Search Results (1,095)

Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standardizes inter-organizational supply-chain visibility events, yet structurally conformant histories can contain contradictory lifecycle claims that undermine information integrity. We present EPCIS-MutBench, a controlled benchmark and layered validator for evaluating security-relevant semantic and lifecycle integrity in EPCIS 2.0.1 histories. Mutations are treated as integrity violations independently of accidental or adversarial origin; the benchmark evaluates detection and localization rather than attacker attribution. The evaluation uses 2000 deterministic clean histories and 20,000 primary mutants, including 16,000 single-fault and 4000 compound cases, with validator-independent typed ground truth. Across all primary mutants, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Schema plus compatibility-projected GS1 Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) detected 18.27%, whereas the full event-local and role-aware lifecycle validator detected 95.29%. Among 13,429 single-fault mutants that passed both structural baselines, the full validator achieved 92.98% recall, with end-to-end intended-rule, event, and field/edge localization of 92.90%, 92.19%, and 92.14%, respectively. No false positives occurred on the 2000 generated-clean controls; however, in a separate sensitivity analysis that provisionally treated all 37 parseable external-source fixtures as clean, 19 were marked invalid. A separate attestation layer used cryptographic hashes, Merkle commitments, a digital signature, and public-testnet receipts to make post-freeze evidence modification detectable. The results demonstrate controlled, reproducible evaluation of EPCIS information-integrity assurance beyond structural conformance. Full article

Research culture plays a critical role in strengthening scientific productivity, knowledge transfer, and the social impact of higher education institutions. This study examines the relationship between research culture and scientific productivity within a higher education institution, while advancing a broader understanding of research culture as an institutional ecosystem that integrates knowledge generation, dissemination, transfer, and social engagement. A qualitative research design was employed, combining Grounded Theory with a five-stage hermeneutic analysis framework. The study was conducted at a public university in Peru and involved 16 key informants, including university authorities, RENACYT-certified researchers, full-time faculty members, and doctoral-level academics with experience in teaching, research, and institutional management. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and a focus group and analyzed using Atlas.ti 22. The findings reveal that research culture is shaped by interconnected dimensions, including intellectual curiosity, interdisciplinary collaboration, continuous professional development, academic leadership, and institutional support. The integration of research and teaching emerged as a central mechanism for fostering critical thinking, developing research competencies, and promoting socially relevant knowledge generation. Participants identified access to resources, academic networks, research training opportunities, and institutional incentives as relevant conditions associated with scientific productivity. However, limited funding, bureaucratic procedures, technological constraints, and insufficient recognition remain persistent challenges. The study contributes to the literature by proposing an integrated perspective of research culture that extends beyond scientific publication performance and emphasizes the interaction between institutional conditions, faculty capabilities, knowledge transfer, and community engagement. These findings suggest that universities can enhance their scientific productivity and social impact by developing research ecosystems that connect teaching, research, innovation, and societal needs. Strengthening research culture therefore represents a strategic pathway for consolidating universities as institutions committed to knowledge creation and sustainable social development. Full article

Sealed-bid auctions require bidders to submit concealed bids within a prescribed bidding period, after which the bids are opened and compared to determine the highest bidder. However, existing auction systems still face challenges in protecting bidder privacy and bid data, verifying auction results, and reducing dependence on centralized auctioneers. This paper proposes LAV-Auction, a linkable anonymous and verifiable sealed-bid auction scheme for consortium blockchain. A registration authority publishes a ring of eligible public keys. Each bidder submits a commitment, a bid ciphertext containing the bid value and commitment randomness, and an auction-scoped linkable ring signature. The signature hides which registered key was used, while its key image enables the contract to reject repeated bids from the same credential in the same auction. After the contract fixes the accepted record order, the auction committee decrypts the bid ciphertexts. A verifier recomputes the digest of the frozen ledger records. It then verifies a Groth16 proof showing that the announced winner corresponds to a valid frozen bid with the highest value. LAV-Auction provides bidder anonymity, bid confidentiality before committee decryption, duplicate bid prevention, and verifiable winner correctness over the frozen valid bid set. Experiments on a Hyperledger Fabric implementation demonstrate practical computation, communication, and scalability trade-offs. The results show that LAV-Auction achieves millisecond-level result verification through succinct Groth16 proofs while maintaining compact result certification payloads under increasing bidder scales. Full article

