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Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Successful Knowledge Management programmes can demonstrate clearly defined links to the value proposition ‐ its bottom line being a contribution to business benefits. This is apparent at British Airways where a programme of external intelligence about information technology (IT) developments is being converted into useful IT applications. This paper explains British Airways’ approach to innovation and examines the difficulty in assigning a specific measure to this intangible asset. It also sets out ways in which innovation can produce improvements in business performance.

Using surveys of Amazon and Tmall Global users, this paper aims to empirically investigate the issue of platform technological selection. We explore the impact of switching costs on users’ intentions to use an app-enabled cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) platform based on an extended technology acceptance model (TAM). The results suggest that the higher the switching cost of a platform is, the greater the users’ satisfaction and intention to use this platform. Therefore, for the platform, a moderate switching cost will be beneficial for retaining users.

Based on the TAM, this paper takes the switching costs as the starting point and focuses on exploring the relationships among switching costs, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived reliability, satisfaction and intention to use. Online surveys of users of Amazon and Tmall Global are adopted as the main instruments of this research. We collected a total of 408 valid responses from Amazon users and 490 from Tmall Global users. For the data analysis, this study conducts frequency analysis, a test analysis of the reliability and validity of the measures, correlation analysis, and path analysis using a structural equation model.

The results show that switching costs positively affect the users’ satisfaction and intentions to use a CBEC platform through perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived reliability.

The questionnaire respondents were predominantly Chinese due to the constraints of the survey conditions. In fact, China has a high penetration rate in CBEC, and Chinese users have rich experience using the Amazon and Tmall Global platforms.

The development of CBEC has ups and downs, and users frequently switch platforms. Considering how platforms can stand out from the crowd and retain users, we believe that a moderate increase in the switching cost of the platform is helpful for companies to address these problems, and the implications of the results are particularly valid for decision-makers of CBEC platforms and companies.

Amazon and Tmall Global are the two largest CBEC platforms in the world. Using these two companies as examples for comparison can effectively identify the differences between the platforms and the conclusions are representative. We suggest that platforms can improve user satisfaction and willingness to use by establishing VIP communities, issuing coupons, providing shipping services as well as convenient after-sale complaint channels, and improving the platform’s easy-to-use interface, as ways to further enable the platform to retain more users and stand out in fierce competition.

This paper addresses an interesting and practical issue related to the effects of introducing switching costs in an extended TAM applied to CBEC platforms.

The purpose of this study is to investigate accurate and effective experimental methods for measuring the frictional loss of bearings (FLB) in mechanical systems and to measure the effect of various operating parameters on the frictional loss of high-speed mechanical systems.

Two novel methods were studied in this paper to measure the FLB: the free-deceleration method and the energy-balance method. A special high-speed motorised spindle and a friction loss test rig were designed and built to measure the effects of rotational speed, lubrication, preload and operating temperature on the FLB.

The experimental results showed that the frictional torque of bearings increases initially but then decreases with an increase in rotational speed. Similarly, the FLB decreases initially and then increases with an increase in temperature because of the influence of the viscosity–temperature relationship of the lubricant and the thermomechanical coupling factor. The optimal lubricant flow was determined, and the effectiveness of a novel preload online adjusting device was verified through experiments.

The research results of this paper provide the basis and methods for the measurement, reduction and prediction of the FLB in mechanical systems.

The purpose of this paper is to take transient contact force response, overshoots and steady-state force tracking error problems into account to form an excellent force controller.

The basic impedance function with a pre-PID tuner is designed to improve the force response. A dynamic adaptive adjustment function that combines the advantages of hybrid impedance and adaptive hybrid impedance control is presented to achieve both force overshoots suppressing and tracking ability.

The introduced pre-PID tuner impedance function can achieve more than the pure impedance function in aspects of converging to the desired value and reducing the force overshoots. The performance of force overshoots suppression and force tracking error are maintained by introducing the dynamic adaptive sigma adjustment function. The simulation and experimental results both show the achieved control performance by comparing with the previous control methods.

The implementation of the controller is easy and convenient in practical manufacture scenes that require force control using industrial robots.

