Global Transformation Research Articles

Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Global Food Transformation System: Edible Insects vs. Livestock.

Antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs) pose a significant threat to the global food transformation system. The increasing prevalence of ARGs in food has elicited apprehension about public health safety. The widespread dissemination of ARGs in food products, driven by the inappropriate use of antibiotics, presents significant adversity for the safety of emerging future food sources such as edible insects. As the world faces increasing challenges related to food security, climate change, and antibiotic resistance, edible insects offer a sustainable and resilient food source. The intriguing possibility of edible insects serving as a less conducive environment for ARGs compared to livestock warrants further exploration and investigation. In this recent work, we listed ARGs from edible insects detected so far by in vitro approaches and aimed to construct a fair comparison with ARGs from livestock based on relevant genes. We also presented our argument by analyzing the factors that might be responsible for ARG abundance in livestock vs. edible insects. Livestock and edible insects have diverse gut microbiota, and their diets differ with antibiotics. Consequently, their ARG abundance may vary as well. In addition, processed edible insects have lower levels of ARGs than raw ones. We hypothesize that edible insects could potentially contain a lower abundance of ARGs and exhibit a diminished ability to disseminate ARGs relative to livestock. A regulatory framework could help intercept the increasing prevalence of ARGs. Due diligence should also be taken when marketing edible insects for consumption.

Satellites Reveal Global Migration Patterns of Natural Mountain Treelines during Periods of Rapid Warming

Profound global transformations in the Anthropocene epoch are hastening shifts in species ranges, with natural mountain treeline migration playing a crucial role in this overarching species movement. The varied reactions of mountain treelines to climatic conditions across diverse climatic zones, when compounded by local disturbances, result in distinct migration patterns. Usually, warming encourages mountain treelines to migrate to higher elevations. Nevertheless, in a period of rapid warming, it remains unclear whether the natural mountain treeline in global thermal climatic zones and subclimatic zones has expedited its upward movement. Here, we employed remote sensing observations and the random forest algorithm to investigate the natural treeline dynamics across 24 major mountain ranges worldwide amidst a period of rapid warming (1990–2020). Our research shows substantial disparities in the migration patterns of natural mountain treelines across the global thermal zone. The natural mountain treeline in tropical and subtropical zones descends by an average of 1.1 and 0.8 m per year, respectively. Only 18.8 and 35.5% of the natural mountain treelines in these regions had undergone upward migration, respectively. The average migration rates of natural mountain treelines in temperate and boreal zones were 0.7 m per year. Correspondingly, 47 and 33.2% of the natural mountain treelines in these zones had already shifted to higher elevations. The highest average migration rate of natural mountain treelines occurs in temperate continental climates (1.7 m per year). The loss or degradation of alpine species habitats, a direct consequence of the upward movement of the treeline, highlights the necessity for increased monitoring and protection of alpine species in temperate and boreal zones in the future.

Neural Network Algorithms in Current Processes of Transformation of Traditional Worldview and Ideological Systems.

This study is devoted to identifying potential risks, challenges, and threats of intensive development and active implementation of artificial intelligence technologies and in particular self-learning neural network algorithms in the current practice of socio-political communications associated with active information impact on mass consciousness. This study proves that contemporary digital technological transformations and the active spread of digital technologies most directly influence the transformation of traditional worldview systems and ideologies. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that with the help of digital tools, there is a significant information and communication impact on mass consciousness in terms of influencing traditional worldview and ideological systems. In this regard, the author puts forward the thesis about the need to form and maintain the digital sovereignty of contemporary states as a key conclusion. It is viewed as a critical condition for preserving and protecting national worldview and ideological spaces in the conditions of current global technological transformations

Dialogue with the World: Reflections on the Fate of Civilization and Personality in the Era of Global Transformations (Review)

