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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new tool called the elderly caregiver questionnaire for COVID-19 (ECQC-24) that helps to assess caregiver attributes toward best possible care for elderly during this pandemic.

ECQC-24 was developed based on international team of experts and draw upon latest advice from reliable governing bodies such as World Health Organization and the US Centre of Disease Control. Psychometric analysis was applied to ensure the newly developed ECQC-24 is valid and reliable.

Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.72 to 0.87, and construct validity by exploratory factor analysis was acceptable. The results provide good estimates for the reliability and validity of ECQC-24.

More evidence is urgently needed to better inform clinicians, health and social policymakers and related stakeholders and organizations involved in caring for the elderly. ECQC-24, the manual to use and analyzing tools are freely available for download and use at https://sites.google.com/view/the-elderly-caregiver-covid19/home.

This paper aims to share how it was possible to change the way business was conducted in a short period in order to continue the academic semester and seek alternatives to manage the day-to-day university affairs in the midst of a pandemic crisis at a higher education setting. As a result, the authors’ experiences have created new norms and opportunities for the university.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Brunei Darussalam is an evolving situation with extraordinary challenges for staff and students of the university. Although the campus remains open and essential services were continuously provided, the university had to implement and adapt to new norms instinctively to minimise the potential pathways for community spread of the coronavirus and at the same time minimise interruption in teaching and learning.

Firstly, structured blended learning will be the basis of teaching and learning, alongside ensuring the highest quality of online education and successful achievement of the intended learning objectives. Secondly, blended learning will open more opportunities to offer programmes in a more flexible, personalised, student-centric and lifelong learning manner, with the option of taking a study hiatus at students' convenience. Thirdly, there will be more global classrooms and the exchange of online modules with international partner universities. Fourthly, short programmes such as the Global Discovery Programmes will be modified and improvised to become an online learning experience. And finally, there will also be the opportunity to understand and consider the physical and mental well-being and durability of the university community in overcoming a national crisis situation.

This paper is intended to be a conceptual paper where the authors describe novel experiences during the pandemic. The authors’ views, interventions and experiences may result into a new model for higher education that will reposition students to the new global markets and economy.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the background and significance of criminalization of self-money laundering in China and to analyze its application in judicial practice.

This paper introduces the international and domestic background of the criminalization of self-money laundering, demonstrates the theoretical basis and practical significance of the changes of Article 191 in the 11th amendment to the criminal law and puts forward solutions to some controversial issues in judicial practice.

The 11th amendment to the Criminal Law, which came into force in March 2021, criminalizes self-money laundering under Article 191 and has brought an impact on the traditional theory of criminal law. There are no similar amendments to the other two crimes, namely, Article 312 and Article 349, which lead to some confusion in the judicial practice, especially in the understanding of the number of crimes, and the meaning of proceeds of crime. This paper puts forward solutions to some controversial issues in judicial practice.

This paper introduces the criminalization of self-money laundering in the 11th amendment to the criminal law in China, presents a comprehensive description of and comments on the difference between the Article 191 and its similar articles, namely, Article 312 and Article 349, to make a well understanding in the application of law in judicial practice, which would be beneficial to theoretical researchers and judicial professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate the Islamic Governance Examination tool (IGET) in applicability to the healthcare setting.

A cross-sectional study using IGET, developed by a panel of expert and extensive literature, which measures Islamic governance (IG) domains – Tauhid, Juristic, Values and Culture. Health and allied health professionals from the largest hospital in Brunei were recruited to establish validity and reliability of the instrument. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was applied to explore the relationship of the IG domains.

Content validity and construct validity were established with good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α ranged 0.835–0.953). SEM supports the conceptual model and demonstrated potential to improve quality of health services. By articulating internal and organisational processes put in place for compatibility of Muslim patients and accommodating incumbent form of healthcare governance.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study developing, validating and exploring IG components in healthcare setting. Usage of IGET should be cross-validated in different disciplines and settings before application. Nonetheless, IG as a whole need to be developed further to create healthcare environment compatible for Muslim patients and complement current health services to improve health service quality for everyone.

The purpose of this paper through the redundant monitoring unit reflecting the real-time temperature change of the array, an adaptive refresh circuit based on temperature is designed.

This paper proposed a circuit design for temperature-adaptive refresh with a fixed refresh frequency of traditional memory, high refresh power consumption at low temperature and low refresh frequency at high temperature.

Adding a metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) redundancy monitoring unit consistent with the storage unit to the storage bank can monitor the temperature change of the storage bank in real time, so that temperature-based memory adaptive refresh can be implemented.

