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Staying with the Trouble of Rural Revitalisation: Material Agencies, More-than-Human Care, and Planetary Rural Futures
No full textThis response engages Chen et al.’s (2025) intervention into our planetary rural geographies (PRG) framework, which rethinks rural–urban relations through material and more-than-human agencies. We welcome their emphasis on infrastructure’s role, particularly in China’s rural construction movement. Extending this, we highlight how materials—chemicals, soils, atmospheric elements—shape uneven planetary transformations. Drawing from metabolic politics and critical agrarian studies, we trace how earthly substances entangle rural assemblages in toxicity, dispossession, and ecological crisis. While rural revitalisation proliferates globally, we caution against anthropocentric models that reproduce harm. Instead, we call for ethics of care rooted in human–nonhuman reciprocity, land stewardship, and intergenerational solidarity—advancing the PRG agenda through attention to more-than-human entanglements and shared planetary responsibilitie
UAVs Relay in Emergency Communications with Strict Requirements on Quality of Information
Full text linkMobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are increasingly being used to provide communications in emergencies. Maintaining the required quality of service of information including its timely delivery, in MANETs, is extremely challenging
under dynamic conditions such as a changing bushfire scenario. Nodes get destroyed or their link qualities degrade leading to suboptimal paths, reduced network performance, and disconnected end nodes. To remedy partitioning in ground-based MANETs and to improve their communication performance, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising relay solution.
This paper presents U-QoIT, a UAV deployment algorithm for
connecting the disconnected end nodes in a dynamic bushfire
scenario. It aims to meet the Quality of Information requirements, with a minimal number of UAVs deployed. U-QoIT takes the UAV deployment problem as a combinatorial search problem and reduces the deployment complexity by applying a reduction by minimization approach. This is done to deploy fewer UAVs without compromising connectivity. Extensive simulation results depict that U-QoIT significantly improves user usability by 48% compared to the best-performing baseline approach, of Dynamic
Service Area (DSA) based UAV deployment, at the expense of
a negligible increase in computational time. It achieves a 38% drop in packet latency and retains its out-performance in a highly mobile network. In a sparse network, it improves user usability by 106%. Furthermore, it needs fewer UAVs, compared to the baseline UAV deployment methods, without compromising its performance gains
Cybersecurity Risk Management Scenarios for Teaching Information Security Management
No full textAmidst security concerns, there has become an increased focus on ensuring cybersecurity
becomes a mainstream part of higher education. Cybersecurity requires the development of
technical and non-technical skills, with the latter often referred to as ‘soft skills’. With calls
for evidence of initiatives used within higher education to develop these skills, this paper
presents an instructional design of how a scenario-based learning activity was utilised for a
group of postgraduate students studying ‘information security management’. This paper
presents the scenario, observations of teaching practice, and student feedback and provides
recommendations for embedding scenario-based learning activities into the curriculum
Kathleen Raine's Poetry of Longing
No full textThe work of Kathleen Raine contains a tension between glimpses of the spiritual world and the experience of being cut off from it. The references to doorways and openings that occur in several poems are often used as metaphors for negotiating a passage between material and spiritual dimensions. Although there are poems that describe profound experiences of the spiritual, the 'doors' are not always open and several poems contain a sense of grief and defiance at the inability to reach the divine. As such, there are many poems that can be read as ‘poems of longing’, where there is a desire to connect with the divine in the human other and in the natural world. Of particular interest is the way in which the expression of longing develops through Raine’s poetic career
Digital equity in the age of generative AI: Bridging the divide in educational technology
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Advancing age and mortality due to pollution exposure: a comprehensive review
No full textThe global aging population has been increasingly vulnerable to environmental stressors, particularly air pollution. Advancing age is associated with physiological declines and a higher prevalence of chronic diseases, heightening susceptibility to pollution-related health effects. This review explores the relationship between advancing age and mortality/morbidity due to pollution exposure, consolidating evidence on how pollution exacerbates health risks in elderly populations. Based on the epidemiological evidence, this comprehensive literature review evaluates the interaction between aging, pollution exposure, and the biological mechanisms that make older adults more vulnerable to pollution-related mortality/morbidity. Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus were systematically searched to identify relevant studies, including cohort studies, meta-analyses, and reviews. Studies were selected based on their focus on air pollution, aging populations, and mortality. Inclusion criteria included peer-reviewed articles addressing pollution-related health outcomes in older adults, specifically emphasizing cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological impacts. Aging amplifies the harmful effects of air pollution through mechanisms like oxidative stress, impaired immune responses, and chronic inflammation. Elderly populations are disproportionately affected by pollutants such as particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone. Mortality, specifically due to cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurodegenerative diseases, is significantly higher in older adults exposed to long-term pollution. Air pollution, as an effect modifier, intensifies the health risks associated with aging. Older adults face heightened mortality risks due to pollution, demanding public health strategies to prioritize pollution reduction and protective interventions at individual and population levels
