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We obtained information on China Gerui from secondary published sources, including annual reports downloaded from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) EDGAR database, news sites and newspapers, the company’s website and journal articles. One of the authors visited the China Gerui plant in Henan, China.

China Gerui, a Chinese metal fabrication company, enjoyed exponential growth because of its location, product innovation and ability to move up the value chain. At the height of its success, the company listed on the Nasdaq and had plans to raise capital to fund ambitious expansion plans. Unfortunately, four years after listing on Nasdaq, the company received a letter from the listing qualifications department notifying China Gerui that they were not in compliance with Nasdaq’s filing requirements because it had not filed its Form 20-F. Now, the company had only five days to decide whether to request an appeal of the letter.

This case is best suited for higher-level undergraduate accounting and finance courses such as intermediate accounting, auditing, international accounting, financial statement analysis, corporate finance and investments analysis. It is especially appropriate for graduate-level global accounting and advanced financial statement analysis courses. In these courses, the best placement is after coverage of SEC regulations and requirements for financial statement reporting and disclosure. Moreover, the case may be used as a tool to demonstrate the step-by-step process for searching and retrieving information from a public company’s filings through the SEC’s EDGAR database.

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The purpose of this paper is to review systematically the research of grey relation analysis (GRA) models.

Three different approaches, the springboard to build a GRA model, the angle of view in modelling, and the dimension of objects, are analysed, respectively.

The GRA models developed from the models based on relation coefficients of each point in the sequences in early days to the generalized GRA models based on integral or overall perspective. It evolved from the GRA models which measure similarity based on nearness, into the models which consider similarity and nearness, respectively. The objects of the research advanced from the analysis of relationship among curves to that among curved surfaces, and further to the analysis of relationship in three‐dimensional space and even the relationship among super surfaces in n‐dimensional space.

The further research on GRA models is proposed. One is about the property of GRA model. An in‐depth knowledge about the properties of GRA model will help people to understand its function, applicable area and requirements for modelling. The other one is about the extension of research object system. The object to be analysed should be extended from the common sequence of real numbers to grey numbers, vectors, matrices, and even multi‐dimensional matrices, etc.

The human body has the same basic size data but has different surface morphology, resulting in the unfitness even under the same size specification. The purpose of this study was to solve the local fitness problems by representing and quantifying the human surface morphological difference.

Firstly, the 3D point cloud for 323 female students was scanned, and the cross-section layers of the “waist-to-thigh” zone were determined. Secondly, the space vector based on the space Euclidean distance was extracted to represent and quantify the surface morphological difference. And the Principal Component Analysis and K-means were adopted to subdivide the target zone. Thirdly, the pattern based on the subdivision results and surface flattening was generated. Additionally, the fitness was evaluated by the subjective and objective assessments, separately.

The space vector could represent and quantify the shape morphology of the “waist-to-thigh” zone. It had successfully achieved the human body subdivision and corresponding pattern generation for the “waist-to-thigh” zone. And the pattern based on the shape subdivision and surface flattening of the space vector could effectively improve the wearing fitness. Particularly in the waist and crotch area of trousers, the obvious wrinkles had been solved because the space vector is more in line with the shape morphology characteristics.

The proposed method could represent and quantify the difference in human surface morphology in a 3D manner. It solved the unfitness problem caused by the same body size but different shape surface morphology. And it will contribute to the fitness improvement of the trousers.

The early care and education (ECE) workforce plays a pivotal role in shaping early childhood developmental trajectories and simultaneously experiences significant mental health disparities. The purpose of this study is to investigate how social determinants of health and external stressors are associated with the mental health of ECE staff, which represent a low-resourced segment of the workforce; how psychological capital (psycap) can mitigate these associations.

The authors administered an 89-item survey to 332 ECE staff employed in 42 Head Start centers in the USA. The authors ran three hierarchical linear regression models to analyze associations between social determinants of health, external sources of stress, psycap and potential moderation effects and mental health outcomes.

Individuals experiencing greater finance-related stress reported 0.15 higher scores on the depression scale and 0.20 higher scores on the anxiety scale than those experiencing less finance-related stress (p < 0.05). Individuals experiencing greater work-related stress reported 1.26 more days of poorer mental health in the past month than those experiencing less work-related stress (p < 0.01). After controlling for all sociodemographic variables and sources of stress, psycap was significantly and negatively associated with depressive symptomology (b-weight = −0.02, p < 0.01) and the number of poor mental health days reported in the past month (b-weight = −0.13, p < 0.05). Moderation models suggest that higher levels of psycap may mitigate the association between work-related stress and the number of poor mental health days reported in the past month (b-weight = −0.06, p = 0.02).

The implications of these findings suggest a need for policy change to mitigate social determinants of health and promote pay equity and multi-level interventio ns that target workplace-related stressors and psycap to combat poor mental health of the ECE workforce.

Despite recent organizational behavior studies have witnessed considerable progress in abusive supervision research; some demerits for both theory and methodology still remain in the past years. To clarify the current state of knowledge in the field, this study aims to analyze the current state of theories and methods on abusive supervision and provides a detailed future research agenda.

This paper conducted a literature review for both theory and methodology of the abusive supervision research using a content analysis of 134 publications.

For the theory part, this paper summarized the theories that had been applied to explain the relationship between abusive supervision and its consequences as well as antecedents. For the methodology part, this paper outlined some critical issues regarding country of origin, research design, measurement, analysis strategy and also summarized with a discussion of the relationship between methodological issues and article impact. Finally, this paper concluded by presenting an agenda for future abusive supervision research regarding both theory and methodology.

