Parental attitudes and digital parenting in the early years: development and validation of the PADTS Scale

BackgroundThis paper reports on the development and validation of the 15-item Parental Attitudes to Digital Technology Scale (PADTS), a brief, psychometrically validated measure assessing parents' beliefs confidence, and concerns about their very young children's use of digital technologies.MethodDeveloped as part of the UK-wide Toddlers, Tech and Talk (TTT) study, PADTS addresses a gap in existing research by focusing on children from birth to 3 years, a stage often overlooked in digital parenting literature. Co-developed with parents and early years experts, the scale was tested with a nationally balanced UK sample (N = 934).ResultsExploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a four-factor structure: perceived risks, perceived learning benefits, parental confidence and technology-related anxiety. The PADTS showed strong model fit and measurement invariance across parent gender, ethnicity and region, with some variation by child age. Correlational analyses indicated that benefits, perceptions and confidence were associated with supportive digital parenting, while anxiety was more weakly linked.ConclusionPADTS shows potential as a practical tool for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers and may support a more nuanced understanding of how parental attitudes shape early digital experiences.<br/

Techniques and metrics for evasion attack mitigation

Evasion attacks pose a substantial risk to the application of Machine Learning (ML) in Cybersecurity, potentially leading to safety hazards or security breaches in large-scale deployments. Adversaries can employ evasion attacks as an initial tactic to deceive malware or network scanners using ML, thereby orchestrating traditional cyber attacks to disrupt systems availability or compromise integrity. Adversarial data designed to fool AI systems for cybersecurity can be engineered by strategically selecting, modifying, or creating test instances. This paper presents novel defender-centric techniques and metrics for mitigating evasion attacks by leveraging adversarial knowledge, exploring potential exploitation methods, and enhancing alarm detection capabilities. We first introduce two new evasion resistance metrics: adversarial failure rate (afr) and adversarial failure curves (afc). These metrics generalize previous approaches, as they can be applied to threshold classifiers, facilitating analyses for adversarial attacks comparable to those performed with Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve. Subsequently, we propose two novel evasion resistance techniques (trainset size pinning and model matrix), extending research in keyed intrusion detection and randomization. We explore the application of proposed techniques and metrics to an intrusion detection system as a pilot study using two public datasets, ‘BETH 2021’ and ‘Kyoto 2015’, which are well-established cybersecurity datasets for uncertainty and robustness benchmarking. The experimental results demonstrate that the combination of the proposed randomization techniques consistently produces remarkable improvement over other known randomization techniques.<br/

Spirituality and religion and the role in improving teaching approaches to diversity and inclusion in the nursing and midwifery curriculum: an explanatory sequential multi-methods study

BackgroundSpirituality and religion play an important role in many people’s lives. While healthcare professionals support people from a diverse range of backgrounds, cultures and belief systems, these dimensions are often missing from assessments and care plans. Using the lens of nursing and midwifery students and academic teaching staff, this study sought to explore how the concepts of spirituality and religion could be better incorporated into nursing and midwifery teaching programmes, while acting as a possible conduit for exploring the richness of diversity and inclusion.MethodsAn explanatory sequential multi-methods study, to include an online survey (n = 114 responses) and focus groups (n = 11 participants). Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics and qualitative data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Integration of the quantitative and qualitative data was achieved through a pillar integration process.ResultsThe concept of spirituality was viewed as predominately positive, something personal to individuals and linked to how people make sense of their place in the world. Religion was seen as a connectedness to a community with common beliefs and a shared identity. However, the rules and regulations associated with religion, were perceived by some respondents as leading to intolerance and the exclusion of others. Overall, participants believed that greater awareness of spirituality and religion could help people to be more aware and to be more welcoming of diversity leading to greater inclusion. Participants believed that these concepts should be included in teaching programmes and integrated with clinical practice.ConclusionsStudents and clinical practitioners should be encouraged to increase their knowledge and awareness towards spiritual and religious issues. This awareness may begin with students and clinical practitioners reflecting on their own beliefs and values enabling them to be more sensitive to and respond to the beliefs and values of others. Insights gained by this study may be valuable to healthcare educators and policymakers highlighting the need for greater awareness of spirituality and religion in health and social care training.<br/

Sustainability obligations and developing countries: any scope for special and differential treatment?

