Using a Modified Payment Card Survey on Chinese Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Fair Trade Coffee: Would the Starting Point Matter

Coffee consumption in China is increasing rapidly over the recent years. This study offers one of the few initial attempts to not only understand general consumption behavior associated with Chinese coffee, but to explore the viability of niche markets for coffee with the credence attribute “fair trade”. A modified payment card approach was adopted as the consumer willingness to pay elicitation method. Survey results of 564 consumers from the city of Wuhan, China suggest a positive attitude toward coffee as an alternative drink and a willingness to pay a premium for “fair trade” coffee. This study also explores and describes the potential impact of starting point bias, which has been relatively well documented in the dichotomous choice literature but has not been thoroughly addressed in a payment card context.coffee, fair trade, payment card, starting point bias, willingness to pay, Agribusiness, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Security and Poverty, International Development, Marketing, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, D12, Q13,

Phenological response of vegetation to upstream river flow in the Heihe Rive basin by time series analysis of MODIS data

Liquid and solid precipitation is abundant in the high elevation, upper reach of the Heihe River basin in northwestern China. The development of modern irrigation schemes in the middle reach of the basin is taking up an increasing share of fresh water resources, endangering the oasis and traditional irrigation systems in the lower reach. In this study, the response of vegetation in the Ejina Oasis in the lower reach of the Heihe River to the water yield of the upper catchment was analyzed by time series analysis of monthly observations of precipitation in the upper and lower catchment, river streamflow downstream of the modern irrigation schemes and satellite observations of vegetation index. Firstly, remotely sensed NDVI data acquired by Terra-MODIS are used to monitor the vegetation dynamic for a seven years period between 2000 and 2006. Due to cloud-contamination, atmospheric influence and different solar and viewing angles, however, the quality and consistence of time series of remotely sensed NDVI data are degraded. A Fourier Transform method – the Harmonic Analysis of Time Series (HANTS) algorithm – is used to reconstruct cloud- and noise-free NDVI time series data from the Terra-MODIS NDVI dataset. Modification is made on HANTS by adding additional parameters to deal with large data gaps in yearly time series in combination with a Temporal-Similarity-Statistics (TSS) method developed in this study to seek for initial values for the large gap periods. Secondly, the same Fourier Transform method is used to model time series of the vegetation phenology. The reconstructed cloud-free NDVI time series data are used to study the relationship between the water availability (i.e. the local precipitation and upstream water yield) and the evolution of vegetation conditions in Ejina Oasis from 2000 to 2006. Anomalies in precipitation, streamflow, and vegetation index are detected by comparing each year with the average year. The results showed that: the previous year total runoff had a significant relationship with the vegetation growth in Ejina Oasis and that anomalies in the spring monthly runoff of the Heihe River influenced the phenology of vegetation in the entire oasis. Warmer climate expressed by the degree-days showed positive influence on the vegetation phenology in particular during drier years. The time of maximum green-up is uniform throughout the oasis during wetter years, but showed a clear S-N gradient (downstream) during drier years

Transport of First Rocks of The Solar System by X-winds

It has been suggested that chondrules and calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) were formed at the inner edge of the protoplanetary disk and then entrained in magnetocentrifugal X-winds. We study trajectories of such solid bodies with the consideration of the central star gravity, the protoplanetary disk gravity, and the gas drag of the wind. The efficiency of the gas drag depends on a parameter $\eta$, which is the product of the solid body size and density. We find that the gravity of the protoplanetary disk has a non-negligible effect on the trajectories. If a solid body re-enters the flared disk, the re-entering radius depends on the stellar magnetic dipole moment, the disk's gravity, the parameter $\eta$, and the initial launching angle. The disk's gravity can make the re-entering radius lower by up to 30%. We find a threshold $\eta$, denoted as $\eta_t$, for any particular configuration of the X-wind, below which the solid bodies will be expelled from the planetary system. $\eta_t$ sensitively depends on the initial launching angle, and also depends on the mass of the disk. Only the solid bodies with a $\eta$ larger than but very close to $\eta_t$ can be launched to a re-entering radius larger than 1 AU. This size-sorting effect may explain why chondrules come with a narrow range of sizes within each chondritic class. In general, the size distributions of CAIs and chondrules in chondrites can be determined from the initial size distribution as well as the distribution over the initial launching angle.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Research on the Market Access System of Renewable Resource Management in China

As an independent module of the countries’ economic development, the renewable resource industry is a part of circular economic development. It is the key element for national economic development and environmental protection. Anyone who wants to regulate the whole renewable resources industry development orderly cannot be separated from the strong supervision and management measures. However, the planning of the management measures is based on a series of standardized system design. This thesis focuses on the market access system of renewable resources management as a starting point, first of all, understand and learn the world most advanced countries’ (Japan, Germany, Singapore) renewable resources market access system design, then according to the objective conditions of China, we draw a lesson from the experience of developed countries and construct a new series of market access system for China’ renewable resource industry, which include renewable resources list announcement system, enterprise technical standard system, extended producer responsibility system and so on, all of these are designed to provide reference management standards for the regeneration resources industry development in China

Note: An object detection method for active camera

To solve the problems caused by a changing background during object detection in active camera, this paper proposes a new method based on SURF (speeded up robust features) and data clustering. The SURF feature points of each image are extracted, and each cluster center is calculated by processing the data clustering of k adjacent frames. Templates for each class are obtained by calculating the histograms within the regions around the center points of the clustering classes. The window of the moving object can be located by finding the region that satisfies the histogram matching result between adjacent frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the effectiveness of object detection.Yong Chen, Ronghua Zhang, Lei Shang, and Eric H