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This paper aims to describe the design and evaluation of a pilot leadership development programme for infection prevention and control (IPAC) professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme’s aim was to improve IPAC knowledge and capacity in the health-care system by developing the leadership skills and capacities of novice and advanced Infection Control Professionals (ICPs), to respond flexibly, and competently, in their expanding and ever-changing roles.

The leadership programme was piloted with seven nurses, who were part of a clinical nursing team in New South Wales, Australia, over a 12-month period between 2021 and 2022. The programme was designed using a leadership development framework underpinned by transformational leadership theory, practice development approaches and collaborative and experiential learning. These principles were applied during programme design, with components adapted to learners’ interests and regular opportunities provided for collaboration in active learning and critical reflection on workplace experiences.

The authors’ evaluation suggests that the programme was feasible, acceptable and considered to be effective by this cohort. Moreover, participants valued the opportunities to engage in active and experience-based learning with peers, and with the support of senior and experienced ICPs. The action learning sets were well-received and allowed participants to critically reflect on and learn from one another’s experiences. The mentoring programme allowed them to apply their developing leadership skills to real workplace challenges that they face.

Despite a small sample size, the authors’ results provide empirical evidence about the effectiveness of using a practice development approach for strengthening ICP leadership capacity. The success of this pilot study has paved the way for a bigger second cohort of participants in the programme, for which further evaluation will be conducted.

The success of this leadership programme reflects both the need for leadership development in the IPAC professions and the applicability of this approach, with appropriate facilitation, for other professions and organizations.

ICP leadership programmes have not been previously reported in the literature. This pilot study builds on the growing interest in IPAC leadership to foster health system responsiveness and change.

Rolling bearings often cause engineering accidents due to early fatigue failure. The study of early fatigue failure mechanism and fatigue life prediction does not consider the integrity of the bearing surface. The purpose of this paper is to find new rolling contact fatigue (RCF) life model of rolling bearing.

An elastic-plastic finite element (FE) fatigue damage accumulation model based on continuous damage mechanics is established. Surface roughness, surface residual stress and surface hardness of bearing rollers are considered. The fatigue damage and cumulative plastic strain during RCF process are obtained. Mechanism of early fatigue failure of the bearing is studied. RCF life of the bearing under different surface roughness, hardness and residual stress is predicted.

To obtain a more accurate calculation result of bearing fatigue life, the bearing surface integrity parameters should be considered and the elastic-plastic FE fatigue damage accumulation model should be used. There exist the optimal surface parameters corresponding to the maximum RCF life.

The elastic-plastic FE fatigue damage accumulation model can be used to obtain the optimized surface integrity parameters in the design stage of bearing and is helpful for promote the development of RCF theory of rolling bearing.

Everyone works in expectation of some rewards, and welfare is one of them. In order to understand the impact of employee benefits on employees′ work‐motivation and productivity, questionnaires were sent to corporations which had undertaken employee benefit programmes. Some of the significant results of this study are: employee benefit programmes have greater impact on work‐motivation than on productivity; monetary benefit programmes are most highly valued by both executives and workers; there is a cognitive gap between management and worker on the importance of employee benefit programmes; different genders have different benefit demands; unmarried employees, more than married employees, perceive that employee benefits have a greater impact on job performance. Employees with different education levels and positions perceive different employee benefit impacts; and employee benefit programmes have greater influence on younger employees′ job performance.

This paper aims to test the causal relationship between urban-biased policy and urban-rural income gap and further examine the moderating role of government intervention.

Based on the provincial Government Work Reports and the long-term policy practice of implementing the target responsibility system, the authors construct a unique indicator of urban-biased policy in China. Further, applying the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces in 2003–2018, the authors explore the causal relationship between urban-biased policy and urban-rural income gap.

The results show that urban-biased policy has contributed to the widen urban-rural income gap in China, which supports Lipton's urban-biased hypothesis. Further research shows that the stronger the government intervention, the bigger the role of urban-biased policy in widening urban-rural income gap.

On the one hand, this study not only investigates the direct effect of urban-biased policy on urban-rural income gap, but also examines the moderating effect from the perspective of government intervention, which helps to enrich the relevant studies of urban-biased theory. On the other hand, the authors' findings provide the latest empirical evidence for urban-biased policy to widen urban-rural income gap and presents a reference and warning for China and other developing countries about balancing the relationship between equity and efficiency during economic development.

Creating memorable tourism experiences (MTE) is vital to obtain sustained tourism visits. In the digital era, infusions of various digital technologies in tourism services without admitting tourist emotions could jeopardize the experience. Drawing from a Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) perspective, this study explains the complexity of digital tourism experience in the service system view, highlighting the importance of emotions as resources. It is composed of actors' orchestrations, connected by shared emotions, and enabled by sensory stimuli facilitated by the digital tourism ecosystem throughout the tourism journey. This study proposes a Memorable Digital Tourism Experience (MDTE) framework by identifying the focal actors, recognizing the emotions, and determining the moderating role of sensory stimuli enabled by various novel technologies. At last, several agenda and practical guidelines are proposed on how to operationalize the framework and different methodologies to explore Memorable Digital Tourism Experience.

Marketers make an effort to affect consumers through scarcity marketing thus shaping the perception of scarcity and creating desirability for consumers. To expand the scarcity-expensiveness-desirability model and to enhance insights for practical applications, this study modifies the causal relationship among two types of scarcity, three types of expansiveness and desirability.

This study surveyed 400 Taipei city residents who had purchase experience with luxury brands products in Taiwan. The study employed structural equation modeling as empirical analysis.

The empirical results show that limited-quantity scarcity main influences perceived social status and then affects desirability. The second path is that limited-quantity scarcity influences perceived uniqueness and then affects desirability. Therefore, perceived social status and perceived uniqueness dominate the majority of effects on desirability because they are the recognition of the individual compared to others, especially when applied to luxury goods.

