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The main aims of this paper include a revision of the essentials of the monetary approach to the balance of payments by constructing a monetary model, an extension of the model to explain the importation of inflation in an open economy and an application of the formulated model to the two small open economies, the Netherlands and Singapore. The most important contribution of the monetary approach to the balance of payments is its focus on the role of money as opposed to the focus of traditional approaches on the real variables and on the current account of the balance of payments. Influenced originally by Johnson (1972), there have been several theoretical as well as empirical analyses supporting the major contentions of the monetary approach to the balance of payments. Notable among these are Mussa, Frenkel and Johnson (1975), Kemp (1975), Whitman (1975), and Kreinin and Officer (1978). On the basis of common elements enclosed in the writings of these authors, it is possible to construct such a model and then solve it, first, for foreign reserves inflow, and second, for the domestic inflation rate as a dependent variable. This formulation is similar to the ones found in Bhatia (1982) and Salvatore (1983), but is broader in its implications. A check of the validity of the relationships of the monetary model is also attempted by using the annual data of the Netherlands and Singapore.

The study's objective was to address the factors impacting the employability attributes of fresh graduates in the Kingdom of Bahrain while considering the various challenges. This study used a quantitative approach which employed the questionnaire tool, and data were collected by using a convenience sampling method. The study sample comprised n = 385 respondents from different industries, including manufacturing, banking and finance, hospitality, healthcare, oil and gas, and real estate sectors of Bahrain. Data gathered from questionnaire were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), where descriptive and inferential statistics was used to analyze the data. The results of the study showed for the major Hypothesis 1 that the demographic variables have no significant statistical impact on employment attributes of the new fresh graduates. Moreover, findings suggest that null hypothesis for major Hypothesis 2 has been rejected as applied academic skills and critical thinking skills have no significant impact on employability attribute of fresh graduates in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Null hypothesis for major Hypothesis 3 has been accepted as findings suggest that technology use skills (β ₁ = 0.080), system thinking skills (β ₂ = 0.210), communication skills (β ₃ = 0.402), and information skills (β ₄ = −0.100) which are an antecedent of workplace skills, have significant statistical impact on employability attribute of fresh graduates in Kingdom of Bahrain. Lastly, null hypothesis for major Hypothesis 4 has been accepted as findings suggest that interpersonal skills (β ₅ = 0.229) which are an antecedent of effective relationship have significant statistical impact on employability attribute of fresh graduates in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The primary purpose of this work is to prepare the renewable source-based polyurethanes coatings which can be used to substitute petroleum-based materials. In the secondary purpose, the paper included improvement in the properties of said PU coatings using modified nano TiO₂ for industrial PU coatings.

The authors have synthesised low molecular weight polyols (monoglycerides) based on vegetable oils such as castor, linseed, coconut, mustard, sunflower and rice bran oils. These monoglycerides were successfully utilised in the preparation of polyurethane coatings. In order to improve the performance of these coatings, modified nano TiO₂ was incorporated into them. The particle size of TiO₂ was determined by transmission electron microscopy. Coatings prepared were characterised for their properties such as gloss, scratch resistance, impact resistance, flexibility, cross cut adhesion and chemical resistance. The thermal stability of coatings was also studied by thermo gravimetric analyzer.

The polyurethane coatings prepared from six monoglycerides of different oils with polymeric diphenyl methane diisocyanate showed good chemical resistance and thermal stability. Coating properties like impact resistance, flexibility and adhesion were excellent for all of the prepared samples of PU coatings. PU coatings with excellent hardness up to 5B were found with the modification of nano TiO₂ by silane coupling agent. The authors successfully prepared the renewable source-based (monoglycerides of oil) PU coatings.

Practically the authors are able to convert renewable source that is vegetable oils into polyurethane coatings which may have strong potential to be used as industrial surface coating. The properties of the PU coatings were evaluated before and after the incorporation of different concentration of surface-modified nano TiO₂ which revealed that the presence of 1 percent nano TiO₂ showed significant enhancement in coating properties.

