The Challenges of Sustainable Development on Facilities Management Outsourcing Services: An Investigation in Educational Facilities

((1) Background: Generally, firms are reluctant to report outsourcing failures, no matter what industry they operate within. To eliminate poor performance of outsourced service providers, it is necessary to establish a specific outsourcing relationship model for facilities management (FM). The purpose of this paper is to study the concept of outsourcing relationships in relation to FM and to investigate the design of the critical success factors on sustainable outsourcing strategies through a discussion of four dimensions (ownership of FM assets, control of FM assets, competitive position and long-term plan). (2) Methods: Based on two questionnaire surveys, data were collected from 38 clients and 34 service providers. The study evaluated the FM outsourcing strategies from critical success factors in educational facilities in Hong Kong. (3) Results: This study explains the impact of FM outsourcing strategies on Hong Kong’s four commonly outsourced FM contracts including building maintenance, security, cleaning and catering from the clients’ and service providers’ point of view. (4) Conclusions: This is the outsourcing way forward in order to create a better working environment conducive for all the parties that would result in better sustainability of FM’s future and thus impact the economic objectives of sustainable development, in parallel with adding social and environmental value

Hong Kong and GBA: psychological distance among Hong Kong working adults

This research is conducted by Professor Joshua Ka-ho MOK, Professor Alex Yue-feng ZHU and Dr Geng-hua HUANG. The research team commissioned an international survey firm Dynata to collect data from a sample of young adults in Hong Kong aged between 18 to 35 years between 25 March 2019 and 1 April 2019. Dynata adopted a random sampling method and selected / invited young adults from all eighteen local districts of Hong Kong to make up a ratio of participants from Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories that would be close to 2:3:5. The final sample consisted of 1,028 respondents, among whom 52.1% were male. The research team categorized the young adults into three income groups based on their self-reported monthly incomes: those with a monthly income of between 0 and 19,999 Hong Kong dollars (HKD) were grouped as low-income earners; those between HKD 20,000 and HKD 29,999 were grouped as middle-income earners; while those with a monthly income equal to or above HKD 30,000 were grouped as high-income earners. The relative numbers of low-, middle-, and high-income young adults were 41.9%, 30.9%, and 27.1%, respectively. The research team measured positive attitude toward GBA cities in Mainland, situational concerns, experience of visiting Mainland GBA cities, intention to migrate to a Mainland GBA City and a series of sociodemographic variables

High throughput mutagenesis for identification of residues regulating human prostacyclin (hIP) receptor

The human prostacyclin receptor (hIP receptor) is a seven-transmembrane G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) that plays a critical role in vascular smooth muscle relaxation and platelet aggregation. hIP receptor dysfunction has been implicated in numerous cardiovascular abnormalities, including myocardial infarction, hypertension, thrombosis and atherosclerosis. Genomic sequencing has discovered several genetic variations in the PTGIR gene coding for hIP receptor, however, its structure-function relationship has not been sufficiently explored. Here we set out to investigate the applicability of high throughput random mutagenesis to study the structure-function relationship of hIP receptor. While chemical mutagenesis was not suitable to generate a mutagenesis library with sufficient coverage, our data demonstrate error-prone PCR (epPCR) mediated mutagenesis as a valuable method for the unbiased screening of residues regulating hIP receptor function and expression. Here we describe the generation and functional characterization of an epPCR derived mutagenesis library compromising >4000 mutants of the hIP receptor. We introduce next generation sequencing as a useful tool to validate the quality of mutagenesis libraries by providing information about the coverage, mutation rate and mutational bias. We identified 18 mutants of the hIP receptor that were expressed at the cell surface, but demonstrated impaired receptor function. A total of 38 non-synonymous mutations were identified within the coding region of the hIP receptor, mapping to 36 distinct residues, including several mutations previously reported to affect the signaling of the hIP receptor. Thus, our data demonstrates epPCR mediated random mutagenesis as a valuable and practical method to study the structurefunction relationship of GPCRs. © 2014 Bill et al