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Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to globally asked questions and information seekers to grab intellectual information in a contextual, concise, and meaningful format at the cost of investing a few minutes. The purpose of this paper is to present a common architecture, history, and a comprehensive review of such sites.

A critical and analytical investigation of the state-of-the-art SQA sites and relevant literature has been carried out with the intention to explore the noticeable features of such sites.

By studying relevant literature, and analysing a number of existing systems, a number of research challenges are identified and a generic architecture of SQA sites is contributed.

The review contributes a comprehensive knowledge about SQA systems and aims to be helpful to new researchers who want to get a broad picture of SQA systems on a single platform. The domain is in its infancy and requires tremendous efforts from the research community to explore its salient aspects with respect to the human world.

The study inspects SQA sites on a large scale and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, future research challenges, and a generic architecture of SQA sites.

There have been many challenges in crawling deep web by search engines due to their proprietary nature or dynamic content. Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) tries to solve these problems by providing a unified searchable interface to these databases. Since a DIR must search across many databases, selecting a specific database to search against the user query is challenging. The challenge can be solved if the past queries of the users are considered in selecting collections to search in combination with word embedding techniques. Combining these would aid the best performing collection selection method to speed up retrieval performance of DIR solutions.

The authors propose a collection selection model based on word embedding using Word2Vec approach that learns the similarity between the current and past queries. They used the cosine and transformed cosine similarity models in computing the similarities among queries. The experiment is conducted using three standard TREC testbeds created for federated search.

The results show significant improvements over the baseline models.

Although the lexical matching models for collection selection using similarity based on past queries exist, to the best our knowledge, the proposed work is the first of its kind that uses word embedding for collection selection by learning from past queries.

How to provide the most useful papers for searchers is a key issue for academic search engines. A lot of research has been carried out to address this problem. However, when evaluating the effectiveness of an academic search engine, most of the previous investigations assume that the only concern of the user is the relevancy of the paper to the query. The authors believe that the usefulness of a paper is determined not only by its relevance to the query but also by other aspects including its publication age and impact in the research community. This is vital, especially when a large number of papers are relevant to the query.

This paper proposes a group of metrics to measure the usefulness of a ranked list of papers. When defining these metrics, three factors, including relevance, publication age and impact, are considered at the same time. To accommodate this, the authors propose a framework to rank papers by a combination of their relevance, publication age and impact scores.

The framework is evaluated with the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics Anthology Network) dataset. It demonstrates that the proposed ranking algorithm is effective for improving usefulness when two or three aspects of academic papers are considered at the same time, while the relevance of the retrieved papers is slightly down compared with the relevance-only retrieval.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed multi-objective academic search framework is the first of its kind that is proposed and evaluated with a group of new evaluation metrics.

For the prosperity of both gender and for social justice, independence and empowerment of women is essential. Empowerment of women not only ensures her personal or household welfare but also spreads positivity throughout the community. This generation of positive externality by empowering women has actually attracted attention worldwide toward exploring the concept of women empowerment as well as analyzing their status. The present research focuses on comparative analysis of the status of women empowerment among the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries and side by side explores its relationship with the various macro-indicators related to growth and development. This study reveals that Maldives and Sri Lanka had a relatively better status of women empowerment as compared to other SAARC countries. Further, based on the panel data analysis, the authors have found that urbanization and globalization have a significant impact on women empowerment. Thus, this holistic approach of measuring women empowerment from a multidimensional perspective and detecting the influencing factors is inevitable for enhancing the status of women at the global level.

This study aims to explore the perception of the compliance officers of the Pakistani financial sector towards the placement of Pakistan on the grey list by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

To achieve this objective, the study adopted a qualitative methodology and conducted semi-structured interviews with different financial institutes and their regulators.

The study found that role of the FATF is lopsided and politically motivated towards Pakistan. Although Pakistan has loopholes like many other countries, its treatment in the FATF is irregular. Therefore, the decision of the greylisting is not purely based on technical compliance, but political preferences are the determinative aspect.

This study provides a holistic overview of the FATF greylisting mechanism and how Pakistan is treated. This might provide both the FATF and Pakistan to revisit their policies.

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the impact of Introduction of Smart Teaching and Learning (INSTAL) project on students' academic achievements in terms of students' science scores. Information and communication technologies (ICT)-based initiative was introduced in Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) schools at District Khairpur, Sindh, Pakistan. The aim of the study was to identify whether science test scores of students have been improved with the use of INSTAL facility at schools or remained the same at SEF-supported schools.

