Cyberchondria During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Many factors govern the behavior pertaining to anxiety regarding health – it may be stressors, triggers, adverse situations faced by people. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, health-related anxiety has been widespread. December 2019 saw the occurrence of a form of pneumonia, not known at that time, from the Wuhan region of China to rapidly proceed into a worldwide pandemic and lockdown. This disrupted normal life across the globe and affected social and economic functioning. Cyberchondria has been one of the coping strategies seen during this time, pertaining to online health-related searches which offer answers and relief as seen at the surface but also bringing a plethora of mental health challenges. The authors in this chapter try to simplify what exactly cyberchondria is and how has it affected the lives of the worldwide population during the COVID-19 crisis, the biggest pandemic of recent times. The origin, development, and prevalence of the concept, along with coping, treatment, and prevention of the condition are discussed.

Big Data and the Essential Facilities Doctrine: A Law and Economics Approach to Fostering Competition and Innovation in Creative Industries

This article examines the growing market power of global streaming services in creative industries for video and music, and the intellectual property investments and inputs in these services. The author considers the prevalence of big data in these industries, enabling the development of highly targeted content, thereby dramatically reducing the potential of failure and mitigating the cost of investment. The author examined the suitability of traditional intellectual property laws for creative works driven largely by data inputs. The possibility of utilising the essential facilities doctrine to impose a duty to licence on these undertakings and the impact that could have on competition, innovation, incentives, and the economic functioning of creative industries is explored. 

Lessons Learnt during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Qualitative Study of South African Families

In a pandemic, such as COVID-19, with every single person struggling to deal with the unknown, it is often within the family that support is found but it is also within the family that circumstances, contexts and behaviours could further drive the pandemic and where they struggle to cope. This is novel research in the South African context with no known information regarding family life during and post the pandemic. This study, therefore, explores the lessons learnt during COVID-19 by South African families. A qualitative approach was employed to guide the gathering and analysis of the data. Data were collected from a sample of 31 family members above the age of 18 years from communities of the Western Cape Province and analysed through thematic analysis. According to the participants interviewed some of the significant lessons learnt from the lockdown include hygiene and health consciousness, appreciation for family, valuing life, self-introspection, less dependency, remote working, and financial savings. The realisation of such lessons even post-pandemic has the potential of strengthening families to be a resource of coping and resilience during very difficult times at the same time, contributing to greater physical, social, and economic functioning of families across South Africa.

The problem of student youth economic socialization: gender perspective

The article deals with the topical issue of personal and professional presentation of young women and men as subjects of their economic socialization. The analysis of the empirical research results of social and psychological determinants of young women and men economic self-presentation, as well as the results of a gender audit is done. A conceptual model of economic behavior of young people in the context of patriarchal / traditional and egalitarian / democratic coordinates is presented. The ambivalence of professional self-realization of young people, in particular, the orientation of girls to economic self-affirmation in the microeconomic environment, and boys - in the macro-society, as well as the commitment of both sexes to traditional gender stereotypes is revealed. The low level of material demands of women, including professional ones, is motivated by the socialized attitude to the financial supremacy of men. In psychological portraits of young men and women who present their professional potential, and hence the economic future, more similarities than differences are observed. Young women show a higher level of subjective general and personal locus of control in professional activities and psychological efforts to defend their beliefs. The social roles of men and women are still largely mediated by gender stereotypes, which guide the differentiation of their economic self-expression, predetermining the life scenarios declared by the student youth and vision of material commitments. However, the realities of the economic functioning of the genders have shaped the greater personal potential of women in the development of the traditionally masculine economic space, the trigger mechanism for which will dominate the patriarchal egalitarian ideas of personal professional self-presentation. A number of socio-psychological differences between the genders as a consequence of differentiation of their gender socialization should be taken into account in the process of education of economic culture and psychocorrection of professional skills, namely: young women do not concede to men in social, varieties of communicative competence and assertiveness in achieving professional goals. The development of a market economy aims to increase the inclusion of young people, especially women, in professional entrepreneurship, using the potential of positive psychology. Conducting gender audit as a practical tool in the implementation of quality monitoring of gender sensitivity-insensitivity of economic socialization allows to develop and implement innovative, egalitarian and educational technologies in higher education.

Reflections on the Closure of Rural Schools in the Local Socio-economic Context - The Example of Poland

The aim of the research has been to portray spatial differentiation of the process of school closures in rural areas of Poland, as well as to identify causes, and the effects of the closures on the socio-economic functioning of communities and local governments. To achieve that, desk research was first applied, with data used to classify Poland’s gminas (local-authority areas), in line with changes in numbers of pupils and schools. In the next step, in-depth interviews with gmina authorities and inhabitants were conducted, to allow intentionally-selected case studies to be considered further. It emerged that the main reasons for around 3300 Polish schools to close over the 2000-2016 period were declining fertility plus migration, combining to reduce numbers of primary-school pupils. Economic reasons were cited as the direct cause of school closures in the countryside. Both the negative and positive effects of closing rural schools in various groups were found.

