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The increasingly pressured environment of academia has led to many toxic manifestations within sector cultures, such as hyper-competitiveness, erosion of research integrity, workforce attrition and increasing instances of burnout. The aim of The Research Whisperer (RW) blog is to level the research career playing field by providing honest, informed and compassionate perspectives about contemporary academia that reaches across institutions and internationally. We seek to counter the pervasive negativity with alternative perspectives on academic life that are realistic and prioritise kindness, generosity and a holistic approach to valuing research and researchers. The blog and its associated social media channels have cultivated a significant community of international researchers and research support professionals. This chapter discusses RW's strategies in growing and managing its global researcher community (through blog posts, social media, workshops and conferences), issues around its sustainability and what having such a community means.

Sports advertisements such as the Super Bowl showcase products and brands that have invested increasingly large sums financially to gain viewers’ attention. However, how audio features in advertisements impact viewers' behavior remains unexplored.

Using the lens of signaling theory, this research uses advanced data analytics of voice and music audio in Super Bowl advertisements to examine its impacts on viewers.

Results show that advertisement viewers prefer more voiced frames and have a greater liking behavior of voiced frames with a low intensity (less loud) and a higher F1 frequency, which is typically associated with male vocal tracts. A fast music tempo works better for longer advertisements. The model controls for various types of ad appeals. The research underlines the importance of voice and music in signaling successful brand features that are likely to increase the ad-liking behavior of consumers (positive effect).

The current research implies that brands advertising through sports ads must carefully select voice actors and music in order to provide the most positive signals for a brand to have the most significant effect and, thus, a greater return on the high sums invested in the ads.

First, this research contributes in terms of a new research process for using audio analytics in advertising. The detailed research process outlined can be used for future research examining audio and music from advertisements. Second, our findings provide additional support to the important role of voice features (e.g. intensity and frequency) as signals in inducing responses from consumers (Biswas et al., 2019; Hagtvedt and Brasel, 2016). Third, the study surfaces a new theoretical association: the effect of tempo in moderating the relationship between duration and propensity to like an ad.

Sustainable and climate-adapted urban development requires integrative governance approaches and forms of collaboration between different disciplinary actors in urban society. Integrative approaches are a particular challenge for those planning cultures in which they are not yet sufficiently established. This also applies to formal urban land-use planning in Germany, which forms the governance setting of this study. This study aims to examine how interdisciplinary participation in formal urban land-use planning contributes to the consideration of climate adaptation in the planning process.

This paper traces the process of two differently designed interdisciplinary participation formats based on the methodological framework of a gaming simulation, each in the context of a formal urban land-use planning procedure in Bottrop, Germany. The gaming simulations are designed as performance simulations in which we involved several representatives from different public authorities.

The gaming simulations show that interdisciplinary participation can lead to an increased awareness of climate adaptation requirements in particular and a mutual understanding of different logics of action in the context of comprehensive and sustainable urban planning in general. In addition, this paper provides recommendations as to how and under what conditions the benefits of the simulations can be transferred to municipal practice.

While integrative and interdisciplinary formats are increasingly being used in the context of informal urban planning, this does not apply to formal urban land-use planning. Participation in formal urban land-use planning procedures is classically linear and multidisciplinary in Germany. Using two simulated interdisciplinary participation formats, this paper tested to what extent the consideration of climate adaptation requirements as a cross-sectoral task can benefit from interdisciplinarity in the context of two formal urban land-use planning procedures.