In the review there is a dialogue of modern thinkers on the problems of the philosophy of civilization. In the era of global changes, the attention of researchers is focused on discussing the planetary nature of civilizational changes, the general dynamics of the world historical process and the place of Russia in it. Of particular interest are studies on Russia as a civilization, on the Russian path of civilizational development, on the search for civilizational identity, on the challenges of the time that Russia is facing today. The review includes a collective monograph “Civilization: the Polyphony of Meanings. Memoria” [2023], the book by G.S. Pomerants “The Roads of the Spirit and the Zigzags of History” [2008], and the book by I.S. Vdovina “Emmanuel Munier: Personality and Civilization” [2023]. The monographs presented in the review contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of civilization, to reflections on the fate of civilization, culture, society, and man in the modern era.

ВПЛИВ ВІЙНИ НА МІЖНАРОДНІ ТРАНСПОРТНІ ПЕРЕВЕЗЕННЯ УКРАЇНИ

The article found that the full-scale war in Ukraine had a strong impact on international transportation. The structure of the volume of cargo transportation and the number of transported passengers were analyzed. It was determined that there is uncertainty in the market of international freight transportation of Ukraine during the studied period. On the one hand, the war had a negative impact on the country's economy and led to a decrease in the volume of cargo transportation. On the other hand, Ukraine is an important transit country through which key logistics routes connecting Europe and Asia pass. It was established that the blocking of air transport and sea trade, with the exception of the "Grain Initiative", led to a radical change in the structure of domestic import/export and the leadership of land corridors. Global transformations in world trade caused by the war in Ukraine also affected the configuration of existing supply chains, Ukrainian exports were completely reoriented towards the EU. It is indicated that Ukraine's signing of an agreement on visa-free transport cooperation with the European Union has opened up new prospects for bilateral international road transport, freeing Ukrainian carriers from the need to obtain permits for flights to EU countries. However, there are also negative trends that affect the growth of transport services and, as a result, decrease the competitiveness of transport companies. A list of legislative and regulatory innovations and organizational measures aimed at improving international transportation is given. It is argued that a successful solution for the recovery of the country will be the integration of the Ukrainian economy into the EU economic system with the help of various European logistics and infrastructure projects. It was determined that the key factors in the normalization of transportation were: the conclusion of the "Grain Initiative" with the UN and Turkey, which allowed to unblock the ports of Great Odesa; signing the Agreement on the Liberalization of Road Freight Transportation with the EU; development of border infrastructure, in particular, increasing the capacity of existing road and railway checkpoints, as well as the opening of new ones; increasing cargo handling in the ports of the Danube port cluster.

Planning virtual and hybrid events: steps to improve inclusion and accessibility

Abstract. The past decade has seen a global transformation in how we communicate and connect with one another, making it easier to network and collaborate with colleagues worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a rapid and unplanned shift toward virtual platforms, resulting in several accessibility challenges that have excluded many people during virtual events. Virtual and hybrid conferences have the potential to present opportunities and collaborations to groups previously excluded from purely in-person conference formats. This can only be achieved through thoughtful and careful planning with inclusion and accessibility in mind, learning lessons from previous events' successes and failures. Without effective planning, virtual and hybrid events will replicate many biases and exclusions inherent to in-person events. This article provides guidance on best practices for making online/virtual and hybrid events more accessible based on the combined experiences of diverse groups and individuals who have planned and run such events. Our suggestions focus on the accessibility considerations of three event planning stages: (1) pre-event planning, (2) on the day/during the event, and (3) after the event. Ensuring accessibility and inclusivity in designing and running virtual events can help everyone engage more meaningfully, resulting in more impactful discussions that will more fully include contributions from the many groups with limited access to in-person events. However, while this article is intended to act as a starting place for inclusion and accessibility in online and hybrid event planning, it is not a fully comprehensive guide. As more events are run, it is expected that new insights and experiences will be gained, helping to continually update standards.

