Andres Coca-Stefaniak, Alastair M. Morrison, Deborah Edwards, Nelson Graburn, Claire Liu, Philip Pearce, Can Seng Ooi, Douglas G. Pearce, Svetlana Stepchenkova, Greg W. Richards, Amy So, Costas Spirou, Keith Dinnie, John Heeley, László Puczkó, Han Shen, Martin Selby, Hong-bumm Kim and Guoqing Du
Chengli Xu, Jing Tian, Cong Liu and Yan Wang
With the rapid economic development, China has been increasingly paying special attention to its sports and health industries. In October 2014, the State Council raised the goal…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid economic development, China has been increasingly paying special attention to its sports and health industries. In October 2014, the State Council raised the goal to upscale the sports industry to the net worth of 5 trillion yuan by 2025. To gain further insights into the current development of tennis in China, especially the development of Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tennis competitions, an interview with the director of Wuhan Opening Fabrice Chouquet and Mr Guoqing Yi of Wuahan Sport Investment Inc. was conducted. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
To gain further insights into the current development of tennis in China, especially the development of WTA tennis competitions, an interview with the director of Wuhan Opening Fabrice Chouquet and Mr Guoqing Yi of Wuahan Sport Investment Inc. was conducted.
Findings
The interview comprised a series of topics including motivators of tennis industries in China, the strategic position of China for WTA development, WTA choice of hosting city, effects of WTA competition events toward the hosting city, and the operation of WTA tennis competitions. Integrating the aforementioned topics with Wuhan Tennis Open, the interviewees also provided suggestions toward the future development of tennis industry in China.
Research limitations/implications
This study has several limitations that are of concern to researchers in the future. First, the interviewees of this research came from Wuhan Tennis Open. Though Mr Fabrice used to be the managing director of WTA in Asia, he only knows about women tennis in China, and his viewpoints have their own limitation. Therefore, the interviewee in the future has to be the person who could hold the opinion on tennis development in China at the macro scale. Second, the questions in the interview have a wide scale, but lack depth and penetration. For instance, the interview only relates to the motive of tennis development but does not go deeply into the relation between the above two aspects. Moreover, it mentions the problems related to the tennis development. It only concentrates on the tennis tournaments but does not discuss the tennis culture and the industry. These questions need to be considered when the authors research on the development of tennis in China in the future.
Originality/value
Through the analysis on WTA and tennis in China, the authors can understand the development of sports in China and the Chinese sports industry in recent years.
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Junqiang Su, Yawei Ren, Guoqing Jin and Nan Wang
To setup a theoretical model for grasping cutting pieces of garment better, which will help to design a special soft gripper and push forward the automated level of garment…
Abstract
Purpose
To setup a theoretical model for grasping cutting pieces of garment better, which will help to design a special soft gripper and push forward the automated level of garment manufacturing.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper first analyzed the mechanics of the grasping process and concluded the main factors that affect the success of grasping. A theoretical model named grasping fabric model (GFM) was constructed to show the mechanical relationship between the soft gripper and the fabric pieces. Subsequently, two fabric samples were selected and tested for their friction properties and critical buckling force, and the test data were substituted into the theoretical model GFM to obtain the grasping parameters required for fabric grasping layer by layer.
Findings
It was found that (1) the critical buckling force of the fabric is mainly influenced by the bending stiffness and the deformation length of the fabric during grab. (2) The difference between the friction between the soft gripper and the fabric and the friction between the fabric, that is DF1-2, has an important influence on the accuracy of grasping layer-by-layer.
Originality/value
It showed that the grasping parameters provided by GFM enable the two samples to be more effectively separated layer by layer, which verifies that the GFM model is strong enough for the possible application in garment automated production.
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This paper examines China's historiography on foreign education since 1900, with an emphasis on the period since 1949. The understanding of “foreign education” in China during…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper examines China's historiography on foreign education since 1900, with an emphasis on the period since 1949. The understanding of “foreign education” in China during this period shifted rapidly from the Western-centered approach that had been introduced from Japanese during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China to the Soviet-centered approach that followed the founding of New China to a restoration of Western-centered approaches after the “opening” of the late 1970s and 1980s. The paper asks: how has the study of foreign educational history changed over time in the People's Republic of China, how has the broader discipline of history of education changed, and how have successive generations of historians of education conceived of their intellectual and political roles?
