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Nurse turnover in critical care units (CCU) significantly affects patient outcomes and health systems worldwide. To safeguard patient care quality, hospitals must address the underlying reasons for turnover and strategize to retain their skilled nursing workforce. The study proposes a prescriptive framework to reduce nurse turnover in CCUs.

In this study, the integrated methodology of Delphi-AHP-Entropy was used for the comparative prioritization of factors and subfactors that influence nursing staff turnover in CCUs.

Study findings reveal that “Organizational factors” and “Individual factors” dictate critical care nurse attrition rate. At the subfactor level, staffing policy, chronic fatigue, and perceived career are the leading concerns for the decision of nurses whether to work or leave.

This study is valuable for both researchers and healthcare professionals. It examines whether actions related to nurse retention align with existing theory and identifies areas requiring further theoretical or applied studies to enhance understanding in this area. This insight can bolster the field’s knowledge base and integrate theoretical and applied knowledge effectively. Additionally, for healthcare professionals, the study provides an overview of key factors conducive to retaining nursing staff in the CCU, offering valuable guidance for implementing effective strategies.

This study uniquely positions itself by presenting a comprehensive and prescriptive framework for critical care nurse retention in the UAE.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changes in initial public offering (IPO) underpricing and short‐run performance following a regulatory reform (No. 54 [2002] China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC)) of the method of allocating IPO shares in China.

On 20 May 2002, the CSRC announced that IPO subscription and allotment would be based on the market value of investors' tradable shareholdings. Before the regulatory change, this was determined by the amount of funds used for subscription. The reform was intended to increase participation by both smaller and institutional investors. Based on a sample of 209 IPOs in the Shanghai A‐share market during the period 2001‐2003, the paper employs an event study methodology to examine the impact of this IPO regulatory reform.

The paper finds that the overall (pre‐ and post‐reform) average abnormal initial return of 116.94 per cent is lower than in earlier studies of Chinese IPOs but higher than in other markets. Post‐reform underpricing decreases by 42.27 per cent compared to pre‐reform levels. In the post‐listing aftermarket a pre‐reform upward trend of cumulative abnormal returns was reversed to become downward post‐reform. The results suggest that the regulatory change has encouraged well‐informed investors, consistent with Information Cascades and Bandwagon hypotheses. It also appears that the reform improved market efficiency and secondary market liquidity.

The findings shed light on the relationship between IPO costs, IPO pricing, market liquidity and market microstructure. They also have important implications for issuers, underwriters and in particular for policy markers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the major provisions of the Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Obama on July 21, 2010.

This does not offer any empirical analysis of the new law given that it has just been adopted. The paper does provide discussion of the major provisions with some commentary on the arguments for an against each provision.

The new law represents the most sweeping changes in financial regulation and supervision in the USA since the Great Depression. The role of the Federal Government is greatly expanded in almost all aspects of the financial sector of the economy and will affect consumers, investors, and managers of financial service firms. Many feel that the effect of the law will be to adversely affect the competitive environment while others feel the additional regulation is necessary to prevent another financial crisis.

As the provisions of this law become more clear, much research will be needed to assess the true economic impact of the law and whether it is indeed providing the additional safeguards against a financial crisis.

This review of the new law offers a concise discussion of the major provisions of the recently passed law. This review is of value to those seeking an introduction to the law and its provisions and implications.

Although numerous signal modalities are available for emotion recognition, audio and visual modalities are the most common and predominant forms for human beings to express their emotional states in daily communication. Therefore, how to achieve automatic and accurate audiovisual emotion recognition is significantly important for developing engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment. However, two major challenges exist in the field of audiovisual emotion recognition: (1) how to effectively capture representations of each single modality and eliminate redundant features and (2) how to efficiently integrate information from these two modalities to generate discriminative representations.

A novel key-frame extraction-based attention fusion network (KE-AFN) is proposed for audiovisual emotion recognition. KE-AFN attempts to integrate key-frame extraction with multimodal interaction and fusion to enhance audiovisual representations and reduce redundant computation, filling the research gaps of existing approaches. Specifically, the local maximum–based content analysis is designed to extract key-frames from videos for the purpose of eliminating data redundancy. Two modules, including “Multi-head Attention-based Intra-modality Interaction Module” and “Multi-head Attention-based Cross-modality Interaction Module”, are proposed to mine and capture intra- and cross-modality interactions for further reducing data redundancy and producing more powerful multimodal representations.

Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e. RAVDESS and CMU-MOSEI) demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of KE-AFN. Specifically, (1) KE-AFN is superior to state-of-the-art baselines for audiovisual emotion recognition. (2) Exploring the supplementary and complementary information of different modalities can provide more emotional clues for better emotion recognition. (3) The proposed key-frame extraction strategy can enhance the performance by more than 2.79 per cent on accuracy. (4) Both exploring intra- and cross-modality interactions and employing attention-based audiovisual fusion can lead to better prediction performance.

The proposed KE-AFN can support the development of engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment.

This article examines the effect of China's soft power projection through the Chinese media in Africa on the African audiences' perception of China's national image through a case study of the residents of Nairobi. It adopted Joseph Nye's soft power model and sought to address three fundamental questions : What is the extent and objective of China's media diplomacy in Africa? How has China's media “offensive” in Africa impacted African audiences' imagery of China? What are the implications, if any, of China's media diplomacy on the Kenyan public view of China?

This article used a mixed-methods research design, which deployed elements of positivism and interpretivism. It used a deductive approach and deployed the survey strategy, which entailed the collection of data from Nairobi city residents. The secondary data were collected from relevant academic literature sources. The primary data were analyzed empirically using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), while the secondary data were analyzed using discourse analysis.

China's soft power projection through the Chinese media in Africa is aimed at addressing the “misinformation” about China. China seeks its share of representation among the African public to correct negative perceptions of China. Kenyans had a generally positive attitude toward China. South Africa and Angola have “Fairly” positive perceptions of the Chinese media. However, this study did not reveal whether the perception was due to the influence of Chinese media. These findings implied that the African public's positive imagery of China cannot be fully attributed to Chinese media's influence.

This study is groundbreaking in that it is one of the few studies that have focused on China's public diplomacy in Africa and assessed the impact of Chinese media on the African public’s perception of China.

The geological conditions of Longyang Reservoir are complex and it is located in strong earthquake area. In order to determine its seismic characteristics, the seismic response and residual deformation of embankment dam should be studied to provide calculation basis for dam design and construction.

Based on the geological survey data of Longyang Reservoir, the dam filling materials are tested by dynamic deformation tests, and the equivalent linear constitutive model parameters of the filling materials are obtained. Based on Duncan-Chang E-B model, the stress state of embankment dam in Longyang Reservoir before earthquake is calculated, and the dynamic response and earthquake residual deformation of embankment dam in Longyang Reservoir under earthquake condition are calculated by using equivalent linear model and Shen Zhu-jiang’s residual deformation model.

The results show that with the increase of dynamic shear strain, the dynamic shear modulus decreases and the damping ratio increases. The scatter plot between dynamic shear modulus and dynamic shear strain, and the scatter plot between damping ratio and dynamic shear strain under different confining pressures show strips. The calculation results shows that the acceleration of embankment dam in Longyang Reservoir increases with the increase of dam height, and the acceleration distribution has obvious amplification effect. Combined with the maximum dynamic shear strain during the earthquake and the state before the earthquake, the maximum vertical residual deformation of embankment dam in Longyang Reservoir is 2.98 cm which occurs at the top of the dam, calculated by the Shen Zhu-jiang’s residual deformation model.

Finite element calculation model parameters of embankment dam are obtained by dynamic triaxial tests. Seismic dynamic responses and residual deformation of embankment dam are analyzed. With the increase of dam height, the acceleration distribution shows an obvious amplification effect. The vertical displacement of embankment dam is larger along the dam axis and decreases in the upstream and downstream direction. The maximum horizontal displacement of embankment dam occurs in the middle of upstream and downstream dam slopes.

• (1)

  Finite element calculation model parameters of embankment dam are obtained by dynamic triaxial tests.

• (2)

  Seismic dynamic responses and residual deformation of embankment dam are analyzed.

• (3)

  With the increase of dam height, the acceleration distribution shows an obvious amplification effect.

• (4)

  The vertical displacement of embankment dam is larger along the dam axis and decreases in the upstream and downstream direction.

• (5)

  The maximum horizontal displacement of embankment dam occurs in the middle of upstream and downstream dam slopes.

Finite element calculation model parameters of embankment dam are obtained by dynamic triaxial tests.

Seismic dynamic responses and residual deformation of embankment dam are analyzed.

