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This paper aims to design an optimum vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) and assess its techno-economic performance for wind energy harvesting at high-speed railway in Malaysia.

This project adopted AutoCAD and ANSYS modeling tools to design and optimize the blade of the turbine. The site selected has a railway of 30 km with six stops. The vertical turbines are placed 1 m apart from each other considering the optimum tip speed ratio. The power produced and net present value had been analyzed to evaluate its techno-economic viability.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) 0020 blade has been carried out. For a turbine with wind speed of 50 m/s and swept area of 8 m², the power generated is 245 kW. For eight trains that operate for 19 h/day with an interval of 30 min in nonpeak hours and 15 min in peak hours, total energy generated is 66 MWh/day. The average cost saved by the train stations is RM 16.7 mil/year with battery charging capacity of 12 h/day.

Wind energy harvesting is not commonly used in Malaysia due to its low wind speed ranging from 1.5 to 4.5 m/s. Conventional wind turbine requires a minimum cut-in wind speed of 11 m/s to overcome the inertia and starts generating power. Hence, this paper proposes an optimum design of VAWT to harvest an unconventional untapped wind sources from railway. The research finding complements the alternate energy harvesting technologies which can serve as reference for countries which experienced similar geographic constraints.

During the decade of the 1980s, the design and implementation of economic reforms had divided the Chinese leadership into two factions: conservative proponents of moderation and “circumscribed” economic reform, and liberal proponents of comprehensive and rapid economic and social reform. Seeks to identify the economic‐theoretic core of leftist and rightist positions. The leftist position described is centred on the works of Chen Yun, Sun Yefang, and Zue Muqiao and explicitly excludes the idealistic and revolutionary political theories of Maoism, focuses instead on the more pragmatic goals of rational central economic planning. The rightist position became identified with Zhao Ziyang and his vision of mixed market socialism which, in the minds of his opponents, came dangerously close to capitalism. As the Chinese economy faltered toward the end of the decade, the conflict between leftist hard‐line conservatives and rightist liberals heightened, leading to the pro‐democracy movement of 1989 and its aftermath.

This paper aims to examine the effect that the recent financial crisis had on auditor conservatism in the form of increased going-concern opinions.

This study uses a sample of US’ distressed firms from 2005 to 2011 to test the change in going-concern opinions issued. This paper uses a logistic regression model to control for other predictors of going-concern opinions to determine when the financial crisis led to an increase in auditor conservatism.

The authors find that auditors became more conservative in the form of issuing higher levels of going-concern opinions even after controlling for other predictors of going-concern opinions. This increased conservatism was present in both Big 4 and non-Big 4 accounting firms. The increased conservatism quickly returned to normal levels when the financial crisis eased.

These findings add to the literature on the effects of environmental changes on audit opinions. Additionally, this study finds a difference in the timing of the reaction by large and small accounting firms, but, overall, it finds consistency in that both increased conservatism during the crisis and quickly returned to normal afterward.

While in Art Spiegelman's non-fiction narrative Maus (1980–1991), the voice of the mother Anja is silenced, Eunsung Kim's non-fiction graphic narrative My Mother's Story (2020) revives a mother's voice that has been hardly heard in the history of Korean literature and culture. Just as the narrative in Maus is based on the interview between a son and his father, who has survived the Holocaust or the concentration camp in the Second World War, in My Mother's Story, a mother in her eighties tells the story of her entire life to her daughter. The writer's mother underwent Japanese colonization, the Korean War and the following years of industrial modernization, migrating from one place to another throughout her life. By visualizing a woman's personal memory, which has been forgotten for quite a long time, the Korean graphic narrative incorporates the subjective and subaltern voice into history. Thus, appropriating Michel Foucault's notion of subjectivation, which generally refers to the construction of the individual subject, I would argue that this visualization or revitalization of the silenced voice of the old woman can be called a process of ‘resubjectivation’, or reconstruction of the marginalized and thereby discarded subject of an aged woman in Korea. But this essay is not exactly a comparative study, paralleling the two different graphic narratives together. Instead, it focuses on uncovering ontological meanings of the feminine narrative in Korean culture as the process of resubjectivation involves not only the recovery of an individual woman's lost voice, but it is also related to the retrieval of a lost cultural legacy.

