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Entrepreneurship, Strategic Management, Organizational Change Management.

Postgraduate and undergraduate students.

Restoran Minang Plus is a self-styled family-owned and managed restaurant featuring a gamut of Malaysian Negeri Sembilan and Indonesian Padang dishes. The eatery establishment has sailed the food industry waters successfully since 2004 and currently has five branches. However, there are certain imperatives they have to institute to integrate their entrepreneurial challenges with organizational change management. The nature of the forces in the competitive restaurant landscape requires a continuous rethinking of current strategic actions, organizational change, communication systems, motivation, asset deployment and strategic flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions and thereby develop and maintain a competitive advantage. The question is how do they integrate this organizational change management to their entrepreneurial challenges with a view to achieve and maintain competitive advantage?

The expected learning outcomes are as follows: understanding managing diversity by looking at the different categories of diversity, that is, generic characteristics and learned characteristics that influence work attitudes; explaining how fostering learning and reinforcement can help in increasing job satisfaction; describing the basic motivational needs of the employees and how it can help in increasing job performance; understanding how an entrepreneurial firm can maximize its firm performance through effective change management; and understanding the importance of strategic management in an entrepreneurial firm.

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Cloud users can access services at anytime from anywhere in the world. On average, Google now processes more than 40,000 searches every second, which is approximately 3.5 billion searches per day. The diverse and vast amounts of data are generated with the development of next-generation information technologies such as cryptocurrency, internet of things and big data. To execute such applications, it is needed to design an efficient scheduling algorithm that considers the quality of service parameters like utilization, makespan and response time. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a novel Efficient Static Task Allocation (ESTA) algorithm, which optimizes average utilization.

Cloud computing provides resources such as virtual machine, network, storage, etc. over the internet. Cloud computing follows the pay-per-use billing model. To achieve efficient task allocation, scheduling algorithm problems should be interacted and tackled through efficient task distribution on the resources. The methodology of ESTA algorithm is based on minimum completion time approach. ESTA intelligently maps the batch of independent tasks (cloudlets) on heterogeneous virtual machines and optimizes their utilization in infrastructure as a service cloud computing.

To evaluate the performance of ESTA, the simulation study is compared with Min-Min, load balancing strategy with migration cost, Longest job in the fastest resource-shortest job in the fastest resource, sufferage, minimum completion time (MCT), minimum execution time and opportunistic load balancing on account of makespan, utilization and response time.

The simulation result reveals that the ESTA algorithm consistently superior performs under varying of batch independent of cloudlets and the number of virtual machines’ test conditions.

Human resource management.

Postgraduate and graduate management programs.

Watson and Lilly (W&L) Berhad is the subsidiary of Wanger Group of Company, established in 1822 by Wanger Watson Group, and engages with transportation and logistics, communication and media, and electricity storage activities. The company provides freight forwarding by air, sea, and land, warehousing and distribution, industrial logistics, and stevedoring and port services. The case is all about the issues related to operations and human resource management in W&L Berhad, company in Malaysia. The company management observed that there has been an increasing trend on the number of mis-shipment. The investigation report was too worrisome to the Managing Director. The mis-shipment recorded in September 2011 was 5.91 per cent and by the end of first quarter in November 2012, the mis-shipment increased to 6.71 per cent. On the second quarter starting from December 2012, the mis-shipment continues to increase to 6.99 per cent and by February 2013, the mis-shipment was at 7.56 per cent. An independent consultancy was assigned to analyze the root causes of the issues. The agency found that the business having high operating cost due to operational inefficiency, documentation issues and human resource issues. The case study proposed several solutions to enhance the manpower efficiency, operational effectiveness, and achieving customer's satisfaction.

Learning the nature of business: to explain the nature of freight and forward business and the base of W&L Berhad, Malaysia. Nature of business operation issues: the case can be used to examine the issues of business operations due to mis-shipment in freight and forward companies. Nature of manpower issues: the case can be used to examine the issues of manpower in correlation with a mis-shipment of freight and forward companies. Integrating business and operational issues with customer delight and business loss. Strategic intervention: instructor can explore varied strategic interventions that curb the operational and manpower issues that may lead to business growth and development in freight and forward companies, achieving customer's satisfaction.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

The purpose of this paper is to optimise the process parameters, namely, fibre orientation angle, helix angle, spindle speed, and feed rate in milling of glass fibre-reinforced plastic (GFRP) composites using grey relational analysis (GRA) and desirability function analysis (DFA).