Phase unwrapping via fully exploiting global and local spatial dependencies

Phase unwrapping (PU) is the process of extracting the authentic phase image from its noisy wrapped measurements, playing a crucial role in scientific imaging techniques. PU requires solving a challenging non-linear ill-posed problem, particularly in the presence of noticeable noise. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a promising approach for PU. Inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image restoration, many existing works trained CNNs for PU. However, due to the locality of convolutional kernels, CNNs are not efficient in capturing global spatial dependencies, a critical cue for PU. As an alternate, recent studies employed recurrent neural networks (RNNs) defined on handcrafted pixel paths. Nonetheless, a limited number of pre-defined pixel paths cannot fully exploit global spatial dependencies existing in complex phase structures. In this paper, we introduce a vision transformer (ViT) model that effectively captures both global and local spatial dependencies using a hierarchical structure with a multi-scale process. The proposed ViT model employs a series of global transformer blocks to capture global spatial dependencies at the roughest scale. The resulting global features are used to guide a set of local transformer blocks to analyze local spatial dependencies in a coarse-to-fine progressive manner for unwrapping. Extensive experiments show that, our proposed ViT model produces higher-quality unwrapped phases over existing CNN/RNN-based methods, while maintaining a lightweight nature.

Application and practice of industrial IoT cloud platform in oilfield intelligent transformation

Abstract Under the context of global energy transformation and low-carbon development, the traditional petroleum industry is facing a series of challenges such as technological innovation, market competition, environment protection, etc. Therefore, there is an urgent demand to realize green, safe, economical, and efficient development of oil and gas through oilfield intelligent transformation. This study develops a novel cloud platform covering the whole business based on the technical architecture of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) for assisting the intelligent transformation of oilfields. Since the application of the IoT-based cloud platform in Qingcheng Oilfield, functions such as automatic collection of whole-domain data, remote monitoring, early warning, as well as intelligent analysis and decision-making have been realized. Furthermore, compared with the traditional platform, the new platform has improved eight indicators, such as data processing efficiency and sharing capacity, by more than 20%. Consequently, the developed IoT-based cloud platform can significantly improve the production and management level of the oilfield, and efficiently support oilfield intelligent transformation.

Competitiveness, Competitive Intelligence, And Strategic Positioning: An Integrated Approach For Organizational Success

In an era marked by rapid globalization and digital transformation, businesses face unprecedented challenges. Understanding and integrating key concepts such as competitiveness, competitive intelligence, and strategic positioning has become essential for organizations aiming to maintain a sustainable competitive edge. This article explores how these three strategic elements interact to create synergy, enabling organizations to identify opportunities, anticipate threats, and develop strategies that drive long-term success. By analyzing foundational theories from notable authors like Porter, Prahalad, Hamel, and Mintzberg, and using real-world examples, this study highlights the importance of a holistic approach in strategic management. The findings suggest that companies capable of harmonizing these concepts are better positioned to innovate, adapt, and thrive in the competitive business landscape

Fine-grained Automatic Augmentation for handwritten character recognition

With the advancement of deep learning-based character recognition models, the training data size has become a crucial factor in improving the performance of handwritten text recognition. For languages with low-resource handwriting samples, data augmentation methods can effectively scale up the data size and improve the performance of handwriting recognition models. However, existing data augmentation methods for handwritten text face two limitations: (1) Methods based on global spatial transformations typically augment the training data by transforming each word sample as a whole but ignore the potential to generate fine-grained transformation from local word areas, limiting the diversity of the generated samples; (2) It is challenging to adaptively choose a reasonable augmentation parameter when applying these methods to different language datasets. To address these issues, this paper proposes Fine-grained Automatic Augmentation (FgAA) for handwritten character recognition. Specifically, FgAA views each word sample as composed of multiple strokes and achieves data augmentation by performing fine-grained transformations on the strokes. Each word is automatically segmented into various strokes, and each stroke is fitted with a Bézier curve. On such a basis, we define the augmentation policy related to the fine-grained transformation and use Bayesian optimization to select the optimal augmentation policy automatically, thereby achieving the automatic augmentation of handwriting samples. Experiments on five handwriting datasets of different languages demonstrate that FgAA achieves the best augmentation effect for handwritten character recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/IMU-MachineLearningSXD/Fine-grained-Automatic-Augmentation

