Search results for: organisational social capital.

Authors: Marco Morini, Nicolandrea Calabrese, Dario Chello

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Despite the international commitment of Algeria towards the development of energy efficiency and renewable energy in the country, the internal energy demand has been continuously growing during the last decade due to the substantial increase of population and of living conditions, which in turn has led to an unprecedented expansion of the residential building sector. The RTB (Thermal Building Regulation) is the technical document that establishes the calculation framework for the thermal performance of buildings in Algeria, setting up minimum obligatory targets for the thermal performance of new buildings. An update of this regulation is due in the coming years and this paper discusses some proposals in this regard, with the aim to improve the energy efficiency of the building sector, particularly with regard to social housing. In particular, it proposes a methodology for drafting an energy performance label of new Algerian residential buildings, moving from the results of the thermal compliance verification and sizing of technical systems as defined in the RTB. Such an energy performance label – whose calculation method is briefly described in the paper – aims to raise citizens' awareness of the benefits of energy efficiency. It can represent the first step in a process of integrating technical installations into the calculation of the energy performance of buildings in Algeria.

Keywords: building, energy certification, energy efficiency, social housing, international cooperation, Mediterranean Region

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Authors: Mohammed Agbali, Claudia Trillo, Yusuf Arayici, Terrence Fernando

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The wide-spread adoption of the Smart City concept has introduced a new era of computing paradigm with opportunities for city administrators and stakeholders in various sectors to re-think the concept of urbanization and development of healthy cities. With the world population rapidly becoming urban-centric especially amongst the emerging economies, social innovation will assist greatly in deploying emerging technologies to address the development challenges in core sectors of the future cities. In this context, sustainable health-care delivery and improved quality of life of the people is considered at the heart of the healthy city agenda. This paper examines the Boston innovation landscape from the perspective of smart services and innovation ecosystem for sustainable development, especially in transportation and healthcare. It investigates the policy implementation process of the Healthy City agenda and eHealth economy innovation based on the experience of Massachusetts’s City of Boston initiatives. For this purpose, three emerging areas are emphasized, namely the eHealth concept, the innovation hubs, and the emerging technologies that drive innovation. This was carried out through empirical analysis on results of public sector and industry-wide interviews/survey about Boston’s current initiatives and the enabling environment. The paper highlights few potential research directions for service integration and social innovation for deploying emerging technologies in the healthy city agenda. The study therefore suggests the need to prioritize social innovation as an overarching strategy to build sustainable Smart Cities in order to avoid technology lock-in. Finally, it concludes that the Boston example of innovation economy is unique in view of the existing platforms for innovation and proper understanding of its dynamics, which is imperative in building smart and healthy cities where quality of life of the citizenry can be improved.

Keywords: Smart city, social innovation, eHealth, innovation hubs, emerging technologies, equitable healthcare, healthy cities.

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Authors: Nader A. Al Theeb, Zaid Abu Manneh, Ibrahim Al-Qadi

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Traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a combinatorial integer optimization problem that asks "What is the optimal route for a vehicle to traverse in order to deliver requests to a given set of customers?”. It is widely used by the package carrier companies’ distribution centers. The main goal of applying the TSP in courier organizations is to minimize the time that it takes for the courier in each trip to deliver or pick up the shipments during a day. In this article, an optimization model is constructed to create a new TSP variant to optimize the routing in a courier organization with a consideration of congestion in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Real data were collected by different methods and analyzed. Then, concert technology - CPLEX was used to solve the proposed model for some random generated data instances and for the real collected data. At the end, results have shown a great improvement in time compared with the current trip times, and an economic study was conducted afterwards to figure out the impact of using such models.

Keywords: Travel salesman problem, congestions, pick-up, integer programming, package carriers, service engineering.

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Authors: Burja C., Burja V.

