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This paper examines the relation between debt structure and investment, by exploiting differences in secured and unsecured debt holdings. In order to address endogeneity concerns, I exploit two sources of exogenous variation for identification. From the firms' side, the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 represents a negative shock to firms' creditworthiness. From the credit market's perspective, the asset-backed commercial paper market collapse of 2007 caused a temporary shortage of unsecured commercial paper. Each of these shocks to debt structure is analyzed combining a difference-in-differences approach with an instrumental variable estimation (Waldinger (2010)), which allows studying i) substitution patterns among debt types and ii) the impact on investment. Results show that greater access to unsecured debt leads to larger investment. When firms face more restricted access to the unsecured debt market, they substitute toward secured debt, and reduce investment. The reason behind this result is that unsecured debt is more cost-effective in terms of spreads and covenants. These findings suggest that collateral is not key to finance investment, as instead has often been claimed in the literature. Creditworthiness rather than collateral is key to access unsecured debt. Additionally, I shed light on how access to the unsecured debt market relates to the balance sheet and credit channels of monetary policy.

Input is considered one of the most important factors in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical skills. Input has been found to interact with other factors, such as learner cognitive skills and the circumstances where language is heard. Language learning itself has sometimes been found to enhance cognitive skills. Indeed, intensive contact with another language has been found to sometimes boost cognitive skills, even in intensive instructed settings, such as immersion programs (bilingual advantage hypothesis). In this paper, we report a cross-sectional study to assess grammar learning of 79 fourth grade German students learning L2 English in two immersion schools. Verbal teacher input was assessed using the Teacher Input Observation Scheme (TIOS, Items 14–25), and the learners’ L2 grammar comprehension was tested with the ELIAS Grammar Test II. Cognitive skills, including phonological awareness, working memory, and non-verbal intelligence, were determined using standardized assessment procedures. The results show that verbal input quantity and quality correlated significantly with the learners’ L2 grammar comprehension. None of the cognitive skills moderated the effect of input on grammar comprehension but all predicted it independently. The combination of L2 input and phonological awareness was found to be the most robust predictor of L2 grammar comprehension.

With the imminent digitalisation of the manufacturing processes of gas turbine components, a large volume of geometric data of as-manufactured parts is being generated. This geometric data can be used in aerodynamic simulations to predict component performance. Both the cost and accuracy of these simulations increase with their fidelity. To efficiently exploit Digital Twin technology, one must therefore understand how realistic the aerodynamic simulations need to be to give useful performance predictions. This paper considers this issue for a sample of scrapped high-pressure turbine rotor blades from a civil aero engine. The measured geometric data was used to build aerodynamic models of varying degrees of realism, ranging from quasi-three-dimensional blade sections for an Euler solver to three-dimensional, multi-passage and multi-stage Reynolds-Averaged-Navier-Stokes models. The flow near the tip of these shrouded blades is sensitive to manufacturing variability and can switch between two quasi-stable horseshoe vortex modes. In general, capacity and exit flow angle can be adequately predicted by three-dimensional, single-passage calculations: averaging single-passage calculations gives a good prediction of the multi-passage behaviour. For efficiency and stage loading, the approach of averaging single-passage calculations is less accurate as the multi-passage behaviour requires an accurate prediction of the horseshoe vortex modes.

This paper examines ethics in international trade from several different ethical perspectives, including consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics and deontology. The views of Aristotle, Plato, Adam Smith, Bentham, Kant, Pareto, Rawls, Flew, Nozick, Bastiat and others are discussed and contrasted. Flow charts are provided to reflect the utilitarian and rights approaches to trade. Utilitarianism is shown to be structurally deficient for several reasons that cannot be overcome. Antidumping laws and sanctions are shown to be negative-sum games. Antidumping laws are seen for what they are, tools of rent-seeking in which some influential minority seeks to use the powers of government to protect them from competition, which harms the vast majority of the population. Any trade restrictions must necessarily violate someone’s property, contract and/or association rights. The only way to achieve a just trade policy is to allow individuals, and the corporations that represent them, to trade what they have for what they want without government interference. The view that trade deficits are bad and trade surpluses are good is dismantled. The present paper also includes a bibliography on trade, including links to more than 100 studies on trade.

This study examined patterns of service use and payment methods for HIV/AIDS treatment using evidence from two data sources. The paper also compares the convergence of evidence from a household and exit survey among persons living with HIV/AIDS. The study was undertaken in Akwa Ibom, Anambra and Adamawa states in south-south, south-east and north-east geopolitical zones of Nigeria respectively. Using a household survey and an exit interview, questionnaires were administered to persons living with HIV who were 18 years and above. The health seeking patterns and payment methods were analysed. The findings showed some differences and similarities. In the exit survey, elicited check-up appointments were predominantly three monthly (35.5%) while about half (49.2%) of respondents from the household survey were on two monthly visits. During actual hospital visits, almost all respondents from exit (96.9%) and household survey (95.1%) received routine drugs for HIV/AIDS as appropriate. Out-of-pocket spending was the main method of payment in the two surveys. Variations exist across states in the patterns of treatment seeking and payment methods for HIV/AIDS but the overall findings from household and exit survey yield similar patterns. Hence, either of the methods may be used in a similar setting to obtain valid responses. However, innovative interventions are needed to reduce the incidence of opportunistic infections to limit the additional burden of hospitalization to patients.&nbsp

Fabrication spaces (fab-spaces), such as TechShops or Fab Labs, provide access to sophisticated digital manufacturing technologies to individuals. They could be a new institutional context which influences entrepreneurial behaviour. To understand how this might happen, we used a grounded approach to examine the experience of eight individuals who have benefitted from fab-spaces to push forward their entrepreneurial ventures. This examination led to the development of new hypotheses regarding the potential role of fab-spaces in the entrepreneurial journey. In particular, it has emerged that fab-spaces might affect the entry phase of a new venture by lowering the 'perception of performance' threshold. Fab-spaces also affect post-entry barriers, as they provide an opportunity to entrepreneurs for fast learning, and consequently, to establish effective routines. However, this paper also shows how these positive effects might be moderated by fab-spaces' institutional setup, chiefly their location and cultural characteristics.

This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of natural resources on under-five mortality in a sample of 50 African countries over the period 1996 to 2018. We also examine the extent to which governance shapes the relationship between natural resources and under-five mortality. Our results show that natural resources have increased under-five mortality. Resource rents also have detrimental effects on child mortality by age, gender, and the three major causes of infant mortality from infectious diseases. However, an extended analysis of different types of natural resources suggests that point resources (such as oil, natural gas and mineral rents) increase under-five mortality, in contrast to the diffuse resources (such as forest rent). We also find that governance mitigates the positive effect of natural resources on child mortality. Corresponding governance policy thresholds that should be attained in order to reverse the positive effects of natural resources on child mortality are provided. We thus suggest an increase in the funds allocated to the health sector from resource rents and encourage efforts to improve governance standards in sampled countries.

