A series of interesting questions will be proposed and tried to be answered in this paper such as: Is there a limit of disaster-bearing capability in a region human-environment system (HES) when the system is hit by an extreme flood disaster? If so, what does it mean and how can it be explained?...

Purpose – This paper therefore aims at systematically estimating the agricultural trade induced farm employment effects in China. Design/methodology/approach – Using detailed agricultural trade and production data during 1994-2009, the authors estimate the “labor contents” of...

In the pharmaceutical industry, sales representatives visit doctors to inform them of their products and encourage them to become an active prescriber. On a daily basis, pharmaceutical sales representatives must decide which doctors to visit and the order to visit them. This situation motivates...

This paper performs a meta-analysis to investigate how changes over time, model specifications, differences in data sets, and variable definitions could contribute to the differences in estimates of returns to education in China. The results show that approximately 10 percent of the variation...

This paper describes exact and heuristic approaches for scheduling multiple cranes that service a shipyard that produces multiple ships concurrently. Cranes transport a variety of materials over a shared network of tracks; therefore, inter-crane interference is a major factor affecting makespan...