Employee engagement and sustainable organisational change: evidence from the UK energy sector

Sustaining organisational change remains a persistent challenge, especially within complex and rapidly evolving industries such as the UK energy sector. As these organisations navigate digital transformation, decarbonisation, and shifting regulatory demands, the capacity to implement and maintain meaningful change becomes increasingly critical. While extensive research exists on organisational change (OC) and employee engagement (EE) independently, their intersection - specifically how EE influences the sustainability of change initiatives - remains underexplored. This study investigates how employee engagement (EE) influences sustainable organisational change (OC) within the UK energy sector, using E.ON UK - a leading energy provider as the case study. The research specifically examines the adoption of a novel change initiative: the Resource Management Tool (RMT). Using a mixed-methods case study approach, the research integrates 104 quantitative survey responses and 14 qualitative interviews with employees across various teams. The study investigates three key areas: (1) the organisational and individual factors that influence EE; (2) the relationship between EE and employee change readiness (CR); and (3) how EE, CR, and individual characteristics shape sustained adoption of change. The findings reveal that while engaged employees tend to show higher change readiness, EE alone is not a consistent predictor of sustainable change adoption. Instead, perceived personal utility, leadership advocacy, and ease of use emerged as critical moderators. Differences in engagement and adoption were also observed across roles and demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, tenure, and team affiliation. This research contributes theoretically by challenging the assumption that EE directly drives sustained OC, highlighting the importance of contextual and structural enablers. Methodologically, it extends existing EE research by incorporating employee narratives alongside quantitative data, offering a more nuanced view. Practically, the study provides actionable insights for managers and change agents on aligning engagement strategies with both individual and departmental factors to enhance long-term change success. These insights are particularly relevant for organisations operating in dynamic, transformation-intensive environments like the UK energy sector

Adherence to the Mediterranean dietary approaches to stop hypertension intervention for neurodegenerative delay (MIND) diet and trajectories of depressive symptomatology in youth

Background: The rising prevalence of youth depression underscores the need to identify modifiable factors for prevention and intervention. This study aims to investigate the protective role of Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet on depressive symptoms in adolescents. Methods: Participants were identified from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Adherence to the MIND diet was measured by the Child Nutrition Assessment or the Block Kids Food Screener. Depressive symptoms were measured annually using the Child Behavior Checklist's depression subscale. We utilized regression analyses and cross-lagged panel modeling (CLPM) to examine longitudinal associations. Additional analyses adjusted for polygenic risk scores for depression, and changes in Body Mass Index (BMI) and waist-to-height ratio. Results: Of the 8459 children (52.3 % male; mean age 10.9 [SD, 0.6] years), 2338 (27.6 %) demonstrated high MIND diet adherence, while 2120 (25.1 %) showed low adherence. High adherence was prospectively associated with reduced depressive symptoms (adjusted β, −0.64, 95 % CI, −0.73 to −0.55; p < 0.001) and 46 % lower odds of clinically relevant depression (adjusted odds ratio, 0.54, 95 % CI, 0.39 to 0.75; p < 0.001) at two-year follow-up. CLPM analyses showed significant cross-lag paths from MIND diet scores to less depressive symptoms across three time points. These associations persisted independently of changes in BMI and waist-to-height ratios, and were not significantly moderated by genetic predisposition to depression. Conclusions: Higher adherence to the MIND dietary pattern was longitudinally associated with decreased risk of depressive symptoms in adolescents. Promoting MIND diet may represent a promising strategy for depression prevention in adolescent populations

Arbitration in cross-border insolvency proceedings: the Chinese perspective

The approach to recognition and assistance in cross-border insolvency proceedings in China has tended to be restrictive. In contrast the approach of Chinese courts to foreign arbitrations has been different. Arbitration has been the favoured means of dispute resolution in China’s efforts to participate in world trade and the global economy after 1978. Accordingly, the arbitration legal system has advanced relatively quickly in line with international norms set out under the New York Convention. There are good prospects for recognition of foreign arbitral awards in China and arbitration is well integrated with China’s domestic insolvency system. In contrast, China’s attitude towards foreign insolvencies remains cautious, even in spite of an arrangement with Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. We consider how foreign arbitrations might fare in Chinese insolvencies. We also consider whether the openness to international arbitrations can ameliorate any aspects of the presently restrictive approach to cross-border insolvencies

Carrying a weapon does not change stride-time variability during treadmill-based load carriage