Environmental awareness consists in the way human beings understand the environment. We observe that relation between humans and the natural environment is a concern related to the currently environmental and social. Thus, this paper aims to identify what we call as environmental perception in students from a 6th grade elementary state school in Sorriso, Mato Grosso. For this case study, we used a semi structured questionnaire with open and closed questions for a group of 63 students. After the answer’s analysis phase, for some previously selected questions, were created categories and tabulated, for other questions, data’s were analyzed and demonstrated in charts. As results, as quoted by several authors, we observed that the environmental and sight perception of the students are coherent for schoolchildren in this age, however, the authors reinforce that the development of projects concerning environmental education are still needed., A percepção ambiental consiste na forma como o ser humano compreende o meio ambiente. Observando a relação do homem com o ambiente natural é uma preocupação pertinente ao quadro ambiental e social, o presente trabalho tem como objetivo identificar aquilo que chamamos de percepção ambiental de alunos de 6° ano do ensino fundamental de uma escola estadual de Sorriso, Mato Grosso. Para este estudo de caso, foi utilizado um questionário semiestruturado com perguntas fechadas e abertas, para um grupo de 63 estudantes. Após a análise do conteúdo das respostas, para algumas questões previamente selecionadas, foram criadas categorias e tabeladas, para outras, os dados foram analisados e demonstrados em tabelas. Foi possível observar que a percepção ambiental dos alunos e a visão de meio ambiente é coerente com o citado por diversos autores para estudantes dessa idade, no entanto, reforçam que ainda há uma necessidade de desenvolvimento de projetos voltados à educação ambiental.

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring prices by capping rents: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The German Constitutional Court revoked the policy only one year later. Although successful in lowering rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and close-by markets are per se not clear. This article evaluates the short-term causal supply-side effects in terms of prices, quantities, and landlords’ strategic behavior. We develop a theoretical framework capturing the key features of first-generation rent control policies and Berlin-specific aspects. Using a rich pool of detailed rent advertisements, predictions are tested, and further empirical causal inference techniques are applied for comparing price trajectories of dwellings inside and outside the policy’s scope. Mechanically, advertised rents drop significantly upon the policy’s enactment. A substantial rent gap along Berlin’s administrative border emerges, and rapidly growing rents in Berlin’s (unregulated) adjacent municipalities are observed. Landlords started adopting a hedging strategy insuring themselves against the risk of contractually long-term fixed low rents following a potentially unconstitutional law. Whereas this hedge was beneficial for landlords, the risk was completely borne by tenants. Moreover, the number of available properties for rent dropped significantly, a share of which appears to be permanently lost for the rental sector. This hampers a successful housing search for first-time renters and people moving within the city. Overall, negative consequences for renters appear to outweigh positive ones. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Funding: This research benefits from funding by the FNR Luxembourg National Research Fund [CORE Grant 3886] (ASSESS) and the OeNB Anniversary Fund [Grant 18767] (LocHouse). M. Fongoni further thanks the Department of Economics at the University of Strathclyde for support and acknowledges funding from the French government under the “France 2030” investment plan managed by the French National Research Agency [Reference ANR-17-EURE-0020] and from the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University - A*MIDEX. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4775 .

Screening mammograms is the gold standard for detecting breast cancer early. While a good amount of work has been performed on mammography image classification, especially with deep neural networks, there has not been much exploration into the confidence or uncertainty measurement of the classification. In this paper, we propose a confidence measure-based evaluation metric for breast cancer screening. We propose a modular network architecture, where a traditional neural network is used as a feature extractor with transfer learning, followed by a simple Bayesian neural network. Utilizing a two-stage approach helps reducing the computational complexity, making the proposed framework attractive for wider deployment. We show that by providing the medical practitioners with a tool to tune two hyperparameters of the Bayesian neural network, namely, fraction of sampled number of networks and minimum probability, the framework can be adapted as needed by the domain expert. Finally, we argue that instead of just a single number such as accuracy, a tuple (accuracy, coverage, sampled number of networks, and minimum probability) can be utilized as an evaluation metric of our framework. We provide experimental results on the CBIS-DDSM dataset, where we show the trends in accuracy-coverage tradeoff while tuning the two hyperparameters. We also show that our confidence tuning results in increased accuracy with a reduced set of images with high confidence when compared to the baseline transfer learning. To make the proposed framework readily deployable, we provide (anonymized) source code with reproducible results at https://git.io/JvRqE., Comment: To be presented at the IEEE ICHI 2020

In this paper, we highlight three issues that limit performance of machine learning on biomedical images, and tackle them through 3 case studies: 1) Interactive Machine Learning (IML): we show how IML can drastically improve exploration time and quality of direct volume rendering. 2) transfer learning: we show how transfer learning along with intelligent pre-processing can result in better Alzheimer's diagnosis using a much smaller training set 3) data imbalance: we show how our novel focal Tversky loss function can provide better segmentation results taking into account the imbalanced nature of segmentation datasets. The case studies are accompanied by in-depth analytical discussion of results with possible future directions.

The Canadian Federation of Municipalities has declared cities the “unofficial welcome wagon” for new Canadians. Research suggests, however, that they embrace settlement and integration policies to varying degrees. While scholarly examinations of municipal policies include analyses of corporate communications strategies, efforts by city governments to reach residents through ethnocultural news media have received little attention. To address that gap, this study investigates why the suburban community of Brampton, Canada adopted one of the most proactive ethnic media strategies in the country in 2015 when, just a decade earlier, it was for the most part unresponsive to the needs of its burgeoning immigrant population. As a starting point, the case study uses the determinants of municipal responsiveness identified by Kristin R. Good (2009) in Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver. Employing a mixed methods approach, it concludes that rapid demographic change, the emergence of an activist political leadership, and efforts to reduce friction between newcomers and other residents influenced Brampton’s communications policy over time. The case study identifies challenges associated with adopting an ethnic media strategy, including issues related to translation and the relative lack of sophistication of some ethnic media outlets. Furthermore, it demonstrates that reaching out to ethnocultural communities via ethnic media requires more than just distributing news releases in English. Translation of these releases has the potential to increase municipal news coverage in ethnic media, the paper suggests, if only because it makes it easier for smaller news organizations to report on such matters

Big Data has received great attention in academic literature and industry papers. Most of the experiments and studies focused on publishing results of big data technologies development, machine learning algorithms, and data analytics. To the best of our knowledge, there is not yet any comprehensive empirical study in the academic literature on big data technology acceptance. The statistical results of this model provide a compelling explanation of the relationships among the antecedent variables and the dependent variables. The analysis of the structural model reveals that the hypothesis tests are significant for 8 out of 12 path relationships.

