-central Mediterranean islands were reached and explaining the presence of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in North Africa.
• An Overview of Public Administration Research: Insights From Publications in Leading Journals (2000-2024)
  This study examines paradigmatic changes, thematic developments and authorship patterns in public administration research by analyzing 4,317 articles published in Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, and Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory between 2000 and 2024. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques through Python software to analyze content of titles, abstracts, and metadata, the article identifies key thematic clusters and paradigmatic shifts across the period, shaped by global events, contextual challenges, and technological advancements. The findings reveal a transition from bureaucratic efficiency to participatory governance, from reform to resilience, and from administrative theory to data-driven governance. Additionally, analysis of authorship patterns reveals increasing collaboration and concentration of scholarly output among top prolific contributors. This study contributes to a growing body of literature on bibliometric and content analytical studies in public administration, offering a comprehensive, data-driven perspective on the field's intellectual evolution over the past quarter-century.
• Socio-Economic Development and the Uneven Legacies of Authoritarian Repression
  Why does repression generate long-term resentment in some contexts but not others? Existing research focuses on how contemporary political context moderates the effects of repression; I emphasize factors that predated the repressive regime. I argue that prior socio-economic development shapes the legacies of political violence. In more developed areas, repression is harder to justify and more likely to provoke enduring backlash. Where development was limited, however, the promise of modernization may temper resentment. I explore two mechanisms - temporal comparisons and the role of education - and test the argument using novel census, archival, and survey data from Moldova. Combining historical records with contemporary public opinion surveys, I show that the relationship between Soviet-era repression and attitudes toward Moldova's communist successor party varies systematically with prior development. These findings contribute to research on political violence by highlighting the importance of preexisting conditions in shaping long-term public responses to repression.
• Student Feedback Questionnaires Are Highly Redundant: Evidence from 6,451 Courses
  Student feedback questionnaires for courses are an essential part of quality control at universities. Feedback can be useful to improve courses and to monitor course development over time. However, the number of questions posed to students varies between universities; some use short questionnaires, while others employ more detailed questionnaires.The answers are usually represented on a Likert scale. We analysed the results of student feedback questionnaires for all courses at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien between the years 2016 and 2023 (n = 6,451). In all 6,451 courses the same nine questions (modalities, structure, explanations, outcomes, practicality, integration, respectfulness, workload, and overall satisfaction) were asked on a 5-point Likert-scale. We found that students do not seem to differentiate between questions and tend to respond similarly to all of them, with Spearman correlation coefficients of up to 0.876. This suggests that the use of long and detailed questionnaires might be unnecessary. A significant reduction in the number of feedback questions could streamline the course evaluation process and encourage student participation while little information is lost. Relevance: To the best of the author's knowledge, this study is the first to analyse the correlations between student feedback questionnaire questions on such a large scale (n = 6,451 courses).
• Evaluating the workplace fatalities impact of "right-to-work" laws: What matters is effect size, not statistical significance
  A recent study on "right to work" laws (Zang et al. 2024) concluded that these laws have a "null" impact on occupational fatalities in the USA - a result that contrasts with previous research suggesting that the laws exacerbated the fatality rate. Their interpretation of results involves a conventional application of statistical significance and hypothesis testing. But a key assumption for hypothesis testing via significance is not met: the data are not taken from a random sample. When we consider the size of the effects revealed by their analysis (which consists of the latest techniques for analyzing panel data), a different and arguably more compelling interpretation is that adoption of right-to-work laws did lead to an increase in the rate of occupational fatalities, an increase even greater than was suggested in earlier research.
• THE THREE-CIRCLE ONTOLOGY Source, Code, and Experience: A Meta-Ontological Framework of Reality
  Abstract Contemporary philosophy and science lack a unified ontological framework capable of coherently explaining the relationship between consciousness, probability, and experienced reality. Existing models tend to privilege either material processes or subjective experience, resulting in persistent conceptual gaps around perception, indeterminacy, and the role of the observer. Current approaches - ranging from physicalism and idealism to information-based theories -struggle to integrate experiential reality with deeper structural mechanisms without collapsing into reductionism or metaphysical speculation. In particular, no widely accepted framework systematically distinguishes between foundational reality, the structural domain of possibility, and the rendered domain of experience. This paper proposes the Three-Circle Ontology, a meta-ontological model that organizes reality into three expression layers: Circle 1 (Source) as the nondual ontological ground, Circle 2 (Possibility-Code) as the structural field of latent configurations, and Circle 3 (Projection) as the domain of perceptual experience. Rather than treating consciousness, probability, and physical reality as competing primitives, the model positions them as functionally distinct but ontologically continuous layers of expression. The framework does not present an empirical theory, predictive model, or spiritual doctrine. Its scope is explicitly conceptual and structural, intended to clarify foundational assumptions underlying existing scientific and philosophical models. The primary contribution of this work is a coherent meta-ontological architecture that enables interdisciplinary dialogue while preserving strict boundary conditions and logical consistency.
• The Reproduction of Political Inequality: Parents Account for Class Differences in Turnout
  Class origin structures the conditions of early political learning, but parents' political behaviour is the central channel through which class-based inequalities in participation are transmitted and reshaped over the life course. Using linked parent-child panel data from the BHPS and UKHLS (1995-2022), the study examines how class background and parental electoral participation during the formative years influence turnout from ages 18 to 40. Class-origin differences are largest at the start of adulthood but weaken, whereas exposure to parental voting has a stronger and more persistent influence on participation. The intergenerational transmission of participation is highly heterogeneous: differences by class origin persist only among those exposed to voting parents, while parental disengagement overrides between-class differences. Parental influence also varies by class contexts, remaining strongest among individuals from middle-class backgrounds. Class structures political socialization, but parents transmit, reinforce, or weaken class-linked norms, shaping the reproduction of inequality across generations.
• Transparency in Psychometric Reporting: A Review of Scales for Well-Being and Quality of Life in Older Persons Employing Rasch Analysis
  There is a growing interest in assessing well-being and quality of life (QoL) among older people. To ensure that evidence-based scales are used for this purpose, comprehensive and transparent reporting of measurement properties is a first essential step. This study aimed to evaluate the reporting quality of studies that applied Rasch analysis on scales designed to measure well-being or QoL in older persons. Articles employing Rasch analysis were identified through a previous broader systematic review of psychometric studies. The findings demonstrate notable deficiencies in the reporting of measurement properties, indicating substantial room for improvement. While detailed reporting alone cannot guarantee that scales possess satisfactory measurement quality, it constitutes a necessary prerequisite for drawing evidence-based conclusions about their measurement quality. Improved reporting practices are essential not only for enhancing the interpretability and replicability of individual studies but also for enabling informed decisions in clinical and policy contexts regarding the use of well-being and QoL scales for older populations.