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The paper presents the Romanian realities and perspectives from the point of view of reaching the sustainable development model in the context of the recent accession to the European Union, based on the analysis of the indicators listed in the EU Sustainable Development Strategy. The analysis of the economic-social potential for sustainable development and of the environment aspects show that the objectives stipulated in the renewed EU Sustainable Development Strategy of 2006 can be reached, but an extra effort must be put-in in order to overcome the existing substantial gaps in several areas in relation to the developed countries of the EU. The paper-s conclusions show that even if sustainable development is not an easy target to reach in Romania, there are resources and a growing potential, which can lead to sustainable development if used rationally.

Keywords: Ecological dimension, economic-social potential, strategy, sustainable development

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Authors: B. K. Yeoh, Z. Arsad, C. W. Hooy

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This paper tests the level of market integration between Malaysia and Singapore stock markets with the world market. Kalman Filter (KF) methodology is used on the International Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) and the pricing errors estimated within the framework of ICAPM are used as a measure of market integration or segmentation. The advantage of the KF technique is that it allows for time-varying coefficients in estimating ICAPM and hence able to capture the varying degree of market integration. Empirical results show clear evidence of varying degree of market integration for both case of Malaysia and Singapore. Furthermore, the results show that the changes in the level of market integration are found to coincide with certain economic events that have taken placed. The findings certainly provide evidence on the practicability of the KF technique to estimate stock markets integration. In the comparison between Malaysia and Singapore stock market, the result shows that the trends of the market integration indices for Malaysia and Singapore look similar through time but the magnitude is notably different with the Malaysia stock market showing greater degree of market integration. Finally, significant evidence of varying degree of market integration shows the inappropriate use of OLS in estimating the level of market integration.

Keywords: ICAPM, Kalman filter, stock market integration.

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Authors: Josephine S. Larkings, Patricia M. Brown

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Mental health professionals views about mental illness is an important issue which has not received enough attention. The negative stigma associated with mental illness can have many negative consequences. Unfortunately, health professionals working with the mentally ill can also exhibit stigma. It has been suggested that causal explanations or beliefs around the causes of mental illness may influence stigma. This study aims to gain a greater insight into stigma through examining stigma among potential mental health professionals. Firstly, results found that potential mental health professionals had relatively low social distance t(205) = -3.62, p <.001. Secondly, an ANOVA indicated that the participants endorsed some causal beliefs more than others, F(1.82, 311.55) = 88.47, p < .001, partial n2 = .34. Moreover, participants endorsed the biological causal explanation the most. Thirdly, results indicated that combined contact (quality and quantity) and causal beliefs (biological, psychological, and environmental) explained a significant proportion of the variance in stigma, R2 = .35, adjusted R2 = .33, F(5, 153) = 16.66, p < .001. Quality of contact was the strongest predictor, with greater quality of contact associated with lower desired social distance. Also, quantity of contact, psychological and environmental causal explanations were also significant predictors of stigma. Greater quantity of contact and higher levels of environmental causal beliefs were associated with lower levels of stigma while psychological causal explanations were associated with higher levels of stigma. A series of multiple regression analyses were conducted that showed the three causal beliefs had different impacts on four factors of stigma (Authoritarian, Benevolence, Social restrictiveness, and Community mental health ideology). These analyses showed that psychological causal beliefs had the most positive impact. More research is required on this topic as it has important implications to the treatment and recovery for people suffering from mental illness.

Keywords: Causal beliefs, contact, health professionals, mental illness stigma, social distance.

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Authors: Zhalmagambetov Yerlanbek, Assymova Dariya, Tashieva Saltanat, and Aliya Bolatkhan

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The relevance of the study of everyday life in Almaty and Kyzylorda are associated with the emergence of the modern trends in historiography and socializing areas of government reform. The relevance is due to the fact that in the early twentieth century Kyzylorda and Almaty began to develop as a city and this period has a special place in the life of the state. An interesting aspect of the everyday life of the inhabitants of the new city, which was built in the era of Stalin's Five-Year Plans, can be examined through the eyes of the Soviet people living in a specific environment, reflecting the life of the citizens. The study of industrialization of the Soviet Union and the attention paid to new developments in the first five years of everyday aspects as the impact of the modernization of the 1930s was one of the decisive factors in the lives of residents. Among these factors, we would like to highlight the medical field, which is the basis of all human life, specifically focusing on the state of medicine in Alma-Ata in the first 20-30-years of the twentieth century, and analyze the different aspects of human life, determining the quality of medical care to the population during this period.

