Future Context Research Articles

Why Did They Assume Only Humans Had Politics?

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

The Nation-State 1648–2148

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

The Stories We Share: Learnings from a Hundred Years of the Three Communities

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

Against Project Arcadia

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. Our earth is approaching its end. Through Project Arcadia our species has a chance at escape. In this paper, I want to argue that Arcadia is all things considered unjustifiable and unadvisable. It is unjustifiable because human beings have proven themselves incapable of stewarding sentient life on planet earth; for example, our collective response to climate change has been dire, handled almost exclusively through adaptation, committing vast areas of the world to desolation, desertification, or disappearance. Basic respect for life, and what we likely will make of some other instances of it, should counsel humility as we contemplate relocating ourselves to other life-supporting domains. It is inadvisable because our species, like the world, is impermanent. We will, at some point, have to contemplate the ceasing of our existence, and it is my argument that we contemplate this ceasing on the terra firm of our own planet. In conclusion, and drawing on the work of Samuel Scheffler and the Japanese concept of mono no aware, I will argue that there is considerable value, admittedly tainted with considerable melancholy, to be had in grasping the opportunity provided by planetary devastation to achieve some semblance of narrative completion.

Assessment of COVID-19 as the Underlying Cause of Death Among Children and Young People Aged 0 to 19 Years in the US

COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940 000 individuals in the US, including at least 1289 children and young people (CYP) aged 0 to 19 years, with at least 821 CYP deaths occurring in the 1-year period from August 1, 2021, to July 31, 2022. Because deaths among US CYP are rare, the mortality burden of COVID-19 in CYP is best understood in the context of all other causes of CYP death. To determine whether COVID-19 is a leading (top 10) cause of death in CYP in the US. This national population-level cross-sectional epidemiological analysis for the years 2019 to 2022 used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database on underlying cause of death in the US to identify the ranking of COVID-19 relative to other causes of death among individuals aged 0 to 19 years. COVID-19 deaths were considered in 12-month periods between April 1, 2020, and August 31, 2022, compared with deaths from leading non-COVID-19 causes in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Cause of death rankings by total number of deaths, crude rates per 100 000 population, and percentage of all causes of death, using the National Center for Health Statistics 113 Selected Causes of Death, for ages 0 to 19 and by age groupings (<1 year, 1-4 years, 5-9 years, 10-14 years, 15-19 years). There were 821 COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 0 to 19 years during the study period, resulting in a crude death rate of 1.0 per 100 000 population overall; 4.3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year; 0.6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years; 0.4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years; 0.5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years; and 1.8 per 100 000 for those aged 15 to 19 years. COVID-19 mortality in the time period of August 1, 2021, to July 31, 2022, was among the 10 leading causes of death in CYP aged 0 to 19 years in the US, ranking eighth among all causes of deaths, fifth in disease-related causes of deaths (excluding unintentional injuries, assault, and suicide), and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory diseases when compared with 2019. COVID-19 deaths constituted 2% of all causes of death in this age group. The findings of this study suggest that COVID-19 was a leading cause of death in CYP. It caused substantially more deaths in CYP annually than any vaccine-preventable disease historically in the recent period before vaccines became available. Various factors, including underreporting and not accounting for COVID-19's role as a contributing cause of death from other diseases, mean that these estimates may understate the true mortality burden of COVID-19. The findings of this study underscore the public health relevance of COVID-19 to CYP. In the likely future context of sustained SARS-CoV-2 circulation, appropriate pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical interventions (eg, vaccines, ventilation, air cleaning) will continue to play an important role in limiting transmission of the virus and mitigating severe disease in CYP.

The Essence of Unity?

