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Forecasting outpatient volume during a significant security crisis can provide reasonable decision-making references for hospital managers to prevent sudden outbreaks and dispatch medical resources on time. Based on the background of standard hospital operation and Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) periods, this paper constructs a hybrid grey model to forecast the outpatient volume to provide foresight decision support for hospital decision-makers.

This paper proposes an improved hybrid grey model for two stages. In the non-COVID-19 stage, the Aquila Optimizer (AO) is selected to optimize the modeling parameters. Fourier correction is applied to revise the stochastic disturbance. In the COVID-19 stage, this model adds the COVID-19 impact factor to improve the grey model forecasting results based on the dummy variables. The cycle of the dummy variables modifies the COVID-19 factor.

This paper tests the hybrid grey model on a large Chinese hospital in Jiangsu. The fitting MAPE is 2.48%, and the RMSE is 16463.69 in the training group. The test MAPE is 1.91%, and the RMSE is 9354.93 in the test group. The results of both groups are better than those of the comparative models.

The two-stage hybrid grey model can solve traditional hospitals' seasonal outpatient volume forecasting and provide future policy formulation references for sudden large-scale epidemics.

The purpose of this paper is to identify salient topic categories and outline their evolution patterns and temporal trends in microblogs on a public health emergency across different stages. Comparisons were also examined to reveal the similarities and differences between those patterns and trends on microblog platforms of different languages and from different nations.

A total of 459,266 microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 on Twitter and Weibo were collected for nine months after the inception of the outbreak. Topics were detected by the latent Dirichlet allocation model and classified into several categories. The daily tweets were analyzed with the self-organizing map technique and labeled with the most salient topics. The investigated time span was divided into three stages, and the most salient topic categories were identified for each stage.

In total, 14 salient topic categories were identified in microblogs about the Ebola outbreak and were summarized as increasing, decreasing, fluctuating or ephemeral types. The topical evolution patterns of microblogs and temporal trends for topic categories vary on different microblog platforms. Twitter users were keen on the dynamics of the Ebola outbreak, such as status description, secondary events and so forth, while Weibo users focused on background knowledge of Ebola and precautions.

This study revealed evolution patterns and temporal trends of microblog topics on a public health emergency. The findings can help administrators of public health emergencies and microblog communities work together to better satisfy information needs and physical demands by the public when public health emergencies are in progress.

The purpose of this research is to explore how immigrant library users view Auckland Libraries as a multicultural bridge in New Zealand. The research explored the various factors keeping different cultures apart in the New Zealand socio cultural systems and to find out the gaps in the provision of multicultural services in Auckland public libraries. The study also discusses the specific roles Auckland public libraries play in the development of multiculturalism in New Zealand from the perspective of immigrant users.

The study uses a qualitative research approach. Semi-structured interviews conducted with 15 participants including five library staff members and ten users of the Auckland library. Thematic analysis (qualitative data analysis, where data is grouped into themes) was used for data analysis.

Participants perceive that the Auckland Library had an advantage over other citizen service institutions in the development and services of multiculturalism in New Zealand. The participants understand that language, cultural background, beliefs and values are some of the causes of gaps between different ethnic groups, and only by learning from each other can groups enhance mutual understanding between them. The services and programs Auckland Library offer to immigrant enable various interactions among different cultural groups and enhance learning from one another to facilitate their integration into the New Zealand society. The findings show that Auckland public libraries have some gaps in multicultural services. In particular, there are more than 200 different ethnicities in Auckland, but the Auckland library's website does not have the function of a multilingual search tab service, lacks a multicultural book collection and some of the existing collections of books are of low quality, low literary value and so on. The study suggests that these issues need to be improved.

This was small-scale research involving the perspectives of only 15 participants. Nevertheless, the findings provide constructive insight into the development of multicultural services in Auckland libraries that can serve as a useful basis for a broader exploration of more immigrant groups in Auckland and New Zealand as a whole.

The results of this research will provide valuable information for the Auckland libraries to have a better plan for multicultural services in the future. The findings will also serve as a reference for improving multicultural services in the Auckland libraries.

Although other studies have looked at immigrants’ behavior and perception on various issues in New Zealand, this study is the first to look at how different immigrant groups percept Auckland libraries as a multicultural bridge to help integrate them.