Keywords: Alma Ata, capital, epidemic diseases, health care, Kyzylorda, the USSR, Vernyj.

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Authors: Sunday E. Ogundipe, Rafiu O. Salawu, Lawrencia O. Ogundipe

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The study examines the determinants of corporate cash holding of non-financial quoted firms in Nigeria using a sample of fifty four non-financial quoted firms listed on the Nigeria Stock Exchange for the period 1995-2009. Data were sourced from the Annual reports of the sampled firms and analyzed using Generalized Method of Moments(GMM). The study finds evidence supportive of a target adjustment model and that firms can not instantaneously adjust towards the target cash level owing to the fact that adjustment cost being costly,. Also, the result shows significant negative relationship between cash holdings and firm size, net working capital, return on asset and bank relationship and positive relationship with growth opportunities, leverage, inventories, account receivables and financial distress. Furthermore, there is no significant relationship between cash holdings and cash flow. In Nigerian setting, most of the variables that are relevant for explaining cash holdings in the Developed countries are found by this study to be relevant also in Nigeria.

Keywords: Adjustment Model , Cash holding, Determinant, Generalized Method of Moments(GMM)

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Authors: Jun-Ho Park, Kwang-Woo Nam, Seung-Mo Hong, Tae-Heon Moon, Sang-Ho Lee, Youn-Taik Leem

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The aim of this study was to build ‘Ubi-Net’, a decision-making support system for systematic establishment in U-City planning. We have experienced various urban problems caused by high-density development and population concentrations in established urban areas. To address these problems, a U-Service contributes to the alleviation of urban problems by providing real-time information to citizens through network connections and related information. However, technology, devices, and information for consumers are required for systematic U-Service planning in towns and cities where there are many difficulties in this regard, and a lack of reference systems. Thus, this study suggests methods to support the establishment of sustainable planning by providing comprehensive information including IT technology, devices, news, and social networking services (SNS) to U-City planners through intelligent searches. In this study, we targeted Smart U-Parking Planning to solve parking problems in an ‘old’ city. Through this study, we sought to contribute to supporting advances in U-Space and the alleviation of urban problems.

Keywords: Design and decision support system, smart U-parking planning, social network analysis.

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Authors: Radek Malinský, Ivan Jelínek

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Web 2.0 (social networking, blogging and online forums) can serve as a data source for social science research because it contains vast amount of information from many different users. The volume of that information has been growing at a very high rate and becoming a network of heterogeneous data; this makes things difficult to find and is therefore not almost useful. We have proposed a novel theoretical model for gathering and processing data from Web 2.0, which would reflect semantic content of web pages in better way. This article deals with the analysis part of the model and its usage for content analysis of blogs. The introductory part of the article describes methodology for the gathering and processing data from blogs. The next part of the article is focused on the evaluation and content analysis of blogs, which write about specific trend.

