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Differences in faecal bile acid excretion have been reported between vegetarians and meat‐eaters. The purpose of this study is to compare fasting plasma bile acid concentrations in Asian vegetarians, white vegetarians and white meat‐eaters.

A human experimental study comparing fasting plasma bile acid concentrations in Asian vegetarians, white vegetarians and white meateaters. Three groups of premenopausal women have been recruited: Caucasian omnivores (n  =  19), Caucasian Vegetarians (n  =  16) and Asian vegetarians (n  =  17). Fasting plasma bile acid concentrations were determined by gas‐liquid chromatography.

Although faecal bile acid concentrations were lower in the Caucasian vegetarians than in the omnivores, fasting plasma bile acid concentrations did not differ.

The present results indicate that fasting levels of plasma bile acids in premenopausal women do not necessarily reflect faecal bile acid concentrations.

Assesses the effect of fat substitutes on satiety and subsequent food intake in men; 50 per cent of fat in pork sausages was replaced by natural fat substitutes ‐ Avicel, Tapiocaline and Simplesse. Results showed that high‐energy fat breakfasts comprising full‐fat sausages led to delayed satiety compared with high‐energy CHO breakfasts. There were no differences between hunger and satiety ratings nor energy and fat intakes following different fatsubstituted breakfasts on the test day and the following day. The deficit in energy between high‐energy and reduced‐energy breakfasts was maintained throughout the test day. Consumption of one reduced‐fat meal resulted in a significant reduction of energy intake, which was not compensated for on the test day or on the following day.

Reviews the potential impact of processing procedures on carotenoid form and content. Fruit and vegetables, in particular, are abundant sources of carotenoids in the diet. Many fruit and vegetables are subjected to various types of processing prior to consumption. Fruit may be canned, dried or processed into juices, while vegetables may be blanched, dehydrated, frozen, canned and also processed into juices. Factors such as heat, light and oxygen exposure may have detrimental effects (including destruction and isomerization, with loss of vitamin A activity), while some procedures may bring benefits (such as increased unit content and retention, breakdown of inhibitory structures and enhanced bioavailability). Concludes that the extent and nature of processing can have a significant impact on the form and content of carotenoids in processed fruit and vegetables.

This research investigates the top five pharmaceutical companies in India to determine whether their financial structures are sound and if they face the risk of bankruptcy, highlighting the potential contribution of intellectual capital (IC) to financial stability.

The analysis outlines operating ratios, profitability ratios, possibility of bankruptcy (through Z-scores) and attractiveness of the financial structure (through the F-score), with consequent focus on (IC).

The financial structure of the selected companies seems stable. Changes in the Indian pharmaceutical scenario, above all, regarding the patent system, will force the companies to consider the impact of IC carefully.

Indian pharmaceutical companies need sustainability and development, with increasing focus on patent issues. To enhance innovation capabilities and overcome international competition, they should redesign their business orientation towards IC, mainly when impacting patents.

Using established approaches for predicting potential bankruptcy, this study focuses on the financial performance of top Indian pharmaceutical companies. IC can support financial stability, and this study provides further perspectives for managing their financial structure, both statically and dynamically.

The case will help learners to analyse how effective handling of an extended marketing mix of 7Ps (product, price, place, promotion, physical evidence, participants and processes) makes a startup profitable in its initial years of inception; understand the significance of the online marketing strategies like digital marketing and social media marketing implemented by firms to attain a competitive edge amongst established local and global competitors; examine the strategic challenges faced by a business enterprise while entering an emerging market; analyse the growth strategies of a startup relative to various market constraints; and propose long-term strategies for sustainable growth for a startup operating in the wearables market.

Founded in 2016, Boat Lifestyle is a Delhi-based Indian startup in fashionable consumer electronics. In the past five years, Boat earned remarkable profits and emerged as one of the most promising startups through its innovative products offerings and promotion. Aiming at its target customer segment, the millennials, it promoted its products through social media marketing such as influencer marketing and brand tie-ins with sports teams and music events. The case focuses on the dynamics of the Indian wearables market that is facing tough competition from global and local players. To ensure continued growth prospects, while maintaining a tight focus on product differentiation, quality, and customer satisfaction, there is a greater need for Boat to rethink its market development and growth strategies regarding new innovations and adopting long-term orientation like diversification and global expansion.

The case aims for teaching business management students at the Undergraduate, Postgraduate, and Executive education level. In addition, the case can be related to the Strategic Management course curriculum and Marketing course curriculum.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy

This paper aims to study the impact of research and development (R&D) activities on the financial performance of Indian pharmaceutical companies listed with the national stock exchange (NSE) of India by conceptualizing R&D’s impact and financial performance framework (RDiFPF).

Strongly balanced panel data set was used for the period of 1999–2020 on the basis of secondary data subscribed from a reputable Capitalline, a corporate database as well as individual company-wise annual report extract for cross-validation.

The paper presents a novel conceptualized framework called RDiFPF with the help of financial performance related variables: sales turnover, return on assets, return on equity and market capitalization, where R&D impacts in a significant manner on the financial performance of the NSE-listed Indian pharmaceutical companies. The paper finally establishes a link between R&D activities and financial performance with respect to the Indian pharmaceutical companies listed with the NSE.

The suggested framework opens new dimension of research with respect to R&D, innovative practices in the pharmaceutical business and financial performance. The research can also be used in teaching and may be beneficial for framing public policy. Though the study has been carried out in Indian context, it might have implications in the emerging economies.

