Search results

This study aims to investigate the impact of regular Kung Fu and Taekwondo practice on the health and quality of life among elderly individuals in the Maule region, Chile.

The authors designed a 12-week Kung Fu and Taekwondo workshop with activities suitable for their age. Through semistructured interviews (at the beginning and the end of the workshop), along with periodic monitoring of vital signs and cardiovascular components, the authors observed an improvement in participants’ physical (strength, speed of reaction and flexibility) and psychological conditions (self-esteem and resilience), quality of life (relationships with family and friends and ability to deal with stressful events in working life) and health (waist circumference, percentage of oxygen saturation in blood, blood pressure, among other values).

From these results, the authors affirm that this workshop improves health and physical condition and helps the participants develop the coping capacity to deal with stressful situations and complicated interpersonal relationships. In this sense, the authors conclude that Kung Fu and Taekwondo as regular sports activities can benefit senior citizens’ aging process.

This research is based on an original study project.

Despite the prevalence of uncivil behaviors across families and past studies attributing work stressors to suicidal ideation (SI), there is no conclusive evidence of the interactive effect of family incivility (FI) aggravating SI. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore the association between FI and SI through emotional exhaustion (EE) in the workplace and regulation of emotion.

A time lag (T1 and T2) study is applied for primary data collection using a survey questionnaire. The partial least squares–structural equational modeling algorithm tests reliability, validity and hypotheses.

Experiencing FI exacerbates SI, while the regulation of emotion and EE mediate the association between FI and SI.

Professionals are advised to adopt regulation of emotion that fosters desirable behavior and shields targets from FI and EE, minimizing the intensity of SI.

This study significantly adds to how FI and EE aggravate SI and contribute to the body of knowledge on the regulation of emotion in stress and coping mechanisms.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of trust, informational support and integrative behaviors in the effective outcomes of peer conflict in the workplace.

Deidentified secondary data were provided by a human resource management company that offers conflict resolution training. The authors studied a sample of 815 supervisors and middle-level managers (51% female; average age = 40) who reported their primary work experience was in the USA. Each respondent described a workplace conflict with a peer. A regression-based bootstrapping technique was used to test the hypothesized relationships between the constructs of trust, informational support, integrative behaviors and effective outcomes in peer conflict.

The relationship between trust and the use of integrative behaviors during peer conflict is conditional on the availability of informational support, such that those who solicit a third party’s views are more likely to exhibit integrative behaviors during the conflict under study, even at relatively lower levels of trust in the conflict relationship.

In this study, the authors add to social interdependence theory and the role of integrative behaviors by proposing the importance of interpersonal trust and informational support, which may reduce uncertainty during peer conflict. The authors also extend existing literature on cooperation, cooperative approaches to managing conflict and integrative behaviors in the workplace by examining peer-to-peer organizational conflict.

Given the difficulties in finding significant exchange rate exposure in the extant literature, this paper attempts to resolve the so-called “exposure puzzle” by investigating whether currency movements have any significant impact on international industry returns.

This paper utilizes the multivariate Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (MGARCH) methodology to estimate both symmetric and asymmetric exchange rate exposures for each industry common across 12 countries simultaneously.

The empirical results show that exchange rate exposure is not only statistically significant but also economically important based on the estimation of an asymmetric three-factor exposure model using MGARCH methodology. This is an extremely important finding as it suggests that the “exposure puzzle” may not be a puzzle at all once a better methodology is utilized in the estimation.

Because this study tries to resolve the exchange rate exposure puzzle by focusing on whether exchange rate movements affect ex-post returns as opposed to ex ante expected returns and given the significant exposures with respect to different risk factors found in the study, it is interesting to see if any of these risk factors commands a risk premium. In other words, a natural extension of this study is to test whether any of these risk factors is priced in international industry returns.

The findings of the study have interesting implications for international investors who would like to diversify their portfolios across different industries and are concerned about whether the unexpected movements in the bilateral exchange rates will affect their portfolio returns in addition to its interest rate and world market risk exposures.

The study utilizes the MGARCH methodology, which has not been fully exploited in the exchange rate exposure literature.

In the reduction of food waste and the provision of food to the hungry, food banks play critical roles. However, as they are generally run by charitable organisations that are chronically short of human and other resources, their inbound logistics efforts commonly experience difficulties in two key areas: 1) how to organise stocks of donated food, and 2) how to assess the donated items quality and fitness for purpose. To address both these problems, the authors aimed to develop a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based approach to food quality and warehousing management in food banks.

For diagnosing the quality of donated food items, the authors designed a convolutional neural network (CNN); and to ascertain how best to arrange such items within food banks' available space, reinforcement learning was used.

Testing of the proposed innovative CNN demonstrated its ability to provide consistent, accurate assessments of the quality of five species of donated fruit. The reinforcement-learning approach, as well as being capable of devising effective storage schemes for donated food, required fewer computational resources that some other approaches that have been proposed.

Viewed through the lens of expectation-confirmation theory, which the authors found useful as a framework for research of this kind, the proposed AI-based inbound-logistics techniques exceeded normal expectations and achieved positive disconfirmation.

