This business is mine! Intra-household effects of property rights in micro-enterprises

This paper studies the intra-household impact of property rights in micro-enterprises. A randomized field experiment on firm formalization in Benin provides exogenous variation in individual property rights. The results reveal significant gender differences. Women entrepreneurs who formalize invest more in their businesses and are more likely to pay to conceal a large windfall transfer from their husbands—a measure of intra-household inefficiency. These findings suggest that while stronger property rights secure and incentivize investment, they may also reduce household cooperation, leading to efficiency losses. Despite this trade-off, women report higher overall well-being when granted formal property rights. In contrast, formalization improves intra-household efficiency for men, likely by reinforcing their authority over household decision-making. Consistently, male entrepreneurs who formalize are more likely to separate business and household finances and to resist pressure to share resources

Shaping Personality in Schools

A broad set of noncognitive skills, including self-control, grit, and perseverance, are increasingly recognized as critical determinants of long-term life outcomes. These “personality skills” have been shown to be as important as cognitive abilities in influencing educational attainment, labor market success, and overall well-being. Importantly, they are not immutable traits but can be shaped through well-designed interventions, particularly during childhood . Therefore, schools offer an ideal setting for fostering their development. This review examines the impact of three key school features on the development of personality. The first feature is the classroom environment, which functions as the primary social space in which children interact with both peers and teachers. Educational policies that target classroom size and peer composition contribute to the positive development of socioemotional skills. Second, teachers play an important role in shaping personality, not only through their pedagogical approaches but also through their beliefs about and attitudes toward students as well as through their own socioemotional well-being. Third, the review analyzes targeted school-based interventions that explicitly aim to support personality development. These interventions often focus on specific skill sets, including self-regulation, resilience, empowerment, and social and emotional competencies. Research on the development of personality faces key challenges, including data limitations, measurement difficulties, and a lack of standardized tools that hinders comparability across studies. Identifying the mechanisms through which school-based policies affect personality development also requires complex, costly research designs. Additionally, there is a need for more long-term studies to evaluate the impact of such policies on personality skills and broader life outcomes. Finally, effectively communicating evidence on personality skills to policymakers and the public is imperative not only to prevent misperceptions about the goals of these policies but also to foster public trust and political support needed for their long-term sustainability

Vehicle Visual Perception Under Low Visibility Road Environments Based on AoP&DoP Multi-Polarization Parameter Characterization

Vehicle visual perception is essential for safe autonomous driving, especially in challenging low-visibility conditions. Polarimetric imaging has shown enhanced perception by improving target-background contrast and reducing glare. However, current research in polarimetric imaging for autonomous driving largely focuses on singular use of polarimetric features. Exploiting polarimetric information to enhance vehicle visual perception in low-visibility scenarios remains a critical challenge. This paper addresses this challenge by integrating multiple polarimetric parameter characterization with a deep learning model for semantic segmentation visual perception task, which is called TransWNet. The model combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Transformer architectures, extracting features and contextual information of both Degree of Polarization (DoP) and Angle of Polarization (AoP) comprehensively during the encoding phase. In the decoding phase, it incorporates skip connections to effectively retain multimodal polarimetric information across deep and shallow features, generating output through feature fusion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that jointly exploits DoP and AoP for vehicle scene understanding in degraded visibility. Experimental results demonstrate that TransWNet, by effectively leveraging multimodal polarimetric information, achieves significantly better performance in semantic segmentation of low-visibility traffic scenes, with marked improvements in mIoU, mPA, and Accuracy over all single-feature baselines. Compared with the baseline method, TransWNet improves the Accuracy by 3.44%

Inside the Mask: the lives and lies of Harry Bensley. A creative-critical investigation into truth, gender and ethics in non-fiction narrative writing.

