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Self, communitarian self, and personhood: a theoretical account of ‘non-compliance’ in corporate governance in Africa
Full text linkThis paper introduces a new theoretical framework that opens significant opportunities for advancing accounting research in Africa and other Majority World contexts. Critical accounting research has long shown that governance reforms rooted in Anglo-American traditions (e.g. individualism, self-interest, and calculative rationality) often travel poorly to the Majority World contexts, yet explanations typically focus on institutional weakness or strategic resistance. Drawing on Gyekye’s (1978, 1987/1995, 1997) conception of personhood, which understands agency as relational, morally constituted, and communally accountable, we argue that such explanations overlook a deeper ontological dissonance between Western governance assumptions and Indigenous understandings of the self. Using evidence from corporate governance practices in Kenya, the paper shows how actors enact agency in ways that are intelligible within communitarian moral frameworks but framed as ‘non-compliance’ through the dominant Anglo-American governance lens. Rather than framing these practices as governance deficits, we demonstrate how they reflect ontologically grounded enactments of moral agency and, in some cases, explicit critiques of the imported corporate governance prescriptions. The paper contributes to accounting scholarship by rethinking agency, legitimacy, and governance beyond universalist framing by centring Indigenous conceptions of personhood as generative theoretical resources
Invisible but present: Black Southern African social workers’ experiences of working in children’s services in England
Full text linkThe thesis reports on a practitioner-initiated practice-near research study investigating the experiences of Black social workers who have migrated from the Southern African region to England and practice in children’s services settings. The study involved a qualitative psychosocial methodology, with a total of 14 in-depth interviews and a focus group being completed. The seven social workers who participated in this study spent their formative years in the Southern African Development Community region. Analysis of the interview accounts revealed multitudinous challenges linked to discriminatory practices, inequalities in workload management and everyday incivilities and microaggressions. These challenges compounded other adversities experienced as a Black African migrant professional and were reflected in a personal subjective experience of feeling isolated, unsupported and rejected. Additionally, for the participants, migration was found to be as much a psychological experience as it was physical and cultural, with upbringing and childhood experiences significant in shaping how social work was embraced as a vocation. Through the analysis, the thesis contributes to the wider professional field via insights it affords into the journeys and personal and professional identities of Black Southern African social workers practising in English children’s services. It focuses on how members of this community navigate power dynamics and in organisations, support structures and the social and emotional demands of frontline child and family social work. This has implications for the way in which anti-racist supervision and leadership are conceptualised and further understanding of the influence of postcolonial histories on workplace relationships, foregrounding ground-shifting approaches to changing practice
Priming for power: evaluating warm-up protocols and sprint performance in cycling
Full text linkWarm-ups are employed to elevate muscular temperature prior to an exercise task, enhancing performance and reducing injury risk. Increases in muscular temperature enhances performance by facilitating an increase in blood flow to the respiring tissues, faster nerve conduction velocity, higher enzymatic activity, and enhanced metabolic responses. Two types of warm-ups exist, increasing muscle temperature differently: Passive warm-ups via external means, and active warm-ups through exercise. In BMX racing, where scientific literature is sparse, no studies have established warm-up strategies to optimise BMX performance. To begin to address this gap, a systematic review examined the effects of warm-up routines on ≤ 30 s sprint cycling performance, identifying warm-up intensity, duration, and recovery period between the warm-up and exercise task as critical factors influencing sprint performance. However, intensity definition varied, and cadence, a known determinant of BMX performance was a significant omission from the literature included. To extend these findings, a laboratory-based experimental study explored whether the manipulation of cadence during a sprint-based warm-up could influence subsequent 30 s Wingate performance following a 30-minute recovery, reflecting BMX race conditions. Twelve male recreational cyclists completed warm-ups under different cadence conditions, with blood lactate, skin temperature, energy system contributions, resting gas exchange, and Wingate performance assessed. Cadence manipulation successfully elicited intensity variation; however, following a 30-minute recovery, any performance benefits had dissipated, with no significant differences observed between conditions. These findings suggest that maintaining thermal and neuromuscular readiness across prolonged recovery may require a stronger warm-up stimulus, supported by direct markers of readiness and carefully timed before performance
