Problematic Gaps Research Articles

Exploring Indonesian coastal communities' responses to the 2019 Ambon earthquake and preparedness for future disasters

Since the seventeenth century, megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis have been recorded in Maluku Province, Indonesia. Most of Maluku's communities live on alluvial soils where tsunamis have occurred on active seismic paths, which will negatively impact them during disasters. Therefore, learning from past communities' responses and experiences is vital to decrease the risk associated with potential future disasters. However, studies about Indonesian coastal communities’ seismic responses and preparedness at the grassroots level, particularly in Maluku Province, have yet to be done. Thirty survivors of the Mw 6.5 Ambon earthquake in 2019 with over a thousand aftershocks, living in the three coastal villages on Ambon Island, were selected as respondents in the semi-structured interviews. The research results showed that the survivors had various responses to the earthquake and its aftershocks. Religious belief was a critical factor for their capability to respond to calamities, besides social support that has helped them survive. The 2019 earthquake has also enhanced their creativity, engagement, and participation. Some disaster preparedness gaps still exist, although their experiences have taught them to be more aware and prepared for future disasters. These problematic gaps are the availability of early warning systems, public education and information, risk transfer capability, protection development, humanitarian aid protocols and procedures, and health recovery. With its crucial recommendations, this study strengthens disaster governance in archipelagic countries like Indonesia and adds to the literature on how coastal communities handle multiple seismic disasters.

What Might Considering the Criminalization of Emotional Abuse Teach Us About Defining It?

Although the issue has been discussed for decades, the field of intimate partner violence struggles with the lack of a consensus definition for emotional abuse. In this article, it is suggested that differences in definition are caused by everyday variation in value judgment among researchers. To address this, it is argued that investigating emotional abuse should be acknowledged as an exercise in moral thought as much as it is in scientific rigor. Looking at the philosophy of criminalization, such as the work of Joel Feinberg or Douglas Husak, it is proposed that criminalization theory may serve to guide research on emotional abuse, reduce or overcome the definitional issue, and reveal problematic gaps in understanding. This article will present a general description of the philosophical and legal questions involved in the hypothetical criminalization of emotional abuse, evaluate existing research from that perspective, and propose a minimalist rather than comprehensive approach to definition, an approach involving either focusing only on those behaviors judged to meet the standards for potential criminalization or conceptualizing the range of emotionally abusive behaviors as distinct phenomena to be studied independently.

A critical analysis of how sexual violence against women is defined and addressed within existing legal instruments in Bangladesh

Violence against Women (VAW) is considered a gender-specific human rights violation and is a form of discrimination that perpetuates women’s subordination and patriarchal structures throughout all levels of society. Research continues to demonstrate that the legal instruments dealing with sexual offences in Bangladesh have significant limitations and fail to meet international standards. This article identifies gaps between Bangladeshi domestic legal instruments and international legal instruments. In order to uncover and analyse the gaps, I employed thematic analysis techniques and a feminist legal theoretical lens. The findings of the study show that there are significant gaps and limitations regarding the conceptualisation of sexual violence, trial process, medical tests, variability of punishment, and protecting rights of victims in the present Bangladeshi legal instruments in comparison to the international instruments. This research provides insight into the alarming situation of sexual violence against women in Bangladesh and the problematic gaps within legal instruments in that nation, which governmental and academic authorities must consider if they are to be effective in preventing violence against women in Bangladesh.

Bibliometric Analysis of Research Hotspots and Frontiers in Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established in 2015, are binding targets for monitoring the sustainable status of all countries in the world. Developing localized SDGs indicator systems, assessing SDGs progress comprehensively, and creating policy tools have gradually become the hotspots of scientific research and practical application of the SDGs. To systematically sort out the research status of the SDGs progress and identify problematic gaps, this paper uses bibliometric methods to analyse the scientific knowledge mapping of SDGs research, sort out the general characteristics, scientific cooperation, cutting-edge hotspots and future research trends of SDGs research. Besides, this paper promotes the integration of academic research into concrete practice by linking it to mainstream SDGs progress reports. The results show that: ① The amount of SDGs research literature in 2015–2022 is on a growing trend, and the existing research is characterised by multidisciplinary crossover. Research institutions such as Utrecht University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have contributed the most to SDGs research. ② The research hotspots include the SDGs practice of different responsible subjects, the comprehensive assessment of the progress of SDGs, the scientific research of SDGs indicators, and the research on the interaction between the goals of SDGs. ③ Environmental issues, indicators, energy transition, education and agriculture are the hot directions of SDGs research. Energy saving and carbon reduction, sustainable practices of supply chain management, and promoting the progress of environmental dimension goals are the focus of subsequent research. According to the results of the bibliometric analysis, future SDGs research should pay attention to strengthening multi-party cooperation, using innovative technologies to support the assessment of SDGs progress, and formulating sustainable development strategies.

