Academic literature on the topic 'Transactive attention system'

The transactive memory system (TMS) concept has been extended from dyads and groups to organizations. While organizational TMS literature helps to understand how employees locate and utilize information based on their awareness of “who knows what” and “who knows who,” conceptual development is beneficial because TMS has been extended to organizations without clear definitions and levels-of-analysis rationale. Drawing from the social psychology and network literature, this paper identifies several aspects requiring further conceptual attention, and defines organizational TMS as overlapping networks of interdependent work groups that use each other as external cognitive aids to accomplish shared tasks. Suggestions for managing and measuring organizational TMS are provided.

Human society faces increasingly complex problems that require coordinated collective action. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds the potential to bring together the knowledge and associated action needed to find solutions at scale. In order to unleash the potential of human and AI systems, we need to understand the core functions of collective intelligence. To this end, we describe a socio-cognitive architecture that conceptualizes how boundedly rational individuals coordinate their cognitive resources and diverse goals to accomplish joint action. Our transactive systems framework articulates the inter-member processes underlying the emergence of collective memory, attention, and reasoning, which are fundamental to intelligence in any system. Much like the cognitive architectures that have guided the development of artificial intelligence, our transactive systems framework holds the potential to be formalized in computational terms to deepen our understanding of collective intelligence and pinpoint roles that AI can play in enhancing it.

Purpose The dispute over the benefit of diversity on the transactive memory system (TMS) has attracted the attention with the development of global collaboration. This paper aims to discover how knowledge heterogeneity (KH), categorized as explicit and tacit KH, affects TMS and to test the mediation effect of innovation climate (IC). Design/methodology/approach Data from a 6-month field study of 207 research and development (R&D) members and 7 expertize observers were analyzed by partial least squares structure equation model. Robustness check and Barron and Kenny mediation test were used to evaluate the model and confirm the mediation effect. Findings Tacit KH of R&D team negatively influences the development of TMS. Furthermore, IC partially mediates tacit KHs’ negative influence on the development of TMS. Research limitations/implications These results distinguish the different influence of explicit and tacit KH on TMS and explore the mediating role of IC that has been confirmed affecting the development of TMS. Practical implications These results could motivate practitioners to address more attention to tacit KH, IC and the development of TMS in the R&D team members composition. Originality/value This study contributes not only to elucidate the different influence of explicit and tacit KH on TMS but also to the appropriate members composition of R&D team by considering the relationships among KH, IC, TMS and innovation performance.

Many studies focus on the effect of a source’s expertise, but little attention has been paid to what happens in the event of a misalignment between who is knowledgeable (cognitive expertise) and who is regarded as being knowledgeable (social expertise). The emphasis on expertise alignment in this study suggests the importance not of simply having a transactive memory system, but rather, of having an accurate transactive memory system in place. Using experimental data from a sample of 134 participants, the results indicate that the knowledge transfer is greater in the source’s cognitive-social expertise alignment than in the misalignment, but the source’s cognitive expertise could be a more significant criterion for the knowledge transfer in the expertise misalignment. In the view of source-recipient dynamics, knowledge transfer is greater in the low cognitive expertise gap condition than in the high cognitive expertise gap condition. The results contribute to the understanding of the role of a source’s expertise in knowledge transfer from a socio-cognitive perspective.

PurposeEnterprise social media platforms (ESMPs) are web 2.0-based computer media tools that facilitate knowledge sharing by employees. The purpose of this paper is to outline the potential of ESMPs in both enabling and hindering knowledge sharing from the perspective of affordances.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper which integrates the literature on ESMPs’ affordances and knowledge sharing.FindingsThis paper finds that prior research on affordances only considered artifacts without much attention on the role of individual goals and organizational context. ESMPs may both enable and hinder knowledge sharing by affording different user behaviors contingent on artifacts, individual goals and organizational context.Practical implicationsThe results of the paper will help managers and ESMPs designers to better understand the potential of ESMPs and pay attention to the positive and negative impacts of ESMPs in the process of knowledge sharing.Originality/valueThe paper derives a new categorization of affordances based on individual goals and organization context and portrays a model to describe how and when these affordances enable knowledge sharing through the development of transactive memory system and social capital and hinder knowledge sharing through overload, groupthink and privacy invasion.