In Western societies, human existence and illness are mostly constructed from the perspective of mind-body dualism: body and mind are considered to function independently, and the body/the physical as primary and more real. Research shows, however, that mind-body dualism is no longer tenable, especially in healthcare contexts. This led to the rise the biopsychosocial model, in which bodily experiences, including illness, are seen an interplay of the physical and the psychological, and the social. This model is the current gold standard for treating chronic pain. As these perspectives on the body and illness are potentially conflicting, and discursively constructed, this paper examines whether they are a source of misalignment in interactions between chronic pain patients and their doctors in a pain clinic. The analysis shows these perspectives indeed lead to misalignment, for instance when discussing the relevance of psychotherapy, and lead to intricate uses of argumentative resources to account for the differing perspectives on (the treatment of) pain.

The medical field is in dire need of more qualified medical laboratory scientists (MLS) and medical laboratory technicians (MLT). Medical laboratory educational programs are diminishing, and medical staff in hospitals are unaware of the unequivocal value trained lab scientists bring to the quality of their patients’ lab results. The national need for more qualified laboratory testing personnel is outpacing the supply. A survey to determine current marketing trends and methods was sent out to 469 program directors of MLS and/or MLT programs, with a 35% response rate. Responses were compared with proven marketing methods to give marketing suggestions relevant to the MLS field. This paper describes the research in how MLS programs currently market themselves. Explanations of marketing techniques are discussed with the intent to help simplify marketing efforts for a more effective marketing strategy. This study showed that medical and clinical laboratory educational programs nationwide should increase marketing and promote the MLS value to local communities.

PurposeThe issues associated with the production and dissemination of management research have been widely debated amongst administrators, scholars and policymakers for decades. However, few studies to date have examined this issue at the level of the individual scholar. The purpose of this paper is to view a management scholar’s choice of knowledge dissemination (KD) outlets as a legitimacy judgment embedded in their social structure and community norms.Design/methodology/approachTo explore this, the authors conduct a sequential mixed-methods study. The study uses qualitative methods, including one-on-one interviews (n=29) and five workshops (n=79) with administrators, management scholars, students and external community members (practitioners and policymakers). In addition, the authors analyzed the KD outcomes of 524 management scholars at seven Canadian universities drawn from a stratified sample of business schools.FindingsThe results of the research demonstrate the complex interaction between individual scholar-level factors, including socialization (degree type and practitioner experience) and tenure, and the institutional-level factors, such as strategic orientation and accreditation, and how these influence KD judgments. Specifically, the authors find that institutional factors (such as tenure and promotion) are a central predictor of scholarly KD; in contrast, the authors find that individual-level factors including degree, professional experience and career stage influence non-scholarly KD.Originality/valueThe results suggest that as management scholars face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact beyond academia, it may be more difficult than simply adapting the reward system. Specifically, the authors suggest that administrators and policymakers will have to consider individual factors, including their academic training (including interdisciplinary training), previous practitioner experience and career stage.

This paper argues that there are distinct parallels between changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act enacted by Bill C-31 (2012), in particular the Designated Foreign National regime (DFN), and Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers who arrive by boat. It is contended that recent Australian history and policy demonstrate the perils of adopting an ideology of control and exclusion toward asylum seekers instead of a politics of hospitality, and that Australia’s present political climate provides a stark and salutary warning to Canada, as it follows a similar path of securitization. The paper first explains what is meant by a politics of hospitality. In Part I, it analyzes Australia’s attitude toward, and its treatment of, asylum seekers, focusing in particular on the period since 1989. It is argued that Australia’s inhospitable stance toward asylum seekers has had discernible negative outcomes that provide important lessons for Canada. Part II provides a brief historical overview of Canadian policy toward asylum seekers, followed by an analysis of the DFN regime with reference to international law. It then argues that the DFN provisions contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The paper concludes by suggesting that Canada is at risk of following Australia’s security-oriented, inhospitable stance toward asylum seekers., Cet article soutient qu’il y a des similarités distinctes entre les modifications apportées à la Loi sur l’immigration et la protection des réfugiés, promulguée par le Projet de Loi C-31 (2012), en particulier le régime de l’Étranger Désigné, et le traitement que réserve l’Australie aux demandeurs d’asile arrivés par bateau. En effet, l’histoire et la politique australiennes des dernières années mettent en lumière l’écueil que représente l’adoption d’une idéologie de contrôle et d’exclusion envers les demandeurs d’asile, par opposition à une politique fondée sur des valeurs d’hospitalité. Le climat politique actuel de l’Australie constitue en cela un avertissement sévère, mais salutaire pour le Canada qui semble s’engager dans cette même voie répressive de sécurisation territoriale. L’article explique d’abord ce qu’on entend par politique d’hospitalité. Ensuite, en première partie, il fait l’analyse de l’attitude et du traitement que réserve l’Australie aux demandeurs d’asile, se concentrant sur la période depuis 1989. L’attitude inhospitalière qu’a adoptée l’Australie a eu des effets néfastes dont le Canada devrait tirer des leçons. La deuxième partie fait un bref historique des politiques canadiennes envers les demandeurs d’asile, suivi par une analyse du régime de l’Étranger Désigné en regard du droit international. Enfin, l’article soutient que les clauses du régime de l’Étranger Désigné contreviennent à la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés. L’article se conclut en suggérant que la Canada est à risque d’adopter la posture axée sur la sécurité et inhospitalière de l’Australie à l’égard des demandeurs d’asile.

This paper studies the causal impact of political connections on innovation. Using a unique hand-collected data set of sudden deaths of politically connected independent directors (i.e., retired government officials) in Chinese firms, we find that an unexpected loss of political connections increases a firm’s patent applications by 34% (14 patents). The innovation response is more pronounced in firms with stronger connections: when the connected directors held higher-level bureaucratic positions or when firms operate within their geographical jurisdictions. Upon losing political connections firms face higher competitive pressure and divert resources from rent-seeking into innovation investment. Our findings highlight the role of competition in the substitution between political connections and innovation, particularly in settings where formal institutions are weak.

A sizeable proportion of enterprises, especially SMEs, in receipt of financial assistance from the government, will fail to repay. In this paper we asked whether, and to what extent, it may be beneficial to apply a screening mechanism to deter those mostly likely to fail to repay from seeking such financial assistance in the first place. The answer largely turns on the relative weights attached for the objectives of stabilisation as compared with allocative efficiency. For this purpose, we develop a two-sector infinite horizon model featuring oligopolistic small businesses and a screening contract in the presence of a pandemic shock with asymmetric information. The adversely affected sector with private information can apply for government loans to reopen businesses once the pandemic has passed. First, we show that a pro-allocation government sets a harsh default sanction to deter entrepreneurs with bad projects from reentering and improves aggregate productivity in the long run, but the economy suffers persistent unemployment in the near term. However, a pro-stabilisation government sets a lenient default sanction or provides full guarantees to reach full employment in the short term, but the economy will be shifted to a lower equilibrium in the long run. The optimal default sanction balances the trade-off between allocation and stabilisation. Then, we derive an analytic measure of “Stabilisation Proclivity” and characterise the parameter space and the macro-financial frictions that render the government either more pro-allocation or more pro-stabilisation. Finally, we solve for the optimal default sanction numerically and conducts comparative statics for various policy analyses.

