Educational, sociocultural and employment experience of Chinese international students in the UK

The purpose of this research is to explore the challenges and experiences of female Chinese international students in the UK. The thesis depicts evidence generated from 64 semi-structured interviews with 24 female Chinese students undertaking a 1-year taught postgraduate course in a UK Russell group HE institution. Conducted over an 18-month period, the fieldwork comprised repeat interviews that sought to build up the different aspects of experiences and attitudes perceived by female Chinese students and how they coped with challenging experiences as individuals. This study covers motivation for internationalisation in higher education, impressions of the UK, experiences of Chinese students in the UK, and stereotypes of Chinese students. The results illustrated that female Chinese students had both favourable experiences and difficulties while staying in the UK. The impressions of the UK were generally positive and satisfactory. Most female Chinese students had employment intention in the UK. The experience of studying in the UK influenced the impression of the UK, and also influenced the intention to remain or to work in the UK. This thesis makes contributions to academic knowledge, to international education practitioners, and to prospective Chinese students considering study in the UK. This research has adopted a longitudinal approach which is a novel aspect from the methodological perspective. Implications of this research can apply to multiple subjects. These include Chinese students, the UK host HE institutions, the UK host cities and the UK as a country

Temporal Trends of Intraurban Commuting in Baton Rouge 1990-2010

Based on the CTPP data 1990-2010, this research analyzes the temporal variability of commuting patterns and efficiency (in both distance and time) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It proposes a simulation-based method to measure commuting by simulating individual resident workers, jobs, and trips between them, in order to mitigate the aggregation error and scale effect that are commonly encountered in existing studies. Specifically, the Monte Carlo simulation approach is adopted to simulate individual resident workers and jobs that were consistent with their spatial distributions across the areal unit (e.g., census tract), and then simulate individual trips that were proportional to the existing journey-to-work trip flows. The results indicate that average commute distance kept climbing between 1990 and 2010, whereas average commute time increased between 1990 and 2000 but then slightly dropped toward 2010. As commuting is a trip linking one’s residence to employment, this research follows the long tradition of using the urban land use pattern, namely the spatial separation between residential housing and job location, to explain the observed commuting pattern. Three land use measures are used: distance from the CBD, jobs to resident workers ratio, and a gravity-based job proximity index. The research finds that these land use measures remained a good predictor of commuting pattern in Baton Rouge over time, and the best model explained up to 90 percent of mean commute distance and about 30 percent of mean commute time. Furthermore, nonspatial factors such as a worker’s socioeconomic attributes also influence commuting. Foremost, income plays an important role in one’s residential choices and thus commuting. This research focuses on the role of wage rates of resident workers in commuting pattern. It is reported that commuting behaviors varied across areas of different wage rates, captured by a convex shape. Initially workers living in more affluent neighborhoods tended to commute more, but those in areas with the highest wage rates retreated for less commuting. This trend remained relatively stable over time. Wasteful (excess) commuting is also examined as the overall commuting efficiency metric for the study area. Wasteful commuting is measured as the proportion of actual commute that is over minimum (optimal) commute when assuming that people could freely swap their homes and jobs in a city. This research identifies two contributors resulting in the miscalculation of wasteful commuting: reporting errors and the use of aggregate zonal data. The former tended to overstate the actual commuting length and led to overestimate wasteful commuting; and the latter (especially the use of large areal unit) led to underestimate wasteful commuting. This research indicates that the percentage of wasteful commuting increased significantly between 1990 and 2000 and stabilized afterward

An evaluation on performance of container multimodal transportation system based on AHP-Entropy method

In recent years, multimodal transportation has achieved rapid development with the support of the governments and stakeholders. Multimodal transportation is characterized by high transportation efficiency, low transportation cost, energy saving and environmental protection. However, the existing transportation industry development indicators are defined and counted from the perspective of a single subsystem. This contribution establishes a performance evaluation index for three container multimodal transportation subsystem from four aspects: capacity, transportation cost, service quality and sustainable development based on system engineering techniques. In order to fully reflect the differences between the decision-makers' subjective experience and preference and objective information, this contribution uses the combination of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and entropy method to determine the weight of indexes. The methodology is applied to examine performance of three container multimodal transportation subsystems in Ningbo-Shaoxing (China) multimodal transportation system. The results show that: multimodal railway is superior to highways and multimodal inland waterway. The methodology and discussion of the AHP-entropy method may be useful for similar transport systems in a make decision framework.Incomin