Energy systems are transforming due to the incorporation of multiple distributed energy resources, such as renewable energy and battery storage systems. This transformation has triggered a need to shift power distribution from a low efficiency centralized model with high coordination costs to a decentralized distribution system comprising smart grids. Researchers have discovered a number of uses for blockchain technology in the energy sector because of its decentralized structure and possibility for safe transactions. In order to pinpoint current trends and important research directions in this area, this article thoroughly examines the effects of blockchain technology on smart grids and distributed energy resources. The aim of this paper is also to identify research gaps and future research initiatives in the area of blockchain-based energy distribution. To do this, 92 research publications were subjected to a comprehensive literature review based on predetermined criteria. Transactive Energy, Electric Vehicle Integration, Privacy and Security, and Demand Response, together with some other relatively fresh and unexplored topics, were, therefore, highlighted as four major focal areas of blockchain energy research. We have also drawn attention to the gaps in the research that has already been done and the constraints imposed by present systems that must be removed before blockchain technology can be widely used.

The article examines the strategic directions of the competence development of specialists in work with youth, determined by modern trends in the development of society and the state's requests for organizing activities with youth. It is shown that, since young people, as one of the most problematic and socially vulnerable groups of the population, require appropriate organization of activities aimed at the formation of their socially significant needs, trajectories of self-improvement and self-realization, the development of their creative potential in the interests of society and the state, a professional standard of a specialist in work with youth. The target guidelines of this professional standard are given, the possibilities of additional educational content for specialists in working with youth, applying for the position of adviser to the head of an educational organization for educational work and work with children's associations, are considered. The most promising areas of competence development of a specialist related to improving knowledge and skills in the field of youth policy, socio-psychological development of the modern digital generation, gamification of the educational process, project activities are indicated. In the content of additional education, an emphasis is needed on the problems of cyber socialization, the peculiarities of socialization of urbanized youth, and knowledge of young science. It is shown that for a specialist developing a strategy for educational work, modern knowledge about the neurocognitivefeatures of the digital generation is also needed, associated with such a conceptual series as web surfing, selective visual attention, clip thinking, simultaneous perception, and transactive memory. Along with the neurocognitive features of the digital generation, it has a special value-semantic perception of information and reality, which should also be taken into account in the competence development of specialists in the field of working with youth, applying for new positions in the education system.

In the energy crisis environment, V2G and G2V energy exchange is an important issue for attention. We studied the V2G and G2V energy exchange process and electric energy transaction mode. The design of an energy transaction management system for V2G and G2V is given, and the management system is developed. This system is an information system for V2G and G2V two-way mode trading platform, which include two parts: the first is the system management and basic information management module, the second is V2G and G2V transaction module. Based on transactions between electric vehicles and the grid, the system realizes the plan and arrangement for the electric automobile to charge and discharge orderly.

This work presents an application of self-attention networks for cryptocurrency trading. Cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile and unpredictable. Thus, cryptocurrency trading is challenging and involves higher risks than trading traditional financial assets such as stocks. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for cryptocurrency trading. The proposed trading system contains a self-attention network trained using an actor-critic DRL algorithm. Cryptocurrency markets contain hundreds of assets, allowing greater investment diversification, which can be accomplished if all the assets are analyzed against one another. Self-attention networks are suitable for dealing with the problem because the attention mechanism can process long sequences of data and focus on the most relevant parts of the inputs. Transaction fees are also considered in formulating the studied problem. Systems that perform trades in high frequencies cannot overlook this issue, since, after many trades, small fees can add up to significant expenses. To validate the proposed approach, a DRL environment is built using data from an important cryptocurrency market. We test our method against a state-of-the-art baseline in two different experiments. The experimental results show the proposed approach can obtain higher daily profits and has several advantages over existing methods.

