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Andrew L. Armagost is a doctoral student in educational leadership at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a baccalaureate degree in education and policy. His interests in future research include education law, school finance, and teacher employment and certification.

The purpose of this paper is to present a low-cost, highly mobile system for performing street-level imaging. Street-level imaging and geo-location-based services are rapidly growing in both popularity and coverage. Google Street View and Bing StreetSide are two of the free, online services which allow users to search location-based information on interactive maps. In addition, these services also provide software developers and researchers a rich source of street-level images for different purposes – from identifying traffic routes to augmented reality applications. Currently, coverage for Street View and StreetSide is limited to more affluent Western countries with sparse coverage throughout south-east Asia and Africa. In this paper, we present a low-cost system to perform street-level imaging targeted towards the congested, motorcycle-dominant south-east Asian countries. The proposed system uses a catadioptric imaging system to capture 360-degree panoramic images which are geo-located using an on-board GPS. The system is mounted on the back of a motorcycle to provide maximum mobility and access to narrow roads. An innovative backwards remapping technique for flattening the images is discussed along with some results from the first 150 km which have been captured from Southern Vietnam.

The design was a low-cost prototype design using low-cost off-the-shelf hardware with custom software and assembly to facilitate functionality.

The system was shown to work well as a low-cost omnidirectional mapping solution targeted toward sea-of-motorbike road conditions.

Some of the pictures returned by the system were unclear. These could be improved by having artificial lighting (currently only ambient light is used), a gyroscope-stabilised imaging platform and a higher resolution camera.

This paper discusses a design which facilitates low-cost, street-level imaging for a sea-of-motorcycle environment. The system uses a catadioptric imaging approach to give a wide field of view without excessive image storage requirements using dozens of cameras.

Project complexity (PC) governs project success, but the project management literature primarily focuses on performance measures and rarely examines the complexity factors, especially for megaprojects. This paper aims to determine the most significant complexity factors for the railway megaprojects in India.

A mixed approach using the Delphi and best–worst method (BWM) helped to identify, validate and determine the most critical factors that require intervention to diminish variance from project performance.

The BWM resulted in stakeholder management, followed by organizational and technological complexity as significant complexity factors, and the varied interests of the stakeholder as the most important among the 40 subfactors.

The finding indicates the necessity for strategic, tactical and operational-level interventions to effectively manage the complexity affecting project efficiency because of the varied stakeholders. This paper will guide the project and general managers to prioritize their resources to handle complexity for effective project performance measured in terms of time, cost and quality and help them make strategic decisions. The research findings of this study are expected to help researchers and practitioners in better planning and smoother execution of projects. In addition, this study would help the researchers formulate policies and strategies for better handling of the projects.

This study adds significant value to the body of knowledge related to PC in megaprojects in developing countries. The result of the investigation underlined that nine complexity factors and seven unique subfactors, namely, the sustainable environment, timely availability of information, communication in both directions, interdepartmental dependency and coordination, design, statutory norms, site challenges, socioeconomic conditions, the tendency of staff to accept new technology and the frequent changes in the requirements of stakeholders are significant in railway megaprojects. The BWM is applied to rank the complexity factors and subfactors in the case area.

What is the role of ethics and values in justice and the role of justice in ethics and values? How do we do them? These questions, ever-present and often unacknowledged, undergird efforts to survive, practice mutual aid, and work to prevent and address harms produced through disasters and environmental change.

Emerging from the teachings of Reverend Richard Krajeski and to honor his call, a group of his mentees, collaborators, and co-conspirators organized a special session at the July 2020 Natural Hazards Workshop, Just Dialogue: An Intergenerational Conversation on Justice, Sustainability, and Abundance. Enough is abundance, as Dick Krajeski, a longtime leader in the hazards community, was known for saying. In this way, he reminded us that that when we live as if we already have enough, we live sustainably and in ways that help lift oppression and reduce inequality and injustice. The session brought together people from diverse and intersecting places of Dick’s life for an intergenerational conversation about hope and healing, and invited the Natural Hazards community to engage in a just dialogue to which we bring our whole, true selves (open and vulnerable) to ask – what are the questions for the Natural Hazards community to be questioning, and to be asking, to motivate change and to move our systems of research and practice toward more equitable futures for all?

This paper aims to explore the complexity and dynamics in the process of negotiation and re-negotiation of brand associations within a Vietnamese cultural context, focusing on the identity construction created through local consumption preferences. t It explores how Western brands are symbolically important in Vietnamese consumers’ self-image.

