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Mobile devices, through their capacity to enable anytime-anywhere learning as well as capture, annotate and share multimedia, offer entirely new ways for students to learn. This chapter provides review of mobile learning with a particular focus on learning design. First various definitions and characteristics of mobile learning are examined in order to establish a common understanding of its boundaries and meaning. Example uses of mobile learning in schools and higher education are described as a way to provide a more concrete understanding of design possibilities. Benefits of mobile learning are unpacked, as distilled from the literature, including the ability to provide flexible, accessible, authentic, personalized, ubiquitous and seamless learning. Mobile learning issues are also examined, including technical problems, cognitive load issues, distraction, equity and safety. A primary school science and a university pre-service teacher education vignette are described so as to offer a more in-depth illustration of what mobile learning can look like and achieve in practice. Finally, mobile learning research findings and observations are synthesized into recommendations, to inform and guide evidence-based mobile learning design practices. Opportunities for future research and investigation are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a novel mobile monitoring and control (MC) framework with active-push and plug-and-play capabilities. This proposed framework is particularly designed to addresses the shortcomings of the traditional factory MC systems in sharing information over the internet, protecting the system security, delivering warning messages, and deploying monitoring points.

By leveraging web service technology, mobile devices, and wireless communication, this paper describes the methodology and approach for designing a MC server, a wireless monitoring module (WMM), an intelligent v-Machine, two active-push mechanisms, a pocket PC application, and a smart phone application.

The designed WMM enables the monitoring points to be deployed in a mobile manner. The proposed mobile MC framework (MMCF) can timely detect abnormalities of appliances and equipment and turn off appliances in dangerous situations through WMM. It can also instantly deliver various warning contents to the mobile devices carried by the responsible persons. The v-Machine is built based on virtual metrology (VM) technology and can predict production precision of machined workpieces.

With the successful design and testing of the novel MMCF, this framework can obviously be used for many more applications and developments.

The authors' implement a factory MC system based on the proposed framework and conduct various integration tests on two electric appliances and a practical CNC machine tool in a factory. Testing results shows that the factory MC system works smoothly according the design goals and can overcome the shortcomings of traditional factory MC systems. The MC system also presents good performances, instantly delivering warning contents with a size ranging from 1K bytes to 10M bytes to the users within few seconds.

The proposed MMCF exploits various automation technologies to detect equipment's abnormalities, reduce the rate of product defects caused by human errors, reinforce security, prevent accidents, and ensure the safety of operations.

The proposed MMCF can effectively promote existing factory MC systems to achieve the merits of mobile MC, which is a unique contribution of this work, compared to previous studies. The results of this study can be applied to a variety of industrial automation applications, including factory automation and assembly automation.

We examine the incremental cross-sectional role of several common risk factors related to size, book-to-market, and momentum in size-and-momentum-sorted portfolios. Unlike the existing literature, which focuses on the conditional mean specification only, we evaluate the common risk factors’ incremental explanatory power in the cross-sectional characterization of both average return and conditional volatility. We also investigate the role of ex-ante market risk in the cross-section. The empirical results demonstrate that the size-and-momentum-based risk factors explain a significant portion of the cross-sectional average returns and cross-sectional conditional volatility of the benchmark equity portfolios. We find that the Fama–French (1993) factors and the ex-ante market risk are priced in the cross-sectional conditional volatility. We conclude that the size-and-momentum-based factors provide a source of risk that is independent of the Fama–French factors as well as ex-post and ex-ante market risk. Our results bolster the risk-based explanation of the size and momentum effects.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a concise overview of the problem of building decay in Hong Kong, the current government measures concerning dilapidated buildings and the latest development and implementation of the mandatory building inspection scheme (MBIS). A comparison of various MBISs from other jurisdictions of the world is also given.

A desktop study of building inspection procedures, repair and maintenance policies was carried out, followed by an industry-wide opinion survey conducted by means of self-administered questionnaires. Target respondents are within the construction community of Hong Kong. The perceived benefits, potential difficulties and insightful recommendations or good practices are investigated. A comparison of the relative ranking of individual mean scores from various groups of respondents is presented in this paper.

