Digitainability: The Combined Effects of the Megatrends Digitalization and Sustainability

The concept of digitainability has recently been suggested to underscore potential cross-fertilization effects between digitalization and sustainability, which have often been neglected. This article draws on an innovation-based view to develop a conceptual framework for combining digitalization and sustainability in firms’ strategic initiatives. It distinguishes four settings depending on whether firms pursue either digitalization or sustainability – or both or none of them to a strong degree. Beyond the individual importance of the two megatrends, their potential positive and negative interdependencies will gain further importance, and this article underscores the need for overcoming a potential dark side of digital solutions in terms of their carbon footprint and energy consumption to enable a sustainable digital transformation. In addition, digitainability offers the opportunity to move beyond optimization and cost savings due to digitalization and sustainability initiatives in order to capture the cross-fertilization potential of these two megatrends for innovation and new business development.

Analysis of Distinct Feature Groups in the Credit Scoring Problem

Registration and financial data have been traditionally used for the credit scoring problem. However,slight improvements in the reliability of the scores positively impacts financial companies. Therefore, exploring newfeatures is a strategic task. This work analyzes the importance of new feature groups not commonly employed forthe credit scoring task and others already used. We categorized features from open credit scoring datasets, suchas German and Australian and compared their groups with the ones of a company dataset used in this work. Ourdataset contains unusual feature groups, such as historical, geolocation, web behavior, and demographic data. In ouranalyzes, we first conducted bivariate tests with each feature-pair to assess their individual importance. Secondly, weran XGBoost machine learning model with each feature group to evaluate each group importance. We also appliedfeature selection with binary Particle Swarm Optimization to assess the groups importance when combined. Next, weemployed correlation tests to find inner and inter-correlation among the features groups. Finally, we used the companydataset and employed AdaBoost, Multilayer Perceptron, and XGBoost algorithms to find the best model for the task.Some of our main findings were that the unusual features added a slight improvement to registration features. We alsodetected reasonable inner correlation among some feature groups and found that all groups were relevant for the taskwith the Historical Group as the most promising. Lastly, XGBoost obtained the best performance over AdaBoost andMultilayer-perceptron for the task.

Fame, Obscurity and Power Laws in Music History

This paper investigates the processes leading to musical fame or obscurity, whether for composers, performers, or works themselves. It starts from the observation that the patterns of success, across many historical music datasets, follow a similar mathematical relationship known as a power law, often with an exponent approximately equal to two. It presents several simple models which can produce power law distributions. An examination of these models' transience characteristics suggests parallels with some historical music examples, giving clues to the ways that success and obscurity might emerge in practice and the extent to which success might be influenced by inherent musical quality. These models can be seen as manifestations of a more fundamental process resulting from the law of maximum entropy, subject to a constraint on the average value of the logarithm of the success measure. This implies that musical success is a multiplicative quality, and suggests that musical markets operate to strike a balance between familiarity (socio-cultural importance) and novelty (individual importance). The common power law exponent of two is seen to emerge as a consequence of the tendency for musical activity to be spread evenly across the log-success bands.

SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SERVICE ROBOTS

We introduce the concept of social sustainability, intertwined with ecological and economic aspects, to the field of service robots and comparable automation technology. It takes a first step towards a comprehensive guideline that operationalizes and applies social sustainability. By applying this guideline to the project MURMEL we offer a concept that collects and rates social key issues to visualize their individual importance. Social sustainability is an important and often overlooked aspect of sustainable technology development which should be considered in the early development phase.

Hernán Cortés

Hernán Cortés (b. 1485–d. 1547) was a central figure in the military, political, and economic colonization of Mesoamerica in the 16th century, and most notable for his role in the destruction of the Aztec Empire in 1521. Córtes’s role in colonial history and the conquest of Mexico has long been controversial. Some people laud his military expertise and political maneuvering as evidence that he was a brilliant tactician who won against incredible odds, while others consider him a ruthless (and sometimes lucky) conquistador who left a trail of destruction in his wake due to his obsession with gold; while more recent historiography has tended to marginalize his individual importance. The centrality of Córtes’s role in the narrative of Spain’s colonial empire, and the destruction of indigenous empires, means he has continued to play a central role in the development and expression of national identity in Mexico from independence until the present. When he is analyzed, Cortés is frequently paired with Moctezuma II, one of the last important Aztec emperors, or his translator and consort Malinche (or Malintzin). Relatively little is known about Cortés when he went to Honduras to crush a rebellion, or about his time in Algiers after he returned to Europe. Ultimately his descendants lost control of his considerable land holdings, tributary, and lordly rights south of Mexico City and died a lonely death. Cortés was born in Medellín, Extremadura, Spain, and died in Castilleja de la Cuesta, Andalusia, and against his last wishes was not buried in Mexico. Cortés’s bones were eventually moved to Mexico City and now reside in the Hospital de Jesús, assigned to a poorly lit corner with a simple plaque bearing his name, date of birth, and date of death.

