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A fundamental change in the planning and delivery of new housing projects has taken place in the last years, with the focus shifting towards adding value to projects based on a better understanding of housing preferences. This issue becomes even more critical when it is intended to the provision of affordable houses for low and middle income groups. This paper describes a model designed to help developers and housing users to achieve their expectations regarding quality, affordability and including also reasonable profits. Developed through a “methodological pluralism”, this study identifies people-oriented variables and assumptions. The model was developed based on a case study in the city of Guayaquil-Ecuador, and information obtained from field work research was used to test it. The study examines implications and limitations of the model for inclusion of housing preferences considering local conditions and cultural values. The different parts of the model along with data requirements for each part are described. The paper concludes with findings regarding the identification of most preferred attributes by housing users and the use of alternatives methods to incorporate additional value into projects, translated into more appealing profits for developers and the provision of better and more affordable houses for users.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This study investigated multiple factors associated with librarians’ intentions to engage in virtual storytimes in public libraries. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the study examined the aspects of attitudes, social norms, behavioral controls and organizational support about librarians’ intentions to engage in virtual storytime practices.

A survey was conducted to investigate the perceptions of public librarians who work in children’s services across the USA. The study collected 365 valid responses to assess the impact of the selected factors on librarians’ intentions. Structural equation modeling was employed for statistical analysis.

The results revealed that attitudes, subjective norms and behavioral controls were significant factors associated with librarians’ intention to engage in virtual storytimes. Among these, attitudinal factors were the most influential; however, organizational support was not a significant factor.

Minimal research has been conducted to explore factors associated with online storytime practices, which served as a primary delivery mode during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is among the first attempts to investigate various factors related to virtual storytimes in public libraries from the perspectives of librarians.

Climate change is a massive multidimensional shift. Temperature shifts, in particular, have important implications for urbanization, agriculture, health, productivity, and poverty, among other things. While much research has documented rising mean temperature levels, the authors also examine range-based measures of daily temperature volatility. Specifically, using data for select US cities over the past half-century, the authors compare the evolving time series dynamics of the average daily temperature (AVG) and the diurnal temperature range (DTR; the difference between the daily maximum and minimum temperatures). The authors characterize trend and seasonality in these two series using linear models with time-varying coefficients. These straightforward yet flexible approximations provide evidence of evolving DTR seasonality and stable AVG seasonality.

The post‐Griffiths period in the British National Health Service (NHS) has seen a major upswing of interest in the evaluation of organisational performance. Many criteria are available to conduct such an evaluation. This paper presents a coherent framework to assist in thinking about this area. It explores the definitions and usages of relevant concepts. The variety of perspectives that actors in the health care field hold about quality are also examined and the inevitable role of values highlighted.

In the context of circular economy, tourism resources development and integrated marketing need to interact with multiple businesses, data processing with big data technology, and in the information age, the best means of integrated marketing is to integrate business through an information platform. The research purpose of this article is to improve the intelligence of the tourism platform by constructing an OR model, integrate information and improve the data processing effect in an all-round way through data mining.

This study builds the business interaction in the form of OR (operations research model) model and combines this model with the e-commerce platform to build an online travel consumption model based on the user's online operation mode.

With the development of the times and the upgrading of industries, tourism and other industries have provided new tourism resources and tourism methods for human beings by virtue of the beautiful environment, special experiences and colorful stories and related industries have been related to the tourism industry based on natural resources, customs and folklore and agricultural experiences. By identifying important nodes with high connectivity in the social network, the weighted centrality algorithm can mine the importance of interest tags.

In addition, this research builds a test platform for model performance analysis and integrates various factors. The results show that the model constructed in this study can further promote the development of tourism, improve the efficiency of tourism resources, provide marketing effects and meet the circular economy theory.

For health services researchers and health services management educators, chronicling the unfolding of a country's implementation of national health insurance (NHI) is once in a lifetime opportunity. Rarely, do researchers have the opportunity to observe the macro and micro changes associated with turning a country's health care delivery system 180 degrees. Accordingly, we report on the first decade of Taiwan's changing delivery system and selected adaptations of health care management, providers and patients.

In recent years, the topic of women's entrepreneurship has gained increasing attention from researchers and policymakers. Its role in economic growth and development has been widely recognized in several studies. However, the relationship between gender in entrepreneurship and innovation is an underexplored aspect in particular at a country-level perspective. This paper aims to answer the following question: Does female entrepreneurship impact innovation at a national level?

Using a panel dataset of 35 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries over the period 2002–2019, the authors carried out a comprehensive econometric analysis, based on the fixed-effect model, the random-effect model and the feasible generalized least squares estimator, as well as a battery of tests to prevent problems of multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation of the error terms. In doing so, the authors found consistent and robust results on the linear and nonlinear relationship between women's entrepreneurship and innovation, using selected country indicators from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) consortium, the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and the World Development Indicators (WDI), including female self-employment, female nascent entrepreneurship and R&D investment and controlling for the same relationships in the case of men's entrepreneurship.

This study shows that the level of R&D investment, which according to the literature can be considered as a proxy of innovation, is higher when the level of women's entrepreneurship is low. However, exploring more in depth this relationship and the relationship between male entrepreneurship and innovation, the authors found two important and new results. The first one involves the different impact on R&D investment of female self-employment and female nascent entrepreneurship. In particular, female self-employment appears to have a linear negative impact on the R&D, while the impact of female nascent entrepreneurship is statistically nonsignificant. The second one affects the nonlinearity of the negative effect, suggesting that very different challenges are possible at different levels of women's entrepreneurship. In addition, analyzing the role of human capital in the relationship between R&D investment and women entrepreneurship, it emerges that higher education (as the main component of human capital) makes early-stage women's entrepreneurship more technologically consuming, which promotes R&D investment. A higher level of education lessens the significance of the negative relationship between the simplest type of women entrepreneurship (female self-employment) and R&D investment.

The originality of the study is that it provides new evidence regarding the link between women's entrepreneurship and innovation at the macro level, with a specific focus on self-employed women entrepreneurs and early-stage women entrepreneurship. In this sense, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is among the few showing a nonlinear relationship between women's entrepreneurship and country-level innovation and a negative impact only in the case of female self-employment. Moreover, this study has relevant implications from a policymaking perspective, in terms of promoting more productive women's entrepreneurship.