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The objective of this study is to examine Chinese consumers' behavioural intentions to reduce restaurant food wastage (i.e. intentions to order moderate meal size, and to pack leftovers) in a group context from both psychological and cultural perspectives.

This paper used an online self-administered survey for data collection. The measurements were either adopted or adapted from prior studies on pro-environmental behaviours. Using data from 311 Chinese consumers, the authors analysed restaurant food wastage in China by utilising PLS-SEM.

By applying an extended value-attitude-behaviour (VAB) hierarchy with information publicity, it is found that materialism, frugality consciousness, information publicity and environmental concern are important factors in influencing individuals' behavioural intentions to reduce food waste in a group dining-out context.

Drawing upon perspectives of Chinese consumers, this paper outlines key promoters and barriers to food waste mitigation, and provides meaningful insights to policymakers, NGOs, industry stakeholders and even consumers on how to effectively overcome the food waste challenge at the consumption stage in the context of Chinese culture.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the productivity of parent firms over the food industry.

The main data in this paper are derived from the China Industrial Enterprise Database 2005–2013 and a data set of Chinese firms’ OFDI information. Then this paper uses propensity score matching to match the treatment and control groups with firm characteristics and combines that with the differences-in-differences method to estimate the real effect of OFDI on total factor productivity.

The food firm’s OFDI significantly improves the parent firm’s productivity (known as the OFDI own-firm effect), but this promotion only exists in the short term. The OFDI own-firm effect of food firms differs remarkably as the sub-sectors, regions and ownership of firms vary. The food firm’s OFDI in “non-tax havens” and high-income destinations has a significantly stronger effect on the parent firm’s productivity. FDI, R&D and exporting can effectively strengthen the OFDI own-firm effect of food firms.

The effect of OFDI on food industry productivity has not been researched yet. This paper aims to fill this gap. This paper further divides the characteristics of food firms into different sub-sectors, regions and ownership types for a comparative analysis, with the aim of conducting a more comprehensive study at the micro-level of firms. In addition, an investigation into which factors influence the degree of the OFDI own-firm effect at the micro-level has not been found in the literature. This paper will draw its own conclusions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a novel mobile monitoring and control (MC) framework with active-push and plug-and-play capabilities. This proposed framework is particularly designed to addresses the shortcomings of the traditional factory MC systems in sharing information over the internet, protecting the system security, delivering warning messages, and deploying monitoring points.

By leveraging web service technology, mobile devices, and wireless communication, this paper describes the methodology and approach for designing a MC server, a wireless monitoring module (WMM), an intelligent v-Machine, two active-push mechanisms, a pocket PC application, and a smart phone application.

The designed WMM enables the monitoring points to be deployed in a mobile manner. The proposed mobile MC framework (MMCF) can timely detect abnormalities of appliances and equipment and turn off appliances in dangerous situations through WMM. It can also instantly deliver various warning contents to the mobile devices carried by the responsible persons. The v-Machine is built based on virtual metrology (VM) technology and can predict production precision of machined workpieces.

With the successful design and testing of the novel MMCF, this framework can obviously be used for many more applications and developments.

The authors' implement a factory MC system based on the proposed framework and conduct various integration tests on two electric appliances and a practical CNC machine tool in a factory. Testing results shows that the factory MC system works smoothly according the design goals and can overcome the shortcomings of traditional factory MC systems. The MC system also presents good performances, instantly delivering warning contents with a size ranging from 1K bytes to 10M bytes to the users within few seconds.

The proposed MMCF exploits various automation technologies to detect equipment's abnormalities, reduce the rate of product defects caused by human errors, reinforce security, prevent accidents, and ensure the safety of operations.

The proposed MMCF can effectively promote existing factory MC systems to achieve the merits of mobile MC, which is a unique contribution of this work, compared to previous studies. The results of this study can be applied to a variety of industrial automation applications, including factory automation and assembly automation.

Following a general trend in software development, CDROM applications are increasingly implementing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). The general assumption is that GUIs offer advantages in terms of ease of learning and use, especially for non‐expert users. Moreover, the adoption of GUIs for CDROMs has been suggested as a means of providing a de facto standard interface. This study assesses the appropriateness of GUIs, more specifically Windows‐based interfaces for CDROM. An evaluation model was devised to carry out an expert evaluation of the interfaces of seven CDROM products. The model identified two levels of interaction, the dialogue level and task level, and focused on general interface features, search and retrieval tasks, and output and processing options as well as the help facilities. The results are discussed in the light of HCI Usability Criteria and design guidelines (including general interface design guidelines, specific Windows design guidelines and The CDROM Consistent Interface Guidelines) to assess to what extent the applications comply and appropriate recommendations are made.