The Cohesion Policy of the European Union has a long history in European integration. New enlargement waves, internal and external challenges, economic downturns and other crises have consistently required a redefinition of the goals and instruments of Cohesion Policy. It is primarily recognised as one of the most prominent distributive policies of the EU and one of the largest development policies of the world. The aim of this article is to provide a basis for understanding this complex policy area by offering a historical perspective and outlining the future context and challenges. After establishing a suitable theoretical framework, the evolution of the policy is explained by examining the policy goals and objectives in different integration eras, as well as providing an overview of Cohesion Policy’s role in the EU’s budget. Following a summary of the main management methods, the article assesses the future perspectives of the policy.

De-concentrating Megacities. Political Theory and Material Normativity

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

Perceptions of Physical Education teachers from a metropolitan region of southern Brazil about the repercussions of the COVID-19 on their pedagogical practices

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact around the world, impacting various sectors of society, including education and consequently school physical education. In this way, we sought to investigate, through a descriptive-exploratory field research, with a qualitative approach to the data, the perceptions of Physical Education teachers from a metropolitan region of southern Brazil about the repercussions of the pandemic on their pedagogical practices. To this end, sixteen teachers participated in this study, nine from the public school system and seven from the private network, through semi-structured interviews, online, during the months of June and July 2021. The data, which were organized through the NVivo-12 software and analyzed by the content analysis technique, point to difficulties, facilities and learning resulting from experiences during the pandemic. Aspects of emergency remote teaching, the application of security protocols in physical education classes and the potential of physical education for students in the current and future context were addressed. From these findings it was possible to verify that these teachers needed, more than ever, to develop their adaptive skills. This is because this study demonstrated that Physical Education classes were the only time when children are out of the classroom, being perceived as a moment of liberation, after experiencing the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, considering that these teachers provide feelings of lightness, joy, and manifestation of expressions. Thus, the findings of this study can contribute to reflections and overcoming of future challenges related to the teaching of School Physical Education. For this, future research is needed to verify how these consequences are reverberating over time.

Persian Optical Character Recognition Using Deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a system of converting images, including text,into editable text and is applied to various languages such as English, Arabic, and Persian. While these languages have similarities, their fundamental differences can create unique challenges. In Persian, continuity between Characters, the existence of semicircles, dots, oblique, and left-to-right characters such as English words in the context are some of the most important challenges in designing Persian OCR systems. Our proposed framework, Bina, is designed in a special way to address the issue of continuity by utilizing Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and deep bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BLSTM), a type of LSTM networks that has access to both past and future context. A huge and diverse dataset, including about 2M samples of both Persian and English contexts,consisting of various fonts and sizes, is also generated to train and test the performance of the proposed model. Various configurations are tested to find the optimal structure of CNN and BLSTM. The results show that Bina successfully outperformed state of the art baseline algorithm by achieving about 96% accuracy in the Persian and 88% accuracy in the Persian and English contexts.

Designing the Future? The Metaverse, NFTs, &amp; the Future as Defined by Unity Users

The “metaverse” and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), though not necessarily “new” terms or technologies, have risen to mainstream prominence post-2020. This paper, based on survey data obtained from Unity Technologies, examines the metaverse, NFTs, and the future of development within the Unity engine from the perspective of current Unity users. Specifically, the paper examines how users define the metaverse, their goals in metaverse and NFT development, and their future questions and concerns concerning these concepts. This data is then used to place the metaverse and NFTs into broader historical, present, and future contexts. The paper ultimately argues: (1) the metaverse and NFTs follow previous historical trends in communication technology development, (2) development within Unity will continue to be split between game development and non-game development, and (3) arguments of the “newness,” “uniqueness,” or “future-facing” of the metaverse and NFTs help to obfuscate legitimate concerns about these technologies.

