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1 – 10 of 12Luisa Tomas Cumba, Xiaoxia Huang, Zenglian Zhang and Sagheer Muhammad
The aim of the research is to examine in depth the relationship between financial support, entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging African economies.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of the research is to examine in depth the relationship between financial support, entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging African economies.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts the system-generalized methods of moments (sys-GMM) technique for data analysis and hypothesis testing on a sample of 34 African emerging economies (340 observations) from 2010 to 2019.
Findings
The results show that there is significant positive correlation between financial support, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Moreover, entrepreneurship served as a partial mediator between financial support and economic growth in African emerging economies.
Practical implications
This research suggests that African governments should focus on entrepreneurial systems, which are essentially networks driven by the pursuit of individual opportunities and the promotion of new business creation; and introduce other forms of financial assistance, such as loans, loan guarantees, interest subsidies, technical assistance, insurance, etc.
Originality/value
The main novelty of the paper is that the authors empirically investigate the mediating role of entrepreneurship in the association between financial support and economic growth in 34 African emerging economies.
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Asad Ali Qazi, Abdul Rehman Shaikh and Andrea Appolloni
Mr Qazi was sitting in his office in the Multan branch, reviewing his past month’s key performance indicators when he got a call from his Town Operations Supervisor, Mr Ahmed…
Abstract
Case overview
Mr Qazi was sitting in his office in the Multan branch, reviewing his past month’s key performance indicators when he got a call from his Town Operations Supervisor, Mr Ahmed, based in Bahawalpur. Ahmed was recently promoted and transferred to Bahawalpur, from Multan branch. He informed Qazi about the huge inventory variances, which were not earlier reported by the previous Town Operations Supervisor, Mr Sagheer. Qazi was informed that differences were around 2.37% of total sales vs the allowable company limit of Zero inventory variance. Qazi was worried about whether to report these differences to higher management or not. He was very well aware that reporting might even cost him his job, and that of Sagheer too. He could not see any solution to the recovery of the inventory or cash against the same. Should Qazi take a risk and let go of Sagheer? Should he report the differences?
Expected learning outcome
1. Demonstrate the fraud and integrity-related issues. Why and how happened? 2. Analyzed the role of organizational policies in the decision of blow the whistle. 3. Identify the behaviors that helped a whistle-blower. 4. Assess the ethical dilemmas in which professional duties may conflict with personal ethics. 5. Propose organizational policies to encourage whistle-blowing and to discourage the fraud or integrity-related issues.
Supplementary materials
Teaching Notes are available for educators only.
Subject code
CSS 9: Operations and logistics.
Study level/applicability
BBA.
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Like many other authors, Briffault recognises the immense contribution of Muslims to civilisation and its influence on the European renaissance. Unlike most other authors…
Abstract
Like many other authors, Briffault recognises the immense contribution of Muslims to civilisation and its influence on the European renaissance. Unlike most other authors, however, Briffault realises that such a contribution was stimulated, motivated and guided by a “new spirit.” Insufficient attention, however, has been given to the source and roots of this “new spirit,” which emerged suddenly and powerfully in the Seventh Century initially among the Arabs who were not known for any significant contribution to science and technology. Nor was the sandy, mostly arid Arabia known as a centre of learning and research.
Usman Haider, Syeda Hina Batool, Amara Malik, Khalid Mahmood and Muhmmad Safdar
Reporters are considered unique in terms of their information needs and seeking from other groups of masses. As they are running information business, the purpose of the study is…
Abstract
Purpose
Reporters are considered unique in terms of their information needs and seeking from other groups of masses. As they are running information business, the purpose of the study is to know about their skills of seeking, evaluating and engaging with information effectively and efficiently.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional survey was conducted with electronic media reporters from 20 news channels to assess their information literacy skills (IL) and personal information management practices (PIM).
Findings
The results indicated that the study’s participants considered themselves as information literate. They perceived themselves competent and confident in IL skills for the overall scale and on its all sub-dimensions as well. Interestingly, the study findings show that IL skills affect PIM practices positively. However, they were less competent in advanced searching techniques (i.e. use of Boolean logic, truncation etc.) and cloud-based storing tools and applications.
Practical implications
The study has inferences for information professionals, educators, media owners and other stakeholders. Policymakers in electronic media, particularly media libraries should offer training opportunities by organizing workshops, seminars etc. to enhance their advanced IL as well as PIM skills at workplace.
Originality/value
Very few studies investigated the IL phenomenon beyond its skills and assessment aspects. The present study uniquely identified impact of IL on PIM practices of working electronic media journalists.
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Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to analyze the heat and mass transfer with entropy generation during magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) flow of non-Newtonian Sisko nanofluid over a linearly stretching cylinder under the influence of velocity slip, chemical reaction and thermal radiation. The Brownian motion, thermophoresis and activation energy are assimilated in this nanofluid model. Convective boundary conditions on heat and mass transfer are considered. The physical model may have diverse applications in several areas of technology underlying thermohydrodynamics including supercritical fluid extraction, refrigeration, ink-jet printing and so on.
