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Continuance usage of mobile applications (apps) has attracted much attention from scholars and enterprises, while the extant research mainly focuses on continuance intention. The inner effect mechanism of the characteristics of apps is still unclear. Under the tenet of continuance usage behaviour, through analysis of characteristics derived from online reviews, this paper aims to establish an effective model and discloses the commonalities and differences between two mainstream apps, which are entertainment and knowledge apps.

The authors collected reviews of TikTok and Zhihu, which are typical representatives of entertainment and knowledge apps, respectively, from 2018 to 2020. They then derive effect factors and establish the effect model using grounded theory. A deep comparison is then conducted. They analysed the similarities and differences in the general effect model, internal effect mechanism and detailed characteristics of the two types of apps.

Entertainment app and knowledge apps share the same general effect mechanism; that is, the effect chain of characteristics to perceived value then finally to continuance usage behaviour. However, obvious differences also exist in detailed and specific effects between the two apps.

The present research is among the first to have a deep analysis of the comparison of entertainment apps and knowledge apps under the context of continuance usage behaviour. The findings contribute to understanding continuance usage behaviours. Suggestions are proposed on how to promote apps, which may benefit app managers.

Introduces a framework for benchmarking organisations – “evolutionary benchmarking”. Discusses the concept and operation of the framework, along with its proposed advantages in aiding benchmarking. The benchmarking approach proposed utilises an evolutionary classification method called cladistics. Uses an example classification of automotive assembly plants to show how the proposed framework helps benchmarking in terms of: providing a framework for representing benchmarking information; enhancing the quality and validity of the information according to the classification rules of parsimony, congruence and homology; and providing a comparison that indicates how the practices should be adopted. This framework is considered to be useful to researchers who study benchmarking methodologies and those that categorise the findings of benchmarking studies.

Although the organizational identity (OI) construct (Albert & Whetten, 1985) is now in its fourth decade, research in the field has been somewhat uneven, particularly with respect to an essentialist view and hypothetico-deductive type of studies. Believing that this stems in large part from insufficient construct clarity (Suddaby, 2010), this theory-development initiative presents an expanded conceptual framework. The authors exploit several key elements of individual identity and make the case for using these as the basis for conceptualizing an organizational-level equivalent. Starting with the premise that an individual’s identity is the product of comparisons, two dimensions are identified: the type of comparison (similarity, difference), referred to as the “identity conundrum,” and the object of comparison (self–other, self–self), referred to as the “identity perspective.” The authors then propose a four-cell distinctive conceptual domain for OI and explore its implications for scholarship.

To ensure health, social and criminal justice services are suited to the complex and dynamic needs of people with learning/intellectual disabilities (LD) at risk of offending, it is important to systematically analyse the needs and characteristics of this population. This study aimed to analyse the patterns of referrals to a single community forensic LD service before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A structured audit was conducted on all referrals to the service (n = 37) across a three-year period (May 2019 – end of July 2022).

The majority of the overall sample were male (36, 97%) and Caucasian (24, 65%) with a mean age of 32.9 years and mild LD. The most prevalent current offending type was sexual offending (17, 44%), whereas the most prevalent historical offending type was violence (17, 35%). The most common service/function offered by the service was advice and consultation to other professionals and agencies (10, 19%). The service user and forensic/legal characteristics measured did not differ significantly before and during COVID-19.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the project is the first to systematically analyse and compare community forensic LD service referral patterns before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also provides an example of how a structured audit tool can be used to benefit individual services and the wider literature on assessing the needs and characteristics of adults with LD who live in the community and are at risk of [re]offending.

This paper examines to what extent formal training targeted to workers aged 45 and over could enhance their knowledge transmission activities specifically in changing work environments. This is a key issue for human resources practitioners. Allowing older workers to keep on interacting with their colleagues and transmitting their knowledge acquired through experience reduces the risk for firms of losing critical knowledge assets.

