Common Ground Research Articles

Formulating a Descriptive Framework and Tagging system for Design Futures Practice Cases: Enabling Heuristic Tool Development for Design Education and Creative Inspiration

There has been a growing trend to extend the domain of futures studies into practical realms by integrating materials, methodologies, and perspectives from design and the arts. “Design Futures” is an emerging field that arises from the interaction between design and foresight, holding great potential for expansion and development. However, there is still a lack of heuristic design tools to empower the creation of practice cases in design futures. Due to the intricacies of the sub-genres of Design Futures practice cases, our prior work included the development of a universal case description framework with a quantitative tagging system to place the different genres of cases on a common ground for study. Firstly, the study established a global descriptive framework and tagging system (4 segments, 7 primary labels, and 36 secondary labels) around 5 Design Futures sub-types through a qualitative approach. Secondly, the study invited 109 participants from five different subjects areas to conduct an empirical study to validate the proposed framework and quantify the tagging system. The results show that the rationality of the framework is preliminarily confirmed; the strength of the correlation between genres and labels is weak; in terms of the quantification of labels, the study produces 62 valid secondary labels (positive 29, negative 33), accompanied by quantitative data as the basis for recommendation, forming a creativity-enabling, content-rich labelling system that can reflect the characteristics and differences between the many genres of Design Futures. Finally, the study proposes three modes of heuristic design (confirmatory, constructive and open-ended), which provide rules to guide the use and collocation of the tagging system. The results of this research have deepened the understanding of the concepts and structures of knowledge in the field of Design Futures, which will play a more extensive role in design pedagogy and creative inspiration contexts.

Common Ground: We Can Comprehensively Treat Pediatric Epilepsy and Psychiatric Comorbidities

Epilepsy and psychiatric illness have been long studied and today are better accepted as co-occurring than as discrete illnesses that are independent even if associated. Common pathophysiology may not be easily explained, but clearly exists given the significant overrepresentation of psychiatric illness among individuals with epilepsy. Conditions like autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are prevalent in pediatric epilepsy much more than expected, even in the context of chronic neurologic disease. The interplay between pediatric epilepsy and neuropsychiatric symptoms represents a complex clinical circumstance that is not well subtended by the chasm-like division of labor between psychiatrists and neurologists. The unfortunate result is that children and families often experience care that is fractured and at worst, counterproductive for their quality of life. A neuropsychiatric paradigm is essential to address epilepsy and its intrinsic psychiatric symptoms. Practical strategies will be discussed to address this challenge.

Informed consent and trial prioritization for clinical studies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stakeholder experiences and viewpoints.

Very little is known about the practice-oriented challenges and potential response strategies for effective and efficient translation of informed consent and study prioritization in times of a pandemic. This stakeholder interview study aimed to identify the full spectrum of challenges and potential response strategies for informed consent and study prioritization in a pandemic setting. We performed semi-structured interviews with German stakeholders involved in clinical research during the COVID-19 pandemic. We continued sampling and thematic text analysis of interview transcripts until thematic saturation of challenges and potential response strategies was reached. We conducted 21 interviews with investigators, oversight bodies, funders and research support units. For the first topic informed consent we identified three main themes: consent challenges, impact of consent challenges on clinical research, and potential strategies for consent challenges. For the second topic prioritization of clinical studies, we identified two main themes: perceived benefit of prioritization and potential strategies for prioritization. All main themes are further specified with subthemes. A supplementary table provides original quotes from the interviews for all subthemes. Potential response strategies for challenges with informed consent and study prioritization partly share common ground. High quality procedures for study prioritization, for example, seem to be a core response strategy in dealing with informed consent challenges. Especially in a research environment with particularly high uncertainty regarding potential treatment effects and further limitations for valid informed consent should the selection of clinical trials be very well justified from a scientific, medical, and ethics viewpoint.

A Common Ground Gun Violence Prevention Policy Package.

In 2022 we conducted a literature review, surveyed 1078 gun owners, and conducted post-survey focus groups and interviews of gun owners and non-gun owners, to determine a common ground gun violence prevention (GVP) policy package. This allowed us to see policies that would save lives and be widely accepted: (1) violent misdemeanor laws, (2) state permit laws, combined with universal background checks; (3) red flag laws. Based on our review of relevant research, we conservatively estimate that in states without any of the policy package components, implementing this package would result in a 27.9% reduction in firearm deaths. We believe that polarization between firearm owners and non-firearm owners, which has thwarted a widely supported response to the problem of gun violence, is largely a harmful myth that can be overcome by including gun owners in the process of fashioning an effective policy approach.

