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To review a newly developed PCB fabrication process based on a parallel lamination technique.

This paper has been written to introduce the SAVIA process, a new parallel lamination technique for PCB fabrication. The basic concept of the SAVIA process has been described along with the individual process steps and the reliability issues. The advantages of SAVIA process have been also discussed in both economical and technological aspects.

It was found that the parallel lamination technique, a key process for SAVIA, was not only highly flexible and reliable but also a cost‐effective fabrication method for high performance PCB. With the SAVIA process, manufacturing lead‐times can be substantially reduced due to the nature of the parallel processing. It was also confirmed that a highly reliable metal alloy interconnection was created between the core and the adhesive layers during the lamination process. The formed metal alloy contacts showed excellent electrical and physical characteristics. The between layers was precise.

The value of this paper is to introduce a novel PCB fabrication process based on a parallel lamination technique that is superior to conventional build‐up processes from both technological and economical viewpoints. By applying a parallel lamination technique, it is expected that fabrication costs can be lowered due to reductions in manufacturing lead‐time.

In the past three years, microvia drilling using laser technology has become the dominant method of producing blind vias smaller than 150μm. The ablation characteristics of the materials used in the manufacture of PWBs can be divided into three categories: organics, glass, and metals. Organics are composed of resins and epoxies commercially available from a variety of vendors. Two types of resins that are typically used for microvia formation in the telecommunication applications are resin coated copper foil^® (RCC or RCF) for subtractive PCB process, and thermal‐curing resin (TCR) for additive PCB process respectively. This paper details the basics of UV YAG laser capabilities, alignment techniques, plating tests, reliability tests, manufacturable microvia design rules, and production experiences.

The health workforce of the 21st century has enormous challenges; health professionals need to be both experts in their field and equipped with leadership and managerial skills. These skills are not part of the regular curriculum, so specific programs bridging this gap are required. Since 2001, FAIMER®, with eight centers across the globe, has worked to create health professions education leaders through transformational learning experiences, developing a global community of practice encompassing over 40 countries. We describe the design, implementation, evaluation, and evolution of the leadership and management curriculum component of the global Institute over 15 years. The curriculum is developed and updated through practices that keep faculty and fellows connected, aligned, and learning together. The article highlights the unique features, challenges faced, and sustainability issues. With a robust mixed methods evaluation, there are substantial reasons to believe that the model works, is adaptable and replicable to meet local needs. The program is playing an important role of answering the call for training positive, strengths-based, collaborative leaders who are socially accountable and embrace the challenges for high quality equitable health care around the globe

The use of information technology (IT) in the hospitality industry is driven by the need to improve and refine customer service. However, it is unlikely that new IT will be successfully implemented if employees' roles and emotions are overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay of negative emotions (anger and fear), coping strategies (venting anger and psychological distancing), perceptions of an IT innovation and intention toward adopting it.

A research model is developed based on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, coping theory and innovation diffusion theory. An online survey was conducted among employees working for hotels that had deployed a new reservation system, and 234 responses were collected.

The results indicate that employees' negative emotions (anger and fear) have negative and significant effects on their perceptions of adopting a new reservation system through coping strategies (i.e. venting anger and psychological distancing). Furthermore, employees' perceptions of adopting an innovative reservation system have a positive effect on their adoption intention toward the system.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research to address the impact of distinct emotions on IT innovation adoption, as well as explaining the relation between affective and cognitive effects. The findings demonstrate the importance of examining negative emotions in IT innovation adoption. In addition, the model developed in this study confirms that an appraisal tendency approach better specifies the conditions under which different emotions are triggered to predict and explain how emotions relate to IT use through adaptation behaviors when compared with a valence-based approach.

The General Election of 1997 was marked by much political activity on the web. An analysis of 20 party web sites a year later on shows that most parties have kept a web presence although few are really capitalising upon the web technologies. Sites are too often stale, out of date and predictable. In no way can cyberdemocracy be seen to have arrived; the web is too often just a publishing vehicle and communication is largely one way. The smaller parties are proving to be the most innovative.

