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This paper aims to investigate the impacts of rumors' information characteristics on people's believing and spreading of rumors online.

This study employed a mixed-methods approach by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. In study 1, the authors explored different types of rumors and their information source characteristics through qualitative research. In study 2, the authors utilized the findings from study 1 to develop an empirical model to verify the impact of these characteristics on the public's behaviors of believing and spreading rumors by content analysis and quantitative research.

The results show that five information source characteristics – credibility, professionalism, attractiveness, mystery and concreteness – influence the spreading effect of different types of rumors.

This study contributes to rumor spreading research by deepening the theory of information source characteristics and adding to the emerging literature on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Insights from this research offer important practical implications for policymakers and online-platform operators by highlighting how to suppress the spread of rumors, particularly those associated with COVID-19.

This research introduces the theory of information source characteristics into the field of rumor spreading and adopts a mixed-methods approach, taking COVID-19 rumors as a typical case, which provides a unique perspective for a deeper understanding of rumor spreading's antecedences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction effect of innovative product category and presentation order on consumer consumer’s purchasing intention and the mediating role of perceived novelty and risk perception.

The authors examined the hypotheses in three experiment studies. In Study 1, the authors primed innovative product category and presentation order on consumer consumer’s purchasing intention. In Study 2, the authors measured the mediating role of perceived novelty and risk perception. In Study 3, they validated the moderating effect of picture and text consistency on the improvement of purchase preference.

The results reveal that RNP/INP and presentation order (from whole to part/from part to whole) could enhance consumers’ purchase intention and verify the mediating role of perceived novelty and risk perception, based on which a complete internal mechanism model is constructed. The third experiment shows the moderating effect of picture and text consistency on the improvement of purchase preference by matching the category and presentation order of innovative products.

Prior literature on the thinking mode of holistic and partial processing has been mostly applied to the cognitive field of reading and text labeling. In this study, using the holistic (local) processing thinking model and anchoring theory, eye movement experiments and situational experiments, the audience’s analysis framework of information processing mechanism is constructed. The unique phenomenon of product category and overall (local) presentation order coexisting in innovative product advertisement is considered comprehensively.

Mobile devices, through their capacity to enable anytime-anywhere learning as well as capture, annotate and share multimedia, offer entirely new ways for students to learn. This chapter provides review of mobile learning with a particular focus on learning design. First various definitions and characteristics of mobile learning are examined in order to establish a common understanding of its boundaries and meaning. Example uses of mobile learning in schools and higher education are described as a way to provide a more concrete understanding of design possibilities. Benefits of mobile learning are unpacked, as distilled from the literature, including the ability to provide flexible, accessible, authentic, personalized, ubiquitous and seamless learning. Mobile learning issues are also examined, including technical problems, cognitive load issues, distraction, equity and safety. A primary school science and a university pre-service teacher education vignette are described so as to offer a more in-depth illustration of what mobile learning can look like and achieve in practice. Finally, mobile learning research findings and observations are synthesized into recommendations, to inform and guide evidence-based mobile learning design practices. Opportunities for future research and investigation are also discussed.

Build-operate-transfer (BOT) contracts are widely used in the construction and operation of charging piles for new energy vehicles worldwide and stipulate that governments grant charging pile operators franchises for a certain period of time to invest in the construction and operation of the charging piles. The charging piles are then transferred to governments when the concession expires. To encourage charging pile operators to build and operate charging piles, governments usually provide two kinds of subsidies, namely construction and operating subsidies.

The authors establish a typical game model to study the optimal BOT contract between a government and a charging pile operator and their preferences for the two kinds of subsidies.

First, the authors show that there are substitution and complementarity effects between the concession period and the subsidy level. Second, the operator prefers the construction subsidy (operating subsidy) when the additional operating cost is low (high). The government prefers the operating subsidy (construction subsidy) when consumer sensitivity to the number of charging piles is low (high) and the concession period is short or long (moderate). Finally, the adjusted joint subsidy can not only improve social welfare but also that the charging pile operator can obtain the same profit as under the operating subsidy at a lower subsidy amount.

This work develops the first analytical model to study two subsidies in the construction and operation of charging piles and investigate the optimal BOT contract and subsidy preferences. The insights are compelling not only for the charging pile operator but also for policymakers in practice from a circular economy perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a kind of fuzzy adaptive control method to control non‐linear system that has the characteristic of small time delay and fast respond speed.

The paper analyzes the production process and the actual condition of the preheat process of the plating zinc and painting plastic scribbled of double layer welded pipe that has the small time delay and fast respond speed, and also gives the preheat process mathematical model. Fuzzy adaptive control method with hierarchical structure is used which aims at one non‐linear system that has the characteristic of small time delay and fast responds speed. Through the simulation, it proves the mentioned method is effective to control the temperature system for double layers welded pipe in welding process.

Based on the mathematical model proposed about the production process and the actual condition of the preheat process, the fuzzy adaptive control method is effective to control the temperature system for double layers welded pipe in welding process.

The paper proposes fuzzy adaptive control method with hierarchical structure which has the basic fuzzy control grade, adaptive adjust grade, and process state judgment grade.

A very useful method in welding process for double layers welded pipe.

The new mathematical model is proposed about the production process, and the new control method is used in the temperature system for double layers welded pipe in welding process.

