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Forecasts of commodity prices are vital issues to market participants and policy makers. Those of corn are of no exception, considering its strategic importance. In the present study, the authors assess the forecast problem for the weekly wholesale price index of yellow corn in China during January 1, 2010–January 10, 2020 period.

The authors employ the nonlinear auto-regressive neural network as the forecast tool and evaluate forecast performance of different model settings over algorithms, delays, hidden neurons and data splitting ratios in arriving at the final model.

The final model is relatively simple and leads to accurate and stable results. Particularly, it generates relative root mean square errors of 1.05%, 1.08% and 1.03% for training, validation and testing, respectively.

Through the analysis, the study shows usefulness of the neural network technique for commodity price forecasts. The results might serve as technical forecasts on a standalone basis or be combined with other fundamental forecasts for perspectives of price trends and corresponding policy analysis.

This study aims to identify an antecedent that hinders knowledge sharing, namely, the perceived climate of Cha-xu. Based on the social exchange perspective, the authors propose a theoretical model that links the perceived climate of Cha-xu to employee knowledge sharing. This model focuses on the mediating role of two types of trust (vertical and horizontal trust) and the moderating role of task interdependence in influencing the mediation.

Using a sample of 509 Chinese employees, this study carried out a survey on an online platform. This study developed a structural equation model and tested the moderated mediation hypothesis by using Mplus 8.0.

The results showed that two types of trust act as mediators in the relationship between the perceived climate of Cha-xu and knowledge-sharing processes. The mediating effect of horizontal trust is stronger. Most significantly, findings show that this mediated relationship is contingent on the level of task interdependence.

This paper provides evidence for distinguishing vertical trust and horizontal trust in the field of knowledge management. From a managerial perspective, this study identifies traditional cultural factors for hindering knowledge-sharing processes within Chinese organizations.

Due to the increasing size and complexity of construction projects, construction engineering and management involves the coordination of many complex and dynamic processes and relies on the analysis of uncertain, imprecise and incomplete information, including subjective and linguistically expressed information. Various modelling and computing techniques have been used by construction researchers and applied to practical construction problems in order to overcome these challenges, including fuzzy hybrid techniques. Fuzzy hybrid techniques combine the human-like reasoning capabilities of fuzzy logic with the capabilities of other techniques, such as optimization, machine learning, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) and simulation, to capitalise on their strengths and overcome their limitations. Based on a review of construction literature, this chapter identifies the most common types of fuzzy hybrid techniques applied to construction problems and reviews selected papers in each category of fuzzy hybrid technique to illustrate their capabilities for addressing construction challenges. Finally, this chapter discusses areas for future development of fuzzy hybrid techniques that will increase their capabilities for solving construction-related problems. The contributions of this chapter are threefold: (1) the limitations of some standard techniques for solving construction problems are discussed, as are the ways that fuzzy methods have been hybridized with these techniques in order to address their limitations; (2) a review of existing applications of fuzzy hybrid techniques in construction is provided in order to illustrate the capabilities of these techniques for solving a variety of construction problems and (3) potential improvements in each category of fuzzy hybrid technique in construction are provided, as areas for future research.

Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element methods (FEMs) applied for the linear and nonlinear, static and dynamic analyses of basic structural elements from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. The range of applications of FEMs in this area is wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore aims to give the reader an encyclopaedic view on the subject. The bibliography at the end of the paper contains 2,025 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with the analysis of beams, columns, rods, bars, cables, discs, blades, shafts, membranes, plates and shells that were published in 1992‐1995.

Online reviews increasingly present the characteristic of bidirectional communication with the advent of Web 2.0 era and tend to be asymmetrical and individualized in linguistic information. The authors aim to develop a new linguistic conversion model that exploits the asymmetric and personalized information from online reviews to express such linguistic information. A new online recommendation approach is provided.

The necessity of new linguistic conversation model is elucidated, and a leverage factor is incorporated into the linguistic label of negative review to handle the asymmetry problems of linguistic scale. A possible value range of the leverage factor is studied. A new linguistic conversation model is accordingly established with an unbalanced linguistic label and a cloud model. The authors develop a new online recommendation approach based on several modules, such as initialization, conversion, user-clustering and recommendation models.

The unbalanced effect between negative and positive reviews is verified with real data and measured using indirect methods. A new online recommendation approach of electronic products is proposed and used as an illustrative example to prove the practicality, effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.

Due to the unavailable transaction information of customers, the limitation of this study is the effectiveness of the authors’ established recommendation system for platform or website cannot be verified.

In most existing studies, the influence of negative review is counterbalanced by positive review, and the unbalanced effect between negative and positive reviews is ignored. The negative review receives much attention from consumers and businesses. This study thus highlights the influence of negative review.

To solve several “inorganic” problems generated recently by community development in China (e.g., waste of social resources, environmental pollution, and decreased economic energy efficiency), focus should be on improving the community traffic organic micro-circulation system. As a historic and mixed functional urban community, the micro-circulation system of Xi'an Railway Bureau exhibits representativeness and complexity. Based on existing research results and years of follow-up investigations, which concentrate on circulation patterns and inherent organic development requirements of the community traffic micro-circulation system, this paper builds an evaluation index system. Value function method was used to implement the index factor quantitative analysis and comprehensive evaluation. Several related strategies were proposed to improve the organic micro-circulation system of the community, which is based on the analysis of the evaluation, in order to adopt the trend in both increasing urban development and stock updating. The analysis results demonstrate that it is necessary to present guiding renewal strategies on community land, road, people, and the environment for those mixed functional communities which use progressive renewed mode. It compensates the problems of overly strong export-oriented system, which is caused by the lack of organic traffic micro-circulation, so as to achieve the selective opening of community external. The study mainly highlights the significance of the systematic analysis of evaluation in influencing strategies on community renewal.

This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.

This paper aims to focus on the accurate analysis of the fractional heat transfer in a two-dimensional (2D) rectangular monolayer tissue with three different kinds of lateral boundary conditions and the quantitative evaluation of the degree of thermal damage and burn depth.

A symplectic method is used to analytically solve the fractional heat transfer dual equation in the frequency domain (s-domain). Explicit expressions of the dual vector can be constructed by superposing the symplectic eigensolutions. The solution procedure is rigorously rational without any trial functions. And the accurate predictions of temperature and heat flux in the time domain (t-domain) are derived through numerical inverse Laplace transform.

Comparison study shows that the maximum relative error is less than 0.16%, which verifies the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicate that the model and heat source parameters have a significant effect on temperature and thermal damage. The pulse duration (Δt) of the laser heat source can effectively control the time to reach the peak temperature and the peak slope of the thermal damage curve. The burn depth is closely correlated with exposure temperature and duration. And there exists the delayed effect of fractional order on burn depth.

A symplectic approach is presented for the thermal analysis of 2D fractional heat transfer. A unified time-fractional heat transfer model is proposed to describe the anomalous thermal behavior of biological tissue. New findings might provide guidance for temperature prediction and thermal damage assessment of biological tissues during hyperthermia.