ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
Toward Climate Justice: Resilience and Adaptation Strategies for Vulnerable Developing Countries

Toward Climate Justice: Resilience and Adaptation Strategies for Vulnerable Developing Countries Surender Kumar¹, Maureen O'Sullivan², Abhnash K Bains³, Vidya Padmakumar⁴, Silverio Allocca⁵, Gelito Inacio Franco Sululu⁶, Cristiano Carocci⁷, Anu Gauba⁸, Clare Walker⁹, &amp; Progga Parmita Chowdhury¹⁰ ¹ ALA Fellow, Melbourne University, Australia / India, ² Fellow, Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, University of Galway, Ireland, ³ Ishkama Global Change CIC, London, United Kingdom, ⁴ EcoDiversity Lab, New Hazelton, British Columbia, Canada, ⁵ Researcher &amp; Analyst, Italy, ⁶ National Representative, Commonwealth Youth Climate Change, Mozambique, Africa, ⁷ Political and Cultural Analyst, Italy, ⁸ Principal &amp; Professor, Department of Nursing, GD Goenka University, Gurgaon, Haryana, India, ⁹ Clare Walker Consulting Ltd, England, ¹⁰ Independent Researcher, National University of Bangladesh Abstract Climate change disproportionately affects developing countries due to their limited adaptive capacity, socio-economic constraints, and increased exposure to climate-related hazards. This paper investigates resilience and adaptation strategies through the lens of climate justice, highlighting the importance of equitable and inclusive approaches. Using a secondary research methodology, it synthesizes theoretical frameworks and empirical data from peer-reviewed literature, international reports, and climate finance databases. A quantitative analysis evaluates adaptation investments and their impact on reducing vulnerability, supported by numerical calculations and country-specific case studies. The study concludes with actionable policy recommendations aimed at achieving both sustainability and justice.
Towards biological control as a major component of integrated pest management in stored product protection

Abstract   Integrated pest management in stored product protection is defined. Areas of research and implementation of biological control in stored product protection and advantages and limits of such an approach are analysed. Limiting factors for effective application of natural enemies are discussed and implications for human health, hygiene and authorisation are considered. Economics of biological control are discussed within the context of integrated management for stored product protection. Examples are chosen mainly from areas only recently gaining some attention such as retail trade and stored product insects as material-destroying pests. If wider economic aspects, including ecological arguments, are considered, and biological control methods are fully explored, the position of biological control within integrated pest management in stored product protection will strengthen.
A Comprehensive Model for Crisis Management by Integrating Leadership, Motivation, and Organizational Behavior in the ADNOC Organization

Despite its considerable potential significance, the mediating role of organizational and behavioural dimensions in linking leadership and motivational factors with crisis management remains notably underexplored. This oversight represents a critical gap in the existing research, hindering a comprehensive understanding of how these elements interact to influence effective crisis management within the ADNOC organization. This paper aims to develop a comprehensive model for crisis management by integrating leadership, motivation, and organizational behaviour within ADNOC. The model consists of leadership and motivation as independent constructs, organizational and behavioural elements as mediator constructs, and crisis management as the dependent construct. The model was developed and evaluated using SmartPLS software with data from 302 operational staff members at ADNOC. It was improved until it satisfied the fitness requirements. There were only eight statistically significant indirect relationship hypotheses out of thirty, according to hypothesis testing. With five important pathways, organisational culture practices were found to be the most effective mediator among them. Mission, with one important relationship, and adaptability, with two important relationships, came next. These eight indirect relationships served as the foundation for the framework that was developed to represent ADNOC's requirement to incorporate mission alignment, organisational culture, and flexibility into its operations. By addressing these interconnected issues, ADNOC can improve its crisis management strategies and thrive in the competitive and volatile energy industry.
Policy and practice in the use of root cause analysis to investigate clinical adverse events: Mind the gap

This paper examines the challenges of investigating clinical incidents through the use of Root Cause Analysis. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study in two large acute NHS hospitals in the U.K. and documented the process of incident investigation, reporting, and translation of the results into practice. We found that the approach has both strengths and problems. The latter stem, in part, from contradictions between potentially incompatible organizational agendas and social logics that drive the use of this approach. While Root Cause Analysis was originally conceived as an organisational learning technique, it is also used as a governance tool and a way to re-establish organisational legitimacy in the aftermath of incidents. The presence of such diverse and partially contradictory aims creates tensions with the result that efforts are at times diverted from the aim of producing sustainable change and improvement. We suggest that a failure to understand these inner contradictions, together with unreflective policy interventions, may produce counterintuitive negative effects which hamper, instead of further, the cause of patient safety.
The microscopic mechanism of bulk melting of ice

