Green practices-IS alignment and environmental performance: The mediating effects of coordination

The problem of environmental sustainability has been growing in recent years with an interest from both researchers and practitioners. A major gap that exists is the absence of empirical studies that addressed business value of green IS (information systems). Thus, drawing on the resource-based view of the firm and IT (information technology) business value literature, this study aims to develop a comprehensive research model of green practice-IS alignment, the key cross-functional coordination of green practices with manufacturing and marketing functions, and firm performance. The study provides a better understanding of the relationship between green practice-manufacturing coordination and green practice-marketing coordination, and how both variables mediated the relationship between green practices-IS alignment and environmental performance. The data used in this study were collected from manufacturing firms. The results show that a firm’s green practices-IS alignment had a positive effect on both green practices-manufacturing coordination and green practices-marketing coordination. In turn, both green practices-manufacturing coordination and green practices-marketing coordination are the significant predictors of environmental performance. Meanwhile, green practices-IS alignment had an indirect effect on environmental performance via both green practices-manufacturing coordination and green practices-marketing coordination. Moreover, the findings of this study show that environmental performance is an important predictor of economic performance.     

Exploring object-based content adaptation for mobile audio

Mobile devices enable users to consume media with audio content in a wide range of contexts, with environmental noise being present in many of these. Several methods exist that aim to improve the experience of mobile listening by utilising information about the environmental noise, such as volume and dynamic range adaptation. This paper explores a fundamentally different approach to improving the mobile listening experience by using the object-based audio paradigm, where individual audio sources are mixed in response to each specific listening context. Three experimental studies, containing both quantitative and qualitative aspects, are presented which investigate whether environmental noise influences preference of background-foreground audio object balance in a mix. The results indicate that environmental noise can influence the preferred audio mix and that the nature of the adaptations made is dependent upon both audio content and user. Additionally, qualitative analysis provides an understanding of the role of environmental noise on preferred audio mix. It is believed that the content adaptation method explored in this paper is a simple yet useful tool for adapting content to suit both the context and the user.     

Entrepreneurial Leadership and Performance in Chinese New Ventures: A Moderated Mediation Model of Exploratory Innovation,Exploitative Innovation and Environmental Dynamism

This study advances prior theoretical research by examining the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance with the introduction of exploratory and exploitative innovations as mediating variables. To fully understand the influence process of entrepreneurial leadership, we argue that environmental dynamism should be considered. Data on 168 new ventures in China indicate that entrepreneurial leadership is positively related to both exploratory and exploitative innovations, which in turn are both positively related to new venture performance. Our results also confirm that environmental dynamism moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and both types of innovation (i.e., exploratory and exploitative). Thus, we contribute to the debate on the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on the pursuit of excellent new venture performance, not only by examining how entrepreneurial leadership affects new venture performance by pursuing two types of innovative activities (i.e., exploratory and exploitative innovations), but also by revealing how these relationships are contingent upon environmental dynamism.     

Digitally enabled affordances for community‐driven environmental movement in rural Malaysia

The immense environmental challenges facing society today have necessitated a research effort toward exploring digitally enabled solutions for environmental problems. Only limited research exists today to inform our understanding on how technology could assist groups of individuals in cultivating collective commitment and engaging in actions for environmental sustainability. By presenting an in‐depth case study of a social media‐enabled grassroots environmental movement in rural Malaysia, this paper aims to illuminate and understand an underresearched phenomenon of community‐driven environmental sustainability. This study makes 2 contributions: (1) we draw on the perspective of technology affordances to shed light on both the enabling power and unintended consequences of social media in the pursuit of environmental sustainability; and on that account, (2) we contribute rich, empirically informed insights toward understanding the underresearched phenomenon of digitally enabled, community‐driven environmental sustainability.     

