Decision-Making Strategy for Digital Transformation: A Two-Year Analytical Study and Follow-Up Concerning Innovative Improvements in University e-Services

Universities worldwide strive to provide the best student services possible, particularly those that support student achievements and career goals. Therefore, academic advising continues to be a significant part of the student experience, one which universities need to fully understand in terms of its objectives, application processes, and required skill. As a result of significant technological improvements since the turn of the millennium, including expanding internet applications and digital transformations, universities have established computer information systems that support academic advising and course registration services. This study examined the effects of modifications to the electronic academic advising and course registration systems at King Abdulaziz University in 2018, and then again in 2020, following a university-wide system failure in 2018 resulting from a demand overload. In 2018, a preliminary statistical analysis and student feedback survey were conducted by the authors to measure student satisfaction with the online portal On-Demand University Services (ODUS Plus). In addition to recommendations suggested by the 2018 analysis such as balancing the load distribution of the university’s network, organizational (i.e., non-technical) solutions, rules, and regulations were adjusted such as progressive course registration that prioritized those expected to graduate first. The survey and analysis were repeated by the authors in 2020 to assess improvements in student satisfaction. As a result of the changes, the investigation revealed improved student satisfaction with the performance of ODUS Plus and network access. Overall, students were significantly more satisfied in 2020 than in 2018. This research shows that some technical challenges can be resolved using re-engineered processes and organizational solutions.

Federalist Fascism

This article analyses the New Right’s understanding of the French Revolution. Since the most prominent intellectual of the New Right, Alain de Benoist, frames ‘Jacobinism’ as the New Right’s main enemy, the New Right may be understood as a counter-tradition to what it understands as Jacobinism. De Benoist defines Jacobinism as an ideology that makes people essentially equal and identical by means of the state. Against this, he posits what he calls ‘federalism’—a project which aims at promoting and defending ethnic, cultural and other differences. In this article, the author shows how the New Right creates a mythical counter-tradition of federalism. We should understand this as a ‘federalist fascism’: instead of mass parties and an authoritarian nation-state, the New Right seeks the mythical rebirth of an Indo-European community consisting of various regional peoples who will supposedly realise their authentic nature through ethnically purified societies governed by a federal European-wide system.

The U.S. Needs a National Human Health Observing System

The COVID-19 pandemic and increasing frequency and severity of environmental disasters reveal an urgent need for a robust health observing/surveillance system. With the possible exception of Brazil, we know of no such comprehensive health observing capacity. The US should create a national system of linked regionally-based health monitoring systems similar to those for weather, ocean conditions, and climate. Like those for weather, the health observing system should operate continuously, collecting mental, physical, and community health data before, during, and after events. The system should include existing cross-sectional health data surveys, along with significant new investment in regional longitudinal cohort studies. The recently described framework for a Gulf of Mexico Community Health Observing System is suggested as a potential model for development of a nation-wide system.

Physiological and Cellular Targets of Neurotrophic Anxiolytic Phytochemicals in Food and Dietary Supplements

Diet impacts anxiety in two main ways. First anxiety can be caused by deficiencies in antioxidants, neurotransmitter precursors, amino acids, cations and vitamins and other cofactors. Second, anxiety can be reduced by anxiolytic nutraceuticals which are food molecules that bind to molecular targets of the amygdala and the hypothalamus-pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA-axis). Anxiety is a feeling of fear that arises from a perceived threat and can be a beneficial coping mechanism to threats and stressors. However excessive anxiety is a disorder that interferes with healthy responses to stressors. The amygdala is responsible for assigning value to a threat or stressor and triggering the HPA-axis to support the body wide system responses to the threat. The amygdala also communicates with the neuroplastic learning and memory centers of the hippocampus to fix or set a learned value to the threat. Interestingly, many anxiolytic nutraceuticals that show benefits in human clinical trials have neurotrophic activity and increase neuronal plasticity. Moreover, anxiolytic nutraceuticals either act like the neurotrophins, nerve growth factor (NGF), brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF and neurotrophin-3 (NT3) by either directly binding to or potentiating the tyrosine receptor kinase (TRK) family of receptors (TRKA, TRKB and TRKC) and activating the ERK1/2 signal transduction pathway associated with neurite outgrowth and neural plasticity. This chapter will explore the neuritogenic activity of clinically proven plant-based anxiolytic nutraceuticals and examine the commonality of TRKA-C receptors and the ERK1/2 signaling pathway in the pharmacological and nutraceutical treatment of anxiety disorders.

Intrinsic hospital factors: overlooked cause for variations in delay to transfer for endovascular thrombectomy

BackgroundIntrinsic hospital factors leading to time delay to inter-hospital transfer for endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) have not been adequately investigated, leading to uncertainty in generalizability of hub and spoke EVT services. We investigated the contribution of intrinsic hospital factors to variations in time delay in a multicenter, retrospective study.MethodsThe setting was a hub and spoke EVT state-wide system for a population of 6.3 million and 34 spoke hospitals. We collected data on acute large vessel occlusion strokes transferred from spoke to hub for consideration of EVT between January 2016 and December 2018. The primary endpoint was the proportion of variability in delay-time in transfer cases contributed to by intrinsic hospital factors estimated through variance component analysis implemented as a mixed-effect linear regression model with hospitals as random effects.ResultsWe included 434 patients. The median age was 72 years (IQR 62–79), 44% were female, and the median baseline National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) was 16 (IQR 11–20). The median onset to CT time was 100 mins (IQR 69–157) at the spoke hospitals and CT acquisition at the spoke hospital to time of transfer was 93 min (IQR 70–132). 53% of the observed variability in time from CT acquisition at the spoke hospital to transfer to the EVT center was explained by intrinsic hospital factors, as opposed to patient-related factors.ConclusionsIntrinsic hospital factors explained more than half of the observed variability in time from CT acquisition at the spoke hospital to departure for transfer. We recommend that the design of hub and spoke EVT services should account for intrinsic hospital factors to minimize hospital transfer delay.

