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Repair, Regenerate, Refuture : Enacting Regenerative Socio-technical Transitions through Participatory Design Futuring
No full textSocietyโs adoption of digital technologies is rapidly accelerating environmental and civic problems including electronic waste, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. The โspeculative turnโ across design and technology research and practice over the past decade has foregrounded Speculative Design as an approach which practitioners can employ to better negotiate such impacts. Yet, this methodโs capacity to facilitate real-world sustainable change beyond its intellectual origins can increasingly be questioned. To this end, this paper outlines how, in order to engender more tangible and pluriversal sustainable impact, this research repositioned speculative practice as part of an applied regenerative design-innovation process. The paper describes how the researcher worked in collaboration with partner The Making Rooms, a UK community makerspace, to combine Participatory Speculative Design and More-than-Human Design methods. This unified approach enabled the prototyping and enacting of regenerative pathways that increase community-driven repair and reuse of โsmartโ Internet of Things (IoT) devices like phones, speakers, and wearables. Reflecting upon the insights generated and boundary artefacts co-crafted during this 4-year โEqual-IoTโ design process, the paper puts forward a novel framework for enacting Regenerative Socio-technical Transitions with, and for, local communities. Contributing to Circular Economy and Net Zero discourse, the paper showcases how the framework can help practitioners and stakeholders to begin to work together to regeneratively refuture the unsustainable dependences between human, ecological and technological actors across scales โ today, for tomorrow
Gender and intersecting inequalities in secondary education : Exploring the experiences and outcomes of girls in secondary schools in post-conflict Sierra Leone
Get PDFThis study offers novel insights into the interplay between gender, violence, and education in the post-conflict context of Sierra Leone. It focuses on the gendered processes and conditions of learning, including the content of what and how girls learn, and gives an account of how schooling experiences produce and reproduce inequalities in secondary education. This study also explores how gender regimes in these schools regulate and construct gender identities. An intersectional lens is employed to provide a more comprehensive understanding of social identities in schools, offering analytical depth for examining the interactions of these identities in sustaining and promoting gender-differentiated schooling experiences and learning outcomes in secondary education in the country. Through a qualitative ethnographic case study methodology, the study draws on fifty (50) individual semi-structured interviews, ten (10) focus group discussions, and sixty (60) classroom observations in four (4) secondary schools to uncover how girls negotiate intersectional identities and are affected by them. This multi-site qualitative research offers school-specific analysis while maintaining broader applicability across the four sites. The rich qualitative data indicate the pervasive and inequitable everyday gender practices within these four schools and illustrate how these contribute to exacerbating inequalities in secondary education. In particular, the findings uncover the complex ways gender intersects with other social inequalities - such as social class, ethic-traditions, sexuality and location to produce highly gendered and differentiated experiences which ultimately influence girls' performance, retention, and attainment. Finally, the study identifies implications for educational practitioners and policymakers with respect to recognising societal factors, such as early marriage and teenage pregnancy, on girls' educational outcomes, especially in a post-conflict context like Sierra Leon
Diabetic Socks : A Systematic Review of the Literature and Commercially Available Products
Get PDFAims: In recent years, various diabetic socks have been developed and introduced to help prevent diabetes related foot ulcers (DFUs). However, the question of which type of sock is most suitable for individuals with diabetes has not been adequately addressed. This review systematically explores the current evidence regarding the performance and structural properties of diabetic socks, along with a narrative analysis of commercial socks. Methods: Four databases, including Web of Science, PubMed/Medline, CINAHL (EBSCO), and Google Scholar, were examined, resulting in the selection of nine articles. Methodological quality of the clinical trials was assessed using the Downs and Black tool. Additionally, 17 commercially available socks were selected for analysis. Results: Among the selected articles, four were clinical trials, two mixedโdesign studies, and three laboratoryโbased investigations. The clinical studies exhibited poor quality and were unable to demonstrate significant outcomes. Laboratoryโbased studies indicated that functional finishes on yarns could prevent microbial growth and that the blend of fibres and the structure of the socks significantly affect the overall performance. Commercially available socks reporting new types of fibres lack clinical evidence to support their claims, complicating the understanding of their performance in people with diabetes. Conclusions: Current evidence regarding the structure and function of diabetic socks is limited, with clinical trials characterised by poor methodological quality. Technical suggestions for diabetic sock design are based on limited evidence from laboratoryโbased studies, highlighting gaps in the literature. This review highlights the need for further investigation to establish the evidence base for diabetic socks in supporting diabetic foot care
