RURAL NONFARM EMPLOYMENT UNDER TRADE REFORM EVIDENCE FROM VIETNAM, 1993-2002

Vietnam’s rural economy has substantially diversified over the past two decades. The rural nonfarm sector has grown rapidly and became an important source of employment and income for rural households. This growing nonfarm employment was associated with radical changes in the trade policy reform that has put the country to the top two or three performers in the developing world. This paper examines the potential effect of the trade policy reform on nonfarm employment in rural Vietnam during the period 1993-2002. It proposes two trade openness indices that allow changes in the trade policy at the macro level to be transmitted to rural households. The results reveal that the trade policy reform does have a material impact on rural nonfarm employment. While a more liberalized agricultural sector encourages nonfarm diversification, a lower protection level in the nonfarm sector discourages individual participation in nonfarm income-generating activities.Trade liberalization, trade policy reform, rural nonfarm employment, Vietnam

Second-order accurate nonoscillatory schemes for scalar conservation laws

Explicit finite difference schemes for the computation of weak solutions of nonlinear scalar conservation laws is presented and analyzed. These schemes are uniformly second-order accurate and nonoscillatory in the sense that the number of extrema of the discrete solution is not increasing in time

Phase Transition in Dimer Liquids

We study the phase transition in a system composed of dimers interacting with each other via a nearest-neighbor (NN) exchange $J$ and competing interactions taken from a truncated dipolar coupling. Each dimer occupies a link between two nearest sites of a simple cubic lattice. We suppose that dimers are self-avoiding and can have only three orientations which coincide with the $x$, $y$ or $z$ direction. The interaction $J$ is attractive if the two dimers are parallel with each other at the NN distance, zero otherwise. The truncated dipolar interaction is characterized by two parameters: its amplitude $D$ and the cutoff distance $r_c$. Using the steepest-descent method, we determine the ground-state (GS) configuration as functions of $D$ and $r_c$. We then use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the nature of the low-temperature phase and to determine characteristics of the phase transition from the ordered phase to the disordered phase at high temperatures at a given dimer concentration. We show that as the temperature increases, dimers remain in the compact state and the transition from the low-$T$ compact phase to the disordered phase where dimers occupy the whole space is of second order when $D$ is small, but it becomes of first order for large enough $D$, for both polarized and non polarized dimers. This transition has a resemblance with the unfolding polymer transition. The effect of $r_c$ is discussed

Users' performance of accessible sound-only computer games

This work is conducted at two levels to meet the requirements of this research. The first objective is to develop a better understanding of how to design better sound-only games for a wide range of users. A new theoretical framework has been crafted to achieve this objective (Human Understanding Theory of Novel Games with Simplex, or the HUNGS theory). Such a theory aims to capture the current consensus about user requirements (as far as it is possible to do so) whilst understanding the principles and practices of interactive systems, namely the design of accessible sound-only games. The second objective is to understand better the psychology of intended users of such games. The importance of the present work is to test psychological concepts in the very different and very popular context of computer games. Implications found for users at work or working on serious tasks may not generalize to game players. To achieve the second requirement, a number of existing games were explored before a new game was designed (namely the Totally Lost game), using a range of methods. The Totally Lost game and different versions of the same game have been designed and evaluated based on user experiences