Given the paucity of comprehensive summaries in the extant literature, this systematic review, coupled with bibliometric analysis, endeavours to take a meticulous approach intended at presenting ...quantitative and qualitative knowledge on the ever‐emerging subject of financial literacy. The study comprises a review of 502 articles ‐ published in peer‐reviewed journals from 2000 to 2019. Citation network, page‐rank analysis, co‐citation analysis, content analysis and publication trends have been employed to identify influential work, delineate the intellectual structure of the field and identify gaps. The most prominent journals, authors, countries, articles and themes have been identified using bibliometric analysis, followed by a comprehensive analysis of the content of 107 papers in the identified clusters. The three major themes enumerated are—levels of financial literacy amongst distinct cohorts, the influence that financial literacy exerts on financial planning and behaviour, and the impact of financial education. Additionally, content analysis of 175 papers has been conducted for the last four years’ articles that were not covered in the co‐citation analysis. Emerging themes identified include financial capability, financial inclusion, gender gap, tax & insurance literacy, and digital financial education. A conceptual framework has been modelled portraying the complete picture, following which potential areas of research have been suggested. This study will help policy‐makers, regulators and academic researchers know the nuts and bolts of financial literacy, and identify the relevant areas that need investigation.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are regarded as ideal filler materials for polymeric fiber reinforcement due to their exceptional mechanical properties and 1D cylindrical geometry (nanometer-size diameter ...and very high aspect ratio). The reported processing conditions and property improvements of CNT reinforced polymeric fiber are summarized in this review. Because of CNT polymer interaction, polymer chains in CNTs’ vicinity (interphase) have been observed to have more compact packing, higher orientation, and better mechanical properties than bulk polymer. Evidences of the existence of interphase polymers in composite fibers, characterizations of their structures, and fiber properties are summarized and discussed. Implications of interphase phenomena on a broader field of fiber and polymer processing to make much stronger materials are now in the early stages of exploration. Beside improvements in tensile properties, the presence of CNTs in polymeric fibers strongly affects other properties, such as thermal stability, thermal transition temperature, fiber thermal shrinkage, chemical resistance, electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity. This paper will be helpful to better understand the current status of polymer/CNT fibers, especially high-performance fibers, and to find the most suitable processing techniques and conditions.
Journal of Business Research (JBR) is a journal of international repute that publishes original, peer-reviewed, and empirical research in business and management. Key business decisions, processes, ...and activities within real business settings frequently feature in JBR articles. The journal reached its 45th year of publishing in 2017. Using bibliometric techniques, we analyze the journal’s impact, its prominent topics, and its most prolific authors, including their affiliated institutions and countries. Using network analysis in VOSviewer software, we group JBR publications into six clusters. Through Gephi software, the findings depict the co-authorship and bibliographic couplings of authors and their affiliated institutions and countries, co-citations of journals, and co-occurrence of author-specified keywords.
Virtualisation is a major technology in cloud computing for optimising the cloud data centre's power usage. In the current scenario, most of the services are migrated to the cloud, putting more load ...on the cloud data centres. As a result, the data center's size expands resulting in increased energy usage. To address this problem, a resource allocation optimisation method that is both efficient and effective is necessary. The optimal utilisation of cloud infrastructure and optimisation algorithms plays a vital role. The cloud resources rely on the allocation policy of the virtual machine on cloud resources. A virtual machine placement technique, based on the Harris Hawk Optimisation (HHO) model for the cloud data centre is presented in this paper. The proposed HHO model aims to find the best place for virtual machines on suitable hosts with the least load and power consumption. PlanetLab's real-time workload traces are used for performance evaluation with existing PSO (Particle Swarm Optimisation) and PABFD (Best Fit Decreasing). The performance evaluation of the proposed method is done using power consumption, SLA, CPU utilisation, RAM utilisation, Execution time (ms) and the number of VM migrations. The performance evaluation is done using two simulation scenarios with scaling workload in scenario 1 and increasing resources for the virtual machine to study the performance in underloaded and overloaded conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed HHO algorithm improved execution time(ms) by 4%, had a 27% reduction in power consumption, a 16% reduction in SLA violation and an increase in resource utilisation by 17%. The HHO algorithm is also effective in handling dynamic and uncertain environments, making it suitable for real-world cloud infrastructures.
All protein therapeutics have the potential to be immunogenic. Several factors, including patient characteristics, disease state, and the therapy itself, influence the generation of an immune ...response. Product-related factors such as the molecule design, the expression system, post-translational modifications, impurities, contaminants, formulation and excipients, container, closure, as well as degradation products are all implicated. However, a critical examination of the available data shows that clear unequivocal evidence for the impact of these latter factors on clinical immunogenicity is lacking. No report could be found that clearly deconvolutes the clinical impact of the product attributes on patient susceptibility. Aggregation carries the greatest concern as a risk factor for immunogenicity, but the impact of aggregates is likely to depend on their structure as well as on the functionality (e.g., immunostimulatory or immunomodulatory) of the therapeutic. Preclinical studies are not yet capable of assessing the clinically relevant immunogenicity potential of these product-related factors. Simply addressing these risk factors as part of product development will not eliminate immunogenicity. Minimization of immunogenicity has to begin at the molecule design stage by reducing or eliminating antigenic epitopes and building in favorable physical and chemical properties.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease for which stem cell research has created hope in the last few years. Seven PD patients aged 22 to 62 years with a mean duration of ...disease 14.7 ± 7.56 years were enrolled to participate in the prospective, uncontrolled, pilot study of single-dose, unilateral transplantation of autologous bone-marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs). The BM-MSCs were transplanted into the sublateral ventricular zone by stereotaxic surgery. Patients were followed up for a period that ranged from 10 to 36 months. The mean baseline “off” score was 65 ± 22.06, and the mean baseline “on” score was 50.6 ± 15.85. Three of 7 patients have shown a steady improvement in their “off”/“on” Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). The mean “off” score at their last follow-up was 43.3 with an improvement of 22.9% from the baseline. The mean “on” score at their last follow-up was 31.7, with an improvement of 38%. Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) and Schwab and England (S&E) scores showed similar improvements from 2.7 and 2.5 in H&Y and 14% improvement in S&E scores, respectively. A subjective improvement was found in symptoms like facial expression, gait, and freezing episodes; 2 patients have significantly reduced the dosages of PD medicine. These results indicate that our protocol seems to be safe, and no serious adverse events occurred after stem-cell transplantation in PD patients. The number of patients recruited and the uncontrolled nature of the trial did not permit demonstration of effectiveness of the treatment involved. However, the results encourage future trials with more patients to demonstrate efficacy.
