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Traditional strategic planning is currently under fire. The product of an era of administered competition—a world in which the external environment was relatively simple, stable, and predictable—strategic planning systems were primarily used as control mechanisms to reduce uncertainty and to allocate power. They were internally focused because most of a company's transactions were internal—checks and balances designed to ensure adherence to its success formula—and because competition itself was essentially internal, pitting business units, functions, and individuals against one another rather than against other players in the marketplace.

Increasingly project work plays a key part in college courses leading to qualifications for business and management jobs. At one time colleges were content to offer courses based entirely on lectures. Nowadays, in the field of training for management and business, this approach is seen to be seriously inadequate.

The purpose of this study is to develop an evaluation criteria system for search engines using the Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process, and to conduct an empirical study on Chinese search engines to verify it. This is because the evaluation criteria in current research rarely considers expert opinions and experience, and seldom calculates the weight of each criterion by quantitative methods.

Expert investigation of the web‐based Delphi method was employed to develop the evaluation criteria, and the analytic hierarchy process based on an exponential scale was adopted to calculate the weight of each criterion. An empirical study was designed to test the evaluation criteria system. A total of 12 study participants were invited to evaluate six popular Chinese search engines by means of e‐mail questionnaires. All the calculation processes were executed automatically by Java programming.

The indexing structure and search method were the core criteria for evaluating the search engines. Google (using simplified Chinese characters) achieved the best performance among the six typical Chinese search engines.

The criteria for search engine evaluation were determined and weighted by the web‐based Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process based on an exponential scale.

Studying abroad is not new for Hong Kong students, especially those from the middle class. For a variety of reasons, traversing to Mainland universities has been an unconventional path confined mostly to students who pursued specific programs, or had family or social ties. Beginning in 2012, an admission scheme was launched for Hong Kong students applying to Mainland universities. The purpose of this paper is to review the admission scheme.

This paper draws on both quantitative and qualitative data sources. It includes statistics from official records of students’ application and enrollment figures, and documents obtained from multiple sources, as well as qualitative data through interviews of Hong Kong students who are studying in the Mainland universities.

The key findings are that since the implementation of the admission scheme, the number of applicants is rather stable irrespective of the changing socio-economic and political context. With the preferential treatment for Hong Kong students, low tuition fees, government financial assistance and scholarships, most students still consider studying in the Mainland a backup plan rather than a first choice. The academic performance of the students and academic/career aspirations have influenced their choice and decisions.

This paper contributes through providing both primary and secondary data to help understand the level of acceptance on the scheme since its implementation. It also reveals the perceptions of the students who have made their choice to study cross the border. In facing the emergent economic, socio-cultural and political challenges, some policies recommendations are proposed to boost the acceptance of the scheme. Moreover, it fills the research gap on student mobility from Hong Kong to Mainland China in the corpus of literature.

SIMPLIFIED CONTROL OF THE MOTOR CAR has occupied the minds of designers ever since the earliest days of the industry. In the many attempts to make driving a car easier for the man‐in‐the‐street, steam was one of the forms of propulsion used until the early ‘thirties’ but when the internal combustion engine finally won the day, efforts were concentrated on finding something better than the friction clutch and manually operated gearbox for use in conjunction with this type of engine. Before World War II several fully automatic transmissions for passenger cars had already been developed, especially in the U.S.A., and it was during this war that these transmissions found application in fighting vehicles. With the return of peace, motor manufacturers turned to fully automatic transmissions in a big way. It is hardly surprising, considering the generally advanced state of mechanisation in that country, that in the volume production of this type of transmission the U.S. again took the lead. Also, the large output of the domestic motor industry offered the best chances for a favourable return on the considerable capital investments inherent to volume production of complex transmission designs.