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The purpose of this paper is to inform the readers of the design process and practical implications of a new gripping device created by the authors.

We have developed a novel gripping device based on the biomechanics of the feeding apparatus of the marine mollusk, Aplysia californica. The gripping device uses modified McKibben artificial muscles arranged in rings and placed in parallel. The rings contract sequentially to produce peristalsis, which moves a grasping mechanism back and forth through the rings.

The central grasper is capable of conforming to soft and irregular material.

This device could have novel applications both for removal of tissue in medical applications and for removing material from clogged plumbing lines.

This paper demonstrates the utility of using biological inspiration for developing novel robotic devices and suggests new ways of handling slippery, irregular, and fragile material.

In a democratic system such as the United States, freedom of expression and free speech are core values in the Constitution and fiercely protected by civil liberties organizations and advocates. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld the right to protest and to express what may be considered unpopular or dissenting opinions. However, the right does not extend to incitement of violence and the state is authorized to protect the safety of citizens. One of the most recent movements challenging the country’s recognition of freedom of expression has been the alt-right/white nationalist movement, particularly Richard Spencer who is a vocal white supremacist and president of the National Policy Institute. A number of universities such as Auburn University, Texas A&M, the University of Florida, and Michigan State University recently found themselves in the middle of a free speech and expression event versus the potential for political violence situation because of the rhetoric of Spencer’s White Lives Matter campus tour and possibility of protests or counter-protests following his speeches. This invites the question of to what extent a university can ban controversial speakers out of concern for violence and when must they allow controversial speech? The chapter will start by looking at state control of political protests and speech in the United States and then how similar dissent is addressed in other countries.

Internationally, dissent is often handled differently with much less tolerance and often a more confrontational response by the state. For example, following the Arab Spring and passage of restrictive laws to prohibit influencing public opinion, Saudi Arabia has seen a rise in political arrests as the state uses its authority to suppress political competitors and consolidate power. The State Security Agency, overseen by the king, claimed in September 2017 that a group of academics, scholars, writers, and leading Islamist figures were inciting violence and called for their arrest. This wave of arrests along with several prior ones and state exercise of media control, exemplifies Saudi Arabia’s desire to suppress dissent by exercising state control. In Venezuela, a law prohibiting messages of hate from being transmitted via broadcast and social media was passed, carrying a possible sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted. The Assembly claimed the law was intended to promote “peace, tolerance, equality, and respect,” but it has been criticized for suppressing extremist sectors of right-wing political groups in the country. Additional case studies of Uganda’s use of military forces to control public outcry over corruption and deteriorating public services will also be evaluated.

In an environment of constrained resources and related quality assurance efforts, a growing number of American institutions are tapping collaborative relationships to develop creative ways to advance institutional outcomes. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Consortium for Higher Education (SEPCHE), a non-profit organization incorporated in 1993, is a collaborative of eight private colleges and universities located in the Greater Philadelphia region. SEPCHE’s institutions are small to mid-sized colleges and universities, and like other institutions of higher education, they are increasingly challenged by several environmental factors including diminished growth in enrollment; reduced family financial capacity; limitations in availability and types of funding; and greater demand for accountability.

This chapter highlights the challenges faced by faculty to ensure that students are learning at the highest levels while balancing teaching, research and institutional responsibilities, and the role that collaborative professional development can play in helping faculty attend to these challenges. Several examples illustrate how faculty-led professional development efforts have expanded professional and research capacity efforts across institutions.

The chapter includes faculty perspectives on what has helped and hindered adoption of these efforts within and across institutions. It assesses institutional conditions and supports for sustained collaborations. These efforts are part of an initiative examining faculty work and student learning in the 21st century funded by the Teagle Foundation.