In this work, experiments were carried out as per the Taguchi experimental design and an L27 orthogonal array was used to study the influence of various combinations of process parameters on surface roughness and delamination factor. As a dynamic approach, the multiple response optimisation was carried out using GRA and DFA for simultaneous evaluation. These two methods are best suited for multiple criteria evaluation and are also not much complicated.

The process parameters were found optimum at a fibre orientation angle of 15°, helix angle of 25°, spindle speed of 6,000 rpm, and a feed rate of 0.04 mm/rev. Analysis of variance was employed to classify the significant parameters affecting the responses. The results indicate that the fibre orientation angle is the most significant parameter preceded by helix angle, feed rate, and spindle speed for GFRP composites.

An attempt to optimise surface roughness and delamination factor together by combined approach of GRA and DFA has not been previously done.

Tourism researchers proposed that service quality dimensions of tourist destinations can contribute in developing a favorable or unfavorable image among travelers which affect visitors’ loyalty or disloyalty as well as destination image. However, such claims are seldom evaluated into in avitourism locations, which are a niche tourism, but fast growing. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between service quality, visitor satisfaction and destination image and destination loyalty among avian tourists.

Following a positivist research philosophy with a quantitative, cross-sectional descriptive study design, the study addressed five direct and two indirect relationships in the model. The research followed expectation dis-confirmation theory of Gartner to test the theoretical model. Following purposive sampling, a sample of 384 international avitourists was collected from five avitourism locations of Malaysia. The study applied SmartPLS SEM to analyze the data.

The results show that the service quality provided by the park management has a positive impact on visitor satisfaction, destination image and destination loyalty. The study also shows partial mediation effect of visitor satisfaction on destination image and destination loyalty among avitourists. The study extends practical, policy and theoretical implications to the stakeholders of avitourism.

The study limits the possibility for generalization of the findings into five avitourism sites located in three states of Malaysia. Hence, the scope of the study needs to be augmented with samples from more regions to meet the expected generalization. Add to the point, this study lacks qualitative data observations to get an in-depth understanding of the issues pertaining to visitor’s expectations on serviced quality, satisfaction, destination image and loyalty. Hence, it is suggested that more qualitative research interventions need to be made with the tools of in-depth interviews, content analysis and with the method of focus group discussions and Delphi applications.

This study provides the park management a clearer understanding on service quality critical factors in enhancing the satisfaction of avian tourists and building a better avitourism destination image and destination loyalty. The avitourism park management may look into the services for these niche tourists, as these resources are directly linked to nature-based tourism with its diverse requirements to keep visitors satisfied. Park authorities require a sound understanding and skills in managing the biodiversity of the natural resources, birds and animals, to match their services with tourists’ expectations.

Biodiversity is important in supporting vital ecosystem services (ES) for human as well as animals. The study has its social implications in generating a greater number of employment opportunity for people surrounding the area of avian destinations preserving the biodiverse area. The people in the surroundings area of avitourism locations will get better employment opportunity as guides and nature trail experts, if the avian tourism develops in its real principle.

Avitourism is a niche tourism. The expectations of the visitors of avitourism locations are entirely varied in comparison with general tourism. Very less studies focused into expectations of the visitors linking human factor of service quality, emotional intelligence, visitor satisfaction, etc. like dimensions that will contribute into dynamic destination image and destination loyalty among avitourists. With the support of quantitative research tools, representative sampling and theoretical selection, the study findings are original in their form, ensuring external validity further to generalize into other birdwatching locations across the countries. The study observations are highly valuable to all stakeholders of avitourism.

Cloud computing gives several on-demand infrastructural services by dynamically pooling heterogeneous resources to cater to users’ applications. The task scheduling needs to be done optimally to achieve proficient results in a cloud computing environment. While satisfying the user’s requirements in a cloud environment, scheduling has been proven an NP-hard problem. Therefore, it leaves scope to develop new allocation models for the problem. The aim of the study is to develop load balancing method to maximize the resource utilization in cloud environment.

