Recent publications
Third-party application developers are increasingly using platform-based business models to enter new markets and create economic value. While prior research has mostly examined the design and architecture of digital platforms, less attention has been given to digital platform boundary resources as an entrepreneurship strategy. The boundary resources of a digital platform significantly impact third-party developers' motivation to engage in digital entrepreneurship. Consequently, scholars need to carefully investigate the affordances of the boundary resources that influence third-party developers to create complementary applications as products for entrepreneurial endeavors. To address this gap, the researcher formulated two research questions and conducted an inductive case study to explore the perspectives and views of third-party application developers in technology hubs within Nigeria's digital start-up ecosystem. Nigeria has a large youth population with a strong digital potential (i.e., tech-savvy) and is confronted with uncertainties, limited resources, and complexities. Furthermore, the study is grounded in the technological affordance theory, which guides the researcher's interpretation. The study's findings uncovered the digital platform's boundary resource affordances that play a strategic role in influencing third-party developers' participation in digital entrepreneurship.
Objectives
To examine associations between state-level public investments in programming for children and parents’ reports of their children’s kindergarten readiness.
Methods
We use regression approaches with publicly available, nationally representative data to examine how time and state variation in public spending on children relates to parents’ concerns about children’s development. We link data on annual state-level spending on health and early learning from the Urban Institute’s State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset and the National Institute for Early Education Research to child-level data from the 2003/2004, 2007/2008, and 2011/2012 waves of the National Survey of Children’s Health (NCHS), focusing on a subsample of parents with one or more children under age six (N = 56,736).
Results
Child-related public spending on both health and early education is associated with decreases in parents’ concerns about their children’s physical health and motor development. A 15% increase in average health spending and early education spending per child per year is associated with a reduction in parents’ concerns about children’s health and motor development of about 3% and 2% of a standard deviation (SD), respectively. Associations between spending and concerns about early learning and social-emotional development are negative but not significant. Among socioeconomically disadvantaged or racial and ethnic minority parents, spending is associated with smaller reductions in concerns.
Conclusions for Practice
Public spending on children is associated with fewer parents’ concerns about their children’s development, but less so among disadvantaged families. It is possible that public spending levels are not adequate to narrow disparities in early opportunity and outcomes.
Climate change adaptation has for a long time been the neglected half of the climate equation, as most attention has been directed toward mitigation. Yet, the catastrophic effects of a changing climate are already occurring, unavoidable, and in many cases irreversible. Organizations need to identify ways of adapting to present and future climatic conditions. In this editorial, we make the case for climate change adaptation as a research topic on par with mitigation. We outline how and why management and organizational scholarship should work toward an integrated approach of mitigation and adaptation in responding to climate change, suggesting three key avenues of research for future inquiry. In so doing, we encourage more impactful and ecologically relevant management research that will make a difference to society at large.
Cybercriminals are constantly developing new and sophisticated methods for exploiting network vulnerabilities. Software-defined networking (SDN) faces security challenges more than other traditional networks because the controller is a bottleneck device. This necessitates the implementation of robust security systems, including intrusion detection to mitigate the effect of attacks. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting the centralized controller of an SDN network can disrupt the entire network. If the controller becomes unavailable due to an attack, flow rules (FRs) cannot be deployed at the network switches, affecting data forwarding and network management. This study focuses on the detection and mitigation of synchronized (SYN) and normal transmission control protocol (TCP) DDoS flood attacks. It introduces two enhanced statistical detection and mitigation algorithms that work seamlessly with the open network operating system (ONOS) SDN controller, and sFlow-RT engine in real-time. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, our empirical findings demonstrate that the proposed algorithms efficiently detect and mitigate attacks with minimal average detection time, and negligible impact on resource consumption. By utilizing tuned threshold values based on network traffic volume, TCP flood attack detection (TFAD) algorithm and the synchronized TCP flood attack detection (STFAD) Algorithm achieved a minimal average detection time, of 4.032 and 3.430 s, respectively. These algorithms also have high detection accuracy in distinguishing normal traffic when appropriate threshold values are applied. Overall, this research significantly contributes to fortifying SDN networks with robust security measures, enhancing their resilience against evolving cyber threats.
