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1 – 10 of 10Andres Coca-Stefaniak, Alastair M. Morrison, Deborah Edwards, Nelson Graburn, Claire Liu, Philip Pearce, Can Seng Ooi, Douglas G. Pearce, Svetlana Stepchenkova, Greg W. Richards, Amy So, Costas Spirou, Keith Dinnie, John Heeley, László Puczkó, Han Shen, Martin Selby, Hong-bumm Kim and Guoqing Du
Chengli Xu, Jing Tian, Cong Liu and Yan Wang
With the rapid economic development, China has been increasingly paying special attention to its sports and health industries. In October 2014, the State Council raised the goal…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid economic development, China has been increasingly paying special attention to its sports and health industries. In October 2014, the State Council raised the goal to upscale the sports industry to the net worth of 5 trillion yuan by 2025. To gain further insights into the current development of tennis in China, especially the development of Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tennis competitions, an interview with the director of Wuhan Opening Fabrice Chouquet and Mr Guoqing Yi of Wuahan Sport Investment Inc. was conducted. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
To gain further insights into the current development of tennis in China, especially the development of WTA tennis competitions, an interview with the director of Wuhan Opening Fabrice Chouquet and Mr Guoqing Yi of Wuahan Sport Investment Inc. was conducted.
Findings
The interview comprised a series of topics including motivators of tennis industries in China, the strategic position of China for WTA development, WTA choice of hosting city, effects of WTA competition events toward the hosting city, and the operation of WTA tennis competitions. Integrating the aforementioned topics with Wuhan Tennis Open, the interviewees also provided suggestions toward the future development of tennis industry in China.
Research limitations/implications
This study has several limitations that are of concern to researchers in the future. First, the interviewees of this research came from Wuhan Tennis Open. Though Mr Fabrice used to be the managing director of WTA in Asia, he only knows about women tennis in China, and his viewpoints have their own limitation. Therefore, the interviewee in the future has to be the person who could hold the opinion on tennis development in China at the macro scale. Second, the questions in the interview have a wide scale, but lack depth and penetration. For instance, the interview only relates to the motive of tennis development but does not go deeply into the relation between the above two aspects. Moreover, it mentions the problems related to the tennis development. It only concentrates on the tennis tournaments but does not discuss the tennis culture and the industry. These questions need to be considered when the authors research on the development of tennis in China in the future.
Originality/value
Through the analysis on WTA and tennis in China, the authors can understand the development of sports in China and the Chinese sports industry in recent years.
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This paper examines China's historiography on foreign education since 1900, with an emphasis on the period since 1949. The understanding of “foreign education” in China during…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper examines China's historiography on foreign education since 1900, with an emphasis on the period since 1949. The understanding of “foreign education” in China during this period shifted rapidly from the Western-centered approach that had been introduced from Japanese during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China to the Soviet-centered approach that followed the founding of New China to a restoration of Western-centered approaches after the “opening” of the late 1970s and 1980s. The paper asks: how has the study of foreign educational history changed over time in the People's Republic of China, how has the broader discipline of history of education changed, and how have successive generations of historians of education conceived of their intellectual and political roles?
Design/methodology/approach
Grounded in archival documents and the published works of influential historians of education, this study notes the ways in which political regime change affected the construction and application of academic knowledge.
Findings
This study identifies four stages in the Chinese historiography on foreign education: a formative stage (from 1900 until the late 1940s); a difficult post-revolutionary recovery, followed by growth and then suppression (from 1949 until the mid-1970s); a period of achievement combined with an academic crisis (from 1978 until the early 2000s); and finally, a recent transition marked by theoretical innovation and global integration (from the 2000s until the present).
Originality/value
This study finds that a narrow focus on “practical utility” or service to politics and policy has perturbed historians of foreign education in China and stunted their field's development. A look back at early periods in the historiography offers a warning about the potential dangers of extreme ideological/political utilitarianism. These dangers existed not only in the history of foreign education but also in the history of education research more broadly. A close examination of these dangers can help twenty-first-century historians of education in China balance the practical, political and professional dimensions of their research. To grasp the meaning of foreign education, historical research needs to be politically independent.
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Guoqing Li, Yunhai Geng and Wenzheng Zhang
This paper aims to introduce an efficient active-simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach for rover navigation, future planetary rover exploration mission requires…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to introduce an efficient active-simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach for rover navigation, future planetary rover exploration mission requires the rover to automatically localize itself with high accuracy.
Design/methodology/approach
A three-dimensional (3D) feature detection method is first proposed to extract salient features from the observed point cloud, after that, the salient features are employed as the candidate destinations for re-visiting under SLAM structure, followed by a path planning algorithm integrated with SLAM, wherein the path length and map utility are leveraged to reduce the growth rate of state estimation uncertainty.