The Future of Financial Technology: Innovations in SAP for Global Business Operations

As globalization and digital transformation reshape the business landscape, financial technology (FinTech) plays a critical role in enabling companies to operate efficiently and competitively on a global scale. SAP, a leader in enterprise software, is at the forefront of this evolution, offering innovative solutions that enhance financial operations. This article explores the future of financial technology, focusing on SAP’s innovations that are driving change in global business operations. It examines the impact of SAP’s advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain integration on financial management, compliance, and decision-making processes

Research on typical operating conditions of hydrogen production system with off-grid wind power considering the characteristics of proton exchange membrane electrolysis cell

Hydrogen energy, with its abundant reserves, green and low-carbon characteristic, high energy density, diverse sources, and wide applications, is gradually becoming an important carrier in the global energy transformation and development. In this paper, the off-grid wind power hydrogen production system is considered as the research object, and the operating characteristics of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis cell, including underload, overload, variable load, and start- stop are analyzed. On this basis, the characteristic extraction of wind power output data after noise reduction is carried out, and then the self-organizing mapping neural network algorithm is used for clustering to extract typical wind power output scenarios and perform weight distribution based on the statistical probability. The trend and fluctuation components are superimposed to generate the typical operating conditions of an off-grid PEM electrolytic hydrogen production system. The historical output data of an actual wind farm are used for the case study, and the results confirm the feasibility of the method proposed in this study for obtaining the typical conditions of off-grid wind power hydrogen production. The results provide a basis for studying the dynamic operation characteristics of PEM electrolytic hydrogen production systems, and the performance degradation mechanism of PEM electrolysis cells under fluctuating inputs.

Devaluation of Work and Its Linkage With Worker Risks in the Recent Transformation of the Work Sphere

ABSTRACTOver the last decades, sociologists of work have paid increasing attention to the critical phenomena in the labor market, among them the devaluation of work and its factors. Based on an analysis of publications in the field, this paper outlines problems of transforming work meanings and values, including their linkage with new worker risks and job security caused by the rapid work changes, precarization, social inequality, growing population gap between the advanced and developing countries, global pandemics, climate crisis and the like. These phenomena reflect social, economic, political, and legal changes and their impact on the sphere of work. Current work challenges have initiated research discussions in the work sphere that have helped spotlight the ongoing transformation of work meanings/values. The article reviews the diversity of theoretical approaches and practical implications of work values transformation from the perspective of factors determining long‐lasting shifts in work values, ranging from recognizing the intrinsic meanings of work to the predominance of pragmatic, instrumental work attitudes. The authors identified three main types of transforming work values based on a systematic mapping of publications. First, the prevalence of material, pragmatic values almost does not leave space for the social value of work. Second, it is the perception of work as a meaningless activity that cannot contribute to work satisfaction. Third, it is a vision of a society without work. When describing these types, the authors outline the transformation of work into an ordinary market product that has lost its intrinsic value and become a source of frustration, alienation, and psychological stress for workers. Diversity of work values reflects the controversial processes related to the global transformation of labor from the growth of innovative potential of some professions to the fear of technological unemployment and new risks for others.

DCPNet: Deformable Control Point Network for image enhancement

In this paper, we present a novel image enhancement network consisting of global and local color enhancement. The proposed network model is constructed using global transformation functions, which are formed by a set of piece-wise quadratic curves and a local color enhancement network based on the encoder–decoder network. To adaptively and dynamically control the ranges of each piece-wise curve, we introduce deformable control points (DCPs), which determine the overall structure of the global transformation functions. The parameters for piece-wise quadratic curve fitting and DCPs are estimated using the proposed DCP network (DCPNet). DCPNet processes a down-sampled image to derive the DCP parameters: The DCP offsets and the curve parameters. Then, we obtain a set of DCPs from the DCP offsets and connect each adjacent DCP pair by using the curve parameter to construct a global transformation function for each color channel. The original input images are then transformed based on the resulting transformation functions to obtain globally enhanced images. Finally, the intermediate image is fed into the local enhancement network, which has a U-Net architecture, to produce the spatially enhanced images. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods in various image enhancement tasks, such as image retouching, tone-mapping, and underwater image enhancement.