‘I drew it in as simply as my breath’: absence, presence, and ideal beauty in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera (1866–70) ‘double work of art’

Abstract Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera or Soul's Beauty (1866–1870) ‘double work of art’ is one of his most recognizable pictures and anthologized poems. His visual-verbal ‘double works’ – typically painting-sonnet composites that share a title, comment on each other, and elaborate on a joint subject – remain, however, understudied. Their cross-medium composition presents a challenge to segregated art-historical and literary scholarship. Almost all studies on these picture-word composites take a monodisciplinary approach and predominantly address a single component: the picture or the poem. Engagement with the other component is either cursory or non-existent. In (re)constructing the Sibylla ‘double works’, this essay argues for a renewed understanding of the viewer-reader and viewing-reading. The formation of the visual-verbal exchange at the heart of the ‘double work’ also results in problematic gaps, dissonances, and ruptures in visual-verbal representation. In a manner yet to be addressed in scholarship, this essay demonstrates how Rossetti exploits both alignment and divergence in the Sibylla ‘double work’ to inform and structure the viewer-reader’s encounter with the absence and presence generated by ideal beauty. By reassessing the wider relationship between (and experience of) picture and word, this essay situates the ‘double work’ form at the centre of image-text studies – and exposes the challenge that they present to disparate scholarship and methodologies.

Challenges to Supporting Domestically Sex Trafficked Persons: In-Depth Interviews with Service Providers

ABSTRACT Domestic sex trafficking is an emergent area of study with problematic gaps in our understanding of the challenges that inhibit client recovery. As social service providers are often on the frontlines of care provision, in this study, we explored the challenges they experienced when serving domestically sex trafficked adolescents and adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 providers in Ontario, Canada’s largest province, and thematically analyzed. Our study found that providers faced systemic-, provider-, and client-related challenges, including insufficient funding, a dearth of (appropriate) shelter and/or housing, problems with healthcare and health professionals, entrenched biases within law enforcement, the weight of emotional work, fear for themselves and their clients, survivors’ misgivings about the systems established to assist them, and their unresolved concurrent mental health issues. By exploring intersections among various challenges facing service providers with the goal of improving services for domestically sex trafficked persons in Canada, we contribute to discourses informing research, policy, and practice considerations in various jurisdictions, working toward achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 16 (specifically targets 5.2, 16.1, and 16.2).

Climate Change, Environmental Health, and Challenges for Nursing Discipline

Current data and scientific predictions about the consequences of climate change are accurate in suggesting disaster. Since 2019, climate change has become a threat to human health, and major consequences on health and health systems are already observed. Climate change is a central concern for the nursing discipline, even though nursing theorists' understanding of the environment has led to problematic gaps that impact the current context. Today, nursing discipline is facing new challenges. Nurses are strategically placed to respond to the impacts of climate change through their practice, research, and training in developing, implementing, and sustaining innovation towards climate change mitigation and adaptation. It is urgent for them to adapt their practice to this reality to become agents of change.

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Coding for Life: Designing a Platform for Projecting and Protecting Global Biodiversity

AbstractTime is running out to limit further devastating losses of biodiversity and nature's contributions to humans. Addressing this crisis requires accurate predictions about which species and ecosystems are most at risk to ensure efficient use of limited conservation and management resources. We review existing biodiversity projection models and discover problematic gaps. Current models usually cannot easily be reconfigured for other species or systems, omit key biological processes, and cannot accommodate feedbacks with Earth system dynamics. To fill these gaps, we envision an adaptable, accessible, and universal biodiversity modeling platform that can project essential biodiversity variables, explore the implications of divergent socioeconomic scenarios, and compare conservation and management strategies. We design a roadmap for implementing this vision and demonstrate that building this biodiversity forecasting platform is possible and practical.

Bridging Tumorigenesis and Therapy Resistance With a Non-Darwinian and Non-Lamarckian Mechanism of Adaptive Evolution.