In this paper, the parallelized task allocation with load balancing (PTAL) hybrid heuristic is proposed for jobs coming from various users. These jobs are allocated on the resources one by one in a parallelized manner as they arrive in the cloud system. The novel algorithm works in three phases: parallelization, task allocation and task reallocation. The proposed model is designed for efficient task allocation, reallocation of resources and adequate load balancing to achieve better quality of service (QoS) results.

The acquired empirical results show that PTAL performs better than other scheduling strategies under various cases for different QoS parameters under study.

The outcome has been examined for the real data set to evaluate it with different state-of-the-art heuristics having comparable objective parameters.

Clarify the effects of potato flour (PF) addition on dough properties and quality characteristics of pie bread, thus providing a theoretical basis for potato-wheat-yogurt pie bread processing.

The seven pie bread formulations were prepared with addition of different amount of PF (0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 per cent) by replacing wheat flour (WF). The influence of replacement of PF with WF on the dough development, gas behavior, microstructural, gluten-starch interaction inside dough matrix and the nutritional and textural properties of pie bread was analyzed.

Compared to dough with WF, dough height was decreased significantly but total gas volume showed no significant difference with the addition of PF (10-60 per cent), and the dough height was decreased gradually with the increasing addition of PF (p = 0.0012). Scanning electron microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy showed that dough with 10-30 per cent PF revealed smooth surface and continuous network structure was also existed between starch and gluten, this was similar to the structure of wheat dough, while the surface was rough and the connection was not continuous when the PF addition was further increased from 40 to 60 per cent. Nuclear magnetic resonance showed dough with 10-60 per cent PF presented larger content of immobilized water compared to the wheat dough, and its content was also increased with the increasing addition of PF (p = 0.0008). Pie bread with 10-60 per cent PF exhibited lower fat, carbohydrate content and energy value compared to the wheat pie bread, and the fat, carbohydrate, energy was further decreased with the increasing addition of PF (p = 0.0012, 0.0002, 0.0007, respectively), while the dietary fiber content increased (p = 0.0011). In addition, specific volume and height/diameter ratio showed no significant difference in pie bread with 0-40 per cent PF, which were 2.1-2.4 cm³/g and 0.16-0.19, respectively (p = 0.004), whereas they were reduced significantly when the PF was increased to 60 per cent (p = 0.001, p = 0.002). In addition, the lightness (L) of pie bread decreased gradually with the increasing amount of PF, and the browning index was increased. Pie bread with 0-40 per cent PF showed similar hardness, springness and chewiness value, which were also increased when the PF was increased to 60 per cent (p = 0.001). The above results indicated that PF could improve the nutritional quality of pie bread, and the appropriate addition amount should be no more than 40 per cent.

The mechanisms of this study should be clarified for further study.

PF was an excellent food ingredient and could be used for pie bread making at 30 per cent replacement level to overcome use of WF.

The results of this study can provide a new kind of potato staple food with high nutrition and low energy for market and consumers.

PF was first used to produce yogurt pie bread to improve the nutritional properties of traditional WF yogurt pie bread.

The service denial threats are regularly regarded as tools for effortlessly triggering online-based services offline. Moreover, the present occurrences reveal that these threats are being constantly employed for masking other vulnerable threats like disseminating malware, information losses, wire scams and mining bitcoins (Sujithra et al., 2018; Boujnouni and Jedra, 2018). In some cases, service denials have been employed to cyberheist financial firms which sums around $100,000. Documentation from Neustar accounts that is about 70 percent of the financial sector are aware of the threat, and therefore, incidents result in few losses, more than 35 percent of service denial attempts are identified as malware soon after the threat is sent out (Divyavani and Dileep Kumar Reddy, 2018). Intensive packet analysis (IPA) explores the packet headers from Layers 2 to 4 along with the application information layer from Layers 5 to 7 for locating and evading vulnerable network-related threats. The networked systems could be simply contained by low potent service denial operations in case the supplies of the systems are minimized by the safety modules. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The initial feature will be resolved using the IPDME by locating the standard precise header delimiters such as carriage return line feed equally locating the header names. For the designed IPDME, the time difficulties in locating the initial position of the header field within a packet with static time expenses of four cycles. For buffering packets, the framework functions at the speed of cables. Soon after locating the header position, the value of the field is mined linearly from the position. Mining all the field values consequentially resolves the forthcoming restrictions which could be increased by estimating various information bytes per cycle and omitting non-required information packets. In this way, the exploration space is minimized from the packet length to the length of the header. Because of the minimized mining time, the buffered packets could be operated at an increasing time.

