Energy efficiency in China: The local bundling of interests and policies

With the end of China's 11th Five-Year Plan approaching, this paper analyzes sub-national governments' implementation strategies to meet national energy efficiency targets. Previous research focuses on the way governance practices and decision-making structures shape implementation outcomes, yet very little attention has been given to what strategies local leaders actually employ to bridge national priorities with local interests. To illustrate how leaders work politically, this paper highlights specific implementation mechanisms officials use to strengthen formal incentives and create effective informal incentives to fulfill their energy efficiency mandates. The analysis is drawn from fifty-three interviews conducted in June and July 2010 in Shanxi, a major coal-producing and energy-intensive province. Findings suggest that local government leaders conform to the national directives by 'bundling' the energy efficiency policy with policies of more pressing local importance or by 'bundling' with the interests of groups with significant political influence. Ultimately, officials take national policies and then frame them in ways that give them legitimacy at the local level. --China,local state,policy implementation,energy policy,governance

Synthesis and Characterization of Unique Pyridazines

The field of semiconductive organic chemistry is vast and expanding as numerous applications are being discovered for semiconductors. The research reported in this thesis focuses on the synthesis and characterization of three pyridazines. Pyridazines are organic heterocyclic aromatic semiconductors containing nitrogen and are planar in structure. The three pyridazine compounds were successfully isolated as evidenced by a high percent yield and then characterized by melting point and infrared spectroscopy. The research goal was achieved as a small library of pyridazines was compiled to be further analyzed concerning their potential within various applications in the electronic and industrial world

Whales, dolphins, and porpoises of the eastern North Pacific and adjacent Arctic waters: a guide to their identification

This is an identification guide for cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), that was designed to assist laymen in identifying cetaceans encountered in eastern North Pacific and Arctic waters. It was intended for use by ongoing cetacean observer programs. This is a revision of an earlier guide with the same title published in 1972 by the Naval Undersa Center and the National Marine Fisheries Service. It includes sections on identifying cetaceans at sea as well as stranded animals on shore. Species accounts are divided by body size and presence or lack of a dorsal fin. Appendices include illustrations of tags on whales, dolphins, and porpoises, by Larry Hobbs; how to record data from observed cetaceans at sea and for stranded cetaceans; and a list of cetacean names in Japanese and Russian. (Document contains 245 pages - file takes considerable time to open

Food Safety Incidents, Collateral Damage and Trade Policy Responses: China-Canada Agri-Food Trade

As markets become globalized, food safety policy and international trade policy are increasingly intertwined. Globalization also means that food safety incidents are widely reported internationally. One result is that food safety incidents can negatively impact products where no food safety issue exists as consumers lose trust in both foreign and domestic food safety institutions. While the policy framework for dealing with directly effected imported foods is well understood, how to deal with the market failure associated with indirectly affected products within the existing trade policy rules has not been explored. Using the example of China’s 2007 problems with a spate of products safety incidents, a theoretical framework is developed and the response of both the Chinese and Canadian governments analyzed. A cooperative approach to the issues appears to have a number of advantages and does not contravene trade policy commitments.Canada, China, cooperation, food safety, market failure, trade policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Hobbs, William

Co. B Hope Case Det. Camp Pataduckhttps://dh.howard.edu/prom_members/1042/thumbnail.jp

An Analysis of Major League Soccer: Competitive Balance and Wage Dispersion

Major League Soccer is in a transitional state which may see it projected into the realm of international relevancy, competing with European soccer. This transition is fueled by contracting renowned superstars from Europe via the designated player (DP) rule. This study examines implications of the DP rule on competitive balance (CB) of the league and wage dispersion among teams. The effect of the rule on CB is inconclusive in the model constructed, but propositions of a more appropriate CB measure are presented for future research. The DP rule has caused higher levels of salary dispersion within the league and this dispersion is found to be negatively related to team performance which is supportive of the wage compression hypothesis

Processing of a multichannel seismic reflection survey in the Hebridean region with special emphasis on improvements in velocity analysis

This thesis presents the results of a multichannel reflection survey conducted off of the Western Isles of Scotland in 1981 in the Sea of the Hebrides region. Ten profiles were acquired to 12 seconds two-way time using an air-gun source and a 2.4 km 24 channel receiver, yielding 24 fold coverage with a gather spacing of 50 metres. The data have been processed at Durham using the reflection seismic processing software developed there over the past six years. The interpretation shows that the Mesozoic basins lie unconformably on up to 5 km thickness of Torridonian sediments, which in turn lie uncomformably on Lewisian crystalline basement. The presence of eastward dipping events in the basement are associated with thrust faults and are probably of Caledonian age. The later reactivation of these faults has controlled the formation of the Mesozoic basins. The thesis also contains details of the modifications made to both the computer hardware and the processing software of the Durham Seismic Processing System during the life-time of this project. The expansion of the facility has enabled a larger selection of faster algorithms to be written for the processing of multichannel reflection data. These include velocity filtering, autostatics and dip filtering routines. Particular attention has been given to the accurate determination of the velocity function used when processing the data and how this information may be used to help the geological interpretation

ConStance: Modeling Annotation Contexts to Improve Stance Classification

Manual annotations are a prerequisite for many applications of machine learning. However, weaknesses in the annotation process itself are easy to overlook. In particular, scholars often choose what information to give to annotators without examining these decisions empirically. For subjective tasks such as sentiment analysis, sarcasm, and stance detection, such choices can impact results. Here, for the task of political stance detection on Twitter, we show that providing too little context can result in noisy and uncertain annotations, whereas providing too strong a context may cause it to outweigh other signals. To characterize and reduce these biases, we develop ConStance, a general model for reasoning about annotations across information conditions. Given conflicting labels produced by multiple annotators seeing the same instances with different contexts, ConStance simultaneously estimates gold standard labels and also learns a classifier for new instances. We show that the classifier learned by ConStance outperforms a variety of baselines at predicting political stance, while the model's interpretable parameters shed light on the effects of each context.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 201

Implementing the Gaia Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) in Java

This paper provides a description of the Java software framework which has been constructed to run the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution for the Gaia mission. This is the mathematical framework to provide the rigid reference frame for Gaia observations from the Gaia data itself. This process makes Gaia a self calibrated, and input catalogue independent, mission. The framework is highly distributed typically running on a cluster of machines with a database back end. All code is written in the Java language. We describe the overall architecture and some of the details of the implementation.Comment: Accepted for Experimental Astronom

International Product Differentiation Through a Country Brand: An Economic Analysis of National Branding as a Marketing Strategy for Agricultural Products

branding, marketing, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,