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It is commonly asserted that a lot of people may gain about 2.5 kg of weight or more over holiday periods, however data are limited. The purpose of this paper is to assess potential changes that may occur in body weight, body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference during Easter holidays.

A total of 138 college students participate in the study in the morning after a 12 h fasting. Body weight is assessed using an electronic scale (Seca ± 0.1 g), wearing minimal clothing. Paired t‐test is used to assess changes in body weight before and after a holiday period.

The mean (±SD) weight increases significantly during the holiday period (+1.5 ± 2.4 kg, p < 0.001) and (+1.7 ± 1.3 kg, p < 0.001) for both males and females, respectively. When subjects are classified by BMI as normal or overweight (OW)/obese, a significant 2.6 ± 3.5 kg gain is found (p < 0.05) in the OW/obese group (≥25 kg/m²). The average holiday gain is less than what is commonly asserted. This gain is not usually reversed and may contribute to the increase of body weight that frequently occurs during adulthood.

A convenience sample (college students), rather than a population‐based sample is used; also the activity level of the subjects is not measured, which might influence the body weight gain.

The paper should be of value to nutritionists and clinical dietetics.

Illicit drug use is a well-known global problem that has been noticed to be increased significantly among medical students. This study aims to assess the prevalence and consequences of illicit drug use among medical students in the country of Jordan using the validated Drug Abuse Screening Test-10 (DAST-10).

The authors used a cross-sectional, descriptive design to conduct this study. A total of 2,104 participants from six medical schools were included. A structured online-based English self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection.

Out of 2,104 included participants, 242 (11.5%) reported using illicit drugs in the past year. More than three-quarters (77%) of the drug users suffer from various degrees of problems related to drug use, ranging from risky (41%) to severe risk (6%). Drug use was found to be associated with gender, planned specialty and exposure to psychiatry training.

The cross-sectional design prevents from drawing cause-and-effect relationships and confirming how the tendency toward substance use is affected by the psychological state, sleep quality and exposure to psychiatry. Also, although it is important to measure the subjective observation of distress and sleep, objective estimates of psychological distress and sleep including actigraphy and sleep diary could be helpful to strengthen the findings. Also using an online survey with convenience sampling are some inevitable limitations with the present COVID-19 restrictions. Also, the nature of DAST-10 closed-ended questions precluded from accurately exploring the consequences of substance abuse.

Appropriate screening to identify medical students at risk for substance abuse and provide them with treatment referrals are strongly recommended in this study. In addition, medical schools should provide a comfortable environment that encourages a healthy lifestyle with a responsible attitude toward using drugs.

There is a dearth of information about illicit drug use among medical students, especially in the country of Jordan. The nature of their studies, the different stresses they experience and the impact imposed by other factors such as sociocultural all are likely to make medical students more susceptible to drug abuse. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first cross-national study of its kind in Jordan with a representative sample of 2,104 participants. We assessed the prevalence and consequences of self-reported illicit drug use and the sleep quality of medical students from all schools of medicine in Jordan.

The global economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused the closure of countless ethnic minority businesses (EMBs) worldwide, partly due to the public policy responses. This paper investigates whether EMBs’ entrepreneurial orientation (EO) mediates the impact of public policy responses to COVID-19 on their survival.

Utilizing institutional theory, the authors developed a novel conceptual framework that divides policy responses to COVID-19 into aggressive (imposing restrictions on movement, e.g. lockdowns) and less aggressive policy responses (not imposing restrictions on movement, e.g. social distancing). The authors then surveyed intra-regional EMBs, specifically businesses owned by ethnic minorities in the Kano and Katsina provinces of Nigeria, and analysed the data using structural equation modelling and analysis of variance (ANOVA).