As well as enabling machines to learn how inbound logistics are handed by human operators, this pioneering study showed that such machines could achieve excellent performance: i.e., that the consistency provided by AI operations could in future dramatically enhance such logistics' quality, in the specific case of food banks.

This paper’s AI-based inbound-logistics approach differs considerably from others, and was found able to effectively manage both food-quality assessments and food-storage decisions more rapidly than its counterparts.

Using features of social media, peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payment enables users to foster social interaction every time transactions are made. Given the increasing popularity of social features in P2P mobile payment applications, it is worth understanding how these components contribute to users’ switching behavior between conventional mobile payment and P2P mobile payment services. By treating sociability of P2P mobile payment as a pull factor, this study aims to extend the push–pull–mooring framework in the context of P2P mobile payment.

A questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain data. Respondents from the USA were exclusively selected due to the emerging number of P2P mobile payment users and the volume of transactions in this country. Based on a sample of 232 Amazon Mechanical Turk mobile payment users, the authors tested the hypotheses using the partial least squares structural equation model technique with SmartPLS software version 3.

The finding reveals that sociability is triggered by social presence, social benefit and social support within the P2P mobile payment platform. Moreover, dissatisfaction with perceived enjoyment of conventional mobile payment (push factor), customer innovativeness (mooring factor) and sociability of P2P mobile payment (pull factor) jointly influence users’ intention to switch to P2P mobile payment services, and subsequently drive their migration behavior.

Unlike past research that mainly focuses on utilitarian-related factors, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to thoroughly examine the sociability features of P2P mobile payment service as a form of a social-centric system.

Distribution network design involves a set of strategic decisions in supply chains because of their long-term impacts on the total logistics cost and environment. To incorporate a trade-off between financial and environmental aspects of these decisions, this paper aims to determine an optimal location, among candidate locations, of a new logistics center, its capacity, as well as optimal network flows for an existing distribution network, while concurrently minimizing the total logistics cost and gas emission. In addition, uncertainty in transportation and warehousing costs are considered.

The problem is formulated as a fuzzy multiobjective mathematical model. The effectiveness of this model is demonstrated using an industrial case study. The problem instance is a four-echelon distribution network with 22 products and a planning horizon of 20 periods. The model is solved by using the min–max and augmented ε-constraint methods with CPLEX as the solver. In addition to illustrating model’s applicability, the effect of choosing a new warehouse in the model is investigated through a scenario analysis.

For the applicability of the model, the results indicate that the augmented ε-constraint approach provides a set of Pareto solutions, which represents the ideal trade-off between the total logistics cost and gas emission. Through a case study problem instance, the augmented ε-constraint approach is recommended for similar network design problems. From a scenario analysis, when the operational cost of the new warehouse is within a specific fraction of the warehousing cost of third-party warehouses, the solution with the new warehouse outperforms that without the new warehouse with respective to financial and environmental objectives.

The proposed model is an effective decision support tool for management, who would like to assess the impact of network planning decisions on the performance of their supply chains with respect to both financial and environmental aspects under uncertainty.

This study aims to explore the relationship between folk religious place-making and the development of urban public spaces and summarize its influence on community network construction and daily behavior to discover the authentic practices and role of folk faith culture in social space.

Taking Macau's Shi Gandang Temple and its belief culture as an example, on-site research, historical evidence and interviews were used to elaborate and analyze the processes of place-making, social functions, management mechanisms and folk culture to establish a new perception of folk religious place-making in contemporary urban spaces.

The article argues that the culture of folk beliefs profoundly influences urban spaces and the social management system of Macau and has a positive significance in building the local community and geopolitical relations. In addition, it suggests that the participation of folk religious places in local practices is important as key nodes and emotional hubs of local networks, reconciling conflicts between communities of different backgrounds and driving urban spaces toward diversity while forming a positive interaction and friendly cooperation between regional development and self-contained management mechanisms, governance models and cultural orientations.

This study takes an architectural and anthropological perspective of the impact of faith on urban spaces and local governance, using the Shi Gandang Temple in Macau as an example, to complement related studies.

This study aims to investigate the effect of speckle pattern on displacement measurements using different speckle diameters and coverage ratios.

In order to compare the coverage ratio and speckle diameter during the evaluation of the correlation of digital images (DIC) study, template speckle plates were produced on a computer numerical control (CNC) punch press with 600 punches per minute. After the speckle plates were manufactured, the speckled pattern was randomly painted on a plain white side through the manufactured template plates, and then tensile tests were performed under the same loading conditions for each sample to observe displacement variation via correlation parameters.

During the manufacturing of templates with thin plates, a punch diameter of less than 1.7 mm will cause tool failure; therefore, uniform speckle size can be assessed before operation. A higher coverage ratio resulted in more accurate and reliable results in displacement data. With smaller coverage, the facet size should be increased to achieve favorable results.

If thick template plates are selected, speckle painting cannot be done properly; therefore, template thickness shall also be assessed before operation.

For randomly distributed DIC templates, increasing coverage beyond 50% does not make sense due to difficulties in the production process in the punch press.

Evaluating DIC results via templates manufactured in a punch press with different speckle diameters and coverage ratios is a new topic in literature.