Representative Democracy as Kitsch, and Artificial Intelligence’s Promise of Emancipation

The chapter explores relations between modernity and the decentralization of authority, kitsch and partial centralization, the avant-garde and social media. Decentralization is identified as an important expression of modernist philosophy in current technology. As a characteristic of current directions of social progress, authority-opposing trends of modernism and post-modernism find significant support in new technology via less falsifiable decentralization based on crypto-currencies, blockchain, social media, search engines, and other products of the internet era. The scalability of classic athenian democracy to large societies is not yet accomplished by technology. Against the early modernity tendency to cheaply give the masses an almost effortless sense of participation (features associated with kitsch), the system of representative democracy promises to become more genuine through opportunities for electronic civic involvement.

Identification of Artificial Recharge Sites for Nand Samand Catchment

Security of groundwater is widely regarded as a serious impediment to India's economic and social progress. According to the Central Ground Water Board's (CGWB) assessment, India's groundwater tables are plummeting at an alarming rate, with reserves in some regions reaching critical levels. Unregulated groundwater use in southern peninsular India has also resulted in excessive extraction, lowering the 'critical' threshold. With over 30 million groundwater structures in use, India is on the verge of a disaster of over-extraction that will leave 60% of all aquifers in critical condition within the next two decades. To resolve the issue, a variety of renewable groundwater solutions must be implemented. Artificial recharge is a procedure that augments groundwater at a pace that is significantly greater than the rate of replenishment under natural conditions, which may give a solution. The current study is for the Nand Samand catchment in the district of Rajasthan. The investigation of artificial groundwater recharge sites is being conducted using an integrated Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) approach. Thematic maps such as topographic elevation, post-mosoon groundwater level, recharge, slope, transmissivity and soils map are created, and weighted overlay analysis is used to identify areas suitable for artificial recharge. Keywords: Nand Samand catchment, artificial recharge zone, thematic map, remote sensing, GIS

Forecasting the next revolution: food technology’s impact on consumers' acceptance and satisfaction

PurposeIn a sector that needs to satisfy a fast-increasing population, advancements like cultivated meat and bio-circular economy are basic to sustain the industry and the society. As innovations are key for economic and social progress, it is crucial to understand consumers' position on this matter.Design/methodology/approachBased on text data mining, 7,030 tweets were collected and organised into 14 different food-related topics. Of the total, 6 of these categories were positive, 5 were negative and 3 were neutral.FindingsIn total, 6 categories related to food technologies were positively perceived by Twitter users, such as innovative solutions and sustainable agriculture, while 5 like the virtual dimensions of the industry or crisis-related scenarios were negatively perceived. It is remarkable that 3 categories had a neutral sentiment, which gives ground to improvement before consumers have a negative opinion and consequently will be more complicated to change their minds.Originality/valueTechnological innovations are becoming predominant in the food industry. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made the sector improve even faster. Traditional methods needed to be substituted and technologies such as robots, artificial intelligence, blockchain and genetics are here to stay.

Does National Gender Equality Matter? Gender Difference in the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Human Capital and Entrepreneurial Intention

Gender equality contributes to economic growth and social progress by promoting women’s social and economic participation. The national gender equality level can affect women’s education and opportunities for economic participation. In this work, we examine whether entrepreneurial human capital (entrepreneurial education and experience) affects entrepreneurial intention and whether these relationships depend on gender and a country’s gender equality level. We used Global Entrepreneurship Trend Report (GETR) data provided by the Korean Entrepreneurship Foundation. The global survey was conducted by the Korean National Statistical Office in 2016. The data were collected from 20 countries, including Korea, and contain at least 2000 individual responses from each country. We used HLM analysis with the HLM 6.0 program to examine the hypotheses. Our results show that entrepreneurship education increases entrepreneurial intention, and that the relationship is stronger among women than men. We also found that for women, the positive relationship between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial intention is stronger in countries with lower gender equality. As for prior entrepreneurial experience, neither gender nor national gender equality level moderated the relationship between experience and entrepreneurial intention. This study contributes to the extension of entrepreneurship theory, especially in the area of women entrepreneurship. We confirm that entrepreneurial human capital contributes to entrepreneurial intention, and that gender and national gender equality level comprise an important social context that influences the effects of education and experience on the entrepreneurial intention of women.