Human capital is the most important determinant of the Hospitality industry’s success. Executive chefs should be skilled in both management and culinary arts, in addition to ensuring the success of the entire hospitality division. The study aims to understand the competencies of executive chefs in international tourist hotels in Taiwan.

Literature review and behavioral event interviews were conducted with ten executive chefs and executive sous chefs. The modified Delphi method verified the results using 15 experts.

A competency framework was created, with four quadrants – managerial, operational, behaviors and skills – to classify executive chefs’ competencies. Each competency was further divided into sub-competencies – culinary research, emotional control, negotiation skills, job guidance and proactive thinking ability – for 25 items. Quadrants I and II are hard competencies that can be improved through education and training, whereas the third and fourth are soft competencies that require more time for development in workers.

The two-step study developed a competency framework with a practical reference value. The study results could be utilized by human resources managers during their companies’ training, recruitment, selection and promotion.

Besides the Delphi method, a deep behavioral event interview that enabled determining critical competencies was also used to collect data. The results obtained could be used to structure schools’ curricula. Collaborations between the hospitality industry and schools could help develop better curricula and training plans to maximize the availability of educational resources.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the shifting perceptions of international tourists to Jeju Island and provide practical lessons to the tourism industry. Specifically, in regard to three United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) natural World Heritage sites in Jeju, this research measures the most salient topics mentioned by tourists to inform a more accurate perception of the island’s most valuable natural assets as reported by tourism experiences.

This study used a Web crawler to gather over 1,500 English language reviews from international tourists from a famous travel information website. The collected data were then preprocessed for stemming and lemmatization. After this, the processed text data were analyzed through a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic modeling approach to identify the most prominent clusters of ideas mentioned and represent them visually through graphs, tables and charts.

The findings from this research suggest that there are ten identifiable topics. Topics focusing on “adventure,” “summits” and “winter” showed noticeable increases, whereas topics focusing on “sunrise peak” and “UNESCO” have decreased over time. There is a trend for international tourists to be ever more conscious of the adventurous and rugged aspects of Jeju, and the novelty of mentioning UNESCO status seems to have worn off. Furthermore, there is the proclivity for tourists to mention “worth” and “enjoy” more as time goes on.

This study applies LDA-based topic modeling and LDAvis using user-generated online reviews with time-series analyses. Consequently, it provides unique insights into the changing perceptions of ecotourism on Jeju today, as well as contribution to smart tourism fields.

This paper explores the potential competitive advantages from the development of an internal network of subsidiaries and external network of alliances. Given the broad scope and lack of systematic investigation in prior research, clinical field research was conducted in eleven Japanese subsidiaries in China. Our in‐depth interviews revealed that there are benefits and costs associated with the development of both subsidiary networks and alliance networks. While there are exploitation and exploration benefits from subsidiary network development, internationalizing firms (especially smaller firms) are subject to the liability of foreignness. Alliance network development is an effective way to mitigate this liability if internationalizing firms choose the right alliance strategy.

The concept and practice of e-services has become essential in business transactions. Yet there are still many organizations that have not developed e-services optimally. This is especially relevant in the context of Indonesian Airline companies. Therefore, many airline customers in Indonesia are still in doubt about it, or even do not use it. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for e-services adoption and empirically examines the factors influencing the airlines customers in Indonesia in using e-services offered by the Indonesian airline companies. Taking six Indonesian airline companies as a case example, the study investigated the antecedents of e-services usage of Indonesian airlines. This study further examined the impacts of motivation on customers in using e-services in the Indonesian context. Another important aim of this study was to investigate how ages, experiences and geographical areas moderate effects of e-services usage.

