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Journal of Tropical Futures editorial update: rethinking tropical futures – towards sustainable systems of justice, care and regeneration
Full text linkMargin-aware active learning for user-adaptive text classification
No full textWe propose a human-in-the-loop text classification framework for rapid personalisation of deep neural networks (DNNs) to user-specific preferences under strict label budgets. The core is a margin-preserving embedding aligned with a margin-aware active learning (AL) strategy that jointly optimizes uncertainty, diversity, density, and class coverage in query selection. Use of a fixed local embedding and lightweight linear SVM classifier ensures rapid model updates. To resolve the cold start problem we introduce a one-class initialisation with ring-radii bisection from a single user-selected example to bootstrap learning, along with a hybrid AL acquisition function that evolves from exploitative to exploratory querying. In experiments on a proprietary dataset (UKAC) and 20 Newsgroups, the proposed AL strategy consistently outperforms random sampling, achieving higher accuracy with far fewer labels especially in the early stages of labeling. Our approach yields superior label efficiency (Macro-F1) at small label budgets, demonstrating a practical solution for user-adaptive DNN personalisation. The code is available at https://github.com/tsantosh7/Margin-Preserving-Active-Learning
Interlimb asymmetry in elite soccer players during jumping and change-of-direction tasks: emphasizing chronic ankle instability-induced contralateral limb deficit
No full textBackground:
Chronic ankle instability (CAI) can induce contralateral limb deficits, influencing interlimb asymmetry during athletic tasks. Understanding the magnitude, direction, and individual thresholds of these asymmetries is critical for effective rehabilitation and performance monitoring.
Hypothesis:
CAI-induced contralateral limb deficits significantly influence the magnitude and direction of interlimb asymmetry in jumping and change-of-direction-speed (CODS) tasks.
Study Design:
Cross-sectional study.
Level of Evidence:
Level 3.
Methods:
Male elite soccer players with (n = 32) and without (n = 38) CAI performed single-leg hop (SLH), single-leg triple hop, modified-505 (Mod505), and 90°-changes-of-direction tests.
Results:
Paired-sample t tests revealed small-to-moderate differences between dominant and nondominant limbs in both groups (P 0.05). Independent-sample t test revealed asymmetries were significantly higher in all tests (P 0.05) in players with CAI. Kappa coefficient showed substantial-to-perfect agreements for players with CAI (κ = 0.71-1.00), and moderate-to-substantial agreements for healthy players (κ = 0.51-0.73), indicating asymmetries favored same limb. Agreement percentages for similar identifications of asymmetry patterns based on individual thresholds derived from intralimb variability revealed that injured players adopted similar patterns in CODS (81.25%), while healthy players adopted similar patterns between SLH and mod505 (76.32%).
Conclusion:
CAI-induced contralateral limb deficits influenced magnitude and direction of asymmetry, potentially underestimating asymmetry. Asymmetry consistently favors the same limb due to injury and functional similarities; thresholds derived from intralimb variability identify real asymmetry.
