The State University System of Florida (SUSF or SUS) is a system of twelve public universities in the U.S. state of Florida. As of 2018, over 341,000 students were enrolled in Florida's state universities. Together with the Florida College System, which includes Florida's 28 community colleges and state colleges, it is part of Florida's system of public higher education. The system, headquartered in Tallahassee, is overseen by a chancellor and governed by the Florida Board of Governors.The Florida Board of Governors was created in 2003 to centralize the administration of the State University System of Florida. Previously, Florida's State University System had been governed by the Florida Board of Regents (1965–2001) and the Florida Board of Control (1905–1965).S.S.
The proposed exploitation of the Jadar Valley lithium/borate deposit in Serbia, by the Rio Tinto Corporation, indicates that it would become large-scale processing of boron- and lithium-containing ore. It would be one of the world's very first lithium mines in populated and agricultural area. The company claims that the envisioned mining will be in accordance with environmental protection requirements. The Jadar Valley deposits have been claimed to cover 90% of Europe's current lithium needs. Yet, local opposition to the mining has arisen due to potential devastating impacts on groundwater, soil, water usage, biodiversity loss, and waste accumulation. Research drilling by the mining company has already produced environmental damage, with mine water containing high levels of boron leaking from exploratory wells and causing crops to dry out. Furthermore, our investigations reveal substantially elevated downstream concentrations of boron, arsenic, and lithium in nearby rivers as compared to upstream regions. Additionally, here we show that soil samples exhibit repeated breaches of remediation limit values with environmental consequences on both surface and underground waters. With the opening of the mine, problems will be multiplied by the tailings pond, mine wastewater, noise, air pollution, and light pollution, endangering the lives of numerous local communities and destroying their freshwater sources, agricultural land, livestock, and assets.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) presents significant ethical, legal, and operational challenges, elevating the importance of responsible AI governance. This paper examines the impact of responsible AI information governance mechanisms on corporate performance using a sample of 342 securities firms. Companies are categorized into control and experimental groups based on their responsible AI application scores. Treating the adoption of responsible AI governance practices as a “quasi-natural” experiment, the study applies a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) regression model to uncover insights into causal relationships. The study also investigates the relative importance of various responsible AI governance dimensions in driving performance improvements. The results demonstrate that firms adopting responsible AI governance practices see significant performance improvements. This study adds to the academic discourse by deepening understanding of how responsible AI governance influences business outcomes and by offering a theoretical foundation for future research. From a practical perspective, it provides actionable guidance for organizations, demonstrating how ethical AI governance can drive sustainable business growth and enhance overall corporate performance.
Towards the role of humanoid robots as squad mates in urban operations and other domains, we identified doors as a major area lacking capability development. In this paper, we focus on the ability of humanoid robots to navigate and deal with doors. Human-sized doors are ubiquitous in many environment domains and the humanoid form factor is uniquely suited to operate and traverse them. We present an architecture which incorporates GPU accelerated perception and a tree based interactive behavior coordination system with a whole body motion and walking controller. Our system is capable of performing door traversals on a variety of door types. It supports rapid authoring of behaviors for unseen door types and techniques to achieve re-usability of those authored behaviors. The behaviors are modeled using trees and feature logical reactivity and action sequences that can be executed with layered concurrency to increase speed. Primitive actions are built on top of our existing whole body controller which supports manipulation while walking. We include a perception system using both neural networks and classical computer vision for door mechanism detection outside of the lab environment. We present operator-robot interdependence analysis charts to explore how human cognition is combined with artificial intelligence to produce complex robot behavior. Finally, we present and discuss real robot performances of fast door traversals on our Nadia humanoid robot. Videos online at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXuyT8w3JVgMPaB5nWNRNHtqzRK8i68dy.
This study investigates the complex relationships among environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices and total factor productivity (TFP) in enterprises, which remains a topic of ongoing debate. Using a comprehensive dataset of 3970 Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed enterprises from 2010 to 2023, we find that ESG governance significantly enhances enterprise TFP. This conclusion is robust even after endogeneity concerns are addressed and robustness checks are performed. The mediating mechanism analysis reveals that ESG governance improves TFP through two primary pathways: promoting green innovation and reducing business risk. Furthermore, the moderating effect analysis demonstrates that media attention and government subsidies amplify the positive impact of ESG governance on TFP. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the benefits of ESG governance are more pronounced for large enterprises, firms in China's central and western regions, non-heavily polluting industries, resource-dependent city enterprises, firms with high financing constraints, low-profit enterprises, and those adopting ESG practices following the 2015 policy tightening phase. This study contributes not only to the understanding of the mechanisms and boundary conditions through which ESG governance influences enterprise TFP but also to the literature concerning the economic consequences of ESG practices while offering practical insights for optimizing enterprise governance and informing policy formulation.
In this article, we introduce a theory of alternative means of positive invertible bounded operators. We define the alternative mean associated to a normalized operator monotone function f by A sigma fB = f(A(-1)& sharp;B)Af(A(-1)& sharp;B) for positive invertible operators A and B. We study the adjoint, transpose, and duals of these means and obtain a characterization of the spectral geometric means in terms of alternative means and their duals. Additionally, we show the deep connection between the alternative means and the near order of positive operators. In particular, we obtain in-betweenness results of the type A-< A sigma fB-< B. Moreover, some of our results are extended to the setting of tau-measurable operators. (c) 2025 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
