Is There a Path for Green Growth? Evidence from India

This paper uses historical temperature fluctuations in India to identify its effects on economic growth rates. Using a climate-adjusted form of the Solow growth model, I find that one degree Celsius increase in temperature decreases GDP per capita growth by 0.71%. This finding informs debates over the role of climate on economic development and suggests the possibility of a green path for economic growth, a policy agenda that is both sustainable and pro-growth

A Case Study of NGO-Government Collaboration in Vietnam: Partnership Dynamics Explained through Contexts, Incentives, and Barriers

Collaboration between international NGOs (INGOs) and governmental organizations (GOs) have contributed significantly to the goals of poverty alleviation and agricultural development in developing countries. Much of the literatures on NGO-GO partnerships have explored theoretically or empirically what motivate and hinder cross-sector collaboration. But not many have studied cross-sector collaboration from both analytical and descriptive perspectives. This study filled in this gap by drawing from previous studies a conceptual framework through which contexts, incentives, and barriers that influence INGO-GO partnerships were described and explained. The researcher adopted a qualitative case-study method with emergent design. Personal interviews were conducted with 20 key informants, including eight Vietnamese staff from one INGO and 12 government officials from six GOs who partnered with the INGO. All participating organizations were institutions serving agricultural and rural development in the south of Vietnam. The data were collected in 2010 and analyzed using the software package ATLAS.ti. The results showed four categories that interact to form a framework of a dynamic continuum of partnership development. The four categories included conditioning factors, incentives, barriers, and feedback loop. The categories held the following themes: 1) socio-political contexts and organizational natures for conditioning factors, 2) shared missions, resource mobilization, capacity building, and networking for incentives, 3) ideological conflicts, structural constraints, and operational hurdles for barriers, and 4) reflections and recommendations for feedback loop. The study contributed a theoretical- and empirical-based perspective on INGO-GO partnerships in post-reform countries. It provided a framework that comprehensively describes and explains partnership dynamics. The study also shared knowledge of the intricacies of INGO-GO partnerships in rural Vietnam. For institutions serving agricultural and rural development, the study could assist in strategic management to minimize constraints and maximize opportunities in collaborative environments

Idiomatic creativity: a pragmatic model for creative idiomatic uses in authentic English discourse

This thesis is a corpus-based investigation from a pragmatic perspective or the phenomenon of idiomatic creativity. The ultimate aim of the thesis is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence of the intertwining relationships between different factors of idiomatic creativity and the effects of such relationships on the reassessment of the determinants of idiomatic creativity in context-specific communicative events. It has often been suggested in the psycholinguistics tradition that the semantic transparency of some idioms facilitates the creative manipulations of such idioms in discourse, while the lack thereof hinders creativity in some others. In other words, the internal characteristics of idioms, including compositionality, analysability and motivation, which contribute towards transparency, arc postulated to determine idiomatic creativity. While theoretical arguments and illustrative examples appear to support such a hypothesis, empirical validation of the hypothesis using large bodies of authentic data is still required for it to gain acceptance in the linguistic community. In the first half of the thesis, therefore, quantitative analyses of corpus data and statistical tests arc carried out to empirically validate the psycho-linguistic hypothesis concerning the semantic determinants of idiomatic creativity. It is found in the analyses and tests that there are significant trends in the data that point towards the prevalence or transparent idioms over opaque ones in terms of both the range and the frequency of their creative manifestations in authentic English discourse. In the second half of the thesis, with a view to flesh out the otherwise decontextualised and superficial results from such quantitative analyses, qualitative analyses of individual instances of idiom variants in the data are carried out, thus elaborating on the varying degrees or importance of the underlying factors of idiomatic creativity and, notably, their interaction with one another in specific contexts. The results suggest that, together with idioms' semantic characteristics, external factors, including context, cognitive constraints and phraseological constraints, also contribute to idiomatic creativity. It is further revealed that the roles of the facilitating and constraining factors of idiomatic creativity vary according to the particular context-specific types of variant, in which context has the overarching power to overrule certain constraints as well as to disambiguate unusual creative uses. As such, the true functional profile of idiomatic creativity is argued to be best described and predicted in relation to context. A context-based model of idiomatic creativity in authentic English discourse is therefore proposed in this thesis in the hope that it will contribute to the existing literature on idiomatic creativity and offer a better understanding of the possibilities and constraints on the phenomenon in real life discourse

絶食刺激によりHSP70発現が増強することで、TRAILを介したNK細胞の活性化が生じる

広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(医学)Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Sciencedoctora

