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Towards a critical decolonial turn/theory:beyond the binary of the West versus Africa
No full textAs writing on decolonisation in African Studies has surged, efforts to avoid the concept becoming a mere metaphor, bandwagon, ideological trope, or mantra have grown, with scholars emphasising decolonial theory's ongoing relevance to the emancipation of formerly colonised Africans. This essay argues that to achieve its emancipatory goals, decolonial theory and intended praxes must re-centre the everyday realities of African societies. Recentring Africans is needed to move beyond Global North versus Africa as the ontological site for decolonisation. Recentring African societies has important epistemological and methodological implications for recentring African agency to make the decolonial project less reactionary and more proactive. I propose “post-independence” as an approach to decolonisation that offers descriptive and prescriptive means to locate the (im)material responsibilities of Africans in recentring their history. Post-independence allows a reimagining of how to undo the effects of colonialism by presenting colonialism as an episodic moment in Africa's long history.</p
Selecting the 'best'? Competing dimensions of politician quality in the developing world
No full textEvidence suggests that politicians in advanced democracies are positively selected on characteristics relevant to their suitability for political office. Whereas stereotypes abound, much less is known about the quality of politicians in developing countries. Drawing on unique experimental and survey data on village-level politicians in West Bengal, India, we find some evidence of positive selection into office: elected politicians are more educated, motivated, and have greater integrity than their constituents. However, they also have lower cognitive ability and are more likely to come from politically networked families. Comparing first-timers with re-elected politicians, we observe that experienced politicians display somewhat more political knowledge and motivation than their inexperienced peers, but are also more likely to be wealthy and male. Our findings demonstrate that conclusions about politician quality depend critically on measurement choices and that there may be competing dimensions of politician quality in the developing world.</p
Thumb:A forensic automation framework leveraging MLLMs and OCR on Android device
No full textThe forensic of Android devices is challenging due to automated thumbnail generation by applications and the operating system, complicating attribution to specific user actions. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a forensic framework, Thumb, which performs real-time experiments on physical Android devices. Thumb integrates multimodal large language models (MLLM) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to capture on-screen information and simulate user interactions, while extracting data from internal storage to monitor changes in cached and thumbnail files. A proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates the framework's accuracy across various applications, highlighting its potential to simplify Android forensic analysis. However, current MLLM limitations and the framework's structure pose challenges in complex scenarios and detailed data analysis.</p
Audit committee financial expertise, equity compensation and employee whistleblowing
No full textMotivated by the importance of effective oversight in mitigating the risks of employee external whistleblowing, this study investigates the effect of audit committee financial expertise and equity compensation on employee external whistleblowing. Drawing on theories of motivated reasoning and overconfidence, I propose that while audit committee financial expertise could enhance oversight, higher equity compensation can trigger cognitive biases that lead audit committee members to overestimate their monitoring effectiveness and discount or overlook the risks in internal reports of wrongdoing, increasing employee external whistleblowing. Using a sample of U.S. listed firms involved in misconduct, I find that greater audit committee financial expertise is associated with lower levels of employee external whistleblowing when audit committee equity compensation is low, but with higher levels of employee external whistleblowing when equity compensation is high. These findings suggest that audit committee equity compensation may undermine the benefits of financial expertise, offering new insights into the unintended consequences of governance and compensation practices.</p
Time-varying pareto optimal risk sharing for annuities
No full textThis paper investigates time-varying risk sharing between annuity buyer and provider. It explores Pareto optimal (PO) and viable Pareto optimal (VPO) risk-sharing designs, in which the share of the reserve deviation transferred to the policyholder varies over time. The optimization problem, based on a weighted average of mean-variance preferences, results in a complex quartic objective function. Such optimization problems are difficult to solve, and checking their convexity is known to be NP-hard. A heuristic method is introduced to simplify the problem, providing a closed-form solution that closely approximates the numerical results. The paper also highlights factors influencing the existence of VPO designs, with age playing a critical role, thereby suggesting the suitability of these designs as retirement products.</p
Silence and degrees of appraisal confusion:a barometer for the strength of teacher-student relationships