The missing employee voice has become a salient topic in China. This paper aims to document the newest developments relating to the topic by reviewing the recent literature on employment relations and employee voice. The findings of this paper suggest that the purposes of and channels for the employee voice in China have been undergoing significant changes. Different stakeholder groups have approached the issue. ‘Democratic management’ in China, the country’s home-grown concept of employee voice, has been resurrected to encourage more effective employee representation. Apart from this top-down influence from the government and All-China Federation of Trade Unions, this paper also identifies the bottom-up approach driven by the workers, and the external influence from the global corporate social responsibility campaign and nongovernmental labour organizations. Based on the review of the newest developments in workplace democracy and the employee voice in China, this paper proposes a stakeholder framework incorporating these developments. The authors also suggest some directions for future research.

Citation contexts have been found useful in many scenarios. However, existing context-based recommendations ignored the importance of diversity in reducing the redundant issues and thus cannot cover the broad range of user interests. To address this gap, the paper aims to propose a novelty task that can recommend a set of diverse citation contexts extracted from a list of citing articles. This will assist users in understanding how other scholars have cited an article and deciding which articles they should cite in their own writing.

This research combines three semantic distance algorithms and three diversification re-ranking algorithms for the diversifying recommendation based on the CiteSeer^X data set and then evaluates the generated citation context lists by applying a user case study on 30 articles.

Results show that a diversification strategy that combined “word2vec” and “Integer Linear Programming” leads to better reading experience for participants than other diversification strategies, such as CiteSeer^X using a list sorted by citation counts.

This diversifying recommendation task is valuable for developing better systems in information retrieval, automatic academic recommendations and summarization.

The originality of the research lies in the proposal of a novelty task that can recommend a diversification context list describing how other scholars cited an article, thereby making citing decisions easier. A novel mixed approach is explored to generate the most efficient diversifying strategy. Besides, rather than traditional information retrieval evaluation, a user evaluation framework is introduced to reflect user information needs more objectively.

An optimal control model is built considering the private sector's opportunistic effort diversion and reciprocal effort improvement, while a numerical study is conducted to draw some managerial implications.

In infrastructure PPP projects, private sectors may opportunistically divert part of their effort from the current projects to other projects to allocate their limited human resources. Nevertheless, this effort diversion can be inhibited by dynamic incentives since the private sectors reciprocally exert greater effort into the current projects when receiving the dynamic incentives. This article investigates how the government specifies the output standard that the private sector should meet and offers dynamic incentives to mitigate the private sector's opportunistic effort diversion.

The output standard for the private sector to acquire the dynamic incentives should be specified as the output level corresponding to the private sector's optimal long-run stationary equilibrium (OLSE) effort level, which decreases with its reciprocal preference level but increases with its effort-diverting level. The optimal dynamic incentives comprise an initial incentive and a periodic OLSE incentive, which declines with the reciprocal preference level but improves with the effort-diverting level. Besides, the numerical study reveals that the government should distinguish whether the bidders have high effort-diverting levels and, if so, should focus on their reciprocal preference levels and decline the bidders with low reciprocal preference to avoid utility loss.

This article provides a theoretical model combining opportunistic behavior with reciprocal preference through an optimal control lens, thus embedding the problem of incentive design into a broader socioeconomic framework.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new method for evaluating the performance of metasearch engines (MSEs), which was used in the reported study to investigate which of eight popular MSEs (Clusty, Dogpile, Excite, Mamma, MetaCrawler, Search.com, WebCrawler and Webfetch) is the best.

This research evaluated the performance of eight MSEs. For each MSE the average of closeness degrees between its ranked result list and those of its underlying search engines (SEs) was measured. Next, these measures were compared to each other to determine which MSE gives the best performance. Furthermore the experiment was repeated ten times with ten different queries to reach a stable result.

The findings revealed that Dogpile outperformed all the others, followed by MetaCrawler, Excite, Webfetch and then Mamma. MetaCrawler and WebCrawler had almost the same performance and occupied the next positions. Clusty and Search.com performed poorly in comparison to the others.

The findings of this research would be useful for MSE designers as well as helping the numerous users of MSEs to choose a truly effective one.

This paper provides a novel method for assessing the performance of MSEs and valuable experimental results on eight popular ones.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the psychosocial perception of harmattan dust on building openings, health and housekeeping to determine the influence of the dust on building occupants.

Population-representative survey data were collected from Maiduguri, Northeastern Nigeria, through physical administration of questionnaires by assessing several variables. Statistical package SPSS 16.0 was used for the data analysis, which is mainly descriptive analysis in frequencies, percentages and means together with a repeated Pearson’s chi-square analysis to identify the relationship between the factors and the significance testing.

The results show that majority (94.3%) experienced dust problem in harmattan season, and a larger part (76.6%) confirmed that the dust penetrates through doors and windows. Higher percentage (91.2%) noticed that the dust particles on their floor/furniture surfaces, and on an average, people clean their houses three times daily in harmattan season. Majority (80.5%) of the respondents smell dust in the harmattan season, and greater part (77.9%) experienced health challenges in this season, of which 12.8% confirmed harmattan dust aggravates their asthma, 13.6% confirmed it causes headache, 3.1% confirmed it exacerbated pneumonia, 58.5% confirmed it causes coughing, 3.5% confirmed catarrh, 2.3% confirmed nasal/respiratory congestion, sneezing and bronchitis and 6.2% experienced eye problems. Moreover, the results indicate that number/types of openings in a building are significantly associated with factors including smelling dust in the harmattan season and health problem experienced because of dust indoors. The number of times people clean their homes/workplaces is significantly related to important variables such as experiencing dust problem in harmattan season and number/type of openings in a building. The results further established that the health problem experienced by people is significantly related to important variables including dust problem experienced in the harmattan season and type of openings in a room.

Harmattan dust is a serious challenge to health and well-being of building occupants in the study area. The built environment professionals need to optimize building openings for effective dust control indoors.