International Journal of Comparative Management to invite expanded papers from 16th International Conference of the Society for Global Business & Economic Development for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the 16th International Conference of the Society for Global Business & Economic Development (SGBED) (10-12 June 2019, ESPM, São Paulo, Brazil) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Comparative Management.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Surface Science and Engineering

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

• Tribological performance of DLC/DLC and steel/DLC contacts in the presence of additivated oil
• Electrochemical studies and surface analyses of laser deposited Zn-Al-Sn coatings on AISI 1015 steel
• In-situ formation, anti-corrosion and hardness values of Ti-6Al-4V biomaterial with niobium via laser deposition
• Effects of pH on CdO films deposited onto ITO coated glass substrates by electrodeposition
• Effect of microwave power on morphology of AgO thin film grown using microwave plasma CVD

Special Issue on: "Advances in Materials Forming"

International Journal of Materials Engineering Innovation 10(1) 2019

• Optimisation and modelling of thinning and geometric accuracy in incremental sheet forming combined with stretch forming
• Prediction of life of piercing punches using artificial neural network and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference systems
• Deformation behaviour of A356, Al-11Si-2.5Cu-0.6Fe, and Al-18Si-2.5Cu-0.6Fe alloys forged under different processing conditions
• Experimental investigation of geometric accuracy in single point incremental forming process of an aluminium alloy
• Experimental study of single point incremental forming with dummy sheet

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of System of Systems Engineering

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

• SoS thinking: an approach to conceptualising and understanding military systems-of-systems
• A cybernetic ontology for project management
• A system of systems view on integrating control for energy efficient building assessment
• A case study of smart energy systems and behavioural aspects of social systems: systems thinking approach

Research pick: Branding in the age of social media - "Impact of social media on brand commitment: testing the mediation role of perceived value and brand image"

Brands have to vie with each other to grab our increasingly diminishing attention spans across a much wider range of media, from traditional print and broadcast to the rapidly changing social media that are so readily scrollable. Writing in the International Journal of the Business Environment, one research team explains how it has looked at the impact of social media on brand commitment and tested the mediation role of perceived value and brand image.

Homa Kavoosi Kalejahi and Mojtaba Ramezani of the Islamic Azad University, in Tabriz, Iran and Reza Rostamzadeh from the University’s Urmia campus explain how firms always found it difficult to make their brands distinct through traditional means because branding is not only about a company’s share of the market, but also the consumers’ perception of that brand. In many ways, the advent of online social media has increased the customers’ engagement with brands, but there are so many choices available that finding a way to stand out from the crowd in any given market remains a conundrum from marketing departments the world over.

The researchers undertook a case study of the consumer electronics company LG and looked at how brand commitment is influenced by perceived value and brand image. The team’s analysis confirms the hypothesis but also poses new questions about marketing in the era of online social media and creating a unique brand that distinguishes itself from the competition.

Kalejahi, H.K., Ramezani, M. and Rostamzadeh, R. (2019) ‘Impact of social media on brand commitment: testing the mediation role of perceived value and brand image’, Int. J. Business Environment, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp.191–208.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Nanoparticles

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

• Implementation of quadruple valued flip-flops using CMOS and spatial light modulator-based Savart plate
• Millimetre-wave and terahertz IMPATT sources: influence of inter-carrier interactions
• Analysis of power consumption and delay of an inverter circuit using TMJLSRG MOSFET for the design of digital integrated circuit
• Staggered heterojunctions-based tunnel-FET for application as a label-free biosensor
• An approach to various carriers' transmission properties and significant parameters in special semiconductor arrangement 'superlattice'
• Study on surface plasmon-based improvement in absorption in plasmonic solar cell
• Effects of hot-carrier degradation on the low frequency noise in strained-Si p-MOSFETs
• Adsorption of gaseous air pollutants over Ti-doped ZGNR structures: a DFT study
• Variation of optical bandwidth in defected ternary photonic crystal under different polarisation conditions
• An insight into the high frequency analysis of work function modulated cylindrical surrounding gate MOSFET
• GaAs SOI FinFET: impact of gate dielectric on electrical parameters and application as digital inverter

Special issue published: "Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications"

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering 18(2) 2019

• Influence maximisation in social networks
• FS-CARS: fast and scalable context-aware news recommender system using tensor factorisation
• Missing value imputation in DNA microarray gene expression data: a comparative study of an improved collaborative filtering method with decision tree based approach
• Breast abnormality detection using combined texture and vascular features

Additional papers

• Allocation of energy-efficient task in cloud using DVFS
• Hough transform-based cubic spline recognition for natural shapes
• Personalised service recommendation process based on service clustering
• Optimising data access latencies of virtual machine placement based on greedy algorithm in datacentre
• An empirical study of disclosure effects in listed biotechnology and medicine industry using MLR model
• A static analytical performance model for GPU kernel

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Materials Engineering Innovation

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

• Bulk/nano-mechanical and tribological response of functionalised multi-wall carbon nanotubes reinforced unsaturated polyester composites
• Modelling and optimisation of treatment parameters using response surface methodology: application to superficial hardening of 2017A alloy using the rods-balls device
• Effect of current density and ZnO nano particles influence on the microstructure and mechanical strengthening properties of Zn-TiO2-ZnO alloys at constant deposition time
• Characteristics of alumina coating on SAE 52100 bearing steel with Ni-Cr bond coat
• Prediction of surface roughness in single point incremental forming of AA3003-O alloy using artificial neural network

Research pick: Saturday night at the movies, tell a friend… "The complementary role of advertising and electronic word-of-mouth for blockbusters and low-budget motion pictures"

There is a complementary role between conventional marketing and advertising and electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) for motion pictures with high and low production costs, according to an analysis by researchers in Chile and Spain. They suggest that understanding the roles of advertising and e-WOM in the era of social media and social networking can have a big impact on low-budget movies compared to the blockbuster, perhaps even allowing low-budget movies to become surprise blockbusters and leading even the biggest budget movie to fail as a “rotten tomato”.

Guillermo Armelini of the Universidad de Los Andes, in Santiago, Chile, and Jorge González and Julian Villanueva of the University of Navarra, in Madrid Spain, detail their findings in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising.

