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The literature on the relation between dividends and stock risks include mixed results. The related studies have reached either insignificant, or positive, or negative results. The authors offer a mathematical structure that addresses potential mutual benefits of dividends signaling under conditions of stock risks (systematic and unsystematic). The mathematical structure demonstrates explicitly a case of risk transfer. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential benefits to firms and stockholders when financial managers adjust dividends per share (DPS) using percentage change in the explanatory power of systematic and unsystematic risks. This perspective is derived from a practical consideration that dividends are part of stock returns that can be adjusted to take stock risks into account.

The paper utilizes the specifications of the two-stage (simultaneous) regression and partial adjustment model. The sample includes quarterly data for firms listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and NASDAQ for the period December 31, 1989-March 31, 2011.

The authors have reached general results based on hypotheses developed from related literature. The results show that: first, benefits of risk transfer can be realized. That is, firms as well as stockholders achieve benefits when the DPS are adjusted using percentage change in the explanatory power of systematic risk only; second, dividend growth rates are affected positively by changes in systematic risks; third, the highest stock returns in the market are reached with sharp decreases in dividend growth rates; fourth, in the highest returns quartile, firm size and time do not matter but the industry type does; and fifth, the associations between dividend growth rates, systematic, unsystematic risks, and stock returns are intrinsically nonlinear.

The study contributes to the literature in terms of first, providing practical insights on the financial strategies that help in the use of dividends to convey the right signals to stockholders, and second, empirically show the potential benefits of adjusting dividends growth rates according to systematic and unsystematic stock risks in a unified mathematical structure that adds to the current literature.

The purpose of this study is to provide the reader with a full study of the bat algorithm, including its limitations, the fields that the algorithm has been applied, versatile optimization problems in different domains and all the studies that assess its performance against other meta-heuristic algorithms.

Bat algorithm is given in-depth in terms of backgrounds, characteristics, limitations, it has also displayed the algorithms that hybridized with BA (K-Medoids, back-propagation neural network, harmony search algorithm, differential evaluation strategies, enhanced particle swarm optimization and Cuckoo search algorithm) and their theoretical results, as well as to the modifications that have been performed of the algorithm (modified bat algorithm, enhanced bat algorithm, bat algorithm with mutation (BAM), uninhabited combat aerial vehicle-BAM and non-linear optimization). It also provides a summary review that focuses on improved and new bat algorithm (directed artificial bat algorithm, complex-valued bat algorithm, principal component analyzes-BA, multiple strategies coupling bat algorithm and directional bat algorithm).

Shed light on the advantages and disadvantages of this algorithm through all the research studies that dealt with the algorithm in addition to the fields and applications it has addressed in the hope that it will help scientists understand and develop it.

As far as the research community knowledge, there is no comprehensive survey study conducted on this algorithm covering all its aspects.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship between intellectual capital (IC) (i.e. human capital, structural capital, relational capital) and service quality (SQ) within the Egyptian mobile telecommunications setting.

A valid research instrument was utilized to conduct a survey of 384 top- middle- and supervisory level managers from three Egyptian mobile telecommunications companies.

Hypotheses related to the relationship of human, structural and relational capital and their influence on SQ were tested. Results show that Egyptian mobile telecommunications companies have mostly emphasized the use of structural capital to boost their SQ.

This is an empirical research applied in the Egyptian telecommunications setting. Its relationships need further investigation in other settings and countries. Also, the traditional limitations of a cross-sectional study apply with respect to the attribution of causality and the time lag effects.

The optimal procedure for the Egyptian mobile telecommunications companies is to focus their efforts on managing all three components of IC in order to improve their SQ and performance.

This is one of the very few researches to study the relationship between intellectual capital and service quality and the first to investigate these relationships in the Arab Region within the mobile telecommunications setting.

The purpose of this paper is to review the service quality (SQ) models established in various empirical studies conducted across the world specifically applied to telecommunications services.

This paper examines different SQ models reported in the literature applicable to the telecommunications sector. The selected 29 studies were limited to empirical English studies based on survey data and statistical methods of analysis and having the SQ construct defined from the customers’ perspective.

