Access to finance for small and medium enterprises in developing countries: key issues and options.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute an essential sector in developed and developing economies. Using evidence from extant literature, recent market trends, and an array of statistics from reputable organisations concerned with SME issues, this chapter unravels the myriad of challenges faced by SMEs in accessing finance, different financing options available, and diverse ways of removing fund access bottlenecks using technological, institutional, and governmental instruments. Additionally, the study discusses a catalogue of financing options that SMEs can deploy or combine to meet the business needs. The paper ends with a discussion of various strategies/mechanisms for removing SMEs’ financing barriers alongside future opportunities for more inclusive and sustainable funding access globally

Harris Tweed Hebrides: producing, promoting, and protecting Harris Tweed in the 21st century.

This paper on Harris Tweed today discusses projects with Scottish textile manufacturer Harris Tweed Hebrides (HTH) that focused on reducing the seasonality of their all-wool product, exploring new markets, and digital and sustainable innovations within their communication, design, and production processes. The partnership project was between HTH and Robert Gordon University where they collaborated on a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) and funded research project, to address the needs of the industry in producing, promoting, and protecting Harris Tweed in the 21st century. Reflecting on the projects, the authors detail the new practices instigated within the context of the changes that have taken place in the Harris Tweed industry since Judith Ennew's chapter 'Harris Tweed: construction, retention and representation of a cottage industry' in Esther Goody's (ed.) From Craft to Industry (1982) book. While a timespan of over forty years has passed, elements of Ennew’s media constructed Hebridean Myth continue to play a role in the communication and marketing of Harris Tweed, however digital and immersive interventions provide opportunity for modernisation of both the brand’s processes and consumer perceptions about Harris Tweed

KD-LSRED: knowledge distillation for lightweight symbol recognition in engineering diagrams.

Engineering diagrams (EDs) provide a rich source of information and play a critical role across various industries. However, the inherent complexity of EDs complicates automatic analysis and processing. These diagrams often contain 100 to 200 visually similar symbols, leading to challenges such as inter-class similarity, overlapping symbols, and substantial background noise. Although recent deep learning-based architectures have shown promising performance in recognising these symbols, these models are heavy and computationally expensive, restricting their use for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Thus, we propose a lightweight knowledge distillation framework for EDs. The framework integrates feature-based and output-level distillation, enabling a lightweight student model to learn from a more complex teacher model. Feature-based distillation is enhanced through Channel-Wise Distillation (CWD) loss, improving spatial and contextual representation, and reducing computational complexity. The output-level distillation employs Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to closely align the student model predictions with the teacher’s probability distributions. Extensive experiments on private and public datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves a 6.9% improvement in mean average precision (mAP), reduces model size by 74.5% and decreases computational cost by 82.7%. The proposed method offers significant potential for real-time industrial applications on edge devices and sets the foundation for further advancements in ED analysis

Corresponding with matters of pedagogy: Bauhaus, Black Mountain and beyond.

This chapter explores the relationship between the modern art school approach to un-learning and anthropology; with specific reference to Bauhaus, Black Mountain and its global resonance and continuum. As Tim Ingold reminds us, the artist-educator Paul Klee repeatedly insisted, and demonstrated by example, that the processes of genesis and growth that give rise to forms in the world we inhabit are more important than the forms themselves. As Klee wrote in his notebook, ‘Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life’ (Klee). This, in turn, lay at the heart of his celebrated ‘Creative Credo’ of 1920: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ (Klee). It does not, in other words, seek to replicate finished forms that are already settled, whether as images in the mind or as objects in the world. It seeks, rather, to join with those very forces that bring the form into being (Ingold). Using this statement as a trigger the text will explore how Paul Klee’s pedagogic approach played a significant part in the formation of the art school ecology and how that relates to the way we live our lives and shape and form our futures

Contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav space: case studies in hauntology.

This edited volume is centered on the production, discussion, and consumption of contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav space now. Authors in this volume demonstrate how and why contemporary art discourses have continued to overcome chronic difficulties in local cultural economies since the dissolution of the common federal space of socialist Yugoslavia. This book focuses on socialist Yugoslavia's prevailing cultural legacies of anti-fascism, non-alignment, queer and feminist movements, and socially engaged art, which inform and shape contemporary critiques of neoliberal capitalist conditions in the arts. Chapters are rooted in ongoing global challenges in contemporary art: a universal exhaustion through over-work (on the part of the artist/art worker) and over-stimulation (the audience); the structural weakness of contemporary art as a set of institutional activities; and the instrumentalization of art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, gender studies, Slavic studies, politics, and post-conflict studies

Data systems education: curriculum recommendations, course syllabi, and industry needs.

