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The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of personal values on students’ learning behaviours. Hong Kong construction students are often criticized, by both practitioners and educators, as rote learners. To improve students’ learning processes, extensive research on a variety of aspects of construction education has been conducted. However, limited attention has been paid to the influence of personal values on students’ learning behaviours. The impact of personal value factors on the learning approaches of Chinese construction students in Hong Kong is investigated.

A questionnaire survey was conducted to ethically Chinese construction students in four universities in Hong Kong. A total of 820 questionnaires were distributed and 431 valid returns were collected.

The survey identified six influential values (namely, personal integrity, conservatism, determination, discipline, interpersonal relationships, and achievement), and shows that students who emphasize the virtues of personal integrity, determination, and a positive attitude toward achievement are better able to handle their interpersonal relationships, which will eventually lead them to engage in deep learning.

Work to develop appropriate value systems is thus recommended in freshmen courses, as is the use of cooperative learning approaches. Such value systems will have a long-term influence on the learning approaches of construction students.

The paper aims to investigate the key components of facilities management (FM) in care and attention (C & A) homes from the end users’ perspective based on a post-occupancy evaluation method. Hong Kong is a rapidly ageing society. Elderly population may reach 24.3 per cent in the next 20 years, causing an increase in the demand for care services. Therefore, it is necessary to provide sufficient and satisfactory residential C & A homes with appropriate facilities for our elderly.

To collect subjective data from end users, a questionnaire survey was conducted in 119 respondents consisting of both elderly residents and staff of the C & A homes. To further understand the actual situations, site measurements were also used to collect the objective data from the representative homes.

The results indicate that three aspects of key FM components, namely, architect, building services and supporting, all have significant relationships with the overall satisfaction. The site measurements further revealed the actual environment of the seven C & A homes, especially the contrasts between homes with highest scores (Homes E and F) and lowest scores (B and D).

To provide a clear picture to the government and construction professionals, a number of practical recommendations were proposed, such as sufficient space with single or couple bedrooms, sufficient corridor width for two people in wheelchairs and white or pink as the colour scheme in architectural aspect; sufficient lighting, central air conditioning system and adequate quantities of natural fresh air in the building service aspect; and frequently updated menus, door lock and CCTV system for supporting facilities.

This paper applied site measurement on the representative homes to cross-check the quantitative results. The findings of this study can assist architects and facilities managers in C & A homes to improve FM services during the design and operational stages for improving the satisfaction levels of elderly residents.

Construction is a competitive, ever‐changing, and challenging industry. Therefore, it is not surprising that the majority of construction professionals suffer from stress, especially construction project managers (C‐PMs), who are often driven by the time pressures, uncertainties, crisis‐ridden environment, and dynamic social structures that are intrinsic to every construction project. Extensive literature has indicated that stress can be categorized into: job stress, burnout, and physiological stress. This study aims to investigate the impact of stress on the performance of C‐PMs.

To investigate the relationships between stress and performance among C‐PMs, a questionnaire was designed based on the extensive literature, and was sent to 500 C‐PMs who had amassed at least five years' direct working experience in the construction industry. A total of 108 completed questionnaires were returned, representing a response rate of 21.6 percent. Based on the data collected, an integrated structural equation model of the stresses and performances of C‐PMs was developed using Lisrel 8.0.

The results of structural equation modelling reveal the following: job stress is the antecedent of burnout, while burnout can further predict physiological stress for C‐PMs; job stress is negatively related only to their task performance; both burnout and physiological stress are negatively related to their organizational performance; and task performance leads positively to their interpersonal performance. Recommendations are given based on the findings to enhance their stress and performance levels.

This study provides a comprehensive investigation into the impact of various types of stress on the performances of C‐PMs. The result constitutes a significant step towards the stress management of C‐PMs in the dynamic and stressful construction industry.

Microblog has become an important tool of social marketing since 2010. Compared with traditional blog, microblog has several distinctive features, such as ease of use, viral transmission, high interactivity and real-time communication. Microblog provides a communication platform for companies and consumers; however, it challenges companies’ consumer-brand relationship management. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influencing mechanism of microblog interaction tactics on consumer-brand relationship.

Based on grounded theory, 66 representative companies’ posts on Weibo are collected, with 1,395 company posts and 5,959 following posts. An influence mechanism model of company microblog interaction tactics on consumer-brand relationship is proposed, then the saturation level of this mechanism is tested.

Results show that: first, companies adopt two types of tactics in microblog interaction: social interaction and task-oriented interaction; second, microblog interaction arises consumers’ emotional response and cognition toward specific brand and eventually influences consumer-brand relationship. Consumers’ emotional response includes pleasure and arousal, brand cognition includes perceived quality, perceived relatedness with companies and brand resonance; third, the influence mechanism differs among different consumer knowledge level, industry and brand awareness.

This study provides insight into the use of microblog interaction tactics. Companies may cross-use social interaction and task-oriented interaction tactics to enhance consumer-brand relationship. Companies need to produce microblog content based on the interests of consumers and further establish and improve fan feedback mechanism.

This paper constructs a model of the influence of company microblog interaction tactics on consumers. This study finds that co-creation activities initiated by companies are the new tactics to attract consumers on microblog. The finding adds new knowledge to the literature of company consumer interaction and provides a theoretical basis for the practice of microblog marketing.

