Circular displays with thumbwheels: Hong Kong Chinese preferences

Direction‐of‐motion stereotypes for circular displays and thumbwheels were tested with a computer display. The influence of pointer position, instruction of turn, and control plane on the direction‐of‐motion stereotype was investigated. For both horizontal and vertical thumbwheels, strong response preferences and reversible stereotypes were found for clockwise and anticlockwise turn instructions when the pointer was perpendicular to the motion axis. The results provided significant implications for the design and selection of thumbwheels and check reading displays in the man‐machine interface of facilities used in industries. In a check reading display, we should use a horizontal thumbwheel when the normal pointer position is at 6 or 12 o'clock; a vertical thumbwheel should be used when the normal pointer position is at 3 or 9 o'clock. Analysis on response times showed that the average values of the majority responses were found shorter and more narrowly dispersed than that of the minority responses. The results of this study provide recommendations for interface design with circular displays and thumbwheels on control panels used in manufacturing systems. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

惠普起诉港台公司侵专利

据国外媒体今日报道,惠普日前起诉了几家台湾和香港的打印机墨盒生产商,称其侵犯了惠普的技术专利,盗窃了惠普的产品而进行销售。惠普向美国旧金山联邦地方法院提交了长达28页的诉讼文件,称台湾研能科技(MicroJet     

国内电子商务发展分析

电子商务作为一种崭新的生产力,在它的直接作用和间接作用下,产业经济、国民经济乃至世界经济正生长出许多新的增长点.相比人类历史上由使用铁器开始的农业革命和使用蒸汽机开始的工业革命,当今使用电子工具开始的这场流通(商业)革命将会对人类社会经济产生更加深远的影响,对人类社会进步发挥更大的作用.     

香港科技与商贸新动态

董建华:香港需要新的经济发展动力 据新华社报道,香港特区行政长官董建华近日表示,随着亚洲经济复苏和祖国内地经济增长,香港特区可从中得益,现在是投资香港的好机会.同时,香港必须作出长远定位,寻求新的经济发展动力.他表示,创新与科技是未来知识经济时代增长的动力,香港要发展形成资讯科技中心、中医中药中心.内地经济将进一步开放和发展,香港应该善用这个机会.     

Realized volatility of index constituent stocks in Hong Kong

High-frequency financial data are useful for studying the statistical properties of asset returns at lower frequencies, and they have been widely used to study various market microstructure related issues. However, most studies to date have been concentrated on markets in developed economies such as the stock markets in US or UK. This article aims to investigate the statistical properties of stock return volatility in Hong Kong. Using the sample of constituent stocks of Hang Seng Index (HSI) and Hang Seng China Enterprises Index (HSCEI or “H-shares Index”), we found that the mean daily realized volatilities of HSCEI stocks to be significantly higher than their HSI counterpart, while the correlations between H-shares stay relatively lower than that of HSI stocks. A long-memory effect is also reported for the logarithmic standard deviations of all shares, with most of them showing slow decay over the series.     

香港岛建筑物群的三维可视化表达

建筑物群的三维可视化表达是多项信息技术的融合，本以香港岛建筑物群的三维表达为主要内容，从数据源、数据采集流程、可视化效果以及应用等方面给出了详细的应用探讨。此外对数据采集过程的质量控制问题也做了分析。     

Investigating ERP systems procurement practice: Hong Kong and Australian experiences

ContextIntegration of information systems is now commonly recognized to be a powerful strategic weapon that sharpens the competitive edge of a firm in today’s highly volatile business environment. Such integration can be achieved by replacing the disconnected and incompatible legacy applications by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Along with the remarkable growth of the ERP market, we have seen a number of failure cases of ERP adoption. Such failure cases indicate that not all firms know how to adopt an ERP solution effectively.ObjectiveTo explore and identify crucial practices from real experiences in the Asia–Pacific region that may explain a firm’s success in ERP procurement, with an overt intention toward the formulation of useful lessons that inform practitioners and contribution to advances in software development practices in organizations.MethodA multiple-case design involving three Chinese firms based in Hong Kong and a local firm in Australia was employed. We collected, verified, and analyzed the information about the ERP procurement practice in each subject firm by means of semi-structured interviews, archive reviews, and member checks.ResultsWe summarized our results in the form of 10 lessons learned, together with observations of how culture seems to have played a part in shaping the practice.ConclusionOur results offer practical guidelines originated from real cases that are of use for practitioners to improve the ERP procurement process.     

