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Agriculture and cultivation firms are facing severe competition in the saturated market. Due to the characteristics of heavy assets, low investment return, long cycle and high price fluctuation, agri-food firms require innovations for capital support. The purpose of this paper is to provide valuable insights on how firms in the food/agricultural industry approach innovations and reinforce their advantages through functional and structural innovations by adopting supply chain finance (SCF).

This research adopts a single-case study methodology to investigate the innovations and mechanisms taking place at H Corp Agriculture Group (H Corp hereafter), a Chinese egg company.

The findings of this paper indicate that SCF could have a great impact on supply chain management through functional and structural innovations throughout the supply chain and solve the capital constraint problems in the agricultural development process, promoting the implementation of the integration strategy as well as innovation in the agricultural industry chain. The research also shows that supply chain structural and functional innovations could promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) and creating shared value (CSV).

The research contributes to the application of SCF mechanisms and the realization of CSV and CSR jointly – both in the literature and in firms’ practices. It also contributes to the extension of structural and functional innovations and vertical integration of the supply chain. However, generalizability and universality are insufficient for a single case study in the specified industry. Data collection and quantitative analysis could be extended for further research.

The study addresses the need for comprehensive research on SCF and its applications. It proposes effective and efficient strategies for agri-food firms applying SCF to overcome industry capital constraints and develop competitiveness. It also provides a balanced and positive circulation between economic value and social value, realizing CSR and CSV.

Unsupervised domain adaptation object detection not only mitigates model terrible performance resulting from domain gap, but also has the ability to apply knowledge trained on a definite domain to a distinct domain. However, aligning the whole feature may confuse the object and background information, making it challenging to extract discriminative features. This paper aims to propose an improved approach which is called intrinsic feature extraction domain adaptation (IFEDA) to extract discriminative features effectively.

IFEDA consists of the intrinsic feature extraction (IFE) module and object consistency constraint (OCC). The IFE module, designed on the instance level, mainly solves the issue of the difficult extraction of discriminative object features. Specifically, the discriminative region of the objects can be paid more attention to. Meanwhile, the OCC is deployed to determine whether category prediction in the target domain brings into correspondence with it in the source domain.

Experimental results demonstrate the validity of our approach and achieve good outcomes on challenging data sets.

Limitations to this research are that only one target domain is applied, and it may change the ability of model generalization when the problem of insufficient data sets or unseen domain appeared.

This paper solves the issue of critical information defects by tackling the difficulty of extracting discriminative features. And the categories in both domains are compelled to be consistent for better object detection.

This paper aims to present the slip/no-slip design in two-dimensional water-lubricated tilting pad thrust bearings (TPTBs) considering the turbulence effect and shifting of pressure centers.

A numerical model is established to analyze the slip condition and the effect of turbulence according to a Reynolds number defined in terms of the slip condition. Simulations are carried out for eccentrically and centrally pivoted bearings and the influence of different slip parameters is discussed.

A considerable enhancement in load capacity, as well as a reduction in friction, can be achieved by heterogeneous slip/no-slip surface designs for lubricated sliding contacts, especially for near parallel pad configurations. The optimized design largely depends on the pivot position. The load capacity increases by 174 per cent for eccentrically pivoted bearings and 159 per cent for centrally pivoted bearings for a suitable design. When slip zone locates at the middle of the radial direction or close to the inner edge, the performance of the TPTB is better.

The simplification of slip effect on the turbulence (definition of Reynolds number) can only describe the trend of the increasing turbulence due to slip condition. The accurate turbulence expression considering the boundary slip needs further explorations.

The shifting of pressure center due to the slip/no-slip design for TPTBs is investigated in this study. The turbulence effect and influence of slip parameters is discussed for large water-lubricated bearings.

The multi-quadrics (MQ) function is a kind of radial basis function. And the MQ method has been successfully adopted as a type of meshless method in solving electromagnetic boundary value problems. However, the accuracy of MQ interpolation or solving equations is severely influenced by shape parameter. Thus the purpose of this paper is to propose a case-independent shape parameter selection strategy from the aspect of coefficient matrix condition number analysis.

The condition number of coefficient matrix is investigated. It is shown that the condition number is only a function of shape parameter and MQ node number, and is irrelevant to the interpolated function which means case-independent. The effective condition number which takes into account the interpolated function is introduced. Then, the relation between the relative root mean square error and condition number is analyzed. Three numerical experiments as transmission line, cable channel and grounding metal box model were carried out.

In the numerical experiments, there is an approximate linear relationship between the logarithm of the condition number and shape parameter, an approximate quadratic relationship with node number. And the optimal shape parameter is corresponding to the early stage of condition number oscillation.

This paper proposed a case-independent shape parameter selection strategy. For a finite precision computation, the upper limit of the condition number is predetermined. Therefore, the shape parameter can be chosen where condition number oscillates in early stage.

This paper aims to design a new surface profile with simpler processing technology, which makes the bearing load carrying capacity (LCC) close to that of conventional tilting-pad thrust bearing.

The paper analyzes the LCC of the thrust pad with crown profile and designs a new profile, whose performance is similar to the crown profile. The laser method is introduced to fabricate the new profile. The profile with tiny crown height can be fabricated by the laser with the proper parameters.