The team tested the two forms of promotion using a novel methodology in experience goods modelling, that endogenise the effect of e-WOM, advertising, revenues per screens and screens – the main constructs of our study. They applied the approach to a random sample of 202 movies.
The team found that “The advertising impact on revenues and e-WOM is more critical for high than for low-production budget movies. However, a higher positive effect of advertising on-screen allocation is found for movies with lower budgets.”

They suggest that their findings have implications for managers: from the demand side, advertising affects the attention of moviegoers beyond a certain threshold and it has a ripple effect on e-WOM. In other words, e-WOM is unlikely to succeed as an exclusive approach to marketing. By contrast, they also showed that cinema owners consider advertising investment as a signal of quality for movies with a limited production budget.

Armelini, G., González, J. and Villanueva, J. (2019) ‘The complementary role of advertising and electronic word-of-mouth for blockbusters and low-budget motion pictures‘, Int. J. Internet Marketing and Advertising, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp.1-21.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Information Technology and Management

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

• The investigation of relationships: self-esteem, self-confidence, and conduct problems in counselling
• Automatic classification of Lithuanian parliament bills
• Game operation query language for facilitating game server's FCAPS operation
• Estimating the sentiment strength of a word using word similarity
• A tree cognitive navigation system based on two-dimensional code and GPS
• A framework for context-aware application programming on smart phone
• Analysis of serious games for preventing internet gaming addiction
• User interface using bounce for realistic movement on smart TV
• Shadow detection using chromaticity and entropy in colour image
• An introduction to face-recognition methods and its implementation in software applications
• Texture analysis based feature extraction using Gabor filter and SVD for reliable fault diagnosis of an induction motor
• Immersive element analysis of the multiplayer online battle arena game genre

Special issue published: "Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Smart Specialisation, Industry Clusters and Regional Development: Understanding Change at the Network Level"

International Journal of Globalisation and Small Business 10(2) 2019

• Clusters as an adaptable regional development measure to mitigate perceived competitive disadvantages
• Cluster policy change and evolution: facilitating regional smart specialisation and economic development
• From free to fee: a behavioural perspective on why companies avoid paying for cluster services
• Steering through tough times? Insights into strategic change processes of small firms in the context of demographic challenges

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising are now available here for free:

• Going native on Facebook: a content analysis of sponsored messages on undergraduate student Facebook pages
• QR code advertising: a cross-country comparison of Turkish and German consumers
• Quantifying the long-term effect of social media
• Your comments are important to me! The impacts of online customer reviews in shopping websites

Research Pick: Mechanical rice production - "The research on the selection of the rice transfer machine"

Growing rice is an intensive business. But, in China where it is the primary food crop, mechanisation has not reached maturity, although it is as high as 90 per cent in some provinces. Writing in the International Journal of Information Technology and Management, researchers have looked at the fuel consumption index and the working efficiency index as the main basis for a rice transfer machine.

Xin Yang and Zhenxiang Zeng of the School of Economics and Management, Hebei University of Technology, Jinyu Wei of the School of Management, at Tianjin University of Technology, and Xinjiang Cai of Yanshan University, explain how they have determined the best model for an optimal working ratio and efficiency, which not only satisfies the requirements of a short payback period on investment but also gives the operator long service life of the equipment.

The team explains that in most areas of China, manual handling is still the main way in which harvested rice is taken from field to transportation. Of course, given that rice grows in wet land, those fields are still wet, muddy after the harvest and manual handling is slow, inefficient, and uncomfortable for the handlers. “This problem cannot be ignored, because the traditional way has become the bottleneck of the realisation of full mechanisation of the rice farming,” the team explains. The insights gained from the team’s analysis of mechanical picking could ultimately boost the amount of mechanization in other provinces allowing rice farming to become more efficient as the population continues to grow.

Yang, X., Zeng, Z., Wei, J. and Cai, X. (2019) ‘The research on the selection of the rice transfer machine‘, Int. J. Information Technology and Management, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp.63-73.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Cloud Computing

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

• Automatic cloud service monitoring and management with prediction-based service provisioning
• A secure encryption scheme based on certificateless proxy signature
• Confidential storage of medical images - a chaos-based encryption approach
• A new key generation technique using GA for enhancing data security in cloud environment

Special issue published: "Information and Technology Management in Big Data Environment"

International Journal of Information Technology and Management 18(1) 2019

• Analysis of the multi-agent's relationship in collaborative innovation network for science and technology SEMs based on evolutionary game theory
• Research on the measuring method and structure mining of organisation conflict
• Electric vehicle range estimation based on the road congestion level classification
• A decision support system for identification of technology innovation risk based on sequential CBR
• The research on the selection of the rice transfer machine
• Dataset replica placement strategy under a response time constraint in the cloud
• Sampling method based on improved C4.5 decision tree and its application in prediction of telecom customer churn
• An improved reversible data hiding scheme based on pixel permutation

Free sample articles newly available from European Journal of International Management

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

• Organising multilingually: setting an agenda for studying language at work
• Validation of a measure of social entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurial orientation in the emerging Russian regulatory context: the criticality of interpersonal relationships
• Standardisation vs. adaption: a conjoint experiment on the influence of psychic, cultural and geographical distance on international marketing mix decisions
• Linking corporate social responsibility and financial performance in Spanish firms
• Challenges in international survey research: a review with illustrations and suggested solutions for best practice
• Top management retention in cross-border acquisitions: the roles of financial incentives, acquirer's commitment and autonomy
• Effectiveness of talent management strategies
• European perspectives on talent management
• Mergers and acquisitions performance paradox: the mediating role of integration approach
• Gender differences in expatriate adjustment
• Cultural values in organisations: insights for Europe
• Critical issues in international management research: an agenda for future advancement

Research pick: We don’t need no education…well… - An experiment in blended learning: higher education without lectures?"

The rock group Pink Floyd famously proferred that “we don’t need no education” while singer Alice Cooper celebrated the fact that “school’s out!”. But, we do need education, just not necessarily provided in the traditional style of lectures.

Can blended learning that avoids the conventional lecture structure be a useful tool in higher education? An experiment by Kevin Anthony Jones of the School of Computer Engineering, at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore and Ravi Sharma of the School of Business, at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, suggests might be so in the teaching of software engineering.