• Childhood Geographical Mobility, Local Opportunity Structures, and the Pursuit of Higher Education
  While prior research links frequent childhood moves--especially within disadvantaged areas--to poorer educational outcomes, less is known about how changing opportunity structures can offset some of these effects. Utilizing full population Finnish register data, we explore whether relocating closer to higher education institutions (<30km) during childhood leads to higher educational attainment by age 30, compared to both those who move without gaining access to improved opportunities and those who do not move at all. The study also considers the role of evolving local opportunity structures, such as the expansion of polytechnics in the 1990s, which may benefit those who remain in place. Our findings indicate that stable, persistent exposure to improved opportunity structures throughout childhood is more consistently associated with higher probabilities of completing higher education by age 30 than is mobility toward such opportunities, with parental separation and parental unemployment compounding the disadvantages associated with mobility. Keywords: childhood; geographical mobility; local opportunity structures; access to higher education
• Pathways to Teacher Wellbeing: AI Pedagogy Self-Efficacy, Workload, and Anxiety in a Structural Model
  As artificial intelligence (AI) tools become more common in K-12 settings, questions remain about whether AI competence can meaningfully support teachers' psychological health. Grounded in Social Cognitive Theory, this study examined how teachers' AI pedagogy efficacy relates to their instructional self-efficacy, engagement self-efficacy, workload, anxiety, and overall mental wellbeing. Using survey data from a nationally representative sample of 402 U.S. K-12 teachers, we employed hierarchical regression and structural equation modeling (SEM) to test direct and indirect pathways. Regression analyses indicated that AI self-efficacy, instructional self-efficacy, engagement self-efficacy, workload, and anxiety all significantly predicted teacher wellbeing. The SEM revealed an indirect pathway in which AI pedagogy efficacy strengthened teachers' self-efficacy, which in turn reduced perceived workload, lowered anxiety, and ultimately improved teacher mental wellbeing. Findings highlight the importance of building teachers' AI competence. As AI becomes embedded in K-12 instructional practice, supporting teachers' confidence in using these tools may serve as a valuable lever for improving teacher wellbeing.
• Shaping sacramental authority: 'The power to bind and loose' as a subject of discussion between the Byzantine Church hierarchy, monasticism, and the state (11th-12th centuries) (Konstruirovanie sakramental'nogo avtoriteta:
  The paper examines the situation of growing attention to the practices of confession, which took place at the turn of the 10th-11th centuries and which lasted until the end of the 12th century. The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the statements by representatives of the Middle Byzantine canonical thought and discover methods (concepts, categories, hierarchical systems) by which they integrated the phenomenon of secret confession into a complex system of relationships in Byzantine society, and to evaluate their compatibility with the discourse of the time. The article consists of two parts which trace the situation during the 11th and 12th centuries, respectively. Each of these is further divided into two sections: in the first one the positions of the main authors of the period are described, while in the second they are analyzed and provided with historical contextualization. Part One compares historical narratives concerning the development of the institution of confession developed by three authors: St. Symeon the New Theologian, Patriarch John IV the Oxite of Antioch, and ex-chartophylax Nicephorus. It turns out that all three see the situation in a similar way, although they differ in their evaluation of it. The juxtaposition of these stories and their historical context allows us to conclude that the interests of the state and church authorities coincided on the issue of regulating confessional practices. This part serves as context for the subsequent assessment of the views of 12th-century authors. Part Two of the article describes and examines the phenomenon of a significant increase of the occurrence of the concept of "power" (exousia) in texts containing reflections on confession. The positions of key 12th-century church canonists are analyzed: Alexius Aristinus, John Zonaras, Theodore Balsamon, and Anonymous, the author of an unpublished commentary on Nomocanon contained in the Codex Sinaiticus 1117. Their ideas about how the "power to bind and loose" arises, exists, and is transmitted in the Church are reconstructed. The correlation of these ideas with the discussions of the 11th century allows us to assert that although Balsamon's model was the most detailed, it also turned out to be the least organic to the views of its time, which predetermined its fate. In conclusion, a connection is made with the subsequent late Byzantine period, in which the ideas of the previous time were partly adopted and partly abandoned.
• The image of the priest in Gregory of Nazianzus' 'Apology for His Flight' (or. 2) in the context of late antique ideas about leadership (Obraz sviashchennika v (slovo 3 / or. 2) svt. Grigoriia Bogoslova v kontekste pozdneantichnykh predstavlenii o nositeliakh vlasti)
  The article continues the study of the principles of constructing the image of a priest in late Antiquity using the example of the "Apology" by St. Gregory the Theologian. It is demonstrated that the literary image of a priest is constructed by using images of other bearers of authority and is thought of as one of them: Gregory uses the topoi and vocabulary of political literature. The key image is that of the Platonic philosopher-ruler, as well as vocabulary from the monarchical rather than democratic tradition. The origin and tradition of using the formula "the art of arts and the science of sciences" (tekhne tekhnon kai episteme epistemon), by which the author defines the priesthood, is studied. It is shown that in this way Gregory puts the priest in the place of the philosopher of the Platonic tradition. This is confirmed by an analysis of allusions to Plato's Gorgias, which contains images of two universal power roles: the rhetorician and the philosopher. The comparison of caring for the soul with medicine, which originates in this dialogue, is further developed by Gregory, who incorporates into it provisions of the Christian gospel and describes principles of spiritual counseling that have no precedent in earlier writings. In addition, the author combines the functions of a rhetorician and a priest in the described image, thus making him a comprehensive leader of the church space, conceptualized by analogy with the polis. In conclusion, a comparison is made with the image of Pythagoras as described by Iamblichus, who, like the priest, combines a political dimension (rule of a community) with a soteriological perspective through varied types of influence on the soul: through public speech, individual communication, example, and a cult. The comparison allows us to see that the priest and the local Church are thought of by Gregory not as a separate new political space with its own power structure, but as its metaphorical projection, universal in defining identity, but not denying the existing political institutions.
