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This article delves into the significance and utility of literature review articles in the field of management research, encompassing their three most prominent forms: structured literature reviews, bibliometric analyses, and meta-analyses. It discusses the evolving role of literature reviews as essential tools in a research process, their methodological intricacies, and their contribution to shaping the landscape of management studies. Through a thorough examination of their merits, limitations, and best practices, our article sheds light on how literature review articles serve as valuable resources for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of management. In addition, the article points towards opportunities for using AI tools, for example Google Colab, ChatGPT, Methods Wizards, or Petal for single or multiple stages and tasks of structured literature analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing relevance of business corporations to the lives of older persons, gerontology has given very little, if any, attention to this field. Further, it seems that both the conceptual and the empirical study of what we firstly term "corporate gerontology"—the rich and diverse ways that corporations interact with, influence, and are influenced by older persons and the aging of society—are quite rare. This systematic literature review was designed and executed to explore and present the current state of academic research in the multidisciplinary realm of aging and the business corporation. Of the 46 papers surveyed, the majority belong to the category in which aging is an independent variable that influences the performance of business corporations. Only 27% belong to the second category, which explores how the conduct of corporations can influence various aspects of aging. In light of the retreat of the welfare state and the rising neoliberal system, the lack of adequate governmental responses to aging has paved the way for profit-guided business corporations to enter the field. Their conduct should not be overlooked, and in establishing a new theoretical framework of corporate gerontology, we hope it will draw future research and public attention and raise awareness of this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantity of data collected has expanded tremendously as the world becomes more dependent on technology and digitization, offering organizations and sectors chances for innovation and development. Concerns regarding the effects of such fast expansion on the environment have been expressed as a result of this increase, however. Prioritizing environmental sustainability is now more crucial than ever in this situation. This research develops a theoretical model to assess the relative advantages Big Data have on R&D via "substitution effects" and "complementary effects," and further leads to directed technological change and its influence on environmental quality. We examine various effects on environmental quality while taking into account and without taking into account the extensive data application to understand the function of Big Data better. Big Data and environmental sustainability may be used to provide major commercial advantages, such as cost savings, higher productivity, and enhanced reputation. Big Data in environmental monitoring may be used to better detect and solve sustainability challenges including resource depletion, waste management, and air and water pollution. Big Data analytics may facilitate better forecasting and decision-making, enabling businesses and industries to develop more sustainable practices and strategies. Big Data management needs a dedication to sustainability principles and practices, as well as a thorough awareness of the environmental impact of the company or sector. In the era of Big Data, cooperation between enterprises, industries, governments, and other stakeholders is crucial for advancing environmental sustainability. The paper also addresses some of the difficulties in using Big Data for environmental sustainability, including issues with data privacy, quality, and security. In conclusion, the fusion of Big Data with environmental sustainability presents both enormous potential and formidable difficulties for enterprises and sectors. Addressing these issues and fostering stakeholder engagement are crucial if Big Data is to achieve its full promise for environmental sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003 and 2004, Aotearoa New Zealand enacted two key laws that regulate two very different ways in which the female body may be commodified. The Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA) decriminalized prostitution, removing legal barriers to the buying and selling of commercial sexual services. The Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2004 (HART Act), on the other hand, put a prohibition on commercial surrogacy agreements. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the ethical arguments underlying New Zealand's legislative solutions to prostitution and commercial surrogacy. While the regulation of prostitution is approached with a Marxist feminist lens with the aim to ensure the health and safety of sex workers, commercial surrogacy is prohibited outright for concerns of negative impacts on present and future persons. I ground the principles of each Act in their ethical foundations and compare these two against one another. I conclude that New Zealand's legislative approach to regulating the commodification of the female body is ethically inconsistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effect of strengthening management literacy on digital business innovation and accelerating performance recovery and examined the impact of digital business innovation on accelerating performance recovery. This study is explanative/associative research accompanied by hypothesis testing. The unit of analysis in this study was creative industry entrepreneurs, with a total population of 354. Sampling in this study used purposive sampling with specific criteria and obtained 194 as a sample size, after which they were referred to as respondents. Path analysis results show that strengthening management literacy directly and significantly influences digital business innovation and accelerates performance recovery; digital business innovation directly and substantially influences the acceleration of performance recovery in the creative industry sector. The findings of this study indicate that strengthening management literacy, which is carried out in a structured and massive manner, will encourage innovative behavior in implementing digital business. Digital business innovation will spur business activities to become more effective, because they are not limited by space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change and associated processes can increase the occurrence of some natural hazards and threaten business operations. Therefore, it is widely recommended businesses respond to climate change and implement climate change adaptation. Worldwide, businesses make efforts towards climate change adaptation, but investigation on such efforts is still required. To partially fill this research gap, the paper explores businesses adaptation efforts in the Hunter Valley, Australia. The paper collects primary data from open-ended interviews to 10 representatives of local businesses and supporting organizations. The paper reveals that businesses interpret climate change in different ways. While some businesses are sceptical about climate change, others are aware of it and its impacts on everyday operations. Businesses therefore implement adaptation by integrating climate change into everyday operations and continuity planning. The paper also shows diverse interactions occurring between businesses and other local stakeholders such as governments and communities. Usually, higher government levels offer vague and limited support to businesses and inhibit their adaptive efforts. Meanwhile, interactions between businesses and City Councils can be both collaborative and fragmented. Some businesses also interact with local communities by disclosing information about their operations and response to climate change. The paper discusses these findings and provides conclusions under the form of recommendations for policy and research on Australian businesses and climate change adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a goal that manufacturing companies strive towards on a regular basis, and it involves enhancing the efficiency and productivity of maintenance operations. It is especially vital to avoid unforeseen breakdowns, which may result in costly charges and production losses if they do not occur in advance. While the execution of an acceptable management plan affects maintenance productivity, it also affects the adoption of proper procedures and tools to help in the assessment processes in this field. This difficulty, among other things, affects a company's capacity to achieve high performance with the equipment it employs, as well as the judgement process and the design of the firm's maintenance plan. In order to achieve this goal, the aim of this paper is to exemplify how intelligent systems can be used to enhance judgement techniques in the implementation of the lean maintenance perspective, allowing for an advancement in the functional capabilities of the industry's technological infrastructure. The reseachers employed artificial intelligence technologies to look for connections between specific operations carried out as part of the deployment of lean maintenance and the findings achieved. The raw set notion, which was used in this situation, was used to determine whether or not the lean maintenance method was being used in this study. The crisis management process carries with it some of the most complex data technology concerns ever encountered. It necessitates, among other items, active information gathering and information transfer efforts, that are used for a range of functions, such as decreasing uncertainty, attempting to measure and manage consequences, and attempting to manage resources in a way that goes beyond what is generally possible to deal with daily problems. It also needs the employment of artificial intelligence technology, among other things, to increase crisis awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has formed partnerships with select private sector entities, including large traditional hospital and health system networks, nursing homes, and payer groups. However, innovations from technology-enabled services companies and digital technology companies are uniquely poised to aid CMS in addressing key barriers toward advancing its mission of improving healthcare access and equity. There are four pivotal opportunity areas where partnerships with technology businesses and tools would enhance the work of CMS: (1) improving consumer awareness about CMS programs, (2) mitigating access gaps through virtual care programs, (3) streamlining the complexity of different payer plan models, and (4) using technology-enabled services to address social risk factors without imposing additional burdens on providers. We offer examples of digital and technology-enabled solutions that improve patient access to care and close equity gaps, as well as propose specific recommendations for CMS to advance and expand the reach and impact of these solutions. Namely, these recommendations include partnerships with private sector companies that can educate and support consumers about