The pair has chronicled a ten-year blended learning program at a leading technological university where the concept of online courses and the technology are already very familiar to educators and students alike. However, over the course of ten years the outcomes were not quite what might have been expected from a technological starting point.

“Though there were few technical problems, it required behavioural changes from teachers and learners, thus unearthing a host of socio-technical issues, challenges, and conundrums,” the team reports in the International Journal of Digital Enterprise Technology. They add that “Education is a changing journey, not a prescribed destination, where learners, teachers, and administrators must reinvent themselves to harness the positive in this disruptive innovation of blended learning – closely related to flipped classroom – which combines eLearning with face-to-face and peer, interactions in problem-based learning.”

The bottom line is that while blended learning has many benefits it does not necessarily lead to better delivery outcomes cost savings. Nevertheless, it makes higher education a more customisable proposition that can be adapted for different learning styles and so make it more accessible to a wider range of students.

Jones, K.A. and Sharma, R.S. (2019) ‘An experiment in blended learning: higher education without lectures?’, Int. J. Digital Enterprise Technology, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp.241–275.

Research pick: Green consumerism - "The grass is greener: developing and implementing a green consumer satisfaction index"

Can consumerism ever by environmentally friendly, or “green” to use the common vernacular? And, how does going green tally with customer satisfaction? Researchers in Taiwan are developing a green customer satisfaction index (GCSI) model to explore green consumer behaviour. The model takes into account various factors including perceived quality, corporate social responsibility, expectation, brand image, perceived value, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty.

The research shows that perceived quality has a positive impact on green corporate social responsibility. That perceived quality positive effects perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty. Also that corporate social responsibility improves brand image. Brand image has a positive impact on perceived value and perceived value positively correlates with satisfaction. Finally, satisfaction has a positive impact on loyalty and expectation positively effects perceived quality and brand image.

The bottom line then is that “When the customer’s expectations are higher, the enterprise will pay more attention and strive to meet the customer’s expectations which in turn improves the enterprise’s perceived quality and brand image.” However, the research found that customer expectation has no significant effect on green perceived value and satisfaction.

“Green consumption can drive changes in the mainstream consumption patterns and, prompt companies to introduce green products that, meet customer and environmental protection needs,” explains Kuang-Heng Shih of the Department of International Business Administration, at the Chinese Culture University, Taipei City. “Green products not only enhance business but also benefit social and environmental sustainability,” he adds, paraphrasing earlier work that the present research corroborates.

The work focused on interviewing customers of three eco-smart hotels in northern Taiwan and thus has limitations but the extension of the modelling to a wider geographical region and beyond the hospitality industry could also reveal implications for the greening of other areas of consumerism.

Shih, K-H. (2018) ‘The grass is greener: developing and implementing a green consumer satisfaction index’, Int. J. Mobile Communications, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp.573–591.

Special issue published: "Organic Pollutants in Different Compartments of the Biosphere – Origins, Emissions, Abatement and Destruction, Risk Analysis: Part III"

International Journal of Environment and Pollution 63(4) 2018

• Catalytic decomposition of 1,2-dichlorobenzene over V2O5/TiO2 catalysts blending with typical carbon nanotubes
• Fly ash from a Belgian stoker-type municipal solid waste incinerator
• Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in off-gas and residue during desulphurisation of iron ore sintering off-gas
• Soil pollution by chlorobenzenes and polychlorinated biphenyls from an electronic waste recycling area in Northern Vietnam
• Effect of microwave treatment onto activated carbon produced from pecan nut shells for Tartrazine removal from aqueous media

Research pick: Californian carafes and ancient amphora - "Innovation developments in the wine industry: a journey from the amphorae of old to the California wine cluster"

From the ancient amphora to the Californian carafe, how does wine change through time and is this most traditional of skills as susceptible to innovation as other areas of human endeavour?

Writing in the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Julien Granata, Beysül Aytaç, and David Roubaud of Montpellier Business School in France discuss developments through history into the modern world of business clusters in the wine industry. They suggest that while wine suppliers focus on technical innovations, winegrowers develop organisational innovations to address the problems they face such as a lack of resources, climate change and other issues.

Historically, innovation has been perceived as giving rise to both creation and progress while at the same time bringing about substitutions. The net effect of this is that the sum of the technical advances, social progress, and new skills created through innovation always add up to more than the job losses that change entails and the obsolescence of some products. That said, disruptive innovators rarely usurp the old-school approaches and products entirely even if they might take up some of the slack in the market. Californian wine-growing clusters might offer innovation but they are at the bottom line still selling containers of wine just as the ancient Egyptians did in seventh millennium BCE.

Granata, J., Aytaç, B. and Roubaud, D. (2019) ‘Innovation developments in the wine industry: a journey from the amphorae of old to the California wine cluster’, Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp.249–255.

Inderscience journals to invite expanded papers from Chitkara University Doctoral Consortium (CUDC - 2019) for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the Chitkara University Doctoral Consortium (CUDC - 2019) (17-18 May 2019, Chitkara University, Punjab, India) will be invited for review and potential publication by the following journals:

• Int. J. of Business and Globalisation
• Int. J. of Cloud Computing
• World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development

Research pick: Beauty is in the algorithm of the beholder - "Facial beauty analysis by age and gender"

Manal El Rhazi, Arsalane Zarghili, Aicha Majda, and Anissa Bouzalmat of the Intelligent Systems and Applications Laboratory at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, in Fez, Morocco, together with Ayat Allah Oufkir of the University’s Medical Center of Biomedical and Translational Research, are investigating facial beauty analysis by age and gender.

Writing in the International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, the team explains that our faces are the first source of information we see and while beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder and perhaps more than skin deep, attractiveness is often tied very closely to the first sight of a person’s face. As such, several studies have been conducted in aesthetic medicine and image processing that might allow attractiveness to be measured in the adult human face.

The team has now proposed an automatic procedure for the analysis of “facial beauty”. In their approach, they first detect the face zone on an image and its feature areas, they then present a novel method to extract features and analyse aesthetic qualities.

“Experimental results show that our method can extract the features corners accurately for the majority of faces presented in the European Conference on Visual Perception in Utrecht (ECVP) and Faculdade de Engenharia Industrial (FEI) images databases,” they report. They add “That there exists a difference in the facial beauty analysis by gender and age, due to anatomical differences in specific facial areas between the categories.”

