Search Results (1,556)

Although Least Squares Support Vector Regression (LSSVR) reduces the hyperparameter space to two, it sacrifices sparsity, causing all training samples to become support vectors and increasing storage costs. In contrast, standard Support Vector Regression (SVR) preserves sparsity but requires tuning three highly coupled hyperparameters, leading to higher computational burden. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a sparse ${\mathcal{L}}_{\infty }$-norm regularized least squares SVR framework that incorporates the infinity norm of approximation errors into both the objective function and inequality constraints. The resulting optimization problem minimizes model complexity while controlling the maximum prediction deviation through a single slack variable, thereby transforming the conventional three-hyperparameter SVR tuning task into a two-parameter problem involving only the regularization coefficient and kernel width. This formulation restores sparsity by enabling a compact support vector set, while preserving the stability and convexity advantages of LSSVR. Experiments on both static and dynamic datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves higher predictive accuracy and improved robustness compared with standard SVR and LSSVR. These results indicate that the proposed ${\mathcal{L}}_{\infty }$-norm regularized framework offers a mathematically principled and computationally efficient alternative for sparse, robust, and scalable regression modeling. Full article

This paper examines the relationship between the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles through a focused case study: the depiction of the altar(s) in Solomon’s temple. While scholarly models vary—some positing a shared source, others viewing Chronicles as a revision of Kings—this analysis supports the view, associated with Wellhausen, that Chronicles reinterprets the Deuteronomistic History in line with the Pentateuch, particularly its Priestly layer. In Kings, Solomon’s two altars function within a hierarchical system that distinguishes between the royal and communal spheres. Chronicles, by contrast, aligns the temple’s cultic architecture with the Tabernacle model, presenting a single sacrificial altar alongside a golden altar with a different function. The Chronicler’s account reveals its secondary nature through both expansion and abbreviation of the Kings narrative, shaped by a theological agenda to harmonize Israel’s cultic past with the normative framework of priestly law. Full article

Background: This integrative review investigates how behavioural and psychological factors shape non-market environmental valuation within the scope of sustainable development. Unlike traditional technical-economic approaches, the novelty of this work lies in reframing socio-cultural drivers of pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) within macro sustainability paradigms and proposing a socially and ethically grounded framework. The review has three objectives: (i) to incorporate psychological and socio-cultural dimensions into the sustainable development agenda; (ii) to demonstrate how values, norms, and perceptions drive PEBs; and (iii) to call for an ethical consensus across socio-economic and environmental sustainability. Methods: The review follows PRISMA 2020 guidelines and synthesises English-language empirical and conceptual studies (2010–2025) from Scopus and Web of Science, supplemented by Google Scholar. The literature search was conducted in December 2025, and rigorous screening and exclusion criteria were applied to ensure methodological reliability. Results: The review includes 69 interdisciplinary studies and 2 reports. The synthesis yields a framework on ethics that integrates psychological, behavioural, and economic perspectives in non-market environmental valuation and informs the weak vs. strong sustainability debate. Discussion: The findings connect sustainability debates to socio-cultural theories to explain how values, norms, and perceptions shape PEBs and valuation-relevant preferences. The review is limited by its integrative (non-meta-analytic) design, which relies on qualitative synthesis and expert judgement across heterogeneous theoretical and empirical traditions; therefore, a formal risk-of-bias assessment was not conducted. The review protocol was registered on OSF (registration ID W9Y8T). Full article

In this paper, we investigate a class of nonlinear fractional boundary value problems involving the Caputo fractional derivative under two-point boundary conditions. By combining the Green function of the associated linear problem with a generalized Gronwall inequality, we derive pointwise estimates for solutions expressed explicitly in terms of the Mittag–Leffler function. In contrast to existing Lyapunov-type inequalities, which are mainly restricted to linear equations and rely on global supremum norm estimates, our approach preserves the nonlinear structure of the problem and captures the local behavior of solutions. These pointwise estimates lead to a Lyapunov-type inequality for nonlinear fractional equations, extending the classical result of Jleli and Samet beyond the linear framework. Moreover, we show that the obtained Lyapunov condition serves not only as a necessary condition for the existence of nontrivial solutions, but also as a sufficient criterion ensuring Hyers–Ulam stability and uniqueness. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the theoretical results. Full article

