COVID-19's Impact on China's Strategic Emerging Industries: An Observation of Policy Difficulties

The study investigates the influence of the COVID-19 on the rate of R&D investment and foreign exchange development of China's most important emerging industry firms. From 2010 to 2020, data were collected from 26 locations across China, focusing on seven different types of critical creating companies. To analyze the data, we have applied Fourier Increased Unit Root Test, Granger causality assessments test, Pattern Assessment test, Poisson pseudo most excellent probability (PPML) approach, Wald test, and Regression analysis test. The results of the tests reveal a clear underlying association among COVID-19 relates Chinese exports and imports. COVID-19's instant effects on imports and exports lack working capital have been calculated, but the short-term, medium-to-long-term products are composite and unidentified. The article result main results are following: (i) The COVID-19 impacts the R&D investment is main industries like as high-end equipment industry, new materials industry, and new-era data innovation. (ii) The COVID-19 highly affects the imports and exports development network of Chinese strategic emerging industries which emphasizes cross-industry grouping features. The study provides the guidance to the future researchers to focus on COVID-19 affects on the strategic emerging industries of developed and underdeveloped countries to determine of foreign direct investment inflow and unemployment growth rates.JEL: G20, O10, O40

Khoja Isma’ilis in Canada and the United States

Khojas constitute the predominant group in the Shi’a Nizari Isma’ili movement of Islam, globally and in North America. They are of South Asian ethnicities and belong to the 700-year old Satpanth tradition. Other groups attached to the movement are indigenous to Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China. Khojas have led them in the formation of a diaspora spanning Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and Australasia. This transnational religious collectivity holds Aga Khan IV, who ascended to leadership in 1957, to be its Imam in lineal descent from ‘Ali ibn ‘Abi Talib and Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter. He has established a “Seat of the Imamat” (also designated a “Diwan”) in Lisbon, Portugal, and he resides in France, from where he provides religious and worldly guidance to followers around the world. The Imam appoints the leaders of the system of councils that govern the jamats (communities) in various countries. His non-denominational Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which operates social, economic, and cultural programs, has become one of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Elite Khoja families, particularly those of East African provenance, tend to dominate the leadership of the Imam’s institutions. They also have hegemony in the Canadian and American self-governance structures. As a group, Khojas are the wealthiest and most educated in the movement, offering substantial funding as well as professional and voluntary services to the Aga Khan’s institutional infrastructure. Their North American ranks provide a steady stream of monetary, physical, and intellectual resources for the Imam’s transnational programs. However, a paradox lies at the heart of the movement. The Satpanth tradition and Khoja cultural identity has been in the process of marginalization since the early 20th century. A steady effort has sought to eliminate what are perceived to be “Hindu” aspects of the Khojas’ religious and cultural heritage. The movement’s research, educational and cultural bodies give minimal attention to Satpanth. An essentialized Isma’ili Muslim identity is favored over what was, since the movement’s earliest days, a pluralist pursuit of universal truth.

Baltic Social Justice School Leaders

Social justice school leadership as a concept, while familiar in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States school leadership literature, is not widely recognized in other parts of the world. Social justice school leadership appropriately differs from one culture to another and is always context-specific to a particular school setting, great organization structure or country. However, social justice is a necessary and fundamental assumption for all educators committed to combating ignorance and the promotion of student global citizenship as a central theme of school practices. The purpose of this study was to provide understandings of ways that selected social justice school leaders from three countries; Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia conceive of and practice social justice in leading their schools. The manuscript describes how six Baltic directors, identified by local educators on the basis of research conducted by the International School Leaders Development Network (ISLDN) as social justice school leaders, responded to interview questions related to their practice. Four directors were Latvian and one each from Lithuania and Estonia. Limitations to the study include basing conclusions upon a single (or in one case, several) interview(s) per subject and limitations on generalizability of qualitative exploratory case study. By definition, every case study is unique, limiting generalizability. Interviews were thematically analyzed using the following definition: A social justice school leader is one who sees injustice in ways that others do not, and has the moral purpose, skills, and necessary relationships to combat injustice for the benefit of all students. Findings reveal strong application of values to identify problems based on well-being of all students and their families and to work collaboratively with other educators to find solution processes to complex issues related to social justice inequities. As social justice pioneers in their countries, these principals personify social justice school leadership in countries where the term social justice is not part of scholarly discourse.