Objectives
This study analyzes the potential criminogenic effect of safe consumption sites (SCSs) in one of the most longstanding and expansive operational networks across Toronto, Canada. The analyses are positioned to test for changes in crime levels and both immediate and spatial effects for total, property, and violent crime events resulting from SCS implementation.
Methods
Staggered synthetic control methods were used to measure changes in crime levels pre- and post-SCS implementation. The method is flexible to variation in treatment locations and timing, allows for aggregate and phase-specific effects to be calculated, and is a robust quasi-experimental method for measuring change at microlevel units of analysis. Following the analysis measuring changes in crime levels, the spatial distribution of crime events was also assessed pre- and post-implementation to determine if the spatial patterning of crime events changed following SCS openings.
Results
The analyses indicated that crime did not significantly change following SCS implementation in the aggregate across the entire network. However, some phase-specific effects for individual SCSs demonstrated some notable changes in crime levels and directional heterogeneity, and the spatial distributions showed some meaningful changes in the spatial patterning of violent (further) and property (closer) crime events around SCSs after implementation.
Conclusion
The study adds important nuance to the discussion around harm reduction approaches like safe consumption sites and their relationship to crime. We found that crime levels were generally unchanged following SCS implementation, but that crime may be situationally impacted based on the crime type, location, and operational capacities of each unique SCS opened.
In 1999, Mali held its first elections for local government by communal councils, following national decentralization. This chapter addresses whether elected local government in two communes in western Mali has brought more legitimacy to local officials in the eyes of citizens. Second, it asks whether this new form of government exacerbated or lessened patterns of inequality. The data show that legitimacy has grown since the election of local government, based primarily on the trust between the population and councillors who share similar culture and backgrounds. This facilitates negotiation and the ability of the residents to argue for their needs. Performance of local government has improved somewhat, but lack of communal resources stymied development plans. Communal councils here have had only minor effects on local inequality. Residents of Manantali town, more educated, with better connections and more resources, have not monopolized benefits, because most of them are transient and employ their political resources nationally. Local elites emphasized the unity of local villages rather than publicly seeking individual advantage, as all faced problems caused by the disruptions following construction of the Manantali dam thirty years earlier. Women could gain public access as groups, somewhat attenuating the effects of patriarchy.
Purpose of review
This review examines the implications of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision on neonatal care and explores how legal restrictions on abortion are influencing medical practices for neonates and the broader healthcare landscape for neonates.
Recent Findings
The Dobbs decision has led to increased uncertainty and challenges in both maternal and neonatal healthcare. Restrictive abortion laws are associated with higher infant mortality rates, increased health disparity, and increased care provider ethical dilemmas and moral distress due to legal uncertainty surrounding the care of infants. However, current changes in federal and state law regarding abortion do not change the previously established standard of care for neonates. Other federal legal statutes potentially addressing the care of neonates have existed for over 20 years and have had minimal effect on the practice of neonatology, because there is no record of federal enforcement actions or federal case law to clarify how the law should be interpreted.
Summary
While restrictive abortion laws primarily affect women and pregnant people's health care, indirect effects on neonatal care are becoming more common. There are other laws and policies with greater potential to regulate care for infants at the federal and state level. Professional medical standards remain the guiding framework in neonatal care. Clinicians can mitigate legal concerns through knowledge and advocacy.