Findings
The proposed approach is able to extract distinguishable 3D landmarks for feature re-visiting, and can be naturally integrated with any SLAM algorithms in an efficient manner to improve the navigation accuracy.
Originality/value
This paper proposes a novel active-SLAM structure for planetary rover exploration mission, the salient feature extraction method and active revisit patch planning method are validated to improve the accuracy of pose estimation.
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This paper aims to apply an integrated data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach to a multi-hierarchy grey relational analysis (GRA) model…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to apply an integrated data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach to a multi-hierarchy grey relational analysis (GRA) model. Consistent with the most real-life applications, the authors focus on a two-level hierarchy in which the attributes of similar characteristics can be grouped into categories. Nevertheless, the proposed approach can be easily extended to a three-level hierarchy in which attributes might also belong to different sub-categories and further be linked to categories.
Design/methodology/approach
The procedure of incorporating the DEA and AHP methods in a two-level GRA may be broken down into a series of steps. The first three steps are under the heading of attributes and the latter three steps are under the heading of categories as follows: computing the grey relational coefficients of attributes for each alternative using the basic GRA model which further provides the required (output) data for an additive DEA model; computing the priority weights of attributes and categories using the AHP method which provides a priori information on the adjustments of attributes and categories in additive DEA models; computing the grey relational grades of attributes in each category for alternatives using an additive DEA model; converting the grey relational grades of attributes to the grey relational coefficients of categories; computing the grey relational grades of categories for alternatives using an additive DEA model; computing the dissimilarity grades of categories for the tied alternatives using an additive DEA exclusion model.
Findings
The proposed approach provides a more reasonable and encompassing measure of performance in a hierarchy GRA, based on which the overall ranking position of alternatives is obtained. A case study of a wastewater treatment technology selection verifies the effectiveness of this approach.
Originality/value
This research is a step forward to overcome the current shortcomings in a hierarchy GRA by extracting the benefits from both the objective and subjective weighting methods.
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Jundong Hou, Lanying Du and Jianfeng Li
One purpose of this paper is to examine several factors that potentially influence a consumer's purchasing decision to participate in cause‐related marketing (CRM) program in the…
Abstract
Purpose
One purpose of this paper is to examine several factors that potentially influence a consumer's purchasing decision to participate in cause‐related marketing (CRM) program in the Chinese context. The other is to empirically test the hypothesized relationship between cause's attributes and purchase intention in such environment.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper develops a measure for exploring the cause's attributes influencing consumer's purchasing intention. Two groups of valid samples, respectively, with 178 and 376 respondents are collected through questionnaire survey. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are employed to extract and test the key influential attributes on the basis of data of two samples respectively, and structural equation model is used to define the structure of influencing attributes and to measure the degree of impact for each attribute on the consumer's purchasing intention.
Findings
The results show that the degree of cause's participation for consumer, fit between the brand and the cause, cause importance, congruence between the firm's product and the cause, cause proximity play an important role in consumers’ attitudes toward the product and firm and their intentions to purchase the advertised product and participate in the CRM campaign, which suggests an opportunity for nonprofits to compete for these vital resources by nurturing and leveraging the antecedent factors and an opportunity for firms to select a cause partner.
Research limitations/implications
The sample is a convenience sample that is the main limitations of this research. The EFA and CFA is difficult to generalize to a larger audience, and there was a lack of experimental control for the questionnaire investigation, so the quality of questionnaire can not be ensured.
Practical implications
This research should help firms determine the best partners for strategic social alliances, and provide an advice on how to make them maximum participation, also should help current and potential consumers ascribe personality traits to nonprofit organizations and differentiate between nonprofits on the basis of the cause's attributes. At the same time, this paper provides several interesting areas for future research that will further aid marketing managers to develop a more effective CRM campaign to fit with goals of corporate, which adds some valuable insights or new ideas to develop essential theory.
Originality/value
This paper offers interesting insight into the development of CRM campaigns, and explores the five variables: the degree of cause's participation for consumer; fit between the brand and the cause; cause importance; congruence between the firm's product and the cause; cause proximity also should influence consumer's purchasing attitude, intention and decision behavior in the Chinese context.
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The development of Chinese librarianship is related closely to the spreading of the influence of Western librarianship in China upon professional practice and research. Provides…
Abstract
The development of Chinese librarianship is related closely to the spreading of the influence of Western librarianship in China upon professional practice and research. Provides an overview of the channels through which ideas were transmitted, and the influences which they exerted on Chinese librarianship, particularly in recent years, upon basic theories, technical services, readers’ services, management, and library science education.