Because limited-quantity scarcity has a greater impact on desirability than limited-time scarcity in the empirical results, marketers can adopt limited-quantity scarcity messages that are better than limited-time scarcity, to increase consumers’ desire to purchase luxury goods.

The first novelty of this study is dividing scarcity marketing into limited-quantity and limited-time scarcity in the scarcity-expensiveness-desirability model. This study extends expensiveness in the scarcity-expensiveness-desirability model with a complete demonstration, that is, perceived social status, perceived uniqueness and perceived value, which is the second novelty of this study.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of principal preparation and training in China by providing a background discussion of principal preparation in a number of countries. As an illustration, it provides an overview of the curriculum used in the initial preparation of school principals at Beijing Normal University.

The paper draws mainly on writing and research from China, Australia and the USA to explore principal preparation and training in China.

In addition to providing a rich description of principal preparation in China, the paper's main findings comprise seven key challenges that confront China as it endeavours to provide quality principal preparation. These challenges include China's diversity and uneven social, cultural and educational development; limited resources in some regions throughout China; the place and importance of study tours for principal preparation; the teaching approach used to train principals; the process used for assessing principal learning during their training programs; the limited transfer of learning from the classroom to the school environment; and the timing of training for principals.

Each of the challenges arising here raises important practical implications for developers of principal training programs.

The paper paints a picture of principal preparation in China and raises a number of issues and challenges with which it continues to grapple. Of note is that China is not alone in facing some of these ongoing concerns.

The hospitality sector, via resort mini-clubs also referred as kids' clubs, has put in place initiatives to empower children to be responsible tourists. This is all the more important as children are the tourists of the future. In their endeavour to educate children during their holidays, many of the activities developed by resort mini-clubs are nature-based; on the long term, this strategy is likely to contribute to the long-term sustainability of the industry. Indeed, the closer an individual is to nature, the more likely this person is to be respectful of the environment. Developing these types of activities could also contribute to the competitive advantage of resorts as most resort mini-clubs are not offering yet this type of sustainability-orientated activities. From a theoretical perspective, resort-mini clubs could be assimilated to lieu de mémoire, and as a result they have the potential to influence the sustainability attitude of the future young adults, and adults whom the children will be.

This study aims to tap into the storytelling’s effects of evoking personal and historical memories and their emotions on travelers’ intention to visit dark tourism sites.

An experimental study was performed. The authors created a story centered on dark tourism as their stimulus. The respondents received two stories in the form of printed ads. The presence and absence of a story character manipulated the stimulus. In addition to the experimental factors, four measurement constructs were included in the model: evoked historical memory, evoked personal memory, evoked emotion and intention to visit.

The results show that evoking historical and personal memories leads to traveler intention to visit the dark tourism sites whether or not the character is present or absent in the story. This study also reveals that only evoked personal memory positively affects individuals’ travel by evoking emotion. Furthermore, evoked historical memories also directly impact the evoke emotion, but only when the character is absent in the story.

This study has three limitations. First, the measurement of emotion in this study only refers to a general measurement and does not specify between negative and positive emotions. Second, the story in the current study only focuses on one example of a natural disaster. Third, this study only used students to represent Generation Z respondents, so it would be interesting if future research compared the results across different generations.

The use of a reflective narrative in storytelling can be one of the options. Marketers should be cautious when using a character when it comes to dark tourism as it might have a boomerang effect, making the destination becoming unattractive to travelers, particularly, if the story tells more about the historical side of dark tourism. Managers of tourist destinations can leverage past visitors to be brand ambassadors of a place since humans share knowledge and experiences through stories and anecdotes. These personal touches can lend the personal aspects of past visitors to current ones, which can evoke memories better than an official message from a tourism board.

This research investigates the role of storytelling in eliciting travelers’ memories and emotional responses and how this response eventually influences their intention to visit a dark-based destination.

This paper aims to develop the Hybrid feature descriptor and probabilistic neuro-fuzzy system for attaining the high accuracy in face recognition system. In recent days, facial recognition (FR) systems play a vital part in several applications such as surveillance, access control and image understanding. Accordingly, various face recognition methods have been developed in the literature, but the applicability of these algorithms is restricted because of unsatisfied accuracy. So, the improvement of face recognition is significantly important for the current trend.

This paper proposes a face recognition system through feature extraction and classification. The proposed model extracts the local and the global feature of the image. The local features of the image are extracted using the kernel based scale invariant feature transform (K-SIFT) model and the global features are extracted using the proposed m-Co-HOG model. (Co-HOG: co-occurrence histograms of oriented gradients) The proposed m-Co-HOG model has the properties of the Co-HOG algorithm. The feature vector database contains combined local and the global feature vectors derived using the K-SIFT model and the proposed m-Co-HOG algorithm. This paper proposes a probabilistic neuro-fuzzy classifier system for the finding the identity of the person from the extracted feature vector database.

The face images required for the simulation of the proposed work are taken from the CVL database. The simulation considers a total of 114 persons form the CVL database. From the results, it is evident that the proposed model has outperformed the existing models with an improved accuracy of 0.98. The false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) values of the proposed model have a low value of 0.01.

This paper proposes a face recognition system with proposed m-Co-HOG vector and the hybrid neuro-fuzzy classifier. Feature extraction was based on the proposed m-Co-HOG vector for extracting the global features and the existing K-SIFT model for extracting the local features from the face images. The proposed m-Co-HOG vector utilizes the existing Co-HOG model for feature extraction, along with a new color gradient decomposition method. The major advantage of the proposed m-Co-HOG vector is that it utilizes the color features of the image along with other features during the histogram operation.