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The playable ad is a new type of digital advertising that combines interactivity with gamification. Guided by psychological reactance theory, this study aims to explore the psychological processes and effects of playable ads on consumers’ perceived control and product attitudes.

This paper conducted two experiments to examine the relationship between playable ads, perceived control and product attitude. This paper also applied psychological reactance theory and investigated whether perceived control triggered by the interactive features of playable ads influenced psychological reactance toward them.

Findings from two experiments show that playable ads, compared to video ads, increased consumers’ perceived control, which, in turn, led to more positive attitudes toward the advertised products (Studies 1 and 2). This study also supports psychological reactance theory by revealing that increased perceived control diminished perceived freedom threat and subsequently alleviated consumers’ psychological reactance toward advertising messages (Study 2).

This study sheds light on the effectiveness of a new type of ad-game integration – playable ads. Different from prior research in gamification of advertising, this paper examined the effectiveness of playable ads in an information processing context in which the ads were not the primary task to focus on. This study also extends psychological reactance theory in the context of interactive marketing by exploring the effect of perceived control afforded by digital message features in mitigating reactance.

Information behaviour exists in two forms: first when information is sought with a clear purpose and second, when we encounter it accidentally or serendipitiously. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the information encountering (IE) and encountered information sharing (EIS) behaviour of research students in an online environment.

The quantitative research approach was applied to carry out this research. The authors selected 120 MPhil and PhD research students (who research information as a part of their assignments) from six departments as sample for the study. Out of 120 research students, 93 returned the filled questionnaires. The collected data were analysed in SPSS version 22. First, descriptive statistics to estimate the IE and sharing behaviour; and later one-way ANOVA and post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD tests were applied to investigate the EIS based on the frequency of internet usage.

The findings indicate that the mean scores of the responses remain between “sometimes” and “often”, in all the behavioural sub-constructs of the model of IE, i.e. noticing, stopping, examining, capturing, storing (keeping), sharing and returning. The extended model proved to be valid in an online environment in the context of Pakistani culture. While estimating EIS, the results indicated significantly higher sharing and large effect size among the research students who used the internet from 11 to 15 h a week than those who used it between 6 and 10 h.

Keeping in view the results the research students and parent organisations (universities) working for the improvement of research ranking and research students’ better performance, should know that research information is not only actively acquired but also huge amount of information is accidentally encountered and shared. Therefore, the universities should train their research students to enhance the information sharing of encountered information. That will promote the research culture and may enhance the speed of learning, research work and ultimately result in competitive advantage, without any extra effort.

This is the first study of its type in Pakistan to measure the IE behaviour of research students in an online environment. Moreover, it is the first study which investigates the extended model of IE using a quantitative approach in the Pakistani research environment, which originated in Japan via qualitative research approach.

Kevin Bales' work on contemporary slavery has brought this under‐researched field of social enquiry to the attention not only of the academic world but to a wider global audience through his prolific publishing, his film work and not least his presidency of Free the Slaves, the US anti‐slavery organisation. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of his findings and methodologies currently prevailing in this field.

This paper is based on an interview with Kevin Bales conducted in April 2009 and subsequent discussions with Claire Griffiths.

Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, the book that brought Bales global recognition over a decade ago, reinstated slavery as a key human rights issue on the research agenda for the twenty‐first century. This interview is condensed from a longer discussion between Kevin Bales and Claire Griffiths on researching contemporary slavery. In this conversation they explore the relationship between slavery, trafficking and prostitution, a theme that leads the discussion to the gendered nature of slavery through the centuries. The interview concludes with some indications of where slavery studies research is going in the twenty‐first century.

This paper provides new insights into the emerging and interdisciplinary field of modern slavery studies.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the roles of ethics and wisdom in knowledge economies and specifically the place of ethics and wisdom in social research in knowledge economies.

Approach – It does this through examining traditional theories of ethics, their application in the context of research ethics, and the origins of the current institutional ethics approval regimes. The limitations of consequentialist and deontological approaches to ethics in social research are articulated, as is the rise of neo Aristotelian virtue ethics – to which wisdom is integral. Questions are posed about several high-profile cases of past social research, and the extent to which these might be considered both unethical and unwise. Attention is then given to the place of wisdom in the practice of social research. Aristotle presents practical wisdom as an executive virtue that coherently integrates intellectual and ethical virtues to create deliberative excellence.

Findings – Practical wisdom is thus seen as a way of performing as an educated, skilled, and ethical social actor with carefully constructed predispositions which automatically seek excellence and well-being. Furthermore, a wise social researcher considers the needs of others carefully to try to find the right thing to do, but in understanding others emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise, is not manipulative. The conclusion poses the question as to how practical wisdom might be developed applied to the practices of contemporary social research.

Many popular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques have low accuracy, especially when localizing environments containing dynamically moving objects since their presence can potentially cause inaccurate data associations. To address this issue, the proposed FADM-SLAM system aims to improve the accuracy of SLAM techniques in environments containing dynamically moving objects. It uses a pipeline of feature-based approaches accompanied by sparse optical flow and multi-view geometry as constraints to achieve this goal.

FADM-SLAM, which works with monocular, stereo and RGB-D sensors, combines an instance segmentation network incorporating an intelligent motion detection strategy (iM) with an optical flow technique to improve location accuracy. The proposed AS-SLAM system comprises four principal modules, which are the optical flow mask and iM, the ego motion estimation, dynamic point detection and the feature-based extraction framework.

Experiment results using the publicly available RGBD-Bonn data set indicate that FADM-SLAM outperforms established visual SLAM systems in highly dynamic conditions.

In summary, the first module generates the indication of dynamic objects by using the optical flow and iM with geometric-wise segmentation, which is then used by the second module to compute the starting point of a posture. The third module, meanwhile, first searches for the dynamic feature points in the environment, and second, eliminates them from further processing. An algorithm based on epipolar constraints is implemented to do this. In this way, only the static feature points are retained, which are then fed to the fourth module for extracting important features.

Part 1, then, begins with Dingwall's analysis and evaluation of ethical regulation in the social sciences. Following a socio-historical account of the present regulatory regime, which concludes that ethical regulation has been and remains largely a matter of reputation management, he proceeds to consider the costs and benefits of ethical regulation. Dingwall argues that far from being indicative of anarchic and now largely anachronistic administrative regimes, autonomy and decentralisation were in fact finely evolved structural responses to facilitate innovation and creative knowledge generation within institutions of higher education. The spasms of centralisation that have accompanied the rise of ethical regulation reflect a wider managerialism and corporatism that not only inhibit innovation, but are also largely inward-facing and therefore more concerned with shielding the institution than protecting vulnerable research subjects. The costs of ethical regulation in its present form may well outweigh the benefits. Examining research ethics in the context of a knowledge economy, Harrison and Rooney reach remarkably similar conclusions in relation to ethical autonomy and decentralisation. Introducing the main traditions of western moral philosophy, they progress to a discussion of research ethics in the context of normative ethical positions in society more broadly. After examining three seminal, social research projects, they point up the failure of traditional approaches and again indicate the importance of organisational structures. Rather than unreflexively policing abstract codes of conduct, which by implication are thoroughly outflanked by the complexities of a contemporary political economy of knowledge, research institutions they argue must generate wise ethical cultures through the production of institutional ethical spaces. Here autonomous reflection, individual engagement and ethical dialogue form an organic base for wise organisation. Rather than a ‘tickbox’ approach to satisfy legal and professional obligations, one imagines an institutional culture of ethical deliberation that extends to consider the furthermost implications for society.