How the private sector is changing Chinese investment in Africa?

In August 2012, US Secretary of the State Hilary Clinton offered a thinly veiled criticism of China’s role in Africa, calling upon African countries to guard against those that “come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave.”The Chinese official news agency, Xinhua, retorted immediately that “Clinton’s implication that China has been extracting Africa’s wealth for itself is utterly wide of the truth.

Untying the Land Knot: Turning Investment Challenges Into Opportunities for All Citizens

Land-use conflicts also occur frequently outside the agricultural sector. In dealing with these conflicts, systematic change is necessary to lead to a fair, efficient and transparent system that both encourages investment and safeguards public interests. Diverse examples demonstrate that, although such change is difficult, it is possible and desirable

Short-Packet Downlink Transmission with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

This work introduces downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) into short-packet communications. NOMA has great potential to improve fairness and spectral efficiency with respect to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) for low-latency downlink transmission, thus making it attractive for the emerging Internet of Things. We consider a two-user downlink NOMA system with finite blocklength constraints, in which the transmission rates and power allocation are optimized. To this end, we investigate the trade-off among the transmission rate, decoding error probability, and the transmission latency measured in blocklength. Then, a one-dimensional search algorithm is proposed to resolve the challenges mainly due to the achievable rate affected by the finite blocklength and the unguaranteed successive interference cancellation. We also analyze the performance of OMA as a benchmark to fully demonstrate the benefit of NOMA. Our simulation results show that NOMA significantly outperforms OMA in terms of achieving a higher effective throughput subject to the same finite blocklength constraint, or incurring a lower latency to achieve the same effective throughput target. Interestingly, we further find that with the finite blocklength, the advantage of NOMA relative to OMA is more prominent when the effective throughput targets at the two users become more comparable.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures. This is a longer version of a paper to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Citation Information: X. Sun, S. Yan, N. Yang, Z. Ding, C. Shen, and Z. Zhong, "Short-Packet Downlink Transmission with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access," IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., accepted to appear [Online] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8345745

解开土地困扰：把投资挑战转变为全民机遇

土地利用冲突也经常发生在农业产业以外的其他产业。在处理这些冲突的过程中，系统性的改革可以帮助建立公正、 高效和透明的制度，既鼓励投资也保障公共利益。很多例子都证明了这一观点，虽然这种变化是困难的但它仍是可执行的并且可取的

民营参与正在为中国对非洲的投资带来变化

2012年8月，美国国务卿希拉里克林顿不加掩饰地批评了中国在非洲的影响力，号召非洲国家防范那些“进入非洲贿赂官员，掠夺自然资源而去”的国家。中国官方新闻机构--新华社立即反驳说：克林顿关于中国“出于自身利益”榨取非洲财富的言论完全与事实不符

Open Innovation Web-Based Platform for Evaluation of Water Quality Based on Big Data Analysis

There are many models presented that assess water quality. However, the applications of the models are limited due to the difficulty of preparing input data and interpreting model output. In this paper, we developed a Web-based platform to assist researchers in analyzing water quality. The data from sensors can be automatically imported to the platform according to the configured information of data structures. The platform also provides conventional methods and big data methods for the users to analyze water quality. Moreover, the users can choose the water quality parameters according to the water usage. The presented platform can show the model output in a text format and a graphic format, which allows for the analysis to be better understood by the user. The platform integrates the input, analysis, and output together well and brings great convenience to the research on water quality