Daily schedule recommendation is an intelligent approach to recommend multiple suitable activity locations and activity sequences for users based on their needs in a day. In such a scenario, training the model using traditional methods requires centralized data collection from individual users, which may be prohibited by data protection acts, such as GDPR and CCPA. In this paper, we address the problem of daily schedule recommendation utilizing the deep reinforcement learning model in a federated learning framework (FedDSR). And curriculum learning is applied to guide the training process towards better local optimization and better generalization. For the uploaded local parameters, a similarity aggregation algorithm is proposed to improve the quality of the model. The experimental results show that the proposed FedDSR model is superior and effective to multiple baselines on two real datasets Geolife and Chengdu. Comparing with baselines, our method not only ensures that the parties do not need to share data and thus achieve joint modeling, but also can exceed ~18% under evaluation metric perimeter and improve ~0.72% under evaluation metric ADTS.

This paper examines the effect of home country characteristics on the internationalization of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs). Drawing on the institution-based view (IBV), we argue that institutional, political, and social characteristics will positively relate to the internationalization of EMNEs. Further, drawing on the knowledge-based view (KBV), we also argue that a firm’s knowledge stock (KS) will positively moderate the aforementioned relationship. Our research setting involves the incorporation of primary data collected from Iranian multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in the food and beverage industry. The results provide support for the hypotheses that home country characteristics positively impact the international growth of EMNEs but this does not lead to their further expansion. Also, supported was the hypothesis that EMNEs' knowledge stock positively moderates the relationship between home country characteristics and their international growth. These findings not only contribute to the current knowledge about the drivers of EMNE’s internationalization but also stress upon the idiosyncratic role of home country institutions and the impact of knowledge-specific capabilities on the internationalization of EMNEs, their international growth, and expansion.

Limited women's health and cancer prevention materials are available that have been validated for vulnerable populations. Such materials are especially important for groups, which have intermittent and typically low-quality healthcare access and are at greatest risk for missing out on women's health and cancer prevention screening. Health education materials are developed from heterogeneous sources. Clinical and research teams have minimal guidance in terms of sources, timelines, outputs, and evaluation in the development of such materials. The goal of this paper is to share our process in developing and evaluating an up-to-date women's health and cancer prevention learning guide appropriate for a target population of women involved in the criminal justice system. A ten-page learning guide was drafted using the current evidence-based data, with the objective of providing educational material on four topics: cervical cancer, breast cancer, sexually transmitted infection, and unintended pregnancy prevention. The learning guide was then tested on a convenience sample of 33 women at a local county jail. Feedback was organized into three parts in which the participants Responded to open-ended question, "What is missing?" Rated each of the four topics for design and content Completed a usability assessment Common themes were participants' interest in learning about side effects of birth control and wanting more information on testing and treatment, specifically for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Women were satisfied with the cancer prevention information presented to them. This report provides a framework for cancer prevention researchers who are developing health education materials for vulnerable populations.

Developers need to perform adequate testing to ensure the quality of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, manually collecting required test cases is tedious and time-consuming. Our recent work proposes CrossASR, a differential testing method for ASR systems. This method first utilizes Text-to-Speech (TTS) to generate audios from texts automatically and then feed these audios into different ASR systems for cross-referencing to uncover failed test cases. It also leverages a failure estimator to find failing test cases more efficiently. Such a method is inherently self-improvable: the performance can increase by leveraging more advanced TTS and ASR systems. So in this accompanying tool demo paper, we devote more engineering and propose CrossASR++, an easy-to-use ASR testing tool that can be conveniently extended to incorporate different TTS and ASR systems, and failure estimators. We also make CrossASR++ chunk texts from a given corpus dynamically and enable the estimator to work in a more effective and flexible way. We demonstrate that the new features can help CrossASR++ discover more failed test cases. Using the same TTS and ASR systems, CrossASR++ can uncover 26.2% more failed test cases for 4 ASRs than the original tool. Moreover, by simply adding one more ASR for cross-referencing, we can increase the number of failed test cases uncovered for each of the 4 ASR systems by 25.07%, 39.63%, 20.9\% and 8.17% respectively. We also extend CrossASR++ with 5 additional failure estimators. Compared to worst estimator, the best one can discover 10.41% more failed test cases within the same amount of time., Accepted to appear in the Demonstrations track of the ESEC/FSE 2021

Through repeated interactions, firms today refine their understanding of individual users’ preferences adaptively for personalization. In this paper, we use a continuous-time bandit model to analyze firms that recommend content to multihoming consumers, a representative setting for strategic learning of consumer preferences to maximize lifetime value. In both monopoly and duopoly settings, we compare a forward-looking recommendation algorithm that balances exploration and exploitation to a myopic algorithm that only maximizes the quality of the next recommendation. Our analysis shows that, compared with a monopoly, firms competing for users’ attention focus more on exploitation than exploration. When users are impatient, competition decreases the return from developing a forward-looking algorithm. In contrast, development of a forward-looking algorithm may hurt users under monopoly but always benefits users under competition. Competing firms’ decisions to invest in a forward-looking algorithm can create a prisoner’s dilemma. Our results have implications for artificial intelligence adoption and for policy makers on the effect of market power on innovation and consumer welfare. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4722 .

In this paper we explore Lawrence Stenhouse’s (1981) provocation that too much research has been conducted for the world and not enough for the village. This provocation has taken on additional significance in contemporary global policy contexts where neo-liberal systems of governance incorporate discourses of educational effectiveness, measurement, standards, quality and sustainable development. Reform movements draw attention to what forms of professional development are effective in the complex global-national policy agendas, with diverse cultural-historical and socio-political contexts. Furthermore, teachers’ work is changing and intensifying under neo-liberal systems of governance, specifically what they have to do to interpret and not just to implement policies. Drawing on two contrasting case studies of teacher research in England and Kazakhstan, we examine ‘outside in’ and ‘inside out’ approaches to teacher development. We problematize the concepts of teacher autonomy, the interpretational work of teachers in the context of policy intensification, and strategic compliance as a pragmatic and necessary response to policy frameworks and their intended and unintended consequences. We conclude by suggesting a hybrid, dialectical approach to professional development which sustains teacher autonomy and professionalism.