Design/methodology/approach
Grounded in archival documents and the published works of influential historians of education, this study notes the ways in which political regime change affected the construction and application of academic knowledge.
Findings
This study identifies four stages in the Chinese historiography on foreign education: a formative stage (from 1900 until the late 1940s); a difficult post-revolutionary recovery, followed by growth and then suppression (from 1949 until the mid-1970s); a period of achievement combined with an academic crisis (from 1978 until the early 2000s); and finally, a recent transition marked by theoretical innovation and global integration (from the 2000s until the present).
Originality/value
This study finds that a narrow focus on “practical utility” or service to politics and policy has perturbed historians of foreign education in China and stunted their field's development. A look back at early periods in the historiography offers a warning about the potential dangers of extreme ideological/political utilitarianism. These dangers existed not only in the history of foreign education but also in the history of education research more broadly. A close examination of these dangers can help twenty-first-century historians of education in China balance the practical, political and professional dimensions of their research. To grasp the meaning of foreign education, historical research needs to be politically independent.
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Shufeng Tang, Yongsheng Kou, Guoqing Zhao, Huijie Zhang, Hong Chang, Xuewei Zhang and Yunhe Zou
The purpose of this paper is to design a climbing robot connected by a connecting rod mechanism to achieve multi-functional tasks such as obstacles crossing and climbing of power…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to design a climbing robot connected by a connecting rod mechanism to achieve multi-functional tasks such as obstacles crossing and climbing of power transmission towers.
Design/methodology/approach
A connecting rod type gripper has been designed to achieve stable grasping of angle steel. Before grasping, use coordination between structures to achieve stable docking and grasping. By using the alternating movements of two claws and the middle climbing mechanism, the climbing and obstacle crossing of the angle steel were achieved.
Findings
Through a simple linkage mechanism, a climbing robot has been designed, greatly reducing the overall mass of the robot. It can also carry a load of 1 kg, and the climbing mechanism can perform stable climbing. The maximum step distance of the climbing robot is 543 mm, which can achieve the crossing of angle steel obstacles.
Originality/value
A transmission tower climbing mechanism was proposed by analyzing the working environment. Through the locking ability of the screw nut, stable clamping of the angle steel is achieved, and a pitch mechanism is designed to adjust the posture of the hand claw.
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Yewei Ouyang, Guoqing Huang and Shiyi He
Safety warnings remind construction workers about dangers and guide them to take necessary actions to avoid potential injuries, which could encourage their safe behavior. Workers’…
Abstract
Purpose
Safety warnings remind construction workers about dangers and guide them to take necessary actions to avoid potential injuries, which could encourage their safe behavior. Workers’ behavior compliance with the safety warnings would be impacted by the risk perception levels induced by the warnings. This study aims to examine whether the design of safety warnings would impact the induced risk perception of workers
Design/methodology/approach
This study compared the risk perception levels of construction workers when processing two forms of safety warnings, i.e., safety signs and safety comics, which are commonly used in construction workplaces. Construction workers (n = 20) volunteered for an experiment with an implicit paradigm to probe how they perceive these safety warnings, using event-related potentials (ERPs) features collected by an electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor to indicate the risk perception level
Findings
The results demonstrated that the design of safety warnings would impact the induced risk perception. The safety signs and safety comics performed differently in inducing the workers’ risk perception. The safety signs representing prohibition and caution warnings induced significantly higher risk perception than the comics, and there were no significant differences regarding direction warnings
Originality/value
This is the first study to compare the risk perception levels between various forms of safety warnings presenting safety information in different ways. The findings would help to expand the knowledge of the relationship between the design of safety warnings and workers’ safety behavioral compliance
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Guoqing Li, Yunhai Geng and Wenzheng Zhang
This paper aims to introduce an efficient active-simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach for rover navigation, future planetary rover exploration mission requires…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to introduce an efficient active-simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach for rover navigation, future planetary rover exploration mission requires the rover to automatically localize itself with high accuracy.
Design/methodology/approach
A three-dimensional (3D) feature detection method is first proposed to extract salient features from the observed point cloud, after that, the salient features are employed as the candidate destinations for re-visiting under SLAM structure, followed by a path planning algorithm integrated with SLAM, wherein the path length and map utility are leveraged to reduce the growth rate of state estimation uncertainty.
Findings
The proposed approach is able to extract distinguishable 3D landmarks for feature re-visiting, and can be naturally integrated with any SLAM algorithms in an efficient manner to improve the navigation accuracy.
