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The presence of green spaces plays a vital role in promoting urban sustainability. Urban green parks (UGPs) help create sustainable cities while providing fundamental ecological functions. However, rapid urbanization has destroyed crucial green areas in Ranchi City, endangering inhabitants’ health. This study aims to locate current UGPs and predict future UGP sites in Ranchi City, Jharkhand.

It uses geographic information system (GIS) and analytical hierarchical process (AHP) to evaluate potential UGP sites. It involves the active participation of urban communities to ensure that the UGPs are designed to meet dweller’s needs. The site suitability assessment is based on several parameters, including the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), land use and land cover (LULC), population distribution, PM 2.5 levels and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. The integration of these factors enables an evaluation of potential UGP’s sites.

The findings of this research reveal that 54.39% of the evaluated areas are unsuitable, 15.55% are less suitable, 12.76% are moderately suitable, 11.52% are highly suitable and 5.78% are very highly suitable for UGPs site selection. These results emphasize that the middle and outer regions of Ranchi City are the most favorable locations for establishing UGPs. The NDVI is the most important element in UGP site appropriateness, followed by LULC, population distribution, PM 2.5 levels and the UHI effect.

This study improves the process of integrating AHP and GIS, and UGPs site selection maps help urban planners and decision-makers make better choices for Ranchi City’s sustainability and greenness.

Patriotism is often described as the “love of country” that individuals display in the acclamation of their national community. Despite the prominence of this sentiment in various societies around the world, organizational research on patriotism is largely absent. This omission is surprising because entrepreneurs, human resource (HR) divisions, and firms frequently embrace both patriotism and patriotic organizational practices. These procedures include (among other interventions) national symbol embracing, HR practices targeted toward military members and first responders, the adulation of patriots and celebration of patriotic events, and patriotic-oriented corporate social responsibility (CSR). Here, the authors argue that research on HR management and organization studies will likely be further enhanced with a deeper understanding of the national obligation that can spur employee productivity and loyalty. In an attempt to jumpstart the collective understanding of this phenomenon, the authors explore the antecedents of patriotic organizational practices, namely, the effects of founder orientation, employee dispersion, and firm strategy. It is suggested that HR practices such as these lead to a patriotic organizational image, which in turn impacts investor, customer, and employee responses. Notably, the effect of a patriotic organizational image on firm-related outcomes is largely contingent on how it fits with the patriotic views of other stakeholders, such as investors, customers, and employees. After outlining this model, the authors then present a thought experiment of how this model may appear in action. The authors then discuss ways the field can move forward in studying patriotism in HR management and organizational contexts by outlining several future directions that span multiple levels (i.e., micro and macro). Taken together, in this chapter, the authors introduce a conversation of something quite prevalent and largely unheeded – the patriotic organization.

Past research has shown there is a relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure. However, the majority of this research has centered on heterosexual participants. In this analysis, the author considers how this relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure may look within women and genderqueer individuals who are all AFAB (assigned female at birth) with 26 out of 30 participants identifying as LGBTQIA+. The author examines perceptions of body size, body hair, and genitals to consider how intersections of social structures – specifically internalized sexism, racism, and misogyny – influence the participants’ experience of sexual interactions. Both resistance and embodiment of traditional gender norms, even as queer women and genderqueer individuals, were examined in these narratives. The majority of the moments where traditional gender norms are examined describe situations when the participants were sexually interacting with cis-gendered men.

Purpose: This study investigates the role of telemedicine in sustaining healthcare systems in Europe, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focusses on how telemedicine serves as a strategic response to modern healthcare challenges, emphasising its efficiency, accessibility, and patient-centred nature.

Need for the study: The need for this study arises from the escalating demands on healthcare systems, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to understand the adoption of telemedicine practices across European Union (EU) countries and their impact on healthcare sustainability.

Methodology: This study employs hierarchical and K-Means clustering to analyse EU citizens’ attitudes towards teleconsultations during COVID-19. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used for data compression and insight extraction. Data is sourced from Eurofound’s 2020 and 2021 surveys, involving extensive participant responses across the EU.

Findings: The study’s findings reveal significant shifts towards digital healthcare solutions, such as an increase in online consultations and prescriptions. It identifies different patterns of telemedicine use across EU countries, influenced by socioeconomic and geographical factors. These findings offer insights into future healthcare policy and strategy development.

Practical implications: The findings provide valuable insights into the shifts in telemedicine adoption in the EU, highlighting the significance of economic and sociological factors in healthcare trends. This study stresses the importance of customising healthcare strategies to suit the unique needs and digital capabilities of different countries.