The study adopts a positivist research paradigm with a two-phase sequential mixed method design involving qualitative and quantitative approaches. An initial research model was first developed based on an extensive literature review, by combining acceptance and use of information technology theories, expectancy theory and the inter-organizational system motivation models. A qualitative field study via semi-structured interviews was then conducted to explore the present state among 15 respondents. The results of the interviews were analysed using content analysis yielding the final model of e-services usage. Eighteen antecedent factors hypotheses and three moderating factors hypotheses and 52-item questionnaire were developed. A focus group discussion of five respondents and a pilot study of 59 respondents resulted in final version of the questionnaire.

In the second phase, the main survey was conducted nationally to collect the research data among Indonesian airline customers who had already used Indonesian airline e-services. A total of 819 valid questionnaires were obtained. The data was then analysed using a partial least square (PLS) based structural equation modelling (SEM) technique to produce the contributions of links in the e-services model (22% of all the variances in e-services usage, 37.8% in intention to use, 46.6% in motivation, 39.2% in outcome expectancy, and 37.7% in effort expectancy). Meanwhile, path coefficients and t-values demonstrated various different influences of antecedent factors towards e-services usage. Additionally, a multi-group analysis based on PLS is employed with mixed results. In the final findings, 14 hypotheses were supported and 7 hypotheses were not supported.

The major findings of this study have confirmed that motivation has the strongest contribution in e-services usage. In addition, motivation affects e-services usage both directly and indirectly through intention-to-use. This study provides contributions to the existing knowledge of e-services models, and practical applications of IT usage. Most importantly, an understanding of antecedents of e-services adoption will provide guidelines for stakeholders in developing better e-services and strategies in order to promote and encourage more customers to use e-services. Finally, the accomplishment of this study can be expanded through possible adaptations in other industries and other geographical contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to assess knowledge of Singapore Grade 5 (11 years old) students’ understanding and proficiency in basic information literacy (IL) skills of defining information tasks, selecting information sources, seeking information from sources and synthesising and using information.

A 38-item multiple-choice question assessment instrument was used to assess the students’ IL skills based on the i-Competent IL model. The instrument first developed in 2010 was refined and expanded to increase the robustness and accuracy of assessment for the study. It was administered to 17 primary schools in Singapore in November 2015. The maximum possible score of 54 was scaled up to 100 to report the overall mean score for ease of reference and comparison. A total of 2,399 returns were obtained and analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 22.0 to compute the mean scores, IL stage-level scores. The study also investigated for any significant differences in performance between male and female students, and students with or without access to the internet at home.

The students achieved an overall mean score of 53.39 which is below a recommended acceptable score of 60 or 70 advocated in a number of past studies. The two worst performing areas of IL skills were synthesising and using information and seeking information from sources with mean scores of 45.89 and 48.81, respectively. A review of the highest number of incorrect answers suggests that students had difficulty in identifying key information from an information task narrative, understanding the use of reference sources and role of librarians, distinguishing between a fact and opinion, and adopting the best strategy for searching. Girls outperformed boys with an overall mean score of 55.38 vs 51.50. Students with internet access at home fared better than those without access to it with a score of 53.67 vs 45.81. The overall poor results of the survey suggest an urgent need to review the IL education landscape in the Singapore school system, revisit polices, priorities and assess the relevance and effectiveness of the IL curriculum, practical hands-on classes, and interventions that are currently employed in schools.

The study helped identify areas of IL skills strengths and weakness among Grade 5 students in Singapore schools. It provides recommendations for follow up actions for education authority and schools to improve the situation.

This study was prompted to provide an assessment after a national IL initiative was launched in 2012 to inculcate IL skills among the school-going children as part of creating a value-driven education system. This is the first reported set of findings for a large-scale survey conducted to measure and ascertain the IL skills level among Grade 5 students.