Search results

There has been a significant expansion of secure psychiatric service provision in the UK, but little discussion about the most appropriate principles on which to base these services. There is longstanding tension between security and treatment that can be difficult to resolve. Solution‐focused ideas may provide a bridge between these two issues, by improving multi‐disciplinary working and providing an appropriate relationship style that optimises the delivery of care to forensic patients.

The paper aims to study the impact of cultural differences on the ownership structure of international joint ventures in China. It is reasoned that foreign investors, when faced with larger culture‐related investment uncertainties, may have the incentive to acquire more control rights to contain the risks by acquiring more equity shares in the joint ventures.

Data on international joint ventures in China were used to test the theory. The data contain 941 observations from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjing, covering a 13‐year time span. Pooled ordinary least square is used in the model estimation.

Cultural distance between China and foreign countries was found to increase the foreign equity share in the joint ventures, a finding contrary to traditional view. In addition, it was found that cultural distance in different dimensions does not play an equal role in affecting foreign equity shares. Last, there is significant evidence that the allocation of ownership between foreign and domestic investors in the joint ventures is influenced by the investor's relative importance in supplying different types of resources.

The paper introduces a new perspective into the study of culture and international joint venture. Foreign investors may be able to reduce investment risk by increasing equity shares, which gives them more internal control, in international joint ventures. In contrast, the traditional view is that larger cultural distance tends to discourage foreign equity ownership.

The use of extended reality (XR) to create memorable experiences has attracted considerable attention, especially in tourism. Multisensory XR offers a new way of virtually previewing a destination before physical holidays. This study aims to explore how multisensory XR can be used at each stage of the tourism experience journey. This study established a model for how destination-image formation is affected by multisensory XR in each phase of tourism experience.

The authors followed the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines to review studies published between 2013 and 2020, gathered from four research databases. The authors identified the predominant XR technology and sensory stimuli based on the characteristics of various tourism domains. The authors synthesized the previous studies to explain destination-image formation by using multisensory XR.

This study summarized the XR study distribution among the three stages of the tourism experience journey. The authors identified the predominant sensory stimuli and dominant XR application and developed a destination-image formation model by using multisensory XR.

This study highlights the holistic approach of multisensory XR in the tourism experience journey in relation to various tourism domains. It also contributes to destination-image formation in the virtual environment by providing multisensory experiences of predominant sensory stimuli at each stage.

多感官扩展现实对旅游体验的影响

运用扩展现实（XR）来创造令人印象深刻的体验在旅游领域得到了瞩目。多感官XR提供了用虚拟方式预览景区的新途径。本研究探讨了多感官XR是怎样在旅游体验的各个阶段进行运用。我们建立了一个关于目的地形象行程是怎样收到多感知XR在每一个旅游体验阶段影响模型。

本研究遵循了系统评价的首选的报告项目对由四份数据库综合提取的2013 到2020 年间发表的文章用系统文献综述和荟萃分析方法进行了梳理。基于不同旅游领域我们发现了首要的XR技术和感官刺激因素。本研究综合了之前文章用多感官XR来解释目的地形象的产生的文章。

我们总结了XR 基于旅游体验三个阶段的研究的分布. 我们确定了主导的感官刺激因素和主导的XR应用技术并且用多元感知XR研发了目的地形象形成的模型。

本研究突出了多元感官XR在旅游体验跨越多层旅游领域的整体性方式。本研究并且通过提供每阶段的主打感官刺激元素在多感官体验过程中对虚拟环境下的目的地形象产生做出了贡献。

The largest share of a building maintenance budget goes towards preventing or repairing building defects. Also, building defects shorten a building’s lifetime, impact the user’s safety and health, prevent the buildings from performing their functions well and repairing building defects generates waste. Therefore, this study aims to specify the factors that affecting the number of building defects and how to reduce their negative impacts.

