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Current global shifts in education towards inclusive early childhood education are deeply engineered by the crisis of educational exclusion. In responding to exclusion, teachers have mainly utilized dominant western theories to plan and implement inclusive teaching. In this chapter, we draw on a non-western philosophy, a Nichiren Buddhist (Soka) philosophy, to provide a ‘kaleidoscopic’ lens through which to create inclusive educational learning spaces that engender full participation of all children. The Soka education philosophy is a humanist concept which can guide teachers when preparing to create inclusive education. The aims of this chapter are threefold: The first is an exploration of the Nichiren Buddhist (Soka) philosophy. The second aim is to highlight how this philosophy can enable teachers to unleash the unlimited potential of children in inclusive learning settings. Thirdly, we argue that grounding early childhood teacher education in this philosophy can help improve the effectiveness of inclusive educational experience for all children.

The identification of barriers for e-commerce to thrive in specific countries is a topic of great interest. This work proposes two models to study the barriers to B2C e-commerce adoption in Portugal, highlighting obstacles less exploited by previous research: the impact of offline shopping pleasure and the influence of the distance to shopping malls on online shopping intent. An online survey was conducted based on different constructs. A multivariate OLS hierarchical regression was used to analyse the proposed models regarding the intention to buy online and the number of online purchases. The results revealed that customer satisfaction is a strong predictor of intent to buy online and that perceived product risk remains a barrier to e-commerce. Consumers living in high urbanised areas have more propensity to buy online. Helpful information is provided regarding the impact of context, culture, product, and individual barriers, showing that multichannel strategies are best suited for success.

Despite the general good intentions towards the environment, individuals tend to adopt traditional internal combustion vehicles. Drawing from technology research, this study focuses on the impact of society - in the form of subjective norm and image – on the behavioral intention to adopt a technology. More precisely, this study seeks to explore to which extent societal influences drive the behavioral intention to adopt battery electric vehicles (BEV) technology. A self-administered survey was used for this purpose. The analysis of the data from a sample of 111 respondents showed significant relationships between the predictors and the target behavioral outcome. The study also revealed that subjective norm and image are particularly significant factors for the segment of BEV owners. The findings suggest that marketers and practitioners incorporate social elements into their product communication strategies in order to encourage the uptake of environmentally-sound technologies.

In the light of the many kinds of journeys that have been considered pilgrimages, this book uses phenomenology as a method to examine the claim that pilgrimage is a journey to the ‘center’ during which pilgrims seek meaning s for themselves. First, by analyzing a phenomenology of Christian pilgrimage, this work attempts to identify what commonalities, as well as differences, exist between Christian pilgrimage and secular pilgrimage in terms of ‘natural attitude’. Next, by using a phenomenological method, such as transcendental reduction, the distinction between these two types of pilgrimage could be clarified that the happiness sought in Christian pilgrimage is both intentionally spiritual and sustainable, while primarily intellectual or sensory in secular pilgrimage. Lastly, this work seeks to establish whether or not ‘being at leisure’ is the primary element for pilgrims whose aim is to attain an understanding of happiness during a pilgrimage

Robotics are being used in the intervention with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in many places and already for many years. Many robots were developed and different studies are being made in order to evaluate its effectiveness. “Socially Assistive Robotics” is shown to be effective in different areas mainly in social and emotional development. Milo, a robot developed by a team led by Richard Margolin for the Robots4Autism program (RoboKind, 2020), is one of the robots whose use is reported to be successful. In Macao there is no report of studies or experiences on the use of robots in the intervention with children with ASD. In a collaboration between the Macao Science Centre, the Macao Autism Association (MAA) and the University of Saint Joseph, an exploratory study was developed to understand the applicability of Milo to the work with children with ASD in Macao. The study showed that the robot is able to facilitate social and emotional competences of children with ASD. However, several limitations including language, cultural differences, the inexperienced facilitators and the level of sessions are too simple for the participants to be aware of that may affect the effectiveness of the intervention. It is important to show that the adoption of Milo in Macao for intervening children with ASD can be further implemented, with better practical solutions.