While government is known to provide political guidance and exercising its executive function, it is also has regulatory powers through laws it enacts. In fostering sustainability, it is important to inquire how government's role can be innovated to facilitate sustainability, particularly in the travel and tourism industry. By reviewing tourism governance literature and mapping governance roles in the travel and tourism industry, this chapter creates a policy framework that underscores a new approach to tourism governance. We underscore that government's role must pivot toward being more developmental than regulatory so that it can effectively stimulate the market to sustainability by fostering value creation, supporting manpower capacitation, ensuring health and safety, and protecting the environment. This can be done if government will not fix the market and promote free market policymaking.

Assembly action recognition plays an important role in assembly process monitoring and human-robot collaborative assembly. Previous works overlook the interaction relationship between hands and operated objects and lack the modeling of subtle hand motions, which leads to a decline in accuracy for fine-grained action recognition. This paper aims to model the hand-object interactions and hand movements to realize high-accuracy assembly action recognition.

In this paper, a novel multi-stream hand-object interaction network (MHOINet) is proposed for assembly action recognition. To learn the hand-object interaction relationship in assembly sequence, an interaction modeling network (IMN) comprising both geometric and visual modeling is exploited in the interaction stream. The former captures the spatial location relation of hand and interacted parts/tools according to their detected bounding boxes, and the latter focuses on mining the visual context of hand and object at pixel level through a position attention model. To model the hand movements, a temporal enhancement module (TEM) with multiple convolution kernels is developed in the hand stream, which captures the temporal dependences of hand sequences in short and long ranges. Finally, assembly action prediction is accomplished by merging the outputs of different streams through a weighted score-level fusion. A robotic arm component assembly dataset is created to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The method can achieve the recognition accuracy of 97.31% and 95.32% for coarse and fine assembly actions, which outperforms other comparative methods. Experiments on human-robot collaboration prove that our method can be applied to industrial production.

The author proposes a novel framework for assembly action recognition, which simultaneously leverages the features of hands, objects and hand-object interactions. The TEM enhances the representation of dynamics of hands and facilitates the recognition of assembly actions with various time spans. The IMN learns the semantic information from hand-object interactions, which is significant for distinguishing fine assembly actions.

As the Philippines enters into the era of the “next normal,” that is, from the pandemic era called the “new normal,” we look into how the Philippines' state of tourism and built environment sectors. We also revisit its situation having the “longest lockdown in the world” and look into iterations of socioeconomic models, business platforms, and other elements that lead to the dream of a postpandemic sustainable tourism industry. In this inquiry, we highlight the importance of elements of the built environment, both at the macroeconomic level and at the micro units of business, civil society, and the tourism sector at large. While there has been a substantive discussion on the nexus of the tourism and built environment sectors, little has been devoted to the challenges these intertwined sectors faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We suggest complementation of practices from the macroscale to the microlevel tourism and built environment sectors, and vice-versa, which will ensure the full complementation of the sectors. These proposals are in full contextualization of the objective toward the postpandemic continued recovery, growth, and sustainability, from the local, national, and the regional economy of Southeast Asia, and also to various parts of the world.

This paper examines the impact of board ethnic diversity on the level of compliance with international financial reporting standards (IFRS) disclosures.

Using a unique hand-collected dataset from South Africa, we develop a comprehensive disclosure index against 570 mandatory requirements of IFRS. Further, we employ the fixed-effects model to investigate whether board ethnic diversity affects IFRS disclosures.

We document a significant positive association between ethnic minority directors and IFRS disclosure levels. Furthermore, we reveal that non-busy ethnic minority directors have a greater impact on IFRS disclosure levels than their busy counterparts. Additional analyses show that ethnic minority directors have less impact on IFRS disclosure levels when their number exceeds two. Companies with more ethnic directors on audit committees are more likely to comply with IFRS disclosure requirements and ethnic diversity increases accounting disclosures irrespective of the level of ownership concentration.

Our findings shed new light on the impact of board ethnic diversity on firms’ compliance with IFRS disclosure requirements. The results are robust to alternative econometric techniques, proxies and potential endogeneity concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how chair-chief executive officer (CEO) generational difference is related to debt financing.

This paper adopts the pooled ordinary least squares and system generalized method of moments estimation procedures to analyze listed firms in Malaysia from 2013 to 2017.

The results reveal that chair-CEO generational difference is negatively associated with leverage. The evidence suggests that substantial age gaps between the chair and CEO precipitate cognitive conflicts, which lead to better monitoring and control. This results in better governance and less information asymmetry, causing firms to depend less on debt as a board monitoring mechanism. The findings provide support to the theory posited in this paper on the substitutability of chair-CEO generational difference and debt financing.

This is the first attempt to investigate the substitutability of chair-CEO generational difference and debt financing.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.