Search results

The spread of entrepreneurial rent seeking (or entrepreneurialism for short) and market-based performance measurement (accreditation, rankings) have transformed many business schools into risk-taking organizations. The establishment of formal risk management activities would represent the fitting counterpart to this development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the state of risk management activities in business schools and evaluates the presence of discrepancies from first-best practices found in the corporate sector.

The data for this study were collected through a structured questionnaire addressed to heads of internationally active business schools in cooperation with a major international accreditation provider. Non-parametric and parametric methods (logistic regression) were used to analyze the formalization of risk management in business schools, in particular the differentiating role of entrepreneurial rent seeking and international accreditation.

Risk management is still in the early stages of formalization compared to the corporate sector. The results indicate that entrepreneurial rent seeking does not encourage the institutional establishment of risk management in business schools, while holding international accreditation has the opposite effect.

Risk management has become a focus area of regulators and accreditation agencies. The rising number of business schools struggling financially also serves as evidence that risk taking is frequently not matched by formal risk management policies (further supported by descriptive statistics of the survey published separately). The largely uncontested statement of the R. Lyons, Dean of the Haas School/Berkeley, that 50 per cent of business schools will disappear within the next five to ten years can only be rationalized in the context of risk not being appropriately addressed by business schools.

The paper represents the first empirical study analyzing risk management practices in business schools. The study design follows the approach commonly employed in the corporate risk management literature to capture the design of the risk management process covering governance aspects as well as approaches to risk identification, risk assessment, risk mitigation and performance controlling.

Social network theory emphasizes that, to acquire needed resources, new ventures should cultivate industrial connections (intra-industry ties and extra-industry ties). In the meanwhile human capital theory focuses on entrepreneurs' employment experience, especially with respect to its breadth and depth. This study examines ties and experience to determine whether, in combination, they have positive or negative effects on resource acquisition in new ventures.

This study tests research hypotheses using questionnaire survey data with a sample of entrepreneurs in new ventures. Multivariate regression analysis is used to analyze the data.

Combining intra-industry ties and experience breadth or extra-industry ties and experience depth affects resource acquisition positively, whereas combining intra-industry ties and experience depth or extra-industry ties and experience breadth affects resource acquisition negatively.

Conclusions may be constrained by the limited sample size and source. Rather, the impact of the study lies in its identification of the effects of interaction between network ties and entrepreneurs' experience on resource acquisition. Future research can explore the effects of interaction between other dimensions of network ties and a range of entrepreneurs' experience characteristics on resource acquisition.

Entrepreneurs are provided with effective strategies to make use of their ventures' network ties and their personal accumulated experience in the process of obtaining resources.

The findings enrich the entrepreneurship literature by providing a more nuanced understanding of how and when new ventures' industry ties and entrepreneurs' employment experience together influence resource acquisition.

Construction enterprises are achieving the goal of production safety by increasingly focusing on the critical factor of “human” and the impact of individual characteristics on safety performance. Emotional intelligence is categorized into three models: skill-based, trait-based and emotional learning systems. However, the mechanism of action and the internal relationship between emotional intelligence and safety performance must be further studied. This study intends to examine the internal mechanism of emotional intelligence on safety performance in construction projects, which would contribute to the safety management of construction enterprises.

A structural equation model exploring the relationship between emotional intelligence and safety performance is developed, with political skill introduced as an independent dimension, situational awareness presented as a mediator, and management safety commitment introduced as a moderator. Data were collected by a random questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 26.0. The structural equation model tested the mediation hypothesis, and the PROCESS macro program tested the moderated mediation hypothesis.

The results showed that construction workers' emotional intelligence directly correlates with safety performance, and situational awareness plays a mediating role in the relationship between emotional intelligence and the safety performance of construction workers. Management safety commitment weakens the positive predictive relationships between emotional intelligence and situational awareness and between emotional intelligence and safety performance.

This research reveals a possible impact of emotional intelligence on safety performance. Adding political skills to the skill-based model of emotional intelligence received a test pass. Political skill measures the sincere and cooperative skills of construction workers. Using people as a critical element plays a role in the benign mechanism of “Emotional Intelligence – Situational Awareness – Safety Performance.” Improving emotional intelligence skills through training, enhancing situational awareness, understanding, anticipation and coordination and activating management environment factors can improve safety performance. Construction enterprises should evaluate and train workers' emotional intelligence to improve workers' situational awareness and safety performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of surface roughness characterized by fractal geometry on squeeze film damping characteristics in damper of the linear rolling guide, which has not been studied so far.

