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The visualization of ranking information in global public policy is moving away from traditional “league table” formats and toward dashboards and interactive data displays. This paper explores the rhetoric underpinning the visualization of ranking information in such interactive formats, the purpose of which is to encourage country participation in reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper unpacks the strategies that the visualization experts adopt in the measurement of global poverty and wellbeing, focusing on a variety of interactive ranking visualizations produced by the OECD, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the ‘Our World in Data’ group at the University of Oxford. Building on visual and discourse analysis, the study details how the politically and ethically sensitive nature of global public policy, coupled with the pressures for “decolonizing” development, influence how rankings are visualized. The study makes two contributions to the literature on rankings. First, it details the move away from league table formats toward multivocal interactive layouts that seek to mitigate the competitive and potentially dysfunctional pressures of the display of “winners and losers.” Second, it theorizes ranking visualizations in global public policy as “alignment devices” that entice country buy-in and seek to align actors around common global agendas.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the impact of persistent racial bias, discrimination and racial violence is facilitated by otherwise well-intentioned individuals who fail to act or intercede. Utilizing the aversive racism framework, the need to move beyond awareness raising to facilitate behavioral changes is discussed. Examining the unique lens provided by the aversive racism framework and existing research, the bystander effect provides important insights on recent acts of racial violence such as the murder of Mr. George Floyd. Some promise is shown by the work on effective bystander behavior training and highlights the need for shared responsibility in preventing the outcomes of racial violence and discrimination to create meaningful and long-lasting social change.

This paper uses literature based on the aversive racism framework together with the literature on the bystander effect to understand the factors, conditions and consequences for lack of intervention when the victim is African American. This paper also provides evidence and theory-based recommendations for strategies to change passive bystanders into active allies.

The use of the aversive racism framework provides a powerful lens to help explain the inconsistencies in the bystander effect based on the race of the victim. The implications for intervention models point to the need for behavioral and competency-based approaches that have been shown to provide meaningful change.

Several different approaches to address incidents of racial aggression and violence have been developed in the past. However, given the principles of aversive racism, a unique approach that considers the inconsistencies between self-perceptions and actions is needed. This sets a new agenda for future research and meaningful behavioral intervention programs that seek to equip bystanders to intercede in the future.

The need to address and provide effective strategies to reduce the incidence of racial aggression and violence have wide-ranging benefits for individuals, communities and society.

By connecting the aversive racism framework to the bystander effect, the need for different models for developing responsive and active bystanders can be more effectively outlined.

The emergence of distributed manufacturing (DM) is examined as a new form of localised production, distinct from previous manifestations of multi-domestic and indigenous production.

Supply network (SN) configuration and infrastructural provisioning perspectives were used to examine the literature on established localised production models as well as DM. A multiple case study was then undertaken to describe and explore the DM model further. A maximum variation sampling procedure was used to select five exemplar cases.

Three main contributions emerge from this study. First, the research uniquely brings together two bodies of literature, namely SN configuration and infrastructure provisioning to explore the DM context. Second, the research applies these theoretical lenses to establish the distinctive nature of DM across seven dimensions of analysis. Third, emerging DM design rules are identified and compared with the more established models of localised production, drawing on both literature and DM case evidence.

This study provides a rich SN configuration and infrastructural provisioning view on DM leading to a set of design rules for DM adoption, thus supporting practitioners in their efforts to develop viable DM implementation plans.

The authors contribute to the intra- and inter-organisational requirements for the emerging DM context by providing new perspectives through the combined lenses of SN configuration and infrastructural provisioning approaches.

The study aims to define a research agenda for creating resource-efficient supply chains (RESCs) by identifying and analysing their key characteristics as well as future research opportunities.

We follow a systematic review method to analyse the literature and to understand RESC, taking a substantive theory approach. Our approach is grounded in a specific domain, the agri-food sector, because it is an intensive user of an extensive range of resources.

The review shows that works of literature has looked at the use of resources primarily from the environmental impact perspective. There is a need to explore whether or not and how logistics/supply chain decisions will affect the overall configuration of future food supply chains in an era of resource scarcity and depletion and what the trade-offs will be.

The paper proposes an agenda for future research in the area of RESC. The framework proposed along with the key characteristics identified for RESC can be applied to other sectors.

Our research should facilitate further understanding of the implications and trade-offs of supply chain decisions taken on the use of resources by supply chain managers.

The paper explores the interaction between supply chains and natural resources and defines the key characteristics of RESC.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the fragmentation of the fashion system can be conceptually explained by drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres.

By conceptually discussing the changing nature of the fashion system and the institutional pressures exerted on fashion systems as a result of digital technology, the fundamental conceptual underpinnings of the theory of spheres are applied to these developments in order to explain the character of the contemporary organization of fashion.

Based on the conceptual analysis, this paper illustrates how a sphereological perspective to fashion provides a conceptual approach to explain the transformation and fragmentation of fashion systems.

This paper contributes to the field of fashion marketing and management by demonstrating how the concept of fashion spheres can explain social arrangements going beyond the boundaries of fashion systems and the associated implications that this brings to bear on the role of fashion.

