The Labour Contract Law of People’s Republic of China came into effect in 2008 to supplement the first Labour Law of 1994. The enactment of this law, however, coincided with the outbreak of the world’s financial tsunami at the same time. Many enterprises in China, especially manufacturing factories, faced tremendous difficulties of both the decreasing sales orders from the West and increasing o...

The potential expansion of freeze-tolerant (FT) Eucalyptus plantations in the United States has raised concerns about the implications for water resources. Modeling was used to examine the potential effects of expanding the distribution of FT Eucalyptus plantations in US Department of Agriculture Plant Hardiness Zones 8b and greater on water yield (Q). Analyses focused on two scales: the stand ...

The energy absorbing capability is one of the most important aspects of crushing behavior of a structure subjected to axial impact. In this paper, a simple practical method is introduced to enhance the crushing behavior of this kind of structure. The axial impact of metallic energy absorbing thin-walled tubes with special shaped cross-section is simulated using LS-DYNA software. The effect of c...

Enhancing population resilience to adverse events is now a policy priority. Accordingly, there have been calls for more evidence on the determinants of resilience. We answer this call by identifying financial and non-financial resources associated with psychological during COVID-19 pandemic. Using longitudinal survey data, measured comparing distress reported pre-COVID-19 outbreak initial lockd...

This paper presents a probabilistic task scheduling method to minimize the overall mean response time of the tasks submitted to the grid computing environments. Minimum mean response time of a given task can be obtained by finding a subset of appropriate computational resources to service the task. To achieve this, a discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) representing the task scheduling process wit...

Let $R$ be a commutative ring and $M$ be an $R$-module. In this paper, we investigate some properties of 2-absorbing submodules of $M$. It is shown that $N$ is a 2-absorbing submodule of $M$ if and only if whenever $IJLsubseteq N$ for some ideals $I,J$ of R and a submodule $L$ of $M$, then $ILsubseteq N$ or $JLsubseteq N$ or $IJsubseteq N:_RM$. Also, if $N$ is a 2-absorbing submodule of ...

We show that financial knowledge is a key determinant of wealth inequality in a stochastic lifecycle model with endogenous financial knowledge accumulation, where financial knowledge enables individuals to better allocate lifetime resources in a world of uncertainty and imperfect insurance. Moreover, because of how the U.S. social insurance system works, better-educated individuals have most to...

Although the aspects of both land use and coastal management represent part of the larger concept of sustainable development, the strength and interest with which these aspects are received varies considerably among countries. It is well known that land use planning can facilitate the allocation of land to those use(s) that provide the greatest sustainable benefits. However, in order to achieve...

This article presents decoupling n-times absorbing boundary conditions designed to model acoustic and elastic wave propagation in a 2D transversely isotropic (TI) medium. More general n-times boundary conditions with absorbing parameters are also obtained by cascading first-order differential operators with parameters. These boundary conditions are approximated with simple finite-difference sch...