Chapter 5 compares laws of employment protection, compensation, and labor unions in the three countries, and describes how the different laws affect incentive bargaining of the firm and corporate governance. The US employment-at-will rule gives employers almost complete discretion to dismiss employees unless there are either contractual protections or discrimination. The Japanese abusive dismissal rule strictly restricts employers’ discretion in dismissing employees even in business downturns. Relative to Japanese companies, the US companies rely heavily on performance-based pay, which includes generous stock options. Among the compensation packages in China, the portion of payment for social insurance and welfare benefits is large. Performance-based bonuses play a significant role in privately owned enterprises (POEs). The US labor unions are basically industry unions and adversarial to management, while Japanese labor unions are company unions and are rather agreeable to management. All labor unions in China are government-backed, organized only on individual enterprises, and expected to mitigate labor disputes.

Where the reason for dismissal concerns business reorganisation rather than individual fault, there is a statutory right for employees with a qualifying period of continuous service to claim redundancy payments based on the number of years of service. In some cases of economic dismissal, the reason for dismissal may not fall within the statutory concept of redundancy, but in such cases dismissal can be regarded as fair as dismissal for some other substantial reason. There is statutory protection for wages and some compensation for dismissal in the event of the employer’s insolvency. Dismissals in connection with the sale of the business or outsourcing to a different contractor are automatically unfair dismissals unless the transferor or transferee can demonstrate that the workers were dismissed for redundancy unconnected to the sale.

How to interrogate and improve your writing. Correcting errors; removing redundant phrases; trimming or augmenting attribution in speech; integrating action and speech; checking dialogue for authenticity; monitoring sentence length; balancing the extent of detail and description; scrutinising the chronology of description; checking narrative viewpoint is secure.

Although several patterns of word-formation appear to introduce tautology, in practice they are probably not felt to be tautologous by the speakers and listeners who are faced with them.

The nonlinear response of the hull girder to global loads is treated in this chapter. These include torsional loads, the result of major damage leading to loss of longitudinal strength of part of the hull girder, and hull girder collapse. In the case of torsional loads, of critical importance is the position of the shear centre, and this depends on hull girder geometry (closed or open section). The effect of structural arrangements is then described in relation to longitudinal warping. The effect of discontinuities is discussed and design issues are considered. Combined and coupled horizontal bending and torsion are treated next. The next section deals with the determination of reserve strength of the hull girder following damage. The approach followed by a classification society to calculating residual strength is described and the use of IACS Common Structural Rules in calculating residual strength of oil tankers is presented. The topic of the last part of the chapter is the ultimate strength of the hull girder in longitudinal bending. The need to calculate ultimate strength is discussed, followed by the calculation of ultimate strength using a simplified, upper bound approach. Progressive collapse analysis is presented and this allows for the gradual spread of elasto-plastic behaviour in individual stiffened plate elements of the hull girder.

The aim in Chapter 7 is to take into account the role of the means of information transmission on the nature of the states that can be perceived. Our point of departure is the recognition that the information we obtain is acquired by observers who monitor fragments of the same environment that decohered the system, einselecting preferred pointer states in the process. Moreover, we only intercept a fraction of the environment. The only information about the system that can be transmitted by its fraction must have been reproduced in many copies in that environment. This process of amplification limits what can be found out to the states einselected by decoherence. Quantum Darwinism provides a simple and natural explanation of this restriction, and, hence, of the objective existence—the essence of classicality—for the einselected states. This chapter introduces and develops information-theoretic tools and concepts (including, e.g., redundancy) that allow one to explore and characterize correlations and information flows between systems, environments, and observers, and illustrates them on an exactly solvable yet non-trivial model.

This chapter covers digital information sources in some depth. It provides intuition on the information content of a digital source and introduces the notion of redundancy. As a simple but important example, discrete memoryless sources are described. The concept of entropy is defined as a measure of the information content of a digital information source. The properties of entropy are studied, and the source-coding theorem for a discrete memoryless source is given. In the second part of the chapter, practical data compression algorithms are studied. Specifically, Huffman coding, which is an optimal data-compression algorithm when the source statistics are known, and Lempel–Ziv (LZ) and Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) coding schemes, which are universal compression algorithms (not requiring the source statistics), are detailed.

In Chapter 13 we will discuss how to produce compression schemes that do not require a priori knowledge of the generative distribution. It turns out that designing a compression algorithm able to adapt to an unknown distribution is essentially equivalent to the problem of estimating an unknown distribution, which is a major topic of statistical learning. The plan for this chapter is as follows: (1) We will start by discussing the earliest example of a universal compression algorithm (of Fitingof). It does not talk about probability distributions at all. However, it turns out to be asymptotically optimal simultaneously for all iid distributions and with small modifications for all finite-order Markov chains. (2) The next class of universal compressors is based on assuming that the true distribution belongs to a given class. These methods proceed by choosing a good model distribution serving as the minimax approximation to each distribution in the class. The compression algorithm for a single distribution is then designed as in previous chapters. (3) Finally, an entirely different idea are algorithms of Lempel–Ziv type. These automatically adapt to the distribution of the source, without any prior assumptions required.

Concision is about more than writing like Hemingway or following Strunk & White’s edict to eliminate unnecessary words. Instead, concision relies on writers recognizing the myriad redundancies in English, a reflection of its evolution from the collision of Latin, French, and Old English in the decades following the Norman Conquest. Moreover, redundancies also litter English in the form of redundant modifiers, throat-clearing, and metadiscourse. By recognizing these words and phrases, writers can quickly pare sentences to their essentials, without fretting over the havoc deletions can wreak on the meaning of their sentences.

Text comprehension and picture comprehension can be synthesized into a common conceptual framework which differentiates between external and internal descriptive and depictive representations. Combining this framework with the human cognitive architecture including sensory registers, working memory, and long-term memory leads to an integrated model of text and picture comprehension. The model consists of a descriptive branch and a depictive branch of processing. It includes multiple sensory modalities. Due to a flexible combination of sensory modalities and representational formats, the model covers listening comprehension, reading comprehension, visual picture comprehension, and sound comprehension. The model considers text comprehension and picture comprehension to be different routes for constructing mental models and propositional representations with the help of prior knowledge. It allows us to explain the effects of coherence, text modality, split attention, text–picture contiguity, redundancy, sequencing, and the effects of different types of visualization.

This chapter completes our critical exploration of Popper’s key work, the Logic of Scientific Discovery and how it applies to corpus linguistics. In this chapter we address the question of how easily linguistics may be viewed as a science, in Popper’s terms. We also consider important critiques of Popper’s work and use those to both clarify and, where necessary, adapt the framework.

This chapter extends the ideas of complex data by looking into cybersecurity through network and graph data.