Former Premier League striker Nile Ranger signs a contract with Kettering Town to run until next summer, with an option for a further 12 months.

Justice Hall returns to her old primary school to encourage children of all backgrounds to try the sport.

Community groups say they are being asked to put plans in place for terrorism, bombs and drones.

Paul Waring birdies the final two holes to win the Abu Dhabi Championship by two shots from fellow Englishman Tyrell Hatton.

The National Trust aims to convert disused farmland in Sefton into a thriving woodland habitat.

Dr Noweed Ahmad performs life-changing surgery that allows deaf people to hear.

Buildings that are normally inaccessible can now be explored virtually using smartphones.

Rebecca Moore, 25, is found guilty of her role in the murder of Sacad Ali in Sheffield on 9 March.

Nigel, from Somerset, decided to become a foster parent aged in his 80s after his wife died.

Former Shrewsbury School boy Sandy Irvine went missing climbing Everest 100 years ago.

Cambridge United manager Garry Monk will make a late decision on whether striker Shayne Lavery is fit to return in Saturday's derby with Peterborough United.

The Chapel and School Room church says the loss of the document will make it "harder to do burials".

The Sikh temple on Cardigan Street welcomes anyone from any background.

BBC Three Counties Radio is putting on free events in Bedford to promote mental health.

The gang, who nicknamed themselves The Sticky Bandits, hit 10 firms within six months.

“As a group of young people, we've kind of grown up and learned to ring together.”

A six-year-old Cumbrian "soldier" who has taken TikTok by storm prepares for Remembrance Day.

Norwich midfielder Gabriel Forsyth will not need surgery on a knee injury but will be out for more than a month.

All good things must come to an end, and this blog is no exception. When Chris Overd, Matthew Weyer, and Harrison Hoffman founded LiveSide.net back in December of 2005 (LiveSide’s first post was on January 3^rd, 2006, …

It's a well-known rule in journalism that if the headline asks a question, the answer is invariably "no". So to see the question above on this blog will probably not surprise you.

What might surprise you is to learn it was also the headline of a prominently-featured article on the BBC website yesterday. Of course, as is the current fad, when they say "prostitutes" they mean "trafficking", and vice-versa.

It's been long known that there is no connection between major international sporting events such as the Olympics, the World Cup, and sex trafficking. But don't take my word for it. Take the word of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who hosted a meeting on this very topic earlier this year. Take the word of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, who produced a must-read report (pdf) on the actual effects of sports events on human trafficking. Go check out Laura Agustin's excellent summary too.

The facts:

• 2010 World Cup, South Africa: the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development did not find a single case of trafficking over the Olympics time period.

• 2010 Olympics, Canada: no evidence of trafficking and sex workers reported a fall in business.

• 2006 World Cup, Germany: 33 cases were referred to the police for further investigation, out of which 5 cases were confirmed to be trafficking (4 women and 1 man). No other cases were found, despite the fact that the police conducted 71 brothel raids (these raids did not identify the 5 confirmed trafficking cases, but did lead to 10 deportations).

• 2004 Olympics, Greece: When trafficking statistics were compared for all of 2004 with all of 2003, there was an increase of 181 trafficking cases (which is a 90% increase). According to both the police and the International Organization for Migration, none of these cases were linked to the Olympics.

• Super Bowls in the USA in 2008-2011: Although law enforcement increased, they made no additional arrests for sex work-related offences during this time.

You might be wondering, and it is a good question, why there isn't sex trafficking during these events. The answer is simple. Criminals may be criminals, but organised crime does not exist for the purpose of being evil. It exists to make loads of tax-free dosh. Does it make financial sense for sex trafficking to occur at these events? With London rents skyrocketing around the venues, with the Home Office plans to tighten border security, with the police already well misinformed about the magnitude of the trafficking problem, you'd have to be mad to pursue this as a business plan.

There was perhaps a time, back in the 90s, when sex trafficking in some parts of Eastern Europe might have netted you some cash if you already had the distribution network, but it's not the case now. Add to that a large native population willing and legally able to exchange money for sex and you'd be laughed out of Dragon's Den for even suggesting it as a goer. I've met a lot of dodgy characters in my day - drug dealers and worse besides - and to a person they were not in it to lose money. In many cases the black marketeers I know were actually better businesspeople than anyone in legit trading.

In spite of all this, we are still treated - almost daily now in the run-up to London 2012 - with the same old guff such as stories that sex trafficking 'almost doubled' during the Athens Olympics.

In this particular case, 'almost doubled' means that the number of reported incidents was 181, a 90% increase over the previous year. So yes, they did 'almost double'.

