Traditional handicraft apparel espouses ecological ethos and symbolises the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. Owing to its distinct attribute of being handmade, it forms a characteristic branch of slow fashion and denotes a sustainable trend in the field of fashion design....

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important strategy for China. This study examines the effect of political involvement on firms' outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in belt-road countries after the BRI. Using merged Chinese nonfinancial listed firm data, the fDi Markets database,...

The annual percent change (APC) has been adopted as a useful measure for analyzing the changing trends of cancer mortality and incidence rates by the NCI SEER program. Difficulties, however, arise when comparing the sample APCs between two overlapping regions because of induced dependence (e.g.,...

We propose a mixture model for data with an ordinal outcome and a longitudinal covariate that is subject to missingness. Data from a tailored telephone delivered, smoking cessation intervention for construction laborers are used to illustrate the method, which considers as an outcome a...

In order to improve the wear resistance of the cable bolt and increase its life-time during operation, plasma nitriding was employed to obtain a protective nitriding layer on its surface. The microstructure, phase constitution, microhardness and wear resistance of the nitriding layer were...