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AbstractAn accurate estimation of COVID‐19 contagion risk is important in terms of understanding the dynamic of disease transmission and health behavior. Previous research has documented that many health‐related variables influence the risk estimation of communicable diseases. We expanded the current understanding by investigating whether health‐irrelevant factors—such as one's sense of power—can have a systematic and consequential impact on perceived risks of catching the coronavirus. Based on the social distance theory of power, we propose that people in a higher power position develop a greater sense of social distance than those in a lower power position, which may in turn predispose the former to think that they are less likely to catch contagious diseases from other people. In Study 1, we provided correlational evidence that the personal sense of power was associated with the underestimation of contagion probability in Chinese university students. In Study 2, we established the causal relationship between power and concerns for contagious diseases in nonstudent adults and revealed the mediating role of social distance in the observed effect. Overall, these results, for the first time, indicate that power can elevate perceived social distance, exerting downstreaming effects on health cognition during the COVID‐19 pandemic.

At the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC, the concept of "socialist deliberative democracy" is put forward for the first time. While, in the eighth session of the Fifth Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the CPC which has just ended, the buzzword "Internet +" is first written in the communique in this information age. "Internet +" strategy is to combine the Internet and all works of life in the traditional industry together through the use of Internet platform, information and communication technology to create a new ecology in the new field. In recent years, with the rapid development and wide application of the Internet, the Internet has enriched the content of socialist democratic consultation with its freedom, equality and inclusiveness and modern democratic consultation.

Purpose
This study aims to understand the impact of market power and competition on earnings management, particularly discretionary accruals, in the Chinese and Taiwanese tourism industries. China and Taiwan differ not only in their political and social systems but also in their economic systems. The research aims to provide managers and investors with stock selection strategy in the decision-making process.


Design/methodology/approach
Accounting data consisted of 60 publicly traded travel companies in China and Taiwan from 2000 to 2014. Methodology included correlation matrix for the variables, univariate and multivariate regression and competition analysis.


Findings
Based on empirical results, the authors found a significant negative correlation between market power and discretionary accruals and market concentration (or lower market competition) and discretionary accruals in both the Chinese or Taiwanese markets. Although the Chinese travel companies enjoyed higher market power and market concentration, they engaged in less earnings manipulation than their Taiwanese counterparts as a result of the Chinese Government regulation.


Research limitations/implications
Based on listed travel companies, generalization of the research results to entire tourism industry is limited. This study compares the travel companies' practices of smoothing out earnings between China and Taiwan, thus helping managers and investors in making their financing, investment decisions.


Originality/value
This research contributes to the earnings management literature by examining a specific industry of tourism. This paper is original in two ways. The authors linked market power and market competition with earnings management simultaneously and then compared the Chinese and Taiwanese tourism industries in manipulating earnings.

Watershed eco-compensation (WEC) is considered a significant environmental policy instrument for watershed ecological protection and management. However, in the legislation and practice of eco-compensation in China, the development of the WEC mechanism is still in the initial stages. In this paper, the institutional opportunities and challenges of WEC are analyzed from the existing policies, laws, and economical instruments. Theoretically, WEC in China has seen a combination of punitive-based "Watershed Ecological Damage Compensation (WEDC)" and incentive-based "Watershed Ecological Protective Compensation (WEPC)". Through a comparative analysis of domestic and foreign watershed compensation practices, the results demonstrate that most of China's WEC projects have an insufficient legal basis, a single compensatory subject, insufficient compensation funds, and an imperfect market-oriented compensation mechanism. To improve watershed eco-compensation in China, it is recommended to strengthen legislation, select diversified eco-compensation approaches, and establish a market-based and systematic eco-compensation mechanism for watersheds.

