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The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on people's lives, air travel and tourism. The authors explored travelers' perceptions of COVID rapid antigen tests before boarding aircraft, willingness to fly and the precautionary actions for safe air travel.

All the participants were asked to complete the survey while reflecting on their experiences of air travel during this COVID-19 pandemic. The questionnaire consisted of demographic information of the participants and air travel preferences during pandemic. The survey was conducted through Google Form in both English and Arabic language. The link was shared through emails and WhatsApp.

In this survey, majority had willingness to fly during pandemic. 45.2% preferred to undergo rapid test before boarding, while 41.9% refused owing to no added benefit (23.8%) and nasal discomfort (9.3%) among others. The best indicators to resume safe air travel were COVID-19 vaccination (80.4%), wearing face mask during flying hours (70.8%) and maintain social distancing with aircraft seating (49.6%).

The findings of the current survey could help the organizations and the biosecurity authorities to act and support accordingly and thus reduce passenger anxiety about resuming the flights, thereby increasing willingness to fly and preparing oneself and the aviation industry for future pandemics.

The findings of the current survey could help the organizations and the biosecurity authorities to act and support accordingly and thus reduce passenger anxiety about resuming the flights, thereby increasing willingness to fly, and preparing oneself and the aviation industry for future pandemics.

Seasonal influenza epidemics accounted for significant morbidity and mortality loads worldwide despite the availability of a safe vaccine as an efficient tool against severity of the disease. However, the uptake of the latter was sub-optimal. This study aims to identify predictors and barriers related to seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

A cross-sectional study enrolled 502 individuals attending primary healthcare centers in Bahrain for ambulatory care between July and August 2022. The data were collected using an interviews-based questionnaire which included questions on demographic data, knowledge and attitudes and practices toward influenza vaccine. The authors identified the barriers as well as the determinants of the vaccine uptake and its recommendation to others.

The mean age of participants was 35.07 years (SD = 13.9). Most of the respondents were Bahraini (86.5%) and 53.4 % were females. The results revealed that 34.1% have previous information about the influenza vaccine and 36.9% versus 69.9% are willing to receive the vaccine or advice it to others, respectively. Determinants of vaccine uptake were identified.

This study confirmed a sub-optimal influenza vaccine acceptance in the general community of Bahrain despite a global access in primary care. Health professionals need to be more proactive in mobilizing the community and particularly females toward influenza vaccination.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the ring structure of the twisted partial skew generalized power series ring RG,≤;Θ and the corresponding structure of its zero-divisor graph Γ̅RG,≤;Θ.

The authors first introduce the history and motivation of this paper. Secondly, the authors give a brief exposition of twisted partial skew generalized power series ring, in addition to presenting some properties of such structure, for instance, a-rigid ring, a-compatible ring and (G,a)-McCoy ring. Finally, the study’s main results are stated and proved.

The authors establish the relation between the diameter and girth of the zero-divisor graph of twisted partial skew generalized power series ring RG,≤;Θ and the zero-divisor graph of the ground ring R. The authors also provide counterexamples to demonstrate that some conditions of the results are not redundant. As well the authors indicate that some conditions of recent results can be omitted.

The results of the twisted partial skew generalized power series ring embrace a wide range of results of classical ring theoretic extensions, including Laurent (skew Laurent) polynomial ring, Laurent (skew Laurent) power series ring and group (skew group) ring and of course their partial skew versions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine bank performance using the different performance measures, namely, return on assets, return on equity and bank margins (MAR).

Unbalanced panel data were constructed to test the related hypotheses and provide evidence on the relationship between ownership types, banking models and performance indicators adopting the random effects techniques.

The findings of the paper substantiate that the banking models are significant performance indicators. However, the results are contingent on the GDP growth of the country. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the impact of ownership types is inconclusive in all measures of performance. However, the GDP is significant when it interacts with the types of ownership, particularly for foreign and government banks, although the evidence is mixed and unfavourable for government banks.

The results of the study provide insights for bankers and policymakers to enhancement Yemen’s banking sector.

This study is considered as the first attempt in examining the role of banking model and ownership type and their link to banking model.

This study aims to explore how to apply and integrate the performance management (PM) process in humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) among and between humanitarian organizations (HOs) and donors so as to improve cost-efficiency (CE) and lead-time effectiveness (LTE) in the stage of natural disaster preparedness.

