Charting intellectual capital performance of the gateway to China

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate whether intellectual capital (IC) has an impact on the financial aspects of organizational performance as well as attempting to identify the IC components that are associated with corporate financial performance indicators that signal organizational growth. Design/methodology/approach: This study drew on financial data from publicly available annual reports of all the constituent companies of the Hang Seng Index of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the years 2001-2009. Following the value added intellectual coefficient™ (VAIC) methodology, regression models were constructed to examine the relationships between IC and the corporate financial performance indicators. Findings: Evidence was found to suggest that IC, as measured by VAIC, was positively associated with profitability of businesses. In particular, structural capital, as a key component of IC, played a notable part in enhancing corporate profitability, and showed a growing trend in its significance. Empirical findings, based on correlation and linear multiple regression analysis, indicated that the components of VAIC were strong predictors of corporate financial performance such as return on equity and profitability. In particular, capital employed efficiency (CEE) was a significant predictor of all four corporate financial performance indicators. Practical implications: The results may extend the understanding of the role of IC in business operations in Hong Kong, and may help to identify the specific IC drivers that may have a direct impact on the financial performance of these companies. In particular, although CEE was a significant predictor of all four corporate finance performance indicators, the increasing contribution of structural capital efficiency (SCE) in predicting ROA and ROE was observed. The role that structural capital plays in strengthening business performance warrants further investigation. Originality/value: There has only been one previous empirical study on the intellectual capital of constituent companies on the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index. This study adds to the literature as the second study in the field. It is the first comparative study across two time periods of the above-mentioned data. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.published_or_final_versio

Rethinking the educational role of school librarians

Conference theme: The Educational Role of School Libraries in the M Generation論壇主題: 學校圖書館在M世代的教育角色This study examined the educational role of school librarians in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, and investigated their qualification and professional development respectively. Questionnaires were sent to public primary school librarians in these three regions on a convenience-sampling basis, 28 responses were received from Hong Kong, 15 from Taiwan and 14 from Mainland China. The result indicated that the educational role of school librarians in Hong Kong and Taiwan were realized to a higher extent than that of school librarians in Mainland China in developing students’ information literacy, fostering students’ reading ability and collaborating with teachers. However, there was still some disparity of the educational role of school librarians in Hong Kong and Taiwan.postprin

The relationship between Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital in listed companies of mainland China

Open URL for the 8th ICICKM 2011 Proceedings - http://academic-conferences.org/pdfs/ICICKM_2011-Booklet.pdfAs the global economic power reshuffles, mainland China stood as the world’s biggest exporter in 2010, and has emerged as the second-largest economy in the world (CIA, 2010). In its transformation from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, how well a business manages its knowledge or utilizes its intellectual capital may be an important factor in determining a …postprintThe 8th International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management & Organisational Learning (ICICKM 2011), Bangkok, Thailand, 27-28 October 2011. In Proceedings of the 8th ICICKM, 2011, p. 14-1

Strengthening students’ reading comprehension ability (both Chinese and English) through developing children’s literature equiz bank on the cloud

Part I of Social Media 2014 will be held in China and Part II will be held in Las VegasReading proficiency is closely related to students’ academic performance. The online e-quiz bank “Reading Battle” aims at enhancing students’ reading interest and developing their reading habits. After reading children’s literature borrowed from school libraries, students may take quizzes on the e-quiz bank to evaluate their reading comprehension ablility. First launched in Hong Kong, the e-quiz bank assists students in enhancing their reading interest and abilities by motivating, scaffolding, and monitoring strategies. This article discusses the project’s features and evaluates their effectiveness in achieving the project goals. Preliminary findings of the project shows that the e-quiz bank offer participants a fun, interactive, and personalized experience in improving their reading comprehension abilities and is effective in fostering a habit of reading.postprin

A probabilistic solar irradiance interval-valued prediction model with multi-objective optimization of reliability, sharpness and stability