Introduction. Air pollution, and particularly high concentrations of PM2.5 can have severe consequences to human health. Particulate air pollution raises the risks for various diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and diabetes type 2. For all of Uzbekistan, over 2021 the expected value of mortality attributable to Ambient PM2.5 pollution was 27,099. This is a significant cause of the mortality in the country. Top five sources contributing to outdoor PM2.5 concentration were: residential, industry, energy, anthropogenic dust, and agriculture. Materials and methods. To estimate PM2.5 attributable mortality in Tashkent, we downloaded the available PM2.5 from the air quality monitor at the US Embassy in Tashkent, and the satellite-based PM2.5 concentration data for the city of Tashkent from the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group at the Washington University in St. Louis. Population data for Tashkent city was taken from the official statistics agency of Uzbekistan. We then applied a PM2.5 attributable mortality model. Results. For the years 2019 to 2022 we estimate a range of mortality in the city from a low of 3095 to a high of 4736; using the same attributable mortality model but the different sources of PM2.5 concentrations. Limitations. The monitor at the US Embassy may not represent average particulate matter concentrations across the entire city. satellite data do not directly measure PM2.5 concentrations and in general rely on ground monitors for verification. Tashkent is growing very quickly and the official estimates of the city’s population may be on the low side. Conclusion. Air quality in Tashkent is a serious health issue and a source of annual mortality. Tashkent needs a detailed emission inventory and source apportionment to support a high quality and feasible air quality management plan and to address the high costs of air pollution.
The cardinality-constrained mean-variance portfolio problem has garnered significant attention within contemporary finance due to its potential for achieving low risk while effectively managing transaction costs. Instead of solving this problem directly, many existing methods rely on regularization and approximation techniques, which hinder investors’ ability to precisely specify a portfolio’s desired cardinality level. Moreover, these approaches typically include more hyper-parameters and increase the problem’s dimensionality. To address these challenges, we propose a customized penalty decomposition algorithm. We demonstrate that this algorithm not only does it converge to a local minimizer of the cardinality-constrained mean-variance portfolio problem, but is also computationally efficient. Our approach leverages a sequence of penalty subproblems, each tackled using Block Coordinate Descent (BCD). We show that the steps within BCD yield closed-form solutions, allowing us to identify a saddle point of the penalty subproblems. Finally, by applying our penalty decomposition algorithm to real-world datasets, we highlight its efficiency and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods across several performance metrics.
The potential of the two‐dimensional ruthenium carbide (RuC) nanosheet to detect highly toxic environmental compounds – namely, Furan (Fur) and 1,n‐Dioxane (1,n‐Diox) – was investigated utilizing the density functional theory (DFT) approach. The adsorption features of the Fur and 1,n‐Diox molecules on the RuC nanosheet were evaluated in parallel and vertical configurations. From energetic manifestations, Fur and 1,n‐Diox molecules preferred to be adsorbed in the parallel configuration rather than the vertical one on the RuC nanosheet with negative Eads values of −27.80 and −9.30 kcal/mol, respectively, for Fur⋅⋅⋅RuC complexes. Bader charge findings demonstrated an electron‐accepting property for the Fur and 1,n‐Diox molecules during the adsorption process over the RuC nanosheet, as indicated by positive Qt values. From the FMO findings, the EHOMO and ELUMO values of Fur/1,n‐Diox molecules, and the pure RuC nanosheet varied considerably after the adsorption process in both configurations. The band structure and TDOS/PDOS plots of Fur/1,n‐Diox⋅⋅⋅RuC complexes showed new bands and peaks for the RuC nanosheet after the adsorption process, proving the capability of the RuC nanosheet to detect the investigated small molecules. The outcomes of the current work can serve as a foundation for using the RuC nanosheets to detect highly toxic small molecules.
Americans collectively hold over $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, and over the last decade millions of borrowers have defaulted on loans, with serious consequences for their financial health. In a 13-million-person field experiment with the U.S. Department of Education, we tested the effectiveness of different email interventions to inform borrowers about alternative repayment options after a missed loan payment. Our interventions tested whether sending monthly behaviorally-informed emails, providing follow-up reminders, framing benefits in percentage (vs. dollar) terms, and providing just one recommended action step at a time (vs. two) affected borrower outcomes. We find that i) behaviorally-informed emails reduce estimated 60-d delinquencies by 0.42 pp, ii) reminders boost the efficacy of such emails by 0.57 pp, iii) describing potential savings in percentage terms is more effective than describing these benefits in dollar terms, reducing estimated delinquencies by 0.14 pp, and iv) encouraging two actions (i.e., enrollment in income-driven repayment plans and auto debit programs) repeatedly across two emails is marginally more effective than encouraging one action at-a-time across two emails, reducing estimated delinquencies by 0.05 pp. Overall, if scaled to all 13-million borrowers in our experiment, we estimate that our best-performing intervention would have averted approximately 79,800 60-d delinquencies. Our findings i) highlight the benefits of describing potential savings in percentage terms, which may magnify perceived savings for recipients, ii) underscore the risks of oversimplification, and iii) demonstrate that nudges can be an effective, low-cost complement to other policies for reducing delinquencies and supporting borrowers with student loan debt.
