Thirty Years of Agricultural Transition in China (1977-2007) and the "New Rural Campaign"

Agriculture in China has experienced a compelling growth in the early 1980s, a buoyant upbeat in the early 1990s, and an extended period of low growth after 1995. Decollectivization, mar-ket reforms, public investments and technology have played a critical role during this overall successful process. However, the transition has also led to increasing inequalities between the agricultural and non-agricultural population, and substantial institutional issues remain to be fully addressed. The Chinese government is now reemphasizing agriculture and rural develop-ment under its New Rural Campaign with the objective to address rural-urban inequalities, but a stronger emphasis on participation and tenure reforms is warranted.agriculture, rural development, transition, institutions, China, Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development, O43, P21, P32,

Documentation of a multi-topic questionnaire-based survey on sustainable resource use in rural China

This Discussion Paper documents a survey conducted in rural China in 2005. A multi-topic survey funded by the Sino-German international Training Program Sustainable Resource Use in North China, the project covers farm management, land property rights and rural credit access on the North China Plain. From a credit standpoint, this paper covers questionnaire design, sample, survey implementation, data entry, a brief assessment of the overall experience, as well as lessons drawn. -- G E R M A N V E R S I O N: Dieses Diskussionspapier dokumentiert die im ländlichen China im Jahre 2005 durchgeführte Erhebung. Diese ist durch eine Vielzahl von Themen gekennzeichnet und durch das Sino-German International Training Program Sustainable Resource Use in North China in China gefördert. So werden unter anderem Farm-Management, Eigentumsrechte an Land und Verfügbarkeit von Krediten im ländlichen Raum des nordchinesischen Flachlandes betrachtet. Hinsichtlich der Kreditverfügbarkeit wird die Ausgestaltung des Fragebogens, die Stichproben erhebung, die Umfrageimplementierung, der Dateneintrag, die Ausreißer und Fehlwerte betrachtet sowie eine kurze Aussage zu den Erfahrungen und Erkenntnissen gemacht.Questionnaire,Survey,Credit access,Household model,Categorical variables,Stata,Fragebogen,Erhebung,Kreditverfügbarkeit,Datenbearbeitung

Does Targeting a Designated Area Crowd out the other Preservation Programs’ Efforts?

Maryland has introduced a number of land preservation programs over the past 40 years to permanently preserve resource lands. Although new programs can increase the number of acres being preserved, they might have unintended impact on land preservation due to interaction with existing land preservation programs. The Maryland Rural Legacy program began in 1997 by designating large contiguous blocks of land and focusing its preservation efforts only in those areas. The program’s could attract existing programs to shift their preservation effort into this designated rural legacy areas if there exist economy of scale or they subsidized existing programs’ effort through matching funds. Alternatively, it could crowd out the others’ preservation efforts in these areas if the RL program raises the cost of preserving there. Using parcel level data and a property score matching method, we find: 1) parcels in designated RL areas are more attractive to preservation programs, 2) the RL program crowds in the preservation effort of the other programs, and 3) RL program preserves more parcels and acres of land in these areas due to increased funding.Crowding effects, Designated preservation areas, Land preservation, Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q18, Q24, Q28, Q58,

Do Exports Raise Productivity? Plant-level Evidence from the Colombian Agri-food Industries

Using detailed plant-level manufacturing Census data from the Colombian Agri-food industries, we show that exports raise plant-level productivity by about 15 to 20 percent. However, the estimates reveal that efficiency in plants that become persistent exporters, i.e. plants that service foreign markets at least 30 percent of the time during our sample years 1981-1991, increases about 30 percent upon their entry into foreign markets, while productivity in plants that become only occasional exporters does not change at all. Hence, the positive impact of exports on productivity for is driven by the large positive impact on persistent exporters. To identify the effect of exports on plant-level productivity we employ the Levinsohn-Petrin (2003) measure of total factor productivity and a difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimator. The estimates reveal that productivity in plants that become persistent exporters, i.e. plants that service foreign markets at least 30 percent of the time during our sample years 1981-1991, rises about 30 percent upon their entry into foreign markets. Productivity in plants that become only occasional exporters, on the other hand, does not change. We perform a number of robustness checks, all of which confirm our baseline results.exports, productivity, difference-in-differences, propensity score matching, International Development, International Relations/Trade, Production Economics, Productivity Analysis, Q17, F12, Q12, O33,

