Regional analysis on the implementation of Madrid International Plan on ageing

The world’s population is rapidly ageing, are countries all geared up to withstand the impacts brought by the demograph­ical changes? 2002 marked an historical moment for the ageing world, where the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing (hereafter ‘MIPAA’) was adopted by 159 countries worldwide at the Second World Assembly on Ageing held in Spain. Countries pledged their commitments to building a society for all ages by means of institutional arrangement, poli­cies and programmes. The document sets out objectives and priority areas in dealing with the ageing population, which serve as guiding principles to policymakers and service providers. 10 years since MIPAA was adopted in 2002, how much progresses countries have made since then? How far countries are from the goals established in 2002? The paper will provide a detailed account the progress on the implementation of MIPAA in regard to ageing policies and programmes based on the responses from 30 countries and areas s in Asia and Pacific region under three priority directions (1) Older Persons and Development; (2) Advancing Health into Old Age; and (3) Ensuring Enabling and Supportive Environments . 「马德里国际老龄问题国际行动计划地域性分析」 摘要 全球人口急速老化，世界各国是否已为人口结构转变而来的挑战做好应对的准备？2002年是历史性的一年，全球159个国家于第二次老龄问题世界大会签订《马德里老龄问题国际行动计划》（下称《行动计划》），承诺以政策及服务建构全龄社会。《行动计划》勾划了国家应对人口老化的政策目标与服务方略，为政策制定者及服务提供者提供指导性原则。从2002年起转眼十年，世界各国进展如何？距离2002年订定的目标还有多远？本论文将就亚太地区30个国家就《行动计划》的三大优先方向：（1）老年人与发展、（2）增进老年人的健康和福祉及 （3）确保老年人有利的支助性环境所实施的老龄政策与项目探讨《行动计划》的落实情况

Long term sustainable product development at the packaging sector

This paper outlines the importance of sustainable product developments and their role in securing a sustainable future through current practices and procedures. It discusses the difficulties faced within organisations through the complexities and swamping of regulations when considering sustainability and the problems in policing such a system to ensure compliance. Focus is centred on the design stage, where large numbers of standards and interests must be factored in to create specifications that are highly compliant. Where there is a limited understanding of the complexities that are presented at this stage, less optimum specifications will be dispatched. This presents the need to think strategically with new systems and approaches which adapt to company behaviour, where decisions that are made at a design stage have impacts up and down the supply chain, changes that are made must be in line with company strategic objectives and provide influential returns on investment

Connection Discovery using Shared Images by Gaussian Relational Topic Model

Social graphs, representing online friendships among users, are one of the fundamental types of data for many applications, such as recommendation, virality prediction and marketing in social media. However, this data may be unavailable due to the privacy concerns of users, or kept private by social network operators, which makes such applications difficult. Inferring user interests and discovering user connections through their shared multimedia content has attracted more and more attention in recent years. This paper proposes a Gaussian relational topic model for connection discovery using user shared images in social media. The proposed model not only models user interests as latent variables through their shared images, but also considers the connections between users as a result of their shared images. It explicitly relates user shared images to user connections in a hierarchical, systematic and supervisory way and provides an end-to-end solution for the problem. This paper also derives efficient variational inference and learning algorithms for the posterior of the latent variables and model parameters. It is demonstrated through experiments with over 200k images from Flickr that the proposed method significantly outperforms the methods in previous works.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Big Data 201

Proposed data compression schemes for the Galileo S-band contingency mission

The Galileo spacecraft is currently on its way to Jupiter and its moons. In April 1991, the high gain antenna (HGA) failed to deploy as commanded. In case the current efforts to deploy the HGA fails, communications during the Jupiter encounters will be through one of two low gain antenna (LGA) on an S-band (2.3 GHz) carrier. A lot of effort has been and will be conducted to attempt to open the HGA. Also various options for improving Galileo's telemetry downlink performance are being evaluated in the event that the HGA will not open at Jupiter arrival. Among all viable options the most promising and powerful one is to perform image and non-image data compression in software onboard the spacecraft. This involves in-flight re-programming of the existing flight software of Galileo's Command and Data Subsystem processors and Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) processor, which have very limited computational and memory resources. In this article we describe the proposed data compression algorithms and give their respective compression performance. The planned image compression algorithm is a 4 x 4 or an 8 x 8 multiplication-free integer cosine transform (ICT) scheme, which can be viewed as an integer approximation of the popular discrete cosine transform (DCT) scheme. The implementation complexity of the ICT schemes is much lower than the DCT-based schemes, yet the performances of the two algorithms are indistinguishable. The proposed non-image compression algorith is a Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) variant, which is a lossless universal compression algorithm based on a dynamic dictionary lookup table. We developed a simple and efficient hashing function to perform the string search

Strengthening family functions and building a neighborhood network

內容 ---2006-2007年施政撮要 ---先瞭解社會／家庭轉變帶來的挑戰 ---香港家庭現時面對的挑戰 ---如何鞏固現有家庭網絡 ---建構新文化、新服務模式創建社區鄰里網絡：營造跨代團結，擴展社域家庭 ---願景：以家庭鄰里為基礎，學校為平台 Content ---Policy Address: family Crisis ---Understand changes & impacts ---Challenges to family ---Strengthening family network ---Need for a new culture – building a network ---Neighbourhood communities & schools becoming family network

The discrimination of the fundamental frequency of complex tones by normally hearing children

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2005.Also available in print.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Adoption of Open Source and conventional ERP solutions for small and medium enterprises in manufacturing

Many studies on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market have indicated that very few ERPs have succeeded to fully meet the expectations of an organisation in particularly the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This is usually due to commercial reasons, because most of the ERP systems are primarily designed and developed for large corporations which is not suitable for simplified and rapidly changing SMEs. With the arrival of licence free open source ERPs and at an affordable price, the problem of capital shortage in SMEs is partially resolved while flexibility remains a problem. In order to solve the flexibility issue, this paper presents methods of (a) an industrial survey and (b) a multistage initiation model to compare open source ERPs and the advantages of conventional ERP’s modular structure to propose an alternative ERP platform. The finding concludes that this alternative platform is feasible to be developed by users as well as flexible enough for growing SMEs in manufacturing