Occurrence of Clostridium perfringens in Wild Mammals in the Amazon Biome.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the occurrence of Clostridium perfringens in stool samples and swabs collected from wild mammals in the Amazon biome. Sixty-five faecal and swab samples were collected in situ and ex situ from 16 species and three genera of wild mammals, some of which were in good health and some of which had diarrhoea. After pre-enrichment, the samples were plated on selective agar for C. perfringens. Characteristic colonies were subjected to multiplex PCR for the detection of genes encoding the main C. perfringens toxins (alpha, beta, epsilon, and iota toxin and enterotoxin). Among the 65 samples, 40 (61.5%) were positive for the gene encoding the alpha toxin and were classified as type A, 36 of which were asymptomatic animals and four were diarrheal. No other toxinotypes were found. The findings of this study suggest that C. perfringens type A is commonly found in mammal species of the Amazon biome. This seems to be the first study to identify C. perfringens type A in species such as B. variegatus (common ground sloth), C. didactylus (two-toed sloth), P. flavus (Jupará), T. tetradactyla (anteater), S. collinsi (squirrel monkey), S. niger (black marmoset), and S. apella (Guyana capuchin) and in the genus Didelphis sp. (opossum).

Trouble in Cyprus, Riots in Turkey: Ian Fleming, Propaganda, and "The Great Riot of Istanbul"

This article will analyse British influence campaigns that employed disinformation and propaganda to advance British interests during the Second World War and the early Cold War, with a focus on the role of Ian Fleming. It draws on declassified files at The National Archives in London, primary media sources in English and in Turkish, and secondary published research to help understand the extent to which British objectives were achieved in Turkey and Cyprus by finding common ground with the Turkish government, creating false anti-communist narratives, and turning a blind eye to undemocratic and repressive activity against minorities driven by ethno-nationalist policies of the Turkish Republic. The article will answer the following questions: why did Ian Fleming trivialise a violent pogrom against ethnic-Greeks in Istanbul in 1955 as a spontaneous “riot” (in his Sunday Times report), and as a Soviet plot in From Russia With Love? Did British strategic considerations in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean make them complicit in human rights abuses in Turkey? Did Ian Fleming’s writing help shield the Turkish government from criticism at a time of declining colonial power and ideological Cold War? And finally, how do public perceptions of intelligence that Fleming helped to create serve the interests of modern, authoritarian politics in Turkey?

Loyal to Whom? Friends, Spies, Revenge, and Our Man in Havana

Abstract The essay deals with the law and revenge issue, questioning the fundamental assumption according to which the law, by its own nature, should act as a substitute for vengeance. Provided that both law and revenge have their common grounds on the different, and at times conflicting, feelings of resentment and loyalty, the paper maintains that law can prevent revenge only if it is trusted by the victims, being itself a part to a bond of loyalty. Graham Greene’s 1958 “entertainment” Our Man in Havana is chosen as a reference scenario. The paper analyses the characters’ attitudes towards the law, their resentments, and their bonds of loyalty, and investigates the emotional scenario behind the two revenges mentioned in the novel. Finally, the essay maintains that each person’s degree of trust in the law, and therefore their willingness to renounce revenge, depends on that person’s own choices and inner feelings about themselves and the community.

Ad-hoc-compounds in spoken German

Abstract Occasionalisms, i.e., non-lexicalized ad-hoc-expressions that are coined for a specific occasion, are a recurrent phenomenon in verbal interactions. Even though recipients have not heard those novel word formations before, they can still understand them. This paper reports on a study from an Interactional Linguistics perspective which explores ad-hoc-expressions in spoken German, such as streichelmichbärchenpärchen (‘stroke-me-little-bear-couple’) and windeldroge (‘diaper-drug’). It draws on an analysis of 934 ad-hoc-compounds in a corpus of German interaction. These typically do not cause a problem of understanding, because their meaning is inferable due to different resources that help recipients understand unfamiliar expressions: a specific word formation with a high degree of compositionality, cues or anchoring in the prior context or common ground. While a compositional word formation is not always necessary to sufficiently understand meaning in interaction due to other resources, opaque word formation has its limits when it comes to understanding the meaning of an expression especially when recipients cannot rely on other resources to understand the expression.

Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters: how interaction ritual connects conversation analysis and cultural sociology.

