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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the characteristics of statutory internal auditors on operating efficiency.

This study investigates three characteristics pertaining to statutory internal auditors, namely, compensation, activity and expertise, based on 1,340 firm observations from 2009 to 2010 using publicly available disclosure data for Korean listed firms.

The authors find no evidence that statutory internal auditors’ compensation is positively associated with operating efficiency. This implies that compensation data on statutory internal auditors in Korea may not directly reflect their competence and ability to enhance operating efficiency. On the other hand, the authors find evidence for a positive association between full-time status for statutory internal auditors and operating efficiency and a positive association between the attendance at board meetings for statutory internal auditors and operating efficiency. The results also show a decrease in operating efficiency when statutory internal auditors are newly appointed. Finally, expertise of statutory internal auditors in financial or legal matters provides no advantage in terms of operating efficiency.

This study contributes to the extant literature on internal audit by examining the advisory role of statutory internal auditors and its effect on operating efficiency, which is one of the objectives established by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission.

While most prior research on internal audit depends on survey data from statutory internal auditors or experimental data based on a limited sample of firms, this study is based on a large sample of publicly available data of the Korean market.

The purpose of this study is to develop a performance measurement system of environmental sustainability in service settings and to empirically examine the relationship between the measured environmental sustainability and operating performance.

This study applies exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to a six‐year panel dataset of 984 US hotels to construct a two‐factor standardized measure of environmental sustainability. The authors then conduct a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to investigate the relationship between the measured environmental sustainability and the operating performance frontier, considering the impact of operating structure.

Customer behavior and operational decisions are two key drivers of environmental sustainability. There is a positive link between environmental sustainability and operating performance. Operating structure has a significant impact on the operating performance. The performance frontier varies across market segment and location characteristics such as degree of urbanization and climate condition.

The findings indicate that service providers should actively involve customers, and manage both front‐office and back‐office operations in environmental sustainability initiatives. Operating structures that favor the alignment of multiple service supply chain partners' interests contribute positively to performance. The managers should be mindful of varying best‐in‐class performance due to operating unit characteristics such as market segment, and location characteristics.

This study is among the first attempts to develop a performance measurement system of environmental sustainability. The resulted standardized measure of environmental sustainability considers both the revenue and cost impacts in service operations. This research is among the first generation of papers that bring the unique characteristics of service operations, particularly service co‐production, into sustainability research.

This study aims to explore the relationship between speed behavior of participants and driving styles on interchange ramps. A spiral interchange in Chongqing was selected as an experimental road to carry out field driving experiment.

The continuous operating speed during experiment was selected by Mobile Eye, and the driving style was selected via two inventories.

Different driving behaviors showed great differences in age, driving mileage and driving experience. During driving process, male pursued driving stimulation more, whereas female pursued driving steadiness more. Therefore, driving characteristics of male were more disadvantageous to driving safety than that of female. Except for the large speed difference at the entrance and exit of the ramps, the differences at other positions were small. And the operating speed of male was slightly higher than that of female. The difference between different genders at the ascending end position achieved 4–5 kph, and the difference at other feature points were mostly 1–2 kph. During driving process, risky participants were more likely to pursue driving stimulation, and the poor speed control behavior was reflected in wide range of desired operating speed. Based on the results of analyzing at feature points, melancholy and sanguine participants more tended to take a high operating speed, and the poor speed control behavior was reflected in the most widely desired speed range. The speed control behavior of mixed participants was more cautious.

Advanced driving assistance system combined with two inventories was used to explore difference of speed behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel totally passive, wireless temperature sensor tag based on ultra high-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The temperature-sensing functionality is enabled by using distilled water embedded in the tag antenna substrate. The novel sensor tag is designed to provide wireless temperature readings comparable to a commercial thermocouple thermometer even in environments with high levels of interference, such as reflections. The structure of the novel sensor tag is aimed to increase its usability by minimizing user-created errors and to simplify the measurement procedure.

The sensor tag is based on a dual port sensing concept in which two ports are used to obtain sensor readings. By utilizing two ports instead of one, the effects of environmental interference, tag-reader antenna orientation and distance can be effectively minimized. Two alternative methods of acquiring the sensor reading from the operating characteristics of the two ports are presented and discussed.

Temperature measurements in practical scenarios show that by utilizing the dual port sensing concept, the developed tag produces temperature readings wirelessly which are comparable to readings from a commercial thermocouple thermometer.

The concept of dual port sensing was shown and two alternative methods on extracting sensor readings from the differences in the port operating characteristics were introduced and discussed. In this paper, the dual port sensing concept is utilized in creating a temperature sensor tag; however, the same concept can be utilized in a variety of passive wireless sensors based on UHF RFID technology. This enables a new approach in designing accurate, easy to use and easily integrable passive sensors. The dual port sensing concept is in its early stages of development; its accuracy could be improved by developing more advanced data post-processing techniques.

The accuracy of a passive dual port UHF RFID-enabled temperature sensor tag is proven to be sufficient in many applications. This indicates that other sensor types utilizing the dual port sensing concept can reach high levels of accuracy as well. Furthermore, the passive RFID-enabled sensors based on the dual port sensing concept are superior in usability versus sensor tags equipped only with a single port. Therefore, dual port sensing concept in passive UHF RFID-enabled sensor tags could make such sensors more attractive commercially and lead to truly widespread ubiquitous sensing and computing.

This paper presents a novel passive, wireless temperature sensor tag for UHF RFID systems. The sensor tag utilizes a new structure which allows tight integration of two ports and two tag antennas. The accuracy of the developed tag is confirmed throughout measurements and it is found comparable to the accuracy of commercial thermometers in practical measurement scenarios. Moreover, the paper presents a dual port sensing concept and two readout methods based on the concept which are aimed to increase the accuracy and usability of all kinds of UHF RFID-enabled sensor tags.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The choice of the transport mode is a fundamental part of distribution management which should be analysed carefully because of the impact upon a company's operational efficiency. Failure to identify the most appropriate transport mode may incur higher costs than are necessary and may provide a lower customer service level than is potentially possible. The decision upon the choice of the transport mode is extremely complex because of the vast volume of choice available together with the numerous methods of examination and evaluation of each choice.

This paper is aimed to study the design of a miniaturized filter with tri-band characteristics. In this paper, perturbation is used to realize circuit miniaturization and multi-band by exploiting the inductive property. During this process, vias are added for twofold benefit, namely, circuit miniaturization and enhanced frequency selectivity at high frequency. Thus, with the introduction of the shorting via, the single-band dual-mode bandpass filter is converted into a tri-band filter with a smaller electrical size.

This paper presents the design and characterization of a miniaturized two-port filter with tri-band operating characteristics. The proposed filter is constructed using a square patch resonator operating at 5.2 GHz with a capacitively coupled feed configuration. A square perturbation is added to the corner of the square patch to achieve diagonal symmetry and to excite dual mode. The perturbation offers a sharp transmission zero defining bandwidth of the proposed filter. In addition, a shorting post is introduced to achieve an 88% size reduction by lowering the operating frequency to 1.8 GHz.

The prototype filter has insertion less than 1.2 dB and return loss better than 12 dB throughout all the realized frequency bands. The prototype filter is fabricated and the simulation results are validated using experimental measurements. The realized fractional bandwidths of the proposed bandpass filter are 11/5.6/1 at 1.8/4.6/5.85 GHz, respectively. The quality factor of the proposed antenna is greater than 80 and a peak Q-factor of 387 is realized at 5.85 GHz. The high Q-factor indicates low loss and improved selectivity. The rejection levels in the stopband are greater than 20 dB.

The results indicate that the proposed filter is a suitable choice for low-power small-scale wireless systems operating in the microwave bands. The realized filter has the smallest footprint of 0.36λ_eff  × 0.19λ_eff where λ_eff is the effective wavelength calculated at the lowest frequency of operation.

The purpose of this study is to propose a fast method for predicting flow fields with periodic behavior with verification in the context of a radial turbine to meet the urgent requirement to effectively capture the unsteady flow characteristics in turbomachinery. Aiming at meeting the urgent requirement to effectively capture the unsteady flow characteristics in turbomachinery, a fast method for predicting flow fields with periodic behavior is proposed here, with verification in the context of a radial turbine (RT).

Sparsity-promoting dynamic mode decomposition is used to determine the dominant coherent structures of the unsteady flow for mode selection, and for flow-field prediction, the characteristic parameters including amplitude and frequency are predicted using one-dimensional Gaussian fitting with flow rate and two-dimensional triangulation-based cubic interpolation with both flow rate and rotation speed. The flow field can be rebuilt using the predicted characteristic parameters and the chosen model.

Under single flow-rate variation conditions, the turbine flow field can be recovered using the first seven modes and fitted amplitude modulus and frequency with less than 5% error in the pressure field and less than 9.7% error in the velocity field. For the operating conditions with concurrent flow-rate and rotation-speed fluctuations, the relative error in the anticipated pressure field is likewise within an acceptable range. Compared to traditional numerical simulations, the method requires a lot less time while maintaining the accuracy of the prediction.

It would be challenging and interesting work to extend the current method to nonlinear problems.

The method presented herein provides an effective solution for the fast prediction of unsteady flow fields in the design of turbomachinery.

A flow prediction method based on sparsity-promoting dynamic mode decomposition was proposed and applied into a RT to predict the flow field under various operating conditions (both rotation speed and flow rate change) with reasonable prediction accuracy. Compared with numerical calculations or experiments, the proposed method can greatly reduce time and resource consumption for flow field visualization at design stage. Most of the physics information of the unsteady flow was maintained by reconstructing the flow modes in the prediction method, which may contribute to a deeper understanding of physical mechanisms.

Aims to identify the most important red flags as individually perceived by auditors, and explores whether auditors' demographic factors might impact on their perception of the relative importance of red flags in Malaysia, particularly in the Klang Valley area.

This study employed a mailed survey as a method of data collection. The respondents to this survey are practicing auditors from audit firms in Kuala Lumpur. The sample of auditors is taken from the population of domestic listed audit firms with the Malaysian Institute of Accountants as of 27 March 2003. A simple random technique is applied to construct the sample.

In general, subjects indicated that the operating and financial stability category was judged as most important, followed by management characteristics and influence over the control environment, and then finally by industry characteristics.

It would be interesting to examine whether these fraud risk indicators are indeed helpful in the investigation of reported misconduct and fraudulent cases in Malaysia. The findings may help researchers to develop a new fraud risk indicator that takes into consideration actual instances of fraud in Malaysia.

The goal of this research is first to investigate the outsourcing needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in each of the following HR sub‐processes: recruiting, training, HR administration, payroll, and benefit processes. Then, the outsourcing needs are analyzed against the characteristics of the companies such as company size, operating environment, culture and information technology maturity. Lastly, integrated business process outsourcing (BPO) service models are developed according to the characteristics of the company.

To fulfil the objective of this research, the questionnaire is used to assess the outsourcing needs of the companies. The data collected by questionnaire are analyzed against the characteristics of the companies. Then integrated BPO service models are developed based on the analysis of the questionnaire data and the interviews with HR managers. This study used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

This study suggests BPO service industry with two different service models: partially integrated model where e‐recruiting and e‐learning are integrated and fully integrated model where all of the HR‐subprocesses are integrated.

As BPO is expected to be booming in the next few years, this study helps BPO service industry to better serve SMEs in the area of human resource management.