Bidirectional recurrent neural network with multi-head attention for automatic scene generation using sentiment analysis

Text generation is one of the complex tasks associated with natural language processing. For efficient text generation, syntax and semantics of the language have to be considered to assign context to key phrases. The main objective of the proposed work is to perform text generation specifically for movie scripts. The training data consist of a self-annotated corpus of movie scripts depicting scenes, specific to certain genre where the annotation mainly focuses on a specific director’s movie scripts. The scene generation is set forth by word embedding with sentiment classification where the emotionally analyzed words are vectorized using the EmoVec algorithm performing sentiment analysis. Based on the sentiment and location associated with each scene, context for the phrases are identified and proceeded to build a well-defined script. Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory BLSTM with multi-head Attention is used to capture the information processed in both forward and backward propagation in order to understand future context. The vocabulary is built using Stanford’s Internet Movie Database IMDB datasets to perform word based encoding for which requirement of an extensive vocabulary is imminent.

Impulsores del cambio en los sistemas educativos

Education is a fundamental element for the progress of society and currenteducational systems have been influenced by multiple factors. This article describes two trends that have emerged in recent years and are driving changes in the educational system, such as the incorporation of technology in education and the development of new educational models and methodologies. At the same time, it poses a challenge for the education sector, which is to provide people with new skills for employment, entrepreneurship,and life in a future context of continuous and rapid change.

Biochemical analysis of microbiotas obtained from healthy, prediabetic, type 2 diabetes, and obese individuals

Abstract Objectives In this study, we aimed to evaluate the intestinal and urinary microbiota diversity of obese, pre-diabetic, diabetic, and healthy subjects together with their food consumption frequency and investigate the effect on glucose metabolism. Methods DNA was isolated from stool and urinary samples of fifteen obese, fifteen prediabetics, fifteen type 2 diabetic, and fifteen lean participants by using the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) method. The amounts of Bifidobacterium, Bacteroides, and Firmicutes were measured and food consumption frequency was answered by all participants through a questionnaire. Results The levels of Bifidobacterium in fecal microbiota were significantly higher in type 2 diabetic patients compared with lean (p=0.034), prediabetic (p=0.009), and obese participants (p=0.012). However, the levels of Bifidobacterium in urinary microbiota were decreased in obese, prediabetic, and type 2 diabetic subjects as controls (p=0.048; p=0.038; p=0.015 respectively). Additionally, Bacteroides/Firmicutes ratio decreased in type two diabetic patients compared with lean subjects and had a negative correlation with BMI in prediabetic subjects. Food consumption frequency illustrates that lean subjects have unhealthy eating habits. Conclusions Urinary microbiota could be considered in the future context of a potential biomarker in the progress of type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Immunogenetic Determinants of Parkinson’s Disease Etiology

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is increasingly recognised as a systemic disorder in which inflammation might play a causative role rather than being a consequence or an epiphenomenon of the neurodegenerative process. Although growing genetic evidence links the central and peripheral immune system with both monogenic and sporadic PD, our understanding on how the immune system contributes to PD pathogenesis remains a daunting challenge. In this review, we discuss recent literature aimed at exploring the role of known genes and susceptibility loci to PD pathogenesis through immune system related mechanisms. Furthermore, we outline shared genetic etiologies and interrelations between PD and autoimmune diseases and underlining challenges and limitations faced in the translation of relevant allelic and regulatory risk loci to immune-pathological mechanisms. Lastly, with the field of immunogenetics expanding rapidly, we place these insights into a future context highlighting the prospect of immune modulation as a promising disease-modifying strategy.

Impacts of snow cover on the pattern and velocity of air flow in air convection embankments of sub-Arctic regions

In northern regions, air convection embankment (ACE) has been implemented to mitigate road subsidence caused by permafrost degradation. The seasonal snow cover largely alters the surface energy balance and adversely affects the thermal stability of the road. However, thermal characteristics of a closed ACE and the quantification of their impacts on talik development remain largely unknown, especially in the present and future context of global warming. Here, impacts of snow cover on the pattern and strength of the air circulation were investigated and quantified. Snow cover greatly weakened the cooling effect of the closed ACE side slopes. The pore air velocity of the crushed-rock layer was reduced by half and the mean annual heat flux increased by approximately 1.6 W/m2, in comparison to the snow-free case. Conversely, the U-shape closed ACE had a better cooling performance due to a stronger air convection in winter, which increased heat loss from the snow-free surface of the embankment center. Our simulations suggest that the U-shape ACE embankment is a potential long-term solution to mitigate permafrost thaw over the life service (50 years) of road embankments in sub-arctic regions. The net results of this study are imperative to improve engineered design and road maintenance in cold regions.