Linking New Ways of Working to Employee Performance in Emerging Countries: The Interplay of Technostress, and Meaningful Work

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly reshaped the landscape of work, prompting an urgent inquiry into the new ways of working among scholars and industry practitioners. Amidst this global transformation, Vietnam stands out as a developing nation embracing remote and hybrid working models, yet there is a notable gap in empirical research. This study aims to provide valuable insights into the intricate interplay between new ways of working (NWOW), meaningful work (MW), technostress (TNS), and perceived job performance (JP) in the context of an emerging economy. The study adopted a cross-sectional quantitative approach, utilizing a questionnaire administered through online platforms to a diverse group of professional participants in Vietnam. Convenience sampling was used to gather data. Upon completion of data collection, a total of 309 valid observations were obtained, ensuring an extensive representation of the research phenomenon within its distinct sociocultural context. The analysis was conducted using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), a method well-suited for robust testing of hypotheses. This study shows a positive correlation between NWOW and both TNS and JP. However, the negative relationship between TNS and JP was not statistically supported. On the other hand, the study confirmed a strong positive relationship between NWOW and perceived MW, which also significantly impacted JP. The study provides actionable insights for organizations planning to implement or enhance NWOW, stressing the importance of understanding its complex impacts on MW and TNS. This study significantly contributes to the literature by exploring the intricate relationships among NWOW, TNS, MW, and JP in an emerging economic context, providing a nuanced understanding of these dynamics.

Resisting organisational change? Psychological resilience and perceived organisational support as mediators in promoting psychological well-being and organisational citizenship behaviours

The increasing prevalence of global transformations has led to a surge in organisational changes worldwide. Consequently, the anticipation of employee resistance and its impact on organisational development has become a vital concern in the field of organisational psychology. This study aims to comprehensively explore employee resistance to organisational change within the energy industry, considering several critical factors, including psychological well-being, organisational citizenship behaviour, organisational support, and psychological resilience. A total of 313 employees from an organisation in the energy industry in Malaysia. Participants completed measures on attitude towards organisational change, psychological well-being, organisational citizenship behaviour, perceived organisational support, and psychological resilience. The results from our study showed significant relationships between employee resistance to organisational change, psychological well-being, and organisational citizenshipbehaviour. The findings also indicated significant mediating effect of perceived organisational support in the relationship between organisational change and psychological well-being. Further, the results also showed that psychological resilience was a significant mediator between organisational change, psychological well-being, and organisational citizenship behaviour. The implications from the study include increase in transparency in organisation, leaders as change agent, and brief coaching for employees to increase organisational resilience.

Geopolitical Aspects of Demographic Processes: Development of Scientific Ideas of L. L. Rybakovsky

Demographic processes play a key role in the formation of the geopolitical picture of the world. Population size, its age structure, growth rates and migration flows have a significant impact on the economic power of states, their military potential and their ability to project power in the international arena. This article examines contemporary and historical views on the significance of demographic factors in the geopolitical competition of countries and the measurement of a state's national power. The study covers both contemporary and historical aspects of the issue. The paper provides a systematic review of the evolution of scientific views on the significance of demographic factors in the geopolitical context. Particular attention is paid to modern methodological approaches to measuring the national power of a state considering demographic indicators. The article offers a critical analysis of existing models for assessing geopolitical influence based on demographic factors and considers their applicability in the context of global demographic transformations. The study also addresses topical issues of the impact of demographic trends on the geopolitical strategies of states in the 21st century, including the problems of population aging, migration processes and demographic imbalances between developed and developing countries. Special attention is paid to the analysis of geopolitical aspects of demographic processes in the works of the outstanding Russian demographer L.L.Rybakovsky. The paper considers the key concepts of the scientist, including demographic security, the geopolitical significance of migration processes, the relationship between demography and spatial development of Russia, as well as the role of demographic policy as an instrument of geopolitical influence.

