14,871 research outputs found
The Impact of Regional and Institutional Factors on Labour productive Performance : Evidence from the Township and Village Enterprise sector in China
This paper investigates the impact of regional and institutional factors on labor productivity in China’s Township and Village Enterprise (TVE) sector, one of the pillar industries of the economy. Employing a balanced provincial panel dataset, we find a significant variation in the factors determining regional labor productivity between the three macro-regions. The factors of capital
investment intensity, foreign intensity, and export intensity behave differently with a significant regional diversity. Only human capital, the real wage, and firm size are identified as the common determinants across regions. A strong self-reinforcing effect has been found with
a high degree of persistence in the behavior of, and hence slow or negligible convergence in labor productivity between regions. We find that the labor efficiency gains have been generated more from internal rather than external economies of scale across regions as well as the country as a whole. We also find that the government privatization reforms have had both a short run and increasingly long-term positive impact on the TVE labor productivity across the regions. This finding may indicate that institutional privatization can be an effective tool in promoting industrialization and labor productive performance in China as well as in other transitional economies
Recovering a lost baseline: missing kelp forests from a metropolitan coast
© 2008 AuthorThere is concern about historical and continuing loss of canopy-forming algae across the world’s temperate coastline. In South Australia, the sparse cover of canopy-forming algae on the Adelaide metropolitan coast has been of public concern with continuous years of anecdotal evidence culminating in 2 competing views. One view considers that current patterns existed before the onset of urbanisation, whereas the alternate view is that they developed after urbanisation. We tested hypotheses to distinguish between these 2 models, each centred on the reconstruction of historical covers of canopies on the metropolitan coast. Historically, the metropolitan sites were indistinguishable from contemporary populations of reference sites across 70 km (i.e. Gulf St. Vincent), and could also represent a random subset of exposed coastal sites across 2100 km of the greater biogeographic province. Thus there was nothing ‘special’ about the metropolitan sites historically, but today they stand out because they have sparser covers of canopies compared to equivalent locations and times in the gulf and the greater province. This is evidence of wholesale loss of canopy-forming algae (up to 70%) on parts of the Adelaide metropolitan coast since major urbanisation. These findings not only set a research agenda based on the magnitude of loss, but they also bring into question the logic that smaller metropolitan populations of humans create impacts that are trivial relative to that of larger metropolitan centres. Instead, we highlight a need to recognise the ecological context that makes some coastal systems more vulnerable or resistant to increasing human-domination of the world’s coastlines. We discuss challenges to this kind of research that receive little ecological discussion, particularly better leadership and administration, recognising that the systems we study out-live the life spans of individual research groups and operate on spatial scales that exceed the capacity of single research providers.Sean D. Connell, Bayden D. Russell, David J. Turner, Scoresby A. Shepherd, Timothy Kildea, David Miller, Laura Airoldi, Anthony Cheshir
On the Cause of Supra-Arcade Downflows in Solar Flares
A model of supra-arcade downflows (SADs), dark low density regions also known
as tadpoles that propagate sunward during solar flares, is presented. It is
argued that the regions of low density are flow channels carved by
sunward-directed outflow jets from reconnection. The solar corona is
stratified, so the flare site is populated by a lower density plasma than that
in the underlying arcade. As the jets penetrate the arcade, they carve out
regions of depleted plasma density which appear as SADs. The present
interpretation differs from previous models in that reconnection is localized
in space but not in time. Reconnection is continuous in time to explain why
SADs are not filled in from behind as they would if they were caused by
isolated descending flux tubes or the wakes behind them due to temporally
bursty reconnection. Reconnection is localized in space because outflow jets in
standard two-dimensional reconnection models expand in the normal (inflow)
direction with distance from the reconnection site, which would not produce
thin SADs as seen in observations. On the contrary, outflow jets in spatially
localized three-dimensional reconnection with an out-of-plane (guide) magnetic
field expand primarily in the out-of-plane direction and remain collimated in
the normal direction, which is consistent with observed SADs being thin.