The main difference by gender is observed in the forehead and chin while the main differences by age take place in areas like the eyebrows, nose and the chin. The eyebrows descend from a high position to a lower one which makes the eyes look smaller, and thus suggestively less attractive. Similarly, the nasal tip descends gradually causing enlargement of the nose, and the chin descends in the same manner as the nose and eyebrows, aspects of facial characteristics that are often considered less appealing than their opposite.

El Rhazi, M., Zarghili, A. Majda, A., Bouzalmat, A. and Oufkir, A.A. (2019) ‘Facial beauty analysis by age and gender’, Int. J. Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, Vol. 18, Nos. 1/2, pp.179–203.

Research pick: International business research is interesting - "How can research on culture in international business be made more interesting?"

Snejina Michailova of The University of Auckland Business School in New Zealand and Nigel Holden of Leeds University Business School, UK, offer the intriguing question: How can research on culture in international business be made more interesting? Writing in the European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management, they suggest that an oft-overlooked aspect of business research is its potential for “interestingness”. They suggest that this is a curious omission from existing reviews and analyses.

The pair has now looked at two interconnected issues that sociologists and management scholars have wrestled with for quite some time: namely, what exactly is interesting research and why does it matter? They have made the suggestion that contextualization is important and have highlighted the need for more research into language. Moreover, they advance the case for research into intracultural variation.

“Conducting research on these three topics involves a break with national value systems, on the one hand, and the embrace of non-cultural variables, on the other,” the team writes. “The current shifts and changes in the world open up new vistas of truly interesting research, at which international business scholars can and indeed should be at the forefront.”

They suggest that when we consider the BRIC countries and so-called emerging markets, the context of the USA as the “default business nation” for benchmarking activity is not necessarily the best approach and moreover is somewhat restrictive.

“The shift in the world’s economic centre of gravity opens up new vistas of truly interesting research, at which cross-cultural management scholars as a specialist sub-group of IB scholars can and indeed should be at the forefront,” the team concludes.

Michailova, S. and Holden, N.J. (2019) ‘How can research on culture in international business be made more interesting?’, European J. Cross-Cultural Competence and Management, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.1–12.

Inderscience journals to invite expanded papers from 10th Annual International Research Conference for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the 10th Annual International Research Conference (SIMSARC 2019) (16-18 December, 2019, Khadki, Pune, India) will be invited for review and potential publication by the following journals:

• Int. J. of Public Sector Performance Management
• Int. J. of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation

Newly announced journal: International Journal of Emerging Computing for Sustainable Agriculture

The International Journal of Emerging Computing for Sustainable Agriculture provides a comprehensive and global forum for scientific discourse on advances in the development and application of innovative computing technologies for effectively addressing the challenges of sustainable agriculture. Science, technology and innovation in areas such as cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, robotics, drones, geospatial and imaging sciences and big data are helping agriculture to achieve its goal of meeting global food, fibre and feed needs in the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics to invite expanded papers from 9th International Conference on Computational Vision and Robotics 2019 for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Computational Vision and Robotics (ICCVR-2019) (15-16 June 2019, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics.

Special issue published: "Transportation and Supply Networks from a Brazilian Perspective"

World Review of Intermodal Transportation Research 8(1) 2019

• Minimum-cost flow algorithms: a performance evaluation using the Brazilian road network
• A framework of management tools for cooperation in distribution networks
• Strengthening innovative supply chain in the public transportation system of Curitiba through relational capabilities
• Evaluating engineered networks: the effects of structure and process on the outcome of the Brazilian small-firm networks
• Synergies and conflicts between marketing and supply chain management key performance indicators

Free sample articles newly available from European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management

The following sample articles from the European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management are now available here for free:

• Integrating highly qualified migrants: allowing a personal narrative to set future research directions
• Interpersonal trust in organisations: an empirical investigation of workplace outcomes in two countries
• Counternarrative and antenarrative inquiry in two cross-cultural contexts
• Lessons from beyond the Great Wall: what cross-cultural management researchers can learn from the Middle Kingdom

Free sample articles newly available from World Review of Intermodal Transportation Research

The following sample articles from the World Review of Intermodal Transportation Research are now available here for free:

• Bus stop network catchment analysis of integrated feeder service for public bus transit system - a case study of Ahmedabad City
• Improving the quality of service in public road transportation using real time travel information system
• Sustainable logistics and supply chain management: a holistic view through the lens of the wicked problem
• Including spaceflight in the transportation matrix: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
• Public-private partnerships in transportation: lessons learned for the new space era

Free open access article available: "Representing the intercultural development continuum as a pendulum: addressing the lived experiences of intercultural competence development and maintenance"

The following paper, "Representing the intercultural development continuum as a pendulum: addressing the lived experiences of intercultural competence development and maintenance" (European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management 5(1) 2019) 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 Managerial and Financial Accounting

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Managerial and Financial Accounting are now available here for free:

• Does R&D investment affect export intensity? The moderating effect of ownership
• Undertaking of environmental accounting responsibility to achieve sustainable development: evidence from Jordanian chemical and mining companies
• Equities issues and long-term firm's performances in Tunisian stock market
• Organisational influences on management accounting toolkits in Chinese enterprises: an exploratory study
• Financial management of publicly funded research activities: an explorative study

Research pick: The employee voice - "Employee voice and silence: a bibliometric analysis of the literature"

What does it mean for a worker to have a “voice”? The moral and sociological implications are more far complicated than a cursory listen to employee voice…or silence…might at first suggest. The employee voice might influence suggestion-box systems, grievance systems, dispute reporting and resolution, whistle-blowing, issue selling, upward influence with management, voice through collective representation, also known as unionisation, employee participation, and employee involvement in the management or company development.

Now, a US team has used advanced bibliometric mapping tools to plot the sciencebase of the voice and silence literature. “Our findings indicate that employee silence and employee voice are terms that are largely claimed by the organisational behaviour (OB) and human resource management (HRM) literature,” the team reports in the International Journal of Bibliometrics in Business and Management.