The review of various SQ models in telecommunications revealed that the meaning of SQ may have some universal aspects, as demonstrated by the similarities in the underlying dimensions as proposed in different studies. This paper lends support to the contention that the dimensions of the telecommunications SQ construct and their importance vary with the cultural and country context. A proposed model for measuring telecommunications SQ was presented as a trial to extract the best of previous models.

This paper reviews only empirical studies based on survey data and statistical methods of analysis from 2001 to 2019.

The paper indicates that a generic instrument for measurement of SQ or even one specifically developed for telecommunications may not be applicable in its original form for all cultural contexts. The development of a customized scale, such as a modified SERVQUAL for measuring the SQ for a particular cultural or country context at that particular time, is warranted.

The reported study describes and contrasts a large number of SQ measurement constructs and highlights the usage of dimensions.

Purpose – The paper explains how internal reporting systems, as embedded practices informing organizational actions and “know-how”, contributed to the inertia in implementing a corporate form of governance in a transitional public organization in a developing country – Egypt.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper synthesizes an institutional theory framework in order to capture the case study mixed results. Drawing on DiMaggio and Powell's (1983) notions of isomorphic mechanisms, Ocasio (1999) and Burns and Scapens’ (2000) notions of organizations’ memory, history, cumulative actions and routines, Brunsson's (1994) notion of organizational institutional confusion as well as Carruthers's (1995) notion of “symbolic window-dressing” adoption of new practices, the paper explores the dynamic of a public hospital corporatization processes. Data collection methods include semi-structured interviews, documentary evidence and direct observation.

Findings – The case study evidence shows that the interplay between the new form of “corporate” governance and the intra-organizational power, routines and “know-how” created internal organizational confusion and changed organizational members’ narrative of risk and uncertainties.

Research limitations/implications – The paper does not reveal the role of reformers involved in the public sector “governance” reform in developing countries. Exploring such a role goes beyond the scope of this paper and represents an area of future research.

Originality/value – The paper provides a comprehensive account of public sector “governance” reform in a developing nation, while exploring the role of management accounting and costing systems in facilitating or otherwise that reform processes.

Diabetes mellitus is becoming a growing concern worldwide. Hence, the purpose of this study is to assess the magnitude of poor glycemic control and to identify the determinants of poor glycemic control among diabetic patients attending a tertiary care hospital in Bangladesh.

This cross-sectional study was conducted among 732 diabetes patients seeking care at the outpatient department of Bangladesh Institute of Health Sciences Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Information, including glycemic status, was collected from patients’ medical records using a structured questionnaire.

About 87.6% of the patients were found to have poor glycemic control (glycosylated hemoglobin = 7%). Variables that were significant in bivariate analysis were put into a multivariate model where the factors associated with poor glycemic control were patients aged 41–60 years (odds ratio (OR)=2.26; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.19–4.32, p = 0.013), suffering from diabetes for > 7 years (OR = 1.84; 95% CI: 1.12–2.99, p = 0.015), using insulin (OR = 2.34; 95% CI: 1.23–4.47; p = 0.010) or diet alone (OR = 0.20; 95% CI: 0.05–0.80, p = 0.023) as a type of diabetes treatment and proper use of medicine (OR = 0.37; 95% CI: 0.17–0.82, p = 0.015).

The high prevalence of poor glycemic control among diabetic patients is evident; therefore, strategic management and proper attention focusing on the predictors of poor glycemic control are necessary to reduce the long-term complications of diabetes.

Text mining has been used for various knowledge discovery based applications, and thus, a lot of research has been contributed towards it. Latest trending research in the text mining is adopting the incremental learning data, as it is economical while dealing with large volume of information.

The primary intention of this research is to design and develop a technique for incremental text categorization using optimized Support Vector Neural Network (SVNN). The proposed technique involves four major steps, such as pre-processing, feature selection, classification and feature extraction. Initially, the data is pre-processed based on stop word removal and stemming. Then, the feature extraction is done by extracting semantic word-based features and Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). From the extracted features, the important features are selected using Bhattacharya distance measure and the features are subjected as the input to the proposed classifier. The proposed classifier performs incremental learning using SVNN, wherein the weights are bounded in a limit using rough set theory. Moreover, for the optimal selection of weights in SVNN, Moth Search (MS) algorithm is used. Thus, the proposed classifier, named Rough set MS-SVNN, performs the text categorization for the incremental data, given as the input.

