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Liner connectivity plays an important role as a determinant in how a country is able to gain access to world markets. Liner shipping as the medium of seaborne transport for import and export of manufactured and semi-manufactured goods plays a significant part in international trade, which in turn potentially contribute towards the prosperity of a country and its surrounding region. Liner Shipping Connectivity Index (LSCI) is one of the most common benchmark to see how well connected a country in global trade, where it consists of five components, namely the number of ships, carrying capacity, ship size, services provided, and the number of companies that deploy container ships calling a country’s ports. This paper aims to tally from the most to the least which LSCI component contributes in improving the shipping connectivity with the most impact, in six Maritime South-East Asian countries, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. By descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and panel data, this paper finds that the country port’s capacity to accept larger ship size provides the most significant impact towards the improvement of the connectivity in the region. To attract companies to deploy largest ship, the improvement needs to be complemented with the capacity that can meet the expected volume, offering a variety of service, and good turnaround speed at the country’s port. The paper is expected to present not only indicative recommendations on which logistics connectivity initiative needs to be invested first, but also necessary proposals to develop a programme for building the region’s overall logistics industry.

Paper Code: SLC-206

The purpose of this paper is to understand how information technology (IT) is used to enhance supply chain performance.

A large‐scale survey and semi‐structured interviews were used to collect industry data.

Two distinct dimensions to information sharing – connectivity and willingness – are identified and analyzed. Both dimensions are found to impact operational performance and to be critical to the development of a real information sharing capability. However, many companies are found to have placed most of their emphasis on connectivity, often overlooking the willingness construct. As a result, information sharing seldom delivers on its promise to enable the creation of the cohesive supply chain team.

Despite the extensive data collection, the research represents a snapshot of practice. Replication from a longitudinal perspective would help define how IT is evolving to enable supply chain management.

A roadmap is presented to help guide IT development and investment decisions.

The research presents a two‐by‐two matrix to help managers and academics understand the related nature of connectivity and willingness. A roadmap is presented to help guide IT development and investment decisions.

In multihop wireless networks, the number of neighbors has an important role in the network performance since links are dynamically formed between a node and its neighbors. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

The paper quantitatively studies the effects of the average number of neighbors in multihop wireless networks on the network connectivity, the number of hops needed to traverse a certain distance, which can be used to determine the hop diameter of a network, and the total energy consumed by packet transmission, which can be used to choose an optimum average number of neighbors that minimizes the energy consumption. This paper also presents an analysis of the energy consumption that can be applied to a wide range of access protocols and show the effect of a variety of factors.

Results show that the minimum average number of neighbors to guarantee the overall network connectivity depends on the size of a network coverage. There is a sharp knee in the network connectivity with decrease of the average number of neighbors, N. If the distance between a source and destination, d, is known, the number of hops needed to reach the destination is usually between d/R∼2d/R, where R is the transmission range. A larger average number of neighbors N leads to a smaller number of hops to traverse a certain distance, which in turn results in a smaller traffic load caused by relaying packets. However, a bigger N also causes more collisions when a contention medium access scheme is used, which leads to more energy consumed by packet transmission. The results show that the optimum N which minimizes the energy is obtained by balancing several factors affecting the energy.

The paper provides a useful study on the effects of the number of neighbors in multihop wireless networks.

An estimate is made of the connectivity of a mammalian neuron, i.e., the number of other neurons to or from which an average neuron directly connects. The value derived is about 10. Some functional implications of the value of the connectivity are considered, particularly mental illness, epilepsy, and intelligence. The “length” and “width”, in terms of neurons, of a functional neural channel are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how company-provided smartphones and user-device attachment influence the psychological contract between employees and managers in terms of connectivity expectations and outcomes.

Data were collected using qualitative semi-structured interviews with 28 participants from four organizations.

The study showed that when organizations provide smartphones to their employees, the smartphones become a part of the manager-employee relationship through user-device attachment and this can change connectivity expectations for both employees and managers.

Due to participant numbers, these findings may not be generalizable to all employees and managers who receive company smartphones. However, the authors have important implications for theory. The smartphone influence on the psychological climate and its role as a signal for workplace expectations suggest that mobile information and communication technology devices must be considered in psychological contract formation, development, change and breach.

The perceived expectations can lead to hyper-connectivity which can have a number of negative performance and health outcomes such as technostress, burnout, absenteeism and work-life conflict.

Smartphone usage and user-device attachment have the potential to redefine human relations by encouraging and normalizing hyper-connected relationships.

This study makes an original contribution to psychological contract theory by showing that smartphones and attachment to these devices create perceived expectations to stay connected to work and create negative outcomes, especially for managers.

This is paper is concerned with the learning outcomes associated with connectivity through online networks, open online exchange and wider changes associated with contemporary information practices. The theme of connectivity is used here to capture both the detailed specificity of relations that define networks of learners and the ambient effect of wide accessibility to resources and people through open, online forums.

The paper follows the idea of a network from the ground up, outlining the social network perspective as a way to consider the foundational bases of learning and networks, as well as the effect of ambient influence. The paper addresses the ways learning may be viewed as a social network relation, an interpersonal relationship and an outcome of interaction and connectivity, and how network connectivity can be used as input for design for learning.

The paper presents a range of perspectives and studies that view learning from a social network and connectivity perspective, emphasizing both the person-to-person connectivity of a learning tie and the impact of contemporary data and information sharing through the dynamics of open contributory practice.

The outcome of connectivity in the service of learning is bound up with digital information practices, including individual practices of search, retrieval, participation, knowledge dissemination, knowledge construction and more. This paper provides a network perspective on learning relations that accommodates analysis in online and offline environments, but incorporates attention to the open, online retrieval and contributory practices that now influence learning practices and which may support design of new learning environments.

