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The present study aims to investigate the inverse-thermocapillary effect in an evaporating thin liquid film of self-rewetting fluid, which is a dilute aqueous solution (DAS) of long-chain alcohol.

A long-wave evolution model modified for self-rewetting fluids is used to study the inverse thermocapillary characteristics of an evaporating thin liquid film. The flow attributed to the inverse thermocapillary action is manifested through the streamline plots and the evaporative heat transfer characteristics are quantified and analyzed.

The thermocapillary flow induced by the negative surface tension gradient drives the liquid from a low-surface-tension (high temperature) region to a high-surface-tension (low temperature) region, retarding the liquid circulation and the evaporation strength. The positive surface tension gradients of self-rewetting fluids induce inverse-thermocapillary flow. The results of different working fluids, namely, water, heptanol and DAS of heptanol, are examined and compared. The thermocapillary characteristic of a working fluid is significantly affected by the sign of the surface tension gradient and the inverse effect is profound at a high excess temperature. The inverse thermocapillary effect significantly enhances evaporation rates.

The current investigation on the inverse thermocapillary effect in a self-rewetting evaporating thin film liquid has not been attempted previously. This study provides insights on the hydrodynamic and thermal characteristics of thermocapillary evaporation of self-rewetting liquid, which give rise to significant thermal enhancement of the microscale phase-change heat transfer devices.

An infrared (IR) spectroscopic technique was used to determine the possible functional groups and chemical compounds present in commercially available ink-jet printing reactive dyes of four primary colours, i.e. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Although other instrumental analytical methods can help to determine the actual chemical composition of reactive dyes, the IR technique alone can still provide important structural information about the commercially available reactive dyes. Experimental results revealed that the reactive dyes under determination contained the same functional groups and chemical compounds as the reference reactive dyes.

Comfort is one of the most important attributes demanded by modern clothing consumers. It reflects the psychological feeling of a wearer, featured by three latent independent sensory factors: thermal comfort, tactile comfort, and psychological comfort. This paper presents a detailed discussion of the mechanisms influencing different thermal variables on the basis of the thermal comfort properties of 12 commercial types of uniform materials collected from different sources with various fiber content, blend composition, fabric weave, color and end uses. Results generated include thermal conductivity, air permeability and moisture permeability since it is well established that the movement of heat, moisture and air through a fabric are the major factors governing clothing thermal comfort. The initiated research is intended to enable a quantitative analysis of the comfort properties of uniform fabrics currently in use. The results will help establish comfort levels for a wide range of fabric types and assist in fabric selection during uniform product development. In addition, this study might have potential application to other clothing products as well.

The majority of Hong Kong filmmakers have pursued co-production with China filmmakers for having the Mainland market at the expense of local styles and sensitivities. To many critics, the two-part series of Ip Man and Ip Man II provide a paradigmatic case of film co-production that sell the tricks of Chinese kung fu, regurgitating the overblown Chinese nationalism against Japanese and kwai-lo. The purpose of this study is to rectify such observation of the Ip Man series.

The authors read the series deconstructively as a postcolonial text in which Hong Kong identity is inscribed in the negotiated space in between different versions of Chinese nationalism.

The analysis points to the varying subversive features in the series from which Hong Kong’s colonial experiences are tacitly displayed, endorsed and rewritten into the Chinese nationalistic discourse whose dominance is questioned, if not debased.

This paper advances new research insights into the postcolonial reinvention of kung fu film and, by implication, the Hong Kong cinema in general.

This paper aims to present the development and experimental study of a fully automated system using a novel laser additive manufacturing technology called laser foil printing (LFP), to fabricate metal parts layer by layer. The mechanical properties of parts fabricated with this novel system are compared with those of comparable methodologies to emphasize the suitability of this process.

Test specimens and parts with different geometries were fabricated from 304L stainless steel foil using an automated LFP system. The dimensions of the fabricated parts were measured, and the mechanical properties of the test specimens were characterized in terms of mechanical strength and elongation.

The properties of parts fabricated with the automated LFP system were compared with those of parts fabricated with the powder bed fusion additive manufacturing methods. The mechanical strength is higher than those of parts fabricated by the laser powder bed fusion and directed energy deposition technologies.

To the best knowledge of authors, this is the first time a fully automated LFP system has been developed and the properties of its fabricated parts were compared with other additive manufacturing methods for evaluation.