The Importance of Context in Social Justice Leadership: Implications for Policy and Practice

<p style="text-align: justify;">This article contributes to the evidence base on the significance of context in enacting social justice leadership. It draws on data from the International School Leadership Development Network of 20+ countries who adopted a common qualitative approach involving interviews with principals identified as being social justice leaders. The article focuses on four case studies of Irish principals in varying primary elementary school contexts. Findings reveal local contextual features significantly impacted principals' perceptions, actions, and self-efficacy as social justice leaders. While the actions and motivation of the principals is similar, two of the principals, working in school contexts where the values and norms are not consonant with broader society, appear to lack confidence in their practice of social justice leadership. This article extends the existing evidence base by arguing for enhanced critical consciousness of all stakeholders related to the personal, institutional and community contexts in schools. It recommends a more flexible and iterative process of policy development to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the cultural and ideological struggles in schools. Finally, it calls for governments and policy makers to take responsibility for and support disadvantaged communities as education alone cannot solve the issue of inequity.</p>

Emerging Aspects of Artificial Intelligence for Smart Life

Nowadays Artificial intelligence makes our life easy and comfortable that is hard to imagine that to survive our life without AI technology. We all know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a precious gift to human being. Recently it is used in robotics, education, agriculture, computer vision, cyber security, face recognition, speech recognition, self driving cars, medical image processing, biometrics, bioinformatics, satellite control, disease detection, drugs development, network developments, manufacturing, business, healthcare and medicine. In the digital era AI provides the best results in all most all the domains. This article helps to understand the emerging aspects of AI in various fields.

Hygienic assessment in the theory and practice of upbringing

For the younger generation, socialization in the digital space poses increasing potential and real risks. Simultaneously, the transformation of educational process with a forced increase of distance learning formats, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the issue of interaction between teachers and students in addressing upbringing tasks. This is confirmed by current international and Russian studies. Discussion of the quality of the educational environment from the point of view of its safety inevitably encourages the search for assessment tools. This article provides a theoretical and methodological justification for effective assessment of upbringing hygienic and its implementation in the current context, based on theoretical and empirical studies. The study took an interdisciplinary approach, treating the safety of upbringing as a complex multifactorial phenomenon based on the integration of natural science and socio-humanitarian knowledge. It used a cross-cultural analysis of empirical data from Russian and foreign studies in the development of formats, strategies, and features of hygienic assessment in education taking into account its cultural variability. Network theory was used to assess the importance of the role of relationships in determining teachers’ readiness resources to carry out a hygienic assessment of upbringing safety activities in digital and network contexts. The core of the educational context of safety is defined as the process of providing means and measures aimed at productive self-realization of children in various life situations based on the assessment of real and potential threats arising in the process of socialization. The principles of safety (socio-biological balance, well-being, integration, cognition), the content and indicators of the hygienic assessment of this process (physiological, social, personal, psychological) are highlighted. The article describes the development network of the teacher's readiness to assess upbringing safety based on non-hierarchical value-resource interaction in upbringing activities, assessment of its safety and hygienic potential. The results obtained will contribute to expansion and improvement of theoretical ideas about hygienic expertise in pedagogical processes, disclosure, and clarification of the concept of ‘hygienic assessment in upbringing’, enrich theoretical ideas and effective practices of upbringing in distance education formats.

Examining the Relationship between the Economic Performance of Technology-Based Small Suppliers and Socially Sustainable Procurement

Sustainable public procurement plays an important role in addressing not only environmental but also economic and social issues through government acquisitions from technology-based small suppliers. In this context, the objective of this study is to better understand the holistic public procurement process by assessing the operational efficiency of technology-based small suppliers and associating the economic aspect of public procurement with the social aspect, such as women-owned businesses. To this end, we analyzed U.S. Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research grantees by combining network data envelopment analysis with bootstrap truncated regression analysis. Drawing on the analysis results, we found that (1) there is heterogeneity in the performance of research and development, network building, and commercialization sub-processes, and (2) there is a positive relationship between the overall performance and women-owned small suppliers who excel particularly in network building. The former implies that small suppliers may have different expertise in the chain of public procurement; the latter suggests that woman entrepreneurs with a business network may be able to outperform their counterparts in the public procurement market.