Post-Quantum Protected Federated Learning with Explainable and Adaptive Intelligence for Smart City Transportation
No full textExisting AI-powered Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have limitations in scalability, privacy, and vulnerability to cyberattacks, as well as a lack of transparency in decision-making. In this work, we present a hybrid framework based on Post-Quantum-protected Federated Learning, a lightweight CNN-Transformer model, LIME explanations, and a local model, achieving a loss of 0.02% and a validation accuracy of 98%. At the boundary, congestion is determined using CityFlowV2 traffic camera feeds, which are based on Federated Learning, a distributed training framework that does not require sharing raw data, and the architecture is privacy-respectful. Reinforcement learning trained on OpenStreetMap road networks in Los Angeles coordinates rerouting plans in a simulated environment at the global level, and SHAP provides an explanation of the decision. The Federated aggregation retained accuracy at the zone level, exceeding 97%. Furthermore, this affirms its strength. CRYSTALS-Kyber is used to encrypt V2I and V2V communications, ensuring they are resistant to attacks in the quantum era
Commercial fishing amplifies impacts of increasing temperature on predator-prey interactions in marine ecosystems
Full text linkPredator-prey interactions determine food web structure, energy flux, and ecosystem stability. Increasing temperatures and commercial fishing both alter body size distributions that underpin predator-prey interactions, but empirical evidence of their individual and combined effects is limited. We study how the predator to prey body mass ratio (PPMR) changes as a function of temperature and fishing effort in over 50,000 predator stomachs collected across the Northeast Atlantic over 35 years. PPMR increases with temperature, an effect that is exacerbated by greater fishing effort, driven by intraspecific decreases in prey body mass in heavily fished areas. To compensate for smaller prey (both within and across species) in warmer waters and areas of high fishing, predators target the largest prey available to them, but this is insufficient to alter the community-wide increase in PPMR. Higher PPMR is associated with weaker trophic interactions that dampen strong oscillatory dynamics but could also reduce energy transfer efficiency within ecosystems, both of which can affect ecosystem stability. These results could help underpin ecosystem-based management and sustainable fisheries by providing estimates of how future climate warming might interact with fishing to affect energy flux through marine food webs
Strongly Typed Cartesian Genetic Programming and its applications
Full text linkGenetic Programming (GP) and its graph-based variant, Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP), have proved highly effective machine-learning frameworks that can evolve human-readable programs that can match or exceed hand-crafted solutions across many tasks. Strongly Typed Cartesian Genetic Programming (ST–CGP) extends CGP by assigning explicit data-types to every input, output and operator, and allowing features to have varying arities. These type constraints prune infeasible regions of the search space while preserving CGP’s directed-acyclic-graph representation and single-row genome, leading to faster, semantically correct evolution. Unlike standard CGP, ST–CGP also introduces two forms of crossover—full two-point recombination and “genetic rewiring”—providing a second source of variation that is rarely available in conventional CGP frameworks. Because operators are typed, ST–CGP can be rapidly retargeted: numeric, boolean and higher-level domain primitives (e.g. OpenCV filters) can coexist in a single run, enabling one framework to span diverse problem domains. This versatility is illustrated in this thesis by three application areas. In computer vision, ST–CGP evolved segmentation, detection and classification pipelines that solved benchmark object-sorting problems and achieved convolutional-neural-network-level accuracy on a 27,000-image malaria-cell dataset with far smaller training sets and CPU-only resources. In agriculture, it classified field parcels into low, high and reference yield zones using laboratory soil measurements with competitive accuracy and markedly low variance relative to traditional models. Finally, it learned predictive models mapping five-minute VOC gas “fingerprints” from an electronic-nose sensor to multiple soil health indicators, delivering laboratory-grade predictions, an application which has now been adopted by UK agronomists in commercial practice. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the combination of strong typing, an enriched operator palette and novel crossover elevates CGP to a general-purpose, interpretable evolutionary programming system capable of tackling data-rich tasks from medical imaging to environmental sensing within a single unified framework