Debra Casey of Temple University, Philadelphia and Steven McMillan of Penn State University, Abington, both in Pennsylvania, USA, explain how they examined 376 articles, notes, and book chapters from the Web of Science (WoS) system. Importantly, from the perspective of reviewing the literature in this area and understanding the sociological and political implications, they found that the terms are defined much more narrowly in this part of the literature than they are in the industrial relations or employment relations disciplines, where one might imagine a clearer definition of the terms might be even more important.

“One of the benefits of using bibliometric techniques is that they provide a quantitative analysis that many times confirms what the astute researcher already knows,” the team reports. “We hope that by further exploring and clarifying this important area of scholarship, both seasoned scholars and those new to this area will have a better appreciation of their own ‘invisible college’ and how to make good use of it,” they add.

Casey, D.L. and McMillan, G.S. (2019) ‘Employee voice and silence: a bibliometric analysis of the literature‘, Int. J. Bibliometrics in Business and Management, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp.251-266.

Special issue published: "Leadership and Management: Challenges and Issues Facing Organisations in Developing Countries"

Middle East Journal of Management 6(2) 2019

• The influence of product innovation, brand image, and physical evidence to purchase decision and WOM of Starbucks in Jakarta
• Linking leader's emotional labour strategies with leader's attitude: an effective approach towards leadership
• Transformational leadership and work engagement: exploring the black boxes by looking into the lense of intentional change theory
• Organisational politics and task performance: the intervening role of affective organisational commitment in a public sector organisation
• Effects of external prestige on emotional labour: mediation by organisational identification and moderation by perceived organisational support
• The impact of organisational structure on organisational learning

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking

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

• Modelling and analysis of enablers for successful implementation of cellular manufacturing system
• Development of a validation and qualification process for the manufacturing of medical devices: a case study based on cross-sector benchmarking
• Prioritising the performance measures of FMS using multi-criteria decision making approaches
• Application of interactive fuzzy goal programming for multi-objective integrated production and distribution planning
• Impact of policy implementation on telecommunication diffusion in India
• Lean implementation in traditional distributor warehouse - a case study in an FMCG company in Indonesia

New Editor for International Journal of Healthcare Policy

Prof. Djamel Eddine Laouisset from the Northeastern Institute of Technology in Algeria has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Healthcare Policy.

Research pick: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) - "Advancing teaching with massive open online courses: a review of case studies"

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been widely adopted by higher education institutions for teaching more widely on-campus courses. Writing in the International Journal of Innovation and Learning, a team from Hong Kong explain how they have carried out case studies and examined best practice for running a MOOC.

Kam Cheong Li and Billy Tak-Ming Wong of The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China, demonstrated three principles that can help with the development and ongoing maintenance of MOOCs. First, the division of labour in the implementation of a MOOC is important. Secondly, technology must be used effectively. Finally, a MOOC must be adaptable so that a course might be redesigned based on teacher and learner experience with the MOOC. They point out that there are many diverse ways in which MOOCs have been implemented on-campus, specifically.

MOOCs allow huge numbers of students to participate in a course at the same time in far greater numbers than is possible with a conventional on-campus lecture and tutorial approach to teaching. It has also been demonstrated in the past that MOOCs can be used to improve accessibility, equity and inclusiveness of education given that many people might be excludes from a conventional course for any number of reasons depending on personal circumstances and geopolitics of a particular campus.
“Following the trend of adopting online technology for teaching in higher educational institutions, this study illustrates how ‘online technology can be used to deliver hybrid courses with reduced class time without compromising student outcomes’,” the team concludes.

Li, K.C. and Wong, B.T-M. (2019) ‘Advancing teaching with massive open online courses: a review of case studies‘, Int. J. Innovation and Learning, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp.141-155.

International Journal of Automation and Control to invite expanded papers from International Conference on Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation and Control Technologies for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the
International Conference on Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation and Control Technologies (ICICICT-2019) (5-6 July 2019, Vimal Jyothi Engineering College, Kerala, India) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Automation and Control.

Special issue published: "Coping with Uncertainty in Complex Socio-Economic Systems"

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics 9(1/2) 2019

• Measuring uncertainties: a theoretical approach
• Technology diffusion of Industry 4.0: an agent-based approach
• Forecasting inflation in Tunisia during instability using dynamic factors model: a two-step based procedure based on Kalman filter
• Do the flexible employment arrangements increase job satisfaction and employee loyalty? Evidence from Bayesian networks and instrumental variables
• On the validity of exclusion restrictions in the structural multivariate framework: a Monte Carlo simulation
• Career mobility of PhD holders in social sciences and humanities: evidences from the POCARIM project

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Management and Enterprise Development

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

• Relationship intention and service quality as combined competitive strategy
• Brazilian microfranchising chains: entrepreneurs' backgrounds and perceptions of brands and support
• Entry-based financial statement analysis for small firms
• Contesting the underperformance thesis of women entrepreneurs: firm-level evidence from South Africa
• Enhancing corporate entrepreneurship: an empirical test of Stevenson's conceptualisation of entrepreneurial management

Research pick: Gaming system helps with autism diagnosis - "Automatic detection of stereotyped movements in autistic children using the Kinect sensor"

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental condition that affects communication, social skills and other behaviours. Characteristic of some cases in both children and adults is repetitive movements or unusual behaviour – stereotyped movements.

A research team from France and Morocco describe in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, an automated detection system for diagnosing stereotyped movements that uses the motion detector system of the “Kinect” video game. The Kinect system is based on a webcam type peripheral computer device that allows the player to control the computer through movements and gestures (as well as spoken commands via a microphone input). The Kinect was originally an add-on for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console.

The team of Maha Jazouli of Sidi Mohamed Benabdellah University, in Fez, Morocco, and colleagues have used a $P Point-Cloud Recogniser to identify multi-stroke gestures as point clouds as recorded by the webcam component of the Kinect and its processing system for gesture and movement determination. Their new methodology can automatically detect five stereotypical motor movements: body rocking, hand flapping, finger flapping, hand on the face, and hands behind back.
The researchers report that for many people with ASD tested using this system, satisfactory results were obtained in identifying stereotyped movements. They suggest that the system might be used in a clinical setting or in the home as a temporary smart surveillance system to augment early diagnosis of ASD by expert clinicians.