Two-dimensional proof-of-principle simulations of reconnection with an
out-of-plane (guide) magnetic field confirm the creation of SAD-like depletion
regions and the necessity of density stratification. Three-dimensional
simulations confirm that localized reconnection remains collimated.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, accepted to Astrophysical Journal Letters in
August, 2013. This version is the accepted versio
Gamification techniques for raising cyber security awareness
Due to the prevalence of online services in modern society, such as internet banking and social media, it is important for users to have an understanding of basic security measures in order to keep themselves safe online. However, users often do not know how to make their online interactions secure, which demonstrates an educational need in this area. Gamification has grown in popularity in recent years and has been used to teach people about a range of subjects. This paper presents an exploratory study investigating the use of gamification techniques to educate average users about password security, with the aim of raising overall security awareness. To explore the impact of such techniques, a role-playing quiz application (RPG) was developed for the Android platform to educate users about password security. Results gained from the work highlightedthat users enjoyed learning via the use of the password application, and felt they benefitted from the inclusion of gamification techniques. Future work seeks to expand the prototype into a full solution, covering a range of security awareness issues
Characterization of gravity current formation for the use in detonation refraction experiments
Detonation propagation through an interface is being studied at Caltech. In these
experiments, the interface shape is determined by the gravity currents. This report
presents an experimental study of the formation and the development of these
gravity currents by an analog system in a water channel using water and salt water to
simulate the density differences in detonation experiments. The major parameters
such as the Reynolds number and the density difference were matched in both
experiments to be able to compare the gravity current in the water channel and the
gravity current in the Galcit detonation tube. In the present study, the gravity current
was generated by the removal of a plate, and was visualized by adding food dye. The
results confirm previous studies; Keulegan demonstrated in 1957 that the velocity of
the gravity current is a function of the square root of the density difference. The
interface is affect by the retracting of the plate which creates the wake effects. The
Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities on the upstream side of the gravity current create the
visualized mixing zones. Finally, this study revealed how the gravity current interface
into the Galcit detonation tube should develop and where the mixing zones should
occur
Non-adaptive Measurement-based Quantum Computation and Multi-party Bell Inequalities
Quantum correlations exhibit behaviour that cannot be resolved with a local
hidden variable picture of the world. In quantum information, they are also
used as resources for information processing tasks, such as Measurement-based
Quantum Computation (MQC). In MQC, universal quantum computation can be
achieved via adaptive measurements on a suitable entangled resource state. In
this paper, we look at a version of MQC in which we remove the adaptivity of
measurements and aim to understand what computational abilities still remain in
the resource. We show that there are explicit connections between this model of
computation and the question of non-classicality in quantum correlations. We
demonstrate this by focussing on deterministic computation of Boolean
functions, in which natural generalisations of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger
(GHZ) paradox emerge; we then explore probabilistic computation, via which
multipartite Bell Inequalities can be defined. We use this correspondence to
define families of multi-party Bell inequalities, which we show to have a
number of interesting contrasting properties.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, final version accepted for publicatio
A quasi-periodic oscillation in the blazar J1359+4011
The OVRO 40-m telescope has been monitoring the 15 GHz radio flux density of
over 1200 blazars since 2008. The 15 GHz light curve of the flat spectrum radio
quasar J1359+4011 shows a strong and persistent quasi-periodic oscillation. The
time-scale of the oscillation varies between 120 and 150 days over a
year time span. We interpret this as the active galactic nucleus mass-scaled
analog of low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations from Galactic microquasars,
or as evidence of modulation of the accretion flow by thermal instabilites in
the "inner" accretion disc.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Letter
A model of fasciculation and sorting in mixed populations of axons
We extend a recently proposed model (Chaudhuri et al., EPL 87, 20003 (2009))
aiming to describe the formation of fascicles of axons during neural
development. The growing axons are represented as paths of interacting directed
random walkers in two spatial dimensions. To mimic turnover of axons, whole
paths are removed and new walkers are injected with specified rates. In the
simplest version of the model, we use strongly adhesive short-range inter-axon
interactions that are identical for all pairs of axons. We generalize the model
to adhesive interactions of finite strengths and to multiple types of axons
with type-specific interactions. The dynamic steady state is characterized by
the position-dependent distribution of fascicle sizes. With distance in the
direction of axon growth, the mean fascicle size and emergent time scales grow
monotonically, while the degree of sorting of fascicles by axon type has a
maximum at a finite distance. To understand the emergence of slow time scales,
we develop an analytical framework to analyze the interaction between
neighboring fascicles.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures; version accepted for publication in Phys Rev
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