Gait biomechanics during load carriage tasks are a focus of military research aiming to optimise performance and manage injury risk. However, the impact of weapon handling on gait during these tasks remains relatively unexplored. This study investigates non-linear stride time measures, specifically detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and sample entropy (SE), which assess the persistence and regularity of stride time. Seventeen Australian Army soldiers completed 12-minute walking trials on an instrumented treadmill, both with and without a replica rifle while carrying 23.2 kg of load at speeds of 3.5 km/h, 5.5 km/h, and 6.5 km/h. Heel contacts were tracked using an 18-camera Vicon system. Mixed-effect model analyses indicated that weapon handling did not significantly affect stride time variability (DFA p = 0.46) or regularity (SE p = 0.42), suggesting it may not be a critical factor in future studies of stride time variability during load carriage tasks

Knowledge, attitudes and practices on substandard and falsified medicines for human and animal use in Wakiso district, Uganda

Background: Substandard and falsified medicines (SFMs) continue to pose a significant threat to public health globally. However, there is limited evidence on use of SFMs for both humans and animals particularly in low- and middle-income countries such as Uganda. The study assessed knowledge, attitudes and practices on SFMs for human and animal use in Wakiso District, Uganda. Methods: A cross-sectional survey that employed a structured questionnaire among 432 community members was conducted in Wakiso District. The questionnaire assessed knowledge, attitudes and practices on SFMs for human and animal use. Data was collected using the KoboCollect mobile application hosted on tablet computers. Univariate data analysis was conducted in Stata Version 14. Results: The majority of respondents (83%) stated that they had heard about SFMs although only 31% could correctly define them. Only 7% of the respondents accurately identified a falsified medicine despite 24% stating that they believed they could recognise SFMs. Almost two-thirds (62% and 60%) of the respondents disagreed that most human and animal SFMs respectively were as good as genuine medicines. Most of the respondents strongly agreed or agreed that SFMs could be very dangerous for humans (96%) and for animals (95%). Respondents reported having bought products they suspected were SFMs for use in humans (14%) and animals (24%). Seeking health worker advice on the medicine brand (40%) / getting medicine from a trustworthy pharmacy (34%) for humans; and seeking a veterinary officer’s advice for choosing the brand (43%) / getting medicine from a trustworthy veterinary pharmacist (29%) for animals were the most common measures respondents reported taking to ensure the medicine bought was genuine. Only 25% of the respondents mentioned informing a health worker and only 4% had reported suspicions of SFMs to the National Drug Authority. Conclusion: Despite commendable attitudes, there was generally limited knowledge and related poor practices regarding SFMs for both humans and animals. There is a need for key stakeholder engagement involving health and regulatory authorities in both human and animal medicine to increase awareness on SFMs to minimise the potential risks to health among the community

Low-resource GAN-stack for high-resolution floor plan generation with enhanced evaluation and contextual validation

The fast and reliable prototyping of floor plan layouts is a crucial element in the early stage of the building construction cycle. The purpose of this study is to ameliorate the major difficulties associated with the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for automating high-resolution floor plan generation: vast computational and data requirements, training instability, and problematic result evaluation. A stable resource-efficient multi-module GAN-stack framework is proposed comprising pre-processing (denoising and 4x down-sampling), floor plan image generation, and up-sampling modules. Each module is individually optimized. An innovative holistic evaluation framework of the generated building floor plans is presented covering image quality, diversity, truthfulness, overall training time, energy spent during training and associated carbon emissions. A novel validation framework is introduced, involving contextual building functionality, data privacy, capability to manipulate design generation to suit the designer’s desires, usability in BIM downstream tasks, and inference speed. Results demonstrate that the apropos network architecture choices allow for significantly cutting down the wall clock training time (<60 h) while maintaining superior generated image quality and contextual meaningfulness, given only sub-thousand 1024 × 1024 training images of single-story residential Danish homes and a limited computing resource (a single RTX-3090 GPU). The proposed computer-aided pipeline may support decisions between architects and their clients. It may broaden access to the GAN-based research on the automation of building design. The presented automated tools could find application in other industries which have the same driving needs and resource constraints for adopting GANs, and that also lack ways of validating their end product

Assessing the utility of predicted brain age for explaining variability in language abilities in healthy older adults

We investigated whether the difference between chronological and modelled brain age explains individual differences in language performance among healthy older adults. Age-related decline in language abilities is widely documented, with considerable variability among healthy older individuals in both language performance and underlying neural substrate. We derived predicted brain age from grey and white matter using machine learning and used this measure to estimate neurological deviations from chronological age. Using Bayesian mixed-effects modelling, we tested whether brain-age deviations predict language performance in a sample of 86 adults aged 60 years and above. We assessed the effect of brain-age deviations on performance across four well-established language processing tasks, each tapping into linguistic domains known to be vulnerable to ageing and show individual variability in skill levels, in both comprehension and production. Our findings suggest that, in healthy older individuals, predicted deviations of brain age from chronological age do not predict language abilities. This challenges the idea that brain age is a reliable determinant of language processing variability, at least in healthy (as opposed to pathological) ageing and highlights the need to consider other neural and cognitive factors when studying language decline