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The development of efficient and reliable online assessments has become increasingly important in the digital era. We developed a 10-min online word reading assessment of global English based on the existing paper-and-pencil version of our English silent word reading test. The test includes two parts, namely, random word recognition and contextual word reading. A total of 889 participants (437 children and 392 adults; 62.7% female) took part in the study. They were from various regions including mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, Poland, the United States, and the Philippines. Reliability and validity analyses on various demographics samples (by age and country/region of origin) demonstrated that the WordSword Test is highly reliable and valid (e.g., the correlation of this test with other English reading measures were above.80). Education level was positively correlated with test performance, while the correlations between age and test performance were not consistent. Ninety-seven children participants also took the paper-and-pencil version of the WordSword Test. The correlation between performances on the online and paper-and-pencil versions of the test was.879, one year apart. With more children and adults taking the WordSword Test, we ultimately hope to establish norms by area, grade level, and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past three decades, fire engineering has experienced fast development worldwide. Fire regulations for building industry were moved from prescriptive description to performance-based specification. This trend started in the UK in the 1980s and spread to other western countries. Hong Kong closely followed the UK development and adopted the approach of performance-based design (PBD) for the Hong Kong International Airport and MTR stations in the early 1990s. The Government of Hong Kong SAR formally recognised the PBD approach in the prescriptive codes of practice in the mid-1990s and developed the performance-based code (PBC) in the 2000s. This PBC was promulgated in 2011. The evolution in fire engineering impacted the fire community in Mainland China. The State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) was established in University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1991. Then fire science and fire engineering stepped into the fast development track. The building industry in Mainland China started to adopt the PBD approach in the early 2000s for the significant developments including large airport terminals, railway and metro stations, super high-rise buildings, and mega commercial centres. However, a structured PBC system is not available within the regulatory framework to date. Adoption of PBD approach is slowing down in recent years. This paper presents a review of fire engineering development in Hong Kong and Mainland China. The review focuses on the development of the PBC in Hong Kong, and the PBD approach and fire research in Mainland China in the past 30 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For an unbalanced cooperative game, its grand coalition can be stabilized by some instruments, such as subsidization and penalization, that impose new cost terms to certain coalitions. In this paper, we study an alternative instrument, referred to as cost adjustment, that does not need to impose any new coalition-specific cost terms. Specifically, our approach is to adjust existing cost coefficients of the game under which (i) the game becomes balanced so that the grand coalition becomes stable, (ii) a desired way of cooperation is optimal for the grand coalition to adopt, and (iii) the total cost to be shared by the grand coalition is within a prescribed range. Focusing on a broad class of cooperative games, known as integer minimization games, we formulate the problem on how to optimize the cost adjustment as a constrained inverse optimization problem. We prove NP -hardness and derive easy-to-check feasibility conditions for the problem. Based on two linear programming reformulations, we develop two solution algorithms. One is a cutting-plane algorithm, which runs in polynomial time when the corresponding separation problem is polynomial time solvable. The other needs to explicitly derive all the inequalities of a linear program, which runs in polynomial time when the linear program contains only a polynomial number of inequalities. We apply our models and solution algorithms to two typical unbalanced games, including a weighted matching game and an uncapacitated facility location game, showing that their optimal cost adjustments can be obtained in polynomial time. History: Accepted by Area Editor Andrea Lodi for Design & Analysis of Algorithms—Discrete. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72022018 and 72091210]; the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China [Grant 16210020]; Hong Kong Polytechnic University [Grant P0032007]; and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences [Grant 2021454]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0268. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The completion of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge marks not only a record-setting achievement in engineering, but also a materialisation of ongoing efforts by the People's Republic of China to engage in cooperative projects aimed at expanding and deepening integrative connections with the semi-autonomous Special Administrative Regions of Macau and Hong Kong. This paper explores the colonial and post-colonial social construction of Hong Kong as a political-economic island, and the implications this carries into the tensions and open conflicts that have unfolded under the One Country, Two Systems agreement. Using the bridge as a case, it critically examines the geopolitical and biopolitical dimensions of infrastructure as a practice of subnational (de)bordering. The case renders visible a contemporary moment where infrastructure occupies a central position at the conjuncture of technology, advanced governmentality and shifting geographies of sovereignty in the People's Republic of China, within subnational city-regional development plans, as well as internationally in projects, such as the geographically expansive Belt and Road Initiative. A close examination of the Bridge project highlights the constructed and contested nature of borders, as well as the complex identities and ideologies that define them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the opening of the Stock Connect programs, the mainland China and Hong Kong stock markets are becoming more closely linked. In this paper, we develop a China's stock market risk early warning system. The proposed early warning system consists of three components. First, we use value at risk (VaR) to identify the stock market risk in which stock market risk is divided into multiple categories instead of two categories. Second, we construct a comprehensive indicator system in which basic indicators, technical indicators, overseas return rate indicators, and macroeconomic indicators are considered simultaneously. Third, we use four machine learning models, namely long short-term memory (LSTM), gate recurrent unit (GRU), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and EXtreme Gradient Boosting algorithm (XGBoost), to predict China's stock market risk. Experimental results show that: (1) Considering the macroeconomic indicators and basic indicators of Shanghai Composite Index (SSEC), ShenZhen Component Index (SZCZ) and Hang Seng Index (HSI) can significantly improve the performance of predicting China's stock market risk. (2) The opening of SH-HK Stock Connect program improves the predictive performance, but the opening of SZ-HK Stock Connect program decreases the predictive performance. (3) The indicators related to Hong Kong become more important after the SZ-HK Stock Connect program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]