28 September 2021

Free open access article available: "An empirical investigation of green shipping practices, corporate reputation and organisational performance in container shipping"

The following paper, "An empirical investigation of green shipping practices, corporate reputation and organisational performance in container shipping" (International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics 13(3/4) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.

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


Free open access article available: "Logistics quality management practices and performance of international distribution centre operators"

The following paper, "Logistics quality management practices and performance of international distribution centre operators" (International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics 13(3/4) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.

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


Special issue published: "New Trends in Monitoring and Measuring Air, Land and Water Pollution"

International Journal of Environment and Pollution 67(2/3/4) 2020

  • Can environmental information disclosure regulate the relationship between environmental cost and enterprise value?
  • Study progress and prospect of ecological industrial market models for control of karst rocky desertification
  • Analysis of the impact of China's manufacturing industry in the global value chain on carbon emissions
  • Evaluating the effects of regulated deficit irrigation on soil water movement, nitrate transport, photosynthetic characteristics, grain yield, water and N use efficiency under furrow irrigation
  • Field based evaluation of Han-Mercury1 UAV sprayer: droplet deposition characteristics at various canopy heights of soybean crop
  • Ecological red line zoning of the Tibet autonomous region based on ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity
  • Runoff simulation performance of multi-source precipitation products in small watersheds of different climatic regions in the USA

Free open access article available: "Sustainable port development: the role of Chinese seaports in the 21st century Maritime Silk Road"

The following paper, "Sustainable port development: the role of Chinese seaports in the 21st century Maritime Silk Road" (International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics  13(1/2) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.

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


27 September 2021

Free sample articles newly available from EuroMed Journal of Management

The following sample articles from the EuroMed Journal of Management are now available here for free:
  • Corporate social responsibility and corporate performance: empirical evidence of Qatari listed companies
  • Capital structure and shareholders' value
  • Does gender affect loan default?
  • Effects of operating segments financials on choice of basis of segmentation and number of operating segments: a lagged analysis
  • Modelling tail dependence structure between carry trade and BRICS markets: copula approach

Special issue published: "Soft Computational Intelligence in Understanding Crisp and Uncertainty Hybrid Modelling"

International Journal of Hybrid Intelligence 2(1) 2021

  • Determination of approximate fuzzy membership function using linguistic input - an approach based on interpolation
  • Tumour model with different imprecise coefficients
  • The behaviour of logistic equation in fuzzy environment: fuzzy differential equation approach
  • Comparison between pre-diabetes and diabetes model in fuzzy and crisp environment: fuzzy differential equation approach
  • A job-sequencing problem using modified score function in PNN environment
  • Quantitative prognostic factor extraction of epidemic thrombosis using machine learning strategy

Free open access article available: "Green port performance evaluation under uncertainty: a multiple attribute group decision analysis"

The following paper, "Green port performance evaluation under uncertainty: a multiple attribute group decision analysis" (International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics 13(1/2) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.

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


New Editor for International Journal of Revenue Management

Prof. Wen-Chyuan Chiang from the University of Tulsa in the has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Revenue Management. The previous Editor in Chief, Prof. Jason C.H. Chen, will remain with the journal as Honorary Editor in Chief.

24 September 2021

Research pick: Brazil’s nuclear industry option - "The current public acceptance in Brazil of nuclear science and technology for peaceful purposes"

The mid-1950s saw the advent of nuclear industries with the first radiological research centre in Brazil and today the country has four research reactors and two nuclear power reactors in operation as well as eleven fuel cycle facilities. Researchers writing in the International Journal of Nuclear Energy Science and Technology, explain that nuclear power represents about 3 percent of output but this in no way represents the full potential of nuclear in the country. This is particularly poignant given that Brazil has the seventh largest reservoirs of the nuclear starting material, uranium.

One of the obstacles that the team of Vitor Fernandes de Almeida, Luciana Sampaio Ribeiro, Edilaine Ferreira da Silva, Anna Flávia de Freitas Valiante Peluso, Nathália Silva de Medeiros, and Amir Zacarias Mesquita of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN) in Minas Gerais, see in changing this situation is that the general population has little comprehension of the nuclear industry, which, of course, is the case in many other parts of the world. As such approval when sought is often met with misunderstandings and misconceptions.

Given that the nuclear industries could have an important role to play in addressing climate change as well as their ongoing role in medically important radiopharmaceuticals and diagnostics, there is a pressing need to understand the level of understanding among the public to allow the nuclear industries in Brazil to mature further. Greater understanding of such issues usually leads to greater approval and the team’s evidence suggests that this is the case in the situation. However, the perceived negatives often receive greater attention in the media and on social media than the benefits of the nuclear industries, often being equated with weaponry and environmental harms.

The team suggests that clear and accessible information about the benefits and the limitations of the nuclear industries is needed if the general public is to accept the paradigm. Opening up visitor centres for adults, improving educational input, as well as endeavouring to drive a positive message across social media could all be done to benefit the nuclear industry and reduce unwarranted prejudice without compromising integrity and being accepting of the limitations.

“Public acceptance of nuclear power and radiation applications are important for the government, the major stakeholder of the industry because consensus is required to drive actions,” the team writes.

de Almeida, V.F., Ribeiro, L.S., da Silva, E.F., de Freitas Valiante Peluso, A.F., de Medeiros, N.S. and Mesquita, A.Z. (2020) ‘The current public acceptance in Brazil of nuclear science and technology for peaceful purposes’, Int. J. Nuclear Energy Science and Technology, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp.328–338.