• The origin of the story of Charlemagne's journey to Jerusalem and Constantinople: From diplomacy to the Crusades (Proiskhozhdenie istorii o puteshestvii Karla Velikogo v Ierusalim i Konstantinopol': ot diplomatii k Krestovym pokhodam)
  This article analyzes the origin and development of the legend of Charlemagne's journey to Jerusalem and Constantinople. Its roots lie in ninth-century Frankish historiography: authors transformed Charlemagne's diplomatic exchanges with the East into a narrative centered on Caliph Harun al Rachid's concession of jurisdiction over the holy sites in Jerusalem. The evolution of the Emperor's image as an ecclesiastical benefactor and collector of relics further contributed to the legend, as sending ambassadors with gifts and meeting pilgrims were replaced by his independent pilgrimage to the Holy Land in search of Passion relics. Charlemagne's acquisition of relics of the Passion became a politically significant symbol of the transfer of imperial dignity from the Greeks to the Franks, beginning with his imaginary journey to the East. As the idea of a crusading movement developed, the friendship between Harun and Charlemagne faded, and his pilgrimage assumed the characteristics of a military campaign imbued with crusading rhetoric. The sources recounting Charlemagne's pilgrimage to Jerusalem were composed independently of one another, which precludes the possibility of a continuous development within a single tradition. However, in each case, the author's perspective may have been shaped by a collective belief in the potential reality of such an occurrence, and adapted to specific contexts. Consequently, Charlemagne's journey to the East and the liberation of Jerusalem came to be seen as part of a broader sequence of events, alongside emperor Heraclius' victory over the Sasanian Empire and the First Crusade. V stat'e rassmatrivaetsia, kak voznikla i razvivalas' legenda o puteshestvii Karla Velikogo v Ierusalim i Konstantinopol'. Ee istoki mozhno naiti uzhe v karolingskoi istoriografii: avtory preobrazovali upominaniia o diplomaticheskikh otnosheniiakh s Vostokom v peredachu Groba Gospodnia frankskomu imperatoru. Stanovleniiu legendy takzhe sposobstvovalo i razvitie obraza Karla kak pokrovitelia Tserkvi i sobiratelia relikvii, tak kak obmen poslami i vstrechi palomnikov smenilis' ego samostoiatel'nym puteshestviem v Sviatuiu zemliu za relikviiami Strastei Gospodnikh. Perenos relikvii igral i vazhnuiu politicheskuiu rol', simvoliziruia preemstvennost' imperii na Zapade. Po mere razvitiia idei krestonosnogo dvizheniia na Vostok druzhba Karla Velikogo s Kharunom ar-Rashidom ischezla iz istorii, a ego palomnichestvo priobrelo militaristskie motivy v dukhe krestonosnoi ritoriki. Istochniki, povestvuiushchie o puteshestvii Karla Velikogo na Vostok, byli sozdany obosoblenno drug ot druga, chto ne pozvoliaet utverzhdat' o postupatel'nom razvitii etogo siuzheta v ramkakh edinoi traditsii. Odnako avtorskaia pozitsiia v kazhdom sluchae mogla opirat'sia na sformirovannoe v narode predstavlenie o vozmozhnosti takogo sobytiia, otchego vposledstvii etot siuzhet dazhe voshel v istoriografiiu i vstroilsia v cheredu istoricheskikh sobytii nariadu s pobedoi imperatora Irakliia nad persami i Pervym krestovym pokhodom.
• El consumo de noticias en las redes sociales: factores asociados en el Peru
  Las redes sociales se han consolidado como una fuente importante para acceder a informacion y noticias. Si bien estudios internacionales han explorado el impacto de estas plataformas, en el Peru la investigacion es aun escasa. El objetivo de este estudio es investigar si las variables genero y edad estan estadisticamente asociadas al consumo de noticias en las redes sociales. Empleando una muestra representativa de la poblacion adulta en linea (N = 2005), este articulo se enfoca en seis plataformas: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X --ex-Twitter--, TikTok y WhatsApp. El analisis descriptivo e inferencial, basado en la prueba estadistica de chi-cuadrado de Rao-Scott, revelo diferencias significativas segun el genero en la mayoria de las plataformas examinadas, con los usuarios hombres prefiriendo YouTube y X para consumir noticias, y las mujeres inclinandose hacia TikTok e Instagram. El estudio tambien hallo diferencias segun la edad. Facebook y YouTube emergieron como las plataformas dominantes para acceder a noticias, particularmente entre los grupos de mayor edad, mientras que TikTok mostro una tendencia predominante entre los jovenes de 18 a 29 anos. Estos resultados subrayan la complejidad y el dinamismo de los repertorios mediaticos de consumo de noticias en la era digital y la importancia de considerar los factores demograficos como variables clave en el contexto del Peru.
• Reviewing Article 136 of the Public Security Administration Punishment Law: "Sealing of Public Security Violation Records" through the Lens of Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law and the Overall National Security Outlook: A Legal Pathway for Deferred Application, Investigation of Specific Issues, and Mitigation of Risks from External Improper Influence
  The newly introduced 'sealing of public security violation records' system under the revised Public Security Administration Punishment Law has sparked intense debate due to its implications for public safety expectations concerning highly sensitive activities such as drug-related offences, occupational access boundaries, and data governance risks. This paper refrains from making factual determinations regarding online allegations against any specific individuals or institutions. Instead, it adopts a 'systemic security governance' methodology to explore how the legislature can achieve risk containment, factual clarification, and institutional consolidation within the rule of law framework when significant societal doubts arise (including 'indications of potential external undue influence during the legislative proposal stage') and supporting regulations have yet to form a rigid closed-loop system. This paper proposes: guided by the normative benchmarks of scientific, democratic, and lawful legislation emphasised in Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, and framed by the risk management principles of coordinating people's security, political security, and institutional security as required by the overall national security outlook, the NPCSC should lawfully arrange for the temporary suspension of Article 136's key application provisions within a specified timeframe. concurrently initiating investigations into specific issues or specialised reviews. This would establish an auditable governance chain of 'first contain risks, then investigate thoroughly, finally consolidate,' thereby minimising systemic spillover costs to public safety, data security, and public trust without undermining institutional objectives.
