Where the river basin is generally seen as the appropriate unit for analyzing freshwater availability and use, it becomes increasingly important to put freshwater issues in a global context. The book analyses the opportunities and threats of international virtual water trade in the context of solving national and regional problems of water shortages. Central questions addressed in the study are: What are the fluxes of virtual water related to the international trade of products? Is the import of virtual water a solution to water-scarce nations or merely a threat of becoming water dependent? Can the international trade of products be a tool to enhance water use efficiency globally, or, is it a way of shifting the environmental burdens to a distant location? To understand the global component of fresh water demand and supply, a set of indicators has been developed. The framework thus developed has been applied to different case studies. An estimated 16% of the global water use is not for producing domestically consumed products but products for export. With increasing globalisation of trade, global water interdependencies and overseas externalities are likely to increase. At the same time liberalisation of trade creates opportunities to increase global water use efficiency and physical water savings. Many nations save domestic water resources by importing water-intensive products and exporting commodities that are less water intensive. As a result of product trades from more productive sites to the less productive sites, there is a saving of 6 per cent of the global water use in agriculture. The study explores the use of virtual water transfers as an alternative to large scale inter-basin real water transfers has been analysed in a case study for China along with some major product studies such as coffee, tea and cotton products. The consumption of a product is connected to a chain of impacts on the water resources in the countries where it is grown and processed. The study has estimated the water footprint of worldwide consumption. Detailed impact study has been carried out for the case of cotton. It identifies both the location and the character of the impacts. The research distinguishes between three types of impact: evaporation of infiltrated rainwater for cotton growth (green water use), withdrawal of ground- or surface water for irrigation or processing (blue water use) and water pollution during growth or processing. Given the general lack of proper water pricing mechanisms or other ways of transmitting production-information, cotton consumers have little incentive to take responsibility for the impacts on remote water systems. It is found that the international trade has indirectly enhanced the global water use efficiency and helped to address the national water scarcity in some water-poor countries by saving national water resources. However, this was possible at the cost of increased water dependencies between nations. The existing indicators of water use are not sufficient to address the effect of consumption on water resources. It is proposed to use the concept of water footprint to understand the real appropriation of water by a nation and also to understand the chain of impacts on global water resources as a result of local consumption. The future trade negotiations should undertake the notion that trade is not only a tool of global economic development; it can also be a means of externalising the water footprint and thus shifting environmental burdens to distant locations
NHAs, such as service accounts, bots, and IoT devices, are an essential component of today’s computing ecosystems, but continue to be under-addressed in the current IAM frameworks 1. Being privileges without supervision, such an enhanced role of responsibility becomes often exposed to being a point of frequent exploitation, misuse and policy misconfiguration. To fill this void, we present a hybrid security framework for combining game-theoretic attack–defense modeling with formal verification of IAM policies. The game-theoretic model yields optimal defense strategies for preventing resource abuse, whereas formal methods (such as Z3, Alloy, SPIN) guarantee correctness and resilience to misconfigurations. In contrast, previous IAM methods consider them separately 3, our dual-pronged model preserves NHAs with end-to-end pipeline. Experimental results show the proposed approach could decrease access violation by 94 percent and improve average response time by 1–2 s over the traditional IAM solutions. This paper presents a strict, scalable and verifiable solution to NHA security, it is theoretical and application-oriented, suitable for enterprise and cloud.
We develop an applied-algebraic-geometry framework for policy boundaries generated by multi-channel Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) systems and use it to formalize a central applied phenomenon: identification wedges—parameter regions where distinct institutional mechanisms produce observationally similar outcomes until a regime boundary is approached. Given a parametric family of constrained optimization problems, the KKT equations define an algebraic set in the joint space of policy parameters, primal variables, and multipliers. Projecting (eliminating) the non-policy variables yields a pull-back policy variety in parameter space. The central objects of this paper are (i) the boundary ideal encoding regime changes (active-set switching), (ii) the Jacobian ideal encoding criticality of the projection, (iii) transversality indices that quantify how policy paths cross boundary components, and (iv) overlap thickness invariants (local algebra lengths) that quantify non-transversal multi-component intersections (boundary crowding). In dimension two, boundary germs admit an ADE-type refinement; we further show that, under mild hypotheses, overlap multiplicities determine the Milnor number and hence certify ADE type, making the identification-wedge geometry computably testable. We conclude by discussing practical implications for policy design and economics.
The presence of cartilage in poultry is considered undesirable. Four novel tryptic cartilage marker peptides derived from chicken collagen IIα1 and IXα1 were identified using LC-QToF-MS/MS in a comprehensive identification process and were not detected in tendons and skin. It was shown that the solely qualitative detection of cartilage-derived peptides is not sufficient for the identification of mechanically separated meat (MSM), as these peptides were – albeit in lower concentrations – also detected in meat intended for further processing into meat products (non-MSM). Therefore, a quantitative method (LC-QQQ-MS/MS) based on matrix-matched calibration using chicken fillets spiked with different concentrations of defatted cartilage powder (0.01, 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, or 0.5%) was developed. A satisfactory level of homogeneity of the sample material for routine analysis was achieved by extensively optimizing the sample preparation procedures, including freeze-drying, Soxhlet defatting with petroleum ether, subsequent grinding, and a substantial increase in the sample weight. The multiple reaction monitoring analysis of the cartilage-specific peptide VMQEQLSQLAASLR from collagen IXα1 exhibited the best quantification performance with low relative errors (%RE) below 15% at all cartilage concentration levels. The method developed provides a basis for evaluating the potential discrimination between MSM and non-MSM in commercial chicken raw materials.
This research seeks to explore the changing dynamics between Financial Technology (FinTech) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing the role of digital finance in promoting inclusive and sustainable growth. A bibliometric analysis was performed utilizing data sourced from the Dimensions database. Following the cleaning and examination of the dataset, VOSviewer was used to create visual representations of citation networks, publication trends and citation connections. The research identifies prominent authors, institutions, journals and thematic groupings associated with FinTech and sustainability. The findings suggest a rising interest among researchers in the role of FinTech in promoting sustainable development, with significant input from particular nations, journals and thematic areas. The research underscores the increasing importance of digital financial instruments in meeting essential sustainability objectives. Dominant terms are “Finance,” “Digital,” and “Financial,” signifying the critical focus on digital financial systems that underpin modern economies. This study adds to the expanding research on the relationship between FinTech and the SDGs by presenting a systematic bibliometric analysis. It offers valuable perspectives for academics, policymakers and professionals who are keen to comprehend the changing dynamics between digital finance and sustainable development.
