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Disaster mutual assistance (DMA) or mutual aid is a reciprocal arrangement between organizations that permits and prearranges one company to access resources from another company to recover from disaster impacts faster. As a practical tool to access response resources quickly, DMA can be an important element of an effective emergency management process, but the decision to provide (or not to provide) DMA is challenging and involves a number of factors. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study conducted to identify DMA decision criteria and their weights based on electricity companies operating in North America.

The authors employed a combination of Delphi and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods. Delphi method identified the decision criteria that should be considered before electricity utilities enact their DMA agreements. A standard AHP calculated the weights of identified DMA criteria.

In total, 11 criteria were identified and classified into three main groups: responding criteria, requesting criteria and disaster criteria. Of the 11, “Emergency Conditions” within the responding criteria group, “Extent of Damage” of the requesting criteria group, and “Size of Disaster”, associated with the disaster criteria group, had the highest weight. Three other factors (“Work Safety Practice”, “Natural Hazards” and “Availability of Resources”) carried a noticeable weight difference, while the remaining factors were weighted relatively lower.

At present, a decision to provide mutual assistance is highly subjective, based on “gut feel”, and dependent on interpersonal relationships between the requestor and the provider. However, mobilizing and dispatching electricity industry crews is a risky and costly operation for both requesting and responding companies and requires careful assessment for which a cost-benefit threshold has not been developed. This cost-benefit perspective is often frowned upon owing to the intended altruistic nature of DMA agreements and its influence on decision makers. The developed criteria in this study are intended to assist electricity companies in making a more informed and quantifiable decision when deliberating a request for mutual assistance. These criteria may also be used by assistance-requesting companies to better identify electricity companies that are more likely to provide assistance to them.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the current state of DMA in electricity utilities, identifying decision criteria and weighing such criteria to enable electricity companies in making more objective decisions, thereby, increasing the overall effectiveness of their disaster management process.

This paper comparatively assesses the connections between individual demographic traits, occupational characteristics, and organizational factors and officers' attitudes toward important groups in China and Taiwan.

Survey data used in this study were collected from 722 police officers from mainland China and 531 officers from Taiwan. Multivariate regression analyses were conducted to assess the correlates of police attitudes toward peers, supervisors, and citizens.

The Chinese and Taiwanese officers do not differ in their trust in peers, but the Chinese officers hold significantly more positive views on the trustworthiness of supervisors and citizens compared to the Taiwanese officers. Supervisor justice and organizational identification are significant predictors of officers' attitudes toward all three groups in both countries.

A major limitation revolves around the inability to test and explain exactly why findings from the two groups vary in their ways. Future research should include specific social, political, and cultural predictors.

This study represents one of the few studies that compare police attitudes toward important groups of peers, supervisors, and citizens across nations/cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of an enhanced continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) with a porous track-etched membrane as the oxygen-permeable window, which is prepared by irradiating polyethylene terephthalate membranes with accelerated heavy ions.

Experimental approaches are carried out to characterize printing parameters of resins with different photo-initiator concentrations by a photo-polymerization matrix, to experimentally observe and theoretically fit the oxygen inhibition layer thickness during printing under conditions of pure oxygen and air, respectively, and to demonstrate the enhanced CLIP processes by using pure oxygen and air, respectively.

Owing to the high permeability of track-etched membrane, CLIP process is demonstrated with printing speed up to 800 mm/h in the condition of pure oxygen, which matches well with the theoretically predicted maximum printing speed at difference light expose. Making a trade-off between printing speed and surface quality, maximum printing speed of 470 mm/h is also obtained even using air. As the oxygen inhibition layer created by air is thinner than that by pure oxygen, maximum speed cannot be simply increased by intensifying the light exposure as the case with pure oxygen.

CLIP process is capable of building objects continuously instead of the traditional layer-by-layer manner, which enables tens of times improvement in printing speed. This work presents an enhanced CLIP process by first using a porous track-etched membrane to serve as the oxygen permeable window, in which a record printing speed up to 800 mm/h using pure oxygen is demonstrated. Owing to the high permeability of track-etched membrane, continuous process at a speed of 470 mm/h is also achieved even using air instead of pure oxygen, which is of significance for a compact robust high-speed 3D printer.

Based on media choice theories and real option theory, this study aims to explore the role of communication media portfolio in achieving collaborative innovation with suppliers.

Using data of the Study of Competitiveness, Technology and Firm Linkages 2002 collected by the World Bank and the Enterprise Survey Organization of the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, this study employed logit model to test the hypotheses. Moreover, some robustness analyses were conducted.

This study suggests that media multiplicity increases the probability for a firm to achieve collaborative innovation with suppliers on the basis of real option theory. Furthermore, distance from the suppliers and relationship formality make media multiplicity further important in collaborative innovation with suppliers.

Through investing how communication media portfolio affecting collaborative innovation with suppliers and the contingency factors, this study complements existing studies just concentrating on supplier capabilities, relationships with suppliers and characteristics of supplier network. Moreover, this study contributes in the information system field by exploring the role of media portfolio rather than individual media.

The purpose of this paper is to assess factors that influence Chinese police supervisors’ attitudes toward police roles, community policing, and job satisfaction.

Survey data were collected from police supervisors in a major Chinese city. Multivariate regression was used to assess the effects of officers’ background characteristics and assignments on their occupational attitudes.

Ethnic minority supervisors were more likely to have a broader order maintenance orientation, a narrower crime fighting orientation, and supportive attitudes toward quality of life activities. Less experienced supervisors were more inclined to favor the order maintenance role. Supervisors with a stronger order maintenance orientation tended to support problem solving activities and have a greater level of job satisfaction. Officers with military service experience also expressed a higher degree of job satisfaction.

