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Virtual reality (VR) technologies have expanded their application domains towards education with pedagogical benefits including fully immersive learning environment and in-depth user engagement through scenario-based virtual simulations. Motion sickness (MS), however, has become one of the long-standing key challenges of the VR utilisation, even in gaming industries. Thus, this paper aims to present a preliminary study on understanding the VR MS, referred as cybersickness, in the teaching and learning (T&L) context at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

A VR-based virtual classroom content was developed and tested for 60 undergraduate students having equal access to the same VR equipment. A two-step data collection, comprising qualitative and quantitative measures, was conducted for the participants. The aspects of how gender influences the cybersickness severity and how academic background affects the learning experience were investigated and analysed using analysis of variance F-test statistical approach.

The results demonstrated approximately 47% of the participants had experienced cybersickness, where 64% of them were females. With confidence level of 95% (a = 5%), the obtained p-value and F-statistical value for the respective gender and study discipline categories against the cybersickness symptoms confirmed the significance level between the two compared variables. Moreover, it is worth highlighting that the virtual movement speed, perspective angle and visual properties of the virtual environment were selected as the top three factors that caused the cybersickness.

The study is hoped to provide valuable pointers to current and future VR developers in minimising the cybersickness symptoms that would enable an effective T&L environment in higher education.

This paper examines the current tendencies associated with transnational mining capital in the context of the current period of neoliberal globalization dominated by transnational corporations, and examines the usefulness of the category accumulation by dispossession, Harvey’s adapted version of Marx’s original accumulation. After a review of the original concept by Marx an evaluation of Harvey’s concept is presented. The current state of affairs in the mining industry is examined, in particular, considering the present level of large scale mining or mega-mining. In addition, this paper examines the associated social conflicts addressing the social and environmental impacts, which have resulted from these recent tendencies, not to mention the problems of increased use of corporate management of social resistance, and repression, on the part of the State, especially with regards to the criminalization of social protest. Moreover, the tendency toward reprimarization in several countries is considered and the degree to which this coincides with ongoing expropriation by the State is addressed, followed by an assessment of the relevance of the concept of accumulation by dispossession in the present day.

The aim of this work was to evaluate the efficiency of subcritical conditions using different water–ethanol mixtures to recover antioxidant compounds from soybean seed coats (SSCs).

SSCs were subjected to high temperature and pressure conditions, using ethanol–water mixtures as extractive solvent, to obtain phenolic and flavonoid compounds with antioxidant activity. A mathematical model, namely one-site desorption kinetic model, was used to describe the extraction kinetics.

Temperature, solvent mass flow rate and solvent composition were studied, and the best extraction conditions were defined by a screening design. The maximum concentration of phenolics was obtained at 220 °C, 50% of ethanol and 2.5 g/min of solvent mass flow rate and a high antioxidant capacity toward different techniques was achieved. The one-site desorption kinetic model showed that before 30 min under optimal conditions, more than 90% of phenolics and flavonoids were recovered, a shorter extraction time than the commonly used at normal pressure and room temperature.

The seed coat is a major by-product of soybean processing, and it only markets as a low value ruminant feed. To date, there are no reports on the extract phenolics from SSCs by means of this methodology. The extraction technique described in this study provides a potential alternative for extraction of bioactive compounds from SSCs. This study contributes to adding value to this industrial waste and, ultimately, to optimize the postharvest production chain of soybean grains.

The purpose of this research is to enable dynamic customization of metadata that describes educational resources in digital repositories.

Users need to describe educational resources in digital repositories according to a user-specific metadata set. As users generally do not have the skills to customize the software application manually, this approach relies on the techniques of model-driven software engineering, which should allow customization of the software application programmatically with no need to develop or order a new software application. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed solution.

A software platform for managing educational resources described by dynamically extendable metadata is proposed. The platform enables the creation of data models that are programmatically transformed to a Web application for the management of educational resources. In this way, users can create their own models of metadata that are relevant in a particular domain.

The solution has been verified by users with technical knowledge. The appropriateness of the model should still be explored for domain experts with little technical knowledge who desire to define new metadata in their domain.

The solution can be used for digital repositories that store diverse educational resources. Each resource could be described using metadata that relates to the domain the resource belongs to.

Digital repositories standardly describe educational resources using some general metadata, which are more focused on the physical characteristics of resources rather than their semantics. The proposed solution introduces custom domain-specific semantics into the description of the resources, which improves their retrieval.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative levels of multiple individual and environmental factors that influence self‐employment motivation in China, Mexico, and the USA and the effect of each factor on motivation for self‐employment in each country.

