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This qualitative case study explored the information literacy acquisition of 23 students enrolled in a learning community consisting of an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) writing class and a one-unit class introducing students to research at a suburban community college library in California. As there are no other known learning communities that link an ESL course to a library course, this site afforded a unique opportunity to understand the ways in which ESL students learn to conduct library research. Students encountered difficulties finding, evaluating, and using information for their ESL assignments. Strategies that the students, their ESL instructor, and their instructional librarian crafted in response were enabled by the learning community structure. These strategies included integration of the two courses’ curricula, contextualized learning activities, and dialogue. ESL students in this study simultaneously discovered new language forms, new texts, new ideas, and new research practices, in large part because of the relationships that developed over time among the students, instructor, and instructional librarian. Given the increasing number of ESL students in higher education and the growing concern about their academic success, this study attempts to fill a gap in the research literature on ESL students’ information literacy acquisition.

Pakistan is one of the most climate change and natural disaster-affected countries in the globe, where the lives and livelihoods of people are repeatedly affected due to these natural disasters. Over the past few decades, the country has been impacted by numerous devastating floods, droughts, and storms. As a result, households face enormous complications, particularly those dwelling in disaster-prone areas. Therefore, this study intends to explore the status of household vulnerability and resilience practices of hazard-prone communities in Pakistan from existing literature. This study has identified the 17 most relevant documents. It argues that household vulnerability is increasing consistently with the increasing rate of disaster intensity. Frequent flooding, landslide, erosion, and crop loss are the leading causes of household vulnerability. This study reveals five types of household vulnerability components which look into several livelihood vulnerability indicators of Pakistani households. Moreover, the study unfolds that the main causes of disaster vulnerability are widespread crop loss, a lack of water, loss of soil fertility, and low socioeconomic situations. The major vulnerability components of dwellers are exposure (increasing summer duration, the rapid increase of population house build-up in the riparian areas, and increasing occurrence of hailstorms), sensitivity, low access to education facilities, human loss, diseases infestation, food insecurity, and social conflict), and less adaptive capacity (social networks, migration, poor emergency services, multiple income sources, and less access to the health facility). To address the household vulnerability, this study has also identified four key aspects of resilience, like social resilience, economic resilience, institutional resilience, and physical resilience. The findings will effectively help to understand the dynamics of household vulnerability and resilience and its measurement and management strategy from developed indicators.

Meal ordering apps (MOAs) have transformed the customers' dining habits, particularly during mobility restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the theoretical cover of the extended stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model, this paper attempts to explore the critical antecedents and outcomes of customer MOA engagement which predict the continuous purchase intentions using these apps. A multigroup analysis is conducted to investigate the difference between the hypothesized relationships between the Chinese and Indonesian consumers.

A mixed-method approach, including a systematic literature review, an open-ended essay (qualitative) with 139 MOA users and an online survey (quantitative) with 1,207 MOA users in total, was used for hypotheses testing.

The structural equation model results revealed that customer MOA experience factors such as mobile online reviews (MR), food quality (FQ), restaurant reputation (RR), service quality and system quality (SyQ) are the absolute positive factors that influence customer MOA cognitive, affective and behavioral engagement, which in turn affect continuous purchase intentions. The multigroup analysis results reveal that Chinese customers prioritized MR and FQ for customer MOA engagement (cognitive, affective and behavioral). Comparatively, Indonesian customers placed most importance on RR and SyQ.

Considering a market-specific setting and based on the extended SOR framework, this study is one of the first to take a comprehensive look at the critical antecedents and outcome of multidimensional customer MOA engagement in the developing countries’ (China and Indonesia) online to offline meal delivery context. Further, this study investigates the customer continuous purchase intentions as an outcome of MOA engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also reveal the differences in consumer behavior across the two developing but culturally diverse countries samples during the pandemic.

The financial policies of the modern world corporations and their investment decisions are generally considered as interrelated because the agency problems, associated with the debt level and its maturity structure, give rise to incentives for overinvestment or underinvestment. The present study empirically investigates the linkage between debt maturity structure and firm investment in a financially constrained environment, using Pakistan as a case study, to determine how the institutional environment in which firms operate affect these decisions and their linkage.

