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This study aims to cover issues regarding traveling to a tourist destination which has seen war and terrorism. These problems can be addressed altogether, as they are interrelated. Based on tourists’ opinions, this paper aims to focus on measures or steps that can be taken to ensure changing their perceptions about a certain destination.

This study targets tourism experts for their opinions regarding the measures most necessary to change the perceptions of tourists. Their opinions were extracted through a questionnaire based on three criteria with four alternatives. Furthermore, raw data extracted are studied using the Fuzzy-VIKOR technique to rank the alternatives in order of importance. Moreover, the questionnaire also aims to know the perception of participants by asking them what would make them trust a destination with a history of terrorism.

The problems captivate the attention of government, guiding them to ensure that they need to focus more on physical security of tourists if they expect tourism industry to thrive. It was found that the steps needed to be taken are in the areas of international trade, cultural exchange programs and social media advertising.

Research based on improving tourist perception of Pakistan to develop Pakistan as a tourist destination is scarce. The study takes four different alternatives into account for image recovery and based on those alternatives, it provides a unique solution to the government in this regard with the necessary steps they need to take and attempts to help the government ensure tourism expansion in the country.

The purpose of this study is to examine the level of Shariah governance disclosure among Islamic banks in Malaysia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (i.e. Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia). On top of that, the effect of Shariah governance disclosure on Islamic banks financial performance is investigated.

Data underwent quantitative content analysis and a mean comparison of the Shariah governance disclosure mechanisms as well as multiple regression analysis. Shariah governance information is obtained from the Islamic banks' official websites and the Bursa Malaysia Exchange.

The results of the content analysis revealed that the level of Shariah governance disclosure among Malaysian Islamic banks has been more pronounced than in the GCC countries. Additionally, the multiple regression analysis results specified that of the five Shariah governance disclosure mechanisms, the Shariah committee emerged as the strongest determinant in the financial performance of the Islamic banks, followed by transparency and disclosure.

Islamic banks should emphasise publishing Shariah governance information in annual reports to reflect superior accounting practices as assessed by certified Shariah auditors with an effective monitoring system.

The empirical findings are vital for serving as a guideline for Islamic banks in Malaysia and the GCC countries to disclose their practice of Shariah governance and gain empirical insights into its effect on firms’ financial performance. Following that, Islamic banks would improve their accounting practices while adhering to Shariah principles, strengthen internal controls and boost their brand reputation.

The purpose of this study was to assess the knowledge of head and neck cancers (HNCs), their risk factors, signs and symptoms among the general public of Karachi, Pakistan.

Initially, 503 individuals were approached for data collection, out of which 404 fit the inclusion criteria (response rate = 80.03%). Nonprobability convenience sampling was utilized to select participants who fell under the age group of 15–60 years, barring the fields of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelors of Surgery (MBBS) and Bachelors of Dentistry (BDS). Knowledge was evaluated by a 9-item questionnaire, the scores of which yielded the following interpretations: No (0), low (1–3), moderate (4–6) and high (7–9) knowledge.

Of the 404 participants who completed the questionnaire, 357 (88.4%) participants claimed to be aware of HNC. The HNC knowledge scores had a statistical relevance with socioeconomic status (p = <0.01) and level of education (p = 0.02). Most participants recognized a “lump or swelling in the throat” (87.1%) as the most common symptom, followed by “bleeding in mouth or throat” (84.7%). Surprisingly, 75.25% of participants thought HNCs were inclusive of brain cancer.

Overall, knowledge of HNCs among the general public of Karachi surpasses the knowledge in other regions around the world. Our study demonstrated that people indulge in unhealthy habits despite having sufficient knowledge and this warrants prompt interventions and counseling of the people.

In artificial intelligence, the optical character recognition (OCR) is an active research area based on famous applications such as automation and transformation of printed documents into machine-readable text document. The major purpose of OCR in academia and banks is to achieve a significant performance to save storage space.

A novel technique is proposed for automated OCR based on multi-properties features fusion and selection. The features are fused using serially formulation and output passed to partial least square (PLS) based selection method. The selection is done based on the entropy fitness function. The final features are classified by an ensemble classifier.

The presented method was extensively tested on two datasets such as the authors proposed and Chars74k benchmark and achieved an accuracy of 91.2 and 99.9%. Comparing the results with existing techniques, it is found that the proposed method gives improved performance.