their benefits, the extension of telehealth reimbursement parity for virtual care solutions, allowing for cross-state licensure across plans and reimbursement for care coordination services that alleviate provider burden to screen and address patients' social determinants of health needs. We argue that CMS has an imperative role in leveraging the innovations of technology-enabled services and digital health technologies to lower healthcare access barriers, mitigate provider burden, stimulate innovation, and close equity gaps at the patient, provider, and innovator levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People are using platforms of social media like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram as a regular way to reach very much targeted and new prospective customers. The role of online media is to facilitate the opportunity in making a connection with followers and fans every time they log in. Online media keep social posts informative and sometimes entertaining which the followers' glade to see the contents in their feeds. Online media facilitate with low commitment and easy way to prospective consumers for expressing attentiveness in the business you do for your services or product. Online media can offer a number of marketing opportunities for businesses of all dimensions. These opportunities include promotion of the brand, communication to the consumer about service or product, attracting customers, and building strong connections with available consumers. Apart from this, several other benefits can be gained from the business of online media such as the ability to target, broad reach, fast, personal, low cost or free, and easy to use. An overview of the existing approaches, tools, and techniques to present is the dire need of the modern business in order to develop novel ways and to present the business of services or products in an effective and efficient way. Therefore, this study has presented a comprehensive review of the existing literature associated with the techniques, tools, and approaches used for business with the help of online media and to decision making. Based on this study, new mechanisms will be provided for effective business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DNA databases have significant commercial value. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies have built databanks using samples and information voluntarily provided by customers. As the price of genetic analysis falls, there is growing interest in building such databases by paying individuals for their DNA and personal data. This paper maps the ethical issues associated with private companies paying for DNA. We outline the benefits of building better genomic databases and describe possible concerns about crowding out, undue inducement, exploitation, and commodification. While certain objections deserve more empirical and philosophical investigation, we argue that none currently provide decisive reasons against using financial incentives to secure DNA samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today humanity is in the midst of the massive expansion of new and fundamental technology, represented by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The ongoing revolution of these technologies and their profound impact across various sectors, has triggered discussions about the characteristics and values that should guide their use and development in a responsible manner. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review with the aim of pointing out existing challenges and required principles in AI-based systems in different industries. We discuss our findings and provide general recommendations to be considered during AI deployment in production. The results have shown many gaps and concerns towards responsible AI and integration of complex AI models in the industry that the research community could address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of technology and digital transformation almost everything is online. Social media business has become a trend in the modern-day industry. Business owners do not have faith in business digitization as they think it is expensive and time-consuming which cannot be substituted by approaches of conventional marketing. With the passage of time, internet marketing, digital transformation, social medial, and so on are becoming popular. Digital transformation has become meaningful but people do not know the importance of social media. The use of social media in the digital era and modern-day industry has become a concrete way of motivating the exchange of information within the social sphere. Social media has different aspects like people for expressing themselves, having fun, communicating, and many others. Social media are becoming popular with individuals and people are sometimes using them to benefit their own businesses. Social media is becoming a wide-range marketing platform for identifying consumers with improved aspects of business leading the band promotion benefits with the audience. Decisions at an early stage about the role of online media in business become one of the burning issues of modern industry which can benefit the business of the organization. The proposed study has presented the research in two-phase, the first one is to show the existing literature with different analyses, and in the second phase, the role of online media in business is evaluated through the Analytic Network Process. The results of the process showed better performance and applicability of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of business-related conspiracy theories (BrCTs). Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics and undertaking a narratological and ethical analysis of 28 BrCTs found online, I emphasize that BrCTs are narratives with structures rooted in other latent macro- and meta-narratives, including centuries-old myths. In particular, I reconstruct the fictional world (diegesis) of BrCTs – one in which CSR and social contracts have failed – before identifying eight different types of actors as which people can morally situate themselves in their relationships with business. Finally, I elaborate on the actors' performances and their use of external and legitimate forces to end the story. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential future research to help combat BrCTs, as well as a call for the critical study of political CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms commercializing perovskite–silicon ‘tandem’ photovoltaics say that the panels will be more efficient and could lead to cheaper electricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A growing body of research has found a link between firearm availability and police shootings of citizens across place. The problem, however, is that the previous studies on the topic tend to suffer from several limitations: a near exclusive focus on citizen fatalities, units of analysis at the state or county levels, and a variety of proxy measures tapping into community-level firearm access. The current study set out to address these issues by examining the relationship between different forms of firearm availability and both fatal and nonfatal injurious police shootings of citizens at the city level. Methods: More specifically, it merged The Trace's "Missing Pieces" measures of guns reported lost and stolen to police as well as licensed firearms dealers across jurisdictions from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives as proxies for firearm availability with data on police shootings of citizens in California and Florida from California's URSUS system and the Tampa Bay Times' "Why Cops Shoot" database, respectively. Negative binomial regression analyses were performed on a sample of 253 cities across the two states and a sub-sample of cities with licensed firearms dealers. Results: Findings uncovered a small positive association between rates of federally licensed guns stores and the number citizens shot by police as well as police shooting incidents while controlling for several community-level measures (e.g., concentrated disadvantage, gun homicide rates). Rates of guns lost or reported stolen were generally not significantly associated with the outcome measures in the multivariate models. Conclusions: Firearm availability is a significant correlate of police shootings. Pooled counts of both citizens shot by police and police shooting incidents are heightened in jurisdictions with higher rates of licensed gun dealers, which may be due to the fact that all firearms sold in the USA first make their way to the public through these mechanisms. Such licensed gun dealers must be appropriately monitored and audited to reduce illicit behavior and prevent firearms from making their way into secondary markets. Addressing access to firearms can be meaningful for a host of gun-related morbidity and mortality outcomes, including police shootings of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A move from one sector to another isn’t a one-way street. Researchers who have pivoted between the two explain why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often maintained that, since the buying and selling of organs—particularly the kidneys—of living people supposedly constitutes exploitation of the living vendors while the so-called "altruistic" donation of them does not, the former, unlike the latter, should be a crime. This paper challenges and rejects this view. A novel account of exploitation, influenced by but different from those of Zwolinski and Wertheimer and of Wilkinson, is developed. Exploitation is seen as a sort of injustice. A distinction is made between justice and fairness. To exploit someone is to take advantage of him or her unjustly. Exploitation pertains to the nature of actions, interactions, and transaction rather than to their outcomes or to how they are perceived by exploitees. Desperation on the part of one or other of the parties to a transaction does not preclude the giving of valid consent to the transaction. Disparities of power or wealth between the parties to a transaction do not indicate or entail that the transaction will be exploitative. A disparity in the benefits that arise from a transaction between the parties does not indicate or entail that exploitation has taken place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 2020 turmoil surrounding the U.S. Postal Service—a crisis not seen since roughly 209,000 employees struck its predecessor the U.S. Post Office Department in March 1970, which led to passage of the Postal Reorganization Act that summer and the inauguration of the USPS in July 1971. The 2020 conflict was not merely rooted in the economic disaster following the COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact stretches back to the 2009 postal financial crisis. I argue that these crises are an unintended consequence of the compromise formation of the USPS as a hybrid government agency/business. Debates over whether public or private postal service too often leave out conflict over the rights of postal labor. The origins of that debate lie in the former USPOD's management of labor using "business methods" that included authoritarian discipline, contingent workers to cut costs, and creating racial divisions among employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are the two disruptive technologies emerging from the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) that have introduced radical shifts in the industry. The amalgamation of AI and blockchain holds tremendous potential