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The fifth Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations targets achieving gender equality by 2030, but recent progress has been sluggish. Gender inequalities in the labor markets may have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 recession. This paper aims to investigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on gender inequalities in the labor markets by...

Theories and models try to describe the complexity of how people embrace and make use of innovations. The determinants of behavior concerning battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have traditionally revolved around factors such as vehicles’ price and range. Surprisingly, despite being small and one of the wealthiest territories in the world, Macau SAR faces challenges in BEV market penetration, underscoring the need to explore alternative causes of behavioral intention. To explain the adoption of technologies, this paper focuses on technology show-off (TS), which combines Rogers’ (2003) concepts of visibility and trialability of technology in a single construct as a determinant of behavioral intention. Therefore, when individuals perceive technology as more visible and available for trial, their behavioral intention to adopt it strengthens. Using structural equation modeling for quantitative analysis, this study examines the significance of TS in terms of the intention to adopt battery electric vehicles. The findings highlight the salience of the technology show-off construct in explaining behavioral intention, underscoring its significance in the context of modern society’s characteristics. This study contributes to advances in understanding technology acceptance and highlights the importance of incorporating experiential aspects (such as TS) into the traditional technology acceptance models.

The understanding of how people accept and embrace new policies is vital in today's world. This paper introduces an original way of looking at this by adapting the widely recognized Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT-2). The goal is to provide a foundational model for assessing policy acceptance. More specifically, we adapted the UTAUT-2 framework to study how Macau residents perceive the "Northbound Travel for Macau Vehicles" policy, which allows cars with Macau registration plates to enter China. Using structural equation modeling software (SmartPLS), we analyze data collected from 136 respondents who experienced the policy.Our findings reveal that Performance Expectancy (PE) and Habit (HB) significantly influence individuals' intention to take advantage of the policy. In other words, people are more likely to embrace policies they perceive as beneficial and that align with their existing habits. Effort Expectancy (EE) and Facilitating Conditions (FC) do not significantly impact acceptance, perhaps as a result of participants' familiarity with the policy and their resource availability. Surprisingly, while not directly tied to usage, Social Influence (SI) shows a high mean value, suggesting its potential role in policy acceptance when influential individuals adopt the policy. This pioneering research contributes to the field by bridging the gap between technology acceptance models and policy studies. Most importantly, it validates the use of the UTAUT-2 as a technology framework that is adapted for assessing policy acceptance.

In a world where sustainable food choices are becoming increasingly important, this study explores the connection between food neophilia — the desire to experiment with new foods — and people's willingness to include insects in their diets. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), our research delves into how neophilia (NP) moderates respondents’ attitude (ATT), social norms (SN), and perceived behavioral control (PBC) concerning the adoption of insects as a food source. The analysis draws from 160 self-administered surveys and employs structural equation modeling. Conducted in the context of Macau SAR (China), our study reveals the pivotal role that neophilia plays in shaping consumer attitudes and intentions. Notably, respondents generally expressed a willingness to explore novel culinary experiences. A positive moderating effect of neophilia on attitudes toward insect consumption is observed, suggesting that individuals with higher neophilia scores are more inclined to hold favorable intentions regarding insects as food. However, neophilia's influence on moderating SN and PBC exhibits contrasting effects, implying that a strong inclination for food neophilia may not necessarily leadto increased social pressure or perceived control in adopting insect-based diets. In light of these findings, this study recommends that practitioners and policymakers promote insect consumptionas an innovative and adventurous means of achieving sustainable nutrition. While the primary focus is on the impact of food neophilia on people's intention to consume insects as food, the study underscores the urgent need for diversified and sustainable dietary choices to address escalating environmental concerns and secure a resilient food supply for future generations.

