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Economic Warfare at Sea: International Sanctions and Iran’s Seizures of Merchant Ships
No full textSince 2019, there has been a notable increase in the harassment of maritime traffic and the seizures of merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. Considering the broader geopolitical context and tit-for-tat moves by Iran, it is evident that these actions are linked to the conflict between Iran and the West aiming to counter the international efforts to implement sanctions against Iran that were reinstated in 2018. Such incidents highlight key legal issues about the legal regime of the Strait of Hormuz and the legitimacy of the actions by Iran. This article argues that Iran’s actions in seizing merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz cannot be justified as lawful countermeasures and are more likely unlawful retaliatory acts by the Iranian State. It is also argued that Iran had no jurisdictional basis to assert control over these vessels. Consequently, the seizures are deemed unlawful under both international law and Iranian law
Testing the interrelationship between area deprivation and ethnic disparities in sentencing
Get PDFData Availability Statement: This work was undertaken in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Secure Research Service using data from ONS and other owners and does not imply the endorsement of the ONS or other data owners. Adherence to the ONS “Five Safes” was upheld to ensure privacy and confidentiality of the subjects recorded in the datasets that were used. The application process to access this data can be found here, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-first-criminal-courts-linked-data. The code used in our analysis is available here: https://osf.io/8kqj7/ .Supporting Information is available online at: https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/asap.12446#support-information-section .In the examination of sentencing disparities, hypotheses related to social class have been relatively overlooked compared to explanations centered on offenders' ethnicity. This oversight is regrettable as both factors often intertwine. In this study, we investigate the mediating and moderating effects between offenders' residential area deprivation and their ethnic background using administrative data encompassing all offences processed through the England and Wales Crown Court. Our findings reveal the following: (i) substantial ethnic disparities among drug offenders, but mostly non-existent across other offence categories; (ii) area deprivation does not explain away the observed ethnic disparities, but pronounced area disparities are found for breach and assault offenses, wherein offenders living in deprived areas are penalized compared to their more affluent counterparts; and (iii) ethnicity and area deprivation interact, but only for breach offenses.Economic and Social Research Council. Grant Number: ES/W00738X/1. This work was supported by the Secondary Data Analysis Initiative of the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Ref: ES/W00738X/1)
Large Language Model Based Multi-Objective Optimization for Integrated Sensing and Communications in UAV Networks
Get PDFThis letter investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, where multiple UAVs simultaneously sense the locations of ground users with radrads and provide communication services. To find the trade-off between communication and sensing (C&S) in the system, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) to maximize the total network utility and the localization Cramér-Rao bounds (CRB) of ground users, which jointly optimizes the deployment and power control of UAVs. Inspired by the huge potential of large language models (LLM) for prediction and inference, we propose an LLM-enabled decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (LEDMA) for solving the highly non-convex MOP. We first adopt a decomposition-based scheme to decompose the MOP into a series of optimization sub-problems. We second integrate LLMs as black-box search operators with MOP-specifically designed prompt engineering into the framework of MOEA to solve optimization sub-problems simultaneously. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed LEDMA can find the clear trade-off between C&S and outperforms baseline MOEAs in terms of obtained Pareto fronts and convergence
Party Finance. Not a Broken System, But Some Reforms Are Required
Get PDFElon Musk's rumoured donation of some £78 million to Reform UK has recently sparked off debate about party financing in the UK. Political party financing periodically appears on the political radar, with resulting calls for reform; some narrowly focussed, others calling for a complete overhaul, with some suggestions that the system is ‘broken’. It would be an error, however, to suggest that the entire system of party finance regulation is ‘broken’—reforms introduced in 2000 have actually been remarkably effective. But tweaks are required to ensure that it remains fit-for-purpose, including: additional regulation governing corporate donations; greater transparency related to donations made by citizens based overseas; and entrenching regular reviews of election spending limits. This short paper outlines the case for each of these proposed reforms
Dual-Domain deep prior guided sparse-view CT reconstruction with multi-scale fusion attention
Get PDFData availability:
