Month: March 2024

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the application of green neighborhood rating systems, specifically Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) and Building Research Foundation Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM)-Communities, in the context of Cairo, Egypt, focusing on Al Rehab City, a prominent urban area in New Cairo. The study begins by providing a background on Al-Rehab City, explaining its strategic planning, urban design, and demographic dynamics. It then delves into the current state of sustainable urban planning in Egypt, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that exist in this rapidly urbanizing context. The core of the article includes a comparative analysis of LEED-ND and BREEAM communities, assessing their adaptability and relevance to the Egyptian urban landscape, especially Al Rehab City. It explores many sustainability issues such as smart location, neighborhood pattern and design, green infrastructure, sustainable transportation, energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management, and community engagement. The discussion extends to examine how each of these aspects of sustainability applies to Al Rehab City, complemented by case studies and examples of current sustainable practices in Cairo. Furthermore, the article identifies specific local challenges in implementing these assessment systems, such as economic constraints, policy constraints, and cultural factors. It also suggests opportunities for improvement, including the potential for public–private partnerships, policy reforms, community engagement, technological innovation, and sustainable urban development modeling. In conclusion, the article provides insight into the future prospects of green urban planning in Cairo. The potential impact of adopting comprehensive assessment systems is discussed, with an emphasis on the role of Al Rehab City as a potential model for sustainable urban development in Egypt and the wider MENA region. The article aims to contribute to the discourse on sustainable urban planning, and provide a roadmap for integrating global sustainability standards into the unique context of Egyptian cities.

Abstract

Without trust there is no credible human health research (HHR). This article accepts this truism and addresses a crucial question that arises: how can trust continually be promoted in an ever-changing and uncertain HHR environment? The article analyses long-standing mechanisms that are designed to elicit trust—such as consent, anonymization, and transparency—and argues that these are best understood as trust represented by proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., regulatory attempts to convey the trustworthiness of the HHR system and/or its actors. Often, such proxies are assumed to operate as markers that trust exists or, at least, has not been lost. But, since trust can neither be “built” nor “secured,” this is a precarious assumption. Worryingly, there is no existing theoretical account of how to understand and evaluate these proxies of trustworthiness as part of a trusted HHR ecosystem. To remedy this, the paper argues for a radical reimagining of trust and trustworthiness as performative acts that ought to be understood in relation to each other and by reference to the common values at stake. It is shown that proxies of trustworthiness are the operational tools used to perform trustworthiness. It advocates for a values-based approach to understanding the relationship between trust and trustworthiness. This establishes a strong basis for an evaluative framework for proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., to determine how to perform trustworthiness well. Five common proxies in HHR are scrutinized from a values perspective. The contribution is to provide a far-reaching normative and practical framework by which existing and future proxies of trustworthiness can be identified, assessed, maintained, or replaced in rapidly changing HHR regulatory ecosystems where trust itself is crucial to the success of the entire HHR enterprise.

Abstract

This study aims to examine and understand the motherhood decisions of career-oriented women who are well-educated, well-paid, and up the corporate ladder in Türkiye. A qualitative research design was preferred due to the nature of the study and in-depth interviews and descriptive content analysis were employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 career-oriented working mothers. The findings of the study have revealed that mothers regret many decisions they made to protect their careers, jobs and families (mainly babies) during this process. In addition, for all of these women, the motherhood decision appeared to be a trade-off between their career goals and motherhood wishes, at least for a period of time. Some have given up on their career progress for a certain period, some have faced the negative attitudes of the institutions they work for, like “ignoring their motherhood experience and their babies”, and others have been forced to pretend as if they were “not mothers” so that their careers would not be impaired. The study also concluded that women who struggle with the difficulties of being a mother in organizational life support each other more with a silent coalition which we call “a motherhood coalition”. Future research may focus on the reproductive decision processes and motherhood experiences of blue-collar women, as they can be quite different from career-oriented white-collar women’s experiences.

Abstract

It is well-recognised that cognitive irrationalities can be exploited to influence behaviour. ‘Hypernudging’ was coined by Karen Yeung to describe a powerful version of this phenomenon seen in digital systems that use large quantities of user data and machine learning to guide decision-making in highly personalised ways. Authors have worried about the societal impacts of the use of these capabilities at scale in commercial systems but have only begun to articulate them concretely. In this paper I look to elucidate one concern of this sort by focusing specifically on the employment of these techniques within social media and considering how it threatens our autonomy in forming moral judgments. By moral judgments I mean our judgments of someone’s actions or character as good versus bad. A threat to our autonomy in forming these is of real concern because moral judgments and their associated beliefs provide a critical backdrop for what is deemed acceptable in society, both individually and collectively and therefore what futures are possible and probable.

In the first two sections I introduce a psychological model that describes how humans reach moral judgments and the conditions under which it can and cannot be considered autonomous. In the third section I describe how hypernudging within a social media context creates the relevant problematic conditions so as to constitute a threat to our autonomy in forming moral judgments. In the fourth section I explore some practical measures that could be taken to protect moral autonomy. I conclude with some indicative evidence that this threat is not experienced uniformly across all societies, pointing to interesting future areas of research.