Search Results (1,913)

This article examines online hate as a driver of cyberbullying and a barrier to inclusive schooling, integrating theoretical, philosophical and methodological perspectives. We approach hate speech as communicative practices that legitimise discrimination and exclusion and, once amplified by social media affordances, erode equity, belonging and well-being in educational settings. The study adopts a qualitative, exploratory–descriptive design using focus groups with pre-service teachers from initial teacher education programmes across several Chilean regions. Participants reflected on the presence, trajectories and classroom effects of cyberhate/cyberbullying. Data were analysed thematically with ATLAS.ti24. Findings describe a recurrent pathway in which anonymous posts lead to public exposure, followed by heightened anxiety and eventual withdrawal. This shows how online aggression spills into classrooms, normalises everyday disparagement and fuels self-censorship, especially among minoritised students. The analysis also highlights the amplifying role of educator authority (tone, feedback, modelling) and institutional inaction. In response, participants identified protective practices: explicit dialogic norms, rapid and caring classroom interventions, restorative and care-centred feedback, partnership with families and peers, and critical digital citizenship that links platform literacy with ethical reasoning. The article contributes evidence to inform anti-bullying policy, inclusive curriculums and teacher education by proposing actionable, context-sensitive strategies that strengthen equity, dignity and belonging. Full article

Background: Ethical dilemmas and the moral distress they generate are central challenges in healthcare practice and professional identity formation. While moral reasoning has been widely studied, comparative evidence on how medical students and practicing physicians approach ethical dilemmas remains scarce in Eastern Europe. Methods: A total of 244 participants (51 senior medical students and 193 physicians) completed an adapted version of the Defining Issues Test, version 2 (DIT-2). Three classical dilemmas were assessed: end-of-life decision-making, access to life-saving medication, and the reintegration of a fugitive. Responses were analyzed through descriptive statistics and chi-square tests to identify differences in decision choices and underlying reasoning. Results: Physicians consistently endorsed conventional, law-based reasoning, emphasizing legality and professional codes, while medical students demonstrated greater variability, indecision, and openness to compassion-driven justifications. In the “Jan and the Drug” and “Fugitive” dilemmas, significant between-group differences highlighted tensions between legality, empathy, and justice (p < 0.01). These differences in reasoning indicate differing vulnerabilities to moral distress, especially when legal and compassionate perspectives conflict. Conclusions: The findings reveal distinct patterns of moral reasoning that reflect different levels of vulnerability to moral distress in healthcare contexts. Integrating structured ethics training and reflective dialogue into both undergraduate and continuing medical education could mitigate moral distress by fostering a balance between justice, compassion, and professional responsibility. Full article

Organoid technology has emerged as a revolutionary tool in cancer research, offering physiologically accurate, three-dimensional models that preserve the histoarchitecture, genetic stability, and phenotypic complexity of primary tumors. These self-organizing structures, derived from adult stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, or patient tumor biopsies, recapitulate critical aspects of tumor heterogeneity, clonal evolution, and microenvironmental interactions. Organoids serve as powerful systems for modeling tumor progression, assessing drug sensitivity and resistance, and guiding precision oncology strategies. Recent innovations have extended organoid capabilities beyond static culture systems. Integration with microfluidic organoid-on-chip platforms, high-throughput CRISPR-based functional genomics, and AI-driven phenotypic analytics has enhanced mechanistic insight and translational relevance. Co-culture systems incorporating immune, stromal, and endothelial components now permit dynamic modeling of tumor–host interactions, immunotherapeutic responses, and metastatic behavior. Comparative analyses with conventional platforms, 2D monolayers, spheroids, and patient-derived xenografts emphasize the superior fidelity and clinical potential of organoids. Despite these advances, several challenges remain, such as protocol variability, incomplete recapitulation of systemic physiology, and limitations in scalability, standardization, and regulatory alignment. Addressing these gaps with unified workflows, synthetic matrices, vascularized and innervated co-cultures, and GMP-compliant manufacturing will be crucial for clinical integration. Proactive engagement with regulatory frameworks and ethical guidelines will be pivotal to ensuring safe, responsible, and equitable clinical translation. With the convergence of bioengineering, multi-omics, and computational modeling, organoids are poised to become indispensable tools in next-generation oncology, driving mechanistic discovery, predictive diagnostics, and personalized therapy optimization. Full article