The code for the DPMA framework is publicly available at https://github.com/jia-W-w/DPKA. The experimental datasets used in this study were derived from the AAPM Low Dose CT Grand Challenge https://www.aapm.org/grandchallenge/lowdosect/.Sparse-view CT reconstruction is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem, where insufficient projection data leads to degraded image quality with increased noise and artifacts. Recent deep learning approaches have shown promising results in CT reconstruction. However, existing methods often neglect projection data constraints and rely heavily on convolutional neural networks, resulting in limited feature extraction capabilities and inadequate adaptability. To address these limitations, we propose a Dual-domain deep Prior-guided Multi-scale fusion Attention (DPMA) model for sparse-view CT reconstruction, aiming to enhance reconstruction accuracy while ensuring data consistency and stability. First, we establish a residual regularization strategy that applies constraints on the difference between the prior image and target image, effectively integrating deep learning-based priors with model-based optimization. Second, we develop a multi-scale fusion attention mechanism that employs parallel pathways to simultaneously model global context, regional dependencies, and local details in a unified framework. Third, we incorporate a physics-informed consistency module based on range-null space decomposition to ensure adherence to projection data constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that DPMA achieves improved reconstruction quality compared to existing approaches, particularly in noise suppression, artifact reduction, and fine detail preservation.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U21 A20447, No. 62471077, and No. 62171073), the Project of the Central Government in Guidance of Local Science and Technology Development (No. 2024ZYD0270), and the Southwest Medical University Natural Science Foundation (No. 2023ZD004)
Disclosure dynamism: TCFD aligned climate claims of UK corporates
Get PDFThis research examines how climate claims by companies from the United Kingdom have changed over the years, especially when they became certain about the mandate of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD). We use text data from FTSE 100 companies for eight consecutive years, starting from 2016, and apply the robust ClimateBERT algorithm to analyse company statements related to climate claims, where they claim how they take care of climate in their business operations. Our findings show that the total number of corporate climate claims made has substantially increased since 2016, resulting in an overall improvement in corporate environmental claims till 2023. This coincides with the official announcement of the TCFD mandate.Our analyses also indicate that the proportion of claims in each report has increased over the years despite economic uncertainties. Additionally, the study findings reveal that even industries with minimal or negligible climate claims can still be associated with carbon-intensive activities. The complementary features of the legitimacy and stakeholder theories support our findings. By applying ClimateBERT, our research mitigates existing data challenges, yielding an efficient framework for analysing text through a robust natural language processing model. Our findings will assist policymakers in identifying necessary modifications to corporate climate disclosure and will help assess the impact of the Taskforce intervention on climate-related financial disclosure
Accuracy in Private Company Financial Reporting for Prediction of Future Cash Flow
Get PDFJEL classification: C53, L32, M41, M48.UK and European private companies follow less stringent reporting standards compared to public ones, with simpler measurement rules. While extensive research focuses on public companies, the impact of these standards on private firms remains underexplored. Our study examines prediction errors using approximately 1.5 million observations of UK private companies for the period from 2006 to 2022, covering a wide range of economic conditions. We distinguish between micro-sized, small, medium-sized, and large private companies. For micro- and small firms, prediction errors for future cash flow are only slightly larger than those of public companies, supporting the European Union 2013 directive to minimize reporting burdens on small businesses. However, medium-sized and large private companies exhibit errors more than double those of public firms, indicating less informative disclosures. These results are robust in predicting beyond the next period and in times when financial distress is high, and therefore will be useful to both investors and creditors
Towards a better understanding of the interrelationship between dynamic capabilities and international Entrepreneurship
No full textThe dynamic capabilities view (DCV) and international entrepreneurship perspective (IEP) are major, relatively recent advances in international business (IB), strategy, and entrepreneurship. Despite their different disciplinary backgrounds—DCV in evolutionary economics and the resource-based view and the IEP in entrepreneurship and marketing—they share many themes and ideas in common, which have only recently started being acknowledged. In this article, we explore the contribution of, and interrelationship between, the two approaches, their limitations and scope for further development. Key insights include that the DCV helps complement IEP in terms of its focus on value co-creation and the requisite reconfiguration of resources to help bring about value capture. In turn, IEP complements DCV in terms of its exploration of the nature of opportunities and the entrepreneurial capabilities to sense these, and in terms of providing supporting evidence about these capabilities
Anatomy of a mass resignation: moral entrepreneurship and academic outsiders within
Get PDFPurpose:
The purpose of this viewpoint is to examine the claims made in the resignation letter and global petition surrounding the mass resignation of editorial members from the journal Gender, Work and Organization. It aims to shed light on the overlooked voices that criticized the boycott and to reflect on how the protest, while addressing legitimate concerns, inadvertently marginalized early-career and minoritized scholars, undermining principles of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).
