Did Covid-19 modify the spatial concentration of business failure?

The existing literature has examined the impact of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic on business failure, highlighting firms' internal characteristics. However, information on changes in firms' external environments remains scarce. This study examines whether Covid-19 has also influenced the spatial co-locational patterns of business failure processes. Therefore, the authors apply symbolisation techniques to identify different business failure processes during pre-and post-covid periods. In addition, the authors compute the Q(m) spatial dependence test for categorical variables to identify differences in the co-location patterns before and after covid. The studie find significant differences in the spatial association of business failure processes, which are further understood when the authors examine sectoral differences.

Investment Feasibility Analysis of Base Transceiver Station (BTS) Tower Using Cost-Benefit Analysis on PT. XYZ

Massive social restrictions due to the spread of COVID-19 have increased the amount of data traffic also the number of devices connected to the network. The pandemic requires mobile operators to deploy superior communications networks to support work-from-home (WFH) activities. Tenant implementation strategies should support infrastructure development, including the deployment of telecommunications towers. In this case, P.T. XYZ offers rental services for new towers (built-to-suit) as well as rentals for existing company-owned towers (colocation). Ownership of numerous towers is balanced by a strong capital structure. Uptime factors affect the cost efficiency of a company. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the investment feasibility of built-to-suit and colocation services. The analysis will determine which BTS tower acquisitions can offer the best benefits and costs for PT.XYZ. This research case study uses cost-benefit analysis to calculate the financial (direct and indirect costs) and benefits (tangible and intangible benefits) attained by comparing built-to-suit and colocation services data collected through interviews and document reviews. The colocation service business strategy for renting customized towers is more promising. It seen from the financial cost-benefit calculation. That is a positive NPV of IDR 590,754,896 and an investment efficiency level (IRR) of 13.18%. The ROI of the period lasts 5 years and 2 months, reaching a projected ROI of 18.77%. The cost-benefit ratio of colocation is also higher at 8.4:6.3 than built-to-suit. This is because the benefits obtained are proportional to the capital costs incurred by the existing tower to implement colocation. Besides the results of financial calculations, this analysis is influenced by the results of intangible benefits where colocation services provide greater intangible benefits including customer segments, fewer resources, affordable investment prices, and accelerated potential additional income from tenants. In addition, the change in key variables needs to be controlled so that it does not decline in the future because it greatly affects the company's business to provide both investment services. Thus, this investment feasibility analysis is expected to provide a better understanding of the provision of telecommunications infrastructure. © 2022 IEEE.

Investigating Novel Proximity Monitoring Techniques Using Ubiquitous Sensor Technology

The goal of this work is to investigate novel proximity detection techniques by researching and testing various sensor technologies and investigate their feasibility in an athletic context. COVID-19 has challenged sports teams to come up with reasonable and easy-to-implement solutions to provide a safe training environment for their players and staff. For this reason, proximity data is more important than ever, as many teams are in need of a way to measure social distancing and maintain contact tracing of their athletes. Bluetooth has been widely used to detect colocation and monitor social distancing. However, there are many other sensing technologies that may prove to be more accurate, robust, and secure. Therefore, the focus of this work is to investigate how Bluetooth compares with ultra-wideband and ultrasound technologies when monitoring the distance between users. We have implemented and compared the three modalities in a controlled experiment to investigate their accuracy at detecting distance between users at various levels. Our results indicate that the UWB signals are the most accurate at monitoring co-location. This is in-line with previous research suggesting that Bluetooth cannot accurately measure the distance between fast moving objects and needs about 20 seconds to stabilize distance measurements;therefore, it is not feasible to use for sports. In addition, we recorded that UWB models yielded an accuracy of over 95%, while ultrasound correctly classified the observations over 80% of the time, and Bluetooth had an accuracy of less than 50% when predicting if a given signal is within 6 feet or not.

Co-location with marketing value activities as manufacturing upgrading in a COVID-19 outbreak era.