Service or community engaged learning has gained momentum as a strategy for developing engineering students’ professional skills while facilitating engagement with the real-world complexities of engineering problem-solving. Along with other critical scholars of engineering education, we argue that embedding social justice frameworks into engineering education, including sensibility around difference, power, and privilege, is required in order for engineering to meet the great sustainability and equity challenges of our time. This paper investigates how social justice course content and community engaged learning experiences can change engineering student attitudes toward civic engagement and social responsibility. We also explore how such content increases interest in engineering among students underrepresented in the field. Using pre-/post-survey data and focus group discussions, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of student experience in an advanced undergraduate engineering course at a public research university that integrated social justice content with hands-on community engaged projects. Our analysis of survey results show that (1) students placed greater importance on justice-oriented civic engagement and socially responsible engineering after completing the course; (2) women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups demonstrated greater interest in community engaged projects, and women indicated a greater interest in engineering at the end of the course than men; and (3) participation in a community engaged project also increased students’ interest in engineering, humanized problems that might have traditionally been construed as technological, and deepened the value students placed on non-technical forms of knowledge and their sense of moral and ethical responsibilities. Full article

Ecuador is experiencing an unprecedented escalation of violence, organized crime and public insecurity, prompting the Ministry of Education to introduce a curricular reform through Ministerial Agreement MINEDUC-MINEDUC-2024-00060-A. This reform incorporates five new subjects—Civic Education, Ethics and Integrity, Education for Sustainable Development, Socioemotional Education, Financial Education, and Education for Road Safety and Sustainable Mobility—into the national curriculum, with the explicit aim of fostering civic responsibility, ethical behavior and social cohesion. This study examines the societal and political context of the reform and analyzes its representation in the Ecuadorian press during 2024 using qualitative content analysis of publicly accessible national news articles, including reports, chronicles, interviews and press releases. The analysis focuses on the framing of the reform’s messages, the information provided and the actors featured in the coverage. Findings reveal that media narratives strongly reflect governmental discourse, portraying Civic, Ethic and Integrity Education as a moral vitamin to counteract the erosion of values and as a strategy to reinforce national identity through civic rituals. The study concludes that the reform exemplifies the integration of educational policy with sociopolitical objectives, positioning schools as central actors in long-term efforts to address societal violence and promote ethical citizenship. Full article

For decades, regeneration of alveolar bone defects has depended on traditional grafting options, such as autogenous/allogenic grafts or allografts. Recently, extracted teeth was introduced as an alternative graft source. Tooth autografts are being used and have gained significant attention due to their biocompatibility, osteoconductivity, osteoinductivity, and osteogenic properties. Furthermore, tooth allografts have potential to act as natural biocomposites for oral regeneration procedures and might be advantageous options in near future. Recent advances in tooth banking, including cryopreservation, can serve to maintain bioactivity and to improve the safety, viability, and regenerative potential of teeth. They might be revolutionary in oral surgery, offering a more sustainable solution to the growing demand for bone regeneration procedures. Nevertheless, challenges such as immunogenic responses, ethical issues, and regulatory constraints persist. Ongoing research and technological innovation continue to address these problems. To date, the success rates of tooth autografts are promising, and they are regarded as a reliable option in clinical practice, with predictable outcomes in alveolar ridge preservation, sinus augmentation, periodontal regeneration, guided bone regeneration (GBR), and endodontic surgery by providing natural scaffolds for cell integration and bone remodeling. However, the scientific literature on tooth allografts is lacking. Therefore, this review aimed to comprehensively evaluate the scientific literature for comparing the properties of tooth grafts with other grafting options, in terms of processing techniques, and various clinical applications, positioning them as versatile biocomposites for the future, bridging material science and regenerative dentistry. Furthermore, possible applications of allogenic tooth grafts and overcoming current limitations are also discussed. Full article

The evolution of decentralized clinical trials, driven by advanced digital technologies, is transforming traditional clinical research. It introduces innovative methods for informed consent, remote patient monitoring, and data analysis, enhancing study efficiency, validity, and participation while reducing patient burden. Some clinical procedures can be conducted remotely, increasing trial accessibility and reducing population selection biases, particularly for cardiovascular patients. However, this also presents complex regulatory and ethical challenges. The article explores how digital platforms and emerging technologies like block chain, AI, and advanced cryptography can promote traceability, security, and transparency throughout the trial process, ensuring participant identification and documentation of each procedural step. Clear, legally compliant informed consent, often managed through electronic systems, both for research participation and data management in line with GDPR, is essential. Ethical considerations include ensuring participants understand trial information, with adaptations such as simplified language, visual aids, and multilingual support. The transnational nature of decentralized trials highlights the need for coordinated regulatory standards to overcome jurisdictional barriers and reinforce accountability. This framework promotes trust, shared responsibility, and the protection of participants rights while upholding high ethical standards in scientific research. Full article

