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Numerous randomized clinical studies have shown that psyllium fiber lowers serum cholesterol in patients with hyperlipidemia and is thus recognized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a dietary fiber that may help reduce the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) by lowering cholesterol. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential economic implications for health-care cost savings and quality of life productivity gains if the cholesterol-lowering effect of psyllium, consumed daily as a fiber supplement, could be applied to a broad at-risk population.

A cost-benefit analysis tool was used to examine evidence that the use of psyllium as a cholesterol-lowering agent can reduce overall CHD-attributed medical care service costs in the USA among those at high risk of experiencing disease-related events.

Results of the analysis showed that the potential net annual avoided medical care service costs and annual quality of life productivity gains among US adults 45 and older with low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels = 130 mg/dL could be up to an average of $870m per year from 2013 to 2020 if everyone in the target population used seven grams of soluble fiber from psyllium daily, corresponding to a net benefit-cost ratio of $1.19 savings in annual medical service cost and annual productivity gains per $1 spent on a psyllium regimen.

Thus, the use of psyllium fiber as a daily supplement could be recommended as a means to help control the risk for potentially costly cardiovascular-related medical events and to maximize the economic potential for an improved quality of life in adults 45 and older with LDL cholesterol levels =130 mg/dL.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the role of training in building employee commitment and the task of job satisfaction in the association between training and employee commitment in the banking sector in Uganda.

The authors used correlation, regression and MedGraph to investigate the hypotheses.

The findings revealed that there is a positive relationships between training and employee commitment (r = 0.507**, p < 0.01), a positive relationship between training and job satisfaction (r = 0.744**, p < 0.01) and a positive relationship between job satisfaction and employee commitment (r = 0.519**, p < 0.01). The regression model showed that the predictor variables explain at least 29.7 per cent of the variance in employee commitment (adjusted R² = 0.297). MedGraph results revealed a partial type of mediation because the correlation between training (independent variable) and employee commitment (dependent variable) decreased from 0.507*** to 0.271*** by inclusion of job satisfaction (mediating variable).

This study is one of the pioneers to extend the employee commitment debate to Ugandan banking sector. It provides an explanation with empirical evidence by demonstrating that training extends direct positive effect on employee commitment in the banking sector in Ugandan situation. The study also demonstrates that, in the banking sector in Uganda, job satisfaction helps to partially transmit the effect of training on employee commitment. This study further builds a model that will help researchers and practitioners in investigating and explaining employee commitment in the banking sector in Ugandan situation.

This paper is prepared from the perspective of civil society and under the context of true democracy, where civil society directly participates in the public matter on a permanent basis, so that the public and private interests are reconciled and governments are made to truly work for all ranks of society and not for the owners of capital. The very concept of social responsibility is currently at the threshold dividing its future between remaining a corporate tool used by corporations to look good, without really doing the public good, or becoming a valuable instrument of civil society to make business become socially and environmentally responsible, in such a way that generates a meaningful net contribution to the sustainability of the planet. The social responsibility of business and what it should be remains very much in debate (White, 2005). For the overwhelming majority of business entities and governments, it is a voluntary option and not a legal or even a moral obligation. This has been the unrelenting position of business, which has been enthusiastically endorsed by governments, where most elected officials in high‐power positions have been the direct beneficiaries of great amounts of corporate money for their political campaigns. For civil society, in contrast, the social responsibility of business is an instrument to make corporations behave responsibly according to the standards defined by civil society at large, through due democratic process, and not according to standards conveniently selected by business (de Regil, 2005:17). In Iberian America, the most unequal region in the world, the need to make both domestic and global corporations practice a social and environmentally‐sustainable economic activity is far more urgent than elsewhere. In this region, a neocolonial business culture pervasively remains entrenched. Since the abandonment, in the 1980s, of endogenous social and economic development, aimed at developing a growing domestic market through aggregate demand to gradually include more people into the middle social strata, the region has returned, in many aspects, to times reminiscent of late Nineteen Century ‐ with the imposition of neoliberal economics globalisation ‐ when many people worked under conditions of slavery. As has been unfolding in many parts of the world, including the G7 countries, Iberian America is today back into an era reminiscent of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Yet it has occurred in a far more pervasive and vicious way, as a result of a far more intolerant, racist and plutocratic mentality of the upper class, which has systematically jeopardised the development of a true democratic ethos. In this way, civil society in the region has begun to use and develop some CSR concepts in attempting to put in check the activity of business. However, the outright abandonment of Iberian American governments of their most basic and preeminent democratic responsibility ‐ to procure the welfare of every rank of society, especially the disposed ‐ is so extreme, that the concept of CSR may be too little and too late to do any good.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

