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Reassuring evidence on statins and cognition in people with HIV
No full textThe use of statins in the general population has long been associated with both clinical enthusiasm for cardiovascular prevention and lingering concerns about potential side effects, including neurocognitive impairment. These concerns, initially fueled by early observational reports and FDA warnings in the early 2000s, persist among patients and clinicians even as more recent data increasingly support the cognitive safety of statins. Among people with HIV (PWH), this issue takes on additional complexity, given the unique neurocognitive vulnerabilities of this population. The recent study by Erlandson et al., published in AIDS, offers important and timely evidence on this subject, concluding that pitavastatin use is not associated with neurocognitive harm among PWH.</p
Concreteness fading for primary school computing
No full textObjectives. This paper investigates the Theoretical Model of Concreteness Fading in the context of teaching children aged 9 to 10 about computer network structure and routing. Three between-groups, pre-test/post-test experiments were conducted to test the following hypotheses: 1) The Concreteness Fading group will have higher learning gains than the Abstract, Concrete, and Concreteness Introduction groups; 2) The Physical Concrete group will have higher learning gains than the Virtual Concrete group; 3) The Three-Step group will have higher learning gains than the Two-Step group; 4) The Five-Step group will have higher learning gains than the Three-Step group.Participants. Participants for all three experiments were pupils aged 9 to 10 at a primary school in the South of England, with 166 participants overall.Study Method. Three experiments were conducted, each with a between-groups, pre-test/post-test design using random, or blocked-random, assignment. In Experiment One (n = 59), four variations of physical and/or paper-based representational progressions were compared. In Experiment Two (n = 48), the physical and paper-based Concreteness Fading progression from Experiment One was compared against a tablet-based augmented reality (AR) learning environment and paper-based equivalent. In Experiment Three (n = 59), the AR learning environment from Experiment Two was extended to compare three distinct approaches to linking the concrete and abstract representations. Outcomes were measured as learning gains using two (pre/post) versions of an immediate near-transfer test in abstract, but contextualised, form. All data were collected in a primary school; pre-tests were completed in the classroom as a group, and post-tests were completed individually in a shared corridor workspace.Findings. In Experiment One, an ANCOVA test showed that differences between groups were not significant (F(3, 54) = 2.413, p = 0.077, partial η2 = 0.118), but the Concreteness Fading group achieved significantly higher learning gains than the Concrete group (Mdiff = 1.00, 95% CI [0.26, 1.75], p = 0.010). Hypothesis 1 was rejected. In Experiment Two, a Welch t-test showed that the difference in learning gains between the Physical and Virtual Concrete groups was not significant (Mdiff = 0.47, 95% CI [-0.47, 1.41], t(41.725) = 1.015, p = 0.316). Hypothesis 2 was rejected. In Experiment Three, an ANOVA test showed significant differences between groups (F(2,56) = 3.670, p = 0.032, η2 = 0.116). The Three-Step group achieved significantly higher learning gains than the Two-Step group (Mdiff = 0.99, 95% CI [0.61, 0.99] p = 0.037). Hypothesis 3 was accepted. The Five-Step group did not achieve significantly higher learning gains than the Three-Step group (Mdiff = 0.16, 95% CI [-0.78, 1.09], p = 0.738). Hypothesis 4 was rejected.</p
Contributing to a nascent public sphere: accounts of the Shura Council in Omani media after the 2011 Constitutional Amendments
No full textEMBARGOED PERMANENTLY</p
Accessibility in Local Authority Finance
No full textIn the past year, the crisis in local authority funding has become impossible to ignore. The stark increase in the number of councils issuing ‘section 114 notices’ between 2020 and 2024 has garnered significant media attention. Yet the lack of standard reporting requirements and formats has hindered efforts to understand how and why different councils are affected. This briefing is the outcome of a collaboration between Research for Action and the University of Sussex. It examines barriers to making local authority financial information accessible to members of the public and elected officials under conditions of austerity, strained council capacity, fragmented sources of finance, and lack of data standards. It is based on interviews with 26 councillors, council officers, academics, accountants, journalists and members of sector bodies.</p
Higher social class is associated with higher contextualized emotion recognition accuracy across cultures
No full textWe tested links between social status and emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) with participants from a diverse array of cultures and a new model and method of ERA, the Assessment of Contextualized Emotion (ACE), which incorporates social context and is linked to different types of social interaction across cultures. Participants from the Czech Republic (Study 1) and from 12 cultural groups in Europe, North America, and Asia (Study 2) completed a short version of the ACE, a self-construal scale, and the MacArthur Subjective Social Status (SSS) scale. In both studies, higher SSS was associated with more accuracy. In Study 2, this relationship was mediated by higher independent self-construal and moderated by countries’ long-term orientation and relational mobility. The findings suggest that the positive association between higher social class and emotion recognition accuracy is due to the use of agentic modes of socio-cognitive reasoning by higher status individuals. This raises new questions regarding the socio-cultural ecologies that afford this relationship.</p
Blockchain in IoT: applications, challenges, and future directions
No full textThis paper presents a comprehensive survey and analysis of the
applications, innovations, challenges, and future developments of blockchain
technology in IoT systems. The study uses a systematic review of current
literature to examine how blockchain can address issues such as scalability,
security, and interoperability within IoT networks. This work contributed on the
integration of blockchain with emerging IoT technologies, highlighting the
potential improvements in system efficiency, data integrity, and secure
communication. Its contributions also include the identification of scalability
solutions that can enhance throughput, reduce costs, and increase the overall
efficiency of blockchain and cryptocurrency networks. The paper also explores
the potential of blockchain to enable new applications across sectors such as
smart cities, healthcare, and supply chain management. It also explains several
practical perspectives on the current state of research on blockchain technology
and identifies future possible directions for further research and development.