First, this paper summarizes the main theories, antecedents and consequences often used in abusive supervision research to allow scholars to carry out theoretically driven research investigating abusive supervision in the future. Second, through a content analysis of the methods sections of abusive supervision research in the samples (i.e. country of origin, research design, measurement and analytical procedures), this paper identified the potential reasons underlying the inconsistency in the conclusions of abusive supervision research and provide some guidance for future empirical studies. Third, based on the qualitative review, this paper provides an agenda for future research investigating abusive supervision by developing a content-specific theoretical framework to benchmark abusive supervision research against other research related to leadership and offers an accurate response to scholars’ criticisms of abusive supervision research.

The practice of facility management (FM) has been evolving with the rapid development of pervasive sensing technologies (PSTs) such as sensors, automatic identification (auto-ID), laser scanning and photogrammetry. Despite the proliferation of research on the use of PSTs for FM, a comprehensive review of such research is missing from the literature. This study aims to cover the knowledge void by examining the status quo and challenges of the selected PSTs with a focus on FM.

This paper reviewed 204 journal papers recounting cases of using PSTs for FM. The reviewed papers were extracted from Elsevier Scopus database using the advanced search.

Findings of this study revealed that PSTs and FM applications form a many-to-many mapping, i.e. one PST could facilitate many FM applications, and one application can also be supported by various PSTs. It is also found that energy modeling and management is the most referred purpose in FM to adopt PSTs, while space management, albeit important, received the least attention. Five challenges are identified, which include high investment on PSTs, data storage problem, absence of proper data exchange protocols for data interoperability, a lack of mature data processing methods for data utilization and privacy of users.

This paper paints a full picture of PSTs adoption for FM. It pinpoints the promising explorations for tackling the key challenges to future development.

This paper aims to study the synergistic effect of self-assembled carboxylic acid-functionalised carbon nanotube (CNT) and nafion/silica nanofibre nanopaper on the electro-activated shape memory effect (SME) and shape recovery behaviour of shape memory polymer (SMP) nanocomposite.

Carboxylic acid-functionalised CNT and nafion/silica nanofibre are first self-assembled onto carbon fibre by means of deposition and electrospinning approaches, respectively, to form functionally graded nanopaper. The combination of carbon fibre and CNT is introduced to enable the actuation of the SME in SMP by means of Joule heating at a low electric voltage of 3.0-5.0 V.

Nafion/silica nanofibre is used to improve the shape recovery behaviour and performance of the SMP for enhanced heat transfer and electrical actuation effectiveness. Low electrical voltage actuation and high electrical actuation effectiveness of 32.5 per cent in SMP has been achieved.

A simple way for fabricating electro-activated SMP nanocomposites has been developed by using functionally graded CNT and nafion/silica nanofibre nanopaper.

The outcome of this study will help to fabricate the SMP composite with high electrical actuation effectiveness under low electrical voltage actuation.

Traditional administration of building services regards them as having confined scope, operating in isolation or tightly coupled and providing minimal support for overall coordination and holistic management hindering the provisioning of advanced services. This approach inherently bears weaknesses related to complex services management, results in increased costs, and formulates rigid architectural design that restricts flexibility and extensibility. Taking into consideration this set of drawbacks, the purpose of this paper is to propose exploiting a service‐oriented architecture that will allow for dynamic, coordinated and distributed building services management.

The paper presents the design of an enterprise‐based networking architecture for building services and systems and specifies its functional components.

The proposed architecture is compliant with established practices in the building automation field and focuses on catering for a wide spectrum of building and enterprise level services. A specific deployment use‐case scenario and its related implementation issues is considered, so as to promote interoperability and adoption of open standards and principles for the system level performance evaluation of the proposed architecture is also examined.

Literature review is not exhaustive and evaluation of the proposed architecture should be performed in a more systematic manner.

Adoption of a service‐oriented view as far as facilities management is concerned.

This paper identifies through a thorough literature review the research problems in the area of building services integration and proposes an approach to enable successful integration. The novelty of this work is based on the application of the state‐of‐the‐art in enterprise networking for integration of building management and IT‐based services.

Web services are going mobile. A mobile enterprise can be established in a cellular network by participating mobile hosts, which act as web service providers, and their clients. Mobile hosts enable seamless integration of user‐specific services to the enterprise, by following web service standards, also on the radio link and via resource constrained smart phones. However, establishing such a mobile enterprise poses several technical challenges, such as the quality of service (QoS), discovery aspects and proper integration solutions, for the network as well as for the mobile phone users. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and research associated with this domain and with establishing the mobile enterprise.

The paper summarizes the challenges and research in the mobile web services domain, along with a detailed discussion of the developed mobile web service mediation framework (MWSMF). MWSMF is realized based on the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, as an intermediary between mobile hosts and web service clients. Moreover, to scale the mobile enterprise to the loads possible in cellular networks, some of the components of MWSMF are shifted to the new utility computing paradigm, cloud computing.

From the study it was found that ESB provides a good integration solution for the mobile enterprise research challenges. The detailed analysis of the MWSMF concludes that the mediation framework and its components are horizontally scalable, thus allowing to utilize elasticity of cloud platform to meet load requirements of mobile enterprise in an easy and quick manner.

The study addresses the research with providing services from smart phones and establishing mobile enterprise. The QoS challenges are addressed and the study introduces an integration framework using ESB technology. The porting of MWSMF onto the cloud is also addressed. As an added value, the research serves as a case study for porting enterprise applications to the cloud.