Design/methodology/approach
The dimensional governing equations are nondimensionalized by using appropriate similarity variables. The resulting boundary value problem is converted into initial value problem using the method of superposition and numerically computed by employing well-known fourth-order Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg approach along with shooting technique (RKF4SM). The quantitative impacts of emerging physical parameters on the velocity, temperature, concentration, skin friction coefficient, Nusselt number, Sherwood number, entropy generation rate and Bejan number are presented graphically and in tabular form, and the salient features are comprehensively discussed.
Findings
From graphical outcomes, it is concluded that the slip parameters greatly influence the flow characteristics. Fluid temperature is elevated with rising radiation parameter and thermal Biot number. Nanoparticle concentration is reported in decreasing form with activation energy parameter. Entropy is found to be an increasing function of magnetic field, Brownian motion and material parameters. The entropy is less generated for shear-thinning fluid compared to shear-thickening as well as Newtonian fluids in the system.
Originality/value
Till now no study has been documented to explore the impact of binary chemical reaction with Arrhenius activation energy on entropy generation in an MHD boundary layer flow of non-Newtonian Sisko nanofluid over a linear stretching cylinder with velocity slip and convective boundary conditions.
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Qiong Jia, Ying Zhu, Rui Xu, Yubin Zhang and Yihua Zhao
Abundant studies of outpatient visits apply traditional recurrent neural network (RNN) approaches; more recent methods, such as the deep long short-term memory (DLSTM) model, have…
Abstract
Purpose
Abundant studies of outpatient visits apply traditional recurrent neural network (RNN) approaches; more recent methods, such as the deep long short-term memory (DLSTM) model, have yet to be implemented in efforts to forecast key hospital data. Therefore, the current study aims to reports on an application of the DLSTM model to forecast multiple streams of healthcare data.
Design/methodology/approach
As the most advanced machine learning (ML) method, static and dynamic DLSTM models aim to forecast time-series data, such as daily patient visits. With a comparative analysis conducted in a high-level, urban Chinese hospital, this study tests the proposed DLSTM model against several widely used time-series analyses as reference models.
Findings
The empirical results show that the static DLSTM approach outperforms seasonal autoregressive integrated moving averages (SARIMA), single and multiple RNN, deep gated recurrent units (DGRU), traditional long short-term memory (LSTM) and dynamic DLSTM, with smaller mean absolute, root mean square, mean absolute percentage and root mean square percentage errors (RMSPE). In particular, static DLSTM outperforms all other models for predicting daily patient visits, the number of daily medical examinations and prescriptions.
Practical implications
With these results, hospitals can achieve more precise predictions of outpatient visits, medical examinations and prescriptions, which can inform hospitals' construction plans and increase the efficiency with which the hospitals manage relevant information.
Originality/value
To address a persistent gap in smart hospital and ML literature, this study offers evidence of the best forecasting models with a comparative analysis. The study extends predictive methods for forecasting patient visits, medical examinations and prescriptions and advances insights into smart hospitals by testing a state-of-the-art, deep learning neural network method.
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Zainab Akhtar, Jong Weon Lee, Muhammad Attique Khan, Muhammad Sharif, Sajid Ali Khan and Naveed Riaz
In artificial intelligence, the optical character recognition (OCR) is an active research area based on famous applications such as automation and transformation of printed…
Abstract
Purpose
In artificial intelligence, the optical character recognition (OCR) is an active research area based on famous applications such as automation and transformation of printed documents into machine-readable text document. The major purpose of OCR in academia and banks is to achieve a significant performance to save storage space.
Design/methodology/approach
A novel technique is proposed for automated OCR based on multi-properties features fusion and selection. The features are fused using serially formulation and output passed to partial least square (PLS) based selection method. The selection is done based on the entropy fitness function. The final features are classified by an ensemble classifier.
Findings
The presented method was extensively tested on two datasets such as the authors proposed and Chars74k benchmark and achieved an accuracy of 91.2 and 99.9%. Comparing the results with existing techniques, it is found that the proposed method gives improved performance.
Originality/value
The technique presented in this work will help for license plate recognition and text conversion from a printed document to machine-readable.
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S. Bilal, Muhammad Sohail and Rahila Naz
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the studies of momentum and transmission of heat on mixed convection boundary layer Darcy‒Forchheimer flow of Casson liquid over a linear…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the studies of momentum and transmission of heat on mixed convection boundary layer Darcy‒Forchheimer flow of Casson liquid over a linear extending surface in a porous medium. The belongings of homogeneous‒heterogeneous retorts are also affianced. The mechanism of heat transmission is braced out in the form of Cattaneo‒Christov heat flux. Appropriate restorations are smeared to revolutionize coupled nonlinear partial differential equations conforming to momentum, energy and concentration of homogeneous‒heterogeneous reaction equations into coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs).
Design/methodology/approach
Numerical elucidations of the transmogrified ODEs are accomplished via a dexterous and trustworthy scheme, namely optimal homotopy analysis method. The convergence of planned scheme is exposed with the support of error table.