to create new business models enabled through digitalization. Although research on the application and convergence of AI and blockchain exists, our understanding of the utility of its integration for business remains fragmented. To address this gap, this study aims to characterize the applications and benefits of integrated AI and blockchain platforms across different verticals of business. Using bibliometric analysis, this study reveals the most influential articles on the subject based on their publications, citations, and importance in the intellectual network. Using content analysis, this study sheds light on the subject's intellectual structure, which is underpinned by four major thematic clusters focusing on supply chains, healthcare, secure transactions, and finance and accounting. The study concludes with 10 application areas in business that can benefit from these technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movement to industry is raising concerns about the future researcher workforce and maintaining ethical expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanity needs to eat less meat. Here are seven alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies making cultured meat are attracting billions of dollars of investment. Here are their biggest challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial researchers can find solutions for Indian problems, but the lack of a spin-off culture means the country loses out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate the relationship between compliance check violations, and characteristics of the tobacco retailer and neighborhood social vulnerability in Oklahoma. Design: This cross-sectional study utilized the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Compliance Check Inspections of Tobacco Product Retailers database for 2015–2019. These data were combined with Neighborhood social vulnerability variables using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Social Vulnerability Index. Setting: The setting of this study is the state of Oklahoma, USA. Outcome measures: The outcome variable for this analysis was whether a sale was made to the youth during the compliance check (e.g., violation; yes/no) regardless of the outcome of the violation, and number of violations per a retailer. Results: We observed a strong association between having a violation and retailer store type, after controlling for socioeconomic vulnerability and percentage of mobile homes. The proportion of a tobacco retailer's violations also varied by store type. Conclusions: More targeted enforcements and retailer education by store type may be necessary to increase compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in information and knowledge management (IKM) has attracted the attention of library and information Science (LIS) scholars in the recent past. The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of ICTs means that the ICT literature is published in several fields of knowledge. Although Bradford's law of dispersion is commonly used to determine the core journals in a given field or discipline or topic of study, this study attempts to use the principles of the law to determine the core concepts of ICTs within the information and knowledge management literature. Data was obtained from EBSCO Discovery's Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) and the Library and Information Science Source (LISS) databases using a variety of keywords as search terms. The procedures of conducting a Bradford analysis were followed to determine the core subject terms in ICTs as reflected in the IKM group of articles published between 1998 and 2017. The results indicate that the application of ICTs in IKM largely occurs in the fields medicine, business and commerce, education and training (higher education and training), decision sciences, and industrial management. It was also noted that the core subjects varied from one study period to another; technology-associated subject terms were largely visible; and the dispersion of subject terms fits the Bradford's dispersion. We however noted that the dispersion of articles according to Bradford's zones is not accurately representative of the principles of the Law. The study has implications for collection development, searching and retrieval practices, and the application of Bradford's law beyond the analysis of core journals or publications in not only IKM but also in the field of library and information science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on how the ideology of political parties in power correlates with climate policy outcomes is abundant, but there is no similar literature for the individual characteristics of government leaders. This assessment is the first study of its kind, building on a dataset of government leaders of OECD countries for the period 1992–2017. We find that national presidents or prime ministers with a professional background in business are strongly correlated with bad climate mitigation outcomes. In particular, higher emissions and lower renewable energy deployment are more likely to occur during the tenure of former business people. Our results suggest that voters and pressure groups should pay attention to candidates’ professional backgrounds, in addition to their party’s ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to large companies, the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in China are more likely to fail in developing green supply chain management (GSCM). Capturing its failure factors could be useful for managers and policymakers to decide how green supply chains can be successfully designed and developed. Meanwhile, these factors can include complex interrelationships. Properly dealing with them can help identify the critical factors which can assist decision-makers to efficiently manage green supply chains. This study thus proposes a comprehensive framework to explore and understand failure factors of GSCM in China's SMEs to improve the opportunities of GSCM in China. The fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) are combined and applied to identify critical failure factors through translating interrelationships in a hierarchical cause–effect model. The results indicate that collaboration and support are the most critical perspectives for GSCM, and these two perspectives also interrelated with each other and affect the perspectives of knowledge, technology and economy to varying degrees. Moreover, the critical failure factors include lack of top management support, poor guidance from authorities, difficulty in supplier selection and inadequate supplier commitment. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to check the robustness. Conceptual and managerial implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 led to a massive shutdown of businesses in the second quarter of 2020. Estimates from the Current Population Survey, for example, indicate that the number of active business owners dropped by 22% from February to April 2020. We provide the first analysis of losses in sales among the universe of businesses in California using administrative data from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. Losses in taxable sales average 17% in the second quarter of 2020 relative to the second quarter of 2019 even though year-over-year sales typically grow by 3-4%. We find that sales losses were largest in businesses affected by mandatory lockdowns such as accommodations, which lost 91%, whereas online sales grew by 180%. Placing business types into different categories based on whether they were considered essential or nonessential (and thus subject to early lockdowns) and whether they have a moderate or high level of person-to-person contact, we find interesting correlations between sales losses and COVID-19 cases per capita across counties in California. The results suggest that local implementation and enforcement of lockdown restrictions as safety measures for public health and voluntary behavioral responses as reactions to the perceived local COVID-19 spread both played a role. Plain English Summary: Business sales dropped by 17% on average due to the pandemic during the second quarter of 2020 in California. Accommodations lost 91% of sales, whereas online sales grew by 180%. Sales fell more steeply in counties with more COVID-19 cases. We examine how much businesses lost in sales using administrative sales tax data. The average losses of 17% in the second quarter of 2020 relative to the second quarter of 2019 occurred even though year-over-year sales typically grow by 3-4%. We find that sales losses were largest in businesses affected by mandatory lockdowns such as accommodations, drinking places, and arts, entertainment, and recreation. Distinguishing between essential and nonessential businesses, which were subject to early lockdowns, and by the level of person-to-person contact, we find that local implementation and enforcement of lockdown restrictions for public health safety and voluntary responses to the perceived local COVID-19 spread both played a role. The results suggest that small businesses may need more support from governments and consumers to mitigate the strong shift to online vendors, and that the pandemic must be brought under control as a prerequisite to a full recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some people change dramatically over time, and often those changes result partly from what they have chosen to do for a living. Drawing on the work of Richard Sennett and Sandeep Jauhar, I explore how practicing in a market-driven medical system can corrupt the character of doctors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation's Business was a monthly business magazine published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with a subscription list larger than Business Week, Forbes, or Fortune. This study explores how the magazine responded and adapted to the rise of environmentalism, and environmental regulation of business, by exploring its treatment of four topics: DDT, environmentalists, government regulation, and renewable energy. It is built on a full-text review of all issues of Nation's Business published between 1945 and 1981. It reveals the development of a variety of anti-environmental logics and discourses, including the delegitimization of environmentalism as emotional and irrational, the undermining of scientific conclusions as uncertain, the monetization of decision-making using cost-benefit analysis, and the problematization of government overregulation. The study thus traces the origins of the anti-environmental policies of the Reagan Administration to the business community of the preceding decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A systematic assessment of the effect of COVID-19 on the food retail environment—an important determinant of health—has not been conducted. Our objective was to assess the impact of COVID-19 on closures of restaurants, food retail stores, and fresh produce vendors in New York City (NYC). We conducted a cross-sectional study following the peak of COVID-19 in six neighborhoods in NYC. Two Chinese ethnic neighborhoods and four higher/lower resourced comparison neighborhoods were selected a priori based on 14 sociodemographic indicators. The primary outcome was indefinite/temporary closures or absence of food businesses. Of 2720 food businesses identified, produce vendors and restaurants were more likely to close than food retail stores. A higher proportion of food businesses closed in Chinese ethnic neighborhoods vs. comparison