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Along with increasing supply chain risks due to economic and environmental changes, it is imperative to answer the question of how to reduce supply chain risks. This study examines supply chain collaboration as a risk mitigation strategy. The study examines three types of risks, namely supply risk, demand risk and process risk in relation to three types of collaboration, namely supplier collaboration, customer collaboration and internal collaboration, as a mechanism to mitigate those risks. The proposed relationship model is tested with data collected from 203 manufacturing companies in Australia. The results show that each area of collaboration effectively reduces its respective supply chain risk, but only the mitigation of process risk and demand risk has a direct effect on supply chain performance. In addition, both supply risk and demand risk increase process risk. We offer theoretical and practical implications of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding the projection performance of hydrological models under contrasting climatic conditions supports robust decision making, which highlights the need to adopt time-varying parameters in hydrological modeling to reduce performance degradation. Many existing studies model the time-varying parameters as functions of physically based covariates; however, a major challenge remains in finding effective information to control the large uncertainties that are linked to the additional parameters within the functions. This paper formulated the time-varying parameters for a lumped hydrological model as explicit functions of temporal covariates and used a hierarchical Bayesian (HB) framework to incorporate the spatial coherence of adjacent catchments to improve the robustness of the projection performance. Four modeling scenarios with different spatial coherence schemes and one scenario with a stationary scheme for model parameters were used to explore the transferability of hydrological models under contrasting climatic conditions. Three spatially adjacent catchments in southeast Australia were selected as case studies to examine the validity of the proposed method. Results showed that (1) the time-varying function improved the model performance but also amplified the projection uncertainty compared with the stationary setting of model parameters, (2) the proposed HB method successfully reduced the projection uncertainty and improved the robustness of model performance, and (3) model parameters calibrated over dry years were not suitable for predicting runoff over wet years because of a large degradation in projection performance. This study improves our understanding of the spatial coherence of time-varying parameters, which will help improve the projection performance under differing climatic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a number of adverse factors, China's steel industry has maintained a rapid growth trend. China continues to consume two-thirds of the world's iron ore, the majority of which is imported. In this context, Chinese steel companies have begun to consider integrating their supply chains to increase efficiency and lower costs. However, the increasingly volatile international environment makes this an extremely risky proposition. As a result, the issue of how Chinese steel producers should participate in global supply chain integration has emerged as a critical research question that requires investigation. In this paper, we examine the supply chain integration problem using a typical China-Australia steel trade as an example. Specifically, we discuss in detail whether relevant firms should continue to promote supply chain integration in the Chinese-Australian steel industry, as well as the decision boundary of influence, using evolutionary game theory and policy risk cost factors. The empirical analysis demonstrates that policy risk has a range of effects on different types of steel firms. Even when international tensions are considered, smaller steel companies may retain a greater willingness to integrate their supply chains. Overall, the above findings can provide necessary decision support for enterprises to formulate supply chain management strategies., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Lequn Zhu et al.)

Background: Millions of people older than 60 years are affected by arthritis. Unrelieved chronic pain of arthritis is associated with increased healthcare needs and decreased quality of life in older adults. Understanding older adults' perceptions and experiences of living with arthritis pain can benefit healthcare experts in designing and implementing clinical, education, and research programs to better care for this population., Objectives: This meta-synthesis of qualitative studies aimed to explore older adults' experiences of living with arthritis pain., Design: A narrative meta-synthesis., Data Sources/review Method: Journal articles published in English were identified by conducting electronic searches in CINAHL, PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, and ISI Web of Science to June 2019. Unpublished studies were searched in Google Scholar, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database. Four groups of keywords were combined in the search strategy: (1) research methods/qualitative researches; (2) older adults; (3) arthritis/arthritis pain; (4) experience. Studies were included if they (a) used qualitative research designs, qualitative data collection and analysis; (b) included participants aged 60 years and older regardless of the study context; (c) reported on older adults' experiences of living with arthritis pain; and (d) were published in English. Studies were excluded if: (a) they used mixed methods where qualitative data could not be extracted or (b) the data analysis lacked the necessary qualitative depth. Noblit and Hare's methodology of synthesizing qualitative studies was used., Results: Eleven studies were included. Among the 11 included studies published in 2003-2018, the sample size ranged from 3 to 551 participants. Older adults aged 62 to 95 years, and the majority were female. The ethnicity of the older adults was reported in 7 studies, including Caucasians, African Americans, Hispanics, Korean Americans, Australian, European, and South Korean. Through meta-synthesis, four themes were identified. The lived experiences of pain among older adults with arthritis include the center of daily living, a lonely path, an inevitable and endless process, and surviving through pain management., Conclusions: These themes may reflect older adults' experiences of living with arthritis pain across diverse ethnicities and cultures. Health care providers must be sensitive to older adults' experience of arthritis pain, realize the importance of providers' support on patients' adaptation, and provide comprehensive and individualized patient-centered interventions for managing arthritis pain for older adults. The study protocol had been registered in PROSPERO (International prospective register of systematic reviews). The registration number is CRD42019129716. Link: http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?ID=CRD42019129716., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

In various real-world applications, it is very useful mining unanticipated episodes where certain event patterns unexpectedly lead to outcomes, e.g., taking two medicines together sometimes causing an adverse reaction. These unanticipated episodes are usually unexpected and infrequent, which makes existing data mining techniques, mainly designed to find frequent patterns, ineffective. In this paper, we propose unexpected temporal association rules (UTARs) to describe them. To handle the unexpectedness, we introduce a new interestingness measure, residual-leverage, and develop a novel case-based exclusion technique for its calculation. Combining it with an event-oriented data preparation technique to handle the infrequency, we develop a new algorithm MUTARC to find pairwise UTARs. The MUTARC is applied to generate adverse drug reaction (ADR) signals from real-world healthcare administrative databases. It reliably shortlists not only six known ADRs, but also another ADR, flucloxacillin possibly causing hepatitis, which our algorithm designers and experiment runners have not known before the experiments. The MUTARC performs much more effectively than existing techniques. This paper clearly illustrates the great potential along the new direction of ADR signal generation from healthcare administrative databases.