The Relationship between Interest Rates, Income, GDP Growth and House Prices

This paper will analyse the relationship between interest rate, income, GDP growth and house prices. First, the control power of interest rate for the prices is limited. Second, people’s income increases, thus that also increases the demand for housing. But house prices are too high and will cause buying pressure. Third, the real estate industry’s growth and GDP growth have inseparable relationship, they interact with each other

Electric field alignment of diblock copolymer thin films.

By anchoring random copolymers to the substrates, the interfacial interactions were tuned precisely and dependence of the orientation of lamellar microdomains in thin films on interfacial interactions was investigated quantitatively. A critical film thickness was found, below which a parallel alignment of the lamellar microdomains was seen throughout the film and depends upon the strength of the interfacial interactions. The electric field alignment process is a competition between the applied electric field and surface fields. In the early stages, the surface field dominates. A mixture of orientations of the lamellae was found if the interfacial interactions were not balanced. However, in the presence of lithium ions (210ppm), lamellar microdomains were aligned along the applied electric field direction throughout the film, regardless of the strong interactions of blocks with substrate. For cylindrical microdomain forming diblock copolymer thin films, starting from a poorly-ordered state, surface fields and opposed electric fields biased the cylinder orientation. With time upon annealing, the cylinders are locally disrupted to form ellipsoidal shape microdomains that connected into cylinders in the applied field direction. Starting from an ordered state with cylinders parallel to the surface, the applied field enhanced fluctuations at the interfaces of the microdomains and disrupted cylinders into spheres. This transition is similar to thermoreversible cylinder-to-sphere order-order transition. With time, the spheres deformed into ellipsoids and reconnected forming cylindrical microdomains oriented at ∼45° with respect to the applied field, which subsequently aligned along the field direction. These studies were complemented by studies on an electric field induced disordered sphere-to-cylinder transition in thin films. Under an electric field, the asymmetric diblock copolymer formed spherical microdomains that were deformed into ellipsoids and, with time, interconnected into cylindrical microdomains oriented in the direction of the applied electric field. A route to control the microdomain orientation in three dimensions in diblock copolymer thin films was also studied by use of two orthogonal, external fields. An elongational flow field was applied to obtain an in-plane orientation of the microdomains of the copolymer melt and an electric field, applied normal to the surface, was then used to further align the microdomains

Model-based Curvilinear Network Extraction and Tracking toward Quantitative Analysis of Biopolymer Networks

Curvilinear biopolymer networks pervade living systems. They are routinely imaged by fluorescence microscopy to gain insight into their structural, mechanical, and dynamic properties. Image analysis can facilitate understanding the mechanisms of their formation and their biological functions from a quantitative viewpoint. Due to the variability in network geometry, topology and dynamics as well as often low resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio in images, segmentation and tracking networks from these images is challenging. In this dissertation, we propose a complete framework for extracting the geometry and topology of curvilinear biopolymer networks, and also tracking their dynamics from multi-dimensional images. The proposed multiple Stretching Open Active Contours (SOACs) can identify network centerlines and junctions, and infer plausible network topology. Combined with a $k$-partite matching algorithm, temporal correspondences among all the detected filaments can be established. This work enables statistical analysis of structural parameters of biopolymer networks as well as their dynamics. Quantitative evaluation using simulated and experimental images demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, a principled method of optimizing key parameters without ground truth is proposed for attaining the best extraction result for any type of images. The proposed methods are implemented into a usable open source software ``SOAX\u27\u27. Besides network extraction and tracking, SOAX provides a user-friendly cross-platform GUI for interactive visualization, manual editing and quantitative analysis. Using SOAX to analyze several types of biopolymer networks demonstrates the potential of the proposed methods to help answer key questions in cell biology and biophysics from a quantitative viewpoint

Cooperative order and excitation spectra in the bicomponent spin networks

A ferrimagnetic spin model composed of $S=1/2$ spin-dimers and $S=5/2$ spin-chains is studied by combining the bond-operator representation (for $S=1/2$ spin-dimers) and Holstein-Primakoff transformation (for $S=5/2$ spins). A finite interaction $J_{\rm DF}$ between the spin-dimer and the spin chain makes the spin chains ordered antiferromagnetically and the spin dimers polarized. The effective interaction between the spin chains, mediated by the spin dimers, is calculated up to the third order. The staggered magnetization in the spin dimer is shown proportional to $J_{\rm DF}$. It presents an effective staggered field reacting on the spin chains. The degeneracy of the triplons is lifted due to the chain magnetization and a mode with longitudinal polarization is identified. Due to the triplon-magnon interaction, the hybridized triplon-like excitations show different behaviors near the vanishing $J_{\rm DF}$. On the other hand, the hybridized magnon-like excitations open a gap $\Delta_A\sim J_{\rm DF}$. These results consist well with the experiments on Cu$_{2}$Fe$_{2}$Ge$_{4}$O$_{13}$.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

External Corporate Social Capital and Technology Innovation Performance: Conceptual Model and Empirical Analysis

Based on the research of relationship between corporate social capital and technology innovation, this paper raised conceptual models and theoretical assumptions of corporate social capital influencing technological innovation performance, and analyzed in depth how the corporate social capital affected corporate technology innovation performance by using resource acquisition, according to questionnaire survey and multiple regression analysis from 210 Chinese companies in Zhejiang Province

Mode Interferences of VLF Waves in the Presence of an Anisotropic Terrestrial Waveguide

It is known that the very low frequency (VLF) signals propagating at long distances over a terrestrial waveguide will experience a diurnal interference across the sunrise and sunset transitions. Early studies indicated that cascaded terrestrial waveguides can be applied to investigate the cycle-clip behaviors of amplitude and phase for VLF waves, with an abrupt effective height change by 20 km to represent the night and day transitions. Based on the knowledge, this chapter starts with some basic concepts on VLF wave propagation in the presence of an anisotropic terrestrial waveguide. Then, by performing the method of field matching at the discontinuous junctions, the coefficients of transmitted and scattered vectors are resulted from two derived matrix equations. Finally, the synthetic fields are calculated to simulate the VLF waves, which are subjected to an oblique geomagnetic field during long-distance propagation. The purpose of the present chapter is to illustrate the disturbing nature during sunrise and sunset for the VLF waves with periodic variations in amplitudes interfered by multimodes over long propagation paths