To achieve financial returns, pharmaceutical companies need to adopt appropriate endeavour to invest substantial amount on R&D to bring innovation in the pharmaceutical business.

A better allocation of R&D expenditure has the potential for bringing new medicine, which can cure unknown diseases and impact on the lives of the patient fraternities.

The contributions of the paper are twofold: on the one hand, the author proposes a framework where emphasis has been provided on the R&D investment in the pharmaceutical business and, on the other hand, significant financial performance has been shown which motivates every R&D-centric pharmaceutical companies. Notably, the novel RDiFPF framework, which has been proposed in this study, may ignite and inspire the pharmaceutical business leaders as well as entrepreneurs to take R&D and innovation in pharmaceutical business for impacting human lives as well as to enjoy significant financial returns by providing health-care solution for treating novel diseases and disorders.

Majority of the research work either concentrated on the optimization of scheduling length and execution cost or energy optimization mechanism. This research aims to propose the optimization of makespan, energy consumption and data transfer time (DTT) by considering the priority tasks. The research work is concentrated on the multi-objective approach based on the genetic algorithm (GA) and energy aware model to increase the efficiency of the task scheduling.

Cloud computing is the recent advancement of the distributed and cluster computing. Cloud computing offers different services to the clients based on their requirements, and it works on the environment of virtualization. Cloud environment contains the number of data centers which are distributed geographically. Major challenges faced by the cloud environment are energy consumption of the data centers. Proper scheduling mechanism is needed to allocate the tasks to the virtual machines which help in reducing the makespan. This paper concentrated on the minimizing the consumption of energy as well as makespan value by introducing the hybrid algorithm called as multi-objective energy aware genetic algorithm. This algorithm employs the scheduling mechanism by considering the energy consumption of the CPU in the virtual machines. The energy model is developed for picking the task based on the fitness function. The simulation results show the performance of the multi-objective model with respect to makespan, DTT and energy consumption.

The energy aware model computes the energy based on the voltage and frequency distribution to the CPUs in the virtual machine. The directed acyclic graph is used to represent the task dependencies. The proposed model recorded 5% less makespan compared against the MODPSO and 0.7% less compared against the HEFT algorithms. The proposed model recorded 125 joules energy consumption for 50 VMs when all are in active state.

This paper proposed the multi-objective model based on bio-inspired approach called as genetic algorithm. The GA is combined with the energy aware model for optimizing the consumption of the energy in cloud computing. The GA used priority model for selecting the initial population and used the roulette wheel selection method for parent selection. The energy model is used as fitness function to the GA for selecting the tasks to perform the scheduling.

The goal of the current research is to use different machine learning (ML) approaches to examine and predict customer reviews of food delivery apps (FDAs).

Using Google Play Scraper, data from five food delivery service providers were collected from the Google Play store. Following cleaning the reviews, the filtered texts were classified as having negative, positive, or neutral sentiments, which were then scored using two unsupervised sentiment algorithms (AFINN and Valence Aware Dictionary for sentiment Reasoning (VADER)). Furthermore, the authors employed four ML approaches to categorize each review of FDAs into the respective sentiment class.

According to the study's findings, the majority of customer reviews of FDAs were positive. This research also revealed that, while all of the methods (decision tree, linear support vector machine, random forest classifier and logistic regression) can appropriately classify the reviews into a sentiment category, support vector machines (SVM) beats the others in terms of model accuracy. The authors' study also showed that logistic regression provided the highest recall, F1 score and lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) among the four ML models.

The findings aid FDAs in determining customer review behavior. The study's findings could help food apps developers better understand how customers feel about the developers' products and services. The food apps developer can learn how to use ML techniques to better understand the users' behavior.

The current study uses ML methodologies to investigate and predict consumer attitude regarding FDAs.

Family socio-cultural values and its practices have pervasive effects on early age at first marriage in every society. The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare how family socio-cultural values and its practices exert effect on early age at first marriage between Muslim and Santal couples in rural Bangladesh.

First of all through snow-ball process and checking of marriage documents the author carefully identified 598 couples from Muslim and 560 from Santal who were married the first time between 1995 and 2005 years and whose age range was 12-48 years for husbands and 10-45 years for wives. Then, 585 pairs of couples (295 for Muslim and 290 for Santal) were randomly selected from the Talonda of Rajshahi district, Bangladesh. Data were collected, applying interview method with semi-structural questionnaire in family setting. Then the collected data were analyzed, using χ2 test and binary logistic regression (BLR) technique.

The frequency distribution showed that most of the Santal couples compared to the Muslim ones were married before the minimum legal age in Bangladesh. The results of χ2 test of the frequency distribution were significant at p<0.01 and p<0.05 level. In addition, results of BLR analysis suggested that early age at first marriage was significantly (p<0.01 and p<0.05) associated with family socio-cultural values studied. It is argued that ethnicity, family pattern, residence pattern, illiteracy and ascriptive occupational status were the risk factors to persist early marriage among the Santal couples than the Muslim ones in rural Bangladesh.

Although the findings are suggestive to understand differences in early marriage associated with family socio-cultural values between the ethnic couples, further cross-cultural study should be conducted on how socio-psychological factors affect early marriage between the ethnic groups. In spite of the limitations these findings may have implications in comparative social policy practice to prevent early marriage associated with changes in family socio-cultural values between the ethnic groups in Bangladesh.

The findings in the paper are original in linking between family socio-cultural theory, its related policy and practice to prevent early marriage between the ethnic couples in Bangladesh.