Learning Discriminative Features for Person Re-Identification

For fulfilling the requirements of public safety in modern cities, more and more large-scale surveillance camera systems are deployed, resulting in an enormous amount of visual data. Automatically processing and interpreting these data promote the development and application of visual data analytic technologies. As one of the important research topics in surveillance systems, person re-identification (re-id) aims at retrieving the target person across non-overlapping camera-views that are implemented in a number of distributed space-time locations. It is a fundamental problem for many practical surveillance applications, eg, person search, cross-camera tracking, multi-camera human behavior analysis and prediction, and it received considerable attentions nowadays from both academic and industrial domains. Learning discriminative feature representation is an essential task in person re-id. Although many methodologies have been proposed, discriminative re-id feature extraction is still a challenging problem due to: (1) Intra- and inter-personal variations. The intrinsic properties of the camera deployment in surveillance system lead to various changes in person poses, view-points, illumination conditions etc. This may result in the large intra-personal variations and/or small inter-personal variations, thus incurring problems in matching person images. (2) Domain variations. The domain variations between different datasets give rise to the problem of generalization capability of re-id model. Directly applying a re-id model trained on one dataset to another one usually causes a large performance degradation. (3) Difficulties in data creation and annotation. Existing person re-id methods, especially deep re-id methods, rely mostly on a large set of inter-camera identity labelled training data, requiring a tedious data collection and annotation process. This leads to poor scalability in practical person re-id applications. Corresponding to the challenges in learning discriminative re-id features, this thesis contributes to the re-id domain by proposing three related methodologies and one new re-id setting: (1) Gaussian mixture importance estimation. Handcrafted features are usually not discriminative enough for person re-id because of noisy information, such as background clutters. To precisely evaluate the similarities between person images, the main task of distance metric learning is to filter out the noisy information. Keep It Simple and Straightforward MEtric (KISSME) is an effective method in person re-id. However, it is sensitive to the feature dimensionality and cannot capture the multi-modes in dataset. To this end, a Gaussian Mixture Importance Estimation re-id approach is proposed, which exploits the Gaussian Mixture Models for estimating the observed commonalities of similar and dissimilar person pairs in the feature space. (2) Unsupervised domain-adaptive person re-id based on pedestrian attributes. In person re-id, person identities are usually not overlapped among different domains (or datasets) and this raises the difficulties in generalizing re-id models. Different from person identity, pedestrian attributes, eg., hair length, clothes type and color, are consistent across different domains (or datasets). However, most of re-id datasets lack attribute annotations. On the other hand, in the field of pedestrian attribute recognition, there is a number of datasets labeled with attributes. Exploiting such data for re-id purpose can alleviate the shortage of attribute annotations in re-id domain and improve the generalization capability of re-id model. To this end, an unsupervised domain-adaptive re-id feature learning framework is proposed to make full use of attribute annotations. Specifically, an existing unsupervised domain adaptation method has been extended to transfer attribute-based features from attribute recognition domain to the re-id domain. With the proposed re-id feature learning framework, the domain invariant feature representations can be effectively extracted. (3) Intra-camera supervised person re-id. Annotating the large-scale re-id datasets requires a tedious data collection and annotation process and therefore leads to poor scalability in practical person re-id applications. To overcome this fundamental limitation, a new person re-id setting is considered without inter-camera identity association but only with identity labels independently annotated within each camera-view. This eliminates the most time-consuming and tedious inter-camera identity association annotating process and thus significantly reduces the amount of human efforts required during annotation. It hence gives rise to a more scalable and more feasible learning scenario, which is named as Intra-Camera Supervised (ICS) person re-id. Under this ICS setting, a new re-id method, i.e., Multi-task Mulit-label (MATE) learning method, is formulated. Given no inter-camera association, MATE is specially designed for self-discovering the inter-camera identity correspondence. This is achieved by inter-camera multi-label learning under a joint multi-task inference framework. In addition, MATE can also efficiently learn the discriminative re-id feature representations using the available identity labels within each camera-view

The expression and localization of cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding proteins in the retina.