However if you too are underwhelmed by that number, it's with good reason. Applying all the usual disclaimers - any instance of forced sex trafficking is abhorrent and should be prosecuted vigorously, this is an argument about best use of police time, tax money and other resources - what does the reported change from just-shy-of-100 people to 181 actually represent?

Prostitution is legal and regulated in Greece, however, not everyone works legally and not everyone registers, because hello, do you want your name on the Greek government's hooker list? Probably not. Anyway, estimates put the number at about 1,000 legal prostitutes and 20,000 illegal ones. Given that these numbers are the ones put about by the US State Department which does not have a great track record on accuracy, it's a little suspect. But let's say for the sake of saying that represents some kind of starting ballpark figure and probably even an overestimate. The 21,000 total gives us about 1 in every 250 women in Greece working as a prostitute - actually a realistic enough proportion for Europe.

In the year before the Athens Olympics, the reports of sex trafficking at 95 represented 0.45% of all prostitution in Greece. And after the Olympics? 0.86%. Less than 1% of prostitutes in Greece were trafficked both before and after the Olympics.

There is no particular evidence, statistical or otherwise, to suggest that the fluctuation in this rather small number was due to the Olympics per se. In fact it is certainly within the bounds of what we call the 'law of small numbers' which dictates that they can and do fluctuate in a way that represents a high percentage of the values themselves, but given the rarity of the events involved, this is expected and not necessarily significant.

Here's an example. Let's say in the year 2008, there was 1 death in all of Scotland from a vending machine falling on someone. Then let's say a year later, in 2009, there were 2 such deaths. While it would be technically true to say that the number of vending machine accidental deaths 'doubled', is this a fair representation of the data? Is this a significant trend that is likely to continue? (Which would mean that by 2032, there would be 8.38 million such deaths in Scotland, or approximately... er, 150% of the population). No, obviously not. The change from 1 to 2 in a given year seems clearly attributable to chance. You'd be silly to conclude the change from one small number to another "means" very much without a lot of additional evidence.

If you've read my paper on the effects of lap dancing on sexual violence in London, you'll already be aware of how over time these small numbers fluctuate wildly. For context, the UNHCR gives the number of trafficked persons for Greece as 137 in 2005, 83 in 2006, 100 in 2007, 162 in 2008, 125 in 2009, 92 in 2010.

Now if these things had no knock-on effect, and if police resources and tax money were infinite, then sure, why not go after human trafficking even if it's only a very tiny proportion of all sex work in Greece - or in the more immediate case, London? But alas, it is not a matter of infinite police time and tax money. And it is definitely not a matter of no knock-on effects.

According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, "Police crackdowns and brothel closures tend to displace sex workers from flats and saunas to less safe work venues, including the street, and make them wary of all authorities so they are less likely to access services or to report episodes of violence or crime to the police."

Given that the anti-sex lobby are so dead keen to keep claiming that all sex workers are inevitably the victims of violent and sex crimes, that seems like it's going to affect a hell of a lot more than a couple hundred people, no? Why does a small number of people matter to them more than a potentially far larger pool of people? Is it because that's where the grant money and column inches are at?

Not only is this increased danger the outcome in previous incidents of trafficking panic, it's happening right now in London. The Moratorium 2012 campaign, organised by x:talk, confirms:

Stop the Arrests Campaign is aware of ‘clean up efforts’ already underway in London, particularly east London, in the run-up to the Olympics ... Last December in Barking and Dagenham a violent gang carried out a series of robberies on brothels at knife point. Sex workers were deterred from pursuing the attacks after police threatened them with prosecution. Thus many more were attacked and one woman was raped.

Got that? Send the police after non-existent sex trafficking, and they end up cracking down on non-trafficked sex workers. When that happens, people in sex work are put in more danger. No one is made safer by doing this. No one is saved. Moratorium 2012 is calling on an end to the pointless and dangerous harassment. Please, sign the petition.

This isn’t the first time a president claimed democracy was ‘under attack’

Google's Store Ratings have been helping US merchants highlight the high quality experiences other shoppers have had right from Search, and we're now bringing store ratings to English-language shopping searches in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom.

This paper presents a system that simulates, in real time, the volumetric deformation of muscles during human locomotion. We propose a two-layered motion model. The requirements of realism and real time computation lead to a hybrid locomotion system that uses a skeleton as first layer. The muscles, represented by an anatomical surface model, constitute the second layer, whose deformations are simulated with a finite element method (FEM). The FEM subsystem is fed by the torques and forces got from the locomotion system, through a line of action model, and takes into account the geometry and material properties of the muscles. High level parameters (like height, weight, physical constitution, step frequency, step length or speed) allow to customize the individuals and the locomotion and therefore, the deformation of the persons' muscles.

