Total-Factor Energy Efficiency in China’s Agricultural Sector: Trends, Disparities and Potentials

This paper investigates total-factor energy efficiency and analyses the trends of the efficiency changes in China’s agricultural production across 30 provinces and three regions from 2001 to 2011, based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The potential amount of energy savings and five potential factors for energy efficiency improvement are also empirically studied by Tobit regression model. The findings show that (1) total-factor energy efficiency in China’s agricultural sector is increasing over years but performs heterogeneously across regions; (2) agriculture intensive regions and energy abundant provinces tend to be relatively energy inefficient in agricultural production; and (3) economic structure, agricultural production structure, technological progress and income effect are major potentials for improving energy efficiency, whereas energy price is not a significant factor. This phenomenon results from the divergence of economic development, endowment effects as well as the scale of agricultural production. Policy implications drawn from this research are to upgrade industrial structure and promote agricultural transformation to enhance farmers’ income as well as to establish a land market with entitling land property rights to farmers. This conclusion can assist to form more scientific rural energy policy decision-making in China and also can be extended to other developing economies for sustainable agriculture

Noise-Resilient Group Testing: Limitations and Constructions

We study combinatorial group testing schemes for learning $d$-sparse Boolean vectors using highly unreliable disjunctive measurements. We consider an adversarial noise model that only limits the number of false observations, and show that any noise-resilient scheme in this model can only approximately reconstruct the sparse vector. On the positive side, we take this barrier to our advantage and show that approximate reconstruction (within a satisfactory degree of approximation) allows us to break the information theoretic lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(d^2 \log n)$ that is known for exact reconstruction of $d$-sparse vectors of length $n$ via non-adaptive measurements, by a multiplicative factor $\tilde{\Omega}(d)$. Specifically, we give simple randomized constructions of non-adaptive measurement schemes, with $m=O(d \log n)$ measurements, that allow efficient reconstruction of $d$-sparse vectors up to $O(d)$ false positives even in the presence of $\delta m$ false positives and $O(m/d)$ false negatives within the measurement outcomes, for any constant $\delta < 1$. We show that, information theoretically, none of these parameters can be substantially improved without dramatically affecting the others. Furthermore, we obtain several explicit constructions, in particular one matching the randomized trade-off but using $m = O(d^{1+o(1)} \log n)$ measurements. We also obtain explicit constructions that allow fast reconstruction in time \poly(m), which would be sublinear in $n$ for sufficiently sparse vectors. The main tool used in our construction is the list-decoding view of randomness condensers and extractors.Comment: Full version. A preliminary summary of this work appears (under the same title) in proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory (FCT 2009

Clean heating and heating poverty: A perspective based on cost-benefit analysis

To improve the air quality in winter, clean heating policy was implemented in “2 + 26” cities of China in 2016, which mainly included replacing coal with gas or electricity. Tremendous financial subsidies have been provided by city and central governments. This new heating mode changed the heating fee-cost to residents. This paper estimates the economic costs to both governments and residents, and evaluates the environmental and public health benefits by combining a difference-in-differences model with an exposure-response function. Results show that the total costs of clean heating were up to 43.1 billion yuan. Governments and residents account for 44% and 56% of the total costs, respectively. In terms of benefits, the clean heating project is effective for air pollution control and brings health economic benefits of about 109.85 billion yuan (95% CI: 22.40–159.83). The clean heating policy was identified as a net-positive benefit program with environmental and public health improvements. However, the inequality in subsidies from different cities governments increases the heating burden on low-income households and leads to heating poverty for households in the less developed regions. We provide suggestions for implementation in future clean heating campaigns and in subsidy mechanism design in China and for other developing countries

Detuning effects in the one-photon mazer

The quantum theory of the mazer in the non-resonant case (a detuning between the cavity mode and the atomic transition frequencies is present) is written. The generalization from the resonant case is far from being direct. Interesting effects of the mazer physics are pointed out. In particular, it is shown that the cavity may slow down or speed up the atoms according to the sign of the detuning and that the induced emission process may be completely blocked by use of a positive detuning. It is also shown that the detuning adds a potential step effect not present at resonance and that the use of positive detunings defines a well-controlled cooling mechanism. In the special case of a mesa cavity mode function, generalized expressions for the reflection and transmission coefficients have been obtained. The general properties of the induced emission probability are finally discussed in the hot, intermediate and cold atom regimes. Comparison with the resonant case is given.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Application-level performance of cross-layer scheduling for social VR in 5G

Social VR aims at enabling people located at different places to communicate and interact with each other in a natural way. It poses extremely strong throughput and latency requirements on the underlying communication networks. This paper investigates the potential of using cross-layer design approaches for radio access scheduling in order to realize these challenging requirements in (beyond) 5G networks. In particular, we provide an in-depth simulation study of the performance/capacity gains that can be achieved by exploiting the end-to-end latency budget and/or video frame type as cross-layer information in the scheduling decisions, and show how the benefits depend on the actual social VR scenario. This study further reveals the importance of using application-level metrics such as PSNR or SSIM rather than traditional network-level metrics like the packet drop rate in the performance assessment.</p

Characterization of Zika virus endocytic pathways in human glioblastoma cells

Zika virus (ZIKV) infections can cause microcephaly and neurological disorders. However, the early infection events of ZIKV in neural cells remain to be characterized. Here, by using a combination of pharmacological and molecular approaches and the human glioblastoma cell T98G as a model, we first observed that ZIKV infection was inhibited by chloroquine and NH4Cl, indicating a requirement of low intracellular pH. We further showed that dynamin is required as the ZIKV entry was affected by the specific inhibitor dynasore, small interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown of dynamin, or by expressing the dominant-negative K44A mutant. Moreover, the ZIKV entry was significantly inhibited by chlorpromazine, pitstop2, or siRNA knockdown of clathrin heavy chain, indicating an involvement of clathrin-mediated endocytosis. In addition, genistein treatment, siRNA knockdown of caveolin-1, or overexpression of a dominant-negative caveolin mutant impacted the ZIKV entry, with ZIKV particles being observed to colocalize with caveolin-1, implying that caveola endocytosis can also be involved. Furthermore, we found that the endocytosis of ZIKV is dependent on membrane cholesterol, microtubules, and actin cytoskeleton. Importantly, ZIKV infection was inhibited by silencing of Rab5 and Rab7, while confocal microscopy showed that ZIKV particles localized in Rab5- and Rab7-postive endosomes. These results indicated that, after internalization, ZIKV likely moves to Rab5-positive early endosome and Rab7-positive late endosomes before delivering its RNA into the cytoplasm. Taken together, our study, for the first time, described the early infection events of ZIKV in human glioblastoma cell T98G

Mass movement susceptibility mapping using satellite optical imagery compared with InSAR monitoring: Zigui County, Three Gorges region, China

Mass movements on steep slopes are a major hazard to communities and infrastructure in the Three Gorges region, China. Developing susceptibility maps of mass movements is therefore very important in both current and future land use planning. This study employed satellite optical imagery and an ASTER GDEM (15 m) to derive various parameters (namely geology; slope gradient; proximity to drainage networks and proximity to lineaments) in order to create a GIS-based map of mass movement susceptibility. This map was then evaluated using highly accurate deformation signals processed using the Persistent Scatterer (PS) InSAR technique. Areas of high susceptibility correspond well to points of high subsidence, which provides a strong support of our susceptibility map