Sovereign Financial Distress, conceptualised in this study as a financial manifestation of sovereign risk involving pressures on a government’s capacity to meet its financial obligations, service its debt, and avoid default, has attracted sustained scholarly attention because of its implications for financial stability, borrowing costs, investment, and economic resilience. This study maps the intellectual and thematic development of the broader sovereign risk literature on sovereign financial distress through a bibliometric analysis of 2030 English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles indexed in Scopus and published between 1974 and 2026. We systematically screened 2444 records against pre-specified criteria, yielding a final analytical corpus after excluding 385 non-article records and 29 non-English articles. We used performance analysis, science mapping, and a rule-based protocol linking bibliometric evidence to five theoretical perspectives. Publication activity increased substantially after 2008, coinciding with the Global Financial Crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis, and one-third of output is concentrated in a Bradford core of 20 journals. Reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) identified 1981, 1989, 2012, and 2013 as prominent intellectual reference points. Keyword clustering revealed three themes: sovereign bond markets and policy; pricing, ratings, and contagion; and sovereign debt, country risk, and emerging markets. The theory-mapping results are consistent with a broadening rather than a replacement of the explanatory apparatus: contagion-related signals rise after the crises, whereas institutional and governance-related signals do not, contradicting one limb of the pre-specified sequence. Sustainability does not form an independent thematic cluster in any configuration tested. Because the absence of a keyword cluster cannot establish the absence of theory, the gap is stated narrowly: the findings point to an emerging theoretical frontier on directly incorporating climate and geopolitical exposures into sovereign repayment decisions within limited-commitment default models. Full article

Universities play a pivotal role in fostering sustainable practices, yet limited evidence is available on how this commitment is translated into digital communication within Latin American higher education. To address this gap, this study examines how Ecuadorian public universities communicate sustainability through digital media, using a mixed-methods design that integrates content analysis, correlational analysis, and expert-judgment validation to develop educommunicational strategies for university communication offices, sustainability units, and higher-education policymakers. Content analysis was conducted on 733 sustainability-related publications (102 on institutional websites and 631 on social media—Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok) from 34 Ecuadorian public universities. Publications were classified into internal and external institutional-performance categories and assessed in terms of publication frequency and engagement rate; Spearman correlations were used to examine associations between audience size and posting activity. The findings reveal limited visibility of sustainability topics, fragmented communication strategies, and a predominance of Facebook and Instagram; only three universities maintain a dedicated sustainability section on their website. Four educommunicational strategies, validated through expert judgment, are proposed as a framework for transforming university digital communication and aligning it more closely with institutional sustainability commitments. Full article

Adversarial testing has strengthened the empirical standards of consciousness science, but recent results also expose a measurement problem: competing theories frequently make predictions about the same neural quantities and can therefore be challenged without being decisively discriminated. This evaluative review incorporates a purposive structured audit of contemporary theories and theory-relevant experiments rather than a systematic census. The audit separates trial-level from origin-level frameworks, explicit from interpreted commitments, and positive from stated-null predictions. Policy count and incompatibility remain sparsely occupied coordinates, whereas organism-wide cortical-autonomic coherence is not explicitly formulated as an access criterion by the trial-level accounts and is therefore treated as a sensitivity-dependent gap rather than an unqualified absence. Importantly, an unoccupied coordinate is not itself a discriminating prediction: direct theoretical adjudication requires opposed commitments. In the baseline theory-addressed content-bearing sample, valenced content is absent; under the most permissive sensitivity rule, it rises to 6 of 57 experiment rows (4 of 30 publications). The crossed conflict-by-valence experiment specified here can be run now, but it does not discriminate among theories that are silent on those coordinates; the autonomic-only condition that would generate a genuinely opposed test cannot yet be run because a validated report-independent measure of interoceptive access is lacking. Full article