Keywords: Blog, Sentiment Analysis, Web 2.0, Webometrics

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Authors: Maryam Khalili, Fateme Ghanei

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As one of the most significant phenomena of industrialized societies, tourism plays a key role in encouraging regional developments and enhancing higher standards of living for local communities in particular. Traveling is a formative experience endowed with lessons on various aspects of life. It allows us learning how to enhance the social position as well as the social relationships. However, people forget the need to travel and gain first-hand experiences as they have to cope with the ever-increasing rate of stress created by the disorders and routines of the urban dwelling style. In this paper, various spaces of such experiences were explored through a virtual tour with two underlying aims: 1) encouraging, informing, and educating the community in terms of tourism development, and 2) introducing a temporary release from the routines. This study enjoyed a practical-qualitative research methodology, and the required data were collected through observation and using a multiple-response questionnaire. The participants (19-48 years old) included 41 citizens of both genders (63.4% male and 36.6% female) from two regions in Tehran, selected by cluster-probability sampling. The results led to development of a spatial design for a virtual tour experience in Tehran where different areas are explored to both raise people’s awareness and educate them on their cultural heritage.

Keywords: Ecotourism, education, gamification, social interaction, urban design, virtual tour.

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Authors: Rocío Abascal-Mena, Erick López-Ornelas

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We present the results of a case study aiming to assess the reflection of the tourism community in the Web and its usability to propose new ways to communicate visually. The wealth of information contained in the Web and the clear facilities to communicate personals points of view makes of the social web a new space of exploration. In this way, social web allow the sharing of information between communities with similar interests. However, the tourism community remains unexplored as is the case of the information covered in travel stories. Along the Web, we find multiples sites allowing the users to communicate their experiences and personal points of view of a particular place of the world. This cultural heritage is found in multiple documents, usually very little supplemented with photos, so they are difficult to explore due to the lack of visual information. This paper explores the possibility of analyzing travel stories to display them visually on maps and generate new knowledge such as patterns of travel routes. This way, travel narratives published in electronic formats can be very important especially to the tourism community because of the great amount of knowledge that can be extracted. Our approach is based on the use of a Geoparsing Web Service to extract geographic coordinates from travel narratives in order to draw the geo-positions and link the documents into a map image.

Keywords: Social web, tourism community, visual communication, travel stories, geo references.

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Authors: Sanjeev Kumar Appicharla

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This paper presents the results of the modelling and analysis of the European Railway Traffic Management (ERTMS) safety critical incident to raise awareness of biases in systems engineering process on the Cambrian Railway in the UK using the RAIB 17/2019 as a primary input. The RAIB, the UK independent accident investigator, published the Report- RAIB 17/2019 giving the details of their investigation of the focal event in the form of immediate cause, causal factors and underlying factors and recommendations to prevent a repeat of the safety-critical incident on the Cambrian Line. The Systems for Investigation of Railway Interfaces (SIRI) is the Methodology used to model and analyse the safety-critical incident. The SIRI Methodology uses the Swiss Cheese Model to model the incident and identify latent failure conditions (potentially less than adequate conditions) by means of the Management Oversight and Risk Tree technique. The benefits of the SIRI Methodology are threefold: first is that it incorporates “Heuristics and Biases” approach, in the Management Oversight and Risk Tree technique to identify systematic errors. Civil engineering and programme management railway professionals are aware of role “optimism bias” plays in programme cost overruns and are aware of bow tie (fault and event tree) model-based safety risk modelling technique. However, the role of systematic errors due to “Heuristics and Biases” is not appreciated as yet. This overcomes the problems of omission of human and organisational factors from accident analysis. Second, the scope of the investigation includes all levels of the socio-technical system, including government, regulatory, railway safety bodies, duty holders, signalling firms and transport planners, and front-line staff such that lessons learned at the decision making and implementation level as well. Third, the author’s past accident case studies are supplemented with research pieces of evidence drawn from the practitioner’s and academic researchers’ publications as well. This is to discuss the role of system thinking to improve the decision making and risk management processes and practices in the IEC 15288 Systems Engineering standard, and in the industrial context such as the GB railways and Artificial Intelligence (AI) contexts as well.

Keywords: Accident analysis, AI algorithm internal audit, bounded rationality, Byzantine failures, heuristics and biases approach.

