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The strength and stiffness of steel deteriorate rapidly at elevated temperatures. Thus, the characteristics of steel structures exposed to fire have been concerned in recent years. Most studies on the fire response of steel structures were conducted at uniformly distributed temperatures. This study aims to evaluate the buckling capacity of steel H-beams subjected to different loading conditions under non-uniform heating.

A numerical investigation was conducted employing finite element analysis software, ABAQUS. A comparison between the numerical analysis results and the experimental data from previous studies was conducted to verify the beam model. Simply supported beams were loaded with several loading conditions including one end moment, end equal moments, uniformly distributed load and concentrated load at midspan. The effects of initial imperfections were considered. The buckling capacities of steel beams under fire using the existing fire design code and the previous study were also generated and compared.

The results showed that the length-to-height ratio and loading conditions have a great effect on the buckling resistance of steel beams under fire. The capacity of steel beams under non-uniform temperature distribution using the existing fire design code and the previous study can give unconservative values or too conservative values depending on loading conditions. The maximum differences of unconservative and conservative values are −44.5 and 129.2% for beams subjected to end equal moments and one end moment, respectively.

This study provides the buckling characteristics of steel beams under non-uniform temperature considering the influences of initial imperfections, length-to-height ratios, and loading conditions. This study will be beneficial for structural engineers in properly evaluating structures under non-uniform heating conditions.

This chapter develops an asymptotic theory for a general transformation model with a time trend, stationary regressors, and unit root nonstationary regressors. This model extends that of Han (1987) to incorporate time trend and nonstationary regressors. When the transformation is specified as an identity function, the model reduces to the conventional cointegrating regression, possibly with a time trend and other stationary regressors, which has been studied in Phillips and Durlauf (1986) and Park and Phillips (1988, 1989). The limiting distributions of the extremum estimator of the transformation parameter and the plug-in estimators of other model parameters are found to critically depend upon the transformation function and the order of the time trend. Simulations demonstrate that the estimators perform well in finite samples.

This paper aims to examine how the temporal distance can influence the effect of the scarcity message. To demonstrate this effect, the authors use the limited-quantity flash sales and compare two types of mixed promotion method comprising discount rate and limited quantity.

The results of the experiment reveal that consumers in the temporally distant condition have a relatively high-level construal of the limited-quantity flash sales and are more likely to value desirability (discount rate) over feasibility (limited quantity).

When the expected value is identical, consumers prefer limited-quantity flash sales with smaller limited quantity but higher discount rates. However, consumers in the temporally near condition have a relatively low-level construal of the limited-quantity flash sales and are more likely to value feasibility (limited quantity) over desirability (discount rate).

When the expected value is identical, consumers prefer limited-quantity flash sales with lower discount rates but larger limited quantity.

Recently, a hugh trade deficit, hovering around $150 billion, has become an important public policy issue in the United States. In the current debate on this deficit, most attention has been on unfair trade practices. However, this is not the most important cause of the problem.

This paper probes into the relationship between Neighbourhood Parks and their efficiency as a potential stress reliever from the outdoor environment. It consists of the introduction to the relationship between stress and outdoor environment, background research on recent issues of Neighbourhood Park and it then continues with the context of perceiving Neighbourhood Park as a stress reliever. This paper looks into the previous studies that employed observations, survey, interviews and instruments as methods in proving Neighbourhood Parks as a potential stress reliever. Relevant findings were highlighted and recommendations for improving the design and planning were suggested to generate more quality living environment in the future.

Women are, in increasing numbers, participating in the labour market and are an important part of an organisation’s human resource pool. Nevertheless, women still face inappropriate treatment at work. One cause of this is family‐related issues. In particular, pregnancy and child birth present special challenges for working women. Discrimination towards pregnant women is commonplace in work settings. Problems are often related to individual work relationships, for example, the one between the pregnant follower and her manager. It is important to understand problems that impact on women in working life that can disturb their job satisfaction, their performance and willingness to give their best for the organisation. Therefore, for the benefit of both employer and employee, existing practices in leader follower relationships during pregnancy are worth studying in more depth. In leadership studies, the Leader‐Member Exchange (LMX) theory is focused on dyadic leader‐follower relationships and is thus used here to understand this phenomenon. In the present article, the literature on pregnancy and work as well as on LMX is re viewed. On the basis of these reviews, a future research agenda is offered.

With their national economy rapidly and structurally turning away from the long-cherished stable employment regime since the national financial crisis, South Koreans’ poverty is increasingly manifested through financial entrapment ensuing from heavy personal indebtedness to banks, kin members and friends, and, the worst of all, private usurers. The world’s once most aggressively saving population turned into one of the world’s most indebted populations merely in a decade. Having lost its once-proud capacity of a developmental state, the South Korean government has instead been busy devising various public schemes for offering grassroots consumer loans in supposedly preferential terms. Consumer credit, instead of social wage, has been offered rather generously by this increasingly neoliberalized state. This is another crucial component of financialization in the contemporary world political economy. South Korea’s emergency measures for escaping the national financial crisis have paradoxically ended up transplanting the financial trouble from banks and industrial enterprises to grassroots households.

This paper aims to describe bridge transported servo‐manipulator (BTSM) system, which was developed to overcome the limited workspace of the conventional mechanical master‐slave manipulators in a hot cell.

The BTSM system consists of four components: a transporter with a telescoping tubeset, a slave manipulator, a master manipulator, and a remote control system. The slave manipulator is able to move horizontally, transversely, and vertically by using the transporter.

The performance test of the BTSM system has been carried out in terms of basic functions such as force threshold, bilateral control and force reflection characteristic.

With respect to design characteristic, the BTSM system has the novel features in that the individual motor modules or the slave manipulator can be repaired in a fully remote manner in case of catastrophic failure. Also, a 3D viewing camera facilitates remote tasks giving human operators realistic environmental information.

‘A MAP OF THE WORLD that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at’ wrote Oscar Wilde. ‘It leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when it lands there it looks out and, seeing a better country, sets sail again. Progress is the realization of Utopias’.

In this paper, we study a partially linear dynamic panel data model with fixed effects, where either exogenous or endogenous variables or both enter the linear part, and the lagged-dependent variable together with some other exogenous variables enter the nonparametric part. Two types of estimation methods are proposed for the first-differenced model. One is composed of a semiparametric GMM estimator for the finite-dimensional parameter θ and a local polynomial estimator for the infinite-dimensional parameter m based on the empirical solutions to Fredholm integral equations of the second kind, and the other is a sieve IV estimate of the parametric and nonparametric components jointly. We study the asymptotic properties for these two types of estimates when the number of individuals N tends to ∞ and the time period T is fixed. We also propose a specification test for the linearity of the nonparametric component based on a weighted square distance between the parametric estimate under the linear restriction and the semiparametric estimate under the alternative. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that the proposed estimators and tests perform well in finite samples. We apply the model to study the relationship between intellectual property right (IPR) protection and economic growth, and find that IPR has a non-linear positive effect on the economic growth rate.