Clinical Relevance:
These findings highlight the importance of considering contralateral limb deficits when interpreting interlimb asymmetries in players with CAI. Rehabilitation programs should address these deficits to optimize performance and reduce injury risk
The roads not taken: issue selling and post-decisional sensemaking in multinational corporations
No full textResearch in international business has a rich legacy of exploring headquarters-subsidiaries relationships. Nevertheless, a focus on mandate allocation by corporate headquarters remains underdeveloped, and has largely ignored critical aspects of issue selling by local subsidiaries. Specifically, understanding those initiatives suggested by local managers but rejected by headquarters remains rather uncharted territory in this literature. Our focus is on these ‘rejected issues’ (RIs) and we contend that these RIs have a far-reaching agency that often violates local actors’ expectations in multinational corporations. We frame RIs as emotional stimuli and, through the lens of emotional contagion, we elucidate post-decisional sensemaking by implicated actors. We develop a conceptual framework and a series of propositions linked to organizational integration and we caution against an asymmetrical focus on “visible” outcomes at the expense of latent aspects that remain influential for integration purposes in multinational corporations
Difference between political intent and action: implementation of recent changes in doctoral education in Georgia
No full textThis paper examines a specific case of policy formulation and implementation to shed light on the dynamics of higher education policy implementation in Georgia. As in many post-Soviet countries, Georgia’s higher education sector has undergone significant policy shifts; however, academic analyses of the drivers and implementation of these reforms remain fragmented. This paper focuses on the recent Doctoral Education Framework (2024), offering insights into persistent systemic challenges related to policy implementation. The analysis draws on interviews with policymakers and institutional actors responsible for enacting the new doctoral regulations and examines the intended objectives and anticipated outcomes of the 2024 framework. This approach enabled us to examine stakeholder understandings of policy intent, implementation processes, actor mandates, and anticipated behavioural responses. The study relies on primary qualitative data supported by secondary qualitative and quantitative sources. In doing so, it contributes to the developing literature on higher education policy realisation, which—despite recent studies—remains historically underdeveloped
Architectures - reimagining praxis in a post-humanist world
No full textThis chapter contends that the Anthropocene is a self-inflicted geological wound—an inscription of extractivism, colonialism, and human exceptionalism onto the Earth’s lithosphere. Architecture, long enthralled by narratives of permanence, progress, and mastery, has been deeply complicit in this planetary violence. From the imposition of the colonial grid to the proliferation of neoliberal glass skyscrapers, architectural practice has repeatedly reproduced systems of exclusion, fortified borders, erased Indigenous lifeworlds, and privileged capital over kinship with more-than-human worlds.
Framing the Anthropocene as both prognosis and prescription, the chapter argues that architecture must relinquish its anthropocentric foundations and re-emerge as an interspecies, reparative, and insurgent form of praxis. It advances a mandate for a post-architectural practice that prioritizes ecologies over economics, embraces posthuman politics, and adopts speculative modes of futurity in which scarcity becomes a framework for sufficiency and survival rather than a marker of failure. Aligning with pluriversal perspectives (Escobar, 2018; de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018), the chapter calls for the cultivation of multiple epistemologies and ontologies capable of resisting the destructive dominance of Western thought. Ultimately, it proposes reconstituting architecture not as a professional enclave of human authorship but as a collaborative practice of care, adaptation, and planetary justice in a world on the verge of rupture
Identifying relevant countermovement-jump parameters for academy soccer players
No full textPurpose: This study aimed to determine the reliability and relevance of key countermovement jump (CMJ) parameters in Academy soccer players. Methods: Twenty-nine bilateral CMJ force-time variables were collected using dual force plates from 63 Academy soccer players. Two analyses were performed: i) test–retest reliability was assessed in a convenience sample of 20 players across two sessions separated by seven days, and ii) principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted in 47 players using their most representative seasonal trial to reduce data dimensionality. Results: Most outcome-based variables demonstrated acceptable reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] ≥ .81; coefficient of variation [CV] ≤ 13.7%). Nine out of eleven time-based variables showed acceptable reliability (ICC ≥ .67; CV ≤ 12.9%). All asymmetry-based variables showed unacceptable reliability (ICC ≥ .11; CV ≤ 66.4%) while symmetry-based variables generally displayed excellent reliability (ICC ≥ .90; CV ≤ 11.8%). The PCA revealed three principal components within outcome- (force and power production during concentric and eccentric phases) and time-based (temporal ratios, concentric duration, and landing characteristics) variables whereas two principal components were revealed for asymmetry- or symmetry-based variables (related to eccentric, concentric, and landing phases). These explained 83.1%, 76.1%, and 81.9% of the total variance for outcome-, time-and asymmetry or symmetry-based variables, respectively. Conclusions: Practitioners involved with bilateral CMJ testing in academy soccer players can rely on the selected parameters presented in our study. Symmetry parameters could be preferred over asymmetry parameters, due to their superior reliability
