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1 – 10 of over 1000Xue Lian Wu, Chuan Peng Yang, Yu Qin Guo and Hong Yu Wang
This paper aims to focus on achieving triple-shape memory effect (triple-SME) of a commercial poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET) film with the thickness of 100 µm.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on achieving triple-shape memory effect (triple-SME) of a commercial poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET) film with the thickness of 100 µm.
Design/methodology/approach
The thermal characteristics and microstructure of PET film were characterized by differential scanning calorimetry, thermogravimetric analysis and wide-angle X-ray diffraction analysis. The dual-shape memory effect (dual-SME) of the PET film was then systematically investigated, and based on that, triple-SME in thin PET film was achieved.
Findings
Investigation of the dual-SME in PET film revealed the difference between recovery temperature and programming temperature reduced with increasing programming temperature. An obvious intermediate shape shifting between the original and final programmed shape was observed during shape recovery in triple-shape memory behaviors.
Research limitations/implications
Compared with dual-SME in polymer, relatively less work has been done on multi-SME in polymer, especially in thin polymer film. In this study, triple-SME in a PET film was investigated based on the results of dual-SME of the film. The main implication of the study is on how to achieve a watermark between the final programmed pattern and the original pattern, for the application of shape memory polymer in anti-counterfeiting label.
Originality/value
Dual- and triple-SMEs were achieved in a PET film that is only 100 µm in thickness, and the underlying mechanism for the difference between programming temperature and recovery temperature was discussed. For the novel application of triple-SME in anti-counterfeit label, the watermark during shape recovery in triple-SME can effectively prevent duplication.
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Swati Dwivedi and Ashulekha Gupta
Purpose: Significant structural changes are currently occurring in the Indian labour sector. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are redefining the…
Abstract
Purpose: Significant structural changes are currently occurring in the Indian labour sector. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are redefining the activities and skill requirements for various jobs in the healthcare sector. These adjustments have been accelerated by the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19, along with other considerations.
Need for the Study: Skills shortages, job transitions, and the deployment of AI at the company level are the three main challenges confronting the Indian labour market. This chapter aims to discuss policy alternatives to address a rising need for health workers and provide an overview of changes to the healthcare sector’s labour market.
Methodology: A review of the available literature was conducted to determine the causes of the widening skill gap despite a vibrant and prodigious young population. The background of the sustainable labour market is examined in this chapter, with a focus on workforce migration and mobility.
Findings: This chapter gives a comparative review of recent policy papers and evidence, as well as estimates of the health workforce and present Indian datasets. Furthermore, it highlights how important it is for all people concerned to invest in today’s workforce to close the skill gap and create better future opportunities.
Practical Implications: This chapter’s findings imply a severe shortage of human intellectual capital in India and a need to bridge this gap in the Indian labour market.
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Wenbo Li, Bin Dan, Xumei Zhang, Yi Liu and Ronghua Sui
With the rapid development of the sharing economy in manufacturing industries, manufacturers and the equipment suppliers frequently share capacity through the third-party…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid development of the sharing economy in manufacturing industries, manufacturers and the equipment suppliers frequently share capacity through the third-party platform. This paper aims to study influences of manufacturers sharing capacity on the supplier and to analyze whether the supplier shares capacity as well as its influences.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper deals with conditions that the supplier and manufacturers share capacity through the third-party platform, and the third-party platform competes with the supplier in equipment sales. Considering the heterogeneity of the manufacturer's earning of unit capacity usage and the production efficiency of manufacturer's usage strategies, this paper constructs capacity sharing game models. Then, model equilibrium results under different sharing scenarios are compared.
Findings
The results show that when the production or maintenance cost is high, manufacturers sharing capacity simultaneously benefits the supplier, the third-party platform and manufacturers with high earnings of unit capacity usage. When both the rental efficiency and the production cost are low, or both the rental efficiency and the production cost are high, the supplier simultaneously sells equipment and shares capacity. The supplier only sells equipment in other cases. When both the rental efficiency and the production cost are low, the supplier’s sharing capacity realizes the win-win-win situation for the supplier, the third-party platform and manufacturers with moderate earnings of unit capacity usage.
