A Glossary of Business Sustainability Concepts

This chapter presents a glossary of business sustainability concepts. The business sustainability definitions have been subjected to an abstractive decomposition. The phrases and terms derived from the abstractive decomposition has been categorized into three types, and each answers the questions of why sustainability, how it could be achieved, and where it will lead the businesses. Concepts categorized under each of these questions are defined individually and described with contextual relevance and examples from literature or industry. The glossary has been presented with a logical order to supplement the table of phrases and concepts. This work is an extension of the work reported on defining business sustainability through an abstractive decomposition.

Non-dominated sorting based multi-page photo collage

The development of social networking services (SNSs) revealed a surge in image sharing. The sharing mode of multi-page photo collage (MPC), which posts several image collages at a time, can often be observed on many social network platforms, which enables uploading images and arrangement in a logical order. This study focuses on the construction of MPC for an image collection and its formulation as an issue of joint optimization, which involves not only the arrangement in a single collage but also the arrangement among different collages. Novel balance-aware measurements, which merge graphic features and psychological achievements, are introduced. Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize the MPC guided by the measurements. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can lead to diverse, visually pleasant, and logically clear MPC results, which are comparable to manually designed MPC results.

Using partial knowledge to inform the creation of learning progressions

The aim of this study was to show that some of the errors made by students when responding to mathematics assessment items can indicate progress in the development of conceptual understanding. By granting partial credit for specific incorrect responses by early secondary students, estimates of the difficulty of demonstrating full and partial knowledge of skills associated with the development of proportional reasoning were determined using Rasch analysis. The errors were confirmed as indicators of progress, and hence partial knowledge, when the thresholds of achievement followed a logical order: The greater the proficiency of the students, the more likely they were to receive a higher score. Consideration of this partial knowledge can enhance the descriptions of the likely behaviours of students at the various levels of learning progressions and this can be informative for teachers in their planning of learning activities.

Asynchronous Multi-grained Graph Network For Interpretable Multi-hop Reading Comprehension

Multi-hop machine reading comprehension (MRC) task aims to enable models to answer the compound question according to the bridging information. Existing methods that use graph neural networks to represent multiple granularities such as entities and sentences in documents update all nodes synchronously, ignoring the fact that multi-hop reasoning has a certain logical order across granular levels. In this paper, we introduce an Asynchronous Multi-grained Graph Network (AMGN) for multi-hop MRC. First, we construct a multigrained graph containing entity and sentence nodes. Particularly, we use independent parameters to represent relationship groups defined according to the level of granularity. Second, an asynchronous update mechanism based on multi-grained relationships is proposed to mimic human multi-hop reading logic. Besides, we present a question reformulation mechanism to update the latent representation of the compound question with updated graph nodes. We evaluate the proposed model on the HotpotQA dataset and achieve top competitive performance in distractor setting compared with other published models. Further analysis shows that the asynchronous update mechanism can effectively form interpretable reasoning chains at different granularity levels.

Compound Figures: A Multi-Channel View of Communication and Psychological Plausibility

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels (gesture, intonation, facial expression), so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern (2000). He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent.

Prospects for the Growth of Labor Productivity in the Transition to Postindustrial Technological Paradigms

The purpose of the work was to determine the value of labor productivity pro-vided by the fourth, fifth and sixth technological modes. Based on the modeling of Kondratyev's cycles and technological structures in the economic dynamics of devel-oped countries, econometric estimates of labor productivity obtained. It has been estab-lished that during the transition from the fourth to the fifth technological order, the growth of labor productivity in developed countries is ensured from 2.0 to 8.0 times, an average of 4.8 times. In the transition from the fourth to the sixth technological order, the growth of labor productivity in developed countries is ensured from 6 to 17 times, an average of 10.1 times. In the transition from the fifth to the sixth order, the techno-logical order provides an increase in the forgiveness of labor from 1.5 to 3.2 times, on average 2.4 times. In the Russian economy, in the short term, with the transition to the fifth technological order, one can expect productivity growth from 2 to 8 times com-pared to the beginning of the 2000s. In the long term, in the Russian economy during the transition to the sixth technological order, one can expect productivity growth from 6 to 17 times compared to the beginning of the 2000s.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEUROTECHNOLOGIES IN THE PERIOD OF THE SIXTH TECHNO-LOGICAL ORDER

The subject of the article is the development of neurotechnologies in the sixth technological or-der, the object of the article is neurotechnologies, the purpose of the work is to increase the ef-ficiency of the development of neurotechnologies in the sixth technological order, to achieve this goal, the following tasks are solved: research of the concept, content, structural elements of the sixth technological order; description of the essence and content of neurotechnologies; de-velopment of methods of logical analysis and synthesis of neurotechnologies; the scientific methods in the article are forecasting, synthesis and analysis, historical and logical analysis, expert assessments, comparative and system analysis; the scientific novelty of the article is as-sociated with the formation of the methodology for the development of neurotechnologies in the period of the sixth technological order.

A Bio-Inspired Algorithm for Symmetric Encryption

The exploits of the structure of the DNA to realize the cryptographic systems is a new direction. The security of data transfer is an important factor for data transmission. Cryptography is one of the methods that ensures this constraint by techniques for sending data confidentially. Harnessing the benefits of DNA to secure information content makes cryptography more efficient. In this article, the authors propose a symmetric cryptography system based on DNA called Stegano-DNA- which operates under two main modules: scrambling and encryption. In its scrambling phase, Stegano-DNA eliminates the logical order of the letters in the clear text by the use of boxes of substitutions, and in its encryption phase, looks for the short sequence DNA in the chromosome sequence and memorizes only the number of positions needed to optimize the encryption time than when memorizing all positions.

Using Moodle as a Solution to Interdisciplinary E-collaboration Issues

Rapid technological development in recent years has contributed to numerous changes in many areas of life, including education and communication. Establishing interdisciplinary collaboration brings many benefits, it is, however, often associated with numerous problems and inconveniences, as well as the need for constant improvement, lifelong learning, professional development (CPD) and finding an effective way of information transfer. Living in a constant rush makes the logical order of information transfer become a key aspect, as more and more operations are being done chaotically, using multiple online tools. Although collaboration happens to be complicated even for colleagues specializing in different aspects of the same profession, establishing cooperation between specific groups of interdisciplinary specialists, such as engineers and physicians, has a significant impact on modern diagnostics and medical treatment development. Based on some selected case studies investigated at Gdańsk University of Technology andMedical University of Gdańsk, supported by an overview of available education and collaboration tools, a solution based on the Moodle LMS platform has been proposed, implemented, and analyzed.

Sforno’s Threefold Approach to the Torah’s Structure

Classical exegetes’ exploration of structure and order in the Pentateuch is generally perceived as part of an internal-Jewish debate. However, in an exceptional testimonial, the introduction to R. Ovadiah Sforno’s Torah commentary describes a polemic against the Torah grounded in a claim about the Torah’s disorderliness. Responding to this critique, Sforno set out to uncover the Torah’s logical order. His efforts to elucidate the Torah’s order and structure include three aspects: he points to a circular structure that is repeated seven times in Genesis-Numbers, he systematically links the independent legal sections in Deuteronomy, and he discusses the Torah’s division into five separate books. While methodically addressing the question of order, Sforno also offers a response to fundamental theological issues at the center of the interfaith polemic.