• Historical Events as Bridges Between Social Domains Taking Bolsonaro's Victory Personal in the 2018 Brazilian Elections
  How do historical events--emergent, intense, and collectively experienced instances of political contingency--generate sweeping bursts of political engagement immediately after they occur? Rational choice perspectives see this capacity as stemming from how events perform as purveyors of information for citizens with exogenous and invariant political identities. Available cultural approaches, by contrast, contend that events politicize by changing the meanings people use to navigate political life. Different as they are, both perspectives assume that events' politicizing impact remains contained within the domain of political experience. But, since politics is rarely instantiated in everyday life, they cannot fully adequately explain how events generate sweeping political activation. I offer an alternative "spillover" approach to understanding how events produce immediate politicization. I argue that the locus of this influence is located events' ability to generate semantic disruptions that allow political narratives to infiltrate the stories and identities that guide social action within social domains that have more routinary instantiation. I develop this argument by drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Sao Paulo in the wake of the unexpectedly strong victory of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro in the first round 2018 Brazilian presidential election. My observations in public spaces and moments of sociability between left-leaning citizens portray this moment as one characterized by "politicization without politics". Bolsonaro's surprising electoral showing intensified feelings of vulnerability, prompting political perceptual and behavioral shifts that were rooted in personal rather than explicitly personal domains of social experience. These spillovers to the personal domain produced an environment of political "engagement without action" where visible political behavior drastically decreased and political conversations and interactions in intimate places skyrocketed.
• The Effects of Eventful Times on SES Gaps and Levels of Political Discussion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the German Reunification Period
  Previous studies have established that abrupt and consequential periods of political uncertainty-or "eventful" times-impact political attitudes. But we still know little on whether events can affect political practices. I investigate how eventful times affect levels and socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in frequency of interpersonal political discussion, a consequential political practice and a high quality indicator of sustained political engagement. Drawing from citizen competence and social cognition studies, I hypothesize that events provoke political talk increases that will be moderate and unequalizing relative to SES for adults but large and equalizing for the young. I find empirical support for this expectation by evaluating differences between West Germany and France in political discussion changes before and during German Reunification. I develop and deploy an original quantitative indicator of eventfulness to show that this comparison meets difference-in-differences quasi-experimental conditions that tackles previously unaddressed validity issues related to history and ambiguous causal precedence.
• Measuring Corruption from Text Data
  Using Brazilian municipal audit reports, I construct an automated corruption index that combines a dictionary of audit irregularities with principal component analysis. The index validates strongly against independent human coders, explaining 71-73 % of the variation in hand-coded corruption counts in samples where coders themselves exhibit high agreement, and the results are robust within these validation samples. The index behaves as theory predicts, correlating with municipal characteristics that prior research links to corruption. Supervised learning alternatives yield nearly identical municipal rankings (R2=0.98), confirming that the dictionary approach captures the same underlying construct. The method scales to the full audit corpus and offers advantages over both manual coding and Large Language Models (LLMs) in transparency, cost, and long-run replicability.
• Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof: Reclaiming the Original Meaning of Birthright Citizenship
  This paper examines the constitutional basis and original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, arguing that the framers intended a more limited application of birthright citizenship tied to full political allegiance. Drawing on historical debates, judicial precedents, and modern immigration challenges, it contends that current doctrine exceeds the Amendment's original public meaning and proposes a principled framework for recalibrating citizenship consistent with constitutional fidelity.
• Determinants of Building-Sector CO2 Emissions in the EU: A Combined Econometric and Machine Learning Approach
  This paper evaluates the structural, environmental, and climatic factors influencing carbon dioxide emissions from the building sector (CBE) in 27 European Union member states from 2005 to 2023. This analysis uses panel data from the World Bank and four econometric models--Random Effects, Fixed Effects, Dynamic Panel GMM, and Weighted Least Squares--coupled with machine learning and clustering to provide a robust analysis of emissions. The econometric models show that all models support a negative relationship between agriculture, forestry, and fishing value added (AFFV) and forest area (FRST), suggesting that a robust rural economy and substantial natural carbon sinks are accompanied by lower emissions in the building sector. On the other hand, water stress (WSTR), PM2.5 pollution, heating and cooling degree days, and nitrous oxide emissions (N2OP) are found to significantly, yet positively, affect CBE. Tests of diagnostic analyses support Fixed Effects and Weighted Least Squares models, whereas results from GMM models are limited by instrument validity violations. In machine learning analysis, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) models are found to be most diagnostic, with all performance metrics being improved, establishing a prominent role for coal electricity, water stress, agricultural intensities, and climatic factors. Subsequently, a solution with 10 clusters, selected using Bayesian Information Criteria and silhouettes, identified a set of environmental and economic characteristics based on differences between low- and high-emission groups. High-emitting groups result from agricultural intensification, pollution, and low energy efficiency, while low-emitting groups are associated with renewable energy, low pollution, and a favorable climate. This analysis, hence, presents a multifaceted assessment of building sector emissions, with climatic, structural, and energy transition patterns as driving factors for meeting decarbonization targets for the European Union.
• Human-AI framework reveals design levers for collective landscape stewardship in agriculture
  We present a rigorously constructed framework to inform the development of evaluative crite-ria for existing knowledge on collective agri-environmental schemes supporting landscape stewardship in agriculture. It is applied in a systematic review of 96 cases across OECD coun-tries, sourced from 73 peer-reviewed articles. The review connects the analytical power of arti-ficial intelligence in concert with expert domain knowledge. The synthesis of both enables a precise and comprehensive examination of policy and implementation dimensions, yielding critical insights into the schemes' designs and functioning, and their broader applicability. We find considerable heterogeneity among schemes indicating flexibility for decision-makers to adapt schemes to specific environmental targets at local scale, but that there is still significant room to enhance the role of farmers as key players in collective agri-environmental schemes. By integrating human expertise with the capabilities of large language models, our approach exemplifies how to balance and mitigate the limitations of each, enhancing both the reliability and transparency of the review process.
• Short-Sighted Demands, Long-Term Consequences: When Political Competition Undermines Disaster Preparedness
  Natural disasters span political boundaries, yet their devastating impacts vary widely across political jurisdictions. I argue that this is because of the differences in political incentives to uphold regulations concerning disaster preparedness. Turkey's 2023 earthquake provides a rare empirical window to observe the cumulative effects of otherwise hidden political incentives. Leveraging the quasi-random shock of the earthquake, I employ a spatial regression discontinuity design along municipal boundaries in the earthquake region. I treat long-term party rule as the treatment and neighborhood-level destruction as the outcome. The analysis shows that neighborhoods governed by the same municipal party for more than 25 years experienced approximately 20\% less destruction than their adjacent, politically contested counterparts. These findings translate into substantially lower exposure of hundreds of residents to known disaster risks. The results demonstrate that electoral competition without institutional brakes can deteriorate long-term policy outcomes. My paper underscores the importance of sharing accountability with technocratic oversight in policy areas requiring sustained infrastructural investment, such as disaster preparedness.