Cultural diversity has become a major issue in the United States. Issues of cultural diversity are more focused, especially in the classroom setting. There are several techniques that may be applied to teaching to accommodate students of diverse backgrounds. Teachers must first be aware of stereo types, ethnocentrism, and prejudice. They should apply management techniques to the physical space as well as students’ behaviour. Multiple intelligence theory, active learning, technology and multicultural education are among some of the techniques that may be applied to teaching in the classroom. In addition to teaching modifications, teachers must include the parents in the classroom activities. Teachers should be familiar with the obstacles they may face when implementing the techniques. These methods also have future implications in the higher education setting. Professors may utilise these techniques in their lectures. Students who have had these practices integrated into their learning will also be better prepared for higher education and for the workforce.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

This paper aims to put forward a kind of new method of intelligent trust engineering metrics for application of mobile ad hoc network (MANET).

The new method calculates the communication trust by using the number of data packets among the nodes of MANET, predicts intelligently the trust and calculates the comprehensive trust based on the historical trust; then calculates the energy trust based on the residual energy of the nodes of MANET, calculates the direct trust based on the communication trust and energy trust. The new method calculates the recommendation trust based on the recommendation reliability; adopts the adaptive weighting to calculate the integrated direct trust by considering the direct trust with recommendation trust.

Based on the integrated direct trust and the factor of trust propagation distance, the indirect trust among the nodes of MANET is calculated. The above process can be optimized based on the dynamic machine learning presented in this study. The advantage of the new method is its intelligent ability to discover malicious nodes.

The advantage of the new method is its intelligent ability to discover malicious nodes which can partition the network by falsely reporting other nodes as misbehaving and proceeds to protect the network. The authors have done the experiments based on the tool kits such as NS3, QualNet, OMNET++ and MATLAB. The experimental results show that this study’s approach can effectively avoid the attacks of malicious nodes, and more conformable to the actual engineering application of MANET.

Quantitative gait analysis is an important research area to enable physiotherapist to perform systematic studies and health diagnosis of the lower extremity of patients throughout the rehabilitation. The quantitative measurement of ambulatory gait can be performed by using convenient and economical wearable sensors outside specialized motion laboratories. In this paper, a sensor system consisting of three tri-axial accelerometers, two flex sensors and four force sensors was developed. Subject testing were carried out to obtain temporal and spatial gait parameters. The performance of the sensor suite is compared to results from camera videos analysed by Kinovea motion tracking software.

The paper aims to comprehensively study the current learning environment of export skills in China and to identify the needs of Chinese firms for skills training. Thus, it proposes a conceptual framework of skills identification and ranking model. Another main purpose of this paper is to expand the domain of export skills and knowledge management by including a broader range of the determinants of interests in export skills acquisition and identification than is normally found in the related literature.

A comprehensive and thorough survey on the learning environment of export skills acquisition was conducted in this study targeting 800 exporting firms in China. Ten propositions were proposed and the data were complemented through correspondence analysis to study the determinants of interest in export skills acquisition among these firms.

The results indicate that the overall level of export skills for Chinese exporters is somewhat low and little training resources are invested in export skills acquisition. Furthermore, interest in export skills learning is broad based and unrelated to ownership structure. It is demonstrated that Chinese exporters of greater export development and management commitment show more interest in export skills learning. Those of lower export development need more support from government trade agencies, yet in general, government assistance in meeting the demand of Chinese exporters is still insufficient.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to find the best practice.

The paper includes implications for the intelligence of learning environment, the identification of determinants of the learning interests in export skills and the development of skills training and knowledge management.

This paper can be used by the exporting firms, the universities and government trade agencies to design more effective skill training programs and to guide their resource allocations.

Discusses the transfer of undertakings in the UK, referring to the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations of 1981, the Employment Rights Act 1996, and the Acquired Rights Directive 1977. Provides the raison d’etre of the Acquired Rights Directive and outlines how it was implemented in the UK. Talks about the confusing jurisprudence of the European and British courts, mentioning the European Court of Justice’s challenges to the directive, the 1994 proposals, amended 1997 proposals, the Commission’s memorandum of 1997 and the UK government’s consultation papers. Describes how the European Directive is applied and interpreted in relation to the Acquired Rights Directive and transfer of undertakings. Outlines the regulations controlling compulsory competitive tendering. Points out the obligation to inform and consult on the transfer of an undertaking and how the directive is enforced if this fails to occur. Notes the effect a relevant transfer has on existing collective agreements and the legal implications of dismissing employees by reason of the relevant transfer. Looks at the European Commission’s proposal for a directive on safeguarding employees’ rights in the event of transfer and the implications that would have on UK business. Concludes that a new directive is needed, building on the 1977 Directive but ironing out its inconsistencies.