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This paper aims to test the causal relationship between urban-biased policy and urban-rural income gap and further examine the moderating role of government intervention.

Based on the provincial Government Work Reports and the long-term policy practice of implementing the target responsibility system, the authors construct a unique indicator of urban-biased policy in China. Further, applying the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces in 2003–2018, the authors explore the causal relationship between urban-biased policy and urban-rural income gap.

The results show that urban-biased policy has contributed to the widen urban-rural income gap in China, which supports Lipton's urban-biased hypothesis. Further research shows that the stronger the government intervention, the bigger the role of urban-biased policy in widening urban-rural income gap.

On the one hand, this study not only investigates the direct effect of urban-biased policy on urban-rural income gap, but also examines the moderating effect from the perspective of government intervention, which helps to enrich the relevant studies of urban-biased theory. On the other hand, the authors' findings provide the latest empirical evidence for urban-biased policy to widen urban-rural income gap and presents a reference and warning for China and other developing countries about balancing the relationship between equity and efficiency during economic development.

The purpose of this study is to propose an innovative methodology in solving the lean production design from semiconductor crystal-ingot pulling manufacturing which is an important industry. Due to the complexity of the system, it is computationally prohibited by an analytical approach; thus, simulation optimization is adopted for this study.

Four control factors that affect the system’s performance, including the pulling strategy, machine limitations, dispatching rules and batch-size control, are identified to generate the future-state value stream mapping. Taguchi two-step procedure and simulation optimization are used to determine the optimal parameter values for a robust system.

The proposed methodology improved the system performances by 6.42 and 12.02 per cent for service level and throughput, respectively.

This study does not investigate operations management issues such as setup reduction, demand forecasting and layout design.

A real-world crystal-ingot pulling manufacturing factory was used for the case study. The results are promising and are readily applied to other industrial applications.

The improved performances, service level and throughout rate, can result in an improved customer satisfaction level and a reduced resources consumption, respectively.

The proposed methodology innovatively solved a practical application and the results are promising.

Integrated thinking is central to the International Integrated Reporting Council’s (IIRC’s) integrated reporting (IR) framework, which is in turn is related to a potential resurgence of intellectual capital (IC) reporting. However, it remains unclear how key IR stakeholders understand this concept in theory or practice. The purpose of this paper is to explore how key stakeholders interpret integrated thinking; and how pilot organizations are applying integrated thinking in practice.

The study involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with key IR stakeholders in Australia, including two IR pilot organizations, one professional association, an accounting professional body, an accounting firm and two IIRC officials.

First, the IIRC has not fully defined and articulated the concept of integrated thinking, and there is no shared consensus among practitioners. Second, there is evidence of an evolving understanding of integrated thinking within practice. What remains unclear is how this understanding will develop over time.

Since interviews were conducted with a relatively small sample of participants in Australia, the results may not be generalizable across different contexts. The study emphasizes the need to interpret carefully IR’s potential contribution to organizational practice through either reporting in general, or IC reporting in particular.

Despite the centrality of integrated thinking to IR, there has been limited research to date on the concept. Clarifying what integrated thinking means in practice can improve our understanding of a key IR concept, and can advance our understanding of IR’s potential to improve IC reporting and research.

This paper aims to propose two parallel two-step finite element algorithms based on fully overlapping domain decomposition for solving the 2D/3D time-dependent natural convection problem.

The first-order implicit Euler formula and second-order Crank–Nicolson formula are used to time discretization respectively. Each processor of the algorithms computes a stabilized solution in its own global composite mesh in parallel. These algorithms compute a nonlinear system for the velocity, pressure and temperature based on a lower-order element pair (P₁b-P₁-P₁) and solve a linear approximation based on a higher-order element pair (P₂-P₁-P₂) on the same mesh, which shows that the new algorithms have the same convergence rate as the two-step finite element methods. What is more, the stability analysis of the proposed algorithms is derived. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of the proposed algorithms.

Finally, numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of the proposed algorithms.

The novel parallel two-step algorithms for incompressible natural convection problem are proposed. The rigorous analysis of the stability is given for the proposed parallel two-step algorithms. Extensive 2D/3D numerical tests demonstrate that the parallel two-step algorithms can deal with the incompressible natural convection problem for high Rayleigh number well.

Online dating services have been growing rapidly in recent years. However, adopting these services may involve high risk and trust issues among potential users toward both online dating services and the daters they introduce to users. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceived benefits vs risks, and trust vs distrust affect user adoption vs non-adoption intentions toward using this rather controversial information and communications technology in the context of online dating.

Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the research model using data from a survey of 451 single individuals.

The results indicated that perceived benefits play more essential roles in adoption, while perceived risks affect non-adoption more. Individuals' trust in online dating service predicts a major portion of the variation in user benefit perceptions, while distrust in online dating service and in daters that users might select significantly influence perceived risks. Moreover, benefit and risk perceptions can mediate the impacts of trust and distrust on both adoption and non-adoption decisions.

This study extends theories of decision-making in the use of controversial information technologies such as in the case of online dating. It investigates the coexistence of various trust and distrust beliefs as well as benefit and risk perceptions, and their different impacts on adoption and non-adoption in online dating services.