Improving Education for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Chinese Technical Universities: A Quest for Building a Sustainable Framework

The global economic trends and the winds of technological change have elevated the status of integration between industry and education for innovation and entrepreneurship to that of being a national strategic priority of China. However, for a long time prior to that, the many differences between the industrial and educational systems have caused a rift between education for innovation and entrepreneurship and professional education, a profound disconnection between professional education and the local industries, and the subsequent disinterest of entrepreneurial mentors. In this paper, we analyze the status of education for innovation and entrepreneurship in Chinese technical universities. It is pointed out that technical universities should deepen the integration between the industry and education for innovation and entrepreneurship in order to mitigate the imbalance between the supply side of the higher education talent training and the demand side of industrial development. It is also argued that technical universities should change their talent training paradigm, which includes a makeover of the organizational structure and of the curricular system, as well as make amends in the innovation ecosystem with respect to the organization of incubation platforms and of teacher–student teams, in order to promote national and regional economic development, as well as social progress. A method to evaluate the performance of the education for innovation and entrepreneurship in Chinese technical universities, based on specific performance indicators including patents filled, publications, awards in competitions, and acquired funding and on certain non-specific ones including organizational arrangements and satisfaction rates, is presented and then applied to the specific case of the Changzhou Institute of Technology.

Renewable Energies and Urban Environment in Spain

Sustainable development is a type of development that advocates first of all the harmonization between economic development and environmental protection, adding social progress; it would therefore be a development in which high and stable growth in the production of goods and services is compatible with widespread social progress, environmental protection, and prudent and efficient use of natural resources. Among the different sectoral areas transferred by the idea of sustainable development is undoubtedly the field of urban planning and housing. The activity generated in cities has an important environmental impact, so it is necessary to orient urban structures, homes, and buildings under premises that are as respectful as possible with the environment, also taking advantage of its economic potential and its effect on the social fabric that inhabits it. It is about promoting integrated actions in the urban environment that are in tune with the objectives.

Ecosystem Valuation of Agricultural Land Use Change

With the rapid pace of urbanization, land-use change is essential for economic and social progress; however, it does not come without costs. With such rapid urbanization, there comes pressure on the land and its resources, like that of food and timber production with a significant impact on the livelihood of millions of people. With the loss of agricultural land due to developmental activities, future agriculture would be very intensive. Therefore, it is likely with the existing pattern of allocating land uses for future development that we may lose the ecosystem services and highly productive agricultural lands. The value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. The study focuses on identifying underlying causes of the land-use change, ecosystem services affected due to land-use change in peri-urban areas of Chandigarh using spatial mapping of affected ecosystem services and suggesting proposals for promoting agricultural ecosystem values using economically-informed policy instruments.

New Indicators and Measurement Methods for Welfare in the Global Economy Era

This study discusses the inadequacy of GDP alone as a measure of welfare in the global economic age and examines alternative welfare indicators and measurement methods. This study, which discusses the human development index (HDI), the inequality adjusted human development index (I-HDI), the gender inequality index (GII), the multidimensional poverty index (MPI), the social progress index (SPI), the happy planet index (HPI), the better life index (BLI), the Legatum prosperity index(LPI), the human capital index (HCI), and the ecological footprint (EF) methods, shares the country rankings of these methods and reveals the differences in the results depending on the method. It also draws attention to the differences between the economic size and welfare level by sharing the rankings of the world's 10 largest economies in alternative methods. In addition, the study examines the obstacles to the inability to establish a complete, precise, and generally accepted method of measuring welfare.