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A global pandemic, non-occupational noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is a completely preventable public health problem, which receives limited air time. This study has dual purposes: to contribute to scholarly literature that puts non-occupational NIHL on the global priority map and to effect change in the City of Vancouver's policies toward noise.

Experts in public health and hearing health were contacted in addition to a scoping literature search on PubMed. Information pertaining to both developed and developing countries was obtained, and comparison was made to Canada where possible. The authors met with elected officials at the City of Vancouver to inform them of the win–win aspects of policies that promoted better hearing.

Non-occupational NIHL is an underappreciated issue in Canada and many other countries, as seen by the lack of epidemiological data and public health initiatives. Other countries, such as Australia, have more robust research and public health programs, but most of the world lags behind. Better hearing health is possible through targeted campaigns addressing root causes of non-occupational, recreational noise – positive associations with loud noise. By redefining social norms so that soft to moderate sounds are associated with positive values and loud sounds are negatively attributed, the societies will prevent leisure NIHL. The authors recommend widespread national all-age campaigns that benefit from successful public health campaigns of the past, such as smoking cessation, safety belts and others. Soft Sounds are Healthy (SSH) is a suggested name for a campaign that would take many years, ample resources and sophisticated understanding of behavior change to be effective.

A gap exists in the collection of non-occupational NIHL data. Creating indicators and regularly collecting data is a high priority for most nations. Beyond data collection, prevention of non-occupational NIHL ought to be a high priority. Studies in each region would propel understanding, partly to discern the cultural factors that would predispose the general population to change favorable attitudes toward loud sounds to associations of moderate sounds with positivity. Evaluations of these campaigns would then follow.

Everyday life for many people around the world, particularly in cities, is loud. Traffic, construction, loudspeakers, music and other loud sounds abound. Many people have adapted to these loud soundscapes, and others suffer from the lack of peace and quiet. Changing cultural attitudes toward loud sound will improve human and animal health, lessen the burden on healthcare systems and positively impact the economy.

Industries that create loud technologies and machinery ought to be required to find ways to soften noise. Regulatory mechanisms that are enforced by law and fines ought to be in place. When governments take up the banner of hearing health, they will help to set a new tone toward loud sounds as undesirable, and this will partially address the root causes of the problem of non-occupational NIHL.

Very little public health literature addresses NIHL. It is a relatively ignored health problem. This project aims to spurn public health campaigns, offering our own infographic with a possible title of Soft Sounds are Healthy (SSH) or Soft Sounds are Sexy (SSS). The study also aimed to influence city officials in the authors’ home, Vancouver, and they were able to do this.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the underlying metaphors that hospitals use to establish their organizational mission. Metaphors impact the direction and managerial decision making of organizations, and provide a method to more easily communicate to a variety of stakeholders.

A text analytics process is run to evaluate the mission statements from the largest hospitals by revenue in each of the 50 states of the USA and District of Columbia to identify the types of metaphor-based organizational health management methods.

A cluster analysis is generated to evaluate primary mission-based metaphors, and metatriangulation is used to evaluate output, develop theory and provide practical implications for healthcare management.

Key contributions include a review of healthcare metaphors, an analysis for understanding commonly utilized metaphors, a theory building process for developing a new integrated value-based care management metaphor, and a value-based process is developed for providing healthcare managers an easy to follow and repeatable process for improving organizational communication.

This study aims to propose a blackboard approach using multistrategy machine learning student modeling techniques to learn the properties of students' inconsistent behaviors during their learning process.

These multistrategy machine learning student modeling techniques include inductive reasoning (similarity‐based learning), deductive reasoning (explanation‐based learning), and analogical reasoning (case‐based reasoning).

According to the properties of students' inconsistent behaviors, the ITS (intelligent tutoring system) may then adopt appropriate methods, such as intensifying teaching and practicing, to prevent their inconsistent behaviors from reoccurring.

This research sets the learning object on a single student. After the inferences are accumulated from a group of students, what kinds of students tend to have inconsistent behaviors or under what conditions the behaviors happened for most students can be learned.

Much of the discussion surrounding the antivaccine movement focuses on the decision of parents to not vaccinate their children and the resulting danger posed to others. However, the primary risk is borne by the child left unvaccinated. Although living in a developed country with high vaccination rates provides a certain amount of protection through population immunity, the unvaccinated child is still exposed to a considerably greater risk of preventable diseases than one who is vaccinated. I explore the tension between parental choice and the child’s right to be free of preventable diseases. The chapter’s goal is twofold: to advocate for moving from a dyadic framework – considering the interests of the parents against those of the state – to a triadic one, in which the interests of the child are given as much weight as those of the parent and the state; and to discuss which protections are available, and how they can be improved. Specific legal tools available to protect that child are examined, including tort liability of the parents to the child, whether and to what degree criminal law has a role, under what circumstances parental choice should be overridden, and the role of school immunization requirements in protecting the individual child.

This paper aims to discuss the Silver and Golden ticket exploits that usually exists in the existing systems. To overcome these challenges, the data is first encrypted and then the ticket is granted to the validated user. The users are validated using the user privileges. The security levels of the proposed model are compared with the existing models and provide a better performance using the Key Distribution Centre (KDC). The number of authentication and authorization levels present in the existing and proposed model is also evaluated.