Data systems have been an important part of computing curricula for decades, and an integral part of data-focused industry roles such as software developers, data engineers, and data scientists. However, the field of data systems encompasses a large number of topics ranging from data manipulation and database distribution to creating data pipelines and data analytics solutions. Due to the slow nature of curriculum development, it remains unclear (i) which data systems topics are recommended across diverse higher education curriculum guidelines, (ii) which topics are taught in higher education data systems courses, and (iii) which data systems topics are actually valued in data-focused industry roles. In this study, we analyzed computing curriculum guidelines, course contents, and industry needs regarding data systems to uncover discrepancies between them. Our results show, for example, that topics such as data visualization, data warehousing, and semi-structured data models are valued in industry, yet seldom taught in courses. This work allows professionals to further align curriculum guidelines, higher education, and data systems industry to better prepare students for their working life by focusing on relevant skills in data systems education

Stitching urban vision (SUV): psychogeographic and visual content analysis in co-creating collaborative capacity among children. [Case study]

This case study explores the "Stitching Urban Vision" (SUV) method, which aims to help children develop negotiation skills with a view to achieving successful outcomes, rather than the delayed, unresolved or fragmented outcomes that can result from other negotiation methods. Studies in the use of SUV have demonstrated how disparate and self-drawn ideas can be stitched into an intelligible shared vision

GASSM: global attention and state space model based end-to-end hyperspectral change detection.

As an essential task to identify anomalies and monitor changes over time, change detection enables detailed earth observation in remote sensing. By combining both the rich spectral information and spatial image, hyperspectral images (HSI) have offered unique and significant advantages for change detection. However, traditional hyperspectral change detection (HCD) methods, predominantly based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), struggle with capturing long-range spatial-spectral dependencies due to their limited receptive fields. Whilst transformers based HCD methods are capable of modeling such dependencies, they often suffer from quadratic growth of the computational complexity. Considering the unique capabilities in offering robust long-range sequence modeling yet with linear computational complexity, the emerging Mamba model has provided a promising alternative. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach that integrates the global attention (GA) and state space model (SSM) to form our GASSM network for HCD. The SSM based Mamba block has been introduced to model global spatial-spectral features, followed by a fully connected layer to perform binary classification of detected changes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first to explore using the Mamba and SSM for HCD. Comprehensive experiments on two publicly available datasets, compared with eight state-of-the-art benchmarks, have validated the efficacy and efficiency of our GASSM model, demonstrating its superiority of high accuracy and stability in HCD

Immersive innovations for the communication of heritage, handcraft and sustainability.

Textile and fashion brands convey core values through marketing, and in slow-fashion heritage brands this often includes skilled craftsmanship, authenticity, sustainability and provenance. As industry digitalisation continues, brands are employing immersive technologies – virtual (VR) or augmented (AR) reality – however there is scarce evidence of these being used to communicate craftsmanship or provenance. To explore this potential, survey participants were shown immersive and traditional marketing content and perceptions of brand image were sought. The immersive content elicited new brand associations compared with the traditional content, which may be desirable if targeting a younger or more fashion-forward demographic. However, the immersive content was less effective at inspiring participants to make a purchase, with many participants overwhelmed by the virtual environment. The research concludes that effective immersive content should incorporate a streamlined representation of brand identity and core values, utilising an accessible platform while the adoption of VR headsets remains limited

Food insecurity, diabetes self-management and support for self-management in high income countries: a qualitative systematic review and synthesis (2008 to 2024).

People living with diabetes and food insecurity in high-income countries have poorer health-related outcomes than those who are food secure. Diabetes is a significant global health challenge. At the same time, the prevalence of household food insecurity continues to increase. This qualitative systematic review and synthesis explored the lived experience of diabetes self-management and support for self-management for people living with diabetes and food insecurity in high-income countries. Keywords and search terms were developed using the PICo framework with searches conducted between January 2008 and August 2024. Titles and abstracts were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the methodological quality of included papers was assessed using the Critical Appraisal Checklist for Qualitative Research and CERQual. Findings from 18 articles (detailing 17 studies) identified four interlinked themes: structural challenges, day-to-day challenges, ways of being for people living with food insecurity and diabetes, and self and support for self-management needs. Structural challenges (poverty, sociocultural and discrimination) were identified as the main determinants of the day-to-day challenges for people living with diabetes and food insecurity. Those challenges included the following: (i)limited access to suitable foods and food management resources; (ii) stress, (iii) poverty and diabetes stigma, (iv) limited informal support, (v) perceived lack of appropriate support from healthcare practitioners, and limited knowledge, confidence and understanding and access to information. The resulting ways of being for people affected were characterised by experiences of subsisting, avoiding, balancing and prioritising. Self and support for self-management needs were characterised by two themes improve[ing] clinical conversations and, support beyond health services. People living with diabetes and food insecurity are adopting methods of self-management, due to economic necessity, which may not be appropriate from a healthcare perspective, and which may be impacting their short and long-term health. There is an urgent need to address these issues in the post COVID-19 pandemic context for effective diabetes prevention and management