Promoting citizen participation in local governance: Case of the new rural construction Program in Binh Chanh district, Ho Chi Minh City

In the direction of enhanced democracy, citizen participation in public administration is also increasingly playing an important role in the process of sustainable development in developing countries. This study explores understanding of participation, barriers to participation as well as how to increase citizen participation in local governance. This study shows evidence of the importance of citizen participation in local governance. In other words, citizen participation helps the government to have better governance practices as well as contribute to ensuring the transparency, responsibility and efficiency of local government. Especially in the rural development program in Vietnam, citizen participation will help the locality have more resources for the new rural development process. This study was conducted by a case study in Binh Chanh district in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The study used qualitative methods and the emerging approach, the stakeholder approach and theories of public participation in governance to understand this phenomenon. In-depth interviews and secondary data use as the main data source. Specifically, data from interviews with 16 local people (in 3 groups: citizens; elected representatives; local officials) show differences in perceptions of participation and barriers as well as ways to increase citizen participation in local governance. This research contributes to knowledge related to participatory governance by clarifying the concept of participation, identifying barriers to participation as well as examining how citizens overcome through these barriers, or in other words, to increase citizen participation in governance activities. The study has profound that participation in local governance or greater empowerment of citizens in final decisions can strengthen democracy as well as limit mistakes in governance

Electrical Properties Of Reactive Magnetron Sputtered Vanadium Oxide Thin Films

It is well known that vanadium oxide can take many different forms. However for this study, only the amorphous phase was investigated. Amorphous vanadium oxide (VOx) thin films were deposited on thermally grown silicon dioxide by DC magnetron sputtering using a vanadium metal target in an argon / oxygen atmosphere. The driving force of this study was to investigate the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) and low resistivity in the amorphous films. Sheet resistance is very sensitive to small changes in temperature, making amorphous VOx very attractive to thermal sensor applications such as infrared detectors. To form the vanadium oxide, physical vapor deposition of vanadium metal at 200 Watts of DC power was used with varied amounts of oxygen in a primary argon atmosphere. During deposition, the concentration of oxygen was controlled by using a 20:80 mixture of O2 and Ar in conjunction with high purity Ar supply. Flow control techniques were derived and calculated to predict the percentage of oxygen before and during deposition to understand the reaction between the vanadium metal and oxygen. Concentrations of O2 in the deposition chamber were varied from 0.025% to 3.000% with the purpose of gaining an understanding of the affects of O2 concentration in amorphous VOx films. TCR and resistivity measurements were performed to characterize the films. The results showed a resistivity decrement with decreasing oxygen concentration. The films with lower concentrations of oxygen were found to have better TCR values then those with higher percentages of oxygen. To further reduce the resistivity of the VOx and maintain the TCR value, co-sputtering of noble metals (gold and platinum) with VOx was studied. The metals were co-sputtered at various power settings with the vanadium oxide reactive process at a fixed percentage of oxygen. The TCR and resistivity results showed that the additions of Au and Pt into VOx reduced the resistivity. However, only Au was found to improve TCR value. The results of these experiments showed that by reducing the amount of oxygen in the film, the ratio between TCR and resistivity further improved. Mechanical limits of the gas delivery system and the relatively low sensitivity to oxygen detection, gas flow control is limited when sputtering with only a single target. Several targets were therefore used during sputtering to allow for higher gas flows thereby increasing the effective sensitivity of the oxygen control. To increase the amount of available vanadium and still have a sufficient amount of detectible oxygen present, four vanadium targets were sputtered simultaneously. The measurements appeared to have a trend of increase in TCR values with a decrease in resistivity. For an ideal case, thermal sensor material should incorporate high TCR and low resistivity for better sensitivity. The amorphous vanadium oxide deposited by 4 vanadium targets seems to satisfy that requirement. In conclusion, a novel method has been established to fabricate amorphous vanadium oxide thin films with high TCR and low resistivity for infrared detectors