This study examines the ethical problems of using artificial intelligence (AI) applications in higher education, focusing on activities performed by university educators. Drawing on Slovak legislation that defines educators’ responsibilities, the study classifies their activities into three categories: teaching, scientific research, and other (academic management and self-directed professional development). From standpoint of methodology, a thematic review of 42 open-access, peer-reviewed articles published between 2022 and 2025 was conducted across the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Relevant AI applications and their associated ethical issues were identified and thematically categorized. Results of this study show that AI applications are extensively used across all analysed areas of university educators’ activities. Most notably used are applications that are generative language models, editing and paraphrasing tools, learning and assessment software, management and search tools, visualizing and design tools, and analysis and management systems. Their adoption raises ethical concerns which can be thematically grouped into six categories: privacy and data protection, bias and fairness, transparency and accountability, autonomy and oversight, governance gaps, and integrity and plagiarism. The results provide universities with a structured analytical framework to assess and address ethical risks related to AI use in specific academic activities. Although the study is limited to open-access literature, it offers a conceptual foundation for future empirical research and the development of ethical, institutionally grounded AI policies in higher education. Full article

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping skill expectations across media, marketing, and journalism, however, university curricula are not evolving at a comparable speed. To quantify the resulting curriculum–skill gap in communication-related programs, two synchronous corpora were assembled for the period July 2024–June 2025: 66 course descriptions from six leading UK universities and 107 graduate-to-mid-level job advertisements in communications, digital media, advertising, and public relations. Alignment around AI, datafication, and platform governance was assessed through a three-stage natural-language-processing workflow: a dual-tier AI-keyword index, comparative TF–IDF salience, and latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling with bootstrap uncertainty. Curricula devoted 6.0% of their vocabulary to AI plus data/platform terms, whereas job ads allocated only 2.3% (χ² = 314.4, p < 0.001), indicating a conceptual-critical emphasis on ethics, power, and societal impact in the academy versus an operational focus on SEO, multichannel analytics, and campaign performance in recruitment discourse. Topic modeling corroborated this divergence: universities foregrounded themes labelled “Politics, Power & Governance”, while advertisers concentrated on “Campaign Execution & Performance”. Environmental and social externalities of AI—central to the Special Issue theme—were foregrounded in curricula but remained virtually absent from job advertisements. The findings are interpreted as an extension of technology-biased-skill-change theory to communication disciplines, and it is suggested that studio-based micro-credentials in automation workflows, dashboard visualization, and sustainable AI practice be embedded without relinquishing critical reflexivity, thereby narrowing the curriculum–skill gap and fostering environmentally, socially, and economically responsible media innovation. With respect to the novelty of this research, it constitutes the first large-scale, data-driven corpus analysis that empirically assessed the AI-related curriculum–skill gap in communication disciplines, thereby extending technology-biased-skill-change theory into this field. Full article

Conventional academic warning systems in higher education often rely on end-of-semester grades, which severely limits opportunities for timely intervention. To address this, our interdisciplinary study developed and validated a comprehensive socio-technical framework that integrates social-cognitive theory with learning analytics. The framework combines educational data mining with culturally responsive, personalized interventions tailored to a non-Western context. A two-phase mixed-methods design was employed: first, predictive models were built using Learning Management System (LMS) data from 2,856 students across 64 courses. Second, a quasi-experimental trial (n = 48) was conducted to evaluate intervention efficacy. Historical academic performance, attendance, and assignment submission patterns were the strongest predictors, achieving a Balanced Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.85. The intervention, specifically adapted to Confucian educational values, yielded remarkable results: 73% of at-risk students achieved passing grades, with a large effect size for academic improvement (Cohen’s d = 0.91). These findings empirically validate a complete prediction–intervention–evaluation cycle, demonstrating how algorithmic predictions can be effectively integrated with culturally informed human support networks. This study advances socio-technical systems theory in education by bridging computer science, psychology, and educational research. It offers an actionable model for designing ethical and effective early warning systems that balance technological innovation with human-centered pedagogical values. Full article

The fashion industry, despite its global economic importance, is a major contributor to environmental degradation and social inequality. In response, sustainable fashion has emerged as a growing movement advocating ethical, ecological, and socially responsible practices. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 1134 peer-reviewed journal articles on sustainable fashion indexed in Scopus from 1986 to 2025. Results show an exponential rise in research output after 2015, with interdisciplinary contributions from social sciences, business, environmental science, and engineering. By applying performance analysis and science mapping techniques, the study identifies five major research themes: “Consumer Behavior,” “Design Ethics,” “Circular Economy,” “Innovation,” and “Digital Media.” The geographic distribution reveals strong outputs from both developed and emerging economies. This study provides an integrative overview of the intellectual landscape of sustainable fashion and serves as a roadmap for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who are interested in the development of sustainable fashion. Full article