The beauty of this work includes synthesis of polyurethanes coatings from renewable source material (monoglycerides of vegetable oils) to substitute petroleum-based materials. The incorporation of silane-modified TiO₂ nanoparticles in renewable source-based PU coatings is another originality of the work. This article is also representing comparative study of various vegetable oils on PU coatings.

This paper aims to perform an experimental investigation on the impact strength, compressive strength, tensile strength and flexural strength of fly ash-based green composites and to compare with these polyvinyl chloride (PVC), high density polyethylene (HDPE) and low density polyethylene (LDPE).

Fly ash-based polymer matrix composites (FA-PMCs) were fabricated using hand layup method. Composites containing 100 g by weight fly ash particles, 100 g by weight brick dust particles and 50 g by weight chopped glass fiber particles were processed. Impact strength, compressive strength, tensile strength and flexural strength of composites have been measured and compared with PVC, HDPE and LDPE. Impact strength of the FA-PMC is higher than that of PVC, HDPE and LDPE. Structural analysis of pipes, gears and axial flow blade was verified using ANSYS. Barlou’s condition for pipes, Lewis–Buckingham approach for gears and case-based analysis for axial flow blades were carried out and verified.

Pipes, gears and axial flow blades made form fly ash-based composites were found to exhibit improved thermal resistance (i.e. better temperature independence for mechanical operations), higher impact strength and longer life compared to those made from PVC, HDPE and LDPE. Moreover, the eco-friendly nature of the raw materials used for fabricating the composite brings into its quiver a new dimension of appeal.

Experimental investigation on the impact strength, compressive strength, tensile strength and flexural strength of fly ash-based green composites has not been attempted yet.

According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.

This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation. The authors’ approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.

As per the experimental results, pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to convert ISL text into English text. The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%, respectively.

It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words, strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion. The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places, numbers and dates. Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence, it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.

Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society. Because of the shortage of human interpreters, an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf. To motivate research in this field, the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos. As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC, the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.

This paper aims to manage access control tasks to satisfy the user privacy needs of online information resources according to social relations and tags.

The study proposes a method for access control management in the online social context. The proposed method includes the access control policy management process, metadata of access control policies, the data of ontologies, tags, and social relations, and conflict detection rules.

Online information sharing and hiding, which needs to consider social relations and mentioned topics, is a unique context and needs a novel access control mechanism. Ontologies are powerful and expressive enough to identify conflicts in access control policies. The paper provides a method using ontologies to control the access control activities based on social relations and tags on web content. The effectiveness of the method's conflict detection rules is validated through several scenarios.

To make the proposed method suitable for widespread usage, further work is required to develop an access control policy specification and conflict detection tool. The proposed method introduces relatively novel usage scenarios, which consider social relationships, and tags compared with existing access control methods for online information sharing.

The proposed access control mechanism can be integrated into existing web sites. Online users can use this method to share information more easily than at present.

The method enables flexible access control in social contexts and handles unavoidable conflicts. It also opens the way to new access control scenarios in online social activities. The method can be used to keep secrets hidden from selected people.

This paper presents a design approach for process-based knowledge management (PKM) systems that can support knowledge-intensive processes where effective task execution is highly reliant on the knowledge and expertise of participants executing the tasks. The proposed design approach includes design methods and kernel theories governing the design of PKM systems and can also be easily integrated with existing systems analysis and design techniques.

The design science research methodology is used to design and develop the artifact which includes the overall PKM design approach. Information systems design theory is used as a high-level framework to develop and structure the design approach. Relevant design methods and behavioral theories are reviewed to identify kernel theories that guide the design and development of PKM systems. The design approach consists of meta-requirements for PKM systems and design processes to achieve the meta-requirements. A feasibility study is conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

The design approach presented in this paper can guide system analysts and system developers in the design of knowledge management systems for supporting knowledge-intensive processes. The paper also includes a comprehensive design theory for PKM systems consisting of meta-requirements and a synthesis of various kernel theories into actionable design procedures. The proposed procedures include knowledge requirements modeling, knowledge flows modeling and knowledge and process performance modeling procedures. The feasibility study indicates that the PKM approach can be more useful and effective than solely using unified modeling language (UML)-based systems analysis and design techniques for the design of PKM systems.

