Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Applied Nonlinear Science

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Applied Nonlinear Science are now available here for free:

• A comparison of different lower bounding procedures for the routing of automated guided vehicles in an urban context
• Determinants of Malaysian bank efficiency: evidence from bootstrap data envelopment analysis
• Multi-objective decision making in macro- and micro-economics with application of the MULTIMOORA method
• A multi-criteria policy set optimisation framework for large-scale simulation models
• An evaluation of the impact of foreign direct investment on Bahraini economy
• Public investment management system in Kuwait
• Multi-objective methods in development planning

Special issue published: "Regionalisation of the Asian Automotive Industries and Markets: Part 2"

International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management 18(4) 2018

• Production networks of the Asian automobile industry: regional or global?
• Examining the realignment strategies of automobile production bases in Southeast Asia: the case of Japanese automakers
• Regional economic integration and the automobile industry: automobile policies, division of labour, production network formation and market development in the EU and ASEAN
• Growth strategy from the suppliers' viewpoint: a case study of Denso and Hitachi Automotive Systems
• Product innovation in emerging economies: product architecture and organisational capabilities in Geely and Tata

New Editor for International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications

Prof. Tao Wu from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications.

Research pick: Unemployment and unhappiness - "The analysis of unemployment, happiness and demographic factors using log-linear models"

A new research paper in the International Journal of Economics and Business Research uses log-linear models to study the correlation between happiness, employment and various demographic factors.

Sultan Kuzu of the Department of Quantitative Methods, in the School of Business, at Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey together with Sevgi Elmas-Atay and Merve Gerçek of the Department of Human Resources Management there, explain how unemployment is an important economic measurement. It is studied in the context of a nation’s development as well as in a sociological context. Importantly, it is known to be closely associated with welfare, quality of life and psychological health of individuals.

The team has now looked at unemployment not as an abstract, statistical concept in the macroeconomic arena but from the personal perspective based on “micro” level data acquired from household surveys carried out by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK). Log-linear models were used to analyse the data and these showed clearly that employment is related to a person’s happiness and gender and that there is a statistically significant difference between happiness and gender in a developing country such as Turkey.

Kuzu, S., Elmas-Atay, S. and Gerçek, M. (2019) ‘The analysis of unemployment, happiness and demographic factors using log-linear models’, Int. J. Economics and Business Research, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp.87–105.

Free Editor's Pick of sample articles newly available from International Journal of Comparative Management

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

• A comparative study on glocal commercial advertisement perceptions - British and French viewers' responses to Red Bull
• The impact of corporate governance on earnings management in emerging economies: the Greek evidence
• Connectivity and closeness among international financial institutions: a network theory perspective
• India's outward foreign direct investment: the home-country economic perspective
• Outward foreign direct investment from Indian manufacturing firms - does transaction cost theory explains early choices?
• Location choices at the subnational level perspective: the case of the Volkswagen Group in BRIC countries
• Emotional exhaustion and its consequences: a comparative study of nurses in India and China
• Institutional, stakeholder, and cultural influences on corporate social performance: an institution-based view

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Water

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

• Status of domestic water supply and prospects of rainwater harvesting in Southeastern Nigeria
• Spatio-temporal analysis of groundwater level in an arid area
• Evaluating water productivity of tomato, pepper and Swiss chard under clay pot and furrow irrigation technologies in semi-arid areas of northern Ethiopia
• Hydraulic interconnections study of Seropan-Ngreneng-Bribin underground rivers in Gunung Kidul karst area using tracer technique
• Comparison of two statistical climate downscaling models: a case study in the Beijing region, China
• Modelling and sensitivity analysis of river flow in the Upper Indus Basin, Pakistan

New Editor for International Journal of Earthquake and Impact Engineering

Dr. Erol Kalkan from the United States Geological Survey has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Earthquake and Impact Engineering.