With the increase of dam height, the acceleration distribution shows an obvious amplification effect.

The vertical displacement of embankment dam is larger along the dam axis and decreases in the upstream and downstream direction.

The maximum horizontal displacement of embankment dam occurs in the middle of upstream and downstream dam slopes.

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

This paper aims to study the attitude control problem with mutating orbital rate and actuator fading.

To avoid malicious physical attacks and hide itself, the spacecraft may irregularly switch its orbit altitude within a specific range, which will bring about variations in orbital rate, thereby causing mutations in the attitude dynamics model. The actuator faults will also cause changes in system dynamics. Both factors affect the control performance. First, this paper determines the potential switching orbits. Then under different conditions, design controllers that can accommodate actuator faults according to the statistical law of actuator fading.

This paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, for the first time, introduces the Markovian jump framework to model the possible unexpected mutating of orbital rate and actuator fading of spacecraft and then designs a novel control policy to solve the attitude control problem.

This paper also provides the algorithm design processes in detail. A comparative numerical simulation is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This is an early solution for spacecraft attitude control with dynamics model mutations.

The purpose of this study is to present a newly proposed and developed sorting algorithm-based merging weighted fraction Monte Carlo (SAMWFMC) method for solving the population balance equation for the weighted fraction coagulation process in aerosol dynamics with high computational accuracy and efficiency.

In the new SAMWFMC method, the jump Markov process is constructed as the weighted fraction Monte Carlo (WFMC) method (Jiang and Chan, 2021) with a fraction function. Both adjustable and constant fraction functions are used to validate the computational accuracy and efficiency. A new merging scheme is also proposed to ensure a constant-number and constant-volume scheme.

The new SAMWFMC method is fully validated by comparing with existing analytical solutions for six benchmark test cases. The numerical results obtained from the SAMWFMC method with both adjustable and constant fraction functions show excellent agreement with the analytical solutions and low stochastic errors. Compared with the WFMC method (Jiang and Chan, 2021), the SAMWFMC method can significantly reduce the stochastic error in the total particle number concentration without increasing the stochastic errors in high-order moments of the particle size distribution at only slightly higher computational cost.

The WFMC method (Jiang and Chan, 2021) has a stringent restriction on the fraction functions, making few fraction functions applicable to the WFMC method except for several specifically selected adjustable fraction functions, while the stochastic error in the total particle number concentration is considerably large. The newly developed SAMWFMC method shows significant improvement and advantage in dealing with weighted fraction coagulation process in aerosol dynamics and provides an excellent potential to deal with various fraction functions with higher computational accuracy and efficiency.

This study aims to examine how young consumers perceive the advertising effectiveness of endorsements by virtual idols and how endorsements by virtual idols differ from endorsements by real human celebrities such as traditional celebrities and online influencers.

An experimental study was conducted with 400 randomly selected young respondents in China in December 2022. A 3 × 2 factorial design was used to test how the type of celebrity endorser and level of product involvement influence the persuasiveness of advertising aimed at young adults. Among 400 respondents, the average age was 21.5 years. A total of 193 male and 207 female respondents participated in the experiment.

Young consumers find virtual idols, online influencers and traditional celebrities attractive. Although virtual idols are the least credible among the three types of celebrity endorsers, young consumers tend to be more convinced by their endorsements of products with low levels of consumer involvement than those with high levels of involvement. Among the three types of celebrity endorsements, young consumers find traditional celebrities the most effective. In addition, young consumers’ attitudes toward celebrity endorsers mediate the impact of celebrity endorsers’ attractiveness and credibility on their attitudes toward the advertisements. The perceived level of product involvement moderates the transfer of meaning from the attitude toward the celebrity endorsers to the attitude toward the advertisement.

First, when choosing celebrity endorsers to advertise products targeting young consumers, marketing communication practitioners should give priority to the endorsers’ perceived credibility, as young consumers have a variety of views about them that can significantly affect their attitudes toward the advertisement. Second, real human celebrity endorsers are more effective than virtual idols in celebrity endorsements. However, virtual idols may be suited for use in advertisements to promote products with low involvement levels, such as soft drinks.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first experimental study to attempt to analyze the effectiveness of virtual idols in advertising aimed at young consumers. This is also the first comparative study to introduce virtual idols as celebrity endorsers in product advertising and to compare their effectiveness with that of the two other types of commonly discussed celebrity endorsers, traditional celebrities and online influencers.