Rural tourism sustainability depends on economic returns, community participation, cultural continuity, and ecological stewardship. This study uses a resource exchange perspective to explain how multiple actors co-create value in rural tourism and how institutional coordination and service interaction transform resources. Drawing on more than 90 days of fieldwork in Zhushan Village, western Hunan, China, between July 2021 and July 2025, the case study uses 96 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and supplementary sources. Qualitative content analysis combined deductive and inductive procedures. The findings show that actors form exchange relationships around heterogeneous resources, including capital, land, dwellings, skills, knowledge, information, affect, reputation, and institutional support. Resource complementarity and cost–benefit assessments shape relationship formation, while reciprocity and fairness sustain cooperation. Institutional coordination stabilises resource commitment through arrangements for participation, rights, responsibilities, and benefit allocation; service interaction expands resource use through joint practice. New uses and related claims for participation and benefits then prompt institutional adjustment. Feedback between the two mechanisms connects dispersed resources in tourism operations and collaboration over public affairs, producing economic, social, cultural, emotional, and ecological value manifestations. Full article

Special education teachers’ career experiences span entry pathways, role enactment, professional meaning and strain, and institutional support, yet these dimensions are often studied separately. This qualitative study examined how 19 full-time special education teachers understood and connected these aspects of their careers. Participants included 17 women and 2 men with 2–33 years of teaching experience, each employed at a different public special education school. The schools were located predominantly in northern and eastern China, with fewer in coastal southern cities. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis with inductive open coding and iterative abstraction. Three themes were generated: making special education a viable career; enacting professional capacity through role; and navigating meaning, demands, and support in special education work. Participants retrospectively linked career entry to the alignment of value-based commitment with viable employment pathways; they described professional capacity as enacted through specialist, pedagogical, rehabilitation-oriented, and relational work; and they discussed sources of professional meaning, occupational demands, and support needs in relation to development opportunities, recognition, and institutional support. Across participants’ accounts, personal commitments, professional role enactment, relational work, and institutional conditions were intertwined. These findings suggest areas for professional learning and workforce support and raise questions for future research on teacher well-being. Full article

Instructional leadership is often displaced by compliance requirements, operational demands, and formal evaluation. This qualitative secondary analysis examined how teachers and principals described organizational pressures and relational practices during a 14-day Build Rapport, Inspire Feedback, Celebrate Success, and Exceed Results (BICE) leadership cycle across five Southern California public charter schools. Data included open-ended survey responses from 33 experienced teachers, interviews with nine teachers, and interviews with six principals. A role-by-source matrix and constant comparison were used to examine demands that displaced developmental work, valued leadership practices, and convergence or tension across participant groups. Two cross-cutting themes emerged. The compliance trap described how urgent operational and accountability demands displaced coaching, recognition, and relationship-building. Relational anchors—approachability, trust, feedback, recognition, collaboration, and human connection—helped preserve developmental relationships within these pressures. Structured, non-evaluative leadership routines may help translate relational commitments into dependable practice by protecting time for connection, observation, recognition, and collective next steps. The findings do not establish that BICE caused teacher retention; rather, they identify practical organizational conditions that may support professional connection and continued development across career stages. Full article

Berta Cáceres’s life and struggle embody a biocultural ethic that conceives rivers as living co-inhabitants whose protection requires ethical commitment, collective organization, and institutional transformation. Her work offers a paradigmatic example of how environmental defense can unite ecological, cultural, gender, and political struggles. As a Lenca Indigenous woman and co-founder of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras, COPINH), she opposed the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, which threatened the sacred Gualcarque River. Her advocacy connected local community mobilization with transnational solidarity networks, generating international pressure that contributed to the withdrawal of financial support for the project. Cáceres understood the river not as a mere exploitable natural resource but as a living co-inhabitant embedded in relationships among people, ancestors, spirits, and the wider biosphere. Drawing on my biocultural ethics model, which integrates the biophysical, cultural-linguistic, and sociopolitical dimensions of environmental conflicts, I identify three priorities for advancing environmental justice: (i) making violence against environmental defenders visible; (ii) analyzing such violence through an intersectional lens; and (iii) confronting corporate and state impunity. Research and public policy should recognize that women, particularly Indigenous and peasant women, experience distinctive forms of gendered, racialized, and political violence. Cáceres’s legacy demonstrates that defending rivers also means defending cultural identity, traditional knowledge, collective self-determination, and biodiversity. Her enduring slogan—“Berta did not die; she multiplied”—expresses how individual loss can become collective resistance. Biocultural ethics further directs attention to sustainable alternatives already practiced in diverse communities through care, reciprocity, and co-inhabitation. Accordingly, biocultural justice requires protecting these existing ways of life while rethinking development, law, and politics around the interconnected dignity of Earth and its human and other-than-human co-inhabitants. Full article