Under strict ecological protection regimes, identifying development pathways that can be integrated into forest governance without undermining conservation boundaries remains a critical challenge. This study adopts a qualitative case-study approach to examine how forest birdwatching is governed as a form of low-disturbance forest use in Mingxi County, China. Based on semi-structured interviews, field observations, and governance-related materials, the analysis examines governance mechanisms and interaction processes shaping everyday regulatory practices. The findings indicate that forest birdwatching does not function as low-disturbance use by virtue of its activity type alone, but through its progressive embedding within routine forest governance under rigid institutional constraints. Institutional enforcement, spatial zoning, community-based benefit coordination, and media-supported normative regulation interact to stabilize behavioral boundaries, manage participation, and mitigate disturbance risks. The governance significance of forest birdwatching lies not in its direct replicability across regions, but in its value as an analytical reference for understanding how governance elements may be conditionally configured under specific institutional, organizational, and spatial contexts. By clarifying the minimum enabling conditions under which low-disturbance forest use can contribute to collaborative governance outcomes, this study provides a context-sensitive analytical framework for forest governance in ecologically valuable but development-constrained regions. Full article

Background: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is associated with slower response speed, yet conventional severity classification based on the apnea–hypopnea index (AHI) shows limited ability to predict cognitive outcomes. The AHI aggregates distinct pathophysiological processes, including intermittent hypoxemia and sleep fragmentation. Within emerging precision sleep medicine frameworks, disentangling these mechanisms is critical for improved phenotyping and personalized risk assessment. This study aimed to replicate prior findings using a Go/No-Go Continuous Visual Attention Test (CVAT) and to identify the most informative polysomnographic predictor of attentional performance in OSA. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, participants underwent full-night type I polysomnography and the CVAT. After exclusions, 84 patients with OSA and 22 polysomnographically normal controls were analyzed. The sample sizes for mean differences and correlational analyses were adequate. Attentional performance was indexed by standardized reaction time (RT), referenced to a normative database (n = 1244). Within the OSA group, linear regression with backward elimination evaluated hypoxemia and sleep fragmentation metrics. Results: Patients with OSA demonstrated significantly slower RTs than controls (p = 0.005). Within OSA, the AHI was not associated with attentional performance (p = 0.398). In the final regression model, sleep stage shifts—reflecting sleep–wake instability—emerged as the sole independent predictor of attentional slowing (β = 0.27, p = 0.013), whereas all hypoxemia indices were excluded. Conclusions: Sleep stage instability represents a cognitive vulnerability marker in OSA, independent of respiratory events. Integrating fragmentation metrics into precision sleep medicine models may enhance individualized phenotyping, identify patients at higher neurocognitive risk, and inform targeted interventions focused on stabilizing sleep architecture rather than relying solely on the AHI. Full article

At the critical juncture where Chinese cities are transitioning toward intensive urban renewal and sustainable development, the revitalization and adaptive reuse of industrial heritage face a collective action dilemma stemming from the misaligned interests among three key stakeholders: the Local Government (LG), the Industrial Heritage Developer (IHD), and the Neighboring Complementary Merchants (NCMs). To address this challenge, this study constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model and innovatively proposes an analytical framework of a Multi-Dimensional Policy Lever System, which integrates spatial synergy (k, w, v), economic incentives (p₁, p₂, q), and behavioral regulation (m, n). Numerical simulations reveal that the successful regeneration of industrial heritage does not rely on any single policy but fundamentally depends on the systematic coordination and dynamic adaptation of these three-dimensional levers. The nonlinear coupling of spatial elements forms the foundation for value leapfrogging. The economic driving force requires a critical shift from government subsidies (p) towards a market-based value capture and recycling mechanism (q). Behavioral interventions provide the necessary cognitive and normative safeguards for cooperation. The research elucidates a three-phase evolutionary pattern of the system, transitioning from a stalemate to synergy, and emphasizes the need for an adaptive and sequential combination of policies. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in providing an integrative quantitative analytical framework. Its practical significance is to offer a scientific basis for decision-makers to construct a dynamic policy toolbox and promote the sustainable collaborative governance of industrial heritage. Full article

This study examines how rural Indonesian women entrepreneurs navigate the gendered structures and institutional barriers that shape their entrepreneurial experiences. Grounded in the Gender and Development (GAD) framework, the research employs a qualitative, interpretive design and draws on 22 semi-structured interviews with women entrepreneurs from diverse regions and sectors. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns of constraint, agency, and transformation within women’s narratives. Findings reveal that patriarchal norms and time poverty continue to restrict women’s visibility and resource access. Nevertheless, they exercise negotiated agency through adaptive strategies such as front-stage/back-stage role division, emotional resilience, and collective peer support. Over time, these adaptive behaviors evolve into transformative practices, such as digital market-making, gender-conscious leadership, and intergenerational empowerment, that challenge structural inequalities from within. The study refines GAD theory by conceptualizing empowerment as cyclical and context-embedded, rather than linear or absolute. Policy implications emphasize reforms linking inclusion to transformation through childcare-linked training, collateral access, digital literacy, and institutional support for women’s networks. Overall, entrepreneurship emerges as both a livelihood strategy and a transformative social practice redefining gender relations in Indonesia. Full article

