Do Money-based Incentives Improve User Effort and UGC Quality? Evidence from a Travel Blog Platform

Although user-generated content (UGC) is prevalent these days, high-quality UGC is still desired by readers and is crucial for the development of a website. Therefore, how to encourage users to produce high-quality content becomes a critical issue for UGC platforms. Using travel blogs collected from Lvmama.com, a leading online travel agency (OTA) in China, we investigated the effects of money-based incentives on user effort to generate high-quality content and its performance in the long run. The launch of money-based incentives after several years of running of the platform provides an ideal natural experiment setting. We applied the regression discontinuity design, and the results show that both user effort and UGC quality increased after the incentive program was released. However, the UGC quality declined quickly after that. This study concludes by presenting theoretical and managerial implications for both research and practice

Local climate change and the impacts on hydrological processes in an arid alpine catchment in Karakoram

Climate change and the impacts on hydrological processes in Karakoram region are highly important to the available water resources in downstream oases. In this study, a modified quantile perturbation method (QPM), which was improved by considering the frequency changes in different precipitation intensity ranges, and the Delta method were used to extract signals of change in precipitation and temperature, respectively. Using a historical period (1986-2005) for reference, an average ensemble of 18 available Global Circulation Models (GCMs) indicated that the annual precipitation will increase by 2.9-4.4% under Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 (RCP4.5) and by 2.8-7.9% in RCP8.5 in different future periods (2020-2039, 2040-2059, 2060-2079 and 2080-2099) due to an increased intensity of extreme precipitation events in winter. Compared with the historical period, the average ensemble also indicated that temperature in future periods will increase by 0.31-0.38 degrees C/10a under RCP4.5 and by 0.34-0.58 degrees C/10a under RCP8.5. Through coupling with a well-calibrated MIKE SHE model, the simulations suggested that, under the climate change scenarios, increasing evaporation dissipation will lead to decreased snow storage in the higher altitude mountain region and likewise with regard to available water in the downstream region. Snow storage will vary among elevation bands, e.g., the permanent snowpack area below 5600 m will completely vanish over the period 2060-2079, and snow storage in 5600-6400 m will be reduced dramatically; however, little or no change will occur in the region above 6400 m. Warming could cause stronger spring and early summer stream runoff and reduced late summer flow due to a change in the temporal distribution of snowmelt. Furthermore, both the frequency and intensity of flooding will be enhanced. All the changes in hydrological processes are stronger under RCP8.5 than those under RCP4.5. In Karakoram region, the transformations among different forms of water resources alter the distributions of hydrologic components under future climate scenarios, and more studies are needed on the transient water resources system and the worsening of flood threats in the study area

Assessment of different modelling studies on the spatial hydrological processes in an arid alpine catchment

To assess the model description of spatial hydrological processes in the arid alpine catchment, SWAT and MIKE SHE were jointly applied in Yarkant River basin located in northwest China. Not only the simulated daily discharges at the outlet station but also spatiotemporal distributions of runoff, snowmelt and evapotranspiration were analyzed contrastively regarding modules' structure and algorithm. The simulation results suggested both models have their own strengths for particular hydrological processes. For the stream runoff simulation, the significant contributions of lateral interflow flow were only reflected in SWAT with a proportion of 41.4 %, while MIKE SHE simulated a more realistic distribution of base flow from groundwater with a proportion of 21.3 %. In snowmelt calculation, SWAT takes account of more available factors and got better correlations between snowmelt and runoff in temporal distribution, however, MIKE SHE presented clearer spatial distribution of snowpack because of fully distributed structure. In the aspect of water balance, less water was evaporated because of limitation of soil evaporation and less spatially distributed approach in SWAT, on another hand, the spatial distribution of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) in MIKE SHE clearly expressed influence of land use. Whether SWAT or MIKE SHE, without multiple calibrations, the model's limitation might bring in some biased opinions of hydrological processes in a catchment scale. The complementary study of combined results from multiple models could have a better understanding of overall hydrological processes in arid and scarce gauges alpine region

Internal Curing by SAP in Ultra-High Strength Concrete with Cement-Silica Fume-Fly Ash Binder

