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Despite the increasing technological capabilities and its affordability, a significantly large proportion of developing nations’ population are still lacking resources to own basic information and communication technologies such as computer and internet. This suggests that majority of the citizens from developing countries (e.g. India) are also not able to access and use emerging electronic government applications and services. This is leading to a further and bigger digital divide gap that already exists between rural and urban as well as economically less and more able population. To reduce the widening digital divide, India has innovated Common Services Centres (CSCs) as means to deliver public services electronically to citizens at the village level. This viewpoint paper aims to discuss some of the challenges and obstacles of such CSCs and to offer some recommendations for their effective implementations and sustainable operations.

This is a viewpoint paper that is based on authors’ awareness of the context as well as knowledge and issues relevant to the research topic. A number of appropriate and current citations have been utilised to illustrate the current state on the topic as well as to support authors’ arguments presented in this paper.

The paper identified a number of key issues relevant for effective implementation and sustainable operation of CSCs. The authors present their views and recommendations related to the following key issues: connectivity problems, lack of or delayed rollout of government to citizen (G2C) services, demotivated village-level entrepreneurs due to lack of G2C services, low computer literacy, lack of awareness about services and facilities, lack of adequate training and support, poor provisioning of an effective infrastructure, lack of support from the concerned government officials, inaccessible locations, burden of high investment, corruption at the government level, lack of skilled manpower to run the CSCs, lack of power supply, language barrier, lack of space, problem with maintenance and management of connectivity network and problem caused by the Naxalite and anarchist activity.

The discussion and recommendations presented in this paper would be valuable to various agencies (both from public and private sectors) as well as policymakers for effective implementation and long-term sustainability of CSCs. The approach discussed in this paper offers an effective way to diffuse e-government applications and services in other developing countries (particularly resource-constrained nations from African, Asian and Latin American regions).

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are complex and have multifaceted effects on countries in an unpredictable and unprecedented manner. While both COVID-19 and the climate crisis share similarities, they also have some notable differences. Being both systemic in nature with knock-on and cascading effects that propagate due to high connectedness of countries, COVID-19, however, presents imminent and directly visible dangers, while the risks from climate change are gradual, cumulative and often distributed dangers. Climate change has more significant medium and long-term impacts which are likely to worsen over time. There is no vaccine for climate change compared to COVID-19. In addition, those most affected by extreme climatic conditions have usually contributed the least to the root causes of the crisis. This is in fact the case of island economies. The chapter thus investigates into the vulnerability and resilience of 38 Small Islands Developing States (SIDs) to both shocks. Adopting a comprehensive conceptual framework and data on various indices from the literature and global databases, we assess the COVID-19 and climate change vulnerabilities of SIDs on multiple fronts. The results first reveal a higher vulnerability across all dimensions for the Pacific islands compared to the other islands in the sample. There is also evidence of a weak correlation between climate change risk and the COVID-19 pandemic confirming our premise that there are marked differences between these two shocks and their impacts on island communities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting the way of how customers interact with organisations by blending both physical and digital environments, thereby creating a new paradigm of customer-organisation relationship. The new relationship boundary driven by AI principally challenges as well as creates opportunities for relationship marketing theories and practices. The main objective of this chapter is to present a framework named ‘physical-digital space’ to demonstrate how AI can merge the physical and digital world. To broaden the understanding, this chapter uses the lens of customer experience in relationship marketing. The framework extends the existing understanding and provides managerial implications on how an organisation can develop strategies so that a customer consciously or subconsciously develops a positive relationship with the organisation.