• Identifying National, Institutional and Disciplinary Sites of Probable Predatory Publishing
  Predatory publishing - for-profit academic publishers and journals publishing academic articles with inadequate quality control - is a professional and societal problem in modern science. Due to their illegitimacy and unprofessionalism, predatory publishers and journals are seldom indexed by major journal bibliographic indices, such as Scopus or the Web of Science. This lack of indexed metadata makes analyzing the predatory publishing market difficult. To fill this gap, we collected journal metadata of corpuses of six probable predatory publishers, comprised of 310,924 articles. We also collected metadata of four other publishers of higher - but contested - legitimacy, to compare with metadata of 54 million articles indexed in the Web of Science. Our research pinpoints precise geographic, institutional and disciplinary sites where probable predatory publishing occurs. Scholars affiliated with developing countries and lower-status institutions disproportionately publish in probable predatory journals. However, since academically central countries and high-status institutions are prolific publishers, they provide much of the money and articles that support the predatory publishing market, even if predatory publishing is a proportionately smaller problem in privileged institutions. Predatory publishing is a worldwide problem, with varying niches and consequences in different institutions and countries. Inequalities in resources and scientific reward structures influence intellectual choices of scholars throughout the world, including propensities for knowingly or naively publishing articles in predatory journals. Research integrity is an emerging axis of stratification in contemporary science.
• Understanding farming through relational farming approaches: The use of a health-nutrition-ecology nexus for enquiry into small-farming households' resilience
  In times of exacerbating agro-food crises, understanding farming through its constituting interrelated factors is a key element of crisis mitigation. The mostly linear approaches such as represented in the current agricultural discourses and by the agricultural sciences fall short in explaining the real-life complexities and overlapping crises experienced by small-scale farmers. Based on my recent qualitative fieldwork in Thailand, this paper aims to picture the complexities within which households' farming practices operate, and how these arise from a web of socio-cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors. By pleading for relational approaches to farming such as those acknowledging its immanent human-ecology interaction, this paper suggests a novel "health-nutrition-ecology" nexus to guide enquiry into the intimate relations between ecology, livelihoods, and health and well-being. It is employed to gain understanding of small-farming households' situations, deep-rooted causes of these, and their resilience in facing crises. The paper further pleads for a shift in existing technocratic agricultural discourses towards their inclusiveness of real-world narratives by small-scale farmers. These narratives can deliver insights for policies that aim at actual transformations of crisis-prone agro-food systems and could benefit both farmer livelihoods and farm ecologies.
• Political Social Distance in Europe
  In this study, we build on Emory Bogardus' classical sociology of distance to develop a relational framework for understanding attitudes related to democratic coexistence. Extending his insight into the political realm, we frame political social distance as the (dis)comfort citizens feel toward supporters of the party they would never vote for, as in-laws, friends, co-workers, or neighbors. Using original survey data from eight European democracies, we show that social trust consistently reduces distance toward political outgroups, while ideological orientation influences this disposition asymmetrically: respondents on the left exhibit higher political social distance than those on the right. Moreover, citizens who attach strong importance to democracy display greater distance toward opponents, a paradox we term democratic exclusivism, grounded in a moral rather than procedural conception of democracy. These findings have important implications for democratic quality, as they reveal both the social foundations that may enable peaceful democratic coexistence and the attitudinal barriers that may gradually weaken it.
• The Ludic Paradox: Why Behavioral Change Through Games Requires Agency, Not Control
  The global games industry engages nearly three billion players, yet instrumental applications of games for behavioral change, from gamification to serious games, demonstrate a puzzling inconsistency between short-term engagement and long-term outcomes. While these interventions consistently generate initial enthusiasm, meta-analyses reveal that behavioral effects typically diminish beyond three months, with changes rarely persisting after interventions conclude. This pattern contrasts markedly with games' demonstrable cultural influence as evident in community formation, identity development, and sustained engagement over years or decades. We propose that this discrepancy reflects fundamental theoretical inadequacies in how behavioral interventions conceptualize games' influence on human behavior. Drawing on converging evidence from cultural economics, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and game studies, we develop a framework that reconceptualizes gameplay as cultural meaning-making rather than behavioral conditioning. The framework articulates how sustainable behavioral transformation emerges through dynamic interactions between four interrelated dimensions: games as designed cultural artifacts, play as evolved behavioral disposition, gameplay as situated embodied experience, and re-play as reflective cultural practice. Situating this framework within active inference and free energy principle perspectives provides computational precision to these meaning-making processes, whereas cognitive gadget theory illuminates how play serves as a foundational environment for constructing distinctively human cognitive capacities. Central to our analysis is what we term the ludic dilemma, a tension between play's intrinsically motivated, autotelic nature and attempts to instrumentalize it for predetermined behavioral outcomes. We suggest that this tension helps explain the persistent failures of mechanistic interventions while pointing toward alternative approaches that preserve play's essential qualities and enable behavioral transformation through extended cultural processes. The framework generates testable predictions about temporal dynamics, cross-cultural variations, and developmental trajectories that distinguish cultural meaning-making accounts from mechanistic alternatives, with implications for an understanding of cultural learning, behavioral change interventions, and human cognitive evolution.
• Staying on in Education: Longitudinal Comparisons of Young People's First Transition in Britain using Cohort and Synthetic Cohort Data
  This paper investigates the changing role of young people's transition to adulthood. We investigate young people's first major transition from school-to-work. We accomplish this by studying a young person's transitionary pathway at age 16 - to stay on within education or to leave it. This paper compares five birth cohorts that range from 1974-2013 to investigate the longitudinal comparisons of young people's first transition to adulthood. We find evidence of remarkable social change across British youth. Historically, a young person's first transition was characterised as a heavily stratified transitionary experience that saw individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds less likely to stay within education. Time has degraded these stratifying influences. Social inequalities such as sex, housing tenure, and social class have continued to decline in their influence during this period of transition. Educational Attainment has continued to have an effect - though it has weakened severely. The single largest impact on a young person staying on within education is now the cohort in which they are born in. Our paper has for the first time extended the investigation of youth across the entire mid-20th century using longitudinal social survey data. The changes that young people experienced during the 1980s have been solidified and furthered in the 1990s onwards.