Improved interval-valued prediction models for solar power and irradiance forecasting allow enhanced planning and operation of solar power systems. Highly uncertain atmospheric and environmental factors are major challenges of solar irradiance forecasting. Existing upper and lower bound estimation methods mainly focus on narrowing the prediction intervals and minimizing forecasting errors. However, the sensitivity of the interval-valued prediction model is not considered. Sensitivity is described as the model's output fluctuations due to unseen samples. Models with high sensitivity may not perform well in real-life applications under uncertain environments. This paper presents a novel interval-valued prediction model, P_RSS, by simultaneously optimizing the reliability, sharpness, and stability (RSS) for probabilistic solar irradiance interval-valued prediction. With sensitivity regularization, P_RSS has reduced sensitivity to unseen samples with perturbations from training samples and enhanced robustness. An Extreme learning machine (ELM) model is constructed to directly output prediction intervals (PIs) of solar irradiance via a multi-objective optimization of the RSS. An evaluation framework is proposed to verify the RSS performance. Moreover, a new comprehensive evaluation indicator is proposed to evaluate the PIs. Case studies on three American solar irradiance datasets show that P RSS yields outstanding performance against state-of-the-art methods.10.13039/501100001809-National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 61876066, 62206020, 61572201, 51907031

The Passive Yet Successful Way of Planktonic Life: Genomic and Experimental Analysis of the Ecology of a Free-Living Polynucleobacter Population

Background: The bacterial taxon Polynucleobacter necessarius subspecies asymbioticus represents a group of planktonic freshwater bacteria with cosmopolitan and ubiquitous distribution in standing freshwater habitats. These bacteria comprise,1 % to 70 % (on average about 20%) of total bacterioplankton cells in various freshwater habitats. The ubiquity of this taxon was recently explained by intra-taxon ecological diversification, i.e. specialization of lineages to specific environmental conditions; however, details on specific adaptations are not known. Here we investigated by means of genomic and experimental analyses the ecological adaptation of a persistent population dwelling in a small acidic pond. Findings: The investigated population (F10 lineage) contributed on average 11 % to total bacterioplankton in the pond during the vegetation periods (ice-free period, usually May to November). Only a low degree of genetic diversification of the population could be revealed. These bacteria are characterized by a small genome size (2.1 Mb), a relatively small number of genes involved in transduction of environmental signals, and the lack of motility and quorum sensing. Experiments indicated that these bacteria live as chemoorganotrophs by mainly utilizing low-molecular-weight substrates derived from photooxidation of humic substances. Conclusions: Evolutionary genome streamlining resulted in a highly passive lifestyle so far only known among free-living bacteria from pelagic marine taxa dwelling in environmentally stable nutrient-poor off-shore systems. Surprisingly, such a lifestyle is also successful in a highly dynamic and nutrient-richer environment such as the water column of the investigate

Technical Report: Evaluation Study on the Roles of Teacher-librarians in Public Sector Schools

Consultancy project for Education Bureau, HKSA

An RFID-based fallen object detection system : a case study of Hong Kong’s light rail system

202402 bcchAccepted ManuscriptOthersHang Seng Management College (E-Logistics Group); The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; NDL Cop.PublishedGreen (AAM

The educational roles of Primary and Secondary School Teacher-librarians in Hong Kong

Conference Theme: Enhancing Students’ Life Skills through the School LibraryThis study explores the professional development and current work situation of Teacher-librarians (TLs) in primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, and investigates and compares the educational roles of primary and secondary schools TLs in teaching subject courses, developing stakeholders’ information literacy, collaborating with teachers and cultivating students’ reading habits. Key findings include: relatively more secondary school TLs have professional qualifications; secondary school TLs spend on average more than one-quarter of their time teaching subject (non-library related) courses, compared to primary school TLs (15%), which they see as restricting their ability to provide library services; primary school TLs spend more time on the preparation and delivery of library lessons than secondary school TLs; both primary and secondary TLs spend less that 5% of their time collaborating with teachers; and that primary school TLs appear to have a more holistic approach to information literacy acquisition