Design/methodology/approach:
The authors adopted a reflexive methodology, engaging with a globally diverse set of junior, mid-career and senior scholars to gather their insights on the unfolding events. By intentionally seeking out those critical of the resignation, the authors emphasized their positionality as scholars committed to fostering inclusivity and fairness. They positioned themselves against the instrumentalization of social justice rhetoric, critiquing how it disproportionately impacted vulnerable academic communities.
Findings:
The viewpoint highlights how the mass resignation and academic boycott of Gender, Work and Organization failed to account for its adverse effects on early-career and marginalized scholars, missing opportunities for feminist care and solidarity. It argues that the boycott, while signalling virtue, had a polarizing impact and overlooked key principles of EDI, leading to unintended negative consequences.
Originality/value:
The originality of this viewpoint lies in its focus on the often-unheard voices of scholars who opposed the mass resignation and academic boycott of Gender, Work and Organization, offering a counter-narrative to the widely publicized protest. Its value comes from critically examining how actions intended to promote social justice and equality can inadvertently harm early-career and marginalized scholars. By spotlighting these complexities and challenging the virtue signalling behind the boycott, the critique contributes to ongoing discussions on the ethical responsibilities of academic activism, solidarity and inclusivity in feminist scholarship
Transition from child to adult health services for young people with cerebral palsy in Ireland; implications from a mixed-methods study
Get PDFData availability:
Underlying data:
Zenodo: Ryan J. Transition to adult services experienced by young people with cerebral palsy: A cross-sectional study (1.0) [Data set]. 2022. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.663648132.
This project contains the following underlying data:
“Transition_data”; quantitative data collected from surveys
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Additional data that cannot be shared:
Data from interviews with participants cannot be sufficiently de-identified and participants did not give written consent for future use of their data. Therefore, supporting data is not available on request.
Extended data:
Zenodo: Ryan J. Transition to adult services experienced by young people with cerebral palsy: A cross-sectional study (1.0) [Data set]. 2022 http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.663648134.
This project contains the following extended data:
“metadata_v1”; questions and response options included in the questionnaires
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Zenodo: Ryan, J (2024). Transition from child to adult health services for young people with cerebral palsy in Ireland; implications from a mixed-methods study: Extended data. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1256798435
This project contains the following extended data:
GRAMMS; Good Reporting of A Mixed Methods Study checklist
Table S1 Description of key transition practices and indicative interview questions
Table S2 Convergence coding matrix displaying quantitative findings and qualitative findings
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Background:
Poor transition from child- to adult-oriented healthcare may lead to negative outcomes and dissatisfaction with services in adulthood. The aim of the study was to examine how transition is provided to and experienced by young people with cerebral palsy in Ireland. This report provides integrated quantitative and qualitative findings and implications based on the totality of knowledge generated.
Methods:
A convergent parallel mixed-methods study was conducted. Data were collected from people with cerebral palsy aged 16–22 years, parents, and health professionals using surveys and semi-structured interviews, which were both informed by a framework of nine key transition practices. Quantitative finding from the surveys and qualitative findings from interviews were integrated at the interpretation stage of the research using integration through joint displays. Implications were developed through discussions with health professionals, young people, and parents.
Results:
Surveys were completed by 75 young people/parents and 108 health professionals. Interviews were conducted with 13 young people, 14 parents, and 27 health professionals. There was complementarity between quantitative and qualitative findings indicating lack of a named worker, limited information provision, insufficient self-management support, no opportunity to meet the adult team, limited contact with the general practitioner, and no opportunity for attending formal life skills training. There was dissonance between quantitative and qualitative findings regarding appropriate level of parental involvement. Quantitative findings identified limited promotion of health self-efficacy and a lack of senior managers responsible for transition. These practices were not described in the qualitative findings.
Conclusion:
Implications of integrated findings include the need for a standardised transition pathway, intentional actions to enable parents and young people to adapt to changing roles, provision of information in a collaborative and phased approach, a common understanding of self-management between young people, parents and health professionals, and the need to involve general practitioners in transition.This research was funded by the Health Research Board and the Central Remedial Clinic (no. APA-2019-004)
Data sources:
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