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By introducing the basic concepts and theories of the philosophy of information created by Kun Wu, and making some comparisons of the philosophy of information and related information theories between Wu and other scholars, this paper aims to have Chinese philosophy of information widely known and understood by more people in the world, thus promoting the international exchanges between Chinese and Western scholars on the topic of philosophy of information.

The main research methods used in this paper are the literature review and the comparative study. On the one hand, it reviews some related concepts and theories in Kun Wu's academic works of philosophy of information. On the other hand, it compares the thoughts and viewpoints of Kun Wu with those of other scholars.

First, Kun Wu is the first person who has established a complete and comprehensive theoretical system of philosophy of information in China; second, Kun Wu's philosophy of information is significant in originality and value, which could be thought as the intellectual quintessence of information age, thus worth learning. Third, with more international exchanges, Chinese philosophy of information created by Wu will surely be more and more influential in philosophical circles at home and abroad.

It is a very valuable first-hand material for Western scholars to know and understand Chinese philosophy of information.

Leadership.

The case is suitable for MBA, Executive level courses.

Yongye Group is a biotechnological enterprise in Inner Mongolia, China. In China, people lack trust in economic transactions due to the transitional state of the economy, especially regarding food safety. To respond to this situation, Wu Zishen, the chairman of the Board of Directors of Yongye Group, was determined to build trust among employees, distributors, farmers, and consumers towards the company. To this end, he started using a creative incentive system with employees and stakeholders: the pay-before-performance incentive system. According to this system, the reward is delivered in advance, contrary to be paid after the fulfillment of the task. This practice is meant to transform employees' work attitude from a passive “being told to work” to a more proactive “I want to work” mentality. When such an incentive system is practiced with customers and external distributors, it sends a message that the company is “treating customers as company employees”, which means that they are trusted as if they were part of the company itself. Wu Zishen also introduced a coherent series of leadership practices that generate a truly proactive culture in the organization.

From this case, students will learn how to create a proactive culture in business organizations and the effect of pay-before-performance on employees' work motivation.

Teaching notes and an exercise for class-based discussion are available.

In an urbanising world, neighbouring is perceived to be steadily losing significance and a remnant of the past. The same belief can also be found in China where rapid urbanisation has had a tremendous impact on the social networks and neighbourhood life of urban residents. This chapter challenges the common perception of neighbouring in demise and argues that neighbouring remains an important form of social relationship, even if the meanings and role of neighbouring have changed. This chapter first charts the changing role of neighbouring from the socialist era to post-reform China. It then provides an account of four common types of neighbourhoods in Chinese cities – work-unit estates, traditional courtyards, commodity housing estates and urban villages – and considers how and why neighbouring in different ways still matters to them. In pre-reform socialist China, neighbourhood life and neighbouring comprised much of the daily social life of residents. Since the reform era, with the proliferation of private commodity housing estates, middle-class residents prioritise comfort, security and privacy, such that neighbouring levels have subsided. Nevertheless, in other neighbourhood types, such as work-unit housing estates, traditional courtyards and urban villages, neighbours still rely upon one another for various reasons.

This paper aims to propose a knowledge management (KM) framework for leveraging big social media data to help interested organizations integrate Big Data technology, social media and KM systems to store, share and leverage their social media data. Specifically, this research focuses on extracting valuable knowledge on social media by contextually comparing social media knowledge among competitors.

A case study was conducted to analyze nearly one million Twitter messages associated with five large companies in the retail industry (Costco, Walmart, Kmart, Kohl’s and The Home Depot) to extract and generate new knowledge and to derive business decisions from big social media data.

This case study confirms that this proposed framework is sensible and useful in terms of integrating Big Data technology, social media and KM in a cohesive way to design a KM system and its process. Extracted knowledge is presented visually in a variety of ways to discover business intelligence.

Practical guidance for integrating Big Data, social media and KM is scarce. This proposed framework is a pioneering effort in using Big Data technologies to extract valuable knowledge on social media and discover business intelligence by contextually comparing social media knowledge among competitors.

This chapter seeks to analyse neighbouring in times of rapid change in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai. Using the local neighbourhood of Tianzifang as a case study, this chapter shows how the pace of change in Shanghai since the 1950s has reshaped the social fabric of the area, including traditional neighbour relations. As Tianzifang has shifted from an unknown neighbourhood comprised of traditional lilong dwellings, where social relations played out in private communal settings, to one of Shanghai’s most famous tourist spots, the relationships between residents, as well as with ‘outsiders’ and the familiar local environment, have also changed. Traditional neighbourly ties have been broken, rebuilt and transformed again through waves of new residents coming into the area and the displacement of others who can no longer afford to live there. For those who remain, the question of who is, and thus who is not, a ‘real’ neighbour has been narrowed to include only ‘insiders’ with a deep sense of belonging and connection to the area – i.e. the urban working class who have always lived in Tianzifang and own rather than rent their homes. Yet even this is no longer sufficient. The disruption that Tianzifang’s physical and social transformation has brought to residents’ lives has also imposed new social norms about how neighbours should behave in this new, intermediary space of public and private. ‘Real’ neighbours are those who conform to changing social norms while neighbours who breach them can be ostracised and excluded by others who once saw them as an insider.