The stochastic model of film thickness between rail and damper is established by using the two-variable Weierstrass–Mandelbrot function defining multi-scale and self-affinity properties of the rough surface topography. The stochastically averaged Reynolds equation is solved by using the variables separation method to further derive the film pressure distribution, the damping coefficient, the damping force and squeeze film time. The effect of surface roughness on squeeze film damping characteristics of the damper is analyzed and discussed through simulation.

By comparing cases of the rough surface for different fractal parameters and the smooth surface, it is shown that for the isotropic roughness structure, the presence of surface roughness of the damper decreases the squeeze film damping characteristics. It is found that roughness effect on the damping coefficient is associated with the film thickness. In addition, the vibration amplitude effect is negligible for the damper of the linear rolling guide.

To investigate the random surface roughness effect, the rough surface topography of damper of the linear rolling guide is characterized by using the fractal method instead of the traditional mathematical statistics method.

Many mobile devices today are equipped with diversified sensors that enable the acquisition of rich user context (e.g. GPS location, phone activity) for application utilization. With the growing usage of mobile devices in daily life, the problem of conveniently and promptly searching a piece of content that a user has viewed on his/her device before becomes more and more crucial. This paper aims to propose a context‐based query processing framework called UCQP that supports unstructured queries for content search in a user's access history.

Beyond the keywords related to the content properties, a context query in the framework is specified with freeform phrases that describe high‐level mobile contexts of the user at a previous time when the user viewed the searched content.

Experimental results on a prototype system of the framework illustrate its good accuracy and small response time.

To tolerate the incompleteness and inaccuracy in user query texts caused by fading human memory, the authors develop several semantic query parsers that are tailored for different types of contexts using natural language processing and information retrieval techniques. The authors further propose a similarity model to rank the multiple result contents of a query by comparing context entities specified in the query and historical context values associated with each result.

Vehicles estimation can be used in evaluating traffic conditions and facilitating traffic control, which is an important task in intelligent transportation system. The paper aims to propose a vehicle-counting method based on the analysis of surveillance videos.

The paper proposes a novel two-step method using low-rank representation (LRR) detection and locality-constrained linear coding (LLC) classification to count the number of vehicles in traffic video sequences automatically. The proposed method is based on an offline training to understand an LLC-based classifier with extracted features for vehicle and pedestrian classification, followed by an online counting algorithm to count the number of vehicles detected from the image sequence.

The proposed method allows delivery estimation (counting the number of vehicles at each frame only) and total number estimation of vehicles shown in the scene. The paper compares the proposed method with other similar methods on three public data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed method is competitive and effective in terms of computational speed and evaluation accuracy.

The proposed method does not consider illumination. Hence, the results might be unsatisfactory under low-lighting condition. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to add a term that controls the illumination changes into the energy function of vehicle detection in future work.

The paper bridges the gap between LRR detection and vehicle counting by taking advantage of existing LLC classification algorithm to distinguish different moving objects.

In order to find a way to create the artistic conception of modern landscape space, the spatial analysis of Daguanyuan is carried out from the perspective of literature in order to find out the method of creating the artistic conception of modern landscape space. Adopting the method of general to special, from theory to practice, the argument with special significance is analyzed from the most common phenomena, and this argument is applied to the method of practical cases. The results show that Daguanyuan space in literature needs the audience's ability to understand words, the perception of space in film and television needs the audience's strong memory and imaginative thinking, while the perception of Daguanyuan space in garden art needs only basic discrimination ability. After analyzing the effect of Daguanyuan space construction from the literary perspective, it is believed that the writing techniques of starting point - development - climax - ending, wanting to carry forward first and restraining first, and reserving foreshadows in literature can be used for reference in modern landscape design.

This study aims to review and synthesize the burgeoning field of auditing research utilizing Chinese data. Over the past decades, there has been a remarkable rise in such research, driven by China’s abundant audit data, distinctive institutional features and enduring cultural influences. The purpose is to comprehensively review auditing studies featured in top-tier accounting journals, shedding light on the unique contributions made possible by Chinese data. By identifying key themes across domains, this paper aims to underscore the cultural and contextual disparities between China and Western countries, predominantly the USA, within the area of auditing.

