Latest preprints

Transportation planning plays a critical role in shaping urban development, economic mobility, and infrastructure sustainability. However, traditional planning methods often struggle to accurately predict long-term urban growth and transportation demands. This may sometimes result in infrastructure demolition to make room for current transportation planning demands. This study integrates a Temporal Fusion Transformer to predict travel patterns from demographic data with a Generative Adversarial Network to predict future urban settings through satellite imagery. The framework achieved a 0.76 R² score in travel behavior prediction and generated high-fidelity satellite images with a Structural Similarity Index of 0.81. The results demonstrate that integrating predictive analytics and spatial visualization can significantly improve the decision-making process, fostering more sustainable and efficient urban development. This research highlights the importance of data-driven methodologies in modern transportation planning and presents a step toward optimizing infrastructure placement, capacity, and long-term viability.

There are many city blocks decorated with murals all over the world. Among them, those developed in the past 15 years in Indonesia have a distinctive feature: houses in slums have murals or are painted in rainbow colors. These villages are called rainbow villages, or Kampung Pelangi in Indonesian. Wonosari village (Kampung Wonosari) in Semarang City became a rainbow village in 2017 under the slum eradication initiative called the KOTAKU program. However, the success did not last long: activity began to decline around mid-2018 and stopped completely because of COVID-19. While many tourist destinations have regained their former bustle in the post-COVID-19 period, activities in Kampung Pelangi Semarang have remained sluggish. This study aims to summarize as comprehensively as possible the efforts of Kampung Pelangi Semarang and its progress up to the present, based on the existing studies and on-site surveys in 2024. The reasons for the initial success include its good location, its proximity to other tourist destinations, and the cooperation of many organizations, including the city of Semarang. The reasons for its gradual decline include the change in the relationship between stakeholders after the shift from top-down activities by the Semarang City to bottom-up activities by the people involved; the Tourism Awareness Group that took over the role of managing Kampung Pelangi Semarang suffered the internal conflicts, resulting in the disruption of its activities. Finally, we overview the remaining issues when improving the slums by modifying Rainbow Village, and the requirements necessary for Kampung Pelangi Semarang to regain its vitality.

This manuscript examines the cinematic representation of heroin users—referred to as “junkies”—as criminal, deviant, and socially marginalized figures within five major films: Sid and Nancy (1986), The Basketball Diaries (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Requiem for a Dream (2000), and T2 Trainspotting (2017). Situated within the framework of cultural criminology and drawing on Hall’s theory of representation and Hjelm’s social constructionism, the study employs narrative analysis to assess how these films construct and reinforce cultural stereotypes linking heroin use with criminality, moral decay, and membership in a dangerous underclass. Particular attention is given to the gendered dimension of these portrayals, with female heroin users often represented through hypersexualized and derogatory tropes. The article argues that these cinematic narratives mirror and legitimate dominant socio-political discourses that frame heroin users as threats to societal order, contributing to their continued stigmatization and criminalization.

This commentary examines the phenomenon of credentialism, i.e., the overemphasis on or misuse of credentials, and its role in the decline of epistemic humility, particularly within anti-vaccine movements. Drawing on recent research by Cosgrove and Murphy (2023) and relevant case studies, this commentary explores how credentialism, when interacting with certain personality traits (e.g., narcissism, low intellectual humility), can undermine critical thinking and scientific literacy. This overconfidence often leads individuals to assume that expertise in one field equates to competence in other domains. However, intelligence and education alone do not ensure sound scientific judgment or rational decision-making. Personality traits such as intellectual arrogance or hyper-confidence can significantly hinder the effective application of knowledge. Research indicates that individuals with higher intelligence are frequently more adept at rationalizing pre-existing beliefs and constructing sophisticated justifications for incorrect conclusions. When combined with traits like narcissism or excessive self-assurance, this can result in a paradoxical effect: greater intelligence and education may lead to worse outcomes, as individuals become resistant to correction, dismissive of contrary evidence, and prone to overestimating their understanding of complex issues. This dynamic can lead to the misuse of credentials, where individuals leverage their academic or professional authority to lend credibility to pseudoscientific claims, particularly in fields outside their area of expertise. This misuse of credentials, termed "credentialed arrogance," amplifies susceptibility to conspiracy theories, even among those with advanced education. This study highlights the complex interplay between credentialism, personality traits, and critical thinking, underscoring the need for educational systems to prioritize epistemic humility and media literacy alongside traditional academic knowledge.