According to the characteristics that the data holding time of dynamic random access memory storage unit decreases with the increase of temperature, a MOS redundant monitoring unit which is consistent with the storage unit is added to the storage array with the 2T storage unit as the core.

A cross-domain intelligent software-defined network (SDN) routing method based on a proposed multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MDRL) method is developed.

First, the network is divided into multiple subdomains managed by multiple local controllers, and the state information of each subdomain is flexibly obtained by the designed SDN multithreaded network measurement mechanism. Then, a cooperative communication module is designed to realize message transmission and message synchronization between the root and local controllers, and socket technology is used to ensure the reliability and stability of message transmission between multiple controllers to acquire global network state information in real time. Finally, after the optimal intradomain and interdomain routing paths are adaptively generated by the agents in the root and local controllers, a network traffic state prediction mechanism is designed to improve awareness of the cross-domain intelligent routing method and enable the generation of the optimal routing paths in the global network in real time.

Experimental results show that the proposed cross-domain intelligent routing method can significantly improve the network throughput and reduce the network delay and packet loss rate compared to those of the Dijkstra and open shortest path first (OSPF) routing methods.

Message transmission and message synchronization for multicontroller interdomain routing in SDN have long adaptation times and slow convergence speeds, coupled with the shortcomings of traditional interdomain routing methods, such as cumbersome configuration and inflexible acquisition of network state information. These drawbacks make it difficult to obtain global state information about the network, and the optimal routing decision cannot be made in real time, affecting network performance. This paper proposes a cross-domain intelligent SDN routing method based on a proposed MDRL method. First, the network is divided into multiple subdomains managed by multiple local controllers, and the state information of each subdomain is flexibly obtained by the designed SDN multithreaded network measurement mechanism. Then, a cooperative communication module is designed to realize message transmission and message synchronization between root and local controllers, and socket technology is used to ensure the reliability and stability of message transmission between multiple controllers to realize the real-time acquisition of global network state information. Finally, after the optimal intradomain and interdomain routing paths are adaptively generated by the agents in the root and local controllers, a prediction mechanism for the network traffic state is designed to improve awareness of the cross-domain intelligent routing method and enable the generation of the optimal routing paths in the global network in real time. Experimental results show that the proposed cross-domain intelligent routing method can significantly improve the network throughput and reduce the network delay and packet loss rate compared to those of the Dijkstra and OSPF routing methods.

Negotiation is crucial to business alliances, but this process can become more complicated if there are language barriers and differences in cultural values, customs, and lifestyles, such as Western businesses negotiating in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Previous studies have presented models of the Chinese negotiating process but these are primarily from the US. This study examines the negotiating experiences of selected New Zealand investors who have had experiences negotiating either Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) or short‐term sales agreements in the PRC to create two conceptual models. The results provide some interesting insights for doing business in China.

The authors explore self-identity construction as a mechanism of institution­aliz­ation at the individual level. Building on in-depth analysis of life stories of yoga practitioners who are at different stages of practice, the authors found that as yoga practitioners are more exposed to the yogic institution, yogic meanings gradually infuse their general worldview and self-concept. The authors follow the line of research which focuses on professional identity construction as institutional work, yet, opening the “black box,” the authors argue that institutional meanings take root at the individual level beyond the institutional context and beneath the explicit level of identity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) estimation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions over the period of 1991–2017.

This survey categorizes the studies on the basis of power of income in empirical models of EKC. It has been hypothesized that the EKC shows an inverted U-shaped association between economic growth and CO₂ emissions.

For all the contexts, the results of EKC estimation for CO₂ emissions are inconclusive in nature. The reasons behind this discrepancy can be attributed to the choice of contexts, time period, explanatory variables, and methodological adaptation.

The future studies in this context should not only consider new set of variables (e.g. corruption index, social indicators, political scenario, energy research and development expenditures, foreign capital inflows, happiness, population education structure, public investment toward alternate energy exploration, etc.), but also the data set should be refined, so that the EKC estimation issues raised by Stern (2004) can be addressed.

By far, no study in the literature of ecological economics has focused on the empirical estimation of EKC for CO₂ emissions. This particular context has been used for this study, as CO₂ is one of the highest studied pollutants in the ecological economics, and especially within the EKC hypothesis framework.

Outlines previous research on measuring the performance of banks and the factors leading up to the banking crisis in Nigeria in the 1990s. Applies data envelopment analysis to 1991‐1994 data on ten listed Nigerian banks to assess their relative efficiency and tabulates the results for each year, year by year. Discusses the consistency of the findings with other research and draws conclusions on the root causes of Nigeria’s banking problem, e.g. government interface, poor management, unprofessional practices etc. Calls for a halt to government interference and better bank performance monitoring.