Co-location has been a relevant topic in the international business literature, yet the extant literature focuses on the co-location of research and development (R&D) and production activities and overlooks marketing value activities. Marketing innovation is an agile and effective way to respond to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and many manufacturers in global value chains aim to upgrade functionally following the trajectory of the OEM-ODM-OBM. Thus, this study proposes the co-location of marketing activities as a flexible and organizational learning strategy for manufacturing upgrades, and explores the antecedents of marketing co-location in foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions. The proposed research framework was examined using survey data from 343 Taiwanese manufacturing firms in China, which were drawn from a database compiled by Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2020. The results show that the breadth of international experience, linkage to R&D, marketing as a primary knowledge source in the host country, upgrading for local demands, and new product development for global supply are all positively associated with the co-location of marketing and production functions. Additionally, it was found that there was a negative association between FDIs that had been impacted by COVID-19 and marketing co-location. The findings provide valuable theoretical, practical, and strategic insights into how firms should manage their global value chains with respect to marketing co-location in case of another crisis.

Overcoming the liability of distance? An exploratory study of the associations between social networks, sense of community and spatial colocation

Purpose: This study aims to examine the associations of social networks with the sense of community (SOC) construct and spatial colocation or having an office. The study site was an institute for health-care policy research formed in 2011 by bringing together scientists from more than 20 different university units. Only 30% of the scientists were had an office or physical presence at the institute. Therefore, the institute was an ideal site to examine whether SOC was correlated with different dimensions of network position – connectedness, reachability and brokerage – even when the authors account for the lack of spatial colocation for the off-site scientists. Design/methodology/approach: A two-part (sociometric and workplace) internet survey instrument was administered in 2014 to the institute’s population of 411 individuals. The sociometric data were used to create an undirected interaction network and the following dependent variables (DVs) or network centralities: normalized degree to measure connectedness;average reciprocal distance to capture reachability;and normalized betweenness to proxy brokerage. Separate node-level network regressions were then run with random permutations (N = 10,000) and listwise deletion for each of the DVs with SOC and spatial colocation as the independent variables, and variables that controlled for gender, organizational affiliation and job category. Findings: SOC and spatial colocation are both positively and significantly correlated with network connectedness and reachability. The results suggest that both SOC and spatial colocation have a larger impact on reachability than connectedness. However, neither SOC nor spatial colocation are significantly associated with network brokerage. Finally, the findings show that SOC and spatial colocation are more reliable predictors of network connectedness and reachability than are key individual- and unit-level control variables, specifically the individual’s sex, job category and organizational affiliation. The controls were not significantly associated with any of the three network centralities, namely, connectedness, reachability and brokerage. Originality/value: This exploratory study used social network analysis and node-level network regressions to examine the associations from SOC and spatial colocation to dimensions of network position. SOC is positively and significantly associated with network connectedness and reachability, suggesting that SOC is an important consideration when individuals are disadvantaged from the absence of spatial colocation. The findings have implications for work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic as they imply that interventions based on the SOC construct could potentially lessen the negative effects of remote work on workplace social networks due to factors such as the reduction of social contacts. © 2021, Felichism Kabo.

On the Transition of Social Interaction from In-Person to Online: Predicting Changes in Social Media Usage of College Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic based on Pre-COVID-19 On-Campus Colocation.

Pandemics significantly impact human daily life. People throughout the world adhere to safety protocols (e.g., social distancing and self-quarantining). As a result, they willingly keep distance from workplace, friends and even family. In such circumstances, in-person social interactions may be substituted with virtual ones via online channels, such as, Instagram and Snapchat. To get insights into this phenomenon, we study a group of undergraduate students before and after the start of COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we track N=102 undergraduate students on a small college campus prior to the pandemic using mobile sensing from phones and assign semantic labels to each location they visit on campus where they study, socialize and live. By leveraging their colocation network at these various semantically labeled places on campus, we find that colocations at certain places that possibly proxy higher in-person social interactions (e.g., dormitories, gyms and Greek houses) show significant predictive capability in identifying the individuals' change in social media usage during the pandemic period. We show that we can predict student's change in social media usage during COVID-19 with an F1 score of 0.73 purely from the in-person colocation data generated prior to the pandemic.

Effects of population co-location reduction on cross-county transmission risk of COVID-19 in the United States.

