Does going green pay off?

Does going green pay off? Research published in the World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development hopes to answer that question from a sustainability performance perspective.

Environmental concerns are changing not only the natural landscape but the economic world too. There is a need to understand how so-called stakeholders can influence and affect the commercial and business world in efforts to address environmental concerns including climate change and fossil fuels, plastic and other pollution, as well as food and water security, and resilience to natural disasters. Moreover, the push to “green” the commercial world is driven by marketing as with anything commercial.

Husna Ara, Jasmine Ai Leen Yeap, and Siti Hasnah Hassan of the Universiti Sains Malaysia, in Pinang, explain that worldwide organisations have begun to embrace the concept of sustainability and moved towards environmental strategies to this end. The team’s review found that investing in green marketing does not have an immediate positive impact on commercial success despite the growing awareness among consumers of a multitude of environmental concerns. However, it feeds a company’s sustainability agenda and they suggest that by improving environmental and social performance economic benefits will be gleaned while concomitantly helping to address many of the issues we face globally.

Ara, H., Yeap, J.A.L. and Hassan, S.H. (2020) ‘Does going green really pay off? A sustainability performance view’, World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp.519–537

The language of health and wealth

What impact does a person’s proficiency in English as a second language have on their health and economic integration when they settle in the USA? That’s the sensitive issue addressed in new research published in the International Journal of Economics and Business Research.

Ibrahim Niankara of the College of Business at Al Ain University in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has used the statistical technique of Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation to analyse annual earnings and medical care spending for a representative sample of data on immigrant families from the US National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS). There is, the research suggests, a negative correlation, as one might expect. Among immigrants, increased English language proficiency improves earnings propensity and reduces medical care spending.

Niankara points out that according to the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration, the number of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people across various regions of the world has increased dramatically in recent years. Numbers are in the hundreds of millions and rising with each passing year. He suggests that “policies aimed at raising immigrants’ families English language proficiency in the USA would not only contribute to their effective socio-economic integration but also strengthen the US workforce and economy in the long run.”

Niankara, I. (2020) ‘The role of English language proficiency on immigrants’ health and economic integration in the USA‘, Int. J. Economics and Business Research, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp.255-287.

You can tell me by the way I walk

The walking style, or gait, of women in the third trimester of pregnancy changes significantly from that seen in the earlier steps of the pregnancy and is markedly different from that observed in women who are not pregnant. The adaptations are assumed to be in response to the changing weight, posture and balance of the women at that stage. Understanding the changes could be used to help design footwear or physiotherapy to reduce pain caused by the attendant joint redistribution.

Research published in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology discusses the study of gait in pregnancy and offers insights into the problems that arise and how they might best be avoided.

Yang Song, Minjun Liang, and Wenlan Lian of the Human Movement Research Center in the Faculty of Sports Science at Ningbo University in Zhejiang, China, examined the walking gait of pregnant and non-pregnant women using foot kinematics and the Oxford foot model. Three-dimensional motion of the forefoot, hindfoot and tibia during walking were recorded using a Vicon motion analysis system and two force platforms were used to record the ground reaction force.

Pregnant women “demonstrated greater plantar flexion and internal rotation of hindfoot and internal tibial rotation during initial contact, greater forefoot eversion and hindfoot external rotation during push off,” the team writes. “Moreover, pregnant women showed greater external tibial rotation than non-pregnant women during toe off and the centre of pressure trajectory moved to the second to third metatarsal at this stage.”

Such detailed findings might help guide physiotherapy if the changes are causing pain or perhaps guide the design of specific footwear or supportive equipment in extreme cases to ameliorate pain and discomfort and reduce the risk of injury or persistent damage to joints.

Song, Y., Liang, M. and Lian, W. (2020) ‘A comparison of foot kinematics between pregnant and non-pregnant women using the Oxford foot model during walking’, Int. J. Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp.20–30.

Inderscience journals to invite expanded papers from Academy for Global Business Advancement's 17th World Congress for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the Academy for Global Business Advancement's 17th World Congress (2-4 July 2021, Istanbul Gelisim University, Avcılar, Istanbul, Turkey) will be invited for review and potential publication by the following journals:

• Journal for Global Business Advancement
• Journal for International Business and Entrepreneurship Development

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Quality Engineering and Technology

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Quality Engineering and Technology are now available here for free:

• Uncertainties estimation in identification of digital planar surface parameters using a 3D laser sensor
• Parameter optimisations for gold electroplating of gold jewellery
• Hotelling's T2 control chart with adaptive sampling interval and variable dimensional
• Statistical analysis of the researches carried out on Lean and Six Sigma applications in healthcare industry

New Editor for International Journal of Mining and Mineral Engineering

Prof. S.J. Jung from the University of Idaho in the USA has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Mining and Mineral Engineering.