The main focus of this thesis was to characterize the patient information leaftlets as a text genre in Portugal, compare it with the same text genre in other countries and propose a new form of elaborating these documents in order to rise its comprehensibility levels. Therefore, we proceeded with an analysis of the patient information leaflet as a text genre and its relationship with text linguistics and translation. We also analyzed a corpus of 50 patient information leaflets with focus not only on its content, but also in the way they were created. In order to know the opinion of the general public, a survey about the situation of these documents in Portugal was distributed. In order to find the differences between these documents in different contexts, we made a comparison of a portuguese leaflet with leaflets from other countries. By last, we proposed a new writing scheme for these documents, reformulating one of the leaflets analyzed in the corpus and, to get the opinion of the general public, distributing a survey where the reformulated version was compared to the original one. The results point out to a lack of uniformity between documents and the way that they are created in pharmaceutical companies. The content of the patient informations leaflets in Portugal has an excess of text, technical language and a visual organization that is not appealing, problems that were also pointed out by the public in a survey. In the comparison between leaflets of different countries, big differences were found even when they were produced by the same company. When confronted with the original version and the reformulated version of the same document, the general public prefered the latter.

Objective: As a world tourist destination, Macao is inevitably under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the market of integrated resorts in Macao are shared by only a few casino concessionaries, together forming an oligopoly. While the firms attempted to adjust price, quantity and quality of their hotel services in response to the pandemic, they could not overlook the strategic interactions with other players in the market. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the possible impact of the pandemic on the oligopolistic strategies in the integrated resort market in Macao. Methodology: Application of a theoretical model of differentiated oligopoly to this six-firm case shows that price differences across firms depend on their quality differentiation. In order to analyze these price differences empirically, this paper collects data of hotel room rates of the integrated resorts from November, 2019 to mid-August, 2020, covering the periods before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. Originality: In the existing literature, there is a lack of studies of the oligopoly in the hospitality industry of Macao. Furthermore, the effect of COVID-19 is still ongoing, so this present paper is one of the first to perform such analysis. Results: The regression of each of the hotel price differentials on the COVID-19 dummy variable shows that COVID-19 has statistically significant impacts on almost all the price differentials. Intuitively, MGM and Wynn were in the high-price segment before and after the outbreak, while other firms switched positions in the low-price segment during the pandemic. One obvious downstream movement was by Conrad. According to the proposition derived from the theory, these imply that COVID-19 should have significant impact on the quality differentiation of the firms. Practical implications: The results are in line with the observations that the integrated resorts have rolled out staycation packages according to preferences of local residents. These quality adjustments observed in Macao’s hospitality industry currently only involved variable inputs rather than fixed inputs of production; therefore, the impact of COVID-19 should be seen as short-term effects. Keywords: Covid-19; Differentiated oligopoly; Hospitality industry; Hotel room rate; Oligopolistic market structure; Pricing strategy.

This paper aimed to build up the theorical and conceptual understanding of future forecasting study of Macau’s GDP and Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) by co-movement of economic indicators. Macau GDP and GGR showed co-movements with a number of time series economic indicators, including China’s exports and imports, China’s manufacturing PMI, non-manufacturing PMI, China's electricity production growth, share price of some Macau’s gaming operators, etc. These time series data can be found in statistics departments of China, Macau and Hong Kong, stock exchanges, and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Burns and Mitchell’s study in 1946 identified co-movements between economic indicators and being further carried out and developed leading, coincident and lagging indicators, which is essential for future econometric models and nowcasting techniques developments to study these co-movements. In particular, with the proper application of nowcasting techniques, future studies can exploit the data of leading and coincident economic indicators to forecast Macau’s GDP and GGR within an acceptable level of error. Since Macau is a “monotown,” where the gaming revenue makes a significant contribution to the economy. The forecasting of gaming revenue is crucial as it aids the gambling and tourism industries in preparing supply and provides information to policymakers to plan for the near future. This research also contributes to understand Macau’s economy by investigating its internal and external economic variables.