In August 1855, 16-year-old Chaloner Alabaster left England for Hong Kong, to take up a position as a student interpreter in the China Consular Service. He would stay for almost 40 years, climbing ...the rungs of the service and eventually becoming consul-general of Canton. When he retired he returned to England and received a knighthood. He died in 1898. Throughout his adult life, Alabaster kept diaries. In the first four volumes of these diaries, collected here by Benjamin Penny, the teenage Alabaster recorded his thoughts and observations, told himself anecdotes, and exploded in outbursts of anger and frustration. He was young and enthusiastic, and the everyday sights, sounds and smells of Hong Kong were novel to him. He describes how the Chinese people around him ironed clothes, dried flour and threshed rice; how they gambled, prepared their food and made bean curd; and what opera, new year festivities and the birthday of the Heavenly Empress were like. Like many a young Victorian, he was also a keen observer of natural history, fascinated by fireflies and ants, corals and sea slugs, and the volcanic origins of the landscape. Alabaster's diaries are a unique, vibrant and riveting record of life in the young British colony on the cusp of the Second Opium War. With A Young Englishman in Victorian Hong Kong, Penny sheds new light on the history of the region.
•Tourists’ local food consumption value is effective on generating tourists’ positive attitude toward local food.•Attitude toward local food positively affects food destination image.•Both attitude ...toward local food and food destination image positively affect tourists’ behavioral intentions.•Taste/quality value and emotional value can be further emphasized to Chinese and Western tourists in Hong Kong.•Epistemic value needs to be further stressed to other Asian and Western groups in Hong Kong.
Despite the importance of understanding food consumption value from tourists’ perspectives, few studies have explored how experiencing local food in a destination shapes tourists’ consumption value. This study explores the effect of tourists’ local food consumption value on their perceptions and behaviors. Tourists’ cultural background is used as a moderating variable. The findings show that tourists’ local food consumption value effectively explains tourists’ attitudes toward local food, food destination image, and behavioral intentions. In addition, the cultural background of tourists partially moderates the relationships between the proposed constructs. This study is the first empirical application of consumption value theory to the context of tourists’ local food experiences. It provides insights into appropriate marketing strategies for the restaurant and food tourism industries and offers practical suggestions to destination marketing organizations (DMOs) for using local food as a destination marketing tool.
"Nobody cares about Hong Kong film." I was on the set of a Hong Kong film shoot in October 2021, and a film director1 that I have known since I started research on film/TV production here in 2005 ...uttered this to me, as he had many times over recent years. The director's remark referred to his perception of a lack of interest on the part of young people to pursue a career in the Hong Kong film industry, making feature (narrative, non-fiction) films geared to theatrical release.
This paper proposes a novel bio-inspired optimization method named memetic salp swarm algorithm (MSSA). It is developed by extending the original salp swarm algorithm (SSA) with multiple independent ...salp chains, thus it can implement a wider exploration and a deeper exploitation under the memetic computing framework. In order to enhance the convergence stability, a virtual population based regroup operation is used for the global coordination between different salp chains. Due to partial shading condition (PSC) and fast time-varying weather conditions, photovoltaic (PV) systems may not be able to generate the global maximum power. Hence, MSSA is applied for an effective and efficient maximum power point tracking (MPPT) of PV systems under PSC. To evaluate the MPPT performance of the proposed algorithm, four case studies are undertaken using Matlab/Simulink, e.g., start-up test, step change of solar irradiation, ramp change of solar irradiation and temperature, and field atmospheric data of Hong Kong. The obtained PV system responses are compared to that of eight existing MPPT algorithms, such as incremental conductance (INC), genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), artificial bees colony (ABC), cuckoo search algorithm (CSA), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), SSA, and teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO), respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the output energy generated by MSSA in Spring in HongKong is 118.57%, 100.73%, 100.96%, 100.87%, 101.35%, 100.36%, 100.81%, and 100.22% to that of INC, GA, PSO, ABC, CSA, GWO, SSA, and TLBO, respectively. Lastly, a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiment using dSpace platform is undertaken to further validate the implementation feasibility of MSSA.
AbstractPrefabricated building projects (PBPs) have contributed significantly to addressing Hong Kong’s serious housing shortage and accommodate almost half of the residents in this densely populated ...city. The supply chains of PBPs involve large numbers of stakeholders, including clients, designers, main contractors, transporters, and assembly subcontractors, all of which need to interact with each other by frequent information exchanges. However, cross-border supply chains are found to be quite complex, resulting in risks that significantly affect the performance of PBPs. Supply chain risks (SCRs) are closely associated with the stakeholders involved and have high interdependency with each other. This paper adopts social network analysis (SNA) to develop the risk network of the supply chain of a PBP in Hong Kong to prioritize the stakeholder-associated SCR. The research findings show that poor planning of resources and schedule, poor control of working flows, and poor information sharing between stakeholders are the major challenges to the supply chains of PBPs. This is the first study to consider the dynamic risk interdependency and associated stakeholders in SCRs. By providing a greater understanding of the risks embedded across the supply chains of PBPs in Hong Kong, this study could assist practitioners dealing with such risks more effectively and efficiently.
Sustainable business model innovation is increasingly viewed as a lever for systems change for sustainability across businesses and industries. Banks hold a unique intermediary role in sustainable ...development, but also have a difficult position after the 2008 financial crisis. This paper aims to explore business models for sustainability in the service industry, particularly banking. It explores the receptiveness of customers towards sustainable business models pursued by banks. The retail banking industry in Hong Kong is the focus of this work. First, a practice review and semi-structured interviews are used to develop and validate a set of sustainable business model archetypes for the banking industry. Second, surveys are conducted to test customer receptiveness for the archetypes. Eight sustainable business model archetypes for banking are developed and validated. “Substitute with digital processes”, “adopt a stewardship role” and “encourage sufficiency” are most welcomed by customers. Some archetypes seem at direct odds with current business practice, such as “encourage sufficiency”. This study gives an insight to how to “do good and do well” in the banking industry. Further research on the attributes of these archetypes can be conducted to gain a deeper understanding why customers prefer banks to use these archetypes.
•Sustainable Business Model Archetypes for banking were developed.•All archetypes are found to have positive links to the attractiveness of banks.•All archetypes are found to have positive links to purchase intention in banks.•New insights are gained on which archetypes banks could pursue for future sustainability.
This paper extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to study acceptance and use of technology in a consumer context. Our proposed UTAUT2 incorporates three constructs ...into UTAUT: hedonic motivation, price value, and habit. Individual differences — namely, age, gender, and experience — are hypothesized to moderate the effects of these constructs on behavioral intention and technology use. Results from a two-stage online survey, with technology use data collected four months after the first survey, of 1,512 mobile Internet consumers supported our model Compared to UTAUT, the extensions proposed in UTAUT2 produced a substantial improvement in the variance explained in behavioral intention (56 percent to 74 percent) and technology use (40 percent to 52 percent). The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are discussed.
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