The lockdown learning curve

How rapidly does a learning curve decline during a period of prolonged interruption? That’s the question asked by US researchers in the International Journal of Quality Engineering and Technology. Adedeji Badiru of the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, USA, has specifically looked at how the “lockdown” response to the global Covid-19 pandemic has affected business, industry, academia, and government.

There is perhaps insufficient “live data” to draw solid conclusions. Badiru has nevertheless found that workers, as a result of being barred from practising their normal functions and learning on the job, have experienced a decline in performance. The restrictive nature of lockdown implemented to reduce the spread of the virus has led to performance degradation.

He has postulated an analytical framework that researchers can use as new data emerges to allow empirical modelling of the adverse impacts of the lockdown on learning curves. The inherent concern with such adversity in the face of the global pandemic is that a decline in learning can translate to a decline in quality of work and quality of products. He suggests retrospective research might now follow in the wake of his IJQET column.

Badiru, A. (2020) ‘Quality insight: exponential decay of quality learning curves during COVID-19 lockdown’, Int. J. Quality Engineering and Technology, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp.106–117.

Research pick: Improving European smart cities - "Smart city in Europe: comparative analysis between Italy and Germany development"

The rush to urbanisation is inevitably characterised by more and more city dwellers. As population densities increase old infrastructure becomes less effective, less efficient. Air and water quality are compromised, public waste management is over-burdened, and the cities become decreasingly dependent on non-renewable energies and unsustainable systems. There is little time, capacity or resources available to ensure the growth takes into account environmental factors and addresses the issue of quality of life for those city dwellers.

The notion of a smart city might sound quite futuristic but there is an urgency now to face the problems of urbanisation with smart tools and systems rather than clinging to archaic ways. Smart cities could ultimately help us reduce road traffic congestion through improved public transport systems while the digitalisation of many public services would improve management of resources and waste in ways that have not been possible before.

Research published in the International Journal of Environmental Policy and Decision Making has assessed the state-of-art definitions of the so-called smart city and offers a critical reflection of this paradigm for urban growth. Gabriella Arcese and colleagues at the Università degli Studi Niccolò Cusano in Rome, Italy, have analysed smart city best practices in pioneering cities in Italy (Bologna, Florence, Milan) and Germany (Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Leipzig) that have core dimensions of technology, community, and policy.

The team has identified the advances various smart city efforts have made as well as their shortcomings so far.

“Sustainable and safe neighbourhoods, building safety, co-working, waste management; health and welfare, through the optimisation of processes and business intelligence, e-care, e-health; education and technical education, through the development of smart city projects should be included in the development model,” they suggest.

Arcese, G., Schabel, L., Elmo, G.C. and Risso, M. (2019) ‘Smart city in Europe: comparative analysis between Italy and Germany development’, Int. J. Environmental Policy and Decision Making, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp.330–359.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Electronic Finance

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Electronic Finance are now available here for free:

• Cash-less policy and economic growth: evidence from Nigeria
• Leveraging artificial neural networks for hedging foreign investments in emerging markets: a large-scale empirical study
• Examining consumer adoption and perception of Mobile Money in Ghana
• Online banking in an emerging market: evidence from Saudi Arabia

Special issue published: "Service Science Meets Artificial Intelligence and Big Data" (includes free Open Access article)

International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services 7(4) 2020

• A case study of MapReduce-based expressway traffic data analysis and service system
• A multidimensional service template for data analysis in highway domain
• Research on symbiosis state between manufacturing and producer services industry
• State prediction and servitisation of manufacturing processing equipment resources in smart cloud manufacturing
• A CNN-based temperature prediction approach for grain storage
• An approach to discovering event correlations among edge sensor services
• Fog-cloud task scheduling of energy consumption optimisation with deadline consideration
• A topic-enhanced recurrent autoencoder model for sentiment analysis of short texts
• The development of knowledge-shelf to enable an effective set-based concurrent engineering application [OPEN ACCESS]

Free open access article available: "The development of knowledge-shelf to enable an effective set-based concurrent engineering application"

The following paper, "The development of knowledge-shelf to enable an effective set-based concurrent engineering application" (International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services 7(4) 2020), is freely available for download as an open access article. 