We study the initial stages of homogeneous melting of a hexagonal ice crystal at coexistence and at moderate superheating. Our trajectory-based computer simulation approach provides a comprehensive picture of the events that lead to melting; from the initial accumulation of 5+7 defects, via the formation of L-D and interstitial-vacancy pairs, to the formation of a liquid nucleus. Of the different types of defects that we observe to be involved in melting, a particular kind of 5+7 type defect (type 5) plays a prominent role as it often forms prior to the formation of the initial liquid nucleus and close to the site where the nucleus forms. Hence, like other solids, ice homogeneously melts via the prior accumulation of defects.
Self-Amplifying RNA Vaccine Candidates: Alternative Platforms for mRNA Vaccine Development

The present use of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 has shown for the first time the potential of mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases. Here we will summarize the current knowledge about improved mRNA vaccines, i.e., the self-amplifying mRNA (saRNA) vaccines. This approach may enhance antigen expression by amplification of the antigen-encoding RNA. RNA design, RNA delivery, and the innate immune responses induced by RNA will be reviewed.
Coping with Uncertainty: Cost-Benefit Analysis, the Precautionary Principle, and Climate Change

Two competing strategies for setting climate policy are cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle. This Article analyzes these strategies and considers their application to climate risks in four case studies: determination of the social cost of carbon, international endorsement of a 2° ceiling on warming, EPA’s endangerment finding, and the polar bear listing decision. In practice, cost-benefit analysis of climate change encounters great difficulties. The precautionary principle works well in determining whether to regulate, but gives modest guidance about the level of regulation. One possibility might be to combine the approaches in a two-step process: (1) using economic models to help identify feasible emissions trajectories that minimize the risk of catastrophic outcomes, and then (2) backing out the social cost of carbon based on compliance costs along the optimum trajectories. In the meantime, the four case studies indicate that decision makers have managed to make reasonably defensible decisions despite the obstacles.
Manipulation Robustness of Collaborative Filtering Systems

A collaborative filtering system recommends to users products that similar users like. Collaborative filtering systems influence purchase decisions, and hence have become targets of manipulation by unscrupulous vendors. We provide theoretical and empirical results demonstrating that while common nearest neighbor algorithms, which are widely used in commercial systems, can be highly susceptible to manipulation, two classes of collaborative filtering algorithms which we refer to as linear and asymptotically linear are relatively robust. These results provide guidance for the design of future collaborative filtering systems.
Efficiency of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in prosecuting state officials for committing international crimes

The aim of the present thesis is to examine and assess the efficiency of the International Criminal Statute in prosecuting state officials for committing international crimes. More precisely the thesis will discuss the Rome Statute of International Criminal Law. The importance lays within the hope for the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court to end the impunity of the State Officials and prosecute the international criminals in a fair trial. The debate of the effectiveness of the Statutes has been ongoing since the moment of the Rome Statute Treaty coming into force in 1998.
DDP-SA: Scalable Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning via Distributed Differential Privacy and Secure Aggregation

This article presents DDP-SA, a scalable privacy-preserving federated learning framework that jointly leverages client-side local differential privacy (LDP) and full-threshold additive secret sharing (ASS) for secure aggregation. Unlike existing methods that rely solely on differential privacy or on secure multi-party computation (MPC), DDP-SA integrates both techniques to deliver stronger end-to-end privacy guarantees while remaining computationally practical. The framework introduces a two-stage protection mechanism: clients first perturb their local gradients with calibrated Laplace noise, then decompose the noisy gradients into additive secret shares that are distributed across multiple intermediate servers. This design ensures that (i) no single compromised server or communication channel can reveal any information about individual client updates, and (ii) the parameter server reconstructs only the aggregated noisy gradient, never any client-specific contribution. Extensive experiments show that DDP-SA achieves substantially higher model accuracy than standalone LDP while providing stronger privacy protection than MPC-only approaches. The proposed framework scales linearly with the number of participants and offers a practical, privacy-preserving solution for federated learning applications with controllable computational and communication overhead.
On the Selection of Loss Severity Distributions to Model Operational Risk

