Corruption,Culture and Transferability: What Can Be Learned From Australia?

The Asian financial crisis is often blamed on ‘corruption’. International banks and aid donors now promote technical assistance and training in corruption prevention, referring to the international best practice of Independent Commissions Against Corruption in Hong Kong or Sydney. However, it is often also argued that what counts as corruption is culturally specific, and that the incidence of petty corruption is related to low salaries. So lessons drawn from corruption prevention in Australia, for example, may not be transferable to other countries with different cultures and levels of income. This paper reflects on the experience of designing and teaching a course on corruption prevention for officials from developing countries in the Asia‐Pacific region. It considers what counts as ‘corruption’, identifies different approaches towards prevention, and draws some conclusions about the transferability of Australian expertise.     

One Social Movement,Two Social Media Sites: A Comparative Study of Public Discourses

Social media have become central places where public discourses are generated, sustained, and circulated around public events. So far, much research has examined large-scale dissemination patterns of prominent statements, opinions, and slogans circulated on social media, such as the analysis of keywords and hashtags on Twitter regarding a political event. However, little attention has been paid to understanding how local socio-cultural-political conditions influence the formation and development of public discourses on social media. To explore this question, we analyzed public discourses about Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement on two distinct social media sites, Facebook and Weibo, the largest micro-blogging service in China. Facebook topped Hong Kong citizens’ usage of social media sites, while Weibo’s primary user base is mainland Chinese. The social movement and these two social media sites provide a unique opportunity to explore the commonalities and differences between social media discourses generated by two different cultures. Using grounded theory and discourse analysis, we reveal how people on two sites reasoned about the many incidents of the movement and developed sometimes similar but other times strikingly different discourses. We trace the links between different discourses and the socio-cultural-political conditions of Hong Kong and mainland China. We discuss how this study may contribute deeper understandings of public discourses on social media to the CSCW literature.     

Historical Trajectories of Innovation and Competitiveness: Hong Kong Firms and their China Linkages

Hong Kong manufacturing firms have been competing in world markets since the 1950’s. Their success has been based on low cost and flexible production and an ability to meet very tight delivery schedules as many of their products are short run fashion items for which consumer demand can be fickle. The opening of China in 1978 has enabled Hong Kong firms to sustain their cost advantages in world markets for a further twenty years. However, the rapid economic development of South China in particular, to which Hong Kong is adjacent, and the competition from lower cost economies in Southeast Asia is leading to pressures on Hong Kong manufacturers to rethink their strategies. Ambitions to continue to compete among world class manufacturers has become a survival strategy. The focus of this paper is to identify and explain the historical development of innovation in the strategies of Hong Kong firms to enable them to continue to dominate niche markets in Europe and the USA and develop a presence in the China market.     

A framework for conducting political event analysis using group support systems

Corporations seeking to expand their operations internationally often encounter certain political events that they do not encounter domestically. Political events are those events that may occur because of the actions or decisions made by certain political actors having influence in a region. Such events include corruption, currency fluctuations, and civil unrest. However, obtaining information and insight about such events from local knowledgeable persons is often difficult due to authoritarian governments and/or cultural environments that discourage open criticism. We present a framework for using group support systems (GSS) under such conditions. The framework consists of methods that can be employed depending on the number of events (unidimensional or multidimensional) and time periods (static or dynamic) of interest. Each method is illustrated with local Hong Kong business executives addressing the future of Hong Kong as a desirable place to conduct multinational operations.     

Artificial intelligence: A Far East perspective

Today the world's fastest economic growth area is in the Far East. Besides Japan, the four Small Dragons of Asia; Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are achieving very outstanding results in industry and trade. Their large foreign incomes will enable them to carry out substantial technology development programmes. An AI programme is certainly a possible candidate, considering Japan's Fifth Generation Project. This paper surveys the backgrounds of these Dragons from many perspectives: economical, cultural, political, historical ... and speculates on the future roles which AI may play in these nations. China, which has so many ties with these Dragons is also included in the discussion.     

