Environmental effects of shrimp culture on Tiab Creek, Hormozgan Province, south Iran

Shrimp fanning industry has rapidly expanded in the south of Iran especially in Hormozgan Province over the past decade. In 2001, nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, total inorganic nitrate, reactive phosphate and total phosphate were assessed monthly in Tiab creek to evaluate the environmental effects of the industry. During the study period, nitrate varied between 4.06-23.58pm/1 where as variation for nitrite was measured as 0.21-2.23ml/l. Variation for ammonia was 0.07-2.04m/1, for total inorganic nitrate was 4.46-25.131.ml/l and for reactive phosphate and total phosphate were 0.114-2.35ml/l and 1.3-22.731ml/l respectively. Results of this study showed that concentration of nutrients in the outlet effluents and creek mouth were higher than other stations. Also, comparison of concentration of nutrients between stations showed that there were significant differences between effluent water and other stations (P<0.05)

Public acceptability of congestion charging in Beijing, China: How transferrable are Western ideas of public acceptability?

Public acceptability is a major concern for road pricing schemes in Western countries but has not yet been sufficiently studied in the context of Chinese cities, a number of which are considering the introduction of such travel constraint measures. This study explores factors influencing public acceptability of a proposed congestion charge in the City of Beijing. In so doing, the study focuses on understanding the appropriateness of Western frameworks for assessing public acceptability in the Chinese context. Through literature review and focus groups a survey to test different public acceptability constructs was developed (N = 1104). A Structural Equation Model was used to analyze relationships that exist among the different aspects of public acceptability. The results demonstrate that public acceptability is dominantly influenced by the level of trust toward the Government and experts. Various determinants in the Western context, such as access to information and perceived effectiveness were not found to have a significant impact on public acceptability. The results imply that public acceptability of congestion charging in the Chinese context has a stronger resonance with wider social issues such as equity than more specific transport problems such as congestion. As such, attempting to present evidence on the anticipated effectiveness of the policy in alleviating congestion and smog may not make the policy more acceptable to the public. The overall inference of the study is that contextual factors are more important than has been previously considered within public acceptability studies

Dandelion plot: a method for the visualization of R-mode exploratory factor analyses

One of the important aspects of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is to discover underlying structures in real life problems. Especially, R-mode methods of EFA aim to investigate the relationship between variables. Visualizing an efficient EFA model is as important as obtaining one. A good graph of an EFA should be simple, informative and easy to interpret. A few number of visualization methods exist. Dandelion plot, a novel method of visualization for R-mode EFA, is used in this study, providing a more effective representation of factors. With this method, factor variances and factor loadings can be plotted on a single window. The representation of both positivity and negativity among factor loadings is another strength of the method