The empirical analysis is carried in a panel data setting using panel regression models as the baseline methods. Moreover, generalized methods of moments (GMM) estimators are used, coupled with the instrumental variables approach, for robustness and improving the efficiency and consistency of estimates.

Results suggest that firms rely more on short financing in Pakistan. Thus, given the capital structure which is characterized by higher proportion of short-term financing, the higher level of leverage is less likely to cause underinvestment problem. However, the underinvestment problem do persists in the firms that have higher portion of long-term debt. These findings imply that the debt-overhang problem may persist even in the financially constrained environments where attractive investment opportunities are limited, and long-term financing is difficult to acquire.

This study contributes to the literature by revealing how corporate investment and financing decisions and their linkage is influenced by the institutional environment of the less developed countries which is characterized by underdeveloped financial markets, inefficient legal system and weak investor protection system.

This study examines how service feedback and physician popularity affect physician demand in the context of virtual healthcare environment. Based on the signaling theory, the critical factor of environment uncertainty (i.e. disease risk) and its impact on physician demand is also investigated. Further, the research on the endogeneity of online reviews in healthcare is also examined in the current study.

A secondary data econometric analysis using 3-wave data sets of 823 physicians obtained from two PRWs (Healthgrades and Vitals) was conducted. The analysis was run using the difference-in-difference method to consider physician and website-specific effects.

The study's findings indicate that physician popularity has a stronger positive effect on physician demand compared with service feedback. Improving popularity leads to a relative increase in the number of appointments, which in turn enhance physician demand. Further, the impact of physician popularity on physician demand is positively mitigated by the disease risk.

The authors' research contributes to a better understanding of the signaling transmission mechanism in the online healthcare environment. Further, the findings provide practical implications for key stakeholders into how an efficient feedback and popularity mechanism can be built to enhance physician service outcomes in order to maximize the financial efficiency of physicians.

With a foundation in the conservation of resource theory, this paper aims to examine the validity of a conceptual model that explains the mechanism connecting perceived threat of terrorism to production deviance. The link between perceived threat of terrorism and production deviance was examined via emotional exhaustion. Notably, the study evaluated whether the relationship between perceived threat of terrorism and production deviance is mediated by emotional exhaustion and moderated by levels of emotional intelligence.

The study is cross-sectional in nature and data were collected from 432 pharmaceutical sales representatives who operate outdoors in the high-risk region. Two-step approach consisting confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling was used for analysis. To examine conditional direct and indirect effects, the authors used model 8 in PROCESS.

Results were consistent with prediction made from the conceptual model in that emotional exhaustion partially mediated the relationship between perceived threat of terrorism and production deviance. This was particularly the case when emotional intelligence was low, but not when high. Likewise, perceived threat of terrorism exerted a direct effect on production deviance when emotional intelligence was low, but not when high.

The study is the first to examine the relationship between perceived threat of terrorism and production deviance. Moreover, no study to date has examined the mediating role of emotional exhaustion between perceived threat of terrorism and production deviance. Finally, up till now, it is unknown that emotional intelligence moderates the relationship of perceived threat of terrorism with emotional exhaustion and production deviance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mechanical and tribological properties of the synthetic diamond coatings deposited on WC-Co cutting tools for their prospective applications in mechanical industry. In this work, the concept of nanocrystalline diamond, microcrystalline diamond and multilayer-diamond coating systems were proposed and deposited on WC-Co substrates with the top-layer nanocrystallinity, optimum thickness and interfacial adhesion strength for load-bearing tribological and machining applications. Also, the overall mechanical and tribological properties of all synthetic diamond coatings were compared for the purpose of selecting a suitable type of protective layer used on the surfaces of WC-Co cutting tools or mechanical dies.

Smooth and adhesive single layered and multilayered synthetic deposited on chemically etched cemented tungsten carbide (WC-Co) substrates using predetermined process parameters in hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) method. A comparison has been documented between diamond coatings having different nature and architecture for the purpose of studying their mechanical and tribological characteristics. The friction characteristics were studied experimentally using ball-on-disc type linear reciprocating micro-tribometer under the influence of varying load conditions and within dry sliding conditions. Nanoindentation tests were conducted on each diamond coating using Berkovich nanoindenter for the measurement of their hardness and elastic modulus values. Also, the wear characteristics of all sliding bodies were studied under varying load conditions using cumulative weight loss and density method.