It was found that there is an optimum value, which is best in terms of the capacity of tilting-pad thrust bearing reach. The new profile with proper parameters can replace the crown profile.

The new profile can replace the crown profile and is easier to be made. The new design method could be adopted for designing the pad surface profile of the tilting-pad thrust bearing.

This aim of this paper has been to investigate the squeeze effect of a water-lubricated tilting-pad thrust bearing during start-up and shut-down periods.

In this paper a numerical model with a squeeze and slippage effect was adopted to analyse the asymmetry characteristic of a tilting-pad thrust bearing during start-up and shut-down periods. A test rig was built to verify numerical results, which were a combined measurement method in which acceleration sensor and torque sensor were used simultaneously to determine the angle change of the thrust pad.

It was found that as the velocity gradient increased, the difference of the minimum dimensionless film H_min could be ignored in the start-up process. But in the shut-down process, as the velocity gradient increased, the value of H_min also increased, which showed that there was an asymmetry characteristic of the tilting bearing in two processes. This phenomenon was verified by measuring the friction torque curve in the test.

The results of the studies demonstrated that the velocity gradient could be designed to reduce the friction of the thrust bearing, which would be beneficial to the working life of the tilting-pad thrust bearing.

The purpose of this paper is to review systematically the research of grey relation analysis (GRA) models.

Three different approaches, the springboard to build a GRA model, the angle of view in modelling, and the dimension of objects, are analysed, respectively.

The GRA models developed from the models based on relation coefficients of each point in the sequences in early days to the generalized GRA models based on integral or overall perspective. It evolved from the GRA models which measure similarity based on nearness, into the models which consider similarity and nearness, respectively. The objects of the research advanced from the analysis of relationship among curves to that among curved surfaces, and further to the analysis of relationship in three‐dimensional space and even the relationship among super surfaces in n‐dimensional space.

The further research on GRA models is proposed. One is about the property of GRA model. An in‐depth knowledge about the properties of GRA model will help people to understand its function, applicable area and requirements for modelling. The other one is about the extension of research object system. The object to be analysed should be extended from the common sequence of real numbers to grey numbers, vectors, matrices, and even multi‐dimensional matrices, etc.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the joint impact of trust, technology diffusion and organisational capacity on collaboration and investigate the effect of the interaction among them on business performance.

A conceptual model is formulated to achieve the study’s purpose. The research employs quantitative methodology to test the validity of the model. Pilot interviews were used to select applicable attribute for each of the model’s constructs and to revise the survey questionnaire. The survey is addressed to CEOs and senior managers of 500 electrical product manufacturers in Wenzhou province, China. The questionnaire covers 20 attributes of the model’s constructs, which are measured on a seven-point scale. A structured equation modelling software known as AMOS is used to analyse data.

Results indicate that trust is an antecedent factor for successful collaboration, but not as a factor directly affecting business performance. However, the research shows that collaboration plays a full mediator between trust and business performance. The empirical evidence from this research implied that technology diffusion do not translate properly into collaboration and the organisations do not give adequate attention to the process performance in making collaboration with partners. In addition, the electrical Chinese organisations do not consider that the commitments of their partners exceed the expectations.

This research limits investigation in China only and considers one type of industry, that is, the manufacturers of small products.

The conceptual model can be used as an audit tool for evaluating the effect of collaboration on business performance. Thus, managers could recognise weak attributes and plan for improvement.

This study provides new measurement instrument for evaluating the joint impact of collaboration, technology diffusion, trust and organisational capacity on business performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the research status and development trend of the field of event detection in social media (ED in SM) through a bibliometric analysis of academic publications.

First, publication distributions are analyzed including the trends of publications and citations, subject distribution, predominant journals, affiliations, authors, etc. Second, an indicator of collaboration degree is used to measure scientific connective relations from different perspectives. A network analysis method is then applied to reveal scientific collaboration relations. Furthermore, based on keyword co-occurrence analysis, major research themes and their evolutions throughout time span are discovered. Finally, a network analysis method is applied to visualize the analysis results.

The area of ED in SM has received increasing attention and interest in academia with Computer Science and Engineering as two major research subjects. The USA and China contribute the most to the area development. Affiliations and authors tend to collaborate more with those within the same country. Among the 14 identified research themes, newly emerged themes such as Pharmacovigilance event detection are discovered.

This study is the first to comprehensively illustrate the research status of ED in SM by conducting a bibliometric analysis. Up-to-date findings are reported, which can help relevant researchers understand the research trend, seek scientific collaborators and optimize research topic choices.

The authors seek to advance the understanding of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) internationalization at the regional level and examine the role of home market institutions in this process.

The authors analyze hypotheses with data from SMEs in five country markets and from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. A cluster analysis establishes the regional diversification patterns (based on regional diversification scope, speed and rhythm) and a multinomial regression tests the effect of home market institutions on their adoption.

The results offer a refined picture of SME regional diversification by revealing three patterns: intra-regionally focused firms, late inter-region diversifiers and early inter-region diversifiers. They also suggest that the adoption of these patterns is determined by SMEs' home market institutions.

The authors develop a nuanced understanding of SME internationalization by building upon and expanding the regionalization rationale in the internationalization patterns literature. Additionally, the authors address the acknowledged, yet rarely investigated, country-level determinants of internationalization patterns.