Search Results (9)

Introduction: The informal food sector in Kisumu City, largely run by women informal food vendors, plays a crucial role in the urban food system. However, these female-led businesses faced disproportionate risks stemming from COVID-19-related policies, exacerbating gendered vulnerabilities. This paper explores the gender gaps of post-pandemic recovery strategies and their implications for resilience, recovery, and sustainability of women-led informal food businesses. Methods: This cross-sectional study was guided by the Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) framework. In collaboration with the Pamoja Community-Based Organization, we employed qualitative methods grounded in community-based participatory approaches. Data were collected through key informant interviews (n = 20), depth interviews (n = 20), focus group discussions (n = 40), and a review of policy documents (n = 2). Data was analyzed guided by the eight principles of the IBPA framework alongside Braun and Clarke’s six-phased thematic analysis approach. Results: Findings indicated that power dynamics in the formulation of post-pandemic policies and top-down implementation approaches excluded women informal food vendors from meaningfully participating in policy processes. For example, female vendors were excluded from the recovery priorities as the strategies adopted had limited to no targeted gender-responsive interventions. As such, women informal food vendors faced several challenges during recovery, including limited government support, barriers to accessing credit facilities, heightened household and unpaid care work, gender-based violence, sexual exploitation, and insecurity. The female vendors employed both individual agency and collective action to facilitate recovery. Discussion: Gender-responsive COVID-19 policies were critical to addressing the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women-led informal food businesses. Moving forward, a comprehensive understanding of existing sociocultural inequalities is crucial for designing post-pandemic strategies that are gender-inclusive and promote equitable recovery. Such an approach would enhance women informal food vendors’ resilience to emergencies and their contribution to urban household food security and livelihood. Full article

Enterprise document management faces a significant challenge: traditional clustering methods focus solely on content similarity while ignoring organizational context, such as priority, workflow status, and temporal relevance. This paper introduces FLACON (Flag-Aware Context-sensitive Clustering), an information-theoretic approach that captures multi-dimensional document context through a six-dimensional flag system encompassing Type, Domain, Priority, Status, Relationship, and Temporal dimensions. FLACON formalizes document clustering as an entropy minimization problem, where the objective is to group documents with similar contextual characteristics. The approach combines a composite distance function—integrating semantic content, contextual flags, and temporal factors—with adaptive hierarchical clustering and efficient incremental updates. This design addresses key limitations of existing solutions, including context-aware systems that lack domain-specific intelligence and LLM-based methods that require prohibitive computational resources. Evaluation across nine dataset variations demonstrates notable improvements over traditional methods, including a 7.8-fold improvement in clustering quality (Silhouette Score: 0.311 vs. 0.040) and performance comparable to GPT-4 (89% of quality) while being ~7× faster (60 s vs. 420 s for 10 K documents). FLACON achieves $O(m log n)$ complexity for incremental updates affecting $m$ documents and provides deterministic behavior, which is suitable for compliance requirements. Consistent performance across business emails, technical discussions, and financial news confirms the practical viability of this approach for large-scale enterprise document organization. Full article

This review paper examines two underutilized yet transformative drivers in addressing the climate crisis: (1) the role of cultural belief systems in fostering large-scale behavioral shifts toward sustainability, and (2) the use of participatory artificial intelligence (AI) methods to mitigate natural disaster risks, such as flooding. Despite their potential, both areas remain largely untapped. The first driver stems from persistent inertia in behavioral change, prompting the 2023 IPCC Report to call for an ‘inner transition’—a cultural shift in which deeply held values shape socio-ecological behavior, encouraging individuals to move away from business-as-usual lifestyles. However, the mechanisms behind such a transition remain unclear, and empirical support for this approach is still emerging. The second driver highlights the untapped potential of advanced computational techniques in developing intelligent solutions for worsening ecological crises. AI development is often expert-driven, disconnected from societal needs and lived realities. To bridge this gap, inclusive technology co-design—engaging all societal groups, especially those most affected by climate change—is crucial. Additionally, effective mechanisms for networking, amplifying, and scaling these efforts are essential. This paper proposes an integrated, multi-method framework that unites both drivers, offering a novel approach to accelerating progress in climate action. Full article