• Homosexual Exclusions: Homonormativity, Elite Distinction, and Failed Assimilation in Pre-Nazi Germany
  Despite the Third Reich's efforts to rewrite German history, post-WWII scholars and activists have worked valiantly to unearth the inspiring legacies of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WhK) before Nazi takeover. But by lionizing Hirschfeld, these same scholars/activists have too often erased (1) WhK's limitations, (2) other, less savory competitor groups like the masculinist Community of the Self-Possessed (GdE) and collaborationist Human Rights League (BfM), and (3) surprisingly generative critiques put forth by these latter groups. In a comparative-historical analysis of WhK, GdE, and BfM organizers, I suggest that fin-de-siecle German capitalism inculcated an illusory proximity to power that limited organizers' insights into bourgeois heteronormative German society and their precarious place within it. Despite criticizing some particulars, all of these activists nonetheless identified with and demonstrated adherence to classist models of normative Germanness by excluding other gender- and sexually-nonconforming people. WhK medicalists constructed themselves as upright, learned "homosexual" professionals against criminalized "pseudohomosexual" sex workers; GdE masculinists constructed their Hellenistic literary circle of enlightened "homoerotic" against crude, hypersexual, effeminate decadents. BfM homonormatives constructed themselves as respectable, everyday middle-class citizen-subjects against perverse, pathological, in-your-face activists. These attempts to gain inclusion at one another's expense undermined their ability to work together and with other oppressed groups. Apart from a brief rapprochement, these competing groups constantly distinguished themselves from and denigrated one another. Hidden beneath this impulse is, to borrow from current discourse about Trump supporters, a sense of being "temporarily embarrassed elites" that obscured friend from foe and obscured their extreme vulnerability to the coming storm of fascist reaction. I conclude by bringing the strengths and limitations of these three groups to bear on the current fascist, genocidal moment, suggesting that learning from their mistakes and capitalizing on their strengths is essential for bringing about a non-fascist movement, society, and world.
• Mobilization for and Against Democracy
  This review examines the expanding body of scholarship on contentious mobilization and its dual role in shaping democratization and democratic decline. It synthesizes research on the conditions under which mass mobilization contributes to democratic transitions, deepening, and consolidation, as well as when it facilitates authoritarian resurgence and democratic backsliding. The review covers key debates on tactics, class composition, organizational infrastructure, ideological framing, and regime type. It also analyzes the evolving role of civil society, digital media, and participatory institutions in both enabling and constraining democratic outcomes. While much of the earlier literature emphasized the democratizing potential of collective action, recent studies reveal a more ambivalent picture in which mass mobilization can bolster authoritarian incumbents or lead to fragmented political settlements. The essay concludes by outlining key directions for future research, including attention to discursive contestation, and the organizational strategies of both pro- and anti-democratic movements.
• The making of 'green' capitalism in Europe's marginal regions: renewable energy production as territory grabbing for accumulation
  It is no mystery that we are living in times of multiple ecological crises. Not only are phenomena such as climate change, widespread pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil artificialisation threatening irreversibly the 'natural' world. They imperil human society too, for human society is part of nature. Taking a historical materialist perspective, this thesis understands those crises as originating in capitalist social relations, which maximise the exploitation of both human labour and the ecosystems. The thesis maintains that mainstream responses to the crises are fully framed within the capitalist paradigm of perpetual and privatised 'accumulation for accumulation's sake', only now legitimised through 'green' credentials. Building on theoretical and political approaches calling for the incorporation of an 'ecological' rationality within capitalist relations, these responses articulate faith in and commitment to the modernisation of productive cycles and governance systems, from which a more sustainable - 'green' - capitalist economy can apparently arise. Differently, this thesis interprets such a 'green' turn as capitalism's adaptation and expansion in the context of the ecological crises. The thesis deploys and innovates a range of historical materialist categories to analyse the relationship between the 'green' as an accumulation opportunity and its leveraging as a legitimation framework. Empirically, the thesis investigates the accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy generation at the level of production areas, the enclosure and trans-formative processes it triggers, the class and factional cleavages it entails, and the regulatory mechanisms and legitimation narratives to which it is associated. Methodologically, it combines a comprehensive theoretical elaboration with case studies in southern Italy on wind energy and in eastern Germany on agricultural biogas. The thesis maintains that under capitalism, renewable energy generation expands accumulation frontiers over not yet or 'inefficiently' commodified spaces and natures. This occurs through their privatisation and abstraction into fictitious capital -that is through their commodification and financialization. In contrast with marginalist approaches, this thesis reconciles the socially necessary labour time theory of value with political ecology. It rejects the assumption that privatised spaces and natures might 'innately' provide exchange value, maintaining that they serve as a collateral to capture -by way of rent- surplus value produced in society at a different point in time and space. Secondly, the thesis defines 'green' capitalism as a hegemonic project in the making. This is characterised by two dialectics: one tending to restructure the forces and relations of production; the other to re-build hegemonic narratives and apparatuses, around re-significations of the 'green' made compatible with sustained accumulation.
• BIAS, BENEFIT, OR BOTH? SURVEYING PERCEPTIONS OF AI IN HEALTHCARE
  Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping healthcare, presenting new opportunities in diagnostics, clinical decision support, workflow optimization, patient engagement, and population health. Yet important concerns remain about trust, transparency, bias, privacy, and the adequacy of existing regulatory frameworks. The objective of this study was to compare the perspectives of Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) and non-HCPs on the integration of AI in healthcare, with a focus on identifying perceived benefits, risks, ethical concerns, and barriers to adoption. Methods: We conducted an IRB-approved cross-sectional survey of adults aged >=18, sampling both HCPs and non-HCPs. The questionnaire assessed perceived benefits and risks of AI, trust in AI systems, health bot applications, privacy and ethical concerns, regulatory priorities, and views on AI's role in clinical decision-making. Responses from HCPs and non-HCPs were compared using descriptive statistics and group-level difference testing. Results: A total of 297 participants completed the survey, including 189 HCPs and 108 non- HCPs. Both groups expressed strong agreement that AI can improve efficiency, enhance access to care, support diagnosis, reduce medical errors, and aid early disease detection. However, trust in AI systems remained limited: nearly two-thirds of respondents expressed no confidence in AI's ability to ensure privacy, safeguard data, or make unbiased ethical decisions. HCPs demonstrated greater emphasis on safety, accountability, transparency, and regulatory oversight, particularly in high-risk clinical environments, whereas non-HCPs were more likely to endorse shared responsibility when AI causes harm. Across groups, the majority believed that AI should serve primarily as an assistive tool, with humans retaining decision-making authority. Concerns about cost, infrastructure, and digital literacy were prominent barriers to equitable AI adoption. Conclusions: Despite recognizing AI's potential benefits, both clinicians and the public remain cautious about its risks and ethical limitations. These findings highlight the need for robust governance, transparent design, targeted education, and human-centered approaches to promote trustworthy, safe, and equitable AI integration in healthcare.
