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The purpose of this paper is to explore managers' and employees' opinions regarding privacy in open plan offices and also investigate the relationship between the perception of managers and employees on visual and acoustical privacy in order to provide better design solutions in an open plan office setting.

The research method is a structured interview. The categorized data are analyzed with percentage of frequency distributions and Chi square analysis. A total of 42 subjects were interviewed and separated in two groups as managers and employees.

It was found that lack of privacy still exists as an unsolved negative aspect in open plan offices. Findings indicated that there is a strong desire for employees to change and control their physical working space when both visual and acoustical privacy is needed in an open plan office setting. Another finding is that there is a difference of opinion regarding visual privacy between managers and employees.

The limitation of the paper is that the sample is small and all subjects' occupations are computer‐related. Future studies are needed to further investigate diverse subjects in a larger population. Any future research instrument would have to be different from a structured interview.

Research findings provide valid recommendations to system furniture designers and manufacturers. System furniture design needs to be modular and easily changeable and adjustable for open plan offices.

The significant contribution of this research is that it provided valid data and makes a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge in open plan office design.

The purpose of this paper is to address the specific challenges with which resource‐based cities are faced when they begin along the path of industrial transformation and to employ empirical studies to determine whether relevant reforms in resource‐based cities (taking Pingxiang, one of the first round of resource‐exhausted cities acting as pilot cities in the national sustainable development transformation program, as an example), promoted by local government in recent years, have brought significant changes to their development modes and facilitated the real transition.

The paper carried out some empirical studies from different angles: employing the “vertical table graph” method, to turn Pingxiang's statistical data (1997‐2010) into a graph that visually shows Pingxiang's economic and social development; comparing several major economic and social development indicators (especially the energy consumption per unit of GDP) of 11 cities within Jiangxi Province in order to learn Pingxiang's relative positions; based on time series data from 1997 to 2009, calculating the change rates, the variation coefficients and the shift‐share indexes of industrial structure so as to measure the quality of Pingxiang's structural transformation; comparing the above results with the cities of Jiaozuo, Benxi and Dalian; and comparing economic and social development state of 16 resource‐based cities (which are all among the list of 44 national resource‐exhausted cities) from the perspective of “green GDP”.

Although Pingxiang has gained great progress in economic development, its industrial structure is not rational enough, and shows great dependence on mining industry with a too high share of the secondary industry and a too small proportion of the tertiary industry. Its heavy dependence on resources and investment does not suggest a fundamental change in development modes. Accordingly, the city's development idea should be switched from GDP‐orientation to sustainable development. It should proceed with the optimization of the industrial structure adjustment, increase manpower capital investment and develop new green substitutable industries, so as to catalyze the success of transition.

This integration of empirical analysis methods from three angles in multivariate statistical analysis, environmental economics, and industrial economics is novel in the field of research on resource‐city and industry change. It not only could be of some help in decision making for Pingxiang municipal government, but also could provide reference for other cities dependent on resource exploitation.

The construction industry accounts for a large proportion of the economy of developing countries, but the connotation and influencing factors of high-quality development (HQD) are still unclear. This study aims to gain a more comprehensive insight into the current development status of the regional construction industry under China's HQD orientation and the obstructive factors affecting its development and to provide informative suggestions for its HQD prospects.

In this study, the construction industry of 16 cities in the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle (CCEC), a new region in southwest China, was used as the research object to collect data from the 2006–2019 yearbooks, construct an evaluation index system for HQD of the construction industry, derive the development level of the construction industry using the entropy value method and spatial autocorrelation method and then apply the barrier Diagnostic model was used to compare and analyze the impact level of each index.

In terms of the time dimension, the development of the construction industry in CCEC is characterized by “high in the twin core and low in the surrounding area”, with unbalanced and insufficient development; in terms of spatial correlation, some factors have positive aggregation in spatial distribution, but the peripheral linkage decreases; through barrier analysis, the impact of different barrier factors is different.

This paper will help governments and enterprises in developing countries to make urban planning and management policies to fundamentally improve the development of the construction industry in underdeveloped regions.

Global climate change speeds up ice melting and increases flooding incidents. China launched a sponge city policy as a holistic nature-based solution combined with urban planning and development to address flooding due to climate change. Using Weibo analytics, this paper aims to study public perceptions of sponge city.

This study collected 53,586 sponge city contents from Sina Weibo via Python. Various artificial intelligence tools, such as CX Data Science of Simply Sentiment, KH Coder and Tableau, were applied in the study.

76.8% of public opinion on sponge city were positive, confirming its positive contribution to flooding management and city branding. 17 out of 31 pilot sponge cities recorded the largest number of sponge cities related posts. Other cities with more Weibo posts suffered from rainwater and flooding hazards, such as Xi'an and Zhengzhou.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the public perception of sponge city in Sina Weibo.

Although being considered for adoption by stakeholders in container shipping, application of blockchain is hindered by different factors. This paper investigates the potential operational risks of blockchain-integrated container shipping systems as one of such barriers.

Literature review is employed as the method of risk identification. Scientific articles, special institutional reports and publications of blockchain solution providers were included in an inclusive qualitative analysis. A directed acyclic graph (DAG) was constructed and analyzed based on network topological metrics.

Twenty-eight potential risks and 47 connections were identified in three groups of initiative, transitional and sequel. The DAG analysis results reflect a relatively well-connected network of identified hazardous events (HEs), suggesting the pervasiveness of information risks and various multiple-event risk scenarios. The criticality of the connected systems' security and information accuracy are also indicated.

This paper indicates the changes of container shipping operational risk in the process of blockchain integration by using updated data. It creates awareness of the emerging risks, provides their insights and establishes the basis for further research.