Super-absorbed polymer (SAP) is an effective internal curing materials for reducing autogenous shrinkage and improving cracking resistance of ultra-high-strength concrete (UHSC). This study investigated the compressive strength, shrinkage properties of UHSC with cement–silica fume–fly ash binder. The composition of the binder was designed using seven-batch factorial design method. The relationships between the binder composition and the properties were expressed in contours. Results showed that, silica fume could improve the compressive strength and total shrinkage of UHSC. However fly ash reduced the compressive strength and total shrinkage of UHSC to certain extent. On the other hand, under the internal curing of SAP, the silica fume and fly ash demonstrated positive synergistic effects on the compressive strength. At the early age of hydration, the effectiveness of internal curing first increases and then decreases with the increase of fly ash and silica fume content. However, at the later age of hydration, the effectiveness of internal curing by SAP reduced because of the pozzolanic activity of silica fume and fly ash

Analysing legislation on Inclusive Education beyond essentialism and culturalism : Specificities, overlaps and gaps in Four Confucian Heritage Regions (CHRs)

Breaking with discriminatory views and segregated education for children with disabilities, regions often referred to as Confucian Heritage Regions (CHRs) have been moving towards inclusive education. Although some of these regions have been at the centre of attention in global education recently, there is a lack of research and information about how they ‘do’ inclusive education. Considering that reinforcing legislative foundations is of foremost importance for its fulfillment, this study examines legislation on the education of children with disabilities in four neighbouring CHRs: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The core principles that frame such legislation were analyzed and cross-compared. The findings show that, despite the common Confucian heritage that is attributed to them systematically in studies of inclusive education – which is often said to influence the way disability is perceived and dealt with – the four Regions treat inclusion differently in terms of legislation. While some CHRs are clearly influenced by e.g. the USA, others are trying to design a specific perspective on inclusive education. The authors argue that the complex example of these CHRs can serve as an important template for studies on both inclusive and comparative education. The article also calls for the careful treatment of inclusive education beyond an essentialist and somewhat simplistic perspective that could reduce certain regions to a monolith.Peer reviewe

The Risk of Cryptocurrency Payment Adoption

The rapid development of blockchain technology enables the application of cryptocurrency payment in real business practice. However, no research has examined the net effect of adopting such technologies on firm performance. Leveraging a unique research context that Booking.com starts cooperating with Travala.com, this study collects consumer reviews of the same hotels listed on Expedia and Booking.com in all states of the US and employs difference-in-differences designs. This study has three main findings. First, the adoption of cryptocurrency payment via Travala.com induces a net decrement in online sales on Booking.com. Second, the sales decrement is mainly driven by upscale hotels. Third, the sales decrement is severer when the cryptocurrency price is lower. These results are robust across hotels in all the states of USA and can be generalized using a later adoption of cryptocurrency payment. We interpret the mechanism as users’ negative associations and provide evidence by an event study analysis

Dark solitons manipulation using optical event horizon

We demonstrate that the optical event horizon can provide an effective technique to actively control the propagation properties of a dark soliton with another weak probe wave. Careful power adjustment of the probe wave enables the black soliton converted into a gray one with varying grayness through the nonlinear interaction, corresponding to a nearly adiabatic variation of the soliton’s speed. The sign of the phase angle for the newly formed gray soliton at optical event horizon is significantly dependent on the frequency of the launched probe wave. Linear-stability analysis of dark solitons under the perturbation of a weak probe wave is performed to clarify the intrinsic mechanism of the nonlinear interaction. The probe wave manipulated collisional dynamics between both dark solitons are investigated as an analogue of the combined white-hole and black-hole horizons which provides some insights into exploring the transition between integrable and non-integrable systems

Active control of adiabatic soliton fission by external dispersive wave at optical event horizon

We show that the group-velocity-led optical event horizon (OEH) in optical fibers provides a convenient way to actively control the propagation property of higher-order solitons by a comparatively weak dispersive wave (DW) pulse. It has been found numerically that clean soliton breakup, a process by which a second-order soliton completely splits into a pair of constituent solitons with vastly different power proportions after interacting with the weak DW pulse, will occur while external DWs become polychromatic. The temporal separation between both constituent solitons can be controlled by adjusting the power of the external DW. The more energetic main soliton is advanced/trailed in time depending on the selected frequency of input DW pulse. We have developed an analytic formalism describing the external acting-force (AF) perturbation. These results provide a fundamental explanation and physical scaling of optical pulse evolution in optical fibers and can find applications in improved supercontinuum sources