Originality/value
This paper innovatively examines supplier's selling and sharing decisions considering manufacturers sharing capacity. It extends the research on capacity sharing and is important to supplier's operational decisions.
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Yuxiang Shan, Qin Ren, Gang Yu, Tiantian Li and Bin Cao
Internet marketing underground industry users refer to people who use technology means to simulate a large number of real consumer behaviors to obtain marketing activities rewards…
Abstract
Purpose
Internet marketing underground industry users refer to people who use technology means to simulate a large number of real consumer behaviors to obtain marketing activities rewards illegally, which leads to increased cost of enterprises and reduced effect of marketing. Therefore, this paper aims to construct a user risk assessment model to identify potential underground industry users to protect the interests of real consumers and reduce the marketing costs of enterprises.
Design/methodology/approach
Method feature extraction is based on two aspects. The first aspect is based on traditional statistical characteristics, using density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise clustering method to obtain user-dense regions. According to the total number of users in the region, the corresponding risk level of the receiving address is assigned. So that high-quality address information can be extracted. The second aspect is based on the time period during which users participate in activities, using frequent item set mining to find multiple users with similar operations within the same time period. Extract the behavior flow chart according to the user participation, so that the model can mine the deep relationship between the participating behavior and the underground industry users.
Findings
Based on the real underground industry user data set, the features of the data set are extracted by the proposed method. The features are experimentally verified by different models such as random forest, fully-connected layer network, SVM and XGBOST, and the proposed method is comprehensively evaluated. Experimental results show that in the best case, our method can improve the F1-score of traditional models by 55.37%.
Originality/value
This paper investigates the relative importance of static information and dynamic behavior characteristics of users in predicting underground industry users, and whether the absence of features of these categories affects the prediction results. This investigation can go a long way in aiding further research on this subject and found the features which improved the accuracy of predicting underground industry users.
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Xiyuan Chen, Sang Qin, Lindsay Sheehan, Zhiying Ma, Virginia Spicknall and Yu Fan
This study aims to report on the feasibility, acceptability and outcomes of a peer support program designed to promote social participation for adults with serious mental illness…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to report on the feasibility, acceptability and outcomes of a peer support program designed to promote social participation for adults with serious mental illness (SMI) in China.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a community-based participatory research approach to adapt and test a six-month, culturally responsive peer program with 68 participants. Peer supporters were trained and supervised in Guangzhou, China. Peer workers were hired via a competitive process and completed both classroom and field training. Study participants were offered individual and group socialization activities. Participants completed measures on recovery, quality of life, functioning and symptoms at three time points (pre-, post- and follow-up).
Findings
Nearly 90% of participants expressed satisfaction with their peer supporters and the frequency of services. Findings showed a significant increasing trend for the social relationships domain of quality of life from baseline to follow-up. Female participants reported significantly increased recovery from pre to post and increased psychological quality of life pre-follow-up as compared to their male counterparts. Supervision logs documented positive gains from participants such as increased help-seeking, improved social skills, enhanced emotion regulation and self-confidence and established routine, alongside challenges like inconsistent engagement, low service incentives and an overreliance on social workers. Peer supporters also reported concerns about their own lack of skills and in navigating relationships between participants and their family members.
Originality/value
Peer interventions have been well studied in Western countries but underexplored in China. This research addresses this gap by presenting a peer program aimed at enhancing the social participation of Chinese with SMI.
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Liang Chen, Jingyuan Shi, Yu Guo, Pianpian Wang and Yiwei Li
The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare haze-related content between traditional and social media in China by applying agenda-setting theory and the extended parallel…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare haze-related content between traditional and social media in China by applying agenda-setting theory and the extended parallel process model (EPPM). Specifically, this paper examines the correlation between the two forms of media in terms of the ranking of the attributes of haze (i.e. the EPPM components) and the interrelationships among the attributes.
Design/methodology/approach
Content analysis and semantic network analysis were employed to address the research aims.