Polypyrrole (PPy)-coated fabric can be produced by means of chemical vapour deposition using pyrrole in the presence of an oxidizing agent. This electrically conductive fabric can be used as a strain sensor, and has high potential for producing wearable sensors that can detect the movements of the wearer. Since direct contact between this conductive fabric and human body will be involved, an investigation of the effect of different types of liquids such as sweat, rain water, drinking water, etc. on the electrical conductivity of fabric sensors is critical. Changes in the conductivity and surface morphology of the PPy-coated textile were analysed by placing few drops of liquid onto the fabrics. The results showed that the electrical resistance of the PPy-coated fabrics was different when the fabrics came into contact with different types of liquid. The phenomenon can be explained by both the fibre/fibre contact and yarn/yarn contact models as well as by the uniformity of the PPy-coating layer on the surface of the fibre.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons for an unusual over‐development of flood‐prone areas outside the river dyke in Hanoi, while analysing the urban development and disaster management policies, and to suggest policy measures for regulating the rapid urbanization incorporating catastrophic flood risk planning.

Urban development and disaster management policies were analyzed and key stakeholders were interviewed to discover the effectiveness of the policies and governance tasks.

A discrepancy was identified between the goals of urban development and disaster management. The negative side of this discrepancy has been amplified by ineffective Construction Regulations and a lack of specificity with regard to Ordinances on Dyke. These factors, combined with poor coordination and lack of motivation within the city authorities in managing the Riverside Urban Areas (RUA), have contributed to the over‐development, which consists primarily of squatting and illegal construction.

Along with a consideration of community perception of catastrophic flood risk in the RUA, which has been examined, the paper further analyses the effectiveness of related policies for catastrophic risk reduction in the RUA.

The paper identifies the following effective measures: build and share a knowledge base concerning catastrophic flood risk and sustainable ways of coping with the flood; be responsible and develop a commitment to manage flood‐prone areas; and develop better coordination between urban development and flood management.

The paper suggests new policy standards for managing the RUA development and reducing flood risks.

The study aims to analyze the relationship between tourists' satisfaction and their sense of belonging in a specific cultural destination by also investigating the moderating role of their on-site involvement, both offline (on-site activities at the destination) and online (social media activities). A further objective lies in exploring the relationship between tourists' sense of belonging and their adoption of environmentally responsible behavior while at the destination. Finally, the paper attempts to determine whether said behavior can predict tourists' pro-environmental behavior and recommendation intention.

To reach these objectives, a survey and a structural equation model, based on a sample of 647 visitors of an important world Heritage site UNESCO (i.e. Urbino), have been adopted.

Findings reveal a positive influence of sense of belonging on satisfaction and environmentally responsible behavior, which, in turn, influences pro-environmental behavior and Recommendation intention, thus triggering a virtuous process in the tourists' formation as responsible and loyal travelers. Moreover, results underline how the relationship between satisfaction and sense of belonging is significantly strengthened when tourists' on-site activity involvement increases. Conversely, the moderating role of social media involvement is not supported.

The present study offers important implications for different actors in the tourism sector, such as policy makers, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and tourism operators.

The present study explores the role of social media involvement, specifically during the tourist's holiday.

This study enriches the empirical evidence in the cultural tourism through an analysis focused on the tourists' perspective, especially by investigating the relationship between satisfaction and emotional constructs (i.e. sense of belonging) that are able to bring environmental and loyalty benefits to the destination. Moreover, although existing research has highlighted the positive influence of the tourists' involvement on their experience, there is a paucity of studies jointly analyzing the on-site and online activities in the sustainability field.

This paper aims to provide a predictive framework of customer churn through six stages for accurate prediction and preventing customer churn in the field of business.

The six stages are as follows: first, collection of customer behavioral data and preparation of the data; second, the formation of derived variables and selection of influential variables, using a method of discriminant analysis; third, selection of training and testing data and reviewing their proportion; fourth, the development of prediction models using simple, bagging and boosting versions of supervised machine learning; fifth, comparison of churn prediction models based on different versions of machine-learning methods and selected variables; and sixth, providing appropriate strategies based on the proposed model.

According to the results, five variables, the number of items, reception of returned items, the discount, the distribution time and the prize beside the recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) variables (RFMITSDP), were chosen as the best predictor variables. The proposed model with accuracy of 97.92 per cent, in comparison to RFM, had much better performance in churn prediction and among the supervised machine learning methods, artificial neural network (ANN) had the highest accuracy, and decision trees (DT) was the least accurate one. The results show the substantially superiority of boosting versions in prediction compared with simple and bagging models.

The period of the available data was limited to two years. The research data were limited to only one grocery store whereby it may not be applicable to other industries; therefore, generalizing the results to other business centers should be used with caution.