A survey was administered to 987 students at universities in the USA (n=535), Mexico (n=195), and China (n=257). Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assure measurement model fit. Hypotheses were tested using ANOVA tests and regression analyses.

Results indicate that: the USA has the individual and environmental factors most favorable to self‐employment; Mexico has the highest level of motivation for self‐employment; independence and risk taking are the best predictors of motivation for self‐employment in all three countries; the predictive capability of independence, risk taking, and social networks appears similar for China and the USA; and the predictive capability of informal institutions, government support, and legal support appears similar for China and Mexico.

In spite of abundant research on factors involving motivation for self‐employment, little research has tested relationships among sizable sets of these factors in different countries. This paper examines the effects of multiple individual and environmental factors on self‐employment motivation in China, Mexico, and the USA.

Building on the recent literature on regionalization, the purpose of this paper is to explore the home‐region orientation of Spanish new multinationals in the manufacturing sector and investigate the impact of the liability of foreignness (LOF) on Spanish firms.

The source of the empirical work is the Survey on Business Strategies from 2000 to 2008. The sample is fully representative of exporting Spanish manufacturing firms and collects more than 1,000 firms per year on average. The study defines and calculates the regionalization and multinationality ratios of home‐region oriented firms. Three moderating factors that affect the international behaviour of Spanish firms are introduced and analysed – the degree of foreign ownership, the level of advertising intensity and the level of research intensity.

The results demonstrate a strong home‐region orientation for Spanish exporting firms in manufacturing and that the three moderating factors are critical to their regional orientation and degree of multinationality. Furthermore, the results are linked to the LOF.

The paper sheds light on the regionalization topic, so far unexplored in the Spanish context. The original triad defined by Rugman is modified by dividing the world into three groups – the European Union, Latin America and the rest of the world – in order to fit Spanish interests. This paper contributes to understanding how firm specific advantages affect firms' behaviour and how they are related to the LOF.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between two psychological factors which are occupation stress and productivity, that influence workers immerse into textile production labor context.

This study has a quantitative methodology, is cross-sectional, nonexperimental and with an explicative scope.

The results of this research allow to identify that occupational stress levels cause a negative impact on worker’s productivity in the textile production area.

There are two limitations in this study, first is the participant’s subjectivity when filling the questionnaires because it was self-reported and the second limitation is that the sample is specifically from a city of a South American country.

The results of this investigation show as an evidence the need for psychological intervention within companies for occupational stress, because it will impact in a negative way the textile production of a company, which will guide future research making possible to develop and apply psychological treatment programs pro employee’s mental health.

A textile company with low productivity will bring strong economic losses and even bankruptcy, although, thanks to this study it was possible to identify that occupational stress will have a negative impact in productivity, drawing an important based line to future research, looking to improve worker’s performance and hence, companies’ profits contributing to social economic processes.

In general, companies of textile industry (as many others from capitalist economic system), make substantial investments in technology instruments, specialized workers, machines’ maintenance and reparation, marketing, etc. to improve their production standards, however, there is a low investment on worker’s mental health, as it has been found in this study it generates a strong negative impact on its productivity.

Architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) is an important industry worldwide and one of the largest economic sectors in several developing countries, particularly in Iran. The Iranian AEC sector suffers from low productivity and needs to adopt building information modeling (BIM) to reduce inefficiencies. Therefore, this paper was conducted to identify the BIM barriers and propose practical solutions to overcome them in Iran.

A comprehensive literature review, two rounds of the Delphi technique and semi-structured interviews with 12 Iranian experts in the AEC sector were conducted. The data were analyzed using the mean score, standard deviation and nonparametric tests.

The present study identified 26 BIM barriers in the Iranian AEC community and provided practical strategies for improving BIM adoption. The identified barriers were categorized into six main groups including source barriers, financial barriers, unawareness barriers, organizational barriers, regulatory barriers and market-demand barriers. The main three BIM barriers in Iran were the lack of government intervention, change-resistant and the gap between industry and academia. Kruskal–Wallis tests revealed that there are no statistically significant differences in perceptions of BIM barriers between respondents. The Mann–Whitney test indicated that there is no statistically significant difference in perceptions between engineers and architects except for one.

There are few studies on BIM adoption across developing countries, particularly in Iran. Moreover, the results can also be used in other developing nations with similar conditions.