A distinctive feature of the new generation of regional trade agreements signed by developed countries is the inclusion of sustainability obligations. These obligations, whether in the form of clauses or chapters, bind parties to respect internationally recognized core labour standards and protect the environment. While the multilateral forum may be challenging to supporters of ‘trade and . . .’ issues, the regional trade agreements setting appears as the next best avenue to suppress the possibility of incorporating special and differential treatment that upholds equity considerations and guarantees developing countries’ rights to variable geometry in multilateral trade agreements. This chapter explores the role, if any, of special and differential treatment at the three levels of trade governance of sustainability obligations, namely, multilateral, regional/reciprocal, and unilateral

Postdigital epistemic violence

Postdigital epistemic violence encompasses a large variety of harms that occur through speech acts about the lived experiences of knowers from marginalised or minoritised groups in online environments using digital and smart technology. Knowers may be silenced, gaslit, trolled or doxed because of structural prejudicial stereotypes about their sex, gender, ethnicity, and so on. These epistemic practices result in the deflation of their testimony, and the inflation of the credibility of other speakers to produce dysfunctions in the knowledge economy. The knowledge of the powerful and advantaged prevail over other kinds of knowing, resulting in epistemic violence

Creating digital value: the role of independent creators as multi-platform users

This chapter discusses the role of online platformplatforms in the production and consumption of cultural products. We explore contemporary forms of cultural creation through digital means where production, distribution, and consumption intertwine. We contribute to the literature on platformization in the cultural and creative sectors by exploring value generation via online intermediaries with different roles (e.g., patronage, funding, co-creation, streaming, and broadcasting) whereby creators produce, share, interact with audiences, and monetize content. With a presence on various platforms, creators generate economic and non-economic value from amateur or professional work by building a wide digital presence for community engagement and monetization. We argue that digitalization changes the careers of independent artists in that they become multi-platform-users adapting their presence to multi-purpose intermediaries which allows the rewarding of creation via both pecuniary and non-pecuniary means

Vision-audio multimodal object recognition using hybrid and tensor fusion techniques

Traditional fusion methods often encounter challenges related to temporal misalignment and signal variability, resulting in suboptimal performance. This study proposes a novel hybrid fusion model that integrates early and late fusion strategies to capture low-level feature interactions and high-level modality-specific abstractions. Advanced feature extraction techniques are employed to ensure robust multimodal representation: visual features are extracted using Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Local Binary Patterns (LBP), while audio features are processed using Spectral Centroid and Pitch-Synchronous Speech Features. Additionally, the Ridgelet Transform enhances spatial–temporal representation. A preprocessing pipeline further reduces data noise, applying Different Resolution Total Variation (DRTV) for visual noise suppression and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) for audio feature extraction. Furthermore, we incorporated an xLSTM-based hierarchical multi-scale temporal encoder in the audio branch and implemented an attention-based fusion stream with Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) for dynamic alignment based on different modalities. Class imbalance is addressed by applying SMOTE in the latent feature space and using class-weighted cross-entropy loss to improve model sensitivity to minority classes. Evaluated on a collected dataset of 22,133 audio-visual samples across 21 object categories, our proposed fusion model achieves an F1 score of 97.89% and a PR AUC of 98.02%. The attention-based fusion variant converged in 14 epochs but required more resources, totaling 19.1M parameters, 9.26G FLOPs, and 14.6 ms of inference latency. In contrast, hybrid fusion with LSTM provided a more efficient option with 12.0M parameters, 4.73G FLOPs, and 9.0 ms latency, making it ideal for low-resource edge applications. These results prove the proposed model’s flexibility in real-time multimodal applications such as autonomous systems, surveillance, and recycling automation

The Windsor Framework and its impact for Northern Ireland and EU-UK Relations?

The successful conclusion of the Windsor Framework was announced to much fanfare in February 2023 and portrayed in some quarters as the beginning of a new dawn for the operation of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol and EU-UK relations. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond such rhetoric and examine the nature of the reforms under the WF package and the extent to which it represents a significant departure from the rules of the Protocol. It also highlights some of the potential pitfalls associated with these reforms and shows that by seeking to address certain difficulties, the WF creates entirely new ones that undermine the central aims of the Protocol and have the potential threaten the sense optimism and trust between the parties