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In recent decades, school discipline has become increasingly characterized by zero-tolerance policies that mandate predetermined punitive consequences for specific offenses. Zero-tolerance policies have not been shown to improve student behavioral outcomes or school climate. Further, these disciplinary policies are applied unevenly across schools and student populations. Despite the well-documented research base that demonstrates that these practices are ineffective, they remain commonplace in K-12 school across the United States. Transformative and culturally responsive educational leadership requires school leaders to examine the historical, societal, and institutional factors that contribute to the racial-discipline gap within their particular schools. This process requires committing to leading for racial justice, self-reflexive practice, and having the courage to boldly name and dismantle practices that do not create equitable outcomes for students on the margins. Drawing on tenets of Critical Race Theory and Culturally Responsive School Leadership to situate the history and proliferation of harmful disciplinary practices, this chapter discusses how critically reflexive school leaders can mobilize restorative practices to dismantle the systems, structures, and practices that reproduce inequities in schools. The chapter provides aspiring and practicing school leaders with the knowledge needed to reform existing school discipline policies and implement practices that support racial justice.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly within the last decade and the application of ‘deep learning’, has simultaneously accelerated human fears of the changes AI provokes in human behaviour. The question is not any more if the new phenomena, like artificially-induced consciousness, empathy or creation, will be widely used, but whether they will be used in ethically acceptable ways and for ethically acceptable purposes.

Departing from a diagnosis of the state humans have brought themselves to by (ab)use of technology, the present chapter investigates the possibility of a systematic study of adaptations human society will have to consider in order to guarantee the obeyance to the fundamental ethical values and thus its spiritual survival. To that end, a new discipline – epharmology (from the Greek epharmozein = to adapt) is proposed, together with its aims and methodology.

Nowadays, the main challenge in the higher education is the daunting task of transforming universities into digital era institutions. Improving HE students' competence to meet the flow of technological innovations through DT has been the focus of many countries. This task has imposed the restraint that HE institutions should implement the most effective strategies of DT. This chapter is focusing on how DT strategies play their role in making the transformation itself become germane and give its fruits. Therefore, this chapter presents the most effective DT strategies that can be implemented by HE institutions in order to prepare their students for the existing professional roles in their societies. A good DT strategy is one that connects the organization's current level of digital maturity with its future ambition. The well-known strategies in the DT field are as follows: the strategy of electronic projects, strategy of smart electronic platforms, integrated training strategy, participatory e-learning strategy, smart learning strategy, pervasive learning strategy, microlearning strategy and e-design thinking strategy, in addition to the strategy in which traditional learning methods are combined with e-learning methods. It is worth noting here that the chapter is not an attempt to favor a strategy over another or compare and contrast them to uncover their differences at any level. On the contrary, the writer will work on displaying how each strategy can be implemented in order to accomplish DT in HE instructional practices. Also, this chapter will show how complementary these strategies can be once they are utilized to reach DT.

This paper aims to discuss the scholarship over the past 30 years on what used to be called Melanesian warfare or “tribal fighting” and is termed in this paper “intergroup conflict” in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The paper categorises the drivers of intergroup conflict that make up the landscape for conflict in the Highlands. It starts with cultural factors and the understandings about conflict that have long been used to explain such violence, then adds newer factors. It argues that while the individual existence of each driver is important, far more important is the way in which they interact with each other in reinforcing feedback loops that propel the actors involved towards violence.

The paper is based on a thorough review of the scholarly and grey literature on the topic, drawing from the fields of anthropology, criminology, political science, law, justice and peacebuilding.

The overall finding of the paper is that the nature of intergroup conflict, its scale and dynamics, has changed considerably over the past 30 years, most prominently in the entanglement of the state with local-level conflicts. This has significantly affected the nature of intergroup conflict today, deepening the attractors towards violence and conflict, while weakening the ability of existing state and non-state systems to prevent it. The picture that emerges is one in which the interconnectivity of factors promoting violence has intensified, the rate of change is accelerating and levels of violence are amplified.

This paper is an original work.

Product returns are a major challenge for e-businesses as they involve huge logistical and operational costs. Therefore, it becomes crucial to predict returns in advance. This study aims to evaluate different genres of classifiers for product return chance prediction, and further optimizes the best performing model.

An e-commerce data set having categorical type attributes has been used for this study. Feature selection based on chi-square provides a selective features-set which is used as inputs for model building. Predictive models are attempted using individual classifiers, ensemble models and deep neural networks. For performance evaluation, 75:25 train/test split and 10-fold cross-validation strategies are used. To improve the predictability of the best performing classifier, hyperparameter tuning is performed using different optimization methods such as, random search, grid search, Bayesian approach and evolutionary models (genetic algorithm, differential evolution and particle swarm optimization).

A comparison of F1-scores revealed that the Bayesian approach outperformed all other optimization approaches in terms of accuracy. The predictability of the Bayesian-optimized model is further compared with that of other classifiers using experimental analysis. The Bayesian-optimized XGBoost model possessed superior performance, with accuracies of 77.80% and 70.35% for holdout and 10-fold cross-validation methods, respectively.

Given the anonymized data, the effects of individual attributes on outcomes could not be investigated in detail. The Bayesian-optimized predictive model may be used in decision support systems, enabling real-time prediction of returns and the implementation of preventive measures.

There are very few reported studies on predicting the chance of order return in e-businesses. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to compare different optimization methods and classifiers, demonstrating the superiority of the Bayesian-optimized XGBoost classification model for returns prediction.

Bibliometric analyses of psychological research on refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced people is scarce. This study aims to evaluate the productivity and impact of publications related to the psychology of refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people.

Using the Scopus database, the authors searched for psychology-related publications under the subject area “Psychology” and included keywords for refugees, asylum-seeker and displaced people. Retrieved publications were analyzed and visualized using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer. Productivity and impact of related research publications were presented.

A total of 2,317 publications were identified, with an h-index of 86. An increase post-2014 was noted. The USA was the most productive country and the University of New South Wales leading institutional contributions. “Review of Child and Adolescent Refugee Mental Health” was top cited. Some keywords, like posttraumatic stress disorder, were frequently used. Research on migration and Syrians from refugee backgrounds is notably advancing.

This study analyzed many publications related to psychology concerning refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people over the past 23 years. Advanced analysis was facilitated using software tools, including Microsoft Excel and Biblioshiny for the Bibliometrix R package and VOSviewer software. These advanced bibliometric and scientometric tools enable us to depict in depth the evolving trends and international collaborations between authors and countries, and analysis tending topic. This study has some limitations. First, the authors restricted our analysis to the Scopus database; thus, some publications available in other databases like Web of Science or Google Scholar may have been overlooked. Second, the keywords used in this study were “refugee,” “asylum-seeker” and “displaced people”. As a result, some relevant publications might have been missed, and future research could use a more comprehensive set of keywords related to refugees, asylum and displacement. For future research, keywords such as humanitarian immigrants, queue jumpers, boaties and stateless, among other terms, should be considered across the field to label people from displaced backgrounds. Our study focused on titles to directly capture the most explicitly relevant articles. In future studies, it is important to include the abstracts and keywords to identify additional pertinent studies. In our study, the authors did not use the asterisk. Thus, the asterisk may allow for the inclusion of all possible endings of a root word.

The study indicates a significant increase in research publications over time. The findings are significant for establishing a research agenda and network in this area, assisting international health agencies and governments in understanding the psychological challenges among this vulnerable group.