Aiming to the superior of phosphor pattern: Influence of SiO2 nanoparticles on photoluminescence intensification of YAG:Ce

Yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG: RE) rare-earth-doped phosphors have great photoluminescence (PL) characteristics and are commonly used in light-emitting rectifying tubes. The RE elements used in these phosphors, however, are precious and in shortage. The production of phosphorus containing a limited amount of RE content is therefore essential. One solution is to manufacture Nano composite phosphors that use an inexpensive and more easily available content as a matrix for RE oxide. In this research, we developed a YAG: Ce/SiO2 Nano composite using a sol-gel procedure; in order to impulse micelle formation and agglomeration, poly (ethylene glycol) and urea have been added, respectively. X-ray diffraction, scanning and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were used to characterize the Nano composites. In proposing an explanation for this enhancement, we defined the concentration of SiO2 that produced optimum PL enhancement and used geometric models as well as the characterization consequences. Our results demonstrated that a 10% SiO2 concentration produced a 120% PL intensity of pure YAG:Ce. TEM analysis revealed that SiO2 nanoparticles filled the voids between the YAG:Ce crystals' single grain borders, hence inhibiting light scattering, resulting in increased PL. This procedure would be beneficial for the synthesis of low-RE and high-PL phosphors on a wide scale

Foreign direct investment, financial development and economic growth in Asian developing countries

This research investigates the role of domestic financial development in enhancing the positive effects of foreign direct investment (hereafter, FDI) on economic growth in Asian developing countries. In other words, we examine whether countries with a better domestic financial system can utilize FDI more efficiently. The empirical analysis uses balanced panel data of 24 Asian developing countries in the period 1995-2009. This research applies the various models and techniques in panel data regression. Linear static models for panel data, including constant coefficients model or pooled regression model (POOLED), fixed effects regression model (FEM) and random effects regression model (REM) are employed. We analyze all models and employ several kinds of test including poolability test, Hausman test, LM test, fixed effects tests and Wald tests to select the most appropriated estimated model. The research findings show that FDI alone does not have direct effect on economic growth but does have when combined with financial development. Well-developed domestic financial markets promote the process of technological diffusion associated with FDI in Asian developing countries. Therefore, FDI and domestic financial development are complementary in increasing the rate of economic growth in the region. There is a threshold level of domestic financial development above which FDI starts to have positive impacts on economic growth

Benefits of triple-layer remote phosphor structure in improving color quality and luminous flux of white LED

Remote phosphor structure has higher luminous efficiency comparing to that of both conformal phosphor and in-cup phosphor structures. However, it is hard to control the color quality of remote phosphor structure, and this issue has become one of the most researchable objectives to many researchers in recent years. Up to now, there are two remote phosphor structures applied to improve the color quality, including dual-layer phosphor configuration and triple-layer phosphor configuration. The purpose of this research is to select one of those configurations to have multi-chip white LEDs (WLEDs) achieved the highest color rendering index (CRI), color quality scale (CQS), luminous efficacy (LE), and color uniformity. In this research, WLEDs with two correlated color temperatures (CCT) of 6600K and 7700K were applied. The obtained results showed that triple-layer phosphor configuration is more outstanding in CRI, CQS, and LE. Moreover, the color deviation has been significantly reduced, which means the color uniformity has been enhanced with the application of triple-layer phosphor configuration. These results can be proven by scattering properties of phosphor layers based on Mie theory. Thus, the researched results have become a reliable and valuable reference for manufacturing higher-quality WLEDs

The application of (Y,Gd)BO3:Tb3+ and CaGa2S4:Mn2+ phosphors to remote white light-emitting diodes

The remote phosphor structure is superior to the conformal phosphor and the in-cup phosphor in terms of lighting efficiency; however, managing the color quality of the remote phosphor structure has been a nuisance to the manufacturers. To address this problem, many researches were conducted and the results suggested that using dual-layer phosphor structure and triple-layer phosphor structure could improve the color quality in remote phosphor structures. The purpose of this article is to study which one between the two configurations mentioned above allows multi-chip white LEDs (WLEDs) to reach highest indexes in color rendering index (CRI), color quality scale (CQS), luminous flux (LF), and color uniformity. The color temperature of the WLEDs used for the experiments in this article is 8500 K. The result of this research shows that the triple-layer phosphor configuration has higher CRI, CQS, and LE and also able to reduce color deviation resulting in better color uniformity. This conclusion can be verified by analyzing the scattering features of the phosphor layers using the Mie-theory. Being verifiable increases the reliability of the research result and makes it a valuable reference for producing better quality WLEDs