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In the state of Hawaii, it has been shown that certain ethnic minority groups, such as Filipinos and Pacific Islanders, suffer disproportionally high rates of cardiovascular disease, evidence that local health-care systems and governing bodies fail to equally extend the human right to health to all. This study aims to examine whether these ethnic health disparities in cardiovascular disease persist even within an already globally disadvantaged group, the houseless population of Hawaii.

A retrospective chart review of records from Hawaii Houseless Outreach and Medical Education Project clinic sites from 2016 to 2020 was performed to gather patient demographics and reported histories of type II diabetes, obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension and other cardiovascular disease diagnoses. Reported disease prevalence rates were compared between larger ethnic categories as well as ethnic subgroups.

Unexpectedly, the data revealed lower reported prevalence rates of most cardiometabolic diseases among the houseless compared to the general population. However, multiple ethnic health disparities were identified, including higher rates of diabetes and obesity among Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders and higher rates of hypertension among Filipinos and Asians overall. The findings suggest that even within a generally disadvantaged houseless population, disparities in health outcomes persist between ethnic groups and that ethnocultural considerations are just as important in caring for this vulnerable population.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study focusing on ethnic health disparities in cardiovascular disease and the structural processes that contribute to them, among a houseless population in the ethnically diverse state of Hawaii.

Homelessness has many causes and also is stigmatized in the United States, leading to much misunderstanding of its causes and what policy solutions may ameliorate the problem. The problem is of course getting worse and impacting many communities far removed from the West Coast cities the authors examine in this study. This analysis examines the socioeconomic variables influencing homelessness on the West Coast in recent years. The authors utilize a panel fixed effects model that explicitly includes measures of healthcare access and availability to account for the additional health risks faced by individuals who lack shelter. The authors estimate a spatial error model (SEM) in order to better understand the impacts that systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have on a variety of factors that directly influence productivity and other measures of welfare such as income inequality, housing supply, healthcare investment, and homelessness.

Professional sports teams employ highly paid managers and coaches to train players and make tactical and strategic team decisions. A large literature analyzes the impact of manager decisions on team outcomes. Empirical analysis of manager decisions requires a quantifiable proxy variable for manager decisions. Previous research focused on manager dismissals, tenure on teams, the number of substitutions made in games or the number of healthy players on rosters held out of games for rest, generally finding small positive impacts of manager decisions on team success.

The authors quantify manager decisions by developing a novel measure of game-specific coaching decisions: the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) of playing-time across players on a team roster over the course of a season.

Evidence from two-way fixed effects regression models explaining observed variation in National Basketball Association team winning percentage over the 1999–2000 to 2018–2019 seasons show a significant association between managers’ allocation of playing time and team success. A one standard deviation change in playing-time HHI that reflects a flattened distribution of player talent is associated with between one and two additional wins per season, holding the talent of players on the team roster constant. Heterogeneity exists in the impact across teams with different player talent.

This is one of the first papers to examine playing-time concentration in the NBA. The results are important for understanding how managerial decisions about resource allocation lead to sustained competitive advantage. Linking coaching decisions to wins can help teams to better promote this core product.

While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

The construction industry is widely recognized as one of the most hazardous sectors in the world. Despite extensive research on safety management, a critical issue remains that insufficient attention is devoted to safety practices in rural areas. Notably, accidents frequently occur during the construction of rural self-built houses (RSH) in China. Safety management tends to be overlooked due to the perceived simplicity of the construction process. Furthermore, it is essential to acknowledge that China currently lacks comprehensive laws and regulations governing safety management in RSH construction. This paper aims to analyze the behavior of key stakeholders (including households, workmen, rural village committee and the government) and propose recommendations to mitigate safety risks associated with RSH construction.

This paper applies evolutionary game theory to analyze the symbiotic evolution among households, workmen and rural village committee, in situations with or without government participation. Additionally, numerical simulation is utilized to examine the outcomes of various strategies implemented by the government.

Without government participation, households, workmen, and rural village committee tend to prioritize maximizing apparent benefits, often overlooking the potential safety risks. Numerical simulations reveal that while government involvement can guide these parties towards safer decisions, achieving the desired outcomes necessitates the adoption of reasonable and effective strategies. Thus, the government needs to offer targeted subsidies to these stakeholders.

Considering that during the construction phase, stakeholders are the main administrators accountable for safety management. However, there exists insufficient research examining the impact of stakeholder behavior on RSH construction safety. This study aims to analyze the behavior of stakeholders about how to reduce the safety risks in building RSH. Thus, the authors intend to contribute to knowledge in this area by establishing evolutionary game model. Firstly, this study carried out a theoretical by using tripartite evolutionary game to reveal the reasons for the high safety risk during building RSH. Practically, this research points out the important role of households, workmen and rural village committee in improving safety management in rural areas. Besides, some suggestions are proposed to the government about how to reduce construction safety risks in rural areas.

Although governments have used social media platforms to interact with the public in an attempt to minimize anxiety and provide a forum for public discussion during the pandemic, governments require sufficient crisis communication skills to engage citizens in taking appropriate action effectively. This study aims to examine how the National Health Commission of China (NHCC) has used TikTok, the leading short video–based platform, to facilitate public engagement during COVID-19.

Building upon dual process theories, this study integrates the activation of information exposure, prosocial interaction theory and social sharing of emotion theory to explore how public engagement is related to message sensation value (MSV), media character, content theme and emotional valence. A total of 354 TikTok videos posted by NHCC were collected during the pandemic to explore the determinants of public engagement in crises.

The findings demonstrate that MSV negatively predicts public engagement with government TikTok, but that instructional information increases engagement. The presence of celebrities and health-care professionals negatively affects public engagement with government TikTok accounts. In addition, emotional valence serves a moderating role between MSV, media characters and public engagement.

Government agencies must be fully aware of the different combinations of MSV and emotion use in the video title when releasing crisis-related videos. Government agencies can also leverage media characters – health professionals in particular – to enhance public engagement. Government agencies are encouraged to solicit public demand for the specific content of instructing information through data mining techniques.

The effectiveness of rhetorical structure is essential to communicate key messages in research articles (RAs). The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) has led to unclear patterns and practice of using rhetorical structures. Understanding how RAs are constructed in LIS to facilitate effective scholarly communication is important. Numerous studies investigated the rhetorical structure of RAs in a range of disciplines, but LIS articles have not been well studied.

In this study, the authors encoded rhetorical structures to 2,216 articles in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology covering a period from 2001 to 2018 with the approaches of co-word analysis and visualization. The results show that the predominant rhetorical structures used by LIS researchers follow the sequence of Introduction-Literature Review-Methodology-Result-Discussion-Conclusion (ILMRDC).

The authors' temporal examination reveals the shifts of evolutionary pattern of rhetorical structure in 2008 and 2014. More importantly, the authors' study demonstrates that rhetorical structures have varied greatly across research areas in LIS community. For example, scholarly communication and scientometrics studies tend to exclude literature review in articles.

The present paper offers a first systematic examination of how rhetorical structures are used in a representative sample of a LIS journal, especially from a temporal perspective.