On the set of divisors with zero geometric defect

Let $f: \mathbb{C} \to X$ be a transcendental holomorphic curve into a complex projective manifold $X$. Let $L$ be a very ample line bundle on $X$. Let $s$ be a very generic holomorphic section of $L$ and $D$ the zero divisor given by $s$. We prove that the \emph{geometric} defect of $D$ (defect of truncation $1$) with respect to $f$ is zero. We also prove that $f$ almost misses general enough analytic subsets on $X$ of codimension $2$

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationSinglet fission (SF) is a process that occurs in some organic semiconductors whereby the photoexcited singlet exciton (SE) undergoes internal conversion to a multiexciton triplet-triplet (TT) state, which subsequently splits into two independent triplet excitons. This process was first observed in crystalline acenes (most notably pentacene) in the 1960s. Renewed interest on singlet fission has been seen dramatically increased in recent years because of its potential in harvesting charges from the triplet excitons in organic photovoltaic cells, thereby doubling the photocurrents. It was shown that the cell external quantum efficiency may exceed 100%, and thus it could potentially overcome the Shockley-Queisser PV efficiency limit under the sun illumination. In this work, we used various optical techniques in our research arsenal to uncover the intrachain singlet fission in a new class of OPV materials, namely low bandgap pi-conjugated polymers, which was used as the electron donor in bulk hetero-junction solar cells. These copolymers produced a record high power conversion efficiency of ~ 8% in an optimum OPV device. Particularly, we introduced two new novel techniques, the nanosecond to millisecond transient photo-induced absorption and transient magneto-photoinduced absorption, dubbed t-PA and t-MPA, respectively, to unravel the population exchange between the singlet exciton and triplet pair (TT) state, which is a new quantum state constituted by two correlated triplet excitons. Using the t-PA in picosecond time domain, we detected the TT state that appears simultaneously with the singlet exciton SE within 300fs time resolution of our experimental setup. The picosecond t-MPA technique further elucidates the nature of TT state, showing its coupling to the SE through their spin exchange interaction with the interaction strength as large as ~30mT. Using the t-MPA together with the ns t-PA, we found that the TT state later separates into two uncorrelated triplets in microsecond time domain. In the copolymers/PC71BM blend, which was used as the active layer in OPV devices, the TT state dissociates, by the unique spin conserved process, into one polaron pair in triplet configuration, PP_T ; leaving behind one triplet on the copolymer chains within 20ps. The PP_T could either dissociate into free charges to generate photocurrents in cell devices or recombine back to triplet excitons. Here we observed the “back reaction”, PP_T --> triplets, in nanosecond time regime, which we identify as a loss mechanism for charge photogeneration in solar cell devices. We also introduce a method to reduce the carrier loss mechanism by the “back reaction” of PP into triplet excitons on the copolymer chains, by adding spin ½ radicals; this method may be especially suitable for copolymer-based OPV cells

Understanding complementary multi-layer collaborative heuristics for adaptive caching in heterogeneous mobile opportunistic networks

Current research aims to deal with emerging challenges of the opportunistic discovery of content stored in remote mobile publishers and the delivery to the subscribers in heterogeneous mobile opportunistic networks. Innovative network and service architectures leverage in-network caching to improve transmission efficiency, reduce delay and handle disconnections. In this paper, we investigate the influences of multi-dimensional heuristics utilised by our adaptive collaborative caching framework CafRepCache on the performance of content dissemination and query in heterogeneous mobile opportunistic environments. We consider the complementary multi-layer heuristics that combine social driven, resources driven, ego network driven and content popularity driven analytics. We extensively evaluate the performance of each complementary heuristic and discuss the impact of each one on every layer of our caching framework across heterogeneous real-world mobility, connectivity traces and use YouTube dataset for different workload and content popularity patterns. We show that the multilayer heuristics enable CafRepCache to be responsive to dynamically changing network topology, congestion avoidance and varying patterns of content publishers/subscribers which balances the trade-off that achieves higher cache hit ratio, delivery success ratios while keeping lower delays and packet loss