An implication to information systems design research is the feasibility of developing a specialized design approach that incorporates significant domain knowledge to solve complex information system design problems. An implication to practice is the significant potential to improve productivity and effectiveness of systems analysts and designers in developing PKM systems. A limitation is the small sample size of the feasibility study used to evaluate the ease of use and utility of the design approach.

The study makes a unique contribution by proposing a design approach that integrates business process and knowledge management considerations. The approach is particularly valuable because of the focus on integration with existing systems analysis and design techniques, thus allowing for easier adoption.

The paper investigates how the interplay of women-specific human and social capital factors with ownership structure impacts her chances to get director level appointment in the light of recent amendments to the Indian statute.

The strength of the study lies in fitting a logistic regression model to the unique hand collected data on women director characteristics from 100 large listed Indian firms.

Counter intuitive findings reveal negative effects of social capital on appointment of independent women directors. This relationship gets reversed when social capital is moderated by ownership structure.

Companies may be influenced to take into cognizance the underlying gender biases prevailing in the highest echelons of management and employ un-gendered fair selection practices for board level appointments in order to progress towards gender balanced corporate boards.

The paper is a first of its kind that combines aspects of human capital and ownership structure using Indian data. By developing several new proxy variables to enrich the construct of social capital it contributes to the corporate governance literature and lastly, through main and interaction effects, the paper offers a deeper understanding about the impact of endogenous factors of corporate boards on women's representation at leadership levels in India.

The increased demand for high-quality, nutritionally rich processed food has led to non-thermal food processing technologies like high pressure processing (HPP), a novel process for microbial inactivation with minimal loss of nutritional and sensory properties. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the impact of HPP on the microbiological, nutritional and sensory properties of food.

Recent research on the role of HPP in maintaining food quality and safety and the impact of process conditions with respect to various food properties have been explored in this paper. Also, the hurdle approach and the effectiveness of HPP on food quality have been documented.

HPP has been verified for industrial application, fulfilling the consumer demand for processed food with minimum nutrition loss at low temperatures. The positive impact of HPP with other treatments is known as the hurdle approach that enhances its impact against microorganism activity and minimizes the effects on nutrition and sensory attributes.

This paper highlights the impact of HPP on various food properties and a good alternative as non-thermal technology for maintaining shelf life, sensory properties and retention of nutrients.

After working through the case, the students should be able to understand Indian political economy and the brand building process of NaMo; identify the media mix strategies used to build the brand NaMo in India; evaluate possible future growth strategies for brand NaMo; and compare and contrast brand NaMo with business brands.

Narendra Modi popularly called as NaMo was the current Prime Minister of India. He belonged to Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) which won India’s general elections in two consecutive terms 2014 and 2019. NaMo was recognised worldwide for his prudence in leading the country to greater heights of achievement. NaMo started his political journey as the worker of BJP at a tender age. His rise in political career was akin to flagship brand overtaking the parent brand. All the steps taken in the past to position himself as a cult brand, will it fortify to NaMo’s victory in 2024 general elections? Business firms may follow NaMo’s strategies. What can the business brands emulate from NaMo to market and position themselves? Can political success be transpired to business success?

This case is designed for use in a graduate-/postgraduate-level marketing course in segments on brand management, brand expansion and the marketing strategies of a market leader. The case can also be used in a brand management course to discuss brand management models (e.g. Keller’s brand resonance pyramid and brand value chain). This case has particular application for classes that focus on brand equity, STP for any brand (segmentation, targeting and positioning) and brand value chain. The case looks in detail at the Indian political market and brand building process of NaMo and examines competitive moves since its inception. This case can be used in brand management, media management courses. The dilemma can be explained as part of a marketing course for postgraduate and executive programmes.

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CSS 8: Marketing.