Research pick: Recycling electronic waste - "Current practice and policy for transforming e-waste into urban mining: case study in Taiwan"

Taiwan is one of the most important suppliers of electrical and electronic products in the world; as such it is itself also an important consumer of those products. This means that the amount of electronic waste, e-waste, generated from information technology (IT) products, home electrical appliances and lighting, is increasing rapidly there.

Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Waste Management, Wen-Tien Tsai of the Graduate Institute of Bioresources, at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, in Pingtung, Taiwan, explains how he has investigated the regulatory promotion of e-waste recycling in Taiwan. He found that although the annual quantity of e-waste recycling through the implementing agencies seemed to increase more than tenfold from 7,321 tons in 2001 to 74,421 tons in 2015, there is evidence that the recycling market in Taiwan has matured in recent years partly because of the country’s ageing population and slow economic growth. Tsai also highlights the case of fluorescent lighting tubes and how mercury can be successfully recovered from these at end-of-life.
He points out how the waste composition is still shifting as new products emerge in the realm of personalised medicine, electric vehicles, IT products, novel consumer electronics products, and an increased diversity of food products and home electrical appliances.

We must address these novel waste streams and find ways to recycle such goods, especially those that contain toxic materials, including mercury. Tsai adds that the improper management and disposal of waste or discarded items could lead to significant environmental harm and harm to human health. In addition, there is a need to retrieve from such goods rare elements that are of limited supply such as precious metals and mineral elements.

Tsai, W-T. (2019) ‘Current practice and policy for transforming e-waste into urban mining: case study in Taiwan‘, Int. J. Environment and Waste Management, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp.1-15.

Special issue published: "New Energy Materials and Nanotechnology: Modelling and Experiment – Part 2"

International Journal of Nanomanufacturing 15(1/2) 2019

• Multiferroic behaviours of Mn-doped Bi4NdTi3FeO15 ceramics
• Molecular dynamics simulation of shear deformation of multi-layer graphene sheets with Tersoff potential
• The luminescent properties of GdAlO3:Tb3+ phosphors based on molten salts addition
• Hollow microellipsoid lithium silicate with mesoporosity and its formation mechanism
• Preparation of poly(3-hydroxybutyrateco-3-hydroxyvalerate) supported cobalt phthalocyanine thin membranes and its catalytic degradation of methylene blue
• Preparation and characterisation of cMWCNTs-mSA/mCS bipolar membrane for electrochemical synthesis
• Photocatalytic properties of magnesium aluminate spinel nanoparticles prepared by chemical precipitation method
• Experimental investigation on the surface tension and contact angle of Al2O3-oil and SiO2-oil nanofluids
• Growth of NiCo2O4 nanotubes @MnO2 sheet core-shell arrays on 3D hierarchical porous carbon aerogels as superior electrodes for supercapacitors
• Scalable synthesis of Sn nanoparticles encapsulated in hierarchical porous carbon networks for high-rate reversible lithium storage
• Silicon-based anode materials with three-dimensional conductive network for high-performance lithium ion batteries
• Khaki-coloured niobium oxide nanochains with enhanced lithium storage performances
• Influence of shear-induced crystallisation on the rheological behaviour of polyethylene
• Low temperature dependence of mechanical process of ultrathin aluminium films: molecular dynamics simulations
• Surface modification of TiO2 nanorod arrays with Ag3PO4 @ PANI nanoparticles for enhancing photoelectrochemical performance
• Creating binder-free supercapacitor electrodes from biomass resources: a nitrogen-doped pomelo peel derived carbon foam
• Sulphur-doped banana peel-derived activated carbon as electrode materials for supercapacitors
• Enhanced photocatalytic activity of AgVO3/TiO2 nanorod array composite film under visible light irradiation
• The study on flexible AgVO3 nano paper and its visible light photocatalytic activity
• The effect of nano-zirconia on the morphology and mechanical properties of PVDF/PAN membrane as separators in super capacitors
• One-dimensional Z-scheme TiO2/WO3 composite nanofibres for enhanced photocatalytic activity of hydrogen production