This study aims to solve the problem of job scheduling and multi automated guided vehicle (AGV) cooperation in intelligent manufacturing workshops.

In this study, an algorithm for job scheduling and cooperative work of multiple AGVs is designed. In the first part, with the goal of minimizing the total processing time and the total power consumption, the niche multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is used to determine the processing task arrangement on different machines. In the second part, AGV is called to transport workpieces, and an improved ant colony algorithm is used to generate the initial path of AGV. In the third part, to avoid path conflicts between running AGVs, the authors propose a simple priority-based waiting strategy to avoid collisions.

The experiment shows that the solution can effectively deal with job scheduling and multiple AGV operation problems in the workshop.

In this paper, a collaborative work algorithm is proposed, which combines the job scheduling and AGV running problem to make the research results adapt to the real job environment in the workshop.

The construction business is widely recognised for its inherent complexity and dynamic nature, which stems from the nature of the job involved. The industry is often regarded as one of the most challenging industries globally in terms of implementing environmental, health and safety (EHS) practices. However, in the absence of EHS, the construction industry cannot be considered sustainable. Therefore, this study aims to identify the trends, knowledge gaps and implications of EHS research to enhance construction activities and knowledge.

The study adopted a science mapping approach involving bibliometric and scientometric analysis of 407 construction EHS publications from the Scopus database with the VOSviewer software. The study is based on journal articles from the Scopus database without restriction to any time range.

The main focus of construction EHS research identified in the study includes sustainability-related studies, risk-related, environmental issues, EHS management, integrated management systems studies, health and safety related and EHS in the construction process. Some emerging areas also identified include productivity, design, culture, social sustainability and machine learning. The most influential and productive publication sources, countries/regions and EHS publications with the highest impact were also determined.

Documents published in the Scopus database were considered for analysis because of the wider coverage of the database. Journal articles written in English language represent the inclusion criteria, whereas other documents were excluded from the analysis. The study also limited the search to articles with the engineering subject area.

The research findings will enlighten stakeholders and practitioners on the focal knowledge areas in the EHS research domain, which are vital for enhancing EHS in the industry.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review-based study is the first attempt to internationally conduct a science mapping on extant literature in the EHS research domain through bibliometric and scientometric assessments.

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, UNESCO Landscapes and World Heritage sites have faced unstable situations. Both at the sites themselves and in the research centres, universities and even the homes of the people involved, they have acted and responded to the best of their ability. In this context, the aim of the comparative analysis of different cases carried out here is to understand the main effects of the pandemic in the short term. On the one hand, the purpose is to determine what the general response trends have been and, on the other, to measure the resilience capacity in each case.

Up to eight cases studies representing different and diverse kinds of Heritage and Protected Natural sites from Southern Europe and America are compared.

In a context of uncertainty, new responses, unique opportunities and hitherto unseen weaknesses have arisen in research and management of natural and cultural heritage. In general terms, the dialogue between officials, technicians and researchers that have put together this article underlines the need to work towards a governance model that engages everyone in dialogue. Discrepancies between overlapping strategies and plans, which is the main conflict detected, should be avoided while a decentralisation of policies could be more operational. In this sense, situated knowledge may be of help in configuring practical management tools.

This paper compares and contrasts for first time the effects of the pandemic in Europe and Latin America. This exercise has provided a valuable diagnostic for present and future heritage management.