This study presents a systematic review of China-themed auditing research, primarily published in seven leading global accounting journals. The researchers conducted a comprehensive search of the websites of these journals, identifying relevant articles using search terms such as “China auditing,” “Chinese Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR),” “institutional environment,” and “internal control.” After the initial search, 54 relevant articles were selected and reviewed. The study covers all China-specific auditing research, categorizing key themes into six areas to explore how scholars use Chinese data to address important auditing questions.

The findings reveal a significant increase in auditing research utilizing Chinese data, prominently featured in top-tier academic journals. This study categorizes six central themes, highlighting the broad range of topics explored using Chinese audit data. More importantly, the research identifies substantial cultural and contextual differences between China and Western nations, particularly the USA, that influence the auditing profession and markets. Exploring these themes underscores the invaluable insights derived from Chinese data, shedding light on areas not previously addressed by studies relying solely on Western datasets.

The value of this study lies in its comprehensive examination of seminal auditing studies using Chinese data, making a distinctive contribution to the auditing literature. This paper highlights the inadequacies of Western datasets in addressing certain auditing questions and emphasizes the unique advantages offered by China’s extensive public audit data, institutional characteristics and cultural determinants. The identified gap in the literature underscores the unexplored opportunities for further research in the Chinese auditing context. This study, therefore, provides a roadmap for future scholars, encouraging the exploration of new avenues and fostering a deeper understanding of the cultural nuances influencing auditing practices in China.

As an important connecting component, the reliability of aluminium alloy welded joints influences the whole structural effectiveness and stability of equipment. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel reliability estimation approach to the welded joints based on time-transformed Wiener process with automatic image measurement of crack growth. The crack length information of the welded joints is incorporated into reliability analysis to reflect the product time-varying characteristics.

The proposed approach is superior to other crack growth estimations in that it innovatively introduce a non-contact and flexible photogrammetry technique.First, on-line crack growth images of aluminium alloy welded joints are acquired by the designed monitor system. Second, crack length is calculated with image measurement, then the crack growth data during the manufacturing process is prepared. Finally, a time-transformed Wiener process is used to modeling the degradation, and reliability estimation is carried out with Wiener model. The approach has been validated on five 7075-T7351 welded joint samples.

The method has a twofold task: first, the extraction of crack length growth data by a sequence of image processing. The main step is to model the crack skeleton with crack skeleton tree, and remove it edges to calculate the length of crack; second, the prediction of crack growth and reliability estimation.

The limitation of proposed method should not be ignored. The pixel/mm scale should be calibrated in advance that means once we have built the monitor system, the relative position of the CCD camera and the surveyed crack cannot change anymore. It has reduced the flexibility. To improve this, we can obtain binocular vision in crack image measurement. The 3-D measurements could solve calibration problem and provide more information, such as the depth and the orientation of crack to research. Therefore, future work can be centered on the improvement of monitor system and measurement precision.

In the paper a novel method to estimate reliability of crack growth from welded joint based on image measurement has been presented. This method could be widely applied in different filed of manufacturing systems, reliability engineering and structural analysis.

The rapid proliferation of mobile context aware applications has resulted in an increased research interest towards developing specialized context data management strategies for mobile entities. The purpose of this paper is to aim to develop a new way to model mobile entities and manage their contexts accordingly.

This paper proposes the concept of “Mobile Space” to model mobile entities and presents strategies to manage the various contexts associated therein. To handle availability related issues, two system services are designed: the “Availability Updating Service” which is an identifier based mechanism and is designed to keep track of mobile objects and handle availability related issues, and the “Application Callback Service” which is a publish/subscribe based mechanism to handle application disruptions and interruptions arising due to mobility.

The paper presents a detailed study of the proposed framework and a description of the underlying services and the components therein to validate the framework. Experimental results carried out in WiFi and 3G environments indicate that the proposed techniques can support mobile applications and minimize application disruptions with minimal overhead.

The proposed context management framework is generic in nature and is not designed for a specific class of applications. Any mobile context aware application can leverage on the framework and utilize the provided functionalities to manage application disruptions. Also, the decoupling of mobile application layer and the underlying context data management layer renders context data management layer transparent to the application design.