This thesis creatively and critically explores the ambiguous terrain between fact and fiction, truth and lies, and past and present in nontraditional autobiographical writing. My creative text, Inside the Mask, explores the real-life Edwardian fraudster and walker Harry Bensley, who created his own masculinist myth. Through auto/bio/fiction and psychogeography, the narrator examines the effect Bensley’s actions and false narrative had on his wives. She learns how history and memory are recreated through the lens of self, discovering the effect of false narratives in her own life. In recognising which narratives were imposed upon her and which were self-imposed, she can reclaim her sense of self. The critical commentary contextualises Inside the Mask within the tradition of nontraditional autobiographical narrative forms by female writers. I examine the first English Language autobiography by Margery Kempe, whose unorthodox life, pilgrimages, and text demonstrate fierce opposition to the gendered narratives imposed upon her. My next subject, Mary Wollstonecraft flouted patriarchal conventions through her walking, marital status, and writing, creating what would now be known as ‘autofiction’ and ‘psychogeography’. Considering the work of contemporary author Julie Myerson, whose autobiographical texts trouble ethical and genre boundaries, I investigate negative reactions to women’s autobiographical writing about motherhood and explore how she and other female authors respond. Throughout, and particularly in Chapter Four, I interrogate my research practice and the ethics of writing about others. By examining ‘competing’ stories, ‘true’ stories, and stories submerged, subverted, or falsified by familial, patriarchal or other influences in nontraditional autobiographic writing, this creative-critical thesis offers an original contribution to current literary discourse on the permeable boundaries of fact and fiction, truth and lies, and past and present in autobiographical forms

Methods that make us feel safer? Challenging the effect of sexism confrontation and holding measures of violence against women up to scrutiny

This thesis critically evaluates key claims in sexism and violence against women research, addressing the question: ‘Are past research methods and measures painting a distorted picture of sexism and its manifestations that uphold violence against women?’ This is timely, considering the need for a more robust evidence base post-replication crisis and rising backlash against gender equality, particularly among younger men. We explore three potentially misleading claims: that challenging sexism mitigates its negative outcomes; that women’s fear of crime is generally unfounded; that rape myth acceptance is declining. In Chapter 2, in three experimental studies, we examine whether challenging sexism mitigates its negative outcomes. By correcting methodological flaws in previous studies, such as the lack of a non-sexist control and failure to control for baseline sexism, we found that the supposed benefits of challenging sexism disappear. Chapter 3 examines the gender-fear ‘paradox’, which suggests that women's fears of victimisation are disproportionate to their risk, demonstrated in crime statistics. The study reveals that women significantly restrict behaviours more than men to avoid victimisation, indicating that crime statistics do not represent the true extent of the risks women face. Moreover, both men and women show low trust in police to report crimes. Chapter 4 challenges the narrative of declining rape myth acceptance. We argue that in using the term ‘rape’, these measures evoke archetypal rape scripts not representative of most cases. In two experimental studies, we replaced the word ‘rape’ with behaviour-specific descriptions, finding higher scores of rape myth acceptance and stronger correlations with victim-blaming and perpetrator exoneration, compared with the original scale. These findings suggest that societal attitudes may not be improving as previously thought, highlighting the need for more accurate measurement tools. This thesis underscores the necessity of refining research methodologies to inform effective policies and counteract the illusion that sexist and rape cultures are diminishing

Capitalism Reloaded

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND license. In Capitalism Reloaded, Peter Bloom charts a pivotal shift from the well-known military-industrial complex to a new 'Authoritarian-Financial Complex'. Unlike its predecessor, which centred on armaments and defence, this emerging power structure fuses financial interests with advanced surveillance and digital control, turning social repression into a lucrative industry. Bloom introduces a ground breaking theory of 'complex power', where control itself becomes a central driver of capitalism, shaping economies and societies. Bloom explores how this insatiable demand for security and profit extends beyond traditional authoritarian regimes, permeating everyday life and eroding democratic freedoms. This book challenges readers to confront the deep entanglements of modern capitalism before they solidify into a techno-authoritarian order