British left-wing politics does not know what to think about mothers. In left-wing women’s movements, motherhood has been recognised as essential and difficult; necessary for future revolutions, not least in raising future revolutionaries. In less radical circles, it has been understood as a crucial contribution to the functioning of society, often forming the basis of women’s claims to citizenship and maternalist forms of politics. On the other hand, motherhood has been seen as a ‘natural’ function of women and a private responsibility, rather than a public good or a collective act which needs comprehensive state support. The family, in this reading, is a rather conservative force, better left to social reactionaries. Mothering has added additional hurdles to the gendered obstacles women already face in pursuing politics as activists or elected representatives. Perhaps because of this, many mothers in politics have sought to downplay or distance themselves from their roles as mothers, emphasising instead their contributions as workers and activists who can be fully committed to the left cause. Feminist historians have often followed their lead and have tended to write around political mothers’ maternal roles in their scholarship. This roundtable develops themes first explored in our November 2023 workshop, generously supported by the Royal Historical Society.
Cognitive mapping is central to urban design. As a pioneer of cognitive mapping, Kevin Lynch focused his work on tangible visual elements while only acknowledging other intangible attributes. In an attempt to bridge the gap between Lynch’s cognitive mapping tools and sensorial studies, this paper explores smell-walking as a method of cognitive mapping in the context of Cairo. Through a designed smell walk experiment, 25 participants documented their immediate sensations, past experiences, and memories evoked by the smells of Syrian food practices in an open market situated at the edge of El-Rehab, a gated community on the outskirts of Cairo. This pilot study is a step forward in renewing The image of the city by displaying a smell map, participants’ cognitive image, smellscape, and placemaking narratives. It concludes with the collective cognitive perception of a hybrid smellscape that triggers hunger, happiness, and nostalgia.
This study is the first to explore the relation between children's attachment classifications, assessed by Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), and mothers’ acceptance‐rejection behaviors from the lens of Interpersonal Acceptance‐Rejection Theory (IPARTheory). As a pilot study, the sample consisted of 23 Egyptian mother‐child dyads. The mean age of children in the SSP was 18.6 months (SD = 3.10). Mothers’ acceptance‐rejection behaviors were explored through the Parental Acceptance‐Rejection/Control Questionnaire (PARQ/Control). The pilot study's findings revealed that maternal acceptance‐rejection behaviors significantly differed across children's attachment classifications. The findings also shed light on gender differences in parenting, as mothers tended to show a higher level of hostility/aggression, undifferentiated rejection, and control with their daughters more than sons. This study is an important stepping‐stone for attachment research in the Arab world. It highlights several cultural aspects to be taken into account for future research using the SSP in Egypt or any other Arab country.
This article explores the materiality of the airplane, working at the intersection of the environment and health. Via its ambiguous relationship with air—existing and functioning within it while also polluting it—the plane is an object that invades and engages with ecologies. The article proposes conceiving of the plane as a material object that creates environmental-health “heterotopias”—a concept borrowed from Michel Foucault—generating pollution via emissions and pathogens. It investigates the value of viewing the plane in this way in the era of environmental and health crises. Exploring interactions and relationships between pilots, air crew, passengers, and civilians on the one hand, and the plane on the other, the article unveils how the meaning of the plane is constructed. To illustrate the idea of the plane as a distinct “heterotopia”, this article refers to Jean-François Richet’s action thriller film Plane (2023).
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