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Forest insurance is a popular way to reduce the loss of forest disasters, so it is necessary to actively involve stakeholders. In the multi-agent simulation model, the government, insurance companies and forest farmers participate as three main stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to mainly simulate the behavior of forest farmers under different environmental variables in order to find the important factors affecting the coverage of forest insurance, so as to improve the ability of forest farmers to resist risks in the face of disasters.

In the simulation process, the decision-making rule of a forest farmer’s purchasing behavior is a binary selection chain, which is created at random. Forest farmer agents who adapt to the environment will remain; on the contrary, those will be eliminated. The eliminated agents will renew their behavior selection chains through learning others’ successful behavior based on genetic algorithm. The multi-agent mode is set up on the Eclipse platform by using Java language.

The adjustment simulation experiments of insurance premium, insurance subsidy and forest area were carried out. According to the result, conclusions and suggestions are as follows: at present, government subsidies are necessary for the implementation of forest insurance; in the future, with the expansion of the insured forest area and the upgrading and large-scale operation of forest farms, forest farmers will be more willing to join forest insurance program, and, then, the implementation of forest insurance no longer requires government subsidies for forest insurance premiums.

This paper explores the impact of three important factors on the implementation of forest insurance.

This paper aims to establish a theoretic framework to provide a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects, their existence and their identification scheme while providing a connection between cyber-enabled spaces and cyberspace. It develops an avenue to quantify general philosophical and theoretical questions, precisely, inherently spatial basis that produces an unprecedented space–time continuum, in which cyber-enabled relations evolve.

Multidisciplinary theoretical approaches are needed to describe complex systems, which in this paper are integrated in a quest for the principles underlying the structural organization and dynamics of cyberspace. A theoretic framework is presented, and the spatial conception of cyber-enabled physical, social, information and thinking spaces and entities existence are provided.

With spatial objects and spatial properties, cyberspace is inherently spatial. Its basic constructs are founded on its spatial qualities and producing radical space–time compression, cyber-enabled spaces in which dynamic relations develop and thrive. The cyberspatial object operations are primarily built on foundations that depend on physical space and other spatial metaphors. Information space, basically missing in the literature, is an important part of cyberspace.

This work suggested a novel analytical approach to describing cyberspace from broader perspectives and fields. Due to the novelty and divergence of cyber concepts, an interdisciplinary study and methodology are needed. Thus, more research toward theoretical direction could help many of the practical implementations of concepts.

The research is of particular significance in cyberspatial mechanics to describe the dynamics and behavior of cyber physical systems. For example, object-based analysis functions like spatial query, node pattern analysis, cluster analysis, spatial similarity analysis and location modeling.

Complementing the existing literature and defining information space to the research sphere, a theoretical framework providing a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects and the general cyberspace foundation has been proposed, resulting in a formalized concept of existence, interactions and applications and services, with respect to philosophy, science and technology, respectively.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of review group’s content-related and environment-associated attributes on information adoption intention of information readers. In addition, this study further investigates the effects of these determinants in different websites with different commercial attributes (i.e. online stores and third party forums).

This study used a structured online survey to collect data from an online store and a third party forum in China; totally 302 responses were collected.

The empirical results confirm that all of the five determinants significantly affect the information adoption intention of information readers. Furthermore, the authors found that four of the determinants have distinct effects in different websites.

The findings of this study validate the significant moderating role of website attributes in readers’ information processing. Information readers use distinct criteria to evaluate the received review information; electronic word-of-mouth determinants have varying effects on different websites with different commercial attributes.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Independent of the size of the company, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system can either boost or doom a company, if implemented successfully or unsuccessfully. There is a great deal of supporting evidence from the literature, mainly from large manufacturing and service organisations. This article adopts a case study approach to investigate the selection and im plementation activities in a manufacturing company in Greece focusing mainly on production management aspects. The goal is to provide insight into the ERP functionality with respect to production and thus the selection of an actual business case proves how the enterprise successfully implemented and integrated such a system, highlighting the processes used, the obstacles faced and how they were overcome, as well as the gains achieved. Finally, it provides useful information and practical suggestions that may help production managers and users to get a better understanding of how to deploy such systems.

