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Bedroom Feng Shui practices have been criticized as myth over the years but in fact having its scientific origin that is not purely superstitious. This paper aims to examine whether the architects' design practice for bedroom interior arrangement is concurring with the recommended bedroom Feng Shui practices. The study has successfully interviewed 16 architects from diverse backgrounds to avoid bias, seeking their design perspectives in bedroom interior configuration. Subsequently, the interviewees submitted sketches of ideal bedroom layout based on their expertise, with pre-set requirements. Data from semi-structured interviews were analyzed using mixed method approach. In agreement with our expectations, majority of the interviewees have matching thoughts that “bed arrangement” is the primary consideration in bedroom interior configuration. Most of the design outputs were highly attached to favorable Feng Shui conditions. The overall findings implied that bedroom Feng Shui is not merely superstitious but most components are practical design references for architects from diverse backgrounds.

China is a fast‐growing economy, and many multinational companies (MNCs) have found their ways to infiltrate that market. The competition among the MNCs has generated human resource management (HRM) problems. When formulating approaches in dealing with these problems, the expatriate management of the MNCs often “speak for” their local employees, as if the latter has no voice of its own. It is suspected that MNCs know partly what their local employees value. With such limited understanding, the former may be ineffective in managing their local staff. The purpose of this paper is to report a study that explores the HRM problems from local employees' perspectives. To understand Chinese employees, the conceptual lens, stemmed from Chinese philosophical traditions instead of that derived from western experience, is used.

Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews with Chinese employees working in MNCs.

The findings suggest that “asymmetrical understanding” exists between expatriate managers and their Chinese employees, and that the former may know much less about the latter than it is normally assumed.

The findings, illustrated through interviews, have shed light on how MNCs could manage their Chinese employees, and how a meaningful dialogue could take place: understanding the other (Chinese employees) on their own intellectual ground to overcome “asymmetrical understanding”.

By allowing the voice of the other to come forth rather than to keep it in the background as, at best, a whisper, the study helps create a platform for a meaningful cross‐cultural dialogue between voices from the west and the other.

When using a machine vision inspection system for rail surface defect detection, many complex factors such as illumination changes, reflection inequality, shadows, stains and rust might inevitably deform the scanned rail surface image. This paper aims to reduce the influence of these factors, a pipeline of image processing algorithms for robust defect detection is developed.

First, a new inverse Perona-Malik (P-M) diffusion model is presented for image enhancement, which takes the reciprocal of gradient as feature to adjust the diffusion coefficients, and a distinct nearest-neighbor difference scheme is introduced to select proper defect boundaries during discretized implementation. As a result, the defect regions are sufficiently smoothened, whereas the faultless background remains unchanged. Then, by subtracting the diffused image from the original image, the defect features will be highlighted in the difference image. Subsequently, an adaptive threshold binarization, followed by an attribute opening like filter, can easily eliminate the noisy interferences and find out the desired defects.

Using data from our developed inspection apparatus, the experiments show that the proposed method can attain a detection and measurement precisions as high as 93.6 and 85.9 per cent, respectively, while the recovery accuracy remains 93 per cent. Additionally, the proposed method is computationally efficient and can perform robustly even under complex environments.

A pipeline of algorithms for rail surface detection is proposed. Particularly, an inverse P-M diffusion model with a distinct discretization scheme is introduced to enhance the defect boundaries and suppress noises. The performance of the proposed method has been verified with real images from our own developed system.

This paper aims to develop a new real‐time effective method for solving the inverse kinematics (IK) problem, especially for those manipulators with high‐dimensional nonlinear kinematic equations.

The paper transforms the IKs problem into a minimization problem. Then, a novel meta‐heuristic algorithm, called the electromagnetism‐like method (EM), is used to solve this equivalent problem. Moreover, in order to further improve the computational efficiency and accuracy of EM, a hybrid method which combines EM with the Davidon‐Fletcher‐Powell (DFP) method is proposed.

The results showed that EM is a powerful yet easy algorithm for solving the IKs problem of robot manipulators. Its complexity is independent on the characteristics of the kinematic equations involving dimensionality and the degree of nonlinearity. Moreover, EM can be used as an accompanying algorithm for DFP method to get better precision at a lower iteration number.

The method developed in this paper is a generalized approach that is efficient enough to obtain IK solutions independent of robot geometry and the number of degrees of freedom.

The integration of e‐business and supply chain enables seamless information flow from suppliers to customer service network via the internet. It also enables better‐coordinated materials flow from customer order to production, storage, distribution and delivery. The purpose of this paper is to describe the work that leads to the realisation of a hierarchical model for e‐supply chain coordination and optimisation.