Jazouli, M., Majda, A., Merad, D., Aalouane, R. and Zarghili, A. (2019) ‘Automatic detection of stereotyped movements in autistic children using the Kinect sensor‘, Int. J. Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.201-220.

Inderscience journals to invite expanded papers from International Conference on Business and Behaviour Studies for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the International Conference on Business and Behaviour Studies (IC-BBS 2019) (7-8 November 2019, Singapore) will be invited for review and potential publication by the following journals:

• Int. J. of Business and Globalisation
• Int. J. of Society Systems Science

Special issue published: "Firm Governance and Risk Management"

International Journal of Management and Enterprise Development 18(1/2)

• Co-movements in volatility of dependency between US dollar and euro: analysing by conditional heteroscedasticity models
• The risk-based management control system: a stakeholders' perspective to design management control systems
• Board characteristics, IFRS adoption and voluntary disclosure: evidence from management forecasts accuracy in France
• To what extent the global financial crisis deteriorated loan quality of US commercial banks?
• Agency conflicts in French SMEs: are banks shareholders still influent?
• Political connections, collateral favours and debt access: some Tunisian evidence
• Does the usage of financial derivatives decrease the systemic risks in the GCC banks? An empirical study
• The impact of intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance practices on the cost of finance: Tunisian evidence

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics

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

• Minimisation of bias of Pearson correlation coefficient in presence of coincidental outliers
• Testing for multi-fractality and efficiency in selected sovereign bond markets: a multi-fractal detrended moving average (MF-DMA) analysis
• Fiscal multipliers and macroeconomic performance in the case of Slovakia and Hungary
• medsem: a Stata package for statistical mediation analysis
• Clairvoyant targeted attack on complex networks
• Price transmission along the Greek food supply chain in a dynamic panel framework: empirical evidence from the implementation of decoupling
• Energy consumption and gross domestic product in the Philippines: an application of maximum entropy bootstrap framework

Research pick: Searching for side effects - "A corpus-oriented perspective on terminologies of side effect and adverse reaction in support of text retrieval for drug repurposing"

Extracting relevant information from the scientific literature about side effects and adverse drug reactions to pharmaceutical products is an important part of data mining in this area. Writing in the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, a team from China has developed a new search strategy that offers the optimal trade-off between retrieving pertinent abstracts and coping with the vast amounts of information available.

The team’s “corpus-oriented perspective on terminologies” of side effect and ADRs could be, they suggest, an important tool in a thriving area of pharmaceutical research and development – drug repurposing.

Alex Chengyu Fang of the Department of Linguistics and Translation, at City University of Hong Kong, Yemao Liu, Yaping Lu, and Jingbo Xia of the College of Informatics at Huazhong Agricultural University, Jing Cao of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China, describe their approach as offering a useful compromise between the relevance of the content retrieved given a large body of work. The terms “side effects” and “adverse drug reactions” are commonly used interchangeably and the latter might in some sense be considered a euphemism of the former term used by members of the public.

Indeed, side effects and ADRs are synonyms. The two, of course, have many hyponyms, terms that are essentially related to examples of both side effects and ADRs, which by definition are the hypernyms to those hyponyms. These terms too must be retrievable by any data mining algorithm that analyses a body of work and is intent on seeking relevant abstracts discussing the “hypernyms. Phrases such as “adverse drug event”, “drug toxicity”, “undesirable effects”, and others all fall into the same clade and so must be involved in the retrieval.

Fang, A.C., Liu, Y., Lu, Y., Cao, J. and Xia, J. (2018) ‘A corpus-oriented perspective on terminologies of side effect and adverse reaction in support of text retrieval for drug repurposing’, Int. J. Data Mining and Bioinformatics, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp.269–286.

International Journal of Economic Policy in Emerging Economies to invite expanded papers from 4th SSBRN Symposium 2019 for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the 4th SSBRN Symposium 2019 (5-6 September 2019, Bucharest, Romania) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Economic Policy in Emerging Economies.

Special Issue on: "Contemporary Indian Scholars Redefining Frontiers of Global Business Research"

Journal for Global Business Advancement 11(6) 2018

• Dynamics of capital structure: evidence from Indian manufacturing firms
• Purpose of international joint venture and interaction post termination
• Perceived ethicality of political behaviours in organisations: a constructivist grounded theory study
• "Strong, yet we are vulnerable": role of psychological factors and financial affluence on women's entrepreneurial success
• Deglobalisation as a challenge: a case study of the USA
• Is the excessive reliance on the board monitoring justified in the context of corporate governance framework?

Free open access article available: "The long-term viability of US wine grape vineyards: assessing vineyard labour costs for future technology development"

The following paper, "The long-term viability of US wine grape vineyards: assessing vineyard labour costs for future technology development" (International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business 36(3) 2019) is freely available for download as an open access article.

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

Special issue published: "Innovation in the Wine Industry" [includes free Open Access article]

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business 36(3) 2019

• Innovation developments in the wine industry: a journey from the amphorae of old to the California wine cluster
• Innovation in wine closure packaging: the case of Diam
• Co-creating a wine: a dyadic approach to consumer experiential value and SME value creation
• Linking branding strategy to ownership structure, financial performance and stability: case of French wine cooperatives
• The long-term viability of US wine grape vineyards: assessing vineyard labour costs for future technology development [FREE OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE]
• Can crowdfunding promote innovation in the wine industry?

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications are now available here for free:

• Mixed integer programming for vehicle routing problem with time windows
• Efficient multimedia content storage and allocation in multidimensional cloud computing resources
• Context aware reliable sensor selection in IoT
• Lagrangian relaxation for distribution networks with cross-docking centre
• Factors influencing regression testing on cloud and on-premises: an analysis
• A hybrid test prioritisation technique for combinatorial testing
• Intelligent systems for redundancy removal with proficient run-length coding and statistical analysis using regression
• An intelligent inventive system for personalised webpage recommendation based on ontology semantics
• Survey on techniques of fault detection-rookies vantage point
• Effect of magnetising core on impedance and induced EMF of two coils wound on single iron core
• Combining RSS-SVM with genetic algorithm for Arabic opinions analysis
• Facial beauty analysis by age and gender
• Support vector machine based fault detection and diagnosis for HVAC systems

Special issue published: "Inventive Systems and IoT"