This study aims to explore public coping strategies with government-imposed lockdown restrictions (i.e. forced compliance) due to a health crisis (i.e. COVID-19). This directly impacts the public's power, as they may feel alienated from their environment and from others. Consequently, this study explores the relationships between the public's power, quality of life and crisis-coping strategies. This is important to help governments understand public discourse surrounding perceived government health crisis communication, which aids effective policy development.

An online questionnaire distributed via Qualtrics received 371 responses from the South African public and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate the public's experience of powerlessness and resulting information-sharing, negative word-of-mouth and support-seeking as crisis coping strategies in response to government-imposed lockdown restrictions.

The public's perspective on health crisis communication used in this study sheds light on adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies that the public employs due to the alienation they feel during a health crisis with government-forced compliance. The findings add to the sparse research on crisis communication from the public perspective in a developing country context and provide insights for governments in developing health crisis communication strategies. The results give insight into developing policies related to community engagement and citizen participation during a pandemic.

The purpose of this study is to discover what attributes of casino buffet restaurants are the most important for customers’ willingness to pay (WTP).

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used in this study to test seven attributes: food, price/value, real price, service, atmosphere, the number of reviews and user-generated star ratings. Sawtooth Software was used to do the conjoint analysis, and a series of significance t-tests were run to determine the significance of each attribute on WTP with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

Based on a survey of 483 respondents who had visited a buffet at a casino within the last two years, this study found that food is ranked as the most significant attribute of a casino buffet restaurant, followed by real price and service quality.

Theoretically, this work is the first to the authors’ knowledge to apply the antecedents of behavioral intention to willingness-to-pay for niche restaurants. Practically, the results of this study will help casino buffet operators as they re-open after COVID-19. Future studies could collect data in the post-pandemic environment and examine WTP at casino buffets in different geographic locations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore differences in the degree of innovation in employment relations (ER) between emerging and established firms,

A large national telephone survey (N=1,416) of both emerging (<5 years) and established firms was conducted.

Emerging firms were more casualised, less unionised, and experiencing higher levels of market expansion and unpredictability. Despite these differences, younger firms showed otherwise remarkable similarity to older firms across a range of ER practices, and both categories showed a reliance on business networks, rather formal training, for ER knowledge. While introducing ER changes more rapidly than older (and larger) firms, they were converging towards a suite of ER practices similar to that adopted by older firms. The results suggest that, if anything, established firms may have been engaged in greater innovation in more unusual ER practices.

Only managers were surveyed. The data are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. As the study was undertaken in only one country, replication in other settings would be desirable.

The results raise major doubts about the notion that new firms represent the cutting edge of innovation, and highlights the degree to which newer firms match or mimic older firms’ ER architecture.

Sorting is a very important algorithm to solve problems in computer science. The most well-known divide and conquer sorting algorithm is quicksort. It starts with dividing the data into subarrays and finally sorting them.

In this paper, the algorithm named Dual Parallel Partition Sorting (DPPSort) is analyzed and optimized. It consists of a partitioning algorithm named Dual Parallel Partition (DPPartition). The DPPartition is analyzed and optimized in this paper and sorted with standard sorting functions named qsort and STLSort which are quicksort, and introsort algorithms, respectively. This algorithm is run on any shared memory/multicore systems. OpenMP library which supports multiprocessing programming is developed to be compatible with C/C++ standard library function. The authors’ algorithm recursively divides an unsorted array into two halves equally in parallel with Lomuto's partitioning and merge without compare-and-swap instructions. Then, qsort/STLSort is executed in parallel while the subarray is smaller than the sorting cutoff.

In the authors’ experiments, the 4-core Intel i7-6770 with Ubuntu Linux system is implemented. DPPSort is faster than qsort and STLSort up to 6.82× and 5.88× on Uint64 random distributions, respectively.

The authors can improve the performance of the parallel sorting algorithm by reducing the compare-and-swap instructions in the algorithm. This concept can be used to develop related problems to increase speedup of algorithms.

Taurine (2-aminoethane sulfonic acid; C2H7NO3S) is a nonprotein sulfur-containing β-amino acid present in nearly all mammalian tissues and the most ubiquitous free endogenous biomolecule in human cells. Taurine is commonly known as a conditionally essential amino acid because taurine is one of the few amino acids that are not incorporated in protein synthesis. The purpose of this study is to review the existing articles related to taurine and to give an account how useful is taurine to the different body systems. In this thorough overview, taurine is covered in terms of its essentiality, sources, advantages for neonates and the elderly, the effects of taurine deficiency, and the safety and toxicity of taurine supplements.

This is a narrative review into the subject matter. Published articles were searched on different portals like PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubChem etc. The authors also evaluated the availability of taurine in commercially available energy drinks.

This comprehensive review, presents the potential clinical benefits and functional properties of taurine as a conditionally essential amino acid. Energy drinks containing taurine (and their concentration) are also reported in this review.

This is the first data that the authors are aware of that shows taurine content in a variety of energy drinks on the market.