The methodology designed in this paper is discussed in this section. The existing models are designed in such a way that the client ID first asked to send an authorization request to the Authentication Server. The server looks up the user in its database and then sends back a ticket generated by it to the client to obtain services for the Service center. Numerous models have some additional features to these systems where the theme of KDC was introduced. The Key Distribution Centre (KDC), which is a set of nodes in a network where the data could be distributed and stored, such that any kind of attack on a single KDC will not impact other KDC and the data stored in it. The nodes other than the KDC in the network are termed as the slave nodes. The slave nodes communicate with each other within the network depending on the topology of the entire network. In this paper, the authors have used the Kerberos protocol for adding more security functions in the entire network. The system developed consists of a client, server and a set of nodes connected to each other in a ring fashion.

The proposed model provides security to the information being used by making use of the Kerberos protocol. Additional features and algorithms such as the use of the ticket-granting approach have been added at the protocol to make it more secure than the existing models. The ticket generation is done at the server-side that makes the user have proper authentication to make use of the services available from the server-side. The model is designed in such a way that it could remain operational even during the time of denial of service. As future work, use of machine learning and deep learning could be used to predict the attack on the network well before it is being misused.

The paper discusses the Silver and Golden ticket exploits that usually exists in the existing systems. To overcome these challenges, the data is first encrypted and then the ticket is granted to the validated user. The users are validated using the user privileges. The security levels of the proposed model are compared with the existing models and provide a better performance using the Key Distribution Centre (KDC). The number of authentication and authorization levels present in the existing and proposed model is also evaluated.

This paper engages Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Insung Jung in a frank and penetrating conversation that seeks to ground, frame, and problematise research in the field conceptualised as “open, distance and digital education” (ODDE). Taking as starting point the recent publication of the landmark Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education (2022), it segues into a broad critique of the shortcomings of ODDE research, the importance of knowledge production on the meso- and macro-levels, the autonomy of ODDE as a field coming into its own, the place of postfoundationalism in ODDE discourse, and related topics that are pivotal in ODDE today.

The semi-structured interview was employed as the primary qualitative research method.

The research imperative of the relatively young but complex field of ODDE today is not the incessant reiteration of the same but rather a strategic reorientation that, first, circumvents the well-documented yet too-often-overlooked shortcomings of ODDE research and, second, promotes transboundary collaborations with the potential for system-wide impact.

This novel interview-based critique of ODDE research demonstrates that extending the scholarly discourse beyond the conventional report format is a productive method for enriching conversations on ODDE and vitalising the field itself.

This study intended to bridge the gap by investigating Chinese master’s students’ perceptions of their supervisors’ use of evaluative language in feedback, from both cognitive and affective perspectives, at a Sino-foreign university in mainland China.

Employing a qualitative research design, 12 participants from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Economics and Finance were included. Data were collected through individual semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis.

The findings show that students perceive directive and actionable evaluative language, as well as evaluative language aligned with assessment criteria as effective, facilitating improvement and self-regulated learning. However, the use of evaluative language can evoke mixed emotions, with linguistic devices and inadequate follow-up explanations reinforcing negative feelings. Additionally, power imbalances between supervisors and students influence feedback perceptions, hindering students’ active participation in feedback processes.

This study addresses a gap in the literature on master’s students’ perceptions of evaluative language in supervisory feedback and provides practical recommendations for both thesis supervisors and master’s students to facilitate the acceptance and application of feedback.

Though logistics security only took care of trading phase in the past, many countries in the world have begun to introduce logistics security system as its coverage has been extended from production stage to delivery at the final destination. Logistics security system has become indispensable element for global corporations involved in international trading and studies on logistics security keep going on. Most of the studies, however, are focused on discussion of system, cost and influence of logistics security and few of them have been specifically dealing with substantial effectiveness thereof. This study developed the models of supply chain security activities and their outcome by means of using Balanced Scorecard (BCS) which is a well known performance indicator to identify relationship between supply chain security activities and their accomplishment. In this study we have presented 8 supply chain frameworks, human resources management, information system management, facilities/freight management, security process, crisis management capability, relationship with partners, sharing of logistics information and logistics security accomplishment, with reference to standards of C-TPAT and AEO based on WCO framework, 10 supply chain security capabilities. This study further indicates that relationship with partners has more effect on logistics security accomplishment than sharing of logistic information. Just as relationship between corporations in chain of supply and sharing of information among them are important elements in management of supply chain, relationship with partners and sharing of logistic information will have positive effect on supply chain security accomplishment and raise its effectiveness.

This paper shows that local mutual funds lead firms to engage in corporate social activities locally – corporate community investment (CCI).

Using an extensive US sample of 3,691 firms for the period of 2005–2018, we find that mutual funds investing in local firms tend to increase CCI. To address endogeneity concerns, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach with the S&P 500 Index and Russell 1000/2000 Indexes, which suggests a causal effect of local mutual funds on CCI. Our robustness tests include alternative measures of CCI and local ownership as well as different samples using sole-HQ firms, time lags and a matching sample analysis. In addition, we employ alternative approaches for causality tests.

We find that mutual funds investing in local firms tend to increase CCI. In addition, our results indicate that CCI tends to increase firm performance measured with Tobin’s Q and operating cash flow, especially in the consumer-oriented industries where customer relations are critical. The findings imply that CCI is considered as building reputational and relationship capital in communities (i.e. strategic intangibles related to stakeholders). Local mutual funds can help firms develop such strategic intangibles that promote shareholder value.

Our study is the first to investigate the role of local institutional shareholders as a driving force of a firm’s community investments.