Integrating financial technologies with green initiatives is critical to the sustainable development agenda. This is particularly true for newly developed smart cities like Tongzhou, the sub-city center of Beijing. To assess the adoption of green fintech in Tongzhou, this paper extends the EnergyAugmented Technology Acceptance Model (EA-TAM) to incorporate two green factors – environmental awareness and green knowledge. This paper applies structural equation modeling techniques to analyze data from 403 respondents who live, work, or study in Tongzhou and finds allhypothesized constructs significant. Since green knowledge is significant to the adoption of green fintech, this paper further divides the sample into a high-education group (162 respondents with university-or-above degrees) and a low-education group (251 respondents with post-secondary-orlower degrees) to evaluate the impact of education. All the hypothesized factors are significant to the high-education group,but environmental awareness and perceived usefulness are insignificant to the low- education group. Hence, the results provide evidence that people in the newly developed smart city adopt green fintech due to their environmental sensitivity. The adoption of green fintech is more environmentally sensitive for people with high education levels.

As environmental awareness grows, sustainable modes of transportation have garnered increasing importance. With the rising popularity of electric vehicles (EVs), a broader community now acknowledges their numerous advantages, such as lower noise levels, enhanced efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in comparison to traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. Furthermore, EVs significantly contribute to a more sustainable future by emitting fewer pollutants and reducing overall environmental impact. However, consumers' perceptions and expectations about the vehicle's country of origin - the nation where the vehicle is manufactured - remain unclear, particularly in the case of Chinese-manufactured EVs due to China's reputation for pollution and product safety concerns. This study employsa qualitative framework based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2(UTAUT-2) to assess the acceptance of Chinese electric vehicles, and the influence of the Country-of-Origin Effect (COE) on a sample of Portuguese residents. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using qualitative methods. The study's results shed light on the significance of the country of origin in shaping consumers' behavioral intentions to purchase Chinese electric vehicles, indicating a positive influence. This suggests that country of origin is a crucial factor when considering an individual's intention to adopt electric vehicles. Additionally, the research highlights the importance of various other factors such as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, price value, hedonic motivation, and habit in shaping consumers' attitudes and intentions. Our results underscore the complexity of consumer behavior toward electric vehicles, suggesting the need for a multifaceted approach to understanding andpromoting EV adoption. Research is needed to examine the COE in different cultural and geographic contexts to develop effective strategies to enhance the global adoption of electric vehicles, particularly from countries with varying environmental reputations

The UTAUT-2 offers the most comprehensive assessment of individual acceptance and use of technology to date. In particular, the theoretical additions of “hedonic motivation”, “price value”, and “habit”, made the model suitable for studying technology in a consumer context. However, a review of the literature revealed that the construct of habit has been dropped from a large number of studies. There are several reasons for this, including that the technologies examined were relatively new for the respondents to form a routine behavior. Therefore, this study aims to explore whether the construct can be used as a key predictor of future intention to use an innovation rather than an acquired practice among technology users. For this purpose, a conceptual model based on the theoretical additions to the UTAUT-2 is proposed and analyzed with structural equation modeling (SmartPLS). Our results showed significant relationships between the predictors and the behavioral intention to use battery electric vehicles (BEV) technology, and, in particular, depicted the construct of habit as the strongest factor in the decision to adopt the technology. In light of our findings, the construct of habit (HT) should be used in research together with the other UTAUT-2 predictors to assess individuals’ perceptions of possible future habitual behaviors.