This manuscript analyzes the emergence, evolution, and fragmentation of the "learning discourse" in education policy, particularly in European contexts from the late 20th century onward. Drawing on conceptual developments and empirical examples, including the Danish 2014 school reform, the study examines two key strands within the discourse: the notion of "learning schools" as educational organizations engaged in continuous development, and the framing of "learning objectives" as policy tools for standardizing outcomes. It contextualizes these shifts within broader frameworks such as the learning economy, learning regions, and lifelong learning agendas promoted by the EU and OECD. Learning, as a policy concept, tended to displace other educational concepts such as teaching, socialization, and Bildung, leading to tensions in pedagogical practice and institutional governance. The article argues that the focus on learning was important and sound, but the implementation of the approach proved difficult. By revisiting critical responses and highlighting conceptual ambiguities, the manuscript contributes to debates on the role of education in knowledge societies and the future of educational professionalism.

This commentary proposes a revised framework for classifying research gaps to enhance clarity and applicability in academic inquiry. Building on prior taxonomies by Miles[1], it identifies overlaps among commonly cited categories such as evidence, empirical, knowledge, and practical-knowledge gaps. The revised classification consolidates redundant categories and introduces a new domain—the geographical gap—to address global disparities in research representation. Five categories are defined: (1) evidence or empirical gap, (2) knowledge or practical-knowledge gap, (3) methodological gap, (4) population gap, and (5) geographical gap. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature, this manuscript emphasizes the importance of inclusive methodologies, context-sensitive frameworks, and equitable knowledge production. This reimagined taxonomy aims to guide researchers, institutions, and policymakers in identifying underexplored areas and fostering more globally representative research agendas.

This paper aims to establish the conceptual architecture for a Critical Realist synthesis of universal school-based mindfulness interventions (SBMIs). While SBMIs have demonstrated benefits in mental well-being, there is a lack of clarity on underlying mechanisms, contexts, and sustainability. A Critical Realist synthesis integrates ontological depth, epistemological reflexivity, and methodological pluralism to develop explanatory frameworks for complex social phenomena. Grounded in Bhaskar's critical realism, the synthesis adopts a stratified ontology that distinguishes between the real (underlying structures and mechanisms), the actual (events and processes), and the empirical (experiences and observations). This depth ontology enables the identification of causal mechanisms that operate across different levels of reality, including structural, cultural, and agential domains. Epistemologically, the synthesis embraces a fallibilist position, recognising that knowledge is socially and historically situated. It employs epistemic relativism to account for diverse perspectives while maintaining ontological realism. Methodologically, the synthesis employs a retroductive approach, combining qualitative and quantitative data to identify causal pathways and emergent properties. An iterative process involves theory refinement through abductive reasoning, retroduction, retrodiction and judgemental rationalism to determine the most plausible transdisciplinary explanation for the findings. The explanatory theory draws on Archer's Morphogenic approach, which theories the dynamic relationship between structure, agency and social change; Pearlin's theory of stress, which theorizes the dynamic relationship between social structures, social institutions, and psychological processes in mental health; and Bonell et al.' s.' theory of the school environment, which examines the interaction of institutional, social interactional, and intrapersonal processes in explaining how the social environment impacts on students' wellbeing. The programme theory was developed using a Laminated System analysis, which considered micro, meso, and macro-level interactions and was based on a targeted literature review. A Critical Realist synthesis advances theoretically informed and practically relevant insights for complex social interventions and policy evaluation by systematically identifying causal mechanisms and their contingent conditions. The review will inform policy, school practices, and intervention design, ensuring mindfulness programmes are context-sensitive and sustainable.

Posting and socializing have become very common in the modern era of social media and technology. This practice is also found to be very common in caregiving. Parents frequently document and share their children’s moments on social media, a practice is known as ‘sharenting’. This study aimed to assess early childhood caregiver of young children (aged 0-8 years old) practices and perception regarding sharenting with its impacts using a quantitative, descriptive cross-sectional study design that recruited 64 participants who registered for the Parenting Club online webinar conducted by the ECD PREP (Early Childhood Development Parenting Readiness Education Program) team at a tertiary care academic medical center in Karachi Pakistan to address the research problem. Convenience sampling is a type of non-probability sampling technique in which participants are chosen due to their accessibility to gather insight for the research problem using a validated self-assessment tool, the Sharenting Scale developed by Mustafa Maruf Cansızlar was used to examine the concept of sharenting and its impact on Early childhood caregiver practices and perceptions that were employed through an online Google form. The study employed descriptive statistics to analyze sharenting behavior among caregivers of young children (aged 0-8 years old) using SPSS software version 25. Results showed that 54.7% of parents are not even aware of the term sharenting. 42.2% of parents never share content related to their child on social media while 4.7% of parents always post on social media, out of which 64.1% of parents use Facebook, 67.2% use Instagram, 79.7% use WhatsApp, 92.2% use TikTok, 95.3% uses YouTube, followed by 98.4% parents who use Snapchat to share content related to their children. The result of this study highlights a need to further explore parental awareness regarding sharenting, children’s digital rights, and protection in Pakistan.