In the preceding decades, due to the advancement of social media, traditional marketing has become less significant. Managers and entrepreneurs are seeking novel, effective and efficient ways both for new and technological products/services. Drawing on the theory of reasoned action, information adoption model and technology acceptance model, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of viral marketing on purchase intentions of mobile applications users in Iran.

Statistical population includes those Iranian users who have used two social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Line, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Telegram, Twitter, Viber, WeChat and WhatsApp) at least. Invalid questionnaires are excluded and 624 are used for the data analysis. Structural equations modelling is used to test the proposed model.

The findings show that the most effective factor on apps perceived usefulness is argument quality of information, followed by source credibility and quantity of information. Perceived usefulness is also predicted by perceived ease of use through the indirect effect of argument quality. Furthermore, it is also found that purchase intention is affected by perceived ease of use, followed by perceived usefulness through attitude towards the purchase.

This research is limited to the Iranian mobile apps market. Future studies on viral marketing in app markets should collect data from multiple industries and multiple countries in order to achieve a more comprehensive perspective on the effects and consequences of viral advertising. Furthermore, rather than social networks, similar research can be conducted on different communication channels of the internet such as blogs, e-mails, chat rooms, online communities, discussion boards, corporate websites, e-commerce and social commerce websites (e.g. Amazon). It is also suggested that the conceptual model of the research can be extended considering other useful factors on purchase intentions than attitude (e.g. subjective norms and perceived behavioural control). Furthermore, future research should consider the role of mobile apps features in forming purchase intentions.

For the firms that develop mobile applications (particularly in Iran’s app market), increasing sales requires exploiting social media viral marketing to effectively change potential customers’ perceptions about usefulness and ease of use of their products. The findings suggest that a viral marketing strategy should be developed with high argument quality, followed by high source credibility and a large amount of information on social media.

This is one of the earliest studies investigating the viral effects of social networks on purchase intention in the mobile applications context. Although very few papers practically recognised the impact of viral marketing on purchase intention, the effect of this concept on mobile applications purchase intention had remained unknown.

Although numerous studies have examined factors that influence smartphone acceptance and use, few have analyzed cognitive age. This study aims to use the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to test two models to analyze the moderating effect of cognitive age. This research offers relevant suggestions among different cognitive age groups.

A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect research data in Taiwan and the UTAUT model was used. Model 1 ensures all four antecedent constructs among digital natives (those under 34 years old). Model 2 divides the digital immigrants into two groups to test the influence of cognitive age on the behaviors of smartphone use. This study tests Model 1 using AMOS 20 to examine the measurement and structural model and validates Model 2 using partial least squares (PLSs).

In Model 1, the digital natives have sufficient confidence to accept a new technology with ease and little effort owing to most educational resources and the widespread internet. Group 1 in Model 2 reveals that the behavior of digital immigrants is similar to that of digital natives. For Group 2 in Model 2, they tend to infer that skills or tasks they associate with having higher value are more difficult to learn.

This study provides another dimensional result for different cognitive age groups and it has to consider not only chronological age but also cognitive age in user behavior. The result can enrich the theoretical perspective on technology adoption and use behavior via cognitive age, which is a significant and important self-related factor that can help predict technology adoption and use behavior.

The government plays a critical role in driving building information modeling (BIM) implementation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the government efforts for driving BIM implementation in three benchmark countries, namely, Singapore, the UK and the US, so as to develop appropriate roadmaps for increasing BIM implementations in other countries.

This study performs a review on the government efforts and roles in BIM implementation in three benchmark countries, namely, Singapore, the UK and the US.

Through cross comparison with existing literature, it is found that Singapore and the UK adopt a government-driven approach and a phase-by-phase development pattern is observed. The first phase focuses on the building sector to rapidly increase the use of BIM and the government generally plays the role of an initiator. In the second phase, BIM is expanded to other implementation areas, e.g. smart city. The importance of the initiator role decreases and more attention is paid to supporting roles such as researcher, educator and regulator. In contrast, an industry-driven approach is adopted in the US. The main role of the government is that of a regulator, with research institutions actively supporting the BIM implementation.

General roadmaps of the two mandating approaches are presented. The results can provide a useful reference for countries and regions that intend to develop roadmaps to increase their BIM maturity level and enhance readiness to accept and implement BIM.