Communicating clocks shape circadian homeostasis

Circadian clocks temporally coordinate physiology and align it with geophysical time, which enables diverse life-forms to anticipate daily environmental cycles. In complex organisms, clock function originates from the molecular oscillator within each cell and builds upward anatomically into an organism-wide system. Recent advances have transformed our understanding of how clocks are connected to achieve coherence across tissues. Circadian misalignment, often imposed in modern society, disrupts coordination among clocks and has been linked to diseases ranging from metabolic syndrome to cancer. Thus, uncovering the physiological circuits whereby biological clocks achieve coherence will inform on both challenges and opportunities in human health.

The Forest Sector in the 2030 EU Climate Policy Framework: Looking back to Assess Its Future

From 2021 onwards, forests and forestry will for the first time contribute to the European Union’s climate action targets. The new Land Use, Land Use Change & Forestry (lulucf) Regulation commits Member States to achieve carbon neutrality on the basis of an EU-wide system. The system accounts for carbon sequestered and emitted from forests and other land uses like crop- and wetland. What looks like a significant step in the Union’s climate policy framework, however, leaves the large potential of Europe’s forest sector for climate mitigation untapped. The present article draws this conclusion from a comprehensive analysis of 67 documents related to decision-making on the lulucf Regulation. It reveals coalitional politics and the salience of the Commission’s behavior as key to explain the Regulation’s limited scope and concludes with assessing the future role of forests in the Union’s climate policy framework.

Russian initiative to unblock water conflicts in the Middle East

The paper is based on the materials of the Strategic Session on the problems of "Water Diplomacy", which was held in Moscow at the end of October 2021 by the НSE University (Russia) together with the Russian Ecological Society, Geneva Water Hub, International Association of Lake Regions and a number of other international and regional environmental organizations. The discussion focused on issues related to the implementation of the Russian initiative to form an international expert working group on water and environmental problems of the Middle East. The article tells about the projects of solving water problems in the Middle East in a collective format, about the reasons that complicate the implementation of these plans. An important place in the article is dedicated to the evaluation of the activities of the first joint environmental projects in the Middle East with the participation of representatives of Arab countries and Israel, the analysis of the most optimal ways to move towards the formation of a region-wide system of rational and safe water use in the Middle East. In this context, specific proposals are being considered, including the creation of a regional unified water center - the Middle East Water Council.

A QCA Crisp set study in matching Cross Managerial Alignment with ERP implementation outcome, leading or misleading subsidiary-innovations

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is the most important methodological innovation in management and social science in the last two decades (Fiss et al., 2016). This paper attempts to use this innovative research method to study innovation in a Parent-Subsidiary ERP implementation project. A Crisp set QCA study is used to study 18 company-wide system projects in subsidiaries of a Multinational Enterprise (MNE). The generic applications of the innovation projects enabled the study to have a common denominator to gauge the innovation resulting in a variance of planned and actual completion dates. Although the data collected was from a completed projects log, the study took a subsidiary-innovation approach to measure the managerial alignments and the possible application of agency theory. Keywords: Subsidiary innovation, Parent-Subsidiary relations, Agency theory

Family Ties and Written Multilingual Heritage of the Frankapani at the Dawn of the Early Modern Period

In the second half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century the Frankapani of Krk, Senj, and Modruš were at the peak of their power. This family of Croatian counts was networked through marriage from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea with Italian, Hungarian, Austrian, and German royal and aristocratic families. Their presence in the courts of their next of kin, as well as their in-laws, is therefore not surprising, whether it be the Roman Curia or the Hohenzollern Branderburger Palace in Berlin. In such a wide system of communications, the Frankapani presented themselves to the European public as a multilingual family ready to promulgate not only the written heritage nurtured during the Middle Ages in Croatia (Latin and Glagolitic), but also ready to adopt, promote, and disseminate the written heritage of their spouses (Italian, German, Hungarian). The following examples attest to this statement: the Roman breviary translated into the German language by Christopher Frankapan and his wife Apollonia Lang printed in 1518 in Venice, the anti-Turkish speech in Latin delivered by Christopher’s father, Bernardin, before the German assembly in Nuremberg and printed in 1522 for the occasion, the translated epistles of Saint Paul, from Latin to Hungarian, donated by Catherine Frankapan married to Gabriel (Gábor) Perényi, printed in Krakow in 1533, and the first Croatian- language breviary written in the Latin script, rather than in the Glagolitic, commissioned by Catherine Frankapan married to Nicholas Zrinski, published in 1560 in Padua.