A Review of Renewable Energy Investment in Belt and Road Initiative Countries: A Bibliometric Analysis Perspective

Since the proposal of the “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) in 2013, China’s renewable energy investments in the countries along the route have shown rapid growth and diversification. These investments have shifted from initial product exports and engineering contracts to deeper equity investments and financing cooperation. They not only promote a global energy structure transformation towards green and low-carbon development but also bring significant economic growth and social progress to the participating countries. This study aims to systematically review the research status and trends of renewable energy investments in “Belt and Road” countries through comprehensive bibliometric analysis. Utilizing the Web of Science database and VOS viewer 1.6.17 software for visualization, this research reveals the publication trends, high-impact articles, institutional collaborations, and author networks in this field. Additionally, through keyword co-occurrence network analysis, three core research themes are identified: investment motivations, synergy effects, renewable energy consumption, and international cooperation. This systematic bibliometric analysis not only outlines the current research landscape but also provides important insights for identifying emerging research directions, thereby supporting more in-depth investigations into renewable energy investments within the “Belt and Road” initiative.

Iterative Mamba Diffusion Change-Detection Model for Remote Sensing

In the field of remote sensing (RS), change detection (CD) methods are critical for analyzing the quality of images shot over various geographical areas, particularly for high-resolution images. However, there are some shortcomings of the widely used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers-based CD methods. The former is limited by its insufficient long-range modeling capabilities, while the latter is hampered by its computational complexity. Additionally, the commonly used information-fusion methods for pre- and post-change images often lead to information loss or redundancy, resulting in inaccurate edge detection. To address these issues, we propose an Iterative Mamba Diffusion Change Detection (IMDCD) approach to iteratively integrate various pieces of information and efficiently produce fine-grained CD maps. Specifically, the Swin-Mamba-Encoder (SME) within Mamba-CD (MCD) is employed as a semantic feature extractor, capable of modeling long-range relationships with linear computability. Moreover, we introduce the Variable State Space CD (VSS-CD) module, which extracts abundant CD features by training the matrix parameters within the designed State Space Change Detection (SS-CD). The computed high-dimensional CD feature is integrated into the noise predictor using a novel Global Hybrid Attention Transformer (GHAT) while low-dimensional CD features are utilized to calibrate prior CD results at each iterative step, progressively refining the generated outcomes. IMDCD exhibits a high performance across multiple datasets such as the CDD, WHU, LEVIR, and OSCD, marking a significant advancement in the methodologies within the CD field of RS. The code for this work is available on GitHub.

New accents of security-oriented management of logistics activity entities in the conditions of digitalization

The paper focuses on management issues in the field of sustainable functioning and development of business entities on the basis of guaranteeing their economic security. The industry specialization of entities specializing in logistics activities is taken into account. New aspects of security-oriented management of logistics entities are defined and taken into account, in particular in the languages of digitalization, which bring to the fore the issues of information and cyber security, digital communications, as well as cashless electronic payments. On this basis, the purpose of the research is to identify new accents of security-oriented management of logistics entities in the conditions of digitalization. The components of the economic security of logistics entities that require priority attention in terms of strengthening during the digital transformation of the economy and society have been determined. The toolkit of safety-oriented management under modern conditions for subjects of logistics activity is indicated. It is shown that under modern conditions, business entities specializing in logistics activities should focus on two mega aspects when forming their own security-oriented management systems. These are: (1) operational challenges caused by critical instability and the consequences of a full-scale war; (2) new opportunities, realities, as well as challenges of global and comprehensive digital transformation of economic relations. It was concluded that the new emphasis of security-oriented management of logistics entities concerns all the leading components of their economic security.