A superior robot controller adapting to a variety of complex tasks owing to the following characteristics: maintenance of high-accuracy position tracking capability in free-space (basic capabilities of modern industrial robots); maintenance of high speed, stability and smooth contact performance in collision stage; and presentation of high-precision force tracking capability in steady contact.

As more and more robots are used in industry, it is necessary for robots to interact with high dynamic environments. For this reason, the purpose of this research is to form an excellent force controller by considering the transient contact force response, overshoot and steady-state force-tracking accuracy.

Combining the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) and the adaptive fuzzy PD controller, an enhanced admittance force-tracking controller framework and a well-designed control scheme are proposed. Tracking differentiator balances the contradiction between inertia and jump control signal of the control object. Kalman filter and extended state observer are introduced to obtain purer feedback force signal and uncertainty compensation. Adaptive fuzzy PD controller is introduced to account for transient and steady state performance of the system.

The proposed controller has achieved successful results through simulation and actual test of 6-axis robot with minimum error.

The controller is simple and practical in real industrial scenarios, where force control by robots is required.

In this research, a new practical force control algorithm is proposed to guarantee the performance of the force controller for robots interacting with high dynamic environments.

With the increasing demands of industrial applications, it is imperative for robots to accomplish good contact-interaction with dynamic environments. Hence, the purpose of this research is to propose an adaptive fractional-order admittance control scheme to realize a robot–environment contact with high accuracy, small overshoot and fast response.

Fractional calculus is introduced to reconstruct the classical admittance model in this control scheme, which can more accurately describe the complex physical relationship between position and force in the interaction process of the robot–environment. In this control scheme, the pre-PID controller and fuzzy controller are adopted to improve the system force tracking performance in highly dynamic unknown environments, and the fuzzy controller is used to improve the trajectory, transient and steady-state response by adjusting the pre-PID integration gain online. Furthermore, the stability and robustness of this control algorithm are theoretically and experimentally demonstrated.

The excellent force tracking performance of the proposed control algorithm is verified by constructing highly dynamic unstructured environments through simulations and experiments. In simulations and experiments, the proposed control algorithm shows satisfactory force tracking performance with the advantages of fast response speed, little overshoot and strong robustness.

The control scheme is practical and simple in the actual industrial and medical scenarios, which requires accurate force control by the robot.

A new fractional-order admittance controller is proposed and verified by experiments in this research, which achieves excellent force tracking performance in dynamic unknown environments.

Despite the advancement, it appears that much has to be done to clarify the understanding of the effects of the meaning of work (MOW) in the lives. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore such a theoretical stream by means of the Spiritism Doctrine (SD) tenets. In fact, the spiritual knowledge derived from this religion alludes to aspects worthy of investigation.

Religious lens serves as a robust frame to approach the MOW, given that people’s beliefs likely shape their view about work. Toward that end, it examines pivotal aspects of MOW literature and the SD revelations thereof.

The wise revelations and teachings from the spirits examined throughout this paper suggest that work embraces one of God’s laws. In this regard, the SD tenets deepen this by providing sound explanations, reflections and arguments about the MOW, as well as highlighting that we all must do the best in the work regardless of the profession or activity. In doing so, this paper is serving the neighbors by fulfilling or at least mitigating their needs and consequently engaging in something indefinitely greater than the own desires, that is, the celestial Father’s wish.

There is no denying that the knowledge brought by the SD, as a source of transcendental epistemology, has deep implications for workers and organizations likewise. Overall, such knowledge enriches the understanding of a very important theme to human beings through an understudied but also insightful lens.

Therefore, this essay contributes to the MOW through transcendental epistemology (Maslow, 1993). Rather, it focuses on a very sensitive issue (work) and its corresponding implications to mankind through the knowledge of a spiritual and religious framework. In addition, such endeavor also adds to the field of management, spirituality and religion Interest Group of Academy of Management.

This article is based on responses to the 1982 general invitation from the Review Board for Government Contracts. The authors' main contention is that the pricing of government contracts has hitherto been deficient in at least two fundamental respects — the use of the historic cost accounting model as a computational framework for the costing and pricing of non‐competitive Government contracts and the use of ex post accounting rates of return for estimating target rates of return.