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The huge population of China, together with its rapid economic growth, has created problems of exhaustion of resources and environmental pollution, which not only harm the Chinese but the rest of the world as well. Studying the underlying forces of environment-related behaviours at all levels in China is very important. An awareness of resource conservation and environmental protection has gradually emerged in China. Nevertheless, consumers’ poor environmental consciousness is a major obstacle for China to build an environmentally-friendly society. Consolidating the experience of research in developed countries, a survey of 1392 Chinese consumers was conducted to explore the determinants of ecologically conscious behaviour (ECB) through an extended knowledge-attitude-practice (KAP) model. Results of the analyses showed that some socio-psychological factors have impacts on consumers’ ECB. Specifically, affection for resource conservation and environmental protection (eco-affection) and social responsibility consciousness have direct effects; eco-awareness has indirect effects; and eco-knowledge and materialistic values on consumption have both direct and indirect effects on consumers’ ECB. These findings provide important public policy implications for government and NGOs to guide consumers to engage in ECB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The k-out-of-n system structure is a very popular type of redundancy in fault-tolerant systems, with wide applications in both industrial and military systems. In this paper, the modeling, application and reliability evaluation of k-out-of-n systems are studied for the case where the components and the system have multiple performance levels. A multi-state k-out-of-n system model is proposed that allows different requirements on the number of components for different state levels, and, very importantly, more practical engineering systems can fit into this model. The multiple states in the model can be interpreted in two ways: (i) multiple levels of capacity; and (ii) multiple failure modes. Application examples of the proposed multi-state k-out-of-n system model are given under each of the interpretations. An approach is presented for efficient reliability evaluation of multi-state k-out-of-n systems with identically and independently distributed components. A recursive algorithm is proposed for reliability evaluation of multi-state k-out-of-n systems with independent components. Efficiency investigations show that both of the reliability evaluation approaches are efficient. The multi-state k-out-of-n system model with a constant k value, which is a special case of the general multi-state k-out-of-n system model, has been studied for a long time, but only on the theoretical stage. A practical application of this model is presented in this paper as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]