Provision of professional training to meet global procurement challenges in Hong Kong

The technology today is so fast that quickly changes the traditional business process. Supply chain management is becoming the profession of the future – an extension of buyers’ job. New professional education in purchasing and supply management should be demanded by Hong Kong’s business world to maintain its status as a global procurement centre and a commercial window of Chin

Efficiency and Returns to Scale Measurements with Shared Inputs in Multi-Activity Data Envelopment Analysis: An Application to Farmers' Organizations in Taiwan

This paper addresses the question how team production promotes efficiency of a firm when some inputs can be rewarded on the basis of outputs but some cannot because they are shared among outputs and non-separable. A multi-activity DEA model with variable returns to scale is proposed to provide information on the efficiency performance for organizations with inputs shared among several closely related activities. The model is applied to study the case of 279 farmers' associations in Taiwan. The result suggests that it is important to improve the efficiency of the non-profit oriented activities to improve their overall performances. Three out of four departments of TFAs can gain from economies of scale through expansion, while the remaining one gains through contraction. Thus, policies promoting structural adjustment and consolidations of TFAs would not be inconsistent with public interests.multi-activity DEA, shared inputs, efficiency measure, directional distance function, Productivity Analysis,

Stability of laminar flow in curved channels

"December 1, 1957.""Reprinted from The Philosophical Magazine Volume 2, Eighth Series, page 305, March 1957.""Occurrence of secondary flow of a viscous fluid flowing under a pressure gradient in curved channels has often been explained by invoking the existence of boundary layers before the primary flow is established. In this paper it is shown that instability can occur even after the full establishment of the primary flow. Chandrasekhar's method is used in the analysis and the relationship between the stability parameter and the wave number of the disturbance for neutral stability is obtained."--Page 1

Generating Log-normal Mock Catalog of Galaxies in Redshift Space

We present a public code to generate a mock galaxy catalog in redshift space assuming a log-normal probability density function (PDF) of galaxy and matter density fields. We draw galaxies by Poisson-sampling the log-normal field, and calculate the velocity field from the linearised continuity equation of matter fields, assuming zero vorticity. This procedure yields a PDF of the pairwise velocity fields that is qualitatively similar to that of N-body simulations. We check fidelity of the catalog, showing that the measured two-point correlation function and power spectrum in real space agree with the input precisely. We find that a linear bias relation in the power spectrum does not guarantee a linear bias relation in the density contrasts, leading to a cross-correlation coefficient of matter and galaxies deviating from unity on small scales. We also find that linearising the Jacobian of the real-to-redshift space mapping provides a poor model for the two-point statistics in redshift space. That is, non-linear redshift-space distortion is dominated by non-linearity in the Jacobian. The power spectrum in redshift space shows a damping on small scales that is qualitatively similar to that of the well-known Fingers-of-God (FoG) effect due to random velocities, except that the log-normal mock does not include random velocities. This damping is a consequence of non-linearity in the Jacobian, and thus attributing the damping of the power spectrum solely to FoG, as commonly done in the literature, is misleading.Comment: 38 pages, 16 figures, code publicly available as "lognormal_galaxies" at http://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~komatsu/codes.html Matches published version : added figures and explanatory comment

The Impact of Leadership to Job Satisfaction and Job Performance – An Empirical Study in the Taiwanese Gaming Machine Manufacture Industry Employees

This study is to explore the relationship between leadership, job satisfaction, and job performance in a gaming machine manufacture with social support as moderating variable which is to test whether there is moderating effect causing by social support between leadership and job satisfaction. This study subject is 125 employees from gaming machine manufacture in Taiwan. The results reveal that leadership has significant positive impact on job satisfaction; job satisfaction has significant positive impact on job performance and social support has no moderating effect between leadership and job satisfaction.