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Sustainable issues have become more serious due to the rapid development of the global economy. Sustainable design is an approach for designing or creating sustainable products/solutions based on sustainable development principles. Patent documents contain a lot of useful inventive information which will be useful for sustainable product design. However, they are dense and lengthy due to excessive overladen technical terminology. Automatic text mining tool in patent analysis is therefore, in great demand to assist innovators or patent engineers in their patent search. The main focus of this work is to develop a patent mining prototype to extract sustainable design information from the patent database and recommend potential solutions to the user by using Patent Mining and TRIZ. The TRIZ problem solving process and details of patent mining will be described in this paper. Patent mining techniques include tokenization, stop words filtering, stemming, lemmatization and classification. The patent mining techniques were implemented together with relevant sustainable design indicators to identify patent documents that contained the most relevant sustainable design solution or suggestions. A sustainable design problem is illustrated in this paper to demonstrate how a TRIZ user can utilize the implemented patent mining techniques and sustainable design indicators to obtain a sustainable solution for a design problem.

This article reports the findings of a qualitative investigation of the way people find meaning through caregiving. It draws on the results of in-depth interviews with 37 informal carers and 11 stakeholders in Nottinghamshire, the United Kingdom. For most respondents caregiving involved looking after family members—for example, husband or wife, father or mother, young or adult children and mother-in-law. The meaning that respondents found through caregiving motivated them to cope with the difficulties associated with looking after a person in need. This research found that most informal carers operate with long-standing, gender-based understandings of their role, creating a potential risk that using gender-neutral terminology when referring to family members may obscure the subjective values that carers attach to informal caregiving and lead to role confusion. Moreover, although informal carers typically feel obliged to take care of family members in need and may value this role, they often require additional support from the state to reduce the pressures associated with caregiving and to enable them to continue to lead a meaningful life both within and beyond their caring role.

To improve poor air quality in Asia and inform effective emission-reduction strategies, it is vital to understand the contributions of different pollution sources and their associated human health burdens. In this study, we use the WRF-Chem regional atmospheric model to explore the air quality and human health benefits of eliminating emissions from six different anthropogenic sectors (transport, industry, shipping, electricity generation, residential combustion, and open biomass burning) over South and East Asia in 2014. We evaluate WRF-Chem against measurements from air quality monitoring stations across the region and find the model captures the spatial distribution and magnitude of PM2.5 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of no greater than 2.5 µm). We find that eliminating emissions from residential energy use, industry, or open biomass burning yields the largest reductions in population-weighted PM2.5 concentrations across the region. The largest human health benefit is achieved by eliminating either residential or industrial emissions, averting 467 000 (95 % uncertainty interval (95UI): 409 000–542 000) or 283 000 (95UI: 226 000–358 000) annual premature mortalities, respectively, in India, China, and South-east Asia, with fire prevention averting 28 000 (95UI: 24 000–32 000) annual premature mortalities across the region. We compare our results to previous sector-specific emission studies. Across these studies, residential emissions are the dominant cause of particulate pollution in India, with a multi-model mean contribution of 42 % to population-weighted annual mean PM2.5. Residential and industrial emissions cause the dominant contributions in China, with multi-model mean contributions of 29 % for both sectors to population-weighted annual mean PM2.5. Future work should focus on identifying the most effective options within the residential, industrial, and open biomass-burning emission sectors to improve air quality across South and East Asia.

Understanding dynamic foot is essential for foot health, footwear design and construction. This study was designed to investigate foot deformation during walking. A pilot experiment using motion capture system was conducted to record the landmark motion. The data showed the foot motion including landmark trajectories and the foot changes with time. In addition, the relative landmark position was further analyzed. The result showed the changes of foot landmarks. Application of this study will be useful for modeling dynamic foot shape, foot evaluation and footwear design.

Many commentators contend that the Chinese government adopted an incremental approach to welfare policy reform because its leaders lacked an overall blueprint for it, allowing initiatives to be implemented only after lengthy experimentation. While this perspective has provided an essential account of the implementation and changes of some welfare programmes, it has inadequately addressed the slow progress in rural areas' welfare programmes and the different welfare entitlements for rural and urban residents. Further investigation is therefore required to resolve these anomalies. Using the minimum standard of living scheme (MSLS) as a case example, this article illustrates how the Chinese government's legitimacy needs, during different stages of its economic reforms, have been the principal motivation for the implementation of such schemes. The introduction of an urban MSLS in 1997 aimed to reduce laid-off workers' dissatisfaction following the government's reforms of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The implementation of a rural MSLS in 2007 was intended principally to minimise conflicts between land-losing farmers and local officials after widespread rural riots. These MSLSs are also minimal and stigmatising public-assistance schemes that fulfil the dual objective of securing a stable political environment for economic reform and maintaining poor people's work ethic for China's mixed economy.