Social media and mental health in democracy movement in Hong Kong: A population-based study

Social media use has proliferated in the past ten years and studies are beginning to investigate the associations of social media use with political movements and mental health. This study extends this literature by testing a novel hypothesis that social resource loss on social media (e.g., “unfriending”) may be associated with increased symptoms of depression and anxiety in social upheaval. A population-based sample of 1,208 Chinese Hong Kong citizens (mean age = 46.89; 52.4% female) was recruited by random digit dialing in February 2015, two months after the conclusion of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Respondents reported social resource loss on social media, and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that social resource loss on social media was positively associated with depressive symptoms but not anxiety symptoms. Age moderated the positive association between social resource loss on social media and depressive symptoms. Simple slope tests revealed that the association was significant only among middle-aged (39–55 years) and older (≥56 years) adults but not younger (18–38 years) adults. The current findings shed light on the role of social media in mental health during political movements across different age groups.     

Value engineering in Hong Kong — a powerful tool for a changing society

Hong Kong, one of the most dynamic cities in Asia if not the world, has been changing rapidly in recent years as a result of technological advancement, fierce local and international competition, and ever-increasing customer requirements. In addition, as design and production costs become more significant, different cost control techniques and the means of achieving better value for money are becoming increasingly important. Value engineering (VE) is one way to improve efficiency and seek the best balance between the cost, reliability and performance of a product or service. Though value engineering is still in its infancy in Hong Kong, there are already signs that value engineering is being used in the private and public sectors. This paper highlights the current development of value engineering in Hong Kong in terms of owners' acceptance of it. Details of VE education, research and professional institution in Hong Kong are also given.     

ISO/IEC 10646国际编码标准下的香港电脑汉字编码及字形原则

在ISO/IEC 10646国际编码标准中,香港使用的汉字载于H列。该文介绍了如何在ISO/IEC 10646国际编码标准下进一步完善香港电脑汉字的扩展机制及H列字符字源资料的编码方案。由于目前H列的很多字形并未完全反映香港的实际习惯写法,因此香港制定了一套适用于香港常用写法的电脑汉字参考字形,该文介绍了此套字形的原则。     

Digging below the surface: Secondary analysis of TIMSS data for Hong Kong and its implications for educational reform

Abstract:

Hong Kong students outperform their counterparts in most other countries’ in mathematics in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study Repeat (TIMSS‐R) project, while their science performance is marginally above the international average. In order to probe below the surface of these achievement results, secondary analysis of the TIMSS‐R Hong Kong data was performed to identify factors that affect student achievement. Results of the secondary analysis relating to curriculum provision, teacher characteristics, and classroom conditions and climate are reported in this paper. Based on the results, some recommendations are proposed to meet the need for quality education in the new era.     

Corruptible social agents

Agent‐based virtual simulations of social systems susceptible to corruption (e.g., police agencies) require agents capable of exhibiting corruptible behaviors to achieve realistic simulations and enable the analysis of corruption as a social problem. This paper proposes a formal belief‐desire‐intention framework supported by the functional event calculus and fuzzy logic for modeling corruption based on the integrity level of social agents and the influence of corrupters on them. Corruptible social agents are endowed with beliefs, desires, intentions, and corrupt‐prone plans to achieve their desires. This paper also proposes a fuzzy logic system to define the level of impact of corruption‐related events on the degree of belief in the truth of anti‐corruption factors (e.g., the integrity of the leader of an organization). Moreover, an agent‐based model of corruption supported by the proposed belief‐desire‐intention framework and the fuzzy logic system was devised and implemented. Results obtained from agent‐based simulations are consistent with actual macro‐level patterns of corruption reported in the literature. The simulation results show that (i) the bribery rate increases as more external entities attempt to bribe agents and (ii) the more anti‐corruption factors agents believe to be true, the less prone to perpetrate acts of corruption. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social network,social trust and shared goals in organizational knowledge sharing