Digital inclusion in Macao is in the very beginning stage, and disability inclusion practice on social media in producing and promoting accessible social media content and needs is hard to find. This study aims to analyse the factors that influence communication staff's practice of disability inclusion on social media by using the combined employee behaviour and communication process model to provide suggestions to management who wants to promote disability inclusion practice on social media.The Service Centre for the Deaf of the Macau Deaf Association (MDA) was selected as the object for this case study. The online social media used for MDA's communication was analysed, and semi-structured in-depth interviews with members of the Association were conducted. The research findings showed that, except for the reward structure, factors examined from the work environment in terms of organisation, supervision and co-workers; communication staff themselves; outcomes of accessible social media communication; audience and feedbacks show relations with disability inclusion practices on social media. The delivery of inclusive culture, the influential power of disability stakeholders and the positioning of social media platforms are the key influencing factors.The interesting part of this study is that people without disabilities seem to be excluded from the disability inclusion practice carried out on MDA's Facebook. Their social media content is highly accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences yet seems not to involve the general public. The study object is a good model for producing accessible content, yet the optimisation of promoting social media accessibility needs further exploration.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can benefit significantly from open innovation by gaining access to a broader range of resources and expertise using absorptive capacitive, and increasing their visibility and reputation. Nevertheless, multiple barriers impact their capacity to absorb new technologies or adapt to develop them. This paper aims to perform an analysis of relevant topics and trends in Open Innovation (OI) and Absorptive Capacity (AC) in SMEs based on a bibliometric review identifying relevant authors and countries, and highlighting significant research themes and trends. The defined string query is submitted to the Web of Science database, and the bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer software. The results indicate that the number of scientific publications has consistently increased during the past decade, indicating a growing interest of the scientific community, reflecting the industry interest and possibly adoption of OI, considering Absorptive. This bibliometric analysis can provide insights on the most relevant regions the research areas are under intensive development.

A growing number of people are becoming aware of the environmental footprint that our actions have on the environment. Research indicates that a key factor leading to the adoption of an electric vehicle is consumers’ high environmental concern. Indeed, the environmental concern (EC) construct is commonly associated with the purchase of sustainable and eco-friendly products in literature. Our study challenges this assumption. We examined how the environmental factor influenced the behavioral intention of Macau residents to adopt battery-electric vehicle (BEV) technology. For this purpose, we conducted a study based on the UTAUT-2 framework and used structural equation modeling (SmartPLS) to analyze the data. As a result, the choice of vehicles did not depend on the consumers’ level of concern. It appeared that consumers strongly perceived the benefits of a cleaner environment, however, when it comes to technology, environmental benefits are nice to have, rather than the primary incentive to purchase BEVs. Researchers should consider the role of environmental concern as a background factor in technology acceptance models, rather than a direct predictor of behavior. It is also recommended that marketers correctly consider this element when developing their product communications strategies, to appeal to the desired segment of customers.

Stock price prediction has always been challenging due to its volatility and unpredictability. This paper performs a preliminary exploratory comparison that utilizes Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms to forecast the stock market in Hong Kong. It considers a public dataset publicly available and uses feature engineering to extract relevant features. Then, LSTM and SVM algorithms are applied to predict stock prices. Our results show that the proposed machine learning techniques can predict stock prices in Hong Kong's share market with the error metrics presented, and, for this purpose, LSTM achieved better results than SVM, with MSE = 0.0026, RMSE = 0.0508, MAE = 0.0406, and MAPE = 1.325.

The classification of emotions based on facial expressions have been a new topic of research in recent years, especially in marketing and consumer behavior areas. However, there is lack of studies to understand how the research topic is developed in terms of bibliometric data. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to provide a bibliometric analysis of the research on the analysis of facial expressions for marketing and consumer behavior, identifying the state of the art, the latest research direction, and other indicators. We extracted data from Web of Science (WOS) platform, considering its core database, resulting in a total of 117 articles. The software Vosviewer was used to analyze the data and graphically visualize the results. This study indicates some of the most influential authors citations and coupling analysis in this specific field, identifies journals with the most published articles, and provide trends of the research area based on the analysis of keywords and corresponding number of articles per year. The results shows that 11 articles (9.4%) were cited more than 100 times, and the two most prolific authors published 5 articles, and the two most influential authors are Bouaziz Sofien and Pauly mark(270 citations) in this field. Of the 117 articles retrieved by WOS, more than 70% were published in high impact journals. The bibliometric analysis of the existing work in this study provides a valuable and reliable reference for researchers in this field and makes a reasonable prediction of the research direction trends.