For the experimentation, the 20 News group dataset, and the Reuters dataset are used. Simulation results indicate that the proposed Rough set based MS-SVNN has achieved 0.7743, 0.7774 and 0.7745 for the precision, recall and F-measure, respectively.

In this paper, an online incremental learner is developed for the text categorization. The text categorization is done by developing the Rough set MS-SVNN classifier, which classifies the incoming texts based on the boundary condition evaluated by the Rough set theory, and the optimal weights from the MS. The proposed online text categorization scheme has the basic steps, like pre-processing, feature extraction, feature selection and classification. The pre-processing is carried out to identify the unique words from the dataset, and the features like semantic word-based features and TF-IDF are obtained from the keyword set. Feature selection is done by setting a minimum Bhattacharya distance measure, and the selected features are provided to the proposed Rough set MS-SVNN for the classification.

The wave of popular unrest in the Arab world reached Syria in March 2011, and what started as peaceful demonstrations with simple demands of justice and freedom turned into a brutal armed conflict and a full-scale civil war. Over seven years of conflict resulted in the deaths of over half a million Syrians, the forced displacement of millions more, and a huge loss of the country's social and physical structures. What began as another Arab Spring movement against a dictatorial regime has turned into a proxy war that has attracted the interests of the world and regional powers. The paper discusses Syria's political history and investigates the motives for the Syrian uprising and argues that it is related to socio-economic deprivations rather than sectarianism. The work underlines the interests of the countries involved in the Syrian conflict focusing on Russia, USA, Iran, and Turkey, as well as their contribution to the future reconstruction of the country.

Over the past few years, the Syrian regime and its allies targeted many cities and destroyed opposition-held neighborhoods. The work considers if this destruction was part of an overall strategy adopted by the al-Assad regime to terrorize those who opposed it and change Syria demographically, examining the new laws issued by the government to transfer public properties into the hands of its loyal businessmen factions, as in the case of the reconstruction project in the city of Homs.

Seven years of war exhausted Syria's financial stocks, and the country (and in turn the regime) is suffering the consequences of military spending. But like any other war, destruction is also a great opportunity to generate money through reconstruction and growth. It is a “win-win situation”; the regime will use the fund designated for reviving the country to its own benefit, gaining future profits. Already invested in the conflict, involved countries will be part of the reconstruction process to secure their presence and control in Syria.

United Nations agencies like UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) are working closely with the Syrian regime and its governmental representatives. This research examines their involvement and how their ‘humanitarian mission' is being exploited to prop up the al-Assad regime.

This research seeks to evaluate the impact of applying lean construction principles on the performance of reinforcement operations using a discrete-event simulation (DES) approach.

Process mapping of reinforcements operations was first established through field observation and interviews with construction managers involved in the selected project. Subsequently, quantitative data were gathered and then used to identify the best probabilistic density functions for each activity duration based on the fit-quality tests. Upon testing the validity of the real-world model, a lean simulation model was developed, using ARENA software, to investigate the impact of lean construction principles on the performance of such processes.

Lean principles are effective in enhancing the performance of the selected construction process. Output performance measurements for real-world model and lean model revealed that lean construction principles led to 41% improvement in process productivity, 14% enhancement in process efficiency and 17% reduction in cycle time.

The statistical findings only represent the process under study (reinforcement process) and cannot be generalized to other construction activities. In order to draw generalizable conclusions, future works are needed to extend this study to different project sizes and more complex construction processes (e.g. bricklaying process and concrete pouring operations). Moreover, there are other factors such as labor skills, rework and uncertainty, site conditions that require further analyses for leaner construction projects.

The methodology and the techniques presented in this work can be used for decision making by analyzing various lean construction scenarios and evaluating their impacts on performance outcomes of any construction process prior to real-world implementation.