Bibliometric analysis is a popular and rigorous method for exploring and analyzing large volumes of scientific data. It enables us to unpack the evolutionary nuances of a specific field, while ...shedding light on the emerging areas in that field. Yet, its application in business research is relatively new, and in many instances, underdeveloped. Accordingly, we endeavor to present an overview of the bibliometric methodology, with a particular focus on its different techniques, while offering step-by-step guidelines that can be relied upon to rigorously perform bibliometric analysis with confidence. To this end, we also shed light on when and how bibliometric analysis should be used vis-à-vis other similar techniques such as meta-analysis and systematic literature reviews. As a whole, this paper should be a useful resource for gaining insights on the available techniques and procedures for carrying out studies using bibliometric analysis.
Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is an essential component of many large-scale, real-world robot deployments, from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. However, despite the community's continued ...efforts, most state-of-the-art MAPF planners still rely on centralized planning and scale poorly past a few hundred agents. Such planning approaches are maladapted to realworld deployments, where noise and uncertainty often require paths be recomputed online, which is impossible when planning times are in seconds to minutes. We present PRIMAL, a novel framework for MAPF that combines reinforcement and imitation learning to teach fully decentralized policies, where agents reactively plan paths online in a partially observable world while exhibiting implicit coordination. This framework extends our previous work on distributed learning of collaborative policies by introducing demonstrations of an expert MAPF planner during training, as well as careful reward shaping and environment sampling. Once learned, the resulting policy can be copied onto any number of agents and naturally scales to different team sizes and world dimensions. We present results on randomized worlds with up to 1024 agents and compare success rates against state-of-the-art MAPF planners. Finally, we experimentally validate the learned policies in a hybrid simulation of a factory mockup, involving both real world and simulated robots.
Drought is a complex natural hazard that affects ecosystems and society in several ways and it is important to quantify drought at the river basin scale. Assessment of drought requires both ...hydrological observations and simulation models as the data are generally scarce. Therefore, we use remote sensing products to help understand drought conditions in four basins in South India. This study analysed the correlation among five drought indices for four seasons: gravity recovery and climate experiment - drought severity index (GRACE-DSI), standardized precipitation index (SPI), self-calibrated palmer drought severity index (sc_PDSI), standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI), and combined climatologic deviation index (CCDI) with GRACE terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSA) using the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) from 2002 to 2016 over the Godavari, Krishna, Pennar, and Cauvery river basins. Basin scale drought events are evaluated using CCDI, GRACEDSI, sc_PDSI, SPI12, and SPEI12 at seasonal and monthly time scale. Characteristics of drought event analysis are calculated for CCDI monthly. The results showed that GRACE TWS is highly correlated with GRACE-DSI, CCDI, and sc_PDSI. Seasonally, high spatial correlations between CCDI and GRACE-DSI with GRACE TWS are evident for all the river basins. Additionally, correlation is found to exist between sc_PDSI and GRACE TWS as soil moisture content is an operating variable between them. The 12-month SPI and SPEI correlated better with GRACE TWS than the 3 and 6-month periods. Among the four basins, droughts in the Krishna Basin lasted 29 months, longer than in the rest of the basins between 2003 and 2005. Overall, CCDI and GRACE-DSI indices are found to be effective for examining and evaluating the drought conditions at the basin scale.
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•A simplified drought evaluation for real-time drought monitoring using GRACE TWS•Multiscale TWS anomalies evaluated with SPI, SPEI, sc_PDSI, CCDI, and GRACE DSI•CCDI provides reliable drought characteristics at the regional level.•Consistencies among several indices showed shifting peak trends and timing.
In this study, we use bibliometric analysis and systematic review to analyze electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) research. Our findings show that the research has grown a lot in terms of publications. ...The publications have mostly come from United States and Europe. The contributors to the field have preferred mixed research designs with more focus on theory building. The geographical focus of the research has been on North America and Europe, which is consistent with the contribution patterns. The prominent topics in the field include negative word of mouth, consumer behavior and trust, word of mouth in social networks, online reviews and ratings, brand loyalty, social media, service failure and service recovery, corporate social responsibility, user-generated content and viral marketing, service quality, and services marketing. There are four primary topics in the field’s current research: determinants of eWOM, eWOM in the hospitality industry, cognitive aspects of eWOM, and service failure and recovery. The future directions and implications of research are discussed.