Introduction. To represent our national goods at the Western market it is necessary to ensure, first of all, the competitiveness of local products through complex mechanization of technological processes, labour costs reduction, increasing yields and quality of received products. The aim of the research is to provide the comparative analysis of technology and machines for potato harvesting, to determine the main factors that influence the agricultural technical indicators of harvesting equipment, to develop technological process patterns and to examine the strategies for improving the potato root-and-harvest machines. Methods and methodology. The research was carried out on the basis of technological and constructional analysis of technology and machines for potato harvesting. The methods of comparison and mathematical modelling of technological processes were used in the study. The research studies of Ukrainian and foreign scientists on technology and machines for potato harvesting were used as information base of our paper. Results. A comparative analysis of technology and machines for potato harvesting made it possible to determine the main factors that influence the agricultural performance of harvesting machinery and to develop the technological process for a digger, a double-loader digger and a harvester (harvesting machines). A theoretical model of the technological processes of harvesting machines includes both uncontrolled and controlled factors that influence the choice of a potato harvesting technology of a digger, a double-loader digger and a harvester. Nevertheless, the first factors are connected, primarily, with the conditions of potato growth and its biological properties, and the second factors deal with the organizational and technical measures, including the improvement of the working bodies of machines (cutting, dirt digging through, top separation, longitudinal hump with cut roller and other constructive and kinematic parameters), quality of received products, length and terms of potato storage, available farming human resources, free vehicle in the period of harvesting, farm potato storage, farm equipment for potato cleaning and sorting.

The paper offers the author’s vision of the political and organizational problem of using modern blockchain-based platform solutions in public governance. The aim is substantiating potential of dec...

The current literature on the use of disruptive innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) for human resource management (HRM) function, lacks a theoretical basis for understanding. Further, the adoption and implementation of AI-augmented HRM, which holds promise for delivering several operational, relational and transformational benefits, is at best patchy and incomplete. Integrating the technology, organisation and people (TOP) framework with core elements of the theory of innovation assimilation and its impact on a range of AI-Augmented HRM outcomes, or what we refer to as (HRM(AI)), this paper develops a coherent and integrated theoretical framework of HRM(AI) assimilation. Such a framework is timely as several post-adoption challenges, such as the dark side of processual factors in innovation assimilation and system-level factors, which, if unattended, can lead to the opacity of AI applications, thereby affecting the success of any HRM(AI). Our model proposes several testable future research propositions for advancing scholarship in this area. We conclude with implications for theory and practice.

Unsupervised feature selection can play an important role in addressing the issue of processing massive unlabelled high-dimensional data in the domain of machine learning and data mining. This paper presents a novel unsupervised feature selection method, referred to as Multi-Group Adaptive Graph Representation (MGAGR). Different from existing methods, the relationship between features is explored via the global similarity matrix, which is reconstructed by local similarities of multiple groups. Specifically, the similarity of a feature compared to other features can be represented by the linear combination of all the local similarities. The local similarity of a representative group is given a large weight to reconstruct the global similarity. Besides, an iterative algorithm is given to solve the optimization problem, in which the global similarity matrix, its corresponding reconstruction weights and the self-representation matrix are iteratively improved. Experimental results on 8 benchmark datasets demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods in terms of clustering performance. The source code is available at: https://github.com/misteru/MGAGR.

Most financial advisors recommend storing three to six months of expenses in liquid assets in case of an emergency. Yet we estimate that more than half of U.S. families do not have at least three months of their non-discretionary expenses in liquid savings. We find that financial literacy is strongly predictive of having three months of liquid savings, controlling for income, income variability, and even parental resources. We also find that financial literacy predicts liquid savings across the income distribution. These results indicate that accumulation of an emergency fund is not simply a function of income. Finally, financial literacy is predictive of liquid savings even among high illiquid wealth households. This suggests that the phenomenon of "wealthy hand-to-mouth" families may reflect financial mistakes rather than portfolio optimization. Our paper highlights the importance of financial knowledge in explaining families' preparedness to deal with unexpected expenses or disruption in their income.

We develop a theory wherein a priori identical banks may trade loans in a search market with reusable information. The equilibrium is unique, but its nature depends on the probability of a future market state. When the probability of a boom is high, all banks hold no equity and do no screening. When this probability is low, all banks choose a high level of equity and screen loans. For intermediate probability values, the equilibrium is heterogeneous, with some banks posting equity and screening and others avoiding equity and screening. This endogenously arising heterogeneity generates interbank trading. The credit market is partially frozen in a recession: only high-capital banks have continued funding access. Low-capital banks obtain funding by selling legacy loans to banks with “financial muscle,” so market funding is reallocated from low-capital to high-capital banks. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, finance.

Problem definition: Online retailers disclose product availability to influence customer decisions as a form of pressure selling designed to compel customers to rush into a purchase. Can the revelation of this information drive sales and profitability? We study the effect of disclosing product availability on market outcomes—product sales and returns—and identify the contexts where this effect is most powerful. Academic/practical relevance: Increasing sell-out is key for online retailers to remain profitable in the presence of thin margins and complex operations. We provide insights into how their information-disclosure policy—something they can tailor at virtually no cost—can contribute to this important objective. Methodology: We collaborate with an online retailer to procure a year of transaction data on 190,696 products that span 1,290 brands and 472,980 customers. To causally identify our results, we use a generalized difference-in-differences design with matching that exploits one policy of the firm: it discloses product availability only for the last five units. Results: The disclosure of low product availability increases hourly sales—they grow by 13.6%—but these products are more likely to be returned—product return rates increase by 17.0%. Because returns are costly, we also study net sales—product hourly sales minus hourly returns—which increase by 12.5% after the retailer reveals low availability. Managerial implications: The positive effects on sales and profitability amplify over wide assortments and when low-availability signals are abundantly visible and disclosed for deeply discounted products whose sales season is about to end. In addition, we propose a data-driven policy that exploits these results by using machine learning to prescribe the timing of disclosure of scarcity signals in order to boost sales without spiking returns. History: This paper has been accepted as part of the 2019 Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Practice-Based Research Competition.

Given the importance of individual level creativity, this paper investigates the influence of employee polychronicity on employee creativity among nurses in the healthcare sector. The current research also tests how job engagement acts as a mediator between employees’ polychronicity and creativity. Finally, thepaper analyzes the role of functional flexibility as a moderator that enhances the influence of polychronicity on employee creativity. The current paper presents empirical research, and cross-sectional data were gathered from 457 nurses (Subordinate Staff) and 127 doctors (Supervisors) working in 37DHQ (District Head Quarters) hospitals in Pakistan. Descriptive statistics, correlation, and multiple-regression techniques were applied for analyzing the collected data. The findings proved that the nurses’ polychronic attitude increases their creativity. Findings revealed that job commitment plays a mediating role between polychronicity and employee creativity. The findings proved that functional flexibility enhances the link between polychronicity and creativity. This research has contributed to both theory and managerial practice about the interplay of polychronicity, creativity, job engagement, and functional flexibility among nurses. The management in practice should focus on employee attitude, i.e., polychronicity, for improving their creativeness.