This study examines how cognitive biases may shape ethical decision-making in AI-mediated environments, particularly within education and research. As AI tools increasingly influence human judgment, biases such as normalization, complacency, rationalization, and authority bias can lead to ethical lapses, including academic misconduct, uncritical reliance on AI-generated content, and acceptance of misinformation. To explore these dynamics, we developed an LLM-generated synthetic behavior estimation framework that modeled six decision-making scenarios with probabilistic representations of key cognitive biases. The scenarios addressed issues ranging from loss of human agency to biased evaluations and homogenization of thought. Statistical summaries of the synthetic dataset indicated that 71% of agents engaged in unethical behavior influenced by biases like normalization and complacency, 78% relied on AI outputs without scrutiny due to automation and authority biases, and misinformation was accepted in 65% of cases, largely driven by projection and authority biases. These statistics are descriptive of this synthetic dataset only and are not intended as inferential claims about real-world populations. The findings nevertheless suggest the potential value of targeted interventions—such as AI literacy programs, systematic bias audits, and equitable access to AI tools—to promote responsible AI use. As a proof-of-concept, the framework offers controlled exploratory insights, but all reported outcomes reflect text-based pattern generation by an LLM rather than observed human behavior. Future research should validate and extend these findings with longitudinal and field data. Full article

Aims: This study aimed to determine the prevalence of nurses in a Latin American leadership school who meet advanced nurse standards. Design: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted. Methods: Data were collected between January and November 2024 from a total of 92 participants from the Latin American Leadership School of FUDEN-FEPPEN (Foundation for the Development of Nursing—Pan American Federation of Professional Nurses). The response rate was 13%. The Spanish version of the APRD (advance practice role delineation) was validated in Spanish. The study was approved by the Social Ethics Committee of UCLM (Universidad Castilla-La Mancha). Inference analysis was performed to examine factors associated with advanced practice domains. Results: A total of 92 nurses participated in the study. Among the participants, 35.86% (33 nurses) met the requirements for advanced practice nurses and the minimum training required by the International Council of Nurses. Nurses in both primary care and specialized care perform more advanced practice activities in direct care; however, nurses practicing teaching and research perform more advanced practice activities in the indirect practice domains (training, research and teaching). Conclusions: The percentage of nurses participating in the Latin American leadership school who met the standards was determined, with the most frequent domains those related to direct care, such as expert care planning, integrated care, and inter-professional collaboration. Implications for the profession and patient care: To our knowledge, this is the first study that describes the profile of advanced practice nurses in the Latin American context. This study shows that advanced practice activities exist and are practiced, but there is no clear delimitation or regulation of these activities. Reporting method: The study was conducted following the STROBE guidelines. Public contribution: This study did not include patient or public involvement in its design, conduct, or reporting. Full article

I offer a close reading of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne“ (“Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht…”) that situates it in terms of its links to Greek tragedy and Homer. The essay explores Hölderlin’s focus on Achilles and the death of the Greek heroes Patroklos and Ajax against the notion of “poetic transport.” I also look at Hölderlin’s 2nd Böhlendorff Letter that traffics in the relation between antiquity and modernity. The essay also offers a reading of the second stanza of “Mnemosyne” in terms of Rousseau’s essay on “The Reveries of the Solitary Walker” and its appeal to the poet. As Hölderlin pursues the tense relation between memory and death, he poses questions about ethical responsibility that challenge the human being to find a path between wallowing in too excessive grief that ends in unbounded subjectivity and affirming the sense of the other that extends beyond our own self-preoccupation. Full article

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has revolutionized how individuals and organizations interact with technology. These systems, ranging from conversational agents to creative tools, are increasingly embedded in daily life. However, their effectiveness relies heavily on the usability of their graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which serve as the primary medium for user interaction. Moreover, the design of these interfaces must align with ethical principles such as transparency, fairness, and user autonomy to ensure responsible usage. This study evaluates the usability of GUIs for three widely-used GenAI applications, including ChatGPT (GPT-4), Gemini (1.5), and Claude (3.5 Sonnet) , using a heuristics-based and user-based testing approach (experimental-qualitative investigation). A total of 12 participants from a research organization in Australia, participated in structured usability evaluations, applying 14 usability heuristics to identify key issues and ethical concerns. The results indicate that Claude’s GUI is the most usable among the three, particularly due to its clean and minimalistic design. However, all applications demonstrated specific usability issues, such as insufficient error prevention, lack of shortcuts, and limited customization options, affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of user interactions. Despite these challenges, each application exhibited unique strengths, suggesting that while functional, significant enhancements are needed to fully support user satisfaction and ethical usage. The insights of this study can guide organizations in designing GenAI systems that are not only user-friendly but also ethically sound. Full article