Depositing any type of diamond coating on the cemented carbide tool insert increases its all mechanical and tribological characteristics. When using boron-doping onto the top-layer surface of diamond coatings decrease slightly their mechanical properties but increases the tribological characteristics. Present analysis reveals that friction coefficient of all diamond-coated WC-Co substrates decreases with the increase of normal load. Therefore, maintaining an appropriate level of normal load, sliding time, sliding distance, atmospheric conditions and type of diamond coating, the friction coefficient may be kept to some lower value to improve mechanical processes.

As the single layered synthetic diamond coatings have not given the full requirements of mechanical and tribological properties when deposited on cutting tools. Therefore, the multilayered diamond coatings were proposed and developed to enhance the interfacial integrity of the nanocrystalline and microcrystalline layers (by eliminating the sharp interface) as well as increasing the hardness of tungsten carbide substrate. However, when using boron doping onto the top-layer surface of diamond, coatings decreases slightly their mechanical characteristics but also decreases the value of friction coefficient.

The study investigates the intention to adopt climate change and the pro-environmental behaviours among the residents of a developing country (Pakistan) through the theory of planned behaviour (TPB).

This is a quantitative designed study and uses a questionnaire to collect cross-sectional data. The authors distributed about 1,600 questionnaires, of which 980 were returned; this represented a 61% response rate.

From applying the PLS-SEM 3.0 technique, the findings highlight the positive and significant impact of attitudes towards climate change (ATCC) and subjective norms (SN) on the intention to adopt climate change (ITCC). On the other hand, perceived behavioural control (PBC) has an insignificant effect on ITCC. Moreover, the ITCC is a significant predictor of pro-environmental behaviour (PEB). Finally, ITCC has a positive effect in mediating the relationship between TPB constructs (ATCC, SN and PBC) and PEB.

This study's findings assist policymakers in designing policies and better plans to enrich the individuals' vision and attitudes towards creating a conducive and healthy environment. Further, this study's findings encourage the promotion of widespread intentions to overcome the environmental challenges of climate change.

In the context of Pakistan, this study's findings offer empirical confirmation of TPB, climate change and PEB.

The purpose of this study aims to examine the effect of fintech on pre- and post-financing credit risks faced by the Islamic banks.

This research uses primary data for fintech awareness and adoption and secondary data of various financial and economic variables from 2009 to 2021. It uses baseline regression to identify moderation of fintech controlling gross domestic products, size, return on assets and leverage. The findings are confirmed using robustness against key variable bias. It also uses a dynamic panel two-stage generalized method of moments for endogeneity.

The study finds that the fintech awareness and adoption are not the same across all Islamic countries. The Asia Pacific region is far ahead of the other two regions where Indonesia is ahead in terms of fintech awareness and adoption, and Malaysia is ahead in terms of reaping its benefits in credit risk management. Fintech affects prefinancing credit risk significantly more than postfinancing credit risk. Also, the study finds that Islamic banks suffer from the problem of “Adverse selection under Shariah compliance.”

This research invites regulators to introduce fintech in Islamic banks on war footing. Similar studies can be conducted on the role of other risks such as operational and market risks. Fintech will also help in improving the risk profile and stability of Islamic banks against systemic risks and financial crises.

This research has variety of originalities. First, it is the pioneering study that addresses the effect of fintech pre- and post-financing credit risks in Islamic banks. Second, it identifies “Adverse selection under Shariah compliance” for Islamic banks. Third, it helps identify how fintech can be useful in reducing credit risk that will help in reducing capital charge for regulatory capital.

The purpose of this study is to solve two unique but difficult partial differential equations: the foam drainage equation and the nonlinear time-fractional fisher’s equation. Through our methods, we aim to provide accurate solutions and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate behaviors exhibited by these systems.

In this study, we use a dual technique that combines the Aboodh residual power series method and the Aboodh transform iteration method, both of which are combined with the Caputo operator.

We develop exact and efficient solutions by merging these unique methodologies. Our results, presented through illustrative figures and data, demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of the Aboodh methods in tackling such complex mathematical models.

Owing to their fractional derivatives and nonlinear behavior, these equations are crucial in modeling complex processes and confront analytical complications in various scientific and engineering contexts.