No full textThis study investigates the long-term emotional impact of student silence on non-Japanese EFL teachers, focusing on one expatriate teacher in Japan (Elliott). Utilizing a model that includes appraisal confusion and recursive feedback loops, the research explores how teachers emotionally process silence in ambiguous relational contexts. Event-based sampling documented real-time emotional responses to silence, revealing patterns in teacher-student interactions. Key findings indicate that (1) prolonged silence triggered hesitation, frustration, and relational insecurity; (2) the lack of verbal and nonverbal cues led to persistent appraisal confusion; and (3) unresolved silent incidents, compounded by breaches of trust, culminated in emotional exhaustion. Silence operated as a barometer of teacher-student relational strength—where mutual understanding failed, emotional strain intensified. These findings underscore the emotional labor involved in interpreting silence in high-silence EFL contexts such as Japan, where ambiguity often gives rise to perceptions of disengagement, leaving teachers vulnerable to sustained emotional fatigue
How do people perceive media-reported risks:risk networks and profiles of segments
No full textIndividuals’ perceptions of and responses to different risk sources are often intercorrelated, particularly for risks belonging to the same domain such as health or finance. However, less is known about the nature of the interconnections of risk perceptions across domains and individual differences in the interconnection patterns. This study examined the perceptions of 13 major media-reported risks and their interconnection patterns across demographic groups. The study also explored whether the perceptions were associated with different population profiles. The study involved 2124 residents in Singapore who completed a cross-sectional survey study in 2023. Network analyses revealed that participants’ risk perceptions clustered based on risk domains. The clustering pattern was not associated with the prevalence of experienced harm from the risks for the sampled population. The clustering patterns were mostly consistent across risk targets—who is at risk, that is, oneself or people in Singapore, genders, and age groups. Furthermore, latent profile analysis identified three classes (Invariant Risk Non-Alert, Selective Risk Alert, and Invariant Risk Alert) with distinct risk perception profiles, which were significantly different in terms of their sociodemographic characteristics. These latent profile results suggest that individuals’ overall risk sensitivity is driven more by personal attributes than by the characteristics of the risks. The findings of this study offer potential implications for the design of risk communication strategies in Singapore. This study also provides insights for cross-country research on risk perception across different domains.</p
The staging of AI:exploring perspectives about generative AI, creativity and education
No full textIn this article we investigate the role of generative AI in education with a focus on creativity, metaphorically utilising relevant features from Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre as part of a participatory qualitative inquiry. Presenting three distinct perspectives— Gatekeeper, Evangelist, and Diplomat—our article explores emotional and intellectual responses to AI and creativity, utilising theatrical forms to offer personal insights about the intricate balance between AI’s benefits and risks. Adopting a post-qualitative approach, we avoid forced consensus, instead weaving individual viewpoints with a reflective commentary that seeks to elucidate and critically engage with the ideas presented. The adoption of Forum Theatre as a metaphor for our inquiry serves to deepen our understanding of AI’s transformative potential in educational settings and highlights the need for a collaborative, dialogic and critical approach to AI in education in a time of global change, one that honours the diversity of opinions in this evolving domain.</p
Towards Modern and Modular SAT for LCG
No full textLazy Clause Generation (LCG) is an architecture for building Constraint Programming (CP) solvers using an underlying Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) engine. The CP propagation engine lazily creates clauses that define the integer variables and impose problem restrictions. The SAT engine uses the clausal model to reason and search, including, crucially, the generation of nogoods. However, while SAT solving has made significant advances recently, the underlying SAT technology in most LCG solvers has largely remained the same. Using a new interface to SAT engines, IPASIR-UP, we can construct an LCG solver which can swap out the underlying SAT engine with any that supports the interface. This new approach means we need to revisit many of the design and engineering decisions for LCG solvers, to take maximum advantage of a better underlying SAT engine while adhering to the restrictions of the interface. In this paper, we explore the possibilities and challenges of using IPASIR-UP for LCG, showing that it can be used to create a highly competitive solver.</p
2025 Australian Youth Barometer:Understanding Young People in Australia Today
No full textThe 2025 Australian Youth Barometer is a survey of more than 520 young Australians aged 18–24, and includes interviews with 30 more, about their experiences with the economy, work, education, health and wellbeing, relationships and participation in civic life. Among these topics, themes emerge: the impact of technology and the role of social media, feelings of belonging and exclusion, financial security (including housing and food insecurity) and the need for governments to offer more support