Academic and industrial researches on nanoscale flows and heat transfers are an area of increasing global interest, where fascinating phenomena are always observed, e.g. admirable water or air permeation and remarkable thermal conductivity. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the phenomena by the fractional calculus.

This paper begins with the continuum assumption in conventional theories, and then the fractional Gauss’ divergence theorems are used to derive fractional differential equations in fractal media. Fractional derivatives are introduced heuristically by the variational iteration method, and fractal derivatives are explained geometrically. Some effective analytical approaches to fractional differential equations, e.g. the variational iteration method, the homotopy perturbation method and the fractional complex transform, are outlined and the main solution processes are given.

Heat conduction in silk cocoon and ground water flow are modeled by the local fractional calculus, the solutions can explain well experimental observations.

Particular attention is paid throughout the paper to giving an intuitive grasp for fractional calculus. Most cited references are within last five years, catching the most frontier of the research. Some ideas on this review paper are first appeared.

Current knowledge management (KM) systems cannot be used effectively for decision-making because of the lack of real-time data. This study aims to discuss how KM can benefit by embedding Internet of Things (IoT).

The paper discusses how IoT can help KM to capture data and convert data into knowledge to improve the parking service in transportation using a case study.

This case study related to intelligent parking service supported by IoT devices of vehicles shows that KM can play a role in turning the incoming big data collected from IoT devices into useful knowledge more quickly and effectively.

The literature review shows that there are few papers discussing how KM can benefit by embedding IoT and processing incoming big data collected from IoT devices. The case study developed in this study provides evidence to explain how IoT can help KM to capture big data and convert big data into knowledge to improve the parking service in transportation.

Less attention has been paid to users’ interactions and behavior in studying multilingual search. Although digital library researchers have yet to assess user interaction and behavior in multilingual search, they have concurred that there is a need for user studies that document the extent to which information retrieval systems meet multilingual users’ needs and expectations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study is composed of five individual cases. The case study participants were Saudi students enrolled either at a large state university or Historically Black College and University located in the same community. Research questions are, what do Saudi Digital Library (SDL) users experience when searching within the SDL in Arabic and English? And what strategies do they use if they fail to find resources? Data collected for this study were via a qualitative method called video-stimulated recall.

In the Arabic search tasks, participants realized that finding resources is not easy. Participants expressed their concerns about the lack of relevance and accuracy of results returned by the search system, indicating weak trust and confidence in the search system. Whereas in the English search task, participants felt more satisfied and confident in their ability to trust the results returned from the search system. Participants expressed their satisfaction in the search experience as it provided them with accurate and varying resources. The participants faced difficulties finding Arabic resources than English resources in the SDL.

This study is considered one of the earliest works in studying the information-seeking behavior of multilingual digital libraries in the Arabic language. The value of this study arises as being the first study to investigate and report the information-seeking behavior of SDL users.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a steady two-dimensional magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) Falkner-Skan boundary layer flow of an incompressible viscous electrically fluid over a permeable wall in the presence of a magnetic field.

The governing equations of MHD Falkner-Skan flow are transformed into an initial values problem of an ordinary differential equation using the Lie symmetry method which are then solved by He's variational iteration method with He's polynomials.

The approximate solution is compared with the known solution using the diagonal Pad’e approximants and the geometrical behavior for the values of various parameters. The results reveal the reliability and validity of the present work, and this combinational method can be applied to other nonlinear boundary layer flow problems.

In this paper, an approximate analytical solution of the MHD Falkner-Skan flow problem is obtained by combining the Lie symmetry method with the variational iteration method and He's polynomials.

Customer knowledge from social media can become an important organizational asset. The purpose of this paper is to identify useful customer knowledge including knowledge for customer, knowledge about customers and knowledge from customers from social media data and facilitate social media-based customer knowledge management.

The authors conducted a case study to analyze people’s online discussion on Twitter regarding laptop brands and manufacturers. After collecting relevant tweets using Twitter search APIs, the authors applied statistical analysis, text mining and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze the social media data set and visualize relevant insights and patterns in order to identify customer knowledge.

The paper identifies useful insights and knowledge from customers and knowledge about customers from social media data. Furthermore, the paper shows how the authors can use knowledge from customers and knowledge about customers to help companies develop knowledge for customers.

This is an original social media analytics study that discusses how to transform large-scale social media data into useful customer knowledge including knowledge for customer, knowledge about customers and knowledge from customers.