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In the face of escalating urban populations, the quest for seamless mobility in cities becomes increasingly complex, even in regions where transit options are presumably accessible within the developing world. The imperative to confront urban mobility challenges and forge sustainable cities equipped with adept transportation and traffic management systems cannot be overstated. This study delves into the technological paradigms employed by developed nations and evaluates their pertinence in the current milieu for mitigating urban mobility challenges. Simultaneously, it scrutinizes the deployment of smart city technologies (SCTs) within developing nations, investigating potential technological strides that can be harnessed to achieve sustainable urban transportation. By dissecting the intricacies of SCTs in developing countries, the study aims to unearth viable technological advancements that can be judiciously implemented to foster sustainable urban mobility. It aspires to provide nuanced recommendations for the integration of latent SCTs, unlocking untapped potential to augment the sustainability of urban transportation in the developing world. The research also elucidates strategies geared towards fostering international collaborations which are instrumental in propelling the development of cities characterized by equity and inclusivity. The study underscores the significance of a global alliance in overcoming urban challenges, emphasizing the need for shared knowledge, resources and experiences to propel the evolution of cities towards a more sustainable and equitable future. This research serves as a comprehensive exploration of the intricate interplay between technology, urbanization and international cooperation, offering insights and recommendations pivotal to steering the trajectory of urban development in developing nations.

This chapter examines the ‘embodied turn’ in the study of traditional Chinese sports and identifies issues within this area of research. It introduces new interpretative perspectives and approaches within the framework of bodily sociology to elucidate the link between locally-informed sports practices and the formation of socialized individuals. The chapter categorises the current research into three main themes: self-giving, the creation of bodily value and the construction of national identity through sports. It then integrates these themes with the findings of embodied sociology. The chapter compiles and analyzes the existing literature on traditional Chinese sports culture from both Chinese and international scholars, offering insights into the status, rationale and challenges of bodily sociological research. By contextualising the concept of the embodied turn in traditional Chinese sports culture – through concepts such as self-givenness, self-techniques, the generation of value and the creation of collective memory – the chapter discusses the impact of bodily sociology on cultural research. The chapter advocates for further bodily sociological studies of Chinese sports culture, which could enhance the understanding of Chinese studies among Western scholars and contribute to a genuine embodied turn in this field of study. Providing one of the initial explorations of embodied studies in traditional Chinese sports, the chapter reveals a transition from broad cultural interpretations and symbolic, structuralist sociology to a phenomenological approach in sports cultural studies. It posits that the bodily sociology approach is beneficial for sports studies although current research has not yet fully realized the embodied turn.

This first chapter is the introduction to the book. The purpose of this book is to address and better understand why China tightly embraces modern sport in contemporary times. Some view this as an indicator of glocalisation and a result of Western industrial civilization putting pressure on China to showcase their strengths as a nation. Some important considerations to explore are China's mediated ability to play and compete with the west. Sport is also seen as a channel of observing global political and economic challenges, especially those in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the intense tensions between communities, which certainly inspires further academic development. Given China's recently remarkable achievements in sport, it is high time to show the world more inside stories of sport development across the nation. The contributors of this collection bring foundational Chinese context to each chapter as they examine changing sport cultures at different scales.

Text classification is a widely accepted and adopted technique in organizations to mine and analyze unstructured and semi-structured data. With advancement of technological computing, deep learning has become more popular among academicians and professionals to perform mining and analytical operations. In this work, the authors study the research carried out in field of text classification using deep learning techniques to identify gaps and opportunities for doing research.

The authors adopted bibliometric-based approach in conjunction with visualization techniques to uncover new insights and findings. The authors collected data of two decades from Scopus global database to perform this study. The authors discuss business applications of deep learning techniques for text classification.

The study provides overview of various publication sources in field of text classification and deep learning together. The study also presents list of prominent authors and their countries working in this field. The authors also presented list of most cited articles based on citations and country of research. Various visualization techniques such as word cloud, network diagram and thematic map were used to identify collaboration network.

The study performed in this paper helped to understand research gaps that is original contribution to body of literature. To best of the authors' knowledge, in-depth study in the field of text classification and deep learning has not been performed in detail. The study provides high value to scholars and professionals by providing them opportunities of research in this area.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive review of electric tugboat deployment in maritime transportation, including an in-depth assessment of its advantages and disadvantages. Along with the identification of advantages and disadvantages of electric tugboat deployment, the present research also aims to provide managerial insights into the economic viability of different tugboat alternatives that can guide future investments in the following years.

A detailed literature review was conducted, aiming to gain broad insights into tugboat operations and focusing on different aspects, including tugboat accidents and safety issues, scheduling and berthing of tugboats, life cycle assessment of diesel tugboats and their alternatives, operations of electric and hybrid tugboats, environmental impacts and others. Moreover, a set of interviews was conducted with the leading experts in the electric tugboat industry, including DAMEN Shipyards and the Port of Auckland. Econometric analyses were performed as well to evaluate the financial viability and economic performance of electric tugboats and their alternatives (i.e. conventional tugboats and hybrid tugboats).