Well-intended policies often have negative unintended consequences if they fail to foresee the different ways in which individuals may respond to the new set of incentives. When widespread and persistent, these may lead to a net reduction of social welfare. Focusing on the case of anti-drug policies, in this paper we show that the recent unprecedented surge in the growing of illicit coca crops in Colombia was the result of a naive and untimely policy announcement during peace negotiations between the government and the FARC guerrillas. On May 2014, the parties’ peace delegations issued a press release announcing that coca-growing farmers would receive material incentives for voluntary crop substitution once a final agreement had been reached. To evaluate the anticipation effect of this announcement we exploit the cross sectional variation on both the cost advantage of growing coca (using an ecological measure of coca suitability) and the expected benefits of doing so (using a predicted measure of where the material benefits would h ave b een t argeted). Coca plantations levels remained high even after the implementation of the announced incentives’ scheme. We explain this persistence by documenting that the surge in coca growing is differentially higher in areas with presence illegal armed groups, that benefited financially from availability of a key input in the drug trade.

This paper deals with the discussions on accounting criteria taken place at the Board of Directors of the Bank of Spain short after its establishment. Shareholders pretended that Public Debt and real property should appear on the Balance sheet at market price values and some members of the Board of Directors shared this opinion. This was against the accounting principle of purchase price, which was the generally accepted at that time. Another burning matter discussed was the convenience of a wider disclosure of financial issues. The way to implement an accrual basis accounting was also a discussion subject as well as even the model that the published Balance sheet had to adopt. These discussions were so harsh that even the Governor, that is, the highest responsible of the institution, began to think to resign, although his appointment was made by the Government and not by the shareholders. Another questions regarding accounting were also the object of bitter criticism that caused the corresponding retorts on the part of the Bank in defence of its actuation and reputation. It seems that nowadays many of the arguments used to defend some accounting principles or to reject others are overcome. Nevertheless, it has to be concluded that the same reasons put forward in those times have been recently heard on the occasion of the acceptance of International Accounting Standard (IAS) in Europe. About 150 years later, in some way, the wax continues burning in the oil-lamp of the controversies. In order to insert the subject matter within its context, the paper begins with an explanation of the background of the Bank of Spain's establishment in 1856. For this purpose, it departs from its predecessor, the Spanish Bank of San Fernando, which in its turn was successor of the Bank of San Carlos, founded in 1782. The banking changes began at that time as a consequence of a new normative framework. Its configuration constitutes the starting point of the current Spanish banking system. The economic environment was stimulated by legislation on several more favourable fronts, which facilitated the entry of foreign investments as an economic path to develop the country. Under the new order, the Bank of Spain did not enjoy the traditional supremacy of its predecessors and experienced the pressure from the competitors, i.e., the Credit Societies, which under this denomination were authentic private banks. On the other hand, the Bank had to learn to assume some opposition to their management, administration and accounting criteria in the shareholders' meetings. This opposition constitutes properly the subject of the paper as seen above.

Do we preferentially learn from outcomes that confirm our choices? This is one of the most basic, and yet consequence-bearing, questions concerning reinforcement learning. In recent years, we investigated this question in a series of studies implementing increasingly complex behavioral protocols. The learning rates fitted in experiments featuring partial or complete feedback, as well as free and forced choices, were systematically found to be consistent with a choice-confirmation bias. This result is robust across a broad range of outcome contingencies and response modalities. One of the prominent behavioral consequences of the confirmatory learning rate pattern is choice hysteresis: that is the tendency of repeating previous choices, despite contradictory evidence. As robust and replicable as they have proven to be, these findings were (legitimately) challenged by a couple of studies pointing out that a choice-confirmatory pattern of learning rates may spuriously arise from not taking into consideration an explicit choice autocorrelation term in the model. In the present study, we re-analyze data from four previously published papers (in total nine experiments; N=363), originally included in the studies demonstrating (or criticizing) the choice-confirmation bias in human participants. We fitted two models: one featured valence-specific updates (i.e., different learning rates for confirmatory and disconfirmatory outcomes) and one additionally including an explicit choice autocorrelation process (gradual perseveration). Our analysis confirms that the inclusion of the gradual perseveration process in the model significantly reduces the estimated choice-confirmation bias. However, in all considered experiments, the choice-confirmation bias remains present at the meta-analytical level, and significantly different from zero in most experiments. Our results demonstrate that the choice-confirmation bias resists the inclusion of an explicit choice autocorrelation term, thus proving to be a robust feature of human reinforcement learning. We conclude by discussing the psychological plausibility of the gradual perseveration process in the context of these behavioral paradigms and by pointing to additional computational processes that may play an important role in estimating and interpreting the computational biases under scrutiny.

The ecological and economic impacts of biological invasions are usually highly conspicuous, but these are the outcome of a global, multistage process that is obscured from view. For most taxa, we lack a large-scale picture of the movements of alien species, the biases and barriers that promote or inhibit their spread at each stage, and blind spots in our ability to detect species during their spread. For instance, countries rely heavily on customs interceptions to prevent new species introductions, but their efficacy for detecting invaders remains unclear. To address these gaps, we synthesize and provide data at unprecedented geographic resolution on the global diversity and distribution of alien ants, a pervasive group strongly impacting humans and ecosystems. From >145,000 records spanning 602 regions, we identify 522 ant species exhibiting human-mediated spread, doubling recent estimates of their diversity. We show that movements of alien ant species across regions globally are non-random and, moreover, that these flows differ by the extents to which species invade—ranging from arrival to indoor establishment, naturalization, and harmful status. Importantly, we find that almost two-thirds of the 309 species that naturalize globally—most of which are ground- and litter-dwelling—are absent from customs interceptions, which record disproportionately high numbers of arboreal species. Our results illustrate the vast, yet uneven extent of ant invasions globally, and suggest that most alien species bypass biosecurity controls while spreading successfully worldwide. This raises doubts on the efficacy of current customs interceptions procedures and highlights a need for radically new approaches.Significance statementBiological invasions impact humans and ecosystems tremendously. Invasions are difficult to address because little is known about large-scale patterns of spread, species’ capacities to invade ecosystems, and the efficacy of existing biosecurity measures. This paper tackles these issues for alien ants, one of the most damaging groups of invasive animals. An unprecedented dataset reveals that 522 ant species exhibit human-mediated spread, 270 more than previously known. Species are grouped under four levels of invasion capacity corresponding to different invasion barriers. Geographic sources and sinks for the groups differ globally. Two-thirds of species with naturalization capacity have never been recorded at customs interceptions, which fail to detect many litter-dwelling species. Novel detection and control strategies for inconspicuous alien organisms are needed.

