2023 China Business Report: On Business Performance and Operations of Companies in China in the New Business Environment

The China and Europe International Business School (CEIBS) Research Team with three professors and two research assistants conducted an online survey from November 18th to November 27th 2022, receiving 1,474 unique responses in total. 1,181 (80.2%) survey participants work for Chinese-owned firms or firms with 50% or more Chinese ownership, and 291 (19.8%) participants work for foreign-owned firms in China or firms with more than 50% foreign ownership.The professional distributions show that the survey sample is not a typical sample of enterprises operating in China, but rather reflects the situation of the enterprises of the senior executives who have study experiences in CEIBS, especially that of enterprises of more than half of the EMBA alumni and students. According to the class profile of CEIBS EMBA programme, the average age of participants is 41, average years of working experience is 17, and their average years of managing experience is 12. More than 95% of the participants are senior managers. CEIBS has more than 20,000 alumni, including EMBA alumni who participated the most in this survey among all alumni or students. Based on the above information, we conclude that the survey result has reference value in the sense that it largely reflects how “head companies” (the leading companies and most active ones in their respective industries) in China assessed and judged the impacts of business environment and innovation on business operations. This is also confirmed by the survey results of the reported market positioning of their products and services

Discovering burst patterns of burst topic in Twitter

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

Detecting community pacemakers of burst topic in Twitter

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

From footprint to evidence: An exploratory study of mining social data for credit scoring

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centre @ Singapore Funding Initiative; Pinnacle Lab for Analytics @ SM

Preliminary Application of Vermicompost in Rice Production: Effects of Nursery Raising with Vermicompost on Fragrant Rice Performances

Vermicompost is an excellent organic fertilizer, but the application of vermicompost in fragrant rice production has not yet been reported. Seedling nursery is an important component of rice production. The present study firstly applied vermicompost in fragrant rice production through nursery raising. The seedlings of three fragrant rice cultivars were raised in matrix with different rations of vermicompost (the treatment without vermicompost was taken as the control), and the growth parameters and physiological characters of seedlings were investigated. The results showed that, compared with the control, the application of vermicompost significantly (p < 0.05) increased the plant height, stem diameter, fresh weight, and dry weight of fragrant rice seedlings by 11.22–24.73%, 38.34–65.87%, 16.74–30.46%, and 16.61–35.16%, respectively. Nursery raising with vermicompost significantly (p < 0.05) enhanced the net photosynthetic rate by 5.99–12.93%, relative to the control. Higher contents of chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, carotenoids, and total chlorophyll were recorded in vermicompost treatments than in the control. Compared with the control, vermicompost treatments also increased root length, surface area, mean diameter, root volume, root tip number, and root activity of fragrant rice seedlings by 12.42–27.82%, 15.04–38.65%, 12.64–23.12%, 42.41–63.58%, 18.62–24.95%, and 12.01–26.29%, respectively. Moreover, nursery raising with vermicompost enhanced the activities of antioxidant enzymes including superoxide, peroxidase, and catalase by 7.97–24.21%, 17.11–44.99%, and 7.37–15.95%, respectively, relative to the control. Moreover, 7.92–29.40% lower malondialdehyde contents were recorded in vermicompost treatments compared with the control. Therefore, nursery raising with vermicompost could be a good agronomy practice in machine-transplanted fragrant rice

Agronomic Performances of Fragrant Rice Cultivars under Different Vermicompost Rates

Vermicompost is an organic fertilizer with high microbiological activity. However, the application of vermicompost in fragrant rice production and the effects of vermicompost rates on fragrant rice performances have not been reported. The present study conducted a field experiment with two cropping lugs to investigate the agronomic performances of fragrant rice cultivars under different vermicompost rates. Five vermicompost rates, i.e., 2.250 (Ver1), 3.000 (Ver2), 3.750 (Ver3), 4.8750 (Ver4), and 6.000 (Ver5) t ha−1, were adopted and a treatment without any fertilizer applied was taken as control (CK). The results showed that the application of vermicompost significantly increased the grain yield of fragrant rice, while the highest or equally highest yield was recorded in the Ver2 treatment. Similar trends were observed in dry matter weight at 80 and 100 days after transplanting. However, the vermicompost didn’t have remarkable effects on chlorophyll content and grain 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (the key component of fragrant rice aroma) content. The effects of different vermicompost rates on grain quality characters were unstable and irregular across the cropping lugs, although Ver1 and Ver2 treatment exhibited relatively good grain quality with lower amylose content and higher protein content. In the present study, the recommended amount of vermicompost was 3.0 t ha−1 in fragrant rice production

Agronomic Performances of Fragrant Rice Cultivars under Different Vermicompost Rates

Vermicompost is an organic fertilizer with high microbiological activity. However, the application of vermicompost in fragrant rice production and the effects of vermicompost rates on fragrant rice performances have not been reported. The present study conducted a field experiment with two cropping lugs to investigate the agronomic performances of fragrant rice cultivars under different vermicompost rates. Five vermicompost rates, i.e., 2.250 (Ver1), 3.000 (Ver2), 3.750 (Ver3), 4.8750 (Ver4), and 6.000 (Ver5) t ha−1, were adopted and a treatment without any fertilizer applied was taken as control (CK). The results showed that the application of vermicompost significantly increased the grain yield of fragrant rice, while the highest or equally highest yield was recorded in the Ver2 treatment. Similar trends were observed in dry matter weight at 80 and 100 days after transplanting. However, the vermicompost didn’t have remarkable effects on chlorophyll content and grain 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (the key component of fragrant rice aroma) content. The effects of different vermicompost rates on grain quality characters were unstable and irregular across the cropping lugs, although Ver1 and Ver2 treatment exhibited relatively good grain quality with lower amylose content and higher protein content. In the present study, the recommended amount of vermicompost was 3.0 t ha−1 in fragrant rice production

Graph OLAP: A Multi-dimensional Framework for Graph Data Analysis

Databases and data warehouse systems have been evolving from handling normalized spreadsheets stored in relational databases, to managing and analyzing diverse application-oriented data with complex interconnecting structures. Responding to this emerg-ing trend, graphs have been growing rapidly and showing their critical importance in many applications, such as the analysis of XML, social networks, Web, biological data, multimedia data and spatiotemporal data. Can we extend useful functions of databases and data ware-house systems to handle graph structured data? In particular, OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) has been a popular tool for fast and user-friendly multi-dimensional analysis of data warehouses. Can we OLAP graphs? Unfortunately, to our best knowledge, there are no OLAP tools available that can interactively view and analyze graph data from differ-ent perspectives and with multiple granularities. In this paper, we argue that it is critically important to OLAP graph structured data and propose a novel Graph OLAP framework. According to this framework, given a graph dataset with its nodes and edges associated with respective attributes, a multi-dimensional model can be built to enable efficient on