This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similarly rooted in Durkheim, Goffman's theory of interaction ritual provides an analytic pivot between EMCA and the strong program. The broader theoretical argument is illustrated using data from interviews with adults about their most recent encounter with a rude strangers in public space, which are here treated a breaches of the interaction ritual of civil inattention. Members readily draw on the specifics of a particular stranger interaction gone awry to reflect on the nature of life in public and to expound on their understandings of the ethics of face-to-face interaction and everyday morality more generally. Where EMCA focuses on the discoverability of the organizational features of everyday interaction, the position developed here is concerned with the organization of members' interpretations of everyday interaction. While centered on specific kinds of interactional breaches, by finding common ground between EMCA and cultural sociology, the argument advances a potentially more broadly applicable approach that treats everyday encounters as morally meaningful and everyday lifeworlds as moral landscapes. Developing a comprehensive understanding of copresent interaction as a basic building block of society requires attention to both the organizational dynamics of copresent encounters and to the interpretive resources that ordinary members use to account for and justify their own and others' conduct.

Mines, environment, questions, and disagreements: An analysis of the Turów coal mine disputes

This is a story of costs of 114 million EUR incurred by stubbornness and unwillingness to cooperate, or, in other words, by sticking to dead ends in discussions where parties disagree strongly enough that they cannot find common ground. This paper proposes an approach to analyzing such cases of disagreement by employing a multidimensional model involving deontic, ontological, and ethical axes. We use an example of the Turów coal mine disputes, which, from March 2020 to February 2022, involved the governments of the Republic of Poland, the Czech Republic, and the European Court of Justice. Our model results in a tree-like structure of the consecutive issues being considered, represented by questions, governed by the dependency between questions and external actions and events related to the dispute. We aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and resolution paths in such complex disagreements.

Beacon, a Lightweight Deep Reinforcement Learning Benchmark Library for Flow Control

Recently, the increasing use of deep reinforcement learning for flow control problems has led to a new area of research focused on the coupling and adaptation of the existing algorithms to the control of numerical fluid dynamics environments. Although still in its infancy, the field has seen multiple successes in a short time span, and its fast development pace is certainly partly imparted by the open-source effort that drives the expansion of the community. Yet this emerging domain is still missing a common ground to (i) ensure the reproducibility of the results and (ii) offer a proper ad hoc benchmarking basis. To this end, we propose beacon, an open-source benchmark library composed of seven lightweight one-dimensional and two-dimensional flow control problems with various characteristics, action and observation space characteristics, and CPU requirements. In this contribution, the seven considered problems are described, and reference control solutions are provided. The sources for the following work are publicly available.

Borderline content and platformised speech governance: Mapping TikTok's moderation controversies in South and Southeast Asia

AbstractContent moderation comes with trade‐offs and moral dilemmas, particularly for transnational platforms governing borderline content where the boundaries of acceptability are subject to debate. While extensive research has explored the legality and legitimacy of platformised speech governance in established democracies, few address the complexities of less‐than‐democratic developing nations. Through sociolegal analysis and controversy mapping of TikTok's localised moderation in South and Southeast Asia, the study examines how major actors negotiate the shifting boundaries of online speech. The analysis reveals that neither the platform nor regional states are well‐positioned to achieve sound governance of borderline content. Primarily, TikTok localises its moderation based on pragmatic necessity rather than moral obligations, deliberately sidestepping contentious political controversies. Governments demonstrate determined efforts to control online discourse, leveraging legal uncertainty to further political agendas. Thus, local content governance often relies on vague rationales around securitisation and morality. The contradictory motives of (de)politicising borderline moderation seemingly counterbalance each other, yet in practice lead to an accountability vacuum where legitimate interests are sidelined. Given the lack of normative common ground, ensuring procedural justice and encouraging civic participation are essential to counteract rhetoric that rationalises imposition of certain speech norms hinging on imbalanced political power.

From MNIST to ImageNet and back: benchmarking continual curriculum learning

AbstractContinual learning (CL) is one of the most promising trends in recent machine learning research. Its goal is to go beyond classical assumptions in machine learning and develop models and learning strategies that present high robustness in dynamic environments. This goal is realized by designing strategies that simultaneously foster the incorporation of new knowledge while avoiding forgetting past knowledge. The landscape of CL research is fragmented into several learning evaluation protocols, comprising different learning tasks, datasets, and evaluation metrics. Additionally, the benchmarks adopted so far are still distant from the complexity of real-world scenarios, and are usually tailored to highlight capabilities specific to certain strategies. In such a landscape, it is hard to clearly and objectively assess models and strategies. In this work, we fill this gap for CL on image data by introducing two novel CL benchmarks that involve multiple heterogeneous tasks from six image datasets, with varying levels of complexity and quality. Our aim is to fairly evaluate current state-of-the-art CL strategies on a common ground that is closer to complex real-world scenarios. We additionally structure our benchmarks so that tasks are presented in increasing and decreasing order of complexity—according to a curriculum—in order to evaluate if current CL models are able to exploit structure across tasks. We devote particular emphasis to providing the CL community with a rigorous and reproducible evaluation protocol for measuring the ability of a model to generalize and not to forget while learning. Furthermore, we provide an extensive experimental evaluation showing that popular CL strategies, when challenged with our proposed benchmarks, yield sub-par performance, high levels of forgetting, and present a limited ability to effectively leverage curriculum task ordering. We believe that these results highlight the need for rigorous comparisons in future CL works as well as pave the way to design new CL strategies that are able to deal with more complex scenarios.

