Search Results (8,473)

The coupling coordination of urbanization and urban resilience is a key issue for achieving sustainable urban development. Taking 49 prefecture-level and above cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) —China’s three major coastal urban agglomerations—as research objects, this paper constructs an evaluation index system for urbanization and urban resilience, and employs the CRITIC–entropy weight composite method, the coupling coordination degree model and kernel density estimation to measure the evolutionary characteristics of coupling coordination between urbanization and urban resilience in the three agglomerations during 2013–2023, and further identifies the key influencing factors using a panel fixed-effects model. The results show that (1) the coupling coordination degree of the three urban agglomerations increased continuously, with the PRD taking the lead in 2023 (0.6650), the YRD ranking second (0.6315) and the BTH ranking third (0.5627); however, their coupling coordination paths diverged markedly, specifically manifesting as a catch-up convergence pattern in the BTH, a balanced advancement pattern in the YRD and a polarization-divergence pattern in the PRD. (2) Opening-up and digital economy development are robust positive drivers of the coupling coordination level, and their positive effects are largely universal across regions; urban population agglomeration and government intervention constitute significant negative constraints, among which the inhibitory effect of government intervention exhibits genuine regional heterogeneity, being most prominent in the YRD, followed by the PRD, while failing the significance test in the BTH; technological innovation fails to pass the significance test; the full-sample effect of spatial structure is insignificant, but its influence exhibits significant regional heterogeneity, with a significantly positive association in the PRD. This study systematically reveals the regional differentiation rules governing the synergistic evolution of urbanization and resilience in the three urban agglomerations, providing empirical support for differentiated policies to promote the deep integrated development of urbanization and urban resilience. Full article

This paper presents a systematic reward engineering methodology for training a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) quadrotor navigation policy in the Webots simulator, using a hierarchical architecture in which a PID controller handles low-level stabilization and a PPO policy issues velocity commands. We document the complete evolution of a composite ten-term reward function across seven versions (v5 through v11) and retrain the key versions with multiple independent training seeds. The multi-seed study revises the single-seed history: penalty-dominated configurations (v8, v10) fail across all seeds, while the strongest historical version proves seed-sensitive (v11: 32.2 +/− 15.8%). An ablation removing the continuous distance-shaping term from v11 yields 0% success across seven seeds, identifying that term as necessary for convergence. We further isolate a previously hidden co-factor: with the library-default exploration-noise initialization (sigma_0 = 1.0), sampled actions saturate the bounded action space, the exploration variance receives no learning gradient, and curriculum progression deadlocks regardless of reward design; initializing sigma_0 = 0.37 restores gradient flow. With this correction and a deterministic evaluation-gated curriculum, the final configuration is evaluated across the full curriculum rather than at a single operating point: across five independent training seeds under a deterministic protocol, it attains 95.0% ± 6.2% navigation success at Stage 0 conditions (2 m targets, no obstacles), 89.6% ± 6.9% at Stage 1 conditions (4 m, one obstacle), and 48.4% ± 10.8% at Stage 2 conditions (7 m, three obstacles). Reporting this difficulty curve, rather than a single headline value, exposes a substantial generalization gap whose dominant failure mode is obstacle collision (45–52% of episodes at Stage 2). Matched retraining of Soft Actor-Critic and TD3 baselines under identical reward and curriculum conditions yields one completed seed each both baselines show non-monotonic difficulty curves, and at Stage 2 conditions, TD3 (64.0%) exceeds PPO (48.4% ± 10.8%) while SAC (43.0%) falls just below it, whereas at Stage 0, PPO (95.0%) leads both, so the ranking is operating point-dependent on the current single-seed evidence. We conclude that a continuous shaping gradient and the exploration-noise initialization, interacting with the curriculum advancement criterion, determine convergence in continuous control deep reinforcement learning, and that reward polarity by itself does not. Full article

The analysis investigates how governance, policymaking, and democracy connect within the framework of sustainable development (as a manifestation of sustainability). It argues that sustainable development should be treated as a core standard for evaluating quality of democracy, alongside freedom, equality, and control, by this expanding democracy into a four-dimensional (Quadruple) model. A key issue is balancing sustainability with existing democratic principles and managing trade-offs. Using data from 2002 to 2016, a relatively stable period in world development, the model shows how democracy and its quality can be assessed globally. Because it offers practical guidance for governance, policy, and strategy, the model is considered transdisciplinary, described as a form of “New IT” (Interdisciplinary Transdisciplinarity). Full article