Dynamic Food Procurement and cross-sectoral tensions: The practical and contractual complexities of digitising local school food supply
No full textLocalising school food procurement has been the subject of international scholarship for several decades, including in the UK, where examples of isolated good practice have emerged. The benefits of local school food are based on three key potentials - sustainable food system transformation, the special market agency of public authorities, and the cultural benefits of localising school meals. A new technological innovation called Dynamic Food Procurement (DFP) has recently enabled the efficient bundling of local produce for school catering buyers. Using a cross-sectoral Living Lab methodology in the English county of Gloucestershire, this article describes a governance experiment to apply DFP technology to optimise local procurement for a school meals service feeding over 18,000 pupils daily. While the Living Lab created an iterative, transparent and inclusive structure to plan the introduction of DFP, the experiment faced entrenched commercial practices, policy inconsistency and legal complexities to reveal the limited leverage of the work at a large territorial scale. The main contribution of the article is to review the potentials of purchasing power of public food with finer-grained practical experiences of local authority school procurement polic
Digiwork: how agriculture 4.0 is changing work for farm advisers
Full text linkIntroduction: Advisers are commonly involved in supporting farmers navigate the smart farming transition, however their experiences in such roles, and any changes to their working lives, has not received a great deal of empirical attention. Knowledge about these changes would enable greater anticipation of disruptions to advisory work and help support strategies to maintain and build advisory capacity. This is important for stakeholders seeking to strengthen the advisory system as part of the Agriculture 4.0 era. This paper reports on a study of advisers in the UK and Australia who work with farmers in implementing Smart Farming Technologies (SFTs), to examine the ways in which their work is changing. Changes to the work of advisers is a less explored topic within smart farming yet is an important aspect to the way the Agriculture 4.0 is unfolding. Method: We developed a multidisciplinary framework from the literature relating to work and working life to collect and analyse data with an overarching theoretical framing of advisory practice as socio-symbolic and socio-material relations. We interviewed 22 advisers and 4 Agricultural technology (AgTech) company representatives about changes to their work as their farming clients implement SFTs. Results: Based on qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts, and applying grounded theory techniques of constant comparison, we found a range of changes to work including: the diversity of advisory roles; integration work or the emerging ‘side office’ at the nexus of the office and the farm; demands in work duration and changes in work efficiency and effectiveness; increased workload in learning and developing new knowledge and skills and in the work of building and adapting business models fit for smart farming. Discussion: We discuss three contributions to the understanding of changes to advisory work: the evolution in advisory roles (including bifurcation and specialisation of roles) expanded knowledge brokering and intermediary work and digiwork, or the work of integrating social, material and symbolic practices in smart farming. These changes have implications for the functioning of the advisory system which, without collective support from government or industry, will privilege technology-centric, commercial and privatised advisory efforts
Database Security and Performance: A Case of SQL Injection Attacks Using Docker-Based Virtualisation and its Effect on Performance
Full text linkModern database systems are critical for storing sensitive information but are increasingly 1
targeted by cyber threats, including SQL injection (SQLi) attacks. This research proposes a robust 2
security framework leveraging Docker-based virtualisation to enhance database security and mitigate 3
the impact of SQLi attacks. A controlled experimental methodology evaluated the framework’s 4
effectiveness using Damn VulnerableWeb Application (DVWA) and Acunetix databases. The findings 5
reveal that Docker significantly reduces the vulnerability to SQLi attacks by isolating database 6
instances, thereby safeguarding user data and system integrity. While Docker introduces a significant 7
increase in CPU utilisation during high-traffic scenarios, the trade-off ensures enhanced security and 8
reliability for real-world applications. This study highlights Docker’s potential as a practical solution 9
for addressing evolving database security challenges in distributed and cloud environments
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