Age-related changes of interoceptive brain networks: Implications for interoception and alexithymia.

Aging is known to be associated with a decline in interoceptive abilities and changes in emotional processing, including alexithymia. As the brain areas supporting interoceptive awareness participate in the perception of emotion, we suggested that interoceptive decline and alexithymia in older adults may share common neural ground. To test this hypothesis, we administered functional magnetic resonance imaging-based heartbeat detection task to 62 adults of diverse ages (range 18-73) and evaluated a larger sample of older and younger adults using questionnaires characterizing interoceptive sensibility, alexithymia, and depressive attitudes. We found that increasing age was linked to decreased activation during the interoceptive task, including the right insular-opercular and supplementary motor areas (SMAs). Age also affected task-based functional connectivity, with two major effects being a decrease in the connectivity of the SMA-insular network and an increase in the connectivity of the prefrontal-lateral occipital network. Path analysis performed for interoceptive accuracy as the endogenous variable revealed that the impact of age was mediated by the functional activation of the insular cortex and SMA and by the connectivity between these areas. Another path analysis using alexithymia as the endogenous variable while controlling for depressive attitudes showed that the effect of age was mediated by interoceptive decline. The study supports the role of central mechanisms in age-related interoceptive decline and shows its implications for alexithymia. Since alexithymia represents a risk factor for mental and cardiovascular diseases, the study findings may open an important direction toward maintaining older adults' well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

An integrated common ground‐based grid‐connected current‐fed switched inverter

AbstractA current‐fed switched inverter and its derivatives are gaining more attention in solar PV grid‐connected applications. In these inverters, the absence of galvanic isolation generates the leakage current, leading to the injection of harmonics and the degradation of solar PV panel life span. This paper proposes an integrated common ground‐based grid‐connected current‐fed switched inverter. The common ground between the input DC source and output AC grid eliminates the leakage current and makes the inverter immune to high‐frequency common‐mode voltage variations. It utilizes the shoot‐through state to boost the input DC voltage and obtain the rated AC output voltage. Moreover, as compared to the contemporary common ground‐based inverter topologies, the number of passive reactive elements and active switches is less. Thereby, the size, cost of the system, and associated power loss are reduced. The proposed inverter's continuous input current and buck–boost nature make it suitable for applications like solar PV systems. The steady‐state analysis of the proposed inverter is validated using the MATLAB Simulink tool, and furthermore, the simulation results during grid‐tied mode have been cross‐verified with the help of real‐time simulator OPAL‐RT. Further, the power loss and thermal loss analysis are carried out using the PLECS software. Finally, the performance of the inverter and simulation results are verified with the experimental results.

The Geoeconomic Turn of the Single European Market? Conceptual Challenges and Empirical Trends

AbstractThe nature of global economic interactions is undergoing profound changes. Rising concerns over the security and strategic implications of economic interdependence are leading to what is often defined as a ‘geoeconomic world order’. In framing this Special Issue, this article sets a common conceptual ground to assess whether, how and why the single European market is experiencing such a geoeconomic turn and how EU responses are shaping other international actors in the process. It develops a research agenda to examine (i) the systemic pressures pushing towards geoeconomic responses, (ii) the internal drivers and processes determining the nature of the EU's geoeconomic turn (what we term ‘shades of geopoliticisation’) and (iii) the external consequences of the EU's embrace of geoeconomics. The analytical discussion is complemented by an overview of empirical trends, drawing examples from the various fields of market integration and European policy‐making covered in the contributions to this Special Issue.