The electrospinng of PAN and PAN/CNT composite webs is carried out with the commercially available Nanospider machine. The webs are spun under similar processes and coated on Polypropylene spun bonded nonwoven fabric. This research work reports on the influence of multi-walled carbon nano tube (MWCNT) on the morphology, tensile properties, conductivity, thermal, chemical and crystalline structure of PAN and PAN/CNT composite nanofibrous webs. The morphological developments are explained on the basis of nanofibre diameter and web density as depicted by FESEM images. An addition of CNT greatly affects the morphology of webs, increases fibre diameter, decreases web density and leads to a roughened web surface. The mechanical properties of PAN /CNT composite webs are also found to be influenced by CNT concentration. The addition of MWCNT to PAN enhances the conductive properties of webs. The specific conductivity of PAN/CNT composite webs is found to be in order of 10^-6 S/cm, which falls in the semiconducting regime and follows Ohm's law of conductivity. The TGA plots confirmed that the PAN/CNT composite web is more thermally stable than the PAN web. The presence of CNT in the polymer matrix is evidenced by D and G band, indicating a successful electrospun coating process.

Purpose: In reality, financial decisions are made under conditions of asymmetric information that results in either favorable or adverse selection. As far as financial decisions affect growth of the firm, the latter must also be affected by either favorable or adverse selection. Therefore, the core objective of this chapter is to examine the determinants of each financial decision and the effects on growth of the firm under conditions of information asymmetry.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This chapter uses data for the non-financial firms listed in S&P 500. The data cover quarterly periods from 1989 to 2014. The statistical tests include linearity, fixed, and random effects and normality. The generalized method of moments estimation method is employed in order to examine the relative significance and contribution of each financial decision on growth of the firm, respectively. Standard and proposed proxies of information asymmetry are discussed.

Findings: The results conclude that there is a variation in the impact of financial variables on growth of the firm at high and low levels of information asymmetry especially regarding investment and financing decisions. A similar picture emerges in the cases of firm size and industry effects. In addition, corporate dividen d policy has a similar effect on firm growth across all asymmetric levels. These findings prove that information asymmetry plays a vital role in the relationship between corporate financial decisions and growth of the firm. Finally, the results contribute to the vast literature on the estimation of information asymmetry by demonstrating that the classical and standard proxies for information asymmetry are not consistent in terms of the ability to differentiate between favorable or adverse selection (which corresponds to low and high level of information asymmetry).

Originality/Value: This chapter contributes to the related literature in two ways. First, this chapter offers updated empirical evidence on the way that financing, investment, and dividends decisions are made under conditions of favorable and adverse selection. Other related studies deal with each decision separately. Second, the study offers new proxies for measuring information asymmetry in order to reach robust estimates of the effects of financial decisions on growth of the firm under conditions of agency problems.

This study aims to explore the structural aspects (roles, responsibilities and reporting) of dyad leadership in one health-care organization (HCO).

The perceptions of 32 leaders (17 physician leaders and 15 dyad co-leaders) in formal leadership positions (six first-level with formal authority limited to teams or divisions, 23 middle-level with wider departmental or program responsibility and three senior-level with institution-wide authority) were obtained through focus groups and surveys. In addition, five senior leaders were interviewed. Descriptive statistics was used for quantitative data, and qualitative data were analyzed for themes by coding and categorization.

There are a large number of shared responsibilities in the hybrid model, as most activities in HCOs bridge administrative and professional spheres. These span the leadership (e.g. global performance and quality improvement) and management (e.g. human resources, budgets and education delivery) domains. The individual responsibilities, except for staff and physician engagement are in the management domain (e.g. operations and patient care). Both partners are responsible for joint decision-making, projecting a united front and joint reporting through a quadrat format. The mutual relationship and joint accountability are key characteristics and are critical to addressing potential conflicts and contradictions and achieving coherence.

Clarity of role will assist development of standardized job descriptions and required competencies, recruitment and leadership development.

This is an original empirical study presenting an integrated view of dyad leaders and senior leadership, meaningful expansion of shared responsibilities including academic functions and developing mutual relationship and emphasizing the central role of stability generating management functions.

