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Embraer‐Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica S.A. recently run for the first time the two 1,300 SHP Garrett TPF351–20 engines installed on the first CBA‐123 prototype.

Economic policy uncertainty (EPU) has huge impact and harm on real economy, so the economic logic and other economic effects behind this must be further studied. By constructing the “China Economic Policy Uncertainty Index” to capture the degree of EPU faced by Chinese companies, the authors empirically test whether and how EPU affects the level of executives' perquisite consumption.

This study investigates the relationship between EPU and executive perquisite consumption based on a sample of 3,185 publicly listed firms in China. To examine the relationship between EPU and executives' perquisite consumption, a mixed least squares method was used for regression. To alleviate the problem of missing variables that do not change over time and control the influence of unobservable individual heterogeneity at the firm level, the firm fixed effects model is used for regression.

The study finds that EPU is positively associated with executive perquisite consumption. This positive association is stronger for firms with smaller size, lower management shareholding and higher levels of separation of ownership and control. Effective external governance (i.e., analyst coverage, media coverage, auditor and market competition) can mitigate the relationship between EPU and executive perquisite consumption. Further analysis reveals that EPU increases executive perquisite consumption by holding more cash and decreasing firm risk taking. EPU hurts market value of firms by boosting executive perquisite consumption and tunneling.

In an environment with high EPU, the board of directors should reduce managers' compensation performance sensitivity to ease the agency conflict caused by uncertainty. Firms should improve their governance mechanisms and standard and pay attention to their environmental changes. Policymakers should pay attention to maintaining the continuity and predictability of policies, stabilizing the economic policy expectations of market entities and avoiding frequent changes in policies that can harm economic and firm value. The regulatory authorities should actively guide listed companies to increase active information disclosure during periods of high policy uncertainty.

This study contributes to the research on corporate governance by showing how EPU influences executives' behaviors. The authors advance relative studies by showing that this uncertainty embedded in a firm's external environments influences executive perquisite consumption. This study also contributes to the literature on how internal and external governances influence corporate behavior during uncertainty. These findings extend this line of research by suggesting that effective external governance is an attribute that can alleviate the effect of uncertainty on managers' opportunistic behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to explore the onboard activity choice of Chinese cruise tourists on three international cruise ships departing Shanghai, China.

A qualitative research method was adopted for this study. Data was collected using participant observation, casual conversation and semi-structured in-depth interviews from 76 Chinese cruise respondents. The data was analysed using thematic analysis.

Chinese cruise tourists were offered various onboard activities, most of which were Western. Booking these activities involved tourists searching information and assessing and choosing what appealed to them. They chose these activities according to the consumption values, and their decision was influenced by both context-dependent variables—the variety and style of the activities and their capacity to appeal, and the personal variable—age. Chinese tourists were satisfied with the array of onboard activity options and viewed them as an opportunity to experience Western culture. However, when they were unfamiliar with or did not understand some activities, they preferred Chinese activities.

This study formulates propositions to underlie a conceptual framework of how cruise tourists choose an onboard activity. The findings derived from the data will be valuable to cruise lines seeking to better manage tourists’ onboard experiences.

The purpose of this study was to design a renovation plan for a university campus building (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) with the aim to achieve nearly zero energy performance, ensuring a low specific demand (lower than 44 kWh/m²) and a high level of on-site renewable generation (equivalent to more than 20 per cent of the energy demand).

The baseline demand was characterized based on energy audits, on smart metering data and on the existing building management system data, showing a recent reduction of the electricity demand owing to some implemented measures. The renovation plan was then designed with two main measures, the total replacement of the actual lighting by LEDs and the installation of a photovoltaic system (PV) with 78.8 kWp coupled with an energy storage system with 100 kWh of lithium-ion batteries.

The designed renovation achieved energy savings of 20 per cent, with 27.5 per cent of the consumed energy supplied by the PV system. This will ensure a reduction of the specific energy of the building to only 30 kWh/m², with 42.4 per cent savings on the net-energy demand.

The designed renovation proves that it is possible to achieve nearly zero energy goals with cost-effective solutions, presenting the lighting renovation and the solar PV generation system a payback of 2.3 and 6.9 years, respectively.

This study innovated by defining ambitious goals to achieve nearly zero energy levels and presenting a design based on a comprehensive lighting retrofit and PV generation, whereas other studies are mostly based on envelope refurbishment and behaviour changes.

The paper describes the Ercis bibliographic information system, developed at the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) in Urbana‐Champaign, Illinois. The purpose of the system is to assist the Architecture/Engineering firms under contract with the Army Corps Engineers in locating regulations or guidelines on the planning, design or construction of army facilities. Full bibliographic records of these regulations or guidelines contained in various army publications constitute the system's database. Ercis is a user friendly information system and its search dialog is based on Boolean logic using controlled vocabulary terms.

