A Three-Dimensional Voting System in Hong Kong

The voting system in the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (Legco) is sometimes unicameral and sometimes bicameral, depending on whether the bill is proposed by the Hong Kong government. Therefore, although without any representative within Legco, the Hong Kong government has certain degree of legislative power --- as if there is a virtual representative of the Hong Kong government within the Legco. By introducing such a virtual representative of the Hong Kong government, we show that Legco is a three-dimensional voting system. We also calculate two power indices of the Hong Kong government through this virtual representative and consider the $C$-dimension and the $W$-dimension of Legco. Finally, some implications of this Legco model to the current constitutional reform in Hong Kong will be given

Towards greener horizontal-axis wind turbines: Analysis of carbon emissions, energy and costs at the early design stage

This paper describes the development of a quantitative analysis system as a platform for rapidly estimate energy, costs and carbon emission to facilitate the comparison of different wind turbine concept designs. This system aimed specifically at wind turbine manufacturing processes due to the fact that a large proportion of the environmental, costs and energy impacts would occur at this stage. The proposed method supports an initial assessment of multiple design concepts which allows the selection and development of a “greener” wind turbine. The developed system enables concept design of commercial wind turbine towers of hub heights between 44 and 135 m. The method supports an accurate estimation in regards to the dimension, energy consumed, maximum power output, costs and carbon emission in the early design phases of a wind turbine. As a result of the development, the proposed approach could potentially be used to minimise the carbon footprints of major engineering projects such as wind farms

Light Gluino, Light Bottom Squark Scenario, and LEP Predictions

The scenario of light gluinos and light sbottoms was advocated to explain the discrepancy between the measured and theoretical production of $b$ quarks at the Tevatron. This scenario will have model-independent predictions for $Z\to q\bar q \tilde{g} \tilde{g}$ at the $Z^0$-pole, and $e^+ e^- \to q\bar q \tilde{g} \tilde{g}$ at LEPII. We show that the data for $Z\to q \bar q g^* \to q\bar q b \bar b$ at LEPI cannot constrain the scenario, because the ratio $\Gamma(Z \to q\bar q \tilde{g} \tilde{g})/ \Gamma(Z \to q \bar q g^* \to q\bar q b \bar b) = 0.15 - 0.04$ for $m_{\tilde{g}}= 12-16$ GeV is smaller than the uncertainty of the data. However, at LEPII the ratio $\sigma(e^+ e^- \to q\bar q \tilde{g} \tilde{g})/ \sigma(e^+ e^- \to q \bar q g^* \to q\bar q b \bar b) \simeq 0.4 - 0.2$ for $m_{\tilde{g}}= 12-16$ GeV, which may give an observable excess in $q\bar q b\bar b$ events; especially, the $4b$ events.Comment: to match the published version in PR

Adoption of Open Source and conventional ERP solutions for small and medium enterprises in manufacturing

Many studies on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market have indicated that very few ERPs have succeeded to fully meet the expectations of an organisation in particularly the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This is usually due to commercial reasons, because most of the ERP systems are primarily designed and developed for large corporations which is not suitable for simplified and rapidly changing SMEs. With the arrival of licence free open source ERPs and at an affordable price, the problem of capital shortage in SMEs is partially resolved while flexibility remains a problem. In order to solve the flexibility issue, this paper presents methods of (a) an industrial survey and (b) a multistage initiation model to compare open source ERPs and the advantages of conventional ERP’s modular structure to propose an alternative ERP platform. The finding concludes that this alternative platform is feasible to be developed by users as well as flexible enough for growing SMEs in manufacturing

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan