Search Results (133)

Educational institutions are facing a crisis characterized by the need to address diverse learning styles and vocational aspirations, exacerbated by ongoing financial pressures. To navigate these challenges effectively, there is an urgent need to innovate educational practices and learning environments, ensuring they are adaptable and responsive to the evolving needs of students and the workforce. The adoption of the Industry 5.0 framework offers a promising solution, providing a holistic approach that emphasizes the integration of human creativity and advanced technologies to transform educational institutions into resilient, human-centric, and sustainable learning environments. In this context, this article presents a transdisciplinary methodology that integrates Asset Management (AM) with Social Innovation (SI) through Design Thinking (DT) to co-design Educational Facilities 5.0 with stakeholders. The application of the proposed approach in an AgroLab case study—a food and agricultural laboratory—demonstrates how the methodology enables the definition of an Educational Facility 5.0 and generates AM Design Knowledge to support informed decision-making in the subsequent design, implementation, and operation phases. Following DT principles—where knowledge emerges through iterative experimentation and insights from practical applications—this article also discusses the role of SI and DT in AM, the role of Large Language Models in convergent processes, and a vision for Educational Facilities 5.0. Full article

Creativity is a vital element for successful negotiation and positive business outcomes. However, a complete understanding of how different thinking styles shape creative agreements is still developing in research. This study examines how broad and detailed thinking affects the ability to create inventive deals, with a particular focus on construal level theory. While past research has often highlighted abstract thinking as the main way to be creative, this study shows that both abstract and concrete thinking contribute to making creative deals but in different ways. For example, Study 1 looks at how concrete thinking helps in forming creative agreements, tested with 114 undergraduate students in a laboratory experiment. This challenges the common idea that concrete thinking limits new ideas. Study 2 then explores the benefits of thinking that combines different viewpoints, where negotiators can skillfully switch between abstract and concrete ways of thinking, tested with 96 students in another laboratory experiment. Across two experiments, mediation analyses were conducted to examine the hypothesized relationships. Findings indicate that cognitive flexibility—the ability to switch thinking styles—benefits both idea generation and specific problem-solving. This study’s implications span negotiation strategies, fostering organizational creativity, and developing flexible thinking approaches for problem-solving. Full article

Exploring the potential of text-to-image generation technology in Taiwanese vocational high school art courses, this study employs a conceptual framework of technology integration, creative thinking, and metacognitive abilities, focusing on its effects on teaching strategies as well as students’ digital art creation skills and cognitive and creative development. The study was conducted through a multi-methodological approach that includes a systematic literature review plus participatory action research and qualitative analysis. The results showed that integrating text-to-image technology with education boosted students’ interest in activities such as prompt design and project creation and suited themes like landscapes and conceptual art. Testing AI tools enhanced technical proficiency (average of 3.95/5), while pedagogy shifted to project-based learning, increasing engagement. Students’ digital art skills improved from 3.26 to 3.78 (16% growth), with creativity and originality (3.82/5), style diversity, visual complexity, and divergent thinking notably advanced. The technology also fostered metacognitive skills and critical thinking, proving to be an effective teaching aid beyond a mere digital tool. This discovery provides a fresh theoretical viewpoint and instructional procedures for high school art education curricula, anchored in technology, and highlights the importance of nurturing students’ innovativeness and adaptability within the contemporary digital age. Full article

Generative AI leads to designs that prioritize cognition, emotional resonance, and health, thus offering a tested alternative to current trends. In a first AI experiment, the large language model ChatGPT-4o generated six visual environments that are expected to boost creative thinking for their occupants. The six test cases are evaluated using Christopher Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties of living geometry as criteria, as well as ChatGPT-4o, to reveal a strong positive correlation. Living geometry is a specific type of geometry that shows coherence across scales, fractal structure, and nested symmetries to harmonize with human neurophysiology. The human need for living geometry is supported by interdisciplinary evidence from biology, environmental psychology, and neuroscience. Then, in a second AI experiment, ChatGPT-4o was asked to generate visual environments that suppress creativity for comparison with the cases that boost creative thinking. Checking these negative examples using Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties, they are almost entirely deficient in living geometry, thus confirming the diagnostic model. Used together with generative AI, living geometry therefore offers a useful method for both creating and evaluating designs based on objective criteria. Adopting a hybrid epistemological framework of AI plus living geometry as a basis for design uncovers a flaw within contemporary architectural practice. Dominant design styles, rooted in untested aesthetic preferences, lack the empirical validation required to address fundamental questions of spatial quality responsible for human creativity. Full article

Visual selective attention is a cognitive process by which humans efficiently process critical visual information. It reflects the user’s authentic visual thinking and can be applied by designers in age-friendly design to enhance the user experience of elderly users, meeting their visual needs and attention characteristics. This has significant implications for the age-friendly design of fresh e-commerce product interfaces. This paper explores age-friendly design for fresh e-commerce product interfaces based on the theory of visual selective attention. Experimental data indicate that the optimized interface significantly enhances the user experience for elderly users, with task completion time reduced by 39.62% and satisfaction increased by 60%. First, qualitative research is conducted to uncover the visual selective attention mechanisms of elderly users. Combining this with the framework of fresh e-commerce products, an age-friendly design model is established, including page layout, brand colors, font size, and focal styles. Second, using eye-tracking, descriptive analysis, and correlation coefficient analysis, a comparative analysis of the visual selection behaviors of elderly and young users is conducted, yielding characteristics and principles for age-friendly interactive interface design. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are validated through design practice and evaluation. This research provides new insights and methods for the age-friendly design of fresh e-commerce product interfaces. It holds practical significance and value for constructing an elderly perspective in fresh e-commerce and expanding the private traffic of elderly users. Full article

This essay seeks to stress the importance of the American poet Walt Whitman to Gilles Deleuze, using how love is variously explored to think about their methods in relationality. I firstly consider how many classic responses to Whitman express division regarding his work. This is indicated by how D.H. Lawrence stresses the satisfactions and exhilarations of reading Whitman but also refers to the sense of embarrassment and shame which readers might experience on doing so, not least because of Whitman’s own apparent shamelessness. For Lawrence, this is exemplified by Whitman’s proclamation that he “aches with amorous love”, as if he were a Deleuzian desiring machine existing only to ache and nothing but. Yet there is no such embarrassment detectable in Deleuze’s responses to Whitman’s work, and his responses are characterized by their insistence that Whitman always insists upon a dimension to experience beyond such conventional desires. He is more than a poet of the body with organs, which in turn enables an understanding of his work as an anticipation of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs as it was first expounded in Anti-Oedipus. To explore this further, direct and indirect correspondences between Deleuze and Whitman are explored, with particular attention to a range of poems from the 1855 Leaves of Grass. These readings show that if there is a conceptual relationship in their work, their style and syntax are also a way in which they relate thought and action. To triangulate the consideration of the varieties of love that are manifest in Deleuze and Whitman, I use Hannah Stark’s essay on Deleuze and love, showing how different aspects of Deleuze’s writing and thought either consciously or unconsciously relate to the American poet. I reflect upon Deleuze’s claim in his essay on the poet that Whitman’s sustained advocacy of “comradely love” represents a practice of radical relationality, and that this also offers a sense of social and political transformability that is key to both. To provide a final shape to this discussion, I refer to Fredric Jameson’s posthumously published seminars on Deleuze, in which he gives particular attention to the philosopher’s particular interest in American literature. Ultimately, the essay finds that Whitman is given a unique status in Deleuze, one which even threatens to jeopardize his own philosophical system, and that the reason for this may well be love. Full article

In Europe and elsewhere in the world, current ambitious decarbonization targets push towards a gradual decommissioning of all fossil-fuel-based dispatchable electrical generation and, at the same time, foster a gradual increase in the penetration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). Moreover, considerations tied to decarbonization as well as to the security of supply, following recent geo-political events, call for a gradual replacement of gas appliances with electricity-based ones. As RES generation is characterized by a variable generation pattern and as the electric carrier is characterized by scarce intrinsic flexibility, and since storage capabilities through electrochemical batteries, as well as demand-side flexibility contributions, remain rather limited, it is quite natural to think of other energy carriers as possible service providers for the electricity system. Gas and heat networks and, in the future, hydrogen networks could provide storage services for the electricity system. This could allow increasing the amount of RES penetration to be managed safely by the electric system without incurring blackouts and avoiding non-economically motivated grid reinforcements to prevent the curtailment of RES generation peaks. What is explained above calls for a new approach, both in electricity network dispatch simulations and in grid-planning studies, which extends the simulation domain to other carriers (i.e., gas, heat, hydrogen) so that a global optimal solution is found. This simulation branch, called multi-energy or multi-carrier, has been gaining momentum in recent years. The present paper aims at describing the most important approaches to static ME modeling by comparing the pros and cons of all of them with a holistic approach. The style of this paper is that of a tutorial aimed at providing some guidance and a few bibliographic references to those who are interested in approaching this theme in the next years. Full article

Introduction: Alexithymia is a multidimensional construct characterized by difficulties in identifying and describing emotions, distinguishing emotional states from bodily sensations, and an externally oriented thinking style. Although the prevalence in the general population is around 10%, it is significantly higher in clinical groups, including those with autism spectrum disorders, depression, anxiety, and neurological conditions. Neuroimaging research, especially using magnetic resonance imaging, has documented structural and functional alterations in alexithymia; however, electroencephalography (EEG)—an older yet temporally precise method—remains less comprehensively explored. This mechanistic review aims to synthesize EEG-based evidence of the neural correlates of alexithymia and to propose potential neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning its affective and cognitive dimensions. Methods: A thorough literature search was conducted in December 2024 across PubMed/Medline, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Cochrane using combined keywords (“EEG”, “QEEG”, “electroencephalography”, “alexithymia”) to identify English-language clinical trials or case studies published from January 1980 to December 2024. Two reviewers independently screened the titles and abstracts, followed by a full-text review. Studies were included if they specifically examined EEG activity in participants with alexithymia. Of the 1021 initial records, eight studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Results: Across the reviewed studies, individuals with alexithymia consistently demonstrated right-hemisphere dominance in EEG power and connectivity, particularly in the theta and alpha bands, during both neutral and emotion-eliciting tasks. Many exhibited reduced interhemispheric coherence and disrupted connectivity in the frontal and parietal regions, potentially contributing to difficulties in cognitive processing and emotion labeling. Some studies have also reported diminished gamma band activity and phase synchrony in response to negative stimuli, suggesting impaired higher-order integration of emotional information. Crucially, subjective reports (e.g., valence ratings) often do not differ between alexithymic and non-alexithymic groups, highlighting that EEG measures may capture subtle emotional processing deficits not reflected in self-reports. Conclusions: EEG findings emphasize that alexithymia involves specific disruptions in cortical activation and network-level coordination, rather than merely the absence of emotional experiences. Right-hemisphere over-reliance, reduced interhemispheric transfer, and atypical oscillatory patterns in the alpha, theta, and gamma bands appear to be central to the condition’s pathophysiology. Understanding these neural signatures offers avenues for future research—particularly intervention studies that test whether modulating these EEG patterns can improve emotional awareness and expression. These insights underscore the potential clinical utility of EEG as a sensitive tool for detecting and tracking alexithymic traits in both research and therapeutic contexts. Full article