This research aims to evaluate a Macau tea brand's social media advertising effectiveness with neuromarketing tools, including physiological monitoring that can measure emotional arousal. This research bridges the gap of social media marketing on Instagram for brands through the neuromarketing method. Data from 40 respondents were collected with iMotions software using neuroscientific tools. This research uses the stimuli of Guanding Teahouse, a newly established Macau tea brand, to evaluate social media advertising effectiveness. The neuroscientific tools – Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors, Eye-tracking, Facial Expression Analysis (FEA) and emotion analysis are used to do the experiment. The data analysis was drawn from one representative respondent to measure the emotions and attention on the Instagram advertisements. Video 1 recorded 9 GSR peaks and Video 2 recorded 12 GSR peaks, both videos attention is ranging between 96-98 indexes. Results show that advertising videos should focus more on the products than the model. Moreover, the participant is more interested in Video 2, but the effectiveness of advertising is showing a lower focus on the brand and the tea. Future studies should consider comparing the video advertising effectiveness of Instagram stories and Instagram reels to prevent disruption of video on the stories ad.

Research in ubiquitous networked music systems has unveiled the potential of behavioural-driven interaction interfaces as an effective model to cope with network communication delays in remote musical performances. Most of the techniques developed under these premises are based on digital music interfaces implemented on laptop computers or tablet devices, where a certain degree of gestural control comes as an added dimension. The purpose of this paper is to present an implementation of such type of interfaces in the form of a physical tangible musical instrument, contemplating multiple expressive possibilities. This is viable at the current stage of technological development thanks to leveraging 3D printing and laser cutting technologies for effective prototyping and testing of such a device. The paper seeks to demonstrate that this approach opens a wide range of possibilities for creating musical instruments with versatility and expressiveness beyond what is usually accomplished in traditional instruments. This implementation, entitled “Radial String Chimes,” is presented with its advantages, the challenges it faces, and the methods used to create it. Finally, the paper will offer suggestions for further developing such an instrument to unlock its potential.

The Black-Scholes equation is famous for predicting values for the prices of Options inside the stock market scenario. However, it has the limitation of depending on the estimated value for the volatility. On the other hand, several Machine learning techniques have been employed for predicting the values of the same quantity. In this paper we analyze some fundamental properties of the Black-Scholes equation and we then propose a way to train its free-parameters, the volatility in particular. This with the purpose of using this parameter as the fundamental one to be learned by a Machine Learning system and then improve the predictions in the stock market.

Dance education has undergone significant changes with the integration of information technology. Traditional dance pedagogy is now complemented by innovative digital software tools and applications. This work surveys the diverse applications of information technology in dance education at college or university level and the impact it has on teaching and learning processes. We discuss the integration of technology in various aspects of dance education, including skill development, choreography, performance analysis, VR/AR, online virtual learning, and collaborative learning. Additionally, the benefits and challenges associated with the use of information technology are also examined and the future research directions for research and practice in this field are proposed.

Resumo Os bibliotecários são profissionais que se devem manter constantemente atualizados, procurando ativamente o desenvolvimento das suas competências profissionais, pelas próprias características das funções que desempenham. Porém, é importante perceber o que pensam estes atores acerca da sua atual formação de base, concretamente se esta tem vindo a acompanhar as tendências de atualização. Assim, partindo de uma análise prévia ao conteúdo de diversos documentos orientadores, emanados de associações internacionais, no sentido de encontrar as competências preconizadas para a área de atuação, é realizado um questionário ao nível nacional e internacional a futuros profissionais, estudantes na área das ciências documentais. O principal objetivo é o de procurar entender, comparativamente, que habilidades e competências são valorizadas para o futuro desempenho profissional. O questionário foi aplicado a grupos de estudantes de ciências da documentação e informação em Portugal, Macau e República Checa, evidenciando-se as perspetivas comuns entre os inquiridos sobre as competências necessárias e aquelas que são recebidas na formação inicial, concluindo-se que existem ainda algumas assimetrias entre as necessidades da profissão e a formação recebida, na perspetiva dos futuros profissionais, independentemente do território a que pertencem.