Consumers' purchase decision in the context of western imported food products: Empirical evidence from Pakistan.

It is essential to identify consumer purchase behavior to establish and implement effective marketing strategies by Western food chains in Pakistan. By identifying motives, firms can offer extra-value products to their current and potential clients. Thus, this study seeks to understand what drives Pakistani consumers to buy imported Western food. This quantitative study uses A standardized structured questionnaire to collect data from 375 Karachi residents. The researchers use a convenient sampling strategy and analyze the data using PLS-SEM modeling through Smart-PLS 4.0. The findings of this research demonstrate that subjective norms, religiosity, product attributes, brand trust, customer satisfaction, and lifestyle significantly and positively influence consumer purchase intention. The findings also show that consumer purchase intention, lifestyle, and subjective norms significantly and positively correlate with purchase behavior. Finally, the study concludes that purchase intention significantly and positively mediates between exogenous and endogenous variables (purchase behavior). This research has significant theoretical and managerial implications. Local and international marketing professionals who wish to investigate the expanding consumer market in Pakistan can find the study's findings extremely useful. In addition, the outcomes of this research enrich the existing body of consumer behavior literature, which is helpful for future researchers.

New imaging technology system reduces patient radiation dose during peripheral arterial endovascular interventions.

BACKGROUND: Radiation exposure and imaging quality are among the main concerns in endovascular procedures. The Clear VD11 PURE platform technology system (Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen, Germany) has been reported to lower the radiation dose and improve image quality. In the present study, we evaluated whether the radiation dose during peripheral arterial endovascular procedures had decreased after implementation of this new imaging system. METHODS: The patient characteristics (age, gender, body mass index [BMI]), procedure type (diagnostic, balloon angioplasty, atherectomy, stenting), body location (aortoiliac, superficial femoral artery, tibial artery), reference air kerma (RAK), kerma area product (KAP), and fluoroscopy time (FT) were recorded during peripheral artery interventions performed 1 year before (group A) and 1 year after (group B) the CLEAR system upgrade. The procedures were performed in an Artis zeego hybrid room (Siemens Healthineers) with the same providers. A general linear model was used to estimate the average difference between groups adjusted by procedure type and patient age, gender, and BMI. Additionally, to control for variations in case complexity, groups A and B were matched by age, gender, BMI, lesion location, and intervention type. Propensity score matching and a paired t test were used to compare the KAP, RAK, and FT stratified by single intervention procedures. RESULTS: A total of 487 endovascular procedures were performed: 209 in group A and 278 in group B. A total of 111 single intervention procedures from each group were matched (1:1), with a mean age of 61 ± 8 years and a BMI of 26.5 ± 4 kg/m2. The median KAP, RAK, and FT for group A were 28.8 Gy · cm2 (interquartile range [IQR], 24-34 Gy · cm2), 146 mGy (IQR, 123-173 mGy), and 12 minutes (IQR, 10-14 minutes), respectively. The median KAP, RAK, and FT for group B were 18.3 Gy · cm2 (IQR, 16-22 Gy · cm2), 71.2 mGy (IQR, 60-85 mGy), and 10.4 minutes (IQR, 9-12 minutes), respectively. The KAP, RAK, and FT were significantly decreased in group B by 24% (P = .005), 41% (P < .001), and 22% (P = .002), respectively, compared with the values for group A. Stratified by single intervention procedures, the KAP and RAK had decreased significantly in group B (36% [P = .002] and 51% [P < .001], respectively) compared with group A. The FT decrease of 13% in group B was not statistically significant (P = .20). CONCLUSIONS: Use of the Clear VD11 PURE platform system (Siemens Healthineers) reduced the patient radiation dose by 51% during endovascular peripheral interventions. The similar FTs for the matched single intervention procedures before and after the upgrade indicated consistent case complexity and surgeon practice. This platform appears to be an effective system for lowering the radiation dose.

Career adaptability as protagonist on contemporary rural migrant workers' turnover intention: The mediating effect of organization embeddedness and organizational identification.

BACKGROUND: Contemporary migrant workers from rural areas demonstrate high turnover behaviors in China and pose substantial threats to China's economic growth. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore the causes of this short-term employment from the perspective of individual dispositions in terms of career adaptability. This study investigated organization embeddedness and organizational identification as underpinning mechanisms linking career adaptability to turnover intention. The hypotheses explanations were provided according to the Conservation of Resources theory. METHODS: Survey data were collected from 379 migrant workers from rural areas in the manufacturing sectors of China, and the structural equation modeling technique was used to find the range of outcomes. RESULTS: The empirical results demonstrate that career adaptability does not meaningfully predict turnover intention but is positively and significantly related to organization embeddedness and organizational identification. Organization embeddedness and organizational identification both negatively and significantly predicted turnover intention and also played as a conciliator in the association between career adaptability and turnover intention. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest management and human resource specialists can directly influence the turnover intention of contemporary rural migrant workers via paying attention to these two critical factors, namely, organization embeddedness and organizational identification.

Relationship between population growth, price level, poverty incidence, and carbon emissions in a panel of 98 countries.

The objective of the study is to examine the dynamic linkages between population growth, price level, poverty headcount ratio, and carbon emissions under investigation of different plausible hypothesis, including "population-induced poverty trap," "welfare-reducing effects," "environmental Kuznets curve," and "pollution haven" hypotheses in the cross-sectional setting of 98 developed and developing countries for the period of 2011. The study used cross-sectional regression and switching regression regime for empirical analysis. The result shows a positive relationship between changes in price level and carbon emissions that verify "welfare-reducing effects," while there is a negative relationship between population growth and poverty at varying poverty threshold to support the "Gary Becker human capital theory." Further, there is a positive relationship between poverty rates and carbon emissions across countries. The results verified the "pollution haven" hypothesis in account of increase in pollution through financial liberalization policies. A U-shaped relationship is found between economic growth and carbon emissions in a given time period. The study concludes that globalized world should have to be careful when devising environmental sustainability policies, as it is important to provide social safety nets to the lower income strata group; hence, it would be helpful to achieve global green development agenda.

Thin Film Multi-Electrode Softening Cuffs for Selective Neuromodulation.

Silicone nerve cuff electrodes are commonly implanted on relatively large and accessible somatic nerves as peripheral neural interfaces. While these cuff electrodes are soft (1-50 MPa), their self-closing mechanism requires of thick walls (200-600 µm), which in turn contribute to fibrotic tissue growth around and inside the device, compromising the neural interface. We report the use of thiol-ene/acrylate shape memory polymer (SMP) for the fabrication of thin film multi-electrode softening cuffs (MSC). We fabricated multi-size MSC with eight titanium nitride (TiN) electrodes ranging from 1.35 to 13.95 × 10-4 cm2 (1-3 kΩ) and eight smaller gold (Au) electrodes (3.3 × 10-5 cm2; 750 kΩ), that soften at physiological conditions to a modulus of 550 MPa. While the SMP material is not as soft as silicone, the flexural forces of the SMP cuff are about 70-700 times lower in the MSC devices due to the 30 µm thick film compared to the 600 µm thick walls of the silicone cuffs. We demonstrated the efficacy of the MSC to record neural signals from rat sciatic and pelvic nerves (1000 µm and 200 µm diameter, respectively), and the selective fascicular stimulation by current steering. When implanted side-by-side and histologically compared 30 days thereafter, the MSC devices showed significantly less inflammation, indicated by a 70-80% reduction in ED1 positive macrophages, and 54-56% less fibrotic vimentin immunoreactivity. Together, the data supports the use of MSC as compliant and adaptable technology for the interfacing of somatic and autonomic peripheral nerves.