The authors use French-matched employer–employee data to estimate the effect of participation in training sessions intended to support change on the probability for workers aged 45–59 of frequently showing work practices to their co-workers. To account for selection bias in training, the authors reduce the group of untrained workers to those who wanted to attend a training session but had to cancel their participation for exogenous reasons. Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008) show that this is a valid approximation of a random assignment to training.

Training with the intention to support change for workers aged 45 and more significantly increases knowledge transmission for training participants. This effect is not strictly related to a supervising role as it is significant for workers without subordinates; it holds when the authors address the selection bias in training by narrowing down the comparison group. When training comes as a response to mitigate the potential negative effects of technological or organizational changes in the work environment, it helps workers aged 45–59 maintain their contribution to the knowledge base of the production.

Our findings suggest that two main aspects have to be borne in mind when assessing the effectiveness of training for older workers. First, the reasons for training must be carefully considered, especially if it occurs in response to technological or organizational change in the workplace. Second, the continuation of interactions between older workers and their co-workers must be factored. If the public debate acknowledges that employee learning and development is critical in times of structural change and crisis, the outcomes of knowledge transmission within workplaces in terms of job satisfaction, turnover intentions, productivity or innovation, which the authors do not cover in this paper, deserve further investigations. In particular, the authors believe that studying how the training that supports technological and organizational change influences the relationship between age diversity and firm productivity is a promising avenue for future research.

The implication of this article for human resource managers is that there may be a substantial cost to not updating the skills of older workers after technological or organizational change. Indeed, it is likely that a large proportion of jobs will only be partially automated, which implies that while some tasks will disappear, rendering the corresponding skills obsolete, others will persist and the skills associated with them will remain useful to organizations. If older workers are excluded from their work collectives after these changes, because their skills have not been updated through training, the knowledge from their accumulated experience that remains valuable will be irrevocably lost when they retire.

This study sheds a new light on the effectiveness of older workers’ training. Some contributions argue that training for older workers is not very effective because it has no significant effect on employment duration, earnings or relative productivity. The authors show that specific types of training to update skills after a technological or organizational change allow older workers to keep interacting with their co-workers and pass on their knowledge gained through experience, thereby reducing the risk for firms of losing critical knowledge assets.

Biometric techniques, such as fingerprint verification, iris or face recognition, retina analysis and hand‐written signature verification, are increasingly becoming basic elements of authentication and identification systems. However, any human physiological or behavioural traits serving as biometric characteristics are personal data protected by privacy protection legislation. To address related issues, this paper examines these classes of biometrics according to data protection principles, purpose, proportionality and security, provided in international legislation. This analysis leads to the desired properties of biometric systems in the form of functional and non‐functional requirements, in order to support developers minimising the risk of being non‐compliant to privacy protection legislation, and to increase user acceptance.

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public events.

This study constructed the severity assessment system of public events from the dimensions of the netizens' role, the Internet media's role, the spread of public events and the attitudes and feelings of netizens. The method of analyzing the influence tendency of the public event severity indicators was proposed. A total of 1,107,308 microblogging entries regarding four public events were investigated. The severity of public events was divided into four levels.

It is found that serious public events have higher indicator values than medium level events on the microblogging platform. A quantitative severity classification standard for public events was established and the early warning mechanism of public events was built.

Microblogging and other social media platforms provide rich clues for the real-time study and judgment of public events. This study only investigated the Weibo platform as the data source. Other social media platforms can also be considered in future.

Different from the ex-post evaluation method of judging the severity of public events based on their physical loss, this study constructed a quantitative method to dynamically determine the severity of public events according to the clues reflected by social media. The results can help the emergency management departments judge the severity of public events objectively and reduce the subjective negligence and misjudgment.

