Hong Kong Baptist University

About: Hong Kong Baptist University is a education organization based out in Hong Kong, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: China & Population. The organization has 7811 authors who have published 18919 publications receiving 555274 citations. The organization is also known as: Hong Kong Baptist College & HKBU.

Crop management techniques to enhance harvest index in rice

Abstract: A major challenge in rice (Oryza sativa L.) production is to enhance water use efficiency (WUE) and maintain or even increase grain yield. WUE, if defined as the biomass accumulation over water consumed, may be fairly constant for a given species in given climate. WUE can be enhanced by less irrigation. However, such enhancement is largely a trade-off against lower biomass production. If WUE is defined as the grain production per unit amount of water irrigated, it would be possible to increase WUE without compromising grain yield through the manipulation of harvest index. Harvest index has been shown to be a variable factor in crop production, and in many situations, it is closely associated with WUE and grain yield in cereals. Taking rice as an example, this paper discussed crop management techniques that can enhance harvest index. Several practices such as post-anthesis controlled soil drying, alternate wetting and moderate soil drying regimes during the whole growing season, and non-flooded straw mulching cultivation, could substantially enhance WUE and maintain or even increase grain yield of rice, mainly via improved canopy structure, source activity, sink strength, and enhanced remobilization of pre-stored carbon reserves from vegetative tissues to grains. All the work has proved that a proper crop management holds great promise to enhance harvest index and, consequently, achieve the dual goal of increasing grain production and saving water.

Recommender systems based on user reviews: the state of the art

Abstract: In recent years, a variety of review-based recommender systems have been developed, with the goal of incorporating the valuable information in user-generated textual reviews into the user modeling and recommending process. Advanced text analysis and opinion mining techniques enable the extraction of various types of review elements, such as the discussed topics, the multi-faceted nature of opinions, contextual information, comparative opinions, and reviewers' emotions. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of how the review elements have been exploited to improve standard content-based recommending, collaborative filtering, and preference-based product ranking techniques. The review-based recommender system's ability to alleviate the well-known rating sparsity and cold-start problems is emphasized. This survey classifies state-of-the-art studies into two principal branches: review-based user profile building and review-based product profile building. In the user profile sub-branch, the reviews are not only used to create term-based profiles, but also to infer or enhance ratings. Multi-faceted opinions can further be exploited to derive the weight/value preferences that users place on particular features. In another sub-branch, the product profile can be enriched with feature opinions or comparative opinions to better reflect its assessment quality. The merit of each branch of work is discussed in terms of both algorithm development and the way in which the proposed algorithms are evaluated. In addition, we discuss several future trends based on the survey, which may inspire investigators to pursue additional studies in this area.

Income, money ethic, pay satisfaction, commitment, and unethical behavior: Is the love of money the root of evil for Hong Kong employees?

Abstract: This study examines a model involving income, the love of money, pay satisfaction, organizational commitment, job changes, and unethical behavior among 211 full-time employees in Hong Kong, China Direct paths suggested that the love of money was related to unethical behavior, but income (money) was not Indirect paths showed that income was negatively related to the love of money that, in turn, was negatively related to pay satisfaction that, in turn, was negatively associated with unethical behavior Pay satisfaction was positively related to organizational commitment Thus, the love of money is the root of evil, but money is not

Do Asian Students Really Want To Listen and Obey

Abstract: This article examines some common preconceptions about Asian students and their learning attitudes, in particular the belief that they see the teacher as an authority figure, and as a fount of all the knowledge which they will need to acquire. Students in eight Asian countries and three European countries responded to three statements which reflect these attitudes. Their responses indicate that our preconceptions do not reflect what they really want, and that there is actually less difference in attitudes to learning between Asian and European countries than between individuals within each country. The results underline the need to question our preconceptions, and to explore in greater depth the nature and extent of cultural influences on learning.

On restart procedures for the conjugate gradient method

Abstract: The conjugate gradient method is a powerful solution scheme for solving unconstrained optimization problems, especially for large-scale problems. However, the convergence rate of the method without restart is only linear. In this paper, we will consider an idea contained in [16] and present a new restart technique for this method. Given an arbitrary descent direction d t and the gradient g t , our key idea is to make use of the BFGS updating formula to provide a symmetric positive definite matrix P t such that d t =−P t g t , and then define the conjugate gradient iteration in the transformed space. Two conjugate gradient algorithms are designed based on the new restart technique. Their global convergence is proved under mild assumptions on the objective function. Numerical experiments are also reported, which show that the two algorithms are comparable to the Beale–Powell restart algorithm.