Can the ShangRing bring us closer to endorsing early infant male circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa?

Can the ShangRing bring us closer to endorsing early infant male circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa?

Memories of the Future: a design technology by scenarios

Scenario Planning allows the investigation of alternative futures being useful in contexts characterized by high volatility and uncertainty. Particularly within the boundaries of Design, the way of thinking through scenarios has been incorporated into design methods to explore future contexts at certain points in the design process. However, we question whether scenario thinking could be an integral approach during the project's lifetime structuring a design technology through comprehensive and systemic mechanisms. Therefore, the present work aimed to share the research of a Design Technology by Scenarios and its application in a design workshop entitled Memories of the Future. The project network was formed by the “Protagonists of the Future,” a group movement orchestrated by the Santa Maria Development Agency supported by UN-Habitat to promote urban development in a sustainable and collaborative way. The results indicate that the co-creation of scenarios as a design technology resignified the actions of the protagonists in the local ecosystem encompassing multiple dimensions: the history and purpose of the project (story); the path necessary to achieve the goals of sustainable development in the city (path); the roles to be performed by the different protagonists involved (actors); and tangible results in the participating communities (evidences).Keywords: design methods, scenario thinking, design-driven innovation, participatory design.

Missing Race and Ethnicity Data among COVID-19 Cases in Massachusetts

Infectious disease surveillance frequently lacks complete information on race and ethnicity, making it difficult to identify health inequities. Greater awareness of this issue has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which inequities in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were reported but with evidence of substantial missing demographic details. Although the problem of missing race and ethnicity data in COVID-19 cases has been well documented, neither its spatiotemporal variation nor its particular drivers have been characterized. Using individual-level data on confirmed COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts from March 2020 to February 2021, we show how missing race and ethnicity data: (1) varied over time, appearing to increase sharply during two different periods of rapid case growth; (2) differed substantially between towns, indicating a nonrandom distribution; and (3) was associated significantly with several individual- and town-level characteristics in a mixed-effects regression model, suggesting a combination of personal and infrastructural drivers of missing data that persisted despite state and federal data-collection mandates. We discuss how a variety of factors may contribute to persistent missing data but could potentially be mitigated in future contexts.

Improving the Effectiveness of Anti-COVID Measures in Buildings: Learning from Users’ Perception

The COVID-19 spread abruptly changed the fruition of indoor environments, where necessary adaptive measures have since been implemented. Buildings open to the public were suddenly equipped with physical devices aiming to encourage users’ appropriate behaviors, such as hand sanitizing, social distancing, and temperature monitoring. Through a twofold architectural-psychological perspective, the paper presents a research aiming to understand how users perceive these devices in the Italian context and to identify the design features that could improve their effectiveness in enhancing individuals’ awareness. With an interdisciplinary approach, four methods were adopted: observational field surveys, background and normative framework analysis, survey research through an online questionnaire, and case studies survey research. The results confirm the overall effectiveness of the implemented anti-COVID strategies, their suitability in encouraging individuals’ appropriate behaviors, and the importance of regulating the users’ flow indoors. The research allowed defining the devices (hand-sanitizing devices and temperature-measurement instruments) and wayfinding systems more suited to be included in the prevention strategy and identified their more appropriate design features in relation to the users’ feedback. Operational suggestions are presented as well. The adopted experimental approach can be useful in supporting decision making in managing of the built environment in both the current and future contexts.