Research on energy storage systems (ESS) is actively aiming to mitigate against the unreliability of renewable energy sources (RES), and ESS operation and management has become one of the most important research topics. Since installing ESS for each user requires high investment cost, a study on cloud ESS gains attention recently. Cloud ESS refers to an ESS that is logically shared by multiple users as if they have their own ESS in their premises. In this paper, we propose a new cloud ESS sharing technique that allows capacity P2P transactions among users. Since cloud ESS is a virtual facility that is linked to an actual ESS, it is easy for users to sell the unused storage capacity to other users or to buy additional capacity from other users during operation. We also propose a system that encourages users to completely entrust the cloud ESS operator and share the extra benefit with the operator and other users. To verify the proposed method, we demonstrate the benefit of capacity P2P transaction based on real year-round data of users.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

AbstractThe number of people living in rural areas of low and middle-income countries is projected to increase in the coming decades. It is in the rural areas of these countries where a large majority of the world’s extreme poor reside. The livelihoods of two to three billion rural people depend on small farms. These small farms are responsible for the production and supply of a large portion of the calories feeding low- and middle-income countries. Small farms are also preservers of crops and associated biodiversity and with the right incentives can contribute to land stewardship. Small farms are diverse, and, hence, so are their associated challenges. We categorize small farms as commercial farms, small farms in transition and subsistence-oriented farms and highlight evidence-based innovations for the sustainable transformation of each type of small farm. Broadly, small farms face high transaction costs, lack collective action, and experience coordination failure in production and marketing. Lack of market access is also a major challenge. Investments in infrastructure, including those that support access to digital technologies, can improve farmers’ access to markets and incentives as well as foster growth in the midstream segments of the value chain that provide inputs, storage, processing, and logistics to small farms. Rural Non-Farm Employment (RNFE) is increasingly the main source of income for most small farmers and provides them with a risk diversification strategy and cash, both to purchase food and for farm investments to raise productivity, expand commercial activities, and produce higher-value products. Public investments and policies that facilitate growth of the agrifood system must pay more attention to creating enabling environments for the development of RNFE and strengthening the synergy between agriculture and RNFE in rural areas.

Public procurement is an important area warranting further attention in government reform, as electronic systems for procurement have enormous potential to help reduce corruption. Public e-Procurement is the use of an Internet or Web-based system by government institutions for the acquisition of goods and services, which can improve transparency and accountability. This chapter discusses different types of e-Procurement technologies with case examples from different countries that demonstrate how the e-Procurement technologies have great potential as the anti-corruption technologies. The chapter reviews the Principal-Agent Theory and discusses other relevant theories including Transaction Cost Theory, Fraud Triangle Theory, Diffusion of Innovation Theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model. Following a discussion of the potential of e-Procurement systems in mitigating corruption, a theoretical research model is proposed for identifying public e-Procurement anti-corruption capabilities.

Public procurement is an important area warranting further attention in government reform, as electronic systems for procurement have enormous potential to help reduce corruption. Public e-Procurement is the use of an Internet or Web-based system by government institutions for the acquisition of goods and services, which can improve transparency and accountability. This chapter discusses different types of e-Procurement technologies with case examples from different countries that demonstrate how the e-Procurement technologies have great potential as the anti-corruption technologies. The chapter reviews the Principal-Agent Theory and discusses other relevant theories including Transaction Cost Theory, Fraud Triangle Theory, Diffusion of Innovation Theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model. Following a discussion of the potential of e-Procurement systems in mitigating corruption, a theoretical research model is proposed for identifying public e-Procurement anti-corruption capabilities.

Along with the exponential increase in online business transactions, the online payment system has gained in popularity because vendors and creditors realize its growing importance as a foundation to improve their information infrastructure and to achieve “paperless” operating efficiency.However, due to per se different characteristics among customers and Web-systems, both sides’ perspectives and technology factors could cause a significant level of variation in customers’ acceptance of online payment methods. Our research involving 148 subjects who participated in a field survey, examined the impact of a series of possible decision factors, including perceived risk, perceived benefits, vendor’s system features, and customers’ characteristics, on the intention to use an online payment system by customers. The results suggest that vendors/creditors should:one, pay particular attention to improving the security and the ease-of-use of their transaction network; and two, focus on adding necessary option features, such as recurring automatic deductions, so that they can speed up the transformation process and encourage customers to switch to using online payment methods.

Electronic banking (E-banking) systems provide a promising solution for breaking geographical, industrial, and regulatory barriers. Improved technology could help with creating anytime, anywhere services and new market opportunities, but does not necessarily ensure a risk-free transaction environment. A main aim for E-banking adopters is to include E-banking risk management to their overall risk management strategy. They must identify the tools and techniques available for managing such risk. In this chapter we provide an overview of E-banking and identify the various risks which exist within the system. The chapter focuses on analyzing state-of-the-art risk management tools and techniques, paying attention to models for internally managing E-banking operational risk. It discusses several soft computing techniques applied to E-banking operational risk as causal modeling tools. The tools include: Decision Trees, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Fuzzy Inference Systems, and Bayesian Networks. Some examples are presented to describe the models developed.