Accurate modeling of operational risk is important for a bank and the finance industry as a whole to prepare for potentially catastrophic losses. One approach to modeling operational is the loss distribution approach, which requires a bank to group operational losses into risk categories and select a loss frequency and severity distribution for each category. This approach estimates the annual operational loss distribution, and a bank must set aside capital, called regulatory capital, equal to the 0.999 quantile of this estimated distribution. In practice, this approach may produce unstable regulatory capital calculations from year-to-year as selected loss severity distribution families change. This paper presents truncation probability estimates for loss severity data and a consistent quantile scoring function on annual loss data as useful severity distribution selection criteria that may lead to more stable regulatory capital. Additionally, the Sinh-arcSinh distribution is another flexible candidate family for modeling loss severities that can be easily estimated using the maximum likelihood approach. Finally, we recommend that loss frequencies below the minimum reporting threshold be collected so that loss severity data can be treated as censored data.
Magnitude, homology, and the Whitney twist

Magnitude is a numerical invariant of metric spaces and graphs, analogous, in a precise sense, to Euler characteristic. Magnitude homology is an algebraic invariant constructed to categorify magnitude. Among the important features of the magnitude of graphs is its behaviour with respect to an operation known as the Whitney twist. We give a homological account of magnitude's invariance under Whitney twists, extending the previously known result to encompass a substantially wider class of gluings. As well as providing a new tool for the computation of magnitudes, this is the first new theorem about magnitude to be proved using magnitude homology.
Topological phases of amorphous matter

Topological phases of matter are often understood and predicted with the help of crystal symmetries, although they don't rely on them to exist. In this chapter we review how topological phases have been recently shown to emerge in amorphous systems. We summarize the properties of topological states and discuss how disposing of translational invariance has motivated the surge of new tools to characterize topological states in amorphous systems, both theoretically and experimentally. The ubiquity of amorphous systems combined with the robustness of topology has the potential to bring new fundamental understanding in our classification of phases of matter, and inspire new technological developments.
A gene expression signature for survival and risk prediction of Breast Cancer that improves the signatures used in clinical genomic platforms

Several gene signatures to assign risk to breast cancer have been implemented in the clinic. However, these are black boxes where the inﬂuence of markers is unclear and the risk scores have no clear biological interpretation. In addition, they can be unrelated to standard tumor markers that guide clinical decisions. Here we propose a list of gene expression markers associated with survival data and breast cancer prognosis that can be biologically interpreted. This list is obtained by applying several statistical and machine-learning techniques to survival data. This results in the development of a robust pipeline to perform risk and survival analysis where the influence of each marker and the risk scores are shown and have a clear biological interpretation.
Asymptotics of Sample Entropy Production Rate for Stochastic Differential Equations

By using the dimension-free Harnack inequality and the integration by parts formula for the associated diffusion semigroup, we prove the central limit theorem, the moderate deviation principle, and the logarithmic iteration law for the sample entropy production rate of stochastic differential equations with Lipschitz continuous and dissipative drifts.
Comparative analysis of IoT-based controlled environment and uncontrolled environment plant growth monitoring system for hydroponic indoor vertical farm

Agriculture is a very important economic sector that contributes to a nation's overall economic development. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, with a rising population, the cereals demand will reach 3 billion tons by 2050. Also, the mission of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to provide zero hunger and sustainable agriculture by 2030. With a simultaneous decline in cultivable land and water scarcity, food production has to increase in order to achieve the above mission. Vertical farming is a current state of art agriculture technology to increase crop yield per unit area. This work focuses on designing and constructing an IoT-enabled smart vertical farming system with a controlled environment for plant growth. This system uses the hydroponic Deep Flow Technique (DFT), various sensors, and an auto pH and Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) balancing system. This paper provides a comparative analysis of IoT-based controlled environment vertical farming setup with the uncontrolled setup for Romaine lettuce in terms of plant growth parameters like plant height, maximum leaf length, maximum leaf width, and fresh and dry weight of the plant. The observed fresh weight of the aerial part for automated and unautomated setup is found to be 58.66 g and 48.81 g respectively. Also, the chemical analysis showed the plants possess the required optimum range of micro and macronutrients for both setups. The macronutrient results obtained for the controlled/automated (A setup), and uncontrolled/unautomated setup (U setup for Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K) are (PA, PU) (5.91 g/Kg, 6.06 g/Kg), and (KA, KU) (67.03 g/Kg, 74.01 g/Kg) respectively.
Validation, Verification, and Calibration: Using Standardized Terminology When Describing Ecological Models