The authors found that intra-regional EMBs in developing countries are very vulnerable to the public policy responses imposed by governments to curb COVID-19. Aggressive policy responses have a more significant negative effect on the survival of intra-regional EMBs than their less aggressive counterparts. Furthermore, the authors found that EO as a crisis response strategy significantly supports intra-regional EMBs in managing their vulnerability to the hostile institutional environment, reduces the adverse effect of public policy responses and stimulates their survival during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper contributes to the institutional theory of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)/entrepreneurship and the literature on EMBs by showing the role of EO in mediating the effects of COVID-19 institutional policies on the survival of intra-regional EMBs.

This paper aims to examine whether private healthcare entrepreneurship can flourish and overcome obstacles in cases of a free-access public health system and periods of strict public policies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the paper aims to illuminate the wider social role of private healthcare entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper adopts a qualitative methodological strategy through 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with the owners of diagnostic centres located in small Greek towns.

Private healthcare entrepreneurship flourished and played a significantly positive social role in the context of a degraded public health sector, which lacked investments for more than ten years and was further depleted by its recent focus on COVID-19 incidents. This paper reveals that although public policies that aimed to deal with COVID-19 produced serious consequences, business activity adapted to the new circumstances.

Future research can combine the findings of this paper with the views of stakeholders, policymakers and social actors.

This paper's value lies in its efforts to expand our current knowledge regarding the impact of COVID-19 public policies on entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to discuss characteristics of Korea’s system responses with a research framework of the structure, conduct and performance theory and explain the role of information, communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data from a technology-mediated control (TMC) perspective.

This study examines the contextual nature of Korea’s diagnostic, preventive and treatment efforts. Particular attention is paid to issues related to the effective use of Big Data analytics and its applications, reporting mechanisms and public safety measures. The research model defines key factors in assessing the effectiveness of Korea’s responses.

Findings of this research suggest: effective strategic planning and operational execution use well-tested and designed crisis-responsive manuals; linkage role of ICT/Big Data is prominent in trace, test and treat and participation (3T + P); and aggressive epidemic investigations require synergistic efforts of national and local government units, broad societal support and participation and contribution of global firms offering their domestic and global supply chain network capabilities.

The Korean Government's effective response experiences suggest the synergy of political, social, cultural and technological factors. Future studies may explore how personal privacy and public safety are both achieved in different social–cultural–political contexts (Ahn et al., 2020; Delgado et al., 2020; Sharma and Bashir, 2020). Other emerging organizational issues and international comparative studies are worth further investigation in future studies.

This case study suggests how to apply ICT capabilities for organizing a national response to the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) pandemic. Public and private partnership in the framework of sociotechnological synergy (i.e. integration of ICT and social orchestration) is essential for the 3T process. In support of public policy initiatives, global firms share their IT infrastructure and supply chain integration experiences to accommodate global-level crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study extends the TMC framework to a national level. In the adapted TMC framework, the control source, control target and linkage mechanism are specified. Using TMC, this shows the dynamic roles of ICT/Big Data in Korea’s COVID-19 response experiences.

The impacts of the COVID-19 are rapid and enormous. Despite the controversial early policy decisions and the rapid rise of confirmed patients, the world has recognized Korea’s effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The transition from high school to university poses many challenges for university students including dietary behaviors’ change and subsequent obesity risk. More tailored interventions and promotions to establish a healthier eating habit are needed to reduce obesity risks. The purpose of this paper is to investigate food intake differences on obesity risk among university students in China through exploring the differences of food intakes with gender, the year in college and body mass index (BMI).

Cross-sectional study was carried in five universities which were randomly selected in all the universities located in different geographical areas of Beijing, China. The sample consisted of 631 university students whom aged from 18 to 25 years. t-tests and one-way ANOVA tests were used to find differences of food intakes with gender, the year in college and BMI.

Having more consumption of food with high protein, high fat and high sugar, but less consumption of fruits and vegetables, may give university students a greater chance to be obese, and food intakes were significantly varied in different genders among Chinese university students.

