An analysis of the change in financial position of the construction industry in Hong Kong

The purpose of this report is to find out the relationship between Hong Kong construction industry and the market condition of Hong Kong in the past 5 years (1993-97). Prior research showed that construction industry is an important contributor to the economic development of Singapore by helping to establish the infrastructure required for sustaining socioeconomic development (Ofori 1988). Although a number of researches were on the prediction of solvency, none was related to the construction industry in Hong Kong. Recently, Hong Kong has been facing economy difficulty, concern is aroused in the healthiness of Hong Kong business. Construction industry, being an important industry, deserves to study. To determine the relationship between market condition and the industry, we use the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The results of CAPM showed that the financial performance of construction companies follow the movement of the market. We determine the change of financial position of Hong Kong construction companies by using the industrial average of the construction sector in Hong Kong and applying financial statement analysis techniques. We found from the financial statement analysis that most construction companies were not profitable and most of them had high gearing ratios. Questionnaires are sent to 22 listed construction companies to identify the possible factors that affect the their performance. According to the view of these construction companies, their performance was much affected by the economic condition. These results are consistent in the way that the construction companies are not profitable during the periods. Long Debtor’s Day and high gearing position are norms in construction industry. Most sample companies in our study follow these norms. The result shows that most sample companies follow the market to grow but the growth rate is not as rapid as the market. We recommend that the construction companies should better control their debt and expenses with great care so as to improve profitability and financial leverage. Through value management to achieve an effective management of change

The Roles of Transport and Wave-Particle Interactions on Radiation Belt Dynamics

Particle fluxes in the radiation belts can vary dramatically during geomagnetic active periods. Transport and wave-particle interactions are believed to be the two main types of mechanisms that control the radiation belt dynamics. Major transport processes include substorm dipolarization and injection, radial diffusion, convection, adiabatic acceleration and deceleration, and magnetopause shadowing. Energetic electrons and ions are also subjected to pitch-angle and energy diffusion when interact with plasma waves in the radiation belts. Important wave modes include whistler mode chorus waves, plasmaspheric hiss, electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves, and magnetosonic waves. We investigate the relative roles of transport and wave associated processes in radiation belt variations. Energetic electron fluxes during several storms are simulated using our Radiation Belt Environment (RBE) model. The model includes important transport and wave processes such as substorm dipolarization in global MHD fields, chorus waves, and plasmaspheric hiss. We discuss the effects of these competing processes at different phases of the storms and validate the results by comparison with satellite and ground-based observations. Keywords: Radiation Belts, Space Weather, Wave-Particle Interaction, Storm and Substor

ASSERT: Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models

As large language models are integrated into society, robustness toward a suite of prompts is increasingly important to maintain reliability in a high-variance environment.Robustness evaluations must comprehensively encapsulate the various settings in which a user may invoke an intelligent system. This paper proposes ASSERT, Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming, consisting of three methods -- semantically aligned augmentation, target bootstrapping, and adversarial knowledge injection. For robust safety evaluation, we apply these methods in the critical domain of AI safety to algorithmically generate a test suite of prompts covering diverse robustness settings -- semantic equivalence, related scenarios, and adversarial. We partition our prompts into four safety domains for a fine-grained analysis of how the domain affects model performance. Despite dedicated safeguards in existing state-of-the-art models, we find statistically significant performance differences of up to 11% in absolute classification accuracy among semantically related scenarios and error rates of up to 19% absolute error in zero-shot adversarial settings, raising concerns for users' physical safety.Comment: In Findings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processin

The Scholarship of Teaching: A Canadian Perspective with Examples

Scholarship is the heart of academic work. Recognizing this the Carnegie report (Boyer, 1990) urges universities to extend the definition of scholarship to include application, teaching, and integration, as well as discovery, thereby making it possible to value all academic work. Although this inclusive view of scholarship holds promise, questions remain concerning the scholarship of teaching and how such scholarship differs from the activities which presently comprise teaching. How would scholarship be identified with teaching, enhance practices, and foster the development of teaching? These questions are addressed, examples given of teaching scholarship, and of institutional policies which support it. The enhancement of teaching, as it meets scholarship's criteria, is discussed.Les activités savantes sont au coeur du travail universitaire. Conscient de cette réalité, le rapport Carnegie (Boyer, 1990) incite les universités à définir l'activité savante de façon à y inclure la pratique de l'enseignement, son intégration et ses découvertes-ce qui permettrait de valoriser toutes les facettes du travail universitaire. Bien que cette définition élargie de l'activité savante soit prometteuse, il faut se poser de nombreuses questions sur "l'enseignement comme activité savante" et sur la façon dont cette activité savante se distingue des activités dont l'enseignement est présentement constitué. Comment peut-on incorporer la notion d'activité savante à l'enseignement, et dans quelle mesure viendrait-elle à la fois perfectionner les méthodes pédagogiques et favoriser l'essor de l'enseignement? Cet article se penche non seulement sur ces questions, mais aussi sur des exemples de l'enseignement comme activité savante et sur des politiques institutionnelles qui en font la promotion. Enfin, l'article discute du perfectionnement de l'enseignement au fur et à mesure que celui-ci répond aux normes de ce qu'est l'activité savante