A case study was used as a research strategy and convergent parallel mixed methods were used as research design. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected concurrently, followed by independent analyses of the quantitative and qualitative data, and then merged the two sets of results according to the procedure of using the convergent parallel design. Descriptive statistics analysed quantitative data, whilst qualitative data was analysed by the content analysis technique.

The findings of this study explored the factors that affect the number of defects in buildings, the significant factors were related to the building’s life cycle in terms of design, construction, operation and maintenance phase; relevant attributes were construction teams, building users and maintenance teams. The study also addressed the approaches to minimise the negative impacts of those factors. Their negative impacts mainly contributed to increased building defects that increase maintenance costs, affect users’ safety and health, reduce buildings’ lifespan and cause environmental impact due to resource extraction.

The existing studies have not adequately addressed the significant factors that affect the number of building defects. Also, emerging technologies and environmental sustainability considerations related to building defects have not been linked in previous related work. Therefore, the present study has contributed to filling this gap.

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are viewed as a reform tool for resolving inefficiency and absence of dynamism in water supply delivery in developing countries. However, the requirements for their successful implementation have received very little attention. This paper aims to describe a set of critical success factors (CSFs) that, when given special and continual attention, would ensure a successful project implementation and to provide a predictive tool to aid implementers to evaluate the likelihood of a successful PPP water supply project.

Fourteen perceived CSFs were initially derived from project cases and extant literature, and verified through a two-round Delphi survey. Factor analysis established five critical success factor groups (CSFGs) that were then used to develop a fuzzy synthetic evaluation tool for assessing the chance of a successful project.

The five key CSFGs are commitment of partners, strength of consortium, asset quality and social support, political environment, and national PPP unit. The model output showed that, overall, these factors have a “very high” positive impact on a successful implementation of a water supply project. Hence, there is an excellent correlation between achievement of the CSFGs and project success. Success indices of individual principal factors are also “very high”.

The study presents a tool to public clients and private audience, and it is hoped that the study will trigger policy development towards PPP practice in developing countries, because these findings have wider implications for legal and regulatory systems, public capacity, financing, public procurement and politics.

Prior studies use two measures of firm-specific return variation (FSRV): idiosyncratic volatility in absolute and relative terms, the latter of which is also termed stock price nonsynchronicity. Whereas most research focuses on investigating the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle, the authors carry out comparison of these two measures and further investigate which of the two constituents of nonsynchronicity explain the association between FSRV and stock returns, emphasising the importance of assessing which component drives stock returns.

The authors use the US individual stock returns from 1925 to 2016 and define the two measures of FRSV based on the Fama and French (1993) model. Specifically, the authors decompose the relative measure into two components: (i) absolute idiosyncratic volatility and (ii) systematic volatility. The authors conduct various tests based on high-minus-low, zero-investment quintile portfolio sorts and perform the Fama–MacBeth analysis by singling out each component.

The authors find a positive return on the portfolio sorted on relative idiosyncratic volatility or on systematic volatility, but find a negative return sorted on absolute idiosyncratic volatility. The results are robust after controlling for size, BM and other risk characteristics using a double-sorting approach. The Fama–MacBeth regression results show that a positive association between the relative measure and stock returns is driven primarily by the low-systematic-volatility anomaly across firms. The findings are robust to controlling for return residual momentum, skewness, jumps and information discreteness.

Extant research posits the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle and the low-volatility anomaly. The authors emphasize the importance of integrating these two streams of research. This study enhances the understanding of the driving force underlying the relationship between FSRV and cross-sectional stock returns.

It has been two decades since the first academic paper shone a spotlight on non-GAAP earnings. The past 20 years of research investigates concerns over the misuse of these disclosures and resulted in some significant changes to accounting and reporting standards across the globe. This paper aims to document the history of non-GAAP reporting and outline the emerging themes of the now matured practice of non-GAAP reporting.

This systematic literature review searches two popular databases to identify the academic publications relating to non-GAAP reporting between 2002 and 2022. The paper uses bibliographic mapping to present the key statistics of the non-GAAP reporting field of research.