Supporting flexible regulation of crisis management by means of situated artificial institution

This paper highlights the use of situated artificial institution (SAI) within a hybrid, interactive, normative multi-agent system to regulate human collaboration in crisis management. Norms regulate the actions of human actors based on the dynamics of the environment in which they are situated. This dynamics results from both environment evolution and actors’ actions. Our objective is to situate norms in the environment in order to provide a context-aware crisis regulation. However, this coupling must be a loose one to keep both levels independent and easyto-change in order to face the complex and changing crisis situations. To that aim, we introduce a constitutive level between environmental and normative states providing a loose coupling of normative regulation with environment evolution. Norms are thus no more referring to environmental facts but to status functions, i.e., the institutional interpretation of environmental facts through constitutive rules. We present how this declarative and distinct SAI modelling succeeds in managing the crisis with a context-aware crisis regulation.     

An expert system for the identification of environmental impact based on a geographic information system

The identification and assessment of the environmental impacts of engineering projects is an essential step in studies on environmental impact (IES). There are methods that allow both tasks to be performed and methods that allow each of them to be carried out separately. Normally, traditional methods are used to identify and evaluate environmental impacts, such as matrices, cause-effect network diagrams or check lists. Here we report the configuration of an expert system as a tool that allows environmental impacts to be identified. The expert system is based on a geographic information system to configure the knowledge base, the inference motor and the user interface. The knowledge base comprises declarative knowledge (structured in an alphanumeric and spatial database from official cartographic information) and procedural knowledge (via heuristic rules that superimpose project actions over environmental factors). We then describe the application of the expert system to the study of the environmental impact of the R-3 motorway in the Community of Madrid, Spain. As results, running the expert system allows the identification of environmental impacts on environmental factors defined at the 1:5000 and 1:25000 cartographic scales. Finally, analysis of the results or conclusions allows the validity of the use of graphic expert systems to be compared for the identification of environmental impacts.     

国家水污染防治技术共享中心设计

为推广环境最佳可行性技术,在设计水污染防治技术元数据标准和环境技术评估元数据标准的基础之上,构建了基于元数据的国家水污染防治技术共享中心,并详细阐述了技术共享的机制和元数据查询与技术实体调用方式。     

Data‐driven learning and planning for environmental sampling

Robots such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) have been used for sensing and monitoring aquatic environments such as oceans and lakes. Environmental sampling is a challenging task because the environmental attributes to be observed can vary both spatially and temporally, and the target environment is usually a large and continuous domain whereas the sampling data are typically sparse and limited. The challenges require that the sampling method must be informative and efficient enough to catch up with the environmental dynamics. In this paper, we present a planning and learning method that enables a sampling robot to perform persistent monitoring tasks by learning and refining a dynamic “data map” that models a spatiotemporal environment attribute such as ocean salinity content. Our environmental sampling framework consists of two components: To maximize the information collected, we propose an informative planning component that efficiently generates sampling waypoints that contain the maximal information; to alleviate the computational bottleneck caused by large‐scale data accumulated, we develop a component based on a sparse Gaussian process whose hyperparameters are learned online by taking advantage of only a subset of data that provides the greatest contribution. We validate our method with both simulations running on real ocean data and field trials with an ASV in a lake environment. Our experiments show that the proposed framework is both accurate in learning the environmental data map and efficient in catching up with the dynamic environmental changes.     

Hedging global environment risks: An option based portfolio insurance

This paper introduces a financial hedging model for global environmental risks. Our approach is based on portfolio insurance under hedging constraints. Each investor is assumed to maximize the expected utility of his/her portfolio which includes financial and environmental assets. The optimal investment is determined for quite general utility functions and hedging constraints. Our results show how and why derivative assets should be introduced in the portfolio to hedge environmental risks.The main conclusion of the paper is that new types of options which combine both equity and environmental assets should be used, contrary to the current practice which considers two separate option markets.     

Analysis of environmental and economic efficiency using a farm population micro-simulation model

New Zealand's success in raising agricultural productivity has been accompanied by higher input use, leading to adverse effects on the environment. Until recently, analysis of farm performance has tended to ignore such negative externalities. The current emphasis on environmental issues has led dairy farmers to target improvements in both environmental performance and productivity. Therefore, measuring the environmental performance of farms and integrating this information into farm productivity calculations should assist in making informed policy decisions which promote sustainable development. However, this is a challenging process since conventional environmental efficiency measures are usually based on simple input and output flows but nitrogen discharge is a complex process affected by climate, pasture composition, cow physiology and geophysical variability. Furthermore, the outdoor pastoral nature of New Zealand farming means that it is difficult to control input and output flows, particularly of nitrogen. We present a novel approach to measure the environmental and economic efficiency of farms, using the Overseer nutrient budget model and spatially micro-simulated virtual population data. The empirical analysis is based on dairy farms in the Karapiro catchment, where nitrogen discharge from dairy farming is a major source of nonpoint pollution.     