This paper aims to determine the opportunity cost borne by US commercial banks to reduce non-performing loans (NPLs) by one unit within the global financial crisis framework.

To achieve this aim, the authors use the directional output distance function to estimate the technical efficiency while considering NPLs as undesirable output. Then, they estimate the shadow prices of NPLs by using the envelope theorem and solving the revenue function.

The results indicate that medium-sized banks are the most efficient, while small banks are the most inefficient ones. Moreover, the shadow prices of NPLs of large banks are higher than those of small and medium-sized banks. This implies a more elevated cost when lessening bad loans in large banks. This is more prominent during the crisis given that the shadow prices of NPLs of large banks have risen sharply over that period.

Shadow prices have important managerial implications given that they display the amounts of required reduced revenues to lessen NPLs. Accordingly, banks’ managers are called to reduce these loans by paying more attention when choosing their customers.

With the absence of an observable market price for bad loans in financial literature, the shadow price notion offers an adequate measure to evaluate them. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that provides an estimation of the shadow price of NPLs in the US banking sector.

Because dietary fibre has been recognized as a major ally to the maintenance of a healthy body as well as to help against the development of some chronic diseases, this paper aims to study the level of knowledge of a relatively wide range of people about the health effects related to the ingestion of dietary fibre in appropriate dosages.

A descriptive cross-sectional study was undertaken on a non-probabilistic sample of 6,010 participants. The data were collected from 10 countries in three different continents (Europe, Africa and America) and measured the level of knowledge regarding different health benefits from dietary fibre. The questionnaires were applied by direct interview after verbal informed consent.

The results obtained considering the general level of knowledge revealed a considerable degree of information about the benefits of fibre (average score of 3.54 ± 0.5, on a scale from 1 to 5). There were significant differences between genders (p < 0.001), with higher average score for women, and also for level of education (p < 0.001), with higher score for university level. The living environment also showed significant differences (p < 0.001), with people living in urban areas showing a higher degree of knowledge. Also for countries the differences were significant (p < 0.001), with the highest score obtained for Portugal (3.7), and the lowest for Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Macedonia and Romania (3.5). However, despite these differences, the results showed that for all the countries the degree of knowledge was good (above 3.5), corresponding to a minimum level of knowledge of 70 per cent.

This work is considered important due to the wide coverage, including so many countries inclusive with different social and cultural settings. The study allowed concluding that, in general, the participants in the study were quite well informed about the benefits of dietary fibre for the improvement of human health, regardless of gender, level of education, living environment or country. This finding is very relevant considering the diversity of people that composed the sample and reinforces the necessity of continuing with educational policies aimed at providing the general population with the knowledge that might help them make appropriate food choices.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This study aims to address how the social structure of the hospitality management field has evolved from 1960 to 2016.

The informal social structure of the hospitality management literature was analyzed by collecting authorship data from seven hospitality management journals. Co-authorship analyses via network analysis were conducted.

According to the findings, throughout the history of hospitality management, international collaboration levels are relatively low. Based on social network analysis, the research community is only loosely connected, and the network of the community does not fit with the small-world network theory. Additional findings indicate that researchers in the hospitality management literature are ranked via degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality. Cliques, which contain at least five researchers, and core researchers are identified.

This study helps both scholars and practitioners improve the informal structure of the field. Scholars must generate strong ties to strengthen cross-fertilization in the field; hence, they collaborate with authors who have strong positions in the field. Specifically, this provides a useful performance analysis. To the extent that institutions and individuals are rewarded for publications, this study demonstrates the performance and connectivity of several key researchers in the field. This finding could be interesting to (post)graduate students. Hospitality managers looking for advisors and consultants could benefit from the findings. Additionally, these are beneficial for journal editors, junior researchers and agencies/institutions.

As one of the first study in the field, this research examines the informal social structure of hospitality management literature in seven journals.