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With global warming intensifying, urban public spaces in cold-climate regions are increasingly exposed to heat beyond residents’ adaptive capacity. This study investigates whether smartphone use enhances thermal adaptation in Jingyue Central Park, Northeast China. A seven-day field campaign integrating microclimate monitoring and Passive Activity Observation (PAO) collected synchronized environmental and behavioral data. Results show that smartphone users had higher attendance and longer stays under high temperatures. Their Thermal Neutrality Threshold (NTT) and Critical Thermal Threshold (CTT) increased by about 2 °C and 3 °C, respectively, and up to 4.5 °C during optional activities, suggesting that voluntary media engagement improves heat tolerance and adaptive behavior. The study proposes mediated thermal adaptation to describe how digital media co-regulate environmental perception and adaptation. It extends thermal comfort research to cognitive-behavioral dimensions, links UTCI, NTT/CTT, and PAO data within one framework, and provides practical insights for optimizing thermal environments in cold-climate public spaces. Overall, the findings reveal the growing role of media-mediated behavior in enhancing human resilience to thermal stress.

Outdoor thermal comfort is influenced by people’s climate expectations, perceptions and adaptation capacity. Varied individual response to comfortable or stressful thermal environments results in a deviation between actual outdoor thermal activity choices and those predicted by thermal comfort indices. This paper presents a passive activity observation (PAO) method for estimating contextual limits of outdoor thermal adaptation. The PAO method determines which thermal environment result in statistically meaningful changes may occur in outdoor activity patterns, and it estimates thresholds of outdoor thermal neutrality and limits of thermal adaptation in public space based on activity observation and microclimate field measurement. Applications of the PAO method have been demonstrated in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, where outdoor activities were analysed against outdoor thermal comfort indices between 2013 and 2014. Adjusted apparent temperature (aAT), adaptive predicted mean vote (aPMV), outdoor standard effective temperature (OUT_SET), physiological equivalent temperature (PET) and universal thermal comfort index (UTCI) are calculated from the PAO data. Using the PAO method, the high threshold of outdoor thermal neutrality was observed between 24 °C for optional activities and 34 °C for necessary activities (UTCI scale). Meanwhile, the ultimate limit of thermal adaptation in uncontrolled public spaces is estimated to be between 28 °C for social activities and 48 °C for necessary activities. Normalised results indicate that city-wide high thresholds for outdoor thermal neutrality vary from 25 °C in Melbourne to 26 °C in Sydney and 30 °C in Adelaide. The PAO method is a relatively fast and localised method for measuring limits of outdoor thermal adaptation and effectively informs urban design and policy making in the context of climate change.

BackgroundStories are inherent to human culture and development. They help give meaning to life and death, explaining how and why things are as they are, and bear witness to important events in history and our lives. Telling someone a story isn’t a passive activity, it’s a social action. It can help the listener understand something, gain perspective or bear witness. Stories are not neutral and their strength and challenges often lie in the speaker’s position.AimsThis presentation will share a storytelling project which worked with ten people bereaved during COVID-19 to share their ‘unheard stories’. We will review the process and results, and ask why it is so important to hear unheard stories around challenging and unjust experiences. MethodsWe created a partnership with the Museum of London and artist, Olivia Twist, to work on a participatory arts and storytelling project. The aim was to help people tell their stories through illustrations other people would understand, with the aim of helping more people understand this time or make it visible and in so doing create change. People in the workshops met together over a series of months, sharing their experiences, telling stories, and then deciding on some key aspects of their bereavement experience to tell through illustration. We also facilitated professional photography depicting people as they wished to be seen, and recorded oral histories of their time. ResultsParticipants rated the process highly, in particular around its impact on their grieving process and the importance of sharing stories. Some have also gone on to be volunteers, help create new initiatives, speak about their experiences as ‘experts by experience’, or submit testimony to All-Party Parliamentary Groups. The illustrations were acquired by the Museum of London for its permanent collection and we exhibited them in our CARE (Centre for Awareness and Response to End of life). We continue to use storytelling and participatory arts methods to explore bereavement and other experiences.