智能化基站动力环境监控系统的应用

介绍智能化基站动力环境监控系统功能及应用,与传统基站动力环境监控系统进行对比分析。智能化基站动力环境监控系统既能方便网络监控,也有效控制基站能耗,降低网络运营成本。     

Analysis of the environmental efficiency in China based on the DEA cross-efficiency approach under different policy objectives

The existing studies on environmental efficiency evaluation generally have the problem of efficiency overestimation. To solve this problem, a new data envelopment analysis (DEA) cross-efficiency approach with undesirable outputs is developed to evaluate environmental efficiency from the perspectives of both self-evaluation and peer evaluation. Then, three new evaluation strategies, namely, economic development strategy, environmental protection strategy, and win–win strategy, are proposed to reflect the needs of decision makers under different policy objectives. The proposed cross-efficiency approach with different evaluation strategies not only realizes the cross evaluation of environmental efficiency, but also guarantees the relative uniqueness of the optimal solution on the basis of the preferences of decision makers. Combining the metafrontier DEA approach and DEA window analysis, a new cross-efficiency analytical framework is constructed to gradually analyse the influences of policy objectives, technology heterogeneity, and dynamic correlation on the environmental efficiency. Subsequently, the environmental efficiency of China's economic development during 2006–2015 is in-depth analysed on the basis of the proposed analytical framework, and some interesting conclusions, and some useful suggestions are obtained.     

考虑绿色网络效应的再制造产品最优生产决策及产品之间的竞争

提出由两个再制造商组成的环保质量和价格竞争的双寡头博弈模型.在一个再制造市场中,同时考虑消费者环保意识以及包括污染税和回收补贴在内的政府财政政策的情况下,探讨绿色网络效应对生产决策的影响,以期使企业的利润最大化.数值实验表明:高质量(低质量)产品的绿色网络效应系数越高(低),可能会反常地减少(增加)两种产品的环保质量和价格,但会促进(削弱)高质量(低质量)产品的销售和利润,而产品产异性不受影响;此外,相比较没有外部网络性的情况,在绿色网络效应的影响下,回收补贴的增加使得高质量(低质量)产品的需求和利润都得到了一定改善(削弱).结果表明,在最优化条件下,监管者总是可以使企业利润和消费者剩余构成的"经济盈余"最大化,并使排放总量最小化.     

A geoprocessing workflow system for environmental monitoring and integrated modelling

Environmental information infrastructure benefits from mainstream information technologies including workflow and service technologies. These technologies allow distributed geoprocessing algorithms, models, data, and sensors to be accessed through Web Services, which later can be chained together to support environmental monitoring and integrated modelling. Existing approaches on integrated environmental modelling, such as OpenMI, have advantages in enabling interoperability between modelling components. It is possible to integrate both of them to take the best from both approaches. The paper introduces the design and implementation of a geoprocessing workflow tool, named GeoJModelBuilder, which is able to integrate interoperable Sensor Web, geoprocessing services, and OpenMI-compliant model components into workflows. In this way, sensors, data, geoprocessing functions, and models could be integrated in a flexible, reusable, interoperable, and user-friendly way. The system has been published as an open source software and illustrated in cases on environmental monitoring and integrated modelling.     

Built environment and violent crime: An environmental audit approach using Google Street View

Recent studies empirically support the role of the built environment in inducing or hindering violent crime. Particularly, studies of the broken window theory have provided evidence that physical disorder is an environmental correlate of crime. This includes broken windows, vacant/abandoned housings, abandoned cars on street, graffiti, and decayed street lighting, among other things. Current studies are limited by the difficulty involved in collecting fine-scale quantitative environmental data. The conventional environmental audit approach, which aims to assess environmental features, is costly, time-consuming, and burdensome. In this study, we use Google Street View to study the relationship between violent crime and physical features of urban residential environment. More concretely, a Poisson regression model with spatial filtering is used to identify socio-economic correlates of violent crime. Parting from the hypothesis that omission of built environmental factors results in systematic residual pattern, we proceed to analyze the spatial filter to select sites for virtual environmental audits. A series of physical environmental factors are identified using contingency table analysis. The results provide both theoretical and practical implications for several theories of crime and crime prevention efforts.     

