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The cruise industry has witnessed steady growth, with passenger volume increasing from 17.8 million in 2009 to 30 million in 2019. In the context of global competition and an uncertain business environment, competition in business has changed dramatically from battles of “firm versus firm” to “supply chain versus supply chain”. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to understand the cruise industry from a chain perspective, which has not drawn widespread research attention.

This paper brings together the insights, opinions, concepts and frameworks from a literature review of different disciplines (maritime shipping, tourism management, logistics management, operations management and supply chain management) and analysis results from 22 semi-structured interviews to make an early attempt to conceptualise the cruise supply chain (CSC).

The cruise supply chain is elaborated on the process, the role of each entity and its characteristics by comparing with the maritime supply chain and tourism supply chain. Based on the understanding of the CSC, two specific characteristics of the Chinese CSC are examined, which need further investigation.

The CSC is articulated with detailed processes and characteristics based on the literature review and empirical study. The findings of this paper not only advance the knowledge of the supply chain in the cruise industry but also highlight the importance of further research on the CSC.

Climate analogues have been extensively used in ecological studies to assess the shift of ecoregions due to climate change and the associated impacts on species survival and displacement, but they have hardly been applied to urban areas and their climate shift. This paper aims to use climate analogues to characterize the climate shift of cities and to explore its implications as well as potential applications of this approach.

The authors propose a methodology to match the current climate of cities with the future climate of other locations and to characterize cities’ climate shift velocity. Employing a sample of 90 European cities, the authors demonstrate the applicability of this method and characterize their climate shift from 1951 to 2100.

Results show that cities’ climate shift follows rather strictly north-to-south transects over the European continent and that the average southward velocity is expected to double throughout the twenty-first century. These rapid shifts will have direct implications for urban infrastructure, risk management and public health services.

These findings appear to be potentially useful for raising awareness of stakeholders and urban dwellers about the pace, magnitude and dynamics of climate change, supporting identification of the future climate impacts and vulnerabilities and implementation of readily available adaptation options, and strengthening cities’ cooperation within climate-related networks.

Since the declaration of reform and market opening from China in 1990, China has drawn much attention from the world thanks to its rapid economic growth and its emergence as the world's major consumer market and the center of the global economy. Moreover, it established the new trade order, making East Asia the center of the new trade trend as it becomes a manufactural and sales stronghold of multinational companies. The Chinese distribution market is expected to show a high growth rate by 2010 and it draws attention as a new business sector which can bring huge profits. However, advancement of the Chinese distribution industry now faces systemic problems and research on such problems is insufficient. Therefore, in this study we will conduct SWOT analysis based on previous studies on the Chinese distribution industry and use it as a ground to propose strategic solutions for development.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis of the literature in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education over the past 15 years, with a specific focus on global distribution and research trends.

This study collected 1,718 documents from the Web of Science (WOS) database and analyzed their timeline distribution, geographical distribution, research topics, subject areas, learning stages and citation burst using a bibliometric approach with VOSviewer and Citespace.

Results indicated that: overall, STEM education has increasingly gained scholarly attention and is developing diversely by emphasizing interdisciplinary, cross-domain and regional collaboration. In terms of global collaboration, a collaborative network with the USA in the center is gradually expanding to a global scope. In terms of research themes, four key topics can be outlined including educational equity, pedagogy, empirical effects and career development. Social, cultural and economic factors influence the way STEM education is implemented across different countries. The developed Western countries highlighted educational equity and disciplinary integration, while the developing countries tend to focus more on pedagogical practices. As for research trends, eastern countries are emphasizing humanistic leadership and cultural integration in STEM education; in terms of teachers’ professional development, teachers’ abilities of interdisciplinary integration, technology adoption and pedagogy application are of the greatest importance. With regards to pedagogy, the main focus is for developing students’ higher-order abilities. In terms of education equity, issues of gender and ethnicity were still the hottest topics, while the unbalanced development of STEM education across regions needs further research.