This paper offers insight into the way social networks and connectivity combine to show network relations, relationships, outcomes and design input at the actor, network and societal levels.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it explores the extent to which diversity of connectivity or the connection through multiple internet access points may facilitate online privacy behavior. Second, it explains the diversity of connectivity-online privacy behavior link in terms of information literacy.

Situated in the context of urban poor youth in the Philippines (n = 300), this paper used a quantitative approach, specifically an interview-administered survey technique. Respondents were from three cities in Metro Manila. To test for indirect relationship, survey data were analyzed using bootstrapping technique via SPSS macro PROCESS (Hayes, 2013).

Urban poor youth with diversified connection to the internet engaged in online privacy behavior. The more the youth are connected to the internet through diverse modalities, the more this fosters cautious online privacy behavior. In addition, information literacy explained how diversity of connectivity facilitated online privacy behavior. It suggests that differences in online privacy behavior may result from the extent of basic know-how of navigating online information. In the context of the urban poor in the Global South, the youth are constantly negotiating ways to not only connect to the internet but also acquire digital skills necessary for protective online behaviors.

To date, this is one of the few papers to contribute to conversations about online privacy among youth in the Global South. It broadens the literature on social determinants of online privacy behavior that is crucial for designing policy interventions for those in the margins.

This paper aims to present a distributed Bayesian approach with connectivity maintenance to manage a multi-agent network search for a target on a two-dimensional plane.

The Bayesian framework is used to compute the local probability density functions (PDFs) of the target and obtain the global PDF with the consensus algorithm. An inverse power iteration algorithm is introduced to estimate the algebraic connectivity λ₂ of the network. Based on the estimated λ₂, the authors design a potential field for the connectivity maintenance. Then, based on the detection probability function, the authors design a potential field for the search target. The authors combine the two potential fields and design a distributed gradient-based control for the agents.

The inverse power iteration algorithm can distributed estimate the algebraic connectivity by the agents. The agents can efficient search the target with connectivity maintenance with the designed distributed gradient-based search algorithm.

Previous study has paid little attention to the multi-agent search problem with connectivity maintenance. Our algorithm guarantees that the strongly connected graph of the multi-agent communication topology is always established while performing the distributed target search problem.

This article explores challenges for rural Australian local governments during the transition to high-speed broadband infrastructure. Despite the National Broadband Network’s promised ubiquitous connectivity, significant access discrepancies remain between rural and urban areas.

Empirical findings are drawn from a full-day workshop on digital connectivity, which included participants from seven rural local governments in New South Wales, Australia. Thematic analysis of the workshop transcript was undertaken to extrapolate recurring nuances of rural digital exclusion.

Rural communities face inequitable prospects for digital inclusion, and authorities confront dual issues of accommodating connected and unconnected citizens. Many areas have no or poor broadband access, and different digital engagement expectations are held by citizens and local governments. Citizens seek interactive opportunities, but rural authorities often lack the necessary resources to offer advanced participatory practices.

While this research draws from a small sample of government officials, their insights are, nonetheless, heuristically valuable in identifying connectivity issues faced in rural Australia. These issues can guide further research into other regions as well as civic experiences of digital inclusion.

There is a need to reconceive Australia’s current policy approach to broadband. Greater rural digital inclusion may be achieved by focusing on connectivity as a public interest goal, targeting infrastructure developments to suit local contexts and implementing participatory digital government practices.

The actions suggested would help ensure equity of digital inclusion across Australian municipal areas. Without such changes, there is a risk of rural citizens facing further marginalisation through digital exclusion.

This review paper, using a systematic literature review (SLR) approach, aims to unravel the various system-wide waste in the construction industry and highlight the connectivity to construction phases, namely men, materials, machines, methods and measurement (5M) and impacting factors.

This study used an SLR approach and examined articles published since the 2000s to explore the connectivity of system-wide waste to construction phases, 5M and impacting factors. The results are given in table forms and a causal loop diagram.

Results show that the construction and demolition (CD) waste research carried out from various perspectives is standalone. The review identified ten types of system-wide waste with strong interlinks in the construction industry. The finding highlights connectivity between wastes other than material, labour and time and the wastes' impacting factors. Further, the review results highlighted the solid connectivity for construction phases, 5M, and impacting factors such as productivity (P), delay (D), accidents (A), resource utilisation (R) and cost(C).

SLR methodology limitations include not keeping in phase with the most updated field knowledge. This limitation is offset by choosing the range for literature review within the last two decades. This literature review may not have captured all published articles because the restriction of database access and search was based only on English. Also, fruitful articles hiding in less popular journals may not be included in the well-known database that was searched. Researcher bias of the authors and other researchers that authored the articles referred to is a limitation. These limitations are acknowledged.

This article unravels the construction system-wide waste and the waste's interlinks, which would aid industry understanding and focus on eliminating the waste. The article highlights the connectivity of system-wide wastes to 5M, which would help better understand the causes of the waste. Further, the paper discusses the connectivity of system-wide waste, 5M and P, D, A, R and C that would aid the organisation's overall performance. The practical and theoretical implications include a better understanding of waste types to help capture better data for waste reduction and productivity improvement. The operating managers could use the tracking of wastes to compare estimated and actual resources at every process stage. This article on system-wide waste, 5M and P, D, A, R and C, relationships and their effects can theorize that the construction industry is more likely to identify clear root causes of waste now than previously. The theoretical implications include enhanced understanding for academics on connectivity between waste, 5M and P, D, A, R and C that the academics can use and expand to provide new insights to existing knowledge.

For the first time, this article categorised and highlighted the ten types of waste in construction industries and the industries' connectivity to construction phases, 5M and impacting factors.