• Retraction Under Pressure: A Case Study in Publisher Overreach, Misrepresentation, and the Compromise of Editorial Independence
  This paper documents a concerning precedent in academic publishing: the retraction of an article from the Journal of Population Economics (Springer Nature, 2024) after an independent editorial committee had concluded retraction was unwarranted. The reversal occurred following a coordinated harassment campaign and publisher-level intervention that cited "lack of robustness" as grounds for retraction. The published retraction notice compounds this breach by containing demonstrable factual inaccuracies. I argue this constitutes: (1) a misapplication of retraction guidelines, (2) an infringement of editorial independence, (3) susceptibility to external coercion, and (4) violation of basic standards for accurate retraction notices. The case underscores the urgent need to protect editorial processes from reputational pressure and ensure factual accuracy in corrective actions.
• Distribucion, Transversalidad y Alineacion del Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federacion 2025 con los ODS: Oportunidades y Retos para el Desarrollo Sostenible en Mexico
  Este articulo examina la alineacion de los programas presupuestarios (PP) del Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federacion (PEF) para el ejercicio fiscal 2025 con los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS), evaluando su distribucion general, las contribuciones tanto directas como indirectas, y el grado de transversalidad en las modalidades presupuestarias. Se analiza como las politicas publicas contribuyen a los objetivos de la Agenda 2030 en Mexico, destacando fortalezas notables y oportunidades de mejora. En particular, los resultados revelan una cobertura amplia que abarca todos los ODS, aunque con mayor representacion en areas como la gobernanza y el desarrollo institucional, en comparacion con temas ambientales y de alianzas, lo que sugiere desequilibrios en la priorizacion. Para mitigar dichos efectos, se proponen enfoques para reforzar la integracion y el efecto de estas politicas, como ajustes en la asignacion de recursos, mejoras en el monitoreo y estrategias para una mayor equidad, con el fin de fomentar un desarrollo mas equilibrado y sostenible en el pais.
• Policy-research partnerships for post-war reconstruction of education in Tigray, Ethiopia: The role of local university-based researchers
  This article draws on the experiences of university-based researchers involved in the post-war reconstruction of education in Tigray, Ethiopia. Based on experiences following the 2020-2022 civil war, we consider the role of local researchers in supporting educational decision-making in line with democratic, human-rights based principles and international commitments (SDG4, CESA 2026). This account is underpinned by conceptual work on the leadership of education provision in crises (the 'endogenous systems leadership' framework), and the politics of knowledge production on education in Africa. The empirical focus of this article is the partnership between Mekelle University researchers and the Tigray Region Education Bureau (TREB) around the introduction of an Accelerated Education Programme (AEP) across all schools in the region in 2023. As we show, this initiative demonstrates the key role of university-based researchers in knowledge production and exchange as a condition for the endogenous leadership of education provision during crises.
• Extractive Authoritarianism: Medical Apartheid in U.S. Immigration Detention
  This article examines U.S. immigration detention as a revenue-generating legal system that profits from prolonged confinement and bodily deterioration. The second Trump administration has systematized this violence through unprecedented expansion, dismantling of oversight, and concentration of executive authority. Drawing on government policy, administrative datasets, facility records, and case documentation, the analysis demonstrates how detention institutionalizes medical neglect, retaliation, solitary confinement, reproductive coercion, language exclusion, deathbed releases, and jurisdictional manipulation as routine administrative practice. Bilateral transfer agreements extend this system extraterritorially, outsourcing custody to sites of documented torture where U.S. officials create conditions meeting the legal definition of enforced disappearance. The article theorizes this configuration as extractive authoritarianism, a mode of governance where legal formalism enables capital accumulation through the exploitation of civil vulnerability. This framework advances critical socio-legal scholarship by demonstrating how procedural compliance produces structural violence within formally lawful systems. It reveals the persistence of detention's harms across cycles of reform and establishes the necessity of abolitionist responses.
• Key network disruptors: A structural analysis of the #DisruptJMM network influencers and actions
  Twitter (now known as X) has been used by an active group of academic mathematics communities to connect and share ideas and information. Like many other Academic Twitter communities, conference hashtags have been widely used to share information between conference attendees and communicate new ideas presented at conferences to the broader academic community. However, in 2020, Dr. Piper Harris proposed a different kind of academic hashtag --- #DisruptJMM --- as a counternetwork hashtag to an in-person conference. This study looks at the use of this hashtag through and in between the 2020 and 2021 Joint Mathematics Meetings, which are advertised as the largest mathematics gatherings in the wold. Through qualitative coding, we investigate the many ways we can conceptualize and define ``influencers'' in this context. We find that some definitions consistently identify the same individuals as ``community organizers'', whereas some definitions of influencers allow us to identify alternative ways that individuals can influence the growth and propagation of hashtags. This study contributes to our understanding of the myriad ways that individuals can contribute to build hashtag movements that move between in-person and online spaces.
• Pattern Recognition of Ozone-Depleting Substance Exports in Global Trade Data
  New methods are needed to monitor environmental treaties, like the Montreal Protocol, by reviewing large, complex customs datasets. This paper introduces a framework using unsupervised machine learning to systematically detect suspicious trade patterns and highlight activities for review. Our methodology, applied to 100,000 trade records, combines several ML techniques. Unsupervised Clustering (K-Means) discovers natural trade archetypes based on shipment value and weight. Anomaly Detection (Isolation Forest and IQR) identifies rare "mega-trades" and shipments with commercially unusual price per-kilogram values. This is supplemented by Heuristic Flagging to find tactics like vague shipment descriptions. These layers are combined into a priority score, which successfully identified 1,351 price outliers and 1,288 high-priority shipments for customs review. A key finding is that high-priority commodities show a different and more valuable value-to-weight ratio than general goods. This was validated using Explainable AI (SHAP), which confirmed vague descriptions and high value as the most significant risk predictors. The model's sensitivity was validated by its detection of a massive spike in "mega-trades" in early 2021, correlating directly with the real-world regulatory impact of the US AIM Act. This work presents a repeatable unsupervised learning pipeline to turn raw trade data into prioritized, usable intelligence for regulatory groups.