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Authors: Zoaib Mirza

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Half of the Muslim countries in the world have declared Islam the state religion in their constitutions. Yet, none of these countries have implemented authentic Islamic laws in line with the Quran (Holy Book), practices of Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H) called the Sunnah, and his four successors known as the Rightly Guided - Khalifa. Since their independence, these countries have adopted different government systems like Democracy, Dictatorship, Republic, Communism, and Monarchy. Instead of benefiting the people, these government systems have put these countries into political, social, and economic crises. These Islamic countries do not have equal representation and membership in worldwide political forums. Western countries lead these forums. Therefore, it is now imperative for the Muslim leaders of all these countries to collaborate, reset, and implement the original Islamic form of government, which led to the prosperity and success of people, including non-Muslims, 1400 years ago. They should unite as one nation under Khalifat, which means establishing the authority of Allah (SWT) and following the divine commandments related to the social, political, and economic systems. As they have declared Islam in their constitution, they should work together to apply the divine framework of the governance revealed by Allah (SWT) and implemented by Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H) and his four successors called Khalifas. This paper provides an overview of the downfall and the end of the Khalifat system by 1924, the ways in which the West caused political, social, and economic crises in the Muslim countries, and finally, a summary of the social, political, and economic systems implemented by the Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H) and his successors, Khalifas, called the Rightly Guided – Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA), Hazrat Omar (RA), Hazrat Usman (RA), and Hazrat Ali (RA).

Keywords: Khalifat, Khilafat-e-Rashida, The Rightly Guided, colonization, capitalism, neocolonization, government systems.

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Authors: J. M. B. Mendonça, M. V. S. Siqueira, A. Soares, M. A. F. Santos

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The purpose of this article is to understand the dynamics of the increase in incivility through social relations (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc.), which hide inequalities in the form of treatment and opportunities within the organizational sphere. For this, we will examine works that address incivility at work, as well as studies that deviate from the mainstream, bringing more obscure organizational facets to light in connection with a critical approach to this issue. Next, some results of a bibliometric study shall be exposed, to analyze contributions connected to the theme and demonstrate gaps for future research. Then, models that facilitate reflection on the dynamics of violence shall be discussed. Finally, a broader concept of incivility in interpersonal relationships in the workplace shall be exposed considering the multiple approaches discussed.

Keywords: Incivility, inequalities, organization reflections, preventing violence.

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Authors: Khaled M. Khan, Armstrong Nhlabatsi

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This article attempts to analyse behavioural traits of lone-wolves who struck and killed innocents in six different attacks in Europe in last nine months. The main objective of this study is to develop a profiling template in order to capture commonality of characteristics of these attackers. This study tries to understand the homogeneity of lone-wolves in terms of their social background and state of mind. The commonality among them can possibly be used to build a profiling template that could help detecting vulnerable persons who are prone to be self-radicalised or radicalised by someone else. The result of this study provides us an understanding of their commonality in terms of their state of mind and social characteristics.

Keywords: Behavioral pattern, terrorism, profiling, commonality.

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Authors: Prateep Wajeetongratana

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This study is a descriptive-normative research. It attempted to investigate the restaurants’ firm performance in terms of the customers and restaurant personnel’s degree of satisfaction. A total of 12 restaurants in Bangkok, Thailand that offer Thai cuisine were included in this study. It involved 24 stockholders/managers, 120 subordinates and 360 customers. General Managers and restaurants’ stockholders, 10 staffs, and 30 costumers for each restaurant were chosen for random sampling. This study found that respondents are slightly satisfied with their work environment but are generally satisfied with the accessibility to transportation, to malls, convenience, safety, recreation, noise-free, and attraction; customers find the Quality of Food in most Thai Cuisines like services, prices of food, sales promotion, and capital and length of service satisfactory. Therefore, both stockholder-related and personnel-related factors which are influenced by restaurant, personnel, and customer-related factors are partially accepted whereas; customer-related factors which are influenced by restaurant, personnel and customer-related factors are rejected.

Keywords: Firm performance, Thai Cuisine, Tourism industry.

