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Special shaped columns composed of concrete-filled square steel tubes have broad application prospects in steel structure residential buildings. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper, the thermal bridge problem of special-shaped column structures is studied, T-shaped column composed of concrete-filled square steel tubes is taken as an example, the finite element thermal bridge model is established by ANSYS software, the heat treatment is calculated by the software and the results are output.

According to the finite element results, it can be found that in the thermal bridge model, the temperature distribution is uniform, the heat flux density is small and the heat dissipation where the steel plate locates is serious. The lowest temperature of the thermal bridge is greater than the air condensation temperature, and the affected area is about 0.2 m, which is larger than the thickness of the wall and will not cause too much impact on the wall. It will help to suppress heat dissipation and achieve energy-saving and heat preservation inside the buildings.

The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the special-shaped column structure for building energy-saving buildings. This study provides some theoretical basis for further application of special-shaped column structures in architecture.

Innovation is the combination of idea generation and idea implementation. Sourcing relevant and credible external knowledge is critical for individuals to generate new feasible ideas and reduce the uncertainty of implementation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of knowledge sourcing on employee’s innovations behavior.

The data were collected by paper-based survey in four Chinese companies’ R&D departments and consisted of 569 valid responses. Structure equitation modeling method was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that knowledge sourcing, which is formatively conceptualized by tacit knowledge sourcing and explicit knowledge sourcing, significantly influences employee’s innovation behavior. In particular, the direct effect of knowledge sourcing is fully mediated by task-efficacy. Furthermore, the effects of knowledge sourcing are contingent upon information transparency.

This study not only contributes to knowledge sourcing literature by investigating knowledge sourcing from idea generation and idea implementation perspectives, but also is of importance to knowledge management research by demonstrating the moderating effects of information transparency.

Path planning is an important part of UAV mission planning. The main purpose of this paper is to overcome the shortcomings of the standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) such as easy to fall into the local optimum, so that the improved PSO applied to the UAV path planning can enable the UAV to plan a better quality path.

Firstly, the adaptation function is formulated by comprehensively considering the performance constraints of the flight target as well as the UAV itself. Secondly, the standard PSO is improved, and the improved particle swarm optimization with multi-strategy fusion (MFIPSO) is proposed. The method introduces class sigmoid inertia weight, adaptively adjusts the learning factors and at the same time incorporates K-means clustering ideas and introduces the Cauchy perturbation factor. Finally, MFIPSO is applied to UAV path planning.

Simulation experiments are conducted in simple and complex scenarios, respectively, and the quality of the path is measured by the fitness value and straight line rate, and the experimental results show that MFIPSO enables the UAV to plan a path with better quality.

Aiming at the standard PSO is prone to problems such as premature convergence, MFIPSO is proposed, which introduces class sigmoid inertia weight and adaptively adjusts the learning factor, balancing the global search ability and local convergence ability of the algorithm. The idea of K-means clustering algorithm is also incorporated to reduce the complexity of the algorithm while maintaining the diversity of particle swarm. In addition, the Cauchy perturbation is used to avoid the algorithm from falling into local optimum. Finally, the adaptability function is formulated by comprehensively considering the performance constraints of the flight target as well as the UAV itself, which improves the accuracy of the evaluation model.

Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of job crafting, this study aims to investigate how and when internal marketing orientation (IMO) promotes employees’ positive word of mouth (PWOM).

The two-wave, multisource data came from frontline employees and their supervisors in a hotel located in Eastern China. The hypothesized relationships were tested with Mplus with multilevel path analysis.

The results reveal that IMO encourages frontline employees to change the task, cognitive and relational boundaries of their jobs. Nevertheless, it is through relational crafting that IMO ultimately affects employees’ PWOM, especially when they work with supervisors high in felt responsibility for constructive change (FRCC).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies to investigate how organizations and supervisors can work together to encourage frontline employees’ PWOM.

The findings carry important implications for practitioners on how to encourage frontline employees’ PWOM in the service sector.

First, this research adds to the limited knowledge of how organizations and supervisors can work together to promote frontline employees’ PWOM in the service sector. Second, by proposing job crafting as a key intermediary mechanism underlying IMO’s impact on employee PWOM, this research not only offers a new theoretical perspective to understand how to promote frontline employees’ PWOM but also sheds new light on the underlying mechanisms through which IMO exerts its influence on frontline employees. Third, supervisors’ FRCC as a boundary condition of IMO can help service organizations more effectively capitalize on IMO to motivate frontline employees’ engagement in job crafting and subsequent PWOM.

Food plays an important role in every culture around the world. Recently, cuisine preference analysis has become a popular research topic. However, most of these studies are conducted through questionnaires and interviews, which are highly limited by the time, cost and scope of data collection, especially when facing large-scale survey studies. Some researchers have, therefore, attempted to mine cuisine preferences based on online recipes, while this approach cannot reveal food preference from people’s perspective. Today, people are sharing what they eat on social media platforms by posting reviews about the meal, reciting the names of appetizers or entrees, and photographing as well. Such large amount of user-generated contents (UGC) has potential to indicate people’s preferences over different cuisines. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explore Chinese cuisine preferences among online users of social media.

Based on both UGC and online recipes, the authors first investigated the cuisine preference distribution in different regions. Then, dish preference similarity between regions was calculated and few geographic factors were identified, which might lead to such regional similarity appeared in our study. By applying hierarchical clustering, the authors clustered regions based on dish preference and ingredient usage separately.

Experimental results show that, among 20 types of traditional Chinese cuisines, Sichuan cuisine is most favored across all regions in China. Geographical proximity is the more closely related to differences of regional dish preference than climate proximity.

Different from traditional definitions of regions to which cuisine belong, the authors found new association between region and cuisine based on dish preference from social media and ingredient usage of dishes. Using social media may overcome problems with using traditional questionnaires, such as high costs and long cycle for questionnaire design and answering.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.