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Following the development of a service that consisted of a “single point of contact” to coordinate end-of-life care (EoLC), including EoLC facilitators and an urgent response team, we aimed to explore whether the provision of coordinated EoLC would support patients being cared or dying in their preferred place and avoid unwanted hospital admissions.

Using a realist evaluation approach, the authors examined “what worked for whom, how, in what circumstances and why”. Multiple data were collected, including activity/performance indicators, observations of management meetings, documents, satisfaction survey and 30 interviews with service providers and users.

Advance care planning (ACP) increased through the first three years of the service (from 45% to 83%) and on average 74% of patients achieved preferred place of death. More than 70% of patients avoided an emergency or unplanned hospital admission in their last month of life. The mechanisms and context identified as driving forces of the service included: 7/7 single point of contact; coordinating services across providers; recruiting and developing the workforce; understanding and clarifying new roles; and managing expectations.

This was a service evaluation and the outcomes are related to the specific context and mechanisms. However, findings can be transferable to similar settings.

“Single point of contact” services that offer coordinated EoLC can contribute in supporting people to be cared and die in their preferred place.

This paper provides an evaluation of a novel approach to EoLC and creates a set of hypotheses that could be further tested in similar services in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of the herbicide triclopyr, nitrogen and their combinations on Striga incidence and sorghum growth.

A greenhouse study was undertaken in season 2013. Sorghum cv Wad Ahmed, urea and triclopyr were employed. Treatments were arranged in a randomized complete design with four replicates.

Nitrogen alone suppressed the parasite completely early in the season. Triclopyr at 0.3 and 0.4 kg a.e. ha−1 reduced Striga emergence by 92.9 and 58.3 per cent early and late in the season, respectively. Triclopyr at 0.3 kg a.e. ha−1 applied subsequent to nitrogen at 43.8 kg ha−1 effected poor control of the parasite. Unrestricted Striga parasitism reduced sorghum height and chlorophyll content by 50.38 and 16.62 per cent, respectively. Triclopyr, nitrogen and their combination improved sorghum growth considerably.

The results suggest that the herbicide when applied subsequent to nitrogen afforded the most consistent performance and resulted in the highest suppression of the parasite.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis between a straight blade (SB) and a curved caudal-fin tidal turbine blade (CB) and to examine the aspects relating to geometry, turbulence modelling, non-dimensional forces lift and power coefficients.

The comparison utilises results obtained from a default horizontal axis tidal turbine with turbine models available from the literature. A computational design method was then developed and implemented for “horizontal axis tidal turbine blade”. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results for the blade design are presented in terms of lift coefficient distribution at mid-height blades, power coefficients and blade surface pressure distributions. Moving the CB back towards the SB ensures that the total blade height stays constant for all geometries. A 3D mesh independency study of a “straight blade horizontal axis tidal turbine blade” modelled using CFD was carried out. The grid convergence study was produced by employing two turbulence models, the standard k-ε model and shear stress transport (SST) in ANSYS CFX. Three parameters were investigated: mesh resolution, turbulence model, and power coefficient in the initial CFD, analysis.

It was found that the mesh resolution and the turbulence model affect the power coefficient results. The power coefficients obtained from the standard k-ε model are 15 to 20 per cent lower than the accuracy of the SST model. Further analysis was performed on both the designed blades using ANSYS CFX and SST turbulence model. The variation in pressure distributions yields to the varying lift coefficient distribution across blade spans. The lift coefficient reached its peak between 0.75 and 0.8 of the blade span where the total lift accelerates with increasing pressure before drastically dropping down at 0.9 onwards due to the escalating rotational velocity of the blades.

The work presents a computational design methodological approach that is entirely original. While this numerical method has proven to be accurate and robust for many traditional tidal turbines, it has now been verified further for CB tidal turbines.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of social media in the marketing of academic library resources and services in Kuwait and identifies the factors related to the use of social media applications in marketing academic libraries.

A quantitative data-collection approach using a paper and online questionnaire has been employed to elicit the opinions of librarians working in academic libraries in Kuwait in both private and public institutions. In total, 89 valid questionnaires have been analyzed using descriptive (frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations) and inferential statistics (factor analysis, correlations, experimental analysis and regression).

The study shows that the academic librarians have a positive perception toward the use of social media. The identified factors relating to the use of social media for marketing library information resources and services are the usefulness of social media tools in raising awareness and in providing needs analysis and satisfaction assessments. However, management support for the use of social media for library marketing is poor.

