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Oyster cultivation has a long history in Pearl River Delta area and is one of the traditional aquaculture depending strongly on the natural coastal resource because of the expected variation of salinity, temperature and diversity of infaunal organisms for the cultivation practice. Apart from being the traditional knowledge inherited through the coastal communities over the centuries, oyster aquaculture is also embedded in the long-term socio-economic relationships among communities that have a rich experience regarding the quality and quantity controls for the long-term sustainable coastal resource management, together with a strong sense of responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the local food heritage for various reasons. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper seeks to examine oyster cultivation in Lau Fau Shan (literally means floating mountain) in Hong Kong, not only from the cultural–historical perspectives but also from the social resilience perspectives, such as how and why local communities are willing to inherit the traditions, what kinds of roles NGOs and government play in oyster cultivation, why local people should be engaged, and how the oyster aquaculture/industry underwent the transformations, given all the difficulties and challenges.

The value of oyster cultivation is not only for food production but also for the global exchange of experiences on social resilience for both school and public educations.

It is an original research making use of a local case study for the understanding of post-disaster reconstruction of coastal communities in the global context.

The sublime in scent refers to the use of language and description that excites thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary olfactory experience, and I would like to borrow this literary concept to explore the recent development of incense traditions in Japan and China from a sociocultural perspective. In order to understand how olfactory characters of incense have been verbally expressed, we can start by looking into the sublime in scent through the articulation of relevant subtle approaches since ancient times.

This paper explains how the description of scent experienced by individuals has been associated with thoughts and history and why the sublime in scent is more complicated than the aroma people can tell. The data collected for this research is mostly based on observations by participating in various events and conversations with different people.

In Japan and China, the use of incense has a long history, and relevant scent cultures have been developed not only for offerings in religious practices, but also as a kind of scent appreciation together with a poetic presentation. Again, it is important and significant to discern several interactions of incense traditions in these two countries, since the transformations became obvious in the last two decades, while Japanese Kodo participated more in international exchange, and the Chinese people's view of intangible cultural heritage has become more important in their daily social practices.

As a way of showing how the study of scent can enhance ethnographic writing and the understanding of changes in the appreciation of incense, this paper hopes to contribute to the study of art and tradition.

Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to address the overfitting and collinearity problems that frequently occur in predictive cost estimating models for construction practice. A case study, modeling the cost of preliminaries is proposed to test the robustness of this approach.

A hybrid approach is developed based on the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and principal component regression (PCR). Cost information for a sample of 204 UK school building projects is collected involving elemental items, contingencies (risk) and the contractors’ preliminaries. An application to estimate the cost of preliminaries for construction projects demonstrates the method and tests its effectiveness in comparison with such competing models as: alternative regression models, three artificial neural network data mining techniques, case-based reasoning and support vector machines.

The experimental results show that the AIC–PCR approach provides a good predictive accuracy compared with the alternatives used, and is a promising alternative to avoid overfitting and collinearity.

This is the first time an approach integrating the AIC and PCR has been developed to offer an improvement on existing methods for estimating construction project Preliminaries. The hybrid approach not only reduces the risk of overfitting and collinearity, but also results in better predictability compared with the commonly used stepwise regression.

An odd‐sounding expression recently introduced into the language, derived from the passage of events, Privatization, introduced as a rescue operation for sections of public and nationalised industry to hand them over to private enterprise to avoid their destruction and smothering by the unholy wedlock of trade unionism and weak, inefficient management. It frequently met with the opposition of unions and sections of staff. Efforts have been made to sabotage the take‐over and operation of the services by private firms, occasionally making them impossible to operate. This elementary operation was expected to achieve even greater success in the sections taken over and reduced the room for destructive manoeuvring by ajitator, much of which was caused independent of the unions. In the public services some of the antics between rival factions bordered on the ludicrous.

At the passing of the Fair Trading Act, 1973, and the setting up of a Consumer Protection Service with an Office of Fair Trading under a Director‐General, few could have visualized this comprehensive machinery devised to protect the mainly economic interests of consumers could be used to further the efforts of local enforcement officers and authorities in the field of purity and quality control of food and of food hygiene in particular. This, however, is precisely the effect of a recent initiative under Sect. 34 of the Act, reported elsewhere in the BFJ, taken by the Director‐General in securing from a company operating a large group of restaurants a written undertaking, as prescribed by the Section, that it would improve its standards of hygiene; the company had ten convictions for hygiene contraventions over a period of six years.

Tourism is Mexico's largest source of foreign exchange, only surpassed by remittances and foreign direct investment, and is one of the most wealth-generating economic activities in the country. However, measures to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic – such as the suspension of flights and strict restrictions on people's mobility – have caused great economic damage to the tourism industry, and with it, to large regions in the country. This chapter aims to determine the national and regional impacts of Covid-19 on Mexican tourism and analyze potential recovery scenarios. To this end, the study looks at tourism performance in Mexico in 2020 and compares it to the experience of the H1N1 influenza epidemic of 2009. The methodology uses a spatial econometric model to simulate potential impacts and prospective recovery scenarios. Finally, recommendations for tourism policy consider new trends in tourism, namely the rise in tourism advertising through digital platforms, the surge in domestic, rural and environmental tourism, and the development of a more informed, demanding and selective consumer.

This study investigates the impact of environmental influences, particularly a secretive aspect of Chinese culture, on voluntary corporate disclosure practices. Evidence is provided of the similarly low level of voluntary disclosure by Hong Kong (HK) and Singaporian listed industrial companies. Further, a comparative analysis with prior research on UK/US companies indicates that the extent of voluntary disclosure by HK and Singaporian companies is lower overall. However, while this finding applies to both financial and nonfinancial information, it is not so in the case of strategic information for HK companies.