Text-making practices beyond the classroom context: Private instant messaging in Hong Kong

This article explores the ways in which instant messaging (IM) texts are produced by a group of university students in Hong Kong. Even though there exists a body of research on linguistic issues of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in non-Western contexts, much emphasis has been placed on the features of CMC English used by ESL learners. Instead of focusing on one particular language, this article reports on a number of language-related issues that are specific to the Hong Kong CMC context such as the use of Chinese and English, invented Cantonese spellings, and code-mixing. Drawing upon qualitative data such as observational notes and interviews, my study analyzes the text-making practices associated with the use of IM (ICQ and MSN Messenger) within the New Literacy Studies (NLS) framework [Gee, James Paul. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies. London: Routledge; Barton, David, Hamilton, Mary, & Ivani?, Roz (Eds.). (2000). Situated literacies, London: Routledge; Street, Brian V. (1998). New literacies in theory and practice: What are the implications for language in education? Linguistics and Education, 10(1), 1-24], which is a social practice approach to the study of reading and writing in real-life contexts. This article concludes by arguing that learning to produce texts in IM involves an entirely different process from that of formal language learning in the classroom. In a multilingual society like Hong Kong, teachers and educators need to be aware of such differences so as to bridge the gap between actual uses of language in students’ private lives and the form of language used in the formal classroom context.     

Hand anthropometry of Hong Kong Chinese females compared to other ethnic groups

Abstract

An anthropometric study of the hand dimensions of Hong Kong Chinese female workers was carried out using 100 subjects. Twenty-three hand dimensions were measured and compared with data from the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States of America. The Hong Kong Chinese had overall smaller hands than the United Kingdom and the United States of America females and larger hands than Japanese females. Comparisons were also made between the Hong Kong Chinese and United Kingdom females on the basis of age and ethnic group. In every case where a significant difference occurred the Hong Kong females had shorter, narrower hands with longer fingers than all other groups.     

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.     

Visual analysis of the air pollution problem in Hong Kong

We present a comprehensive system for weather data visualization. Weather data are multivariate and contain vector fields formed by wind speed and direction. Several well-established visualization techniques such as parallel coordinates and polar systems are integrated into our system. We also develop various novel methods, including circular pixel bar charts embedded into polar systems, enhanced parallel coordinates with S-shape axis, and weighted complete graphs. Our system was used to analyze the air pollution problem in Hong Kong and some interesting patterns have been found.     

Bridging research and practice: Implementing and sustaining knowledge building in Hong Kong classrooms

Despite major theoretical progress in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), relatively less attention has been paid to the problem of how research advances may impact schools and classrooms. Given the global changes and educational policies for twenty-first century education, issues of how research in CSCL can be integrated with classroom practice for innovation pose important challenges. This paper draws on experiences in Hong Kong and examines research-based CSCL classroom innovations in the context of scaling up and sustaining a knowledge-building model in Hong Kong classrooms. It begins with an examination of the rationale for CSCL research in classrooms and then considers a range of problems and constraints for school implementation. Classroom innovations involve complex and emergent changes occurring at different levels of the educational system. The experience of CSCL knowledge-building classroom innovations in Hong Kong schools is reported, including: the macro-context of educational policies and educational reform, the meso-context of a knowledge-building teacher network, and the micro-context of knowledge-building design in classrooms. Three interacting themes—context and systemic change, capacity and community building, and innovation as inquiry—are proposed for examining collaboration and knowledge creation for classroom innovation.     

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.