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Slim and dexterous manipulators with long reaches can perform various exploration and inspection tasks in confined spaces. This paper aims to present the development of such a dexterous continuum manipulator for potential applications in the aviation industry.

Benefiting from a newly conceived dual continuum mechanism and the improved actuation scheme, this paper proposes a design of a slim and dexterous continuum manipulator. Kinematics modeling, simulation-based dimension synthesis, structural constructions and system descriptions are elaborated.

Experimental validations show that the constructed prototype possesses the desired dexterity to navigate through confined spaces with its kinematics calibrated and actuation compensation implemented. The continuum manipulator with different deployed tools (e.g. graspers and welding guns) would be able to perform inspections and other tasks at remote locations in constrained environments.

The current construction of the continuum manipulator possesses quite some friction inside its structure. The bending discrepancy caused by friction could accumulate to an obvious level. It is desired to further reduce the friction, even though the actuation compensation had been implemented.

The constructed continuum manipulator could perform inspection and other tasks in confined spaces, acting as an active multi-functional endoscopic platform. Such a device could greatly facilitate routine tasks in the aviation industry, such as guided assembling, inspection and maintenance.

The originality and values of this paper mainly lay on the design, modeling, construction and experimental validations of the slim and dexterous continuum manipulator for the desired mobility and functionality in confined spaces.

The purpose of this study is to assist brand and product managers in selecting appropriate ingredient names for environmentally friendly products. It investigates the effects of unfamiliar ingredients on consumers’ evaluations of environmental friendliness and their purchase intentions, based on the cue consistency theory.

Five experimental studies (n = 968) were conducted to achieve the research objectives. Study 1 found that consumers tended to avoid choosing unfamiliar ingredients. Study 2 examined the impact of ingredient familiarity on consumers’ perceived greenness. Study 3 investigated the mediating role of perceived naturalness. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, explored the moderating effects of emphasizing the importance of technology in environmental conservation and product category.

The findings indicate that when environmentally friendly products are labeled with unfamiliar ingredients (vs. familiar), consumers’ perceived greenness and purchase intentions decrease. This effect is mediated by perceived naturalness. Moreover, the negative impact of unfamiliar ingredients is mitigated by emphasizing the importance of technology and the high-tech product category.

This paper reveals the unique role of unfamiliar ingredients in shaping consumer attitudes toward environmentally friendly products. Based on cue consistency theory, it uncovers how unfamiliar ingredients influence the perceived greenness of environmentally friendly products through perceived naturalness. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the impact of emphasizing the importance of technology (emphasis vs. control) and product category (high-tech vs. low-tech) on consumer attitudes and behaviors toward environmentally friendly products.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to extract medical temporal information from online health communities.

The authors trained a conditional random-filed model for the extraction of temporal expressions. The temporal relation identification is considered as a classification task and several support vector machine classifiers are built in the proposed method. For the model training, the authors extracted some high-level semantic features including co-reference relationship of medical concepts and the semantic similarity among words.

For the extraction of TIMEX, the authors find that well-formatted expressions are easy to recognize, and the main challenge is the relative TIMEX such as “three days after onset”. It also shows the same difficulty for normalization of absolute date or well-formatted duration, whereas frequency is easier to be normalized. For the identification of DocTimeRel, the result is fairly well, and the relation is difficult to identify when it involves a relative TIMEX or a hypothetical concept.

The authors proposed a new method to extract temporal information from the online clinical data and evaluated the usefulness of different level of syntactic features in this task.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize a multi-method design for research on corruption in China. Corruption in any society is inimical to good governance. Singapore, despite her size, is argued to be a plausible model for China.

Taking a multi-method approach, the phenomena of corruption is investigated from: etymological analyses for corruption (European roots) and its Chinese equivalent, 贪污 (pinyin: tan wu) case studies taken from three periods: current, Qing Dynasty and to founding of China (zhong guo, Qin Dynasty) to ground our policy recommendation of China be modeling after Singapore on the basis of our analysis of statistical (2013 and longitudinal) data. In the process, the authors embark on inter-country comparisons (mainly Confucian China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan).

Here are the key insights: scholars are unaware the English word corruption is narrower in scope than the Chinese equivalent tan wu贪污. As far back as 3,000 years, the Chinese had attributed wu, 污 as filthy, polluting, dirty to psychological concept of greed tan, 贪. In English, corruption does not denote greed per se. Falsification of facts as a political ploy dates back to Qin dynasty. Destabilizing corrupt cases occurred in China today as in Qing Dynasty. Singapore rather Hong Kong is a better model for China in reforming society.

This paper illustrates a distinctively, in-depth approach to research on Chinese management. It shows why it is important to clarify key concepts: corruption in the West and tan wu贪污in the East. Historical cases are utilized to show the presence of a continuing Chinese mind set. The authors argued for China to embark on a city-by-city strategy (modeling after Singapore) toward becoming a corruption-free society. Now, as 3,000 years ago, the Chinese conceptualization of corruption embeds the psychology of greed.