Is economy-led urbanization the only answer to urban planning? By 2050, about 70% of the world population will live in urban areas, intensified by rapid urbanization in developing countries. A new urban development framework is critically relevant to investigating urban living's emerging complexity for advancing human-social-economic-environmental sustainability. The multi-disciplinary study explores a roadmap for solving industrialization's adverse effects to inform future resilient development in developing countries. The classical Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (MHN) and some scholars have stated that human physiological needs would be prioritized and fulfilled by developing countries, and psychological needs would be satisfied and desired by developed countries after fulfilling physiological needs level. Our study argued that transit-oriented-development (TOD) and ICT could simultaneously fulfill some essential physio-psychological needs with digital-ruralism. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was adopted to test the indicator-based MHN theory developed by literature, urban quality of life (Uqol) evaluation between the developing and developed countries, and backed by digital-ruralism success in developing China. The Uqol evaluation identifies the developing countries' subjective well-being demand as the health, mobility, governance, environment, social, economy, human capital, technology-ICT, smart living, and lifestyle, which are used to transform the classical MHN model to the indicator-based MHN model. The SEM subsequently illustrates that the observed well-being indicators are positively correlated to the TOD and ICT, defined by the proposed urban-ruralism development framework. The study contributes to an innovative approach to reconnect the classical MHN theory to contemporary sustainable urban planning while narrowing the socioeconomic-environmental gap between the developed (urban) and developing (rural) domains, which encourages a paradigm shift for future resilient urban development in the developing countries.

BACKGROUND: This study analyzes the regulation of and developments in blood donation in China from 1996 to 2019, and demonstrates the government's efforts to improve blood safety. RESULTS: Since the implementation of the Blood Donation Law in 1998, the number of blood donors in China increased by 275% from 1998 to 2018 (from 4 million to 15 million). The principle of no-fault liability was proposed and has been applied since 2010 to the tort liability related to blood transfusion malpractice. In 2015, mutual blood donation accounted for 4.2% of the national collection. However, in some provinces of China, the percentage of mutual blood donation increased from 9.3 to 35.6% in 2016. The National Health Commission canceled mutual blood donation in March of 2018. Since 2015, nucleic acid amplification testing has become a routine test item for screening blood. CONCLUSIONS: The Chinese government institutionalized the voluntary non-remunerated donation principle, enacted regulations for the management of blood transfusion, and adopted advanced blood testing technology to sustain blood supply and ensure blood safety. Despite increased blood donation, blood shortages persist. The quality and safety of blood collection can be further improved through the cancellation of mutual blood donation and incentive measures for voluntary non-remunerated donation of blood, which needs facilitation by governmental legislation.

Knowledge‐based systems (KBS) and multimedia technology (MMT) have been widely used in many industries for years to solve complicated problems. The integration of KBS and MMT, which leads to intelligent multimedia, provides a powerful tool for expertise‐intensive training. Although many tasks in construction demand extensive expertise and years of experience, the use of intelligent multimedia for training on these tasks has, however, hardly been documented in the literature. Aims to demonstrate the feasibility and potential benefits of using intelligent multimedia for expertise‐intensive training in construction. By referring to a case study in strategic cost estimate for building projects, illustrates the facilities that can be offered by the integrated systems. Since strategic cost estimate for a building project at early design stages is an extremely complex task, trainees have to go through a long period of learning before they can be competent in conducting such tasks. Introduces an intelligent multimedia system as a solution to the above problem. Reveals that intelligent multimedia can be deployed to meet the challenges of accurately representing the highly complex expertise in the knowledge base, and facilitating the learning process of the trainees through the highly interactive and non‐linear access to the explicit and transparent expertise.

AbstractIn this paper, we develop a formal framework for what a good community should look like and how strong a community is (community strength). One of the key innovations is to incorporate the concept of relative centrality into structural analysis of networks. In our framework, relative centrality is a measure that measures how important a set of nodes in a network is with respect to another set of nodes, and it is a generalization of centrality. Building on top of relative centrality, the community strength for a set of nodes is measured by the difference between its relative centrality with respect to itself and its centrality. A community is then a set of nodes with a nonnegative community strength. We show that our community strength is related to conductance that is commonly used for measuring the strength of a small community. We define the modularity for a partition of a network as the average community strength for a randomly selected node. Such a definition generalizes the original Newman's modularity and recovers the stability in as special cases. For the local community detection problem, we also develop efficient agglomerative algorithms that guarantee the community strength of the detected local community.