62463 research outputs found
Sort by
Mapping Circular Economy strategies in the construction sector: impact, solutions and gaps
No full textThe construction sector is a major contributor to global resource consumption and environmental degradation. Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as a transformative framework for sustainable construction, promoting resource efficiency, waste reduction, and regenerative practices. To enable advancement, this study conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of 384 peer-reviewed articles to map CE strategies in construction, assess their impacts, identify solutions, and highlight research gaps. The review reveals a growing academic interest in CE, yet the practical implementation of CE strategies remains limited. The thematic analysis categorised CE impacts under the three pillars of sustainability: economic (e.g., cost savings, market innovation), environmental (e.g., waste minimisation, decarbonisation), and social (e.g., job creation, stakeholder engagement). Solutions identified were synthesised into four overarching categories: Foundational Enablers, Design and Planning, Implementation, and Innovation and Knowledge-Building Solutions. Despite promising developments in CE in the construction context, the study identifies critical gaps: limited empirical validation, underexplored social impacts, fragmented implementation frameworks, and insufficient integration of digital technologies. The dominance of recycling over more sustainable strategies like reduction and reuse also reflects a partial transition toward circularity in the construction sector. The paper calls for interdisciplinary research, harmonised metrics, and collaborative ecosystems to advance CE adoption in the construction sector. By offering a comprehensive synthesis of CE strategies, impacts, and gaps, this study provides actionable insights for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders. It advocates for a systemic shift toward regenerative, low-carbon, and resource-efficient construction practices, aligning CE principles with broader sustainability goals.</p
Understanding housing insecurity: a qualitative study exploring the perspectives of families and professional practitioners in England
No full textLike many high-income countries, England is experiencing a housing crisis, where conditions around housing availability and affordability are contributing to housing insecurity. Housing insecurity can be understood as experiencing, or being at risk of, forced and multiple housing moves. Our study explores families’ experiences and navigation of housing insecurity, drawing on the perspectives of families and professional practitioners. We undertook 78 interviews with 81 participants (43 practitioners involved in housing support, and 38 parents and children who had experienced housing insecurity). Data analysis generated three themes which provide insight into families’ experiences of housing insecurity: (i) navigating limited options and forced choices, (ii) trying to maintain normality, and, (iii) struggling to maintain hope. Our findings highlight how housing insecurity produces a pervasive state of uncertainty for families, marked by forced and frequent moves, limited choices, disrupted routines, and hopelessness. Further, our article discusses how the combined concepts of structural violence and slow violence produce a useful lens for understanding families’ experiences of housing insecurity, and explanation of why inequalities in housing are produced and how harm unfolds and endures over time. This can help to move towards appreciating the social, economic, and political forces that create and maintain housing inequalities.</p
Neural corrective machine unranking
No full textMachine unlearning in neural information retrieval (IR) systems requires removing specific data whilst maintaining model performance. Applying existing machine unlearning methods to IR may compromise retrieval effectiveness or inadvertently expose unlearning actions due to the removal of particular items from the retrieved results presented to users. We formalise corrective unranking, which extends machine unlearning in (neural) IR context by integrating substitute documents to preserve ranking integrity, and propose a novel teacher–student framework, Corrective unRanking Distillation (CuRD), for this task. CuRD (1) facilitates forgetting by adjusting the (trained) neural IR model such that its output relevance scores of to-be-forgotten samples mimic those of low-ranking, non-retrievable samples; (2) enables correction by fine-tuning the relevance scores for the substitute samples to match those of corresponding to-be-forgotten samples closely; (3) seeks to preserve performance on samples that are not targeted for forgetting. We evaluate CuRD on four neural IR models (BERTcat, BERTdot, ColBERT, PARADE) using MS MARCO and TREC CAR datasets. Experiments with forget set sizes from 1 % to 20 % of the training dataset demonstrate that CuRD outperforms seven state-of-the-art baselines in terms of forgetting and correction while maintaining model retention and generalisation capabilities.</p
A systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions for the management of overweight and obesity in children that are delivered or referred to by health providers in primary care
No full textIntroduction: Reducing childhood overweight and obesity prevalence is a global public health priority. This systematic review and meta‐analysis evaluated the effectiveness of behavioral weight management interventions delivered or referred to by health care providers in primary care settings.Methods: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of behavioral interventions published up to 05/01/2026, involving participants Results: Fifty‐nine RCTs (n = 10,454) were included; 23 trials (n = 3241) contributed to the primary outcome. At 12 months, the pooled mean difference in zBMI was −0.08 (95% CI −0.13 to −0.03, p n = 30), the mean difference was −0.15 (95% CI −0.22 to −0.08), and at last follow‐up (n = 37), −0.08 (95% CI −0.15 to −0.02). BMI at 12 months showed a mean difference of −0.37 (95% CI −0.72 to −0.01). Interventions referred to community settings achieved greater zBMI reductions (−0.14 [95% CI −0.2 to −0.08]) than those delivered within primary care (0.04 [95% CI −0.10 to 0.18]).Conclusions: Behavioral weight management interventions for children delivered or referred to by health care professionals in primary care led to modest reductions in zBMI. Referrals to community‐based interventions (e.g., HENRY) may yield greater improvements.</p
Physical education (PE) in Northern Ireland: conceptualising and structuring PE in a complex landscape
