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This study explores practitioners’ perspectives on the perceived gap between university and practice beyond the hard and soft skill paradigm. Utilising Tomlinson’s graduate capital model of employability (2017), we explored human, social, cultural, and psychological capitals to enrich the understanding of this issue and employability. It provided a new perspective, useful for implementing curriculum renewal.

This study utilised a two-stage mixed methods design. Using Tomlinson’s (2017) Graduate capital model as a framework, the first stage involved distributing an online survey to qualified architects in hiring positions practising in Australia. This served as the foundation for generating qualitative and quantitative data. The second stage involved a two-hour practitioner workshop where the survey results were discussed and expanded upon.

Our results found that the practitioner’s perspective on the perceived skills gap is more complex than the hard/soft skill paradigm commonly discussed. Practitioners expressed a need for students/graduates to possess identity and cultural capital to contextualise industry norms and expectations. This knowledge lets students know where and how hard/soft skills are used. Our results also suggest practitioners are concerned with the prevailing individualistic approach to the higher education system and traditional architectural teaching methods, instead suggesting a more industry-aligned collaborative disposition.

By expanding the employability discourse beyond hard/soft skills, the results of this research provide an opportunity for architectural curriculum renewal in line with industry expectations.

One of the major challenges faced by the world at present is management and treatment of waste. Especially, waste such as polyethylene (plastics) is non-degradable and is causing great damage to our environment. Aquatic environment is one among them that is getting affected by these plastic wastes. Water pollution is a great issue faced in many countries and steps to reduce it are being taken on a wide scale. Unwanted aquatic plants grown in ponds and lakes create problems like totally covering up the surface of the lake that blocks the sunlight for aquatic species and also reducing their total storage. Identifying such unwanted plants and plastics is a very essential part in treating and management of waste. Detection and classification help us to achieve this. With the help of satellites, drone-shot images of many oceans are captured, and the amount of plastic content present is detected using artificial intelligence. In artificial intelligence, we have many algorithms and platforms that help us to achieve object detection. Tensorflow is one such framework that helps us to perform object detection with the help of pre-trained models present in it, and thus, it is used in this study. Object detection uses computer vision to detect objects from images. Convolutional neural networks are a subset of machine learning that is helpful in image processing – in other words, processing of pixel data. In this study, we used the ResNet-50 model involving transfer learning for classifying unwanted plants and plastics. Lakes and ponds are the major places among the other aquatic environments where these kinds of wastes are found, and therefore, this study concentrates on waste present in these aquatic bodies. The lakes and ponds present near residential areas act as a place for storing excess rainwater, which prevents flooding. Many cities, especially residential areas, face a lot of water stagnation problems during the rainy season. Ponds and lakes near these areas contain unwanted plants and plastics present, which makes it a problem to store the rainwater that comes during monsoon. Another problem is that they don’t provide sunlight to enter deep into water, making the aquatic species difficult to survive. Preserving and maintaining such lakes from getting filled with non-degradable plastics and unwanted plant growth becomes very important. Therefore, the lakes and ponds present in such residential areas would be useful to detect the unwanted waste.

In this study, the focus is on detection and classification of the plastics and unwanted plants. The dataset is very important for this study, which is an image dataset. There was not any readily available image data of unwanted plastics available online, and therefore, the images were captured from the lakes and ponds in Kanchipuram district. Images of duckweed, plastics, bulrush and leaves of sky lotus were taken. This dataset consisted a total of 200 images, with 50 images belonging to each category. Having this as the dataset, detection and classification were carried out.

The object detection took place for the plastic, duckweed, bulrush and leaves of sky lotus and the performance metrics such as precision and recall was evaluated to test the accuracy of the detections. Precision is used to calculate the number of correctly identified positive identifications. This is done by dividing the sum of true positives and false positives from the number of true positives. True positives are nothing but the number of correct predictions of positive identifications, and false positives are the number of false predictions of positive identifications. Similarly, recall is used to calculate the number of actual positives identified. We can calculate recall by dividing the sum of true positives and false negatives from the total number of true positives. Here false negatives are the number of false predictions of false identification. This performance metrics was evaluated for the trained model, and we obtained an average precision of 0.81 and an average recall of 0.86. The high precision and recall values of our model show that the model produces accurate results. Therefore, the model is producing good performance in detecting the unwanted plants and plastics from lakes and ponds. The evaluation results were visualized with the help of TensorBoard and are available in fig-4 and fig-5. The loss rate is visualized and is available in fig-6. We can see that the loss rate has reduced over the steps as we pass from 1,000 to 4000th step.

The work was originally carried out in the Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu.