Industry 5.0 frames digital and circular investment as a capital-allocation problem under risk. This study examines how a small open economy allocates limited public capital between two demands. The first is civil protection against hybrid and military threats. The second is the transition to a digital circular economy. Lithuania serves as the case. The study combines doctrinal analysis of EU and national law with documentary analysis of budgetary and program data. It assesses three hypotheses on displacement, funding composition, and the early identification of dual-benefit investment. The data combine state budget allocations for 2021–2024 with planned needs and allocations up to 2030. All figures from 2025 onward are planning commitments, not outturns. Civil protection funding rose from EUR 12.7 million in 2021 to EUR 43.0 million in 2023. It stood at EUR 39.7 million in 2024. A further EUR 284.7 million is required for 2025–2030. Circular economy measures are planned at EUR 4.27 billion against an assessed need of EUR 4.44 billion (96.0% coverage). The displacement hypothesis is not supported. On a like-for-like annual basis, the circular program remains eight to thirteen times larger. The main constraint is composition. The circular industry receives 32.8% of its assessed need and accounts for 90.8% of the program’s funding gap. The horizontal line for digitalization, research, and coordination receives only 0.3% of planned funds. The findings have three policy implications. Project appraisal should include a dual-benefit test. Civil protection procurement should apply lifecycle criteria. Digital traceability infrastructure needs dedicated funding because both circular finance and supply-chain security depend on it. Full article

Industrial ecology (IE) offers a territorial approach to sustainable development by promoting resource efficiency, waste valorization, and coordinated interactions among industrial actors. However, empirical evidence on the structural factors shaping IE implementation in North African industrial ecosystems remains limited, particularly in Tunisia, where economic, technical, institutional, and organizational conditions may constrain the development of industrial symbiosis. This study aims to (1) identify the main enabling and constraining factors associated with the implementation of IE in Tunisian industrial ecosystems and (2) examine the structural influence and dependence relationships among these factors in order to identify strategic priorities for territorial governance. The study applies the MICMAC (Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification) method to two systems comprising 18 variables: 11 enabling variables and 7 constraint variables. Expert-informed direct influence matrices were constructed and analyzed to classify variables according to their levels of influence and dependence. The results identify public incentives for environmental protection (X10) and investment stimulation (X9) among the most structurally influential variables in the enabling system, while recycling recovery (X1), human commitment (X8), and emission minimization strategies (X11) also occupy strategic positions. In the constraint system, economic (Y2), technical and energy (Y1), and human-dimension constraints (Y7) emerge as particularly important relay factors. These findings suggest that the development of industrial ecology in Tunisia depends not only on technical capabilities but also on the institutional, economic, and organizational conditions shaping territorial coordination. The study contributes an exploratory structural perspective on Tunisian industrial ecosystems and provides evidence-based priorities for policymakers and industrial stakeholders while recognizing the contextual and expert-dependent nature of the analysis. Full article

Public expenditure is central to human development, but higher spending does not necessarily produce better outcomes. This study examines fiscal commitment, institutional conditions, and health and education trajectories in Canada, Malaysia, and South Africa in relation to Sustainable Development Goals 3, 4, 8, and 16. Using indicator-specific longitudinal data covering 1990–2024, including health expenditure for 2000–2023, it applies a comparative trajectory-based design combining descriptive statistics, period changes, indexed trajectories, bilateral gap analysis, averaged-endpoint robustness tests, and expenditure–outcome co-movements. The findings reveal multidimensional, indicator-specific trajectories. Canada retained the strongest institutional and developmental levels, although gains were generally modest from high initial conditions. Malaysia converged across several outcomes despite comparatively low health expenditure and declining education expenditure shares. South Africa increased expenditure and improved infant mortality and schooling but continued to diverge in life expectancy, unemployment, and selected governance indicators. HDI trajectories synthesize these previously examined health, education, and income dimensions rather than provide independent confirmation. The study contributes an integrated longitudinal comparison that distinguishes fiscal commitment, absolute progress, and bilateral convergence. Although non-causal, the analysis shows how expenditure and outcomes evolved differently across institutional and structural contexts over more than three decades, supporting context-sensitive, outcome-focused public management. Full article

