Cities play a key role in achieving the climate-neutral supply of heating and cooling. This paper compares the policy frameworks as well as practical implementation of smart heating and cooling in six cities: Munich, Dresden and Bad Nauheim in Germany; and Jinan, Chengdu and Haiyan in China, to explore strategies to enhance policy support, financial mechanisms, and consumer engagement, ultimately aiming to facilitate the transition to climate-neutral heating and cooling systems. The study is divided into three parts: (i) an examination of smart heating and cooling policy frameworks in Germany and China over the past few years; (ii) an analysis of heating and cooling strategies in the six case study cities within the context of smart energy systems; and (iii) an exploration of the practical solutions adopted by these cities as part of their smart energy transition initiatives. The findings reveal differences between the two countries in the strategies and regulations adopted by municipal governments as well as variations within each country. The policy frameworks and priorities set by city governments can greatly influence the development and implementation of smart heating and cooling systems. The study found that all six cities are actively engaged in pioneering innovative heating and cooling projects which utilise diverse energy sources such as geothermal, biomass, solar, waste heat and nuclear energy. Even the smaller cities were seen to be making considerable progress in the adoption of smart solutions.

Introduction: With the adoption of the rural rehabilitation strategy in recent years, China’s rural tourist industry has entered a golden age of growth. Due to the lack of management and decision-support systems, many rural tourist attractions in China experience a “tourist overload” problem during minor holidays or Golden Week, an extended vacation of seven or more consecutive days in mainland China formed by transferring holidays during a specific holiday period. This poses a severe challenge to tourist attractions and relevant management departments. Objective: This study aims to summarize the elements influencing passenger flow by examining the features of rural tourist attractions outside China’s largest cities. Additionally, the study will investigate the variations in the flow of tourists. Method: Grey Model (1,1) is a first-order, single-variable differential equation model used for forecasting trends in data with exponential growth or decline, particularly when dealing with small and incomplete datasets. Four prediction algorithms—the conventional GM(1,1) model, residual time series GM(1,1) model, single-element input BP neural network model, and multi-element input BP network model—were used to anticipate and assess the passenger flow of scenic sites. Result: The multi-input BP neural network model and residual time series GM(1,1) model have significantly higher prediction accuracy than the conventional GM(1,1) model and unit-input BP neural network model. A multi-input BP neural network model and the residual time series GM(1,1) model were used in tandem to develop a short-term passenger flow warning model for rural tourism in China’s outskirts. Conclusion: This model can guide tourists to staggered trips and alleviate the problem of uneven allocation of tourism resources.

In the era of rapid technological development, the integration of technology in education has become crucial (Hashim et al., 2022). The digital transformation of education requires universities to transform their traditional operational models, strategic directions, and teaching practices, re-examine their own value propositions, and promote high-quality innovative development in universities. Transformation and change bring challenges to organizational management, especially leadership. Can digital leadership positively influence the innovative behavior of university teachers? Can digital leadership improve organizational innovation performance by influencing innovation behavior? These questions urgently need to be answered through practical surveys of digital transformation in universities. From March 2024 to May 2022, we conducted a survey of 1142 participants from 12 universities in Kunming, southwestern China. Our research findings indicate that digital leadership has a positive impact on the innovation performance of university organizations; Innovation behavior plays a mediating role between digital leadership and organizational performance. These findings provide new insights into the potential mechanisms by which digital leadership influences organizational innovation in universities. The research findings emphasize that in the process of transforming traditional operational models, strategic directions, and teaching practices in higher education, in order to achieve high-quality innovative development, it is necessary to attach importance to digital leadership and continuously stimulate innovative behavior.

This paper studies the product language construction of the twisted porcelain cultural heritage. Through field research, we collected and sorted out samples of twisted porcelain products, explored the product language characteristics of twisted porcelain from multiple aspects such as production process, product shape, and product color, interpreted cultural value, captured potential connotations, extracted representative words from user comments, quantified the relationship between users and twisted porcelain culture, realized the construction and transmission of traditional cultural language information, conveyed the traditional cultural information of the product to users, and promoted the sustainable dissemination and development of this cultural heritage. The research results show that after mining and extraction at the level of twisted porcelain characteristics, the core language constructs the cultural expression of twisted porcelain products, which is more in line with the needs of the market and users, and has the potential to be developed and disseminated using the language generation of cultural heritage products.

The quest for quality postgraduate research productivity through education is on the increase. However, in the context of the African society, governance structures and policies seem to be impacting on the quality level of the provided education. Hence, this conceptual study explored the roles of governance structures and policies in enhancing and ensuring quality postgraduate education programmers in African institutions of higher learning. To this end, various relevant literature was reviewed. The findings showed amongst others that governance structures and policies affect the quality of education provided. Meanwhile, other factors such as curriculum, foreign influence, lack of resources, training, amongst others contribute to the quality of education provided. The study concludes that there is need for the current structures of governance and the designed and implemented policies for postgraduate education to be reviewed and adjusted towards ensuring the desired transformation.

With the rapid development of digital technology, the digital infrastructure enables the rapid formation, modification and refactoring of digital products through continuous experimentation and implementation, reduces the cost of innovation, and facilitates the implementation of digital innovation. To solve the problem that the technical scope of digital innovation is relatively concentrated and the knowledge flow between the achievements of digital innovation is insufficient, this study investigates the impact of digital infrastructure on organizational digital innovation in China. The cross-sectional study was conducted from November 2023 to March 2024 among 384 employees and managers in the core industries of the digital economy, as well as enterprises in traditional industries in China. Data were collected using closed-ended questionnaires adapted from previous literature. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to analyze the data using SPSS 28 and AMOS 28. The results reveal that both the information infrastructure and the innovation infrastructure have a positive and direct effect on organizational digital innovation in China, as well as an indirect effect through data flows. Converged infrastructure has only an indirect impact on organizational digital innovation through the flow of data.