This paper aims to investigate the features of single phase shaded pole stator with squirrel–cage rotor or permanent magnet rotor, that leads to an investigation of these topoloties as induction motor or synchronous motor. The comparative analysis is realised for the following three topologies: single phase shaded pole induction motor (SPIM) with squirrel–cage rotor, the second topology (single phase synchronous motor) has the same stator configuration but with permanent magnet rotor and the third investigated topology is similar to the second one, where the stator poles instead of iron steel are made of soft composite material.

The investigation in this work starts with a performance analysis of single-phase SPIM. Afterwards for the same stator topology the squirrel rotor is replaced with a two-pole permanent magnet rotor and the same performance analysis is realised for this topology. Finally, the second topology is improved bay replacing the iron steel stator poles with stator poles made of soft magnetic composite material and performance analysis is realised for this third type of topology as well. The performance analysis of all topologies is realised by implementation of finite element method and finite element analysis.

The presented data and diagrams from the realized investigation show that single phase synchronous motor with shaded pole stator has an improved characteristics in comparison with the initial single-phase SPIM. Finally, the third topology realized on the bases of the single-phase synchronous motor has the best performance characteristics due to the implementation of soft magnetic material in the realization of the stator poles. The proposed methodology for structural and performance improvement of a single-phase SPIM topology opens the possibility for additive manufacturing application and significant cost reduction.

The focus was put on exploration the possibilities of the single-phase shaded pole stator topology for application in low-power and low-cost single phase self-starting motors. By simple replacement of the squirrel–cage rotor, in the reference AKO-16 motor, with one-piece ferrite permanent magnet rotor, the self-starting single phase synchronous motor was derived. In the next step, owing to simplify the SPPM motor production process and manufacturing, the stator poles instead of iron steel lamination were made of soft composite material Somaloy®. It opens the possibility for additive manufacturing application and significant cost reduction.

The research in this paper helps to understand the difference between the Eulerian method and the Lagrangian method in describing the performance of Pelton turbine buckets, so as to improve the design level and design efficiency of the runner.

This paper used DualSPHysics to calculate the unsteady flow of the Pelton turbine runner bucket and compared it with the mesh-based method to explore the difference between mesh-based and particle-based methods in torque curves, jet flow patterns and pressure characteristics.

It is noted that the particle-based method is challenging to compare with the mesh-based method concerning accuracy. In addition to better describing the free water film, the particle method also captures many droplets near the water film, but it cannot well describe the negative pressure region on the bucket back and the resulting jet interference after cutting off the jet. Compared with the mesh-based method, the pressure measurement points obtained by the particle-based method generally have shorter periods and violent fluctuations, and the pressure value of some points is underestimated.

This paper helped to calculate the unsteady characteristics of the Pelton turbine by Fluent, CFX and DualSPHysics; exploration jet flow pattern differences between the mesh and meshfree methods; prediction of the flow interference between the bucket back and the jet and the pressure curve of SPH usually has a shorter period and violent fluctuations.

This paper aims to identify the determinants of school choice and factors that define the success of a school as perceived by the parents and then compare “Public” and “Private” schools with respect to the explored criteria to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the institutions.

The study is based on 1,121 quantitative data collected through survey questionnaire from the parents living in urban areas of Bangladesh. The school choice model was developed and validated by applying structural equation modeling.

This paper offers a statistically significant, robust and reliable five-dimensional 23-item school choice model that includes both school characteristics and preferred outcomes as perceived by the parents. Characteristic-wise comparisons in terms of characteristics revealed that public schools are superior to private institutions in fulfilling several choice criteria such as parents–teacher relationships, performance of the teachers, offerings of special programs, safety assurance in the campus and in having bigger campus with playground. On the other hand, private schools dominate in providing better educational environment, arranging training to the teachers, ensuring satisfactory library services and delivering information effectively to the parents. Among outcome determinants, government schools are well ahead in creating self-discipline, morality and good work habits among students. Private schools are superior in developing critical thinking skill of the kids.

There is a gap of comprehensive empirical study on school choice in South Asia region that includes both school characteristics and outcomes. Therefore, this paper contributes significantly to the relevant literature.