This study investigates the antecedents of consumers’ willingness to pay more for sustainable (green) events, applying the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in the context of Serbia, a developing non-Western economy. Using survey data from event attendees, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was employed to identify empirically supported dimensions underlying the original TPB-related constructs. Four factors emerged: Integrated Behavioral Orientation toward Green Events, Preferences for Green Events, Subjective Norms and Perceived Behavioral Control, and Attitudes toward Green Events. Regression analyses show that Subjective Norms and Perceived Behavioral Control and Preferences for Green Events are the strongest predictors of willingness to pay more, while Integrated Behavioral Orientation has a weaker but significant effect. In contrast, Attitudes toward Green Events did not significantly influence willingness to pay, suggesting that positive attitudes alone are insufficient without supportive social norms, perceived control, or strong personal preferences. These findings also highlight the importance of social influence, perceived control, and individual preferences in shaping consumers’ financial support for green events. The study provides an empirically grounded framework for understanding willingness to pay in green event contexts beyond Western settings and offers practical guidance for organizers seeking to enhance participation and investment in sustainable practices. Full article

Engineering remains a highly gendered and racialised profession in South Africa, shaped by enduring historical inequalities and the imprint of institutionalised exclusion that structures women’s experiences of belonging and professional legitimacy. While women’s underrepresentation in STEM is well documented, there remains a limited body of qualitative, intersectional, identity-focused research examining how women engineers negotiate professional identity within everyday organisational contexts. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study draws on semi-structured interviews with nine women engineers working across diverse engineering fields in South Africa and employs inductive reflexive thematic analysis informed by an intersectional and social constructionist framework. The findings identify one overarching theme, Negotiating the Intersection of Multiple Identities, capturing how women’s professional identities are continuously negotiated within engineering cultures characterised by the continued privileging of narrow norms of competence and belonging. Identity negotiation was shaped by intersecting gendered and racialised norms, with variation linked to pressures of professional legitimacy, relational positioning, and anticipated life-course considerations. The study demonstrates that professional identity negotiation among women engineers is a relational and ongoing organisational process rather than an individual or episodic response to workplace demands, and offers analytically transferable insights for scholarship on identity, belonging, and legitimacy in masculinised and historically unequal STEM contexts. Full article

Accurate power-sector carbon emission data (PS-CED) are critical for ensuring sustainable practices in carbon trading and effective emission reductions. However, conventional centralized reporting systems are susceptible to data tampering, duplicate accounting, and inefficient manual verification, hindering the achievement of sustainability goals. Blockchain technology (BCT) provides transparency, immutability, and automated compliance, offering significant potential for improving the sustainability of PS-CED supervision. Despite this, its diffusion in the sector faces challenges such as data heterogeneity, security concerns, institutional differences, and resource limitations. This study integrates the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to develop a diffusion framework for BCT adoption in PS-CED supervision with a focus on sustainability. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the study examines both linear effects and multiple adoption configurations. The results indicate that adoption willingness mediates the effects of perceived usefulness and ease of use, while perceived regulatory norms underscore policy pressure as a crucial external driver for fostering sustainability. Configurational analysis reveals heterogeneous diffusion patterns, with high adoption performance driven by technological capability combined with regulatory enforcement, and low performance linked to weak technological engagement and structural constraints. Based on these findings, a strategic framework is proposed to support differentiated and phased BCT adoption across organizational contexts to enhance sustainability in carbon emission supervision. This paper clarifies the diffusion mechanisms and provides practical guidance for scaling blockchain-based PS-CED supervision to promote sustainability. Full article

This research examines the contemporary policy framework through which the European Union seeks to counter-disinformation, situating this agenda within the broader challenges posed by ongoing democratic backsliding. It focuses on the EU media regulatory architecture and addresses the institutional and normative capacity of candidate countries such as Serbia to achieve alignment. The applied theoretical framework conceptualizes the disinformation within the contemporary processes of democratic backsliding and the growth of autocratization. The analysis further explores the regulatory challenges that arise in the context of current autocratization processes. The study is guided by two central research questions: (1) What are the main challenges associated with defining and implementing counter-disinformation policies within the EU and Serbia? (2) How do differences in political systems shape the respective approaches to countering disinformation? The research design combines theoretical source analysis with descriptive comparative methods. The paper maps the principal obstacles that hinder Serbia’s alignment with the EU’s evolving media regulatory framework. Also, the findings highlight several contextual patterns that characterize the approaches to disinformation across EU member states and Serbia. Full article