CEOs’ Early-Life Disaster Experiences and Corporate Hedging Activities
Full text linkWe study how traumatic experiences in childhood influence CEOs’ risk preferences and corporate financial hedging decisions. Based on a sample of U.S. public firms from 1993 to 2020, we document a positive relation between CEOs’ early-life disaster experiences and the likelihood of firms using financial derivatives. We also find that the interactive impact of disaster experiences and financial hedging on firm value is negative, suggesting that early-life disaster experiences increase the gap between CEOs’ and shareholders’ risk preferences, potentially leading to conflicts of interest. Furthermore, our cross-sectional analysis shows that the positive relation between disaster experiences and financial hedging is more pronounced in firms with weaker corporate governance, fewer financial constraints, and higher firm-specific risk. Our findings suggest that corporate boards and regulators should maintain active oversight of corporate risk management practices, especially when early-life disaster experiences are known to influence a CEO’s risk preferences
Meaning maintenance drives science rejection
Full text linkCurrently, ideologically-motivated discourses are actively undermining perceived value of science, with evidence-based policy-making being increasingly replaced with antiscience agendas shaped by political, spiritual, or conspiratorial ideologies. We propose that motivated science rejection is driven by compensatory mechanisms serving to maintain a coherent understanding of reality when this understanding conflicts with science. Drawing on the meaning maintenance model and the assumption of fluid compensation—any belief framework can be replaced with another to restore meaning—we argue that when science violates meaning, it is rejected in favour of an alternative framework of ideological beliefs, regardless of their epistemic validity. Interventions that align science with meaning-maintenance needs to minimise compensatory responses may prove promising in reducing science rejection
Solidarity as a Fundamental Principle of EU Law
No full textThis article examines the principle of solidarity in the EU legal order by tracing the evolving contours of its meaning and operation in recent and emerging jurisprudence. It argues that interpreting solidarity through the lens of its underlying drivers (functional, axiological and identity based) offers a conceptually coherent account of its normative scope and boundaries. Solidarity has largely assumed an instrumental character, oriented towards securing the effective operation and systemic stability of the Union and its legal architecture. Yet the principle now stands at a transformative juncture, where a functional rationale no longer suffices to explain how it takes effect. Through instances that defy a purely instrumental logic, the article reconceptualises solidarity as a bearer of shared values and collective identity. This reframing is not only a matter of candour but indispensable for conceptual clarity and for engaging more directly with the constitutional stakes of sovereignty and belonging
Age is just a number: Clustering gait and functional measures.
Full text linkObjective: As we age, we walk slower, but it remains unclear whether this is consistent at an individual level. Current clinical assessment of function assumes movement deficits with older age, and clinical norms are linked to decades or specific age stratifications such as “old” or “oldest-old”. Current approaches stratifying by age may hide trends of higher and lower functioning individuals within each age bracket. Therefore, our aim was to cluster spatiotemporal data, from the 1000 Norms Project, to understand if patterns of function could be identified without using age as a factor. Methods: The 1000 Norms Project, a cross-sectional, observational study, collected gait, functional performance, and self-reported health data (participants (n = 695) aged 18–92 years). Spatiotemporal and functional data were clustered, after rendering the parameters dimensionless. Results: Three clusters were identified (n = 277, 208, 210). Although age significantly differed between clusters, each showed a broad range (e.g. 20–92 years). Additionally, walking speed (Froude number) did not differ between clusters, often used to separate by age. Our clusters defined 3 groups, ‘higher functioning’, ‘age average’ and ‘cautious gait’, whose spatiotemporal, functional performance, strength and quality of life measures vastly differed, independent of walking speed and including a wide range of ages. Conclusion: Our analysis suggests that age should not be used to separate individuals into groups, and that our assumption of “age matters” may not be relevant when determining true functional movement ability. Further work is needed to understand normal senescence, true negative loss, and reversible loss within these functionally different groups