Despite the promising advancements in smart contract, financial, healthcare
sectors, challenges remain, particularly in achieving full interoperability and
addressing privacy concerns. These limitations are discussed together with
recommendations for future research directions to overcome existing problems
and fully use the potential of blockchain in IoT ecosystems.</p
Empires, famine, and the significance of the political economy of colonialism: from the Mughal Empire to British colonial rule in India
No full textEmpires and nation states tend to be understood as two distinct types of political organization. The former are primarily associated with the premodern world, while the latter have come to be seen as political forms paradigmatic of the modern. While colonialism is a process associated with empires, it is more usually practised by modern nation states in their establishment of overseas empires. These empires are marked by a particular form of political economy—a colonial political economy—which determines the specificity of their political form as distinct from earlier empires. In this article, I examine the Mughal Empire of the premodern period in relation to the subsequent establishment of British colonial rule in India, and discuss the particularities of each in terms of the modes of political economy—moral and colonial—which were characteristic of their administration. In particular, I address the mobilization of the precepts of classical liberalism by the British, as demonstrated in the response of colonial administrators to incidences of dearth and famine, and contrast this with the modes of governance of the preceding Mughal Empire. The differences between them, I suggest, demonstrate that British colonial rule was a structurally distinct, modern type of empire.</p
Communication strategy on macro-and-micro traffic state in cooperative deep reinforcement learning for regional traffic signal control
No full textAdaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) has become a popular research topic in intelligent transportation systems. Regional Traffic Signal Control (RTSC) using the Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) technique has become a promising approach for ATSC due to its ability to achieve the optimum trade-off between scalability and optimality. Most existing RTSC approaches partition a traffic network into several disjoint regions, followed by applying centralized reinforcement learning techniques to each region. However, the pursuit of cooperation among RTSC agents still remains an open issue and no communication strategy for RTSC agents has been investigated. In this paper, we propose communication strategies to capture the correlation of micro-traffic states among lanes and the correlation of macro-traffic states among intersections. We first justify that the evolution equation of the RTSC process is Markovian via a system of store-and-forward queues. Next, based on the evolution equation, we propose two GAT-Aggregated (GA2) communication modules—GA2-Naive and GA2-Aug to extract both intra-region and inter-region correlations between macro and micro traffic states. While GA2-Naive only considers the movements at each intersection, GA2-Aug also considers the lane-changing behavior of vehicles. Two proposed communication modules are then aggregated into two existing novel RTSC frameworks—RegionLight and Regional-DRL. Experimental results demonstrate that both GA2-Naive and GA2-Aug effectively improve the performance of existing RTSC frameworks under both real and synthetic scenarios. Hyperparameter testing also reveals the robustness and potential of our communication modules in large-scale traffic networks.</p
Critiquing commitments to community and belonging in today’s law school: who does the labour?
No full textThis article offers a critique of commitments to community and belonging in today’s law school. Notwithstanding the importance of community and belonging, it argues that we need to challenge our conceptualisation of these terms as they relate to both students and staff, the frame within which “community and belonging” sit and, most importantly, our perceptions of who is responsible for ensuring a sense of community and belonging, especially for students. Reconceptualising these terms and challenging problematic assumptions about structures and responsibility could, it is argued, lend itself to a more equal distribution of the labour of community and belonging that we are all responsible for. Extracurricular and social activities play an important role in the fabric of our law schools, but commitments to community and belonging must sit more closely in, and as part of, the academic sphere so that everyone contributes, and everyone benefits.</p
Dynastic international relations: understanding race and the crisis of liberal order through Ibn Khaldun
No full textThis paper offers insights into the Crisis of Liberal International Order by combining Ibn Khaldun’s theory of change with scholarship on liberalism and race. We argue that the crisis emerges from the incongruence of two features of liberal order: a binding feature (or ‘assabiyya) of white supremacy and liberalism’s principles of equality. The crisis is an outcome of a normative political order that can no longer balance a material and discursive reality of racialised hierarchy with ideals of equality. The crisis cannot be reduced to bad leadership or a technical failure to enact liberal values. Instead, attempts to think beyond the crisis must acknowledge the incongruence between white supremacy and liberal equality. Through this diagnosis, we gesture towards the constructive use of ‘non-Western’ theory in the discipline of International Relations.</p