The aim of our study was to further develop an understanding of social capital in organizational-knowledge-sharing. We first developed a measurement tool and then a theoretical framework in which three social capital factors (social network, social trust, and shared goals) were combined with the theory of reasoned action; their relationships were then examined using confirmatory factoring analysis. We then surveyed of 190 managers from Hong Kong firms, we confirm that a social network and shared goals significantly contributed to a person's volition to share knowledge, and directly contributed to the perceived social pressure of the organization. The social trust has however showed no direct effect on the attitude and subjective norm of sharing knowledge.     

Super-Resolution Image Restoration from Blurred Low-Resolution Images

In this paper, we study the problem of reconstructing a high-resolution image from several blurred low-resolution image frames. The image frames consist of decimated, blurred and noisy versions of the high-resolution image. The high-resolution image is modeled as a Markov random field (MRF), and a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation technique is used for the restoration. We show that with the periodic boundary condition, the high-resolution image can be restored efficiently by using fast Fourier transforms. We also apply the preconditioned conjugate gradient method to restore the high-resolution image. Computer simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Research supported in part by Hong Kong Research Grants Council Grant Nos. HKU 7130/02P, 7046/03P, 7035/04P and HKU CRCG Grant No. 10205775.Michael K. Ng is a Professor of the Mathematics Department, Hong Kong Baptist University, and is Adjunct Research Fellow in the E-Business Technology Institute at the University of Hong Kong. Michael was a Research Fellow (1995–1997) of Computer Sciences Laboratory, Australian National University, and an Assistant/Associate Professor (1997–2005) of the Mathematics Department, the University of Hong Kong before joining Hong Kong Baptist University in 2005. Michael was one of the finalists and honourable mention of Householder Award IX, in 1996 at Switzerland, and he obtained an excellent young researcher’s presentation at Nanjing International Conference on Optimization and Numerical Algebra, 1999. In 2001, he has been selected as one of the recipients of the Outstanding Young Researcher Award of the University of Hong Kong. Michael has published and edited several books, and published extensively in international journals and conferences, and has organized and served in many international conferences. Now he serves on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications, Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing, International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, Numerical Mathematics, A journal of Chinese Universities (English Series), and several special issues of the international journals.Andy C. Yau received the undergraduate (1998–2001) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the M.Phil degree (2002–2004) from the University of Hong Kong. He is a PhD student of the University of Hong Kong. His research area is image processing and scientific computing.     

Review Essay: Prospects for Old-Age Income Security in Hong Kong and Singapore

This review shows that Hong Kong and Singapore face a distinct and serious challenge to old-age income security due to their mix of public pension provision and intergenerational family support. They are among the fastest ageing societies internationally and will be the oldest in Asia after Japan by 2030. Yet their public pensions remain weak. Defined contribution pensions, even for full-career workers, are projected to replace just 17% of net lifetime average earnings in Singapore and 41% in Hong Kong, compared to 70% across the OECD countries. Instead, older persons in Singapore and Hong Kong depend mainly on their adult children for income security in the form of co-residence and cash transfers. More than half of them live with adult children. In Singapore, more than two-thirds receive financial support from the younger generation, compared to just 5% on average in Europe. Current welfare theory would suggest that Singapore and Hong Kong portray an extreme variant of welfare regime where the state??s role is more limited than in the liberal regime and the family??s role more central than in the Southern European regime. The sustainability of current old-age income security arrangements is therefore particularly vulnerable to new social risks that threaten the stability of traditional family structures. Already co-residence and financial support from adult children are declining. A fuller assessment of the prospects for old-age income security must focus on the interaction of pension policy and family support for elderly persons in different gender and income groups.     

ERG Group decides to go it alone

The partnership between ERG and Motorola is to be wound up. We look at ERG’s plans to carve out a major role in the international smart card business. On-going projects in Hong Kong and the UK will form the foundation for ERG’s next phase of growth.     

