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Robots come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from manipulators in the industrial assembly line, to house cleaners, and to carebots of the elderly and sick. In recent years entertaining robots have been developed to engage adults and children into playing and learning. There are however no robots that have been specifically designed to entertain pets. The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype developed to engage pets into outdoor playing.

A prototype that can engage a dog or a cat into playing was designed, built, and tested by a group of senior students. The enclosure of the prototype has the shape of a round shell. Within this shell there is a sensor interfacing unit, which can interpret sounds generated by the animals, and a light and sound system designed to interact with the animals.

The testing results showed that the prototype was able to fulfill requirements for outdoor playing, such as being waterproof and able to travel through grass. Testing of the individual sensor interfacing circuits demonstrated the interactive capability. Dogs were chosen to be the subjects to be entertained. However, it is envisioned that a smaller version of this prototype can be suitable for cats.

This is the first prototype that explores ways to entertain pets when their human owners are absent or busy. The prototype developed is a good start for any intelligent robotic systems specifically designed to entertain pets.

This paper empirically analyses climate change effects in Chad.

Using temperature and precipitation averages, we analyse the effects of climate variations on production, income and consumption.

Estimating a simultaneous equation model with the Zellner’s Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) estimator, the results show a statistically zero temperature effect while precipitations show a statistically significant effect. Precipitations are positively related to production and income but inversely to consumption. These conclusions confirm existing findings on negative effects of climate change. Furthermore, they confirm on the one hand, the difficulty of analysing climate change effects and highlight the need to carry out country-specific analysis. On the other hand, it is evidence of the existence of climatic issues in Chad. The findings are relevant in improving approaches of climate adaptation and mitigation, both at local and global levels.

The study complements the extant literature by assessing how climate change affects income and production in Chad.

Leadership education is a prominent component of youth programming. In their efforts to promote leadership development, most youth programs promote character development and teach interpersonal skills but fall short in teaching leadership because they fail to encourage the use of authority. In this paper, we present the stories of five late adolescent exemplars as a case study of youth leadership emergence through volunteerism. These youth demonstrated leadership by transitioning from participating in community service activities to becoming organizers of their own beneficent efforts. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with these adolescent leaders, we present themes that were important to their emergence as leaders. We then discuss how these findings should be used to inform youth development programs that are designed to encourage youth leadership through volunteerism.

Oriented to ongoing student and university momentums for decolonial futures, the purpose of this paper is to interrogate the role and status of mainstream international development curricula and pedagogies by critiquing two absences in the sub-discipline’s teaching formulae: appropriations and assassinations.

The author draws from a decade of research on oil extraction in Central Africa, including ethnographic work with two communities in Cameroon along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline; four years of research (interview-based and unofficial or grey materials) on the 1983 August Revolution in Burkina Faso and assassination of Thomas Sankara; and five years of experience teaching international development in North America, Western Europe and North and Eastern Africa.

Through a critical synthesis of political and rhetorical practices that are often considered in isolation (i.e. political assassinations and corporate appropriation of Indigenous knowledges), the author makes the case for what the author calls pedagogical disobedience: an anticipatory decolonial development curricula and praxis that is attentive to the simultaneity of violence and misappropriation within colonial operations of power (i.e. “coloniality of power” or “coloniality”).

This paper contributes to debates within international development about the future of the discipline given its neo-colonial and colonial constitutions and functions with a grounded attention to how this opens up possibilities for teaching praxis and scholarship in action.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and synthesize the current academic literature on emerging trends to increase CSR reporting credibility.

This paper synthesizes literature on emerging trends to increase CSR reporting credibility from the past ten years, focusing mainly on the most recent five years, by searching ABI/Inform and Business Source Premier for academic papers containing the following keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Reporting, CSR, Sustainability, and Social Responsibility.

This paper identifies four relatively unexplored trends to improve CSR credibility: CSR assurance, integrated reporting, CSR reporting standards, and CSR regulation.

This study will be of use to academic researchers to facilitate research and discussion on the credibility of CSR disclosure.

Regulatory agencies, boards of directors, customers, suppliers, and investors are increasingly using CSR information for decision making; therefore the credibility of the information is important.

Much of the extant research investigating CSR has focused on financial performance metrics. The study synthesizes the recent CSR literature, including some interdisciplinary research focusing on emerging accountability trends in reporting. The authors identify several research opportunities that will enhance the authors’ understanding of CSR reporting.

The purpose of this research is to answer the question: how can a new service development (NSD) program in the financial services industry be managed? More specifically, this research has two objectives: to explore the stages in the NSD process; and to explore how customer input may be obtained in the various stages of the development process. After a review of the new product development literature, the case study methodology involving in‐depth interviews with managers and their customers is described. Analysis of the data showed that there were ten stages in the NSD process, and whether those stages were managed linearly or sequentially was a function of the size of the firm. In addition, how NSD managers obtained customer input in each stage, was uncovered. Implications for NSD managers include which stages to concentrate on, and how to capture customer input.

The article intended to excavate the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployment challenges, Critical Success Factors (CSF), tools and techniques, and managerial implications in an Indian healthcare setting.

The article illustrates a case study established using Action Research (AR) approach. Further, the case study is based on the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) phases of LSS. The performance and service quality of the Endodontics department of a dental college attached to a hospital is enhanced and sustained through the LSS strategy.

The processing time of Root Canal treatment is reduced by determining the root causes for delay and implementing sustainable solutions. The structured deployment of the LSS strategy helped the Endodontics department to reduce the processing time from an average of 116 min–84 min. Thus, the process's sigma level is enhanced from 0.06 to 4.17 and assisted in sustaining the results.

The case study's findings are based on the single AR carried out at an Endodontics department of a dental college hospital based on LSS strategies. Even though this study's results cannot be generalized, the deliverables of the case study can be used to develop the LSS roadmap for the dental colleges to enhance the service quality and safety of the patients.

The article provides step-by-step details for implementing LSS in dental college hospitals with critical analysis based on robust statistical tools and techniques. The case study provides evidence of the adoption of LSS in medical college education and provides the confidence to adopt the same through novice users. The study's findings may persuade the policymakers to add LSS in the medical education curriculum to reinforce safety and reduce errors in the healthcare system.