Contrasting the Madisonian model of democracy with Westminster style arrangements, this chapter examines how American political scientists and policymakers expressed second thoughts about the constitutional settlement of 1787 and looked towards the British political system for possible reforms to their own. In particular, it details the arguments offered by Thomas Finletter, James MacGregor Burns, and others, from the 1940s through to the early 1960s that the United States might adopt certain features of the Westminster model. The chapter analyzes their proposals and the – essentially negative – reception that they received. It concludes by addressing the failure of these proposals and the endurance of fragmented government within the United States.

This study aims to identify the key attributes of esports venues as perceived by spectators. Using the stimulus-organism-response framework, it also examines how these attributes influence customer experience, satisfaction and re-attendance intentions.

This mixed-methods research comprises two main stages. In the qualitative stage (Stage 1), we conducted a literature review, interviews with live esports event attendees and observations at two esports events to identify key esports venue attributes from spectators’ perspectives. In the quantitative stage (Stage 2), we recruited 564 esports game attendees at two live events to validate a measurement scale developed from the qualitative procedures. We also examined the relationships between venue attributes and the three spectator outcomes by using structural equation modeling.

Five key perspectives of esports venue attributes emerged from the qualitative analysis: (1) stage and stage lighting, (2) Internet infrastructure, (3) visibility of display screens, (4) concourse layout and (5) seating comfort. These dimensions were validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and were found to directly influence spectator experience and satisfaction, but not re-attendance intentions.

This study provides pioneering insights into the specific esports venue attributes that drive spectator outcomes. The findings offer valuable directions for future esports research and practical strategies for esports venue management.

Miller (2011) revisited his influential 1983 work on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and remarked that its underlying drivers are fully open to debate, fresh scholarship and connection with new theories. Indeed, the genealogy of the EO construct is rarely questioned. We take a “making masculinity visible” approach, engaging with a lens of masculinity, precarious manhood theory (PMT) and double standards of competency, to define and test the masculine elements of EO in the setting of family business CEOs.

Using the 2019 Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Project (STEP) dataset, a comprehensive database of family business chief executive officers (CEOs), we examined the construct of EO, in whole and in its masculine elements. Stepwise multiple regression method was used to test the hypotheses of this study. Control variables entered the equation first, followed by the variable of interest for this study.

We find differences by gender when EO is tested as a whole construct. Further in testing its masculine dimensions, we find that being male is significant to the elements of autonomy and competitive aggressiveness and that gender is not significant to risk-taking.

Although research on the widespread and influential EO continues to proliferate (Covin and Wales, 2019), there is not an understanding of its applicability across genders (Fellnhofer et al., 2016). It is possible that EO may not explain how women do business. Our study contributes to the understanding of between-gender differences in EO, and our findings suggest that the masculine elements of EO vary by gender.

The US central government enactment of the 1866 Post Roads Act preempted state and municipal telegraph franchise entry barriers. Like present-day telecommunication companies, local franchise regulations were an entry barrier to US telegraph companies. These pre-1866 state and municipal telegraph laws were barriers of both entry and trade between states. Barriers that would of reduced the benefits of a common market if the barriers had not been preempted by the 1866 Post Roads Act. I document what laws were preempted by the 1866 Post Roads Act, explain how these laws increased entry barriers, provide evidence that preemption was enforced, and use two counterfactuals to calculate rough estimates of the decrease in entry costs from enforcement of the act.

Police stress is a critical concern for public safety agencies. This study proposes a research model to examine the relationship between police operational stress and affective commitment, mediated by psychological safety.

A survey was developed and administered to law enforcement professionals from two large police agencies in a Midwestern US state and Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil.

The results suggest the research model applies similarly in both countries. A significant relationship between police operational stress and lower affective commitment was found. Psychological safety mediated this effect, suggesting its importance in mitigating stress. The focus on psychological safety offers valuable insights for understanding officer well-being in high-stress environments.

Qualitative methods might be used to help better understand the contextual elements around police stress and its consequences. Results indicate that supportive work environments that foster psychological safety can be a powerful tool to buffer the negative effects of stress and promote officer well-being and retention.

A comprehensive understanding of the psychological factors influencing officer morale and engagement is essential for developing interventions to enhance law enforcement effectiveness. Psychological safety helps create a supportive work environment, reducing stress’s negative impact on officer commitment.

This study makes a distinctive contribution by examining the mediating role of psychological safety in the relationship between operational stress and affective commitment among police officers in two countries. Building upon prior research that has examined the impact of stress and psychological safety, this study is among the first to investigate how psychological safety specifically mitigates the negative impact of stress on officer commitment.