Although neo-Darwinian (and less often Lamarckian) dynamics are regularly invoked to interpret cancer’s multifarious molecular profiles, they shine little light on how tumorigenesis unfolds and often fail to fully capture the frequency and breadth of resistance mechanisms. This uncertainty frames one of the most problematic gaps between science and practice in modern times. Here, we offer a theory of adaptive cancer evolution, which builds on a molecular mechanism that lies outside neo-Darwinian and Lamarckian schemes. This mechanism coherently integrates non-genetic and genetic changes, ecological and evolutionary time scales, and shifts the spotlight away from positive selection towards purifying selection, genetic drift, and the creative-disruptive power of environmental change. The surprisingly simple use-it or lose-it rationale of the proposed theory can help predict molecular dynamics during tumorigenesis. It also provides simple rules of thumb that should help improve therapeutic approaches in cancer.

The Manager in Intragroup and Intergroup Hierarchies: Managing Hierarchy Across Levels of Analysis

Research on hierarchy within organizations tends to focus on hierarchies of individuals within a group (intragroup hierarchy) or on hierarchies composed of groups, such a race- and gender-based hierarchies (intergroup hierarchy). Although both types of hierarchies impact individuals in organizations, the literatures on intra- and intergroup hierarchy run largely separately without significant cross-fertilization. This is likely to the detriment of both literatures: many ideas fundamental to hierarchy at one level of analysis are virtually or totally underexplored on the other level of analysis, undoubtedly leading to problematic gaps in our theorizing. This panel symposium will engage a group of expert panelists in a formal, moderated discussion of how intra- and intergroup hierarchy research can be integrated. We expect that more integrative theorizing will be a boon to the literature on hierarchy and that it will bolster organizational researchers’ ability to provide actionable recommendations to frontline managers around the globe.

Coming to Terms with the Black Box Problem: How to Justify AI Systems in Health Care.

The use of opaque, uninterpretable artificial intelligence systems in health care can be medically beneficial, but it is often viewed as potentially morally problematic on account of this opacity-because the systems are black boxes. Alex John London has recently argued that opacity is not generally problematic, given that many standard therapies are explanatorily opaque and that we can rely on statistical validation of the systems in deciding whether to implement them. But is statistical validation sufficient to justify implementation of these AI systems in health care, or is it merely one of the necessary criteria? I argue that accountability, which holds an important role in preserving the patient-physician trust that allows the institution of medicine to function, contributes further to an account of AI system justification. Hence, I endorse the vanishing accountability principle: accountability in medicine, in addition to statistical validation, must be preserved. AI systems that introduce problematic gaps in accountability should not be implemented.

A twofold tale of one mind: revisiting REC\u2019s multi-storey story

The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC’s view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC’s notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are the same, yet different. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms.

EULAR/eumusc.net standards of care for rheumatoid arthritis: cross-sectional analyses of importance, level of implementation and care gaps experienced by patients and rheumatologists across 35 European countries

ObjectiveAs part of European League against Rheumatism (EULAR)/European Musculoskeletal Conditions Surveillance and Information Network, 20 user-focused standards of care (SoCs) for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) addressing 16 domains of care were...

An Overview of the United States Administrative Procedure Act

For almost seventy-five years, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in the United States has set a procedural framework within which most federal administrative agencies must act. The APA lays out procedures that federal actors must follow in fashioning rules and in resolving adjudications, as well as the standards of review that federal courts must use when reviewing the agencies’ resolution of those adjudications and promulgation of rules. As a consequence the APA has been remarkably effective in ensuring that agency decisionmaking is responsive to public concerns and that the public has an outlet for voicing those concerns. Nonetheless, some of the exceptions carved out by Congress in the APA have created problematic gaps, failing to protect the regulated public adequately, particularly from agency policy statements and interpretations of statutes and regulations, which private firms and individuals cannot challenge directly but may affect their livelihoods.

Protecting Local News Outlets from Fatal Litigation Expenses

As lawsuits targeting the press continue to rise in response to today’s political climate, local news outlets are more likely to find themselves facing unexpected legal expenses. Although the national news media can generally weather the costs of libel lawsuits and subpoena requests, smaller news outlets have gone bankrupt or barely escaped such a fate while paying off legal fees, even when these outlets have ultimately been successful in their legal battles. Because local news outlets serve a critical role in underserved communities and are powerful agents of positive social change, they ought to be protected against fatal legal expenses. This article examines the important functions of local journalism, explains the recent legal challenges that local news outlets have been facing and their resulting impact, and exposes the problematic gaps of statutory frameworks that fail to adequately protect local news outlets from fatal legal expenses. In so doing, this article argues that enacting strong state anti-SLAPP statutes and reporter’s shield laws is necessary to combat the costly attacks against the press as of late and to preserve the vitality of the local media.