No full textPhysical education (PE) in Northern Ireland (NI) is positioned within a complex and separated educational context. While we know something about the PE curriculum within this landscape, we know little about how PE teachers navigate this complexity. Consequently, we recruited secondary PE teachers from different school types in NI (n = 8) to take part in individual, semi-structured interviews to explore how they understand and structure their PE curriculum. Given this focus, our analysis paid some attention to Bernstein's (1975) concept of boundaries, which helps us to consider the potential impact of curriculum structures in schools. We found that all the PE teachers referred to the overarching national curriculum (the ‘Big Picture’ curriculum), highlighting the opportunities it offers – through weak boundaries – to shape broad, connected and meaningful PE curricula. However, the findings also reveal tensions that limited the extent to which these opportunities could be fully realised. Specifically, given the weak boundaries between sport and national identity in NI, sport (particularly team games) plays a significant role in shaping PE curricula. This, in part, may contribute to the perception among participants that PE is not valued by other teachers or society more broadly. We suggest that weakening boundaries both within the PE curriculum and across the broader school curriculum has the potential to shift the emphasis away from sport towards other forms of knowledge. This could create opportunities for teachers of other subjects to better understand the educative possibilities of PE.</p
An evasive action-based bivariate extreme value model for estimating pedestrian crash frequency using traffic conflicts
No full textTraditional models, employing extreme value theory for estimating pedestrian crashes from traffic conflicts, commonly utilise popular conflict measures, such as post encroachment time and gap time. Whilst these measures have proven useful, they are limited in identifying a vehicle–pedestrian conflict based on a fixed threshold value and depend on subjective graphical-based extreme identification methods, which neither fully capture the dynamic interactions between vehicles and pedestrians nor account for road user behaviour to identify conflicting events. This study proposes a bivariate extreme value modelling framework that analyses evasive action-based traffic conflicts by integrating risk force theory and artificial intelligence-based video analytics to estimate pedestrian crash frequency by severity. The methodological framework quantifies crash risk dynamically during vehicle–pedestrian interactions and identifies traffic conflict events based on evasive behaviours. Traffic conflicts are modelled using a Generalised Pareto distribution to capture the tail behaviour of high-risk conflicts. The proposed econometric modelling framework was validated using 72 h of traffic movement data from three signalised intersections in Queensland, Australia. Results demonstrate that the Generalised Pareto distributions effectively fit evasive action-based vehicle–pedestrian conflicts, with estimated total pedestrian frequency and severe crash frequency aligning closely with historical crash records, thereby supporting the validity of the proposed model. This study presents a scalable, behaviourally grounded methodology as an alternative to a subjective conflict identification approach, enabling continuous risk assessment for proactive pedestrian safety management and real-time safety analysis.</p
Equality T-shirt in the Goodwill Collection at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, Houghton, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
No full textThis is a portrait of a young man wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with three horizontal black bars across the chest. The symbol on the shirt signifies equality.</p
Ballet class at Nelson Mandela Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
No full textSilhouettes of ballet dancers practising at the Nelson Mandela Theatre. Big windows provide a landscape of the city.</p
An overlapping domain decomposition method for parametric Stokes and Stokes-Darcy problems via proper generalized decomposition
No full textA strategy to construct physics-based local surrogate models for parametric Stokes flows and coupled Stokes-Darcy systems is presented. The methodology relies on the proper generalized decomposition (PGD) method to reduce the dimensionality of the parametric flow fields and on an overlapping domain decomposition (DD) paradigm to reduce the number of globally coupled degrees of freedom in space. The DD-PGD approach provides a non-intrusive framework in which end-users only need access to the matrices arising from the (finite element) discretization of the full-order problems in the subdomains. The traces of the finite element functions used for the discretization within the subdomains are employed to impose arbitrary Dirichlet boundary conditions at the interface, without introducing auxiliary basis functions. The methodology is seamless to the choice of the discretization schemes in space, being compatible with both LBB-compliant finite element pairs and stabilized formulations, and the DD-PGD paradigm is transparent to the employed overlapping DD approach. The local surrogate models are glued together in the online phase by solving a parametric interface system to impose continuity of the subdomain solutions at the interfaces, without introducing Lagrange multipliers to enforce the continuity in the entire overlap and without solving any additional physical problem in the reduced space. Numerical results are presented for parametric single-physics (Stokes-Stokes) and multi-physics (Stokes-Darcy) systems, showcasing the accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency of DD-PGD.</p
Why railways fail: Colonial railways and economic development in Habsburg Bosnia-Herzegovina
No full textAre railways always a harbinger of prosperity? We examine the economic effects of railways in Bosnia-Herzegovina under Habsburg colonial rule. Our novel dataset consistently tracks the non-agricultural population share of over 4,500 settlements in Habsburg Bosnia in 1885, 1895, and 1910, based on census records. Applying the inconsequential units approach, with least-cost paths as our instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of railway access on occupational change. In settlements directly connected to imperial railways and competition, non-agricultural activity
declined as craftsmen returned to agriculture. By contrast, the new railway network temporarily accelerated non-agricultural activity, primarily by attracting factories and foreign labor. Railway access generated more sustained non-agricultural employment growth in settlements with higher human capital and stronger law enforcement. Overall, our findings suggest that colonial railways did not uniformly promote economic development: while railway access reshaped local occupational structures, lasting positive effects depended on local development preconditions.</p