A total of 600 Vietnamese youth between 18 and 35 years living in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City completed the survey. A projective technique (storytelling) was applied to elicit the hidden thoughts and motivations among respondents.

Vietnamese consumers increasingly attach themselves to certain brands to affirm their desired identity. They believe in “material goods bring happiness”. The symbolic meanings of brands (which we describe around six themes) become very important in their patterns of consumption in shaping their lived experience and the way they want to communicate their self-images.

The paper’s insights can be of value to marketing and advertising professionals and to those with responsibility for consumer regulation in emerging markets.

The paper contributes to our understanding of how socio-political tensions are played out and managed in consumer culture and identifies particular contradictions which may drive future changes.

The paper reports on a study which uses a neglected method to provide the latest data on consumer culture in Vietnam and links features of consumption-based identity to the specific Vietnamese historical, political, economic and socio-cultural context.

The popularity and use of mobile marketing technologies or devices have led to significant interest from researchers and practitioners, particularly in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where these technologies offer significant benefits to SMEs given the poor human capital and financial constraints encountered. The use of mobile marketing devices assists SMEs to boost their sales promotion strategies which aim at increasing the sales of their products and services. However, there has been limited focus on developing a suitable framework that enables the evaluation and shared an understanding of the factors influencing the adoption of mobile marketing technology by service SMEs in Nigeria. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a theoretically grounded framework for exploring these factors and explaining their impact on mobile marketing technology adoption in SMEs in Nigeria.

The study is qualitative and used both unstructured and semi-structured interviews with a total of 26 participants drawn purposively from NIJA database in Nigeria. Thematic analysis was deployed in analysing the data.

The study developed an extended technology organisation environment (TOE) framework by incorporating the value anticipation context which helped to unveil 16 key factors influencing mobile marketing technology adoption in service SMEs in Nigeria. The finding revealed that factors associated with the extended TOE framework have an impact on SMEs mobile le marketing technology adoption but at different levels.

The limitation of this study emerged because of the use of qualitative methodologies about the research design, rigour in the collection and management of the large volume of the raw data, the data analysis and the credibility of the findings. This may lead to unforeseen respondent and research bias in the data analysis, which may lead to a limited understanding of alternatives and insights into the factors influencing the adoption of mobile marketing. Hence, other measures and approaches such as case study and mix-method could be deployed to validate the findings further. Also, one of the limitations of qualitative study has been the issue of theoretical generalizability of the framework. The generalizability of the formwork needs to be established across a broader range of the population. Future studies may apply confirmatory statistical techniques to test and ascertain the validity and reliability of the framework across a broader population of mobile marketing technology adopters in Nigeria. Such studies may be used as a benchmark for the theoretical constructs and the factors that may lead to the success or failure of mobile marketing technology adoption.

The study had further enriched TOE framework and provided an analytical dimension for exploring the adoption of mobile marketing technology. It also demonstrates the capacity to provide a reliable explanation of the factors and serves as a tool for evaluating the benefits or challenges of mobile marketing technology adoption in SMEs in Nigeria.

Telehealth has been playing a progressively significant role in the management of the COVID-19 crisis. The enforcement of social distancing measures has had the consequence of reduced technology distance in almost every walk of life. In this chapter, based primarily on the still-unfolding experiences of deploying it during the current situation, we argue that telehealth has finally come of age and that it is time to move it from the peripheries to the center of the twenty-first-century healthcare. To provide a live context to the discussion, several instances of how telehealth strengthened our healthcare systems during the COVID-19 crisis are presented.

Stigma remains to be a major barrier to addressing the sustained rise of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections in the Philippines. Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with other men (MSMs) (G/B/MSM) living with HIV experience compounded stigma due to their sexual identity and HIV seropositive status. The family has been identified as one of the main sources of homonegativity and HIV-related discrimination. Drawing from the family life histories of 31 Filipino MSMs living with HIV, the authors demonstrate the concept of compounding stigma, which posits that the extent and nature of gender- and sexuality-based stigma experienced in early life may potentiate or mitigate the experience of HIV stigma in later life in the context of the family. Narrative analysis of the family life histories reveals a central factor that shaped the sexual development and stigma experiences of MSMs living with HIV: sexual identity visibility in the family (SIVF) – the family’s extent of knowledge and/or acceptance of their sexuality. Three core narratives emerged from the data that categorize informants based on the type of SIVF present in their family life viz. full, partial, and invisible. Results also trace the resultant life trajectories for each core narrative and reveal three forms of compounding stigma: low compounding stigma or compounding acceptance, compounding enacted stigma, and compounding internalized stigma.