Lek-associated movement of a putative Ebolavirus reservoir, the hammer-headed fruit bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus), in northern Republic of Congo.

The biology and ecology of Africa’s largest fruit bat remains largely understudied and enigmatic despite at least two highly unusual attributes. The acoustic lek mating behavior of the hammer-headed bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus) in the Congo basin was first described in the 1970s. More recently molecular testing implicated this species and other African bats as potential reservoir hosts for Ebola virus and it was one of only two fruit bat species epidemiologically linked to the 2008 Luebo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ebola outbreak. Here we share findings from the first pilot study of hammer-headed bat movement using GPS tracking and accelerometry units and a small preceding radio-tracking trial at an apparent lekking site. The radio-tracking revealed adult males had high rates of nightly visitation to the site compared to females (only one visit) and that two of six females day-roosted ~100 m west of Libonga, the nearest village that is ~1.6 km southwest. Four months later, in mid-April 2018, five individual bats, comprised of four males and one female, were tracked from two to 306 days, collecting from 67 to 1022 GPS locations. As measured by mean distance to the site and proportion of nightly GPS locations within 1 km of the site (percent visitation), the males were much more closely associated with the site (mean distance 1.4 km; 51% visitation), than the female (mean 5.5 km; 2.2% visitation). Despite the small sample size, our tracking evidence supports our original characterization of the site as a lek, and the lek itself is much more central to male than female movement. Moreover, our pilot demonstrates the technical feasibility of executing future studies on hammer-headed bats that will help fill problematic knowledge gaps about zoonotic spillover risks and the conservation needs of fruit bats across the continent.

Procedural Guaranteeing of Tenants Rights in Case of Land Use for Farming

The article is primarily aimed at the settlement of practical problematic aspects of realizing the procedural protection of the rights of the participants of leasehold land legal relationships.
 In order to protect the procedural rights of individuals during the settlement of land disputes, the author has analyzed legal scientific studies on the realization of the rights of land tenants, who, as ordinary citizens of Ukraine, concluded land rental agreements necessary for them to create and maintain farms. The author has studied the state of scientific doctrine and legal guarantees in the sphere of ensuring the protection of the rights of the participants of leasehold relationships, including procedural one. The main problems and shortcomings of the current legislation on procedural guaranteeing of the rights of tenants of land plots used for farming have been outlined.
 It has been emphasized that disputes on the termination of land rental agreements and sometimes the simultaneous collection of rent arrears initiated by the authorities in relation to individuals – the tenants as parties to the agreement have the special status within land disputes, whereas legal entities – farm enterprises actually use the land plots. These disputes are relevant and widespread in the practical field, but at the same time they are hardly protected by the doctrine and are imperfectly protected by the norms of the current legislation, which originates to significant violations of the rights of the participants of leasehold land legal relationships. Thus, starting from 2018, within the framework of the judicial reform and the creation of a new Supreme Court of Ukraine, a prudent legal position began to emerge regarding the need to appeal in these situations to commercial courts within the economic jurisdiction and to file claims against farm enterprises, which as legal entities are the defendant in the case, being the actual user.
 Taking into account the above, the author has studied the scientific environment within the aspect of solving the issue of procedural guaranteeing of the rights of the tenants of land plots that are actually used by farm enterprises for conducting this activity. The author has also made an attempt to study the current legislation, focusing on the problematic aspects and gaps that need to be addressed by improving legal regulation.

What's Meat Got to Do with It? Some Considerations for Ecologizing Education with Respect to Diet

AbstractEven in a society of meat‐eaters such as the United States, when diet is addressed in school at all, it is widely treated as matter of personal choice, the consequences of which are borne by individual consumers. Overlooked are myriad connections involved in human diet and the implications of consumption for other entities. In the first part of this essay, Suzanne Rice discusses ways in which diet, particularly meat‐eating, is connected to animal suffering, environmental harms including climate change and pollution, and risks to the health of agricultural workers and consumers. In the second part, she discusses ways in which education might be “ecologized” in efforts to help students gain insight into such connections. There are many ways to ecologize education, but regardless of how teachers proceed, they are likely to encounter not only simple ignorance, relatively unproblematic gaps in students' knowledge linked to youth and inexperience, but also willful ignorance, more problematic gaps linked to avoidance, manipulation, or rejection of evidence perceived as threatening.