The paper aims to explore the factors that influence the risk perception. The moderating roles of purchase experience and purchase involvement are also investigated.

The conceptual model is framed into the SOR (stimulus-organism-response) model, which was tested using data collected from the users of a leading group buying platform in China, with the help of LISREL.

The result indicates that both vendor- and intermediary-related factors exert negative yet significant influences on perceived risk. The relationships between vendor-related attributes and perceived risk are contingent on purchase involvement. The relationships between intermediary-related attributes and perceived risk are subject to purchase experience.

This study explores the moderating effects of purchase experience and purchase involvement based on the characteristics of group buying, demonstrating the differences from traditional online shopping.

With the rapid development of materials informatics and the Semantic Web, the semantic-driven solution has emerged to improve traditional query technology, which is hard to discover implicit knowledge from materials data. However, it is a nontrivial thing for materials scientists to construct a semantic query, and the query results are usually presented in RDF/XML format which is not convenient for users to understand. This paper aims to propose an approach to construct semantic query and visualize the query results for metallic materials domain.

The authors design a query builder to generate SPARQL query statements automatically based on domain ontology and query conditions inputted by users. Moreover, a semantic visualization model is defined based on the materials science tetrahedron to support the visualization of query results in an intuitive, dynamic and interactive way.

Based on the Semantic Web technology, the authors design an automatic semantic query builder to help domain experts write the normative semantic query statements quickly and simply, as well as a prototype (named MatViz) is developed to visually show query results, which could help experts discover implicit knowledge from materials data. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed system in this paper can rapidly and effectively return visualized query results over the metallic materials data set.

This paper mainly discusses an approach to support semantic query and visualization of metallic materials data. The implementation of MatViz will be a meaningful work for the research of metal materials data integration.

The purpose of this study is to improve the corrosion resistance of the transmission towers by Zinc-aluminum-magnesium (Zn-Al-Mg) coatings doped with rare earths lanthanum (La) and cerium (Ce) (denoted as Zn-Al-Mg-Re) in Q345 steel.

The phase structure of Zn-Al-Mg-Re composite coatings has been determined by X-ray diffraction, whereas their surface morphology and cross-sectional microstructure as well as cross-sectional elemental composition have been analyzed by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive spectrometry. Moreover, the corrosion resistance of Zn-Al-Mg-Re composite coatings has been evaluated by acetic acid accelerated salt spray test of copper strip.

Experimental results show that doping with La and Ce favors to tune the composition (along with the generation of new phase, such as LaAl₃ or Al₁₁Ce₃) and refine the microstructure of Zn-Al-Mg galvanizing coatings, thereby significantly improving the corrosion resistance of the coatings. Particularly, Zn-Al-Mg-Re with 0.15% (mass fraction) La exhibits the best corrosion resistance among the tested galvanizing coatings.

Zinc-aluminum-magnesium (Zn-Al-Mg) coatings doped with rare earths lanthanum (La) and cerium (Ce) (denoted as Zn-Al-Mg-Re) have been prepared on Q345 steel substrate by hot-dip galvanizing so as to improve the corrosion resistance of the transmission towers, and to understand the corrosion inhibition of the Zn-Al-Mg-Re coating.

In recent years, a new type of double-layered containment structure of nuclear power plant has been built in China, named ACP1000 NNP. This paper aims to propose a new method to mitigate the seismic responses of this type of the structure.

The new base isolation structure (BIS)- tuned mass damper (TMD) structure was proposed and implemented only by modifying the connection between various components of NPPs, and the application of this concept design in ACP1000 was skillfully realized.

The new structure adopts the combination of structural form and function, adopts appropriate amplification of the seismic response of the secondary component, possesses advantages in explicit damping mechanism, good damping effect, robustness of seismic structures, simple implementation process, etc., and meets the special seismic safety requirements of the NPPs.

This seismic and hazard mitigation and BIS-TMD structure can avoid the risk of ACP1000 accidents caused by horizontal earthquakes.

The purpose of this paper is to prepare a new modified activated carbon fibers (ACFs) of high specific capacitance used for electrode material of supercapacitor.

In this study, the specific capacitance of ACF was significantly increased by using the phenolic resin microspheres and melamine as modifiers to prepare modified PAN-based activated carbon fibers (MACFs) via electrospinning, pre-oxidation and carbonization. The symmetrical supercapacitor (using MACF as electrode) and hybrid supercapacitor (using MACF and activated carbon as electrodes) were tested in term of electrochemical properties by cyclic voltammetry, AC impedance and cycle stability test.

It was found that the specific capacitance value of the modified fibers were increased to 167 Fg^-1 by adding modifiers (i.e. 20 wt.% microspheres and 15 wt.% melamine) compared to that of unmodified fibers (86.17 Fg^-1). Specific capacitance of modified electrode material had little degradation over 10,000 cycles. This result can be attributed to that the modifiers embedded into the fibers changed the original morphology and enhanced the specific surface area of the fibers.

The modified ACFs in our study had high specific surface area and significantly high specific capacitance, which can be applied as efficient and environmental absorbent, and advanced electrode material of supercapacitor.