The technique presented in this work will help for license plate recognition and text conversion from a printed document to machine-readable.

This paper aims to explore key management actions for implementing security on the cloud, which is a critical issue as many organizations are moving business processes and data on it. The cloud is a flexible, low cost and highly available technology, but it comes with increased complexity in maintaining the cloud consumer’s security. In this research, a model was built to assist strategic decision-makers in choosing from a diverse range of actions that can be taken to manage cloud security.

Published research from 2010 to 2022 was reviewed to identify alternatives to management actions pertaining to cloud security. Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) was applied to rate the most important action(s). For this, the alternatives, along with selection criteria, were summarized through thematic analysis. To gauge the relative importance of the alternatives, a questionnaire was distributed among cloud security practitioners to poll their opinion. AHP was then applied to the aggregated survey responses.

It was found that the respondents gave the highest importance to aligning information security with business needs. Building a cloud-specific risk management framework was rated second, while the actions: enforce and monitor contractual obligations, and update organizational structure, were rated third and fourth, respectively.

The research takes a general view without catering to specialized industry-based scenarios.

This paper highlights the role of management actions when implementing cloud security. It presents an AHP-based multi-criteria decision-making model that can be used by strategic decision-makers in selecting the optimum mode of action. Finally, the criteria used in the AHP model highlight how each alternative contributes to cloud security.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the needs of digital library stakeholders and how a collaborative digital library might be designed to meet these needs. The collaborative digital library has been conceived to support secondary school students' information needs in conducting school‐based projects.

The paper uses the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture as the approach to investigate the user requirements and define the digital library organization, resources, processes, technology and information flows In applying the Zachman Framework and to holistically control the study, the case study approach and multiple data collection techniques were adopted.

Information obtained from these data gathering techniques helps to populate the requirements of the top three layers (18 cells) in the Zachman Framework to ascertain the design details of the digital library's scope, business and system model. The framework requires the abstraction of the characteristics and features of the digital library based on Zachman's six dimensions – motivation, data, people, process, place and time – as well as explains their structures and processes from the perspectives of the planner, owner and designer of the digital library.

The paper is of significance in the field of collaborative digital libraries, since the perspectives and dimensions established from the framework comprehensively capture the user needs and context of use, and help ensure that everything relevant to the digital library enterprise is covered.

This study aims to analyze Islamic financial institutions’ (IFIs) current financial engineering and product development procedures.

The paper is quantitative in nature and the survey questionnaire were collected from managers and IF experts working for Islamic Banks, Takaful and other IFIs in Turkey, Malaysia and UAE. Two-stage structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesis.

The findings highlighted that the Shari’ah Supervisory Board, Strategy and Planning of IFIs, Legal and Regulatory framework, pricing of a new product and financial performance positively impact the new product development (NPD) process. At the same time, Islamic values have no significant positive impact.

When generalizing the research results, data collection from the right departments was the main limitation of the current study. Future research may opt to collect data only from Product Development Departments.

The findings of this study will allow IFIs to reflect on their present methods, procedures and Shari’ah compliance framework for the NPD process.

Factors affecting the product development and financial engineering process are discussed in the literature. The findings of this study can be regarded as building blocks for future academic research on product development and financial engineering in Islamic finance.

This paper aims to investigate whether negative and positive monetary policy (MP) shocks have asymmetric impacts on corporate firms’ investment decisions in Pakistan using firm-level panel data set. Moreover, the authors emphasized on symmetric effects of MP; the authors examine whether high-leverage and low-leverage firms respond differently to negative and positive unanticipated shocks in MP instruments.

In contrast to the conventional framework of VAR, it uses an alternative methodology of Taylor rule to estimate unanticipated MP shocks. The two-step system-generalized method of movement (GMM) estimation method is applied to examine the effect of MP shocks on firm investment through leverage-based asymmetry.

The two-step system-GMM estimation results indicate that unanticipated negative changes (unfavorable shocks) in MP instruments have negative, significant effects on investment. In contrast, unanticipated positive changes (favorable shocks) have statistically insignificant impacts on firm investment. The results also reveal that firm leverage has a significant role in establishing the effect of unanticipated negative changes in MP instruments on investments. Finally, the results indicate that high-leverage firms respond more to negative changes than low-leverage firms. Yet, the results show that only low-leverage firms positively respond to unanticipated positive shocks in MP.