The advantages of electric tugboats encompass decreased emissions, reduced operating expenses, improved energy efficiency, lower noise levels and potential for digital transformation through automation and data analytics. However, high initial costs, infrastructure limitations, training requirements and restricted range need to be addressed. The electric tugboat alternative seems to be the best option for scenarios with low interest rate values as increasing interest values negatively impact the salvage value of electric tugboats. It is expected that for long-term planning, the electric and hybrid tugboat alternatives will become preferential since they have lower annual costs than conventional diesel tugboats.

The outcomes of this research provide managerial insights into the practical deployment of electric tugboats and point to future research needs, including battery improvements, cost reduction, infrastructure development, legislative and regulatory changes and alternative energy sources. The advancement of battery technology has the potential to significantly impact the cost dynamics associated with electric tugboats. It is essential to do further research to monitor the advancements in battery technology and analyze their corresponding financial ramifications. It is essential to closely monitor the industry’s shift toward electric tugboats as their prices become more affordable.

The maritime industry is rapidly transforming and facing pressing challenges related to sustainability and digitization. Electric tugboats represent a promising and innovative solution that could address some of these challenges through zero-emission operations, enhanced energy efficiency and integration of digital technologies. Considering the potential of electric tugboats, the present study provides a comprehensive review of the advantages and disadvantages of electric tugboats in maritime transportation, extensive evaluation of the relevant literature, interviews with industry experts and supporting econometric analyses. The outcomes of this research will benefit governmental agencies, policymakers and other relevant maritime transportation stakeholders.

Predicting commodity futures trading volumes represents an important matter to policymakers and a wide spectrum of market participants. The purpose of this study is to concentrate on the energy sector and explore the trading volume prediction issue for the thermal coal futures traded in Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange in China with daily data spanning January 2016–December 2020.

The nonlinear autoregressive neural network is adopted for this purpose and prediction performance is examined based upon a variety of settings over algorithms for model estimations, numbers of hidden neurons and delays and ratios for splitting the trading volume series into training, validation and testing phases.

A relatively simple model setting is arrived at that leads to predictions of good accuracy and stabilities and maintains small prediction errors up to the 99.273th quantile of the observed trading volume.

The results could, on one hand, serve as standalone technical trading volume predictions. They could, on the other hand, be combined with different (fundamental) prediction results for forming perspectives of trading trends and carrying out policy analysis.

This paper summarizes and synthesizes existing research while critically assessing findings for future studies to advance the scholarship of maritime logistics and digital transformation with big data.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 159 journal articles from the Scopus database with search keywords “maritime*” and “big data.” This analysis helps identify research gaps by identifying themes via keyword co-occurrence, co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis. The Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) framework was applied to understand the findings of bibliometric analysis and provide a research agenda.

The analyses identified emerging themes of the scholarship of maritime logistics and digital transformation with big data and their relationships to identify research clusters. Future research directions were provided by examining existing research's theory, context, characteristics and method.

This research is grounded in bibliometric analysis and the TCCM framework to understand the scholarly evolution, giving managers and academics retrospective and prospective insights.

This study aims to improve the control accuracy and antidisturbance performance of the manipulator with the flexible link, a combined controller, which combines the novel backstepping sliding mode controller based on the extended state observer (ESO) and super-twisting sliding mode controller.

First, the dynamic of the system is constructed by Lagrange method and assumed mode method, and then the dynamic is decoupled by the singular perturbation theory to obtain the slow-varying subsystem and fast-varying subsystem. For the slow-varying subsystem, the novel backstepping sliding mode controller based on ESO is used to achieve joint tracking. For the fast-varying subsystem, the super-twisting sliding mode controller is used for vibration suppression. At the same time, to suppress chattering, the tanh function is used to replace the sign function in the reaching law.

The simulation results show that the combined control has better trajectory tracking performance, antiinterference performance and vibration suppression performance than traditional sliding mode control (SMC).

A novel backstepping sliding mode controller based on ESO is designed to guarantee the performance of the tracking trajectory. The new controller improves the converge rate. A super-twisting sliding mode controller, which can stabilize the fast-varying subsystem, is used to suppress the vibration of flexible link.

This paper aims to explore factors influencing suppliers' acceptance, integration challenges, expected benefits and support from customers when implementing a customer-introduced digital supply chain system.

The study investigates the perspective of suppliers using a mixed methodology approach that combines qualitative interviews with a large-scale quantitative survey conducted among 220 internationally located suppliers of an automotive-industrial firm.

As a result, the authors identified 11 factors that drive suppliers' acceptance of customer-introduced digital supply chain systems. These factors have been ranked based on their importance. The top three important factors identified were the digital system being provided at no cost to the suppliers, the system's ability to save time and the system offering benefits to the suppliers.

Further research can be conducted to validate the perspective of suppliers in other industries. Additionally, future studies can investigate the effectiveness of fulfilling these acceptance factors within an actual digital integration setup.

Companies can leverage these insights to accelerate their digital supply chain integration efforts. The insights on acceptance factors, challenges, benefits and support expected by suppliers can serve as a valuable guide for policy and decision makers within the industry.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to investigate the perspective of suppliers in the integration of a customer's digital supply chain. By including the supplier's perspective, this study makes a significant contribution to the academic literature about supply chain digitalisation.