The relevance of the research is due to the fundamental transformation of the system of international relations towards polycentricity, where, along with traditional factors of power, the role of communicative and value resources is increasing. Russian, being one of the official languages of the United Nations and preserving a significant communicative space in the post-Soviet territory, has found itself at the epicenter of the contradictory processes of globalization, regionalization, and digitalization, thereby necessitating a new understanding of its strategic potential and limitations. The purpose of the article is to conduct a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the role of the Russian language as a factor in international relations in order to identify its resource base, systemic challenges, and likely development trajectories in the emerging polycentric world order. The objectives of the study derive from the stated goal and include: 1) reconstruction of the historical evolution of the international status of the Russian language; 2) classification and characterization of its modern multifunctional manifestations in various fields; 3) analysis of the geopolitical and civilizational dynamics associated with the language; 4) a critical assessment of its effectiveness as a soft-power instrument; 5) identification of key trends and formulation of alternative scenarios for its future. The research is based on a set of scientific publications on sociolinguistics and international relations, official documents of the United Nations, the EAEU, the SCO, statistical data, and the results of sociological surveys. The methodological basis is a systematic approach supplemented by historical, genetic (diachronic), and comparative methods, as well as content analysis. The study demonstrates the dual nature of the modern Russian language has been established. Russian functions simultaneously as an instrument of integration and practical communication in the Eurasian space and as a field of ideological and informational confrontation. The key trends determining its development have been identified: sustainable regionalization, deepening diversification of language preferences under the influence of global competition, as well as the significant influence of digital transformation and demographic challenges. Thus, it is concluded that the stability of the Russian language's position is ensured by its institutional status, functional necessity within the framework of Eurasian integration, and unique historical and cultural capital. However, its long-term future will depend on Russia's overall socio-economic and political trajectory, and its ability to generate meanings and products that are attractive to the international community. The most realistic scenario seems to be that it will retain the status of one of the world's leading regional languages without returning to the global influence characteristic of the bipolar era.
The article examines the structural and functional relationships among key determinants that shape the international competitiveness of Ukraine’s ICT sector. The research methodology combines graph theory and the Laurent power series. The research offers a detailed framework for understanding competitiveness in the ICT sector, highlighting the systemic interdependence among infrastructure, human capital, regulatory and business conditions, innovation potential, and international integration. It is found that the factors of the business and regulatory environment, integration of Ukraine’s ICT sector into international economic relations, and human capital have the greatest impact on the international competitiveness of the Ukrainian ICT sector. The practical value of the article lies in its applicability for strategic decision-making and policy formulation for strengthening Ukraine’s ICT sector international competitiveness, as well as further academic research and practical evaluations in similar national or regional contexts.
In an age marked by digital transformation and global uncertainty, traditional management education remains helpful but no longer sufficient to prepare leaders for the challenges ahead. This paper proposes a holistic framework that integrates human values with digital innovation to create a future-ready paradigm for business education. Built on a strong foundation of ethics, compassion, environmental care, and technological proficiency, our framework introduces Seven Transformative Educational Pillars and Five Engines of Sustainable Business Development. These elements serve as a blueprint for cultivating conscious, adaptive, and impact-driven leaders. By drawing on ideas from systems thinking, emotional intelligence, and stakeholder theory, as well as lessons learned from hands-on, real-world experiences, the paper highlights real-world applications through global case studies from organizations like Google, Unilever, Patagonia, Amazon, and Zappos. It not only presents these cases as sources of knowledge but also reveals the hidden values these companies uphold during pivotal decision-making moments. By uniting humanistic principles with emerging innovations, the paper offers a visionary yet actionable roadmap for reimagining management education in a rapidly changing world.
International relations, Economic growth, development, planning
En América Latina nacieron civilizaciones antiguas que han dejado una importante huella en la cultura hispana. En el desarrollo de toda civilización, la “lengua” es un elemento básico y un punto de apoyo importante de la identidad étnica y cultural. Este trabajo explora desde la perspectiva del lenguaje, combinada con la perspectiva de la historia y la antropología, la relevancia del lenguaje en la identidad cultural. Hace un análisis del lenguaje de la cultura “Maya” en México, de su relación con la gestión política y de la evolución de la relación entre la minoría étnica maya y la sociedad hispana mexicana. Se seleccionan tres períodos históricos importantes (siglo XV; 1860–1950; las dos primeras décadas del siglo XXI) para revisar la formación y desarrollo de las respectivas “lenguas indígenas y oficiales” de las dos culturas, así se deja en claro el papel dilemático de la lengua en la identidad étnica y cultural.
Andreas Waldis, Vagrant Gautam, Anne Lauscher
et al.
