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The contemporary zombie genre is known for exploring what the end will look like, with its widespread infection, chaos and violence – all images that resonate in a post-9/11 America. These zombie narratives also speak to a present-day America with their emphasis on diminishing individuality and agency. Unlike early Haitian incarnations of the zombie figure, the modern zombie terrifies because no singular agent possesses the victim’s mind. In contrast, the light-hearted CW television show, iZombie (2015–) rethinks the zombie paradigm. Not only does it envision how zombies would manifest in everyday life, without the requisite apocalypse, but it also subverts the antiquated gender politics common to the genre by providing viewers with a female zombie protagonist, Olivia Moore (Rose McIver) who is not only highly functional, but also female and with plenty of agency. Moore, through whose eyes the show is told, absorbs personality traits and memories belonging to the brains she eats, from frat boy to alcoholic, stripper to housewife. This device creates such a cornucopia of roles for McIver to explore that it brings to mind the work of American photographer Cindy Sherman, providing a rare multi-dimensional woman on TV. iZombie also takes the contemporary zombie text’s reliance on the trop of infection one step further. This chapter not only examines iZombie’s unusual female point of view, but also its portrayal of ‘zombie-ness’ as a chronic contagious illness with many similarities to HIV.

Nonperforming assets in any banking system have stressed the economic health of nations. Resultantly, literature has given considerable impetus to predict failures and bankruptcy. Past studies have focused on the outcome of failures, while, there is a dearth of studies focusing on ongoing firms in bad shape. We plug this gap and attempt to identify underlying communication patterns for firms witnessing prolonged underperformance. Using text mining, we extract and analyze semantic, linguistic, emotional, and sentiment-based features in non-numeric communication channels of these poor-performing firms and their peers. These uncovered patterns highlight the use of vocabulary and tone of communication, in correspondence to their financial well-being. Furthermore, using such patterns, we deploy various Machine Learning algorithms to identify loser firm(s) way ahead in time. We observe promising accuracy over a time window of five years. Such early warning signals can be of critical importance to various stakeholders of a firm. Exploration of writing style-related features for any firm would help its investors, lending agencies to assess the likelihood of future underperformance. Firm management can use them to take suitable precautionary measures and preempt the future possibility of distress. While investors and lenders can be benefitted from this incremental information to identify the likelihood of future failures.

The objective of this research work is to study the artificial intelligence (AI)-based product benefits and problems of the agritech industry. The research variables were developed from the existing review of literature connecting to AI-based benefits and problems, and 90 samples of primary data from agritech industry managers were gathered using a survey of a well-structured research questionnaire. The statistical package of IBM-SPSS 21 was utilized to analyze the data using the statistical techniques of descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Results show that better information for faster decision-making has been ranked as the topmost AI benefit. This implies that the executives of agritech units have a concern about the quality of decisions they make and resistance to change from employees and internal culture has been ranked as the topmost AI problem.

This chapter aims to assess the scope of India's gastronomic tourism post-COVID-19 and discuss the utilisation of vlogs to promote India as a gastronomic destination. First, the evolution of gastronomic tourism is reviewed. Next, opportunities and challenges associated with India's gastronomic offerings, both from international and domestic tourism perspectives, are discussed. Then, the role of vlogging to position and promote India as a gastronomic destination is established. The chapter suggests recommendations for the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India on utilising vlogging to promote gastronomic tourism.