ABSTRACT
Purpose: This paper aims to find out the digital services of management libraries provided during the library closure and the challenges and initiatives the libraries have taken up to fulfill the need of their user community during the pandemic crisis. Design/methodology/approach: To meet the purpose of the study, the investigators have used a survey method. An online questionnaire was devised and administered among the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) librarians using Microsoft Forms. Findings: The study's findings suggested that all the libraries under investigation must avail of various digital library services in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Further, the investigators recommend that libraries formulate a disaster preparedness and management plan in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic so that libraries can prepare themselves for the future. Originality/value: The pandemic has affected every aspect of life and changed the digital library services scenario. Thus, it is essential to examine the role libraries have played during the COVID-19 pandemic and distinguish the challenges and initiatives libraries have taken to tackle the problems they faced. This study has been conducted on the digital library services that were provided by the libraries of IIMs. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, crowdfunding, has emerged as a hugely disruptive force within the financial landscape worldwide. Crowdfunding, the process of raising relatively small sums of money from the crowd, via the internet, enables entrepreneurs, particularly at the innovative and new start-ups stage, to access much needed funding, overcoming a "funding gap”. The growth of crowdfunding has been phenomenal. In 2019, an estimated €14 billion was crowdfunded worldwide (Statistia 2020) and the forecast is for the sector to grow to €30 billion by 2025 (Mordo Intelligence, 2020). Initially, crowdfunding gained prominence through funding creative and artistic projects, but over the last number of years, this appeal has spread across a diverse range of businesses and sectors (Bradford 2012 and Research and Markets 2022). In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, crowdfunding offers entrepreneurs and businesses access to much needed seed funding, but also non-financial benefits in the form of market and product testing, media exposure and customer feedback. Crowdfunding is a relatively new domain for businesses in the hospitality sector. As noted by Belavin, Marinesi and Tsoukalas (2020), crowdfunding offers huge potential for the sector, who often face funding challenges thereby limiting new innovative start-ups, critical for the sector's long term viability. This case study examined how one entrepreneur in the hospitality sector, successfully crowdfunded an innovative business idea in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The case traces the idea and the factors that shaped the decision to crowdfund. Additionally, the case examines the benefits and challenges involved in successfully crowdfunding the business idea and closes with the entrepreneur reflecting on the key learning from the experience. The contribution of this case study is twofold. Firstly, it serves to highlight the potential of crowdfunding as a funding source of enterprise development, particularly among new, innovative businesses. Secondly, it adds to the current debate, as noted by Belavin, Marinesi and Tsoukalas (2020), of the potential crowdfunding in fostering entrepreneurship and economic development within the hospitality sector. © 2022, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All right reserved.
ABSTRACT
This Work in Progress, Research paper aims to address the well-documented discrimination against people with disabilities regarding the use of technology in education. Poor accessibility standards, a lack of administrative support, and numerous other barriers have contributed to the ever-present digital equity gap for students with disabilities. The digital equity gap has continued to widen as schools continue to increase the use of virtual or distance learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims to better understand students with disabilities' barriers in accessing online undergraduate engineering education by addressing the following research question: What barriers do engineering students with disabilities face in an online learning environment? The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework guides the research questions, data collection, and data analysis. A fixed item survey has been developed and is currently being used to capture the experiences of students with disabilities in engineering who participated in online learning at four-year colleges and universities across the United States. The identification of these students' barriers will be used to inform accessibility improvements and considerations to engineering online learning. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The recognition of aircraft wake vortex can provide an indicator of early warning for civil aviation transportation safety. In this paper, several wake vortex recognition models based on deep learning and traditional machine learning were presented. Nonetheless, these models are not completely suitable owing to their dependence on the visualization of LiDAR data that yields the information loss of in reconstructing the behavior patterns of wake vortex. To tackle this problem, we proposed a lightweight deep learning framework to recognize aircraft wake vortex in the wind field of Shenzhen Baoan Airport’s arrival and departure routes. The nature of the introduced model is geared towards three aspects. First, the dilation patch embedding module is used as the input representation of the framework, attaining additional rich semantics information over long distances while maintaining parameters. Second, we combined a separable convolution module with a hybrid attention mechanism, increasing the model’s attention to the space position of wake vortex core. Third, environmental factors that affect the vortex behavior of the aircraft’s wake were encoded into the model. Experiments were conducted on a Doppler LiDAR acquisition dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed network has an accuracy of 0.9963 and a recognition speed at 100 frames per second was achieved on an experimental device with 0.51 M parameters.
ABSTRACT
The MOMENTA project combines in situ and remote sensing observations, wind tunnel experiments, and numerical modeling to improve the knowledge of wake structure in wind farms in order to model its impact on the wind turbines and to optimize wind farm layout. In this context, we present the results of a first campaign conducted with a BOREAL unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to measure the three wind components with a horizontal resolution as fine as 3 m. The observations were performed at a wind farm where six turbines were installed. Despite the strong restrictions imposed by air traffic control authorities, we were able to document the wake area of two turbines during two flights in April 2021. The flight patterns consisted of horizontal racetracks with various orientations performed at different distances from the wind turbines;thus, horizontal wind speed fields were built in which the wind reduction area in the wake is clearly displayed. On a specific day, we observed an overspeed area between the individual wakes of two wind turbines, likely resulting from the cumulative effect of the wakes generated behind two successive rows of turbines. This study demonstrates the potential of BOREAL to document turbine wakes.
ABSTRACT
Droplet transmission and aerosol transmission are both possible transmission pathways for many respiratory infections (e.g., COVID-19) and human movements may affect these viral particle transmission pathways. Realistic 3-D human models were used here in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study to analyze the effect of human movements on the transmission of virus particles exhaled by a patient. The changes in the airflow, pressure and particle diffusion were compared with experimental data to verify the accuracy of the computations. The results show that when a person passes by a sitting patient in a poorly ventilated room, the wake velocities can reach 1.6~2.0 m/s. The airflow velocity can reach 0.53 m/s at 0.10 m from the moving person, 0.22 m/s at 0.25 m away, and 0.13 m/s at 0.55 m away. The airflow fluctuations can last more than 10 s. Double peak airflow velocities are found near the moving person. The pressure difference of 0.49 Pa caused by the moving person moves the air and the viral particles into the wake of the moving person and slows the nearby droplet deposition. More than 50% of the viral particles are deposited on the moving person's body or spread further. Thus, this study recommends less cross-area movement in epidemic areas and that all people should wear masks and use personalized ventilation equipment. © 2022, Tsinghua University Press. All right reserved.