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In this paper, we investigate whether internal control and whether corporate life cycle would affect firm performance in the emerging markets of China.

We use Chen, Dong, Han, and Zhou’s (2013) internal control index on the effectiveness of internal control and Dickinson’s (2011) definition on firm life cycle. We use multivariate regression analysis.

We find that the internal control improves corporate performance. When dividing firm life cycle into five stages: introduction, growth, mature, shake-out and decline, we find that the impacts of internal control on firm performance vary with different stages. The positive impact of internal control on firm performance is more significant in maturity and shake-out stages than other stages.

Our findings would have implications for the regulators and policy makers with regards to the importance of internal control in corporate governance and the effectiveness of implementing standards and guidelines on internal control in public firms.

In addition, our findings on the various roles of internal control at different stages of firm life cycle would help managers and board of directors find more focus in risk management and board monitoring, respectively.

Although the prior literature have examined the link between internal control, information quality and cost of equity capital (Ashbaugh-Skaife, Collins, Kinney, & LaFond, 2009; Ogneva, Subramanyam, & Raghunandan, 2007), our study would be the first attempt to investigate the link between internal control and firm performance during different stages of firm life cycles.

Challenges from the urban–rural disparity immensely burden the world's progress fulfilling Sustainable Development Goals and the goals' central promise, particularly for developing countries experiencing rapid structural change and urbanization. A knowledge gap lies between the epistemology of urban–rural disparity and the practice of integrated urban-rural development. This paper aims to provide a new approach to bridge the knowledge gap based on the recent Chinese experience.

This qualitative research reviewed major economic and multidisciplinary studies regarding urban-rural development and the growth-equality tradeoff. Chinese experience is employed to showcase concrete challenges from the urban–rural disparity and how the proposed approach works for urban-rural integration.

Theoretical and practical approaches with urban bias largely fail to counter the challenges. Building on China's recent practice probing beyond urban bias, IFPRI (2019) proposes the term rurbanomics with a highlight of equalized urban-rural economic partnership, whereafter Zhou and Chen (2021) enrich the term into a conceptual framework. This paper further improves rurbanomics as a new viable approach to integrated urban-rural development under the overarching goal of common prosperity. The approach prioritizes driving forces in the economic, demographic, eco-environmental, social institutional and technological aspects for the policy community to leverage. Long-term mechanisms are decerned to link urban-rural integration to common prosperity.

China has leveraged ingredients of the rurbanomics approach in the political deployment to integrated urban-rural development. However, the application of this approach is yet to be adapted with local heterogeneities and live up to application's potential. Long-term mechanisms recommended by the rurbanomics approach will need to be carried out. Future improvements will need substantial theoretical extension and micro-level empirical studies.

This paper streamlines the epistemological shreds regarding pursuits, challenges, global experiences and theoretical approaches of urban-rural development. The paper also develops rurbanomics to navigate urban-rural integration, Sustainable Development Goals and common prosperity. By decerning long-term mechanisms in the Chinese case accordingly, this paper provides clues for other economies to employ the new approach.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the status and characteristics of rail technology of high-speed railway in China, and point out the development direction of rail technology of high-speed railway.

This study reviews the evolution of high-speed rail standards in China, comparing their chemical composition, mechanical attributes and geometric specifications with EN standards. It delves into the status of rail production technology, shifts in key performance indicators and the quality characteristics of rails. The analysis further examines the interplay between wheels and rails, the implementation of grinding technology and the techniques for inspecting rail service conditions. It encapsulates the salient features of rail operation and maintenance within the high-speed railway ecosystem. The paper concludes with an insightful prognosis of high-speed railway technology development in China.

The rail standards of high-speed railway in China are scientific and advanced, highly operational and in line with international standards. The quality and performance of rail in China have reached the world’s advanced level. The 60N profile guarantees the operation quality of wheel–rail interaction effectively. The rail grinding technology system scientifically guarantees the long-term good service performance of the rail. The rail service state detection technology is scientific and efficient. The rail technology will take “more intelligent” and “higher speed” as the development direction to meet the future needs of high-speed railway in China.

The development direction of rail technology for high-speed railway in China is defined, which will promote the continuous innovation and breakthrough of rail technology.

With the proliferation of terrorist/extremist websites on the World Wide Web, it has become progressively more crucial to detect and analyze the content on these websites. Accordingly, the volume of previous research focused on identifying the techniques and activities of terrorist/extremist groups, as revealed by their sites on the so-called dark web, has also grown.

This study presents a review of the techniques used to detect and process the content of terrorist/extremist sites on the dark web. Forty of the most relevant data sources were examined, and various techniques were identified among them.

Based on this review, it was found that methods of feature selection and feature extraction can be used as topic modeling with content analysis and text clustering.

At the end of the review, present the current state-of-the- art and certain open issues associated with Arabic dark Web content analysis.

