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As the subject of female criminology in South Africa has only recently been dealt with in a qualitative manner, this paper aims to explore if there is a potential link between rehabilitation, reintegration support and recidivism as females are often placed back into the environment which prompted their criminal behaviour, further excluding them from rehabilitative reform, which might lead them to recidivate.

The research adopted a qualitative approach using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with six participants that were chosen purposively.

The paper notes a potential link between rehabilitation, reintegration support and recidivism as the female prisoners are imprinted with criminal dispositions since rehabilitation within the correctional facility has no implementation process to ensure that restoration can continue after they have been released.

Due to the limited number of the incarcerated female population and the scope of the preliminary study, the sample comprised of only six female offenders. As such, it contributes to the larger discourse of female criminality, but does not offer any recommendations.

Provides an understanding of the conditions in which the females are released. Allows for the inclusion of the female’s voice on, and reflection of, rehabilitation and recidivism. Notes a link between rehabilitation, reintegration and recidivism. Creates a pathway for further research in the exploration of a gendered reform approach.

While the subject of female criminology in South Africa has only recently been dealt with in a qualitative manner, this study offers an insight into how females who offend are often placed back into the environment which prompted their criminal behaviour.

This study employs the social ecology model to comprehensively explore the complex challenges young Black men face in South Africa and aims to highlight the importance of collaboration in addressing these multifaceted issues.

A multidisciplinary approach combines insights from sociology, education and the health literature with regard to government reports and academic data, and provides a holistic analysis of challenges faced by young Black men. Furthermore, it emphasises formal and informal learning, social and environmental influences and health disparities.

Young Black men in South Africa encounter complex challenges throughout their developmental journey, including limited family support, educational barriers, financial constraints, societal expectations and health disparities. Therefore, collaboration among stakeholders is essential for creating an equitable and inclusive environment that supports their development.

This research provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by young Black men in South Africa by emphasising the interconnectedness of informal education, economic empowerment and healthcare. Future research should focus on longitudinal studies, cultural influences and international comparisons, informing evidence-based interventions for a more equitable society.

While most efforts to combat climate change are focussed on energy efficiency and substitution of fossil fuels, growth in the built environment remains largely unquestioned. Given the current climate emergency and increasing scarcity of global resources, it is imperative that we address this “blind spot” by finding ways to support required services with less resource consumption.

There is now long overdue recognition to greenhouse gas emissions “embodied” in the production of building materials and construction, and its importance in reaching targets of net zero carbon by 2050. However, there is a widespread belief that we can continue to “build big”, provided we incorporate energy saving measures and select “low carbon materials” – ignoring the fact that excessive volume and area of buildings may outweigh any carbon savings. This is especially the case with commercial real estate.

As the inception and planning phases of projects offer most potential for reduction in both operational and embodied carbon, we must turn our attention to previously overlooked options such as “build nothing” or “build less”. This involves challenging the root cause of the need, exploring alternative approaches to meet desired outcomes, and maximising the use of existing assets. If new build is required, this should be designed for adaptability, with increased stewardship, so the building stock of the future will be a more valuable and useable resource.

This points to the need for increased understanding and application of the principles of strategic asset management, hitherto largely ignored in sustainability circles, which emphasize a close alignment of assets with the services they support.

Arguably, as the built environment consumes more material resources and energy than any other sector, its future configuration may be critical to the future of people and the planet. In this regard, this paper seeks to break new ground for deeper exploration.

This paper is determined to examine the role of body image and materialism in predicting the identity exploration of university students when conspicuous consumption is a mediator variable.

The study used a quantitative method. Data were collected from students of three federal universities in Nigeria. The sample size was 331. A self-report questionnaire was used to collect data and analysis was performed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling.

Findings reveal that materialism has a negative association in predicting the identity exploration of students. At the same time, there was a significant full and partial mediating effect of conspicuous consumption on the relationship between body image and materialism on identity exploration, respectively.

The study provides valuable information for parents in understanding how conspicuous consumption may influence their children’s identity formation. The findings can also be helpful for educators in the design of discussions and interventions for students on the social-psychological antecedents of conspicuous consumption and identity exploration. Government and regulatory agencies can use the study’s findings to shape student financial literacy and consumer protection policies.

This study makes both theoretical and methodological contributions to the existing literature. It provided concrete empirical evidence establishing a subtle connection between the symbolic self-completion theory and the identity status paradigm. It is also amongst the first single research conducted within the scope of these two theories in the Nigerian higher education context.

This paper aims to explore how environmental employment can promote desistance among criminalised children. Research demonstrates that being immersed in and interacting with the natural environment has a positive impact upon well-being and behaviour, including reduced aggressive and violent behaviours. However, how exposure to the natural environment might promote desistance amongst children with persistent criminal involvement is unclear.

This paper examines, through semi-structured interviews and participant observations, the experiences of n = 23 criminalised children aged 16–18 employed in outdoor work at a UK social enterprise.

The findings demonstrate how working in the natural environment can provide a safe space for children, where they can build positive relationships, learn valuable skills and reconnect with the world outside of the high-pressure, conflict-driven spaces in which they typically occupy.