This chapter presents a discussion on the economic governance aspect of sustainability in the context of energy policy and access. It is believed that incentives are sufficient for emergence of competitive energy markets which augment energy access. However, recent developments in Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) have shown that this need not be true when costs arising out of incomplete contracting are high. Yet, the role of transaction costs and the need to identify and model their behavior has not received adequate attention. This chapter reviews the basic tenets of TCE around natural monopoly sectors. It then illustrates in greater micro-analytic detail how transaction costs can be identified and empirically modeled in the context of industrial self-generation of electricity. The conclusion is that in the analysis of production systems, sustainability arguments are not complete unless costs arising out of inefficient contracting are accounted and an adequate economic governance apparatus is set-up.

Blockchain, the technology behind most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin and Ethereum, has attracted wide attention recently. It is the most emerging technology that has changed the financial and non-financial transaction system. It is omnipresent. Currently, this technology is enforcing banks, industries, and countries to adopt it in their financial, industrial, and government section. Earlier, it solved the centralize and double-spending problems successfully. In this chapter, the authors present a study of blockchain security issues and its challenges as well. They divided the whole chapter into two parts. The primer part covers a holistic overview of blockchain followed by the later section that argues about basic operations, 51% attack, scalability issue, Fork, Sharding, Lightening, etc. Finally, they mention an intro about its adaptation (financial or non-financial) in our 24/7 life and collaboration with fields like IoT.

Blockchain, the technology behind most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin and Ethereum, has attracted wide attention recently. It is the most emerging technology that has changed the financial and non-financial transaction system. It is omnipresent. Currently, this technology is enforcing banks, industries, and countries to adopt it in their financial, industrial, and government section. Earlier, it solved the centralize and double-spending problems successfully. In this chapter, the authors present a study of blockchain security issues and its challenges as well. They divided the whole chapter into two parts. The primer part covers a holistic overview of blockchain followed by the later section that argues about basic operations, 51% attack, scalability issue, Fork, Sharding, Lightening, etc. Finally, they mention an intro about its adaptation (financial or non-financial) in our 24/7 life and collaboration with fields like IoT.

Cultural values provide a way of understanding consumers’ acceptance or rejection of the way business is conducted, given their culturally-attuned preferences, choices and tastes. Culture has also been shown to affect almost all aspects of business, including transactions between seller and buyer, from how the seller attracts the customer’s attention to the way they negotiate a deal to the moment the transaction is completed. The notion that globalization results in a “universal taste” is no longer an effective promotional element for enticing international customers. Instead, marketers need to customize their products, services and systems to suit the customer’s specific needs. This chapter is to explore two questions: In what ways does culture impact e-commerce and what are the culturally-rooted challenges of conducting e-commerce in the MENA region? The chapter concludes with a set of propositions based on the argument that culture does influence the adoption of e-commerce for MENA consumers.

Blockchain is one of the technologies that is gaining significant attention within the healthcare industry. In order for blockchain to reach its full potential, it's essential that governments and public institutions map the blockchain ecosystem and establish a blockchain framework for coordinating early adopters. The authors have proposed a web-based application using blockchain with security algorithms to store patients' and other users' details who sign up on the website. Blockchain is highly secure as any tampering with data in any block is not possible. Blockchain attributes ensure smooth interaction between different applications and systems along the availability chain. They also reward the patient with their own implemented bitcoin on their transaction. Ethereum library Web3 is used to make a complete decentralized peer-to-peer chat service without any involvement of a third party. The application will be able to send encrypted messages both securely and anonymously. Blockchain technology has been seeing widespread interest as a means to ensure the CIA triad in fewer environments.