This study provides a global landscape of STEM education along the timeline, which illustrates the yearly progressive development of STEM education and indicates the future trends.

The initial policy of the countries that developed vaccines has been to lock the vaccine by patent. This has been due to the fact that domestic demand for vaccine was mounting. Since only a few countries could invest in it, manufacturing and export remained at the behest of those few resulting in deep inequity in the global rollout. Pandemics are global health crises. Hence, calls for the patent waiver for the COVID-19 vaccine are growing to access the vaccine. The vaccine and its production, marketing and distribution have been politicized driven by the hegemonic aspiration. Both manufacturing and import-dependent countries are racing to win the diplomatic battle: the former has to win to gain hegemony and the latter to get the vaccine. Hence, the vaccine distribution has been marked with deep discrimination, and as a result, the migrant community is less likely to get their vaccine on time. This article engages in the decades-long debate over intellectual property rights and patenting life-saving vaccines. We argue that exemption of COVID-19 vaccines from intellectual property rights would improve global access and equity.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a two-degrees-of-freedom wire-driven 4SPS/U rigid‒flexible parallel trunk joint mechanism based on spring, in order to improve the robot’s athletic ability, load capacity and rigidity, and to ensure the coordination of multi-modal motion.

First, based on the rotation transformation matrix and closed-loop constraint equation of the parallel trunk joint mechanism, the mathematical model of its inverse position solution is constructed. Then, the Jacobian matrix of velocity and acceleration is derived by time derivative method. On this basis, the stiffness matrix of the parallel trunk joint mechanism is derived on the basis of the principle of virtual work and combined with the deformation effect of the rope driving pair and the spring elastic restraint pair. Then, the eigenvalue distribution of the stiffness matrix and the global stiffness performance index are used as the stiffness evaluation index of the mechanism. In addition, the performance index of athletic dexterity is analyzed. Finally, the distribution map of kinematic dexterity and stiffness is drawn in the workspace by numerical simulation, and the influence of the introduced spring on the stiffness distribution of the parallel trunk joint mechanism is compared and analyzed. It is concluded that the stiffness in the specific direction of the parallel trunk joint mechanism can be improved, and the stiffness distribution can be improved by adjusting the spring elastic structure parameters of the rope-driven branch chain.

Studies have shown that the wire-driven 4SPS/U rigid‒flexible parallel trunk joint mechanism based on spring has a great kinematic dexterity, load-carrying capacity and stiffness performance.

The soft-mixed structure is not mature, and there are few new materials for the soft-mixed mixture; the rope and the rigid structure are driven together with a large amount of friction and hindrance factors, etc.

It ensures that the multi-motion mode hexapod mobile robot can meet the requirement of sufficient different stiffness for different motion postures through the parallel trunk joint mechanism, and it ensures that the multi-motion mode hexapod mobile robot in multi-motion mode can meet the performance requirement of global stiffness change at different pose points of different motion postures through the parallel trunk joint mechanism.

The trunk structure is a very critical mechanism for animals. Animals in the movement to achieve smooth climbing, overturning and other different postures, such as centipede, starfish, giant salamander and other multi-legged animals, not only rely on the unique leg mechanism, but also must have a unique trunk joint mechanism. Based on the cooperation of these two mechanisms, the animal can achieve a stable, flexible and flexible variety of motion characteristics. Therefore, the trunk joint mechanism has an important significance for the coordinated movement of the whole body of the multi-sport mode mobile robot (Huang Hu-lin, 2016).

In this paper, based on the idea of combining rigid parallel mechanism with wire-driven mechanism, a trunk mechanism is designed, which is composed of four spring-based wire-driven 4SPS/U rigid‒flexible parallel trunk joint mechanism in series. Its spring-based wire-driven 4SPS/U rigid‒flexible parallel trunk joint mechanism can make the multi-motion mode mobile robot have better load capacity, mobility and stiffness performance (Qi-zhi et al., 2018; Cong-hao et al., 2018), thus improving the environmental adaptability and reliability of the multi-motion mode mobile robot.