This research highlights the relevance of the setting in which child rehabilitation takes place and the potential role of natural environments in providing places and opportunities which support pro-social identity development and desistance for children.

This brief is designed to inform disaster risk reduction and management in Philippine jails and prisons. It draws upon research conducted in nine jails and prisons between July 2015 and January 2016. This research included 44 interviews with stakeholders, including inmates and prisoners, and nine focus groups with inmates and prisoners in different regions of the country. The research indicates that natural hazards are one amongst the many threats that inmates and prisoners face in their everyday life. Natural hazards are significant because inmates and prisoners are particularly vulnerable. Inmates' and prisoners' vulnerability stems from a thread of proximate and root causes that range from insalubrious and overcrowded facilities and limited resourcing from the government, to the neoliberal nature of the Philippine state. However, inmates and prisoners are not helpless “victims” in dealing with natural hazards. They display a wide range of skills, resources and knowledge (i.e. capacities) that are grounded in everyday practices and values reflective of the broader Philippine society. This policy brief finally makes some recommendations for strengthening hazard prevention, fostering vulnerability mitigation, enhancing preparedness, and reinforcing disaster management in Philippine jails and prisons. These recommendations emphasise the contributions of a number of stakeholders, including the active role of inmates and prisoners who are the first line of defence in facing disasters in jails and prisons.

This paper provides practical advice for archaeologists and heritage specialists wishing to use ML approaches to identify archaeological features in high-resolution satellite imagery (or other remotely sensed data sources). We seek to balance the disproportionately optimistic literature related to the application of ML to archaeological prospection through a discussion of limitations, challenges and other difficulties. We further seek to raise awareness among researchers of the time, effort, expertise and resources necessary to implement ML successfully, so that they can make an informed choice between ML and manual inspection approaches.

Automated object detection has been the holy grail of archaeological remote sensing for the last two decades. Machine learning (ML) models have proven able to detect uniform features across a consistent background, but more variegated imagery remains a challenge. We set out to detect burial mounds in satellite imagery from a diverse landscape in Central Bulgaria using a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) plus additional but low-touch training to improve performance. Training was accomplished using MOUND/NOT MOUND cutouts, and the model assessed arbitrary tiles of the same size from the image. Results were assessed using field data.

Validation of results against field data showed that self-reported success rates were misleadingly high, and that the model was misidentifying most features. Setting an identification threshold at 60% probability, and noting that we used an approach where the CNN assessed tiles of a fixed size, tile-based false negative rates were 95–96%, false positive rates were 87–95% of tagged tiles, while true positives were only 5–13%. Counterintuitively, the model provided with training data selected for highly visible mounds (rather than all mounds) performed worse. Development of the model, meanwhile, required approximately 135 person-hours of work.

Our attempt to deploy a pre-trained CNN demonstrates the limitations of this approach when it is used to detect varied features of different sizes within a heterogeneous landscape that contains confounding natural and modern features, such as roads, forests and field boundaries. The model has detected incidental features rather than the mounds themselves, making external validation with field data an essential part of CNN workflows. Correcting the model would require refining the training data as well as adopting different approaches to model choice and execution, raising the computational requirements beyond the level of most cultural heritage practitioners.

Improving the pre-trained model’s performance would require considerable time and resources, on top of the time already invested. The degree of manual intervention required – particularly around the subsetting and annotation of training data – is so significant that it raises the question of whether it would be more efficient to identify all of the mounds manually, either through brute-force inspection by experts or by crowdsourcing the analysis to trained – or even untrained – volunteers. Researchers and heritage specialists seeking efficient methods for extracting features from remotely sensed data should weigh the costs and benefits of ML versus manual approaches carefully.

Our literature review indicates that use of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML approaches to archaeological prospection have grown exponentially in the past decade, approaching adoption levels associated with “crossing the chasm” from innovators and early adopters to the majority of researchers. The literature itself, however, is overwhelmingly positive, reflecting some combination of publication bias and a rhetoric of unconditional success. This paper presents the failure of a good-faith attempt to utilise these approaches as a counterbalance and cautionary tale to potential adopters of the technology. Early-majority adopters may find ML difficult to implement effectively in real-life scenarios.

Unlike many high-profile reports from well-funded projects, our paper represents a serious but modestly resourced attempt to apply an ML approach to archaeological remote sensing, using techniques like transfer learning that are promoted as solutions to time and cost problems associated with, e.g. annotating and manipulating training data. While the majority of articles uncritically promote ML, or only discuss how challenges were overcome, our paper investigates how – despite reasonable self-reported scores – the model failed to locate the target features when compared to field data. We also present time, expertise and resourcing requirements, a rarity in ML-for-archaeology publications.

In this paper, the heterogeneity of the linkages among financial development, productivity and growth across income groups is emphasized.

An empirical analysis is conducted with an illustrative sample of 130 economies over the period 1991–2019 and classified into four subsamples: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), developing, least developed and net food importing developing countries. Forecast error variance decompositions and panel vector auto-regressive estimations are computed, with insightful findings.