With the explosive growth of transaction activities in online payment systems, effective and real-time regulation becomes a critical problem for payment service providers. Thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), AI-enable regulation emerges as a promising solution. One main challenge of the AI-enabled regulation is how to utilize multimedia information, i.e., multimodal signals, in Financial Technology (FinTech). Inspired by the attention mechanism in nature language processing, we propose a novel cross-modal and intra-modal attention network (CIAN) to investigate the relation between the text and transaction. More specifically, we integrate the text and transaction information to enhance the text-trade joint-embedding learning, which clusters positive pairs and push negative pairs away from each other. Another challenge of intelligent regulation is the interpretability of complicated machine learning models. To sustain the requirements of financial regulation, we design a CIAN-Explainer to interpret how the attention mechanism interacts the original features, which is formulated as a low-rank matrix approximation problem. With the real datasets from the largest online payment system, WeChat Pay of Tencent, we conduct experiments to validate the practical application value of CIAN, where our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have drawn wide attention from nuclear power industry for digital instrument and control applications (DI&C), because it’s much easier and simpler than microprocessor-based applications, which makes it more reliable. FPGAs can also enhance safety margins of the plant with potential possibility for power upgrading at normal operation. For these reasons, more and more nuclear power corporations and research institutes are treating FPGA-based protection system as a technical alternative. As nuclear power industry requires high reliability and safety for DI&C Systems, the development method and process should be fully verified and validated. For this reason, to improve the application of FPGA in NPP I&C system, the specific test methods are critical for the developers and regulators. However, current international standards and research reports, like IEC 62566 and NUREG/CR-7006, which have demonstrated the life circle of the development of FPGA-based safety critical DI&C in NPPs, but the specific test requirements and methods which are significant to the developers are not provided. In this paper, the whole test process of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) protection sub-system (Primary Coolant Flow Low Protection, Over Temperature Delta T Protection, Over Power Delta T Protection) is described, including detail component and integration tests. The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) based on System Verilog class libraries is applied to establish the verification test platform. All these tests are conducted in a simulation environment. The test process is driven by the test coverage which includes code coverages (i.e., Statement, Branch, Condition and Expression, Toggle, Finite State Machine) and function coverage. Specifically, Register Transaction Level (RTL) simulation is conducted for Component tests, while RTL simulation, Gate Level simulation, Timing simulation and Static timing analysis are conducted for the integration test. The issues (e.g., the floating point calculation, FPGA resource allocation and optimization) arose in the test process are also analyzed and discussed, which can be references for the developers in this area. The component and integration tests are part of the Verification and Validation (V&V) work, which should be done by the V&V team separated from the development team. The testing method could assure the test results reliable and authentic. It is practical and useful for the development and V&V of FPGA-based safety DI&C systems.

The digital twin technology platform has not yet achieved the expected acceptance and wider implementation in the maritime industry. So far, most of the focus of the digital twin application discussions have centred around what to learn from big data in ship operation, and to a lesser extent, has anybody extended this discussion to include the benefits such new technology can contribute to the enhancement of the upstream ship concept and basic design activities, as well as detailed engineering. This paper particularly pays attention to this latter, partly forgotten, application area. There could be many reasons behind such a reluctance to take on new technology and utilize it to its full potential. It is hypothesized and argued by this article that the development has focused on applications that are too complex, too expensive and reflect, to a little extent, real-life needs. Lack of effective data transfer and transaction interphases among relevant stakeholders is another important factor creating these inefficiencies. This paper document how and why such inefficiencies in novel digitization technology adoption and adaptation exist and hamper the progress of achieving noticeable benefits of such implementations and how such development hurdles can be eliminated. Real-life user cases and several contributions in the professional literature suggest that more effective implementation of digital twin technology requires further discussions and investigations relating to three important aspects: i) a common and accepted definition of what is a digital twin; ii) an agreed-upon scalable and systemic approach to what is the solution space for a digital twin solution and iii) which systemic method to be used for digital twin development. Digital-twin technology must combine effective ship in operation and ship design feedback and feed forwarding, including their inherent people involvement and market behaviour. This article reviews the status of digital twin technology in the maritime domain and proposes a common definition of the digital twin. The latter part of the article proposes a systemic perspective for effective digital twin development and a method for a goal-oriented digital twin development in the novel ship design domain as well for ships in operations. Real-life user-case examples are elaborated upon to support our suggestions for improvement. The paper summarizes that, in its current form, the success rate of the digital twin technology implementation is so far, limited. Thus, the short- and long-term benefits to be achieved from digital twin applications in relation to vessel operations and their designs are also limited. This paper advises ways for improvement of the present situation.