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The purpose of this paper is to extend the social loafing literature by investigating the role of group development process on perceptions of social loafing within groups. Building on extant literature, it is contended that group members’ association with the group development stages can help in predicting their perceptions of social loafing.

Using a cross-sectional survey data were collected from 164 individuals nested in 39 groups. Mixed-effect modeling in R was unitized to test the proposed hypotheses.

Results of mixed-effect modeling in R show that group development stage of inclusion and dependency (stage 1) has no significant effect on perceptions of social loafing. Whereas, group development stage of counterdependency and fight (stage 2) has positive, and trust and structure (stage 3) and work (stage 4) has negative effect on perception of social loafing by group members.

This study investigates unique relationships between group members’ association with different stages of group development and their perceptions of social loafing. Additionally, a newer, shorter and cost-effective scale to measure four stages of group development is developed.

Built upon three components (attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that influenced accounting students’ intention to pursue public accounting instead of private accounting as their career choice in China.

The TPB is used to predict the rational intention of accounting students in this study. A binary logistic regression analysis was applied to test all hypotheses because of its suitability.

The authors find that the variety and marketability of public accounting experiences, high turnover plus, low firm cohesion in the workplace, and perceived difficulties in traveling extensively affected students’ intentions to pursue the public accounting profession significantly. By highlighting these factors that affect students’ intention to pursue public accounting, this paper has important implications for the accounting educators and other stakeholders in China and other emerging economies.

By understanding the factors influencing the accounting students’ interests in pursuing public accounting, accounting educators and accounting firms could make some changes, redesign accounting curriculum, and enhance internship experience and recruiting process in order to increase more interests in public accounting. Professional organizations and policy makers might learn some lessons to take some actions to encourage young accounting professionals to work for public accounting firms. Moreover, this study has provided a valuable perspective to accounting educators, practitioners, and policy makers in other emerging economies with the same shortage of qualified public accountants.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on the mental health of older adults in rural China. The authors also examine potential heterogeneous effects and two possible pathways from social capital increase to mental health improvement.

Based on a panel data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper employs a fixed effect model to examine the impact of social capital on health. A two-stage instrumental variable approach is adopted to alleviate the issue of endogeneity.

Results demonstrate that social capital has improved the mental health of older adults in rural China significantly. The beneficial effect is stronger for female, people with lower income, aged people and mainly observed in the central and western regions. Social capital affects the mental health of rural older adults through raising the awareness of healthy behavior and lowering the searching cost of health-related information.

Social capital plays a vital role in improving the mental health of older adults in rural China and is necessary for the construction of beautiful countryside in China. The authority should increase the investment in both the hard and soft infrastructure to improve the mental health of rural residents and narrow the inequality in health status.

This study enriches the empirical literature on the relationship between social capital and mental health by providing new evidence from China. Also, we choose the social activities and communications of individuals to construct a standardized index for social capital, which can better capture the social capital at the individual level.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different types of the village relationship influence different types of public goods provision in rural China.

The three components (clan-based relationship, neighborhood relationship and external relationship) were derived by employing factor analysis. The simultaneous discrete choice model was used to estimate the influence of these components on public goods provision, using the survey data from the China Household Income Project conducted in 2007.

The findings indicate that considering different components of village relationship allows for a better understanding of the public good provision. The results indicate that the neighborhood relationship has a significantly positive effect on rural public goods provision, particularly on water conservancy and irrigation, while the external relationship has a significantly positive effect on all types of public goods.

Local public goods provision is the core of the new rural construction in China. These findings imply that relationship in villages plays a vital role in the provision of public goods and is necessary in the construction of the new harmonious countryside in China. The results also have implications for rural public goods provision in other developing countries.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantitatively model the impact of different relationships on public goods provision at the rural level. A consideration of the different components in village relationship allows for a more precise understanding of the pubic goods provision in the village.

Against the backdrop of China’s curriculum reform, this paper explores how a Chinese lesson study (CLS) of English literature instruction in a senior high school promotes the teacher participant’s professional development (PD) in teacher beliefs and emotions, teaching contents, teaching approaches and learner outcomes.

This study adopted the CLS approach to explore the teacher participant, Lily’s PD. Three rounds of CLS of short fiction instruction were conducted. Triangulated data including interviews, reflection journals, discussion notes and lesson materials were collected for directed qualitative content analysis.

The results show that through the CLS, Lily has (1) changed her beliefs about the curriculum and literature instruction, and improved her emotion management and become more resilient and motivated; (2) shifted her teaching focus from forms and facts to meanings; (3) adopted a more learner-centred and inquiry-based teaching approach and (4) received satisfactory learner outcomes including increased learner participation and quality output. The follow-up class observations suggest the sustainability of such development.

This study applies and validates a conceptual framework of teachers’ PD, and establishes the value of promoting curriculum reform and facilitating EFL teachers’ PD through CLS and literature instruction.

The decipher, analysis and research of gene sequence is the most challenging problem that scientists all over the world are trying their best to solve. This paper introduces the application of factor reconstruction analysis in this field, its process and steps in using this kind of method. The resulting computation and analysis is presented.

This paper aims to propose a method to diagnose fused deposition modeling (FDM) printing faults caused by the variation of temperature field and establish a fault knowledge base, which helps to study the generation mechanism of FDM printing faults.

Based on the Spearman rank correlation analysis, four relative temperature parameters are selected as the input data to train the SVM-based multi-classes classification model, which further serves as a method to diagnose the FDM printing faults.

It is found that FDM parts may be in several printing states with the variation of temperature field on the surface of FDM parts. The theoretical dividing lines between different FDM printing states are put forward by traversing all the four-dimensional input parameter combinations. The relationship between the relative mean temperature and the theoretical dividing lines is found to be close and is analyzed qualitatively.

The multi-classes classification model, embedded in FDM printers as an adviser, can be used to prevent waste products and release much work of labors for monitoring.

This paper aims to present a hybrid control approach that combines learning-based reactive control and affordance-based deliberate control for autonomous mobile robot navigation. Unlike many current navigation approaches which only use learning-based paradigms, the authors focus on how to utilize the machine learning methods for reactive control together with the affordance knowledge that is simultaneously inherent in natural environments to gain advantages from both local and global optimization.

The idea is to decompose the complex and large-scale robot navigation task into multiple sub-tasks and use the hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) algorithm, which is well-studied in the learning and control algorithm domains, to decompose the overall task into sub-tasks and learn a grid-topological map of the environment. An affordance-based deliberate controller is used to inspect the affordance knowledge of the obstacles in the environment. The hybrid control architecture is then designed to integrate the learning-based reactive control and affordance-based deliberate control based on the grid-topological and affordance knowledge.

Experiments with computer simulation and an actual humanoid NAO robot have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid approach for mobile robot navigation.

The main contributions of this paper are a new robot navigation framework that decomposes a complex navigation task into multiple sub-tasks using the HRL approach, and hybrid control architecture development that integrates learning-based and affordance-based paradigms for autonomous mobile robot navigation.