Looks at planning, use of resources, labour relations, management style, and the concept of change in Malaysia, comparing management techniques with those employed in the USA. Concludes that there are some similarities and some differences in the two countries’ management techniques and philosophies, but points out that Malaysians are actively trying to upgrade their management skills by seeking help from Japan and the USA.

Epidemiologists are concerned the next deadly global cognition will be a new kind of deadly flu which humans have no resistance. Since the 1960s, their alarm has been focused on a bird (avian) virus (H5N1). This virus is generally harmless in its host species, but it is extremely deadly when contracted by humans. H5N1 mutates quickly and tends to pick up genes from flu viruses that affect other species. The flu is far more contagious and harder to contain than the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus. It is projected that 30‐40 per cent of the population would be infected in a H5N1 flu pandemic, and as many as one‐third would die. The 1918 Spanish flu caused 20 to 50 million deaths world wide. One scientist observed that the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic could have caused civilisation to disappear within a few weeks. Currently, more than 50 million chickens have been slaughtered in eight Asian countries in efforts to curb the spread of avian influenza. This article examines the roots and dangers of the potential avian influenza pandemic, examining the business and social ramifications that could ensue if the worst case scenario occurs.

This article presents a General Theory of Social Systems. This general theory proposes a model and method for the design, behaviour, and development of social systems. The model advanced is an exposition of the universal composition of social systems in three‐dimensions. The accompanying prescribed method offers dissection and analysis of past, present, and planned systems from Micro to Meta scales in isolation and relation to external systems.

X-ray pulsar navigation (XPNAV) is an autonomous celestial navigation technology for deep space missions. The error in the pulse time of arrival used in pulsar navigation is large for various practical reasons and thus greatly reduces the navigation accuracy of spacecraft near the Earth and in deep space. This paper aims to propose a novel method based on ranging information that improves the performance of XPNAV.

This method replaces one pulsar observation with a satellite observation. The ranging information is the difference between the absolute distance of the satellite relative to the spacecraft and the estimated distance of the satellite relative to the spacecraft. The proposed method improves the accuracy of XPNAV by combining the ranging information with the observation data of two pulsars.

The simulation results show that the proposed method greatly improves the XPNAV accuracy by 70% compared with the conventional navigation method that combines the observations of three pulsars. This research also shows that a larger angle between the orbital plane of the satellite and that of the spacecraft provides higher navigation accuracy. In addition, a greater orbital altitude difference implies higher navigation accuracy. The position error and ranging error of the satellite have approximately linear relationships with the navigation accuracy.

The novelty of this study is that the satellite ranging information is integrated into the pulsar navigation by using mathematical geometry.

As arc suppression coils (ASCs), magnetically controlled reactors (MCRs) are usually operated in the single-phase mode. Due to the lack of a third order harmonic compensation circuit, the current harmonics are high. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel structure of MCR and a genetic algorithm (GA) to determine the parameters which will result in minimum total harmonics.

This paper proposes the structure and the working principle of the multi-valve controlled saturable reactor (MCSR). There are several sorts of magnetic valves in the iron cores of the MCSR. The saturation degree of each magnetic valve is different when the same direct component of the magnetic flux is generated in the iron core, therefore current harmonics of different phases emerging, i.e. the total harmonics can be reduced. The magnetization characteristics and the mathematical model of the current harmonics of the MCSR are presented by introducing three parameters. The optimal values of the parameters that result in the smallest total harmonic distortion in the output current are calculated by a GA.

The simulation and experimental results are coincident with the theoretical analyses, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed method on harmonic suppression.

The method proposed in this paper can successfully reduce the current harmonics of the conventional MCR, including but not limited to the ASC. A prototype MCSR (540 kVA/10 kV) has been designed and constructed.

In this paper, a MCSR is proposed. The mathematical model of the MCSR for harmonic analysis is developed. The optimal parameters that result in the smallest THD in the output current are calculated. The mathematical model can be also used for the harmonic analysis of conventional MCRs.