23 September 2021

Special issue published: "The 4 Cs: Communication, Commerce, Connectivity and Culture: Implications for Business and Society"

International Journal of Public Sector Performance Management 8(1/2) 2021

  • A global examination of country-level factors impacting corruption
  • Pleasant experience in Indian academic libraries: shopping mall centric and phenomenology approach
  • Impact of four components of money supply on GDP growth using ARDL: evidence from India
  • An impact of bank rate and inflation rate on volatility of foreign exchange rate in India
  • Role of fundamentals in evaluation of IPOs: evidence from Indian and US textile sector
  • Role of citizens' knowledge about e-governance initiatives in framing citizens' satisfaction
  • Distilling factors influencing international mobility: international students' perspectives
  • Dynamic interaction between historical and implied volatility in the Indian option market
  • The interplay of cultural rigidity, vertical communication, and perceived severity of decline: an empirical affirmation from the public sector
  • Are the non-agricultural commodities markets efficient?: an ARDL model approach
  • Enterprise architecture implementation in Indian banks: a content analysis
  • Kitchen in cloud: an analysis of the food tech industry in India
  • Use of social media by selected Indian private sector banks

Research pick: Predicting and controlling dioxins - "Soft measurement of dioxin emission concentration based on deep forest regression algorithm"

Dioxins are a group of toxic and persistent environmental pollutants. These compounds are formed through a variety of processes but commonly through incomplete combustion of organic matter. Levels are usually monitored in industrial settings for safety reasons using offline laboratory analyses that are carried out periodically. New work published in the International Journal of System Control and Information Processing offers an emission concentration estimate from soft measurements that utilises a deep forest regression algorithm.

Such an approach could offer a better approach to dioxin monitoring allowing a profile of emission concentrations to be seen almost in real-time in a way that periodic monitoring cannot. As such, this might allow optimal control of the processes to reduce the risk of noxious emissions. The team has validated the predictions made by the trained algorithm with data from a typical industrial process, municipal solid waste incineration, which is well known as an important potential source of dioxins in many places. Their approach provides a rather accurate prediction based on input parameters for the known data from an incinerator.

Municipal solid waste is increasing by up to ten percent annually across the globe. Moreover, given that practical recycling is not possible in many of the world’s cities at any meaningful level, waste incineration represents one of the only pragmatic ways of addressing this growing problem. But, the issue of pollution must also be addressed if incineration is not to cause more problems than it solves. Of course, the heat generated by municipal waste incineration can itself be put to good use in heating local buildings or generating electricity.

Jian, T., Heng, X., Junfei, Q. and Zihao, G. (2021) ‘Soft measurement of dioxin emission concentration based on deep forest regression algorithm’, Int. J. System Control and Information Processing, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp.208–228.

22 September 2021

Free open access article available: "Android apps and advertising networks - a survey on data privacy"

The following paper, "Android apps and advertising networks - a survey on data privacy" (International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity 4(4) 2020), is freely available for download as an open access article.

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

Research pick: COVID-19 dynamics across India - "Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Indian states during lockdown: incorporating heterogeneity and non-pharmaceutical interventions"

New research published in the International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, has looked at the non-pharmautical interventions that were used during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rohit Sindhwani, Venkataramanaiah Saddikuti, and Omkarprasad S. Vaidya of the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, explain that the exponential thread of a potentially lethal infectious disease requires a strong response from those in authority if the impact is to be limited in any way. The team has modelled the response and effects of the pandemic on ten of the worst affected states in India to see if there are any state-specific dynamics. The modelling gives them a dynamic reproductive number for the virus and its spread. Such dynamics might offer clues as to how best to deal with re-emerging waves of infection or the development of a future pandemic. Importantly, the team’s study reveals the importance of understanding the heterogeneities that exist between different places, which can help to highlight what measures are useful and what measures fail.

At the time the work was undertaken, the strongest message that is offered is that in terms of non-pharmaceutical interventions, regular personal testing and self isolation, social distancing, and ongoing personal hygiene measures, such as wearing a face covering and hand-washing should be continued. Critically, it is important to identify super-spreaders and to counter the impact they might have on the development of new waves of infection.

Given that India is the second most populous country in the world, it is important for a huge number of people that science understands very clearly how pandemics unroll across the sub-continent. There are, of course, implications for its citizens, its near neighbours, and the whole world.

Sindhwani, R., Saddikuti, V. and Vaidya, O.S. (2021) ‘Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Indian states during lockdown: incorporating heterogeneity and non-pharmaceutical interventions’, Int. J. Indian Culture and Business Management, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp.490–521.

21 September 2021

Research pick: Up-converting for Super SloMo video - "A high-quality frame rate up-conversion technique for Super SloMo"

Research published in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, points to several approaches that might be used to up-convert Super SloMo video files with deep learning offering improvements in final quality. The methods described offer a way to convert a video with a lower number of frames per second to be converted to one with a higher number of frames per second.

Minseop Kim and Haechul Choi of the Hanbat National University in Daejeon, Republic of Korea explain how a training data set can be used to gain optimal results with Super SloMo boosting signal-to-noise ratio significantly. Super SloMo is a deep learning-based frame rate up-conversion (FRUC) method proposed by graphics hardware company NVIDIA. The current team’s approach works with this and can preclude flickering effects when displaying video that does not match the quality of the display itself by creating frames between frames using the techniques of artificial intelligence. This allows a more natural up-conversion to be carried out whereas earlier approaches can successfully reduce flicker but look unnatural. The new approach avoids the negative impact that can be seen when a bad motion vector is used to add frames.

The team trained the system with thousands of videos showing various moving objects of different sizes. The large objects dataset contained more than 50000 images of basketball, soccer, volleyball, marathons, and vehicles. The dataset with small moving objects contained more than 50000 images of golf, badminton, table tennis, and tennis. A similar-sized dataset of both large and small objects was also used.

“The results of training by object size shows that the performance was improved in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the mean of the structural similarity index (MSSIM) in most cases when the training set and the validation set had similar properties,” the team reports. Specifically, “The experimental results show that the two proposed methods improved the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the mean of the structural similarity index by 0.11 dB and 0.033% with the specialised training set and by 0.37 dB and 0.077% via adjusting the reconstruction and warping loss parameters, respectively,” the team writes.

Kim, M. and Choi, H. (2021) ‘A high-quality frame rate up-conversion technique for Super SloMo’, Int. J. Computational Vision and Robotics, Vol. 11, No. 5, pp.512–525.