Survey data collected from a single Chinese city may not be generalizable to officers in other regions and departments.

Police administrators should screen all applicants on attitudes that reflect departmental work priorities and styles of policing during the initial selection process. Desirable attitudes can be further molded into officers during their academic training, field officer training, and in-service training. Police administrators should continue their recruiting efforts targeting former military personnel. With adequate training in fulfilling civilian tasks and displaying proper outlooks, these individuals could become effective members of the forces.

Despite a growing number of studies on crime and justice in China, empirical research on policing in general and on officers’ occupational attitudes in particular remains very limited. This study represents one of the first attempts to assess factors related to police occupational outlooks in China.

Delivering messages and information to potentially interested users is one of the distinguishing applications of online enterprise social network (ESN). The purpose of this paper is to provide insights to better understand the repost preferences of users and provide personalized information service in enterprise social media marketing.

It is accomplished by constructing a target audience identification framework. Repost preference latent Dirichlet allocation (RPLDA) topic model topic model is proposed to understand the mass user online repost preferences toward different contents. A topic-oriented preference metric is proposed to measure the preference degree of individual users. And the function of reposting forecasting is formulated to identify target audience.

The empirical research shows the following: a total of 20 percent of the repost users in ESN represent the key active users who are particularly interested in the latent topic of messages in ESN and fits Pareto distribution; and the target audience identification framework can successfully identify different target key users for messages with different latent topics.

The findings should motivate marketing managers to improve enterprise brand by identifying key target audience in ESN and marketing in a way that truthfully reflects personalized preferences.

This study runs counter to most current business practices, which tend to use simple popularity to seek important users. Adaptively and dynamically identifying target audience appears to have considerable potential, especially in the rapidly growing area of enterprise social media information service.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanism and filter efficacy of accumulation generation operator (AGO)/inverse accumulation generation operator (IAGO) in the frequency domain.

The AGO/IAGO in time domain will be transferred to the frequency domain by the Fourier transform. Based on the consistency of the mathematical expressions of the AGO/IAGO in the gray system and the digital filter in digital signal processing, the equivalent filter model of the AGO/IAGO is established. The unique methods in digital signal processing systems “spectrum analysis” of AGO/IAGO are carried out in the frequency domain.

Through the theoretical study and practical example, benefit of spectrum analysis is explained, and the mechanism and filter efficacy of AGO/IAGO are quantitatively analyzed. The study indicated that the AGO is particularly suitable to act on the system's behavior time series in which the long period parts is the main factor. The acted sequence has good effect of noise immunity.

The AGO/IAGO has a wonderful effect on the processing of some statistical data, e.g. most of the statistical data related to economic growth, crop production, climate and atmospheric changes are mainly affected by long period factors (i.e. low-frequency data), and most of the disturbances are short-period factors (high-frequency data). After processing by the 1-AGO, its high frequency content is suppressed, and its low frequency content is amplified. In terms of information theory, this two-way effect improves the signal-to-noise ratio greatly and reduces the proportion of noise/interference in the new sequence. Based on 1-AGO acting, the information mining and extrapolation prediction will have a good effect.

The authors find that 1-AGO has a wonderful effect on the processing of data sequence. When the 1-AGO acts on a data sequence X, its low-pass filtering effect will benefit the information fluctuations removing and high-frequency noise/interference reduction, so the data shows a clear exponential change trends. However, it is not suitable for excessive use because its equivalent filter has poles at the non-periodic content. But, because of pol effect at zero frequency, the 1-AGO will greatly amplify the low-frequency information parts and suppress the high-frequency parts in the information at the same time.

Police officers' attitudes toward their employing organizations are impacted by officers' perceptions of justice within the organization itself, and these perceptions can affect the bond that officers form with their organization. The current study explored how perceptions of three dimensions of organizational justice (i.e. interpersonal, procedural and distributive justice) were related to the affective (i.e. voluntary) organizational commitment of Chinese police officers.

The data for the current study came from a voluntary survey of 589 Chinese police officers in three areas, one each in southern, central and western China.

Based on an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression equation, interpersonal, procedural and distributive justice had similar sized positive associations with organizational commitment.

The findings support the contention that perceptions of organizational justice views are related to the commitment of Chinese police officers.

Raising the interpersonal, procedural and distributive justice views should raise the level of affective commitment of officers.

Enhancing the justice views of officers should benefit officers by treating them more fairly, as well as benefiting the police organization by increasing commitment of officers.

There has been limited research on how the different forms of organizational justice are related to officer commitment, especially among Chinese officers.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the relationship between the corporate governance (CG) environment, governance behavior and governance performance and place it into the research of the evolution and revolution of the Chinese telecommunication industry, a complex economic system.

On the basis of information about the Chinese telecommunication industry from 1949 to 2009 and China Mobile from 1997 to 2007, the authors analyze the Chinese telecommunication industry from two levels, namely industry level and firm level, with the combination of a critical incident method and time series method.

The results demonstrate that the evolution of the Chinese CG environment and governance behavior presents characteristics of punctuated equilibrium; governance behavior lags behind governance environment and it can cause the governance environment to evolve to benefit its development through exerting active effects; governance environment and governance performance strongly relate to and have an effect on each other; and the improvement of governance structure and mechanisms, together with the enhancement of strategic capability, can greatly contribute to the governance performance of firms.

This paper has divided the development of the Chinese telecommunication industry into four stages, revealing the relationship between governance environment, governance behavior and governance performance with a case study of the Chinese telecommunication industry and China Mobile.