Behavioral steering—through nudges, defaults, incentives, and informational feedback—has become a dominant approach in promoting sustainable consumption. Drawing on a selective, problem-oriented engagement with the related literature, this study notes that a substantial body of studies has reported challenges associated with such interventions, particularly with regard to durability, cross-domain spillovers, and context sensitivity. Rather than providing an exhaustive empirical synthesis, this study uses these findings diagnostically to identify underlying conceptual tensions in prevailing policy approaches. It argues that one contributing source of these limitations lies in an implicit and narrow conception of consumer agency, which frames individuals primarily as reactive decision-makers rather than as agents whose habits, dispositions, and practical judgment develop over time through participation in social practices. Integrating insights from virtue ethics and social practice theory, this study develops a normative framework that emphasizes the cultivation of stable orientations, competencies, and dispositions. It further explores how this framework can inform the design and evaluation of a series of policies and institutions, such as learning-oriented interventions, participatory programs, and practice-enabling infrastructures. By offering a normative diagnosis of problems emerging in empirical sustainability research, the study outlines promising directions for more resilient and ethically grounded sustainability governance. Full article

This study proposes a new formalized approach to the stabilization of linear transformations in artificial neural networks, based on discrete algebraic properties. In contrast to existing stability methods that rely on spectral norms, regularization techniques, or empirical heuristics, this work introduces the concept of algebraic stabilization—stability that arises from the structural properties of the matrices defining linear operators. The central object of investigation is the class of integer-valued matrices for which exponentiation to a form of the type ${\mathrm{W}}^{\mathrm{k}}=\mathrm{I}+\mathsf{\mu }\mathrm{D}$ is possible, where $\mathrm{D}\in {\mathbb{Z}}^{\mathrm{n}\times \mathrm{n}},\mathsf{\mu }\in {\mathbb{Z}}_{>1}$. A well-known problem in group algebra is considered that guarantees the existence of such an exponent under the condition that $\mathsf{\mu }$ is coprime with the determinant of $\mathrm{W}$. Within this framework, modular arithmetic, reduction modulo $\mathsf{\mu }$, and the group structure of ${\mathrm{G}\mathrm{L}}_{\mathrm{n}}\left({\mathbb{Z}}_{\mathsf{\mu }}\right)$ are employed, thereby linking the proposed method to the theory of finite groups and linear automata. The advantages of the approach are discussed, including formal control over the iterative behavior of transformations, compatibility with quantized and finitely representable networks, the possibility of embedding stabilizing conditions directly into the network architecture, and the potential to improve model interpretability and reliability. At the same time, limitations are identified, particularly those related to constructive implementation, the selection of suitable hyperparameters, and generalization to broader classes of transformations. Full article

The regulatory framework governing EU electricity markets is highly complex, fragmented across multiple normative acts and sensitive to citation accuracy and contextual completeness. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for regulatory question answering (QA), their tendency to hallucinate legal references and omit critical conditions makes them unreliable for compliance-sensitive domains. This paper presents the design of a domain-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for EU electricity market regulations, explicitly engineered to deliver source-grounded, traceable and low-hallucination answers. The answering component is based on Google’s gemini-2.5-flash model. The Open AI’s gpt-4o-mini model is responsible for both relevant document selection before building the RAG prompt and playing the judge LLM role for Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment (RAGAS) evaluation. We build a legal corpus comprising multiple core EU regulatory acts related to REMIT and market operation and propose a regulatory QA architecture that integrates: (i) three chunking strategies (article-based, structure-aware, sliding window), (ii) two embedding models and (iii) a novel LLM-based document selection agent that restricts retrieval to the most relevant normative acts before vector search, improving contextual focus and retrieval precision. Using a fixed benchmark of regulatory questions and a reproducible evaluation protocol, we quantitatively assess system performance with RAGAS metrics and classical information-retrieval measures. While all configurations achieve strong faithfulness (up to 0.96), answer relevancy varies substantially with embedding and chunking choices. The findings confirm that retrieval engineering, particularly embedding selection, chunking strategy and pre-retrieval document filtering, has a high impact for building reliable regulatory AI systems. The sliding window strategy combined with bge-small-en-v1.5 delivered the strongest rank-sensitive retrieval performance, achieving the highest Precision@10 and NDCG@10. In contrast, article-level chunking with the same model yielded a modest improvement in Recall@10, indicating a clear trade-off between recall and precision-oriented ranking quality in legal corpora. Full article