Assessing product sustainability performance is essential for supporting sustainable product development since it enables comparison and progress monitoring and informs decision-making. However, approaches for integrating sustainability considerations into product development are not merely technical choices; they reflect underlying assumptions about how sustainability performance is conceptualized and interpreted, which has significant implications for what the goal of sustainable product development is considered to be. Based on a systematic literature review, complemented by exploratory interviews with practitioners, this study examined how product sustainability performance is conceptualized in relation to what is assessed (scope), at what level impacts are considered (scale of impact), and in relation to what results are interpreted (point of reference). Three conceptualizations emerged from the clustering of the findings, showing different combinations of the spectrum of scope, scale of impact and point of reference. In addition, it was found that the choice of performance lens, i.e., efficiency or effectiveness, can be linked to the adopted point of reference. Both lenses are necessary in the product development process, and the paper therefore proposes a definition of product sustainability performance that combines both. The discussion presents theoretical implications of the proposed definition to the product development process. The paper concludes that advancing sustainable product development may depend less on creating new assessment tools and more on strategically applying existing ones within a shared conceptual understanding of product sustainability performance.
With the growth of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, human existence is expanding into four interconnected spaces: physical (natural), social, thinking, and cyber. The interplay of these four spaces is reshaping the relationships between humans and nature, society, their inner selves, and the cyber world. The traditional tripartite philosophical system of Eastern culture (Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) faces new challenges in explaining human existence and its relationship to these fundamental living spaces in the digital age. This paper proposes a new quadri-philosophical system, “Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Cyberism" based on the Cyber-Physical-Social-Thinking space. In this new system, Cyberism emerges as a new philosophical domain dedicated to exploring the relationship between humans and the cyber realm, including its existence and space, and responding to ongoing transformations in human life in the digital age. Specifically, this paper analyzes the new forms of existence and space, philosophical logic, and new applications and philosophical problems for each of the four philosophical dimensions, examining the contemporary relevance of Eastern philosophy in the context of digital society. This research seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions on Eastern philosophy and offers an interdisciplinary perspective for reflecting on the impact of emerging technologies on human existence.
Interest in philanthropy has witnessed a resurgence in recent decades, paralleled by a steep increase in the creation of individual fortunes. Originally being a more conspicuous phenomenon in Anglo-Saxon countries, philanthropy has become increasingly salient in traditional welfare states. However, the economic implications of philanthropy basically remain unknown. Here, we examine whether donations to research at higher education institutes (HEIs) in Sweden affect their knowledge output, as reflected in scientific publications and patent applications. The analysis is confined to the STEM-disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) for the period 2001 to 2015. We have access to data on the respective HEIs’ total research funding for STEM divided into donations, corporations, public block grants, and other public sources. In the analysis, we compare the effects of different research funding on knowledge output relative to their base funding. Implementing numerous controls, we find that patent applications are positively associated with a higher regional share of donations, whereas no such effects are detected for scientific publications. This is indicative of philanthropy being positively related to growth, since contemporary microeconomic models assign a critical role to innovation in promoting growth and societal prosperity.
Given a set A and an abelian group B with operators in A, in the sense of Krull and Noether, we introduce the Ore group extension B[x; sigma B, delta B] as the additive group B[x], with A[x] as a set of operators. Here, the action of A[x]on B[x] is defined by mimicking the multiplication used in the classical case where A and Bare the same ring. We derive generalizations of Vandermonde's and Leibniz's identities for this construction, and they are then used to establish associativity criteria. Additionally, we prove a version of Hilbert's basis theorem for this structure, under the assumption that the action of A on B is what we call weakly s-unital. Finally, we apply these results to the case where B is a left module over a ring A, and specifically to the case where A and B coincide with a non-associative ring which is left distributive but not necessarily right distributive. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This study investigates the effectiveness of preattentive visual features, namely motion, color, and shape, in guiding attention within consistent 3D game-like environments. Through two experiments, we measured detection accuracy and user preferences for visual cues embedded in controlled scenes. In the first experiment, motion and color were reliably detected within 250 ms, while shape-based detection showed lower accuracy and greater variability. The second experiment extended the analysis by collecting player preferences in a simple interactive scenario. Participants strongly favored color cues, particularly glowing effects, for their visual appeal. These findings highlight the value of combining perceptual performance with user preference when designing attention-guiding mechanisms in interactive 3D environments.