The findings of the paper suggest that MP authorities should pay due attention to the asymmetric effects of MP shocks on firm investment while designing MP. Because firm leverage has a significant influence on the effects of MP shocks, firm managers should take into account such role of leverage while deciding capital structure of their firms.

First, unlike “Keynesian asymmetry” and most of published empirical research work, the authors use both unanticipated negative and positive MP shocks simultaneously. Departing from the conventional empirical literature, the authors differentiate between unanticipated positive and negative shocks in MP using the backward-looking Taylor rule. Second, the authors contribute to the existing literature by investigating the differential effects of positive and negative unanticipated MP shocks on firms’ investment decisions. Unlike the published studies that have emphasized on the symmetric effects of MP, the authors examine whether high-leverage and low-leverage firms respond differently to negative and positive unanticipated shocks in MP instruments.

This paper aims to review and compare the conventional and Islamic perspectives of working capital management (WCM) to devise the best option of financing for managing working capital (WC) in South Asia. The paper also aims to help the business world for running its operations more smoothly by devising an alternative source of financing especially during crises such as the global financial crisis 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The divergence approach is used for a critical analysis of existing literature to derive the best possible alternative to the conventional system of financing.

This paper identifies that Islamic financing is an appropriate mode of financing as compared to conventional financing for meeting WC requirements in South Asia. Furthermore, under Islamic financing, the best available alternative way for managing WC needs is the Mudarabah Islamic mode of financing.

This is a theoretical paper and thus does not include empirical results.

This paper provides conventional and Islamic perspectives of WCM. The Islamic banks in South Asia may devise policies to encourage and convenience firms for using Mudarabah mode for meeting their WC needs instead of conventional sources. This paper also identifies that small and medium enterprises may be targeted by Islamic banks in Asian markets for providing funds for their smooth operations especially during a financial crisis when conventional banks refuse to lend. This will help managers to run businesses more efficiently and effectively especially during any kind of financial crisis in the future.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that studies the relationship between WCM and Islamic financing in comparison to conventional financing. Although prior studies identify an alternative to conventional financing as Islamic financing, no one studied while considering the WC as the main variable. This paper informs practitioners and researchers about a “state of the art” Islamic perspective of WCM.

Sustainable and resilient infrastructure projects aim to reduce flooding impacts and improve community adaptability. For instance, flood-resistant stilts elevate structures, mitigating flood damage. Comprehensive consideration is crucial when adding elements to housing projects, incurring costs for all involved parties. This study aims to assess the viability of concrete stilts for cost-effective flood mitigation in Malaysian terrace housing.

The study evaluates cost implications through a comparative 5D building information modeling (BIM) cost analysis of stilted and conventional (standard) housing models. This assesses the percentage increase in total cost. Furthermore, a survey of construction professionals was undertaken. The study used online convenience and stratified sampling techniques. Out of the 222 emails that were sent, 27 construction professionals located in Johor, Sabah and Selangor within Malaysia participated in the research survey. Their perspectives on stilt housing prospects and factors for costing such structures were analyzed through a descriptive analysis using SPSS.

The case study models revealed that the incorporation of stilts could lead to a 21.64% increase in the overall cost per unit. This cost increase was primarily attributed to the additional reinforcement required. However, the survey findings highlighted that a majority of construction professionals perceived the cost increment to fall within the range of 10%–20%. Consequently, it becomes imperative to meticulously consider cost factors such as foundational requirements, staircases, and the extended construction duration to effectively curtail expenditures. The prospect of heightened costs potentially posing a threat to profit margins and discouraging developers necessitates careful financial management. Notwithstanding these challenges, the survey's insights underscored that professionals in the construction industry indeed recognize the potential of stilt technology in the realm of flood mitigation and management, particularly within housing projects.

This research has significant practical implications. It provides a precise financial contrast between housing categories using 5D BIM and incorporates construction experts’ viewpoints on raised housing. Enhanced design considerations for raised housing can make it economically viable, offering a cost-effective, nature-based approach to flood mitigation. This approach can bring substantial benefits to residents by reducing flood-related damages and enhancing community resilience.

One of the notable aspects of this research is its originality. It uses a dual quantitative methodology involving modeling and survey techniques to address its objectives effectively. This approach contributes significantly to the relatively limited body of research focused on stilt housing and the application of 5D BIM. By combining these methodologies, the study explores a relatively uncharted area, making a valuable contribution to the field.