The execution of MBIS was found to be effective in enhancing public awareness of the importance of building upkeep and recognition of the property owner's legal responsibilities in this respect. Private property owners were made aware of the necessity to take holistic preventive measures to maintain the overall safety of their own buildings. A comparison of MBIS with other similar MBISs across different cities, revealed similarities as regards the inspection cycle, scope of inspection and qualifications of inspectors. The main difference related to the age rather than the height of target buildings.

Proper inspection and maintenance is necessary to keep buildings in good condition to avoid injury or loss of life due to sudden collapse of structures or their elements such as concrete spalling and fall of window frames. The official launch of MBIS on 30 June 2012 is one of the proposed effective measures to resolve the long-standing problems of building neglect and deterioration in Hong Kong with particular regard to the existing old private premises.

The execution of MBIS should be useful in improving the safety and health status of the dilapidated premises and in so doing safeguarding the residents and general public. To further identify the perceived benefits and potential difficulties of MBIS, and to suggest insightful recommendations or good practices for its successful future implementation, an opinion survey was launched among construction practitioners in Hong Kong between March and April of 2012.

The principal aim of this study was to provide more realistic output data based on imprecise measurements of product quality. The real‐world problems in fuzzy testing and selecting better processes performance are considered.

The Taguchi index, which provides numerical measures on process performance, has been widely used in the industry. In practice, the Taghchi index is estimated by sample data, thus it is of interest to obtain the confidence limits of the estimate C_pm for assessing processes. In addition, it is much more realistic, because in general the output quality characteristics of continuous quantities are more or less imprecise. Using the approach taken by Buckley, with some extensions, a general method is used to combine the vector of fuzzy numbers to produce the membership function of a fuzzy estimator of C_pm for further fuzzy testing and selection of better process performances.

As the rapid advancement of manufacturing technology occurs, current firms are increasing their levels of out sourcing and are relying more heavily on their supply chain as a source of their competitive advantage. Supplier selection decisions have become an important component of production and logistics management. Those decisions have a significant impact on manufacturers' ability to compete as purchases from outside suppliers may account for a large proportion of a product's costs.

The authors assume that measurements are taken from normally distributed populations in this research. Using fuzzy inference to assess manufacturing process capability processed using imprecise data under mild and severe departures from normality would be an interesting issue for further research.

From a managerial standpoint, considering stochastic uncertainty and fuzziness of data during testing and selecting the better supplier often provides a strong incentive to suppliers to adhere to the conscious gathering of data and variance reductions, as well as to quality requirements and standards.

An obvious advantage of process capability analysis over traditional classical approaches, which use binomial distribution for estimating low fractions of NC, is that reviewing a smaller sample reduces time, effort, and expenses.

Universities are expected to operate with high efficiency, with ever-growing expectations from a rising number of stakeholders in society. From a theoretical perspective economic science does provide frameworks and methods in order to tackle this, with the cornerstone of defining efficiency as a simple relation of a quantity of inputs toward a quantity of outputs. For the practice of university management and policy this does not answer the crucial questions of which inputs and which outputs to measure, and how to ensure the quality aspect of such management approaches. Higher education research can contribute to answering these questions. This chapter outlines a sector-specific framework for efficiency analysis and management, including suggestions regarding how to implement efficiency-improving measures in university settings.

Purpose: The Internet provides patients easy access to scientific information originally, limited to medical professionals. However, this information may not be entirely relevant to the patient’s context. Therefore, doctor–patient conversations need to contextualize this information to the specific circumstances of the patient’s illness. A problem exists insofar as this conversation may not always meet the patient’s expectations. Interpersonal competence, an important aspect of emotional intelligence, is therefore critical for medical practice in the digital era. “Medicine” is viewed as a “masculine” profession requiring competence, while compassion as “feminine”. Gender stereotyped socialization prescribes gender - congruent emotional display norms for men and women thereby, influencing both gender behavior and emotions. Psychological androgyny is the coexistence of masculine and feminine behavior traits in the same individual irrespective of biological sex. This leads to responses, which are appropriate for situations irrespective of biological sex, rather than gender-stereotyped behaviour. In this study, I explored the role of gender personality and interpersonal competence in doctor–patient interaction.