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Authors: Mohsen Mohammadi, Toshio Fujimi

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High population and irregular urban development in Kabul city, Afghanistan's capital, are among factors that increase its vulnerability to earthquake disasters (on top of its location in a high seismic region); this can lead to widespread economic loss and casualties. This study aims to evaluate earthquake risks in Kabul's 13th district based on scientific data. The research data, which include hazard curves of Kabul, vulnerability curves, and a questionnaire survey through sampling in district 13, have been incorporated to develop risk curves. To estimate potential casualties, we used a set of M parameters in a model developed by Coburn and Spence. The results indicate that in the worst case scenario, more than 90% of district 13, which comprises mostly residential buildings, is exposed to high risk; this may lead to nearly 1000 million USD economic loss and 120 thousand casualties (equal to 25.88% of the 13th district's population) for a nighttime earthquake. To reduce risks, we present the reconstruction of the most vulnerable buildings, which are primarily adobe and masonry buildings. A comparison of risk reduction between reconstructing adobe and masonry buildings indicates that rebuilding adobe buildings would be more effective.

Keywords: Earthquake risk evaluation, Kabul, mitigation, vulnerability.

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Authors: Alhaji M. H. Conteh, Xiangbin Yan, Alfred V Gborie

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Rice, which is the staple food in Sierra Leone, is consumed on a daily basis. It is the most imperative food crop extensively grown by farmers across all ecologies in the country. Though much attention is now given to rice grain production through the small holder commercialization programme (SHCP), however, no attention has been given in investigating the limitations faced by rice producers. This paper will contribute to attempts to overcome the development challenges caused by food insecurity. The objective of this paper is thus, to analysis the relationship between rice production and the domestic retail price of rice. The study employed a log linear model in which, the quantity of rice produced is the dependent variable, quantity of rice imported, price of imported rice and price of domestic rice as explanatory variables. Findings showed that, locally produced rice is even more expensive than the imported rice per ton, and almost all the inhabitants in the capital city which hosts about 65% of the entire population of the country favor imported rice, as it is free from stones with other impurities. On the other hand, to control price and simultaneously increase rice production, the government should purchase the rice from the farmers and then sell to private retailers.

Keywords: Domestic price of rice, Econometric model, Rice production, Sierra Leone.

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Authors: Siriwan Saksiriruthai

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This paper develops models to analyze the relationship between leisure time and wage change. Using Thailand-s Time Use Survey and Labor Force Survey data, the estimation of wage changes in response to leisure time change indicates that media receiving, personal care and social participation and volunteer activities are the ones that significantly raise hourly wages. Thus, the finding suggests the stimulation in time use for media access to enhance knowledge and productivity, personal care for attractiveness and healthiness in order to raise productivity, and social activities to develop connections for possible future opportunities including wage increase. These activities should be promoted for productive leisure time and for welfare improvement.

Keywords: Leisure, wage, time use, Thailand.

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Authors: Elsayed A. Habib Elamir

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In social network analysis the mean nodal degree and density of the graph can be considered as a measure of the activity of all actors in the network and this is an important property of a graph and for making comparisons among networks. Since subjects in a family or organization are subject to common environment factors, it is prime interest to study the association between responses. Therefore, we study the distribution of the mean nodal degree and density of the graph under correlated binary units. The cross product ratio is used to capture the intra-units association among subjects. Computer program and an application are given to show the benefits of the method.

Keywords: Correlated Binary data, cross product ratio, densityof the graph, multiplicative binomial distribution.