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing are now available here for free:

• A negotiation based dynamic pricing heuristic in cloud computing
• Performance analysis of two WMN architectures by WMN-GA simulation system considering different distributions and transmission rates
• A hybrid heuristic resource allocation model for computational grid for optimal energy usage
• Extensible markup language keywords search based on security access control
• An improved image classification based on K-means clustering and BoW model
• MT-DIPS: a new data duplication integrity protection scheme for multi-tenants sharing storage in SaaS
• SER performance optimisation of AF cooperative communication system based on directional antenna
• Enhanced cuckoo search algorithm for virtual machine placement in cloud data centres

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Nanomanufacturing

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

• Experimental study and prediction on impact scratching of single abrasive for K9 glass
• Study of materials effects on the single cutting in ultra-precision raster milling
• Experimental investigation on the abrasive wear of AISI 52100 steel
• Study on a non-contact polishing method using motion coupling confined etchant layer technique
• Modelling and optimisation of cutting parameters on surface roughness in micro-milling Inconel 718 using response surface methodology and genetic algorithm
• Water dissolution ultra-precision polishing of KDP crystal and its precision cleaning
• Ultra-precision cutting of linear micro-groove array for distributed feedback laser devices
• Performance of PVDF/TiO2 nano-composite film in the application of energy harvester

International Journal of Precision Technology to invite expanded papers from International Conference on Functional Materials, Manufacturing and Performances 2019 for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the International Conference on Functional Materials, Manufacturing and Performances (ICFMMP) (12-13 September 2019, Phagwara, Punjab, India) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Precision Technology.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Exergy

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

• Effect of pressure drop and longitudinal conduction on exergy destruction in a concentric-tube micro-fin tube heat exchanger
• Exergy analysis of evacuated tube solar collectors: a review
• Investigation on the exergy performance of salt gradient solar ponds with porous media
• Assessment of the work efficiency with exergy method in ageing muscles and healthy and enlarged hearts

Special issue published: "European Financial Systems in the Post-Crisis Period"

International Journal of Trade and Global Markets 11(4) 2018

• Are banks in financial conglomerates more profitable than other commercial banks? Evidence of banking sectors in Visegrad countries
• Profitability and efficiency of the Croatian banking sector: impact of bank size
• New approach to operational risk measurement in banks
• Does idiosyncratic return volatility capture information or noise?
• Importance of financial ratios for predicting stock price trends: evidence from the Visegrad Group
• Performance of active and passive management of Slovak's pension funds in return-risk space
• Linear hedging of crude oil and natural gas

Special issue published: "Advances in Smart Learning Systems"

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing 10(1) 2019

• Educational data modelling using curve fitting and average uniform algorithm
• Energy harvesting techniques for routing issues in wireless sensor networks
• Evaluating the affordances of wearable technology in education
• High-speed gesture modelling through boundary analysis of active signals from wearable data glove
• How mutual information interprets anomalies using different clustering
• A novel integrated framework for securing online instructor-student communication

Additional papers

• A data replication strategy for document-oriented NoSQL systems
• Cost-aware hybrid cloud scheduling of parameter sweep calculations using predictive algorithms
• Towards providing middleware-level proactive resource reorganisation for elastic HPC applications in the cloud

International Journal of Comparative Management to invite expanded papers from International Conference on Advances in Management Practices 2019 for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the International Conference on Advances in Management Practices (ICAMP 2019) (27 April 2019, Rohini, Delhi, India) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Comparative Management.

International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism to invite expanded papers from Humic Conference 2019 for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the Humic Conference 2019 (5-8 June 2019, Riga, Latvia) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism.

Research pick: Data mining syndromes - "Data mining and ontology-based techniques in healthcare management"

With every news story, the concepts of data mining healthcare information move higher still up the research and policy agenda in this area. Clinical information and genetic data contained within electronic health records (EHRs) represents a major source of useful information for biomedical research but accessing it in a useful way can be difficult.