The quantitative research approach has been used in the current study, and within it a quasi-experimental research design was employed. The descriptive (mean, standard deviation) and inferential statistics (independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test) were computed to find the pre- and post-difference in science scores of students. Both primary and secondary data were used. The primary data were gathered through questionnaire from 48 science teachers. Whereas, secondary data of 382 students who used ICT-based facility under INSATL project for two academic years were taken from quality assessment test (QAT) scores conducted by third party in SEF-assisted schools in District Khairpur.

The findings of the study revealed that the students' science scores improved by 10% in one year and 23% in two years with the use of ICT-based facilities under INSTAL project. Also, it can be concluded from the results that ICT has a positive as well as statistically significant impact on students' science learning by using INSTAL facility in schools. Results of the study show that students' level of interest toward learning science has been enhanced by the use of ICT.

As the world is rapidly moving toward digitalization, the modes of teaching and learning have been changing. ICT plays a very significant role in the betterment of education. ICT helps to achieve socio-economic development of a country. However, Pakistan, being a developing country, has not that much resources, and ICT-based learning is not common in Pakistan. Therefore, it is very important to be aware people about the usage of technology in teaching and learning. The present study is an attempt to create such type of awareness. Moreover, the current study may be the first kind of study in the context of Pakistan which used TPACK as theoretical framework, and this study may contribute to the body of knowledge in the context of ICT.

Implementing ICT-based software for teaching and learning in rural context of Pakistan was a challenging task, but it has brought positive results in terms of student's achievement. This may be the first study that has been conducted in the context of adopted schools of SEF.

This study aims to understand tourists’ travel intention during the COVID-19 pandemic by using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) with additional causal links and moderators. The three research objectives of this study are to explore basic causality, mediating effects of attitude and moderating effects of age and perceived risk, of the extended TPB model, respectively.

An online survey was conducted in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, the survey generated 351 responses. The structural model analysis was performed to test the cause-and-effect relationships in the traditional TPB model and the mediating role of an individual’s attitude regarding travel during the COVID-19 pandemic. The SmartPLS multi-group analysis procedure was applied to test the moderation effects of age and perceived risk.

It is found that the perceived behavioral control is the main contributor of travel intention for the traditional TPB while attitude partially mediates the relationship between subjective norm and travel intention for the test of mediation. Also, moderation tests confirm that both age and perceived risk show significant moderating effect only on subjective norm to travel intention relationship.

The novelty of this research is that this study proposed and verified the mediating influence of attitude and two additional paths, the moderating influence of age and perceived risk, which deepened the understanding of the TPB model and the impact of COVID-19 on travel intention. Because TPB model is context-dependent, using one mediating and two moderating variables allows the study to understand how TPB functions in a different situation.

游客旅游意图：以年龄及感知风险为调解因素态度为中介因素重新审视TPB模型

本研究旨在通过使用计划行为理论 (TPB) 以及额外的因果关系和调节因素来了解 COVID-19 大流行期间游客的旅游意图。本研究的三个研究目标分别是探索 TPB 扩展模型的（1）基本因果关系、（2）态度的中介效应、和（3）年龄和感知风险的调节效应。

本研究在台湾COVID-19大流行期间, 进行了一项线上调查。该调查共收集了351份回复问卷。本研究以结构模型分析测试传统 TPB 模型中的因果关系及个人对 COVID-19 大流行期间旅行态度的中介作用。本研究也应用了 SmartPLS 多组分析程序来测试年龄和感知风险的调节作用。

本研究发现感知行为控制是传统TPB旅行意愿的主要贡献者, 而态度在中介测试中部分中介了主观规范与旅行意愿之间的关系。此外, 本研究在调节测试中证实, 年龄和感知风险均仅对旅行意愿关系的主观规范显示出显着的调节作用.

本研究独创之处在于提出并验证了态度的中介效应, 以及年龄和感知风险的调节效应这两条附加路径, 加深了对 TPB 模型的理解以及 COVID-19 对旅行意愿的影响。由于 TPB 模型是上下文相关的, 因此本研究使用一个中介变量和两个调节变量可以让未来研究了解 TPB 在不同情况下的功能。

Intención de viajar de los turistas: revisitando el modelo TPB con la edad y el riesgo percibido como moderadores y la actitud como mediadora

Este estudio tiene como objetivo comprender la intención de viajar de los turistas durante la pandemia de COVID-19 mediante el uso de la teoría del comportamiento planificado (TPB) con vínculos causales y moderadores adicionales. Los tres objetivos de investigación de este estudio son explorar (1) la causalidad básica, (2) los efectos mediadores de la actitud y (3) los efectos moderadores de la edad y el riesgo percibido, del modelo TPB extendido, respectivamente.