The manufacturing era is going through an evolutionary phase from Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0 (I4.0). In 2011, Germany initiated I4.0 during the Hanover fair in collaboration with industrialists, academicians and researchers. The benefits of implementing I4.0 are attracting the curiosity of practitioners. In current academic literature, there is little discussion related to analysing potential roadblocks of I4.0 implementation using mathematical modelling. This paper has identified roadblocks through an extensive literature review and validation has been carried out by gathering experts’ opinions. As per the findings, the identified roadblocks have been categorized into five sections: management roadblocks, operational roadblocks, human resource roadblocks, procedural and behavioural roadblocks. A case study of the automobile industry has been discussed. The data was collected from experts in the area of I4.0. A Graph Theory and Matrix Approach (GTMA) was applied to evaluate the relative intensity of the roadblocks, Comprehensive I4.0 Index (CII) and its range for each category of roadblock. Implications for industrialists, practitioners and academicians are provided.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigates how healthcare seeking for oneself and “healthcare work” for family—constellations that include the continuation of health insurance, access to formal medical care, and medication adherence—change during a period of unemployment. BACKGROUND: “Intensive mothering” norms that promote selfless caregiving may discourage women’s (but not men’s) engagement in own healthcare seeking behavior. Breadwinning norms may oblige men (but not women) to provide income and other resources, including health insurance. METHOD: This paper relies on data from 100 in-depth interviews with unemployed men and women conducted from 2013 to 2015. An iterative coding process guided data analysis; themes and patterns were evaluated to determine their importance across the data. RESULTS: After a job loss, many women (but few men) stopped seeking previously maintained healthcare for themselves. In contrast, some men rejected obligations to provide health insurance for their family. Moreover, the majority of women (but few men) discussed the prioritization of family in their healthcare decision-making. CONCLUSION: The intersection of financial inequalities and changing gender norms in healthcare seeking and family healthcare work placed a unique toll on women’s health. IMPLICATIONS: These findings expand current understanding of how gender functions as a primary frame and how these frames change, suggesting that gender beliefs about family responsibilities extend to healthcare seeking and family healthcare work and are constrained by social class, even as gender frames change to reshape men’s obligations to provide health insurance.

In 2010, Stephen Hawking commented that, “Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.” This is not a connection we might readily make in the modern world. Science is technology, laboratories, facts and figures. It is experiment, cold, hard evidence, and equally cold, hard environments. Yet, visitors to the Science Museum Group’s museums (and readers of the Science Museum Group Journal) know that this is not the case. Many have recently stood in awe at the Soyuz TMA-19M descent module that brought Tim Peake and colleagues back to Earth from the International Space Station, cowed by the fragility, complexity and humanity of such an object: its romance. Indeed, Hawking was talking about sending astronauts on dangerous missions when he spoke about romance. Although unmanned space flight was perfectly possible at the time, and eliminated the risk to human life, he believed that human participants were a fundamental part of the endeavour. The exploration, the adventure and the risk were essential. There is romance in the stars that inspires humans to advance, but a romance that technology devoid of human connection cannot convey. Yet, technology also has its own romance. There is a nostalgia, an emotional pull, to technologies that we have known and spent time with over the course of our lives. Technologies facilitate romance – the phone call, the dating app, the email, the letter, the train journey, the meal, the contraceptive pill. Technologies open a new world of experience to us, whether through travel, enhanced vision, means of recording, or display. But technologies can also be ‘romanticised’, over-simplified into a black box that masks realities of labour, discrimination, resource exploitation or environmental damage. This complex relationship, as well as the sheer variety of what we might consider technology, or romance, to be was investigated as part of a collaboration between the Science Museum Group, Central Saint Martins, and eeodo publishing in 2018, and is further developed in the papers that make up this mini collection.

In this paper the author discusses three works of video art featured in the Technologies of Romance symposium held at the Science Museum, London, in 2018. The author searches within video art, as a genre or medium, within its technical apparatuses and within the three particular works, for contributions to the particular notion of ‘object love’ as drawn from a paper by Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess (2014). The author interprets the three video artists’ works with the aim of gleaning comparative examples that might illustrate or extend the ‘object love’ concept. Mathilde Roman’s book (2016) on the ‘staging’ of video art is an influence on the text, as are two short but profound statements by Walter Benjamin, one from his Theses on a Philosophy of History (1940), another from his essay on Surrealism (1929). History, ‘the past’, museology and ‘object love’ are all woven into the core of the article. As it moves towards its conclusion the author is inspired by the image of an empty, machine-made stocking (a classic symbol of Freudian fetishism) in Elizabeth Price’s video K, in such a way that the article ends by skewing both the idea of ‘object’, and that of ‘love’ in the direction of the fetish, while concluding that the past – just as much as any particular object from or of the past – tends to be subject to fetishisation. Meanwhile, video’s relative immateriality as an art medium, and its current use by artists, is seen as representative of an age of image-based archival practices that, assisted by digital technology, might now divert traditional, object-based processes of the museum – a shift that might be summed up in the phrase ‘screen becomes vitrine’. This shift, from vitrined objects to screened images might then, in turn, have implications for the ‘object love’ that initially interested Geoghegan and Hess and which began the author’s article and this dialogue with the Science Museum. This paper was published in Science Museum Journal's special 'Technologies of Romanc edition, which was based on, and featured several papers from a day-long symposium at the museum to celebrate the launch of my 2018 book 'Technologies of Romance - Part II. Both the symposium event and the spcieal edition of the journal featured my own paper and contributions from leading academics, curators and artists drawn from CSM, ScienceMuseum and beyond.

The paper examines attitudes towards employers using social media to screen job applicants. In an online survey of 454 participants, we compare the comfort level with this practice in relation to different types of information that can be gathered from publicly accessible social media. The results revealed a nuanced nature of people’s information privacy expectations in the context of hiring practices. People’s perceptions of employers using social media to screen job applicants depends on (1) whether or not they are currently seeking employment (or plan to), (2) the type of information that is being accessed by a prospective employer (if there are on the job market), and (3) their cultural background, but not gender. The findings emphasize the need for employers and recruiters who are relying on social media to screen job applicants to be aware of the types of information that may be perceived to be more sensitive by applicants, such as social network-related information. Keywords : social media, information privacy, job screening, hiring practices

Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) have several properties desirable for locomotion: they generate smooth trajectories, are robust to perturbations and are simple to implement. Although conceptually promising, we argue that the full potential of CPGs has so far been limited by insufficient sensory-feedback information. This paper proposes a new methodology that allows tuning CPG controllers through gradient-based optimization in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time CPGs have been trained in conjunction with a MultilayerPerceptron (MLP) network in a Deep-RL context. In particular, we show how CPGs can directly be integrated as the Actor in an Actor-Critic formulation. Additionally, we demonstrate how this change permits us to integrate highly non-linear feedback directly from sensory perception to reshape the oscillators' dynamics. Our results on a locomotion task using a single-leg hopper demonstrate that explicitly using the CPG as the Actor rather than as part of the environment results in a significant increase in the reward gained over time (6x more) compared with previous approaches. Furthermore, we show that our method without feedback reproduces results similar to prior work with feedback. Finally, we demonstrate how our closed-loop CPG progressively improves the hopping behaviour for longer training epochs relying only on basic reward functions.