neighborhoods. COVID-19 impacted food businesses in six NYC neighborhoods examined in this period, with the greatest effect observed for Chinese ethnic neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights due diligence is today a key aspect of the international, regional and national debates about corporate accountability for human rights abuse. It is a process by which businesses are expected to assess actual and potential human rights impacts, integrate and act upon the findings, track the responses, and communicate how those impacts are addressed. Yet there is little research as to how effective human rights due diligence is and whether its aim to prevent business activities which have adverse impacts on human rights, has been achieved in state and business practices. HRDD is now at the crossroads as it begins to become part of legislation, which will firmly test its potential to contribute substantively to the prevention of corporate human rights abuses. Drawing on developments in law and empirical research, this article examines the effectiveness of human rights due diligence as a means to prevent business activities which have adverse impacts on human rights, in relation to the actions of states, business and rightsholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Quality early childhood education (ECE) sets the foundation for children's healthy development. Families make choices regarding the ECE options available to them, and families who desire smaller, more personal, flexible, and less expensive options, often select family child care (FCC) providers over center-based care. In addition, trending research in the United States indicates that there is a decline of FCC providers leading to a gap in the available resources for families. Objective: This study explored the experiences of family child care providers regarding the challenges and benefits of their profession. Methods: Two focus groups (N = 27) comprised of licensed and unlicensed FCC providers were conducted to understand their perspectives on the perceived challenges and benefits of their work. Results: Using Bromer and Korfmacher's conceptual model of high-quality support, we conducted a thematic analysis and found providers identified several challenges including: feeling uncomfortable in their home, payment and scheduling issues, frustration with parents, limited resources, and role conflicts. Providers also described strategies for managing their family childcare program including utilizing critical early childhood education learning strategies with children, separating personal and work spaces, using contracts, and the importance of networking with other professionals. Providers also shared benefits of FCC for the children in their care, themselves, and their own families. Conclusions: The findings align with Bromer and Korfmacher's (2017) conceptual model and suggest a need for networking opportunities to provide information and support amongst FCC providers, improved resource sharing, more accessible funding opportunities, and the need for business training tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While pharmaceutical industry involvement in producing, interpreting, and regulating medical knowledge and practice is widely accepted and believed to promote medical innovation, industry-favouring biases may result in prioritizing corporate profit above public health. Using diabetes as our example, we review successive changes over forty years in screening, diagnosis, and treatment guidelines for type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, which have dramatically expanded the population prescribed diabetes drugs, generating a billion-dollar market. We argue that these guideline recommendations have emerged under pervasive industry influence and persisted, despite weak evidence for their health benefits and indications of serious adverse effects associated with many of the drugs they recommend. We consider pharmaceutical industry conflicts of interest in some of the research and publications supporting these revisions, and in related standard-setting committees and oversight panels. We raise concern over the long-term impact of these multifaceted involvements. Rather than accept industry conflicts of interest as normal, needing only to be monitored and managed, we suggest challenging that normalcy, and ask: what are the real costs of tolerating such industry participation? We urge the development of a broader focus to fully understand and curtail the systemic nature of industry's influence over medical knowledge and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automation of document processing has recently gained attention owing to its great potential to reduce manual work. Any improvement in information extraction systems or reduction in their error rates aids companies working with business documents because lowering reliance on cost-heavy and error-prone human work significantly improves the revenue. Neural networks have been applied to this area before, but they have been trained only on relatively small datasets with hundreds of documents so far. To successfully explore deep learning techniques and improve information extraction, we compiled a dataset with more than 25,000 documents. We expand on our previous work in which we proved that convolutions, graph convolutions, and self-attention can work together and exploit all the information within a structured document. Taking the fully trainable method one step further, we now design and examine various approaches to using Siamese networks, concepts of similarity, one-shot learning, and context/memory awareness. The aim is to improve micro F 1 of per-word classification in the huge real-world document dataset. The results verify that trainable access to a similar (yet still different) page, together with its already known target information, improves the information extraction. The experiments confirm that all proposed architecture parts (Siamese networks, employing class information, query-answer attention module and skip connections to a similar page) are all required to beat the previous results. The best model yields an 8.25% gain in the F 1 score over the previous state-of-the-art results. Qualitative analysis verifies that the new model performs better for all target classes. Additionally, multiple structural observations about the causes of the underperformance of some architectures are revealed, since all the techniques used in this work are not problem-specific and can be generalized for other tasks and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pharmaceuticals are priced uniformly by convention, but vary in their degree of effectiveness for different disease indications. As more high-cost therapies have launched, the demand for alternative payment models (APMs) has been increasing in many advanced markets, despite their well-documented limitations and challenges to implementation. Among policy justifications for such contracts is the maximization of value given scarce resources. We show that while uniform pricing rules can handle variable effectiveness in efficient markets, market inefficiencies of other kinds create a role for different value-based pricing structures. We first present a stylized theoretical model of efficient interaction among drug manufacturers, payers, and beneficiaries. In this stylized setting, uniform pricing works well, even when treatment effects are variable. We then use this framework to define market failures that result in obstacles to uniform pricing. The market failures we identify include: (1) uncertainty of patient distribution, (2) asymmetric beliefs, (3) agency imperfection by payer, (4) agency imperfection by provider, and (5) patient behavior and treatment adherence. We then apply our insights to real-world examples of alternative payment models, and highlight challenges related to contract implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2006, New York City (NYC) has attempted to reduce sugary drink consumption through several population-based initiatives, media campaigns and policy proposals. We estimated trends in the relative market share of sugary drinks and other beverage categories in NYC, using over 5 years of weekly, point-of-sale data from a retailer sample. We used an interrupted time series approach to assess whether changes in NYC beverage purchasing patterns occurred following the announcement of a proposed portion cap rule for consumer purchases of sugary drinks. Overall, market share of sugary drinks declined in NYC between 2010 and 2015. While the proportion of beverage volume sold that was sugary drinks was stable prior to the May 2012 portion cap rule announcement, decreases of 1.25% per year were observed in the period following the announcement compared to the period before (95% confidence interval (CI) − 1.60, − 0.90). Water/seltzer market share was increasing prior to the announcement and increased by an additional 1.03% per year in the post-announcement period (95% CI 0.48, 1.57). City-led efforts to increase public awareness about sugary drink-associated health risks in NYC may have led to reductions in consumer purchases of these beverages. Though never implemented, the portion cap proposal and accompanying media coverage may have contributed to decreases in sugary drink sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Gun violence can negatively affect business activity at the place-level through a variety of mechanisms. However, estimating this effect is difficult since reported crime data are biased by factors that are also associated with business health. Despite some of its limitations, data from gunshot detection technology has been shown as a new valuable source of data on gun violence (Irvin-Erickson et al. in Appl Geogr 86: 262–273, 2017a). In this study, we use gunshot detection data to explore the spatial relationship between gunshots and business activity at the neighborhood level in Washington, DC between 2010 and 2012. Methods: In this exploratory study, we create spatial buffers of 500 and 1000 feet around each block and sum up the total number of gunshots and business births, deaths, sales, and number of employees within these buffers each year and estimate a spatial fixed effects panel model. Results: Gunshots within 1000 feet of a block increase the number of business deaths by 4.3% within that buffer on average, and gunshots within 500 feet of a block decrease the total number of service and retail businesses, the number of employees employed by businesses within that buffer, and total sales for those businesses (although not at a statistically significant rate). Gunshots on blocks with the lowest initial levels of gunshots increase business turnover and reduce the total number of businesses present by 0.5%, and gunshots on blocks with the highest initial levels of gunshots cause an increase in the number of business deaths by 7.5%. Conclusion: Results suggest that efforts to improve distressed neighborhoods should target both areas with lower and higher pre-existing levels of gunshots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nervous about advising junior lab colleagues who want to switch sectors? Don't be, say scientists who have made the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jes Lefcourt aims to guard African wildlife by creating a real-time tracking software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unlikely discovery of a life-changing leukaemia drug uncovers harsh realities of profit and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]