The chapter contains an in-depth analysis of contemporary risks confronting terrestrial ecosystems and examines prominent strategies for biodiversity preservation, sustainable tourism, and ecological management. Agroforestry parks and ecological corridors emerge as central mechanisms for safeguarding biodiversity and enhancing habitat connectivity. The chapter delves also into the urgent task of combating desertification, exacerbated by climate change and unsustainable practices, with a particular emphasis on the challenges inherent in the realm of tourism. Within the context of tourism, the chapter identifies nature and adventure tourism as catalysts for fostering biodiversity conservation through emotive engagement, thereby stimulating visitor support for conservation policies. The imperative of sustainable tourism practices, underscored by a dedicated commitment to attenuating adverse impacts while optimizing positive outcomes, assumes paramount importance in this pursuit. The chapter underscores the strategic significance of managing visitor influxes, exemplified by techniques such as access limitations and temporal restrictions, as a key approach to mitigate issues of overcrowding and ecological deterioration.

The aim of this paper is to formulate the effect of the process variation on various leakage currents and subthreshold swing factor in FinFET devices. These variations cause a large spread in leakage power, since it is extremely sensitive to process variations, which in turn results in larger temperature variations across different dies.

Owing to large temperature variation within the die, the authors investigate the variation of various leakage currents with absolute die temperature.

The results obtained on the basis of the model are compared and contrasted with reported numerical and experimental results. A close match was found which validates the analytical approach.

The analytical modeling of subthreshold leakage current, subthreshold swing, gate leakage current and its variation with process parameters are carried out in this paper.

The recent innovations of Industry 4.0 have made it possible to easily collect data related to a production environment. In this context, information about industrial equipment – gathered by proper sensors – can be profitably used for supporting predictive maintenance (PdM) through the application of data-driven analytics based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Although deep learning (DL) approaches have proven to be a quite effective solutions to the problem, one of the open research challenges remains – the design of PdM methods that are computationally efficient, and most importantly, applicable in real-world internet of things (IoT) scenarios, where they are required to be executable directly on the limited devices’ hardware.

In this paper, the authors propose a DL approach for PdM task, which is based on a particular and very efficient architecture. The major novelty behind the proposed framework is to leverage a multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism to obtain both high results in terms of remaining useful life (RUL) estimation and low memory model storage requirements, providing the basis for a possible implementation directly on the equipment hardware.

The achieved experimental results on the NASA dataset show how the authors’ approach outperforms in terms of effectiveness and efficiency the majority of the most diffused state-of-the-art techniques.

A comparison of the spatial and temporal complexity with a typical long-short term memory (LSTM) model and the state-of-the-art approaches was also done on the NASA dataset. Despite the authors’ approach achieving similar effectiveness results with respect to other approaches, it has a significantly smaller number of parameters, a smaller storage volume and lower training time.

The proposed approach aims to find a compromise between effectiveness and efficiency, which is crucial in the industrial domain in which it is important to maximize the link between performance attained and resources allocated. The overall accuracy performances are also on par with the finest methods described in the literature.

The proposed approach allows satisfying the requirements of modern embedded AI applications (reliability, low power consumption, etc.), finding a compromise between efficiency and effectiveness.

In the past decade, three-dimensional (3D) printing has gained attention in areas such as medicine, engineering, manufacturing art and most recently in education. In biomedical, the development of a wide range of biomaterials has catalysed the considerable role of 3D printing (3DP), where it functions as synthetic frameworks in the form of scaffolds, constructs or matrices. The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art literature coverage of 3DP applications in tissue engineering (such as customized scaffoldings and organs, and regenerative medicine).

This review focusses on various 3DP techniques and biomaterials for tissue engineering (TE) applications. The literature reviewed in the manuscript has been collected from various journal search engines including Google Scholar, Research Gate, Academia, PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, Cochrane Library and Web of Science. The keywords that have been selected for the searches were 3 D printing, tissue engineering, scaffoldings, organs, regenerative medicine, biomaterials, standards, applications and future directions. Further, the sub-classifications of the keyword, wherever possible, have been used as sectioned/sub-sectioned in the manuscript.

3DP techniques have many applications in biomedical and TE (B-TE), as covered in the literature. Customized structures for B-TE applications are easy and cost-effective to manufacture through 3DP, whereas on many occasions, conventional technologies generally become incompatible. For this, this new class of manufacturing must be explored to further capabilities for many potential applications.

This review paper presents a comprehensive study of the various types of 3DP technologies in the light of their possible B-TE application as well as provides a future roadmap.