New Editor for International Journal of Sustainable Agricultural Management and Informatics

Associate Prof. Jason Papathanasiou from the University of Macedonia in Greece has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Sustainable Agricultural Management and Informatics.

17 September 2021

New Editor for International Journal of Product Sound Quality

Associate Prof. Jinyang Xu from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Product Sound Quality.

Newly announced journal: International Journal of Education, Arts and Social Issues in Africa

The International Journal of Education, Arts and Social Issues in Africa provides a forum for scholars and researchers to analyse, evaluate, discuss and develop policy ideas on issues related to education, the arts and society in Africa. The journal acknowledges that these are intricate issues and that one size does not fit all. Since there are many countries in Africa, most with a colonial past, problems and solutions are very complex, often requiring interdisciplinary approaches and involving the use of different models.

Research pick: Culture and social media - "The effects of cultural differences on social media behaviour"

Research published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising has looked at how cultural differences affect behaviour on social media. Myron Guftométros and João Guerreiro Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, in Lisbon, Portugal, focused on what is perhaps the most well-known and well-populated online social network, Facebook. They used an organic approach to assimilate data from 6750 posts from 225 different Facebook brand pages across fifteen different countries.

The team categorized the engagement metrics such as the number of likes, shares and comments and the various versions of “likes” such as love, wow, and funny that can be used to tag an update. They then used Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to analyse the data. The team found several interesting differences that could be explained by Hofstede’s dimensions. For instance, countries that are considered low in individualism and/or high in power distance, share posts more than commenting on them. They also found that the use of the “funny” or “wow” emoticon responses instead of a standard “like” also related to higher scores on individualism.

Despite the reach of Facebook and other social media systems, globalisation and interconnectedness, people still retain and favour their own cultural values in different regions and across different groups within those regions. However, ongoing studies are still needed to discern whether the effects of globalisation are blurring cultural distinctions or not particularly in update and commenting activity on social media. The authors write that their work appears to be the first published based on real-world organically gathered data in the form of engagement metrics to analyse cultural differences.

The next step will be to look at cultural differences surrounding smaller, local companies, and also to extend the analysis of metrics to other applications, such as the microblogging site Twitter and the photo- and video-oriented Instagram. The researchers also find that their study poses several more questions that future research might answer: Does “loving” a post instead of “liking” it mean that there is a stronger brand relationship? Also, they ask, does responding with the “funny” or “wow” emoticon mean that customers are more engaged and interested in the posts? Of course, the bigger question is to learn whether these fleeting online sentiments actually reveal anything at all about a user or customer’s actual feelings towards a given brand.

Guftométros, M. and Guerreiro, J. (2021) ‘The effects of cultural differences on social media behaviour’, Int. J. Internet Marketing and Advertising, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp.412–428.

16 September 2021

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Islamic Marketing and Branding

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Islamic Marketing and Branding are now available here for free:
  • Muslim youths' e-lifestyle and its impacts on well-being
  • Awareness towards Halal pharmaceuticals: an analysis of pharmacists' views
  • Segmentation of retail bank customers based on occasions (Agribank of Iran as case study)
  • Constructing marketing thought: the case of Islamic marketing
  • Halal tourism: guidelines for Oman

Research pick: The COVID-19 response - "Which strategies are appropriate for the fight against the worldwide coronavirus crisis?"

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic governments, corporations and private companies, as well as not-for-profit organisations have tried to support public health in many different ways. A new report in the International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, has looked at what strategies appear to have worked in coping with this disease.

Amina Omrane of the ECSTRA Research Center at IHEC Carthage, University of Sfax, in Tunisia and Sudin Bag of Vidyasagar University in West Bengal, India, found that digital tools and technologies coupled with specific cultural responses have helped us face the pandemic in many ways. Their detailed findings point to how corporate management, government and state officials, as well as entrepreneurs, might learn from the current crisis how best to cope with the ongoing problems it brings as well as how we might successfully cope with a similar crisis in the future.

In late 2019, human health, security, and safety took a turn for the worse with the emergence of a novel and potentially lethal airborne coronavirus dubbed SARS-CoV-2, which causes a disease labeled COVID-19, as we all know. In March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic, which has proven to be the worst for many decades in terms of people affected and the number of deaths around the world that it has wrought.

There have been many different responses to the disease in different parts of the world, such as telecommuting mandates, lockdowns, and border controls, some more successful in some places than others. At the time of writing, we now have several vaccines available to some parts of the world population. There has also been significant blowback from those concerned with the societal and economic impact as opposed to the direct public health effects. Irrespective of the politic of such discussions, the pandemic has wreaked havoc in most parts of the world affecting everyone in one way or another. At the time of writing, the WHO reports that more than 4.6 million people have died of this disease.

There is now a pressing need to move forward with research in the biomedical, social, and business sciences to help us cope with the current ongoing problems we face and to ready ourselves for a future pandemic even before this one is over.

Omrane, A. and Bag, S. (2021) ‘Which strategies are appropriate for the fight against the worldwide coronavirus crisis?’, Int. J. Indian Culture and Business Management, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp.416–430.