Advances in portfolio selection and asset pricing in honor of Harry Markowitz
Get PDFThis paper introduces the Special Issue of The European Journal of Finance that seeks to honor the seminal contributions of Harry Markowitz to modern portfolio theory. Reflecting the fact that Markowitzโs work is particularly influential, the articles in this special issue tackle a wide range of research questions. In summarizing these articles, we group them into three broad topics: (1) estimation of optimal portfolios; (2) portfolio selection beyond the meanโvariance model; and (3) asset pricing implications of equilibrium models of portfolio selection. We also provide a brief discussion of possible directions for future research
A tropical approach to rigidity : Counting realisations of frameworks
Get PDFA realisation of a graph in the plane as a barโjoint framework is rigid if there are finitely many other realisations, up to isometries, with the same edge lengths. Each of these finitely many realisations can be seen as a solution to a system of quadratic equations prescribing the distances between pairs of points. For generic realisations, the size of the solution set depends only on the underlying graph so long as we allow for complex solutions. We provide a characterisation of the realisation number โ that is the cardinality of this complex solution set โ of a minimally rigid graph. Our characterisation uses tropical geometry to express the realisation number as an intersection of Bergman fans of the graphic matroid. As a consequence, we derive a combinatorial upper bound on the realisation number involving the Tutte polynomial. Moreover, we provide computational evidence that our upper bound is usually an improvement on the mixed volume bound
PCL-BPRE : privacy-preserving certificateless-based broadcast proxy re-encryption for data sharing in cloud-based IIoT
No full textWith the rapid advancement of industrial automation and intelligent manufacturing, an increasing volume of sensing data generated by Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices is being transmitted to cloud platforms. Identity-based broadcast proxy re-encryption (IB-BPRE), as an efficient cryptographic mechanism, has been deployed in IIoT data-sharing environments. However, existing IB-BPRE schemes are susceptible to identity privacy breaches of data recipients. Furthermore, IIoT devices are structurally vulnerable to key escrow compromises resulting from the exposure of encrypted key. To mitigate these critical security challenges, we propose a privacy-preserving certificateless-based broadcast proxy re-encryption scheme for data sharing in cloud-based IIoT, and formally prove its security against chosen ciphertext attacks under the random oracle model. The PCL-BPRE scheme employs a Lagrange interpolation polynomial to obfuscate the identity information of data receivers. Additionally, it integrates certificateless encryption to eliminate the inherent key escrow dependency in IB-BPRE, thereby preventing unauthorized disclosure of private keys in the event of a compromised key generation center. Experimental results validate that the proposed scheme achieves both strong practical feasibility and computational efficiency in IIoT data-sharing
Inventory control and picking behavior : The roles of sustainability messages and price discounts
No full textCustomer picking behavior plays an important role in retail inventory management. Inventory models often distinguish between picking the freshest items, i.e., last-in-first-out (LIFO), or oldest items first, i.e., first-in-first-out (FIFO). We analyze how picking behavior affects inventory management, and how sustainability messages and price discounts can change picking behavior to increase sales of earlier expiring items and reduce food waste. By conducting an online experiment, we find that: (1) sustainability messages induce more subjects to buy earlier expiring items; (2) higher price discounts increase sales of earlier expiring items; and (3) some subjects do not change their behavior, or crowd out with price discounts. Understanding how different customer types respond to incentives helps retailers offer them only to customers who most likely respond with buying expiring items. We evaluate the effect of these findings on inventories using a periodic review model for perishable items with age-dependent lifetimes. Assuming Poisson and Negative Binomial demand in our numerical study, we find that the retailerโs costs may be up to 30.25% lower under pure FIFO compared to pure LIFO demand. We estimate the cost savings if a retailer nudges customers to change their picking behavior and analyze different FIFO-LIFO splits, which is more realistic than the retailer assuming pure FIFO or LIFO picking behavior. Furthermore, we show that misspecification of the FIFO-LIFO split has a notable effect on inventory costs, in-stock probability and waste, and that the retailer should rather slightly overestimate FIFO than LIFO if actual picking behavior is unknown
