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This study aims to examine variables and factors in vocational awareness and attitudes that affect the vocational aspiration of seafaring course students who are potential future seafaring employees.

A literature review was conducted to identify factors that prompt students in seafaring courses to pursue seafaring careers, followed by a design of preliminary questionnaire questions to survey students’ perception on the conditions of seafaring careers (i.e. vocational awareness) and their intention to pursue a seafaring career (i.e., vocational aspiration). A total of 744 seafaring course students in four Taiwanese universities completed a questionnaire developed according to the previous studies. A structured equation modelling was conducted in this research including model validity, goodness of fit, model correction and mediation effects.

With a model consisting of four factors for vocational awareness, three factors for overall attitudes and vocational aspiration as a dependent variable, the results showed that factors of vocational awareness and students’ overall attitudes were significantly correlated, and the factors of overall attitudes exhibit strong mediation effects on vocational aspiration from vocational awareness. The results confirmed that the factors are important determinants for the vocational aspiration of students.

The findings of this study provide a comprehensive approach to understand students’ seafaring aspiration for the universities, governments and shipping companies. Seafaring policies and management are discussed from the research findings.

This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being and mental health of the seafarers who had to overstay on ships after their contracts expired, identifies topics that affect their mental distress and recommends measures to overcome these.

Four research questions about the impacts on the seafarers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic were raised. A literature review and a questionnaire survey were conducted to find answers. Ship officers were asked to assess and fill in the questionnaires for the stranded seafarers onboard in order to collect sufficient samples rapidly for this study.

Despite the guidelines provided by the shipping companies being adequate to protect the seafarers from COVID-19, their mental distress levels have been worsened under the pandemic. The crew change crisis causes anxiety and negatively impacts on their working performance; however, the repatriation expectation of the stranded seafarers is of the highest concern. Three topics were identified as having impacts on the mental health of the stranded seafarers: crew change crisis, low vaccination rate and the lack of key worker recognition. While international stakeholders are advocating for support in these issues, the shipping companies and the seafarers need to do their parts to exacerbate the mental distress, and to survive and thrive beyond the pandemic.

The findings of this study will help the shipping companies to navigate the challenges and the seafarers to overcome issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The objective of this research is to examine the performance of weather routing service in the North Pacific Ocean based on a global container shipping company.

The data comprise two passages: one that departs from the port of Taipei to the port of Los Angeles (TPE-LAX) and another that departs from the port of Tacoma to the port of Kaohsiung (TCM-KSG). A weather routing service was utilized to compare the differences of the distance, sailing time and fuel consumed among different voyages.

Results indicated that the average speed of vessel in winter is faster than in summer. The vessels consumed much more fuel in the winter than they did in the summer. In terms of the distance of the passage, the results show that the ships' sailing distance across the North Pacific Ocean in the summer was shorter than it was in the winter.

Due to the difficultly of practical data collection, relatively few sailing records were employed in this study. It is suggested that additional sailing records should be collected, which adopt weather routing recommendations, to more comprehensively analyze sailing performance in future research.

The study's findings offer valuable guidance to different stakeholders in the maritime industry (e.g. seafarers, marine hull and machinery companies, Protection and Indemnity Club (P&I), ocean container carriers and freight forwarders) to clarify their responsibilities in order to achieve desired sailing outcomes.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, the current study is the first research to utilize practical sailing data to provide objective evidence of sailing performance based on a weather routing service, which can assist various stakeholders to make optimal decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating influence of organizational climate in the relationship between job stress and intent to stay.

This study has used a non-probability sampling design for data collection. A semi-structured questionnaire has been prepared and a street survey has been carried out at popular public places in Macau.

This study shows that stressful employees working in organizations characterized by unsupportive organizational climate had far less desire to stay with the organization than those working in organizations with supportive organizational climate.

Street intercept survey is a technique of convenience sampling. This makes it difficult to generalize the study’s findings to the entire population.

Few studies to date have paid attention to the influence of organizational climate between job stress and intent to stay. The multi-industry context from which the data are collected suggests that the results and findings are useful to managers and practitioners from across a broad range of business sectors.

Condition assessment on reinforced concrete (RC) structures is one of the critical issues as a result of structure degradation due to aging in many developed countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the sensitivity and reliability of the conventional dynamic response approaches, which are currently applied in the RC structures. The key indicators include: natural frequency and damping ratio. To deal with the non-linear characteristics of RC, the concept of random decrement is applied to analyze time domain data and a non-linear damping curve could be constructed to reflect the condition of RC structure.

A full-scale RC structure was tested under ambient vibration and the impact from a rubber hammer. Time history data were collected to analyze dynamics parameters such as natural frequency and damping ratio.

The research demonstrated that the measured natural frequency is not a good indicator for integrity assessment. Similarly, it was revealed that the traditional theory of viscous damping performed poorly for the RC with non-linear characteristics. To address this problem, a non-linear curve is constructed using random decrement and it can be used to retrieve the condition of the RC structure in a scientific manner.

The time domain analysis using random decrement can be used to construct a non-linear damping curve. The results from this study revealed that the damage of structure can be reflected from the changes in the damping curves. The non-linear damping curve is a powerful tool for assessing the health condition of RC structures in terms of sensitivity and reliability.