This study is one of the first studies that investigate the step-by-step roadmaps for implementing BIM from the perspective of changing government roles.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the electrical conductivity and tribological properties of magnetron sputtered silver (Ag), copper (Cu) and aluminum (Al) thin films under conductive grease lubrication.

Three types of silver (Ag), copper (Cu) and aluminum (Al) thin films were prepared by magnetron sputtering. Current-carrying friction tests were carried out by a ball-on-plate reciprocating friction and wear tester. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) were used to observe and analyze the worn surface and cross-section morphology of the films.

Silver and Cu films exhibited good conductivity and tribological properties, which were mainly attributed to the synergy of the protective tribofilm generated by conductive grease, current-induced thermal effect and magnetron sputtered films effect. Al film was worn through. Large pitting storing lubricate were only found in Ag film. Cu film showed a similar surface uniformity with Ag film.

This study provides a reference for the design and application of conductive grease and investigates the current-carrying friction behaviors of magnetron sputtered films as electrical contact materials. The comparison of current-carrying friction behaviors of the three films was rarely covered in previous studies.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between leisure involvement (LI), conspicuous sport consumption and subjective well-being (SW) for two luxury leisure activities: golf and skiing.

The authors collected data from Guangdong Province (golf, n = 342) and Jilin Province (skiing, n = 310) and examined the proposed model using structural equation modeling (SEM) and tested the mediating effect of conspicuous sport consumption using bootstrapping method.

The findings show that the proposed model explained the relationships among LI, conspicuous sport consumption and SW. Furthermore, the findings suggest that LI and conspicuous consumption (CC) can elevate sport participants' perception of SW, enriching leisure-class theory.

The authors’ findings contribute to the domain of CC in sport participant and leisure research and provide significant implications for the sport tourism marketers.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new approach to a well-known problem for digital libraries, how to search across multiple unrelated libraries with a single query.

The approach involves creating new Dewey Decimal Classification terms and numbers from existing Dublin Core records. In total, 263,550 records were harvested from three digital libraries. Weighted key terms were extracted from the title, description and subject fields of each record. Ranked DDC classes were automatically generated from these key terms by considering DDC hierarchies via a series of filtering and aggregation stages. A mean reciprocal ranking evaluation compared a sample of 49 generated classes against DDC classes created by a trained librarian for the same records.

The best results combined weighted key terms from the title, description and subject fields. Performance declines with increased specificity of DDC level. The results compare favorably with similar studies.

The metadata harvest required manual intervention and the evaluation was resource intensive. Future research will look at evaluation methodologies that take account of issues of consistency and ecological validity.

The method does not require training data and is easily scalable. The pipeline can be customized for individual use cases, for example, recall or precision enhancing.

The approach can provide centralized access to information from multiple domains currently provided by individual digital libraries.

The approach addresses metadata normalization in the context of web resources. The automatic classification approach accounts for matches within hierarchies, aggregating lower level matches to broader parents and thus approximates the practices of a human cataloger.

This study examined the impact of school leadership on teacher professional collaboration, with collective teacher innovativeness and teacher self-efficacy (TSE) playing the mediating role. Two most commonly used leadership styles, instructional leadership (IL) and distributed leadership (DL), were analyzed using a multilevel design, i.e. teachers are nested within schools.

The proposed model was validated using data of Taiwan TALIS 2018 collected from both teachers and principals and analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling.

Results showed that IL and DL influence teacher professional collaboration through different paths. IL had a significant direct impact on teacher professional collaboration alone, while DL had a significant direct impact on both teachers' collective innovativeness and their professional collaboration. While TSE had a direct effect on collective teacher innovativeness, TSE and collective teacher innovativeness had a direct effect on teacher professional collaboration.

This study highlights the significant impact of principal leadership as both principals and teachers work in the same environment and culture co-shaped through the interaction and collaboration. Research evidence regarding the effects of IL and DL on teacher professional collaboration is limited; this is even less evidential when the indirect effects of variables mediating between school leadership and teacher outcomes, including teacher collective innovativeness and TSE, are added to the total effects. The present findings provide useful references for principals and teachers when promoting professional collaboration to achieve desired outcomes in school and student improvement.