Findings
The results revealed that more than half of the total messages on both types of media reflected the EPPM components, either threat or efficacy information. However, the imbalance between the threat and efficacy information was more prominent in the haze-related content presented in the People’s Daily than it was on Weibo. In addition, the results from a Spearman’s rank-order correlation and a quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) indicated that there was no significant correlation between the People’s Daily and Weibo in terms of the rankings of the attributes of haze (i.e. the EPPM components) or the interrelationships among the attributes.
Originality/value
This study is the first to apply a theoretical approach to examine and compare the nature of haze-related messages on traditional and social media.
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Mirjana Pejic Bach, Emil Tustanovski, Andrew W.H. Ip, Kai-Leung Yung and Vasja Roblek
System dynamics is a whole-system modelling and learning approach, useful for tackling non-linear problems, such as sustainable urban development. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
System dynamics is a whole-system modelling and learning approach, useful for tackling non-linear problems, such as sustainable urban development. The purpose of this paper is to review system dynamics applications in the simulation of sustainable urban development over a period from 2005 to 2017.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis reveals that the number of applications of system dynamics modelling in the area of urban sustainable development increased in the analysed period. Research has changed its focus from the modelling of environmental problems to more complex models, portraying the multidimensional socio-economic processes that have an impact on the sustainability of urban development. Analysed case studies most often use the behaviour reproduction test for model validation, but without a unified approach. In most cases, modelling has been done in China, Germany and the USA, while urban development in the Eastern European countries, Africa and Latin America has not often been investigated. This paper indicates the knowledge gaps and suggests future research directions.
Findings
Papers that report the use of system dynamics modelling reveal a wide range of applications in urban sustainability. The analysis shows significant emphasis on environmental problems, while the interest for modelling social problems has been increasing during the last several years. Most of the modelled problems examine the sustainability of resources (land, water) and waste management, which are used for insights into the reasons for the system behaviour, forecasting future behaviour and policy testing.
Originality/value
The presented models were developed in most cases for the purpose of understanding the phenomena examined, as well as the future use of the models in policy planning. This brings us back to the need for greater stakeholder involvement, not only in the initial phase, but also during the whole modelling process, which could increase understanding, use and ownership of the models in the future, and thus increase their practical application.
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Yong Liu, Xue-ge Guo, Qin Jiang and Jing-yi Zhang
We attempt to construct a grey three-way conflict analysis model with constraints to deal with correlated conflict problems with uncertain information.
Abstract
Purpose
We attempt to construct a grey three-way conflict analysis model with constraints to deal with correlated conflict problems with uncertain information.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to address these correlated conflict problems with uncertain information, considering the interactive influence and mutual restraints among agents and portraying their attitudes toward the conflict issues, we utilize grey numbers and three-way decisions to propose a grey three-way conflict analysis model with constraints. Firstly, based on the collected information, we introduced grey theory, calculated the degree of conflict between agents and then analyzed the conflict alliance based on the three-way decision theory. Finally, we designed a feedback mechanism to identify key agents and key conflict issues. A case verifies the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed model.
Findings
The results show that the proposed model can portray their attitudes toward conflict issues and effectively extract conflict-related information.
Originality/value
By employing this approach, we can provide the answers to Deja’s fundamental questions regarding Pawlak’s conflict analysis: “what are the underlying causes of conflict?” and “how can a viable consensus strategy be identified?”
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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the sustainable development thought is one good reason why Chinese civilization is continuously developing, and it can be used as…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the sustainable development thought is one good reason why Chinese civilization is continuously developing, and it can be used as a reference for the development of Chinese agriculture today.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employs a historical analysis approach to examine the sustainable thoughts concerning Chinese traditional agriculture, including view of sancai, farming season, fertility, the nature of matters, recycling, and economization.
Findings
The results reveal that the nature of Chinese traditional agriculture is akin to ecological agriculture, which is precious heritage for China and the whole world.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper is that it confirms the fundamental reason of the continuous development of Chinese civilization which, based on organization of sustainable development thought, lies in traditional agriculture.
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