Operational Sustainability and Digital Leadership for Cybercrime Prevention

The digital world of work and social media, despite its challenges, is here to stay as an integrated part of our day-to-day operational norms. Therefore, we must make the best of it on a proactive basis before the private data of our employees and consumers becomes hacked remotely by criminals. Privacy violations and hacking of data cannot be sustained since they can be very costly and may even lead to bankruptcy. As such, today’s leaders, managers, and educators have the responsibility of preparing their future replacements for the modern digital economy, so their organizations’ operational processes can remain competitive, safe, and sustainable. Operational sustainability, in this paper, is proposed as a tripod or “three-legged stool” of environmental, social, and digital responsibility. With more employees and entrepreneurs accessing digital data remotely through vulnerable or unsecure online platforms, the opportunities for cybercrimes rise. Therefore, this article focuses more on the often-neglected digitalization element of operational sustainability. All leaders must be aware of the legal, social, and environmental expectations of a digital society by doing what is good for the world while also being efficient and safe from cybercriminals. The paper proposes that future leaders must be socialized with a sustainability mindset about data privacy and safety measures that are necessary for this fast-changing digital economy where hackers and artificial intelligence (AI) tools can make the process more challenging. With AI being used by some actors to generate false yet realistic content, companies will have to do more to make sure their brands are not defamed or tarnished. As such, this conceptual article discusses a model for operational sustainability, which includes the privacy and safety of data that can be used by managers, educators and other leaders for training and development purposes in today’s digital world of work.

Study of characteristics of long-period ground motion response spectra by using broad-band records of the Chinese Digital Seismograph Network

Broad band and very broad band (BB and VBB) records of Chinese Digital Seismograph Network (CDSN) from 65 earthquakes are used to calculate the horizontal relative displacement, relative velocity and absolute acceleration response spectra with critical damping ratio ζ =0.005, 0.01, 0.02, 0.05 and 0.10, respectively. The results show that it is insufficient to obtain the credible characteristics of long-period ground motion response spectra only with the common ground acceleration records in engineering, while the broad band records of CDSN, as an important supplementary to ground acceleration records, can be used to study the characteristics of long-period ground motion response spectra.

Digital imaging approaches for phenotyping whole plant nitrogen and phosphorus response in Brachypodium distachyon

This work evaluates the phenotypic response of the model grass （Brachypodium distacbyon （L.） P. Beauv.） to nitrogen and phosphorus nutrition using a combination of imaging techniques and destructive harvest of shoots and roots. Reference line Bd21-3 was grown in pots using 11 phosphorus and 11 nitrogen concentrations to establish a dose-response curve. Shoot biovolume and biomass, root length and biomass, and tissue phosphorus and nitrogen concentrations increased with nutrient concentration. Shoot biovolume, estimated by imaging, was highly correlated with dry weight （R2 〉 0.92） and both biovolume and growth rate responded strongly to nutrient availability. Higher nutrient supply increased nodal root length more than other root types. Photochemical efficiency was strongly reduced by low phosphorus concentrations as early as 1 week after germination, suggesting that this measurement may be suitable for high throughput screening of phosphorus response. In contrast, nitrogen concentration had little effect on photochemical efficiency. Changes in biovolume over time were used to compare growth rates of four accessions in response tonitrogen and phosphorus supply. We demonstrate that a time series image-based approach coupled with mathematical modeling provides higher resolution of genotypic response to nutrient supply than traditional destructive techniques and shows promise for high throughput screening and determina- tion of genomic regions associated with superior nutrient use efficiency.

An iterative re-weighted least-squares algorithm for the design of active absorbing wavemaker controller

In physical model tests for highly reflective structures, one often encounters a problem of multiple reflections between the reflective structures and the wavemaker. Absorbing wavemakers can cancel the re-reflective waves by adjusting the paddle motion. In this paper, we propose a method to design the controller of the 2-D absorbing wavemaker system in the wave flume. Based on the first-order wavemaker theory, a frequency domain absorption transfer function is derived. Its time realization can be obtained by de- signing an infinite impulse response （IIR） digital filter, which is expected to approximate the absorption transfer function in the least- squares sense. A commonly used approach to determine the parameters of the IIR filter is applying the Taylor expansion to linearize the filter formulation and solving the linear least-squares problem. However, the result is not optimal because the linearization cha- nges the original objective function. To improve the approximation performance, we propose an iterative reweighted least-squares （IRLS） algorithm and demonstrate that with the filters designed by this algorithm, the approximation errors can be reduced. Physical experiments are carried out with the designed controller. The results show that the system performs well for both regular and irregu- lar waves.