This paper critically examines the parallels of devaluation encountered by early childhood educators and sessional faculty members in Ontario as reflective praxis. The three authors’ experiences are diverse and include a tenured professor and two sessional faculty members, both ofwhom have worked in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). The narratives of the authors inform the concerning trend of precarity and devaluation embedded within two polarizing spectrums of the Ontario educational landscape: Post-Secondary Education (PSE) and ECEC. Although these aforementioned areas of education rarely intersect, the authors centre them on the frontline of the neoliberal assault on education transpiring in Ontario today. The three authors self-identify as female settlers; two have doctoral degrees; one has an MA and is an early childhood educator (ECE). One author self-identifies as a racialized and white-coded cis-gendered woman, and two selfidentify as white, cis-gendered women. All of the authors have worked in Ontario’s post-secondary landscape, one as sessional faculty member and then a tenured professor, and two as sessional faculty members. The paper will problematize the neoliberal assault on higher education and ECEC through a Feminist Political Economy (FPE) conceptual framework in order to draw on the multifaceted ways femAtlantis Journal Issue 40.1 /2019 46 inized discourses devalue the work of ECEs and perpetuate the overrepresentation of women, particularly racialized women in precarious faculty positions.

Student voice in governance and decision-making has become ubiquitous in higher education, evolving from buzzword to orthodoxy. Student engagement measures have become instruments of quality control, with students expected to take an active role in shaping institutional policy and practice. In this paper, we argue that this ubiquity of demands for student engagement has served to hollow-out and depoliticise student voice practices – drawing upon Cooke and Kothari’s seminal (2001) work in development studies we ask whether student voice has become a new tyranny of participation? In developing this argument, we identify how students are expected to be both strategic, instrumental consumers and active citizens of their university. This results in the paradox of the strategic active student-citizen. ispartof: Teaching In Higher Education vol:28 issue:1 pages:1-16 status: Published online

PurposeNature-based tourism (NBT) blossoming requires sound monitoring models to maximize its potential in the tourism industry. Cooperation of different segments from nature to economy will lead to a sustainable NBT. Therefore, the qualitative and quantitative relation between these subdivisions has to be investigated.Design/methodology/approachThis paper proposes an advanced NBT model for the design of an optimum tourism system. To this end, Bayesian network (BN) has been implemented to characterize the impact of each subsector on NBT.FindingsThe outcomes of this study can help the tourism managers, policymakers and related organizations to find the optimum approach to achieve a continuous improvement in the system. To demonstrate the applicability of the methodology, two cases of observations are considered.Originality/valueThe originality of the work is well demonstrated in the literature review of the paper.

Background: Little is known about the opinions or perceived benefits of an inspiratory muscle training intervention in patients with cystic fibrosis and their multidisciplinary team. Objective: The aim of this qualitative study was to examine patients' and multidisciplinary teams' views on inspiratory muscle training to inform and tailor future interventions. Methods: Individual, semistructured interviews were conducted to evaluate participants’ perspectives of a 4-week inspiratory muscle training intervention. In this study, 8 of 13 individuals involved in the inspiratory muscle training program (5 children aged 11-14 years; 2 physiotherapists; and 1 respiratory physician) participated. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, analyzed using thematic analyses, and then coded into relevant themes. Results: Four key themes emerged: acceptability, facilitators, barriers, and recommendations. While fun, enjoyment, and improved perceived physical ability were reported by children and their multidisciplinary team following the inspiratory muscle training program, the multidisciplinary team identified factors such as time and cost as key barriers. Conclusions: A short inspiratory muscle training program was perceived to have positive effects on the physical ability and psychosocial health of children with cystic fibrosis. These findings highlight the importance of obtaining participants’ and multidisciplinary teams' perceptions and recommendations to ensure the efficacy and optimal design of future inspiratory muscle training protocols.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual reality (VR) have attracted growing attention within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in recent years. Integration of BIM and VR technology can develop workflow efficiency through enhanced common understanding and prepare students in architecture and engineering programs to become leaders of the AEC industry. However, the current shortage of AEC professionals trained in BIM and VR is still a barrier to collaborative working practice in this industry. This paper reviews previous work on the BIM, VR, and BIM-into-VR in AEC education/training to bridge this gap. It also presents an advanced framework to clarify creating and using the BIM model into VR workflow in the AEC industry through the integrated definition function (IDEF0) model. The authors further evaluated the BIM-into-VR applications in literature and real-life by surveying students’ learning performance in terms of eight characteristics relevant to the VR environment and students’ performance within two projects, one involving the “NASA Mars Habitat Project” and the other involving the “Norris Center Project” at Northwestern University. The results confirmed that BIM-into-VR usability and efficiency in improving students’ main learning performance characteristics: Learnability, Interoperability, Visualization, Real-world, Interaction, Creativity, Motivation, and Comfort. This study addresses the advantages of using BIM-into-VR in AEC programs. It also offers suggestions to AEC educators and students in implementing BIM-into-VR in different courses and creating a roadmap for their future as professionals in the AEC industry.

This paper examines the effects of improvement in creditors’ rights protection on firms’ financing choices and securities issuance. To address these issues, I exploit exogenous variation in creditors’ rights protection induced by the staggered adoption of anti-recharacterization laws by some U.S. states. The laws enhance the ability of creditors to repossess collateral during bankruptcy. Using a difference-in-difference methodology to estimate the causal impacts, I find that: [1] the laws are positively related to debt capacity and debt maturity. Firms increase market leverage and substitute away from costly short-term debt financing into long-term debt financing [2] the laws are positively related to debt issuance [3] the laws are negatively related to equity issuance. My analysis further demonstrates that proactive securities issuers are significantly more responsive to the adoption of anti-recharacterization laws than passive securities issuers

This paper mobilises Dillard and Vinnari’s (2019) proposals for critical dialogic accountability practices that address the concerns of marginalised and under-represented groups, rather than privileging finance capital. We approach this through participatory fieldwork with(in) an NGO that provides development programs, including microfinance, intended to empower poor women in Bangladesh. We engage with microfinance representatives, women borrowers, their husbands, program volunteers and gender change activists on the problems and conditions of possibility associated with microfinance and women’s empowerment programs. By engaging competing discourses and constructing counter-narratives, based on poor women’s lived experiences with neoliberal microfinance programs, we demonstrate the potential of critical dialogic praxis to support marginalised groups’ struggles to hold powerholders accountable for their (in)actions and to promote more enabling development approaches.