Writing in the International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, Hassan Mahmoud and Enas Abbas of Benha University and Ibrahim Fathy Ain Shams University, in Egypt, discuss the need for innovative and effective methods for representing this huge amount of data. They point out that there are data mining techniques as well as ontology-based techniques that can play a major role in detecting syndromes in patients efficiently and accurately. A syndrome is defined as a set of concomitant medical symptoms and indicators associated with a given disease or disorder.

The team has reviewed the state of the art and also focused on reviewing the well-known data mining techniques such as decision trees (J48), Naïve Bayes, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and random forest (RF) techniques and compared how well they each perform in the classification of a particular syndrome, heart disease.

The team concludes that in experiments with a public data set, the RF classifier provides the best performance in terms of accuracy. In the future, they suggest that data mining will benefit healthcare and medicine significant for building a system able to detect a specific syndrome.

Mahmoud, H., Abbas, E. and Fathy, I. (2018) ‘Data mining and ontology-based techniques in healthcare management’, Int. J. Intelligent Engineering Informatics, Vol. 6, No. 6, pp.509–526.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Learning and Change

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Learning and Change are now available here for free:

• Pretending pirates: tracing the toxic trail in South Asia
• Aligning teaching methods for learning outcomes: a need for educational change in management education using quality function deployment approach
• Spirituality: a tool for learning, change and adaptation of elderly in changing Indian family
• Core self-evaluations, worry, life satisfaction, and psychological well-being: an investigation in the Asian context
• Modified UTAUT2 model for m-learning among students in India

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment are now available here for free:

• Book Review: Full Employment Abandoned: Shifting Sands and Policy Failures by William Mitchell and Joan Muysken
• Towards genuine progress on the Genuine Progress Indicator
• Response to ''Income, sustainability and the 'microfoundations' of the GPI''
• Academic staff perspectives on operating beyond industrial actions for sustainable quality assurance in public universities in Kenya
• Household labour allocation to forest extraction and other activities in areas adjacent to tropical forests: the case of Kakamega forest, Western Kenya
• Reward for environmental performance: using the Scanlon Plan as catalyst to green organisations
• Environmental capacity constraints in macroeconomic policy analysis

Special issue published: "Advancements in Global Business Research Across Emerging Countries"

Journal for Global Business Advancement 11(4) 2018

• Comprehending ambidexterity in the emerging-market context: the moderating role of learning capability and environmental dynamism on e-commerce firms' performance
• Influence of institutional investors on firms' corporate social performance in an emerging market
• Sequels of HRM praxes on service quality of employees in boutique hotels: a Thailand perspective
• Unpacking the 'black box' in the relationship between pay-for-performance, employee benefits and performance
• Bangladeshi consumers' intentions towards purchasing meat
• Impact of HPWS on employees' performance within the Bangladeshi telecom sector

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Knowledge Management Studies

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Knowledge Management Studies are now available here for free:

• A capabilities-based service development process for industrial manufacturers
• Knowledge management evaluation in a service sector: the case of Central Bank of Iran
• Influence of organisational culture dimensions on knowledge management processes in higher educational institutions
• A framework for knowledge management in requirements engineering
• Enhancing knowledge articulation in communities of practices: the role of the community leader
• Knowledge management practices and economic complexity in BRIC countries from 2001 to 2014

Research pick: The seven ages of face recognition - "Human age classification using appearance and facial skin ageing features with multi-class support vector machine"

Face recognition is becoming an increasingly common feature of biometric verification systems. Now, a team from India has used a multi-class support vector machine to extend the way in which such systems work to take into account a person’s age. Jayant Jagtap of Symbiosis International (Deemed) University in Pune, and Manesh Kokare of the Shri Guru Gobind Singhji Institute of Engineering and Technology, in Nanded, India, explain that human age classification has remained an important barrier to the next generation of face recognition technology but could be a useful additional parameter in security and other contexts.