Special issue published: "Earnings Management: New Insights"

International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation 17(1/2) 2021

  • Are Tunisian firms managing their earnings through asset sales following the 2011 uprising?
  • The effectiveness of board of directors and family ownership: interaction and impact on the discretionary accruals
  • The trade-off between accrual-based and real earnings management: evidence from Jordan
  • Political connections, government ownership, and earnings management: evidence from Jordan
  • The impact of corporate governance and accruals flexibility on the interaction between earnings management strategies
  • The effects of R&D expenditure and earnings management on stock options: evidence from market competition
  • Earnings management, corporate social responsibility and governance structure: further evidence from Egypt

15 September 2021

Special issue published: "Transition of Global Society and Technology – Part II"

International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy 15(1/2/3) 2021

  • Unexpected applause for the human mind: the limitations of deterministic approaches in neuroscience - allowing us to become who we are
  • The situation of indigenous peoples in Brazil - a general exploration and assessment within the context of Belo Monte
  • Synoptics, Part IX: the six basic sentences for synoptic social analysis - theoretical and practical steps towards a psychosocial analysis of society
  • Forward-looking university curricula and enterprises for renewable energies
  • Bioethics in international relations
  • Transition Ashram - a part of the solution to social problems and climate change
  • Socio-economic and environmental effects of renewable energy policy in Russia
  • The coming demographic avalanche: on the threshold of the great resettlement of peoples
  • Future tendencies in the financial markets in Mongolia and worldwide

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation are now available here for free:
  • Compliance with IFRS for related party transactions across eight African countries: do corruption and government quality matter?
  • The impact of multiple directorships, board characteristics, and ownership on the performance of Palestinian listed companies
  • Do strategic cost policies lead to more sustainable practices? Evidence from county governments
  • Continuous internal auditing: can big data analytics help?
  • Effects of mandatory adoption of IFRS on market liquidity in Brazil

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology to invite expanded papers from International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Patterns Recognition (ISPR'2022) for potential publication

Extended versions of papers presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Patterns Recognition (ISPR'2022) (24-26 March 2022, Hammamet, Tunisia) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology.

Research pick: Busting the problem of cloud cover - "Short-term solar power forecasting using satellite images"

The downside to solar power is that it’s not always sunny and so grid operators have to compensate for energy drops by bringing alternative generation sources online. New research in the International Journal of Powertrains, looks at how short-term forecast of sunshine using satellite images could offer one tool to help power companies maintain a steady supply.

A. Shobana Devi of the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, in Chennai, India and colleagues explain how solar irradiance forecasting currently represents a major challenge to companies hoping to integrate solar energy resources into the existing structures of energy supply. Fundamentally, it is the vagaries of changing cloud cover that compromise the power output of solar panels. However, it might be possible to compensate for the problem if there were a way to predict cloud movements within a fifteen to ninety-minute window throughout the day.

The team has developed an approach using the long short-term memory (LSTM) technique and tested it against known satellite imagery and the power output of a 250-megawatt solar plant to show that the predictions can be sufficiently accurate to allow grid operators to balance power output from solar and other sources. Their tests demonstrate that this approach is more accurate than other methods when tested against cloud cover data accumulated over a seven-month period. Statistical regression models allow them to assess the efficacy of the various models tested.

“The results of experiments verify and affirm that over current techniques, our suggested algorithms can considerably enhance the precision of cloud monitoring and solar energy estimation,” the team writes. They add that “This predictive solar power data in the smart grid can be used efficiently for grid operation (load tracking) and energy management system.”

Devi, A.S., Maragatham, G., Boopathi, K. and Prabu, M.R. (2021) ‘Short-term solar power forecasting using satellite images’, Int. J. Powertrains, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp.125–142.

14 September 2021

Special issue published: "Value Co-Creation in the Course of International Entrepreneurial Opportunity Development"

European Journal of International Management 16(3) 2021

  • Garut value co-creator: fostering the growth of SMEs in Garut to attract more customers
  • Glocal corporate social responsibility and co-creation of shared values in the mining industry
  • The interplay between empathy, learning, and opportunity in the process of entrepreneurial value co-creation
  • CRM's effect on the customer knowledge creation process and innovation
  • The impact of knowledge creation and acquisition on innovation, coopetition and international opportunity development
  • The impact of networks on value co-creation for women-owned businesses
  • Media branding and value co-creation: effect of user participation in social media of newsmedia on attitudinal and behavioural loyalty
  • Testing critical levels in product and geographic diversification: a structural threshold approach

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

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Decision Sciences, Risk and Management are now available here for free:
  • Capital controls: a tool to protect an economy under pressure? The cases of Cyprus, a eurozone member, and Iceland
  • Job satisfaction determinants and assessment: the case of a Greek public agency under organisational change
  • Greek milk price decomposition
  • Social media adoption among small and medium-sized Greek hotels: a survey about its antecedents and its impact on performance outcomes
  • Incentive schemes for bank branch staff during deep recession: empirical evidence from Greece
  • Risk dimensions of a vertical Chinese expansion in the Greek tourism sector: the Chinese side

Special issue published: "Strategic Use of Social Media as a Marketing Tool"

International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising 15(4) 2021

  • Engagement and reactions of brand posts on brand fan pages in Facebook: an investigation of brand posts' characteristics
  • Examining consumer responses to YouTube ads through facial expressions and self-reports: the role of gender identity and emotional appeals
  • Optimal Instagram advertising design features. A study on brand image and millennials' purchase intention
  • The effects of cultural differences on social media behaviour
  • The effectiveness of e-word-of-mouth communication about smartphones purchase intention: digital influencer

Research pick: AI for employee retention - "Managing employee turnover: machine learning to the rescue"

Machine learning might be able to predict which employees within an organisation are readying themselves to leave the company for whatever reason. Research published in the International Journal of Data Science, explains how employee turnover costs organisations billions of dollars annually. Finding ways to improve employee retention might be guided effectively if there were a way to spot the trends in employee intentions ahead of their making any decision to move to a new position within another organisation, for example.

Owen Hall of the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, USA, points out that, as one might expect, engagement, job satisfaction, experience, and compensation are four of the most obvious factors that point to an employee’s decision to leave when any combination of those factors fails to align with that person’s aspirations and expectations with regard to their career and prospects.

Employee retention is a perennial issue for those working in human resource management. This has become even more acute during the COVID-19 where normal life and work practices have been changed beyond recognition in many areas of employment. Increased competition, more customer demands, and intensified recruiting and onboarding challenges, have never been of greater concern, it might be said.

Within HR, the understanding of employee turnover has generally been done in retrospect, perhaps long after specific employees have already moved on. A proactive stance is needed, which is where Hall suggests machine learning might be able to assist. “Machine learning can be used to both identify employees that are planning to leave and design specific implementation amelioration strategies,” writes Hall.