Based on the assessments of IPDME against broadly employed SIP application layer function tools it discloses hardware offloading of IPDME it could minimize the loads on the essential system supplies of about 25 percent. The IPDME reveals that the acceleration of 22X– 75X as evaluated against PJSIP parser and SNORT SIP pre-processor. One IPDME portrays an acceleration of 4X–6X during 12 occurrences of SNORT parsers executing on 12 processors. The IPDME accomplishes 3X superior to 200 parallel occurrences of GPU speeded up processors. Additionally, the IPDME has very minimal latencies with 12X–1,010X minimal than GPUs. IPDME accomplishes minimal energy trails of nearly 0.75 W using two engines and for 15 engines it is 3.6 W, which is 22.5X–100X less as evaluated to the graphic-based GPU speeding up.

IPDME assures that the system pools are not fatigued on Layer 7 mining by transmitting straightforwardly based on network intrusions without branching into the operating systems. IPDME averts the latencies because of the memory accesses by sidestepping the operating system which essentially permits the scheme to function at wired speed. Based on the safety perception, IPDME ultimately enhances the performance of the safety systems employing them. The increased bandwidth of the IPDME assures that the IPA’s could function at their utmost bandwidth. The service time for the threat independent traffic is enhanced because of minimization over the comprehensive latencies over the path among the network intrusions and the related applications.

COVID-19 pandemic has heavily affected worldwide. One of the major industrial sectors impacted by COVID-19 virus is the travel and hospitality, and it has resulted in extreme level of unemployment in travel and tourism industries especially hotels, restaurant chains, street food caterers and bars. Cancellations of events, conferences, conventions and sports leagues are instantaneously causing severe impact on the travel and tourism and hospitality industry. The unemployed workforce is facing numerous mental health challenges in the form of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, lack of confidence and loss of interest in life which are leading them to maladaptive coping mechanisms like suicide, alcohol and substance abuse. This chapter discusses the following topics:

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a booming sector that has profoundly influenced every walk of life, and the education sector is no exception. In education, AI has helped to develop novel teaching and learning solutions that are currently being tested in various contexts. Businesses and governments across the globe have been pouring money into a wide array of implementations, and dozens of EdTech start-ups are being funded to capitalise on this technological force. The penetration of AI in classroom teaching is also a profound matter of discussion. These have garnered massive amounts of student big data and have a significant impact on the life of both students and educators alike.

Purpose: The prime focus of this chapter is to extensively review and analyse the vast literature available on the utilities of AI in health care, learning, and development. The specific objective of thematic exploration of the literature is to explicate the principal facets and recent advances in the development and employment of AI in the latter. This chapter also aims to explore how the EdTech and healthcare–education sectors would witness a paradigm shift with the advent and incorporation of AI.

Design/Methodology/Approach: To provide context and evidence, relevant publications were identified on ScienceDirect, PubMed, and Google Scholar using keywords like AI, education, learning, health care, and development. In addition, the latest articles were also thoroughly reviewed to underscore recent advances in the same field.

Results: The implementation of AI in the learning, development, and healthcare sector is rising steeply, with a projected expansion of about 50% by 2022. These algorithms and user interfaces economically facilitate efficient delivery of the latter.

Conclusions: The EdTech and healthcare sector has great potential for a spectrum of AI-based interventions, providing access to learning opportunities and personalised experiences. These interventions are often economic in the long run compared to conventional modalities. However, several ethical and regulatory concerns should be addressed before the complete adoption of AI in these sectors.

Originality/Value: The value in exploring this topic is to present a view on the potential of employing AI in health care, medical education, and learning and development. It also intends to open a discussion of its potential benefits and a remedy to its shortcomings.