Public-private partnerships in China's urban water sector

During the past decades, the traditional state monopoly in urban water management has been debated heavily, resulting in different forms and degrees of private sector involvement across the globe. Since the 1990s, China has also started experiments with new modes of urban water service management and governance in which the private sector is involved. It is premature to conclude whether the various forms of private sector involvement will successfully overcome the major problems (capital shortage, inefficient operation, and service quality) in China¿s water sector. But at the same time, private sector involvement in water provisioning and waste water treatments seems to have become mainstream in transitional China

Labour Market Information Driven, Personalized, OER Recommendation System for Lifelong Learners

In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer. We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150 recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of CSEDU 2020 by SciTePres

Listening to Corrosion

Using condition monitoring techniques to achieve predictive maintenance is a prominent topic for military systems. Some of the main challenges related to this topic will be introduced, and after that a specific application will be used to demonstrate the successful development of a corrosion monitoring technique. One of the effective ways to cope with corrosion as a failure mechanism is to use dedicated sensors. Preferably, these sensors do not interfere with the prevalent corrosion process, i.e. they ‘listen to corrosion’ as it occurs spontaneously. A potentially interesting monitoring technique is based on electrochemical noise (EN), which is the spontaneous charge transfer generated by the corrosion process. A unique property of this technique is the possibility to identify corrosion processes based on their EN signature. This work describes the analysis of EN signals, based on which corrosion identification can be performed. Metastable pitting of AISI304 stainless steel serves as an example of the analysis procedure. The effectiveness of the procedure is then demonstrated by means of the identification of microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC), which is generally regarded as one of the most difficult to predict corrosion mechanisms

Cost-effectiveness modelling of three different hysterosalpingography diagnostic strategies in addition to standard fertility management for couples with unexplained infertility in the United Kingdom

Funding: This research was supported by Guerbet, Paris, France. Guerbet had no influence on the results of this researchPeer reviewedPostprin

Destination choices of international students in the Netherlands:A meso‐level analysis of higher education institutions and cities

This study quantitatively investigates enrolments of international students using data that contains nearly every student in the Netherlands for the years 2016–2019. Using this data, we are able to perform a meso-level analysis where we could investigate the characteristics of higher education institutions (HEIs) and cities in international student mobility. This research contributes to the literature by studying variation between HEIs and by focusing on actual enrolments instead of relying on survey results. Such meso-level studies have thus far been very rare, especially on this scale. Although there are commonalities between types of degrees, we find mixed results for academic and city characteristics, and it appears that academic factors are more important for master students while for bachelor students city characteristics have stronger effects. The effect of having already existing stocks of international students appears to be important for all types of degrees. Aside from differences between bachelor and master students, our findings also suggest that HEIs might directly influence international student flows as this would explain some of our results. Although this study only focuses on the Netherlands, it opens up many avenues for future comparative research on the destination choices of international students and the role of HEIs