The Chinese criminal justice system has undergone significant changes in the past 20 years. An important aspect of the changes is the promulgation of a series of laws that are essential to the criminal justice operation. In 1996, the National People’s Congress promulgated the amended Criminal Procedure Law (CPL). The amended law in many aspects has expanded the rights of defendants and suspects. But the preliminary research on the implementation of the amended CPL indicates that due to the lack of a culture of respect for the law on the part of the police and the deficiencies contained in the amended CPL, the protections afforded to suspects are far from being properly implemented by the police. Introduces to readers the legislative progress made in the amended CPL, examines various problems that arise in the implementation of the amended CPL, and offers suggestions as to what needs to be done further to assure better protections of suspects’ rights at the police investigatory stage.

In response to the problem of insufficient traction/braking adhesion force caused by the existence of the third-body medium on the rail surface, this study aims to analyze the utilization of wheel-rail adhesion coefficient under different medium conditions and propose relevant measures for reasonable and optimized utilization of adhesion to ensure the traction/braking performance and operation safety of trains.

Based on the PLS-160 wheel-rail adhesion simulation test rig, the study investigates the variation patterns of maximum utilized adhesion characteristics on the rail surface under different conditions of small creepage and large slip. Through statistical analysis of multiple sets of experimental data, the statistical distribution patterns of maximum utilized adhesion on the rail surface are obtained, and a method for analyzing wheel-rail adhesion redundancy based on normal distribution is proposed. The study analyzes the utilization of traction/braking adhesion, as well as adhesion redundancy, for different medium under small creepage and large slip conditions. Based on these findings, relevant measures for the reasonable and optimized utilization of adhesion are derived.

When the third-body medium exists on the rail surface, the train should adopt the low-level service braking to avoid the braking skidding by extending the braking distance. Compared with the current adhesion control strategy of small creepage, adopting appropriate strategies to control the train’s adhesion coefficient near the second peak point of the adhesion coefficient-slip ratio curve in large slip can effectively improve the traction/braking adhesion redundancy and the upper limit of adhesion utilization, thereby ensuring the traction/braking performance and operation safety of the train.

Most existing studies focus on the wheel-rail adhesion coefficient values and variation patterns under different medium conditions, without considering whether the rail surface with different medium can provide sufficient traction/braking utilized adhesion coefficient for the train. Therefore, there is a risk of traction overspeeding/braking skidding. This study analyzes whether the rail surface with different medium can provide sufficient traction/braking utilized adhesion coefficient for the train and whether there is redundancy. Based on these findings, relevant measures for the reasonable and optimized utilization of adhesion are derived to further ensure operation safety of the train.

Managing diverse talents has become a necessary part of the human resource management of contemporary organizations. The growing diversity of organizations' workforce makes companies reassess their conventional HRM approaches. State-owned enterprises get the increasing attention of talent management scholars since state firms enthusiastically compete for talents. These companies have some particularities that distinguish them from private firms, and there is a need to analyse the existing research on the HRM in state companies which has the potential to add a missing part to the puzzle of managing diverse talents. We study the major topics in the literature on human resource management and talent management in state-owned enterprises, the key findings researchers provide and the gaps in the literature that need to be covered and the resulting research directions for future studies.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a transform method and a deep learning model to identify the inner surface shape based on the measurement temperature at the outer boundary of the pipe.

The training process is assisted by the finite element method (FEM) simulation which solves the direct problem for the data preparation. To avoid re-meshing the domain when the inner surface shape varies, a new transform method is proposed to transform the shape identification problem into the effective thermal conductivity identification problem. The deep learning model is established to set up the relationship between the measurement temperature and the effective thermal conductivity. Then the unknown geometry shape is acquired by the mapping between the inner shape and the effective thermal conductivity through the inverse transform method.

The new method is successfully applied to identify the internal boundary of a pipe with eccentric circle, ellipse and nephroid inner geometries. The results show that as the measurement points increased and the measurement error decreased, the results became more accurate. The position of the measurement point and mesh density of the FEM model have less effect on the results.

The deep learning model and the transform method are developed to identify the pipe inner surface shape. There is no need to re-mesh the domain during the computation progress. The results show that the proposed method is a fast and an accurate tool for identifying the pipe inner surface.

This paper aims to present a multi-material additive manufacturing (AM) process with a newly developed curing-on-demand method to fabricate a three-dimensional (3D) object with multiple material compositions.

Unlike the deposition-on-demand printing method, the proposed curing-on-demand printheads use a digital light processing (DLP) projector to selectively cure a thin layer of liquid photocurable resin and then clean the residual uncured material effectively using a vacuuming and post-curing device. Each printhead can individually fabricate one type of material using digitally controlled mask image patterns. The proposed AM process can accurately deposit multiple materials in each layer by combining multiple curing-on-demand printheads together. Consequently, a three-dimensional object can be fabricated layer-by-layer using the developed curing-on-demand printing method.

Effective cleaning of uncured resin is realized with reduced coated resin whose height is in the sub-millimeter level and improved vacuum cleaning performance with the uncleaned resin less than 10 µm thick. Also, fast material swapping is achieved using the compact design of multiple printheads.

The proposed multi-material stereolithography (SL) process enables 3D printing components using more viscous materials and can achieve desired manufacturing characteristics, including high feature resolution, fast fabrication speed and low machine cost.