Siemens is well known for ambitious efforts in knowledge management, providing a series of innovative tools and applications within the intranet. References@BT is such a web-based application with currently more than 7,300 registered users from more than 70 countries. Its goal is to support the sharing of knowledge, experiences and best-practices globally within the Building Technologies division. Launched in 2005, References@BT features structured knowledge references, discussion forums, and a basic social networking service. In response to use demand, a new microblogging service, tightly integrated into References@BT, was implemented in March 2009. More than 500 authors have created around 2,600 microblog postings since then. Following a brief introduction into the community platform References@BT, we comprehensively describe the motivation, experiences and advantages for an organization in providing internal microblogging services. We provide detailed microblog usage statistics, analyzing the top ten users regarding postings and followers as well as the top ten topics. In doing so, we aim to shed light on microblogging usage and adoption within a globally distributed organization.

Collaborative Filtering(CF) is a well-known technique in recommender systems. CF exploits relationships between users and recommends items to the active user according to the ratings of his/her neighbors. CF suffers from the data sparsity problem, where users only rate a small set of items. That makes the computation of similarity between users imprecise and consequently reduces the accuracy of CF algorithms. In this article, we propose a clustering approach based on the social information of users to derive the recommendations. We study the application of this approach in two application scenarios: academic venue recommendation based on collaboration information and trust-based recommendation. Using the data from DBLP digital library and Epinion, the evaluation shows that our clustering technique based CF performs better than traditional CF algorithms.

A feature model (FM) defines the valid combinations of features, whose combinations correspond to a program in a Software Product Line (SPL). FMs may evolve, for instance, during refactoring activities. Developers may use a catalog of refactorings as support. However, the catalog is incomplete in principle. Additionally, it is non-trivial to propose correct refactorings. To our knowledge, no previous analysis technique for FMs is used for checking properties of general FM refactorings (a transformation that can be applied to a number of FMs) containing a representative number of features. We propose an efficient encoding of FMs in the Alloy formal specification language. Based on this encoding, we show how the Alloy Analyzer tool, which performs analysis on Alloy models, can be used to automatically check whether encoded general and specific FM refactorings are correct. Our approach can analyze general transformations automatically to a significant scale in a few seconds. In order to evaluate the analysis performance of our encoding, we evaluated in automatically generated FMs ranging from 500 to 2,000 features. Furthermore, we analyze the soundness of general transformations.

Project monitoring plays a crucial role in project management, which is a part of every stage of a project's life-cycle. Nevertheless, along with the increasing ratio of outsourcing in many companies' strategic plans, project monitoring has been challenged by geographically dispersed project teams and culturally diverse team members. Furthermore, because of the lack of a uniform standard, data exchange between various project monitoring software becomes an impossible mission. These factors together lead to the issue of ambiguity in project monitoring processes. Ontology is a form of knowledge representation with the purpose of disambiguation. Consequently, in this paper, we propose the framework of an ontology-based real-time project monitoring system (ORPSM), in order to, by means of ontologies, solve the ambiguity issue in project monitoring processes caused by multiple factors. The framework incorporates a series of ontologies for knowledge capture, storage, sharing and term disambiguation in project monitoring processes, and a series of metrics for assisting management of project organizations to better monitor projects. We propose to configure the ORPMS framework in a cloud environment, aiming at providing the project monitoring service to geographically distributed and dynamic project members with great flexibility, scalability and security. A case study is conducted on a prototype of the ORPMS in order to evaluate the framework.

1. Niagara Health offering free parking after delays reported  News Talk 610 CKTB
2. Implementation of new Niagara Health patient info system resulting in long wait times  St. Catharines Standard
3. Temporary delays impacting registration at emergency departments  Thorold News
4. Niagara Health Working Through Delays  101.1 More FM
5. Niagara Health experiencing temporary delays impacting registration and EDs  Niagara Health

Overwhelmed families surrendering custody of their children to CAS  CTV News Northern Ontario

by Mitchell Longan[1] Introduction The European Parliament is currently considering a proposal to address problems of piracy and other forms of copyright infringement associated with the digital world.[2] Article 13 of the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single

Through the unparalleled espousal of theory of planned behaviour, this study intends to significantly add to the current knowledge on social networking sites (SNS) in <i>eWOM</i> information and its role in defining intentions to buy green products. In specie, this study seeks to first investigate the part played by <i>attitude towards SNS information</i> in influencing the <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> and then by <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> in effecting the <i>green purchase intention</i>. Besides this, it also aims to analyse the influence exerted by first <i>credibility of SNS information</i> on <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> and then by <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> on <i>green purchase intention</i>. In doing so, it also examines how well the age of the SNS users moderates all these four associations.