Women's rugby in South Africa is a recent development. Inaugurated four years after the professionalisation of the men's game in 1997, the ‘Springbok Women’ national team faced an uphill battle in their struggle to match the century-old reputation and international respect enjoyed by the male ‘Springboks’. The women's game grew slowly over the last two decades, starting from a low base with only a few clubs in 2000. Despite its designation as a national team with the title of ‘Springbok’ in 2012, the women's game on the national and club level remains an under-resourced largely amateur game with only a small group of semi-professionals. Given the country's lack of a dedicated professional league or national competition, the national team struggled in the international arena. Poor results, in the end, resulted in the prioritisation of rugby sevens, despite this shortened version retarding the growth of the traditional game. After two decades, the semi-professional ‘Women Springboks’, known as ‘Imbokodo’ or ‘grinding stone’ since 2019, is still facing salary discrimination, inadequate resourcing and a lack of genuine recognition as its exclusion from Team South Africa for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games demonstrated. At the start of the second decade of the millennium, the situation looks decidedly bleak for women's rugby in the country despite the South African Rugby Union's endorsement of World Rugby's international programme for game development.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

The demand for higher bandwidth has resulted in the development of mm-wave phased array systems. This paper aims to explore a technique that could be used to feed the individual antennas in a mm-wave phased array system with the appropriate phase shifted signal to achieve the required directivity. It presents differential Colpitts oscillators at 5 and 60 GHz that can provide differential output signals to the quadrature signal generators in the proposed phase shifter system.

The phase shifter system comprises a differential Colpitts voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) and utilizes the vector-sum technique to generate the phase shifted signal. The differential VCO is connected in the common-collector configuration for the 5-GHz VCO, and is extended using a cascode transistor for the 60-GHz VCO for better stability at mm-wave. The vector sum is achieved using a variable gain amplifier (VGA) that combines the in-phase and quadrature phase signal, generated from oscillator output using hybrid Lange couplers. The devices were fabricated using IBM 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS process, and simulations were performed with a process design kit provided by the foundry.

The measured results of the 5-GHz and 60-GHz VCOs indicate that differential Colpitts VCO could generate oscillator output with good phase noise performance. The simulation results of the phase shifter system indicate that the generation of signals with phases from 0° to 360° in steps of 22.5° was achieved using the proposed approach. A Gilbert mixer topology was used for the VGA and the linearity was improved by a pre-distortion circuit implemented using an inverse tanh cell.

The measurement results indicate that differential Colpitts oscillator in common-collector configuration could be used to generate differential VCO signals for the vector-sum phase shifter. The simulation results of the proposed phase shifter system at mm-wave show that the phase shift could be realised at a total power consumption of 200 mW.

This paper aims to present a survey of the perceptions of the barriers to implementing reverse logistics (RL) practices in South Australian (SA) construction organisations. Despite the extensive research on forward logistics and RL, there is a paucity of studies that examine the barriers to implementing RL particularly within the Australian construction industry. This study builds on the ongoing research being undertaken by the authors, entitled “Designing for reverse logistics (DfRL) within the building life cycle: practices, drivers and barriers”, which is examining the best practices and drivers that could be used as a “road map” for developing appropriate solutions for the successful implementation of RL.

Data were collected by utilising a triangulated data collection approach, a literature review and 49 questionnaires. The review of the literature identified 16 barriers to implementing RL. The quantitative survey data were subjected to descriptive and inferential statistics with correlation analysis to examine the relationships between different pairs of variables comprising RL’s critical barriers.

The following barriers were indicated as most significant: lack of incorporation of salvaged materials by designers; regulation restrictions to usage of recovered materials and components; potential legal liabilities; higher costs; and longer-time association with deconstructing buildings. The least ranked barriers were mostly drawn from the operational and industrial categories as being: organisational lack of support for deconstruction due to incompatible design; lack of organisational support for deconstructing buildings due to higher health and safety risks; and inadequate skills and experience for deconstruction (operational). The industrial barrier was related to “higher costs of salvaged materials in comparison to virgin products”.

First, the reported findings are focussed on one study that used questionnaire surveys within the construction industry; therefore, the results may not be generalisable to other contexts. Further, studies should be conducted and extended to other industrial sectors beyond the construction industry. Second, the quantitative study (n = 49) used a smaller sample, and the survey items were based on the review of the literature.

The identified barriers could be used as a “road map” for the development of appropriate solutions for the successful implementation of RL, and to improve the environment-related decision-making processes of contractors.

This study makes a contribution to the body of knowledge on the subject of RL within a previously unexplored SA context. In addition, the study provides some insights on the contributory effects of the barriers to the implementation of RL. It is the first work undertaken to determine the barriers to the adoption of RL within the SA construction industry.

Vocational courses in England support the progression to higher education (HE) of large numbers of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, yet there is little research exploring the college experiences of these young people prior to entering university. The purpose of this paper is to consider the experiences of young people on Level 3 Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) vocational courses in their progression to HE from differently positioned post-16 colleges in England.