Business owners must try to enforce a clear rule to provide a prize for a certain number of purchased items. Of course, the prize can be something other than the purchased item. Business owners must accept the items returned by the customers for any reasons, and the conditions for accepting returned items and the deadline for accepting the returned items must be clearly communicated to the customers. Store owners must consider a discount for a certain amount of purchase from the store. They have to use an exponential rule to increase the discount when the amount of purchase is increased to encourage customers for more purchase. The managers of large stores must try to quickly deliver the ordered items, and they should use equipped and new transporting vehicles and skilled and friendly workforce for delivering the items. It is recommended that the types of services, the rules for prizes, the discount, the rules for accepting the returned items and the method of distributing the items must be prepared and shown in the store for all the customers to see. The special services and reward rules of the store must be communicated to the customers using new media such as social networks. To predict the customer behaviors based on the data, the future researchers should use the boosting method because it increases efficiency and accuracy of prediction. It is recommended that for predicting the customer behaviors, particularly their churning status, the ANN method be used. To extract and select the important and effective variables influencing customer behaviors, the discriminant analysis method can be used which is a very accurate and powerful method for predicting the classes of the customers.

The current study tries to fill this gap by considering five basic and important variables besides RFM in stores, i.e. prize, discount, accepting returns, delay in distribution and the number of items, so that the business owners can understand the role services such as prizes, discount, distribution and accepting returns play in retraining the customers and preventing them from churning. Another innovation of the current study is the comparison of machine-learning methods with their boosting and bagging versions, especially considering the fact that previous studies do not consider the bagging method. The other reason for the study is the conflicting results regarding the superiority of machine-learning methods in a more accurate prediction of customer behaviors, including churning. For example, some studies introduce ANN (Huang et al., 2010; Hung and Wang, 2004; Keramati et al., 2014; Runge et al., 2014), some introduce support vector machine ( Guo-en and Wei-dong, 2008; Vafeiadis et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2011) and some introduce DT (Freund and Schapire, 1996; Qureshi et al., 2013; Umayaparvathi and Iyakutti, 2012) as the best predictor, confusing the users of the results of these studies regarding the best prediction method. The current study identifies the best prediction method specifically in the field of store businesses for researchers and the owners. Moreover, another innovation of the current study is using discriminant analysis for selecting and filtering variables which are important and effective in predicting churners and non-churners, which is not used in previous studies. Therefore, the current study is unique considering the used variables, the method of comparing their accuracy and the method of selecting effective variables.

The purpose of this paper is to link public relations to peacebuilding. Although scholarship has discussed public relations as relationship management, the nexus between public relations and peace building has been understudied. To address this deficiency, this research studies the negotiations between the Government of Colombia and the FARC-EP separatist group that lead to the landmark peace treaty between the two entities that had fought for over five decades with thousands of deaths. Three research questions addressed the communication factors that contributed to the two sworn enemies – FARC-EP and the Colombian Government – finally sealing a peace agreement; the specific public relations strategies and techniques that led to relationship building between the two sides leading to the landmark peace agreement; and the use of the indicators of relationship building proposed by scholarship in the negotiations between the Colombian Government and FARC-EP.

The case study method was used and a purposive sample of news reports from three national newspapers at specific key dates yielding a final sample consisted of 504 articles was analysed. A codebook with deductive and inductive categories was developed specially to study the existing communication factors (RQ1), public relations strategies and techniques (RQ2), as well as contributions by relationship indicators (RQ3). Given the sensitivity of the issues, only secondary data could be relied upon for this study.

The results of RQ1 fall within the scope of Grunig’s (2001), Sriramesh’s (1992) and Hung’s (2001) notion of the personal influence model where the leveraging of individuals’ network is important to facilitate communication. Indeed, the relations already existing and established with third parties are revealed to be fundamental to the success of the negotiation process. As for RQ2, findings demonstrate that the Colombian Government used third-party mediation, principled and distributive strategies, while FARC-EP mainly used contending strategies. But results showed that both used compromising during the whole process, and that both transitioned from one-way asymmetrical strategies, such as principled or contending towards compromising along the peace talks. Finally, findings demonstrate evidence of the four indicators of the relationship and their link with public relations techniques. The most evidenced indicators of the relationship were trust, commitment and control mutuality. Trust was the indicator of the relationship the most evidenced in the Colombian case. The dimension was built during the whole process and evolved continually. Distrust was the total between the two enemies at the beginning of the pre-negotiation. However, as parties entered into a relationship, confidence and trust increased.

The inability to obtain primary data is the major limitation of this study. It was caused by the sensitivity of the topic.

This study links public relations to a very practical case that is also vastly understudied/underreported – peacemaking/peacebuilding – while also addressing communication by governments and civil society in Latin America – an area that is largely understudied.

This is the first study that links public relations with peacebuilding.