This study adapts and operationalizes a framework for the PM process used in commercial supply chains to assess HSCs. A multiple-case study with two types of actors – six HOs and three donors—is used to describe the applications of the PM process and analyze the level of integration between the actors.

The activities in the PM process could sometimes be only vaguely described. Both actors emphasized improving CE, with less emphasis on LTE. Both actors have a low level of integration in each PM process activity, decreasing the CE and LTE. Therefore, guidelines for improving the level of PM process integration are provided.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to combine literature on HSCs and PM process integration, thereby contributing to both literature fields. The concrete contribution of this study is a framework for PM process application and integration among and between HOs and donors.

The PM process framework can be used to assess PM process application, as well as current and increased level of integration, to improve CE and LTE. The current applications can also inspire other HOs and donors.

Previous studies indicate the lack of frameworks in the PM domain of HSCs, especially in the stage of natural disaster preparedness.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of terrorist attacks on the volatility and returns of the stock market in Tunisia.

The employed sample comprises 1250 trading day from the Tunisian stock index (Tunindex) and stock closing prices of 64 firms listed on the Tunisian stock market (TSM) from January 2011 to October 2015. The research opts for the general autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) and exponential generalized conditional heteroscedasticity (EGARCH) models framework in addition to the event study method to further assess the effect of terrorism on the Tunisian equity market.

The baseline results document a substantive impact of terrorism on the returns and volatility of the TSM index. In more details, the findings of the event study method show negative significant effects on mean abnormal returns with different magnitudes over the events dates. The outcomes propose that terrorism profoundly altered the behavior of the stock market and must receive sufficient attention in order to protect the financial market in Tunisia.

Very few evidence is found on the financial effects of terrorism over transition to democracy cases. This paper determines the salient reaction of the stock market to terrorism during democratic transition. The findings of this study shall have relevant implications for stock market participants and policymakers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether attention, emotion, and cognitive regulation (CR) may be strategies to advance one’s ethnic identity.

The paper is presented in three parts. The first section discusses integrative inquiry (INIQ) (Bresciani Ludvik et al., 2016), a mindfulness methodology and mindful inquiry training program, as a potential pathway to help mitigate stress and enhance healthy development and well-being strategies that combat stressors related to ethnic and racial identity; and increase opportunities for positive ethnic identity development. INIQ was designed to influence areas of the brain associated with attention regulation, emotion regulation, and CR in order to decrease stress and anxiety, and heighten executive functions of undergraduate and graduate students. The second section discusses an exploratory study to see whether INIQ resulted in higher mean scores for participants on their ethnic identity, as assessed by the multigroup ethnic identity measure (Phinney, 1992).

The results indicated that there was a significant increase in pre-test and post-test scores for mindfulness (p=0.001) as well as the dependent measure for learning exploration (p=0.028) among 30 undergraduate, master’s- and doctoral-seeking students. There was also a non-significant increase for clear understanding (p=0.15) and overall ethnic identity achievement (p=0.387); and non-significant decrease for ethnic belonging (p=0.424).

These findings suggest that INIQ may increase students’ ethnic learning exploration, which is an important process in ethnic identity development (Phinney and Ong, 2007). This study also suggests that INIQ increases mindfulness in participants. The authors conclude with a discussion and recommendations to future INIQ and other diversity centered student support practitioners interested in influencing positive ethnic identity formation.

This paper aims to propose a solution for detecting and grading diabetic retinopathy (DR) in retinal images using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach. It could classify input retinal images into a normal class or an abnormal class, which would be further split into four stages of abnormalities automatically.

The proposed solution is developed based on a newly proposed CNN architecture, namely, DeepRoot. It consists of one main branch, which is connected by two side branches. The main branch is responsible for the primary feature extractor of both high-level and low-level features of retinal images. Then, the side branches further extract more complex and detailed features from the features outputted from the main branch. They are designed to capture details of small traces of DR in retinal images, using modified zoom-in/zoom-out and attention layers.

The proposed method is trained, validated and tested on the Kaggle dataset. The regularization of the trained model is evaluated using unseen data samples, which were self-collected from a real scenario from a hospital. It achieves a promising performance with a sensitivity of 98.18% under the two classes scenario.

The new CNN-based architecture (i.e. DeepRoot) is introduced with the concept of a multi-branch network. It could assist in solving a problem of an unbalanced dataset, especially when there are common characteristics across different classes (i.e. four stages of DR). Different classes could be outputted at different depths of the network.