Machine learning can do this with much less bias than might be experienced with human assessment of the situation as it unfolds in terms of employee intentions. Of course, engaging senior leadership is then required to mitigate against the loss of experienced and useful employees to opportunities elsewhere. Hall explains that “The results of a machine learning analysis featuring extreme gradient boost trees and neural nets of a representative employee database yielded classification accuracy levels on the order of 90%.”

Hall, O.P. (2021) ‘Managing employee turnover: machine learning to the rescue’, Int. J. Data Science, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.57–82.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy are now available here for free:
  • The Thabarwa centres - a mindful foresight strategy
  • The Soviet nationalities policies and their contribution to conflicts: law, legacies and ideology
  • A centre of excellence for infrastructure project preparation and PPP to fight climate change
  • The European refugee crisis in Europe and multicultural integration
  • The divided Venezuela

10 September 2021

New Editor for International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services

Prof. Mitsuo Gen from the Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute in Japan has been appointed to take over editorship of the International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services.

Research pick: Baking greener bread after COVID - "Effects of COVID-19 on energy savings and emission reduction: a case study"

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must not squander the clean energy gains that were made through reduced human activity and economic downturn during the periods of lockdown and beyond. That is the message from recent research published in the International Journal of Global Warming.

Fatemeh Nadi of the Department of Agricultural Machinery Mechanics at the Islamic Azad University, in Azadshahr, Iran, and Mustafa Özilgen of the Department of Food Engineering at Yeditepe University, in Istanbul, Turkey, explain how during the ongoing pandemic, prices across the energy sector were pushed down by reduced demand.

As such, there may well have been a shortfall in investment into renewable energy projects in the short term during the current period and after the pandemic, they add. That said, at the time of writing this Research Highlight, there is already growing signs that point to price hikes across the energy sector as nations relieve restrictions and endeavour to unlock their economies once more.

The team has looked at one particular energy-intensive sector in Iran – bakeries. The Iranian baked goods industry is among the most energy-intensive in that sector across the globe with bread production amounting to an annual 15 million tonnes.

The team has developed three different scenarios that could lead to a 45% reduction in energy consumption across bakeries, a rate that amounts to well over 100 megajoules per tonne of produce per annum. Their approaches involving adopting wind power and biogas use in baking and in the growing of wheat and flour milling before that. They also suggest a potential greening of the sector amounting to a 70% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. They add that waste products and waste bread might be fed back into the production cycle for bioethanol for making requisite transportation greener too.

To conclude, the team writes how “Sustainability of the baking industry may be improved substantially through implementing three different scenarios: improving the flour production process from farm to factory, replacing fossil fuels with their renewable counterparts, and producing ethanol from the leftover bread.” They add that “Such an improvement may be a major attempt toward protecting the clean energy gains of the pre-pandemic era.”

Nadi, F. and Özilgen, M. (2021) ‘Effects of COVID-19 on energy savings and emission reduction: a case study’, Int. J. Global Warming, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp.38–57.

9 September 2021

International Conference on Advanced Vehicle Powertrains (ICAVP2021) a Success

The International Conference on Advanced Vehicle Powertrains (ICAVP), a biennial event since 2017, was initiated by the International Journal of Powertrains. ICAVP2021 took place over 3-4 September (hosted by Beihang University in Beijing, China), and the two-day conference was truly a success. More than 200 online and offline experts and scholars from China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries participated to discuss "dual carbon goals". Furthermore, the development status and future trends of cutting-edge technologies such as advanced motive power systems, electric propulsion systems and new energy vehicle technologies were also discussed.

The hybrid conference offered both in-person and global online attendance to address the pandemic situation. It was also broadcast globally via the internet for its prospective audience. 73 experts attended in person, over 143 attended online, and over 186,000 viewers viewed its free broadcasts.

The following broadcast links from ICAVP2021 will be available online for one year.

The Main Venue Link

3 September Room A

3 September Room B

4 September Room B

4 September Room A (including Closing)

ICAVP2021 had five invited keynotes, ten invited technical reports from ten automotive companies, and 29 technical presentations from 32 accepted full papers. One BPA and two Student BPAs were awarded. The conference programme is available here, and videos of the talks can be watched here.


Please refer to the above links for more detailed information.

Research pick: Hazardous goods in the smart city - "Traffic jam prediction using hazardous material transportation management simulation"

The transportation of hazardous materials through densely populated areas, such as cities, is a necessary part of modern life, but comes with risks of spills and leaks, explosions, environmental issues, and public health concerns. New research in the International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, has used a transportation management simulation to look at problems that might arise in moving hazardous materials within a city when traffic congestion is common.

Luiz Antonio Reis, Sergio Luiz Pereira, Eduardo Mario Dias, and Maria Lídia Rebello Pinho Dias Scoton of the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in Brazil explain how their simulation can be used to reduce risk and find optimal routes for the transport of hazardous materials. By suggesting ways that traffic might be better managed overall in a city, they also demonstrated how to improve city life. The advanced simulation system makes a huge contribution to reducing traffic jams and their consequences on fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, the team writes.

The team points out that Brazil’s National Transport Confederation says that road transport is responsible for 61% of cargo transportation, and practically all of the dangerous cargo transportation in the country’s urban areas. “Thus, the greater the control and standardisation of operating procedures for this type of transport, the better and safer it will be for society,” the team writes.

As city infrastructure and control mature and we can begin to talk about “smart” cities, there is a pressing need to address the issues of real-world logistics and transportation which can succumb to the whims of real-world traffic and drivers and the incidents and accidents that plague them. To make use of the output from their simulation there is thus a need for greater control and traffic awareness and management in the urban environment.