Why Maintenance Matters: Disorder in the Built Environment and Physical Health

Over the last decade there has been a renewed interest in identifying exactly how aspects of the residential built environment “get under the skin” and affect the health of not only those who dwell within, but reside and commute among, disorderly and deteriorating buildings. In parallel, across the different disciplines that constitute the neighbourhood effects literature, there is a growing acknowledgement that unpacking the “black box” of the phenomenon will require a principled theoretical approach that proposes plausible causal pathways between the area-level neighbourhood context and individual-level health; that is a concerted effort to answer not only the “why?” (ultimate) question, but the “how?” (proximate) question, too. Building on Wilson and O’Brien’s explicitly evolutionary construct of Community Perception, we introduce Jos Brosschot’s Generalised Unsafety Theory of Stress to propose and test a novel account of the causal pathway we believe residential maintenance plays between a place and its people. We use C-reactive protein (CRP), a biomarker associated with infection and stress, alongside information relating to neighbourhood maintenance, demographic characteristics, and health behaviours, all drawn from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Hierarchical multiple regression models estimate CRP for exposure to poor maintenance conditions, controlling for known predictors and confounders. Results indicate that poor maintenance is associated with elevated CRP. Residential maintenance matters to people’s physical health. Future work will look to further elucidate the proximate mechanisms that underlie this pathway, in the hope that it will lead to impactful evidence-based policy proposals

A Sequential Mixed Method Study of Employee Job Satisfaction in Upscale Restaurants, Malaysia

The study determines the main factors affecting job satisfaction in upscale restaurants and their degree of comparative influence. The research initially involves qualitative data analysis of 20 interviews with restaurant employees representing five upscale restaurants in Kuala Lumpur (KL), followed by structural equation modeling of data retrieved from 368 questionnaires from 16 KL restaurants. The impact variance of four main determinants of job satisfaction are revealed, where the “working environment” has the highest impact, followed by “payment and compensation,” “promotion”, and finally, “workplace fairness”. Crucially, “workplace relationships” have a moderating effect on the relationship between the “work environment” and job satisfaction, implicating industry-applied recommendations to strengthen job satisfaction levels

Reliability and validity of velocity measures and regression methods to predict maximal strength ability in the back-squat using a novel linear position transducer

Purpose: to examine the reliability of load-velocity profiles (LVPs) and validity of 1-repetition maximum (1-RM) prediction methods in the back-squat using the novel Vitruve linear position transducer (LPT). Methods: twenty-five men completed a back-squat 1-RM assessment followed by 2 LVP trials using 5 incremental loads (20%-40%-60%-80%-90% 1-RM). Mean propulsive velocity (MPV), mean velocity (MV), and peak velocity (PV) were measured via a (LPT). Linear and polynomial regression models were applied to the data. The reliability and validity criteria were defined a-priori as intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) or Pearson correlation coefficient (r) > 0.70, coefficient of variation (CV) ≤ 10%, and effect size (ES) < 0.60. Bland-Altman analysis and heteroscedasticity of errors (r2) were also assessed. Results: the main findings indicated MPV, MV and PV were reliable across 20- 13 90% 1-RM (CV < 8.8%). The secondary findings inferred all prediction models had acceptable reliability (CV < 8.0%). While the MPV linear and MV linear models demonstrated the best estimation of 1-RM (CV < 5.9%), all prediction models displayed unacceptable validity and a tendency to overestimate or underestimate 1-RM. Mean systematic bias (-7.29 to 2.83 kg) was detected for all prediction models, along with little to no heteroscedasticity of errors for linear (r2 < 0.04) and polynomial models (r2 < 0.08). Furthermore, all 1-RM estimations were significantly different from each other (p < 0.03). Conclusions: MPV, MV, and PV can provide reliable LVPs and repeatable 1-RM predictions. However, prediction methods may not be sensitive enough to replace direct assessment of 1-RM. Polynomial regression is not suitable for 1-RM prediction