New Thinking about Urban Growth: Liujiang County

The New Road to Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics that was put forward by the eighteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is being implemented in Liujiang County of Luizhou city through a series of plans and policies. This is an analysis of the process of urbanization under those plans: The Twelfth Five-year Economic Plan for Liujiang County and The Research Report on Liujiang Urbanization. The poster depicts three of the major components: (1) background material on the urbanization of Liujiang County and the opportunities that both external and internal factors present; (2) the new thinking about urban growth and the policies that can enhance the urbanization in terms of developing competitive industries, accelerating facilities construction, promoting the equalization of public services, and eliminating the institutional barriers, and; (3) a model of interaction between urbanization and industrialization to guide Luijiang’s development

Joint outcome modeling using shared frailties with application to temporal streamflow data

Recently there has been tremendous interest in the development of tools for joint analysis of longitudinal data and time-to-event data. This has gained emphasis particularly in clinical studies, where longitudinal measurements on a response may be recorded along with a time-to-event outcome. Joint analysis of multiple outcomes beyond longitudinal and survival have also been considered, for example, joint analysis of a variety of generalized linear models including continuous and count data, or continuous and binomial data. With joint analysis of multiple outcomes, the interest may be analysis of one outcome conditional on the others, or, more typically, analysis of all outcomes jointly using latent random effects to link the outcomes. In this project, we study joint-outcome models with the particular application being streamflow at two stations on the prairies. Here, streamflow at the two stations is linked via an annual random effect. Smoothers are used to flexibly account for temporal trends in the model. An important aspect is determining the amount of information required in order to estimate the link parameter which connects the two processes, and we investigate this via simulation in the context of the streamflow analysis

Basis Function Approaches for Two Dimensional Cochlear Models

The human cochlea possesses the amazing ability of analyzing audio signals. The structures and mechanisms behind its characteristic response to sound stimuli has been an active area of research for decades. It has been demonstrated that mathematical cochlear modeling poses a promising alternative to discover the elusive activities in an in vivo cochlea. However, despite the successful application of numerical methods such as the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) method, finite difference method (FDM) and finite element method (FEM), the critical effects of the choice of basis functions have not been studied exclusively for the numerical solutions of cochlea models. This work presents the numerical solution procedures to two types of cochlear models using the basis function collocation approach. Accuracies and effectiveness of basis functions are evaluated by comparing simulation results with past experiment and physiological data. The time-domain solutions in response to various audio inputs are also shown. The cochlear model demonstrates sound processing abilities which are qualitatively comparable to physiological data. It is hoped that the results in this work would help in laying the foundation for future cochlear model solutions and cochlea-based audio signal processor

Agricultural diversification and specialisation : the impact on smallholders' farm efficiency in China

Structural change is a major engine in fostering a country’s growth. In the agricultural sector, diversification is the commonly used development strategy to increase the rural sector’s flexibility, to respond to improving technologies and market conditions. From an agricultural transformation perspective, this thesis consists of three interrelated studies. The first study examines agricultural development and transformation during China’s socio-economic reforms. In particular, it empirically tests the question of whether economic development results in agricultural diversification at the national and regional level in the Chinese context, given its fast growth and special paths of transition and development. The degree of agricultural diversification was quantitatively measured at a regional scale using the Herfindahl index. An underdeveloped region, Gansu province in Northwest China, was studied to provide insights into the interaction among structural change, agricultural diversification, and implemented development policies. Aggregate-level analyses suggest that, although economic growth in China is unique, its pattern of agricultural transformation is consistent with those of other developing countries. China’s agricultural sector became more diversified as the economy grew. Agricultural diversification appears to relate to a region’s comparative advantage and the relative importance of agriculture in the region. The second study explores the interrelationship between smallholders’ production specialisation and commercialisation.This study first ascertains whether China’s macro-level agricultural diversification is accompanied by farm specialisation. It then explores earlier studies,that were at a more conceptual level, that propose a relationship between commericalisation and specialisation by providing modest insights into farm-level commericalisation and specialisation.Using a set of simultaneousequations,a two-way interrelationship between specialisation and commercialisation were confirmed, suggesting that farmers’ decisions on farm commercialisation and production specialisation are actually separate and interacting. The results further suggest that higher asset endowments indeed enable small farmers to specialise in production where they have a comparative advantage, while assets, especially capital, actually reduce farmers’ incentives to sell their surplus to get cash. The third study examines the impact of specialisation on farm efficiencies. Farms’ technical, allocative, and scale efficiencies were measured by non-parametric frontier analysis. Then the impact of specialisation on efficiency and the determinants of inefficiency were investigated using a Tobit model. The results reveal that specialisation increases households’ technical efficiency and cost efficiency, confirming that specialised farms benefit from saving inputs or improving outputs. It was found that economic losses are commonly generated by allocative and scale inefficiency among the studied farms