Originality/value
This paper proposes a novel active-SLAM structure for planetary rover exploration mission, the salient feature extraction method and active revisit patch planning method are validated to improve the accuracy of pose estimation.
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This paper aims to apply an integrated data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach to a multi-hierarchy grey relational analysis (GRA) model…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to apply an integrated data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach to a multi-hierarchy grey relational analysis (GRA) model. Consistent with the most real-life applications, the authors focus on a two-level hierarchy in which the attributes of similar characteristics can be grouped into categories. Nevertheless, the proposed approach can be easily extended to a three-level hierarchy in which attributes might also belong to different sub-categories and further be linked to categories.
Design/methodology/approach
The procedure of incorporating the DEA and AHP methods in a two-level GRA may be broken down into a series of steps. The first three steps are under the heading of attributes and the latter three steps are under the heading of categories as follows: computing the grey relational coefficients of attributes for each alternative using the basic GRA model which further provides the required (output) data for an additive DEA model; computing the priority weights of attributes and categories using the AHP method which provides a priori information on the adjustments of attributes and categories in additive DEA models; computing the grey relational grades of attributes in each category for alternatives using an additive DEA model; converting the grey relational grades of attributes to the grey relational coefficients of categories; computing the grey relational grades of categories for alternatives using an additive DEA model; computing the dissimilarity grades of categories for the tied alternatives using an additive DEA exclusion model.
Findings
The proposed approach provides a more reasonable and encompassing measure of performance in a hierarchy GRA, based on which the overall ranking position of alternatives is obtained. A case study of a wastewater treatment technology selection verifies the effectiveness of this approach.
Originality/value
This research is a step forward to overcome the current shortcomings in a hierarchy GRA by extracting the benefits from both the objective and subjective weighting methods.
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Jundong Hou, Lanying Du and Jianfeng Li
One purpose of this paper is to examine several factors that potentially influence a consumer's purchasing decision to participate in cause‐related marketing (CRM) program in the…
Abstract
Purpose
One purpose of this paper is to examine several factors that potentially influence a consumer's purchasing decision to participate in cause‐related marketing (CRM) program in the Chinese context. The other is to empirically test the hypothesized relationship between cause's attributes and purchase intention in such environment.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper develops a measure for exploring the cause's attributes influencing consumer's purchasing intention. Two groups of valid samples, respectively, with 178 and 376 respondents are collected through questionnaire survey. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are employed to extract and test the key influential attributes on the basis of data of two samples respectively, and structural equation model is used to define the structure of influencing attributes and to measure the degree of impact for each attribute on the consumer's purchasing intention.
Findings
The results show that the degree of cause's participation for consumer, fit between the brand and the cause, cause importance, congruence between the firm's product and the cause, cause proximity play an important role in consumers’ attitudes toward the product and firm and their intentions to purchase the advertised product and participate in the CRM campaign, which suggests an opportunity for nonprofits to compete for these vital resources by nurturing and leveraging the antecedent factors and an opportunity for firms to select a cause partner.
Research limitations/implications
The sample is a convenience sample that is the main limitations of this research. The EFA and CFA is difficult to generalize to a larger audience, and there was a lack of experimental control for the questionnaire investigation, so the quality of questionnaire can not be ensured.
Practical implications
This research should help firms determine the best partners for strategic social alliances, and provide an advice on how to make them maximum participation, also should help current and potential consumers ascribe personality traits to nonprofit organizations and differentiate between nonprofits on the basis of the cause's attributes. At the same time, this paper provides several interesting areas for future research that will further aid marketing managers to develop a more effective CRM campaign to fit with goals of corporate, which adds some valuable insights or new ideas to develop essential theory.
Originality/value
This paper offers interesting insight into the development of CRM campaigns, and explores the five variables: the degree of cause's participation for consumer; fit between the brand and the cause; cause importance; congruence between the firm's product and the cause; cause proximity also should influence consumer's purchasing attitude, intention and decision behavior in the Chinese context.
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The development of Chinese librarianship is related closely to the spreading of the influence of Western librarianship in China upon professional practice and research. Provides…
Abstract
The development of Chinese librarianship is related closely to the spreading of the influence of Western librarianship in China upon professional practice and research. Provides an overview of the channels through which ideas were transmitted, and the influences which they exerted on Chinese librarianship, particularly in recent years, upon basic theories, technical services, readers’ services, management, and library science education.