The objective of this study is to examine the transmission risk of COVID-19 based on cross-county population co-location data from Facebook. The rapid spread of COVID-19 in the United States has imposed a major threat to public health, the real economy, and human well-being. With the absence of effective vaccines, the preventive actions of social distancing, travel reduction and stay-at-home orders are recognized as essential non-pharmacologic approaches to control the infection and spatial spread of COVID-19. Prior studies demonstrated that human movement and mobility drove the spatiotemporal distribution of COVID-19 in China. Little is known, however, about the patterns and effects of co-location reduction on cross-county transmission risk of COVID-19. This study utilizes Facebook co-location data for all counties in the United States from March to early May 2020 for conducting spatial network analysis where nodes represent counties and edge weights are associated with the co-location probability of populations of the counties. The analysis examines the synchronicity and time lag between travel reduction and pandemic growth trajectory to evaluate the efficacy of social distancing in ceasing the population co-location probabilities, and subsequently the growth in weekly new cases across counties. The results show that the mitigation effects of co-location reduction appear in the growth of weekly new confirmed cases with one week of delay. The analysis categorizes counties based on the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and examines co-location patterns within and across groups. Significant segregation is found among different county groups. The results suggest that within-group co-location probabilities (e.g., co-location probabilities among counties with high numbers of cases) remain stable, and social distancing policies primarily resulted in reduced cross-group co-location probabilities (due to travel reduction from counties with large number of cases to counties with low numbers of cases). These findings could have important practical implications for local governments to inform their intervention measures for monitoring and reducing the spread of COVID-19, as well as for adoption in future pandemics. Public policy, economic forecasting, and epidemic modeling need to account for population co-location patterns in evaluating transmission risk of COVID-19 across counties.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Positive Newborns of COVID-19 Mothers After Dyad-Care: A Case Series.

The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in newborns is extremely rare, and there is a scarcity of research pertaining to epidemiology, clinical presentation, transmission, and prognosis in this population. We present five newborns who tested positive while colocating with their SARS-CoV-2 positive mothers from March 19 to May 15, 2020, at a large public hospital in Queens, New York that was severely affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. All the newborns subsequently tested negative and remained asymptomatic, including through median outpatient follow-up of three weeks.

Creating a Colocation Unit for End-of-Life Care during a Pandemic.

Background: Palliative care seeks to support the physical, psycho-social and spiritual needs of patients and families who are facing life threatening diseases. Advantages of establishing a palliative care unit, or alternatively co-locating patients, include promoting optimal physical and psychological symptom management; increased family satisfaction; and facilitating resource allocation. Objective: To design a stand-alone hospital unit to provide end of life care during a pandemic. Setting: Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH), a 1,144 bed tertiary- and quaternary-care teaching facility and Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai. Method: Tracking key indicators signaling the need for conversion to a COVID-19 unit, and identifying factors to facilitate a successful conversion. Result/Implementation: Using previously identified key focused action categories as framework, we describe our successful palliative care unit (PCU) conversion into a COVID-19 care unit. Conclusion: We believe that these operational insights gained from transforming our unit during COVID-19 will be helpful to other programs and institutions during a pandemic, or public health emergencies.

Anesthetic Considerations During Heart Transplantation Using Donation After Circulatory Death.

Worldwide, the majority of heart transplant organs are from donation after brain death. However, the shortage of suitable donors places severe limitations on this route. One option to increase the donor pool is to use organs from donation after circulatory death (DCD). Transplant centers for solid organs have been using DCD organs for years. At this time, 40% of solid organ transplantation in the United Kingdom uses organs from DCD. Use of DCD for solid organ transplants in Canada is also rising. Recently, there has been interest in using DCD organs for heart transplantation. The authors will discuss their experience of 4 heart transplants with organs from DCD donors after normothermic regional perfusion (NRP). The authors' first heart transplant using a DCD organ was in January 2020, and the fourth was in March 2020, just before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authors' protocol using NRP allows adequate evaluation of the donor heart to confidently determine organ acceptance. The co-location of the donor and the recipient in neighboring operating rooms limits ischemic times. Avoidance of an expensive ex vivo organ perfusion machine is an additional benefit for programs that may not have the resources required to purchase and maintain the machine. Some hospitals may not have the resources and space to be able to co-locate both the donor and recipient. Use of cold storage may be an option to transport the procured organ, similar to donation after brain death organs. The authors hope that this technique of NRP in DCD donors can help further increase the donor pool for heart transplantation in the United States.