Unified Convergence Analysis of Chebyshev–Halley Methods for Multiple Polynomial Zeros

In this paper, we establish two local convergence theorems that provide initial conditions and error estimates to guarantee the Q-convergence of an extended version of Chebyshev–Halley family of iterative methods for multiple polynomial zeros due to Osada (J. Comput. Appl. Math. 2008, 216, 585–599). Our results unify and complement earlier local convergence results about Halley, Chebyshev and Super–Halley methods for multiple polynomial zeros. To the best of our knowledge, the results about the Osada’s method for multiple polynomial zeros are the first of their kind in the literature. Moreover, our unified approach allows us to compare the convergence domains and error estimates of the mentioned famous methods and several new randomly generated methods.

Adapting the UTAUT2 Model for Social Commerce Context

Social commerce (SC) became a major channel for conducting business as a result of the ban adopted by many countries because of Covid-19 era. The simplicity of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and use of Technology (UTAUT) and its extended version (UTAUT2) invites researchers to explore other options that can yield better explanation of the adoption of SC. This study extended the UTAUT2 with perceived value, trust and a SC related construct. In addition, the study re-structured the UTAUT2 to fit with SC environment. The study utilized 463 surveys distributed in Qatar, and analyzed the data using SEM. Results fully supported the proposed model, where trust, perceived value, facilitating conditions, and hedonic motivation significantly predicted behavioral intentions with an R2 value equal to 72%. The model supported the role of performance expectancy and SC constructs in predicting perceived value, and the role of effort expectancy and habit in predicting hedonic motivation.

A Critical Assessment and Enhancement of Metrics for the Management of Scarce Human Resources

The effect of digitalization and its transformative power in all aspects of corporate strategies and organizations are visible everywhere. As leaders try to make sense of the “digital tornado” and prepare, try out, and set courses in new business directions, the authors propose to take a step back and focus on what is still at the core of corporate change – the people of your organization. In this chapter, the authors reflect on the forces and challenges that employees are facing in times of rapid and digitally driven change. They also mirror this, considering structural, sociological, and demographic change in the workforce, especially with regards to younger employees. They provide a set of fundamental metrics that can quantify the human resource strategy of an organization to derive measures which can be controlled via a DMAIC cycle. This contribution is an extended version of and includes an enhanced set of metrics to address challenges of digitalization and agile work environments. Further, approaches to possible solutions and first steps for an implementation in companies are presented.

Hyperspectral Pansharpening in the Reflective Domain with a Second Panchromatic Channel in the SWIR II Spectral Domain

Hyperspectral pansharpening methods in the reflective domain are limited by the large difference between the visible panchromatic (PAN) and hyperspectral (HS) spectral ranges, which notably leads to poor representation of the SWIR (1.0–2.5 μm) spectral domain. A novel instrument concept is proposed in this study, by introducing a second PAN channel in the SWIR II (2.0–2.5 μm) spectral domain. Two extended fusion methods are proposed to process both PAN channels, namely, Gain-2P and CONDOR-2P: the first one is an extended version of the Brovey transform, whereas the second one adds mixed pixel preprocessing steps to Gain-2P. By following an exhaustive performance-assessment protocol including global, refined, and local numerical analyses supplemented by supervised classification, we evaluated the updated methods on peri-urban and urban datasets. The results confirm the significant contribution of the second PAN channel (up to 45% of improvement for both datasets with the mean normalised gap in the reflective domain and 60% in the SWIR domain only) and reveal a clear advantage for CONDOR-2P (as compared with Gain-2P) regarding the peri-urban dataset.

Differences in data-sharing attitudes and behaviours, extended version to African data curators and data management experts

This article reports the results of a survey conducted between 16th November and 8th December 2020 among African data curators and data experts about different aspects of data sharing. The sample of respondents has been extracted from participants to the 1st IASSIST Africa Regional Workshop held on 11th -13th January 2021, Kampala, UGANDA and other data experts and practitioners. First, we recall the main results of a previous article published by IQ about the same argument in order to introduce the new survey. After that we analyse the new findings comparing them with the previous results, splitting the samples between Africans and not Africans.

Player Mobility and Competitive Balance Regulation in Professional Sports Leagues

Competitive balance regulation is more widespread in North American than in Europan sports leagues. The present paper addresses the question whether this observation can be explained with the help of differences in the degree of player mobility. Using an extended version of the workhorse contest model of sports leagues, the paper shows that the answer depends on the kind of competitive balance regulation. While player mobility may help to explain the difference with respect to salary regulation (e.g., salary caps), the choice of revenue sharing schemes turns out to be independent of player mobility.

An extended artificial bee colony with local search for solving the Skyline-based web services composition under interval QoS properties

In this paper, we introduce an extended version of artificial bee colony with a local search method (EABC) for solving the QoS uncertainty-aware web service composition (IQSC) problem, where the ambiguity of the QoS properties are represented using the interval-number model. At first, we formulate the addressed problem as an interval constrained single-objective optimization model. Then, we use the skyline operator to prune the redundant and dominated web services from their sets of functionally equivalent ones. Whereas, EABC is employed to solve the IQSC problem in a reduced search space more effectively and more efficiently. For the purpose of validation of the performance and the efficiency of the proposed approach, we present the experimental comparisons to an existing skyline-based PSO, an efficient discrete gbest-guided artificial bee colony and a recently provided Harris Hawks optimization with an elite evolutionary strategy algorithms on an interval extended version of the public QWS dataset.