• Voting and Social Conformity in U.S. Presidential Elections (1920 to 2000)--A Social Entropy Analysis at the State Level
  The conformity model and its quantitative predictions The impact of social conformity on voting has been studied extensively and reported in previous research on the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, India, Japan, and Russia. (Coleman, 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2010, and 2018; Borodin, 2005). Here I present a shortened version of the theory and then show how it applies to American presidential elections from 1920 to 2000 using state-level results.
• Gradational gender identification across European gender regimes
  By using mostly binary measures of individuals' sex or gender category, most existing quantitative social science literature has underestimated variations in gender self-concepts among cisgender individuals as well as increasing transgender or non-binary identifications. Some recent mostly non-representative studies from the US, Germany and Sweden have proposed novel gradational measures based on self-rating of masculinity and femininity. We extend these studies by systematically exploring how gender identification and self-perceived (non-)conformity relate to gender socialisation and performance in different domains as well as to gender equality in political, economic and normative dimensions across European regions. We draw on European Social Survey data collected in 2023/24 and apply multi-level regression models for 37,587 individuals across 199 regions of 26 European countries. The results show the expected associations of gender identification and non-conformity with bodily characteristics and personality traits, regional gender regimes and partly with relationships but not with labour market- and care-related aspects. We find some systematic variation in these associations across gender regimes pointing to altered meanings of masculinity and femininity. On the whole, gradational measures of gender identification are promising to include in future quantitative studies to complement gender category and domain-specific beliefs but contextual comparisons require adjustments to improve comparability.
• Tweeting migration: A decade of shifting sentiment across local areas of Great Britain
  Public opinion towards migration increasingly shapes political discourse and policy agendas. Yet, traditional surveys lack spatial and temporal granularity needed to detect local variation and rapid shifts in sentiment. Leveraging a dataset of 925,000 tweets from 2013-2022, we examine how local contexts influence sentiment towards migration across Great Britain. Using natural language processing, we extract sentiment from tweets, linking them to demographic and socioeconomic characteristics at the district level. Our analysis reveals stark geographical divides: anti-migration sentiment is more prevalent in areas that are older, less diverse and with lower rates of higher education. We find an intensification of polarisation after the 2016 Brexit referendum, with rises in both pro- and anti-migration expression and identify short-term fluctuations in sentiment corresponding to real-world events. Contrary to group threat theory, we find no association between short-term migration and negative sentiment. Instead, long-term demographic factors - particularly the presence of migrants - are positively associated with sentiment, supporting contact-based explanations. By capturing both the structural and dynamic dimensions of migration sentiment, we advance understanding of how local contexts mediate public sentiment. These findings demonstrate the value of digital trace data in complementing surveys and offer a methodological blueprint for future research.
• Are Farmers Algorithm-Averse? The Case of Decision Support Tools in Crop Management
  The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has the potential to improve farming efficiency globally, with decision support tools (DSTs) representing a particularly promising application. However, evidence from medical and financial domains reveals a user reluctance to accept AI-based recommendations, even when they outperform human alternatives. This is a phenomenon known as "algorithm aversion" (AA). This study is the first to examine this phenomenon in an agricultural setting. Drawing on survey data from a representative sample of 250 German farmers, we assessed farmers' intention to use and their willingness-to-pay for DSTs for wheat fungicide application either based on AI or a human advisor. We implemented a novel Bayesian probabilistic programming workflow tailored to experimental studies, enabling a joint analysis that integrates an extended version of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology with an economic experiment. Our results indicate that AA plays an important role in farmers' decision-making. For most farmers, an AI-based DST must outperform a human advisor by 11-30% to be considered equally valuable. Similarly, an AI-based DST with equivalent performance must be 21-56% less expensive than the human advisor to be preferred. These findings signify the importance of examining AA as a cognitive bias that may hinder the adoption of promising AI technologies in agriculture.
• School Choice in Italy between Family Preferences and School Characteristics
  This paper investigates the matching process between pupils and schools for lower secondary schools in Italy by taking into account the characteristics of both families and schools, and the way they interact in school choices. It uses a brand new and unique database, including individual-level, geo-referenced data for students' residence and school location, as well as information concerning the characteristics of both parents and schools. First, we ask which is the impact of home-school distance in school choice. Second, we investigates the role of family background in terms of social class and education. Third, we test whether school characteristics in terms of inputs (composition) and outputs (performance) play a role in shaping family preferences. Our findings highlight the several factors influencing lower secondary school choice in Italy, pointing especially at the role of home-school distance and family background (social class and parental education). Finally, school's characteristics appear to affect significantly only the choices adopted by middle and upper classes.
• Diskriminierung von Konsument:innen in Deutschland. Eine Bestandsaufnahme
  Der vorgelegte Bericht untersucht kritisch den Zusammenhang zwischen Konsum und Diskriminierung in Deutschland. Auf Basis eines systematischen Desk Reviews werden neun marktbezogene Sektoren (Arbeits- und Wohnungsmarkt, Gesundheit, Finanzdienstleistungen, Einzelhandel, Mobilitat, digitale Markte, algorithmische Systeme sowie Freizeit- und Kulturangebote) analysiert. Dabei stutzt sich die Studie auf soziologische Diskriminierungstheorien und intersektionale Ansatze, um die Wechselwirkungen von Macht- und Ungleichheitsstrukturen im Konsum zu verstehen. Die Autor:innen konstatieren eine dunne empirische Datenlage: Konsum und Diskriminierung werden kaum gemeinsam untersucht, weshalb der Bericht vor allem qualitative Befunde aus Antidiskriminierungsstellen und NGOs synthetisiert. Er zeigt, dass Benachteiligungen entlang von Alter, Behinderung, Geschlecht, sexueller Identitat, Herkunft, Staatsangehorigkeit und Religion in allen betrachteten Markten auftreten. Diskriminierung aussert sich interaktional, okonomisch und strukturell-technologisch, was sich in emotionalen Belastungen, eingeschrankter Kaufkraft und reduziertem Vertrauen niederschlagt. Zugleich bestehen erhebliche rechtliche und institutionelle Schutzlucken: Das Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz ist fur Verbraucher:innen schwer durchsetzbar, Beratungsstellen verfugen uber begrenztes Wissen, und ein Verbandsklagerecht fehlt. Der Bericht schliesst mit der Forderung nach einer integrierten Verbraucher:innenforschung und-politik, die Diskriminierung als sozialen und okonomischen Faktor ernst nimmt und strukturelle Barrieren - insbesondere in digitalen und algorithmischen Kontexten - abbaut.