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications 18(1/2) 2019

• Mixed integer programming for vehicle routing problem with time windows
• Efficient multimedia content storage and allocation in multidimensional cloud computing resources
• Context aware reliable sensor selection in IoT
• Lagrangian relaxation for distribution networks with cross-docking centre
• Factors influencing regression testing on cloud and on-premises: an analysis
• A hybrid test prioritisation technique for combinatorial testing
• Intelligent systems for redundancy removal with proficient run-length coding and statistical analysis using regression
• An intelligent inventive system for personalised webpage recommendation based on ontology semantics
• Survey on techniques of fault detection-rookies vantage point
• Effect of magnetising core on impedance and induced EMF of two coils wound on single iron core
• Combining RSS-SVM with genetic algorithm for Arabic opinions analysis
• Facial beauty analysis by age and gender
• Support vector machine based fault detection and diagnosis for HVAC systems

Research pick: Generating electricity with rice straw - "Economic utilisation of rice straw – an effort for preventing social hazard"

Rice straw is the waste product of growing rice. Normally, it is simply burned adding sooty pollution to the local air and nudging up atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. What if there were a better alternative to simply burning this material? Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Waste Management a team from India offer an alternative. Pardeep Aggarwal and Anu Prashaant of Amity University in Gautam Budh Nagar, India, suggest that rice straw could instead be utilized for power generation or bioethanol production.

Unfortunately, the team explains, some farmers believe that rice straw open burning can remove weeds, control diseases and release nutrients for the next crop. There is little evidence that rice straw burning does anything but pollute. Rice straw length, low elevation land, and even the great distance from farmhouse to farmland are additional factors that influence the field burning of rice straw. Rice straw cannot be used as cattle feed either and there is very little time between successive crops to do much with the fields other than eradicating the stubble.

In order to make the alternative proposition viable both commercially and logistically, they explain that there is a need for a sustainable supply chain management of rice straw. At the moment, there is but a single 12-megawatt power plant that uses 100% rice straw as its fuel, one million tonnes annually, but that is a fraction of the tonnage of this agricultural waste product. The team points out that the numbers of rice straw power plants in China too is low and actually falling. However, the environmental and economic benefits of utilizing a ubiquitous waste product could make power production and bioethanol production tenable given the right geopolitical conditions.

The team concludes from the study that “only when such infrastructure with proactive planning is available, a secured supply of rice straw can be maintained for continuous year-long operations of a power plant.”

Aggarwal, P. and Prashaant, A. (2019) ‘Economic utilisation of rice straw – an effort for preventing social hazard‘, Int. J. Environment and Waste Management, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp.97-112

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation are now available here for free:

• A rule generation algorithm from neural network using classified and misclassified data
• 3D reconstruction of pulmonary nodules in PET-CT image sequences based on a novel 3D region growing method combined with ACO
• An elite opposition-flower pollination algorithm for a 0-1 knapsack problem
• Differential evolution based on node strength
• Behaviour-driven dynamic pricing modelling via hidden Markov model
• A bacterial foraging-based batch scheduling model for distributed systems
• Iterative sequential bat algorithm for free-form rational Bézier surface reconstruction

Special issue published: "Sustainable Development and Innovative Practices"

World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development 14(6) 2018

• A study to measure the organisational integrity across different sectors
• Decision tree model for classification of fake and genuine banknotes using SPSS
• Intellectual property rights protection and foreign direct investment: a study of BRICS countries
• Indian individual investor behaviour: a model based study to meet sustainable and inclusive growth
• Green practices for sustainability of quick service chain restaurants business: an empirical investigation
• Conceptual development of transfer of brand loyalty in brand stretching
• Data mining techniques for stroke: a systematic review

Additional papers

• Ecotourism: repositioning green tourism amongst millennial generation in India
• A mixed methods bibliometric investigation of the World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development: from qualitative to quantitative data

Research pick: The spiritual side of business - "Workplace spirituality: insights from the Bhagavad Gita"

Spirituality is good for the bottom line, according to research from India. Writing in the International Journal of Business Excellence, researchers from Anna University, in Chennai explain how spiritual theories in India are based on the principle of unanimity, integrating physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of people through dharma (righteousness). They point out that the Bhagavad Gita highlights the practice of spirituality and ethics in the workplace. In their paper, they review twenty years of research into the spiritual aspects of business practice in this context and define workplace spirituality from a new perspective. They also delineate its dimensions as a persistent positive state of work environment that promotes spiritual awakening and enhances business ethics.

The team suggests that there is a need for a new wave of spirituality in business suggesting that workers must carry out their tasks not only with their brain and limbs but also with heart and spirit. They add that “Western” thought has often been concerned with spirituality and finding links to “Eastern” philosophy. “Workplace spirituality is applicable to practically every organization,” they suggest, in the West or the East.

The team has extended the theory of the positive relationship between workplace spirituality and business ethics. Indeed, they suggest that supporting and nurturing spiritual practices in an organisation can maximize the “triple bottom line”: people, profit, and planet.

Srilalitha, R. and Supriya, M.V. (2019) ‘Workplace spirituality: insights from the Bhagavad Gita’, Int. J. Business Excellence, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp.210–229.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling are now available here for free:

• Modelling and analysis of multi-agent systems using UPPAAL SMC
• Supporting collaborative business processes: a BPaaS approach
• Crowd evacuation simulation based on emotion contagion
• Modelling and simulation of an analytical approach to handle real-time traffic in VoIP network
• Continuous Petri nets and hybrid automata: two bisimilar models for the simulation of positive systems
• Artificial neural networks for acquisition and processing of sensors data in a radiotherapy application
• Modelling and hardware co-simulation of a Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Special issue published: "Innovative Application of Technology in Education"

International Journal of Innovation and Learning 25(2) 2019

• Improving the experience of teaching and learning kindergarten-level English vocabulary using augmented reality
• Improving English pronunciation via automatic speech recognition technology
• Advancing teaching with massive open online courses: a review of case studies
• Massive open online courses as open educational resources in a blended teaching and learning mode of instructional delivery in higher education
• Instructional support for the faculty members to promote flipped classroom based on the IDEAL model in Japanese higher education
• Evolution and effectiveness of e-learning in accounting education: the case of Hong Kong
• A review on learning analytics

Free open access article available: "Luxury limbo: temporal techniques of border control and the humanitarianisation of waiting"

The following paper, "Luxury limbo: temporal techniques of border control and the humanitarianisation of waiting" (International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 4(1/2) 2018) is freely available for download as an open access article.