Digital technologies seem to contribute to health promotion and disease prevention, allowing older people to benefit from targeted health interventions supported by digital resources. The current study aimed to develop a substantive theory focusing on the experiences of older people who use smartphone technology daily and its repercussions on healthy aging. This qualitative study employed Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory approach. Purposeful and theoretical sampling was used to recruit 37 older Brazilian people from a community extension project that integrates nurses who offer personalized guidance and support using smartphone devices. Individual phone-call interviews and reflective journals were conducted between August 2022 and March 2023. Four interrelated theoretical categories emerged: (1) technological progress during the aging process; (2) technological learning using smartphones and participation in virtual groups; (3) expanding social and personal development through smartphone communication; and (4) virtual groups for older people on healthy aging. The core category “Experiencing guided smartphone use as a resource for healthy aging” portrays the individual, social and cultural aspects involved in the habits and attitudes that older people develop to promote independence and quality of life. This study offers valuable insights into the daily use of smartphones by older people, and its repercussions on individual and social issues that bring people and places closer together, expand the social network, and modify communication patterns. The findings indicate that older adults undergo changes and adaptations in their daily lives and in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, and that using digital applications such as smartphones contradicts the stereotype of fragility or limited understanding associated with aging. The findings can also help with the implementation of policies and practices aligned with a more person-centred care approach. Full article

Background/Objectives: Dental graduates make clinical decisions shaped by ethical principles, legal obligations, patient expectations, and private-practice economics. This study synthesized empirical findings from Romanian healthcare education and practice and proposes an exploratory model for teaching ethical decision-making in entrepreneurial dentistry. Methods: Exploratory conceptual framework development informed by four previously published Romanian healthcare studies examining business-ethics attitudes using the Attitudes Toward Business Ethics Questionnaire (ATBEQ), moral reasoning using an adapted Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2; 242 valid cases), scenario-based ethical decision-making (n = 244), and ethical reasoning profiles derived from the joint administration of the ATBEQ and 35-item scenario questionnaire (n = 277). Results: “It depends” accounted for 47.8% of scenario responses. Students and practitioners differed regarding vaccination of healthcare workers, risk-based insurance contributions, and organ-market policy (chi-square, df = 2, uncorrected). Practitioners endorsed law-oriented arguments more strongly but weighted patient autonomy more heavily at end of life. Idealism/Legalism showed an isolated exploratory association with fewer conditional responses (B = −0.69, 95% CI −1.28 to −0.11, p = 0.021); however, the overall regression model was not statistically significant and had low explanatory power (R² = 0.04, adjusted R² = 0.02, p = 0.08). Four ethical reasoning profiles were identified. Conclusions: The G.D.C. framework is a theory-informed, hypothesis-generating educational framework derived from mixed Romanian healthcare samples. It has not been validated specifically in entrepreneurial dentistry and requires prospective, dental-specific validation. Full article

Background: Children with Down syndrome often have co-occurring physical conditions affecting well-being, and respiratory issues remain a leading cause of hospitalization and death among people with Down syndrome. Parents of children with Down syndrome experience stressors associated with respiratory illness and challenges navigating healthcare access. No prior qualitative study has examined parental perspectives on respiratory health specifically among children with Down syndrome. Identifying parental concerns can help in the development of strategies to mitigate respiratory ailments in children with Down syndrome. Methods: One-hour, semi-structured interviews were conducted among 24 families of children with Down syndrome to understand respiratory concerns. Findings were identified through codebook thematic analysis. Results: The themes identified included persistent concerns about respiratory health, repeated impact from acute and chronic respiratory issues, a rapid and unexpected decline in health during respiratory illness, insurance coverage concerns, and a lack of confidence in assessing air quality which could impact respiratory health. Conclusions: Insights gained from interviews of parents of children with Down syndrome can help policy makers identify opportunities to prevent and mitigate respiratory health problems. Findings underscore the importance of clinician responsiveness to parental concern about rapid deterioration and suggest that insurance coverage policies for this high-risk population warrant further research and policy consideration. Full article

