THE URBAN HOUSING MARKET IN A TRANSITIONAL ECONOMY: SHANGHAI AS A CASE STUDY

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Geography, 2006The urban housing market has been an important research topic for urban geographers and urban economists. After 1990 when former communist regimes were transformed from planned to market-oriented economies and globalization accelerated, the urban housing markets of the transitional nations attracted increasing attention from academia. Most of these studies addressed housing market structure, housing price and residential location. Similarly, this research examines housing market structure and housing price in the newly established housing market in Shanghai. This research begins with an exploration of market structure and market players and the interactions between them. Market structure sets the framework within which market players' maximize their market related interests. China's reform and its integration into the world economy have brought many players into its urban housing market. These players not only have unique interests in the market but also share common interests to some extent. Players include international institutions, private companies, and traditional forces, such as the government and work units. It is necessary to understand market structure and players and how they interact because this knowledge is fundamental for any further investigation of the market. Moreover, the analysis of market structure and market players adds texture to the following empirical analysis. Housing price is another focus of this research. The determinants of housing price and the geographical distribution of housing price are the main research topics of housing price studies. Previous literature has documented the effects of houses' structural and locational characteristics on housing price. However, they rarely pay attention to the influences of 'macro factors' (such as FDI, economic transition (ET) and urban transformation (UT)) on housing price, although these factors do play crucial roles. Using hedonic modeling techniques, this research conducts quantitative analyses of the impacts of 'macro factors' on housing price. The hedonic models are fitted for both the whole housing market and individual submarkets. Since the modeling results may be affected by definition of submarkets and there are many methods to delimit the submarkets, this research also explores an appropriate method of market segregation for Shanghai's housing market

Utilization of Molecular Simulation Software Gaussian 03 to Design Absorbent for CO2 Capture

AbstractA preliminary study on the interaction between molecules of absorbent for CO2 absorption was undertaken using Gaussian 03 molecular simulation software. The results indicate that the molecular interaction energy has strong correlations with Henry's constant. The lower interaction energy between molecules, solvent molecules form an “associated complex” more stability, and therefore the worse the effect of CO2 absorption

Dynamic 3D Urban Scene Modeling Using Multiple Pushbroom Mosaics

In this paper, a unified, segmentation-based approach is proposed to deal with both stereo reconstruction and moving objects detection problems using multiple stereo mosaics. Each set of parallel-perspective (pushbroom) stereo mosaics is generated from a video sequence captured by a single video camera. First a colorsegmentation approach is used to extract the so-called natural matching primitives from a reference view of a pair of stereo mosaics to facilitate both 3D reconstruction of textureless urban scenes and man-made moving targets (e.g. vehicles). Multiple pairs of stereo mosaics are used to improve the accuracy and robustness in 3D recovery and occlusion handling. Moving targets are detected by inspecting their 3D anomalies, either violating the epipolar geometry of the pushbroom stereo or exhibiting abnormal 3D structure. Experimental results on both simulated and real video sequences are provided to show the effectiveness of our approach. 1

Application of network transposition in the design of OTA-C filters and oscillators

Recent advances in analog integrated circuit and signal processing have shown that the current-mode approach is superior to the voltage-mode in terms of its wide bandwidth, high speed, low voltage and power. As a wide range of voltage-mode analogue circuits already exist, a straightforward method of converting these voltage-mode circuits to current-mode circuits would be very useful. The network transposition, introduced by Bhattacharyya and Swamy as early as in 1971, provides a perfect solution to this question of conversion from voltage-mode to current-mode circuits. A vast body of literature already exists concerning voltage-mode OTA-C filter structures. At the same time, many current-mode OTA-C filter structures are being reported in the literature. These two apparently independent areas of research and development could be unified by the application of the principle of network transposition. For this reason, an intensive investigation on the OTA-C structures is conducted. The result of this investigation shows that transposition relationship could be used to advantage in deriving current-mode filter structures from the voltage-mode filter structures and vice versa. The principle of transposition has been extended to oscillator circuits to derive new OTA-C oscillator structures from known ones. The concept of transposition has been extended to differential input dual-output (DIDO) structures, since such structures can increase the common-mode rejection ratio, eliminate the even-order harmonic distortion components and reduce the effects of power supply noise. The theoretical work presented in the thesis is verified by simulation results as well as by practical circuits using discrete resistors, capacitors and OTA devices. In addition, an oscillator is fabricated in a 0.18 om CMOS process to further verify the validity of network transposition. The measurement result shows good agreement with the theoretical analysis

Cross-lingual knowledge linking across wiki knowledge bases

Wikipedia becomes one of the largest knowledge bases on the Web. It has attracted 513 million page views per day in January 2012. However, one critical issue for Wikipedia is that articles in different language are very unbalanced. For example, the number of articles on Wikipedia in English has reached 3.8 million, while the number of Chinese articles is still less than half million and there are only 217 thousand cross-lingual links between articles of the two languages. On the other hand, there are more than 3.9 million Chinese Wi-ki articles on Baidu Baike and Hudong.com, two popular encyclopedias in Chinese. One important question is how to link the knowledge entries distributed in different knowledge bases. This will immensely enrich the information in the on-line knowledge bases and benefit many applications. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-lingual knowledge link-ing and present a linkage factor graph model. Features are defined according to some interesting observations. Exper-iments on the Wikipedia data set show that our approach can achieve a high precision of 85.8 % with a recall of 88.1%. The approach found 202,141 new cross-lingual links between English Wikipedia and Baidu Baike

Real-time indoor assistive localization with mobile omnidirectional vision and cloud GPU acceleration

In this paper we propose a real-time assistive localization approach to help blind and visually impaired people in navigating an indoor environment. The system consists of a mobile vision front end with a portable panoramic lens mounted on a smart phone, and a remote image feature-based database of the scene on a GPU-enabled server. Compact and elective omnidirectional image features are extracted and represented in the smart phone front end, and then transmitted to the server in the cloud. These features of a short video clip are used to search the database of the indoor environment via image-based indexing to find the location of the current view within the database, which is associated with floor plans of the environment. A median-filter-based multi-frame aggregation strategy is used for single path modeling, and a 2D multi-frame aggregation strategy based on the candidates’ distribution densities is used for multi-path environmental modeling to provide a final location estimation. To deal with the high computational cost in searching a large database for a realistic navigation application, data parallelism and task parallelism properties are identified in the database indexing process, and computation is accelerated by using multi-core CPUs and GPUs. User-friendly HCI particularly for the visually impaired is designed and implemented on an iPhone, which also supports system configurations and scene modeling for new environments. Experiments on a database of an eight-floor building are carried out to demonstrate the capacity of the proposed system, with real-time response (14 fps) and robust localization results

The mechanism and therapeutic strategies for neovascular glaucoma secondary to diabetic retinopathy

Neovascular glaucoma (NVG) is a devastating secondary glaucoma characterized by the appearance of neovascular over the iris and the proliferation of fibrovascular tissue in the anterior chamber angle. Proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) is one of the leading causes of NVG. Currently increasing diabetes population drive the prevalence rate of NVG into a fast-rising lane. The pathogenesis underlying NVG makes it refractory to routine management for other types of glaucoma in clinical practice. The combination of panretinal photocoagulation (PRP), anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) injections, anti-glaucoma drugs, surgical intervention as well as blood glucose control is needed. Early diagnosis and aggressive treatment in time are crucial in halting the neovascularization process and preserving vision. This review provides an overview of NVG secondary to diabetic retinopathy (DR), including the epidemiology, pathogenesis and management, so as to provide a better understanding as well as potential therapeutic strategies for future treatment