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To examine the nature of Chinese business negotiating style in Sino‐Western business negotiations in business‐to‐business markets involving large industrial projects from a social…
Abstract
Purpose
To examine the nature of Chinese business negotiating style in Sino‐Western business negotiations in business‐to‐business markets involving large industrial projects from a social cultural point of view.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual approach developed from personal interviews.
Findings
This study reveals that the Chinese negotiator does not possess an absolute negotiating style but rather embraces a mixture of different roles together: “Maoist bureaucrat in learning”, “Confucian gentleman”, and “Sun Tzu‐like strategist”. The Chinese negotiating strategy is essentially a combination of cooperation and competition (termed as the “coop‐comp” negotiation strategy in this study). Trust is the ultimate indicator of Chinese negotiating propensities and role choices.
Research limitations/implications
The focus of this study is on Chinese negotiating style shown in large B2B negotiations with Chinese SOEs.
Originality/value
Differing from most other studies on Chinese negotiating style which tend to depict the Chinese negotiator as either sincere or deceptive, this study points out that there exists an intrinsic paradox in Chinese negotiating style which reflects the Yin Yang thinking. The Chinese negotiator has a cultural capacity to negotiate both sincerely and deceptively and he/she changes coping strategies according to situation and context, all depending on the level of trust between negotiating partners.
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Mojtaba Kazemi Kelishami and Esmail Lakzian
The purpose of this paper is to report the result of a numerical investigation of film cooling performance on a flat plate for finding optimum blowing ratios.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report the result of a numerical investigation of film cooling performance on a flat plate for finding optimum blowing ratios.
Design/methodology/approach
Steady-state simulations have been performed, and the flow has been considered incompressible. Calculations have been performed with 3D finite-volume method and the k-e turbulence model.
Findings
The adiabatic film cooling effectiveness and the effects of density ratio (DR), blowing ratio (M) and main stream turbulence intensity (Tu), coolant penetration, hole incline and diameter are studied. The temperature and film cooling effectiveness contours, centerline and laterally film cooling effectiveness are presented for these cases. Results show that the cases with smaller Tu have better effectiveness. In the console, using the air coolant and in cylindrical hole cases, using CO2 coolant fluid has higher effectiveness. The results indicated that there is an optimum blowing ratio in the cylindrical hole cases to optimize the performance of new gas turbines.
Research limitations/implications
Investigation of optimum blowing ratio for the convex surfaces and turbine blades is a prospective topic for future studies.
Practical implications
The motivation of this study comes from several industrial applications such as film cooling of gas turbine components. This research gives the best blowing ratio for receiving maximum cooling effectiveness with minimum coolant velocity.
Originality/value
This study optimizes the blowing ratio for film cooling on a flat plate.
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Conglin Li, Jiawei Lu, Jiankun Lai, Junbo Yao and Gang Xiao
Ride comfort is one of the important factors affecting passenger health. Therefore, the elevator industry usually uses the International Organization for Standardization (ISO…
Abstract
Purpose
Ride comfort is one of the important factors affecting passenger health. Therefore, the elevator industry usually uses the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 18738-1 standard to evaluate elevator ride quality and optimize elevator design. However, this method has certain limitations in its evaluation of comfort due to the problem of boundary division. The ISO 2631-4 standard is used as a general method of comfort evaluation in the current rail transit system, but it has not been applied in the elevator industry. In order to explore the difference and connection between the two standards, the author aims to conduct a detailed analysis on this.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the elevator internet, a large amount of measured data of normal and abnormal vibration of elevator car were collected and analyzed and preprocessed; based on ISO 18738-1:2012 standard and ISO 2631-4:2001 standard, the differences of ride comfort assessment methods in the two standards were analyzed, and the ride comfort assessment study of elevator under normal and abnormal vibration conditions was carried out.
Findings
The experimental results show that the comfort assessment results of ISO 2631-4:2001 standard and ISO18738-1:2012 standard are consistent under two vibration conditions. At the same time, ISO 2631-4:2001 can not only provide a more accurate quantitative description of comfort, but also roughly determine the comfort interval of each vibration, which can provide theoretical reference for elevator vibration classification and car comfort design.
Originality/value
The authors designed an Internet of Things (IOT)-based elevator vibration signal acquisition method to address the shortcomings of the previous elevator ride comfort assessment methods, which can realize the dynamic assessment of elevator ride comfort; by comparing the assessment results of elevator ride comfort under normal vibration and abnormal vibration, the feasibility of ISO 2631-4:2001 for elevator ride comfort assessment was fully verified. In addition, the experimental results also give the influence of abnormal vibration on elevator riding comfort under the stages of start-stop, uniform speed, acceleration and deceleration, which can provide theoretical support for elevator vibration suppression and comfort transformation.
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