Background Spinal flexibility is an essential parameter for clinical decision making on the patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Various methods are proposed to assess spinal flexibility, but which assessment method is more effective to predict the effect of orthotic treatment is unclear. Objective To investigate an effective assessment method of spinal flexibility to predict the initial in-orthosis correction, among the supine, prone, sitting with lateral bending and prone with lateral bending positions. Methods Thirty-five patients with AIS (mean Cobb angle: 28° ± 7°; mean age: 12 ± 2 years; Risser sign: 0–2) were recruited. Before orthosis fitting, spinal flexibility was assessed by an ultrasound system in 4 positions (apart from standing) including supine, prone, sitting with lateral bending and prone with lateral bending. After orthosis fitting, the initial in-orthosis correction was routinely assessed by whole spine standing radiograph. Comparisons and correlation analyses were performed between the spinal flexibility in the 4 positions and the initial in-orthosis correction. Results The mean in-orthosis correction was 41% while the mean curve correction (spinal flexibility) in the 4 studied positions were 40% (supine), 42% (prone), 127% (prone with lateral bending) and 143% (sitting with lateral bending). The correlation coefficients between initial in-orthosis correction and curve correction (spinal flexibility) in the 4 studied positions were r = 0.66 (supine), r = 0.75 (prone), r = 0.03 (prone with lateral bending) and r = 0.04 (sitting with lateral bending). Conclusions The spinal flexibility in the prone position is the closest to and most correlated with the initial in-orthosis correction among the 4 studied positions. Thus, the prone position could be an effective method to predict the initial effect of orthotic treatment on the patients with AIS.

This paper examines the eligible criteria of the Minimum Living Standard Scheme (MLSS) in Chinese main cities. The MLSS policy documents of 31 Chinese cities were obtained from relevant local governments' websites and then analysed by NVivo 10 for Windows. It was found that the cities are using several criteria to assess the eligibility of public assistance applicants, including income, expenditures, living space, household electrical appliances, leisure, motivation to work, and acceptable behaviour. It is obvious that the local governments have adopted a life-style assessment approach to decide the eligibility of the applicants. This approach, however, has two main weaknesses. Firstly, the MLSS claimants have to demonstrate that they are in extreme hardship and this has separated them from the rest of society. Their poor quality of life will be a barrier to their social integration to community. Secondly, some terms about the quality of life style are too ambiguous and different cities have different criteria on a poor living standard. As public assistance criteria vary from city to city, this leads to an unequal access to public benefits among Chinese citizens.

This article discusses how China's institutional constraints combine with its integration into the global economy to suppress its workers' rights. The rapid expansion of China's market economy is the consequence of the government's active embrace of global capitalism and global capitalists' ongoing search for new markets and lower production costs. China's traditional socialist labor relationships collapsed as a result of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and the emergence of private enterprises. In the wake of these events, China's leaders promulgated new labor legislation and social insurance schemes, but these initiatives fail to safeguard workers' rights effectively. This is because the SOEs fail to compensate their workers properly, local authorities do not actively monitor labor abuses, the judicial system cannot effectively defend workers' rights, and the Chinese government suppresses efforts to organize independent labor unions. In short, global capitalism together with China's authoritarian polity have limited workers' rights and undermined their well-being.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. The hardcopy may be available for consultation at the UTS Library. NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. ----- It is undeniable that quality has become a significant emphasis in all organizations. In 1979 the International Organization for Standards, a non-governmental organization made up of national standards organizations, formed Technical Committee (TC) 176 for the purpose of developing a worldwide standard for quality management. Their efforts produced the first of three editions in 1987 of a family of quality management standards labeled by the titles IS09000. Subsequent editions were published in 1994 and 2000. The IS09000 quality management standard is a model that provides a framework for any organization to establish a customer satisfaction oriented quality system that is internationally recognized and can be independently assessed and certified. This study explores the experience of senior managers in three Hong Kong schools that have implemented the IS09000 quality management standard. As only a few schools in Hong Kong successfully applied IS09000 quality management standard in their school management and operation, it is important to explore why and how these schools applied this standard and their assessment of its implementation and impact. The results of this study revealed that despite their different backgrounds, districts and governing bodies, the three schools studied shared many common factors that helped to implement the IS09000 standard in school setting successfully. These elements also matched with the findings from the previous research and literature review. The three schools indeed had substantial improvement in students’ achievement and school management after the IS09000 implementation, but they all reflected that it was difficult to prove whether there was a direct relationship between implementation of IS09000 and students’ achievement, simply because teaching and learning was a comprehensive and complicated concept which was not easy to define and classify clearly and explicitly in school operation. This study identified factors that contributed to the successful implementation of IS09000 in a school. These factors, along with issues that principals identified in the application of the IS09000 standard, are of potential interest to policy makers and school leaders interested in quality improvement in schools. The study concludes with a few recommendations for the practice of school leadership and three recommendations for further research.

Electrodes, batteries, methods for use and manufg. are implemented to provide ion-based elec. power sources and related devices. Consistent with one such method, a battery electrode is produced having nanowires of a first material. The electrode is produced using a single growth condition to promote growth of cryst. nanowires on a conductive substrate and of the first material, and promote, by maintaining the growth condition, growth of an amorphous portion that surrounds the cryst. nanowires.