Invented and manufactured by the French company AHG (Ateliers de la Haute‐Garonne), the MATT rivet has been specially formulated to prolong the life of riveting in thin sheet metals. The original design allows controlled expansion of the head and shank, and most importantly, the head expands into the countersink to ensure a precise interference fit which does not require additional sealants.

Alan Hobby has recently been appointed Applications Engineer at DEK Printing Machines Ltd, Weymouth. In 1968 he joined Ferranti at Bracknell and became one of the small team setting up the thick film production unit. Four years later he joined EMI at Hayes as the Production Engineer, where he gained experience in the manufacture of high volume but relatively simple hybrids. In 1975 Alan moved to Marconi Electronic Devices Ltd at Portsmouth, where he was one of the engineers responsible for the company's programme of qualification as a hybrid manufacturer for the European Space Agency and for their BS 9450 approval programme. Since then he has been concerned with the development of printing and firing techniques both at Portsmouth and at Marconi's high volume production unit at Swindon.

The need to flexibly react to changing demands and to cost-efficiently manage customized production even for lot size of one requires a dynamic and holistic integration of service-based processes within and across enterprises of the value chain. In this context, this paper aims at presenting ODERU, the authors’ novel pragmatic approach for automatically implementing service-based manufacturing processes at design and runtime within a cloud-based elastic manufacturing platform.

ODERU relies on a set of semantic annotations of business process models encoded into an extension of the business process model and notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard. Leveraging the paradigms of semantic SOA and XaaS, ODERU integrates pattern-based semantic composition of process service plans with QoS-based optimization based on multi-objective constraint optimization problem solving.

The successful validation of ODERU in two industrial use cases for maintenance process optimization and automotive production in the European project CREMA revealed its usefulness for service-based process optimization in general and for significant cost reductions in maintenance in particular.

ODERU provides a pragmatic and flexible solution to optimal service composition with the following three main advantages: full integration of semantic service selection and composition with QoS-based optimization; executability of the generated optimal process service plans by an execution environment as they include service assignments, data flow (variable bindings) and optimal variable assignments; and support of fast replanning in a single model and plan.

The authorship authentication (AA) problem is concerned with correctly attributing a text document to its corresponding author. Historically, this problem has been the focus of various studies focusing on the intuitive idea that each author has a unique style that can be captured using stylometric features (SF). Another approach to this problem, known as the bag-of-words (BOW) approach, uses keywords occurrences/frequencies in each document to identify its author. Unlike the first one, this approach is more language-independent. This paper aims to study and compare both approaches focusing on the Arabic language which is still largely understudied despite its importance.

Being a supervised learning problem, the authors start by collecting a very large data set of Arabic documents to be used for training and testing purposes. For the SF approach, they compute hundreds of SF, whereas, for the BOW approach, the popular term frequency-inverse document frequency technique is used. Both approaches are compared under various settings.

The results show that the SF approach, which is much cheaper to train, can generate more accurate results under most settings.

Numerous advantages of efficiently solving the AA problem are obtained in different fields of academia as well as the industry including literature, security, forensics, electronic markets and trading, etc. Another practical implication of this work is the public release of its sources. Specifically, some of the SF can be very useful for other problems such as sentiment analysis.

This is the first study of its kind to compare the SF and BOW approaches for authorship analysis of Arabic articles. Moreover, many of the computed SF are novel, while other features are inspired by the literature. As SF are language-dependent and most existing papers focus on English, extra effort must be invested to adapt such features to Arabic text.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of labour market outcomes after the initial vocational basic education (ISCED 3).

A multinomial logit model is used for examining the effect of school resources and other factors on students' post‐schooling outcomes defined as employment, further studies, non‐employment and dropping out. Analysis has been done by using unique linked register data on students, their parents, teachers, educational organisations and business companies in Finland.

The results indicate that teaching expenditures do not matter but teachers' characteristics have a role to play. Teachers with a university degree increase the employment probability of the students, whereas the formal competence of the teachers does not have such positive effects. The students' characteristics and performance in comprehensive schools play an important role in determining the outcomes. Local business conditions affect the outcomes of boys but less those of girls. The official quality evaluations adopted in recent years seem to pay attention especially to such aspects of education production that are important for providing capabilities for further studies but less so for employability.

Employability seems to be a great challenge to the initial vocational basic education. The findings for local business conditions give support to the view that measures of education policy do not suffice but need to be complemented with those of regional or employment policy, for example, policies aiming to increase regional mobility of the labour force. Such complementary tools are particularly important for boys.