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The purpose of this paper is to review the barriers in the dissemination of effective smoking cessation treatments and services globally. Offering tobacco users help to stop using tobacco is a key demand reduction measure outlined under Article 14 of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Implementing Article 14 can reap great dividends for the billion plus tobacco users around the world and their families, friends and societies.

A review of the status of the global implementation of Article 14 using available literature on smoking cessation products, services and national guidelines. Discussing innovative approaches being currently explored in South Asia that can lead to faster adoption and implementation of Article 14 globally.

Major gaps remain in cessation products’ availability and resource allocation for cessation services globally. Current licensed products are falling short on delivering and sustaining smoking cessation. Innovation in cessation products and services needs to build on learnings in nicotine pharmacokinetics, behavioural insights from consumer research and tap into 21st century tools such as mobile based apps. National implementation of FCTC’s Article 14 needs to follow guidelines that encourage integration into existing health programmes and health-care practitioners’ (HCPs) upskilling.

Smoking cessation is a desirable health outcome and nicotine replacement products are a means of achieving cessation through tobacco harm reduction. E-cigarettes are sophisticated nicotine replacement products. Innovation is urgently needed to fill the gaps in smoking cessation products and services, and for converting global policy into local practice. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), HCPs’ knowledge, attitudes and practice regarding tobacco use and cessation may hold the key to rapidly scaling up cessation support and delivery to achieve FCTC objectives sooner. Additionally, HCPs can play an important role in offering smoking cessation support in existing national health programmes for TB, cancer screening and maternal and child health. Also, widely prevalent smartphone devices may deliver smoking cessation through telemedicine in LMICs sooner, leapfrogging the hurdles of the existing health-care infrastructure.

As publishers and academia swiftly head towards e-textbooks, it is important to understand how students feel about using e-textbooks as a primary learning tool. This paper discusses results of a small-scale study looking into how a group of language learners view and use e-textbooks as learning tools in ESL classrooms. The paper concludes by offering teaching implications that could ease integrating e-textbooks in language classrooms in a more effective and efficient manner.

This paper aims to identify the factors that are constraining technological innovation to support the development of coalbed methane in China.

The analysis applies ideas relating to national and sector systems of innovation to explain why China’s strategies to support research and technological innovation have failed to stimulate the desired progress in coalbed methane production. It also provides a counter-example of the USA that implemented a number of measures in the 1970s that proved very effective.

The deficiencies of China’s research and development strategies in support of coalbed methane development reflect the national and sectoral systems of innovation. They are exacerbated by the structure of the national oil and gas industry. Key constraints include the excessively top-down management of the national R&D agenda, insufficient support for basic research, limited collaboration networks between companies, research institutes and universities and weak mechanisms for diffusion of knowledge. The success of the USA was based on entirely different systems for innovation and in quite a different industrial setting.

The originality of this analysis lies in placing the challenges facing research and innovation for China’s coalbed methane development in the context of the national and sectoral systems for innovation and comparing with the approach and success of the USA.

This paper aims to investigate how actors in the farmer’s network influence the adoption of smart farming technology (SFT) and to understand how social media affects this adoption process, in particular focusing on the influence of social media on trust in knowledge dissemination within the network.

The methodology used a two-stage process, with semi-structured interviews of farmers, augmented by a netnographic approach appropriate to the social media context.

The analysis illustrates the key role of the farmer network in the dissemination of SFT knowledge, bringing insight into an important B2B context. While social media emerges as a valuable way to connect farmers and promote discussion, it remains underused in knowledge dissemination on SFT. Also, farmers exhibit more trust in the content from peers online rather than from SFT vendors.

Novel insights are gained into the influence of the farming network on the accelerated adoption of SFT, including the potential role of social media in mitigating the homophilous nature of peer-to-peer interactions among farmers through exposure to more diverse actors and information. The use of a social network theory lens has provided new insights into the role of trust in shaping social media influence on the farmer, with variances in farmer trust of information from technology vendors and from peers.

Improvements in neonatal and paediatric care mean that many children with complex care needs (CCNs) now survive into adulthood. This cohort of children places great challenges on health and social care delivery in the community: they require dynamic and responsive health and social care over a long period of time; they require organisational and delivery coordination functions; and health issues such as minor illnesses, normally presented to primary care, must be addressed in the context of the complex health issues. Their clinical presentation may challenge local care management. The project explored the interface between primary care and specialised health services and found that it is not easily navigated by children with CCNs and their families across the European Union and the European Economic Area countries. We described the referral-discharge interface, the management of a child with CCNs at the acute–community interface, social care, nursing preparedness for practice and the experiences of the child and family in all Models of Child Health Appraised countries. We investigated data integration and the presence of validated standards of care, including governance and co-creation of care. A separate enquiry was conducted into how care is accessed for children with enduring mental health disorders. This included the level of parental involvement and the presence of multidisciplinary teams in their care. For all children with CCNs, we found wide variation in access to, and governance of, care. Effective communication between the child, family and health services remains challenging, often with fragmentation of care delivery across the health and social care sector and limited service availability.

