The Formation of Wenzhou Footwear Clusters: How Were the Entry Barriers Overcome?

Wenzhou used to be one of the poorest regions in eastern China. With limited arable land, poor road access to major cities, and little support from the government, it seemed to lack all the necessary conditions for economic growth according to the standard textbook. However, over the past several decades, Wenzhou has achieved one of the fastest growing rates and owned the most dynamic private sector in China. The footwear industry in particular has grown from a negligible place to the largest market share and has formed one of the largest industry clusters in China. Therefore, the footwear industry provides us with a good example to unde rstand the driving forces behind the dramatic rural industrial growth. For this study, we undertake a survey on about 140 enterprises at different scales in Wenzhou. The survey enables us to examine how the start -up capital, credit, technology, and institutional barriers have been overcome in the formation process.International Relations/Trade,

The role of clustering in rural industrialization: A Case Study of the Footwear Industry in Wenzhou

"Wenzhou used to be one of the poorest regions in eastern China. With limited arable land, poor road access to major cities, and little support from the upper level governments, this region seemed to lack all the conditions necessary for economic growth. However, over the past several decades Wenzhou has developed the most dynamic private sector in China, and has accordingly achieved one of the fastest growth rates. In particular, the footwear industry in Wenzhou has grown from a negligible market share to the largest in China. Here, we report a survey of 140 Wenzhou-based footwear enterprises of various scales, and use this information to examine the driving forces behind the dramatic rural industrial growth seen in this region. Our results show that clustering deepens the division of labor in the production process and makes it possible for small entrepreneurial firms to enter the industry by focusing on a narrowly defined stage of production. Therefore, Wenzhou represents an example of how clustering plays a significant role in helping fledgling rural industries overcome the growth constraints of capital and technology in the incipient stage of industrialization." from Authors' AbstractCluster analysis, Industrialization, Finance, Economic development, Nonfarm economy,

Coherent Operation of a Gap-tunable Flux Qubit

We replace the Josephson junction defining a three-junction flux qubit's properties with a tunable direct current superconducting quantum interference devices (DC-SQUID) in order to tune the qubit gap during the experiment. We observe different gaps as a function of the external magnetic pre-biasing field and the local magnetic field through the DC-SQUID controlled by high-bandwidth on chip control lines. The persistent current and gap behavior correspond to numerical simulation results. We set the sensitivity of the gap on the control lines during the sample design stage. With a tuning range of several GHz on a qubit dynamics timescale, we observe coherent system dynamics at the degeneracy point.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

S3^3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector

This paper presents a real-time face detector, named Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector (S$^3$FD), which performs superiorly on various scales of faces with a single deep neural network, especially for small faces. Specifically, we try to solve the common problem that anchor-based detectors deteriorate dramatically as the objects become smaller. We make contributions in the following three aspects: 1) proposing a scale-equitable face detection framework to handle different scales of faces well. We tile anchors on a wide range of layers to ensure that all scales of faces have enough features for detection. Besides, we design anchor scales based on the effective receptive field and a proposed equal proportion interval principle; 2) improving the recall rate of small faces by a scale compensation anchor matching strategy; 3) reducing the false positive rate of small faces via a max-out background label. As a consequence, our method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on all the common face detection benchmarks, including the AFW, PASCAL face, FDDB and WIDER FACE datasets, and can run at 36 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) for VGA-resolution images.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 2017 + its supplementary materials; Updated the latest results on WIDER FAC

Single and binary protein electroultrafiltration using poly(vinyl-alcohol)-carbon nanotube (PVA-CNT) composite membranes.

Electrically conductive composite ultrafiltration membranes composed of carbon nanotubes have exhibited efficient fouling inhibition in wastewater treatment applications. In the current study, poly(vinyl-alcohol)-carbon nanotube membranes were applied to fed batch crossflow electroultrafiltration of dilute (0.1 g/L of each species) single and binary protein solutions of α-lactalbumin and hen egg-white lysozyme at pH 7.4, 4 mM ionic strength, and 1 psi. Electroultrafiltration using the poly(vinyl-alcohol)-carbon nanotube composite membranes yielded temporary enhancements in sieving for single protein filtration and in selectivity for binary protein separation compared to ultrafiltration using the unmodified PS-35 membranes. Assessment of membrane fouling based on permeate flux, zeta potential measurements, and scanning electron microscopy visualization of the conditioned membranes indicated significant resulting protein adsorption and aggregation which limited the duration of improvement during electroultrafiltration with an applied cathodic potential of -4.6 V (vs. Ag/AgCl). These results imply that appropriate optimization of electroultrafiltration using carbon nanotube-deposited polymeric membranes may provide substantial short-term improvements in binary protein separations

Friction Between Gas-Solid Suspension and Circulating Fluidized Bed Downers

Friction between co-current downflow gas-solid suspension and the column wall was investigated. A new model to predict pressure drops due to friction between the gas-solid suspension in the fully developed section and the downer wall was developed. The results show that the friction between the gas-solids suspension and the downer wall causes a significant deviation of the apparent solids concentrations from the actual ones, especially for those operating conditions with higher superficial gas velocities and solids circulation rates. When the superficial gas velocity is greater than 8 m/s, the actual solids concentrations in the fully developed region of the downer can be up to 2~3 times of the apparent values. After the frictional pressure drop is considered, the predicted actual solids concentrations by the proposed model agree well with the experimental values