A high gain Z-source boost DC–DC converter with common ground for solar PV applications

This paper proposes a high-gain dc–dc converter with common ground utilizing a Z-source network for low voltage solar photovoltaic (PV) applications. This converter features a common ground and a high output–input voltage conversion factor at a low duty cycle. These converters find their most common application in grid-tied or stand-alone solar photovoltaic systems, particularly those with low output voltages that must be increased to the required level. The presented converter operating duty ratio is within 0–0.5 and maintains similar voltage stress on Z-network components since it employs the conventional Z-source configuration. The presented converter provides a common ground between source and load, unlike conventional Z-network converter. A type-2 closed-loop voltage controller and state–space average model evaluate the converter’s dynamic behavior for reliable and steady performance. A laboratory hardware prototype of 250 Watts is built and low gate signals are generated by using a ARM cortex M4 Microcontroller (STM32F407VGT6). The experimental results confirm that the proposed converter, with a gain of 10.46 and a power of 250 Watts, has a maximum efficiency of around 93%. The experimental results validates the effectiveness of the proposed converter under both constant and shifts in amounts of solar irradiation.

Religious Moderation: An Analysis of Understanding, Internet and Social Media Exposure and Social Interaction Systems

<p><strong>Introduction:</strong> Religious moderation is launched because it concerns the order of life of the nation and state, where the internet and social media become a platform for any dynamic public discussion and change perspectives and practices in religious harmony. This study examines access to information about religious moderation through the internet and social media (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Line) as the most widely used platforms in Indonesia and the influence of exposure to its content on understanding and the system of relational interaction among university students.</p><p><strong>Methods:</strong> Explanatory quantitative survey method with factor and regression analysis to explain the dominant factors and the magnitude of the influence of exposure to religious moderation content on students' understanding and interpersonal relationships.</p><p><strong>Findings:</strong> That student quite often access information about religious moderation on social media through WhatsApp and Instagram. Issues related to national commitment, tolerance, intolerance, violence, radicalism, government attitudes, regulations and their consequences, correlate with the dogmatism factor. The findings show that it is not easy to change one's religious beliefs, and this should be respected. So what remains is to find common ground and give a positive impression so that social interactions continue to run normally.</p><p class="normal"><strong>Originality:</strong> The research presents a novelty in the perspective of communication science on the understanding of religious moderation and its correlation with the interpersonal interaction system in students from non-religious campuses. Where previously religious moderation was widely studied in the perspective of language, civilization, humanity, culture, education and with subjects from religious campuses, especially Islam.</p>

The Complex Relationship between Mechanisms Underlying Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Its Treatment, and the Risk of Lymphomas: A Comprehensive Review.

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease may be at higher risk of developing lymphomas and other cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. In addition, there may be a link between the use of thiopurines or anti-tumor necrosis factor drugs (anti-TNF) and these pathologies. The treatment of patients with Crohn's disease who have previously been diagnosed with lymphoma is a challenge for gastroenterologists. In this report, we examine important clinical issues related to the treatment of patients with inflammatory bowel disease with active lymphoma, as well as of patients with hematological cancer history. In this discussion, we take into account most of the available treatments for inflammatory bowel disease, as well as the impact of chronic inflammation and viral infections. In addition, we try to find common ground for the development of lymphoproliferative disorders and autoimmune diseases. Patients with inflammatory bowel disease may be at higher risk of developing lymphomas and other cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. Chronic inflammatory processes and viral infections play an important role in carcinogenesis. In addition, there may be a link between the use of thiopurines or anti-TNF drugs and these pathologies. A significant risk of the development of lymphoma in people undergoing each therapy should be considered, and it should be estimated how much greater this risk will be in patients with a history of lymphoproliferative disorders. The following review is an attempt to answer which therapy would be the most appropriate for patients with Crohn's disease and a history of lymphoma treatment. A lack of clear guidelines creates great challenges for doctors.

Survey of Danish Head and Neck Cancer Patients' Positions on Personalized Medicine, Gene Tests, and Personalized Follow-Up.

The field of personalized medicine (PM) has grown rapidly because of the "omics revolution", but PM may be difficult for patients to comprehend. This study sought to explore head and neck cancer (HNC) patients' positions and knowledge of PM, gene tests, and follow-up and to compare HNC patients' positions to a sample from a national Danish questionnaire. To do this, patients with prior HNC were invited to participate in a questionnaire. Initial interviews revealed a heterogenic understanding of PM between patients. A total of 226 patients were included in the survey and 177 patients with complete data were included for analysis. Most patients were more positive than negative towards gene tests and gene research (83% and 93%, respectively), but 72% had little or no knowledge of the subject. Almost all patients, 98%, were satisfied with their follow-up. Significantly more patients with HNC were positive towards gene research compared to a sample from a national Danish questionnaire (p < 0.001). Patients with HNC were positive towards gene tests and PM, but patients may not understand or comprehend the information given, and it is important to inform and educate patients and health professionals to establish common ground in PM.