Obviously, registered vehicles with hazardous cargos will be tracked continuously, but private and even commercial traffic will not other than through the closed-circuit television network and monitoring present on many roads and perhaps drone or helicopter surveillance of traffic congestion as it arises. As such, there need to be stronger connections formed between different stakeholder departments who might then share timely information and using the team’s model be able to respond quickly to help avoid congestion issues and potential accidents involving, primarily, the hazardous cargos, but also the wider traffic base in a city.

Reis, L.A., Pereira, S.L., Dias, E.M. and Scoton, M.L.R.P.D. (2021) ‘Traffic jam prediction using hazardous material transportation management simulation’, Int. J. Simulation and Process Modelling, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp.256–269.

8 September 2021

International Journal of Economics and Business Research to invite expanded papers from 12th International Scientific Conference "Business and Management 2022"

Extended versions of papers presented at the 12th International Scientific Conference "Business and Management 2022" (12-13 May 2022, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania) will be invited for review and potential publication by the International Journal of Economics and Business Research.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Data Science

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Data Science are now available here for free:
  • Financial time series prediction: an approach using motif information and neural networks
  • What do angles of cornea curvature reveal? a new (Sinusoidal) probability density function with statistical properties assists
  • Loading, searching and retrieving data from local data nodes on HDFS
  • Statistical analysis of fatal crash in Michigan using more than two time series models
  • RNN-based deep-learning approach to forecasting hospital system demands: application to an emergency department

Research pick: Getting around the smart city - "Improved hybrid fuzzy logic system for evaluating sustainable transportation systems in smart cities"

Smart cities will not be truly smart until they have sustainable transport systems. New work published in the International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics has used fuzzy logic to look at the options.

Chenghua Wang of the School of Public Affairs at Chongqing University, in Chongqing, China, and colleagues Oscar Sanjuán Martínez and Rubén González Crespo of the School of Engineering and Technology at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja in Spain, suggest that current expansion of transportation is having an increasingly detrimental effect on environment at the local and global levels as well as reducing the quality of life for many people. They suggest that governments and those running our cities must invest in clean, safe, efficient, economic, and sustainable transport networks to address this growing problem. This is even more pressing given the demands of the citizens living and working in technologically rich cities, which we might refer to as smart cities.

The problem facing policy makers, planners, and stakeholders in transportation is how to define what is meant by sustainable transport and how to select the appropriate systems to fulfill the demands of such a system.

The current team has introduced what they refer to as an improved hybrid fuzzy logic system (IHFLS) for the generation of aggregate values for the sustainable evaluation of hybrid fuzzy logic to allow the decisions to be made more effectively. In the first step, they define the sustainability evaluation criteria for transport. In step two, experts provide language ratings against selected criteria for potential alternatives. Finally, the IHFLS generates aggregate results for the evaluation of sustainability and the choice of the best alternatives. The approach allows the social, economic, and environmental considerations, to be balanced equitably, viably, and in a way that stakeholders can bear. Optimally, all of these criteria will mesh together to enable a sustainable solution to be found for a given city.

Wang, C., Sanjuán Martínez, O. and González Crespo, R. (2021) ‘Improved hybrid fuzzy logic system for evaluating sustainable transportation systems in smart cities’, Int. J. Shipping and Transport Logistics, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp.554–568.

7 September 2021

Research pick: Detecting forged video evidence - "Methods for forgery detection in digital forensics"

Video evidence is commonly used to prove what happened during an event. However, with the emergence and rapid development of CGI (computer-generated images), deep fakes, and video manipulation, there is a pressing need for tools to detect forgeries that would otherwise undermine the value of video evidence.

A review in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics has taken a look at the state-of-the-art in video forgery detection with a particular focus on how those tools might be used to ensure evidence in a criminal investigation has not been compromised or is not a forgery. Punam Sunil Raskar and Sanjeevani Kiran Shah of Savitribai Phule Pune University, in Pune, Maharashtra, India, explain how they have categorised forgery detection tools into four distinct domains within digital forensics.

The first domain involves those tools that can help those investigating so-called “copy move attacks” (CMA). In a CMA, part of an image is cloned (selected, copied, and pasted) on to another area of the image, still or moving. It may be used to render invisible something that is incriminating or identifying in the image. A CMA might also be used to duplicate a part of an image in a suggestive manner for nefarious purposes. The second domain represents tools that can scrutinise a video and detecting tampering based on motion estimation techniques. The third area uses the principle of optical flow to identify problems with a moving object in a video suggestive of something having been faked. The fourth section looks at the specific issues that arise in extracting information from a compressed video.

It is the latter area of research on compressed video evidence that is yet to mature fully although the researchers suggest that their review points to numerous routes that might be taken in developing all of the areas of digital forensics for video evidence.

Raskar, P.S. and Shah, S.K. (2021) ‘Methods for forgery detection in digital forensics’, Int. J. Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp.528–547.

Special issue published: "Effective Management of Internet of Things Breaches"

International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions 11(5/6) 2021

  • Security and detection mechanism in IoT-based cloud computing using hybrid approach
  • An evolutionary-based technique to characterise an anomaly in internet of things networks
  • Robust and provable secure three-factor mutual authentication scheme using a smart card
  • An improved security approach for attack detection and mitigation over IoT networks using HACABO and Merkle signatures
  • Digital application of analogue-like time perception mechanism based on analogue on digital theory
  • An upgraded model of query expansion using inverse-term frequency with pertinent response for internet of things
  • An architecture for enabling IoT interoperability between cross-platforms
  • An effective cloud-based smart home appliances automation in IoT using PHMM model
  • Enhanced adaptive trust management system for socially related IoT

6 September 2021

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Forensic Engineering

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Forensic Engineering are now available here for free:
  • Investigating the level of involvement of lean manufacturing tools in Hail Industrial City
  • Geopolitics in the search for the disappeared Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370
  • Olive mill wastewater phenolic compounds adsorption onto active olive stones: equilibrium isotherms and kinetics study
  • Building crack evaluation program for the identification of its causes
  • Forensic study of premature failures with unbonded concrete overlay on interstate 70 in Ohio

Special Issue published: “Smart Innovation in Engineering and Management Part 2"