The non-GAAP reporting environment started out as the “wild West’ but, through regulation and public awareness, emerged as an important supplement to the traditional outputs of financial reporting. Current consensus is recent non-GAAP earnings are informative to users but there is lack of research into qualitative non-GAAP disclosures and the vast body of archival research needs triangulating with more experimental studies.

This paper contributes to the literature by documenting the past 20 years of non-GAAP reporting and identifying the important existing and emerging research areas concerning non-GAAP earnings disclosures.

Bisphosphonate (BP) medications can be applied to prohibit the damage of bone density and the remedy of bone illnesses such as osteoporosis. As the metal chelating of phosphonate groups are nearby large with six O atoms possessing the high negative charge, these compounds are active toward producing the chelated complexes through drug design method. BP agents have attracted much attention for the clinical treatment of some skeletal diseases depicted by enhancing of osteoclast-mediated bone resorption.

In this work, it has been accomplished the CAM-B3LYP/6–311+G(d, p)/LANL2DZ to estimate the susceptibility of SWCNT for adsorbing alendronate, ibandronate, neridronate and pamidronate chelated to two metal cations of 2Mg²⁺, 2Ca²⁺, 2Sr²⁺ through nuclear magnetic resonance and thermodynamic parameters. Therefore, the data has explained that the feasibility of using SWCNT and BP agents becomes the norm in metal chelating of drug delivery system which has been selected through alendronate → 2X, ibandronate → 2X, neridronate → 2X and pamidronate → 2X (X = Mg²⁺/Ca²⁺/Sr²⁺) complexes.

The thermodynamic results have exhibited that the substitution of 2Ca²⁺ cation by 2Sr²⁺ cation in the structure of bioactive glasses can be efficient for treating vertebral complex fractures. However, it has been observed the most fluctuation in the Gibbs free energy for BPs → 2Sr²⁺ at 300 K. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulation has resulted by increasing the dielectric constant in the aqueous medium can enhance the stability and efficiency of BP drugs for preventing the loss of bone density and treating the osteoporosis.

According to this research, by incorporation of chelated 2Mg²⁺, 2Ca²⁺ and 2Sr²⁺ cations to BP drugs adsorbed onto (5, 5) armchair SWCNT, the network compaction would increase owing to the larger atomic radius of Sr²⁺ cation rather than Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺, respectively.

This paper aims to identify key theoretical cornerstones and research trends in the apparel industry. It also compares theoretical bases with those of the general research domain in technology adoption literature and, thus, provides future policy guidelines for practitioners and research gaps for further studies.

Documents were collected from the Web of Science (core collection) database using systematic methods. The bibliometric coupling and co-citation analyses were conducted using VOSviewer software to construct theoretical cornerstones and research trends in the apparel industry.

Literature in the apparel industry focuses mainly on the diffusion of innovation and the theory of reasoned action. Hence, the literature lacks investigations of technology–organization–environment and institutional theories for technology adoption in the apparel industry. This study also traces six clusters of prevalent research trends: radiofrequency identification, virtual-try on technology for e-commerce, computer-aided design, Industry 4.0 technologies, virtual-try on technology in design and information technology.

Little research is done on theoretical cornerstones on technology adoption in the apparel industry. This study looks into the theoretical bases for technology adoption, research trends in the apparel supply chain and calls for future research necessities.

The purpose of this paper is to critically summarize the current data concerning the impact of obesity and micronutrient adequacy and supplementation on the risk and severity of COVID-19 disease, and their potential impact on treatment and rehabilitation.

PubMed, Scopus and Google Scholar databases were thoroughly searched to identify studies concerning obesity and nutritional status, vitamin and other micronutrients adequacy with COVID-19 severity.

Individuals with higher body mass index are in greater risk of severe disease and need for mechanical ventilation. Concerning micronutrient adequacy, no published studies at the present time have evaluated the effect of supplementation on the risk and the treatment of the novel disease.

Recently, COVID-19 has monopolized the interest of the medical community regarding diet and nutritional status and it possibly plays an important role in disease severity.