Design/ methodology/approach: Sixty Indian doctors across different specializations completed the self-report format of emotional intelligence appraisal (Emotional Intelligence Appraisal-EIA) as measure of interpersonal competence and Bem’s Sex role Inventory (BSRI) as a measure of psychological androgyny.

Findings: Psychologically androgynous doctors scored significantly higher on interpersonal competence than non-androgynous doctors.

Practical implication: Since both male and female doctors undergo similar training, there is a need to explore in greater depth the nature of the relationship between androgynous gender behaviors in doctors and corresponding interpersonal competence correlates, to understand their impact on patient care and healthcare related outcomes for both patients and doctors. This is especially critical because, in addition to increasing incidents of violence against doctors in Internet-empowered world, previous research also points to varying patient outcomes and legal complications based on biological sex of doctors.

This paper aims to investigate the effects on material performance in the epoxy acrylate resin system owing to the existence of the different ring of the cyclic methacrylate. In this paper, cyclic methacrylate as diluents was added into epoxy acrylate (EA) resin by ultraviolet (UV)-cured polymerization to investigate the effects on material performance owing to the existence of the different rings.

EA and 1-adamantyl methacrylate were synthesized by traditional methods according to previous papers, respectively. After adding different cyclic methacrylate as diluents to the EA oligomers, the system was exposed to the UV-light for polymerization.

The hydrophobic properties of the cured materials were increased slightly because of the alkyl groups from the methacrylate. The thermal stabilities and mechanical properties of the resins were enhanced by the cyclic diluents with the hard segments. Meanwhile, the crosslink density of the polymer decreased with the bulky group like adamantly owing to its huge structure.

The cyclic methacrylates were introduced into EA oligomers for decreasing the viscosity and increasing the materials performances, which could be recognized as new diluents applied in UV-cued polymerization.

The results of this study will be conducive to fabricate EA resins possessed with high thermal stabilities and mechanical properties by convenient UV-cured polymerization.

In recent decades there has been much interest and activity in the application of mathematical ideas for controlling inventory. However most of this has been related to the control of stock products whose demand is smooth and continuous. When demand is lumpy these methods are inefficient in their attempts to minimise thé operating cost. A simple regression model is developed for computing optimal (s, S) policies for items with lumpy demand patterns. Continuous review of inventory level is assumed and the lead time demand is approximated by the stuttering Poisson distribution. A grid of 864 known optimal policies has been used to provide the data for the calibration of the regression models. Numerical models are used to illustrate this approach. Extensive computational results show that this model provides excellent performance in estimating the optimal values of the control parameters s and S for wide ranges of demand and cost parameters.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the fuzzy reliability of the compressor house unit (CHU) system in a coal fired thermal power plant under vague environment by reducing the accumulating phenomenon of fuzziness and accelerating the computation process. This paper uses different fuzzy membership functions to quantify uncertainty and access the system reliability in terms of different fuzzy reliability indices having symmetric shapes.

This study analyses the fuzzy reliability of the CHU system in a coal fired thermal power plant using T_ω-based generalized fuzzy Lambda-Tau (TBGFLT) technique. This approach applies fault tree, Lambda-Tau method, different fuzzy membership functions and α-cut coupled T_ω-based approximate arithmetic operations to compute various reliability parameters (such as failure rate, repair time, mean time between failures, expected number of failures, availability and reliability) of the system. The effectiveness of TBGFLT technique has been demonstrated by comparing the results with results obtained from four different existing techniques. Moreover, this paper applies the extended Tanaka et al. (1983) approach to rank the critical components of the system when different membership functions are used.

The adopted TBGFLT technique in the present study improves the shortcomings of the existing approaches by reducing the accumulating phenomenon of fuzziness, accelerating the computation process and getting symmetric shapes for computed reliability parameters when different membership functions are used to quantify data uncertainty.

In existing fuzzy reliability techniques which are developed for repairable systems either triangular fuzzy numbers, triangle vague sets or triangle intuitionistic fuzzy sets have been used for quantifying uncertainty. These approaches do not examine the systems for components with different membership functions. The present study is an effort in this direction and evaluates the fuzzy reliability of the CHU system in a coal fired thermal power plant for components with different membership functions. This is the main contribution of the paper.