China is at a crossroad of her economic development. There is a possible risk of China being destabilized through the corruption of the top rung of leadership. Chinese authorities must with urgency, rein in corruption. An approach is proposed in this paper.

In terms of style, approach and method of research, this paper is highly original. The integrative research here provides a rationale and basis for the Chinese leaders to implement a policy for a less corrupt society.

This paper aims to identify and systematically analyze the causal-effect relationships among barriers to circular food supply chains in China.

Grounded in multiple organizational theories, this paper develops a theoretical framework for identifying relevant barriers to integrating circular economy philosophy in food supply chain management. The study uses 105 responses from Chinese food supply chain stakeholders including food processors, sales and distribution channels, consumers and government officials. It applies a fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method to examine the causal-effect relationships among the identified barriers.

Overall, the results suggest two key cause barriers: first, weak environmental regulations and enforcement, and second, lack of market preference/pressure. Meanwhile, lack of collaboration/support from supply chain actors is the most prominent barrier. The key cause and prominent barriers are also identified for each of the supply chain stakeholder involved.

The study offers practical insights for overcoming barriers to integrating circular economy philosophy in the management of supply chains in the Chinese food sector, as well as in other contexts where similar challenges are faced. It also sheds light on which organizational theories are most suitable for guiding similar studies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first barrier study on circular food supply chains. The use of multiple organizational theories for the development of the theoretical framework is unique in barrier studies. The study offers insights from multiple stakeholders in the Chinese food supply chains.

Previous dynamic prediction models rarely handle multi-period data with different intervals, and the large-scale patient hospital records are not effectively used to improve the prediction performance. This paper aims to focus on the prediction of cardiovascular disease using the improved long short-term memory (LSTM) model.

A new model based on the traditional LSTM was proposed to predict cardiovascular disease. The irregular time interval is smoothed to obtain the time parameter vector, and it is used as the input of the forgetting gate of LSTM to overcome the prediction obstacle caused by the irregular time interval.

The experimental results show that the dynamic prediction model proposed in this paper obtained a significant better classification performance compared with the traditional LSTM model.

In this paper, the authors improved the LSTM by smoothing the irregular time between different medical stages of the patient to obtain the temporal feature vector.

In recent years, circular economy (CE) has come to prominence as an alternative to the classic approach of “make-use-dispose”. How companies can exploit the opportunities of CE to position themselves better are not well articulated in the literature. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to identify the barriers and opportunities of CE in the manufacturing sector through a socio-political, economic, legal and environmental perspective.

The study adopts a positivist approach, which is deductive in nature. A survey questionnaire was designed and distributed to manufacturing companies operating in the UK and EU. The study used FAME database and social networking platform LinkedIn to identify manufacturing companies. More than 200+ companies were approached for this study and data collection lasted over two months.

The study provides a comprehensive review of the CE literature and identifies a number of barriers and opportunities to CE implementation from a socio-political, economic, legal and environmental perspective. The findings highlight key barriers, opportunities and benefits of CE for the manufacturing industries operating in the UK and EU.

The findings are limited to 63 responses from the survey questionnaire distributed to manufacturing companies in the UK and EU. The present study aims to equip manufacturers with necessary understanding of the key opportunities and barriers to address the challenges encountered during the implementation of CE.

This study adds to the limited empirical literature on CE barriers and opportunities to manufacturing organisations operating in the UK and EU. The paper also identifies barriers and opportunities of CE from a socio-political, economic, legal and environmental lens.

The salinity of the oilfield produced water has a significant effect on steel corrosion. The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of salinity on corrosion behavior of X60 steel and it also provides basic for material selection of gas wells with high salinity.

The weight loss experiment was carried out on steel with high temperature and high pressure autoclave. The surface morphology and composition of corrosion scales were studied by means of scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy and X-ray diffractometry.

The results show that as salinity increases, the corrosion rate of X60 steel will gradually experience a rapid decline stage and then a slow decline stage. X60 steel is mainly exhibiting uniform corrosion in the first rapid decline stage and pitting corrosion in the second slow decline stage. The increase in salinity reduces gas solubility, which, in turn, changes the morphology and density of the corrosion scales of X60 steel. At low salinity, loose iron oxides generated on the surface of the steel, which poorly protects the substrate. At high salinity, surface of the steel gradually forms protective films. Chloride ions in the saline solution mainly affect the structure of the corrosion scales and initiate pitting corrosion. The increased chloride ions lead to more pitting pits on the surface of steel. The recrystallization of FeCO₃ in pitting pits causes the corrosion scales to bulge.

The investigation determined the critical concentration of pitting corrosion and uniform corrosion of X60 steel, and the new corrosion mechanism model was presented.