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The purpose of this study is to explore the potential of Cordyline Australis fibers as an alternate raw material for textile.

The water retting method was used to extract the fiber. Cordyline Australis fibers were characterized in terms of the morphology of fibers (fiber cross-sectional and longitudinal), fiber chemical functional groups, tensile strength and elongation, fineness, fiber length, moisture regain and friction coefficient.

Cordyline Australis fiber strands consist of several individual fibers. At the longitudinal section, the fiber cells appeared as long cylindrical tubes with a rough surface. The cross-section of the Cordyline Australis fibers was irregular but some were oval. The key components in the fibers were cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The tensile strength of the fiber per bundle was 2.5 gf/den. The elongation of fibers was 13.15%. The fineness of fiber was 8.35 Tex. The average length of the fibers was 54.72 cm. Moisture Regain for fiber was 8.59%. The friction coefficient of fibers was 0.16. The properties of the fiber showed that the Cordyline Australis fiber has the potential to be produced into yarn.

To the best of the author's knowledge, there is no scientific article focused on the Cordyline Australis fibers. Natural fibers from the leaves of the Cordyline Australis plant could be used as an alternate material for textile.

This paper seeks to develop an adaptive finite volume algorithm, and to present an extensive numerical analysis of it.

The effectiveness of the developed algorithm is demonstrated through practical and computationally challenging problems. The algorithm is tested for a wide range of singularities.

The convergence of the presented algorithm is independent of the regularity of the problems. It is shown that the our algorithm produces more accurate and well conditioned matrix systems.

Though the presented algorithm works for extreme singularities on rectangular meshes, it may not be as efficient if the underlying meshes are distorted, and it may not converge. Further research is under way for including the multi‐point approximation technique into the algorithm.

Almost all reservoir simulators use the two‐point method, and this algorithm is based on this method. The algorithm can be easily incorporated into the reservoir simulators. The results show that such an implementation will greatly improve the computational efficiency of the simulators. The work is useful for computational scientists, and especially for the researchers in oil industries. The paper reports the numerical work with practical applications.

The paper develops an adaptive finite volume algorithm. It is shown that adaptive meshes represent the underlying problem more accurately, and matrix systems associated with adaptive meshes are easier to solve compared with matrix systems associated with uniform meshes.

In the last 10 years, India has amended its laws dealing with sexual offences against women with the changes ranging from increasing terms of imprisonment for the offence of rape to state-funded compensation schemes for women and child victims. In this regard, challenges persist for the agencies of the criminal justice system in India especially the courts to realise the vision of restorative justice as these forums have to navigate the relevant statutory provisions and binding precedents. This chapter seeks to analyse the challenges faced by courts in proper reintegration of victims and offenders of sexual offences, the institutional responses of the courts and suggests reforms to the criminal justice system in India in consonance with the principles of restorative justice acknowledged in the restorative justice movement in the international discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to critically look at how immigrants to Canada are informed and educated about how to become productive members of society. The authors adopted a postcolonial framework to unveil the underlying assumptions embedded in the messages that are conveyed to “teach” and “prepare” immigrants for the Canadian workplace. In particular, the authors focus on non-white immigrants because they form the majority of immigrants to Canada and at the same time data show that they experience particular socio-economic obstacles in their settlement process that European immigrants did not.

The authors apply postcolonialism as the theoretical framework. This approach allows the authors to analyze the relationship between the local subject and the encounter with the non-local other, in this case the immigrant who is from a non-European background. The authors conduct a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis on selected texts that serve as information sources for immigrants. These texts include government documents, immigrant information brochures, and workplace information books and booklets.

The analysis shows ideological positions that reveal discursive messages representing the non-white immigrant in binary terms. Such immigrants are represented in opposing (and inferior) terms to the local (largely white) Canadian citizen. By adopting a postcolonial lens, the analysis shows that the messages to acculturate immigrants reveal assimilationist features.

The authors acknowledge that the authors’ own personal socio-political, intellectual, and ideological locations influence the approach, logic, research process, and the interpretation of the findings. For future research, other textual sources should be analyzed with regard to the messages they convey to immigrants as a form of education to see what kind of acculturation is conveyed.

This paper sheds light on the necessity to develop policies that not only aim to acculturate immigrants using integration strategies but also to carefully communicate and educate newcomers through messages that that do not stem from colonial assumptions.

This research points out the taken-for granted and oftentimes invisible forms of discriminatory practices in the workplace that appear non-discriminatory on the surface but are rooted in colonial thinking. Consequently, the authors challenge “mainstream” management theories concerning diversity in the workplace by questioning the underlying messages portrayed to immigrants.

The case aims to understand and analyse the capital structure decisions made by a profit-making, growing organisation which aimed to be India’s premier airline and the market leader. The company that had pursued a high debt policy, to take advantage of the financial leverage that it would get, was now facing problems in an operating environment that proved to be challenging. A decline in operating profit, coupled with high-interest costs and an uncertain environment with cutthroat competition, had caused the company to plunge into losses. Attempts to deleverage by equity infusion were proving to be difficult. The case can be used in MBA, Executive Education and doctoral programmes. The learning objectives of this case are: to analyse the capital structure of the company, to interpret the relationship between financial leverage and risk, to assess the pecking order theory, to analyse the nuances of the aviation sector and the factors influencing the profitability of the companies in the aviation industry, to estimate the risks and the rewards associated with foreign currency loans, to evaluate the magnifying impact of the financial leverage and to propose deleveraging methods like sale and leaseback, debt conversion to equity and devise a revival strategy for the company.