Ciało mitu. Piłsudski Brunona Schulza

The present paper focuses above all on a variant of the legend of Józef Piłsudski presented by Bruno Schulz in his literary works. It is definitely not the best known literary incarnation of the myth of Polish First Marshall, neither is it the most quoted one, like excerpts from General Barcz by Józef Kaden-Bandrowski or from Jan Lechoń’s book of poetry Silver and Black [Srebrne i czarne]. Still, Schulz gives us a very interesting analysis of the formation of this legend, and we can find in it Schulz’s own approach and style. His views on the formation of this legend are in fact ahistorical, free of the specific context. When he writes that “unbelievable historic maturity was incarnated in this man,” he is closer to heroic narration rather than sociological analysis. It is not a coincidence then that Schulz’s sense of historic moment is intertwined with his understanding of myth and his literary mythology. The author of The Street of Crocodiles worked on his essay “How Legends Come Into Being” [Jak powstają legendy] when he was finishing “Spring,” which brings the two texts closer and gives a historical incentive for a parallel reading of both, which is also justified by their content. Schulz puts Piłsudski in his own symbolic domain and makes him an agent/actor of his own narration. The problem of his individual importance or eminence is confronted with the views of Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke. The aim of the paper’s author is not just a close reading of Schulz’s text, but juxtaposing it with a few other analyses of the phenomena of birth, rise, and death of the legend. Karol Irzykowski was one of the most clear-headed analysts of those processes and that is why his views are quoted in the fragments devoted to a “socio-cultural process” which he treated not as an esoteric phenomenon but as a conscious strategy of influencing people. A short analysis of the quotation from Piłsudski about the role of legends and the oppressiveness of the legendary discourse in Polish culture is also important. Piłsudski, who understood the vampirical character of legends, became a prisoner of Schulz’s creative imagination in his essay.

Minimal in vivo requirements for developmentally regulated cardiac long intergenic non-coding RNAs

Long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) have been implicated in aspects of gene regulation, but their requirement for development needs empirical interrogation. To begin to understand the roles lincRNAs might play in heart development, we computationally identified nine murine lincRNAs that have developmentally regulated transcriptional and epigenomic profiles specific to early heart differentiation. Six of the nine lincRNAs had in vivo expression patterns supporting a potential function in heart development, including a transcript downstream of the cardiac transcription factor Hand2 that we named Handlr (Hand2-associated lincRNA), Rubie, and Atcayos. We genetically ablated these six lincRNAs in mouse, which implicated genomic regulatory roles to four of the cohort, However, none of the lincRNA deletions led to severe cardiac phenotypes. Thus, we stressed the hearts of adult Handlr and Atcayos mutant mice by transverse aortic banding and found that absence of these lincRNAs did not affect cardiac hypertrophy or left ventricular function post-stress. Our results support roles for lincRNA transcripts and/or transcription to regulation of topologically associated genes. However, the individual importance of developmentally-specific lincRNAs is yet to be established. Their status as either gene-like entities or epigenetic components of the nucleus should be further considered.

Autophagy, apoptosis, and mitochondria: molecular integration and physiological relevance in skeletal muscle

Apoptosis and autophagy are processes resulting from the integration of cellular stress and death signals. Their individual importance is highlighted by the lethality of various mouse models missing apoptosis or autophagy-related genes. In addition to their independent roles, significant overlap exists with respect to the signals that stimulate these processes as well as their effector consequences. While these cellular systems exemplify the programming redundancies that underlie many fundamental biological mechanisms, their intertwined relationship means that dysfunction can promote pathology. Although both autophagic and apoptotic signaling are active in skeletal muscle during various diseases and atrophy, their specific roles here are somewhat unique. Given our growing understanding of how specific changes at the cellular level impact whole-organism physiology, there is an equally growing interest in pharmacological manipulation of apoptosis and/or autophagy for altering human physiology and health.