Passive investors-ETFs and index funds-are the most important development in modern-day capital markets, dictating trillions of dollars in capital flows and increasingly owning much of corporate America. Neither the business model of passive funds, nor the way that they engage with their portfolio companies, however, is well understood, and misperceptions of both have led some commentators to call for passive investors to be subject to increased regulation and even disenfranchisement. Specifically, this literature takes a narrow view both of the market in which passive investors compete to manage customer funds and of passive investors' participation in the capital markets. We respond to this failure by providing the first comprehensive theoretical framework for passive investment and its implications for corporate governance. To start, we explain that to understand passive funds, it is necessary to understand the institutional context in which they operate. Two key insights follow. First, because passive funds are simply a pool of assets, their incentives are a product of the overall business operations of fund sponsors. Second, although passive funds are locked into their investments, their shareholders are not. Like all mutual fund investors, shareholders in index funds can exit at any time by selling their shares and receiving the net asset value of their ownership interest. Consequently, the sponsors of passive funds compete on both price and performance with other investment options-including other passive funds as well as actively managed funds-for investor dollars. As we explain, this competition provides passive fund sponsors with a variety of incentives to engage with the companies in their portfolios. Furthermore, the size of the major fund sponsors and the breadth of their holdings affords them economies of scale that not only justify engagement economically but also enable them to engage effectively. An examination of passive investor engagement in corporate governance demonstrates that passive investors behave in accordance with this theory. Passive investors are devoting greater sophistication and resources to engagement with their portfolio companies and are exploiting their comparative advantages-their size, breadth of portfolio, and resulting economies of scale-to focus on issues with a broad market impact, such as potential corporate governance reforms, that have the potential to reduce the underperformance and mispricing of portfolio companies. Passive investors use these tools, as opposed to analyzing firm-specific operational issues, to reduce the relative advantage that active funds gain through their ability to trade. We conclude by exploring the overall implications of the rise of passive investment for corporate law and financial regulation. We argue that, although existing critiques of passive investors are unfounded, the rise of passive investing raises new concerns about ownership concentration, conflicts of interest, and common ownership. We evaluate these concerns and the extent to which they warrant changes to existing regulation and practice.

Abstract Older adults engage in approximately 7.1 hours/day in leisure activities; however, much of the leisure activity engagement comprises of passive activity engagement (e.g., watching TV). An increasing amount of literature suggests that regular engagement in cognitively and physically stimulating activities, rather than strictly passive activity engagement, is associated with better physical and mental health as well as maintenance of social networks. As the aging population continues to increase and levels and types of activity engagement are shifting across our more diverse older adult populations, it is imperative to understand levels and types of activities older adults are participating in, as well as the psychosocial and contextual factors related to leisure activity engagement. This symposium will include presentations from studies that explore the following: (1) leisure activity interests, engagement, and constraints; and (2) determinants and/or consequences of leisure activity engagement. Specifically, Sardina and colleagues examined daily variability between affect and leisure engagement, and explored potential sociodemographic moderators for these associations. Tian and colleagues explored the association between leisure activities and modes of transportation. Tian and colleagues explored leisure activity engagement with prospective daily diary methods, and examined associations between leisure activities and physical health. Janke and colleagues explored associations between facilitators, constraints, and constraint negotiation and self-reported physical activity levels for older adults with arthritis.

Differences in expressing facial emotions are broadly observed in people with cognitive impairment. However, these differences have been difficult to objectively quantify and systematically evaluate among people with cognitive impairment across disease etiologies and severity. Therefore, a computer vision-based deep learning model for facial emotion recognition trained on 400.000 faces was utilized to analyze facial emotions expressed during a passive viewing memory test. In addition, this study was conducted on a large number of individuals (n = 493), including healthy controls and individuals with cognitive impairment due to diverse underlying etiologies and across different disease stages. Diagnoses included subjective cognitive impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) due to AD, MCI due to other etiologies, dementia due to Alzheimer’s diseases (AD), and dementia due to other etiologies (e.g., Vascular Dementia, Frontotemporal Dementia, Lewy Body Dementia, etc.). The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) was used to evaluate cognitive performance across all participants. A participant with a score of less than or equal to 24 was considered cognitively impaired (CI). Compared to cognitively unimpaired (CU) participants, CI participants expressed significantly less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher facial expressiveness during the test. In addition, classification analysis revealed that facial emotions expressed during the test allowed effective differentiation of CI from CU participants, largely independent of sex, race, age, education level, mood, and eye movements (derived from an eye-tracking-based digital biomarker for cognitive impairment). No screening methods reliably differentiated the underlying etiology of the cognitive impairment. The findings provide quantitative and comprehensive evidence that the expression of facial emotions is significantly different in people with cognitive impairment, and suggests this may be a useful tool for passive screening of cognitive impairment.

Purpose This paper aims to explore why consumers absorb ethical habits into their daily consumption, despite having little interest or understanding of the ethics they are buying into, by looking at the motivation behind mainstream ethical consumption. Design/methodology/approach Fifty in-depth field interviews at point of purchase capture actual ethical consumption behavior, tied with a progressive-laddering interview technique yields over 400 consumption units of analysis. Findings Ethical attitudes, values and rational information processing have limited veracity for mainstream ethical consumption. Habit and constrained choice, as well as self-gratification, peer influence and an interpretivist understanding of what ethics are being purchased provide the primary drivers for consumption. Research limitations/implications Use of qualitative sampling and analysis limits the generalizability of this paper. However, the quantitative representation of data demonstrates the strength with which motivations were perceived to influence consumption choice. Practical implications Ethical brands which focus on explicit altruistic ethical messaging at the expense of hedonistic messaging, or ambiguous pseudo ethics-as-quality messaging, limit their appeal to mainstream consumers. Retailers, however, benefit from the halo effect of ethical brands in store. Social implications The paper highlights the importance of retailer engagement with ethical products as a precursor to normalizing ethical consumption, and the importance of normative messaging in changing habits. Originality/value The paper provides original robust critique of the current field of ethical consumption and an insight into new theoretical themes of urgent general interest to the field.