The case discusses the dilemma faced by Naresh Goyal, promoter and chairman of Jet Airways (India) Limited. At the initial stage, Jet Airways, like many other companies in its growth phase, relied on borrowed funds to meet its investment needs. However, over-reliance on borrowed funds with just one equity infusion resulted in a high leverage ratio and an aggressive capital structure. Moreover, the company operated in a sector that was highly regulated, with competition that was cutthroat and a cost structure that was volatile. A high operating risk, coupled with high financial leverage, pushed the company into incurring losses. Having run out of cash, Jet Airways eventually defaulted on loan repayments to its lenders. Facing the eventuality of losing control of the company to lenders or to a strategic investor, Goyal was trying to figure out a way to save the company from insolvency and liquidation. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Goyal to keep Jet Airways, the company he had nurtured like a baby, airborne.

The case can be taught in both online and offline modes of delivery in a 90-minute session. Post-covid, the delivery mode of classes has changed. In online sessions, it may be a challenging task to ensure student participation.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the competitive landscape of emerging market economies (EMEs) and the implications of business models and strategies used by multinational enterprises (MNEs) to enter and operate in such landscapes. It does so by considering the aviation sector in an emerging economy – India, and by studying the strategies pursued by AirAsia India – the Indian joint venture of AirAsia Investment Limited and Tata Sons..

The paper follows a case study approach. Secondary data sources from the library, company website and newspaper articles have been used to build a case that would encourage students to discuss and analyze the competitive strategies followed by MNEs in EMEs.

Emerging markets offer attractive investment opportunities to MNEs across several industries. However, their markets for intermediate goods and services possess imperfections. Competitiveness in such markets will require going beyond country-specific and firm-specific advantages. MNEs will need to integrate location-specific advantages with internalization advantages of these market imperfections to operate successfully in the complex environments of EMEs. A one-size-fits-all approach of transposing successful strategies from home markets will fail to create value.

MNEs, such as AirAsia, will need to develop participatory skills to leverage the location-specific-advantages of EMEs and reduce their own curse of foreignness to be able to succeed in EMEs.

This paper contributes to extant literature by studying the competitive strategies pursued by a global leader in an EME. The case of the “World’s Best Low-Cost Airline” – AirAsia’s India operations seeks to go beyond the Eclectic Paradigm and the country-specific and firm-specific advantages framework, to provide a location-internalization paradigm for operating in EMEs.

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular as it facilitates convenient, ubiquitous, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources and applications that can be quickly retrieved and released. Despite its numerous merits, it faces setbacks in data security and privacy. Data encryption is one of the most popular solutions for data security in the cloud. Various encryption algorithms have been implemented to address security concerns. These algorithms have been reviewed along with the Jumbling Salting algorithm and its applications. The framework for using Jumbling Salting to encrypt text files in the cloud environment (CloudJS) has been thoroughly studied and improvised. The purpose of this paper is to implement the CloudJS algorithm, to discuss its performance and compare the obtained results with existing cloud encryption schemes.

The paper uses six research questions to analyze the performance of CloudJS algorithm in the cloud environment. The research questions are about measuring encryption time and throughput, decryption time and throughput, the ratio of cipher to the plain text of CloudJS algorithm with respect to other Cloud algorithms like AES and DES. For this purpose, the algorithm has been implemented using dockers-containers in the Linux environment.

It was found that CloudJS performs well in terms of encryption time, decryption time and throughput. It is marginally better than AES and undoubtedly better than DES in these parameters. The performance of the algorithm is not affected by a number of CPU cores, RAM size and Line size of text files. It performs decently well in all scenarios and all resultant values fall in the desired range.

CloudJS can be tested with cloud simulation platforms (CloudSim) and cloud service providers (AWS, Google Cloud). It can also be tested with other file types. In the future, CloudJS algorithm can also be implemented in images and other files.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first attempt to implement and analysis of a custom encryption algorithm (CloudJS) in the cloud environment using dockers-containers.

This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

Cancelled operations are a major drain on health resources: 8 per cent of scheduled elective operations are cancelled nationally, within 24 hours of surgery. The aim of this study is to define the extent of this problem in one Trust, and suggest strategies to reduce the cancellation rate.

A prospective survey was conducted over a 12‐month period to identify cancelled day case and in‐patient elective operations. A dedicated nurse practitioner was employed for this purpose, ensuring that the reasons for cancellation and the timing in relation to surgery were identified. The reasons for cancellation were grouped into patient‐related reasons, hospital clinical reasons and hospital non‐clinical reasons.

In total, 13,455 operations were undertaken during the research period and 1,916 (14 per cent) cancellations were recorded, of which 615 were day cases and 1,301 in‐patients: 45 per cent (n=867) of cancellations were within 24 hours of surgery; 51 per cent of cancellations were due to patient‐related reasons; 34 per cent were cancelled for non‐clinical reasons; and 15 per cent for clinical reasons. The common reasons for cancellation were inconvenient appointment (18.5 per cent), list over‐running (16 per cent), the patients thought that they were unfit for surgery (12.2 per cent) and emergencies and trauma (9.4 per cent).

This study demonstrates that 14 per cent of elective operations are cancelled, nearly half of which are within 24 hours of surgery. The cancellation rates could be significantly improved by directing resources to address patient‐related causes and hospital non‐clinical causes.

This paper is of value in that it is demonstrated that most cancellations of elective operations are due to patient‐related causes and several changes are suggested to try and limit the impact of these cancellations on elective operating lists.