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

Research pick: Twofish to protect you medical records - "An efficient two stage encryption for securing personal health records in cloud computing"

Electronic health records (EHRs) are becoming more and more prevalent. There is thus an increased risk of data leaks, breaches or other ways in which personal and private medical information might be compromised. As such, a team from India has now described an efficient two-stage encryption for securing personal health records stored “in the cloud”.

KrishnaKeerthi Chennam and Lakshmi Muddana of Gitam University, in Hyderabad, explain how accessibility to remote servers for the storage of huge amounts of data – the storage aspect of cloud – computing is an efficient and cost-effective alternative to on-site data storage. Given the vast amounts of medical information stored in patient records, this is a useful alternative for any healthcare facility. The cloud approach also means that patient EHRs are more readily available to a healthcare worker regardless of their location, whether with the patient in their home, at the doctor’s surgery, in hospital, in an ambulance en route to another site, or perhaps even at the scene of an accident.

Regardless there is a critical need for EHRs to be safe from the prying eyes of third parties whether simply other members of the public, unconnected health workers or those with malicious intent.
The team explains how their approach uses a hierarchical clustering algorithm that determines the different user roles associated with the EHRs. Once clustering is done twofish-based encryption algorithm is used to lock down the data. The team’s novel approach to encryption has lower encryption and decryption times than other approaches.

Chennam, K. and Muddana, L. (2018) ‘An efficient two stage encryption for securing personal health records in cloud computing’, Int. J. Services Operations and Informatics, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp.277–296.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Computing Science and Mathematics

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

• Elliptic curve based authenticated encryption scheme and its application for electronic payment system
• Discontinuous Legendre wavelet Galerkin method for the generalised Burgers-Fisher equation
• An improved cuckoo search algorithm for integer programming problems
• Zeghdoudi distribution and its applications
• Three stage game research of dual-channel supply chain of fresh agricultural products under consumer preference
• Analysis of motion characteristics of three degrees of freedom decoupling hydraulic self-servo joint
• An inclusive framework for developing a car racing simulator game using artificial intelligence techniques and usability principles
• Optimal path for mobile aggregator in intelligence agriculture
• Analysis of flow field of hydrodynamic suspension polishing disk based on multi-fractal method
• On ve-degree molecular topological properties of silicate and oxygen networks

Special issue published: "3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing"

International Journal of Materials and Product Technology 58(2/3) 2019

• Investigation of professional design practice: a framework for designing plastic consumer products for additive manufacturing
• Evaluation of additive manufacturing technologies for dimensional and geometric accuracy
• Selection of 3D printer based on FAHP integrated with GRA-TOPSIS
• Investigation of parameters influencing mechanical properties in SIS by using RSM
• Estimating percentage contribution of process parameters towards build time of FDM process for components displaying spatial symmetry: a case study
• Using additive manufacturing applications for design and development of food and agricultural equipments
• Novel quantification for silver ion generated by the submerged arc discharge method

Free sample articles newly available from African Journal of Economic and Sustainable Development

The following sample articles from the African Journal of Economic and Sustainable Development are now available here for free:

• Human capital development in Nigeria: an empirical assessment on the impact of corruption
• When 'property cannot own property': women's lack of property rights in Cameroon
• Does financial performance really improve the environmental accounting disclosure practices in India: an empirical evidence from nifty companies
• A dynamic investigation of foreign direct investment and sectoral growth in Mauritius
• A nonlinear relationship between unemployment and human capital - evidence from African countries
• Analysis of GMO food products companies: financial risks and opportunities in the global agriculture industry

Research pick: Detecting and blocking cyberbullying - "Improved cyberbully detection techniques using multiple correlation coefficient from forum corpus"

Bullying is as old as humanity, but in today’s world of ubiquitous and always-connected devices, there is a whole realm of bullying that can take place out of sight but be just as devastating to its victims – cyberbullying. Detecting and so having the opportunity to prevent cyberbullying in open online forums and social networking sites, for instance, requires technology that can automatically detect trollish and thuggish behaviour. Once detected, the problems that victims face might be addressed but more importantly, the cyberbullies might be shut down or otherwise punished.

Writing in the International Journal of Autonomic Computing, a team from India reveals their algorithm which detects and weighs the words in forums and calculates whether or not particular clusters of words are associated with cyberbullying behaviour.

The team explains the problem and why it matters so much: “Cyberbullying has emerged as a major problem along with the recent development of online communication and social media. Cyberbullying has also been extensively recognised as a serious national health problem, in which victims demonstrate a significantly high risk of suicidal ideation,” they write. They add that “This proposed framework shows better results while the action is to stop the online users becoming the victims of cyberbully.”

Sheeba, J.I., Devaneyan, S.P. and Tata, P. (2018) ‘Improved cyberbully detection techniques using multiple correlation coefficient from forum corpus’, Int. J. Autonomic Computing, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.152–171.

Free sample articles newly available from Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal

The following sample articles from Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal are now available here for free:

• Analytical benchmark solution for Stokes flow with variable viscosity in spherical layer
• Explicit staggered grid scheme for rotating shallow water equations on geostrophic flows
• Computational investigation of the velocity and temperature fields in corrugated heat exchanger channels using RANS based turbulence models with experimental validation
• Fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics within a rectangular microchannel array of different manifold shapes - modelisation and optimisation using CFD and response surface methodology
• Material point method and smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations of fluid flow problems: a comparative study

First issue: International Journal of Spatio-Temporal Data Science (free sample issue available)

The rapid pace of data growth through proliferating, disparate location-sensing sources has given rise to a paradigm shift in how new age spatio-temporal (big) data is processed. Confidence in existing/traditional data engineering capabilities is gradually fading, triggering an urgent need for the next generation data management and analytical frameworks to deal with scalable spatio-temporal big data. The International Journal of Spatio-Temporal Data Science addresses the issues/challenges increasingly posed by overly complex and geographically distributed spatio-temporal data, a rapidly growing area in the realm of big data.

There is a free download of the papers from this first issue.