This study provides insights into the factors related to the use of modern social media platforms to promote information resources and services at academic libraries to provide outreach services to current and potential users.

This research contributes to the field of information studies as it highlights the importance of using social media platforms in marketing academic library information resources and services. Library administrators could use the results to develop social media marketing plans to effectively promote their library resources.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between accounting conservatism and pledging of shares by controlling shareholders of a firm to obtain a loan. The pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders of a firm results in alterations to the payoff and risk structure for these shareholders. Since accounting numbers have valuation implications, pledging of shares by a controlling shareholder has an impact on accounting policy choices made by the firm. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of controlling shareholder share pledging to obtain a loan on a specific accounting policy choice, namely, conservatism.

The paper uses a large data set from India comprising 14,786 firm years consisting of 1,570 firms belonging to 58 industries for a period of 11 years (2009–2019). The authors use ordinary least square regression with robust standard errors. The authors conduct robustness checks and the results are consistent across alternative statistical methodologies and alternative measures of the primary dependent and independent variables.

The primary results show that pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders results in higher conditional conservatism and lower unconditional conservatism. Further analysis reveals that the relationship is stronger when the controlling shareholder holds a majority ownership in the firm. Additionally, the results show that for business group affiliated firms, which are unique to developing countries, both the conditional and the unconditional conservatism are incrementally lower when the controlling shareholder pledges the shares. For family firms with a family member as CEO, the conditional conservatism is incrementally higher and the unconditional conservatism is incrementally lower. Finally, the authors show that the results hold when the pledge intensity variable is measured with a one-year lag and finally, the authors show that conditional conservatism is incrementally higher in the year of the increase in the pledge and the year after, but there is no such incremental impact on unconditional conservatism.

The research is limited to the listed firms in India. Since majority of the listed firms are controlled by families and the family firms around the world are heterogeneous the findings of the research may not be applicable to other countries.

The study has implications for policy-making and monitoring of the pledging by the controlling shareholders. It also helps the investors in making investment decisions with respect to family firms in India.

The study is unique as it focuses on the relationship between pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders and its impact on accounting conservatism. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research integrating these two aspects.

Recycling construction waste is a promising way towards sustainable development in construction. Recycled aggregate (RA) is obtained from demolished concrete structures, laboratory crushed concrete, concrete waste at a ready mix concrete plant and the concrete made from RA is known as RA concrete. The purpose of this study is to apply multiple linear regressions (MLRs) and artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the mechanical properties, such as compressive strength (CS), flexural strength (FS) and split tensile strength (STS) of concrete at the age of 28 days curing made completely from the recycled coarse aggregate (RCA).

MLR and ANN are used to develop a prediction model. The model was developed in the training phase by using data from a previously published research study and a developed model was further tested by obtaining data from laboratory experiments.

ANN shows more accuracy than MLR with an R²-value of more than 0.8 in the training phase and 0.9 in a testing phase. The high R²-value indicates strong relation between the actual and predicted values of mechanical properties of RCA concrete. These models will help construction professionals to save their time and cost in predicting the mechanical properties of RCA concrete at 28 days of curing.

ANN with rectified linear unit transfer function and backpropagation algorithm for training is used to develop a prediction model. The outcome of this study is the prediction model for CS, FS and STS of concrete at 28 days of curing.

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 study attempts to find the structural relationship between Total Quality Management (TQM) and Corporate Sustainability (CS) by analyzing the role of Innovation Capability (IC).

The authors conducted the study in the context of manufacturing industries in the Indian Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector. In the process, The authors attempt to throw light on the significance of TQM and IC in bringing out sustainable practices in organizations. The authors used Structural Equation Modeling with AMOS to study the relationship between TQM and CS.

The authors measured TQM through product control management, process control, vendor quality management and customer relationship improvement. We did find a direct relationship between TQM and CS, along with its three dimensions: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social sustainability. TQM was found to be antecedent to IC. IC, measured through product innovation, process innovation and managerial innovation, did not mediate the relation between TQM and CS. However, the link between TQM and social and environmental sustainability partially mediates through IC at the dimension level.

TQM can provide a holistic means of nurturing participation and satisfaction of stakeholders for achieving corporate sustainability and in the process, can create an innovative culture for stimulating a circular social economy.

This study fills the gap in the literature by providing a structural model that explains the relationship between TQM and corporate sustainability and highlights the role of innovation capability in achieving it.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.