Purpose This study contributes to current efforts to design and implement sustainable innovation strategies in organisations from the textile industry. This study aims to examine how businesses can overcome the current challenges (e.g. lack of resources) of sustainable innovation by the incorporation of green knowledge of customers into their value co-creation strategies. Such strategies are based on actively listening to customers and addressing their expectations with regard to environmental sustainability, in particular in the face of the negative environmental impact of the fast-fashion industry. Design/methodology/approach The findings of this study are derived from the analysis of data collected from 208 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Spanish textile sector. A partial least squares structural equation modeling analysis was conducted using version 3.3.3 of the SmartPLS software. Findings This paper contributes to the literature on environmental sustainability by informing SME eco-innovation through the active listening of their customers’ perceptions while implementing value co-creation strategies. The research has found that engaging with customers and actively listening and addressing their expectations can result in the creation of green knowledge that contributes to both incremental and radical eco-innovation in the textile sector. Practical implications This study found that when organisations from the sector lack eco-innovation capabilities, their existing and often their potential customer base is able to acquire new environmental knowledge and transfer it to the business through a process of value co-creation. The research also found that such green knowledge has the potential to lead to eco-innovation in the sector. In other words, the value co-creation process between the textile industry and its customers is a driver of the eco-innovations required to reduce the environmental impact of the sector, helping it address both its sustainability and its ethical challenges. Originality/value This study proposes that co-creation challenges such as the lack of resources, funding, qualified staff or technologies motivate companies in the textile sector to collaborate with their customers to seek joint solutions.

How could we explain the mechanism driving the effects of Urban Green Space (UGS) on human health? This mechanism is a complex one suggesting, on one hand, an indirect effect of UGS Provision (measured as quantity, quality or accessibility of UGS) on health through UGS Exposure (measured as visit frequency to UGS, duration of visit or intensity of activities taking place during the visit). On the other hand, UGS Provision may have an indirect effect on Exposure, mediated by people's perception of UGS. The mechanism further suggests that UGS Exposure may influence indirectly human Health but mediated by human motivation to use UGS. We tested these different expectations by fitting 12 alternative structural equation models (SEMs) corresponding to four different scenarios, depending on how UGS Provision was approximated. We show that SEMs where i) Provision is approximated as UGS quantity, and Exposure as duration (SEM.sub.i ), ii) Provision is approximated as quantity, and Exposure as intensity (SEM.sub.ii) and iii) Provision is approximated as distance of the closest UGS from people's house, and Exposure as intensity (SEM.sub.iii) are equally the best of all 12 SEMs tested. However, apart from the SEM.sub.i that has no significant path, SEM.sub.ii and SEM.sub.iii have the same significant path (motivation ~ intensity; [beta] = 7.86±2.03, p = 0.0002), suggesting that visits to UGS may be motivated by opportunities of physical activities offered by UGS. In all our scenarios, the best SEM is always the one where Exposure is measured as intensity, irrespective of how Provision is approximated. This suggests that it is not only UGS provision that matters the most in the mechanism linking UGS to human health improvement, but rather intensity, i.e. the type of activities people engage in when they visit UGSs. Overall, our findings support the theoretical model tested in this study.

This study emphasises the critical role of quality sleep in physical and mental well-being, exploring its impact on bodily recovery and cognitive function. Investigating poor sleep quality in approximately 40% of individuals with insomnia symptoms, the research delves into its potential diagnostic relevance for depression and anxiety, with a focus on intervention in mental health by understanding sleep patterns, especially in young individuals. This study includes an exploration of phone usage habits among young adults during PPI sessions, providing insights for developing the SleepTracker app. This pivotal tool utilises phone usage and movement data from mobile device sensors to identify indicators of anxiety or depression, with participant information organised comprehensively in a table categorising condition related to phone usage and movement data. The analysis compares this data with survey results, incorporating scores from the Sleep Condition Indicator (SCI), Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), and Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7). Generated confusion matrices offer a detailed overview of the relationship between sleep metrics, phone usage, and movement data. In summary, this study reveals the accurate detection of negative sleep disruption instances by the classifier. However, improvements are needed in identifying positive instances, reflected in the F1-score of 0.5 and a precision result of 0.33. While early intervention potential is significant, this study emphasises the need for a larger participant pool to enhance the model’s performance.