There is a lack of evidence for investigating the differences of food intakes with gender on obesity among young adults in China. Findings of this study indicated that the food intakes of male students might make them more prone to obesity than female students, and suggested more tailored interventions, food marketing strategies and promotions on controlling students’ food intakes for a healthier life are needed.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the Questionnaire Eating Behaviours (QEB), developed by the Science Committee of Human Nutrition of the Polish Academy of Sciences, as an instrument to examine the opinions on food and nutrition and diet quality indicators in women in various age groups.

The study involved 161 healthy Polish women aged 18–92, divided into four age groups to assess the QEB questionnaire, as an instrument to examine the opinions on food and nutrition and diet quality indicators.

Women provided statistically significant responses to 40 per cent of the statements in the test. In the case of 60 per cent of responses proper answers increased with the age of the participant. Questionnaire determines that people whose opinions were more compliant with nutritional knowledge more often applied the principles of proper nutrition. Dependencies between the number of points from the test of opinions about food and nutrition and the Prohealthy-Diet-Index (pHDI-8) or the sum of points from the test and the Non-healthy-Diet-Index (nHDI-8) were indicated. People who obtained the higher pHDI-8 and the lower nHDI-8 coefficient better evaluated their diet.

The QEB questionnaire can be an effective, quick and cheap instrument recommended to examine the association between the opinion about food and nutrition and the quality of diet of people at various ages and useful in determining the directions of further education and improvement in the quality of diet, including its assessment in large population groups.

Due to the proliferation of generic medicines, pharmaceutical marketing has become increasingly competitive, and marketing executives are now focusing their attention on understanding the prescribing behaviour of physicians to enable them to devise marketing strategies that would put them at a superior business position relative to their competitors. Previous studies carried out either lack a sound theoretical foundation, or report contrasting results, making generalizations sketchy. Thus, a better understanding of attitude-prescribing axiom is needed. Underpinned by the theory of reasoned action (TRA), this study aims to empirically examine the factors that predict the prescribing behaviour of physicians.

A conceptual model was developed and tested on a sample of 355 respondents drawn from 76 private and 50 public hospitals in Sudan. The data set from the questionnaire survey included both general practitioners (N = 200) and specialists (N = 155). Primary data gathered were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The findings reveal that the prescribing behaviour of physicians is positively influenced by the physician’s attitude towards direct marketing, personal selling, educational travel and public relations, but negatively influenced by gifts. Besides, the moderating effect of subjective norms showed no significant influence on the relationship between attitude and prescribing behaviour. However, gender seems to moderate the attitude towards health sector-related charity on prescribing behaviour and the attitude towards scientific conferences on prescribing behaviour.

The findings gathered from this study offers a significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the essential factors that influence the prescribing behaviour of physicians in the hospital setting.

By examining the essential factors that predict physicians’ prescribing behaviour, pharmaceutical companies can improve their understanding of physicians’ attitudes towards the pharmaceutical promotional tools. This is an aspect that is ill reflected in the literature.

The authors have developed the “Ethernet Speaker” (ES), a network‐enabled single board computer embedded into a conventional audio speaker. Audio streams are transmitted in the local area network using multicast packets, and the ES can select any one of them and play it back. A key requirement for the ES is that it must be capable of playing any type of audio stream, independent of the streaming protocol, or the encoding used. The authors achieved this by providing a streaming audio server built using the kernel‐based audio stream redirector (ASR) in the OpenBSD kernel. The ASR accepts input from any of the existing audio file players, or streaming audio clients. Since all audio applications have to be able to use the system audio driver, this system can accommodate any protocol or file format, provided that there exists some compatible player running under OpenBSD. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the server as an ASR, the streaming protocol developed for this application, and the implementation of the client.

This paper aims to discuss problems, requirements and current trends for deploying group communication in real‐world scenarios from an integrated perspective.

The Hybrid Shared Tree is introduced – a new architecture and routing approach to combine network – and subnetwork‐layer multicast services in end‐system domains with transparent, structured overlays on the inter‐domain level.

The paper finds that The Hybrid Shared Tree solution is highly scalable and robust and offers provider‐oriented features to stimulate deployment.

A straightforward perspective is indicated in the paper for a mobility‐agnostic routing layer for future use.