Modeling of the Convection and Interaction of Ring Current, Plasmaspheric and Plasma Sheet Plasmas in the Inner Magnetosphere

Distinctive sources of ions reside in the plasmasphere, plasmasheet, and ring current regions at discrete energies constitute the major plasma populations in the inner/middle magnetosphere. They contribute to the electrodynamics of the ionosphere-magnetosphere system as important carriers of the global current system, in triggering; geomagnetic storm and substorms, as well as critical components of plasma instabilities such as reconnection and Kelvin-Helmholtz instability at the magnetospheric boundaries. Our preliminary analysis of in-situ measurements shoves the complexity of the plasmas pitch angle distributions at particularly the cold and warm plasmas, vary dramatically at different local times and radial distances from the Earth in response to changes in solar wind condition and Dst index. Using an MHD-ring current coupled code, we model the convection and interaction of cold, warm and energetic ions of plasmaspheric, plasmasheet, and ring current origins in the inner magnetosphere. We compare our simulation results with in-situ and remotely sensed measurements from recent instrumentation on Geotail, Cluster, THEMIS, and TWINS spacecraft

Transforming Tourism Destinations\u27 Marketing Strategies by Understanding Tourists\u27 Satisfaction

Tourism propels the growth of a country’s economy and gives rise to other service industries such as accommodation, food and beverages, retail trade, and transportation industries. With trends in travel and tourism pointing to tourists seeking novelty experience according to TripAdvisor, the objective of this paper is to identify factors influencing the intentions of tourists to a destination, taking into account the characteristics of tourists, by means of a systematic literature review (SLR). Collectively, 17 factors were identified from a total of 77 studies. Satisfaction, destination attraction, and loyalty are the three most investigated factors, while perceived behaviour control, psychological well-being, and religious are the three least investigated factors that affect the behavioural intentions of tourists to a destination. This SLR is instrumental in later part of the research in discovering whether there exist differences between a model developed based on factors identified via content analysis with a model discovered upon mining of data. The coalesced perspective of content analysis and data mining is essential in serving as a guide to practitioners or destination marketing organisation (DMO) in the formulation of marketing strategies to promote tourism destinations in accordance with their intended audience

CLOUD COMPUTING OPPORTUNITIES: ENHANCING INTERACTIVE VISUAL CONTENT USAGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION LEARNING

Visual content in learning material most commonly found in schools learning materials and less in higher education learning. Students in universities and colleges are dependent on wordy textbook and lecture notes to study. Use of visual contents depends on educator’s interests, needs and willingness to provide the material to students. Nowadays, learning started to emerge at a rapid pace in producing learners with excellent academic achievements. The role of cloud computing hence increases the capability of delivering education from educator’s perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to highlight important features of cloud computing in enhancing the use of interactive visual content in higher education learning and promotes interactive learning to students. Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method is used to obtain primary data from online databases Scopus and by using the coding procedure in Grounded Theory(Strauss & Corbin, 1990), research produces meta-model data of codes extractions from primary data. Findings shows there are four major abstractions of cloud features that lead to enhancing interactive visual content use in higher education

Probabilistic Parking Functions

We consider the notion of classical parking functions by introducing randomness and a new parking protocol, as inspired by the work presented in the paper ``Parking Functions: Choose your own adventure,'' (arXiv:2001.04817) by Carlson, Christensen, Harris, Jones, and Rodr\'iguez. Among our results, we prove that the probability of obtaining a parking function, from a length $n$ preference vector, is independent of the probabilistic parameter $p$. We also explore the properties of a preference vector given that it is a parking function and discuss the effect of the probabilistic parameter $p$. Of special interest is when $p=1/2$, where we demonstrate a sharp transition in some parking statistics. We also present several interesting combinatorial consequences of the parking protocol. In particular, we provide a combinatorial interpretation for the array described in OEIS A220884 as the expected number of preference sequences with a particular property related to occupied parking spots, which solves an open problem of Novelli and Thibon posed in 2020 (arXiv:1209.5959). Lastly, we connect our results to other weighted phenomena in combinatorics and provide further directions for research.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 4 table