To proactively draw efficient maintenance plans, road agencies should be able to forecast main road distress parameters, such as cracking, rutting, deflection and International Roughness Index (IRI). Nonetheless, the behavior of those parameters throughout pavement life cycles is associated with high uncertainty, resulting from various interrelated factors that fluctuate over time. This study aims to propose the use of dynamic Bayesian belief networks for the development of time-series prediction models to probabilistically forecast road distress parameters.

While Bayesian belief network (BBN) has the merit of capturing uncertainty associated with variables in a domain, dynamic BBNs, in particular, are deemed ideal for forecasting road distress over time due to its Markovian and invariant transition probability properties. Four dynamic BBN models are developed to represent rutting, deflection, cracking and IRI, using pavement data collected from 32 major road sections in the United Arab Emirates between 2013 and 2019. Those models are based on several factors affecting pavement deterioration, which are classified into three categories traffic factors, environmental factors and road-specific factors.

The four developed performance prediction models achieved an overall precision and reliability rate of over 80%.

The proposed approach provides flexibility to illustrate road conditions under various scenarios, which is beneficial for pavement maintainers in obtaining a realistic representation of expected future road conditions, where maintenance efforts could be prioritized and optimized.

It is of great significance to study the influence of subgrade filling on permafrost temperature field in permafrost area for the smooth construction and safe operation of railway.

The paper builds up the model for the hydrothermal coupling calculation of permafrost using finite element software COMSOL to study how permafrost temperature field changes in the short term after subgrade filling, on which basis it proposes the method of calculation for the concave distortion of freezing front in the subgrade-covered area.

The results show that the freezing front below the subgrade center sinks due to the thermal effect of subgrade filling, which will trigger hydrothermal erosion in case of sufficient moisture inflows, leading to the thawing settlement or the cracking of the subgrade, etc. The heat output of soil will be hindered the most in case of July filling, in which case the sinking and the distortion of the freezing front is found to be the most severe, which the recovery of the permafrost temperature field, the slowest, constituting the most unfavorable working condition. The concave distortion of the freezing front in the subgrade area increases with the increase in temperature difference between the filler and ground surface, the subgrade height, the subgrade width and the volumetric thermal capacity of filler, while decreases with the increase of the thermal conductivity of filler. Therefore, the filler chose for engineering project shall be of small volumetric thermal capacity, low initial temperature and high thermal conductivity whenever possible.

The concave distortion of the freezing front under different working conditions at different times after filling can be calculated using the method proposed.

To meet their ambitious targets for a circular economy, multinationals need to speed up their innovation efforts. This requires experimentation capability. But it is not clear what this capability entails, and how companies can build it. The purpose of this paper is to give companies guidance on how they might develop experimentation capability for the circular economy.

We conduct in-depth interviews with innovators in frontrunner multinationals, H&M, IKEA and Philips. We use the Gioia method to analyse our data.

This article identifies novel institutional, strategic, and operational actions that build experimentation capability for a circular economy.

The identified actions help innovation managers experiment and speed up their innovation efforts for a circular economy.

To reverse environmental degradation, multinationals need to transform their dominant linear take-make-waste business models. This research provides actions that help them organize this transformation.

This article is based on extensive research with leading multinationals and reveals novel insights on how to innovate for a circular economy.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact on student work readiness outcomes of collaboration with employers in developing and delivering tailored graduate employability workshops in socio-emotional skills for work (SES4Work).

Framed by the CareerEDGE model of graduate employability, the authors piloted a five-session module for near graduates in five disciplines. The research included an online employer survey (n = 128), employer interviews (n = 21) and tailored workshops for near graduates, culminating in a mock competency-based interview. Using a pre/post-test design, participants (n = 24) also completed the CareerEDGE Employability Development Profile (EDP) and the Trait Emotional Intelligence questionnaire (TEIque).

After completing the module, there was a statistically significant improvement in participant scores on the CareerEDGE EDP +12.3%, p < 0.001, effect size (Cohen's d) 0.89, large, and the TEIque +6.4%, p = 0.009, effect size (Cohen's d) 0.61, moderate. Furthermore, 70% (n = 17) of participants were “hired” based on their mock interviews, with 12% (n = 4) offered employer connections after graduation.

This is the first academic research in Ireland to develop and evaluate an enterprise-collaborative, discipline-specific module for enhancing graduate employability. Findings suggest that employer collaboration can enhance the efficacy of employability interventions and therefore merits further research.

The engineering construction standards in China play an important role in protecting the safety of the construction projects. They are the basic principles that standardize the construction activities and guarantee the quality of projects. However, there are many barriers that affect the adoption of the engineering construction standards. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the barriers that challenge the adoption of the engineering construction standards in China.

The research reveals the barriers that affect the implementation of the engineering construction standards in China through a literature review. Then this study uses factor analysis to analyze 12 indices which we get from a questionnaire to build explanations from the results.

According to this paper, four main brands of uncorrelated variables are derived which are the main challenges in implementing the engineering construction standards in China: management barriers, policy barriers, knowledge barriers and market barriers. This paper gives a clear classification of the barriers that the enterprises face while adopting the engineering construction standards in China.

This paper makes a contribution to the understanding of the barriers that affect the adoption of the engineering construction standards in China.