Despite the growing importance of firm-generated content (FGC) on social platforms, the effect of its relevance to products on consumer brand attitudes remains underexplored. As digital platforms increasingly influence consumer decision-making, this study investigates how the relevance of FGC to products affects consumer brand attitudes. Through four experimental studies, we examine the mediating role of brand authenticity and the moderating effects of brand type (time-honored vs. new) and consumer thinking style (analytic vs. holistic). The results indicate that the relevance of FGC to products positively affects consumer brand attitudes, with brand authenticity acting as a mediating factor. Furthermore, this effect is stronger for time-honored brands and analytic-thinking consumers. These findings contribute to digital marketing literature by introducing a novel perspective on FGC and product relevance, an aspect largely overlooked in previous research. Our study also provides valuable insights for brand managers on how to leverage FGC to enhance consumer–brand interactions, particularly by aligning FGC with both brand type and consumer thinking style. Full article

Background/Objectives: The educational system thinking approach (ST) takes a holistic vision of instructors/teachers and learners’ relationships, making sports pivotal for reflection on education. This study evaluated the efficacy of a multisport ST-based course on minirugby instructors’ teaching competence and children players’ motor conduct. Methods: The twenty-five rugby instructors (IAC) attended the 25 h course and the children of their teams (n = 109, Ch-IAC) participated in this study as experimental groups. Twenty-five rugby instructors who were not attending the course (I-CON) and their pupils (n = 111, Ch-CON) acted as control groups. Changes in instructors’ teaching competence (by the Instrument for Identifying the Teaching Style and the System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time) and children’s motor conduct (by the Körperkoordinationtest für Kinder test, the Game Performance Assessment Instrument, the Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale, and the physical self-efficacy scale for children) were assessed. Results: Thanks to the education received, IAC improved in didactics and methodological competence. They learned to use more production teaching styles than CON (10.5 ± 9.3% vs. 0% of the lesson time, p < 0.05), reduce children’s inactive lesson time for management (−5.1 ± 3.3% vs. 1.1 ± 3.1%, p < 0.05) and promote more outside lesson topics (4.4 ± 3.2% vs. 0%, p < 0.05). In addition, compared to Ch-CON, Ch-IAC significantly improved motor coordination, game performance, enjoyment, and self-efficacy (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Children’s enjoyment and self-efficacy acted as mediators that amplified the effects of the multisport training course. At the same time, the instructor’s didactical and methodological competence were moderators directly favoring or worsening children’s motor competence. Such an integrated multisport model is applicable and suggested for improving sports performance and education processes. Full article

The evolving landscape of educational technology has not only affected the design of teaching learning contents but also the employment of methods of delivery. In Vietnam’s language education discipline, research indicates that the integration of educational technology has significantly expanded the range of delivery modalities available to educators. However, whether the existing modalities can effectively cater to the needs of diverse learning styles remains uncertain. To bridge the research gap, this study initially seeks to assess the effectiveness of commonly utilized delivery modalities in K-12 EFL education. Thirty volunteer EFL teachers from across Vietnam, representing the north, central, and south regions, participated in in-depth interviews. These teachers teach English at primary, secondary, and high schools. The main findings include their current ICT competence levels and preferences for instructional design regarding diverse modalities of delivery. Then, grounding on an in-depth analysis of their choices and perspectives, a trichronous model is proposed and innovated to accommodate diverse learning preferences and maximize learning potential. The research findings and proposal are significant for professional development trainers and teacher educators, providing valuable insights for decision-making regarding the increasing use of technology in current EFL research and practice. This study can contribute to shaping a forward-thinking approach to EFL education in an increasingly digitalized world by addressing challenges and identifying more practical practices in language teacher education. Full article