For historical reasons, the Kingdom of Hungary was one of the most confessionally diverse states in Europe. The rapid spread of the Reformation, the exceptional religious pluralism of the Principality of Transylvania, and the Habsburg-era repopulation of territories reconquered from the Ottoman Empire produced a durable multi-confessional society in which different denominations often lived side by side within the same communities. Against this background, the religious affiliation of children born into mixed marriages became one of the most contentious church–state issues in nineteenth-century Hungary. Although Act LIII of 1868 sought to regulate the matter by assigning children to their parents’ denominations according to sex, many Catholic priests continued to follow canon law, requiring reversales or baptizing children contrary to the provisions of civil law. These practices—known in Hungarian public discourse as “re-baptisms” (elkeresztelés)—generated prolonged political, legal, and theological disputes involving the Catholic hierarchy, Protestant churches, the Hungarian government, and the Holy See. This article examines the historical origins of the controversy, the theological foundations of the Catholic position, the development of the reversalis system, and the political conflicts that culminated in the Hungarian Kulturkampf of the 1890s. It argues that the dispute was not merely a denominational conflict but a manifestation of the broader process of secularization, understood here primarily as the renegotiation of the respective competences of church and state in a modern constitutional order. Particular attention is devoted to the resolution of the controversy through the ecclesiastical policy legislation of 1894–1895, which introduced compulsory civil marriage and state civil registration, thereby removing the civil legal consequences of “re-baptisms” while leaving the Catholic Church’s internal doctrinal position fundamentally unchanged. Full article

The news media in Gulf countries are among the most important institutions shaping the public’s understanding of climate action. This study aims to explore the longitudinal developments, thematic framing, and sentiment tones of Omani English-language newspapers’ sustainability discourse during the period 2015–2025. The study applied a multi-stage computational method to analyze a deduplicated corpus of 709 news articles from two English-language dailies of Oman: Times of Oman and Oman Daily Observer for a time period from 2015 to 2025. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was used to group topics into five types of macro frames. Results show that the focus of the Omani media is very localized, and the dominant frames are “Corporate ESG, Business & Green Investment” and “Clean Energy Policy, Research & Institutional Governance”. Furthermore, a sentiment analysis of headlines using VADER showed clearly defined sentiment polarity; domestic economic transition headlines were characterized by high positive polarity, while global climate crisis headlines had a higher negative polarity. The study concludes that the press in Oman is in a strategic process of “nationalizing” the climate change issue, moving from the conventional disaster discourse to making sustainability a local opportunity for economic diversification, technological modernization, and national resilience. Full article

This article reviews CFO gender as a role-specific executive diversity issue and addresses the fragmented literature in which gender effects are often interpreted without separating appointment selection from the authority and organizational context of the CFO position. Using a hybrid design, we combine bibliometric analysis with a systematic literature review. A Web of Science title-and-abstract search reported through PRISMA 2020 and manual eligibility assessment identifies 68 peer-reviewed journal papers published from 2010 through 2026 across 46 outlets. The bibliometric stage maps publication growth, outlet distribution, recurring vocabulary, a ten-topic Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model, and term co-occurrence. The evidence shows a recent and dispersed field: more than four-fifths of the sample appear from 2019 onward, and the papers span governance, management, finance, accounting, ethics, and sustainability journals. The systematic stage compares evidence on the internal and external determinants and consequences associated with CFO gender across financial policy, earnings management, executive governance, capital markets, compensation and labor-market signals, and adjacent business fields. The findings do not support a universal gender effect. Observed associations depend on CFO authority, CEO power, board composition, incentives, task domain, institutional setting, and research design. Relative to broad reviews of executive characteristics, this article provides a current CFO gender-specific cross-outcome synthesis. The review concludes by identifying selection and endogeneity, direct measurement of CFO influence, review scope limitations, and underdeveloped applications as future directions, and developing implications for boards, executive recruitment, governance practice, professional development, and policy. Full article