The edge computing paradigm has emerged as a new scope within the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT) by bringing cloud services to the network edge in order to construct distributed architectures. To efficiently deploy latency-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry IoT application services, edge computing paradigms make use of devices on the network periphery that are distributed and resource-constrained. On the other hand, microservice architectures are becoming increasingly popular for developing IoT applications owing to their maintainability and scalability advantages. Providing an efficient communication medium for large-scale microservice-based IoT applications constructed from small and independent services to cooperate to deliver value-added services remains a challenge. This paper introduces an event-driven communication medium that takes advantage of Edge–Cloud publish/subscribe brokers for microservice-based IoT applications at scale. Using the interaction model, the involved microservices can collaborate and exchange data through triggered events flexibly and efficiently without changing their underlying business logic. In the proposed model, edge brokers are grouped according to their similarities in event channels and the proximity of their geolocations, reducing the data delivery latency. Moreover, in the proposed system a technique is designed to construct a broker-based utility matrix with constraints in order to strike a balance between delay, relay traffic, and scalability while arranging brokers into proper clusters for efficient data delivery. Rigorous simulation results prove that the proposed publish/subscribe model can provide an efficient interaction medium for microservice-based IoT applications to collaborate and exchange data with low latency, modest relay traffic, and high scalability at scale. Full article

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) encompasses activities through which a firm ultimately achieves sustainable management by improving the society and environment. Contrary to the general perception that CSR activities can improve only the enterprise value (EV), they can also be strategically deployed based on agency problems (situational factors). Specifically, by focusing on the nature of related party transactions that exhibit high tendencies to introduce agency problems, this study analyzes whether South Korean firms that engage in such transactions perform CSR activities more actively than those that do not. The empirical analysis reveals that firms that engage in related party transactions exhibit increased CSR activity scores, indicating that managers are more likely to deploy CSR activities as a tool for managing their image and concealing or embellishing illicit corporate transactions. Hence, CSR activities undertaken at the expense of shareholders may be opportunistically exploited as a tool for positively embellishing a firm’s image. However, it is observed that chaebol companies do not strategically exploit CSR activities, despite being engaged in related party transactions. Thus, chaebol companies that are registered with a large business group and under the supervision system of the government are unlikely to opportunistically exploit CSR activities. Full article

When selling small-framed steers at weaning, profitability is diminished. The hypothesis is that by using a vertically integrated business model that includes retained ownership, extended grazing, abbreviated feedlot finishing, and selling at slaughter, profitability would increase. Crossbred yearling steers (n = 288) from small size Aberdeen Angus (Lowline) × Red Angus × Angus × Angus cows and moderate to large size Red Angus × Angus × Simmental × Gelbvieh cows calved May−June were randomly assigned (complete randomized design), in a 3 y study, to feedlot control (FLT) and extended grazing (GRZ) frame score treatment groups. Mean frame score for FLT were small frame (SF) 3.82 and large frame (LF) 5.63, and for GRZ, SF: 3.77 and LF: 5.53. Least-square means were utilized to identify levels of effects and to control family-wise error adjusted with Tukey test. The FLT control steers were housed in the feedlot and fed growing diets and subsequently high energy corn-based diets for 218 days. The GRZ steers grazed a sequence of forages (native range, field pea-barley mix, and unharvested corn) for 212 days and then were transferred to the feedlot and fed high energy corn-based finishing diets for 82 days. The SF GRZ steers grew more slowly grazing native range and annual forages compared to GRZ LF steers, but SF steer grazing cost per kg of gain was reduced 7.80%. Grazing steers did not grow to their full genetic potential. Slower growth during grazing allowed LF and SF steers to grow structurally before feedlot entry creating a compensatory feedlot finishing growth response. Overall, grazing steer performance exceeded steer performance of the FLT control treatment and LF grazing steers had the highest rate of gain, and lowest feed cost per kg of gain. The GRZ steer feedlot days on feed were reduced 136 days and total feed intake was reduced resulting in LF and SF grazing steer feed cost reductions of 175.9 and 165.3%, respectively. Extended grazing also resulted in LF and SF grazing steer hot carcass weights to be greater than control LF and SF steers and SF grazing steers had greater dressing percent, and marbling score. Carcass quality grade, meat tenderness, and cooking losses were similar. System net returns were highest for LF (USD 911.58), and SF (USD 866.61) grazing steers. Managerial modification combining retained ownership, extended grazing, and delayed feedlot entry increased profitability and eliminated market bias. Full article