We introduce aligned probing, a novel interpretability framework that aligns the behavior of language models (LMs), based on their outputs, and their internal representations (internals). Using this framework, we examine over 20 OLMo, Llama, and Mistral models, bridging behavioral and internal perspectives for toxicity for the first time. Our results show that LMs strongly encode information about the toxicity level of inputs and subsequent outputs, particularly in lower layers. Focusing on how unique LMs differ offers both correlative and causal evidence that they generate less toxic output when strongly encoding information about the input toxicity. We also highlight the heterogeneity of toxicity, as model behavior and internals vary across unique attributes such as Threat. Finally, four case studies analyzing detoxification, multi-prompt evaluations, model quantization, and pre-training dynamics underline the practical impact of aligned probing with further concrete insights. Our findings contribute to a more holistic understanding of LMs, both within and beyond the context of toxicity.
A longstanding goal in computational educational research is to develop explainable knowledge tracing (KT) models. Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT), which leverages a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to predict student knowledge and performance on exercises, has been proposed as a major advancement over traditional KT methods. Several studies suggest that its performance gains stem from its ability to model bidirectional relationships between different knowledge components (KCs) within a course, enabling the inference of a student's understanding of one KC from their performance on others. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing explanation and demonstrate that DKT's strength lies in its implicit ability to model prerequisite relationships as a causal structure, rather than bidirectional relationships. By pruning exercise relation graphs into Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and training DKT on causal subsets of the Assistments dataset, we show that DKT's predictive capabilities align strongly with these causal structures. Furthermore, we propose an alternative method for extracting exercise relation DAGs using DKT's learned representations and provide empirical evidence supporting our claim. Our findings suggest that DKT's effectiveness is largely driven by its capacity to approximate causal dependencies between KCs rather than simple relational mappings.
To understand how fluctuations arise and are distributed in international trade, a question crucial for economic risk assessment and policymaking, we analyze strong adverse fluctuations-collapsed trades-defined as individual trades with sharp annual volume declines. Adopting a hypergraph framework for a fine-scale trade-centric representation of international trade, we find that collapsed trades (hyperedges) are clustered and their occurrence decays algebraically with trade volume (weight), which suggests inhomogeneous, epidemic-like spreading of collapse in the international trade hypergraph. Modeling collapse propagation as a contagion process and analyzing its dynamics, we show that a positive degree-weight correlation and a volume-decaying collapse rate synergistically suppress the onset of global collective collapse. Notably, the degree-weight correlation persisted but the volume-decay of the collapse rate weakened during the 2008-2009 global economic recession, resulting in a broader collapse spread. Our study shows how the interplay between structure and dynamics stabilizes complex systems.
Spanish conquistadors drew a clear distinction between their objectives as they embarked on expeditions, with two contrasting verbs highlighting the difference: the verb poblar (to populate) involved establishing settlements and towns (pueblos), whereas the verb rescatar implied trading or even raiding the land. Founding a town meant the conquistadors started to colonize the area, relying on it as a «door» to go «deep in to the territory». Spanish colonization of the New World was marked by an important feature: any settlement was granted the status of a town and center from the outset. Any fort served as a town, a foothold for settlement in a vast unexplored area; it was the antithesis of endless and chaotic wilderness. The image of an indigenous town that conquistadors had in mind manifested itself in two forms, namely, a real town and a mythical one. While the perception of Spanish towns in the New World was unfailingly positive, an indigenous town, whether a real or mythical one, was deemed ambivalent, dangerous yet appealing.Mythical indigenous towns played a more important role in the history of Spanish exploration and conquest of the New World than real indigenous towns. It was the quest for mythical kingdoms and towns that became the main driving force behind Spanish colonization of the New World, as most major expeditions in America were launched to pursue pipe dreams. Those expeditions failed to generate wealth yet they resulted in geographical discoveries. Conquistadors’ fantasies prompted them to explore the great wilderness in a short period of time from a historical perspective.
This volume contains the proceedings of DCM 2023, the 13th International Workshop on Developments in Computational Models held on 2 July 2023 in Rome, Italy. DCM 2023 was organised as a one-day satellite event of FSCD 2023, the 8th International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are currently developing new computation models or new features for traditional computation models, in order to foster their interaction, to provide a forum for presenting new ideas and work in progress, and to enable newcomers to learn about current activities in this area.
Olga E. Bashina, Marina D. Simonova, Lilia V. Matraeva
et al.