International Journal of Forensic Engineering 5(1) 2021

  • Enhancement of classification techniques using principal component analysis and class imbalance handling methods in credit card defaulter detection
  • Analysis of opportunities and challenges presented by big data in climate change research and its social impact
  • The ecosphere of online service delivery and its growing presence in automobile sector: an extended study of connected technology in Indian outlook
  • An analysis of consumer behaviour of green marketing
  • Review of geopolymer concrete: a structural integrity evaluation
  • Injury biomechanics in aircraft crash-landing reconstruction

3 September 2021

Research pick: Lockdown or downturn - "Exploring the heated debate over reopening for economy or continuing lockdown for public health safety concerns about COVID-19 in Twitter"

The social media network, Twitter, has been at the heart of many a public debate not least the national and international response to the COVID-19 pandemic. New research from the USA published in the International Journal of Business and Systems Research, has examined public opinion on “lockdowns” and “reopening for the economy” during the first summer of the pandemic as revealed by more than a million unique Twitter updates about COVID-19.

Sina Shokoohyar and Julianne Dang of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Hossein Rikhtehgar Berenji of Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, classified 1.3 million Twitter updates, whimsically known to users of the microblogging website and application as “tweets”. Their classification divided updates into three camps. The first, were in favour of removing lockdown restrictions to allow the US economy to “reopen”. The second category had those updates aligned with continuing lockdown restrictions for the sake of public health. The third category were neutral tweets offering facts rather than opinion.

Rather than using logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, neutral network or multinomial naïve Bayes, the team turned to a gradient boosting classifier algorithm, which they demonstrate had an accuracy of 88% and so outperformed those other classifiers in their research.

The fundamental conclusion from the analysis is that there were significantly more tweets in favour of reopening the economy rather than persisting with lockdown measures, such as ongoing educational and business closures and stay-at-home orders and that this opinion became increasingly prominent as time passed during the early stages of the pandemic lockdowns. The team suggests that the perceived and real socioeconomic impact of lockdowns on stock markets, gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment rates, and rates of household consumption were drivers for the offered opinions of many Twitter users.

Of course, lockdowns led to an increase in social media activity and so this in itself partly underpins the increase in tweets offering an opinion on lockdown, public health, and the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19.

“Perhaps one of the most surprising side effects of the outbreak is the increase in US residents’ engagement in expressing their opinion on social media,” the team writes. “People from all walks of life are suddenly reading statistical analyses and epidemiology charts and sharing them as if they were popular music videos or comedy memes,” the researchers add.

There are implications for policymakers of this study, the team suggests. Twitter and other social media can be used to extract public opinion quite widely and so reveal how public attitudes to any given policy or regulation might change in an emergency situation such as a global pandemic.

The team adds that “Analysing these tweets can shorten the time to observe the consequences of the pandemic, and can facilitate faster response by policymakers.” Whether or not policymakers should be chasing public opinion in a crisis of this sort is perhaps a different matter when there are direct implications for public health to be weighed against long-term implications for the economy and ultimately its effects on public wellbeing and public health.

Shokoohyar, S., Rikhtehgar Berenji, H. and Dang, J. (2021) ‘Exploring the heated debate over reopening for economy or continuing lockdown for public health safety concerns about COVID-19 in Twitter’, Int. J. Business and Systems Research, Vol. 15, No. 5, pp.650–672.

2 September 2021

Special issue published: "Social Entrepreneurship: Key Issues, Drivers, Challenges and Impact"

International Journal of Business and Globalisation 28(4) 2021

  • Barriers and drivers of social entrepreneurship: a qualitative insight from Indian social entrepreneurs
  • Entrepreneurial intention for social cause: role of moral obligation, contextual support and barriers
  • Motivations of social entrepreneurs: use of self-determination theory to gain insight into the Indian scenario
  • Social entrepreneurs' venture launch intention: exploring the role of cognitive determinants
  • Conscientiousness and social entrepreneurial vision: testing the moderating effect of family influence
  • Moderating role of entrepreneurial marketing in enhancing society through social entrepreneurship: an Indian perspective
  • Ecotourism in India: social trends and pathways on sustainable tourism and eco-travelling

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of International Journal of Electronic Banking

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Electronic Banking are now available here for free:
  • Virtual learning enriched by social capital and shared knowledge, when moderated by positive emotions
  • Development of conceptual framework for internet banking customer satisfaction index
  • Customer's operational risk towards electronic banking products and its mitigation: a covariance-based structural equation modelling approach
  • Capital adequacy norms: banks compliance with Basel-III norms
  • Corporate governance disclosure compliance: a comparison between conventional and Islamic banks

Special issue published: "Differential, Difference, and Dynamic Equations"

International Journal of Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations 11(3/4) 2021

  • Mean square characterisation of a stochastic Volterra integrodifferential equation with delay
  • A study on discrete Ponzi Scheme model through Sturm-Liouville theory
  • First-order nonlinear dynamic initial value problems
  • Analysis of the bilateral Laplace transform on time scales with applications
  • A discrete SIS model of fractional order
  • Modelling analysis of Zika virus with saturated incidence using optimal control theory
  • Pullback and forward attractors of contractive difference equations
  • Linear Hilfer nabla fractional difference equations
  • On the global behaviour of a system of piecewise linear difference equations
  • Effect of pollution on predator-prey systems
  • Application of generalised Riccati equations to analysis of asymptotic forms of solutions of perturbed half-linear ordinary differential equations
  • Oscillatory and stability of a mixed type difference equation with variable coefficients

Research pick: Virtual hospital tour - "Development of a hospital virtual tour with virtual reality-based panorama"

Panoramic photography can be coupled with virtual reality to allow patients and others to take a virtual tour of their hospital ahead of a procedure to allow them to familiarise themselves with their temporary surroundings and to reduce any anxiety they may have about entering an unfamiliar environment at a potentially stressful time in their lives. The reality-based VR panorama tour is discussed in detail in the International Journal of Innovation and Learning.