Se realizó una encuesta online en Taiwán durante la pandemia del COVID-19. En total, la encuesta generó 351 respuestas. El análisis del modelo estructural se realizó para probar las relaciones de causa y efecto en el modelo TPB tradicional y el papel mediador de la actitud de un individuo con respecto a los viajes durante la pandemia del COVID-19. Se aplicó el procedimiento de análisis multigrupo SmartPLS para probar los efectos de moderación de la edad y del riesgo percibido.

Se muestra que el control del comportamiento percibido es el principal antecedente de la intención de viajar en el TPB tradicional, mientras que la actitud media parcialmente la relación entre la norma subjetiva y la intención de viajar. Además, los tests de moderación confirman que tanto la edad como el riesgo percibido muestran un efecto moderador significativo solo en la relación entre la norma subjetiva y la intención de viajar.

La novedad de esta investigación es que este estudio propuso y verificó la influencia mediadora de la actitud y los dos efectos moderadores adicionales de la edad y del riesgo percibido, lo cual profundiza en la comprensión del modelo TPB y el impacto del COVID-19 en la intención de viajar. Dado que el modelo TPB depende del contexto, el uso de una variable mediadora y dos variables moderadoras permite comprender mejor cómo el TPB funciona en una situación diferente.

After reading and analyzing the case study, the students will be able to recognize the role of the mega environment in shaping business strategy, explore the challenges and opportunities in a mature industry (Foam), understand the business context of a family-owned firm and assess the implications and recommend managerial strategies.

In July 2019, Unifoam, a leading foam manufacturer, found itself at a crossroads as the company leadership grappled with diverging vision and future course of action. The newly appointed chief executive, Mr Faraz Khalid Shaikh, had overseen significant investments in expanding production capacity, and the time had come to reap the rewards. However, a series of unexpected events had unfolded, presenting the company with a unique set of challenges. Unifoam relied heavily on imported raw materials from China. Unifoam had high hopes of capitalizing on the opportunities presented by the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. However, the newly formed government had made significant policy changes regarding currency valuation and borrowing rates. This had increased the company’s working capital cost by 40%. This unexpected development had divided the board on the future direction and had forced the leadership to confront a crucial question: Should they hit the brakes or accelerate their growth strategies? This case study explored into the dynamic interplay between external factors, internal divisions and the family-owned nature of Unifoam. The analysis recognized the influence of the mega environment on the company’s strategy, exploring the challenges and opportunities within the mature foam industry and assessing the implications of conflicting approaches. This case study also offered valuable insights and managerial recommendations to guide the company’s path forward. Through embracing discomfort and confronting strategic dilemmas head-on, Unifoam sought to navigate uncharted waters and emerge as a resilient player in the evolving foam industry.

This is suitable for BBA or at the very start of MBA in the strategy courses, mainly business strategy and strategic management, and the case study can be positioned during the initial weeks in the course to provide a quick review of the basic analysis frameworks used in strategic decision-making.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The study examines the influence of quality management practices (QMP) on project performance (PP) and the indirect association of QMP with PP through the mediating role of intellectual capital (IC). QMP may be one of the most successful strategies to improve project performance. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) and institutional theory, the study examines the impact of QMP on PP through the mediating role of IC.

The sample frame of 329 employees in different NGOs and public healthcare organizations was selected. Data were analyzed on SmartPLS 3.2.7 by applying SEM.

The outcome reveals that QMP has a significant impact on PP. The results found partial mediation of IC on the linkage between QMP and PP.

The key research limitation was that it examined only two antecedents (QMP and IC) of project performance based on RBV and institutional theory, which did not yield deep insights from other institutional forces that could influence the model, such as mimetic pressure, institutional pressure and business orientation.

QMP is highly significant in the healthcare sector; however, research on the relationship between QMP, IC and PP is lacking. Thus, this research is an initial attempt to investigate these relationships empirically. We add to our understanding of RBV by investigating the role of IC in mediating the QMP-PP linkage.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the unidimensional and multidimensional inequality in the case of Pakistan and compare their results at the provincial as well as regional (urban and rural areas) level. The authors collected data from Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement and Household Integrated Economic Survey for fiscal years of 1998–1999 and 2013–2014.

The authors used Gini coefficient for unidimensional inequality and multidimensional indexing approach of Araar (2009) for multidimensional inequality.

The findings predicted that unidimensional inequality is relatively high in the urban area due to uneven dissemination of income, but multidimensional inequality is quite high in rural areas because of higher disparities among all dimensions. At the provincial level, Punjab has relatively high-income inequality followed by Sindh, KPK and Baluchistan.

This study is a pioneering effort to compare two time periods to explore unidimensional and multidimensional inequality in all provinces of Pakistan and their representative rural-urban regions by applying Araar and Duclos’s (2009) approach. Further, this study opens some new insights for policy makers.