A comparative study of crisis communication strategies between Mainland China and Taiwan: The melamine-tainted milk powder crisis in the Chinese context

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to identify and compare the crisis communication strategies (CCSs) that organizations used to respond to a congenetic melamine-tainted milk crisis in two Chinese societies (i.e., Mainland China and Taiwan), and (2) to explore the underlying political and media system reasons that led to the differences. Content analysis and discourse analysis of media coverage were used. The most significant finding is that Sanlu (a Mainland China-based organization) and KingCar (a Taiwan-based organization) demonstrated inverse pattern of the CCS adoption. Specifically, according to Coombs’ (1998) defense-accommodation continuum, Sanlu's CCSs moved from defensive to accommodative pole as time went by whereas, in contrast, KingCar started with accommodative strategies and moved towards the defensive pole gradually. Besides, the results showed that both organizations adopted denial, corrective action and apology strategies. However, on the Sanlu part, the most frequently used strategy was denial, while KingCar used justification most often. Moreover, this paper suggests that besides cultural dynamics, political and media systems also play a part in corporate selection of CCSs, and they are among the most important factors that should be taken into account to explain the differences in societies even with an identical traditional culture.     

How young Chinese depend on the media during public health crises? A comparative perspective

Under the framework of media system dependency theory, this study investigates and compares traditional media dependency and Internet dependency in public health crisis situations in the context of Mainland China. 373 college students participated in the survey. Empirical data demonstrated that, during public health crises: (1) traditional media and the Internet play different roles for individuals; (2) higher level of threat perception leads to more intense Internet dependency, but does not do the same to traditional media dependency; (3) individuals’ Internet dependency intensity is higher than their traditional media dependency intensity; and (4) the Internet may influence the behavior of young Chinese more directly.     

Three Actions by NHFPC to Solve Salient Issues

正In order to better protect people’s health,National Health and Family Planning Commission(NHFPC)has taken real actions,improved its management style,worked closely in line with institutional reform and system reform,highlighted the features of window units and service industries,and launched     

A Comparison of Normalized and Non-Normalized Multiplicative Subjective Importance Weighting in Quality of Life Measurement

Social Indicators Research - In quality of life (QOL) studies, importance weighting generally refers to the incorporation of perceived importance as a weighting factor into measures of QOL....     

基于改进PCA的朴素贝叶斯分类算法

朴素贝叶斯是一种处理分类问题的常用方法,但它的属性条件独立性假设在实际应用中难以成立,导致其分类性能降低。针对这一问题,文章提出了基于改进PCA的朴素贝叶斯分类算法,该算法通过Pearson和Kendall系数计算出属性间的相关性大小,基于主成分分析筛选出新的属性集,使其尽量满足条件独立性假设,并对新数据集进行朴素贝叶斯分类。实验结果表明,该方法有效地提高了分类准确率。     

Early involvement in the design chain—a case study from the computer industry

This work presents a case study of how a design chain, with more than three tiers of organisations (customer, manufacturer, and supplier), can involve its members in the early stages of the design and development process to meet their needs more effectively. A vertical design chain model, consisting of strategy, process and information levels, is adopted to elucidate how a computer company can provide for different customers and use various suppliers to create synergy within the design chain. The results of this study demonstrate that the re-engineering of cross organisation product design flow, product data management software applications and the integration of information from various parties are critical to the early involvement in a vertical design chain. Based on this case study, the proposed early involvement model can shorten the time taken to develop new products and considerably reduce the number of engineering changes for various manufacturers.     

Statistical analysis of a portable parallel non-linear programming algorithm

It is well known that the availability of cost-effective and powerful parallel computers has enhanced the ability of the operations research community to solve laborious computational problems. But many researchers argue that the lack of portability of parallel algorithms is a major drawback to utilizing parallel computers. This paper studies the performance of a portable parallel unconstrained non-gradient optimization algorithm, when executed in various shared-memory multiprocessor systems, compared with its non-portable code. Analysis of covariance is used to analyse how the algorithm's performance is affected by several factors of interest. The results yield more insights into the parallel computing.     

Tourist number prediction of historic buildings by singular spectrum analysis

A wooden historic building located in Tibet, China, experienced structural damage when subjected to tourists visit. This kind of ancient building attends to too many visitors every day because heritage sites never fail to attract tourists. There should be a balance between accepting the visitors and the protection of historic buildings considering the importance of the cultural relics. In this paper, the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is used for forecasting the number of tourist for the building management to exercise maintenance measures to the structure. The analyzed results can be used to control the tourist flow to avoid excessive pedestrian loading on the structure. The relationship between the measured acceleration from the structure and the tourist number is firstly studied. The root-mean-square (RMS) value of the measured acceleration in the passage route of the tourist is selected for forecasting future tourist number. The forecasting results from different methods are compared. The SSA is found slightly outperforms the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), the X-11-ARIMA model and the cubic spline extrapolation in terms of the RMS error, mean absolute error and mean absolute percentage error for long-term prediction, whereas the opposite is observed for short-term forecasting.     

A reference model for collaborative design in mould industry

The mould industry is an indispensable foundation for mass production by manufacturer and influences the time to market of new product. It is difficult to integrate the new product development processes and information systems among the mould companies which are mainly small and medium enterprises. The design chain operations reference-model (DCOR) provides a well-recognised methodology to standardise the management process for a product development project and enables the integration for mould industry. The DCOR focuses on a primary and preliminary product development process and is necessary to extend the detail templates for the industrial requirements. Hence, the purpose of this research is to develop an approach that extends the DCOR to the mould industry. The framework of the developed model, which is called the design chain operations reference-model for the mould industry, is adopted for a case mould company for a feasibility discussion.     

Measurement of bivariate attributes using a novel statistical model

Reducing process variability is essential to many organisations. According to the pertinent literature, a quality system that utilizes quality techniques to reduce process variability is necessary. Quality programs that respond to measurement precision are central to quality systems, and the most common method of assessing the precision of a measurement system is repeatability and reproducibility (R&R). Few studies have investigated R&R using attribute data.

In modern manufacturing environments, automated manufacturing is becoming increasingly common; however, a measurement resolution problem exists in automatic inspection equipment, resulting in clusters and product defects. It is vital to monitor effectively these bivariate quality characteristics. This study presents a novel model for calculating R&R for bivariate attribute data. An alloy manufacturing case is utilized to illustrate the process and potential of the proposed model. Findings can be employed to evaluate and improve measurement systems with bivariate attribute data.