IoT edge actuation requires records that remain auditable after an incident. We present a crypto-agile provenance framework that keeps decision records and signatures off-chain while a Sui Move contract stores a 32-byte SHA-256 anchor, bounded metadata, and a one-byte scheme identifier. Public keys and their ledger-time validity windows are registered on-chain for historical auditing. For a fixed multi-key endpoint, measured commitment gas is identical across Ed25519, ML-DSA-44, and SLH-DSA-SHA2-128f despite a 267-fold signature-size range; it also remains unchanged across a 3301-fold record-size range. Different endpoint key sets introduce up to 5.66% variation through state-rewrite costs on the evaluated localnet. On a Raspberry Pi 5, the mean of three ML-DSA-44 run medians is 0.65 ms, with a signing-latency coefficient of variation of approximately 78% and substantial upper tails. Additional crossed key-by-message measurements show no nominally significant ML-DSA key-factor result on the Pi, but two nominally significant ML-DSA-44 key-factor results in the desktop sessions, one of which remains significant after Bonferroni correction across 72 comparisons. These results do not establish key independence or a variance upper bound; they support budgeting for observed signing tails while preserving uncertainty about persistent key effects. The framework establishes tamper evidence and conditional endpoint attribution, not physical truthfulness of telemetry or the time a signature was created. Full article

Breastfeeding is a cost-effective public health intervention that reduces infant morbidity and mortality while providing long-term benefits for mothers and children. In Southeast Asia, rising female labor force participation and complex regulatory environments highlight the need to understand how breastfeeding policies and workplace support are implemented. Breastfeeding protection sits at the intersection of maternal and child health, gender equity, decent work and social protection, yet evidence mapping on its implementation in the region remains limited. This scoping review mapped the national regulatory frameworks and workplace support provisions for breastfeeding reported in the peer-reviewed literature from Southeast Asia, along with their reported implementation, compliance, monitoring and enforcement; the barriers and facilitators encountered; and the evidence gaps identified (RQ1–RQ4). This scoping review followed the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology for scoping reviews and was reported in line with the PRISMA-ScR guideline. The protocol was registered a priori with the Open Science Framework. Five information sources of three distinct types were searched on 16 March 2026: two bibliographic databases (PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus), two publisher platforms (ScienceDirect, Taylor & Francis Online) and one academic search engine (Google Scholar). Two reviewers independently screened records using the Population–Concept–Context (PCC) framework. Findings were then organized along a six-link implementation chain—policy existence, implementation, accessibility, utilization, compliance, and effectiveness to distinguish what is enacted from what reaches workers. This review included 22 studies. The evidence was geographically concentrated: all included studies reported on only five of the eleven ASEAN member states: Indonesia (n = 13), the Philippines (n = 4), Thailand (n = 3), Malaysia (n = 1), and one multi-country study covering Indonesia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam. Along the implementation chain, the duty-bearer links were well reported: policy existence in 22 of 22 sources, implementation in 21, and compliance in 20. In contrast, worker-facing links were less well reported: accessibility in 12, utilization in 7, and effectiveness in 4. Policy coverage remained concentrated in the formal sector, with limited protection for informal workers, and implementation often depended on institutional commitment rather than national enforcement. Organizational-level barriers were the most frequently reported (18 of 22 studies), followed by structural or policy-level barriers (11 of 22). Within the five ASEAN member states for which evidence was located, a consistent gap was reported between enacted provisions and their implementation in workplaces. The literature documents that employers are required to provide far more fully than employed women can actually access and use, and the absence of evidence from six member states is itself a priority gap. Because no critical appraisal was undertaken and the included designs cannot support effect estimates, this review makes no claim about policy effectiveness. Full article