Formalizing knowledge on international environmental regimes: A first step towards integrating political science in integrated assessments of global environmental change

International environmental regimes are considered key factors in dealing with global environmental change problems. It is important to understand if and how regimes are effective in tackling these problems, which requires knowledge on their potential impact on these problems as well as on their political feasibility. Integrated assessments of global environmental change, which are mainly bio-physical and technology-economic oriented, barely address knowledge on environmental regimes, due to problems in drawing general and policy relevant lessons on regime effectiveness and inherent difficulties in modelling human and social dimensions. This paper presents an innovative approach to formalize knowledge on the effectiveness of environmental regimes, so that scientists from both the political science and integrated assessment domain can understand it, discuss it and contribute to it. We constructed a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of conditions that influence regime effectiveness and implemented it in a computer model using fuzzy logic methodology. We evaluated the fuzzy model in an ex post case study on four existing international environmental regimes. The model can be used as an aid in analysing the effectiveness of existing or future regimes, highlighting which determinants contribute to success or failure, and it enables systematic and meaningful comparisons between regimes and policy measures.We discovered that formalizing knowledge on environmental regimes in a framework and model enhanced its transparency and deductive power as it forced us to be explicit about our choices and assumptions. Developing and using the framework and model also revealed the lacunae in knowledge in environmental regime theory which may inform regime researchers to further structure and increase their knowledge. By making knowledge on environmental regimes explicit and understandable we have taken an important step towards a better integration of political science in integrated assessments. We believe, however, that this integration is still in its early days and requires further attention in the future.     

沈阳郊区土壤及农产品重金属污染的现状评价

本文对沈阳郊区三个农产品生产区域的土壤及农产品中的七种重金属进行检测 ,用两种方法 (土壤环境质量标准和土壤背景值标准 )进行评价 ,结果表明 :沈阳地区土壤已经受到了不同程度的污染 ,污染较重的元素是镉和汞 ,以土壤环境质量标准评价其综合污染指数分别为 2 51和 2 89;以土壤背景值为标准评价其综合污染指数为分别为 1 9 4 6和 1 3 56.农产品中主要超标元素为铅 ,沈阳郊区的白菜超标率 1 0 0 % ;超标倍数 3 9.水稻中铅的检出率 1 0 0 % ;超标倍数 1 8.     

Climatic stress in the workplace: its effect on thermoregulatory responses and muscle fatigue in female workers

The present study was designed to determine the differences in thermoregulatory responses and the levels of muscle fatigue in the seated worker, performing a task involving a light metabolic load (typing), versus the standing worker, undertaking a task of a heavier metabolic load (lifting), in different climatic conditions (neutral and hot, humid). The results showed that environmental heat significantly influenced the cardiovascular and thermoregulatory systems in workers performing both light and heavy work tasks. In addition, environmental heat was shown to influence the magnitude of the frequency shift during the fatiguing muscle contraction in the typists rather than the lifters. These results suggest that: (1) performance of even sedentary workers performing a light manual task may be deleteriously affected by environmental heat; and (2) environmental heat may be of secondary importance to the nature of the task investigated on the level of muscle fatigue.     

Assessing heterogeneity from remote sensing images: The case of desertification in southern Portugal

A 10-year series of Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper images was used to test the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity at the landscape scale is evidence for desertification. The proposed methodology, based on spatiotemporal statistical analysis, was implemented for a study area in the innersouthern Alentejo region of Portugal. Major findings from the study include the increasing 'greenness' of vegetation patterns and an increasing trend towards spatial heterogeneity of both vegetation and soil variables. The former supports the global model of desertification, which proposes that feedback mechanisms stimulate the adaptation of vegetation to adverse environmental conditions by increasing biomass.