Adhistya Erna Permanasari, Dian Anggriawan Hidayat, Sunu Wibirama, and Intan Sulistyaningrum of the Sakkinah Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the Universitas Gadjah Mada, in Yogyakarta, and Dayang Rohaya Awang Rambli of the Computer and Information Science Department at Universiti Teknonologi PETRONAS in Perak, Indonesia, explain how information technology has an important role to play in socialising institutions such as hospitals as public services.

Educational establishments, museums and libraries, and companies have used VR successfully to share their offering with their respective stakeholders. A 360-degree panoramic experience opens up an unfamiliar realm as well as allowing the developers to showcase their buildings, displays, and products without the user needing to pay an initial real-world visit. A VR simulation can be augmented with textual and other cues generated by the software to guide the user on their tour in a way that is perhaps not possible with a real tour of an establishment. A user might also be able to retrace their steps, take another look at a particular aspect of the tour, and even visit areas that are usually off-limits to the public.

The current work uses a veterinary hospital as a test case for a panoramic VR tour with textual cues for users to learn about the site and be guided through the tour. The team validated the user experience and the value of the textual cues using the Wilcoxon test, showing experience to be above average and in the excellent range.

Permanasari, A.E., Hidayat, D.A., Wibirama, S., Sakkinah, I.S. and Rambli, D.R.A. (2021) ‘Development of a hospital virtual tour with virtual reality-based panorama’, Int. J. Innovation and Learning, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp.119–131.

1 September 2021

Special issue published: "Environmental and Social Issues in Modern Transportation Systems"

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics 13(5) 2021

  • Asset shortages and economic operating system based on two-stage least-squares regression
  • Design of reverse logistics system for B2C e-commerce based on management logic of internet of things
  • Research on the improvement of rural old-age security system in the new era sustainable smart city transportation
  • Impact of accessibility of land transportation networks on regional economic resilience: an empirical study of China
  • Workforce optimisation for improving customer experience in urban transportation using heuristic mathematical model
  • Improved hybrid fuzzy logic system for evaluating sustainable transportation systems in smart cities

Special issue published: "Waste Management and Environmental Sustainable Development"

International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management 24(5/6) 2021

  • Demonstration of urban environmental protection planning and ecological construction index system
  • Integration of industry and city and economic development based on environmental sustainable development
  • Innovation of enterprise environmental cost management path from the perspective of sustainable development
  • Evaluation method and promotion countermeasures of green competitiveness for industrial enterprises under the background of environmental protection
  • Application of GIS remote sensing information integration in eco-environmental quality monitoring
  • Reliability analysis of vacuum circuit breaker with permanent magnet material actuator based on competitive failure model
  • Evaluation of the construction of water rights transaction system in the Yellow River Basin
  • Energy and exergy analysis of a CI engine fuelled with blend of liquid hydrocarbon waste plastics fuels and diesel
  • Strategic relationship between water conservancy project construction and environmentally sustainable development
  • Simulation research of water flowing fracture zone of overburden strata in fully mechanised caving mining
  • Simulation experimental study on the influence of plow pan on water infiltration in dry land
  • The environmental protection path of world cultural heritage sites from the perspective of circular economy

Special issue published: "Computational Advances in Healthcare Solutions: Part II"

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology 65(4) 2021

  • The application of plug-and-play ADMM framework and BM3D denoiser for compressed sensing MR image reconstruction
  • Unification of firefly algorithm with density-based spatial clustering for segmentation of medical images
  • Alzheimer's disease diagnosis based on feature extraction using optimised crow search algorithm and deep learning
  • An intelligent COVID-19 classification model using optimal grey-level co-occurrence matrix features with extreme learning machine
  • MED-NET: a novel approach to ECG anomaly detection using LSTM auto-encoders
  • Multimodality medical image fusion based on non-sub-sampled contourlet transform
  • Application and evaluation of classification model to detect autistic spectrum disorders in children
  • Detection of supraventricular tachycardia using decision tree model
  • IoT implementation strategies amid COVID-19 pandemic

Research pick: Fishbone ash blowing free to treat landfill - "Utilisation of fish waste bones ash for struvite precipitation in actual landfill leachate"

The precipitation of the mineral struvite (magnesium ammonium phosphate) precipitation is proven chemistry for the pre-treatment of landfill leachate. New work in the International Journal of Environment and Waste Management suggests that sustainable sources of the requisite phosphorus are urgently needed and posits that ash from waste fishbones could be such a source.

M. Darwish, M.H. Puteh, and A. Aris of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in Johor and A. Abdul Kadir of the Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, also in Johor, are investigating the possibilities.

“One of the major environmental problems related to solid waste management is the landfill leachate,” the team writes. “Leachates generated from municipal landfills are high strength waste streams that contain high concentrations of many pollutants, such as ammonium nitrogen, organic matter, and heavy metals,” they add. The researchers point out that landfill leachate can be processed using anaerobic biological treatment but this is only efficient if the ammonia content of the leachate can be reduced as ammonia is toxic to the microbes needed for this type of treatment.

The team explains how phosphorus-rich fishbone ash can be mixed with magnesium oxide before adding to landfill leachate. The two components react with noxious and odorous nitrogen compounds in the leachate, which form the “ammonium” part of the struvite which then comes out of solution as a solid material that can then be processed further safely.

The researcher’s tests with this approach to struvite precipitation show that it works well when compared with conventional phosphorus and magnesium starting materials for this kind of cleanup of noxious leachate from landfill. They were able to demonstrate some 70 percent removal of ammonium nitrogen from sample leachate with their approach. “Compared to previous works, the application of Mg-P mixture to actual landfill leachate is competitive, taking into consideration the achieved side advantages,” the team concludes.

Darwish, M., Puteh, M.H., Aris, A. and Abdul Kadir, A. (2021) ‘Utilisation of fish waste bones ash for struvite precipitation in actual landfill leachate’, Int. J. Environment and Waste Management, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp.209–218.