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Authors: Eulalia Torras, Andreu Bellot

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To know whether students’ achievements are the result of online interaction and not just a consequence of individual differences themselves, it seems essential to link the teaching presence and social presence to the types of knowledge built. The research aim is to analyze the social presence in relation to two types of knowledge, declarative and procedural. Qualitative methodology has been used. The analysis of the contents was based on an observation protocol that included community of enquiry indicators and procedural and declarative knowledge indicators. The research has been conducted in three phases that focused on an observational protocol and indicators, results and conclusions. Results show that the teaching-learning processes have been characterized by the patterns of presence and types of knowledge. Results also show the importance of social presence support provided by the teacher and the students, not only in regard to the nature of the instructional support but also concerning how it is presented to the student and the importance that is attributed to it in the teaching-learning process, that is, what it is that assistance is offered on. In this study, we find that the presence based on procedural guidelines and declarative reflection, the management of shared meaning on the basis of the skills and the evidence of these skills entail patterns of learning. Nevertheless, the importance that the teacher attributes to each support aspect has a bearing on the extent to which the students reflect more on the given task.

Keywords: Education, online, teaching and learning processes, knowledge.

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Authors: Maia Margvelashvili, Kakhaber Cheishvili, Ineza Vatsadze

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In Capitalism all economic activity rests upon a set of core institutional foundations, main from which are privately owned capital assets and profit. How these core institutional foundations are working in former soviet countries, in particular in Travel and Tourism Industry of Georgia? The role of Travel and Tourism as a key pillar of economic growth is being increasingly recognized by governments in all regions of the world. For the last few years Georgia succeeded in the World Bank and IFC “Doing Business” rankings. Despite of that, during decades totally different statistical data of the tourism sector were provided by the different State bodies; economic parameters were published few, or not published at all. The frequency and extent of property rights violation in Georgia has repeatedly been the subject of concern for the last decade. Total value of abrogated by the former Georgian Government private property is estimated approximately in US$4-5 billion. Thus, if economic profitability is unknown and property rights are not protected – that means that the main institutional foundations of capitalism in Georgia, are not working properly yet, that cause management problems at all levels of the national Travel and Tourism industry of Georgia.

Keywords: Institutional foundations of capitalism, Tourism management, Transition stage.

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Authors: Abu S.M. Junaid, Wei Wang, Christopher Street, Moshfiqur Rahman, Matt Gersbach, Sarah Zhou, William McCaffrey, Steven M. Kuznicki

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Oilsands bitumen is an extremely important source of energy for North America. However, due to the presence of large molecules such as asphaltenes, the density and viscosity of the bitumen recovered from these sands are much higher than those of conventional crude oil. As a result the extracted bitumen has to be diluted with expensive solvents, or thermochemically upgraded in large, capital-intensive conventional upgrading facilities prior to pipeline transport. This study demonstrates that globally abundant natural zeolites such as clinoptilolite from Saint Clouds, New Mexico and Ca-chabazite from Bowie, Arizona can be used as very effective reagents for cracking and visbreaking of oilsands bitumen. Natural zeolite cracked oilsands bitumen products are highly recoverable (up to ~ 83%) using light hydrocarbons such as pentane, which indicates substantial conversion of heavier fractions to lighter components. The resultant liquid products are much less viscous, and have lighter product distribution compared to those produced from pure thermal treatment. These natural minerals impart similar effect on industrially extracted Athabasca bitumen.

Keywords: Natural Zeolites, Oilsands Bitumen, Cracking, Viscosity Reduction, Upgrading.

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Authors: Shaukat Wasi, Zubair A. Shaikh, Sajid Qasmi, Hussain Sachwani, Rehman Lalani, Aamir Chagani

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Automatic Extraction of Event information from social text stream (emails, social network sites, blogs etc) is a vital requirement for many applications like Event Planning and Management systems and security applications. The key information components needed from Event related text are Event title, location, participants, date and time. Emails have very unique distinctions over other social text streams from the perspective of layout and format and conversation style and are the most commonly used communication channel for broadcasting and planning events. Therefore we have chosen emails as our dataset. In our work, we have employed two statistical NLP methods, named as Finite State Machines (FSM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for the extraction of event related contextual information. An application has been developed providing a comparison among the two methods over the event extraction task. It comprises of two modules, one for each method, and works for both bulk as well as direct user input. The results are evaluated using Precision, Recall and F-Score. Experiments show that both methods produce high performance and accuracy, however HMM was good enough over Title extraction and FSM proved to be better for Venue, Date, and time.

