Management of e-technology in China

"e" technology is bringing about many challenges for companies, in particular for their managers. This concerns a vast range of business processes in many sectors of the economy and in nearly every country of the world. In rapidly industrializing China, companies and other organizations are actively finding their way by adapting, developing and exploiting new e-technologies. The paper's focus is the identification of the management issues in implementing e-technology in China. The paper reports on research into difficulties of establishing and operating e-business in China. In particular, it discusses management related to e-technology sharing and application. A brief review of literature is followed by the analysis of three recent case studies: an international IT services alliance, a financial services provider and an international manufacturing joint venture. All case companies are applying e-technology in China, but the role of e-technology differs in the three cases: adding a service line to the existing business processes; developing a new business process; and increasing efficiency and effectiveness in business processes. The conclusions present the emerging management issues: cooperation is a key asset in networking; the choice of business models plays an important role; adequate management attention for details such as a training program is require

Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates

College completion, earning a degree or certificate, is considered to be a key college success outcome, supported by every educational policymaker. Yet, institutions and policymakers in the U.S. know surprisingly little about the rates of completion for students who follow all but the most traditional of postsecondary pathways. This is because traditional graduation rate calculations are institution based and only count students who finish at the same institution where they started. Building on findings from previous reports in the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's Signature Report series, this new report measures this key college success outcome -- rates of first completion -- encompassing postsecondary credentials of all levels and types at any institution in any state, whether it is the first, second, third, or more, attended.Students in the U.S. pursuing a postsecondary education move along pathways that are increasingly complex. In its second Signature Report, Transfer and Mobility: A National View of Pre-Degree Student Movement in Postsecondary Institutions (Hossler et al., 2012), the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that one-third of first-time college students attended multiple institutions before earning a degree or certificate. Nontraditional students, like those who postpone college enrollment after high school, attend college part time, and/or have full-time jobs, have become the new majority among U.S. college students. This emphasizes the limitations of continuing to rely on traditional measures of student and institutional success that describe only first-time full-time students who never enroll at any institution other than their starting institution. Such measures fail to capture the full range of outcomes among today's college students. They also fail to recognize institutional and policy efforts to support students pursuing diverse pathways.This report draws on the Clearinghouse database's near-census national coverage of enrollments and awarded degrees to explore the six-year outcomes of a cohort of first-time-in-college degree-seeking students who started in fall 2006 (N=1,878,484)

Control of a 3D piezo-actuating table by using an adaptive sliding-mode controller for a drilling process

AbstractRecently, the micropositioner has become an important developing target for achieving the requirements of precision machinery. The piezo-actuating device plays a very important role in this application area. In this paper, a model-free adaptive sliding-mode controller is proposed for a 3D piezo-actuating system because of the system’s hysteresis nonlinearity and time-varying characteristics. This control strategy employs the functional approximation technique to establish the unknown function for releasing the model based requirements of the sliding-mode control. The update laws for the coefficients of the Fourier series function parameters are derived from a Lyapunov function to guarantee the control system stability. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller, drilling process control using the designed controller is investigated in this paper

Capacity Bounds for Broadcast Channels with Confidential Messages

In this paper, we study capacity bounds for discrete memoryless broadcast channels with confidential messages. Two private messages as well as a common message are transmitted; the common message is to be decoded by both receivers, while each private message is only for its intended receiver. In addition, each private message is to be kept secret from the unintended receiver where secrecy is measured by equivocation. We propose both inner and outer bounds to the rate equivocation region for broadcast channels with confidential messages. The proposed inner bound generalizes Csisz\'{a}r and K\"{o}rner's rate equivocation region for broadcast channels with a single confidential message, Liu {\em et al}'s achievable rate region for broadcast channels with perfect secrecy, Marton's and Gel'fand and Pinsker's achievable rate region for general broadcast channels. Our proposed outer bounds, together with the inner bound, helps establish the rate equivocation region of several classes of discrete memoryless broadcast channels with confidential messages, including less noisy, deterministic, and semi-deterministic channels. Furthermore, specializing to the general broadcast channel by removing the confidentiality constraint, our proposed outer bounds reduce to new capacity outer bounds for the discrete memory broadcast channel.Comment: 27 pages, 1 figure, submitted to IEEE Transaction on Information Theor