Countries with a large energy sector are faced with the issues of forming and developing a state energy policy that takes into account not only sectoral and intersectoral aspects, but also the components of managing significant amounts of rental income. In this regard, any of these economic systems, on the one hand, has great opportunities associated with the management of energy resources as a factor of development, on the other hand, it is constantly at risk of destabilization of the economic system as a whole. To date, the economic history allows us to speak about the accumulation of a sufficient number of observations for conducting a comprehensive study of the features of the development of public energy policies. The study is based on the formalization of historical descriptions of the experience of 24 countries (30 cases). The article describes in detail the experience of 13 of the most striking cases. This made it possible to identify 14 variables for evaluating the state energy policy, while outlining three areas (areas of attention) of public administration. The choice of variables used in the model was made on the basis of the relative frequencies of the mechanism application for the observed population, MNRW-TF recommendations within the improving extractive industry, the formation of the contribution of resource industries to the socio-economic development of the country and etc. Further cluster analysis led to the identification of both a pronounced polarity in the development of the state energy policy and options for combining its areas. JEL Classifications: C82, Q43, Q48, P51, O57, O11.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
This paper shows that disregarding the information effects around the European Central Bank monetary policy decision announcements biases its international spillovers. Using data from 23 economies, both Emerging and Advanced, I show that following an identification strategy that disentangles pure monetary policy shocks from information effects lead to international spillovers on industrial production, exchange rates and equity indexes which are between 2 to 3 times larger in magnitude than those arising from following the standard high frequency identification strategy. This bias is driven by pure monetary policy and information effects having intuitively opposite international spillovers. Results are present for a battery of robustness checks: for a sub-sample of ``close'' and ``further away'' countries, for both Emerging and Advanced economies, using local projection techniques and for alternative methods that control for ``information effects''. I argue that this biases may have led a previous literature to disregard or find little international spillovers of ECB rates.
Pesticides are a kind of agricultural input, whose use can greatly reduce yield loss, regulate plant growth, effectively liberate agricultural productivity, and improve food security. The availability of pesticides in economies all over the world is ensured by pesticide redistribution through international trade and economies play different roles in this process. In this work, we measure and rank the importance of economies using nine node metrics in an evolutionary way. It is found that the clustering coefficient is correlated negatively with the other eight node metrics, while the other eight node metrics are positively correlated with each other and can be grouped into three communities (betweenness; in-degree, PageRank, authority, and in-closeness; out-degree, hub, and out-closeness). We further investigate the structural robustness of the international pesticide trade networks proxied by the giant component size under three types of shocks to economies (node removal in descending order, randomly, and in ascending order). The results show that, except for the clustering coefficient, the international pesticide trade networks are relatively robust under shocks to economies in ascending orders and randomly, but fragile under shocks to economies in descending order. In contrast, removing nodes with the clustering coefficient in ascending and descending orders gives similar robustness curves. Moreover, the structural robustness related to the giant component size evolves over time and exhibits an inverse U-shaped pattern.
Shane Mansfield, Benoît Valiron, Vladimir Zamdzhiev
This volume contains the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2023). The aim of the QPL conference series is to bring together academic and industry researchers working on mathematical foundations of quantum computation, quantum physics, and related areas. The main focus is on the use of algebraic and categorical structures, formal languages, type systems, semantic methods, as well as other mathematical and computer scientific techniques applicable to the study of physical systems, physical processes, and their composition.
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and variable shape stiffness, so having a unique algorithm for all these issues would be extremely beneficial. In this work, we adapt Model Predictive Control (MPC), popular for rigid robots, to a soft robotic arm called SoPrA. We address the challenges that current control methods are facing, by proposing a framework that handles these in a modular manner. While previous work focused on Joint-Space formulations, we show through simulation and experimental results that Task-Space MPC can be successfully implemented for dynamic soft robotic control. We provide a way to couple the Piece-wise Constant Curvature and Augmented Rigid Body Model assumptions with internal and external constraints and actuation dynamics, delivering an algorithm that unites these aspects and optimizes over them. We believe that a MPC implementation based on our approach could be the way to address most of model-based soft robotics control issues within a unified and modular framework, while allowing to include improvements that usually belong to other control domains such as machine learning techniques.
Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel, Jaime Zamorano, Martin Aubé
et al.
Nighttime images taken with DSLR cameras from the International Space Station (ISS) can provide valuable information on the spatial and temporal variation of artificial nighttime lighting on Earth. In particular, this is the only source of historical and current visible multispectral data across the world (DMSP/OLS and SNPP/VIIRS-DNB data are panchromatic and multispectral in the infrared but not at visible wavelengths). The ISS images require substantial processing and proper calibration to exploit intensities and ratios from the RGB channels. Here we describe the different calibration steps, addressing in turn Decodification, Linearity correction (ISO dependent), Flat field/Vignetting, Spectral characterization of the channels, Astrometric calibration/georeferencing, Photometric calibration (stars)/Radiometric correction (settings correction - by exposure time, ISO, lens transmittance, etc) and Transmittance correction (window transmittance, atmospheric correction). We provide an example of the application of this processing method to an image of Spain.
