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.
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.
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•This study identifies illegal dumping behaviors by using big data analytics.•This study proposes an Illegal Dumping Filter to identify illegal dumping cases from the big data.•This ...study explains a major driver, i.e., long wait time, to illegal dumping.•This study identifies 546 suspected trucks from over 9 million waste disposal records.•A three-step big data-enabled urban crime identification methodology is proposed.
Illegal dumping, referring to the intentional and criminal abandonment of waste in unauthorized areas, has long plagued governments and environmental agencies worldwide. Despite the tremendous resources spent to combat it, the surreptitious nature of illegal dumping indicates the extreme difficulty in its identification. In 2006, the Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme (CWDCS) was implemented, regulating that all construction waste must be disposed of at government waste facilities if not otherwise properly reused or recycled. While the CWDCS has significantly improved construction waste management in Hong Kong, it has also triggered illegal dumping problems. Inspired by the success of big data in combating urban crime, this paper aims to identify illegal dumping cases by mining a publicly available data set containing more than 9 million waste disposal records from 2011 to 2017. Using behavioral indicators and up-to-date big data analytics, possible drivers for illegal dumping (e.g., long queuing times) were identified. The analytical results also produced a list of 546 waste hauling trucks suspected of involvement in illegal dumping. This paper contributes to the understanding of illegal dumping behavior and joins the global research community in exploring the value of big data, particularly for combating urban crime. It also presents a three-step big data-enabled urban crime identification methodology comprising ‘Behavior characterization’, ‘Big data analytical model development’, and ‘Model training, calibration, and evaluation’.
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.
With its generally recognized benefits of clean and safe working environment and good quality, prefabricated house construction (PHC) as a solution is gaining momentum in the face of various housing ...challenges in Hong Kong's construction industry. Although prefabrication has its own benefits, its fundamental disadvantages of fragmentation, discontinuity, poor interoperability, and scarce real-time information availability have imposed significant adverse influence on the schedule performance of prefabricated house construction. As a result, despite the promise of the government to provide sufficient houses and harmonious housing, schedule delay problems still frequently beset the industry of PHC. To help address schedule delay problems encountered in the construction of prefabrication housing, this research first identified and analysed critical schedule risk factors that may have significant influence on the schedule performance of PHC. Based on the identified schedule risks, the challenges and corresponding required functions for enhancing schedule performance are determined. Then, a radio frequency identification device (RFID)-enabled BIM platform that integrates various involved stakeholders, information/data flow, offshore prefabrication procedures, and state-of-the-art construction technologies, is developed to handle the critical schedule factors. Smart construction objects and RFID-enabled smart gateway work collaboratively to ease operations within the three echelons of prefabrication manufacturing, logistics and on-site assembly construction, while real-time captured data are used to form a closed-loop visibility and traceability mode in which different end users can supervise the construction statuses, progresses in real time. The developed platform can provide various services, tools and mechanisms to different stakeholders, improve the success of daily operations and decision makings throughout PHC management, such that critical schedule risks can be mitigated and the schedule performance of PHC can be enhanced to ensure timely project delivery.
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.
This study explores the factors that influence customer citizenship behavior in the context of the customer experience of a transportation application that incorporates the concept of the sharing ...economy. In contrast to previous studies, the research framework of this study predicts customer citizenship behavior through the influence of individual customers' perceptions of product offerings (perceived quality, situational involvement, enduring involvement) on customer experience. Furthermore, considering the nature of the industry where the exchange of services occurs between individual users as both service providers and recipients, this study investigates the moderating effect of communitas. Similarly, this study also addresses how customer citizenship behavior can be encouraged through the elevation of customer experience, facilitated by behavioral engagement. By focusing on the effects of subjective user experiences with the application, this study explores the factors that can encourage customer citizenship behavior. Through this investigation, it aims to propose managerial implications that can enhance the superiority of consumer services.
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The rapid decline of solar PV costs and the urgency to develop effective post-Fukushima climate/energy plans in recent years have led to an upsurge of policy interest in deploying solar in ...international megacities including New York, Tokyo and Singapore. Nonetheless, overcoming barriers to large-scale uptake of urban solar PV remains under-explored. This study conducted 57 face-to-face interviews with potential solar PV adopters from the residential, institutional, and commercial sectors in Hong Kong, to understand perceived barriers and policy preferences. We found that firstly, most interviewees perceived high upfront costs and long payback period as primary barriers. Secondly, a reduced payback period is effective in improving their attitude towards installing solar. A majority of the residential interviewees shifted away from the "low level of interest" group to higher levels of interest if payback periods could be reduced from 35 years (business-as-usual scenario) to 8 years. Thirdly, potential PV adopters had different policy preferences. While residential interviewees indicated a strong preference for subsidies, institutional interviewees leaned towards regulatory measures, and commercial interviewees preferred feed-in-tariffs. Our findings suggest that the Hong Kong government needs to adopt the enabling framework developed in this study to effectively steer, nurture, and regulate PV deployment.
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