This paper aims to consider numerical simulation for radionuclide transport calculations in geological radioactive waste repository.

The nonlinear two-point flux approximation is used to discretize the diffusion flux and has a fixed stencil. The cell-vertex unknowns are applied to define the auxiliary unknowns and can be interpolated by the cell-centered unknowns. The approximation of convection flux is based on the second-order upwind method with a slope limiter.

Numerical results illustrate that the positivity-preserving is satisfied in solving this convection-diffusion system and has a second-order convergence rate on the distorted meshes.

A new positivity-preserving nonlinear finite volume scheme is proposed to simulate the far-field model used in the geological radioactive waste repository. Numerical results illustrate that the positivity-preserving is satisfied in solving this convection-diffusion system and has a second-order convergence rate on the distorted meshes.

Design is a time-consuming process for mechanical production. Some design structures frequently occur in different products and can be shared by multiple assembly models. Thus, identifying these structures and adding them to a design knowledge library significantly speed up the design process. Most studies addressing this issue have traditionally focused on part models and have not extended to assembly models. This paper aims to find a method for common design structure discovery in assembly models.

Computer-aided design models have a great deal of valuable information defined by different designers in the design stages, especially the assembly models, which are actually carriers of information from multiple sources. In this paper, an approach for discovering a common design structure in assembly models is proposed by comparing information from multiple sources. Assembly models are first represented as attribute connection graphs (ACGs), in which we mainly consider topological information and various attributes of parts and connections. Then, we apply a K-means clustering method based on a similarity analysis of different attributes to classify the parts and connections and transform ACGs of assemblies into type code graphs (TCGs). After this, a discovery algorithm that improves upon fast frequent subgraph mining is used to identify common design structures in assemblies.

A new method was developed for discovering common design structures in assembly models, considering the similarity of information from multiple sources and allowing some differences in the details to keep both commonalities and individualities of common design structures.

Experiments show that the proposed method is efficient and can produce a reasonable result.

This discovery method helps designers find common design structures from different assembly models and shorten the design cycle. It is an effective approach to build a knowledge library for product design that can shorten the design cycle.

The improvement of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance requires more efficient and inexpensive electrocatalysts. The purpose of this study is to prepare Ni-W and Ni-W-P thin films using the electrodeposition technique using a pulse current and investigate their behaviors toward HER in an acidic solution.

The aim is to prepare Ni-W and Ni-W-P films by the electrodeposition technique using a pulse current and estimate their performance for the HER. The surface morphologies and chemical compositions of the deposited films were assessed using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray analysis and X-ray diffraction. Linear sweep voltammetry, chronoamperometry, Tafel plots and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used to evaluate the prepared electrodes toward the hydrogen evolution process.

The main conclusion is that the surface morphology of Ni–W deposited film is a crystalline structure, while that of Ni-W-P deposit is an amorphous structure. HER activity on Ni-W electrodes increases with decreasing the Wt.% of W to 7.83 Wt.% in the prepared electrodes. In addition, the presence of P enhances HER activity, which increases with increasing the Wt.% of P in the prepared Ni-W-P electrodes. Both Ni-W (7.83 Wt.% W) and Ni-W-P (20.34 Wt.% P), which have been prepared at 8 A dm⁻² display the best performance toward HER compared to the other prepared electrodes. They exhibit high catalytic activities toward HER, which is evidenced by high hydrogen evolution current density values of 9.52 and 33.98 mA cm⁻², low onset potentials of −0.73 and −0.63 V, low Tafel slopes of −125 mV/dec, high exchange current densities of 0.058 and 0.20 mA cm⁻², low charge transfer resistances (Rct) of 226.28 and 75.8 ohm·cm² for Ni-W (7.83  Wt.% W) and Ni-W-P (20.34  Wt.% P), respectively; moreover, they exhibited considerable stabilities too.

The results presented in this work are an insight into understanding the performance of the prepared Cu electrodes coated by Ni-W and Ni-W-P films toward HER. In this work, a consistent assessment of the results achieved on laboratory scale has been conducted.

To address the problem that the current train operation mode that train selects one of several offline pre-generated control schemes before the departure and operates following the scheme after the departure, energy-saving performance of the whole metro system cannot be guaranteed.

A cooperative train control framework is formulated to regulate a novel train operation mode. The classic train four-phase control strategy is improved for generating specific energy-efficient control schemes for each train. An improved brute force (BF) algorithm with a two-layer searching idea is designed to solve the optimisation model of energy-efficient train control schemes.

Case studies on the actual metro line in Guangzhou, China verify the effectiveness of the proposed train control methods compared with four-phase control strategy under different kinds of train operation scenarios and calculation parameters. The verification on the computation efficiency as well as accuracy of the proposed algorithm indicates that it meets the requirement of online optimisation.

Most existing studies optimised energy-efficient train timetable or train control strategies through an offline process, which has a defect in coping with the disturbance or delays effectively and promptly during real-time train operation. This paper studies an online optimisation of cooperative train control based on the rolling optimisation idea, where energy-efficient train operation can be realised once train running time is determined, thus mitigating the impact of unpredictable operation situations on the energy-saving performance of trains.