Theories of decision-making grounded in political psychology have experienced a dramatic rise in the study of International Relations. There is widespread recognition of the benefits of incorporating insights from the behavioural sciences into analyses of political behaviour. However, some scholars have argued that the theoretical and empirical scope of these perspectives remains hampered by an unresolved issue: aggregation. While the fundamental unit of interest in psychology is the individual, most International Relations models concern patterns of collective decision-making in aggregate units such as states, bureaucracies, armed groups, transnational networks and institutions. This article contributes to the aggregation debate by providing a more optimistic portrait of its implications for interdisciplinary work. I argue that aggregation may be an overstated problem in International Relations and that a disciplinary preoccupation with it may hinder rather than pave the way for interdisciplinary theorizing.
Communities on the planet are faced with complex challenges: changing relations within and between human communities, changing relations with ecological and climatic conditions, and shifts in technology-human interconnections. The complex interconnections across issue areas – migration, environmental degradation and new technologies, for example – demand that scholars increasingly think across theories, paradigms, specialisms and disciplines. But how should we ‘hold things together’ as we try to make sense of complex realities in International Relations (IR)? This introductory article to the Special Issue ‘Facing human interconnections: thinking International Relations into the future’ discusses the open thematic of ‘human interconnections’ that is used to loosely structure the contributions. Analysis of human interconnections, as understood here, does not have a precise or fixed definition but is considered an open-ended notion with varied meanings and dimensions. Indeed, the authors engage it here in varied ways to explore their empirical, theoretical and political concerns. Yet, this notion also allows for interesting new questions to be posed on the potential and limits of IR as it faces the future, and debates around how we see interconnections between issue areas and ‘-isms’, how IR constructs ‘humans’ or ‘non-humans’ in interconnections, and what is at stake in bringing to our attention unacknowledged interconnections. Here we set out why human interconnection is an interesting notion to work with and why we need to keep its meaning open-ended. We also provide an account of six different orientations we observe amongst the authors tackling the dynamics of human interconnections in this Special Issue.
Memory brings, sorts and shapes our lives, giving a sense of the immediate present and projecting the future. A report that, following the postulates of Maurice Halbwachs, bets on a collective and not merely individual analysis of the act of remembering, adopting a teleological dimension that evokes in the present, a past event, within the framework of a strategy of Future. It is therefore particularly interesting to analyze how the progressive introduction of the Internet into the daily life of so many users, and the changes in communicative paradigms that it has brought with it, has had and continues to have unintended consequences in the the scope of their privacy but also in the social construction of identity. So far the right to be forgotten has been the only parameter that has tried our Web presence. A right of recent legal construction which covers the possibility that the data of the people will stop being visible on the web, at the request of the same and when they so decide. From Europe it has legislated in this respect (Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016, on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) but without have an impact on the question of the limits, hence, in this work the focus is on the implications or effects that we may have to, individually, conform and decide on the history, the story and, in short, on our collective identity. If we self-determine our presence in this context based on our own interest and personal experience of the subjective dimension of time, what will we remember?
Key-words: collective memory, Internet, forget, Europe, Internet, identity.
La memoria reúne, ordena y conforma nuestra vida, dándole sentido al presente más inmediato y proyectándose sobre el futuro. Una memoria que, siguiendo los postulados de Maurice Halbwachs, apuesta por un análisis colectivo y no meramente individual del acto de recordar, adoptando una dimensión teleológica que evoca en el presente, un acontecimiento pasado, en el marco de una estrategia de futuro. De ahí que resulte especialmente interesante analizar cómo la introducción progresiva de Internet en la cotidianidad de tantos usuarios, y los cambios de paradigmas comunicativos que ha traído consigo, ha tenido y sigue teniendo consecuencias no siempre deseadas en el ámbito de su privacidad pero también en la construcción social de la identidad. Hasta ahora el derecho al olvido ha sido el único parámetro que ha enjuiciado nuestra presencia en la red. Un derecho de reciente construcción jurídica que ampara la posibilidad de que los datos de las personas dejen de estar accesibles en la web, por petición de las mismas y cuando estas lo decidan. Desde Europa se ha legislado al respecto (Reglamento (UE) 2016/679 del Parlamento Europeo y del Consejo, de 27 de abril de 2016, relativo a la protección de las personas físicas en lo que respecta al tratamiento de datos personales y a la libre circulación de estos datos y por el que se deroga la Directiva 95/46/CE) pero sin incidir en la cuestión de los límites, de ahí que en este trabajo se ponga el foco de atención en las implicaciones o efectos que puede llegar a tener que, de forma individual, conformemos y decidamos sobre la historia, el relato y, en definitiva, sobre nuestra identidad colectiva. Si autodeterminamos nuestra presencia en este contexto en base a nuestro propio interés y la experiencia personal de la dimensión subjetiva del tiempo, ¿qué recordaremos?
Palabras clave: memoria colectiva, olvido, Europa, internet e identidad.