Corporate boards are since years dominated by male members. However, given the rising risks and lesson learned from monopoly corporate boards and also lack of talents due to aging society, how to get more female talents on the board is becoming an important part of corporate strategies of all industry. Among all kinds of methods, legislative gender quotas introduced firstly by Norway has been adopted by several European countries. Despite arguments, Germany has joined this gender quota camp at corporate board level from 2016. This paper intends to unfold the gender quota decision of Germany and illustrate the possible outlook of board gender quota in Germany through Europe-wide comparative analysis in selected countries.
The three main routes for NZ to transition to open access are identified as author self-archiving, the article publication charge (APC) model, or transformative agreement. The preprint initiative can effectively complement the above three approaches by making early versions of journal papers publicly accessible. The author self-archiving model requires little extra cost and can make a huge difference to the accessibility of accepted manuscripts. US$2,000,000+ needs to be set aside by NZ funders to publish all papers via the APC route, based on a rough estimate. Council for New Zealand University Libraries (CONZUL) could seek to reach cost-neutral transformative agreements with publishers by re-purposing their current subscription expenditure. An explicit national-level open access policy is expected to be made by NZ government and funders. We need a NZ solution instead of simply replicating others.
From product maintenance and service point of view, high-value sophisticated computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools in modern manufacturing factories play important roles: they are manufacturing equipment, and on the other hand, they are also products supplied by equipment manufacturers. There is a trend that manufacturers are extending their responsibilities to the products use phase to meet customers' requirements for lifetime support and service. To ensure the effective performance and efficient maintenance of high-value machine tools, information and knowledge from their lifecycle should be collected and reused. However, in the research area of product service systems and related computerised maintenance systems, there is a lack of research work on how to integrate knowledge from different stakeholders into the maintenance and service planning process, which is important for modern digital manufacturing systems to reduce machine tools' downtime and improve their working performance. This project proposed a collaborative maintenance planning framework to connect different stakeholders and integrate their knowledge into the maintenance and service process. The potential of advanced content management systems (CMSs), which are widely used non-engineering sectors such as finance, business, publishing and government organisations, has been explored and tested for applications in the manufacturing engineering domain. The research realised that CMSs have several advantages compared with traditional engineering information systems, especially in managing dynamic and unstructured knowledge. A prototype maintenance and service planning system has been developed and evaluated using a real CNC machine tool.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Anxiety plays an important role in psychology. An exploration of anxiety and its associated reactions may provide insight into measures for addressing mental health problems caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Data from this study provide potential correlational responses to anxiety. METHODS: A cross-sectional study using data collected via an online self-reported questionnaire was conducted in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-6), we assessed anxiety levels and explored the relationship between anxiety STAI-6 score, sources of COVID-19 information, the influences of COVID-19, social anxiety symptoms, discrimination, and evaluation of the government. RESULTS: A total of 4,127 participants were included in the analysis. The level of anxiety was not equally distributed across the general population with respect to age, gender, educational level, occupation, income, presence of underlying disease, and location (p < 0.05). The number of sources of information on COVID-19 had a positive correlation with the STAI-6 score (Spearman's rho = 0.176, p < 0.001). The influence of the pandemic was correlated with moderate–severe anxiety. A high level of anxiety added to social anxiety (Spearman's rho = 0.04, p < 0.05) and discriminatory behavior (Spearman's rho = 0.11, p < 0.01). Being female (Estimate = 0.926) and from a non-emergency area (Estimate = −0.308) was related to higher STAI scores, and higher education (Estimate = −0.305), and income (Estimate = −0.168) decreased the STAI score. The respondents who had a lower evaluative score of the preventive activities undertaken by the national and local governments had higher STAI-6 scores. CONCLUSION: Our findings provide statistical evidence for the associated reaction of anxiety and that anxiety reactions may vary in predictable ways. Further studies should focus on the strategic interventions that may decrease the associated responses to anxiety, to address ...