The current status of our knowledge of synaptic plasticity comes largely from studies of the hippocampus and the context of learning and memory. We remain largely ignorant of plasticity in other neural systems and contexts. The molecular basis of plasticity has recently been given new impetus due to the discovery of a local control mechanism which can regulate protein synthesis at stimulated synapses. This involves the use of cytoplasmic polyadenylation binding proteins (CPEBs) to regulate translation. The studies presented here attempt to show that these molecular components are present in the retina, a part of the central nervous system that has been seen, historically, as not plastic. Methods used. RT-PCR was used to determine the presence of mRNAs in tissue. In situ hybridization and immunofluorescence microscopy were used for localization of mRNAs and proteins respectively. Real-time PCR and Western blots were used for quantifications of mRNA and proteins during postnatal development. A bioinformatics program CPE detector and 3\u27 RACE were used to identify potential mRNA targets for CPEB1 in the UTR databases and in the retina respectively. The PAT assay was used to determine the length of poly(A) tails for some potential mRNA targets. Data mining and sequence alignment were used to identify alternatively spliced isoforms of CPEB3. Major results. Our results demonstrated that CPEB1-4 were all present in the retina. The four CPEBs had similar distributions in the inner retina: predominantly in the retinal ganglion cell layer, and to a less extent, in the inner nuclear layer. However, CPEB1 had a laminar pattern in the inner plexiform layer, whereas CPEB3 was diffuse. The presence of CPEB1 was minimal in the outer plexiform layer in contrast to CPEB3. During postnatal development the levels of CPEB1, 3 and 4 were up-regulated; whereas the level of CPEB2 was constant. Potential mRNAs were identified as targets of CPEB1; some mRNA targets demonstrated elongated poly(A) tails at postnatal day7 or day12, consistent with the up-regulation of CPEB1 at these ages. Multiple isoforms, including a novel one, were identified for CPEB3. The alternative splicing of CPEB3 could occur both in the UTRs and in the coding region. Major conclusions/significance. Our data demonstrated that more than one CPEB paralog is present in mouse retina. Potential mRNA targets for CPEB1 were present in the retina and gained elongated poly(A) tail in accordance with the up-regulation of CPEB1 during development. The increases of CPEB1, 3 and 4 during the development indicate a possible role of such CPEBs in synaptogenesis. Continuing up-regulation of CPEB1, 3 and 4 also indicate a role in the adult retina. Alternative splicing in the UTRs of CPEB3 indicates a complex regulation of CPEB3; multiple isoforms of CPEB3 protein indicate the functional complexity of CPEB3. The presence of CPEBs in the retina indicates the existence of a translational control system in the retina. Future studies. Future studies should focus on the identification of mRNA targets for each CPEB. Such potential targets can be validated using in vitro binding assays to confirm their interaction with CPEB proteins. CPEB can be knocked-down or overexpressed in cultured cells. CPEB knockout mice can be generated for further functional studies

Research on the effect of entrepreneurial preparedness on resource acquisition-- a mediation mechanism based on cognitive legitimacy

The acquisition of external resources in the process of entrepreneurship is not only significant to the survival and development of start-ups, but also a challenging task. Under the trend of "Linguistic Turn" in the field of social science, the role of narrative in the entrepreneurial process has attracted more and more attention and research, especially the acquisition of external resources. This paper discusses the effect of entrepreneurial preparedness on resource acquisition, and examines the mediating mechanism of cognitive legitimacy. In this paper, the narratives of 18 entrepreneurs from a business reality show is selected as the research samples. The results show that entrepreneurial preparedness has a significant positive influence on cognitive legitimacy ,and cognitive legitimacy has a significant positive relation on resource acquisition; also the relationship between entrepreneurial preparedness and resources acquisition pass the significance test and there is intermediary mechanism of cognitive legitimacy between entrepreneurial preparedness and resource acquisition. Key words: entrepreneurial preparedness, resource acquisition, cognitive legitimacy, new ventur

Transesterification of waste olive oil by Candida lipase

Biodiesel was produced by transesterification of waste olive oil with methanol and NovozymRTM435. Studies were also performed to evaluate the effect at different acyl acceptors and/or solvents on biodiesel yield. Among the selections, tert-butanol with methanol as the solvent and acyl acceptor gave relatively high yield, while tert-butanol without methanol gave a very low yield. Hexane as the solvent and methanol as the acyl acceptor also gave good yield. While using methyl acetate as both the solvent and the acyl acceptor, the yield was a little low, but still much higher than in tert-butanol without methanol. However, compared to the above selection, the yield of biodiesel with hexane as the solvent and ethanol as the acyl acceptor was as high as 0.63 g biodiesel/g used oil, while the highest yield in the other cases was about 0.43 g biodiesel/g used oil. Finally, studies on enzyme efficacy were carried out. The efficacy of NovozymRTM435 was determined by reusing the enzyme after washing it with solvent hexane. When methanol was added in one shot (at a ratio of 9:1 with respect to triolein), a slight increase in yield was observed in the second run after the initial first run. The yield then started to decrease progressively for each run beyond the second run, but the activity was still high for the first 6 runs. When methanol was added stepwise at 3:1 * 3, the enzyme underwent slow irreversible inactivation. For sugar catalyst, feasibility studies were done on its preparation and the activity testing. The conversion of triolein by sugar catalyst was lower than 1%, which indicated that the sugar catalyst activity was very low