The team’s novel two stage age classification framework based on appearance and facial skin ageing features using a multi-class support vector machine (M-SVM) can classify, the team suggests, classify images of faces into one of seven age groups. Fundamentally, the system examines characteristics of the image coincident with facial skin textural and wrinkles and is accurate 94.45% of the time. It works well despite factors such as genetics, gender, health, life-time weather conditions, working and living environment tobacco and alcohol use. Indeed, accuracy is more than 98% in the first step wherein adult and non-adult faces are distinguished.

“The proposed framework of age classification gives better performance than existing age classification systems,” the team reports. They add that future research will look to improve accuracy still further for use in real-time applications. This will be done through the development of an algorithm for extracting facial skin ageing features and through the design of an efficient age classifier, the team concludes.

Jagtap, J. and Kokare, M. (2019) ‘Human age classification using appearance and facial skin ageing features with multi-class support vector machine‘, Int. J. Biometrics, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp.22-34.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Heavy Vehicle Systems

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Heavy Vehicle Systems are now available here for free:

• Stability of long combination vehicles
• Assessment of ground vehicle tankers interacting with liquid sloshing dynamics
• A real-time non-linear vehicle preview model

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Education Economics and Development

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Education Economics and Development are now available here for free:

• The teachers' impact on policy making for the improvement of the school performance (the case of Kosovo)
• Interstate disparity in the performance of controlling crime against women in India: efficiency estimate across states
• What affects average net price at four-year public and not-for-profit private institutions in the USA?
• Is the interaction between human capital and financial development one of the determinants of FDI in emerging markets?
• Child labour and school dropout in least-developed countries: empirical evidence from Lao PDR

Rotating Editorship for International Journal of Multinational Corporation Strategy

Associate Prof. Joseph Amankwah-Amoah from the University of Kent in the UK has been appointed to take on a rotating editorship of the International Journal of Multinational Corporation Strategy, and will be Editor in Chief of the journal for the duration of 2019.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology are now available here for free:

• MC-Sim: a mobile cloud simulation toolkit based on CloudSim
• Architectural method to design and control dynamic composite web services
• A contractual approach for the verification of UML2.0 software architectures
• Modelling, specifying and verifying self-adaptive systems instantiating MAPE patterns
• A template for formalising reliable Acme-based software architecture
• An emerging multi-paradigm for representing mobile applications' architectures using heterogeneous conceptual bricks

Research pick: Twitter sentiment - "An innovative and efficient method for Twitter sentiment analysis"

Sentiment analysis is an increasingly important part of data mining, especially in the age of social media and social networking where there is endless opinion and commentary that could be of use to a wide range of stakeholders in commerce, other businesses, and even politics.

Now, an innovative and efficient method of sentiment analysis of comments on the microblogging platform, Twitter, is reported in the International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management by a team from India. Hima Suresh of the School of Computer Sciences, at Mahatma Gandhi University, in Kottayam, Kerala and Gladston Raj. S of the Department of Computer Science, Government College, also in Kerala explain how sentiment analysis centres on analysing attitudes and opinions revealed in a data set and pertaining to a particular topic of interest. The analysis exploits machine learning approaches, lexicon-based approaches and hybrid approaches that splice both of the former.

“An efficient approach for predicting sentiments would allow us to bring out opinions from the web contents and to predict online public choices,” the team suggests. They have now demonstrated a novel approach to sentiment analysis surrounding the discussion of a commercial brand on Twitter using data collected over a fourteen-month period. Their method has an unrivalled accuracy for gleaning the true opinion almost 87% of the time in their tests using a specific smart phone model as the target brand being studied. They suggest that accuracy could be improved still further by incorporating a wider lexicon that included Twitter slang, for instance.

Suresh, H. and Raj. S, G. (2019) ‘An innovative and efficient method for Twitter sentiment analysis‘, Int. J. Data Mining, Modelling and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp.1-18.