Keywords: Emails, Event Extraction, Event Detection, Finite state machines, Hidden Markov Model.

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Authors: Linda, Sau-ling LAI

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This paper addresses the fundamental requirements for starting an online business. It covers the process of ideation, conceptualization, formulation, and implementation of new venture ideas on the Web. Using Facebook as an illustrative example, we learn how to turn an idea into a successful electronic business and to execute a business plan with IT skills, management expertise, a good entrepreneurial attitude, and an understanding of Internet culture. The personality traits and characteristics of a successful e-commerce entrepreneur are discussed with reference to Facebook-s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is a social and e-commerce success. It provides a trusted environment of which participants can conduct business with social experience. People are able to discuss products before, during the after the sale within the Facebook environment. The paper also highlights the challenges and opportunities for e-commerce entrepreneurial startups to go public and of entering the China market.

Keywords: F-Commerce, Entrepreneur, Startup, E-Commerce

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Authors: Sangdeok Lee, Sangwon Han, Changtaek Hyun

Abstract:

Construction defects are major components that result in negative impacts on project performance including schedule delays and cost overruns. Since construction defects generally occur when a few associated causes combine, a thorough understanding of defect causality is required in order to more systematically prevent construction defects. To address this issue, this paper uses association rule mining (ARM) to quantify the causality between defect causes, and social network analysis (SNA) to find indirect causality among them. The suggested approach is validated with 350 defect instances from concrete works in 32 projects in Korea. The results show that the interrelationships revealed by the approach reflect the characteristics of the concrete task and the important causes that should be prevented.

Keywords: Causality, defect causes, social network analysis, association rule mining.

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Authors: L. Dagilienė

Abstract:

The article explores the impact of normative institutional factors on the development of sustainability reporting. The vast majority of research in the scientific literature focuses on mandatory institutional factors, i.e. how public institutions and market regulators affect sustainability reporting. Meanwhile, there is lack of empirical data for the impact of normative institutional factors. The effect of normative factors in this paper is based on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGO) and institutional theory. The case of Global Compact Local Network in the developing country was examined. The research results revealed that in the absence of regulated factors, companies were not active with regard to social disclosures; they presented non-systemized social information of a descriptive nature. Only 10% of sustainability reports were prepared using the GRI methodology. None of the reports were assured by third parties.

Keywords: Institutional theory, normative, sustainability reporting.

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Authors: M. R. Martinez-Torres, S. L. Toral, M. Olmedilla

Abstract:

Typically, virtual communities exhibit the well-known phenomenon of participation inequality, which means that only a small percentage of users is responsible of the majority of contributions. However, the sustainability of the community requires that the group of active users must be continuously nurtured with new users that gain expertise through a participation process. This paper analyzes the time evolution of Open Source Software (OSS) communities, considering users that join/abandon the community over time and several topological properties of the network when modeled as a social network. More specifically, the paper analyzes the role of those users rejoining the community and their influence in the global characteristics of the network.

Keywords: Open source communities, social network analysis, time series, virtual communities.

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Authors: Fadzilah Abdul Rahman

Abstract:

Emotional development is developed between the parents and their child. Behavioural development is also developed between the parents and their child. Social Development is how parents can help their special needs child to adapt to society and to face challenges. In promoting a lifelong learning mindset, enhancing skill sets and readiness to face challenges, parents would be able to counter balance these challenges during their care giving process and better manage their expectations through understanding the hierarchy of needs modality towards a positive attitude, and in turn, improve their quality of life and participation in society. This paper aims to demonstrate how the hierarchy of needs can be applied in various situations of caregiving for parents with a special needs child.

Keywords: Hierarchy of needs, parents, special needs, care-giving.

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