Since the early 21st century, wildlands have witnessed an effusion of wildfires, with climate and social changes resulting in unanticipated wildfire activity and impact. For forest fires to be prevented and suppressed effectively, forest firefighting forces have adopted a specific administrative system for organizing and managing the fighting force. Under the administrative system, a debate on desired “leadership and management qualities” arises, and hence, this study sought to identify the leadership and management traits that should distinguish individuals in the forest fire incident command system (FFICS) applied by the Department of Forests (Cyprus). The research subject was addressed using mixed method research, employing quantitative and qualitative data. Both datasets were used to distinguish the purposes of the applied triangulation, enabling the examination of differentiation between the trends/positions recorded in terms of the object of study. These findings point to ideal forms of transformational leadership and neoclassical management. The outcomes suggest that at the individual level, the leaders of each of the operating structures should develop leadership qualities related to emotional intelligence, empathy, judgment, critical thinking, and especially self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses. At the stage of pre-suppression, a democratic leadership style (or guiding style) is supported, while during the operational progress stage of the FFICS, a “hybrid” leadership style is suggested, borrowing elements from the democratic and authoritarian (or managerial) leadership styles. The administrative skills of FFICS leaders should include the moral and psychological rewards of subordinates, job satisfaction and recognition, and two-way communication. The current study illustrates the need for divergent leadership and management traits and styles among the different hierarchical structures of the FFICS. Full article

We propose an anime style transfer model to generate anime faces from human face images. We improve the model by modifying the normalization function to obtain more feature information. To make the face feature position of the anime face similar to the human face, we propose facial landmark loss to calculate the error between the generated image and the real human face image. To avoid obvious color deviation in the generated images, we introduced perceptual color loss into the loss function. In addition, due to the lack of reasonable metrics to evaluate the quality of the animated images, we propose the use of Fréchet anime inception distance to calculate the distance between the distribution of the generated animated images and the real animated images in high-dimensional space, so as to understand the quality of the generated animated images. In the user survey, up to 74.46% of users think that the image produced by the proposed method is the best compared with other models. Also, the proposed method reaches a score of 126.05 for Fréchet anime inception distance. Our model performs the best in both user studies and FAID, showing that we have achieved better performance in human visual perception and model distribution. According to the experimental results and user feedback, our proposed method can generate results with better quality compared to existing methods. Full article

This study investigates the effectiveness of the Sibiu Impact Makers program, a 14-week social entrepreneurship initiative at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, which integrates Design Thinking to develop entrepreneurial competencies among students from the faculties of Economic Sciences, Engineering, as well as Social Sciences and Humanities. Using a quasi-experimental design, the study employed a pre-and-post-analysis based on the EntreComp Framework to assess changes in entrepreneurial competencies, revealing significant post-program improvements. To situate this research within the broader academic landscape, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to identify trends linking Design Thinking and entrepreneurial education. The findings indicate that the program enhances entrepreneurial skills, with impact variations tied to students’ learning styles, as classified by the Honey and Mumford Learning Style Questionnaire. However, as a case study with a sample size of 58, findings may have limited generalizability. This research contributes to the discourse on personalized and experiential education, suggesting that integrating Design Thinking with tailored learning strategies can play a vital role in entrepreneurship education. Full article

The ability to communicate effectively in writing and produce clear and cohesive text is a necessary skill in both educational settings and the workplace, yet many young students struggle to organize their thoughts and engage in deep thinking. To address these challenges, an augmented reality (AR) application titled “Explore Wild Animals” has been used to help students organize information; however, it may not accommodate different cognitive styles. Integrating formative peer assessment (FPA) strategy into AR-based instruction can enhance knowledge construction and address diverse cognitive needs. This study, conducted from May to June 2023, empirically investigates the effects of FPA in an AR environment on the writing performance of learners with field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) cognitive styles. A total of 89 fifth-grade pupils from China were randomly assigned to two groups: one group adopting FPA in an AR environment (AR-FPA), and the other group adopting FPA in a conventional PowerPoint (PPT) version 2410 environment (FPA). The results of a two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) indicate that the AR-FPA group outperformed the FPA group in writing performance. Specifically, FI learners benefitted more from the AR-FPA approach, while FD learners performed better with the FPA approach. However, multiple linear regression analysis reveals that the peer feedback quality and features showed little to no significant correlation with feedback providers’ writing performance, regardless of cognitive style. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating AR and FPA in enhancing educational outcomes, providing practical insights for promoting the sustainability of technology-enhanced learning and teaching practices. Full article