This study examines Form 10-K filing lags of US firms during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021. The findings suggest that filing lags relate negatively to firm size, profitability, hiring Big4 auditors, and filing status, but positively to ineffective internal control, ineffective disclosure control, and going concern opinion. Large accelerated and accelerated filers had shorter filing lags, and non-accelerated filers had longer filing lags in 2020-2021 than 2018-2019. Further analysis provides mild evidence that Big4 auditors contributed to the filing lag reduction in 2020-2021, echoing the view that adopting advanced audit technologies allows Big4 auditors to respond better to the external shocks brought by the pandemic.

Supply chain management practices are vital for success and survival in today's competitive Indian retail market. The advent of COVID-19 pandemic necessitates a digital disruption in retail supply chain management centred on efficient technology like blockchain in order to enhance supply chain performance. The present research aims to decipher the nature of associations between supply chain management practices, blockchain technology adoption and supply chain performance in retail firms. The research is based on primary survey of specific food and grocery retailers operating on a supermarket format stores in two Indian cities. The findings pointed towards the presence of significant and positive association of all the constructs with each other. Moreover, the mediating role of blockchain technology adoption was also revealed, i.e., it partially mediates the effects of supply chain management practices on supply chain performance.

Word of mouth (WOM) and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) are very effective and important communication tools to persuade consumers for purchasing the products/services. These become more significant with products that are difficult to assess before consumption, e.g., hospitality. The tourism industry is reviving, and the consumer is conscious when booking a particular destination. Thus, it is important to understand how WOM and eWOM are impacting the various factors in distinct ways while choosing the tourist destination. The seven factors identified, for the present study, are channel engagement, expertise, homophily, resource helpfulness, source credibility, tie-strength, and trustworthiness. The PLS-SEM was used to test the theoretical model of this study. The study shows that both WOM and eWOM impact an individual in different ways. The expertise of the reviewer is the most important factor in the case of WOM and channel engagement is the most significant factor for eWOM. Resource helpfulness is common for both WOM and eWOM.

Along with amazing advancements in the field of digital payments, this article seeks to provide a summary of research undertaken over the last four decades and to suggest areas in need of additional study. This study employs a two-pronged technique for analysing its data. The first is concerned with performance analysis, and the second with science mapping. The study uses the apps VOS viewer and R-studio to do bibliometric data analysis. From 1982 until May 2022, the most trustworthy database, Scopus, is used to compile a database of 923 publications The findings of this study identify the scope of current research interest, which is explored with critical contributions from a variety of authors, journals, countries, affiliations, keyword analysis, citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and bibliometric coupling, as well as a potential research direction for further investigation in this emerging field.

The spread of COVID-19 results in disruption, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in all businesses. Employees help companies achieve their aims. To manage human resources sustainably, analyse organisational strategy. This thorough research study attempts to find previously unidentified challenges, cutting-edge techniques, and surprising decisions in human resource management outside of healthcare organisations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrative review examined corporate human resource management measures to mitigate COVID-19. Fifteen publications were selected for the study after removing duplicates and applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. This article examines HR's COVID-19 response. Human resource management's response to economic and financial crises has been extensively studied, but the COVID-19 pandemic has not. This paper reviewed the literature to reach its goal. The results followed the AMO framework for human resource policies and procedures and the HR management system. This document suggests COVID-19 pandemic-related changes to human resource management system architecture, policies, and practises. The study created a COVID-19 pandemic human resource management framework based on the literature. The COVID-19 pandemic had several negative effects, including social and behavioural changes, economic shock, and organisational disruption.

The intelligent financial sharing platform in the online realm is capable of collecting, storing, processing, analysing and sharing financial data through the integration of AI and big data processing technologies. However, as data volume grows exponentially, the cost of financial data storage and processing increases, and the asset accounting and financial profit data sharing analysis structure in financial sharing platforms is inadequate. To address the issue of data security sharing in the intelligent financial digital sharing platform, this paper proposes a data-sharing framework based on blockchain and edge computing. Building upon this framework, a non-separable task distribution algorithm based on data sharing is developed, which employs multiple nodes for cooperative data storage, reducing the pressure on the central server for data storage and solving the problem of non-separable task distribution. Multiple sets of comparative experiments confirm the proposed scheme has good feasibility in improving algorithm performance and reducing energy consumption and latency.