Modelling and Simulation of Transformer Tests under Dynamic Testing

Large power transformers are the most important equipment for the power grid. Their reliability not only affects the availability of electricity in the supply area, but also affects the economic functioning of an energy supplier. The main objective of this work of the development of the transformer testing simulation model on the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. The designing aspect shall comprise the generator-based and grid-based testing of the transformer and associated results on the same in the SIMULINK. And the methodology shall study the impacts on the grid-connected devices due to testing of the transformers in the grid-based method. The study concluded that there is effectively no effect on the parameter evaluation of OC and SC tests by either source. However, the practical conditions would require grid-based testing that allows a greater range of transformers of various ratings to be tested with high current capability. The impact of fault on the grid can be easily evaluated through location of fault, duration of fault, and dip if occurred. The testing should follow proper timing to avoid such disturbances on the grid. This leads to the rescheduling of the other approved outages or Short Circuit tests.

Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity, and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars

In recent decades, public prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. By the early 2000s, private equity-owned corporations had entered the core sectors of prison and jail operations, creating “markets behind bars” in telecommunications, commissary sales, health provision, and a range of other services. Two decades later, they have become a quasi-oligopolistic market force across the carceral economy. Reacting to these developments, scholars and activists have explored how private firms generate profits by extracting resources from families of the incarcerated. Less explored is the fact that it is often and particularly private equity firms that partner with public carceral institutions in these extractive practices. In this reflection, we propose a three-part schematic for understanding how such partnerships, with their attendant predation on the poor and people of color, have become normalized. We focus, first, on the mechanism of bureaucracy through which mutual profit-making by public and private entities becomes regularized; second, we explore the legal mechanisms—the apparently small but potent and politically unexamined legal maneuvers—that enable the redirection of family resources beyond the support of a loved one to the operational needs of jails and prisons; finally, we trace the role of gender as a social mechanism through which private equity and its prison/jail partners rely simultaneously on women’s traditional role as caretaker and non-traditional role as primary breadwinner. We show that all three mechanisms are crucial to the economic functioning of the carceral state.

The possibility of using innovative models to refine the most optimal approach to managing the behavior of a commercial organization

Practical modeling uses not only theoretical approaches, but also management issues, therefore, it is not entirely correct to compare theoretical and mathematical models. The concept of demand exists as an independent unit, has an independent meaning, and the demand model is represented in the form of an increasing curve and, like any model, contains various explicit and implicit conditions. The paper provides an analysis of existing classification approaches on the adaptation of economic and mathematical models in the issue of finding the most appropriate criteria for optimality from the point of view of using the mathematical apparatus. A detailed representation of the top-level structure is given, reflecting the basic requirements for the information necessary for drawing up a model passport, and conditions are also given that limit the area of existence of an operator that determines the corresponding payment matrix of an arbitrary game. The possibility of establishing the number of restrictions on the used variants of the game, which does not change the content of the game, is analyzed, which will allow choosing the most optimal strategies for each case. The proposed and justified, from the point of view of mathematical formalization, approach to making the most optimal decision on managing the behavior of a commercial organization based on preliminary monitoring of economic functioning is of interest from the point of view of the following aspects: the possibility of identifying the key elements that determine the system in choosing a format that characterizes the state of the elements of interest; development of a virtual model that reproduces the behavioral features of the modeled system.

Challenges of Air-Lines’ Development on the Basis of their Accounting Book Analysis

The article studies the work of Russian air-lines in the current situation of unstable market of air-transportation. The public company ‘Aeroflot’, the industry leader acts as an object of the research. Topicality of the subject is explained by strategic importance of the company development in Russia, as the growth in air-transportation acts as a great stimulus for the Russian economy development. The authors analyzed finance figures of air-lines that show efficiency of their work and came to the conclusion about key reasons of their fluctuations in today’s conditions. On the basis of comparative analysis they identified the air-line, which managed to retain certain finance stability. The article also studies current trends of air-transportation market and on their foundation worked out recommendations by vectors of air-lines’ development. The algorithm of drawing respective conclusions about airlines’ stability and their efficiency was shown by factor analysis of finance figures. Calculations made by the authors according to the proposed methodology of economic analysis are logically substantiated. In article preparation the authors used normative documents, present day literature sources dealing with the subject of the research, articles of academic journals and annual accounting reports of companies. Analysis methodology provided in the article could allow experts to improve the quality of analytical work in the field of economic analysis of air-lines’ operation and optimization of principle figures of their economic functioning.