It can be downloaded via the full-text link available here.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking

The following sample articles from the International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking are now available here for free:

• Load-balanced overlay recovery scheme with delay minimisation
• Creating a portable, high-level graph analytics paradigm for compute and data-intensive applications
• Using the loop chain abstraction to schedule across loops in existing code
• Developments in memory management in OpenMP
• Performance evaluation of OpenMP's target construct on GPUs - exploring compiler optimisations
• Efficient implementation of OpenACC cache directive on NVIDIA GPUs
• PACC: a directive-based programming framework for out-of-core stencil computation on accelerators
• Acceleration of unstructured implicit low-order finite-element earthquake simulation using OpenACC on Pascal GPUs

Special issue published: "Green Technologies for Production"

International Journal of Product Development 24(2/3) 2020

• Optimisation model construction of enterprise's green production and energy saving based on internet technology
• Distribution and transportation control of high-speed and flexible packing production line for medical kit based on green technology
• Scheduling method of green flexible production line for enterprise products based on task priority
• Multi-objective scheduling model of green production based on genetic algorithm under agricultural supply side structure
• The control method of green production efficiency based on multi-layer and complex network under the background of export trade transformation
• Green production cycle mining of mass production based on random forest algorithm
• Product's green production method based on environmental management and ecological perspective of enterprise
• Green production benefit evaluation model of trade products based on principal component analysis

Additional paper

• An empirical analysis of the impact of AMT and e-commerce on innovation and performance in Spanish firms

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Decision Sciences, Risk and Management

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Decision Sciences, Risk and Management are now available here for free:

• Risk dimensions of a vertical Chinese expansion in the Greek tourism sector: the Chinese side
• Comparative analysis of the contemporary public sector quality determinants in relation to the satisfaction level of the Greek judicial officials and citizens in civil, criminal and administrative courts
• Coaching: a plus (+) to managerial skills
• Motivation and job satisfaction: the case of call centres in Greece
• Greek public airports' efficiency assessment using DEA-modelling. Factors influencing efficiency and economic recession environment (2009-2014) implications
• The role of China in the global shipping industry, with emphasis on the dry bulk market
• Strategic management in times of crisis: the case of marble enterprises in the prefecture of Drama, Greece

Research pick: What do you want from your smart watch? - "A survey of what customers want in smartwatch brand applications"

New research published in the International Journal of Mobile Communications has surveyed customers regarding their use of branded apps on their smartwatches. The analysis of the survey results reveals the external factors that influence the intention to use and tracks the relationship between factors using a technology acceptance model.

Meuel Jeong, Kyeongjin Park, and Kyungdoh Kim of the Department of Industrial Engineering at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea, also analysed to survey data to reveal what kinds of smartwatch brand apps users would use and found music, weather information, basic telephone function, social networking, navigation, basic text messaging, productivity, and health were most commonly used. Apps for reading e-books, playing games, associated with sports, entertainment, QR code/barcode recognition, finance, photography, and video were not so popular on smartwatches.

Such insights feed into how brands can best engage with putative customers knowing that they favour certain types of apps on their smartwatches and not others.

They suggest that companies hoping to engage customers through brand apps need to ensure that the app is as easy to use as possible and offering low complexity and no financial risk. They point out that there is a market for those kinds of apps already being used but suggests that certain other kinds of apps that are perhaps more suited to smartphones and tablets not be pursued as avenues for marketing and increasing brand awareness on smartwatches, such as QR code/barcode recognition apps, financial apps and photo and video apps.

Jeong, M., Park, K. and Kim, K. (2020) ‘A survey of what customers want in smartwatch brand applications’, Int. J. Mobile Communications, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp.540–558.

Special issue published: "Green Progression in Smart Cities and Intelligent Buildings"

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling 15(4) 2020

• Energy management of microgrid based on day-ahead and short-term optimisation
• A novel method for calculating the light energy distribution in building space
• Fault diagnosis and location method for electrical power supply and distribution of buildings
• Arancino.ccTM: an open hardware platform for urban regeneration
• Blockchain for smart city - public service integration by strategic alliance
• Deep activity recognition in smart buildings with commercial Wi-Fi devices
• Analysis of vehicle lane-changing behaviour at signalised intersection
• Occupant counting modelling for intelligent buildings based on data from multiple WiFi sniffers