With the expansion of business scope, the environment faced by enterprises has also changed, and competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Traditional financial systems are increasingly difficult to handle complex tasks and predict potential financial risks. In the context of the digital economy era, the booming financial sharing services have reduced labour costs and improved operational efficiency. This paper designs and implements an intelligent financial sharing platform, establishes a fund payment risk early warning model based on an improved support vector machine algorithm, and tests it on the Financial Distress Prediction dataset. The experimental results show that the effectiveness of using F2 score and AUC evaluation methods can reach 0.9484 and 0.9023, respectively. After using this system, the average financial processing time per order decreases by 43%, and the overall financial processing time decreases by 27%. Finally, this paper discusses the role of intelligent financial sharing platform in accounting transformation and optimisation of production.

This study investigates the well-being of healthcare professionals in India, with a specific focus on the detrimental effects of the pandemic on their mental and physical health, including stress, burnout, and fatigue. This research examines the roles played by calling, mindfulness, and compassionate love as essential resources in promoting the well-being of healthcare professionals. Utilising structural equation modelling (SEM), the results reveal a significant cause and effect relationship between calling, mindfulness, and compassionate love and their influence on overall well-being. Furthermore, the study identifies a noteworthy parallel mediation effect, demonstrating that mindfulness and compassionate love serve as mediators in the relationship between calling and well-being. This research offers practitioners invaluable insights into the effective utilisation of mindfulness and compassionate love practices to enhance the overall well-being of healthcare professionals.

This empirical study investigates the mediating role of two components of psychological capital (PsyCap), namely self-efficacy and optimism, in the context of the relationship between transformational leadership (TL), work engagement (WE), and innovative work behaviour (IWB). The study was conducted among IT professionals with a minimum of three years of experience employed in Chennai, India. Data collection was executed using a Google Form, and both measurement and structural models were examined using SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 23.0. The findings of this study reveal several significant relationships. Firstly, transformational leadership (TL) demonstrates a robust positive association with work engagement (WE). Furthermore, work engagement (WE) positively correlates substantially with innovative work behaviour (IWB). Notably, the study underscores that two crucial components of psychological capital, specifically self-efficacy and optimism, mediate the relationship between transformational leadership (TL) and work engagement (WE). These findings carry valuable implications for IT company managers. Recognising that transformational leadership positively influences both work engagement and employees' innovative work behaviour highlights the pivotal role of leaders in fostering a productive and innovative work environment within IT organisations.

Intellectual assets, especially its relational forms, have become increasingly important to explain a firm's innovation. To examine relational forms of intellectual assets (IA), this study theoretically and empirically advances a concept of alliance management capability (AMC) to explain the value creation and capture aspects of a firm's innovation process. The concepts of value-creating alliance experiences (VCAE) and value capturing alliance experiences (VCPAE) were introduced in which a firm's ability to learn from these alliance experiences increases the firm's ability to discover and govern partnerships that bring the firm's innovations to market. Hypotheses were developed and empirically examined in the biotechnology industry. A contribution of this study is that a firm's VCAE and VCPAE introduce a greater 'openness' to a firm's innovation process. This openness enables a firm to better adapt and respond to the opportunities of the market and thus impact a firm's competitive advantage to innovate.

This article explores dual affiliated graduate students that conduct research involving both universities and firms, which we conceptualise as a form of academic engagement, e.g., knowledge networks. We explore what they do during their studies, and their perceptions about their contributions to the firm's capacities for technology and innovation. So far, university-industry interactions in engineering are less researched than other fields, and this qualitative study focuses upon one department of Electrical Engineering in Sweden. First, we define and describe how the partner firms and universities organise this research collaboration as a form of academic engagement. Secondly, we propose a conceptual framework specifying how graduate students act as boundary-spanners between universities and firms. This framework is used for the empirical analysis, when exploring their perceptions of impact. Our results reveal that they primarily engage in problem-solving activities in technology, which augment particularly the early stages of absorptive capacities in firms.

Pandemic has compelled the entire world to change their way of life and work. To control the infection rate, academic institutes deliver education online similarly. At least one smartphone is available in every home, and students use their smartphones to attend class. The study investigates the link between smartphone usage (SU) and academic performance (AP) during the pandemic. 490 data were obtained from various institutions and undergraduate students using stratified random sampling. These components were identified using factor analysis and descriptive methods, while the relationship of SU and AP based on gender classification was tested using Smart-PLS-SEM. The findings show that SU has a substantial relationship with academic success, whether done in class or outside of it. Even yet, the study found that SU and AP significantly impact both male and female students. Furthermore, the research focuses on SU outside and within the classroom to improve students' AP.