The model is based on an e‐business information flow network in order to respond rapidly to the dynamics of e‐supply chain and market. It can be used to realize management level strategies, and facilitate the planning and control of detailed operation schedules of supply chain units in an e‐supply chain environment. Three main modules are discussed. They are routing and sequence optimiser (RSO) with the aid of a GA and TS‐based multiple population search strategy (MPSS); supply chain virtual clustering (SCVC) based on fuzzy virtual clustering; and supply chain order scheduling (SCOS) using an agent‐based distributed scheduling system.

These modules enable: the generation of preferred routings, transportation modes and work order plan under such constraints as customer service level, cycle time and cost; the formation of supply chain's unit‐transportation‐work order families using a clustering approach to down‐size supply chain problems and increase computation efficiency; and the integration of scheduling with supply chain optimisation in order to facilitate the control of a supply chain with the aid of an agent‐based distributed scheduling approach.

This paper proposed a hierarchical model for e‐supply chain coordination and optimisation that is capable to solve large‐scale problems. A MPSS using GA and TS was depicted in detail to expedite the RSO.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of audit committee meeting frequency in Chinese listed companies.

A multiple linear regression model, derived from the logarithmic model proposed by Raghunandan and Rama, is used to examine the determinants and an unbalanced panel data fixed effects model was used for robust tests.

Based on 912 year‐firm observations, the authors found that audit committee meeting frequency was negatively associated with the proportion of shares owned by a majority shareholder and the number of audit committee meetings is less in stated‐owned firms than privately‐owned firms. Both audit committee and firm size were found to be positively associated with the frequency and there was a negative relationship between the proportion of independent directors on a board of directors and the number of audit committee meetings in China. However, no evidence was found of the associations of the frequency with the proportion of directors who are accounting experts on the audit committee, the CEO‐Chairman duality, management ownership, board size, BIG4 and profitability.

This is the first paper to present empirical evidence on the determinants of audit committee meeting frequency in Chinese listed companies. The paper looks into the impact of firm ownership on the meeting frequency in China and finds that the number of audit committee meetings is less in stated‐owned listed firms than privately‐owned listed firms.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of virtual currency (VC) development on financial stocks’ value in selected Asian equity markets and the moderating role of investor attention on this relationship.

The pooled ordinary least squares regression is used on a sample of 138 listed financial firms from four emerging Asian countries for the period 2016–2020.

This study finds that changes in VC values have greater spillover effects on the values of financial stocks in countries which do not recognize the legitimacy of VCs than in countries which do, due to the lack of breadth and depth of the former markets. Moreover, this paper also reports evidence of the greater moderating role of investor attention on this relationship in countries which do not recognize the legitimacy of VCs than in countries which do.

Although numerous studies have been conducted on the influence of VCs on stock performance, majority of these studies did not distinguish whether the sample countries being studied actually recognize the legitimacy of VC transactions or not. Moreover, extant literature has not considered the moderating role of investor attention on this relationship. It is the aim of this study to address these research voids by using a refined three-factor theory model of capital asset pricing model incorporating VCs to better represent stock performance in the digital economy era.

The goal of this chapter is to respond to the theoretical inquiries by scholars who are interested in how the public–private partnership (PPP) models adapt to China’s context where political power dictates economic strategies. We also want to provide suggestions to policy designers who aim to promote a sustainable investment environment for domestic and international investors. We review the literature that explains the upside and downside of PPP projects in contemporary China. (1) We classify the trajectory of PPP evolution into four phases, i.e., emergence, growth, recession and revival. (2) We note that private companies take a disadvantageous position in the partnership compared with governments and state-owned enterprises because of a lack of specialized legislation, unequal competition between private companies and state-owned enterprises and the opposition from the civic society. (3) We identify political risks as the most influential risks. Political risks also lead to the misallocation of other risks between public and private parties that contributes to the high failure rate of China’s PPP projects. Based on these findings, we recommend governments to draft specialized legislation, stabilize the political environment and provide favourable subsidies to local governments to limit the risks involved in PPP projects. We also advise private enterprises and state-owned enterprises to focus on negotiating over task and risk division with governments when they make decisions to participate in PPP projects. This full review of studies on PPP development in China provides reliable recommendations to scholars, governments and enterprises.

In this paper, microbial transglutaminase (MTG) was applied to process silk fabric for improving its crease resistance under the prerequisite of maintaining other performances. Not only was the effect of MTG on silk fabric investigated through the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FR), but analysis was also undertaken in the microcosmic structure of fibroin through the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Solo MTG treatment as well as compound treatments of MTG followed by hydrogen peroxide, protease and ultrasonic, all showed that MTG can improve the crease resistance of silk fabric. It also enhanced its tensile breaking strength or amended damage in the tensile breaking strength caused by pretreatments.

Simultaneously, comparison with other treatments showed that compound treatment of MTG followed by ultrasonic exerted a better coordinated effect and conferred better performances, which made the wrinkle recovery angle (WRA) increase by 17.4% and tensile breaking strength improve by 11.2% respectively. At the same time, other performances were still maintained well.