Model-based digital twin engineering: insights, challenges, and future directions
No full textThis article presents a systematic literature survey on model-based digital twin engineering (MBDTE). We introduce a novel taxonomy for categorizing MBDTE approaches and provide definitions of both MBDTE and the models it employs. Model-based engineering (MBE) leverages models as essential pillars of the development process, enabling teams to clarify requirements, streamline design, specify behavior, and perform rigorous verification and validation across the entire system life cycle. Digital twins (DTs) are software systems that mirror cyber-physical, socio-economic, or biological entities, Software and Systems Modeling systems, or processes. Built from models and data, DTs support high-impact applications includ-ing planning, monitoring, control, and optimization of their physical counterparts. The model-centric nature of DTs has naturally sparked exploration into harnessing MBE for DT engineering and oper-ation. However, this exploration for now has created a fragmented landscape of partial solutions. To address this challenge, our survey analyzes 47 peer-reviewed publications across four dimensions, viz., model characteristics, data integration, implementation technologies, and empirical evidence, to map the current state of practice, identify critical research gaps, and avenues for further exploration
Drinking patterns, drinking-at-risk and the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in eight European countries
No full textRESEARCH AIMS: To describe alcohol consumption and preferences among both drinkers, and high-risk drinkers; to compare consumption before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic across 8 European countries.
METHOD: Secondary analysis of a dataset from 24,946 respondents 18-90 years old from 8 European countries who reported having drunk any alcoholic beverages during the week prior to the online interview (October-November 2022).
RESULTS: Weekly alcohol consumption across countries was between 123.6 and 197.2 grams of pure alcohol per person, with a male/female ratio between 1.1:1 and 1.5:1. Traditional wine-drinking pattern was confirmed for France, Italy, and Greece, as well as for Great Britain. Prevalence of high-risk drinkers (daily consumption >30 grams for females, >40 grams for males) was highest in Great Britain; M/F ratio was between 1.1:1 and 1.3:1, except in Belgium, Great Britain and Greece, where females outnumbered males. Those older than 65 years and those who resided in the countryside were less likely to be high-risk drinkers. Most respondents reported drinking the same amount of wine and beer in 2022 as before the COVID-19 outbreak, with high-risk drinkers increasing their drinking frequency of all types of alcoholic beverages.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirm a downward trend in alcohol consumption in most European countries. The gender gap between male and female high-risk drinkers is narrowing or, in some cases, reversing.
In 2022, compared with before the COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of respondents reported drinking the same amount of alcoholic beverages, whereas high-risk drinkers increased the frequency of their drinking
Promotional cultures
No full textIf, as Raymond Williams (1980) argued, culture is to be viewed as a 'whole way of life', then the term promotional culture has become a shorthand for conveying the extent to which the symbolic machinery of consumer capitalism has come to dominate our lives. To speak of promotional cultures, however, is to acknowledge that not all cultures have been impacted by or articulate the logic of promotion in the same ways.
This article begins with a comprehensive overview of how this concept emerged in the work of Andrew Wernick (1991) and other Marxist critical theorists in the 1980s and 90s. Key examples from advertising and popular culture are used to illustrate the semiological focus of this tradition. In Pop Art, for example, we witness not just the radical democratisation of art but also its radical marketisation, presaging the rise of neoliberalism and the cult of the self toward the end of the century.
The rise of digital networks and globalisation in the 2000s has seen the logic of promotion extend across cultures and societies. In the work of Davis (2013), Powell (2013), Edwards (2016) and Cronin (2018) we witness the seemingly unilinear role played by particular promotional industries and intermediaries in advancing this logic, while the more complex story of promotion within specific visual domains is told by the likes of Banet-Weiser (2012, 2018), Grainge and Johnson (2015), Sobande (2020), Poel et al. (2021). These and other studies reveal how promotional cultures are typically shot through with ambivalence: they afford agency, especially to people who would otherwise be socially marginalised, yet do so through processes of subjectification which all too often entrench material inequalities