WEC-216, a 2-page fact sheet by Frank J. Mazzotti and Joy J. Vinci, discusses briefly the philosophical issues surrounding the use of ecological models and try to reduce confusion by providing definitions for these three key terms. Includes references. Published by the UF Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, April 2007. WEC216/UW256: Validation, Verification, and Calibration: Using Standardized Terminology When Describing Ecological Models (ufl.edu)
Beneficial contribution of regional assistance in the effectiveness of dispute settlement within the World Trade Organization: comparison of trade dispute settlement between Russia v. EU and Russia v. Japan

The main objective of this research is to compare the effectiveness of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body in context of two specific cases: DS462: Russian Federation - Recycling Fee on Motor Vehicles and DS463: Russian Federation - Recycling Fee on Motor Vehicles. These cases share common legal provisions of Russia, which are challenged by two different counter parties - the EU and Japan. However, despite highly similar context of the cases, their course of resolution differentiate. In this regard, main goal of this comparative analysis is to find a shortage in the WTO DSB, which could possibly be solved by the assistance of other regional organizations
Impact of Digital Detox Awareness and Practices on Health Profession Students’ Mental Wellbeing, Physical Health, and Academic Performance: A Cross-Sectional Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND                   Health profession education students exhibit a higher rate of excessive digital technology use compared to their peers. Although the interaction of technology with student well-being has become more pronounced, the lack of awareness about digital detox among students in technology-intensive healthcare disciplines, along with the scarcity of studies exploring their practices, is concerning.                                                     OBJECTIVE                   This study aimed to investigate the patterns of social media usage and potential relationships between digital detox practices, mental well-being, physical health, and academic performance.                                                     METHODS                   A cross-sectional survey design was employed at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS) in Riyadh. The sample consisted of 471 students from the health professions. Validated surveys were used, including the Social Media Disorder Scale, Digital Detoxification Awareness Questions, Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K-6), and physical health assessments. The relationships between the study variables were analyzed using the chi-square test and ANOVA, with a significance level of 0.05.                                                     RESULTS                   A total of 471 students were included, with the majority being female (n = 291, 61.8%), single (n = 440, 93.4%), and aged between 18 and 37 years (M = 21.62, SD = 2.30). Participants reported an average daily social media usage of 7.07 ± 4.11 hours, with 31.6% of the sample classified as problematic users. Digital detox awareness was 59.7%, and 58.6% reported having experienced a digital detox. The most common strategies reported were avoiding phone use (69.1%) and muting notifications (70.3%). Participants reported eye strain (59.0%), neck pain (56.7%), and back pain (49.7%) due to the use of smartphones. Significant associations were found between social media use, gender, college affiliation, awareness of digital detox, level of physical activity, and sleep patterns (p &lt; 0.005). A positive correlation was found between GPA and digital detoxification (p = 0.01). Social media use was significantly associated with the mental well-being of the participants (F = 214.096, p &lt; 0.001) and with their academic performance (p = 0.04)                                                     CONCLUSIONS                   The relationships between digital behavior, physical health, mental well-being, and academic performance of health profession students are complex and intertwined. The practice of digital detox, as observed, offers improvements in various aspects of students' lives; therefore, incorporating digital wellness strategies into the curriculum is vital for preparing students as professionals and enhancing student outcomes.                                                     CLINICALTRIAL                   NRR24/007/11
THE IMPORTANCE OF LEAN MANUFACTURING AND SIX SIGMA CONCEPT FOR QUALITY MANAGEMENT OF SUPPLY CHAIN BUSINESS PROCESSES

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the importance of lean and six sigma concepts and techniques on the basis of systematic knowledge gathered from relevant scientific sources, both for discovering supply chain processes where potential waste can occur and for improving the quality of those processes. The paper will first outline the key features and effects of applying lean and six sigma concepts in manufacturing and supply chains. The focus is on the frameworks and potentials of implementing the lean concept in the Republic of Serbia. Then, the possibilities of integrating these concepts into the lean six sigma concept are presented and its role in eliminating defects in business processes. The penultimate part of the paper outlines the key features of lean supply chain while the final part contains the mathematical frameworks for designing six sigma supply chains.