Urban airspace environments present exciting new opportunities for delivering drone services to an increasingly large global market, including: information gathering; package delivery; air-taxi services. A key challenge is how to model airspace environments over densely populated urban spaces, coupled with the design and development of scalable traffic management systems that may need to handle potentially hundreds to thousands of drone movements per hour. This paper explores the background to Urban unmanned traffic management (UTM), examining high-level initiatives, such as the USA’s Unmanned Air Traffic (UTM) systems and Europe’s U-Space services, as well as a number of contemporary research activities in this area. The main body of the paper describes the initial research outputs of the U-Flyte R&D group, based at Maynooth University in Ireland, who have focused on developing an integrated approach to airspace modelling and traffic management platforms for operating large drone fleets over urban environments. This work proposes pragmatic and innovative approaches to expedite the roll-out of these much-needed urban UTM solutions. These approaches include the certification of drones for urban operation, the adoption of a collaborative and democratic approach to designing urban airspace, the development of a scalable traffic management and the replacement of direct human involvement in operating drones and coordinating drone traffic with machines. The key fundamental elements of airspace architecture and traffic management for busy drone operations in urban environments are described together with initial UTM performance results from simulation studies. Full article

The present quasi-experimental study tested the business impact of a leadership development program focusing on psychological well-being through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs. Based on the concept of engaging leadership and self-determination theory, the 8-month program targeted midlevel team leaders of the customer fulfilment center of a health systems multinational organization. The program was designed in co-creation between senior leadership and the team leaders that participated in the program. Outcomes showed positive business results through significant increases in a preselected key performance indicator and decreased employee absenteeism. Through changes in autonomy satisfaction and intrinsic motivation, the team leaders (N = 14) benefitted in a moderate to very large extent relative to a similar control group (N = 52). In contrast, team members (N = 148) displayed no such benefits. Specifically, higher levels of autonomy satisfaction are said to lead to higher levels of psychological well-being and motivation. Still, the link with business performance is absent in most organizational studies within self-determination theory, making the present study one of the first to fill this gap. The study discloses the program design, compares the effects to a relevant control group, evaluates the lessons learned, and provides practical suggestions. Full article

Prefabrication is considered as a modern method of construction, transferring part of on-site work into factories and generating a new decoupling point in supply chain. Management of prefabricated component (PC) suppliers plays a key role in the performance of prefabricated construction project (PCP). Evaluating and improving supplier management maturity (SMM) become critical issues for large contractors. Previous research on PCP supply chain mainly focused on technology, process and performance aspects, while paying little attention to supplier relationship management. This study proposes an assessment criteria system of supplier management from five dimensions, including procurement process, operation efficiency, relationship coordination and strategy alignment and corporate social responsibility. A maturity grid with five levels is designed to present continuous improvement of supplier management. 34 large PCP construction firms listed in contractor directory were investigated in China through semi-structured interview and questionnaire survey. Independent two-samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance were adopted to explore SMM of different groups according to business scope, procurement method and construction experience. The results indicate that the overall maturity level of supplier management is relatively low, implying that supply activity cannot achieve inter-organization integration. Management on relationship coordination and strategy alignment lag behind procurement management and operation efficiency. Single business contractors have higher SMM than diversified ones. Contractors integrated in engineering, procurement and construction are superior to design-bid-build contractors in supplier management, especially in relationship coordination and strategic alignment. Construction experience is conductive to supplier operation efficiency. Noticeably, there are no statistically significant differences in the performance of corporate social responsibility among different groups. These results will contribute to developing a benchmark framework for contractors to evaluate SMM and achieve continuous improvements in PCP. Full article