Combating Corruption in Singapore: What Can Be Learned?

Singapore is the least corrupt country in Asia according to the annual surveys recently conducted by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy and Transparency International. This article deals with the major causes of corruption in Singapore during the colonial period, it describes the features of Singapore’s anti‐corruption strategy, and identifies six lessons to be learned from Singapore’s experience in fighting corruption.     

Using a fuzzy association rule mining approach to identify the financial data association

In the rapidly changing financial market, investors always have difficulty in deciding the right time to trade. In order to enhance investment profitability, investors desire a decision support system. The proposed artificial intelligence methodology provides investors with the ability to learn the association among different parameters. After the associations are extracted, investors can apply the rules in their decision support systems. In this work, the model is built with the ultimate goal of predicting the level of the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong. The movement of Hang Seng Index, which is associated with other economics indices including the gross domestic product (GDP) index, the consumer price index (CPI), the interest rate, and the export value of goods from Hong Kong, is learnt by the proposed method. The case study shows that the proposed method is a feasible way to provide decision support for investors who may not be able to identify the hidden rules between the Hang Seng Index and other economics indices.     

The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarization: Time‐Series Analysis on Facebook Pages and Opinion Polls During the Hong Kong Occupy Movement and the Associated Debate on Political Reform

Online activity is often cyberbalkanized, but it remains unclear whether this phenomenon leads to polarization of public opinion or if the relationship works in the reverse direction. This study tested the temporal association between cyberbalkanization and opinion polarization during the debate on political reform in Hong Kong. Online communities were constructed by a post‐sharing network of 1,644 Facebook pages (101,410 shares); the differences between intra‐ and inter‐community shares were derived, and a cyberbalkanization index was computed. A time‐series analysis showed that the index temporally preceded the opinion polarization, i.e., most of the opinion poll's respondents gave extreme ratings to government leaders, but not vice versa. The index was particularly predictive of polarization among youth.     

A multi-objective optimization approach for health-care facility location-allocation problems in highly developed cities such as Hong Kong

Public health-care facilities are essential to all communities, and their location/allocation has long been an important issue in urban planning. Given the steady growth of Hong Kong's population, new health-care facilities will need to be built over the next few years. This research examines the problem of where such health-care facilities should be located to improve the equity of accessibility, raise the total accessibility for the entire population, reduce the population that falls outside the coverage range, and decrease the cost of building new facilities. However, because urban areas such as Hong Kong are complex socio-ecological systems, the aforementioned conflicting objectives make it impossible to find one ‘best’ solution that meets all of the objectives. Therefore, this research uses a genetic algorithm based multi-objective optimization (MOO) approach to yield a set of Pareto solutions that can be used to find the most practical tradeoffs between the conflicting objectives. The MOO approach is used to optimize the location of new health-care facilities in Hong Kong for 2020. Because the MOO approach provides a set of diverse plans, planners can compare the value of each objective and the spatial distribution of facilities to analyze or select the solution that best supports their further decisions. Comparing the Pareto solutions with other solutions, it indicates that the MOO approach is a sensible choice for solving multi-objective problems of health-care facility location-allocation in Hong Kong.     

Desert dust aerosols observed in a tropical humid city: a case study over Hong Kong

Observations from the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) sunphotometers, MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images, back-trajectory modelling and ‘in-situ’ PM10 measurements in Hong Kong confirmed that two dust storms on 16–17 April 2006 and 27–30 April 2009, with source areas in northwest China, affected the city. The impacts of the dust on the air quality of Hong Kong were quantified using aerosol optical properties from AERONET data and local PM10 (particle size less than 10 μm) concentrations. Combined analysis of back trajectories and the microphysical properties of the dust aerosols from AERONET inversion data suggest that the dust particulates are sometimes associated with industrial chemicals on arrival in Hong Kong. This is the first remote-sensing study to observe the presence and characteristics of Asian dust carried into the humid tropical region of south China.