Use of twitter data for waste minimisation in beef supply chain

Approximately one third of the food produced is discarded or lost, which accounts for 1.3 billion tons per annum. The waste is being generated throughout the supply chain viz. farmers, wholesalers/processors, logistics, retailers and consumers. The majority of waste occurs at the interface of retailers and consumers. Many global retailers are making efforts to extract intelligence from customer’s complaints left at retail store to backtrack their supply chain to mitigate the waste. However, majority of the customers don’t leave the complaints in the store because of various reasons like inconvenience, lack of time, distance, ignorance etc. In current digital world, consumers are active on social media and express their sentiments, thoughts, and opinions about a particular product freely. For example, on an average, 45,000 tweets are tweeted daily related to beef products to express their likes and dislikes. These tweets are large in volume, scattered and unstructured in nature. In this study, twitter data is utilised to develop waste minimization strategies by backtracking the supply chain. The execution process of proposed framework is demonstrated for beef supply chain. The proposed model is generic enough and can be applied to other domains as well

Mobile Applications and Wearables for Chronic Respiratory Disease Monitoring

Mobile health (mHealth) has tremendous potential to benefit patients, providers, and the entire healthcare system. Benefits for patients to adopt mHealth include more effective access to health providers, reduced costs of care, and better health control. For physicians and the healthcare system, reasons to embrace mHealth are enhanced health outcomes, facilitated access to patients for care, and decreased time required for administrative tasks. Currently, some mobile apps and wearables dedicated to respiratory health provide medical education and messaging services, enable diary logs, aid with disease self-management, and include educational games. Major challenges for mHealth to be widely adopted include lack of studies demonstrating effectiveness, limited access to technology by all patients, decreased adoption over time, high costs, and data privacy concerns

Achievement and self-concept relation: An evidence of the adequacy of the I/E model with a short version of the self-description questionnaire-ii among school students in oman

© 2019, Padova University Press. All rights reserved. Due to the segregated nature of schools in Arab countries and the differential socialization of boys and girls, the Arab culture presents interesting aspects to explore. In the current research, we tested the generalizability of the social comparison and dimensional comparison theory among school boys and girls in Oman. A sample of 700 students (334 boys and 366 girls) with ages between 13 and 20 years old participated. Two subscales of the Self-Description Questionnaire-II (SDQII, short form) were used: Arabic and math self-concepts. Statistical procedures included confirmatory factor analysis, invariance tests, and path analysis using AMOS (v.23) and MANOVA. The results revealed positive paths between achievement and respective self-concept domains (external comparison), and negative paths between achievement and non-matching domain (internal comparison). Differences in achievement were observed for girls, although boys presented higher math self-concept. Overall, the propositions of the internal/external (I/E) frame of reference model were valid in the Omani society, although more studies, especially longitudinal and using nationally representative wide samples of Arab countries are recommended