A qualitative study was undertaken into the experiences of students on BTEC courses in four subject clusters (science, technology, engineering and maths, arts and humanities, social sciences and health) at both a Further Education College and a Sixth Form College in an area of multiple deprivation and low HE participation. Young people’s experiences of BTEC courses and the support and guidance they receive are explored through the conceptual lens of “possible selves” and using Bourdieu’s ideas of capital, habitus and field.

Pedagogies and practices on BTEC courses are found to support the development of relevant social and cultural capital and help young people formulate well-articulated “possible selves” as university students, even amongst students who previously had not considered university as an option. The findings illustrate how differently positioned colleges support students’ progression and identify challenges presented by an increasingly stratified and marketised system.

The study highlights the transformative potential of BTEC courses and their role in supporting progression to HE amongst young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The current emphasis on standardisation and rigour as mechanisms to better equip students for HE neglects the unique contribution BTEC pedagogies and practices make to encouraging HE participation. A Bourdieusian and “possible selves” theoretical framework has provided new insights into these valuable learning processes.

Corporations and businesses have been a major influence on society since before the industrial revolution, but academic focus on corporate responsibilities is a recent phenomenon which focuses predominantly on globalised multi-national corporations of the late twentieth century. The purpose of this paper is to consider the evolution of the corporate responsibility and community involvement tracing the development of corporate behaviours in the UK from medieval guilds to the modern form of corporation seen at the end of the last century.

The analysis considers the institutional forces which have shaped responsible business behaviours in a context of changing power and influence.

Drawing on Weber's notion of the ideal-type, this paper demonstrates that many “modern” corporate social responsibility (CSR) concepts such as codes of conduct, stakeholder consultation, and corporate donations have considerable heritage.

This paper develops an important precedent by examining the evolution of CSR and other aspects of corporate engagement. It develops a long-term instrumental context for corporate donations, whilst revealing that practices such as employee volunteering are considerably more recent, and less institutionally developed.

Despite extensive research on supply chain management (SCM), the literature lacks a perspective to empirically assess the importance of poverty alleviation in social business. Using resources dependence theory, the purpose of this study is to analyze to ascertain whether financial innovation has a powerful solution for business sustainability and, hence, poverty alleviation in developing countries. This study reviews the financial innovations offered by Dompet Dhuafa Republika in integrated supply chain management (ISCM) of smallholder livestock business through Tebar Hewan Kurban (Spreading Sacrificial Animals) program to overcome capital and marketing problems at the farmer level and distribute Qurban meat to the recipients.

This study was conducted using descriptive qualitative method. The data were obtained through a field survey, by interviewing two crowdfunding-based investment companies, 250 partner farmers, program managers and assistants, marketing partners, donors/consumers/person who sacrifice and Mustahik (recipients of Qurban meat) involved in program implementation, using purposive sampling method. Focus group discussion was conducted with selected panelists to validate the results of the field survey.

The results of this study showed that the Tebar Hewan Kurban program provides greater benefits to farmers, while increasing the distribution of Qurban meat to be more equitable. The role of moneylenders and middlemen can also be eliminated. Donors feel satisfied because their goals are fulfilled in the Qurban ritual. Program implementers and investors also got decent returns. ISCM is very feasible to be developed on a wider scale, to improve the welfare of farmers or fishermen.

This study used a set of samples of the assisted areas from only one institution, which may lead to institution-specific results. Although the sample is small, the results of this study are expected to provide new insights into the implementation of the Qurban, which will provide more profits and benefits for partner farmers. In broader practice, the program flow is worth considering compared to similar programs in other institutions, in Indonesia or abroad. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the field survey and focus group discussion were carried out online.

The results show that ISCM is able to increase the income of farmers. Practically, this program can be duplicated in similar institutions, as well as in government or non-government organizations, in Indonesia and abroad, that have the same context and activity.

This study offers several social contributions by exploring how and why ISCM can eliminate the role of moneylenders and middlemen, increasing the small farmers' income, providing reasonable profits to parties involved in marketing and satisfying donors and equitable distribution of Qurban meat.

This study contributes to the literature by confirming the higher impact of ISCM in social business on poverty alleviation. Therefore, this paper provides an alternative solution to increase the income of small farmers through the supply of animals for Qurban or other religious rituals through ISCM arrangements.