Findings
The exploration of mixed convection Darcy‒Forchheimer MHD boundary layer flow of incompressible Casson fluid by the linear stretched surface with Cattaneo‒Christov heat flux model and homogeneous‒heterogeneous reactions is checked in this research. Imitations of the core subsidized flow parameters on velocity, temperature and concentration of homogeneous‒heterogeneous reactions solutions are conscripted. From the recent deliberation, remarkable annotations are as follows: non-dimensional velocities in xa− and xb− directions shrink, whereas the non-dimensional temperature upsurges when the Casson fluid parameter ameliorates. Similar impact of Casson fluid parameter, magnetic parameter, mixed convection parameter, inertia parameter, and porosity parameter is observed for both the components of velocity field. An escalation in magnetic parameter shows the opposite attitude of temperature field as compared with velocity profile. Similar bearing of Casson fluid parameter is observed for both temperature and velocity fields. Enhancement in concentration rate is observed for growing values of (Ns) and (Sc), and it reduces for (k1). Both temperature and concentration of homogeneous‒heterogeneous upturn by mounting the magnetic parameter. Demeanor of magnetic parameter, Casson fluid parameter, heat generation parameter is opposite to that of Prandtl number and thermal relaxation parameter on temperature profile.
Practical implications
In many industrial and engineering applications, the current exploration is utilized for the transport of heat and mass in any system.
Originality/value
As far as novelty of this work is concerned this is an innovative study and such analysis has not been considered so far.
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Sami Ul Haq, Muhammad Bilal Ashraf and Arooj Tanveer
The main focus is to provide a non-similar solution for the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of Casson fluid over a curved stretching surface through the novel technique of the…
Abstract
Purpose
The main focus is to provide a non-similar solution for the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of Casson fluid over a curved stretching surface through the novel technique of the artificial intelligence (AI)-based Lavenberg–Marquardt scheme of an artificial neural network (ANN). The effects of joule heating, viscous dissipation and non-linear thermal radiation are discussed in relation to the thermal behavior of Casson fluid.
Design/methodology/approach
The non-linear coupled boundary layer equations are transformed into a non-linear dimensionless Partial Differential Equation (PDE) by using a non-similar transformation. The local non-similar technique is utilized to truncate the non-similar dimensionless system up to 2nd order, which is treated as coupled ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The coupled system of ODEs is solved numerically via bvp4c. The data sets are constructed numerically and then implemented by the ANN.
Findings
The results indicate that the non-linear radiation parameter increases the fluid temperature. The Casson parameter reduces the fluid velocity as well as the temperature. The mean squared error (MSE), regression plot, error histogram, error analysis of skin friction, and local Nusselt number are presented. Furthermore, the regression values of skin friction and local Nusselt number are obtained as 0.99993 and 0.99997, respectively. The ANN predicted values of skin friction and the local Nusselt number show stability and convergence with high accuracy.
Originality/value
AI-based ANNs have not been applied to non-similar solutions of curved stretching surfaces with Casson fluid model, with viscous dissipation. Moreover, the authors of this study employed Levenberg–Marquardt supervised learning to investigate the non-similar solution of the MHD Casson fluid model over a curved stretching surface with non-linear thermal radiation and joule heating. The governing boundary layer equations are transformed into a non-linear, dimensionless PDE by using a non-similar transformation. The local non-similar technique is utilized to truncate the non-similar dimensionless system up to 2nd order, which is treated as coupled ODEs. The coupled system of ODEs is solved numerically via bvp4c. The data sets are constructed numerically and then implemented by the ANN.
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Madiha Ajmal, Rashid Mehmood, Noreen Sher Akbar and Taseer Muhammad
This study aims to focuse on the flow behavior of a specific nanofluid composed of blood-based iron oxide nanoparticles, combined with motile gyrotactic microorganisms, in a…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to focuse on the flow behavior of a specific nanofluid composed of blood-based iron oxide nanoparticles, combined with motile gyrotactic microorganisms, in a ciliated channel with electroosmosis.
Design/methodology/approach
This study applies a powerful mathematical model to examine the combined impacts of bio convection and electrokinetic forces on nanofluid flow. The presence of cilia, which are described as wave-like motions on the channel walls, promotes fluid propulsion, which improves mixing and mass transport. The velocity and dispersion of nanoparticles and microbes are modified by the inclusion of electroosmosis, which is stimulated by an applied electric field. This adds a significant level of complexity.
Findings
To ascertain their impact on flow characteristics, important factors such as bio convection Rayleigh number, Grashoff number, Peclet number and Lewis number are varied. The results demonstrate that while the gyrotactic activity of microorganisms contributes to the stability and homogeneity of the nanofluid distribution, electroosmotic forces significantly enhance fluid mixing and nanoparticle dispersion. This thorough study clarifies how to take advantage of electroosmosis and bio convection in ciliated micro channels to optimize nanofluid-based biomedical applications, such as targeted drug administration and improved diagnostic processes.
Originality/value
First paper discussed “Numerical Computation of Cilia Transport of Prandtl Nanofluid (Blood-Fe3O4) Enhancing Convective Heat Transfer along Micro Organisms under Electroosmotic effects in Wavy Capillaries”.
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