Climate change presents serious challenges, especially in dry and semi-dry areas, and these challenges are most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, where people are dependent on rain-fed agriculture. To address this issue, a new type of reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism that can be used to simulate and optimize climate adaptation policies in Kitui County, Kenya, was developed. In this study, combined geospatial data encompassing several variables, such as precipitation, the health of vegetation, population, and economic indicators, were used to create a custom reinforcement learning environment. A Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent was developed to distribute restricted financial resources amongst nine climate adaptation policies over a 25-year simulation period. The findings clearly show that the artificial intelligence agent targeted the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem. In connection to this, it made the choice of agroforestry in 76.0% of its decision cycles, and at the same time, it tactically bypassed high-capital, high-latency infrastructure such as dams and opted for distributed adaptive measures. This framework provides a powerful tool to support policymakers in a data-driven manner to analyze the interdependence of urgent aid and sustainable development. The study demonstrates the possibilities of using AI-powered decision support systems in the field of climate policy planning for the areas most affected by climate change. Full article

This article examines whether treaty-based and cooperation-oriented institutions can perform complementary functions in Indo-Pacific economic governance. It compares the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), while treating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and other regional mechanisms as contextual alternatives. Drawing on a structured 53-document corpus of legal, policy, institutional, scholarly, and project-level materials, the study maps overlapping participation and agreement-specific legal status, then analyses labour and supply-chain governance in Malaysia and Vietnam and an attribution boundary case on clean-energy cooperation in Indonesia. It develops selective complementarity as an issue-specific evaluative framework distinguishing thematic overlap, functional differentiation, prospective compatibility, operational interaction, and institutionalised interaction. The findings show functional differentiation and prospective compatibility in Malaysia and Vietnam, but no cross-framework linkage, transmission, uptake, or additional implementation value was documented within the defined corpus and period. Indonesia demonstrates that policy alignment does not convert bilateral, development-finance, or adjacent regional initiatives into IPEF activities. Japan is best understood as a cross-case facilitating actor because the evidence does not establish a stable bridging mechanism between the two frameworks. By setting clear evidentiary thresholds and identifying evidence that would count against complementarity, the study contributes to research on regime complexity, institutional interaction, and sustainability-oriented regionalism. Full article

To address the increasing volume of end-of-life power batteries, governments leverage Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations to encourage battery suppliers to increase recycling. We develop a Stackelberg game model for a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) that includes a government, a battery supplier, an NEV manufacturer, and a third-party recycler. The model endogenizes tax–subsidy decisions while incorporating cascade utilization, competitive intensity, and environmental damage from informal channels. We compare three recycling modes: manufacturer–supplier competition (MSC), manufacturer–third-party competition (MTC), and manufacturer–third-party alliance (MTA). Our analysis addresses three main issues. First, the structure of recycling modes affects the equilibrium decisions of CLSC members: pricing under MSC is governed by a threshold effect of cascade utilization, whereas pricing under MTC depends on relative cost differences. Second, higher cascade utilization strengthens the supplier’s pricing power under MSC, whereas intensified competition reduces the profits of the supplier and government under MSC and MTC; by contrast, the profits of the supplier and government under MTA remain stable. Third, environmental damage encourages the government to raise the subsidy level provided to suppliers for battery recycling. These findings offer practical guidance for designing adaptive EPR policies that balance economic and environmental objectives. Full article

This article examines the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) as a regulatory instrument of the European Union, situated at the intersection of international trade law, customs law and environmental protection. The primary objective of the study is to assess the legal nature of the CBAM, evaluate its compatibility with World Trade Organisation (WTO) law and analyse its implications for sustainable global trade governance and climate policy. Particular attention is paid to Articles I, III and XX of the GATT, as well as relevant WTO case law, including the cases of United States—Gasoline, United States—Shrimp, European Communities—Asbestos and Brazil—Retreaded Tyres. The study further examines the procedural transformation of customs authorities, particularly in relation to the verification of emissions, the burden of proof and administrative enforcement. The article also assesses the environmental effectiveness of the CBAM in preventing carbon leakage and in enforcing higher environmental standards in third countries, addressing the legal and economic issues of discrimination, proportionality, administrative complexity and potential impact on developing economies. The research is based on doctrinal legal analysis, comparative legal methodology and a review of relevant international and European legal sources, including WTO case law and Regulation (EU) 2023/956. The authors demonstrate that the CBAM represents a hybrid regulatory mechanism combining elements of environmental taxation, regulatory charges and trade policy instruments implemented through customs procedures. The originality of the article lies in its integrated and comprehensive analysis of the CBAM from the perspective of customs law, international trade law and environmental regulation with a focus on sustainability. In contrast to existing studies focusing primarily on trade or climate aspects, the article highlights the evolving regulatory role of customs authorities in the framework of European Union climate governance. The findings suggest that the CBAM is generally compatible with WTO law, provided that it is implemented in a transparent, proportionate, flexible and non-discriminatory manner. The authors conclude that the CBAM can become an important model for the future development of sustainable international economic regulation and climate-related trade governance. Full article