Higher levels of output stimulate the economic development in the agricultural sector, mainly via the productivity channel and, in the most developed economies, also through access to credit. Differently, in developing and least developed economies, the role of access to credit is marginal. The findings have practical implications for stakeholders involved in the planning of long-run investments. In less developed economies, priorities should be given to investments in technology and innovation, whereas financial markets are more suited to boost the development of the agricultural sector of developed economies.

The authors conclude on the credit–output–productivity nexus and contribute to the literature in (at least) three ways. First, they assess how credit access, agricultural output and agricultural productivity are jointly determined. Second, they use a novel approach, which departs from most of the case studies based on single-country data. Third, they conclude on potential causality links to conclude on policy implications.

This article aims to explore the engagement of refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) in informal and precarious jobs from a civil society actors' perspective. Despite a burgeoning literature on refugee integration and a focus on institutional integration programmes, little is known about the early insertion of RAS into informal and precarious employment as an alternative to subsidised integration programmes, when these are available.

This article draws on rich qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews with social workers, volunteers and other professionals supporting migrants.

Data analysis shows that migrants' insertion in informal jobs and their rejection of integration programmes may be the result of people's need to access financial capital to cover actual and future needs. Although such an engagement may be criticised for hampering RAS’ integration, it can be seen as an important source of agency against insecurity surrounding one's legal status.

This article highlights the importance of legal status precarity in shaping informal workers' agency and perceptions of them, opening up a debate on the relevance of informal work in terms of long-term integration and future migration trajectories.

This study aims to examine the role of mindfulness in promoting customers’ purchase intentions, especially with the mediation effects of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness toward online ride-hailing services. As such, several recommendations for ride-hailing service providers and researchers are suggested for better implementation in a practical and theoretical context.

The data collection process is carried out online during the period of February 2022 to March 2022, with a sample of 237 respondents being analyzed by the covariance-based structural equation modeling approach.

First of all, mindfulness had a direct influence on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, as well as an indirect influence on purchase intention through the mediation role of perceived usefulness. Besides, perceived usefulness is found to have a positive influence on the customer’s purchase intention, while perceived ease of use positively affects both perceived usefulness and intention.

This study just ends with customers’ intentions to adopt ride-hailing services; nevertheless, the actual behavior has not been examined. Further research might consider actual usage as a dependent factor when investigating the topic of ride-hailing services.

This study is notably different from the existing literature by filling the literature gap on the role of mindfulness in promoting customers’ purchase intentions toward ride-hailing services.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo examinar el papel del mindfulness en la promoción de las intenciones de compra de los clientes, especialmente con los efectos de mediación de la facilidad de uso percibida y la utilidad percibida hacia los servicios de transporte en línea. De este modo, se sugieren varias recomendaciones para los proveedores de servicios de transporte en coche y los investigadores para una mejor aplicación en un contexto práctico y teórico.

El proceso de recopilación de datos se lleva a cabo en línea durante el período de febrero de 2022 a marzo de 2022, con una muestra de 237 encuestados que se analizan mediante el enfoque CB-SEM.

En primer lugar, mindfulness tuvo una influencia directa sobre la facilidad de uso percibida y la utilidad percibida, así como una influencia indirecta sobre la intención de compra a través del papel de mediación de la utilidad percibida. Además, se observa que la utilidad percibida influye positivamente en la intención de compra del cliente, mientras que la facilidad de uso percibida afecta positivamente tanto a la utilidad percibida como a la intención.

Este estudio se limita a analizar la intención de los clientes de adoptar los servicios de transporte rápido; sin embargo, no se ha examinado el comportamiento real. En futuras investigaciones se podría considerar el uso real como un factor dependiente a la hora de investigar el tema de los servicios de transporte rápido.

Este estudio es notablemente diferente de la literatura existente al llenar el vacío bibliográfico sobre el papel de mindfulness en la promoción de las intenciones de compra de los clientes hacia los servicios de ride-hailing.

本研究旨在探讨 “正念 “在促进顾客购买意向方面的作用, 尤其是在感知易用性和感知有用性对在线叫车服务的中介效应方面。因此, 本研究为叫车服务提供商和研究人员提出了若干建议, 以便在实践和理论背景下更好地实施这些建议。

数据收集过程于 2022 年 2 月至 2022 年 3 月期间在线进行, 采用 CB-SEM 方法对 237 个受访者样本进行分析。

首先, 正念对感知易用性和感知有用性有直接影响, 并通过感知有用性的中介作用对购买意向产生间接影响。此外, 还发现感知有用性对顾客的购买意向有积极影响, 而感知易用性对感知有用性和购买意向都有积极影响。

本研究仅对顾客采用打车服务的意向进行了分析, 但并未对实际行为进行研究。在研究叫车服务时, 进一步的研究可能会将实际使用情况作为一个因果因素。

独创性 本研究填补了关于正念在促进顾客乘车服务购买意向方面作用的文献空白, 与现有文献有明显不同。