Accommodation establishments constitute a core component of tourism infrastructure, and their location choices directly affect water resource utilization, land pressure, and the spatial equilibrium of tourism development—issues that are particularly acute in vast arid regions. Yet the spatial organization of accommodation supply across extensive drylands characterized by fragmented oasis distribution, and the reasons why standard and non-standard accommodation follow divergent location logics, remain poorly understood. This study addresses three questions: (1) How are nine accommodation categories, differentiated by type and quality, distributed across Xinjiang? (2) Do directional spatial associations exist among categories that are consistent with hierarchical, path-dependent development? (3) Which factors drive these patterns, and do their effects exhibit the nonlinearity and threshold behavior predicted by location theory? Drawing on 12,073 accommodation establishments from the Ctrip platform, we construct a staged analytical framework in which each technique answers a specific question: the nearest-neighbor index and standard deviational ellipse characterize global patterns; kernel density estimation and OPTICS clustering identify local agglomerations; directional local co-location quotients measure asymmetric spatial associations; and XGBoost–SHAP isolates nonlinear drivers and threshold effects. Results reveal a highly concentrated “single-core, multi-center” structure anchored by Urumqi, Yining, and Kashgar, with rapid expansion toward the Ili Valley, Kashgar, and Altay since 2019. Standard accommodation tracks urban centrality and transport nodes, while non-standard accommodation tracks tourism resource endowments, consistent with location-theoretic expectations. Directional co-location analysis reveals hierarchical spatial associations among categories, and driving factors exhibit pronounced nonlinear threshold effects. From a sustainability perspective, the identified thresholds—elevation (1360 m), water-body proximity, and distance to rural tourism demonstration sites (3 km)—constitute quantifiable, spatially explicit sustainability indicators that can be incorporated into planning tools to monitor and steer accommodation development away from ecologically sensitive zones. Global Moran’s I diagnostics of model residuals (reduction of 83–99.7%) suggest that these findings are unlikely to be artifacts of spatial autocorrelation; this diagnostic, however, complements rather than replaces spatially blocked validation. The study contributes category-differentiated, spatially directed evidence for policies balancing tourism expansion against water security and ecosystem integrity, serving sustainable tourism development in arid-region destinations. Full article

Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) operating at low speeds are susceptible to parameter mismatches, periodic harmonics, and various internal and external disturbances, which result in steady-state current errors and low-frequency speed oscillations. To address these issues and improve low-speed PMSM performance, an automatic tuning disturbance rejection incremental deadbeat predictive current control (AT-DR-IDPCC) method is proposed. First, an incremental extended-state observer (IESO) is incorporated into the incremental deadbeat predictive current control (IDPCC) framework to estimate and compensate for lumped disturbances caused by resistance and inductance mismatches, thereby improving parameter robustness. Meanwhile, a quasi-resonant controller (QRC) is connected in parallel with the current loop to selectively suppress sixth-order current harmonics induced by inverter nonlinearities and flux harmonics. Furthermore, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based parameter optimization scheme is introduced to automatically tune the controller parameters, overcoming the limitations of conventional trial-and-error tuning and achieving the coordinated optimization of dynamic response, steady-state accuracy, and disturbance rejection capability. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that, compared with proportional–integral (PI) control and IDPCC incorporating the IESO (IESO-IDPCC), AT-DR-IDPCC reduces the phase current’s total harmonic distortion (THD) by 56.1% and 23.7% while also decreasing the speed fluctuation amplitude by approximately 50% and 20%, respectively. The proposed method significantly enhances the robustness, harmonic suppression capability, and low-speed control performance of PMSM drives. Full article